iil:

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Bookman

Illustrated History of

English Literature

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

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

•r- <

<»
^

-4-i

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.)

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

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).

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

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

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

THE CHAUCER MSS.

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

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

SIR THOMAS MALORY

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.

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 e<litions include one by Thomas Wright,
1856 ; the Globe edition, with introduction by Sir E. Strachey, 1868 (the best of the modernised editions) ;
and the standard Le Morte d' Arthur, by Syr Thomas Malory, reprinted and edited, with introduction and glossary,
by n. 0. Sommer, with an essay on Malory's prose style, by Andrew Lang (.3 vols., 1889-91). Another very elaborate
edition, though with a modernised text, is Le Morte d' Arthur . . . with introduction In/ Professor J. Rhys, and
il/mtralions by Aubrey Beardsley (2 vols., 189.3-4). Malory's indebtedness to the respective manuscripts has
been laboriously traced by Oskar Sommer in his edition ; most of the later and more highly embellislied versions
of the legend can be followed back to a common original through such works as the alliterative Morte Arthur
of the Scots poet Huchown, the Lancelot of A\'alter Map, the Brut of Layamon and VV'ace, and the Uisloria
Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The substratum of the vast body of Arthurian legend was the fabulous
tale of the wizard Merlin (a relic of the old Celtic mythology), and of the obstacles which Arthur had to
surmount before he reached his rightful throne. Upon this were grafted tales of kniglitly fortitude, of erring
passion, of mortal feud. And the whole was surmounted by the mysterious legend of the Quest of the Holy
Grail — tlie legend, that is, of a protracted search for tlie blood of Christ, preserved in a small (-asket or vessel
of some kind after the Crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea. This curious fable was of far later date than the
nucleus of Artlnirian tradition, and there seems little doubt that it was originally brought from the Kast by
the early Crusaders. For tlie older strata of Welsh mythic romance the reader is referred to tlie scries entitled
Popular Studies in Romance, Mythology, and Folklore, published by the accomplished Celtic scholar David Nutt.
He may then proceed to Professor Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian Legend (1891), a work of tlie highest authority,
but one that presupposes a considerable knowledge of the subject — more especially of the writer's own Hibbert
Lectures on Celtic Heathendom (1888). It must he admitted that neither the Confessio Amantis nor the Morte
d'Arthur can stand the juxt;iposition of The Canterbury Talcs. Their vivid humanity renders Malory wan,
attenuated, and bloodless in comparison, .\scham and Latimer attackeil its morals, and it went into a long
eclipse from 1634 to 1816 ; but it emerged then to strike a ])riccless blow for purity and brevity iu speechcraft
as opposed to the tasteless, polysyllabic verbiage of the post-Johusouian scho(d.

CHAPTER IV

THE SCOTS POETS

"What Voltaire aaid of Dant© is literally true of such poets as Heuryson^ Douglas, aud Dunbar. We
simply take them ou trust." — Chubton Coixins.

TTie Chaucerian tradition in Scotland — Robert Henryson— 7fo6f7ie and Malcyne — William Dunbar — The Golden
Targe — Comparisons of Dunbar with Chaucer and Burns— Ga\in Douglas — Sir David Lyndsay^Hia
religious satires.

THE arbitrary date 1475 is followed in
English literature by a century of second-
rate writers, in other words, of preparatory
and tentative work. Among the names of
those who, for want of better, we must
describe as the leaders in English literature,
there is not one that evokes enthusiasm,
there is scarcely one that awakes an echo
in the halls of remembrance. It is perhaps
somewhat difficult to believe, but is yet
the fact, that when we have enumerated
Hawes, Skelton, More, Tyndale, Latimer,
Wyatt, Aschara, Surrey, Udall, to whom
might possibly be added I^ord Berners, Hey-
wood, and Foxe, we have named all the pro-
minent writers of the century that followed
Caxton in England. It is true that they
produced among them one book of quite the
first rank (the Utopia), but that was written
in Latin. In Scotland it was very different ;
there the true Chaucerian tradition was handed
on, and brilliant verse in ChauceFs vein was
deftly wrought by apt pupils.

Most Chaucerian of these Scottish disciples
of the English maker was Robert Henryson
(an interesting link between the days of
James I. and those ot James IV.), who seems
to have been educated abroad before he was
admitted at Glasgow University in 1462.
Subsequently he became schoolmaster at Dun-
fermline, and died there at a ripe old age
before 1506, when Dunbar mentions him as
one of the departed. The principal works of

Henryson are Moral Fahk.i of JEsop, Orpheus
and Eurydice, The Testament of Cresseide (a
sequel to Chaucer's Troilus aiid Criseyde),
and the early pastoral (perhaps it should be
describe<l as the earliest, as it is certainly one
of the best, in the English tongue) Robene and
Makyne. This last, as its merit desei-ves, is
the best known of Henryson's poems ; it was
included in Percy's Reliques of English Poetry
and in many later anthologies. Robin and
Marion were traditional names for rustic
lovers in the Middle Ages. The earliest pas-
toral play in France, by Adam de la Halle
(thirteenth century), bears the title Robin et
Marion.

The amount of character and of local colour
which Henryson managed to impart to these
pieces is striking ; they are full of playful
satire, while as delineations of contemporary
manners they merit a close appreciation.
Behind the rude and archaic phraseology of
Robene and Makyne lies hid an eclogue of a
very high poetic merit.

This charming little pastoral may be termed
a "sport" in Scottish literature, for we have
nothing like it again until we come to Ramsay's
Gentle Shepherd. It is written in ballad metre,
to which Henryson recurs in The Bludy Serke
(the story of a blood-stained garment, be-
queathed by a mortally wounded knight to
a king's daughter, whom he had rescued from
a giant's dungeon), and in the quaint alliterative
GarmoruL of Gude Ladeis.^

■ A large proportion of Henryson's poems were first printed from manuscript sources by David Laing in
186.5— largely from George Baunatyne's manuscript in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, aud from the
Maitland manuscripts in the Pepysian Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The Morall Fahilles were
however, printed in 1-570, aud The TexUiment of Crexseide in 1593. Selections from Henryson have been very
numerous. Allan Ramsay gave some in his Eccrgrcni (1724), so did Percy and Lord Hailes. There is a good
one, with glossarial notes on every page, in G. Eyre Todd's Medueval Scottish Poetry (Glasgow, 1892). The
standard edition is The Poems and Fables of Robert Ucnryson {first collected, with notes and memoir), by David
Laing (Edinburgh, 1805).

WILLIAM DUNBAR

But the greatest of these Scottish disciples
of Chaucer was admittedly 'William Dunbar* —
"Dunbar quha language had at large," as
Sir David Ljudsay compendiously called him.
Of less tender and graceful fancy than either
James I. or Henryson, Dunbar had more
original genius. In choice of subjects he has
some affinity with Jan Steen or Hogarth, but
his outlines are as sharp and relentless as
Diirer's. With a Heinesque ribaldry and
malice he combines something of the fatalistic
temper of Villon. Timor inoiiis conturbat me,
he groans.

Dunbar gi-aduated at St. Andrews Univer-
sity in 1479, being then probably near twenty
years of age. He was at one time a Franciscan
friar, in which capacity he made good cheer
on the English roads ; but he seems to have
thrown off the habit and taken to diplomacy.
Subsequently he took priest's orders (in 1504),
but he continued to lead the life of a courtier,
and his name disappears significantly after the
battle of Flodden (September 9th, 1513).

Dunbar''s most celebrated poems were The
Thistle and the Rose, The Golden Targe, and
the allegorical satire called TJie Dance of the
Seven Deadly Sin-s. The TTiistle and the Rose
was a political allegory, occasioned by the
marriage of James IV. of Scotland with Mar-
garet Tudor, eldest daughter of Henry VII.,
King of England — an event in which the
whole futui'c political state of both nations
was vitally interested, and which ultimately
produced the union of the two crowns and
kingdoms. It was finished on May 9th, 1503,
in plenty of time for the Queen's arrival in
Scotland after a magnificent progress from
Richmond to Edinburgh. The Rose is hailed
Queen by the flowers, and her praises are sung
by a chorus of birds, the sound of which awakens
the poet from his dream.

The design of Dunbar's Golden Targe is to
show the gradual and imperceptible influence
of love when too far indulged over reason ; it
is tinctured throughout with the morality and
imagery of The Romaunt of the Rose and
The Floxcer and the Leaf of Chaucer. The
opening scene of the rising sun on the spring
landscape is delineated in the manner of
Lydgate, yet with more strength, distinctness,
and exuberance of ornament. It concludes
with the laboured eulogy of Chaucer (" flower
imperial and rose of orators"). Moral Gower,
and Lydgate laureate.

In dealing with the seven deadly sins, Dunbar
was treating a hackneyed theme. The Romaitnt
of the Rose personifies a series of heinous sins.
Chaucer, in TTie Parsons Tale, expounded them
at some length ; Gower's Confessio Amantis is
composed of tales illustrating the same deadly
seven ; Lydgate had treated the theme some-
what differently in his imitation of the old
French Danse Macabre. Dunbar's Dance
describes a procession of the sins personified
before the devil in hell, and the conception is
vigorously, and at the same time humorousl}',
handled. The devil having commanded the
dance to begin, the seven deadly sins appear,
and present a mummery (in imitation, it may
be, of one of the miracle or clerk plays, as
they were called in Scotland), with the newest
gambols, just imported from France.

Among the shorter poems, of which Dunbar
is prolific, several dwell upon the irredeemable
flight of time and the ruthless stroke of death.
One of the best of these is The Lament for
the Makaris, written when he was ill, probably
about 1507. His short meditations on the
"Headache" and on "Wyntir" show him to
have been a connoisseur of melancholy. But
Dunbar was a man of an infinity of moods ;
the shadow on human existence could not

' The chief predecessors of Dunbar in Scottish poetry were : (1) John Barbour, a pensioner of King
Robert II., and Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who wrote Iiis versified chronicle or rhyming narrative of the
wanderings, trials, sufferings, and fortitude of the great Robert Bruce aliout liiTd-Si, and died at Aberdeen,
at a good old age, in March, 139G. (2) Andrew of Wynton wrote a somewhat similar but inferior rhyming
chronicle from the beginning of the world down to 140G. Then comes the famous Kitigis Quair {The
King's Quire or Book) of (.'<) King James I. Born in 1394, James was captured by the English at sea in
I'lOC, and was imprisoned for eighteen years, mainly in the Tower of London. M'hile in prison James was
carefully educated ; he became a disciple of Chaucer, and, though the ])oinl is much disputed, there is still
good reason to believe that lie and no other wrote the (^wiir—a. beautiful description of love at sight and of
the solace derived from love by a captive ; a classic example of the love allegory iirst develope«l in lUily and
France, but naturalised in England by Chaucer's Eommint of the Rose and 'J'roilux and Crigeyde. ; and written
in the seven-line st;inza of Troitun, known since the time of Gascoigno as the "rhyme royal." James I.,
who was murdered in 14.'i7, was followed at the other end of the social scale by (4) Blind Harry the
Minstrel, who ilouriahed about 1470, and wrote a patriotic chronicle in heroic verse on Wultace, founded
mostly on traditional stories of the national hero.

GAVIN DOUGLAS

escape his saturnine humour ; yet he was well
disposed to be cheerful and even merry —
witness his " Without Glaidnes availis no
Tressour" and "For to be blythe me think
it best." From his SurrexU dominus, his
realistic Passioun of Christ, or his grand
nativity chant opening with the Latin descant
Borate cell de»uper, we turn to a scene of
satirical comedy such as The Treatise of Two
Married Women and a Widoxc, in which he
fathoms the depths of obscenity. There is a
delightful pendant to this in the Dutch cabinet-
piece of TTie Twa Ctimmers, two old gossips,
a Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig of the six-
teenth century, over their mutchkins, com-
plaining, " This lang Lentern makis me Icne."
Everywhere alike his poetry is resonant with
verse-craft, and is nourished by a thousand
freshets of sparkling wit. A couplet glistens
and one breathes the sharp air of the northern
spring. Yesterday, says he, the season soft
and fair

Come ill as fresh as peacock fedir ; —
This day, it stingeth like au addir.

A beautiful example of complimentary verse is
afforded in Dunbar's panegyric of London, with
the burden, " London, thou art the flower of
cities all!" composed in 1501, to be recited
by the Scottish envoys at the court of
Henry VII.

Dunbar undoubtedly owed much to Chaucer,
whom he revered as a master ; but to call him
a Scots Chaucer is in reahty, as we have
hinted, to render him a disservice ; for he in-
herited little of Chaucer's special endowment,
and his own best qualities are anything
but Chaucerian. He entirely lacks the genial
humanity, the indefinable charm, the width of
view, and the sustained inspiration of the
English maker. Chaucer's dramatic talent,
and still more his reflective power, find no
counterpart among the many gifts of Dunbar,

who is one of the most self-centred of bards,
always brooding over the good fortmie of
others and the ill-luck of William Dunbar.
It is more to the point to compare him with
his greater descendant, Robert Bums — the
Burns of saturnine humour and insight, who
wrote Tlie Jollij Beggars and Tarn o"" Shanter,
but a Burns deficient in passion and in pathos,
who wrote, not for the people, but for the
court, and was niuch less easily stirred by
the sentiment of patriotism.^

The third member of this Scottish pleiade
was Gawin or Gavin Douglas, born at Tantallon
Castle about 1474, third son of Archibald,
Earl of Angus, who figures so prominently in
Marmion as Bell-the-Cat. After education at
St. Andrews and Paris he rose into high office,
on the strength of his family interest ; was
nominated to the See of Dunkeld, and pro-
mised the Archbishopric of St. Ajidrews ;
but when the Douglas party was overthrown
in 1520, Gavin fled to England, and died
in exile at the court of Henry VIII. in
September, 1522.

Douglas's chief work was his translation ot
the ^'Eneid of Virgil, completed on July 22nd,
1513.

The ob-^'ious faults of his version are many.
He frequently expands one line into six or
more, and is almost always very diffuse. He
deliberately paraphrases and transforms the
text — as, for instance, where he makes the
sibyl in the sixth book a nun. His diction,
moreover, is much more archaic even than
that of Dunbar, and he makes up a number
of new words from the Latin. With all its
faults, however, it was largely imitated by
Surrey and other translators. The best poetry
is in the independent prologues. These are
free creations, descriptions of Scots landscape,
not wholly unconventional or free from the
missal-picture style of ornamentation, yet
frequently rising above this to a sincerely felt

' The metrical side of Dunbar has been studied not only by Prof. Schipper (now of Vienna), but
also by H. B. Baildon in On the Rimes in the Authentic Puems of Dunbar (1899). Eight of Dunbar's poems
wore printed by Cliepman & Mj'Uar at Edinburgh in 1508. A mutilated copy of this unique book is in
the Advocates' Library. ITie Poems were printed by Pinkerton in his Ancient Scottish Poems (vol. i.,
1786), and were collected, with a brief memoir, by J. Paterson (Edinburgh, 1860). They were first
adequately edited, with a memoir and notes, by David Laing* (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1834-5), with supplement,
1866. llie best edition now, however, is that of the Scottish Text Society (in 2 vols.), edited by J. Small,
to which an excellent study by Sheriff ^Eneas Mackay is prefixed in a separate volume (1889). There are
selections of Dunbar, with modernised spelling, by G. Eyre Todd, in MedicEval Scottish Poetry (vol. ii.,
1892), and by Hugh Haliburton (adapted to present-day Lowland Scots), 1895. Some of the best poems
are well modernised in H. M. Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry (1887). There is a first-rate article on Dunbar
in Blackwood (February, 1835), and a slighter one by F. R. Oliphant in the same magazine September, 1893).

SIR DAVID LYNDSAY

interpretation of the moods and harmonies of
Natm-e. His Winter Peecc, his May Day, his
Welcum to the Lamp of Day are still good to
gladden the heart. ^

The fourth poet in this remarkable group
is Sir David Lyndsay. Born about 1490 at
Monimail, Fifeshire, he was educated at St.
Andrews, and became the companion, play-
fellow, and whipping-boy of the brilliant
James V. In 1529 he was knighted and made
Lyon King of Arms, or chief of the Scots
heralds. He w-ent on several embassies, sat
in the Scots Parliament for Cupar, and died
at Monimail early in 1555.

A satirist keen and racy — i-ude in every
sense of the word — Lvndsay was highly popular
with his fellow-countrymen. Repeated editions
came out between 1558 and 1776 ; and of
anytliing not worth saying, " Yell no find
that in Davie L\-ndsay " became proverbial.

Still is tliy name in liigli account
And still thy verse has charms.

Sir David Lindsay of the Mount,
Lord Lion King-at-Arms.

His caustic censure lashed the monks and
friars as free!}- as Butler scorched the
pseudo-saints in Hud'ibras or Burns the Ower
Gude in Holy Willie. He lays his grasp

upon the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate and
upbraids him with his secret sins in words
ill-fitted for modern ears. Nor does he spare
the King and his advisers, or the mean-
ness of the merchant class, or the extravagance
of court ladies, whose long skirts he devotes
a lay to ridiculing. His breadth and licence
are those of a chartered libertine. Nor can he
have failed to smooth the way for the reformers,
though he avoided a direct breach with the
Roman Church. Ecclesiastical corruption was
rife, and he probed it shrewdly. Many a man
has been burnt for less ; for though he did not
attack theological mysteries and said nothing
of the Mass, his demands squared well with
those of the early Protestant martyrs. He
insisted on the use of the vulgar tongue in the
Liturg}^, protested against the mumbling of
prayers in half-understood Latin,^ and jeered
in the freest manner at pilgrimages, processions,
relics, and pardons ; yet he managed to avoid
the semblance of cutting deeply by an affecta-
tion of grotesque clownage which disarmed a
serious resentment. The very indecencies of
his humour would have made a solemn prosecu-
tion for heresy seem ludicrous ; and there is
little doubt that, as with Rabelais, the expedient
of indecorum was deliberately adopted to em-
barrass clerical interference.'

' The XIII Bukes of Eneados, translated into Scotcti Metir, was printed in 15.53 (4to), and carefully reprinted
hy the Bannatyne Club in 1839. Select works of Douglas were printed by Pinkerton in Ancient Scottish
Poems (178C), and separately at Perth in the following year ; again together with Dunbar by J. Sibbald in
his Chronicle nf Scottish Poetri/ (1802). The best edition of to-day, with memoir, notes, and glossary, is that
by J. Small (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1874) ; but a full critical edition of Douglas is still a desideratum.

' In Kittie's Confession a demure-looking curate confesses (and would have kissed) a personable wench :

" Said he, have ye na wrongous gear ?
Said she, I stole a peck of beir.
Said he, that should restored be.
Therefore, deliver it to me ! . . .
And mekil Latyne did he mummill —
I heard nothing but hummil bummill."

Such dramatic scenes as this, and several in The Satire of the Three Entatcs, serve to justify the description
of Lyndsay as a rude Scots Aristophanes.

' A full bibliography of Lyndsay's works, with facsimilRS of the title-pages of the chief editions, is
given in David Laing's Complete Edition (Edinburgh, 1871). Eor the four Scots poets dealt with in this
chapter, see T. F. Henderson's studious monograph on Scottish Veniacu/ar Literature (1898).

CHAPTER V

EARLY TUDOR POETRY

"In Henry VIII. 's reign sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat the
elder, and Henry, Earle of Surrey, were tlie two chieftains." — Puttenham, Arte of English Poeide.

"That Time's hest makers and the authors were
Of those small poems which the title bear
Of songs and sonnets." — Dhayton.

Stephen Hawefv-Alexander Barclay— John Skelton— His pictures of low life— Skeltonic verse— Sir Thomas
M^yatt— His metrical innovations— Earl of Surrey— His use of decasyllabic blank verse.

THE early Tudor kings, Henry VH. and
Henry VHI., imported their court
painters, Mabuse and Holbein, from abroad.
It seems a pity that they could not have im-
ported, say from Scotland, their court poets ;
for of the tribe of courtly makers Stephen
Hawes and John Skelton can scarcely be
described as brilliant representatives.

An Oxford man of reputed Suffolk origin,
Hawes was commended to Henry VH. as a
scholar formed by travel, a complete gentle-
man, and a master of languages. His chief
poem. The Passeti/me of Pleasure, was written
about 1505-6, and printed by Wynkyn de
Worde about 1512. In form it is one of the
old-fashioned allegories ; through Hawes, in
fact, mediaeval allegory sang its last courtly
note^a swan-song of which one note at any
rate still vibrates in the couplet :

For though the day be never so long.
At last the belles ringeth to evensong.

During the last years of Henry VII., Alex-

ander Barclay, a Scot by descent, though
apparently a native of the South of England,
possibly Croydon, was writing a book which
made almost as great a stir in its own day
as GulRver''s Travels did in that of the first
George ; this was a version, or rather para-
phrase, of Sebastian Brandfs Narrenschiff (or
Ship of Fools), printed by Pynson in December,
1 509. The bidk of Barclay's version, constituting
a ponderous and extravagantly didactic satire,
was thrown into the form of the Chaucerian
stanza, but parts are linked together by passages
in prose, while the metre is occasionally varied.'
Homely in style, Barclay was fairly harmonious
in manner, and there was enough pith in him
to make his work long popular. Tlie Ship of
Fools suggested the machinery of that formid-
able satire of Henry VIIL's reign called ne
BoTC'ge of Court, by John Skelton, laureate, the
whip of Wolsey, and the father of English
doggerel, — " beastly Skelton," as Pope calls
him.^

' This Present Soke, named the Shyp of Fotys . . . (printed by Pynson, December, 1509, folio). A modern
edition, with some account of Barclay, appeared in 1874 (London, 4to), and a jiotice of Barclay's Life and
Writings, by T. H. Jamieson, in the same year. See, too, Herford's German Influence on Emjlish Literature
in Sixteenth Century.

' Bowge (Bouche) of Court signifies the King's Table ; the name is given to an ornate vessel in which
Skelton embarks in quest of the purchasable commodity, court favour. Skelton's anarchical versification,
known as Skeltonic or Skeltonical, has often been imitated ; he may have caught the lilt of it himself from
the tavern harpers of his day. Echoes of his pungent rliymes and playful word coinage may be found in
Butler, Swift, Peter Pindar, Southey, Thackeray {Peg o' Limavnddy), but the velocity of his verse has seldom
been equalled. Skelton handed on to Spenser the name of Colin Clout for a religious satirist or reformer.
'ITie resentment of his enemies encompassed him about, and it was in an asylum that he died on June 21st,
1529 (buried in chancel of St. Margaret's, ^V^estminster). The Poetical WorUs of Skelton were edited in two
volumes by A. Dyce (London, 1843, 8vo), and a new Selection, containing The Bowge, Phyllyp Sparowe, Colin
Cloute, and Why come ye not to Court? (ed. W. H. ^V'illiams), appeared in 1902. A fresh edition (which
is a desideratum) is understood to be in contemplation by A. F. Pollard for the Clarendon Press.

SIR THOMAS WYATT

Skelton's eleg\' on the SpaiTow is a tour de
force of a kind rare in any literature ; yet it
seems characteristically English. \Mien Catullus
bewailed the death of Lesbia's bird, he confined
himself to eighteen truly exquisite lines ; but
"ragged, tatter'd and jagged" Skelton, while
lamenting the Span-ow that was "slain at
Carowe," has engrafted on the subject so
many far-sought and whimsical embellish-
ments that his episode is really what the old
editions term it — a " boke."

The whole poem is an extraordinary arab-
esque, in which wit, pedantry, imagination, and
burlesque are strangely intermingled. Nursery
rhymes, strongly suggestive of the death and
burial of Cock Robin, ai-e blended ^-ith Maca-
ronic verses full of irony and mischief, and not
seldom indecency. Skelton's wayward rhymes,
which are well termed " breatliless " (so much
breath do they require in reading them aloud),
are often miracles of skill ; and similarly his
verse, from its volume and volubility, is well
compared to the ribands out of a conjurer's
mouth at a fair. Skelton imitates low life with
the coarse relish of a Dutch painter, while as a
master of the repulsive he challenges Swift and
Hogarth.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, born at Allington Castle
in Kent, in 1503, was the son of Sir Henry
Wyatt, a strong Lancastrian, and faithful
adherent to the House of Tudor. He took his
degree at Cambridge (St. John's), at the age
of seventeen. His distinguished bearing and
appearance aided his progress at the Court of
Henry VHI. We soon find him travelling
abroad on diplomatic missions, and in 1530 he
was High Marshal at Calais. He knew Anne
Boleyn well, and is said to have warned
Henry VHI. against her light character, having
had cause himself, many believed, to rue that
same levity. He was sent to the Tower
upon her fall, but was very soon released.^

He went as envoy to the Emperor Charles V.
in 1537, and was sent to Flanders again
in 1540. Wyatt's official correspondence shows
him to have been a man of quick observation
and an excellent writer. The penetration
which he showed into the Emperors character
was remarkable. After Cromwell's fall, how-
ever, in June, 1540, Wyatt's enemies, par-
ticularly Bishop Bonner, procured his im-
prisonment ; he was arrested and sent to the
Tower on a charge of having defamed the King,
and having conspired with Reginald Pole against
him. After an eloquent defence Wyatt was
acquitted and restored to favour in the summer
of 1541. He spent most of the next year in
retirement, but he died from a chill caught on
the hurried journey to Falmouth to receive the
Emperor's ambassador in the autumn of 1542.
He was buried at Sherborne on October 11th.
His poems ran only at court until, in 1557, a
shrewd stationer, one Richard Tottel, collected
them and the MS. poems of rival courtiers
(271 in all) into the volume of Songes arid
Sonnettes, dear to the heart of Master Slender.-
Two very marked and contrary features
distinguished Wyatt's poetry — the individual
energy of his thought, and his persistent imi-
tation of foreign models. The former is what
separates him sharply from the poets of the
Middle Ages. Hitherto, with the exception of
The Caiitcrbiiri/ Tales, almost every English
poem of importance had been didactic in in-
tention, thereby denoting its clerical source,
and symbolical in form, thus revealing the
influence of the allegorical method of inter-
preting Nature and Scripture encouraged in
the Church schools. Wyatt, on the other
hand, looked at Nature through his own eyes,
and sought to express directly the feelings of
his own heart. He was a man of many moods
and ideas ; his compositions include love verses,
epigrams, devotional meditations, satires, and

' The career of Anne Boleyn is still shrouded in much mystery. It is prob.able that Wyatt long cherished
a secret affection for her. 'ITiey were children together, and Anne wrote to him from Paris in 151.5 as
"your loving little \an." She is cert;iinly the "Anna" of several poems, and the platouic attachment
between the two must have been alluded to in the lines :

" Forget not — oh ! forget not this,
How long ago hath been and is
The love that never meant amiss,
I'orget n(jt yet."
' Of the various editions of ^V'yatt's works appearing since that day, by far the most important is the
one edited by Dr. G. !•". Nott (Surrey and Wyatt, in 2 vols., lt)1.5-l(i). The text given hero differs materially
from that found in the Misce.Uany, for it is based upon Wyatt manuscripts discovered by Nott, and tlie number
of poems is alno considerably augmented. The Aldiue edition of 1800, with a memoir by T. W[right], has a
good reproduction of Holbein's portrait.

EARL OF SURREY

in all of these the force and ardour of his
thought is sensibly felt. But equally in all of
them the poet shows himself to be aware of the
imperfection of his native language as an in-
strument of expression, and submits himself
with humility to the superiority of the foreign
masters whose manner he seei<s to reproduce.

As a metrical innovator Wyatt is specially
to be remembered for his attempt to Anglicise
the Italian sonnet. The sonnet form was pro-
bably originally cultivated in Provence, but as
a vehicle of poetical expression it was perfected
and its form arbitrarily fixed by Petrarch, who
stands for the sonnet in European literature
much as Milton stands for blank verse and
La Fontaine for fables. Ordinarily Petrarch
wrote two kinds of sonnets; they closely resemble
each other, and may be called nonnal types.
The Petrarchan sonnet consists of fourteen
decasyllabic lines, and is divided into two
parts :

(1) The octave of two quatrains, often called
the bases of the sonnet. Tliis octave must only
have two rhymes, but these two rhymes must
be well varied ; the eight lines of the octave
should also end upon a full-stop or point.

(2) The sestet of six lines, which may have
two or three rhymes variously arranged, but
always in such a manner as to avoid the
formation of a rhyming couplet in the last
two lines.

As regards theme, the sonnet must be
self-contained and homogeneous. Ordinarily
speaking, the first eight lines give a broad
exposition of the motive, and the last six a
special application of it. In the first eight
lines the thought ascends to a climax ; in the
last six the idea descends to a conclusion.

Nevertheless, by inborn faculty, Wyatt ex-
celled rather in worth of poetic matter than
in elegance of form or diction. His best poems
are not imitations, but lyrics written for the
accompaniment of the lute in simple metrical
forms. His best innovation was not the intro-
duction of Italian measures, but the revival of
that lyrical mood which had produced some
charming snatches of English verse in the
thirteenth century, and had then almost
entirely died away, Chaucer himself having
but a faint touch of it.

The Earl of Surrey was to some extent a
disciple of Wyatt, though his poems have none
of the vehement individuality and character
which distinguish the style of his predecessor.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was great-
grandson of that Duke of Norfolk ("Dickon
of Norfolk ") who fell in the cause of
Richard III. at Bosworth Field. Neither the
place nor the exact date of his birth can i)e
settled with precision ; but Kenning Hall, in
Norfolk, is suggested by his indefatigable
biographer, Dr. Nott, as the most probable
birtliplace, and the year 1516 as the date for
his birth best coinciding with the known facts
of his career. SiuTey was carefully educated,
studying classical and modern (Italian) litera-
ture, and trying his hand at verse from boyish
years. The antiquary Leland was his brother's
tutor, and may also have instructed him. He
was placed in the court at the early age of nine
as cup-bearer to Henry VIII., and from the age
of fifteen he was about that monarch's person.
The spirit of poetry was not long in manifesting
itself in him, and he associated it, as is familiar
to many who have never read a line of his
poems, with the lady of the illustrious House of
FitzGerald, Earls of Kildare, and since Dukes
of Leinster. Dr. Nott pointed out, as detract-
ing somewhat from the romance, that the " fair
Geraldine " was but a child of six years when
the youthful and chivalrous poet adopted her
as his " ladie," and celebrated her beauty and
virtue in one of the loveliest of our early
sonnets.

In April, 1-545, Surrey was recalled from his
command in France through the intrigues of
the Earl of Hertford (afterwards Protector
Somerset). The exposure of Katherine Howard
and the ignominy which attached to that con-
nection no doubt rendered Henry exceptionally
ready to listen to anything to the discredit of
her relatives, and many stories of Surrey's rash-
ness and impulsive nature were current. Both
Surrey and his father were on bad terms with
Hertford, whom they disliked and despised as
the representative of the new nobility, and
whom they sought to supplant in the confidence
of the King. In August, 1546, Hertford and
his friends trumped up a charge against Surrey
of quartering the royal arms upon his shield,
and of aspiring to the succession upon Henry's
death. Henry was genuinely afraid that
Surrey's headstrong nature might lead him to
dispute the succession of a boy of ten, and
attempt to smash the windows, not of London
citizens, but of the Tudoj dynasty. Surrey
was found guilty on January 15th, 1547, and
a week later was brought to the block on

SURREY'S ' .ENEID

Tower Hill. His remains, after interment at
Barking All Saints^ were eventually deposited
at Framlingham.^

As far as regards the subject-matter of his
poetry, Surrey must be regarded as the follower
of Wyatt. Almost all his poems deal with the
subject of love, the fair Geraldine taking the
place of the dark-eyed Anna of his predecessor.
Ninety-six of his love poems to forty of Wyatt's
were included in TotfeTs Mwcdlany of June,
1557. Some of these are iiTegular sonnets (a
great improvement upon those of Wyatt in form
of constiuction, though not based upon the
Petrarchan model) ; others, canzoni composed
either in ferza rima or in long verses of twelve
and fourteen syllables ; others, again, in the
form of short lyrics.

Perhaps the most important of Surrey's
achievements as poetical inventor (and he
did much to form the prosody and reform the
diction of his day) was the distinction of having
been the first to make use in English of deca-
syllabic blank verse. This he did with daring
originality in his translation of two favourite
books in Virgil's jEneid — the second with the
account of the downfall of Troy, and the fourth

contiiining the Dido episode. In his phraseology
and diction Surrey was indebted to Gavin
Douglas, and in regard to the innovation of
blank verse there is little doubt that the
novelty was suggested by the translation of
these same two books of the ^neid by
Francesco Maria Molza, published at Venice
in 1541. Surrey's jEneid was published after
his death in 1557. The selection of heroic
verse for tlie translation was only a natural
one, but in making it Sun-ey was the first
Englishman to take the successful venture of
employing the verses in simple succession
without any coimecting rhymes. His Italian
predecessor had set him an example in this, and
even if Surrey knew not Molza he could not
have been unaware of other Italian endeavoui-s
of a similar kind, whether in the form of drama
or in elegies. He certainly applied the new
principle \\ith skill, and showed considerable
power over the new insti-ument by varying the
place assigned to the rhythmical pause. It
was not, however, until many years later, in
the hands of Christopher Marlowe, that the
potentialities of this new species of verse could
be tlioroughly appreciated.

' In addition to Dr. Nott and the authorities cited for AV^j-att, the reader must refer to Ed. Bapst's Deux
GentiU-hommes Poites (1891), and to Schipper and J. B. Mayor on Surrey's metres. Certain Bokes of Virgiks
JEnais, turned into English meter hy the right honourable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey, were printed in black-letter
by Richard Tottel, Fleet Street, June, 1567.

CHAPTER VI

EARLY TUDOR PROSE

" Libel'us fere aureus nee minus satutaris quam fest'wus."

Lord Berners' Froissart — Fabyan's New Chr<micles — Richard Grafton— John Leland — Andrew Boorde— George
Cavendish— Grocyn and Linacre— John Colet — Sir John Cheke —Roger Ascham— jTAp Sehofemaster —
Latimer — Sir Thomas Elyot— Sir Tliomas More — Utopia — Its influence in literature.

OF the chief prose writers during the two
reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.,
covering a period of over sixty years, it is
proposed to give a classified rather than a
chronological survey. Hitherto English prose
had been strictly limited in kind. There were,
of course, chronicles and letters, translations
and treatises. Annals, theology, and law had
engrossed by far the greater part of the activity
of English prose writers. Only a few years
before the crowning mercy of Bosworth (1485)
Malory had adapted prose to the purpose of
highly imaginative narrative, and it was soon
to be bent to other fresh uses. New forms of
literature are now rising, and they are associated
everywhere with the battle of opinion which,
like the first movement of sap in plants, is
a first condition of health, growth, and fiiiit-
bearing. The example of the Italian courts had
strengthened the faith of king and courtiers
in the skilled use of the pen. Henry VIII.
among his courtly makers attacked Luther
in a treatise, and composed some tunable
songs. He was soon to defy the Pope of
Rome, like Shakespeare's King John, and to
make himself Pope of England, to the exceeding
great joy of the Lollard remnant, and of the
much greater section of the community who
either hated or coveted, as the case might be,
the power and the wealth of Rome.

Commencing in the old paths of chronicle
and translation we pass on to the outpourings
of our first really great English antiquary,
John Leland ; the early English eccentric and
merry -andrew, Boorde ; and our first distinctive
and individual biographer, George Cavendish.
The great humanistic movement was now
beginning effectually to quicken English

thought, especially through the influence of
the universities. Linacre and Grocyn, Colet
and Erasmus, lead us to More, Elyot, and
Ascham. But the Renaissance in England
soon becomes merged in the Reformation, of
which we have a noble representative in
Latimer, although for the most fundamental
work of our English reformers in the evolution
of the English Scriptures, the liturgy, and
other formularies of Protestant doctrine, we
must refer our readers to a special chapter
a little later on.

The chief work of Lord Bemers (c. 1467 —
1-533), his famous translation of Froissart,
was und_rtaken by the express command of
Henry VIII. Tlie first volume was printed
by Pynson in 1524, the second in 1525. It
may be freely admitted that Berners shows
a gentlemanly indifference to pedantic niceties
of style, whether French or English. He
makes no pretence to superior qualifications
for the work. In the preface to the Froissart
he speaks of his " rude translation '^ ; and
elsewhere he speaks of his lack of facility in
English, and his incomplete study of French.
This unpretentiousness had one capital result ;
the translator attempts no soaring flights, but
keeps his nose down close to the phrasing of
his original. When his author is clear, Berners
is comparatively lucid, but when there are hard
words or difficult constructions he is apt to
become confused. The difficulty is often due
to the printed text of the French, which was
not derived from the best manuscripts and is
full of corruptions ; yet he is frequently very
careless both in translating his French and in
constructing his English, while instead of
correcting the English proper names, of wliich.

FROISSART

presenting to the eye no regular or uniform
picture.

From the glittering pages of Froissart as
rendered by Lord Berners one turns sadly to the
tedious homespun of our native chroniclers such
as Fabyan and Hall, representatives of English
history under Henry VII. and Henry VIII.

Fabyan's New Chronicles of England and
France, the concordance of histories, wa.s
printed by Pynson in 1516 in two parts :
Part I., from the mythical Brut of Geoffrey
of Monmouth to Henry II. ; Part II.,
from Richard I. down to the accession of
Henry VII. Successive continuations carried
the work down to the enthronement of
Elizabeth. Each year is dealt with separately
under the heading of its Lord Mayor, and
much space is devoted to the London Cor-
poration and to the details of blood-curdling
executions. More attractive, perhaps, is the
so-called chronicle of Edward Hall, another
Londoner, who studied at Eton, Cambridge,
and Grav's Inn, became a common Serjeant,
and died in 1547. Tlic character of HalPs
book is shown in its title : The Union of the
N'ohle and Ilhtstre Families of Lancastre and
York, commencing with Henry IV. and ending
with Henry VIII. ; printed by Berthelot in
1542. HalPs chronicle is a glorification of
the Hoase of Tudor and a justification of all
the acts of Henry VIII., especially as regards
Church matters. Hall is far superior to
Fabyan in style, and the limitation of his
subject enables him to invest it with con-
siderable dramatic interest. He uses the Latin
history of Polydore Vergile to some extent
as a groundwork, but for the early years of
Henry VIII. he becomes an original authority.
Some of his descriptions are very vivid and
were closely followed by Shakespeare, in
Richard III. for instance. Later historians
also, such as Grafton, Holinshed, and Stow,
borrowed very largely from Hall.

Richard Grafton (died 1572) was an im-
portant printer and stationer, who printed the
first Book of Ci)inmon Piayer in 1549. He
edited the metrical chronicle of John Har-
dvngo, brought down Hall from 1532 to 1546,
and in 1568 brought out a chronicle of his
own, entitled A Chronicle at Large and Mere
History e of the Affayres of England}

' 'fTie scientific value of tliese chronicles is not perhaps great, hut they mark progress in the history
of English prose a^ a vehicle of narrative. They were all edited and indexed hy Sir Henry Ellis between
1809 and 1810. On Berners, see W. P. Ker, Essays mi Medieval Lileraturc, 190.5.

the French-speaking Froissart had made a most
admired havoc, he frequently makes matters
worse by incorrect transcription. With all his
faults, however, Berners, with his unformed
fifteenth-century English, probably represents
the spirit of the original better than any
accurate version in modern prose could do. There
is a vigorous picturesqueness about his phrase,
and a vitality about the utterances of his
personages, for the loss of which no amount
of grammatical concord with the original could
possibly atone. He has, too, this unique ad-
vantage — that he was born within seventy years
of the death of Richard II., the event with which
his translation terminates. His diction is, on
this account, not too far removed from the
time of his author, or from the famous acts
and glorious deeds in which the ancestors of
the translator and his readers alike had borne
their share.

" It is well to read Froissart," writes Taine
to his sister, " but do not seek facts there.
Simply remark and make a note of the picture
of manners. For the rest, read it like a
romance. You can read Rollin in the same
way, but that will profit you less.'" In reading
Froissart, nevertheless, we are reading the
history of the fourteenth century, breathing
the spirit and the very air of that age of
infinite variety, in which the knight-errant
appears side by side with the plundering
adventurer, while popular uprisings sound the
first note of alarm to feudal oppressors, and
the schism of the papacy leaves an open door
to the religious reformer. The Chronicles only
really cover two reigns in any detail, but these
two reigns — of Edward HI. and Richard II. —
make up the greater part of the fourteenth
■century. The chief landmarks of the book
are exploits of war — Sluys, Cre9y, Calais,
Poitiers, Najara, Limoges, Wat Tyler's Re-
volt, Rosebequc, and Ottcrburn — concluding
with the coronation of Henry IV. The whole
forms a great pageant of court and camp, of
barons, captains, archers, sieges, and fierce
■"journeys," or noble adventures of feats of
Arm.s. As we read it, we seem to be unrolling
a length of ancient tapestry, displaying an
animated crowd of knights and ladies with
a background of castles, tilts and tournaments,
unfaded in colour, harmonious in grouping, yet

JOHN LELAND

type of Tom Coryate ; or of George Cavendish,
author of a well-known Life of Cardinal Wolseij.
Boorde travelled in Europe from Sicily and
Spain to Denmark, partly as a political agent
of Thomas Cromwell. His most important
journey, however, was a purely recreative ramble
by Antwerp, Cologne, Venice, and Rhodes to
Jerusalem, and back by Naples, Rome, and the
Alps. He wrote an Itinerary of Europe, which
has unfortunately perished ; but he has left a
Book of the Introduction of Knowledge'^ which
is, in effect, a kind of handy guide to European
travel.

As a corrective to the coarse lampoons or
Skelton it is desirable for the student of the
period to read the pious Life of Cardinal Wolsey,
written about 1557 by the great prelate's gentle-
man usher, George Cavendish (1500 — 1562).
A devout Conservative and Catholic, Cavendish
wrote in an old-fashioned style, with some-
thing of the archaic diction of an ancient
chronicle. As a record of unwavering fidelity,
entirely free from pretension or artifice, his
book has an attraction and a literary grace of
its own, apart from its critical or artistic merits,
which are small. It is the production of a
refined, pious, and gentle nature, which looks
over many years of quiet melancholy upon a
period when he, too, had borne a part in great
affairs. The story of Wolsey's death is memor-
able for the use which seems to have been made
of it in the great Elizabethan pageant play
of Henry VIII. If Shakespeare or Fletcher
saw it at all, they must have seen it in MS.'
The early part of the reign of Henry VIII.
was honourably distinguished by the grert
encouragement given to humane letters, and
especially to the teaching of Greek at Oxford
and Cambridge.* Before the end of the
fifteenth century William Grocyn and Thomas
Linacre brought back from Italy both know-
ledge of and enthusiasm for the newly found
authors of antiquity. They established the
study of Greek at Oxford, where they were
soon followed by John Colet, who became

' Lelaud's MSS. had, however, been preserved in the Bodleian and Cotton Libraries, and their riches were
largely drawn upon by such famous antiquaries as Caradeu, Drayton, Stow, Burton, Dugdale, and Wood.

- Boorde's Introduction and Dietary were edited by Dr. FurniTall for the Early English Text Society in 1870.

' Cavendish's book was extensively circulated in manuscript long before it was printed. It was published
in a garbled form in IC41 ; first separately edited from the author's autograph MS. by S. W. Singer in 181.5 ;
reissued with an introduction by Prof. H. Morley in 1885 ; and beautifully printed with original spelling
by William Morris, Hammersmith, March, 1893. Cavendish's book is well described in Retrospective Review,
V. 1-44.

■* For the rise of the New Learning, more especially at Oxford, and in connection with Colet, Erasmus, and
More, see Frederic Seebohm'g delightful Oxford Rc/ormen; 1867, 3rd ed. 1887.

Of greater intrinsic value than these chroni-
cles is the work of our first great (extra-legal)
antiquarian scholar, John Leland, who was
educated first at St. Paul's School under the
celebrated grammarian Williatn Lilly, grand-
father of the Euphuist, and then at Cambridge,
Oxford, and Paris. Henry VIII., with his
undoubted gift in discerning talent, en-
couraged Leland in every way, making him
Chaplain Librarian and King's Antiquary, in
addition to according him a special permit to
examine the historical records of the country.
From 1536 to 1542 Leland travelled all over
the kingdom. His tours were as extensive as
those of Defoe, but his survey was not so
much social and economic as topographical
and antiquarian. He visited towns, villages,
castles, cathedrals, and monasteries ; ransacked
libraries for valuable books and records; hunted
out coins, inscriptions, and ancient works of
ai't ; and even collections in what we should
now call folk-lore, in which pursuit his know-
ledge of Anglo-Saxon and of Welsh stood him
in valuable stead. He also made large bio-
graphical collections which took shape in four
books of British biography entitled De Viris
Illustrlbus. Like the contemporary work
of Bishop John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium
Maiorig Britannia; Catalogue (1548-1559),
Leland's Lives are disfigured by many avoid-
able errors and fables, but are noteworthy
as being first in a series of efforts leading up
to the Biographia Britannica and the Dic-
tionary of National Biography. Having fid-
filled the tasks of both the Nepos and Varro
of his age, poor Leland died insane in 1552,
and his greatest work, the Itinerary through
most Parts of England and Wales, was not
printed until 1710, when it was taken up by
the great Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne.^
While we are on the subject of the topo-
graphers and biographers of Henry VIII. 's
generation we must not altogether omit mention
of Andrew Boorde (1490 — 1549), who punned
his name into " Perforatus,'" a fantastic proto-

ROGER ASCHAM

Dean of St. Paul's, the founder of the Cathedral
School there, and the friend of Erasmus and
More. Cambridge followed a little later, and
the great Erasmus lectured there in Greek for
a short time. After him came Sir John Cheke
(d. 1557), who became Provost of King's College,
Cambridge, and is remembered as "the professor
who taught Cambridge and King Edward
Greek." Of the pronunciation of that language,
moreover, he set up the standard which has ever
since prevailed in England. Cheke produced
a number of learned and controversial works in
Latin. His most notable work in English was
a pamphlet, published in 1549, under the title
of The Hiu-t ofSidiiioT), a somewhat uncritical
denunciation of the agrarian rising in Norfolk
under Robert Ket. Cheke in turn was followed
at Cambridge by his more brilliant pupil, Roger
Ascham.

Roo-er Ascham was bom near Northallerton
in 1515. His father was house steward in the
family of Lord Scrope. He himself was placed
in the family of Sir Anthony Wingfield, under
whose patronage he entered St. John's College,
Cambridge. At Cambridge Ascham joined the
progressive party in education, and applied him-
self diligently to the study of Greek. He was
made a fellow of his college, gathered many
pupils about him, and was, in 1538, appointed
Greek reader at St. John's. Besides his pro-
ficiency in Greek, Ascham was distinguished
for the purity of his Latin epistles and for his
beautiful handwTiting. Many of his scholars
rose to great eminence, and among them
William Grindal was so much distinguished
that, by Cheke's recommendation, Ascham was
called to court as a proper master of languages
for the Lady Elizalxjth. In defence of his
pastime, archery, and to show how well he
could handle Platoni(t dialogue, he wrote and
dedicated to Henry VHI. in 1545 the masterly
little treatise called Toxophilus. For this
treatise, long regarded as a model of prose
style, Ascham received a yearly pension of A'lO
from the King. He was also chosen orator to
the University of Cambridge in the place of
Sir John Cheke.

In 1563 Ascham was invited by Sir Edward
Sackville to write The Scholcmaster^a. treatise on
education. The book sprang out of a conver-

sation after a dinner in Sir William Cecil's
chamber at Windsor. A number of scholars
at Eton had run away from the school for fear
of beating, and the question arose whether it
were better to make the school a house of
pleasure or a house of pain. Aschani, as the
model pupil ot a model teacher. Sir John
Cheke, was appealed to by Sackville to decide
the issue. The book, commenced with so much
alacrity, in the hope no doubt of a considerable
reward, was interrupted by the death of the
patron, and afterwards sorrowfully and slowly
finished in the gloom of disappointment under
the pressure of distress. But of the author's
disinclination or dejection there can be found
no tokens in the work, which is conceived with
great vigour, and finished with great accuracy,
and perhaps contains the best advice that was
ever given for the study of languages. The
treatise was practically completed, but Ascham
did not live to pubhsh it. He died of a
wasting illness on December 30th, 1568. The
printers showed no eagerness to print the book,
which lay unseen in his study, but was eventually
dedicated by his widow, Margaret Ascham, to
Sir William Cecil in 1570. Of Ascham's other
English works there remains to mention A
Report and Discourse of the Affairs and State
of Germany, an interesting contemporary
account of European politics during the critical
time of the struggle between Charles V. and
Maurice of Saxony.'

Another advocate of the long-bow, who vTote
his native tongue with a racier idiom and a
homelier strength than Ascham, was Hugh
Latimer, the son of a Leicestershire yeoman
whose armour the boy had buckled on in
Henry VII. 's reign during the Cornish rebel-
lion. Born at Thurcaston about 1486, Latimer
threw himself into the cause of New Learning
at Cambridge with a zeal fully equal to that of
Ascham, but he was destined to be known not
as a scholar, l)ut as a jireacher. He is well
represented in two volumes of Prof. Arber's
invaluable reprints — Seven Sermons and The
PhmirJi(!:s\ The doscri|>tion 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^<ir Ascii.am were edited by Dr. J. A. (iiloH, 3 vols., 180.5. To.tnplii/nx and The
Scholemaxter have both been r(?j)riuted by Prof. Arl)er, and The Schokmaxler by J. K. B. Mayor, with a Life
of Ascham by Hartley Coleridge, 1073 aud 1881. Tliere is an agreeable article on the Toxophittis iu
KeiroHpeclive lievie.w, iv. 7fJ-C7.

LATIMER AND ELYOT

Kichard." He had an exceptional gift for the
jocose. His sermons were full of happy instances
and "merry toys," such as the story of the
white-bearded old man of Kent, who asserted
that the building of Tenterden steeple was
the c-ause of the Goodwin Sands, because
before it was built the Goodwin Sands gave
no trouble to Sandwich Haven. He was also
a master of taunts and fleers. At the trial
just before his death he mocked the Bishop of
Gloucester in such wise that the court roared
with laughter. He had little turn for specula-
tion, but intense moral earnestness, backed up
by no small store of irony and invective.
" His homely humour breaks in with story and
apologue ; his earnestness is always tempered
with good sense ; his plain and simple style
quickens with a shrewd mother wit. He talks
to his hearers as a man talks to his friends,
telling stories of his life at home as a boy, or
chatting about the changes and chances of the
day with a transparent simplicity and trath
that raises even his chat into gi'andeur. His
theme is always the actual world about him,
and in his simple lessons of loyalty, of industry,
of pity for the poor, he touches upon almost
every subject from the plough to the throne.
No such preaching had been heard in England
before his day, and with the growth of his
fame grew the danger of persecution." Latimer
was protected by Henry VHI., and his Lutheran
s\-mpathies allowed full sway dovm to 1540,
when the reaction set in. He was then im-
prisoned and forced to resign his See of
Worcester. Under Edward VI. he was, of
course, a powerful influence, but on Mary's
accession he was promptly sent to the Tower
as an extreme Protestant. His rough jeers at
the supposed miraculous images of the Virgin
rendered him obnoxious to the Catholics.
When charged with heresy at Oxford in
October, 1555, Latimer firmly refused to recant
and appealed to a general council. On

' Separate sermons by Latimer were printed during his lifetime ; twenty-seven were issued in 1,56" 4to
Some of the best were selected by Leiph Richmond in liis Fathers of the English Church, 1807 vol ii -'they
were issued m a more complete form by the Parker Society, 1844-5, 2 vols., edited by George Elwes Corrie
Ihere is a strong and moving account of Latimer in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and there are Lives by Gilpin
(1/55), and by Demaus, revised edition, 1881. The accounts of Latimer in Burnefs Reformation and
Jbroudes Histor,,, InWoch's Leaders of the Reformation, and in Blackwood, vol. Ixix., should" aUo be read
There is a modern Life in the Leaders of Religion Series, by R. M. and A. J. Carlyle, 18!)9

' A very complete reissue of The Governour was edited by Henry Herbert Stephen Croft from the
first edition of 15.31, in 2 vols., 1880. The edition contains a full Life and an elaborate glossary For a
very detailed examination of the credibility of the Prince Hal story, which Mr. Croft regai-ds as originally
a monastic legend, see vol. ii. GO-71. As a translator Elyot followed Barclay, Skelton, and N. UdaU ITie
noted Ireuch Grammar of John Palsgrave first appeared in 1530.

October IGth he and his junior, Bishop Ridley,
were handed over to the secular arm for
execution in the ditch over against Balliol
College, Oxford (lu'gh where the Martyrs'
Memorial now stands).'

Another of the early masters of English
prose, who deserves a place between Ascham
and More, more, perhaps, on account of his
versatility than on any distinctive merit of
style, is Sir Thomas Elyot (d. 1546), himself
a diplomatist and the son of an eminent judge.
As a scholar and a humanist he owed much to
More, at whose house he was a frequent visitor.
His most fiimous book was an ethical and
educational treatise dedicated to Henry VHI.
in 1531, and styled The Boke named the
Governour. Full of borrowed wisdom as it
was, it proved eminently adapted to the wants
of the age, and passed through numerous
editions. Its primary object was to discuss the
education and training of those who might one
day be called upon to fill leading positions in
the commonwealth. To many readers, how-
ever, it must be admitted that the chief interest
of The Governour," with all its merits, will
always lie in the fact that it is the original
authority for the delightful story of the
righteous judge Gascoigne and the insubordi-
nate Prince Hal. Elyot passed the story on
to Hall, from whose chronicle Shakespeare
derived it. Elyot borrows many other notable
instances from the Bible, from tlie fathers,
from classic antiquity, and from English
history, both in The Governour and in his
subsequent works, such as The Castle of Health,
The Banquet of Sapience, 1534, The Image of
Govcnmiice, 1540, and The Dcfcn.se of Good
Women, 1545. In 1538, with the aid of a
loan of books from the King, he compiled a
Latin-English dictionary called Bihliotheca,
which far surpassed anything of the kind that
had hitherto appeared in England — the old
Promptuarium Parvulorum, for instance, first

SIR THOMAS MORE

printed by Pvnson in 1499. This great lexicon
A^as remodelleil by Bishop Thomas Cooper, and
published in 1550 under the title of Tliesaunis.

Sir Thomas More, a son of a justice of the
King's Bench, was born in Milk Street, London,
on February 7th, 1478, and as a boy was sent as
a page to the household of Archbishop Morton,
by whom he was sent to Oxford. Morton, it is
said, often remarked to his guests upon the
genius which he perceived to be latent in the
youthful page. He began his legal career under
brilliant auspices, and his prospects were greatly
improved b}' the accession of Henry VHI. He
was made Master of Requests in 1514 ; was
appointed successively Chancellor of the Duchy
of Lancaster and Speaker of the House of
Commons ; was sent on diplomatic errands to
France and Germany, and in 1529, on the fall
of Wolsey, against his own wish was made
Lord Chancellor. Both as a man and as
a lawyer More was strongly consenative by
temperament. He was very bitter in his
denunciation of advanced religious opinions,
especially those of what he called the pestilen-
tial sect of Tyndal and Luther, and he had
little pity for stubborn heretics. He naturally
witnessed with grave disapproval the course
of events which were eventually to turn the
Defensor Fidei into the head of a schismatic
Church. In May, 1532, he sought and obtained
permission to resign the chancellorship. He
retired to his house at Chelsea, and devoted
himself to his family and their studies. When,
however, in April, 1533, he was called upon
to subscribe upon oath to the Act of Succession,
involving his acquiescence in the King's head-
ship of the Church and the royal divorce, he
steadfa.stly refused to sacrifice his conscience to
Henry VIH., and after a 3-ear''s harsh imprison-
ment in the Tower was beheaded on Tower Hill
on July 6lh, 1535. John Fisher, himself an
impressive preacher and author of two short
treatises of genuine beauty, A Sphitual Con-
solation and The. Ways to Perfect Religion,
suffered a like death for a similar cause a
fortnight earlier. It was not safe, wrote one
scholar to another, to relate how much feeling
was moved throughout the whole kingdom by
the death of such good men.

Utopia seems to have owed its immediate

origin to an embassy in which More was engaged
in 1515, when he was sent by Henry VIII.
in company with Cuthbert Tunstall, afterwards
Bishop of Durham, to confer with the ambassador
of Charles V. on the question of a renewal of
alliance. And " since our business did admit
of it (says More) I went to Antwerp," where
among the many who visited the distinguished
Englishman was one whom he describes as
more acceptable to himself than any other.
This was Peter Giles (.Egidius), a man of great
humour and good rank in his town, with whom
More contracted a close friendship. It was at
Antwerp about November, and probably after
many conversations with his new acquaintance,
that More wrote the second book of Utopia ;
the first was written later after his return to
London early in 1516. In October, 1517, More
wTote to Erasmus to say how glad he was
that ^gidius likes his Nusquama (Utopia).
Erasmus wrote next month to say that the MS.
of Nusquama was in great request and was
about to be placed in the printer's hands. It
was accordingly printed at Thierry Martin's
Press at Louvain in December, 1516, with the
title LiheUu-s vere aureus nee minus salutaris
quam festivus de optima reip. statu de que nova
Insula Utopia. Tlie volume has no pagination.
First comes the picture chart of the island of
Utopia ; then the Utopian alphabet, in which
A to L are represented bv circles or curves,
M by a triangle, and N to Y by rectangles or
portions of rectangles, dashes being used with
them for the sake of further diversity ; then a
short " meter " of Utopian -vn-itten by Ane-
molius, poet laui-eate — verificatory details
worthv of a Defoe or a Swift. The book was
received by a chorus of praise. More could
only hope that it was all sincere. Erasmus
caused all his friends to read it, and wrote to
More that a burgomaster at Antwerp was so
delighted with the new Res puhlica that he
had it all by heart ; he suggested that the
autlior might become the ruler of the Utopian
people. More wrote with delightful humour
deprecating the high honour, but adding that
should it please Heaven to exalt him to this
high dignity, while too high to think of
common acquaintances he will still keep a warm
corner in his heart for Erasmus and Tunstall.'

' Cnriously enough no English version of (i/ojiia was pnblislicii in llio lifetime of the writer. The earliest
in point of time is that which appeared in l.'j.51 under the title of A fniteful and plcafuunt worlte of the l:^'xt
ttale in a publique weule and of the new yie called Utopia: written in jMtine by Syr Thomas More, knyght,
ami trantlated into Englyshe by lialphe liobynson, Citizen and Ooldsmylhe of London. Printed by Abraham

" UTOPIA "

The polity of Utopia was a confederation of
free city-states. There were forty-four of these
cities in the island, all large (holding at least six
thousand families) and well built, and all formed
and governed upon one uniform plan. Each had
twenty miles of soil round it and assigned to it,
and each sent up three of its wisest senators
once a year to the chief city, Amaurote(shadowy),
to consult about the common concerns. The
country outside the towns was devoted to
agriculture, and was covered with farmhouses
for the husbandmen, which were well contrived
and furnished with all things necessary for
rural labour. Each country family consisted
of no fewer than forty men and women and
two bondmen, the good-man and his wife ruling
ej'ery family, and over thirty families being
governed by a special magistrate. After stay-
ing two years in the country twenty out of each
family were sent back to town and their places
taken by twenty townspeople, who came to leani
the agricultural arts, which by-and-by they
would have to teach to others. During the
harvest large numbers of additional hands were
despatched from the towns, and the harvest was
generally got in in a single day. The centre of
the means of communication (which were far in
advance of those of the sixteenth century) was
the chief city of Amaurote, situated upon the
River Anyder, some sixty miles above its mouth.
This city was encompassed by a high and thick
wall, in which thei-e were many towers and forts,
and the streets were made very convenient for
all carriages and were well sheltered from the
wind. The buildings were good and were so
uniform that a whole side of a street looked like
one house. The inhabitants were lucky in
possessing each of them a large garden in
connection with their dwellings, and their doors
were so happily constructed that they not only
easily opened but also shut of their own accord.
ITiere was, however, no property among the
Utopians ; every man entered freely into any
house whatsoever ; and at ten years' end they
shifted their houses by lot.

The great principle on which the life of the
Utopians was based is community of goods.
There is no private property ; no use of money
except as a means of communication with other

nations and for paying mercenaries. They
contennicd gold, which was " the reproachful
badge of unfamed persons." Meals were taken
in common, " four in a mess" ; the food, plain
but ample, being fetched from the connnon
market early in the day by special stewards,
with a reservation of the very best for hospitals,
one for each ward of the city, outside the walls.
Bloodshed of evei-y kind was abhorred by the
Utopians, and the hunter was classed with, or
even below, the slaughterman, both being the
occupations of serfs. They trained themselves
in martial exercises, but preferred to get the
better of their enemies by payments to mer-
cenaries, by corruption, and even by assassination
than by open warfare.

Every able-bodied man was compelled by the
laws to work for his livelihood. They were
careful, the Utopians, not to wear themselves
out with perpetual toil from morning to night.
Dividing the day and night into twenty-four
hours, they appointed six of these for work.
Three hours are so devoted before dinner;
after that comes a rest of two hours, and then
another short spell of three hours brings them
to supper-time. At eight o'clock all go to bed,
to rise next morning at four. Lectures, music,
and honest games fill up the intervals of the
day. Owing to the absence of drones, hoarding,
and superfluous expense, the amount of labour
proved amply sufficient. All over the island
they wear the same sort of clothes. Male and
female dress varied but little. Fashions never
altered, and every family made their own
garments. All, both women and men, learned
some ti'ade or other. Generally the same trade
passed down from father to son, inclination
often following descent ; but if any man's genius
lay another way, he was by adoption translated
into a family that dealt in the trade to which
he was inclined. Of the religions in Utopia
" there be divers kinds " ; but as laws and lawyers
were rare, so also have they very few priests.
These are men of exceeding holiness, and there-
fore " exceeding few." Like the other magis-
trates of Utopia, they were selected by ballot.
The great feature of More's scheme was religious
toleration. By one of the oldest laws of Utopia
it was decreed that no man should be punished

Vele. A revised edition appeared in 1556, and a third in 1597. All these were in black-letter. Robinson's trans-
lation, which, if ofttimes redundant, is still almost always idiomatic and picturesque (recaUing in many phrases
the Book of Common Prayer of the same date) has been reprinted by T. F. Dibdin, 1808, by Prof. Arber in
1869, also at Morris's Kelmscott Press, 1893, and at the Clarendon Press in 1895. The Latin of More has
also been Englished by Bishop Burnet, 1684, by Arthur Cayley in 1808, and others.

INFLUENCE OF "UTOPIA"

for his religion. Every one might be of any
rehgion he pleased, and might use argument to
induce others to accept it. This liberty was
extended to avowed atheists, though these were
judged to be mifit for any public trust. All
sects united in public worship, which was so
designed that nothing might be seen or heard
which should jar with the feelings of any class
of worshippers. This broad-minded conception
formed a coping-stone to the noble ideal which
More had given to the world.

More's conception of the Utopia was sug-
gested in part, there is httle doubt, by some of
his favourite books. Among these we know
were Plato's Republic and the playful dialogues,
especially the Vera Historia of Lucian. It
seems, further, that More had in his mind the
recorded practices of the early Christians and
some of the introductory machinery of St.
Augustine's De Civitate Dei. It was the first
notable example from the pen of an English
writer of the type of voyage imaginaire. Its
popularity abroad procured it a number of
imitators. It suggested such speculative
treatises as Campanella's Civitas Salts, and it
may have had some influence upon such playful
flights of fancy as Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage
de la Lune. It certainly gave a new adjective,
Utopian, not only to England, but to Europe.
English literature itself contains many examples
of the voyage imaginaire, both of the specu-
lative and of the more purely playful type.
Amongst the former may be merely noted
Bacon's New Atlantis, Harrington's Oceana,
Hobbes's Leviathan, Sir John Eliot's Monarchy
of Man, Hall's Mundus alter et idem, Filmer's
Patriarcha, Butler's Erewhon, and Bellamy's
Looking Baclacard ; among the latter Barclay's
Argenis, Bishop Francis Goodwin's Man in the
Moon, Bishop John AVilkins's Discovery of a
World in the Moon, Swift's Gidliver\s Travels,
Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins, Raspe's Baron
Munchansen, Lytton's Coming Race, and the
numerous fantastic peregrinations of Mr. H. G.
Wells.

In regard to dramatic invention. More is
superior to any of his successors, with the ex-
ception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is
a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting
from a small portion of fact he founds his tale
with admirable skill on the few lines in the
Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo
Vespucci. He is very precise about dates and
facts, and has the power of making us believe
that the narrator of the tale must have been
an eye-witness. More greatly regrets that he
forgot to ask Raphael Hytlilodaye in what part
of the world Utopia was situated. When
More wrote to his friends at Antwerp to
make good the loss of this important detail,
the whereabouts of Hytlilodaye coidd no longer
be ascertained and the secret has perished
with him.'

The Utopia shows its author to have possessed
a reach and originality of thought far beyond
his contemporaries. Nearly all that we can
learn of More is delightful, but baffling. The
favourite of Holbein, of Henry and of Erasmus
(who wrote his Encomium Moriw under More's
roof), he is described by his " Erasmiotatos "
as omnibus omnium horarum homo. A merry
story ever on his lips, he was never in gayer
humour than when he had decided to defy
Henry VIII., unless it was when he was actually
on the scaffold. Always smiling (like Newman,
like Arnold), he keeps hearers and readers alike
under the enigma of his style, and, like his
wife, we never quite know when, if ever, he is
in earnest ; but he wins all hearts, even that of
his practical wife, by his playful flattery. Lover
of Lucian, patron of Hellenists and musicians,
he brings up a family of scholars with the aid of
a birch made of peacocks' feathers. Careless
and ironical though he is about worldly pros-
perities, he constantly eulogises his father's
sternness and tenacity in such matters ; while,
in regard to heretics, he himself was pitiless.
The anti(|ue mould and the medireval strain
render his character an exceptionally puzzling
one for the modern man to unravel. -

' One of tlie nearest approaches to the Utopian polity, as pointed out by Sir Clements Markham in his
interesting Jlistori/ of Pt-rn, was that of Peru under tlic adniiiiistnitioii of the Incas.

' The Workes of S'' Thomas More . . . written in the l-Mi/i/xh Taiii/ne, were edited in folio by Rastell in 1567
(a new edition is promised by Delcourt and O'Connor). His liest jjrose is contained in tlie unfinished little
tract, De Qiiatuor J^'orisniniit:, und in tlie ilialofrue entitled "Quiilh lie and Quoth I." The two contoniiioraiy
Lives of More are by "son Rojjer," who married his favourite daughter Marfraret, first printed in lOKi,
and the Life in tlie Tres Thotiur (l.Oiili) of 'lliomas .Stapleton. 'J'he sketches by Mackintosh and Seehohm
and tlie imaginary picture in Anne Manning's Iluusehold of Sir Thomas More apart, there are two good
Lives by Catholics of to-day, Father Bridgctt's (best edition 1892) and Henri Bremoud's much briefer Blessed
Thonum More (1904).

BOOK II

JDRA3IA AND LYRIC

CHAPTER I

FROM TRANSITION TO TRANSFORMATION— I

''The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature." — Emebson.

An important period of development — Italian influence — Classical translations — Arthur Golding — Sir Thomas
North — Sir Thomas Hoby — Sir Geoifry Fenton — Painter's Palace of Pleasure — George Chapman — Edward
Fairfax — Joshua Sylvester — John Florio — Thomas Shelton — Sir Thomas Urquhart.

and by journey work for the infant stage, that
the hterary train was laid.

The development that took place in regard
to English literature between early Tudor and
late Tudor time.s, in the fifty years let us say
between 1529 and 1579, was a most important
one. The period may at first sight seem empty
and singularly barren. But when we regard it
attentively and recognise the change brought
about in the view taken of fundamentals, we
must admit its claim to serious interest. At the
commencement of it Sir Thomas More wrote his
Utopia in Latin. This is a momentous fact.

IMuch had already been done to unify tlie
English language. Caxton, like another King
Alfred, had made translations into English, and
having given vernacular books his imprimatur,
had distributed them to serve as patterns of
the " King^s English " broadcast over the land.
The same influence had been used to give a
wider circulation to the poetry which had
hitherto been mainlv a monopoly and a luxuiy
of the court — notably the works of Chaucer
and Gower ; a little later, the popular col-
lections known as the Poetical Miscellanies.
Already the Stationers' Company had grown
into a powerful federation successfully interested
in extending the dissemination of books.^

' In the reign of Mary, the Privy Council began to perceive and to regard with a jealous eye the far-reaching
influence which the new art of printing was capable of exercising upon public opinion ; the scriveners and book-
sellers had formed a guild or craft fraternity in Henry IV. 's time. In Henry ^'II.'s reign, the Stationers, as
they were called, were reinforced by printers, boolc-binders, paper-makers, type-founders, and others representing
all the trades that took part in the book-producing industry. In May, 1-557, the ancient guild was incorporated
as a regular company, and a charter was granted to it investing its master and wardens with the sole power of
printing, with power to search, seize, and destroy any unlicensed or prohibited books and to imprison any
persons who should print without their authority. No one was allowed to print without the company's licence
and all books were to be entered in the register at Stationers' Hall. The fee exacted by the company for licensing
a book was at first usually Ad., but came in Shakespeare's time to be almost invariably 6rf. The charter of
incorporation was confirmed by Elizabeth in No\ember, 1.559, when ^ve gather tliat there were twenty-two master

IN dealing with the important period of
transition between the early Tudor and
later Tudor period, we must pause. We are
in a century of two great reigns. Tlie Wars of
the Roses ai'e becoming forgotten. Henry VIII.
is King.

The Tudor regime continues — in the eighties
as in the forties the absolute despotism seems
undistiu'bed, nay even strengthened by the
repulse of external enemies. But great changes
had taken place quietly and imperceptibly.
By 1590 the Tudors had achieved their task.
Parliament was reviving and was bracing itself
up for a task of its own. The force of
circumstance which had delivered Englishmen
bound into the hands of tyrants w^as going to
release them. The genius of the race demanded
it. So in literature, extraordinary develop-
ments had taken place in this interval. External
signs had been few and of no sensational order.
We shall look in vain during the Protectorates,
and during the fifties, sixties, and seventies for
any literary planet or for any star of the first
magnitude. The literary aptitudes of English-
men were being undemonstratively schooled
and disciplined.

Poeti'y was acquiring a new quiet force. But
it was mainly by forced labours of translation,

38 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRESS

Much had assuredly been done, but not enough The extent of foreign influence upon English

apparently for More to think it worth while to literature in Elizabeth^s day was almost in-
clothe the ideas of the future in their native calculable. Of the various influences that
garb of English. ]Much remained to be done, then came in to shape our literature, that of
and the consolidation of English as a uniform the Italians was unquestionably the greatest,
literary language suitable for every kind of In history, politics, philosophy, science,
expression by Englishmen had to be established manners, in travel — but above all, imagina-
during these unostentatious years. The founda- five work of every kind from drama to lyric
tions had to be laid in translations into a — Italian books and Italian models were
sound, homespun, seniceable prose — religious the passion and the rage. From the queen
translation was most effectual. to the humblest courtier the Italian tongue

Tlie result of these combined forces of tlie was the test of good breeding. It is doubtful
organisation of the book industry, the multi- whether any foreign vogue before or since ever
plication of translations, and the conversion took such a complete hold upon English
of English into tlie medium of the popular society. It has been computed by Miss Scott,
religion, was greatly to strengthen the position the diligent bibliographer of Elizabethan
of the native language. So far had these translations from the Italian, that over four
influences been brouglit to bear by 1579 that hundred translations from the Italian were made
More, if he had been in the act of composing in England during the century (1550 — 1650),
Utopia then, would not have dreamed of representing over two hundred English trans-
writing it in Latin. By 1579 England, though lators and rather more Italian authors, the
still looking abroad for inspiration and design, two lists, Italian and English, comprising
had definitely begun to aspire to a great nearly all the most eminent writers of the
literature of her own. day. Shakespeare, it is true, did not im-

printers in London, and the number of printing houses remained fixed at twenty-two until quite down to
Commonwealth times. As it was the purists of the day complained bitterly of the lavish way in which premises
were licensed. The number of presses in operation is estimated at between fifty and sixty and, considering that
they were all small hand presses, the number of books, many of them large folios, which they were able to turn
out speaks well for the untiring industry of their manipulators. Stereotyping was of course unknown ; type was
seldom allowed to stand or to be locked up for long ; editions were small, rarely exceeding from twelve to fifteen
hundred. Not the Privy Council only but also its divisional Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission
seem to have exercised a general supervision over the output of the press ; but such supervision was of a general
and more or less accidental kind. The exact manner in which the censorship was exercised is not very easy
to define ; nor has the subject ever been worked out with the thoroughness which its intrinsic interest
demands. It may be stated, however, in general terms that after 155'J every book, as a necessary condition of
publication, had to receive the " allowance " of some recognised authority or other ; but the authority varied a
good deal. If the hook were obviously free from political or theological taint the authority of the master or
wardens of the Stationers' Company might suffice ; if it had a doctrinal bearing, however remote, it might be
necessary to obtain the licence of the Archbishop or the Bishop of London, or at any rate from the Archbishop's
secretary or some well-recognised doctor of divinity, acting possibly as a deputy. In pulilishing plays it was
necessary to affix the imprimatur of the Master of the Revels ; the Earl Marshal sanctioned heraldic books ; a
deputy of the College of Surgeons medical books, and so ou. Later on, in the time of the Long I'arlimnent,
regular boards were appointed for the licensing of books classified according to subjects. The universities appear
to have had almost full licensing powers, or powers at least coextensive with those of the bishops ; in them too was
vested a somevi hat ill-defined power of issuing licences for the printing of Bibles and Testaments. In case of a
book being issued which had a bearing upon the government, state-craft, home or foreign policy, it would liave
been considered advisable if not essential to obtain the imprimatur of the Secretary of State ; neglect of such a
precaution might very well lead to both author and publisher being deprived of their ears. Tliese possibilities
notwithstanding, it cannot be justly said that the censorship of the Elizabethan press was excessively stringent.

\ very impoi-tant fcatui'e in a system in many respects far from regular was that there was a large number
of patentees who were exempt from the ordinary licensing jurisdiction; so we find that a licence for ])rinting
playing cards was issued to one Bowes, the printing of all law books was licensed to Tottle (and if 'I'ottle were
lazy, as it was complained he was, the sup]dy of law Iiooks had to fiill into arrears). Similarly Day had a licence
for psalters. Seres for primers, and Roberts for almanacks, 'i'he Bisliop of London at one time claimed an
exclusive right to license almanacks. The company strongly objected to these monopolies and gradually
absorbed them, or as many of them as it could. They made large sums out of their privilege to issue Bibles,
though this was disputed at various stages by the universities and by the King's printer ; but the fact that the
privilege was not altogether witliout its penalties was shown by the circumstance that in 1032 the King's
printer was fined £3,000 for omitting the "not" from the seventh commaiulment.

SIR THOMAS NORTH

mediately translate, but his poems are intensely
Italianate, and the stories of fourteen of his
plays are founded upon Italian fiction, while
several other plays contain features which owe
their suggestion to Italian sources. Of some
seven hundred plays which survive from an
output of probably over two thousand during
the Elizabethan period, Miss Scott shows that
nearly three hundred hark back to Italy for
their motif \ while if imitative plays or plays
of remote suggestion were included, the number
of " Italianate " dramas would be considerably
greater.

The translators who swarmed so thickly
had almost the whole field of Latin scholarship
open to them. The direct influence exercised
by the Greek authors was comparatively remote.
The three writers of antiquity whose matter
and form exercised most influence upon the
Elizabethans were undoubtedly Virgil, Seneca,
and Ovid, and after these the next most fruitful
field was found in Italian authors of compara-
tively recent date.

Virgil had remained to some extent popular
throughout the whole of the Middle Ages ; his
style had endeared him to the Latin fathers,
apart from which it was commonly believed
that in his fourth eclogue he had foretold the
coming of the Messiah. The task of rendering
his beauties into English had already been
essayed in various forms by Caxton, Gavin
Douglas, and Surrey. In 1555 an Oxford
student and barrister of Lincoln's Inn, who
was also a physician, named Thomas Phaer,
commenced a new translation, completed after
his death in 1560 by a fellow-physician called
Thomas Twine. Owing to the influence which
they exercised over the early English dramatists,
the translations from Seneca's plays which wei-e
made by Jasper Hey wood (1559 — 1561) were
in some respects even more important. The
Metamorphoses of Ovid was another book which
had retained a distinct measure of popularity
throughout the Middle Ages. These were
translated between 1565 and 1567 into a ballad
metre full of life and spirit by Arthur Gold-
ing, a man of good femily, who was connected
by marriage with the seventeenth Earl of
Oxford and was a friend of Sir Philip Sidney.
Golding also translated The Commentaries of
Ccesar in 1575. The Metamorphoses furnished
a mine of fable and allusion to Golding's
countrymen. Ovid was much read at the
time in schools, where it is possible that

(lolding's translation may not have been un-
known. Shakespeare, at any rate, was well
acquainted with it, and the frequency of his
mythological allusions is largely due to this
source. It was to him, in fact, very much what
Lempriere's Classical Dictionary was to Keats.
Marlowe, too, is saturated with Ovidian meta-
phors and images.

Even more directly influential upon the work
of Shakespeare than Golding was the great
prose stylist among our early translators. Sir
Thomas North (1535—1600). North com-
menced his career as a translator with a version
of the Spanish Guevara's Diall of Princes
(1557). It was not until 1579 that he
published his famous translation of Plutarch
entitled The Lives of Noble Grecians and
Romans compared together. North translated
directly from the French version of Amyot,
but he wrote with a spontaneity and an idio-
matic vigour and wit which give his translation
many of the characteristics of an original work.
Shakespeare's appreciation of North is shown
by the close adherence which he paid to the
text of the translator in the plays of JuUius
CcEsar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra ;
while Midsummer Night''s Dream, Pericles,
and Timon of Athens are all indebted in a
less degree to the same source. Another book
which exercised a widespread influence in its
English form was the Coriegiano, or Coiu'tier,
of Castiglioni, a mirror of good taste in all
that pertained to knightly exercises, literary
accomplishments, and elegant love-making,
which exercised profound influence over
Northern tastes. The Coiuiier, first printed
in the original Italian in 1528, was indeed an
epitome of the social ideas of the Renaissance.
It serves as a good index of the manner in
which the new generation, the fin de siecle of
the fourteenth century, had transferred their
interests from the world to come to the world
in being. This was rendered by Sir Thomas
Hoby (1530 — 1566), a Cambridge man \\\\o
served as English Ambassador in France. His
translation, which like most of its fellows was
far from literal, was published in 1561. In
1562 Arthur Broke, or Brooke, gave to the
world his version of The Tragical History of
Eomeus and Juliet, from the great Italian
novelist who almost rivalled Boccaccio, Jlatteo
Bandello (1480—1561). A few years later,
between 1566 and 1567, William Painter con-
structed a much larger treasure-house of stories

THE PALACE OF PLEASURE '

drawn both from Boccaccio and Bandello and
their imitators, Belleforest and Cinthio, to
which he gave the name TTie Palace of Pleasure.

Later in the 'sixties George Turberville fol-
lowed Golding as a translator of Ovid. In
1566 we have William Adlington's version
of The Golden Ass of Apnleius. In 1569
comes a further translation of Ovid and one
of the ^Ethiopica of Heliodorus by Thomas
Undei'down. Sir Geoff'ry Fenton was simul-
taneously cjuarrying in the favourite mine of
Belleforest, Boisteau, and Guevara, and glutting
the English market with Tragical Discourses
(1567). Orie of the monumental translations
of the period was by this same Fenton. It was
a version of the History of the Wars of Italy
by Guicciardini — the book which, Macaulay
relates, rather than read, the condemned felon
went joyfully to the gallevs. This bare
enumeration may serve to give some idea of the
volume of translating work that was being
poured out in the early Elizabethan time.

More important perhaps than the transla-
tions from ancient classics or from Italian
treatises and plays were the versions of Italian
novelists — collections formed by combining
together the most sprightly stories which
poured from the lips of the Florentine tale-
tellers of the fifteenth century. Many of the
Italian stories were excellent of their kind.
A good many were based upon ancient sources,
but the writers were certainly not lacking in
invention. These new Italian stories soon out-
weighed all other kinds of literary imports, and
superseded the native products in popularity ;
coinciding with the rise of romantic drama
in England they soon became the happy
hunting ground of playwrights in search of
plots. TTie great storehouse of Elizabethan
plots was the collection of stories already
alluded to, translated and edited by a Seven-
oaks schoolmaster called William Painter
(1540—1594), under the title of The Palace
of Pkasure. Tiie book was projected upon
a comparatively small scale in 1562, but the
first volume eventually came out in 1566, and
a second volume wiis added in 1567, bringing
the number of short stories up to nearly a

hundred, mainly from Italian sources. The
collection must have come upon the English
reading world with something of the freshness
that The Ai-abian Nights did 150 years later.
The success of the book was very great : reissues
of it were soon called for, to which additions
were made.' Excluding the Bible, it was the
biggest book issued between the Morte d" Arthur
and North's Plutarch. Its appearance upon the
scene was all the more important because it
arrived during the seed-time of the Elizabethan
drama between 1565 and 1590. The contact
of England with novel conceptions from abroad
through the classic revivalists at the universities,
through Erasmus, through Luther and the
reformers, and through the translators of
Boccaccio and Petrarch, had given an enormous
stimulus to the intellectual activity of the
nation. The English mind had suddenly
blossomed out into manhood, ardent and
indefatigable ; the one thing it wanted was
material to work upon. Of the scholastic-
philosophy and chivalric poetry of the Middle
Ages there remained but little, and that little
was to a large extent effete. The great intel-
lectual wealth remained to be created, but it
could not be created out of nothing. The
drama was already indicated in England as the
most convenient expression for imaginative
apital, for nowhere had the interludes been
,'iore popular or better acted than in the
English cities. The play, too, would reach
many who could not read, or if they coidd read,
had no money for books. Where, then, were
the English playwrights to go for their plots ?
Gorbodiw, an English tragedy derived from
pseudo-classical Seneca, had appeared in 1561,
and indicates the source to which English
dramatists would have gone for inspiration, buc
for the rich domain of modern Italian myth
which Painter and his fellow-translators were
able to naturalise in England. The classic-
drama with its frigid conventionalities, its.
well-worn plots, its clumsy machinery, and it&
banishment of all at'tion from the stage was
by this unlikely means happily prevented from
taking a deep root in English soil. An Italian
plot soon became to be an almost indisi-

' Among Painter's successors and rivals in the diligent collection of Italian historiettes were : Sir GeofFry
Fenton, who gave the world in 1567 his Ocrtaine Tragimll lH.scour.scD, from the Italian through Belleforest and.
Pierre Boisteau ; George I'ettie, who produced in 1576 A Petiti; ralkicc of Pettic /ii'.v Plm-mrc ; George \V'hetHtone,
who produced in 1582 his IJfptiwii'ron of Virilt iJinrourxf.i, mainly from tlie yM«/o»(W(7/i! of Cinthio ; Rohert
Smyth ; George Turherville {Traykal Tulfx) ; Barnabe Kith (Farcwc/l to tlte MHitarye I'roffudun, 1681, exploitiu<ji
Bandello) ; 'llomas Fortescue (Forent or Colleclion of Ilistoryes, 1571).

GEORGE CHAPMAN

pensable passport to English favour (thirty
plays are based upon Bandcllo alone), partly
because the public curiosity was aroused to the
keenest pitch about everything that concerned
Italy, partly because Italians lent themselves
best to romantic treatment. Wlien the classic
and romantic schools came into conflict the
romantic cause proved the winning one. One
might almost say that Italy dominated the
Elizabethan drama as much as it did the
opera in England between 1750 and 1850.

The finest specimens of verse translation
blossomed simultaneously with what was best
in Elizabethan poetry and drama during the
last few years of Elizabeth''s reign. Then
were seen the first-fruits of Chapman's ever-
memorable Homer, Fairfax's Tasso, and Syl-
vester's Du Bartas.

George Chapman, " the learned shepherd of
fair Hitchin Hill," was born some five years
before Shakespeare, and has been claimed as an
alumnus by both of our old universities on very
insufficient grounds. In scholarship he stands
as the rival of Jonson, Donne, and Bacon in
the Upper House of letters ; and his patrons
and friends were the most distinguished that
the age afforded. As a poet he made his first
appearance at the age of thirty-five, when he
produced his dignified and somewhat obscure
and laboured Shadoiv of Night (1594). The
two Hymns to Night and to Cynthia are
written in heroic couplets, the same measure
which he subsequently adopted for his Odyssey.
Chapman was forty when he published the first
specimen of his great translation as Seven
Books of the Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets,
in fourteen-syllabled rhyming couplets. The
twenty-four books of the Iliad were printed
and published by 1611. The twenty-four
books of the Odyssey followed, and were com-
pleted in ten-syllable couplets in 1615. The
two qualities in which Chapman's translation
excels are primitive strength and an untram-
melled vigour in the coining of compounds
(cloud-compelling, low-grown tamarisks, triple-
feathered helm, mortal-man-made wound,
scourge-obeying horse, high-deed-daring man,
for instance). Keats's appreciation of Chap-
man's Homer is a notable testimony to its
vitality as a poem ; as a scholarly criticism
its value, of course, is nil ; for in exactitude
Chapman, who makes no attempt to reproduce
the minuter shades of the original, is wholly
lacking. The rapid directness of Homer, the

plainness and naturalness of his thought, could
obviously find no exact counterpart in the
inveterate quaintness and lingering fancifulness
of an Elizabethan. In those parts of the
Iliad where the savagery of Homer is most
conspicuous, however, Chapman is perhaps at
his best, and is certainly unsurpassed by any
subsequent rival.

Then gript iEacides his heel, and to the lofty flood
Flung, swinging, liis unpitied corse, to see it swim

and toss
Upon the rougli waves, and said : " Go, feed fat the

fisli with loss
Of thy left blood, they clean will suck thy green

wounds, and this saves
Thy mother tears upon thy bed. Deep Xanthus on

his waves
Shall hoise thee bravely to a tomb that in her burly

breast
ITie sea shall open, where great fish may keep thy

funeral feast
With thy white fat, and on the waves dance at thy

wedding fate,
Clad in black horror, keeping close inaccessible state."

Such poetry as this, rough and unmistak-
able in its strength, makes it no great ex-
aggeration to say that in Chapman the Iliad
is best read as an English book, or that the
generation which produced Shakespeare knew
best how to translate Homer. " Since Amyot
in France had, as Montaigne said, made
Plutarch himself speak French, endeavours to
bring into home fellowship the most famous
of the ancients had spread from France to
England ; but in England, among all such
labours, the most arduous and successful was
that of George Chapman upon Homer."
Chapman completed his work as a translator
of Homer by his version of the Hymns and
The Battle of Frogs and Mice in 1624. He
was then sixty-five, and wrote proudly at the
end of his volume, "The work is done that
I was born to do." Chapman died ten years
later, "a poet of most reverent aspect," in
1634. Anticipating the modest vein of Lilly-
white, Ben Jonson was apt to say that there
were only three men who could make a masque:
he was one. Chapman an indifferent second,
and Fletcher a poor third. But there is much
more vitality in Chapman's Homer than in any
of his other poetic or di-amatic work.

Another truly poetic version was the Godfrey
of Bollogne ; or. The Recoveiie of Hierusakm,
from the Italian of Tasso, which appeared in
octave stanza from the pen of Edward Fairfax

JOHN FLORIO

in 1600. In musical sweetness it far surpassed
the previous version (1594) of the Cornish
scholar and antiquary, Richard Carew, or the
unconventional rendering (also in ottava lima)
of the Orlando Furioso, by Elizabeth's saucy
godson. Sir John Harrington. Fairfax owed
a good deal to the poetic vocabulary and the
scholarly taste of Spenser ; but he paid back
the loan to his poetical posterity, bequeathing
much to delight the nicer spirits of the seven-
teenth century, such as Crashaw, Milton,
Browne, Dryden, and pre-eminently Waller.

Fairfax has great beauties, which have found
their most ardent eulogist in old Isaac d'Israeli.
If he roughened the music of Tasso a little,
he still kept it music, and beautiful music ;
some of his stanzas, indeed, " give the sweetness
of the original with the still softer sweetness of
an echo ; and he blew into the rest some noble,
organ-like notes, which perhaps the original
is too deficient in. He can be also quite as
stately and solenm in feeling ; he is as fervid
in his devotion, as earnest and full of ghastly
apprehension in his supernatural agency, as
wrapt up in leafiness in his sylvan haunts, as
luxuriant and alive to tangible shapes in his
voluptuousness. He feels the elements and
varieties of his nature, like a true poet ; and
his translation has consequently this special
mark of all true poetry, translated or original —
that when the circumstances in the story or
■description alter, it gives us a proper and
pervading sense of the alteration. The sur-
faces are not all coloured alike as in a bad,
monotonous picture. We have no silken
armour, as in Pope's eternal enamel ; nor iron
silks, as in Chapman (who is perhaps the only
other various translator, ne\ertheless) ; nor an
everlasting taste of chip instead of succulence,
as in the Ariosto of Harrington." The charm-
ing pastoral scene in his version of Tasso
(vi. and vii.) in which Erminia in disguise
seeks refuge with a shepherd and his sons must
have given a .special delight to the author of
Cijmbcline and creator of Imogen.

One of the most admired European poems

ot the Elizabethan era was the Divine Weeks
of Du Bartas, an enormous epic upon the
Creation (Paris, 1578 and 1584) by a very
pedestrian Huguenot Milton. Numerous trans-
lators sprang up, but the only one to reap
tlie harvest of a complete version was Joshua
Sylvester, the son of a Medway clothier, who
was educated above his rank, and conceived ex-
travagant ambitions as a poet. He succeeded
in developing a remarkable ingenuity as a weaver
of cjuaint metrical patterns ; his religious zeal
inspired some respect ; and he was not content
until he had enlisted Prince Henry as a patron.
On Prince Henry's death a post was with some
difficulty obtained for him as .secretary to the
merchant adventurers in Middleburg, in Hol-
land, and there he died on December 28th,
1618, at the age of fifty-five. His Du Bartas
was begun in 1598 and finished in 1606; the
version gained him praise from Drummond,
Hall, Drayton, and others, as a "sweet-Sylvestre-
nightingale," he was abundantly quoted in the
anthologies, and was unquestionably one of the
most popular of Jacobean poets.

Together with Spenser, Sylvester formed the
chief poetical nutriment of Milton when a boy,
and his influence was transmitted through
William Browne to other pastoral writer's. It
is not too nuich, perhaps, to surmise that from
Du Bartas and Sylvester Milton first conceived
the possibilities of the sacred epic ; but the
influence upon Milton was mainly indirect, and
the parallelisms are occasional and accidental
rather than studied and deliberate.

As a pendant to this triad of verse trans-
lators we may conclude this section with
miniatures of three of the most remarkable
prose translators,' extending our survey from
1599 until the seventeenth centm-y was fairly
adxanced.

John Florio, son of a Florentine Protestant,
was bom in London about 1553. He resided
in his youth at Oxford, about 1576 was private
tutor in foreign languages, and in 1581 matri-
culated at Magdalen. In 1578 Florio published
his First Fniites, mainly English and Italian

' Of the minor prose translations it is needful only to mention The OoMt-u An.i of Apuleius (15GG), by
William Adlington ; The yKlhUipian JIUIori/ of llelioiloriis (15(19), by John Underdown ; The Italmn lihtori/
of (itiieciardini (1.57!)), by G. i'enton ; the lli.storien of Tacitus (IW)!), by Sir Henry Savile ; diraldo's liudimenti-
of Mora/ Phi/ono/ih;/, by L. IJryskett ; Giovi on KnthlemK (loii.'i), by Daniel; Machia\'elli's /Ihiitn/ of F/orence
(!.'»;).')), by 'I'homas Hedinglield ; i\\K LeuHppe and Clilophon of Achilles 'I'atius (l.lJtT), by William Burton; The
llUlorie of Philip de Cumminex (KiOl), by Thomas Danett ; the Livy (ICOO), I'liny (ICOl), I'hitarcli (1(>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

<lialogues. The Secmul Fruites, more Italian
and English dialogues, with the Gardem of
Recreation annexed, containing " Italian Pro-
verbs," ap|jeared in 1591. His noted Italian
and English dictionary, A Worldc of Worde.s;
with which there is every probability that
Shakespeare was familiar, was published in
1598. He enjoyed the patronage successively
of the Earls of Leicester, Southampton, and
Pembroke, and at the close of the sixteenth
century he was living in London on intimate
terms with all tiie chief literary men and their
patrons. Thei-e is no doubt that through
Florio Montaigne spoke to Shakespeare, and
probably contributed to convert the cast of his
thought into a mould more serious than had
yet been habitual to him. Florio's famous
translation of Montaigne's Essays was licensed
to Edward Blount in 1599, but was not pub-
lished till 1603, in which year Florio became
reader in Italian to Queen Anne at a salary of
,£'100 a year, and on August 5th, 1604, was
appointed groom of the privy chamber. After
1620 Florio resided at Fulham, where he died
of the plague in 1625. There is something of
the charm of an original book in the strutting
display of Florio's acquired Elizabethan, but
he is often far too fantastic to convey the pith
of the original.

Thomas Shelton {fl. 1612), apparently an
Oxford man of an old Norfolk family, seems
to have entered the service of Lord Howard
de Walden, afterwards Earl of Suffolk. Ac-
quiring a knowledge of Spanish, he translated
the first part of Don Quixote into English in
1607, the task (it is said) only occupying
him forty days. Shelton used a reprint
of the original Spanish which was issued
at Brussels by Roger Celpius in 1607. On
January 19th, 1611-12, at the entreaty of
Shelton's friends, it was licensed for publication
to Edward Blount under the title of The
Delightful History of the Wittie Knight, Don
Quishote. The book at once achieved the
popularity that Cervantes's work has always
retained in this country, in which it was the
first to appear after the land of its birth. In
1616 the second part of Cervantes's novel was
reprinted at Brussels, and an English translation
was published by Blount in 1620. No mention
of Shelton is made in this volume, but internal
evidence places it to his credit. With the
second part wa.s published a new edition of the
iirst, and the two were often bound up together.

Shelton accjuitted himself like a good para-
phraser, and his version is readable enough in
strong idiomatic Englisii ; but the original often
proved too much for him.

Sir Thomas Urijuhart of Cromarty, eldest
son of Thomas Urquhart, was born in 1611.
He was admitted at King's College, Aberdeen,
in 1622, where he proved himself to be an apt
scholar. But before his " brains were ripened
for eminent undertakings'" he set oft' on the
"grand tour," and travelled through France,
Spain, and Italy, acquiring the accent of the
several countries with such " liveliness " that he
soon passed " for a native." In 1639 after
taking up arms with the northern confederates
who opposed the " vulgar covenant," Ll^rquhart
sailed to London, entered the service of
Charles I., and in 1641 was knighted at
Whitehall. Before returning to his estate (the
financial conditions of which were not of the
soundest), in the autumn of the ensuing year
Sir Thomas published his three books of
Epigrams. In 1642 he went abroad again for
three years ; but his affairs being mismanaged
during his absence, from the close of 1645 he
took up his abode in the ancestral tower of
Cromarty, where, in the very year of his return,
he prepared for the press his abstruse work on
trigonometry called Trissotetras.

On the coronation of Charles II. at Scone,
he finally quitted the old castle of Cromarty
and joined the Scottish army, but, being
taken prisoner at the battle of Worcester,
he was lodged in the Tower of London.
During the summer of 1651 he was removed
to AVindsor Castle, and in the next month
was released on parole. Urquhart, \\ishing
to convince Cromwell of his value to the
country, traced the genealogy of the Urquharts
back to Adam, inserting a line in the pedigree
(like a street in a directory) with " Here is
the Flood." His next publication was The
Jeicel (vindicating the Scots nation and
proposing the adoption of a highly ingenious
universal language), which, despite its obvious
extravagance, has not only many graphic and
humorous touches, but much truth of observa-
tion ; and in 1653 appeared his admirable
translation of the first two books of Rabelais.

After 1653 practically nothing is known of
Urquhart ; but it is very probable he remained
for some years longer in London, continuing
his translation of Rabelais, a third book of
which appeared after his death. (The version

SIR THOMAS URQUHART

was completed with great adroitness by Peter
Anthony Motteux in 1708.) It is stated that
Sir Thomas died abroad, from an uncontrollable
fit of laughter upon hearing of the Restoration
early in 1660.

In an age of " concettists " and " meta-
physical " writers, emblematists, and Platonists,
not to speak of Muggletonians and literary
quakers, Urquhart with his " antimetathetick
commutation of epithets," his " illative ratio-
cination," his " exclamations in the front and
epiphonemas in the rear," could have given
points to Cowley himself. Few Englishmen
before Sterne could have known the great
Valois humorists as well as Urquhart did. His
qualities suggest a veritable transfusion of
blood from his original Rabelais (who affected
craziness as a mask) into the pedantic Scots
virtuoso, whose shrine might seem to have been
sheer eccentricity. It seems almost a pity that

the creator of Baron Bradwardine, of Jonathan
Oldbuck, Dominie Sampson, and Dugald Dal-
getty, not to mention James I. in The Fortunes
of Nigel, should never have infused the breath
of enduring life into this Ancient Pistoll.

The Rabelais is perhaps the most brilliant
and the most noteworthy of these three great
prose translations, but it can hardly be said
that any of them survive, except as landmarks,
in the history of English prose : they have all
been superseded.' The ornament in all these
versions is extremely fine ; they are adorned
with a fancifulness which is thoroughly Eliza-
bethan in form and colour, but the first object
of a translation they do not succeed in com-
passing. They paraphrase with an emphasis
and a brilliancy that is derived not from their
author, but from their own inner consciousness,
and consequently transform more than they
translate.

' Florio by the vigorous and spirited version of Charles Cotton ; Shelton by Ormsby and Watt ; and
Urquhart by AV'. F. Smith (2 vols., 1893). Among the minor translators of early Elizabethan time ought
perhaps to be included the great Eliza herself. She produced some renderings from Boethius, Sallust, Plutarch,
and Horace. Her letters, whether in French or English, certainly illustrate the \igour of her mind, but as
a prose stylist the most that can be said in extenuation is that her translations were done rapidly, and with no
idea of future publication. Creighton accepts as genuine the impromptu lines made to foil her inquisitors when
her life was in danger under Mary, and a direct denial of transubstantiation might have been fatal :

"Christ was the word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what His words did make it.
That I believe, and take it."

She was emphatically a learned lady in a period of unrivalled feminine accomplishment ; spoke Italian perfectly,
Latin easily, Greek moderately, turned out prose and verse indiflferently well, and regarded the professional
tribe of authors with a cool glance of contemptuous disapproval.

'-J3

t-(

• 1-^

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

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

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.

"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<l Yonge as composers and students of foreign music. Yonge was a singing man at Paul's,
and a clever collector of strange madrigals. John Uowland studied in France and Italy before taking his
Mus. Bac. at Oxford in 1588. He was a wonderful lutenist, and was eagerly welcomed at the Danish court in
1600, but he appeals to us most as a connoisseur of song. AVilliam Byrd (1539 — 162.3), another Gentleman of the
Chapel Royal, who ranks with Tallis in the van of old English music, made his reputation as Organist at
.Lincoln. His taste was rather Puritan, and he shows an undue fondness for square-toed psalmody, yet he also
set some delightful pastoral songs. The volume of all this collected verse is enormous, not to speak of the
dainty verselets " in private chambers that encloistered are." To the lover of word-music these composers are
a race apart, inasmuch as they were not content to regard the words of a song as a "mere peg on which to hang
the music, but sought the services of true-born lyrists." And it is "not too much to say that, for delicate
perfection of form," some of these obscure librettists come within measurable distance of the choicest epigrams
in the Greek Anthology. For the musical side of the subject the student should consult the Fourth and Fifth
Chapters of Henry Davey's extremely interesting History of English Music. The contents of the best
of the song-books, with comments on the more notable songs, are given in Shorter English Poems {An English
Garner, 1903). There, too, will be found a copious collection of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Po«'e.s /or
Jtings, Uandkerchers and Gloves (1624). "Taken a few at a time," says Mr. Bullen, "these suckets have a
pleasant relish."

CHAPTER III

RELIGION AND LETTERS FROM THE AGE OF CHAUCER

DOWN TO 1611

"■W'vclif, Langland, aud Chaucer are the three great figures of English literature in the Middle Ages."-

JUSSERAND.

Jolni VVyclif — Piers Plowmun — William Langland — AV'illiam Tyndale — John Foxe — The English Prayer Book-
The Metrical Psalms — The Authorised Version of the Bible.

rp^HE text Ave have put at the head of this
-JL chapter is one that strikes home with
the vigour of what seems ahiiost a famihar
truth. Langland, who taught the people by
poetic allegory in an old alliterative verse which
takes us back to the days before the speech of
the people was disdained as vile, and forms a kind
of bi-idge between Anglo-Saxon and English ;
Chaucer, who naturalised Italian story and
French verse in the new " mother-tongue," as
Midland English began to be called from about
the time of the Black Death ; Wyclif, who formed
the conception of a popular Bible in the vulgar
tongue or English of the commonalty. These
three sum up what is of most pith and moment
to the twentieth century in what remained of
the Middle Ages to England in 1475.

John Wyclif belonged to the rich and re-
spectable family of the Wyclifs, lords of the
manor of that name in the Richmond district
of Yorkshire. He was born from ten to
twenty years before Langland and Chaucer,
.somewliere about 1 322. He studied at Oxford,
probably at Baliiol, and soon attracted notice,
being one of those men who occupy from
the beginning of their lives without seeking
for it, but l)eing, as it were, born to it, a
place apart and aloof from the limp multitude
of men. \\lion he was barely thirty-five the
College of Bailiol, which had lost its master,
elected him to fill the post, which he seems to
have held for a brief space only. In 1372, after
sixteen years'' study, he became a doctor of
ilivinity. He was already famous as a writer
and logician, and was preparing to qualify for
the title of ecclesiastical politician.

Advancing upon the familiar lines of those
who said that the action of the Pope must be
restrained and controlled by General Councils.
Wyclif soon outstripped all his predecessors in
daring as a theorist. He was not satisfied, in
fact, until he had destroyed the papal theory
altogether, and by so doing acted as pioneer
of that Protestant sap of the organisation of
Christianity as a Church which has gone on
more or less steadily ever since. Wyclif was
charged in papal bulls ordering his arrest with
no less than nineteen notorious heresies, and
was tried at Lambeth early in 1378. But
with the court and baronial backing at his
connnand, the prelates manifestly dared not
condenni him to any severe penalty. He was
merely adjured not to disseminate his errors,
and naturally j)aid no attention whatever to
the adjuration.

But there was another side to Wyclirs
activity, not theological or theoretical at all,
but evangelical. He was the pioneer of the
university extension movement, for it was the
main object of his care in his later life that
the plain outlines of the gospel story should be
disseminated among the poor by college men in
tlie guise of itinerant preachers.

Lollardism and Methodism, too, as well as-
the so-called "Oxford Movement," began at
Oxford. By the " poor preachers " the authority
of the Bible was to be exalted against that of the
Bislioj) of Rome. There was no printing press
then, we must remember, and reading was still
an accomplishment. About 1380, or possibly
a little before, he began to arrange for the
version of the Bible from the Latin which goes

JOHN WYCLIF

by his name, and uliich he undoubtedly inspired,
though the bulk of the actual translating was
done by his Oxford disciples. His final stage
as an insurgent against Church authority was
reached when, in his antagonism to sacerdotal
miracle-mongering, he questioned the miracle
of the mass, and declared (though somewhat
ambiguously) that he recognised in the sacra-
ment only an emljlem of remembrance and
communion. In the eyes of opponents he had
now quitted "error'" for black heresy, which
was promptly condemned by the assembled
D.D.'s at Oxford in 1381. The political situa-
tion alone could now have saved Wydif, as it
subsequently saved Luther. As it was, the great
peasants' revolt of this year was followed by a
steadily accelerating movement of ecclesiastical
reaction. But Wyclif himself was left un-
molested, and retired to the peaceful parsonage
of Lutterworth, in Leicestershire (where his
pulpit may yet be seen) : there he occupied
himself with pi-eaching to his rural congrega-
tions the sermons which have come down to us,
in completing some portion of his translation
of the Bible, and in composing treatises of
enhanced violence against the abuses of the
Church and the scandals of the pontificate, until
his death on the last day of 1384. He was
buried at Lutterworth.

Since the beginning of his academic course
Wyclif had been deeply absorbed in the study
and exposition of the Scriptures. His contro-
versial tracts were varied by strenuous Bible
sermons. The Oxford students listened with
rapt attention to the life-giving words of his
preaching, and soon, in accordance with the
scholastic habits of the day, they styled him
" Doctor Evangelicus." It was then that the
idea first dawned in his mind of transferrins
the dead letter of the Latin version into the
recently developed speech of his mother-land.
This great work, which seems to have occupied
him mainly about 1379-80, was of necessity
based upon the Vulgate or Latin Bible, for
Wyclif did not understand the original Hebrew
or Greek. Part of the Bible had already been
done into Anglo-Saxon and into English,
especially the great treasure-house of mediieval
devotion, the Psalms, and the whole Bible had
been done into court French, which had but
recently ceased to be the common language of
the law courts and of the upper classes. As
part of his great appeal to Scripture against
the mediaeval Church it was Wyclifs earnest

desire that the Scriptures in the living tongue
should reach the people through the medium of
the poor priests which he had instituted a few
years j)reviously. Wyclif himself seems to have
inspired and supervised the translating of the
whole Bible into the vulgar tongue. He him-
self was responsible probably only for c|uite a
small portion of the New Testament. But a
great ennilation seems to have [)revailed among
his disciples in regard to the carrying on of the
work by which their master set so much store.
Nicholas Hereford rendered most of the Old
Testament, and the whole was revised after
Wyclifs death by his former curate at Lutter-
worth, John Purvey. Purvey''s version of
1388-9 is less stiff and awkward, yet at the
same time is freer from colloquialism and from
Midland provincialisms than the original. In
spite of the subsequent persecution of the
Lollards, as many as a hundred and seventy
manuscript copies of Wyclifs version are extant
to this day, affording a faint hint of the impres-
sion which must have been produced by the
first appearance of the translation. Its wide-
diffusion was in fact the first irrepai'able breach
in the fortress round which the clergy had
reared the Vulgate as an impregnable bulwark.
Wyclifs Bible was extensively copied down to
about 1450, and even amid the violence of
orthodox reaction during the fifteenth century
the Bible penetrated so deeply into the hearts
of the people that the knowledge of it could
not again be wholly eradicated. " It is certain
that the Reformation had virtually broken out
in the secret Bible readings of the Cambridge
reformers before either the trumpet call of
Luther or the exigencies of Henry VIII.^s per-
sonal and political position set men free once
more to talk openly against the Pope and the
monks and to teach a simpler and more spiritual
gospel than the system against which Wyclif
had striven."

Contemporary with Wyclif, or even before
him in point of time, we have the strange and
mvstical book of Piers the Plozcman. Along
with Wvclifs sermons and Chaucer''s tales it
aids us in forming a large yet accurate con-
ception of the social life of the time. It is,
however, neither an exliortation nor a humor-
ous reflection, but a calm allegorical exposition
of the corruptions of the State, of the Church,
and of social life, revealing to the people the true
causes of the evil under which they were suffer-
ing. The author is a stern reformer, influenced

"PIERS PLOWMAN"

to some extent no doubt by Wyclif in his later
work. Without the inward power of religion
outer observances are to him but hollow
shows, mockeries, hypocrisies. He is a severe
judge of those dignitaries whom he takes to
be blind guides and betrayers of their trust.
Amidst the wealth and corruption of the world,
the poet, whose moral feeling is intense and all-
absorbing, looks to poverty as the best of
purifiers. Like Chaucer, he looks for charity
and unselfishness in the Plowman, and he almost
adores the industrious, the down-trodden, rustic
poverty of the humble and lowly.

Such opinions were wrapped by the poet
in a pi-udent allegory, but they reached the
ear and tlie heart of the people. During the
whole of the fifteenth century it is probable
that the rhythm of Long Wille passed cm-rent
among the rural population of Central England,
especially among followers of Wyclif. The
author who thus describes himself as Long
Wille is believed to have been William Lang-
land, or Langley, a Shropshire man who was
bom at Cleobury Mortimer about 1332. His
father and friends put him to school possibly
in the monastery at Great Malvern, made a
clerk or scholar of him, and taught him what
holy writ meant. In 1362 he wrote the first

draft of his poem, which he apparently

began to compose in the month of May, while

wandering on the Malvern Hills. Soon after-
wards he went to live in Cornhill, with his

wife Kitte, and his daughter Calote, for many

long years. In 1377 he began to expand and

modify his poem, in which he now alludes to

the accession of Richard II. Fifteen years

later, he wrote another and final draft of it.

The poems were very popular, but the poet

sought no patron, and remained exceeding

poor, earning a precarious living by singing

penitential psalms and hymns for the good of

men's souls, and possibly by acting as a

scrivener, and transcribing legal documents.

He was prol)ably a clerk in minor orders, and

his time was spent between London and the

' There are two exoelleiit ones: (1) A rhythmical version preserving the old alliterative measure, itself
a moditication of the Anfflo-Saxon measure, by I'rof. Skoat {Thi: Kiiuj's ('/(inxics), 1!)05. (2) A modern prose
version by Kate M. 'Warren, 1899. There is a delightful book on I'ii'rx I'/oumimi* (ISQi), by J. J. Jusserand,
and a more recent study (1900) by Menseudieck. For social conditions reflected in the poem, see G. M.
Trevelyan's Enylnnd in lite Age of Wyeliffc (189!), and new edition 1904). About 1394, when the book of Piers
the I'hvmian was at the height of its popularity, this popularity was taken advantage of by an unknown writer,
who produced a sharp satire against the friars, less mystical and less charitalde tlian Langhmd's poem, though
written in the same metre, to wliicb was given the name Pirrrr the I'hiuihmun'x Crei/r, a short poem of U.^O lines.
For Wyclif see Dictionan/ of Xittiotml Hioip-ii/ihi/, and II. H. Workman, D/nni of the Itiformation 1901 ; see also
ilorris and Skeat, Specimens of Early Kmjlish, part ii. (1298— i;J9y).

West ; the last we hear of him is at Bristol.
We have no trace of him after 1399.

His poem was not written in rhyme, but,
with certain differences, in the old Anglo-Saxon
alliterative metre, and in the West Midland
dialect. No less than fifty MSS. of the three
various ch-afts exist, but the poem was not
printed until 15.50.

A translation of the English of Edward III.
is almost essential to an Englishman under
Edwai-d VII.' A lover guides Guillaume de
Lorris through the paths of the Garden of the
Rose, Virgil led Dante through the Inferno ; the
English visionary is led by Piers Plowman —
the real hero of the work. Bent over the soil,
patient as the oxen that he goads, he performs
each day his sacred tasks, the years pass over
his whitening head, and from the dawn of life
to its twilight he foUows ceaselessly the same
endless furrow, pursuing behind the plough
his eternal pilgrimage. Around him the idle
sleep, the careless sing. Piers shall feed them
all except the useless ones. There must be no
unfairness to classes, but social endeavour must
be the touchstone of each class alike. Every
class that is content to perform its duties imper-
fectly, and without sincerity, without passion,
without pleasure, without striving to attain
the best possible results and do better than
the preceding generation, will perish. So much
more surely shall perish the class that fails
to justify its privileges by its services. Lang-
land let loose upon the indolent, the careless,
the busybodies who talk much and work little,
a terrible foe — Hunger. " Then Hunger seized
Waster quickly by the Maw," but Piers inter-
vened. " Let him live with the hogs," he prayed.
Piers Plowman soon became a sign and a
symbol — a personification of the labouring
class, of the honest and com'ageous workman.
John Ball invoked his authority in his letter
to the rebel peasants of 1381. His credit was
made use of by the reformers and a remedy
claimed for abuses in his name. The vehement
and passionate England that produced the

WILLIAM TYNDALE

great rising of 1381, the heresy of Wychf,
and later the Puritan revolution of 1642, all
these latent j)ossibilities are indicated by the
rumblings of Piers Plowman.

William Tyndale was born on the borders
of Wales, probably about 1485. He was
apparently brought up in Gloucestershire, a
stronghold of the Church, where religious
abuses arc said to have flourished with some
vigour. In 1510 he was entered at Magdalen
Hall, Oxford, and is related to have improved
hiniself in tongues, in which he excelled,
and in theology. After taking his degree
there in 1515, he proceeded to Cambridge,
where the fame of Erasmus was still fresh
in men's minds. There we i<now that he
read with delight that wonderful satire, that
encomium moricv, in which Erasmus smothered
with ridicule the defenders of the old tradi-
tional ignorance. " I totally dissent," says
Erasmus in another work, " from those who are
unwilling that the sacred Scriptures translated
into the vulgar tongue should be read by
private individuals. The mysteries of kings it
were perhaps better to conceal, but Christ
wishes His mysteries to be published as widely
as possible. I would wish even all women to
read the gospel, and St. Paul's Epistles, and
I wish they were translated into all languages
of aU people, that they might be read and
known, not merely by the Scotch and Irish,
but even by the Turks and Saracens. I wish
that the husbandman would sing parts of them
at his plough, that the weaver may warble
them at his shuttle, that the traveller may with
their narratives beguile the weariness of the
way."

When in 1522 Tyndale, convinced already
of the special antidote which the obscurantism
of the Church needed, avowed his intention of
turning the Word of God into English, it
was in terms which were the very echo of these
noble words of Erasmus. With this idea of
translation in his mind, he sought the patronage
of a distinguished scholar. Bishop Tmistall, in
the summer of 1523. But Tunstall was a
typical bishop in his timidity with regard to
dissent, and Tyndale soon found that it would
be impossible for him to accomplish his trans-
lation in England. A few sympathisers sup-
plied him with money, and, with his amanuensis,
William Roy, he proceeded through Hamburg
and Wittenburg, where he paid a long visit
to Luther, to Cologne, and there began

printing his version of the New Testament.
A prominent Catholic got wind of the enter-
prise, and procured an order from the senate
of Cologne interdicting the [)rinters from pro-
ceeding with the work. Tyndale and Roy
managed to escape to Worms with the sheets
in October, 1525, and the work was soon set
up again, and printed by Schoeff'er, not in
cjuarto, as originally designed, but in octavo.
Copies were smuggled over to England early
in 1526. But the king and bishops had been
warned of the threatened danger, and the im-
portation of the copies was strictly prohibited.
Tunstall himself felt bound to preach against
it ; by such means the circulation was greatly
stimulated. Two copies of the octavo of 1525
and one of the original Cologne quarto are
still extant, the latter in a fragmentary con-
dition in the Grenville collection at the British
Museum. Apart from its merit as a model
of English vernacular style, Tyndale's New
Testament is a sound piece of English trans-
lation, not, as the learned Hallam erroneously
states, taken from the German of Luther and
the Latin of the Vulgate, but based primarily
upon Erasmus's third edition of the Greek
text. Even Sir Thomas More admits that
Tyndale " before he fell into his Lutheran
frenzies was full prettily learned." " Of the
translation itself," says Froude, " though since
that time it has been many times revised and
altered, we may say that it is substantially
the Bible with which we are all familiar. The
peculiar genius, if such a word may be per-
mitted, which breathes through it, the mingled
tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity,
the preternatural grandeur, unequalled, unap-
proaehed, in the attempted improvements of
modern scholars, all bear the impress of the
mind of one man, William Tyndale."

Shortly after the completion of the New
Testament, Tyndale took refuge in Marburg,
and was soon converted to a type of Protestant
theology much more advanced than that which
he had imbibed from Luther at Wittenburff.
Rejecting not only Luther's doctrine of con-
substantiation, but also Calvin's theory of a
spiritual presence in the Sacrament, he followed
the Swiss reformer Zwingli in regarding the
Lord's Supper merely as a commemorative rite.
In October, 1528, he issued his most important
original work, The Obedience of a Christian Man,
printed by Hans Luft at ^Marburg; it insists
upon the supremacy of the civil power and the

TYNDALE'S BIBLE

paramount authority of Scripture in matters
of doctrine. Unfortunately, Tyndale undid
the good impression which this produced upon
Henry by an unsparing denunciation of the
divorce proceedings in a work of some pith
called The Practysc of Prelates (1530). It is
grievous to find two such men as Tyndale and
Sir Thomas More engaged during these years in
a literary controversy which degenerated into
an interchange of the most scurrilous per-
sonalities. More defended the practice and
paramount authority of the Church with the
skill of an accomplished logician. Tyndale
replied in a sharp and satirical An-mrrc (1531),
appealing to Scripture with an ultimate resort
to individual judgment. No controversial issue
could possibly be reached from such divergent
premises ; in the meantime Tyndale, first at
Hamburg and then at Antwerp, was pro-
ceeding steadily with his translation of the
Pentateuch, which was issued at Marburg by
Hans Luft, January, 1530, 8vo. The only
perfect copy of this edition is in the British
Museum, as is also a copy of his unique version
of Jonah, Antwerp, 1531. His translation of
Joshua, Kings, and Chronicles was not printed
separately, but was left in MS. and incorporated
in Matthew's Bible. This was done through
the agency of John Rogers, the first martyr
of the Marian persecution who came out to
Antwerp as English chaplain, and was con-
verted by Tyndale. From the end of 1531,
Tyndale's position in Antwerp had been a very
precarious one. Not only had Henry VIH.
demanded his surrender from the Emperor on a
charge of spreading sedition in England, but
several priests and ecclesiastical embassies were
plotting against him. As long as he remained
in the English merchant's house under the pro-
tection of a sympathiser named Thomas Poyntz,
Tyndale was comparatively secure. Unhappily
in May, 1535, he was decoyed from this refuge
by a fanatical papist, betrayed to the Emperor's
agents, and imprisoned in the Belgian Bastille,
the castle of Vihorde. Great efforts were made
to procure his liberation ; nevertheless, in the
early summer of 1536 lie was brought to trial
for heresy, condennied, degraded, and sentenced
to death. On October 6th he was bound by an
iron chain to a stake, surrounded by faggots,
strangled, and then burnt.

No one had dared to print VVyclif's Bible —
the knowledge of which was consecpiently much
restricted. Tyndale, no doubt, used it, and

also its original the Vulgate ; but on the whole
his translation is an independent one, based
upon the Hebrew and Greek texts. More
important still is the originality of his language
and his happy collocation of phrases. His
achievement fixed the type in accordance with
which later labourers worked. His influence
decided that our Bible should be popular rather
than literary in its appeal. He felt by a happy
instinct the potential affinity between Hebrew
and English idioms, and eiu-iched our lansuage
and thought for e\er with the characteristics of
the Semitic mind. The labours of the next
seventy- five years were devoted to improving
his work in detail.

His Bible had been prohibited in England,
though large numbers of ill-printed copies were
steadily imported from Antwerp, and mean-
while a decree had been passed by Convocation
to the effect that the Bible should be printed
in the vulgar tongue (1533). As the outcome
of this, the first complete English Bible, a
translation from the German and Latin, with
aid from Tyndale's English, was issued in
October, 1535. This did not prove wholly
satisfactory, and in 1537 another version made
up of Tyndale and Coverdale was published
]jy the King's " lycense." This was known as
Matthew's Bible. And here we must interrupt
for a brief sjjace our story of the English
Bible.

John Foxe (1516 — 1587) was born at Boston,
in Lincolnshire, and was educated at Magdalen
College School, subsequently becoming a Fellow
of Magdalen College, Oxford ; but he retired
from his Fellowship in 1545 as, being already
a fervent Protestant, he objected both to the
enforcement of celibacy and to the obligation
of taking Holy Orders. In 1547 he married a
lady who, like himself, was then in the house-
hold of the Lucys of Warwickshire, and soon
after this ho was appointed to be tutor to
the sons of the unfortunate Earl of Surrey.
During this period he read largely in Church
history, with a view to an elaborate defence
of the Protestant position. In 1550 he was
ordained deacon by Bishoj) Ridley, but on the
accession of Mai'y he fled to Strasburg, where
he printed in Latin the earliest draft of a
iragmcnt of his great Martyrology. A little
later, at Frankfort, he became an adherent of
Jolm Knox, and later we find him at Basle,
reduced to his last penny, and full of gratitude
to Griudal for a gift of two crowns. Then

FOXES "BOOK OF MARTYRS "

his fortunes mended slightly, and he hecaine
a reader for the press of a Protestant printer,
Johannes Oporinus ; yet he seems to have had
a considerable amount of time for his own
studies, and when the accounts of the terrible
burning of Protestants reached him he set to
work innnediately upon a narrative of the
Marian persecutions. In the autumn of 1559
he returned to England, where he was now
ordained priest. In 15()!5, from the press of his
friend John Day, he published his great work
■with a title borrowed from the Ad'tones et
Monimenta Martyitim, printed at Geneva some
two or three years previously. The success of
the undertaking was immediate (four editions
of the Actcs and Mommwnts appeared during
his lifetime), and, through Bishop Jewel, Foxe
received a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral as
a reward. But Foxe still remained poor ;
vainly he communicated to Elizabeth in very
complimentary terms his intention of writing
her Life. When she was excommunicated in
1570, he preached a strong anti-Catholic
sermon at St. Paul's Cross. He next wrote a
treatise on the legal settlement of the Church
of England, and edited for Archbishop
Parker an Anglo-Saxon text of the Gospel.
In 1572 he showed his fidelity to his old
patron by attending the Duke of Norfolk on
the scaffold, and three years later he showed
more courage in protesting against the burning of
two Dutch Anabaptists. His obstinate refusal
to adopt the surplice effectually pre\ented his
promotion in the Church ; but he lived on till
April, 1587, when he was buried in St. Giles's,
Cripplegate, where his monument may still
be seen. Though extremely devout, and ill-
provided with worldly goods, he seems to have
been merry, sanguine in disposition, and kind-
hearted and charitable to the poor. Though
grave and bearded, he had more benevolence in
his look than seems habitual to the grim
Protestant divines of that age. In his di-ess he
is said to have been shabby and even slovenly.

