CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT 
 FUND GIVEN IN 189I BY 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 85.L261912 
 
 History of English literature, from "Beow 
 
 i 
 
 3 1924 013 353 911 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013353911 
 
HISTORY OF 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 FROM 
 
 "BEOWULF" TO SWINBURNE 
 
 ANDREW LANG, M.A. 
 
 LATE HON, FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE 
 OXFORD 
 
 SECOND EDITION — REVISED 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO, 
 FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 LONDON, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 1912 ^ 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 A Preface to a book on the History of English 
 Literature is apt to be an apology, for a writer must 
 be conscious of his inability to deal with a subject so 
 immense and so multiplex in its aspects. This volume 
 does not pretend to be an encyclopaedia of our literature; 
 or to include all the names of authors and of their 
 works. Selection has been necessary, and in the fields of 
 philosophy and theology but a few names appear. The 
 writer, indeed, would willingly have omitted not a few 
 of the minor authors in pure literature, and devoted his 
 space only to the masters. But each of these springs 
 from an underwood, as it were, of the thought and effort 
 of men less conspicuous, whom it were ungrateful, and is 
 practically impossible, to pass by in silence. Nevertheless 
 the attempt has been made to deal most fully with the 
 greatest names. 
 
 The author's object has been to arouse a living interest, 
 if it may be, in the books of the past, and to induce the 
 reader to turn to them for himself Scantiness of space 
 forbids the presentation of extracts; for poetry there is 
 perhaps no better selection than that of the Oxford Book 
 of Verse by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.^ For prose, the 
 
 ' University Press. 
 
vi Preface 
 
 Anthologies of Mrs. Barnett and Mrs. Dale may be recom- 
 mended.^ 
 
 It is unhappily the fact that the works of a majority 
 of the earlier authors are scarcely accessible except in 
 the publications of learned societies or in very limited 
 editions; but from Chaucer onwards the Globe Editions 
 are open to all ; and the great Cambridge " History of 
 English Literature" is invaluable as a guide to the 
 Bibliography. It is better to study even a little of the 
 greatest authors than to read many books about them. 
 If the writer should perchance succeed in bringing any 
 readers to the works of the immortals his purpose will 
 be fulfilled. But readers, like poets and anglers, are 
 " born to be so " ; and when born under a fortunate star 
 do not need to be allured or compelled to come into the 
 Muses' paradise. 
 
 That sins of commission as well as of omission will 
 be discovered the author cannot doubt, for through much 
 reading and writing they that look out of window are 
 darkened, and errors come. 
 
 ' Longmans, Green & Co. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface v 
 
 List of Authors xi 
 
 I. Anglo-Saxon Literature : The Anglo-Saxon Way of Living 
 — Minstrels, Story-Tellers, and Stories — Beowulf — The 
 Wanderer— The Plaint of Deor— The Seafarer— Waldhere 
 — The Fight at Finnsburg .' t 
 
 II. Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry: Caedmon — Cynewulf— 
 
 Andreas — Dream of the Rood — Elene — Riddles — Phoenix . it 
 
 III. Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose : Latin among the 
 
 Anglo-Saxons — Bede — Alcuin — Alfred — The Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle— The Monks and Learning — Aelfric . . .23 
 
 IV. After the Norman Conquest: Latin Literature — Walter 
 
 Map — Changes Since the Conquest 35 
 
 V. Geoffrey of Monmouth : The Stories of Arthur . . .42 
 
 VI. Layamon's " Brut " : Ormulum — Ancren Riwle — The Owl 
 and the Nightingale — Lyrics — Political Songs — Robert of 
 Gloucester — Cursor Mundi — Devotional Books — Minot . 48 
 
 VII. The Romances in Rhyme : Tristram — Havelok — King Horn 
 — Beues of Hampton — Guy of Warwick — Arthur and Merlin 
 —The Tale of Troy— The Story of Troy from Homer to 
 Shakespeare — King Alisaundre 60 
 
 VIII. Alliterative Romances and Poems : Gawain and the Green 
 
 Knight — Pearl — Huchowne 72 
 
 IX. Chaucer : Early Poems — The Dethe of the Duchesse — Other 
 Early Poems — Troilus and Criseyde — The Canterbury 
 Tales 78 
 
 X. " Piers Plowman," Gosver 99 
 
 vii 
 
viii Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAOE 
 
 XI. The Successors of Chaucer : Lydgate — Occleve — Hawes . i lo 
 
 XII. Late Medieeval Prose; Wyclif— Chaucer's Prose Style — 
 Trevisa — Mandeville — Pecock : " The Repressor " — Cap- 
 grave — Lord Berners 115 
 
 Xin. Malory 124 
 
 XIV. Early Scottish Literature : Barbour — Wyntoun — The Kingis 
 Quhair — Henryson — Dunbar — Blind Harry — The Buke of 
 the Howlat — Gawain Douglas— Sir David Lyndsay . . 129 
 
 XV. Popular Poetry. Ballads. 
 
 Professional Poetry : Skelton — Barclay . , . .147 
 
 XVI. Rise of the Drama : Hesrwood — Ra)ph Roister Doister — 
 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle — "Qorboduc'' .... 153 
 
 XVII. Wyatt and Surrey. Gascoigne. Sackville : The Earl of 
 
 Surrey — Tottel's Miscellany — Gascoigne — Sackville . . 163 
 
 XVIII. Prose of the Renaissance : Elyot — Ascham — Lyly's 
 Euphues — Sidney — Sidney's " Defence of Poesie ". 
 Spenser 17a 
 
 XIX. The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights: John Lyly — 
 Peele — Greene — Lodge — Nash — Marlowe — Kyd — Shakes- 
 peare — The Sonnets — Later Plays — Jonson — Jonson's 
 Prose ..... igj 
 
 XX, Other Dramatists : Beaumont and Fletcher — Chapman — 
 John Marston — Dekker — Middleton — Heywood — Webster 
 — Massinger — Ford — Shirley 242 
 
 XXI. Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers: -Hooker — 
 " Martin Marprelate " — Bacon — Raleigh — Overbury — 
 Translators — Pulpit Eloquence 265 
 
 XXII. Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets: Minor Lyrists — 
 Drayton — Daniel — Davies — Giles and Phineas Fletcher 
 — Corbet — Sir John Beaumont 283 
 
 XXIII. Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose: Burton — Herbeit of 
 Cherbury — Browne. 
 Caroline Prose : MiItaii=Jeremy Taylor — Thomas Fuller — 
 Hobbes — Izaak Walton — Jbhn Bunyan — Clarendon . . 303 
 
Contents ix 
 
 CHAPTER PAOE 
 
 XXIV. Caroline Poets: Crashaw — Herbert — ^Vaughan — Herrick — 
 Carew — Lovelace — Suckling — Habington — Cartwright — 
 Davenant — Cowley — Denham — Sherburne — Stanley — 
 Browne — Cotton — Waller — Marvell — Milton — Samuel 
 Butler 328 
 
 XXV. Restoration Theatre: Congreve — Vanbrugh — George Far- 
 
 quhar — Otway — Nat Lee — Dryden 358 
 
 XXVL Augustan Poetry: Alexander Pope — Prior — Gay — Ambrose 
 
 Philips— Tickell 382 
 
 XXVII. Augustan Prose : Steele — Addison— Swift — De Foe . . 394 
 
 XXVIII. Georgian Poetry I. : Edward Young — James Thomson — 
 William Collins — Thomas Gray — The Wartons — John Dyer 
 — William Shenstone 422 
 
 XXIX. Georgian Poetry II. : Thomas Chatterton — William Cowper 
 — Literature in Scotland (1550-1790) — Robert Burns — 
 Charles Churchill — George Crabbe 434 
 
 XXX. Georgian Prose I. : The Great Novelists — Richardson- 
 Henry Fielding — Tobias Smollett 458 
 
 XXXI. Georgian Prose II. : Samuel Johnson — Oliver Goldsmith — 
 
 Edmund Burke — Horace Walpole — Laurence Sterne — 
 David Hume — Robertson — Edward Gibbon — Richard Brins- 
 ley Sheridan — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu— Junius . 471 
 
 XXXII. The Romantic Movement: Coleridge — Walter Scott- 
 
 William Wordsworth — Robert Southey — Shelley — Byron 
 
 — Keats — Walter Savage Landor ..... 497 
 
 XXXIII. Later Georgian Novelists: Frances Burney — Mrs. Radcliffe 
 
 — Maria Edgeworth — Charles Brockden Brown — Jane 
 Austen — Walter Scott, the Novelist — James Fenimore 
 Cooper — Washington Irving. 
 
 Magazines and Essayists: Charles Lamb — Leigh Hunt — 
 William Hazlitt — Thomas de Quincey .... 530 
 
 XXXIV. Poets after Wordsworth : Philip Freneau— William Cullen 
 
 Bryant — John Greenleaf Whittier — Henry Wadsworth 
 Longfellow — Alfred Tennyson — Robert Browning — Edgar 
 Allan Poe — Ralph Waldo Emerson — James Russell Lowell 
 — Matthew Arnold. 
 General Writers: John Ruskin ... . . 560 
 
Contents 
 
 XXXV. Late Victorian Poets: Edward FitzGeiald — George Mere, 
 dith— Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Christina Rossetti — 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti — William Morris — Swinburne. 
 Poetic Underwoods 594 
 
 XXXVI. Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists: Dickens — 
 Thackeray — The Bronte Sisters — Nathaniel Hawthorne — 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes — Charles Kingsley — George 
 Meredith — Anthony Trollope— George Eliot — Robert Louis 
 Stevenson — Minor Novelists 609 
 
 XXXVII. Historians : Thomas Babington Macaulay — Thomas Carlyle 
 — James Anthony Froude — Edward Augustus Freeman — 
 William Hickling Prescott — John Lothrop Motley — J. S. 
 Mill — Cardinal NewTnan — W. E. H. Lecky . . . 643 
 
 Index 66; 
 
LIST OF AUTHORS. 
 
 Adamnan, Abbot {c. 625-704), 
 
 25- 
 
 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 
 
 399-407- 
 yElfric (<r. 955-1020), 33. 
 Ailred {c. 1109-1166), 36. 
 Ainsworth, William Harrison 
 
 (1805-1882), 610. 
 Alcuin (735-804), 26. 
 Aldhelm, Bp. (c. 640 - 709), 
 
 Alexander, Sir William, Earl of 
 
 Stirling [c. 1567-1640), 441. 
 Alfred, King (849-901), 26-8. 
 Andre wes, Lancelot (1555- 
 
 1626), 282. 
 Arbuthnot, John (1667 -173 5), 
 
 420. 
 Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), 
 
 586-90. 
 Ascham, Roger (1515-1568), 
 
 17s. 176- 
 Asser, Bp. (y?. c. 900), 27. 
 Atterbury, Francis (1662-1732), 
 
 420. 
 Austen, Jane (177S-1817). 536- 
 
 40. 
 Ayton, Sir Robert (1570-1638), 
 
 441. 
 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, 
 
 (1813-1865), 206. 
 
 Bacon, Francis (i 561 -1626), 
 
 265, 270-8. 
 Baillie, LadyGrizel (1665-1746), 
 
 445- 
 Bale, John (i49S-iS63)> 158, 
 
 159- 
 Bannatyne, George (1545-1608), 
 
 445- 
 Barbour, John (c. 1316-1396), 
 
 130-2. 
 Barclay, Alexander {c. 1475- 
 
 1552). IS?- 
 
 Barnfield, Richard (1574-1627), 
 
 289. 
 Barrow, Isaac (1630-1677), 
 
 317- 
 Baxter, Richard (1615-1691), 
 
 317- 
 Beattie, James (1735-1803), 
 
 447- 
 Beaumont, Franci" (1584-1616), 
 
 242-7. 
 Beaumont, Sir John (1582- 
 
 1628), 300-1. 
 Beckford, William (1759-1844), 
 
 53°- 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803- 
 
 1849), 607. 
 Bede (673-735), 23-26, 42, 43. 
 Behn, Mrs. Aphra (i 640-1 689), 
 
 36r, 458. 
 
Xll 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Bentley, Richard (i 662-1 742), 
 
 420. 
 Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 
 
 420, 421. 
 Berners, Lord (1467-1533), 122. 
 Besant, Sir Walter (i 836-1901), 
 
 642. 
 Black, William (i 841-1898), 
 
 642. 
 Blackwood, William (1776- 
 
 1834), 548. 
 Blair, Robert (1699-1746), 432. 
 Borrow, George (1803-1881), 
 
 632. 
 Boswell, James (1740-1795), 
 
 460, 471. 
 Bowles, William Lisle (1762- 
 
 1850), 499. 
 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth (1837- 
 
 ). 635- 
 Brome, Richard (/?. c, 1623- 
 
 1652), 264. 
 Bronte, Anne (1820-1849), 623. 
 Bronte, Charlotte (1816-1855), 
 
 623-5. 
 Bronte, Emily (1818-1848), 
 
 623-5- 
 Broome, William, (1689-1745), 
 
 384- 
 Brougham, Henry, Lord 
 
 Brougham (1778-1868), 547. 
 Brown, Charles Brockden (1771- 
 
 1810), 536. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605- 
 
 1682), 306-9. 
 Browne, William (^. 1591-1643), 
 
 301, 302. 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 
 
 (1806-1861), 596, 597. 
 Browning, Robert (1812-1889), 
 
 573-6- 
 
 Bryant, William Cullen (1794- 
 
 1878), 562. 
 Bunyan, John (1628-1688), 322- 
 
 324- 
 Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), 
 
 478-82. 
 Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715), 442. 
 Burnett, James, Lord Mon- 
 
 boddo (1714-1799), 447. 
 Burney, Charles (i 726-1814), 
 
 531- 
 Burney, Frances (1752-1840), 
 
 530-2- 
 Burns, Robert (1759-1796), 447- 
 
 450- 
 Burton, Robert (15 7 7- 1640), 
 
 3°3-S- 
 Butler, Samuel (1612-1680), 
 
 355-7- 
 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 
 (178-8-1824), 519-25. 
 
 Cakdmon (/?. c. 670), 16-18. 
 Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 
 
 606. 
 Campion, Thomas {fl. 1581- 
 
 1619), 290. 
 Canning, George (1770-1827), 
 
 548. 
 Capgrave, John (1393-1464), 
 
 122. 
 Carew, Richard (1555-1620), 
 
 281. 
 Carew, Thomas {c. 1598-1639), 
 
 335. 336. 
 Carlyle, Alexander (17 2 2- 1805), 
 
 444. 
 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 
 
 648-51. 
 Cartwright, William (161 1- 
 
 1643), 264, 339. 
 
List of Authors 
 
 xni 
 
 Caxton, William {c. 1422-1491), 
 
 47, 124, 125. 
 Chambers, Robert (1802-1871), 
 
 611. 
 Chapman, George (c. 1559- 
 
 1634), 247-50, 281. 
 Chatterton, Thomas (1752- 
 
 1770). 434-6. 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey {c. 1340- 
 
 1400), 78-98, 117, 118. 
 Chillingworth, William (1602- 
 
 1644), 317. 
 Churchill, Charles (1731-1764), 
 
 451- 
 Churchyard, Thomas {c. 1520- 
 
 1604), 166. 
 
 Cibber, CoUey (1671-1757), 
 
 365. 385. 399- 
 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl 
 
 of (1607-1674), 325-7. 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772- 
 
 1834), 498-502. 
 Collins, Wilkie (1824- 1889), 
 
 633- 
 Collins, William (1721-1759), 
 
 426, 427. 
 Colman, George (1762-183 6), 
 
 492. 
 Congreve, William (1670-1729), 
 
 363-5- 
 Constable, Henry {c. 1560-1613). 
 
 289. 
 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of 
 Shaftesbury (i67i-i7i3),42o, 
 
 443- 
 Cooper, James Fenimore (1789- 
 
 1851), 544, 545. 
 Corbet, Richard (1582-1635), 
 
 300. 
 Cotton, Charles (1630-168 7), 
 
 343- 
 
 Coverdale, Miles (1488-1568), 
 
 174. 
 Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667), 
 
 34i> 342-. 
 Cowper, William (i 731-1800), 
 
 436-40. 
 Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 
 
 452-7- 
 Cranmer, Thomas (1489-1556), 
 
 174. 
 Crashaw, Richard {c. 1613- 
 
 1649). 59. 328, 329. 
 Creighton, Mandell (1843- 
 
 1901), 654. 
 Cross, Mary Ann : " George 
 
 Eliot " (1819-1880), 637, 638. 
 Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688), 
 
 317. 419- 
 Cynewulf (_/?. r. 750), 18, 19. 
 
 Dalrymple, Sir David, Lord 
 
 Hailes (1726-1792), 447. 
 Daniel, Samliel (1562-1619), 
 
 283, 294-6. 
 D'Arblay, Madame, see Frances 
 
 Burney. 
 Darwin, Charles (1809-1882), 
 
 661, 662. 
 Davenant, Sir William (1606- 
 
 1668), 264, 340, 341, 359. 
 Davies, Sir John (1569-1626), 
 
 296, 297. 
 Day, Thomas (174,8-1789), 534. 
 De Foe, Daniel (1661-1731), 
 
 415-9- 
 Dekker, Thomas (^r. 1570-1641), 
 
 235. 251,253 
 De la Ramee, Louise (1840- 
 
 1908), 634. 
 Denham, Sir John (1615-1669), 
 
 342. 
 
XIV 
 
 English Literature 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas (1785- 
 
 .i8S9)> 557-9- 
 Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); 
 
 612-6. 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of 
 
 Beaconsfield (1804-1881), 
 
 610. 
 Donne, John (1573-1631), 282 
 
 283, 284-8. 
 Douglas, (jawain (f. 1473-1522), 
 
 143. 144- , 
 Drayton, Michael (i 563-1 631), 
 
 283, 291-3. 
 Drummond, William, of Haw- 
 
 thornden (1585-1649), 239, 
 
 441. 
 Dryden, John(i63i-i7oo), 359, 
 
 360, 361, 373-80. 
 Dunbar, William {c. 1460-1520), 
 
 138-40. 
 D'Urfey, Thomas (1653-1723), 
 
 483- 
 Dyer, John {c. 1700-1758), 432. 
 
 Eadmer {d. c. 1 1 24), 36. 
 Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849), 
 
 534-6- 
 Edwards, Jonathan (1629-1712), 
 
 561. 
 Edwards, Richard [f. 1523- 
 
 1566), 162. 
 Eliot, George, see Mary Ann 
 
 Cross. 
 Elliot, Jean (1727-1805), 445. 
 Elyot, Sir Thomas {c. 1499- 
 
 1546), 173. 174- 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803- 
 
 1882), 579-82. 
 Etherege, Sir George (c. 1635- 
 
 1691), 358, 361. 
 Evelyn, John (1620-1706), 327. 
 
 Fairfax, Edward (//. c. 1600), 
 
 281. 
 Farquhar, George (1678-1707), 
 
 368, 369. 
 Fenton, Elijah (1683-1730), 
 
 384- 
 Ferguson, Rev. Adam (1723- 
 
 1816), 446. 
 Fergusson, Robert (i 750-1 774), 
 
 446, 449. 
 Ferrier, Susan (i 782-1854), 609. 
 Fielding, Henry (i 707-1 754), 
 
 461-7. 
 FitzGerald, Edward (1809- 
 
 1883), 594-5. 
 Fitzneale, Richard {fi. 1169- 
 
 1198), 38. 
 Flefcher, Giles [c. 1549-1611), 
 
 297. 
 Fletcher, Giles {c. 1588-1623), 
 
 283, 297-300- 
 Fletcher, John (1579-1625), 
 
 242-7- 
 Fletcher, Phineas {c. 1582- 1650), 
 
 283. 297-300. 
 Florence of Worcester (d. in 8), 
 
 36. 
 Florio, John (c. 15 53- 162 5), 281. 
 Forbes, Bishop Robert (1708- 
 
 1775). 64s- 
 Ford, John [fl. c. 1613-1633), 
 
 261-3. 
 Fordun, John {d. c. 1384), 133. 
 Forster, John (1812-1876), 574. 
 F"ox, George (1624-1690), 325. 
 Francis, Sir Philip (1740-1818), 
 
 496. 
 Franklin, Benjamin (1706- 1790), 
 
 561. 
 Freeman, E. A. (1823- 1892), 
 
 653-4- 
 
List of Authors 
 
 XV 
 
 Freneau, Philip (1752-1832), 
 
 560-562. 
 Froude, James Anthony (1818- 
 
 1894), 651-3. 
 Fronde, Richard Hurrell (1803- 
 
 1836), 652. 
 Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), 
 
 317-8. 
 
 Galt, John (i 779-1839), 455, 
 
 609 
 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson 
 
 (1829-1902), 312, 647, 653. 
 Gascoigne, George {c. 1525- 
 
 iS77)> 162, 167-9. 
 Gaskell, Elizabeth (1810-1865), 
 
 641. 
 Gay, John (1685-1732), 388- 
 
 39°- 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth {c. iioo- 
 
 iiSS)> 36, 42-7- 
 Gerald of Wales (c. 1147-1217), 
 
 38, 39- 
 Gibbon, Edward (r 737-1 794), 
 
 490-4. 
 Gildas {c. 516-570), 23, 43. 
 Giraldus Cambrensis, see Gerald 
 
 of Wales. 
 Glanvill, Joseph (1636-1680), 
 
 317. 372, 419- 
 Godric, St. {c. 1065-1x70), 34. 
 Golding, Arthur {c. 1536-1605), 
 
 166, 281. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-1774), 
 
 474-8. 
 Googe, Barnabe (1540-1594), 
 
 166. 
 Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624), 
 
 180, 201. 
 Gower, John {c. 1325-1408), 
 
 106-9. 
 
 Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), 428- 
 
 430- 
 Green, J. R. (1837-1883), 654 
 Green, Matthew (1696-1737), 
 
 432- 
 Greene, Robert {c. 1560-1592), 
 
 194, 198-200. 
 Griffin, B. (/. 1596), 289. 
 Grimald, Nicholas (1519-1562), 
 
 166. 
 Grote, George (1794-1871), 659. 
 Gwynne^ Talbot {fi. c. 1862- 
 
 1865), 641. 
 
 Habington, William (1605- 
 
 1654). 339- 
 Hales, John (1584-1656), 317. 
 Hall, Joseph (1574-1656), 282, 
 
 310. 
 Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 
 
 643-5- 
 
 Hamilton, William, of Bangoui 
 (1704-1754), 445. 
 
 Hamilton, William, of Gilbert- 
 field {c. 1 665-1 751), 445. 
 
 Harington, Sir John (1561- 
 1612), 281. 
 
 Harry, Blind [Jl. c. 1480-1492), 
 140-2. 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel {c. 1545-1630), 
 176, 184. 
 
 Hawes, Stephen (c. 1475-1523), 
 
 ii3> "4- 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804- 
 
 1864), 625-8. 
 Haywood, Eliza (c. 1693-1756), 
 
 458- 
 Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 
 
 •555-7- 
 Henley, W. E. (1849-1903), 
 641. 
 
XVI 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon {fl. 1125- 
 
 "54). 38- 
 Henryson, Robert (fl. c. 1462), 
 
 I3S-8. 
 Herbert, Edward, Lord Herbert 
 
 ofCherbury (1583-1648), 305, 
 
 306. 
 Herbert, George (1593-1633), 
 
 330. 331- 
 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 
 
 334, 335- 
 Hey wood, John. (^. 1497 -1580), 
 
 157. 158- 
 Heywood, Thomas (fl. c. 1596- 
 
 1650), 256, 257. 
 Higden, Ranulf (d. 1364), 118. 
 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 
 
 318-21. 
 Hogg, James (1770-1835), 612. 
 Holland, Philemon (1552-1637), 
 
 281. 
 Holland, Sir Richard (ft. c. 
 
 145°). 142. 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809- 
 
 1894), 628, 629. 
 Home, Henry, Lord Kames 
 
 (1696-1782), 446. 
 Home, John (1722-1808), 381, 
 
 427, 446. 
 Hood, Thomas (1799- 1845), 
 
 607. 
 Hook, Theodore (i 788-1841), 
 
 613. 
 Hooker, Richard (c. 1553-1600), 
 
 265, 266-70. 
 Horner, Francis (1778-1817), 
 
 547- 
 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 
 
 (c- 1517-1547). 163. 165, 166. 
 Howell, James (1594-1666), 
 
 327- 
 
 Huchown (ft. i342-i377)> 75- 
 Hume, David (1711-1776), 488- 
 
 490. 
 Hunt, James Henry Leigh 
 
 (1784-1859), S53-S. 
 Hutcheson, Francis (1694- 1746), 
 
 444. 
 Huxley. T. H. (1825-1895), 661, 
 
 662. 
 
 Irving, Washington (1783- 
 1859), 546, 547. 
 
 James I of Scotland (1394- 
 
 1437), 133-5- 
 James VI of Scotland and I of 
 
 England (1566-1625), 440. 
 James, G. P. R. (i 799-1 860), 
 
 610. 
 Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 
 
 547- 
 Jocelin de Brakelond (;?. 1173- 
 
 1202), 38. 
 Johnson, Samuel (1709- 17 84), 
 
 381, 471-4. 
 Jonson, Ben (c. 1573-1637), 
 
 233-41. 
 "Junius" (fl. 1 768-1 773), 496. 
 
 Keats, John (i 795-1 82 1), 525-7. 
 Kingsley, Charles (1819-1875), 
 
 629-31. 
 Kingsley, Henry (1830-1876), 
 
 631. 
 Kirke, Edward (1553-1613), 184. 
 Knox, John (c. 1505-1572), 146. 
 Kyd, Thomas (c. 15 58-1 5 94), 
 
 208, 209. 
 
 Lamb, Charles. (1775-1834), 
 550-3- 
 
List of Authors 
 
 xvii 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage (1775- 
 
 1864), 527-9. 
 Langland, William {c. 1332- 
 
 1400), 99-106. 
 Lawrence, G. A. (1827-1876), 
 
 634- 
 Layamon (/?. c. 1200- 12 20), 48- 
 
 51- 
 Lecky, W. E. H. (1838-1903), 
 
 662-4. 
 
 Lee, Nathaniel {c. 1653-1692), 
 
 359. 371-3- 
 Leighton, Robert (1611-1684), 
 
 442. 
 Leslie of Ross, Bishop (1527- 
 
 1596), 148. 
 Lever, Charles (1806-1872), 
 
 610, 611. 
 Lewes, George Henry (181 7- 
 
 1878), 637, 638. - 
 Lingard, John (1772-1851), 
 
 643- 
 
 Locke, John (1632.-1704), 419. 
 
 Lockhart, George, of Carnwath 
 
 (1673-1731), 548. 
 Lockhart, John Gibson (1794- 
 
 1854), 548, 549, 612. 
 Lodge, Thomas {c. 1558-1625), 
 
 200, 201, 202. 
 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 
 
 (1807-1882), 565-8. 
 Lovelace, Richard (1618-1658), 
 
 336, 337. 
 Lowell, James Russell (1819- 
 
 1891), 582-6. 
 Lydgate, John [c. 1370-1446), 
 
 110-11, 169. 
 Lyly, John {c. 1554-1606), 177, 
 
 178, 19s. 196- 
 Lyndsay, Sir David (i49°-iS5S)j 
 144-6. 
 
 Lytton, Edward George Eulwer 
 (1803-1873), 6ii. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 
 
 (1800-1859), 645-8. 
 Mackenzie, Sir George (1636- 
 
 1691), 184, 442-3- 
 Macpherson, James (1 736-1 796), 
 
 483- 
 Malory, Sir Thomas {c. 1400- 
 
 1471), 42, 61, 124-8. 
 Mandeville, Sir John {fl. c. 1322- 
 
 1357). 118-20. 
 Map, Walter (c. 1 137-1 200), 39- 
 
 40. 
 Marlowe, Christopher (1564- 
 
 1593) z°4-8. 
 Marry at, Capt. Frederick (1792- 
 
 1848), 612. 
 Marston, John {c. 1575-1634), 
 
 235. 250, 251. 
 Marvell, Andrew (1621-1678), 
 
 345-7- 
 Massinger, Philip (1583- 1640), 
 
 243. 259-61. 
 Mather, Cotton (1663-1728), 
 
 561. 
 Mayne, Jasper (1604-1672), 264. 
 Meredith, George (1828-1909), 
 
 595. 596, 634-6. 
 Meres, Francis (1565-1647), 
 
 220, 222, 233. 
 Middleton, Thomas {c. 1570- 
 
 1627), 253-5. 
 Mill, James (1773-1836), 659, 
 Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873), 
 
 659- 
 Milman, Henry Hart (1791- 
 
 1868), 659. 
 Milton, John (1608-1674), 309- 
 
 312. 347-SS- 
 
XVlll 
 
 English Literatuffi 
 
 Minot, Laurence {c. 1300-1352), 
 
 59) 142- 
 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 
 
 (1689-1762), 495. 
 Montgomery, Alexander {c. 
 
 1556-1610), 440. 
 Montgomery, Robert (1807- 
 
 1855), 424. 
 Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 
 
 606, 607. 
 More, Henry (1614-1687), 317, 
 
 372- 
 More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535), 
 
 173- 
 Morris, William (i834-r896), 
 
 42, 599-601. 
 Motley, John Lothrop (1814- 
 
 1877), 657, 658. 
 
 Nairne, Carolina, Lady (1766- 
 
 1845), 446. 
 Napier, Sir William (1785-1860), 
 
 658. 
 Nash, Thomas (1567-1601), 
 
 203, 204. 
 Nennius {c. 800), 23, 43. 
 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal 
 
 (1801-1890), 631, 652, 659- 
 
 662. 
 Nicholas of Guildford ifl. 1250), 
 
 54- 
 Nichols, Thomas (/?. 1550), 
 
 280. 
 North, Christophci', see John 
 
 WUson. 
 North, Roger (1653-1733), 327. 
 North, Sir Thomas {c. 1535- 
 
 1601), 229, 281. 
 
 OccLEVE, Thomas {c. 1368- 
 1450), 111-13. 
 
 Oliphant, May Margaret Wilson, 
 
 (1828-1897), 633. 
 Ormin {c. 1200), 52. 
 Otway, Thomas (1652-1685), 
 
 359. 369-71- 
 Ouida, see De la Ramee. 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas (1581- 
 
 1613), 279, 280. 
 
 Painter, William {c. 1540- 
 
 1594), 281. 
 Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788- 
 
 1861), 643. 
 Parnell, Thomas (1679-1718), 
 
 392. 
 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839- 
 
 1894), 592, 593. 
 Payn, James (1830-1898), 634. 
 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785- 
 
 1866), 632. 
 Pecock, Reginald (f. 1395-1460), 
 
 120-2. 
 Peele, George {c. 1558-1598), 
 
 193, 196-8. 
 Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 327. 
 Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 
 
 150. 483- 
 Phaer, Thomas {c. 15 10-1560), 
 
 166, 281. 
 Philips, Ambrose (1675-1749), 
 
 390-1. 
 Poe, Edgar Allan (r8o9-i849), 
 
 576-9- 
 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 
 
 382-6. 
 Praed, Winthrop • Mackworth 
 
 (1802-1839), 608. 
 Prescott, William Hickhng 
 
 (i 796-1859), 654-7. 
 Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 
 
 386-8. 
 
List of Authofs 
 
 Xix 
 
 Prynrie, William (1600-1669) 
 262, 263. 
 
 Radcliff, Ann (i 764-1822), 
 
 48s. 522, 532-4- 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter {c. 1552- 
 
 1618), 265, 278-9. 
 Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), 
 
 445- 
 Randolph, Thomas (1605-1635), 
 
 264. 
 Reade, Charles (1814-1884), 
 
 641-2. 
 Reeve, Clara (i 729-1 807), 530. 
 Reynolds, John Hamilton (i 796- 
 
 1852), 525. 
 Rich, Barnaby {c. 1540-1620), 
 
 201, 280. 
 Richard, Prior of Hexham (/?. 
 
 1138-1154), 36. 
 Richardson, Samuel (1689- 
 
 1761), 458-61. 
 Ritson, Joseph (i 752-1803), 483. 
 Robert of Gloucester (j^. c. 
 
 1 260-1300), 41, 56. 
 Robertson, William (1721-1793), 
 
 490. 
 Robynson, Ralph (Jl. c. 1551), 
 
 173- 
 Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 
 
 606. 
 Rolle, Richard {c. 1 290-1349), 
 
 58. 
 Rossetti, Christina (1830- 1894), 
 
 597, 598- 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828- 
 
 1882), 598, 599. 
 Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718), 
 
 381. 
 Rowley, William (c. 1585-1642), 
 
 253. 255- 
 
 Ruskin, John (1819-19C0), 
 590-2, 
 
 Sackville, Thomas (1536- 
 
 1608), 161, 162, 169-71. 
 St. John, Henry, Viscount 
 
 Bolingbroke(i678-i75i),42o. 
 Savile, Sir Henry (1549- 1622), 
 
 281. 
 Scott, Alexander {c. 1525-1584), 
 
 440. 
 Scott, John (1783-182 1), 548. 
 Scott, Michael (i 789-1 835), 612. 
 Scott, Sir Walter (i 771- 1832), 
 
 62, 149, 150, 151,424, 502-6, 
 
 540-4- 
 Sedley, Sir Charles (c. 1639- 
 
 1701), 361. 
 Shadwell, Thomas (1642-1692), 
 
 361. 
 Shakespeare, William (1564- 
 
 1616), 212-33. 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792- 
 
 1822), 516-9- 
 Shenstone, William (17 14-1763), 
 
 433- 
 Sherburne, Sir Edward (1618- 
 
 1702), 343- 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 
 
 (1751-181,6), 494, 495. 
 Shirley, James (1596-1666), 
 
 263, 264. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586), 
 
 .178-83. 
 Simeon of Durham (/?. 1 130), 36. 
 Skelton, John (c. 1460-1529), 
 
 151- 
 Smith, Horace (1779-1849), 
 
 548- 
 Smith, Captain John (1580- 
 1631), 560. 
 
XX 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 547. 
 Smith, William (/. 1596), 289. 
 Smollett, Tobias (17 21-17 71), 
 
 467-70. 
 South, 5^obert (1634-1716), 317. 
 Southerne, Thomas (1660-1 746), 
 
 380, 381. 
 Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 
 
 S13-6. 
 Spencer, Herbert (182 0-1903), 
 
 662. 
 Spenser, Edmund [c. 1552- 
 
 1599), 184-92, 266. 
 Stanley, Thomas (1625-1678), 
 
 343- 
 Stanyhurst, Richard (1547- 
 
 1618), 281. 
 Steele, Sir Richard (167 2-1 729), 
 
 394-9- 
 Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), 
 
 485-8. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850- 
 
 1894), 638-41. 
 Still, John (1543-1608), 160, 
 
 161. 
 Strachey, William (Jl. 1609- 
 
 1618), 560. 
 Stubbs, William (1825-1901), 
 
 644, 654. 
 Suckling, Sir John (1609-1642), 
 
 264, 338, 339- 
 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 
 
 407-15- 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 
 
 (1837-1909), 602-6. 
 Symonds> John Addington 
 
 (1840-1893), 592, 593. 
 
 Talfourd, Sir T. N. (1795- 
 1854), 574- 
 
 Tautphoeus, Baroness (1807- 
 
 1893), 641. 
 Taylor, Jeremy (1613-1667), 
 
 312-7. 
 Temple, Sir William (1628- 
 
 1699), 409, 430. 
 Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892), 
 
 42, 568-73. 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace 
 
 (1811-1863), 616-22. 
 Thomas of Ercildoune {d. c. 
 
 1299), 62-4. 
 Thomson, James (1700- 1748), 
 
 381, 424-6. 
 Tickell, Thomas (1686-1740), 
 
 391-3- 
 Tourneur, Cyril {c. 15 75- 16 26), 
 
 259- 
 Trevisa, John [c. 1326-1412), 
 
 118. 
 Trollope, Anthony (1815-1882), 
 
 636, 637. 
 Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 
 
 643- 
 Tusser, Thomas {c. 1524-1580), 
 166. 
 
 Udall, Nicholas (1505-1556), 
 
 159, 160. 
 Urquhart, Sir Thomas (1611- 
 
 1660), 140, 441. 
 Ussher, James (1581-1656), 
 
 282. 
 
 Vanbrugh, Sir John (1666- 
 
 1726), 365-8. 
 Vaughan, Henry (1622-1695), 
 
 331-3- 
 Villiers, George, second Duke 
 of Buckingham (1627 -1688), 
 358, 359- 
 
List of Authors 
 
 XXI 
 
 Wace {fl. 1 1 70), 46. 
 
 Waller, Edmund (1606-1687), 
 
 343-S- 
 Walpole, Horace (17 17-1 797), 
 
 482-5. 
 Walton, Izaac (1593-1683), 321, 
 
 322. 
 Wardlaw, Elizabeth, Lady 
 
 (1677-1727), 445. 
 Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 
 
 43I; 432- 
 Warton, Thomas (f. 1688- 1745), 
 
 431- 
 Warton, Thomas (17 2 8- 17 90), 
 
 431. 483- 
 Watson, Thomas (c. 1557-1592), 
 
 289. 
 Webster, John [c. 1580-1625), 
 
 257-9- 
 
 Whetstone, George (c. 1544- 
 1587), 166. 
 
 Whittier, John Greenleaf (I8o7- 
 I892), 563-5. 
 
 Whyte- Melville, George John 
 (1821-1878), 633, 634. 
 
 Wilkie, Prof. William (1721- 
 1772), 490. 
 
 William of Malmesbury {c. 1095 
 
 .1143). 36, 37- 
 William of Newburgh (1136 
 
 1 1 98), 38. 
 Willoughby, Henry {c. 1574 
 
 1596), 289. 
 Wilson, John (i 785-1854), 548 
 
 558, 644. 
 Wither, George (1588- 1667), 
 
 302. 
 Wodrow, Robert (1679-1734) 
 
 443. 561- 
 Wood, Mrs. Henry (1814-1887), 
 
 635- 
 Wordsworth, William (1770 
 
 1850), 507-13. 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-1542), 
 
 163-5- 
 Wycherley, William (c. 1640 
 
 1716), 362, 363. 
 Wyclif, John (c. 1329-1384) 
 
 "5-7- 
 Wyntoun, Andrew {fl. c. 1413) 
 132. 
 
 Young, Edward (1683-1765), 
 381, 422-4. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE. 
 
 The literature of every modern country is made up of many ele- 
 ments, contributed by various races ; and has been modified at 
 different times by foreign influences. Thus, among the ancient 
 >ltic inhabitants of our islands, the peoples whom the Romans 
 found here, the Welsh have given us the materials of the famous 
 romances of King Arthur, and from the Gaelic tribes of Ireland 
 and Scotland come the romances of heroes less universally known, 
 Finn, Diarmaid, Cuchulain, and the rest. But the main stock of 
 our earliest poetry and prose, like the main stock of our language, is 
 Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon tribes who invaded Britain, and 
 after the departure of the Romans (411) conquered the greater 
 part of the island, must have had a literature of their own, and 
 must have brought it with them over sea. 
 
 For all early peoples, even the least civilized, possess the 
 germs of literature. They have their hymns to their Divine Father 
 above the sky, and to gods and spirits ; they have magic songs, to 
 win the love of women, or to cause the deaths of men ; they have 
 love-songs, and songs of feats of war. They possess fairy-tales, 
 and legends in prose concerning gods and fabulous heroes ; they 
 have tales of talking birds and beasts ; and they have dances in 
 which the legends of old heroes are acted and sung. These 
 dances are the germ of the drama : the songs are the germs of 
 lyric poetry ; the beast-stories are the sources of books like .iEsop's 
 Fables and Ovid's " Metamorphoses "; and the fairy-tales are the 
 earliest kind of novels. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon invaders were, of course, on a very much 
 higher level than that of savages. They were living in the age of 
 
 I 
 
2 English Literature 
 
 iron ; they did not use bronze for their swords, spears, and axes ; 
 much more remote were they from the period of stone axes, stone 
 knives, and stone arrow-heads. They could write, not in the 
 Roman alphabet, but in " Runes," adapted at some unknown time 
 by the Germanic peoples, probably from the Greek characters; 
 and there is no reason why they should not have used this writing 
 to preserve their poetry, though it is not certain that they did so 
 at this early period. 
 
 One early Anglo-Saxon poem, indeed, " The Husband's Mess- 
 age," professes to be written in runic characters on a staff or 
 tablet of wood. Even more ancient poems may have been written 
 and preserved in this way, but the wood, the bbc (book) as it was 
 called, has perished, while brief runic inscriptions on metal and 
 on stone remain. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Way of Living. 
 
 The society of the Anglo-Saxons, as described in the oldest 
 surviving poems, was like that of the early Irish about a.d. 200 
 as depicted in their oldest romances, and like that of the early 
 Icelanders as painted in the sagas, or stories of 1100, and later. 
 Each free man had his house, with its large hall, and a fire in the 
 centre. In the hall, usually built of timber, the people ate and 
 passed their time when not out of doors, and also slept at night, 
 while there were other rooms (probably each was a small separ- 
 ately roofed house) for other purposes. The women had their 
 " bower," the married people had their little bedclosets off the hall, 
 and there were store-rooms. The house stood in a wide yard or 
 court, where geese and other fowls were kept ; it was fenced about 
 with a palisade, or a bank and hedge. Tilling the soil, keeping 
 cattle, hunting, and war and raiding, by sea and land, were the 
 occupations of the men ; the women sewed and span, and kept 
 house. 
 
 A group of such homesteads, each house well apart from its 
 neighbours, made the village or settlement : there were no towns 
 with streets, such as the Romans left in Britain. 
 
 A number of such villages were united in the tribe, each tribe 
 had its king, while the other chief men, the richest and best 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature 3 
 
 born, constituted a class of gentry. Later, tribes were gathered 
 into small kingdoms, with a " Bretwalda " or " Over-Lord," the 
 most powerful of the kings, at the head of all. 
 
 This kind of society is almost exactly the same as that which 
 Homer describes among the Greeks, more than a thousand years 
 before Christ. As- in Homer, each Anglo-Saxon king had his 
 Gleeman {scop) or minstrel, who sang to his household and to the 
 guests in hall. The songs might be new, of his own making, or 
 lays handed down from of old. 
 
 We shall see that the longer Anglo-Saxon poems, before Chris- 
 tianity came in, were stories about fabulous heroes ; or real kings 
 of times past, concerning whom many fables were told. Most of 
 these tales, or " myths," were not true ; they were mere ancient 
 " fairy stories," in which sometimes real but half-forgotten 
 warriors and princes play their parts. The traditions, however, 
 were looked on as being true, and the listeners to the gleemen 
 thought that they were learning history as well as being amused. 
 Meanwhile any man might make and sing verses for his own 
 pleasure, about his own deeds and his own fancies, sorrows, and 
 loves. 
 
 There was no lack of old legends of times before the English 
 invasion of Britain, or of legends quite fabulous about gods and 
 heroes. We know from Roman and early Christian authors, that 
 the other Germanic peoples, on the Continent, had abundance of 
 this material for poetry : thus the Germans sang of Arminius, the 
 Lombards sang of Alboin, or ^Ifwine (died a.d. 573), and the 
 Scandinavians and Germans had legends of Attila, the great Hun 
 conqueror, in the fifth century, and of Sigurd, who slew Fafnir, 
 the Snake-Man ; of the vengeance of Brynhild, and all the other 
 adventures of the Volsungs and Niblungs ; in Germany fashioned, 
 much later, into the famous " Nibelungenlied ".^ 
 
 The Anglo-Saxons, too, knew forms of these legends ; and 
 mention the heroes of them in their poetry. Thus there is no 
 
 ' The best versions for English readers of these splendid stories are to be 
 found in " The Volsungs and the Niblungs," translated by William Morris 
 and Magnusson, and in " The Corpus Poeticura Roreale," with translations by 
 F. York Powell and Vigfusson. 
 
4 English Literature 
 
 reason why the Anglo-Saxons should not have produced poems as 
 magnificent as those of the early Greeks, except that they, like all 
 other peoples, had not the genius of the Greeks for poetry, and 
 for the arts ; and had not their musical language, and glorious 
 forms of verse. They were a rough country folk, and for long 
 did not, like the Greeks, live in towns. 
 
 But even if they had possessed more genius than they did, 
 much of their old literature would probably have been lost when 
 they became Christians ; and when the clergy, who had most to 
 do with writing, generally devoted themselves only to verses on 
 Biblical or other Christian subjects, or to prose sermons ; and to- 
 learned books in Latin. While plenty of Anglo-Saxon Christian 
 poetry survives, of poetry derived from the heathen times of the 
 Anglo-Saxons there is comparatively little, and much of it has 
 been more or less re-written, and affected by later changes and 
 additions, in early Christian times. 
 
 The fragments of old poetry enable us to understand the 
 poetic genius of our remote ancestors as it was before they had 
 wholly adopted Christianity, or come under Latin, French, and 
 Nqrman influences. From the descendants of the Britons whom 
 they had conquered, or who survived as their Welsh neighbours, 
 they seem, at this time, to have borrowed little or nothing in the 
 way of song or story. 
 
 Before beginning to try to understand the Anglo-Saxon liter- 
 ature, we ought to set before our minds two or three considerations. 
 Though the language of these very old poems is the early form of 
 our own English, we cannot understand them except in trans- 
 lations, unless we learn Anglo-Saxon. However well a translator 
 may render the ideas of a poem, he cannot give the original words 
 of it in another language. Now the poet's very own words have a 
 beauty and harmony and appropriateness which a translation cannot 
 reproduce. The ideas remain, but the essence of the poem is 
 lost : gone is the vigour, the humour is weakened ; the harmony 
 is impaired. Once more we are accustomed to rhyme, and to cer- 
 tain forms of versification in our poetry. The early Anglo-Saxons 
 did not employ rhyme ; the peculiar cadence, with alliteration, of 
 their verse cannot easily be reproduced ; and there is much differ- 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature 5 
 
 ence of opinion as to the prosody or scansion of Anglo-Saxon 
 verse. Thus, till we can read Anglo-Saxon easily, and while we 
 only read its poetry through translations, we are apt to think less 
 highly of it than it deserves. 
 
 Again, the ideas and manners of the Anglo-Saxons were not 
 like our own in many details. Their poets did not write for us, 
 but for men of their own time, whose taste and ways of thinking 
 and living were in many respects very different from ours. 
 
 If many people cannot now take pleasure in the novels of 
 Fielding, Scott, Miss Austen, Thackeray, and Dickens — the novels 
 of 1745-1870 — because these seem " so old-fashioned," they will 
 certainly be unable to admire the poetry of 500-800. Yet it may 
 be excellent poetry, when we put ourselves as far as we can in the 
 place of the hearers for whom it was composed. If we fail to do 
 this we may read Anglo-Saxon poetry as a matter of history, but, 
 as poetry, we cannot enjoy it. 
 
 Minstrels, Story-tellers, and Stories. 
 
 Perhaps the oldest of the Anglo-Saxon poems is that called 
 " Widsith," after the name of the far-travelled minstrel or gleeman 
 who sang it before the people in the hall of a princs or noble. 
 This short poem tells us what kind of tales the people liked to 
 hear. It begins : — 
 
 Widsith spoke 
 His word-hoard unlocked, 
 
 that is, he opened his treasure of stories as a travelling pedlar 
 opens his box of goods, He says that he has wandered, gather- 
 ing songs and tales, all over the world from the German Ocean to 
 Egypt and India. He means that he knows all stories ; he is 
 merely giving his hearers their choice of a tale about any king and 
 people in the known world. 
 
 Let us suppose that they choose to hear about ^Ifwine, or 
 Alboin, king of the Longobards or Lombards, whom Widsith says 
 that he had visited. We know what tales were told of ^Ifwine. 
 One of these is a fair example of the rest ; it is probably not true. 
 ^Ifwine had killed the father of his wife Rosamund, and had a 
 
6 English Literature 
 
 cup made out of the skull, and he made Rosamund drink out of it 
 at a feast. She determined to be revenged for this cruel insult, 
 and took counsel with the king's shield-bearer and guardsman. 
 By his advice she entrapped Beartheow, a very strong man, by a 
 trick, so that he became guilty of high treason. He was now at 
 her mercy, for she threatened to inform against him, and thus 
 compelled him to murder her husband, ^Ifwine, in his bed. After 
 that, the king's shield-bearer tried to win the kingdom. But Rosa- 
 mund gave him poisoned wine, and he, when he knew that it was 
 poisoned, made her drink out the cup, and they two died in the 
 same hour. 
 
 This makes a noble tragic song, but the story is only a form 
 of a much older Greek tale which Herodotus, looo years earlier, 
 tells of King Candaules of Lydia, of his wife, who.-n he insulted, 
 and of the Captain of his guard, whom she induced to kill King 
 Candaules. 
 
 Probably an Anglo-Saxon minstrel would recite the poem called 
 "Widsith," and then the listeners would ask him for any of the 
 stories which he had mentioned, perhaps for one about .^Ifwine ; 
 or Alexander the Great ; or Sigurd of the Volsungs, who slew the 
 Serpent-Man, Fafnir; or of Hygelac (who is believed to have 
 been the man named, in Latin, Chochllaicus, a real king of about 
 520) ; or of Hrothgar, whom Widsith mentions. This king is be- 
 friended by Beowulf, in the great Anglo-Saxon poem of that name, 
 the noblest and most famous of all these old songs. The minstrel 
 makes requests for gifts of rings and bracelets ; and speaks of his 
 desire to meet generous princes. In the same way Homer loves 
 to tell how golden cups and beautiful swords were given by princes 
 to the minstrels in Greece. The last verses of " Widsith " run thus, 
 in modern English, and are a fair example of early Anglo-Saxon 
 versification : — 
 
 Swa sciithende So wandering on 
 gesceapum hweorfath the world about, 
 
 glee men gumena gleemen do roam 
 
 geond grunda fela ; through many lands ; 
 
 thearfe secgath they say their needs 
 
 thonc word sprecath, they speak their thanks, 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature 7 
 
 Simie suth oththe north sure, south or north 
 sumne gemetath, some one to meet, 
 
 gydda gleawne of songs to judge 
 
 geofam unhneawne and gifts not grudge." 
 
 There are few early Anglo-Saxon poems that can be called 
 " lyrics " ; they are rather narratives, as in the case of the songs 
 of war, the battles of Brunanburh and Maiden ; or " elegiac," and 
 reflective, as in " The Ruined City," though personal emotion, a 
 characteristic of the lyric, often appears in the Christian poems 
 and elsewhere as we shall see. 
 
 "Beowulf" the chief poem may be called a brief "epic,'' a 
 narrative of over 3000 lines, on great heroic adventures. Such a 
 poem would be sung in hall, to beguile more than one long 
 winter night. 
 
 Beowulf. 
 
 It is impossible to be certain about the date when the original 
 form of this great old poem, " Beowulf," was first composed, because 
 it contains, on the one hand, descriptions of the ancient heathen 
 way of living, thinking, manners, and customs ; and, on the other 
 hand, has many allusions to Christian doctrine, which the Anglo- 
 Saxons knew nothing of till after they had quite conquered this 
 country. The poet of "Beowulf" as it now exists, had read the 
 Bible, or knew part of its contents. We must look first at the 
 
 • This form of verse has been described thus by Prof. Saintsbury : — 
 " The staple line of this verse consists of two halves or sections, each 
 containing two 'long,' 'strong,' 'stressed,' 'accented' syllables, these same 
 syllables being, to the extent of three out of the four, alliterated. At the first 
 casting of the eye on a page of Anglo-Saxon poetry no common resemblance 
 except these seem to emerge, but we see on some pages an altogether extra- 
 ordinary difference in the lengths of the lines, or, in other words, of the 
 number of ' short,' ' weak,' ' unstressed,' ' unaccented ' syllables, which are 
 allowed to group themselves round the pivots or posts of the rhythm, that 
 is, round the syllables on which strong stress is laid." 
 
 The eye and ear of the reader soon find out the essential facts of the 
 measures; the strong pause in the middle of each verse, the alliteration, 
 the accent, and the great variety in the number of the syllables which are 
 slurred, or not dwelt upon, in each case. The poetry avoids rhymes, except 
 in " The Rhyming Poem," later than King Alfred's time, and in two or three 
 other instances. 
 
8 English Literature 
 
 poem as it stands, and the story as it is told, or rather at the 
 stories, for there are several. 
 
 One Beowulf, not our hero, was the son of Scyld. Scyld died, 
 and, in place of Christian burial, was placed in his ship, with arms 
 and treasures, and so sailed out to sea at the wind's will. Not so, 
 when his time came, was our Beowulf buried ; that is, Beowulf the 
 hero of the poem, for the earlier Beowulf, son of Scyld, was 
 another man. 
 
 The grandson of Scyld was Hrothgar (whose name becomes 
 Roger in later times), and Hrothgar was a Danish king, builder of 
 Heorot, a princely hall. His happiness awoke the envy of Grendel, 
 a fiend of the wilds. 
 
 The Christian author of the poem, as it stands, thinks that 
 Grendel and other monsters a're descendants of Cain 1 
 
 The nobles slept in the great hall, whither Grendel came and 
 caught away thirty of them. Men sought other sleeping-rooms, 
 but Grendel still came and slew them. The house was empty, 
 and men promised sacrifices to their false gods all in vain : " they 
 knew not the true God," yet the poet often forgets their ignorance, 
 and makes them speak like Christians. 
 
 There was a king of Gothland named Hygelac, a real king 
 living at the beginning of the sixth century. The king's nephew, 
 Beowulf, heard of the evil deeds of Grendel, and set sail with some 
 of H-ygelac's men to help the unhappy Hrothgar. They all wore 
 shirts of mail made curiously of interlaced iron rings, they had 
 spears with iron heads, and helmets crowned with the figure of a 
 boar made in iron ; some of these shirts of chain-mail and helmets 
 still exist. Coming into the great hall, built of timber plated with 
 gold, the heroes explained their errand, and were well received. 
 As Grendel cannot be harmed with stroke of steel, Beowulf will 
 carry neither sword nor shield, but be slain by Grendel ; or slay 
 him with his hands. If Grendel eats him, Hrothgar will not need 
 to give him due burial — burning his body, and burying the bones 
 in a mound of earth ; the custom is that of the unconverted German 
 tribes. Hrothgar accepts the offer, the warriors sit at their ale 
 (they had not much wine), and listen to the clear voice of the 
 minstrel as he sings of old adventures. But Hunferth, a thane of 
 
■ Anglo-Saxon Literature 9 
 
 Hrothgar, out of jealousy, taunts Beowulf with having been beaten 
 in a swimming match that lasted for seven nights. Beowulf re- 
 plies that Hunferth " has drunk too much beer " : he himself swam 
 better than his opponent for five nights, and slew nine sea- 
 iponsters with his sword ; Hunferth, on the other hand, dare not 
 face Grendel, and has been the destroyer of his own brothers. Yet 
 Hunferth does not draw his sword, after these insults, which is 
 strange ; and the feast in hall goes on merrily. 
 
 Such scenes of boasting and quarrelling were, no doubt, 
 common over the ale cups, but Waltheow, Queen of Hrothgar, 
 " the golden-garlanded lady, the peace-weaver," enters the 
 throng, and bears the cup of welcome to Beowulf, thanking God 
 that she has found a helper to her heart's desire. Then she 
 takes her place by her lord Hrothgar. 
 
 Night fell, Beowulf, committing himself "to the all-knowing 
 God," takes off his armour and lays his head on the bolster — the 
 word is the same in Anglo-Saxon. Grendel arrived, burst in the 
 iron-bolted door, and laughed as he saw the sleeping men. One 
 warrior he tore to pieces and devoured ; but Beowulf, who had 
 -the strength of thirty, gripped the fiend, and the hall echoed with 
 their wrestling and stamping up and down ; the clamped benches 
 were torn from the floor. Men smote at Grendel with swords, 
 but the steel did not bite on his body. Beowulf tore his arm 
 and shoulder clean away, and Grendel, flying to a haunted pool, 
 described as a terrible place, dived down through the blood- 
 stained water, and " hell caught hold of him ". 
 
 In Heorot men now made merry, and the minstrel sang a new 
 song of the fight. 
 
 After the rejoicings, eight horses and princely armour are 
 given to Beowulf. The minstrel sings of the hero Finn, with a 
 pleasant description of the coming of spring after a long winter. 
 The poem is not all about fiends and fighting ; the descriptions of 
 wild rocks and seas, and of happy nature, are beautiful. Then 
 the gracious wife of Hrothgar bids Beowulf farewell, giving him a 
 cup of gold. Other presents are offered, and on so happy a day, 
 wine, not ale, is drunk in hall. 
 
 But Beowulf's adventure is not ended. That night he slept. 
 
10 English Literature 
 
 not in hall, but in a separate room, and the mother of Grendel, a 
 creature more terrible than himself, came to avenge her son, and 
 slew a warrior. 
 
 Next day Hrothgar described to Beowulf the home of the 
 fiends ; they abode in dark wolf-haunted places, windy " nesses,'' 
 or headlands, wild marshlands, where the hill-stream rushes 
 through black shadows into a pool or perhaps sea-inlet, under the 
 earth. The boughs of trees hang dense over the water, and at 
 night a fire shines from it. Even the stag that ranges the moors, 
 when he flies from the hounds to the lake, dies rather than venture 
 there to take the water. This is a fine example of the descriptions 
 of nature in the poem. Beowulf is not alarmed ; we must all die 
 at last, he says, but while we live we should try to win glory. 
 
 So they all rode to the haunted pool, Beowulf in his iron 
 armour and helmet. The man who had insulted him now repents, 
 and gives Beowulf the best of iron swords, named Hrunting; for 
 famous swords in these days had names, like King Arthur's blade, 
 Excalibur, or Roland's Durendal. " I will gain glory with 
 Hrunting, or death shall take me," says Beowulf.^ 
 
 Beowulf dived into the black water, the fiend strove to crush 
 him, but his iron shirt of mail protected him, and she dragged him 
 into the dreadful hall, her home, where the water did not enter. 
 A strange light burned ; Beowulf saw his hideous foe and smote 
 at her with Hrunting ; but the edge did not bite on her body. 
 He threw away the useless sword, and they wrestled ; they fell, 
 Beowulf was under her, and she drew her short sword. She could 
 not pierce his armour, but he saw and seized a huge sword, made 
 for a giant in times long ago. With this he cut her down from 
 the neck to the breast-bone, and his friends on shore saw the 
 pool turn to blood ; all but his own men had believed that Beo- 
 wulf was dead, and had gone home. 
 
 Meanwhile the blade of the great sword melted away in the 
 
 1 The words are : — 
 
 Ic me raid Hruntinge 
 dom gewyrce, otthe mec death nimeth. 
 I (Ic, German Ich) with (German mit) Hrunting, glory will win, other- 
 wise {otthe) me {mec) death taketh {nimmeth), German nehmen (" to take "). 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature ii 
 
 poisoned blood of his foe, and he swam to shore with the hilt, and 
 with the heads of the two monsters, Grendel and his mother. 
 With these he came gloriously to Hrothgar, who wondered at that 
 sword hilt, covered with plates of gold, engraved with a poem in 
 Runic letters ; for the poet is fond of describing beautiful swords 
 and armour. 
 
 Hrothgar now made a long speech about the goodness of God, 
 which, of course, is a Christian addition to the poem. Beowulf 
 gave back Hrunting to iHunferth, saying no word against the 
 weapon though it had been of no service. Then they all departed 
 in high honour, and their swift ship under sail cut the sea into 
 foam as she flew homeward. 
 
 In time Hygelac and his son fell in battle, and Beowulf was 
 for fifty years " the shepherd of the people ". The last adventure 
 of his old age was a fight with a fiery dragon which dwelt among 
 the golden treasures in an ancient burial mound. In the tomb, 
 says the poet, " there is no sound of swords or harness, no joy of 
 the harp ; the good hawk flits not through the hall ; the swift horse 
 does not beat the ground at the gate ". Anglo-Saxon poetry is 
 full of the melancholy of death, and of mournful thoughts awakened 
 in presence of the ruined homes of men long dead. 
 
 In his last fight and his best fight, Beowulf, with a young 
 prince to aid him, slew the Fire Drake, but he was mortally hurt 
 by its poisonous flaming breath, and spoke his latest words : ''•Bid 
 the brave men pile up a mound for me, high and far-seen on the 
 headland, that seafaring men in time to come may call it Beowulf s 
 mound ". These are almost the very words of the ghost of the 
 dead oarsman, Elpenor, to Odysseus in Homer. 
 
 So much has been said about the poem of " Beowulf," because 
 it is by far the greatest poem that the Anglo-Saxons have left to 
 us, and best shows how they lived. From " Beowulf " we learn 
 that our ancestors lived almost exactly as did the ancestors 
 of the Greeks, in Homer's poems, made perhaps 1600 years 
 before the making of "Beowulf". Both these ancient Greeks 
 and our own ancestors had, and expressed in poetry, the same love 
 of life and of the beauty of the world ; and the same belief that, 
 after death, hope was hopeless, and joy was ended. Both had the 
 
12 English Literature 
 
 same sense of the mystery of existence, and, when they took time 
 to think, had the same melancholy. Our poetry thus began like 
 that of Greece, and, in the end, became the rival of the greatness 
 of Greece. 
 
 We know from broken pieces of these old songs which have 
 come down to us that the Anglo-Saxons, like their German neigh- 
 bours on the Continent, had even better stories than " Beowulf ". 
 But they have been lost, and "Beowulf" was perhaps saved by 
 the Christian parts of it, which must have been put in by some 
 one who wrote it over again after the Anglo-Saxons were con- 
 verted : the language is like what was spoken and written about 
 750. One beautiful poem is " The Ruined City ". The minstrel, 
 beholding the desolation of the towers and baths of some Roman 
 town which the Anglo-Saxons have overthrown, laments its fall 
 and the perishable state of human fortunes. Other poems 
 may be briefly mentioned. 
 
 The Wanderer. 
 
 In " The Wanderer " there is abundance of gloom, but it is a 
 less noble poem than " The Ruined City," for the speaker is in 
 sorrow, not for the griefs of afl mankind, but for his own. He is 
 an exile, homeless, in fact a tramp, Eardstapa. He has lost his 
 lord, his patron ; and dreams of his kindness, in the old happy 
 days; and wakens, an aged man, friendless, to see the snow 
 falling in the ocean, and the seabirds flitting with their white 
 wings through the snow. The house where he had been young 
 has fallen, and he laments over the ruins. 
 
 The Plaint of Deor. 
 
 This complaint is also rueful, but it is manly. The poet calls 
 to mind old heroes and heroines, such as Weland (remembered 
 still as Wayland Smith, in Scott's " Kenilworth "), who suffered 
 many misfortunes, but endured them bravely. The poem is in 
 stanzas ; each ending with the burden or refrain, 
 
 That evil he overcame. 
 So may I this I 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature 13 
 
 It is like the often repeated word of Odysseus in Homer : — 
 
 Endure my heart, 
 
 Worse hast thou endured I 
 
 One sorrow of the poet is that his lord has taken from him 
 the land which he held as a minstrel, and given it to another 
 singer. Now he is in new trouble. 
 
 That I surmounted, 
 So may I this I 
 
 Probably there were many other poems with refrains, or recur- 
 ring lines at the end of each stanza ; this is a very old poetic de- 
 vice; originally the refrains were sung in chorus by the listeners 
 as they danced to the music of the minstrels. 
 
 The Seafarer. 
 
 In this poem, as in " Beowulf," the sea is spoken of as it 
 would be by men who knew its wild moods ; cold, tempest, biting 
 salt water, danger, and grey waves under driving rain, yet the 
 seafarer loves it. The poet says that (like 
 
 The gentlemen of England 
 Who live at home at ease,) 
 
 many a one knows not the dangers of the deep, while the minstrel 
 has heard the swan sing through the ice-cold showers of hail and 
 the spindrift. But the coming of spring and the cuckoo's cry, ad- 
 monish the brave man to go seafaring, despite the distresses ; 
 they are more inspiriting than life on land. He is a Christian, 
 but he falls back on the old melancholy for the passing of kings 
 and gold-givers. Though he preaches over much, he still thinks 
 of the bale-fire as the mode of burial, as if Christian rites of earth 
 to earth were not yet adopted. 
 
 Waldhere. 
 
 Of this poem only some sixty lines exist. They were found at 
 Copenhagen, written on two pieces of vellum which had been used 
 in binding a book : it is common to find fragments of early printed 
 books or manuscripts in the bindings of books more recent. One 
 
1 4 English Literature 
 
 page of " Waldhere " contains a speech by the heroine, of the tale, 
 Hildeguthe, urging Waldhere to fight Guthere ; the other fragment 
 has portions of a dialogue between the two combatants. 
 
 The names of the personages show that the poem was one of 
 which we have other versions, the most intelligible is a Latin form 
 in verse. ^ The story deals with an adventure, real or romantic, in 
 the wars of Attila with the Franks. Waldhere, an Aquitanian 
 hostage, brought up in Attila's court, with his betrothed lady, 
 Hildeguthe, daughter of the King of the Burgundians, is now keeper 
 of Attila's treasures ; he and his friend Hagen escape ; Hagen, 
 who first fled, reached the court of Guthere, King of the Franks, 
 and hearing there that a lady and a knight, with a treasure, are 
 wandering about, he recognizes his friends, and follows them 
 with King Guthere (who mainly wants the treasure), and with 
 eleven other warriors. Hildeguthe sees them coming, and Wald- 
 here, who will not give up the* treasures, slays the eleven com- 
 panions of Guthere, who are chivalrous enough to "set him man 
 for man," as the Scottish ballad says, in place of overpowering 
 him by numbers. Hagen, of course, does not want to fight his 
 friend Waldhere, but Fate, the Anglo-Saxon Wyri, is too strong ; 
 Waldhere has to encounter both Guthere and Hagen, for Hagen 
 is Guthere's man, or thegn, and may not disobey him ; more- 
 over, he must avenge his nephew, whom Waldhere has already 
 slain. All three men receive terrible wounds, and then they make 
 friends ; and Waldhere keeps both his lady and the treasure. 
 
 This version of the story is more like a later romance than the 
 other Germanic epics. In these, as in this tale, there is usually a 
 tragic conflict of passions and duties, as when the law of blood- 
 vengeance compels a woman to avenge a slain father or brother, 
 or her husband or her lover. The end is always tragic, but the 
 Latin poet has probably contrived "a happy ending," while re- 
 taining the many good fights, and the conflict of friendship and 
 duty to a hero's lord, which make the interest of the story. 
 
 In the Anglo-Saxon fragments, Hildeguthe, encouraging her 
 
 ' Translated from a lost German form ; the Latin is of the tenth century, 
 by Ekkehard of St. Gall. 
 
Anglo-Saxon Literature 1 5 
 
 lover to fight, praises the swordsmith, the old German hero, 
 Weland, the Tubal Cain of the race. He made the sword Miming, 
 the best of all swords, which never fails the fighter. Hildeguthe 
 has never seen Waldhere flee the fight ; now he must not be less 
 noble than himself. The other fragment is like the dialogues of 
 the heroes in the Iliad before they come to blows. 
 
 The whole of " Waldhere " must have been, when complete, a 
 poem much more complex, and even more interesting (at least to 
 modern readers) than "Beowulf". It had "love interest," a 
 brave heroine, good duels, and the tragic conflict of duties, while 
 it was full of allusions to other ancient epics of the Germanic 
 peoples. 
 
 The Fight at Finnsburg. 
 
 In a song of the gleeman at Hrothgar's house in " Beowulf," 
 there are obscure references to the slaying of Hnaef, brother of 
 Hildeburh, wife of the Frisian King Finn, and the slaying of Hilde- 
 burh's own sons by the men of Hnsef, in a fight within the royal hall 
 of Finn. They are all burned together on the funeral pyre, while 
 Hildeburh weeps for sons and brother. A fragment of an Anglo- 
 Saxon epic on this affair exists only in one copy, the original is 
 lost. It is a complicated story of slayings and revenges among 
 folk akin by marriage, and the interest clearly lay in the tragic situ- 
 ation of Hildeburh, who owes vengeance against her husband, Finn, 
 and also against ihe family of her brother, who have slain her sons. 
 As Hildeburh returns to her own people, the Danes, after her hus- 
 band is killed, she probably preferred her own blood kindred to 
 those of her husband. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON CHRISTIAN POETRY. 
 
 When the Anglo-Saxons became Christians (597-655) they took 
 the Gospel, and the rules of the Church, in the North, from the 
 Irish missionaries who, under St. Columba of Ireland, settled in 
 the Isle of Zona : in the South from Roman teachers, such as 
 Theodore of Tarsus, who had studied at Athens, and, in 668 
 became Archbishop of Canterbury. Both in the South, and 
 North, in Northumberland, great schools were established, in con- 
 nexion with the monkish settlements ; in the monasteries Greek 
 was not unknown, and the language of Rome, Latin, was taught 
 and was used in writing all learned works, and hymns. With the 
 language of Rome, almost dead as a living speech, came know- 
 ledge of ancient history,- and of the great Roman poets, especially 
 Virgil. The seventh and eighth centuries were thus a new epoch, 
 a century of learning, and of division between the educated and 
 the unlearned. The learned, mainly priests, no longer cared 
 much for making songs and stories about fighting, love, and the 
 adventures of their heathen heroes. They were occupied with 
 the history of Rome and of the old world ; and still more with 
 their new religion, and the stories of apostles and saints and 
 Hebrew kings and patriarchs, and with the making of sermons 
 and hymns. Thus the old heathen tales and poems were lost or 
 half forgotten. 
 
 CiEDMON. 
 
 The first sacred poet of whom we hear is Csedmon. His tale 
 is told by the great and learned Bede, born at Wearmouth in 
 Northumberland in 673, and trained in the new monastery there. 
 Says Bede : "There was in the monastery of St. Hilda at Whitby, 
 a Brother who, when he heard the Scriptures interpreted, could in- 
 
 16 
 
Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry 17 
 
 stantly turn the lesson into sweet verses." Just so the minstrel 
 ofHrothgar, when he heard the nobles talk about Beowulf s 
 defeat of Grendel, turned the story at once into a song. This was 
 "improvisation," and Caedmon "improvised" religious poems; no 
 man has equalled them since, says Bede. But he began when he 
 was far from young, and was not yet a priest. Till then he had not 
 been a poet ; indeed, if he were at a feast where every man sang in 
 his turn, when the harp was brought to people near him at table, 
 he arose and went home. 
 
 One night he ran away from the harp into the stalls of the 
 cattle, and there fell asleep on the straw. In a dream One ap- 
 peared to him, and bade him sing. He answered that he had left 
 the feast because he could not sing. 
 
 " You must sing." 
 
 " About what am I to sing ? " 
 
 " The beginning of things created." 
 
 Caedmon then made in his sleep a poem about the Creation, 
 and when he awoke he remembered it, as Coleridge made " Kubla 
 . Khan " in a dream, and remembered part of it until he was dis- 
 turbed by a person on business from Porlock. After this Caedmon 
 made sacred poems, doing Scripture into verse, with perfect ease, 
 and he became a monk. 
 
 Now there exist long Anglo-Saxon poems on parts of Genesis, 
 Exodus, and Daniel, and it has been very naturally supposed that 
 these are the poems of Caedmon, which, as Bede thought, had 
 never been equalled in the Anglian tongue. Nothing is known 
 for certain, and only one short hymn has a good chance to be by 
 the poet Caedmon. The ideas of the poet singing of the war 
 in Heaven, so closely resemble those of Milton, in "Paradise 
 Lost," that Milton has been supposed to have known something 
 of the Anglo-Saxon poem.^ No lines in "Paradise Lost," are 
 more familiar than those which describe a land of fire, 
 
 Yet from these flames, 
 No light, but rather darkness visible, 
 Served only to discover sights of woe. 
 
 'First published in his time (1655) by Francis Junius (of course not the 
 Junius who has been identified with Francis). 
 
 2 
 
1 8 English Literature 
 
 The old Anglo-Saxon poet says : — 
 
 They sought another land, 
 That was devoid of light, 
 And was full of flame. 
 
 The speech of Satan, too, in Anglo-Saxon, the speech in 
 which he blames the justice of God ; his threat of what he would 
 do, were he free for but one winter ; his design to* avenge himself 
 on Adam and his posterity, are all like Milton, wbose 
 
 is exactly like 
 
 Fairest of her daughters. Eve, 
 
 The fairest of women, 
 
 That have come into the world. 
 
 In the fighting scenes of these Anglo-Saxon Biblical poems, 
 the poets appear to enjoy themselves most and to feel most at 
 home. They have only to write in the manner of their own old 
 battle songs, about the howling of wolves and crying of ravens to 
 whom the victor gives their meat. 
 
 Indeed Anglo-Saxon poetry reminds us of an ancient casket 
 of whalebone in the British Museum, with its scenes from the 
 heathen story of Weland or Weyland Smith, the adoration of the 
 Magi, Romulus and Remus and the wolf, and a battle between 
 Titus and the Jews : such is the mixture of Christianity, heathen- 
 ism, and learning in the Christian Anglo-Saxon literature.^ 
 
 Thus in the long fragment " Judith," based on the well- 
 known story of Judith and Holofernes in the Apocrypha, there is 
 vigour in the descriptions of the intoxicated roaring Holofernes ; 
 and of the cries of wolf, raven, and eagle ; and of the clash of 
 swords and shields. 
 
 Cynewulf. 
 
 The best Christian poem, called " Crist," is full of the happi- 
 ness bestowed by the new religion. The verses are by a poet 
 named Cynewulf of whom nothing is known but his name, 
 recorded in a kind of acrostic written in the Runic alphabet. 
 He took his matter from sermons and hymns in Latin, but 
 
 ' I find that Mr. W. P. Ker has made the same comparison. 
 
Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry 19 
 
 Cynewulf makes the poetry his own. He is joyously religious. 
 After all the melancholy of the heathen or half-heathen minstrels, 
 their wistful doubts about the meaning and value of our little life, 
 the author of the " Crist " comes as one who " has seen a great 
 light ". He rejoices like the shepherds who heard good tidings of 
 great joy at Bethlehem on the first Christmas night. It is as 
 when spring comes to the world and the thrushes cannot have 
 enough of singing : the night and the darkness are over : the 
 grave has lost its sting and Death his victory. The poet is as 
 happy as the birds in March. To him the message of Christ is 
 no old story, but a new certainty ; he has no douljt, no fear, and 
 this gladness of faith is all his own, whether he sings of Our Lord 
 or of Our Lady. That is the charm of Cynewulf, his fresh 
 delight in his work. 
 
 Thou to us "> 
 
 The bright sun sendest, 
 
 •And thyself coraest, 
 
 That thou may'st enlighten 
 
 Those who long ago 
 
 With vapour covered, 
 
 And in darkness here 
 
 Sat, in continual night. 
 
 The legends of "St. Guthlac" and "St. Juliana," on the other 
 hand, are not, it must be confessed, such spontaneous bursts of 
 
 song. 
 
 Andreas. 
 
 In the " Andreas " the poet, whoever he was, sings of what he 
 has heard, adventures of St. Andrew and St. Mark. St. Matthew 
 has fallen into the hands of the cannibals of old Greek legend, the 
 Laestrygonians, the poet calls them the " Mermedonians".^ 
 
 The cannibals have caught, and are about to eat St. Matthew, 
 but the Lord appears first to him, in his dungeon, and then to 
 St. Andrew, who is living among the Achaeans, in Greece. The 
 voyage, the fighting, are in the old heathen style, and the Deity 
 
 1 Apparently he has confused the Lastrygonians who devoured some of 
 
 the companions of Odysseus, with the Myrmidonians (Myrmidones) the 
 
 Greeks who followed Achilles to Troy. 
 
 -1 * 
 
20 English Literature 
 
 appears with two angels, all three disguised as sailors. It is im- 
 possible to give the whole tale, which appealed to the natural man 
 as a great story of adventure in waves and war, while it introduced 
 religion. The adventures are many, and much more startling 
 and wild than any that survive from the Anglo-Saxon poetry of 
 heathen times. 
 
 Dream of the Rood. 
 
 There is a singular poem " The Dream of the Rood,'' which 
 with many other " masterless " poems, some critics assign to 
 Cynewulf, on account of the style, and the deep personal feeling 
 which we admire in the " Crist " : others attribute it to Csedmon. 
 This opinion was partly based on a curious set of facts. The fol- 
 lowers of the great Reformer, John Knox, in Scotland (1560) 
 destroyed almost all the " monuments of idolatry " as they called 
 works of Christian art. But they forgot to break to powder a tall 
 ancient cross of red sandstone, beautifully .carved, and marked 
 with Runic characters, in the church of Ruthwell, near Dumfries. 
 Some eighty years later (1642) when the Covenanters were in arms 
 against Charles I, the preachers began a new war against works of 
 Christian art, and ordered the Ruthwell Cross to be destroyed. 
 It was broken into several fragments, which have now been pieced 
 together, and the Cross stands in an apse-shaped building adjoin- 
 ing the church. The Runic characters record a part of the poem 
 styled " The Dream of the Rood," and give the inscription " Cced- 
 mon me made'' probably Caedmon was really the artist who made 
 and carved the stone cross : indeed the name is rather hard to 
 read. 
 
 The poem speaks of the author's wonderful dream of the gold 
 adorned and jewelled True Cross, and, in "Elene," Cynewulf also 
 speaks of the revelation to him of the light of the Truth of the 
 Cross. Conceivably, then, Cynewulf really had a dream or vision, 
 and became devout after a life of war and minstrelsy. 
 
 Elene. 
 
 It would, in that case, be in old age that Cynewulf wrote, in 
 the " Elene," a poetic version of the legend of the discovery of the 
 
Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry 21 
 
 True Cross by Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine. 
 This poem, probably based on a Latin legend, has been very 
 highly praised. But before we can take any pleasure in it, we 
 must try to think ourselves back into the state of mind of England 
 when the heathen poetry of war was still popular, and Christianity, 
 with many mediaeval legends, was a fresh inspiration. Even when 
 we have done that as well as we can, the " Elene " awakens only 
 an historical kind of rapture. The natural man is much more at 
 home with "Beowulf" and " Waldhere" than with "Elene". 
 
 The poet begins with an imaginary battle : allied Franks and 
 Huns attack the Emperor Constantine. The motive of Cynewulf 
 is to introduce plenty of fighting : probably he never fought him- 
 self, but like other men of peace, he loves to sing of war. His 
 treatment of war is conventional ; he introduces the usual cries of 
 wolf, eagle, and raven. Constantine is encouraged by a dream of 
 a bright being who urges him to trust in God ; he also sees a vision 
 of the Cross, gay with jewels (as in " The Dream of the Rood ") 
 and letters making the words "In this sign conquer". Then the 
 battle is described, with more zest than originality, and the heathen 
 are routed ; many are converted. Helena next takes a large force, 
 and sails to Palestine to look for the True Cross. The usual 
 formulas descriptive of a seafaring are employed. 
 
 Helena preaches to the Jews in the mediaeval way, and they, 
 naturally, reply, " We know not, lady, why you are so angry with 
 us ". A crafty Jew, Judas, guesses that she has come to demand 
 from them the True Cross, which he is reluctant to give up. 
 Helena threatens to burn the Jews, and does put Judas in a pit, 
 without meat or drink, for seven days. Broken in spirit at last, 
 he says that he will do his best ; he prays ; a miraculous vapour 
 arises from the spot where, twenty feet underground, three crosses 
 are discovered. Another miracle points out which of the three is 
 the Holy Rood ; Judas is baptized, and the shining nails of the 
 Cross are discovered. Then follow the verses in which the poet 
 describes his own old age, and his beholding the true light that 
 lighteneth all men. 
 
2 2 English Literature 
 
 Riddles. 
 
 Among other poems vaguely assigned, in part, to Cynewulf 
 are Riddles. The Sword describes itself, so do the byrnie, or shirt 
 made of iron rings, the helmet, the shield ; and there are many 
 other riddles, some derived from late Latin. The best are really 
 poetical. In addition to the Riddles there are several curious 
 magical songs, or charms, for curing diseases, and removing spells 
 of witchcraft. In these there are remains of the old heathen 
 magical songs. 
 
 Phcenix. 
 
 The " Phoenix," assigned to Cynewulf as usual, is based on a 
 late Latin poem attributed to Lactantius (290-325) and ends as an 
 allegory of Christ. It is interesting to observe in the " Phcenix " 
 a description of an ideal land of p^ace " where comes not hail or 
 rain or any snow," the picture is borrowed from Homer's lines on 
 Olympus, the home of the gods, and Elysium, the abode reserved 
 for Helen of Troy and Menelaus, in the Odyssey. Anglo-Saxon 
 poetry, without knowing it, came in touch, through Lactantius, 
 with the most beautiful verses in the most ancient poetry of 
 Greece, verses paraphrased in Latin, by Lucretius, and in English 
 by Tennyson, twice (" Lucretius," and the " Morte d'Arthur "), 
 and in "Atalanta in Calydon," by Mr. Swinburne. The golden 
 thread of ancient Greek poetry thus runs through Roman, Anglo- 
 Saxon, and English literature. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON LEARNING AND PROSE. 
 
 Latin Among the Anglo-Saxons. 
 
 Books written on English soil in the Latin language are no part 
 of English literature. It is necessary, however, to notice them, 
 because they testify to the knowledge and taste of the educated ; 
 while the ideas expressed in Latin reached the less instructed 
 people through sermons and in conversation, and through the 
 translations into Anglo-Saxon which were directed and in part 
 executed by King Alfred. 
 
 Though written by a native of our island we may omit the 
 Latin book of Gildas, of about 5 16-5 70, for he was a Briton of the 
 Romanized sort, who fled to Brittany. His book, where it does 
 not contain mere lamentations, gives a kind of history, very vague, 
 of events in the country, and of the sins and crimes of the British 
 princes down to about 550. Such as the information was, Bede, 
 the great early Anglo-Saxon historian, used it, as did the author 
 of " The History of the Britons " attributed to Nennius (say 800), 
 who, like Gildas, mentions the battle of Badon hill, but, unlike 
 Gildas, brings in King Arthur. As we shall see later, Bede does 
 not mention Arthur. 
 
 Leaving these vague British writers in Latin, we come to Bede. 
 
 Bede. 
 
 When we think of the time in which Bede, the greatest of our 
 early scholars, lived and worked, it seems amazing that he had 
 such a wide knowledge of books and so comparatively clear an 
 idea of the way in which history should be written. Bom in 673 
 
 23 
 
24 English Literature 
 
 (died 735), he was in his thirteenth year when his king, Egfrid of 
 Northumbria, was killed by the Picts (practically Gaelic-speaking 
 Highlanders), in the gVeat battle of Nectan's mere (685), in Angus 
 beyond the Tay, for so far into what is now Scotland had English 
 Northumbria pushed her conquests. Great part of these was lost, 
 and in the eighth century, there came an age of anarchy and civil 
 war, as fierce as the contests of the old times of heathendom. To 
 us the Anglo-Saxons of these ages seem barbarous enough, but 
 Bede speaks of the Picts of Scotland as " barbarians ". He con- 
 stantly deplores the greed and ignorance of the clergy, in terms 
 much like those used by the Protestants before the Reformation. 
 In an ignorant age Bede wrote unceasingly and copiously about 
 such natural science as was within his reach, especially using that 
 popular and fanciful book of Pliny, mere fairy-tales of natural (or 
 unnatural) history. He wrote' much and usefully on chronology in 
 relation to history ; and on theology, of course, he wrote abundantly. 
 Most important is his " Church History of the Race of Angles," 
 without which we should know little indeed concerning the Anglo- 
 Saxon invasions of Britain, and the development of events both in 
 England and Scotland. His tale of the reception of Christianity by 
 Edwin is very commonly quoted : it is of much literary interest, 
 and proves that the sense of the mystery and melancholy of the 
 world, so often expressed in Anglo-Saxon poetry, weighed heavily 
 on men who were not poets. 
 
 A council or Witanagemot was held to consider the Chris- 
 tian doctrines preached by Paulinus. One noble, Coifi, said, in 
 jest or earnest, that the heathen religion was useless, " for no man 
 among your people does more to please our gods than I, but 
 many are more favoured by you and by fortune ■". Coifi, therefore, 
 voted that Christianity deserved consideration. But another noble, 
 agreeing so far, added, " Human life, oh King, . . . seems to me 
 to resemble the flight of a sparrow, which flits into your warm hall 
 at a feast in winter weather. The bird flies into the bright hall 
 by one door, and out by another, and after a moment of quiet, 
 slips from the wintry darkness into the wintry darkness again. 
 Such is the life of man, that is for a moment, but what went be- 
 fore, and what comes after, as yet we know not. " The practical 
 
Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose 25 
 
 Coifi then proposed to destroy the old temples of the old gods ; 
 rode off, and threw his spear into a shrine. 
 
 Coifi's idea was merely to "change the luck," and to enjoy 
 the pleasures of destruction ; he was of a common type of refor- 
 mers ; while the other speaker desired intellectual satisfaction, 
 and the understanding of the mystery of existence. 
 
 Latin and even Greek learning, we have seen, found footing 
 in southern England with the arrival of Archbishop Theodore 
 and Abbot Hadrian at Canterbury in 66g. Latin had never been 
 quite extinct. A non-English writer in Latin, in Scotland, is 
 Adamnan (died 704), author of a Life of the Irish St. Columba, 
 who brought Christianity to the Picts of Scotland, while later 
 from his little holy Isle of lona missionaries reached Northum- 
 bria. Adamnan 's book may be read with more pleasure than 
 any other of the time ; it is so rich in pictures of Highland life 
 and sport on sea and land, and in tales of magic and the second 
 sight. This was one of the works used. by Bede in writing his 
 " History ". 
 
 The numerous books which were within the ireach of Bede 
 were brought, in five journeys, by Benedict Biscop, Abbot of 
 Wearmouth, from Rome to Northumberland. Before Bede, such 
 books had been studied by Aldhelm (Bishop of Sherborne, died 
 709). He wrote poetry in the native language, which King 
 Alfred greatly admired, but none of the extant poems are attribu- 
 ted to him. His Latin would have surprised Cicero ; he delighted 
 in strange words, and in strings of alliterations. He wrote 
 edifying treatises on Christian virtues as exemplified by Biblical 
 characters and by saints, some of them rather fabulous person- 
 ages. He knew many early Christian authors, and Virgil, Cicero, 
 Ovid, and Lucan, but his own style was as absurdly bombastic as 
 that of many of the ancient Irish romances. He had disciples in 
 style, who manufactured acrostics in Latin verse. '~ 
 
 The Latin literature of the southern Anglo-Saxons thus, fell for 
 a time into full decadence ; very different was the learning of the 
 northern Bede. His taste was uncorrupted by the sudden arrival 
 of ancient literature among a people almost barbarous. He wrote 
 in plain Latin without affectation concerning things worthy to be 
 
26 English Literature 
 
 known and remembered : he gave us a frank and charming picture 
 of the great St. Cuthbert ; he had, no doubt, too great a love of 
 miracles, and rather exaggerated some which he found in earlier 
 lives of early English saints, such as the said Cuthbert, the saint 
 of the Border, whose body sleeps in Durham Cathedral. The 
 authors whom he quotes are mainly Christian, including many of 
 the chief Fathers of the Church, and he is not certain about the 
 propriety of studying the heathen classics, though he cannot ab- 
 stain from Virgil, who, it was fancied, predicted the coming of 
 Christ. He had Greek enough to read the Greek New Testa- 
 ment, but this learning was lost, in England, in later times. The 
 translation of Bede's " History " into Anglo-Saxon under King 
 Alfred was not the least of his gifts to his people. 
 
 Alcuin. 
 
 Alcuin (735-804), a pupil of the school of York, lived at the 
 worst period of the savage attacks made by the still heathen Danes 
 on England. What the Anglo-Saxons had done to the Britons, 
 the Danes after 780 did to the Anglo-Saxons, slaying, plundering, 
 torturing, and burning, wherever they came. Happily for Alcuin 
 he passed most of his life abroad, aiding the great Emperor 
 Charlemagne in founding schools and fostering education. 
 Charlemagne collected the old war-songs of his people, little 
 dreaming that in three centuries he would become as fabulous a 
 hero, in the French epic poems of the eleventh to the thirteenth 
 century, as Beowulf or Alboin had been in Germanic lays. 
 Alcuin had far more influence as a lecturer and as a writer of 
 letters than as an author; in a poem he preserves the names of 
 the books in the libraries of York and Wearmouth, beautiful 
 manuscripts that would now be almost priceless, but the Danes 
 burned them all. Other Latin writers there were, they mainly 
 dealt with religious themes, and their works are of very little 
 importance. 
 
 Alfred. 
 
 Not till the kingdom of the West Saxons, Wessex, became the 
 most powerful state in England, and made successful resistance to 
 
Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose 27 
 
 the Scandinavian invaders, who had destroyed monasteries every- 
 where, were learning and literature able to raise their heads again. 
 It was the most famous of English kings, Alfred (849-901), that, 
 among all his other labours as warrior and ruler, restored education. 
 
 It is unfortunate that so many matters of interest in Anglo- 
 Saxon times are veiled in obscurity. The "Life of Alfred," by 
 Asser, a Welshman, Bishop of Sherborne, is a confused record. 
 
 Alfred was certainly taken to Rome by his father at a very early 
 age, but all that is told on this subject is most perplexing. He is 
 said to have been untaught in the art of reading till he was 1 2 
 years old, but he heard Anglo-Saxon poems repeated by others, 
 and knew many of them by heart. The famous tale that his 
 mother offered a book of Anglo-Saxon poems to the first of her 
 sons who should "learn it," and that Alfred was taken by the 
 beauty of the illuminations, learned to read, and won the prize, is 
 absolutely unintelligible in Asser's Latin. But Asser says, and 
 Alfred, in his Preface to an Anglo-Saxon translation of Pope 
 Gregory's " Pastoral Care " himself avers, that learning was almost 
 or quite extinct south of the Humbsr, when his reign began, while 
 in Northumbria matters were little better. But his father's second 
 wife, Judith, was daughter to the Emperor, Charles the Bald, and 
 though Judith, a young girl, was far from being sedate and erudite, 
 the connexion with the Continent enabled Alfred to bring over 
 Prankish scholars, such as Grimbald, while from Wales came 
 Asser, who, for part of each year, lived with Alfred as his tutor. 
 
 The king wrote a Handbook, or commonplace book, of Latin 
 extracts, which he translated into his own native tongue ; and later 
 he translated, or caused to be translated, the " Pastoral Care " of 
 Pope Gregory; the very popular work on "Consolation "by Boethius, 1 
 a philosopher who was slain about 524 ; the " Church History " ot 
 Bede ; and a kind of " History of the World " by Orosius, a Christian 
 writer of the fifth century. Of these books, the "History " by Bede 
 was of the greatest value for Englishmen ; the " Consolations " of 
 Boethius are at least as consolatory as any others, and were long 
 popular; while whoever reads Orosius will learn many things, 
 though he will learn them wrong, about the whole history of the 
 human race. Still, the Anglo-Saxon reader became aware of the 
 
28 English Literature 
 
 elements of geography, and of the existence of the powers of 
 ancient Assyria, Egypt, Crete, and Athens, while much space is 
 devoted to the empire of the Amazons.' " It is shameful," says 
 Orosius, nobly, "to speak of such a state of things, when such 
 miserable women, and so foreign, had subdued the bravest men of 
 all this earth," a conquest which the women repeated, he says, 
 during the Peloponnesian war I 
 
 When Orosius reaches Roman' history he is much more 
 copious, and not so amusingly incorrect. Alfred, as a rule, para- 
 phrased rather than translated his originals, omitting and adding 
 at pleasure, and amplifying the geography of the North, by infor- 
 mation received through Otthere and Wulfstan, contemporary 
 voyagers. 
 
 He found learning on its deathbed and he restored and 
 revived it, saving erudition from the natural contempt of men by 
 the royal example of a great statesman, sportsman, and warrior. 
 It was plain to the world that, in spite of the human tendency to 
 despise books, learning was not merely an aifair for shavelings in 
 cloisters, for the great king himself loved reading and writing. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. 
 
 I To the influence of Alfred is attributed, with much proba- 
 bility, the organization of the earlier parts of the "Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle," which briefly tells the history of the country from year 
 to year. There were several versions of these annals, containing 
 the most notable events of each year. It seems that copies of 
 one manuscript, containing the remotest events, beginning with 
 the invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar, and going on to Alfred's 
 own age, were given to several monasteries. In each the scribe 
 afterwards continued to make, as it were, a diary of the chief oc- 
 currences, and, later, various additions about past events would 
 be inserted in various religious houses, so that the dates are not 
 always to be trusted. After the year of Alfred's birth, the records 
 become more full. In his " Life of Alfred," Asser turned much 
 
 'The Amazons appear to have been the armed priestesses of the Hittite 
 empire in Asia Minor, about 1200 B.C. 
 
Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose 29 
 
 of the " Chronicle " for Alfred's reign into Latin : the materials of 
 the " Chronicle," therefore, existed in his day (an early part of it 
 was by a Northumbrian writer). The " Chronicle " now exists in 
 several versions, done by various hands in various monasteries. 
 Some " Chronicles " are lost, such as that of Kent, whence much 
 matter has been borrowed by that of Peterborough, which is the 
 longest, and reaches the year 1154. 
 
 The early entries in the " Chronicle " are very short : here is the 
 history of the year ^74. 
 
 " In this year a red Cross appeared in the heavens after sunset ; 
 and in this year the Mercians and Kentish men fought at Otford, 
 and wondrous serpents were seen in the South Saxons' land." 
 
 This reads like a journal kept by a child. In later days events 
 are recorded at more length, such as fights with the Danes ; meet- 
 ings of the Witanagemot, or great Council of the Wise ; slayings 
 of Kings and Earls ; even foreign facts of interest about Popes and 
 Emperors. But as late as 1066, the chronicler is brief enough, 
 when he tells how William, Count of Normandy, sailed to Pevensey 
 on Michaelmas Eve. 
 
 " This was then made known to King Harold, and he gathered 
 a great army, and came to meet Count William at the hoar apple 
 tree. And William came against him unawares, ere his people 
 were in battle order. But the king, nevertheless, fought boldly 
 against him with those men who would follow him, and there was 
 a great slaughter made on each side. There were slain King 
 Harold, and Eail Leofwine his brother, and Earl Gyrth his 
 brother, and many good men ; and the French held possession of 
 the place of carnage, as to them God granted for the people's 
 sins." We who write long books about a single_ battle, such as 
 Waterloo, are surprised by the brevity of the " Chronicle ". 
 
 Some seventy years later, just before it ends, the "Chronicle" 
 has a long and famous passage about the cruel oppressions in 
 Stephen's reign (1137). By that date the language has changed 
 so much, that the meaning can easily be made out, even by readers 
 who do not know Anglo-Saxon. The style of the " Chronicle " is 
 always extremely simple, and the good monks are usually more 
 interested in events affecting their own monasteries, than in 
 
30 English Literature 
 
 matters which are of more importance to the history of the country. 
 Nevertheless, there are records of periods in the " war-age " when 
 the Danes were,burning, plundering, and slaying through England, 
 and there are characters of great interest among the kings, earls, 
 and counsellors, lay or clerical, of whom we should know little or 
 nothing if the monks had ceased to make their entries in the 
 "Chronicle". To students of language, with its dialects and 
 changes, the " Chronicle " is priceless, and a few poems and ballads 
 are contained in its pages. 
 
 The most famous poem in the " Chronicle " is on the battle of 
 Brunanburh (937), when the English, under ^thelstan, defeated 
 the Scots and Danes. This song, translated by Tennyson, does 
 not so much describe the fighting as the triumph after the battle. 
 
 Five lay 
 
 On that battle-stead, 
 
 Young kings 
 
 By swords laid to sleep: 
 
 So seven eke 
 
 Of Olaf s earls, 
 
 Of the country countless 
 
 Shipmen and Scots. 
 
 Olaf fled in his ship over the barren sea, the aged Constantine, 
 King of the Scots, left his son dead on the field. As usual the 
 raven, wolf, and eagle have their share of the corpses : an Anglo- 
 Saxon poet could not omit these animals. This poet boasts that 
 there has been no such victory since first the Anglo-Saxons " the 
 Welsh overcame ". Perhaps the enthusiasm of English students 
 rather overrates the poetical merits of this war-song. 
 
 There is more poetry, and more originality in " Byrhtnoth," a 
 song of a defeat at the hands of the Danes. The warrior 
 entering the field of battle 
 
 Let from his hands his lief hawk fly, 
 
 His hawk to the holt, and to battle he stepped. 
 
 He haughtily refuses to accept peace in exchange for tribute 
 which the Danes demand. The armies are divided from each 
 other by a tidal river, and Byrhtnoth chivalrously allows the 
 
Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose 31 
 
 heathen to cross, at low tide, and meet him in fair field. There 
 are descriptions of hand to hand single combats ; and of the 
 wounds given and taken, and the boasts of the slayers, who throw 
 their spears, piercing iron mail, and shields of linden wood ; and 
 strip the slain of their armour and jewels. The friends of the 
 fallen fight across the corpses. Byrhtnoth falls, some of his com- 
 pany flee, the rest make a ring of spears about the hero, one cries 
 
 The more the mood, as lessens our might, 
 that is, 
 
 The braver be we, as our strength fails. 
 
 The whole poem might be translated, almost without a 
 change, into "the strong-winged music of Homer," or the verse 
 of the old French " Song of Roland ". The song is not conven- 
 tional, it is a noble war-poem. For some reason the best war- 
 poems are inspired by glorious defeats, at Maldon, at Flodden, at 
 Bosworth, at Roncesvaux, at Culloden. 
 
 The Monks and Learning. 
 
 The " Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," running from Alfred's day to 
 King Stephen's, and thus surviving the Norman Conquest, is the 
 earliest historical writing in English prose. As we have seen, it 
 was the work of the monks, regular soldiers of learning, living 
 together under strict rules. On the other hand the secular 
 clergy, parish priests and others, were the irregular levies against 
 ignorance. The monks were fallen on evil times for learning and 
 literature. 
 
 During the long cruel wars against the Danish raiders and \ 
 settlers ( 900-96 0) many monasteries were overthrown ; others, like ' 
 Abingdon, became poor neglected places ; into others the kings 
 and nobles placed their younger children, to live comfortably on 
 the rents and revenues of the Church, and neglect prayer and 
 books. Under Eadwig the Fair, St. Dunstan (born 925) \ 
 appeared as a reformer, making the rule of the Church respected, 
 and being therefore at feud with Eadwig, as Thomas a Becket 
 was with Henry II. Under Edgar (957-975), peace was 
 restored, and Dunstan could carry out reforms as Archbishop of 
 
32 English Literature 
 
 Canterbury. He brought back from Flanders the new rule of 
 the Order of St. Benedict (which the monk in Chaucer despises 
 as not up to date) for the strict living of monks, and was backed 
 by Bishops Oswald and ^thelwald, men of learning and reformers 
 of education. 
 
 New monasteries, which often had schools attached to them, 
 were built, and old monasteries were restored. Dunstan was an 
 artist (a picture of him as a monk is still preserved, and is said to 
 i have been drawn by himself). He was skilled in music and metal- 
 \ working, and fond of the old Anglo-Saxon poetry. He has left 
 no books of his own writing, but there are curious early Lives of 
 him in Latin. As a boy he climbed in his sleep to the roof of a 
 church ; he used to see visions of people at the time of their 
 deaths ; a large stone is said to have flown at him of its own 
 accord ; and, before his death, his bed, with him in it, was slowly 
 raised up in air, and softly let down again. According to these 
 tales, Dunstan must have been a "medium"; there is nothing 
 saintly in such prodigies. Like many people of genius who were 
 not saints, he was of a visionary nature, though a thoroughly 
 practical and energetic man. 
 
 Thus he, with Oswald, Bishop of Worcester, later Archbishop 
 of York ; Abbo ; ^Ethelwold ; Byrthferth ; and others, introduced 
 " regulars '' — Benedictine monks — in place of married priests into 
 the cathedrals, and encouraged schools and learning of all kinds. 
 iEthelwold himself taught Latin to boys at Winchester, and had 
 the Latin book of the rules of the Benedictine monks done into 
 Anglo-Saxon. A set of Anglo-Saxon sermons survives from this 
 age called " The Blickling Homilies " (from Blickling, a house of 
 Lord Lothian, where the manuscript has been preserved). 
 Homilies are simple statements of Scriptural facts for simple 
 hearers. The preacher already addresses the congregation as " my 
 dearest brethren " {mine gebrothra tha leo/ostan). " Bethlehem," 
 says the preacher, " means being interpreted, the House of Bread, 
 and in it was Christ, the true bread, brought forth." " The Divine' 
 nature is not mingled with the human nature, nor is there any 
 separation : we might explain this to you by a little comparison, if 
 it were not too lowly ; see an egg, the white is not mixed with the 
 
Anglo-Saxon Learning and Prose 33 
 
 yolk, yet it is one egg." The sermons (these quoted are by ^1- 
 fric) are all plain teaching for plain people, but there is a famous 
 address by Bishop Wulfstan, encouraging the English, by Biblical 
 examples of Hebrew fighting patriots, to defend themselves against 
 the cruel heathen Danes (10 14). 
 
 ^LFRIC. 
 
 In the school at Winchester Mkvc was trained (born 955?) 
 and thence went to instruct the young monks in the abbey of 
 Cerne in Dorset, where he preached homilies ; he wrote them both 
 in English and in Latin. His sermon on the " Holy Housel," 
 that is the Holy Communion, contained ideas which the Pro- 
 testants, at the Reformation, thought similar to their own, and 
 they printed this homily. " All is to be understood spiritually." 
 "It skills not to ask how it is done, but to believe firmly that 
 done it is." The style of the prose is more or less alliterative, 
 and a kind of rhythm is detected in some of the sermons, as if 
 they were intended to be chanted. 
 
 The Latin grammars written by ^Ifric do not concern English 
 literature ; his Dialogue {Colloquium) between a priest and a 
 number of persons of various occupations, throws light on ways of 
 living. He wrote Latin "Lives of Saints," and edited part of an 
 English translation or paraphrase of the Bible, suitable as material 
 for homilies. He produced many other theological works, and 
 died about 102- (?) being Abbot of Eynsham in Oxfordshire. 
 
 The interest of ^Ifric, Wulfstan, and the rest, for us, is that 
 they upheld a standard of learning and of godly living, in evil times 
 of fire and sword, and that English prose became a rather better 
 literary instrument in their hands. 
 
 The " Leechdoms," and works on herb-lore and medicine of 
 the period, partly derived from late Latin books, partly from popu- 
 lar charm songs, are merely curious; they are full of folk-lore. 
 After, the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose, save in the "Chronicle," 
 was almost submerged, though, in poetry, there were doubtless 
 plenty of popular ballads, for the most part lost or faintly traceable 
 as translated into the Latin prose of some of the writers of history. 
 There would be songs chanted among the country people about 
 
 3 
 
34 English Literature 
 
 the deeds of Hereward the Wake and other popular heroes ; min- 
 strels, now poor wanderers, would sing in the farmhouses, and in 
 the halls of the English squires, but not much of their compositions 
 remains. 
 
 We have, however, a few famous brief passages of verse, like 
 the poem of " The Grave," familiar through Longfellow's trans- 
 lation, and probably earlier than the Conquest. It is written on 
 the margin of a book of sermons, and the author's mood is truly 
 sepulchral. The "-Rhymed Poem" is celebrated only because 
 it is in rhyme, which was a novelty with a great future before it ; ■ 
 it is older than 1046, its muse is that of moral reflection. 
 
 The one verse of a song of King Canute is handed down by 
 a monkish chronicler who lived more than a century later. The 
 king in a boat on the Ouse, near a church, bids his men row near 
 the shore to hear the monks sing : — 
 
 Merie sungen the munaches binnen Ely, 
 Tha Criut ching rew therby: 
 " Roweth cnihtes neer the land, 
 And here we thes munches sang.'' 
 
 This contains a kind of rhyme, or incomplete rhyme, of the vowel 
 sounds only (assonance) in Ely, therdy, "land," "sang". 
 
 St. Godric (died 11 70) also left a hymn to Our Lady, in 
 rhymed couplets, with the music. 
 
 Of about the same period is a rhymed version of the Lord's 
 Prayer ; the number of syllables to each line varies much, as in 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry, contrary to the rule' in the poetry of France. 
 
 There are other examples all showing the untaught tendency 
 of the songs of the people towards rhyme and towards measures 
 unknown to the early Anglo-Saxons. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 AFTER THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 
 
 At the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), the invaders pos- 
 sessed a literature in their own language, poems on the adventures 
 of Charlemagne, and of Roland and the other peers and paladins. 
 But perhaps none of the French poems on Charlemagne, or only 
 one, the " Song of Roland," now exists in a form as early as the 
 date of the Conquest, and they did not then reach the English 
 people. 
 
 On the other hand the Norman clergy, many of whom obtained 
 bishoprics and abbeys in England, were much more learned than 
 they of England ; and Lanfranc, the Conqueror's Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, threatened to depose Wulfstan, the English Bishop of 
 Worcester, for his ignorance of philosophy and literature. Yet 
 Wulfstan excelled " in miracles and 4;he gift of prophecy ''. Many 
 new monasteries were founded by the Norman kings, homes of 
 learning, each with its scriptorium (writers' room), in which new 
 books were written, and old books were copied, almost all of them 
 in Latin. St. Albans became a specially learned monastery and 
 home of historians, while Roman law, medicine, and theology were 
 closely studied, and books were lent out to students from the 
 monastic libraries, a pledge of value being deposited by the 
 borrower. 
 
 Latin Literature. 
 
 The books of the s^e which most interest us are the histories 
 written in Latin, by various authors of known names, who often 
 were not cloistered monks, but clergymen who lived much at 
 court, and knew the men who were making history, kings and 
 great nobles. 
 
 35 3 * 
 
36 English Literature 
 
 Of all of these authors the most important in the interests of 
 literature, not of history, is Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welshman, 
 whose " History of the Kings of Britain " is really no veracious 
 chronicle, but a romance pretending to be a history of Britain, 
 especially of King Arthur. The name of Arthur spells romance, 
 and Geoffrey's book is almost the first written source of all the 
 poems and tales of Arthur which fill the literature of England and 
 the Continent. But it is more convenient to discuss Geoffrey 
 when we reach the age of the Arthurian romance. 
 
 It is not necessary to speak here of all the writers of Latin 
 histories in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the North 
 were Simeon of Durham, and Richard, Prior of Hexham, who 
 wrote "The Deeds of King Stephen," and Ailred, whose account 
 of the defeat of David I of Scotland at the Battle of the Standard 
 (1138) is very well told and full of spirit. In reading Ailred we 
 find ourselves, as it were, among modern men : he speaks as a 
 good English patriot, yet as a friend and admirer, in private life, 
 of the invading Scottish king and prince. Florence of Worcester 
 attempted a history of the world, compiled out of other books, 
 called " Chronicon ex cbronicis ". The habit of " beginning at 
 the beginning," namely with the creation, took hold of some of 
 these historians, whose books are of little use till they reach their 
 own times (if they live to do so), and speak of men and events 
 known to themselves. 
 
 Eadmer, on the other hand, wrote of what he himself knew, a 
 "History of Recent Times in England,'' down to 11 2 2, and 
 especially about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselra, and his 
 dealings with William Rufus and Henry I (Henry Fairclerk, a 
 patron of learning). 
 
 William of Malmesbury (1095 ?-ii43 ?) like Geoffrey of Mon- 
 mouth, was patronized by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, to whom 
 they dedicated books. William understood, and said that there 
 were two Arthurs, one a warrior of about 500-516 (?) the other a 
 hero of fairy-land ; but, as time went on, people began to confuse 
 them, and to believe as historical the stories of Arthur which 
 Geoffrey had written as a romance. William wrote the " History 
 of the Kings of England," with several lives of saints and books 
 
After the Norman Conquest 37 
 
 on theology. The " History of the Kings " begins with the com- 
 ing of the Anglo-Saxons, and ends in 1127, the reign of Henry ; 
 towards the close of its sequel, the " Historia Novella,'* his patron, 
 Robert of Gloucester, an enemy of Stephen, is his hero. The 
 book contains a history of the First Crusade. 
 
 William sometimes treats history in almost a modern way, he 
 quotes his sources of information, chiefly Bede and the " Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle ". He refuses to vouch for the exact truth of 
 events before his own time : he throws the responsibility on 
 earlier authors, his authorities. Later, he speaks of what he has 
 seen, or learned from trustworthy witnesses. When he reaches 
 the time of the British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons, he 
 mentions " warlike Arthur, of whom the Bretons fondly tell so 
 many fables, even to the present day, a man worthy to be celebra- 
 ted, not by idle tales, but by authentic history ". 
 
 Happily for his readers, William is not above telUng anecdotes 
 like the romance of the statue at Rome, with an inscription on 
 the head, " Strike here ". How this was misunderstood, how at 
 last a wise man marked the place where the shadow of the 
 fore-finger of the statue fell at noon, and what wonderful adven- 
 tures followed when men dug there, and found a golden palace, 
 lighted up by a blazing carbuncle stone, is narrated in a captivat- 
 ing way, but is not scientific history. (Bk. H, Ch. x.) William 
 mingles real letters and other documents with miracles and ghost 
 stories : indeed, he is determined to amuse as well as to 
 instruct, and he succeeds. In describing the enthusiasm stirred 
 by the preaching of the First Crusade, he falls into the very 
 manner of Macaulay. "The Welshman left his hunting, the 
 Scot his fellowship with lice, the Dane his drinking-party, the 
 Norwegian his raw fish." 
 
 Certainly William was not a wholly scientific historian. He 
 is never uninteresting. If he finds any set of events tedious, he 
 says so plainly, and passes onwards. He is very fair, is learned in 
 the manner of his age, and his love of digressions and good stories 
 reminds us of the Greek Herodotus, " the Father of History," and 
 the most entertaining of historians. 
 
 Among the names of other Latin chroniclers is that of Henry 
 
38 English Literature 
 
 of Huntingdon (writing in 1125-1154). The author of the 
 " Deeds of King Stephen " is unknown : the work of William of 
 Newburgh in the reigns of Henry II and Richard •Coeur de Lion, 
 is well remembered for his attack on the " lies " of Geoffrey of 
 Monmouth. The assault on Geoffrey's truthfulness was not so 
 superfluous as it seems, because his romance won the beUef of 
 many generations. 
 
 Richard Fitz Neale, who was Treasurer of England and for 
 nine years Bishop of London (1189-1198), wrote the Dialogue 
 " De Scaccario," " concerning the Exchequer," which is still 
 studied as the best authority on mediaeval national finance in 
 England, and on our early constitutional history. 
 
 Jocelin de Brakelond left a " Chronicle " (i 1 73- 1202) much con- 
 cerned with life in his own monastery at St. Edmundsbury, and 
 with the wise rule of Abbot Sampson. This book forms the text 
 on which Carlyle preaches in his " Past and Present " : it proves 
 sufficiently that the monks were not the lazy drones of popular 
 tradition and abounds in vivid pictures of men and of society. 
 
 Gerald of Wales (Girald de Barri, called Cambrensis, " the 
 Welshman,'' 1147-1217?) was of royal Welsh and noble Norman 
 birth, his family, the de Barris, were among the foremost Norman* 
 knights who took part in the invasion (it can hardly be called the 
 conquest) of Ireland, under Strongbow ; and he himself was a 
 great fighter in the disputes of churchmen. There was not much 
 schooling to be had in wild Wales, then very rebellious, but he 
 probably learned Latin from the chaplains of his uncle, a Bishop, 
 before he went to the University of Paris, to study law and science. 
 Gerald was more like a modern literary man than a mediaeval 
 chronicler. He never ceased from travelling, now following the 
 Court, now rushing to Paris, now to Rome. When Archdeacon 
 of St. David's, which the Welsh wanted to make a Canterbury of 
 their own, with their own Archbishop, he stood up against the 
 Bishop of St. Asaph's ; when the Bishop threatened to excom- 
 municate him, he had bell, book, and candle ready to excommuni- 
 cate the Bishop, whom he frightened away. 
 
 But Henry II would not permit Gerald to be Bishop of St. 
 David's, thinking him certain to stand up for Wales against Eng- 
 
After the Norman Conquest 39 
 
 land. In 11 84, Gerald went to Ireland with Henry's son, Prince 
 John, who cannot be better described, as an insolent ribald young 
 man, than he is in Scott's " Ivanhoe ". 
 
 Gerald wrote a "Topography of Ireland," which is really 
 "A Little Tour in Ireland ". His chapters on the " Marvels of 
 Ireland " lead us to suppose that the natives hoaxed him with 
 strange stories, for example the tale of a church bell that wandered 
 about the country of its own will : the innumerable ileas at St. 
 Nannan's in Connaught is more credible, but the tale of the 
 wolves who asked to receive the Holy Communion was not believed 
 in England. One miracle was only -a beautifully illuminated 
 manuscript of the kind decorated by Irish artists 400 years earlier. 
 The art had been lost, and the artist was supposed to have copied 
 the designs of an angel. 
 
 Gerald found the Irish very ignorant, lazy, dirty, and ferocious. 
 Every man used a battle-axe in place of a walking stick, and man- 
 slayings were frequent. The Irish clergy were devout and chaste, 
 but drank too much. On the wild beasts and birds of Ireland 
 Gerald wrote like a naturalist and a sportsman, though he supposed 
 that salmon, before leaping a fall, put their tails in their mouths, 
 » and letting go, fly upward by the spring thus obtained. 
 
 His " History of the Invasion of Ireland " is valuable, but he 
 introduced, in the manner of some Greek and many Roman his- 
 torians, long speeches which were never made. He also, after an 
 energetic wandering life, always fighting to be made Bishop of St. 
 David's, wrote his own autobiography, an amusing conceited book, 
 full of adventures of travel. He wrote, too, on the natural history 
 and the inhabitants of Wales, a book very valuable to this day. 
 He died after reaching the age of 70. 
 
 Walter Map. 
 Among his friends was a native of the Welsh border, Walter 
 Map, Archdeacon of Oxford. " You write much. Master Gerald," 
 said Map to him, " and you will write more ; and I deliver many 
 discourses. Your books are better than my speeches, and will be 
 remembered longer; -but I am much more popular, for you write 
 in Latin, and I speak in the vulgar tongue," meaning French. 
 
40 English Literature 
 
 Poor Gerald confesses that he made nothing by his books, and 
 looked for his reward, not in vain, to the applause of future ages. 
 But Map has had his own share of praise, more than he should 
 get, if, as he said, he wrote little. He was bom about 1137, 
 studied at Paris, was one of the king's judges who rode on circuit, 
 and, in 1197, was made Archdeacon of Oxford. One book which 
 he certainly wrote, " On Courtly Trifles " (" De Nugis Curialium," 
 in Latin) is a collection of anecdotes clumsily told, and of reflec- 
 tions, with stories of the Welsh, historical jottings, folk-lore, tales, 
 and attacks on the clergy of the Cistercian Order. As a judge he 
 said that he was fair, except to Jews and Cistercians, " who did 
 not deserve justice, for they gave none ". Satirical Latin poems 
 against Golias, a type of a noisy licentious Bishop, are also attri- 
 buted to him. In the confession of this Bishop occur the famous 
 lines, thus translated by Leigh Hunt, 
 
 I devise to end my days — in a tavern drinking ; ' 
 
 May some Christian hold for me — the glass when I am shrinking ; 
 That the Cherubim may cry— when they see me sinking, 
 God be merciful to a soul — of this gentleman's way of thinking. 
 
 The lines, in rhyming Latin, became a drinking catch, con- 
 ceivably they were that before, and were merely put into the 
 Bishop's mouth as a proof of his bad character. The word 
 " Golias " as a nickname for a ribald " Philistine " priest was 
 hundreds of years older than Map's time. A long romance in 
 French, on Launcelot, the Holy Grail, and the death of Arthur, is 
 attributed to Map in some manuscripts, and as a contemporary 
 romancer says that Map " could lie as well as himself — that is, 
 like himself wrote romances of love and tournaments — he may 
 possibly have been the author of " the great book in Latin which 
 treats openly of the history of the Holy Grail ". But no copy of 
 that Latin book is known to exist, nor is it certain that it ever 
 existed, while Map, as we know, said that he did not write much 
 of any sort, especially not in Latin. 
 
 Changes Since the Conquest. 
 
 It is plain that, within a century from the battle of Hastings, 
 new influences of many kinds were working in England, and 
 
After the Norman Conquest 41 
 
 changing the national character and intellect. There was the 
 learning from Paris University, and from the Continent in general ; 
 there was the clearer intellect and energy of the Normans ; the 
 vivacity of such Welshmen or men from the Welsh marches as 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald, and Map. Anglo-Saxon literature 
 had never been vivacious. 
 
 There were the new topics, "the matter of Britain," the Celtic 
 legends of Arthur, whether derived from Wales or from Brittany — 
 matter most romantic, and suited to the coming poets who, unlike 
 the Anglo-Saxons, were to glorify love. There was, too, the con- 
 stant excitement and variety that came from travel, whether in the 
 Crusades, in pilgrimages, or to France and Rome on public or 
 private business, or in search of books and teachers. In various 
 ways knowledge of Saracen science and learning, translations of 
 Aristotle from the Arabic into the Latin, and romantic ideas 
 derived from the fables and tales of far-off India, filtered into 
 England. 
 
 These things were for priests and book-loving lords and 
 courtiers. Their wits were sharpened by knowledge of several 
 tongues. All educated men knew Latin; "all men of this land," 
 said Robert of Gloucester (about 1270) "who are of Norman 
 blood, hold to French, and low men hold to English," but high 
 men of English blood would talk in English to their farmers and 
 servants. All who learned Latin learned it through French books, 
 but country priests would preach in English. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon language and grammar were slowly changing, 
 though very few new words from French or Latin had yet come 
 into common use. Cow, sheep, calf, and swine were Anglo-Saxon 
 words, as Gurth the swineherd says in " Ivanhoe ". Englishmen 
 herded the animals, but the meat of them was called by French 
 names derived from Latin, like beef, mutton, veal, and pork. From 
 the Conquest (1066) to 1200, learning, Latin, and knowledge of 
 French books would filter slowly into the native English mind, 
 partly through sermons ; and rich Franklins, and Englishmen in the 
 service of the conquering race, and English priests would be 
 Anglicizing French words. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 geoffrey of monmouth. 
 
 The Stories of Arthur. 
 
 Of all these Latin chroniclers by far the most important was 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bishop of St. Asaph, who finished his 
 "History of the Britons" about 1147. Geoffrey, as has been 
 said, is not a real historian, but something much more interesting. 
 He introduced to the world the story of King Arthur, which at 
 once became the source and centre of hundreds of French ro- 
 mances, in verse or prose, and of poetry down to Tennyson and 
 William Morris. To Geoffrey, or to later English chroniclers who 
 had read Geoffrey, Shakespeare owed the stories of his plays, 
 " Cymbeline " and " King Lear ". Though Geoffrey did not write 
 in English but in Latin, he is one of the chief influences in the 
 literature, not only of England, but of Europe, mediaeval and 
 modern. 
 
 All readers of the " Morte d'Arthur " of Sir Thomas Malory 
 (about 1470), and the "Idylls of the King," and William Morris's 
 short poems about Arthur and Guinevere, are naturally curious to 
 know if ever there were a real fighting Arthur, and to trace the 
 sources of the countless French and English romances about him 
 and his Court. Where did Geoffrey of Monmouth get his infor- 
 mation about this island, from the days of the fabulous Roman 
 who settied it (Brut, or Brutus), to King Arthur's time? We 
 must look at what is known or reported about Arthur. 
 
 Bede, the historian, writing about 700-730, says nothing about 
 Arthur, but he does speak briefly about the period (500-516) in 
 which Arthur, if there were such a prince, must have existed. 
 
 42 
 
Geoffrey of Monmouth 43 
 
 Bede takes from the Welsh writer in Latin, Gildas (about 550) 
 the fact that, up to the date of the siege of Badon Hill (516), 
 forty-four years after the Anglo-Saxons came into Britain, " the 
 British (Welsh) had considerable successes under Ambrosius Aure- 
 lianus," perhaps the last of the Romans. '■^ But more of this 
 later'' says Bede, who never returns to the subject. He may 
 have expected to get more information, and that information 
 might have included some account of Arthur, of whom Gildas 
 makes no mention. Bede says nothing of the fable of Brut, 
 which may not have been invented in his time, or, if known to 
 him, was regarded by him as fabulous. Next we have a book at- 
 tributed to the Welsh Nennius, a " History of the Britons," which is 
 really a patchwork of several older records, and there is the 
 " Annales Cambriae," annals of Wales. Nennius (aboutSoo?) makes 
 Arthur (" the war -leader " not the king) win twelve great battles, 
 ending with Badon Hill. 
 
 The names of the battles are given, the first is on the river 
 Glein. Now one Glein is in Northumberland, the other in 
 Ayrshire. Four battles are " on the Douglas water in the country 
 called Linnuis " ; if " Linnuis " is the Lennox, there are -two 
 Douglas waters there, which fall into Loch Lomond, between 
 them is Ben Arthur. The sixth battle was " by the river 
 Bassas," a " Bass " being a hill shaped like an artificial mound, 
 for example the isle called " the Bass " in the Firth of Forth. 
 There are two Basses on the river Carron, in Stirlingshire, and 
 here may have been the sixth battle. The seventh was "Cat 
 Coit Celidon," "the battle {cat) of the wood of Celyddon," that is 
 Ettrick Forest, perhaps the fight was on the upper Tweed. The 
 eighth battle is thought to have been waged at Wedale, in the 
 strath of Gala water, a tributary of Tweed, which it reaches at 
 Galashiels ; the ninth at Dumbarton, which means " the castle of 
 the Britons " ; the tenth near Stirling, where a very late writer says 
 that Arthur kept the Round Table; the eleventh at " Agned 
 Hill"; that is Mynyd Agned — Edinburgh Castle rock; and the 
 twelfth was " the siege of Badon Hill," perhaps a hill on the Avon, 
 near Linlithgow, which has remains of strong fortifications, and is 
 called " the Buden Hill," or " Bouden Hill ". (It is not easy, 
 
44 English Literature 
 
 however, to see how the a in Badon became the u in Buden.) 
 Finally the great battle of Camion, where Arthur fell, is taken to 
 be at a place long called Camelon on the Carron, in Stirlingshire, 
 where Arthur met Saxons, Picts, and Scots, under Medraut, 
 (Modred), son of Llew, or Lothus, to whom Arthur had granted 
 Lothian. On the other side of the river was an ancient building 
 called, as far back as 1293, "Arthur's Oven"; it was destroyed by 
 a laird at the end of the eighteenth century. 
 
 If all these conclusions, drawn by Mr. Skene from legends, 
 Nennius, and place-names, be correct, Arthur was a real war- 
 leader, fighting for the Britons, that is the Welsh of Strathclyde, 
 whose country stretched from Dumbarton down through Cumber- 
 land. Even Geoffrey of Monmouth makes Arthur fight between 
 Loch Lomond and Edinburgh, and give Lothian to King Lot, 
 that is Llew, whose son, Medraut (Modred), turns traitor to 
 Arthur. Bede places the battles at a time when the Picts had 
 made an alliance with the Saxons, and these two peoples were in 
 contact with each other not down in Cornwall, where later writers 
 place " the last battle in the west," but exactly where Arthur seema 
 to have fought, in the fighting place of Edward I and the Scots — 
 from Carlisle to Dumbarton and Falkirk, and in Ettrick Forest 
 and round Edinburgh, a region where several hills bear Arthur's 
 name. 
 
 We need not, then, give up Arthur as a fabulous being, though 
 legends far older than himself came to be told about him. In the 
 oldest Welsh poems that survive he is mentioned among scores 
 of other old heroes, now forgotten, and is always named as a great 
 war-leader, "Emperor and conductor of the toil". 
 
 One mention is important. In a long Welsh poem on the 
 graves of many heroes now forgotten, we read : — 
 
 The grave of March, the grave of Gwythar, 
 The grave of Gwgwan Gleddyvrudd, 
 A mystery to the world, the grave of Arthur. 
 (Or " not wise to ask where is the grave of Arthur.") 
 
 Thus it appears that, even in very early Welsh poetry, the Grave 
 of Arthur (like that of James IV, slain at Flodden), was unknown ; 
 
Geoffrey of Monmouth 45 
 
 hence he was believed, like King James, not to be dead; he was 
 in "the island valley of Avilion," and would come again to help 
 his people, when he was healed of his grievous wound. 
 
 Several of his companions in the later French and English 
 romances, such as Geraint, Kay, and Bedivere, were also known 
 to these very early Welsh poets. Moreover, there exist in the 
 Welsh "Mabinogion" ("Tales for the Young"), very ancient 
 stories of Arthur which do not resemble the ordinary later ro- 
 mances about him, but are infinitely older and more poetical : 
 such are " Kulhwch and Olwen " and " The Dream of Rhonabwy ". 
 
 Probably about 1066 there were many tales of Arthur surviv- 
 ing in Brittany, a Brython (Welsh) country from which the exiled 
 prince of South Wales returned home in 1077. If he brought 
 these tales back and if the Welsh poets took them up, there would 
 be plenty of Welsh Arthurian literature between 1077 and 1140, or 
 thereabouts, when Geoffrey of Monmouth produced his " History 
 of the Britons ". He says that he has had the advantage of using 
 a book in the Breton tongue, which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, 
 brought out of Brittany ; this book he translates into Latin. 
 
 No such book can be found. It is probable that Geoffrey 
 used Welsh and Breton traditions, and the patchwork book, parts 
 of it very early, called the "History of the Britons," attributed to 
 Nennius (about 796). In this we have a mixture of the real 
 fighting Arthur of about 520, and the fabulous Arthur, a wonder- 
 ful, powerful being, like all the old heroes of fable, who goes down 
 to the mysterious land of darkness, like Odysseus and the Finnish 
 WaTinamoinen. 
 
 The patchwork book of Nennius derives the name of Britain 
 from that person of pure fantasy, " Brut," " Brutus," great-grand- 
 son of ^neas ; who sailed to the Isle of Albion. Now " Brut " was 
 invented merely to explain the name " Britain," and to connect the 
 Britons, or Welsh, with the Trojans. In the same way the Scots 
 had framed false histories of their ancestress Scota, who came from 
 Scythia to Ireland, by way of Egypt, Athens, and Spain. 
 
 All these legendary and fictitious materials, and others, were 
 used by Geoffrey in what he called a " History " ; and his " History," 
 in spite of criticism, became the most popular book of the age. 
 
46 English Literature 
 
 He begins with the flight of ^Eneas from Troy, and the flight of 
 the great-grandson of ^neas, Brutus, to the Isle of Albion, " in- 
 habited by none but a few giants ". Brut builds New Troy (Lon- 
 don) on the Thames, and so the romance runs on, a mere novel 
 of adventures, those of Shakespeare's " King Lear " and " Cymbe- 
 line,'' for example, mixed up with history from Bede, till we come 
 to Merlin the Enchanter, and Uther Pendragon, and the mysteri- 
 ous birth of Arthur, who is crowned king, and slays 900 Saxons 
 with his own sword in one battle, conquers all Northern Europe 
 and France, and defeats the Romans, all of which is sheer medi- 
 aeval fable. At home, in a great fight (" the battle of Camlan " it 
 is called in older books than Geofi'rey's) he kills Modred, and is 
 carried to the Isle of Avallon or Avilion, to be healed of his 
 wounds. 
 
 Geoffrey ends by requesting historians, his contemporaries, 
 such as William of Malmesbury, " to be silent concerning the 
 " History of the Britons," since they have not that book written in 
 the British tongue, which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought 
 out of Brittany ". This is mere open banter. Geoffrey was not 
 likely to show them that book I 
 
 Even in the old Welsh tale of the great boar-hunt, a story far 
 earlier than Geoffrey's time, Arthur is surrounded by many fabu- 
 lous heroes, really characters of fairy-tale, like them who followed 
 Jason in the search for the Fleece of Gold. All of them can do 
 miraculous feats, like the heroes of "the dream-time," "the dark 
 backward " of unknown ages. These companions of Arthur be- 
 come, at least some of them do, the Knights of the Round Talble 
 in the later romances, but we do not yet hear of Launcelot, or of 
 the Holy Grail. 
 
 From Geoffrey's book come the French poetical and adorned 
 version of Wace (1155), many French romances, and finally 
 a vast throng of chivalrous and romantic fancies cluster round the 
 great name of Arthur. Geoffrey's was a book that gave delight to 
 every one, ladies as well as men, for in the marriage of the traitor 
 Modred with Guinevere the wife of Arthur, and in Arthur's re- 
 venge, was the germ of a world of romances. The conquest, too, 
 by Arthur, of Gaul and Aquitaine, inspired, and, to their minds, 
 
Geoffrey of Monmouth 47 
 
 gave an historical excuse for the ambition of English kings to re- 
 cover these old dominions of Britain. Caxton, our first printer, 
 long afterwards wrote that not to believe in Arthur was almost 
 atheism. 
 
 Geoffrey also translated into Latin out of Welsh the prophecies 
 attributed to the enchanter Merlin. If they had any meaning in 
 Welsh, in Latin they have none. Hotspur, in Shakespeare's 
 " Henry IV," is weary of Owen Glendower's talk. 
 
 Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, 
 A clip-winged griffin, and a moulten raven, 
 A couching lion, and a rampant cat. 
 And such a deal of skimble-skamble stutT. 
 
 Nevertheless, three centuries after Geoffrey wrote, men who thought 
 themselves wise and learned believed that not only Merlin but 
 Bede were true prophets, who foretold the victories of Joan of 
 Arc (1429). 
 
 It must be kept in mind that Geoffrey says nothing about 
 these great characters in later Arthurian romances, Launcelot, 
 Galahad, Tristram and Iseult, and nothing about the mysterious 
 Holy Grail, and the Quest of the Grail. How and whence these 
 parts of the Arthurian legend arose, how much of them comes 
 from ancient Celtic legend, how much from the invention of French 
 romancers, is still a mystery. Geoffrey, however, made Arthur, 
 Merlin, Guinevere, and Modred familiar to all his readers. All 
 Englishmen were proud of Arthur of Britain, though, of course, in 
 his life he was the deadly foe of the English. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 LAYAMON'S "BRUT". 
 
 Thanks to Geoffrey, at last, some time about 1200- 12 20, came 
 an English poet, Layamon, a true poet (now and then), whose 
 work reminds us occasionally at once of the Greeks whom he had 
 never read, of masters whom he did not know ; and of the things 
 most romantic in the verses of the last great poet of England. 
 Layamon, the author of "The Brut," had no ambition; he had 
 no hope of gain ; the king and the courtiers would never hear of 
 him. 
 
 Layamon was an English priest in a quiet country parish, not 
 far from the Welsh Border, at Ernley, near Radstone, on the 
 Severn, as he tells us. Yet the new French culture had reached 
 him and inspired him ; he gave it to Englishmen in their own Eng- 
 lish language and he is therefore readable : is more than a mere 
 name. It " came into his mind " to tell the history of England, 
 in verse, and he says that he travelled far to get the books of 
 Bede (in Anglo-Saxon), "the fair Austin and St. Albin,'' in Latin, 
 and the book made in French by a French clerk, Master Wace, 
 "who well could write". "Lovingly he beheld these books," 
 but, in fact, he only used one of them, namely Wace's French 
 version (1155) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's romance. Wace had 
 altered Geoffrey as he pleased, and Layamon took the same liberty 
 with Wace ; his book is twice as long as that of the French clerk ; 
 he also inserted many things not to be found in the text of Wace 
 as now printed, but derived partly from still unprinted manuscripts 
 of Wace, partly from other sources ; perhaps from Welsh legends 
 known to this priest who dwelt beside the Severn. Wace added 
 to Geoffrey's account of Arthur, the story wherever he found it 
 
 48 
 
Layamoii's "Brut" 49 
 
 of "The Table Round," so shaped that the knights could not 
 quarrel about the highest place. Layamon adds that the Fairy 
 ladies came to Arthur's birth — as in a very old belief, found in 
 ancient Greece and ancient Egypt — and that they later carried 
 him away to Avalon, there to be healed of his wounds. 
 
 He calls the fairy Queen " Argante," possibly a French cor- 
 ruption of a Breton name. His account of the birth of the en- 
 chanter Merlin, " No man's son," is romance itself. Merlin's 
 mother, who had become a nun, knew not who was her child's 
 father, only that in her dreams there came to her " the fairest thing 
 that ever was born, as it were a tall knight, all dight in gold. 
 This thing glided before me and glistened with gold. Oft me it 
 kissed, and oft embraced." 
 
 What can be more romantic than this tale of the golden shadow 
 of love that glides through the darkling bower — told by a nun 
 with bowed head, shamefast 1 We are reminded of the lines in 
 which lo, in .^Eschylus, tells of the shadowy approaches of Zeus, 
 the king of gods ; and the voice that spoke to her in dreams. 
 
 The Greeks had another such tale of the gold that fell in the 
 tower of Danae before the birth of Perseus. The origin of Laya- 
 mon's story may be in some ancient Celtic myth of the loves of 
 gods and mortal women, and of Merlin, son of a god. 
 
 From his shadowy nameless father, Merlin received his gift of 
 prophecy, and, from the first, foretold the Passing of Arthur. 
 
 In Layamon's poem we find what does not occur in the older 
 Anglo-Saxon poems, such as "Beowulf," the use of similes in 
 the manner of Homer, whose warriors charge like lions, hungry, 
 and beaten on by wind and snow. Thus, too, in Layamon's 
 verse, 
 
 " Up caught Arthur his shield, before his breast, and he 'gan 
 to rush as doth the howling wolf when he cometh from the wood, 
 flecked with snow, and thinketh to seize what beasts he will." 
 
 Arthur defeats the Saxons, and drives them from the ford of 
 the river, through the deep marshland, 
 
 " And as the wild crane in the fen, when the falcons follow him 
 through air, and he wearies in his flight, but the hounds meet 
 him in the reeds; as he can find no safety whether in field or 
 
 4 
 
50 English Literature 
 
 flood, even so the Saxons were smitten in ford and field, and 
 went blindly wandering." 
 
 These similes give clear, vivid pictures of life in fen and 
 forest, and enliven the poem in the true epic way, and Layamon 
 gives, perhaps, the first English picture of an English fox-hunt. 
 In his poem, Guinevere does not love Launcelot, but the traitor 
 Modred, and when Modred is defeated by her husband, Arthur, 
 she flies to Caerleon, where " she hooded her and made her a 
 nun," and her end is unknown. 
 
 In the last great battle in the west, both hosts fall — it is a field 
 of the dead and dying. Arthur bears fifteen wounds. He is 
 alone with Constantine, to whom he entrusts his kingdom. " But 
 I will pass to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the 
 Queen, an elf most beautiful, and she shall make my wounds all 
 whole with draughts of healing. And afterwards I will come 
 again to my kingdom. . . . 
 
 "Then came floating from the sea a little boat, and two 
 women therein, shaped wonderfully ; and they took Arthur anon, 
 and bore him to that boat, and laid him softly down, and went 
 their way. Bretons believe that he liveth yet, and wonneth in 
 Avalun, with the fairest Queens of Faery." 
 
 Do we not already seem to hear the voice of Tennyson's 
 weeping queens, as the king floats into the night ? 
 
 Romance has come to England, and from the mingling of 
 races and tongues — Celtic, French, English — an English poet 
 has been born : a man who sees with the eyes of imagination, and 
 who can make us share his visions of the golden shadow that was 
 father of Merlin ; of the wolf with the snow caked on his matted 
 hide as he rushes from the wood ; of the hawking party in the 
 fens ; of the battle by the tidal waters of the west. 
 
 Layamon is full of promise of good things to come, as in his 
 description of Goneril and her husband, when she begins to 
 grudge to her father, King Lear, the expensive service of his forty 
 knights ; while her husband feebly opposes her unnatural avarice. 
 (The story of Lear is also in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and is based 
 on a common folk-tale.) 
 
 Again, when Layamon's Arthur laughs over the slain Colgrem, 
 
Layamon's " Brut " 5 1 
 
 "... Lie there, now, Colgrem ; high hadst thou climbed this hill, 
 as if thou wouldst win heaven, now shalt thou fare to hell, and 
 there find thy kinsfolk, . . . " we are carried back to the boasts 
 over the dead that Greeks and Trojans utter in the Iliad. But 
 these great touches are rare in the 30,000 lines of Layamon, the 
 mass of his poem " is blank enough ". 
 
 Layamon thought himself a chronicler in rhyme, a historian ; 
 in his book he has many tales, not that of Arthur alone ; he has 
 dull passages in plenty, none the less the good priest had many 
 qualities of the great poet. 
 
 The verse of Layamon is sometimes of the old Anglo-Saxon 
 sort already described, with alliteration and without rhyme ; and 
 in other parts consists of rhyming couplets varying in length, all 
 intermixed. A rhyming couplet is 
 
 Thet cevere either other 
 luvede alse if brother. 
 
 That ever either other 
 Loved as if brother. 
 
 In the words the tendency is to drop the old inflections, the 
 language is shaking off its original grammar and approaching 
 modern English. In the later of two manuscripts of the poem 
 this tendency is much more strong. Thus the older manuscript 
 
 has 
 
 He wes a swithe aehte gume 
 
 And he streonde (begat) threo snelle sunen. 
 
 The later copy has 
 
 He was a strong gome 
 
 And he streonede threo sones. 
 
 The word " snell " in the older version still survives in Scots, 
 
 " There cam a wind out o' the East 
 A sharp wind and a snell," 
 
 snell meaning " keen ". 
 
 Ormulum. 
 
 Layamon was too great a poet to mingle sermons with his 
 song. The pulpit was his preaching place, he scarcely ever 
 
 4* 
 
52 English Literature 
 
 preaches in his poem. On the other hand the worthy brother 
 Ormin or Orm did nothing but preach in his versified book " The 
 Ormulum". He was an Augustinian canon of the North Mid- 
 lands who, about 1200, paraphrased the Gospels read on each 
 day, and the homily which followed, often drawn from Bede (for 
 Orm was not an advanced theologian), in a kind of blank verse. No- 
 thing could be more simply edifying to plain congregations, but 
 edification is not the aim of literature. Orm is best known for his 
 determination to have English properly pronounced. A vowel, in 
 English is, and was, sounded short before two consonants, and 
 Orm was bent on making the reader pronounce the vowels thus ' 
 and not otherwise. He therefore wrote the two consonants 
 after every short vowel, and explained himself thus, the lines also 
 give the metre of his verses ; — 
 
 And whase wilenn shall thiss hoc 
 
 Efft others sithe writenn 
 Hini bidde Ice thatt het write rihht 
 
 Swa summ thiss hoc him teachcthh. , , . 
 And tatt he loke wel thatt he 
 
 An bocstaff write twiyess 
 Eyywhaer thaes itt upo thiss hoc 
 
 Iss written o thatt wise. 
 
 By using some Scots words we may translate this in the 
 original metre. 
 
 And whasae willen shall this book 
 
 Another time be writing 
 Him do I bid that he write richt 
 
 Even as this book him teacheth. 
 And that he do look well that he 
 
 Ane letter writeth twice 
 Aye there where it upon this book 
 
 Is written in that wise. 
 
 The metre is very like that of the Scottish rhymed version of 
 the Psalms, though Orm (as in the second verse above) only 
 uses rhyme by accident. The " Ormulum " is not to be " read 
 for human pleasure," though it is interesting to students of the 
 language and versification while in a state of transition. 
 
 The same pay be said of a number of works in prose or verse 
 
Layamon's " Brut " 53 
 
 which are to be found by students in editions published by learned 
 societies. It is necessary to say something of them, because it is 
 a kind of duty to be aware of their existence, though few but 
 specialists can be enthusiastic over their merits, save in one or two 
 cases. They show how the language and the modes of versifying 
 were going forward, and becoming such as a great poet like 
 Chaucer could improve ; or, on the other hand ; language and 
 verse were going backwards, deserting rhyme and depending (as 
 in Anglo-Saxon) on alliteration, or alliteration mixed with rhyme. 
 
 Ancren Riwle. 
 
 Among the works of this period which were useful or pleasant 
 in their day, the longest book in prose is the " Ancren Riwle," or 
 " Rule of Anchoresses," ladies who were not exactly female soli- 
 taries, but lived together religiously, each with her maid. The 
 author, whoever he may have been, bids them say, if any one in- 
 quires, that they are " of the Order of St. James ". There was no 
 such Order, but St. James bids us visit the widow and the orphan, 
 and keep ourselves unspotted from the world. This, says he, is 
 true religion. The three ladies dwelt together at Tarente in 
 Dorset. The language is of the same period as Layamon's " Brut," 
 very early in the thirteenth century. The style is simple and free 
 from decoration, the dialect is that of western England. The ad- 
 vice to the ladies is excellently pious ; no severe austerities are re- 
 commended, except silence at meals. An anchoress " should not 
 speak with any man often or long," and should have a witness 
 (probably out of ear-shot), even when she confesses, since " the 
 innocent are often belied for want of a witness ". Flirting, and 
 belief in luck and in dreams and witchcraft, are severely reprobated. 
 Scepticism is attributed to intellectual pride. "Wear no iron" 
 (James IV wore an iron girdle under his clothes), " nor hair cloth, 
 nor hedgehog skins " ; the ladies are not to flog themselves, unless 
 their confessor permits, and their shoes are to be thick and warm. 
 The author remarks that, God knows, he would rather set out on 
 a voyage to Rome than write his book over again : he may have 
 feared that the ladies would lose their copy. 
 
 Other religious books of the time are the " Poema Morale," in 
 
54 English Literature 
 
 lines of fourteen syllables ending in a double rhyme, as lort, morl, 
 deedi, redi, and a new metrical paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus. 
 The story is told with some vivacity, in rhyming couplets of eight 
 syllables. 
 
 The diempte pharaoh king a drem 
 
 That he stod by the flodes strem 
 
 And the then ut come VII neat 
 
 Everile wel swithe fet and gret, 
 
 And VII lene after the. 
 
 In places the metre of Coleridge's " Christabel," which was 
 the model of Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," is recognized in 
 the casual couplets, thus : — ■ 
 
 For sextenS yer Joseph was old 
 Quane he was into Egypte sold. 
 
 But it is a far cry from this to 
 
 The feast was over in Branksome tower ; 
 
 and the metre, when Scott's " Lay " appeared, seemed to be a 
 novelty. 
 
 The Owl and the Nightingale, 
 
 in rhyming eight-syllable couplets, seems to have been written 
 about 1250 (?). The theme is a debate, in the fashion of 
 French poetry, between the owl and the nightingale, as to the 
 comparative merit of their songs. The nightingale, deserting her 
 art, rather feebly asserts the moral influence of her own music, 
 and attacks the owl in a very personal strain of invective, reflect- 
 ing on his want of good looks, and on his taste in food. We are 
 far indeed from Keats's " Ode to the Nightingale ", " If you are 
 so great a teacher," replied the owl, " why do you not sing to 
 men in Ireland, Norway, and Galloway ? " La Fontaine might 
 have made a witty poem on the dispute of the owl and the night- 
 ingale, but the poet was not a wit, and made a poor use of his 
 opportunities. He is supposed, but not with certainty, to have 
 been Nicholas of Guildford, who is credited with being neglected 
 by the Bishop in the distribution of patronage. 
 
 The owl quotes the " Proverbs of King Alfred," of which there 
 
Layamon's "Brut" 55 
 
 is a thirteenth century collection in rhyme ; there are also the 
 "Proverbs of Hendyng ": the latter in stanzas of six lines each, 
 the first two rhyming with each other, as do the last two, while 
 the third line rhymes with the sixth : a very popular jingle. 
 
 Lyrics. 
 
 Far more interesting than these things, whether moral or re- 
 ligious, are the rhyming songs, the voice of the English people, 
 laymen, not priests, the love lyrics (1300?), for example, one on 
 Alison, beginning 
 
 Bytuene Mershe ant Averil 
 
 When spray biginneth to springe, 
 
 The lutel fowl hath hire wyll 
 On hyre lud to synge, 
 
 each stanza ending 
 
 From alle wymen mi loue is lent 
 Ant lyht on Alisoun. 
 
 This is the first sweet English love-song that has escaped the ruins 
 of time. Everyone knows by heart 
 
 and 
 
 reminds us of 
 
 Sumer is icumen in ; 
 
 Blow, northeine wynd. 
 Send thou me my suetyng, 
 
 O gentle wind that bloweth south 
 , From where my love repaireth. 
 
 There were all the sounds and scents of spring in the hearts and 
 songs of the poets : — 
 
 Lenten is come with love to-toune, 
 With blosmen ant with briddes roune, 
 That all this blisse bryngeth. 
 
 This metre came to be used in telling stories in verse, a purpose 
 for which it is not well fitted. But truly English poetry, with 
 rich re-echoing rhymes and many forms of verse, is awake at 
 last. 
 
56 English Literature 
 
 Political Songs. 
 