In its enlarged form of 1570 Foxe's work
contains more than twice as much matter as
Gibbon's Dcdinc and Fall. When it is re-
membered that he wrote the book in exile
with the scantiest facilities for reference to
works of learning, the reader is impressed not
only by the amazing industry, but also, and
scarcely less, by the historical respectability
of the work. Foxe did not belong to the class
of philosophical historians. He did not try

to hold the balance between contending sides.
He was an out-and-out Protestant, and
he wrote his book in a polemical s[)irit and
for a polemical purpose. It was intended as
an attack upon the Popish system, the errors
and intolerant spirit of which he felt it his
bounden duty to expose. Hence, especially in
his marginal notes, he uses expressions such as
modern taste would object to.

Yet, after the Bible, it is probable that
Foxe's Martyrs moulded English Protestantism
more than any single book. The first three
Archbishops, Parker, Grindal, and Whitgift,
cordially approved it, and Convocation ordered
it to be set up in the parish churches and halls
of the universities. Its influence in keeping
alive Protestant feeling in Britain and North
America is too well known to be disputed.
It has passed through the ordeal of innumerable
abridgments ; it may still be seen, as Macaulay
saw it, chained to the reading desk in the
villaffc church. Its lurid drawings of racks
and faggots have given nightmares to genera-
tion upon generation of Protestant children.

The process of evolution to which we owe
the English Book of Common Prayer was more
rapid than that by which our Authorised
Version of the Bible gradually assumed its
final form. The originality of the forms of
worship which go to inspire the English
liturgy is not much greater than that of the
subject-matter of our Bible. The outlines
of the service are an inheritance which has
come down to us from the remote ages of
Christianity. During the iMiddle Ages a com-
plicated S3'stem of ritual books had come into
existence, and it was to the abbreviation and
careful editing of these rather than to the
origination of any novelties that reformers
such as Cranmer very wisely and properly
applied themselves. A number of primers
containing the most familiar portions of the
service, such as the I^ord's Praver, Creed,
Litany, and Ten Connnandments in the ver-
nacular, were handed down from the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The versions which
they gave of the old Latin pi-avers formed a
nucleus upon which the revisers of church
books would most naturally work when they
began to draw up a scheme for a liturgy in the
\-ulgar tongue in 1542. The Sarum Breviary,
which was still in use all over the south of
England, was the principal model. The names
of the popes and Thomas a Becket were scru-

THE ENGLISH PRAYER BOOK

pulously erased, the Litany was carefully revised
by Cranmer, and the desire to make the pubhc
service of the church congregational generally
avowed. Various experiments continued to
be made, primarily in the Chapel Royal ; the
Litany, the Epistle and Gospel, and the ser-
vice of Compline were given in English in
the churches. An English order of Communion
was further, in the first year of Edward VI.,
grafted upon the Latin office of the mass,
restoring Communion in both kinds to the laity.
But this step was merely preparatory to the
publication of a complete book, upon the
settling of the order of which Cranmer, with
Ridley, Goodrich, Redman, and others were
engaged at Chertsey in September, 1548.^ The
guiding principles of the revisers were fairly
interpreted in the answer given to the Devon-
shire rebels, who objected to the new service,
namely, that it was no new service, but " the
self-same words in English which were in Latin,
saving a few things taken out." It was, in
fact, the most conservative of the liturgies
produced by the Reformation. The Book thus
drawn up was readily accepted by Parliament
in January and promulgated in England, V^ales,
and Calais in June, 1549.

Ardent reformers such as John Hooper, who,
having sione as far as Luther, were now be-
ginning to look in the direction of Zwingli,
were of opinion that the changes were not
nearly sufficient ; and many of the English
divines went farther in this direction than
was altogether approved by the foreign Pro-
testant scholars, such as Bucer and Peter Martyr
(appointed professors of theology at Cambridge
and Oxford respectively), whose criticisms of
the Book were studiously moderate in tone.
But the desire for further alteration pre-
dominated, and at the special command of
the King a fresh committee of revisers was

appointed, with Cranmer at its head. Various
alterations were eventually made, chiefly in the
direction of restricting vestments, holidays, and
the ritual of baptism, and considerable addi-
tions were made at the beginning of the
morning service. The doctrinal theory of the
sacrament (which Cranmer held to contain a
spiritual presence conditioned by the faith of
the recipient) was modified through the medium
of a change in the Communion service, and the
Communion was restricted to Sundays. Ridley
first officiated from the new Prayer Book on
All Saints' Day (November 1st, 1552). Next
year the accession of Mary put an end to the
reformed service, but in 1559 the 1552 liturgy
was restored with a few but not unimportant
alterations, framed with a view of compre-
hending as many as possible within the pale of
the Church.

ITie harmony of the various parts of the
Prayer Book is certainly one of its greatest
claims to our admiration. The English of
the Litany, Creed, and Lord's Prayer is, of
course, extremely ancient. The Decalogue,
Canticles, and Psalms are taken from the
Great Bible (i.e. the old translation of Tyn-
dale and Coverdale as revised by Cranmer).
The eighty-three Collects, originally very
ancient, were rendered in Edward VI. 's day,
mostly by Cranmer. Other prayers were added
in 1559, 1604, and 1661, when the beautiful
prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Men
and the General Thanksgiving were first
incorporated. But throughout all these modi-
fications the same devout and conservative
spirit was in the ascendant, and the result was
a most beautiful sounding-board of English
prose, " an accumulation of ancient wisdom,
a bequest of ancient piety, the form of words
and bond of faith uniting English worshippers
with the saints and martyrs of antiquity."

' Of the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer (born at Aslacton on July 2nd, 148!)), "first
Protestant Arclil)ishop of this kingdom, and the frreatest instrument under God of the happy reformation of
this Church of Kngland," was undoulitedly tlie master-spirit and chief artificer. 'J'o liis Cliurch he fjave it —
a priceless possession- -bearinfr tlie imprint throuj^liout of his cautious temper, fjentle disposition, and extensive
liturpcal learning. Clever controversialist, on the other hand, and subtle theidogian though Cranmer was, his
Book has far more of religion than recrimination about it ; it provokes the spirit of devotion rather than that
of debate, and that is why, striking a deep chord in Knglish hearts, it is on the lips of millions of our countrymen
to this <lay. How tlie cruelty of Cranmer's enemies used the impressionability of a sensitive man to try and
discredit the movement he symbolised is too well known to need or to bear repetition. He was done to death
on March 21st, 1556. He died in the place where Ridley and Latimer had suffered, and whatever be thought
of his recantations his final end was heroic enough. He had done with the quicksands of logic, legal formulas,
and constitutional maxims, aiul had gained a foothold in conscience. The fight had been long and bitter, but
he had reached a conclusion at length ; he had "professed a good profession before many witnesses." (See
ThomuK Cranmer, by I'rof. A. F. I'oUard, I'Mi.) Cranmer's first Book of Uvmilien dates from 1547.

THE METRICAL PSALMS

Before we leave the Prayer Book altogether,
and its exquisite patterns of English prose,
we must mention, as having had a considerable
influence upon English verse, the old Metrical
Version of the Psalms. The original aim was to
furnish the people with sacred ballads for every-
day use, and the pioneer effort was " Certayne
Psalms chose out of the Psalter of David and
drawn into English metre by Thomas Steriihold,
groom of the King's Majesty's robes," about
1547 ; a second edition containing thirty-seven
in place of nineteen psalms was published in
1549. Sternhold, of whom very little is
known, died in this year, having written in all
some forty versions, nearly all in the older
form of Common Measure (CM.), the ballad
measure of Chevy Chace, with only two rhymes.
In 1562, after various intermediate experiments,
the Complete Psalter was published by John
Daye as " The Whole Book of Psalms, collected
into English metre by T. Sternhold, John
Hopkins, and others : conferred with the Ebrue,
with apt notes to sing them withal.'" The others
include William Whittingham, John Pullain,
Robert Wisdome, Richard Cox (Bishop of Ely),
and Thomas Norton, the joint author of
Gorboduc. Although not fully authorised the
Metrical Version was certainly permitted and
used as the psalm book in many churches, and
so it remained, in spite of the frowns of High
Church and austere Puritans alike, and of the
competition of "Tate and Brady" (1696),
until well on in the eighteenth century, "a
venerable monument of the Reformation." Its
poetical merit was slight ; of Sternhold and
Hopkins it was said by Fuller, and constantly
repeated, that their piety was better than their
poetry ; they had drunk more of Jordan than
of Helicon. Yet if they had been more
poetical, it is probably true that they would
have been less popular. It must be remembered
that when they were written the great outbui-st
of Elizabethan poetry was still in the future.
They had the merit of plain meaning, they
were tunable, and of a striking fidelity to the
original Hebrew. In their original form they
are now quite extinct, but their fall was broken
by the incorporation of considerable extracts
into the most popular hymn-books. " It is
pleasant to think that in Sternhokrs 23rd,
' My Shepherd is the Living Lord ' ; in the old
100th, 'All People that on Earth do

Dwell ' ; in Kettra's 104th, ' My Soul, Praise
the Lord,' and one or two more, we still retain
some links with so venerable a book and
history."

We can now resume the thread of the history
which tells of the coping-stone put to the
sumptuous edifice of Elizabethan translations
by the appearance of the Authorised Version
of the Bible in 1611. We had got as far as
the appearance of Matthew's Bible, shortly
followed in 1538-9 by two further revisions.
The second of these in a revised form, with
a preface by Cranmer, of April, 1540, was
widely circulated in England and known as
"The Great Bible." This was the Bible of
the Edwardian reformers and the Bible pre-
sented to Elizabeth on her accession. It is
the psalter of this version that we still use as
printed in the Prayer Book. Another very
careful revision was issued by English exiles
at Geneva iTi 1560, and dedicated to Queen
Elizabeth.' The scholars responsible for it had
the advantage of highly finished Latin versions
by Castalio and Beza. The disadvantage in-
herent in all the sixteenth and seventeenth-
century work was, of course, in this — namely,
that the Greek texts used were late and faulty
as compared with some of the more authentic
codices to which we now have access. The
Geneva versioi^ was soon imported largely into
this country, and the Great Bible as read in
the churches was subjected to comparisons that
were often disparaging.

Archbishop Parker, in consequence, took in
hand a new translation, to be carried through
by co-operative effort, to remove all errors and
obscurities from the Great Bible, adhering still,
however, to the scheme of a popular and not a
literary version, retaining as much as was
possible of the old phraseology. The work
appeared in October, 1568, in a magnificent
folio, with portraits of the Queen, Leicester,
and Burleigh, 140 wood engravings, and the
simple title "The Holie Bible." Of the re-
visers (who seem as a body to have relied
very largely upon the Geneva version), eight
were bishops, hence the name assigned to the
penultimate version of a remarkable series,
" The Bishops' Bible." It soon replaced the
Great Bible, and was sanctioned by ecclesi-
astical authority for public use ; but it did not
supersede the Geneva. Eighty-six editions of

' This is known to bibliophiles as the "Breeches Biblej" because "breeches" is substituted for "apurns"
in Genesis iii. 7. The text was first divided into "verses."

THE AUTHORISED VERSION

the latter appeared between 1568 and 1611 to
only twenty of the Bishops' Bible, which was,
however, carefully revised as regards the New
Testament in 1572.

The stimulus which prompted the setting
on foot of the Authorised Version was mainly
due to James I. The matter was broached
at the Hampton Court Conference in January,
1604. The King pressed forward the scheme
during the ensuing summer, and took a promi-
nent part in selecting the lifty-four translators
and allotting the work to them.

Forty-seven scholars were eventually divided
into six groups and set to work in 1606-7.
In 1610 the whole translation was revised by
six delegates, two from Westminster, two from
Oxford, and two from Cambridge, to whom six
coadjutors were soon added. After seven years'
steady work the MS. was finally revised for
press by Dr. Miles Smith, aided by Bishop
Bilson, and in 1611 the Authorised Version
was imprinted at London by Robert Barker.'
The book was stated to be produced by " his
Majesty's special command," and " appointed
to be read in churches," by whose authority is
not precisely knovni.^

The revisers did not attempt to render the
Bible afresh into the common language of
their own day. This may be seen in the
quaint and highly decorative English of the
dedication, and in the interesting, if somewhat
bombastical, preface. Their great merit con-
sists in the fact that they so fully retained the
.•simple and racy idiom of the earlier versions.
'Occasionally they even replace a familiar word
hy one more archaic, e.g. they substitute
*' charger" for " platter." As i n the Li turgy, the
Latin and Old English word may be seen
side by side, as in act and deed, labour and
work, transgi'ession and sin, desert and wilder-
ness, remission and forgiveness. Upon the
■whole, however, the Authorised Version is

marked by an unusual predominance (greater
even than in Swift) of Teutonic words. It is in
every way a complex unity, the final product of
a long series of strenuous, fortunate, converging
efforts. The result of a century of toil and
study from the conception by Tyndale to the
conclusion in 1611, during which the researches
of the ripest scholars, not of England alone, but
of Europe, were absorbed into the work, it has
been almost universally commended, not only
for its fidelity, but also for its extraordinary
force and beauty. Its harmony, simplicity, and
energy have drawn paneg^Tics from foreigners
and Catholics. Its English is, in the opinion of
all the best judges, of uncommon beauty. " It
lives in the ear like a music that can never be
forgotten, like the sound of church bells. . . .
Its felicities seem to be almost things instead of
words ; it is a part of the national mind, and the
anchor of national seriousness ; the memory of
the dead passes into it ; the potent traditions
of childliood are stereotyped in its verses ; the
power of all the griefs and trials of a man is
hidden beneath its words. ..." A striking
testimony to its essential greatness is the fact
that instead of a cause of division, in this land
of sect and schism, it has ever been a bond
between the different sects, for it was soon
adopted by the Puritans (Scottish, as well as
English), and preferred even to the Genevan.
After the Koran, it is doubtful whether any
book has been more recited or read. It was of
special importance to this country from the fact
that England had no Luther, Calvin, or Knox.
Hers was a common soldier.s' Reformation due
largely to the circulation of the vernacular
Bible. So it has become part of the national
mind, and has permanently impressed upon
that mind a cerbiin purity of the classic age
of English literature. Its noble figures, happy
turns, and pithy sentiments arc upon every lip.
It pervades the whole literature of our country.

' Octavo and quarto editions appeared in 1G12 : the original Folio in Roman type in 1610. Of the
variations and errors in early issues a good many were .silently correc^ted long before the Great Revision of
1881-5. The dates in the margin were inserted from Ussher's Annal<:\ in 1701.

' On the development of our Englisli Hible, consult Wit/ituH Tiftiduff, a Hingrii/ihi/, by R. Deniaus ;
Westcott's Hhtory of the, Knylhh IliUi:* (;iid ed., 190.5); Kadie's Kny/i.yli liih/i', 187(> ; Moulton's flhtori/ of
Kntjli-ih Hihle, Hi"!!; Lovett's Printed Eriylish liibk, 1894; Dore's Engtinh liihlcn (2nd ed., 1888); quarterly
Jieview, April, 1870.

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF THE DRAMA

"The best actors in the world, cither for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, tragical-
historical, tragical-coinical-historical-pastoral. " — Hamlet.

" Few events in our literary history are so startling as this sudden rise of the Elizabethan Drama.
— Green's Short History of the Eiiglhh J'eopte.

Religion and the drama — Church festivals and moralities— Tlie church, the market-place, the banquet-hall —

Heywood's interludes — Gorboduc — Senecan plays.

THE evolution of religiou.s worship leads
inevitably to the exclusion of ecstatic
elements and to the regularisation of every
kind of religious demonstration within the
bounds of a strict decorum. In the more
vivid pages and passages of Church history
conditions were different, and the great festi-
vals of Holy Church during the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries were com-
monly attended by strange orgies, saturnalia,
and burlesques of sacred rites and mysteries
in which the dramatic, animal, and loutish
instincts beneath the cassocks of the innumer-
able vicars, minor clerks, acolytes, choir-boys,
and lay brethren in the Church found a
free vent for expression. Singing, grimacing,
drinking, and dressing-up in masks formed
prominent features in the topsy-turvy mum-
niings and festi fatuorum, with their Fool
Bishops, Boy Bishops, Lords of Misrule, and
the rest — of which Scott gives us a tanta-
lising glimpse in his Abbot. The nobility gave
them money as contemptuously as Theseus's
courtiers threw coins to Bottom and his troupe,
but the people adored these clownish and
irreverent amusements, which were avowedly
undertaken for their delectation, more antique,
pri.itiiium. modum, '■'■ad solacium popzdi.'" The
responsible clergy tried to discipline them, but
usually quite in vain, for any attempt to sup-
press the mummeries invariably led to popular
tumults and street riots. The popular drama
of the professional troubadours, mimi, and
buffoons was thus in a way borrowed by the
Church, in the person of the inferior clergy, in
order to amuse the people, to keep them in a

good humour, and to inveigle pence from the
pockets of the well-to-do.

But the connection of the Church with the
rise of popular drama was a much closer and
profounder one than this. In England, as
in India, Greece, France, where you will, the
theatre is immediately the outcome of an act
of worship. Religion adopted, and may almost
be said to have created, the drama. It was
born in the sanctuary, and its primitive form
in the modern world was that of a religious
pageant designed to commemorate Gospel
scenes by either direct or allegorical represen-
tation. In Greece, its evolution from a ritual
dance at festivals, in which one half-chorus set
to another and gradually introduced spokesmen,
is almost equally roundabout and indirect.

Simultaneously with the growth of the folk-
drama was a singular new birth of drama in the
very bosom of the Church's own ritual. The
Mass, the commemorations of Palm Sunday
and of Good Friday, of Maundy Thursday and
of Christmas Day, such services of those of the
Tenebrae (or extinction of lights), or of the
tollite portas (or the dedic^ition of the Church) —
all these contained strong elements of drama,
together with a marked potentiality of di-amatic
development. Symbolism and mimetic action
were already there. What was wanting was
dialogue, and this was soon to be supplied
b)' the practice of antiphonal singing. It is,
indeed, from the antiphon, in which one-half of
the choir answers the other, or a choir as a
whole answers its cantor or precentor, that the
gradual development of the liturgical drama
may most directly be traced.

EVERYMAN "

An equivalent to the celebration of Easter
was supplied for the Christmas festival by a
representation of the adoration of the shep-
herds known as the Officium, or Misterium
Pastorum, of which we have manuscripts dating
back to the thirteenth century, and just as the
Easter celebration centred rornid the sepulchre
erected in the choir, so the embryo drama of
the shepherds, and later that of the Magi or
three kings, had its material starting-point in
the crib with the Christ-child in the manger,
and with a live ox and ass, which are still
exhibited near the altar in Cathohc chm-ches
at Christmas-time. At the same time a star
lit with candles was hung from the roof of the
church. AVith these plays, of the Pastores and
the Stella, the Lamentation of Rachel was often
amalgamated. This liturgical drama afforded
a good introduction to the offering of oblations
by the congregation ; and we soon have similar
representations springing up in the shape of
a Daniel drama, a Suscitatio Lazari, and an
Advent play representing a duel between Anti-
christus and Ecclesia. This evolution was prac-
tically complete by the thirteenth century, and
during the hundi-ed years from 1250 to 1350 a
significant change takes place which transfers
the presentment of these dramas from the
clergy, and from the nave and choirs of the
large churches, into the hands of the laity
in their market-places and guild-halls. The
natural result was the broadening of their
human, as distinct from their religious, aspect.
Conceived originally as a mere expansion of the
regular office, with a view of bringing home
the great events of the Gospel narrative to the
hearts of the people, they came in time to be
primarilv spectacles to amaze the people and to
make them laugh. The existing plays received

accretions on every side. The texts were
amplified, new scenes were added, the dresses
and properties were greatly elaborated, until
the process culminated in the formation of
those great ch-amatic cycles of which the
English Corpus Christi plays are perhaps the
most complete examples.

In a few extant examples the plan of the
miracle play was extended to subject-matter
other than religious in character. We thus
have stories such as those of Jeanne of Arc,
Griselda, Robert the Devil, and the Fall of
Troy thrown into the shape of miracle dramas,
or, as the French call them, mysteries. More
important in its results was the extension of
the miracle in the direction of allegoi-y giving
rise to the morals or moralities, as they came
to be called. The germ of these plays may be
seen in the symbolism of some of the earlier
miracles, such as that of Antichristus or the
dialogue of the Heavenly Virtues, in which
Truth and Righteousness denounced the guilty
Adam, while Mercy and Peace pleaded in his
favour. The Dance of Death was a subject
which lent itself to similar treatment. The
gross impartiality with which Death took liber-
ties with Pope and Emperor, no less than with
Clown and Beggar, was indeed an idea which
took a strong hold upon the mediaeval imagina-
tion. A similar motive was the pageant of
the Seven Deadly Sins, and the finest of these
fifteenth-century moralities,' the now well-
known Everyman, was evidently a growth from
this same root. There is a Dutch play on pre-
cisely the same theme as Everyman, and it has
been much disputed which of the two is the
original. It is not improbable that both plays
have a common original.

We have seen how the religious drama

' 'Hie morality which became so popular at the close of the fifteenth century must not he regarded as
superseding tlie miracle drama, but as affording a pleasant variety of religious teaching upon the stage. As
the miracle illustrated the narrative portion of tlie Church service, so the morality illustrated the sermon and
the (reed. 'Hiis was done by means of allegories, many of which are inferior in force and vividness only to
The I'ilyrim'x Progresn, The lloltj War, and Mr. Ikidnmn of John Buuyau. Of the older type of morality, the
most typical are Tlw Custell of Perseverance, perhaps as early as 1400, The Pride of Life, Mundus et In/ann, and
The Moral Play of the Summoniiiff of Everi/man. Among moralities of the second and later type, in which
the dramatic tendency is more conspicuous, and the allegory not quite so much obtruded, arc Man Ki/nd, written
perhaps about 1480; The floodlij Interlude of Nature, written by Archbishop Morton's chaplain, Henry Mcdwall,
a few years later; and Ihiekeseonier, a moral interlude in tlie later years of Henry VII., containing humorous
dialogue, real characters under allegorical names, and .some new situations, such as the setting of Pity in
the stocks. In the same class must be placed a later and much duller Protestant interlude called Luxtij Juventus.
The lat^-r interludes of John Uastell and John Ileywood, in which the moral and allegorical element is wholly
.suhordinatcil, if not entirely dropped out, bring us to the very threshold of the Elizabethan farcical comedy, to.
the evolution of which the moral interlude liad contributed most powerfully by its insistence upon social types. The
morality, gradually drojjping the didactic purpose and the allegorical form bc(iueathed to it by its old traditions,,
pa-sses insensibly into the imit'ition of manners. See that great work of exploration, Chambers's Mediavat Drama.

INTERLUDES

gradually migrated from the church choir to
the nave or churchyard, and then from the
religious precincts to the guild-hall or market-
place. The drama was now to migrate still
farther, to the banqueting-hall. To this new
tvpe of drama sj)ecially suitable for a bantjuet
in the hall of some great noble, the title of
interlude — that is, merry dialogue between two
or more performers — seems to have been given
from the first. The ubiquitous minstrels, who
must have suffered considerably from the com-
petition of the guilds, especially as these latter
seem to have travelled with their pageants,
made a special point of the playing of these
interludes. Many of them gave up the older
minstrelsy as a specific calling and took up
interlude playing, though they commonly re-
tained their old livery and put themselves, as
before, under the protection of nobles and
persons of honour. The apparatus necessary
for these interludes was on an extremely small
scale as compared with that of the older
pageants. In exceptional cases, a special room
seems to have been put apart for them. A
relic of the old minstrel days was the prayer for
the sovereign with which their entertainment
concluded. They soon became very popular
in the towns, where, after a first performance
before the municipality, they would find a
profitable pitch in the courtyard of some old-
fashioned inn with convenient outside galleries.
In some villages they maintained the right of
playing in the church, probably on trestles at
the west end, but more ordinarily they erected
their stage on the village-green. In the course
of their peregrinations they doubtless excited
the emulation of local amateurs, such as the
Mechanicals of Athens (Stratford), who some-
times played in wagons. The children of St.
Paul's and of the Chapel Royal, gentlemen
of the Inns of Court, scholars of Westminster,
Eton, and of the universities proved more
serious rivals of the professional players.

From the morality the interlude drew abstrac-
tions ; from the farce, a variant form specially
popular in France (VAvocat Patelin), it di-ew
social types. The possibility of vital drama
lay in the direction of an advance to the
portraiture of individualities.

John Hey\vood,the most noted writer of farces
and interludes that the court of Henry VIII.
could boast, was born in London about 1497,
studied at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College),
Oxford, became a skilled musician on lute and

virginals, and was entered in 1515 as one of the
King's singing men. He was specially attached
to the Princess Mary : instructed her, in all pro-
bability, in the mysteries of virginal playing, and
played interludes for her amusement with the
choir-boys under him. On Mary's coronation
Heywood uttered a Latin speech in her honour
as she entered the precincts of St. Paul's. His
later history is uncertain, but he probably lived
well into Elizabeth's reign, down to the dawn of
the great drama in the 'eighties. In 1575 he
wrote to Burleigh from Mechlin. He appears
to have been a humble member of the party of
reform within the Church, of which More and
Erasmus were the luminaries ; and the keen
interest which More always took in the stage
as a vehicle of instruction may have quickened
the zeal of Heywood in writing some pieces for
it which should not be so purely moralising
and didactic as satirical and amusing. Hence
The Dialogue of Wit aiid Folly, The Play of
Love, The Playe called the Foure P.P., The Play
of the Wetlier, The Pardoner and the Frere, and
his " masterpiece," The Mery Play bctwene
Johan Johan the husband, Tyb his wyfe, and
Syr Jhan, the preest, were all written somewhere
about 1530. In approaching this last pro-
duction, as in approaching Chaucer's tales of
the Miller and Reeve, or, later. The Merry
Wives, we must, of course, leave our morality
behind, and accept the playwright's and tale-
teller's convention that cuckoldy and cuckold-
making are prime subjects for humour. This
granted, says Mr. Pollard, " it will be difficult
to find a flaw in the play. Like The
Pardoner and the Frere, it is short, only about
half the leng-th of the plays of Love, The Wether,
and The Foure P.P., and it gains greatly from
being less weighted with supei-fluities. Johan
Johan himself, with his boasting and cowardice,
his eagerness to be deceived and fatile attempts
to put a good face on the matter, his burning
desire to partake of the pie, his one moment
of self-assertion to which disappointed hunger
spurs him, and then his fresh collapse to
ludicrous uneasiness — who can deny that he
is a triumph of dramatic art, just human
enough and natural enough to seem very
human and natin-al on the stage, but with
the ludicrous side of him so sedulously pre-
sented to the spectator that there is never any
risk of compassion for him becoming uncom-
fortably acute ? The handling of Tyb and
Syr Jhan is equally clever."

CHRONICLE FLAYS

From the farcical situations that had hitherto
performed the task of holding up the ends of an
interlude, we now begin to get the idea of an
organic plot. The two elements — native and
foreign, English and classical, farcical and
comic — are seen together admirably side by
side in Roister Doistcr, a merry " Comedie or
Enterlude,"" written, it is believed, about 1550 '
by a somewhat notorious Eton and AVestminster
master, Nicholas Udall (1506 — 1556), and first
printed in all probabihty in 1552, though the
first dated copy we have bears 1567 on the
title, with the addition of a conventional tag
in honour of Queen Elizabeth. The plays of
Plautus and Terence had been much admired
and studied since the revival of learning ; and
in this comedy, though features boiTowed from
the old vernacular drama are by no means
wanting, the two principal characters, Ralph,
a pusillanimous, vain, and foolish braggart (the
Miles Ghiiosus of Plautus), and Matthew Mery-
greeke, a needy adventurer and parasite, are
types directly borrowed from the Roman stage.
A school drama of a similar type, probably
written about the same time, and also based
upon Plautus, is the anonymous Jackc Jugeler,
written, like Roister DoiMer, in rough twelve-
syllable rhyming couplets. The element of
broad jocularity is very strong, both in this
play and in the probably contemporary Gammer
Giirtori's Needle, first printed apparently in 1575,
but acted not later than 1563, and perhaps a
full decade earlier. This coarse specimen of
early comedy was written for a college enter-
tainment, very probably by W[illiam] S[teven-
son], a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge,
who died a prebendary of Durham in 1575 ;
the form of verse is not Alexandrine but
rhyming fourteeners, the dialogue is thrown
into a more or less conventional rustic dialect,
and, inilike its predecessors in English comedy,
both plot and characters are purely native.
TTie famous drinking song at the commence-
ment of Act. II., " Back and syde go bare, go
bare,'' is extant in more than one version, and
may be a little, though not much, older than
the body of the play. ITie Misogonwt of
I'homas Richardes (.-'), written in 1560, and
embodying hints from Terence ; the Damon,
and Pijthias (1565) of Richard Edwardes, con-
taining features of courtly allegory strongly
suggestive of the later efforts of Lyly ; and
The Supposes (1566) of CJi'orge Gascoigne, a

prose translation of ' Ariosto's / Suppositi,
and the most Jonsonian of English comedies
before Ben Jonson — are all interesting and
typical works of this transition period. The
genius for humorous drama which the
English people had shown so unmistakably
in the shepherds' plays in the old miracle
cycles, and in some of the interludes of
Heywood, is here seen to be quickened,
directed, and, above all, shaped by fusion
with foreign ideals and imitation of classical
examples. The cross-fertilisation of native
genius by foreign esprit and sense of form
which is seen so clearly in 1066, and later upon
the eve of the Augustan and Romantic move-
ments in English literature, is seen nowhere
more significantly than in the English drama
during the quarter of a century preceding
the marvellous efflorescence known as the
Elizabethan drama.

Between comedy and tragedy there stands a
species of drama almost peculiar to England,
of immense popularity and no little importance
as showing the vitality of native dramatic de-
velopment. This is the native chronicle di'ama
or history play — a species to which Shakespeare
himself devoted, roughly speaking, as much as
a third part of his energies, and which is repre-
sented in the first folio of his Comedies, His-
tories, and Tragedies by a complete section to
itself. We can trace the evolution of this kind
very distinctly from the old English morality.
We can see the morality, first tinctured with
history, and so becoming an historical morality,
and then gradually shedding the morality and
assuming the features of the chronicle history
familiar to us in King John and Richard HI.
The process may be observed in an interlude
like the Kyng Johan (1548) of John Bale
(1495—1563), a Suffolk and St. John's, Cam-
bridge, man, who married and took orders, thus
committing himself to the Protestant side, and,
after the ordinary vicissitudes of that age,
was promoted by Edward VI. to a bishopric
(Ossory) and confirmed by Elizabeth. He
treats King John as a victim of papal tyranny,
and in doing this the veil of allegory gets toi'n
aside and the real personalities of history stand
revealed. Here we can see, as it were, the
abstractions of the older morality resolving
themselves into historical characters. Thus
Sedition becomes Stephen Langton ; Private
Wealth, Cardinal Pandulph ; Usurped Power,

Possibly tea years earlier, for liis pupils at Eton.

" GORRODUC "

Innocent III. ; and so on. It is clearly a step for-
ward from this to the" troiiblcsoine" chronicles
which were the immediate forerumiers of Shake-
speare's histories. The admixture of the foreign
clement and of classical influence in the evolu-
tion of the chronicle drama is comparatively
very small. But the type serves as a valuable
link between the development of comedy and
the development of tragedy.

Another important link was the strong taste
for the plays of Seneca and for Italian versions
of one or two of the plays of Euripifles, which
set in about the middle of the sixteenth century.
Seneca appealed strongly to the Italians as a
famous bridge between the greater models of
Greek antiquity and the more facile ideals of
the Renaissance, and a taste for Seneca must
rank high in the list of Italian novelties which
the English scholars of the sixteenth century
were so proud of imjiorting from the Trans-
alpine peninsula. The rising confraternity of
critics (it is hardly an exaggeration to say)
would not look at a serious play unless it were
modelled upon an Italian design, and by pre-
ference an Italian adaptation from Seneca or
one of the remoter stars of antiquity. Early
in Elizabeth's reign Seneca's Tcnnc Tragedies
were successively translated into English by
five scholars — Neville, Nuce, Studley, Jasper
Heywood, and John Newton — and collected in
a single volume by the last-mentioned in 1581.
Long before this the direct influence of Seneca
upon English di'ania was shown in the first
English tragedy, entitled Gorboduc, which was
acted on Twelfth Night, 1561, by gentlemen of
the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth. Gor-
boduc (printed 1565, and again in 1571 as Ferre.v
atid Porrex) was a joint production, being the
work of Thomas Norton (1532 — 1584),aLondon,
Cambridge, and Inner Temple man, who married
a daughter of Cranmer's, and though successful
at the Bar, gave much attention to literature,
in conjunction with Thomas Sackville, after-
wards Lord Buckhurst, author of the stately
Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates (1559-
63) ; Sackville wrote the last two acts, and
perhaps revised the whole. The plot of
Gorboduc was derived from a British legend
of the King Lear variety, to be found in
Geoffrey of Monmouth's History ; but the
management of it is thoroughly Senecan.
The action is not represented on the stage, but
is reported by professional messengers or eye-
witnesses, after the Greek fashion. As a

substitute for it, we have a dumb-show before
each act, signifying allegorically the nature of
the events to follow, and finally there is a
chorus of four sage men of Britain who com-
ment upon the course of events at the close of
each act. The external form of the piece, with
its acts and scenes, choruses, stock characters,
ghosts, and ghastly incidents reported — not
enacted — is thus absolutely Senecan ; while the
moral is one grateful to Tudor ears, the curse
of civil war and the horrors of a disputed
succession. But one novel feature in Gorboduc,
perhaps the most important of all, remains
still to be noted.

Since the appearance of Trissino's Sophonisba
in 1515, the Italians had been increasingly given
to combine prose and verse, tragic and comic
effect, and rhyme with blank verse. The two
English authors now, in their attempt to be
completely faithful in form to their classical
and Italian models, discarded the rhymed metre
(generally twelve or fourteen-syllable couplets),
which had hitherto been the sole dramatic
vehicle, and adopted in its place the new blank
verse which Surrey had but recently used, as
we have seen, for his version of two books of
Virgil's /Eneid, and which seemed to them, as
to him, to be the one way of reproducing the
unrhymed measures of Greece and Rome. The
verse, like the texture of the play generally, is
thoroughly wooden. There may be flesh and
blood, as Charles Lamb remarked, if we could
only get at it ; but we can't. Ligneous as the
drama is, however, and as its immediate suc-
cessors are, their importance as fixing the type
for the drama of air and fire that was to
come, and to which Marlowe was to lend the
resonance of his " mighty line," can hardly be
overrated.

Having dealt so fully with Gorbodv£, it will
be necessary to do little more than enumerate
its Senecan successors, such as The Lamentable
Tragedy mixedfull of pleasant MiHh, contemning
the Lfe of Cambises, King of Persia, his many
Wicked Deeds and Odious Death, written in
1570 by Thomas Preston (1537—1598), another
Cambridge man ; the Tancrcd and Gismunda,
by Robert Wilmot, played before the Queen
at the Inner Temple, in 1568, the story
again taken from the Italian and treated in the
Italian manner ; the Promos and Cassandra of
George Whetstone (1544 — 1587), taken from the
Hecatommithi of Cinthio and printed in 1578 ;
the Jocasta of George Gascoigne, based on the

THE DAWN OF THE DRAMA

Italian version of the Euripidian Pha-nissa',
by Ludovico Dolci, and written in blank verse
much after the pattern of Gorboduc; and The
Misfortunes of Arthur, produced before the
Queen at Greenwich by eight members of
Gray's Inn (of w hom Francis Bacon was one)
in February, 1588. Impossible from the point
of view of intrinsic literary interest, these
plays are all of an historical value as illus-
trating the final process by which English
tragedy (which admittedly owed more to foreign
examples than even comedy) was evolved from

mysteries and moralities through the transitional
phase of chronicle-histories. The enumeration
brings us to the threshold of the immediate
predecessors of Shakespeare ; to the mysterious
ten years from 1580 to 1590, when the bats that
flit about the twilight of the drama give place
to the immediate harbingers of the mightiest
dawn in all our literature.

In order to understand this marvellous trans-
formation-scene we shall have to go for some
assistance to the political and social history of
the period.^

' Amoug the more indispensable books for the study of the rise of the Drama in England are J. Payne
Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1879 ; Dr. A. W. Ward's English Dramatic Literature, 1899 ;
E. K. Chambers's The Mediaval Stage,* 1903 ; A. \V. Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes
(ed. 190-1) ; Gayley's Representative English Comedies, 1903. In addition to these the student of the ancient
English Drama will be anxious to consult Dodsley's Collection of Old English Plays, and the texts of the four
great cycles of miracle plays, edited — the York Plays, by Lucy Toulmin Smith ; the Chester Plays, by T. Wright;
the Toumeley or Wakefield Plays, by England and Pollard ; and the Ludus Coventrice, by Halliwell Phillipps.
And references on the subject generally may also be given to Ten Brink's History of English Literature
(Bell, vol. ii.), Jusserand's Le Theatre en Angleterre, Davidson's Studies in the English Miracle Plays (1892),
Courthope's History of English Poetry (vol. i.), Creizenach's Geschichte des neueren Dramas, 1893, and K. L. Bates's
The English Religious Drama, 1893, with a bibliography.

CHAPTER V
PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRA3IA

" It is especially with reference to the drama and its characteristics in any given nation, or at any
particular period, that the dependence of genius on the puhlic taste becomes a matter of the deepest
importance. " — CoLKRm(ii:, Lecture*:

Actors and theatres— Lyly — Greene — Peele — Kyd — Marlowe — Tamburlaine — FausUi-i — Edward II. — Arden of

Feversham.

THE marvellously rapid expansion of English
life and literature in the middle of Eliza-
beth's reign is seen nowhere more clearly than in
that exuberance of dramatic production which
first made itself felt between 1580 and 1590.
The famous writer of interludes, John Hey wood,
lived to the very threshold of this period,
but the interludes themselves had long been
superseded as an old-fashioned transitional form.
Deeper still in oblivion were the moralities or
allegorical plays from which the interludes had,
in a sen.se, been evolved. Such plays lingered
on, to be sure, in the country and among ruder
town audiences, but in cultured circles they were
quite eclipsed by novelties bearing the .stamp of
Italy or the classics. Comedies in Latin, French,
Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly " raked,''
as Greene expressly declares, to furnish the
playhouses of London. Between these admirers
of classical models and the conservative audiences
who loved the old medleys, there were, no doubt,
some eclectics who aimed at creating a drama
out of elements furnished by each of the other
schools. Nearly all the attempts in the variou.s
kinds at the period have utterly disappeared.
Those that have survived best ai-e the mo.st
ambitious and the most experimental, such as
Edwardes's Damon and Pythias and Whetstone's
Promos and Cassandra, and several plays by
George Gascoigne. But although several of
these are important historically, they are almost,
without exception, dreary, sapless, and uncx-
hilarating. In ten years' time, in the interval
between the appearance of The Shepheards
Calender, Astrophel and Stella, Faustu,s, and
The Jew of Malta, what an extraordinary

change seems suddenly to have come over
the landscape ! The golden age of our litera-
ture has, in effect, suddenly set in ; and this
age is dominated by the romantic drama. By
the close of Elizalbeth's reign twelve theatres
existed in London, where in 1558 not a .single
public playhouse could have been heard or even
dreamed of. Dramatic poets sprang up by
tens, and plays, many of which have taken their
place in the world's literature, were written by
fifties. How did this sm-prising literature so
suddenly come into being H From a seemingly
barren waste, how sprang up this chorus of
song — a chorus so melodious that in poetry
Elizabethan has almost become a synonym
for sweet and tunable .-'

The more we study it the more clearly
perhaps shall we discern the sharply cut char-
acteristics which fitted this one age of a small
people in a small country to form the alembic
of such a marvellous intellectual product as the
drama of Shakespeai-e.

The sudden and unexpected character of
the development might be compared with the
blossoming period of Athenian literature in the
generation that followed that of Themistocles.
It was an age of resistance to external pressure,
and the extraordinary success of Henry VIII.
and of his daughter Elizabeth in affirming
national independence in every way, both in
secular and also in religious matters, can hardly
have failed greatly to exhilarate that instinct
of national identity and national pride which
the whole ti'end of circumstances in the closing
years of the fifteenth century had contributed
to prepare. Free in respect to mind, body, and

COMPANIES OF ACTORS

estate to an extent rarely, if ever, attained
before or since, Englishmen were all the time,
politically speaking, under a despotism. They
had no hand whatever in steering the ship
of State. Such a combination has ever been
fivourable to the emergence of great writers.

The time was one of daring expansion and
of vehement utterance. England had thrown
off its old insularity and was looking out-
wards into the world ; its vision was not yet
bluiTed and narrowed by Puritanism. The
national genius was craving for popular literary
expression. The overwhelming popularity of
the stage pointed superior minds to the
conquest of the Drama, where the conflict
seemed to lie between the popular drama,
which was not literary, and the literary drama,
which was not popular. As a whole the play-
goers, with Queen Elizabeth at their head,
were demanding situation-plays with ingenious
devices from Italian novels, spiced with plenty
of native English wit, and with a large
infusion of jigging and clownage. Of the vast
majority of plays produced under these in-
fluences before 1588 we know little or nothing.
The names of some of them have survived,
but most of them have perished utterly.
The playwright then did not mind mixing
tragedy with comedy, prose with verse, town
with country, kings with clowns. He set at
naught the unities of classical and Aristotelian
tradition. Sidney and his scholarly friends
laughed at the absurdities of the popular
theatre. They eschewed rhyme, and hoped
to be able to bring hexameter into general use.
They sighed after Terence, Italy, and Seneca,
and wished to have tragedy, comedy, and
pastoral carefully discriminated with a due
observance of the unities of time and place —
such a development, in fact, as led in PVance to
the declamatory drama of Racine. The bulk
of the playgoing public cared for none of these
things. They preferred the rhyme of King
Camhueti to the blank verse of Gorbochic.
They liked their playwrights to leap lightly
over great intervals of time and space, and
thought themselves " ill-provided if they were
not taken within the space of two hours from
Genesis to the Day of Judgment." The public,
indeed, were ready to follow a dramatic author
of ^vigorous imagination wherever he desired to
lead them. These were the circum.stances in
which great leaders and innovators responded
to the nation's literary need, and in which

during the years between 1579 and 1589 such
amazing strides were made.

At the same time another influence of the
greatest possible imjiortance was in operation —
a change, namely, in the condition of the theatre
by the growth of a class of habitual spectators
and of professional performers.

The details of the transformation are not
recoverable ; but it is clear that during the
generation that preceded 1580 the permanent
stage gradually discarded the homely properties
of the movable platform ; the hall or inn-yard
is superseded by the regular theatre ; the
servitor or strolling minstrel by the professional
player ; the morality, comic or serious, by
comedy and tragedy ; and the clerk or court
poet, who wrote interludes, by the professional
dramatist or playwright.

The old-fashioned moralities were played by
roving companies, at first in open spaces or
inn-yards, afterwards in the banqueting-halls
of nobles. Early, however, in Henry VIII.'s
reign, or even before 1509 in some cases,
the great nobles began to attach permanent
troupes of players (by origin choristers) to their
households.

In the early days of Elizabeth the principal
companies of these trained actors were Lord
Leiccster^s, I^ord Warwick's (afterwards Lord
Hunsdon's), and Lord Clinton's (afterwards
known as the Earl of Sussex's men). In addi-
tion to the adult performers (all of whom were
men) there were troupes of boy-actors, com-
posed of the choirs of the Chapel Royal and
St. Paul's. When not playing at court or the
houses of their patrons, these companies as a
rule made use of inn-yards, such as the Bell
and Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street, the
Bull in Bishopsgate, or the Belle Savage on
Ludgate Hill. Leicester's influence with the
Queen enabled him in 1574 to procure for his
"servants" a royal patent empowering thenx
to perform within the City of London and
throughout the realm, provided that their
plays were licensed by the Master of the
Revels. But the company was to meet with
strenuous op])osition to the exercise of these
privileges. The Corporation of London was
the determined enemy of the stage, on the
(loul)le ground of the immorality of many of
the performers and their productions, and the
peril of contagion in time of plague. Accord-
ingly in 1.57(5 it issued an order thai no theatrical
performances shoukl be given in public within

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRES

the city bounds. Tliis order led to a prolonged
contest between the Corporation and the Privy
Council, which had a highly important result.
The players, relying on the favour of the coiu't,
yet not daring openly to defy the authority of
the Lord Mayor, established themselves in per-
manent buildings just beyond the boundaries of
the city. Here they were outside the jurisdiction
of the Corporation, and yet close enough to the
town to pern)it of both the citizens and the
court gallants being present at their perform-
ances. An early dinner over, the pleasure-
seekers of the day would stroll down to the
Strand to see what flags were flying across the
river ; then, having made their selection, they
would cross the Thames in a veritable armada
of row-boats for the entertainment houses of
Bankside. The temporary stmcture in the inn-
yard had given place to permanent buildings in
the suburbs, such as the houses of Shoreditch
(the Theater and the Curtain, 157(i-7), of
Bankside, South wark (the Rose, 1592 ; the
Hope, the Swan; the Globe, built 1599), and of
Newington Butts ; in addition to which there
was the Blackfriars. The stage had passed
from a nomadic to a settled condition.

Before the end of the sixteenth century, at
a time when Paris had but a single playhouse,
London was girdled with theatres, of which the
most famous were the Fortune, near Cripplegate,
and the Globe. In these playhouses a medley
of influences, made up of the practice of the
itinerant stage, the learning of the universities
and the Inns of Court, the pictorial and scenic
effects aimed at in the court masks and
pageants, were focussed in a common centre.
The " thronging " audiences were composed of
all classes, so that the dramatist had to take
account of various and often conflicting tastes
in the composition of his play.

As for the theatres themselves, the best of
them were simple wooden buildings, round or
hexagonal in shape— Shakespeare's "wooden O."
Some of the smaller theatres were roofed in, but
the larger ones stood open to the air. The per-
formances took place, roughly speaking, between
two and Ave in the afternoon — in the summer,
during which the companies travelled from
town to town, probably rather later ; but in
the absence of long " waits," a five-act play and
an after-piece, or "jig," were easily compressed
into two and a quarter hours, " the two hours'

' The only employment a woman could obtain in the
entrance.

traflic of our stage." Performances at court
were ordinarily given in the evening, and with
a greatly enhaiu'cd splendour of mise- en- scene.
Tlie public theatres advertised on posts and in
booksellers' shops. A flag marked the day of
a performance, and when all was ready a
trinnpet sounded, and the play began. Play-
goers who could afford the luxury were accom-
modated with stools upon the stage ; others
might take boxes or rooms, just above the heads
of the groundlings standing in the circular space
of the yard. Scenery, in the modern sense, was
almost wholly lacking, but costly properties
were not uncommon. A " traverse " or curtain
of drapery drawn upon a rod from the centre
was at the rear of the stage. The stage itself
projected apron-wise into the pit or courtyard^
so that the actors were brought close to the
spectators beneath and around them. At the
back of the front stage was a shallow rear .stage,
which could be partitioned off' by means of the
" traverse " ; above was a balcony or gallery.
Distinguished visitors occasionally occupied part
of this, but it was also used by the actors. On
this gallery stood the citizens who held parley
with King John and Philip Augustus. To
this balcony was Antony drawn up. On it
stood Juliet when she bade farewell to Romeo
upon her wedding night. Pieces were acted
continuously — no waits — and deep and shallow,
located and unlocated scenes, were as far as
possible alternated. No actresses appeared
upon the English boards ' and all female parts
were played by boys. Trained boys were in
great demand, and were bought and sold like
expert footballers at the present day. Coryat
was surprised at Venice to find that women
could sustain female parts almost, if not quite,
as well as these "sci'ubby" boys. But, generally
speaking, in comparison with the home product,
the foreign theatres were " beggarly." The
incidental songs and music were excellent ; the
dresses were choice ; the lack of scenery was
compensated by an amplitude of action and
phraseology, just as the lack of programmes
was supplied by placards. The " poet " in
Ben Jonson's time got "ten pound the play," in
addition sometimes to forty shillings for a dedi-
cation if the play were printed ; but this was
seldom done with the company's consent, so great
was the fear of rival troupes getting hold of the
text. As it was, a good stage-piece was often

theatre is said to have been that of " gatherer " at the

JOHN LYLY

filched, either by means of stenographers sent to
take down the play, or through the unscrupulous
agency of impecunious actors. Occasionally, how-
ever, books of the play (the slender " quartos ")
were sold in the theatre for a few pence.

Tlien, as now, people crowded to witness a
new play, especially when there was a chance
of seeing in a new part such actors as Alleyn
or Burbage, Will Kemp, or Nat Field. And
while the players counted on the bourgeoisie
for applause, they looked for a more discrimi-
nating approval from the nobles. The troupes
were now noblemen's servants in name only, but
many of the leading nobles were ardent con-
noisseiu's of plays and acting, and courtiers of
highest distinction (Southampton, Essex) con-
tributed large sums to playhouse treasuries.
The leading actors were profit-sharers, and, as
will have been seen, they looked well after their
business. There was indeed nothing amateurish
about the Elizabethan stage. Coleridge\s
" naked room and a blanket '''' is somewhat
hors ligne in a description of its bustling
boards and full treasuries. Marvellous as was
the development of dramatic art between the
accession of the play- loving Elizabeth and 1588,
the progress towards perfection in the matter
of stage-craft was fully commensurate with it.

Research has done much to dissipate the
dense haze which formerly hmig over the
eastern horizon of great drama in England.
Of the precentors of the great dramatic chorus
as a whole, there still remains much to be
learned. Many plays have perished. Other
striking dramas, such as Arden of Fever.sham,
Titiu! Andronictis, and Edward III., are unpro-
vided with authors. Five dramatists of the
period, however, have emerged more or less
completely from the twilight, each of whom has
contributed a definite constructive feature to
the building-up of the dramatic edifice — a pillar
here, a window there, a portal outside. The
only great name among them, that of Marlowe,
is that of a mighty genius indeed, but of a
genius undeveloped and i-ather poetic than
purely dramatic. He contributed the spirit of
poetic romance, the fire of intensity, the enthu-
siasm for new, grandiose, and revolutionai-y
ideals and the vehicle of a sounding blank

verse. Next, Kyd contributed the element of
melodramatic horror ; Peele a pastoral sweet-
ness in flowing blank verse, the honeyed cadences
of which are not seldom echoed in Shakespeare ;
Greene, together with a harvesting of native
drollery and folklore, a tradition of sweet, for-
giving women and a verdure of English fields
and hedgerows. After Marlowe, by his refining
influence upon form, and his excellence in witty
dialogue, lyrical interlude, and classical imagery,
no one contributed more perhaps than John
Lyly. We shall deal with these predecessors of
Shakespeare in a reverse order to that in which
we have just enumerated them, commencing
with Lyly.

John Lyly entered Magdalen College, Oxford,
at the beginning of 1569 at the age of sixteen,
his father being, it is surmised, a man of Kent,
and son of the famous grammarian, William
Lyly or Lilly. He graduated B.A. in April,
1573, M.A. 1575, and probably settled in
London in the Savoy four or five years later.
His first work, Euphues, the Anatomie of Wit,
was published at the close of 1578, and the
sequel entitled Euphiies and Ms England came
out fifteen months later, about March, 1580.
At this time he seems to have been private
secretary to the Earl of Oxford, who first
suggested to him the writing of plays for the
court. Oxford was at the time Lord High
Chamberlain, and he must have been gratified
at the success with which his protege adapted
classical and mythological themes to the flattery
of their royal mistress. Lyly's ambition for years
was to obtain the post of Master of the Revels
at court, but hope was persistently frustrated.

Of his eight plays, Campaspc may be termed
an historical play ; Mother Bomhie is a comedy
of contemporary life with a Terentian plot ;
Sapho, Endymion, and Midas are mythological
comedies of the court ; while tlie remaining
three, Galathca, Loivs Metamorphosis, and The
Woman in the Moon, are pastoral comedies
approaching the form of masques. In Cam-
paspc, which was probably produced in 1580,
history was first treated in an imaginative
way for the stage. The prose in which the
play is written has a good deal of animation
in it, its chief defect being lack of passion.^

' 'riie chief authority for Campaupe is a passag'e in Pliny's Natural History, Book XXXV. It was printed in 1584.
'Jlie story of (Va/«/Aca was su^^pstcd l>y()vi(l. It was prohaldy written about l.'ilUaiid |)rintedin l.")i)L'. Saphn imd
I'hao was based on Ovid's Ejnxtki!, and was pri)bal>ly written about 1 oUl and printed in 1 fiiH. ICndipnhn, an allofrorical
pastoral, may have been written in 1579, but has also been assif;neil to tlio year 1584-5. As to the meaning of
the allegory, the opinions of cx])ertH, such as llalpin. Baker, Bond, J. D. Wilson, and Fcuillerat, are in conflict.

ROBERT GREENE

In Endymion he ventured on a daring tran-
scription of the history of the reign, and in
Midas embodies the national sense of triumph
over Philip of Spain. From Lyly's witty,
sprightly, and mocking girls Shakespeare to()l<
a number of hints for his picture gallery.
Lyly wrote his Pappe zvith a Hatchet in
September, 1589. In 1601 he wrote a second
despairing petition to the Queen for some
adequate rewai'd I'or his years of service. At
the close of the reign he appears to have sat
in Parliament more than once for the borough
of Aylesbury. He is known to have had
children and debts, but seems to have obtained
little satisfaction from the Queen. The register
of St. Bartholomew-the-Less records Lyly^s
bm'ial on November 80th, 1606, being then
fifty-two years of age. A good epitaph for
him would have been that phrase in Euphues :
" I have ever thought so superstitiously of
wit that I fear I have committed idolatry
against wisdom." His six court comedies were
printed in 1632, and Euphues as late as 1718;
but after that it disappeared from the English
press for 150 years.

Original in form, refined in manner, purged
of all the earthliness of the old vernacular
drama, Lyly's plays are miracles of quip, quirk,
antithesis, pun, conceit, simile, pleasant allu-
sion, and verbal fence. They were acted at the
court, where the author was able to gratify to
the full his taste for erudite allusion and curious
expression. Sidney and his erudite friends,
inimical to Euphues though they were, might
appreciate them. Human interest, dramatic
situation, characterisation, emotion — they have
none ! The plays of Lyly have the form of
true comedy, but not its substance ; they are
as unsubstantial as the moonbeams extracted
from cucumbers which Gulliver saw in Laputa.
In formal respects, however — and form in the
drama goes for much — they exhibit a striking
originality. Putting aside Gascoigne, Lyly was
the first to write prose comedy in England ;
he was also the first to wi'ite comedy that
ignored the gross popular taste, clear of the old
English tradition, and depending on a-sthetic
and intellectual qualities alone. He bequeathed
a taste in repartee and witty retort to Shake-
speare himself, and the characteristics of
Lylyan dialogue are aptly summed up by
Shakespeare in T%e Two Gentlemen of Verona :
" a fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly
shot off."

Robert Greene was born at Norwich about
1 560, graduated at Cambridge (St. John's) in
1579, and then, according to his own atx-ount,
went abroad. After some roystering and disso-
lute adventures in France and Spain, he returned
to England about 1580. Five years later he
married, but, after spending the marriage por-
tion, left wife and child and settled in London.
There he was joined by his friend ITiomas
Nash, and supported himself by his flowing pen
luitil his final or death-bed " repentance " in
August, 1592. He died on September 3rd,
and was buried " in the new churchyard by
Bethlehem Hospital." In later life he accused
himself of a great variety of crimes ; but his
works are singularly free from immorality
or grossness, and, in the absence of better evi-
dence, we may well doubt if Greene was a man
of inherently vicious character, and not merely
an easily led and reckless pleasure-seeker of
notoriously irregular life. Except that he pos-
sessed a lyric gift of a high order, his resemblance
to Villon may be taken to be slight. In
the affairs of this world, indeed, Greene seems
to have been as improvident, as feckless, and as
inconsiderate as a little child. In literature he
achieved a reputation in the first place for his
journalistic industry and lightning rapidity ;
both the faculty and the imperative need for
scribbling remained with him to the end. He
made copy out of his spells of sottishness, out
of his neglect of his wife, and even out of his
last illness. In 1588 he attacked Marlowe for
his " drumming ^ blank verse ; and on his death-
bed, in his G?vatsKV7ih of Wit bought with a
Million of Repentance (1592) he bitterly re-
proached Shakespeare with being a low actor
and poacher upon the preserves of the old
college wits, who thinks himself, forsooth, the
only Shakescene in the country. Yet Greene's
faculty for spontaneous production both in
prose and verse was brilliant, and spasmodic
and fragmentary though his literary output may
be, we cannot fail to regard him with interest
as one of the men, if not of genius, at any rate
of exuberant literary vigour and vitality, who
straightened the way for the great romantic
movement in Elizabethan England. Greene
was a bright and spontaneous lyrist, and a most
industrious novelist and pamphleteer. His plays
are not known to have exceeded six in number:
A Looking-Glass for London and England,
written in collaboration with Thomas Lodge in
1587-8, and printed in 1594 ; Alphonmts, King

GEORGE PEELE

of Aragon, a ranting imitation of Marlo\ve''s
Tamburl-aim; written in 1588 and printud in
1599 ; Historie of Orlando Furioso, based on
Ariosto (xxii.), written in 1588 and printed in
1594 ; The Hono7irabk Historie of Friar Bacon
and Friar Bungay, wTitten in 1589 and printed
in 1594; T/ie Scottish Historie of James IV.,
ba-sed partly on a tale of Cinthio's, with a
curious chorus prelude introduced by Oborani,
King of Fairies, and a quaint clown, Slipper,
WTitten in 1590 and printed in 1598 ; and
Georgc-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, a
Robin Hood and Edward I. drama, written
about 1590-91 and printed in 1599. One of
these only need arrest our attention.

The Honourable Historie of Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay was probably produced in emula-
tion of Marlowe's Faustus. Both plays deal
with the very ancient fable (to go back no
farther than Simon Magus) of a compact made
by a man with the Evil One, Marlowe basing
his play upon the German Faust-book of 158T,
Greene upon a prose tract (of which no early
copy is known) dealing with the legendary
history of Friar Bacon (i.e. Roger Bacon of
Oxford), his magic crystal, his brazen head,
and scheme for encircling England with a wall
of brass. If we conclude that Faustus was
written in the autumn of 1588, we may safely
assume that Friar Bacon was produced about
six months later. There is, however, no cjues-
tion of imitation, the two plays being worked
out on entirely different lines. Marlowe's play
looks forwai-d to the terror that Shakespeare
inspired in Macbeth ; Greene looks backward
to the old morality, with its wcll-v\orn
buffbonci'ies. It is one of the last pieces in
which the devil appeared in propria persona
upon the London stage, and the magical inci-
dents are all described nol, only without the
lea-st semblance of a .shudder, but with the
greatest possible joviality and gusto. TTpon
the original legend Greene engrafts a medley
thoroughly typical of his (juaint English
humour and versatile talent.

George Peele (whose fondness for Devonshire
comparisons in his plays suggests a Devonshire
origin) wa.s the son of a clerk of Christ's
Hospital, and was educated at that school,
wlience he proceeded to Broadgates Hall, now

Pembroke College, Oxford, where Heywood
also had studied. He migrated, however, and
graduated B.A. from Christ Church in 1577.
Four years later he left Oxford for London,
and at first turned his graceful pen to the pro-
duction of literary tributes and compliments
in return for stipulated fees.' This source of
income running dry, he abandoned himself,
despite the warnings of his friend Greene, to
write for the common players. He resembled
Greene in some respects, and Greene wrote of
him in his Groatszcorth as a fellow-sinner.
His life does not appear to have been in any
sense a counterpart of his sweet and innocuous
poetry. He was often put to humorous shifts
for the bare means of subsistence, and he died
distressfully in or about 1597. Meres, in his
PaUadis Taiuia (1598), ascribes a disgraceful
death to him. Some eight years afterwards his
notoriety suggested a label for a compilation of
extravagant and somewhat musty practical
jokes (in some of which a suspicious likeness
may be detected to anecdotes of Francois
Villon), styled Merne conceited Jests of George
Peele, gentleman, some time a Student in Oxford.
A pastoral play by Peele, The Arraignment
of Paris, was written about 1581-2 and pub-
lished in 1584. The idea of the play is the
trial of Paris for error of judgment in giving
the apple to Venus. Composed for the delecta-
tion of the court, it contended that in merit
the ball belonged to one Eliza, who ruled over
(says Diana) —

A kingdome tliat may well compare witli mine
An ancient seat of kings, a second Troy,
Y-compassed round with a commodious sea.

In his earlier work, Peele's blank verse is
ordinarily dash'd and brew'd with rhyme ; yet
he managed to set more music out of the metre
than any earlier dramatist had done. His
rhymed verse is sweet and caressing if somewhat
monotonous. Beautiful songs now and again
i-ise to the surface ; in the third act of T/ie
Arraignment, for instance, where occurs —

Fair and fair and twice so fair.

And fair as any may be,
The fairest shepherd on our greeu,

A love for any ladye.

The dramatic work (if any) done by Peele

' .Some of his later occasiou.al .and complimentary poems are exquisitely graceful, and illustrate a remarkable
deftness in smooth blank verse rhythm by no means devoid of dignity. J'o/iihi/nmiii, written to celebrate one of
the annual coronation day tilling matches (November 17th) and ))ublished in 15i)0, concludes some majestic
lines with the noble irregular sonnet " His golde locks time hath to silver turn'd."

THOMAS KYD

undeserving of such summary condemnation,
and marks an advance on earlier efforts. But it
was as a tragedian of blood that " sporting
Kyd," as he was ironically called, achieved his
widespread fame. In or about 1588 he pro-
duced a play before which the popularity of
even Marlowe's 7'mnburlaine paled. It was
licensed in 1592 as The Spanish Tragedie,
dealing with the pitiful fate of Old Hieronymo,
who goes well nigh stark mad ere, in anticipa-
tion of Hamlet, he converts the stage into a
shambles in the prosecution of his " revenge " ;
the first extant edition is dated 1594, and
another edition appeared in 1604, with extensive
additions at the hand of Ben Jonson. l^ike
Titus Andi-anicus, The Spanish Tragedie was
a tale of horrors, in what we should now call
transpontine taste, and, although it excited the
enthusiasm of the vulgar, it was derided by the
more cultured of its critics. The wits were
fond of parodying it, and the strange soliloquy
of the hero, " Beware, leronymo, go by, go by,"
became a regular catchword. A similar ex-
pression greatly in request among theatre-goers
was " Hamlet, revenge ! " the quotation being
from a pre-Shakespearean play on the subject of
the Prince of Denmark. Now in the prefatory
Epistle, or Satire, which Nash contributed to
his friend Greene's Mtmaphon in 1589, Nash
makes the enigmatic remark in the course of a
diatribe against Kyd that this dramatist could
an he would furnish " whole Hamlets, I should
say handfuls of tragical speeches." This looks
very much as if Kyd \\ere the author, or at
least the reputed author, of this original Hamlet,
written some twehe years before Shakespeare's
great tragedy, probably about 1588. The
resemblance between the motif of two such
extraordinarily popular plays as 7Vie Spanish
Tragedie and Hamlet is at any rate remarkable.
Like Hamlet, the Tragedie represents an action
of cruel and cold-blooded murder followed by
a long-harped-on and sanguinary revenge. A
ghost appears in both ; in both the revenge is
ett'ected by means of a play within a play.
Upon the same grounds the Tragedie resembles
Marlowe's Jew of Malta, in emulation of which
play Prof. Courthope thinks it vas probably
written.

Born on February 6th, 1564, the eldest son
of a shoemaker at Canterbury, Marlowe^ received

' Sacrapant and Delia in this play being the origir.als of Milton's Comus and Lady.

' He was christened at St. George's Church, Canterbury, February 2Gth, 15(53-4, some two months
before Shakespeare's baptism at Stratford-ou-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, appears to have been the

between 1582 and 1590 remains to be identified.
In the latter year he produced The Old Wives''
Tak, printed five years later (1595), a strange,
incoheient, and unmannerly medley, impossible
as drama but interesting to the antiquary and
the folk-lorist ; interesting, too, by reason of its
induction, its (juaint tags of song, its supposed
ridicule of Gabi'iel Ilarvey and his hexameters
in the ])art of Huanebango, and its suggestions
to Milton.^ An eerie glinuner of romantic
lunnour seems to be trying to percolate the
dark aisles of what is not so much a play as
& pathless, plotless, and almost impenetrable
forest. In 1599, a year or so after his death,
was printed Peek's best-remembered play,
David and Bethsabe. Peek's two editors differ
in their estimate of David and Bethsabe (" be-
loved of German critics"). Dyce calls it Peek's
chef d''a:uvre ; Bullen describes it as a mess of
cloying sweets. It was very popular, but
perhaps this was due to curiosity to witness
Absalom swinging from a tree by his long hair
{a suspension which cost manager Hcnslowe
the sum of 1,?. 6c?. in ropes and pulleys). Both
as regards smooth versifying and treatment of
religious tliemes (often recalling the obsolete
miracle poetry) a resemblance may be traced
between Peek and Clement Marot, whose
Psaumes were published in 1541-3. Peek's
honeyed cadences may to a slight extent have
modulated the verse-manner of Shakespeare
during the early period from Thf: Two Gentle-
men of Verona to Romeo and Juliet ; but, upon
the whole, he contributed less to dramatic
progress in England than either Lyly, Greene,
or Marlowe.

Thomas Kyd, the son of Francis Kyd, a
scrivener, was baptised at St. Mary Woolnoth's,
in Lombard Street, on November 6th, 1558.
He was sent to Merchant Taylors' and educated
above his profession of scrivener, which he soon
deserted for literature. His accession to the
ranks of professional writers, a.s usual, excited
some jealousy, and Nash wrote in his preface to
Greene's Menaphon of those who, leaving the
trade of Noverint whereto they were born, busy
themselves w'ith the endeavours of art, pose as
English Senecas, attempt Italian translations
or twopenny pamphlets, and blotch up a blank
verse with ifs and ands. Of all these ort'ences
Kyd was guilty, although his blank verse is

MARLOWE

the rudiments of his education at the King's
School in that cit}', which he entered at
Michaelmas, 1578, and where he had as fellow
pupils Richard Boyle, afterwards known as the
Great Earl of Cork, and Will Lyly, the brother
of the dramatist. Stephen Gosson entered the
same school a little before and William Harvey,
the famous physician, a little after Marlowe.
He subsequently went to Cambridge with a
Parker scholarship from his school, and took his
degree from Benet College (now Corpus Christi)
in 1584. His classical acquirements were of a
kind which was then extremely common, being
based for the most part upon a minute acquaint-
ance with Roman m^'thology as revealed in
Ovid's Metamorphoses. His spirited translation
of Ovid's Amorcs, which was at any rate com-
menced at Cambridge, does not seem to point
to any very intimate acquaintance with the
grammar and syntax of the Latin tongue.
Before 1587 he seems to have quitted Cam-
bridge for London, where he attached himself
to the Lord Admiral's company of actors under
the leadership of Edward Alleyn, and almost at
once began writing for the stage. Of Marlowe's
career in London, apart from his four great
theatrical successes, we know hardly anything.
The licentious character of some of the young
dramatist's tirades seems to have early sown a
suspicion among the strait-laced that his
morals left everything to be desired. It is
probable enough that this attitude of reproba-
tion drove a man of so exalted a disposition as
Marlowe into a more insurgent attitude than he
would have otherwise adopted. He seems to
have dallied with Unitarian opinions, which were
then regarded as putting a man outside the
pale of civilised humanity, and the Privy Council
were just on the eve of investigating some
depositions against him when his career was
abruptly and somewhat scandalously terminated.
It appears that he surprised a woman whom he
loved in the arms of his low-born rival, who is
described as a serving-man. Carried away by
anger, he drew his dagger with a view of
making an end of his supplanter, but his
adversary, a man of more nniscle and greater
agility, seized the blade, reversed it, and plunged

it into his eye. This lamentable affray took
place on June 1st, 1593, in a low tavern^ at
Deptford, in the register of the parish church
of St. Nicholas in which town (where the
poet sought refuge from tlie plague then raging
in London) appears the following entry :
"Christopher Marlowe, slain by Francis Archer."

A few months before the end of his life there
is reason to believe that he transferred his ser-
vices from the Lord Admiral's to Lord Strange's
company, and was thus brought into direct
communication with Shakespeare, who owed
not a little, as we shall see, to the influence of
his gifted predecessor.

To no single man does our drama o«e more
than to this ill-starred genius. It was he who
determined the form which tragedy and history
were permanently to assume. It was he who
first clothed both in that noble and splendid
garb which was ever afterwards to distinguish
them. It was he who gave the death-blow to
the old rhyme-plays on the one side and to the
frigid and classical unrhymed plays on the other.
Before him the dramatist had found himself in
this dilemma : he had either been divorced from
poetry altogether or had been wedded to the
fettering monotony of rhyme. Marlowe freed
the fraternity from this Caudine Forks of
which they felt the irksomeness without being
able to discover the means of deliverance.

Marlowe's first play was The Tragedy of
Tambiirla'me the Great, produced at the close of
1587 and printed in 1590. Its avowed object
was to revolutionise the drama, and its imme-
diate effect has been compared to that produced
by Gotz von Berliehingen or Hernani, only in
this case the war which Victor Hugo declared
against classicism Marlowe declared against the

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits

And sucli conceits as Clownage keeps in pay.

He astonished and alarmed old prejudices ; he
raised a violent storm among the critics against
what they called " the swelling bombast of his
bragging blank verse." It is true that a kind
of blank verse had already been used in a limited
number of plays (e.g. Gorhodiu; Jomsta, and
The Woman in the Moon) ; but it had not been

grandson of . I olin Morley or Marlowe, a suhstantial tanner of Canterbury. He married on May 22nd, 1.5G1,
Catherine, daughter of Christopher Arthur, at one time rector of St. Peter's, Canterbury, who liad been
ejected by Queen Mary as a married minister.

' Another version says tliat tlie ri.rc was a gambling affair and took place on board the Clnldm Hind,
Drake's ship returned from encompassing the globe, and moored off Deptford as a popuhir draw, liired out
to refresliment caterers.

"TAMBURLAINE " AND "DR. FAUSTUS

so used on the popular stage, and even at the
private houses where it had been used it had
been employed in such a lifeless, formal, and
mechanical way as to give no idea to any one
that it could possibly have a future before it.
It was the genius of Marlowe as displayed in
TamhurJainc which transformed it at a single
stroke into the noblest and most flexible of
English metres. But the prejudices and the
criticisms were soon dispersed before the gust
of passion which Marlowe had infused into the
drama. There was that in his diction and in
his metre wliich proved irresistible to audiences
so alive to new impressions as those of that
day. Marlowe was recognised as the reigning
dramatist of his day, and the cause of the
drumming blank verse was won.

The faults of Tamburlainc, it must be
admitted, are both many and conspicuous.
Like all works which react powerfully against
tendencies of long standing, it is marked by a
violence which is often crude and excessive. It
has the defects of the revolutionary spirit ; it
is too sonorous, owr-rhetorical ; it is fierce,
savage, raucous, and blatant. It displays an
immense canvas on which all the figures are
superhuman, while that of Tamburlaine himself
towers like a giant in proportions of audacious
impossibility. In successive scenes the reader
is transported from Persia to Scythia, from
Scythia to Georgia, and from Georgia to
Morocco. The author seems intoxicated, as it
were, with the fumes of his invention. He
outlines his theme in immense contours, while
the figure of his hero moves through the piece
like an avalanche. The diction is no less
grandiose than the subject of the drama.
Marlowe ransacks the continent for a pic-
turesque name, and pours the wealth of an
empire into the lap of a single epithet.

Yet with all this rant and extravagance we
believe that it is no exaggeration to say after
Mr. Verity that Tamburlaine contained more
genuine poetry than all previous dramas put
together, from the first miracle play down to the
last piece of rhymed fustian that Nash or Peele
or Kyd happened to have produced.

It would have seemed impossible for the
author of Tamburlainc to eclipse a piece so
sensational and so novel in popular estimation.
It is, nevertheless, the case that in a second
tragedy he succeeded in throwing into strono-er

' "What has Margaret to do with I^'aust.''" asked
from Marlowe is worth Goethe's whole play."

relief than ever his striking poetic genius, for his
genius is essentially rather poetic than dramatic.
Pre-eminently bold (it dcligiitcd him to "dally
with interdicted subjects ") was his choice of
material for his next play — the old stoi-y of
the man's contract with the devil. He found
a fine setting of the old fable ready to his hand.
The story had crystallised round Dr. Fanstus,
who flourished in Thuringia about 1520, and
whose doings were narrated in a popular story-
book or Faiusthiwh published at Frankfort in
1587. The play which Marlowe founded upon
the English translation of this popular legend
is, like Tamburlainc, a succession of scenes rather
than an organised dramatic structure. Faustus
sells his soul to the devil in order to obtain a
limited power for the .space of twenty-four
years, together with the services of one of
Satan's lieutenants, Mcphistopheles. Master
of the elements and of all the forces of nature,
he travels hither and thither about the globe,
performing every kind of miracle. He goes to
Rome, attends a banquet which is being given
by the Pope, and, having assumed invisibility,
snatches the dainties from the PontifTs plate,
and, when Papa crosses himself, boxes his ears.
He plays similar tricks with friars and scholars,
with the emperor, and with the princes of
Germany. He then returns to his native
Wittenberg, where he awaits his terrible fate
in gradually intcnsifving anguish. He is re-
vealed in his study with one bare hour to live.

The sublimity of the play is concentrated
into this passage. At the close of it, upon the
stroke of midnight, the demons enter to " bear
him quick to hell.'" The dtnouement, though
bordering upon the grotesque, is sustained by
lines of the truest poetical inspiration. The
mighty line of Marlowe is nobly exemplified in
the whole of the passage commencing

See ! see ! where Christ's blood streams in the firma-
ment,

and ending with the terrible longing for annihi-
lation which reaches the climax in

O soul, be chang'd into little water drops.
And fall into the ocean, ne'er to be found.

The play is disfigured by buffooneries. Faust
and Mcphistopheles are practically the only
characters. There is no Gretchen,^ and of the
opportunities for symbolism or for irony which

Lamb, loyal as ever to an old favourite. " A scene

MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE

the play affords conipai-atively little use is
made. Yet there are passages in it, such as
the famous apostrophe to Helen or the dis-
covery by Mephistopheles of the real meaning
of Hell, which attain to the high-water mark
of English poetry.

The third of Marlowe's tragedies, Tlte Rkh
Jew of Malta, was probably produced in 1589,
and as a dramatic composition exhibits a
considerable advance. It is not known where
Marlowe derived the material for his play. Its
plot is of an extremely elaborate kind. It has
for its subject the hatred of a Jew against his
Christian persecutors. The early scenes, in
which Barabas is depicted gloating over his
gems, "infinite riches in a little room," in terms
that constitute the very poetry of avarice, are
as fine as anything that Mai-lowe ever wrote.
But the cumulation of horrors and the ex-
aff deration of the Jew's character, in which the
semblance of humanity is sacrificed for the
ravings of a devil incarnate, tend gradually
to neutralise the human interest of the play.

During the last two years of his career
Marlowe was jointly responsible for two plays
on the civil wars of the fifteenth century known
as the First and Second Contentions " betwixt
the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster,"
printed in 1594 and 1595 respecti\ely, and
generally regarded as rough preliminary drafts
of the Shakespearean dramas now known as the
Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.
But Marlowe's greatest, and probably his last,
effort in the direction of the chronicle drama
was an unaided one. The noteworthy play
entitled The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentahle
Death of Edward the Second, King of England :
with the tragicall fall of proud Moiiimer, was
registered for publication in July, 1593,' less
than two months after Marlowe's death. As in
the case of Shakespeare's historical plays, the
facts are taken from Holinshed, with an occa-
sional reference for a detail to Stow and Fabyan,
and the chronology is severely compressed in
order to enhance the dramatic effect. Struc-
tin-allv, this ])lav is far sujx'rior to the skimble-
skamble chronicles t hat had hitherto encumbered
the English stage, and it forms a keystone of
the arch of our historical drama. Its influence
is very marked ujion the Riclutrd II. of Shake-
speare and the other historical plays of that
period. But it must be admiticd that Marlowe
lost almost more than he gained by his novel

restraint in regard both to diction and structure.
The play is almost wholly lacking in the lyrical
fervour and exti'avagance of his earlier produc-
tions — though the old Marlowesque vein is seen
now and again, especially in some of the earlier
speeches of Gaveston (whose sinister influence
forms the staple of the plot) and in the extreme
physical hon-or of the ending — a foretaste of
the most terrible kind of realism. The clownage
which had been a foible of Marlowe's is alto-
gether excluded. The result, unfortunately, is
only to emphasise IMarlowe's very defective
powers of dynamic characterisation (the char-
acter of Isabella here, for instance, is wholly
incoherent). The superiority of Richard II. in
human and psychological interest is no less
marked than the immense superiority of Shake-
speare as a poet in the delicacy, subtle sadness,
and rhythmical charm of those magnificent
soliloquies in the closing acts of Richard, which
have no counterpart whatever in the sheer
animal distress of Edward.

When all is said, however, Edward II.
remains a pioneer work of a very noble design,
and, as Schelling well remarks, " may be con-
sidered the final evolution of the tragic type of
the English chronicle play."

What separates Marlowe from Shakespeare
is his inability to individualise his characters.
But there are not wanting indications in
Edward II. which render it conceivable that,
had he lived beyond his tv\enty-nine years, he
might have stood second only to Shakespeare —
far below him in humour and in power to
depict men and women — yet possibly supreme
in a different province of dramatic art. As it
was, he was " the herald who dropped dead in
announcing the victory, the fruits of which he
was not to share."

The vivid success which attended the traffedies
of Kyd and Marlowe gave the signal for the
appearance of a \'ery remarkable group of
domestic tragedies in which the poetic clement
was wholly subordinated to the luridly realistic.
These plays were based directly upon incidents
which had occupied the pens of the Tyburn
chroniclers of the period. Thus, on the murder
of a London merchant near Shooter's Hill in
1573 was founded the anonymous tragedy of
A Warning for Fair Women. On a murder of
peculiar atrocity which occurred in Thames
Street, Robert Yarrington founded his Two
Tragedies in One. On the nun'der of two

' Quartos, 1594 and 1598.

"ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM " 75

children by their father at Calverley, in York- and her lover Mosbie, who contrived the murder

shire, was founded The Yorkshire Tragcdij, Ijetween them, are full of individuality, and

which appeared at the Globe in 1(508, and was appallingly true to life. The guilty fears and

afterwards printed under the name of Shake- suspicions witii which Mosbie is haunted, the

speare. The most famous of the group is the delicate and complex shades of sentiment in

play based upon the murder of a Kentish Alice, and the despairing passion l)y which she

gentleman in Edward VI/s reign and entitled is consumetl, reveal the work of a master in

Arden of Feversham. In this play, which was the delineation of character. The author,

printed in 1592, the character of the victim whoever he wns, was the first to depict a

Arden is drawn in a faint and somewhat waver- complex woman character upon the tragic

ing outline, but the characters of his wife Alice stage.^

' Works upon tlie early Elizabethan Drama have been ffreatly multiplieil diirinj^- the last fifteen years. To
Dr. A. \V. ^Val•(l's English Dramatic Liti-rature, J. P. Collier's Ilhtury of Kny/i.sh lirainufw Poi'tnj, and
J. A. Symonds's Predecessors of Shakespeare, 1884, would no\v probably be added by jjeiieral (-onseiit: F. .S. Boas,
Shakspere and his Predecessors, 180G ; Mezieres, Predecesseurs et Conteinporuins de .Shakespeare, 3rd ed., 1881;
V. G. Fleay, Chronicle History of the London Stage, 1890 ; Gayley, I{epresentatiee English Comedies, 1903 ;
Manly, The Pre-Shukespearean Drama, 1897 ; Schellinfr, The English Chronicle Play, 1902 ; and Jusserand,
Jlistoire Litteraire, vol. ii. chap. v. Of Lyly (upon whom we are expecting an elaborate monograph by
Prof. Keuillerat, of Rennes), the recognised edition is that by R. Warwick Uond (1902). Kyd is edited by
Prof. F. S. Boas (1901) ; Greene by A. Dyce, Dr. Grosart, and Prof. Churton Collins (Clarendon Press) ; Peele
and Marlowe by Dyce, both of whose editions, good though they are, have been superseded by those of
A. H. Bullen. For Marlowe may be consulted, further, Ingram's Christopher Marlowe, 1904 ; A. W. Verity's
Marlowe's Influence on Shakespeare, 1880; Churton CoUins's Essays and Studies, 189."); Swinburne's Essay in
Encycloptedia liritannica; Seccombe and Allen's Age of Shakespeare ; Fortnightly J'eview, September — October,
1905. It is an amusing exercise and test of critical ingenuity to trace the theories of Elizabethan staging as
originally constructed upon very slender data by Nathan Drake, Malone, and J. P. Collier, and reflected in the
ingenious reconstructions of Philarete Chasles (La Representation d'une Piece de Shukspeare en 1613), through the
conjectures of F". G. Fleay, J. A. Symonds, H. B. Wheatley, William Archer, E. Bapst, W. W. Greg,
F. Reynolds {Some Principles of Elizabethan Staging), and Karl Mantzius (in his voluminous History of Theatrical
Art), down to the elaborately circumstantial theories of the very latest German specialists, such as Dr. Brandl,
Robert PrOlss (Altenglishes Theater), and Cecil Brodmeier (Die Shakespeare-Biihne). As in the case with some
Teutonic theories concerning Shakespeare's chronology and " Metrik," zeal occasionally outruns discretion,
but both zeal and discretion alike seem distanced by prodigious learning.

CHAPTER VI

sp:ea^seb and his school

"See ill your library whether you have Spenser's Faerie Queene. No English is easier to understand,
richer or more flowing ; nowhere is there such an assemblage of abundant fiction, blissful imaginations, and
marvellous adventures. It is lilie soaring on the wings of a beautiful swan ; this aerial and fantastic world
seems Man's natural home. It is like Ariosto, but serious, tender, touching, exalted, Platonican. It
resembles in nowise Shakespeare's rapid, tormented, and dazzling Fairyland ; it is perfectly calm, bright, and
sweet. I shall endeavour to show this delight of Imagination, this beautiful madness of sixteenth-century
poetry to our modern public fed on physiological novels."— Tainb, Letters.

Rhyme or classical metres— Gabriel Harvey— Edward Dyer— Two great metrical innovations— Edmund Spenser
—The Shepheards Calender—The Faerie Queene— GWes and Phineas Fletcher— Daniel— Drayton.

TT^VER since the " new learning'' had begun
-L^ to make way in England, Engli.sh poetry
had been mainly experimental and imitative.
In the absence of any native literary tradition
and of good and available English models, our
writers had turned with a commendable humility
to the reservoirs of the classics and to the more
recent Italian masters. Wyatt and Surrey had
followed the Italians ; the more original Sack-
ville had been influenced chiefly by Virgil. The
writers of 1579 found themselves in the presence
of developed literatures, with the formal per-
fection and maturity of which English litera-
ture coidd not bear comparison. They were
oppressed by the superiority of Greek and
Latin poetry ; and in order to reproduce the
merits of the classical poetry they thought
that its pro.sody would first have to be re-
surrected. It would not have been so very
surprising had the development of poetry in
England been injured and retarded — as it was
deplorably retarded in France— by a too timid
devotion to these models of antiquity.

Between 1570 and 1580 it was actually being
debated whether rijyme should not be alto-
gether discarded, and English poetry written
for the future in mc-tres consecrated bv Greek
or Latin usage. 'J'he ([ucstion of the adapta-
tion of Englisli lo classical metres was first
raised by Roger A.scham in his SHokmaster of
1570.

Thomas Drant, a Cambridge man of a later
generation, translated Horace's Satires and his

Ars Poctka into classical metre, and when he
died in 1578 left some elaborate posthumous
rules whereby English might be twisted into
quantitative measures such as sapphics and
pentameters, but more especially hexameters.
Ascham had found it absurd that such novices
in poetry as the English should presume to
follow the Goths in rhyming when they had
before them the example of Homer and Virgil,
the world's greatest poets, who knew not
rhyme. William Webbe, the critic, likewise
protested against " the tinkerly verse which
we call rhyme," and the very lyrists themselves
such as Thomas Campion denounced the
practice as a concession to childish titillation.
These various rules and admonitions wei'c
taken up very seriously by the group of poetical
theorists who surrounded Sidney. Prominent
among these were Gabriel Harvey and Sir
Edward Dyer. Gabriel Harvey, a lecturer in
rhetoric at Cambridge and author of various
works in Latin, a man of genuine learning and
not devoid of shrewdness and humour, is now
mainly remembered for his devotion to this
lost cause of classicism, in English poetry. His
counsels encouraged Sidney in the metrical
experiments which diversified the Arcadia.
The material service which he rendered to
Spenser by introducing him to Sidney's circle
at Penshurst entitles him to our gratitude.
His attempts to convert Spenser to his classical
theory of versification had no lasting success.
The poet was too polite to say what he thought

Edmund Spenser

TWO GREAT METRICAL INNOVATIONS

about the practicability of moulding English
pronunciation to suit the exigencies of metre-
mongers ; but after 1580, in which year he
commenced The Faerie Qiwcne, he ceased all
experiments in classical metres, and, revolting
definitely against Harvey's theories, resolved
to work out his salvation as a metrist by
an exclusive reliance upon his own poetic
instinct.

Yet the classical doctrine was not lacking
in some confessors and martyrs not by any
means wholly devoid of poetical faculty,
among them Sir Edward Dyer, Aljraham
Fraunce, John Dickenson, and Richard Stany-
hurst.

Edward Dyer was born at Sharpham Park,
near Glastonbury, in a house which was sub-
sequently the birthplace of Henry Fielding.
Both at Oxford and the court he was early
marked out for distinction. He was the close
friend and acted in 1586 as the executor of
Sir Philip Sidney. Three years later he went
on an embassy to Denmark, was subsequently
knighted and made Chancellor of the Garter,
died unmarried in 1607, and was buried in
St. Saviour's, Southwark. Dyer was most
highly reputed in his own day as poet, elcgist,
and staunch classicist, but he is remembered
now exclusively by a single lyric.

Abraham Fraunce, a Salopian and St. John's,
Cambridge, man, was emphatically a satellite
of Sidney's, and one or two of his sonnets and
other lyrics are included in the Astrophcl and
Stella. He also wrote Aivadian Rhetoricke,^
and in 1591 issued The Countess of Pembroke''s
Emanucll, an account of the Nativity in rhym-
ing hexameters. This was followed by The
Countess of Pembrolrs Yvy Chureh (two parts,
1591-2), which contains versions from Tasso,
from the jEthiopical History of Heliodorus,
and from Watson's Latin poem of Amyntas.
Fraunce's attempts vary in success from
prettiness to the most ludicrous doggerel.

More thorough-going than Fraunce, though
unable to attain to the high prosodical ideas of
Drant, was Richard Stanyhurst (1547 — 1618),
an Irish gentleman whose ambition was roused
to avoid barbarous rhyming by Ascham's
indication of what true poetic excellence was
in a quotation from a no longer extant ^
version of the Odyssey in English hexameters :

do gladly report prcat praise of
men's manners and saw

many

All travellers

Ulysses,
For tliat he knew

many cities.

Stanyhurst's translation of tlie first four books
of Virgil's /Ene'/d into English hexameters is
justly considered one of the curiosities of
English literature. Inspired with an "hexa-
meter fui'y," wrote Nash in his preface to
Greene's Menaphon, this Stanyhurst "recalled
to life wiiatevor hissed barbarism hath been
bui'ied this hundred years ... a pattern
whereof I will propound to your judgments
as near as I can, being part of one of his
descriptions of a tempest, which is thus :

"Then did he make heaven's vault to rebound with

rounce, robble liobble.
Of ruflf raff roarings with thwick thwack thurlery

bouncing."

John Dickenson in his Shejiheardes Coynplahit
and also in the verses interspersed in his Arisbas,
or Cupids Journey to Hell, a palpable imitation
oi Eup}tws,da.iedL 1594, has recourse to classical
metres, to hendecasyllabics, and to hexameters.
While such experiments as these were occupying
men's minds, while Webbe and Puttenham were
descanting upon the elegance of verses shaped
to the semblance of eggs and pillars, and when
even a born lyrist such as Thomas Campion
found it incumbent on him to denounce the
vulgar and artificial custom of rhyming, the
future of English poetry could hardly seem
other than dark and perplexed ; but little
light was reflected on the past which could
serve to illumine the future. From this
impass English poetry was saved by two pieces
of adaptation so striking and so successful as
to rank among the highest of literary in-
ventions. The first of these was Spenser's
discovery of the stanza called after his name,
an original modification and improvement of
the Italian ottava r'lma, exceptionally fitted for
the unwinding of romance, and adapted to show
to the best advantage the melodious possibili-
ties of English rhyme. Tlie second was the
adaptation of blank verse (which Sm-rey had
attempted in his version of the jEneid) at the
hands of Christopher Marlowe, before whom no
one can be said to have realised even remotely
the enormous possibilities of this unrhymed
metre. The demand for English hexameters

' The Arcadian Rhetoricke is notable from the fact that though published in 1598, it cites passages from The
Faerie Qiwene, none of which was published until two years later.
' By his friend M. Watson, of St. John's, Cambridge.

SPENSER

and Sapphics, impracticable as it was, was thus
not by any means \\liolly devoid either of
meaning or of effect. It sprung from a sense
of poverty in the old rhyming measures and
led to the building up of forms of more
complex beauty. ]\Iore directly, though still
for the most part unconsciously, it realised
that for epic or serious dramatic poetry a real
need for an unrhymed form of verse existed.
This need, which was first expressed at Cam-
bridge, gradually penetrated to the popular
theatre, and the necessary relief from jigging
rhyme was effectually found in the mighty line
of IMarlowe.

Edmund Spenser was born at East Smith-
field, pi'obably in 1552. His father, John
Spenser, was a clothier of Lancashire origin,
and Ednmnd was sent when he was ten years
old or thereabouts as a poor scholar to the
newly founded Merchant Taylors' School ;
there he stayed till 1569, and had for his
master the celebrated Dr. Mulcaster. In
defiance of the classical prepossessions of the
times, this distinguished scholar had the
courage to say : " I love Rome, but London
better ; I favour Italy, but England more ; I
honour the Latin, but worship the English."
The robust faith in the genius of his native
tongue, which he derived from Mulcaster, may
have enabled him to resist the heresies of his
college friend, Gabriel Harvey, who became a
fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, about
a year after Spenser entered the Hall as a sizar
in April, 1569. But Harvey's theories, en-atic
as they wei-e, probably did more in the end to
quicken and stimulate than definitely to mislead
Spenser's taste for poetry. Harvey pi-obably
rendered considerable service to Spenser by
introducing him to the Leicester House circle.
Spenser, on his part, was not ungrateful, as
he shows ill his JEclogiic-i, where Harvey is
Ilobbinoi. A common friend at Cambridge
was Edward Kirke, who subsequently edited
The Shcjthnirds Cti/ciider.

Spenser left Cambridge, after taking the
degree of M.A., in 1576. Soon after this he
returned from a sojourn in I>ancasliire by the
express advice of Harvey. About 1578, pro-
bably, he took up his abode at Leicester
House in the Strand, as a poet in the favourite's
household. In December, 1579, his famous
collrction of pastorals, TTie Shepheards Calender,
was published, and immediately established
Spenser's reputation. Next year he was made

private secretary to I^ord Grey de Wilton,
recently appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland.
Spenser went over to Ireland in August, 1580,
and took part in the reduction of the fort at
Smerwick, where some six hundred Roman
Catholics, mostly Spaniards, who had effected
a hostile lodgment there, were slaughtered in
cold blood. Lord Grey returned to England
after this achievement, but Spenser remained
on in Ireland, where his home was henceforth
fixed, first in Dublin, and after 1588 at Kil-
colman, where he bought, for a small sum, a
forfeited estate, the castle in which he resided
being an abandoned Peel-tower of the Des-
monds. There he was visited by Raleigh, who
urged him to bring to court the first three
books of the fairyland romance which he was
creating. He was presented to the Queen,
published The Faerie Queene as far as it was
completed in the spring of 1590, and in 1591,
in answer to a good deal of grumbling about
the hardships of his lot, and in spite of the
opposition of Burleigh, received an annual
pension of <£'50 from the Queen, with the
informal title of " poet laureate." He returned
to Ireland late in 1591, to resume his duties
as Clerk to the Council of the province of
Munster, which he resigned in June, 1594,
upon his marriage in Cork Cathedral to
Elizabeth Boyle, of an old Anglo-Irish family
— the lady celebrated in the beautiful but
somewhat artificial sonnets called Amoretti.
He was in England again towards the end of

1595 bearing the MSS. of the fourth, fifth, and
sixth books of The Faerie Queene. During

1596 he r'emained in London writing his
drastic prose treatise called A View of the
Present State of Ireland, embodving an uncom-
promising plan lor the thorough subjugation
of that rebellious country : his plan was not
adopted, and \\hen he returned to Kilcolman
in 1597, he found to his cost that rebellion was
still rife. Breaking into a flame in October,
1598, it took Spenser, the newly appointed
Sheriff of county Cork, entirely by surprise.
The castle, with one of the children in it, was
burnt over his head, and lie fled for refuge to
Cork. While there the distressed poet wrote
a plaintive appeal to the "mighty Empresse"
and " dread Sovereign" Elizabetli " out of the
ashes of desolation and wastcness of this
wretched Realm of Ireland " to " receive the
voices of a few most niilinppy gliosts." In the
second \\eek of December, Sir Thomas Norrcys

"THE SIIEPHEARDS CALENDER"

7!)

swit him «ihli ;i letter to the Privy Council
ill I'^iiirlaiid " manifesting the misery of the
country." He reached London momentarily
penniless, and died at a tavern in King Street,
Westminster, on January 16th, 1599. ITe was
buried in the neighboui-ing Abbey close to
Chaucer, poets bearing his pall and casting
verses into his grave.

Upon the appearance of The Shcpliciirds
Calender in 1579, "entitled" to Maister Philip
Sidney' and sped by some verses signed
"Immerito," which reveal the singer at a
glance, Sj)enser was acclaimed Parnassian, peer
of Ariosto, and poet — our first since Chaucer;
and the Calender recognised as the first poem
for England to boast of since the days of John
of Gaunt.

The title, as Warton was the first to point
out, was borrowed from that of an old book
first printed by Wynkyn de Worde,and reprinted
on several occasions. A comical, odd book,
Hearne called it, a strange medley of astrology
and homely receipts, itself borrowed, in all
probability, from an old French cennpilation
called the Kalendrier des Bergcrs. Spenser's
Calender is likewise a medley consisting of
twelve compositions, alike called " yEclogues,"
and assigned to the twelve months of the year,
but differing greatly in subject, metre, character,
and excellence. It is very probable that they
were written at different periods. The mas-
querade of shepherds, oaten pipes, and pastoral
scenes is maintained throughout. In this
Spenser was merely following the example
borrowed by Virgil from the Greeks, revived
by Petrarch and Mantuanus ' (followed by
Sannazaro, Guarini, and Tasso), and naturalised
in England by Barclay and Googe. Spenser
acquiesced in it, to the extent of uttering his
thoughts through the mouths of imaginary
shepherds and goatherds bearing homely, rustic
names such as Diggon, Willy, and Piers. Colin
Clout (adopted from Skelton) stands for Spenser
himself, Hobbinol for Gabriel Harvey, Cuddie
for Edward Kirke, Tityrus stands for Chaucer —
Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.

as Spenser later on described him — while Syrinx
is Anne Boleyn, and Great Pan presumably
Henry VIII. Thus, in its general scheme,
The Shepheards Calender was quite conventional.
Spenser had added little or nothing to the idea
of the pastoral, and he had borrowed much.
But he had followed no one model, and he had
written eclogues in pure English matching
anything written abroad. The experiment in
versification was a triumphant success. Tliere
are passages in The Shepheards Calender of
" poetical eloquence, of refined vigour, and of
musical and imaginative sweetness, such as the
English language had never attained to since
the days of him who was to the age of Spenser
what Shakespeare and Milton are to ours, the
pattern and fount of poetry."

During the ten years following the appear-
ance of the Calender Spenser resided mostly in
Ireland, suffering the loss of that society which
made the age of Elizabeth so famous, but not
apparently suffering in reputation. The hopes
of litei-ary England were directed towards him,
nor were these hopes disappointed when in 1589
he returned to England and brought his sheaves
with him in the shape of the first thi-ee books
of The Faerie Qneene. These three books were
published early in 1590, and were dedicated
to " the most high, mighty, and magnificent
empress, Elizabeth." The next three books
appeared in 1596, and the first complete
edition of Spenser's works in 1609 included two
additional cantos belonging to some later book,
presumably never completed. The whole poem,
as originally planned, was to have been com-
pleted in twelve books of twelve cantos each.
In a letter to Raleigh written in 1589, and
prefixed to the first edition, Spenser describes
the poem, the greater part of which has yet to
be written, as a continued allegory or dark
conceit. He goes on to give some information
apparently intended to guide one in the
obscurity. The general end of all the book is
to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vir-
tuous and gentle discipline. " I labour," he
says, " to portray in Arthur before he was king

' Baptista Mantuanus (1448—1516), a Carmelite monk of the Pagan Renaissance, who imitated Virgil
with amazing cleverness. Love-plaint, singing bout, elegy, fable, satire, panegyric, and Sicilian landscape
were all pressed into Immerito's service in the form in which pastoralists had used them since Tlieocritus
first sung, and Moschus lamented Bion. Spenser invented a Doric of his own, half rustic, half archaic
(Chaucerian), which is justified to us by a quaint, sylvan music of its own. But those who knew not Chaucer
looked askance at it, and Spenser used it more sparingly as he went along. Archaisms came to be shunned
like the plague until Percy and Chatterton revived a taste with which Pope and Tliomsou, Prior and
Shenstone, had merely played.

THE FAERIE QUEENE "

gory which is mi allegory. Its other faults
may be reduced to a certain monotony, akin to
that of the Mo lie cV Arthur and inseparable
from the similarity of adventures appropriate
to chivalric romance and the difficulty of
differentiating purely mythical charactei-s. Of
the many beauties and excellences of the
poem every generation from the date of its
appearance has testified through the mouths
of its choicest spirits. For Spenser has not
been the poet of a school of singers, but
the poet of all true poets from Dryden and
Pope and Byron to Milton, Keats, and
Wordsworth.

It is significant that many of his best appre-
ciators in modern times have regarded him less
and less as a great thinker, allegorist, or justi-
fier of the ways of God to mau, and more and
more as a metrical musician, and, above all, as
a painter of scenes who, with the imaginative
opulence of a literary Turner, has furnished a
whole gallery of his own with the stuff that
dreams are made of. One of his finest appre-
ciators, Leigh Hunt, in his Imagination and
Fancy, has dwelt almost exclusively upon this
word-painting side of his genius. Spenser was
in fact " the great painter." The personages
in The Fneiie Queene are not so much characters
as richly coloured figures, mo^'ing to the accom-
paniment of delicious music in an atmosphere
of serene remoteness from the earth. Not
until Keats did another English poet arise so
filled with a passion for outward shapes of
beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions
of the senses. In narrative description, in
movement, and in action Spenser is inferior to
his immediate model, the Orlando Furioso of
Ariosto. But in effects of richness of gloom
or of mystery, or in the projection of allegoric
figures perfect in beauty or in ugliness, he is
almost unapproached. And above all, great
painter that he is, he excels in atmosphere, an
atmosphere of dreamland, silvery and pure and
faint and mysterious as niounlight, in wjiicli the
figures of his noble knights and maidens siiine
with an unearthly beauty.-

iie writ no l;iiij^uaj;c " — inventiiif; a more or less beautiful

the image of a brave knight perfected in the
twelve private moral \-irtues as Aristotle hath
devised. The which is the purpose of these
first twelve books." The poet intended to
reserve the central event, which was the occasion
of all the adventures of the poem, till they
had all been related, leaving them, as it were,
"in the air" till at the end of twelve long
books the reader should at last be told how the
whole thing had originated, and what it was
all about. He made the mistake of confound-
ing the answer to a riddle with the resolution
of a plot. As it is The Faerie Qiwene has no
definite relation to the various stories and the
stories have no definite relation to each other.
The different knights have no very special
connection with the virtues they are supposed
to represent, viz. holiness, temperance, chastity,
friendship, justice, courtesy. To each virtue
its own work ; but the work of Spenser's
knights is much the same in all cases. Brito-
mart is not more chaste than Belphoebe or
than Amoret. Sir Calidore is not more
courteous than another. Sir Guyon is not
extraordinarily remarkable for temperance.

The allegory is fully entitled to the epithet
" dark " which Spenser bestowed upon it, yet
it is much clearer in the first book than in any
of its successors. From the point of view of
the allegorist the lack of any real unity is a
danming fault. Spenser, in fact, was not a para-
bolist,but a poet; and The Faerie Qmene is not
an allegory, but a dream, full of symbolism,
and touched here and there throughout with
allegorical import more or less definite. Haz-
litt's advice under these circumstances is to
leave the allegory severely alone on the ground
that if you dont meddle with the allegory the
allegory won't meddle with you.

Like so many great works whose fame may
be said to have become constant and not
variable. The Faerie Qiieene has yielded to
assiduous analysis the secrets of those faults
which now seem so patent to every beholder.
It is written in the language which is " no
language," ' and it is concerned with an alle-

' " Affer.liiifj the ancients," said Jonson bluntly, "
and appropriate jargon of his own.

- To those who would seek to penetrate his philosophy, S])cnser would seem at first sight to reflect
from a full surface the luxuriance and many-sided culture of the Ilenaissance. But Spenser does not really
typify Kenaissance idea-; any more than he represents the dominant Drama and Lyric of his day. Ho is iu
a way far more modern, the moralising temper, the seriousness and melancholy of later Anglo-Saxon
temperament being powerfully represented in his work. If he is the poet of Catholic chivalry, it is of a
chivalry which has lost its ancient simplicity and become clouded by tlie abstractions ol' rrotcstant I'latonism.
'llie religious Bymbolism, too, though mediieval iu origin, is complicated and embittered by the intrusion of

THE SPENSERIAN STANZA

As compared with the style of his earlier
work, that of 7%e Faerie Queene is a good deal
more matured than that of The Sltcphcards
Calender. Spenser was the first and one of
the finest of our student poets, and his style
was (juite traceably elaborated by the study
of his greatest predecessors in England, such
as Chaucer, Malory, and Sackville, and by the
practice of imitation and translation from the
choicest Italian poets in vogue — Petrarch,
Ariosto, Tasso, Mantuan, Sannazaro, and last
but not least fR)m the French of Clement
Marot. He was, moreover, a great lover of
antiquities, and certainly projected if he did
not write a work on Irish archasology. This
zealous antiquarianism found expression in the
archaic diction which he adopted in the first
instance partly as a make-weight against the
latinising tendency which was sapping the
foundations of the vernacular, partly to com-
pass a Chaucerian and old-world rusticity
appropriate to a bucolic almanac such as The
Shepheards Calender ; but the ruggedness of
this language was considerably modified in
The Faerie Queene, where he adopted his
archaisms more sparingly and deliberately with
a view to securing definite artistic effects of
colour, depth, and cadence. In The Fame
Queene are visible also the resources of much
wider reading and closer observation of nature
than in his previous work, and there is through-
out a much greater luxuriance of colour,
imagery, and mythology. As with other poets
of his time, pre-eminently Tasso, the gods and
heroes of antiquity glide continually across the
vistas of his strange, enchanted forest, in which
we wander ankle deep in the yielding moss of
heroic allegory.

But it is perhaps specially in the music of
metre that the greatest definite advance is to
be noted. The predominant metrical instru-
ment of the Calender (apart from the old five-
foot heroic line, which is most splendidly
handled by Spenser) was an accentual line
of four beats, an old measure which derived
new lustre from the brilliant use of it made

in after times by Chatterton, Blake, and
Coleridge. The stanza of T%e Faerie Queene
is one of Sj)enser''s own invention, a metrical
creation of the first order, manipulated with
consummate skill. The Spen.ser stanza, .says
Professor Courthojx', is jjlainly "a develop-
ment of the eight-lined ballad .strophe first
introduced by Chaucer from France. This
consisted of two ()uatrains with three sets of
rhymes, the (juatrains being connected with
each other by a common rhyme in the fourth
and fifth lines, thus, a b a b b c h c."" To this
measure Spenser gave a new movement by
adding an alexandrine rhyming with the sixth
and eighth lines, thus, a b a b b c b c c, thus
greatly enhancing the effect of the ottava
rima, which his stanza otherwise resembled, by
avoiding the somewhat mechanical snap of the
finial double rhyme.'

" With such a metre, and such a lexicon,
marvels in verbal nuisic become almost easy.
Hardly any two stanzas of this enormous work
will be found exactly to repeat each other in
cadence. The secrets of varying the caesura
of the line, and of using or abstaining from
enjambement or overlapping, which have been
by turns ignored, recovered, and abused, and
on which rests practically the whole art of
rescuing any metre from monotony, were per-
fectly well known to Spenser, and as cunningly
used by him as by any of his followers. Nor
can he be said to be ignorant, though he
employs them rather less, of the other two
great metrical secrets, the use of trisyllabic
feet and the distribution of words of varying
weit^ht and length over the line." ^

The great success of the first three books
of The Faerie Qimene induced the publisher to
apply to Spenser for material for a further
volume. This appeared early in 1591, entitled
Complaints, forming a collection of nine mis-
cellaneous poems. Of these Muiopotinos, or
The Fate of the Butterfly, swept by a gust of
wind into a spider^s web, is a delightful exercise
of lyrical fancy (admirably criticised by Lowell);
The Rubles of Time is an elegiac tribute to

religious party spirit. The fact is not to be supposed or concealed, that in poetry, too, as well as in
religion, the old moorings were by way of being lost. With many a lingering look the poet leaves the
light and warmth of the Mediterranean, the tradition of Holy Church and Roman Empire, and witli the
aspirations of Tudor England to till his sails (upon which the radiance of the southern sun is still reflected),
and with the Reformation to serve him as rudder, sets a new course for the ideal across the tracl<less waves
of Futurity.

' A somewhat similar use of the alexandrine to set oif the decasyllabic line is seen in a poem by Ferrers
in The Princely Pleasureif of Kenilwortk Castle.

' Saintsbury, A Stiort History of Etiglisli Literature, 2nJ ed., p. 209.

GILES AND PHINEAS FLETCHER

the Countess of Pembroke, lamenting the
deaths of Sidney, Leicester, and Warwick ;
Tlie Tears of the Miuwx, a lament upon the
low state of learning in England ; while the
vigorous though desponding Motlier Hubbercfs
Tale, perhaps the most direct of Spensers
writings, contains a poignant satire in deca-
syllabic couplets upon certain aspects of the
Enghsh court.

Other fragments of Spenser''s early work,
a volume of Stemmata DtidMana and a poem
to which several references are made called
The Dying Pelican, were never recovered. On
Sidney's death in 1586 the most poetic of the
innumerable elegies, albeit highly artificial
and somewhat conventional in its decorations,
was naturally Spenser's Astrophel : A Pastoral
Elcgic. In 1594 his Amorctti and Epithalamion
■went to Ponsonby for publication. The sonnets
are rather disappointing in their lack of in-
dividuality, but the Epithalamion (written in
alternately rhyming decasyllabics), which crowns
the series of Amoretti, is perhaps the most
splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. In 1595 appeared Colin Cloufs
come Home Againe, a fascinating narrative
of his journey to court and what he saw
there, written immediately upon his return
to Kilcolman in 1591. His next visit to
London in 1596 saw the issue of his Four
Hymns in praise of love and beauty, heavenly
love and heavenly beauty. The most stately
and noble of these — characteristic, too, in its
union of intellectual and sensual rapture — is
the second hymn, in honour of beauty, the
one worship of Spenser's life. Later in the
year he published his Spousall Verse or
Prothalamion in honour of the double mar-
riage of the Earl of Worcester's daughters,
written in a beautifid measure of his own
devising and full of the most enchanting
melody.

Among the disciples and imitators who
followed Spenser into fields allegorical or
jja-storal, the two most noteworthy were the
two Fletchers, Giles and Phineas.

Giles Fletcher, " etjually beloved of the
Muses and of the Graces," came of a poetic
stock. His father was Dr. Giles Fletcher,
author of Licia, ; his elder brother I'hiiicas
wrote The Purpk Island ; and his cousin John
was the dramatic partner of Francis Beaumont.
Born about 1587, he spent full fifteen years
among the colleges of his dearly lo\cd

Cambridge, was one of the long line of
spiritual teachers who have filled the Church
of St. Mary's, and quitted this sphere only
toward the end of his life for the lonely
\-icarage of Alderton, on the Suffolk coast,
where his death in 1623 is said by Fuller to
have been hastened by " melancholy." His
only literary work of importance was a poem
entitled Chrisfs Victorie and Triumph in
Heaven atul Earth, Over and AJlcr Death,
which was dedicated to the Master of Trinity
and published at Cambridge in 1610. This is
a religious epic in four books and 2,100 lines,
dealing with the Redemption, and containing
passages (such as those describing Satan as an
aged sire slowly footing in the silent wilderness
and the temptation of Jesus in the goodly
garden and in the Bower of Vain Delight)
which it is evident that Milton used with
profit in the second of his great epics. The
poem is diversified by lyrical measures, but is
written for the most part in a modified
Spenserian stanza, a stanza considerably injured,
however, by the omission of Spenser's seventh
line. He retains Spenser's allegorical method
and many of his archaic mannerisms. But the
work is too sincere and too genuinely reverent
to be spoiled by literary affectation. It is not
primarily a literary exercise but a long labour
of love by a man of marked literary talent,
ingenious and cultivated and of some imagi-
nation.

Phineas Fletcher, the elder of the two
brothers, also took orders and died rector of
Hilgay, in Norfolk, in 1650. The best re-
membered of his numerous poems is The Purple
Island, not published before 1633 but written
many years earlier, probably early in the
reign of James I., upon whom a good deal of
the usual adulation is heaped. Spenser and
\ irgil are avowedly the models, and the poem
is written in a debased Spenserian stanza of
seven lines. The allegory is much more
methodical tlian that of The Faerie Qwene.
The Purple Island is the body of Man with
its three metropolitan cities, the Brain, the
Heart, and the Liver, in which rise the great
rivers of the Blood. The anatomy and
j)hvsiology of the island having been treated
at greater length, its occupants, tlie intellectual
and moral facullies of Man, are similaily
personified, and in the last two cantos the
virtues and vices are niaisliallcd in Iiostile
array and we have a grantl battle !

From a Drawing by Walter Crane, reproduced by kind permission of the Artist and Mr. George Allen.

The Wedding of The Medway and The Thames

FAEBIE QUEENB, IV. 11.

SAMUEL DANIEL

Tlie quaiiitnoss and pedantry of tliis aniazinj^
poem are apt to disguise its better tjiialities;
but the personifications are often noble, tlie
style is vijrorous and antithetical, the phrasing
frequently happy and strong.

Leaving Spenser's allegorical school for the
time, we come to the chief of his j)astoral
imitators, William Browne (1591 — IM'.i), a
native of Tavistock, of a good Devonian family,
who was educated at Exeter College, mari-ied
a, lady of some means, and quitting the Temple
about 1616, lived thenceforth a retired life in
the country. He followed S[)enser's Calender
very closely in his Shepluard's Pipe, a series of
seven eclogues in varying metre. But Browne's
chief work was Bnfa7i)ihi\i Pa.stornn.i, the value
of which consists just in this, that with an easy
and simple charm of manner he sets before us
the pleasant things of real country life. Like
his master, he introduces into his Arcadia a
large number of river-gods, well-gods, dryads,
and nymphs from the same sources of classical
inspiration, Theocritus, Moschus, Virgil, and
Ovid, as well as their Italian imitators. The
conventionality of this species of decoration
gives to all these seventeenth-century pastorals
a detestably suburban air; yet Browne generally
appreciated the country, while as for his o«n
West Country he loved it as a true poet should,
and celebrated the beauty of those rivers whose
very names are musical :

TTie Walla, Tamar, Tavy, Exe, and Tau,

The Torridge, Otter, Ockmeiit, Dart, and Plym —

with the same devotedness that impelled Burns
to " cock the crests " of neglected Ayrshire
streams.

To the same pastoral flock belong the
obscure and belated Elizabethan, W^illiam
Basse (1583 — 1653), whose pastoral elegies or
eclogues and Polyhymnia, written about 1623,
remained in manuscript for over 250 years,
.and John Dennys, author of the curious but
unaffected poem on The Secrets of Angiing,
1613. From disciples of the school of Spenser,
such as the pastoral lyrists Breton and Wither,
the Platonist Henry More, and the romantic
author of PharoiiiiiJa, William Chamberlavne,
calling for notice else\\ here, we can pass without
any great dislocation to a group of writers who

combine the pastoral and allegory with metrical
history and topography in poems of truly
monumental proportions. Their vastness has
caused them to be mistaken for prehistoric
al)odes of the dead rather than monuments of
the living. Drayton, Daniel, and Warner,'
have indeed been not unhappily described a.s
the saurians of English poetry. It is true that
they did not approach in prolixity The Sacred
Warre of W. Barret, an epic of 68,000
linos which failed to find a publisher even in
the reign of James I., and still remains in
manuscript. Yet the metrical histories of
Daniel and Drayton are both designed upon a
truly colossal scale.

Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master,
was born near Taiuiton in 1562. He entered
Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in 1579, but "his
geny being more prone to easier and smoother
studies than in pecking and hewing at logic,"
he left Oxford degreeless in 1582, and after
travel in Italy settled down as a tutor under
the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke ; this
was exchanged about 1587 for a Yorkshire
home as tutor in the Clifford family. His
sonnet cycle in praise of Delia, 1592, was warmly
hailed by Colin Clout, and a second edition
minutely revised soon appeared with the
addition of an " historical " narrative piece, TTie
Complaynt of Roxamond, written in the metre
of Shakespeare's Lucrece. In 1594 came his
rhymed Senecan tragedy, Cleopatra, in which
the Egyptian enchantress moralises on her own
fsiU through some 200 lines. In 1595 were
issued the first four books of his bulky historical
epic. The Civih Warn hcticeen the Tzco Hoiises
of Lancaster and York, completed in eight
books in 1609, when it numbered upwards of
7,000 lines. On Spenser's death he seems to
have succeeded in his position as a so-called
" volunteer laureate." Early in the reign of
James, whose advent he celebrated in a Pane-
gyric Congratulatorie, he was made one of the
grooms of the privy chamber to Queen Anne,
who took great delight in his conversation.
From the commencement of the new reiffn
Daniel was drawn in to bear a share in the
court festivities, and his best art was shown in
the fourth and last of his masques or pastoral
tragi-comedies, entitled Hymeii's Triumph. His

■ William V^^arner (1558 — 1609) gave the world in 1584 Pan, hix St/rin.r or Pipe Compact of nevcn Biedra,
and five years later completed his metrical history of the world from the Flood to Flodden Field. Albioiu
England, as it was called, reached a se\enth edition in 1012, and ruined tlie sale of The Mii-ror for ilagist rates.
Its interminable couplets (fourteen syllables to each line) are not often disturbed at the present day.

DRAYTON

rhyming is sweet, his hmguage stately and
copious, inclining always, however, rather to tlie
neutral ground of prose and verse. For some
reason or other Daniel appears to have been
dissatisfied with the recognition that lie obtained
at court and among the lettered. He turned
husbandman, and, as Fuller says, devoted him-
self to the practical exposition of the Georgks.
" I question whether his Italian will fit our
English husbandry." He died in his native
Somerset, at Ridge Farm, Beckington, on
October 14th, 1619. His old pupil. Lady
Anne Clifford, put up a tablet to his memory
in the parish church. His Whole Wovkcs were
collected in 1623.

His good qualities are evidenced in the
epithet which has become his by right of
prescription — " well-languaged " Daniel. And
this epithet is well earned by a kind of
familiarity in his rhythm and his phrasing, a
familiarity which makes his language seem
almost modern to us as compared with that
of some of his greater contemporaries. Both
Wordsworth and Coleridge are loud in praise
of his pure and natui-al language. Coleridge
wrote letters imploring Lamb to try to ap-
preciate Daniel better than he did, and Lamb
responded by including a passage from Hymens
Triumph in his specimens of the English drama-
tists. Though his verse lacks colour and emo-
tion, it has great beauty of line, together with
a lucidity and a serenity that do occasionally
soar into the region of the majestic.

Daniel was outshone by a very near neigh-
bour in the realm of poesy, one who combined
his own studious zeal for verse-making with a
double share of poetic fibre, Michael Drayton.
The grandson of a well-to-do Warwickshire
butcher, who dwelt at Atherstone, Michael
Drayton was born at Hartshill, Warwickshire
(a quarry-village in which his cottage was aptly
"discovered" some fifty years ago), in 1563.
As a youth he seems to have been attached
to the Goodere family of Polcsworth, in the
capacity of "a proper goodly page." At Poles-
worth he studied side by side with Sir Henry
Goodere, a good friend in later years of Jonson
and Donne, and himself the author of a few
courtly fragments of verse. It seems possible
that this generous patron may have maintained
him for a time at one of the universities;
Drayton's muse is certainly not of the unlearned
order. In the old convent buildings, ujion
vhich the hall was engrafted, he doubtless

romped with one of the daughters of the house,
the fair Anne Goodere, by whom, and no
other, it is pretty certain that the sonnets
of Drayton's Idea weie inspired. Nor is the
epithet " fair " a merely conventional one, for
the physician of the family, John Hall, who
married Shakespeare's daughter Judith, ex-
pressly calls her a beauty. Two years later, in
1595, she married Sir Henry Rainsford, and
the inference seems irresistible that it was the
parting between the poet and his old playmate
and literary mistress which occasioned that
wonderful sonnet, " Since there's no help — come
let us kiss and part." This was not published
until 1619, but it must have been written,
we feel sure, a good many years before this.
The pastorals of 1593 were called Idea, The
Shcpheards Garland, fashioned in " nine eglogs,"
written on the model of Spenser's Calender.
Like so much of Dravton's work, they were
subsequently refashioned, and the beautiful
daffodil song —

Gorbo, as thou cani'st tliis way

By yonder little hill.
Or as thou througli the field didst stray,

Saw'st thou my Uaffadil? —

one of the most fragrant of Drayton's lyrics,
was enwrought in the ninth eclogue of the
1606 version. Drayton's power of song was
of distinctly slow growth.

In 1594, after the Astrophel and Stella and
Delia sonnets, it was hard for a poet not to be
inditing of these matters. The result was the
fifty-one "Amours in Quatorzains" of Drayton's
Ideas Mirrour (of which there were recensions
in 1599, 1602, 1605, 1619). Much of this
work consisted in framing and glazing French
adaptations from the Italian against the rigours
of the English climate.

Drayton's next venture was the most popular
appeal that he made to his contemporaries ; this
was his Englamh Ileroieall Episths, published
in 1597. Obtaining a hint from Ovid's
Heroides for the stories of historical amours,
he imparted to them a richness of declamation
and a ]Marlowes(|ue vigour which is foreign to
most of his work. And sounding though the
verse is, it is written in heroic couplets of a
smoothness that seems often to anticipate that
of a much later period. In 1603, though an
elaborate panegyric which he prepared for the
reception of James was repulsed, he became an
es(|uire to Sir Walter Aston, and found a pleasant
haven of retreat in time of need at his seat of

"THE BATTAII.E OF AGINCOURT "

Tixall, in Staffordshire. It was thus in some-
what restored circumstances that he published in
1606 his Pocmcs Lyric and Pnstoral : Odes (tiul
Eghgs. Some of the odes, which are written
in strophes of Drayton's invention, are among
the finest thin<;s he wrote, and a place is found
among them for that stirring ballad of Ag'ni-
court, the fine flower of old patriotic lyric. It
wa.s based with great skill upon some fragments
of a much more ancient ditty, and it was
sedulously revised and improved by Drayton
during his lifetime. Heywood imitated it in
his Edward IV. ; Tennyson took it for the
prototype of his Charge of the Light Brigade,
but he has not succeeded in surpassing his
model. Like Shakespeare's Henrij V., it must
have had a powerful effect in focussing atten-
tion upon triumphs as remote from that day as
Blenheim and Ramillies are from the present.
On happy Crispin day
Fought was tliis uoble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry :
O ! when shall Englishmen
With such acts till a pen.
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry .''

In his historical Legends (Piers Gaveston,
Matilda, Robert of Normandy, 1593-6) Drayton
reverted to the influence of Daniel, and the
motive of the vicissitudes in the fortunes of
the great ones of the earth, which had so often
done duty in our literature from Chaucer and
Lydgate to The Mirror for Magisty-ates. The
first poem that he planned on a large scale
was Mortimeriados, 1596, republished with
radical alterations, including a change from
seven-line stanza to ottava rima, and with
a new title. The Barron.^ Wars, in 1603. It
forms an epic narrative in 3,600 lines of the
events of the reign of Edward II., ending with
the retributive overthrow of Mortimer and
Isabella by Edward III.

For twenty full years from 1598 off and on
Drayton was working diligently at his Pohj-
Olbion, or a chorographical description of all
the tracts, rivers, mountains, forests, and other
parts of Great Britain, of which he issued
eighteen songs or cantos in 1613. This famous
topography, which is for the most part a
sufficiently tedious and prosaic recapitulation
of Camden and Leland in fourteen-syllable
verse, is encased in a thin film of personification
and antique legend. A stern patriot alone
could have finished such a work. Drayton

must have been glad to see the thirtieth and
last song printed in 1622. Meanwhile in
1619 he collected into a small folio all the
poems with the exception of the Poly-Olhion
that he wished to preserve, and added some
new lyrics. In 1627 he brought out a fresh
volume of miscellaneous poems, two somewhat
dreary metrical chronicles {The Battuile of
Jgincourt and The Miseries of Queen Mar-
garite). The Shepherd's Sirena, and the daintily
imagined and quaintly comic fairy tale the
Ni/mphidin, telling how Oberon, king of the
fairies, and the valiant Pigwiggin, mounted on
earwigs, helmeted with beetle-heads, sworded
with hornets' stings, with cockle-shell shields
and armour of fish scales, fought for the love
of Queen Mab, and were cured by the waters
of Lethe. Of equal charm with this Lilliputian
extravaganza, which has left a little wake of
its own in the history of English poetry, are
some of the verses in The Muses'' Elysitim
included in his last volume, published in 1630.
The poet had imitated all round, tried every
kind of measure, and put his lips to every
kind of mouthpiece from the bassoon to the
flute. In these pastoral dialogues of his last
years, he blossomed out in a manner which
showed that he had fathomed the resources
of this species of art, borrowing the tones and
the cadences of a later generation, while he
kept, not wholly free indeed, but fully as free
from the affectation which is the bane of
the pastoral as his old master, Colin Clout.
He died in Fleet Street, about one hundred
yards east of Temple Bar, in December, 1631,
and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His
property was assessed at i?24 2.?. Sd.

Drayton practises almost every kind of verse
measure : sextain, rhyme royal, sonnet, Italian
octave, heroic couplet, short-lined ode, octo-
syllabic couplet, dithyrambic, and alexandrine.
He was not a master either of rhythm or
metre, and, like most of the poets of the day
other than song-writers or dramatists, he under-
stood his models imperfectly. But he \\Tote
an enormous amount of verse, and success came
to him fitfully, yet once or twice without stint :

Near to the silver Trent

!>irena dwelleth.
She to whom Nature lent

All that excelleth.

In the generations from Milton to Goldsmith
Drayton seems to have completely dropped out
of poetic memory ; but although Goldsmith

THE INFLUENCE OF SPENSER

asked who he was, an attempt had ah-eady
been made at reparation in a fairly complete
edition of his works published in 1748. Lamb
and Coleridge did nuich to enforce his claim,
and Southey thought sufficiently well of his

Poly-Olbion to include the whole of it in his
selections from the British poets in 1831.
Rossetti wrote exuberantly of the sonnet
" Since there''s no help " as almost the best in
the language, if not quite.^

' Spenser's influence upon our poetic literature lias been profound. His has left his mark upon Milton,
Bunyan, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The eighteenth century produced some Spenser scholars, notably John
Hughes, 'riiomas Birch, Thomas At^arton, and Henry John Todd, whose edition in 8 vols., 1806, is still a
standard work. Dr. Johnson writing in The Raiiih/er, in 1751, lamented that imitation of Spenser was corrupting
the age. He referred to the experiments of Thomson and Shenstone in the Spenserean stanza, attempts wliich
were soon to be indefinitely multiplied. To Kyron, Shelley, and Keats in particular (for to Keats " Spenser
revealed the secret of his birth "), the attraction of Spenser's stanza proved irresistible. Among later devout
worshippers at Spenser's romantic altar, observe Coleridge, Scott, Southey, Haz.litt, Campbell, Lamb, Leigh
Hunt, " Christopher North," Kossetti, and Tennyson. Landor is one of the few singers to whom Spenser
appeared tedious ; even he was sufficiently attracted to devote two huaginary Conversations to the author
of The Faerie Queene.

Spenser's Works were first collected in 1611. Since the annotated editions of Hughes (1715), and that
of Todd in 180.5, the most elaborate editions are those of Prof. F. J. Child, Boston, 1855, J. P. Collier,
18C2, and Dr. Grosart, in 10 vols., 1880-82. A desirable one-volume edition is that issued by Routledge
(1850), though this is superseded as regards the Memoir by the Globe edition, 1899 (small print). An excellent
eilition of The Faerie Queene in si.x slim volumes is that of Miss Kate M. ^^'arren,* 1897-9 (Constable). Students
will also obtain ^^'arton's (Jbserrntioiis on The Faerie Queene (1752, 1762), Craik's Sj/eiixer and his Times, 3 vols.,
1845, R. ^V'. Church's Spenser, 1879, in the Men of Letters Series, and Prof. Herford's edition of The
Shepheards Calender,* 1895. Of essays introductory to the study of Spenser, Leigh Hunt's selections and
critical notice in his Imagination and Fancy,* Lowell's Essay on Spenser in English Poets,* and Prof.
Courthope's chapter on "Court Allegory: Edmund Spenser" {History of English Poetry, vol. ii. 234-87) are
the most suggestive. F. L Carpenter's Outline Guide to Study of Spenser (1894) is also useful. Of William
Browne a desirable edition is that by Gordon Goodwin (Muses Library). Of Draj'ton there are Selections, ed,
BuUen, 1883, and a fuller volume promised, ed. A. R. Waller; and see Michael Drayton: A Critical Study,
by Prof Elton, 1905. Daniel has been edited by Dr. Grosart for the Huth Library in 3 vols., 1887.

One of the least admirable moulds created by Greek art for Elizabethan copyists was the Didactic Poem.
The Works and Days of the Boeotian Hesiod had a most remarkable echo in the early Elizabethan Fice
Hundred pointes of good Husbandrie as well for the Champion or Open Countrie as also for the Woodland or severall,
mixed in everie month ivilh Huswiferie, which was in course of enlargement from 1557 to 1580. Its author,
Thomas Tusser, au Essex man (Rivenhall), choir-boy at St. Paul's, an Etonian under the bloodthirsty Udall,
and a scholar of King's, Cambridge (1543), tried his hand at husbandry near Witham, but died in London
May 3rd, 1580, and was, appropriately enough, buried in the Poultry, Cheapside. His work is a kind of
agricultural Sternhold and Hopkins, with admixture of proverbs and old saws in the old nursery rhyme
measure of " eight and six " (as Quince calls it), Skeltonics, and rude anapaests :

CJo wash well, saith Sommer, with sunne I shall drie,
(io wring well, saith Winter, witli winde so shall

I. . . .
One dog for a hog and one cat for a mouse,
One ready to give is enough in a house. . . .

Where window is open, cat maketh a fray.
Yet wilde cat with two legs is worse by my fay. . . .
Where hens fall a-cackling, tiike heed to tlieir nest,
\\'here drabs fall a-whisp'riug, take heed to the
rest. . . .

Two later and more ordinary didactic versifiers were Greville and his congener. Sir John Davies. School-
mate of Sidney at .Shrewsbury, Sir Fulke (ireville (Lord Brooke) wrote his friend's life or eulogy in a fine
specimen of ornate prose. He was a jealously guarded favourite of the Queen, but retained the favour of
James, and wrote long-winded didactic poems (in a h a iccmetre) on " Humane Learning," '' Fame and Honour,"
and " War " ; they are i^viare to the general, and Hazlitt accused Lamb of liking them becau.se no one
could understand them. Two dramas deal similarly with problems of political science. His "sonnets" are
imlike any otlier sonnets. Greville was stal)bed by a servant in 1028, and his poems appeared in l(i33,
posthumously, and in the same year with (ieorge Herbert's. Sir Jolni Davies (l.")()7 — l(i2li), a distinguislied
lawyer and judge of excellent family, wrote in seven-line stmza a curious poem (Orchestra, 159(1) on the
musical motion of all things in a dance of love, and another graver poem called Nusce Teipsuni, which he
couched in the long elegiac quatrains rendered famous by Dryden and liray.

CHxVriER VII
SONNETEERS, SONG-WRITERS, AND MINOR VERSIFIERS

"To describe a tiling- of no account we say sometimes that it is 'not worth an old song.'
come to think of it, liow few things are ! "

When you

Sir Philip Sidney — The fashion of sonneteering— Elizabethan lyrics and music— Lyly, Nash, Greene, Lodge,

and Breton — Campion — Barnfield — Browne — Wotton.

THE fashion of sonneteering in England was
really set by Sir Philip Sidney, over a
hundred of whose sonnets, under the title of
Astrophel and Stella, were circulated in no less
than three separate editions during 1591. The
notion of sonnets and sonnet- writing was already
fairly familiar in England. Both Wyatt and
Surrey had turned Italian canzone into irregular
sonnet forms. Googe, Turberville, and others
had produced so-called " somiets " ; Thomas
Watson devoted the close and unintermittent
labour of a zealous literary amatcm- to pouring
the oriffinal wine of Petrarch out of French
into English bottles. The sonnet was at this
time scarcely regarded as a definite literary
form, but rather as a synonym for a con-
ventional love poem in eulogy of a mistress.
It is in this sense that Shakespeare uses the
word in his early comedies. The outward form
of the sonnet, and its special applicability to
court and complimentary usage, were soon
better understood ; but we still hear of six-line
and eighteen-line sonnets (Breton's " Pretty
twinkling starry eyes "" is called Sonnet, and so
is Wither\s " Shall I, wasting in despair," as
late as 1615) ; and, indeed, it is not u!itil we
get to Drummond and Milton that the teclini-
calities and exigencies of the sonnet as a verse
form can be said to have engaged the study
of competent poetical scholarship. Sidney's
sonnets were probably written for the most
part in 1581, within half a dozen years, that is
to say, of the appearance of two of the largest
and most popular sonnet collections in France
—those of Ronsard and Desportes. The sonnet
was soon flourishing in the English court as a

delicate exotic. Then in 1591 Sidney's sonnets
were published, and even thus transplanted to a
ruder atmosphere, it seemed for a time as if the
sonnet were going to flourish rankly. From
1591 to 1598 nearly every year witnessed the
appearance of three or four competing sonnet
series. Most of these volumes were highly
frigid and artificial, and it is mainly to the
fact that Shakespeare himself was for a time
captivated by the passing craze that we owe our
interest in such productions. Several isolated
sonnets by Drayton and others are of
a rare finish and perfection ; but as regards
collections, after the unapproachable 154?
sonnets of Shakespeare, the collection of
Sidney's entitled Astrophel and Stella has pro-
bably the most intrinsic interest ; while to the
literary historian, both as a pioneer effort and
as enshrining the romance of the Bayard or the
Hirosu of English letters, Astrophel and Stella
must always make what is perhaps a dispro-
portionately strong appeal.

In 1575,"at Chartley, Philip Sidney first met
Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of
Essex. She was then only about thirteen, while
Sidney was a young man of twenty- one, lately
returned from the Continent with his head full
of " serious " imaginings and ambitious dreams.
He was a favourite of the Earl of Essex, and,
as presumptive heir to the Leicester estates, a
highly eligible parti. It was perfectly natural,
therefore, that the project of marriage should
have been entertained between the youthful
heiress and the gallant but impecunious courtier.
And there seems no doubt that some such
scheme was broached, and that the initiative
87

HENRY CONSTABLE

'svas taken not by Sidney (who was consumed at
this time not so much by love as by love''s
antidote — ambition) but by the relatives of the
lady. Early in 1581, however, Penelope was
hastily married to a well-endowed roui. Lord
Rich, and then at last Sidney discovered the
passion which had apparently been smouldering
for some time, and found himself in the position
of one who realises the depth of his love for a
woman only when he is bound in honour to
fiffht against his desire. Sonnets written for
the most part during his forced retirement from
court in 1581 represent a summer thunder-
cloud of sentiment tinted by beautiful reflections
and lurid gleams from afar, and emitting a few,
a very few, lightning flash&s of genuine passion.
Much of Sidney's best verse is to be found in
the songs which are intertwined with the
sonnets. The majority of these, it is important
to bear in mind, are full of reminiscences of
French and Italian conceits, and if the poems
as a connected series are really a record of
passion tragically thwarted and finally sup-
pressed, it is at least strange that this passion
should have needed so much help from Petrarch
and Desportes in expressing itself. It may be
that the book as a whole has gained a partly
adventitious reputation due to the personal
fame of the writer, yet Sidney's sonnets are
certainly superior to any previously written in
English. Admirers of the French sonneteers
could no longer maintain that the quatorza'in
was too delicate a plant to bear transplantation
to England ; and writing sonnets to the eye-
brows of despaired-of mistresses, real or
imaginary, soon became the reigning literary
fashion. Many of these exercises are so wii-e-
drawn as to leave one in doubt whether Sidney's
influence was an unmitigated benefit. But in
one respect, at any rate, it was of real value :
like all romanticists, ho had appealed to nature.
He had proclaimed love, love unadorned, a
worthy and sufficient theme for the poet. The
success of poems written on such a princi})le at
a time when euphuism threatened to make of the
lyric a scholastic exercise must have been really
valuable.

The fashion set by Sidney, and also the {)ar-
ticular form of the Elizabethan sonnet, is to a
large extent confirmed by Daniel's collection of
fifty-five sonnets entitled Delia, which found
their way into print in F(?l)ruary, 1592. The
love which they celebrate is evidently of a very
platonic kind, and to compensate for deficiency

in passion, Daniel falls back upon the resources
of his French masters, especially Desportes.
The success of Delia was so unequivocal that
several booksellers seem to have rashly concluded
that sonnets were destined to make their for-
tunes. Within seven months of ZJeZio appeared
the slender and typical sonnet-book entitled
Diana. The writer, Henry Constable (1562 —
1613), had the misfortune to be a Roman
Catholic at a time when the anti-Jesuitical
panic was at its height. He had to leave
England hastily, was shadowed abroad by
Protestant emissaries, repulsed at the Scottish
court for fear of offending Elizabeth, and
finally, on venturing to return without a licence,
thrown into the Tower ; and all this although
he appears to have been of a most peaceable
disposition, was of a good family, and, in his
sonneteering days, would appear to have had
the entree at court. His sonnets are graceful,
ingenious, and typical ; sweet in phrase, wholly
deficient in passion, wrought in the French vein
and held up as good models by Ben Jonson and
Edmund Boulton, who writes, in 1616, in his
Hijpercritica of Constable's, " quick and high
discovery of conceits."

In 1593 the sonneteers were reinforced from
various quarters. Barnaby Barnes gave forth
over a hundred sonnets in his Parihenophil and
Patihenophe ; Watson issued his sixty-one Tcares
of Fancie, or Love Disdained ; Giles Fletcher his
Licia, or Poems of Love, in honour of his lady ;
and Lodge his Pfiilli.s, which is perhaps the
most charming of the minor sonnet-books of
the period. Though a diligent imitator of the
F'rench, Lodge has the dexterity to give his
complaints an air of tlie most direct and artless
simplicity. Better than the sonnets them-
selves, however, are the j)astoral lyrics which
are scattered among them. Drayton's Idea's
Mirrour came next in 1594, and within a twelve-
montli followed the Ca'lia of AVilliam Percy,
the Zepheria of some anonymous author. Chap-
man's Coronet, the Alalia of J. C, Forhj Love
Sonnets by E. C, and, finally, the eighty-eight
Amoreiti of Spenser. Certain Amoretti were
addressed, though not by name, to the Eliza-
beth Boyle who, in 1594, became Spenser's wife ;
but many of tiiem are either purely ideal or not
poems of love at all. A few are wholly ex|)i-es-
sive of religious aspiration, while the larger
proportion are of the conventional type. He
ripresents his lady as a l)eautiful Ijut carnivorous
creature. In one sonnet she is a lion, in another

ELIZvVRETIIAN SONG-BOOKS

a tiger, in a third a panther. Her cruelty is a
constantly recurring theme. She is an angler
who .smiles on her dying victims so sweetly that
they enjoy dying ; a cruel dolphin who will
not come to Arion ; a new Pandora, her beauty
is but a bait ; she binds men in the golden net
of her hair ; again and again the poet begs her
piteously not to slay him outright.

Sonneteerinii was a fashion the force of which
was soon spent, but the publication of light
lyrical verse, generally in song form, but in an
immense variety of measures, continued in great
vigour throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean
periods. Next to Elizabethan drama, Eliza-
bethan song is perhaps the most characteristic
feature of the age. It is also the most inde-
pendent, for in lyrical measures English poets
forgot their classical and Italian schoolmasters
and were natural and spontaneous, or if schooled
at all were schooled by the native English
musicians. The early lyrists are frequently
hampered by archaic idiom, clumsy convention,
and outworn prosody; but in 1580 or there-
abouts a change comes rapidly. Gaiety, ex-
pansiveness, fanciful ease, richness, and music
take the ear and dispel the cloudy and didactic
commonplace of lingering mediajvalism.

This lyrical impulse seeks expression in a
great variety of poetical forms. Elizabethan
poets comparatively rarely published volumes
containing lyric poems only. Such poems were
frequently published in volumes containing
poems of a different order, as in Drayton's
Poems, Lyric and Pastoral. Lyric verse is also
found scattered through the romances of Greene,
Lodge, and others, in the plays of Shakespeare,
Fletcher, Webster, Dekker, and Jonson, and in
the sonnet-books. But the principal store-houses
of purely lyrical verse published at this epoch

are the miscellanies and the .song-books. A
rapid succession of such miscellanies is significant
of the popular taste. Tlie earlier anthologies
of Tottel, Edwards, and I'l-octor ' were thus fol-
lowed in L584 by Clement Robinson's //rtTw^t/?.//
of Pleasant Dclitcs. In 1.588 and 1592 ap-
peared fresh delights and conceits under the
names of Munday and Breton. In 1593 wa.s
published The Phwiiix Nest, in 1599 The Pas-
sionate Pilgrim, and in 1000 no less than three
separate anthologies of extremely varying but
very high average merit : the famous and finely
eAMed England' sHelicon,i\\Q mediocre England's
Parnaasus, and an inferior scrap-book of " poet-
ical petals" entitled Belvedere, or The Garden
of the Muses. Finally, in 1602 was published
Francis Davison's Poetical Rhapsody.

Still more significant in popular taste are the
song-books — slim quartos orfolios in which words
and music are printed together — a very large
number of which were issued.^ The most im-
portant of these were the song-books of William
Byrd, John Dowland, Thomas Morley (of " It
was a lover and his lass " fame), and Thomas
Campion. As a general rule (though not in
Campion's case), the composers were responsible
only for the music in the books issued in their
names. Much excellent verse and some ex-
quisite specimens of pure song-writing vrere
hidden away among the " ayres," motets, mad-
rigals, and accompaniments of these and other
song-books until they were brought to light
mainly owing to the researches of Mr. A. H.
Bullen.

Elizabethan music was music perfectly fitted to
song, slight and melodic, full of local colour and
suggestiveness, admirably adapted in every way
to the flexible lyric poetry which was often not
far removed from folk-song. The songs which

' See pp. 48-9.

' Davey gives a list of about ninety collections of Madrigals, Ayres, Canzonets and Ballets, actnally
published between 1587 and 1630, in addition to vast quantities of vocal music of this time iu MS. {Uistory
of Knglish Music, 171-4). It is important to distinguish between the quality of the madrigals and that of the
"ayres." The former consisted of a few jingling rhymes set to elaborate music. The " ayres " are stanzaic,
and the words are all important to the composition, for the accompaniment is quite independent, and the tune
ordinarily is simple and slow, so that not a word would be missed. As to the universal prevalence of music
(1570—10.30) the reader is referred to Cliappell's Popular Mnxic of the Olden Time. Servants and apprentices in
those days advertised their musical abilities. Tinkers sang catches, milkmaids trolled ballads, carters whistled ;
each trade, and even the beggars, had their special songs ; the viol hung in tlie guest-chamber for the
amusement of casual visitors ; our musical " execution " was the envy of all Europe ; lute, cittern, and virginalls
for the diversion of waiting customers were in every barber's shop. They had music at dinner, music at supper,
music at weddings, music at funerals, music at dawn, music at night. Musicians were constantly introduced
upon the stage. Sometimes the dramatist wrote a song for them ; more often than not, they provided their
own. The original identity of poet and musician )iad by no means disappeared when Elizabeth reigned. Much
later, courtly poets and gentlemen of the Royal Music or t'liapel Royal continued to be drawn from the
same families.

NICHOLAS BRETON

were written to this music are marked by lack
of intensity and passion, by brilliant fancy and
unfailing vivacity ; they are not overweighted
■with meaning, neither at their best are they
overcharged with convention or with ornament.
One of their essential qualities is their objective
idealism, their impersonal character. The poet
loves love, " sweet desire," but no single woman ;
he does not write from his own, but from
common experience. He commonly masquerades
as a shepherd, and in this capacity invites some
dainty nymph to come maying with him or to
play at barley-break. In a more serious mood
he complains of the coldness of his mistress and
her couipassionless beauty, or dwells upon the
superior happiness of shepherds as compared
with courtiers. Many of the flakes from this
wonderfully rich bed of Elizabethan song have
such a light and holiday air about them that it
is impossible to characterise or to classify them.
They are as spontaneous and as irresponsible as
nursery rhymes, the carols of choiring birds,
or the tuneful rispctti of the Tuscan peasants.
They sparkle, they sing of themselves, often
to their own dance-music : spirit and substance,
" music and sweet poetry agree " rarely — the
enchantment, however, is not in the thought
but in the tone.

Some of the deftest lyrics are often to be
found embedded in plays the general character
of which was anything but light or enticing,
as, for example, in some of the dramas of Lyly,
Dekker, Nash, Munday, and Jonson. Of the
Elizabethan poets whose work as poets was
primarily lyrical, the most characteristic are
Greene, Lodge, Breton, Barnfield, and Campion.

Several of tiie lyrics in plays by Lyly ' reach
the highest point of daintiness and refinement.
Tiiere is a haunting cadence al)out tlie few of
Peele's songs that remain to us, such as the
beautiful song of Paris and ffinone:

Fair and fair, and twice so fair
As fair as any may be.

And c(|ually memorable witli this, perhaps, is
the quaint and inspiriting

Spring, tlie sweet Sprinjr, is tlie year's pleasant V.u\^

of 'I'homas Nash. Greene is even more jjrettily
fanta.stic in such poems as "Sitting by a Rivers
.side " ; " Walking in a valley greene " ; " Infida's

Song " ; " Weep not, my wanton ; smile upon
my knee " ; or, the Shepherd's Wife's song :

All, what is love.^ It is a pretty thing.

His verses, like his plays, are a rich medley of
classical allusions and folk-melodies, far-fetched
measures and slipshod versifying, deliberate
affectation and indefinite charm. But, with all
his April variety, as a lyrist he still falls short
of the prismatic wantonness of Thomas Lodge.
Lodge was a poet of a rare and delicate talent,,
wholly lacking in seriousness or passion, but a
more deliberate artist than Greene. He trans-
plants freely from the French, more often than
not greatly improving on his originals, and
he has the verbal dexterity and daintiness of
Konsard without his seriousness. The well-
known madrigal of RosaUtid, in which love
appears as a kind of tickling, is perfect in its
absolute harmony between form and content.

As fresh as Nash and as facile as Lodge,
Breton approaches the latter in the careless-
vivacity with which he appears to prattle in
verse. He scribbles incontinently, plays with
words, defies grammar and logic, worries conceits
to death, is always buoyant and artistic, and'
wonderfully seldom dull, considering how little
he has to say. Read his honey-flowing seven-
syllabled trochaics scattered about The Pas-
sionate Shepherd of 1604. They set the fashion
to other heptasyllabic poets such as W^ither
before Carew and Waller made the fortune of
octosyllabics. Breton captivates partly by his-
freshness and gaiety, partly by the genuine
pleasure that he felt and conveyed in country
hedges and blossoms. The ingenuity with
which he rings the changes upon a few key-
words in his composition is perfectly amazing.
But preferable to these jugglings is a rippling-
movement such as the ibllowing, and in this
kind he excels :

In the merry month of May,
On a morn by break of day,
Forth I wallied by tlie woodside,
AV'hen as May was in his pride :
'ITiere I spied, all alone,
I'liyllida and Corydon :
Much ado there was, (Jod wot !
He would love and she would not.

A very similar note is struck in the pretty-
verses beginning " As it fell upon a day" by

' Whether lie wrote them or not, let I'rof. Feuillerat, the great e.vpert on Lyly, to whom we are indebtedi
for several hints in this chapter, eventually decide ; Mr. Greg thinks they may have been by Dekker.

THOMAS CAMPION

Richard Barnfield, a Staffordshire and Inns of
Court gentleman who dedicated his Affectionate
Shepherd {i.e. Dapfinis si<rliiiig for the " love"
of Ganymede) to Sidney's Lady \\\Ai in 1594
and died at Shakespeare's age in 1627.

Barnfield's manner and his cloying sweetness
were influenced apparently by Peele and by
Shakespeare's narrative poems ; two of his
lyrical fragments were included as by Shake-
speare, along witli Marlowe's "Come live with
me" and other popular strains, in Jaggard's
miscellany. The Pas.nonate Pilgiim, which was
brought out in 1599.

As that Elizabethan nightingale's re-dis-
coverer and editor, Mr. Bullen, remarks : " There
are no sweeter lyrics in English poetry than
are to be found in Campion's song-books."
In the distinctive charm of his lyric, Campion '
would seem almost to blend the grace and
tenderness of Greene with Lyly's wealth of
mythological illustration and the artless sim-
plicity (which is often the highest art) of Lodge :
in proof of which it might almost suffice to
cite such numbers, no longer unfamiliar, as
"Come, ye pretty false-eyed wanton," "O never
to be moved, O beauty uni-elenting," and " Shall
I come, sweet love, to thee, when the evening
beams are set." But Campion was also much
more intellectual than the typical lyrists of his
time. There is a sardonic note, a premonition of
Donne, one might almost say of Heine, in stanzas
such as " A secret love or two I must confess."

As a supplement to these miscellaneous
IjTics may be mentioned the courtly verses of

a number of occasional amateurs in metre.
Most of them are strictly occasional verses,
inasnmch as their celebrity in nearly every case
owes somethinj' to the circumstance either of

the singer or the song. Such poems were
Sir Walter Raleigh's reply to Marlowe's " Come
live with me," his poem called The Lie, " Go,
soul, the body's guest," his famous verse " Fain
would I climb, yet fear I to fall," or his couj)let
on the snuff of a candle the night before he died.
E(iually famous, incomparably more poetical,
are Browne's epigram, or ej)itaph, on the
Countess of Pembroke :

Underneath tliis sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother . . . ;

and the romantic lines of the accomplished Sir
Henry Wotton on his mistress, the Queen of
Bohemia, " You meaner beauties of the night."
Contrast is found in the still noted verses of
Bacon, " The world's a bubble, and the life of
man less than a span," which are hardly poetical
at all, and are less essays in metre than metrical
essays. Somewhat akin to these in clumsiness
are the effusions of Thomas Lord Vaux on the
contented mind and the instability of youth.
There is more pith in the fancies of Edward
Vere, Earl of Oxford, and more still in the
early but well-tuned and idly imitated " My
mind to me a kingdom is " of Sir Edward Dyer.
Fulke Greville, the ill-fated Earl of Essex, and
Sir John Harrington, or Harington, the enfant
terrible of palace circles, helped to make up the
tale of these courtly poets."

' Of Thomas Campion hardly anything is known save one or two friendships (Dowland and Nashe), and
enmities (Barnes and Breton). His Latin Pocniala appeared in 159.5, but it is for his Air.-< of 1601 and 1613 that
we cherish his memory. He was an excellent scholar, a writer on music, and a " Doctor of Physicke."
Carried off, it would seem, by the plague on March 1st, 1020, he was buried in St. Uunstan's ; hence a pleasing
refereiice by Edmund Gosse to A. H. Bullen's efforts as rehabilitator of the poet-musician —

' Bullen, well done !

^Vhere Campion lies in London-land,
IjuUed by the thunders of the Strand,
Screened from the sun.

Surely there must

Now pass some pleasant gleam
Across his music-haunted dream.

Whose brain and lute are dust."

' On that incomparable Eros of literature, t!ie Elizabethan Song, putting aside the earlier books of Ritson,
Bellamy (the glee collector), Chappell and Rimhault, the interest of which is peculiar to the antiquary, the
explorer should have recourse to the Miixa Mwlr'ninlexai (18-S7) of Thomas Oliphant, and to Bullen's unrivalled
series*: Lyrics and Moi'e Lyricn from Elizaliethan Song-Books and Lyric's from Klizahetluin Rotnances ; his
editions of England's Helicon, Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, and Thomas Campion, and his Love Poems from Hong-
Books of the Seventeenth Century. He may also consult with profit Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics * and
Carpenter's English Lyrics. For a magisterial exposition on English sonneteering, especially in regard to its
close dependence upon French and Italian models, see Elizabethan Sonnets,* ed. Sidney Lee (2 toIs. iu An
English Gamer).

CHAPTER van
WILLI A 31 SHAKESPEARE

" Triumphj my Britain, tliou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe." — Ben Jonson.
"Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame." — Milton.

'' But Shakespeare's magic could not copy'd be.
Within that circle none durst walk but he." — Drvden.

"Our myriad-minded Shakespeare." — Coleridge.

"Shakespeare's mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see." — Euehson.

Life at Stratford — The player — Early poems — First-fruits — T\\e flowering period— Shakespeare and Scott-
Humlet and the great tragedies — Later years — Bibliograpliical summaries.

IF the name of Shakespeare had come up
before a lord-Heutenaiit or a "enealouist
during the first thirty years of EHzabeth's
reign, it would have been readily identified as
that of a large family of small farmers in the
midland counties. During the last fifteen
years of the same reign the name (which finds
its equivalent in the well-known Italian sur-
name, Crollalanza) was to acquire a celebrity
which has given it a unique and almost sacro-
sanct significance from that day to this. As in
the case of so many great men, the place and
time of Shakespeare's nativity have been the
subjects of much animated discussion, the
echoes of which have by no means died away,
even at the present day. It is generally
believed, however, that Shakespeare was born
in a roomy cottage neighbouring the site of what
is now known a-s "Shakespeare's Birthplace," in
Henley Street, Stratford-on-Avon,' during the
second half of April, l.'5G4. His christening is
thus entered in Chiux-h Latin in the bajjtismal
register of the parish church of the Holy
Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon : " 1564, April 2Cth,
Guliclmus filius Johannes Shakspere." Of

Shakespeare's father, the said Johannes or John
Shakespeare, we strive in vain to get a clear
idea, based upon such facts as that he was a
chief alderman of his native Stratford, that he
married a rich wife, Mary Arden, daughter of
Robert Arden of Wilinecote or Wilmcote, and
begot a large family, that he apparently had
heavy losses, was continually engaged in law-
suits, but continued " merry-cheek'd," and, like
Mr. Wilkins Micawber, was invincibly hopeful
that something would turn up. John Shake-
speare bought the Henley Street property in
1556 and brought his wife home there in the
following year. Ten years later he was head
bailiff of the town and welcomed the Queen's
and other companies of players to Stratford.
In 1575 he bought the house familiar to-day as
tlie "Birthplace"; but from 1577 the fortunes
of the once prosperous glover began to decline.
Every long holiday that the eldest son spent
at home from the Free Grammar School we
can imagine him noticing that the family
resources were steadily diminishing, while every
year his fatiier had in pro.spect some new law-
suit or some new business scheme whereby the

' A small town of then about 1,300 inhabitants, clustered roinid the ford at wliich the ancient Roman
street from I.«ndiiiium to Uriconiuin crossed the W'arwickahiro Avon, thou'.rli from about 1490 the road was
carried over the river by a noble stone bridge (still standing), called after its Imildcr, Sir Hugh C^Iopton.
Legend says that tljc I)ard was liorii on the same day of the nionlli that he died. \\'e may safely drink
to his memory on any d.iy from the 20th to the lifltli.

The Chandos Shakespeare,

EARLY LIFE

finances of the Shakespeares were infallibly to
be restored.

After a few years' subjection to the good
pedagogue Walter Roche, Shakespeaie had to
leave his Latin book and the (juaint gabled
schoolroom with its rough desks and wooden
beams, which still forms a most genuine attrac-
tion to all Stratford pilgrims — he had to (juit
these altogether, and rally to the help of his
father in the humble trade to which all his
great projects had reduced hiin, that of a
common butcher.

John Aubrey, the first of our anti(]uaries
who thought it worth while to record anecdotes
about Shakespeare, when collecting materials
(the product of a journey made to Stratford
about 1662) for Anthony a Wood, wrote
of the poet at this time : " His father was
a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by
some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy
he exercised his father's trade, but when he
kiird a calf he would doe it in high style, and
make a speech. There was at that time another
butcher's son in this towne that was held not
at all inferior to him for naturall witt, his
acquaintance and coetanean, but dyed young."
These days in the slaughter-house must evi-
dently have been to Shakespeai-e what those in
the blacking factory were to Dickens. They
begot in him an unconquerable determination
to rise to a position of well-to-do respectability
in the world.

A mile or two from Stratford is a hamlet
named Shottery, accessible by a short walk
through pleasant fields from the little town.
Here, in a cottage of thatch, brick, and rubble
which is stiU standing, lived Richard Hathaway,
husbandman, and his daughter Anne. Shake-
speare as a lad of eighteen must apparently
have fallen in love with the maiden of twenty-
five or six. According to an entry in the
register of the Bishop of Worcester (Whitgift),
a licence was granted on November 27th, 1582,
for a marriage between William Shaxpere and
Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. On the
following day (November 28th) a bond was
entered into, in which two husbandmen of
Stratford guaranteed the bishop against liability

for any objection that might be made against
J)im (such as pre-contract or consanguinity) for
allowing the contemplated marriage between
William Shagspcrc and Anne Hathwey of
Stratford-upon-Avon: provided, moreover, that
Anne obtained the consent of her friends, the
marriage was to be allowed to proceed with but
once asking of the banns instead of the usual
thrice.' Although at first sight the discrepancy
in details appears to justify the opinion that
different transactions are referred lo, there are
good reasons for the belief that both of the
records relate to the licence for the poet's
marriage, and that the entry in the bishop's
register is incorrect, all the available evidence
being in favour of the greater accuracy of the
bond. The presumption is that the ceremony
of marriage was precipitated ; the view, how-
ever, that anything discreditable to Shakespeare
or his wife is implied by the application for
a licence is not sustained either by the docu-
mentary evidence or by a consideration of the
known facts relating to the marriage. The
urgency may have been dictated by a prospect
of legal advantage, or by the poet's impending
departure from Stratford. Aubrey " guessed "
that he went to London " about eighteen "
(1582). On the other hand legend hints that
during the next three years or so Shakespeare
endeavoured to gain his living as a lawyer's
clerk and as a village schoolmaster. Aubrey, in
his short account, expressly says " he under-
stood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his
younger days a schoolmaster in the country."
Whatever Shakespeare's chief means of subsist-
ence may have been at the time — and there
are reasons for supposing that he may have
endeavoured to play more than one part —
everything points to the fact that his chief
relaxation was to be found in those sports of
the country-side to which his country training
and connections would naturally predispose
him. Most notable, indeed, throughout
Shakespeare's writings are the sponfcuieous and
almost unconscious allusions to the minuter
details of field sport. A poaching adventure
is plausibly alleged to have been the immediate
cause of his abandonment of Stratford. " He

■ For obscure questions raised by Shakespeare's marriage, see C. I. Elton, William Shakespeare : lii.s Family
and Friends ; and Joseph A\'illiam Gray, Shakespeare's Marriage, 1905. The baptisms of liig children are thus
recorded in the Stratford registers: "1583. h. May 20, Susanna, daughter to William Shakspere." ''1.^85.
6. February 2, Hamuet and Jiideth, sonne and daughter to William Shakspere." Hamnet, who died in
August, 1596, was named after a neighbour, Hamnet Sadler, who was on March 25thj 1616^ one of the
signatories of Shakespeare's will.

SHAKESPEARE THE PLAYER

had," wrote his first Ijiographer, Nicholas Rowe,
in 1709, "by a misfortune common enough to
young fellows, fallen into ill company, and,
among them, some that made a frequent practice
of deer-stalking, engaged him with them more
than once in robbing a park that belonged to
Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, near Stratford.
For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman,
as he thought, somewhat too severely ; and, in
order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a
ballad upon him, and though this, probably
the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is
said to have been so very bitter that it
redoubled the prosecution against him to that
desree that he was obliged to leave his business
and family in Warwickshire and shelter him-
self in London.'" Whether it lie true or no, as
a local parson, Richard Davies, who died in
1708, used to relate, that Lucy had Shake-
speare whipped for his depredations, it is certain
that Sir Thomas Lucy spoke in Parliament
during 1585 on behalf of more stringent game
laws, and that Shakespeare had a clear pas-
sado at Sir Thomas in 1600 when he made
Justice Shallow boast of the dozen white lux-cs
in his coat in proof of his ancient lineage. It
is an old coat, comments Sir Hugh Evans, " the
dozen white louses do become an old coat well."
Soon afterwards Falstaft" comes in, and Shallow
taunts him with the very crimes which we know
that the game-preserving old seigneur so keenly
resented in " young Stratford."

" Knight, you have beaten my men, killed
niv deer, and have broken open my lodge," and
he forthwith threatens to make a Privy Council
matter of it. This was Sir Thomas I>ucy all
over, as Stratford archives attest.

Shakespeare must surely in July, 1575, have
seen the revels at Kenilworth during the pro-
gress thither, when he was yet a boy, of the
spectacle-loving Gloriana ; and besides, he
would be likely to have seen the old-fashioned
miracle plays at Coventry, in addition to the
repertoire of roving companies nearer home
in guild-hall or market-square, by consent of
the corporation of his native town. In 1587
no fewer than five companies of actors visited

Stratford. That his young aspirations should
have been stirred by contact with a force
so novel, so untried, yet so potent as the
new drama obviously was, is not at all to be
wondered at. It was a rare moment for art in
England. The culture of the Renaissance was
just blossoming here — in music, in poetic
rhapsody, in lyrical effusions, in the rii'h
embroidery of vernacular prose — under the
protection of the short-lived Tudor despotism.

^Vliether Shakespeare joined a travelling
company at Stratford, or trudged his wav
independently to London in 1586 to claim
the hand of fellowship, it may be, from a
fellow Stratfordian, Richard Field, a prosperous
stationer of Blackfriars, can only be matter for
conjecture ; what is pretty certain is that he
very soon gravitated to the theatre. Of the
two chief companies in being at that time, the
Queen's and the Earl of Leicester's, he became
attached to the last-mentioned, and, if it were
not already the best, he speedily made it
so. Its headquarters wei'e the Theater play-
house, situated without the City, among fields
in Shoreditch, but it moved several times' ere
it settled, in 1599, at the Globe, on Bankside,
Southwark, while its patronage passed from
Leicester to Strange, and from Strange to
Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain ; hence it became
known from 1594 as the Lord Chamberlain's
company.' All the companies went on tour
during the summer.

In however menial a capacity Shakespeare
may first have assisted the theatrical company
into which he was first admitted, it can hardly
have been long before the intelligent members
of it (among them Dick Burbagc, Ileminge,
and Condell) discovered that they had to do
with a youth of extraordinary promise. As
Napoleon made suggestions at Toulon when he
was merely a lieutenant, so Shakespeare may
early have made suggestions the \alue of which
instantaneously struck his superiors. That he
would soon absorb all the romances and plays
within his reach, and would most rapidly learn
all that could be learned of the working of the
theatre, may be regarded as certain. That a

' To the Curtain in Moorfields (heiioe Curtain Road), lo tlio Rose on Hankside, and to Nowinfjton Butts.
The patronage of the companies was traditional, the nominal patrons contributing little more than their names.
In 1010-11 .Shakespeare played occasionally at his conipaMy's second house, the Ulackfriars, wliere Thi'
Timex now st^mds. Shakespeare suH'ered loss, and the iMSS. of his plays were probably destroyed in the tiie
at the (ilohe, which broke out wtien //iiiri/ V III. was beinir performed in .June, 1(>1;!.

' .\ftcr James I.'s .accession in May, ](!().'!, they were promoted to be the King's Players, and acfjuirod tlie
rank of Grooms of the lloyal Chamber.

FIRST-FRUITS

!)5

hackneyed forms of classical iinajfcry. With
hoth these practices Shakespeare found it ex-
ceedingly convenient to comply. Judging by
the evidence of his own writings and the state-
ment of Aubrey, he had been well grounded in
Ovid, and had the old Scntcittiir; Ptterilcs and
Colhrjuia, and not a little; of Mantuanus and
Virgil besides, at his fingers' ends. In addition
to which, the author of I'/ie Comcclij of Errors
may well have construed a play or two each
by I'lautus and Terence. Shakespeare had a
sounder classical discipline than Moliere, and
a Jviiiori than Cervantes or the author of the
Ode to a Grecian Urn (who got nearly all his
" classics " from Lempriere) ; yet his " little
Latin" must always be a stumbling-block to
the pedants who, by a law of their being, insist
that no one can be expected to write good
English unless he can compose bad Latin !

Such then were the influences and the aspira-
tions under the sway of which Shakespeare
about 1590 put forth the first-fruits of his
drama in sprightly comedies, such as Love's
Labou/s Lost and The Tico Gentlemen of
Verona,^ intermingled with the mirthful farce
of The Comedy of Errors. In reality and
charm they are far in advance already of the
toylike frigidity of Lyly ; full of rhyming and
bickering and phrase-capping and rather vapid
classical affectation (and other infallible signs
of very early work) as they are, we can still
detect in them the grace, the wit, and the fun
which are to become so pre-eminent in Shake-
spearean comedy — all these are present, but
present in embryo. These three plays mark
Shakespeare's play-time. In Richard IIL he
indicates already his strong practical tendency ;
he wi'ites a regular ranting play, very Marlow-
esque in character, and moreover a one-part
play of a pattern that must have been dear
indeed to a tragedy lead (such as Burbage, for
instance). Its success on the boards was the
foundation-stone of his fortune. In King Johii
he makes another popular bid by addressing
a play to the hot Protestant prejudice of the
hour. It shows an advance upon Richard IIL
in the art of characterisation ; but it is inferior
as a work of poetic art to Richard II. The
opening speech in Richard III. is a magnificent
overture, but here in Gaunt's dying speech we

' The parts generally ascribed to him include the Ghost in Hamlet, Adam iii As You Like //, several "kingly
parts," a role in Sejanus, and old Knowell in Every Man in his Humor.

' The true spirit of humour enters our drama wlien Launce appears on the stag-e leading his dog with
a string. The same dog was, no doubt, used by Starveling in Midsummer Xight's Dream.

time quickly came when plays would be put
in his hands for suggestion or revision is very
probable. He would soon perceive the char-
actei-istic defects of the plays which possessed
the stage at the moment. The comedy was
too academic (Lyly), the tragedy too full of
rant and extravagance (Marlowe), the melo-
drama too sanguinary (Kyd), and the history
too rude and archaic both in form and diction.
Of his early work as reviser and adapter, we
have examples in Henry VI., into the aridities
of which he infused some life, humour, and
poetry ; Titus Andronicus, a perfect shambles
of a play, over which he breathed a little
country air ; and The Taming cf the Shrew,
an old-fashioned farce of which he greatly
enriched the himiour. But from reviser of
existing dramatic work he must have very
rapidly risen to be author-in-chief of his
company. An actor himself, no one so well as
he could adapt a catching part to an individual
performer. By 1590 the company's belief in
" young Shakespeare " nmst have become a
firm article of faith. He was now twenty-six,
and was already becoming known rather widely,
we can fancy, as a good-looking fellow, of
astonishing quickness and talent, as a delightful
companion of singularly attractive pei'sonality,
and as a safe and resourceful, rather than
as a particularly brilliant actor.^ Shakespeare
had started work as an adapter, and his first
independent work is essentially adaptive and
imibitive. In the course of his revisions he
nmst have got a considerable insight into the
methods of such experienced playwrights as
Greene and Peele, Gascoigne, Nash, Chettle,
Whetstone, and Kyd. But the dramatists for
whom he had a particular admiration were
Lyly and Marlowe. Both of these writers
were in the habit of borrowing their plots or
fables from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (the
Elizabethan substitute for a Classical Dic-
tionary), from hen trovato tales in popular
chapbooks, or from the modern stories, novelle
or historiettes, which had sprung up in Italy
with Boccaccio and Bandello, and had been
imitated and translated into every modern
European tongue. Both, again, were extra-
ordinarily fond of mythological ornament, and
were never tired of introducing somewhat

THE "HONEY-FLOWING VEIN"

get the full symphonic utterance of the new

master :

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Eng-
land,
This niirse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Kear'd by their breed and famous for their birth.

Here too we get the first glimpse of the interest
still taken by England in the strange and
fluctuating history of the old dynastic feuds.
They were to the youth of Shakespeare what
the Jacoljite stories of the Talcs of a Grand-
father were to the boyhood of Scott ; and this
series of plays, together with the novels of
Scott, form the finest background for his his-
torical consciousness that an English boy can
well have. Shakespeare''s princes and states-
men in their speeches seem to give us the very
pith and marrow of history.

Hitherto, excellently though he was writing,
Shakespeare had Avritten notliing that would
place his output much above the work of such
a dramatist as Francis Beaumont. It is true
that he had written two "honey-flowing'" and
highly decorative poems, the Verms and Adonis
and Lucrecc, full of sensuous beauty, showing
that he had felt to the full that religion of
Beauty which all highly impressionable youth
must feel : these he had addressed in flowery
language as the " first heir " of his " invention "
to the young Earl of Southampton,^ the hand-
somest and one of the richest men about the
court, who was his special patron at the play-
house, and the addressee of many of the exquisite
sonnets which he began writing soon after the
publication of the poems in 1593-4. It is true,
too, that he was beginning to be known and
cordially disliked on account of his too rapid

' Richard Field (a fellow-townsman of Shakespeare) was the publisher of Venus and Adonis, which was
licensed April 18th, 1693, and brought out next month at the " White Greyliound in Paules Church-^'ard " :
the dedication was signed " Your Honor's in all dutie, William Shakespeare." It proved enormously popular
and went tlirough seven editions in ten years. (For details of its debt to Ovid, Dolce, Tarch;ignota, and Spen.ser's
Astrophi'l, see Shakespeare's Poems, ed. Lee, 190.^.) The remark of the coxcomb Gullio (a Slender in cap and
gown) in tlie amusing students' play of The Returne from Purnassus (1.599) gives us a notion of how its
syrupy beauties were idolised by university wits. "O sweet Mr. Shakos]ieare ! I'll have his picture in
my study at the court. . . . Let the duncificde age esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I'll worship sueet
Mr. Shalcespeure, and to honour liim will lay his 1V/(W.« imd Adonis under my pillow." In 1594 Kichard
Field printed Lucrece, also dedicated to Southampton, which Shakespeare modelled externally upon Sanuiel
Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond in the rhyme-royal of Chaucer or seven-line stanza, as he had modelled Venus
and Adonis, in six-line stanza, upon the Sei//a's Metamorphosis of 'ITiomas Lodge. Lucrece i)ro\fd nearly as
popular as its predecessor (Sth ed., IGIG) and in 1598 in his Poems in Divers Humours, Kitliard Harntield
specially commended the " honey-flowing vein " of the poet —

"AVhose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste) | Tliy Name in Fame's immortiil Hook liave placed."
' A new record of a royal command to Shakesjiearo and lUirliage to produce a play at court before
James I., in return for an unusually substantial payment, has recently been discovered.

rise. Greene, prematurely worn out with
sedentary toil and incessant scribbling, did his
best to give the young man a fall in his
dying valediction (published by his friend
Henry Chettle in September, 1592) called A
Groatsieorth of Wit bought mth a Million of
Repentance. Beware, he WTote, in eff'ect, to his
fellow-toilers, of this upstart antic, who decks
himself in your plumes, and then jets and
struts as if the whole theatre belonged to him
alone, low-bred Johannes Factotum that he is.
Shakespeare''s rising consideration is shown by
the fact that Greene's publisher, like the good,
careful tradesman that he was, wrote at once
to explain away his client's petulance, and to
put on record without delay that Shakespeare
was in reality the most obliging, the most
favoured for his uprightness by " divers of
worship," and the most admirable of men and
players. He was, at any rate, the most able
and capable of being one of the most foi'-
niidable to a small man like Chettle. We
come across several other contemporary sneers
at Shakespeare's ambition, his snobbery in
applying for a coat-of-arms, and his inordinate
pride in buying the Big House in Stratford.
But to such attacks Shakespeare never waited
to reply or to retaliate ; he was too busy and
too successful. In March, 1594, by a warrant
dated from Whitehall, Kemp, Shakespeare,
Burbage and company were awarded JP21
for " two comedies or enterludes [very pro-
bably The Comedy of Errors and Love''s
Laboti7-\s iMst] shewed before her Majestie
at Christmas." The Comedy of Errors was
given that same Christmas in Gray's Inn
Hall. Henceforth Shakespeare's plays as
given by the Burbage-Shakespeare combina-
tion were frequently commanded at court,^ at

"ROMEO AND JULIET"

the Temple, at functions of ihv nobility, and
elsewhere.

It was, in fact, during the next two years,
1594-6, that Shakespeare l)cgan in a marked
degree to distance all competitors. For he
wrote about this time A Midsummer Nighfs
Dream, Romeo and Juliet, the first draft of
AlTs Well that Ends Well (or Imivs Labours
Won), and The Merchant of Venice. A Mid-
summer Nighfs Dream is a pastoral fairy-
drama of the highest poetic beauty. In the
loveliness of its lyrical music, and in that of
its woodland, floral, hunting, and moonlight
scenes, it has rivals only in 'J'he Merchant, As
You Like It, and The Winter''s Tale. Shake-
speare may not improbably have played Theseus
himself, and given utterance to that noble
sentiment,

For never anj-thing: can be amiss
When simpleuess and duty tender it ;

and we have reason to be thankful that he had
some good voices in the company who could
sing " You spotted snakes," and other such
delightful lyrical fragments. As a whole the
play is unique, and not one of Shakespeare's
dramas is a more perfectly harmonious whole.
It is the first of his plays which, from the first
scene, in which Hermia is given her choice
between marriage with Demetrius and

living a barren sister all her life.
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moou,

to the last, in which the fairies dance at mid-
night in Theseus's palace, is unmistakably a
work of genius.^

Written probably when Shakespeare was
about thirty, or even a little befoi-e, Romeo and
Juliet is less flawless," and less free from the
preciosity of Lyly than the Dream, yet it must
be considered upon the whole as a work of
greater significance and moment. It is, indeed,

one of Shakespeare's most world-wide triumphs,
nay more, it is the typical love tragedy of the
world, for as Tennyson said, "No one has
drawn the true passion of love " as Shakespeare
has done here. Mow many love scenes has it
inspired, from De Mus.set downwards .'^ The
nearest approach to it that we can think of is
the love duet between Richard and I^ucy in
Richard Feverel. You feel at once what Shake-
speare meant you to feel, that the culmination
of the love of these two beautiful, ardent, and
thrilling young human creatures is the object
and climax of all existence. Yet with what
finished art has Shakespeare provided relief for
their simplex passion in the complex worldly
wisdom of the Friar and the Nurse, and the
tianscendental wit of Mercutio ! With what
witchery of magic has he transformed and trans-
figured some of the oldest and most hackneyed
lyrical motives, such as the declaration of love,
the love soliloquy, and the dawn-song ere lovers
part ! This period of Shakespeare's work
seems to us marked as no other by an air of
conscious triumph in his mastery on the part
of the artist, who was, had he known it, at the
very point of the assumption of the primacy
among all our poets. Of this period of fabulous
growth and sunny realisation of power the
most characteristic example, however, is The
Merchant of Venice. To labour a tale of
Arabian extravagance to anything like proba-
bility Shakespeare makes simply no attempt ;
in the style of play which he favoured he clung
most tenaciously to the element of opera and
the agency of miracle ; but he revelled frankly
in his newborn power, and gave his audience of
his best. In Shylock, a man perverted to a
base malignity by a just sense of racial wrong,
he created his first really tragic figure, and he
revealed to us for the first time the inmost soid
of a complex man. Yet see how uncere-

' How beautifully the bewilderments of the night evaporate with the dawn ! TTieseus, the practical
rationalistic man, enters with his dogs and horses : straightway tliese beautiful images and hallucinations fade.
Fairies ! what nonsense ! Dreams bodied forth by the lunatic, the lover and the poet, that is what they are !
Observe that it is the clown Bottom who has neen the fairies, not the wise ITieseus. Tlie ending is practical
and material — wedding, feasting, a riglit glorious evening, wassail and a pantomime. Theseus is right. But
then Shalcespeare prepares an e.\quisite surprise for us. These are fairies after all, for after they have all
parted and said the last word, the fairies enter and dance a ringlet in the empty lialls (music by Mendelssolni).
This play helps us to realise Shakespeare's debt to an England alien and remote from the England of to-day,
to the wellspriugs of our ancient communistic literature, to the faery lore of still older races. Nothing
he wrote is a more wonderful harmony of ancient mythology, English and Celtic folk-lore and Renaissance
culture. For some suggestions here the writer is indebted to a delightful lecture delivered by
Mr. G. K. Chesterton, though he fears that liis recollections are sadly imperfect.

' There are occasional specimens of almost imbecile punning, and lapses here and there into a kind of
taste which is quasi-barbaric.

THE FLOREAL PERIOD

moniously Shylock is shuffled off at the end of
the fourth act, so as not to disturb the ravishing
moonhght melodies which bring this miraculous
and most typical play to a fitting close. This
last act has always seemed to us absolutely
transporting, suggestive in some complicated
and far-oft" way of Watteau and of Persia, of
stately terrace.s and old court costumes, of warm
southern nights, of fountains splashing in the
moonlight, of songs and silvery chimes and
dance melodies, of the twanging of lutes and
the twinkling of feet amidst the delicious per-
fumes of pinewoods in summer. It is hard to
leave Belmont. There is enchantment in the
very name !

How swe«t tlie moonlight sleeps upon this bank !

Shakespeare followed up these early comedies
Ijy that wonderful series of historical dramas, the
two parts of Heniij IV. and Herny V. (1597-9).
Together these plays form an epic, rising at its
close to an apotheosis of English might and
achievement. In variety, interest, and power
they are very far removed from his earlier
efforts in historical drama ; and borrowed
wholesale though the material is from Holins-
hed, they are in reality among the most
original of all his productions. In splendour
of rhetoric, constructive skill, knowledge of life,
characterisation, and creative humour (Falstaff),
these plays show a marked advance upon any-
thing that Shakespeare had yet done.^ And
here we must remark upon a peculiarity in
Shakespeare^s work as a whole, which differ-
entiates it from that of almost all other artists jealousy, the appalling "Tragedy of Sleep" —
in literature — its progressive character. Be- these are some of the themes.^ If we try to
ginning with brilliant experiments and imitative determine the reason for this persistent

' One of his best stage hits was the original prose farce of The Merry Wms ; written hastily (so it is handed
down) in fourteen days in order to exhibit Falstaff in a new light as a frustrate and befooled Don Juan.
'File most lauglial)le and boisterous thing of its kind, it at the same time eclipses the contemporary Every Man
in hix Humor (1.598) as a picture of manners, and illustrates to perfection Sliakespeare's almost miraculous gift
of changing tlie stops. On the complex character of Falstatf, see G. lladford (in Uhiter IHcta, 188,5, p. 200)
and Maurice Morgann, Character of FaLitaff (1777).

' Tlie atmosphere of this Jloreal period (ISUi) — IGOl) is delightfully suggested l>y Stopford Brooke in the
opening sentences of his study of An You lAke It. Sliakesjicare huiglied out tlie title of this gay and graceful
play one day " after reading what he h;id written. ' Take it as you like it, in whatever way it pleases you. Take
its mirth or seriousness, its matter of thought or fancy, its grave or lively characters, its youthful love and
self-conscious melancholy — take anything you like out of it. There is jdonty to please all kinds. It is
written for your pleasure." The solemn professor, the most solid moralist, will not be able to assert that
ShakeKj)eare wrote this play with a moral purpose, or from a special desire to teach mankind. He wrote
it as he liked it, for his own delight. He hoped men would listen to it for their pleasure, and take it just
,is they liked best to take it" (Ten Plays of l^hulccxpeare, 1905).

' A few essential features of the tr.igody of i^hakespeare m.ay be observed. " It is invariably a tragedy
of weaknwis. 'Hiere is no instance in it of the struggle of a strong man against overwhelming circumstances,
or the Blniggle of a good man iigainst overwhelming evil. In no single instance docs the hero's fall result
from his own nobility of character or purpose — it is in every ca.sc the consequence of his own weakness or
follies. Every one of the heroes of Shakespearean tragedy is a weak man. . . . Hamlet, the highest spirit

essays in drama, he reaches the limits of pure
fancv in -A Alidsummcr Nlghfs JJream, scales
the heights of observation of common life and
.sounds the depths of its humour in Henri/ J V. ;
lea\es even this behind, and goes on to produce
the perfect comedv of his florcal period {As You
Like It, Airs \Vell, Muvh Ado, and Tn-eljih
N'lght), in which romance and reality, pris-
matic wit and genial humour, are so consum-
mately blended - ; passes on to unapproached
altitudes in Hamkt, Othello, and Lear; and,
when it is apparentlv impossible that absolute
power should increase, still widens his thought
until, like an arctic midnight, it seems to com-
bine the hues of sunset and of dawn in the
sovereign serenity of The Tempest, pa-s-sionless,
but not less powerful than the greatest of his
tragedies.

Before 1601 the genius of Shakespeare had
but rarely travelled into the regions of the
sublime or the mysterious. From this date
onward, however, especially in the " great
quadrilateral " of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and
Lear, we are simply overwhelmed bv tragical
issues, terrible and profound, interrupted only
by the irony of Troilus and Cressida and the
speculations of Mea.mre for Measure. Great
resolutions (as in Hamlet) the mere plaything
of accident ; valour, in Macbeth, stooping to
crime ; honour and fidelity victims, in Othello,
to bat-like suspicion ; generosity betrayed to
selfishness, great dominion to lust, legitimate
pride to insensate passion, old age the resistless
prey of vultures in human form, revenge,

"HAMLET"

selection of tragic themes during the seven
years that intervene Ix'tween Julius Cw.sar and
Coriohimm (1601-8), we can do little more
than take our choice between a growing sense
of the waning romance of life and of the
omnipresence of evil, the importunity of deeper
problems, a changing mood in the audience no
less than in its author, the activity of younger
I'ivals, the clamour of " star " actors for bigger
parts — last, but not least, the tariff question,
the tidal influence of supply and demand. In
these four plays Shakespeare left the /epliyrs
of light summer comedy for the storm-winds of
tropical passion. They seem compoiuided of
the elements. In Hamlet (1602) we first see
that Shakespearean concentration, fusion, and
balance which are so distinctive of Shakespeare
and of Shakespeare alone. The drama is one
of moods finding expression in passages which,
&o far as the experience of 300 years goes, have
proved the most memorable in all literature.
Othello (1604) is the most artistically coherent
and the most intense of the four ; it is, to our
mind, the greatest of all stage plays, but it
requires Titans as actors. With an lago of a
calibre equal to that of Salvini as Othello, the
play would be almost too terrible to beliold.
Macbeth (1605 ?), fragmentary though it be, is
the most picturesque and imaginative of all
modern dramas. To the actor it has proved
murderously and fatally irresistible, for it is the
least playable of dramas, and essentially, as
Johnson said, a play for the closet. Lear
(1606) is the grandest, the largest, and the
most sublime of all Shakespeare's dramas, and
in its entirety is almost too vast to be fully

comprehended. This is not becjiuse anything
in Lear is obscure, or far-fetched, or unintelli-
gil)le — Shakespeare is never metaphysical or
mystical ; his best things arc three parts truism,
and what makes the mintage Shakespearean is
the perfection of the die from which he strikes
the thoughts of Everyman — but it is by means
of the grouping and collocation of circum-
stances and by the lightning play of Nemesis
that Shakespeare renders I^ar so universally
overwhelming. One feels of it at times almost
as Johnson felt of Burke once, " If I had to
read Lear now, it would kill me."

In none of these plays is there anything
approaching to self-revelation. We can never
feel sure how Shakespeare felt towards any of
his characters. No great writer, if we put
aside Homer, reveals so little of himself in his
writings. In Hamlet, it is true, we get some
trace of his professional views and a slight
gust of one of the storms that troubled his
professional career.^ In Ulysses it is possible
that we get Shakespeare's own conception of
subordination as the axis of human society :

Tlie heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe decree, priority and place. . . .
7^ake but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows !

In Coriolanus, again, taken in connection with
what has gone before, we seem to get just a
hint of Shakespeare's political antipathy —
Demos. A mob to him (like a motor with us)
was a thing inseparable from an evil smell,
a thing most rank and corrupt, both literally
and metaphorically. Shakespeare was, in the

of them all, fails least. He at least in a fashion does his work. Nor is the theme of this trag-edy in any case
a moral struggle against what is called temptation. The themes chosen are not ethical in any distinctive
sense. Love again plays a comparatively small part in Shakespearean tragedy. ..." It would be rash to
draw very positive conclusions from these facts, but they are suggestive. Shakespeare was an idealistic artist,
but he lived in the centre of the actual. Now tlie tragedy of moral struggle, or of heroic failure, or of
love are things comparatively rare, but the tragedy of weakness is — everywhere. But the tragedy of mere
weakness is apt to be sordid. That it is never so in Shakespeare is due to tlie dramatist's characteristic love
of intensity in human character. Shakespeare's tragic heroes, though none of them are heroic, are none of
them mediocre ; all are finely or even splendidly endowed. Every one of them has great qualities, and
most of them are men of conspicuous intellect. See Tlii^ Age of ShakeKppare, vol. ii. pp. 8.5-6.

' Tlie rivalry in "classical" plays between Sliakespeare and his friend Ben Jonson, and the bitter feud
•(in which Jonson was also closely involved) between the adult and boy actors. For an illuminating account
of this, and in regard to tlie amount of self-revelation in tlie Sonnets, see Sidney Lee's Life of SUiikespeare.
Mr. Lee holds that this amount has been unduly exaggerated. It may be that he goes rather too far in
the opposite direction ; but there can be no doubt of the great service he has done in demolishing the
superstructure of fable about the dedication of the Sonnets as issued in 1G09. The book, as was common in
those days, was published without the author's permission by a stationer "in the street," one Thomas
Thorpe; and the "dark" dedication was merely a more or less hackneyed trade compliment which one of
these pushful book-pirates (with a lively anticipation of favours to come in return) was in the habit of
paying to another member of the same confraternity. See Poems of Shakespeare (1905, Oxf. Univ. Press).

100

SHAKESPEARE AND SCOTT

best sense of the word, essentially an aristocrat,
and it is instructive to see how writers of a
democratic humour have shown an instinctive
disHke of him. Bunyan had probably never
heard of him, but Swift and Defoe mistrusted
him ; and Goldsmith, in The Vicar of Wake-
Jield, attributes a taste for " Shakespeare and
the musical glasses " to the sham refinement
of Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Ske£r2:s ;
Bums preferred Douglas to Macbeth ; and
Tolstoi would put Schiller or Ibsen above the
author of Hamlet ; while Cobbett, with his
usual sans gene, speaks of Shakespeare as " a
punster and a smutster " and a " great snob "
for making paladins of the two young peasants
in Cymbeline, owing to the mere fact that
royal blood coursed secretly in their veins.

It remains true that Shakespeare is inscru-
table, — he "ne'er left his bosom's gate ajar";
yet he is not so wholly elusive as Matthew
Arnold would have us believe ; ' nor can the
patient and attentive student by means of
negative and analogical processes fail to discern
at least some traces of the distinctive linea-
ments of his genius. Like not a few of the
greatest creators of world-litei-ature, Cervantes,
Moliere, Scott, Shakespeare was not a self-
conscious artist. His literary work, conceived
as he pursued a round of avocations that would
have quite sufficiently absorbed a more than
ordinary successfnl man of talent, must have
found expression and taken form, without
extraordinary elaboration, but with a perfectly
amazing rapidity. He was evidently no
eccentric ; to the exhaustion incident upon
preliminary labours which has sterilised so
many men of first-rate talent he was obviously
a stranger ; of the seclusion which so many
deem indispensable to perform intellectual
labour he was manifestly oblivious. The inner
necessity that prompted him to such work as
he performed must have been strong — nay,
overpowering. As with Sir Walter Scott or
Napoleon I., the ostensible pretext (even to
himself) for an amount of effort that may well
seem to us superhuman was the alleged
necessity of building up a property, an ancestral
mansion, or an empire — in each case for
phantom heirs to inherit. In each case, in
strict reality, the work must have been its own
stimulus and its achievement the main, truly
substantial, reward. As in the case of Scott,
we have contemporary evidence which seems to

us to point decisively to Shakespeare's except
tional sociability and to the sweetness and
serenity of his temper. Apart from his work,
however, there is no necessity for believing
that Shakespeare was in the ordinary traffic of
human intercourse (any more than Scott) an
exceptionally brilliant man. Fuller's brilliant
word-picture of Ben Jonson as conversationally
a solid high-built Spanish galleon, and Shake-
speare as a trim English man-of-war, taking
advantage of every wind, and sailing round
and round his adversary by sheer quickness of
wit and invention, was, we must remember,
a purely imaginary one printed after the
Restoi-ation. Had Shakespeare really excelled
so greatly in conversation as his great con-
temporary Jonson, or Ben's still more illustrious
namesake the incomparable Doctor of a later
age, we could hardly have failed to have
specific reference to such a talent. Ben
Jonson, for instance, in his Timber (published
1641), in which he so cordially praises his old
rival, as "• honest and of an open nature," a
man to be loved, and his memory honoured
" on this side idolatry," never thinks of com-
paring him as a talker with Lord Bacon, whose
discourse was such that " a hearer could not
cough or look aside fi-om him without loss."
In Shakespeare's case, as in that of so many
typical men of letters, we are prepared to
believe that the facultv of expression was by a
subtle alchemy transmuted and the man himself,
as it were, transfigured by the magic of the pen.
To continue the process of analogy : Shake-
speare, like other men of genius who stand
nearest in relation to his particular stamp,
borrowed materials very freely, but imitated in
the strictest sense very little. Of the distilling
process, and sedulous imitation of artistic effects
as practised by such masters as Milton and
Tennyson, he was altogether imiocent. His art,
we may say in fine, was consistently more of the
subconscious than of the self-conscious order.

Once more, it seems to us, does Siiakespcare
resemble Scott in his master qualities of humour,
reality of observation, and constructive imagi-
nation. Beside his Richards and Henries, as
beside the James I. and Louis XI. of Sir
Walter, how shadowy and faint do most
elaborate historical portraits appear, even those
of a Motley or Macaulay ! 'i'he humorous
figures of his comedy — veritable giants, some
of these — stand ecjually apart : Falstaff,

" Others abide our question. Thou art free." " Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour 'd, self-secure."

o ^

"THIS MANLY BOOK

101

Autolycus, Bottom, Dogberry, Sir Toby, un-
rivalled, perhaps, in any literature, unapproached
in English, save only by Sterne and Dicivens.
The same in even a greater degree a[)plies
to his tragic figures, Antony and Cleopatra,
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Isabella and
Claudio, Othello and lago, f(jr instance. Re-
flect only for a moment on the energy, the brain
power, the passion, the throbbing humanity in
the contrast between these last two chai-acters
alone ; and then the extraordinary and lifelike
vividness with which the crisis of those two
men's lives and those of the group depending
on them are adapted and concentrated into
two brief hours of stage dialogue and the
successive fevers of delight, anxiety, wrath,
dismay, and anguish excited in the mind of
every spectator who possesses a heart and a
brain. AVhere out of Shakespeare can this
overpowering effect upon the imagination of
man be approached ? Macaulay cannot be far
wrong when he says, "This play of love and
jealousy is the master- work of the whole world."
Shakespeare added to all these qualities, as we
have seen, an almost superabundant wit. He
abused the gift sometimes, it cannot be denied.
On the other hand, we must remember that
many of his jests (such a.s those in Much Ado
and Turljth Night), now decidedly obscure,
were momentarily the most exquisite of all, the
most topical, and consequently the most highly
relished at the time. Out of a play, more
than almost every form of literary composition,
virtue inevitably evaporates with the lapse of
time. But for the most part Shakespeare's
wit is still pregnant in the highest sense, and
reminds the reader of Porson's saying, " Wit
is in aeneral the finest sense in the world."
" Wit and Truth (true reasoning) I discovered
to be one and the same."

So completely free is Shakespeare from the
meshes of anything approaching a philosophical
system, that one would hesitate to pronounce
him definitely either an optimist or a pessimist.
For " utter freedom of thought," as Goethe
observed, not infrequently in the direction of
irony and cynicism, it is difficult to surpass
some passages in Troilm and Cressida ; while
speeches in Hamlet and Macbeth are indicative
in the strongest way of a deep-seated weariness
and nausea of the self-complacent optimism of
every-day respectability and worldly success.
A rather gloomy philosophy of life, by no
means wholly free from fatalism, emerges from

su(-h plavs as Mcaaiirc for Meavire, Othello, and
even Romeo and Juliet, in which the most vital
issues are shown to be woven inextricably into
the merest chapter of accidents. Shakespeare
had seen too much of life at first hand to
iirnore or underrate the value of luck. But in
his most typical moods, especially, perhaps, in
his later plays, what amazes us is the centrality
and the serenity of his point of view. Shake-
speare — this one point is clear — had always
been a clean and strenuous worker. The
incentive to be active and to do things had
kept him out of the dark comers which are as
likely eventually to warp the artist as to
dissolve the man. Charles Lamb was fortunate
in his epithet when he wrote of Shakespeare's
plays as " this manly book." Of the sickly,
decadent "cast of thought" which has come
to pervade so much of our literature, there is
absolutely no trace in Shakespeare. Such
modern subjects as ugly disease and painful
mediocrity, the hete humame or the hideous
lusts and morbidities which humanity in all ages
has shrouded — such subjects were wholly foreign
to Shakespeare's psychological palette. Enor-
mously liberal as he was in almost every way,
he yet had a thoroughly healthy dislike of the
abnormal. The lusn^ naturcE had not superla-
tive attraction for him ; his choice of theme
was reserved for strong, potent, and energetic
types of the hmnan species.

Nor has he much tolerance in practical
things for the blurring of the line of demar-
cation between good and evil : they appeared
to him in a well enough defined contrast, and
the absolute triumph of evil or wickedness
must clearly have appeared to him something
in the nature of the abnormal. He faces such
problems squarely, for there is in him none of
that pre-occupation with and insistence upon
the beauty of nature upon which modern poets
harp. " What he loves as an artist is power^
intensity — in human character. It may be
power of intellect or moral power, or power
of passion or of grace, or the intensity of the
exquisite as in Ariel, or power of love as in
Imogen, or power of wit as in Benedick, or in-
tensity of stupidity as in Sir Andrew Aguecheek,
whose silliness approaches the sublime ; but it
is always the intense, the perfect in some
kind, that he dwells upon and makes central.
Splendid and puissant personalities are the
primary material of his tragedies, giants of
wit or silliness of his comedy. If we put

102 "APPLAUSE! DELIGHT! WONDER OF OUR STAGE

aside the morbid, there is only one form of
tlie extreme in human character which he
practically never makes use of, and that is
the extremely brutal. The merely bestial he
disregards entirely. Yet his characters, splendid
or extreme as they are, are never extravagant
or abnormal in their nature ; they are rather
perfected tvpes of the normal. We may fairly
say that Shakespeare sought for the highest
expressions of the normal in humanity. But of
mere mediocrities Shakespeare makes but little
use. He relegates them to the background,
and uses them as foils and explanatory notes.
Mediocrity may be complex ; but Shakespeare
has not the modern love of the complex as
such, though he masters it when he pleases.
He prefers a complexity that is not common-
place, like that of Hamlet. Mediocrity may
be tragic or pathetic ; but Shakespeare prefers
the pathos of Imogen and the tragedy of Lear.
The man who is dull, but not dull enough to
be altogether laughable, the man whose summed
virtues make up respectability, whose actions
are reducible to fear, who can neither dare nor
enjoy freely, is not a subject of Shakespeare's
art. He is included and passed over.^'' ^ The
test of his writing is that it braces us for effort,
enlarges our thoughts towards charity, and
ennobles our feelings. Em-ichers of the fancy,
Charles Lamb calls these plays, " strengtheners
of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and
mercenary thoughts and actions, to teach
courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity : for
of examples teaching these virtues his pages
are full." No one is debased or depressed by
Shakespeare, for there is nothing base or
cowardly in him. His are the darkness and
terror of crag and precipice, and his, too, the
exhilaration of the summits.

Coriokimis was one of three plays in which
Shakespeare used Plutarch as a prop as he
had previously used Holinshed, probably with
the intention of saving himself trouble, and

merely dramatising historical narratives. But
in every case (especially that of Antmiy and
Cleopatra,^ which combines the highest ([uali-
ties of history and tragedy with an alacrity
in careless construction that is truly Shake-
spearean) he was caught in the web of hi.s
own imagination, and irresistibly impelled in
view of the climax to put forth the full
strength that was in him. After Coriolanu.s,
Shakespeare''s pre-occupation with the gravest
issues ends, and he creates for us a new type
of play — the "romance" (Cyynbcline, Winter's
Tale, Tempest, 1610-12), in the direction of
which it is possible that his mind may have
been turned by the immense success of Beau-
mont and Fletcher's Phi/aster. Finally, on the
eve of his retirement in 1612-13, he wrote
some scenes for a pageant play of Henri/ VIII.,
and a few shreds ^ to be woven into the texture
of The Two Noble Khumen, by John Fletcher
(who was now thirty-four to his forty-nine),
the rising hope and crown prince, as it were,
both of the "company" and the play-going
circle of wliich Will Shakespeare had so long
been the undisputed roi-solcil. Stratford and
rest at last ! He had realised the most normal
ambition of the strong man — returning to the
home of his youth with the fortune that he
had made in the centre of competition. His
balance was drawii. He had written " settled "
at the foot of the account, and we know what
his old player-comrades thought of him : " Our
Shakespeare," " so worthy a friend and fellow,'"

Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare !

" Of Shakespeare, our conntryman^'' wrote his
rival Ben Jonson, with honest pride,

I loved the man, and do honour his memory. . . .
Soule of the Age

'I'he applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stiige.

All the time that he was pi-oducing his early
mastei-pieces, by which in his capacity as author
he is estimated to have earned some .if20 a

' Age. of Shnkrspeare, vol. ii. pp. 127-8.

* Anion// (ind C/ro/tatra is perhaps only not the greatest of all Shakespeare's tragedies hecausc the tlieme
is smaller and ha.s les.s reach tlian the tlicmes of lliituli'l or Ac«r, and hecause it is i)erliaps e.xceptionally
lacking in concentration and unity. In Periclen and Timon of near this same date (1607-!)) we are surprised
a little to find Shakespeare recurring to his earlier manner of somewhat hreathle.ss and haphazard collaboration.

' Including, we are fain to believe, the opening song, " Roses, their sharp spines lieing gone," which
seems not unworthy of a place in the exquLsite nosegay of Shakespeare songs, embracing as this does : —

" O mistress mine, where are you roaming } "
" Fear no more the heat of the sun,"
" Where the bee sucks,"
" Sigh no more, ladies,"

" Blow, blow, tliou winter wind,"

" 'lake, ( ) take those lips away,"

" Full fathom five," and

" liark, hark, tlie lark at heavi^ii's gate sings.'

T.ATER YEARS

103

year,' Shakespeare in liis rapacity of actor was
cfFectively hoarding money.

In 1.597 lie bought for i'fiO tlic larj^e.st house
in Stratford, known us New Place, "a pratty
house of hricke and tynihre,'' huilt foi- Sir
Hugh Clojjton in 1496. The lack of repair
accounted for the low price. The house was
occupied by Queen Henrietta Maria and her
suite for three weeks during KHfJ ; but the
foundations of the mansion are unhappily all
that at present remain. Henceforth we have
plentiful details of the dramatist's investments
in land at Stratford, of his purchase of the local
tithes, of his lawsuits with debtors and others,"
and of his good fortiuie in securing two pro-
prietary shares in the Globe Theatre (worth
efSOO a year each). As Bagehot remarked,
" The reverential character of Englishmen has
carefully preserved what they thought the
great excellence of their poet, that he made
a fortune." In 1615 " Willi. Shakespeare,
gentleman,'''' is registered in Stow's Amiales as
one of the most excellent of present poets.
The poet's only son, Hanmet, was buried at
Stratford in 1596. The theory that Shake-
speare was long separated from his family is
gratuitous, but it is reasonable to believe that
from this date onwards new ties arose to knit
him to Stratford,^ and after his retirement he
settled there, having disposed of his theatre
shares, and sunk nearly all his capital in house
property and real estate in his native town.
He was keenly interested in the domestic affairs
of his two daughters ; the eldest, Susanna (his
heiress), had married in 1607 John Hall, a
rising physician, of Puritan leanings, by whom
she had, in 1608, a daughter, Elizabeth, the
poefs only grandchild that lived to maturity.^
The younger daughter, Judith, married in
February, 1616, a Stratford vintner named
Thomas Quiney, and Shakespeare is said to

have made merry at her wedding ; she survived
the Restoration, dying at Stratford February
9th, 1662. llie increasing Puritfui atmosphere
of the place must have been rather oppressive to
the poet. Ky 1622 the Stratford town council
were so scjuare-toed that they actually bribed the
King's Players (Shakespeare's old company) to
leave the place without giving a performance !

The precise manner of the poet's death is
uncertain. His will, still preserved in the
Prerogative Office, London, is dated March
25th, 1616. His handwriting — never at all
good, if we may judge from the five signatures
that have been preserved— is feeble, shaky, and
imperfect. In estimating his orthography,
however, we must remember that he learned
handwriting when that art was at its nadir in
England, long after the good old legal hand
had gone out, and before the fine Italian
penmanship had come in, and when the terrors
of abbreviations and parafes were in full swing.
His death did not occur until April 23rd,
just four weeks after the signature of the will
(he was buried on the 25th) ; this interval
impairs the tradition circulated fifty years
later, that the poet died of a fever con-
tracted at a merry meeting with Drayton and
Ben Jonson. The burial of Chaucer in 'West-
minster Abbey was a more or less accidental
circumstance ; but the interment of Spenser
and Beaumont near his ashes had given a new
sanction in Elizabethan times to the idea that
the Abbey might become in time a kind of
Santa Croce of English poets. So within six
years of Shakespeare's death we get the pa.s-
toral poet William Basse lamenting the exile
of Shakespeare's bones in distant Stratford :

Renowned Spenser, lie a tlioug;lit more nisli
To learned Beaumont ; and rare Beaumont, lie
A little nearer Chaucer, to make room
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.

' Multiply l)y at least six to bring to modern values. As a player between 1.590 and 1.590 Mr. Sidney
Lee estimates that Shakespeare made, on the avera^'e, £11.5 per annum {Life of lihakexpeare. Library
Edition, p. 159).

^ "As is common among men of wealth," says Mr. Lee, " Sliakespeare stood rigorously by his rights
in all business relations, and often appeared as plaintiff in the local courts."

^ The poet's father, whose finances his prosperous son is believed to have eased considerably, died in
1601, when Shakespeare became the head of the family; his mother, "Mary Shaxspere," seven years later
(Sept. 1G08) ; his younger brother Ednmnd, who, like himself, was an actor, was buried in Southwark, in
December, 1G07.

* Tliis Elizabeth marrie<l as her second husband, in 1G47, Sir John Barnard, of Abington, near Northampton,
and at her death in February, 1G70, slie was the last surviving descendant of the poet, whose Stratford
property she had inherited just previously to her second marriage. The poet's own widow, Anne Shakespeare,
died on August Gth, 1G23, a't. 67. She was buried near her husband (though not in the same grave) in
the Stratford chancel. John Hall's very curious medical Observatioiis were issued posthumously in 1657.

104

"A MONUMENT WITHOUT A TOMB

These lines appealed strongly to the imagi-
nation of contemporaries. Ben Jonson, writing
in the following vear, repudiated the idea of
" bidding Beaumont lie a little further," for
he said, addressing Shakespeare, " Thou art
a monument, without a tomb." Sepulchred in
his works, Shakespeare, as Milton claimed, with
a glance back at the same sonnet,

in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die ;

and Beisse's own ultimate wish is that probably
shared by the great multitude of the dramatist's
worshippers.
Sleep, brave Tragedian, Shakespeare, sleep alone.

It was not until the subsequent interments of
Drayton and Ben Jonson that the neighbour-
hood of Chaucer's monument in the Abbey
became definitely consecrated as " Poets'
Corner."

Shakespeare's bust ^ above the tomb, on the
north chancel wall of Stratford Church (erected
by the family within six years of his decease),
and his portrait engraved by Martin Droeshout
prefixed to the first folio edition of his works
in 1623 (which, as interpreted to some extent
by the so-called Droeshout painting at Stratford,
seem to us the most interesting and probably
authentic of the portraits) confirm in a general
way Aubrey's statement that Sliakespeare was
" a handsome well-shap't man." If the opinion
of competent judges may be taken, the bust
was executed from a cast taken after death.
The colours, renewed in 1749, were originally
taken from life, and, until whitewashed in

1793 (owing to the unpardonable presumption
of Malone), represented the poet exactly
as he appeared to his contemporaries. The
large dome-shaped forehead is the most strik-
ing feature of the image, the colours of which
were restored in 1861. The eyes are a l)right
hazel, the hair and beard auburn ; the doublet
scarlet, covered with a loose black sleeveless
gown. Shakespeare's hands, in one of which
is a quill, repose on a cushion, and beneath
this is an inscription in indifferent Latin,
likening Shakespeare to a Nestor for judgment,
a Socrates for genius," and a ^'irgil for art :

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, populus mseret, Olympus habet.

Then come three couplets in English :

Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast .''
Read, if thou canst, whom envious Death hath

placed
Within this monument ; Shakespeare : with wliom
Quick nature died ; whose name doth deck this

tomb
Far more than cost ; sith all tliat he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve liis wit ;

while on the ground above the grave itself,
near the north wall of the chancel, is the well-
known side viator appeal to the sexton :

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To digg the dost encloased heare ;
Bleste be ^'e man Yt spares thes stones.
And corst be he Yt moves my bones.

The poet died within a few days of the im-
mortal author of Don Quiaote ; he had just
completed his fifty-second vear, and was thus
of the same age as Moliei'e and Napoleon.

During the years of his active career Shakespeare's sole preoccupation in regard to his plays would appear to
have been to provide for their adequate production upon the stage of the Globe Theatre on Bankside. He did
not cause them to be published either singly or collectively. \\'hen unauthenticated copies were printed without
his permission he took no active steps against the offenders, and he did nothing whatever to substitute correct
editions for the garbled versions that were constantly emanating from the press. Having regard to the abnormal
supineness of Shakespeare in respect to the rights and responsibilities of authorship, it can hardly be doubted
that we owe a heavy debt to the depredatory printers who flourished so exceedingly in London during the Last
ten years of Queen Elizabeth and the tirst ten years of King James. London was teeming with competitive
stationers and printer-publishers, eager to acquire saleable raw material, but unwilling (in the then wholly vague
state of ideas upon the subject of copyriglit) to give more than the merest trifle for a manuscript, however
promising. 'ITiere were scarcely any Knglish classics to fall back upon, and no newspaper reports of spee(^hes by
eminent contemporary statesmen. It w;i,s (]uite natural in the circumstances that the publishers should liave
turned their eyes to the theatres on the south side where the plays of a young man of but thirty-tliree or thirty-
four were already becoming town talk. " As I'lautus and Seneca are accounted the best for t'onu'dy and
Tnigedy among the I>;itines," wrote one of the most wide-awake literary (|uiilnuncs of the ilay, "so Shakespeare
among ye English is the most excellent in both kinils for the sfcige ; for Comedy witiics his d'e-nllnneii of Vi^rona,

' Executed by a well-known London sculptor of Dutch extraction named (ierard Johnson. The original
pen and tirst linger (prey of some barj)y) lia\e beim restored ; otherwise the bust is subst;intially undianged
since its erection about l(i2<), William Morris laughs at tlie Droesliout picture : " It can't be like Sliakespeare,
because it imt like n num." 'J"he " I'elton" portrait, in my opinion, deserves more study than it has yet been
accorded.

' A reference is intended no doubt to the familiar tlitimnn of Socrates.

zn g

THE FIRST QUARTO EDITIONS 105

his Errors, liis Love Lubourx ImsI, liis hmf. Lahourx Wonne, his Midnutnnier.'i N'njht Drnami', and lii.s Merrliant of
Venire : for Tragedy liis Itichard the '2, SiU-.hard the ", Jlenry the J), Kbiy John, Titn.i AndronhntH and his
Jivitieo and Juliet." ^ It nuist liave hi'coini! pcu-rcctly <il)vious a yt'ar or two bef'oro tliis ol/iter dictum was nti^'red
that Shakespeare was u thorouffhly " good thinff " ; he miglit jjrove a mine of wealtli to a siiccessfiil piratical
printer. The question was liow to get hohi of a copy of a likely play. 'I'lie original manuscript would he
jealo\isly guarded by the theatre proprietors. Two courses would appear to liave presented themselves to
piratical adventurers, zealous and willing to surmount any obstacle. One was to get at either an impoverished
actor or some one liehind the scenes at the (Jlobe and persuade him to procure an acting copy : another was to
send reporters to the theatre and get them to take down an outline in rough shorthand, llie two methods were
in some cases very probably combined. An actor for a small fee would furnish two or three parts in full, the
remainder would be patched together and pieced in by the publisher's back, after two or three visits to the
playhouse. 'Ilie resultant (from some such processes as these) was hurried through the press and sold broadcast
at the rate of tivepencc or six])ence a copy. The circulation nmst have been rapid and extensive, but so fugitive
is literature of this kind that at the present day a Shakespeare quarto hardly ever comes into the market, and
when it does it fetches an enormous price.^ The only really good collections are in the Briti.sh Museum and the
Bodleian, and in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire and Trinity College, Cambridge.

The quartos vary greatly in merit, but none of them can claim to be very correct. In no case can we
suppose one to have been corrected by a thoroughly competent hand, still less by Shakespeare himself.
Corrections of proofs by authors does not appear to have been an ordinary practice in Elizabeth's time, but, even
if it had, we could hardly expect Shakespeare to have corrected playbooks issued in defiance of his wishes. Once
printed, the publishers seem to have taken no further pains about securing completeness or accuracy. As a rule
each succeeding quarto was printed off from the one next preceding it. Such corrections as were made were
executed by ignorant and irresponsible hands, fresh blunders crept in, and the text deteriorated steadily. Such
as they were, these quarto playbooks were the only form in which the dramatist was accessible to readers down
to 1623. They are consequently very important. Appended is a list of the first quarto editions of single plays
between 1.597 and the appearance of the first folio in 1023; an attempt has further been made to indicate the relations
which the quartos bear one to another, and to the collective edition of Shakespeare's plays in folio in 1623.

(1) An Ejrcetlenf conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, 1.597. The first quarto, an imperfect
shortened and unauthorised reporter's draft, was "newly corrected, augmented and amended " in 1599.
This latter is a vastly improved text of a play which had probably been strengthened in the interval.
From it was printed the third quarto (Q3) in 1009. From this last the folio version was derived with
changes usually for the worse. There is a fourth quarto, undated, with useful corrections ; and a fifth,
dated 1637. The received text is largely that of the last quarto, but is in many places conjectural.

(2) The Trugedij of King Richard the third. Containing his treacherous plots . . . with the trhole course
of his detested life and most daerved death, 1.597. The first quarto appears to have been (though the
point is very obscure) a shortened and revised copy of the original play, of which we get the nearest
idea iu the 1623 or folio version. Subsequent quartos appeared 1.598, 1602, 1605, 1612, 1622, 1629,
1634, each for the most part copying its predecessor and progressively deteriorating. The textus receptu*
is ba?ed on the folio with substantial additions from Ql. The modern te.vts vary a good deal.

(3) The Tragedie of King Jiichard the Second, 1.597. Reprinted 1598, with some blunders adde*l, and
again, with additions (the deposition scene), in 1008. The 1608 quarto was issued first with a title-page
not mentioning the additions, then with a title-p.ige in which they are mentioned. The fourth quarto
of 1615, used in printing the folio text, is a mere reprint of that of 1608, but the copy used was corrected,
in MS., by a good acting copy, and the folio is thus purged of many errors accumulated by successive
quartos, and is on the whole the best text. The 1634 quarto was printed from the second folio (F2).

(4) A Pleasant Conceited Comedie called Loves labor.i Lost . . . newly corrected and augmented by W.
Shakespeare, 1598. The folio version is a reprint from this (Ql) di\'ided into acts. 15oth versions contain
nii.stakes of their own, but the folio is rather more carefully printed. Q2 was printed from Fl in 1631.

(5) The Historic of Henrie the fourth with the hnltel at Shrew.shurie . . . icilh the humorous conceiti
of Sir John Falstnffe, 1598. Tliis is the standard text of the play, and was reprinted in successive
quartos 1.599, 1604, 1(508, 161.3, 1022, 1632, and 1039. The folio differs from the quartos for the
worse, though it corrects a few typographical errors and has a division into acts and .scenes.

(0) The Second part of Henrie the fourth . . . with the humours of Sir John Falstaffe and swaggering
Pistoll, 1000. The textus receptus is a combination of the quarto and the folio version, which supplement
each other in a valuable manner, the former probably representing the purer and less sophisticated text,
the latter contributing some fine additional lines.

' Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, 1598. Love's Labour's Won has been supposed to be a first draft of the play
restyled Alfs Well that Ends Well (Dr. Farmer) ; The Tempest (Rev. Jos. Hunter) ; Much Ado (A. E. Brae) ;
Taming of the Shrew (G. L. Craik).

^ The Lund quarto of Titu.<i Andrtmicus, 1594, was sold to America in January, 1905, for £2,000. Concerning
the author of this play, consult John M. Robertson's IHd Shakcipeare write Titus Andronicus?* He finds strong
traces of Greene and I'eele (possibly Kyd) in the play, but very little of Shakespeare. Cf. Gro.sart's edition
of Selimus (Temple Classics).

106 THE QUARTOS

(7) The, Chronicle Uistonj of Henry thefift. With his htUtelfougU at Agin Court in f'rnnee . . . lOOO
(Q2 1602, Q3 11)08). The quartos alike are imperfect and almort valueless for comparison. Tliey were
probably \aniped up from notes taken at a performance of the play in a shortened form. 'I'lie folio
supplies the textics receptus.

(8) The moU excellent Hixtorie of the Merchant of Venice. With the exlreame crueltic of Shytockc . . .
1600 (Roberts Ql) and 1600 (Heyes Q2) : two versions distinguished by the rival publishers' names.
"Notwithstanding: some worsenesses," says Dr. Furnivall, "the betterness of the second quarto is-
established." From it the first folio text was printed in 1623, with a few insignificant corrections and
some added blunders. The "Heyes" quarto was reprinted in 1637 ((^3) ; reissued with new title-page
in 16.52 (Q4).

(9) Much udoe Ahotit Xothing, 1600. The folio version is a reprint of this, with alterations and
blunders as usual, and with the acts marked for the first time.

(10) A Mid.sommer nights dreame, 1600. Two quartos were printed in this year, one by Fisher
(Ql), the other by James Roberts (Q2). The folio text is based on the latter (which is better printed
if less authentic), with some conjectural alterations. The received te.xt is a combination.

(11) A most pleasannt and excellent conceited Comedif. of Syr John Falstaffe and the merrie Wives of
Windsor . . . 1G02. This version and that of the folio convict each other of serious imperfections. Both
probably derive from a common original no longer e.\tant. The modern text, as is not infrequently the
case, represents a degradation of the author's work, 'llie quarto version is probably a report by a literary
hack from a shortened stage version. Q2 (1610), a reprint of Ql, was followed by Q3 (1630), a reprint
from the folio. The fexlits receptus is mainly that of the folio.

(12) The Tragieall Historic of Hamkt Prince of Denmarke, by A\'illiam Shake-speare, 1603. Tliis
version (Ql) is a piratical and carelessly transcribed copy of Shakespeare's first draft of the play, in which
the dramatist drew largely upon an old piece called Hamlet's Bevenge. A revised version greatly enlarged
and amended "according to the true and perfect copy " appeared in 1604 (Q2). This again was roughly
printed from a curtailed acting copy. The folio text came nearer to the original ; it also followed an
acting copy which had been cut down for representation, but the cuts were less drastic and in dilferent
places as compared witli those of Q2. The textus receptus, long based upon Fl almost exclusively, is
now based upon a combination of it and Q2. Later quartos appeared in 160-5, 1611, an undated quarto
(Q.5) about 161.5, and 1637 (Q6).

(13) Mr. William Shake-speare : His Tntc Chronicle Historic of the life and death of King Lear and hi^e
three daughters, 1608, two quarto editions, both printed for N. Butter. The first, known as the
" Pide Bull " edition, was made up of corrected and uncorrected sheets indiscriminately, so that scarcely
two copies are alike in all respects. The second, known as the " N. Butter " edition, is a reprint
of a copy of the first which contained some of the uncorrected sheets. A tliird quarto, 1655, is a bad
reprint of the second, 'llie folio text is somewhat shorter hut very superior to (jnartos : it was probably
printed from one of them, lieavily corrected from a manuscript in possession of tlie theatre.

(14) The (Famous) Historic of Troylus and Crcsseid (Excellently expressing tlie lieginning of their
loves with tlie conceited wooing of Pandarus Prince of Licia) as it was acted at the Cilobe, by AV'illiam
Shakespeare, 160!). A surreptitious version. \Vhcn tlie printer was rebuked for printing it " as acted at
the Globe" he cancelled the phrase and substituted the words in brackets on the title, adding an
extraordinary preface. Tlie folio version was j)rinted from this with a few variations and additions. 'ITie
received text has, liowever, been improved by tlie aid of the quarto.

(1.5) The Tragwdy of Othello, The Moore of Venice, 1622 (Q2 1630). Printed "after tlie author's death "
by Thos. U'alkley, who sjiys in his Epistle (a book without an Epistle is like "A Blew Coat without
a badge") that "the author's name is sufficient to vent his work." The folio text is fuller and better
than that of the quarto.

There are first editions (sometimes not quite perfect) of all the above in the British Museum with the
exception of Richard 11. and The Merry Wives.

Quartos also appeared during Shakespeare's lifetime of Titus Andronicus (1594 and 1600) and I'ericlcf
(1609 and 1611). 'i'here were thus seventeen quartos in all.
It will be sufficiently seen from the foregoing list (which has been most kindly looked over by Mr. P. A.
Daniel) that the text of the quartos is in nearly every case corrupt. Tliere was no proper editorial supervision
in their preparation, and being intended merely for the accommodation of the playgoers (and the convenience
of actors who preferred to have their parts in print), very little trouble of any kind was expended upon tliem.
Bad as they are, we should, but for them, have been tlie inheritors of an infinitely worse text of Sliakespeare
than the "tolerably good" one which we do actually possess. In many cases the quartos proved to be the
best versions available for the printers, when Shakespeare's plays came to be collected ; in others, they have
proved of the utmost value to modern ccmiment^itois in amending the text.

Had wc not been steeled, tlirougli adversity, against the infirmity (to which so many criticsare prone) of looking
into a modern looking-ghiss for Shakespeare, we miglit be inclincil to exclaim, AVliat a remarkable thing that the
dram.itist during the four years of his retirement sliouM not have ]ireparc<l an edition of liis own plays for the
prcs-s ! He might even have found time, at le.ist, to liave commenced an autobiogiaphy. Wo may all be .illowed
to share the pioua regret of his fellow-actors John Heminge and Ilenrie Londell : " it had bene a thing, we

HEM INGE AND CONDELL 107

confesse, wortliic to liave bene wished, tliat tlie Author liiiiiselfe had liv'd to have set forth, and overseen his
owne writings." ' On the otlier hand it is possibly just as well that the manuscripts should not have been
entrusted to him at Stratford. Tlie greatest authors have occasionally proved int^ompetent revi.sers of their own
writings, while early work that tliey deem " immature " is notoriously uns;ifc in tlieir hands.

Some years elapsed after Shakespciire's death before aiiytliing was done to bring out a collective edition of
his plays. Two tilings were needed for sucli an enterprise, money and the goodwill of the the.itre proprietors,
who had in their possession tlie manuscripts of the twenty Sliakesi>eareaii plays which had not yet appeared
separately in print. The requisite conjuiictun; of circumstances was apparently hrouglit about in tlie following way.
Shortly after Shakespeare died a printer called William Jaggard (who had already made money l)y pulilisliing
The Faxxioniite Pilgrim in Shakespeare's name) absorbed a smaller printer c.illcd James Roberts, who printed tlie
players' bills. Jaggard wa,s thus brought into contact with the theatre proprietors, Ileminge and Condell,
whom he eventually convinced of the credit, not without profit, that would accrue from the publication of the
popular plays of the deceased dramatist. Jaggard and his newly found allies were unwilling to incur the whole
risk, so they brought into the Sliakespeare publication syndicate three additional booksellers (or [lublishcrs),
Aspley, Smcthwick, and Kdward Hlount, a man of some culture and an old friend of Marlowe's. William
Jaggard shared the printer's work with his son lsa;ic. 'Hie nominal sponsors for this memorable literary venture
were the two sleeping partners, Ileminge and Condell.

John Heminge is supposed to have come from Shakespeare's native town of Stratford and to have created the
part of Falstaif ; Henry Condell was his partner in the proprietorship of the Globe and was great as the Cardinal
in Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Shakespeare left mourning rings to them both in his will. They seem (from their
advertisement to the Shakespeare volume) to have thoroughly recognised Shakespeare's utter pre-eminence. Tliis
is their great merit. They were very slow in getting to work. They probably talked freely of their great labours
and their dear old friend AVill Shakespeare in the Bankside taverns. Beyond this their labours were apparently
confined to the selection of copies of the plays from the theatre library for the use of the printers. Some of
these were apparently tlieatre copies which had been curtailed for representation, one or two (e.g. The Tempest)
may have been prompt copies iu the author's own hand. NVhen printed quartos were available, they were
generally used, with a few marginal corrections. In other cases transcripts of plays in private hands were used.
The correction of the press was, there is little reason to doubt, left to the reader of Jaggard's printing house,
who certainly could not have exercised any extraordinary vigilance in his vocation. Abbreviations were then
freely used in writing, and these were very carelessly and imperfectly interpreted. The result was a rather
slovenly and dilapidated text, especially in certain plays for which no (juartos exist — Curiolanns, Alt's Well,
Macbeth, and Antony. On the other hand, the exclusive folio text of The Tempest, Twelfth Niglit, As You Like It,
and Julius C'cesar is exceptionally good.

^Vith all its imperfections thick upon it, the famous first folio (Fl) issued from Jaggard's pre.ss towards the
close of 1(523. Twenty plays were printed in it for the first time.- These were :

The Tempest.

Tlie two Gentlemen of Verona.

Measure for Measure.

The Comedy of Errours.

As You Like It.

The Taming of the Shrew.

All is well, that Ends Well.

Twelfe-Night, or what you will.

The Winters Tale.

The Life and Death of King John.

Henry the Sixt. Parts I., II., and III.

The Life of King Henry VIII.

The Tragedy of Coriolanus.

Timon of Athens.

Tlie Life and death of Julius Ctesar.

The Tragedy of MacVieth.

Anthony and Cleopater.

Cymbeline King of Britaine.

The only play previously published as by Shakespeare and now excluded was Pericles. (It is just possible
that a stationer with printing rights over this play prevented its inclusion.) Tliirty-six pieces were thus brought
together. The volume consisted of nearly 1,000 double-column pages, and copies (of which something'
like 200 are probably still in existence) were sold at £l. The plays are arranged in " A Catalogue " (i.e. contents
table) under three headings — Comedies, Histories, Tragedies. Each section is separately paged. The histories
are arranged in the order of the kings chronicled, the other two sections in a promiscuous manner.' This
arrangement has been followed in subsequent collective editions.

Heminge and Condell were careless editors, but they must have known quite well which plays deserved
to be called (^and would be accepted by the public of the time as) Shakespeare's. The first folio has therefore
the greatest possible weight in determining the Shakespearean canon. It contains a few plays only in part by
Shakespeare — Jhiiry VI., Timon, Titus Andronicus, and Henry VIII. ; but the mere fact that they are included
points powerfully to the conclusion that the dramatist had some considerable sliare in tlie least Shakespearean
of them. The fact that Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Edward III. are omitted tells no le.«s strongly against
our regarding them as Shakespearean in more than a secondary manner.

' In the " Epistle Dedicatorie " to the first folio.

' The licence from the Stationers' Company was obtained on November 8th, 1623. The title ran : Mr. William
Shahe-vpeares Comedies, Histories i.\ Tragedies. IhtUushed according to the True (Jriginall Copies. (Portrait " Martin
Droeshout, sculpsit, London.") London : Printed by Isaac laggard and Ed. Blount, 1623.

^ Troilus and Cressida was accidentally omitted from the contents table.

108 EULOGY AND DISSENT

The second folio editiou was reprinted from the first with a few (for the most part) valueless corrections in
]632. Both Charles I. and Charles II. had copies of this edition, and the former made good use of his
(though Milton pointed out that he ought to have studied Richard III. to better advantage). The third
folio was printed in 1663-4 with the addition of seven plays : Pfric/ex ; The London Prodigall ; The Hittory
of Thomux- Lord Cromuell; Sir John Oldcanlle, Lord C'obham ; The Ihiritan M'idow; A Yorkshire Tragedy; The
Tragedy of Locrine. The attribution of these last six pieces to Shake-speare was quite erroneous. The fourth
folio of 168.3 reproduces the third with a slight modernisation of the spelling, and with a good many additional
misprints. These blunders proved signally noxious owing to the fact that the early editors, Nicholas Rowe
(1709), Alexander Pope (172.5), and Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744), generally used the fourth folio as the basis of
their text.' llie modern tendency is to attach more and more credence to the readings of the first folio.

The books written about Shakespeare are legion. Of the monthly lists of Accessions printed by the
British Museum Library a number rarely appears without two or three entries under the heading "Shakespeare,
A\"illiam." Of the yearly crop a comparatively small number are books by literary critics ; for Shakespeare has
become degraded in use from a subject for our quickest and best intellects down to a rubbish-tip for our
worst and most inveterate faddists. A series of curious hallucinations and crazes have swept in succession over
the study of Shakespeare. One, of French origin, which persisted long and obtained wide currency owing to
the loud authoritative voice of Voltaire, was that Shakespeare was a kind of inspired rustic, whose habitual
gibbering was diversified by great moments of genuine poetry. Another was that Shakespeare was the
unrecognised and much-persecuted victim of Ben Jonson and other dramatists of the age. Allied with this was
the German theory of Shakespeare's isolation among the dramatists of the period, and the exaggerated theory of
Shakespeare's art, the very rudenesses and nodosities of which were nothing less than additional beauties.
Tliis was followed in the mid-nineteenth century by an extraordinary mania for the discovery of Shakespeare
symbolism, together with a strong inclination to the psychological fallacy that Shakespeare's choice of
tragic or comic themes mnst have been conditioned by the immediate circumstances of his life. Not
only was each play discovered to represent some distinct ethical teaching, a parable in the disguise of
a play, hut almost every character of importance was discovered to conceal a satire upon some contem-
porary rival or enemy. In a similar spirit Shakespeare's dramatic blank verse has been subjected to every
kind of possible and impossible '''metrical test," while his acts and scenes have been pulled about to suit
the exigencies of the latest theories of Elizabethan staging. These ingenious but for the most part faded
speculations have given place to passionate altercations upon the inner meaning and significance of the
sonnets — the debate concentrating upon the interpretation of the cryptic dedication addressed to the only
begetter, Mr. VV. H., by the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth, T. T. t)ne can read now, with
nothing short of intense amusement, the grand discovery by the French discoverer, M. Philarete Chasles,
acclaimed with perfect solemnity by the Athena-um, the Westminster, and Saturday Reviews, and by a consensus
of learned opinion, that the my.stic W. H. meant nothing more nor less than " William Himself." VoUa la
syinliolique des sonnets ! Another craze (initiated by people who seem to have known Shakespeare alone among
great authors, and to have ignored that extraordinary faculty of assimilation which is practically indispensable
to all great creative artists, constituting, in fact, the kind of literary second sight which distinguishes
an author from another) is that because Shakespeare has written so well about travel, about seafaring, about
soldiering, about women, about angling, about litigation, about the Bible, etc., etc., therefore he must have
been a great traveller, a sailor, a soldier, a woman, an angler, a lawyer, a Protestant divine and the like,
himself. This exquisite folly reached its climax in 18.57, in a book by Delia Bacon to prove that Lord Bacon,
and not Shakespeare, really wrote the plays commonly attributed to the latter. Shakespeare, it is plain, was
not a sedentary man, or a man of study, or an inns of court man ; on the contrary, he was an open-air man,
a man of affairs, and a sportsman, but he had that peculiar, tliat compelling, and that much-abused power
of transmitting thoughts and impres.sions by means of ink and paper which distinguishes the literary man from
tlie non-literary man. Like all great authors, he uttered a va-st quantity of truth without knowing it ; he
delivers obiter dicta in cases of which he never even heard, and pours forth profound opinions on many subjects
of which practically lie knew nothing.

The explanation of these crazes is not recondite ; they are the direct outcome of the extravagance of
Shakespeare eulogists. So inseparable from the abuse of a cult is the fungoid groivth of dissent, ^\'ith singular
shortness of sight the votaries of the poet have represented him as (1) virtually flawless ; (2) so comprehensive as
to be practically universal. Tlic converse of these propositions is probably nearer to the truth. As
\'auvenargues said, " Les ])lus grands ouvragps de I'esprit humain sont trcs-assurcment les nioins parfaits." A
fa\iltlcss author would be not human but divine. As Jonson, the most epigrammatic, and Johnson, the sanest of
his critics, pointed out, Shakespeare is full of faults; among these are conspicuous carelessness, profusion,
and extravagance. He suffered from what Leigh Hunt calls a super-fcetation of thought, and his work at times
from an ultra-luxuriance of imagination and metaphorical illustration. His partiality for the " purple patch "
is inconsistent with that purity of taste which we begin to recognise as essentially Hellenic. He strains
language to the point of obscurity or slovenliness, neglects rudimentary plausibility of plot or of chronological

' Some important emendations were suggested by Lewis TTieobald in 173.S. Tlie most valuable of all
{Henry V. H. iii. 17), "and a' babliled of green fields," was more than hinted at in a marginal note by a friend,
"and a' talked of green fields." This famous emendation seems almost too brilliant to be sound.

From a Paintins \<v Konl Mjdox Brown, reproduced by the courtesy of Mr. Charles Rowley.

Romeo and Juliet

SELECT BlBLIOGRArHY 10{>

coherence ("Panting Time toils after liiin in vain"), sacrifices dramatic propriety and instancy to bravura
and rhetoric, or, worse still, to scandalous quibbles and ignominious puns. His plays were written in the
first instance for the theatre of his day. Ho knew his audiences and actors, and made concessions to both, to
the detriment of his worl<. Caring little for formal completeness, he rarely consented to subordinate all his
detail to his main design. If an episode or a character did not fully rouse liis imagination, he wrote well
enough for liis audience and was content.' .Shakespeare, again, is anything but universal. His love of
authority and contempt for the "mutable rank-scented many'' are essentially 'I'udor and pre-.\rmada senti-
ments. His power, then and now, is largely a corollary of the fact tliat he was so perfect a representative
of his age and countrj'. Like every very great writer, Shakespeare has an energetic people beliind him.
While uttering supremely what he himself thinks and feels, he is at the same time uttering what is felt
and thought most deeply by the best minds among his contemporaries.

Among other causes which have contriliuted to give Sliakespeare his position of supremacy, it is possible
now to specify only four : (1) His service to the connnon speech of Englislimen by fixing the functions of new
words and enriching tlie vernacular with new phrases of unrivalled jiith and [mtency ; (2) the exquisite alterna-
tions of quickness and emphasis, of verisimilitude and beauty, of touch-and-go playfulness and solemn
music, of comic and tragic^ tone which lie obbiins by turning from prose to verse, or vice versa, every such change
being consciously or unconsciously modulated and motived ; (.3) the consummation of dramatic blank verse
in his hands between lOOO and 1G12 — increasing vibration and flexibility, unlimited variety of music and
expression, the double-ending and varied pause so regulated as to set up a continuous flow of vital rhythm ;
(4) his powerful double appeal in each successive age to playgoer and student.

Among the shoals of modern Shakespeare books, upon the genesis of which we have thus endeavoured to
throw a ray of light, we select those for mention which we should like every genuine Shakespeare student
to possess :

Editions mth Variorum Notes: " Boswell's Malone " * (24 vols. 1821); Furness's Variorum (12 vols.).
Sumptuous Printing : The Stratford Town Shakespeare, 10 vols, (the Ktth vol. to include new critical
essays by various hands), printed at Stratford under the care of A. H. Hullen. Apparatun Oriticus .-
Cambridge Edition, 1863-6, or 189.3; The Arden Shakespeare; The Bankside (20 vols.). Facsimiles:
First Folio* (Clarendon Press, 1902) and Poems (190.5); Furnivall's Shakexperc-Quarto Facsimiki- (40 vols.).
One-Volume Text: Globe Edition (since 1891 with good Glossary); Leopold Shakespeare* (with Furnivall's
introduction). Pocket Play-per- Volume Editions: The First Folio Edition (40 vols.) ; The Little Quarto Edition
(40 vols.). Sources: Douce's Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807 and 1839) ; J. Hunter's jVew ///M.rfra/iO«.« (184.5) ;
Collier and Hazlitt's Shakespeare Library, 1875 ; Skeat's Shakespeare's Plutarch, 1875 ; Boswell-Stone's Shakespere's
Jlolinshed, 18dG ; Anders's Shakespeare Books, 11)03. Lexicons and Granunars : A. Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon
(1874) ; J. Bartlett's Concordance, 1895 ; E. A. Abbott's Shakesperean Crammar ; Vranz's Shakespeare Grammatik ;
Fleay and Dowden's Handbooks. Lives: J. O. Halliwell-l'billipps's Otitline.s (10th ed. 1898) ; Sidney Lee's Life *
(5th ed. 1905), with which should be used as supplementary D. H. Madden's Diary of Master William Silence,
1897 ; C. L Elton's Will. Shakespeare, His Family and Friends, 1904; and J. W. Gray's Shakespeare's Marriage,
1905. Shakespeare Riference : Shakespeare's Centurie nf Praise, 1874; Fresh Alhmons to Shakespeare, 1886 (New
Shakespeare Soc. Publications), and The Prai-^e of Shakespeare (ed. Hughes), 1904. Critics : Eighteenth
century— Johnson's Preface, 1765 ; R. Farmer's E.^say on the Learning of Shakespeare, 1767 ; Nathan Drake's
Shakespeare and His Times, 1817 (see N. Smith's Eighteenth-Century Ess.says on Shakespeare). Romantic —
Coleridge's Xotes and I^ectures (ed. 1883) ; Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays ; Schlegel's Shakespeare
and the Drama, 1815 ; Goethe's Wilhclm Meister and Heine's Frauen-Gestatlrn. Modern — Dowden's Shakspere,
His Mind and Art, 1875 ; Brandes's William Shakespeare, 1898 ; A. C Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904),
and Essays by Landor {the Citation of William Shakespeare for deer-stealing, and Imaginary Conversations, passim),
Swinburne, Lowell, Wyndham, Moulton, and A. W . Ward. Foreign — Kreyssig, Brandl, Mezieres, Stapfer,
Beljame, and Jusserand.

' See Stephen's Studies of a Biographer, iv. 8 ; Seccombe and Allen, Age of Shakespeare, 1904, ii. 128-31 ;
Bookman, October, 1903. The present chapter has been most kindly read by, among others, Mr. A. H. Bulleu,
Mr. Walter Sichel, Dr. J. \V. Allen, and Dr. Furnivall. Both Mr. Bullen and Dr. Furnivall dissent from the
views expressed in regard to the sonnets at the foot of p. 99 ; Dr. Allen dissents from the view tliat Maclieth is
the least actable of the tragedies ; Dr. Furnivall disagrees with the view taken of Shakespeare's marriage and
with the preference given to Richard II. over King John.

CHAPTER IX

THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS OF

SHA KESPEA RE

"Of the later dramatists, I think Beaumout and Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare in the amount of
pleasure they give, though not in the quality of it, and in fanciful charm of expression. In spite of all their
coarseness, there is a delicacy, a sensibility, an air of romance, and above all, a grace in their best work that
make them for ever attractive to the young, and to all those who have learned to grow old amiably."

— J. R. Lowell, Old English Dramatists.

Beaumout and Fletcher — Ben Jonson — Voljione — The Alchemist — Jousou's later comedies — Chapman-
Dekker — Middleton — Heywood — W^ebster — Tourueur — Ford — JMassinger — Sliirley.

-Marston-

AS to the gulf \\hich .sepiirate.s Shakespeare
from his fellow Elizabethans the opinion
of Alexander Dyce, perhaps the most thorough-
going student of the old English drama that
■we can boast, is well worth hearing. " Lamb
and Hazlitt,'" he says, " have on the whole
exaggerated the general merits of the dramatists
of Elizabeth and James's days. ' Shakespeare,"'
says Hazlitt, ' towered above his fellows in
shape and gesture proudly eminent, but he was
one of a race of giants, the tallest, the strongest,
the most graceful and beautiful of them ; but it
was a common and a noble brood.' A falser
remark, I conceive, has seldom been made by
critic. Shakespeare is not only immeasurably
superior to the dramatists of his time in
creative power, in insight into the human
heart, and in profound thought ; but he is
moreover utterly unlike them in almost every
respect. . . ."

The plays which approach most nearly at any
one given point to the current of Shakespearean
drama are probably those of lieamnont and
Fletcher. But this label of " Beaumont and
Fletcher" amounts very often to hardly more
than a chronological expression signifying that
the plays were written between the accession of
James I. and the meeting of the Long Parlia-
ment by well -accTcdi ted collaljorating play-
wrights of the period. The Beaumont and
Fletcher folios of 1()47 and 1679 were a kind
of large repertory of post-Shakespearean drama,
generally romantic in type, but extremely

various in point of merit. Beaumont's share
in these plays was comparatively small ; but
both Fletcher and Massinger had a large share
in the contents, sometimes writing alone, but
more often in collaboration with Middleton,
Rowley, and others. Fletcher was an extra-
ordinarily versatile writer, a veritable Proteus
of the di-ama of that day. This renders it
extremely difficult to fix his work by internal
evidence. The distribution of plays in the
Beaumont and Fletcher corpus must therefore
always remain extremely tentative; and we
must be continually on our guard against the
eagerness of the sjiecialist to reach definite
conclusions in the matter. Roughly speaking,
however, there can be no doubt that John
Fletcher, who, with the exception of Hey-
wood, was probably the most prolific dramatist
of the day, was the protagonist of the
plays.

John Fletcher, youngest son of Richard
Fletcher, wlio acted the ungrateful part of
chaj)lain to Mary Stuart in the last days
of her life, and eventually became Bishop of
London, was born at Rye, in Sussex, in 1579.
He was educated at Benet (Corpus) College,
Cambridge, and had certainly commenced his
literary career in London by the year 1607.
It is probable that he began writing for the
stage a few years earlier than that. The
Womait^i Prize, a kind of sequel to T/u;
Taming of the Shrew, and WH at Several
Weapons, both very early plays (1604-C), show

110

FRANCIS BEAUMONT

111

the influence of the Lord Chaniherlafn's com-
pany and its great dramatist upon this young
recniit to the ranks of the playwriliiig and
theatrical wits.

He seems to liave become acquainted with
Francis Beaumont not later than 1607, angi
their first successful play, The Romance of
Philastcr, was probably written between 1608
and KilO. The fluency and versatility of his
endowment must have attracted the attention
of Shakespeare about the same time ; and during
1613 we find Shakespeare contributing scenes
and passages to the two predominantly
Fletcherian plays of Henry VIII. and The
Tzi'o Noble Kinsmen. In general popularity,
facility in writing, and honest love of popular
applause, and also in apparent indifterence
to the final form of his productions, Fletcher
seems to have approached the great dramatist
more nearly than any other writer of the
age. Subsequently he became a close ally of
Ma.ssinger. He died at the zenith of his fame,
a victim of the plague, in August, 1625, and
was buried near Massinger in St. Saviour's,
Southwark.

Francis Beaumont, the descendant of a good
Leicestershire family, famous for its lawyers,
was born within the borders of Charnwood
Forest at Grace-Dieu in 1584, and was edu-
cated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, whence
he migrated to the Inner Temple in 1600.
A literary friendship with Ben Jonson, and an
intimacy with Fletcher, formed probably much
about the same time, brought him into con-
nection with the stage a few years after his
settlement in London. In 1605 he inherited
part of the property of his elder brother, the
poet, Sir John Beaumont ; but he seems to have
<;lung to the Bohemian habits of a writer for the
■stage until at least 1613, when he married a
lady of birth and fortinie. Three years later
he died (March, 1616), and was buried in
Westminster Abbey near Chaucer and Spenser.
According to the tradition handed down by
Aubrey, the two poets, the Orestes and Pylades
of our drama, inhabited the same dwelling on
the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, and

had everything, including a single cloak, in
common.

Of the |)lavs ordinarily attributed toBeaunjont
and Fletcher, it does not appear probable that
more than about twelve were the joint com-
position of both dramatists. About fifteen
others are fairly well ascertained to be by
Fletcher alone. The remainder are for the
most part by Fletcher and Ma.ssinger, with a
few minor variations, 'lliis first delimitation
is based primarily upon the hard facts of
chronology. Plays known to have been written
after 1616 could manifestly not have been the
work of Beaumont. Beamnont's share in the
plays previous to this date is decided with a
strong colour of plausibility upon internal
evidence, which is almost exclusively metrical
in character. There is something very dis-
tinctive alx)ut I'letcher's verse, thoroughly
typical of an age which has begun to think
itself sophisticated, and to talk of the " last
reign," less than ten years since, as vieux jeu.
Fletcher had to sustain a reputation of being
thoroughly modern ; one sign of this was to be
found in the looseness and carelessness of his
line structure. His line runs commonly to
eleven, and not infrequently to twelve, thirteen,
or even fourteen syllables, and there is little
attempt, as in Shakespeare, to redress redundan-
cies of effect by the general balance of a passage.
Slipshod methods seem natural to Fletcher.
He is exceedingly fond of writing " 'em " for
" them," and ' 'tis " for " it is " ; his redundant
syllables are frequently accented, and he has an
exasperating trick of adding a perfectly super-
fluous monosyllable, such as " sir," to make up
his eleven syllables. There is a marked lack of
dignity about the cadence of his verse.' We
feel instinctively that it was a court coterie and
not a strong mixed audience that encouraged
such mannerisms. Fletcher, however, was a
most versatile artist, and whether in collabora-
tion with Beaumont, by himself, with Massinger,
or in some other combination, he was for all
tastes, and generally had wit at call. Of all
the great battalion of Elizabethan dramatists,
he is perhaps the only one (with such very

' Such a passage as the following is not at all exeej)tioiial :

Go home, good man, and tell your masters from us,
We do 'em too much honour to force from 'em
Their barren countries, ruin their waste cities ;
And tell 'em, out of love, we mean to leave 'em.

Since they will need be kings, no more to tread on
Tlian they have able wits, and powers to manage ;
And so we shall befriend 'em. — Ha! what does she
here .'' "

— Uumuuroua Lieuienant, 1. 1.