 To politics as well as to love and the delights of spring the 
 Muse of the people was alive. The popular hatred of Richard of 
 Cornwall, brother of Henry III, expressed itself thus after the 
 battle of Lewes (1264). The English is here but slightly modern- 
 ized : — 
 
 Be thou lief, be thou loth, Sir Edward, 
 
 Thou shalt ride spurless on thy lyard 
 
 All the right way to Doverward 
 
 Shalt thou never more break forward, 
 
 Edward, thou did'st as a shreward. 
 
 Forsook thine uncle's lore, 
 
 Richard, though thou be ever trichard 
 
 Trick shalt thou never more. 
 
 (A lyard is a grey, spoken of a horse, 
 
 The Dinlay snaws were ne'er so white 
 As the lyart locks o' Harden's hair, 
 
 says the ballad of " Jamie Telfer ".) 
 
 The English view of Wallace, the patriot knight of Scotland, 
 cruelly executed, is thus set forth : — 
 
 To warn all the gentlemen that be in Scotland 
 The Wallace was drawn, thereafter hanged, 
 Beheaded alive, his bowels burned, 
 The head to London Bridge was sent. 
 
 To abide 
 After Simon Frysel, 
 That v/as traitor and fickle 
 And known full wide. 
 
 (Frysel or Fraser; a later Simon Eraser, Lord Lovat of 1745, 
 was traitor and fickle enough.) 
 
 Robert of Gloucester. 
 
 By no means so lively, though useful in its day, is the very 
 long metrical chronicle (about 1300) of Robert of Gloucester, 
 whether it be by two hands or by one. One, at least, named 
 Robert, was living at the dates of a great Oxford town and gown 
 row, which he describes, and of the battle of Evesham (1265). 
 
Layamon's " Brut " 57 
 
 He was fortunately not nearer than a distance of thirty miles from 
 that stricken field, and records his own fear of a dense darkness 
 which prevented the monks from reading service in church. 
 Robert dwelt in Gloucester, as his minute local allusions prove. 
 He began his chronicle by versifying the fabulous work of Geoffrey 
 of Monmouth, but put into it not a glimmer of the poetry of Laya- 
 mon. For the rest, till he reached his own time, he copied Henry 
 of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, and "Lives of the 
 Saints". 
 
 Robert's learned modern editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, outworn 
 by all the tediousness which the poet bestows on us, says "as 
 literature, the book is as worthless as twelve thousand lines of 
 verse without one spark of poetry can be ". But Robert's praises 
 of England, " a wel god lond," and of English folk, so clean and 
 handsome, have a sound spontaneous note of patriotism, and there 
 is a swing in what Mr. Wright cruelly styles his " doggerel verse 
 in ballad metre," which is not to be despised. To be sure he has, 
 without knowing it, several different sorts of verse, and is nearly 
 as irregular as Layamon himself, in his measures. His readers 
 would not be offended by these defects, and they learned from 
 him, with a great deal of inaccurate history, a sense of pride in 
 their country, and to speak English, though the nobles and gentry, 
 he says, spoke French. 
 
 Cursor Mundi. 
 
 A book in verse about twice as long as the lengthy world-chronicle of 
 Robert is the " Cursor Mundi," " the Over-Runner of the World ". The 
 author, like the makers of many pretty lyrics on religious subjects, perceived 
 that people preferred songs to sermons, and romance to homilies. To mod- 
 ernize his language 
 
 Men yearn jests to hear 
 
 And romances read in divers mannere. 
 
 He gives the themes of the romances, " Matter of Rome "—which 
 includes all antiquity, Troy, and Greece as well as Rome—" Matter of 
 Britain," the stories of Arthur and his Knights— and " Matter of France," 
 concerning Charlemagne, and his Twelve Peers. Nothing is in fashion but 
 love and lovers : but this poet will sing of Her whose love never fails, namely 
 Our Lady. He begins before Satan and his angels fell, and goes on end. 
 lessly, yet, to his readers, perhaps not tediously, for he enlivens the Biblical 
 
58 English Literature 
 
 narrative with legends to the full as fantastic as could be found in any 
 romance. There is the story of how Moses found, through a dream, three 
 wands that grew from three pips placed under Adam's tongue. David, 
 through another dream, found these wands in the grave of Moses, which, 
 like that of Arthur, " is a mystery to the world ". The wands turned ugly 
 black Saracens into handsome white men : the branches grew into a tree, and 
 round that tree were thirty circles of silver. The wood was made into the 
 True Cross, and Judas received the thirty pieces of silver. The most absurd 
 tales are told of the boyhood, by no means exemplary, of our Lord, varie 
 gated by miracles not wholly beneficent. 
 
 Thus thp " Cursor Mundi " may have been found amusing enough in its 
 day, when the ceaseless octosyllabic rhyming couplets were not reckoned 
 tedious (they are sometimes varied), and adventures wholly unknown to the 
 authors of the Gospels occur in every page. 
 
 Devotional Books. 
 
 Books more purely devotional are "The Ayenbite of Inviyt" ("The 
 Biting of Conscience ") and " The Pricke of Conscience ". The former states 
 itself to be written " in English of Kent," by " dan Michelis of Northgate," 
 and to be in the library of St. Austin's of Canterbury. The author, or rather 
 translator from a French book of 1274, finished his writing in 1340. The author 
 of " The Ayenbite " classifies sins and virtues in the allegorical manner : his 
 moral advice, for example, as to the duty of giving alms promptly, gladly, and 
 without the discourtesies with which too many accompany them, is excellent. 
 But nothing, he says, is to be given to minstrels, he " calls their harmless art 
 a crime " The dialect is uncouth and rather difficult. 
 
 " The Pricke of Conscience " is in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, about 
 10,000 lines in all, and is the work of a singular person, Richard Rolle, who, 
 after being a wandering hermit, settled at Hampole, and died in 1349. A 
 Latin biographer of Richard states that he was born at Thornton in the 
 diocese of York, was well educated by the care of his parents, was sent to 
 Oxford by Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made good progress 
 in his studies, especially in theology. In his nineteenth year he left the tempt- 
 ations of Oxford, went home, and turned two dresses of his sister's, one white, 
 one gray, into what he thought the appropriate costume of a hermit, covering 
 his head with his father's rain-hood. His sister fled from before him, think- 
 ing him insane : he took Lady Dalton's seat in church, was allowed to preach 
 a sermon, and was kindly received by the lady's husband, Sir John. In a 
 cell provided by the knight he had unspeakable raptures, and felt as if he 
 were being burned by a physical fire, which proved to be that of Divine love. 
 Some ladies found him writing at a great pace, while he simultaneously dis- 
 coursed to them for two hours. It seems to follow that either his writing or 
 his preaching was " automatic ". He wrought some miracles of healing, and 
 he must have written rapidly indeed if he produced all the works attributed to 
 him. His prose treatises of religion are as fervent as the Letters of Samuel 
 
■ Layamon's "Brut" 59 
 
 Rutherford, the Covenanter : his anecdotes of his own temptation by the 
 phantasm of " a full, fair young woman " who loved him dearly ; and of a 
 repentant scholar, who wrote out a list of his own sins which vanished from 
 the paper, are interesting. He allows that the brains of eagerly pious people 
 sometimes " turn in their heads," thereby causing empty hallucinations, and 
 the hearing of wonderful songs that are merely subjective impressions. This 
 strange being, with the ardour of Crashaw, had something of Crashaw's 
 poetic fire. 
 
 MiNOT. 
 
 The verses of Laurence Minot, celebrating events from 1333 to 1352 are 
 of almost no literary merit. The Muse of Laurence is the patriotic ; he 
 crows, for example, over the defeat of the Scots by English archers at Halidon 
 Hill, in 1333, but he merely babbles in the vague, and does not give a single 
 detail as to the fighting. When he promises to tell of the battle of Bannock- 
 burn, in place of doing that he glories in the recovery of Berwick by Edward IIL 
 
 The best praise we can give him is that he loved to celebrate the victories 
 of his countrymen ; and had at his command many metres that were ready 
 for some better poet to use. It must also be admitted that there are very few 
 successes in our British essays in patriotic poetry, and that an enemy of the 
 Scots, as Minot was, may be not impartially judged by a critic of that race. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE ROMANCES IN RHYME. 
 
 When romance "is in," and, after Geoffrey of Monmoutfi, 
 romance was in, every other kind of literature "is out''; is un- 
 fashionable and little regarded. The English rhyming chroniclers, 
 and even religious writers such as the author of the " Cursor 
 Mundi," felt constrained to make their works resemble fiction as 
 nearly as possible ; owing to the supremacy of French romances 
 and English translations and adaptations of French romances, in 
 the late twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. 
 
 Many of these productions grouped themselves round the 
 Table of King Arthur, "matter of Britain"; others dealt with 
 "matter of Rome," that is all the ancient world; others with 
 "matter of France"; others with legends or fancies, English or 
 foreign. Their subject was often the chivalrous theory and prac- 
 tice of love, as a kind of religion, a fantastic semi-idealized de- 
 votion to the beloved, who, as a rule, was another man's wife. 
 This breach of recognized religion and morality was often set down 
 to fate, to the power that the Anglo-Saxons named IVyrd. 
 
 The two greatest cycles of romantic love are found in the lives 
 of Tristram and Iseult (the wife of King Mark of Cornwall, and 
 aunt by marriage of Tristram), and of Lancelot and Guinevere, the 
 wife of King Arthur. Tristram (whose name seems to be altered 
 from the Welsh name Drysdan), has but little original connexion 
 with the Court of Arthur, though he is a mythical hero of a very 
 old Welsh " triad ". He and Iseult love each other because they 
 have by mischance drunk together of a love potion intended for 
 Mark and his wife; their love is fatal and inevitable, and immortal. 
 
 Lancelot, on the other hand, has been sent to bring the bride 
 
 Op 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 6i 
 
 Guinevere to Arthur, and they fall in love before the lady has seen 
 her lord. Every one knows their joys and sorrows, from Malory's 
 "Morte d'Arthur," (1470)— a prose selection and compilation of 
 "the French books," which excels them and supersedes them— 
 and from the poems of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Mr. 
 Swinburne. 
 
 The romances of love and tournament are pervaded and 
 darkened by the influence of the Celtic Merlin, the enchanter and 
 prophet whom men call Devil's son ; he represents Destiny. A 
 wide circle of romances, "Merlin" and the "Suite de Merlin," 
 attributed to Robert de Borron, at the end of the twelfth century, 
 are concerned with him. 
 
 As if to counteract the fanaticism of love which, in the romances, 
 becomes a non-moral counter-religion, the mysterious story of the 
 Holy Grail came into literature, French, German, and English. 
 The Grail is perhaps originally one of the many magical things 
 of Celtic legend, a vessel as rich in food inexhaustible as the purse 
 of Fortunatus in gold, but conceived by the romance writers to 
 be a mystic dish or cup, used by our Lord before His passion, 
 and still existing, but only to be seen by the pure of heart, such 
 as Sir Percival, and Sir Galahad, the maiden son of Lancelot. 
 
 By accident or design the romances fall into a tragic sequence : 
 The youth of Arthur, and his unconscious sin ; the mysterious 
 birth of Merlin ; the fatal loves of Lancelot and Guinevere ; the 
 coming of the Grail and the seayjh for the Grail by many knights ; 
 the failure of all but Galahad and Percival ; the falling of Lancelot 
 and Guinevere to their old love again; and the sorrows and 
 treacheries that precede and lead up to the king's last battle in 
 the west, and his passing to Avilion. 
 
 France and Ireland, like England, have their own romances on 
 the adventures of knights under the feudal sway of a chief king ; 
 in France, Charlemagne ; in Ireland, Conchobar or Fionn ; in 
 England, Arthur, and in all these cases the king becomes much 
 less interesting than his knights, such as Roland and Oliver in 
 France ; Cuchulain and Diarmaid in Ireland ; Lancelot, Tristram, 
 Gawain, and Percival in England. Yet Arthur, at first and at the 
 last, is the supreme as well as the central figure in the epic, or 
 
62 English Literature 
 
 cycle of romances. These are a great treasury of brilliant imagina- 
 tions, rising from Celtic traditions of unknown antiquity, and then 
 transfigured, first by the chivalrous counter-religion of love ; next 
 by the reaction to celibacy, and the yearning after some visible 
 and tangible Christian relic and sign, " the vision of the Holy 
 Grail ". From this hoard of mediaeval fancies later poets have 
 taken what they could, have placed the jewels in settings of their 
 own fashioning. 
 
 The romance writers were by no means restricted to " matter 
 of Britain/' with Celtic traditions ; or to " matter of France," 
 the epics of Charlemagne and his peers, or even to " matter of 
 Rome," ranging through all antiquity. Material came in from 
 popular tales of all countries, and from recent historical events, 
 as in the romance of Richard Coeur de Lion. In the fifteenth 
 century there was a romance of Jeanne d'Arc, as fantastic as any ; 
 the matter of it survives partly in the prose of the " Chronique de 
 Lorraine," and has drifted into "Henry VI," Pt. I. In France 
 the most famous and fashionable novelists of the late twelfth 
 century were Chretien de Troyes and Benoit de Ste-Maure, author 
 of the great romance of Troy, whose manner, long-winded and 
 elaborately courtly, was strangely revived by the French romancers 
 of the years preceding Moliere. 
 
 TRISTR.4M. 
 
 The earliest English romances, or novels of chivalrous adven- 
 tures, are couched in metre. Among the first is "Sir Tristrem " 
 (usually spelled Tristram) ; certainly this has been the most popular 
 in modern times. Sir Walter Scott edited it, from the copy in the 
 Auchinleck Manuscript (a collection of early poems once in the 
 possession of Bos well of Auchinleck, father of Dr. Johnson's 
 Boswell).! 
 
 Sir Walter was persuaded that " Sir Tristrem " was written from 
 local Celtic tradition, by the famed Thomas of Ercildoune, called 
 
 ^ Scott's edition of i8ig is the fourth, while other romances in verse are 
 to be read in the volumes of learned societies. No doubt people bought the 
 book for the interesting essays and notes of Sir Walter ; few of them would 
 look at the old romance itself. 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 63 
 
 the Rhymer. Thomas, who dwelt at Ercildoune (Earlstone on 
 Leader water), was a neighbour, as it were, of Scott at Abbotsford ; 
 he died between 1286 and 1299, and he had great though obvi- 
 ously accidental fame, as a prophet. 
 
 The poem on Tristram begins with the words, 
 
 I was at Erceldoune 
 
 With Thomas spake I there, 
 There heard I rede in roune 
 
 Who Tristram gat and bare, 
 (that is, " I heard who the father and mother of Tristram were ") 
 Who was King with croun ; 
 
 And who him fostered yare ; 
 And who was bold baroun, 
 
 As their elders ware, 
 Bi yere : — 
 
 Thomas tells in toun, 
 This auventours as thai ware. 
 
 The English poet uses this difficult stanza in place of the 
 simple rhymes of a French original which knew nothing of Ercil- 
 doune. In similar stanzas, of French origin as usual, the whole 
 romance is told. Throughout " Tomas " is mentioned as the source 
 of the story — " as Tomas hath us taught ". 
 
 There are fragments of an earlier French romance in which 
 Tomas is also quoted as the source, and an early German version, 
 by Godfrey of Strasbourg refers to Thomas of Britanie. 
 
 Scott was well aware that the story of Tristram was popular 
 in France long before the time of Thomas of Ercildoune, but 
 he liked to believe that Thomas collected Celtic traditions of Tris- 
 tram from the people of Leaderdale and Tweeddale, though they, 
 by 1 2 20- 1 290, were English in blood and speech. 
 
 In the romance, Tristram is peerless in music, chess-playing, 
 the fine art of hunting, and of cutting up the deer ; and his main 
 virtue is constancy to Iseult, wife of his uncle. King Mark. This 
 unfortunate prince is not the crafty avenger of his own wrongs, as 
 in Malory's " Morte d' Arthur," but a guileless, good-natured be- 
 ing, constantly and ludicrously deceived. Iseult is treacherous 
 and cruel, but everything is forgiven to her, and, as the manuscript 
 is defective, we do not know how the poet handled the close of 
 
64 English Literature 
 
 the tale, the episode of the other Iseult " of the white hands ". 
 Scott finished the tale in the metre and language of the original. 
 Tristram is dying in Brittany, only Iseult of Cornwall can heal 
 him, as only CEnone could heal Paris. Tristram sends for her, 
 the vessel is to carry white sails if it bears her ; black, if it does 
 not. The idea is from the Greek saga of Theseus. The second 
 Iseult, wife of Tristram, falsely reports that the sails of the vessel 
 are black. Tristram dies, and Iseult of Cornwall falls dead when 
 she beholds him. 
 
 Swiche lovers als thei 
 
 Neer shall be moe," 
 
 concludes Sir Walter. 
 
 Havelok. 
 
 In " Havelok " we naturally expect, thinking of our historical 
 hero Havelock, to find a true English romance. The scene is 
 partly in England, the tale is of a Danish king's son kept out of 
 his own by one of the most fearsome guardians of romance (who 
 chops up the hero's little sisters), is saved by the thrall Grim, who 
 was ordered to murder him, and, after adventures as a kitchen 
 lad, marries an English princess who is in the hands of another 
 usurper. The story is truly English in sentiment and style. The 
 poet curses Godard, the murderous oppressor of Havelok, in a 
 thoroughly satisfactory fashion. The noble birth of the hero is 
 recognized by the " battle-flame " of the ancient Irish romances ; 
 the flame with which Athene crowns Achilles in Homer shines 
 round Havelok. This light warns Grim not to drown Havelok, 
 and teaches the oppressed lady whom he wins that her wooer is 
 no kitchen-knave but a prince in disguise. The story has abund- 
 ance of spirit, and may be read with more pleasure than the 
 romance of the perfidies of Iseult. It is written in no affected and 
 entangled rhymes, but in rhyming couplets. 
 
 King Horn. 
 
 In " King Horn " we have a novel that must have been 
 reckoned most satisfactory. The course of true love is inter- 
 rupted by accidents which caused the utmost anxiety to the 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 65 
 
 readers, who probably looked at the end to see "if she got him ". 
 " He " was Prince Horn, son of Murry, King of Saddene ; the realm 
 is "by west," and is invaded by Saracens. They spare Horn, for 
 his beauty's sake, but launch him in a boat with his friends, 
 Athulf and Fikenhild ; his land they overrun, and disestablish the 
 Church, being themselves professors of the Moslem religion. 
 Horn drifts to the shore of the realm of Westerness, under King 
 Aylmar. Here the king's daughter Rymenhild, falls in love with 
 Horn, but cannot have an opportunity of declaring her passion. 
 In the romances the lady, as a rule, begins the wooing. B^ 
 Athelbrus, the steward, Athulf is brought to her bower, appar- 
 ently in the dark, for she addresses him as Horn. 
 
 " Horn " quoth she, " well long 
 I have thee loved strong." 
 
 Athulf undeceives her ; Horn is brought, in the absence of 
 King Aylmar : Rymenhild again speaks the secret of her heart, 
 and when Horn alludes to their unequal ranks, she faints away — ■ 
 one of the earliest faints executed by any heroine in English 
 fiction. Horn kisses her into consciousness, and she devises that 
 he shall be knighted. The king consents, giving him a ring 
 which secures him from " dread of dunts," sends him to win 
 glory. Horn at once kills a hundred Saracens. But Fikenhild, his 
 false friend, finds Horn consoling Rymenhild for a dream of a 
 great fish that burst her landing net. Fikenhild, in jealousy, 
 warns King Aylmar, who discovers Horn and his daughter em- 
 bracing. Horn is exiled, and bids Rymenhild wait seven years, 
 and then marry if she will. Like the daughter of " that Turk," 
 in " The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman," she " takes a vow and 
 keeps it strong ". 
 
 At another court Horn, now styled Cutberd, not only slays 
 giants, but encounters and routs the very Saracens who had 
 invaded his father's dominions, The king of the country offers 
 Horn his daughter and realm : he, however, is true to his vow, 
 but, at the end of seven years, Rymenhild is betrothed to a king. 
 She sends a boy to Horn with a message. In returning with 
 Horn's reply the boy is drowned ; the princess finds his dead 
 
 5 
 
66 English Literature 
 
 body. Disguised as a palmer, like Ivanhoe, Horn returns to 
 Westerness, and, like Odysseus, sits on the ground at the palace, 
 as a beggar. Rymenhild does not recognize him, asks him if he 
 has met Horn, and is shown her own ring. Horn, she is told, is 
 dead. She had secreted a knife to kill her bridegroom, like the 
 Bride of Lammermuir. Then Horn reveals himself, the pair are 
 wedded, but he has still to recover his own kingdom. This he 
 does, but Fikenhild has carried off Rymenhild. Disguised as 
 minstrels, Horn and his friends surprise him in his new castle, 
 and all ends happily. 
 
 " Horn " is a fair example, happily short, of the novels of the 
 period, which, in essence, are like all good novels that end well. 
 Assonance (rhyme of vowels but not of consonants) occurs in the 
 verse : — 
 
 He lokede on his rynge, 
 And thogte on Rymenhilde. 
 
 It is not necessary to analyze the plots of all the romances : two 
 or three enable us to estimate the kind of fiction that was popular 
 with ladies in bower. 
 
 Beues of Hampton. 
 
 " Sir Beues of Hamtoun " is another English romance, con- 
 cerning the son of the Earl of Southampton and his wife, a prin- 
 cess of Scotland. The Earl is old, and his bride proposes to the 
 Kaiser to kill the Earl and wed herself. The Emperor promptly 
 invades England and cuts off the head of the good Earl. The 
 Scottish traitress orders the murder of her son, Beues, but is de- 
 ceived by her agent, and Beues knocks down the Kaiser. 
 
 The boy is sold and sent to Armenia, where he refuses to 
 worship Apolyn (Apollo). The pagan king has a fair daughter, 
 Josian, who becomes the mistress of Beues, while he has a con- 
 quered giant, Ascopart, for page. After a thousand adventures, 
 Beues and Josian, being true lovers, make a good end, and die 
 together. The English writer, prolix as he is, has shortened his 
 French original, in places, made additions in others, and generally 
 writes with freedom. 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 67 
 
 Guy of Warwick. 
 
 The same happy end, simultaneous death, rewards the hero 
 and heroine of " Guy of Warwick ". The hero's unexplained for- 
 getfulness of his lady, Felice, is borrowed from the ancient popular 
 tale in Scots, "The Black Bull of Noroway," where the forgetful- 
 ness is explained. Many stock incidents of the romances come 
 from popular tales (" Marchen ") of unknown antiquity. Felice is 
 a very learned and rather hard-hearted maiden, and Guy, when in 
 love, faints frequently. The romance contains every kind of ad- 
 venture with dragons, lions, and human foes, and as much religion 
 as devout damsels could desire, or even more, for Guy, in a de- 
 vout mood, deserts the learned Felice for a life of chastity and 
 military adventure. As usual he returns in the guise of a palmer. 
 
 Arthur and Merlin. 
 
 " The Arthour and Merlin," a rhymed romance of the old story, 
 from the Auchinleck manuscript, about 1320, has not the gleams 
 of true poetry that shine in Layamon's " Brut," and is verbose 
 and incomplete — the tragedy of Arthur is absent. We find, how- 
 ever, the story of how Arthur won the sword Excalibur, thereby 
 proving himself a true prince, for no other man could pluck it 
 from the stone into which it was driven. King Lot (Llew, a his- 
 torical personage apparently), could not draw forth Excalibur. 
 Sir Kay, one of Arthur's companions in the oldest Welsh tales, 
 appears, with Sir Gawain, whose character, as in the Welsh ro- 
 mances, is far above that which he displays in the " Idylls of the 
 King " ; Merlin continually exercises the art of glamour, appearing 
 in various forms, and Arthur loves Guinevere, but the poet wearied 
 of his toil long before the last battle in the west. 
 
 He professes that, as many gentiemen know not French, 
 
 and as 
 
 Right is that Inglische understond 
 That was born in Inglond. 
 
 he sings in English of the glory of England, Arthur. The final 
 English form of the great Arthurian tale may best be considered 
 when we arrive at the date of Sir Thomas Malory and Caxton. 
 
 5* 
 
68 English Literature 
 
 In Malory's " Morte Arthur " the long dull wars of the king 
 against the Anglo-Saxon invaders are much compressed, while the 
 epic, tragic, and mystic elements, the great character of Lancelot, 
 the mournful victory of the winning of the Grail, and the end of 
 all, are handled with genius. 
 
 The Tale of Troy. 
 
 The story of Troy had a hold on the mediaeval mind only less 
 strong than the story of Arthur. In early English, at the end of 
 the fourteenth century, we find the romance in the revived Anglo- 
 Saxon allUerative form ; it is the " Geste Hystoriale " concerning 
 the Destruction of Troy, and the story is told once more in the 
 rhyming couplets of the " Troy Book ''. The manuscript of the 
 " Troy Book " is marked " Liber Guilielmi Laud, Archiepiscopi 
 Cantuar et Cancellarii Universitatis Oxon 1633 ". (The book of 
 William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the 
 University of Oxford.) 
 
 The author of the alliterative romance begins by saying that 
 learned men wrote the history in Latin, but that poets have cor- 
 rupted it by fables and partisanship. Homer, he says, was notori- 
 ously partial to the Greeks ; moreover, he introduced incredible 
 gods fighting like men. Ovid, on the other hand, was " honest '' ; 
 Virgil was true to the rightful cause, that of Troy ; but the best 
 authority is Gydo (Guido de Colonna). 
 
 Such was the nature of historical criticism as understood by 
 the mediaeval romancer. For love of lost causes, and, as de- 
 scendants of the Trojans through the Brut of mediaeval myth, 
 the romancers detested the Achseans, the conquering Greeks. 
 
 The Story of Troy from Homer to Shakespeare. 
 
 The history of the development of the "Tale of Troy," as 
 Chaucer and even as Shakespeare knew it, is very curious. Homer 
 himself, perhaps living about iioo-iooo B.C., tells, in the Iliad and 
 Odyssey, parts of the " Tale " as it was known to his own people, the 
 conquering Achseans, who were to the older dwellers in Greece 
 what the Normans were to the English. They finally melted into 
 the older population, who, about 800-700 B.C., wrote poems of 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 69 
 
 their own about the " Tale of Troy," altered the facts, and blackened 
 the characters of Homer's greatest heroes. Later, again, the great 
 Athenian tragedians, of the fifth century B.C., wrote dramas more 
 on the lines of the conquered population of Greece than on those 
 of Homer, and they still more deeply degraded some of the heroes 
 of Homer. The Romans, looking on themselves as descended 
 from the Trojans, persevered in the same course, and a Greek, 
 after the Christian era, wrote a prose version of the " Tale of Troy," 
 pretending that it was a manuscript by Dictys of Crete, who was 
 a spectator of the Trojan war. A similar prose book was attributed 
 to another spectator, Dares of Phrygia. These books tell the 
 story of Troilus and Cressida, of Palamedes, and many other tales 
 unknown to Homer. But, in Western Europe, Homer was unread, 
 and unknown in England till Chapman translated him : and all the 
 romancers about Troy — Lydgate, Chaucer, Caxton, and the rest, 
 down to Shakespeare, — depend on the false tales whose growth 
 we have described. 
 
 Probably the first romancer who expanded the bald prose 
 narratives of Dares and Dictys, was Benoit de Sainte-Maure (i 160) 
 in a long French rhyming poem. He unites the fates of Briseida 
 (Briseis, daughter of Calchas, the Greek priest who is made a 
 Trojan), and Troilus, son of King Priam. Briseida, through a 
 confusion with Homer's " Chryseis," daughter of Chryses, the 
 Phrygian priest of Apollo, later becomes the " Cressid " of 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare. Meanwhile " Gydo '' or Guido de 
 Colonna, did the French of Benoit into Latin prose (1287) and 
 Guido is the source of the English authors of the alliterative and 
 the rhyming romances of Troy. The pedigree of the story is 
 
 Pseudo- Dares Pseudo Dictys 
 
 Benoit de Sainte-Maure 
 
 Guido de Colonna 
 The English Romances. 
 
70 English Literature 
 
 Through Caxton's printed " Book of Troy," the story continued 
 popular, a cheap edition appeared in the eighteenth century. 
 
 Each of Homer's poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, deals 
 but with the adventures of a fortnight, or six weeks, but the 
 mediaeval readers wanted, and from the romancers received, 
 the whole history of the ten years' siege, and more, with Christian 
 legends thrown in, with minute descriptions of all the characters — 
 Cassandra " gleyit a little," had a slight cast of the eye like Mary 
 Stuart. The heroes fight as mounted knights, not in chariots ; 
 they use cross-bows as well as long-bows ; and Hector kills men 
 by the thousand, with more than Irish exaggeration. As Hector 
 must be killed, Achilles suddenly charges him in front, while his 
 shield is slung behind. Had a Trojan poet left an epic on the 
 war he would not have told the story otherwise. The poet of the 
 Laud " Troy Book " bids God curse .(Eneas as a traitor, forgetting, 
 apparently, that the British are descendants of .(Eneas. 
 
 King Alisaundre. 
 
 The history of Alexander with all manner of romantic and 
 fabulous additions, under the name " King Alisaundre," is in rhym- 
 ing couplets of eight syllables to each line ; the couplets are often 
 irregular, as in Coleridge's "Christabel," and the story, like most 
 of the English romances of this period, is borrowed through the 
 French, from a late fabulous Greek work. 
 
 This kind of versified romance endured till Chaucer thought 
 it tiresome, and parodied it, in " Sir Thopas ". These rhyming 
 English romances, in various forms of verse, were made for ladies 
 and gentlemen who, already, were not able to read the more 
 artistic and elaborate French romances for themselves ; but were 
 very well able to take pleasure in stories of true love and miracu- 
 lous adventures. The romances set a fashion which was con- 
 tinued in the endless heroic novels in prose, French, and English, 
 down to the end of the seventeenth century. The Middle Ages 
 had no taste for novels of ordinary life, about people of their own 
 time. These, in England, do not begin to appear till the reign 
 of Queen Elizabeth, and then nearly a century and a half passed 
 before they became really popular. 
 
The Romances in Rhyme 71 
 
 If much has been said about these old romances it is because 
 they have so powerfully impressed themselves on the fancy of all 
 later English poets, from Shakespeare and Milton, who dreamed 
 of an epic on Arthur, and delighted in the sonorous names of 
 Arthur's knights, to Tennyson and William Morris. 
 
 The romances, composed of fancies from so many sources and 
 times, Greek, Celtic, Roman, and French, and English, are like 
 that Corinthian bronze composed of gold and silver, copper and 
 lead, all molten together at the burning of Corinth. In this rich 
 metal poets of later times have moulded figures in their own 
 fashion. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ALLITERATIVE ROMANCES AND POEMS. 
 
 Though English poets, in the fourteenth century, had a full com- 
 mand of rhyme, and of many forms, simple or complicated, of 
 rhyming verse, there began a return to the old Anglo-Saxon al- 
 literative verse, sometimes combined with rhyme. Chaucer, later, 
 makes his parson say, 
 
 I am a Southren man, 
 I can nat geste — rum, ram, kuf — by lettre ; 
 Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettre. 
 
 The parson's opinion is his own, not that of Chaucer, who cer- 
 tainly "Uked rhyme," whether he liked alliterative rhythm or 
 not. 
 
 Gawain and the Green Knight. 
 
 A famous and really amusing alliterative romance, with a 
 rhymed close to each passage, is " Gawain and the Green Knight ''. 
 This tale is found in a manuscript which also contains two devout 
 poems, " Patience,", and " Cleannes," with an elegy of remarkable 
 merit, "The Pearl". All four poems are attributed by several 
 critics to the same author, and some of the Scottish learned be- 
 lieve that author to have been a very prolific and accomplished 
 Scot. A few words may be said on this question later, meanwhile 
 " Gawain and the Green Knight " has the merit of being readable. 
 Though Gawain is best known in modern times through Tenny- 
 son's " Idylls of the King," in the romance he was by no means the 
 " false, fleeting, perjured " knight of the great Laureate. In the 
 Welsh Triads and other early Welsh versions, he is one of the 
 three "golden-mouthed heroes," one of the three most courteous. 
 
 72 
 
Alliterative Romances and Poems 73 
 
 He was the eldest son of King Llew, Loth or Lot, a contemporary 
 of Arthur, from whom he received Lothian. In Geoffrey of Mon- 
 mouth, Gawain appears as Walwainus. The figure of Lancelot 
 comes later, as we saw, into romance, and Lancelot and Gawain 
 then become foes. When Tristram (or Tristan) was introduced 
 into the circle of Arthur, later, the authors of the Tristan (under 
 Henry II and Henry III) had, for some reason, a bitter spite 
 against King Lot and all his family ; and calumniated Gawain 
 on every occasion. This vein of detraction pervades Malory's 
 " Morte Arthur," where Tennyson, looking for a false fleeting 
 knight, found the Gawain of the " Idylls ''. 
 
 In " Gawain and the Green Knight," Arthur's friend displays 
 great courage, courtesy, tact, and chastity under severe temptations, 
 while, if he falls for a moment short of heroic virtue, he redeems 
 his character by frank confession. The story is too good to be 
 spoiled by a brief summary : grotesque as is the figure of the 
 gigantic Green Knight, who suffers no inconvenience from the 
 loss of his head, the trials of Gawain are most ingeniously in- 
 vented, and he overcomes them like the Flower of Chivalry. He 
 is rewarded by the magical " green lace " which may, it has been 
 suggested, symbolize the Order of the Garter (about 1345), though 
 the ribbon of the Garter is now dark blue. 
 
 Pearl. 
 
 In the manuscript volume containing " Gawain and the 
 Green Knight," is the singular poem, " Pearl," which has been 
 described as the " In Memoriam " of the fourteenth century. It is, 
 indeed, an elegy by one who has lost a " Pearl," probably a Mar- 
 garet, who dies before she is two years old. The poet bewails his 
 loss, and speaks, in a vision, with his Pearl, concerning religion 
 and the future life. The poem (edited, paraphrased, and anno- 
 tated by Mr. Gollancz) was praised by Tennyson as " True pearl 
 of our poetic prime ". 
 
 "Pearl" is written in stanzas of twelve lines, with some re- 
 semblance to the form of the Italian sonnet (in fourteen lines), 
 with which the author may have been familiar. The system of 
 rhyming may be roughly illustrated thus, 
 
74 English Literature 
 
 Pearl that for princes' pleasure may 
 Be cleanly closed in gold so clear, 
 Out of the Orient dare I say, 
 Never I proved her precious peer; 
 So round, so rich, and in such array, 
 So small, so smooth the sides of her were. 
 Whenever I judged of jewels gay 
 Shapeliest still was the sight of her. 
 Alas, in an arbour I lost her here, 
 Through grass to ground she passed, I wot, 
 I dwine, forsaken of sweet love's cheer, 
 Of my privy Pearl without a spot. 
 
 The same rhymes persevere through the first eight lines, as in a 
 sonnet, the rhyme of the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines 
 continues in the ninth and eleventh ; a new rhyme appears in the 
 tenth and twelfth lines : and throughout there is much allitera- 
 tion. In stanzas i to 5, "pearl withouten spot " comes always as 
 a " refrain " at the close, and other refrains end each set of five 
 or six stanzas, as in the old French ballade. The form is thus 
 difficult and highly artificial, the making of the poem was, as 
 Tennyson says, " the dull mechanic exercise " to deaden the pain 
 of the singer. 
 
 The poet, fallen on the grassy grave of the lost child, lies en- 
 tranced, but his spirit floats forth to a strange land of cliffs and 
 woods, where the leaves shine as burnished silver, and birds of 
 strange hues float and sing. He comes to a river crystal-clear, 
 whose pearls glow like sapphire and emerald, but that river has 
 no ford, and may not be crossed by living man. On the farther 
 shore he sees a maiden clad in white and in pearls, fresh as a 
 fleur-de-lis ; she is the Blessed Damosel, the Lady Pearl. Her 
 locks are golden, and her crown is of pearls and gold. She tells 
 the dreamer that she is not lost : his Pearl is in a coffer ; safely 
 set in the garden of Paradise. She comforts him with the hope 
 and comfort of Christ. Henceforward her discourse is religious : 
 he strives to cross that River, and to reach the shining city of the 
 Apocalypse ; but he wakes on the grave of his child ; and consoles 
 himself with the promise of the Communion of the Saints. The 
 machinery of the Dream, and the River, are borrowed (as all 
 
Alliterative Romances and Poems 75 
 
 poets then borrowed), from the famous French " Roman de la 
 Rose " (1240) with its allegorical characters. This fashion of 
 poetry, always beginning with a dream, in which the dreamer has 
 visionary adventures with allegorical personages, became a kind 
 of literary epidemic, terribly tedious and conventional, as time 
 went on. 
 
 The poet has given to his lay the charm of sorrow not without 
 hope, and a dainty grace of artifice that is not insincere; "of his 
 tears are pearls made ". 
 
 As to the author of "Pearl," there is much difference of 
 opinion. Nothing in the two edifying poems in the same manu- 
 script, "Cleanness" and "Patience," makes it improbable that he 
 wrote them. " Gawain and the Green Knight " is a very different 
 composition, yet of lofty character ; the author of " Pearl " may 
 have written it, just as the author of " The Lotus Eaters " wrote 
 "The Northern Farmer," and " The Charge of the Light Brigade ". 
 
 HUCHOWN. 
 
 With a number of other poems, " Pearl " has been claimed for a 
 Scot, Huchown, Sir Hugh of Eglintoun, an Ayrshire laird, known 
 as a fighting man, a diplomatist, and a judge, in the reign of David 
 II of Scotland ; he "flourished" between 1342 and 1377. Or 
 perhaps Huchown was a priest, nobody knows. 
 
 The process of argument is this ; some forty-three years after 
 Sir Hugh died, in 1420, a Scottish writer of history in rhyme, 
 Wyntoun, produced his " Orygynale Cronykil " (his spelling is 
 original enough). He says that "Huchown of the Awle Ryale," 
 wrote learnedly, on the Brut and Arthur themes, in his " Geste 
 Hystorialle," that is a rhymed romance named " Morte Arthur ". 
 Wyntoun also says that Huchown made the " Gret Gest off 
 Arthure " (apparently the '' Morte Arthur "), the " Awntyre off 
 Gawaine" (perhaps " Gawain and the Green Knight," or perhaps 
 the " Awntyrs of Arthur"), and the " Pystyll of Swete Susane" (a 
 poem still extant, on Susannah and the Elders, the story in the 
 Apocrypha). 
 
 Some claim for Huchown not only these pieces, but " Pearl," 
 "Cleanness," and "Patience," and long poems on Alexander the 
 
Id English Literature 
 
 Great, and the Tale of Troy, and much more. Huchown, on 
 this theory, must have been a professional poet, yet he has been 
 identified, we saw, with Sir Hugh of Eglintoun, a soldier, diplo- 
 matist, and man of affairs. 
 
 It is certainly improbable that a man so busy as Sir Hugh of 
 Eglintoun wrote such a huge mass of poetry unless he were as 
 energetic as Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 The great alliterative "Morte Arthur" wanders from the 
 true way, pointed out in the ancient Welsh verses on " The Graves 
 of Heroes," and by Layamon. "The Grave of Arthur" is no 
 mystery to honest Huchown ; of the King it cannot be said " in 
 Avalon he groweth old," he does not dwell with " the fairest of 
 all Elves": he is buried at Glastonbury, a fable invented late, in 
 the honour of that beautiful and desolate home of old religion. 
 
 Huchown shows that he was intimately familiar with minutiae 
 of English law, which Sir Hugh of Eglintoun was more likely to 
 know than an obscure parish priest. Many other curious argu- 
 ments in favour of Sir Hugh of Eglintoun as author of the " Morte 
 Arthur" have been set forth (by the learned ingenuity of Mr. 
 George Neilson, who also claims for him " Pearl "), but we still 
 marvel how a busy man like Sir Hugh, living in a rough age, 
 found time for all his labours. 
 
 The " Pistyl of Susan " adds little, save in one passage, to the 
 laurels of Huchown. It is a tale of Susannah and the Elders, 
 told in stanzas, both alliterative and rhyming, of eight lines, fol- 
 lowed by one short line of two syllables, then come three rhyming 
 lines of three feet, and a fourth rhyming to the first in this set : 
 thus, 
 
 And told 
 How their wickedness comes 
 Of the wrongous dooms 
 That they have given to gomes (men) 
 These Judges of old. 
 
 The garden of Susan is described in a manner both copious, florid, 
 and inconsistent with botanical science, but there is a touching 
 scene between the falsely-accused Susan and her husband. 
 
 Huchown is also credited with the "Awntyrs (Adventures) of 
 
Alliterative Romances and Poems 77 
 
 Arthur " ; which contains a curious appearance of the ghost of 
 •Guinevere's mother to Sir Gawain and "Dame Gayenour," Guin- 
 evere. This is certainly " the gryseleste gaste," — the grisliest 
 of ghosts, but she has all of Huchown's delight in theology 
 and edification, prophecy, heraldry, and hunting. The metre is 
 not unlike but is not identical with that of "Susan ". 
 
 By Scottish critics the " Morte Arthur " and " Susan," at 
 least, are claimed for the Ayrshire bard. Sir Hugh, and, if they 
 are right, Scotland was civilized enough, and fortunate enough, to 
 have a considerable poet before Barbour, author of " The Brus " 
 (1376), a rhymed history of King Robert Bruce, the great hero of 
 his country. But the literature of Scotland is more conveniently 
 to be treated in a separate chapter. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 CHAUCER. 
 
 Hitherto we have known scarcely anything about the lives, and 
 usually have not even known the names, of the writers in English 
 verse and prose. About 
 
 The Morning Star of Song who made 
 His music heard below, 
 
 about Geoffrey Chaucer, we know more than we do of Shakes- 
 peare. 
 
 Chaucer is the earliest English poet who is still read for human 
 pleasure, as well as by specialists in the studies of literature, lan- 
 guage, and prosody. A few of his lines are part of the com- 
 mon stock of familiar quotations. Coming between two periods 
 of literary twilight — the second saddened rather than cheered by 
 notes more like those of the owl than of the lark and nightingale, 
 — Chaucer is himself the sun of England during the age of the 
 glory and decline of the Plantagenets. His " Canterbury Tales " 
 show us the world in which he lived, or at least part of that world ; 
 his pilgrims are personages in that glorious pageant which Froissart 
 painted — kings, ladies, nobles and knights in steel, or in velvet 
 and cloth of gold; tournaments glitter in all the colours and 
 devices of the heralds — while the horizon is dim with the smoke 
 of burning towns and villages. 
 
 It is not really possible to say what conditions produce great 
 poets : they may arise in times of peace or war ; in times quiet or 
 revolutionary ; at prosperous Courts or in the clay-built cottages 
 of peasants. At least Chaucer lived a long time in an age eagerly 
 astir, lived through the light cast by the great victories of Edward 
 III, — Crecy and Poitiers, — the years when London knew tWQ 
 
 78 
 
Chaucer 79 
 
 captive Kings, John of France and David of Scotland ; the years 
 when Edward turned away from the ail-but conquered Scotland 
 to fight the France which he could not conquer. Chaucer knew 
 the Court triumphant, and the Court overshadowed by the dis- 
 credited old age of Edward III, the fatal malady of the Black 
 Prince, the troubles of the minority of Richard II, and the 
 peasant rising of Wat Tyler. He had his part in the patronage of 
 that art-loving King, by character and fate more resembling a 
 Stuart than a Plantagenet ; and he was in friendly relations with 
 the rising House of Lancaster. He marked the dawn of the re- 
 ligious and social revolution in the doctrines of Wyclif and of the 
 Lollards, the hatred of the rich and noble, the scorn of priests and 
 monks and friars. He felt the poetic influences of France and 
 Italy, and, if not in Italy, certainly in France, had poetic friends. 
 He bore arms in France : in Italy and France he fulfilled diplo- 
 matic duties ; at home he held a courtly place ; he sat in Parlia- 
 ment ; he was a complete man of the world and of affairs, as well 
 as a man of learning and of letters. He was always of open, 
 kind, and cheerful humour ; still, when nicknamed " Old Grizzle " 
 by his friends, dipping a white beard contentedly in the Gascon 
 wine; still "not without the lyre," not a deserter of the Muse. 
 His portrait, as Old Grizzle, white-bearded and white-haired, a 
 rosary in his hand, shows a face refined, kindly, and humane. 
 
 The father of the poet, John Chaucer, was a citizen of 
 London, a prosperous vintner, or wine-merchant. The date of 
 the poet's birth is unknown, that he died an old man in 1400 is 
 certain. His birth year was for long given as 1328, when his 
 father was scarcely 16, and was unmarried. The date 1328 
 for the poet's birth must be wrong, and the year 1340 is uncer- 
 tain. In a trial of 1386, to decide whether the Scropes or Gros- 
 venors had the better right to blazon the famous " Bend Or," 
 Chaucer was described as " of the age of forty years and more, 
 having borne arms for twenty-seven years " " And more " is 
 vague, we cannot be certain that it means "just over forty years 
 of age," though that (as far as I have observed) is the usual 
 meaning in old records of ages of witnesses. In some cases, on 
 the other hand, they are given most incorrectly. Chaucer's own 
 
8o English Literature 
 
 remarks about his " eld " in late poems, tell us little ; at 40 
 Thackeray wrote of himself as if he "lay in Methusalem's 
 cradle ". 
 
 As, in 1386, Chaucer had borne arms for twenty-seven years, 
 that takes us back to 1359, when he went, under the standard of 
 Lionel, Duke of Clarence, on a far from triumphant expedition of 
 Edward III against France. He is unlikely, at that date (1359) 
 to have been under 15 years of age; he may have been born 
 as late as 1343, or anywhere between 1340 and 1343. The 
 household accounts of the wife of the Duke of Clarence prove 
 that Chaucer was a member of her household, and, in 1357, she, 
 and Chaucer, were staying with John of Gaunt, at Hatfield, in 
 Yorkshiie. 
 
 In the campaign of 1359, when Chaucer bore arms, Edward 
 III failed to take Rheims and Paris : he wasted the country vainly, 
 and made peace, at Bretigny, in 1360. Somewhere and somehow 
 Chaucer was taken prisoner by the French, whether in a skirmish, 
 or while foraging, or when visiting his lady, or absorbed in a book, 
 or meditating the Muse, and contending with the difficulties of 
 rhyme. His captors thought that there was money in his case, 
 or they would have knocked him on the head. There was money. 
 Edward III paid sixteen pounds, whether as the whole or as part 
 of his ransom (i March, 1360). The sum (equivalent to our 
 ;^2oo) was not then insignificant for a youth not of noble birth, 
 though, in 1368, an Esquire. 
 
 Account books show Chaucer {1367) as a valet of the Royal 
 chamber, like Molifere (and Shakespeare !) in France during the 
 time of war in 1369; salaried by the King; a married man; 
 pensioned by John of Gaunt in 1374, and receiving a daily pitcher 
 of wine, commuted for money in 1378. In 1372-1373, he went 
 on a mission to Genoa and Florence. Whether he then met the 
 famous poet Petrarch or not, is uncertain : in his " Clerk's Tale," 
 the Clerk says that ^ met Petrarch ; it does not follow that 
 Chaucer was so fortunate. In 1374 he got a good place in the 
 Custom House, in the wool department, and, 1375-1376, had valu- 
 able gifts from the King. In 1377 he went on a mission to 
 Flanders, and on another to France. Froissart the delightful 
 
Chaucer 8i 
 
 chronicler mentions him in this connexion. In the following 
 year he went on a mission to Visconti in Milan, and to the cele- 
 brated English commander of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood. 
 His experiences made Chaucer equally fit to sing of "the 
 Court, the camp, the grove " : his various posts in the Civil Service 
 brought him acquainted with merchant-men, architects, all sorts 
 and conditions of men. In 1386 he sat in Parliament for a divi- 
 sion of Kent. Parliament made an attack on the Court, and 
 Chaucer lost his offices, which he had for some time performed by 
 deputy. Later he received valuable appointments, but by 1398 
 he needed and obtained royal protection from his creditors; 
 probably he was never a frugal man, he was not in the best cir- 
 cumstances towards the end of his life, but neither Richard II or 
 Henry IV let Old Grizzle starve. Henry was no sooner on the 
 throne (30 September, 1399) than (3 October) he gave the poet a 
 pension of forty marks and ratified a pension given by the ill-fated 
 Richard five years previously. If Chaucer's wife, Philippa, was 
 the sister of Catherine, mistress and (1396) wife of John of Gaunt, 
 father of Henry IV, the poet had a friend in the Lancastrian party. 
 But the fact is uncertain, unimportant, and a great cause of the 
 spilling of ink. Chaucer died on 25 October, 1400. 
 
 We only know, as regards Chaucer's children, that he had a 
 little boy, Lewis, whom, in his prose work on the astrolabe, he 
 addresses in a style that makes us love him. He gives him, at his 
 earnest prayer, an astrolabe and writes for him, in English, a little 
 treatise on its use, "for Latin can'st thou but small, my little 
 son '. The poet, the friend of that less charming minstrel, " moral 
 Gower,'' left a fragrant memory. 
 
 When we open Chaucer's works at the Prologue to the 
 " Canterbury Tales," usually placed in the forefront, and when we 
 remember the wilderness of long romances through which we have 
 wandered, the happy change of scene, the return to actual human 
 life, is surprising. 
 
 Chaucer is by no means free from the blemishes of " middle 
 English " literature. If he is not to be called prolix in his narra- 
 tives, " when his eye is on the object " — the main object, — he is 
 none the less profuse in digressions. His mastery of verse was not 
 
 6 
 
82 English Literature 
 
 born fully armed ; he had to acquire it by effort, by experiment ; 
 he had to feel his way. An unusually large number of his poems 
 are unfinished : some he seems to have abandoned, like the 
 " I,egend of Good Women," because he felt that he was on the 
 wrong path ; that his task was no longer pleasant to himself, and 
 therefore certainly could not give pleasure to his readers. He was, 
 at first, eager to impart information, as the early scops conceived 
 it their duty to do. Gathering his materials from all sources, 
 Latin, French, and Italian, he, in " The Book of the Duchess " 
 (about 1369), makes the bereaved husband not only allude to 
 many classical tales of sorrow, but actually give his authorities for 
 each case; "And so seyth Djres Frigius," or " Aurora teWeth 
 so ". Even the old habit of preaching at great length, the habit 
 of edifying, clung to Chaucer. He was a man of the world, the 
 last man to risk martyrdom for any advanced theological ideas 
 which he might be inclined to entertain; and not the first to 
 suppose that any set of opinions contained the absolute truth. 
 In his day a fierce attack was made against the wealth of the Church 
 and the luxury into which many members of the Regulars, of the 
 various monkish Orders, had fallen. The curse of a parson was 
 no longer so much feared as it had been. The exhibition of 
 saintly relics for money, the arrival of pardons "hot from Rome," 
 could safely be derided. The friars had been the butts of the 
 French authors of fabliaux, tales of coarse popular humour, for 
 two centuries. 
 
 Such censures were not heterodox, they did not assail matters 
 of faith, and the satire of Chaucer is always as good-humoured as 
 it is humorous. To him the Pardoner and Summonour of the 
 " Canterbury Tales," and the rest of the riff-raff of the Church are 
 amusing knaves : he has Shakespeare's smiling tolerance for such 
 a rogue as Paroles. He is earnestly sympathetic in his famous 
 portrait of the good and gentle parish priest, a man of " true re- 
 ligion and undefiled," a man of "the Order of St. James," like 
 the ladies in the " Ancren Riwle ". 
 
 It were much more pleasant, perhaps more profitable, to linger 
 over and lovingly enumerate the charms of Chaucer at his best, 
 than to trace him through his early experiments to such master- 
 
Chaucer 83 
 
 pieces as the blending of old Greek romance and manners with 
 the manners and romance of chivalry in "The Knight's Tale," 
 and in " Troilus and Criseyde ". But it is customary to trace the 
 " making " of Chaucer, not only through his experiences of Court, 
 and camp, and grove, and city, but through his literary work. It 
 is certain that in youth he translated that great popular French 
 poem, the " Roman de la Rose," for he says so in his pro- 
 logue to his "Legend of Good Women ". The French poem was 
 begun by Guillaume de Lorris about a century before the birth of 
 Chaucer, as an allegory on the refinements of the doctrine of Love, 
 as taught in the Courts of Love. Guillaume says that he has the 
 warrant of Macrobius, in his ," Dream of Scipio," for supposing 
 that dreams are not wholly to be neglected : so he dreams, of 
 course in May, of how the birds sang, and how he walked beside 
 that very stream which the author of " Pearl " borrowed,' and con- 
 verted into the River that sunders the living and the dead. He 
 encounters allegorical works of art, representative of all things evil, 
 outside the walls of a beautiful garden, within which are Love and 
 all things good. The ideas have a sweet vernal freshness, on their 
 first presentation, but by repetition become as artificial as those of 
 the "Carte du Tendre," the map of Love's land which amused the 
 " Precieuses," the affected literary ladies, in the youth of Molifere 
 (1650- 1660). The dreamer desires a lovely Rose, watched by a 
 squire " Bel Accueil " (Fair Welcome) and the adventures, and 
 fables from Ovid, are of a kind so taking to mediaeval readers that 
 henceforth every poet had his May dream, birds, river, Love, 
 Venus, allegorical personages, and the rest of the " machinery ". 
 De Lorris left the lover in despair, but Jean de Meung continued 
 the poem at enormous length, and in a spirit far from chivalrous : 
 he introduced every kind of new heresy against the feudal ideals, 
 and so began a controversy in which Gerson, who lived to befriend 
 the cause of Jeanne d'Arc (1429) took up his pen in defence of 
 Christianity and chastity. 
 
 This " Roman de la Rose," or much of it, Chaucer assuredly 
 did translate, but on the question as to whether the " Romaunt 
 of the Rose," printed in his works, is wholly, or only in part, or 
 is not at all from his hand, scholars dispute endlessly. It is not 
 
 6 * 
 
84 English Literature 
 
 possible, here, to follow the mazes of the dispute, which turns on 
 the quality of the work, the closeness or laxity of the translation in 
 various parts ; the presence or absence of traces of the northern 
 dialect (Chaucer wrote Midland English), the correctness or incor- 
 rectness of the rhymes, and other details. The opinion that the 
 first 1700 lines or so are Chaucer's, that his manuscript was defec- 
 tive, that the later portions, some 6000 lines, were filled up from 
 manuscripts by other hands, is not certain, but is not improbable. 
 Many other views are defended. 
 
 Early Poems. 
 
 Though we do not often know, the dates of Chaucer's poems, 
 the development of his genius can be traced with much prob- 
 ability. Roughly speaking, in his first period he is mainly inspired 
 by French influences ; in his second are added Italian influences ; 
 he was always reading such Latin authors as he could procure ; 
 he was suppling his style by experiments in French measures 
 demanding much search for rhymes ; and finally, in the " Canter- 
 bury Tales," his best work is purely English in character, though 
 he still introduces translations from other languages when it suits 
 his purpose. 
 
 The Dethe of the Duchesse 
 is of 1369-1370, for it deplores the decease of Blanche, wife of 
 John of Gaunt (Lancaster), and the lady departed this life in 1369. 
 Here Chaucer works in accordance with the usual formula of the 
 " Roman de la Rose ". He begins with a dream, but his sleep is 
 a respite in a period of eight years of insomnia, described so pitifully 
 that the passage seems autobiographical. He cannot tell, he says, 
 why he is unable to sleep, 
 
 I holde hit be a siknesse 
 
 That I have suffred this eight yere. 
 
 Perhaps his nerves were shattered by the circumstances of his 
 capture and durance in 1360, for prisoners of war were treated 
 with great cruelty, placed in holes under heavy stones, or locked 
 up in wooden cages. 
 
 Unable to sleep, Chaucer has Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyone 
 
Chaucer 85 
 
 read to him. He says elsewhere that in youth he made a poem 
 on this tale ; now he probably utilized his old material in the poem 
 on the Duchess. In the Ce)rx tale, Alcyone prays to Juno for the 
 grace of sleep and dream, and Chaucer, humorous always, vows 
 that he will even risk the heresy of presenting gifts to heathen 
 gods, Morpheus and Juno, if they will give him slumber. His 
 prayer is heard, and this prologue is by far the best part of " The 
 Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse ". It is personal, it is touching, 
 and the story is charmingly told. 
 
 In his sleep comes the usual dream of the chamber decorated 
 with works of mythological art (a stock feature, as in the " Roman 
 de la Rose "), there is a hunting scene, with French terms of 
 venery, and then Chaucer meets a mourner, John of Gaunt, whose 
 long plaint and narration of similar sorrows in fable, with due re- 
 ference to authorities, is prolix and pedantic, to a modern taste. 
 
 This piece is in rhymed octosyllabic couplets. 
 
 Other Early Poems. 
 
 "The Compleynte unto Pite " (Pity) is the earliest of Chaucer's 
 poems in " Rhyme Royal " (so called, some think, because James I 
 of Scotland used it much later in " The King's Quhair,'' a far- 
 fetched guess). The poet seeks Pity, and finds her dead ; he adds 
 the petition which he meant to have presented to her, that of a 
 despairing lover. The ideas are hackneyed, and the piece is a mere 
 exercise. The metre, later much used by Chaucer in narrative, 
 runs thus : — 
 
 This is to seyne, I wol be youres ever ; 
 Though ye me slee by Crueltee, your fo, 
 Algate my spirit shal never dissever 
 Fro your servyce, for any peyne or wo. 
 Sith ye be deed, — alias 1 that hit is so ! — 
 Thus for your deth I may wel wepe and pleyne 
 With herte sor and ful of besy peyne. 
 
 The " A.B.C." is a hymn of prayer to Our Lady, each stanza 
 beginning with each successive letter of the alphabet. It is an 
 exercise in translation from a French original ; the stanzas are 
 shorter than in the French. 
 
86 English Literature 
 
 " The Compleynte of Mars " tells of the wooing of a mediaeval 
 Mars and Venus, interrupted by Apollo " with torche in honde " ; 
 the original source of the story is the song of the Phseacian min- 
 strel in the " Odyssey," but that is humorous, while Chaucer is 
 sympathetic ; Mars asks poets not to make game of his passion, 
 
 take hit noght a-game. 
 
 The Phaeacian singer did " take it a-game ". 
 
 "A Compleynte to his Lady " is of the conventional kind, and 
 an exercise in metres. 
 
 " Anelida and Arcite " is also scholar's work, but the scholar 
 has now learned Italian, during his Italian mission of 1372 ; has 
 read and in places translates the " Teseide " of Boccaccio, which he 
 often utilized. He had also Statius, a late Latin poet, and other 
 models, or he dealt in his own inventions. As in the " Knight's 
 Tale," Theseus returns from conquered Scythia, with his bride, 
 Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and her sister, Emily, the 
 heroine of the " Knight's Tale ". The unpopular tyrant, Creon, 
 is ruling in Thebes, where Anelida loves Arcite, who is a true 
 lover, in the " Knight's Tale," but here " double in love," a follower 
 of Lamech, in Genesis, the first man who loved two ladies at once. 
 His second love holds him tightly "up by the bridle," so Anelida 
 despairs, expressing her woe in a kind of ode, strophe and anti- 
 strophe, in, stanzas of eight, and next of nine lines, with complicated 
 rhymes, finally with rhymes in the middle as well as at the end of 
 each line. The poem, more interesting than the previous experi- 
 ments, and not without passion, is unfinished : ends abruptly. 
 
 " The Parlement of Fowls " appears to be a kind of Laureate's 
 Ode on the marriage (January, 1382) of Richard II with Anne of 
 Bohemia, who previously had two other wooers, a Prince of Bavaria, 
 and the Margrave of Meissen. When the Birds hold their Parlia- 
 ment, the Formel Eagle represents Anne, Richard is the Royal 
 Tercel Eagle, the two other tercels are the German wooers. Chaucer 
 was always a most literary poet; and was still an adaptive poet. 
 As he must begin with a dream, he versifies the contents of Cicero's 
 " Dream of Scipio " : he takes a little from Dante, a little from 
 Claudian, the whole Pageant of Birds he borrows from Alain Delille's 
 
Chaucer 87 
 
 "Plaint of Nature," greatly improving on it, while, in the debate 
 of the birds on St. Valentine's Day, as to which tercel shall win the 
 formel tercel, he gives way to his own sense of humour. The 
 verses are vers de societe, designed not for our taste, but for 
 that of the society of his time. Chaucer himself perceived the 
 tediousness of the love-pleading of the tercels : like the Host in 
 the " Canterbury Tales," when bored by Sir Thopas and the 
 Monk's tragedies, the jury of birds cry to be released, 
 
 The noise of foules for to ben delivered 
 
 So loude rong, " have doon and let us wende ! " 
 
 In giving their verdicts the Goose is remote from sentiment, saying 
 to the unsuccessful wooer, 
 
 But she wol love him, lat him love another 1 
 
 The turtle-dove blushes, and gives her word for immortal hopeless 
 love. The poem, in the seven line stanza, ends with a rondel, 
 confessedly translated from the French, and the poet wakens from 
 his dream and returns to his dear books, on the look-out for new 
 material. He has shown his mastery of style, and his knowledge, 
 but he has not yet " come to his kingdom ". 
 
 Trohus and Criseyde. 
 
 Not to linger over other minor pieces, we may say that, in 
 "Troilus and Criseyde," Chaucer does come to his kingdom, and 
 proves himself a Master, granting the taste and conditions of his 
 age, while, in many beautiful passages, he attains to what is good 
 for universal taste, to what is universally human. 
 
 The subject is an episode in the mediaeval legend of the Siege 
 of Troy, as it was embellished on the lines of the pseudo-Dares 
 and the pseudo-Dictys, by Eenoit de Sainte-Maure, then by Guido 
 de Colonna, and then by Boccaccio in the " Filostrato ". The 
 last gives Chaucer his starting-point; out of 8239 lines, 2583 are 
 reckoned to be translated from Boccaccio, while there are borrow- 
 ings from Petrarch, and much moralizing is rendered out of the 
 prose of Boethius, whom King Alfred translated into Anglo-Saxon, 
 and Chaucer into the prose of his own time. Chaucer uses 
 his materials as he pleases, greatly expanding, transposing, and 
 
88 English Literature 
 
 omitting. Almost all his own is the character of Pandarus, who, in 
 Homer, is merely notable for havii^ broken a solemn truce by 
 wounding Menelaus with an arrow. Boccaccio made him a young 
 cousin of Criseyde, who, in the mediaeval legend, stays shamefaced 
 in Troy, while her father, Calchas, deserts to the Greeks. Troilus, . 
 scarcely mentioned by Homer, is the brother, and in battle 
 almost the equal of Hector. Troilus, though he had scoffed at 
 love, is smitten by the eyes of Criseyde, and is on the point of 
 dying without avowing his passion, when Pandarus, whom Chaucer 
 makes the uncle of Criseyde, acts vigorously as go-between, and 
 saves the life of Troilus by bringing the pair together. Pandarus 
 is a good-natured but the reverse of a scrupulously delicate friend 
 and uncle. Nevertheless, a conscience he has, in his way, and 
 lectures Troilus at length on the infamy of men who boast of their 
 victories in love, and of men who play his own part from any 
 lower motive than kindness and pity. 
 
 For thee am I becomen, 
 Betwixen game and ernest, swich a mene 
 As maken wommen unto men to comen : 
 Al sey I nought, tliou wost wel what I mene, 
 
 Pandarus has a conscience, to this extent, and it is to be presumed 
 that he did not go beyond the mediaeval idea of what a gentleman 
 might do to help a friend in love. Yet " he will be mocking," and 
 his conduct is as remote from our ideas of honour, as from those 
 of the heroic Greeks and Trojans themselves. Shakespeare has 
 debased the Pandarus of Chaucer in his treatment of the same 
 character in " Troilus and Cressida ". 
 
 Criseyde herself, granting the ideas of Chaucer's time about 
 love, is an honourable and most winning lady, the soul of honour 
 (she wears widow's weeds for her father's shame), but she has not 
 the faintest idea of marrying her lover. 
 
 In the beautiful, the magical story of " The Vigils of the 
 Dead," in the mediaeval " Miracles of Our Lady," we meet a 
 most devout and pious damsel, whose views are precisely those of 
 Criseyde. No modern novelist could treat the struggle of Criseyde 
 with her passion more psychologically and more delicately, and 
 none so charmingly as Chaucer has done. 
 
Chaucer 89 
 
 We all see Ctiseyde, so young, gay, and winning, with the eyes 
 of Troilus ; and Troilus, brave, gentle, courteous, and modest, with 
 the eyes of Criseyde. She, learning his love from Pandarus, and 
 deeply pitying him, sees him ride past from the battle, his helmet 
 h3wn, his shield shattered with sword strokes, the people welcom- 
 i ng him, and her love outruns her pity. It must be confessed that the 
 manoeuvres of Pandarus are told at very great length. The poet 
 has all our sympathy when he cries : — 
 
 But flee we now proUxitee best is, 
 For love of God ; and lat us faste go 
 Right to th^effect. 
 
 When he does come to the point it is in a scene where delicacy 
 tempers passion. 
 
 Considered alle thinges as they stode. 
 No wonder is, sin she dide al for gode, 
 
 trapped by Pandarus, and yielding to love and pity. Assuredly 
 Criseyde seemed so true a lover that, like Queen Guinevere, she 
 should have " made a good end ". But as she must pass to her 
 father in the Greek camp, being exchanged for Antenor, the end 
 came which all the world knows, and which she foreknew. 
 
 Alias, of me, unto the worldes ende, 
 
 Shal never been y writen nor y-songe 
 
 No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. 
 
 O, rolled shal I been on many a tonge ! ' 
 
 Destiny and Diomede prevailed, but Chaucer speaks of false Cris- 
 eyde as tenderly and chivalrously as Homer speaks of Helen. 
 
 Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde 
 Ferther than the story wol devyse. 
 Hir name, alias 1 is p ublisshed so wide, 
 That, for hir gilt it ought e y-now suffyse. 
 
 Had Chaucer left to us nothing but "Troilus and Criseyde," he 
 would have given assurance of a poet so much greater than any 
 English predecessor that the difference is one of kind, not of 
 degree. Chaucer is our first poet of great and various genius. 
 
 Space being limited, we can only say that "The House of 
 Fame" {1383) is much influenced by Dante, while, even in 
 
90 English Literature 
 
 modelling himself on Dante, Chaucer gives play to his natural 
 jollity and humour. Dante was never jolly. The poem in rhym- 
 ing couplets of eight syllables shows Chaucer borne heavenwards 
 by an eagle, like a middle-aged Ganymede, to Jove's House of 
 Fame. He addresses the eagle with charming banter, and the 
 bird tells him that he is to have a holiday, for all day he sits " at his 
 reckonings " in the Custom House, and, when he returns home 
 
 also domb as any stoon 
 Thou sittest at another boke. 
 
 This was just before the spring of 1385, when Chaucer was al- 
 lowed to have a deputy. This may have been granted at the re- 
 quest of the Queen, Anne of Bohemia; and, if she did not ask 
 Chaucer to write his next work, the " Legend of Good Women," 
 as counterbalancing the naughty Criseyde, he may have chosen 
 the subject in gratitude. It concerns ladies who were true lovers ; 
 and this book Alcestis, who gave her life for her lord's, bids 
 Chaucer present to the Queen. If he meant to celebrate nine- 
 teen of St. Cupid's Saints, he tired of his work, and tells only of 
 ten, of whom Cleopatra and Medea are less than saintly. Boc- 
 caccio's book " On Famous Ladies," and Ovid, on Heroines, gave 
 him hints and materials ; he also uses Ovid's " Metamorphoses," 
 the " ^neid," and other sources of information. He is extremely 
 severe on male flirts. 
 
 Have at thee, Jasoun 1 now thyn horn is blowe I 
 
 but, far from being prolix, he merely gives the briefest summary 
 possible of Medea's case, and leaves out almost the whole of the 
 wonderful romance. He bids Theseus " be red for shame," as the 
 deserter of Ariadne, but here again he is very brief, and leaves 
 Ovid to tell the tale. 
 
 As all the stories are of man's cruelty and all the complaint of 
 the women (who usually die forsaken), is 
 
 Oh, do not leave me I 
 
 the poet felt that the thing was like the tragedies of his monk in 
 the " Caiiterbury Tales ''—was becoming stereotyped, and he left off 
 in the middle of a story. The poem is in "heroic" measure, and 
 
Chaucer 91 
 
 Chaucer's command of this practically new instrument is perhaps 
 the main merit of the book. 
 
 The Canterbury Tales. 
 
 Chaucer's aim, in the "Canterbury Tales," in which most 
 readers begin to study him, though a great part of the book be- 
 longs to his late maturity, was to be universal : to paint all his 
 world, to appeal to every taste, from that of the lovers of the 
 broadest and coarsest humour (as in the Miller's and the Reeve's 
 Tales), to that of devout students of saintly legends (the Man of 
 Law's, the Second Nun's, and the Prioress's Tales). In the Pro- 
 logue to the " Canterbury Tales," and in the discourses of the 
 Pilgrims, he is entirely English, the mirror of his own people. 
 We are in a throng of Shakespearean variety, while their talk is 
 dramatically appropriate; each speaks in character, though the 
 " Wife of Bath's Tale," for example, is far more philosophic, be- 
 ing a reply in part to St. Jerome's praise of celibacy, than any- 
 thing that we are to expect from Dame Quickly, or from Scott's 
 Mrs. Saddletree. 
 
 The Prologue and the conversations of the pilgrims are the 
 thoroughly English work of Chaucer, in the maturity of his genius. 
 So are the humorous pieces, the Wife of Bath, the Reeve, and the 
 Miller, and that striking contrast with all these, the Knight's 
 Tale, a noble masterpiece of true chivalry, which was composed in 
 another form, in stanzas, and was again refashioned in couplets of 
 ten syllables, before the idea of the pilgrimage occurred to the 
 poet.i 
 
 Several of the Tales had been first undertaken earlier, and 
 were later fitted into the general scheme of Pilgrims to Canterbury 
 telling their stories as they ride. Chaucer supplies his own criti- 
 cisms, often in the rough banter of the Host, who cannot endure the 
 sing-song romance of " Sir Thopas " (a parody of the form of 
 many romances), or the dismal " tragedies " of the lusty Monk. 
 
 "The Prologue and conversations and some tales are thus the 
 
 1 This is manifest for (line izoi) he dismisses the story of Perithous and 
 Theseus in Hades, 
 
 But of that story list me nat to wryte. 
 
92 English Literature 
 
 work of the very Chaucer, in accomplished maturity of power, but 
 he is giving examples of many tastes and fashions older in liter- 
 ature than his own free, humorous, and ironical view of life. He 
 professes, in his art, to be all things to all men, he must rehearse 
 
 tales alle, be they bettre or werse, 
 
 and whosoever does not like the humour of the Reeve or the in- 
 toxicated Miller may " turn over the leaf and tell another tale ". 
 
 The modern reader, for one good reason or another, may " turn 
 over the leaf, and choose another tale," whether the Reeve, or 
 the Monk, or the Parson, or Chaucer himself be narrating. Like 
 all old poets he wrote for his own age, not for ours; but in him, 
 as in all great poets, however old, much is universally human and 
 is immortal. 
 
 The scansion, in the so-called "heroic couplet," practically 
 Chaucer's own conquest and bequest to our literature, gives little 
 trouble, especially if, as in the Globe edition, the final es which 
 are to be sounded, are marked by a dot over the letter. The 
 spelling repels the very indolent, but no attempt hitherto made to 
 modernize the spelling has been successful, though the task does 
 not seem to pass the powers of man. 
 
 The device of setting stories in a kind of framework, so that 
 the variety of each narrator, according to his kind, lends dramatic 
 interest, is very old. Chaucer is especially happy in his idea of 
 making thirty pilgrims, of all sorts and conditions, meet at the 
 ancient Inn of the Tabard in Southwark and agree to journey to- 
 gether to the tomb of St. Thomas a Becket. This was a favourite 
 shrine of pilgrims, the road led through a smiling landscape, the 
 Saint had always been popular and a great worker of miracles ; 
 and the pilgrimage was dear to an England still merry. In less 
 than a century and a half after Chaucer's death, Henry VIII seized 
 the wealth of the Saint, the gold and jewels given by noble 
 pilgrims, and destroyed this pleasant pilgrimage. 
 
 Chaucer's Prologue with his description of the Pilgrims, is the 
 most kind, genial, and jocund of his works, a perfect picture of a 
 mixed multitude of English folk of many classes, and with no 
 awkwardness caused by a keen sense of distinction of class. 
 