112

JOHN FLETCHER

minor exceptions as Day and Field) who reveals
a decided genius for frivolity. This quality is
seen uiiniistakaljly, as we should expect, only in
those plays which Fletcher wrote alone. Those
written with Beaumont are stained strongly
with seiitimentalitv, and elevated by a nobler
diction than was habitual to Fletcher alone.

These distinctions will appear in the attempt
which we must now make to group and charac-
terise some fifteen of the most notable out of
the fifty odd dramas m-dinarily attributed to
Beaumont and Fletcher. The earliest of these
in point of date (with one exception) are also
the most serious and the most emotional in
quality; and these are undoubtedly those in
which the serio-coiTiic vein of Fletcher was
weighted on the serious side of the morally
stronger man. The chief of these properly
called Beaumont and Fletcher plays were
Philaster, produced about 1608 (printed 1620),
TheMakVs T ragcdy Ahoui 1610 (printed 1619),
and A King and No King in 1611. The
predominant part in all these is felt to be
that of Beaumont. The aim of the dramatists
in Philaster seems to have been to work a
romantic and quasi-tragic vein into comedy of
the Twelfth Night and As You Like It order.
Extravagant though the plot is, the beauty
of the descriptions, the poetry of the sentiment,
and the sweetness of the verse combine with
the novelty of the compound to make the
play a very brilliant success, and rendered the
two heroines, Euphrasia and Ai-ethusa, con-
spicuous on the stage for over two centuries.
The Maid's Tragrdj/ is planned on a scheme
equally ambitious with that of Philaster. The
plot, again, is as inherently improbable as it is
unpleasant, and the fluctuations of feeling in
Aspatia are very confusedly traced ; but the
phrasing and diction in this play are finer and
more direct than that of anything else by
Beaumont and Fletcher. And long delayed

though the awakening of Evadne to her
shame is, her resoluteness in finally wreaking
vengeance is very nobly depicted. The third
of these plays, A King and No King, is again
mainly the work of Beaumont, though the hand
of Fletcher is seen in the last two acts, and
also in the plot. The subject of this drama
is a revolting one, and the chief character,
Arbaces, whose monstrous passion is ostensibly
the theme of the play, is very crudch' worked
out. The play survived long, however, on the
strength of the admirable portraiture of another
Parolles, the cowardly Captain Bessus, with his
sword-bearing tutoi-s in the gentle art of
evading challenges.

The two plays of importance left to Beaumont
and Fletcher are both in a much lighter vein.
They are The Seornful Lady and The Knight
of the Burning Pestle ; the former an early
production of a rather coarse and dull texture
which owes most of its merit to the Adelphi of
Terence. The Knight of the Burning Pestle
may probably be attributed to 1611. It is a
highly original and very amusing mock-heroic
drama, burlesquing the theatrical tastes of the
city 'prentices and the theatrical manners of
the Whitehall courtiers with a delightful impar-
tiality. The comic vein is wonderfully well
sustained, and the whole piece maintained at
one temperature in a manner that is very rare
in the Jacobean drama. The levity of Fletcher
in combination with the humours of Beaumont
afford promise of new conquests in the domain
of the drama — frustrated, unhappily, by Beau-
mont's premature retirement in 1613, and death
three years later.

Fletcher's unaided skill is seen in his farcical
or semi-farcical comedies or romances, in which
his technical adroitness, his extraordinary gift
for blague, his pretty talent for lyi-ic and idyll,
and bis irresponsible fancy are seen to full
advantage.' Joyously funny and cheery again

' Such were Monsieur Thomas, an early play, in which a travelled scapegrace is amusinsjly characterised ;
The Chances (? 1(!1!)), ainillicr very piipuhir comedy, with a Cervantes plot of the complicated order tlien in
voffue ; The Iliitnoiirnim JAciitcnunt (1019), which sounds like a novel of Marryat's, hut relates to the strange
ca.<e of a lieutenant who fights like Mars when in pain with disease, but is a coward when well. 'J"he underplot
is whimsical, licentioas, and extremely laughable, tlie racy dialogue often convulsing the reader. The I'ikjrim
(Hi21), containing a scenario of operatic complexity dominated by the most sparkling of Fletcher's soubrettes,
Juletta ; The Heyrfdr's Bu.sh (l(i22), an eccentric medley of Cervantic complexity, witli Jews and gipsies, farce,
parody, and what-not, so charming and "sunshiny" withal th.vt Coleridge declared he could read it all day;
and Jiii/i: ii Wife and hare a Wife (1(!24), a clever and amusing comedy of a despised husband who asserts liimself
(as, SliU Waters Ihm Deeji ai\i\ The Walls of Jericho attest that husbands may still do). Fletcher's two unaided
tragedies, lionilnca and Vah'iilitiiaii, are stagey, declamatory, .md unreal, suggesting the talent of a Fragonard
exerting itself to produce a St. Seliastian in the style of Guido. Of his work in collaboration with IMassinger,
the one tragedy of note, Thierry and Theodoret, gains enormously in dignity by the association. The Little

BEN JONSON

113

is Wit iv'ithuid Moiici/. The pupiilarily of
this kind is siiowii in the Rev. W. CaiLwriglii's
preference of Fictc-her''s banter to Shakespeare's
wit in llie well-known lines :

Shakespeare to Ihee was ilull : whose hest, jest lies
J' Ih' ladies' questions and tlie fool's replies ;
Nature was all his art ; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility.

jjart

lainl

place

Ben Jonson was born in the early
1573. His grandfatlicr was a small
Annandale, in Scotland, from which
removed to Carlisle, and was subse((uentlv taken
into the service of Henrv VIII. His father
forfeited his estate unilcr Queen Mary, sub-
secpiently l)ecame a Protestant minister, and
died in 157!3. The poet was born in the city
of Westminster about a month after his father^
death. In 1575 his mother married again a
master bricklayer. He was sent to a school
at St. ]\Iartin^s-in-thc-Fields, and showed such
remarkable aptitude that he was sent by a
iViend of the family to Westminster, where
William Camden was then second master.
His wonderful memory enabled him rapidly to
climb into the sixth form. About 1589 he
obtained an exhibition, and passed a few
months at St. John's College, Cambridge. But
his father soon required him in the business, in
which he laboured until he found the work too
irksome, when he escaped froMi it, not by rctm'n-
ing to Cambridge, but by joining the English
army in Flanders as a volunteer. He returned
from abroad Ijefore he was twenty, found his
stepfather dead, took to the London stage for a
living, and was entrusted ere long, just as Shake-
speare had been, with the altering and repairing

of pieces for the stage. Aubrey, with the

amazing credulity which characterised his mind,

stated that about this time Jonson killed Mar-
lowe, the poet, on Bunhill. Thv story had this

amount of foundation, that on Septemlier 22nd,

1598, Jonson fought what he later described

as a duel with an actor called Gabriel Spencer,

whom he killed. Arrested on a chari>e of

felony, he pleaded guilty ; escaped the gallows

by benefit of clergy, but underwent a brief

imprisonment, in the course of w hich he adopted

the Catholic faith on trust from a " sharking "

priest, but abjured it on conviction twelve years

French Lawyer, The yipaiiisk Curate, and The Oiixlom of the Coiaitri/, all given between 1618 and 102:1, are
probably assignable in the main to the exquisite serio-comic vein of Fletcher. In the last-mentioned his verve
in working out a wliimsical conception triumphs over every obstacle, though the play resulting was so scandalous
ill its licence that it shocked the sense of propriety of the not too sensitive Mr. Pepys.

later. The incident led to a l)reach with
Hcnslowc, who was angered by the loss of a
promising member of his company. 11 thus
came about that Jonson offered his first extant
<()mc(h-, Kccrij Man in his Humor, not to
Heiislowc, l)ut to the rival company of Lord
Chamberlain's servants. Shakespeare, fresh from
the success of Hviirij IV., may have had some-
thing to say in regard to the acceptance of the
piece. He certainly took ))art in the perform-
ance, and probably played the part of Knowell
wiien it was given at the Globe in 1598. Jonson,
« hose work had hitherto Ix^en that of an obscure
collaborator, henceforth ranked as one of the
foremost dramatists of the day. His next two
comedies, which, like the first, are very Plautian
in character, and turn upon a complicated
intrigue into which the satire is introduced
more or less as an accident, were next produced,
and were well received. But Jonson already
set himself up as a censor of literary taste and
of the manners of his age. Already he boasted
loudly of his superiority to vulgar criticism and
of the feiirless hand with which he proljed the
foibles of his age. An envious howl, of which
but the faintest echo still survives, was almost
certainly raised upon the first stage triumphs of
the youthful Shakespeare. A more formidable
cabal was now formed against the pretensions
of Ben Jonson. In the stage squabble which
followed, and which has been dignified by the
sonorous name of " Poetomachia," antagonism
to Jonson's arrogance was complicated by the
rivalries of theatrical companies and by cross
personal feuds to such an extent that it is
extremely difficult to get any clear idea of the
melee.

From 1599 to 1602 Jonson was partly occu-
l)ied in hack work for Henslowe, and partly on
the three satirical and literary dramas, Every
Man otd of his Iliimoi; Cijiithias Revek,
and Poetaster. Of these, Cipithias Revek,
entirely lacking in substance though it is, is a
simply marvellous exercise of literary adroit-
ness and dexterity. In it, too, he seems to
approach more nearly than anywhere else
to the light touch and the lyrical abandon
("Queen and huntress, chaste and fair" is to
our mind his most beautiful song), the absence
of which is, generally speaking, so conspicuou.s

THE MERMAID TAVERN

in his works — " works " too often in the sense
that he could not conceal the lahour he ex-
pended upon them. In 1603 was produced
Jouson's earliest extant trayedy, Scjamis. A
little later he got into trouble for abusing the
"industrious Scots" in the delightful city
comedy of Easf-iCurd IIo (in which Chapman
and Marstou bore a shai'e), biit from 1605 down
to 1615 he entered upon the most fruitful and
the most glorious period of his career. In 1605,
the year of Vuljmnc, he jnoduced the first of
his wonderful masques. A hybrid between a
dramatic poem and a pageant, the mast[ne
grew out of the carnival and Epiphany revels,
and was naturalised at the court of Henry VIII.
as a Twelfth Night frolic, with disguising song
and dance ; classical and mythological decora-
tions, inventions and machinery were subse-
quently added. The diversion of masquing
was generally deputed by Elizabeth and her
nobles to the children of the chajjel. Jonsou
was commissioned to organise a number of these
spectacular shows for James I.'s extravagant
and pleasure-loving Queen, Anne, aided bv such
experts as Inigo Jones, Ferrabosco (music),
and T. Giles (concerted dances). They cost
thousands of pounds, and were ;icted frequently
by the Queen and her ladies — the Mascjue of
Blackness, for instance, in which they appeared
as negresses. Jonson\s part of them was lavishly
done — abounding in splendid diction, fertile in
imaginative device, and rich in masculine word
pla}'. His only rival in masque-making was
Thomas Campion. Ben was also famous for
his songs. These are generally somewhat
artificial — we can fancy him planning them in
accordance with some formula or reci{X! such
as the author of Annabel Ixc professed :

Then Jouson raiue instructed IVom tlie school,
To please in method, aud iuvciit by rule.

But, however protluced, his effects are not
seldom superb. The Elizabetlian music was in
his ears, its phrases were on his lips, and these
lliings remained a legacy of English lyrists
down to Marvell's time.

Meanwhile Jonson's I)est jjlays followed in
rapid succession: The S'lltnt Woman, 1609;
7'hc Akhcmiat, 1610; Catiiuu; 1611; Bartho-
lomew Fair, 1614; and The Devil is an A.is,
1616. He remained high in court favour with
hardly a break. In 1616, when he brought out
a folio ecHtion of iiis fVorLi, he was made ptKit
lain-eate with a |)ension of 100 marks. In

the previous )-ears we note traits of the
man in the casual glimpses we get of him.
Rejoining the Anglican Church with such
energy that he drained the communion cup
to the dregs; dominating the circle of wits
at the Mermaid in Bread Street, or sharing
the nimble talk with Shakespeare, Beaumont,
Fletcher, and Drayton ; swallowing large pota-
tions of Canary ; and seeking diversion in the
neighlx)uring purlieus of Bartholomew Pair
or the rookeries of Alstitia and Bernuida. For
a time we hear he served as tutor to Raleigh's
son and went with him to Paris, where he told
the Cai'dinal du Perron frankly that his trans-
lation of Virgil was worthless ; but his loose
habits of drinking lost him this post, shamefully
enough. The Earl of Pembroke, one of his many
high-born friends, sent him regidarly on New
Year's Day 1'20 to buy books >\ ithal ; but a
fire broke out and seriously damaged his library,
whereupon he wrote his E,ircration of Vulcan.
In 1618 he set out on his famous walking tour
to Scotland, spending nearly a ^•C'ar en nmie,
including a sojourn of some weeks with William
Drunnnond at Hawthornden. He offended the
(juiet scholar half-unwittingly by his brutal
outspokeimess, his strongly assertive and con-
temptuous manner. He was, how ever, honoured
in strange lands by being made a burgess of
Edinburgh, and he seems to have felt sufficiently
at home to fall in love with a lady, to whom he
left his picture ;is a vehicle of consolation. He
was also ci-eated an M.A. at Oxford with every
kind of complimentary observance. His last
really notable play appeared in 1625, and with
the death of James and accession of Charles his
favour fx'gan to decline. He had a fierce feud
with Inigo Jones, the topics of dissension being
those still connnon among artistes. He came
under the shadow of royal displeasure, and in
plac^e of mas((ues contrived hasty j)lays, which
Dryden not altogether unjustly calls "dotages."
He wrote an appeal to himself at last to " leave
the lojithcd sbige." 'I'ouched by compassion
for the old poet, Charles sent him a present
and afterwards raised his (generfdly unpaid)
sidary as laureate. So we get a last glimp.so of
Ben in some renewal of his old glory, with his
tribe of satellite wits around him in the Apollo
(or big room) of tlie Devil Tavern in Fleet
Street. We can see him still with his rocky
face, hectoring voice, great stoop, and " moun-
tain belly," living (until at the last he was bed-
ridden with ptdsy) the bibulous lii'e of a reveller

JONSON'S PLAYS

115

auf] a I'ovstorcr, as well as a shipeiidous wit.
He died on the (511) and was binied on the !)lh
of August, 1637, in Westminster Abl)ev,' where
Sir John (Jack) Younjj, for eighteenpence to
a mason, procured him that most famous of
Englisli epitaplis, " rare Hen Jonson."

For all his didactic tone, the moralist is not
unduly obtruded in Jonson. His censoi-ship is,
indeed, more judicial than strictly moral, and
his s<;;orn of fools and shams is quite as great,
if not greater, than his hatred for knaves. As
a chastiser of vice, he is seen to Ixjst advantage
in Voipone or The Fox, first performed at the
Globe Theatre in 1605, and publishetl two years
later with a dedication to the two equal and
sister univei-sities. In this play certainly Jonson
lashes vice with teri'ific power, and metes out to
the moral delinquents at the end a stern and
exemplary justice by way of punishment.

" Putting aside Shakespeare," says Cumber-
land,"! would venture an opinion that this drama
of The Foot is, critically speaking, the nearest to
perfection of any one drama, comic or ti-agic,
on the English stage." From this judgment
there seems little reason, even at the present
day, to dissent. The power and variety of the
working of the central theme, tlie admirable
form both of the stnicturo and of the emliellish-
ments, combine with the absorbing natui'e of the
fable and the mai-vellous richness and energy of
the dialogue to render the play one of the most
fascinating to read, as it has always proved until
quite recent times one of the most effective
on the stage. The only plays that approach
Voipone in maintaining the strenuous ethical
tone are the tragedy of Sejaims and to a lesser
extent the comedy The Dexnlis nn A fin. Either
they represent a series of ingenious ti'ickeries as
in The Akhevmt and Every Man in his Humor,

without anything that could Ix' called a serious
moral, or, as in licuihohininc Ftihy they illustrate
a kind of saturnalia, affording opportunities
for a wonderful satiric insight into the " upside
down" of society. In The Silent IVowrtw wehave
what is really a pure farce, depending much upon
ingenuity of plot, without a trace of moral tone,
and all the lx,'tter for its freedom from it.

The Alt-he nnxt (that "incomparable" play, as
Mr. Pepys called it), in which we have the
very apotheosis of roguery, is chieHy famous
for its highly finished construction. Jonson
often tended to a complexity by which the
central emphasis essential for the serious
motive was sacrificed ; but in The Akhemiit
he attains the happy mean. The comedy
ends in no very moral fashion. The author
inclines his audience, like Lovewit, to take
an indulgent view of the transcendent wit,
roguish though it is, of the inimitable Face.
Face is, indeed, the hero of the piece, and
his adroitness and his marvellous " patter "
to his victims surpass even the cleverness of
Mosca. In ingenuity of construction The
AU-hcml-^t excels Voipone, but in the deeper
fertility of imaginative power and poetry it
seems to us a good deal inferior. Less grim
than The Alehemist, and much less grim than
Voipone, is The Silent Wonwn, which is the most
Molieresque and, on the whole, the most laugh-
able of all Jonson's pieces. The collegiate
ladies are, in reality, a kind of anticipation
of the prfcieu.tes of Moliere. ^Phe idea of the
character of Morose, a gentleman who loves not
noise, and who insists upon being answered by
signs, is taken direct from I^ibanius, the sophist
of Antiocli. His pre-occupation with the idea
of getting a tongue-tied wife, and his ludicrous
deception, is quite in the manner of one of the

' WHien John Hunter's grave was being' made in the Abbey, Jonnon's skull was discovered with red hair
still attaching to it, and the position confirmed the tradition that he Iiad been buried uprig-ht (Stanley, Memorials
ofthf Abtify, 1882, 255).

" The plot of /Ja//Ao/omfMJ /"«!> hears the same relation to that of a complex structure like The Alchemi.it
as that of Pickwick l>ears to the plot of a higlily organised modern novel. The fable is, in fact, little mora
than a device for bringing the various characters together in the middle of Bartliolomew Fair. Jonson combines
throughout this wonderful medley the frankness of ancient witli the richness of modern humour, his satire
running riot through a laughable saturnalia of knavery, folly, and cant. In the humorous yet keen observation
of its outlook upon society it connects unmistakably with the drama of Shadwell and the fiction of Defoe,
Smollett, and Dickens. Here, as in Tlie Silent Woman, the conception is farcical; and tlie most serious part of
the satire, that which deals with Puritanism, is no more tlian caricature. In The Devil in an .4,v.s and The Staple of
News (1G20), Jonson's wit and wisdom are still in possession. Nevertheless, signs of the decline which set in at
the close of James I.'s reign are already visible : in Tlie Deeilis an Ass we observe an inability to combine the
various threads of a complex intrigue, as is done with such marvellous skill in The Alchemist. In The Staple of
News the reader is never certain whether he is to regard the character of Pecunia as a money-bag or as a
real live princess ; and the same deplorable confusion of allegory and realism runs through the whole structure
of this remarkable but very imperfect play.

116

GEORGE CHAPMAN

farces of Moliere. The lii.fis, or untying of
the plot, seems hardly to deserve all the com-
mendation bestowed upon it by Dryden. But
the introduction of a counter-butt to Morose in
the person of Sir Amorous Lafoole, descended
lineallv from the French Lafooles, but not one
of the Lafooles of Essex, is an admirable bit of
comic invention.

Jonson conceived comedy as a picture ot
manners, and he showed, perhaps, an over-
fondness for local colour and contemporary
types. Of this kind there existed no com-
plete example in England before his time.
Shakespeare approached it in 7'//r Mtrrij Wnvf!
of Windsor, and again in T-welfth Night ; but
l>oth of these appeared after Even/ Man in
hit Ilnmor, which was in 1598 essentially a
new thing in native comedy. Shakespeare's
comedy is never quite what Jonson's was, pre-
eminentlv satiric and didactic. To Jonson the
end and aim in comedy was the ridicule of folly
and e\erv form of pretension, affectation, and
cant; the exhibition of the comic hideousness
of lust, avarice, and dishonesty. Intolerant of
ever}' kind of folly and humbng, his comedy is
the whip wherewith he scourged what he liated
and despised. Herein lay both the intonsitv
and the narrowness inherent in his scheme of
comic drama. He exhibits follies and vices
pitilessly, minutely, aspect after aspect, and
bids us not so much laugh as scorn and
loathe. Indeed, it is almost too serious
for laughter. We can laugh somewhat at
Bobadill and Kitely, for in Fa'cvi) Man in
hi.s Humor there is a certain geniality of
manner. But this disappears in the later
comedy ; the scourging is too terrific, and the
exposure too brutal for laughter. Who can
laugh .'it Corvino ? Even the roaring humours
of Bartholome-a) Fair are grim in the memory,
'i'luoughout his comedies Jonson stands apart,
an unsympathetic showman, an Asper, con-
ten)ptuous and wrathful. His ridicule trembles
always (m the verge of denunciation. Wc
cannot laugh heartily at what we despise, and
Jonson himself is not amused, or only giimlv.
Volpnne is a tragedy rather than a comedy, and
liartholomezi) Fair a farce that Juvenal might
have written.

But, after all, we have no right to demand
laughti T of .Jonson, still less a creative power
given to Shakes])eare alone among dramatists.
II muhI be i-enienibei'ed that Jonson the satirist,
tlic censor, (h'd not n'(|uire for his purposes the

cieation of complex human Iwings. Where the
object is the satire of real tvpes, complete
human figures demanding sympathy, and un-
typical in proportion to their individuality,
are out of place. And by comparison with
those of any other Elizabethan dramatist than
Shakespeare, how rich and vivid to us are
Jonsonls portraits !

Jonson is by far the most intellectual of
Elizabethan dramatists, save Shakespeare, and
by right of his masculine wit and energy he
occupies to this day, by acclamation, the V'ice-
P^esident^s chair. Every scene of his great
comedies has a concentrated force, a drastic
wit, an irony, a sublime commcm sense, a grip
of detail, a vind intensity, hardly to be
paralleled. The conception and construction of
Volponc, The Akhemist, and Barthohmew Fair
are alike triumphs of imagination and grasp.
In exactness of observation where humanity
alone is concerned, Jonson matches Shakespeare,
and in constructive power he stands first of all.
At his highest points, in Volpone and in Sir
Epicure Mammon, his imagination has created
transcendent and unique figures, in which the
comic and the horrible meet and are one.

Cireat writei' and great Elizal)ethan though
he is, Jonson remains something of an alien
in English letters. From the mind of his great
contemporary he stands as mucli aloof as an
Arab stands from a Persian. He makes one
capital mistake — that of thinking that English
Art would best achieve its aim by assimilating
or appropriating what was Ijest in the Greco-
Latin literature. He forgot that whenever a
foreign work is finely translated an opportunity
(probably unique, so rare is the planetary con-
junction required for the production of really
fine work) is missed of producing an original
creative effort of a high order.

The leai-ned George Chapman (15.59—1634),
doi/cn of Elizabethan dramatists, gave his most
noted plays to the world simultjuieously with
the gi-eat dramas of Shakespeare's prime, Ix'l ween
1600 and 161!3. He had a considerable share
in the comedy Ea.tlxcard Ho, containing those
refiections on the Scots which gave him and
his collaborator Ben Jonson so nnich trouble.
This was in 1605, and in the same year
appeared his best comedy, Af/ Foo/.i, wliich
owes, however, its unusual excellence of
construction entirely to Terence. But
Chapman's lx;st work is in those tragedies
which he founded on incidents in contem-

DEKKER AND MARSTON

117

porary Frcndi liistorv. The Due dc Hiroii,
whose name liiul already heeii biken in
vain by Shaivespeare in Love's Lnixmr's Lost,
perished on tlie scaffold in lfiO!2. ChajjinaiTs
two plays of The Cn>ixp'iriu\ij and Tnigedjj of
Byron, forming one continuous drama in ten
acts, were written probably as early as 1(505,
though they were not published until HiOS.
Two other plays of a similar type, Bu.wij
(VAtnJm.i and The linrngc of lhis\y/ d\inibotn,
belonging respectively to 1607 and l(Jl:3, are
replete with midnight conspiracy, mystery,
murder, and Machiavellisnuis. In sonx' of
the splendid rlietorie which is inlaid in
his speeches. Chapman, perhaps, more easily
approaches Shakespeare than any of his fellow
dramatists. But as regards dramatic ett'ect, he
is seldom reminiscent of Shakespeare even in his
least inspired moments, for instance, in T'lmon
of At/im.s'. Chapman seems to have no idea
whatever of the need for rapidity of action on
the stage; he is tediously long-winded, his
puppets do not talk, they make speeches. Yet,
now and again, amidst verbosity, over-emphasis,
antl emphatic commonplace, there comes a
speech so magniticently inspired that we caimot
help regarding Cliapman as one of the greatest
poets of the Elizalx'than di-ama. 'J'ake the
following passage, for example :

Give me a spirit that on this life's i-oug-li spa
Loves to have his sails tilled with a lusty wind
Even till his sail-yards trenihle, his masts crack,
And his rajit sliip run on lier side so low
Tliat she drinlcs water and her keel plonglis air.

A colleague of both Jonson and Chapman in
Eu.itward Ho was John Marston (l.^T()' — l(),'i4),
who was educated at Coventry and Krasenose,
Oxford, took orders, and in KilG became
vicar of Christchurch, Hampshire. He resigned
his living in 1631 and died on June ^5th three
years later, in the parish of Aldermanbiny.
Personally, Marston seems to have been at feud
with most of his fellow dramatists, con-
spicuously with Ben Jonson, in whose Poetaster
and Revels he appears respectively as the con-
temptible Crispinus and the pretentious cad
Hedon ; his satires called The S'courgv of
[lllainij, 1598, bespeak a lofty disdain for the
whole hmnan race. There is great turgidity
and violence about his tragedies, despite their
occasional trenchancy of expression. But he is
for ever straining his style a point too high.
' Dekker was the Demetrius Fainiiusj tlie rank

'{'here is something suspect about the harshness
and bitterness of Marston which Ix^comes monoto-
nous, and as.sumes the outlines of a pose. His
two comedies. The Mah-ontnd and 'The Dideh
Coiirte::aii, 1604-5, are on the whole decidedly
better reading than his tragedies, such as Antonio
and Menkhi{\(]02) and SophnnMa (1606). The
extravagance of Marston's tragedic rant was
not improbably glanced at in Shakespeare's
ancient Pistol. His work remains a glaring
example of the extravagance, misuse of genuine
power, and lack of taste, \^ liich mars so nmch
of the Elizabethan drama.

Of Thomas Dekker we know little, save that
he oscillated pretty steadily between Grub
Street, the Counter and King's Bench prisonsj
and worked diligently foi' most of his life,
both in partnership and alone, as playwright
and pamphleteer, Dekker |Mrsscsse<l an un-
rivalled knowledge of the town, and he was,
with Heywood, the chief of those jwpular city
dramatists who depended more upon the
groundlings and apprentices for applause than
upon the mixed West End audience, with a
strong sprinkling of nobility, to which Shake-
speaie more espw-ially addresses himself. This
group of dramatists, which Ben Jonson lull I in
special disdain,' was reinfoiX'e<l from time to
time by such men asllowley, Anthonv .Munday,
Day, Marston, and Middleton. .Vll these
writers wrote much in collaboration, and were
easily diverted from the drama to produce
pageants, panegyrics, and anv other form of
literature that would pay. Dekker displavs in
his prose works gi'eat talents of observation and
descriptive narration ; and in his plays, writes
Professor Saintsbury, "a most charming drama-
tic genius, a little, as is the wont of the time,
chaotic and irregular, but sweet and pathetic,
as is no contemporary sa\e the master of all,
especially in the delineation of womcMi's char-
acter, while he has both blank verse and lyric
touches and flashes, not seldom well sustained,
of divinest poetry." This reads like an attempt
to see Dekker w ith the eyes of Lamb, who said
that there was poetry enough in Dekker for
anything. And there certainly are rich veins
of poetry in Dekker, especially of the lyrical
oixler ; but, as a vhole, his plays have much
of the old primitive chaos about them. Thev
take us back to the tmdeveloped drama of the
early 'nineties rather than to the brilliant
comed\- of Twelfth Night and Everij Man in
slanderer and mere " play-dresser " in Poetaster.

118

THOMAS MIDDLETON

/(?.9 Humor. Tliey revert in type to medleys
such as Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or The
Old U'nr.s' Talc., if they do not, indeed, go
still further back half-\^ay to the moralities of
John Heywood. Something in the nature of a
di-amatie parable «as deemed specially appro-
priate to the l^ndon apprentices from the
eailiest times down to George Bnrnicell, and
from Geora;e BannceU down to the latest Drurv
Lane melodrama. This parabolic quality is
seen very dearly in Dekiver's most popular
dramas, such as Old FoHunatus, given at Christ-
mas, 1599, The Shoemalers Holiday of the
same date, and ITie Honed Whore, in two parts,
of a few years later.' Dekkcr seems to write
most happily and easily when he is in a hurry,
and has not to ca.st alxiut for his material;
his good-humoured realism is then .seen at its
best, whereas, when he tries to be impre.ssive,
he is nearly always conventional. He deserves
some credit as one of the very few Elizaliethan
playwrights who cared to Ixase their drama on
the actual life they saw about them.

Another writer who comes into this group
as a utility dramatist, following such men as
Munday, Chettle, Haughtou, and Dekker, from
whom he derived several charactei-i.stics, was
Thomas Middleton, a gentleman of Cray's Inn,
who turned .scribbler, tried iiis hands in most
kinds of writing for the market, obtained a small
post in the city a.s chronologer in \&10, and died
in 1627. His most fertile period of composition
was l)etween 1607 and I61], when he wTote
The Pho'nij\ Mu-huelnuis Term, The Mayor of
Qu'inhoroiigh, A Trick to Catch the Old One,
The Family of Imvc, YmirFlvc Gnllantu, A Mad
World, my Mastera, ;uid The Roaring Girl, this
last in collaboration with ]3ekkcr. All these
were designed to hold the mirror up to contem-
poiiiry fashions and foibles ; lience his plays
fonn an invalual)ie tieasurc-housc for the anti-
quary.^ "Possessing a knowledge of life in
London only n'valled l)y that of Dekker, he
knew liow to i-eprixhice his own experience in

a dramatic form. Bawds, panders, harlots,
usurers, j)awnbrokei"s, gulls, gallants, gamblers,
doctors, judges, linen-drapers, and apprentices
crowd and bustle through the dialogue of his
comedies with a vigorous zest which must have
been highly palatable to the spectators of the
time, and perhaps no English dramatist has
inherited so much of the prosaic imitative spirit
of the new comedy at Athens." Middleton often
worked in conjunction with a professional actor-
dramatist, William Rowley ; Itowley influenced
him in tlie direction of a gentler type of
character-drawing in addition to writing the
first scene and underplot of A Fair Quai'rel,
the first part of A World To.tt at Tenniji, and the
first and last scenes as well as the underplot of
The Changeling, by far Middleton's finest play.
Th^e. Changeling, written about 1622, proves
decisively to nuxlern critics that Middleton's
real strength lay in tragedy ; but he has left
only one other powerful essay in this line,
the undated ti.igedy of Women Bexcare Women.
The central situation in The Changeling is
magnificently conceived. De Flores, a deformed
scoundi'el of deepest dye, has a passion for
Beatrice (the heroine), who loathes him.
Beatrice has been plighted to Alonzo, a noble
gentleman ; unhappily her heart h.id already
been Irestowed on one Alsemero. De Flores
tempts Beatrice by offering to put Alonzo out
of the way. She consents. De Flores, hitherto
grovelling in himiility, intrudes into her
chaml»r on tlie day of the wedding between
Beatrice anil Alsemero, and insists on the
satiation of his hellish passion, to the gratifi-
cation of which he connwls her by threats of
divulging all. Here occurs a truly great
scene — one of the finest in English drama.
Alsemero nevertheless suspects, and De Flores
only prevents punishment by himself applying
the cold steel — first to Beatrice, then to himself.
Thomas Heywood, gentleman, born in Lin-
coln.shire somewhere al)out 1.'574, and educated
at retcrhousc, Cambridge, was one of the most

' Old Fortiiixiliis, for inst.Tiicp, derived from an old Gorman sourop, is a regular fal>le, illustratiiifj tlie misuse
of rirlies and the, blindness of man when lie is rlx-a-ri.'/ witli liis destiny. Tliere is a frood comic servant in this
called Sliadow, hut hardly any other characterisation to s|)eak of There is a f{ood deal, however, in the second
jart of y/i*- IliniH.st Wharf, where we have another morality presented, this time rather as a romance than an
extravagan-Ai. In the lirst part of this play, Hellafront, the heroine, is converted from her evil life by the
elocjuenl jileadings of llippolito ; the second, and much the better, part represents the converted courtesan
defendint; tlie position she has piined a^fainst the assaults of Hippolito himself. It is Hippolito now who has
fallen .iway fnmi his former lofty staiulard of virtue, (irossly improbable as the plot is, the characters are
powerfully realised, and some of the scenes deeply nuiviiiff owinfj to the simplicity and directness of the jrathas.

' His able Giimr at Chr.^.'.r, with dan(feroUH political satire in it, was jfiven in 1(124 to crowded audiences ; it
shows what a fine classical scholar -Middleton was - " Imrdly .second to Ben himself."

THOMAS HEYVVOOn

110

prolific playwiighlN of James I.'.s reign. \lv
wrote a ytvoavi Apologi/ fur the Stage in IGlii,
tli'ftMRlini; the theatre from the attacks of
Gosson and his riii'ilan successors, who de-
nounccd play-going. He himself joined the
Admirars men as an actor alwiit ISiW, the
year which saw Kyd's death and veiy jirobably
the first production at the Curtain of lioriia)
and Ju/ki. Ileywood soon became lx,'tter
known as a lightning playwright, a kind of
Elizabethan Scriljc, rather than a,s a player.
lie claims to have knocked together in all
some 2^0 plays, written to meet the stage
exigencies of the moment, and printed or not
as chance directed. Of these only some twenty-
two have come down to us. In liis homely con-
ception of his vocation, in his uncritical attitude
towards his material, in his frecjuent crudity
and carelessness, lie takes us Ijtick to the old-
fashioned harle(|uin type of dramatic produc-
tion, adapted to suit the momentary pressure
of the theatrical market rather than aimed at
fulfilling any theory of dramatic art. I lis plays
are said to have been loosely and rapidly com-
posed in taverns, and this history of their
origin accords well enough with the elementary
underlining of every situation, and with the
general slovenliness of workmanship.

There is a wistful tenderness, a sense of the
whimsical conti^ariety of human nature and of
the weathercock variability of human passion,
which give his most notable play, A Woman
Killed with K'indms.f (produced 1603, printed
1()07), an almost modern note. Tliis Ix-longs
to the category of what Diderot and Mercier
subsequently called bourgeois drama, enabling
us to be the spectators of homely domestic
scenes "of everyday life. The singular merit
of the play lies in the (juiet beauty of the
idea of the ending and in the truth and
pathos of the chai'acter of Frank ford. It is
clumsily and carele^ssly constructed, and the
essential figure of the wife is drawn with a
faint and vacillating outline. She sins and
repents and dies alike without justification.
When Heywood came to write his next Ijest
play. The English Traveller, published in 1633,
he was more under the influence of Ben Jonson
than, as heretofore, of Shakespeare. The best
scenes deal with the unselfish love of an old
gentleman of tlie Frankford family, recently
wedded to a young wife, for a very good young
man called Geraldine. Grief is brought upon all
the characters owing to the somewhat Quixotic

behaviour of this young man and the intrigues
of a friend whom he introduces into his patron's
lio\ise. Hut tiiere are not many men in the
wiiole world so unsuspecting as Frankford and
old Wincott. The [)lay has some of the (]uiet
pathos of its piedecessor, but an undue strain
is ])ut upon our credulity, and matters are
made worse by a by-plot of the most whimsic'al
nature derived in the main from the Maslclhi/ut
of Flautus. It contiiiiis a notable bravura
passage, however, describing tire drunken hallu-
cinations of a I)and of roysterers o\er their t-ups.
The most notable of Ileywood's remaining
comedies of domestic life are The lAinraghire
U'it(h(s\ The U'i.sr Woman of Ilog.sdon, Fortune
hji Land and Sea, The Fair Maid of the Ex-
change, and 17w Fair Maid of the We-it ; while
among his old-fashioned "histories" are
Juhcard IV. and Jf/juu A'noza nut ine //on, Kmno
Nohodij. Some of his best poetry is inwoven
in the four Age.s, of Mhich Ileywood was very
proud. He died about 1650.

John Welister, who, |)utting aside Shake-
speare and Marloue, probably ranks first among
tlie tragic dramatists of our great dramatic
epoch, was born in London, probably about
L'jSO. In 1602 he Ix'gan writing plays in
()artnershi}) for the company of which Hens-
lowe was the presiding spirit. In 1604 he
was employed l)y the King's company to make
additions to JNIarston's Malcontent, and a little
later he was iussociated with Dekker in the
jjlays of Wcsticard Ho! and Xoiihxcard Ho!
in whicli the influence of 'J'he Merry Wive.i
(f Wind.svr has l)een traced. But Webster's
title to fame rests almost exclusively ujjon
tile two great tragedies of revenge, Tlie White
Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, Ixjth of
which were almost certainly written, mainly
under influence of Kyd, Shakespetire, and
Marston, within five years of Shakespeare's
death. In the whole of Eliwdjethan drama
there are no plays outside Shakespeare which
show such rare and intense imaginative power
as these two. Tlieir chamcl-house atmosphere,
their sinister suggestiveness, the gloom of their
imaginative cynicism, and their appalling scent
of churchyard mould, put them in a place
apart. Webster ^vas, no doubt, profoundly
influenced by Shakespeare — by Shakespeare
especially as the delineiitor of the cruelty of
passion, the Shakespeare of Othello, Measure
for Measure, and Antoni/ and Cleopatra ; while
in his romantic idealism, and his appeal to

120

JOHN WEBSTER

sheer lioiror, lie tonnetis latlier with Marlowe
and Kyd and Chettle than with his immediate
contemporaries; though lie shares the fondness
of Beaumont and Fletcher for iiun-e or less
illicit themes. The White Devil, 01 TIw
Tragedij of the Life and Death oj Miloriu
Cominbona, the lanious Venetian courtesan,
was first published a.s acted by the Queen's
servants in 161!^. ITie earlv scenes of this
play introduce us at once to some of Webster's
most distinctive characteristics. His close
imitation of Shakes{x>are is seen in the manner
in which he blends prose and verse, and uses
rhymed couplets at every pause in the action ;
unlike Shakespeare, however, he does not
understand how to motive these devices. The
atmosphere of impending fate which Webster
loves is achieved instantaneously in Act I.,
where Flamineo is introduced as pander pro-
curing intimacy between his .sister Vittoria,
who is married to Camillo, and Brachiano,
who is married to Isalxilla de' Medici. Flamineo
is a Protestant Englishmairs conception of a
countryman of Borgia, and his reproaches to
his mother when she interferes with his schemes
are not merely revolting in their cynicism, but
perfectly horrible. Webster never attenuates
the horrors and seldom graduates the intensity
of his effects. The drama progresses by the
crude method of dumb show, in which Vittoria's
husband and Brachiano's wife are both seen
to meet their deaths in a childishly impossible
manner. A trial scene, ecjually impressive and
imreal, concludes with Vittoria's condemnation
to a house of convertites or fallen women,
from which slie is successfully rescued by her
liaramour, Brachiano, preparatory to a general
butchery of all the leading characters, making
no empty form of Giovanni's concluding behest,

'• lleiiiove the bodies." If we judge the plav by
the ordinary external tests, we can hardly fail to
come to the conclusion that in the endowments
which go to make up a great dramatist, Web-
ster is wholly lacking. The construction of 'J'he
White Devil is either chaotic or, with its cUnnb
shows and apparitions, merely childish. The
po\\ er of characterisation shown is diminutive —
sense of the actual curiouslv distorted, humour
totidly absent. There is romantic feeling and
some intense poetry, but no breadth in the pre-
sentation ; everywhere an over-elaboration ot
detail and a consistent disregard of cnsriiible.

Webster's second play, The Duehess of Malfi,
was first printed in 162(3, though it was
j)robably acted by the Queen's servants six
years earlier, and may have been written
about 1613. Though flawed bv grotesque
incident and a complexity of horror similar
to that of The White Devil, this play is far
more capable of holding the imagination
consecutively than its predecessor. The story
on which the ])lay is bfised had been told
respectively in Italian, French, and English
by Bandello, Belleforest, and Fainter. And
the tale is referred to as that of " the lady of
the Strachey " in Shakesjjeare's Twelfth Night,
while it was also used by Lope de Vega in Kl
Majordomo de la Duqitesa de Amalfi} Webster
admits no cheerful or lively variation into
his lugubrious tragedy, which is everywhere
encrusted \\\\\\ sombre imagery, and made
hideous by the parapliernalia of torture. His
object seems to Ix; to distil from it the
maximum of tragic horror of which it is sus-
ceptible. Webster's imaginative writing is
magnificent in certain scenes, but he is strangely
dependent and imitative. He imitates Shake-
speare, Bacon, Montaigne, and himself, and

' Baudello relates lion a wi(l<i«e(l |)riiu-e.-'S of Anial/i who retains licr beauty, and "illi it a fear lest by
ic-niarria^c sbe sbould twtoiiie oiiee more a ci])her in her own couit, decides to inarry a Kulijcct, and selects for
llie |iiir|H>se her own iiitcndant or steward, Antonio de IJologiia, Antonio being not only liandsoiiie, hut also
affectionate and discreet. The wedded pair live happily for some years, in the course of which a son is boru to
the nuchess, without exciting suspicion or causing the circumstance of their union to he known outside a very
small circle. At the birth of their second child the Duchess is less prudent, and her Inother, the ('ardinal r>f
,\rrag(in, hears reports which cause him to place a numlM^' of spies in her household. Antonio seeks safety in
a temporary letirement at Ancoiia. Tliere, however, he is joined by the Duchess, who is rescdved to brave out
Ibe matter «itl] her kinsfolk. Such an insult to the family l>ride is deeply resented by her brothers. Tlicy
liring influence to effect the expulsion of the Duchess and her hnusebohl from -Vncona, and set horsemen to
I'olbiw (he fugitives. Perceiving tliat they are being tracked, the Duchess entreats .\ntonio to leave her on his
swift horse, hoping thus to avert the worst conse(|uences of her brothers' rage. But such hopes are ill-founded ;
the ])ursuers, having cai)tured her, cruelly murder both the Duchess anil her infants in a solitary castle by
the wayside. Antonio falls a victim to their hmi'i in Milan a few days later. This is one of the sombre
traditions with which Boccaccio anil Bandello arc wont to diversify their coarser but more enlireniiig
fables. It just suited the genius and temper of Webster, leu of the personages are butchered in this
play, eight in Tlif Whilr Di'vil.

TOURNEUR

121

in The Diwhess he ransacks Sidney''s Arcadia
for figurative passages and metapiiorical ex-
pressions, incorporating whole passages of
Sidney ''s prose, just as Shakespeare does with
North\s Plutarch in CorioluniM.

Cyril Tourneur (1575 — 1626)^ was another
student of the drama of his time who threw
in his lot with the cultivators of the frlisnn, a
large tribe of Elizabethans and Jacobeans, from
Kyd, Marlowe, and the author of Arden of
Feversham, down to Middleton, Webster, and
Ford, reinforced occasionally by Fletcher,
Marston, and even the staid Massinger. A
noble brood ! says Hazlitt ; but we cannot
agree with him that Shakespeare was of it — at
least after his early work on a small portion of
Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare, it is true, was
tempted to use the material of the terror-
mongers — in Hamlet, for instance ; but with
what a magician's wand did he alone transform it !

Cyril Tourneur is only really memorable on
account of two plays. The first to be published
1607) was The Revengers Tragwdie, As it
hath been sundry times acted by the Kings
Majesties Servants. Four years later was pub-
lished The Atheisfs Tragedie ; or, the Honest
Man^s Revenge, As in divers places it hath often
beene acted. Written by Cyril Tourneur. The
order of publication was probably the inverse of
that in which the plays were composed. The
Atheisfs Tragedie must have been written after
1600, as there is a reference to Dekker's For-
tune's Tennis of that date, but not much later
than 1603-4, while the siege of Ostend was still
in men''s minds. A third drama by Tourneur,
The Nobleman, licensed to Edward Blount on
February 15th, 1612, and acted at the court by
the King's men on February 23rd, 1611-12, is
said to have been destroyed by Warburton's
cook.

The plays of Tourneur suggest a deliberate
attempt made by the dramatist to satisfy the
lust of his countrymen for Italian horrors.
Details of villainy, monstrous vice, and poison-
ing were heaped up for this purpose : thus in
The Revenger''s Tragedy, for instance, the story
of the poisoning of Louisa Strozzi for resisting

Duke Alexander's lust is woven into that of the
duke's murder by his pretended pander, Loren-
zino. 11ie crime of a country which was believed,
like Italy, to represent the brain of Europe and
to possess an a?stheti(; monopoly of the world
fascinated the coarser-fibred Englishman of the
time. Men like Tourneur could lay themselves
out to satisfy this morbid curiosity, which the
theatrical managers of the day fostered by every
means in their power. The tragedy of blood
thus acquired a strong vogue and had a large
number of ardent votaries. A needy artist in
the first place, Tourneur in the course of his
attempts to supply lurid intensity would .seem
to have lost his own equilibrium. A genuine
feeling of the desolation of evil oppressed
him, and with the true Elizabethan gift of
converting emotion into expression, he utters
cries not wholly grotesque nor insincere, but
dark and lamentable as the moaning of despair;
his landscape is volcanic, unrelieved by a single
clear spot on the horizon. What surprises
one in this close and stinking atmosphere is
the suppleness and beauty of Tourneur's verse.
It must have been a depraved curiosity which
has consigned the imagination of a poet to
such a crypt of sin and evil as this ! Yet there
is no mistaking here and there that the strain
emerging is that of a true poet. In Tourneur
and Ford we must be content to recognise the
eccentricity of a great imaginative movement.
John Ford, the younger son of a Devonshire
gentleman of independent means, was baptised
at Ilsington, near Ashburton, on April 17th,
1586, the year of Sidney's death. He was thus
almost of an age with Massinger, though his
dramatic career presents few points of resem-
blance to that of the hard-working and
practical playwriglit. He seems to have been
a short time at Oxford, and was certainly
admitted to the Middle Temple in 1602.
He wrote verses, . prose tracts, and a masque
called Honor Triumphant (1606), and years
elapsed before he began to apprentice himself
to the stage by putting a hand to some
of the loose constructions of Dekker and
Rowley ; a small fee would doubtless have put

' The first attempt at a connected account of Tourneur's very obscure life was made by the present
writer in the Dictionary of National Biogruphy. He was probably the son of Richard Turnorj a lieutenant at
the Brill in Holland— one of Vere's soldiers. Cyril wrote a panegyrical elegy upon Sir Francis V'ere in
1609. A connection with the Cecil family procured him a post in tlie Low Countries, similar to that held
by the poet Josua Sylvester. Sir Edward Cecil's arrival in llolland seemed of good augury to the dramatist,
and he secured a post as secretary to that general in tlie Cadiz expedition. Unfortunately it proved a com-
plete failure, and Tourneur died on the way home at Kinsakj in Ireland, P'ebruary 28th, 1620.

122

JOHN FORD

the experience of those redoubtable stage car-
penters at the disposal of any educated amateur
who aspired to theatrical renown. It was not
until 1628, when he was well over forty, that
Ford felt himself in a position to furnish a
piece for the theatre in his own name ; The
Lovers Melancholy, as the play was called, was
printed in 1629. It is a thoroughly imitative
piece, full of reminiscences of Shakespeare and
Fletcher, with a masque suggested by Burton's
Anatomy, and some buffooneries which sink
below the exiguous standard exacted from
Rowley. But it served its purpose admirably
in showing Ford the groove in which his narrow
genius could most advantageously work — that,
namely, of inexorable tragedy. The great
themes of tragedy had already been exliausted.
The naivete, the directness of passion, the in-
terpolation of the burlesque, the bewildering
alternation of motive — all had been tried and
exhausted. Webster had decked the stage with
cypress and gi-ave clothes, and had elicited
sympathy for a harlot almost as fascinating
as wicked. With the deliberate intention of
making his audience's flesh creep. Ford, un-
shackled by Webster's sense of moral retribu-
tion, determined with all the sang-froid of
the amateur artist to go farther afield — much
farther. In 'Ti* Pity shss a Whore, first pub-
lished in 1633, Ford treats of the guilty love of
Giovanni for his sister Annabella.

The moralist who regards this terrible play
wiU hardly be conciliated by the unmistak-
able power which it exhibits. But it is marked
throughout by an economy of rhetoric, and by
a concentrated intensity in the dialogue which
is extremely rare outside Shakespeare. TTie
guilty figures of brother and sister stand out
in bold relief with indubitable grandeur of
outline, and the poet invests them, in spite
of their depravation, with a kind of heroism
which places them far above the comparatively
sordid figure of the husl)and. Ford had evi-
dently noted the sympathy which Webster
had evoked for a character so thoroughly
corrupt as that of Vittoria Corombona, and he
represents here the same superficial innocence
of tone which gives a semblance of I)cauty and
of the ideal to evil, the most ugly and re-
j)ulsive. ITie poison of this poetic treatment
of mortal sin is thus dissolved in a cup of
almost seductive sweetness. None of the poetic
force with wliich this play is so directly charged
is frittered away upon irrelevant decoration.

The emotion in it is absorbing. It may be
purchased at too high a price ; but it is centred
and unified with almost tlie same intentness
that is to be found in Othello. To puU the
bow as tight again and to do so in a legitimate
manner proved beyond Ford's capacity. The
best attempt he made was that in his next
play. The Broken Heart, printed in 1633. In
this an ingenious plot is directed with single
aim upon a situation in the fifth act in which
the heroine is subjected to an intensity of
suffering, the accumulation of which upon the
seemingly stoical heroine has the effect of
killing her outright. The play is well con-
structed and finely moulded in all its externals,
but the characters are lifeless. They have no
existence apart from the immediate circum-
stances in which we find them. And the
scattered beauties, not excluding those of the
famous scene in which Calantha hears suc-
cessively of the deaths of her father, her friend,
and her brother, will not compensate for the
sheer extravagance of this denouement. It is
extraordinary to find a critic of Lamb's nice
humour and discernment working himself up
into a fervoui' over this scene, which ends thus :
"The expression of this transcendent scene
almost bears me in imagination to Calvary
and the Cross " !

Ford wrote several other single-handed plays.
Of these, Love''s Sacrijice is a coarse tissue of
passion and revenge not wholly dissimilar to
the plays which had preceded it. Ths Lady's
Trial, acted in 1638, shows that Ford had not
altogether abandoned the idea of developing
a vein of pleasantry, conspicuously absent
though this had l)een from his previous
attempts. His by-plots generally are the
reverse of entertaining. The chronicle history
of Perkin \Varbeck is Ford's one attempt in
the direction of historical drama. Ford had
the best material of any dramatic chronicler of
the age — Bacon's admirable Life of Henry VII.
But Ford's sense of humour and power of
developing character were whoUy inadequate
to the competent treatment of such a theme.
Ford's vei'sification is a good deal more Shake-
spearean than that of most of his contem-
poraries. It is fluent without a deficiency of
depth, while it sacrifices no shade of meaning
to the requirements of metrical composition.
The lyrics in The Broken Heart display a
melodious fancy. As a general rule Ford is far
less prone to experiments in his verse, metrical

MASS INGE 11

123

or immetrical, than either Webster or Fletcher,
and his verse, owing to its masttuhne character,
approximates more nearly to the versification
of Cyril Tourneur.

Philip Miissinger, the son of a gentleman
in the service of the Earl of Pembroke, was
bom at Salisbury in 1583, studied at Oxford
(St. Alban Hall) between 1602 and 1606, when
he made his way to London, though he is not
known to have connncnced playwright until
nearly ten years later. He probably worked
his way up like Shakespeare, though with
much greater deliberation ; it is known that
he began as a play mender and renovator.
Few writers surpassed him in practical experi-
«nce of stage requirements. He wrote a very
large number of plays in collaboration. He
flattered Shakespeare by frequent imitation,
and was rietcher''s principal assistant. A
good many of his own pieces have been de-
stroyed, but fifteen at least of the plays which
he wrote unaided have come down to us. Ho
lived on almost to the closure of the drama
by the Puritans ; was found dead in his bed
in his Bankside lodgings one March morning
of 1640 ; and was buried in the neighbouring
church of St. Saviour, near the author of
The Faithful Shepherdess.

Massinger's plays, as a whole, are marked
by an even skill in workmanship. He is clever
at composition, prolific of rhetorical blank
verse suited to almost every requirement, and
a consummate master of all the professional
technique of the stage. He excels in the
somewhat mechanical character-designing of the
Caroline period. He is a master of stage vei-se
and histrionic eloquence. For satire, especially
for political satire, he has an exceptional knack ;
but he strangely lacks that overmastering
passion, that brief moment of inspiration which
seems to have been a birthmark with almost
all his contemporaries among writers for the
stage. His verses somewhat miss the catch of
the Elizabethan manner. He was a stranger
to that alacrity with which even a dramatic
underling of that period seemed to tumble to
a tunable lay. He is never to be seen reeling
under the impulse of the vehement emotion
which breathes in the spontaneous, if too
lawless, vigom- of the older race. The facility of
mere convention had replaced the vital energy
which characterised the immediate successors
-of Shakespeare.

The plays that Massinger wrote unaided

appear to have been written during the
eighteen years between 1618 and 1636. The
first of these is The Duke of Milan, a sombre
tragedy based upon a story, which is partly
historical but more imaginary, on the fall of
Ludovico Sforza. In this play, as in The
Kmperor of tlie East, written twelve years later,
the hero, who is a man of passionate and
ungovernable temper, unjustly suspects his wife
of infidelity. No dramatist of the time repeats
himself more than Massinger is in the habit of
doing. He also repeats others — so many
genres of play had been utterly used up.
The most practical of all contemporary play-
wrights, he developed strict habits of literary
economy, economy not only of passion, but
also in forms of rhetoric, in which his plays
ordinarily abound — none more so than his early
tragedies. The Dulce of Milati, The Unnatural
Combat, The Renegade, and The Roman Actor.
Some of the scenes in this last are finely con-
ceived. Domitian the emperor plays a part
in stage tragedy and kills outright his rival
in love, the actor Paris, who had previously
defended the dignity of his art with success
against an impeachment by the Senate. Of
semi-political plays, Massinger perpetrated
several, the most remarkable being the two
tragi-comedies. The Bondman, acted in 1623,
and The Maid of Honour, played at the
Phoenix, in Drury Lane, somewhere about
1630. In The Maid of Honour, Fulgentio,
the minion of Robert, King of Sicily, is
certainly meant for Buckingham.

Discouraged though Massinger often seems
and deficient in nervous edge, his observation
and satirical energy are sufficiently attested
by such a comedy as TJie City Madam
of 1632 ; but his greatest achievement un-
doubtedly is the racy Jonsonian comedy, A New
Way to Pay Old Debts, probably written in the
winter season of 1625-6, though not printed
until 1632. The play contains two character
types, Sir Giles Overreach, who is almost
worthy to rank with Volpone, and Justice
Greedy, a farcical figure hardly, if at all,
inferior to Morose. Both are superb stage
creations, and were the delight of leading
actors down to the collapse of the licensed
houses in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. The intrigue and construction are
alike of a thoroughly histrionic character.
The plot might have been taken direct from
the comedy of Terence, and it certainly owes

124

JAMES SHIRLEY

something nearer at hand to A Trick to Catch
the Old One. The satire concentrated into
tjie delineation of Overreach and Greedy is
unmistakably after the pattern of Ben Jonson,
even if it lacks Jonson's severe originality of
treatment. The vitality of the play is due,
of course, to the one stage figure of Sir Giles
Overreach. As with Tamburlaine, Barabas,
Shylock, Sir Epicure Mammon, the theme is
the energy and will-power of a single man
under the dominion of superhuman lust.
Massinger has none of the power of dealing
with an abstraction or creature of virtu in a
poetic manner as Marlowe or Shakespeare
had. But he atones to some extent for the
deficiency by his superabundance of stage
sense and his knowledge of what is due to
the part of Overreach as a lead of the first
magnitude. Few parts, undoubtedly, have
had such a great stage career as that of Sir
Giles Overreach.

The last of the giants of the English theatre
before the deluge of Puritanism, not a giant
in individual stature, but a direct continuator
of the tradition of Shakespeare, was James
Shirley. Bom in the City of London on
September 13th, 1596, Shirley was admitted to
Merchant Taylors" School in October, 1608, and
passed thence direct to St. Jolni^s College,
Oxford, four years later. Laud, who was
then president of the college, was interested in
Shirley's literary precocity, but is said to have
objected to a man with a large mole on
his face taking holy orders. Shirley migrated
to Catharine Hall, Cambridge, and there wrote
his graceful poem Narcissus in undisguised
imitation of Shakespeare's Venu,i arid Adonis.
About 1622 he abandoned the English Church
for that of Rome, and followed teaching as
a profession at St. Albans Grammar School.
At St. Albans about 1625 he wrote \qs first
successful comedy called Love Tricks. His
success in his new vocation might have led
to a place in the royal household, so high
in favour was gentlemanly comedy held at
court. But Shirley was a studious, literary
type of man who seems to have preferred
the study to the perils of court favour. Yet
Shirley's facile and modest temper won him
the favour of several persons of rank, and
of not a few of the contemporary wits and
dramatists such ;us Ford, Massinger, Habington,
Rand()]])h, and May. The successful produc-
tion of his plays was broken only by visits

to Ireland in 1636 and 1638. Three or four
of his plays were produced in Dublin, and
during the decline of the king's fortunes he
seems to have been settled obscurely in London.
Under the influence of the great blight which
befell all dramatic ambitions Shirley fell back
upon teaching a small school, while, accord-
ing to Wood, he spent much unacknowledged
labour as a drudge for the remorseless trans-
lator, John Ogilby. After Shirley had seen
much of the world in various conditions, he
and his second wife Frances were driven by
the dismal conflagration that happened in
London in 1666 from their habitation near
to Fleet Street into the parish of St. Giles's-
in-the-Field, where, overcome by the fright
and the losses they had sustained, they both
died, and were buried in one grave at St.
Giles's on October 29th, 1666. One of his
sons became butler at Fumival's Inn. Over
twenty comedies and half as many ti'agedies.
or tragi-comedies by Shirley are still extant.
Among the comedies The Wedding, first given
in 1626 ; Tlie Brothers, performed in the same
year; Hyde Pari-, acted 1632; The Gamester,
1634 ; and The Lady of Pleasure, 1635, are
among the most diverting. The plot of The
Gamester is said to have been partly suggested
by and the development highly approved by
his Majesty Charles I. The Merry Wives of
Windsor is said to have owed its inception ta
a royal suggestion taking the ordinary form
of a command. But The Gamester probably
stands alone in its reliance upon a fable that
emanated directly from the reigning sovereign,
though, like other fabulists of the period,
Charles I. seems to have been indebted to the
Italian novelUeri, probably in this case t»
the iiovelle of Celio Malespini. Of the
tragedies. The Traitor, first acted in 1631,
and Lovc''s Cruelty of the same year, vould
probably be preferred by most readers to-
Shirley's own favourite, The Cardinal, which
was apparently written in direct emulation of
Webster's Duchess of Malfi. Shirley was a
skilful constructor, and most of his plots were
of his own invention. But he stands in much
the same position to the two generations of
dramatists that preceded him as tiie Caracci
stood to the great floreal period of Italian art,
and it was almost inevitable that his talent
should feed on the imaginations of Shakespeare
and Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, antl AVebster.
He reproduces their style, their diction, and

A MIRACULOUS SPIUNGTIDE 125

even their tone, in much the same way as Sir vivacity, and is clothed in dehcate shades of
Walter Besant in his happier moments reflects grey and of green, but it lacks the azure and
something of the manner of Dickens or the purple of which the great masters could in
Thackeray. A natural taste and "elegant fit season be so lavish. It is interesting to
smoothness" of style came to the aid of his reflect that he might, conceivably, have been
adroitness, and he worked buoyantly upon present at the first performance of one of
the old lines. He was excellent at soli- Shakespeare's latest and of Dryden's earliest
loquies and descriptions, and had a genuine productions. From Marlowe to Shirley, in
sense of the picturesque. the short space of fifty years, a complete
It seems rather doubtful whether Shirley literary movement has been traversed. The
should take a place upon his own merits in greatest impulse that literary art has ever
the ckoriis vatiim of those days when poet known has risen, culminated, declined, and
and playwright were one. But he cannot finally worn itself out. Says Maeterlinck, " I
well be divorced from that fellowship, not should never finish if I had to cite the names
so much, as Lamb says, on account of any of all these dramatists, for never has humanity
transcendent genius in himself, but because blossomed so spontaneously and so abundantly
he was the last of a great race, all of whom in inexhaustible poetry, in beauty so multi-
spoke nearly the same language and had a form and so profound. One might fancy oneself
set of moral feelings and notions in common, in the midst of a miraculous springtide of the
The gradual exhaustion of the great talents human mind. Truly were those the days of
paved the way naturally for a continuation marvellous promise. One would have said that
of mediocre endowments such as that repre- humanity was going to develop into something
sented by Shirley. His work has plenty of altogether new." ^

' The editions of Beaumont and Fletcher are by Weber (1812), Alexander Dyce (11 vols., 184.5-6), and
the "Variorum editions" now in progress, one under the direction of A. 11. Bullen, the other issuing from
the Pitt Press. Ten principal plays were given in the Mermaid Series (2 vols., ed. Strachey). The studies
by Hazlitt and Lowell, and AslJey H. Tliorndike's Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (1901),
are also to be consulted.— The standard edition of Ben Jonson is that by William Gilford (9 vols.,
1816), reissued with additions by Cunningham in 1875. The best plays appeared in 3 vols, of the
Mermaid Series, 1893-5. The exploration of Jonson still remains very incomplete. There are suggestive
introductory studies by Swinburne (cf. Fortnightly, 1888), Herford (Mermaid edition), Symonds (Canterbury
Poets), Dowden, Schelling {Timber), and others ; a very useful introduction to Every Man in his Humor,
by H. B. Wheatley ; and there are copiously annotated American editions of The Alchemist (Hathaway),
Bartholomew Fair (Alden), The Staple of News (De Winter), and Poetaster (Mallory), among the " Vale
Studies" of 190.3-5. Add to these a brilliant causerie by T. E. Brown (New Review, xiv.). A competent
edition is expected of Prof Herford. — Of Marston there are editions by HaUiwell-Phillipps (18.56) and
A. H. Bullen (3 vols., 1887).— The standard edition of Middleton is also that of A. H. Bullen (8 vols.,
1885-6) ; and see the essays of Swinburne, Ellis, Wiggin on the Middleton-Rowley plays, and Hugo Jung
(1904). — Heywood's plays were edited by J. Pearson (6 vols., 1874), and in the Mermaid Series by Verity,
1888. — Webster's plays have been edited by Dyce (1830 and 1857), and re-edited by Hazlitt. His two best
plays were edited with those of Tourneur for the Mermaid Series by J. A. Symonds. See also Elmer E.
Stoll, John Webster: The Periods of hi^ Work (1905), and an interesting criticism of The White Deitil by
W. W. Greg (Mod. Lang. (Quarterly, December, 1900), who takes an extremely high view of the consummate
art of the construction. For Webster's filchings from Sidney see Charles Crawford in Note^ and Queries,
October, 1904. — There are editions of Massinger by Coxeter, Gifford, Hartley Coleridge (Massinger and Ford
1840), Cunningham, and a selection in the Mermaid Series (2 vols., ed. Symons, 1904) ; and for Massinger
the student is referred to Stephen's Hours in a Librury, Symons's Studies in Two Literatures, and Westminster
Review, 1899.— James Shirley (Dramatic Works, 6 vols., 18.33, and six plays. Mermaid Series, ed. Gosse) is
supplemented by Dr. Nissen's James Shirley (Hamburg, 1901). — Ford, Heywood, Dekker, and Cyril Tourneur
are sufficiently represented in the Mermaid Series. For the later dramatists generally, in addition to the
notes by Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, the student must refer first and foremost to the highly eulogistic
studies by Swinburne in his collected essays, and then to the works of Ward, Lowell, Mezieres, Jusserand,
and Bodenstedt (Shakespeare's Zeit-Genossen, Berlin, 1858).

CHAPTER X
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE.— I

" O all-seeing Light, and eternal Life of all things, to whom nothing is either so great that it may resist
or so small that it is contemned, look upon my miserie with thine eye of mercie, and let thine infinite power
vonchsafe to limite out some proportion of deliverance unto me, as to thee shall seem most convenient. Let
not injurie, O Lord, triumphe over me, and let my faults hy thy hands be corrected, and make not mine
unjuste euemie the minister of thy Justice. But yet, my God, if in thy wisdome, this be the aptest
chastizement for my inexcusable foDie ; if this low bondage be fittest for my over-hie desires ; if the pride
of my not-inough humble harte, be thu.^ to be broken, O Lord, J yeeld unto thy will, and joyfully embrace
what sorrow thou wilt have me suffer." — The famous prayer used by Charles L in Arcadia, Book III.

John Lyly — Sidney's Arcadia — Greene — Dekker — Nash — Nicholas Breton — Hall — Overbury — Earle —

James L — Bacon.

THE first author who ri.sked an original
novel in English on his own account had
a phenomenal success. This was a young man
of some twenty-five summers, a grandson of
the once terrible William Lilly, pedagogue and
grammarian. John Lyly, as he usually called
himself, was a Kentish man and was fresh from
Magdalen, Oxford, when in December, 1578,
he hatched the memorable novel Ewphues : Tlie
Anatomie of Wit. Tire resounding character
f)f the success achieved could hardly have been
foreseen by any one — even by John Lyly him-
self. For nearly fifteen years thenceforth lie
bet:ame arhiter eleganiiarium in all matters
jxTtaining to literature in the court of the Great
Queen. Recognised as the high priest of a
[jolitical and witty fashion, he not only en-
croached upon the attention paid by fashion-
able dames to the sit of a rufl^" or the health of
a pet dog, and imposed his very phrases and
sentiments upon their obedient lip.s, but he
wa.s even paid the sincerer homage of imitation
by the greatest wits of the age, including not
only Greene and Lodge, but William Shake-
speare himself. The supplementary volume
known as Euphucs and his Engkind ai)[)eai-ed
in 1580. Like More's Hythlodayc, Euphues
is a mora] philosopher who holds forth om-
ni.sciently on religion, travel, government,
marriage, ethics, and every subject under the
sun. Unlike Hythlodaye, lie is an ineffable
bore.

126

Lyly^s highly artificial style of ornamenta-
tion has proved extremely interesting to literary
archiEologists. In it are to be found, as in a
meeting-place, many affectations of contem-
porary stylists on the continent, many hints
from Lyly^s contemporary, the rhetor, Arthur
Wilson, and not a few supposed peculiaritie.s
of Lyly's imitators and successors. What
attracted Lyly's readers in the 'eighties of the
sixteenth century, however, was not merely
his extravagantly elaborate stvle, but also hii->
high didactic manner and his judicious flattery
of Englishmen and more particularly English-
women. Great a-s was his influence among the
ladies of the court (who, we are told, were all
Lyly''s scholars), it was short-lived, and the
novelist fluttered about the court a sovu'ed and
discontented man until, upon his death in
November, 1606, hardly any one knew any-
thing either of the writer or his book. Neglect
was its fate for over two centuries. Yet its
importance in the history of English letters
is something considerable, for in it first we
leave epic and medix-val tales of chivalry, and
approach the novel of manners. There is no
longer tjuestion of Artliur and his marvellous
knights, of Roland or Palmerin, of Guy of
Warwick, Bevis of llamtoun, Iluon of Bor-
deaux, or Amadis of Gaul, but rather of con-
temporary men, who in spite of excessive
oratorical firieiy possess some resemblance to
reality. There is some attempt, at any rate,

SIDNEY'S "ARCADIA"

127

to depict contemporary manners, and conver-
sations are reported in which the tone of
well-bom persons of" the period may often be
detected.

Of the heirs and imitators of Lyly, the well-
to-do Thomas Lodge {liosaljjnde, 1590), tlie
disreputable Robert Greene {Pandoxto, 1588;
Menaphon, 1589), tlie unscrupulous Anthony
Munday {Zr/mito, 1580), the edifying Krian
Melbancke (Philotirmis), Warner, Dickenson,
Breton, Rich, Emmanuel Ford and the rest,
the fact that they are the costly and exclusive
dehght of the antiquary and the bibliophile
may be allowed to speak for itself. They were
evidently written with facility during the flood-
tide of an early fiction market, and so much
easy writing makes uncommonly hard reading.
The story in all these " novels," as we must call
them, meanders now between banks of dialogue
and now at its own sweet will, now through a
marsh of mythology and moral instruction, and
again through a mead of miscellaneous verse.
But for all the flowers in the meado\vs and
the pleasant conceits in its course, the Eliza-
bethan novel must be pronounced to be wholly
unreadable by the reader of to-day. A few of
these stories claim to have been written for the
delectation of the gentlemen no less than " the
ladies of the court " ; but in a modern view
they will appear almost without exception to
have been written for the benefit of very
patient children.^

The popularity of Euphues and of the books
which it inspired was waning when Sidney^s
still more famous Ancidia was first published
in quarto by Ponsonbie as The Countess of
PembroJces Arcadia in 1590.- It was the
fashion of Pof)e superseding that of Dryden,
or the taste for Byron eclipsing that for
Scott. Yet Sir Philip Sidney when he wrote
it in 1580, or thereabouts, did not write for
the court or the public at all, but only for the
delectation of his sister, the celebrated Countess
of Pembroke, and her coterie at " delicious
Penshurst.^' Her name would be a sanctuary for
such a trifle of gossamer, as the author called
his romance of " cloud-cuckoo land." To please

her he made Love the pivot of his phantasy,
and sent her the successive sheets as fast as ever
he penned them. The explanation that the
Arcadia, with its marvellous adventures, its
rainbow descriptions, its pastoral nobles and
countrymen, its stately kings and queens, was
an ardent and immature production, in whicli
the young author was enabled to deliver his
fermenting brain of a crowd of theoi-ies and
love fancies (in verse and prose), fits the work
much better than the theory of his friend and
encomiast, P'ulke Greville, that it wa.s written
with high moral and political purpose. The
moral and political influence of a half- pastoral,
high chivalric fairy tale is not usually very
great.

The popularitv of the romance was owing in
no small measure to its being a manual of
modish affectation in speech, and of gentleman-
like accomplishments, of chivalric courtesy and
refined ingenuity. Like its subsequent French
counterpart, the Astr-cca of DTTrfe, it was a
perfect rendezvous of classic and romantic
conceits.

The literary distinction of the Arcadia is
largely due to the fact that it combines two
affectations, two strained ideals — the pastoral
and the chivalric (Scenery and Love). The
poetical landscape, such as the famed descrip-
tion of Arcadia, is derived from the pastoral
of Sannazaro {Arcadia, 1504-). The love plot
is imitated from the famous Diana Enamorada,
1542, of the Portuguese Jorge de Monte-
mayor. The second element, on the whole,
predominates, and the romantic adventures of
the love-lorn Pyrocles and Musidorus are of just
such a nature as Don Quixote would have
doted on. Many Arcadian affectations, such
as the artificiality of the cadence and the
exquisite monotonous obsequiousness of courtesy,
are pre-eminently Spanish. It is in the main
a thorough " coterie " piece, wTitten by a vei-y
young and very serious literary amateur and
doctrinaire. The story is extraordinarily ' in-
tricate and rambling, and is encumbered by
episodes gravely ludicrous and extravagant.
Sidney deliberately eschews Euphuism, but he

' The only writer who has made anj-thing- out of them is M. Jusserand, who in his English Novel in the
Time of fShaknpmre, and in vol. ii. of his Ui.stvire Littcraire du Peupte Angkiise, has discovered a delightful
method of poking sympathetic fun at their ingenuous imbecility.

' A second edition in folio supplemented and newly arranged by Sidney's sister appeared in lii9X There
is a good reprint by Prof Somnier, 1891. For the biography of Sidney consult Lives by Zouch (1808),
.7. A. Symonds (1880.), and Fox Bourne (1892), and compare Sidney Lee's Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth
Century (1904) and Edith J. Morley's study of Works of Sir Philip Sidney (1901).

128

THOMAS NASH

substitutes for it a style hardly less artificial
than tliat of Lyly. Alliteration, paronomasia,
repetition, and personification are all found in
excess. Yet the very excess of poetic licence
(for Sidney's prose is nothing if not poetic),
more especially in regard to redundant orna-
ment, is the cause and fountain of many
surpassing excellences. Such are many delicate
touches of imagination, and not a few phrases
and passages of a noble, enchanting, and at
times almost lyrical beauty.'

A congener of Greene whom one imagines
wTiting in a cellar against time, fluent, hap-
hazard, reckless, jovial, dissipated, and unabashed
by Fortune was Tliomas Nash, author of a kind
of historical Gil Bias, imitated in part from the
Spanish rogue-stories {Lazarillo and Guzman),
with an admixture of autobiography in the
manner of Greene, and called Jaclc Wiltcm
(1594). Greene, Dekker, and Nash were three
cui-ious types who anticipated Murger's Vie de
Boheme in a metropolis hardly suflicientlv de-
veloped to welcome such precocious childi-en.
Their lot collectively was dramatic job-work,
pamphlets, poems, novels, the bottle, loose
women, Henslowe (the well-known impresario
who commissioned plays from the jobbers), the
CUnk, literary squabbles, and premature decline
and death. Nash was perhaps the gayest and
most good-humoured ; Greene the most fluent
and the biggest liar ; Dekker the most percep-
tive and the most poetic— he rivalled Breton in
the delicacy with which he could tune a stave
or vamp a lament in a minor key. But Na.sh
also could lilt a pretty song, and, gross
borrower from Latin, French, and Italian
though he seems, he was the most original
prose writer of his age, full of artistic theories
as to the use of adjectives and the divinity
of Aretino, Rabelais, Sidney, Marlowe, and
" heavenly " Spenser, a connoisseur of meta-
phors and expletives and a bigoted devotee of
the mot jrropre.

The work of Nash, with its numerous
eccentricities of style, subject, and point of

view, serves as a convenient link between the
no'-elists and the satirical essayists, who literally
swarmed in London during the late and post-
Elizabethan periods. The prince of the.se
pamphleteers, excelling in fluency and facetious
quaintness, and a very Defoe in respect of
ductility, was Thomas Dekker. More vividly
even than Nash and Greene he takes us back
to the crooked lanes, the gabled houses and
creaking signs of old London. The crude
verbiage in which so much of Dekker's humour
is enshrouded soon rendered his books obsolete,
but as a mirror of the manners of his time
they are as invaluable as those of Tom Broiiti
and Ned Ward of the age of Queen Anne,
while in literary quality they are superior.
Indirectly they have formed the groundwork of
almost every attempt to arrive at a clear
picture of the social life of the period.

Dekker's plays are full of sidelights upon
the social life of the day. But even richer in
this kind of material are the series of prose
tracts commenced in 1603 with The Wonderful
Yeare. In this he describes the death of the
Queen, the proclamation at the Coronation of
the King, concluding with a vivid picture (with
which Defoe must have been familiar) of the
ravages caused by the plague. He returned to
the subject in one of his last tracts, penned
when people were fleeing from the city, and
entitled A Rod for Runawayes (1625). In the
same year, 1603, appeared his Batchelor's
Banquet, a satire on different types of women
suggested by the fifteenth-century Quinze Joies
de Mariage. From the sermonising tones of
The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606)
Dekker passes by an easy transition to a
coarse volume of Jests to inake you Merrie
(1607), a favourite of Robert Burton's. Thf
Belnuin of London, which went through three
editions in 1608, is a skilful rifacivwnto of
Harman's Caveat for Commen Cursetors.
Dekker anticipates Vidocq in describing the
different varieties of rogues, .sucli as priggers,
kinchin coves, swigmen, and otliers ; and he

' That Sidney could also upon occivsioii excel in perfectly direct and simple speech is nowhere better
shown than in the famous prayer of Pamela (Hook III. chap, vi.), which Cliarles I. is said to have used
upon the scaffold. The sentences have more than a ring of tlie Prayer Book ; and it is impossihle to acquiesce
in Milton's condemnation of the dyiii;^ Kiiifj heiH-iuse he used so noble a su|>plication, even thoujjjh it was
" stolen word for word frotn tlie mouth of a liealhcn woman prayiiifj to a heathen god, and that in no serious
book." Few books were copied more tlian llie Arriidia. Some ilramatists, such as Webster, conveyed ligur&s
and phrases from it wholesale into tlieir plays. Sidney also wrote a ma-scjuc, Thi- Ijidji of Ihf May, 1578, in
whicli Rhombus, a schoolmaster, is a feeble |)rolotype of Holofernes in Shakespeare's /joy«',v /y«Ao!/»-'.v //<«/. As
" warbler of poetic prose " Sidney was regarded with curiosity by C'owper, with scholarly interest by Southey,
and with contempt by Horace Walpole, who calls his romance " tedioas, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral."

NICHOLAS BRETON

1-29

follows this up by Lanthome and Candlelight,
describing fresh types of suburban scoundrelisni.
In 1609 appeared the most graf)hic of all
his sketch books, Hie GuLi Hornbook. The
tract is to some extent modelled on the
German Dedekind's Grobianus (1549), a world-
famous satire of bad maimers, inverted eti(|uettc,
gross living, eccentric garb and slovenly habits.
It had been Dckker's intention to turn portions
of Grobianus into English verse, and he admits
that his book retains a relish of Grobianism, but
on further reflection he altered the shape, and
of a Dutchman fashioned a mere Englishman.
His sketch remains the most vivid picture that
can be found of the night side of the town and of
the manners and customs of the Jacobean gallant.
It is particularly valuable for its caricatures of
the playgoers of Shakespeare's prime.

In prose essay as in lyrical eclogue Dekker is
perhaps surpassed by the lighter vein and more
facile touch of Nicholas Breton. One of the
best of the prose tracts that came from this
versatile pen is one of the very earliest, an angling
idyll called Wits Trench mour in a Conference had
betwixt a Scholler and an Angler, 1597, in
which but for the interminable digressions to
which he was so prone, Breton might have
rivalled his successor, Izaak Walton, upon his
own ground. In the same year Breton wrote
The Figure of Foure, in which proverbial
small change is served up in various
ways. There is no controverting many of
Breton's propositions. He advances in fours :
four good medicines — abstinence, exercise, mirth,
patience : four men needful in an army — a good
commander, a good scout, a good sentinel, and
a good gunner : four chief notes of a good
housewife — early rising, close gathering, safe
keeping, and well bestowing. There is more
humour in the Court and Country, 1618,
the old controversy of the debating society
between the town courtier and the rustic.
The speeches are formal and much too long ;

but the champions Ix'gin to kindle to their
work when the courtier imputes an evil
smell of garlic to the countryman, who retorts
that his town cousin stinks of tobacco. In
Fantasticks, 1626, Breton give.s us compact
little essays on the world, money, love, harvest,
spring, summer, and then the months seriatim.
Those on April and May are prose pastorals,
as delicate as those of Washington Irving,
and less artificial. After the months come
the hours, and so round the clock to an end.
These charming vignettes of Breton's are almost
as rich in material for social portraiture a.s
those of Dekker ; they are written, too, with
racy spontaneity in a vernacular undefiled
either by coarseness or affectation.

Among Dekker's rivals in exploring the
seamy side or vagabondage of the metropolis
should at least be enumerattni Samuel Row-
lands, who in Martin Markall, 1610, professes
to correct Dekker's observations on the roaring
boys of the town contained in T/w Behnan. His
Letting of Hununirs Blood in the Head-vaim
was so scandalous that it was burned with
contumely in the kitchen of the Stationers'
Company. The Search for Money, 1609,
of William Rowley, the dramatist, shows how
popular these now obscure attempts to dredge
the sewers for eccentric types once were. But
all these so-called satires were partially, at any
rate, vamped up from materials turned over by
Greene, Peele, and Nash. Better known, by
name at least, is the earlier and puritanically
motived Anatomie of Abuses, hy Philip Stubbes.

Tlie time was now approaching — late in
James's and early in Charles I.'s time — -when a
regular epidemic of short, generalised character-
sketches broke out in England. Tliis is not,
like the sonnet-mania, to be traced directly to
France, for there is little doubt that the impulse
was due to the translation of the Greek
Characters of Theophrastus into Latin, made
by Isaac Casaubon in 1592.' Theophrastus

' It is true that something in the nature of the "character" had appeared in England hjng before
Casaubon's version of Tlieophrastus, for in 15G.5 John Awdeley produced his Fratcmitye of Vacabondes, followed
two years later by Thomas Harman's Caveat for Cmntnen Cur.se.torg, or Vagabones, a curious series of essays on
various kinds of thieves, tramps, and beggars, with their slang. Harnian was freely imitated, not to say copied,
by Dekker, in liis Behnan of London, while Deklcer had independently produced something closely approximating
character-sketches in his Batctielor's Banquet of 1G03, as had several of tlxe writers of the innumerable touch-
stones, glasses, mirrors, and anatomies of the hour. But such productions as these could hardly have led to
the Theophrastian essay, at which, as we should have expected, first attempts were made by notable scholars —
to wit, Joseph Hall and Ben Jouson. Most of Jonson's plays are " character " plays, and in tlie dramatis
personce of Every Man out of kin Humor, first printed in 1600, he condenses his conceptions into the form of
a series of labels which are in effect character-sketches. (See West's Introduction to Earle, and Miss Lee's
introduction to Seleciioms from La Bruyere and Vauvenargues, 1002.)

130

SIR THOMAS OVERBURY

(d. 284 li.f.) was the initiator of the genre,
which is a very difficult one. Fine por-
traiture is not possible under its conditions.
No two men are exactly alike, and a por-
trait cannot at once portray a class and
an individual. The ideal is to hit the mean
between abstract statement and details calcu-
lated to rob the portrait of all generic interest.
In this Theophrastus succeeded so well that
he was not surpassed in seventeenth-century
England, though most of the wits, from Hall
and Overbury and Earle to Butler and Halifax,
put their best work into the attempt. It
remains a question whether he was surpassed
by La Bruyere in France.

Joseph Hall, who had in 1597 produced
his Toothlesse Satyrs, wnd in 1605 (in Latin) his
strange satirical allegory of Mundus Alter et
Idem, suffered to appear in 1608 his note-
worthy Characters of Vcrtucs and Vices in
Two Books. Hall's " Characterisms,"" as he
calLs them, are directly modelled on Theo-
phrastus ; pithy and well-balanced, his phrasing
gave the note to all his successors ; but the
tone of the work is too abstract, and the
moralising and balancing of good qualities
against bad is unnecessarily obtruded. Yet
his Characters signal the vogue the full force
of which was felt some six years later in A
Wife, now the Widow of Sir Tlwma-s Over-
bury . . . whereimto are added many witty
characters and conceited newes.

Sir Thomas Overbury, born in Gloucester-
shire in 1581, took a bachelor's degree from
Queen's College, Oxford, in 1598, entered the
Middle Temple, and then travelled. He became
the adviser and "governor" of the favoiu-ite
Rochester, whom he had first met at Edinburgh,
and perhaps subsecjuently abroad. His Observa-
tions upon the Netherlands were circulated in
manuscript, and Overbury obtained a great
reputation for his wit at court. The Wife, a
didactic poem, written in 1613, was flattered by
numerous imibitions. The poem is stated to
have been written to dissuade llochester from
marriage with such a woman as Lady Essex,
'llie lady, at any rate, took umbrage at Over-
bury's secret influence over the Earl. She
managed to get her enemy shut up in the Tower,
where on September 15th, 1613, the unhappy
man was poisoned. Appended to The Wife, as
issued the second time in 1614, were a number
of characters by Overbury and his friends.
'Iliey rapidly grew in successive editions from

twenty-one to as many as eighty, of which ten
only are true characters. The rest are concerned
with such peculiarities as are developed by
certain occupations or positions in life. These
are curious as illustrating manners, of which
Overbury was a quick observer. But for the
delineation of character in the proper sense,
Overbury and his court friends had no very great
talent. They were concerned primarily with
tricks of speech and behaviour rather than
moral qualities. Their portraits are frequently
neither typical, distinctive, nor humorous.
They are rather lively, entertaining, and quaint.
Overbury sacrifices humour to epigram, and per-
ception of subtle differences to the demands
of a pretty wit. What a satisfaction to find him
laying aside his cleverness for once, and pro-
ducing a sympathetic picture like that of The
Franklin ! And with this may be ranked TTie
Good Wife, The Worthy Commander, and
The Milkmaid. Breton's The Goode and the
Badde, or England''s Selected Characters,
describing the good and bad Worthies of this
Age, first appeared in 1616. Every tiny little
pamphleteer now began to place " Characters "
in large type in his shop-front. Two yeai-s
elapsed, and the best of the bunch came from
the pen of a young Oxford scholar, John
Earle.

John Earle, a native of York, where his
father was registrar of the Archbishop's Court,
graduated from Christ Church in 1619, and
became a probationer fellow of Merton in 1620.
He was with Chillingworth and the other Oxford
men who resorted to Falkland's house at Great
Tew. During the troubles he went abroad,
made a Latin version of the Eikon Basilike,.
another (which went under the grate) of the
Ecclesiastical Polity, eventually became Bishop
of Salisbury, and died in the Plague year at
Oxford in the sixty-fifth of his age.

The first edition of the Microcosmographic ,-
or, A Peece of the World Discovered, in Essays
and Characters, appeared in 1628, containing
fifty-four characters ; twenty-three were added
during 1629 ; one in the sixth edition,
1633. After 1629 it seems doubtful whether
Earle concerned himself further about his
" Characters." As far as he wrote from the
results of his own observation, he succeeded
in producing a series of lifelike and at the
same time generic portraits adorned not by
witty antitheses, but by genuine fia-shes of
insight into human nature. There is no

KING JAMES THE FIRST

131

methodical arrangement of tlie characters. ^
Among the best are 'Ilie College Butler, The
Church Papist, The She Hypocrite, 77/1? Mecr
Gull Citizen, The CriticJce.

James I."s fame as an author has undoubtedly
suffered somewhat from his notoriety as a
King. It may be admitted that he was a
diffuse and pedantic writer ; but though diffuse,
there is often a pithy saying or an apt illustra-
tion to be gleaned from his furrow, and though
pedantic he preferred to write in his native
tongue, while he might have shone resplendent
in Latin like his master, George Buchanan,
or his persistent flatterer, Francis Bacon. He
was naturally clever, had a tenacious memory,
and a remarkable aptitude for classifying
matters in his mind in accordance with the
system then in vogue. James's juvenile pro-
duction, Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine
Art of Poetry (1584), was probably written as
themes for his tutors. The Aleditations on the
Revelations (1589) show his theological bent.
Demonologie (1597), Basilihon Dorou (1599),
and A Counter-blast to Tobacco (1604) are his
best known essays. He is most eloquent
when he speaks of the divine hereditary right of
kings, of the absolute truth of which strange
tenet he seems to have had a sincere con-
viction. His prose works were collected in
1616. The Basililion Dorcm, though teeming
with quotations and references, is probably his
most readable production, containing much
good sense and shrewd worldly wisdom.

The one outstanding figure among the prose
writers of the period — England''s great coeval

of Shakespeare and Galileo — has now to be
brought prominently upon the scene.

Francis Bacon, younger son of Sir Nicholas
Bacon, Lord Keeper, was bom at York House,
between West Strand and the Thames, on Jan-
uary 22nd, 1561 ; he was thus, as he courtierly
observed, "just two years younger than Her
Majesty's happy reign." His mother, Ann,
daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, was a woman
of scholarly accomplishment and was the trans-
lator of Jewel's Latin Apology for the Church
of England (1.564) ; her sister Mildred was the
wife of Lord Burghley. When Francis Bacon
was bom, his cousin Robert Cecil, afterwards
Lord Salisbury, was eleven years old. Francis
went in April, 1573, to Trinity College, Cam-
bridge, where, with Whitgift for his tutor, he
learned to question the authority of Aristotle.
In the fall of 1576, after being admitted to
Gray's Inn, he went to Paris in the suite of our
ambassador. Sir Amyas Paulet, and in the
interests of diplomacy invented some highlv
ingenious ciphers ; he had to return to England
on his father's death in 1579. Having been
called to the Bar he sat in Parliament for
Melcombe Regis (1.584), and during the next
winter drew up his somewhat Machiavellian
treatise of Advice to Queen Elizabeth. In
1586 he became a bencher of his Inn, and now
sat for Taunton in Parliament. When the
Marprelate controversy was raging in 1589 he
sought to arbitrate between parties in his
Controi'ersirs of the Church of England. He
disliked the bigoted nari'owness of the Puritan,
but was convinced that the Chm-ch needed

' Tliey are kept within modest limits as regards length. In style they are somewhat monotonous owing to
the rather mechanical ply of the sentences ; but they are pellucid, free from far-fetched conceits, and uncom-
plicated as regards syntax. Tliere are singularly few obsolete words, though, as in Bacon, words are often used
in senses that have become uncommon or pedantic. At their best they exhibit the work of an observer,
a philosopher, a humorist, and an artist. A French paraphrase appeared at Louvain in 1071.

Allied both to the character and didactic work of the period, may here be noticed the Ten Precepts to hit-
Son Robert, written liy Lord Burghley in Elizabeth's reign, though not published until 16.37- In gnomic power —
in weight of matter and depth of judgment — still more in worldly wisdom, these PrecepLi rival Bacon's Essays.
They lack tlie wit and power of expression, but they have a homely force of their own that is impressive. The
style, too, is clear, untrammelled by "conceited" imagery, wholly free from Italian phrasing and affectation,
which the sound Aschamite and Protestant Burghley abhorred.

A place may here be found, too, for the " witty, grave, and sententious book " of Owen Feltham, of which
the poet Randolph wrote :

" Thy book 1 read, and read it with delight,
Hesolvhig so to live as thou do'st write."
The book so complimented was, of course, Feltham's Ri'.folres of 1620 (or thereabout), a diligent, extra-didactic,
but somewhat wishy-washy understudy of Bacon's Ksmn/s. Tliey resemble, in more than one respect, especially
m their somewhat specious smoothness and shallow veneer, the once popular eighteenth-century Meditations of
Hervey. The prose style is for the period remarkably easy and fluent, the composition neat and accomplished ;
here and there may be detected an artistic finish and a proneness to literary equation and balance that suggest
the manner of Hamerton's Inte/lectiinl Life. A modernised and " amended " edition of the Resolves was brought
out by James Cummiug in 180C.

132

FRANCIS BACON

some reform and much greater elasticity. In
the meantime he was diligently preferring his
suit with Burgliley and Walsingham, but the
" tired suitor " was unable to secure a post,
though he was continually in debt and always
in want of money. He hungered and pined
after office, but he barred his own path by
&n independent speech in Parliament. Within
two years he was craving restoration to royal
favour, but in 1595 the Earl of Essex, his
new patron, generously gave him an estate
at Twickenham. In 1594, while he was still
engaged in suing. Bacon jotted down the
extraordinary collection of extracts, proverbs,
and happy thoughts, often of a mean and
cynical character, to which he gave the name
of Promus (i.e. dispenser of formularies and
elegances). The spirit of Promus animates
the advice which Bacon gave to Essex, with a
view to his more secure retention of his place
as first favourite with the Queen. The same kind
of cunning rather than the maturer wisdom of
later instalments is apparent in the first edition
of the Essays published in January, 1597 ; but
the most deplorable manifestation of this same
short-sighted sagacity is discerned in the part
taken by Bacon in the proceedings against
Essex. Probably in consenting to contribute
to the destruction of his friend Bacon acted
under considerable pressure. If he had refused
the task assigned to him by the Crown, he
would have had to give up all chance of the
Queen's favour, and with it all hope of imme-
diate promotion. Bacon wa.s not the man to
make such a sacrifice. He had a keen sense of
the value of fortune, of the possibilities of a
learned leisure, of the importance of his colossal
plans for the benefit of the human race ; on the
other hand he had a very dull sense of the
claims of honour and friendship ; he prefen-ed
to be prosperous even at the cost of facilitating
the i-uin of a friend, for whom ruin in any case
was ultimately inevitable.

The death of the Queen brought about a
complete change in his prospects. His conduct
to Essex was now viewed in a disparaging light,
and although he was one of a large batch of
legal knights, his first overtures to the new
King appear to have lK.'cn rebuffed. Yet Bacon
was encouraged by the conviction that the new
King with his learned hobbies, his comprehen-
sive ideas, and his aversion from intolerance, was
su.sceptible in a high degree to philosophic.il
advice. Hence his brief discourse touchiii''- the

happy union between England and Scotland,
and his treatise on the pacification and edifica-
tion of the Church. In the latter he advocates
drastic Church reform in the direction of
elasticity of ceremonial and conciliation of the
Puritan conformists. He wrote, evidently, in
ignorance of the temper of the King, who
peremptorily rejected his advice. Bacon, who
knew not his own mind till he knew the King's,
promptly acquiesced in James's conservative
views to the extent of calling in the printed
copies of his treatise. In the new Parliament
of 1604 he was on surer ground, and he quickly
assumed a prominent position of conciHation to
the new sovereign, extolling the prerogative,
supporting the Union, advocating a subsidy,
and the maintenance of the King's right of
pre-emption. He at once received a pension,
and devoted his leisure, previous to the re-
assembling of Parliament, in working at his
masterly essay on The Advancement of Learning,
published in 1605, which contains some of his
finest writing and is described as the first great
book in English prose of secular interest. It is
the first also of a long hue of books which have
attempted to teach English readers " how to
think of knowledge, to impress upon them all
that knowledge might do in wise hands for the
elevation and benefit of man ; to warn them
against the rocks and shallows of error and
fallacy which beset the course of thought and
inquiry, and to elevate the quest for truth and
the acquisition of wisdom into the noblest aim
and best assured hope of the human species."
In the summer of 1607 he became Solicitor-
General and Clerk of the Star Chamber, a
long-promised reversion for which he had
waited nineteen years. Tlie ardour of the
pursuit for a position having abated, Bacon
underwent a period of depression, as an antidote
for which he addressed himself to philosophy,
and settled a plan of his Instauratio Magna,
or great renewal of learning, to which his
treatise on The Advaiicement of Learning h&d
Ijccn intended as but a portico, a preface or
statement of general principles preliminary to
the great work. In May, 1612, his cousin,
I^rd Salisbury, died, lionours and preferments
were now flying aljout, and Bacon was suing
for promotion iti accordance witli the .system
which he elalx)rati'd in his note-books with a
thoroughness befitting an inductive philosopher
and with an obsajuiousness appropriate to
the " King's chessman." He lost no time

Francis Bacon

LORD VERULAM

13S

in suggesting to the King that he should
be removed to business of" state ; but it was
not until August, 1613, that ho was sub-
stantially promoted to the post of Attorney-
General. His progress to the woolsack was
definitely assured in 1616, in whieh year he
was appointed a Privy Councillor. Towards
the close of the year he tendered a letter of
advice to the rising star of the court, George
Villiers, soon to become the Duke of Bucking-
ham, and in March, 1017, he received the
Great Seal with the title of Lord Keeper.
Buckingham early showed his appreciation of
Bacon's character by sending letters to him in
favour of suitors who had cases pending in
chancery. Their advancement went hand-in-
hand, for in January, 1618, Buckingham was
made a marquis, and Bacon Lord Chancellor,
with the title of Baron Venilam. In October,
1620, was published all that was ever completed
of his Novum Organum (or " Directions con-
cerning the Interpretation of Nature ""), and
this date may be taken to mark the climax of
his greatness. On January 27th, 1621, he was
created Viscount St. Albans.

Bacon rather complimented himself on his
suave manners and on his knowledge of people
and Parliament, but he naturally excited the
greatest hostility by the support he gave
Buckingham and Mompesson in enforcing op-
pressive monopolies, and in his cold-blooded
severity to the Attorney-General, Yelverton,
who had incurred the spite of the favourite.
In March, 1621, he was impeached for corrup-
tion, and, having admitted the truth of twenty-
eight of the principal charges against him, he
was sentenced to be fined i:^40,000, and to be
imprisoned in the Tower during the King''s
pleasure. He was also discjualified from sitting
in Parliament or holding any office in the
State. Of deliberately perverting justice for
money Bacon was guiltless ; but he had ad-
mittedly taken money from suitors ; he had
connived at the extortions of his servants, and
had allowed himself to be brow-beaten by the
King's favourite in the administration of justice
to an extent which must preclude us from
pronouncing him inconupt. His disgrace
procui'ed him for the remaining five years of
his life a seclusion which, though involuntary,
was none the less fruitful of work befitting a
philosopher and a scholar. " Like precious
odours, most fragrant when incensed or
crushed," Bacon's virtues of patience, assiduity,

and good temper were brought out by his
adversity.

Freed from imprisonment after a two days'
sojourn in the Tower, Bacon pursued his
philosophic studies with little inteiTuption.
The De Augvientis (a translation with large
.additions of The Advancement of Learning),
the completed edition of the K.H.says, the
History of Henry VII., The AdveHisement
(dialogue-wise) Touchvurr an Holy War, besides
the Sylva Sylvarum, and some other frag-
ments of the Novum Organum, all proceeded
from his pen during his enforced retirement.
He died on April 9th, 1626, owning an
estate of ,t'7,000, and debts amounting tO'
upwards of i;'20,000. His bequests were
superb in their munificence, but unhappily not
one of them took effect.

No nation has been more willinc to condone
— or rather to shut its eyes upon — the moral
blemishes or delinquencies of its great intellec-
tuals than the English. To this rule, however,
there are one or two conspicuous exceptions,
notably Laurence Sterne and Francis Bacon.
The flagrant indecency of Sterne has proved
in the main too much for English decorum,
while in the case of Bacon, his notorious sale
of justice and his unmistakable prepossessions
in favour of autocracy have weakened the
resistance to the plain evidence of the facts.
Resplendent as Bacon's intellectual endowment
was, giving to everything he wrote a classical
atmosphere of solidity and magnanimity, his
deficiency in regard to character and conduct
is beyond the pale of wholesome apology. His
mind was a typical late product of the European
Renaissance, which in its early phases had
produced Macchiavelli. In Bacon's case, how-
ever, the remorseless utilitarianism of the Italian
was complicated by the subtle and sophistical
logic of Calvinism. Add to this the training
he received as a boy amid the crooked tricks
of policy and intrigue which infected the very
atmosphere of the English court, and we shall
get some idea of the factors that went to form
his character. An opportunist so subtle that
he could never make up his mind. Bacon's faith
in such invaluable abstractions as truth and
honour became fatally sophisticated. He
wavered always between theory and practice,
philosophy and politics, Latin and English,
tyranny and oligarchy, philanthropy and self-
advancement, religion and science. The higher
he climbed the more independent he felt

134

HISTORY OF HENRY VII."

himself of the mere ordinary conventional
distinction between right and wrong. The
mightv intellect of Francis Bacon had become
the insti-ument of a calculating and cold-blooded
egotist, but an egoti.st without either a rudder,
a compass, or a definite course. With a clear
vision of what might be done for mankind
by a man of science, a wise statesman, an able
and honest lawgiver, Bacon himself, with his
superlative endowment, was neither a pioneer
of discovery, a faithful pilot of the ship of
state, nor even a just judge. His scheme for
the advancement of learning was the noblest
thing of his life, but he neglected it and failed
to arrive at any clear notion as to how the
things he thought desirable should be actually
done. He said that knowledge was power, and
aimed ostensibly above all at the advancement
of learning ; but actually he wasted his time
in the pursuit of riches and titles, and in quest
of new devices for trading upon the foil)', the
vanity, and the selfishness of man. Intellectu-
ally capable of almost anything, Bacon lacked
that essential quality which in Shakespeare
dominates other gifts, moral capacity. Few
men have understood the faults of the human
intellect better and few have comprehended
defects in the moral nature worse. It is, never-
theless, this extraordinary quality of Bacon's
nature which contributes more than anything
to the differential value of his two almost
priceless literary legacies, the Essays and the
History of Henry VH.

The essay may be said virtually to be a
new literary form of Montaigne's own invention.
There is nothing exactly like it either in Latin
or Greek. In classical literature Plutarch's
Morali, Cicero's Offices, Pliny's Epistles, and
Seneca's Letters to Lucullus are perhaps the
nearest approach to the essay, but the resem-
blance is slight. Both Montaigne and Bacon
use the word in its true sense as an essay or
analysis of some subject of thought treated
in a " dispersed " or desultory fashion. As
assaying depends upon a close application of
chemistry and mineralogy, so the essay owes
its distinctive quality to a novel combination
of philosophic and literary skiU.

The famous iviii. Essayes of Bacon that
we know were a gradual growth. The first
edition of 1597 comprised only ten essays ;
the second thirty-eight essays, of which twenty-
eight were new in l(jl2; the third fifty-eight
essays, of which twenty were new in 1625.

The composition, correction, and augmenta-
tion of the essays thus extended over a period
of nearly thirty years. T'hey were planted
under Elizabeth, watered under James, and
attained their final growth under Charles.
During this long interval the thought with
which they are enriched was being deposited
in Bacon's mind. No other English aphorist,
unless it be Emerson, approaches Bacon in
conveying the impression of classic style com-
bined with such concentration and energy of
thought. It is just in this suggestion of fine
old sap and venerable experience within a
narrow compass that his work recalls that of
the sages of the antique world. Bacon was
a natural hoarder of thought and phrase, of
pith and maiTow. Of the mere flowers of
speech he was sparing and economical. Each
essay then is a cluster of detached thoughts,
sentences, and maxims, forming a collection
of happy epigrams, apothegms, and lucky
citations grouped under approximate headings.
There is no elaboration of style, and very
little order. Thoughts are put down, and left
unsupported, unproved, undeveloped. Their
vitality is due in the main to their unusual
combination of sagacity, wit, and terseness.
Some of the most prosperous sayings in the
language are packed into these secular sermons.
Secondarily it is due to the interesting duality
of the man of letters and the man of the
world, the idealist and the creature of shifts
and expedients which is so deeply marked in
this little great son of man.

No less supreme in the realm of history than
the Essays in the sphere which they adorned.
Bacon's History of Hemy VII. simply towers
above the other historical prose of this epoch.
His greatness can be estimated when we com-
pare the finished work with the raw material
out of which it was fashioned — the chronicles,
namely, of Fabyan, Polydore, Virgil, Hall,
Holinshed, and Stow. Poor and incomplete
tliougli these materials were, Bacon succeeded
so well that he has left later historians but
little to do. Subsequent researches have but
confirmed and illustrated the trutli of his
history in all its main features. The portrait
of Henry as drawn by him is the original
of all the portiaits which have been drawn
since. The good stories of the reign, such as
those of Morton's form, Empson's fixed deter-
mination to " cut another chop " (1720) out
of Alderman Sir William Capel, Henry's

"THE NEW ATLANTIS " 135

rebuke to the Earl of Oxford, and Maximilian's tenders, Simnel and Warbeck (the King was

method of mamage by proxy with Anne of haunted with spirits by the magic and curious

Brittany, are all related by Bacon, and it is arts of the I^ady Margaret), the establishment

amusing to trace how certain of his statements of the Star Chamber, Henry's intervention in

have been borrowed, perverted, and often dis- the affairs of Britain (Brittany), and the wily

figured by subsequent historical compilers. As diplomacy on both sides which surrounded this

compared with the dull, soulless, and uncritical event, are introduced with an ajjundaiice of

compiling of his predecessors and contempo- art. A ripple of humour, albeit saturnine, is

raries, the effect of Bacon's treatment of his more conspicuous than in any other of Bacon's

materials resembled the bringing of a light works. Pithy and poignant sayings, as is the

into a dark room. ride in his work, keenly stimidate the zest

The movement of the narrative as a whole of the reader. But the reader's interest is

is rapid, and the style is singularly clear and primarily governed, as it should be, by the

unencumbered. Classical turns of phrase and art with which Bacon gradually unfolds the

words used in a strict classical or etymological character of his main figure, the monarch of

sense (now obsolete) are much rarer than in whose nature his comprehension ap[)ears to be

the Essays. Long imaginary speeches put well-nigh perfect. Considered upon its own

in the mouth of the Chancellor and others claims as an explanation of events by reference

occasionally betray Latin models such as Livy to the feelings and purposes of the chief actor,

and Sallust. The episodes, especially those it is perhaps a better model than any history

dealing with the adventures of the two Pre- that has been published since.'

' The magistral edition of Bacon's Work.t is that of Ellis and Spedding (7 vols., 1857); supplemented
by Letters and Life (7 vols., 1862-74). From this somewhat cumbrous Life Carlyle borrowed the plan of his
Cromwell. A first-rate edition in one volume of The Philosophiviil Works was issued by Routledge in 190.5
(ed. J. M. Robertson). This contains The Advancement of Learning, the Magna Instauratio, Novum Organum,
and De Augmentis (in English), The New Atlantis, Essays, Apophthegms, and De Sapientia Vcterum (also in
translation) ; also minor fragments, virtually all, in fact, except the Henry VH. The defects of Bacon's
moral nature have perhaps been somewhat overstrained by Macaulay in his trenchant essay, by Dr. Abbott
in his brilliant Francis Bacon: An Account of His Life and Work (1885), and to a less degree by Dean
Church (1884) and Sidney Lee in Oreat Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (1904). A more lenient view is
taken by Spedding, Prof Nichol (1890), J. M. Robertson, and Dr. S. R. Gardiner. Macaulay's theory of
Bacon's character, which is little more than an amplitication of Pope's hackneyed paradox as to the wisest,
brightest, meanest of mankind, was subjected to a very destructive analysis by Spedding in Evenings with a
Reviewer. Like Herbert Spencer, and like Pope, and to some extent like Coleridge or De Quincey, of course
in very diiferent ways. Bacon eludes our sympathy. His character is the more liable to be traduced. On
the other hand, his position as a Pilot in matters of Science has been exaggerated. Of the great inventors
and philosophers of his day, such as Harvey, Fabricius, Harriot, Kepler, Napier, Galileo, and Gilbert, he
knew practically nothing. The discoverer of the circulation of the blood said of him that he wrote philosophy
like a Lord Chancellor. Hallam said that he might have been the High Priest of Nature had he not been
Lord Chancellor of James L But he gave little evidence of this capacity. His famous method was an
impossible one. Poets and literary critics have lauded it to the skies, but quite innocuously, for men of science
have instinctively avoided it. Bacon thought that the secrets of Nature could be analysed and dissected
like a great Cryptogram ; and he thought quite genuinely that in his new Organon he had discovered the
t'lavis, for the use of the initiated. The great secret (the Inductive iVIethod) was as old as Aristotle, or
rather, very much older, since it implies that combined method of guessing and inference by which men have
discovered almost everything that they know. It was well to deride dogma, deduction, convention, and other
idols and obstructions to thought and progress. It was good to ponder on method, to argue for a better
discipline in inference, and to plead for an open door to Inquiry in the widest possible sense. All this Bacon
did memorably ; but, when he came from the general to the particular, he paid the penalty of all who aspire
to omniscience. In practical science he was far behind his own day. In prophetic vision of what Science
might accomplish he is considerably ahead of 1906. VVe get an imaginative glimpse of this in his ultra-didactic
and consequently somewhat grotesque but most attractively written New Atlantis (written about 1624-5, this
popular fragment was published 1627). This wonderful island called the Ne^v Atlantis, lest we should confuse
it with the great Atlantis (i.e. America), is situated, figuratively speaking, somewhere between More's Utopia
and Swift's Laputa. The book forms a fitting epilogue to the Renaissance in England. In the counter-Renaissance
that was impending Bacon would have been a strangely incongruous figure.

CHAPTER XI

ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE.— II

"O, eloquent, just, and mighty death ! whom none could advise, thon hast persuaded ; whom none hath
dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
despised ; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man,
and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hicjacet!" — History of the World.

Raleigh — Stow — Holinshed — Speed — Camden — Knolles — Memoirs and Diaries — Manningham — Sir Symonds
D'Ewes— Naunton— Moryson — Ilakluyt— Elizabethan criticism— Gosson — Sidney's Defense and Jonson's Timber.

NO history of the sixteenth or early seven-
teenth century approaches in modem
interest the remarkable work of Bacon.

But apart from this the right of place must
be accorded to the famous work of Raleigh, the
brilliance of whose achievement as a man of
action has thrown a kind of rainbow over his
portentous Hlsiory of the World — intended in
the first instance as a portico to his History
of England under the Great Queen. Of the
England of that period Raleigh himself was a
kind of epitome — as typical of his generation
as Sidney was of his ; even more versatile, a
striking representative of the restless spirit of
romantic adventure, mixed with cool practical
enterprise that marked the time. Popular
hero as he became after his death, in the hey-
day of his career Raleigh was a most unpopular
favourite. His whole character seemed com-
posed of opposites. As pedantic as Lord
Herbert about his pedigree and his training in
arms, a finished courtier, reserved, magnificent,
fearless, in talk incisive even when he spoke in
broad Devon, in arts accomplished, by his
wife and a few friends worshipped, by the
majority of his contemporaries detested, Raleigh
eclipsed them all, including Leicester, Sussex,
Southampton, Hatton, and even Essex, in the
romantic interest which his versatile career has

inspired. The region of the Exe and the
Otter, so prolific in great seamen ; Oriel College ;
the fields of France, where he served a campaign
or two against the League ; the Middle Temple
and the English camps in the south of Ireland
witnessed the training of this paragon among
the courtiers of the English Renaissance. In
his early days he was famous for his patronage of
BiTjno, the advanced Italian thinker who was in
England in 1583 and again in 1585. He was
no less celebrated for his extravagant dress, his
hatbands being often composed, we aj-e told,
of the costliest pearls. He was equally noted
for his avarice and for the rich monopolies he
obtained from the Queen and from the seques-
trated estates of traitors. His wealth enabled
him to build the superb vessel of 200 tons,
as she was then deemed, the Ark Rakigh,
the flagship of Admiral Howard in 1588, and
to fit out the privateering and colonising ex-
peditions which have given him a permanent
place in English history. Fierce swashbuckler
as he often appeared in his capacity of Captain
of the Guard and rival of Essex for his royal
mistress's favours, in the quiet study of Durham
House overlooking the river Raleigli enter-
tained and patronised with a rare urbanity
some of the choicest spirits of the day, such as
Spenser, Harriot, Hakluy t, Hooker, and Jonson.^

' Raleigh's career as a man of action may be briefly summarised. In IflOG he was there when Essex
singed the Spanish king's beard in Cadiz harbour. The year previous he had sailed to (iuiana ni search
of the fabled " El Dorado," destroying on the way the Sjiauisb town of San .fose, and on his return he
published bis Discovery of the Empire of fiuiana. He took a director's part in the colonisation of Virginia, and
introduced tobacco and potato plants into Europe. 15ut in 1(!(i;) his career as courtier was blightc<l. Arrested
for conspiring with the miserable Lord Cobliam against the fox and his cubs (iJarnes I. and Iiis cliildrcn)
be attempted suicide in the Tower. Coke, at his trial, set an example which Jefl'reys hardly eclipsed, " thou "-ing
the prisoner, calling him "viper" or "spider of hell." Condemned to die, Raleigli was under the shadow of

13G

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

137

But we are concemed liere with his writings
in prose. Of these Only three were pubHshcd
in his lifetime. The Fight about the IkU's of the
Azores (1590), 7'he Diuiazieri/ of Guiana {\59(i),
and the History of the World. The History
was written in the Towei-, wliere, though
Raleigh was comparatively well-treated and
indulged in chemical experiments, the society
of friends and other diversions, he necessarily
had much time upon his hands, between 1607
and 1614. In large portions of the work he
was greatly aided by learned friends. Thus
Dr. Burhill assisted him in the interpretation
of Hebrew ; Harriot was his oracle on disputed
questions of chronology or geography ; John
Hoskins, the arbiter of style, friend of Donne
and Selden and informant of Aubrey, is said
to have revised the whole work for press ; Ben
Jonson also read the work in manuscript and
claimed to have written, with other sections,
much of the narrative of the Second Punic War.

There is no doubt that the liveliest passages
came direct from Raleigh's pen, such as the
preface, the conjecture that the Garden of
Eden and its rivers were rightly to be found
in South America, |the illustrative comments
drawn from contemporary history, the di-
gressions dealing with abstract questions of
law, theology, philosophy and magic, or the
ideal form of government, the elaborate por-
traits of historical personages — Epaminondas,
Jezebel, Pyrrhus or Semiramis (a veiled portrait
of the Great Queen of his own day), and finally
the magnificent apostrophe to " eloquent, just
and mighty Death," with which the History
closes — all these are unmistakable Raleigh.
The intervening chronicle portions are often
extremely lifeless : much of this compilation

may well have been the work of erudite
assistants under Sir Walter's supervision.

The first part of the contemplated History
was alone pul)lishcd in the early part of 1614
(two impressions, a second edition followed in
1617), and this brought the work down no
farther than 1^0 b.c^, or roughly from chaos to
Antiochus the Great. In two subsequent parts
of which a few preparatory notes remain
Raleigh had intended to bring his history down
to 1603. The work involved was greatly
encouraged by Raleigh's consistent advocate
and hero-worshipper, the young Prince Henry,
for whom the prisoner wrote a number of small
educational treatises, and upon his death in
1612 the historian lost heart and interest in
his colossal undertaking. It remains a signal
monument to one of the most interesting and
paradoxical figures of this difficult and per-
plexing era, and as one of the curiosities of
rather than vital contributions to English
Literature.

The remaining historians of the Elizabethan
era, putting aside Bacon and Raleigh, can be
treated in a very brief space. Fuller wrote
humorously of the good purpose to which
those honest tailors, John Stow and John
Speed, had stitched away at English history
for the benefit of future generations. Most of the
historical compiling was done after this pattern.
Raphael Holinshed had continued his Chronicles
of England down to 1575, and his noteworthy
folio had appeared in 1578 in ample time to
prove of yeoman service to Marlowe, Greene,
Shakespeare, and contemporary masters of the
historic drama. Holinshed died shortly after
the publication, but the work was edited with
a supplement by John Hooker in 1586.'

this sentence until 1618, when he was sacrificed (Octoher 29th), in part as a propitiatory offering to Spain, after
the inevitable failure of his forlorn raid in (luiana. From 1604, after the parody of justice witnessed at his
trial (not that Raleigh was guiltless, but that the Crown lawyers were infamous), and since his solitary walks in
the Tower were observed by huge crowds, wlio saw in him one of the last of the little band of heroes of the
late reign who sailed beyond the sunset and bore the brunt of the duel with the might of Catholic Spain,
Raleigli had become a popular hero. His angry temper, his headstrong arrogance, his overweening ambition,
and his damnable pride (as Aubrey had it) were forgotten, and so the strange career of the poet, soldier, scholar,
buccaneer, and spoiled courtier was concluded by the superposition of a martyr's cro^vn and halo.

' One of the most graphic and entertaining narratives of the Elizabethan period is contained in Harrison's
Description of England, a kind of topographical outwork to the Chronicle of Holinshed. It was written by
William Harrison, Londoner and Oxonian (Christ Church), who died Windsor canon in 1593, at. 59. The
chronicle was a printer's hodge-podge, but Harrison's animated description of England changing before his
eyes leavens the whole mass of uninspired annalising. In its ruder fashion it almost deserves comparison with
JMacaulay's famous third chapter, or the inspired tableau of France in the third chapter of the second volume
of Michelet's Histoire. About the churches and their services, ministers and covetous patrons, he tells us much
at first hand. Bells and times of prayer and much stained glass still remained. Images, shrines, rood-lofts,
tabernacles, wakes, and bride-ales he gives as superstitions of the past (this in 1577). The " prophecyings "
were just beginning to come in. The English bishops, says he, were the most learned in Europe, though

138

CAMDEN

Meanwhile in 1565 John Stow (d. 1605), origi-
nally a tailor, a friend and protege of Archbishop
Parker, and one of the antiquarian society
founded by that great Churchman, had com-
piled from a larger basis of original authorities
his SummaTie of Engiyshe Chroiiiclcs (1565) ;
this was followed by his more compendious
Chronicles of England 1580, from which was
developed the subsequent and Ijetter known
Annales of England (1592, and subsequent
editions), and finally in 1598 appeared his
invaluable Sitn'oy of Londoji, the basis of all
modern London topography. The chief con-
tempiorarv rival to the Annales of Stow was
the well-digested H'tstoij/ of Great Britahie
(1611) by another wielder of the shears, the
diligent John Speed (1552—1629) of Moor-
fields. The coiTesponding Britannia (1586) of
the scholarly William Camden (1551—1623),
head of Westminster School and Clarenceux
King-at-Arms, was written in Latin and was
not Englished by Holland until 1610, but his
Remains and Annals of Elizabeth, written in
1605 and 1615 respectively, were written in
English. Sir John Hay ward (1564—1627), as
became a somewhat larger experience of life,
took a more political and less dry-as-dust view
of the historical past in his First Paii of the
Life and Raignc of Henry the IVth, which he
dedicated with much temerity in 1599 to the
service of Essex. It very nearly cost him his
head and Elizabeth herself expressed a desire that
he should be racked ; but he lived to enjoy the
favour of James I., and to write his Life and
Raigne of King Edivard the Sixt, published in
1630, which Ednmnd Bolton holds up in his
Hypercritica as a model for the future historian
along with the histories of More, Raleigh, and
Bacon. Richard Knolles (1550—1610) had
the good luck to light upon an untrodden path

in a Latin Histonj of the Turks, published at
Frankfort in 1596. Like Watson with Spain
he had Ottoman history practically to himself.
Six or seven editions of his folio Generall
Historie of the Ottoman Turks appeared within a
century of its first appearance (1603), and "Old
Knolles " was warmly eulogised by Dr. Johnson,
Southey, Hallam, Kingsley, Lane-Poole, and,
above all, Byron ; but it is significant that no
edition of the work has appeared since 1700.

We need not speak here of Spottiswoode on
the Scots Church, of Heylyn on the Reforma-
tion, of Lord Herbert's Henry VILL., or of
Fuller's Crusades and other historical com-
pilations. More characteristic really is the
great amount of accumulative work done by
such men as Parker, Twysden, Selden, Dugdale,
Carew, Cotton, Coke, Spelman, Weever, Wyrley,
Vincent, Brooke, Bodley, and others, most of
whom are mentioned elsewhere. Antiquaries
were beginning to be found to take thought
for the tools and materials of future historians.
Such were Ralph Agas (d. 1621) and Speed,
the great map-makers ; William Watts, chap-
lain to Rupert, who in 1640 edited the Historia
of Matthew Paris ; the grave and courtly
Thomas Bedingfield, who translated the Floren-
tine History of Macchiavelli in 1595 ; Sir Henry
Savile, translator of the Histories of Tacitus
(1591) ; or Sir Symonds D'Ewes (1602—1650),
author of the Journals of all the Parliaments
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who lived
to undergo the indignity of being expelled by
Colonel Pride in 1648. The literary value is
not great, but the historical value almost
priceless.'

A sub-species of the chronicle out of the full-
dress biography is the memoir, and it is
characteristic of the last twenty-five years of
the sixteenth century, which saw so many

in gluttony they fell short of tlieir predecessors. Oxford and Cambridge are equal in greatness, so that it
is impossible to discriminate between them. He bemoans the high prices, ever rising in spite of England's
increased traffic. Wheat bread is a luxury for the rich. The beer, however, is better, or at any rate stronger,
than of old. Men took two meals a day only — dinner and supper — and each class had its own hour for dining.
In matters of attire he found his countrymen so nnitable that, except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not
see any so disguised — women have become men and men transformed into monsters. In the maimer of building
and furnishing houses, he notes three important changes in his time — chimneys, bedding, and plate (to which
add glass windows) had all been multiplied to admiration. But with these refinements he laments rise of rents
and growth of usury. Then, as now, work was scamped, horsedealers were often rogues, Roman coins were
dug up, English ships were famous, vagabonds, Egyptians, harlots, and scolds were incorrigible, the fox and
badger were preserved l)y gentry for sport. Beavers lingered on the Tavy (?). English brawn was deemed
the rarest treat in foreign parts. An odd story is told of certain Jews in Spain being inveigled into eating
it on the supposition that it was fish.

' Closely akin to this may be noticed The History nfthe Parliaments oj England (1640-4.3) by the versatile and
not oppressively trutliful or honest Thom;is May of Mayfield (159,5 — 10.50), secretary and apologist of tlie Long
Parliament, translator of Lucan, author of tragedies, vcrse-chrt nicies, and The Heir, a comedy, 1022.

DIARISTS

139

experiments both in life and in literature, that
it should witness the rude commencements of
this delightful art of memoir-writing in the
modern sense. " Memoir,"' of course, is a very
elfistic term, including autobiographical diary
(Pepys), diurnal of occurrences (Luttrell), and
a workcd-uf) chronicle of contemporary events
(Walpole). The best specimens ^ contain all
three elements, as in St. Simon ; and in Eliza-
bethan time we already can recognise specimens
jof each species. In the first class we have
Forman, Manningham, Dee, Wilbraham, and
Yonge ; in the second D'Ewes, Hcnslowe,
Camden, and Bodley ; in the third Melville,
Bannatyne, Spottiswoode, Baillie, Moysie, the
Scots annalists, to wliom we might perhaps
add Carey and Winwood. Most of them are
somewhat rudimentary as regards development :
the more self-conscious forms, such as the
literary memoir and the confession, are practi-
cally absent. They are nevertheless of much
interest both from their intrinsic value and
from the literary influence of a much-needed
kind which they must have exercised upon
narrative prose.

A very typical diary in which records of a
few salient historical events are diversified by
multitudes of notices of persons of social dis-
tinction with personal details, portents and
records of sermons in the summarising of
which nearly all the diarists of the period
show an abnormal skilfulness is the diary
of John Manningham, a gentleman of Bra-
bourne, Kent, and of the Middle Temple,
who discussed Queen Elizabeth's illness with
her physician Dr. Parry, collected much gossip
in the Temple Hall, recorded his visit to
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in 1602, and died
some twenty years later. His closely written
and compact diary, after lying obscurely in
the Harleian Collection for over two hundred
years, was detected by the keen eye of Mr.
Collier as containing a Shakespeare reference
in 1831, and thirty-seven years later was
transcribed and edited by Mr. Bi-uce. Apart
from the frequent allusions to legal luminaries
there are many other interesting anecdotes

and personalia in these long-forgotten pages.
The unfortunate Overbury comes before us
several times, such as we should have expected
to find him, inconsiderate and impetuous.
Ben Jonson flits across the page. Of Marston
there is a disagreeable anecdote which has not
been left unnoticed by poetical antiquaries.
Sir 'ITiomas Bodley and I^rd Deputy Mount-
joy are alluded to. There is an excellent
account of an interview with old Stow the
antiquary, a valuable glimpse of the Crom-
well family during the boyhood of the Pro-
tector, and references, some of them of
importance, to Sir Walter Raleigh, to his
foolish friend Lord Cobham, to the wizard
Earl of Northumberland, and, of course, many
allusions to the Cecils, both to Sir William and
to the youngest son, to whom, according to the
joke which is here preserved, his father's wisdom
descended as if it had been held by the tenure
of Borough-English. Some of Manningham's
descriptions of the preachers whom he patronised
are most realistic. " At Paules," he wrote in
1602, "one preached with a long browne
beard, a hanging look, a gloating eye, and
a tossing learing gesture. In the afternoon
at Foster Lane, one Clappam, a ' blacke '
fellow with a sour look, but a good spirit,
bold and sometimes bluntly witty, and he
preached about Rahab " — a queer text and
queer sermon.

Sir Roger Wilbraham of the old Cheshire
family. Master of Requests to Queen Elizabeth,
died in 1616. He was at Gray's Inn with
Bacon, and was knighted at the same time as
Sir Julius Caesar by James I., at Greenwich,
soon after his arrival in London. A lawyer,
and a man of affairs, who sat in Parliament
under James I., and had official and judicial
experience in Ireland, Wilbraham's comments
are not those of the man in the street, but are
judicious and carefully weighed. His abstracts
of speeches in Parliament are full of interest,
and confirm the subserviency of tone adopted
towards Elizabeth to the very close of her
reign. His account of her and of James's
accession and his attempt to compare their

' Of the minor diarists. Sir Tliomas Bodley (1.545-101:3) is brief and somewhat formal. Henslowe's is a
professional diary and play note-book by the notorious dramatic manager ; Alexander Daniel's from 1617 onwards
is genealogical, chronological, and local in character ; Dee's is a learned professional diarial with quaint
memorabilia of his life ; Sir Tliomas Hoby's, which closes early in 1654, is largely composed of travel notes ;
the Scottish memoirs are very valuable historically, especially in ecclesiastical matters (incorporated wholesale
by Calderwood and later historians). Books of engraved portraits with short Lives were furnished by He:.ry,
ihe bookseller son of Philemon Holland.

140

FATHER JOHN GERARD

characters show that he had some literary
ambition in inditing his journal.

John Rous, a respectable clergyman, from
Emmanuel, Cambridge, a native of Hessett in
Suffolk, appointed minister in James I.'s reign
of Weeting and Santon Downham, began
diarising before 1612, but most of his original
drafts are lost. From his loophole in the
countiy he observed and recorded and collected
materials in a small way. He was no partisan, a
fair scholar, hostile to the Duke of Bucking-
ham and to all papists, but generally inclined
to be tolerant (see a lively account by him of
Buckingham''s assassination, and some rather
gruesome details of William Utting the toad-
eatei'). Another diarist of the same class is
Walter Yonge. He commenced his Diary
very soon after Elizabeth's death ; it was found
cjuite by accident at Taunton among a lot of
old books ; came into pos.session of George
Roberts, the Lyme Regis antiquary, and was
edited by him in 1848. It is a good specimen
of the common sense and wide information
possessed by a West Country Puritan justice
of the peace in the south of Devon imder
James I. The diaries of Rous and Yonge are
comparatively of humble and local interest ; but
tliey show the kind of simultaneous instinct by
which educated people in every gi'ade began
recording events in a more or less systematic
way about this time, with a kind of half-sup-
pressed consciousness that they were living
upon a great stage in which events momentous
in their interest to posterity might occur at
any time.

One of the most interesting and typical in
many respects of the personal naiTatives of the
period is the Latin Autobiography of Father
John Gerard. A much-persecuted Jesuit, he
managed to escape from England about 1606
and then set to work and wrote a detailed
account of the Gunpowder Plot — an accoinit
exculpatory of tlie Catholics as a whole, and
specially designed to exonerate and indeed to
beatify Father Garnet — Saint Garnet as
Yonge indignantly declares that the papists
call him. About three years after this he
wrote his very interesting Autohiography. We
have an extraordinary picture of the fana-
ticism — if that be the proper word — of this
devoted man, playing hide-and-seek with the
priest-baiters such as Topcliffe and Anthony
Mimday, the Balladino of The Case is Altered,
feeing the gaoler wJio put his fetters on, but

refusing to give him anything for taking them
off, shuffling about in these fetters in his
narrow cell until the rust wore off and they
became as bright as polished steel, and jangling
them noisily so that they might drown the
sound of Geneva psalms going on beneath
him.

Robert Carey's account of the circumstances
of Elizabeth's death will always possess interest.
He was a grandson of Mary Boleyn, the Queen's
aunt ; he was always rather a favourite, and
when he went to see the Queen at Richmond
in March, 1603, he was promptly admitted
and found her sitting low upon her cushions ;
in anticipation of her death he made his
arrangements, and in spite of the watchfulness
of the guards he managed to escape from the
closed palace and to reach Holyrood, in spite
of a bad kick from his horse, upon the third
day. For the moment he obtained his reward
— a post about the King ; but reflection upon
the indecency of his haste led James eventually
to revoke his appointment !

The Autobiography of Sir Symonds D'Ewes
is a distinct and very interesting type, linking
the personal autobiography proper with the
diurnal of occurrences, for it is in its inception
an autobiography based upon a diary. The
diary begins to expand into some fulness at the
time of Overbury's murder in 1616. D'Ewes
was only about fourteen at the time, but he
was a most precocious youth, and was, in fact,
a born memoir-writer, like Horace Walpole —
observant, close, censorious, narrow, indefatigable
with his pen, very jealous and sensitive to the
lightest offence, timid, and devoid of masculine
tastes. D'Ewes was in many ways a type of
the white-blooded Laodicean and rather feline
diarist. He has perhaps been unduly attacked
by Wood, Hearne, and other stalwart Tories,
but he was certainly far from being a genial
character.

Witii D'Ewes we are among the diurnalists —
recorders and commentators from day to day
like Narcissus Luttrell, Madame D'Arblay,
Mrs. Delany, and Grevillc. And even in
Jacobean times we have the quidnuncs Sir
Dudley Carleton (1573—16352), John Chamber-
lain (1.553 — 1627), George Carcw, Baron Carew,
and Sir James Melville. And their letters,
like those of HoiTy Walpole, arc really memoirs
under a very thin disguise, exhibiting tlie same
extraordinary facility and diverting flow of
casual everyday narratives.

RICHARD HAKLUYT

141

Carleton''s style is exceptionally clear and
fluent ; few writers have surpassed him in
making his meaning obvious without effort and
without unnecessary verbiage. And of all his
coiTespondents the most kindred spirit is John
Chamberlain, of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Both were university men who had travelled
widely, and Carleton especially had a keen
insight into all the intricacies and delicacies of
diplomatic life. Both were eclectics, humorists
in a quiet way, connoisseurs, and gossips.

Sir Robert Naunton (1563—1635) was an
inveterate old courtier of the Tudor regime,
who warily and stealthily made his way to
the secretaryship mainly by the sufferance of
Buckingham. From that point of view, in a
few intervals of leisure, he made notes upon the
characters of his contemporaries and predecessors
in office. These he worked up in Charles's
reign into his Fragmenta Regalia, which is
interesting as a link between characters and
memoirs proper, and also as foreshadowing the
elaborate characters which later artists such as
Clarendon, Burnet, Hervey, and Hume worked
into their histories or memoirs.

A short interval only separates the historical
from the geographical gossips — the travellers
such as Coryat, Fynes Moryson, William
Lithgow, and Sir George Sandys, who wrote
such monumental narratives of their wanderings
from city to city and from land to land.

Fynes Moryson (1566 — 1630), a Lincolnshire
and Peterhouse man, obtained licence to travel
in 1590, and his portentous Itinerary, dealing
partly with his journeys in central and southern
Europe, partly with the art of travel generally,
was put forth in 1617 (a fourth part remained
in MS. until 1903). More amusing, though
scarcely less voluminous, are the travels of
Thomas Coryat (1577—1617), an unofficial
court jester who concealed a passion for travel
under his motley, and set out on a wonderful
tour from his native Odcombe in Somerset in
1608. His Coryat\s Crudities Hastily Gobled
Up, as his itinerary was grotesquely called,
appeared in folio in 1611. The more academic
but hardly less entertaining Travel Relation of
George Sandys, who journeyed in Egypt and
the Holy Land, appeared in 1615, and William
Lithgow's Rare Adventures and Painfull Pere-
grinations in 1632. William Parry's Discourse
of the Travels of Anthony Sherley appeared in
1601. Captain John Smith, of Virginia, wrote
a famous but partly apocryphal narrative of

his European travels, Tnw Travels (1630). llie
travels of Sir Thomas Overbury, Sir Rolx'rt
Dallington, Sir Thomas Herbert, and John
Evelyn are all the work of highly scholarly
and ob-servant men, but have less individuality
and more of the impersonal and diplomatic
character than the preceding. Heylyn, Corbet,
and Brathwaite are noticed elsewhere.

For the logs and yarns of the sea-farers as
opposed to the land-faring journals of the
epoch we are indebted almost exclusively to
Richard Hakluyt (1.5.52—1616), who from the
time that he was a boy at Westminster dis-
covered a positive passion for cosmography and
voyagers' narratives. These as time went on,
and he became a well-beneficed dignitary of
the Church, and a facile discharger of archi-
diaconal functions, he collected into his well-
known Principal Navigations, Voyages, and
Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, en-
larged 1598-1600). Most of the greatest
captains of the day upon whose lips Hakluyt
had hung entranced are represented in this
monster collection, which is of the utmost
interest in the history of commerce, shipping,
travel, colonisation, and philology, the narra-
tive, which is frequently the compiler's own,
being constantly heightened by the air of
adventure and glamour of the period, while
here and there are to be found splendid reaches
of English prose. A successor and continuator
of Hakluyt, though of somewhat inferior calibre,
was found in Samuel Purchas (1577 — 1626),
whose Pilgrimes came out in four volumes in
1625. Finally, before quitting topography
we must just name those eminent pioneers of
England's noble series of County Histories,
John Norden's Speculum Britannice and Erdes-
wicke's Survey of Staffordshire, commenced
1593, Lambarde's Perambulation of Kent, Stow's
Survey of 1598, Carew's Survey of Cornwall,
1602.

The writings of the Elizabethan critics
are primarily apologies for Poets and Poetry
against the onslaught of Precisians and Puritans.
By writers such as John Northbrooke {Treatise
wherein Dicing, Dawncing, Vaine Playes, etc.,
are Repvved, 1577), Stephen Gosson {The
Schoole of Abuse ... a Pksaunt Invective
against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, etc., 1579, and
Playes Confuted, 1582), Philip Stubbes {The
Anatomie of Abuses, 1583), George Whetstone
{A Touchstone for the Time, 1584), William
Rankins {Mirrour of Monsters. 1587), Dr.

142

ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM

Rainolds {Overthrow of Stage Players, 1599),
and others, the early Christian tradition of the
iniquity of plays, songs, and merry tales was
wrested with little regard to the context from
Augustine, TertuUian, Cyprian, Lactantius,
and Chrysostom, and hurled at the exponents
of heUes lettres collectively, and without any
attempt to discriminate between poets and
balladmongers. Thev attacked the vices of
the playhouse, and the dangei's of foreign
influence through literature. Against these
" poet-whippers," as Sidney called them, there
sprang up a school of vigorous protest headed
by Thomas Lodge, Sidney himself, Sir John
Harington, Daniel, and Heywood. They de-
fend poetry both on historical and on abstract
grounds. Poetry they held was universal in
its antiquity. All great nations had practised
it, and all great princes patronised it. Poetry
was of divine origin, moral and artistic in its
aim, summarised by Webbe as "to mingle
delight with profit in such wise that a reader
might by his reading be partaker of both."
To the time-honoured objections that poets
were liars and wantons and their readers fools
for their pains they furnish answers equally old
and equally hackneyed.

From these beginnings the critics go on to
discuss more purely literary problems such as
the classification of literary types or genres,
the necessity of studying classical models, tlie
need of symmetry and restraint, of bringing
order into the chaos of English prosody, of
refining the vernacular diction threatened by
the present influx of new words and new forms.
Here again were sides of controversy, Gabriel
Harvey, Wilson, Puttenham, Webbe, Thomas
Drant, Thomas Campion (and even if we do
not include Sidney), most of the familiar names
being strongly in favour of a classical pro-
gramme and a classical or quantitative prosody,
their object being, in Harvey's words, " to pull
down rhyming and set up versifying " after
Latin models ; the champions of the other, and
as it proved the winning, side were far less
noted personages.

One of these was Richard Mulcastcr, noted
in his day as a schoolmaster, who wrote in
1581 in his book on Training up Children,
" I love Rome, Ijut London better ; I favour
Italy, but England more ; I honour the Latin,
but worship the Engli.sh." Another was
Sir Ric'hard Carew, the Cornish antitjuary and
translator of Tasso, who penned in 159G his

Excelkncij of the Emgllih Tongue, and finally
there was Samuel Daniel, the poet, who in his
Defense of Rhyme of 1602 gave the coup de
grace to the academic theory that English
verse ought to be built; upon classical lines.
The books of lasting value and interest which
emerged from these early debates upon the
first principles of the literary art were two
in number, Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (or,
as a rival printer had it, Defense of Poesie),
1595, and Jonson's oddly named Timber, or
Discoveries, first printed in 1641. Sidney's
theory of poetry (classification of genres, and
vindication of the superiority of poetry over
its two chief rivals, history and philosophy)
may be termed an epitome of the criticism
of the Italian Renaissance. Sidney expected
his correspondents to inform him as to the
latest Italian books and theories, and in his
own treatise he drew considerably upon the
theories of Minturno, Trissino, and Castel-
vetro, and also from Scaliger's poetics. By
these writers he controlled his views on such
knotty questions as the dramatic unities, and
the various canons of Aristotle, the different
classes of prose and verse, and most of the
technical points.

But the most interesting portion of his
defence by far is the more original section in
which he discusses the contemporary state of
poetry in England. Why, he inquires, is
England, the mother of excellent minds, such a
hard stepmother to poets .'' He admits great-
ness to Chaucer, and poetical beauties to TTie
Mirrour for Magistrates, to Surrey, and to
The Shepheaj-ds Caknder, but he deplores the
defects of the English di-ama, its fondness for
farce and neglect of the unities ; while he
strongly deprecates the tendency to affectations,
euphuistic and other. This state of tilings, he
concludes, should not be ; England ouglit to be
the reverse of sterile in regard to poetry, for
the English language is specially favourable to
poets. Our language is equal to all demands
upon it, its composite nature, its facile grannnar,
its richness in compound words, are so many
advantages, contributing to vaiious and melo-
dious expression. Finally, for the purposes of
modern versifications, the English language is
especially adapted. " Fie, then, on the
Englishman wlio scorns the sacred mysteries of
poetry ! On all such earth-creeping minds,"
says Sidney, in his humorous peroration, " I
oufiht to invoke some terrible curse such as

BEN JONSON'S "TIMBER " 143

that you be rliyined to death ; I will not do authorities as Dryden revered Boileaii, but he

that, but thus inucli curse I must send you in loves good Engli^h. " Pure and neat language

the behalf of all poets — that while you live, you I love, yet plain and customary." " Custom is

live in love and never get favour for lacking the mistress of language.'' " The chief virtue

skill of a sonnet ; and when you die your of style is perspicuity."" " Writings need

memory die from the earth for want of an sunshine." Elsewhere, as champion of the

epitaph." poetic office, Jonson left a noble expression

Ben Jonson's notebook with its pedantic title of an exalted ideal, when he wrote of Poesie ;

of Timber (1641) is a somewhat promiscuous

thicket of artistic and moral epigrams, raw Attired in tlie majesty of art,

material of thought for his Works, showing ^«* ^'^^ '" *P'"* "''*'' *''« Pi-ecious taste

, , ,, , r. ■ 1 J Of sweet philosopliy. . . .

what a marvellous sponge he was oi ideas and r\ ^r, i i j i i .

r o O then, iiow proud a presence does she hear !

notions from ancient and modem literature. x^en is she like herself; fit to be seen

He invades other authors like a monarch and Of none but grave and consecrated eyes,

holds most of the writers of antiquity in

solution in his spacious memory. The craze By the time he wrote Tim()er critics had begun

for Latinising English poetry was fairly laid to to feel it superfluous to argue about the general

rest by this time ; in other respects Jonson was tendencies of poetry. Taking all that for

usually a strong classicist, but there is a sub- granted they began to study no longer the

stratum of sanity, moderation, and native good allegory but the art which underlies all creative

sense about his opinions which separates him work in literature. Jonson thus represents

by a wide gulf from pedants such as Drant, the maturity and the sophistication of a period

Harvey, and Webbe. He respects the Italian now drawing to its close.^

' Of Raleigh there are Lives by Oldys (1736), C'ayley, Tytler, Kingsley, Edwards (1808), Stebbing,
Martin Hume, Taylor, and Rennell Rodd (1904). See also Diet. Nut, Biog. and Gardiner's Uisturij ; the
complete Works at Oxford, 1829 ; A Bibliography of Raleigh, by W. Eames, 188G. For much fuller detail
as to biographers, travellers, and critics, see Seccombe and Allen's Age oj Shakespeare, ed. 1904, Book II.
For the critical writers, Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays (1811-15) and G. Gregory Smith's Elizabethan
Critical Essays (1904) should be consulted. There are good editions of Sidney's Apologie and Jonson's Timber
by Cook and Schelling. On Coryat, Peacham, Overbury and some minor prose writers of the period
A. W. Fox's Book of Bachelors may be perused with profit.

The period closed light-heartedly enough with tlie licentious comedy of Fletcher and with copious
imitation of Melic and Anacreontic strains — the last imitation of antiquity until anti<iue form again crops up
in the Pindarics of Cowley and the Heroic Drama or Dryden. The Italian and Renaissance temper of the
statesmen who had safeguarded England througli the Reformation movement was none the less surely working
itself out. England was now, by a strange admixture of introspection and scripture, to seek to justify the
religion which its rulers had provided for it. Radical politics and biblical religion submerged the pagan and
foreign, yet at the same time nationalist literary impulse, which had set in with Sidney, culminated in
Shakespeare, and was disguised almost out of recognition in Milton. The serious development of our Letters
had undoubtedly been deflected from its natural course by the brilliant success of the composite drama, by
tlie undue amount of subserviency to foreign models, and by the surfeit of words for music. Narrative prose
and verse, upon which it would have been natural for a later generation to build, was comparatively
undeveloped. Dazzling as Elizabethan literature is, it was in some respects strangely defective. It resembles
a faerie structure built upon a narrow rock. Of foundations in the ordinary sense it possessed none. And
yet, if its sphere was to be enlarged, these foundations would have, sooner or later, to be constructed. This
eventually proved the task of the period from 1600 to 1780. The postponement was due to no literary dearth
in the period upon which we are now entering. It was, indeed, prolific in great writers, and promised to
be germinal in the highest degree. But forces more urgent than Literature were driving men to introspection
and religion. A complicated and rather rapid social change, which set in about 1603, began to divert them
from the drama, the very success of which had exliausted its native vifcility. Literature had, in brief, to go
through the straits of Puritanism. The cross conflict between Renaissance and Reformation entered upon
an entirely new phase. Stress was thrown upon actual rather than upon reflected life. Bunyan, Baxter, and
Clarendon became typical figures. The more intense and individualistic note which had begun to sound so
interestingly in Donne and Crashaw, and Browne and Herbert, was dammed up and flowed underground for
upwards of a century. But the literary study of this transition period is still in its infancy, and all such
generalisations must be suspect on the score of unripeness.

BOOK III

THE COUNTER RENAISSANCE

145

CHAPTER I
FOUR GREAT PROSE WRITERS

" Fuller's language ! Grant me patience. Heaven ! A tithe of his heauties would be sold theap for a whole
library of our classical writers . . . and antiquarians. . . . The venerable rust and dust of the whole concern
are not worth an ounce of Fuller's earth ! . . . God bless thee, dear old man ! may I meet with thee ! which is
tantamount to— may I go to Heaven ! " — Coleridge, Notes on English Divines, etc.

" To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle.
Every inch of space is a miracle,

Every spear of grass — the frames, limbs, organs or men and women and all that concerns them.
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles." — Motto for Browne Jrom Whitman.

Robert Burton — Thomas Fuller — Sir Thomas Browne — Jeremy Taylor.

ROBERT BURTON, the son of Ralph
Burton, born at Lindley, in Leicester-
shire, on February 8th, 1577, passed from
Nuneaton School to Oxford, becoming in 1599
a student at Christ Church, where for form's
sake, " though he wanted not a tutor,'' he was
placed under the tuition of Dr. John Bancroft,
afterwards Bishop of Oxford. Residing at
Christ Church, he drew the revenues of two
livings (one in Oxford, to the parishioners of
which, Wood tells us, he always gave the
Sacrament in wafers), and in his famous
" studie " at the " House " he died on January
25th, 1640, in the year of his grand climacteric.
He lies in the north aisle of the cathedral at
Oxford, and his resting-place is commemorated
by a coloured bust, similar in design to the Shake-
speare bust at Stratford and the Hooker bust
at Bishopsboume, bearing the famous epitaph :
" Faucis notus, Paucioribus Ignotus, Hie Jacet
Democritus Junior, Cui vitam dedit et mortem
Melancholia." He seems to have led a secluded
and uneventful life as a scholar, seeking an
easily found relaxation in merry tales and
buffooneries. He wrote a fairly juvenile Latin
play called Phihsophaster, begun in 1606 (that

is, four years before The Alchemisi), and acted
at Christ Church in 1617 (first printed 1862),
dealing with the exposure of a nest of charlatans
in a theme familiar to Ben Jonson. In 1621
appeared the first edition of his great work,
The Anatomy of Mela/uholi/, What It is,
in quarto, by Democritus Junior.' For the
general conception and form of the work
Burton owes not a little, it may be supposed, to
the " humorists " of a precedent generation,
and to such books in particular as Thomas
Walkington's Optick Glass of Humours (1607),
Rowlands's Democritus, or Dr. Merryman Ms
Medicines against Melancholy Humours (1607),
and several of Dekker's tracts. Burton himself
was mined regularly until Anne's reign, when
the workings were abandoned, to be rediscovered
by Sterne. With the third edition of 1628,
which was the second published in folio,
appeared Le Blanc's remarkable frontispiece,
preceded by a curious description of its contents
in homely verse — verse analogous to the doggerel
of the translations which adorn the text. After
the dedication to Lord Berkeley come some
Latin elegiacs of little interest, and some
English verses called the author's " Abstract of

' The Rylands Library at Manchester has a fine copy of the first edition " At Oxford, 1G21," distinguished
by the fact that the conclusion " To the Reader " is dated "from my study in Ch. Ch., Oxon, December 5th,
1620," and signed Robert Burton. It also contains the following characteristic manuscript note by George
Steevens : " During a pedantic age like that in which Burton's production appeared, it must have been eminently
serviceable to writers of many descriptions. Hence the unlearned might furnish themselves with appropriate
scraps of Greek and Latin, whilst men of letters would find their inquiries shortened by knowing where they
might look for what both ancients and moderns had advanced on the subject of human passions. I confess my
inability to point out any other English author who has so largely dealt in apt and original quotations."

Ii7

148

ROBERT BURTON

Melancholy,'' of more than a little interest, for it
seems practically certain that Milton had their
theme in his mind and their refrain ringing in
his ears when he drafted his Penserow. These
verses are followed by the long expository intro-
duction, entitled " Democritus Junior to the
Reader," which forms one of the most interesting
and masterly portions of the book.

One of the most obvious and perhaps super-
ficial remarks to make on the book is that it is
typical of its age — that of the scholarly cento
— the cento, or as Camden puts it, the " patch-
work quilt " of innumerable scraps of polyglot
learning, and the age that of scholars like
Prynne and Cudworth, Casaubon, Keckermann,
and Isaac Vossius — men of an abnormal leathery
physique, who sat over their desks till their
eyes grew dim, whose deliberate ideal was appa-
rently to read and abstract and summarise
practically every book that had ever been
wTitten. Swift and Bolingbroke, with Pope
and Arbuthnot, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century managed between them to
laugh such a viodn.s operandi out of court as the
extremity of pedantic absurdity, and we have
both gained and lost by the success of their
jeiuc d'esprit. Smollett, jeering in his eighteenth-
century fashion at the survival of the ancient
scholastic diligence in Germany, said that the
German genius lay more in the back than in
the brain. But the English scholar of Burton's
day seemed to possess both back and brain.

For brain power of no ordinary kind is surely
evinced in this scheme, partial though it be,
of the philosophy of human life. One out of
sympathy with Burton's mood may perhaps be
tempted to say that a Burton might be cut out of
a mind like Bacon's without much being missed.
Yet Burton is much beside a scholar. If The
Anatomy be regarded as the mere outpouring
of commonplace books, with a pretext merely
of unity in purpose and subject, then, maybe,
it is no great thing. To be understood it must
be regarded at once as the exhibition of a
temperament and the discussion of a case.
TTie case is that of the seamy side of human
life and its perils. The author deliberately
takes up his position of detached yet watchful
isolation, in order to observe and to illustrate
the human comedy : and he exhibits a new

variety of vanities, combining in one book, a.s
it were, the knowledge of Solomon and his
reflections upon the futility of things known
and the knowing of them. " There is nothing
true, and if there is we don't know it," said
Democritus ; and also, " we know nothing, not
even if there is anything to know." We cer-
tainly know little of Democritus, save that he
was a little wearish (withered) old man, very
melancholy by natui-e, averse from company,
and given to solitariness. Burton modestly dis-
claimed any intention of comparing himself with
the sage of Abdera, but urged that he, too,
had led a silent, solitary, and sedentary life.
In philosophical calibre he may have been, and
probably was, inferior to the author of Peri
Enthtimias : yet Burton represents admirably
well the amused tolerance of the laughing
philosopher, his nihilism and his scepticism
as to the possibility of attaining anything like
content or happiness. " Man never is, but
always to be blessed."

A curious mixture was Burton — a Christian,
a Protestant, and superstitious as Montaigne,
as may be gathered from his digression on
devils. From a profound theologian and
learned microscopist of Melancholy, a waggon-
load of sermons or a huge Latin tractate might
have been expected. Burton gives his reasons
against both, and we have what we have — a
composition as heterogeneous as any English
novel and containing almost every possible
content except a regular intrigue or love plot.
Yet we have an enormous section on Love
Melancholy, in which in his own words Burton
does not omit to " call a spade a spade."
Thinking aloud in a slow, rumbling manner
over the emptiness of life and the vanity of
learning, he seeks and finds the same relief that
Montaigne, Browne, and Charles Lamb found
in a large measure of self-portraiture, and his
erudite pessimism is at lea.st as entertaining a.s
Schopenhauer. His fellow collegians discerned
in him a merry, tacete, and juvenile old man,
while his bookseller made a fortune out of his
book. In lust of words and fondness for
catalogues of them, he is a true fellow of Jonson,
Marlowe, Rabelais, and Urquhart. Beneath
all we may discover ' peeping out pretty often
the grave waggery of a man scanning human

' For Burton's life tlie aiitliorities are Wooil's famous Athcrxr Oxnniensex and the Itfliquia of Thomaa
Hearne. The best edition is Shilleto's, witli A. H. Bulleii's introduction (,"? vols., 18!)3).* See also Ferriar's
IlltUilrufionx of SIcme ; Ljinili's Driached Thoughts on Ifookn mid Itnulivij ; lilaclcwood, Sept. 1861 ; A. W. Fox's
Hook of liac.helurn (189!)) ; and Charle-s Whibley's essay iu I.iti-mry Portraits {VM4).

FULLER'S " WORTHIES "

149

nature for foibles, and tlicrel)y keeping himself
on the windy side of care.

Of the prose writers whom we are now con-
sidering Fuller had most native wit, and did
the most to naturalise common sense in English
everyday writing. In one respect he was the
forerunner of Samuel Johnson, in the other of
William Cobbett. Born at Aldwinkle, where
his father was rector, in 1608, Thomas Fuller
was proud to call himself a Northamptonshire
and Cambridge (Queens' and Sidney Sussex) man.
He took orders in 1630, and one of his first
duties was to " bury " Hobson, the famous
Cambridge carrier. Fuller's uncle, Bishop
Davenant of Salisbury, gave him a prebend
and a rectory at Broad Windsor, Dorset.
There he manied, and in 1639-40 brought out
his Historie of the HoUc Warre, an entertaining
account of the Crusades in five books, rich in
good stories and unlooked-for allusions and
digressions. In 1642 he brought out his best
and most popular work, the Holy and Prophane
State, a series of character-sketches and essays,
with many concrete examples — of a good wife,
Monica ; of a good college head, Dr. Metcalf ;
of a good herald, Camden ; of a wise states-
man, Burghley ; of a good general, Gustavus
Adolphus ; of a good prince, Charles I. ; of a
witch, Joan of Arc ; of a tyrant, Alva. Fuller
obtained a chaplaincy in the Royalist army,
and while rambling through the country col-
lected materials for his Worthies of England.
He would sit, it is said, patiently for hours
listening to the prattle of old women in order
to obtain snatches of local history or time-
honoured tradition. In 1648 he obtained a
curacy at Waltham Abbey, and while there
wrote his buoyant Pisgah Sight of Palestine
(1650), the topography of which was taken in
toto from Bochartus in his Holy Geography.
" Let my candle go out in a stink when I refuse
to confess from where I have lighted it." Next
year he edited and partly wrote a racy bio-
graphical Thesaui-us of Protestant divines
known as Abel Redivivus. He managed to get
through the ordeal of the " triers " (or Board
of Examiners who tested the " sufficiency " of
divines) with the help of a "shove" from
Cromwell's chaplain, John Howe, and was once
more a lecturer in the City of London, where
in 1655-6 he brought out his folio Church
History of Britain. The learned Peter Heylyn
regarded Fuller, if not as a time-server, as a
far too placable Churchman, and attacked his

History as a rhapsody, full of impertinences,
errors, and scraps of trencher jests. Fuller
replied with a gentleness and moderation which
eventually softened the heart of his critic and
converted him into a trusty friend. In
1658 Fuller was made rector of Cranford, in
Middlesex ; at the Restoration he was reinstated
to all his honours and emohnnents, was made a
D.D., and was well within sight of a bishopric
when he was cut off by fever, at the age of
fifty-four, in August, 1661.

Fuller's last great book, and one of the most
characteristic, The History of the Worthies of
England, was published posthumously by his son
in 1662. Its " endeavour " was to record the
natural resources and most eminent worthies of
each county in order. But of all biographical
dictionaries it is certainly the most rambling,
and also the most facetious. Fuller's peculiar
humour finding scope in quaint anecdotes about
all the notorieties of his day. Alike in his
references to public calamities and his converse
with private individuals, Fuller was utterly
unable to repress this overmastering tendency
to jocularity. It ought at any rate to be true
that he once caught a tartar in a certain Mr.
Sparrowhawk, of whom he asked what was the
difference between an owl and a sparrowhawk.
The reply was that an owl was fuller in the
head and fuller in the face, and fuller all over.

The combination in Fuller of wit and learn-
ing, erudite fancy, and the humblest gossip
made him the darling of Coleridge and Charles
Lamb. He had been one of the most popular
wTiters of his time, and one of the first who
made writing pay. The eighteenth century
wits were prone to look down upon him as a
buffoon ; but in reality he is neither coarse,
vulgar, nor irreverent. He excels nearly all his
contemporaries not only in clearness of style,
but also in a gentle and humorous kindliness
which sometimes becomes delicately beautiful.
It cannot be denied that Fuller is read far less
than his present reputation as "an appetising
bundle of contradictions" would seem to warrant.
This is partly due to the fatigue felt by many
at the frequency of his jokes and his maxims.
As a model both of prose style and of temper
he deserves to be read far more than he is.

Sir Thomas Browne was born in Cheapside,
London, on October 19th, 1605. His father
was a London mercer of a good Cheshire family ;
but he died when Thomas was a child, and his
mother married Sir Thomas Dutton. The

150

RELIGIO MEDICI'

boy's pecuniary interests seem to have been
somewhat neglected. He was, however, sent to
Winchester and to Pembroive College, Oxford,
whence he took his Master''s degree in 1629.
Attracted by his love of physical science to the
medical profession, he spent some years in
travel and study at Montpelier, Padua, and
Leyden, where he took his doctor's degree, and
then settled down to a country practice at
Shipley Hall, near Halifax. In 1637 he left
Shipley, and settled finally at Norwich, where
he passed forty-five years of scarcely interrupted
prosperity. No man of talent, not even
Herrick, stood more completely aloof from the
great political struggle. From the heats of
religious controversy he detached himself with
a like contemplative contempt. His mind was
so constituted that he held it to be essential to
hold opposite views on every subject. He was
thus at the same time one of the most religious,
one of the most philosophic, one of the most
sceptical, and one of the most credulous of
men. His habitual mood is determined by
an attraction towards tiie two opposite poles of
humour and mysticism. In his great book,
the ReUg'io Medici, Browne indulges in some
disparaging remarks upon marriage. " The
whole world," he says, " was made for man ; but
the twelfth part of man for woman. Man is the
whole world and the breath of God, woman the
rib and the ci-ooked part of man." He wishes,
after Montaigne, that we might grow like trees,
and so avoid this foolish business of matrimony.
Shortly afterwards he married a lady of whom
it is said that she was so perfect that they
seemed to come together by a kind of natural
magnetism, had ten children, and lived very

happily ever afterwards. When Charles II.
visited the capital of East Anglia in 1671,
Norwich was afflicted with a shy mayor, a bird
almost as rare as the phoenix, about whom the
author of Vulgar Errors speculated so freely.
And so the honour of knighthood devolved
upon Dr. Thomas Browne. In addition to
the licUgio Medici, written about lG.'35-6, but
not printed until 1642, the two famous works
published by Browne were P.ieudo-dojia
Epidemica, better known by its English title

' Thus he discusses whether after Lazarus was raised from the dead, his heir would be justified leg;ally
in detaining his inheritance. Other topics are : Does goat's Wood dissolve diamonds .'' Do Jews stink ? Why
are negroes black .'' What to say after sneezing. Should Adam be represented with a navel, or no ? See
Stephen's Iloun in a Lihrari/ ; Symonds's introduction to llcliijio i/(,'rf«;i (dainelot (Classics) ; Sir T. Brorvni\ by
Edmund (Josse (Knglish Men of Letters, 190")). A good text is furnisheil in Cliarles Sayle's edition of 1!)04.
The classic editors are Simon Wilkin and \V. A. (ireenliill ; while of Urne-IJuriuU the l)cst edition is that o(
Sir John Evans (1893).

of Vulgar Errors, 1646 ; Unie-Buriall and Th^
Garden of Cyrus, published together 1658.
The busy, prosperous provincial doctor, whose
whole life was " wrapt in a pure flame and
ecstasy of high curiosity," survived until 1682,
when he met his end philosophically on his
seventy-seventh birthday, nearly a quarter of a
century after the completion of his literary work.

Browne's earliest work, the Religio Medici,
is a sort of confession of faith, revealing a deep
insight into the mysteries of the spiritual life.
In this he by no means confines himself to
theological matters, but takes his reader into
his confidence upon a host of questions a.s
abstruse as those debated by the schoolmen,^
intermingled with curious passages of self-
laudation in which he enlarges upon his charity-,
tolerance, and perfect freedom from both
meanness and pride. On such subjects, with
a seasoning of Talmudic conceits and meta-
physical subtleties, he pours himself out with
all the artless and undisguised volubility of
Montaigne. In Browne, however, there is much
more of the poet ; he is perhaps the most
poetic Englishman that has ever habitually
written prose. His thought and expression
seem fused into one, and there is a sense of
mystery, humour, and incommunicable charm
about all that he writes which wiU always
confirm fond readers in the belief that Religio
Medici (with its " beautiful obliquities ") is the
most fascinating book ever written.

Browne, perhaps, attained his highest dis-
tinction as a stylist in his grave meditation to
which he gave the name Hi/driofaphia, a word
of his own composition. The discourse
originated with the discovery in 1647 of
forty or fifty old urns containing burnt
bones in a field at Old Walsingham, in Norfolk.
The five chapters on urn-burial are the least
discursive of Browne's writings. In them he
takes up his abode in the charnel-house, and
finds himself unexpectedly at home. We can
imagine nothing graver. The rhythm has the
solemnity of the passing bell ; almost every
word is a sepulchre ; tiie very ornaments are
flowers of mortality. But the dignity of this
of funeral emblems is ever

strange dead-marc!

JEREMY TAYLOR

151

on the increase, and at the close of the fifth
chapter the author rises to the occasion with a
sombre imprcssiveness and a dirge-like intona-
tion which will long resist the opium of time.
It is one of the finest examples we have of
Gothic prose, full of dark corners and grotesque
finials, but gi'eatly and profoundly imaginative
in the highest sense of the word. Lamb com-
pares it to a deep abyss at the bottom of which
lie hidden pearls and rich treasure.

Browne's style is too peculiar and idiomatic
ever to be widely popular ; but he is, with
Milton and Jeremy Taylor, one of the greatest
masters of tranquilly elaborated and polyphonic
English prose. Like the style of the pedant
satirised in Htidihras, that of Browne was
English cut on Greek and Latin. Master of six
languages, he was for ever mingling his com-
pounds and trying new experiments with deri-
vatives. Many of these experiments, now
completely " incrassated " by time, exercised a
morbid influence upon the polysyllablic periods
of Dr. Johnson. A great admirer, Coleridge,
admitted that his style was often hyper-
Latinistic. He spoke, however, with enthusiasm
on Browne's originality in conception. " Rich
in various knowledge and magnificent in his
style, he is a quiet and sublime enthusiast with
a strong tinge of the fantast : the humorist
constantly mingling with and flashing across
the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot
silk play upon the main dye." The impress
of his thought and manner have been strong
upon such writers as Charles Lamb, Hazlitt,
Carlyle, Emerson, and Pater ; he is seen most
strongly perhaps in the contemplations of De
Quincey. He has never been ranked so high as
by a few critics of the last quarter of a century
such as Saintsbury,Bullen, and, above all, Lowell,
who calls him our most imaginative mind since
Shakespeare. Taine regards him characteristic-
ally as a striking example of the Englishman's
unconquerable obsession by churchyards, gi-aves,
tombstones, winding-sheets, and death's-heads.

The most famous of the young scholars who
owed their advance to the patronage of Laud,
and the ornatest, if not the greatest preacher
in the golden age of the English pulpit, Jeremy
Taylor, was born at the Black Bear, or Black
Bull, Cambridge, probably in August, 1613.
His father was a barber in the town, though
his ancestors had enjoyed a small estate at
Frampton, in Gloucestershire ; and he traced
his descent from the celebrated Rowland Taylor,

who perished at the stake in the third year of
Queen Mary. He was well grounded at the
free school, and entered Caius College as a poor
scholar in August, 1626. He was thus a con-
temporary of Milton at Cambridge, where
Taylor, who was already a fellow of his college,
proceeded M.A. in 1634. He was now ordained,
and, having preached for a friend at St. Paul's,
the rumour of his eloquence reached Lamlx^th,
whither he was sununoned to preach before the
Primate. Laud greatly admired his style, and
deplored nothing but the preacher's youth ;
whereupon Taylor humbly begged his Grace to
pardon that fault, and promised, if he lived, he
would mend it. By Laud's advice Taylor now
pursued his studies at All Souls', in Oxford,
until in March, 1637, he was presented to the
rectory of Uppingham, and soon afterwards
made a chaplain to the King. In the struggles
that were impending Taylor had committed
himself on the losing side by his treatise on
episcopacy asserted. In 1642, or thereabouts,
he was ejected from his living at Uppingham,
and followed the royal army in the capacity
of chaplain. Of the other divines of this period
it is interesting to remember that Fuller was at
this very time picking up stories of English
worthies in the rear of a marching column.
Pearson was chaplain to the King's troops at
Exeter, while Chillingworth acted as engineer
at the siege of Gloucester in 1643. It was
perhaps during his connection with the army
that Taylor wrote the prayer which is now
appended to the third chapter of his Holy
Living commencing, " Place a guard of Angels
about the person of the King." In 1 644 Taylor
seems to have been taken prisoner by the
Parliamentary forces. He was soon released,
however, and, under the patronage of Sir John
Vaughan, decided to remain on in Wales and to
set up a school. And there he had as an
assistant the learned William Nicholson, who
afterwards became Bishop of Gloucester.

While in this seclusion he wrote his cele-
brated Liberty of Prophesying, showing the
unreasonableness of prescribing other men's
faith, and the iniquity of persecuting opinions.
In this Taylor suggests the Apostles' Creed or
summary of fundamental truths as a broad basis
of union. In 1648 Taylor was in London,
and was permitted to pay a last visit to
the King. Charles, in token of his regard, is
said to have given him his watch and a few
pearls and rubies which had adorned the ebony

152

EIKON BASILIKE"

case in which he kept his Bible. Long after
that farewell, in a letter to John Evelyn,
Tavlor spoke with affectionate reverence of the
departed saint. He returned to his seclusion
at Golden Grove, in Carmarthen, in the neigh-
lx)urhood of Grongar HiU, afterwards celebrated
by Dyer, where he was continually cheered by
the friendship of the Earl of Carbery, in whose
family he spent many happy hours, and after
whose seat of Golden Grove he called the
Manual of Devotion, at one time almost without
a rival in popularity, which goes by that name.
The year 1650 saw Taylor's famous Holy
Living, completed in 1651 by Holy Dying,
the Allegro and Penseroso of Christian ethics
and Anglican devotion. Their apposite titles
and the euphony of their author''s name have
served to embalm these little works in the
popular mind. Far inferior in originality as
they doubtless are to the works of Burton,
Fuller, or Browne, they have exercised a con-
tinuous influence on such devout persons as
Wesley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and have
found a champion in the anything but senti-
mental mind of the author of Horw Subbaticw.

To prose anthologists the musings and reverie-s
of this prose poet, with his Virgilian ornaments,
composite similes, and other flowers of speech,
will always remain dear, while Taylor himself
will survive as the most flowery and "honey-
flowing" of divines and pietists — theologian we
can scarcely call him. Standing between two
tides, the tide of words and the tide of Puri-
tanism, both of which came near to overwhelm
him, Taylor (with his old patron Sanderson)
was almost alone among the mighty men of old
who survived the flood. His heart was gladdened
by the Restoration, and the dedication of his
great work of casuistry, Dtictor Dubitantium,
to Charles H. secured a mitre for him in the
Irish Establishment. No better man, unless it
were Ken, was so elevated by the later Stuarts.
Bishop Jeremy Taylor died at Lisburn, and
was buried under the communion-table at
Dromore in August, ] 667. It must be admitted
that Jeremy makes monotonous reading. He
writes with a peacock's feather, and every
movement, however slight, not only of his-
pen, but also of his mind, is attended by
flourishes.^

' The standard edition of Taylor is Bishop Heber's (15 vols., 1822, revised by Eden, 1854). See also
Coleridge's Literary Remains, Dowdeu's Puritan and Anglican (1901), Willmott's Jeremy Taylor, his Predecessors,
dontemporuries , and Successors (184G), and Edminid Gosse's monograph in English Men of Letters (1904).
Fuller's chief works were reprinted between 1831 and 1841, and his Sermons iu 1891. 'Iliere are Memoria/,
of his life by Arthur T. Russell (Pickering, 1844), a fuller Life by John Eglinton Bailey in 1874, and a sketch
of his Life and Genitis, with " Fulleriana," by Henry Rogers (1856). See also Basil Montagu's Selections from
the Works of Taylor, Latimer, Hall, Milton, Barrow, South, Browne, Fuller, and Bacon,* first published in 1805.

A mncli greater casuist than Jeremy Taylor was Robert Sanderson (1587 — 1663), a luminary of Lincoln
CoUege, and afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, who enjoys the greater honour of being enshrined with Doinie
and Herbert and Hooker in Walton's never-to-be-forgetton Lives. His Nine Cases of Conscience Resolved (1678)
is a book of great intellectual vigour. His Sertnons, too, are notable for their clear reasoning. Charles L was
wont to say that he might take his ears to other divines, but for his conscience he would always take that
to Dr. Sanderson. Unfortunately, upon his premature death on January 30th, 1649, the King's conscience
fell into very inferior hands. The very day after his execution appeared a little book called Eikon Basiliker
the Portraicture of His Sacred Maje-stie in his Solitudes and Sufferings." It is a volume of reflections written in
the first person, apparently by Charles himself, dealing with the vicissitudes of the reign from Strafl'ord's death
down to the threshold of his own, interspersed with prayers — just sucli a book as the King might have written
at Carisbrooke and after. As a manifesto of monarchy in extremis it was a most successful venture, fifty
editions being sold within fifteen months. As a genuine expression of the conscience of the King it appeals
strongly to the historical sensibilities. If it is not by Charles, it is worse than nothing, for it is one of the
(deverest, most audacious, and most cynical forgeries known. It was not seriously suspected at the time, even
by Milton, wlio answered it. But after the Restoration the authorship was called in question and, before
Junius, it was the reigning puzzle of literary history. The external testimony is so conflicting as to be .almost
worthless; but internal evidence up to the present runs rather strongly against the authorship (or, at any
rate, the exclusive authorship) of Charles, so confirming the claim made by .lidni (iauden (1G0.5 — 1662), a very
willow-pattern divine and casuist, who certainly wrote nothing else so skilful, but who was very suspiciously
raised to the see first of Exeter and then of Worcester by Charles II. and Clarendon, presumably for some secret
.service. The problem, however, is not yet by any means completely solved. Our own opinion is that it was
written by Charles with the aid of certain divines, edited by Cauden, and named by Jeremy 'I'.nylor.

CHAPTER II

JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE POETS

1. DONNE AND DRUMMOND

"Donnej nature a la fois ailee et grossiere, aiige au pied fourclui, vers rocailleux, do rimmoralite siniiesque
dc Sterne. . . . Mais il a Ic don, ce qu'aiieun travail, aucunc imitation dcs lions niodides ne saurait fo\irnir ;
jmrtout oil il va, quoiqu'il ecrivo, quelque boue qu'il reniue, et jusque dans son hideux, ironique et nialpropre
Progress of the Soul, il est pot'tc." — Jitsskranu.

THE actuality, the intensity, and the in-
dividuality of Donne represent a new
note in English poetry. Elizabethan love
poetry is rarely personal. Ideal and graceful
though it commonly is, it is at the same time
decidedly nruuiercd, full of affectation and
imitation, and, as a result, but too often either
patently false, or conventional and cold.
Donne may be brutal or ugly, but he is not
cold, still less conventional. Fantastic to excess
as he often is, he writes of his own experience.
He takes us into his intimacy and runs through
mood after mood. He probes unsparingly even
into the arcana of passion.

The descendant on both sides of Catholics
who had remained staunch through the reli-
gious troubles of Edward's reign, John Donne
was born in the neighbom-hood of Bread
Street, London, in 1573. His father, a pros-
perous ironmonger, died two years after his
birth. His maternal grandfather, no other
than John Heywood, the famous \vriter of
interludes in Henry Vni.''s reign, died in the
Low Countries a few years later. In order to
escape an embarrassing tender of the oath of
allegiance, Donne went up to Oxford very early,
entering Hart Hall at the age of eleven. He
was already, however, extremely precocious.

and is said while there to have commenced a
friendship with a lad much older than himself,
the famous letter-writer and diplomatist of
later years. Sir Henry Wotton. In May, 1592,
he entered Lincoln''s Inn, and two years later
came into his considerable fortune. In the
previous year he seems to have abandoned his
Catholic convictions and embraced the Anglican
Communion.

At the age of twenty-three Donne sailed
in the famous expedition with Essex to Cadiz.
In the following year he made the Island
voyage, and transmitted to his friend Chris-
topher Brooke those two poems. The Storm
and The Calm. He returned from his travels
finally in 1598, with a good knowledge of
Spanish and Italian, to become secretary to
the Lord Keeper. His curiosity seems to have
been ec[ually divided for a time between women
and books,! ^^^^ j^- ^^g^^ onl}' very gradually that
his sensuality worked itself out, and that his
intellect acquired the mastery. All this time
he was writing verses at intervals, and he com-
mitted a part of himself and of his experience
to his poetry in a manner quite unique among
the Elizabethan poets ; he must have felt
keenly the incompatibility between its intel-
lectual and rather brutal sensuality and the

' Tlie fashion of trying to compete in Elizabethan English with the satirical moods of " angry Juvenal " or
" crabbed Persius " set in among metropolitan wits between 1593 and 1599, when the practice of printing
promiscous libels was suppressed by a peremptory rescript of Archbishop AVhitgift and a great conflagration of
existing "satires" by Marston, Weever, Hall, Guilpin, Cioddardj and others. It was to this scabrous style of
writing that the precocious and indejiendent mind of Donne Has first directed in 1593. His Satires, school
exercises for the most partj cleverly modelled on classic patterns, appeared forty years later.

153 12

154

JOHN DONNE

iterated prettiness of those verses wliidi liis
friends contributed with so much facihty to
the cliarniing anthologies of that day. In liis
new sei'ies of poems follo\\ing the satires, the
lyrical Songs, Donne reveals the preoccupa-
tions of the idle and full-blooded, yet highly
intellectual male, in a way that hardly any
other poet has done — at least before the days
of De Musset.

After a clandestine and not very creditable
courtship he was privately married in December,
1601. The man'iage, as it turned out, could
neither be concealed nor annulled, and at the
furious father's instance Donne was reluctantly
dismissed from the post of secretary to the Lord
Keeper Egerton and sent to the Fleet Prison.
The father-in-law's wrath and pei'secution proved
only transitory, but Donne was not reinstated in
his secretaryship, and had for years to come no
ade([uate means of support for his wife and
growing family. Donne's private resources had
greatly diminished; and for five or six years,
first at Camberwell, then at Mitcham, his
poverty seems to have involved him in some-
thing approaching distress. In 1608, however,
his wife's father had sufficiently relented to
allow her dowry to be paid, and Donne was
henceforth in a position to assume the uniform
of a court flatterer and pamphleteer, a role for
which the extraordinary subtlety and pliancy
of his mind, his remarkable sensibility, and
the anxieties he had undergone, alike fitted
him. The Pseudo- Martyr, which he published
in 1610, and which was constructed to minimise
the wrongs of the recusants and to deprecate
their claim to a fair hearing, was probably
merely one of a series of controversial writings
undertaken with a view of bolstering up the
CTO\ernment, and written in the name of several
di^ines who were bent upon establishing their
claims for a substantial reward in the Church.

Donne is said to have affbi-ded much gratifi-
cation to James by his treatment of one of
these subjects in debate; the King told him
frankly that he must preach for his preferment.
Donne consented, and took orders early in
1616 ; he was deeply skilled in all the arts of
the sycophant, and it was somewhat of a plunge
to exchange the certainty of private i)atroiiage
for such an unstable assurance as that of court
favour. But the step was more than justified ;
James was immensely impressed by Donne's
preaching, in which he found the compound
of learning, logic, and schola.stic casuistry en-

tirely to his taste. Such sense and non-sense
wei-e alike congenial to James, who strained his
influence to the utmost to extort the unwilling
degree of D.D. from Cambridge University for
the new preacher, and soon afterwards appointed
him royal chaplain, and procured him a reader-
ship in Lincoln's Inn. The intellectual side
of religious controversy appealed strongly to
Donne, and he extended himself in a series
of sermons of inordinate length, intricacy, and
scholastic elaboration. The strain of this novel
kind of labour racked his excitable nerves to
the furthest point of tension, and his fame as a
preacher seemed to be gained at the expense of
what remained of his physical buoyancy. This
attenuation of fibre is reflected very faithfully
in the overwrought character of his writing at
this period, both in his sermons and his letters.
But his physical health ^vas fortunately repaired
by a leisurely journey through Central Europe
in 1619-20, as chaplain to Lord Doncaster on
his diplomatic mission to the Emperor. On
his return from this, Donne's subserviency
to the most powerful influence of the court
was suitably rewarded, and he was made Dean
of St. Paul's (November, 1621). He was at
last in a position to manifest that dignity and
generosity of which he had always had the
strongest artistic appreciation. His wife had
now been dead four years, and Donne was able
to devote an undivided attention to the worthy
fulfilment of his spiritual duties ; as in the case
of Becket, the worldliness of his early career
became obliterated, and the ecclesiastic was by
way of being sublimed into the saint. At the
same time the frequent illness to which he
was exposed seems to have sharpened his
already extraordinary introspective faculties,
and the combination of this with Donne's
amazing talent for the refinements of theology
render the transformation which the cynical
sensualist and the calculating courtier seems
genuinely to have undergone one of the most
curious of psychological problems. In his late
years he was surrounded by admirers who, like
Iziicik Walton, marvelled at a sanctity so com-
plete and so unassuming. Charles I. was num-
bered amongst his admirers, and fully intended
to have made him a bishop, but by 1630
symptoms of a fatal disease began to declare
themselves. His last great sermon in St. Paul's
was delivered at Easter, 1630 ; a year later than
this he wrote one of the most original of all his
strikingly individual poems, connuencing :

DRUMMOND OF IIAWTIIORNDEN

155

Since I am coming to tlwit holy room,

VVliere with Tliy choir of saints, for evermore

I shall be made Thy music, as I come
I tune my instrument here at the door,
And, what I must do then, tliink liere before.

About the .same time he caused that extra-
ordinary portrait of himself to be made in a
winding-sheet, with the upper part of liis face
disclosed, standing upon a large urn, a drawing
which served as a model for that cjuaintly
imagined monument in stone which is still
preserved in St. Paul's. His death-bed, like
so much of his life, seems to have been care-
fully studied by this amazing neuropath. It
was finally on March 31st that, as Walton
says, his body finally melted away and vapoured
into spirit. He was buried in his cathedral, in
which the preservation of his monument from
the fury of the Great I'ire may well appear in
the light of a miracle. The volatile spirit of
this extraordinary, subtle, and self-seeking, yet
at times sublime, genius, had experienced little
rest upon earth. After his juvenile (rarely
Juvenal) satires, we have of Donne a few rather
obscured and jagged but most singular lyrics,
poems these of transcendental sensuality, highly
intellectualised, abrupt, scandalous, ecstatic,
fantastic, mocking, actual. Donne in them is
a shameless realist, raising ugly and piercing
screams of passion, which sound doubly raucous
amid the pretty litanies of the professional and
pastoral amorists who form the conventional
chonts vatum of 1600 and thereabout. He
presents in brief the graceless figure of an
individualist before his time ; and his strange
new notes of sophistication and defiance were
scarcely pardoned by contemporaries, even Ben
Jonson. The younger men, of course, wor-
shipped him, and Carew wrote of him as a
king who

ruled as he thoujiht fit
The universal monarchy of wit.

Walton, in his Life, characteristically tried
to bury the outspoken lyrics, and expresses a
devout hope that they have been forgotten and
forgiven amidst the crowd of verse letters,
obsequies, epigrams, elegies, and di\ine poems
of Donne's later, more seraphic years.^

Donne founded no school, though he, of

course, had imitators. That which was valuable
in him was quite inimitable. He certainly did
not found tlie school of religious poetry which
produced Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughaii.
Elizabethan poetry did not begin with Donne,
nor did he give it anything permanent save his
own {)oems, though his popularity no doubt
stimulated this kind of poetic expression. As
to his versification, it is haid to say whether he
was the more careless or perverse. He has a
fine eai-, as he shows constantly, yet he is
capable of verse so harsli and crabbed as to be
a positive offence. He deliberately breaks up
the natural sequence of accent, and trusts to
his ear to restore the bi'oken cadence by a nice
balance of emphasis. No poet's cadence depends
more absolutely on his meaning, and therefore
it is indeed that his cadence is often tortured
and crabbed. Yet at his best his verse has a
depth of often broken nmsic rarely equalled by
more regular craftsmen.

William Drunnnond, born December 13th,
1.585, was the eldest son of the first Laird of
Hawthornden, his mother being Susannah
Fowler, sister of Secretary Fowler. He was
educated at the High School, Edinburgh, and
at the recently founded University (M.A. 1605).
Thence he visited London on his way abroad,
and witnessed court spectacles at Greenwich and
Gravesend in 1606, varying sight-seeing with
study and reading such books as Sidney's
Arcadia, Lyly's Euphues, Ariosto's Orlando
Furioso, a few pieces by Drayton and Dekker,
and Shakespeare's liomco and Juliet, Love's
Laboivr's Lost, and Midsummer Nighfs Dream.
In 1609, after about three years' travel-
and law study at Bourges and Paris, an
accomplished dilettante in books and pictures,
Drunnnond was back in Scotland. In 1610
he paid another visit to London, after which
nothing remained but that he should settle in
Edinburgh and be called in due coiu'se to the
Scottish Bar. \Vliile he was about to do so, his
father, Sir John Drummond (wjio had received
his knighthood on James's accession to the
English throne) died suddenly at the age of
fifty-seven ; and thus the poet, at the age of
twenty-four, found himself Laird of Hawthorn-
den, with ample means, free to choose his own

■ ^Vlth the exception of The Anatomy of the World, the Elegy on Prince Henry, and a few commendatory
verses, none of Donne's poetry was printed before the posthumous quarto of 16.33, Poems by J. D., with Elegies on
the Authors Death. Considerable additions were made in the following issues : 1G35, IGoO, and 1G69. There is
a good modern edition in the Muses' Library (ed. Chambers, 2 vols., 1896) ; Selected Poems (Oriuda
Booklets v.), VMi; and the interesting Life and Letters of John Donne* by Edmund Gosse.

156

DRUIMMOND'S SONNETS

course of life. 'WHiat this course of life was
likely to be might have been easily guessed by
those who knew him. From his boyhood his
disposition had been meditative and studious ;
abandoning all thoughts of the Law, he retired
to his own house at Hawthornden, " and fell
again to the studving of the Greek and Latin
authors." Drumniond attached himself to the
school of Scottish writers who cultivated the
pure new English ; his uncle Fowler and Sir
Thomas Hudson, the translator of Du Bartas,
may have guided him in this direction ; yet he
was a Scot to the last, with a keen and studious
fondness for Scottish history and traditions.

The death of James''s eldest son, Henry,
Prince of Wales, on November 6th, 1612,
opened the flood-gates of the poebs, both in
England and Scotland ; and in 1613 was
published Drummond^s first poem, Tcares on
the Death of Mwliadcs, ■which was peihaps the
most gracefully poetical of all the tributes
evoked by the occasion in Great Britain. After
the publication of this poem Drummond
became a close friend of Sir William Alexander,
and furnished him with a commendatory sonnet
to his forthcoming Dooins Day. About this
time, notwithstanding his close retirement and
serious studies, he was betrothed to a young
lady named Cunningham, but in 1615, after
the date of the marriage had been fixed, she
died.

In 1616 appeared Poems: Amorous, Funerall,
Divine, PastoraU. This second book of
Drummond's may be called a memorial of his
love and sorrow, with an appendix of miscel-
laneous sonnets, written at various times.
Much is copied from Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini,
Sanazzaro, and, above all, Marino.

After an absence of fourteen years King
James resolved to revisit his native land, and
on Mav 16th, 1617, he entered Edinburgh.
Drummond, drawn from his retirement by
the whirl and excitement of the King's visit,^
thought it his duty not to be wanting with
his own particular tribute ; accordingly the long
and very extravagant panegyric, Forth Feasting,
was indited as a memorial of the visit. In it
James is described as " lOye of our Western
World, Mars-daunting King."

By the yeai' 1618 Drunnnond was known

amongst English literary circles as a Scottish
geiitleman who wrote verses that were really
English ; Drayton seems to have been the
first person to stretch out a hand of liking and
recognition ; and a correspondence was main-
tained between them. In the autumn of 1618
Drummond received the famous visit from
Ben Jonson. Drummond made careful notes
of the talk between them, in which the im-
perfect sympathy between the fastidious scholar
and the free-spoken tavern wit is very clearly
exposed.

In 1623, after six years of comparative dearth,
appeared Floicers of Sion, hij William Drum-
mond, of Haicthornc-denne : to icliich is adjoyned
his Cypresse Grove ; a volume of sonnets and
lyric or heroic verse, entirely philosophic or
religious in character. The Cypresse Grove is
a platonic meditation upon death, rich and
sonorous in style, and anticipating much that
came to full fruition in Sir Thomas Browne
and Jeremy Taylor. His later literary work
was chiefly in prose, and his epigrams and
satires were mostly political, and are of no
literary value. In the year 1649, the year of
regicides and their commonwealth, Drunnnond
died on December 4th, and was buried in the
church of Lasswade, about two and a half
miles from Hawthornden.

All Driunmond's valuable work is in the
two publications of 1616 and 1623 ; and the
best of it is extremely good. As a sonnet
writer he stands easily above all his con-
temporaries save Shakespeare. The art of
sonneteering seemed inseparable in that age
from extensive borrowing, and Drummond was
no exception to this rule, but he was an artist
and a scholar, far removed from such light-
hearted bui'caneers as Lodge. Drummond is
not a poet of love, or even a poet of sorrow.
Though there is real melancholy in them, few
would have supposed that the poems of 1616
refer to the recent and actual loss of a bride.
He is at his jiest in his religious poems, and
when in a mood of pensive and contented
melancholy reflects, with conviction born of
religion and the aversion from action of a
natural recluse and student, on the vanity of
human endeavour and worldly prizes. His
religion was deeply influenced by Plato, and

' Driiiiiinoiid's brother-in-law, tlie author of Scot of SvotKlarmfs Sliiggerhi(/ ,St<i/c of Scots Sldtcsmni , ivas
kiiifjhted upon tlio occasion, and lierame Sir John Scot. On Drumniond, see Masson's hriimmoud of
J/awtlioniflen* iiiJH, a pood edition of tlie Poeim- for the Muses' Library by \V. ('. \\'anl (2 vols., 1894); and
an essay on Urumniond's Library (presented in 1C27 to Kdinburgli University) in Whibley's Literary Portraits.

THOMAS CAREW

1.57

frequently like Wordsworth, he uses ahnost i)hil()sophic in his contemplations. He has
pantheistic- lansruaoc. His God is a god of not the snbtlety or the strange strength of
beauty and love, and he is ecstatic rather tlian Honne, hut he has far more religious feeling.

2. THE CAROLINE LYRISTS: OAREW, LOVELACE, HEKRICK,

SIR JOHN SUCKLING

The epithet Caroline is certainly not a term
of precision. Its chronological application
is ambiguous, for it might apply equally
well to the works of Bunyan and to those
of Herrick. Nor has the short period from
1625 to 1642 any very distinctive character
of its own. Yet the lyrical poets of the
reign of Charles I., who ranged themselves on
the Cavalier side, do form a small group to
themselves to whom the convenient title of
Caroline may without too much ambiguity be
applied. In the light-hearted gaiety of Carew
and Hen-ick, in the sparkling or pathetic grace
of Lovelace or Suckling, in the religious fervour
of Herbert and Crashaw, we can trace an under-
current of protest against the sombre asceticism
with which the Puritans sought to eliminate
joy from life, elegance from literature, and
beauty from worship.

One of the vainest, most artistic, and most
irresponsible of this group was Thomas Carew.
Born in Kent either in 1594 or 1595, one of
the younger sons of an injudicious and iras-
cible Master in Chancery, Sir Matthew Carew,
Thomas graduated from Merton College, Oxford,
in 1611, when he was entered at the Middle
Temple. Showing little aptitude for the law,
he was packed off in 1612 to join the house-
hold of the English Ambassador at Venice, Sir
Dudley Carleton. Carleton retained his ser-
vices as secretary when he was transferred to
The Hague in 1616. But Carleton had to get
rid of him in the same year owing to the licence
which he allowed himself in his criticism of the
Ambassador and his lady. Carew then spent
nearly three years in the unsuccessfid quest for
employment. He laboured under the imputa-
tion of being a backbiter, and was reproached
by his father for his dissolute mode of life
(some naughtiness is certainly reflected in
such a poem as The Rapture). In 1619,
however, he went in the train of Lord Herbert
of Cherbury to France. Henceforth our
knowledge of his career is fragmentaiy. But

in 1628 we know that he was appointed a
gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and a
year or so later Sewer in Oi'dinary (that is,
sewer and taster) to his Majesty. He was
selected to write the gorgeous mastjue called
Ccfluvi BiHlauicum given at the Banqueting
House on Shrove Tuesday, 1633. And he
seems to have led a merry life at the court
among the chief wits of that age until his pre-
mature death in 1639. Carew is to-day remem-
bered almost exclusively by five or six choice
lyrics.i None of these exceed twenty lines of
verse, and no anthology can be considered
complete without two or three of them. They
include : " Go, thou gentle whispering wind " ;
"Ask me no more"; "In Celia's face a (jucstion
did arise. Which were more beautiful, her lips or
eyes " ; " Give me more love or more disdain " ;
" Kiss, lovely Celia, and be kind " ; " You that
will a wonder know"; and "He that loves a
rosy cheek, or a coral lip admires." His epitaph
on Donne has the fine coujjlet :

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.

To the same college of wits as Carew, \\ith
the same conventions, the same ideals, and
the same standards, belonged the Cavalier
poet, Richard Lovelace. Grandson of one of
Queen Elizabeth's knights and son of one
of James's, Sir William Lovelace, who was
killed in 1628, a,fter brave service under Sir
Horace Vere in the Low Countries, the poet
Richard Lovelace was born at Woolwich in
1618. He was taught at the Charterhouse,
and began writing poetry while he was at
Gloucester Hall, Oxford, during 1635-6. He
wrote a comedy, T7ie Scholar; and a tragedy
called The Soldier. He was one of the bold
squires of Kent who, in April, 1642, at Maid-
stone Assizes, resolved to petition the House of
Commons praying that the King might be re-
stored to his rights. For his temerity in de-
livering this petition he was, on April 30th,

' The early editions of Carew's Poems- are dated 1640, 1642, 10.31, and 1071.
done for the Muses' Library by A. Vian, 1899.

An excellent edition was

158

HERRICK

coniinitted to the Gate House at Westminster.
There, during a seven- weeks' imprisonment, he
V rote that celebrated song called " Stone walls
do not a prison make." AVhile in London
Lovelace consorted \\ith the chief musicians,
poets, and painters of the day. He was well-
known to Lely, the Cottons, and Andrew
Marvell, and he may have been the addressee
of Suckling's famous " I tell thee, Dick, where
I have been." During 1646-8 he was once
more in the King's service, and he ran through
his money in attempts to ser\'e his sovereign.
Returning to England in 1648, and once more
imprisoned, he beguiled his confinement by
framing for the press liis Lucaata, Epodes, Odes,
Sonnets, Songs. Lovelace was released from
prison by warrant in December, 1649, but he
was a ruined man. Alms were conveyed to
him from Charles Cotton and others, but he
sank and died in 1658 in a mean lodging in
Gunpowder Alley, between Shoe Lane and
Fetter I^ane, close to the spot where, a little
more than a hundred years later, Chatterton
was given a pauper's funeral. He was buried
at the west end of St. Bride's, one of the
churches burnt in the fire of 1666.

Lovelace's coiniection with St. Bride's sug-
gested to Richardson the name of the hero of
Clarissa, and thus, by an ironical destiny,
" Lovelace " passed through the agency of
Clarissa into common use in the eighteenth
century as a synonym for a libertine. Though
supplanted in England by the older Lothario
from Rowe's Fair Penitent, it still survives in
France. Lovelace's immortality rests upon two
short lyrics in Lucasta, "Tell me not (sweet)
I am unkind," and To AltJwa from Prison, con-
taining the famous couplet, " Stone walls do not
a prison make. Nor iron bars a cage." In the
whole garden of Caroline lyric poetry these are
perhaps (if we except a blossom or two of
VVither's, such as "Shall I, wasting in despair?")
the most perfect flowers. It cannot be denied
that Lovelace is both imitative and inie(iiial ; his
thought is tortuous and his expression often
careless. There is a spirit of a nobleness in his
best verses, as charming to every reader as the
gallantry and heroism of his life ; but he is at

other times, especially in the Postlniinc Poems
(16j9), frigid, conceited, and not a little
obscure. His popularity is shown in the
numberless imitations ; and, yet, where else
among contemporary lyi'ists shall we attain to
the happy valiancy of that noble couplet :

I could not love tliee, dear, so much
Lov'd I not lionour more ?

Robert, son of Nicholas Herrick,' a goldsmith
of Wood Street, Cheapside, was born in London,
and baptised at St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on
August 24th, 1591. In the following year
Herrick's father committed suicide by the novel
method of jumping out of an upper window,
leaving a good estate in trust for his children.
At sixteen Robert (after Westminster) was
appi'enticed to his uncle and guardian. Sir
William Herrick, a favourite goldsmith and
banker of James I. But in 1614 he abandoned
the business, and entered St. John's College,
Cambridge. After taking his bachelor's degree
in 1617, he settled in London, cultivated the
society of wits and courtiers, took the time of
day from Ben Jonson, passed round in manu-
script the lightest of light lyrics, and was
welcome where^•er sonfjs and glees were held
in honour. He may have had a small post
in the chapel at "Whitehall : at any rate, he
took orders, wrote a Farezccll to Sack, and in
September, 1629, was presented to the vicarage
of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire.

Some of the bantlings of his wit first saw
the light in a miscellany of 1640 called Wifs
Kecreations. A volume of religious rhymes con-
taining one or two gems, such as his thanks-
giving to God for his house, and much more
doggerel, appeared in 1647 under the title of
Noble Numbers ; or, Pious Pieces. A corrective
to this was found, and Herrick's true talent
revealed in his Hesperides, or " works both
lunnane and divine," of 1648. Before this ap-
pearetl Ilerrii'k had been tumbled out of his
sequestered parish by the storms of the civil
war, and had returned gaily to London, where
he seems to have dropped his clerical style and
habit, called himself Robert Herrick, Esquire,
and renewed the acquaintance of the tem-

' Variously spelt, .as AUiiigliam's allusion hints: —

" Hayrick some do spell thy name, I For 'tis like frcsh-sccntod liay

And thy verso approves the same ; | With country lasses in't at play."

Herrick is excluded from Soiithey's Si'lect Wnrlcs oflhi' liritish Pnr/.s/mm Ch(tnn-r (n Jinisim (Ifi.'^l), wliich contnins
the best poems of Greville, Davies, Daniel, Donne, Caiew, llie Flclclicrs, Hahinfftun, \\'illier, Uruwne, Davunant,
Lovelace, and the whole of Draj'ton's I'aliiolhiim.

SUCKLING

159

pestuous pctlicojits of liis youtli. To tliis
period may possibly be referred his Wclmvu;
to Sack. In the Caroline Collct^e of Wit-
Crackers Hcrrick stands alone, in so nmch as
he rhymed not as an elegant accomplishment,
but by vocation. He versified as instinctively
as Wordsworth. The joy of life was strong
within him, and found expression in a con-
tinual stream of fleurettes, posies, and mottoes.
Now and again he soars for a more sustained
Hight with an excjuisite lyrical movement. But
it is always essentially a butterfly flight. The
poise and colour and sunshine of it are perfect;
but of the music which comes from the emotion
felt, or mystei-y shadowed, there is practically
none. Herrick speaks of himself as singing of
" brooks and blossoms, birds and bowers," of
April, May, of June and July flowers :

I sins' of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, biides, and of their bridal-cakes.

It is true he does rhyme on these .subjects,
and on many others besides under earth and
heaven ; but he is really poetical on the
smallest possible number of themes, and those
the common property of all tuners of the
elegant lyre. Let us di'ink and be meiTy, for
to-morrow we die. Love's a stuff' will not
endure. Where are the snows of yester year.'
Herrick can touch all these subjects with en-
chanting delicacy and with some tenderness.
He imitates freely from Horace, Catullus,
Martial, Marot, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Marlowe,
Ben Jonson. He anticipates Prior, Praed,
Moore, and Fitzgerald. He is, perhaps,
essentially a writer of vers de societc before
his time. Before, that is to say, either the
material or the instrument was quite lipe for
such treatment. He is pagan, malicious,
scholarly, Anacreontic, and, above all, frivolous,
as every accomplished occasional writer should
be, but he is also inveterately quaint. His
poems are as nice as kisses— kisses that are
never more than playful. The proportion of
Herrick's verses that is of really high quality
is extremely small, but a few of his songs
have come to be almost everywhere known.

These indispensable little poems combine an
amatoi'y playfulness and ({uaintness with a
lyrical daintiness and melody so enchanting as
fully to justify tlie resuscitation of Herrick by
the nineteenth centui-y as a poet ranking with
Witlier, Crashaw, Collins, and Hood ; l)ut not
to justify the excessive laudation of Herrick as
second, third, or even first of English lyrists, into
which some enthusiasts have been betrayt^d.^

After fourteen more years of London life the
versatile Herrick once more resumed a surplice.
Having witnessed the festivities of the joyous
Restoration, a favouring gale wafted him Ijack
to his old moorings at Dean Prior in August,
lfiG2, and there he was buried on October 15th,
1(374.

Sir John Suckling was born at his father's
house in the parish of Twickenham in January,
1609. His grandfather was mayor, and his
uncle dean, of Norwich. His father sat in
Parliament for Reigate, was knighted at
Theobalds in 1616, and held a lucrative post
in the royal household at the same time as
Carew. After a [)ronienade in polite learning
at Cambridge (Trinity) he passed to Gray's
Inn, and so to Paris and Italy. In 1632 he
returned to London, after a term of service
imder the great captain of that age, Gustavus
Adolphus, and plunged into all the pro-
digalities of the court. In feather-headed-
ness, and also, it must be added, in licence,
he seems to have been a true protot^'jie of
Rochester and Buckingham. At one time he
was all for gaming, and won or lost thousands
at cribbage — a game he is said to have in-
vented — or ninepins ; at another time the black
eyes of the ladies attz-acted him, and he made a
magnificent entertainment in London, at which
he presented all the young beauties with silk
stockings and garters. Cudgelled into a handful
by an irate rival, he turned philosopher, travelled
about with a cartload of books, discussed learned
themes with Falkland and Boyle, and cham-
pioned Shakespeare against the classics. In
January, 1639, he raised a troop of horse,
magnificently accoutred, for the Scots cam-
paign. But his scarlet and gold contingent

' There is a perfect rage to-day for reprinting-, and we suppose re-purchasing (more problematically for
re-perusing) the ])oets of the seventeenth century. Among the ranks of the rej)rinted Herrick is easily
first favourite. Witness recent editions in the Golden Treasury Series (F. T. Palgrave), Aldine and Canterbury
Poets, Muses' and Red Letter Libraries, Century, World, and Temple Classics, Caxton and Newnes Reprints,
and many others. His monument at Dean Prior went up in 1857. See Edinburgh Review, January, 1904.
He is represented by seven pieces in The Golden Trenmry, and no less than twenty in the Lyra Elegantiarmn.
Lovelace still awaits an editiou by Mr. Thorn Drury. For his Life see Diet. Nat, Biog.

160

SUCKLING

fled, like the rest of the army, without striking
a blow ; ami Suckling's own coach was captured
by Leslie full of magnificent clothes.

Suckling remained a staunch royalist to the
end, and Charles placed much reliance upon
him, though he was scarcely a man of the
type that one would repose gi-eat trust in at
an extremity'. He rallied to the Queen in the
same spirit as the French officers rallied round
Marie Antoinette in July,1789. But the "army
plot" failed ignominiously, and Suckling fled in
May, 1641, to Paris. The deplorable end of
the rich, gay, and witty, but spendthrift, knight
is thus related by Aubrey :

"Anno (1641) he went to France, where,
after some time being come to the bottome of
his fund that was left, reflecting on the miserable
and despicable condition he should be reduced
to, having nothing left to maintain him, he
(having a convenience for that jnn-pose lyeing
at an apothecarie's house in Paris) tooke poyson,
which killed him miserably with vomiting.
He was buryed in the Protestants' churchyard.
This was (to the best of my remembrance)
1646." Aubrey's recollection of the year of his
death is unquestionably wrong, since an elegy
upon the " incompai'able " Suckling appeared
in 1642 ; and it is probable that the poet met
his death in the early sunniier of that year.

In TJic Session of the Poets Suckling hits oft',
with an audacity which we could ill spare, the
foibles of all the most celebrated wits among
his contemporaries, conspicuously Ben Jonson,
Tom Carew, Will Davenant, Tobie Matthew,
and the author himself. The idea was imitated
in the next generation by Rochester ( Trial for
the Bayes) and Sheffield {Election of a Poet
Lcnireate) ; subsecjuently by Byron, Leigh Hunt,
and many others. The famous Ballad upon
a Wedding, commencing, " I tell thee, Dick,
\\herc I have been," addressed, says tradition,
to Dick Lovelace, and written upon the mar-
riage of Roger Boyle to Lady Margaret Howard
at No:-thnmberland House, Charing Cross, has
already seen the light in Wittes Recreations of
1640. Hallam remarks sagely of Suckling that
though deficient in imagination, he left former
song writers far behind in gaiety and case. It
is not equally clear, he adds, that he has ever

been surpassed since. Of wits about town he
was at least the facile princeps of his day :

In music made of morning's merriest heart.

If we admit that Suckling did not excel in
imagination, it nmst be conceded that he had
the gift of fancy in the most superlative
degree. To no feebler endowment can we
attribute the delight which the sportive and
frolicsome humour of the " ballad " never fails
to produce. The artful simplicitv of its stanzas
reaches its climax in the figui-e of the bride
dancing, when —

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out.

But the distribution of excellence through
every part of this remai'kable jeu d\'sprit is
such that we can scarce equal it out of John
Gilpin. The wit, insouciance, and airy levity
of minor lyrics, such as —

'Tis now, since I sat down before

That foolish fort, a heart
(Time strangely spent !), a year or more ;

And still I did my part ;

and-

Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together ;

I pritliee, send me back my heart.
Since I can not have thine.

can hardly be approached in occasional poetry
until we come on to Prior and Praed. As a
playwright " natural easy Suckling," as Milla-
mant called him, was rather dull, and his
dramas are precious only inasmuch as they
harbour a few poems of price, such as " Why
so pale and wan, fond lover ?"

What seems to have struck Suckling's con-
tempoi'aries — and it is really a priceless gift —
was the directness and vivacity of his diction
and the airy persiflage which he substituted for
the distressful yearning of the conventional
Elizabethan lo\er. Wither's best songs are
distinguished by a charming simj)licity, Love-
lace's by a brave and gallant spirit. Suckling's
are marked by a gay and sparkling impudence.
This was to become the Mtisa Protcix'a of
Sedley and Rochester.^

' The best edition of Suckling is still HekcHunn, with life and critical remarks l>y tlio Re\'. Alfred Suckling,
1831. An edition for the Muses' Lil)rary is in preparation by Hamilton Tliompson. See Diet. Nat. Iliog. Suckling is
well represented in \V. J. Linton's charming anthology, Raru I'oe/ns oj IhcHixtcenth and tSevcnkenth Ccnturka* 1883.

CHAPTER III

RELIGIOUS POETRY

" Thouirlits too deep to lie expressed.

And too strong to bo suppressed." — Gkouge Wither.

Herbert, C'rashaw, and Vaughan— Wither and Quarles— Habington, I'ordage, and Tralierne.

THERE is something the least bit unpleasant
about the avowed epicureanism of parson
Herrick and the outspoken contempt which he
expressed for the " salvages " who w ere his
parishioners, whether or no Kingsley's ideal be
true, and it be

Better to Lave the poet's heart than brain,
To feel than write ; but better far than both
To be on earth a poem of God's making.

It is with a sense of wholesome contrast that we
turn from the celebrator of Anthea''s instep to
the saintly and single-minded George Herbert.
It is like passing from the atmosphere of a revel
and the capping of verselets over the wine-cups
to the serenity of Herbert's own " Sweet day, so
cool, so calm, so bright ! "

George Herbert was born at Montgomery
Castle on April 3rd, 1593 (the same year as his
proud biographer Izaak), being the fourth son
of Sir Richard, and younger brother of Edward,
famous as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, destined
to become a pioneer of English deism. George
had only reached his fourth year when his father
died ; the rest of his childhood passed " in a
sweet content '" under the care of a mother
whose virtues he never tired of expoimding ;
he was taught at Westminster and Trinity
College, Cambridge (M.A. 1616), and was dis-
tingui.shed both as scholar and musician. In
1619 he became Public Orator at Cambridge,
and gratified James I. by the flattering terms
in which he acknowledged the King's gift to
Cambridge of a copy of the BasUicon Down.
Bishop Williams presented him to the prebend

of Leighton Ecclesia ; he went to live in the
neighbourhood ; was influenced by the saintly
Nicholas Ferrar, of Little Gidding ; set to work
to restore the ruined church at Leighton, and
finally decided to enter into sacred orders
(1626), to which his mother had often per-
suaded him. In April, 1630, at the instance
of the Earl of Pembroke, Charles I. presented
Herbert to the rectory of Bemerton, between
Salisbury and Wilton. There the poet passed
the remainder of his life, which he devoted to
the saintlike performance of the duties of his
office and to the elaboration of a series of
religious poems which are probably without
a rival in the English language. But his
strength was not eijual to his self-imposed
tasks. Consumption declared itself, and after
an incumbency of less than three years he
died on February 24-th, and was buried beneath
the altar of his church on IVIarch 3rd, 1633.
Dying childless, he left his property to his wife
Jane (Danvers), whom he had married in 1629 ;
his books to his friends, and his manuscript
verses to Nicholas Ferrar.'

Apart from a few Latin and Greek verses, all
Herbert's poetic work was published after his
death. With the exception of his sonnets to
his mother, eight psalm renderings given in
Playford's Psalms and Hymns (1671), and two
stray poems first collected by Dr. Grosart, it
is all to be found in The Temple: Sacred Poems
and Private Ejaculations, brought out by Ferrar
at Cambridge in 1633. These poems, forming
a Jacob's ladder of the religious emotions, were
all written in strict self-communion and without

' The best Life of George Uerbert since Walton's is that of John J. Daniell (1902). The best annotated
edition is that of George Herbert Palmer (3 vols., 1905). There are many reprints, Pickering's, Nichol's, and
Grosart's being among the best. See Cambridge Modem History, vol. iv., and Times, December 22nd, 1905.

IGl 13

162

CRASHAW

the slightest regard to public scrutiny. Hence
many of their peculiarities : their close-packed
elliptical phrasing, their simplicity of unwrought
expression often mistaken for affectation, their
profoundly intimate feeling. He was deeply
imbued by the intellectuality and ingenuity of
Donne. The result is often an obscurity akin
to the obscurity of Browning, an elusive-
ness resembling that of Emerson, a turn of
phrase as far removed fi'om the obvious and
also from the superficial as a phrase of George
Meredith. But the thought implicit is weU
worth unravelling, for under it lies the emotion
of one who had been gradually drawTi to the
religious life and stirred by it to his inmost
soul ; of one whose appeal to God against the
sense of sin is more intimate than that of any
other religious poet, and of one who combines
an intellect second only to that of Donne, with
a far deeper emotional existence. Those to
whom we should naturally appeal as the best
judges of religious poetry, Crashaw and Vaughan,
Cowper and Coleridge, have all expressed their
profoundcst admiration for Herbert. Charles I.
in prison, Cowper in the agonies of religious
dejection, both found in him the truest solace.
Failing an adequate commentary, the reader
must himself creep with difficulty into the heart
of Herbert's meaning : the true inwardness of
resignation, of prayer and communion with
God, of the passionate sense of sin, of humility,
and of charity, will nowhere else be so deeply
and intellectually revealed to him.

Taking the risk of obscurity Herbert gains
in some whole poems and in more single
stanzas a power of illumination that frequently
seems almost miraculous. Such power of
intuition is most clearly seen perhaps, though
it is clogged with a difficult and spasmodic
utterance, in such poems as Employment and
Man. In such jjoems as The Floxcer and
Prayer, with its grand finale of thought that
seems almost too deep for words, the thought
is linked with a mysticism approaching to
ecstasy, which is unconunon in Herbert. In
that wonderful poem. The Temper, it is
combined witli an elegant dignity and an
intensity which is of the very centre.'

TTie juxtaposition of George Herbert with

Hooker and Donne in the exquisite pages
of WUton has led to his being regarded with
a kindly and condescending affection involving
a complete under-estimate of his poetical \'alue.
This under-estimate is based in the main upon
two misconceptions — first, that Herbert is pri-
marily the poet of a religious party representing
the High Church Anglicans luider the Primacy
of Laud. This is a complete mistake. Herbert's
poems are in their essence the ejaculations not
of a Churchman but of a Christian. The second
misconception is due to the likening of Herbert
and his poetry to the seemly and decorous
formalism of Keble. To confuse the nature of
the two poets is just about as intelligent as to
confuse the functions of priest and sacristan
because they are both employed about the altar.
Herbert is the interpreter of mysteries, Keble
the beautifier of the formal and external. To
recognise the message of Herbert in the music
of Keble were to mistake for the chalice of
the grapes of God the embroidered cloth that
adorns the altar.

Among the foremost admirers of Herbert
was the erratic and ecstatic genius of Richard
Crashaw, the most mystical and perhaps the
most unequal of English poets. The only child
of William Crashaw, a Puritan incumbent of
^\'T^itechapel, Richard was born about 1612-13,
and went to Charterhouse and Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge, but owed the best part of his
education to Nicholas Ferrar, whose Protestant
nunnery was within a ride of Cambridge.
Under this influence his early training in
Protestant divinity gave place to a mystical
and fervent devotion, which led him to refuse
to take the Solemn League and Covenant
and to his consequent ejection from his
fellowship at Peterhouse by the Parliamentary
Commissioners.

Soon after his ejection, Crashaw seceded from
the Protestant Church and retired to France.
His friend Cowley, who was in the French
capital in IG^G as secretary to Lord Jermyn,
found him in great poverty (a " meer scholar
and very shiftless ") at that time. Queen
Henrietta was then an exile in Paris, and
it is said that Cowley or Dr. Gough and
Mr. Car introduced Crashaw to her, and she

' More purely poetic in conceptiou is Life, " I made a posic while the il.iy ran by," or Church Munic. Into
the four .sliort .'st.inzas of Vir/iie, still more into the six stanzas of Thf (^nip, Herbert contrives to condense a
whole morality play. That Herbert could combine playfulness and finish with a genuine depth of feeling in
place of the essential frivolity of the courtly makers of his time, is triumphantly shown in such a poem aa
tiubmissim. His quaint ingenious symbolism is well seen in The Elixir.

VAUGHAN

168

gave him letters of recommendation to Italy,
whither he went and became secretary to
Cardinal Palotta at Rome. He probably
remained in Rome until 1650, when, having by
his plain speech in regard to certain ecclesiastics
made his position an uncomfortable one, he
was transferred to the Lady Chapel of Loretto,
of which Palotta made him a canon. He died
of fever after but a few weeks' residence, and
was buried at Loretto within the chapel in 1650.
The poet Cowley laid one of his best elegies as
a tribute on his grave.

His chief poems were published in 1646
(revised 1648) under a title suggested by his
study of Herbert, Steps to the Temple : Sacred
Poems, with Other Delights of the Ahtses.
Among the secular poems indicated by the
sub-title are Wishes to his Stipposed Mistress,
beginning with the unforgettable

Whoe'er she be,

That not impossible she,

That shall command my heart and me,

and The Mtcses Duel, a rendering of Strada's
Latin fable of the poet and the nightingale,
notable for what Mr. Swinburne calls " its
dazzling intricacy and affluence of refinement,
its choiceness and subtlety." But the flame of
Crashaw's genius soars to real ecstasy only at
the touch of religious emotion in the poems
(collected in the volume called Carmen Deo
Nostro, Paris, 1652) in which he addresses
Jesus, the Holy Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and
Santa Theresa. His poem on the Name of
Jesus is an extraordinary concatenation of in-
spirational flashes and fantastic conceits ; but
the sunmiit of Crashaw's lyrical exaltation is
attained in the octosyllabic " Hymn " and the
last dozen couplets of the poem on " The
Flaming Heart" of Saint Teresa."

Of all the concettists, from Donne and
Herrick to Cowley and \'aughan, Crashaw was
perhaps the most conceited. He sank deeper,
and in brief momenta. y flights it is possible
that he fluttered higher than any of his con-
temporaries. Plain critics have reproached him
for being a wire-drawer and a hyperbolist, but
the school of enthusiasm — Coleridge, Swinburne,

Macdonald, and Dowdcn— do reverence to his
raptures, and have perhaps successfully vindi-
cated his claim to be regarded as the poets'
poet. P'or such a distinction Cnishaw un-
doubtedly possesses this qualification : he is
" caviai'e to the general.'"

Henry Vaughan, the scion of an old Welsh
family, was born at a farmhouse near Brecon in
April, 1622. He .studied with his twin-brother
Thomas, the alchemist, at Jesus College, Oxford.
Both of the brothers sufl'ered deprivjition and
imprisonment in the royal cause, though 'ITiomas
only actually bore arms for the King. About
1645 we find Henry settled as a physician in
his native county, the county of the Silures,
whence he always described himself as
" Silurisf" 2

It was almost inevitable that Vaughan should
start his poetic life as a disciple of Ben Jonson.
His first-fruits as an author were accordingly
Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Eng-
lished, published in 1646. Other translations
followed on Olor Iscavm (Swan of Usk),
written about 1647, published without authority
in 1651. Meantime a serious illness had pro-
foundly deepened and intensified Vaughan's
religious convictions, as may be seen in the
devoutly mystical tone of his chief work, Silex
Scintillans (Sparks from the Flint), or Sacred
Poems and Private Ejaculations, London, 1650,
re-issued with a second part in 1655. This
second part contains the crown of all Vaughan's
poetry, the now widely famous :

They are all gone into the world of light !

And I alone sit lingering here ;
Their very memory is fair and bright,

And my sad thoughts doth clear.

Such poems as these had little interest for
the age of Rochester and Burnet. Aubrey
himself could not find a word to recommend
the literary productions of his relative to
Anthony Wood. Vaughan lived on obscurely
at Skethrog until April 23rd, 1695, " the world
forgetting, by the world forgot." Vaughan
was forgotten effectually for fully a century
after his death until, at the close of the
eighteenth century, a copy of Silex Scintillans

' The best text of Crashaw is that of .\. R. ^^^alle^ in the Cambridge English Classics, 1904. Or
Crashaw and \'aughan alike there are recent and convenient editions in both the Muses' Library and the
Little Library.

' They were born, says Aubrey, at Llansanfraid in Brecknockshire by the River Uske (Isca). Their grand-
mother was an Aubrey : their father, " a coxcombe and no honester than he should be — he cosened me of
60. s. once."

164 WITHER

fell into the hands of Wordsworth. Subse- general tone of which is dark and obscure,

quently to this, in his notices of the English whild in form it is often chaotic and rugged,

poets written in 1819, Campbell speaks of The dui-ability of his fame is ensured by his

Vaughan as one of the harshest even of the two poems. Beyond the Veil and The World :

inferior order of the school of conceit, though , . , , . ,

, ,, , . „ ,, 1 ,, 1 , ,, Ti i saw eteruity the other niffht,

he allows hnn a few scattered thoughts like ^ike a great ring of pure and endless light,

wild flowers on a barren heath." The passage

of another century has greatly increased and by that beautiful fragment, T7ie Retreat, in

Vaughan's fame, though it still reposes upon a which the perfected grandeur of the Intima-

few rare beams of transcendental beauty, t'lons of ImmoHcd'itij is so distantly yet distinctly

emerging from a cumulus of thought, the foreshadowed.^

' Two singular compilers of religious " Emblems," hymns, songs, pious aphorisms, and the like in this
period were that most cavalier of Roundheads, George Whither, and that most plebeian of Royalists, Francis
Quarles. As a poet, of course, M'ither reaches "starry heights" far above Quarles. A natural warbler, in
his darling measure, the heptasyllabic, he published delicate poetry between IGll and 10:22 {The Shepheards
Hunting, Withers Motto, Fair Virtue, and Fideliti, which enshrines that famous and most exquisite song, " Shall
I, wasting in despair.''") and went on drivelling in verse almost down to his death in 1667, (Bt. 79. The joy
and confidence and lilting elasticity of his early secular poems present a sharp contrast to the scholarly
sweetness of Drummond or the subtleties and perversities of Donne. While pent in the Marshalsea Gaol in
early years, \V'ither reverted with fond yearning to the sylvan beauties of his native Bentworth, of Alton,
and the silver pool of Alresford, so that Charles Lamb says with some justice that his prison notes are finer and
freslier, if not freer, than the woodnotes of his poetical brethren. The godly Quarles was a staunch loyalist,
but his poetry is opaque and partakes more of Jordan than of Helicon ; it serves as letterpress to the Latin
mottoes and strange Dutcli emblems which constitute the Emblemes. By Fra. Quarles of 1635. Succeeding
ages have agreed to describe these expositions as quaint ; but what Horace Walpole thought subject for
derision, we should only expect Charles Lamb to find delectable. The Emblemes are entertaining in an early
edition, not otherwise. The Poetry of Wither is to be studied in the excellent edition of Frank Sidgwick
(2 vols., 1903). The copious Quarles — dull, peaceful, prolific, a fond votary of the angle down along his slow-
moving native streams of Essex — was included by Grosart in his C'hertsey Worthies Library (3 vols., 1874).
Tliree other serious poets of the age of Milton must be included in this brief mention. \Villiam Habington,
a Wigornian (160.5 — 1654), wrote a tedious panegyrical miscellany called Castara, 1634, in honour of his adored
wife, Lucy Herbert. John Pordage (1607 — 1681), an astrological parson and Behmenist mystic, calling himself
" Father Abraham," who survived a highly dangerous charge of Pantheism, wrote a quantity of very strange
mystical verse of a theological tendency. Thirdly and lastly, the new-discovered poet, Thomas Traherue
(1G35 — 1674), who combined peculiarities of Donne and Cowley with equally contrary characteristics of the
simple and saintly Herbert and the mystical and obscure Vaughan. The son of a cobbler at Hereford, Traherne
was educated at Brasenose, Oxford, and is noted by the unsparing curiosity of Aubrey as having entertained
a phantom apprentice in a red waistcoat in his chamber by moonlight. After publishing one or two divinity
tracts, notably Roman Forgeries, 1673, he died at Teddington in the capacity of chaplain to Sir Orlando
Bridgman, and was buried October 10th, 1674. In some of his transcendental poems such as The Salutation,
The Choice, Love, Thoughts, The Estate, written in a very irregular metre and manifestly inspired in large
measure by George Herbert, Traherne occasionally hits upon expressions, ideas, and even phrases curiously
premonitory of Blake and Wordsworth. He is a true poet of very limited range, and the world is indebted
to Bertram Dobell for the handsome collection of his Poetical Works (Dobell, 1903).

CHAPTER IV

DIVINITY AND LEARNING FROM HOOKER TO SELDEN

" What went they out to see ? A man clothed in purple and fine linen ? No, indeed ; but an obscure,
harmless man ; a man in poor clothes, his loins usually ^\t\. in a coarse pown, or canonical coat ; of a mean
stature and stooping-, and yet more lowly in tlie thouffhts of his soul : his body worn out, not with af^e, but study
and holy mortifications ; his fiice full of heat pimples, beg-ot by his unactivity and sedentary life. . . . God
blessed him witli so blessed a baslifulness that in his younger days liis pupils might easily look hira out of
countenance ; so neither then, nor in his age did he willingly ever hiol< any man in the face : and was of so mild
and humble a nature that his poor parish-clerk and be did never talk, but with both their bats on, or both oif, at
the same time : and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet he was short or weak-sighted ;
and where he fixed his eyes at the begiiniing of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended ; and the
reader has a liberty to believe that his modesty and dim sight were some of the reasons why he trusted
Mrs. Churchman to choose his wife."— Walton, Life of Mr. Richard Hooker.

An age of ecclesiastical controversy — Richard Hooker — The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity — Archbishop Ussher —
Sir Henry Savile — John Selden — Sir Henry Wottou — The " ever-memorable " John Hales — William
Chillingworth — Francis Godwin.

AS Elizabetlfs reign progressed, the spread
of Puritani.sm — that is, of distinctively
Calvinistic forms of rehgion — indicated the
approaching breakdown of the basis of com-
promise on vhich Elizabethan uniformity in
religious matters rested. It was natural that
one of the first symptoms should take the form
of an attack upon tiie bishops ; many of these
were in the Elizabethan regime extremely
worldly and self-seeking men, chosen rather for
their pliancy and power of " forking up " than
for any spiritual or moral pre-eminence. The
Puritans objected to them not only for their
sponginess, but on principle as institutions
savouring of Popery and as guardians of an
Act of Uniformity which legalised the use of
the old vestments and lent itself to catholic
interpretation. Nor were the Puritans the only
enemies of the bishops, upon whose wealth the
poorer clergy of all shades looked askance. At
court also there was a party gluttonous for
more Church property. Such factors produced
the Martin Marprelate controversy — a virulent
paper and pamphlet w&v which raged from
1589 to 1593, in spite of all the threats and
prohibitions of constituted authorities. But
the age was one of ecclesiastical controversies,
and disputes were rife between Anglican and
Catholic theologians, between High and Low
Chm-ch within the pale of the Establishment,
between " Marians " and " Genevans," between
Brownists and Presbyterians, Presbyterians and

165

Episcopalians, and so all round the circle. Two
of tlie most noted books of the time were
thus produced by apologists for the Anglican
settlement — Bishop John Jewel (whose Latin
Apohgia for the Church of England appeared
in 1564, and was Englished by the sister of
Lady Burghley and mother of Lord Bacon) and
"the judicious Hooker."

Richard Hooker, born in March, 1554, was
a native of Exeter and a nephew of John
Hooker, otherwise known as John Vowell, the
foremost of Holinshed's editors when the
famous Chronicle came to be re-edited in 1597.
This uncle paid for Richard's schooling at the
High School, and found a patron for the pro-
mising boy in the famous Dr. Jewel. Jewel
knew Cole, President of Corpus Christi College
at Oxford, where Hooker was accordingly (1568)
entered as a clerk or servitor. Hooker stayed
on at college as a scholar greatly respected for
his Hebrew and other linguistic learning until
1584, when he was married, and a year later
was appointed Master of the Temple. Here
began Hooker's labours in defence of the
apostolic character of the English Church.
Travers, a bold preacher with a popular manner,
was afternoon lecturer in the Temple, and
maintained in the pulpit Presbyterian views of
Church government. Hooker preaching in the
forenoon, the pulpit, as Fuller said, " spake
pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva
in the afternoon." Travers, silenced by Whit-

166

HOOKER

gift on the ground of insufficient ordination,
continued the war in print. Hooker replied
to the charge of latitudinarianism ; but, unfit
for the worry of controversy, begged from his
patron some quiet post in the country, and in
1591 removed to the Hving of Boscombe, near
SaHsbury. Here, in peace and privacy, he
investigated the general principle involved in
the position of the Church of England, and
organised the already begun eight books of his
Laxi'S of Ecdcskistkal Polity, of which the first
four were published in 1594. Translated in
1595 to the better living of Bishopsbourne,
near Canterbury, he sent a fifth book (longer
than all the rest) to press in 1597. He died
at Bishopsbourne on November 2nd, and was
buried November -ith, 1600. A sculptured
portrait bust in the chancel of the beautiful little
church stands to us for a noble type of Eliza-
bethan divine. Books VI. and VIII. of the
Polity were published in 1648 ; a seventh book
appeared in 1662. Books VII. and VIII. ap-
peared to have been edited by Gauden from
notes left by Hooker. Doubts have been
raised as to the genuineness of the sixth book.
It does not conform with Hookei-'s plan ; but
Keble, Hooker's chief editor, had no doubt it
was substantially Hooker's, though not designed
as part of the Polity.

The objects of Hooker's work may thus be
summed up. In the first book he endeavours
to show the philosophical position of the
Church of England, and the place of such an
institution in a universal scheme. The second
book is an argument to refute the Puritanical
view of the Bible as being a cyclopaedia of all
knowledge and all truth. The object of the
third is to prove that there is no ground for
the assumption that Scripture must of necessity
prescribe a form of Church government. The
fourth book is a defence of the Church of
England ceremonies against the charge of being
Popish ; and the fifth contains a long and
minute vindication of the Church on all the
points attacked by tlie Puritans. The sixth
book was designed to carry the war into the
enemy's country, and to confute the Presby-
terian theory of Church government. The
seventh is an exalted vindication of Episco-
palianism ; and the eighth an explanation of and
apology for the doctrine of the royal supremacy.

The main objet-t of Hooker is thus to uphold
the settlement made by Queen Elizabeth's
Government, and known in later days as the via

media, against the attacks of the party formed
by the Protestant exiles who, expelled from
England under Mary, and repulsed by the
Lutherans, had fallen under the sway of Knox,
Calvin, and the Swiss reformers of Zurich.
Hooker is in this way the literary exponent of
the practical policy of Whitgift ; and continually
upon a knife-edge between Home and reform,
symbolism and whitewash, the Bible and the
Church, tradition and logic, the dialectician's
task is an almost superhuman one. To defend
an elaborate compromise, the result of peculiar
political conditions created by Tudor lust,
despotism, and the greed of the rising official
families of Russells and Cavendishes and Cecils
who fawned upon the throne, might well seem
to a philosopher a task beyond human power.
Undoubted it is, nevertheless, that in the
liturgy of the new Church Cranmer created a
monument of the power and beauty of the
English language that has never been rivalled ;
\\\\\\e in his defence of the polity of the same
Chm-ch and the laws that ought to govern such
polity Hooker created a prose classic (" the first
in our language") which remains to this day
the most representative and original example
of great and high-somiding English prose.

The three greatest preachers on the Church
.side were Joseph Hall (1574 — 1656), Bishop of
Norwich, the English Seneca, already celebrated
for his Characters; John Donne (1573—1631),
the poet and Dean of St. Paul's, whose poems
were printed in folios dated 1640 and 1649 ;
and Lancelot Andrewes (1555—1626), chaplain
of A\l3itgift, and eventually Bishop of AVin-
chester. Though a serious scholar who never
left his book before noon, Andrewes was a
vivacious wit, and his felicitous citations made
him a great favourite in the pulpit, the star of
preachers. His Prcces Privatw, or private de-
votions, constructed out of precious stones of
ancient piety, became almost instantly popular.
Bishop Andrewes was a noted apologist of his
Church, and his example and influence were
long active forces within it.

A primacy among our scholars of this jieriod
may justly be claimed for James Ussher, the
celebrated Archbishop of Armagh, who was
born in Dublin on January 4th, 1581. While
a. student at the newly founded Trinity College
in Dublin, Ussher's preference was for poetry ;
but a chance phrase in Cicero, " nescire quid
antea quaiii natus sis acciderit, id est semper
esse puerum," revealed to him what was

JOHN SELDEN

167

evidently for him the right path, of history and
archirology. He came over to buy books for
his college, and was soon known to Camden
and the antiquaries as the most learned of all
Irishmen. His reading made of him a zealous
Protestant and predestinarian, and the Calvinists
pointed with pride to his Dc Eccks'iarum
Christianarum Succexsione et Statu (1612) as a
worthy monument of their faith and erudition.
In 1625 he was made Primate of the Irish
Church, but the rebellion drove him to Oxford.
Later, by refusing to take part in the West-
minster Assembly, he put the seal upon his
steadfast professions of loyalty. The death of
the King profoundly affected him. Cromwell
ti'eated him with indulgence, and he was re-
spected by all parties ; but he died in the shade
of adversity and retirement at the Countess of
Peterborough's seat at Reigate on March 21st,
1656. While at Oxford he was in a good
position for advancing his great chronological
work. The Annaks (I., 1650 ; II., 1654), for
which he is celebrated. This is a chronological
digest of universal history from the creation of
the world to the dispersion of the Jews in
Vespasian's reign. He fixes the creation of the
world at 4004 b.c'

A close rival of Ussher in historical scholar-
ship was a man of an earlier generation, Sir
Henry Savile, vir doctissimus according to
Joseph Scaliger, and generally admitted to be
the most learned Englishman in profane litera-
ture at the court of Elizabeth. In 1591 he
brought out his translation of Foxccr Bookes of
the Histories of CorneRus Tacitus with The
Life of Agricola, forming a kind of continuation
to Richard Grenewey's translation of The
Annals. Between 1610 and 1613 Savile issued
from his own private press at Eton in eight
folio volumes, at a cost estimated at over i^8,000
(equal to more like ,£'50,000 in our money), a
sumptuous edition of St. Chrysostom. As a
publishing venture it was a failure, for a much
cheaper Latin edition, containing much of
Savile's material, was brought out by the Jesuits

at Paris very shortly after its appearance. But
it greatly exalted Savile's reputation in Europe
as a munificent scholar, and this was further
enhanced by his foundation of two professor-
ships named after him at Oxford. He died at
Eton on February 19th, 1622, being then
seventy-three years of age.

The most interesting of the savants of the
early Stuart time was John Selden (1584-1654),
a man whose social position enabled him to
employ his uncommon learning as an instrument
of power, while a trenchant wit and irony lent
a double-edge sharpness before which some of
the most formidable persons of the day
experienced unfamiliar tremors. Selden was
perhaps the greatest of the powerful and
numerous tribe of English antiquarian lawyers.
He was a Whig constitutionalist before his
time, and we have in him not a few premonitions
of Temple, Halifax, Chestei-field, Burke, Black-
stone, Fox, De Lolme, Disraeli, Bagehot, and
other theorists upon constitutional questions
of the first moment to statesmen at times of
political tension or crisis.

Born at East Tarring, near Worthing, Selden
was educated locally at Chichester, and at
Oxford, but it was not until he got into the
congenial atmosphere of the Inner Temple that
his great powers began to develop. About 1605
he made the acquaintance of Sir Robert Bruce
Cotton, the learned baronet, in whose library
in Palace Yard (transferred in 1753 to the
British Museum), a veritable El Dorado to the
literary student, he met Savile, D'Ewes, Spelman,
Vincent, Ben Jonson, Sir Roger Twysden, and
other erudite persons. The first fruits of his
research were seen in some very crabbed pro-
ductions upon the ancient law of Britain ; in
1610 a small treatise on Single Combat; in
1614 a study upon Titles of Honour ; an
edition of Fortescue, a treatise on the Jezas in
England, a Discourse on the Office of Lord
Chancellor, and finally in 1617 his famous
History of Tythes. In this work, by the
implied denial of the right of the clergy to

' His great predecessor Scaliger, in his Lk Emendatione Temporum, had fixed it at 3950 b.c, adhering closely
in the main to the vulgar Jewish chronology and to the authority of the Masoretic text. Scaliger was followed
by Petavius, who fixed the Creation at 3984 b.c. and the Exodus from Egypt at 1531 b.c. His chronology was
generally adopted hy Roman Catholics. Thus Ussher was to a large extent in leading strings when he
began his investigation'^, the scholarly repute of Scaliger and Petavius carrj-ing with it the consensus of nearly
all learned Europe. Ho »as thought, however, to have made a brilliant and daring innovation by assigning 130
instead of seventy years to Terah at the time of Abraham's birth. The net result of his labours was to enlarge
the era of Petavius by twenty years, fixing the Deluge at 23i8 b.c, the Exodus at 1491, and the foundation of
the Temple at 1012 b.c. His system was adopted iu the English Bible and generally among the divines of the
Reformed Church.

168

SIR HENRY WOTTON

such tithes jure divino, Selden showed what a
formidable handle might be made of erudition
and knowledge of precedent in approaching the
burning questions of the hour. In the political
controversy of the seventeenth century both
parties claimed that law and precedent were on
their side, while both alike were apt to l)e
extremely vague in their references. By his
wonderful power of manipulating ancient and
precise records Selden actiuired a political
influence which it is doubtful if a pure savant
has exercised licfore or since — at any rate, in
England. Though James I. deprecated some of
his deductions he was very much interested in
his details, and Selden was thenceforth a person
of indisputable importance. Charles was highly
pleased with his demonstrations of the exclusive
rights of England in the narrow seas {Marc
C/aiisu7?i, 1636). Both Lords and Connnons con-
sulted him on questions of right and precedent.
Amid the bitter controversies of his time Selden
was naturally a trinnner both by conviction
and scholarly predilection for peace. He was
strongly opposed to Ship-money and to certain
illegal acts of Charles and Buckingham, but he
was no less hostile to the aggressions of the
Commons in regard to the militia and the
exclusion of bishops, while to the despotism of
the King or Protector, bishop or presbyter, he
was equally and impartially antagonistic. All
parties reciprocated his suspicion, but he was
above all a thorn in the sides of the West-
minster divines. A cardinal principle with
him was the supremacy of the state. This dry
light of detachment gives a special charm to
his caustic sayings. As a writer he is apt to
be prolix, discursive, and embarrassed by the
weight of his own learning. As a talker we
have Clarendon's word that he was a most
clear discourser and "had the best faculty in
making hard things easy and presenting them
to the understanding of any man that hath
been known." His most prized work, accordingly,
for other than purposes of learned reference, is
his Tuhk Talk, put together by his secretary,
Richard Milward, and published in 1689 —
thirty-five years after his death and " magni-
ficent " funeral in the Temple Church.

Sir Henry Wotton attained to tiie coveted
post of Provost of Eton College in 1624, and
he thanked God that after a life of so nuich
bustle he was able, like Charles V., to enjoy the
quiet of the cloister. As Provost he conferred
great benefits on the school and scholars, a

number of his thoughtful and sympathetic
letters to noblemen who put their sons or grand-
sons under his charge being still extant. At
his hospitable table distinguished strangers met
the most hopeful pupils of the college. But
none surpassed Wotton himself either in wit or
in rich store of reminiscence ; for he had mixed
intimately, not only with the great Elizabethans
but also with most of the great foreigners of
the age. It was he who forwarded a copy of
Bacon's Organum to Kepler, and who furnished
Milton with the necessary advices and intro-
ductions on his setting out for Italy. As a
corrective to books and learned conversation,
Wotton speaks of the delight with whicli, when
the month of jNIay came, he would go out with
his angling-rod. He was also a great collector
of Italian pictures and engravings. So many
occupations left him but little leisure for the
jnagnum opus upon the history of England to
which Charles I. summoned him. All that he
left eventually were the fragmentary poems and
essays, and the urbane familiar letters included
after his death in the Rel'tqmw Wottonianw.

A near neighbour of Wotton's at Eton who
frequented his parties and who resembled him
both in great accomplishment and small achieve-
ment was the " ever memorable " John Hales.
Born at Bath in 1584, he was educated at
Corpus Christi at Oxford, whence he became
university Greek lecturer and a fellow of
Merton. He had a brief diplomatic experience
as chaplain to Sir Dudley Carleton in Holland,
and was present at the synod of Dort. On his
return he seems sincer'ely to have shunned
Church preferment, secluding himself among
his books as a fellow of Eton College, and
dividing all his small surplus income between
books and charity. Hales himself was noto-
riously a walking library, to whose resort the
learned courtiers did seriously incline when
the court was at Windsor. His great learning
and profound judgment were combined with
the most punctilious integrity and the utmost
modesty in demeanour, so that tlierc was no
man of the day of whom more people sj)oke well.
Of a firm though equable spirit, he became a
fugitive during the Puritan revolution, but
(lied eventually at Eton on ]\Iay 19th, 1656,
being tiien seventy-two years of age. His
Works were first collected and printed by the
noted Glasgow printers Robert and Andrew
Foulis, in three volumes, 1765.

'I'he story of his defence of Shakesjjcare

FRANCIS GODWIN

lGf>

against a tirade of Ben Joiison, and of liis
undertaiving to find something on any topic
treated by the ancients at least as well treated
by Shakespeare, is well known. He is one of t he
finest examples we have in England of iriodest
and self-denying authorship. At the time of his
death it wa.s found that he had sold his library
and had pai'ted by degrees with all his ready
money in charity to deprived clergy and scholars.^
The tolerant and latitudinarian views of
Hales were shared by no one more fully than
his friend William Chillingworth, the son of
a mayor of Oxford, who was educated at the
Grammar School there, and became in 1628 a
Fellow of Trinity College, being then twenty-
six years of age. lie came eai'ly under the
influence of the Laudian theology, but was
puzzled by the criticisms of Bellarmine, and
became dissatisfied with the evidence for the
continuity of the Protestant Church. In 1630
he put himself under the tuition of the Jesuits
at the College of Douay. But a course of
Catholic theology effected a revolution in his
views, and in 1634, having in the meantime
returned to Oxford, he declared himself once
more a Protestant. During the Civil War he
adhered zealously to the Royal party, and in
August, 1643, he fashioned an engine for the
assault of the city of Gloucester. A few months
later he was captured by the Parliamentarians,
but was allowed to retire to the palace at
Chichester, where he died on January 30th, 1644.
He was buried in Chichester Cathedral, where
his Puritan opponent. Dr. Cheynell, flung a copy
of his " heretical " Religion of Protestants into
the grave, that it might rot with its author
and see corruption. His plea for toleration and

' His most notable, thougli still brief, contribution to eirenical literature was his tract on Schism and
Schisimitirhs, jjrobably written about 16.36, tliougli not publislied until 1042. I'erhaps the earliest open plea
for complete reli^ous toleration, an idea alisolutely revolting to Tudor tliouglit, was the Reliyioasi Peace, or
A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, of Leonard Busher, first printed in 1614 (see Masson's Milton, iii. 102). It
has been suggested that James I. was influenced by this sincere and well-written advocation when lie declared
to Parliament in 1614, "No state can evidence that any religion or heresy was ever e.\tirpated by the sword
or by violence, nor have I ever judged it a %vay of planting the truth." Among the broad-minded Jacobean
divines a high place belongs to Thomas Morton (d. 16.59), an anti-Laudian bishop and great benefactor of
learned men, such as Hooker, Walton, Basire, Barwick, and Durie (a warm advocate of Protestant union).
Among the Laudians were John Buckeridge (d. IG.^l) and Richard Montague, both great preachers. Godfrey
Goodman (d. 16.56), Bishop of Gloucester, was too Romanising for Laud. He was the author of the delightfully
circumstantial Court of James I., first printed by Dr. Brewer in 1839. His advanced Fall of Man (admired
by Milton and Southey) was answered by Bishop George Hakewill (d. 1649), a divine, Boswell tells us, who
helped to form Dr. Johnson. Among the Puritan preachers of this time the most justly noted were Thomas
Adams of Wingrave, " the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians " ; Daniel Featley of Actou (d. 1645),
author of Aiicilla Pietatix ; and Richard Sil)bes (d. 1635), an emotional preacher who exhibited extraordinary
power in his pulpit at Gray's Inn.

' Among other English authors who enjoyed the unusual lionour of translation before 1650 were More,
Foxe, Buchanan, James I., Bishop Hall {Characterisms, 1010), Bacon {Essays, 1612), Greene {Pamloslo, 1619),
Sidney {Arcadia, 1620), and Lord Herbert.

his appeal to the individual reason were naturally
disregarded during the heat of the conflict. But
his ideas were revived with redoubled force after
the Restoration, until after the Revolution of
1688 they became dominant under the influence
of such men as Tillotson and Burnet.

Anotlier of the most erudite Latinists and
antiquarians of this abundant period was Franci.s
Godwin, a Northain])t<)nshire and Christ Church
man, who owed his bishopric at Llandaff in 1601
expressly to his masterpiece of compilation and
research, A Catnhgiic of the Bishops of Kiig/<tiid
since the First Planting of Christian KcUgian
in this Island ; together with the Brief Historij
of their Lives and Memorable Actions (1601,
quarto). This was greatly improved in an
edition of 1615, and translated into Latin in
the following year as I)e PnrsuUbics Angliw ;
Godwin, as a reward, was promoted to the more
remunerative See of Hereford. Godwin also
wrote annals, both ecclesiastical and civil, of the
Tudor pei-iod. He died in April, 1633, leaving
a great reputation for scholarship and a curious
manuscript published in 1638 as " The Man in
the Moone, or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither,
by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger."
This work, which reveals an imaginative interpre-
tation of the Copernican system, was translated
into French by the indefatigable Baudoin in
1648, and imitated by Cyrano de Bcrgerac in
his famous Voyage de la Lune." Hints were
obviou.sly derived from it by Dr. Wilkins, one
of the institutors of the Royal Society, for
his Discovery of a New World in the Moon,
while directly and indirectly it evidently in-
fluenced both Gulliver\s Travels and Paltock's
Adventures of Peter Wilkins.

CHAPTER V

IZAAK WALTON: OCCASIONAL AND MINOR PROSE OF

THE AGE OF 3IILTON

"Simon Peter said, 'I go ■ a-fishing ' ; and they said, 'We also will go with thee.'" — John xxi. 3.
James Howell— Harriugtou — Wilkiiis— Digby — Heylyn — Dugdale— Sir Thomas Herbert.

THE life of Izaak Walton from 1593 to
1683 almost bridges over a span of the
Stuart dynasty. It affords a kind of talisman
against the fanaticism which intervened between
the Renaissance and the Restoration in Eng-
land. Isaac — or, as he liked to write it, Izaak
— Walton was born at Stafford on August 9th,
1593. Of his education and early years we
know practically nothing, but, according to
Wood, he obtained a competency as a linen-
draper in London. This seems hardly con-
sistent with the fact that in his marriage of
1596 he was styled an ironmonger, while
records show that he was made free of the
Ironmongers'" Company in November, 1618. In
1643 Walton was able to retire from trade on
a modest competency, and in 1644 a vestryman
was chosen for St. Dunstan's in room of " Isaac
Walton, lately departed out of this parish."
Wood says that Walton retired to Stafford,
but if so he was back in London in time for
Laud's execution early in 1645, and in 1650 he
was at Clerkenwell preparing for press the
Rcliqiiicc WoUoniaruv, to which he prefixed the
brief yet charming life of Sir Henry Wotton
which came out in 1651. In 1647 (after being
.seven years a-widower) he had married again,
Anne, daughter of Thomas, and half-sister of
Bishop Ken.

Walton was sixty wlien in 1653 he published
his immortal treatise, The Compleat Angler, or
The Contemplative Mans Recreation, being " a
discourse of fish and fishing not unworthy the

perusal of most anglers." The first edition
(price eightoenpence) differs materially from the
second, which apjjeared under Walton's super-
intendence in 1655. The first edition is cast in
the form of a dialogue between two persons —
Piscator and Viator ; while, in the second, three
characters — Piscator, Venator, and Auceps
(falconer) — sustain the discourse. Totnam Hill,
however, is still the scene, and a May-day
morning the time of the meeting. The idyllic
mood in which Walton's favourite pastime is
treated had been to a certain extent antici-
pated in Nicholas Breton's Wits Trenchmour
in a Conference had Betioixt a Scholkr and
an Angler, published in 1597, and in John
Dennys's unaffected and quaintly humorous
poem on Th/; Secrets of Angling, published
three years after the author's death, in 1613.
Yet in the perfection of finished art, discovered
in a perfect simplicity, TTie Compleat Angler
remains unique in our literature.