Chaucer 93 
 
 The Knight is a flower of chivalry ; he has sought honour 
 everywhere, in the dangerous crusade against the barbarians of 
 Pruce (Prussia), against the Moors, against the Turks : he is a 
 fighting man who speaks no evil and bears no malice. His tale 
 is from the old Romance of Thebes and Athens, and has its root 
 in ancient Athenian literature, though its flowers are derived from 
 mediaeval fancy, and mainly from the Italian poem, the " Teseid," 
 or poem of Theseus, by Boccaccio. It is written in the rhyming 
 couplets of five feet apiece which ^.re practically the great metrical 
 gift of Chaucer to English poetry : he took to them late in life, 
 about 1385-1386, and his tales in this measure were made later than 
 his stories in stanzas. 
 
 The jolly Host of the Tabard, who directs the tale-telling of 
 the company, next asks, out of respect, the Monk to follow the 
 Knight ; but the rude Miller is drunk, and insists on being heard. 
 
 For I wol speke or elles go my wey. 
 
 Thus the noble tale is followed by a " churl's tale " for the sake of 
 contrast, and Chaucer warns his readers that a coarse story it is, 
 and that whoever does not want to hear it must turn the pages 
 over and pass on. The Miller begins decorously enough with a 
 description of a pretty young musical scholar of Oxford, that could 
 read the stars and predict the weather, and lodged with an old 
 carpenter that had a pretty young wife, and had never read Cato 
 who would have advised him to mate with an older wQman. 
 The Miller's description of the pretty young woman is more deli- 
 cate than we expect from this noisy drunkard. A parish clerk, 
 not more godly than the scholar, is next introduced ; and a pecu- 
 liarly broad piece of rural pleasantry finishes the story of the 
 Miller. 
 
 The listeners laughed at "this nice case," all but the Reeve, 
 who was a carpenter by trade, and did not like a carpenter to be 
 mocked. He therefore tells a tale against a Miller, a proud and 
 dishonest Miller, who suffers loss and infinite dishonour and has_ 
 his head broken, at the hands of two young Cambridge men. 
 This tale also may be judiciously skipped: the fourth is that of 
 the Cook, and is only a fragment : manifestly it was to be matter 
 
94 English Literature 
 
 of rude mirth, but Chaucer dropped it. The Host calls in The 
 Man of Law, whose story is told in stanzas ; The Man of Law was 
 himself told it by merchants. It is an early piece of work by 
 Chaucer, fitted into this place. He had plenty of short stories of 
 many kinds, written by himself at various dates, and he placed them 
 into the mouths of the pilgrims ; not always quite appropriately. 
 The Man of Law's tale of fair Constance, daughter of an Emperor 
 of Rome, herself a pearl of beauty and goodness, persecuted by 
 elderly ladies professing the Moslem or heathen religion, and 
 driven from Syria to pagan Northumberland, is partly based on a 
 widely diffused fairy-tale. It is pure and tender, and more fit for 
 the ears of the Prioress than several of the coarse comic stories. 
 In these days, as Chaucer would learn from the " Decameron " of 
 Boccaccio, ladies listened to very strange narratives. 
 
 The Host next bids the Parish Priest to tell a story, and swears 
 in a style which the good parson resents. The Host " smells a 
 Lollard," or Puritan heretic, in a clergyman who objects to swear- 
 ing, which suggests that the orthodox priests were very indulgent ! 
 
 The sailor, or shipman, a rough brown man and "a good 
 fellow," cries 
 
 heer he shal nat preche, 
 He shal no gospel glosen heer ne leche, 
 
 he is a heretic, a sower of tares among the wheat ; and, to check 
 heresy tells a story far from creditable to the morals of a monk. 
 This is in the "heroic" verse, rhymed couplets of ten sylla- 
 ables each, like the coarse stories of the Reeve and the Miller. 
 As this measure was adopted late by Chaucer, in place of the 
 earlier stanzas, it appears that his taste did not grow more delicate 
 with his advance in years. 
 
 The dainty Prioress, as becomes her, now tells, in stanzas, the 
 legend of a miracle of Our Lady : how a little boy used to sing her 
 praises through the Jewish quarter of a town ; how the Jews slew 
 him and cast him into a pit, and how he nevertheless continued to 
 sing his hymn like " young Hugh of Lincoln, who cursed Jews," 
 slain also in 1255, if ever the thing occurred: it was a common 
 fable of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The poet himself is called in next, and recites " Sir Thopas " ; 
 
Chaucer 95 
 
 a parody of the rhymed romances of chivalry. It boreg the Host, 
 " No more of this," he cries, " you do nothing but waste our time," 
 so the poet tells "a litel thing in prose," the Story of Melibeus. 
 It is not so very " litel," and is freely translated from the French of 
 Jean de Meung. There are about twelve thousand words in 
 Melibeus, which is full of quotations from all sorts of learned 
 books and moral lessons: the Host, however, thought it would 
 have been very edifying to his ill-tempered wife, a fierce 
 woman. 
 
 The Monk now "tells sad stories of the deaths of Kings," and 
 of the miseries of celebrated persons from Lucifer, Adam, and 
 Hercules to Nero, and Croesus, and Julius Caesar. Chaucer 
 borrowed from the Bible, Boccaccio, Boethius, the " Romance of 
 the Rose " : in fact he seems to have begun the collection while 
 he was young, taken it up again after his visit to Italy, and finally 
 wearied of the long series of miseries ; so he makes even the 
 courteous Knight rebel, and cry, " Good sir, no more of this ". 
 He wants more cheerful matter. The Host is of the same mind, 
 and calls one of the three priests that ride with the Prioress. Since 
 the Monk is described as a jolly hunting clergyman, it is not clear 
 why Chaucer put old work about mortal tragedies into his mouth. 
 The Priest tells a form of the tale of the Cock, his Hens, and 
 the Fox, which includes a ghost story, a good deal of learning 
 and morality, and a great deal of humour and of brilliant descrip- 
 tion. The tale is in ten syllabled verse ; and in Chaucer's late 
 manner, as is the Physician's Tale, the Roman story of Virginia, 
 (as in Macaulay's " Lays of Ancient Rome "). Chaucer in part 
 translates the version of Jean de Meung in the " Romance of the 
 Rose ". The tale is told with sweet pitifulness and delicacy. 
 
 The Pardoner, with his wallet 
 
 Bret-ful of pardoun come from Rome al hoot, 
 
 " pardons hot from Rome," and with a large collection of spurious 
 relics of Saints, is an odious kind of sacred swindler, but his tale 
 is pointed against avarice. It is derived from a very old story 
 found in Asia as well as in Europe. The Pardoner begins by a 
 satirical account of his profession and of his practices, his greed 
 
96 English Literature 
 
 and lust, his spoiling of the poor, before he preaches his moral 
 tale of the evils of greed. 
 
 For, though myself be a ful vicious man, 
 A moral tale yet I you telle can, 
 
 and a terrible tale of murder it is. The Host himself is sickened 
 by the cynicism of the Pardoner, but the tolerant Knight makes 
 peace between them : in the nature of things the Knight would 
 have ridden forward out of his odious society. It has been said 
 that the tales " display the literary and artistic side " of Chaucer's 
 genius ; and many of them were not made for their places in the 
 Pilgrimage, while Chaucer's " observing and dramatic genius " ap- 
 pears in the prologues and places where the characters converse 
 together. These passages are often, to us, the most curious and 
 interesting, for they are dramatic and humorous pictures of actual 
 life and manners. But the tolerance of the Pardoner by the 
 Knight, is almost too great a stretch of gentleness. 
 
 The rich, business-like, proud, luxurious Wife of Bath who has 
 had as many husbands as the Woman of Samaria, begins with a 
 long Prologue about her own past life and her distaste for the 
 mediaeval exaltation of virginity ; she prefers the example of the 
 much married King Solomon. She boasts herself to be a wor- 
 shipper of Venus and Mars, love is not more her delight than 
 domestic broils and domineering. Her prologue and tale are in 
 Chaucer's best later style of verse : the tale is like that of court- 
 eous Sir Gawain, and his bride, the Loathly Lady, in a romance, 
 and the Friar, or Frere, justly says that she deals too much "in 
 school matter of great difificulty," and in learned authorities. 
 
 The Frere and the Summoner next tell tales gibing at each 
 other's profession. They are of the coarser sort, and are relieved 
 by the Clerk's tale in stanzas ; it is a form of the famous legend 
 of Patient Griselda, whose patience is like that of Enid in " The 
 Idylls of the King ". The Clerk says that he learned the story 
 from Petrarch, the great Italian poet, in Padua. The story, like 
 most of those which are serious, is given in stanzas : Boccaccio 
 wrote it in Italian ; Petrarch in Latin. The poet would not wish 
 wives be as meek as Griselda ; there is a happy mean between her 
 invincible patience and the tyranny of the Wife of Bath. 
 
Chaucer 97 . 
 
 The Merchant's Tale continues the debate on Marriage, started 
 by the Wife of Bath, and carried into clearer air by the modest 
 Clerk of Oxford. Chaucer had Latin sources for the discussions, 
 and the humorous laxity of the story of January and May is based 
 on an old popular jest-story of which Boccaccio's version, in the 
 " Decameron," seems nearest to the original form — the Tree, as 
 in Asiatic versions, is enchanted. A more pleasant variety of 
 Asiatic tale, that of the Flying Horse (as in the "Arabian Nights "), 
 is " left half-told " by the Squire, the son of the Knight : as good 
 a man as his father. Chaucer either never finished the story, or 
 the conclusion was lost. 
 
 The story told by the Franklin is, after those of the Knight and 
 the Prioress, perhaps the most poetical of all. It is a romance in 
 which the problem of marriage and the supremacy of husband or 
 wife is once more touched on and happily settled by the steadfast 
 love of the knight and lady. They are separated for years, a new 
 lover is rejected by the lady, and, to win her, makes a magician 
 cause by "glamour' (something in the way of hypnotic sugges- 
 tion) the apparent disappearance of the black rocks of Britanny. 
 But loyalty is stronger than magic. This charming tale is based 
 on a Breton original ; but the handling is entirely Chaucer's, and 
 is done in his best and gentlest manner. 
 
 The Second Nun's Tale is the legend of the marriage and 
 wooing of St. Cecily ; it was composed in stanzas, and is put into 
 its place without the removal of lines which show that it was 
 written separately before Chaucer thought of his framework. 
 Among the latest additions are the Prologue and Tale of the 
 Canon's Yeoman, — neither yeoman nor canon is among the 
 original characters of the General Prologue. The story contains 
 a satire of the golden dreams, self-deceptions, and impostures of 
 the Alchemists, with their search for the Philosopher's Stone. 
 
 The Tale of the Manciple, or kitchen servant, is really a " Just 
 so Story " explaining why the crow is black, and is taken from 
 Ovid, who took it from an old Greek fable. 
 
 Finally, the honest country Parson has his chance. He an- 
 nounces that being a man of Southern England, he likes not rum, 
 ram, ruf (alliterative verse), nor cares for rhyme, and he preaches 
 
 7 
 
98 English Literature 
 
 in prose at very great length. His sermon is a free translation, 
 with alterations of all sorts, from a French source, the same as 
 the source of the " Ayenbite of Inwyt " (Remorse). 
 
 The immense variety in character of the Tales, covering all the 
 tastes of the time, is now apparent. For the gay and the grave, 
 the lively and severe, Chaucer has provided reading. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 "PIERS PLOWMAN." GOWER. 
 
 Contemporary with Chaucer, and in perfect contrast with Chaucer, 
 whom he probably never met, was the author of the alliterative 
 "rum, ram, ruff," poem " Piers Plowman ". This author is generally 
 supposed to have been named William Langley or Langland. By 
 piecing together many detached pieces of evidence the conjecture 
 is reached that William first saw the light at Cleobury in Shrop- 
 shire or at Wychwood in Oxfordshire, about the year r332, was 
 well educated, was in minor orders, and a married man. But if 
 everything that the author of " Piers Plowman " makes his dreamer 
 say about himself is also true of the author, he must have been a 
 strange and unhappy character. 
 
 His poem, following the convention of dreams and allegories, 
 is the record of dreams into which he fell, first on the Malvern 
 hills; later, wherever he chanced to be. The poem exists in 
 three forms (A, B, C), and, from the allusions to contemporary 
 events (such as the peace of Bretigny, with France (1360), and a 
 great tempest of January, 1362), the A version may have been 
 composed in 1362. The B version, much altered and enlarged, 
 is dated, from its allusions to events, in 1377 ; and the C version, 
 also enlarged, from its references to the unpopularity of Richard 
 II, must be later than 1392. 
 
 If the poet drew his dreamer and narrator from study of his 
 own character, he must have been, in some ways, not unlike Mr. 
 Thomas Carlyle. Though he had a noble appreciation of the 
 dignity and duty of manual labour, — the honest and pious 
 ploughman was his favourite character, — he never did toil with 
 his hands. In reply to the remonstrances of Reason, he says : — 
 
 I am too weak to work with sickle or with scythe. 
 
 99 7* 
 
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 Over- education in youth has sapped his manhood: and, since his 
 friends who paid for his schooling died, he has never joyed. He 
 praised the country, but, as Dr. Johnson said, " hung loose upon 
 the town," a man of a modern type. 
 
 " Ich live in Londone, and on Londone both," he writes. The 
 instruments of his craft are not sickle and scythe, but the pater- 
 noster, the psalter, " and my seven psalms," that " I sing for men's 
 souls ". In return for such services he picks up a bare livelihood. 
 Clerks like himself should "come of franklins and freemen," not 
 of bondmen. The sons of serfs, he thinks, should do manual 
 labour, and should not be admitted to Holy Orders. This was 
 the view of the English House of Commons, under Richard II, 
 and it may be that the poet is rather satirizing their exclusiveness, 
 and the hand-to-mouth lazy life of poor clerks, than describing 
 himself. The narrator, after the sermon preached at him by 
 Reason, goes to Church in a penitent mood, and beats his breast, 
 but does not change his course of life. 
 
 The poem (or, as some think, the series of poems iby various 
 hands) represents in the most vivid way, the unrest, discontent, 
 and doubt which came over Western Europe towards the end of 
 the fourteenth century. The cruel and endless wars, the brigands, 
 the ravages of the Black Death (which caused demand for higher 
 wages because so few were left to work) drove the poor into re- 
 volts like that of Wat Tyler. There were frightful cruelties and 
 terrible reprisals. The wealth and licentiousness of the regular 
 Orders of clergy caused them to be hated and despised. The 
 people called Lollards advocated a kind of evangelical Protestant- 
 ism, and something very like modern Socialism. All these things 
 Chaucer passed by or treated lightly, but whoever wrote " Piers 
 Plowman " threw into his picture of the age his vivid and fiery but 
 lurid and confused genius. He paints himself as poor, discon- 
 tented, powerless, and always angry. 
 
 The dreamer states that he went about London, — z. tall lonely 
 discontented man, — "loath to reverence lords and ladies," and 
 never saluting the great, and the well clad, nor doing any courtesy, 
 so that "folk deemed me a fool". He describes taverns full of 
 bad company, as if he were familiar with them. He states the 
 
"Piers Plowman." Gower loi 
 
 doubts that arise in clerkly minds. Why should the penitent thief 
 have been allowed to go straight to Paradise ? " Who was worse 
 than David, or the Apostle Paul," when he breathed out threaten- 
 ings against the earliest Christians ? Beset by such questionings, 
 and by the scepticism which haunted the Ages of Faith, clerks 
 may curse the hour when they learned more than their creed. 
 
 The narrator seems to know a good deal, about law, and de- 
 spises men who draw up charters ill, and in bad Latin ; he speaks 
 as if he may have eked out his livelihood as a scrivener. He says 
 that he dresses like a " Loller " (however they may have dressed), 
 but he is not a Loller, which may mean either an idle loiterer or a 
 heretical Lollard, who was apt to be a kind of evangelical socialist, 
 entertaining advanced ideas about property. 
 
 The poet himself, in the spirit of the contemporary House of 
 Commons, denounces the foreigners who obtain benefices in Eng- 
 land, and the Englishmen who buy them from Rome. He would 
 not throw off all allegiance to the Pope, but the Pope ought to 
 follow the example, not of St. Peter, a very human character, ■ but 
 of the divine Master of St. Peter. He hates the P'riars as much 
 as John Knox did, who called them " fiends, not freres ". He de- 
 nounces the lawless rapacity of " maintainers," the liveried followers 
 of great lords ; in fact his poem is often an alliterative rendering of 
 the complaints of the House of Commons preserved in the Rolls 
 of Parliament. For Parliamentary institutions he has the highest 
 respect and admiration, he is the warm advocate of peace with 
 France, and opposes the idea of settling the Eastern Question by a 
 Qrusade. If he is the author of " Richard the Redeless," he gave 
 good advice, in a severe tone, and too late, to Richard II, when that 
 Prince set himself, like Charles II and James II, to govern Eng- 
 land without a Parliament, and was near his fall. The dreamer, 
 or the poet, was no friend of Revolution, but his works were 
 quoted by John Ball, priest and agitator, who was hanged some 
 time after Wat Tyler was done to death. 
 
 Chaucer was a poet who did not write on political, social, and 
 ecclesiastical reform. Langley or Langland, wrote about little 
 else : he is for reforming a world full of inequality and injustice. 
 In his time the Revolution stirred in its sleep, as it were, like the 
 
102 English Literature 
 
 great subterranean reptile of Australian mythology, and caused the 
 crust of society to tremble, and the spires of the Church to rock. 
 He professed that a reforming King is to come 
 
 And thanne shal the Abbot of Abyndoun 
 And all his issue for evere 
 . Have a knokke of a Kynge, and 
 Incurable the wounde. 
 
 The prediction was fulfilled by Henry VIH, but the poor, in 
 whose interests Langland wrote, were none the better but much 
 the worse for " The Great Pillage " of the Tudor King. 
 
 We cannot, let it be repeated, feel certain that the dreamer's 
 description of himself, as a moody, idle, discontented clerk, spoiled 
 for work by much study, and unable to find a market for his 
 science ; striding angrily and enviously through the London streets 
 where he has not a friend, is the poet's description of himself, a 
 satire on himself; or whether it is a dramatic study of an imagin- 
 ary character. We cannot be certain that he has lived much at 
 or near Malvern ; where the hills, overlooking the vast plain, form 
 the natural scene for his Vision of the " sad pageant of men's 
 miseries " ; of poverty and toil, of wealth and injustice and oppres- 
 sion. Of the poet we really learn nothing, even his name, — whether 
 Langley or Langland, or neither, — is matter of conjecture. We 
 only know that his heart burned within him at the many evils 
 which he was impotent to cure, and that he had a kind of apoc- 
 alyptic faculty for visions of good and evil. As readers usually 
 take the narrator and preacher in the poem to be a portrait of the 
 poet himself, he appears as a character neither happy nor the cause 
 of happiness in others. He is not so much a poet as a prophet in 
 the Hebrew sense of the word ; the world owes to him no such 
 gratitude and love as it owes and pays to the kind, happy Geoffrey 
 Chaucer. 
 
 The Visions of Langland are visionary ; now the dream is 
 luminous and distinct ; now it merges, as dreams do, into shadowy 
 shapes of things half-realized. In sleep the poet first sees a vast 
 plain ; on the eastern side is a tower, westward is the den of Death. 
 In a field full of folk some laboured ; others, gaily clad, took their 
 ease ; some were hermits in cells, others were merchants; and 
 
" Piers Plowman." Gower 103 
 
 there were minstrels who hate work, " swink not, nor sweat," but 
 make mirth. The poet, like the author of the " Cursor Mundi," 
 detests minstrels. There were sham hermits with their women ; 
 pilgrims with leave to lie, from Rome; pardoners who took 
 money from men for remission of their sins ; parish priests who seek 
 gold in London as the Black Death has impoverished their people. 
 To them all Conscience preaches at great length, denouncing 
 idolatrous priests in the manner of John Knox. Then follows a 
 version of the fable of " belling the cat," told with some vigour 
 and political point. 
 
 Holy Church now appears as a stately lady, explaining that 
 Truth dwells in the tower to the east ; and she preaches at much 
 length on the functions of Kings (which were not fulfilled in any 
 godly sense by the aged Edward III), and on the nature of Con- 
 science, and the duty of " having ruth on the poor ". Now 
 appears a magnificent lady, " Meed," that is Recompense. In 
 the poet's opinion, some people get far more than their due recom- 
 pense ; others do not get half enough, like the poor labourers ; 
 and Meed, or Reward, on the whole, is won by bribery and corrup- 
 tion. Meed is to be married to Falsehood : Simony, Liar, Civil 
 Law, and so forth, are of the wedding party, with the Count of 
 Covetousness, the Earl of Envy, the Lord of Lechery, and the 
 rest of them. 
 
 All this, we must remember, was written by the poet for his 
 own age, which was insatiably fond of allegory devoid of the 
 human merits of Bunyan's immortal dream. 
 
 How Theology forbids the banns between Falsehood and Meed ; 
 how Meed goes to town, and wins all hearts ; how she is taken to 
 Court, and offered as a bribe to Conscience, who refuses her 
 hand ; all this the poet narrates. He is very firm on the iniquity 
 of writing the names of the donors on windows in churches : now 
 the historian would be glad to know who the donois were. 
 
 The King, who has Meed's marriage to arrange, listens to 
 Reason, and so ends the first Vision. How Reason, later, ad- 
 monishes the narrator for this way of life, ha? already been de- 
 scribed. The Deadly Sins make their confessions, and Repentance 
 gives them good advice : as does Piers the Plowman, who describes 
 
104 English Literature 
 
 to these rude pilgrims the nature of the road which they must 
 tread; here there is a considerable resemblance to the "Pilgrim's 
 Progress". Piers directs the industry of the pilgrims, aided 
 by the Knight ; and always and every day Piers preaches without 
 stint. A realistic picture of the life of poor laborious women in 
 cottages is drawn (x. 76, p. 162) : — 
 
 Al so hem-selve suffren muche hunger, 
 
 And wo in winter-tyme, with wakynge a nyghtes 
 
 To ryse to the ruel, to rocke the cradel, 
 
 Bothe to karde and to kembe, to clouten and to wasche 
 
 To rubbe and to rely russhesto pilie 
 
 That reuthe is to rede, othere in ryme shewe 
 
 The wo of these women that wonyeth in cotes. 
 
 It is an old over-true tale, a tale not told by Chaucer. Pity 
 for the poor, earnest, clear-sighted, not to he, controlled, is the 
 most admirable point in the nature of Langland. He returns to 
 his complaint that men give gifts and gold to minstrels, while the 
 poor suffer cold and hunger, and "lollers" (idle "loafers"), gain 
 money in the abused name of Charity. Yet the poet is not so re- 
 volutionary as to attack the Game Laws I In irony or in earnest, 
 he bids Lords to hunt every day in the week but Sunday, to hunt 
 foxes, wolves, and other beasts. That is what Lords are fit for ; it 
 amuses them, and is of service to the farmer. Bishops are the 
 cause of most of the mischief: "their dogs," the priests, "dare 
 not bark ". With Knox, two centuries later, the bishops them- 
 selves are the " dumb dogs ". 
 
 The dream ends, another begins about Do- well. Do-better, Do- 
 best. Do-well (good conduct) is better than Indulgences, as 
 Luther preached later. The poet sets off on the quest of Do-well, 
 who has a castle somewhere. The poet rather leans to heresy 
 when he introduces the Emperor Trajan, boasting that, though a 
 heathen, he was saved " without singing of Mass ". To Trajan he 
 keeps returning. " Reason rules all beasts, but not men, and why 
 not ? " Reason declines to answer. 
 
 Finally, after giving a summary of Christian morals, the Plow- 
 man vanishes away : he returns later, but, whoever comes or goes, 
 the sermons and the satire go on for ever with the same illustra- 
 
" Piers Plowman." Gower 105 
 
 tions. The friars are drubbed from end to end, and when at 
 length the narrator awakes, he finds things just as they were, while 
 Conscience goes off to seek Piers Plowman. 
 
 Probably the most famous and singular part of the poem is the 
 reappearance of Piers Plowman, or of One like him, riding on an 
 ass, barefoot, without spurs or spear, but looking like a knight. 
 Faith peers forth from a window, and cries, " Ah, son of David ! " 
 as heralds do when knights ride to tournaments. Jesus is to joust 
 with Satan : then the crucifixion is described, and the terror of 
 Satan, who calls his forces out, places his bronze guns, and orders 
 calthrops to be thrown on the ground under the walls of his castle.^ 
 The idea of the guns was used by Milton, in a lapse of his genius, in 
 "Paradise Lost". 
 
 The conclusion is that Righteousness and Peace kiss each 
 other ; the dreamer awakes, for the last time, and with Kytte his 
 wife, and Kalote his daughter, creeps to the Cross, and gives 
 thanks for the Resurrection. 
 
 It may be remarked that the style of " Piers Plowman " could be easily 
 imitated; any man who chose could prolong a poem so lacking in organiza- 
 tion and plan. Consequently, in compliance with the habit of contradicting 
 all tradition and denying to authors the books with which they have from the 
 first been credited, efforts are made to prove that much of " Piers Plowman " 
 is the work of other hands ; not of the author of the shortest and earliest version 
 A. In this case critics discover " differences in diction, in metre ... in power 
 of visualizing objects and scenes presented, in topics of interest to the author 
 and in views on social, theological, and various miscellaijeous questions".^ 
 
 The other, the usual theory, is that the author kept adding to and alter- 
 ing his poem through some thirty years. In that time new topics would in- 
 terest him ; his views on all questions would change with his moods ; his 
 alterations, meant for the better, might turn out for the worst (as in the case 
 of Wordsworth and other poets) ; and his powers, of course, would not always 
 be at the same level. 
 
 It is true that the first eight passus, or cantos, or books of version A 
 are more distinct, better organized, more consecutive, more brilliant than the 
 rest of the book ; while passus IX-XlI, are perhaps more allegorical and 
 less orderly; more vague, more controversial, and one John But is said "to 
 
 ' Calthrops, used at Bannockburn, were iron sets of spikes ; Joan of Arc 
 was wounded by a calthrop at the siege of Orleans. 
 
 ' Professor Manley of Chicago, in " Cambridge History of English 
 Literature ". 
 
io6 English Literature 
 
 have made this end, because he meddles with verse-making ". The author 
 of B is supposed to be a new hand, working over and altering the A version of 
 his predecessor, and often misunderstanding him, while C misunderstands B. 
 It is quite certain that in some MSS. of the fifteenth century the whole poem is 
 attributed to William Langland (or Langley ?), and also that the whole poem 
 at its longest, was composed between 1362 and 1392 and was very popular 
 because it turned over and over, in every light, all the political, social, and 
 theological problems that vexed the minds of men. Whether it is all by one 
 hand or not is a question ol very little importance. Many men could have 
 written various parts of it. 
 
 Most can raise the flowers now, 
 
 For all have got the seed. 
 
 The poem retains an historical value which would not be di- 
 minished if much of it were cut out. In style it led nowhere ; 
 the rather careless versification, the ancient unrhymed alliterative 
 rhythm were doomed to disappear. The moral advice was wasted 
 on Lancastrian England, which rushed into the madness of the 
 fifteenth century ; the burning of Lollards ; the attempt to conquer 
 France — as vain as unjust, — the burning of Joan of Arc; the 
 twenty years of defeat and disgrace which followed and avenged 
 that crime ; the fury of the Wars of the Roses, the butcheries, the 
 murders, and, accompanying all this, the dull prolix stuff that did 
 duty for poetry and literature. 
 
 GOWER. 
 
 Chaucer's other prominent contemporary "the moral Gower," 
 "^ Shakespeare's phrase, was a far more commonplace character than 
 Langland.\, John Gower was entitled to write himself Esquire, 
 and owned lands in Norfolk and Suffolk; he died in 1408, and 
 his tomb, with his three great books under his head, exists in St. 
 Saviour's church, in Southwark. Chaucer was a friend of Gower 
 and, during one of his missions abroad, left Gower in charge of 
 his affairs. Alt the close of " Troilus and Criseyde " he writes : — 
 
 O inoral Gower, this book I directe 
 
 To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, 
 
 To vouchen-sauf, ther nede is, to correcte. 
 
 Strode is unknown, and we need not examine conjectures about him. 
 Gower was not ungrateful for Chaucer's compliment, and in the 
 
" Piers Plowman." Gower 107 
 
 earlier version of his " Lover's Confession " {" Confessio Amantis ") 
 he repaid it, very prettily. Venus bids Gower's poems greet 
 Chaucer well " as my disciple and my poet, who, in his youth filled 
 the land with ditties and glad songs which he made for my sake ". 
 This passage was later omitted by Gower : who, it has been sug- 
 gested, was annoyed by some words in the Prologue to the Man 
 of Law's Tale (in Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales "). At the same 
 time, Gower may have removed the compliment to Chaucer 
 merely to make room for more matter. If not, literary people 
 have quarrelled bitterly over smaller things than the criticism by 
 the Man of Law. 
 
 With Gower's French and Latin poems we have little to do. 
 His Fifty Ballades, in French, to his lady, are very pleasing ex- 
 amples of that old formal verse, with its difficult rhymes ; and but 
 for the grammatical liberties which the Anglo-French writer took, 
 would secure for Gower a high place among the French versifiers 
 of his age. 
 
 In French he wrote " Le Mirour de I'Omme," " Man's Mirror," 
 which has a curious history.^ 
 
 The "Mirour," in French, and the "Speculum " in Latin, deal 
 allegorically with virtues, vices, and the way of salvation ; they 
 contain many stories from all quarters, which are retold by Gower 
 in English, in his immense " Lover's Confession ". 
 
 In his Latin "Vox Clamantis" (1381) (" The Voice of one cry- 
 ing ") and in his "Mirour de I'Omme," but especially in the 
 former, Gower had given his testimony against the sins of the age, 
 and had impartially rebuked all sorts and conditions of men. He 
 
 1 It was lost, but, in 1895, when Mr. G. C. Macaulay was editing Gower's 
 enormous English poem, " Confessio Amantis " (" The Lover's Confession " ) 
 he remarked to Mr. Jenkinson, Librarian of the Cambridge University Library, 
 that if ever Gower's French " Speculum Meditantis " (" The Contemplative 
 Man's Mirror ") were found, it would probably be under the Latin name, 
 " Speculum Hominis" (" Man's Mirror "). Now Mr. Jenkinson had just bought 
 and presented to the Library' a French manuscript, " Mirour de I'Omme," 
 " Man's Mirror ". This was proved to be Gower's lost French poem. It had 
 lain in some farm-house, in 1745, and had been scribbled on by a rustic hand, 
 while a manuscript of the Ballades had been given, in 1656, by a very old 
 man, Charles Gedde, of St. Andrews, to Lord Fairfax ; at the time of the 
 English conquest of Scotland by Cromwell. 
 
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 described the peasant rising, under Wat Tyler and others, of 1381, 
 exculpating King Richard, who was only a brave boy. But, as 
 time went on, and dissatisfaction increased, Gower turned irom 
 Richard, and, very early, to the son of John of Gaunt, later Henry 
 IV. Gower transferred his affections so early to Henry, that it 
 would be unfair to call him a venal turncoat : he saw no hope for 
 English liberty except in the Lancastrian cause. 
 
 Probably about 1390, and at the suggestion of Richard II 
 himself, Gower abandoned unmitigated sermonizing in verse : re- 
 nounced the ambition to reform the world by rhyme, and mingled, 
 as he says, pleasure with morality in the endless " Lover's Confes- 
 sion," the work on- which his reputation as an English poet rests. 
 He professes his desire to make a work for England's sake, and, 
 in early, versions, declares that Richard II called him into his 
 barge on the Thames, and set him to the task. It was to be 
 " some new thing " readable by his Majesty. After a moral pro- 
 logue Gower tells how he met Venus, in May of course, and how 
 she gave him her chaplain. Genius, as a confessor. To Genius 
 Gower makes his confessions as a lover, and Genius preaches to 
 him, illustrating every homily with a tale. It is by the tales, and 
 by some pretty passages descriptive of true love, that the poem 
 survives. Most of the stories are borrowed from Roman literature. 
 The Greek reader is surprised to find that the Sirens had fishes' 
 tails, a fact unknown to Homer, or to Greek art; which usually 
 represented them as birds with the heads of women. The Trojan 
 horse is of bronze, whereas it was notoriously of wood. The tale 
 of Alboin and Rosamund, and the cup made of her father's skull, 
 is told pleasantly, but the truly tragic situation is slurred over and 
 lost ; and the tale of Hercules and Deianira, and the fatal garment 
 of Nessus the Cenfaur, is also far from worthy of the tragic Greek 
 theme ; of the pity and terror of the legend. 
 
 Perhaps Shakespeare admired Gower's " Pyramus and Thisbe,'' 
 which the Athenian craftsmen dramatize in "A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream ". The " Jason and Medea " is one of the best 
 tales ; but Gower did not know the Greek version by ApoUonius 
 Rhodius, or the " Medea " of Euripides ; and his own genius rises 
 to no such picture of a maiden's love as ApoUonius draws, to no 
 
"Piers Plowman." Gower 109 
 
 such tragic passion as Euripides conceives, while he has little or 
 none of the humour of Chaucer. 
 
 None the less here was a book of many thousand lines, full of 
 the material of old romance, mediaeval or classical : here the verse 
 ran easily, copiously, and sweetly, for Gower was a master of the 
 rhymed octosyllabic couplets, through his knowledge of and 
 practice in versification both French and English. Indeed his 
 style, soon to be lost by English versifiers, is his main virtue. 
 
 At last he confesses to Venus that he knows not the true nature 
 of Love. She gives him a black rosary of beads — like that 
 which Chaucer holds in his portrait, — with the motto in gold, 
 por reposer, "Take thy rest". He is to write of Love no more, 
 no more to come to Venus's Court, so, in 1398, the foolish veteran 
 did make love, and married Agnes Groundolf ! He survived this 
 unseasonable wooing for ten years, when Agnes came into his 
 property. 
 
 The reputation of Gower, for long, was very high ; people 
 spoke of Chaucer and Gower as we speak of Browning and Tenny- 
 son, or of Shelley and Keats. But no longer with Chaucer is 
 Gower "equalled in renown," and his most enduring inonument 
 is Shakespeare's introduction of him in " Pericles, Prince of Tyre ". 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE SUCCESSORS OF CHAUCER. 
 
 After Chaucer and Gower, English poets wandered back into 
 the wilderness. They are most valuable to students of the de- 
 velopment of the language, they were popular in their own time 
 and for more than a century later. Specialists find in them some 
 literary merits, oases in the sandy desert, but it would be false to 
 say that they are generally entertaining and attractive. 
 
 John Lydgate, the Monk of St. Edmondsbury, would have 
 obliged us had he written prose Memoirs of his own life, for he 
 came in contact with some very interesting persons, and knew 
 London and Paris as well as his cloister. Born (1370) at Lyd- 
 gate near Newmarket (where good drink was hardly to be come 
 at, he tells us), he was, before the age of 15, received into the great 
 Edmondsbury monastery school, where he was a reluctant pupil, 
 and, later, a not very willing monk. He proceeded to Oxford, 
 it is thought to Gloucester Hall, now Worcester College, and, by 
 1397, was a priest in full orders. He speaks of Chaucer as his 
 Master ; but probably he means his master in the spirit : probably 
 he never sat at the feet of the great poet. 
 
 In 1423 Lydgate was made prior of Hatfield Broadoak. In 
 1426 he was in Paris, and, by order of the Earl of Warwick, 
 the cruel jailer of Jeanne d'Arc, he translated a French poetical 
 pedigree by Laurence Callot, a French clerk in English service. 
 Laurence is notorious for having called the Bishop of Beauvais a 
 traitor, when he accepted the abjuration of Jeanne d'Arc (May, 
 143 1), and for being very busy in the tumult which then arose. 
 Lydgate returned to his cloister at Bury in 1434, and we last hear 
 of him, in connexion with a pension which he held, in 1446. 
 
 The dates of his poems are not certainly known, as a rule. 
 
The Successors of Chaucer 1 1 1 
 
 "The Flower of Curtesie," "The Black Knight," and "The Temple 
 of Glass," may be between 1400 and 1403. The "Troy Book," 
 made from Dares, Dictys, Benoit de Sainte-Maure, and, mainly 
 Guido de Colonna, is of monstrous length, and is dated 141 2-1420. 
 This poem has some fine passages in which Lydgate, for example, 
 when describing the penitence of Helen, seems to be translating 
 the actual words of the Iliad. The " Story of Thebes " followed 
 (1420), then came "The Falls of Princes," and a translation of 
 Deguileville's " Pilgrimage of Human Life," made for the Earl of 
 Salisbury. "The Legend of St. Edmund" was written for the 
 devout Henry VI ; the date of " Reason and Sensuality " is earlier 
 (1406-1408). 
 
 •About forty works are attributed to Lydgate, all, or almost all, 
 being marked by " his curious flatness ". His lines have, for the 
 ordinary mind, the unpleasant peculiarity that you may read many 
 of them several times before you discover, if you ever do, how he 
 meant them to be scanned. It is not to be found out when he 
 meant the final e to be sounded, and when he did not. His poems 
 may have been badly copied, or badly printed, or both, but the 
 bewildering result remains. When we add that Lydgate is usually 
 a translator, and is always a copyist of all the old formulae of spring 
 and dreams, and that he is as prolix as an Indian epic, it must be 
 plain that he cannot be said to hold a high place in living litera- 
 ture. " The Book of the Duchess," a thing of Chaucer's im- 
 maturity, is not one that a young poet of the next generation 
 would sedulously ape, yet Lydgate imitated it in "The Black 
 Knight ". 
 
 The best-known piece of Lydgate is a short satiric poem, 
 "London Lickpenny," describing the misadventures of a poor 
 countryman who finds that in London he can get nothing, neither 
 law, nor food, nor any other commodity — for nothing. His hood 
 is stolen in the crowd. 
 
 OCCLEVE. 
 
 Occleve is not merely a less voluminous Lydgate. He is a 
 character, or assumes to be a character not unlike the French 
 poet, Frangois Villon, but with little of Villon's genius. Occleve 
 
1 1 2 English Literature 
 
 was born about 1368; about 1387 he got a little post in the 
 Office of the Privy Seal ; in 1406, in a poem " La Male Regie," he 
 petitions for payment of a pension : he has wasted his youth, his 
 health is lost, and no wonder, 
 
 But twenty wintir passed continuelly 
 Excesse at boide hath leyd his knyf with me. 
 
 The great number of public-houses excite people to drink, 
 So often that man can nat wel seyn nay. 
 
 He would have drunk harder if there had been more money in 
 his pouch : had Occleve been a richer man there would be less of 
 the rhymes of Occleve. He liked the society of gay girls, which 
 is expensive. 
 
 To suffre hem paie had been no courtesie. 
 
 He abstained from discourteous language, 
 
 I was so ferd with any man to fighte. 
 
 The tapsters said that Occleve was "a real gentleman," "a verray 
 gentil man ". He was too lazy to walk to his office ; this indolent 
 civil servant, he took a boat, and the oarsmen knew^nd flattered 
 him. He is~rather impudent and impenitent, but he seems to ask 
 for no more than was his due in the way of money. The picture 
 is drawn from the life, whether dramatically studied, or" only too 
 truly told of Occleve. 
 
 Being what he calls himself, Occleve wrote over 5000 lines of 
 good moral advice to "the mad Prince," the friend of Poins and 
 Falstaff (1411-1412). Heacts as his own "awful example ". He " 
 asks for money, and his poem is a compilation from various musty 
 sources ; but he is always laxly autobiographical, a loose, genial, 
 familiar knave. Conceivably he may have met the Prince in a 
 tavern; it is a pity that Shakespeare did not think of bringing 
 this shuffler, in Falstaff's company, to take purses at Gadshill. 
 He bids the Prince to burn heretics, and, in the interests of peace 
 with France, to marry Catherine, daughter of the mad Charles VI. 
 Henry took both pieces of advice, but the marriage brought not 
 peace, but the sword in a Maiden's hand. 
 
The Successors of Chaucer t i 3 
 
 Like Villon, Occleve wrote a poem (more than one), to the 
 Bkssed Virgin : he is always very orthodox. He had an interval 
 of darkened mind, but recovered and went on versifying, a pathetic 
 figure, for he was a married man, and his wife must have endured 
 things intolerable. Occleve was very human : as a poet his 
 versification is as loose as that of Lydgate. He died about 1450. 
 
 Hawes. 
 
 Stephen Hawes was the last of the English followers of Chaucer who 
 deserves notice. Between him and the genuine Middle Ages a great gulf 
 exists. The art of printing is familiar to Hawes. Writing of Chaucer he 
 says of the poet's many books 
 
 He dyd compyle, whose goodly name 
 In printed bohes doth remayne infante, 
 
 where the jostling vowels of " name," " remayne " and " fame " prove Hawes 
 to be a careless author. In his own time, he says, writers " spend their time 
 in vainful vanity, making balades of fervent amity, as gestes and trifles 
 without fruitfulness "- Hawes alone " of my Master Lydgate will follow the 
 trace " 
 
 Hawes is all for allegory and moral instruction in his long poem, mis- 
 leadingly entitled " The Passetyme of Pleasure ". All the old formulse 
 of the Romance of the Rose are retained, and the castles of Rhetoric, Logic, 
 and the whole curriculum of Learning are not much more joyous than the 
 den of Bunyan's Giant Despair. Even combats with seven-headed monsters 
 fail to excite pity and terror, for Hawes has seen, in a work of art, his own 
 future, and we know beforehand that Grand Amour married La Bel Puceli. 
 Hawes was born about 1475, was over-educated at Oxford, and was Groom 
 of the Chamber to Henry VIL He made the words of a ballet for the 
 Court in 1506 (ten shillings) and, for Henry VIIL (1521) a play, now lost, 
 (£6 13s. 4d.). He also wrote " The Example of Virtue," and several poems, 
 some of which have not been found in print or manuscript. The " Passetyme 
 of Pleasure " is of 150&. It is in rhyme royal, with more or less humorous 
 interludes concerning the facetious Godfrey Gobelive, a dwarf who tells 
 tales against women, in rhyrjing "heroic" couplets. "The Example of 
 Virtue," another moral and allegorical poem, is in the same measures. 
 Spenser may have known the works of Hawes, there are coincidences in the 
 allegorical details of both which can scarcely be all accidental. Hawes, in a 
 sense, would " have raised tlie Table Round again," if he could ! He knew 
 Malory's great prose work, the " Morte d' Arthur," and would fain have re- 
 stored ideal chivalry. 
 
 But chivalry died at the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, under the 
 eyes of "the Father of Courtesy," the Earl of Warwick. The 
 
 8 
 
ii4 English Literature 
 
 Flower of Chivalry was sacrificed like Odin, "herself to herself " 
 
 (1431)- 
 
 Hawes was a chaotic versifier : it is not easy to guess how 
 he scanned many of his own lines. In the " Passetyme " the 
 words of the hero's epitaph are probably a versified proverb, 
 
 For though the day be never so longe, 
 At last the belles ringeth to evensonge. 
 
 Long were the poems, and long the day of the foUowers'of Chaucer. 
 Now for its even song the bells were rung. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 LATE MEDIAEVAL PROSE. 
 
 As far as literature is concerned the poetry of the period which 
 we have been considering is infinitely more imjcrtant than the 
 prose. For most prosaic purposes, Englishmen still wrote in 
 Latin : Richard Rolle, that eccentric hermit, and Wyclif, the 
 premature Reformer, were even more prolific in Latin than in 
 English. Prose was used in writing of science, as in Chaucer's 
 treatise concerning the Astrolabe; for translation out of Latin, 
 as in Chaucer's translation of Boethius, and Trevisa's rendering 
 of Higden's chronicles ; in sermons, and by Wyclif and his followers 
 for their tracts against the rich ; against the Friars ; against the 
 eridowments of the Church (constantly threatened in Parliament) ; 
 and against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist ; and for their 
 translations from the Latin Bible. 
 
 Wyclif. 
 
 John Wyclif (born about 1329) was a man of great influence 
 in his day ; and the Reformation, when many of his ideas revived, 
 probably found the embers of the fire which he had tended still 
 glowing. He is said to have been born at Hipswell, near Rich- 
 mond in Yorkshire, and certainly was of the Diocese of York. He 
 was Master of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1361. In 1372 Wyclif 
 took the degree of Doctor in Theology : he had already written 
 not a few Latin treatises on philosophical subjects. As a philoso- 
 pher he was a believer in predestination (on which much might 
 be said), but averse to the theory of the disintegration of matter ; 
 indeed his views on this subject controlled his theory of the 
 Eucharist. His desire to reform the Church by reducing her 
 
 115 8* 
 
ii6 English Literature 
 
 endowments endeared him to a political party in the State ; and 
 when he was summoned before Convocation in 1377, he was 
 supported by John of Gaunt, uncle of Richard II. 
 
 The affair ended in a brawl ; and in a later examination his ideas 
 were not pronounced heretical. The London mob as well as some 
 persons of high rank were on his side, and when one Pope, Urban, 
 proclaimed a crusade against the other Pope, Clement, Wyclif 
 opposed it in manuscript pamphlets. He had, about 1378, started 
 a kind of order of "poor priests" who spread his doctrines, and, 
 in regard to the unlawfulness of owning private property, went 
 beyond him. 
 
 The Bible, not the tradition of the Church, was the centre of 
 Wyclif s inspiration : it would be a mistake to suppose that the 
 Bible was then generally ignored, the literature of the time is full 
 of quotations from Scripture. There was no authorized translation 
 of the Latin Bible, but many separate books of Scripture were 
 circulating in English. There is much controversy as to whether 
 or not Wyclif translated, or caused to be translated, the entire 
 Bible, as a chronicler declares that he did : certainly he made much 
 of it known in English tracts and sermons. 
 
 In 1382 he was suspended from teaching at Oxford ; he retired 
 to his rectory at Lutterworth, continued to write, and died on Old 
 Year's Day, 1384. 
 
 It is impossible, here, to enter into theological details, but 
 Wyclif anticipated many of the great multitude of ideas which 
 flooded Western Europe at the beginning of the Reformation. If 
 we open his sermons at random, we find him preaching on Lazarus 
 and Dives, " how richessis be perilouse, for lightli wole a riche man 
 use hem unto moche lust," that is, luxury. Words of Latin origin 
 are nearly as common in his style as in that of Chaucer or Piers 
 Plowman. In his Englishing of the Bible, Wyclif uses " And " at 
 the beginning of many sentences, just as Mandeville does in his 
 amusing and fabulous " Travels ". The sermons have the double 
 merit of being very short, and very plain, with no rhetorical flowers. 
 The tracts can scarcely be called amiable: the word "stinking," 
 for example, is not thought by Wyclif too strong to apply to " proud 
 priests of Rome and Avignon ", 
 
Late Mediaeval Prose 117 
 
 All these brave and earnest men, the Wyclifite pamphleteers 
 and " poor priests," and Piers Plowman, with their socialism and 
 their doubts, their " New Theology," were rehearsing in mediaeval 
 costume the drama of to-day; while Chaucer was arraying the 
 heroes of the Fleece of Gold, of Troy, and of the Achaeans, in 
 the armour of the men who fought at Crdcy and Poitiers. What 
 remains as a gain to literature is the art of Chaucer. 
 
 Sweet reasonableness and urbane irony are not to be expected 
 from men full of righteous indignation, and in great danger of 
 being burned alive ; for by this penalty did the Church and State 
 suppress the preachers of doctrines which were apt to cause danger- 
 ous popular tumults. The Wyclifite Biblical translations look like 
 a canvas later embroidered on by the authors of King James's 
 authorized version, that immortal monument of English prose. 
 
 Chaucer's Prose Style. 
 
 It was not in the nature of these Reformers to follow the 
 counsel of Chaucer's good Parson in the " Parson's Tale " (the 
 spelling may here be modernized, as an example of the poet's 
 prose). 
 
 " Certainly chiding may not come but out of a villain's heart, 
 for after the abundance of the heart speaketh the mouth full often. 
 And ye should understand that ! Look ever when any man shall 
 chastise another, that he beware of chiding and reproving, for 
 truly, unless he be wary, he may full lightly kindle the fire of 
 anger and of wrath which he should quench, and peradventure 
 slayeth him whom he might chastise with benignity. . . . Lo, 
 what saith saint Augustine, ' there is nothing so like the Devil's 
 child as he that often chideth '. Now cometh the sin of them that 
 sow and make discord among folk ; which is a sin that Christ 
 hateth utterly, and no wonder it is ; for he died to make concord. 
 And more sin do they to Christ, than did they that him crucified ; 
 for God loveth better that friendship be among folk than he did 
 his own body, which he gave for unity." 
 
 Chaucer's country-priest, not the chiding Wyclifite Sons of 
 Thunder, is the true Christian. There is more of the spirit of the 
 Master in the caressing words of Chaucer's address to " little Louis 
 
ii8 English Literature 
 
 my son . . . pray God save the king that is Lord of this lande, 
 and all that him faith beareth and obeyeth, each in his degree, the 
 more, and the less," than in torrents of bitter chiding, and a hail 
 of unpublishable vituperation. 
 
 The English of Chaucer's treatise of "The Astrolabe," despite 
 its difficult astronomical matter, is pellucid, and there is a charm 
 of rhythm in his prose translations of the verses in Boethius. 
 
 Trevisa. 
 
 The English prose of John Trevisa, a Cornish priest, educated 
 at Oxford, and a traveller on the continent (died 1412), was en- 
 tirely given to translation from the Latin. He is said, by Caxton, 
 to have translated the Bible : he certainly made an English 
 version of the " Polychronicon " of Ranulf Higden, the monk of 
 Chester, which begins with the Creation, and is rich in geographical 
 and social information. 
 
 Trevisa occasionally inserts notes of his own. His versions of 
 Higden, and of the mythical popular science and prodigious fables 
 contained in the " De Proprietatibus Rerum " (" Concerning the 
 Properties of Things") of Bartholomseus the Englishman, were 
 very popular, as their amusing nature deserved, and the " Poly- 
 chronicon " was printed by Caxton. Trevisa himself tells us that 
 in his day English boys in grammar schools were ceasing to learn 
 French, and there was a public for English books supposed to be 
 educational. 
 
 Mandeville. 
 
 The most famous and by far the most interesting of these 
 adapters of foreign books is the so-called Sir John Mandeville, 
 with his " Voiage and Travaile ''. The author of this book was 
 not an Englishman, at least he did not write in English, and did 
 write in French, at Liege, about the end of the fourteenth century. 
 It is impossible and unnecessary to discuss here the fables about 
 Man leville. The author of the book declares that he himself is 
 " Sir John to all Europe," is an Englishman born at St. Albans, 
 that he passed the sea in 1322, that he travelled in Tartary, Persia, 
 Armenia, Lybia, Chaldaea, the land of the Amazons, India, and 
 
Late Mediaeval Prose 1 1 9 
 
 so forth. In fact he resembles Widsith in the ancient Anglo- 
 Saxon poem — he has been almost everywhere and knows almost 
 everything. He especially writes for pilgrims to Jerusalem; he 
 first wrote his book in Latin, then translated it into French, and 
 finally into English. There are countries that he has not seen ; 
 and he says that he could not play a part in the deeds of arms 
 which he beheld. Now he suffers from arthritis, "gowtes arte- 
 tykes," and he amuses himself by writing his adventures. in 1357. 
 Another version of Sir John's career is given by Jean d'Outre- 
 meuse, a writer of histories, who had the felicity of hearing from 
 an old man with a beard in 1472, that he was the genuine Mande- 
 ville : but that the author was really Jean d'Outremeuse is not so 
 certain. The author, whoever he was, stole from a manuscript of 
 the time of the First Crusade, and from the book of Odoric, a 
 Franciscan missionary, and the Itinerary of William of Boldenrele, 
 (1332-1336) from a History of the Mongols, from a forged letter of 
 Prester John — from every source whence he could pick amusing 
 stories. He fabled with a direct and honourable simplicity which 
 is comparable to that of Defoe, and to the straightforward and 
 moderate statements of Swift's Captain Lemuel Gulliver. With 
 the spelling modernized it is thus that the good knight tells the 
 story of the Pygmies who were known to Homer for their battles 
 with the cranes. 
 
 " The folk be of little stature, but three span long, and they be 
 right fair and gentle, after their quantity, both the men and the 
 women. And they marry them when they be half a year of age, 
 and get children. And they live not but six or seven years at the 
 most. And he that liveth eight years, men hold him there right 
 passing old. . . . And they have often war with the birds of the 
 country that they take and eat. These little folks labour neither 
 in lands nor in vineyards. But they have great men among them 
 of our stature that till the land and labour amongst the vines for 
 them. And of the men of our stature have they a great scorn 
 and wonder as we would have among us of Giants if they were 
 amongst us." 
 
 Mandeville speaks as calmly about the ants, known to Hero- 
 dotus, which guard the hills of gold, and are as large as hounds ; 
 
I20 English Literature 
 
 and of the devil's head in the valley perilous, through which the 
 knight and his company travelled in great fear, "and therefore 
 were we the more devout a great deal ". Thence he reached an 
 isle where men are from twenty-eight to thirty feet in stature, " and 
 they eat more gladly men's flesh than any other flesh," being in- 
 deed the Lsestrygonians who devoured the men of Odysseus, or 
 the Mermedonians of the Anglo-Saxon poem of " St. Andreas," who 
 meant to devour St. Matthew. Mandeville enjoyed and deserved 
 great popularity, being a follower of Lucian's "True History," 
 and a predecessor of Gulliver. 
 
 Pecock. " The Repressor ". 
 
 A writer of English prose even more interesting, though much 
 less popular and amusing than Mandeville, is Reginald Pecock 
 (1395-1460), the deposed Bishop of Chichester, author of ''The 
 Repressor of overmuch blaming of the Clergy ". The clergy 
 blamed Pecock, and repressed him. This remarkable man, born 
 shortly before the date of Chaucer's death, in North Wales, was 
 a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford (141 7), was patronized by 
 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, obtaining the Mastership of Lord 
 Mayor Whittington's school in London (1431), became Bishop of 
 St. Asaph's (1444), and passed his life in attempts to convert the 
 Lollards by persuasion, not by the stake. " The clergy shall be 
 condemned at the last day," he writes, "if by clear wit they draw 
 not men into consent of true faith otherwise than by fire, sword and 
 hangment; although I will not deny these second means to be 
 lawful, provided the former be first used." In the opinion of the 
 Lollards, nothing in ecclesiastical matters was defensible that 
 was not positively inculcated in the Bible as interpreted by the 
 average Christian man, however unlettered. Pecock defended 
 Episcopacy, and even defended non-preaching Bishops, on the 
 score that they had to discharge more important duties. Even 
 the much abused friars he stood up for, arguing that, whatever 
 their offences, they and the world would be worse rather than 
 better if there were no religious orders. His arguments in support 
 of the begging Franciscans who, in counting up money, touched 
 
Late Mediaeval Prose 121 
 
 it with a stick, not with the hand, are certainly even more 
 sophistical than ingenious. 
 
 He wrote many pamphlets still in manuscript ; the " Repressor " 
 is of 14s S, and is a most remarkable book in all ways. Pecock 
 became vastly unpopular, because he was too clever, ^nd, in his 
 dislike of religious persecution, as well as in the nature of his 
 arguments, was in advance, not only of his own age, but of the 
 age of the Reformation. He was thought to give far too high 
 authority to reason, and to the natural faculties of man in the way 
 of developing unrevealed morality and unrevealed religion. " No 
 virtue or governance or truth into which the judgment of 
 man's reason may sufficiently ascend or come to, to find, learn, 
 and know it without revelation from God, is grounded on Holy 
 Scripture.'' 
 
 This conclusion arrives at the end of a sentence of thirty lines, 
 a fair example of Pecock's logical and legal style, by him first 
 used in English. It is not possible, here, to discuss Pecock's 
 ideas, which are concerned with questions that still divide the 
 Church and the world, Anglicans, Catholics, Nonconformists, and 
 Agnostics. The " Repressor " has been described as ' the earliest 
 piece of good philosophical disquisition of which our English 
 prose literature can boast " ; it may still be read with interest, 
 especially by students of the Reformation. Pecock was opposed 
 to the unjust and brutal war of conquest and of disaster waged by 
 England in France. 
 
 In 1450 he became Bishop of Chichester, and shared the un- 
 popularity of the Duke of Suffolk, who was blamed for the dis- 
 asters in France. His" Book of Faith" (1456) practically aban- 
 doned the infallibility of the Church in 1457 ; he was as unpopular 
 with the clergy as with the mob; twenty-four doctors reported 
 unfavourably on his works : he was a defender of " drowsy reason " 
 and of " unrevealed morality " : he was found guilty of heresies 
 which were no heresies, and, with no choice except that of being 
 burned alive, he signed a confession and abjuration of sins which 
 he had not committed : he was consigned to close confinement 
 in the Abbey of Thorney, was deprived of his bishopric — and of 
 writing materials — and died obscurely. 
 
122 English Literature 
 
 The source of his misfortunes was this : he was not only clever 
 but he knew it, and wrote that whatsoever man did not agree 
 with an argument of his " is duller than any man ought to be ". 
 As few agreed, most were dull, and ihey did not like to be told it. 
 
 Capgrave. 
 
 John Capgrave (1393-1464), a Norfolk priest, and Augustinian 
 canon, author of many scriptural commentaries and of a work on 
 " Illustrious Henrys," wrote in English a "Chronicle of England," 
 beginning with the Creation and ending in 141 7. Capgrave re- 
 minds us that Adam " was made on a Friday, in the field of 
 Damascus " ; the date was unlucky. He is nearly as brief as the 
 Anglo-Saxon " Chronicle," his account of Agincourt is no longer 
 than the " Chronicle's " description of Hastings. Here is a 
 sample of his style, " In the same yere III beggeres stole HI 
 childyr at Lenne, and of on thei put oute his eyne, the othir they 
 broke his bak, and the thirde thei cut off his handis and his feet, 
 that men schuld of pite give hem good. Long aftir the fadir of 
 on of hem, wheech was a marchaund, cam to London, and the 
 child knew him and cried loyde 'This is my fadir.' The fadir 
 took his child fro the beggeris and mad hem to be arrested. The 
 childim told alle the processe, and the beggeris were hangen, ful 
 well worthy." Such is Capgrave's work, described by himself as 
 " a short remembrance of old stories." 
 
 Lord Berners. 
 
 Later by two generations, John Bourchier, Lord Berners, was 
 born about the time of Capgrave's death, and while Malory was 
 writing his " Morte d'Arthur" (born 1467, died 1533). As Cap- 
 tain of Calais, the last spot of land held by England in France, 
 Lord Berners had leisure enough, which he spent in translating 
 Froissart, and the French romance of " Huon of Bordeaux " and 
 Oberon the fairy king, " Arthur of Little Britain," and Guevara's 
 Spanish "Dial for Princes,'' with the "Carcel de Amor" and the 
 " Libro Aureo," books which more or less anticipate the anti theses of 
 " Euphuism ", In his translation of Froissart, Berners fojlow^ 
 
Late Mediaeval Prose 123 
 
 the style of the original, his language is much akin to that of 
 Malory ; in his prefaces he is more rhetorical and " aureate,'' and 
 has a habit, like Sir Robert Hazlewood in " Guy Mannering,'' of 
 treble-shotting his verbs. " Histories show, open, manifest, and 
 declare to the reader by example of old antiquity, what we should 
 inquire, desire, and follow, and also what we should eschew, avoid, 
 and utterly fly." This mannerism is tedious, but the translation 
 itself is in admirably simple and expressive English. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 MALORY. 
 
 Much the most important novelty in the literature of this period 
 is the " Morte d'Avthur," finished by the author, Sir Thomas 
 Malory or Maleor, in 1469, and published in 1485. Malory is 
 believed to have been the Squire of Newbold Revell in Warwick- 
 shire, born about 1400 (?) and a retainer of that Richard Beau- 
 champ, Earl of Warwick, who was called " the Father of Courtesy " 
 by the Emperor Sigismund, and was the cruel jailer of Jeanne 
 d'Arc at Rouen (1430-1431), where she was burned. Malory 
 appears to have joined the Lancastrian party in the Wars of the 
 Roses ; he, or a man of his name, was left out of a general amnesty 
 granted by Edward IV, in 1468 ; he may have fled to Bruges 
 and there made the acquaintance of Caxton, and Caxton, in his 
 Preface to the " Morte," says that the book is printed " after a 
 copy unto me delivered which Sir Thomas Malory did take out of 
 certain books of French, and reduced it into English ". Malory 
 died in England, and was buried in the Grey Friars, near Newgate, 
 in 1471. 
 
 As we have seen already, the true first sources of the immense 
 body of Arthurian romance are obscure : the fountain-head is 
 certainly Celtic, but the affluents are mainly French — without 
 France the legend would have been but a small thing. Malory 
 constantly refers to " the French book " for his statements, to what 
 book he does not say, but the learned industry of Dr. Sommer has 
 detected that, for the youth of Arthur, Malory used French romances 
 of Merlin the Seer ; used French authorities for the tales of Sir 
 Tristram and Lancelot, and also freely employed an English metri- 
 cal romance, "Morte Arthur," attributed to the mysterious Scot, 
 
 124 
 
Malory 125 
 
 Huchown. There are other sources, and Malory treats his author- 
 ities with much freedom, omitting, adding, and introducing con- 
 fusions. His great romance has a definite beginning; it has a 
 middle in the fatal revival of Arthurian chivalry in the search for the 
 Holy Grail ; and thence turns towards its end with the falling of 
 Lancelot to his old sinful love of Guinevere, wife of Arthur, the 
 decadence, the rebellion of Mordred, the passing of Arthur, and 
 the penitence of Lancelot and Guinevere. 
 
 Malory's book may be called a work of true genius, so simple 
 yet so noble is the prose style ; so fine, loyal and chivalrous the 
 temper, while even the confusions add to the element of mystery 
 and to the expectation and curiosity of the reader. Malory purges 
 away the stupid monkish fables about the birth of Merlin by a 
 machination of a devil: he does not linger over the long dull 
 fables of Arthur's wars against the Anglo-Saxon invaders; he 
 gathers the flower of 1 the chivalry of the fourteenth century, while 
 true love is his theme, with no palliation of the guilt of sinful love. 
 His Lancelot deserves the Douglas motto of " tender and true," 
 
 though 
 
 His honour rooted in dishonour stood, 
 And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. 
 
 Hence comes .the inevitable tragedy, the gjj^test in romance. 
 
 " Herein," says Caxton, rising to the height of Malory's own 
 style, men " shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and 
 noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. 
 For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, 
 friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, 
 goodness, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it 
 shall bring you to good fame and renommee." 
 
 Many recent critics of Tennyson's " Idylls of the King,'' which 
 is mainly derived from Malory, appear to think that Malory's 
 " Morte d'Arthur " is a violent, brutal, licentious book, and that 
 Tennyson invented the noble courtesy, chivalry, humanity to suit 
 the middle-class moraUty of i860. This opinion is merely stupid. 
 " The Morte,'' it has been well said, " assumes the recognition of 
 a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its own 
 century knew. . . . The motive forces are the elemental passions 
 
126 English Literature 
 
 of love and bravery, never greed, or lust, or cruelty," — except 
 of course in traitors like Meliagraunce and Mordred. The knights 
 have the strongest sense of fair play : Sir Lancelot bears no spite 
 against Sir Palamedes, a pagan knight, who, from ignorance of the 
 rules, deals a stroke in a tournament which the rules forbade. 
 Their sense of honour is crystal-clear, and, as in Tennyson's 
 Idylls, this honour and loyalty make the tragedy ; the struggle 
 between Lancelot's love of Guinevere, and his friendship for and 
 loyalty to King Arthur. His sin brings its own punishment, he 
 cannot win the vision of the Grail, that Holy thing : " blessed are 
 the pure in heart for they shall see God ". 
 
 Arthur himself, after the wars of his youth, is but faintly drawn : 
 it is not for the King to seek adventures, but to hear the suits of 
 his people who come to him for help and justice. A mystery of 
 Fate hangs over him : he is smitten by the sins of his knights, and 
 passes away, sorely wounded but alive, as strangely as CEdipus 
 in the tragedy of Sophocles : perhaps, who knows, to come again. 
 " In Avalon he groweth old," in the peaceful hidden land of apples 
 and apple-blossom. 
 
 The scenes all pass in a world where colours are magically soft 
 and bright. There is an old song of the fourteenth century which 
 gives the kind of colour that abounds in Malory. 
 
 Lully, lulley, lully, lulley 
 
 The fawcon hath borne my mate away 1 
 
 He bare him up, he bare him down, 
 
 He bare him into an orchard brown. 
 
 In that orchard there was a hall 
 
 That was hangid with purple and pall. 
 
 And in that hall there was a bed. 
 
 It was hung with gold so red. 
 
 And in that bed there lieth a knight. 
 
 His wounds bleeding day and night. 
 
 By that bedside kneeleth a may. 
 
 And she weepeth both night and day. 
 
 This is like a song made on some scene in the Quest for the 
 Grail. 
 
 Malory's world is "an unsubstantial fairy place,'' yet there is 
 no fairy non-morality. There is the loftiest ideal among the 
 
Malory 127 
 
 knights who follow the gleam and fragrance of the Holy Grail. 
 That all do not attain to their ideal is but the failing of human 
 nature, the ideal is among them, they aspire to reach " the spirit- 
 ual City". For Guinevere, Malory has the chivalrous compassion 
 of Homer for Helen ; of Chaucer for Criseyde, but while Helen 
 wins, with light penance, to her home by the Eurotas, and her 
 translation to Elysium, the Avalon of Greece, it is through many 
 years of penance that Guinevere comes to her rest. What Shelley 
 said of the end of the Iliad may be said of the last chapters of 
 the " Morte,'' they die away " in the high and solemn close of 
 the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow ". 
 
 The prose with all its simplicity has rhythm and charm. 
 Thus, "Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remem-/ 
 brance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere, for whonu 
 I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true! 
 lover, and therefore had she a good end ". The words spoken 
 by Sir Ector over the dead body of Lancelot are one of the 
 noblest passages in English prose. 
 
 The very titles of the chapters call us into the realm of 
 romance, like a blast blown on Arthur's horn. " How Sir Lance- 
 lot came into the Chapel Perilous, and gat there of a dead corpse 
 a piece of cloth and a sword." "How the damsel and Beau- 
 mains came to the siege, and came to a sycamore tree, and there 
 Beaumains blew an horn, and then the Knight of the Red Lands 
 came to fight him." "How Sir Lancelot, half-sleeping and half- 
 waking, saw a sick man borne in a litter, and how he was healed 
 with the Sangreal." Who can read the titles, and not make haste 
 to read the chapters ? The beautiful close of Tennyson's " Morte 
 d'Arthur " is merely done into verse from the fifth chapter of 
 Malory's twenty-first book, — the casting of Excalibur into the 
 mere, and the coming of the barge with the elfin ladies, " many 
 fair ladies, and among them all was a Queen, and all they had 
 black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw 
 King Arthur ". 
 
 But for Malory, the old Arthurian romances would be known 
 only to a few of the learned. Malory " made them common 
 coin," his romance was neglected only in the eighteenth century. 
 
X28 English Literature 
 
 It has been the inspiration of many poets, but none can "recap- 
 ture the first fine careless rapture," to which Tennyson comes 
 nearest in the best of his " Idylls of the King," and in " Sir 
 Galahad," and " The Lady of Shalott ". 
 
 Next to Chaucer's poems, Malory's romance is the greatest 
 thing in English literature from "Beowulf" to Spenser. To boys, 
 and to men who retain the boy, the '' Morte " is an inestimable 
 treasure, which has not to be sought for in the seldom-visited 
 shelves that hold the publications of learned Societies, but is within 
 the reach of all.i 
 
 1 In the Globe edition, edited by Sir Edward Strachey. Macmillan & Co. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE. 
 
 For purposes of convenience the development of " Ynglis " 
 literature north of the Tweed and Esk, may be treated in this 
 place. 
 
 Originally the " Scots " or Scottish tongue was Gaelic, the 
 language of the Irish Scots who, landing in Argyll about a.d. 500, 
 finally gave a dynasty and its existing name, to " Scot " land. When 
 the dynasty acquired the Anglicized Lothian and much of Cumber- 
 land, it adopted the English speech, consequently the writers 
 of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Scotland used a form 
 of northern English or " Ynglis," and knew not Gaelic. They 
 called their speech " English " till the long wars with England 
 led them to draw a distinction and patriotically style it "Scots" 
 or "Scottis". Thus by 1562, Ninian Winzett upbraids John 
 Knox for " knapping English " in his writings, and forgetting the 
 " Scots " that he learned at his mother's knee. Gaelic was no 
 longer reckoned " Scots," it was Ersch, Yrisch, or Erse. Even 
 before the days of Edward I, the town seal of Stirling, on the 
 Forth, describes the Gaelic -speaking men north of Forth as Scott 
 bruti. The Scottish writers did not know, and therefore despised 
 Gaelic, from which they have scarcely borrowed anything. Latin 
 and French they knew, and enriched their tongue by borrowing 
 from these sources. 
 
 The one verse of Scottish poetry that may have survived from 
 the end of the thirteenth century, the lines on the death of Alex- 
 ander III, are charming, but, if they were written at the time, or 
 shortly after, they must have been modernized, more or less, when 
 Wyntoun, the rhyming chronicler, quoted them about 1420, twenty 
 years after the death of Chaucer. 
 
 129 9 
 
130 English Literature 
 
 Barbour. 
 
 Setting aside the enigmatic Huchown already discussed, John 
 Barbour, author of " The Brus," a history of King Robert Bruce 
 in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, is the first poet of English 
 speaking Scotland. He remains one of the , most spirited and 
 readable ; the most like Sir Walter Scott, who used his book in 
 poetry and in prose historical writing. 
 
 By 1357 Barbour was Archdeacon of Aberdeen : he was prob- 
 ably born at least ten years before Chaucer. In 1357 he went, 
 with others, to study at Oxford, probably at the Scottish college, 
 Balliol. He also visited France, for studious purposes ; he held a 
 position ' in the Exchequer, and, after finishing " The Brus " in 
 1376, received a pension from Bruce's grandson, Robert II : other 
 pensions he received : he died in 1396. He had written other 
 works, lost or disputable, and a romantic genealogy of the Stuarts, 
 who were really Fitz Alans, and of ancient Breton origin, not, as was 
 fabled, of the old Scoto-Irish dynasty. "A Bulk of Alexander" 
 (the romance of Alexander the Great), is attributed to Barbour 
 with much probability. 
 
 Barbour possesses, unlike most of the narrative poets of the 
 Middle Ages, one supreme advantage. He is not telling, for the 
 twentieth time, the Tale of Troy, of Alexander the Great, of King 
 Arthur, or of any dim mythical hero. The events in the history 
 of Scotland which his own father witnessed, make one of the best 
 stories in the world. Bruce was far from a faultless hero, but his 
 adventures are picturesque facts, not inventions : though some- 
 times Barbour tells the same story twice, with variations. His 
 many defeats, his wanderings in the heather, with a little company 
 or with a single attendant ; his flight over sea ; his crossings of 
 perilous lochs in frail boats; his single combats; the desperate 
 chivalrous valour of his brother Edward ; his own sagacity as a 
 strategist and tactician; his kindness of heart; his love of the 
 romances ; the sufferings of his loyal friends, men and women ; all 
 his days of almost desperate warfare ; all his escapes when sur- 
 rounded in the hills of Galloway and of Argyll, are matters of 
 historical fact, and can often be traced in English documents of 
 
Early Scottish Literature 131 
 
 the time. His " crowning mercy '' Bannockburn, is as historical 
 as Marathon or Waterloo. 
 
 When we think of the wild scenes in which Bruce warred and 
 wandered, Loch Trool, Loch Awe, the whole of the Lennox, the 
 uplands of Don and Dee ; when we remember the blending of 
 English armed knights, and of the plaided clans in the ranks of 
 his enemies ; his own combination of the Islesmen with " the dark 
 impenetrable wood'' of the Lowland spears; the many-hued silks 
 of the standards ; the cowled friars who prayed while the warriors 
 fought ; the fair ladies who shared the hero's dangers, we see that 
 Barbour has a theme fresh, brilliant, and unique for his poem. 
 He has a true story which is more thrilling than any invented 
 romance. 
 
 Barbour notoriously, perhaps in the interests of poetic perspec- 
 tive, rolls up three Bruces, the grandfather, the father, and the 
 hero himself, into one personage. Yet his statements of the 
 numbers of the English engaged are sometimes corroborated by 
 the English muster rolls. Before he has written three hundred 
 lines he strikes the sonorous keynote of his narrative in that 
 praise of Freedom which is worthy of the poet who fought at 
 Marathon. 
 