In 1665 Walton gave to ^^^ world his Life
of Richard Hooker, which he dedicated to
George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, at
whose palace at Farnham he found an asylum
for his old age after the death of his wife in
1662. Five years later appeared his Life of
George Herbert, and in the same year, 1670.
the four Lives of Donne (the favourite of
Dr. Johnson), Wotton, Hooker, and Herbert
were collected in a single volume dedicjited
to Morley. To this unrivalled collection of
devotional biographies, tinapproached alike in

' TIio last edition published in Walton's time was the famous fifth edition of 1678, in which Charles
Cotton's " InstriK-tioiis how to Angle for a Trout or Grayling in a Clear Stream " appear for the first time.
The standard editions of The Compleat Angler are those of Sir Harris Nicliolas (1830) and K. B. Marston
(1088) ; to whicli may be added for reference the introductions by Lang, Lowell, and John Kudiau
(Little Library).

170

WALTON

171

gi-atcful .simplicity and in humble admiration
and piety, the Life of Robert Sanderson was
added in 1678. Walton must have been well
over eighty when he wrote it — truly the ripe
fruit of a noble stem. Walton died at his
married daughter's house in Winchester on
December 15th, 1683, and was buried in the
south transept of Winchester Cathedral.

Walton's career, says Mr. Andrew Lang, is
seen to be that of "a man born in a humble
position, but attracting by his charm of
character and happy religion the friendship of
learned divines and prelates. More than most
authors, he lives in his writings, which are the
pure expression of a kind, humorous, and
pious soul in love with nature ; while the ex-
pression itself is unique for apparent simplicity
which is really elaborately studied art.'" His
descriptions of flowers, fields, and streams are
the prose of the poetry in Sliakespcare's inci-
dental rustic songs, or Marlowe's Come Live
■with Me. His love of music is continually
evident in the pages of his Angler. His
unaflected love of God and man won for him,
after his death, the admiration of Dr. Johnson,
who must also have been drawn to him as a
Royalist and Churchman, of Wordsworth, of
Lamb, and of Landor. The pastoral revives
in his idyllic pages, and he has given the gentle
sport a halo of fine literature which it has
never quite lost. Culture and sport, poetry
and prose, nature and art are reconciled most
rarely in the choice simplicity and haunting
cadences of the fondly remembered " Iz : \Va."
James Howell, the son of a Carniarthenshire
rector, was born at Abernant about 1595, and
was educated at Hereford Free School, and
Jesus College, Oxford. After taking his degree
he became the foreign agent of a glassware
manufactory in Broad Street, I ondon, and was
sent to Venice to pick up competent workmen
and the latest designs. After six ycjirs of this
work he became an accomplished linguist, and
was employed on one or two semi-diplomatic
missions (Madrid-Copenhagen). In 1640 he
published a political allegory in prose called
Dodona'i Grove, or The Vocal Forest. His
services and talents already gave him a strong
claim upon the Royalist party, when in 1643

his papers were seized Ijy order of the Long
Parliament, and he was committed (for eight
long years) to the Fleet Prison. There he
wrote a large number of political pamphlets,
an ill-natured description of the people and
country of Scotland, and a survey of the
Seignorie of Venice, published in the year of
his release from the Fleet, 1651. Six years later
he gave to the world Londinnpolis, a gossipy
perlustration of the city, largely borrowed
from Stow, with interesting plates by Hollar.
In 1661 he was appointed Historiographer Royal
of England, with a salary of ot'lOO a year. He
died unmarried in Holborn, and was buried on
November 3rd, 1666, in the Temple Church,
where in the triforium gallery his costly
monument may still be seen. It is an ex-
aggeration to say that Howell was one of the
fiist Englishmen to make a livelihood by his
pen, yet few professional writers have worked
harder than he did during his sojourn of eight
years in the Fleet Prison. He owes his place
in English literature exclusively to the Epistolte
Ho-EUance : familiar letters, domestic and
foreign, divided into sundry sections, autobio-
graphical, historical, political,and philosophical.*
The eighteenth-century essayists from Steele
and Defoe onwards borrowed much of Howell's
manner and method and not a few of his
stories. It is pleasant to be able to go so far
back for one's travel talk and anecdotage and
to find the tap running so clear. Howell him-
self says that " running waters are purest,"
which being interpreted may be taken to mean
that Howell writing in the manner of a diarist
of travel mercifully avoids all stylistic preciosity.
The result is a literary salad which has been
the delight of the omnivorous reader, and is
still verdant for the true book-lover, who for
stray reading prefers an old book to a new one.
A writer who has some affinity to Howell,
though ostensibly at least a political theorist,
and is in fact somewhat difficult to classify, is
James Harrington, who must be carefully dis-
tinguished from his remote kinsman Sir John
Harrington (or Harington), the godson of
Queen Elizabeth, the author of a version of
Ariosto and of The Metamorphosis of Ajax.
James Harrington, the political theorist.

' 1C45— 1655: there is nothing very extraordinary about the letters. Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Tobie
Mathew, and other gossips of James I.'s court ]iad developed the Familiar Letter in imitation of ('icero, Pliny,
and Seneca ; but the Epid. llo-Eliana: are more of an olla podridn, and come nearer to the divine chit-chat
of Walpole and Cowper. His light touch in stringing together oddities and the fealty and flattery of Southey,
Lamb, D'Israeli, and, above all, Thackeray, ensure a long life to Howell.

172

HARRINGTON'S "OCEANA

eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington, of Rand,
Lincolnshire, rambled from Oxford to Uonie,
where lie refused to kiss the Pope's toe, adroitly
excusing himself at a later date to Charles I.
for what Sir Leslie Stephen agi-eeably calls his
" rudeness " by saying that he would not kiss
the foot of any prince after kissing the hand of
King Charles. He visited Venice, and like
most of the thinkers of that time was much
impressed by the Venetian constitution and
system of government. In 1647 Harrington
and his friend Herbert were made grooms
of the King's bedchamber at Holmby House.*
The King loved his company, says Aubrey,
only he could not bear to hear of a common-
wealth; and Mr. Harrington passionately loved
his Majesty. Often they disputed about govern-
ment. Harrington was on the scaffold in
January, 1649, and the King gave him a watch.
After the King's death he began a scheme for a
new form of government ; this he embodied in
a large book upon an ideal connnonwealth, to
which he gave the name Oceana. He was kept
in confinement for two years or so upon the
Restoration, and suffered much, Aubrey tells
us, at the hands of Beelzebub and other evil
spirits, dying finally at Westminster on
September 11th, 1677, aged sixty-six.

Harrington's general scheme as expounded
in Oceana comprised a popular assembly and
a senate of members with the land qualification
elected by the people in their precincts by
secret ballot. The senate was to debate and
propose laws, the assemblies to accept or refuse
them only. The executive was drawn annually
from the senate by a process of rotation.
There was further to be limitation in the
ownership of land, upon which Harrington
held that all political power depended. He
believed, too, in " a natural aristocracy," in
free compulsory education, in an independent
judicature, in liberty of conscience for all
Protestants, and in the abolition of primogeni-
ture. Many of his ideas are undoubtedly good
and well expressed, but they are overwhelmed

by the nniltiplicity of detail, a glaring
example being his explanation of the proper
method of balloting drawn mainly from Venice.
Many of his expressions, such as that in which
he demands a government of laws not of men,
or says that the exercise of just authority over
a free people ought to arise from their own
consent, have found their way into American
constitutions.

The lighter vein of prose during what we
may call the periodic period is well illustrated
by Peter Heylyn, a native of Burford in
Oxfordshire, a clever young Demy of Magdalen,
who took up historical geography and published
a book on the subject in 1621. James L is
said to have taken offence at a phrase in this
book to the effect that France was a greater
and more famous kingdom than England. In
order to show that his heart was in the right
place, Heylyn in 1625 made a journey through
France and wrote an amusing satirical journal
published many years later as a survey of
France. This work and the geography which
he subsequently enlarged into a cosmography,
contained the most entertaining part of Heylyn 's
work as a stylist.

Hcylyn's Survey remained a popular book
in the eighteenth centui-y, and many of his
observations reappear in the works of Gold-
smith, Smollett, and Sterne. But Heylyn was
much better known in his own day as a keen
controversialist, as the assailant of the Puritan
Sabbath in his Hisfori/ of the Sabbath, written
by royal connnand in 1636, of Bishop "Williams
and other opponents of Laud, and of the
"falsities" in Fuller's Church History. But
Heylyn's controversial acrimony was the mask
of a kindly disposition, and his complete
reconciliation with Fuller is a delightful
episode in Heylyn's restless and somewhat
irritable career as a critic. In 1642 he lost
all his possessions, and became a fugitive in
the land ; yet when quieter times supervened
in 1653 his parishioners in Alresford in
Hampshire showed their affection for him by

• Another liU'rary attciulaiit of Cliarlos (hiriiif; the last sadilencd liours was Sir Thomas Ilerhert, a kiiisiiian
of tlie third Earl of I'enibroke, who pulilislied, in H134, a once famous volume of Trnrui/e into Afriijiie and Grnitcr
Asia (he had been in the Persian suite of Sir Uodmore Cotton). A fourth edition of this appeared in 1(!77. A
Parliamentarian in politics, Herbert was appointed to attend the Kinjr at Holmby House. The Kins became
attached to him, and on the fatal .30th January pave him a watch and his folio Shakespeare (1032). In 1078
Herbert printed a touchiiijj, minute, and ceromonioiia detail of the last two years of the King's life {Threnodia
Carolina, 10713, reprinted several times as Mrwoirs of the Lust Two Years, to which was added -1 J'artimlar Aecount
of the Funeral of the King in a Letter to Sir Wm. Huf/dale). He «as made a baronet in KiOO, worked at anticjuities
for I^ugdale, and died at York in 1082. An interesting sketch of Harrington's doctrinaire theories will be foimd
in Scott's Woodstock.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY 173

restoring tlie chief artick's of his furniture uliicli Illstitri/ of the Itiformation. At the Ifestoni-
they had bought for that purpose. From an tion he was restored to liis prebend as sub-
academic point of view his most important dean of Westminster, and he would probably
works were those written towards the end of have been made a bishop ; but he was already
his career, in justification of Laud's attempt so wasted by ague that he looked like a
to restore ecclesiastical order, notably Ecck.na skeleton, and he died at Westminster f)n
Vindicata and Ecclc.i'm licstaurata, or The May 8th, IfJfiS.'

' Another exponent of this more active and concise English prose was Dr. Joliii ^Vilkins, wliose best known
work, published in IGOii wlicn he was only twenty-four years of age, was entitled The Dixcovery of a New vyofld ;
or, A Discourse Tending to Prove that it in Probable there mui/ he Another World in the Moon, unth a Discourse
Concerning the Possihilitg of a Passage Thither. In this treatise tlie learned doctor gravely discourses the practica-
bility of a journey to the moon, and shows mucli ingenuity and Ininiour in disposing of the serious difficulties in
the way of sucli an attempt. Another treatise entitled .1 Discourse Concerning a Nnc Planet, \\\\\c\i appeared two
years later, is interesting from its connection with a somewhat similar book, already descrilied, of Bishoj) (iodwin,
and as being one of the earliest attempts of an English pliilosoplier to uphold tlie validity of tlie Copernican
system.

A more singular representative of the nebulous scientific theories of the period was Sir Kenelm Digby, a
sucking philosopher whom the sober John Evelyn does not hesitate to call "an arrant mountebank," " the very
Pliny of our Age for lying." The son of Sir Everard Digby, of Gayhurst, he strayed from Oxford to Florence,
and thence to Madrid, returning from Spain with Prince Charles in 102.3. His romantic courtship of \'euetia
Stanley, the history of which is recorded in his private memoirs, mostly written upon the Isle of Melos in 1628,
at the close of a successful privateering expedition in the Mediterranean, the various confidential missions in
which he was engaged, first on behalf of Queen Henrietta Maria, and subse<|uently in the service of the Protector,
his numerous conversions and reconversions, and his alleged hectoring of his Holiness at Rome, serve alike to
perpetuate the memory of one of the most fantastic characters of the period. His two most important works,
Of Bodies and Of the Immortality of Man's Soul, were published at Paris in 1644, and owe much to the influence
of Thomas White, a Catholic savant and Aristotelian with whom Digby lived for some time. His writings at
their best appear to be a singular medley of Aristotelian philosophy, astrology, alchemy, grotesque natural
history, and absurd superstitions. His treatise Of Bodies may be regarded as a choice supplement to Browne's
Vulgar Errors, written in an inferior but not dissimilar style. Digby's friendship with Browne and with such
thinkers as Descartes and Hobbes seems to have had the effect of investing his erratic speculations with an
importance which they were far from deser\ing.

Of much greater interest in its bearing upon the after-history of Literature was the germination during
the sterile period of the Civil War of the institution which was to become far-famed as the Royal Society.
Mushroom societies forj exploring the secrets of Nature had sprung up in Italy and elsewhere from 1660
onwards, but this was the first of the kind definitely to take root. Archbishop Parker had founded the Old
Society of Antiquaries in 1.572, but after various vicissitudes it was dissolved by James I. Edmund Bolton
projected a Royal Academy in 1617, but this collapsed on James's death. Cliarles I. granted a licence for
a Museum Minerva; in 163.5, the year of the definite inception under the auspices of Richelieu of the famous
Academie Frauij'aise. To England, nevertheless, belongs the honour of first establishing north of the Alps
a society for the investigation and advancement of physical science. The first meetings of a small scientific
club were held about 1646 in Dr. Goddard's lodgings in Wood Street. Among the chief founders was
John Wilkius, afterwards Bishop of Chester, who had studied deeply in physics and mathematics, and who
received from the Parliament party the headship of Wadham College ; there in 1648 he harboured a small
knot of University men who used to meet for the cultivation of experimental philosophy as a diversion from
the painful thoughts excited by public calamities. Among these philosophers were John Wallis the
mathematician, Seth AVard, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, Christopher Wren, and
two remarkable eccentrics, Robert Boyle and Sir Kenelm Digby. A little later on, " these divers worthy
persons inquisitive into natural philosophy and other parts of human learning did by agreements meet
weekly in London on a certain day to treat and discourse of such affairs." In its early days the Society was
known as the " Invisible College," and before 1660 it seems to have had a regular habitat at Gresham College
in Bishopsgate Street, where Wren was Professor of Astronomy. In 1659 the worthy John Evelyn began
to take keen interest in the proceedings. Wallis records that the subjects discoursed of were " the circulation
of the blood ; the valves in the \eins ; the venal lacteie ; the lymphatic vessels ; the Copernican Hypothesis ;
the nature of comets and new stars ; the satellites of Jupiter, the oval shape of Saturn, the spots in the sun,
and its turning on its own axis ; inequalities and selenography of the Moon ; the several phases of \'enus and
Mercury ; the improvement of telescopes and grinding of glasses for that purpose ; the weight of air, the
possibility or the impossibilities of vacuities, and Nature's abhorrence thereof; the Torricellian Experiment
in quicksilver; the descent of heavy bodies, and the degrees of acceleration thereof; and divers other things
of like nature." The Records of the Society begin on November 28th, 1660.

CHAPTER VI
TRANSITIONAL POETS

" Who now reads Cowley ? If Le pleases yet.
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.
Forgot liis epic, nay Pindaric art !
But still I lo\e the language of his heart." — Pope.

Cowley — Waller — MarveU — Rochester, Sedley, and Dorset — TTie Westminster wits — Charles Cotton.

AN interesting but belated and long-
neglected group of transitional poets
is formed by the philosophical lyrists who
flourished at the close of the Connnonwealth
and may be described collectively as disciples
or rivals either of Donne and Cowley or Carew
and Waller. This last cluster put forth by
the dying Renaissance in England may be
extended to include not only Cowley, Joseph
Beaumont, Henry More, William Chamberlayne,
Thomas Flatman, Thomas Stanley, and " the
matchless Orinda,"'' but also Waller, Davenant,
Denham, Cleveland, and for convenience' sake,
Andrew Marvell, and one or two of the minor
lyrists of the Restoration.

Abraham Cowley, the most popular English
poet of his time, was born in Fleet Street,
near Chancery Lane, in 1618, and was the
posthumous son of a respectable stationer (and
grocer). His precocity was exceptional, and
he may be truly said to have lisped in numbers.
In his twelfth year he composed a short epical
romance, while in his fifteenth he brought out
his Poetical Blossomes (1633). A study of
The Faerie Qticeiw confirmed his resolution to
become a poet, and when he proceeded from
Westminster to Trinity at Cambridge in 1637
his poetic fame had preceded him. He was
already a fellow of his college in 1641 when
he ])roduced his comedy of jTV^r Guardian,
subseijuently metamorphosed and greatly im-
proved under a more familiar name, The Cutter
of Coleman Street. Three years later a satire
on the Puritans compelled his withdrawal to
Oxford, whence Cowley followed the Queen to

France (and so met and befriended Crashaw) as
secretary and diplomatic agent. He conducted
private correspondence in cipher and made
some dangerous journeys on the King^s behalf
to the Low Countries, Jersey, Scotland, and
elsewhere. He had written little since his
popular collection of amorous poems known as
TJie Mistress appeared at London in 1647. In
1656 he was discovered in London and was for
a sliort time imprisoned ; but in the same
year he found means to issue a folio collection
of his poems including his sacred epic in four
books, the Davideis, and his two celebrated
Pindaric Odes. He received in 1657 the
degree of ^l.D. at Oxford, and published his
I^itin poem, Plantarum, on the properties of
simples. As a Latin poet Dr. Johnson,
himself one of the best practical Latinists
England can boast, held that Cowley was
superior to Milton, though he held Thomas
RLtv to be better than either. Upon Crom-
welFs death Cowley paid a long visit to Paris.
\t the Restoration, when men who had fought
for Cromwell were rewarded for coming over to
Charles II., Cowley was denied the Mastership
of the Savoy on pretence of " disloyalty," and
the Lord Chancellor told him that his pardon
was his reward. He was, however, allo\\'ed to
resume his fellowship. The sum of his offence
was that he had lived peaceably under the
usurping government, though without having
published a word to compromise his original
principles. Misanthropy as far as so gentle a
nature could cherish it naturally strengthened
his love of retirement, and increased that

174

COWLEY

175

passion for a country lift; wliicli breathes in
the fancy of his poetry and in tiie eloquence of
his prose. By the influence of Buckingham
and St. Albans he proved more successful than
Sam Butler, and eventually obtained a com-
petence of about d£^300 a year upon a lease for
life of some of the Queen Mother's dower lands.
Unrequited love drove him from Battersea to
Barnes, and from Barnes Pope would have us
believe to the bottle. He caught his death
from lying out (with Dean Sprat) after a
carouse. He died at the Porch House,
Chertsey, on July 28th, 1667 ("Here the last
accents flowed from Cowley\s tongue," said an
inscription over the door), and was buried
with solemnity and six horses in Westminster
Abbey, Charles II. declaring that " he had
not left behind him a better man in England."
His Grace the " Duke of Bucks," Aubrey tells
us, condescended to hold a tassel of the pall.
" Who now reads Cowley ? " wrote Pope sixty
yeai's after his predecessor''s death. Yet for
half that period at least he was not only
considered absolutely sure of a place among
our classic writers (an opinion in which Milton
concurred), but was also one of the most
popular of poets. He was rightly considered
on the whole as a continuator of the tradition
of Donne, but of a Donne, it must be
admitted, greatly diluted, while at the same
time modernised and French polished. Frost-

work and silver tinsel replace the gold of
Pindar and the platinum of the incomparable
Dean.

So fragmentary has our kno\\ledge of
Cowley's ^^•ork gradually become that it is
hard for us to assign importance to his
literary influence. Yet all the short pieces of
Cowley tliat are still in the least familiar, such
as the airy and fickle Chrojiicle, in which he
relates the quick succession of his short lo\ es,
The Grasshopper, The Sioallow, The Epicure,
and Drinking from the Anacreontics, the
humorous paraphrase of The Town and
Country Mouse from Horace's Satires, the
delicious fragment, " Love in her sunny eyes
doth basking play," the dignified Ode to the
Royal Society, and the favourite A Wish, first
printed in Poetical Blossomes (which subse-
cjuently inspired Pomfrefs Choice, a poem
described by Southey as the most popular in
the language) — all these bear ample testimony
to Cowley's ingenuity, taste, and scholarship.
And there is one point at least at which
Cowley may be regarded as an innovator. The
Pindaric Odes which he professed to imitate
from Pindar were probably adopted by him for
the exceptional scope which they gave to his
fertility in invention, classical imagery and
ingenious figures. Cowley was thus responsible
for naturalising in England ^ a somewhat frigid
and unsatisfying metrical form, and one ex-

' Of the other so-called metaphysical poets of Cowley's day we need do little more than meutiou Henry
More and William Chamberlayne. More's philosophical poems containing his Plutonic Song of the Soul in
Spenserian stanzas appeared in lG-17 ; it is a serious attempt by a contemplative collegian of unlimited leisure
to turn metaphysics into poetry. William Chamberlayne^ a physician of Shaftesbury, who fought on the
King's side at the second battle of Newbury, and died at his native place, aged seventy, in 1G89, produced
iu 1659 his long romance of Pfuironnida in five cantos of heroic verse. The story is extremely complicated,
having some affinities with The \Vinler'.<< Tale and some with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, while at other
points it recalls the adventures of Don Juan. But the writer has none of the vigour or the clearness requisite
for sustaining the interest of such an intricate narrative. The changes of scene alone between Sicily, Sparta,
and Epirus are bewildering in the extreme. The poet studiously avoids adapting the sense to the conformation
of the couplet, and thus adds to the rambling effect of a poem which contains detached passages of undoubted
beauty. Even longer than the " mammoths " of More and Chamberlayne is the Psyche, an allegorical
description in twenty cantos of The Intercourse between Christ and the Soul (1048) of Dr. Joseph Beaumont, a
distant relative of the dramatist, and a close friend at Cambridge of Crashaw. Tliis colossal work in six-line
stanzas (of the type favoured by Brooke in his terrible treatises on Monarchy and Humane Learning) forms
a kind of link between the metapliysical and ecstatic school of religious poetry and the long set pieces of
eighteentli-century didacticism. Pope ascribes to it a great many flowers well worth gathering ; " the man
who has the art of stealing wisely will find his account on reading it." A more direct disciple of Cowley
was Thomas Flatman, of Winchester and New College, a skilful painter of miniatures by profession, though
he had been called to the Bar by the Inner Temple. He was a virtuoso in "numbers" and diligently imitated
the Pindaric Odes of Cowley, writing similar effusions on "the matchless Orinda," on Monk, on Rupert, and
on Charles l\. His meditations upon Death led to stronger and more original verses ; his songs are irregular,
and some of the best, such as his Advice to an Old Man at/out to Marry, exceedingly free. Flatnian's flatteries
have scarcely succeeded in retrieving "the matchless Orinda" from obliviwi. Her poems, commenced in
1651, made up but a slender bundle when collected in 1667, three years after the fair Katherine's death. Of
this tear-bottle sentimentalist and Delia Cruscan it is safe to say that she would have been long forgotten,
but for her melodious name, not Philips, but "the matchless Orinda."

176

WALLER

treinelv hard to reconcile with the genius of
the language. The irregularity of the odes was
embraced for different reasons by Dryden and
Gray, but its existence was not perhaps fidly
justified until a good deal later in the hands of
Keats, Shelley, and Arnold.

Edmund Waller was born on March 3rd,
1606, at the manor house of Coleshill, a prettv
little hamlet two miles from Amersham. His
father was an esquire of good family and
his mother was John Hampden's aunt. He
entered Lincoln's Inn in 1622 after education
at Eton and King's, and went into Parliament
before he was twenty. In 1631 he made a
rich city match, in 1634' his wife died, and
Waller, after a year's interval, during which lie
frecjuented the society of literary men and
acquired literary aspirations, became a suitor
to the Lady Dorothea Sidney of Penshurst,
whom he eternised in his poems as Sacharissa.
His poems to Sacharissa, however, though oc-
casionally pretty, are singularly unemotional,
and wlien slie married the Earl of Sunderland
a few years later the grief of Waller appears to
have been anything but poignant. As cousin
of John Hampden and a connection by marriage
of Cromwell, Waller had some leanings towards
the popular side, but he was at heart a courtier
and a conservative ; he looked upon things
with a carnal eye and only wanted to be left to
enjoy his wealth and popularity in peace. But
like Sir William Temple he was vain, and he
wanted to shine as an orator in the new parlia-
mentary arena.^ He was veering more and
moi-e towards the Royalist side when in February,
1643, he went as a commissioner to treat with tlie
King at Oxford. There in all probability was
conceived the plot, afterwards known as Waller's,
to secui-e the City of London for the King.
Tlie plot was revealed by a clerk whom the
Earl of Manchester had bribed, and in the liope
of saving his life Waller disclosed all that he
knew about the design. Several of his accom-
plices were hanged, but Waller himself escaped
with the sentence of bani.shment and a fine of

dP10,000. He spent most of his exile in Paris,
where he saw nuuh of Evelyn and Hobbes, and
had more money to dispense than most of the
refugees. He and Evclvn parted in Paris in
1652, and Waller returned home. In 1655 he
was made a commissioner of trade and pro-
duced an elaborate Panegyrk to my Lord
Profcdor.

The bold Imperial note which Waller strikes
in these verses is repeated more than once,
notably in his heroics Of a War with Spain
and A Fight at Sea. In other respects they
do little enough to confirm his claim, which
badly needs support, to be a powerful in-
novator and great master of technique in
English verse. Posteritv, in fiict, owes its debt
to Edmund Waller, not for his couplets, finely
as he wrote these upon one occasion at least,
in his swan song. Of the Last Verses of the
Book, but for his occasional lyrics ; no one
could improve a trivial occasion much more
gracefully than W^aller — witness his lines On a
Girdle, concluding :

Give me what tliis ribband bound.
Take all the rest the sun goes round,

and his still more famous Go, Love!// Rose.
The fragrance of this is indeed exquisite, but
the idea is of immemorial antiquity, and has
been worked and re-worked. The finest imasre
in Waller is that perhaps in his lines To a
Lady :

The eagle's fate and mine are one,

WTiich on the shaft that made him die

Espied a feather of his own

^Fherewith he wont to soar so high.

As " the greatest refiner of our English
language in poetry," he was held after Cowley's
death to dominate the world of wit. In reality
he was just as much of a wit as other minor
Caroline lyrists, like whom he has left two or
three copies of verses, and no more, which
posterity will not willingly let die. The
difference between him and Lovelace or
Suckling amounts to just this, that there is less

' lie was esteemed as a wit and a "privy mocker." He said he wished he had written the Duchess of
Newcastle's verses on the death of a stag : charged with adulation, he explained that nothing was too much
to be given that a lady might be saved from the disgrace of such a vile performance. Kor the Lives of Cowley
and Waller, the prime authorities are Wood, Aubrey, Clarendon, and the Diaries of Kvclyu and Pepys, and
then the two excellent Lives l)y Dr. Jolmson, Live.s of the I'oet.s (Clarendon I'ress, 11)0.5, vol. i.*). Both
M'aller and .Marvcll are well edited in the Muses' Library, and tliere is a recent Life of Alarvell by Augustine
Birrell (in tlie Eiiglisli Men of Letters). A complete Marvell (ed. Grosart) tills 4 vols, in Fuller's Worthies
Library, 1872. For all three sec JiicHoiiar;/ (if Siilumal Hiuyriijilaj. There is a good dialogue in Landor, in
which Marvell dilates both on Milton and Cromwell. Of Cowley there is an edition in the recent Cambridge
English Classics : cd. \\aller (1904-5 : Hekctionx, 1902).

DENHAM

177

distance between his polished verse that no
one now reads, and the few " ]iici<y trifles"
that all the world knows. Few poets so
essentially superficial have received such an
ample recognition from their contemporaries.
He died at Hall Barn, Beaconsficld, on October
21st, 1G87, and was buried under a pynmiidul
monument still shaded by a very fine walnut-
tree in the churchyard there.^

Waller's poetical ideal was applause, and he
deliberately studied to be correct, modern, and
smooth. But the notion that he first success-
fully trimmed the balance of our heroic couplet
is quite preposterous. Thomas Lodge, Marlowe,
Drayton, Fairfax (to whom Waller admits a
debt), George Sandys, Carew and others, not to
mention Shakespeare, had exhibited a mastery
over the heroic couplet to which the slower
endowment of Waller could never have approxi-
mated. Carew, had he lived, would have
probably given our poetry' an even stronger
bias in the same direction. The result of the
tendency was first made decidedly manifest after
the return of our exiles from France in 1660.
Hence a not unnatural inclination to attribute
it too exclusively to Cowley and "Waller. The
growth of poetic diction (so-called), of balanced
epithets and a mannered inversion, the further
definition of the pause at the end of the line,
and the increasing fixity of the rule to complete
the sense at the conclusion of the couplet — all
this was well adapted to the growing demand
of the age for verse satire, through which the
old heroic measure was merged by imperceptible
degrees into the finished clockwork couplet of
the school of Pope.

The number of Waller's imitators and copyists
was legion.^ Foremost among them stands Sir
John Denham (d. 1669, wt. 54), the son of an
Irish judge, and a long-suffering Royalist, who
published his famous descriptive poem. Coopers
Hill, as early as 1641, four years before the first
collective edition of Waller's poems appeared.
But for all that, Denham was as much a
deliberate imitator of Waller, and especially
Waller's smoothness of versification, as Mason

subsequently was of Gray. It was not until
Denham's poems were published in 1655 that
the four famous lines were added :

(), could I flow like thee, and make tliy stream
My great example, as it is my tlieme !

Tlioiigli deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull.
Strong without rage, without o'crflowing full.

Nothing else in the poems, it must be owned,
comes up to this fine rhetorical invocation.
Johnson describes it as our first topogiaphical
poem of importance, strangely overlooking not
only Jonson's Penshurst, but also Drayton's
mammoth Pohjolhion. Denham's verse is
consistently sleek, but ho wrote nothing else of
interest with the exception of his threnody on
Cowley.

Andrew Marvell forms an interesting link
between the classical culture of the concettists,
the Puritan enthusiasm of Milton, and the
satirical energy of Dryden. Marvell was born
at Winestead-in-Holdernesse on March 31st,
1621, and in 1633 gained an exhibition at the
Hull Grammar School, and went as a sizar to
Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1646 he re-
turned to England after a long sojourn on the
Continent ; three years later he addressed some
verses to his noble friend, Richard Lovelace ;
while in the following year (1650), in a fine
Horatian Ode upon CronnveWs Return from
Ireland, he wrote those touching lines upon
Charles's execution which so well sum up the
feeling of a scholar and a gentleman, without
reference to the particular creed in politics
which he might feel called upon to adopt :

He nothing conmion did, or mean.
Upon that memorable scene ;

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try ;

Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right.

But boived his comely head

Down, as upon a bed.

At the close of 1650 he went to Nunappleton
in Yorkshire as tutor to Lord Fairfax's daughter
May. And there, during two happy years, he
wrote his longest poem in octosyllabic verse

' The walnut, as a recognisance, was an armorial pun ; the name being pronounced \V'aw-ler.

' Thomas Stanley (d. 1G78), a consideraljle translator, and a patron of still smaller poetical fry, such
as Sherburne and Hammond, a close imitator of Waller, exhibited, in his Original Poems of 1651 (reprinted
by Brydges 1814), verses of great smootlniess and no little variety of metre. But they are occasional poems
without an occasion upon themes hopelessly worn and conventional. Another poet and essayist upon the
fringe of literature at this time was John Hall (1G27 — 16.5G), of Durham and St. John's, Cambridge, a friend
of Hartlib and of Hobbes, who published liis IIorcB V'acirce or Essays in IGIO, and his Poem.i in 1647. Sir
Francis Kiuaston (1587—1642) shows similar tendencies, as a kind of glorified court-usher of poetry, as
Leigh Hunt heartlessly described \\'aller.

14.

178

MARVELL

upon Appleton House, and many of his most
beautiful pastoral and amorous verses. In the
Fairfax garden-croft his muse seemed to bud
and blossom like a spring cherry :

What woud'rous life is this I lead !
Ripe apples drop about my head . . .
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands tliemselves do reach. . . .
Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines
Curb me about, ye gadding vines.
And oh, so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place !■

In 1653 he returned to London and became a
fomilar figure at Milton's house in Petty France,
and in 1657 he became Milton''s colleague in
the Latin secretaryship. Next year he wrote
his poem on the death of Cromwell, the sincerity
of which shines in comparison with the specious
eulogies of Dryden and Waller. From 1659
onwards he sat as representative of Hull in
Parliament, receiving the still customary pay-
ment of six and eightpence per day while
Parliament sat. As a member of the House
he may have been able to do something to
ensure Milton's safety in 1660. By 1667,
\\hen he wrote the first of his national satires
called Instnuitons to a Pa'uiter after the models
of Waller and Denham, Marvell had definitely
joined the ranks of the opposition. Most of
these denunciating satires are of ephemeral
interest (except, indeed, to the historian),
though they caused Marvell to be regarded by
the Tory and High Church party as a very
pestilent and dangerous wit who ought to be
severely repressed. Marvell died in London on
August 16th, 1678, and was buried in St. Giles's-
in-the-Fields. His early and non-political
poems, written far away from the tow n and its
corruptions, are the most \aluable part of his
literary legacy. His knowledge of the classics
taught him form, while he had much of the
grace of llerrick with infinitely more feeling.
His country poems — The Nymph and the Fmvn,
The Songs of the Moicer, The Garden, A Drop
of Dew — arc melodious and witty ; full, as
Charles Lamb said, of a witty delicacy. Their
conceits, in fact, serve as real adornments, for
under the surface of their (juaintness there is
a deeper meaning. In the whole compass of
our poetry there is nothing ([uite like tlie love
of gardens, woods, meads, rivers, and biids in
Marvell's best octosyllabics, which had a j)otent
influence upon the rhythm of not a few occa-
sional poets in the same genre — above all, upon

Charles Lamb. He himself owed to Fletcher,
]\Iilton, Herrick, Wither, and Randolph ; yet
who oi these could have written :

Through the hazels thick espy

The hatching throstle's shining eye?

Such observation was rare among the poets.
Though unequal, Marvell is far less so than
those typical court poets, Carew, Suckling,
and Lovelace. Besides the poems mentioned,
his Coronet, in which he approaches Crashaw,
Young Love, On Paradise Lost, and the ex-
quisite Where the Remote Bermudas Ride — all
are regarded with true affection by lovers of
poetry.

As a satirist Marvell is brought into the
somewhat shady companionship of John Old-
ham, a native of Tetbury, and a graduate of
Oxford (St. Edmund Hall). Oldham became
an usher at Croydon, where Rochester and
Sedley are said to have visited him, struck
perhaps by the regular thwick-th^^'ack of his
satirical heroics. He wrote passable imitations
of Horace, Juvenal, and Boileau ; but his repu-
tation belongs to the episode of the Popish
Plot, when his precious couplets against the
Jesuits, in describing the sham relics of Rome,
are outrageous enough to have been penned
by Oates himself. In their uncompromising
savagery we recognise a literary progenitor of
Charles Churchill. Pope's opinion is worth
hearing on the minor Restoration arts and
versifiers : " Oldham is a very indelicate writer :
he has strong rage but is too much like
Billingsgate. Lord Rochester had nuich more
delicacy and more knowledge of mankind."
" Rochester," he added, " is the medium be-
tween the rough coarseness of Oldham and
the delicate exactness of Lord Dorset. Sedley
is a very insipid writer : except in some few
of his little love verses." This depreciation
of Sedley seems beyond the mark when we
c-onsider songs such as " Love still has some-
thing of the sea," or the more famous :

Phillis is my only joy,

Faitliless as the winds or seas ;

Sometimes coming, sometimes coy,
Yet she never fails to please.

But for this we are willing enough to accept
Pope's order of merit. It is hard to form a
satisfactory estimate of Rochester for the
simple reason that many of his cleverest verses
are simply im])rintable, and this dilliculty is
comijlicated by the fact that it is almost ini-

ROCHESTER

179

possible to identify llochostei's work, if it may
so be described, from that of liis eoli;il)arators,
rivals or imitators. Born at Ditchley, Kochester
graduated M.A. from Wadham when he was
thirteen, and set out upon a tour of foreign
courts, during which he studied Alcibiades,
Boileau, and Cowley as models. At seventeen he
appeared at Charles II. ''s court a good-looking,
.slender boy, precociously sprightly and amusing
when sober and extravagantly comical when
drunk. His life at the court was a succession
of practical jokes, of which the victims varied
from the King himself to the harmless city
merchant, but Charles could forgive anything
rather than spare such an idle rogue from his
society. In his last years promiscuous de-
bauchery seems to have given way to habitual
intoxication, and Rochester in his penitent
■state confessed to Buinet that he had been
,drunk for five years. On his deathbed he
ordered his licentious poems to be destroyed,
but this naturally was not done, and Rochester
is still saddled with many obscenities which
he can never have perpetrated. His verses are
•always described as lewd and profane ; but we
know of them little more than " Nothing."
He died an enfeebled old wreck of thirty-three
■on July 26tli, I68O.1

Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, was a more

amiable rake than Rochester. Walpole con-
firms Pope's view that he was the finest gentle-
man at the voluptuous court of Charles II.,
and that he had as much wit as either the
King, Buckingham, or Rochester, without the
want of feeling of Chailes, the want of principle
of the Duke, of the "thoughtlessness" (charming
euphemism) of the third. He was undoubt-
edly a munificent patron to Diyden and Prior,
and apart from his gay poems to the royal
mistresses, for whom he had a particular tendre,
he wrote at least one masterpiece which far
surpasses anything of Rochester's, his Song
xvrittcn at Sea hi the First Dutch War the
Night before the Engagement :

To all you ladies now on laud

We men at sea iiidito :
But first would have you understand

How hard it is to write.

But each one of the eleven stanzas of this
sprightly gaiety is a gem. Dorset is also
responsible for the happy literary application
of the Shakespearean phrase " alacrity in
sinking." "Gay, vigorous, and airy" Dorset
grew tat, and according to Swift dull, when
lie reached sixty. He died at Bath on
January 29th, 1706. Sedley and Dorset passed
on the tibia to Prior, who was the last to sound
it for well-nigh a hundred years.^

' There is a good deal of libertine verse, some of it, no doubt, by Rochester, in tlie collection known
iis Poems on Affairs of State. See also BuUon's Musa Proterra, Rochester and the Bakes, lUitherford's Singular
Life of the Renowned Earl, Aubrey, Dr. Johnson, and the excellent memoir in the Dictionary of National
Biography. A pretty selection of Lyrists of the Restoration has appeared iu The Chap-books (ed. Masefield, l!.i0.5).

' VV'estmiuster School, under James 1. and Charles I., must have been a veritable nest of singing birds,
•with every variety of note and utterance. In addition to three poets who achieved so much as George Herbert,
Herrick, and Cowley, the school was the cradle of tu'o singers of such promise as Cartwright and Randolph,
and of a great host of minor versifiers such as William Strode (1602— lfi4:.5), author of The Floating Island, and
of a pretty kissing song; Henry King (d. in()ij), Bishop of C'hichester, author of devotional poems not without
merit ; Jasper Mayne (d. 1072), a priestly playwright of no scruples worth speaking of, and an adept translator
-of Lucian ; Nicholas Hookes (d. 1712), author of Amanda ; and several others. William C'artwriglit, a young
person of the humblest origin, passed from A\'estminster to Christ Church an accepted paragon and particular
wit, aud his early death, it was said of camp fever, in 1643 was felt as a blow by many, even in that short-lived
generation. Among his Poems and Plays collected in 1051 we find nothing save an iudifl'erent play called
The Ordinary, nor can we expect his Poemata Grceca et Latina to supply the key to this riddle of his fame.
Even younger vpas nipped Thomas Randolpli (1005—16.35), who went from the school to Trinity, Cambridge.
Inspired by a furtive glimpse of Jonson in the Uevil Tavern, he drank too greedily, we are told, of the
Muses' Spring. So may it be. His plays are iu the dust with Da\-enant's, Nabbes's, and Brome's, but there
;are some pastoral blossoms among his heroic and other verses, and one phrase, " blithe, buxom, and debonair,"
which Milton himself condescended to improve.

Charles Cotton (d. 1687), the unsurpassed translator of Montaigne, left a few copies of verse not on any
.account to be forgotten. Angler (" a dog at a catch "), wit, traveller, and toss-pot, he was a benefactor of poor
bards, such as Lovelace, and a bright exemplar of all-round talent. His Poems on Several Occasions (1689)
contain Winter ("Hark! Hark! I hear the north wind roar") and the sunny Retirement. Honest, hearty
Mr. Cotton has always been a favourite — Coleridge, \\'ordsworth, and Lamb unite in calling Cotton " a first-rate.'
Charles Cotton's Voyage to Ireland in liurlesqae (1071), which has been claimed as anticipating the Bath Guide
of Anstey, owed something, no doul)t, to the facetious rhpiiing Journal (16.38) of '" Drunken Baruabee " or
Jlichard Brathwait (d. May 4th, 1073, at. 85), and to the more sprightly humours of Bishop Corbet's Iter Boreale.

CHAPTER VII
FR03I THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT: JOHN BVNYAN

"A curious writer is Bunyan. The Pilgrims Progress is a uursery tale, a blood-curdling allegory,
showing the terrible inner mind of one of tliose fanatics ; groans^ invasions of the spirit, the belief in
damnation, visions of the devil's scruples. Oh ! Pray do not turn us into Protestants ; let us remain
Voltaireans and Spiuozists ! After the hallucination is calmed down, a sort of rigidity remains, moral spikes
with which to wound oneself continually and stab others." — Taine, Letters.

"The whole allegory is a consistent attack on morality and respectability. "^Shaw, Mun and Superman.

The Pilgrim's Progress and its creator.'

IF IVIilton repi-esented cultivated Puritanism,
the everyday faith of the humble Christian
in se\enteenth-century England, the class who
set out to colonise the backwoods of America
is represented by John Bunyan, the most popular
religious writer that England has ever produced.
The greatness of Milton resides largely in the
complexity of his endowment and the scholarly
elaboration of his talent ; that of Bunyan, on
the other hand, depends upon the simplicity of
his mind and the devotion of his natui'e to one
single idea. He was a pilgrim in his deeds as
well as his words, and his particular other-
worldliness exactly appealed to the religious
cravings of the English Protestant, who had
abandoned the ideas of sacramental grace and
purgatory, and wanted something definite in
their stead. Two generations had elapsed since
the Reformation had formally taken place, and

the current of time had brought a generation
of Englishmen

far more religious than our
country had seen for at least four hundred
years. But these men were religious in a
nari'ow, exclusive, and intensely individual way.
Their historical philosophy was based on two
books, the Bible and Foxe, of the literal
veracity of which they were implicitly assured.
In all these men, represented by such tyjics as
Bunyan, Peters, Roger Williams, Winthrop,
Baxter, and many others, the fear of God was
developed to an extent of which the phrase
as used at the present day and fatigued by

centuries of unmeaning

use can
very slightest conception. How

give not the
to escape the
ban of sin, how to flee from the wrath to come,
if the sacraments were no good — this was the
prime concern of every one of them. The
method by which this can be done was shown
by Bunyan in his all-famous allegory. He
knew by bitter experience. And the conviction
of sin and the cruel weight of the Burden, the
agonising query. What shall I do to be saved ?
the revelation of the wicket-gate of conversion
by which the narrow way alone may be entered,
the deliverance from the load of sin through
the agency of the Cross — these personal phases
of suffering and delivery explain the various
steps by which the sinner may come to benefit
by the atonement.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village
near Bedford, where his father mended pots
and kettles, in 1628. He learned the elements
at Bedford Grammar School ; and before he
was seventeen was drafted into the Parliamentary
army, and served for a year or so under Sir
Samuel Luke, who was CromwelTs scout-master
for the county of Bedford ; but he makes no
reference whatever to his own military exploits,
the recollection of which can hardly have been
congenial to him. In 1647 he returned to his.
tinker''s work at Elstow much as he had left it.
"Two years later," he says, "I lighted on a
wife whose father was counted godly. We
came together as poor as might be, not liaving

' llie best introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress is supplied by its author's own Grave Abounding. The best
Life of liunyan is that of Dr. Jolm Brown, and the best cheap modern edition that edited by Prof. C H. Firth
(Methuen, 1898). Among famous illustrators are John Martin and fSir John (iilbert. And in recent literature
the reader .«houId not fail to notice the appreciation of Bernard Shaw in the Preface to Man and t>uperman or
the respectable solicitor's unbiassed summing-up of Christian's harebrained enterprise in Ileiiri/ lirncltni.

ISO

"GRACE ABOUNDING"

181

so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon
between us. Rut she had for hei- portion two
books, The Plain Mini's Patlncay to Ilenvcn
and The Practise of Piety, which her father
had left her when he died. In these two books
I souietinies read with her." On his marriage
he became regular and respectable in his habits.
" I fell in," he says, " with the religion of the
times — to go to church twice a day, very
devoutly to say and sing as the others did, yet
retaining my wicked life." By this wicked life
he means not so much the lying and swearing at
which he professes that he excelled as a boy, but
merely an indulgence in amusements and Sunday
sports, and an indifference to the Bible and to
the mysteries of religion. But his conscience
was from the first extraordinarily sensitive, and
even as a boy he was haunted by visions of hell,
by spectres, hobgoblins, and dreams.

The next years of Bunyan''s life are in the
account he has given us of his own struggles in
the book called Gmce Abounding, a history of
his own panic fear of the wrath to come. He
went about with the book in his hand, saying to
himself, " What shall I do to be saved .? " Of his
material progress during the Commonwealth he
tells us practically nothing, though it is clear that
he must have been a successful trader, in the same
fraternity as Izaak Walton, and for aught we
know he may have been as shrewd a dealer in
his way as either Fi'anklin or Cobbett. But
what is certain is that Bunyan regarded all
such matters as wholly unimportant as com-
pared with the salvation of his soul. He
heard voices saying continually unto him,
" Sell Christ for this or that." He tortured
himself into the belief that he had committed
the unpardonable sin, the sin of Judas, and he
was for a long time in the pitiable condition of
the Welsh minister so powerfully described by
Borrow in Lavengiv. Giant Despair had
blinded the unhappy man, and he was for a
long time groping among the tombs. Deliver-
ance came appropriately in the form of an
illusion — the hobgoblins and devils that had
tormented him being replaced by voices from
heaven. Conversion was followed by baptism
in the Ouse, by admission to the Baptist com-
munity, by an illness, and by a calm. In
1655 he was called upon to take part in the
" ministry." He was modest, humble, shrink-
ing. The minister when he preached was,
accoi'ding to the theory, an instrument uttering
the words not of himself but of the Holy Spirit.

A man like Bunyan, who really believed this,
iniglit well be alarmed. After earnest entreaty,
however, he made " experiment of his powers "
in private, and it was at once evident that, with
the thing which these people meant by inspira-
tion, he was abundantly supplied. No such
preacher to the uneducated English masses was
to be found within the four seas. He was a
man of natural genius, who believed the Pro-
testant form of Christianity to be completely
true. He knew nothing of philosophy, nothing
of history, nothing of literature. But his
humour, his modesty, and his real greatness as
a preacher are shown alike in the well-known
story of his descent from the pulpit after a
great eflbrt. " Oh, master Bunyan," said a
grateful elder in his congregation, " that was
a sweet sermon." " You need not tell me that,"
said Bunyan, " the Devil whispered it to me
before I was well out of the pulpit."

After the Restoration, the Anglican clergy,
who had been as " partridges on the mountains,"
returned to their pulpits, and it became the
turn of the conventicles to undergo persecution.
The Act of Conformity made no distinction
between aggressive and unaggressive sects such as
the Baptists ; and the magistrates at Bedford
were compelled, however i-eluctantly, to an-est
and imprison Bunyan as an unlicensed pi-eacher.
There seems to have been no kind of animus
against him, and he could have got out of prison
at any time by giving an undertaking not to
preach in public. But this stipulation he found
it out of his power to make, and the result was
that he remained on in the county gaol from
1660 to 167^. Bunyan's detention for such a
long period was evidently of an irregular kind.
Such irregularities were common enough before
the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1679.
It is probable that he was treated on the whole
in a very lenient manner. In the first year of
his imprisonment he is known to have made a
visit to Loudon. He was allowed to receive
the visits of his friends, to receive comforts
from without, and to exhort his fellow-sufferers
in the gaol, where he helped to support himself
by making tag-laces. His four young children
were looked after by the devoted woman whom
he had married in 1659, within a year of the
great loss sustained by the death of the wife of
his youth. There is little doubt that the con-
finement of gaol considerably stimulated his
powers of composition ; his lil^rary there was
select, consisting of the Bible and The Book of

182

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS "

Martyrs. The first of his prison-books, as
they are called, was a verse dialogue called
Projitahle Meditations, printed in 1661 ; The
Holy City, an expansion of a prison sermon,
followed in 1665; and his famous autobiogi-aphy,
Grace Abounding to the Chiif of Sinners, or A
Brief and Faithful Relation of the Exceeding
Mercy of God in Christ to his Poor Servant
John Bunyan, in eight sheets, 12mo, 1666.
In the early summer of 1672 his release was
prociu-ed under the Act of Indulgence, and he
began preaching regularly in a barn in an
orchard which stood between Castle and !Mill
Lane. But in 1675 his licence as a preacher
was revoked, and Bunyan, once more informed
against, was sent this time to the town prison or
" den " on Bedford Bridge, which had recently
been repaired after the damage sustained by
the floods in 1671, and which was finally taken
down in 1765. Here he wrote the first part of
Pilgriins Progress down to the parting of
Christian and Hopeful with the shepherds on
the Delectable Mountains, which Bunyan con-
cludes with the words, " So I awoke from my
di'cam." Bunyan was forty-seven at the time.
He was writing, as usual, strictly to improve the
occasion, and fell into the allegory unawares.
His final imprisonment seems to have lasted
only until the early months of 1676, and in
1677 Bunyan took the completed allegory (which
had ended by wholly devouring the discourse) to
London for publication, and it was published at
1*. 6d. in March, 1678. Some characteristic
additions were made in the second edition of
1679, in which Mr. Worldly Wiseman appeared
for the first time. The second part did not
appear until January, 1685. The realistic Life
and Death of Mr. Badman was presented to the
world in 1680 in the form of a dialogue between
Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive, after the
manner of Dent's Plain Mail's Patlncay to
Heaven. It is the story of a predestinate rascal
with a moral intention at least as clear as that
in Hogarth's "Idle Apprentice," but its general
plausibility is much stronger, and it has nuich
of the realistic power of Defoe.

The next two years were occupied by Bunyan
in writing his second gi-eat allegory, The Holy
War, which was published in 1682. The story
of his remaining years is briefly told. He lived
at a small liouse in St. Cuthbcrt's parish,
Bedford, in ea.sy circumstances, greatly respected
by all the Dissenters of the ncighbourliood.
His fame as a preacher and as author of 'J'he

Pilgrim's Progress spread abroad. Annually
he visited London to preach to the Baptist
churches in Pinner's Hall. It was on one of his
visits to London, while staying at the house of
John Strudwick on Snow Hill, that he was seized
with a fevei', and died on Friday, August 31st,
1688. On the following Monday he was buried
in Strudwick's vault in Bunhill Fields, where a
monument was placed over his tomb in 1861.

In tlie tribe of literature to which it belongs
— that of the allegory or drami-out fable —
Pilgrit?i''s Progress stands first. It has no rival
either in success or popularity : witness the
eighty translations which it has undergone in
the various languages and dialects of the human
speech. Satire in the guise of travel, inculca-
tion of moral truth in allegorical form, had
been attempted frequently in the world of
letters from Lucian to Spenser ; but such
models had no existence as far as John Bunyan
was concerned. The Bible was to him not only
his book ; it was his library as much as was the
Koi'an to the most bigoted of Mohannnedans.

What distinguishes The Pi/griin\i Progress
from all other allegories is the fact that the
outward story and the inward experience which
it portrays are absolutely one. The child can
read it with delight for the story alone, the
mature reader can cross the line as often as he
likes between the fable and the moral. The
application is so direct that he can never be at
a loss as to the bearing of an incident ; at every
turn he can recognise familiar footprints. The
carnal man and the Christian believer are equally
fascinated by the dogged valour of the Puritan
sergeant, a reminiscence, it may be, of 1645.

There is no subtlety, no ambiguity about the
moral, the clearness and directness of which
are as unmistakable as that of the narrative in
Robinson Crmoe. From this unity and per-
spicuity in Bunyan's work conies the unique
result that he made the abstract as palatable
as the concrete. The mould of style into
which the allegory is thrown is one as durable
as tliat of our English Bible, and one even
more impervious to time, for after the lapse
of two hundred years there are practically
no obsolete words in Bunyan. The characters
in that company of his, so like and so unlike
Chaucer's, were evidently drawn from life, —
eternal figures in the human comedy. His
Progress is a perfect reflection of the Scripture
with none of the rubbish of the theologians
mixed up with it.

CHAPTER VIII

ENGLANHS SECOND POET: ''SHAKESPEARE FIRST,

AND NEXT— MILTON'

"This man cuts us all out ami the ancients too." — Drvden.

"The natural expression of a soul exquisitely nourished upon the best thoughts and finest words of all
ages. . . . An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship." — Mahk P.^ttison.

" I had thought of the Ltjrida.s as of a full-grown beauty — as springing up with all its parts absolute —
till, in an evil hour, I was shoivn the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of the author
in the library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam,
or sent them after the later cantos of Spenser into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine
things in their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure !
As if they might have been otherwi.se and just as good ! As if inspiration were made up of parts, and these
fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again."

— Charles Lamb.

Early life — Italian travel — Pedagogy and prose — Retirement — Chalfont — Completion of Paradise Lost — Last

years — Critical estimate — Bibliography.

TOHN MILTON was born over his father^s
♦J shop in Bread Street, London, on Decem-
ber 9th, 1608. His father, a scrivener, a native
of Halton in Oxford.shire, about one year older
than Shakespeare, prospered rapidly in London
from 1603 onwards at the sign of the Spread
Eagle in Bread Street. He married about
1600 and had six children, three of whom, a
daughter Anne and two .sons, John and
Christopher, survived infancy. Anne married
Edward Phillips and became the mother of
Edward and John Phillips, the well-known
poetasters and scribblers. Christopher, who
was born in 1615 and was called to the Bar in
1639, adhered as the law taught him, to the
King's party. He studied the law, says
Johnson, and was a strong Royalist, and in
James II.'s reign professed Catholicism and was
accordingly raised to the judicial bench and
knighted, though his legal capacity is said to
have been small. The poet's father, apart
from possessing the knack of making money,
was a man of refinement and cultivation.
He was not only a connoisseur of music but
also a composer of some merit. When his
elder son was a beautiful boy of ten he had him
painted by the Dutch portrait-painter Jansen.
" My father," says the poet, " destined me
while yet a little child for the study of humane

183

letters. Both at the grannnar school and
under other masters at home, he caused me to
be in.structed daily." Among his private tutors
was Thomas Young, a well-known Scots
Presbyterian divine. Young left England
early in 1622 and before that date Milton
Ijecame a scholar at St. PauPs School under
Alexander Gill, successor to the eminent
Richard Mulcaster.

Before his school-days were over, he had
learnt to read French and Italian and something
of Hebrew, in addition to Greek and Latin.
In English literature two of his favourite books
are known to have been Spenser's Faerie Qiieene
and Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas. The
influence of Sylvester is apparent in paraphrases
of Psalms 114 and 126, written by Milton at
the age of fifteen. IMarlowe, Jonson, and
Shakespeare he doubtless read in first editions,
as one poet reads another. His closest friend
at school appears to have been Charles Diodati,
the son of an Italian doctor who had settled in
England. Diodati entered Trinity College,
Oxford, in February, 1623, and two years later
IMilton was admitted at Christ's College,
Cambridge. During the first three years of
his .sojourn at college Milton's severe and ascetic
habits seem to ha^e rendered him somewhat
unpopular, and he clearly had a quarrel of some

184

CONTINENTAL TRAVELS

kind with his first tutor, William Chappell.
" I am ashamed to relate what I fear is true,"
writes Johnson, on the authority of Aubrey,
" that jMilton was one of the last students in
either university that suffered the public in-
dignity of corporal correction." There is a
tradition that he was called " the lady " in
his college, where his rooms are recognised to
this day on the first floor of the western stair-
case on the north side of the great court, and
where the mulberry-tree that he planted in the
college garden is still pointed out to credulous
and incredulous visitors. AVhile at college he
coiTesponded in Latin with Young, Diodati,
and the younger Gill. He also wrote aca-
demical verses and orations, while among the
English verses of this period are the " epitaph "
on Shakespeare, the sonnet " On having arrived
at the age of twenty-three," the would-be
humorous epitaph upon the death of the
university carrier, Thomas Hobson, an epitaph
on the Marchioness of Winchester, and the
noble Ode on the Nativity of Christmas, 1629.
He spoke with great contempt of the academic
di-ama and of the philosophic curriculum of
Cambridge. As in the case of Wordsworth,
his attitude towards the scheme of university
education was almost uniformly critical. "Wlien
he finally left Cambridge in July, 1632, he
■was four months short of twenty-four years of
age. According to xVubrey, he was a little
under the middle height, of fair complexion,
with a delicate o^•al face, dark grey eyes and
light brown hair. His mental and moral
attitude at this period is thus summed up by
Sir Leslie Stephen :

" Although respected by the authorities, his
proud and austere character probably kept him
aloof from much of the coarser society of
the place. He shared the growing aversion to
the scholasticism against which one of his
exercises is directed. Like Henry More, who
entered Christ's in Milton's last year, he was
strongly attracted by Plato, although he was
never so much a philoso|)her as a poet. He
already considered himself as dedicated to
the utterance of great thoughts, and to the
strictest chastity and self-respect, on the ground

that he who would ' write well hereafter in
laudable things ought himself to be a true
poem."' "

On leaving Cambridge, having taken the
degree of M.A. in 1632, JMilton went to live
again under his father's roof and spent nearly
six years at the country residence to which his
father had retired to pass his old age, at
Horton near Colnbrook, on the old coach road
between London and Reading. The first two
years and a half of his residence at Horton
(1632-4) form the period of the composition of
his Sonnet to the Nightingale, his L Allegro
and Penseroso, his Arcades, and his Comus. At
Horton the poet's mother, Sarah Milton, died
on April 3rd, 1637. In November of this year
he wrote the monody of Lycidas, one of the
thirty-six pieces — twenty-three in Latin and
Greek, thirteen in English — published at
Cambridge early in 1638 as Obsequies to the
Mcmorie of Mr. Edward King, a wit and
scholar who had for eleven years been one of
the ornaments of the university.^

In the spring of 1638 Milton obtained his
father's unwilling consent to a journey on the
Continent, though the travelling expenses of
the poet and his servant, ^hich the old man
had to defray, must have cost him fully 20
guineas a month. The poet's departure was
marked by a letter full of the kindliest advice
from the veteran Sir Henry Wotton. In it he
referred to the Doric delicacy of Milton's songs
and odes, which ravished him beyond anything
in our language, sent him a letter of introduction
to Lord Scudamore at Paris, and commended
to hnn as a rule for his demeanour abroad the
Italian saw Pensieri strctti ed il visa sciolto
(Thoughts close, looks loose). At Paris in May
he was most courteouslv received by Lord
Scudamore, who introduced him to the learned
Hugo Grotius, the greatest of living Dutchmen.
He entered Italy at Nice and took shipping
thence to Genoa and Leghorn. From Lejihorn
he proceeded by way of Pisa to Florence, where
he stayed until the middle of September. At
Florence he was hospitably receixcd by Jacopo
Gaddi, Carlo Dati, Agostino Coltellini, and
others, and contributed some Latin compositions

' Lt/riiliis is primarily an allegoric pastoral, into the texture of which all that is most beautiful and most
significant in pastoral verse seems marvellously condensed ; but it contains one passage of stern censure
against the unspiritual clergy at the time which is strikingly anticipatory of the later Milton. This intention
is clearly marked in the nolo wliich he wrote upon the rejiulilication of tlic poem with his full name in 1G45 :
" In tliis monody tlie autlior bewails a learned friend unfortunately drowned in his pjissage from Cliester
on the Irish seas, 1G37 ; and l)y occasion foretells tlie ruin of our corru[)ted clergy."

Af(cr a Miniature by Faithorne.

John Milton

"AREOPAGITICA "

185

to the transactions of thuir private academies.
Near Florence too, at Arcetri, he visited the
famous Galileo, "grown old, a prisoner to
the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy
otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican
licensers thought." From Florence he went
by Siena to Rome, where he spent most of
October and November. There he was intro-
duced to Lucas Ilolstenius, secretary to Cardinal
Barberini, and one of the librarians of the
Vatican. In November he went on to Naples,
where Manso, Marquis of Villa, a patron and
biographer of Tasso, conferred on him many
acts of courtesy.

Milton appears to have been desirous of
crossing into Sicily and Greece. " But," he
-says, " the sad news of civil war coming from
England called me back. For I considered it
disgraceful that while my fellow-countrymen
were fighting at home for liberty, I should be
travelling abroad at ease for intellectual
purposes." At the close of 1638, therefore, ho
started back, travelling leisurely by Florence
to Venice, where he shipped for England a
number of books collected during his Italian
tour. He proceeded by Verona, Milan, and
the Pennine Alps to Geneva. There he met
Giovanni Diodati and received a confirma-
tion of the sad news of the death of the
doctor's nephew, his old schoolfellow. A noble
tribute to the one intimate friendship of his
youth was the EpUaph'mm Damonis, composed
in Latin hexameters shortly after his return.
It is modelled on VirgiPs bucolic, Milton as the
shepherd Thyrsis bewailing the death of his
friend. In August, 1639, he crossed the Channel
and returned to London, first to a lodging, and
then to a pretty garden house in Aldersgate
Street, at that time one of the quietest in
London, where he took pupils, the first of
these being Edward and John Phillips, the
fatherless sons of his only sister Anne. He
was already meditating a great moral and
religious epic, and about 1642 he sketched
out an heroic poem on King Arthur and a
tragedy on Paradise Lost. During 164-1-2,
in five vehement tracts, which fluctuate in
style between dignified eloquence and savage
invective, he threw himself into the pamphlet
war then raging against prelacy. In May, 1643,
Milton made an expedition into the heart of
the Royalist district of Oxfordshii-e and returned
with a wife, Mary Powell, the daughter of a
jovial yeoman and cavalier of Shotover who

seems to have owed Milton a considerable sum
of money. Very soon after the marriage, Milton
began his famous I)ook on divorce; even before
this, his bride seems to have found the studious
life profoundly uncongenial. She was barely
eighteen at the time of the marriage, and after
a month of married life she returned to the
open-air freedom of her father's house. She
had been a Royalist, and, says Aubrey, " two
opiin'ons do not well on the same bolster" ; she
had lived where there was a great deal of
company and merriment " environed by the
sons of Mars," and when she came to live with
her husband she found it very solitary ; no
company save that of the pupils whom she
often overheard being whi[)ped. This was the
end of June, 1643, and in little more than a
month from tliis time appeared Milton's
pamphlet on divorce. Milton took exactly the
same view of his difficulties as Henry VIII. ; he
was not responsible in any way for the awkward
position in which the " cursed spite " of matri-
mony had placed him, and from which he
loudly demanded that the law should release
him. The view that he took — namely, that no
obstacle should be put in the way of a husband's
obtaining a divorce on the ground of incom-
patibility of temper — led to the book being
proscribed. Milton followed it up with several
pamphlets which he issued without licence.
Various steps were taken to suppress these
pamphlets and a new ordinance passed (1644)
to give more stringency to the licensing regula-
tions. Upon this Milton wrote his Areopagitica,
the most noted of his prose works, in defence
of a more extended liberty of the press.

About this time he seems to have had the
idea of translating into practice his somewhat
oriental precepts on the subject of divorce, and
cast his eye on the handsome and witty daughter
of a Dr. Davis; she, however, was "averse to
this motion." Meanwhile the rviin of the royal
cause had brought the Powells into distress, and
they wished to restore to Milton his actual wife.
She was unexpectedly introduced to him while
he was on a visit, and, after begging pardon
upon her knees, was somewhat grudgingly re-
ceived back into favour. Their household was
now i-emoved to the Bai-bican, where there was
more room for the now increasing pupils, and
there were born Milton's three daughters, Anne,
Mary, and Deborah (1646, 1648, 1652), and a
son John, who died in infancy. His wife, Mary
IMilton, died in the summer of 1652. His

186

PAMPHLETS

wife's relatives maintained that Milton behaved
harshly to them aftei- the loss of their pro-
perty, but this charge is not supported by an
impartial consideration of the evidence. The
poefs father died in March, 1647, whereupon
Milton, who thereby inherited a competence,
moved to a small house in High Holborn
opening at the back into Lincoln's Inn Fields,
and gave up teaching. During the following
year he was engaged in compiling his Hisionj
of Britubi, and in ]\Iarch, 1649, after his
vindication of the right of the people to judge
their rulers in his Tenure of Kings and
Miigistratcs, he was invited by the Council of
State to become their Latin secretary at a
salary of 15^. \Ohd. a day. His chief duty was
to translate foreign despatches into dignified
Latin. He was also the chief intermediary
between the Government and the press, and
was expected to answer any detractors of the
Government who succeeded in making their
voices heard. In this capacity he wrote
E'lkonolda.'ites (in answer to Eikon BasiUke), and
his Defensio pro Populo AngUcano} Milton's
final contribution to this deplorable contro-
versy, in which he lost both his temper and
his eyesight, and in which he destroyed the
character of several authors who were really
quite free from complicity in the squabble,
was the Pro se Defensio (August, 1655).
Some years befoi-e this he had moved from
chambers allowed him in ^^Tiitehall to a pretty
garden house in Petty France, Westminster.
His duties and his salary were somewhat re-
stricted in consequence of his blindness, yet
he remained in the service of the Council,
being assisted from 1657 onwards by the poet
Andi-ew ]\Iarvell. After Cromwell's death he
inclined towards the old exclusive republican
party, and wrote several pamphlets. In the
summer of 1660 his hiding-place was discovered,
and he was connnitted to prison for a few
months, but released in the course of December,
1660, upon the payment of fees, through the
influence of Sir William Davenant, whom he
had previously befriended, and a few friends in
the House of Connnons. He seems to have
lost a good sum of money, owing chiefly to the

disastrous turn given to his investments by
political events ; and his income was reduced
from between £oOO and ^^600 a year to perhaps
a third of that sum. His second wife, Catherine
Woodcock, had died in 1658, and he married
a third, Elizabeth Minshull, early in 1663.

Soon after his third marriage,Thomas Elwood,
the Quaker, was reconnnended to Milton as a
person who, for the advantage of his conversa-
tion, would read to him such Latin books as
he thought proper. For this purpose Elwood
attended him every afternoon except on Sundays,
and acquired for his benefit the foreign pro-
nunciation of Latin. " Milton," says Elwood,
" perceiving with what earnest desire I pursued
learning, gave me not only all the encourage-
ment but all the help he could ; for having a
curious ear he understood by my tone when I
understood what I read and when I did not ;
and accordingly he would stop me and examine
me, and open the most difficult passages
to me." By 1664 Milton was settled in his
last house in Artillery Walk, leading to
Bunhill Fields, and was busied upon his
Paradise Lost. At this time his house is
said to have been the resort of foreigners, his
celebrity being more active on the Continent
than in England, the English, as Littleton
remarks, being apt to see no good in a man
whose politics they dislike. We have a picture
of Milton at this time, retaining to an unusual
extent the figure, the tunable voice, and the
fair countenance of his early manhood. A
casual glance at his grey eyes was not sufficient
to reveal their loss of sight. LTntil his latest
years he habitually wore a sword, and his gait
was erect and manly. One Dr. Wright, a
parson of Dorset, describes him sitting in an
elbow chair, in a small chamber hung witii
rusty green, dressed neatly in black, pale but
not cadaverous, with chalk stones in his hands.
He was wont to say that, were it not for the
gout, his blindness would be tolerable. He
used also to sit in a coarse grey cloth coat at
the door of his house near Bunhill Fields, in
warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air,
and so, as well as in his room, received tlie
visits of his admirers.-

' 111 answer to the Dvfmsin Begio of tlie learned Sahnasiiis. lie had to follow this up with the Ihfcihsin
Secunda, full of aut()hiojrra])hical interest, thoujjh often descending to scurrilous personal ahuse.

2 " His domestick liahits were those of a sober and temperate student. Of wine or of any stronj,^ liipiors lie
drank little. In his diet he was rarely influenced hy delicacy of dioice. lie once delighteil in walking and
using exercise, and appears to have amused himself in botanical jiursuits ; but after he was confined hy age and
bliuduess he had a machine to swing iu for the preservation of his health. In summer he then rested in bed

PARADISE LOST "

187

During the Plague year Milton retired to a
"pretty box' which Eluood had taken for him
at Chalfont St. Giles, in 15llckinghanl^sln'rc. It
was there that one day Milton handed to him
the complete nianiiscript of Panid'isc Lost.
" Thou hast said much here of I'aradise lost,"'
the Quaker observed ; " but what lias thou lo
say of Paradise found 't "

Paradise Lod, a poem written in ten Ijooks
by John Milton, was published in \{Wu. Tlie
first edition was sold out in the course of
eighteen months, whereupon Milton received
the sum of =£^10. Tliree thousand copies
were disposed of in the course of a little over
ten years. In 1680 Miltoifs widow sold her
contingent rights for £S. Milton's Hlitory
of Britain was published in 1670 ; and Paradise
Regained, a poein in four books, to which is
added Samson Agonistes, appeared in 1671.
He could not bear, Elwood tells us, to hear
Paradise Lost preferred to Paradise Regained.
By this time Milton's health was declining, and
his domestic life appears to have been disturbed.
His daughters complained of the servitude
of reading books in various languages to their
father without knowing the meaning. " In the
scene of misery which this mode of intellectual
labour sets before our eyes," says Johnson, " it
is hard to determine whether the daughters or
the father are most to be lamented." Such a
trial of patience gradually became beyond en-
durance, and about 1670 the daughters were
all sent out to learn such curious and ingenious
sorts of manufactux'e as ai'e proper for women.

especially embroidery in gold and silver. In
the last two years of his life Milton sent to
press his little Treatise of True Religion,
Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the Best Means
to Prevent the Grotcth of Poperif, and a Nolume
of familiar epistles in Latin, to which are added
some of his Cambridge prolusions. He remained
the severe scholar until the end of his life, rising
between four and five and studying regularly
until noon. He had long been a sufferer from
the gout, and in July, 1674, he felt his end to
be approaching. He died eventually of gout
struck in on Sunday, November 8th, 1674, so
peacefully that the time of death was not
perceived. He was buried on the 12th in
St. Giles's, Cripplegate (the historic old church
menaced twice by fire in 1666 and 1897, and
still suffering by " restoration "), near his
father and the historian, John Speed.' The
Anglican service was performed over him. For
some years before his death he had attended
no kind of religious worship. His treatise
on Christian doctrine, discovered many years
later, and first published in 1823, served to
show how far he had travelled from the
Calvinism of his early youth. In matters of
Church government he had come round to Ije
almost an Arniinian, while his religious views
as a whole are verging towards pantheism,
and he propounds anomalous theories of poly-
gamy and divorce. He had quite discarded
the Sabbatarian strictness of a Puritan, and
unmercifully satirised the sermons by which
his contemporaries set such store."

from nine to four, in winter to five. If, at tliese hours, he was not disposed to rise, he had a person by his
bedside to read to him. AV'hen he first rose lie lieard a cliapter in the Hebrew Bible, and commonly studied till
twelve, then dined ; afterwards played on the organ or bass-viid, and either sung himself or made his wife sing,
who, he said, had a good voice but no ear." It is related tliat, when educating his nephews, "he had made them
songsters, and sing from the time they ivere with him." No poet, it may be observed, has more frequently or
more powerfully commended the charms of music than Milton. He wished, perhaps, to rival, and he has
successfully rivalled, the sweetest description of a favourite bard, whom the melting voice appears to have often
enchanted — the tender Petrarch. After his regular indulgence in musical relaxation he studied till six, then
entertained his visitors till eight ; then enjoyed a light supper, and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water
retired to bed.

' John Foxe and Frobisher are buried in this church, where Ben Jonson and Oliver Cromwell were
married. A monument was erected to Milton by Sam \Vhitbread, the brewer. Quite recently a bronze statue
has been erected in the yard. His death took place at his house. Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields.

^ Johnson found compensation for these eccentricities and for his neglect of family prayer in liis continued
veneration for the Holy Scriptures. Towards his political constancy he is less charitable : " Milton's
republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness and a sullen desire of independence ;
in petulance impatient of control, and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs iu the State and
prelates in the Church, for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It has been observed that they who
most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. \Vhat we know of Milton's character and
domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women, and there appears in his
book something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own daughters
miglit not break the ranks he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought
woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion."

188 SHAKESPEARE AND MILTON

The same voice, as vague and as illimitable be said there can be only one Milton ! Not that

as the niurnmr of the ocean, that has placed time has done aught to bridge the mighty gulf

Shakespeare first among our poets has placed that yawns between these two men of genius, so

Milton second. By his adaptation of classical alien in well-nigh everything but dwelling-place

form to biblical materials, an adaptation in and nationality. Shakespeare is loved and

which the genius of pagan art is blended with laughed over even more than he is reverenced,

the genius of a Puritan Christianity, and in We may be permitted to compare his fame to

which the stately sevei'ity of the Latin form and Westminster Abbey — a national memorial, the

tongue is harmonised -with, the multitudinous pride of the whole English-speaking world, as

vocabulary and the breathing tone and accent dear to the most secular as to the most religious

of our northern speech ; by the encyclopaedic minded of Englishmen, dedicated to St. Peter,

learning which he has wedded to the most yet catholic only in the sense of universal,

subtle and melodious art — an art which must Milton's poetry and poetic fame, on the other

live as long as the language to which it has hand, may be compared to St. Paul's, inci-

aftbrded some of the supremcst figures of dentally a religious structure, primarily a great

speech — Jlilton has created for himself a Renaissance temple ; second, in a way in point

monument which seems impervious alike to the of definite rank, among the churches of the

gusts of popular prejudice, and to the light Empire, but far from sharing either the prestige

winds and chilling damps of critical fervour or the love by which all men are drawn to the

or depreciation. As of Shakespeare, it may old foundation as to the magnetic pole.

It is interesting enough to follow Milton's career by means of the ordinary signposts — marriages and
issue, employments, migrations, and friendships. AV'e have traced liis movements even from one house in
Loudon to another. Yet few men lived less within the four walls of a material dwelling than Milton. His
life was the abstracted existence of the pure scholar. He lived in his ideas, his books, his thoughts, his
art. His life was one long progress in intellectual egotism, the stages of which were marked, not by
possessions and actions, but by the march of mind. Milton's scholarly arrogance and contempt for the
vulgar was profound. His egotism is redeemed, however, by the fact that there was nothing sordid about
it : the things of the intellect were the only things he coveted or really cared for. The world, he thought,
should be governed by men of mind, by an intellectual oligarchy of Miltous. Their power was to be
absolute, and was to last for life. A worse form of tyranny could not perhaps easily be devised. But
Milton's relation to politics was absolutely theoretical from first to last, and, in the few cases in which he
realised them, he was totally out of sympathy with the ideas, needs, and feelings of his fellow-countrymen.
Holding the views that he did as to the sacredness of tlic Bible, and having passed through the classical
training he had, it was perfectly natural that he should take the views that he did, and should have
thrown in his lot with the Puritan oligarchy. He hated the crown and the prelacy in the first place for
having stifled the Reformation, tlie blaze of ^V'yclif, at which all succeeding reformers had lighted their
tapers. To his mind, too, as lucid, logical, and positive as that of a Frenchman, there was something
essentially degrading about the flunkeyism of a court, with its cringing and servile crew "not of servants
only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up to the hopes not of public but of court ofl[ices, to be stewards,
cliamberlains, ushers, grooms even of the close-stool." Ignoring both the historical interest and symbolical
value of the crown, ignoring, too, the immense services which it had performed for England (his historical
sen.se was slight), Milton simply saw in the pretension of one man to be the object of adoration to his
fellows a position offensive not only to taste and reason, but also to common sense and decency. "All
ingenious and knowing men will easily agree with me that a free commonwealth without single persons
or House of Lords is by far the best government." From an early period this was his conviction — that of
a confirmed intellectual. He was so interested in expressing his anti-prelatical views apropos of the intensely
interesting political situation in 1641-2, that he turned aside from his studies, and wrote those tracts on
Reformation against Prelaty, which contain the most impassioned of his prose writings. His next group
of tracts on Divorce (1013-5) was prompted by more personal considerations. Irritjvted by the contiguity
of a wife of incompatible temperament, Milton set about, by his usual scholarly methods, to show the
desirability of a facile divorce. He was soon convinced that he was absolutely in the riglit, and as usual
resented opposition with the full bitterness of the unbending doctrinaire. He publi>hed these tracts without
the necessary licence, and the opposition of the Stationers' Company to sucli " unlicensed printing "
occasioned his famous defence of such a practice in his Areopagitica. The immediate stimulus, again, was
a personal one. He admits the desirability of stifling bad books, until the risk that such a process might
involve — namely, the suppression of his own views as to the need of extending divorce facilities — appeared to
him greater than the evil it was intended to remedy — "As good almost kill a man as kill a book." He
now shows it to be a Popish practice (Galileo), this trying to crush a man's opinion, anil a tiling
essentially unmanly to try and protect a man from every contact witli danger or vice. And then comes

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LATIN SECRETARY 189

that splendid passage in which we seem to catch the very inspiration of Burke : " I cannot praisi^ a fugitive
and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unhreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to he run for, not without dust and heat." Its
premises involved conclusions larger than lie himself suspected, but the emotion which he gradually
developed can be measured by the splendour of the language.

Areopngitim itself, to the scandal of stitionors, was published without a licence. It was followed by a
tract on Education (Juno, l(Ul), prompted Iiy his personal interest in pedagogy and by a discussion with
Samuel Hartlib, extraordinary alike for the higli standard set up and for the eloquence of its language. Milton
discountenanced the devotion of time to Latin composition. He begins witli grammar and pronunciation, and
proceeds with the study of education, arithmetic, geography, and easy grounds of religion ; the next gradation
is the study of authors on agriculture— such as Varro, Columella— use of globes, and natural {diilosophy. Greek
is then followed by the institution of physic, economics, and politics ; theology and church history combined
naturally with a systematic study of Hebrew and the Syriac tongues ; logic, poetry, and the higher kinds of
composition complete the scheme — in the course of which, as Milton remarks casually, the student may have
easily learned, at any odd hour, the Italian tongue. Such a scheme was obviously adapted for the education of
Miltons and the preparation of readers for the perusal of such poems as Paradise Lout. Of the products of this
system we know but one, the fluent but superficial Edward Phillips.

An interval elapses between these two groups of tracts and those commencing in 1G49, aiwl dealing with the
different phases of the political situation, such as The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates-, published in 1049, a
fortnight after the King's execution. It was followed in October by the lengthy Eikonoklastes, an answer, point
by point, of the famous Eikoii BasiHke,^ which the defeated party had brought out as a testimony to the integrity
of the late King, and as a shrine for the popular image of a martyred saint.

In the interval between these two publications Milton had been appointed Latin secretary to the Common-
wealth. His justification of tyrannicide upon the grounds of reason and authority alike had attracted
Cromwell's attention. The nature of the bargain implied between two natures so divergent in type as those
of Milton and Cromwell was probably simple enough. Cromwell wanted the name and .style of Milton — the
only English scholar whose name would carry the least weight abroad, the only English Latinist wlio could
meet that paragon of foreign linguists, Salmasius, upon his own ground. Milton, on his side (like Voltaire,
or still more like Goethe in a somewhat similar situation), can hardly have failed to be flattered by the attentions
and solicitings of the greatest soldier and most practical statesman of the day. He may have even been deluded
as to the amount of influence which it would be in his power to exercise. The result was the almost unique
diversion of the great humanist and poetic scholar for the space of ten years from working in marble to working
in clay — it must almost bo confessed now and again to be working in mud. For much of his p Jti'.'al
pamphleteering was devoted to Logomachia, a prose flyting, a ferocious word duel between the chanipions of
English republicanism, so called, and continental mouarcliy. One of the champions boasted that he had
destroyed the eyesight, the other that he had destroyed the life, of his adversary.^ Cromwell was perfectly
right in his estimate that such a controversy would resolve itself into a competition as to which side could call
names best, and also in his foresight as to the ascendency which he would be able to establish for his own views
and sentiments over the ideals which were native and proper to Milton's intellectual idiosyncrasy. How
completely Milton .stood aloof from the popular current of his age is shown by his plea for a commonwealth as
the readiest solution of all difficulties in the sjtring of 1660, upon the very eve of the Restoration, wlien all men
were thirsting for a return to the old paths of monarchy. His sympathy with the dictatorship of Cromwell, by
which a real tyrant was set up in place of a sham, can hardly have been a genuine one. Milton, however, was
illuded by Cromwell's marvellous adaptability in winning the best instruments that he needed fr>r his purpose,
and by the magnetism of a great personality, the personal deference of whose attitude to himself at the critical
moment had subtly appealed to the poet's vanity.

Of Milton's later and miscellaneous prose writings, his letters, his histories, his manuals of grammar and
logic, and his Latin treatise of Christian doctrine (disinterred from the State Paper Office, 1823), it is needless

' " Following up the royal meditations chapter by chapter, Milton meets them with refutation, mockery,
or ridicule. He feels nothing of the glamour of sentimental attachment to the royal saint. The tone of his
reply is sufficiently indicated by the text prefixed to the pamphlet : " As a roaring lyon and a ranging beare,
so is a wicked ruler over the poor people." At times Milton is sa\agely vindictive in his antipathy to the late
King, as, for instance, when he revives the malignant calumny that Charles had poisoned his own father ; and
throughout the pamphlet no gleam of sympathy for a fallen man, no spark of generous feeling towards a
vanquished cause, lightens the stern pages of ruthless analysis and condemnation. In rhetorical ability and
force of thought and language, Eikonoklastes completely surpasses the King's book, but the image that floated
before the tear-dimmed eyes of men could not be broken by weapons of logic and argument " (Masterman,
Age of Milton).

' "As Salmasius reproached Milton with losing his eyes in the quarrel, Milton delighted himself in the
belief that he had shortened Salmasius's life, and both perhaps with more malignity than reason. Salmasius
died at the Spa, September 3rd, 1653 ; and, as controvertists are commonly said to be killed by their last
dispute, Milton was flattered with the credit of destroying him " (Johnson).

190 "L'ALLEGRO " AND " IL PENSEROSO "

to speak iu detail, as tlieir interest is comparatively small, and they lack the passion and the inspiration of tlie
great passages iu the earlier tracts. Of his jjrose works as a whole it is enough to obser\'e tliat tlie pamplilets
(tweuty-five in number — twenty-one English, four Latin) fill the second, or political, j)anel of Milton's life
(1640-60). Their immediate political influence can have been decorative at best ; several were written for the
express purpose of asserting a j)ersonal freedom from restraint, not a few are marred by coarseness, bitterness,
and violence. Yet it is not possible to agree with Mark Pattison that Milton's prose period was one during
which he prostituted his genius to jiolitical party. Except where he is obviously merely the mouthpiece of
Cromwell, Milton is as much of the unpractical but impeccable scholar and idealist in his prose as in his verse ;
and there are passages of greater splendour in Milton's prose than in almost any other English prose writer
of any period whatsoever. Pestered as his prose is by the inveterate seventeenth-century habit of citation
from the classic and patristic writers, and inordinate as are his periods in their complicated length,
involution, and obscurity, there is a fortissimo passage here, a crescendo there, and a cadenza farther on
which compensate for the longueurs, and re\eal to us the fire of a poet in the rhythm, the harmony, and,
above all, in the magnificent imagery which gleams and crackles and finally blazes up through the rough,
unpolished surface.

It cannot he denied that there is a personal interest about Milton's prose, together with a warmth of
emotion that very rarely penetrates the cold inhumanity of his artistry, as we may call the artificial and elaborate
style of his versification. It is of the cold marble, however, which endures. Milton's prose is the prose of a past
manner and of a past age. Interesting as it is in revealing the personality of the great poet, we must pass from
it to that which has a more permanent interest.

The first sure signs of Milton's greatness in poetry are seen in the ode On the Morning of Christ's Naticity, a
noble prelude to the music of Paradise Lost. Scholarly though this is in form, and well constructed as is the
ground-plan, it is the only one of Milton's poems that bears traces of juvenility, which is shown in the luxuriance
of the imagery and phrasing and iu the facile character of the rhyming. Learned though the poem is, too, it shows
more signs of spontaneous and unsophisticated religious feeling than any of his later verse. The other poems of
his early poetic period down to the composition of Li/cidds in 1637 represent far more clearly and characteristically
Milton's idea of poetry as the topmost and brightest flower of scholarly culture. Of such methods of poetic
composition as Shakespeare or Byron might be taken to represent; of ideas caught at in the street or during the
two hours' traffic of the .stage, and committed to paper as rapidly in some tavern parlour under the influence of a
rapid glowing imagination ; of Byron's dashing theory of the essential rapidity of the conversion of poetical
'"estro" into printed matter, Milton had a very vague notion. The wood-notes of unstudied art, though they
might be admirable in their way, were to him always wild, erratic, and rustic, for to him there would be no really
high art without really highly trained study. His early poems are therefore, like those of Tennyson {(Eiionf
and The Lotus Eaters, for example), combined exercises of observation, poetic reminiscence, and verse-craft
all wrought up into the most exquisitely refined combination of the traditive, or inherited, and original
elements in poetry of which we can form any conception. Tlie subject-matter of these exercises was of
comparatively little impoi'tauce — the execution was the thing. Such work is in poetry that which mosaic is in
the domain of graphic art — the most difficult and the most permanent of all forms. It requires the most intense
concentration, the most refined powers of selection, and the most amazing combination of delicacy of touch with
Herculean strength in the welding and fusing.

Such qualities are seen in technical combination in the exquisite lyrical masque of Comus, presented at Ludlow
Castle in 10.34 before the Earl of Bridgewater, then the President of Wales. The cast of the work is more Italian
than English ; but echoes from Jonson and Fletcher (notably in The Sad Shepherd and The Faithful Shepherdess),
and from Marlowe and Sliakespeare (notably in Fanstus and The Tem/iest), are numerous and unmistokable.
The dramatic argument, which is of tlie simplest, is suggested partly by the Circe episode in the Odi/ssei/ and
partly by the Sacrapant and Delia episode in Peele's 0/d Witrs' Tale. Two brothers and their sister, wandering
iu a wood haunted by Comus, Circe's son and imitator, part from her in search of a guide and shelter. She falls,
bewitched by art but protected by her \irtue from any real harm, into the enchanter's power, till he is driven off
by her brothers and an attendant spirit (half Mentor and half Ariel), and the charm is reversed by Sabrina, the
river-nymph of the Severn. The felicity of Shakespeare's rhythm, with the loss perhaps of some of its earele.ss
rapture, is caught again and again and composed into faultless passages of blank ver.se which has still much of the
Elizabetlian ring about it. Interspersed are passages in a .shorter and irregular metre, both the rhymes and
images of wliicli, especially in the speeches of Conuis, transmit frecjuent echoes both of sound and expression to
Milton's next two masterpieces, L' Alleyro and // yV/i.vcTOio, both of which were written during Milton's Hortou
period.

Written for the most part in a seven or eight-syllabled verse of four beats, with subtly varied modulations,
these two wonderful poems well illustrate what has been Siiid of Milton's extraordinary power of making a poem
of what, as far as regards subject-matter, might be termed no more than a very artificial exercise in the use of
poetic material. 'I'lie poet soliloquises in L' Allegro as a cheerful and in // Penseroso as a melancholic man ;
and so remarkable is the [jictorial riclniess of the adjectives witli which both soliloquies are inwrought
that, after supplying tlie anthologists of four generations with their richest spoils, the poems have gone
farther, and liave supjilied our speech of every day with some of its choicest felicities. Tlie beauty of the
verse-phrasing and expression has been thought by many to reach its climax in the last twenty-two verses
of 11 J'mseroeo :

LYCIDAS " 191

And bririj^ all liuav'ii before mine eyes.
And may at last my weary ajje
Find out tlic peaceful lierinitage
The hairy gown and mossy cell
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heav'n doth shew.
And every herb that sips the dew ;
'I'ill old experience do attain
To soinetliiiig like prophetic strain.
These pleasures iVIelancholy ' give,
And 1 with thee will choose to live."

" But let my due feet never fail
To walk tlie studious cloysters pale.
And love the high cmbowed roof.
With antic pillars massy proof,
And storied windows riclily diglit.
Casting a dim religious light :
There let tlie pealing organ blow,
To the full voic'd (juire below.
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear.
Dissolve me into ecstasies,

lliree years after the date of Oomiu appeared Lycidiiti. The occasion of the elegy was the death of
Edward King, a popular fellow of Christ's College, who liad been drowned in crossing the Irish Channel,
August, 1637. The universities were wont at this time to celebrate notable events in national or academic life
by i)ublishing collections of eulogistic verses in Latin or English. 'I"he anthology was published in April,
1638, Milton, wlio had been a college contemporary of King's, contributing the last of the English poems.
The occasion was the propriety of hanging a laurel wreath in memory of a college friend, and the imagery and
arrangement of the poem were those of such pastoral models as Theocritus and Virgil, as already imitated
in England by Spenser. The due consideration of these facts cuts the ground from Dr. Johnson's splenetic
attack upon Lycidus in his Lives of the Poets on the grounds of its hollowness, insincerity, and artificiality.
I'he poem was not intended as the vehicle of a profound personal sentiment ; it was a decorative wreath
woven and bent with incomparable skill in strict accordance with a conventional form of universal
acceptance and the most reverend antiquity. In poetic beauty, and perhaps we should say in metrical
skill also, it is a poem almost without a rival.' The wonderful variety of its numbers, from a solemn and
psalra-like grandeur to the lightest delicacy and playfulness, the variegated harmony of the verse (the
ground of which is the heroic verse of Marlowe) suggest the indebtedness of Milton to the form of the
canzone as employed by Petrarch and Boccaccio. liut the timbre of the rhythm of Li/cidas is still
thoroughly English and Elizabethan — a last mournful echo, as it were, of an age the inspiration of which
was so soon to pass away for ever. The Elizabethans having died out, fully a hundred years were to
elapse before our literature could produce in Collins and Gray two men capable of even appreciating
such a poem as Lycidus.^

Milton began to write his great epic, tlie evolution of which had so long beset his mind, in the year of
Cromwell's death— 16.58, the poet himself being tlien tifty years old. His second wife and her infant had
recently died, but he was left the three daughters of his first marriage, and lived witli them in Petty France,
— studying for his great poem line by line and almost letter by letter, mainly in the night season froni
October to March. The lines were dictated in parcels of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time, and his
younger daughters (who envied their elder sister who could not read, so irksome did they find the task)
were frequently summoned at night time to take down lines not one of which the whole world could have
replaced. " Grand, indeed, is the thought of this unequalled strain poured forth, when every other voice
was hushed in the mighty city, to no meaner accompaniment than the music of the spheres." 'I he MS. of
Faradlse Lost was completed at C.'halfont St. Giles in 166.5, and a fair coi)y was then made by a scrivener.
The poem was officially licensed for publication in 166(), but did not appear until August, 1G67, when it was
published by Mr. Samuel Simmons, "next door to the Golden Lion, Aldersgate Street," in a small 4to of
342 pages called Paradise Lost, written in Ten Books by John Milton, price 3*. Milton received £10 for the
first edition of 1,300 copies. A second edition appeared in 1674 (when the ten books were rearranged in
twelve), shortly after which Mrs. Milton sold her rights in this and any successive editions for £8. A
fourth edition appeared in 1688, from which date to 17o0 the issue of Milton remained a profitable monopoly
in the publisliing house of Tonson. " In tlie history of Paradise Lost a deduction thus minute will rather
gratify than fatigue."

The character of Milton's poetic production is (more than is the case with most poets) partly the result
of the character of his studies. He set out to be a poet — to make himself a poet. Being already a poet
born, he set out to equip himself for his essential business of making poetry. And the training he gave
himself lay chiefly in the study of Latin and Greek literature. This did not merely result in his poetry
being fully of reminiscences of the "classics." His mind was very full of classical poetry; he must have

' Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy had appeared in 1621.

' "No English poem exhibits a more exquisite harmony and variety of numbers, or a more e.xtraordiiiary
science of rhyme, while very few of anything like the same length have a greater number of signal
phrases memorable for thought or music or both " (Saintsbury).

^ The revival of the study of poetry in the nineteenth century led to its partial imitation in two
noble dirges conceived somewhat in the same spirit — Shelley's Adonais and Matthew Arnold's Tliyrsis.
The latter poem is far tenderer than Lycidas, and Adonais is charged with much deeper and more
symphonic thought and passion. But both poems owe to Lycidas a debt which Lycidas owes to no
other poem.

192 ■ MILTONIC DICTION

thought ahont men and things largely in the form of quotations — and the result is that we get an increasing
proportion of reminiscence, and more than that — the deliberate making up and adaptation of phrases and
images from the Latin and Greek, and of course a very Latinised vocabulary.

The diction, the mannerism, of Paradise Lost is admittedly not that of earlier poets any more than of
ordinary speech. Milton made for himself a manner of speaking suitable to the scale of things he was repre-
senting and the dignity of his persons. Tlie manner itself was suggested by the Latin, chiefly by Virgil : hence
a new fashion of poetic speech, created in the first instance by the urgency of Milton's need for more sustained
notes in Eni^lish verse and by his absorption in classical literature. Milton's mastery of blank verse — apart from
his mannerisms — was also largely due to his classical studies. His one great model for blank verse in English
was Shakespeare. But Shakespeare's blank verse was not epical ; it was everytliing else, but it was not epical.
Nevertheless, Jlilton might perhaps ha^e learned what he wanted from Shakespeare ; but it is evident that he
did not. Nor did he go to Spenser for verse models. He went to the classical or quantitative blank verse. His
study of it must have enormously trained and improved his ear, quickened his extraordinary sense of consonantal
syllabic values, and refined his extraordinary sense of the value both of quantity and of accent. So far as this
was not innate, he got it from the classics ; it was on them that he sharpened his ear. llie result of this is seen
in the fact that Milton's blank verse is not Elizabethan ; one might almost say it was not English till he wrote it.
He comes at last to the verse of the Samson Agonistrs, and this was the logically complete development of the
Miltonic blank verse. Blank verse, in short, was to him not an Elizabethan verse-form, but a classical verse-
form which he had to adapt to English ; and he adapted it, finally, as if there had been no English blank
verse before.

If there is one quality in Milton which one should single out as undeniably great and altogether extraordinary
by itself, it is his infallible sense of accentual and consonantal values, together with the mastery of language,
which enabled him to realise his ideal harmony between sense and sound in almost every line. His effects
depend to an extraordinary degree upon the exact words he uses and their exact order in the line. Examples
are everywhere :

" While the bright pomp ascended jubilant ! "

" Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air."

" From Arachosia, from Candaor east.
And Margiana, to the Hyrcanian cliffs
Of Caucasus, and dark Iberian dales."

And after this calculated harmony of sense and sound, we should admire, in the second place, the complex
mutation in Milton's periods, and the studied variety of the Miltonic caesura or pause.

There is no mystery in Milton's poetry, and this is one great reason why many lovers of poetry find it dull
and lacking in suggestion. It is, in fact, singularly lacking in suggestiveness. Milton's mind is very Latin. It
seeks delinitiou and precision everywhere. It materialises. He believes that if only you knew rather more about
what happened you could explain quite nicely in the English language just what the thought of God was when
He started the world, and His relations with the devil would be quite clear and intelligible to us if the Bible record
were a trifle fuller. It is quite natural to him to regard heaven and hell as substantial portions of space. AVhat
else should they be ? He does not shrink from making God talk English. He really thinks that God's thought
could be expressed in English. At least he believed this just as much as he believed in Adam and Eve and the
whole .story. In his universe there is nothing essentially beyond the powers of the human (Miltonic) mind.
But if he has no sense of mystery he is an absolute master of the vague. His effects of vague horror are perhaps
the finest of any (the magnificent finales of Books II. and IV., for instance, or the awe-inspiring descriptions
of the shapes by hell's mouth in Book II., line G.50, etc., especially G5C-73). They make up to some extent for the
undue hardness of his usual drawing. Milton, then, is a supreme artist in words and syllabic values and a master
of all kinds of poetic artifice, and he has a singularly precise imagination which is at its very best in description of
the vague and enormous, to which he succeeds in giving just enough description to make it impressive. But though
he is rigidly logical witliin his limits and very definite in thought, he is not much of a thinker ; his mythopoeic
faculty entirely transcends and is nourished in exuberant excess of his ratiociuati\e powers. The worst of it is
that the myths he makes are not beautiful, nor are they symbolic ; thoy are just myths. The conceptions
underlying Paradise Lost are absurd and even childish. No mediajval divine would have fallen into such
absurdities. It is not merely a matter of artillery in heaven ; a sense of humour would have saved him from
symbolism of tliat sort, if symbolism it is. But his representation of God might almost be a caricature of
popular notions. Satan's declaration that God is only greater than he because he has the secret of thunder —
" whom thunder has made greater" (I. S.OS)— seems quite true of tlie Miltonic God — the God who says :

" Nearly it now concerns us to be sure (V. 720)
Of our omnipotence . . .
. . . lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill."

Paradisp LnsI is the greatest of Milton's poems, (1) because more ofliis mature thought, more of his altogether,
went into it than any other ; (2) because, thougii the verse-craft oi Samson and Purudisc Pcyaincd is as great, the

g
c
o

"SAMSON AGONISTES" 198

austerity of those poems is such tliat beauty is sacrificed to a sheer severity of line that becomes barren and
monotonous ; (3) it represents in the grand manner the life-experience of a poet who was called upon to li\c
during the epic age of our country's liistory.

The earlier poems have not quite the same verse ma.stery, and are a much less complete expression of the
poet's mind. 15ut they are certainly the most beautiful of any. For the beauty of the style of Paradise Lost is
to a great extent marred by its subject-matter, which, regarded as a sort of fairy tale, is a dull and rather
unpleasant one ; while, regarded as an exposition of the universe, it is primitive and incoherent to an extent that
is glaringly out of keeping with the perfection of the most chastened and refined Renaissance craftmanship.
Nor, though wonderfully managed and fitting the nature of the narrative, can one admire the mannerisms of
Paradise Lost in itself. The typical line of this mannerism is such as this :

"To whom the Patriarch of Mankind replied" (V. 006),
or —

"To whom our general ancestor returned,"

for "Adam said." When these lines extend to whole passages they assume a pseudo-classical rotundity which
caught the taste of the next age, and was largely responsible for the characteristic poetic diction of the eighteenth
century.

But there is the same artificiality even in Lycidus, in which there is not the least sign of any real regret for
the " learned friend" amid all the elaboration of the verse. Milton's poetry lacks emotion. It is of the nature
of an intellectual descant or thesis, an exercise or a lecture, and, at the highest, an efl'ort intellectually to realise
and represent the utterly incomprehensible. Deeply though Milton had studied Spenser, and probably also Donne
and Crashaw and Herbert, he had much more sympathy than they had with the marmoreal hide of Renaissance
culture ; hence a certain frigidity and absence of that individual and personal note which breaks so appealingly
upon tlie ear after the extremely impersonal and oljjective character of Elizabethan jjoetry. AVhenever the
personal note is struck in Milton, and it is very rarely (but notably in the opening descants of Books III. and
VII.), such passages are treasured as beyond all price. They give the warmth which is so commonly lacking iu
these high aijrial altitudes.

In the same volume with Paradise Regained, published by John Starkey in 1071, appeared Milton's last great
work, the partly autobiographical poem of his darkened old age — damson Agoiiistes. As with the subject-matter
of Paradise Lost, Milton had been anticipated both in the subject and form of Samsoti by the contemporary Dutch
poet Vondel ; but Milton's drama is cast in a much more severely classical mould, and tlie verse of it,
appropriately to the requirements of drama, is much less regularly symphonic than the verse of Paradise Lost.
As iu a Greek drama, tlie action is simple, the persons few, the statuesque severity of the iambic dialogue being
relieved by the stately strophes of the chorus, which bears the same close relation to the development of the plot
as in the tragedies of Sophocles. Samson himself acts as spokesman in the Greek manner at the beginning of
the drama, and the catastrophe is related in the Attic fashion through the agency of a messenger. Tlie whole
piece reflects faithfully the austere patriotism and religious feeling of the Old Testament, but so closely are
details of style and construction borrowed from Hellenic drama that it is no exaggeration to say that the modern
reader derives a more accurate impression of Sophocles from iSamson Agojiistes than fromany English translation ;
or to repeat Goethe's saying that Samson Agoiiisles had more of the antique spirit than any modern poem. It is
characteristic of the more austere sublimity of Milton's later art tliat the mythology is drawn from the rugged
strength of the more primitive poets, such as Hesiod and Homer (Jove and the Titans, Night and Chaos, Rhea
and Saturn). In his use of ancient mythology and geography, as in his use of proper names of epic catalogues
generally, of Petrarchan canzone, of the " occasional " sonnet and of the verse paragraph, Milton polished to a
perfection of contour what had existed hitherto in but rudimentary shape. More tlian this, he partly created
and partly shaped for himself, with a view to his exceptional needs as an epic poet and wielder of a measure not
less stately, to be sure, than that of Virgil, a complete body of poetic diction. Spenser, as we have seen, did
something of this kind out of archaic dialect and purely P^nglish materials. Milton was far from disdaining a
pastoral vocabulary, and in Lgcidas he employs a number of words of true Spenserian mould. His needs,
however, far transcended those of Spenser, and in the course of Paradise Lost he called into being a large
vocabulary of his own evocation from the Latin tongue. This vocabulary and the facilities afforded by it for
paraphrase of homely English substantive, adjective, or verb entirely won the heart of our heroic composers from
Pope to Hayley, and they ground out commonplaces in it so unmercifully that Wordsworth, in a moment of
exasperation, decreed that the whole gaudy concern must go by the board, llie danger of playing at Milton
has now been fully recognised.

Milton can get more vibration out of a word than any poet in our language. He worked upon the
foundations of verbal utterance (as Chatham for other purposes knew how to do), and every word with him is
charged uot only with its plain meaning and its life-history as a word, but is fraught with a subtle music struck
from some secret chord, and freighted with a long chain of poetic reminiscence. In this manner is Milton's
style nourished with the best thought and finest expression of Time. In this way does the phrase become not
only an intellectual exercise, but also an emotional force, while Paradise Lost becomes the Historic Peerage
in which we rummage for the pedigree of every stray slip from the House of Poetry that lays claim to a noble
lineage or an aucient inheritance. It is probably no exaggeration to say that Milton is the greatest master
of the poetic art in modern times— at any rate, since Daute. It is true that, as compared with Spenser or

194 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Shakespeare, for instance, there is an almost inhuman severity about }iis art : the claims of aesthetic beauty
are with Milton unduly paramount over those of emotion or feeling, and tlie interpretation of his parable is to
modern ideas much too strained. The poet, nevertheless, extorts our homage ; he compels our reverence, and
the more we understand, the deeper that reverence tends to become.'

' The two older universities have both issued handsome texts of Milton's, but Henry J. Todd's edition (first
issued in 1801, and supplemented by a Life and a Verbal Index) remains the most complete, while the just
favourite of the public is Prof. Masson's edition (3 vols., or condensed in one as the Globe edition*). Of
the Poems first printed in 1645, Thomas Warton's edition of 1785 has not been surpassed. A rough draft of
the MS. is preserved at Trinity, Cambridge (Facsimile 1899). There are handy reprints in the Little Library and
in the Gateway Series. Dr. Johnson's famous anti-honeysuckle Life of Milton was written in January-February,
1779 ; it was based mainly upon the spade-work of Wood, Aubrey, Phillips, and Jonathan Richardson. Prof.
David Masson's noble monument to the biographical fame of Milton, commenced in 1859, was completed in
1894. Lowell was strangely infelicitous in his comments upon Masson's Life and Times of Mi/ton, and provoked
from Jowett the oft-cited quotation, " O for a stone-bow to hit him in the eye ! " Among the shorter studies the
most notable are those of Mark Pattison (1880), Dr. Richard Garnett (1889), W. P. Trent (1899), and Walter
Raleigh (1900). ^'aluable studies of Milton's thought are given by Dowden and TuUoch, of his classical
mythology by C. G. Osgood (1900), and of his prosody by R. Bridges (189.3) and Courthope {History of English
Poetry). In the harmonious sea of Miltonic verse, as Courthope points out, the rhythmic unity of the single
verse or line is subtly balanced with that of the verse paragraph, the cadence of which is punctuated and
varied until it acquires a beauty and proportion approximating that of a rhyming stanza. These periods are
bound together into a single chain of harmony by a hitherto unrivalled use of the old Anglo-Saxon principle
of alliteration ; and the whole of his verse is thus welded into a symphonic whole, governed by principles of
verse harmony (innate in the language but hitherto undeveloped) and wrought into a system governed by the
intuition of sheer musical genius, from which a scheme of Miltonic prosody as regular and complete as the
classical prosody of a \'irgil can be systematically deduced. To carry such a vast weight of imagination and
learning, a metrical vehicle of extraordinary complexity was indispensable; and perhaps of all European
languages English alone could have provided what was required. For in our tongue the Teutonic and the
Latin genius unite, just as our constitution has beeu the instrument of reconciliation between the Norman and
Saxon races, between monarchy and feudalism, between absolutism and republican freedom, between ecclesiastical
tradition and the liberty of conscience. Valuable suggestions have been made in dealing with this part of the
subject by Mr. J. AV. Allen. Some interesting remarks upon the Iconography of Milton are scattered in
S. Leigh Sotheby's Ramblings in Elucidation of the Autograph of Milton, 18G1. The poet wrote an exceptionally
fine and delicate hand. For " New Lights " on Milton see Quarterly Beview, No. 194.

In 1750 William Lauder issued his Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his " Paradise Lost,"
an indictment of wholesale plagiarism against the poet, but the charge was itself an imposture, and as such was
exposed by Bishop John Douglas in 1751. AVarton and other critics have shown progressively the enormous
extent to which Milton wove into his fabric the felicities of other men's phrasing wherever he found them. But
such discoveries, as in the cognate case of Tennyson, only enhance our admiration for the semi-miraculous
power of transforming while assimilating — a species of transubstantiatiou. Mova Solyma, a Latin romance
modelled upon the New Atlantis (printed in six books by John Legat in 1G48 and translated by \V^alter Begley
in 1902), was claimed as Milton's ; but his silence in regard to it and the uu-Miltonic character of its Latiuity
are fairly conclusive against its being his. As a Latin poet he was surpassed by Campion, and perhaps also by
Cowley and May. Milton's collections for a Latin Dictionary were extensively utilised by the editors of
the Cambridge Dictionary of 1693. As in the case of Shakespeare, Milton's unique greatness was promptly
recognised in England. Abroad, his genius obtained a certain recognition, especially in Germany, before
Shakespeare was heard of, and a good Life has been done by a German, Alfred Stern (1879). For all that we
are sceptical as to the possibility of a complete appreciation of Lycidas or Paradise Lost (in such passages as
I. 780, II. 490, IV^ 130) by any save a true-born native ear.

CHAPTER IX
PROTO-RATIONALISTS: THOMAS HOB BBS

" Hobbes was a thinker and writer of marvellous power, and take him altogether, is probably the
greatest of English philosophers."— Huxley.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury — Lord Clarendon —The Royal Society.

EDWARD HERBERT, known to fame as
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was born at
Eyton, in Shropshire, on March 3rd, 1583 — in
the same year with Massinger and the great
jurist who afterwards became his friend, Hugo
Grotius. Hobbes was born only five years
later. He was a remote kinsman of the great
Pembroke and Powis families, and an elder
brother of the deepest and sweetest of religious
songsters, George Herbert, who sang on earth,
wi'ote old Izaak, such hymns and anthems as
he and the angels and Mr. Ferrar now sing in
heaven.

Of his early youth, with its impossibly
precocious questions and orations, his innate
antipathy to deceit, and such-like, Lord
Herbert tells us much in his queer braggadocio
Autobiography^ which Walpole found so side-
splitting on first reading it in manuscript that
he persisted in having it printed, and finally
overcame the opposition of the Powis family
in the matter. It cei-tainly presents their
kinsman in a singulai- light — a compound of
the gasconading Urquhart, the translator of
Rabelais, and of the fire-eating Alan Breck —
for ever boasting of his duels, his gentle blood,
and his genealogical choler.

Of his Oxford career Herbert says little,
but he has much about his ailments and his
accomplishments — swimming, dressing, dancing
fencing, and " riding the great horse." At
eighteen he married Sir William Herbert of
St. Julians' daughter, and went to court,
where Queen Elizabeth was profoundly im-
pressed by his beaux yeu.v (so he gives us
to understand), patted him twice on the
cheek, and swore by " God's death " it was
a grievous pity that he was married, and so

young too. A few good stories will be found
intertwined amid the texture of his hunting
and duelling and diplomatic exploits, such as
the Duke of Montmorency's wary answer to
Hein-i IV. when he offered money and exchange
for Chantilly : '■ Sieur, la niaison est a. vous,
mais que je sois le concierge." Or his answer
to the Duke of Neuburg : " Of what died Sir
Francis Vere?" "Per aver niente a fare" (Of
having nothing to do) ; and Spinola's comment,
" And it is enough to kill any general."

Herbert's own later career forms a gloomy
and ironical epilogue to the triumphal portion.
In 1624, when he was still little over forty,
he was deprived of his ambassadorship in the
interests of James I.'s weak and capricious
diplomacy. He was rewarded with the cheap
honour of an Irish peerage, but could not get
the arrears of his salary. His devices to get
back again into employment were all in vain ;
all that Charles would concede him was to
exchange his Irish for an English peerage.
He set to work gloomily upon his Life of
Hcnnj VIII., his Philosophical Treatises, and
his Autobiography. Upon the outbreak of the
Civil War he hedged frankly until 1644, when
such a course became no longer possible. He
then had to make over his castle of Mont-
gomery to the Parliament, and proceeded
almost destitute to London, where he died
in Queen Street, St. Giles's, on August 20th,
1648, in receipt of a Parliament pension of
£20 a month. His defection spelt ruin to
the Royalist cause in Montgomeryshire ; and
in most people's opinion the " heroic " Herbert
had saved his property at the expense of his
honour.

In literature the " black lord " has a niche

195

196

HERBERT OF CHERBURY

not only as the author of the delightfully
impertinent and coxcombical Aidohlography
(first published at the Strawberry Hill Press in
1764), in which his gusto in bragging about
himself and developing his personality gives his
wTiting an aroma of really fine literature, but
also as the creator of an elaborate historical
eulogy of Heni-y VIII. (first published in 1649)
and as the versifier of Poems (first issued in
1665), as obscure and as rugged as those of his
master Donne, in which, however, Herbert used
the metre already used by Raleigh and since
consecrated by Tennyson in In Memoriam with
genuine feeling. As the author of the De
Vcrifate (1624), De Causis Erwrum (1645, to
which was appended the tract, ReVigio La'ic'i),
and De ReUgione GentUiiim (Amsterdam, 1663,
first in English 1709), Herbert accomplished
work of more significance, and has fully justified
his title in the eyes of later historians to be
called the father of English Deism. In these
works, roughlv and summarily speaking, Herbert
rejects the idea of Revelation, but maintains
that all men alike entertain innate ideas on
the subject of God and the future life. Inci-
dentally he describes sin as very often attri-
butable to hereditary physical defects, and
declares that a virtuous man, whatever form
his religion may take, will attain to the reward
of happiness. In his estimate of the value of
common sense as a guide, and of the significance
of the universality of fundamental ideas, Herbert
was a pioneer of the school of common-sense
philosophers, as in other respects he was one of
the very first of English autobiographers and
of English metaphysicians ; while in his Ode
npon a Question moved ichether Love should
continue Forever, he was, perhaps, the first to
employ the stanza of In Memoriarn.

Herbert's work encountered a storm of in-
dignation ; but it bore fruit in the work of
Hobbes, Chillingworth, Cudworth, and the
later speculations of Deists such as Toland,
Tindal, and Collins.'

Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5th, 1588,
his birth being hastened by the fear of Mrs.
Hobbes that the Spaniards of the Armada wei'e
making straight for the town of Malmesbury,
in which the Hobbes family had set up its tent.
The philosopher's fiither was vicar of an ad-
joining parish — and rather a strange one, if the

story be true that he once woke up in church
after a nap and informed the congregation that
"cl'dbs were trumps." This worldly-minded
cleric had to leave his charge in conse(]uence
of an act of violence perpetrated upon one of his
flock. A worthy uncle, who was, like Shake-
speare's father, a glover, took charge of the
deserted family, and sent Tom to school and
college (Magdalen Hall, Oxford, 1603-8).
When he was twenty, and had taken his degree,
he had the good fortune to be made a page to
William Cavendish, a youth of eighteen, born
with an enormous silver spoon in his mouth, and
afterwards second Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes
made the grand tour and settled down happily
at Chatsworth, the friend of his pupil and a
favourite with his familv, who gave him all the
books he wanted. Under the Cavendishes' roof
he probably met Ben Jonson, and may have
met Bacon.

Unhappily for Hobbes's continuance in the
retreat in which his serenest and happiest
years were passed, the second Earl died of
" excessive indulgence in good living " in 1628,
and the Dowager Countess found it necessary,
or at any rate desirable, to retrench. Hobbes
was comparatively fortunate in obtaining a
travelling tutorship. He was now forty years
of age, and it was during the next few years
that an introduction to geometry and to Des-
cartes first gave his mind its decided philosophic
bent. Among other learned men whose per-
sonal acquaintance he made on his foreign tour
should be mentioned Galileo, Gassendi, Mer-
senne, and Selden. It became his ambition now
to be numbered among the philosophers. He
abandoned the grazing habit of the mere scholar,
and devoted himself to profound contemplations
upon the origin of matter. In 1631 he was
mightily pleased on being recalled to the
Cavendish household as tutor to the third Earl,
and henceforth his relations with the family
were virtually unbroken. He was as felicitous
in the munificent patronage of the Cavendish
family as was Locke subsequently in that of "Sir
Francis Masham, at Gates, in Essex." When
he went abroad for the third time, in 1634, he
was welcomed by the European thinkers as a
fellow inquirer. In three years he returned,
and in the intervals of tutorial work, which
became more and more frequent, began the

' See De Ilemusat's interesting monograph on Lord Herbert (Paris, 1871)> t'hurton Collins's edition of
the I'oems (1881), and Sidney Lee's edition of the Aulobiogniphy (with contiuuatiou 188(i).

HOBBES

197

exposition of his system of philosophy. His
meditations were interrupted by the outbreak
of the Civil War, upon which Hobbes, who was
not a fighting man, led the van of the emigres
to France, where he continued eleven years.

Hobbes, the Hei-bcrt Spencer of the seven-
teenth century, now connncnced steady work at
his system of synthetic philosophy. It is true
that he contributed nothing of the slightest
value to the special sciences ; but he worked
out a legal and political theory which had a
very powerful and direct effect upon the course
of speculation, while the indirect effects of his
system of inquiry were undoubtedly immense.
His " selfish system " of moral philosophy was
expounded primarily in one or two minor
writings, especially the De Corpore Politico, the
Ehmenta Phihsophiea de Cive, and the small
Treatise on Human Nature, followed by an
admirably cogent Letter upo7i Liberty and
Necessity. The most enduring part of his
system is that which forms a contribution to
political science, and it is more important now
historically, on account of its independent and
scientific spirit, than as a working theory. The
most valuable part of his synthesis is summar-
ised in the Leviathan.^ In this Hobbes de-
taches the political man swayed primarily by
fear of his fellow-men, just as the economist
detaches the "economic man" swayed primarily
by self-interest. From the principle of self-
preservation he deduces as a pure necessity the
growth and concentration of the sovereign
power. The bcte-noire of every sensible person,
he implies, is a mixed government — a disputed
sovereignty. Human progress is conditioned
by an implicit contract between the people and
the sovereign — a kind of pact or covenant in
which in the interests of that overwhelming
need, security, the individual {en bloc, thus
forming the people) resigns his right of waging
private war and his right of governing himself
generally into the hands of a sovereign. Mili-
tary, civil, legislative, and administrative power
is transferred wholly into the hands of this
sovereign ; the multitude thus acquires unity
through the agency of this sovereign-Leviathan.
When this sovereign ceases to ensure peace and
to protect his subjects, then and then only the
compact can be relaxed. The end of his insti-
tution is peace, and as long as peace is preserved
the sovereign is supreme, in'esponsible, of in-

• Leviathan : or, The Matter, Form, and Power
a symbolical title-page.

defeasible title. Law is simply the command
of the sovereign. He goes still further, and
identifies law and morality. To maintain order,
he contends, is to enforce morality. If the
Church says otherwise, the Church is wrong ;
but the Churcli in any case must be rigorously
subordinated to tlie authority of the sovereign.
Underneath Hobbes's somewhat crude, and
sometimes incoherent, but always lucidly ex-
pressed, exposition, it will thus be seen that
there is a logical, rationalistic, profound, and
thoroughly modern conception of State right.
Personally Hobbes preferred monarchy, no
doubt, but he scarcely argues for one form of
government more than another ; his special
point is that in every form, monarchic, aristo-
cratic, or democratic, there must be a sovereign
— an ultimate supreme and single authority
(the political like the animal organism being
essentially a unit). Regarding the theory
locally and superficially, Hobbes's contempo-
raries looked upon his sovereign-Leviathan,
invested with supreme power over both material
force and the force of opinion, as a portent and
a monster. Time and competition, however,
have shown Hobbes's theory of the necessity of
State unity to be essentially correct, and in
England the theoretic power of Leviathan
sovereignty has long been conferred upon the
committee of wealthy landowners, lawyers,
and labour controllers which goes by the name
of Parliament.

In morals and law there can be little doubt
that Hobbes is the progenitor of Austin,
Romilly, and Bentham. In logic he is the
ancestor of John Stuart Mill. In many re-
spects he stands as a thinker head and shoulders
above any of his generation, though it included
such powerful thinkers as Descartes, Herbert,
and Pascal. In his time, however, his avowedly
low estimate of human nature caused many
well-intentioned people to regard his views as
blasphemous. His inclination to take a some-
what aggressive and dogmatic line in uphold-
ing the cause of science made him specially
obnoxious to all religious cults alike. The
various sects competed with one another in
repudiating his views and holding him up as
the enemy of religion. And " Hobbism " was
invariably referred to, even by the superior
minds among them, as a kind of shallow Ijut
subversive and poisonous atheism — much as the

of a Commonweclth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), with

198

« LEVIATHAN "

ideas of Voltaire or Tom Paine were referred
to a century ago.

In the meantime, Hobbes's candour in
criticising had led to his rapid retreat from
Paris. He had renewed acquaintance with the
Cavendish family during their exile ; he had
patronised and aided the precocious young
philosopher, William Petty ; he had even for
a time been mathematical tutor to the exiled
Prince of Wales (Charles II.); but he had lost
his best friends Mersenne and Gassendi, he had
managed to alienate Descartes, his views on
ecclesiastical matters were regarded as dan-
gerously subversive, and the Leviathan, which
the author presented in manuscript to Charles
upon his return to Paris after his escape after
Worcester, was deemed by Clarendon and all
the Conservatives to be a most insidious and
demoralising book. The result was that he
had to retreat to England and make his peace
with the " Rump." Like the man of peace that
he was, he justified this reconciliation with the
de facto Leviathan by an ingenious double-
edged sophistry. To the Roundheads he said
that he was setting an example of rational
submission to the existing regime ; to the
Cavaliers he explained that by submitting to
the enemy betimes he was diminishing the
plunder of the usurpers, and so would be better
able, in the fulness of time, to serve his rightful
sovereign.

In 1653 he again became a member of the
Earl of Devonshire's household, this time at
Latimers, in Buckinghamshire. During the
next few years he incurred considerable ridicule
at the hands of John Wallis and the Royal
Societarians by his unguarded incursions into
geometry and his persistent claim to have
solved the problem of squaring the circle. The
Churchmen and politicians of the old school
were only too glad of a pretext to sneer at him
as a mere paradox-monger in philosophy.
Fanaticism was very far at that time from being
fangless, and people were not wanting who
sought in the dangerous growth of " Hobbism "
for an explanation of the great pestilence of
1665. A parliamentary committee in quest
of the best practical means of suppressing
atheism was " instructed to receive information
about Mr. Hobbes's Levinthan."" Fortunately,

Charles II., who always welcomed his appear-
ance at court as a signal for amusement, and
who put him down on the pension list foriPlOO
a year. With the aid of Charles, Arlington,
and the Devonshires he managed to defy the
clergy, though very little love was lost between
them.

When his eightieth year was passed he aban-
doned philosophic controversy, and, like Cowper,
devoted his declining ^-ears to a translation of
Homer into English verse. This long work,
in which the measure adopted is that of the
decasyllabic quatrain, has more of the quaint
to recommend it than of the beautiful, yet it
contains beauties in odd corners, as where, for
instance, the son of Hector in his nurse's arms
with " his beautiful and shining golden head "
is compared to " a star upon her bosom."