 " Ah ! freedom is a noble thing 1 " 
 
 In what other mediaeval romance can these lines be equalled ? 
 What wearies us in Barbour is the common defect of mediaeval 
 poets, the occasional display of learning, references to what Cato 
 did, or Hannibal, or Scipio, and the like, but Barbour is not 
 tedious when, after giving a minute portrait of the good Lord 
 James of Douglas, he compares him to Hector, though, for 
 valour, 
 
 To Hector dare I none compare 
 Of all that ever in world were. 
 
 The story never drags, adventure follows adventure, and there is 
 none of the weary exaggeration of romance. Bruce does not 
 slay his thousands, like Arthur. When he, a mounted man in 
 armour, has the better of three plaided clansmen, MacNaughton, 
 who is of the hostile party, cries 
 
 9 * 
 
132 English Literature 
 
 Surely, in all my time, 
 I never heard, in song or rhyme. 
 Tell of a man that so smartly 
 Displayed such great chivalry. 
 
 But Bruce is soon obliged to give his horse to one of the ladies, 
 and go on foot, like Prince Charles, living on such venison as 
 his arrows may procure. Barbour has to invent no fanciful dan- 
 gers ; he knows the racing tides and dangerous shoals of Argyll — 
 
 The waves wide that breaking were. 
 Weltered as hills, here and there. 
 
 Unlike Chaucer, Barbour has a scorn of astrology : no man ever (he 
 says) made three correct prophecies, by knowledge of the stars ! 
 He is far from scrupulous, and does not blame Douglas when, like 
 Achilles, he slays prisoners of war : apparently because he could 
 not take them with him in his retreat, and secure their ransoms. 
 Barbour has not, of course, the genius of Chaucer ; but he has a 
 touch of the genius of Scott, he has spirit, and a true sense of 
 loyalty, chivalry, and patriotism ; these, with his subject, place 
 him beside Chaucer in so far as that he may still be read with 
 unaffected enjoyment. 
 
 Wyntoun. 
 
 Between Barbour and the first true Scottish disciple of Chaucer, 
 James I, comes the author of a Chronicle in rhyming octo- 
 syllabic couplets "The Orygynale Crony kil ". This is Andrew 
 Wyntoun, who was a canon of St. Andrews Cathedral, and prior of 
 St. Serfs on a little island in Loch Leven, the loch of Queen 
 Mary's captivity. Wyntoun appears to have been an old man 
 when, in 1413, the first Scottish university was founded at St. 
 Andrews, by a bull of the Anti-Pope, Pedro de la Luna. The 
 place must, with its Augustinian canons, have been a seat of 
 learning before 1413, but the new university was very poor, and a 
 thing of small beginnings. 
 
 Wyntoun's book commences with Adam and Eve, and is at 
 fifth hand and fabulous till the author approaches his own time. 
 
 Mythical as is his work when he approaches his own date he, 
 
Early Scottish Literature 133 
 
 with Fordun, the really industrious author of the prose "Scoti- 
 chronicon " (died about 1384), is one of our few sources of informa- 
 tion about Scottish affairs. Wyntoun is amusing, but does not 
 pretend to high poetic merit. 
 
 The Kingis Quhair. 
 
 To people who only know King James I of Scotland in history, 
 his poem, " The Kingis Quhair " (book) must be rather disappoint- 
 ing. Fortune was his foe, as he says in the poem, and the foe of 
 his House. 
 
 Born in July, 1394, yoting James was made prisoner in March, 
 1405-1406, and, for about eighteen years was a captive in England, 
 or was led with the army of Henry V. against his natural ally, 
 Charles VII, the Dauphin of Jeanne d'Arc. The ransom demanded 
 from James when released, in 1423, was ruinous; of his hostages, 
 noblemen, some died in England ; he found his country full of 
 anarchy and treason ; the disorders he suppressed with illegal 
 vigour; he seized earldoms to which he had no right, he made 
 powerful enemies, and, in 1437, he was slain by Robert Graeme 
 and a band of Highlanders, at the Black Friars' in Perth. In 
 England he had married Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of 
 Somerset, who lived to avenge him on his murderers with unheard- 
 of cruelties. 
 
 When a man of James's intellect, character, and experiences 
 writes a poem on his own taking at sea by faithless foes, his own 
 long captivity, and his own love-story, we naturally expect some- 
 thing of poignant personal interest. But we expect what his time, 
 his taste, and his rank forbade him to give. Never was poetical 
 tradition so crushing to originality as the tradition of the " Roman 
 de la Rose ". 
 
 For centuries each mediaeval poet aimed at saying just 
 what his forerunners had said, and in much the same style: 
 Barbour, of course, is an exception; he does not open with a 
 sleepless night ; a book read in bed ; a dream of a May morning ; 
 a walk to a pretty river, a palace near the river, and all the rest of 
 it. Barbour writes " like a man of this world ". 
 
 But King James follows the fashion of allegory. He cannot 
 
1 34 English Literature 
 
 sleep ; he reads Boethius in bed, Boethius " full of moralities "- He 
 lies thinking over his sorrows when (this is original), the bell for 
 matins rings, and 
 
 Ay me thought the bell 
 
 Said to me, tell on, man, quhat the befell. 
 
 He did not think that the Voice was a real Voice, " impression of 
 my thought causes this illusion," said he, and though he had 
 "spent much ink and paper to little effect," he sat down, made a 
 mark of the cross, and set to work at his tale, first comparing his 
 life to a ship in perilous seas, and tlfen briefly mentioning his 
 capture when about three years past the age of innocence (which 
 was seven, he was, when taken, four years past seven). Birds, . 
 beasts, and fishes, he says, are free, why does Fortune make me 
 thrall ? He looks out of his window into a green garden ; the 
 nightingales sing; he sees, and describes very prettily, a fair lady 
 walking with her two maidens, and falls in love. In all probability 
 this is a mere imitation of the first sight of Emily by Palamon 
 and Arcite, in Chaucer's " Knight's Tale ". James would meet 
 Jeanne in society : he was not a close prisoner, we are told that 
 he knew many English ladies, and the course of his true love ran 
 smooth enough. But the description is charming, as is the address 
 to the nightingale which follows. 
 
 After this long and excellent passage of true poetry, fashion 
 compels the King to visit the Palace of Venus and see the lovers 
 of old times, converse with Venus and with Pallas, and visit 
 Fortune with her Wheel, and take his place on it ; then he awakes 
 not " seeing all his own mischance ". A white turtle-dove brings 
 him flowers, and a glad message in letters of gold ; and he blesses 
 birds and flowers and even his prison wall, and 
 
 the Sanctis marciall 
 That me first causit hath this accident. 
 
 The poem ends with an invocation of the shades of his " masters 
 dear," Gower and Chaucer. 
 
 The manuscript, of about 1488, ascribes the poem to King 
 James, so does Major or Mair, a not too trustworthy historian. 
 
Early Scottish Literature 135 
 
 The language is northern English, mixed with Scots, with many 
 borrowings from Chaucer. The story indicated is true of James 
 and of no one else, but the usual attempt has been made to deprive 
 him of the authorship — wholly without success. The measure is 
 the " rhyme royal " of Chaucer's " Troilus and Criseyde ". The 
 scansion is remarkably correct, and the lines have a melody not 
 common in the works of Chaucer's followers. There is a strong 
 moral element in the reflection and discourses. 
 
 Henryson. 
 
 Not a King like James I, nor a courtier priest, like Dunbar, 
 his junior, but a schoolmaster of the Benedictine Abbey-school 
 at Dunfermline, Robert Henryson had, among Scottish poets of 
 his day, the greatest share of the spirit of their master, Chaucer. 
 He may be the Robert Henryson who, already a Bachelor of 
 Arts, joined the University of Glasgow in r462, but nothing is 
 certainly known of him. He wrote his " Morall Fabillis of Esope " 
 
 by request and precept of a lord, 
 Of whom the name it needs not record, 
 
 SO he apparently had a patron destitute of vanity, and not ambi- 
 tious of publicity. Henryson regarded ^sop, the mythical Greek 
 slave, as "a noble Clerk," and made his own use of the tales of 
 talking beasts, birds, and fishes, which are told among savages in 
 most wild countries, and reached him, some of them by way of 
 India, filtered through Latin, French, and Enghsh authors. 
 
 The animals are perfectly human in character, and give to 
 Henryson, as later to Prior and La Fontaine, the opportunity to 
 show his own wit, humour, and tolerant gentle nature. The tales 
 are told in the seven line stanza, rhyme royal, of Chaucer's 
 "Troilus and Criseyde". Even to-day they may be read with 
 unfeigned pleasure, for their humorous and human studies of 
 character, for their unostentatious pictures of nature, of the little nest 
 of the field mouse, the moors, the stubble fields, the warm storeroom 
 of the burgess's house, where the town mouse has her hole, and 
 for the unaffected sympathy with our wild kindred of fur and feather. 
 The chatter of the hens, the widows of Chanticleer, when the fox, 
 
136 English Literature 
 
 who has claimed old family friendship with the cock, flatters 
 his vanity and carries him away, is far more pleasing than Dunbar's 
 satire on his revolting Widow and two married women. One hen, 
 Pertok, makes bitter moan for the cock, the common husband of 
 them all, but Sprutok declares her intention to sing, " Was never 
 widow so gay '' ; she enumerates the faults of the dear deceased ; 
 Pertok comes into her way of thinking ; and Toppok speaks of 
 the faithlessness of their late Lord. Heaven has punished Chan- 
 ticleer, who, after all, cheats the fox, and returns to his harem. 
 
 "The Two Mice" is especially humorous, and as sympathetic 
 as Burns's poem " The Twa Dogs ". The tale is so vivid that we 
 feel the keenest anxiety when Gib, or Gilbert, " our Jolly Cat," 
 pounces on the country mouse ; the town mouse knows her hole, 
 and has fled thither. The horror of the town mouse when she 
 has rural dainties placed before her by the country mouse, her 
 mincing airs of patronage, are delicately touched ; in short, with 
 the Fox's confession to the priestly Wolf, and the Trial of the Fox ; 
 and the strained law which the Wolf administers to the Lamb, the 
 fables are animated and delightful poetry in their kind : the Morals, 
 as when the hard lot of the poor husbandmen is described, are far 
 from contemptible. Had Henryson left nothing else we must 
 recognize in him a true son of Chaucer. 
 
 His " Testament of Cresseyde " begins from a bitter winter 
 night, when alone and snug in his warm room, he mends the fire, 
 takes a drink, lays down his Chaucer, and ends the tale of fair 
 false Cresseyde, whom Chaucer pitied. Chaucer was not the man 
 to have created, like Thackeray, that other Cresseyde, Beatrix 
 Esmond in her matchless bloom of triumphant beauty, and later 
 to have drawn her as the old Baroness Bernstein. What Chaucer 
 held his hand from, — the mediaeval tale of the punishment of false 
 Cresseyde, — Henryson, not without a passion of pity, undertook. 
 The gods sent on Cresseyde 's beauty the plague of leprosy, a 
 terrible malady scarcely known by name to the Greeks, but as 
 common in the Middle Ages as in ancient Israel. 
 
 Diomede deserts Cresseyde ; she becomes the common " spoil 
 of opportunity," and returns to her father Calchas, priest of Venus. 
 But " into the Kirk " Cresseyde is ashamed to go. In a trance 
 
Early Scottish Literature 137 
 
 she comes into the presence of Saturn, a frozen god, and of the other 
 old deities. Saturn then condemns her. The lady awakes and 
 sees in her glass that she is a leper. She goes to the lazar-house, 
 she dwells and begs with the lepers : Troilus rides past, and 
 knows her not, but, in some faint way, memory of his love for 
 Cresseyde wakes in him, and for his lost love's sake he gives to 
 the leper lordly alms, " a purse of gold and many a gay jewel ". 
 
 And nevertheless not ane ane uther knew. 
 
 But another leper recognized Troilus, and Cresseyde, smitten 
 to the heart, made her moan and her Testament, leaving to 
 Troilus the royal ring and red ruby that he had given her long 
 ago. So she died, and Troilus raised a tomb of marble to 
 
 Cresseid of Troyis toun, 
 Sumtyme countit the flour of Womanheid. 
 
 In the poem of this adventure there are but 616 lines; and it 
 contains the poignant essence of romance ; all passion and pity. 
 Nothing in the poetry of Scotland excels, perhaps nothing but 
 here and there the cry of a ballad, or of Scott's "Proud Maisie," 
 approaches in excellence this work of the schoolmaster of Dun- 
 fermline. 
 
 His " Robene and Makyne," or love-dialogue between a lad 
 and lass, the girl first wooing and repulsed ; then wooed and 
 scornful, is in a charming measure, and may have imitated some 
 ancient French pastourelle. 
 
 The " Orpheus and Eurydice," that sad and beautiful tale — 
 told by Maoris in New Zealand, and by Iroquois in America — 
 of the man who seeks his dead wife in Hades, has merit in 
 Henry son's version. The passage of Orpheus to and through 
 Hades, where his music consoles Tantalus and Theseus, and wins 
 the grace of Persephone, is excellent; the tragic close is not 
 successfully handled, and the long Moral is tedious. A number 
 of moral poems do not transcend the common course of those 
 things, and Henryson lives by his "Fables," his "Testament of 
 Cresseid," and "Robene and Makyne". 
 
 These, with the sympathetic kindliness of his unrepining 
 
138 English Literature 
 
 nature place him, if an individual opinion may be given, high 
 above his more famous contemporary, Dunbar. 
 
 Dunbar. 
 
 William Dunbar, whom Scott declared to be the greatest poet 
 of Scotland prior to Robert Burns, took the degree of Bachelor of 
 Arts at St. Andrews in 1477. Much later, lads of seventeen or 
 even of fourteen, graduated, so Dunbar may have been born (in 
 East Lothian) so early as 1460. His language, with some southern 
 English tincturer is that of the most Anglicized part of Scotland. 
 The Earls of Dunbar were a great shifting power on the Border, 
 and Dunbar's name, at least, was noble, he may have come of 
 Cospatrick's line (Earls of March). 
 
 A favourite Scottish form of verse was the " Flyting " (scolding) 
 or humorous raillery, and Dunbar's opponent, Walter Kennedy, 
 represented a very old Celtic clan of Galloway and- Ayrshire : 
 Dunbar banters him on his " Irish '' dress and accent. Dunbar 
 was brought up to be a Churchman, and was a novice in the Order 
 of St. Francis, " begging with a pardon in all Kirks ". From 1479 
 to 1491, he was travelling abroad, preaching and begging in 
 France, far from honestly, he says : — 
 
 " 1 wes ay reddy all men to begyle," like Chaucer's Pardoner, 
 but perhaps Dunbar was merely copying Chaucer. He is thought 
 to have been attached to the Scottish Embassy in Paris, and he 
 may have read, in print, the works of the famous burglar poet, 
 Frangois Villon. His recognized Masters, however, were Chaucer, 
 Gower, and Lydgate. 
 
 From 1500 to the great defeat of Flodden (15 13) and the 
 death of James IV, Dunbar was a priest and poet at the Court of 
 that magnificent prince, in whose days Scotland was peaceful, 
 comparatively rich, and addicted to letters and the arts. Her 
 poets, a century after Chaucer, and eighty years after their Royal 
 leader, James I, were all Chaucerians, but were confessedly more 
 vigorous, tuneful, more original in genius, and much less prolix 
 and pedantic than the English Chaucerians, Lydgate, Gower, and 
 Hawes. But what Dunbar lacks in length, he more than makes 
 up for in breadth. He made Court poems on the Royal marriage 
 
Early Scottish Literature 139 
 
 of " The Thistle and the Rose " (Margaret, the Rose, was really as 
 prickly as the Thistle). He was but thriftily rewarded, and 
 emitted many rhymed petitions for money. Benefice he got 
 none. 
 
 Probably, like Dean Swift, he was thought no credit to his 
 cloth, even in days far from respectable. As Chaucer was styled 
 "Old Grizzle," so the Scot speaks of himself as "this gray horss, 
 Auld Dunbar". At about 48, and in sickness, he wrote 
 his "Lament for the Makaris," the dead "makers " or poets, in- 
 cluding Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, with the recurring burden, 
 Timor mortis conturbat me, " Fear of Death disturbeth me ". In 
 1 5 1 1 he was with the Queen at her reception in Aberdeen, which 
 he celebrated, as he had already made immortal the filth and 
 stench of Edinburgh, a town famous for its dirt till after Dr: 
 Johnson's time. His humorous poems, his satires on society and 
 clergy, are coarser than the English poetic attacks. His Three 
 Wanton Wives, "Two Married Women and the Widow," is in- 
 spired by Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," or rather by the 
 prologue. 
 
 Historically, these poems are full of matter, with their pictures 
 of a society not more pure than that to which Piers Plowman 
 preached, but they have not the gentle and humane wit of Chaucer. 
 Like all the poets following Chaucer, Dunbar shines in descrip- 
 tions of gardens and woods in spring, though May, in Scotland, 
 is not always what his fancy painted it, indeed these vernal glories 
 are borrowed from the verse of sunny France — - 
 
 The sun rises fair in France, 
 
 And fair sets he, 
 But he has tint the bonny blink 
 
 He has in nay ain countrie, 
 
 writes the Jacobite exile, accustomed at. home, only to a "blink '' 
 of gleam of the sun through clouds. After 1520, or there- 
 abouts, Dunbar saw no more of the sun. 
 
 Dunbar, with his satires, "flytings," Court poems, allegories 
 of the usual kind, rhymed petitions, poems of penitence and faith, 
 and the rest, was versatile enough, and wrote in many forms of 
 verse, even in the old unrhymed alliterative cadences (" The tua 
 
140 English Literature 
 
 Mariit Wutnen and the Wedo "). To his glory be it said that 
 this, his longest piece, is only of 530 lines. He also used the 
 heroic rhymed couplet, "Riding Rhyme," and the rhymed octo- 
 syllabic couplet, strophes of various arrangements, and even the 
 tripping French triolet. 
 
 One allegorical poem, "The Golden Targe," full of classical 
 mythology and the usual praise of May, contains the lines 
 
 O reverend Chaucere, Rose of rethoris all, 
 As in our tong ane flour imperiall, 
 
 "rethoris," being masters of rhetoric. 
 
 Dunbar escapes from Venus and other gods, and from a crowd 
 of allegorical people — including Danger, of course, — ^at the end 
 of 278 lines. Apparently Scotland did not love the long-winded 
 style. The " flyting " combines with rhyme copious alliteration. 
 
 For wealth of strange coarse terms of abuse Dunbar may com- 
 pare with Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais. A poem to the 
 young Queen is unspeakably nauseous. In short to be plain, it 
 is not easy to see why Dunbar has been reckoned above James I 
 and Henryson; while Barbour, with a chivalrous heart and a 
 spirited story, is infinitely more agreeable and profitable than the 
 Court-haunting priest of James IV. In Scotland, Dunbar at no 
 time has been so popular as the poets already mentioned. He 
 praises Chaucer, but the lesson of Chaucer he never fully learned. 
 
 Blind Harry. 
 
 Blind Harry, or " Henry the Minstrel," is a mysterious person- 
 age. WhowasHarry? John Mair or Major (1469-1550) (?) is not 
 an accurate historian ; the Antiquary, in Scott's novel, calls him 
 " a pillar of falsehood ". Major says that, in his own infancy (say 
 1480) a man blind from his birth wrote "Schir William Wallace," 
 and supported himself by chanting it to the nobles. The manu- 
 script is of 1488. A few entries of small sums paid to " Blind 
 Harry " occur in the Royal accounts, ending in 1492, and Harry 
 was dead when (1508) Dunbar printed his Lament for poets dead 
 and gone. Harry may have become blind, but can hardly have 
 been blind from his birth. Though he calls himself " a borel man," 
 
Early Scottish Literature 141 
 
 an unlettered man, he had some education ; he was not a ballad 
 maker, but produced a romance of nearly 12,000 lines. He says 
 that he had a Latin source, a narrative written by Wallace's chap- 
 lain, John Blair, of which nothing is known. 
 
 He is full of anachronisms, and tells long adventures of Wal- 
 lace with Edward I and his Queen which never occurred. Tra- 
 dition, already mythical, is his chief source, his Wallace is but 
 little more historical than Grettir in the Icelandic Saga, and 
 like him has dealings with a ghost, that of a slain man, which 
 appears with its head in its hand. Wallace, whose wife, it is 
 said, was slain by the English, is a very bloodthirsty hero ; his 
 manslayings and burnings of houses are many. Harry has not 
 too high an opinion of Bruce. His hero, Wallace, has always 
 been, thanks mainly to Harry, the most popular of Scottish heroes. 
 Harry tells his tale with abundant energy ; he hates the English 
 infinitely more than the chivalrous Barbour did, and he is per- 
 fectly free from the influence of the " Roman de la Rose ". His 
 verse is not wholly correct ; eight consecutive lines have the fol- 
 lowing rhymes, — "been, keen, saw, mean, seen, raw, knaw,«teir, 
 faw,'' indeed some passages have a kind of stanza formation, in the 
 Second Book (lines 260-360). 
 
 We must not look on Harry as an unlearned maker of Border 
 ballads. He had read Wyntoun, and Chaucer (though he does 
 not make Chaucer his model), and he borrows from the alliterative 
 romance of "Arthur" ascribed to the mysterious Huchown. 
 Moreover, it has been proved, and anybody can see it, that he 
 stole adventures of Robert Bruce from Barbour's poem, and made 
 Wallace, not Bruce, their hero. Harry takes some of Bruce's 
 battles and transfers them to Wallace. " Harry nearly uproots 
 Barbour." Whereas Bruce, on the eve of Bannockburn, cut down 
 Sir Henry Bohun, as he charged, with a blow of his ^axe, Harry 
 declares that Wallace dealt this very stroke on Bruce's spear and 
 horse's neck. To Wallace he attributes the famous campaign in 
 which Bruce drove Edward H within the walls of York (1322). ^ 
 
 Harry is, in short, a mystery, and his book, wholly worthless 
 
 'See proofs by Mr: George Neilson, in Blind Harry's " Wallace," " Essays 
 and Studies," by Members of the English Association, igio. 
 
142 English Literature 
 
 as history, is a colossal perversion of Barbour " The Bruce," with 
 other matter from pure fancy or from unknown legend, while 
 great parts are played by men of Harry's own time, English in- 
 vading knights of 1483. 
 
 The Buke of the Howlat. 
 Sir Richard Holland, or de Holand, a cleric, and a partisan of 
 the House of Douglas during its encounters with the Crown, and 
 its fall under James H, wrote, to please his patroness, the Countess 
 of Moray, and to flatter the Douglas, "The Buke of the Howlat," 
 the Owl. The poem, in stanzas of thirteen lines, rhyming and 
 alliterative, begins with the usual dream and leads up to a kind of 
 allegorical " Parliament of Fowls ". The allegory is entangled, 
 the poet's real desire is to glorify his patrons with their motto, 
 
 O Dowglass, Dowglass, 
 Tender and Trewe I 
 
 " Trewe " they had been, to Bruce and to Scotland, but they be- 
 came the allies, against king and country, of Edward IV and 
 Henry VIH, while " tender " the Douglases never were. The 
 , most interesting passage describes the voyage of the good Lord 
 James towards the Holy Land, with the heart of Bruce. In Spain 
 he meets the Saracens in battle, and throws among them the 
 Heart, in its jewelled case — 
 
 Amang the hethin men the hert hardely he slang, 
 Said, " Wend on as thou was wont, 
 Throw the batell in front. 
 Ay formost in the front, 
 Thy foes amang." 
 
 There fell the Douglas, above the heart of his king, that was rescued 
 by Logan and Lockhart, and brought back to Scotland ; a noble 
 feat t)f chivalry, nobly told. Here Holland " stirs the blood like 
 the sound of a trumpet ". 
 
 It may be said of these Scottish poets that while, in initiative 
 and in models they owe almost all to England, their long and 
 desperate war with that country gives them a martial fire and 
 spirit to which the English poetry of the time furnishes no rival. 
 Laurence Minot does not stir the blood ! 
 
Early Scottish Literature 143 
 
 Gawain Douglas. 
 
 Gawain Douglas was of the family of the Red Douglases, 
 Earls of Angus, who rose on the ruin of the turbulent Black 
 Douglases, of the House of Bruce's good Lord James, when they 
 failed in their alliance with England against the Crown of Scot- 
 land. The Red Douglases also rose high, and had their own 
 feud with the Crown and alliance with or servitude to Henry 
 VIII and the Protestant cause. Gawain was a younger son of 
 the Earl of Angus called Bell the Cat, who hanged the artistic 
 favourites of James III. As an old man he was present at 
 Flodden (1513) where James IV died so gallantly, and his 
 grandson, now Earl of Angus, married Dunbar's " Rose," 
 Margaret Tudor, widow of James IV. Gawain himself, born 
 about 1473 or 1474, was educated at St. Andrews University, 
 took orders, and, being of a powerful House, received rapid 
 clerical promotion. 
 
 His poems were written in the peaceful and prosperous years 
 of James IV, between 1501 and 1513, the date of Flodden and 
 of the completion of Ga wain's translation of the " Mneid " of Virgil. 
 His earlier works "The Palice of Honour" and " King Hart," 
 are merely rhymed allegories after the manner of the unceasing 
 "Roman de la Rose," and have no special interest. What is 
 true about one of these belated last allegories is true of another : 
 they are no longer to be read for mere literary pleasure. In his 
 " ^neid," Douglas introduces original prologues to the books of the 
 "^neid," rather in the manner of Scott's poetical epistles between 
 the cantos of " Maftnion ". He describes winter, spring, and 
 summer in Scotland. He criticizes, not unfavourably, the theo- 
 logy of Virgil, whom the Middle Ages regarded, now as a magician 
 (like Ovid among the Italian peasantry to this day), and now as 
 an inspired prophet of the coming of Our Lord. He attacks 
 Caxton for printing a translation of Virgil, not from the original 
 Latin, but from a French version. His criticism of Caxton is 
 full of detail, and severe. He himself is " bound to Virgil's text," 
 and he does not treat it, as a rule, with the licence of Chapman 
 when rendering Homer into English verse ; but Gawain remarks. 
 
144 English Literature 
 
 truly, that sometimes of one word he must make three, must 
 occasionally expand in exposition, and add, in colouring. 
 
 Sura tyme I follow the text als neir I may, 
 Sum tyme I am constreinit ane uther way. 
 
 His remarks on the task of the translator show considerable 
 reflection. On comparing the poem with the Latin it seems more 
 close in sense to the great untranslatable original than might have 
 been expected in an uncritical age and country. It is the first 
 attempt in our language at the rendering of a great ancient 
 classic, and, as such, looks forward to the new times, and to the 
 Renaissance which, in Scotland, was mainly confined to Biblical 
 criticism. 
 
 After Flodden, Gawain was immersed in politics, and in a long 
 and futile struggle to obtain, through English influence, the Arch- 
 bishopric of St. Andrews. For this he fought a triangular duel 
 (nor were the weapons of the flesh unused), with Hepburn, the 
 Prior, and Forman, a clerical diplomatist, who was successful. 
 Gawain obtained the petty Bishopric of Dunkeld, on the Tay, 
 and died when on a political mission to London (1522). Gawain 
 is almost the only Scottish example of a nobleman and a Church- 
 man, in his age, distinguished for devotion to literary scholarship. 
 There are a number of Scots poems, of this date, such as " Christ's 
 Kirk on the Green " and " Peebles at the Play " (the best of them), 
 which show much command of lively metre and rude descriptive 
 powers where rustic merriment and horseplay are to be painted. 
 But their dialect is usually uncouth, and they are only appreciated 
 by special students. 
 
 Sir David Lyndsay. 
 
 The most popular of the old Scottish poets was not so 
 poetical as Henryson, but gave pleasure by his genial character, 
 his extremely coarse humour, and his attacks on the Churchmen 
 and on abuses in the State. This author, Sir David Lyndsay, 
 was born, perhaps at his family place, the Mount, in Fife, about 
 1490. His name "Da. Lyndsay" (if it be his) appears in the 
 register of St. Andrews University besides that of the man whom 
 
Early Scottish Literature 145 
 
 he hated so much, and attacked i« verse after his murder, the 
 great Cardinal Beaton. By 1511, Lyndsay was a page at Court, 
 and acted in a play at Holy rood. In 1512, Lyndsay was Master 
 of the Household, or chief attendant of the infant Prince, later 
 James V. He was present when the apparition described in 
 " Marmion " gave a warning, in church, to James IV, just before 
 Flodden, and told Lyndsay of Pitscottie, the amusing chronicler, 
 that he tried to arrest the figure " but he vanished away as if he 
 had been a blink of the sun or a whiz of the whirlwind ". Till 
 1522 his chief business was to teach and amuse the boy, James V; 
 
 I bore thee in mine arm 
 Full tenderly, 
 
 and, later, told him fairy tales such as the story of the Red Etin, 
 or disguised himself as " the grisly ghost of Guy ". 
 
 About 1528 Lyndsay wrote "The Dream e " (the usual allegor- 
 ical dream), in 1529 he was made chief herald, "Lord Lyon King 
 of Arms," and as such went on many foreign embassies. In 1539- 
 1540 his great play, "The Satire of the Three Estates," was acted 
 before the Court ; it is the only early Scottish drama that survives. 
 There are two Parts, and three interludes full of matter wonder- 
 fully coarse. The play is all in favour of reforms, and is full of 
 the satire of the Churchmen and pleadings for the poor which 
 ensured its popularity. There are some seventy characters, most 
 of them allegorical personages. The King delighted in the satire, 
 and as Lyndsay attacked the vices of the clergy and the Pardoners, 
 not the doctrines of the Church, he ran no risk of martyrdom. 
 The verse is in many forms and different sorts of stanzas, in rhym- 
 ing couplets of eight syllables, or of ten or more. 
 
 After James's death and the murder of Cardinal Beaton, 
 Lyndsay wrote a poem, " The Tragedy of the Cardinal " in which 
 his ghost accuses himself of many sins and crimes, and is sure that 
 Boccaccio would write " my tragedie," if Boccaccio were still alive. 
 Lyndsay died early in 1555. His most popular poem, probably, 
 was a good-humoured romance, " Squire Meldrum," about the 
 fighting adventures, at home and abroad, of a young Fife laird of 
 the period. He wrote many other things, humorous or grave, 
 
 10 
 
146 English Literature 
 
 admonitions to the King, and a reply to a " Flyting " or scolding, 
 of the King against him, in verse ; unluckily the Royal lampoon is 
 lost. A Lament for James's first wife who died young ; a very 
 humorous set of verses on the King's dog ; and a " Dialogue be- 
 tween Experience and a Courtier," with shorter pieces, grave or 
 gay, make up Lyndsay's 'contribution to the literature of his 
 country. They are full of historical hints, but, merely as poetry, 
 are now seldom read, as Henryson may be read, for pleasure. The 
 Reformation, breaking out in 1559, distracted men's minds from 
 secular literature, to which, for more than a century, Scotland con- 
 tributed nothing of real importance except the " History of the 
 Reformation " by John Knox, the Reformer. This work is written 
 in such English (not Scots) as Knox could command, for in origin 
 it was meant to be read in England, and to justify the proceedings 
 of the Reformers. It is partly derived from memory of the events 
 and the memory is sometimes strangely inaccurate. Public docu- 
 ments are inserted at full length, in one case with some lack of 
 candour, and actions are denied which, later, were acknowledged. 
 The book, as history, needs to be cautiously studied, but as a 
 picture of the men and women of the age, especially of Knox him- 
 self and Queen Mary, it is most vivacious, and may be read with 
 interest and amusement. Knox's other works, theological, epis- 
 tolary, and political, were written to meet the needs of the moment, 
 and are of little value except to historians and students of the 
 career and character of the author. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 POPULAR POETRY. BALLADS. 
 
 The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and Scotland 
 were rich in popular poetry and in ballads. We must define the 
 meaning of "popular" and "ballad" poetry, as used in this 
 chapter. 
 
 Much confusion and much controversy exist regarding this matter of ballads 
 and popular poetry. To understand the subject it is necessary to be acquainted 
 with the results of research in the orally transmitted verse of peoples in every 
 stage of culture ; for till elementary instruction in reading and writing become 
 universal, the untaught rural classes retain, in their songs, the literary methods 
 of the quite uncivilized races of Australia, North America, Africa, and so on. 
 Taking the peoples lowest in civilization, we find that the Australian blacks 
 and the American Red Indians have several kinds of songs, usually sung in 
 dances, whether festive or religious or magical. They have magic chants, and 
 even hymns, often unintelligible to those who sing them in the dance, either 
 because the language is obsolete, or because the songs have been borrowed from 
 tribes of alien speech. It is clear that in Europe, too, the ballad was originally 
 a dancing song {" ballad " is from ballare, to dance), and where a story was told, 
 that was given in recitative, while the dancers followed each line of narrative 
 with a chorus or refrain, such as 
 
 There were three ladies lived in a bower, 
 
 Oh wow I bonnie. 
 And they went out to pu' a flower 
 
 On the bonnie banks o' Fordie. 
 
 The story told in the recitative, in surviving examples, was probably, at first, 
 composed by one author, versifying a popular tale, of unknown antiquity, or 
 narrating some recent event. Even now in the remoter isles of the Hebri des, 
 various singers, each in turn, improvise and chant verses, and thus a kind of 
 ballad is made collectively. But it is plain that for each of our oldest surviving 
 narrative ballads there must have been one original author, whether his theme 
 was an old story or a recent occurrence, — on the Borders usually a cattle raid, 
 the escape of a prisoner, or a battle. There would be no professional poet, as 
 
 147 10 * 
 
148 English Literature 
 
 Queen Mary's ally, Bishop Leslie of Ross tells us, in his " History of Scotland," 
 " the Borderers themselves make their own ballads, about the deeds of their 
 ancestors, or crafty raids or forays". Such unwritten songs would be altered 
 by every singer, as time went by, so that these ballads as they stand are thor- 
 oughly popular and " masterless," many hands have combined to bring them 
 into their present state. 
 
 The Robin Hood ballads, or songs about Robin Hood, are mentioned by 
 Piers Plowman as popular among the peasants at the end of the fourteenth 
 century. They would be sung in connexion with the very ancient festivities 
 of May Day, held in England and Scotland, when money was collected, 
 rather roughly, from spectators and passers-by. Now Wynkyn de Worde, 
 the successor of Caxton as a printer, published a " Lytil Geste " of Robin Hood 
 (about 1490). But we are not obliged to suppose that the songs known to 
 Piers Plowman were borrowed from the " long Geste " of Robin Hood ; 
 more probably the " Geste " was derived from the popular traditions and 
 rhymes of the May Day show of Robin Hood. How far these ballads as 
 they now exist have been organized and improved upon by a professional 
 minstrel it is hard to say. In any case the older ballads are worthy of merry 
 England. 
 
 The ballads of King Arthur are manifestly popularized and reduced to 
 the simple ballad form from the long literary romances, and are probably the 
 work of lowly professional minstrels. 
 
 The long ballad of " Flodden Field " is the work of a partisan of the 
 Stanley family, it is far too long (over 500 lines), and too full of historical 
 detail, for a ballad made by the Borderers themselves. " Scottish Field " 
 (Flodden) is another piece of the same sort, in alliterative measure. 
 
 The class of ballad which was made as a narrative of current events, or 
 a satire on contemporaries (of such ballad-satires Henry VHI complained 
 to James V) was usually, in England, the work of a versifying journalist of 
 the humblest sort, and was printed. John Knox tells us that ballads were 
 made on Queen Mary's Four Maries (Mary Livingstone, Mary Fleming, 
 Mary Beaton and Mary Seaton), and these, it is plain, were satirical. But 
 the only survivor of these ballads, " Mary Hamilton," is romantic, and in all 
 its many various forms transfers, to a non-existent Mary, the misfortunes 
 of a French waiting-maid of the Queen, who, jvith her lover, an apothecary, 
 was hanged for the murder of their child. In only one text is the lover an 
 apothecary : the lady is sometimes not an apocryphal Hamilton, but a Camp- 
 bell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll ; or a daughter of the Duke of York, or 
 even " Mary Mild " (or Mile) which is the name of our Lady in old carols. 
 For the lover, the poet chooses Henry Darnley, husband of Queen Mary, or 
 that old offender, " Sweet Willie," or any one ; and this is a good example 
 of the changes which popular ballads underwent in recitation. As they stand, 
 the multitude has collaborated in them, reciters have altered the original in 
 many ways. 
 
 Such ballads differ much from " Lady Bessy," with its 1080 lines, 
 probably written by Humphrey Brereton in honour of the House of 
 
Popular Poetry, Ballads 149 
 
 Stanley and of Lady Bessie's revenge on Richard III. Some verses are as 
 spirited as those of " Kinmont Willie," a Border ballad to which Scott lent 
 the vigour of the last and greatest of the Border makers, for probably the 
 finest verses in the song are by Sir Walter himself: at all events he im- 
 proved what old verses he found. 
 
 At Bosworth Field, when all is lost, Sir William Harrington says to 
 Richard III :— 
 
 " There may no man their strokes abide, 
 
 The Stanleys' dints they be so strong, 
 Ye may come in another time ; 
 
 Therefore raethink ye tarry too long." 
 
 As lion-hearted as his namesake Richard I, Richard III replies : — 
 
 " Give me my battle-axe in my hand, 
 
 And set my crown on my head so high. 
 
 For by Him that made both sea and land. 
 King of England will I this day die. 
 
 " One foot of ground I will not flee 
 
 While the strength abides my breast within," 
 
 As he said so did it be, 
 
 If he lost his life he died a king. 
 
 The early history of our purely romantic ballads, such as " Clerk 
 Sanders," "The Douglas Tragedy," "The Dowie Dens o' Yarrow," 
 " Young Beichan," " The Wife of Usher's Well," " Fair Annie," " Tamlane," 
 and many more, is obscure. They have analogues in all European countries, 
 from Greece to Scandinavia, and in popular tales, the oldest things in litera- 
 ture. Their extraordinary charm, their touch of supernatural terror, their 
 simplicity, their recurring formulje of words, their brevity and pathos, make 
 them things apart. The heart of humanity is their maker, though in each 
 country where they exist local allusions and local colour have been given to 
 them by the singers. When such ballads have been worked over by some 
 hack of the early Press they are often worthless; the best have been collected 
 from oral recitation, or old written copies. 
 
 There. can be no universal theory of the origin of ballads; each ballad 
 must be examined by itself before we can say whether it is a popularized ' 
 shape of a literary romance, or a versified " Marchen " worked over by many 
 hands in many ages, or a mere mythical news-letter, like " King James and 
 Brown" ; or the work, like " Otterburne," of a humbler poet than the min- 
 strels of the Stanleys, but a better poet ; or one whose work h^s been im- 
 proved by the modifications of later singers ; or whether the thing is a dance 
 song, contributed to by each dancer in turn ; or a brief and beautiful lament 
 like " The Bonny Earl o' Murray "- The best traditional ballads have the 
 colour and fragrance of wild flowers. 
 
 Curious and very ancient traits of popular usages may be gathered from 
 the songs of merrymaking, for example in the songs of Ivy, the badge of the 
 
150 English Literature 
 
 women, and of Holly, the badge of the men. Girls and lads bring ivy and 
 holly into halls and a fight ensues, the girls are thrust out into the cold. 
 
 " Nay, nay Ivy it may not be, I wis. 
 For Holly must have mastery, as the manner is." 
 
 The girls burned the " Holly boy " of the men, the men burned the " Ivy 
 maid " of the girls. This ancient feud of the sexes, and of their patron birds, 
 exists among the tribes of South-Eastern Australia, the men killing the bird 
 of the women, the women the bird of the men, and an amorous kind of com- 
 bat follows. 
 
 The old ballad of " Chevy Chace," a form of the older ballad on the 
 battle of Otterburn (1388) was warmly praised by Sir Philip Sidney. Later 
 Addison took delight in ballads : they began to be collected and printed in 
 volumes towards the end of the seventeenth and early in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. In 1765 Bishop Percy printed many ballads and other early poems 
 from a manuscript, the " Folio " which he found, tattered and mutilated, in 
 the house of a friend. Percy, in his " Reliques," omitted, altered and 
 modernized the contents of the Folio, but it was very popular. In 1803 and 
 later Sir Walter Scott published " The Border Minstrelsy," containing many 
 excellent old ballads, in places modified by himself, from manuscripts, recita- 
 tions, and printed copies. It is in " The Minstrelsy " that we find the " clas- 
 sical" versions of the ballads; there are many other collections. 
 
 We have put into smaller type a short account of the probable 
 origins and development of the ballad, because a study of these 
 subjects is mainly based on folk-lore and on research into the 
 unwritten poetry of backward races. The reader of poetry who 
 is not concerned about an obscure and difficult subject, is best 
 advised if he takes up Scott's " Border Minstrelsy '' and reads it 
 " for human pleasure ". He will find endless variety of strong, 
 simple, passionate poetry, seldom made difficult by obsolete words, 
 for the ballads are, however old, far less Scots in language than 
 the poems of Burns. Another good collection is the abridgement 
 by Professor Kittredge, of the late Professor Child's vast col- 
 lection of ballads in five volumes, a work indispensable to the 
 special student. 
 
 Though it is not a ballad, the most beautiful and loyal piece of 
 masterless poetry of this age is "The Nut Brown Maid," already 
 old when it was published in 1502. This is a defence of woman's 
 faithfulness in love, the maid will follow her outlawed lover to the 
 greenwood, ay, even if he have another lady there. Her lover 
 replies :— 
 
Professional Poetry 151 
 
 Lo yet, before, ye must do more, 
 
 Yf ye wyll go with me ; 
 As cut your here up by your ere, 
 
 Your kyrtel by the kne ; 
 With b'owe in hande, for to withstande 
 
 Your enemyes, yf nede be. 
 
 Scott's song, " Greta Banks," in "Rokeby," repeats the senti- 
 ment and metre of this beautiful poem, with its music and mastery of 
 changing refrains and various measures. Some of the carols too, 
 such as " I sing of a Maid," are the earliest notes in the bird-like 
 music of the lyrists under Elizabeth and Charles I. 
 
 PROFESSIONAL POETRY. 
 Skelton. Barclay. 
 
 Meanwhile professional poetry of society and the Court was sinking to 
 the lowest depth. The verse of the prolific priest and scholar, John Skelton 
 (born 1460 ? died 1529 ?), leads nowhere, and though it is full of historical and 
 personal interest, must not detain us. Skelton had honours of a sort, as 
 Laureate, from Oxford, Cambridge, and Louvain. He translated parts of 
 Cicero and other classics, and, in 1500, was highly praised by the famous 
 Erasmus, who later brought the study of the New Testament in Greek to i 
 England, and was the wittiest of scholars in the Revival of Learning and of 
 Greek literature. Skelton had Latin enough, of Greek not much, and about 
 1500 was tutor of the future Henry VHI. His profuse poetry is mainly in 
 long but lively stretches of doggerel ; very short rhyming verses, generally 
 satirical, poured from him ceaselessly. He had a "flyting" or scolding 
 match like that of Dunbar and Kennedy, with Sir Christopher Garnesche ; 
 he lamented at terrible length the death of " PhiHp Sparrow," slain by " our 
 Cat Gib" — nothing can be less like CatuUus's dirge for Lesbia's sparrow, but 
 some graceful compliments to young ladies are intermixed with the doggerel. 
 He owed the Rectory of Diss, Norfolk, probably to his patron, Wolsey, but 
 for some unknown reason he later pursued Wolsey with libellous satires. 
 
 In "The Bowge of Court," when he relapses into stanzas and the out- 
 worn allegorical verbiage, he satirizes Court life. In " Colyn Clout," his hero 
 is a tramp, as vehement in attack on all sorts and conditions of men as Piers 
 Plowman. Wolsey was attacked as a despot in " Colyn Clout," and much 
 more bitterly assailed in " Why come ye not to Court " : after writing this 
 piece Skelton fled from his foes and creditors to sanctuary in Westminster. 
 He wrote a long " Morality," " Magnificence," with the usual personified 
 vices and virtues. In very bad taste he hurled doggerel at " King Jimmy," 
 James IV, after his glorious death at Flodden, and,, more deservedly, attacked 
 the Scots who deserted the Duke of Albany and the French when the Duke 
 wished to lead them across the Tweed. 
 
152 English Literature 
 
 A brief sample of Skelton when most Skeltonical is his reply to the 
 alleged boast of tlie Scots that they won the battle of Flodden. 
 
 That is as true 
 
 As black is blue 
 
 And green is grey 
 
 Whatever they say 
 
 Jemmy is dead 
 
 And closed in lead, 
 
 That was their own king : 
 
 Fie on that winning ! 
 Even in his own country, as he admits, the execrable taste of Skelton was 
 reproved. He had a rude kind of vigour, but his verses make it manifest 
 that a new strain of blood, as it were, was needed in English poetry : old 
 forms, such as the allegorical form, were outworn quite, and verse resembling 
 the poem of Aramis, in lines of one syllable, could not endure, while Skelton's 
 " Crown of Laurel " mixes his own blusterous humour with the stale learning, 
 and pompous allegory of the fifteenth century ; and " The Tunning of Eleanor 
 Rummyng " (an alewife), in doggerel, is as offensive as the Scottish song, 
 "There was a haggis in Dunbar," and extends to 620 lines. Very truly 
 quoth Skelton : — 
 
 I have written too mytche 
 
 Of this mad mummynge 
 
 Of Elynour Rummynge. 
 
 Barclay. 
 
 Alexander Barclay (died 1552) was probably not a Scot, though his name 
 is spelt in the Scots not the English way (Berkeley). His high praises of 
 James IV of Scotland, however, scarcely indicate an English author, and he 
 was very early regarded as a Scot. He was a priest, a monk of Ely ; he dwelt 
 long at St. Mary Ottery in Devon, and was a copious translator. His " Ship 
 of Fools" (1508-1509) is from the German " Narrenschiff " of Sebastian 
 Brandt : his " Castle of Labour," from the French of Gringore was an earlier 
 work. His " Eclogues," in part translated, are very unlike those of Virgil, 
 and their contents are growls in the style of " Colyn Clout. 
 
 Barclay used French and Latin versions of the " Narrenschiff," as well as 
 the original " Dutch "- He altered and added to his original as he pleased, 
 and he prolongs the cry against abuses raised by Piers Plowman. A writer who 
 takes all follies and vices for his theme, from the frauds of friars, the wickedness 
 of heretics, the oppressions of knights, to the peevishness of the patient who 
 kicks over the table on which the physic bottles stand, can never want matter, 
 and Barclay's matter is exceeding abundant. 
 
 But the clever contemporary woodcuts that illustrate his satire are better 
 than his two thousand irregular stanzas in rhyme royal, and if Barclay quar- 
 relled with Skelton the affair is like a feud between Bavius and Maevius. 
 The two writers are characteristic of their rude and chaotic age, which, as 
 regards all but popular poetry, was the dark hour before the dawn. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 RISE OF THE DRAMA. 
 
 In one shape or another, the drama, acting with or without written 
 words, is always in existence, at least in the form of pantomime, 
 even among the rudest peoples. The Church permitted a kind of 
 half-ritual, half-dramatic representation of sacred scenes at a very 
 early period : but we have no earlier relic of English written plays 
 than the very brief " Harrowing of Hell " of the first half of the 
 fourteenth century. There are a few speeches between our Lord 
 and Satan, and our Lord and the released Hebrew patriarchs. A 
 good idea of the plays of the fifteenth century may be obtained 
 from the set called the " Townley Plays " because the manuscript 
 belonged at one time to the old Jacobite family of Townley. It 
 is thought to have been originally the property of the Abbey of 
 Woodkirk or Widkirk near Wakefield, and one play, the second play 
 representing the Shepherds at the birth of Christ, contains allusions 
 to the country scenes near Woodkirk. The plays were acted on 
 movable wooden stages, by the members of the various trade 
 guilds, such as the Glovers, the Barkers (Tanners, " There is 
 brass on the target of barkened bull's hide,'' says Scott in " Bonnie 
 Dundee "), the Grocers, and so forth. 
 
 The plays of one town are sometimes the basis of the plays of 
 another town, some of those of York follow those of Wakefield, 
 and in places Wakefield borrows from York. The authors are 
 unknown ; if they were priests, these clerics had much more of 
 broad humour than of reverence as we understand it. No doubt 
 the plays informed the spectators on points of the scriptural story, 
 but the religion was highly recreative. Nothing can have been 
 more amusing to the crowd than the spectacle of their neighbours 
 
 '53 
 
154 English Literature 
 
 playing all manner of highly laughable pranks by way of illustrat- 
 ing the gross, grumbling, reckless, impudent Cain ; or the rustic 
 waggeries of the local shepherds of Bethlehem. Even now the 
 words of the plays make a man laugh aloud, in the comic parts, as 
 he reads them. They are of the broadest farce, yet our mirth 
 rises more from the character displayed than from mere practical 
 buffoonery and clowning. The Tanners enacted the " Creation " ; 
 the Glovers, the " Death of Abel ". Many Old Testament stories 
 were played, the unaccomplished Sacrifice of Isaac, the story of 
 Abraham, and so on, with the Birth, Crucifixion, and Ascension of 
 our Lord, and the soliloquy and suicide of Judas, a fragment. 
 
 Whoever the authors may have been, they took pains to repre- 
 sent the most unearthly characters as very human, though the 
 opening soliloquy of the Deity at the Creation is orthodox and 
 majestic. The Cherubim then take up the tale, praising the 
 Works, especially praising Lucifer, " He is so lovely and so bright ! " 
 Lucifer enters and, accepting the praise, proposes to be Lord of 
 all and says that the Throne becomes him rarely, taking his seat 
 on it ! The bad Angels approve in the most colloquial style ; the 
 good dissent, and the bad, sent down below, express their lively 
 regrets. 
 
 The slaying of Abel is introduced by Garcio, not a scriptural 
 character, in an impudent speech ; and then Cain enters, ploughing, 
 cursing his horses, and wrangling with his boy, who offers to fight 
 him. Abel enters, full of human kindness, but Cain insults him 
 in the coarsest rustic manner, " Go to the Devil and say I bade ". 
 Abel insists that Cain should offer a burnt-sacrifice of a tenth of 
 his corn, but Cain loves paying tithes no more than any other 
 farmer. He grumbles in the true natural tone of the depressed 
 agriculturist. 
 
 When all men's corn was fair in field, 
 
 There was mine not worth a held. 
 
 The weather is such, says Cain, that the farmer owes no gratitude 
 to providence, no tithes. He selects his worst sheaves, as pay 
 tithe he must. The Deity intervenes, but Cain treats him with 
 the most serene insolence, kills the remonstrating Abel with the 
 jaw-bone of some animal, and, in short, is no more edifying than 
 
Rise of the Drama 155 
 
 Mr. Punch, whose lawless and irreverent behaviour in the popular 
 street drama is a survival of the humour of Cain. 
 
 The " Rejoicing of the Shepherds," the second play, is much more 
 human and various : the shepherds are full of the complaints of 
 their condition with which Piers Plowman has made us familiar, 
 but the provisions at their picnic are rich and various, and the 
 adventure of Mak, the sheep stealer, is of the best comedy. Hos- 
 pitably entertained by the shepherds, Mak steals a sheep, flays it, 
 and takes it home to his wife. They put it in a cradle, and cover 
 it with blankets, next Mak hies to the shepherds again, grumbling 
 that his wife has a new baby. They suspect and follow him ; he 
 denies his theft, and will eat the child in the cradle, if the sheep 
 can be found on his premises. It is found. This child, says a 
 shepherd, has too long a snout. Mrs. Mak, with much presence 
 of mind, admits the fact, but declares that her child is a fairy 
 changeling : fairies stole the baby at midnight, and left this ugly 
 substitute. The shepherds forgive Mak, for the joke's sake, after 
 tossing him in a sheet. 
 
 The same story is told of Archy Armstrong, the bolder reiver 
 and jester. When the shepherds go back to their flocks, the 
 Angel sings Gloria in excelsis ; and the shepherds criticize the 
 music learnedly, "there was no crochet wrong," and imitate the 
 air. The sacred part of the play, the Adoration, and offering of 
 balls and toys to the new-born babe, is very brief. The play is a 
 most humorous and lively representation of " our liberal shep- 
 herds," the sacred narrative merely affords a pretext for the 
 gambol. England was merry England in the fifteenth century, in 
 spite of defeats in France, murder and civil war at home, preach- 
 ings and burnings of Lollards, and all the grievances of Piers 
 Plowman, the cruelty of the great, and the greed and cunning of 
 the Friars. 
 
 The play of " Lazarus," on the other hand, is not only solemn, 
 closely following the words of the Gospel, but is as full as the 
 Anglo-Saxon poem, " The Grave," of sepulchral horrors. 
 
 Of the costumes we may judge by that of St. Paul on the road 
 to Damascus, in " The Digby Plays " — the Apostle is " dressed 
 like an adventurous knight," and is mounted. In place of scene- 
 
156 English Literature 
 
 shifting the audience shifted from one open-air stage in the street 
 to another. There were dances between the scenes. Paul's servant 
 has a scene of banter with an ostler. He maintains that he is a 
 gentleman's servant, a superior person. Says the ostler : " I saw 
 such another gendeman with you, a barrowful he bare of horse 
 dung . . . and such other gear ". 
 
 There are forty characters and a crowd in the play of " Mary 
 Magdalene," and much skill in stage management must have been 
 needed. In this play of more than two thousand lines allegorical 
 characters abound, including the Seven Deadly Sins ; much of the 
 Gospel story of the Magdalene is introduced, with lively scenes 
 from the unconverted career of the Lady of the Castle of Magdala, 
 and there is a long passage of sheer romance ; we have a storm 
 at sea ; the abandonment of the King's wife and child on a rock ; 
 their discovery later, alive and well — in fact the story is akin to 
 that in Shakespeare's " Pericles ". 
 
 We see that the secular entertainment, the drama of romance, 
 is ousting its religious occasion and pretext. In " Mary Magdalene," 
 too, we observe that the " Miracle Play " on sacred subjects, is com- 
 bined with the " Morality," the drama with allegorical characters 
 (as in the " Romance of the Rose "), presented in flesh and blood, 
 and therefore more entertaining than they are in the endless alle- 
 gorical poems. The Morality of" Everyman '' has been revived with 
 much success in our own time. In all these plays the verse takes 
 many rhymin ^; forms, mainly lyric. The chief collections are the 
 Townley, York, Chester, Digby, Coventry, and a Macro (named 
 from an owner of the manuscript). In the Macro play, " Mankind,'' 
 the actors make collections of money from the audience : they 
 must have belonged to a professional strolling company, not to 
 an honourable and disinterested trading guild. The piece is a 
 gross burlesque of morality, full of blatant jests and dog-Latin 
 rhymes. 
 
 There is a scientific Morality, an " Interlude," " The Four 
 Elements,'' in which Nature, Humanity, Studious Desire, Sensual 
 Appetite, Experience, and' Ignorance play their parts. Much 
 novel information about the dimensions of the earth and meteor- 
 ology is given ; Studious Desire is an apt pupil, but Sensual 
 
Rise of the Drama 157 
 
 Appetite and the Taverner offer instruction more palatable to " the 
 Man in the Street ". They introduce 
 
 little Nell 
 A proper wench, she danceth well, 
 And Jane with the black lace, - 
 We will have bouncing Bess also . 
 
 and Humanity slinks out of the lecture room, being more con- 
 cerned 
 
 to see a pretty girl. 
 It is a world to see her whirl 
 Dancing in a round, 
 
 than to observe the gyrations of the terrestrial globe. 
 
 In " Hickscorner," an interlude of the same kind, the hero 
 has been in as many places as Widsith himself, including 
 
 the land of Rumbelow 
 Three mile out of hell. 
 
 Hickscorner and Free Will are worse roisterers than Humanity, 
 and their rude waggeries make the mirth, though Free Will speaks 
 of forswearing sack and living cleanly. 
 
 Heywood. 
 
 John Heywood is one of the few known authors of these 
 things ; he was of what is now Pembroke College, Dr. Johnson's 
 College, in Oxford, and was an acquaintance of Sir Thomas 
 More, who frankly admits that by nature he was "a giglot,'' a gay 
 fellow, though, by grace, devout.- Heywood was merry in mourn- 
 ful times, when Henry VHI began to make martyrs of Protestants, 
 and of Catholics who were not, at any moment, of the same shade 
 of belief as himself. The anecdotes say that Heywood saved his 
 skin by his jests, that after Henry's death he amused Mary Tudor, 
 who was not easily amused, and that he fled from persecution 
 under Edward VI, and died abroad in the reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 His best-known piece is "The Four P's," a Pothecary, 
 Pardoner, Palmer, and Pedlar. Why, asks the Pardoner, should 
 the Palmer visit hundreds of remote shrines, while the Pardoner, 
 at his very door, can sell him forgiveness of sins at the lowest 
 
158 English Literature 
 
 figure? He can cleanse a thousand souls for as small a sum as 
 the Palmer spends on one voyage. All four men are impudent 
 rogues, and all, in the spirit of the Morality, are rapidly converted ; 
 the Pedlar becoming as pious as Piers Plowman. There is no 
 action, and the great jest is that, in a lying competition, the 
 Pedlar says that he has never seen " a woman out of patience ". 
 The diversion must have been derived mainly from the antics of 
 the players on the stage. 
 
 Heywood's " Thersites " (the impudent orator in the '' Iliad ") 
 was written about 1537, to make mirth for the birth feast of the 
 Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. Thersites asks Mulciber 
 (Hephsestus) to make him a helmet (sallet) as he made the arms 
 of Achilles. This enables Mulcib'er to vent many puns on salad; 
 they look like the very first puns ever devised, and occupy two 
 pages. The pun seems to have been a novelty in Tudor England. 
 Thersites is a rough-hewn predecessor of Shakespeare's Pistol. 
 There is much mockery of sacred relics and some buffoonery by 
 way of action. Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses (such a 
 thing, said J. J. Rousseau, very foolishly, would have been useful 
 in the " Odyssey ") and Miles, the Knight, ends all with a pious 
 speech. 
 I In early Tudor England the drama had sunk many fathoms 
 below the level of the Miracle Plays, such as that of the Shep- 
 herds. The rise of the drama, under Elizabeth, is a kind of 
 miracle, like the sculpture of Phidias appearing after the rude art 
 of the artists who worked at Athens before the victories of Mara- 
 thon and Salamis. 
 
 In " Jack Juggler, however, we find the influence of Roman 
 comedy faintly dawning, for the play is Plautus's comedy of 
 "Amphitryon," "without Amphitryon," the hero, and with the 
 mischievous and much-beaten Jack Juggler as the source of the 
 fun. 
 
 The infant drama had wandered out of Biblical and allegori- 
 cal subjects into touch with actual ancient Roman comedy, and, 
 with Bale's " King John," was preluding to Shakespeare's Chron- 
 icle Plays. In the dawn of the Reformation, disputants on both 
 sides addressed the people in Interludes, just as to-day a person 
 
Rise of the Drama 159 
 
 '• with a purpose " puts it into a novel, in place of writing a sober 
 and reasonable treatise which would not be read. Among the 
 plays with a purpose none is more absurd than the " King John " 
 of John Bale (1495-1563). Bale, whose best work is a kind of his- 
 tory of English literature in Latin, was a fiery hot gospeller ; he had 
 to leave the country under Mary Tudor. In " King John " that pro- 
 fane and licentious but astute prince appears as a kind of Protestant 
 martyr. Attacked by Stephen Langton, he says that the Church 
 hates him because he does not found abbeys, and is in favour 
 of an open Bible. So he is poisoned by the wicked priests I 
 
 In the interests of History no less than of her Church, Queen 
 Mary issued proclamations against plays with a Protestant pur- 
 pose, while Elizabeth was equally severe against Catholic Inter- 
 ludes. 
 
 We must think of these Interludes, whether moral, religious, 
 scientific, or amusing, being played from the reign of Henry VIII 
 till the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Till 1575 or 1576 there 
 were no theatre-houses ; stages were erected in halls of palaces, 
 castles, colleges, and in, open spaces of towns. The King or Queen 
 had Interlude players in their service, as they had musicians. Com- 
 panies calling themselves " the Servants," and wearing the liveries 
 of nobles and gentlemen, strolled about the country, protected by 
 their more or less nominal masters, and supporting themselves 
 by their skill in their profession. The "children," that is the 
 boys, of various schools, especially of St. Paul's, acted under the 
 managership of their teachers. The undergraduates of the Univer- 
 sities also acted, at first in Latin, before Queen Elizabeth, who 
 did not conceal her distaste for what did not amuse her. The 
 language of the plays was cast into all sorts of rhyming measures, 
 and " the Vice " or lively buffoon of the Interludes was the germ y 
 of the Shakespearean Clown. There was abundance both of 
 writers and players, but the plays had little merit as literature. 
 
 Ralph Roister Doister. 
 
 Among the unforgotten of these dwellers on the threshold of the 
 Elizabethan drama is " Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas 
 
i6o English Literature 
 
 Udall (1505-1556) (of Corpus Christi College,. Oxford, later 
 headmaster of Eton, and next of Westminster ; he died in the 
 reign of Mary Tudor). Th^Vice, so to speak, or clever buffooning 
 parasite, of the piece is Matthew Merrygreek, who in a long rhym- 
 ing prologue describes his own way of life and his intention to 
 befool the braggart Ralph Roister Doister. Ralph enters melan- 
 choly, he is in love : he has met the lady at supper, but forgets 
 her name. She is rich (says Matthew), a widow, and betrothed 
 to another man. Ralph is a fatuous ass, like Malvolio, and thinks 
 all women in love with him. Merrygreek fools him to the top of 
 his bent, and presents the lady with a forged love-letter from Ralph, 
 who is drubbed by the maid-servants and generally disgraced, while 
 the true love of the heroine returns from a voyage to be happy 
 with her. There is plenty of noise, singing, and beating, and 
 some intrigue in the case of the genuine wooer and his suspicious 
 jealousy. 
 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle. 
 
 The equally renowned " Gammer Gurton's Needle,'' was acted 
 sixteen years after " Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, 
 Cambridge. It is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a 
 member of Christ's, Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of 
 that College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop 
 of Bath and Wells (died 1608). As. Vice-Chancellor, Still was a 
 stickler for Latin plays at Cambridge, which were more educational 
 but not so popular as dramas in English. The plot turns on the 
 loss of a needle by old Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a 
 wag, that another old woman has stolen it ; the search for the 
 needle ; combats about the needle, and the final discovery of that 
 implement in the seat of a man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, 
 Diccon, is " the^^ce/' and sets Gammer Gurton and another 
 gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a servant, with his broad 
 dialect, and insistent demand for the needle, that a large and 
 unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may instantly be 
 patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when somebody 
 slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his 
 breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge 
 
Rise of the Drama i6i 
 
 audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the 
 language is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made 
 abundant mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister 
 University, where poets have been rare in comparison with these 
 glories of Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the 
 famous drinking song in the Second Act, " Back and Side go bare, 
 go bare ! " 
 
 The Bishop of Bath apd Wells probably looked back with 
 mingled feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, 
 which has made him immortal, for all have heard of " Gammer 
 Gurton's Needle ". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen 
 to sixteen syllables. 
 
 " GORBODUC ''. 
 
 " The Gammer," though low, is lively ; not so is " Gorboduc " ; 
 it is a tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse 
 which has no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, 
 though not always, ending at the close of each line. The author, 
 Thomas Sackville , later Lord Backhurst and Earl of Dorset, and 
 High Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, 
 Sussex, in 1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so 
 he was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, 
 as a young man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed 
 " Gorboduc," which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The 
 authors were inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca^the 
 moral philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor 
 Nero. The play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, 
 abdicated, and, dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country 
 north of the Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the 
 Humber to the elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each 
 had a kind of tutor, and each had a favourite. They were both 
 discontented, the younger slew the elder son, and the mother of 
 both avenges the elder on the younger of her children. The result 
 was national ruin, in which " Fergus Duke of Albany " (apparently 
 King of Scotland is meant) took an active part. There are very 
 long speeches, no action ; a messenger brings the news of the dis- 
 tressing occurrences, and a Chorus moralizes on them. Carried 
 
 II 
 
1 62 English Literature 
 
 away by grief when his wife murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc 
 pronounces the name of Eubulus with the penultimate syllable 
 short, and expires with decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then 
 utters a political forecast in more than a hundred lines, and the 
 drama concludes. 
 
 " Gorboduc " was printed in 1565 : translations of Seneca's plays 
 were also being written : George Gascoigne translated a piece 
 named "Jocasta" (the wife of CEdipus) from the Italian, and a 
 prose comedy, "The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great 
 Italian poet and his countrymen adapted to Italian man- 
 ners the plots and characters which the ancient comic drama- 
 tists of Rome, Terence and Plautus, derived from late Greek 
 comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of orderliness in 
 comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of Italian 
 adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock 
 characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning 
 servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of 
 tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree, 
 that of England. 
 
 Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude 
 of a classical nature, " Damon and Pythias," the characters being 
 Gi-eek, Sicilian and English — a dash of buffoonery is mixed with 
 very lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to 
 attain definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we 
 reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such 
 
 .as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young 
 men about town. Th e infln pnrps gf the "'^ waggish or controver- 
 sial Interludes, o f the~5'enp iliri fir^""' Of Sli'ff'"''^^-^"^ ,, pf tran s- 
 
 'lationij grtmitati ons^ of _ Itfiilim Cff '7"i''1iigff , were seeth ing i n t he 
 
 cauldron oithe'sLRe. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE. 
 
 The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry 
 Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in 
 English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for 
 what they attempted. They abstained from alleynry. still lingering 
 in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of them- 
 selves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their 
 verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated 
 in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They 
 turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw 
 afar the dawning of the "Pleiade," the company of French re- 
 formers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the 
 rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But 
 both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, 
 Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The 
 two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the 
 Bion and Moschus of Greece : theirs is " unfulfilled renown ". 
 
 Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of 
 Allington in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune 
 in the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went 
 very early to St. John's College, Cambridge, married at 17, 
 was a glory of the Court of Henry VIII, went on diplomatic 
 missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and Rome), 
 studied Italian literature, was now in favour and now in prison, 
 and made love, with more or less of earnestness, to Anne Boleyn, 
 being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her admirers when 
 Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's minister, 
 Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic mis- 
 
 163 1 1 * 
 
164 English Literature 
 
 deeds by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success 
 then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems 
 on the advaritages of retirement ; paraphrased the Seven Peni- 
 tential Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and 
 travel, in October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey. 
 
 The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed 
 to find that we have travelled through so many centuries of the 
 life of English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely 
 be scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very 
 dim, perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the lan- 
 guage, the obsolescence of the sound of the final e, and the Angliciz- 
 ing of the sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the 
 accent (as in honour for honour, virtue for virtue). Wyatt, when 
 he began to write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and 
 counted syllables on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten 
 of them in a line. To rhyme "aggrieved" to " wearied," is like 
 the tramp's effort to make "workhouse"' rhyme with "sorrow"'. 
 The young student in a novel of Henri Murger's reads only the 
 rhymes in sonnsts. If we study in that way Wyatt's sonnet "The 
 Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last words in the first 
 eight lines are 
 
 aggrieved 
 
 last 
 
 past 
 
 wearied 
 
 buried 
 
 fast 
 
 haste 
 
 stirred. 
 
 He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes 
 in the first eight lines ab baabb a, but, contrary to Italian rule, his 
 last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's 
 " Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. 
 The sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, 
 while in the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the with- 
 drawal of the wave of the first eight lines. 
 
 The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, 
 afforded excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring 
 
Wyatt and Surrey 165 
 
 delicacy and order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as 
 written by Skelton and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is 
 among the rarest of good things, and the mere technical difficulties 
 once overcome, men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value 
 with the rapidity of machine work. The stock character of this 
 kind of poetry, the Lover, with his strange far-fetched conceit in 
 his almost metaphysical refinements, is apt to become as tedious 
 as the old figures of allegory ; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt 
 improved with practice in sonnet-making, though such rhymes as 
 " mountains," " fountains," " plains," " remains," a.re a stumbling- 
 block to the modern reader. But his " And wilt thou leave me 
 thus ? '' and "Forget not yet the tried intent," with their brief refrains 
 are immortal lyrics, heralding the music of the age of Elizabeth. 
 
 His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly 
 called epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams 
 of the Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on 
 Italian poems, and including a form of the " Town and Country 
 Mouse," are not in Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle 
 man, and the poems in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six 
 syllables to the line, are charming novelties. 
 
 The Earl of Surrey. 
 
 The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain : it was four or five 
 years after the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather 
 — " an auld decrepit carle in a chariot — '' was victorious over the 
 fiery James IV. "The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne 
 by the poet as son of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a 
 dozen years younger than his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young 
 courtier, who was made a Knight of the Garter in 1541. He 
 married very early, in 1532, and his famous passion for fair 
 Geraldine may have been merely poetical — the usual story about 
 Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from a novel of 1554. 
 About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a duel, a challenge 
 at least, and in 1543 went about London at night breaking win- 
 dows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he gravely main- 
 tains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for lier sins. 
 Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France, and. 
 
1 66 English Literature 
 
 returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept 
 unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had 
 the worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded 
 by the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort 
 of heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Con- 
 fessor, who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and 
 executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VHI. 
 
 Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior 
 to that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, 
 in the first eight lines ; indeed he writes in the form of Shakes- 
 peare's sonnets. His " Prisoned in Windsor '' is a pleasant picture 
 of a young gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis 
 to watch the ladies in the dedans; hunts, tilts, and makes 
 friends. The moral poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no 
 great merit, but Surrey's translation of the Second Book of the 
 .iEneid is the first English example of blank verse, borrowed 
 from Italian practice. The lines are stiff and hard ; and the main 
 merit is the novelty, the first birth of the measure that was to 
 become, in forty years, " Marlowe's mighty line ". 
 
 Tottel's Miscellany. 
 The poems of Wyatt and Surrey were not published till long 
 after the deaths of the authors, when they appeared, with many 
 other pieces, in " Tottel's Miscellany ". Other writers' represented 
 there are Nicholas Grimald, with his jog-trot metre, the "poulter's " 
 or poulterer's measure of fronf twelve to fourteen syllables to 
 the dozen — so were eggs sold by a custom of the trade. Surrey's 
 retainer, Thomas Churchyard, a man very busy with sword and 
 pen, was also a writer in the " Miscellany " ; and indeed was a 
 literary hack-of-all-work. There came, after the brief gleam of 
 sunshine that fell on Wyatt and Surrey, another generation of 
 wooden versifiers and translators, with whose names, Tusser the 
 bucolic, Phaer, Golding, Googe, and Whetstone, it is hardly ne- 
 cessary to fill the page and burden the memory. They may be 
 studied by the curious, but they wrought no deliverance. To 
 generations which possess superabundance of versifiers and no 
 great poets, these barren years are a kind of consqlation.. For 
 
Gascoigne 1 67 
 
 reasons not to be discovered there are such periods in the literary 
 life of all nations, as in England between Pope and Cowper. 
 
 The versifiers in " Tottel's Miscellany " keep harping unmelo- 
 diously on the strings of Surrey and Wyatt, many of their pieces 
 are complimentary addresses to ladies, or laments on the deaths of 
 friends. Poor conceits are twisted and tormented ; there is hardly 
 any promise of advance ; we scarcely hear any of the bird-like 
 musical notes with which the later part of the reign of Elizabeth 
 sang so wondrously. 
 
 Gascoigne. 
 
 George Gascoigne (t525(?)-iS77) was an interesting character. 
 He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Society of Gray's Inn, a 
 poet who, like Scott, composed his verses in the saddle : a Member 
 of Parliament who was opposed as " a common rhymer . . . noted 
 for manslaughter ... a notorious Ruffian," and even a spy : 
 certainly he owed debts, and was disinherited by his father. He 
 wrote on woodmanship, but was apt to forget to shoot at the deer 
 that came within range of his cross-bow. As a captain in the Low 
 Countries he and his command were surprised and taken by the 
 Spaniards : he came home, published his Posies (1575) and, he says, 
 got not a penny by the venture : he then wrote " The Steel Glass," 
 a kind of satire, the mirror of the age, in blank verse, and next 
 wrote in conimon ballad measure the long and amazingly prosaic 
 " Complaint of Philomene ". 
 
 In 1572 Gascoigne published "A Hundred Sundry Flowers, 
 bound up in one small Posy". The long title sets forth that, 
 some of the flowers were culled in the gardens of Euripides, Ovid, 
 Petrarch, and Ariosto, others are from English orchards. The 
 native flowers are the sweeter and more fair. While our poets 
 were turning into stiff measures the sonnets of Italy, Gascoigne 
 could write so naturally and melodiously his own English, as in 
 his " Lullaby of a Lover ". 
 
 Sing lullaby as women do, 
 
 Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, 
 And lullaby can I &ing too, 
 
 As womanly as can the rest. 
 
1 68 English Literature 
 
 Beneath the stiff borrowed phrases and metres there was always 
 this native and tuneful spirit of unsophisticated song. 
 
 In 1575 he was a maker of words for the Masques at Leicester's 
 famous reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth (see the novel of that 
 name, where Scott calmly introduces Shakespeare as already a 
 ■successful dramatist). He satirized drunkards : we have already 
 seen that he translated a tragedy, "Jocasta," from the Italian; 
 he wrote a love story in rhyme of a personal kind, and his 
 brief " Instructions " is the earliest English work, in no way in- 
 debted to Aristotle, on the Art of Poetry. As he also translated, 
 we have seen, a comedy from the Italian, and a prose tale, a 
 kind of work later fashionable, Gascoigne may be regarded as 
 an intrepid explorer in many fields of literature. " He first beat 
 the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired to 
 since his departure," says Nash (1589). "He brake the ice for 
 our quainter poets that now write," says Tofte (1615). But the 
 path as trodden by this pioneer continued to be rough. Gascoigne 
 was an example of the versatility and literary ambition which many 
 young gentlemen displayed in the age of Elizabeth ; mingling poetry 
 and study and serious thought with their gallant adventures in love, 
 diplomacy, war, and travel. 
 
 His " Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of 
 Verse in English " is a very brief pamphlet. He quotes "my master, 
 Chaucer " against alliterative " thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff," but 
 mentions no other poet. Be original, he says, if you sing of a lady 
 do not applaud her "crystal eye " or "cherry lip," which Spenser 
 did not disdain, for these things are trite and obvious. The great 
 matter is " to avoid the uncomely customs of common writers," says 
 this " common rhymer ". Do not use " obscure and dark phrases 
 in a pleasant sonnet". Do not wander out of your " poulter 
 measure " metre into lines of thirteen syllables. Give every word 
 its natural emphasis : do not make treawae. into treaj«/-«. Chaucer 
 is to be followed as a master of prosody. You should write : — 
 
 " I understand your meaning by your eye," 
 not, 
 
 " Your meaning I understand by your eye ". 
 
Sackville 1 69 
 
 " The more monosyllables you use, the truer Englishman shall you 
 seem ". 
 
 There follows advice on the caesura, and all this counsel shows 
 that, in the early years of Elizabeth, versification was at a very low 
 ebb. 
 
 In practice, Gascoigne did not always shine. There are few 
 passages of interest in the stiff blank verse of his " Steel Glass " (the 
 mirror that does not flatter). The best passage, and it is very 
 good, describes the labourer, 
 
 Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat, 
 Divdain him not, for shall I tell you what ? 
 Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns, 
 
 because the labourers 
 
 feed with fruit of their great pains 
 Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent. 
 
 It would be cruel to quote " Philomene,'' no stall-ballad creeps 
 more tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her 
 who sings, in a later poet's words. 
 
 Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten ? 
 They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow. 
 But the world shall end when I forget. 
 
 Sackville. 
 
 The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found 
 in his dull tragedy, " Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast 
 and once popular collection, " T he Mirror for Magistra tes ". This 
 work is intended to admonish men i n powe r pyr nymed historie s 
 of the falls o f English peers and princ'es '.'"''This wai"tire ptte 
 ^eMBRISfrKtonlc, m "The Monk's "lyi'eT" which that sound critic, 
 the Host, could not long endure. The model was Boccaccio's 
 work on " The Falls of Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The 
 enterprise storted by Baldwin and others in 1554-1559, suggests 
 a dread lest English verse should return to Lydgate in the den of 
 Giant Despair, and take up with sepulchral solemnity the tale of 
 tragedies from the darkest days of the unfortunate ancient Britons. 
 A mammoth compilation was gradually evolved, for doleful matter 
 
lyo English Literature 
 
 was not far to seek, but Sackville's two contributions, the " Induc- 
 tion," and the " Complaint of Buckingham " — the Buckingham 
 executed under Richard III, — alone concern us. 
 
 In the " Induction " the poet describes the gloom of winter, 
 and, in the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As 
 he muses, he is met by a very deplorable female form^ 
 
 With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky. 
 
 She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sack- 
 ville " to the grisly lake " of Avernus, over which no fowl may 
 fly and live. A number of rueful figures of allegory are en- 
 countered. Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, 
 and these are drawn with abundant vigour and variety. The 
 stanza on Sleep gives the measure of the versification, which 
 is rapid, concise, various, sustained, and in its music heralds the 
 arrival of Spenser. 
 
 The body's rest, the quiet of the heart, 
 The travail's care, the still night's frere was he. 
 And of our life on earth the better part, 
 Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see 
 Things oft that tide, and oft that never be, 
 Without respect, esteeming equally 
 King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty. 
 
 One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to 
 have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the 
 " Odyssey ". 
 
 The " Induction " ends with the appearance of the spirit of 
 Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, 
 and in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient 
 tragedies, those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, 
 Alexander the Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pherseus, Camillus, and 
 Hannibal. From these fallen princes we drop to 
 
 One John Milton, Sheriff of Shropshire then, 
 
 who arrested Buckingham, and to 
 
 A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastaire, 
 
Sackville 171 
 
 who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven 
 stanzas. " May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then 
 be tried for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty ; his 
 second son be strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten 
 by leprosy." 
 
 It cannot be denied that this tragedy,* including as it does 
 the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in 
 terrible conl|)onents, and does not, especially when Banastaire is 
 being dealt with, affect us in the same measure as Dante's pictures 
 of the Inferno. On the whole it is the manner, not the matter, 
 of Sackville that contains more than mere promise : his manage- 
 ment of the stanza and of the music of the line is far in advance 
 of anything that had come from an English pen since the death 
 of Chaucer. As for the gloom and horror, these were congenial 
 to a people which, since the burning of the Maid of France (143 1), 
 had seen an endless sequence of violence, murder, martyrdoms, and 
 massacres of peers. Princes, Queens, Bishops, and humble folk. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE. 
 
 A GREAT, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this 
 juncture, was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek 
 poetry, and Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had 
 little Greek, arrived in England and visited Oxford (1499), he 
 found there Grocyn, Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek 
 on the continent ; and, with Sir Thomas More, were already 
 competent classical scholars. But their Greek learning was mainly 
 turned into the channel of theology, the study of the sources of 
 Christian doctrine, the New Testament, the Greek Fathers; and 
 they were attracted by the philosophy of Plato which appeared to 
 " utter a Christian voice " much more clearly than do the writings 
 of the idol of the Middle Ages, Aristotle. 
 
 Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of 
 England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The 
 violent times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable 
 to severe study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, 
 a most desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and 
 of the English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people 
 knowledge of the contents of the Greek classics came through 
 translations, and these translations, as in the case of the historian 
 Thucydides, were ^one from French versions, while Plato was 
 read through Italian commentators, much influenced by Plato's 
 disciples in early Christian times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of 
 beautiful dreams concerning things that cannot be uttered. 
 
 Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek 
 mythology — Shakespeare's humblest characters have heard of many 
 a Grecian fable — yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the 
 
 172 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 173 
 
 refinement of the Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We 
 may detect it in More's (1478-1535) " Utopia," where the adven- 
 turers carry with them to " Nowhere " a " pretty fardel," or parcel, 
 of the cheap neat Greek books printed by Aldus. The fancied 
 State of Utopia, with its comfortable communism and perfect 
 freedom in religion, is derived from the " Republic " of Plato, and 
 in religion is more liberal than, in his later work, " The Laws," 
 he would have permitted it to be. But the " Utopia," written in 
 Latin, was meant for the learned. 
 
 Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became 
 famous in Europe, it did not reach unlearned English readers till 
 an English translation, by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. 
 They now had More's eloquent advocacy of communism before 
 them as regulated in his imaginary state, with a Six Hours' Day, 
 universal training of men and women for war, and habit of assas- 
 sinating the leaders of hostile nations. There is tolerance of all 
 religions which accept a deity and the immortality of the soul : 
 atheists are disqualified for public offices. 
 
 In his English works on religious and social controversy, which 
 are little read. More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but 
 in discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would 
 have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that 
 model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico 
 della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides 
 the controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent per- 
 sonal abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that 
 art. The first effect of Greek in England, by producing a new 
 Biblical criticism and an attack on the foundations of the medi- 
 aeval Church, was to " bring not peace but a sword," the wars of 
 religion. 
 
 Elyot. 
 
 No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir 
 Thomas Elyot (1499 ?-i546), author of "The Governour," a long 
 treatise on the education of a gentleman, and on the nature of 
 forms of government. Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and trans- 
 lates such passages of Homer as he quotes into English verse, 
 
174 English Literature 
 
 the alternate lines rhyming. He is of the Greek opinion that a 
 gentleman should be taught, if he has a taste for art, to draw, 
 paint, and execute works in sculpture, not as a base professional 
 artist, but as an amateur.^ Elyot would have a boy, at 7 
 years old, begin with Greek, learning it through Latin, which he 
 picks up, with French, in conversation. Grammars of Greek are 
 now almost innumerable. Grammar, he says with much truth, " if 
 it be made too long and exquisite to the learner, in a manner 
 mortifieth his courage. And by that time he cometh to the most 
 sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of fervent 
 desire of learning is soon quenched with the burden of grammar.'' 
 Elyot would start his pupil as early as possible with what will 
 interest a child, .^Esop's Fables in Greek, and then pass to Lucian, 
 who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me to be too 
 long from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded 
 all eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to 
 interest the pupil ; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified school- 
 masters ? They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, 
 and while Elyot's system of education, in sports as well as in books, 
 is free and joyous, like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys 
 were suffering the horrors described by Agrippa d'Aubignd in his 
 Memoirs. Elyot translated works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and 
 others, wrote a medical work " The Castle of Health," was clerk 
 of the Privy Council, and went on various diplomatic missions. 
 Elyot was not a professional instructor of youth : he was, it seems, 
 educated privately, and of neither university ; what pleases us in 
 him is his unstaled zest for learning, his fresh enthusiasm. 
 
 The best English of the age and the most durable is that of 
 Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the 
 Church of England, while much of the merit of King James's 
 Authorized Version of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles 
 Coverdale's translation (1488-1568). How easy it is to translate 
 the Bible into English which is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, 
 we pre too frequently reminded by the Revised Version. 
 
 1 A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew, is said 
 to have been " a Holbein in oils ". 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 175 
 
 ASCHAM. 
 
 Roger Ascham (15 15-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle 
 classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid 
 him as well as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, 
 Cambridge, he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who 
 introduced the English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly 
 wrong — no people pronounce the vowels as we do ; but if Cheke 
 resisted the pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is 
 not much to be blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a 
 Readership in Greek, the Fellowship he lost when he married : he 
 did not long retain his tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth ; as 
 secretary to an ambassador in Germany he continued to teach 
 Greek to his chief ; and in his letters, Latin or English, we find 
 him often in straits for money and begging for assistance. Camden, 
 writing under James I, says that he lost money at dicing, and in 
 his attack on gambling, in his " Toxophilus," a dialogue on 
 Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy knowledge of all 
 the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid for his edu- 
 cation. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of cock 
 fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps Ascham 
 was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his unworthy 
 attacks on that noblest of romances, " The Morle d'Arthur ". Sir 
 Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at 
 a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian in- 
 fluences that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was 
 certainly profligate and luxurious, 
 
 An Englishman that is Italianate 
 Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate, 
 
 was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like 
 his contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew 
 and the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and 
 French, as in " Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples ; 
 therefore he desired that archery should be universally practised. 
 But the harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavv hand gun of 
 
176 English Literature 
 
 the fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than 
 a match for the bow. 
 
 " Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless 
 classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string 
 only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used 
 iron arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, 
 a fact not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham's 
 teaching in archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are 
 summed up in the prayer that the English 
 
 Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow 
 May all manner of enemies quite overthrow. 
 
 In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign 
 words Anglicized make such a mixture " as if you put malmsey 
 and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot ''. Yet 
 he advocates in his " School Master," published after his death, a 
 yet more unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English 
 verse. " Our English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may 
 as well receive right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." 
 (He means " quantity " as opposed to accent, as if one said car/e«- 
 ter.) As an example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the 
 third line of the "Odyssey "into two English hexameters 
 
 All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, 
 
 For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities. 
 
 Obviously if we are to say " men's manners," making " man " in 
 " manners '' long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" 
 short, as Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to 
 
 Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the travellers. 
 
 This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was 
 upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment, 
 nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical 
 of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted 
 by eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false 
 perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses, allitera- 
 tions, and pedantic wit of Lyly's " Euphues ! " 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 1^7 
 
 Lyly's Euphues. 
 
 The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining de- 
 coration and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous 
 and the exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, 
 as we see in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the 
 various ruffs, the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and 
 women. A like dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the 
 supply was provided by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned 
 later. Lyly was born a Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, 
 was his college ; his plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal 
 and St. Paul's, are of 1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as 
 a prose writer, in his " Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit " (1579), and 
 the sequel, "Euphues and his England" (1580). The style 
 became a fashion, a fashion which affected even those who, like 
 Sidney, were in would-be revolt against it. Lyly, like all writers 
 of the periods just before and after him, was copious in classical 
 allusions. He was not the first to hunt in all directions, especially 
 in fictitious natural history, for similes, and needless decorations, 
 but he hunted further and more assiduously : emphatically his 
 style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every sentence is 
 a thing bristling with points and antitheses and alliterations. The 
 first part of the book was a kind of novel ; two friends, at Naples, 
 woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters, and the question of 
 education, in the wide sense in which the Renaissance understood 
 education, is always prominent. There is endless conversation 
 and discussion of life, love, and learning, always in the same style 
 of fantastic decoration and allusion : all continued when Euphues 
 arrives in England, all conveying general information not verified 
 by experiment. " I have .read that the bull, being tied to a fig 
 tree, loseth his strength ; that a whole herd of deer stand at the 
 gaze if they smell a sweet apple " ; facts on which the cattle- 
 breeder or the hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This was the 
 kind of science against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly appealed, 
 in his Dedication, and with success, " To the Ladies and Gentle- 
 women of England," who found in the book a kind of love-story, 
 much philosophizing on that dear theme ; and a pleasurable 
 
 12 
 
178 English Literature 
 
 example of a new way of being witty and romantic. Lyly was the 
 chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale plainly which 
 besets the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth. 
 
 Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth's time, 
 we must turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser 
 and Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Drama. 
 
 Sidney. 
 
 Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse 
 than Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and char- 
 acter. He was one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, 
 exemplars of natural charm and excellence. He is the ideal 
 gentleman of the type which Spenser professed to educate by the 
 examples of his virtuous knights, brave, pious, courteous, and just. 
 The son of Sir Henry Sidney and nephew of Elizabeth's Leicester, 
 Philip Sidney was born into the Court, but was not of it; his 
 heart Was set on other things than pleasure, spendour, flattery, and 
 promotion. Educated at Shrewsbury School, he went to Christ 
 Church at 14, being already the friend of the noble Fulke 
 Greville, who, however, went from Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In 
 1572 he was attached to the English embassy in France, and, on 
 the night of the Bartholomew massacre was sheltered in the house 
 of his future father-in-law, Walsingham. Till 1575 he travelled, 
 chiefly in Germany, and made the acquaintance of his constant 
 correspondent and adviser, Languet, whom he celebrates as a 
 shepherd of the Ister, and as his own religious Mentor. In 
 Venice his portrait was painted by Veronese; at Vienna he 
 perfected himself in horsemanship under Pugliano, whose en- 
 thusiasm he describes so amusingly in his " Defe nce of Poesie ". 
 For a man so earnest as Sidney was, he nad a tine sense of 
 humour. 
 
 Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with 
 Elizabeth at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known 
 through Scott's novel, " Kenilworth ". Afterwards, at the house 
 of the Earl of Essex, he met the Earl's daughter, Penelope, later 
 Lady Rich, the Stella of his sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, 
 but fate decided otherwise. In 1577 Sidney went, a young diplo- 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 179 
 
 matist, to the Emperor and the German Princes, and later, was 
 obliged to attend the Court, while his mind was set on adventures 
 beyond the Atlantic ; on failing in that, he trifled with the idea 
 of introducing Greek metres into English poetry. In 1579, he 
 quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in the tennis court. A duel 
 was not permitted, but as Sidney also gave Elizabeth his opinion 
 about her distasteful flirtation with the odious Due d'Anjou, the 
 worst of the bad Valois Princes, he retired to Wilton, the house 
 of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and there wrote the pastoral ' 
 romance, "Arcadia". 
 
 He was recalled to Court, satin Parliament for Kent, and in 1583 
 married a daughter of VValsingham. He was forbidden to join 
 Drake's American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always 
 thwarted in his desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as 
 the conditions of his age permitted — they leaned somewhat to 
 piracy and filibustering. At length, as Governor of Flushing, 
 while Leicester commanded the forces engaged against Spain in 
 the Low Countries, he fell in a cavalry charge against a superior 
 force at Zutphen. His leg was broken by a musket bullet from 
 the Spanish trenches : it was now that he handed the cup of water 
 that was at his lips to the soldier whose need was greater than 
 his. He lingered for some weeks, and died on 17 October, 
 1586. 
 
 The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly at- 
 tested than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the 
 handsome and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent 
 on the Scottish embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while 
 his desire was to be fighting under Sidney's banner. He expresses, 
 in a touching letter, the sudden revulsion of his nature from his 
 wonted treacheries ; and, contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he 
 did not betray, but, to his own loss, did his best to save the Queen 
 whose cause he had previously deserted. 
 
 As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his 
 death, is best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella. 
 Lady Rich. There is a controversy as to whether these are mere 
 exercises in gallant but "platonic" love- verse, or whether they 
 reveal a true passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnel 
 
 12 * 
 
i8o English Literature 
 
 in which he says that he has found his fortune too late, and has 
 lost what he had unwittingly won, 
 
 O punisht eyes 
 
 That I had been more foolish or more wise, 
 
 seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can 
 be the critics in such a case as this of Sidney. 
 
 The sonnets vary much in poetic value ; some are written in 
 Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the 
 English Muse. 
 
 SMftey's " Defence of Poesie" . 
 
 Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary 
 poetry between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to 
 note that Sir Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted 
 as he was with the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he 
 could see nothing to admire in the efforts and experiments of 
 such writers as Occleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and 
 Turberville. His "Defence of Poesie " (or, according to the title 
 of the first edition (1595), his " Apologie for Poesie ") was elicited 
 by the unauthorized dedication to himself of Stephen Gosson's 
 "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young Oxford man who had 
 tried his hand as a playwright, and been disgusted, he says, by 
 the disorders of the playhouses, where his corftedy and morality 
 may have been hooted. He therefore tried to make himself 
 notorious, or he expressed .his penitence, by assailing poets who 
 deal in the silly conceits of Lyly's " Euphues ". 
 
 " The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in cows- 
 hard ... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields aqd 
 wallow in the mire : and the whole practice of poets, either with 
 fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their 
 mischief, discover their shame, discredit thetnselves, and disperse 
 their poison through the world ". Gosson chooses Virgil as one 
 of his terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypo- 
 critical puritan, or a mere fribble in search. of notoriety, he made 
 a mistake when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, 
 who does not advertise Gosson's name in the " Defence of Poesie ", 
 
Prose of the Renaissance i8i 
 
 After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents 
 drawn from every quarter, even from the respect paid to their 
 minstrels by the Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as 
 being " 'olead^^anddrawustoashig^^ 
 generate souls, made 'vvorse By 'fe'eir "c^^'loi^^m^^^^^^^m^te 
 oi'. .- .' ?'' If poSHT^aSSsTiBfirwaysTtlainTh^^ "it is not the 
 tSult of the art, but that by few men that art can be accomplished ". 
 He quotes Aristotle's " Poetics " to the effect that poetry is more 
 philosophical and more serious than philosophy. Nothing in 
 history is so noble but that " the poet may, if he list, make it his 
 own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and more delighting, 
 as it please him, having all, from Dante's heaven to his hell, 
 under the authority of his pen ". Here Sidney seems to differ 
 from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for 
 example in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the 
 poetic art. But Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, " I speak 
 of the art, not of the artificer ". Sidney then discusses the various 
 kinds of poetry. As to the Comedy, " naughty play-makers and 
 stage-keepers have made it justly odious," — so far he sides with 
 the Puritans of his time. In speaking of the lyric, he says : " I must 
 confess mine own barbarousness ; I never heard the old song of 
 Percy and Douglas " (" Chevy Chase "), " that I found not my heart 
 moved more than with a trupipet ". Indeed the true spirit of 
 poetry did dwell, disregarded by wits and courtiers, in the popular 
 poetry and the ballads. But poetry, he knows not why, finds, in our 
 time, a' hard welcome in England : " I think the very earth 
 laments it, and therefore decks our soil with fewer laurels than 
 it was accustomed, for heretofore poets have in England also 
 flourished ". If poets are not esteemed it is because they do not 
 deserve esteem, for we are " taking upon us to be poets in despite 
 of Pallas,'' t'nvi'fa Minerva. Our would-be poets are destitute 
 of genius — which was very true. " Chaucer undoubtedly did 
 excellently in his 'Troilus and Cressida' : of whom truly I know 
 not whether to marvel more either that he, in that misty time, 
 could see so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so stumblingly 
 after him." 
 
 What ailed Sidney's age was lack of terseness and clearnesSk 
 
1 82 English Literature 
 
 Most poets did not know what they would be at ; they where con- 
 fused by the tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language 
 in transition, the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant 
 effort to imitate Greece, Rpme, France, and Italy. They could 
 not yet see life and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney 
 found little that "had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts 
 of "The Mirror for Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, and 
 Spenser's " ' Shepherd's Calendar ' hath much poetry in his 
 'Eclogues,' indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived. 
 That same framing of his style to an old rustic language I 
 cannot allow ..." 
 
 Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the 
 alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly 
 in his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress 
 never would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly 
 they apply fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from 
 books. 
 
 It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney 
 defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which de- 
 votes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments 
 by men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic 
 genius. 
 
 Sidney's best poems and his " Qefence of Poesie " retain their 
 freshness ; but that book of his which was most popular suffers 
 from the changes of time and taste. At most periods prqse fic- 
 tion is more welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. 
 Sidney's book "The Countess of Pembroke' s Arcadia ." is a novel, 
 written by the author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither 
 in favour at Court nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on 
 sea or land. The book was to Sidney what " The Faery Queen " 
 was to Spenser, a wilderness of delights of his own creation, a re- 
 tr eat into a world of fantasy . He wrote it in sheets read, or sent 
 as soon as finished, to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke; the 
 book was meant for her, not for the world. Not long after his 
 death, an unauthorized copy was published (1590), and an author- 
 ized edition followed, and the general delight in the romance is 
 attested by its constant reissues. 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 183 
 
 The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his 
 fancy to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of 
 the late Greek romances ; and in an Arcadia which never existed, 
 and a Laconia most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous 
 ideals of the author, in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and 
 combats ; the truth and constancy of his lovers ; the beauty of his 
 descriptions, made this njixture of the Spanis h heroic romance s 
 that infatuated Don QuSSt^ tVHIl mb'-a rfc^dian pastorals, tne 
 delight of four generations. Milton BISniecrTR'e'^paveOiarles I 
 for copying the beautiful and appropriate prayer of the captive 
 Pamela, long after Shakespeare had interwoven with the story of 
 King Lear, Sidney's tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia. 
 
 In its new mode " The Arcadia " was to four generations 
 what Malory's " Morte Arthur " had been in its day. As late as 
 1660, we find Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in 
 his heroic and historic romance, " Aretina," where Argyll and 
 Montrose play their parts. Indeed the " Arcadia " was a fruitful 
 parent of the interminable heroic French romances which Major 
 Bellenden laughs at in " Old Mortality," and from which Scott 
 did not disdain to borrow a description in " Ivanhoe ". It is 
 indeed curious to compare Sidney's description of an Amazon 
 (Book I, Chap, xii.) with an actual representation of a genuine 
 Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on the stone work of a 
 gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a corslet of scale 
 armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured satin, 
 covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson velvet 
 buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked. 
 The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout 
 the romance. The style is less conceited than that of " Euphues," 
 and is always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of 
 parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The pro- 
 fusion of love-passages and of martial adventures, " with notable 
 images of virtues, vicefe, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed 
 fancies, were what the world demanded from a novel, and what 
 Sidney gave in the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of 
 the amoebean verse of the shepherds of Theocritus' 
 
184 English Literature 
 
 Spenser. 
 
 After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the 
 'second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552 ?-iS99). 
 We know from his " Prothalamion " that Spenser was born in Lon- 
 don — 
 
 my most kindly nurse 
 That to me gave this life's first natal source, 
 Though from another place I take my name, 
 A House of ancient fame — 
 
 that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the 
 ancestry of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills. 
 
 Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, 
 but his own family must have been poor. He was educated at 
 Merchant Taylors' School, was aided by the munificent Robert 
 Nowell, and obtained a S'zarship (corresponding to the old Oxford 
 servitorship), at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he 
 made two friends, Gabriel Harvey, a true friend, if a rather pedantic 
 don (the Hobbinol of his " Shepherd's Calendar "), and E. Kirke, 
 the E. K. who furnished the notes explanatory of old English words 
 in that poem. Spenser also gained the good graces of Grindal, 
 then Bishop of London, later Primate, a puritan, who fell into 
 Elizabeth's disgrace, and is applauded as Algrind by Spenser in 
 the "Shepherd's Calendar". 
 
 Spenser's youth was passed in an England disturbed by the 
 claims of the captive Mary Stuart to the Crown ; by the rebellion 
 of her adherents in the North ; by the papal excommunication of 
 Elizabeth, and by the pretensions of the extreme puritan exiles 
 who, driven abroad by the Marian persecution, had imbibed at 
 Geneva the doctrines of Calvin. In their attacks on the English 
 Bishops they out-wearied even the successors of Calvin in Geneva, 
 who regarded them as men not to be satisfied by any con- 
 cessions ; " a sect of perilous consequence who would have no 
 king but a presbytery," said Elizabeth. Here were all the elements 
 which caused Elizabeth's cruel persecution of Catholics, the long 
 struggle of the puritans under Elizabeth and James I, the wars 
 under Charles I, and the strife with Spain and Catholic Ireland. 
 In the words of James VI, it was " a world-wolter,'' and Spenser, 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 185 
 
 as a poor young man, eager to make his fortune, had to swim as 
 best he might in the cross-currents of this troublesome world. He 
 never enjoyed the peaceful leisure of a Tennyson or a Wordsworth ; 
 he had to play an active part in strenuous and most unhappy 
 affairs. 
 
 *His nature, too, was divided. With all his love of pleasure 
 and of beauty he leaned, though not virulently, towards the puritan 
 party, and, as a good patriot, loathed and detested Rome. 
 
 It is probable that, when a freshman at the age of 17, 
 he contributed to a Miscellany, Van der Noodt's "Theatre of 
 Worldlings" (1569), translations in blank verse of certain sonnets 
 of the French poet Joachim du Bellay, and of Petrarch. These, 
 re-cast into the form of sonijets, recur in a volume of Spenser's, 
 of 1591. 
 
 After taking his Master's degree (1576) Spenser visited Lanca- 
 shire, and if his words as Colin Clout in the " Shepherd's Calen- 
 dar " be autobiographical, lost his heart to a lady whom he calls 
 Rosalind, " the widow's daughter of the glen ". According to 
 Gabriel Harvey she " christened him her Signior Pegaso" though 
 neither his poetry nor his wooing won her from her cruelty. Many 
 years later he still writes of her with chivalrous affection, so, tike 
 Scott, he had his heart broken and cleverly pieced again. 
 
 By 1579 Spenser was in London, a literary retainer or protege 
 of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester ; while he also en- 
 joyed the friendship of Leicester's nephew. Sir Philip Sidney, the 
 Flower of Chivalry, himself a poet, and the best beloved man of 
 his time. Now (1579) Spenser published, and dedicated to Sidney, 
 his " Shephet^|sCalejidVj" ^ set of twelY ^.-ecl(j) ^ue s y f; pas [:q i ;- |i l 
 po ems, one fo r each month . The pastoral had wandered far from 
 tl]i?rurSr [)e'au't3^'''bl ineochtus, and, in the hands of Mantuan and 
 Clement Marot, had become a vehicle for allegory, and even of 
 Protestant argumentation. Spenser does not stray far into party 
 and puritanic politics, but they are not unknown to his shepherds. 
 In January, as Colin Clout, he bewails the coldness of Rosalind, 
 
 She laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make, 
 
 which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a 
 
1 86 English Literature 
 
 rustic dispute between youth and age : the metre is one of the 
 measures of the " Lay of the Last Minstrel " : — 
 
 Who will not suffer the stormy time 
 
 Where will he live to the lusty prime ? 
 ( They burned the chapel for very rage 
 And they cursed Lord Cranstoun's goblin page.) . • 
 
 March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the 
 strange bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most 
 pleasant manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair 
 Eliza, a Maiden Queen; which probably procured Spenser's pre- 
 sentation to Elizabeth. The great variety of melodious verse of 
 I which Spenser was already a perfect master is, for us, perhaps the 
 i chief merit of his pastorals. Through life Spenser keeps up the 
 ' shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in his verse, is " The Shepherd of 
 Ocean ". The rival Protestant and Catholic clergy also appear as 
 ■shepherds, good or bad, while in another eclogue the perfect poet, 
 Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus, of public indifference, and is 
 advised to sing of redoubted knights : and, indeed, Spenser had 
 already conceived the idea of his knightly romantic poem " The 
 Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his model, Ariosto. In 
 this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin " must not "run away 
 with the garland from Apollo ". 
 
 Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he 
 dallied with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English 
 words, as in the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he 
 dropped many projects at which he had glanced, and was con- 
 stant to his "Faery Queen". 
 
 The manuscript of that great poem must have been the com- 
 panion of Spenser in many strange wanderings. 
 
 In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount, 
 
 as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the 
 household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his 
 to France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring 
 the enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's 
 brilliant and wavering favourite — who once so nearly brought her 
 into a plight almost as bad as that of Mary Stuarl— and hef 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 187. 
 
 sagacious counsellor, Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh) — who now 
 and again saved his Queen " as by fire '' — might have furnished 
 Spenser with a high theme for a poetic allegory. But chance had 
 made him Leicester's man, not Burleigh's man, so that he never 
 won the fortune for which he sought. Who, indeed, would seek 
 fortune in Ireland ? Spenser did, accompanying Lord Grey of 
 Wilton to an isle more than commonly distressful. 
 
 To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English 
 invaders was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion 
 after rebellion was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is 
 notorious for his massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and 
 Spanish filibusters at Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet 
 of the " Faery Queen " was present at this abominable deed. It was 
 neither without precedent nor imitation. Seventy years later David 
 Leslie, urged on by a preacher, massacred the remnant of Mont- 
 rose's Irish contingent at Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most 
 interesting " View of the Present State of Ireland " says concerning 
 the foreign prisoners, " there was no other way but to make that 
 short way with them which was made ". He defends Grey's ruth- 
 less policy; he had made Ireland "ready for reformation" when 
 he was recalled, on the charge of being " a bloody man " who had 
 left the country in ashes (1582). Grey was pursued by the clamour 
 of a horrified people, that is, he was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, mo- 
 lested by the Blatant Beast, the public. The idea of the public 
 as a Blatant Beast is borrowed from Plato. 
 
 It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that 
 Spenser, acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war 
 in Munster, wrote part of the " Faery Queen ". He held public 
 posts, was Clerk of Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, 
 he received 3000 acres of land, and a ruinous castle of the Des- 
 mond family, Kilcolman, between Mallow and Limerick (1586). 
 
 Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he 
 had the advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical 
 literary society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, 
 its satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conver- 
 sation of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his 
 friends the aim and scope of the " Faery Queen ". Each virtue 
 
1 88 English Literature 
 
 was to be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it 
 by example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, 
 Spenser says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be 
 a perfect exemplar of " the twelve private virtues ". The Faery 
 Queen herself is, first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the 
 royal and " most virtuous and beautiful " Queen Elizabeth, who 
 also appears as Belphoebe. He is to begin in the middle, before 
 telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs, and a palmer bearing an infant 
 with bloody hands came seeking adventures to a festival of the 
 Faery Queen. " Many other adventures are intermeddled." 
 
 The " Faery Queen " is not, and does not aim at being an 
 epic. It is without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six 
 books were not written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser 
 was driven from Kilcolman. 
 
 The original scheme is that of the " Morte d' Arthur,'' moral- 
 ized, and intermingled with allegory. The poem is an ^llegOTJcal 
 ro mance adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and ttie Conti- 
 nent under E lizabeth, and to the war of the R eformation against 
 the dragon of Rome and the Scarlet W ornarf'ot 'T'lie ' iseven Hills; 
 the seeming fair and inwardly filthy Duessa, w ho is occasionally 
 meant for Mary Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is 
 given by the conflict of Good , as Spenser understood it, against 
 JJivjl^ private and ptiblic, the vices, and the Church of Rome. 
 The Red Cross Knight wears the armour which St. Paul describes, 
 and in which Bunyari equip pad Christian and Greatheart. 
 
 There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue 
 " sermoned At larg e, as they use ". But while Spenser insists on 
 being taken as a m oral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, 
 and it is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with 
 knights and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". 
 Like the knights in the "Morte d'Arthur he "rides at adven- 
 ture " ; in every page a new adventure opens, and leads to others 
 endlessly, through conflicts with Saracens, — Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sans- 
 joy, — with the wily Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with 
 Despair, in a wonderful passage ; with dragons and dragonettes, 
 with Acrasia and all the charms of her abode of wanton bliss, 
 which is depicted with great enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XID^^, 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 189 
 
 This canto is remote indeed from the puritan taste, despite its 
 moral ending 
 
 Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind, 
 
 But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind. 
 
 The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of 
 Circe in the Tenth book of the " Odyssey," and it is curious to com- 
 pare the severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless 
 luxury of the Italian Renaissance in Spenser. 
 
 The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, 
 which is perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is 
 a garden of endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for 
 there is a perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing 
 is constant but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, 
 Spenser's own measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the 
 strong stream of melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the 
 enchanted river, and forth into the fairy seas. 
 
 The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the 
 stanza may not be the best vehicle for nanativer'TBurSpenser^ 
 ?B?SR does flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of 
 Lotusland occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of 
 the reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens 
 
 One day, as they all three together went 
 To the greene wood to gather strawberries, 
 There chaunst to them a dangerous accident: 
 A Tigre forth out of the wpod did rise, 
 
 narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous ! We cannot 
 but be reminded of the " Swiss Family Robinson," and when 
 Spenser makes Sir Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with 
 a shepherd's crook, he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead"."^ 
 
 It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and 
 allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his 
 time. The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and 
 sunbeams and for her the Trojans and Achaeans war and die. 
 So, in Spenser's poem, the witch makes a false Florimel of snow, 
 
 ■ On this and on the more than mediaeval size of" The Faery Queen," see Mr. 
 Mackail's " Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28. 
 
I go English Literature 
 
 informed by " a wicked spright " with burning eyes for the de- 
 struction of mankind, and the false Florimel is another form of 
 the white witch, Mary Stuart. The affairs of Ireland, France, 
 " Beige," and Spain appear in knightly or magical disguise in the 
 procession of dissolving views ; a pageant pf the rivers of Ireland 
 and England anticipates Drayton's " Polyolbion " : the romance 
 becomes, like " Piers Plowman," a farrago of all that is in the 
 poet's mind. 
 
 Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare, 
 Sufflaminandus erat, "he needed to have the drag put on ". Like 
 Pindar in youth, " he sowed from the sack, not from^ the band ". 
 His archaic words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words 
 annoyed the critics of his time more than they vex us. If he 
 " writ no language," " writ the language of no time," as Ben. 
 Jonson said, the " Iliad " and " Odyssey," too, are in the language of 
 no time, represent no one dialect that ever was actually spoken. But 
 Spenser was writing about no actual time : his own age is confused 
 with the fairy age of chivalry, and the ages of the " Morte d'Arthur," 
 and of Greek mythology. With Spenser we are " out of space, 
 out of time," and of his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient words 
 keep us in mind. That great and noble effort towards perfection, 
 the spirit of chivalry, was his ideal ; and in Sir Philip he saw the 
 last of the gentle and perfect knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth 
 we must submit ; she needed it all if to her subjects she was to 
 stand for England and their love of England. 
 
 Spenser's blemishes are of his age ; no pure and perfect work 
 of immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging 
 from a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of 
 too much ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with 
 no control from sane and temperate criticism. 
 
 Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite, 
 Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read 
 the " Faery Queen " in manuscript, and brought " Colin Clout Home 
 again". The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared 
 compliments to Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new 
 courtiers. Sidney was dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh " hated 
 poetry and painting". The first part of the "Faery Queen" 
 
Prose of the Renaissance 191 
 
 (1590) had made Spenser famous, but had won him no prize of 
 Court favour save a small pension. 
 
 His " Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox " may 
 have been written earlier and now was published; in this the 
 satire is much more keen ; the poet finds even " the Comic Stage 
 defaced and vulgarized, in his ' Tears of the Muses,' where "oui 
 pleasant WUly that is dead of late," cannot conceivably be Shakes- 
 peare — the silence of John Lyly may be intended. 
 
 When Spenser returned to Ireland a collection of his miscel- 
 laneous poems was published, containing, among other things, 
 " Mother Hubberd's Tale," " The Tears of the Muses," " The 
 Ruines of Rome " (sonnets from the French of Joachim du Bel- 
 lay). 
 
 The " Ruines of Time," dedicated to " Sidney's sister, Pem- 
 broke's mother," Lady Pembroke, begins with a vision of the 
 genius of the ruined Roman city, Verulam, and in a far-off way 
 reminds us of the Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City. There 
 is a lament for the fall of ancient empires, and the sorrows of 
 the House of Dudley. 
 
 Spenser's mood was that of melancholy and disappointment, 
 presently cheered by his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. From 
 his love came his sonnets, .and his matchless " Epith alamium," 
 his " love-learned song ". If the " Faery Queen,^*atT9"ffl"?!Tfee 
 that Spenser did were lost, the " Epithalamium " and the " Fjo- 
 thalamion " would win for him the crown of the chief of English 
 poets before Shakespeare. The marriage occurred in June, 1594 : 
 then troubles with the Irish whom he had supplanted, or some 
 other cause, sent him to England, with the last three books of his 
 romance. The affair of Duessa's treatment caused James VI to 
 remonstrate through Bower, the English ambassador to Holyrbod, 
 and though the poet was not punished, his designs may not have 
 been advanced. He now published his Hymns to Love and 
 Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, the latter under the influence of 
 Plato, and his " Prothalamion " for the Ladies Elizabeth and 
 Katherine Somerset. These splendid poems were his swan-song ; 
 Ireland called him, and in October, 1598, the natives whom he 
 had despoiled drove him from Kilcolman, which they burned. 
 
192 English Literature 
 
 Spenser died, a ruined man, in Westminster (16 January, 1599), 
 Essex paid for his funeral, he lies in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 As Hephaestus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted 
 bronze and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined 
 the wealth of Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in 
 the great crucible of his genius. In the " Epithalamium," for 
 example, we find a translation of four lines from a sonnet of 
 Ronsard, mingling with notes from Theocritus and the Song of 
 Songs, with all the beautiful things of all the creeds. It would, 
 perhaps, be unfair to call the style of Spenser, as it appears in the 
 " Faery Queen," " Corinthian ". Yet the metal in which he works 
 is like that " Corinthian bronze " formed, at the conflagration of 
 the city, from the molten gold and silver and copper of the sacred 
 vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of all old poetry are 
 mingled with his own. He has been called " the poets' poet " ; 
 his successors have taken from him his very tones. As has been 
 said well, when Spenser writes — 
 
 Scarcely had Phoebus in the glowing East 
 Yet harnessed his fiery-footed team, 
 
 that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of " Romeo and Juliet ". 
 
 And taking usury of time forepast 
 
 Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights, 
 
 that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets. 
 
 Many an Angel's voice 
 
 Singing before the eternal Majesty 
 
 For their triune triplicities on high : 
 
 that is the younger voice of Milton. 
 
 I And ever and anon the rosy red 
 I Flasht thro' her face, 
 
 one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.^ 
 English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried 
 and forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till 
 Thomson revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, 
 and English poetry came fully to her own again when the magic 
 book of Spenser was opened by Keats. 
 
 1 Mackail, " Springs of Helicon,'' pp. go, 91. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS. 
 
 The rejoicing age of Elizabeth was fond of " variety entertain- 
 ments ''. The Court Masques, such as those of Lyly, and George 
 Peele's " Arraignment of Paris," abounded in songs, music, and 
 dancing, and were expensively furnished. The Universities had 
 their own amateur authors and perforuiers. The " children " of 
 St. Paul's and other schools acted so naturally that, as we read 
 in " Hamlet," they became serious rivals of the professional actors.^ 
 "An aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of 
 question, and are most tyrannically clapped for it, these are 
 now the fashion ". Polonius indicates the many sorts of plays, 
 "tragedy, comedy, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, 
 tragical-historical, tragical-comical, historical-pastoral, scene in- 
 dividual, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy or 
 Plautus too light.'' From authors of the heavy Senecan school 
 came blank verse : " the light people " continued, when Shakes- 
 peare wrote " Love's Labour's Lost," to employ rhymes in many 
 rrjeasures ; till Peele, and above all Marlowe, introduced a more 
 free and varied and accomplished blank verse. The general taste 
 turned from many imitations of the ponderous Seneca to plays of 
 more freedom, but even moralities and interludes of the old sort 
 continued to be played in the age of the Shakespearean drama. 
 
 There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes 
 of the law — those who held no licence from a noble (as " the Earl 
 of Leicester's men," "the Admiral's men," and many others), 
 
 ' They also ran every chance of becoming desperately wicked dogs, ac- 
 cording to Charles Kingsley in his essay, " Plays and Puritans " 
 
 193 13 
 
194 English Literature 
 
 " hardly scaped whipping ". In " Ratsei's Ghoaste " a company of 
 strollers, Bottoms and Snugs, stage-stricken, are licensed by a 
 highwayman. They acted where they could, mere " barnstormers," 
 mainly in the yards of inns, under the galleries. 
 
 The City was puritanic, or, at all events, was adverse to the 
 nuisance caused by crowds of roisterers and hangers-on of the 
 theatre, and by 1577 James Burbage built his theatre beyond the 
 municipal bounds, in Shoreditch. The Curtain and the Fortune 
 were in the same region. Southwark, south of the river, a noisy 
 quarter, gave hospitality to the Rose, and, in 1599, to the Globe, 
 built by Burbage's son, the famous Richard, Shakespeare's friend. 
 
 The Diary of Richard Henslowe, who financed players and 
 authors, among his other enterprises, contains the jottings of 
 this avaricious and uneducated patron. There were many small 
 " private theatres," which had a scrambling existence. 
 
 The pit was unseated, and open to the rain and sun, the 
 galleries above were less uncomfortable. The noble and wealthy 
 sat in galleries round the pit, or on the stage; which was covered 
 over or partly covered from the air. The arras, or tapestry hang- 
 ings, concealed the prompter — and Polonius in " Hamlet ". Scenes 
 in bedrooms were at the back, and when such a scene closed, the 
 hangings fell over it. There was no scene-shifting, as with us, 
 pasteboard rocks and trees were easily moved about. A painted 
 frame with a name over it in large letters, stood for a town-gate, 
 and for the town.* 
 
 There were no women actors, boys took women's parts till 
 the Restoration. 
 
 Such clowns, dancers, singers, and practical jokers as Tarleton 
 and Kemp, and such actors as held shares in their theatres, made 
 good livelihoods. The authors, who sold them dramas for a sum 
 down, and had no more profit from them in any way, were paid 
 sums ranging from j£6 to j£2o : according to modern rate of 
 purchasing power from ;^5o to ;^i6o. The play then became 
 the property of the speculator, like Henslowe, or Manager, or 
 company of authors, which had paid for it. Robert Greene, the 
 
 • See an interesting discussion in Mr. Darrell Figgis's " Shakespeare " 
 (1911), Chap. III. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 195 
 
 celebrated literary man of whom we have to speak presently, was 
 accused of selling a copy of a play to one company, and then, 
 when that company went " on tour " through provincial towns, of 
 selling another copy to another company. " He was very capable 
 of having it happen to him." When any speculator or company 
 had once bought a play, they could hand it over to any author 
 with orders to alter it as he pleased. This was annoying to the 
 first author or authors, for sometimes two men, sometimes three, 
 sometimes five or six would combine to make a play. The con- 
 sequertce is that modern critics spend much time and ink in try- 
 ing to discover which author wrote each part of a comedy or 
 tragedy, and how much of the original work of the first author, or 
 authors, was kept in a play which, perhaps, Shakespeare himself 
 took up and re-wrote. 
 
 We have no space for such discussions, which seldom lead to 
 any certain conclusions, but we must remember that the actors 
 much objected to the printing of any plays which they owned, for, 
 once printed, it was not easy to prevent other companies from 
 acting them. But publishers sent shorthand reporters to take 
 down the words during the performance, and wild work they often 
 made of it. These printed plays, small cheap square volumes or 
 "quartoes," may be very correct or very incorrect copies of the 
 author's words; some of Shakespeare's quartos are good texts, 
 some are execrable. 
 
 The playwrights were usually young men who had been at 
 one of the Universities, and had picked up all that they 
 could learn of the newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and 
 manners. They were very scornful of playwriters who, like Kyd, 
 Shakespeare, and even Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of 
 them, had not been at Oxford or Cambridge. The pamphlets of 
 the University men tell us much of the little we know about their 
 rivals, often their betters, who had not studied at Oxford or 
 Cambridge. 
 
 John Lyly. 
 
 From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, 
 John Lyly (? 1554- 1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart. 
 
 13 * 
 
196 English Literature 
 
 He wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy 
 singers of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's. Unlike some of 
 his brethren, he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, 
 and his pieces are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the 
 refined and romantic sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of 
 his " Endymion," for example, and the style of the prose in his 
 dialogue, are all in the manner of his " Euphues ". When he 
 aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad enough or facetious 
 enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as in " Endymion " 
 and " The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses, heroes, 
 and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are those 
 of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined. 
 
 Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the 
 plays : Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary 
 reference to Elizabeth. " Mother Bombie '' is not a successful 
 essay in low comedy : " Campaspe," a love story of the Court of 
 Alexander the Great (where Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite 
 a pretty approach, as is " Galatea," towards the romantic comedy ; 
 but in Shakespeare's early " Love's Labour's Lost " we see that, 
 at the first attempt, he far surpassed his predecessor. Puns, 
 alliteration, and anecdotes of unnatural history are nearly as prev- 
 alent in the plays as in the " Euphues " of Lyly. Several of his 
 songs are pretty; some of his scenes of love-making when the 
 lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are graceful, and the prose 
 of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and in good taste. His 
 blank verse in " The Woman in the Moon," is not specially char- 
 acteristic. 
 
 Peele. 
 
 George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the 
 title of " sporting " if there were even a little truth in the tract 
 about him called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, 
 Gentleman " ; while to the title of " gentleman " he would have no 
 moral pretensions. The jests are rough and far from honest 
 practical jokes, but the author had some knowledge of Peele's posi- 
 tion as a director of pageants and masques. There is no smoke 
 without fire, and the contemporary stories of the " Bohemian " 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 197 
 
 life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits 
 connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely 
 be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire : 
 he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates 
 Hall, now Dr. Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took 
 his Bachelor's degree about 1577, his Master's in 1579. 
 
 His " Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 
 1589), he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and 
 summary of the Trojan war — based partly on the " Iliad," partly on 
 the later Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles 
 for Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. 
 In 1584 his "Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted 
 in that year before Elizabeth by the " children " of the Chapel 
 Royal. It is strange sport for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might 
 have said, " You do ill to teach the child such words ". The 
 piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the apple to Venus, 
 is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres, with some 
 speeches in creditable blank verse : there is a pretty song. 
 
 Fair, and fair, and twice as fair, 
 And fair as any may be. 
 
 At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of 
 Venus, Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged 
 pageants for the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle 
 History of Edward I," a play based on an absurd ballad about the 
 profligacy and fabulous cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of 
 " Longshanks ". Friar David ap Tuck provides a comic part, in 
 prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland, brags and submits in blank 
 verse: the best of the blank verse is assigned to the wicked 
 Eleanor : the lines are not usually " stopped " in the stiff old style. 
 In 1593 Peele also wrote his " Honour of the Garter," a poetic 
 vision of " lovely knights " of old days. The Prologue contains a 
 lament for Marlowe, 
 
 the Muses' darling for thy verse. 
 Fit to write passions for the souls below. 
 
 " The Old Wives' Tale " is thought to have suggested a poem 
 very unlike it, Milton's " Comus ". The date of Peele's " David 
 
198 English Literature 
 
 and Bathsheba," "a remain of the fashion of Scripture plays," is 
 uncertain (published in 1599). This is the best of Peele's extant 
 work, and the blank verse is not unworthy of Marlowe. David says 
 of the dead Absalom — 
 
 touch no hair of him, 
 Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds 
 Delight to play, and love to make it curl, 
 Wherein the nightingales would build their nests, 
 And make sweet bowers in every gplden tress, 
 To sing their lover every night to sleep. 
 
 With Peele and Marlowe we are coming close to the perfection of 
 the verse of Shakespeare. Peele died in 1597 ?; two years earlier 
 he was poor and in sickness. Probably some of his plays are lost ; 
 the " Battle of Alcazar " is but doubtfully assigned to him. Peele 
 cannot have taught Shakespeare much : though he greatly im- 
 proved blank verse, he only proves that spectators were not 
 intolerant of real poetry in plays. 
 
 Greene. 
 
 Robert Greene was a Norwich man (born about 1560), the 
 son of parents of substance ; at St. John's College, Cambridge, he 
 graduated in 1578. Norwich was a puritan town, but the in- 
 dulgence of Greene's mother, as he tells us, enabled him to make 
 the Italian tour, probably between 1578 and 1580, 
 
 An Englishman that is Italianate 
 Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate, 
 
 said the proverb, and Greene, a man greatly given to fits of repent- 
 ance, describes his dissipations much as St. Augustine describes his 
 own. At all events he learned Italian and could borrow from 
 novels in that language. He lived among " wags as loose as 
 myself," both in Italy and London. Neither the effects of a rousing 
 sermon nor an early marriage (1585, 1586) to a wife with whom he 
 soon parted company could withdraw Greene from the bottle and 
 his wild comrades. He was the conventional " gentleman of the 
 press," living by a very rapid pen, " yarking up a pamphlet " with 
 unprecedented speed, says Nash, and his wares, we learn, were well 
 paid. He had also many noble patrons, at least he dedicated his 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 199 
 
 " love pamphlets," romances in the manner of Lyly, to many 
 ladies. They are pure in tone, and his favourite female character 
 is a chaste and long-suffering Patient Grizel, like Enid in the 
 Welsh " Mabinogion," and Enid in the " Idylls of the King ". 
 Between 1583 and 1589 he wrote at least eight of those love 
 stories and pamphlets, including " Euphues, his Censure to 
 Philautus," and, as five were dedicated to ladies of rank, they 
 were probably of the sort which women enjoyed. Later he was 
 either remorseful, or afifected remorse, for his way of living, and 
 turned his experience of the town to use, in tracts on " Cosenage " 
 and " Cony-catching," exposures of the devices of courtesans, 
 usurers, and other harpies. 
 
 His " Repentance," and his " Groatsworth of Wit " (1592), with 
 the notorious allusion to "Shake-scene" were among his last 
 eflorts. The " Groatsworth of Wit " describes the jealousies be- 
 tween the playwrights and the actors, who, then as always, gained 
 most of the popularity, and then gained most of the money 
 yielded by the stage. It is almost impossible for unbiased readers 
 to avoid detecting in Greene's "Johannes Factotum," "the only 
 Shake-scene in the country," an allusion to Shakespeare. Whether 
 he partook too freely of pickled herrings and Rhine wine, as 
 gossip averred, or not, he fell into a fatal illness, and died in debt 
 to his landlord and landlady, in September, 1592. 
 
 Harvey attacked and Nash defended his memory, but, even 
 according to Nash he was a " ruffler ". " Penning of plays,'' 
 Greene says, was his " continual exercise," but at what date he 
 began it is uncertain. He appears to have been stung by some 
 comment in a play by two other authors on the unfashionable 
 character of his own dramas, " for that I could not make my verses 
 jet upon the stage in tragical buskins " ; that is, apparently, he did 
 not try to write the sonorous blank verse of Marlowe ; or tried and 
 failed to produce in Nash's words "the swelling bombast of a 
 bragging blank verse ". 
 
 If " Alphonsus, King of Arragon" be his first play, as it gives 
 Tamburlaine on a small scale it may have been suggested by 
 Marlowe's drama : however Alphonsus, after Napoleonic victories, 
 marries his own true love, the daughter of the Sultan and Greene's 
 
200 English Literature 
 
 play, like the tragedies preferred by Charles II, "ends happily". 
 The blank verse is inferior to that of the Ninevite play in which 
 Lodge took part, " A Looking Glass for London and England ". 
 
 " Orlando Furioso " is a strange medley ; there is prose, blank 
 verse, and even a speech in Latin : the materials are drawn, of 
 course, from Ariosto ; the Paladins deal enormously in classical 
 allusions. 
 
 In "Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay," Edward I, while Prince 
 of Wales, falls in love with a gamekeeper's daughter, and describes 
 her charms in blank verse, and in a very pretty pastoral manner. 
 By the old trick of novels and of the stage he sends Lacie, a 
 courtier, to woo for him (as in " Much Ado about Nothing," 
 "Twelfth Night," and "Two Gentlemen of Verona"), and the 
 usual consequences follow. 
 
 The Friars Bacon and Bungay are shown at their pranks, with 
 a devil, and Lacie, "in country apparel,'' flirts with the keeper's 
 daughter in talk of Apollo's courtship of Semele (mother of 
 Dionysus by Zeus). The king beholds their courtship by dint of 
 crystal-gazing ; while they are also on the stage. 
 
 The plot becomes extremely complicated, and poor Margaret, 
 the keeper's daughter, has to play the patient Grizel to Lacie. 
 She is cruelly treated, but marries Lacie in the end, while Edward 
 pairs off with Eleanor. The servant of Friar Bacon, Miles, and 
 a devil provide some comic matter. The blank verse is now 
 much more accomplished, and imitates the cadences of Marlowe. 
 
 The play of " James IV " is so absurdly unhistorical (it trans- 
 fers the plot of an Italian novel by Cinthio to the Court of Holy- 
 rood), that it can hardly be read with patience, but Greene's sweet, 
 patient, long-enduring heroine, Dorothea, appears again, in the 
 part historically filled by a very different person, Margaret Tudor, 
 whose passion for being alternately married (finally to "Lord 
 Muffin ") and divorced, was rebuked by her brother, Henry VIII, 
 himself no model of constancy. Greene introduced and Shakes- 
 peare continued the practice of taking plots for romantic comedies, 
 (such as "As You Like It ") from Italian novels ; and, like 
 Shakespeare, he is the poet of good women, "the Homer of 
 women,'' as his friend Nash said with hyperbole of compliment. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 201 
 
 Lodge. 
 
 The Memoirs of Thomas Lodge, had he left them to us, would 
 be of more interest than are his writings. He " had an oar 
 in every paper-boat," says the Cambridge satirist in the play, 
 "The Return from Parnassus," but he had oars in other boats that 
 were not of paper. Born about 1558, he was the second son of 
 Sir Thomas Lodge, an eminent grocer. He was educated at 
 Trinity College, Oxford, being by one academic generation junior 
 to Lyly. Going to the Inns of Court, London, he answered 
 Gosson's attack on poetry, " The School of Abuse," in an abu- 
 sive style very unlike that of Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of 
 Poesy ". He and Barnaby Rich (the supposed author of a most 
 vivacious translation of two books of Herodotus), were friends, 
 and wrote commendatory verses, each for the other's work (1581). 
 
 If in his "Alarum against Usurers " (1584), Lodge is speaking 
 from his personal experience, he already knew " the ignoble melan- 
 choly of pecuniary embarrassment," thanks to the expensive ac- 
 quaintance of " Mrs. Minx," and long bills due to his tailor. He 
 warns the young against the temptations of the town, at tedious 
 length and with overabundance of classical allusions. In an 
 unreadable romance (1584) (Lyly's " Euphues " being the model), 
 "Forbonius and Prisceria," he inserts many not unreadable 
 verses. 
 
 " Glaucus and Scilla " is a work of the same genre as 
 Shakespeare's " Venus and Adonis," a classical tale told in stanzas 
 of six lines. 
 
 " Delayes in tragic tales provoke offences " 
 
 says Lodge, and his tale is too prolix, verbose, and full of "de- 
 layes ". There are Tiarmonious cadences, and pretty descriptions, 
 but Lodge's poetic vein is best in his brief lyrics. He found time, 
 on sea or land, to write " Rosalynde : Euphues' Golden Legacy ". 
 This contains the tale which Shakespeare made immortal by 
 transfiguring it in " As You Like It ". The vagrant and affected 
 prolixity of this kind of story had a popularity that endured for 
 a century, and surprises us as much as our popular novels will 
 
202 English Literature 
 
 doubtless astonish future generations. Such as the style was, 
 Lodge had mastered it, and redeemed it by the intercalated 
 verses. " Rosalynde " had vogue, and Lodge, who had set forth 
 on a freebooting expedition with young Thomas Cavendish, wrote 
 probably the only novel, "A Margarita of America "(1596), ever 
 composed in the frosty Straits of Magellan. His next novel was 
 " Euphues's Shadow," the euphuism of the shadow is equal to that 
 of the substance. His play, " A Looking Glass for London and 
 England," written in collaboration with Greene, was acted in 1592. 
 We are introduced to Rashi, King of Nineveh, with three Kings 
 of CiHcia, Crete, and Paphlagonia, returning from the overthrow 
 of Jeroboam, King of Jerusalem. 
 
 Greene and Lodge are magnificently disdainful of local colour. 
 The Cilician King, in very sonorous blank verse, proclaims 
 the Assyrian monarch to be more beautiful than Hyacinthus 
 and Endymion, personages of Greek mythology. Hosea the 
 prophet, brought in by an angel, listens to an angelic har- 
 angue of thirty-three lines, and replies in a terse quotation 
 from the Lord's Prayer. To him enter " the Clown and his crew 
 of Ruffians," and we have several pages of humours in prose, 
 mainly the talk is of ale and horses. After a prolonged and 
 chaotic performance, Nineveh repents under the preaching of 
 Jonah, and these amiable moralists, Greene and Lodge, bid 
 London go and do likewise. That the blank verse is not bad, 
 and that the satire of Rashi's flatterers may be a hit at the adula- 
 tors of Elizabeth, is the best that can be said for this Scriptural 
 drama. After all it is npt so tedious as Lodge's play from 
 Roman history, "The Wounds of Civil War ". 
 
 It is needless to speak of such mere hackwork as his books 
 on William Longbeard and Robert the Devil, but his " Fig for 
 Momus," satires in rhyming heroic couplets, a(5:redit him, contrary 
 to the boast of Richard Hall, as the first English satirist. 
 
 Not popular in literature. Lodge (1600) turned physician, 
 taking his M.D. degree at Avignon. Now he really flourished, 
 and was in good practice, till his death in 1625. His reputa- 
 tion rests on his lyrics : for the advance of the drama he did 
 nothing. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 203 
 
 Nash. 
 
 With no special gifts except reckless fluency, Thomas Nash, 
 or Nashe, made his name one of the most frequently quoted in the 
 history of Elizabethan literature. The son of " William Nash, 
 minister " (not improbably a Puritan preacher) Nash was born at 
 Lowestoft in Suffolk in November, 1567. The Christian names of 
 his brothers and sisters, Nathaniel, Israel, Martha, Rebecca are 
 of the Biblical sort favoured by " the Brethren ". 
 
 Nash made no claim to the title " gentleman " then used in 
 the heraldic sense. He was (1582) either a "sizar'' (at Oxford 
 " servitor ") or Lady Margaret's Scholar of St. John's College, 
 Cambridge, and was in residence for nearly seven years. By 1589 
 he was in London, a literary hack, employed, for example, to write 
 an " Introduction " to Greene's " Menaphon ". He addresses the 
 students of both Universities in his irrepressibly rattling way, and 
 it is hardly possible to doubt that in a long passage he rails at the 
 unfortunate Kyd, in his capacities as playwright and translator 
 from the Italian. He rapidly reviewed contemporary literature 
 and mocked at English hexameters, the darlings of Gabriel 
 Harvey. 
 
 With him Nash later had a war of pamphlets, the best known 
 is ■' Have with You to Saffron Walden," containing a full answer to 
 the eldest son of the Halter-maker (1596). The pamphlets are 
 only of interest for their personal hints : the feud arose from 
 a slighting allusion by Greene to Harvey's parentage (" Quip for 
 an Upstart Courtier "). Nash took up the cudgels (as his weapons 
 of wit may be called) for Greene ; Harvey pursued Greene's 
 memory beyond the tomb, and Government at last put an end to 
 the publication of the pamphlets. 
 
 Nash and Marlowe worked together at the play of " Dido," 
 mainly based on the " ^neid " of Virgil, with an opening scene 
 in un-Virgilian bad taste, and highly unedifying to the players, 
 " the Children of her Majesty's Chapel ". The play is in blank verse, 
 usually better than Nash's own in his "Summer's Last Will and 
 Testament ". Much of this is in Nash's hasty prose ; a blank verse 
 tirade in praise of dogs is amusing : — 
 
204 English Literature 
 
 To come to speech, they have it questionless, 
 Although we understand them not so well, 
 They bark as good old Saxon as may be. 
 
 In 1597, Nash was imprisoned for a play "The Isle of Dogs ". 
 
 It is impossible to enumerate his tracts, of which his turbulent 
 prose satire, " Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil," is 
 the most spirited. His " Unfortunate Traveller," or " The Life of 
 Jack Wilton " (1594) is a crude anticipation of " Gil Bias," and 
 the novel of unscrupulous wandering adventurers, and contains 
 the feigned story of the loves of Surrey and his Geraldine, which 
 was taken to be historical. Nash lived a scrambling life, a book- 
 seller's hack, destitute of patrons, and died about 1601. For 
 the advance of the drama, despite his play-writing, Nash did 
 nothing. 
 
 Marlowe. 
 
 Christopher Marlowe is happily on the right side of the line 
 which separates poets who may be read from poets who must be 
 written about. He was born on 6 February, 1564, being the son 
 of an eminent shoemaker at Canterbury. He was educated at the 
 King's School of that town, where he held a little scholarship of a 
 pound, quarterly, and went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 
 with one of the scholarships founded there for Canterbury boys 
 by Archbishop Parker (1581). In 1584 he took his Bachelor's 
 degree, being a contemporary of Nash and Greene, and three 
 years later put on his Master's gown. His translations of Ovid's 
 "Amores" may have been executed at Cambridge; he did not 
 publish them. His first public work was the first part of the play 
 of " Tamburlaine," acted in 1587 or 1588. The drama, in both 
 parts, is destitute of construction ; the hero, Tamburlaine, " the 
 scourge of God," merely overruns a vast extent of country, sub- 
 duing kings, massacring maidens, and glutting his unbounded 
 rage for universal conquest. His only human weakness is his 
 passion for " divine Zenocrat^," his wife, and he might be called 
 a martyr to " megalomania," trampling on divine names no less 
 than on the backs of Emperors. The scene in which he enters 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 205 
 
 in his chariot drawn by the Kings of Trebizond and Sorla, bit in 
 mouth, and cries : — 
 
 Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia I 
 
 was matter of constant jest and parody, a proof of the popularity 
 of the drama. 
 
 In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, 
 Marlowe was " a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with 
 the thought of what man may achieve. " Nature," he makes 
 Tamburlaine say, 
 
 Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds : 
 Our souls whose faculties can comprehend 
 The wondrous architecture of the world. 
 And measure every wandering planet's course, 
 Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
 And always moving as the restless spheres, 
 Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest, 
 Until we reach the ripest fruit of all . . . 
 
 but afler this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine 
 sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown ". 
 
 The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, 
 places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines 
 on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful : — 
 
 If all the pens that poets ever held 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts. 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds and muses on admired themes, 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy. 
 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
 The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
 If these had made one poem's period. 
 And all combined in beauty's worthiness 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least. 
 Which into words no virtue can digest. 
 
 This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as 
 the shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from 
 his embrace. Sometimes it appears to him 
 
2o6 English Literature 
 
 like women or unmarried maids, 
 Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows 
 Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love. 
 
 Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks ths 
 impossible in magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the 
 Adversary, the vision arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that 
 ancient symbol of the World's Desire. 
 
 Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium . . . 
 Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, 
 Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. 
 
 In this absolute perfection of the magic of verse, we see the 
 true conquest of Marlowe : as in the agonies of the last hour of 
 Faustus, 
 
 Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight 
 And burned is Apollo's Laurel Bough. 
 
 The last act is full of pity and of terror. 
 
 The dagger- thrust that slew Marlowe in, a Deptford tavern, 
 at the end of May, 1593, robbed English poetry of a genius whose 
 future performance cannot be measured, nor can the form which 
 it might have taken be guessed. The comic prose scenes in 
 " Faustus " are very stupid and may perhaps be by another hand, 
 but nothing in Marlowe indicates the gift of humour. 
 
 In " The Jew of Malta " Barabas, on a scale less dispropor- 
 tionate than Tamburlaine, represents immeasurable desire of 
 wealth, not of royalty. In the earlier scenes the speeches of 
 Barabas, with the recurrence of romantic and sonorous names, 
 in a way remind us of Milton. The Jew, ill-treated as he is, is 
 not allowed to be sympathetic, and the monstrosity of his crimes 
 reminds the modern reader of Aytoun's "Firmilian": with a 
 touch of the story of the Hunchback in the " Arabian Nights ". 
 Though Barabas has a beloved daughter, rapidly converted to 
 Christianity, though his ducats and his daughter are all that he 
 loves, he lags very far behind Shylock. The play was well calculated 
 for popularity, but, save Barabas, it contains no character of 
 marked merit. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 207 
 
 " Edward II " has been much praised in modern times, and 
 even preferred to the " Richard II " of Shakespeare. Neither 
 King was a- good subject for tragedy, though both endured the 
 extremes of misfortune. But in Richard there were noble ele- 
 ments, debased by a long struggle with some of his uncles, and 
 undermined by a period of absolute power. In Edward II we 
 know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour when 
 he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to 
 Piers Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable 
 insults to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his 
 awful last hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change 
 of the Queen from a loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged 
 woman to a monster of cruel hypocrisy cannot be called artistic ; 
 and though the play, compared with Marlowe's other dramas, is 
 " regular," and opens the path to what we may call the legitimate 
 drama, without the monstrosities of " The Jew of Malta," it does 
 not contain such surpnsmg excellencies as occur in "Tam- 
 burlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of 
 the fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward 
 of the earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholo- 
 mew massacre of 1572) is of no importance among Marlowe's 
 works. 
 
 If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe 
 wrote the passages of" Henry VI," in which Jeanne d'Arc is worthy 
 of herself, and that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes 
 of her debasement, we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear- 
 sighted appreciation. But nothing in their works confirms this 
 conjecture. What share, if any, Marlowe had in " Henry VI " and 
 "Titus Andronicus," and precisely what Shakespeare did for both of 
 these dramas is unknown. Marlowe's beautiful lyric, " Come live 
 with me and be my Love," is for ever fragrant, and his " Hero and 
 Leander " (stiffly finished by Chapman, it is said at Marlowe's own 
 dying request) is at least the equal of, and may even be preferred 
 by many readers to, the first fruits of Shakespeare's invention, 
 "Venus and Adonis". 
 
 Shakespeare's "dead shepherd" did not die unlamented by 
 his brother poets : he had patrons in Raleigh and Sir Thomas 
 
2o8 English Literature 
 
 Walsingham, and it is not necessary to criticize here certain 
 horrible Ubek on his life and conversation.^ 
 
 Kyd. 
 
 The irony of chance, by a freak of Ben Jonson's, has attached 
 to the most ill-fated of authors the name of " Sporting Kyd ". Born 
 about 1558 the son of a scrivener in the City, Kyd was educated 
 at Merchant Taylors' School. He was not a member of either 
 University. It is by a piece of luck, for his biographers, that he 
 was satirized by Nash as one who stole from a French translation of 
 Seneca's tragedies ; and so produced a play, " Pompey the Great, 
 his fair Cornelia's Tragedie," one who " will afford you whole 
 Hamlets," and who took up the business of translating from the 
 Italian. By pursuing these and other sarcastic hints of Nash's, 
 Kyd has been identified as the author of the most truly popular 
 of early Elizabethan plays " The Spanish Tragedy " ; of what the 
 Germans call the " Ur- Hamlet," the oldest English Hamlet play ; 
 and the translator of " The Householder's Philosophie," in prose ; 
 while he is thought guiltless of the first part of "Jeronimo,'' a 
 prelude, meant to be tumorous, to his " Spanish Tragedy ''. To 
 that work, again, additions were made, and Ben Jonson was paid 
 for making them, though they are thought not to resemble his 
 manner, and he frequently girds in his own later dramas at the 
 popular " Spanish Tragedy ". It is a long tissue of horrors and 
 revenges in blank verse, old Hieronymo slowly pursuing the 
 slayers of his son, Horatio, and contains, like " Hamlet," a play 
 within a play, in which the actors in a fencing scene slay each 
 other in earnest, to glut Hieronymo's revenge. As in " Hamlet " 
 there is a ghost, but ghosts were common in the dramas of 
 
 1 Marlowe was summoned before the Privy Council, and " entered his 
 appearance " on ao May, I5g3. The Council had heard of a " school of 
 Atheists," and Marlowe appears to have been named among them. There 
 is no hint of atheism in the fragmentary paper which Kyd said that he had 
 from Marlowe, who was at liberty in the end of May, but was killed at 
 Deptford, and buried on i June. On Whitsun Eve, a June, a horrible libel 
 against Marlowe was brought to the Privy Council. The circumstances 
 are mysterious. C/. Mr. Boas, " Works of Thomas Kyd," 1901, and Mr, 
 Ingram, " Christopher Marlowe and His Associates," 1904. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 209 
 
 Seneca and his English imitators. Hieronymo, when apprehended, 
 bites his tongue out, and stabs himself and a Duke who happens 
 to be convenient in his neighbourhood. 
 
 If Kyd were really the author of the first play of "Hamlet," 
 based on a Danish story which English actors who played in 
 Germany in 1587 may have brought home, the fact would be 
 interesting. If we only possessed a copy of this first " Hamlet," 
 we should know how much, if anything at all, Shakespeare retained 
 from the original play. Kyd is credited with being the first to 
 show the change and development of characters under the sway 
 of the events of the drama, though this can scarcely be proved 
 save by a long comparison of all the characters in the plays of 
 other writers. Grotesque as are his horrors, when we compare 
 those of " Titus Andronicus " and of successors of Shakespeare 
 who ought to have known better, we " wonder at his moderation ". 
 
 Kyd's end was lamentable. He was arrested, and tortured, 
 in May, 1593, on suspicion of having written a placard threatening 
 a massacre of undesirable aliens in London, who interfered with 
 home industries. In his papers was found part of a perfectly 
 serious though heterodox discourse on a theological topic, ap- 
 parently intended to be submitted to a Bishop. He cleared him- 
 self of the placard, and, in a letter to Puckering, the Lord Keeper, 
 said that he had the theological piece from Marlowe, that it was 
 among his papers by accident, and that Marlowe, then just dead, 
 was an evil man, and no friend of his. 
 