In November, 1679, being now \\ell over
ninety-one, Hobbes was attacked by a mortal
complaint, which was aggra\ated by his moving
with the fiimily from Chats worth to Hardwick.
He died there on December 4th, and was buried
in the chancel of the parish church of Hault-
Hucknall.

We get a vivid idea of the philosopher's
personality and habits from the charmingly
unsystematic gossip of Aubrey.' We learn
thus that Hobbes was a decidedly handsome
and wittv old man, exceptionally good-tempered
perhaps for a philosopher, but swayed by
philosophic habits, and latterly, at any rate,
as impatient of contradiction as Descartes or
Spencer himself.

He walked much and contemplated, and he
had in the head of his staff a pen and inkhorn ;
in his pocket was ever a notebook, and as
soon as a thought darted he promptly entered
it in his book, otherwise he might have lost it.
Every chapter was planned out in advance and
in detail, so that he knew at once into what
pigeon-hole the warm idea was to be placed.
He read comparatively little, but thought the
more, and wrote, as we have seen, much. In
his later years he rose about seven, and break-
fasted on bread-and-butter ; then he walked
and meditated till ten ; he dined at eleven, as
his stomach could not bear waiting till the
Earl's dinner at two. After dinner he took a
pipe of tobacco and a nap, and in the afternoon
wrote down his morning's thoughts. He had

the old philosopher had a firm friend in

' After Aubrey read .Sir Leslie Stephen's entcrt^-iiiiiiif^ iiionof;niph on Ilnbbes* (in Enf;lisli Men of
Letters) and Sir .1. F. Stephen's Essays in Uortp Suhl/iitk<r (H.). 'Ihe Lcritithan is reprinted by the Pitt
Press (1903) and in the Universal Library. Molesworth's annotated edition (18^6) is in IG vols.

CLARENDON'S " HISTORY "

199

been much addicted to music in his youth, and
practised on the bass viol. He had always
books of " prick -song " lying on his table, such
as Lawes's songs, and at nigiit, when he was in
bed and the doors made fast, so that he was
sure of being unheard, he would sing aloud for
his health's sake. He denied the conunon
report that he was afraid to be alone on account
of ghosts. He was not afraid of spirits, but
of being knocked on the head for £5 or ^10.
Hobbes was evidently careful about his health,
and a believer in bodily exercise. He played
tennis occasionally, and when in the country,
where there was no tennis-court, walked up and
down hill till he was in a great sweat, and then
had himself rubbed down. Of his vices we
hear little, even from his adversaries. He
calculated, for Aubrey's benefit, that he had
been drunk about a hundred times (not more)
in the course of his life. Kennett speaks of a
natural daughter, whom he called his delictum
pivenfutis, and for whom he provided ; but ir
he had been habitually immoral, his respectable
opponents would hardly have refrained from
obstreperous accusation.

Perhaps the most durable literary monument
of the Commonwealth was the noted History
of Clarendon. As a political narrative of an
historian's own time it has not been surpassed
in this country. Edward Hyde (born at Dinton,
near Salisbury, February, 1609 ; died at Rouen,
December 9th, 1674), who became Earl ot
Clarendon at the Restoration, took a prominent
part in England's history. His reproachful
fidelity in a great cause, his inopportune con-
servatism, his qualifications as a scapegoat, and
the " gust of envy " which finally transported
him back to exile — all these things are bound
up with our knowledge of the great political
struggle between Venetian oligarchy and Tudor
despotism which raged from 1628 to 1688.
The famous History of tlie Rebellion was written
originally in island refuges between 1645 and
1648. Into its texture was subsequently woven
the more public portions of an autobiography,
written 1669-70. The unused portion of this

Lift: of Clarendon (which remains a most in-
teresting and amusing and instructive document)
was subsequently printed in 1759. The History
appeared at Oxford, 1702-4. From the first
it had an important influence uj)on political
thought. It was based upon noble models
(chiefly the Latin historians Livy and Tacitus),
and at its be.st the style, though copious, is
strong and clear. It is partial, discursive,
and uneven ; but it is to be remembered
that it was originally intended partly as a
manifesto, and rather as an "exact memorial
of passages " than a " digested relation."
Nothing can replace it as a vivid narrative of
those twenty memorable years, 1640-60 ; for it
was written by a chief actor, in whose memory
lingered details simply priceless to the historian.
Macaulay justly conmiended it as a splendid
study for a young man, and Sir Walter Scott,
but for Constable's " fall from heaven," would
have annotated it as it deserved.

Clarendon's work suggests a comparison with
Thucydides, in that Hyde was himself a pro-
minent actor in the events that he describes,
and there are, especially in his character-
sketches,^ passages that will bear comparison
with the graffiti of the great Athenian master.
As in the case of Thucydides, too, banishment
from his native country gave Hyde an oppor-
tunity for calm and detached contemplation of
the events through which he had lived. But
there the comparison ends. The inner spirit
of the two men is different. Neither his double
exile nor advancing years brought philosophic
calm or intellectual fairness to Clarendon. He
writes now as a partisan of the monarchy, now
of the Church, now of his own administration ;
lack of insight or of knowledge precludes a
clear vision of his opponents' point of view.
But none the less, Clarendon's work is epoch-
making in the development of English historical
writing. His book is a national monument.
Here the nation's story is told by a man of
practical knowledge, in language well suited to
the subject, and in a tone of honest conviction.
For a century and a half (until its prestige was

' To celebrate the memories of eminent and extraordinary persons Clarendon held to be one of the
principal ends of history ; hence the portraits which fill so many pages. His characters " are not simply
bundles of characteristics, but consistent and full of life, sketched sometimes with affection, sometimes with light
humour. Evelyn described them as so just and tempered, without the least ingredient of passion or tincture of
revenge, yet with such natural and lively touches as show his lordship well knew not only the persons' outsides
but their very interiors." Pepys describes Hyde's eloquence in debate as a mighty pretty thing. He wa« one
of the first statesmen in England who owed promotion directly to literary and forensic skill. As a young man
he knew Jouson, ^V'aller, Selden, Falkland, Hales.

200 THE ROYAL SOCIETY

sapped by the no less partial presentment of regard to the prominent actors in the great
Carljle) it fixed the ideas of Englishmen with Puritan revolution.^

' See Characters and Episodes of the Great Rebellion, ed. G. D. Boyle, 1889. 'Hie best edition of the
History is W. D. Macray's, in 6 vols., 1888, newly collated with the MSS. in the Bodleian.* The O.xford
I'niversity Press, called, after its benefactor, the Clarendon Press, enjoys a monopoly (by Act of Parliament)
of the production of the History in this country. Ranke and Gardiner pass interesting estimates upon
t'lareudon, and there is a most valuable survey of his Life in the Dictionary of National Biography* by
Prof. Firth. A desirable edition of The Life . . . in which is included A Continuation of his History of the
Great Rebellion is that printed at Oxford in 1827.

The inception of the Royal Society has been traced down to 1660 in a previous chapter. In 1661 a new era
opened with the presidency of Sir Robert Moray and the membership of Charles II., who proposed some
laughable experiments to his erudite associates. In 1662 the persevering philosophers were, through the King's
grace and favour, incorporated by charter as the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural
Knowledge. Tlie charter-book of the Society is one of the finest collections of autographs in the world. In
16.55 the Society had gained the adhesion of the singular genius of Robert Hooke (16.35 — 170.3), who had already,
we are told, invented thirty ways of flying, which he communicated to the warden of ^V'adhara. In November,
1662, he was made curator of experiments, and the register testifies to the inconclusive eagerness with which
he rushed from one inquiry to another — from respiration and falling bodies to telegraphy and diving-bells, and
thence with ardour to meteorology. He measured the vibrations of a pendulum, 200 ft. long, attached
to the steeple of St. Paul's ; invented a useful machine for cutting the teeth of watch wheels ; fixed the
thermometrical zero at the freezing-point of water ; and ascertained the number of vibrations corresponding
to musical notes. This he explained on August 8th, 1666, to Pepys, who thought his " discourse in general
mighty fine " but his pretensions " to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings " " a little too much
refined." In 1665 was published his Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, a book
full of ingenious ideas and singular anticipations. It contained the earliest investigations of the " fantastical
colours " of thin plates, with a quasi-explanation by interference, the first notice of the " black spot " in
soap-bubbles, and a theory of light as "a. very short vibrative motion" transverse to straight lines of propagation
through a "homogeneous medium." Heat was defined as "a property of a body arising from the motion or
agitation of its parts," and the real nature of combustion was pointed out in detail, eleven jears before the
publication of Mayow's similar discovery. Amongst other original ideas and anticipations of this fertile brain,
it will sufl[ice to mention the discourse on gravity containing the happv idea of measuring its force by the
swinging of the pendulum, from which dates the clear idea of the mutual attraction of the heavenly bodies
and of the planetary movements, tliough Hooke had not the mathematical ability to work out his theories.
Similarly he devised an anemometer, divined the rotation of Jupiter, described the refraction of light, and
in>'ented a spiral spring to regulate the balance of watches ; he also expounded the true theory of elasticity,
suggested several new forms of barometer, and first stated the law of inverse squares. Aubrey gives a particular
description of this extraordinary man : " He is but of middling stature, something crooked, pale faced, and his
face but little belowe, but his head is lardge ; his eie full and popping, and not quick ; a grey eie. He haz
a delicate head of hair, browne, and of an excellent moist curie. He is and ever was very temperate and
moderate in dyet, etc. As he is of prodigious inventive head, so is he a person of great vertue and goodnes.
Now when I have sayd his inventive faculty is so great, you cannot imagine his memory to be excellent, for they
are like two bucketts, as one goes up the other goes downe. He is certainly the greatest mechanick tliis day
in the world." John Flamstecd (1646 — 1719), the first Astronomer Royal, was a prouiinent member of the
Society from 1680 to 1700. He owed his appointment and the foundation of the Observatory to the indig-
nation of Charles II. that there were not better celestial maps in existence for the use of seamen. Over-
worked, ill, and querulous though he was, Flamsteed achieved the most amazing results, his work with that
of Hooke helping to bridge the gulf that separated Tycho Brahe from Newton. A contemporary and rival
of Flamsteed during the early days of the Society, and one to whom the suggestion and encouragement of
Newton's I'rincipiu was far more directly due, was Edmund Halley (1656 — 1742), the founder of cometary
astronomy, still familiarly known through " H.alley's comet." Another pillar of the Society, and one of the
most robust inventive minds that a prolific age gave birth to, was John \\'allis (1616 — 1703), wlio was educated at
Felsted .School, and was a predecessor of Newton at Trinity, Cambridge. His Arithmetica Jnfinilorum (Oxford,
1655) was the most stimulating mathematical book that Knglanil so far had produced, and it contained the
germs of the difl'erential calculus. He also wrote a very interesting English grammar, and undertook with
success to teach a deaf-mute to speak. In mathematical history \Vallis was the greatest of Newton's precursors.
An almost equally eminent group is formed by the botanical and zoological pioneers — Nehemiah Grew, William
Derham, Francis W'illoughby, and John Ray. Of the physicians and chemists of the mid-century, Sydenham
and Mayow best deserve to rank among those in whom scientific knowledge was combined with im.aginative
insight. In " hydraulics," which tlicn occupied such a large field in practical science, Sir Samuel Morland
forms a link between the hazy conceptions of the Marquis of ^Vorcester and our first practical engine-builder,
Tliomas Newcomen. But the reputation of all these pioneers in their several departments of scientific progress
pales before that of John Ray (1627 — 170.5), the first true systematist of the animal kingdom, as Cuvier called
him — the greatest precursor of Buffon, Linuseus, Cuvier, and Darwiu.

BOOK lY

SATIRE AND ESSAY

201 16

CHAPTER I
THE RESTORATION : SAMUEL BUTLER

Between modern thoujfht, on some at least of its more important sides, and the thouj^lit of men liefore
the Restoration, there is a great gulf fixed. A political thinker in tlic present day would find it equally liard
to discuss any point of statesmansliip witli Lord Hurleigli or Oliver Cromwell. . . . But no gulf of this sort
parts us from the men who followed tlie Restoration. Paley would liave found no difficulty in understanding
Tillotson ; Newton and Sir llumpliry Davy would have tallied vvilliout a sense of .sevorancc. Tliere would
have heen nothing to liinder a perfectly clear discussion on government or law between John Locke and
Jeremy Bentliam." — J. R. Gkekn, A Short History of the English People.

diaries II. and literature — The birtli of modern English prose — Samuel Butler — A master of rliyme

and caricature.

a"^HE gulf in thought and politics whicli
separated the men of the Restoi-ation
from their ancestors who lived befoi'e the
Puritan flood was almost equally marked in
the domain of literature. The old English
Renaissance, which had long been dying, now
ceased to breathe, and a new departure in
intellectual civilisation began. The great dis-
location which had taken place in society
created a singular insensibility among the wits
of the new court to the great poets and
dramatists of the Elizabethan age. Charles I.
had been a devoted admirer of Shakespeare ;
but to Charles II. there was something insupei'-
ably archaic, old-fashioned, and semi-barbaric
about the dramatist whom his father and
grandfather had delighted to honour. His
impatience under the tirades of the Elizabethan
drama is amusingly depicted in Woodstoclc.
The personal influence of the restored monarch
upon English letters was far from insignificant.
"The King," says Burnet, "had little or no
literature, but true and good sense, and had
got a right notion of style, for he was in France
at a time when they were much set on reform-
ing their language. It soon appeared that he
had a true taste." By this Burnet means that
he approved a style which was pre-eminently
clear, plain, and .short. Everything had long
pointed to the necessity of relieving English
style by an importation of lucidity, brevity,
and grace. Charles instinctively felt the lack
of these qualities in our native literature. His

travels had taught him that France was far
ahead of his own country in these respects.

The royal influence is the more appreciable
at this period, inasmuch as London more than
ever dominated the world of letters, while
the court dominated London. The idea of
the court became avowedly to assimilate its
manners to those of the court of Versailles.
It discarded almost all that remained of
mediaeval usage, and became a drawnig-room
in \vhich, attracted to the throne by security,
curiosity, annisement, and interest, the nobles,
who are at the same time the chief patrons of
letters, meet together and become at once men
of the world and men of the court. The aims
of such a society, which existed for selflsh
amusement, are fairly expressed by Etherege
when he says : " A gentleman ought to dress
well, dance well, fence well, have a talent for
love-letters, a pleasant voice in a room, to be
always very amorous, sufficiently discreet, but
not too constant." Words take the place of
deeds — a pleasant voice in a room. We cannot
bawl, gesticulate, philosophise, or monologise
in a drawinff-room. We learn to narrate con-
cisely, to retail anecdotes, to criticise and to
discuss. Life is passed in visits and conversa-
tions — the art of conversing becomes the chief
of all. A clever comment is preferred to an
imaginative creation. Wit temporarily quits
the province of invention and settles down to
criticism, for the purposes of which the long-
windedness and exuberance of the old stylists

203

204

RESTORATION PROSE

are recognised as manifestly inappropriate. In
order to wing a new fliglit and to cross the
narrow seas our writers have to borrow a pinion
from the hght and dexterous prose of France.

Most of the transitional works of this period
have proved as evanescent as the plays that
heralded the gi-eat romantic di-ama of 1587,
or the spmious battlements that heralded the
Gothic revival of Pugin and Scott. Amidst
all this welter of experiment the solitary form
of Dryden stands like a solid isthmus between
two seas, touching on the one hand the imagi-
nation and richness of the past, and on the
other the calmer and more critical instincts of
the succeeding generation. In one direction
he looks not without experience over the great
imaginative ocean of Tudor and Stuart lite-
rature. In the other he seems to survey in
thought the yet untravelled waters of the
eighteenth century — the world of reason, judg-
ment and science, of the calm serenity, unruffled
optimism, and becoming temper of Berkeley
and Addison, of Robertson and Hume, of Burke
and of Reynolds. In Dryden we shall find
all the most pregnant tendencies of the age
epitomised. In him the poetical prose of the
great tone-poets (such as Milton, Browne, and
Taylor) was transmuted into the prosaic prose
of everyday literature. The loss of picturesque-
ness was great, no doubt, but the gain in
smooth-living might be compared to the
substitution of friction matches for the fiint
and steel of our forefathers.

The Restoration, says Matthew Arnold,
marks the real moment of birth of our
modern prose. Prose's elder sister, Poetry, had
suffered rather heavily from the redistribu-
tion of favours which commonly attends a
birth in the family. For the time being
her chief hope of holding her own seemed
to depend upon her becoming as prosaic as
possible. The new prose was not long in find-
ing a congenial sphere of operations in the
new field of criticism. Poetry, in consequence,
turned its eyes in the same direction, and dis-
covered the unexplored region of metrical satire.
Prose expands from criticism into innumerable
letters, memoirs, essays, and periodicals. Poetry
approximates more and more to prose in sub-
stance, but is carefully diderentiated from it in
foi-m by what comes to be known as poetic
diction. As a variant from satire, it becomes
copiously didactic, and is devoted to ungi-ateful
tasks of translation and paraphrase : to de-

scriptive inventories of the arts and sciences
or to the descriptive enumeration, in the
approved poetic diction of the day, of natural
objects. In the sphere of the drama, the
decline of the old romantic medley, a complete
failure to appreciate such pieces as The Mid-
stimmer N'lghfs Dream or Much Ado about
Nothing, leads to more and more divergent
results. Tragedy degenerates into the ranting
of inflated heroics, of which the sound is mono-
tonous and the sense almost wholly wanting.
In this direction the influence of the com-t in
encouraging an imitation of French models was
far fi-om beneficial. The comedy of the Restora-
tion similarly borrowed everything from the
comedy of France, save the poetry, the delicacy
and the good taste which veiled its grossness.
In it we get a perfect reflection of the licence
which attended the reaction against Puritanism.
The dramatists piqued themselves on the frank-
ness and plain dealing which painted the world
as they saw it — a world of brawls and assigna-
tions, of orgies at Mulberry or Spring Gardens,
of fights with the watch, of lies and double-
ententes, of knaves and dupes, of men who sold
their daughters, and women who cheated their
husbands.

Before we sail into the main current of
Restoration literature in the wake of Dryden,
we must stay to describe a derelict in the year
of grace 1662, a poem unique in our literature,
a strange compound of new wit and old learn-
ing, giving expression to the accumulated
hatred of the Puritans which had become
envenomed in the breasts of thousands during
the time of the Commonwealth. The years of
the Civil War and of the Republic had been
an iron age for literature. For eighteen years
there had been an interregnum in public taste
— no theatres, no books except works of pole-
mical divinity. Cowley and Denham had been
exiled with their sovereign. Waller had re-
mained diunb, and Milton had descended from
Parnassus into the plain. The worst effects
were seen later, in the barrenness of the last
quarter of the seventeenth century. Meanwhile,
the revenge of profane literature against its
saintly oppressors found apj)ropi'iate expression
in a burles([ue. Among burlesijues, however,
Hitdih-as stands alone.

Samuel Butler was the second son of Samuel
Butler, a farmer and churchwarden of Strens-
ham, in Worcestershire, where the poet was
born and baptised in February, 1613. He was

HUDIBRAS "

205

educated at Worcester Free School, and became
a page in the family of Elizuhcth Countess
of Kent at a salary of ^'20 a year. In this
household at Wrest, in Bedfordshire, he met the
scholarly wit and handsome form of Selden, who
did more than any teacher to form and mould
his mind. He also studied painting, and is said
to have painted a head of Oliver Cromwell from
the life ; but his pictures were so little esteemed
in the eighteenth century that they wei"e used
in a windowless house to keep out the rain.
He served in other families as clerk or attendant,
and probably went abroad before 1659, when
he published his first work, a prose tract in
favour of the Stuarts. Next year he married
upori an appointment as secretary to the Earl
of Carbery and steward of Ludlow Castle. He
lived for some years mainly upon his wife's
income, but this dwindled owing to bad invest-
ment, and poor Butler grew progressively
poorer.

Late in 1662 appeared a small anonymous
volume entitled Httdibras; the first part
tmitteii in the time of the late wars. It con-
tained an unfinished burlesque in octosyllabic
verse in three cantos, which as Prior relates
were made known at court by the taste and
influence of the Earl of Dorset. When it was
known, says Johnson, it was necessarily admired ;
the King quoted, the courtiers studied, and the
whole party of the Royalists applauded it.
Every eye watched for the golden shower
which was to fall upon the author, who cer-
tainly was not without his part in the general
expectation. In 1664 the second part appeared ;
the curiosity of the nation was rekindled and
the writer was again praised and elated. But
praise was his whole reward. Clarendon says
Wood gave him reason to hope for places and
employments of value and credit, but no such
advantages did he ever obtain. Oldham wi'ites
his famous lines of indignation :

On Butler who can think without just rage,
Tlie glory and the scandal of his age.

The King was fond of giving Hudibras as a
present to any new face at the court. Clarendon
had a portrait of the author in his library over
the chimney. Only Pepys could not see enough
where the wit lies. But to this day, writes
Aubrey, Butler has got no employment, only
the King gave him . . . {£Q00 ?). " Memo-
randum : satyricall witts disoblige whom they
converse with ; and consequently make to

themselves many enemies and few friends, and
this was his manner and case." " He was of
a middle stature, strong sett, high coloured,
a head of sorrell haiie, a severe and sound
judgment ; a good fellow . . . sanguino
choleriquc, middle-sized, strong. He might
have had preferments at first ; but he would
not except any but very good ones, so at last
he had none at all and dyed in want." Wood
says he was a boon witty companion ; considering
his reputation, however, we know remarkably
little either of the man or his career. He
brought out a third part of Hudibms in 1678,
but left the poem still imperfect, with an
abrupt ending. " Nor can it be thought
strange," says Johnson, " that he should stop
here, however unexpectedly. To write without
reward is sufficiently unpleasing." In his last
years we know that he was much troubled with
gout, but he died of a consumption in Rose
Street, Covent Garden, on September 25th,
1780, and was buried in St. PauFs, Covent
Garden ; " his feet touch the north wall."
Aubrey, Shadwell, and Dr. Davenant were
among his pall-bearers. ITie monument in the
Abbey was put up by Lord Mayor Barber in
1721.

Of the Genuine Remains (ed. Thyer, 1759)
collected and published many years after
Butler's death, the most notable are TTie
Eh'phant in the Moon, a skit on the Royal
Society, a Dialogue of Cat and Puss
ridiculing the heroic plays, and 120 brilliant
" Characters" after the pattern of Overbury,
Fuller, and Earle. These abound in strokes
of shrewdness, sarcasm, and wit such as one
might expect from the author of the best
burlesque poem in the language. Read
especially his sketch of A Small Poet, in
which, while the pattern is modelled upon
Earle, there is not a little anticipatory of the
stronger saturnine luimour of Swift.

Suggestions from the masterpiece of Cervantes
and from Ariosto supply the substratum of
Butler's burlesque. He is a c>nic, and he can
see little in the religious and political pro-
fessions of the Puritan but a mask for cant
and greed. Sir Hudibras (Presbyterian) and
his squire Ralpho (Independent) represent the
odious types of self-seeking " saints " whom
Butler had had the ill-fortune to come across
and the penetration to see through.

As a master of rhyme Butler stands high and
anticipates the feats of such successors as Swift,

206

A KING OF CARICATURE

Cowper, Hood, Calverley, Browning, Gilbert,
and Seaman. As a king of caricature and of
rigmarole he carries us back to John Skelton,
and as with Skelton the octosyllabic measure,
with its terrible facility, continually carries him
off on its back and he seems to be degenerating
into one of the primitive glee-men, rambling in-
terminably into incoherent and irrelevant detail.
ITie lack of measure and form and progress
about the poem is typically and aggravatingly
English.

That Butler''s octosyllabics are over-done to
the point of monotony and that his jokes are
often tasteless while the form of the whole
piece is chaotic — all this may not be denied.
There is enough filth to remind a great French
critic of Rabelais, and enough buffoonery and
tiresome caricatured description to recall Scarron
at his worst. But there is a fitness and a
flavour about Butler's phrasing, terse in its
mother-wit for all the writer's incorrigible
rambling, which a foreign critic, however
eminent, could hardlv be expected fully to
appreciate. And there is a good deal more in
Butler of such qualities as need be concealed
from no man.

There is a genuine satiric impulse about
all that he wrote. He may not ha\e been an
enthusiast for virtue, loyalty, or religion. He
seems, in fact, to have had a sufficiently low
opinion of human nature. But a real indigna-
tion accompanied the insight which enables

him to penetrate the di.sguises which roguery,
hypocrisy, and self-seeking cant are so especially
prone to assume during re^■olutionary times ;
and there is little doubt that the mixture of
cynicism and farce which animates the doggrel
of Hiidihras was much better adapted to stir
the age of Charles H. than the lofty scorn of a
Burke. There is, too, amongst the wit and
satire, learning and buffoonery, a vein of a very
rich humour. Htidtbi-os and his squire Ralpho
set out to put down a bear-baiting, not for
compassion towards the bear, but from hatred
of amusement qua amusement, and tliey express
their views of each other's doctrinal peculiari-
ties with a frankness which is wholly to the
advantage of the inquiring reader.'

It is a mistake to suppose, as Taine did,
that Hud'thras was universallv appreciated in its
own day. Mr. Pepys bought it twice or more
in the hope of being able to discover the
pointed humour of it, yet apparently failing ;
and there is this amount of truth about his
strictures, that Hiidib)-as, like most epics, comic
or otherwise, is relished to-day only in brief
extracts. Sir Conan Doyle has made an
effective use of it in this fashion in his .story of
M'lmh Clarke. Despite the rudeness and clever
schoolboy buffoonery of which Taine in his
most donnish hmnour so acidly complains, a
book the wit and wisdom of which is crystallised
into so many imperishable quotations can
never be wholly forgotten.

' See the passage commencing :

" Presbytery doth but translate I A commonwealth of popery

Tlie Papacy to a free state; | ^^lle^e ev'ry \iHafre is a see."

There is a famous annotated edition of Iludibras by Ur. Zachai-y Grey (the 3 \olume edition of 1819 is,
perhaps, the best), and there are modern editions by Robert Bell (18.5.5) and Brimley Jolnison (1893). The
text has been edited for the Cambridge English Classics by A. R. Waller, 1905. No one wlio is interested
should fail to read the enlivening chapter on the Restoration in Taine's great book on English Literature.
Dr. i;arnett's entertaining Age, of Urydeii, Barrett AV^endell's Tmipn- of lhi> Sem-nti-enth Century (1904), and
Beljame's Le Public et les Hommes de LeI/res (m Angleterre (1B81), are also to be consulted.

CHAPTER II
DRYDEN AND THE RESrORATION DRAMA

" But at whatever period of his life we look at Drydeii, and whatever, for tlie moment, may have been
his poetic creed, there was soiiiethinff in the nature of the man that would not be wholly subdued to what
it worked in. Tliere are continual glimpses of somethinff in liim greater tlian he, hints of possibilities finer
than anything he has done." — Lowkli,, My IStndy Windowx.

" By placing his readers on the same level as himself, Dryden freed criticism of its didactic character ;
and by recognising that there were different methods and principles in literature, and by investigating
them and weighing their merits, he established comparative criticism. Moreover, as a con.sequeiice of these
changes, he raised criticism to the dignity of an art, and estalilished it as a distinct literary form. And
for these reasons he is worthy to be called, in the words of his great successor in the eighteenth century,
'the father of English criticism." " — Introduction to Dryden' n Essay of Drumutic Poesy (ed. D. Nicbol Smith).

John Dryden — Early poems— Comedies— Heroic tragedies — Satires— Fables— Critical essays— Cougreve-

Otway — Nat Lee and Nicholas Rows.

'OHN DRYDEN was born at Aldwinkle
All Saints (the home of old Tom Fuller)
in Northamptonshire in the early part of
August, 1631. His grandfather, Erasmus
Dryden, of Canons Ashby, high sheriff of
Northamptonshire, was created a baronet in
the seventeenth year of James I. ; but the
poet's father was a younger son who married
in 1630 Mary, a granddaughter of Sir Gilbert
Pickering. Dryden was admitted as a scholar at
Westminster under Busby, and passed thence
to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1650.
Dryden's father died in 1654 and left a small
estate at Blakesley to his son. Apart from the
few school exercises and translations, the death
of Cromwell was the first subject of the young
poet's muse :

His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,
For he was great, ere Fortune made him so ;

And wars, like mists that rise against the sun.
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.

After the Restoration this piece fell into a state
of oblivion, from which it may be believed that
the author, who had seen a new light in politics,
was by no means anxious to recall it. His very
next publications, in fact, were the Astrwn
Redux, celebrating the Restoration, and a
panegyric upon the King's coronation. On
leaving Cambridge Dryden seems to have
lodged with Herringman, a bookseller of the
New Exchange, who published his books down

to 1679. His election to the Royal Society in
1662 cemented a connection with many of the
learned men of the time. His literary activity
at this time was not great, but he took the
important step of securing a patron in the
person of Sir Robert Howard, whose sister.
Lady Elizabeth Howard, he married on Decem-
ber 1st, 1663. At the time of his marriage he
had already experienced failure on the boards
of the King's Theatre with the flimsy comedy
The Wild Gallant (February, 1663), and a modi-
fied success with a tragi-comedy. The Rival
Ladic.t, which appeared eight or nine months
later. Alike in their foreign origin, their
rhymed verse, and their coarseness, these pieces
were deliberately aimed at tickling the jaded
and sceptical palate of the newly returned
court.

Dryden's pointed preference for rhyme and
his rejection of dramatic blank verse were the
occasion of the first of his critical controversies,
to which we shall have to refer a little later on.
In the meantime his position as a dramatist
was established by two splendidly mounted
plays. The Indian Qiwen and The Indian
Emperor, brought out at the King's Theatre
during 1664-5. In the first of these plays,
his brother-in-law. Sir Robert Howard, had
a large share. During the disastrous years of
the Plague and the Great Fire, Dryden seems
to have stayed with his father-in-law, Lord

207

208

DRYDEN'S COMEDIES

Berkshire, at Charlton, in Wiltshire. It was
during this period that he composed in elegiac
quatrains his notable poem. Annus Mirahilis,
in which his descriptive power and the fluent
energy of his style are first characteristically
developed. The poem in its general conception
bears a considerable resemblance to the Phar.salia
of Lucan. With the reopening of the theatres
in 1667, Dryden again became active as a play-
wright. On March 2nd, 1667, Nell Gwynn
first fascinated the towii in Dryden''s comedy of
Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen. This was
followed in the autumn by his highly success-
fill adaptation of Moliere's U^tourdi called
Sir Ma/iin Mar-all. A month later appeared
Dryden and Davenant's joint adaptation of
Shakespeare's Tempe.^t, the prologue to which,
in a finely written tribute to Shakespeare from
Dryden's pen, enshrines the lines :

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be ;
Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Dryden now entered into a contract with the
King's Theatre to supply them with plays at
the rate of three a year. As playwright in
ordinary to the company he drew a stipend
of o\er i^300 per annum. But the actual rate
of production was little more than one play
yearly. In August, 1670, his appointment as
Poet Laureate must have brought up his income
to nominally well over 1^600 a year, but his
salary was irregularly paid, and Dryden seems
to have been free at no time fi-om anxieties on
the score of income.

Of Dryden's comedies during this period
several owed their success primarily to their
licence ; in the special sense of comedy or in
the gaiety of humour which can stimulate it,
Dryden cannot be said to have excelled. The
most striking of his plays from 1669 onwards
are not the comedies but the heroic tragedies,
commencing with Tyrannic Love and TVir
Conqiuxt of Granada and ending with Aureng-
zebe, or The Great Mognl. Several of these are
dignified by rant, and by stilted heroics which
Di-ydcn himself would gladly have seen burned.
Some of these traits were notably caricatured in
the Duke of Buckingham's famous farce. The
Rehcarml. The poet Bayes of this farce was
Dryden ; a number of passages in his plays

' " In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,
A man so various that lie seemed to be
Not one but all mankind's epitome :

were parodied, his favourite phrases freely
used, his dress and manners mercilessly imitated
on the boards of his own theatre. Bayes was
first designed to represent Davenant, Drvden's
predecessor as Laureate ; but after Davenant's
death in 1668 and the transference of the laurel
to Dryden the latter became the main object of
attack, and Bayes became his nickname for ever
after. It is evident that the skit was a long time
in preparation, and Buckingham, who was the
ostensible author, is said to have gone for aid
to the author of HiuUhras, to Sprat, and Martin
Cliftbrd, Master of Charterhouse, and great
pains were taken in coaching the actor Lacy in
Dryden's eccentricities of manner. The result
seems hardly commensurate with such a com-
bination of talent, but it had an immense
success in its own day. Dryden hnnself seems to
have taken the assault with admirable humour ;
but he did not spare Buckingham when he
found it safe to assail him a few years later,
and gibbeted him for ever in that inimitable
sketch of Zimri in the first part of Absalom
and Achitophel, published just ten years after
the provocation of 77(^ Rehearsal.^

The next ten years were mainly devoted to
the production of plays, the stage commending
itself to Dryden as being still the one paying
branch of his profession as author. To his
phlegmatic and argumentative mind there was
no especial attraction in the traffic of the stage,
and he adopted the means of cajoling his
audiences which came readiest to his hands. In
his comedies he w^as as ready to appeal to the
to\ni's love of indecency as in his dramas he
appealed to their political prejudice, or in his
tragedies to their singular love of bombast,
while for their praise and blame in general he
showed little more respect than was shown by
Henry Fielding half a century later. Two
typical comedies were produced in 1672, The
Marriage a la Mode (which after the two
adaptations Sir Martin Mar-all m\(\ Amphitrijon,
is the most successful of all his comedies) and
The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, which
most deservedly failed in spite of its j)rovo-
cative title. Another comedy, T^e Kind Keeper,
or Mr. Limberham, was «itlidra\\n after three
days on the score of off'eiisiveness. In 1667
Dryden produced A mboijna, or The Cntelties of

Stiff in opinions, always in the wronp,
Was everything by starts and nothiiifr long;
But in tlie course of one revolving moon
Was chymist, fiddler, stjitesnian, and luirt'oon."

"ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL "

209

he Dutch to the Knglish Merchants, an inflam-
matory drama dcsiirncd to gratify the anti-
Dutch feeh'ng of the liour. In a similar manner
he took advantage of the Popisli plot, by a
play named The Spanish Friar, or The Dmihle
Dhtcovery performed in 1681. It is a bitter
attack upon the hypocrisy and licentiousness
attributed to the Catholic priesthood. A more
singular performance was The State of Innocence,
an opera which is founded upon Milton's
Paradise Lout {\mh\\A\(i({ 1669). Aubrey states
that Dryden asked Milton's permission to put
his poem into rhyme, and that Milton replied,
" Ah ! you may tag my verses if you will." In
the preface Dryden speaks of Paradise Lost as
" one of the greatest, most noble, and sublime
poems which either this age or nation hath
produced." The admiration was lasting.
Richardson, in his notes to Paradise Lost, tells
the story to the effect that Dryden said to
Lord Buckhurst, " This man cuts us all out,
and the ancients too."

But Dryden's most characteristic works during
his dramatic period were his heroic tragedies.
They were called heroic because they were
written in language elevated above nature, and
exhibited passion in a state of maniacal ecstasy ;
but their chief distinction in the history of
English literature is the fact that they were
written in rhyming couplets. The example, it
is true, had been set to some extent by Davenant,
but the great exponent of rhyming tragedy
both in theory and practice is Dryden himself.
The new fashion was largely due to Charles II.,
who brought back from France confirmed views
as to the propriety of rhyme, the observance of
the unities, and the limitation of the tragic
stage to personages of exalted rank. The most
famous of these rhymed plays were The Conquest
of Granada and AurengzeJje. This use of
rhyme, so necessary to the rhythm of French
verse, gives a monotony and a regularity to
English drama entirely destructive to the free
play of the national genius in poetry. The
experiment of Dryden has consequently never
been repeated, and except for the fifteen years
or so which followed the Restoration the use of
rhymed couplets has been confined on the stage
either to prologues and epilogues, or to short
salvoes specially designed to mark the fall of the
curtain. In the last and best of his rhyming
tragedies, Aurengzehe, he expresses his deter-
mination to return to the form of verse which
had been used with such success by the old

masters, and no longer to make its sense a slave
of .syllables. The result was seen in his fine
blank- verse tragedy, J ^/^or Love, on the theme
of Antony and Cleopatra, which was brought
out at the King's Theatre early in 1678. The
ambition of the play suggests that Dryden
proposed, as an English Corneille, to rival
Shakespeare himself. If so, the result is a
magnificent failure. From a French point of
view the dignity of the play is seriously com-
promised by the unseemly squabble between
Octavia and Cleopatra. Yet for strength and
dignity combined, no dramatic writing of
Dryden approaches the first and last acts of
All for Love. The scene between the devoted
veteran Ventidius and his wayward master with
its delicate fluctuations of feeling is unquestion-
ably superb.

It was in 1681, after a long interval of almost
exclusively dramatic work, in the course of
which his technique had matured in a semi-
miraculous manner, that Dryden resumed the
series of his political poems with his famous
Absalom and Achitophel, the first of English
political sptires in verse. The occasion was the
restless scheming of Shaftesbury and the country
party against the court, and more especially the
determination of Charles that the succession
should take its legitimate course, and should
not be diverted from his brother James to his
illegitimate son Monmouth. The situation
was much aggravated by the attempts of un-
scrupulous Whigs to excite the London mob by
preposterous fictions as to the designs of the
Pope and the Jesuits against our Protestant
land. The plan of the satire was not new to
the public. A Catholic poet had in 1679
paraphrased the scriptural story of Naboth's
vineyard and applied it to the condemnation
of Lord Stafford on account of the Popish Plot.
Neither was the application of the story of
Absalom and Achitophel to the persons of
Monmouth and Shaftesbury first made by
Dryden. A prose paraphrase published in
1680 had already been composed upon this
allusion. But the vigour, the happy adaptation
not only of the incidents but of the very names
of individuals characterised, the glowing force
of these characterisations, and the masterly
vigour- of the metre, in which each verse serves
as a stroke and ends with a lash, gave Dryden's
poem a novelty of effect which has rarely been
surpassed. The depreciation of Shaftesbury is
precisely as effective as it could be made with-

210

« MACFLECKNOE "

out conspicuous exaggeration. The diaracter
of Absalom seems exactly made for the feebly
aspiring and invertebrate Monmouth.

The success of the poem was so great that
the court once more turned to Dryden for his
assistance when it required satirical capital to
be made out of the acquittal of Shaftesbury by
a grand jury upon a charge of high treason.
The Whigs celebrated the event by striking a
medal with a motto "LKtamur," and in March,
1682, Dryden published The Medal, a satire
against sedition, in which he retouched and
re-emphasised his unflattering profile of the
Whig leader, and once more drew upon himself
the vituperation of a nameless crowd of Whig
scribblers. Rather more formidable, however,
was the assault upon Tory bards by Dryden's
chief dramatic adversary, Thomas Shadwell, in
a lampoon called The Medal of John Bayes.
Dryden retaliated in the autumn of 1682 in a
strenuous personal lampoon called MacFleeknoe,
upon the form of which he expended so much
elaboration that it served as a perfect model for
The Dnnciad and all its derivative burlesques.
Richard Flecknoe, an Irish poetaster, is repre-
sented as dying full of years in 1678, and as
justly bequeathing his absolute power over the
realms of nonsense to the most accomplished of
all his heirs :

Shadwell alone of all my sons is he

Who stands confirmed in full stupidity,

The rest to some faint meaniiiff make pretence,

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

The ancient monarch had just time to draw
up the protocol for his successor's coronation
when he was lowered, still declaiming, down a
trap :

Sinking, he left his drugjjet robe behind,
Borne upwards by a subterranean wind ;
The mantle fell to the young prophet's part,
With double portion of his father's art.

I^he assault was followed up by an, if
possible, still more robust buflf'eting of Shadwell
and Settle as Og and Doeg in the second
part of Absalom and Ach'ttophel, which came
out in November, 1682, and was mainly the
work of Nahum Tate, but was so devised
as to work off the aftermath of Dryden''s
satirical harvest in this peculiar field - that,
namely, of the faction-fights between the
petitioners and abhorrers from 1678 to 1682.

Dryden's next great poem was in the nature
of a striking contrast to these masculine but

somewhat brutalising satires. It was an argu-
ment for the faith of the Church of Enirland
as the via ttitissima between deism and popery,
to which he gave the name of Religio Laici. It
seems as if his thoughts havins been directed
to the claims of rival creeds, his mind was
already hankering after an infallible Church.
If this be so, his conversion to Roman Catho-
licism in the coiu'se of the next four years was
the result primarily not of an opportunism with-
out scruple, but of a normal process of religious
evolution from the period in 1682 when his
mind seems to have been first seriously directed
towards religious speculation. This line of
defence in regard to Dryden''s conversion, against
the malice of his enemies, was maintained with
brilliant success by no less an advocate than
Sir Walter Scott. It need not prevent us from
acknowledging that the precise manner and
season of Dryden''s conversion were influenced
by a desire to ingratiate himself with James II.,
or that his new religious manifesto. The Hind
and the Panther, which was published in 1687,
nearly five years after Rel'tgio Laid, was issued
with a view of conciliating the King rather than
unburdening his own conscience in regard to
the variations in its creed. Roth works take a
very high place among Dryden's poems, as
examples of that wonderful ai't of reasoning in
rhyme in which Dryden was scarcely rivalled
by Lucretius. The Hind and the Panther
naturally excited a good deal of clamour against
the author. Two young men destined to fame,
Matt Prior and Charles Montague, wrote a
parody of it in The Tmmi and Country Mouse.
The inconsistencies between the new poem and
lieligio Laid were pointed out by industrious
pamphleteers, but little heed was paid to the
fault which first strikes the modern reader —
namely, the grotesque character of the imagery
that represents a hind and a panther discoursing
at length in couplets upon nice points of
theology and Church discipline, while a subaltern
allegory represents Father Petre as a martin and
the clergy of the Church of England as doves !
The court, however, was perfectly .satisfied,
the piece went through four editions during
161S7, and Dryden was set to work upon a
translation of The Life of Francois Xavier,
which was issued by Tonson with a dedication
to the Queen in 1688.

In 1687 appeared the first and, just ten
years later, the second, more famous Ode in
Honour of St. CedlicCs Day, written to music

DRYDRN'S TRANSLATIONS

211

and celebrating the triumjjhs of hlu? art,, the
inetliod employed being a pai'uble describing
Alexander the Great's feast in the royal halls
of Perscpolis, and the eflfeet of 'rinu)theiis\s
harping upon the eoncpieror's p;issions ; in
1687 also his memorial verses to Anne
Killigrew, a noble example of a poem written
to commission. Far less pleasing in effect is
the official panegyric on the birth of the Prince
of Wales in June, 1688, in which the I^aureate
adopts an ultra-Byzantine posture of adulatory
rapture. Hi,s flowery predictions were cruelly
falsified by the event. The impending revolu-
tion naturally gave the death-blow to Dryden's
hopes of political place or advancement. The
Government which restored Titus Oates to
freedom and estate could not be insensible to
the "honesty" and merit of Thomas Shad well,
another sufferer in the Whig cause. Dryden's
pension was promptly transferred to Tom, and
the late Laureate bent prudently and patiently
to the storm which he could not resist. To his
great honour Dryden grappled with the situa-
tion with all the sturdy tenacity of his lym-
phatic temperament, and in the same spirit
which Scott afterwards displayed under similar
circumstances. He may probably have re-
formed his system of living, which can hardly
have been other than extravagant. Certain it
is that if he could not entirely keep out of
debt, he at least kept out of disgrace, and that
the years which followed his apparent ruin, if
not the brilliant part of his life, were the most
honourable and honoured. Debarred from the
sunshine of court favour, Dryden naturally
turned once more to the theatre, though he
always regai-ded his dramatic work as second
best. Yet the two plays that he produced in
1690 proved two of the most vital that ever
came from his pen. These were Don Sebastian,
one of the .stateliest of his declamatory dramas,
containing a once famous scene (Act IV.) be-
tween Sebastian and Dorax, and AivphUryon,
the most humorous of his adaptations (from
Plautus through Moliere). The later efforts of
the veteran playwright were not so fortunate ;
Cleomene.s (1692) was very coldly received, and
his last play, Love Triimiphant (1694), was a
deplorable failure.

More congenial and more distinctive work
remained for Dryden to do in the sphere of

translation and paraphrase, and his chief pub-
lications between 169'i and his death were I'he
Satires of Juvenal and Prrsins, translated into
English verse, 1693; The Works of Vir^-il,
translated into English verse, July, 1697; and
Fables Ancient and Modern, ti-anslated into
verse from Homer, Ovid, Hoccace (Boccaccio),
and Chaucer, 1700. The first of these volumes
gave a foretaste merely of Dryden's power and
method as a translator. Dryden was a very great
metrist and a very great rhetoi-ician, but he was
no great Latinist, and he had none of the space
and leisure which is indispensable to really
scholarly accomplishment. Like most of his
work, therefore, his translation bears the impress
of his necessities; but so sublime a journeyman
was Dryden, so true is it that " his chariot
wheels grew hot with driving," that his versions
and fables have always ranked among the
greatest and most original of his works, and
as among the very finest specimens of literary
paraphrase in any language. It is good to
relate that these versions were warmly welcomed
and richly remunerated by the poet's con-
temporaries.

When his Fabks appeared, Dryden was an
old man, and had suffered a long time with gout
and gravel. On April 30th, 1700, The Postboy
announced that " John Dry<lcn, Esq., the
famous poet, lies a-dying." His death was not
delayed. The amputation of his leg, which was
gangrened, might have saved his life, but
Dryden chose rather to resign it ; and on
Wednesday, May 1st, at three o'clock in the
morning, he died at his own house, 43, Gerrard
Street, Soho, whither he had moved from Long
Acre in 1686. His body was embalmed, and
upon Garth's application was deposited " in
state " at the College of Physicians. On
May 13th (after private burial in St. Anne's,
Soho) he was honoured with a public funeral
more imposing than English poet had ever
received. He was buried in Westminster Abbey
by the side of Chaucer and Cowley, near Spenser
and Jonson, in " Poets' Corner." His monument
there was uncovered in January, 1721.

For a long time Dryden had occupied the
presidential chair in the republic of letters.
And his authority was at least as unquestioned
as that of Sam Johnson seventy, or that of
Victor Hugo a hundred and forty, years later.'

' Pepys first met Dryden in the «its' room at Will's C^offee House (1, Bow ."street, Coveiit Garden) as
early as 1063, and there the poet was still to be .seen thirty years later, with his Chaucerian "down look," his
snuffy waistcoat, and his florid but unimpressive countenance. Round his armchair, placed near the fire in

212

DRYDEN AS CRITIC

He was moreover, by general consent, the best
prose ^vl•ite^ and the best poet of his own day,
and, down to our own, he is still in many
opinions the best prose writer among poets,
and the best poet among prose writers. It is a
singular fact that when literary authorities
were amusing themselves, a score of years ago,
in drawing up lists of the hundred best writers,
the name of Dryden was wholly omitted, and
that the omission was pointed out by a layman
as regards literary criticism — to wit, his present
Majesty, King Edward VII. Before an inter-
national tribunal it may well be doubted
whether Dryden would obtain a hearing among
the first hundred or even two hundred authors,
but where the judges were all Englishmen a
poet so characteristically English seemed rather
strangely overlooked ; yet the strangeness is
rather apparent than real, for few writers of
Dryden's reputation are so little beloved — so
little realised as a man, so little read as an
author. People take him on trust, as, indeed,
they take most of the literature of his period.
Dryden^s endowment is, in fact, of the kind
which appeals niuch more to the literary crafts-
man than to the literary explorer. He shows
little creative power, no profound intuition, his
inventive gifts are far fi-om striking. The
success of his reputation has been to some
extent adventitious. He owed the survival of
his influence largely to the discipleship of Pope,
which was due in no small measure to the
accident that both were Catholics. The key
thus struck by Pope was maintained during
the critical period owing to the enthusiasm of
Johnson, Charles Fox, and Sir Walter Scott.

Dryden's most genuine success was achieved
by the application of vigorous heroic couplets to
the novel purposes of religious argument andkeen
political satire. This, his gradually developed

art of verse narrative, and his extraordinary
technical skill in every branch of his profession,
have gained for him his position, that not
merely of the literary representative of his age,
but of one of the chief pivots in the theory of
literary development from Chaucer's time to
the present. It is noteworthy that Dryden
went on improving to the very last, not only as
a playwright and songster, but also as a versifier
and critic. At the end of his career he was a
perfect master of every literary weapon of which
his age comprehended the use. Of his plays
it might perhaps be said (as Johnson said of
Irene) that it is useless to criticise what nobody
reads. Dryden turned to Drama as a gaffne-
pain. The perceptive insight and synthetic
imagination which it demands were by no
means his strong points. As regards the
critical essays or Examens, in which the Gallic
model was improved upon, it is far otherwise.

Dryden's critical writings, says Mr. Ker,
have been less damaged by the lapse of time,
and have kept their original freshness better
than any literary discourses which can be com-
pared with them. " Every one of his essays
contains some independent judgment ; his love
of literature was instinctive. His mind answered
at once to the touch of poetry, and gave in
return his estimate of it in the other harmony
of prose. There is nothing in literary criticism
more satisfactory, merely as a display of literary
strength and skill, than the essays in which
Dryden's mind is expatiating freely, as in the
Dramatic Poe.iy and the preface to the Fables,
where he faces his adversaries, personal and
impersonal, with the security of a man who has
confidence in his own powers and in the clear-
ness of his eye. He is at his best when he has
set himself to try the value of dogmatic rules
and principles — cautious, respectful, seeming to

winter, and out on the balcony in summer, hung delighted listeners — gay young templars, eager to hear the
reniiiiiscences of one who could recall roistering suppers with Ktherege and Sedley, and Attic evenings with
Waller and Cowley and Davenant ; who could remember the wit-combats between Charles and Killigrew and
the sallies of Nell Gwynn, when she was still mixing strong water foi the gentlemen ; — students from Oxford
and Cambridge who had quitted their books to catch a glimpse of the English Juvenal ;— clever lads about
town, ambitious for a pinch from his snuff-box, which was, as we are told, ecjual to a degree in the Academy
of Wit; -pleasant liumorists, "honest Mr. Swan" the punster, Tom D'Urfey, Browne, and old Sir Roger
L'Kstrange ; men distinguished for their skill in art or science, whom his fame had attracted thither, lliitcliffe,
Kncller, and poor t'losterman. There were those, wlio, like liimself, li.ad achieved high literary distinction,
but wlio were nevertheless proud to ackimwledge him their teaclier — Wycherley, Southerne, Congreve, and
\anbriigli ; Thomas Creech, whose edition of Lucretius had placed him in the front rank of English scholars ;
\V illiaui Walsh, " the best critic in the nation " ; George Stepney, whose juvenile poems had made grey authors
blush ; young t'ollcy Cibber, flushed with the success of his first comedy ; and Samuel Garth, whose admirable
mock-heroic poem is even now not forgotten. 'I'here too were occasionally to be seen those younger men who
were to carry on the work he was so soon to lay down, and who were to connect two great ages of linglisb
literature.

From a Painting by G. Kneller.

John Dryden

OTWAY

213

comply with them, till the time comes for the
stroke that ends the ciicoimter, and leaves the
arena to be cleared for the next antagonist."

As a critic Drydcn was primarily occupied
with the critical topics of his day. He treats
of the hcioic poem and of the characteristics
which should distinguish it ; he expatiates upon
"Nature" and the duty of following it; he
dilates upon the merits and relative functions
of rhyme and blank verse ; he discourses upon
the unities ; he discusses the critical dicta of
his predecessors such as Ben Jonson ; he insists
upon the unchartered excellence of the older
English poetry and drama (Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Fletcher) ; his appreciation of
Shakespeare and Jonson is both enthusiastic
and expert ; he defines wit as a propriety or
congruity of thoughts and words ; he supports
the moderns against the ancients in the gi-cat
battle of which the first skirmishes were
witnessed just before the Restoration.

Dryden's prose Essay of Dramatic Poesy,
written in 1665, touched up two years later
and published in 1668, was his first great out-
standing work ; with the preface to the Fables
it remains the liveliest and the most stimulating
of all his essays. A compte rendu of the
dramatic theories of the day, it is the first
example of comparative English criticism — a
criticism genial in manner and not addressed
over the heads of the public to a starched bench
of scholars, but challenging an open verdict
from the literary world at large. His characters
of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Ben Jonson are
models of happy and discriminating criticism ;
Neander's defence of rhyme is a masterpiece of
ingenious reasoning. Excellent as it is, however,
Dryden's critical power is seen in an even more
favourable light in his introduction to the
Fables of 1700, in which he sets forth his views
of Chaucer, Ovid, and Boccaccio. He also
expresses a noble contrition for the faults of
taste in his plays, while uttering a dignified
protest against the unmannerly zeal of Jeremy
Collier's attack upon the drama and everything
connected therewith.

For the last word in appreciation of Dryden's
prose, and one that comprehends practically
everything that may most fitly be said, we draw
upon one of the most felicitous passages in
what is perhaps the finest essay in Dr. Johnson's
best book : " Criticism, either didactic or de-
fensive, occupies almost all his prose, except
those pages which he has devoted to his

patrons ; but none of his prefaces were ever
thought tedious. They have not the formality
of a settled style in which the first half of the
sentence betrays the other. The clauses are
never balanced, noi- the periods modelled ;
every word seems to drop by chance, though it
falls into its proper place. Nothing is cold
or languid; the whole is airy, animated, and
vigorous ; what is little, is gay ; what is great,
is splendid. He may be thought to mention
himself too frequently; but while he forces
himself upon our esteem, we cannot refuse him
to stand high in his own. Everything is ex-
cused by the play of images and the spriteliness
of expression. Though all is easy, nothing is
feeble ; though all seems careless, there is no-
thing harsh ; and though since his earlier works
more than a century has passed, they have
nothing yet uncouth or obsolete."

After the heroic plays of Dryden, The Mourn-
ing Bride of Congreve and the Venice Preseii'ed
of Otway occupy the first place in traditional
repute as far as this genre is concerned. Con-
greve's one tragedy, produced in 1697, is chiefly
remembered now for its opening verses :

Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak,

and for the passage describing a cathedral,
which Johnson with extravagant praise lauded
beyond any poetical passage in the whole of
the English drama. The play certainly reveals
a tragic power in Congreve which is not wholly
absent even from some of his comedies, such as
The Double Dealer ; yet the verse as a whole
is deplorably stilted, and Congreve is satUy
hampered by the formality in the French style,
or rather an affectation of it in which a
semblance of fine writing has to do duty for
true passion and genuine feeling. Yet " paltry
as it is when compared, we do not say with
Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of
Massinger and Ford, The Mourning Bride stands
very high among the tragedies of the age in
which it was written," and it undoubtedly proved
one of the most successful dramas of its day.
The part of Almeria remained popular until
the eighteenth century was well advanced.
If the tragedy were revived now, .says Leigh
Hunt, the audience would laugh at its inflated
sentences and unconscious prose.

Thomas Otway, son of the Rev. Humphrey
Otway, was born on March 3rd, 1652, at
Trotton, near Midhurst, and was educated at

214

NATHANIEL LEE

Winchester and Christ Church. But the pros-
pect of a living was cut away from him, and we
find him in London in 1671 poor and needy.
In 1675 he produced his boyish play J Icilnades
and thi.s led to Rochester taking him up under
the delusive hope that he had at last discovered
a serious rival to Dry den. Under such auspices
he produced his rhymed tragedy of Don Carlos,
the success of which may have temporarily
annovcd Drvden. This was followed in 1680
by Caitis Marhis, a grotesque adaptation from
Romeo and Juliet. In the meantime, despairing
of any substantial gain from the patronage of
Rochester, whose jealousy was excited by his
philandering with Mrs. Barry, Otway served
two campaigns in Flanders. His talent seems
to have been invigorated in some way, for, in
the same year that he produced the wretched
travesty of Caiu.'i Marnis, he first showed his
remarkable gift of declamation and stage pathos
in The Orphan, a sensational play of some
power, for which hints were obviously derived
from The Tzoo Noble Kinsmen, A King and
No King, and CijmbeUne, though by such a
talent as Otway's the conceptions of a Fletcher
or a Shakespeare could not fail to be vulgarised,
coarsened, and de-supernaturalised. In 1682,
from Saint ReaFs classical and mainly imaginary
nari-ative of the Conjuration dc Venise, Otway
derived the colour and setting for his ambitious
ti'agedy of Venice Preserved. Full of sublimated
rant and spurious pathos, Venire Preserved is
fitted only for the garish light of the theatre.

The closing scenes of Otway 's life (April,
168.5) are more pathetic than any of his dramas.
He made i-'lOO each at least by the most
successful of these ; but his manners were
extravagant, and he gamed and drank away
large sums. One day he went into a coffee-
house in a starving condition and begged a
shiiHiig of a gentleman, who, distressed at his
wretclicd state, gave him a guinea. Otway
rushed off' to a baker's shop, bought a roll,
and was choked while rapidly swallowing the
first mouthful. Pathetic in tiiis connection are
the words of Wood (originally used of George
Pcele)as cited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill: "When
or where he died I cannot tell ; for so it is and
alway hath been, that most poets die poor and
coiise(|ucntly obscurely, and a hard matter it is
to trace them to their graves."

The career of Nathaniel Lee affords a curious
parallel to that of Otway. He was well
educated at Westminster and Trinity, Cam-

bridge, but his career was blighted by early
dissipation and an excessive fondness for the
stage, complicated in his case by a strain of
in.sanity. In the intervals of Bedlam and
intoxication he wrote The Rival Queens
(Roxana and Statira), or Alexander (1677), an
old stage favourite, in blank verse, and another
successful tragedy, Mitkridates, in the following
year. In t^^■o plays, (FAipus and The Duke of
Guise, in which Shaftesbury was attacked, he
collaborated with Dryden. Lee's habitual rant
mounts occasionally almost into the regions of
the Marlowesque. He was almost persuaded to
be a poet. Unfortunately, as in the somewhat
similar case of Christopher Smart, it is very
difficult to distinguish his tumidity from sheer
lunacy. There could not be so much smoke
without a certain amount of fire, and so we
may perhaps allow with Addison that there
is " infinite fire " but greatly " involved." As
with Otway, poor Lee died a piteous death,
the details of which are diversely given. He
got lost in the snow and died of exposure, but
whether he was a fugitive from the mad-house
or a strayed reveller from some tavern is a
disputed point. He was buried in the parish
church of St. Clement Danes on May 6th, 1692.
In Southerne, Rowe, and Lillo we get into
lower and lower strata of " heroic " tragedy.
Thomas Southerne was born in the year of the
Restoration at Oxmantown, near Dublin, and
studied at Trinity College, Dublin ; but came
to England in 1678, and enrolled himself at the
Middle Temple as a student of law. He won
the esteem of Dryden, who wrote a prologue
for his Loyal Brother (1682, a compliment to
the Duke of York), was friendly with Pope, and
lived to become ac(juainted with Gray. He is
said to have fought on the winning side at
Sedgmoor. He was certainly a Nestor among
playwrights, and wrote two plays which proved
wholly to the taste of the ages of Pope and
Johnson. Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage {1694<)
was based upon Aphra Bi'hn's romance of The
Nu7i. Oroonoko (1696) is similarly based upon
the novel by Mrs. Behn. Both plays are
didactic, Isabella denouncing paternal partiality
and Oroonoko the horrors ol' the slave trade.
" Respected as a relic of the past, a decorous
church-goer witli silver hair, Soutliernc lived
far into the eigliLeenth century (1746), and came
sufficiently under its influences to repent his
mingling of tragic and conn'c action in the
same piece ; which indeed he had reason to

NICHOLAS ROWE

215

regret, not because he had done it, but because
he liad not done it better.'"

Nicholas Howe was one of Busby's ])uj)ils at
Westminster, and entered, after he left school,
at the Middle Temple. At twenty-five he
produced his first tragedy. The Avihilious Step-
mother, followed in 1702 by Tamerlane, in
which the distance travei'sed by English drama
since Marlowe can be realised. Tamerlcme is a
magnanimous and very sentiment<'il hero, who
is evidently aping the manner and ])hrascology
of the great ElizabeLlians. His character wiis
drawn with the patriotic intention of represent-
ing " the deliverer" William, while I.ouis XIV.
was caricatured as Bajazet. As Johnson said,
" our quarrel with Louis has been long over,
and it now gratifies neither zeal nor malice to
see him painted with aggravated features like a
Saracen upon a sign." In 1705 Howe attempted
a comedy, The Biter, which caused its inventor
intense mirth, but was not appreciated by an
audience. He returned to the grand tragic
manner, and wrote Jane Shore m " imitation of
Shakespeare's style." Pope deplored that he
should have " professedly imitated the style of a
bad age." His last tragedy was Lady Jane Grey
(1715). In the meantime he had brought out

the first octavo edition of Shakespeare's works
in 1708 with a few notes and emendations, and
a life of the author " such as tradition then
almost expiring could supply." Rowe wa.s
successfid with his own party, the Whigs, from
whom he obtained several good sinecures in
addition to the post of Poet Laureate (August
1st, 1715). "A gentleman," says Dennis,
" who loved to lie in bed all day for his ease
and sit up all night for his pleasure," Howe
adorned his leisure by [jrcparing a version of
Lucan's Pharmlia, which Johnson (fresh from
the congenial task of belabouring Lycidiis)
describes in an ecstasy of exaggeration as " one
of the greatest productions of English poetry."
Of his plays the same critic observes : " He
seldom pierces the breast, but he always
delights the ear and often improves the
understanding." Rowe died in December,
1718, and was buried in Westminster Abbey,
" over against Chaucer." His best known
piece. The Fair Penitent (1718), reads ahno.st
like a travesty of a past Elizabethan drama —
all is sentimental and turgid. The blank
verse, however, is smooth and literary, and
the long speeches are generally rounded off
with end-stopped couplets.^

' Select plays of Dryileii and Otway may be studied in the Mermaid Library. Of Uryden's poems tliere
are excellent editions : the Globe (ed. Christie) and the Aldine (ed. Hooper). 'J"he Satires have also been
edited by Prof. Churton Collins ; select Poemx (Cromwell, Astrce, Annus, Absalom, Retigio, Uind and
Panther) by Christie and Firth (Clarendon Press) ; The Hind and the Panther by W. H. Williams, 1900 ;
while of Dryden's prose, the critical Essai/s* have been finely edited by Prof. Ker (2 vols., 1900). 'Hie
standard edition since the eighteenth-century work of Malone is that of Sir Walter Scott, as revised by Prof.
Saintsbury (author of Dryden in "Men of Letters" and in "Chambers"). The racy Lives of Dryden, Otway,
and Rowe should be read in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's edition of Johnson's Lives* (Oxford, 1905). See also Baker's
Biographia Dramatica, L. N. Chase's English Heroic Play, 190.3, Beljame and 'I'aine (cited in Book IV. Chap. L),
Lowell's essay on Dryden in Among my Books, the Life of Otway in Diet. Nat. Biog., and Dr. Garnett's Age
of Dryden.* Matthew Arnold, in his Preface to the .S'j.i- Ohief Lives of Joluison, speaks up well for Dryden
as a mighty worker for the age of prose. " Let us always bear in mind that the century so %vell represented
by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Swift, and of which the literary history is so powerfully written by Johnson
in his Lives, is a century of prose — a century of which the great work in literature was the formation of
English prose. ... It is the victory of this prose style, ' clear, plain, and short,' over what Burnet calls
' the old style, long and heavy,' which is the distinguished achievement, in the history of English letters,
of the century following the Restoration. From the first it proceeded rapidly and was never checked.
Burnet says of the Chancellor Finch, Earl of Nottingham : ' He was long much admired for his eloquence,
but it was laboured and affected, and he saw it much despised before he died.' A like revolution of taste
brought about a general condemnation of our old prose style, imperfectly disengaged from the style of poetry.
By Johnson's time the new style, the style of prose, was altogether paramount in its own proper domain,
and in its pride of victorious strength had invaded also the domain of poetry."

CHAPTER HI
THE COMIC DRA3IATISTS OF THE RESTORATION

" He wrote ouly a few plays, but they are excellent in their kind. The laws of the drama are strictly
observed in them. They abound in characters, all of which are shadowed with the utmost delicacy, and we
don't meet with so much as one low or coarse jest. The language is everywliere that of men of fashion,
but their actions are those of knaves, a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature,
and frequented what we call polite society." — Voltaire on Congreve.

" I do not know how it is with otliers, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's —
nay, why sliould I not add even of Wycherley's comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and I could
never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation
in real life." — Charles Lamb, On the Artificial C'omedi/ of the Last Centiiri/.

French models — The Restoration stage — Etherege — Wycherley — Sedley — Crowne — Shadwell —
Congreve — Farquhar — Vanbrugh — The Collier controversy.

PASSING from the stage of Shakespeare to
that of Dryden we appear to have
suddenly entered a new world. The repre-
sentatives of the di-ama seem instantly trans-
formed by some Circean potion into beings of a
lower type. The mere fact that the drama had
been proscribed by the Puritans created a furore
for plays among the Royalists. No time was
lost in dragging old favourites by Jonson and
Fletcher out of the seclusion in which they had
remained for over twenty years. But these
plays were so little adapted to the manners of
1660 that it soon became the fashion to regard
them as antediluvian. The two play-houses,
which were all that were licensed in the capital
upon the Restoration, depended primarily upon
the patronage of the court ; and Charles II.
was neither indispo.sed nor wholly unfitted to
become an arbiter of dramatic excellence. In-
accessible as he was to the deeper human
emotions, and without a grain of poetry in his
composition, he was nevertheless a man of
exceptional wit and with an excpiisite taste and
polisli. It was not lii<cly that Charles would
find Shakespeare and the other dramatists before
the flood very much to his taste. His capacity

for being bored by the favourite dramatist of
his martyred father is, there is little doubt, very
accurately illustrated in the pages of Woodstock.
He and his court had returned from the
Continent, where they had become thoroughly
imbued with the French taste ; and they now
looked forward to declamatory tragedy, embody-
ing ideals of supernatural virtue and self-
sacrifice, and couched in rhymed couplets
approaching as near as possible to the French
model. The contemporary taste for extravagant
heroic romances such as those of Madame de
Scuderi confirmed the capricious taste of a
selfish and debauched society for a morbid
and impossible virtue. As regards comedy
the popular taste took the more simple and
intelligible form of a desire for an accurate
presentment of contemporary manners, drawing
its material from society and not from nature,
and consequently depending on wit rather than
on humour. The evolution of stage archi-
tecture, by means of which plays were now pro-
duced no longer upon an exposed stage or
platform but rather as a picture in a frame,
the introduction of movable scenery, and the
substitution of women for boys in female parts'

' Edward Kynaston, who played Evadne in The Maid'.i Tragedy in 1661, i.s believed to have been one of the
last male actors of women's parts on the English stage. According to Pepys he was both the prettiest wom.in
and the handsomest man on the hoards. Another famous actor in feminine rofev was James Nokcs, called
" Nurse Nokes," from his part in Romeo and Juliet. Tlie ladies soon took their revenge by playing men's parts,
to the unconcealed joy of Mr. I'epys.

216

Sm GEORGE ETIIEREGE 217

which now became common, all this aided by foppish airs, the filthy language, and the
French models, of which it is true that the eternal pursuit of women proper to the con-
English made a very blundering use, led rapidly temporary gallant, became the regular staple
to a conception of comedy far removed from of the Restoration comedy. The scene was
that of the favourite Fletcher or the still invariably laid either in the metropolis or its
redoubted Ben Jonson. As the taste for suburbs.^

spectacle, for music, and for rhyming heroics Of the first generation of this comedy, apart

was inseparable from the new tragedy, so the from Drydon, the most typical representatives

' Just before the Puritan revolution of the Civil War closed down the tlieatres, the stage in ICngland seems
to have been in a prosperous condition. There were at least five companies playing pretty regularly: tlie King's
Servants at the Globe (Blackfriars in winter) ; the Queen's Servants at the ('ockpit, Drury Lane ; the Prince's
Servants in Salisbury Court ; two inferior companies at the Fortune and the lied Hull. When the Civil War
broke out, the actors, as might have been expected, ranged themselves on the side of the King. Many of them
went into the royal army : John Lowin, a famous Falsbitf, took an inn called the Three Pigeons, at Brentford,
and died very old and very poor. Wild Robinson was assassinated by the enthusiast Harrison (vide Woodxtock),
who shot him through the head, after he had laid down his arms, exclaiming, "Cursed is he that iloelli tlio work
of the Lord negligently." In 1647 all public stages were pulled down, and by an Act of February 1 1th, 1048,
all actors convicted of acting were to be publicly whipped, and all spectators for each offence fined 5.?.
Many actors must have nearly starved, tliough Cromwell seems to have connived at a certain amount of furtive
activity on the part of the old players, hi March, 1G60, during the dictatorship of General Monk, a bookseller,
John Rhodes, obtained a licence and opened a small theatre, the Cockpit, in Drury Lane, where Betterton
and Kynaston appeared. Rival houses were soon set up at the Red Bull and at Salisbury Court. All these
performed under the authority of the Master of the Revels ; but in August, 1600, the monopoly was shattered
by the issue of a grant empowering Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to erect two companies of
players for the representation of plays in convenient places. After a complicated triangular duel between the
Master of the Revels, Davenant, and Killigrew, by December, 1660, all the chief available actors were grouped
under two flags : Betterton and tne majority of Rhodes's troupe under Davenant at Salisliury Court ; while
Kynaston joined Mohuu, Hart, Clun, and the old actors, as they were called (several of them had been trained
at Blackfriars), who took service under Killigrew in Vere Street, Clare Market. Davenant soon removed to a
house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, while Killigrew established himself in the New Theatre, or Theatre Royal, Drury
Lane, in April, 1663. The internal arrangements of the theatre changed rather rapidly between 1660 and 1700.
At the former date the playhouses had many points of contact with the private, or candle-light, houses under
Queen Elizabeth. By 1700 it approximated much more nearly to the theatre of the present day. When
Charles II. was chief stage patron, and Mr. Pejjys an assiduous playgoer, the pieces were still advertised on the
etreet-posts — the posts which Dr. Johnson used to touch with his stick as be walked along. During the three
last decades of the seventeenth century the time of performance changed rather rapidly from three or half-past
to six in the afternoon. The doors were thrown open at noon, and the leisurely playgoers of that time frequently
wasted half a day sitting in their places. A little later, between 1670 and 1680, rich people would send lackeys
to keep a place for them to witness a new play. After the epilogue, the actors announced the details of their
next performance. The author generally took his benefit on the third performance of his piece. All authors
were free of the theatre in those days, and dead-heads of other kinds seem to have been only too numerous.
The floor of the house was devoted to the half-crown pit ; slightly raised above this was a tier of four-shilling
boxes, above this the eighteen-peuny or middle gallery — notorious as the haunt of vizard masks (" Some there
are," says Dryden, "who take their degrees of lewdness in our middle galleries"). Above were " the gods " of
the shilling gallery, to which footmen were admitted gratis at the end of the fourth act — later, by 1700, to
witness the whole play. The wits and beaux congregated chiefly in the pit, a separate corner of which was
consecrated to the fops, who often made such a noise that the players could hardly make themselves heard. But
ladies often penetrated to the pit, and shared the manners of the place. " Sitting behind in the pit, in a dark
place," says Mr. Pepys, " a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me ; but, after seeing her to
be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all." The stage still extended, but to a decreasing extent, like a
flattened U into the auditorium, and one of the players' entrances at least on each side was in front of the curtain,
which was drawn sideways from the centre. Owing to the experience gained from the court masques arranged by
luigo Jones, the scenic arrangements had been greatly developed since the days of Ben Jonson. The stage was
lighted from above by branches or hoops of candles suspended from the ceiling. The day had passed when the
gallants mounted upon the stage, and aired their finery or drank their tobacco under the gaze of the audience.
The " Fop Alley " to which Davenant alludes appears to have been the passage between the orchestra and the
front row of the pit, from which between the acts the fine gentlemen ogled the boxes. The make-up of the
actors was, as regards effect, probably much the same as at present. A huge periwig crowned the head of each
actor, and uncomplimentary wits were taunted with being less able to judge a play than a peruke. As regards
costume, no pretension was made to historical accuracy, and Henry V. wore the cast-ofl^ clothes of Charles II.
Little advance, in fact, was made in this respect until long after the time of Garrick, who, as we know, played
Macbeth in a scarlet military uniform (for an excellent summary, see Thomas Betterton,* by R. W. Lowe).

218

WYCHERLEY

are Etherege, Wycherley, Sedley, Crown e, and
Shadwell. Sir George Etherege was a man of

fashion and a courtier, who had been much in

Paris, and was familiar with all the devices of

the French stage, and his plays are of historical

importance as pi-otot}'pes of the comedies of

manners so brilliantly developed in the next

generation by Congreve. His first comedy.
The Cumical Revenge,or Love in a Tub, appeared

as early as 1664 ; but his best play. The Man

of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, was only given

to the world twelve years later, in 1676. The

personification of the fashionable coxcomb in

the title-role is said to have been the image of

the author, while tlie heartless rake Dorimant

is believed to have been a study from Rochester.

But Sir Fopling is more interesting as the

ancestor of Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington ; as

for Dorimant, he is perfectly anticipatory of the

foreheads of bronze, hearts like the nether mill-
stone, and tongues set on fire of hell, which

the comic dramatists of the Restoration took

such a peculiar pleasure in depicting. Both as

a mirror of the time and as a piece of stage

construction, Etherege's comedy marks an

advance upon its predecessors. His plays

suffer from a deficiency of plot, a deficiency of

wit, and a superfluity of naughtiness ; beastli-
ness drops from them like honey from the

comb ; yet they cannot be denied to possess a

light airy grace, and to have imbibed some-
thing of the manner though little of the humour
of Moliere.

But the first real master of this earthy sensual
and devilish comedy, as Macaulay calls it, was
William Wycherley, the sou of a Shropshire
squire, who has achieved the reputation of
being the coarsest writer that ever polluted the
English stage — unless, indeed, an even lower
deep was sounded by the fair Aphra Behn —
peace be with her ashes ! Being sent to France
during the Revolution, he became a Catholic ;
but recanted finally, if Pope may be believed,
to recant again. He had learnt of M. de
Montausier the art of wearing gloves and a
peruke, which suflficed in those days to make
a gentleman. This merit and the success of a
filthy piece, Loc'e in a Wood, first produced in
the spring of 1671 , but possibly written earlier,
drew upon him the attentions of the Duchess
of Cleveland, and the mnitresse procured the

' The end of the plain dealer himself — of "manly Wycherley," as his contemporaries called him — was not
unfitting such an egrpg-ious champion of misanthropy, obscenity, and libertin.igc. lie iiicmrod the King's
disfavour by a marriage above his rank, was imprisoned for debt uj)on the lady's death, turned I'apist, and lost

indulgence of the King. Lely''s portrait testifies
to Wycherley's good looks and the absurd fables
which he circulated about his early work are
sufficient evidence of his vanity ; but the
French polish to which he set up a claim is not
very highly estimated by the best judges. He
may be likened, indeed, to the donkey in the
fable imitating the gambols of the lap-dog.
His Gentleman Dancing-Master (1671-2), which
borrows the leading idea from Calderon, has
not unjustly been styled by Hazlitt a long and
foolish farce. Poor though it was, it was
decidedly superior to Love in a Wood.

That Wycherley had benefited by his ex-
perience is shown in his next and most brilliant
comedy. The Counti-y Wife. In this he shows
a strong stage sense. The two chief parts of
Pinchwife and Horner are striking creations.
The preliminary dialogue of Act I. is brilliant
in itself, and admirably adapted to the atmo-
sphere of the play. The gallants are most
skilfully grouped, and the coxcomb Sparkish is
a really humorous conception. Charged with
malicious intention and with esprit du diable,
the piece abounds in opportunities for a
competent troupe of actors. Its one draw-
back is that its loathsome character, topic,
and treatment alike render it absolutely
unactable.

A viler parody of characters and situations
suggested by dramatic genius of the highest
order can hardly be found anywhere than in
Wycherley 's last comedy, Tlte Plain Dealer,
acted in 1674 and printed three years later.
Ideas in this are deliberately taken from
Twelfth Night and from Racine''s Pkiideurs.
The groundwork is based upon Moliere''s Misan-
thrope, while the criticism and defence of the
coarseness of The Conntry Wife is evidently
suggested by Moliere^s brilliant comedy, Le
Cfitiqtte de VEcole des Femmes. " Quantum
mutatus ab illo!" As an acting play, this queer
medley is far inferior to The Country Wife.
Many of the scenes are dull, brutal, and heavy ;
but there are some good indications of character,
especially in the Widow and Jerry Blackacre,
in whom hints have Ijeen foimd for Tony
Lumpkin and his mamma. The moral obtuse-
ness of Wycherley is finely illustrated by
Macaulav when he compares Wyi'lierky''s hero
Manly with Moliere's Alceste.' "Wycherley

SEDLEY AND SHADWELL

219

borrowed Alceste, and turned him into u
ferocious sensualist, who beheved himself as
great a rascal as he thought everybody else.
So depraved was his moral taste that, while he
firmly believed that he was producing a picture
of virtue too exalted for the commerce of this
world, he was really delineating the greatest
rascal that is to be found even in his own
writings."

Of the remaining comedy contemporary with
that of Wycherley it is necessary to do little
more than mention The Mnlhcrry Garden, a
slender comedy by the witty talker Sir Charles
Sedley (1639—1701). The Mulberry Garden,
which owed something to Moliere's Ecok des
Maris, was given in 1668, and, in spite of its
gross impropriety, could elicit even from Mr.
Pepys no more praise than "here and there a
good thing." More urbane is a stage-play which
marks the close of the first period of Restoration
comedy, the Sir Courtly Nice of Crowne —
" little starch Johnnie Crowne," as Rochester
called him. Charles II. gave the author a plot
derived from a Spanish comedy by Moreto
(1661). Charles I., it will be remembered,
rendei'ed the same service to Shirley. But old
Rowley died on the eve of its production, and
so gave Crowne an excuse for bitterly com-
plaining of the non-fulfilment of a promise
(" to see about getting him a place ") by one
who was perhaps the most faithless not only of
men, but even of kings.

Between these two comedies of 1668 and 1685
we must leave a short space in our chronology
for the humorsome comedies of Thomas
Sbadwell, an inedited dramatist who is now
remembered less as having inherited the mantle
of Ben Jonson than as having succeeded to the
druffffet of Flecknoe. Three imitations from the
French— r/fe Sullen Lovers (1668), The Miser,
and 7%e Libei-tine — based in the main upon
Moliere — were followed by some original and,
upon the whole, more vigorous plays such as
Epsom Wells (1676), The Lancashire Witches,
Bury Fair, and The Squire of Alsatia (1689),
this last play dealing with the evil fame of the
sanctuai-y of Wliitefriars, and supplying many
hints to The Fortunes of Nigel. The worthy
" Og " was a capital talker, but his wit deserted
him when he tried to write. He excels, how-
ever, in Smollettian sketches of the coarser

humour of Restoration London. He prided
himself on introducing not less than four new
humours into each comedy. Tlie Sr/nire of
Alsatia needs a glossary of cant words to make
it intelligible to the reader. The Scowrers is
loiuled with Gargantuan descriptions of the
delicacies of the various seasons. The Lanca-
shire Witches is full of folk-lore and dialect, in
order to explain which, when the j)lay was
printed, the author provided a series of erudite
notes. As a collector of strange expressions
and forms of life Sbadwell indeed showed him-
self no unworthy imitator of Ben Jonson,
Dekker, or the omnidicent author of Lenten
Stuff', the puzzling Tom Nash.

The interval which separates Peregrine Pickle
from Tristram Shandy is hardly more marked
than that which separates a play such as
Wycherley 's Plain Dealer (1674) from the first
comedy. The Old Bachelor (1693), of William
Congreve. The depravity of the Revolution
drama is perhaps more dangerous than the
obscenity and ferocious coarseness of the Re-
storation di'ama properly so-called ; so much
more attractive and insidious is the innuendo
of Congreve than the outspoken grossness and
satirical savagery of Wycherley. The substi-
tution of wit for satire, of douhle-entendre for
verbal brutality, is thoroughly indicative of the
polishing process which had been going on
since 1660. On leaving Sbadwell and Wycher-
ley and coming to Congreve, we feel, at any
rate, as Macaulay says, that the worst is over ;
that we are one remove farther from the
Restoration ; that we have passed the nadir of
national taste and morality.

William Congreve was born at Bardsey,
near Leeds, in February, 1670. His father, a
cadet of an old Staffordshire family, had dis-
tinguished himself amonff the cavaliers in the
Civil War, was set down after the Restoration
for the order of the Royal Oak, and subsequently
settled in Ireland under the patronage of the
Earl of Burlinston. " Harmonious Congreve "
passed his childhood at Voughal, went to school
at Kilkenny (the school of Swift and Berkeley),
and completed an excellent education at Trinity
College, Dublin, and the Middle Temple. Con-
greve troubled himself little about pleading,
however, and gave himself up to literature and
society, in which his wit, looks, and cool egotism

the art of flattery. His last act, ten days before his death at the age of seventy-five, was to marry a girl of
sixteen in order to cut his nephew out of the succession. He died in December, 1715, and was buried near
Samuel Butler in the vault of St. Paul's, C'o\'ent Garden.

220

CONGREVE

admirably fitted him to sliine. His ambition
was to double the part of exquisite and man
of letters. The history of his life is the
history of a conflict between these two impulses.
He inclined as he grew older to give a
strong preference to the fine gentleman — a
coxcombry which elicited the excellent reproof
of Voltaire : " If you had been a mere private
gentleman, I should not have come to see
you."

Congreve's success as a dramatist was almost
as rapid and as midisputed as that of Sheridan.
The ease with which he professed his work to
be done is probably just about as delusive.^ It
was in the autumn of 1692 that Congreve sub-
mitted his first play, The Old Batchelor, to
Dryden. Dryden, whose generosity as a critic
is notorious, said that he had never read such
a first play, and lent his services to shape it for
production at Drury Lane in January, 1693.
It was a great success, and was worth a place
to Congreve from Charles Montague, then a
Lord of the Treasury, to whom Congreve dedi-
cated his second play. The Double Dealer, a
much more considerable effort. Love for Love,
his most vivacious stage comedy, was given at
Betterton's new theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields
in 1695. His sole tragedy. The Mourning Bride,
appeared in 1697, and his last piece, The Way
of the World, in 1700. After this he left " the
ungrateful stage " partly owing to the annoy-
ance of his awkward controversy with Jeremy
Collier. Lost to the stage at thirty, Congreve
became the Beau Nash of the literary world.
"Regarded as an extinct volcano, he gave
lunbrage to no rivals ; his urbane and undemon-
strative temper kept him out of literary feuds ;
all agreed to adore so benign and inoffensive a
deity, and the general respect of the lettered
world culminated in Pope's dedication of his
Homer to him — the most splendid literary
tribute the age could bestow. Sinecm-e
Government places made his circumstances more
than easy ; but he suffered continually from
gout, the effect of free living, and he became
blind, or nearly so, in his latter years." Of
the liaisons formed by Congreve with the
actresses of the period, the most notable was

that between him and the fascinating Mrs.
Bracegirdle, for whom he created such pai-ts as
Araminta, Angelica, Cynthia, and Millamant.
But in his premature old age he deserted her
for a haughtier beauty, Henrietta, the sole
daughter of the Great Duke of Marlborough,
to whom he left the bulk of his fortune of
£10,000. He died at his house in London
on January 19th, 1730, and the Duchess
spent his legacy on a diamond necklace, an
ivory image of the poet, and a gorgeous
funeral and monument in Westminster Abbey ;
while poor Bracegirdle went shabby, and the
Congreve family are said to have been left in
a most poetical distress.

Sir Fopling Flutter, Dorimant, Sparkish, and
Sir Courtly Nice — it was among such parts as
these, and not among the ruder satire of The
Plain Dealer or Epsom Wells, that Congreve
sought for the development of his comedy.^
The critics are usually so pre-occupied with
the wit and repartee of Congreve's comedy
that they have perhaps been in some danger of
ignoring the humoiu- which is seldom absent
amidst all the superficial glitter. As a matter
of fact, the two qualities are so compoimded in
Congreve as to form the best possible amalgam
for purposes of the comic stage. It has been
said of Mr. Meredith that he cannot refrain
from making the most unlikely of his characters
wittv, but makes them all alike utter epigrams
culled from The Pilgrini's Serip. The same
thing applies to Congreve, who makes of Jeremy,
a servant in Love for Love, one of the wittiest
figures in the whole realm of English drama.
This seems a rather too literal adaptation of
the Molicrescjue valet, yet the whole of this
play is sparkling with wit and gaiety from
beginning to end. The plot is so incoherent
as to raise the piece little, if at all, above the
level of a farce — a plot was indeed an after-
thought with Congreve ; but the dialogue is so
sparkling, and each one of the characters so
entertaining, that Love for Love is probably on
the whole the brightest and most playable of
Congreve's plays (it made a record run of thir-
teen consecutive nights), though it yields in
intellectuality, and in tlie gossamer wit of the

' "There is a strange alTcct-ition in aiilhnrs of appearing to liave done everything l)y dianoe. The Old
Batchelor was written for amusement in tlie languor of convalescence." Yet it is composed, says Johnson, with
great elaboration of dialogue and "iiu'essant ambition of wit."

' He was, of course, thoroughly conversant with the Latin and tlie French comic ilrama, and ho was
able to reproduce, not only the form of the latter, as when he adojjted the plan of changing the scone upon the
entrance and exit of each character, but also to a considerable extent its external polish and verba refinement.

FARQUHAR

221

dialoj^jiic, to Congi-cvc's last comerly, TJie Waij
of the World. Foi- a stage scene it is almost
impossible to beat that in which Mrs. Foresight
and Mrs. Frail arrive at mutual uiulcrstaiuliiig,
or that in which Tattle illustrates to Scandal
the importance of delicacy in treating a lady's
reputation. But the relations between Mirabel
and Mrs. Millamant in The Way of the World
have a more subtle interest for the under-
standing. The intricacy of the plot, and the
distilled irony in much of the dialogue, exact
an amount of attention which seems at times
hardly consistent with the traffic of the stage ;
yet, taken as a whole. The Way of the World
attains to the high-water mark of English
comedy, or, as Mr. Swinburne calls it, " final
and flawless comedy." It might be called the
conquest of a town coquette, and Millamant is
a perfect coquette. It is a piece of genius in a
writer to make a woman's manner of speech
betray her. Yet you feel sensible of Millamant's
mutinous presence, haughty mouth, bewitching
lips, from the moment when she comes on
"full-sail with her fan spread and her sti'eamers
out and a shoal of fools for tenders, until
she finally consents to dwindle into a wife."
She has all the charm that springs from the
frivolity without the fragility or the febrility
of "Frou-Frou." Crispness of style is perfected
in Congreve. He is at once precise and voluble
— exquisite combination, so rare in English.
Sheridan imitates him, but as a limb of Moliere
would {teste Swinburne) have sufficed to make a
Congreve, so a limb of Congreve, or of Vanbrugh
either for that matter, would have sufficed to
make a Sheridan.

George Farquhar (1678 — 1707), whose work
extends into the early years of Queen Anne's
reign, was the son of a parson, and was
born at Londonderry in 1678. He forsook
Trinity College, Dublin, for the stage ; but
he gave up acting owing to an accident with
a sword, which had nearly proved fatal to
a brother actor in the course of a stage duel.
He obtained a commission as captain in Lord
Orrery's regiment ; but left the army in order
to marry a girl who fell in love with his ap-
pearance, and to obtain her end falsely gave
herself out to be an heiress. Another disap-
pointment came to him through the non-fulfil-
ment of the promise by Ormonde to get him
another regiment. Farquhar came to London
in 1699 with a few guineas in his pocket, and
found it necessary to write for his living. His

plays conse()uently came out in rapid succession,
and, in spite of tiic ill-luck of their author
(who also acted some of their leading roles),
they have much more good humour in them
than those of Wycherley or Congieve. Love
in a Bottle, his first play, given in 1699, has
not much to recommend it save its gaiety and
rattle. The Con.stant Couple (1700) and Sir
Harry Wildair have more character about
them.

Farquhar improved upon all his previous
work in 77ie Recruiting Officer of 1706 ; but
his best play, by common consent, is the last.
The Beaux'' Stratagem, written shortly before
his death. The scene in Tlie Recruiting Officer,
in which Sergeant Kite cajoles two honest
fellows into the belief that they are willing to
serve their Queen, is typical of Farquhar's
breezy style. But The Beaux' Stratagem is
livelier still in the variety of its incidents and
characters. The rascally landlord Boniface,
Squire Sullen, and the inimitable servant
Scrub ; Gibbet the highwayman, the impudent
Archer, and the Irish-French Jesuit, Father
Foigard — all these supply parts which were
keenly appreciated both by actors and audiences
throughout the eighteenth century. The scene
is laid at Lichfield, and the room in the
Georse Inn, in which Boniface entertained
Aimwell, and where Farquhar is believed to
have stayed, is still pointed out.

Sir John Vanbrugh, playwright and architect,
born in the parish of St. Nicholas Aeons,
London, in January, 1664, was the son of
Giles Vanbrugh, who married in 1660 the
youngest daughter of Sir Dudley Carleton.
The production of Colley Gibber's Love's Last
Shift at the Theatre Koyal in January, 1696,
supplied a play to Vanbrugh on which to
hang his first acted comedy. He thought
that it would be interesting to develop the
situation upon which Gibber had rung down
the curtain, and the result was The Relapse, or
Virtue in Danger, given at the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane, on Boxing Day, 1696. The lead-
ing roles in The Relapse — Lord P'oppington,
Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, his daughter Miss
Hoyden, and the maid Abigail — at once estab-
lished themselves in popular favour, and the
piece remained a prime favourite throughout
the eighteenth century. Sheridan's A Trip to
Scarborough is one of the numerous transfor-
mations through which it has passed. Lord
Foppington was splendidly played by Gibber;

222

VANBRUGH

and as a typical fop, he is perhaps the best of
the line commenced by Etherege's Sir Fopling
Flutter, Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, and Gibber's
own Sir Novelty Fashion, and continued in such
parts as Ogleby, Dundreary, and Beau Austin.
The vivacity of TVte Relapse, which springs
from Vanbrugh's happy knack of improvising
upon a situation, is maintained in the stronger
and more original play, The Provoked Wife,
famous for the parts of Sir John Brute and
Lady Brute. Sir John, a bully and a wife-
beater, a peevish sot, a quan-elsonie and rake-
helly coward, is undoul^tedly one of the most
repulsive figures ever seen on any stage, yet
the part seems to have been grandly played by
Betterton, and created a great impression. It
was long afterwards the favourite part of
Garrick, who was in the drunken scene, says
Hazlitt, inimitable. Even more effective and
exhilarating to the modern reader are the
scenes between the affected Lady Fanciful and
her sycophantic French maid. There is a
spontaneous gaiety and ease about these scenes
which was new to the English stage. Vanbrugh
is indeed one of the few men who has known
how to transplant the very delicate and de-
lightful stage prattle of France across the
Channel.

VanbiTJgh's W7i moral levity reaches its climax
in The Confederacy, a comedy combining

an infinite contrivance and intrigue with a
matchless spirit of impudence. Corinna, the
heroine, was by her own admission " a devilish
girl at bottom.'" As for the hero, Dick Amlet,
an incipient Barry Lyndon, he is surely one of
the droUest, most adroit, and most brazen
knaves that ever strutted on the boards. Van-
brugh's remaining comedies — /E«op, The False
Friend, The Mistake, The Country House, and
A Journey to London — are comparatively little
read and unimportant. jFsop, in two parts, a
successful adaptation from M. Boursault, was
given at Drury Lane in 1697; The False Friend
(1702) was derived from the Spanish through
Le Sage ; The Mistake (1705) was a rapid
adaptation from Moliere's Depit Amoureux;
The Cmintry House (1705), like The Con-
federacy, was based upon a comedy by the
popular French playwTJght Dancourt. The
Journey to London, a light comedy which pro-
mised well, was left at his death in a fragmen-
tary condition ; but was finished by Colley
Gibber as ne Provoked Husband, and given
with great success at the Lane on January
10th, 1728, running twenty-eight nights ! Both
this play and The Provoked Wife were accorded
the honours of a French version.^

" The broad and robust humour of Van-
brugh's comedies,'' says Mr. Swinburne, " gives
him a place at the master's (Congreve's) right

' From 1701, wheu he commenced building Castle Howard for Lord Carlisle, " Van " was seriously distracted
from the stage by his grandiose work as an architect. lu 170.3 he designed and built a theatre for himself
at the lower end of the Haymarket. This was specially constructed for opera (the Italian development of
masque), of which he was one of the earliest patrons in this country ; but the theatre showed grave acoustic
defects, and \'anbrugh was very glad to transfer his interest in the concern to another party ; this was in 1708,
three years after the Haymarket Opera House was opened. In the meantime, he had commenced work upon
the vast palace which it was proposed to erect for Marlborough at Woodstock in commemoration of the victory
of Blenheim. Vanbrugh, whose ideas had received an ineffaceable impress from the fa(,ade of \'ersailles and
from the French fortresses in which he had sojourned, had a passion for producing a stupendous effect by means
of size and solidity which amounted almost to megalomania. At Blenheim he had a grand scope, hampered
though he was by the hostility of the Duchess of Marlborough ; but it can hardly be said that he rose fully to his
opportunities, though there is undoubtedly a certain scenic splendour about the general conception. Voltaire
remarked upon Blenheim that if the rooms were as wide as the walls were thick, tlie chateau would be con\enient
enough. But tlie last thing that \'anbrugh thought of was the personal comfort of his clients; provided he made
his effect he was satisfied. His other works included \'anbrugh f 'astle (quite recently demolished) at Blackheath,
the " Goose Pie " (so mercilessly mocked at by Swift) in Whitehall, and Grimthorpc in Lincolnsliire, containing
" the biggest entrance-hall " in the kingdom. Of all these it might bo said, a^: the Earl of Peterborough remarked
of the strange temples and mausolea which the architect designed for the famous gardens at Stowc, " immensity
and Vanbrugh appear in the whole and in every part." His Brobdingnagian style in architecture elicited from
Abel Evans the well-known epitaph —

" Lie heavy on him earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee."

Vanbrugh died at his house at ^Vllitehall on March 26th, 1726. He seemed to ha^•c been much beloved in his
family circle, and was very popular in society and among the Kil-Kats (of tlie \\')iig club so named) as a man of
wit and honour. Walpolc somewhat inconclusively attributes his ease in writing to the fact that ho lived in the
best society, and wrote as they talked.

JEREMY COLLIER 223

hand ; on the left staiuls Farquhar, whose such development ; l)ut as a matter of fact, the

bright light genius is to Congreve's as female Puritan closure intervened in 1642, and the

is to male, as moonlight unto sunlight." T'licse product came to us predominantly thi-ough

threecomicdramatists(\vitliWy(herley)form i)y French and more remotely Spanisli influence,

themselves a distinct facet of Enghsh literature. We must not judge these comedies of a

and not one of the least brilliant. There is a corrupt court (Dryden attributed the main

snap about them and a levity, an artistic de- fault to the courtiers of Charles II.) too harshly,

tachment and consequent techuitjuc which we remembering that when they lost the stage,

shall hardly find elsewhere. Through such plays unlike the Elizabethan drama, they lost all.

as Much Ado, The Merry Wives, Monsieur The town comedies of Shadwell and VVycherley

TJwmas, The Little French Lmci/er, we might are annihilated utterly, and all that remains

have arrived by a purely native process at some is a j)illar of salt.'

' For the history of tlie Restoration drama see VV'aril, Heljaine, and John Genest's Some Account of the
English Stage {10 \'o\s., 1832). W^ychcrley, Coiif;reve, Shadwell, Karquliar, and Vaiil)rugh arc included in the
useful Mermaid Series*: the best plays of each author beinj,^ selected and printed witliout alteration and
without comment, save in the resi)ective introductions. The four chief comic dramatists were edited by Leigh
Hunt, and his edition in 1840 provoked Macaulay's famous Essay in The Edinburgh Review. Compare with this
the essays by Lamb, Hazlitt, Leii^h Hunt, and Mr. VVilliam Archer in his introduction to Farquhar. There
are good sketches of Congreve by Edmund Gosse, Dr. Schmid (1897), A. Bennewitz {C'ongreve und Moliere),
G. S. Street, and A. C. Ewald. Of Vaubrugh there is an excellent edition* by W. C. \\^ard (2 vols., 1893). See
also the article by Thomas Seccombe in the I>ietio7iarij of National Biogruphy (Ivin. 80-94). For our knowledge
of the stage before Colley Gibber we are largely indebted to Mr. Pepys, and to the brief Historical Review of
the Stage entitled Roscius A7iylicunus (1708), by John Downes, book-keeper and prompter to the theatre in
Lincoln's Lin Fields. The best part of what can thus be painfully gleaned is well summarised in R. W. Lowe's
Thomas Betterton* (1891).

A thunderbolt descended from a clear sky upon the corrupt stage of Wycherley, Congreve, and \'anbrugh
when in March, 1698, Jeremy Collier hastily put together and brought out in an octavo of some 300 pages his
famous Short View of the. Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Born in 1650, Collier was educated at
Cambridge (Caius), became Lecturer at Gray's Inn, but three years later refused to take the oaths to \\Mlliam,
and joined the ranks of the nonjurors. A born controversialist, after dealing in a spirit of comparative
moderation with the points indicated by his title. Collier warmed considerably to the work. He denounced
the disrespect shown by the stage to sacred things and sacred persons (to wit, the elergv) ; he fulminated against
the immorality of plays in which the purblind Fondlewife is always triumphantly fooled by some " gay
Lothario" or other; and finally he reverts with tedious erudition to the old argument of authority. His
pamphlet thus stands half-way between the Ilistrio-Mastix of A\'illiam Prynne and the Absolute Vnlaufulness
invoked by VVilliam Law. The book sold like wildfire, and elicited, of course, a whole troupe of replies by
actors and authors, by, among others, Gildon, Wycherley, Filmer, John Dennis, Tom Durfey, Tom Brown,
Motteux, Vanbrugh, and Congreve. Dryden seemeil to admit a certain amount of provocation %vhilc lamenting
the vehemence of the onslaught. " Perhaps the parson stretch'd a point too far," he complains in the Epilogue
to The Pilgrim. The consequence was that societies to curb the licence of the stage sprang up in all quarters ;
the stage was terrorised by informers on the watch for blasphemous expressions ; witli the result that the stage,
among a fluctuating but far from negligible section of Englishmen, obtained a sulphurous reputation for licence
and wickedness, a reputation almost peculiar to our country, and one from which it has never, perhaps, quite
completely recovered.

CHAPTER IV

ESSAYS, LETTERS, AND MEMOIRS: CONTROVERSIAL

AND 3IINOR PROSE

"Such is the romance of authorship, that wliat was intended to be the most private of documents has
become one of the great books. . . . Great as is the fascination of this most personal document as a problem
in literary psychology, not less great is its interest to us as an interpreter of an age which we people with lewd
Rochesters or mere Vicars of Bray. In it we get the accent and flush of these strange days." — Introduction to
the " Globe Pepys " (ed. G. Gregory Smith).

Mr. Pepys and his Diary^John Evelyn — Bishop Burnet — 'Ilie Lives of the Norths — Lucy Hutchinson —
George Savile, Marquis of Halifax — Sir William Temple — The Buttle of the Books — Whitelocke, Luttrell,
Ludlow, and Lilly — Three great antiquaries : Dugdale, \V'ood, and Aubrey.

SAMUEL PEPYS, of an old family of Cottcn-
ham, Cambridgeshire, was the son of John
Pepys,^ a not too prosperous tailor in London,
and was born probably at Brampton, Hunts,
whither his father afterwards retired to a small
estate, on February 23rd, 1633. He left
St. Paul's School in 1650 (he was then "a gi-eat
Roundhead"), and settled at Magdalene College,
Cambridge, to which foundation upon his death
he bequeathed his valuable library." We know
little of his college career, save for the fact that
he was once admonished for being scandalously
overserved with liquor. On December 1st,
1655, when he was still without settled
means of support, he married Elizabeth St.
Michel, a beautiful and portionless girl of
fifteen, daughter of Alexandre St. Michel, a
scatter-brained Huguenot who came to England
in the retinue of Henrietta Maria, and was
dismissed by that Queen for striking a friar.
In 1656 Pepys entered the family, and became
factotum, of his second cousin. Sir Edward
Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich. This
led to a secretaryship and a place at the Navy
Board. He studied the multiplication table,
mastered not only accounts, but all the details
of the navy, and soon became the " life of the
office.'" In January, 1660, he commenced his
famous Diaiy, whicii reveals him to us as
gradually increasing in prosperity. In March,
1668, he made a great speech before the House

of Connnons in defence of the naval administra-
tion, and soon after this became the most
important of the naval officials. In 1668 he
set up his coach. In May, 1669, he had to
give up his diary, as he found the writing so
harmful to his eyesight. Mrs. Pepys died a
few months later. Subsequently he became
secretary to the Admiralty, and obtained a
seat in Parliament. During the Jesuit scare
of 1679 he was accused of complicity in the
" Popish Plot," but was able, though not
without great expense, to clear himself satis-
factorily. In 1683 he accompanied Lord Dart-
mouth to Tangier, and wrote a Journal of the
proceedings. Next year he was chosen President
of the Royal Society, and frequently enter-
tained that body at his house in York
Buildings. U^pon the Revolution he was
cashiered, and then after a short detention
withdrew to a dignified and learned retirement
at Clapham. He lived on until Anne's
reign, and died at Clapham in the odour of
sanctity, having received the sacraments from
the nonjuror, George Hickes, on May 26th,
1703. His contemporary, John Evelyn, speaks
in the highest terms of his industry, knowledge
of the navy, generosity, and learning. He was
buried on June 5th in a vault in St. Olave's,
Hart Street. His neatly written manuscript
Diary was deposited with his other books, in
six bound volumes, at Magdalene College,

' The pronunciation of the surname has been much in dispute ; but the evidence is in favour of peeps,
rather than pe/i.i, pep-pis, p/ipes, pips, or otlier euphonic fancies.
* See Oentlcman'n Magazine, February and Marchj 1000.

221

SAMUEL PEPYS

225

Cambridge. It was written in Shelton''s system
of tachygraphy or shorthand, which Pepys
probably learned as a boy at college. It was
first deciphered between" 181!) and 1822 by
John Smith, afterwards rector of Haldock,
then an undergraduate of St. Jolurs. In 182.5
about iialf the whole of liie transcript was
edited by Lord Braybrooke. It was transcribed
again by Mynors Bright, 1875-9, when four-
fifths of the whole was published. The whole,
save for a few flagrant indecencies, has been
edited by Mr. H. B. Wheatley, 1893-9.

It is a curious fact that within a few years
of the Restoration so many books that can only
be described as quite unicjue in character, such
as Hiulibra.s, Pilgrims Progress, Panidlsc Lost,
Samson Agonistes, and Pepys, His Diai-y, should
have been produced. Not any of them perhaps
are now very much read ; we are strongly
disposed to take them upon trust. There
are strong elements of tediousness in nearly all
of them, yet all of them have become absolutely
part of our literary consciousness.

Pepys is really as unique as St. Simon in his
own way, a more human and more primitive
way ; and he is almost, if not quite, as valuable
to the historian, to the naval and theatrical
historian especially, and also as affording an
unrivalled social picture of his times. Still
more unique is the Diarij as revealing the
whole area of a temperament not in itself,
we imagine, by any means exceptional, always
acquiring, always busy, always curious, always
amused, always making the best of himself,
and parading himself and his good repute as
it were in a fine new coat. His cheerfulness and
interest in life were so animated, his vitality
is so great, that " to read Mr. Pepys is to
enjoy our own brief innings better." But we
marvel especially when we recognise that we
owe a picture as detailed and as unembarrassed
as BoswelPs picture of Johnson to no other
man than to Mr. Pepys himself He was his
own Boswell, and when we reflect on this we
may well come to regard Mr. Pepys as a kind
of man monster, for no man has done the like
before or since. St. Augustine, it is true,
attempted something of the kind, but his
confessions are sadly handicapped by his saint-
ship, as are Rousseau's by his distoi'ting theories
and by the psychological pose he finds it
requisite to assume. But Pepys tells us every-
thing quite cheerfully and simply, without the
gloss either of poetry, romance, or philosophy.

He tells us all his little meannesses and
brutalities (piite frankly. He tells us, for
instance, how he kicked his cook-maid, and
how he was annoyed, not with himself, but
with a nobleman's footboy, who was an
unobserved spectator of the incident. He had
a pretty wife at home, poor wretch ! yet nothing
would content him but to roam abroad and flit
inconstantly from flower to flower. He was
vain, greedy, wanton, pious, repentant, pro-
fligate, all on paper. He lived in an age when
old Rowley led the revels, and he humbly
followed in his wake, and although his Dianj
has its tedious spaces, it is in the end mighty
good sport indeed.

Had Pepys any idea at the back of his mind
that he was addressing a vast audience in the
remote future — that his uni(|uc confidences to
himself would be unravelled some day, and that
the very Pepys would stand revealed to the
world as no other man before or since .'' This
is a question which every reader of Pepys will
put to himself, and it is one which we have
reflected upon not seldom. The best answer
that we have been able to find to it hitherto
is a passage by R. L. Stevenson in his volume
on Men and Books. " Pe[)ys was not such an
ass," says Stevenson, " but that he must have
perceived as he proceeded with his Diarij that
his book was not like other books. He was a
great reader, and he knew what other books
were like. It must at least have crossed his
mind that some one might ultimately decipher
the manuscript, and he himself, with all his
pains and pleasures, be resuscitated in some
later day, and the thought, although dis-
couraged, must have warmed his heart. He
was not such an ass besides but he must have
been conscious of the deadly explosives, the
guncotton and the giant-powder, he was
hoarding in his drawer. Let some contem-
porary light upon the journal, and Pepys was
plunged for ever in social and political disgrace.
We can trace the growth of his terrors by two
facts. In 1660, while the Diary was still in
its youth, he tells about it, as a matter of
course, to a lieutenant in the navy; but in
1669, when it was already near an end, he
could have bitten his tongue out, as the saying
is, because he had let slip his secret to one so
grave and friendly as Sir William Coventry.
And from two other facts I think we may infer
that he had entertained, even if he had not
acquiesced in, the thought, of a f;ir distant

226

BISHOP BURNET

publicity. The first is of capital importance —
the Dhiry was not destroyed. The second — ■
that he took unusual precautions to confound
the cipher in roguish passages — proves beyond
question that he was thinking of some other
reader besides himself. Perhaps while his
friends were admiring the greatness of his
behaviour at the approach of death he may
have had a twinkling hope of immortality."

A very different estimate of the probabilities
of the case is upheld by a less impressionistic
critic, Sir Leslie Stephen. " The piquancy of
the D'lary^ he says, " is not due to its ex-
pression of uncommon emotions, but precisely
to the frankness which reveals emotions, all but
universal, which most people conceal from them-
selves, and nearly all men from others. Boswell
not only felt, but avowed similar weaknesses.
Pepys avowed them, though only to himself.
He was not a hypocrite in cipher, though no
doubt as resened as his neijjhbours in lonji-
hand. The ' unconscious humour ' which
Lowell attributes to him lies in the coolness
of his confession, with which his readers
sympathise, though they would not make
similar confessions themselves. It seems to be
highly improbable that he ever thought of
publicity for his diaries, though he may have
kept them as materials for an autobiography
which was never published."

What is perfectly clear is that Pepys is no
longer what the formal age imagined him to
be, a garrulous braggart who amused after
ages by accident. His ferocious enjoyment
of life and his absorbing greed of sensation
were linked not only with an amazing savoir
vivre, but also with a peculiar gift of frank and
forthright utterance on paper.

A singular contrast to the naughtiness of
this world-famous i-tud^ intime is supplied
by the studious and respectable Diaiy (first
published 1818) of John Evelyn, the loyalist
virtuoso and country gentleman whose long
life from lG!iO to 1706 is almost synchronous
with that of his worthy friend and fellow
diarist. For the two were great friends, though
Pepys cherished an inward laugh at Evelyn's
vanity, and Evelyn was sandblind as regards
the real and imier Pepys.

Evelyn, as has been justly said, never drops
the somewhat artificial manner of the cultivated,
dignified gentleman with a mind open to
appreciate all the best which his age had to
give him on the side of science, miscellaneous

information, artistic taste, but never harassing
his reader with any imaginative or speculative
effort of his own. He represents the last word
of a scholarly but somewhat frigid self-culture.
He was essentially a student who assimilates
with no little versatility the many-sided culture
which foreign travel and a gradual absorption
of Renaissance ideas had rendered possible in
England. He has, too, much of the curiosity
which is so conspicuous in Pepys, but without
Pepys's absorbing zest in the life that he saw
about him. As an elegant virtuoso he is almost
the equal of Horace Walpole in a later age, but
without the propensity to witty and malicious
gossip which renders Horry Walpole so inimit-
able a chronicler of the mental activity of a
period. This absence of the vividly personal
element detracts from the interest of Evelyn's
Dhry, yet it has an interest and value of its own.
It rarely gives the writer's own thoughts or
predilections,but it is careful, minute, scholarly,
and methodical in its descriptions of events and
of persons, of places and buildings and works
of art. ^\1iere he does exhibit some warmth of
personal sentiment is in his loyalty to the
English Church, a loyalty which is characteristic
of what was best and noblest and most con-
sistent in the Royalist party. It is this devotion
which animates and redeems the coldness of
critical reserve and self-repression by which
so many pages of the Diary are coagulated
and benumbed. AVhat it loses in human
interest, however, Evelyn's Diary gains in value
to the historian of civilisation as a compendium
of the culture, the technical knowledge, and
artistic taste of the highest type of educated
English gentleman during the second half of
the seventeenth century.

It was not till 1724 that Thomas Burnet, the
Bishop's thii'd son, published the History of
his Own Time, written by his worthy father
Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury (d. 1715, at. 72).
This work is divided into two parts. The
first includes the period from the accession of
Charles I. to the Revolution of 1688, and
of this the part jjrevious to the Restoration
is a mere sketch. The second part contains an
account of the reigns of William III. and of
Anne as far as the year 1713. Burnet's first
idea was a gossiping history of the half-century
1660-1710; but the appearance of Clarendon's
History exercised a somewhat sinister influence
upon the design. He had the ambition of
converting his book from a brick chronicle into

ROGER NORTH

227

a marble History of Clareiulonian proportions.
The result was perceptibly to blunt tiie
humorous edge of his original reporting. In
his own way Burnet is often delightful ; partial
and journalistic, no doubt ; but giving us a
wonderfully lively, and on the whole not
seriously inaccurate, survey of that revolutionary
period. A busybody, rather obtuse than
otherwise, and full of self-importance, " B." is
yet patriotic above the standard of his age.
He writes consistently as a Whig, but
without the absurd credulity or the selfish
and malignant passion which was so common
among his party. Worse than any partisan-
ship, says the pedant, is the extreme care-
lessness alike of manner, style, and substance
which so often disfigures his pages. His prose
indeed is at times so tedious and confused
and so muddled by parentheses and interlocked
relative clauses that it is almost impossible
to interpret the precise drift of what he is
saying ; but through almost all the aberration
of Burnet's judgment and style we shall recog-
nise qualities as rare as they are welcome in an
historian. The framework of his histoi-y is
constructed upon first-hand evidence and upon
personal knowledge. His historical portraits
are those of men with whom he had come in
close personal contact. He actually lived with
the men of whom he writes. He observed their
errors, their faults, and their vices ; but he is a
humorist and a man of the world, a competent,
energetic man, with a largish horizon, and for
all alike, however they may have treated him,
Burnet retains a shrewd toleration, a most
human and reconciling indulgence.

Burnet's History of his Oicn Time deserves
a place by itself for its frank partisanship and
cheerful anecdotage. The same qualities are
present in a more legitimate sphere in the
delightful Lives of the Norths. Roger North
(d. 1734, cct. 81), son of Dudley, fourth Baron
North, and brother of Francis North, first
Baron Guilford, who was appointed Lord
Chancellor in 1682, was not only a stout cavalier
by race, but was also closely bound by official
position to the government of James II. At
the Revolution he refused to take the oaths,
and retired to his country estate at Rougham,
in Norfolk, \\here he spent a vigorous old age

in gardening, building, music, vindicating the ,
meiiiory of iiis bnjthers Francis and Sir Dudley,
and writing his own autobiogi-aphy. The Lives,
first published in 1744, show the distance
traversed in the biographic art since Manning-
ham collected legal gossip in the Temple.
They are written in a familiar and at times
rather slovenly style, but are full of shrewdness
and good stories, keen observation, and that
instinct for detail so peculiar to the age of
Aubrey and Pcpys. North also wrote a fierce
Examen traversing the Compkat HisUmj of
the Whig chronicler Bishop White Kennett.
His Tory predilections were certainly (juite as
strong as the Wliig prepossessions of his
opponent, and his attack on the History quite
as partial and intemperate in spirit as that of
the less systematic strictures of Swift upon
Bishop Burnet.

Another biography of the time, unknown to
the age which produced it, is the Life of Colonel
Hutchinson, the regicide, bv his wife Lucy.
Born in 1620, she was the third daughter of
Sir Allen Apsley, governor of the Tower. From
the date of her marriage in 1638 she was whoUy
devoted to the husband whose strict relijrious
and political views she henceforth shared. At
the Restoration she managed to save her
husband, whose republican views had prevented
his retaining office under Cromwell, but he
was soon thrown into prison as a suspicious
character, and died in confinement at Deal
Castle. His widow devoted herself henceforth
to the vindication of his character in a pane-
gyrical Life (first printed 1806) which still
pleases through the simplicity of its style
and the single-minded affection which is the
dominant motif of it.

Of the remaining historical writers of the
age, or more precisely, we should sav, the
historical essayists, the most prominent is
George Savile, jNIarquis of Halifiix, whose
reputation is nicely balanced by that of Sir
WiUiam Temple. The mind of Halifax was
one of the loftiest and most statesmanlike in
that age of grovelling factions, above which
it sought continually to maintain itself fairly
poised. He opposed alike the more despotic
acts of Charles and the fury of the so-called
Protestant opposition.^ In his views on govern-

■ He contributed more perhaps than any single man to prevent James II. 's exclusion from the throne, yet
■when James was King he kept entirely aloof from court and visited the seven bishops (at most of whom he
laughed iu his sleeve) in the Tower. After ^Villiam had lauded he took the lead in making him welcome and
in scaring James away from ^VhitehaU. After Somers, perhaps no one took a gi-eater part in the definitiou of

228

SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE

ment he seems indeed to have had much
in common with Bohngbroke in the next
generation, while in regard to toleration and
colonial policy he in more than one respect
anticipated the broader and more luminous ideas
of Burke. The miscellanies of the Marquis of
Halifax, including his Advice to a Dmtglder,

about the Triple Alliance between England,
Holland, and Sweden ; in the same year he
was appointed English ambassador at The
Hague. After his return thence in 1670 he
penned his interesting Observations on the
United Provinces of the Netherlands, which
remained for many years one of the most

The Character of a Trimmer, The Anatomy of popular of political handbooks. The same

an Equivahnt, A Letter to a Dissenter, Cautions
for Choice of Parliament Men, A Rough Draft
of a Neio Model at Sea, and Maxims of State,
were published in one volume in 1700, and
a<;ain in 1704 and in 1717. The famous
Character of a Trimmer (a warm vindication
of Halifax's political temperament) was written
in January, 1685, in answer to an attack upon

might be said of his Essay upon the Original
and Nature of Government, which is notable
not only for some fine images and sensible
definitions, but also as anticipating the view
expressed with less caution nine years later by
Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha (1680),
that the State is the outcome of a patriarchal
system, rather than of a social compact as con-

trimmers in general by Roger TEstrange in his ceived by Hooker or Hobbes. After a period

Observator. Ranke justly calls Halifax one of of prominence as a politician of first rank,

the finest pamphleteei's that ever lived, and Temple was offered an embassy at Madrid, but

most of the pamphlets above named are as preferred to return to the nectarines, cherries,

pregnant with wisdom as with the pointed, " sheen plums," and apricots of his new seat of

ironical wit in which Halifax was one of the Moor Park, near Farnham, where he was set on

first of our writers to excel. Like Chesterfield a pedestal and worshipped as an oracle by his

or Lord Byron, Halifax prided himself on being womenkind. Thither in 1689 came Jonathan

an aristocrat. He wrote about what was goins; on
around him as part of a great comedy. Where
other writers relapse into tedious explanation
or commentary he is quite content to shrug
his shoulder or to raise an eyebrow, and he
expresses himself throughout with the perfect
ease of a fine gentleman and the nonchalance
of a contemporary and associate of that prince
of saunterers. King Charles II. These qualities
perhaps are seen nowhere better than in his
admirable Character of Charles II. This was
not included in his miscellanies, nor was it
printed until 1750, when it was issued with some
fresh maxims with the consent, and probably

Swift {cct. 22) in capacity of amanuensis at a
salary of £%0 a year, and here he first met
Esther Johnson (Stella), whose mother was in
attendance upon Temple's sister. Lady Giftard.
Hither, too, came William III. to discuss the
Triennial Bill and other important matters of
state. On one of these visits William is said
to have taught Temple's amanuensis the Dutch
method of cutting asparagus ; while Temple
himself is less credibly I'eported to have assisted
his young familiar in revising a first draft of
A Tale of a Tub.

During the whole period of his retirement in
1681 Temple had been employed in elaborating

by the desire, of his granddaughter, Lady the essays upon \\hich his literary fame mainly

Burlington. Like most of Halifax's pieces, rests. Six of these had appeared in 1680 under

however, it is probable that it had passed the title of Miscellanea. The second and more

from hand to hand in manuscript long before noteworthy volume, including the papers Of

it was printed. Gardening, Of Heroic Virtue, Of Poetry, and

The character of a trimmer was exemplified the notorious essay on Ancient and Modern

almost as well by Sir AVilliam Temple as by Learning, was issued in 1692. The vein

Halifax himself. But Temple looked down of classical eulogy and reminiscence which

upon conflicting parties not so much from the Temple affects in the essay last mentioned was

standpoint of the philosophic statesman as adopted merely as an elegant prolusion upon

from that of a cautious diplomatist. He was the passing controversy among the wits of

appointed English envoy at Brussels in 1665, France as to the relative merits of ancient

and in 1668 was mainly instrumental in bringing and modern writers. First broached as a

the Revolution Settlement. But tlie fact did not prevent a strong revulsion of sentiment when lie discovered
tliat William was goiiifi; to abandon himself to party jjfovennnent and not put himself above it, and he seems to
have gone as far as to exchange a letter or two with the exiled monarch.

THE ANCIENTS AND THE MODERNS

229

paradox, the superiority of modern poets over
the Greeks and Romans had been seriously
maintained by Charles Perrault in a poem upon
the Sicc/c dc Louis Ic Grand which he read
before the Academy in January, 1687. Fonte-
nelle, in a lighter and far more suggestive
vein, ranged himself with Perrault in his lucid
Digression siir Ics Ancicns ct Ics Modcrnes. La
Fontaine and La Bruyere took the opposite
view. Boileau was extremely angry at the
presumption of Perrault, but it was not until
1694 that he delivered himself magisterially
on the subject in his Reflections on Longinns.
Temple now adopted the tone without possessing
a tithe of the knowledge of a Boileau, but his
essay is light, suggestive, and fanciful, rather
than gravely critical, and too much serious
criticism has already been wasted upon it.

William Wotton was the first to enter the
lists against Temple with his Reflections o?i
Ancient and Modem Learning, published in
1694. Charles Boyle (afterwards Earl of
Orrery), by way of championing the polite
essayist, set to work to edit The Epistles of
Phalaris, which Temple (whose opinion on
such a matter was absolutely worthless) pro-
fessed to regard as genuine. It was when
this conjecture had been ruthlessly demolished
by the learned sarcasm of Bentley that Swift
came to the aid of his patron with the most
enduring relic of the controversy, The Battle
of the Books. Temple had begun to reply to
Bentley, but he was now happily spared the
risk of publication.

As a writer, apart from a weakness for
Gallicisms, which he admitted and tried to
correct. Temple, in his Essays, heralds a develop-
ment in the direction of refinement, rhythmical
finish, and emancipation from the pedantry of
long parentheses and superfluous quotations.
He was also a pioneer in the judicious use of the
paragraph. Hallam, ignoring Halifax, would
assign him the second place, after Dryden,
among the polite authors of his epoch. Swift
gave expression to the belief that he had
advanced our English tongue to as great a
perfection as it could well bear ; Chesterfield
recommended him to his son ; Dr. Johnson
spoke of him as the first writer to give
cadence to the English language ; and Lamb
praises him delightfully in his Essay on the
Genteel Style. During the eighteenth century
his essays were used as exercises and models.
But the progress made during the last half-

century in the dii-ection of the sovereign prose
quality of limpidity bus not been favouraljle
to Temple's literary reputation, and in the
future it is probable that his Letteis and
Memoirs will be valued chiefly by the historian,
while his Essays will remain interesting
primarily for the picture they afford of the
cultured gentleman of the period. A few noble
similes, however, and those majestic words of
consolation addressed to Lady Essex, deserve
and will find a place among the consecrated
passages of English prose.