 Kyd now lost the patronage of a peer, unnamed, and by 
 December in the following year he was dead ; his family renounced 
 the administration of what possessions he may have left behind 
 him. He has of late been the subject of minute English and 
 German research, like every one who had, or may have had, the 
 faintest connexion with Shakespeare. The indecision of Hiero- 
 nymo (Act iii. scene 1,2) in revenging himself on Balthasar for slay- 
 ing Horatio, Hieronymo's son, and hanging him up in Hieronymo's 
 summer-house, has other motives than the indecision of Hamlet. 
 But this indecision, and the play within the play, and Kyd's sup- 
 posed authorship of the " Ur-Hamlet," which lies behind the First 
 Quarto of " Hamlet," make Kyd interesting to critical specialists 
 
 14 
 
2i6 English Literature 
 
 These predecessors of Shakespeare need to be mentioned, 
 though perhaps only Marlowe's dramas arenow commonly read by 
 lovers of poetry. Though these men wandered in the wilderness, 
 so to speak, they pointed out the way to Shakespeare, and made the 
 world familiar with rude forecasts of the forms of the romantic 
 comedy, the historical play, and the tragedy. Several wrote blank 
 verse well, occasionally ; Marlowe brought blank verse, not pre- 
 cisely dramatic, but rather reflective, to the highest beauty. 
 Almost all the early dramatists also graced their plays with charm- 
 ing songs. 
 
 All of these early dramatists had that sweet and birdlike 
 English note of song, " woodnotes wild," which (to an English 
 ear) is rare in all but the early poetry of France. We have ob- 
 served this note in the lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 centuries. Time did not stifle the music, it is prolonged in the 
 fashionable love-romances and in the early dramas. Thus even 
 Nash, the least poetical of his associates, has his 
 
 Adieu, farewell earth's bliss 
 This world uncertain is, 
 
 which, with its refrain, 
 
 Lord, have mercy on us, 
 
 recalls Dunbar's lament 
 
 Timor Mortis conturbat me. 
 Dust hath closed Helen's eye, 
 Worms feed on Hector brave. 
 
 Where are the lovely knights and the ladies of old time ? 
 
 Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure, 
 written in a time of pestilence, is another lament of Nash's, and 
 
 Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year. 
 Peele has 
 
 His golden locks hath time to silver turned, 
 
 and the beautiful song of Bethsabe at the bath, 
 
 Hot sun, cool fire, teiiipered with sweet air. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 211 
 
 Greene has his 
 
 Ah, what is love, it is a pretty thing, 
 As sweet unto a shepherd as a king, 
 
 which is in the spirit of Burns's best songs of rural love ; and his 
 courtly love song with the French refrain, 
 
 N^oserez vous, mon bel ami I 
 
 and his Lullaby 
 
 Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee, 
 When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee. 
 
 This has the charm of the folk-songs. 
 
 Old and plain, 
 
 And dallying with the innocence of love. 
 
 It may also be said that, at the opposite pole, Greene's snatches 
 of English hexameters are the best of their kind then written. 
 If nothing else of Lyly's existed his 
 
 Cupid and my Campaspe played 
 At cards for kisses — Cupid payed, 
 
 would keep his memory green. 
 
 Lodge has been blamed as a common plagiary because he 
 translated so many of his lyrics, not always or often with due 
 acknowledgment, from Des Portes and Ronsard. But in some 
 cases he improved the land which he conquered, and his " Love 
 in my bosom like a bee," " Down a down ! " " Thus Phyllis 
 sung," and " Pluck the fruit and taste the pleasures," are genuine 
 additions to English song, and prelude to Shakespeare's, and the 
 music of the coming generation. 
 
 All of the treasures of his predecessors are not equivalent or 
 nearly equivalent to the small change of Shakespeare's genius. 
 But the best things in his predecessors' work indicate that, in a 
 favourite phrase of Aristotle, " Nature was wishing to make " a 
 Shakespeare. Yet was the birth of his genius none the less a 
 miracle. He did much more than combine all that was good in 
 all the others. He added that which is universal and eternal. 
 
 14* 
 
212 English Literature 
 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Concerning the life of William Shakspere (as he signed it), 
 or Shakespeare (as his name was usually spelled), only a few 
 essential facts are known from records of his own time, mainly 
 documents concerning the legal affairs of himself, his family, 
 and the theatrical company with which he was connected. 
 Unlike many of the contemporary playwrights he was not a 
 member of either University, and so college records about 
 him are necessarily absent : and there is no contemporary roll 
 of names of pupils at the school of his native place, Stratford- 
 on-Avon. 
 
 Again, he was not a pamphleteer or journalist, like Nash, 
 Greene, and others, and so he left no account of his friendships 
 and enmities ; no prose books about his opinions on art and liter- 
 ature, like Ben Jonson ; he wrote no satirical plays, as Ben did, 
 full of angry, contemptuous, and envious attacks on his rivals, and 
 on the actors. As he was no learned scholar, the Universities 
 never dreamed of making him, like Ben Jonson, a Master of Arts. 
 People who wrote criticisms of poetry in prose or verse always 
 spoke highly of him : one, John Davies, remarks that, in the 
 opinion of some, had he not been an actor, he would have been 
 fit company for Kings. But anecdotes of him were not sought 
 for till all who had known him had long been dead. His own 
 dramas contain a few topical allusions, and his sonnets appear to 
 be more or less autobiographical, though to what degree, as in 
 the case of Sidney's sonnets, is matter of dispute. He took almost 
 no part in any public services, and in these circumstances little 
 is known of his life, despite the painful researches of many learned 
 students, and the wildest modern conjectures. 
 
 Concerning even the paternal grandfather of the poet, pre- 
 sumed to have been Richard Shakespeare, a farmer at Snitter- 
 field, within four miles of Stratford-on-Avon, we have little more 
 than probable presumptions. Richard's son John, father of the 
 poet, in 1 55 1 set up in business at Stratford-on-Avon, then a town 
 of some 1500 inhabitants. He was a dealer in agricultural com- 
 modities ; Aubrey, the antiquary, a century later, heard that he 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 213 
 
 was a butcher. But the trade of a butcher in a tiny town is not 
 lucrative, yet by 1556 he could buy two tenements, one in Henley 
 Street, next door to the so-called " Birthplace ". He held a 
 succession of municipal offices, and was one of two chamberlains 
 of town accounts. In 1557 (?) he married Mary Arden, a daughter 
 of a far away branch of a good family ; she inherited fifty acres of 
 land and a house at Wilmcote, and other property. After the 
 birth of children who died young, came William, baptized on 26 
 April, 1564. His father, still prospering, was chief magistrate in 
 1568: that year came licensed play-actors to Stratford — "The 
 Queen's," and "The Earl of Worcester's". But after 1572 the 
 affairs of the father turned gradually to the worse ; he mortgaged the 
 property near Wilmcote in 1578; befell into debt, and in 1586 
 ceased to be an alderman. His family had increased while his 
 fortunes declined. 
 
 As there was a free Grammar School at Stratford, it is natural 
 to suppose that William was educated there from his seventh 
 or eighth to his thirteenth year. If so, he would learn Latin 
 grammar, and read more or less in the popular classics, in- 
 cluding, " old Mantuan " — not Virgil, but a writer of the Italian 
 Renaissance. Supposing Shakespeare to have left school at 
 thirteen, he was at the age of Bacon when he went up to Cam- 
 bridge. ' Books have been written about the learning or want of 
 learning of Shakespeare. In all probability he could make out 
 most of the meaning of a Roman writer of comedies, like Plautus, 
 or of a philosopher like Seneca. But his use of English trans- 
 lations, whenever he could get them, does not look as if he read 
 Latin with ease : he could ask a friend or pay a poor scholar to 
 help him when he had no translations ; and to Ben Jonson his 
 Latin seemed " small," because Ben had so much scholarship, 
 and was so proud of it. All general information Shakespeare 
 acquired as easily as he drew breath. Of schoolmasters, judging 
 from allusions in the plays, he entertained the same opinion as 
 Sir Walter Scott. The classics are most in view in his early plays, 
 in some of which he worked over an earlier manuscript by a more 
 scholarly hand. Moreover classical allusions, mythological and 
 historical, lay loose on the surface of all contemporary literature ; 
 
214 English Literature 
 
 and abounded in the conversation of the wits.^ No man ever 
 cared less for historical accuracy and correct " local colour " than 
 Shakespeare : he piled up anachronisms, making Aristotle live 
 before the Trojan war. 
 
 When not yet 19 years of age, at the close of 1582, Shakes- 
 peare married Anne Hathaway, who had the same dowry, in money 
 {;£6. 13s. 4d.) as his mother. She was seven or eight years older 
 than he: their first child was born at the end of May, 1583, 
 and the circumstances did not promise domestic happiness. 
 Twins, Hamnet (who died young) and Judith, were born in 1585, 
 and whether Shakespeare did, or did not get into trouble for 
 poaching on the lands of Lucy of Charlecote (against whom his 
 heraldic ridicule, in "Merry Wives," Act I, Scene i, indicates a 
 grudge), it was time for him to seek his fortune. Perhaps he 
 made ventures near home (Aubrey, who knew an old actor that 
 had traditions, says he was a schoolmaster), but by 1587 he was 
 probably "hanging loose on the town" in London. Here he 
 had a fellow townsman. Field, who later printed his " Venus," 
 and his " Lucrece ". The story that Shakespeare held the horses 
 of playgoers outside the doors of a theatre comes late into literary 
 anecdote. 
 
 By 1594 (perhaps by 1592) Shakespeare was a member of the 
 Company of Actors known successively as "Leicester's," " Derby's " 
 (died 1592) "Hunsdon's" (Carey) and, at the accession of James 
 VI and I (1603) " The King's ". With him were the great Richard 
 Burbage, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips. 
 By this Company all his plays were first acted. By 1592 they 
 used the Rose Theatre, and others, and in 1599 the Globe. There 
 is no proof that Shakespeare ever played in Scotland (he could 
 not pronounce Dunsinane, and accentuated the final syllable) or 
 abroad. 
 
 From the moment of his departure from Stratford nothing is 
 certainly known of Shakespeare, till the dying Greene apparently 
 
 ' The curious, almost verbal coincidences, between passages in Shakespeare 
 and passages in the Athenian tragedians are probably due to parity of genius, 
 not to imitation. On the other side see Mr. Churton CoUins's " Studies in 
 Shakespeare," p. 72, et sqq. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 215 
 
 alludes to him in "A groat's worth of wit, bought with a million 
 of Repentance" (1592). Adjuring his comrades (Nash, Peele, 
 and Marlowe ?), to forswear sack and the stage, Greene seems to 
 remind them of a hardship in their professional position : the re- 
 wi-iting of plays, once sold, by other hands. A new hand might 
 alter it for the owners, the hand might be that of an actor, one of 
 the "puppets," says Greene, "that speak from our mouths. . . . 
 There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with 
 his ' Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide ' supposes he is as well 
 able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an 
 absolute ' Johannes factotum '" (jack-of-all- work) "is, in his own 
 conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie. ... It is a pity 
 men of such rare wit should be subject to the pleasures of such 
 rude groomes." 
 
 If, as has been suggested (there is no certainty), a piece called 
 "Henry VI " (part i), played by Shakespeare's company in March, 
 1592, was an older drama "bombasted" by Shakespeare, and if 
 his conduct was one cause of Greene's wrath, we can only regret 
 that Shakespeare set his hand to a work that rejoiced English 
 patriots. The author or authors represent Jeanne d'Arc in two 
 totally different characters, now as a patriot, equally brave, self- 
 sacrificing, and eloquent ; now as a loose woman who denies her 
 father, and asserts her pregnancy by one or other of several lovers. 
 History is strangely treated, and the materials must have been 
 taken from Anglo-Burgundian scandals, and from a curious French 
 prose chronicle romance, obviously done into prose out of verse, 
 the " Chronique de Lorraine ". This appears to have been the 
 source of the scenes in which Jeanne fights at Rouen, many years 
 after her martyrdom in 1431. 
 
 Shakespeare may have '' written in " the scenes where Jeanne 
 acts and speaks like herself ; the others (let us hope so I) may be 
 by a baser hand. The second and third parts of " Henry VI," 
 were later much altered, probably by Shakespeare ; the scenes 
 with Jack Cade are entirely in his manner. 
 
 As we have not the original manuscripts, we are often unable 
 to distinguish, in Shakespeare's earlier works, between what is 
 his own and what belongs to a play by an earlier hand, or by a 
 
2i6 English Literature 
 
 collaborator. The tendency of criticism is to attribute the best 
 passages to Shakespeare and to guess at the authors of what is 
 not so good. 
 
 The dates especially of the early plays are far from certain. 
 But we can hardly be mistaken in thinking "Love's Labour's 
 Lost " a very early example of the poet's play-writing. He has 
 not mastered blank verse : the sense usually ends with the end of 
 each line ; much of the play is written in rhymed verse of various 
 metres : prose is comparatively little used. Some of the person- 
 ages, as Biron and Longueville, are of the contemporary Court 
 of Henry of Navarre, a most unlikely person to contemplate 
 seclusion from female society 1 The play, of which the plot 
 seems to be Shakespeare's ovrap- is full of promise of good things 
 to come. Biron will blossom into Benedick, Costard and Jac- 
 quetta into Touchstone and Audrey ; the ladies are predecessors 
 of the poet's many ladies, as Beatrix and Rosalind, who are merry 
 when in love. We have the stock figure of the pedant school- • 
 master in Holofernes, of the fantastic talker in Armado, and the 
 songs, " On a day. Alack the day," and " When daisies pied and 
 violets blue,'' prelude to all the enchantments of Shakespeare's 
 lyrics. The play was revised and worked over in 1598 (?). 
 
 " Titus Andronicus " (certainly extant in 1 594) is the play which 
 Burns and his brothers, in boyhood, declined to listen to ; it is as 
 full of horrors as an Assyrian bas-relief of the torturing of prisoners 
 of war. Tortures were familiar, in practice, to the subjects of 
 Elizabeth, and the horrors are not worse than those of ancient 
 Athenian and other Greek legendary histories. But neither these 
 things nor the over-abundance of pedantic classical allusions are in 
 Shakespeare's mature taste. Much of the play has been guessed 
 at as the work of " Sporting Kyd," and a fairly old tradition (pub- 
 lished in 1678) says that Shakespeare only touched it up. Long 
 ago Hallam remarked that criticism might come to be as dubious 
 
 1 Shakespeare's other plays are based either on actual chronicles and 
 histories ; or on legends, as in " King Lear " and " 'Cymbeline " ; or on tales, 
 mainly Italian, founded as a rule on old traditional stories, and sometimes 
 done by others into English novels. Earlier plays, of similar origin, are also 
 employed. Such, too, were the usual sources of Moliere, and almost all Greek 
 tragedy rests on Achasan or Ionian myths, current in older epic poems. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 217 
 
 as to Shakespeare's precise share in the plays, as, after Wolf (1795), 
 she has been uncertain about Homer's part in his epics. It is 
 clear and certain that plays, when Shakespeare came to the town, 
 were often altered and added to by others than the original 
 authors. Though "Titus Andronicus" was, in 1598, assigned to 
 Shakespeare by Francis Meres, and was included in the first col- 
 lected edition, the Folio, in 1623, he may, perhaps, have been 
 the last and, as the most popular, the titular bearbeiter, or worker- 
 over of the drama. 
 
 "Richard IK" could scarcely be made to feed more'fuU of 
 horrors on the stage than that prince actually did, as reported by 
 Holinshed, and the play, if inflated, is less so than Marlowe's 
 "Tamburlaine". Marlowe's "Edward II," again, had its in- 
 fluence on "Richard II," a perilous play to be concerned with, 
 from the scene of deposing the king, under the irritable Elizabeth. 
 Acted by order of the Essex conspirators, in 1601, it brought 
 Shakespeare's company under the momentary displeasure of the 
 Queen. 
 
 The third Richard has all the elements of popularity. He is 
 as hideous as the second Richard was effeminately beautiful, as 
 resolute as his predecessor was weak. It is well that a dramatist 
 should make himself plainly understood, but Shakespeare seems 
 to play with his own art when the splendid rhetoric of Richard 
 III reveals (he soliloquizes more than Hamlet) the cause why he 
 is " determined to prove a villain " — his spite against the world for 
 his own deformity, — and why he is determined to be a hypocrite, 
 
 With odd old ends stolen out of holy writ. 
 
 The scene of the wooing of the Lady Anne, and the dream of 
 Clarence, are among the most familiar passages in English poetry, 
 and the second is rich in the magic of Shakespeare's blank verse. 
 The wavering character of Richard II, ever in extremes of con- 
 fident arrogance and of sudden dread, like that of Agamemnon, 
 would not have seemed to Aristotle fit for a hero of tragedy. But 
 in memorable passages of poetry, single lines that, once read, can 
 never be forgotten, the play is rich, and such lines are the mark 
 and sign manual of Shakespeare's genius. " The real Shakespeare 
 
2i8 English Literature 
 
 cannot help showing himself here and there ; and then we are in 
 the presence of something new — of a kind of EngUsh poetry that 
 no one has hit upon before. . . ." ^ 
 
 It is in " Romeo and Juliet," and the " Midsummer Night's 
 Dream," both relatively early pieces, even more than in the 
 chronicle plays, that this ever-present magic of genius, the un- 
 equalled command of beautiful fresh phrases, the hurrying rush 
 of exquisite ideas, first shines out most conspicuously : the youth 
 of passion in the Romeo, and the soul of romance, are accom- 
 panied by the gay wit of glorious Mercutio and the lax humours 
 of the Nurse and the servants. Shakespeare was compelled to 
 kill Mercutio by Tybalt's sword, otherwise a character so con- 
 genial to him would have run away with the play, and turned the 
 tragedy into comedy. Shakespeare, says Ben Jonson, " had an ex- 
 cellent phantasy" (fancy), "brave notions and gentle expressions, 
 wherein he flowed with such facility that sometimes it was neces- 
 sary he should be stopped." Mercutio could only be stopped by 
 a sword thrust ! The " Midsummer Night's Dream " is the en- 
 chanted consummation of the world-wide fairy belief, relieved 
 against the rustic comedy of Bottom and Snug. 
 
 " The Two Gentlemen of Verona," like " Love's Labour's 
 Lost," is a bud full of promise. Launce is as delightfully 
 humorous as Silvia is gay and charming, and Julia is the first of 
 the ladies in page's guise and deep in love ; but " Romeo and 
 Juliet," and " A Midsummer Night's Dream " are already non- 
 pareils, full-blown roses that time cannot wither. 
 
 The "Comedy of Errors," based on Plautus, with the farcical 
 errors of indistinguishable identities in the masters, reduplicated 
 in the servants, would add by its broad farce to Shakespeare's 
 popularity, though not to his fame. But in " The Merchant of 
 Venice " the blending of moral tragedy in the sombre character of 
 the outraged Jew, Shylock, combined with the delightful and 
 tender romance of the lovers, proved the multifarious versatility 
 of the poet, his power in the delineation of the most various 
 moods and passions, and also the unequalled magic of his verse. 
 
 ' Saintsbury. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 219 
 
 On such a night 
 Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 
 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love 
 To come again to Carthage. 
 
 Here Virgil is equalled or surpassed in the province where 
 Virgil was greatest ; in the use of words that by some inexplicable 
 art suggest more than they seem to say, filling the mind with 
 vague and potent emotion, and a longing not to be appeased, as 
 does the beauty of twilight and moonlight. 
 
 Look how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ; 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ; 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls ; 
 But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 
 
 In this passage, whether he knew it or not — and we know not 
 how he knew things, — Shakespeare soars to the heights of Plato's 
 dreams, in the "Phsedrus" and the "Symposium" Did he go 
 beyond the appreciation of " the groundlings " in such passages ? 
 Did they find mirth in the passion of the Jew, and fail to fathom 
 Shakespeare's deep sympathy with the oppressed ? Probably he 
 gave them more and other things than he seemed to give; to 
 them Shylock's may have appeared as a comic part, but indeed we 
 cannot judge that strange Elizabethan audience. Shakespeare 
 knew what they wanted, horrors, ghosts, revenges, manslayings. 
 He gave them these things in "Lear" and "Hamlet," but gave 
 with them the deepest and subtlest thoughts, the most magical 
 poetry, treasures of wit, and all this they could enjoy, as they could 
 follow every point, pass, and parry in the wit-combats. 
 
 It seems probable that Shakespeare's fame as a poet rested, 
 for a while, rather on his verses, "Venus and Adonis " (published 
 1593) and " Lucrece " (1594), than on all the treasures of his plays. 
 The two poems, the only works of Shakespeare's which he himself 
 saw through the press, are dedicated, in brief terms, to Henry 
 Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, then a lad of twenty, fond of 
 
2 20 English Literature 
 
 pleasure, art, and letters. The dedications are not fulsome, when 
 we consider the manner of addressing patrons in that age. The 
 second address, of some ten lines, says "the love I dedicate to 
 your lordship is without end. . . What I have done is yours; 
 what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted 
 yours." It seems that Southampton had behaved with generosity 
 to the poet, and it looks as if the poet's " love " were more than 
 the trick-phrase of a person obliged. 
 
 " The poems themselves, " Venus and Adonis " in a six line 
 stanza, " Lucrece" in a seven line stanza, are remarkable for fluent 
 mastery of verse and rhyme, for lusciousness of description of 
 physical beauties, and for the compassionate passage on the poor 
 hunted hare, and the vigorous description of a horse. Shakespeare 
 manifestly loved a good horse, and probably felt compunctions 
 about riding to harriers. But as to the poetry ; it certainly is 
 not superior to the luscious descriptions in Spenser ; the verse is 
 by no means superior to, nor, to some tastes, equal to Spenser's ; 
 and, if we lost Marlowe's " Hero and Leander," the misfortune 
 would be as great as if we lost " Venus " and " Lucrece ". The 
 two compositions show us Shakespeare exercising himself on a 
 fashionable class of themes, and with an overflow of fashionable 
 conceits ; sufflaminanius erat, says Ben Jonson ; " the drag needed 
 to be put on ''. Had we nothing else of Shakespeare's, we could 
 make no guess at his greatness. 
 
 Indeed his contemporaries could hardly do so, till his plays 
 were pirated and printed, because all their innumerable merits 
 could not be fully appreciated till the plays were meditatively 
 and frequently perused. By 1598, Francis Meres, comparing 
 English with ancient poets, names Shakespeare and others with 
 Homer, ^schylus, Sophocles and Aristophanes, also Ausonius 
 and Claudian. But he places Warner in the same good company 
 (in "Palladis Tamia," or "Wit's Treasury," 1598). 
 
 The plays named by Meres are "Two Gentlemen of Verona," 
 "Comedy of Errors," " Love's Labour's Lost," " Love's Labour's 
 Won " (?), " Midsummer Night's Dream," " Merchant of Venice," 
 both "Richards," " Henry IV," King John," " Titus Andronicus," 
 and "Romeo and Juliet ". "The soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 221 
 
 and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his 'Venus and Adonis,' 
 his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets, among his private friends." 
 (Not published till 1609.) 
 
 GuUio, in the Cambridge comedy, " The Return from Par- 
 nassus" (about 1599-1602) is a farcical ignorant braggart who 
 says "let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, 
 I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare," for his "Venus and Adonis ". 
 He also quotes " Romeo and Juliet," and the University wits 
 manifestly despised Shakespeare, as no scholar and not a Uni- 
 versity man. They bade Ben Jonson go back to his brick-making ; 
 fie was not a University man ! 
 
 Meanwhile Shakespeare, with his share in the company and 
 what he received for his written plays, and from patrons, was thriv- 
 ing, while his father struggled with debt and difficulties. None the 
 less, probably aided pecuniarily and advised by Shakespeare, he 
 applied to the College of Arms for a grant of armorial bearings 
 (1596). A memorandum exists in which John Shakespeare is 
 said to have " lands and tenements of good wealth and substance ". 
 The grant was not made till 1599, and the heralds appear to have 
 been very good-natured in permitting these Shakespeares to write 
 themselves gentlemen. The financial basis, however, was supplied 
 when, in 1597, Shakespeare bought New Place, a large house in 
 the town of Stratford, and two gardens. Mr. Lee reckons his 
 income, allowing for the altered values of money, at ;^io4o in 
 our currency. 
 
 In short, like Scott, Shakespeare lived to found a family of 
 gentility, though Scott naturally inherited the gentility and 
 heraldic quarterings, which Shakespeare did not. He prospered 
 continually ; he held, later, shares in the Globe theatre, and there 
 is abundant proof that in money, acres, and goods he throve to an 
 extent that denotes careful living. He appears as a strict exactor 
 of debts : in nothing was he careless and indifferent except as 
 regarded the immortal works, which, after his death, his stage 
 friends, Heming and Condell, published as best they migljt (1623, 
 the first folio). 
 
 Shakespeare seems, in fact, to have had even more than 
 Scott's indifference to his literary fame, unless we suppose him to 
 
2 22 English Literature 
 
 h^ve been firmly persuaded that his works, once given to the 
 stage, must secure their own immortality. Even so, he might 
 have employed the leisure of his last years in preparing a correct 
 text for the press. 
 
 Yet who knows that Shakespeare did not dream of doing what 
 was unprecedented, of revising and collecting his plays for publi- 
 cation? Playwrights seldom printed their dramas, for reasons 
 already given. But, in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, 
 Ben Jonson published his "works " (he was laughed at for call- 
 ing them " works ") in a tall and stately folio. It may have been 
 in Shakespeare's mind to do the same thing: but "to-morrow 
 and to-morrow and to-morrow " 1 He may have contemplated 
 the difficult task, he may even have made fair copies of some of 
 his manuscripts of his many unprinted plays, — the papers which 
 his friends, the actors, say had " scarce a blot ". But his older 
 manuscripts may have been tattered and worn, and altered for 
 bptter or worse. To collect and revise all was a serious labour 
 for a retired, perhaps a weary man. He was but 52 when 
 he died ; he may, we repeat, have dreamed of a task which he put 
 off from day to day : there is no mystery in delays so natural 
 when the custom of playwriters was not to publish. 
 
 The Sonnets. 
 
 It is difficult or impossible to date Shakespeare's Sonnets. 
 As we know from Meres, " sugared sonnets " of his were circulat- 
 ing in manuscript in 1598 : the book of Sonnets was (piratically ?) 
 published in 1609 with a dark dedication to " Mr. W. H.," by 
 the pirate, or procurer of piracy, Thorpe, " To the only begetter 
 of these sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity 
 promised by our ever-living jjoet wisheth the well-wishing adven- 
 turer in setting forth T.T. ". T.T. did not wish to be understood. 
 The two most popular theories are that Mr. W. H. is William 
 Herbert, in 1601 Earl of Pembroke; before his accession to the 
 Earldom, he was known by " courtesy title " as Lord Herbert. 
 To him then, about 1598-1601, the Sonnets to a man are ad- 
 dressed. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 223 
 
 The second theory lays stress or\ Shakespeare's known 
 devotion to the Earl of Southampton ; certainly his patron, and 
 assured of his love in the dedications of "Venus" and " Lucrece," 
 in 1593, 1594. The Sonnets are therefore dated about 1594, 
 whereas, by the Pembroke theory, they are dated about 15 98-1 601. 
 
 It is not possible, in this place, to criticize the twe theories. 
 The matter is of no importance in itself, but some partisans of the 
 Pembroke theory represent Shakespeare as embittered almost to 
 madness by the affair, constantly alluded to in the Sonnets, of a 
 double betrayal by his mistress, the Dark Lady, and by his adored 
 friend the Earl of Pembroke. Henceforth we are to suppose, he 
 revealed his passions in his tragedies, and was a fevered creature, 
 dreaming of " bloody vengeance ". 
 
 There is not a shadow of proof for the hypothesis that the Dark 
 Lady of the Sonnets was a Maid of Honour, IVlary Fitton, whose 
 portraits demonstrate that she was of a fair complexion, with grey 
 eyes and brown hair. We have not the slightest reason to believe 
 that, in 1 597-1601, when he was building up an estate, Shakes- 
 peare was mad with love of Mary, and jealousy of her lovers who, 
 after 1601, are unknown, till, in 1606, she committed a fault, in 
 the country. Of the two Earls, Southampton, rather more prob- 
 ably than Pembroke, was, if either of them was, the beloved 
 friend of the Sonnets. ^ 
 
 The Sonnets are not in the Italian or Petrarchia n form of re- 
 curring rhymes, but are in three verses of four lines, with a rhyming 
 couplet to conclude. In many respects they resemble the sonnets 
 fashionable at the time, with praise of a patron whom the poet loves 
 and who is the inspiration of the poet. The accustomed conceits 
 of Petrarch and his French followers, des Portes, Ronsard, and many 
 others, are transfigured by the poet's genius. It was usual to ap- 
 plaud the beauty of the patron, and to 'exaggerate the love of the poet. 
 
 This was matter of common form, but the sonnets of Shakes- 
 peare reflect the actual passion of love, or of friendship " passing 
 
 ^ Mr. Tyler, in his edition of the Sonnets (i8go), Dr. Brandes, in his 
 " William Shakespeare," and Mr. Harris, in " The Man Shakespeare," support 
 the Pembroke theory. Mr. Sidney Lee's " Life of William Shakespeare " 
 contains the arguments in favour of Southampton. 
 
2 24 English Literature 
 
 the love of women," yet always respectful. People wrote thus to 
 Elizabeth in her old age, but Shakespeare conveys an impression 
 of sincerity, whether because he felt what he expresses, or whether 
 his genius makes real and glowing that which was, with other 
 writers, mere matter of compliment. He may be "unlocking 
 his heart," in either case, for he must have known, for some one, 
 the passion which, on the second theory, he dramatically employs 
 to glorify his young inspirer. Yet again, he could imitate and 
 express "all thoughts, all passions": his "sweetest nature" can 
 scarcely have known the emotions of Shylock ! 
 
 However we may try to distinguish between what is conven- 
 tional and what is felt in the Sonnets, they apparently refer to real 
 persons and real situations. Sonnets I-XVII urge marriage on 
 the beautiful young patron and friend : his beauties and virtues 
 must live in his children as well as in verse. Sonnets XXXUI- 
 XXXVI hint at some measure of estrangement, some wrong done 
 to the poet by the friend. 
 
 No more be grieved at that which thou hast done. 
 
 Sonnets XL-XLIII suggest that the friend has drawn away 
 the poet's mistress. 
 
 I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, 
 Although thou steal thee all my poverty. 
 Such are 
 
 The pretty wrongs that liberty commits. 
 
 The suffering poet appears to bear no malice, it must be ad- 
 mitted. Thenceforward there are regrets for the absence of the 
 friend, beautiful reflections, promises of immortality in verse, till 
 (LXVII) the poet hears that the friend keeps bad company, and 
 though (LXX) this may be an envious slander, the poet has his 
 doubts. In LXVIII-XCIII the poet feels that the patron is 
 preferring other minstrels, and one of these he applauds for 
 
 the proud full sail of his great verse. 
 This singer is inspired by 
 
 that affable familiar ghost 
 Which nightly gulls him with intelligence.' 
 
 ' Ben Jonson was something of a visionary. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 225 
 
 Here are personal allusions to some facts, or jests, .which we 
 cannot hope to discover : the rival poet has been guessed at as 
 Barnabe Barnes ("Parthenope and Parthenophil," 1593), who 
 certainly wrote a sonnet on the inspiration of Southampton's eyes. 
 Others think that George Chapman, the translator of Homer, is 
 the rival whom Shakespeare writes of admiringly. In XCV-XCVI 
 the poet recurs to the stories which "spot the beauty of thy 
 budding name ". In CIV he has loved his friend for three years, 
 
 Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned. 
 
 Yet he goes on in the old strain of love and praise, though 
 
 What's new to speak, what new to register ? 
 
 In CX-CXI he perhaps laments his own profession as a player ; 
 perhaps he refers to changes in his affections. Taking the whole 
 of this and the preceding sonnet together, the second seems the 
 more natural interpretation. In Sonnet CXI, Fortune is blamed 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than public means which public manners breeds, 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand. 
 
 The name of actor was, indeed, branded as no better than that 
 of vagabond, while the play- writers constantly called the players 
 " apes," and " mimics ". Here Shakespeare does seem to speak 
 of his profession : — 
 
 I have gone here and there 
 
 And made myself a motley to the view. 
 
 With CXXVII begin Sonnets addressed to a woman, a dark 
 
 lady, but (CXXX) not very beautiful. 
 
 My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. 
 
 This may be a mere criticism of the absurd hyperboles of admira- 
 tion by contemporary sonneteers. In CXXXIII the poet seems 
 to upbraid the lady for taking his friend from him, and through 
 three sonnets this plaint is poured out with obscure puns on 
 "will" and "Will," his name, and — some think — his friend's 
 name. The poet is (CXLIV) placed between " two spirits that 
 suggest me still ". One good, is a man ; oqe evil, a woman. 
 
 15 
 
2 26 English Literature 
 
 To win me soon to hell, my female evil 
 Tempteth my better angel from my side, 
 And would corrupt my saint to be a devil. 
 
 Id addressing the woman, the poet is much more outspoken than 
 when addressing the man on 
 
 The pretty wrongs that liberty commits. 
 
 The poet, like Catullus with Lesbia, loves against his reason 
 and his knowledge of the woman's true nature (CXLVII). 
 
 Past cure am I, now reason is past care, 
 
 And frantic-mad with evermore unrest ; 
 
 My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are. 
 
 At random from the truth vainly expressed ; 
 
 For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright. 
 
 Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. 
 
 If all this be in earnest, we have a tragedy of the heart, whether 
 in 1594, or in 1598-1601, or in neither. Again and again, in his 
 plays, Shakespeare mocks at sonnets and sonneteers ; and though 
 his, in parts, are personal, the depth of their significance, and the 
 persistence of his emotions, must be left to the literary instinct of 
 the reader. We cannot reconstruct Shakespeare's self out of his 
 works, lyrical or dramatic. Had the sonnets been recognized as 
 reflecting a scandalous episode in society, it could scarcely have 
 followed that " no sequence of such poems was received more 
 coldly ". Those of Sidney, Daniel, Drayton, and Constable, were 
 often reprinted. Shakespeare's had not even a second edition til] 
 1640.^ 
 
 It is unfortunate that literary history cah scarcely pass by, 
 leaving these strange guesses about a strange matter unnoticed. 
 The sonnets in themselves are a book of golden verse, shining 
 with gems of beautiful phrases, 
 
 The stretched metre of an antique song. 
 
 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ? 
 Thou art more lovely and more temperate. 
 
 The painftil warrior famoused for fight, 
 After a thousand victories once foiled. 
 
 ' Jusserand, " Literary History of the English People," Vol. Ill, p. 233. 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 227 
 
 Full many a glorious morning have 1 seen 
 Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye. 
 
 When in the chronicle of wasted time 
 I see descriptions of the fairest wights- 
 And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 
 In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights. 
 
 Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul 
 Of the wide world dreaming on things to come. 
 
 This beautiful poem (CVII) most manifestly refers to Shakes- 
 peare's forebodings about "my true love," who was "supposed as 
 forfeit to a confined doom " (Southampton, in 1601, was sentenced 
 to captivity for life). But " The mortal moon hath her echpse 
 endured," that is Elizabeth, Cynthia, is dead, "Luna's extinct," 
 as contemporary versifiers said. " In this most balmy time," 
 Peace " proclaims olives of endless age," that is the accession of 
 James VI and I put an end to fears of wars of a disputed suc- 
 cession. On 10 April, 1603, James released Southampton. ^ The 
 Sonnets, like " the floor of heaven," are " thick inlaid with patines 
 of bright gold," never to be dimmed by mists of conjecture, 01 
 nonsense about Shakespeare as a sensual sycophantic snob, mad 
 with jealousy and foiled desire. 
 
 Later Plays. 
 
 Returning to the plays, we find, between 1597 and i6or, Shakes- 
 peare in his second period, with " Henry IV," " The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor," " Henry V," Much Ado about Nothing, " As You Like 
 It," " Twelfth Night," and " Julius Caesar ". Such was the astonish- 
 ing harvest of five years. Probably " Henry IV " is the play which 
 we would retain, could we keep but one, so delightful is Falstaff, the 
 fat knight, the embodiment of the richest humour. He "has 
 given us medicines to make us love him," and even the delightful 
 characters of Hotspur, the Mercutio of the history, and of Lady 
 Percy, take a far lower place. We would banish all, and keep 
 honest Jack. Many cannot bear to see Falstaff have much the 
 worse of the jest, as in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," said to 
 have been composed in a fortnight, at the desire of Elizabeth, who 
 
 1 Lee, pp. 147-150. 
 
 IS* 
 
2 28 English Literature 
 
 wished to see that impossibility, Falstaff in love. The characters 
 of Shallow, Slender, Sir Hugh, even the transient Anne Page, and 
 all the broad humours of life in an English country town, do not 
 console us for the defeat of the hero. 
 
 It is in " Henry V " that Shakespeare not only emphasizes his 
 love of England, nobly expressed by John of Gaunt in " Richard 
 n," but makes it the mainspring of the drama. The yeomen 
 soldiers in the play frankly tell the disguised king that they doubt 
 the justice of his cause — and well they may, for no man ever had 
 a worse, and Shakespeare must have known it, — but " our country, 
 right or wrong," must be the motto of the playwright, and he 
 puts into Henry's mouth the speeches that still stir the blood like 
 the sound of a trumpet. Much has been written on Henry's 
 hardness to Falstaff, whose heart he broke, — but Henry at least 
 acts in accordance with his actual character, a brave, able, ruth- 
 less, and hard man, always convinced of his own righteousness. 
 Pistol's braggart humour is as good as ever, and that learned man 
 of the sword, Fluellen, is a forerunner of Scott's Dugald Dalgetty. 
 
 " Much Ado about Nothing'" " As You Like It," and " Twelfth 
 Night" (1599-1600) are the three central stars in the crown of 
 Shakespeare's comic Muse. More humorous than "Henry IV" 
 they cannot be, but in them is no admixture of history, and the 
 women in the three are ladies, whereas in " Henry IV " Lady 
 Percy is the chief contrast with FalstafPs Mrs. Quickly, and her 
 crew. Shakespeare cannot, we may suppose, have lived in the 
 intimate society of the ladies of Elizabeth's Court ; he must have 
 divined and created Beatrice ( " a star danced, and under that 
 was she born ") and Hero, sweetly bearing the accusations of her 
 intolerable lover, Claudio : — 
 
 I have marked 
 A thousand blushing apparitions 
 To start into her face, a thousand shames 
 In angel whiteness beat away these blushes, 
 And in her eye there hath appeared a fire 
 To burn the errors that these princes hold 
 Against her maiden truth. 
 
 The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 229 
 
 endear the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," 
 like the ends of many of the plays ; Claudio is lightly taken back 
 into favour, with Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He 
 can scarcely ever bring himself to punish one of his rogues, such 
 as Lucio and ParoUes, and is as clement to the less deserving 
 Claudio. 
 
 The mirth of " Twelfth Night " might border on the farcical, 
 if Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the 
 light people, were not so delightfully human and living, like their 
 butt, Malvolio; and did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite 
 grace. Meanwhile, in " As You Like It," we fleet our time care- 
 lessly as they did in the golden world, under the greenwood tree, 
 in the enchanted company of Rosalind, Touchstone, the greatest 
 of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy and humorous Jaques, 
 the contemplator. 
 
 Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation 
 of Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, 
 he now produced "Julius Caesar," in which the chief personages 
 are Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus 
 appears as the virtuous and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic 
 conscience which pushes him on to the slaying of great Csesar. 
 All readers note Shakespeare's way of placing a man of nature 
 more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis which demands de- 
 cision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great examples. 
 It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute, and 
 that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant 
 part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. 
 He simply chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where 
 would be the interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone 
 straight to his mark and slain the king "at sight"? There would 
 have been no play! How could we endure a Brutus who, in his 
 relations with Csesar, mobbed and stabbed the greatest of mortals, 
 in a forthright business manner, with no hesitations? If there were 
 not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman him, he would be a 
 vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could design men 
 as true to their single aim as Richard III and lago. Tragedy 
 requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a 
 
230 English Literature 
 
 fatal blemish ; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles 
 to the Aias and CEdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, 
 a deed, to reverse his own' words, "to make whole men sick," 
 when in contemplation, would not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep ; 
 but, once resolved, his heart is steeled, nor does the ghost of 
 Caesar fright him, as the spectres of his fancy appal Macbeth. 
 
 The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played 
 on by the rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to 
 the people, but the mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again 
 and again. 
 
 "Hamlet" (1602) is believed to have been based on a lost 
 drama of 1589, perhaps by Kyd ; the original source is the " History 
 of the Danes " by Saxo Grammaticus, and there was a French 
 version by Belleforest. Of Shakespeare's play there are three 
 versions, a hopelessly imperfect text in a pirated quarto of 1 603 ; 
 abetter, "enlarged to almost as much again" {1604); and the 
 Folio edition of 1623. None of these is good, as a text; and the 
 inconsistencies of the play may in part be due to an admixture of 
 the old piece, and to tamperings with the manuscript. 
 
 Of " Hamlet " it is vain to speak briefly, and more than 
 enough of speaking at large has been done by a myriad of com- 
 mentators. The young prince, full of good quaUties, is bound 
 with knots which a real Dane of the Saga time would have cut 
 with the short sword. But Hamlet has "the prophetic soul 
 of the wide world, dreaming " of life, and death, and love, and 
 contrary duties. Thus he, like CEdipus in the Greek tragedy, be- 
 comes as fatal to all around him as if he bore the Evil Eye ; and 
 while, like David at Ziklag, he is playing the madman, actual 
 madness hangs over him like the sword of Damocles. Thus 
 Shakespeare has left to the world a marvel of subtle and pene- 
 trative thought, of tenderness, of humour ; to the critics a wrangle 
 over psychological problems. 
 
 The same unparalleled powers, the same universality, the same 
 gloomy vision of life, and, in " King Lear," another study of true 
 and of feigned madness, inspire " Lear," Macbeth," and " Othello," 
 the last the most piteous of all. For in Othello it is not the error 
 of a wavering hero, or the ambition of a man tempted, like Mac- 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 231 
 
 beth, by portents and prophecies, but the sheer inborn devilry of 
 a creature in human form, lago, that " breaks, and brings down 
 death " on the most innocent of victims, Desdemona. "The pity 
 of it " is too awful : the sense of wyrd, of masterful destiny, 
 is too cruel. 
 
 Yet, if Shakespeare were to write tragedies, and to write them 
 on the traditional materials which are the bases of these plays, 
 it was inevitable that, as he wrpte, he should have regarded life as 
 he does, and human fortunes as the spoil of wayward and cruel 
 fate, .^schylus could not make pretty melancholy pieces out of 
 the materials of the "Agamemnon " and " Eumenides ". He, to 
 be sure, tried to justify the ways of the gods to men, and Shakes- 
 peare makes no such effort. His characters, in the immortal 
 words of Nicias to his doomed- Athenian army, " have done what 
 men may, and endure what men must ". "The rest is silence." 
 
 Of Troilus and Cressida (1603), printed i6og, we can only say 
 that Shakespeare when he wrote it " was for one hour less noble 
 than himself". The piece makes mockery — save for Odysseus, — 
 of the heroes of Homer, and of Cressida, whom Chaucer treats 
 with such fine chivalry. Thersites is merely loathsome, Aias a 
 fool, Achilles a treacherous procurer of the death of Hector. 
 Shakespeare made an impossible blend of Homer (of whom he 
 clearly knew a little), ^ of Ovid, and of the mediaeval forms of the 
 Tale of Troy. The elements are wholly incompatible, and the 
 mood of the poet, whether he wrote the play early or late, was 
 unenviable. 
 
 " Unpleasantness " is also the not undeserved charge against 
 " Measure for Measure " ; but Cinthio's Italian tale, on which it is 
 founded, was " a sordid record of lust and cruelty ". Shakespeare, 
 altering the plot, redeemed it by the figure of Isabella, and by 
 the sad Mariana in her " moated grange ". 
 
 It cannot be denied that when Shakespeare added " Timon of 
 Athens," the tragedy of a misanthrope, to " Troilus," and then 
 
 1 Shakespeare could read parts of Homer in Chapman's translation of 
 Books I, II, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, published in 1598. But certain touches 
 indicate his acquaintance with Book XXII, 320, 321, 3qi-393. The drama 
 begins with the situation in Book VII. 
 
232 English Literature 
 
 produced the extremely unpleasant scenes in " Pericles " (which is 
 not in the Folio of 1623, the first edition of his collected plays) he 
 was selecting topics that encourage the belief in his own bitterness of 
 spirit, while in " Antony and Cleopatra " the magnificent study of 
 " the serpent of old Nile," and of the ruin she wrought, he con- 
 tinues his vein of thought on the accidents that bring courage and 
 greatness to the dust. 
 
 In " Coriolanus " he contrasts the fickleness of the mob with 
 an heroic soul ruined by its relentless exaggeration of its own merits 
 and overweening greatness ; the tragedy of Napoleon is a modern 
 instance. Dating the play in 1608- 1609, critics derive the char- 
 acter of the mother of Coriolanus from Shakespeare's thoughts of 
 his own mother, who died in 1608. Of her character, of course, 
 we know absolutely nothing. 
 
 The " tranquillity " of " Cymbeline " so rich in poetry, and so 
 recklessly constructed; of the "Winter's Tale," where the poetry 
 is yet more divine, and the plot is as heaven pleases ; and of 
 "The Tempest" (1613), where much of the "local colour" is 
 derived from the adventures of English seamen in the Bermudas 
 (1609-1610), is explained by the resignation of increasing years. 
 
 We cannot reason thus with much confidence. Shakespeare 
 could only have produced "The Tempest" in the plenitude of 
 his genius, but he might have created it as it stands at any date 
 after 1596, when he happened to take up the materials. 
 
 "Henry VIII" was being played in 1613 when the Globe 
 Theatre was burned. That parts are by Shakespeare, parts by 
 Fletcher, is a theory resting on the elusive internal evidence of 
 style and quaUty. 
 
 From 1611 till his death in 1616, Shakespeare is thought 
 to have lived mainly at home, at Stratford, where his daughters 
 married men in their own situation of life. Shakespeare died 
 on April 23, 1616. By 1623 his monument in Stratford Church 
 had been erected. 
 
 Ben Jonson wrote, " I loved the man and do honour his 
 memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed 
 honest, and of an open and free nature." 
 
 Shakespeare, in accordance with Greek and Roman wisdom, 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 233 
 
 had chosen the fallentis semita vitm ; in his private course he was 
 studiously obscure. His all-embracing and unparalleled genius 
 was exhibited only in his art, and in his profession by which he 
 lived and prospered. He had carried blank verse from the point 
 at which Marlowe left it to a never equalled pitch of various per- 
 fection ; while his lyrics are worthy of " all the angels singing out of 
 heaven ". His creations of character are in number, variety, and 
 excellence, unrivalled; he touched with the surest hand every 
 chord in the human heart ; he explored every height and depth, 
 and despite the inevitable stains left by his age, and the haste 
 necessitated by his profession, his work attains the high-water 
 mark of human genius. 
 
 JONSON. 
 
 Ben Jonson (born 1572-73) is believed to have been descended 
 from the Annandale border clan of the Johnstones. His father, 
 after suflFering troubles under Mary Tudor, became a Protestant 
 preacher. Ben was a posthumous child, his mother's second 
 husband was a bricklayer or builder. The boy was educated at 
 Westminster school, under Camden, the antiquarian and historian, 
 to whom he more than once expressed his gratitude. His name 
 as an undergraduate is not found in the records of either Oxford 
 or Cambridge. Jonson did not long practise his stepfather's 
 useful art : he served through a campaign in Flanders, and told 
 Drummond of Hawthornden that he slew, in single combat, a 
 champion of the enemy. He had more than a literary acquaint- 
 ance with the fencing terms which his Captain Bobadil uses with 
 so much gusto. Returning to England he fell among actors and 
 playwrights, is mentioned as a tragedian by Meres ("Palladis 
 Tamia") in 1598, was challenged by an actor, Gabriel Spencer, 
 whom he slew in fair fight ; was imprisoned ; turned Catholic, not 
 for long; and, on his release, married. By 1596 he had worked 
 with very minor playwrights at forgotten plays, and had tinkered 
 at "The Spanish Tragedy ". He now wrote "Every Man in His 
 Humour," an early form of the play, which he revised; removing 
 the scene from Florence to London, for its repetition in rsgS, when 
 Shakespeare's company were the players. In the Prologue he 
 
234 English Literature 
 
 ridiculed, as Sidney had done, the reckless early dramas, in which 
 the hero lives a long life on the stage, while " three rusty swords " 
 furnish forth a stage army, and squibs and stage thunder delight 
 the audience. He aims at good-humoured comedy of everyday 
 life, laughs at " such errors as you'll all confess," and in Master 
 Stephen draws a shadowy Shallow, a predecessor of Bob Acres, 
 while that stock-figure, the poltroon bragging copper-Captain 
 Bobadil, survives in loving memory as an excellent study in a 
 familiar " character-part," the " Miles Gloriosus," of the Roman 
 comedian. 
 
 The personages are citizens of the day, the anxious father; 
 the downright squire; a "Town Gull," or dupe. Master Matthew, 
 to match the country gull, the melancholy and gentlemanlike 
 Master Stephen ; while Kitely illustrates the humours of jealousy. 
 The characters are types, each with his "humour,"' or ruling 
 passion of foible, and the standing butt is Hieronymo in Kyd's 
 " Spanish Tragedy ". As the author parodies forgotten plays, 
 and makes use of forgotten catch-words, it may justly be said that 
 " much of his humour still remains in obscurity ". In Shakes- 
 pearean humour, with its sweet tolerance, enduring quality, and 
 sympathy and gentle melancholy, Ben is totally deficient. His 
 " humours " are idiosyncrasies or " fads " or " ruling passions " 
 carried into ludicrous extremes. 
 
 The success of " Every Man in His Humour " prompted 
 "Every Man out of His Humour," acted in 1599, by Shakespeare's 
 company, and printed, " Containing more than hath been publicly 
 spoken or acted," in 1600. Jonson was as eager to print his 
 plays as Shakespeare was indifferent. The comedy was much 
 too long, and had been " cut " severely by the players. It has a 
 kind of chorus of spectators and critics, and is an exhibition of 
 " humours " (the word was then a piece of popular slang), or 
 types. Sogliardo is an amusing bourgeois geniilhomme, who, 
 like Shakespeare, " lacks '' what he calls a " cullisen'' (scutcheon) 
 and will stick at no expense to purchase one. The romantic and 
 euphuistic humours of Pantaroolo and his lady are excellent 
 fooling ; Macilente, the bitterly envious, suggests, in a more 
 tragic style, his contemporary, Scott's Sir Mungo Malagrowther 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 235 
 
 (in "The Fortunes of Nigel"); the coxcomb, Fastidious Brisk, is 
 an agreeable rattle, especially in his account of his duel and his 
 dresses, boots, hat, and jewellery ; and the compliment by Macilente 
 to the Queen is charmingly courtly, coming from that blustering 
 mountain of a man, the author. But the play was not a success. 
 For this, or for any other reason (perhaps because they cut down 
 his plays into manageable size), Ben quarrelled with the actors, 
 Shakespeare's company, and began to write satirical plays on the 
 players, and on the poets who were more successful than himself, 
 or who had theories that were not his about how plays should be 
 written, about " art," in his favourite phrase. In different moods 
 he spoke differently about Shakespeare's " art," now saying that he 
 had none; now that without art and labour Shakespeare could 
 not have produced his "true-filed" phrases. 
 
 "Cynthia's Revels" (1600) was acted by "the children of the 
 Royal Chapel," and printed in 1601. (New scenes were added 
 in the Folio edition of 161 6). A lively prologue is acted by the 
 boys, who quarrel for the privilege of speaking it. One of them 
 mimics a coxcomb spectator, with three sorts of tobacco to smoke 
 on the stage. Among the humours of the Court, Crites is taken 
 to represent the author himself, " this Crites is sour ''. The exqui- 
 site song {ex forti dukedo) " Queen and huntress, chaste and 
 fair," outlives the humours, and the satire, which was personal, for 
 the gentlemen of the press and stage, then, as now, liked personal 
 controversy, " it is such easy writing ". 
 
 The " Poetaster '' (1601) runs amuck against actors. " They for- 
 get that they are in the statute " (against vagabonds) " the rascals; 
 they are blazoned there . . . they and their pedigrees ; they need 
 no other heralds, I wis." This was an anachronism, at the Court 
 of Augustus, the scene of the play, but appropriate to Shakespeare's 
 new scutcheon. The loves of Ovid and Julia, Virgil reading the 
 " .^neid '' to Augustus, are mixed with contemporary satire to 
 which Dekker replied in " Satiro-Mastix, or the untrussing of the 
 Humorous Poet" (acted by Shakespeare's company, 1602). 
 
 Marston (Crispinus) was also assailed, and war raged on the 
 lower slopes of the Muses' hill. Since the beginnings of the 
 theatre, play-writers have parodied and mocked each others' works, 
 
236 English Literature 
 
 as Aristophanes caricatured Euripides, as ancient Pistol parodied 
 Marlowe's "jades of Asia," and Moliere made mirth of the 
 tragedies played by the company of the H6tel de Bourgogne. 
 But Ben, though a huge, noisy, and truculent adversary, was plac- 
 able, and he and Marston became friends. Much ingenuity has 
 been spent in detecting hits at Shakespeare in Ben's plays and 
 epigrams ; very probably some of his cutting allusions are aimed at 
 his successful rival, but it needs two to make a quarrel. 
 
 When James VI of Scotland came to the English throne, and 
 lived no longer on the allowance of ;i£^30oo a year from Elizabeth, 
 he spent very largely on elaborate masques, courtly entertainments, 
 not unlike the ballets in which Louis XIV later danced his parts. 
 The hosts of Greek mythology were let loose on the stage, all the 
 sea-nymphs, daughters of Oceanus, for example, floating in a shell 
 of mother-of-pearl, among Tritons better schooled in their parts 
 than honest Mike Lambourn in " Kenilworth ". The dresses, 
 scenery, and decorations, " the bodily parts, were of Master Inigo 
 Jones his design and act " (see " The Masque of Blackness," 1605). 
 The Queen and the Court ladies acted, or at least appeared as 
 sea-nymphs, and iBen produced the words, which were deeply 
 learned, and the exquisite songs. Unrefined as he was, he be- 
 came intimate with hospitable and generous lords and ladies. 
 Their gifts and his payment from the Royal coffers in pensions 
 were of more profit to him than his plays, for which he said that 
 he received only ;£^2oo. It is hardly necessary to add that he 
 had bitter quarrels with Inigo Jones. 
 
 Jonson's Roman tragedy, "Sejanus" (1603) on the fortunes 
 and fall of that favourite of the Emperor Tiberius, is deeply learned. 
 The author, in the printed version, gave references in footnotes, 
 to his authorities, Tacitus, Juvenal, Suetonius, and many others, 
 as if he had been writing a severe work of history. Nothing can 
 be less like Shakespeare's Roman tragedies, with his free handling 
 of North's translation of Plutarch, with his wild mobs, and murder 
 done openly. Ben was classical and accurate ; his Romans speak 
 a stately blank verse : his Tiberius, slow, formal, hypocritical, and 
 deceitful above all things, is the Tiberius of Tacitus ; his all-daring 
 Sejanus is a less candid Richard III ; and though Ben admitted 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 237 
 
 that the ancient Chorus, with its chants, was impossible on the 
 English stage, he was, in other respects, conscientiously classical. 
 The whole heavy air of Rome, the terror, the duplicity, the political 
 influence of women, their passion, the servility and the discontent, 
 live in the somewhat ponderous blank verse, of which Ben first 
 wrote the matter in prose, an uninspired method. 
 
 The "Catiline and His Conspiracy," acted 1611, "did not 
 please the populace," nor the Court much, as Ben admits in a 
 quotation from Horace: in these "jig-given times" he asked 
 Pembroke's patronage for " a legitimate poem". In fact Jonson 
 with all his amazing energy, vigour, and appreciation of character 
 — that of Cicero is excellent — was too pedantic, and the orations 
 of his Cicero were too long for the stage.- The odes of the Chorus 
 were not apt to increase the pleasure of the audience. 
 
 Ben's recognized comic masterpieces were " The Fox (Vol- 
 pone) " first acted at the Universities, then at the Globe, 1605; 
 "The Silent Woman" (1609), "The Alchemist" (1610), and 
 "Bartholomew Fair "(16 1 4). Both in "The Fox" and "The Al- 
 chemist," there is something that reminds us of Marlowe. The 
 Fox, Volpone, a Venetian magnifico, a childless man, for years 
 pretends to be dying, surrounded by his little court of obscene 
 depravities, and aided by his parasite, Mosca, gulls men who, each 
 in his degree, is an incarnation of cruel greed. 
 
 Volpone is a voluptuary in his devilish delight in human cor- 
 ruption. The aged Corbaccio he tempts to disinherit his son ; 
 the madly jealous Corbino he tempts to prostitute his wife, from 
 the avaricious Voltore and from all of them he wrings rich pre- 
 sents. It is a masque of the Deadly Sins, and behind them stands 
 Murder, hesitating between poison, the dagger, and the smothering 
 pillow, for all the fortune-hunters would slay their tormentor if 
 they dared. 
 
 The scene with the English Lady Would-be, an affected literary 
 lady, who tires Volpone to death with literary chatter, is more than 
 the rest in the true spirit of comedy. Celia, the suffering wife of 
 Corbino, and Bonario, the young son of the evil dotard, Corbac- 
 cio, alone represent the soul of good in things evil. The plot 
 is ingeniously entangled and untied, and justice can scarcely add 
 
238 English Literature 
 
 to the torments which the characters owe to their own insatiate 
 greed. 
 
 In "The Alchemist,'' three scoundrels, occupying by con- 
 nivance of a servant an empty house, and captained by Subtle, 
 an alchemist, play on the greed and lust of many " coneys ". 
 These each, in Jonson's way, represent a " humour ". Sir Epicure 
 Mammon, the City Knight, is all for unlimited lust, secured by the 
 Elixir of Life and the Philosopher's Stone. He is as eager as 
 Faustus for the unlimited, and as learned in his gloating discourses 
 as Jonson himself, who, in Subtle, displays all his knowledge of the 
 jargon of alchemy. Dol Common, the decoy, the Fairy Queen, 
 has an extensive and peculiar knowledge of Billingsgate ; Abel 
 Drugger, the tobacconist, hopes to prosper in his trade by magical 
 spells; the gamester, Pertinax Surly, strong in his own marked 
 cards and loaded dice, has a salutary scepticism ; and the two 
 puritans, Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, are ready for any- 
 thing which will supply finance for their godly crew of Anarchists 
 at Amsterdam^ Ben well understood these extreme fanatics, "a 
 sect of dangerous consequence that will have no king, but a pres- 
 bytery," said Queen Elizabeth. They were soon to put an end to 
 "merry England," and, when we look at the quality of much of 
 the mirth in the later Jacobean plays, we are not enamoured of 
 either party in the conflict. The play, with its constant bustle, 
 was and long remained popular. So did "Bartholomew Fair," a 
 colossal exhibition of a London festival, with all the humours of 
 the joyous populace, interrupted by Rabbi Busy, the fanatic, who 
 has eaten more roast pig than any one, and rushes about de- 
 nouncing all the other " Dagons " and " idols,'' like a bloated 
 English »Tartuffe, le pauvre homme. The stocks do not daunt 
 him, his tongue remains as free as Mause Headrigg's. In an in- 
 troduction to this enormous burlesque Jonson throws scoffs at 
 "The Tempest " of Shakespeare. 
 
 " The Silent Woman " is truly a roaring farce on a singular 
 subject, Morose, a gentleman as impatient of noise, and as certain 
 that all silence except his own was golden, as the Sage of Chelsea. 
 How he is saddled with a wife who, from being " mim as a mouse" 
 becomes the most vociferous of Roaring Boys, and, indeed to the 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 239 
 
 confusion of some boastful gallants, is a boy pranked up for the 
 practical jokes whereby Morose's nephew extracts Morose's money, 
 may be read, with much other mirthful noisy matter, by the 
 curious. 
 
 "The Devil is an Ass " (16 16) is a satire on conjurers, crystal- 
 gazers, projectors, or, as we say, " promoters " of bubble enter- 
 prises, and then gulls and " coneys ". 
 
 A walking tour to Scotland (1618-1619), where Jonson was 
 entertained by Drummond of Hawthornden, had for its fruit 
 Drummond's brief notes of his conversation and literary opinions. 
 He did not care much for Drummond's Petrarchian sonnets, 
 "cross-rhymes"; and, as to Shakespeare (whom Drummond 
 himself does not seem to have appreciated), merely said that " he 
 wanted art," and that, in his geography, he was wrong when he 
 gave Bohemia a sea-coast Happily Ben left splendid tributes other- 
 where (in verses attached to the first collected edition of Shakes- 
 peare's plays, " The Folio " (1623), and in prose), to Shakespeare's 
 genius and character. Drummond's estimate of Ben as a braggart 
 about himself, and a contemner of others, as jealous and vindic- 
 tive, is only true in part. No man had more or more admiring 
 friends; at taverns he reigned, among the great wits "Sealed of 
 the Tribe of Ben," like an earlier Dryden. 
 
 His last plays " The New Inn," " The Magnetic Lady," and 
 "The Tale of a Tub," were badly received : in an Ode he 
 
 left the loathed stage 
 And the more loathsome age ; 
 
 he lost his place of Masque- maker in 1632, but was still befriended 
 by Charles I. He died on 6 August, 1637, before the troubles 
 of the Covenant came to a head. 
 
 His great collection of books and his treatise on the " Poetics " 
 of Aristotle and the "Art of Poetry" of Horace had already 
 been destroyed by a fire. Many of his beautiful lyrics exhibit 
 that grace, delicacy, and, in the best sense, J>oeiry which are not 
 conspicuous in his plays. " His throne is not with the Olympians 
 but with the Titans," and Tennyson could not endure the gloom 
 which he found in Jonson's comedies. 
 
240 English Literature 
 
 Scott, on the other hand, seenis to have known them almost 
 by heart, and constantly quotes them, and, indeed, the whole host 
 of minor Elizabethan playwrights. The learning of Jonson, .in 
 Greek no less than in Latin, is a marvel, 
 
 Which is a wonder how his Grace should glean it, 
 
 in his prodigious activity of production. His immortal lyrics at- 
 test the delicacy and grace which seldom inspire his plays, and, 
 indeed, are most noted in the lover, " a scholar and a gentleman," 
 of his incoherent play "The New Inn" (1629). Ben's drama is 
 the work of a " made " writer, the fruit of reflection on what 
 the stage ought to be, and of ponderous industry and diligent 
 observation. We feel that the plays, despite their richness and 
 vigour, their masculine energy, are somewhat prolix, rather pedantic, 
 and they do not hold the stage, like those of Shakespeare, at 
 whom Ben scratched so often, without moving the master to reply 
 in kind. 
 
 Jonson's Prose. 
 
 It is not easy to sympathize with the sweet enthusiasts who 
 place Ben Jonson's "Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men 
 and Matter," above Bacon's Essays. These sayings, maxims, and 
 very brief essays were mainly written when Ben was old, and not 
 yet wise enough to be contented. He appears as a contemner of 
 times present, when the poet is no longer taken at his own esti- 
 mate, which, in Jonson's case, was rather high. Many of the 
 " Discoveries " had, not infrequently or of recent date, been dis- 
 covered before. Thus of Fortune, "That' which happens to any 
 man, may to every man. But it is in his reason what he accounts 
 it, and will make it." This has been put more briefly and better: 
 " Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so ". Nothing can 
 be more trite than this of waste of time, but the expression is ad- 
 mirable, " What a deal of cold business doth a man " (and do 
 most women) " mis-spend the better part of life in 1 In scattering 
 compliments, tendering visits, gathering and venting news, follow- 
 ing feasts and plays, making a little winter-love in a dark corner.'' 
 But Jonson was not profuse in venting compliments, and, with his 
 
The Elizabethan Stage and Playwrights 24 1 
 
 enormous reading, can hardly have spent much time in paying 
 calls. The sentences on the decay of taste are passed by elderly 
 men of letters in all ages on " railing and tinkling rhymers, whose 
 writings the vulgar more greedily read . . ." "Expectation of 
 the vulgar is more drawn with newness than goodness,'' yet a poet 
 is nothing if he has not something new in manner if not in matter. 
 Jonson says that his memory was once excellent, till he was 
 past 40. Certainly it had ceased to be trustworthy : he attri- 
 butes to Homer what Homer never said, and to Orpheus what 
 Homer did say. Ben finds the new poems in his old age so bad 
 that a man " never would light his tobacco with them ". We all 
 remember his sentences on Shakespeare: and "how there was 
 ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned ". He had 
 three ways of viewing Shakespeare : one when he had well drunk, 
 and was magnificent, as Howell tells us, about himself and his 
 Muse. Thus he said to Hawthornden that Shakespeare " wanted 
 art," and did not know that Bohemia lacks a sea-coast. The 
 second way is that of his " Discoveries ". The third and excellent 
 way is in his poem, in which he speaks of Shakespeare as the 
 mind of the great world does, 
 
 He was not for an age but for all time, 
 
 was greater than 
 
 the comparison 
 Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome, 
 Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
 
 To the oratory of Bacon he gives the same praise in the same 
 noble measure. " I have and do reverence him for the greatness 
 that was only proper to himself. . . ." Against Machiavel's "a 
 Prince should exercise his cruelty by his ministers and not by him- 
 self," Jonson nobly replies, " But I say he puts off man, and goes 
 into a beast, that is cruel," though indeed beasts are not wittingly 
 cruel, and the man that is cruel goes into a devil. Jonson is al- 
 ways manly : fits thoughts are ponderous and just rather than 
 remarkable for novelty; they do not cling, like Bacon's, to. the 
 memory of the race, nor shine in so many facets with such im- 
 perishable colours. 
 
 16 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 OTHER DRAMATISTS. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 
 John Fletcher was born at Rye in December, 1579; being the 
 son of that Dean of Peterborough who troubled the last moments 
 of Mary, Queen of Scots, and later was bishop, successively, of 
 Bristol, Worcester, and London. Very early, aged about 12, the 
 son entered Benet College, Cambridge, but before he was 1 7 the 
 death of his father, in poverty, caused him to leave the University. 
 We hear no more of him, on sound authority, till he began to 
 write plays with Francis Beaumont, born in 1584, the third 
 son of Sir Francis Beaumont of Grace-Dieu, a judge. In 1597 
 Beaumont entered Pembroke College, Oxford, then known as 
 Broadgates Hall ; three years later he entered the Inner Temple. 
 In 1605 Beaumont wrote some prefatory verses to Jonson's play 
 "The Fox (Volpone) " as also did Fletcher. "Philaster" (1610?) 
 is believed to have been the first play composed in their prolific 
 partnership, but it was also attributed to Beaumont alone. Beau- 
 mont died in March, 16 16, the death-year of Shakespeare; 
 Fletcher in 1625. 
 
 One need not be a Charles Lamb to discover that " after all, 
 Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of Sidneys and 
 Shakespeares ". But perhaps only a reader who is himself a poet 
 can discover, with Mr. Swinburne's certainty, in Beaumont " the 
 gifts of tragic pathos and passion, of tender power and broad 
 strong humour " ; in Fletcher " a more fiery and fruitful force 
 of invention, a more aerial ease and swiftness of action, a more 
 various readiness and fullness of bright original speech ". 
 
 Others cannot pretend to assign to each author, or to their 
 
 242 
 
Other Dramatists 243 
 
 various allies, their own contributions to each of the fifty-two 
 dramas, which Mr. Swinburne suspected Coleridge of " never having 
 really read ". Whether Coleridge did or did not carefully peruse 
 the fourteen stout volumes of Weber's edition, it is certain that very 
 few people are more industrious. A French critic, M. Jusserand, 
 affirms that a friendly hand could make a pleasing selection of 
 scenes, displaying tragical vigour, eloquence, poetry, wit, and that 
 the selection would give "the falsest idea of their work," for 
 " the lugubrious and the ribald were their chief domain ". 
 
 At all events other qualities than ribaldry will win their readers 
 at present, and it is unnecessary to direct readers to a play in which 
 a woman " makes the very satyrs blush at her sight ". Coleridge 
 thought it would be interesting to settle a question of statistics, 
 " how many of these plays are founded on rapes, how many on 
 incestuous passions, and how many on mere lunacies ". Mr. 
 Swinburne provided the statistics. Plays 52, Rapes 2, Incestuous 
 Passions o, Lunacies 2. 
 
 vin the throng of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher (of which a 
 folio edition was published in 1647 ; an uncertain amount of the 
 writing was ascribed to Massinger), it must suffice to speak of but 
 a few. The bald analysis of any of these Jacobean dramas 
 cannot do justice to its merits. The plots of the greatest dramas, 
 those of the Athenian stage and of Shakespeare, rest, now on 
 history, now on inventions of prehistoric antiquity, myths and 
 legends. The story of Lear has elements as impossible, and as 
 primitive, as the stories of QEdipus or of Thyestes. The events 
 are monstrous — "people don't do these things," — but they afford 
 to the dramatist great situations, and they were already familiar 
 in tradition. 
 
 The events in " The Maid's Tragedy," on the other hand, could 
 not have occurred, and have no traditional source. There have 
 been callous and profligate kings, but Charles II, who declared 
 that " in my reign all tragedies must end happily," and for whom 
 Waller later made " The Maid's Tragedy " end happily, did not 
 seduce innocent girls, hand them over as brides to courtiers who 
 were already betrothed to other ladies, and retain his victims as 
 his mistresses. 
 
 16* 
 
244 English Literature 
 
 The king in " The Maid's Tragedy " does these things, and is a 
 moral monster. Amintor being in love with Aspatia, and she 
 with him, the king forces him — for loyalty and passive obedience 
 are his guiding stars — to reject Aspatia, and wed Evadne, whom 
 nobody suspects of being the royal mistress. At Courts, however, 
 these graces are not hid. 
 
 The bridal eve is not much enlivened by a masque of Neptune 
 and ^okis, and is saddened by the wails and prophecies of the 
 forlorn Aspatia. Other bridesmaids talk ribaldry enough, but the 
 bridegroom, whose heart is with Aspatia, feels 
 
 A grief shoot suddenly through all my veins; 
 Mine eyes rain: this is strange at such a time. 
 
 The bride receives him coldly. A man has wronged her, will he 
 slay that man? She names the king: "To cover shame I took 
 thee^' she says. The situation, — with the horror-stricken loyalty 
 of Amintor; his heart already a chaos of remorse, regret, and 
 desire; the implacable resolution of Evacfiie; "the murderess- 
 Magdalen, whose penitence is of one crimson colour with her 
 sin — " is undeniably tragically great. Ribaldries as of Pandarus in 
 " Troilus and Cressida " greet the happy pair in the morning. 
 The secret reaches Melanthius, brotlier of Evadne and the king's 
 bravest captain. Evadne binds the sleeping king in his bed, 
 wakens him, taunts him, and stabs him for her husband, her brother, 
 and herself. Aspatia disguises herself as her own avenging brother, 
 challenges Amintor who has deserted her, strikes him, kicks him ; 
 at last he draws, and she falls by the hand of the man she loves. 
 Evadne enters, led-handed fi-om regicide, 
 
 Am I not fair ? 
 Looks not Evadne beauteous with these rites ? 
 
 The seeming dead speaks, — 
 
 I am Aspatia yet — 
 
 and takes farewell. Amintor stabs himself, but not before Evadne 
 has set him the example. Had Ophelia fallen by the sword of 
 Hamlet the tragedy would not have been " deeper ". 
 
 "Philaster," again, is a romantic comedy, that deserves' its 
 
Other Dramatists 245 
 
 second title " Love lies a'bleeding ". Philaster is kept out of his 
 royalty by the king, who is wedding his daughter, Arethusa, 
 beloved by Philaster, -to Pharamond, prince of Spain, a random 
 debauchee. His intrigue with the audacious wanton Megra, a 
 Court lady, and the besetting of him by the armed burgesses, 
 devoted to Philaster, yield the grim comic material. Philaster 
 gives his page, Bellario (really the disguised Euphrasia, who loves 
 him), to Arethusa. She is accused of an intrigue with the page, 
 who is the soul of loyalty to her and to Philaster. He, in jealousy, 
 rejects both his lady and his page : they meet in a forest : he 
 dismisses Bellario, and bids Arethusa stab him, or he will stab her. 
 
 We are two 
 Earth cannot bear at once. 
 
 He does stab her, and is attacked by a country fellow, who wounds 
 him ; he then flies from some of the Court who are approaching. 
 Finding Bellario asleep in a glade, Philaster wounds her ; so that 
 the pursuers, who 
 
 Have no mark to know me but my blood, 
 
 may suppose Bellario to be the assailant of Arethusa! "Oh, 
 my heart, what a varlet's this, to offer manslaughter upon the 
 harmless gentlewoman," we may cry, with the grocer's wife in 
 " The Knight of the Burning Pestle ". We " could hurl things 
 at him," at Philaster : whose jealousy does not palliate his cruelty 
 and treachery. 
 