Among the lesser historians and memoir-
writers, Bulstrode Wliitelocke (1605 — 167-5)
stands pre-eminent. He was a Commissioner
of the Great Seal under the Commonwealth,
and did good service to the state as ambassador
to Sweden. In his retirement under the
Restoration regime he wrote Memorials of
English Affairs from 1625 to 1660, first pub-
lished in 1682, and a journal of his Swedish
embassy, which did not see the light until
1672. Whitelocke hardly aspires to be more
than a chronicler or historical journal writer,
but his work is of the utmost importance to
the historian for the material which it embodies,
including many state papers of importance.

A humbler compilation, made up of diurnal
occurrences and cuttings from newspapers, is
the Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs
of the collector, town gossip, and anti(juary,
Narcissus Luttrell (1657 — 1732). His diary,
which extends from 1678 to 1714, was first
brought into notice by the dexterous use made
of it by Macaulay in his History, which led to
the Clarendon Press printing it in six volumes,
with a rough index, in 1857. LuttrelPs
extensive collection of ballads is now in the
British Museum Library.

Among memoir - writers proper, a not
unimportant place is held by Edmund Ludlow
(1617—1692). To destroy the King and found
a republic was the fixed idea of Ludlow's life,
as to so many ideologists when in unsettled
times the very name of republic becomes a sort
of fetish. Such wei'e the views expressed in
the composition of his Swiss exile, his notable
Memoirs, first printed in 1698-9. Narrow in
outlook, plain and homely in expression, Lud-
low's Memoirs, like those of most of the Puritan
and Parliamentary apologists, form anything
but enlivening reading. Within the range of
the writer's own observation and experience,
however, they are thoroughly honest, and their

230

SIR WILLIAM DUGDALE

integrity is that of the earnest man with few
ideas. Like another Defoe, Ludlow l<ept his
eyes very near down to tlie texture of political
Ufe.i

William Lilly (1602—1681), who also wote
A True History of James I. and Charles I.
showing some power of character-di'awing, is
more noted for his once highly esteemed
astrological ^Titings, and for memoirs which
are still highly entertaining to curiosity-
hunters for the glimpses they afford of con-
temporary humours, bygone manners, and
singular characters with whom this Restoration
Mr. Sludge was brought professionally into con-
nection. The memoirs of that distinguished
virtuoso, Elias Ashmole (1617 — 1692), are like-
wise diverting by reason of their quaint egotism
and minute portrayal of his strenuous conflict
with the various ailments, both major and
minor, to which human flesh is heir. Besides
medicine this worthy antiquary studied pro-
foundly in astrology, physics, mathematics, and
heraldry. He eventually became Windsor
Herald, saved a nice sum of money, and by the
acquisition of the Tradescant antiquities laid
the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum at
Oxford. His marriage connected him with
the great antiquary of the previous generation,
and one of the greatest savants in his own
department that England has ever produced.
This was the great Sir William Dugdale
(1605 — 1686), a native of Warwickshire, who
was educated at Coventry, and showed when
little more than a boy a strong predilection for
antiquarian research.- Sir Christopher Hatton
procured him access to the Cottonian Library
and the Tower records, and he was soon estab-
lished as a pursuivant (Rouge Croix, 1639),
and as the prospective historian of Warwick-
shire. His Antiquities of that county was
eventually issued in 1656, and was hailed at
once as a masterpiece of archa;ological and
topographical research, and as a model county
history for all time. In the meantime, with
much help from the original projector, lioger
Dodsworth (d. 1654), Dugdale had issued the
first volume of his monumental Monasticon
Anglicanurn (1655), containing a vast mass of

information concerning the history, biography,
architecture, inscriptions, and documents of the
great monastic institutions of England prior
to the Reformation — a book in great demand
on the continent among the libraries of foreign
monasteries, though it was looked upon sourly
both by the Puritans and also by the descendants
of those hungry courtiers who had either
begged or purchased vast tracts of Church
property at nominal prices during the reign
of Henry VIH. A second volume appeared
in 1661, and a third in 1673. The best
edition is the greatly augmented one issued by
Bandinel, Caley, and Ellis in 54 parts with
246 illustrations (the latter alone costing
6,000 guineas) in 1813. Dugdale was scarcely
less fortunate in the choice of subjects of
permanent interest and importance in his
History of St. PauTs Cathedral in London,
1658, a detailed account of the chui'ch before
its destruction by the Great Fire, and his
Baronage of England, 3 vols., 1676, the first
really adequate genealogical and biographical
survey of the English nobility. In this noble
series of antiquarian compilations Dugdale was
materially assisted by several of the leading
antiquaries of his day, including Dodsworth,
Spelman, Rushworth, Somner, Aubrey, Ashmole,
and Anthony h. Wood. Dugdale's treatment of
antiquities afibrded to Wood, as he naively
confessed, a glimpse into Elysium, and the
Oxford antiquary gives us a c[uaint picture of
their joint researches in the Cottonian Library
at Westminster (in which he laments that they
were only allowed to peruse two MSS. at a
time), and amidst the vast store of charters and
rolls in the White Tower. Dugdale was
Norroy Herald from the Restoration onwards,
nor did he allow his absorption in black-letter
documents to interfere with the due exaction
of his legitimate fees. He was, in fact, the
terror of heraldic amateurs, interlopers, and
evildoers. He built up a considerable estate,
and Wood, whose foible was not Christian
charity, suggests that his end was hastened
by his over-anxiety about worldly concerns.
He died on Febioiary 10th, 1686, leaving a
somewhat colourless Diary, which was edited

' In speaking of liis autij)athies be often attains a sardonic power which takes the reader by surprise. His
jiarticular account of tlie republican factious which first opposed Cromwell, and after his death fell foul of one
another, is valuable and suggestive. Scott derived some hints from him for his effective sketch of the fifth-
monarchy fanatic in Peveril of the Peak.

' He was born, says Aubrey, at .'5.16 p.m. on September 12th, 1G05, at which precise hour a swarm
of bees pitched under liis mother's chamber window as an omen of his laborious collections.

ANTHONY A WOOD

231

with his letters and other materials by William
Henry Hamper in 1827.

To Dugdale's example and influence was due
in no small measure the vast antiquaiian out-
put of Anthony a Wood. liorn in Oxibrd of
an old county family, Wood was educated at
New College and Tliame Schools, whence he
passed to Merton College (in the street where
his father's house was situated), first as post-
master and then as Bible-clerk. He would
doubtless have succeeded to a fellowship there,
as his brother had done, but for his notoriously
peevish temper. In politics he was a strong
cavalier, but his tastes were musical and
historical rather than political, and he would
have probably relapsed into a very desultory,
futile, and despondent mode of life but for the
keen spirit of emulation roused in him by the
appearance of Dugdale's Warwickshire. He
determined to do a book of the same kind for
his native Oxfordshire, and commenced opera-
tions by perambulating the county, collecting
inscriptions and noting antiquities. Eventually,
however, he restricted his design to a treatise
on the annals of Oxford City and University,
with an account of the antiquities of the
churches, colleges, and public buildings thereof.
The univereity portion was brought out in
Latin in two foho volumes in 1674 as Hi.sioria
et Antiquitates Uiiiversitath Oxoniensis, the
text of Wooers original English vei-sion appear-
ing for the first time under the careful editor-
ship of John Gutch in 1791-6. The city
treatise was not adequately edited until a
hundred years later, when it was brought out
under the auspices of the Oxford Historical
Society. Wood had been greatly assisted in
the biographical part of his work by John
Aubrey, and with Aubrey's assistance and that
of others, especially Andrew Allam, vice-
principal of St. Edmund Hall, he now con-
templated an elaborate biographical dictionary
with a bibliography of all Oxford writers and
bishops. In his history of Oxford he had been
supplied with most of his material ready-made at
tlie hands of the indefatigable Oxford antiquary
of James I.'s time, Brian Twyne. The new
work {Athence Oxon.) was based upon materials
which had to be collected for the first time, in-
volving an enormous amount of industry whether
of research, coiTespondence, or bibliographical
compilation. Biassed as Wood's opinions are,
and censorious as are his judgments, and in-
valuable as was the informal assistance which

he received from such men as j\ubrcy, it re-
mains perfectly marvellous that at a time when
libraries and other instruments of re.search were
in such a ru<linK'ntary state one single man
slioidd have been able to bring together such a
vast corpus of fresh biographical material.
His book, indeed, lias not merclv been the
inspiration and exemplar of all similar works,
but it has proved the core of all biographical
com[)ilation on a large scale in England from
that day to this. It was issued at a consider-
able pecuniary sacrifice in two large folio
volumes in 1691 and 1692, bringing the history
of Oxford writers from 1.500 to 1690. A very
valuable edition with additional material was
brought out by Ur. Philip Bliss in 1813-20,
but a new edition corrected by Wood's own
supplementary papers remains a desideratum.

Wood wrote of his biographical henchman
John Aubrey with contemptuous ingratitude
as " a man of a sparkish garb, a shiftless
pei"son, roving and maggoty-headed, and some-
times little better than crazed, who stuffed his
letters with foolishness, and was often guilty of
grievous misinformation." Such a description
does a gioss injustice to Aubrey, though it
helps us to form some idea of the singularity
of the man whose position among biographical
antiquaries is a unique one. His curiosity had
a twist in it which separated it from that of
the orthodox antiquary, and this sprang from
his conception that it was incumbent on him
to transmit to posterity just those distinctive
traits and peculiarities of the subjects which
ordinary observers deem it convenient to over-
look.

John Aubrey (1626 — 1697) was born at
Easton Percy in the parish of Kington in Wilt-
shire on ^larch 12th, 1626. He was sent to
school wth Hobbes at the house of a \-icar near
Malmesbm-y, and went on to Trinity College,
Oxford ; but the war interrupted his studies
£Uid he was sent home, nuich to his grief, to
associate with grooms and serving-men at his
father's house. With difficulty he persuaded
his father to enter him at the jMiddle Temple.
In 1652 he inherited his father's lands with
many debts and encumbrances, to which he
steadily added until his estate was all gone.
" I was never quiet till all was gone."
In 1667 he began working for AVood. In
1685 he roughly stitched together his Natural
Remarqiu'S on the County of Wilts, a quaint
and breezy concatenation of chapters upon a

232

JOHN AUBREY

diversity of topics : air, springs, rivers, soils,
plants, diseases and cures, worthies, gardens, arts,
the do«nis, wool, clothing trade, fairs, hawking,
fatalities, accidents, and seats. These were
edited by John Britten in 1847. The only
work which was published in his lifetime was
the Miscellanies of 1696, an entertaining
collection of ghost-stories with other weird and
impossible anecdotes of the supernatural. In
June of the following year, during one of his
interminable perambulations, he died, and was
buried in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene at
Oxford. His Brief Lives and other anti-
quarian collectanea were all eventually to find
their way in manuscript into the Oxford
libraries.

Aubrey began his extraordinary series of
Brief Lives, some 400 in number, on the
suggestion of, and with the desire to help,
Anthony a Wood, to whom he became known
in 1667, with his History and Athencv. The
idea was that after Wood had used ^\hat he
required — and he often seems to have embodied
w'hole passages from Aubrey's manuscript Lives
in his Athencv — the text should be returned to
Aubrey, revised and polished into a more
consecutive form and brought out separately.
He seems to have got back his manuscript in a
sadly gelded condition, as he bitterly com-
plains in 1692, and he was much concerned
thenceforth in getting opinions upon it with a
view to shaping it finally for the press. Next
year, however, the manuscript of the Lives was
placed in the Ashmolean Museum, and no
adequate use of it was made until 1813, when
the most interesting of the Lives were published ;
not, however, until 1898 were the Brief Lives
published in their integrity from the originals,
mainly in the Bodleian, by the Rev. Andrew
Clark.

Aubrey, as we are enabled to picture him,

can be described only as a delightful if in-
congruous blend of Sir Andrew Aguecheek,
Jedediah Cleishbotham, and a descriptive re-
porter on a modern New York journal. With
Mr. Pepys and James Boswell he is one of
the three consummate Paul Prys of English
letters. The biographical instinct was de-
veloped in him to an extent that is perhaps
unrivalled for purity and intensity. His
literary style, we must admit, was altogether
unequal to his conceptions. That insatiable
curiosity of his, which time had not yet vulgarised
nor custom staled, had no wings wherewith
to fly. It kept to the earth. Aubrey docs
not try to fathom or to explain greatness.
He takes his heroes at the world's valuation.
But he sees that, although heroes, they are
still men with like absurdities to ourselves ;
and he points out what are to him, Aubrey,
an unprejudiced and incorruptible observer,
the distinctive and peculiar traits or oddities
of each one of them. Hobbes was a profound
philosopher, no doubt, and Aubrey shared
many of his opinions, but what Aubrey was
anxious to inform the world about him is
that he trod both his shoes aside the same
way, that he was much afflicted when bald
by flies, that his favourite diet was whitings,
that he wore Spanish leather boots laced up
the sides with black riljbons, and that in the
middle of the night, when he believed that
everybody else was fast asleep, he would sing
prick-song with a loud voice in order to
exercise his lungs. Similarly with Milton,
Spenser, Fuller, Suckling, Waller, Bacon, and
Shakespeare himself, he gives us many incom-
parable details. Aubrey well understood two
most important axioms of the biographic
art : first, the need of avoiding history and
generalities ; secondly, that the best of men
are but men at the best.^

A LARGE number of minor memoir-writers, who already begin to swarm, and of autobiograpbers, might
without difficulty be enumerated ; the number of such works is constantly increasing as the dust of old libraries
and other depositories of manuscripts is disturbed by emissaries of the Historical Manuscrijjts Commission,
and their finds printed, often in e.rtenno, through the diligence of the Camden or of the Chetham or other
learned publishing societies. It will be sufficient here briefly to mention the names of lleresby, Bramston,
Prideaux.

Sir John Korcsby (lC.'i4 — 1689), a baronet and local magnate of weight in the \Vest Hiding, wrote an
entertaining account of his doings and goings as a member of Parliament in the employment of the court between
1658 and 1688. He was a regular time-server, obsequious, yet ever ready to speak boldly for any douceur that
he conceived to be within his reach ; but though his personality is uninteresting, his close practical view of
men and things is entertiiining because it is so real. Reresby's special patron was the Marquis of Halifax.

' For a most diverting study of Aubrey and his art, see Marcel Schwob, Spicilcge, 1890, 253-67.

ISAAC RAT^ROW

233

Amoiiff " sideliglits " wo liavo a f^liinpso (if Cliarles 11. priniiii^; Uic l'rii]c(r of ()j'aiif,a' ivilli iviiii', and of the
Prince getting very drunk and lircaliing the windows of tlie niaids-nf-lionoiir.

Sir iTolm Braniston (Kil I — 1700) wrote anotlier Iloyalist aiitohiograpliy, wliicl] is very full tliroutfli tlie
closing period of ('liarles ] I. 's reign and (rotrtains much of purely personal interest at the time, wliiili now liy
its very minuteness throws light upon the social and family history of England in Stuart times.

Of Oxford at this same period we get a pleasantly scandalous chronicle at the hands of Ilunijdirey
Prideaux (1(548 — 1724), a good classical scholar, and extremely typical, first of a college don, and tlien of a
garrulous dean. He was Dean of Norwidi from 1702 to 1724.

Among the hcst letters of llio ])eriod, ajiart from those of Halifax, Danhy, TiMnple, Sir iviward Nicholas,
and other politicians, may perhaps he mentioned 7'Ae Verney Letters (puljli-hcd by the Camden Society), the
Savile correspondence, tlio correspondence of the Ilatton family, and tlie perhaps somewhat overpraised
epistles written hy Dorotliy Osborne to her future husband. Sir \\'illiam Temple, between 10.52 and 10.54.
That the personal charm of a very winning woman breathed through these letters is not, however, to be denied,
and there is in addition the romance of a long and arduous courtship. T. P. Courtenay first brought these
letters to light in his Life of Temple, and they led him to proclaim himself one of Dorothy's de\oted servants ;
upon which act of homage, with a delightful n.se of the editorial plural, the incomparable T. B. Macaulay iu
The Edinhuryh exclaims that "we must declare ourselves his rivals." More recently the fair Dorothy has found
a devoted champion and most jealous editor in Judge I'arry.

The amount of religious writing produced between 1000 and 1700 is very extensive ; as, however, it is now
practically unread, our survey of it must l)e rapid. The superior clergy of the first generation after tlie Restoration
include the names of Gilbert Sheldon, J(din Pearson, John t'osin, George Morley, Brian Walton, Seth A\'ard,
John Dolben, Herbert Thorndike, Barnabas Oley, Isaac Barrow, Robert South, Richard Busby, Edmund Pocock,
Lsaac Basire, and Richard Alle.stree, this last being the reputed author of the most famous devotional manual of
the age between Jeremy Taylor and \V'illiam Law (Serious Cull), the homely and unemotional Whole Duty of Man
(1658). Most of the divines above mentioned represent the tradition of the older Caroline Church. Their prose
is somewhat stiff and stately, with old-fashioned embroidery. Pearson, for instance, whose " very dross is gold,"
is a representative High C'hurchman of the old school, and his one immortal contribution to Anglican theology
is his Ex)MKition of the Creed (10.")".)). Pearson's penultimate predecessor as Master of Trinity was Isaac Barrow
(d. 1G77, (ft. 47 ; buried \V'e.stminster Abbey), the Creighton of his time, a man of extraordinary intellectual
eminence and versatility. In mathematics in that time Barrow had but one rival, John W'allis, and both
Barrow and \rallis were educated at Felsted School, then at the height of its reputation undei' the single-minded
and devoted Martin Holbeach. Among Barrow's pupils was Newton, and chief among his .admirers as a pre.acher
and controversialist will ever be remembered the great Earl of Chatham, who impressed upon his sons the
importance of a style as dignified as that of Barrow. The son of a linendraper, and so unruly .as a boy that his
father was wont to exclaim that, if it pleased (iod to take any of his children, he could best spare Isaac, Barrow
attained to the front rank by sheer strength of brain. He was, indeed, an intellectual athlete of the first order,
and a cosmopolitan in respect to human knowledge, being equally eminent in .science and linguistics, in theology
and iu mathem.atics. The first of Cambridge preachers, Barrow's rival in the Oxford pulpit was Robert South
(1683 — 1716), pupil of two of England's mo.st famous pedagogues. Dr. Busby and Dr. Fell (the unlucky transferee
of Martial's Ejiigram,^ i. 33), himself unrivalled for his wit in the pulpit and for his repetition of the formula
" nolo episcopari." He showed his wit by preaching shorter sermons, — he was briefer by two hours than Taylor
or Barrow, and correspondingly more epigrammatic. His sarcasm of Taylor's style was not wholly undeserved :
" I speak the words of soberness. . . . I preach the Gospel not with enticing words of men's wisdom. Nothing
here of the fringes of the North Star, nothing here of the down of angels' wings, or the beautiful locks of
eherubims — no starched similitudes introduced with a 'Tlius have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion.'
The Apostles, poor souls ! were content to take lower ground." Like most of his fellows. South was a
staunch and rather bitter royalist, referring to Milton once as a "blind adder." Bishop Cosin of Durham was
the Pusey, the mind-manager and diplomatist of the Restored Church. Its aggressive exclusiveness is well
represented by Archbishop Sheldon. He it is who was mainly responsible for that exclusion of Puritans which
must ever seem disgraceful to the intelligence no less than to the Christianity of the Protestant Church of
England of 1662. Anglicanism, it might then have seemed, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. A few
concessions would have won over 1,600 out of the 2,000 ejected divines. As it was, many of the best men were
excluded, among them Baxter, Poole, Manton, Bates, C'alamy, Brooks, ^^'atson, Charnock, Caryl, Howe, Flavel,
Bridge, Owen, Goodwin ; many others. By common consent the first place among them falls to Richard Baxter,
born at Rowton, Salop, of a family of decayed freeholders, towards the close of 1615. A conformist originally
both by birth and temper, he grew too puritan for the bisliops and too episcopalian for the Presbyterians. His
personal holiness and extraordinary gifts as a preacher, no less than his casuistic and literary attainments,
designated him for the episcopal bench, but he could not accept it upon the proffered terms, and was driven
out of the Church. He found a Zoar in the village of Acton, where he had as neighbours Lord Halifax and

' "Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare.
Hoc tantum possum dicere : non amo te."

" I do not like thee Dr. Fell,

The reason why 1 cannot tell ;
But this I know, and know fuU well ;
I do not like thee, Dr. Fell."

234 RICHARD BAXTER

Sir Matthew Hale. His friciuls were mimerous and iiifhioiitial ; Iml in their despite he was sliamelessly
persecuted, driven from pillar to post, and subjected to the lash of Jeffreys' merciless tongue. " Richard, thou
art an old fellow, an old kna\e. Thou hast written books enough to fill a cart, and every book as full of .sedition
as an eg-g is full of meat. Hadst thou been whipt out of thy v<riting trade forty years ago, it had been happy.
By the grace of God, I'll look after thee ! "

Apart from his Reliquice (1696), which contains some of tlie mo?t vivid pictures in the whole realm of
autobiography, and "a whole cartload" of lesser books, Baxter wrote throe great beseeching books, which are fit to
rank as the masterpieces of one of the first pastoral geniuses that England has produced. These are The. Saints'
Everlasting Rest (16.50), The Reformed Pastor (1656), and The Call to the Unconverted (16.57). Left saddened and
lonely by the death of his wife, celebrated in the Breviate of 1681, he sought refuge from sorrow and physical
pain in writing and preaching, in harness to the end, and on his death-bed "almost well." About five on the
evening of Monday, December 7th, 1691, Death sent his harbinger, says Sylvester, to summon him away. A
great trembling and coldness awakened nature, and extorted strong cries which continued for some time. At
length he ceased, waiting in patient expectation for his change. The gentle cry in the ear of his housekeeper,
" Death, death," betokened full consciousness to the last, and turning to thank a friend for a visit, he e.xelaimed,
"The Lord teacli you to die." At four o'clock next morning his long suffering was over, and " he entered on
the saints' everlasting rest." Many vied in doing honour to his memory. Conformists and Nonconformists
both lamented him, and accompanied his hearse to the grave from Merchant Taylors' Hall to Christ Church.
Among his many incongruous admirers was Joseph Glanvill (1636 — 1680), the vindicator of witchcraft (,Sadd tivismus
Triumphatus), aiul of the pre-existence of souls {Liuv Orientalis), and the preserver of the fruitful legend of the
" Scholar-Gypsy."

The second generation of Anglican divines after the Restoration was, perhaps, more eminent than the first.
It included the names of William Sancroft,, John Tillotsou, Edward Stillingfleet, Thomas Ken, Gilbert Burnet,
Humphrey Prideaux, Simon Patrick, AVilliam Beveridge, and Tliomas Tenison. Brought up a Calvinist,
Tillotson conformed at the Restoration, and rose by his preaching and his clear lucid English, in which he had
scarcely a rival in that age, to be Dean of St. Paul's. From that position he was elevated, much against his will,
to the uneasy succession of Sancroft, when that archbishop persistently refused to acknowledge the supremacy of
A^'illiara III. A man of a sweet, gentle, and sensitive nature, accustomed to the environment of breathless crowds,
who hung upon his every word, he was unfitted for an elevation so high and so stormy as that which fell to his
lot. Intellectually he was a latitudinarian, and his doctrine has been described as the slioe-horn which drew on
the deism of the eighteenth century. A much stronger prelate was Pepys's " famous young Stillingfleet,"
whom Burnet described as " the learnedest man of his day " ; educated among the liberal Cambridge schoolmen,
represented by Ralph Cudworth and Benjamin AVhichcote, Stillingfleet was in 1659 a strong advocate of accom-
modation {Jreninim) ; later on he produced his erudite Origines Sacrce (1662), but notwithstanding his cool
head, his tolerance, and his learning, he was badly worsted in his encounter with the philosophic Locke.

Tliree more .self-denying and devout prelates than Patrick, Beveridge, and Tenison, pioneers of the
evangelical divines of tlie eighteenth century, could seldom be found living at one time. Yet they are eclipsed
in this age by Dryden's " Good Parson " and Charles II.'s " little black follow who refused Nelly a lodging " —
the saintly Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and ^\'ells. If public opinion could beatify. Ken would take a high
place among the Blessed, along with Bishop Wilson, Thomas More, John Kyrle (the Man of Ross), George
Herbert, Charles Dickens, and Charles Lamb. As Macaulay admits. Ken's " character ajjproaches as near as
human infirmity permits to the ideal perfection of human virtue." He survives in literature in two almost
inspired Lives, and in those two beautiful hymns of Morning and Evening, "Awake, my soul " and " Glory to
Thee, my God, this night." The first owes something to Flatman's Morning Ilynin. The most faithful witness
of his age. Ken refused to take the oaths, and was deprived in 1691. He died at Longleat, March, 1711,
<^t. 74, and his tomb under the chancel window of the handsome church at Frome is still a place of
pilgrimage. As the last spadeful of earth was cast upon his grave, it is recorded that the sun rose and the
children present sang with their clear young voices, " Awake, my soul, and with the sun." The spirit of these
good men is seen in the educational, religious, and philanthropic societies which sprang up and flourished
so beneficently under good Queen Anne. Tlie Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which aimed at
correcting the licence of the times (so conspicuous, as already referred to, upon our comic stage), began to be
formed in 1692, and in ten years' time were already enormously powerful. The Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge was projected by Dr. Thomas Bray in 1699. The Society for the Propagation of tlie Gospel in
Foreign Parts was floated by Bishops Tenison and Compton, Humphrey Prideaux, and Dr. Bray just two
years later. Numerous parochial liliraries and charity schools date from the same period, and exercised an
unmistakable influence in extending and difl'using, and at the same time giving an exce.ssive Puritan tinge to
English Letters (see Josiah \V'oodward's Rise and Progress of the Religious Societies; Life, and Designs of Dr. Bruy,
174G ; Nelson's Life of Bull, 1713 ; Secretan's Life of Nelson ; Overton's Life in the English Church, 1(100-1714 i
(^uarterlg Review, No. 313; Dr. Stough ton's Church of the Restoration, 187-J ; Kempe's Classic Preachers of the
English Church, 1877; Tulloch's English Puritanism, 1H61).

It is prol);il)le that the greatest spiritual energy of the age emanated neither from conformi.sts nor dis.senters
of the old orders (Prcsl)yterians, Independents, and Anabaptists), but from the extraordinary mystics who became
known as Quakers, and whose proper place in the .scheme of the univer.so (were they mad fanatics or the salt of
the earth .') it is still so difficult to define {cf, Macaulay and Carlyle). Discontent with the shams of a State

GEORGE FOX 235

Chuixh, wlipther Presbyterian, Episcopal, Baptist, or iMrlopciideiit, may liave wi-ll coiilrilnitiMl to the ris^e of
these mystical aiirt mysterious i)sy(;hopaths. }{ut, as with other mysties (the family lil<ciiess is notable), the
conviction of illumination from within and ilirect f;;ui(lance from the unseen world is their predominant feature.
They have religion (conventional as far as it goes, but not very clearly emphasised or defnieil) in a most acute
form; their belief is fixed on auto-inspiration, not in dogma or learning, (ieorge l''ox (Ifi^-i — UIOl) set the
example of going about from steeple-bouse to steeple-house asking the priest or minister by what <-onnnission
he taught and how he dared to take money for propagating error. The man in the leather breeches, who kept
his hat oil before magistrates and was undeterred from pursuing this course by any known discipline of stocks or
stones, became a source of panic to professional pulpiteers, who fled incontinently at the very rumour of his
approach. In an age of shams this cult of veracity, rooted in spiritual inwardness, and existing only in an
atmosphere of antagonism, found a ready response. Fox himself bad little of the spiritual genius of one or two
of his fellows, such as James Nayler, Simpson, or Uarclay. lie was a more homely mystic, but bis neuropathic
absorption was sufficiently sublime, as evidenced by the story of his taking olT his shoes and jiarading Lichfield,
shouting as he went, " M'oc to the bloody city of Lichfield." His Joiinia/, edited by Thomas Kllwood in lO'.J-l —
three years after Fox's death — remains a book of extraordinary interest, if only as a record of human will-power
and originality, apart from its unconscious humour and its vivid sidelightss upon the England of liunyan and
Bishop Burnet. Ellwood as a mystic was less exalt/', but his own History of his life (first published in 1714, the
year after bis death) gives a most graphic picture of the period of the Quaker persecution, and of the unspeakable
prisons in which "the seekers" of the seventeenth century were too often immured. William Penn, in
bis Fruits of Solitude of 109.3 and its various sequels, was the Solomon (or the Sancho Pan/.a) of the early Friends,
with his constant relays of reflections aiul maxims. Hohert Barclay (IGlii — ](!'.)()) was the learned apologist of
the movement. In his Truth r/cared of Culurnnies, his Apo/ogt/ for the True Chrixliiin llieinity us the same is held
forth and preached hi/ the people, called in seorii, Quakers (1G78), and elsewhere be undertakes to demonstrate the
possibility of the union of the soul with God — without sacraments, without councils, without bulls, without bishops,
without priests, without tradition, without commentaries, without books — without intermediary of any kind
whatsoever (see Fox's Diary,* ed. P. L. Parker ; Ellwood's History,* ed. Crump, 1900 ; Combe's Revelation
Interieure, 1894 ; W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience).

The best edition of Burnet's History is that in course of publication by the CLarendon Press (Routh and
Airy), with a supplement of Burnet's collected material and a commentary by Miss Foxcroft, the capable editor
of the Martjuis of Halifax. Charles Lamb writes to Manning, " I am reading Burnet's Oum, Times. Did you
ever read that garrulous pleasant history ? He tells his story like an old man past political service, bragging
to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when bis 'old cap was new.' Full
of scandal, which all true history is." See also Prof. A. J. Grant's English Historians, 1900. Tlie standard
edition of Ludlow's Memoirs is that of Prof. Firth, also published at Oxford, with a \'aluable introduction.
There is an excellent three-volume edition of the Lives of the Norths by Canon Jessopp, with portraits and
full index (Bohn). Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson was re-edited by Prof. Firth in 1885 ; new editions
of this book and of Reresby's Memoirs and Travels have recently appeared among the Drydeu House Memoirs
(published in Gerrard Street, close by the site of Drydeu's old house). The Memoirs of Evelyn, containing the
Diary, were fir.st published by William Bray in 1818-19 ; re-edited by Upcott in 1827, and by Wheatley in 1879
& 1900. There are recent editions in the Newnes Library, both of the Diary (1903) and of the Life of Mary
Godolphin (1904). Some of Evelyn's gardening books and his Sylva, or discourse on forest trees, and Pomona, on
fruit trees, of 1064, have recently been resuscitated. His travels of 1641-46 in France and Italy, as related
in the Diary, gain in interest as illustrating the contemporary rambles of John Milton and the imaginary
John Inglesant, and as exhibiting the charm of foreign travel before quick trains and cheap tourist agencies
bad robbed it of the last vestiges of magic.

CHAPTER V

JOHN LOCKE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

" The philosophy of Locke is still the system of the English, and all tlieii' new additions to morality are
saturated ivitli his spirit." — Lvtton, England and the English.

The Essat/ on the Hunuin Understanding — The Star C'liamlier and the Press — Some early newspapers —

Newspapers and style.

JOHN LOCKE, son of a coiintrv attorney,
who joined the Parhamentary side in
1642, born at Wrington, Somerset, August 29th,
1632, was educated at Westminster School and
Christ Cliurch, Oxford, where he become lectm-er
on Greek and rhetoric. Obtaining exemption,
however, from taking orders, as his office jire-
scribed, l^ocke devoted himself to the study of
physics, and especially of medicine, with intent
to becoming a doctor. After thirteen years'
residence at Christ Church, in 1665, disgusted
with the verbal subtleties of the Aristotelian
philosophy, he went on a diplomatic mission to
the Elector of Brandenburg (some interesting
letters written by him from Germany on this
occasion were published by I^ord King in 1829).
In 1666, though never having taken a degree
in medicine, he practised as a kind of amateur
assistant to Dr. David Thomas, and through
his medical skill became an intimate friend of
Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury,
who attached the young scholar to his house-
hold as tutor to his son. In the Earl's house
Locke was brought into the society of the most
distinguished wits of the day, notably the
Duke of Buckingham and the Marquis of
Halifax.

In 1672, through Shaftesbury's influence,
Locke obtained the post of Secretary to tlie
Board of Trade, which he only held for a ycai-,
his patrons falling out of favour.

In 1675 his hcallli, about which he frcHjuently
consulted his fiiend Sydenham, being in a
specially delicate state, Locke visited France,
where he resided for four years — first at Mont-
pelier, and afterwards at Paris, where he made
the accjuaintance of the most eminent French

literary men. He returned to England in 1679,
and, Shaftesbury being again in power, he
acted as his private adviser ; but Shaftesbury
falling for the second time, they both fled to
the Low Countries, where Shaftesbury died in
1683, and Locke was deprived of his student-
ship at Christ Church by a special order from
Charles II., and denounced as a dangerous
hei'esiarch in philosophy. During this exile his
first essays appeared in Le Clerc's Bibliotheque
Univcrsclh', which was to be for many years the
chief European organ of men of letters. The
Revolution of 1688 restored Locke to his native
country, and he wa.s made a Commissioner of
Appeals with a salary of ,^200 a year. In
1695, having aided the Government with his
advice on the subject of the reissue of the
coinage, he was made a member of the new
Council of Trade, which ofUce the state of his
health obliged him to resign in 1700, and he
resided during the last four years of his life at
Oates, in Essex, the seat of his friend Sir Francis
Masham, where the infirmities of his dcclininir
years were soothed by Lady Masham, daughter
of Dr. Cudworth. Locke died on October 28th,
1701<, and was buried at High Laver, near
Oates.

Locke was a homely thinker — the only kind
of thinker likely profoundly to influence the
typical Englishman of the eighteenth century.
His foundations in metaphysics were broad and
ob\ ions, but they were foumhitions. He tried
to bring his pin'losophy down to the level of
cheerfuliu'ss and connnon sense, and the obliga-
tion of practising his own philosophy was one
which he empliatically did not shirk. He was
indeed one of tho.sc men like Benjamin Franklin

JOHN LOCKE

237

who, without possessing any soaring spirit, yet
by their constant and systematic industry, zeal
for worl\,and contcntration upon tlie practically
useful subjects of contemplation helped to raise
the standard of living about him to an extent
almost incredible in a single individual. His
familiar works, all of them assuming the charac-
teristic form of pamphlets addressed to the
public with a view to clearing the way toward
some innnediate end, might be termed the
Synthetic Philosophy of the eighteenth century.
Unlike a later system, however, they influenced
political thinkers in the same kind of way that
Burke and Adam Smith began to influence
them a century later, and all the English
philosophers and most of the French ones
(notably Berkeley, Hume, and Rousseau) used
Locke's essay as the foundation of their own
speculations.

Locke's Essaij on the Human Understanding
(1690, the result of twenty years' thought, for
which he received £'M) formed the corner-
stone of his system. It is in brief a very
straightforward plea for the free exercise of
reason (for no province of our knowledge can
be regarded as independent of reason), together
with an analysis of ideas and of the language
in which alone we can communicate them. He
attempts to show that ideas are not innate, but
are the outcome of reflection working upon the
records of sensation. The reason is in conse-
quence the one safe guide. Formulae, doctrines,
assumptions leading to acts and modes of life
without ideas are the dangers from which
reason is our refuge. Custom from which
reason has departed is the stumbling-block of
humanity.

In full harmony with the teaching of this
famous essay is that of A Letter concerning
Toleration (1689), in which he is at pains to
demonstrate that Christianity (in which he
was a firm believer) was essentially reasonable.
Similarly in his Treatise of Government (1690)
he shows that civil government is not the
outcome of a contract such as Hobbes had
described, but of a free contract, in which the
guiding principle must be the intelligence
between governors and governed ; and com-
pletely of a piece with the rest of the system
is ThougJds concerning Education (169!3), in
which in an admirably lucid form he develops
the distinctively English tenets that wisdom
and character rather than knowledge or erudi-
tion should be the proximate aims of the

teachers of youth. This pellucid and admirable
rationality invaded every activity of his life.
He loved order; he went about the most trifling
things always with some good reasons, and he
esteemed the employments of men in proportion
to the good they were capable of producing.
The sense of responsibility that he endeavoured
to implant in every one of the obligation to
prove a useful member of society became one
of the root ideas in England, where the idea of
duti/ acquired a significance elsewhere unknown.
We have seen in a previous chapter how
printers were restricted in mimber by law ; how
it was in 1534 prohibited to import books
which were printed abroad for the wholesale
market in England ; how functionaries were
appointed to license books and patents gi-anted
which carried with them a monopoly of the
printing of certain individual books such as
the Bible, or classes of books such as law books
or music books. The committee of the Pi'ivy
Council, known as the Star Chamber, in 1637
increased the penalties of those who issued
unlicensed books to whip[)ing and the pillory.
The Puritans, if possible, took an even stricter
view of their responsibility in regard to the
stamping out of objectionable books than the
Cavaliers. Powers were granted by the Long
Parliament to break open private houses in
search for unlicensed printing presses. After
the Restoration a strict system of licensing was
adopted, and in 1662 it was sought to control
the selling of books by enforcing a licence from
some episcopal authority. This was not carried
out ; but in 1663 Roger TEstrange, a Tory
stout and bitter, was appointed sole licenser of
all political and periodical literature — a post
which he retained with small interruption down
to the Revolution of 1688. L'Estrange himself
organised two small papers. The Intelligencer
(every Monday) and The Nezos (every Thurs-
day), which he designed to tell the people of
London just as much news as it was expedient
for them to know. Rivalry with these two
privileged organs seemed quite out of the
cjuestion ; but by a curious accident — the
sequestration of the court at Oxford during
the Plague of 1665, and the need felt by the
court for an independent paper, free from all
possibility of infection — The O.rford Gazette
came into existence. L'Estrange wa.s furious
at such a contravention of his pet monopoly
and privilege; but the new venture was brought
out by express command of the King, and

238

EARLY NEWSPAPERS

L^Estrange could do nothiiirr to iniiire it. So
helpless was he that at No. 24 (February 5th,
1666) The Oxford Gazette became The London
Gazette, which after many vicissitudes is still
with us, and commenced its career like that of
an Oi'iental potentate by summarily destroying
all its rivals.

The hampering restrictions upon the Press,
with most of the laws and ideas upon which
these were based, especially as to the unlawful-
ness of publisliing rumours, came to an end in
1695. The Star Chamber had opposed a free
Press on the same ground that the Catholics
had opposed a free Bible. Opinions were dan-
gerous things, and authority in such matters
must be placed above reason. Now, owing
largely to the spirit with which Locke had
permeated the politics of the Whigs from
Shaftesbury ''s time onwards, a silent revolution
of the very greatest moment in the history of
opinion and of literature as the organ of
opinion "as effected.

On May 3rd, 1695, the law which had sub-
jected the Press to a censorship expired. " A
great experiment was making. A great revo-
lution was in progress. Newspapers had made
their appearance." It was not, of course, a
first appearance, as the vivacious expression of
Macaulay might almost lead one to suppose.
Gazcttas (so called after a small coin) origi-
nated in North Italy during our Elizabethan
period, and in 1622 Nathaniel Butter had
brought out in I^ondon a regular numbered
join-nal called The Weekli/ Xeics, hardly dis-
tinguishable in its appearance or contents from
the popular broadsheets and pamphlets con-
taining intelligence of robberies, executions, or
foreign events which had already been common
enough. It is true enough, however, that the
seventeenth-century " Gazettes," " Diurnals,"
" Mercuries," and " Observators," though their
importunity was severely mocked by the drama-
tists (especially Ben Jonson in Staple of News
and Fletcher in Fair Maid of the Inn), had
been of very little account. Until 1695 the
Press had been ((Ilclually muzzled. A new era
started for iouiiiali>m with The Dai/// Coiirant
of 1702, jiriiilcd on one side only as it was, "to
spare the public at least half the impertinences
of ordinary joinnalism."

During the eighteenth century, what with llic
stringent laws of privilege and libel and ciiisii-
ing taxation dating from the stamp duty of
1712 (the "fall of the leaf"), the Press was "still

subjected to extraordinary disabilities and for-
feits. Nevertheless, very few years elapsed
before something like a journalistic fair was
manifested by men like Roper and Boyer ;
much higher qualities were exhibited Ijy ex-
ponents such as Addison, Swift, and that born
journalist Daniel Defoe. Later in the century
commercial, industrial, financial, and managerial
capacities of the very highest order were de-
voted to the Press by such men as Walter,
Perrv, and Daniel Stuart. Changing its uniform
perpetually, represented now by a flight of
" Postmen," " Postboys," " Flying Posts," and
" Daily Posts," now by The Reriejc, The E.ia-
viincr. The Tatkr, and Speetutor, a little later
by a crop of " Journals " — Defoe's, Mist's, the
Grub Street and the Covent Garden, famous
for its coiniection with Henry Fielding — the
Press has all along maintained a steady upward
course of almost continuous and uninterrupted
progress. Johnson and Smollett, associated as
they are with The Gentknian^i Magazine, The
Eamhkr, The Idler, The Craftsman, The Critieal,
The Monthl/j, The Briton (with its more famous
antidote The North Briton), were two of the
chief pillars of journalism in mid-eighteenth
century. Then came the era of 'The Public
Adveitiser and The Public Ledger, followed by
The Morning Chroniek, The Morning Herald,
The Moniing Advertiser, and The Morning Po.it
— serving to show that at each succeeding
epoch in journalism there is one predominant
catchword.

The Su7i and The Star were in those days
both highly reputable papers; but when the
century closed the three foremost competitors
for popular favour were The Morning Chronicle
(Whig), The Courier (Ministerialist), and The
Tiwe.s. With the aid of a somewhat motley
bodyguard of rebels and insiu'gents — Defoe,
Smollett, Wilkes, Woodfall, Junius, Home
Tookc, Shelley, Cobbett, the Hunts, the Hones,
and the Iletheringtons — the British Press
throu'di all these changes and chances made its
way gradually and slowly but surely to a posi-
tion of complete emancipation from Govern-
mental control ; while its relief from pillage
was achieved in successive instalments by the
substantial reduction of the Stamp Duty in
lcS36 and its total al)()lition in 1855. The
abrogation of the Paper Duties about six years
later removed I lie last of the so-called taxes
uj)on knowledge.

Despite the depths of degradation to which

TIIK USE AND AlUTSE OF THE TKESS 239

it had Ik'011 rwliiccfl hy Sir Iloljci'l Wal))()k', ami inorf and more iiii])i'i-ssivcly a.s.suiiiiiig Uic

who manipulated it sysleiuatically — iiowhrihiiig ri'ih' of the f^reat liberator and emancipator,

heavily with secret service money, now thundj- Oriffinally little more than a town crier, it was

screwing with fine and imprisonment — the Press preparing with more and more [)lausi))ility to

had all this time been gaining in reputation, assume the robes of the prophet.

The mecliauical improvements effected towards the close of the eif^hteeiith cciilnry iiicreascil tlie constituency
of tlie Press fi-om thousands to inillioiis, and wliat had liitlierto heen a vast potentiality became almost at once
(it was first seen clearly in the United States of North America) an immense power. When the transformation
was accomplished, it was seen that the effects of this power were very different from what had been anticipated.
They were also much more comprehensive; the transformation atfectinp society at war' quite as nuich as
society at peace, and profoundly inllucnciuff not only trade, politics, and the traffic of everyday life and
conversation, but also relij^fion, justice, science, art, amusements, the drama, and, hy no means least, literature.
Because the newspapers had freed debates and helped to discredit the j^-ross tyranny ami jobl)ery of the
parliamentary majority uniler George III. and his wirei)ullers, it was thought that the Press would become a
prime agent of political freedom ; because it liad been in general strongly opposed to religious intolerance, it
was thought that it would stimulate to a high degree independent and individual opinion ; because it was the
work to a large extent of men from the lower middle class who showed themsehes to possess bi'ains, it was
thought that it might become an advocate of (that heterodox and anti-British conception) a fraternity of wit.
But in all these matters expectation has been pretty completely falsified. Instead of emancipating, the Press
(.as most would agree) b.as done much to enslave individual opinion, while as to puldic. opinion it sliige-manages
that to suit what must be regarded as primarily the interest of the capitalist class ; it arranges the political
limelight in such a way as to foster the popular delusion that the two great parties in the .State are bruising
e.ach other for the popular benefit; it inflates the importance of those debates, which are more often than not
hut a feelile echo of its own ; it stultifies diplomacy by its indiscretions ; aggravates popular aiul national
prejudices, and exaggerates village games into imperial shows. Exaggeration has, in fact, become to such an
extent the normal tone of the Press as to expose it very seriously to the charge of " vulgarising the national
mind." The grave and censorious airs of its didactic youth have been pretty generally dropped, and the Press
has acted in all these ways as an intensifier of popular tendencies and failings. Liberation writ large is
promised in general terms as the ultimate objective of Press activity, but in the pursuit its forces are very soon
reduced to become the passive instruments of every kind of subsidiary agitation. The "papers" work hard,
it must be 'confessed, to condone the two besetting sins of English society in the twentieth century — the two
ugly vices, avarice and cowardice. \Vith such nicety does it register the form and pressure of an age of frivolity
that the public is in chronic danger of a surfeit — even of football and f(dts divers, both excellent things in
their way ; book-chat has become a burden, while the petitesses of philanthropic peeresses, song and dance
comediennes, successful jockeys, and the reigning buffoons of bench and pulpit are degraded to the anecdotal
value of " teu-a-penny." By such proceedings four-fifths of the Press at least incurs grave peril of becoming
what the foreign and .•\merican Press has already become — not so much a watchword as a byword — a
laughing-stock !

The venal Press of V\''alpole's time has risen superior both to blackmailing and to bribery — no Press could
be freer from anything approaching to corruption in this respect than ours. Vet all this time it cannot be
concealed that in the long run its commendation is virtually assured for every enterprise, whether it be a
theatre, a book, a church, a charity, or a business concern, subject to the one necessary condition that capital
be extensively invested in it. It becomes in the ultimate analysis the champion of every strong vested interest.
Automatically, without the intervention of any gross agency such as bribery, our Press strengthens in every way
the hands of the upper class, who in England direct everything, absorb everything, pay for everything, disguise
everything. Like the "Reformed Parli.ament" and the "New Police," the free and independent Press has
become a bulwark of the system by which all power is concentrated in upper-class hands — the more eft'ectually
since, to all outward appearances, borough-mongering and bribery are as extinct as the dodo and the avenues to
every kind of distinction in England are absolutely free.

Of anything in the nature of intelligent guidance of the humbler classes, the labouring poor, the exploited,
the down-trodden, and the impenetrably stupid, the English Press has no idea, ^\■hen it has supplied the mob
with the latest cricket, the latest football, the latest police news, and the latest racing, it thinks it has done as
much as can be expected. It is not a philanthropic concern, of course, the Press. Primarily, each newspaper
is a perfectly independent going business concern, representing ordinarily a large amount of capital, the value
of which is estimated by the extent of the paper's popularity. Nevertheless, having regard to the large part

' "Most modern wars may be ultimately traced to national antipathies which have been largely created
by newspaper invectives and by the gross partiality of newspaper representations. As the writers have no part
in the dangers, while by the increased circulation of their papers, they reap a large harvest from the excitement
of war, they have a direct interest in producing it. ^Vherever there is some vicious spot, some old class hatred,
some lingering provincial antipathy, a newspaper will arise to represent and to inflame it " (Lecky, England in
the Eii/hteenth Century, chap. xi.).

240 INFLUENCE OF THE PRESS ON LITERATURE

wliicli the iniap:ination must play in the liealthy activity of the mind, anrl to the need tliat tliere is in the
imag-ination for altruistic and patriotic stimulus, one cannot but regard the neglect of the altruistic emotions by
the modern newspaper Press as a source of considerable danger to the commonwealth.

A\'ith all its defects, the British Press has rendered groat services to this same commonweal, and it is a
common opinion among unprejudiced persons that the benefits due to it have outweighed the abuses to which it
has shown itself liable. A\'hen, however, we confine ourselves to the direct influence which the Press has
produced upon English literature, with which we are more nearly concerned, tliis common opinion is no
longer tenable. It can hardly be denied that the effect of the newspaper Press upon our literature has been
preponderantly bad.

In the first place it tends to make the literature of the passing moment even more ephemeral than it
ordinarily would be. It is the Press that consecrates such phrases as "the hook of the week," "the book of the
season," and that enshrines in the place of literature the credentials of celebrities and the memoirs of " men
(and women)of the time." Every one knows what is implied by "a newspaper general," "a newspaper statesman,"
" a newspaper lawyer," or "a newspaper divine." To the modern journalist, as to the modern actor, the part is
greater tlian the whole. A pungent extract is more effective than a new point of view ; a snapshot has more
actuality than an artistic composition. By the praise of such qualities, which make good copy, the Press warms
up numbers of ephemeral fragments into heterogeneous books. For a serious work, it instinctively feels and
sometimes ingenuously admits its incapacity. We have a good instance of this in the treatment accorded by The
Athmceum to Herbert Spencer's Si/nthetic Philofiophy. Briefly speaking, the newspaper distracts the public, and
by feeding it with hors d'ceuvres and re/eivs unfits it for a more sustained course. Instead of being something new
that is of value to the world at large, literature is degraded to a disproportionately increasing extent to subserve
the distraction known as " reading," by acting as an anodyne to the monotony of the life of machine drivers — the
monotony to which so many of the vices of our town dwellers are attributed, and to which so many of the evils of
modern life are so incontrovertibly due. For a great portion of the nineteenth century it ivill be readily admitted
that the Press (through the agency of such organs as the Edinhitrgh and Siiturduy Reviews) exercised a strong
deterrent influence upon triflers and amateurs in letters. Its unsympathetic attitude won for it a reputation of
ferocity, and it has now gone to the opposite extreme. It welcomes everything on condition that its vogue
does not outlast a single season. Remarkable as the managerial capacity displayed by English journals has
been — their enterprise in getting best news and best comments — the amount of space it has found for pure
literature has hitherto been small. Latterly, however, it has followed continental example in admitting alike
contes, ronians, and literary papers. The free library, funereal in most of its eft'ects upon literature, has hitherto
combated the monopolising influence of the Press with some success. But the larger is evidently destined to
swallow up the less, and the newspaper will eventually supersede the book altogether as far as the great mass of
the population are concerned. The dream of popularising the first of the arts is already exploded, and the study
of literature in its highest sense must inevitably become restricted more and more to the small elements in our
Anglo-Saxon population in whom the power of artistic appreciation is actively developed.

In one respect the collective Press of the English-speaking world has been gravely maligned. Tlie popular
view that the purity of the English language is endangered by slovenly writing in the Press is diametrically
opposed to the facts of the case. Slovenly writing is committed not to the columns of the Press (which are
criticised with Argus eyes both before, by the pick of professional readers, and after publication by all and
sundry) but to the pages of long-winded academic studies— to books by scientific experts who are not expert
with the pen, and to the increasing multitude of books by amateur authors who happen to be notorieties.
Cacophonies, tautologies, and solecisms of grammar have no effect whatever upon the reputation of these
worthies. They would be simply fatal to that of a skilled workman upon the Press. The standard of
workmansliip and e.yirit de rorpa among members of this body is high, and when once a form of expression
or a grammatical usage is recognised by a leading authority in the Press to be objectionable, it is stamped out
quite mercilessly (one of the earliest precisians and reformers in this respect was that greatest of all our
journalists, Jonathan Swift), and with a severity which makes small allowance for the catholicity of our older
English literature in such matters. Far from degrading the English speech, the Press operates far more than
any other agency to purify and to unify it.

INDEX TO VOL. I

Abbott, Dr., Francis Biiroii by, 135
Actors, companies of, the rise of,

66
Adams, Thomas, of AVingrave,

celebrated Puritan preacher, 1G9
Adlington, William, translator of

Thp Golden A.s-s of Apuleius, 40
Agas, Ralph, map-maker, 138
Agincourt, Drayton's, 8o
Allen, Dr. J. Vv., 109, 194
Alleyn, Edward, actor, 68
Audrewes, Bishop Lancelot, 166
Antiphonal singing, the germ of

the liturgical drama, .59
Apollo Tavern, the, 114
Apuleius, Adlington's translation of

The Golden Aa.i of, 40
Arabian Nights, The, 11
Arber, Prof., edition of Ascham

by, 30 ; edition of Gascoigue's

The Steele Glass, 47
Arden of Fevershum, 68, 75
Arnold, Matthew, comparison of,

with Sir T. More, 34 ; his sonnet

on Shakespeare, 100
Arraignment of Paris, The, Greave's,

70
Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus and

The Scholeiuaater by, 30, 76
Ashmole, Elias, antiquary, 230
Aubrey, John, anecdotes of Shake-
speare hy, 93 ; collaborator of

Anthony a Wood, 231 ; Brief

Lives, 232 ; a veritable Paul Pry,

ib.
Awdeley, John, Fratemitye of Vaca-

bondes by, 129.

Bacon, Delia, and the Shakespeare-
Bacon theory, 108

Bacon, Fi-ancis (Lord Verulam),
The New Atlantis suggested by
More's Utopia, 34 ; early life of,
131 ; Advice to Queen Elizabeth,
ib. ; Promus, 132 ; The Advance-
ment of Learning, ib. ; the first
great book in English prose of
secular interest, ib. ; Lord Chan-
cellor, 133 ; Novum Organum,
ib. ; downfall, ib. ; his moral
obliquities, ib. ; The £«.«///.«, 134 ;
History of Henry VII., ib. ; quality

as a historian, 135 ; various esti-
mates of his character, ib. ; his

claims as a scientist, ib. ; The New

.Atlantis, ib.
Baildon, Mr. H. B.,21
Ball, John, author of the interlude

Kyng Joltan, 02
Bandello, Matteo, 39
Bannatyne MSS., The, 19
-Banquet of Dainty Conceits, A, an

Elizabethan song-book, 49
Bapst, E., Deuj! Geniils-hommes

Poetes by, 26
Barbour, John, 20
Barclay, Alexander, The Ship of

Fools by, 23
Barclay, John, Argenis by, deri\ed

from More's Utopia, 34
Barclay, Robert, Quaker apologist,

235
Barnfield, Richard, songs of, 91 ;

his praise of Shakespeare, 96
Barret, \Villiam, author of a record

epic still unpublished, 83
Barrow, Isaac, 233
Basse, William, 83 ; elegy on

Shakespeare by, 103
Bates, K. L., The English Religious

Drama by, 64
Baxter, Richard, Reliquite by, 234 ;

The Saint-i' Everlasting Iie.st, ib. ;

his contemporary fame, ib.
" Bayes," Davenant and Dryden

the originals of, 208
" Beaumont and Fletcher," the

title, little more than a chrono-
logical expression, 110
Beaumont, Dr. Joseph, P.9yche, a

poetical "mammoth" by, 175
Beaumont, Francis, his friendship

with Jonson and Fletcher, 111 ;

analysis of the plays known as

Beaumont and Fletcher's, ib.

et seq. ; plays in which his share

is most apparent, ib.
Beckett, Thomas a, 11
Bedingfield, Thomas, translator of

Macchiavelli, 42, 138
Bellamy, E., Looking Backward

derived from More's Utopia, 34
Bellefhrest, 40
Belvedere, Bodenham's, 49, 89

241

Bentley, Richard, his share in the

Ancient and Modern Learning

controversy, 229
Bergerac, Cyrano de. Voyage de la

Lune of, 34
Berners, Lord, translation of Frois-

sart by, 27
Biljle, The Bishops', .'yY; The Authorised

Ver.\iini of the, !)7-fi
Hililiothera, Sir Thomas Elyot's, 31
Birdi, Thomas, Spenserian scholar,

80
Birrell, Mr. Augustine, Marvell

(E.M.L.) by, 176
Bi.shop.1' Bible, The, 57
Blackfriars Theatre, 94
Black-letter type, 7
Blades, William, 5-6
Blank verse, Surrey the first to use,

2(;

Boas, F. S., Shakespeare and his
Predecessors by, 75 ; edition of
Kyd by, ib.

Boccaccio, influence of, on Chaucer,
10-11

Bodley, Sir Thomas, diarist, 139

Botithius, Chaucer's fondness for, 13

Boisteau, Pierre, 40

Boleyn, Anne, Sir Thomas Wyatt
and, 24

Bond, R. Warwick, 75

Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's, 9, 10

Boorde, Andrew, 29

Borron, Robert de, 18

Bovge of Court, The, Skelton'.?, 23

Boyle, Charles (Earl of Orrery),
The Epistles of Phalari.s by, 229

Boyle, G. D., Character.\ and Epi-
sodes of the Great Rebellion by,
200

Bradley, A. C, Shakespearean
Tragedy by, 109

Brady, Nicholas, Metrical Psalms
by, 57

Bramston, Sir John, memoir-ivriter,
233

Brandes, Dr. G., William Shake-
speare by, 109

Brandt, Sebastian, Narrenschiff by,
23

Brathwait, Richard, the Journal of
"Drunken Barnabee" by, 179

18-

242

INDEX

Bremond, Henri, Life of Sir Thomas
More by, 84

Breton, Nicholas, lyrics of, 90 ;
literary tracts and pamphlets,
129 ; their high literary ex-
cellence, ib. ; as a writer of
" characters," 130

Bridgett, Father, Life of Sir Thomas
More by, 3i

Broke, Arthur, translations from
Bandello by, 39

Brooke, Stopford, Ten Plays of
Shakespeare by, 98

Browne, Sir Tliomas, life and cha-
racter, 149-50 ; Religio iledici, ib. ;
its fascination, ib. ; Hydriotaphia,
ib. ; qualities of his style, 151 ;
the influence of his thoughts and
manner, //;.

Browne, AVilliam, Britannia's Pas-
toralls by, 83 ; epitaph on Coun-
tess of Pembroke, 91

Brut, The, Layamon and AVace's, 18

Bryskett, L., translator of Giraldo,
42

Buckingham, Duke of. The Re-
hearsal by the, 208 ; the original
of "Zimri," 208

Bullen, Mr. A. H., 89, 91, 109;
Elizabethan Song-book edited by,
49 ; edition of Peele and Mar-
lowe by, 75 ; edition of Beaumont
and Fletcher by, 125 ; editions of
Marston and Middletou by, ib.

Bunyau, John, the representative
of uneducated Puritanism, 180 ;
sketch of his life, ib. et seq. ;
Grace Abounrling, 181 ; in prison,
ih. ; The Pilgrim's Progre.\s, 182 ;
The Holy War and Mr. Badnian,
ib. ; imperisliable features of his
allegory, ib.

Burbage, Richard, actor, 08, 94

Burghley, Lord, Ten Precepts to his
Son Robert by, 131

Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salis-
bury, History oj My Own Time by,
220 ; qualities as a historian, 227

Burton, Itobert, The Anatomy of
Melancholy by, 147 ; its literary
pedigree, ib. ; influence on later
literature, ib. ; verses anticipating
11 Pen.seroso, 148 ; a scholarly
cento, ih. ; estimate of its varied
learning and philosophy of life, ib.

Burton, William, Flizabetlian trans-
lator, 42

Busby, Dr., 233

Buslier, Leonard, the earliestpleader
for religious toleration, 109

IJutler, Sannicl, life of, 204-5; his
pfipularity and poverty, 205 ;
I'he Elephant in the Moon, ib.;
as a writer of " characters,"

ib. ; his mastery of rhyme, ib. ;

Hudihras, ib. et seq. ; a medley

of w'lt, satire, and humour, 206
Butler, Samuel, Erevhov by, derived

from More's Utopia, 34
Butter, Nathaniel, The Weekly News

of, 238
Byrd, William, 49, 89

Camden, AVilliam, Britannia by, 138

Campanella, Civitas Solis by, 34

Campaspe, Lyly's, 68

Campion, Thomas, 49 ; denuncia-
tion of rhyme by, 70-7 ; song-
books, 89 ; lyrics of, 91

Canteriiury Tales, The, Chaucer's,
W et seq.

Carew, George, 140

Carew, Richard, translator of Tasso,
42

Carew, Sir Richard, Surrey of Corn-
wall by, 141 ; as a literary critic,
142

Carew, Thomas, lyrics by, 157 ;
epitaph on Donue, ib.

Carey, Robert, diarist, 140

Carleton, Sir Dudley, 140

Carlyle, R. M. and A. J., Life o/
Latimer by, 31

Carpenter, Prof. , 86 ; English Lyrics
by, 91

Cartwright, Rev. W., eulogy of
Fletcher by, 113

Cartwright, ^V'illiam, poems by, 179

Casaubon, Isaac, influence of his
Latin translation of Theophrastus,
129

Caslon, \\'illiam, a famous type-
founder, 7

Castiglioni, The Courtier of, 39

Cavendish, George, Life of Wokey
by, 29

Caxton, William, his age coincident
with the era of modern England,
4 ; the staudardiser of our lan-
guage, ib. ; sketch of his life, ib.
et seq. ; Gibbon's criticism, 6 ;
his influence in fixing the lan-
guage, ib. ; Lord Spencer's col-
lection of sixty Caxtons, ih. ;
editions of Chaucer and Gower, 16

Chamberlain, John, 140

Chamberlay ne, William, Pha ron n ida
by, 175

Chambers, Mr. E. K., Mediceval
Drama by, 60 ; The Media-vul
Stage by, 04

Chapman, George, his scholarship,
41 ; translation of The Iliad and
Odys.s-ry, ib.; qualities and defects
of liis rendering, (6. ; collaborator
with Ben Jonson, 116; tragedies,
117; magnificence of his rlietoric.

" Characters," the growth of Eng-
lish prose, 129 footnote

Charles II., personal influence of,
on literature, 203

Chase, L. N., English Heroic Plays
by, 215

Chasles, M. Philarete, 75, 108

Chaucer, Geofl^rey, praise of, 6 ; by
contemporaries and immediate
successors, 8 ; early life of, ih. ;
visits Italy, 9 ; royal and other
patronage, ib. ; his tomb the
nucleus of Poets' Corner, ib. ;
fictitious legends concerning, ib. ;
the portrait by Occleve, ib. ;
autobiographical allusions in his
poems, 10 ; three chronological
periods in his writings — French,
Italian, and English — ib. ; The
Canterbury Tales, 11 et seq. ; the
excellence of their plan, 12 ;
Dryden's famous criticism, ib. ;
qualities of his style, 13 ; his
text, ih. et seq. ; growth of
modern interest in, 14 ; periods
of Chaucerian scholarship, ib. ;
the modernisation of, ib. ; the
vicissitudes of his fame, ib. ;
Dryden's defence for the modern-
ising of, 15; a short bibliography
of, ib.

Cheke, Sir John, a famous teacher
of Greek, 30

Chess, The Game and Play of the, 5

Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 97

Chettle, Henry, 96

Child, Prof., studies in Chaucer by,
13 ; edition of Spenser by, 86

Chillingworth, n'illiam, 169

Christie, W. D., Globe editor of
Spenser, 86

Chronicle plays, the place of, in the
e\ olution of English drama, 62

Church, R. AV., Spenser by, 86

Churchyard, Thomas, 47

Cibber,'Colley, 212

Cinthio, 40

C'ivitas Solis, Campanella's, suggested
by More's Utopia, 34

Clarendon, Earl of, Edward Hyde,
History of the Rebellion by, 199 ;
its great literary qualities and
historical faults, ib. ; a national
monmnent, ih.

Clarendon Press, the, 200

Colet, John, 29

Colin Clout, origin of the name, 23

Collier, .lereniy, his attack on Con-
grevc and the stage, 220, 223

Collier, .F. Payne, 75 ; Seren Eng-
lish Miseelhtnies edited by, 49 ;
History of English Dramatic Poetry
by, 64 ; edition of Spenser by,
80

INDEX

248

Collins, Prof. Cliurton, quotation
from, respectiuff the vicissitudes
of Chaucer's fame, 14; edition of
Greene by, 75 ; Exsayx and Studies
by, ih.

Complaint to Pity, Chaucer's, 10

Condell, Heury, 94, 10?

Confexsio Amantis, Gower's, 16

Cougreve, William, The Mourning
Bride, 213 ; tlie gulf between Re-
storation and Revolution comedy,
219 ; educated in Ireland, ib. ;
his reproof by Voltaire, 220 ; lost
to the stage at thirty, ih. ; con-
troversy with Jeremy Collier, ifj. ;
life and character of, ib. ; amalgam
of wit and humour, ih. ; Love for
Love, ih. ; " final and flawless
comedy," 221

C'onstable, Henry, sonneteer, 88

Corbet, Bishop, Iter Boreate by, 179

Corrie, George Elwes, edition of
Latimer's Sermon.^ by, 31

Coryat, Tom, 29; Crudities by, 141

Cosin, Bishop, 233

Cotton, Charles, translation of
Montaigne by, 44; poems by, 179

Courant, The Daily, 238

Court oj Love, The, Chaucer's, 10

Cowden Clarke, C, as a moderniser
of Chaucer, 14

Cowley, Abraham, a poet at twelve,
174; The Gutter of Coleman Street,
ih. ; The Mistress, ih. ; Latin
poems, ih. ; Pindaric odes, ib. et
seq. ; his literary influence con-
sidered, 175

Craik, G. L., Spenser and his Poetry
by, 86

Cranmer, Thomas, the chief artificer
of the Englisli Prayer Book, 56

Crashaw, Richard, the most mystical
of English poets, 162-3 ; the poets'
poet, 163

Creation of the world, Ussher's
chronology of the, adopted in
the English Bible, 167

Creed, Thomas, editor of Lucretius,
212

Croft, H. H. S., edition of Elyot's
The Oovemour by, 31

Crowne, John, Sir Courtly Nice by,
219

Dallington, Sir Robert, 141

Dance of the Seven Deadly Sin.f, The,
Dunbar's, 20

Dauett, Thomas, Elizabethan trans-
lator, 42

Daniel, Alexander, diarist, 139

Daniel, Mr. P. A., 106

Daniel, Samuel, " volunteer laure-
ate " in succession to Spenser, 83 ;
" well-languaged Daniel " 84 ;

sonnets of, 88 ; as literary critic,
142

Daniell, John J., Lije oJ Herbert by,
161

Dante, influence of, on (Jhaucer, 1 1

Davenant, Sir William, befriends
Milton, 186 ; the original of
" Bayes," 208 ; as theatre mana-
ger, 217

Davey, Menry, History oJ English
Music liy, 49

David and Bethsabe, Grcene'.s, 71

Davies, Sir John, SCiJoolnote

Davison, Francis, Poetical Rhapsody
by, 89

Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, an
Elizabethan song-book, 49

Day, John, a famous type-founder, 7

Dee, John, diarist, 139

Dekker, Thomas, plays and lyrics
of, 117 ; a dramatist of real life,
118 ; the antiquarian value of his
satirical pamplilets and plays,
128 ; The Guts Hornbook, 129 ;
The Batchelor's Banquet, 129

De la Mare, Mr. Walter, Henry
Bracken by, 180

Demaus, R., William Tyndak, a
Biography by, 68

Denham, Sir John, Cooper s Hill by,
177 ; his threnody on Cowley, ib.

Dennys, John, 83

De Regimine Principum, Occleve's,
containing the portrait of Chaucer,
9

Deschamps, Eustace, his praise of
Chaucer, 8

D'Ewes, Sir Symonds, 138, 140

Dickenson, John, metrical experi-
ments by, 77

Dictes and Sayinges q/ the Philo-
.sophers, The, 5

Digby, Sir Kenelm, "an arrant
mountebank," 173

Diodati, Charles, the friend of
Milton, 18.3, 185

Dobell, Mr. Bertram, the dis-
coverer of Traherue's poems,
164 footnote

Don Quixote, Shelton's translation
of, 43 ; Ormsby and Watt's trans-
lation, 44

Donne, John, sounds a new note
in English poetry, 153 ; his pre-
cocity and friendship with Sir
Henry VV^otton, ib. ; with Essex
to Cadiz, ih. ; first poems, ib. ; in
the Fleet prison, 154 ; finds a
patron in King James, ih. ; Dean
of St. Paul's, ib. ; from sensualism
to sanctity, ih. ; his monument
in St. Paul's, 166 ; an amazing
neuropath, ih. ; Carew's eulogy,
ih. ; qualities of his verse and its

influence, ih. ; as a preacher,
166

Dorset, Karl of, Charles Sackville,
poems of, 179

Douglas, Bishop John, exposes
Lauder's forgeries, 194

Douglas, Gavin, his version of The
yEneid, 21

Dowden, Prof., Shakespeare: Ui»
Mind and Art by, 109

Dowland, Joliii, 49, 89

Downe.s, John, autlior of Hosciiu
Anglican us, 223

Doyle, Sir (Jonan, Micah Clarke by,
206

Drake, Dr. Nathan, 76 ; Shakespeare
and his Times, 109

Drant, Tliomas, metrical critic, 76

Drayton, Michael, his sonnets, 84;
England's Heroirall Epistles, ih. ;
Agincourt, ii.'i ; Poly-Olbion, ili. ;
his metrical versatility, ih. ; his
posthumous reputation, 85-6

Droeshout, Martin, portrait of
Shakespeare by, 104

Drummond of Hawthornden, Wil-
liam, visited by Ben Jonsnii, 114;
an accomplished dilettante, 1 55 ;
Poems, 150; friendship with
Drayton, ih. ; visited by Ben
Jonson, ib. ; The Cypresse Grove,
ib. ; his achievement as a son-
neteer, ih.

Dryden, John, his famous estimate
of The Canterbury Tales, 12 ; as
a moderniser of C^haucer, 14-15 ;
the founder of modern English
prose, 204 ; first poems, 207 ; mar-
ried Lady Elizabeth Howard, ib. ;
early plays, ib. ; Annus MiralAlis,
208 ; his tribute to Shakespeare,
ib. ; poet laureate, ih. ; the original
of " Bayes," ib. ; his revenge on
Buckingham, ib. ; the pruriency
of his plays, ib. ; his admiration
for Milton, 209 ; his heroic
tragedies, ib. ; rhymed couplets,
ib. ; Absalom and Achitophel, ih. ;
MacFlecknoe, 210 ; Religio Laid,
ib. ; The Hind and the Panther,
ib. ; misfortunes bravely met,
211 ; translations and paraphrases,
ib. ; Fables, ib. ; burial in ^Vest-
minster Abbey, ih. ; his undis-
puted dictatorship, ih. et seq. ; an
author taken on trust, 212 ; as
a literary critic, ib. ; Essay of
Dramatic Poesy, 213 ; Johnson's
eulogy, ib. ; Matthew Arnold's
estimate, 215

Du Bartas, Divine Weeks by, 42

Duff, Gordon, Early Printed Books
by, 6

Dugdale, Sir William, Antiquitiet

244

INDEX

by, 230 ; Monnstican Anglicanum,
ib. ; Baronage of England, ib.

Duubar, ^\'illiam, the greatest of
the Scottish C^haucerians, 20 ;
The Thistle and the Rose, ib. ; The
Golden Targe, ib. ; The Dance oj
the Seven Deadly Sins, ib. ; the
prototype of Burns, 21

D'Urfey, Thomas, 212

Dyce, Alexander, edition of Skeltou
by, 23 ; estimate of Shakespeare
hv, 110

Dyer, Sir Edward, 77, 91

Eames, W., Bibliography of Raleigh

by, 143
Ear'le, John, Microcosmogruphie by,
130 ; the best of the "character"
writers, ib.
Edward II., Marlowe's, 74
Edward III., G8
Edward VII., defence of Drydeu by

King, 212
Edwardes, Ricliard, 48 ; Damon and

Pythias by, 62
Eggestein, early printing of, 3
Eihon Bu.iilih-e, disputed authorship

of, 152
Eliot, Sir John, Monarchy of Man
by, suggested by More's Utopia,
34
Elizabeth, Queen, her literary

accomplishments, 44
Elizabethan songs and lyrics, 48-9
EUesmere MS., the Chaucerian, 13
Ellis, Sir Henry, edition of Early

English Chronicles by, 28
Ellwood, Thomas, his friendship
with Milton, 186-7 ; Autobiography
of, 235
Elton, C. I., William Shnke.speare :

his Family and Friendx by, 1)3
Elton, Prof., Drayton by, 86
Elyot, Sir 'Iliomas, 31
Encomium Morice, Erasmus's, 34
Endyiiiion, Lyly's, 68
England's- Helicon, an Elizabethan

song-book, 48, 89
England's Parnassus, an Elizabethan

song-book, 49, 89
English, the history of, before

Caxton, 3
Epithalaminm, Spenser's, 82
Era-smus, lectures of, at Cambridge,

30
Erdeswicke, Sampson, 141
P^therege, Sir tieorge, historical

importance of his plays, 218
Enphnes, Lyly's, 68 ; the first aj)-
proach to the novel of manners,
126
Evans, Sir John, edition of Browne's

Urne-Burinlt by, 150
Evelyn, John, his studious and

respectable Diary, 226 ; its his-
torical value, ib.
Everyman, 60

Fabyan's Chronicles, 28

Faerie Queene, Spenser's, 78 et seq.

Fairfax, Edward, Godfrey of Bol-

logne ; or. The Recoverie of Hieru-

salem, translated from Tasso by,

47 ; Isaac d'Israeli's eulogy of, 42

Farmer, Richard, E.uay on the Leaiti-

ing of Shakespeare by, 109
Farquhar, George, the comedies of,

221
Faustus, Dr., Marlowe's, 73
Featley, Daniel, celebrated Puritan

divine, 169
Fell, Dr., 233

Feltham, Owen, Resolves by, 131
Fenton, Sir Geoifry, Tragical Dis-
courses by, 40 ; translation from
Guicciardini, ib.
Ferrar, Nicholas, influence of, on

Herbert and Crslshaw, 161-2
Feuillerat, Prof., 76
Field, Nat, actor, 68
Field, Richard, Shakespeare's friend

and publisher, 96
Fielding, Henry, Chaucer compared

to, 12
Filmer, Sir R., Patriarcha by, de-
rived from More's Utopia, 34
Fisher, John, preacher, author, and

martyr, 32
Fitzgib'bon, Mr. H. M., 21
F'lamsteed, John, first Astronomer-
Royal, 200
Flatman, Thomas, painter and poet,

175
Fleay, F G., Guide to Chaucer and
Spen.ier hy, 15; Chronicle History
of the London Stage by, 75
Fletcher, Giles, religious epic poet,

82
Fletcher, John, association of, with
Shakespeare and Beaumont and
Massinger, 111 ; analysis of the
plays known as Beaumont and
F'letcher's, 111-12 ; plays in which
his share is most apparent, ib.
F'letclier, Phineas, The Purple Island

by, 82
Florio, John, translation of Mon-
taigne, 43
Flower and the Leaf, The, Chaucer's,

10
Folios, the Shakespeare, 107-8
Ford, John, early dramatic liack-
work, 121 ; The lever's Meltin-
clioly, 122 ; 'Tis Pity .ihe's a
Whore, ib. ; Lamb's extravagant
eulogy of The Broken Heart, ib. ;
his versification, ib.
I'ord, Thomas, 49

Fortescue, Thomas, Forest or Col-
lection of Historyes by, 40

Fox, A. W., Book of Bachelors by,
143

Fox, George, Journal of, 235

Foxcroft, Miss, edition of Burnet's
History by, 235

Foxe, John, The Book of Martyrs,
56 ; its effect on English Pro-
testantism, ib. ; buried in St.
Giles's, Cripplegate, 187

Fraunce, Abraham, 77

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,
Greene's, 70

Frith, Prof., edition of Ludlow's
Memoirs by, 235

Froutsart, Lord Berners', 27-8

Fuller, Thomas, Historie of the
Holie Warre, 149 ; Holy and
Prophane State, ib. ; The Historie
of the Worthies of England, ib. ;
his wit and learning, ib.

Furnivall, Dr., 109; foundation of
the Chaucer Society by, 13 ;
edition of six Chaucer MSS. by,
14 ; edition of Boorde's Introduc-
tion and Dietary by, 29

Fust, early printing of, 3

Galathea, Lyly's, 68
Gammer Gurton's Needle, 62
Garnett, Dr. Richard, 194 ; Age of

Dryden by, 215
Garth, Samuel, The Dispensary by,

212
Gascoigne, George, adventurous
life of, 46 ; George Guscoigne's
Posie, ib. ; Jocasta, 47 ; Supposes,
ib. ; The Steele Glass, ib.
Gauden, John, his probable share

in tlie Eikon Ba.nlike, 152
Gaunt, John of, the patron of

Chaucer, 9
Gayley, Prof., Representative Eng-
lish Comedies by, 64, 75
Gazette, The London, 238
Geffs, Abel, edition of Gascoigne

by, 47
Genest, John, -Some Account of the

English Stage by, 223
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 18
Gerard, Father John, Autobiography

of, 140
Gibbon, Edward, his criticism of

Caxton, 6
Giles, Dr. J. A., edition of Ascham's

works by, .30
(ilanvillc, Joseph, 234
(ilolic Theatre, the, 94
(iodilaril, .lonathan, one of the
founders of the Royal Society, 173
Ciodwin, Francis, Bishop of Here-
ford, literary influence of his
Man in the Moone, 34, 169, 173

INDEX

245

Golden Hind, The, Btory of Marlowe's

reputed death on board, 72
Golden liycnd, The, 6
Golden Tnn/e, The, Dunbar's, 20
Goldiiiff, Arthur, translator of ( )vid,

89 ; Shakespeare's debt to. Hi.
Goodman, Godfrey, Bishop of

(iloucester, Court oj James I.

by, 169
Goodwin, Gordon, 8(i
Oorhoduc, the first Enjflish tragedy,

40, 08 ; the influence of Seneca,

ib. ; the use of blank verse in

Enfflish drama, ib.
Gorgeous Gallery oj Gallant Inven-

tions. A, 48
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, verses to Mr.

A. H. BuUen, 91 ; Sir Thomas

Browne by, 150 ; Life and Letters

of John Donne by, 1.55
Gosson, Stephen, The Schoole of

Ahu.ie by, 141
Govemour, The, Sir Thomas Elyot's,

31
Gower, John, the foil of Chaucer, 16;

his capital work, ih. ; Warton's

criticism, 17; comparison of, with

Chaucer, ib. ; " Moral Gower," ib. ;

various editions of, ih.
Grafton, Richard, Chronicle of, 28
Gray, J. W., Shakespeare's Mar-

riagehy, 109
Gray's Inn, The Comedy of Errors

played at, 96
Greene, Robert, attacks by, on

Marlowe and Shakespeare, 69 ;

lyrist, novelist, and pamphleteer,

ib. ; Friar Bacon and Friar

Bungay, 70 ; lyrics of, 90 ; his

Groatsworth of Wit, 96 ; Pandosto

and Menaiihon, 127
Greeuhill, W. A., edition of Sir

Thomas Browne, 1.50
Grenewey, Richard, translator ol

Tacitus, 167
Greville, Sir Fulke, 86 footnote, 91
Grey, Zacbary, edition of Samuel

Butler, 206
Groatsworth of Wit, Greene's, 96
Grocyn, William, 29
Grosart, Dr., editions of Daniel and

Spenser by, 86
Guevara, 40

Guido delle Colonne, 10
Gutenberg, John, 3

Habington, William, 164 Joofnofe
Hakewill, Bishop George, his

influence on Johnson, 169
Hakluyt, Richard, Voyages of, 141
Hales, John, the "ever-memor-
able," 168 ; his famous defence
of Shakespeare, ib. ; his learning
and his charity, 169

Halifax, Marquis of, George Savile,
brilliance of, as a pamphleteer,
228 ; The (.'haracter of a Trimmer,
ih.

Hall, Edward, The Union, of the
Ndhle and lllnsire Families of Lan-
ea.\ler and )VwA:by,28; influence
of his Chroniele, ib.

Hall, Fvlizabeth, Lady Barnard,
the last surviving descendant of
Shakespeare, 108

Hall, John, Shakespeare's son-in-
law, 10.8

Hall, Jolni, essayist and poet, 177

Hall, Joseph, his Charurteri.sms,
modelled on I'beophrastus, 130 ;
as a great preacher, 100

Halley, Edmund, astronomer, 200

Hamerton, P. J., Intellectual Life
by, 131

Handfal of Plea.tant Delights, A, an
Elizabethan song-book, 49

Hanmer, Sir Thomas, edition of
Shakespeare,. 108

Harleian MS., the Chaucerian, 13

Harman, Thomas, Caveat for Com-
mon Cursetors, a pioneer of
" character " sketches by, 129

Harrington, James, Oceana of, sug-
gested by More's Utopia, 34 ; his
theories described by Scott in
Woodstock, ih. ; his friendship
with Charles 1., 172 ; Oceana by,
ih.

Harrington, Sir John, translator of
Ariosto, 42, 91

Harrison, William, Description of
England by, 187

Harry, Blind, 20

Harvey, Gabriel, influence of, on
Spenser, 76

Hawes, Stephen, The Passetime oj
Pleasure by, 23

Hayward, Sir John, First Part oJ
the Life and Raigne of Henry the
IVth by, 138

Hazlitt, \V. C, edition of Gascoigne
by, 47

Hearne, Thomas, 29 ; Reliquia: by,
148

Heminge, John, 94, 107

Henderson, Mr. T. F., Scottish
Vernacular Literature by, 22

Henry IV., the first English king
who spoke English habitually, 4

Henry VIII., literary influence of,

27
Henry son, Robert, Bobene and

Makyne by, 19
Henslowe, Philip, diarist, 139
Herbert, George, comparison of,

with Herrick, 161 ; sketch of his

life, ib. ; The Temple, 161-2 ;

critical estimate of, 162

Herbert, Sir Tliomas, 141 ; his
friendship with (Charles I., 172 ;
Threnodia Carolina by, ih.

Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 161 ;
his Aulobiography, 195 ; political
career, ih. ; poems, 196 ; uses
the /n Mevioriam stanza, Hi. ; the
fatlier of English Deism, ih.

Herford, Prof. C. H., German In-
fluence on English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century by, 23 ; edition
of The Shepheards Calender by, 86

Herrick, Roliert, Ilesperides, 158 ;
a versifier by instinct, 159 ; as a
writer of vers de socAele, ih. ; his
position among English lyrical
poets, ih.

Hewlett, Mr. Maurice, obligation
of, to the Morte d' Arthur, 18

Heylyn, Peter, his Survey, 172 ;
History of the Sahliath, ib. ; his
popularity in the eighteenth cen-
tury, ib. ; History oJ the Reformat
tion, 173

Heywood, Jasper, translator of
Seneca, 39

Heywood, John, author of morali-
ties and interludes, 60-61 ; the
interludes of, 65 ; as literary
critic, 142

Heywood, Thomas, a prolific play-
wright, 119; comedies of domestic
life, ih.

Higden, John, 6

Historia Britonum, Geofi'rey of Mon-
mouth's, 18

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan of, sug-
gested by More's Utopia, 34 ; his
eccentric father, 196; the patron-
age of the Cavendishes, ih. ; dawn
of his philosophical ambitions,
ih. ; eleven years in France, 197 ;
Leviathan, ih. ; his political con-
ceptions, ih. ; his influence on
English political philosophy, ih. ;
his casuistry, 198 ; " squaring the
circle," ib. ; a poet at eighty, ih. ;
Aubrey's account of, ih.

Hoby, Sir Thomas, his translation
of C'astiglioni's Courtier, 39

Hoby, Sir Thomas, diarist, 139

Holinsbed, Raphael, Chronicles of
England by, 137

Holland, Philemon, Elizabethan
" translator-general," 42

Hooke, Robert, the "greatest
mechanick " of the seventeenth
century, 200

Hooker, Richard, appointed Master
of the Temple, 165 ; Laws of
Eccle.'iia.^tical Polity by, 166 ; the
genuineness of the sixth book of
the Laws, ib. ; the objects of his
work, ib. ; a great prose classic, f 6.

246

INDEX

Hookes, Nicholas, Amanda by, 179
Hopkins, John, joint author of the

Psalms in metre, 57
Home, Richard, as a moderiiiser of

Chaucer, 14
Hoskins, John, assisted Raleigh

with the History of the World, 1.37
House oj Fame, The, Chaucer's, 10
Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 25
Howard, Sir Robert, brother-iu-law

and collaborator of Dryden, 207
Howell, James, miscellaneous writer

and Historiographer Royal, 171 ;

his Epistolce Ho-EliancE, ib. ; his

influence on the English essayists

and his posthumous reuo\vn, ib.
Huchown, 18
Hughes, John, Spenserian scholar,

86
Humphreys, H. Noel, History of

the Art of Printing by, 6
Hunuis, M'illiam, 48
Hunt, Leigh, as a moderuiser of

Chaucer, 14
Hutchinson, Lucy, Life oJ Colonel

Hutchinson by, 227

Interludes, the position of, in the
evolution of English drama, 61

Italian influence, the extent of, in
the Elizabethan age, 38, 63

Jaggard, William, 91, 107

James I., calls Chaucer ''his
master," 8 ; The Kingis Quair
by, 20 ; works of, 131

Jamiesou, T. H., Life and Writings
of Alexander Barclay by, 23

Jason, The History of, 5

Jessopp, Canon, Lives oJ the Norths
edited by, 235

Jew of Malta, The Rich, Marlowe's,
74

Jewel, Bishop John, 165

Jocasta, Gascoigne's, 47

Johnson, Gerard, bust of Shake-
speare by, 104

Jones, Inigo, his share in Eliza-
bethan masques, 114

Jones, Robert, 49

Jonson, Ben, early life, 113; escapes
gallows by benefit of clergy, ib. ;
Shakespeare acts in Every Man in
his Humor, ih. ; " Poetomachia,"
ih. ; Cynthia's Revels, ib. ; Sejanus,
114 ; masques, ib. ; songs, ib. ;
poet laureate, ib. ; the Mermaid
Tavern, ili. ; journey to Drum-
mond of Ilawthornden, ili. ; king
of the Apollo, j'A. ; "() rare Ben
Jonson," 116; Vot/mie, ili.; The
Alchemist, ib. ; Bartholomew Fair
and The Silent Woman, ib. ; char-
acteristics of Jonson's comedy.

116 ; after Shakespeare, the
most intellectual of Elizabethan
dramatists, ib. ; his friendship
with Sir Walter Raleigh, 137;
Timber, 143
Jusserand, J. J., Piers the Plowman
by, 52 ; The English Novel in the
Time oJ Shakespeare by, 127

Keffer, early printing of, 3

Kemp, Will, actor, 68

Ken, Bishop Thomas, author of
two famous hymns, 234 ; his
saintly character, ib.

Ker, Prof. W. P., Essays on
Medieevul Literature by, 28 ; esti-
mate of Dryden as a critic by,
212 ; edition of Dryden's Essays
by, 215

Killigrew, Thomas, manager of the
Theatre Royal, 217

Kinaston, Sir Francis, minor poet,
imitator of Waller, 177

King, Edward, the subject of
Milton's Lycidas, 184, 191

King, Henry, Bishop of Chichester,
devotional poet, 179

Kingis Quair, The, by James I., 20

Kinwelmersh, Francis, 48

Knolles, Richard, historian, 138

Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedie
of, 71 ; resemblance of his play
to Hamlft, ib.

Kynaston, Edward, actor, 216

Laing, David, edition of Henryson
by, 19 ; edition of Dunbar by,
21 ; edition of Sir David Lyndsay's
works by, 22

Lamb, Charles, eulogy of Shake-
speare, 101-2

Lament for the Makaris, The, Dun-
bar's, 20

Lancelot, Walter Map's, 18

Laugland, AVilliam, comparison of,
with Chaucer, 8 ; Piers the Plow-
man by, 52 ; outline of the poem,
ib. ; short bibliography, ib. foot-
note

Latimer, Hugh, literary qualities
of the sermons of, 30 ; the story
of Teuterden Steeple and the
Goodwin Sands, 31 ; his martyr-
dom, ib.

Latin influence, extent of, on Eliza-
bethan literature, 38

Lauder, William, his charges of
plagiarism against Milton, 194

Lee, Miss Elizabeth, Selections from
La Bruyere by, 129

Lee, Mr. Sidney, Elizabethan Son-
nets by, 91 ; theory regarding
Shakespeare's sonnets, 99 ; esti-
mate of Shakespeare's income as

an actor, 103 ; Life of Shake-
speare by, 109 ; Great Englishmen
of the Sixteenth Century, 127 ;
edition of Herbert's Autobio-
graphy by, 196

Lee, Nathaniel, unhappy life of,
214 ; his Marlowesque plays, ib.

Le Fevre, Raoul, 6

Legend o_f Good Women, The,
Chaucer's, 10

Leland, John, the first great Eng-
lish antiquary, 29

L'Estrange, Roger, licenser of the
press, 212, 237 ; The Intelligencer
and The News, ib.

Lettou, John, a rival of Caxton, 6

Lilly, ^rilliam, 230

Linacre, Thomas, 29

Lithgow, William, traveller, 141

Locke, John, medical studies and
varying fortunes of, 236 ; a
homely thinker, ib. ; Essay on
the Human Understanding, 237

Lodge, Tliomas, sonnets of, 88 ; the
lyrics of, 90 ; Rosalynde, 127 ; as
literary critic, 142

" Lothario," the name (from Rowe's
Fair Penitent) supplants that of
" Lovelace " as a synonym for a
libertine, 1.58

Lounsbury, Prof. T. R., estimate
of Chaucer by, 12 ; Studies in
Chaucer by, 15

Lovelace, Richard, dramatist and
lyrist, 157 ; Richardson's use of
his name, 158

Lowe, R. W., Thomas Betterton by,
217

Lowell, J. R. , as a critic of Chaucer,
15

Lowin, John, actor, 217

Lucy, Sir Thomas, Shakespeare and,
94

Ludlow, Edmund, Memoirs by, 229

Luttrell, Narcissus, Macaulay's use
of his diary, 229

Lyly, John, Euphues by, 68 ; his
comedies, 69 ; lyrics attributed
to, 90 ; the success of Euphues,
126 ; first approach to the novel
of manners, ib. ; his imitators,
127

Lyndsay, Sir David, a Scottish
Rabeiais, 22

Lyrics, Elizabethan, 48-9

Lytton, E. B., The Coming Race by,
34

Mahbe, James, Elizabethan trans-
lator, 42

Macaulay, Prof. G. C, edition of
Gower by, 17

" Machlinia," 6

Mackay, Sheriff yEucas, 21

INDEX

247

Macray, W. D., odition of Claren-
flou's Ilistorii by, 200

Madden, D. H., Diary of Muster
WUlinm Silence by, 109

Maeterlinck, M., quoted ou the
Elizabethan dramatists, 126

Malines, William of, G

Malone, Edward, desecration of
Shakespeare's bust by, 104

Malory, Sir 'lliomas, life of, 17 ;
Morte d' Arthur, ih.

Manninff, Aune, The Household oj
Sir Thomas More by, 34

Manningham, John, diarist, 139

Mansion, Colard, 5-6

Mautuanus, Baptista, 79, 95

Map, Walter, 18

Markham, Sir Clements, History oJ
Peru by, 34

Marlowe, Christopher, life of, 71-2 ;
translator and actor, ib. ; death
at Deptford or on board The
Golden Hind, ib. ; his place in
English drama, ib. ; Tamhurlaine,
ib. ; Mr. Verity's estimate, 73 ;
Charles Lamb on, ib. ; Dr. Faustus
ib. ; The Jew oJ Malta, 74 ; Edward
II., ih.; influence on Shakespeare,
ib. ; legend of his death at the
hands of Jonson, 113

Marston, John, extravagant plays
of, 117

Martin - Marprelate controversy,
the, 165

Martyr, Peter, 56

Marvell, Andrew, his famous lines
on Charles I., 177 ; colleague and
friend of Milton, 178; his satires,
ib. ; the colleague of Milton, 186

Masques, Elizabethan, 114

Massinger, Philip, his association
with Beaumont and Fletcher,
110-12 ; play-mender and reno-
vator, 123 ; a master of his-
trionic eloquence, ib. ; a literary
economist, ib. ; A New Way to
Pay Old Debts, ib. ; "Sir Giles
Overreach," 124

Massou, Prof. David, Drummond of
Hawthomden by, 156 ; Life oJ
Milton by, 194

May, Thomas, historian and drama-
tist, 138

May, Thomas, Johnson's praise of,
as a Latin poet, 174

Mayor, J. E. B., edition of Ascham's
Scholemaster by, 30

Mazarine Bible, the, 3

Medwell, Henry, author of a miracle
play, GO

Melbancke, Brian, Philotimus by,
127

Melville, Sir James, 140

Mentelin, early printing of, 3

Meredith, George, IHchard Fmierel
compared with Romeo mid Juliet,
97

Meres, Francis, 106

Merlin, Robert de Borron's, 18

Mermaid Tavern, the, 114

Middleton, Thomas, antiquarian
value of bis plays, 118; The
('hinijii'.lmy, ih. ; bis scliolarship,
ill. fooliiote

Milton, John, his schooldays, 183 ;
friendship for Diodati, ib.\ early
poems, 184; at C/'ambridge, ih. ;
lyycidus and Comus, ib. ; travels
on the Continent, ib. ; Kpitaphium
Damonis, 185 ; marriage with
Mary Powell, ih. ; pamphlets on
divorce, ib. ; Areiipayitiva, ib. ;
Latin Secretary, 186; controversy
with Salmasius, ib. ; second and
third marriages, ib. ; life at
Bunhill Fields, ib.\ Paradise Lost,
187 ; domestic unhappiness, ib. ;
death, ib.; religious opinions, ib.;
Johnson's estimate, ili. footnote ;
Shakespeare and Milton at West-
minster Abbey and St. Paul's,
188; his controversial pamphlets,
ih.; Areopagitica, 188-9; Eikoyio-
clastes, 189 ; his relations with
Cromwell, ib. ; qualities of his
prose style, 190 ; On the Morning
oj Chrisfs Nativity, ib. ; Comus,
ib. ; L' Allegro and // Penseroso,
ib.; Lycidas, 191 ; the publication
and history of Paradi.ie Lost, ib. ;
Miltonic diction, 192 ; the Latin
quality of his mind, ib. ; the
sources of the greatness of Para-
dise Lost, ib. ; his lack of emotion,
193 ; Samson Agonistes, ib. ; its
Sophoclean qualities, ib. ; his
vocabulary and its dangers, ih. ;
the severity of his art, 194 ;
bibliography, ih. ; false charges
of plagiarism by Lauder, ih. ;
Nova Solyma, ib.

Miracle plays, 60

Mirror for Magistrates, The, 45 ;
Sackville's Induction, ib.

Miscellanies, Seven English, edited
by J. Payne Collier, 49

Misfortunes oJ' Arthur, The, a play
acted before Elizabeth at Gray's
Inn by Bacon and others, 64

Moliere, Chaucer compared to, 11

Molza, Francesco Maria, transla-
tion of The ^neid by, 26

Montague, Charles, joint author of
The Town and the Country Mouse,
210

Montague, Richard, a famous Jaco-
bean preacher, 169

Montaigne, Florio's, 43 ; Cotton's, 44

Moralities, 60

More, Henry, Platonist and poet,
175

More, Sir Thomas, .'•ketch of his
life, 32 ; his dramatic rise and
downfall, ib. ; origin of Utopia,
ib. ; its flattering reception, ih. ;
tlie first Kngiisli version, ib.
footnote ; analysis of Utopia, 33 ;
influence of Plato and Lucian and
St. Augustine, 34 ; its influf^nce
on later literature, ib. ; his char-
acter an enigma, ih. ; bibliographi-
cal note, ih. footnote

Morell, Thomas, edition of Chaucer
by, 13

Morgann, Maurice, Character of
Falstaff hy, 98

Morland, Sir Samuel, engineer, 200

Morley, Miss E. J., Sir Philip
Sidney by, 127

Morley, Prof. Henry, critical work
of, on Gower, 17

Morley, Thomas, 49, 89

Morte d' Arthur, Malory's, 17-18 ;
influence of, on later literature,
18 ; various editions of, ib. ;
Huchown's, ih.

Morton, Thomas, a famous Jaco-
bean divine, 169

Moryson, Fynes, Itinerary of, 141

Mother Hubhurd'.s- Tale, Spenser's, 82

Mulcaster, Richard, Elizabethan
critic, 142

Munday, Anthony, Elizabethan
translator, 42 ; A Banquet of
Dainty Conceits, ii); Zelauto, 127

Narren.iehiff, Sebastian Brandt's, 23
Nash, Thomas, Jack Wilton by, 128
Naunton, Sir Robert, Fragmenta

Regalia by, 141
Newman, John Henry, comparison

of, with Sir T. More, 34
Nokes, James, actor, 216
Norden, John, historian, 141
North, Roger, Lives by, 227
North, Sir Thomas, translation of

Plutarch by, 39
Northbrooke, John, Elizabethan

critic, 141
Norton, Thomas, joint author of

Gorhoduc, 63
Nott, Dr. G. F., edition of "Wyatt's

poems by, 24
Nova Solyma, attributed to Milton,

194
Nutt, Mr. David, Popular Studies in

Romance by, 18

Occleve, Thomas, 9
Old Wives' Tale, The, Greene's, 71
Oldham, John, poet and satirist,
178

248

INDEX

Oliphant, F. R., article on Dunbar
by, 21

Oliphant, TTiomas, Musa Madri-

galesca by, 91
"Orinda, The Matchless," 175
Ormsby, John, translator of Cer-
vantes, 44
Osborne, Dorothy (Lady Temple),

the Letters of, 233
Otway, Thomas, The Orphan by,

214 ; Venice Preserved, ib. ; tragic

death, ib.
Overbury, Sir Thomas, tragic life

of, 130 ; The Wife, ib. ; his

" characters," ib.
Ovid, influence of, in Elizabethan

literature, 39 ; Shakespeare's debt

to, 95

Painter, AVilliam, The Palace of

Pleasure by, 40
Palace ofPlea-ture, The, Painter's, 40
Paltock, Robert, Peter Wilkins by,

34
Paradyse of Dai/nty Devices, The, 48
Parker, Archbishop, 57
Parliament nf Foules, The, 10
Parry, William, 141
Passetime of Pleasure, The, Stephen

Hawes's, 23
Pass-ionate Pilgrim, The, 49, 91
Paterson, J., edition of Dunbar by,

21
Pattison, Mark, his view of Milton's

prose, 190
Pauli, Dr. R., edition of Govver by,

17
Pearson, John, 233
Peele, George, lyrist and dramatist,

70 ; influence on Milton, 71 ;

David and Bethsabe, ib. ; possible

influence on Shakespeare, ib.
Penu, William, Fruits of Solitude

by, 235
Pepys, Samuel, early life, 224 ;

work at the Admiralty, ib. ; Pre-
sident of the Royal Society, ib. ;

history of his Diary, 225 ; a

unique document, ib. ; did Pepys

anticipate publication ? ib. ; R. L.

Stevenson's view, ib. ; Sir Leslie

Stephen's view, 226
Percy, William, sonneteer, 88
Pettie, George, A Petite Pallace oj

Pettie his FleMure, 40
Pfister, early printing of, 3
Phaer, Thomas, translation of Virgil

by, 39
Philips, Katherine, "tlie matchless

Orinda," 175
Phillipps, llalliwell, Ludus C'ojiere-

trice edited by, (j4
Pliillips, Eilward, miscellanist, the

nephew of Milton, 183, 185, 189

Phillips, John, miscellanist, the

nephew of Milton, 183, 185
Phcenicc Nest, The, an Elizabethan

song-book, 48
Piers the Plowman, 61
Plomer, H. R., English Printing by,

6
Plutarch, Sir Thomas North's, 39
Policronicon , Higden's, 6
Pollard, Mr. A. F., Thomas Cranmer

by, 56
Pollard, Mr. A. W., estimate of

Chaucer by, 12 ; Chaucer Primer

by, 15 ; English Miracle Plays,

Moralities, and Interludes by, 64
Poly-Olliion, Drajdon's, 85
Pope, Alexander, as a moderniser

of Chaucer, 14 ; his edition of

Shakespeare, 108
Pordage, John, 164 footnote
Porson, Prof., 101
Prayer Book, the English, the

evolution of, 55
Press, the, the development of,

during the eighteenth century,

238 ; the power of, 239-40
Preston, Tliomas, an Elizabethan

dramatist, 63
Prideaux, Humphrey, memoir

writer, 233
Printing, the transformation from

xylography to typography, 3 ;

early history of, ib. et seq.
Prior, Matthew, share in parodying

Dryden's Hind and the Panther,

210
Proctor, Thomas, an Elizabethan

anthologist, 48
Promptuarium Partmlorum, an early

Latin lexicon, 31
Psalms, the Metrical, history of, 57
Psalter, tlie Mainz, 3
Purchas, Samuel, Pilgrimes by, 141
Puttenliam, John, 77
Pynson, Richard, 6

Quarles, Francis, 164 footnote
Quartos, the Shakespeare, 105-6

Babi'lais, Sir Thomas Urquhart's,
43 ; translation by W. F. Smith,
44

Rainokls, Dr., Elizabethan critic,
141

Raleigh, Prof, 194

Raleigh, Sir ^Valter, poems of, 91 ;
the romantic interest of his life,
136 ; the patron of Bruno, ib. ;
liis literary friendships, ib. ;
ci>itome of his life as a man of
action, ib. footnote; History of the
World, 137

Randolpli, Thomas, minor poet, to
whom Milton owed a line, 179

Rankins, William, Elizabethan

critic, 141
Raspe, R. E., Baron Munchausen

by, 34
Rastell, John, writer of "inter-
ludes," 60
Ravenscroft, Thomas, 49
Ray, John, naturalist, 200
Reade, Charles, The Cloister and the

Hearth, 5
Recueil des Histoires de Troye, Le, 5
Reresby, Sir John, memoir writer,

232
Reynolds, F., Some Principles of

Elizabethan Staging by, 75
Rhynie-royal, 20

Rhys, Prof., edition of the Morte
d'Arthur by, 18 ; Studies in the
Arthurian Legend by, ib. ; Celtic
Heathendom by, ib.
Rich, Barnabe, Farewell to the Mili-
tary e Profes-s-ion by, 40
Richard, Thomas, Mi.sogonus by, 62
Richmond, Leigh, Fathers oJ the

English Church by, 31
Rivers, Earl, 5

Bobene arid Makyne, Henryson's, 19
Robertson, Mr. J. M., edition of

Bacon's works by, 135
Robertson, Mr. J. Logie (" Hugh

Haliburton "), 21
Robinson, Clement, an Elizabethan
anthologist, 49 ; Handefull of
Pleasant Delites by, 89
Roche, Walter, Shakespeare's

schoolmaster, 93
Rochester, Earl of, poems of the, 179
Rogers, John, the first martyr of

the Marian persecution, 54
Roister Doister, an interlude by

Nicholas Udall, 62
Roman de la Rose, 10
Romeus and Juliet, The Tragical
Hi,story of, Broke's translation of,
from Bandello, 39
Roper, William, son-in-law and bio-
grapher of Sir T. More, 34
Rosseter, Philip, 49
Rous, John, diarist, 140
Rowe, Nicholas, first biographer
of Shakespeare, 94 ; his edition
of Shakespeare, 108; tragedies of,
215 ; edition and life of Shake-
speare, ib. ; poet laureate, ib. ;
translator of Lucan, ib. ; The Fair
Penitent by, ib.
Rowlands, Samuel, Martin Markatl

by, 129 ; Democritus by, 147
Rowlands, Sanmel, Elizabethan

translator, 42
Rowley, \V^illiam, collaborator with
'Hionias Middleton, the Eliza-
liethan dramatist, 118 ; his satire.
The Search for Money, 129

INDEX

249

Roy, William, associate of Tyndale,

Royal Society, the, early liistory of,
na footnote ; later history of, 200

Sackville, Tliomas, Earl of Dorset,
his Induction to The Mirror for
Magistrates, 45-6 ; his share in
Gorboduc, 63

Saintshury, Prof., on the Spenserian
stanza, 81 ; quoted on 'I'honias
Deklter, 117 ; Dryden l>y, 215

Salmasius, Milton's controversy
with, 186, 189

Sanderson, Robert, tlieologian, 152

Sandys, George, traveller, 141

Supho and Phao, Lyly's, 68

Savile, Sir Henry, translator of
Tacitus, 42, 138, 1G7

Schelling, Prof., Life of Gascoigne
by, 47 ; Elizabethan Ijyrivs by, 91

Schipper, Prof., 21

Schoeffer, early printing of, 3

Sckolemaster, The, Ascham's, 30, 76

Scot, Sir John, of Scotstarvet, 156

Scott, Sir Walter, Chaucer com-
pared to, 12 ; comparison of, with
Shakespeare, 100

Scottish Vernacular Literature, Mr.
T. F. Henderson's, 22

Sedley, Sir Charles, 179 ; The Mul-
berry Garden by, 219

Seebohm, Frederick, Oxford Re-
formers by, 29

Selden, John, greatest of anti-
quarian lawyers, 167 ; his Table
Talk, 168

Seneca, influence of, in Elizabethan
literature, 39, 63

Settle, Elkaunah, Dryden's satire
210

Shadwell, Thomas, The Medal of
John Bayes by, 210 ; Dryden's
reply in MacFlecknoe, ih. ; his
appearance as "Og" in Absalom
and Aehitophel, ib. ; poet laureate,
211 ; his comedies, 219 ; The Squire
of Alsatia and Scott's Fortunes of
Nigel, ib.

Shakespeare, William, date of birth,
92 ; misfortunes of his father, ib. ;
early life, 93 ; Aubrey's anec-
dotes, ib. ; marriage with Anne
Hathaway, ib. ; goes to London,
ib. ; bis children, ib. footnote ; Sir
Thomas Lucy, 94 ; players' visits
to Stratford, ib. ; early work as
reviser and adapter, 95 ; Henry
VI. , Titus Andronicus, The Taming
of the Shrew, ib. ; theatrical parts
ascribed to him, ib. footnote ; in-
fluence of Ovid and Mantuanus,
ib. ; early comedies, ib. ; Launce
in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

ib. Jootnnle; early liistorical plays,
ib. ; inlluence of Marlowe, ih. ;
poems, 96; (ireeno's atfciok, ib. ;
his phiys at Court, ib.; patronage
of tlie Earl of Southampton, ih. ;
A Midsummer Might's Dream, 97
and footnote ; Romeo and Juliet,
ib. ; Merchant of Venice, ih. ;
Henry IV. and Hmry V., 98;
The Merry Wices, ib. ; ,l.v You
Like It, ib. ; features of Sliake-
spearean tragedy, ib. J'ootnote ;
Hamlet, Macljeth, Othello, and King
Lear, 99 ; rivalry of Ben Jonson,
ib. J'ootnote ; autobiograi)hical
element in Coriolanus, ib. ; tlie
dedication of the Sonnets, ib.
footnote ; personal characteristics
compared with Scott's, 100 ; his
constructive imagination, ih. ; his
philosophy of life, 101 ; "this
manly book," ib. ; Antony and
Cleopatra, 102 ; Coriolanus, ib. ;
"romance plays," «6.; retirement
to Stratford, 103 ; history of his
family, ih. ; deatli and burial at
Stratford, ih.; portraits and per-
sonal appearance, 104 ; the first
quarto editions, 105 ; The Pas-
sionate Pilgrim, 107 ; tlie first
folio, ib. ; the second folio, 108 ;
the third and fourth folios, ih. ;
critical fads and hallucinations,
ib.; the identity of " W. H.," ib.;
the Baconian folly, iA. ; Theobald's
emendations, ib. J'ootnote ; causes
of Shakespeare's supremacy, 109 ;
a select bibliography, ih. ; acts in
Ben Jonson's Every Man in his
Humor, 113

Shaw, Mr. Bernard, appreciation of
Bunyan by, 180

Sheldon, Archbishop, 233

Sheldon, Thomas, translator of Don
Quixote, 43

Shepheards Calender, Spenser's, 78-9

Ship of Fools, The, Alexander Bar-
clay's, 23

Shirley, James, the last of the
Elizabethan dramatists, 124 ; Love
Tricks, ib. ; victim of the Great
Fire, ib. ; The Gamester, ib. ; his
relation to his predecessors, 125

Sibbald, J., Chronicle of Scottish
Poetry by, 22

Sibbes, Richard, celebrated Puritan
preacher, 169

Sichel, Mr. Walter, 109

Sidgwick, Mr. F., edition of Wither
by, 164 J'ootnote

Sidney, Sir Philip, the fashion of
sonneteering set by, 87 ; Astrophel
and Stella, ih. ; French and Italian
influence apparent in, 88 ; Arcadia,

127 ; its mixture of the pastoral
and the chivalric, ib. ; its popu-
larity and literary qualities, 128;
Apologie for I'netrie, ].12 ; its
critical value, ih. ; as literary
critic, ill.

Singer, S. W., Cavendish's lAfe of
iVolsey edited by, 29

Skeat, I'rof., edition of Cliaucer by,
1 4 ; The Student's Chaucer by, 16 ;
The Chaucer ('anon by, ih. ; trans-
lation of I'iers the Plowman by, 62

Skelton, Jolin, 23-4

Small, J., edition of Dunbar by, 21 ;
edition of Gavin Douglas by, 22

Smith, Alexander, Dreainthorpe by,
15

Smith, Captain Joliii, Trm Travels
by, i41

Smith, Dr. Miles, 58

Smith, Miss Lucy Toulmain, The
York Plays edited by, 64

Smith, Prof. D. Nichol, Eighteenth-
Century Essays on Shakespeare by,
109

Smith, Prof. G. Gregory, Elizabethan
Critical E.ssays by, 143

Smith, W. F., translator of Rabelais,
44

Smollett, Tobias, Cliaucer compared
to, 11

Smyth, Robert, Italian translator,
40

Snell,Mr. F. J., The Age of Chaucer
by, 15

Sommer, H. O., edition of the
Morte d' Arthur by, 18

Song-books, Elizabethan, 89

Sonnet, liistory of the English, 87

South, Robert, 233

Southampton, Earl of, Shakespeare
and the, 96

Southern, Thomas, the " heroic "
tragedies of, 214

Soutliey, Robert, edition of the
Morte d' Arthur by, 18

Spanish Tragedie, Kyd's, 71

Speculum Meditantis, Gower's, 16

Speed, John, History of Great Britain
by, 138

Speght, Thomas, edition of Chaucer
by, 10, 13

Spenser, Edmund, influence on, of
Mulcaster and Gabriel Harvey,
78 ; The Shepheards Calender, ib. ;
life in Ireland, ib. ; misfortunes
and death, 79 ; real characters
in the Calender, ib. ; The Faerie
queene, ih. et seq. ; the poet of
poets, 80 ; Leigh Hunt's appre-
ciation of, ib. ; Jonson on his
diction, ib. ; the Spenserian
stanza, 81 ; his later work, 81-2 ;
Epithalamium, 82 ; Prothalamium,

250

INDEX

ib. ; his profound influence on
English poetry, 86 ; bibliography,
8Q footnote ; Amoretti, 88

Spielmann, M. H., The Portraits
of Geoffrey Chaucer by, 9

Stanley, Thomas, minor poet, imita-
tor of Waller, 177

Stanyhurst, Richard, translation of
The JEneid by, 77

Stapletou, Thomas, the biographer
of Sir T. More, 34

Stationers' Company, the rise of the,
37 and footnote

Steele Glass, The, Gascoigne's, 47

Stephen, Sir Leslie, Hobbes by, 198

Stepney, George, 212

Sternhold, Thomas, metrical version
of the Psalms by, 57

Stevenson, William, probable author
of Gammer Gurton's Needle, 62

Stillingfleet, Edward, 234

Stoll, E. E., John Webster by, 125

Stow, John, 10, 13 ; Annates 0/
England and Survey of London by,
138

Strachey, Sir Edward, edition of the
Morte d' Arthur by, 18

Strode, William, The Floating Island
by, 179

Stubbes, Philip, Anatomie of Abuses
by, 129 ; Elizabethan critic, 141

Suckling, Sir John, a prototype of
Rochester, 159 ; his prodigal
career, )'*. ; Aubrey's account of
his miserable death, 1 60 ; the gay
and sparkling impudence of his
lyrics, ib.

Supposes, Gascoigne's, 47

Surrey, Earl of, Henry Howard,
life of, 25 ; the legend of " fair
Geraldine," ib. ; a disciple of
Wyatt's, 26 ; the first to use
decasyllabic blank verse, ib.
Sylvester, Joshua, translator of Du
Bartas, 42 ; his translation an
influence on Milton, 183
Symonds, J. A., Predecessors of
Shakespeare by, 75

Taine, his estimate of Froissart
quoted, 28

Tamburlaine, Marlowe's, 72-3

Tate, Nahum, metrical Psalms by,
67, 210

Taylor, Jeremy, outline of tlie life
of, 151 ; King diaries I. and, ib.;
Holy Living and Holy Dying, 152;
qualities of his style, ib.

Temple, Sir William, diplomatic
career of, 228 ; life at Moor Park,
ib. ; Essays, ib. ; Ancient and
Modem Learning, ib. ; tlie course
of the controversy, 229 ; his
poethumous reputation, ib.

Tenterden Steeple, tlie story of,

first told by Bishop Latimer, 31
Theater and the Curtain, the, 67
Theater playhouse, 94
Theatre, Blackfriars, 67
Theatre, the Fortune, 67
Theatre, the Globe, 67, 94
Tlieatre, the Hope, 67
Theatre, the Rose, 67
Theatre, the Swan, 67
Theatre, the rise of the English,
66 ; the Elizabethan, 67 ; the
Restoration, 217
Theobald, Lewis, his famous Shake-
speare emendation, 108
Theophrastus, his Characters trans-
lated into Latin by Casaubou, 129
Thistle and the Rose, The, Dunbar's,

20
Thorudike, A. H., Influence oj
Beaumont and Fletcher on Shake-
speare by, 125
Thynne, Francis, edition of Chaucer

by, 13
Tillotson, Dean, 234
Title-pages, introduction of, 7
Titus Andronicus, 68
Todd, Henry J., editor of Spenser,

86
Todd, Mr. G. Eyre, 19, 21
Tottel's Miscellany, 24, 26, 48
Tourneur, Cyril, obscure life, 121
footnote ; The Athei.'it's Tragedie,
121 ; The Revenger's Tragedie, ib. ;
a morbid genius, ib.
Toxophilus, Roger Ascham's, 30
Traherne, Thomas, 1G4^ footnote
Trent, Mr. W. P., 194
Trevelyan, Mr. G. M., England in

the Age of Wycliffe by, 62
Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's, 10
Tunstall, Cuthbert, Bishop of Dur-
ham, the friend of Sir T. More, 32
Turberville, George, translator of

Ovid, 40, 48
Tusser, Thomas, QG footnote
Twine, Thomas, translator of Virgil,

39
Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 102
Tyndale, William, influenced by
Erasmus, 53 ; began his transla-
tion of the New Testament at
Cologne, ib. ; Froude's estimate of
the translation, ib. ; The Obedience
of a Christian Man, ib. ; contro-
versy with Sir Tliomas More, 54 ;
martyrdom, ib. ; the subsequent
history of his " Bible," ib.
Typography, the invention of, 3
Tyrwliitt, Thomas, edition of
Chaucer by, 13

Udall, Nicholas, author of Ralph
Roister Doister, 63

Underdown, Thomas, Elizabethan
translator, 40

Urquhart, Sir Thomas, eccentric
career of, 43 ; translation of
Rabelais, ib.

Urry, John, edition of Chaucer by,
13

Ussher, James (Archbishop of
Armagh), Annates by, 167 ;
his chronology of the Creation
adopted in the English Bible, ib.

Utopia, Sir Thomas More's, its
origin, 32 ; its brilliant recep-
tion, ib. ; the first English version,
ib. Jootnote ; analysis of, 33 ; in-
fluence shown by it of Luciau and
Plato and St. Augustine, 34 ; its
own influence on later literature,
ib. ; bibliographical note, ib.
footnote

Vanbrugh, Sir John, playwright
and architect, 221 ; The Relapse
by, ib. ; The Provoked Wije, 222 ;
Garrick's favourite part of Sir
John Brute, ib. ; his work as an
architect, ib. note ; Abel Evans's
epitaph, ib.

Vaughan, Henry, Silcr Scintillans
by, 163 ; A\'ordsworth and, 164

Vaux, Lord, 48, 91

Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford, 91

Verity, Mr. A. W., criticism of
Marlowe's Tamburlaine, 73 ; Mar-
lowe's Influence on Shakespeare, 76

Verney Letters, The, 233

Virgil, influence of, in Elizabethan
literature, 39

Vox Clamantis, Gower's, 16

Walkington, Thomas, Optick Glass
oj Humours by, 147

Wallace, Blind Harry's, 20

Waller, Edmund, poems to "Sacha-
rissa," 176 ; " WaUer's Plot,"
ib. ; his claim as a political in-
novator, ib. ; his occasional verse,
ib. ; his exaggerated reputation,
177

Waller, Mr. A. R., edition of
Beaumont and Fletcher by, 126;
edition of C'rashaw by, 163 ; edition
of Cowley by, 176

Wallis, John, famous seventeenth-
century mathematician, and one
of the founders of tlie Royal
Society, 173, 200

Walsli, WiUiam, critic, 212

Walton, Izaak, sketch of the life
of, 170 ; The Compleat Angler,
ib. ; his obligation to Breton and
Dennys, ib. ; Lives by, ib. ; the
posthumous fame of " Iz : Wa.,"
171

INDEX

251

Ward, Dr. A. VV., 76 ; Chmicer by,

1.5 ; Engliah Drmiintir, /Jterulurt:

by, (54
Warner, ^Villiam, Albion -i linglund

by, 8.-?
Waminyfor Fair Women, A, 74
Warren, Miss Kate M., translation

of Piers the Plowman by, 52 ;

editor of Spenser, 8fi
Wartoii, Thomas, liititori) oj Englixh

Poetrji by, \:>
Watts, William, ];!8
Webbe, William, denunciation of

rhyme by, 7<i
Webster, John, influenced by Kyd,

Shakespeare, and Marston, 119 ;

in imaginative force next to

Shakespeare, ih. ; The White Devil,

120 ; Tlie J>uehe.s.s of Mulfi, ib. et

seq.
Weelkes, Tliomas, 49
Wells, Mr. H. G., his obligation to

Sir T. More, .34
Westcott, Bishop, Hi.story of the

English Bible by, .58
WTietstone, George, Elizabethan

critic, 48, 141 ; Heptameron of

Civill PHscoursen by, 40 ; author

of Promos and Cassandra, 6.3
Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 229
Wilbraham, Sir Roger, diarist, 139
Wilbye, John, 49
Wilkin, Simon, editor of Sir T.

Browne's works, 1.50

Wilkins, Bishop John,. 34; The Dis-

eoreri/ of a Xew World l)y, 17.3
Williams, W. H., edition of Skelton

by, 23
Will's Coffee-house, Dryden at,

211
Wilmot, Robert, author of Tancred

and Gismmidn, 0.3
Witlier, George, 104 footnote
Wit's f'otiinwnireallh, iin IClizal)ethan

song-book, 49
Worde, Wynkyn de, Caxton's

assistant and successor, 6
AVordsv.'orth, W'illiam, as a modern-

iser of Chaucer, 14
Wood, Anthony a, antiquarian,

231 ; a pioneer of biographical

compilation, ilt.
Workman, Mr. H. B., Dawn oJ

the Reformation by, .52
Wotton, Sir Henry, verses by, 91 ;

provost of Kton, 108 ; Reliquicc

Wottoniance, ib.
Wotton, William, Reflections on

Ancient and Modern Learning by,

229
Wren, Sir Christopher, one of the

founders of the Royal Society,

173
Wright, Thomas, edition of Chaucer

by, 13 ; edition of the Morte

d' Arthur by, 18 ; edition of

Wyatt's poems by, 24 ; The

Chester Plays edited by, 04

VFy.att, SirjTliomas, outline of the
life of, 24 ; striking individuality
of his tiiouglit, it>. ; importance
as a metrical innovator, 2.5 ; the
Petrarchan sonriet^forrn, ilj. ; his
best innovation material rather
than formal, ih.

Wycherley, William, the coarsest
writer for the"Knglis)i stage, 218;
The ('oimtrg Wife and The Plain
Deakr, ib.

Wyclif, John, elected master of
Balliol at tlie age of thirty-five,
.50 ; a daring theorist, il>. ; pioneer
of" university extensionism," ib.;
condemned for heresy, .51 ; death,
it). ; " Doctor Evangelicus," ib. ;
his share in the translation of the
Bible, ib. ; luimber of MSS. copies
still extant, ib.

Wynton, Andrew of, 20

Xylography, the transformation of,
to typography, .3

Yarrington, Robert, Two Tragedies

in One l)y, 74
Yonge, N. , 49
Yonge, Walter, diarist, 140
Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 7.5

Zainer, early printing of, 3
Zell, Ulric, early printing of, 3 ; hi
supposed influence on Caxtou, 6

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