 Through many complications the plot winds its way ; Bellario, 
 who is about to be tortured, proves to be a woman ; both she and 
 Arethusa survive ; Philaster, of whom nobody thinks the worse, 
 marries Arethusa ; Pharamond is mobbed ; all ends happily except 
 for that most pathetic of patient Grizels, Bellario, who remains 
 contented in the happiness of the others. The purity and sweet- 
 ness of Arethusa, the loyalty of the loving Bellario, and her beauti- 
 ful speeches, cannot enable this play to escape the blame of being 
 unnatural and repulsive. 
 
 The naked analysis of the plays of this age, is, of course, no 
 fair criterion of their merit. A bare exposure of the plot of 
 
246 English Literature 
 
 " Cymbeline " would deter a man from reading it. The authors 
 are protected by the magic of their poetry, which conveys them 
 off in a golden cloud as Aphrodite saved ^tieas. A bare analysis 
 of "A King and No King" (161 1), with the alternate valour and 
 nobility, brag, and unintelligible clemencies and ferocities of 
 Arbaces, King of Iberia, who has defeated and captured Tigranes, 
 King of Armenia, would move the most austere to mirth. But 
 there is a method in the apparent madness of Arbaces ; and Bessus, 
 the braggart poltroon, is an officer worthy to fight under the same 
 standard as Parolles and Bobadil, while virtue and happiness are 
 kept for Arbaces and Panthea, Tigranes and the faithful Spaconia, 
 through the sudden revelation of Gobrias, the Lord Protector, that 
 Arbaces is a warming-pan pretender, and neither son of Queen 
 Arane (who unceasingly tries to have him stabbed or poisoned), 
 nor the brother of Panthea. 
 
 The last tragedies are "The False One," and " Valentinian ". 
 Concerning " Thierry and Theodoret " it is not pleasant to speak 
 out, and it is not honest to be silent. " Derived," we are told, 
 " from the French chronicles of the reign of Clotaire the Second," 
 the play is rancid with the humours of the lowest London haunts ; 
 marked by wild anachronisms — the Merovingian troops carry 
 muskelSj^and crammed with impossible crimes. For a contrast 
 we have the eloquence of Thierry (poisoned by a handkerchief 
 that robs him of sleep, after he has been drugged to deprive him 
 of offspring), and the spotless virtues of his wife Ordella, whom 
 Thierry has been on the point of sacrificing to the gods. The blank 
 verse almost uniformly moves with a loose superfluous foot ; as 
 
 The most remarkable thing in which kings differ, 
 From private men, 
 
 and so on, is a specimen. There is a pearl to be found on this 
 dust-heap, the stainless Ordella, " the most perfect idea of the 
 female heroic character," says Lamb ; but she is found after we 
 have passed through a malodorous labyrinth of " unnatural and 
 violent situations ". 
 
 Plays like this, or even like " The Spanish Comedy," which 
 opens pleasantly and humorously, and in the cure and his sexton 
 
Other Dramatists 247 
 
 suggests the influence of Cervantes, but closes in a mist of evil 
 passions, give some show of reason to the opinion of our French 
 critic. "A friendly hand selecting with care" might give all of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's that can please readers not specially de- 
 voted to the study of the Drama. Even in the beautiful scenes of 
 "The Faithful Shepherdess," in poetry worthy of Spenser's pastoral 
 vein, the author, quite needlessly, introduces a shepherdess who 
 resembles the Brunhault of " Thierry and Theodoret " as Brunhault 
 may have been in girlhood. 
 
 "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," on the other hand,- with 
 the grocer-critic who insists on a play in which a grocer shall " do 
 admirable things " ; with the humours of the grocer's wife, and 
 the Quixotic adventures of Ralph, the apprentice, is lively, and, 
 says the Prologue, " has endeavoured, to be far from unseemly 
 words to make your ears glow ". Yet, in the jail delivery of the 
 Barber, the authors go out of their way to find ugly ribaldries. 
 Famous among the comedies are "The Scornful Lady," "The 
 Humorous Lieutenant," " The Wild-goose Chase," and " The 
 Little French Doctor ". The lyrics and songs are especially beau- 
 tiful, even in the Elizabethan wealth of song. 
 
 A peculiarity of Fletcher's blank verse is his fondness for re- 
 dundant syllables at the close, and indeed anywhere in the line. 
 This manner was gaining on Shakespeare in his latest plays, and, 
 in authors after Fletcher, led to the decay, almost to the death, of 
 blank verse. Yet Fletcher's lines, as before Marlowe and Shakes- 
 peare, were often " end-stopped " : the sense closed with the 
 close of each line ; this is not the manner of Shakespeare, or of 
 Beaumont. In his later days Fletcher went for his plots to 
 Spanish tales and romances. 
 
 Chapman. 
 
 The date of the birth (near Hitchin) of George Chapman, 
 conjecturally placed in 1559, is unknown. He was at Oxford in 
 1574. The exactness of his scholarship must not be estimated by 
 his translation of Homer ; translations, whether in prose or verse, 
 did not then aim at precision. In 1594 he published "The 
 Shadow of Night," containing verses which have been used to 
 
248 English Literature 
 
 support the theory that he was the poet concerning whose favour 
 Shakespeare expresses uneasiness in his Sonnets. He wrote a con- 
 clusion to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander"; attempted the 
 luscious (which did not suit his genius), in Ovid's " Banquet of 
 Sense"; celebrated Henry, Prince of Wales, in "The Tears of 
 Peace," is mentioned as a dramatist by Meres in 1598, and in 
 that year published his version of "Seven Books of the ' Iliad ' " (not 
 the first seven), while he finished his "Iliad"in 1611, his "Odyssey," 
 some years later. 
 
 Thanks mainly to the perfect sonnet of Keats, Chapman's 
 Homer is the work by which his memory is kept green except among 
 special students of the Elizabethan drama. To have made Homer 
 "common coin "was a great benefit to the English public,, that 
 had known only the mediaeval romances based on Ionian 
 (700 B.C.), Athenian, and Roman perversions of the poet. The 
 " Iliad " he did into " fourteeners," a jigging old measure, — ^ " a 
 splendid swinging metre," says Saintsbury, "better able than 
 any other English metre to cope with the body as well as the 
 rhythm of the English hexameter ". Tastes differ ! Here are 
 four lines ("Iliad" XV, 596-600). The poet speaks of Zeus, 
 
 For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about 
 
 To make him cast the fleet such fire as never should go out ; 
 
 Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise 
 
 The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes. 
 
 "The last line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own 
 splendour at his best," says a critic, and this may be the best of 
 Chapman. But it does not express the meaning of Homer, who 
 says nothing about the " foulness " of the prayer of Thetis, and 
 whose Zeus does not desire to satiate his eyes with " Ihe splendour 
 of the burning ships," but to see one ship set on fire ; as, on that 
 signal, he intends to cause the instant rout of the Trojans. It 
 will be observed that Chapman here compresses four Greek 
 hexameters into four English " fourteeners " ; and that the move- 
 
 1 As I write, an accidental " fourteener " meets the eyes in the heading 
 of a magazine article — " Discovery of the Missing Link by Georgiana 
 Knight", This metre does not seem the best in which to render Hornet, 
 
Other Dramatists 249 
 
 ment of his verse is as rapid as the nature of the " fourteener " 
 permits. He is, however, rugged and obscure and overloads the 
 simplicity of Homer with Elizabethan conceits of his own inven- 
 tion. The " Odyssey " he rendered into heroic couplets with a free 
 movement, and, had he been more sparing of his own conceits, 
 the version would be more satisfactory. Unhappily no English 
 measure represents the Homeric hexameter. 
 
 In 1604-5, Chapman with Marston was imprisoned for a very 
 faint piece of satire on the Scots, in " Eastward Ho " ; and Ben 
 Jonson, who had been no partner to the passage, as a collaborator 
 in the play magnanimously insisted on sharing the punishment. 
 
 Chapman's comedy, " All Fools " opens with an imitation of 
 a play of Terence (followed by Moliere in "L'Ecole des Peres "). 
 We have the sensible and indulgent, and the severe and de- 
 ceived father. But the plot becomes painfully involved, and 
 jokes on cuckolds are no longer so delightful as they were for 
 two centuries to English taste. His other comedies are not 
 below the level of his contemporaries, excluding Shakespeare and 
 Jonson. 
 
 Among Chapman's plays on contemporary French history, 
 the two on Bussy d'Amboise vary much from " ' Byron's ' (Biron's) 
 Conspiracy," and " The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron ". 
 " Bussy d'Ambois " has all the faults of fustian, obscurity, blood- 
 shed, torture exercised on the stage, and. great palpable ghosts. 
 A friar is the go-between of le brave Bussy and Madame de 
 Monsoreau, Chapman's " Tamyra, Countess of Mountsurry ". He 
 appears and disappears through a trap door, and when he dies 
 " Umbra Friar" (the ghost of the holy man), "keeps on the busi- 
 ness still ". Mountsurry (Monsoreau) too, disguised as the friar, 
 is very busy. A magician summons Behemoth, a monstrous 
 fiend with whom Joan of Arc was accused of being too familiar. 
 Tamyra is stabbed frequently on the stage, to make her write a 
 letter inviting Bussy to a fatal tryst; and next, being tortured, 
 she complies and writes in her own blood. Bussy is overpowered 
 by numbers and slain. Charles Lamb admired a long description 
 of a duel between six minions of Henry HI, three on each side. 
 The Nuntius (the messenger), a looker-on, tells how Bussy charged 
 
250 English Literature 
 
 his foe exactly as, in his youth, the Nuntius had seen a unicorn 
 charge an Armenian jeweller, and 
 
 Nailed him with his rich antler to a tree. 
 
 In " The Revenge of Bussy " his ghost enters and dances with 
 the ghosts of the Due da Guise, the Cardinal, and Chitillon. The 
 lookers-on are surprised, believing the Guises to be alive and 
 well, when Aumale enters with the news that both have just been 
 assassinated ! The " Revenge " contains some very noble passages 
 of reflection, in which Chapman always shines, and some remin- 
 iscences of Homer. The ghosts, though " affable familiar sprites," 
 might be excused by the example of Seneca's tragedies. Dryden 
 found in "Bussy d'Ambois" "a hideous mingle of false poetry 
 and true nonsense," but not all of the poetry is false. There are, 
 indeed, in Chapman's blank verse, passages of exquisite beauty 
 and charm : praise which cannot be denied to passages in the 
 works of all his contemporaries in dramatic writing. 
 
 John Marston. 
 
 John Marston was of an old Shropshire family : he is supposed 
 to have been born in 1575 and educated at Coventry school. He 
 was a member of Brasenose College, Oxford. His father intended 
 him to be a barrister, but observes in his will that " man pro- 
 poseth but God dispcfeeth". He wrote satires first, and then 
 plays, later took orders, in 1616 received the living of Christchurch 
 in Hampshire, and died in London in 1634. His plays had been 
 collected and published in 1633. Marston's earliest publications, 
 under the assumed name of Kinsayder, 1598, were "The Meta- 
 morphosis of PygmaUon's Image, with Certain Satires," and, in 
 the same year, "The Scourge of Villainy ". As to "Pygmalion," 
 
 My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing, 
 
 he says : the verses are in the stanza of " Venus and Adonis ". 
 With a cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory 
 statue of a woman, invokes the shade of Ovid — who lived much 
 after his time. At his prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases 
 to sing lasciviously. 
 
Other Dramatists 251 
 
 Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. 
 Toots to the Chicken, " the language is coarse and the meaning 
 is obscure". The first attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. 
 Toots, letters to himself. Parasites and boasting soldadoes are 
 also satirized. A quarrel with Hall who styled himself " the first 
 English satirist," arose ; the authors of "The Return from Par- 
 nassus " (1601) spoke of Marston with coarse but effective con- 
 tempt. In 1599 this "new poet " sold a play to Henslowe. His 
 "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will," and 
 " The Malcontent " (a misanthrope, as in Molifere and Wycherley), 
 do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts 
 for the old drama. In the dedication to " The Malcontent " 
 Marston made up his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had as- 
 sailed in " Satiromastix " in reply to Ben's " Poetaster " (1601), not 
 before Ben, according to his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 
 Marston joined Chapman and Ben in composing " Eastward Ho ". 
 The remarks on the Scots, for which the authors were imprisoned, 
 are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to make for the purpose of 
 teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is a very good-humoured 
 study of life in London — -rather in Hogarth's manner, — with the 
 honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle apprentice ; his 
 ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a castle in 
 the air ; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious appren- 
 tice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and 
 local colour that was useful to Scott in " The Fortunes of Nigel ". 
 Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy ; he wearied 
 of play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and 
 careless of his own fame. 
 
 Dekker. 
 
 Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a play- 
 wright and bookseller's hack, concerning whose life little is known 
 except that he was one of Henslowe's "hands " in 1597 ; was re- 
 deemed by Henslowe from prison in the Poultry in 1598 ; and 
 was still producing pamphlets in 1637. A Londoner by birth, he 
 knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The Honest Whore" 
 proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose was " The 
 
252 English Literature 
 
 Gull's Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the taverns ; 
 the thieves ; the bona robas, usurers, fops, gamblers, all the world 
 which is best known to the modern reader in " The Fortunes of 
 Nigel ". 
 
 The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in 
 "The Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The 
 Seven Deadly Sins of London " shows a helpless horror of the 
 crowded poverty of the town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of 
 Dekker's tracts a genius akin to Goldsmith's, Thackeray's, Sterne's, 
 Moliere's, Dickens's, and not unlike Shakespeare's ; with Goldsmith 
 he is often compared ; he has given men medicines to mike them 
 love him. 
 
 Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contri- 
 butions are discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. 
 Of his own pieces, "The Shoe Maker's Holiday" (1600) is a 
 broadly cheerful comedy ; the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, 
 becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the upper plot, the hero. Lacy, is 
 very readily pardoned after deserting his regiment in France ,to 
 woo another Mayor's daughter in the disguise of a shoemaker. 
 
 " The Honest Whore," in two parts, shows Bellafront as a 
 Magdalen redeemed by a sudden love which does not find its 
 earthly close ; she marries a scamp to whom, in the Second Part, 
 she plays the Patient Grizel, backed by her father disguised as an 
 old serving-man. There is abundance of the inevitable ribaldry. 
 
 In a play devoted to " Patient Grissil," that ideal of the 
 dramatists, occurs the lovely lyric " Art thou poor, Yet hast thou 
 golden slumbers " ; in " Old Fortunatus " (in the story of the 
 Magical Purse) is " Fortune's kind, cry holiday " : other pretty 
 songs occur in " The Sun's Darling " (Ford and Dekker). 
 
 " Satiromastix," as we have seen, secures for Dekker the praise 
 of audacity, for no craven would have attacked Ben Jonson. 
 There are fine tirades of imaginative blank verse in " Fortunatus ". 
 Dekker admired a thoroughly good woman, whether converted or 
 needing no conversion, as most of his fraternity and as Fielding 
 did. But Fortune, if she sometimes " cried holiday " to Dekker, 
 was never "kind". He is best remembered for his songs and for 
 the words 
 
Other Dramatists 253 
 
 the best of men 
 That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer, 
 A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
 The first true gentleman that ever breathed. 
 
 When Lamb tells us that Dekker " had poetry enough for any- 
 thing" : when Mr. Swinburne declares that Dekker "was endowed 
 in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious 
 fancy, tender and cordial humour, vivid and pathetic realism, a 
 spontaneous refinement, and an exquisite simplicity of expression," 
 we wish to search for his privately reprinted works in prose, and 
 the solitary edition of his plays. 
 
 But on the other hand we are told that his " Satiromastix " is not 
 too severely called " a preposterous medley " : that his " besetting 
 vice " is " reckless and sluttish incoherence " ; that one play can 
 be best explained as the work of an intoxicated man in a debtor's 
 prison; that "there are times when we are tempted to denounce 
 the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens 
 and of sluts ". Dekker wrote several pamphlets, which, in a sort, 
 resemble some minor work of Daniel de Foe. 
 
 MiDDLETON. 
 
 Though Ben Jonson said in his haste that Middleton was " a 
 base fellow," he was of a gentle house. The date of his birth is 
 unknown (1570?), as early as 1597 he was writing for the Press; 
 by 1602 he was working at plays in which five or six other men 
 collaborated. Probably they settled on a plot, or rather on two 
 plots, upper and under, and each author wrote an act : a little 
 ready money came in, but the dramas must have been " in the 
 veniable part of things lost ". Middleton frequently worked with 
 Dekker, also with Rowley. They are usually thought to have 
 mainly contributed the noisy and incoherent underplots, but 
 Dekker's admirers credit him with the denouement of " The Old 
 Law " (Middleton, Massinger, Dekker). 
 
 Mr. BuUen finds this passage the drollest of things droll. There 
 can be no doubt that it must have evoked hearty laughter on the 
 stage. 
 
 Easily are Hoard and Lucre gulled in "A Trick to Catch the 
 
254 English Literature 
 
 Old One," namely the uncle of the young profligate Witgood. 
 Granting that these ancient chuffs were incredibly ciedulous, the 
 play is a bustling comedy, with abundance of tricks and turns. 
 The Mayor of Queenburgh in the play so styled was contemporary 
 with Hengist and Horsa ; is full of very serious matter, merrily 
 set down. We must not approach in a spirit of historical pedantry 
 a drama in which the Earls of Devonshire and Staffordshire, the 
 sons of Constantine (namely Aurelius Ambrosius, Constantius, and 
 Uther Pendragon), with Vortiger and Horsus, Hengist, the tanner 
 Mayor of Quinborough, Aminada, and a number of button- makers 
 and professional murderers, also two monks, play their parts. The 
 incoherencies, the button-makers, the chaste Constantius, an un- 
 willing monarch, his murder by the minions of Vortiger, their 
 murder (in Macbeth's manner) by Vortiger, are the drollest of un- 
 conscious drolleries. This monstrous medley of dull disconnected 
 humours, unspeakable villainies, and speeches in excellent blank 
 verse, with the sufferings of the angelic Castiza, contains, as usual, 
 a pearl of wronged and innocent womanhood. 
 
 Middleton is thought by some to walk more closely in Shakes- 
 peare's footsteps than even Webster, and his acknowledged 
 masterpiece is "The Changeling," so called from the underplot 
 (by Rowley), in which two sane men smuggle themselves as maniac 
 and idiot into a private lunatic asylum. The cheerful interludes 
 of lunacy set off the tragedy. 
 
 Beatrice Joanna, betrothed to Alonzo de Piracquo, loves Alse- 
 mero at first sight, and for Piracquo's murderer suborns de Flores, 
 a man whom she loathes, and whose face seems charged with 
 disaster. De Flores has a violent physical passion for Beatrice, 
 endures her insults, haunts her, and accepts her murderous com- 
 mand. After slaying her betrothed, and cutting off his finger 
 that wears the ring of betrothal, he has that scene with Beatrice 
 in which he rejects all her offers, even her whole fortune, and, by 
 threatening to divulge her crime, compels her to be his mistress. 
 This scene is justly celebrated ; it does indeed move terror, and 
 pity for the pitiless. But the adventures of Beatrice's bridal night 
 with Alsemero ; the absurd affair of the glasses marked M and C > 
 the burning by de Flores of the girl who here plays the part of 
 
Other Dramatists 255 
 
 Brangwain in the romance of Tristram and Iseult ; all these things 
 prove Middleton's inability to keep on the level of his own high 
 conception. 
 
 After some powerful passages and the reappearance of the 
 bleeding finger with the ring, de Flores murders Beatrice, and 
 dies rejoicing in his success. Tragedy, as Shakespeare and 
 Aristotle understood it, was not concerned with resolute ruffians 
 and girls with violent passions, but with Cordelia and Hamlet, 
 Othello and Desdemona, noble souls; with fate-driven and fallen 
 Macbeth and Lady Macbeth ; or Coriolanus ruined by the excess 
 of his own qualities. 
 
 Middleton's comedy of " The Roaring Girl," a contemporary 
 virago with pipe and sword, idealized as the champion of her 
 sex; his prodigal old Sir Bounteous in "A Mad World," and 
 his "Chaste Maid in Cheapside " were long popular; while the 
 humours of the duel, and the sterling excellence of Captain Ager 
 in " A Fair Quarrel," are contrasted with the horseplay of Middle- 
 ton's constant partner, Rowley. In 1620, Middleton was appointed 
 Chronologer to the City, and did the work for which he was paid. 
 He continued to write for the stage, and his " Spanish Gipsy,'' an 
 intermezzo of a very serious plot with the humours of gentlefolks 
 playing gipsies ; his " The Witch," with curious resemblances to 
 the Witches in " Macbeth," and the highly successful "topical" 
 play, "A Game of Chess," with the intrigues in the affairs of the 
 Spanish match for Charles, Prince of Wales, are among the most 
 notable of his many dramas. The Spanish ambassador, in August, 
 1624, caused the political "Game of Chess" to be withdrawn, for 
 "his Majesty," James I, " remembers well there was a command- 
 ment and restraint given against the representing of any modern 
 Christian kings in those stage plays". James might well re- 
 member it I In 1604 Shakespeare's company had brought him 
 on the, stage, playing his part in the mysterious affair of 1600, 
 the Gowrie Conspiracy. The play was stopped on the third 
 night. 
 
 Middleton also wrote many City masques. He died on 4 July, 
 1627. 
 
256 English Literature 
 
 Heywood. 
 
 Thomas Heywood was born in Lincolnshire, was a Cambridge 
 man, and by 1596-1598 was an actor and a writer for the stage 
 and the Press. He says that it is no custom of his to print his 
 plays, being faithful to the actors (who lost their rights in a play, 
 when printed). He confesses to having " had a hand or at least a 
 main finger " in two hundred and twenty plays. 
 
 The strong point in Heywood is his study of domestic manners 
 in Englishmen at home, and as adventurers abroad, as in " The 
 English Traveller," and "The Fair Maid of the West". Here 
 Clem, the son of a baker who, " when corn grew to be at a high 
 rate, never doughed after," frankly says of four sea captains, "I 
 believe they be little better than pirates ". 
 
 Heywood's most celebrated play, " A Woman Killed with 
 Kindness,'' reads as much like a modern novel as a Jacobean 
 drama. There is no ribaldry, no horrors, only a duel between 
 two sets of men over a disputed hawking match. The hero, 
 Frankford, shelters and entertains a broken gentleman who flees 
 from the field, and the man, though thoroughly conscious of his own 
 villainy, seduces Frankford's wife, who is beautiful and hitherto a 
 pearl of virtue. She yields at a word : Frankford discovers and 
 spares them, the lady makes a pathetic end, and, dying of remorse 
 (of which her lover has his full share), she is " killed with kindness ". 
 
 The pathos and the details of manners are entirely in the style 
 of many modern novels, and the underplot, also serious, if improb- 
 able, has the favourite stainless heroine, Susan ; a girl of great 
 nobility. 
 
 There is a most amusing list of the practising " Mediums " of 
 the day, in " The Wise Woman of Hogsdon ". They have their 
 specialities, one " doth pretty well for a thing that is lost ". Mother 
 Sturton deals in prevision — "is for fore-speaking " ; another " prac- 
 tiseth the book and key " (an automatism, the key is tied into the 
 book, the fingers hold it up under the haridle_^f the key, and 
 the book turns in answer to questions). "All do well," says 
 the witch, " according to their talent. For myself, let the world 
 speak ". There are some good speeches and good blank verse in 
 
Other Dramatists 257 
 
 " The Iron Age," one of four dramas on the " Four Ages of Hesiod's 
 Mythology". In "The Rape of Lucrece" is an extraordinary 
 set of popular songs, some coarse enough, one in Dutch, and 
 among them the beautiful lyric. 
 
 Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day, 
 
 which, more than his twenty-four surviving dramas, keeps Hey- 
 wood's memory green and fragrant. He wrote miscellaneous 
 pamphlets and books with enormous industry. 
 
 There is something sympathetic in his very carelessness, — what 
 Lamb precisely meant when he called Heywood " a prose Shakes- 
 peare" is disputed. Possibly he meant that Heywood has sweet- 
 ness of nature, tumour, and knowledge of character, without 
 much poetry. 
 
 Webster. 
 
 Concerning the life and adventures of John Webster next to 
 nothing is known. In 1602 the account books of Henslowe, the 
 financier of the stage, mention two lost plays as being, the first 
 by Dekker, Urayton, Middleton, Munday, and Webster ; and the 
 second by Webster, Chettle, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and 
 Dekker. Dramas by so many hands cannot be masterpieces. 
 Webster was a great and busy collaborator ; in the bustling " citizen 
 comedies," " Northward Ho " and " Westward Ho " he worked 
 with Dekker. He is best known by Lamb's extracts from his 
 " White Devil " and " Duchess of Malfi ". 
 
 "The White Devil " (printed in 16 12) is a chronicle play of 
 the career of Vittoria Corombona, but Webster has altered the 
 facts as he pleased. The more tragic humours of the betrayed 
 husband (our liberal fathers gave him a shorter name) are ex- 
 emplified in her lord Camillo, who, in the interests of her lover, 
 the Duke of Brachiano, is murdered in a manner intended to 
 disguise the crime : the device is about as subtle as the blow- 
 ing up of Darnley with gunpowder. The Duchess, another patient 
 Grizel, except so far as Vittoria is concerned, men slay by poison- 
 ing the portrait of her faithless husband, which she kisses, and thus 
 imbibes the infection. Cornelia, the mother of Vittoria and of 
 
 17 
 
258 English Literature 
 
 her leading murderer Flamineo, is a pathetic figure, and it is she 
 who sings the beautiful lyric. 
 
 Call for the robin red breast and the wren. 
 
 Lamb says of Cornelia, "she speaks the dialect of despair; 
 her tongue has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To 
 move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon 
 fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready 
 to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last 
 forfeit, this only a Webster can do." But if this is all that a 
 Webster can do, and if to do this he needs an accumulation of 
 unnatural horrors — fratricide, the murderer of a brother contem- 
 plating the madness which his deed has wroug]jt in his mother ; 
 if the slain brother has just been kicking his strumpet sister; then 
 we may ask whether an art that flourishes in these odious and 
 extravagant conditions produces "one of the imperishable and 
 ineradicable landmarks of literature ". 
 
 The serene and audacious impudence of Vittoria, when accused 
 of her first husband's, Camillo's, murder; and the Ophelia-like 
 laments and the song of Cornelia ; with the ail-but imperturbable 
 wickedness of Flamineo, yield the extracts which Charles Lamb 
 made current coin. Webster, in fact, returned, with abundant 
 genius, but without discretion, to the class of Revenge-plays 
 opened by Kyd in " The Spanish Tragedie ". 
 
 The behaviour of the Duchess of Malfi, in the play of that 
 name (printed 1623), introduced as she is by a noble panegyric, 
 does not prepare us for her sudden wooing of her steward, Antonio. 
 Her brothers, like the brothers of Keats's Isabella, determine to 
 punish her : their instrument, Bosolo, is a character not wholly 
 lost, who deliberately sells himself to guilt ; and the scene in which 
 eight madmen are let loose to dance round the Duchess — they do 
 not shake her resolution, — is much admired. She is strangled, the 
 children are strangled on all sides, the servant Cariola is strangled, 
 though " she bites and scratches ". The Fifth Act is a scene of 
 the Kilkenny cats ; almost everybody, including Bosolo, is stabbed, 
 and Ford, in commendatory verses, applauds Webster, a? at least 
 the equal of the Athenian tragedians. 
 
Other Dramatists 259 
 
 Webster's genius was confessedly "subdued to that it worked 
 in ''. In the preface to " The White Devil " he complains that 
 the public will not endure a tragedy which observes the critical 
 laws; "the sententious Chorus," and "the passionate and weighty 
 Nuntius," the messenger who, in Greek tragedy, reports the horrors 
 done off the stage. Deprived of th e m |^§i] P^i i;i'p'"i "t^fliypd- t ;p ^ wor k 
 his massacres on the scerie. We bs^t£ g ;,j)ji|ig^ jj^ 
 His "Devil's Lawsuit'' 'is'a'complicatedweb of squalid intrigue; 
 the blank verse is utterly degenerate ; and " Appius and Virginia " 
 is not remarkable for originality in the representation of that 
 famous Roman story. 
 
 Webster's idea of a ghost was rather unconventional ; Brachiano's 
 phantasm in "The White Devil" wore no common sheet, but 
 " leather cassock and breeches, and boots ; with a cowl, in his 
 hand a pot of lily flowers, with a skull in't ". Dekker advises his 
 Gull at the play to laugh aloud in the crisis of the tragedy, and 
 probably there were some hardy or hysterical spectators who thus 
 received the too, too solid spirit of Brachiano. The Tragedy of Re- 
 venge inspired Cyril Tourneur's " Revenger's Tragedy,'' and 
 horror has her home in this play and his " Atheist's Tragedy '. 
 What in them deserves reading may be found in Lamb's extracts. 
 
 Massinger. 
 
 Philip Massinger (born 1583) was the son of a gentleman 
 patronized by the noble house of Pembroke. The poet was 
 educated at St. Alban Hall, Oxford, but left without taking a 
 degree (1606). He had fallen into debt, and commenced play- 
 writing in 1 6 14; his earliest known piece, in which Dekker took 
 part, "The Virgin Martyr," was acted in 1622. The period re- 
 presented is that of the persecution under Diocletian, and the 
 piece is old-fashioned enough ; introducing the angelic companion 
 of St. Dorothea, and the devil who attends the persecutor, Theo- 
 philus, a very late convert. Torture is introduced on the stage, 
 and Theophilus slays his daughters, whom he -had tortured out of 
 Christianity back into the Olympian faith, and whom Dorothea 
 reconverts by arguments with which they must already have long 
 been familiar. There is a tendency to credit Dekker both with 
 
 17 * 
 
26o English Literature 
 
 the most gracious passages of verse in the piece and with the 
 stupid but energetic ribaldries of Hircius and Spungius. 
 
 " The Unnatural Combat " (duel between a son and a father who 
 rivals Cenci in Shelley's tragedy), " The Duke of Milan," with a most 
 unnatural plot, "The Roman Actor," "The Fatal Dowry,'' are 
 among Msissinger's tragedies ; some twelve of his plays were 
 burned in manuscript by Betty Baker, or Barnes, the cook of 
 Warburton, the herald. If they contained such scenes as that of 
 " the ghost of young Malefort," slain by his father, "naked from 
 the waist, full of wounds, leading in the Shadow of a lady, her face 
 leprous," our regret for them may not be overwhelming. We have 
 plays enough in which a man is poisoned by the venomed paint 
 on a canvas or on a dead lady's face ; plays enough in which 
 victims (as in " The Roman Actor ") are cruelly tortured on the 
 stage. 
 
 That Massinger has noble passages and great tirades is un- 
 deniable, and he is one of the four or five successors of Shakes- 
 peare who are said by their admirers to follow most closely in 
 his footsteps. The play which keeps Massinger's memory green 
 in common recollection is his " A New Way to pay Old Deb ts ". 
 The great part is that of Sir Giles Overreach, a tinancial ruitiall, 
 suggested probably by a real character equally nefarious, Sir Giles 
 Mompesson. A victim of Overreach's in his own nephew. Well- 
 born, and the play shows how Wellborn, with the aid of a rich 
 and virtuous widow. Lady AUworth, cozens Overreach into ad- 
 vancing money ; how his creature, Marrall, chouses him ; and 
 how his daughter, Margaret, marries young Allworth, and not the 
 peer for whom the usurer designed her. Described as " both lion 
 and fox," Overreach, always ready to fight, is more successful in 
 the furious than in the furtive part of his nature. He bullies man 
 and defies God in seeking satisfaction of his two chief desires, to 
 ruin and humihate his social superiors and to plunder the widow 
 and the orphan or any other victim whose loss may be his gain. 
 
 But like the Mammon-worshippers in " A Trick to Catch the 
 Old One," Overreach himself is credulous enough, an easy victim 
 of the conspirators against his pride and pocket. Massinger's 
 indelicacy " has not always the apology of wit," indeed he is not 
 
Other Dramatists 261 
 
 remarkable for humour, any more than most of his contemporaries, 
 who sought and doubtless got a laugh by stereotyped and witless 
 ribaldries. 
 
 The character part of Greedy, a parasite of Overreach's, re- 
 markable for his appetite, — a shield of brawn and a barrel of Col- 
 chester oysters "were to him a dish of tea '' before breakfast, — 
 must have been diverting on the stage ; and when Marrall turns 
 against his master, we are reminded of similar surprises by Mr. 
 Micawber and Newman Noggs, though they were not accomplices 
 in the iniquities which they exposed. 
 
 Massinger's plays are often interwoven with the work of other 
 hands, and deal, in a more or less veiled way, with the political 
 situations of his time. He lived in poverty, as his petitions to the 
 Herbert family prove ; and he died in 1640. He was dissatisfied 
 with his fortunes and with public indifference ; poverty had forced 
 him into poetry, and hunger had made him hasty in his work ; the 
 too common calamity of poor authors. 
 
 Ford. 
 
 John Ford was a native of Ilsington in Devonshire, baptized 
 on 17 April, 1586. He was of good family, entered the Inns of 
 Court, and is said to have practised in his profession. A con- 
 temporary rhymer speaks of him " deep in a dump," " with folded 
 arms and melancholy hat ". He worked at plays with Dekker, as 
 in "The Witch of Edmonton" (1622?). 
 
 Four of his comedies were burned or otherwise put out of be- 
 ing by Betty Barnes, or Baker, the celebrated cook of VVarburton, 
 Somerset herald, who made away with at least fifty manuscripts 
 of old plays: his earliest known comedy ( 161 3) was among Betty's 
 victims. His earliest independent surviving piece, " The Lover's 
 Melancholy," was played in 1628. The more serious part has a 
 rather improbable plot turning on the disguise of a girl as a man, 
 but there are many beautiful romantic passages in the loves of 
 Palador, Prince of Cyprus, and Eroclea. A masque of Bedlamites 
 within the play indicates the strange contemporary taste for the 
 terrors and humours of maniacs. 
 
( 
 262 English Literature 
 
 In 1633 the famous plays '"Tis Pity She's a Whore," and 
 " The Broken Heart," were printed. The former has a plot of 
 incestuous loves, ending in a pretty general massacre. Given the 
 inspiration of the unnatural, Ford could do great things. In 
 the Prologue to " The Broken Heart " (the scene is Sparta, of all 
 unlikely places) Ford reprobates the staple of low contemporary 
 comedy, "jests fit for a brothel court's applause," "apish laughter," 
 " lame jeers at place or persons " ; perhaps Ford was not unaffected 
 by Prynne's famous attack on the stage, " Histriomastix " (1632). 
 
 " The Broken Heart " is free from the customary ribaldries ; 
 it is a tragedy of fate, the characters are noble. Ithocles is noble, 
 despite the original wrong which he has committed in separating 
 Orgilus and Penthea, and wedding Penthea to " the grey dis- 
 simulation " of the jealous Barzanes. Orgilus, who murders 
 Ithocles, is noble in his death, the death of Seneca without the 
 bath. Penthea is noble, and the wanderings of her mind at the 
 end of her slow suicide, are beautiful in their sad fantasy ; finally 
 the dancing of Cleantha, while one after another come messengers 
 with the tidings that break her heart, is noble, and probably her 
 endurance is the reason for the placing of the scene in Sparta. As 
 in Greek tragedy, all are doomed by Fate ; the Oracle of Delphi 
 has spoken truth, with the wonted obscurity which only Time can 
 unriddle. It is true that the interest shifts, in the last scenes, from 
 Penthea to Calantha, whom we have scarcely looked on previously. 
 But Ford aimed high, and came near to hitting his mark. He 
 ought never to have attempted his crazy low comedy scenes. 
 
 Ford's " Perkin Warbeck " is by far the most readable his- 
 torical play of the old stage, after Marlowe's " Edward II," and 
 Shakespeare's Chronicle plays. Perkin's character is resolute and 
 princely, as is that of his Gordon bride, " The White Rose ". " If 
 he lost his life he died a king " in royal bearing. As King Henry 
 
 says 
 
 The custom, sure, of being called a king 
 Has fastened in his thought that he is such. 
 
 Ford, in his Tragedies, is not to be reckoned among Mr. Swin- 
 burne's " splendid slovens "- His blank verse never degenerates 
 into skimble-skamble slackness, but, compared with most of his 
 
Other Dramatists 263 
 
 contemporaries, he does not shine as a lyric poet. He retired to 
 the country after the overthrow of the stage and the beginning of 
 the civil war. 
 
 Shirley. 
 
 James Shirley, of an honourable family, was born in London, 
 in 1596. He entered the Merchant Taylors' School, and, in 1612, 
 went to St. John's, Oxford, where Laud was then master. Laud, 
 who believed in " the beauty of holiness," is said to have prevented 
 Shirley, as a blemished man, with a large mole on his face, from 
 taking holy orders. He migrated to Cambridge, to St. Catherine's 
 Hall, published a poem in 1616, did take orders, received a living; 
 left it on becoming a Catholic, turned schoolmaster at St. Albans, 
 and then went to town as a playwright. 
 
 His " Love's Tricks " was licensed in 1624-1625, — " a silly play," 
 writes Mr. Pepys in 1667. Shirley was prolific; his "Witty Fair 
 One" (acted 1628) is thought-one of his best comedies. These 
 dramas have a touch of the modern ; we hear of " balls,'' a new 
 name then for dancing parties. In "The Lady of Pleasure" 
 (163 s) Lady Born well's contempt for the country life and for 
 country gentlemen, and her determination to spend her husband's 
 fortune on the gaieties of the Court, are amusing, and we expect 
 her to be a Lady Teazle. But, despite her husband's stratagem of 
 beating her at her own game, and the humours of the nephew whom 
 she has brought from Oxford, the piece can hardly be read with 
 enthusiastic delight. It is deemed Shirley's masterpiece in comedy, 
 and preludes to the comic drama of the Restoration and the Re- 
 volution of 1688. Dryden expresses extreme contempt for both 
 Heywood and Shirley ; it is to be feared that his own plays are 
 now no more popular than theirs. 
 
 After residing at Dublin under the great Earl of Strafford, and 
 producing plays at the Viceregal Court, and after insulting in an 
 ironic dedication of "The Bird in a Cage," the Puritan Prynne, 
 who had been most cruelly punished for allusions in his work 
 against the stage (" Histriomastix "), Shirley returned to London. 
 His "The Cardinal" is imitated from Webster's "Duchess of 
 Malfi," and with "The Traitor "is reckoned (though Shirley pre- 
 ferred "The Cardinal"), "the best of his flock" in tragedy. 
 
264 English Literature . 
 
 Pepys (1662) writes "there is no great matter in it," but Pepys's 
 dramatic criticisms are no great matter. In 1642 came the shutting 
 up of the theatres, and Shirley, after seeing the wars under his 
 patron, the Duke of Newcastle, returned to his old profession as a 
 schoolmaster. 
 
 He wrote a preface (1647) to some hitherto unprinted plays 
 of Beaumont and Fletcher, commending their stage as a school 
 of moral discipline, " In this silence of the stage thou hast a 
 Ubertyto read these inimitable plays ". In 1659 Shirley published 
 his " Contention of Ajax' and Ulysses," containing the noble lines 
 which embalm his memory : — 
 
 His 
 
 The glories of our blood and state. 
 Are shadows, not substantial things. 
 
 Bid me no more good night, because 
 'Tis dark, must I away ? 
 
 is also a pretty piece, like his " Song " (attributed wrongly to 
 Carew). 
 
 Shirley's works were often acted at the beginning of the Re- 
 storation, but he refused to write more dramas. The shock of 
 the great fire of i666 is said to have caused the deaths, on the 
 same day, of himself and of his wife. The blank verse of Shirley 
 is seldom distinguished. His numerous works suffer somewhat 
 because they come at the end of a long period in which talent 
 like his, with defects of taste often greater than his, have satiated 
 and wearied all but the special student and enthusiastic devotee 
 of the drama. The minor stars in the galaxy of playwrights almost 
 defy enumeration. 
 
 Space does not permit estimates of the last dramatists of " the ■ 
 first temple," Randolph, Suckling— whose dramatic verse is as 
 chaotically bad as several of his lyrics are exquisite ; Davenant, 
 who tried to keep alive a semblance of the drama at the end of 
 Cromwell's protectorate ; Brome, Cartwright, Mayne, and others. 
 The blank verse in which the elder poets had so often excelled 
 was left to the care of Milton; the blank verse of the stage 
 became formless, and, during the Restoration, rhymed heroic 
 couplets usurped its place. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE WRITERS. 
 
 In sketching the history of the English drama from its beginnings 
 to the close of Ben Jonson's career, we have passed through a 
 long tract of years, rich in other than poetic literature. We must 
 now return to the writers in prose who came after Ascham and 
 Sidney, and lived through the last period of Elizabeth, and in 
 the reigns of James I, Charles I, and the Commonwealth. 
 
 The prose writers may be considered in four sets. First we 
 have the purely literary authors, the critics and novelists such as 
 Lyly, Sidney, Greene, Nash, and others, of whose style, with its 
 " brave conceits," euphuism, and metaphors we have already 
 spoken. Next (2) we have the controversial pamphleteers, who 
 wrangled mainly about religion and Church government, defend- 
 ing or attacking the Established Church with its usages ; or Puri- 
 tanism with its love of Presbyterian discipline, and hatred of the 
 cross in baptism, the surplice, and other " rags of Rome ". While 
 Government supported the cause of the Established Church and 
 severely handled recalcitrant ministers of the Puritan party, some 
 Puritan writers went so far as to threaten war against the cause 
 of the detested Bishops. On both sides temper rose to fever- 
 heat, and the controversy was conducted in a prose style which 
 was full of abuse and satire. Meanwhile {3) Hooker wrote on the 
 same disputed themjs in a style lofty, logical, and harmonious ; 
 and in his " History of the World," Sir Walter Raleigh often 
 played on language with the effect of "a solemn music ". Lastly 
 (4) Bacon in his essays touched on familiar themes in a style of 
 brief sentences, witty, or poetic, or philosophical, which was all 
 his own ; which came home, as he says, " to men's bosoms and 
 
 265 
 
266 English Literature 
 
 business " ; and, of all the manners which we have described, that 
 of Bacon remains by far the most easily and most commonly ap- 
 preciated. 
 
 Meanwhile the common fault of men who wrote in prose was 
 the inability to tell a plain tale ; to say succinctly, distinctly, and 
 unmistakably what they meant. Perhaps they did not always 
 wish to be understood, but even when Elizabethan and Jacobean 
 writers were anxious to be lucid, their fanciful tropes and long 
 sentences often detain or defy the modern reader. 
 
 This defect arose partly from imitation of the structure of 
 stately Latin sentences in Roman literature. But in Latin the 
 nature of the grammar does not permit the meaning to be lost. 
 When books were comparatively rare, and leisure was plentiful, 
 readers did not grudge the time passed over tall and massive folios 
 and long stately involved periods. Now and again, in the age of 
 Elizabeth as in the Restoration, the lighter authors took refuge in 
 a style lax, colloquial, and charged with current slang. A cen- 
 tury must pass before we arrive at the unadorned plain manner of 
 Dean Swift. 
 
 It was not that the Elizabethans lacked the power to write 
 tersely, simply, and clearly. So luxuriant a poet as Spenser was 
 the master of a perfectly clear and unadorned prose style, deeply 
 interesting in his work on the condition of Ireland. The letters 
 of such diplomatists as Randolph, Queen Elizabeth's envoy to the 
 Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, are as clear and amusing, or, once 
 or twice, as pathetic, to-day, as when they were written. But the 
 prose of literature was entangled and encumbered by the search 
 of ornament, of esprit at all costs, and by copious antitheses and, 
 among the lighter writers, by " clenches " and even by slang. 
 
 Hooke r. 
 
 " It is not ,to be doubted but that Richard Hooker was born 
 at Heavytree " (near Exeter), says Izaak Walton, about 1/53. But 
 sceptics have averred that he was born in Southgate Street, in 
 Exeter. His parents were not rich, and, aided by Bishop Jewel, 
 he entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1567, as a Bible 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 267 
 
 Clerk. In 1577 he obtained a Fellowship ; in 1579 was Reader in 
 Hebrew, a tongue with which few Oxford men were, or are, 
 familiarly acquainted. About four years later he took holy orders, 
 had a severe cold, and married a wife recommended by the lady 
 who had nursed him in his illness. "The good man," says 
 Walton, "had no cause to rejoice in the wife of his youth," for 
 "the contentions of a wife" (at least of Mrs. Hooker), "are a 
 continual dropping." He took a living in Buckinghamshire, and 
 experienced " the corroding cares that attend a married priest". 
 Among these was reading Horace while he watched his sheep, 
 and rocking his child's cradle. 
 
 A friend, Edwin Sandys, finding him in these distressful cir- 
 cumstances, obtained for him the Mastership of the Temple (1585) 
 during the " Martin Marprelate '' controversy, in which the 
 boisterous Nash bore a part. A lecturer, Travers, opposed 
 Hooker's theological positions, for Hooker, it seems, had main- 
 tained that all Catholics are not necessarily damned to all eternity. 
 In 1591 Hooker obtained the living ofBoscombe in Wilts, and in 
 1595 moved to that of Bishopsbourne near Canterbury, where he 
 died in 1600. 
 
 The first four books of his " Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity " 
 appeared in 1594, the fifth in 1597, the rest was posthumously 
 published. The book was admired by James VI, who read it in 
 Scotland, and by the Pope and Cardinal Allen. Hooker was a 
 good, devout, simple man, a most laborious parish minister, and 
 so short-sighted that Walton accounts for his choice of a wife (if 
 he could be said to choose her), by this defect of vision. 
 
 The great work of Hooker, " ' The Ecc lesiastical Polity," is an 
 argument against the Puritans who, irotn~maT!erlTtte-tite-9*irplice 
 to matters like the Liturgy, desired in all things to imitate the 
 "discipline" of Geneva and of Presbyterian Scotland. In the 
 Martin Marprelate controversy, as in all old controversy, the style, 
 as we shall see, had been extremely scurrilous on both sides. 
 Hooker, on the other hand, writes like a gentleman, a scholar, 
 and a Christian. As the dispute was really between men of two 
 opposed temperaments and characters, arguments, however learned, 
 moderate, and logical, could not make converts. The Reformation 
 
268 English Literature 
 
 had brought not peace but a sword. Religious differences, mingled 
 with political differences, soon broke into civil war under Charles I. 
 
 Hooker begins by stating that the opponents of the Church 
 of England, " right well affected and most religiously inclined 
 minds," must, he supposed, " have had some marvellous reason- 
 able inducements " for desiring to upset the existing ecclesiastical 
 settlement. He therefore studied the subject diligently, and could 
 find "no law of God or reason of man" against the attitude of 
 the defenders of the settlement, and no proof that the Presbyterian 
 "discipline," "by error and misconceit named 'the ordinance of 
 Jesus Christ,' " was so in very deed. 
 
 After a pathetic request for a fair hearing " of the words of one 
 who desireth even to embrace together with you the self-same 
 truth, if it be the truth," he gave a history of the discipline as in- 
 troduced by Calvin at Geneva. Calvin, he said, by " sifting the 
 very utmost sentence and syllable " of the New Testament found 
 that certain passages seemed to him to enjoin that congregations 
 should have elders with power of excommunication (with fearful civil 
 consequences) but Calvin had " never proved that Scripture doth 
 necessarily enforce these things " ; or enforce any other thing in 
 which the Puritans differed from the Church established. Mani- 
 festly an opponent would blow away this argument with any iso- 
 lated scriptural text, whatever its original application, which as he 
 thought backed his opinion. 
 
 Hooker analysed Puritan demagogic methods, spiritual pre- 
 tensions, and habit of leading women captive. " But, be they 
 women or be they men, if once they have tasted of that cup, let 
 any man of contrary opinion open his mouth to persuade them, 
 they close up their ears, his reasons they weigh not at all, all is 
 answered with the words of John, ' We are of God, he that knoweth 
 God heareth us'." 
 
 All this was, in fact, the case ; it was superfluous to write a 
 long book, with quotations about the Angels from the pre-Christian 
 Greek Orphic poems, for the purpose of converting people who 
 closed their ears. When Hooker wrote, some Puritan writers had 
 already threatened civil war ; their martyrs, in fact, lay in New- 
 gate, and their blood was up. What they desired was not to be 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 269 
 
 tolerated, but to dominate the consciences of others. One text 
 both parties could use, " Compel them to come in ''. 
 
 The style of Hooker is somewhat rich in Latinized components. 
 He is remote from euphuistic conceits; and does not rise into 
 eloquence except when his subject elevates his mind and style. 
 A celebrated example is his defence of Church music. 
 
 " Touching musical harmony whether by instrument or by 
 voice, it being but of high and low in sounds a due proportionable 
 disposition, such notwithstanding is the force thereof, and so 
 pleasing effects it hath in that very part of man which is most 
 divine, that some have been thereby induced to think that the 
 soul itself by nature is or hath in it harmony. A thing which de- 
 lighteth all ages and beseemeth all states ; a thing as seasonable 
 in grief as in joy ; as decent being added unto actions of greatest 
 weight and solemnity, as being used when men most sequester 
 themselves from action. The reason hereof is an admirable fa- 
 cility which music hath to express and represent to the mind, more 
 inwardly than any other sensible mean, the very standing, rising, 
 and falling, the very steps and inflections every way, the turns and 
 varieties of all passions whereunto the mind is subject ; yea, so to 
 imitate them, that whether it resemble unto us the same state 
 wherein our minds already are, or a clean contrary, we are not 
 more contentedly by the one confirmed, than changed and led 
 away by the other. In harmony the very image and character 
 even of virtue and vice is perceived, the mind delighted with their 
 resemblances, and brought by having them often iterated into a 
 love of the things themselves." Magnificent as is the harmony of 
 these sentences, and severe as is the logical thought which they 
 express, the modern reader finds that he cannot get at the sense 
 of them by merely running his eye over them. The sentences 
 must be carefully construed, and such writing cannot possibly 
 be popular; as, in some degree, some writings of Bacon still 
 remain. 
 
 The posthumously published books of Hooker were supposed 
 to have been tampered with by the Editors. Hooker did not 
 publish his sermons, of which several were put forth after his 
 death. Even his Puritan adversaries could not with decency have 
 
270 English Literature 
 
 complained that they are too short. In one sermon he speaks 
 freely of the Pope as " The Man of Sin ". 
 
 " Martin Marprelate.'' 
 
 We cannot here do more than mention the masters of the fierce con- 
 troversial prose; indeed their names, often, can only be guessed. They 
 fought like wild cats, with the yells of these animals when enraged, in the 
 wordy war of" Martin Marprelate," or " Bishop's bane ". Archbishop Whit- 
 gift {1586) obtained a decree from the Star Chamber for the suppression of 
 pamphlets that attacked the usages of the Established Church. Till 1593 the 
 battle of books lasted ; and then Parliament silenced the Puritans — for a while. 
 The authors, taking the name of " Martin Marprelate," entered the fray, on 
 the Puritan side, with the weapon of satire, banter, and Billingsgate, in 
 autumn, 1588. Martin, whoever he or they may have been, employed a 
 secret press, owned by one Waldegrave, that was set up now in one place, 
 now in another. The history of the secret presses, of Waldegrave and of 
 his successors, is curious. The learned Udall, John Penry (" the Father of 
 Welsh Dissent ") and other combatants, were imprisoned ; Penry was hanged. 
 
 There remain seven tracts by Marprelate, in a style of variegated abuse, 
 banter, and " gag " : Bishop Cooper found that his name yielded gross palp- 
 able quips and puns to the Puritan wags who wrote for " the man in the 
 street". Martin was no Pascal, his weapons were not the small sword but 
 the jester's bladder on a stick, and the bully's bludgeon. The Anti-Mar- 
 tinists answered with the same weapons, as Nash and Lyly were responsible 
 for certain pamphlets ; Greene took a hand in the fray, and it faded out in a 
 literary and personal squabble with Gabriel Harvey. 
 
 The Martin Marprelate tracts were revolutionary, and afford a singular 
 instance in which the wit exhibited itself on the Puritan side. 
 
 Serious treatment of serious themes, on the other hand, is nobly vindi- 
 cated in the great work of Richar<| Hooker. 
 
 Bacon. 
 
 A style quite unlike that of Hooker is Bacon's. Francis Bacon, 
 later Lord Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, was born in 1561, 
 a younger son of Sir Nicholas Bacon (long time Keeper ot the 
 Seals under Elizabeth), and of his wife Elizabeth Cooke, daughter 
 of Sir Anthony Cooke, and sister of the wife of the famous Cecil, 
 Lord Burleigh. Bacon did not profit much by the high place of 
 his uncle William, and his cousin Robert Cecil. They retarded 
 from jealousy the worldly advancement, to secure which, and to 
 aid the progress of Science, were Bacon's leading desires. After 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 271 
 
 leaving Trinity College. Cambridg e, and studying law at Gray's 
 Inn, Bacon followed to Faris Sir Amyas Paulet, later the jailer 
 of Queen Mary Stuart at Fotheringay. He was called to th^B^ 
 in 1582, and in 1584 entered gjjljggjgjjt, on the Court side. 
 Ben Jonson has left lofty praise of his eloquent sagacity in debate. 
 His memoirs of advice to Elizabeth were more admired than fol- 
 lowed in practice. He was in favour of moderation towards both 
 Catholics and Puritans. He attached himself to the fortunes of 
 the Queen's brilliant wayward favourite, Essex, but his wisdom 
 was not what Essex was fitted by nature to follow : he swayed the 
 woman in Elizabeth by his beauty and daring grace : his military 
 ambitions were distasteful to the pacific and parsimonious Queen. 
 The mad enterprise of Essex, on Scottish models, to seiie the 
 Royal person, was no true English political move ; it led to his 
 trial, and Bacon was the leading speaker in his benefactor's pro- 
 secution. " It is the wisdom of rats," says Bacon, " that will leave 
 a house some time before it fall " (" Essays," " Of Wisdom for 
 a Man's Self "). 
 
 He has never been forgiven for an action which could scarcely 
 appear other than judicious, and praiseworthy, and even necessary, 
 to himself. Like Cecil he made advances to James VI of Scot- 
 land, when it was clear that Elizabeth could not, as James feared, 
 " last as long as sun and moon ". On James, Bacon bestowed all 
 his wisdom, and spoke for the project of Union between England 
 and Scotland, a project not realized till after the lapse of a century. 
 
 Partly through the influence of Ring James's favourite, Buck- 
 ingham, Bacon received promotion ; he became Attorney-General ; 
 in 1617, Keeper of the Seals, like his father ; in 1618, Chancellor, 
 and Baron Verulam; in 162 1 Viscount St. Albans. In the same 
 year he was accused of taking gifts from suitors (then a not un- 
 common practice), pled guilty, with qualifications, and was dis- 
 graced. His last years were spent in literary pursuits at his place, 
 Gorhambury, near St. Albans ; he caught cold in an experiment 
 in freezing poultry and died in March, 1626. 
 
 The industry of his biographer, Mr. Spedding, has not wholly 
 redeemed the character of Bacon, whose personality does not 
 endear him to mankind, and was not on a level with his genius. 
 
272 English Literature 
 
 That genius was literary in a very high degree, and was influenced 
 by a desire to benefit humanity through scientific knowledge of 
 the laws of Nature and of human nature. To this task he brought 
 an enthusiasm which reminds us of a man so different from him- 
 self as Shelley. In Bacon's belief, man might be and ought to be 
 the master of things ; and a reasoned account of all things in nature 
 was the inventory of human possessions. To make this inventory, 
 and to discover a new method of "interrogating nature," putting 
 her to the question and wrenching from her all her precious 
 secrets, was the main object of his scientific meditations. 
 
 His first important book, however, the "Essaies " (1597), was 
 literary, and no doubt was suggested by the Essays of Montaigne, 
 which were also familiar to Shakespeare. In its original form the 
 book contained but ten brief studies, but Bacon kept improving 
 them and adding to their number. There are thirty-four in the 
 edition of 1612, fifty-eight in that of 1625. It is dedicated to 
 Buckingham, who is informed that he has " planted things that 
 are like to last,'' an unlucky prediction. " Of all my other works," 
 adds Bacon, " my essays haye been most current ; for that, as it 
 seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms ". The 
 phrase is a proverb, — indeed the essays, as the man said of 
 " Hamlet," are " made up of quotations " of phrases that are now 
 household words. 
 
 The genius of Bacon, in the essay, and even in his scientific 
 works, "The Advancement of Learning" (1605), and the Latin 
 "Novum Organum " (1620), was not desultory, like Mon- 
 taigne's, but aphoristic. He coined Maxims or Aphorisms, brief 
 sayings, weighty with wisdom, brilliant with points of wit and 
 fancy, which sometimes remind us of La Rochefoucauld. It is 
 interesting to compare the first drafts of the Essays in 1597 with 
 the finished work in 1625, where they are considerably enlarged, 
 and altered in details. " Of Faction " is increased fourfold, and 
 strengthened by examples from Roman history. Like all the 
 men of his time, Bacon is rich in classical references and anec- 
 dotes which, with him, are not tedious and pedantic. When he 
 quotes Homer it is in Latin hexameters, he cites a Roman altered 
 adaptation, "a prophecy, as it seems, of the Roman Empire," 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers ■2'j^ 
 
 which, of course, Homer never predicted; but the Latin form 
 serves Bacon's theory of " prophecies that have been of certain 
 memorys and from hidden causes ". This wise man notes that 
 "the King of Spain's surname, they say, is Norway," in order 
 that a folk-prophecy may be fulfilled by the defeat of the Armada. 
 However on the whole he regards fulfilled prophecies, not scriptural, 
 as accidental coincidences. " Men mark when they hit, and never 
 mark when they miss, as they do generally also of dreams." 
 
 There is something pathetic in Bacon's wise futilities and gener- 
 alities on the most pressing political question of his time, " Unity 
 in religion ". Concerning the means of procuring Unity, " Men 
 must beware, that in the procuring or muniting of religious unity 
 they do not dissolve and deface the laws of charity and of human 
 society". Being men, they necessarily defaced both — Laud later 
 had the ears of Puritans cut off, Puritans cut off the head of Laud, 
 "and so as to consider men as Christians, we forget that they are 
 men ". 
 
 Bacon is not a little " Jesuitical ". Secrecy is often necessary, 
 " no man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope of 
 dissimulation; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of 
 secrecy". Simulation is "more culpable and less politic; except 
 it be in rare and great matters " — rather encouraging to Charles I, 
 for we are bidden to have " dissimulation in seasonable use ". 
 Love is rather profitable to the Stage than to human existerice, 
 " in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a syren, sometimes 
 like a fury ". " No great and worthy person " (except Mark An- 
 tony and Appius Claudius, famed for his adoration of Virginia) 
 " hath been transported to the mad degree of love ". " It is impos- 
 sible to love and be wise." Bacon certainly varied much from 
 Plato and all the poets " in this of love ". 
 
 Bacon knew very well that atheism was apt to follow in the 
 steps of his adored physical science, and consoled himself by as- 
 suming that " a little philosophy inclines man's mind to atheism, 
 but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion ". 
 He deemed that without belief there could be no sense of honour, 
 for atheists have died for their opinion, whereas, if they believe 
 that there is no God, "why should they trouble themselves?" 
 
 i8 
 
274 English Literature 
 
 " Against atheists the very savages take part with the very subtlest 
 philosophers," which is perfectly true. To the dog "man is in- 
 stead of a God, or melior natura ". " As atheism is in all respects 
 hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to 
 exalt itself above human frailty," yet martyr atheists have despised 
 human frailty. " For martyrdoms, I reckon them among miracles ; 
 because they seem to exceed the force of human nature." 
 
 Concerning the extreme Reformers, Bacon says "there is a 
 superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if 
 they go furthest from the superstition formerly received," as in the 
 Scottish Presbyterian burial of the Christian dead with no religious 
 service, one of Knox's innovations. In his Essay on " Wisdom for 
 a Man's Self," Bacon speaks, wittingly or unwittingly, of his own 
 mischance : " Whereas they have all their times sacrificed to therp- 
 selves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the incon- 
 stancy of fortune ". A word of Bacon's is always apt. "Let no 
 nation expect to be great that is not awake upon any just cause 
 of arming." Of colonization, "it is a shameful and unblessed 
 thing to take the scum of the people and wicked condemned men, 
 to be the people with whom you plant ". " If you plant where 
 savages are . . . use them justly and graciously.'' Always the 
 counsel is excellent, always the adviser is unheard ! Bacon even 
 advises on the stage management of Masques. On Gardening 
 he writes at much length and with manifest pleasure. His ad- 
 vice to keep caged birds in " little turrets with a belly " — is not that 
 of a poetical imagination. He did not like the Ars Topiaria, 
 " images cut out in juniper " or box. His garden contained " a 
 heath of a natural wildness," with many artificial additions. 
 
 Bacon's Promus of Elegancies is a commonplace book, full of 
 germs of essays, pensees. The essays themselves are strings of 
 connected aphorisms, without much consecutiveness of style or 
 skilled transitions. "Aphorisms," says Bacon himself, "except 
 they should be ridiculous, cannot be made but of the pith and 
 heart of Sciences." His Aphorisms certainly were more popular, 
 as he knew, than his connected work of 1605, " The Advancement 
 of Learning, Divine and Humane ''. 
 
 In the Dedication of this work to James I, Bacon admires his 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 275 
 
 Majesty's genius, "a light of nature I have observed in your 
 Majesty," who certainly was a clever man, and interested in 
 literature. The book is a plea for the organization of knowledge : 
 Bacon styles it " a small globe of the intellectual world ''. He 
 surveys all knowledge, and maps it out, with a view to organized 
 study. He meets religious objections in his usual way. It is 
 argued that ignorance is a fine thing, making " a more devout 
 dependence on God as the first cause ". Bacon replies in the 
 words of Job, "will you lie for God, as one man will do for 
 another to gratify him?" Will you "offer the author of Truth 
 the unclean sacrifice of a lie"? Bacon attacks the schoolmen as 
 darkening counsel by words and spinning cobwebs out of assumed 
 first principles, instead of collecting facts, and questioning nature 
 by experiments. Practically, experimental philosophy, and the en- 
 dowment of special research, are the burdens of his argument. 
 He divides knowledge into History (the original sense of the 
 word being inquiry). Human, Natural, and Divine. Anxious that 
 nothing should esoape him, he even classifies Ciphers, then much 
 used in the secret correspondence of statesmen and conspirators. 
 He had invented a cipher when a young diplomatist in Paris, and, 
 in the later Latin translation of this book, the " De Augmentis," 
 he is copious on the' subject. The secrets of each writing were 
 usually discovered by the simple process of torturing the con- 
 spirators who used them. 
 
 " Poesy," he says, " was ever thought to have some anticipa- 
 tion of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by 
 submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind ; where- 
 as reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of 
 things." He conceived that there was a mystic meaning, a re- 
 cord of lost wisdom, in the myths of the Greeks (which are mainly 
 decorated survivals of savage guesses at the causes of things). 
 He asks for more biographies, in an age very careless of bio- 
 graphy. He speaks of the "inductive" method, as opposed to 
 the scholastic reasoning from invented assumptions; and his 
 mind was always busy with a perfect system, " Instauratio Magna," 
 of the interpretation of nature, ^nd the encyclopaedic organization 
 of knowledge. This work he never completed ; the " Novum 
 
 18* 
 
276 English Literature 
 
 Organum " (1620), written in Latin, is the most important frag- 
 ment. He " had a vision of his own," but what his great and 
 perfect method really was, in practical operation, he probably did 
 not know himself. Fallacies he could detect and classify in bril- 
 liant fashion, the " Eidola " or shadowy Dwellers on the Threshold 
 of Truth, bewildering men who would enter that sanctuary. His 
 work in this kind, especially the "Novum Organum," is immensely 
 stimulating : he saw in vision the Promised Land of Science into 
 which he did not enter, and he would have been much disen- 
 chanted by the results, as regards human happiness, of the dis- 
 coveries which he, not vainly, summoned men to make. He did 
 not urge haste in practical application — the commercializing of 
 science. He insisted on the collection of "contradictory in- 
 stances," a method always, in accordance with human eagerness, 
 too much neglected.^ 
 
 Bacon's mind, in fact, was encyclopaedic, and shared the faults 
 common to encyclopaedias. The contemporary specialist, like 
 Gilbert with his remarkable experiments in magnetism, is spoken 
 of but slightingly by Bacon ; nor has he much praise for other 
 students who, in his time, were practising what he was preaching. 
 
 Bacon's prose, beyond the region of essays and of science, may 
 best be studied in his " Reign of Henry VII," the fruit of a few 
 months' labour, after his banishment to the country, in 1621. He 
 had no access to manuscripts of the period, except in copies made 
 for him in the great collection of Sir Robert Cotton, now in 
 the British Museum. The printed books concerning the reign, 
 those of Polydore Virgil, Holinshed (translating Polydore), Stowe, 
 and Speed, led Bacon into some mistakes about facts. But the 
 . book is lucid and sagacious ; the character of the king is clearly 
 depicted, without favour or deliberate fault-finding. The study of 
 Perkin Warbeck is full of subtle interest. " Himself with long and 
 continued counterfeiting and with often telling a lie was turned, 
 
 1 To take a very simple instance, a critic, observing that Hector, in the 
 " Iliad," slays some men who lived on the road from Thessaly to Boeotia, in- 
 fers that Hector's exploits are a record of the wars of a tribe advancing in that 
 direction. But he entirely overlooks the " contradictory instances," those in 
 which Hector spears men from other remote parts of Greece. 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 277 
 
 by habit, almost into the thing he seemed to be, and from a liar 
 to a believer." Ford makes Henry VII express the same opinion 
 in his tragedy of " Perkin Warbeck ". Bacon treats the strange 
 career of Perkin in terms of the Stage, speaks of the prompter with 
 his prompt-book, and, in the last Act, says, " therefore now, like 
 the end of a play, a great number came upon the stage at once ". 
 The nature of the statecraft of Henry VII, not very apprehensive 
 or forecasting of future events, afar off, " but an entertainer of 
 Fortune by the day," is admirably analysed. "I have not flattered 
 the king," says Bacon in his dedication to Charles, Prince of 
 Wales, " but took him to life as well as I could, sitting so far off, 
 and having no better light." Henry's attempt to secure the 
 canonization of Henry VI is amusingly described. Cardinals were 
 set to examine that poor prince's career, " but it died under the 
 reference. The general opinion was that Pope Julius was too dear, 
 and that the king would not come to his rates." But Bacon holds 
 that the Pope did not wish to cheapen saintliness, and chose to 
 " keep a distance between innocents and Saints ". The virtues 
 of Henry VI had not the necessary quality of being heroic. 
 
 "The New Atlantis," unfinished in 1624, was published with 
 the " Sylva Sylvarum," after Bacon's death, in 1627. Here our 
 author appears as the framer of a philosophical romance, not un- 
 like More's " Utopia," but concerned, as far as it goes, with the 
 organization of experiment and of knowledge, as practised by the 
 people of Bensalem, somewhere in the southern seas. Bacon 
 makes no long story of how he and his company arrived at Ben- 
 salem, an unheard of land, where civilization has survived since 
 the time of Plato's mythical lost Atlantis. Bacon was inclined to 
 suspect that there must have been " in the dark backward and 
 abysm of time," a race more advanced in knowledge than the 
 Greeks or the men of his own age. The Bensalemites are survivors 
 of that race, people very stately, peaceable (though well provided 
 with improved artillery), and Christian. The tale of their miracu- 
 lous conversion, through St. Bartholomew, " about twenty years 
 after the ascension of our Saviour " ; and of their acquisition of 
 the Old Testament and the New (including parts of it not yet 
 written) about 53 A.D., is the most romantic part of the romance. 
 
278 English Literature 
 
 The Bensalemites, who are rich in everything, make trading 
 voyages, not for lucre, but "for Light" knowledge. They have 
 every kind of museum, library, and scientific apparatus which the 
 mind of Bacon could desire, regardless of expense, nor do they 
 seem to have shrunk from vivisection in their search for the secrets 
 of nature. " We have some degrees of flying in the air," they 
 have Christian temples : they are extremely moral, kind, and in- 
 dustrious, in fact are a sort of scientific Phaeacians ; " far apart 
 they dwell, in the midst of the wash of the waves, and with them 
 are no men conversant,'' for they help, but do not welcome 
 mariners. 
 
 Bacon's Latin tracts are numerous : he believed that Latin 
 was a permanent, English a less stable speech, but of course, since 
 his day, knowledge of Latin has more and more decreased, owing 
 to the progress of education and the march of science. The 
 prophetic enthusiasm of his insistence on experimental philosophy, 
 the brilliance of his illustrations, and the sagacity of his aphoristic 
 observations, are the bases of his literary fame. He was not so 
 well fitted to be an experimental philosopher himself, as to be the 
 cause of experimental philosophy in others. 
 
 Raleigh. 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh (born 1552, at Hayes Barton, Budleigh, Devonshire), 
 educated at Oxford, a soldier with the Huguenots in France, familiar with 
 the wits in 1576 (when he wrote commendatory verses for Gascoigne's " Steel 
 Glass"), a courtier who enjoyed the sunshine and suffered from the frosts of 
 Elizabeth's favour, when supplanted by Essex went to Ireland, as we saw, 
 became the friend of Spenser, and was styled by him " The Shepherd of the 
 Ocean". 
 
 In life and in literature a fiery and indefatigable adventurer, his productions, 
 from sonnets and the long, and for the most part lost poem, " Cynthia " (dn 
 Elizabeth) to tracts on practical points ; accounts of voyages and of South 
 America, and the gigantic " History of the World," give proof of extra- 
 ordinary energy and fertility. His description of the glorious fight of " The 
 Revenge," and the death of Sir -Richard Grenville (published in 1596) can 
 never be forgotten. In 1596 appeared, too, his account of his first explora- 
 tion (1595) of Guiana, with a descr iption of " the great and golden City of 
 Manoa," — a mirage. 
 
 On the death of Elizabeth, James I, on grounds of not unnatural if base- 
 less suspicion, imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower, where he was well treated 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 279 
 
 enough, and, with what amount of aid from collaborators is uncertain (Ben . 
 Jonson said that he had much) but, in any case with portentous industry, 
 Raleigh compiled his " History of the World," from the creation to 130 B.C. 
 The book (1614-1615) had a very great popularity : even the Puritans read it 
 with admiration. There was then no "such world-history in English, and 
 though, as history, it is now obsolete of course ; it is admired for its vigour, 
 for the character it displays, and the personal observations suggested by the 
 author's wide experience of men ; and above all for occasional passages of 
 lofty eloquence, and the organ-tones of a magnificent style, as in the famous 
 address to Death. The capacities of style in original work had never so been 
 exemplified in English, though such examples are but occasional. 
 
 Raleigh's very title in " The Prerogative of Parliaments " was offensive 
 to the king, who doted on the prerogative of princes, and the book was not 
 printed till after Raleigh's execution, following his return from his second ex- 
 pedition to Guiana. He also wrote tracts on War in general, on " The Navy 
 and Sea Service," on " Trade and Commerce," on " A War with Spain " (the 
 last thing that James desired), on " The Arts of Empire " (published by Milton, 
 1658, as " The Cabinet Council ") and doubtless much is lost of the 3452 
 sheets of Raleigh's writing which John Hampden was having transcribed be- 
 fore the Great Rebellion. 
 
 More than Bacon, Raleigh tuned the language of "lofty, insolent, and 
 passionate English prose " : these terms were applied by Puttenham (" Art 
 of English Poesie") to Raleigh's " dittie ind amorous ode ". " Insolent," of 
 course, means here "out of the common". 
 
 OVERBURY. 
 
 Sir Thomas Overbury was born in Warwickshire in 1581 : was the son of 
 a Gloucestershire squire, was a gentleman commoner of Queen's College, Ox 
 ford, 1595-1598, entered the Middle Temple, and passed some years abroad. 
 On his return he became, in Scotland, the friend of Robert Carr (or Ker), son 
 of Ker of ■ Fernihirst, one of Queen Mary's Border partisans. Carr, who was 
 handsome, became King James's minion, and, in 1613, was created Earl of 
 Somerset. His friend Overbury obtained a place at Court; and was first 
 the friend, then the foe of Ben Jonson. An ally of Somerset, Overbury dis- 
 suaded him from his fatal marriage with Frances Howard, who, after a child- 
 marriage (1606) with the boy Earl of Essex, detested him, loved Somerset, 
 and, backed by James's influence, in spite of the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 Abbott, obtained a decree of nullity against her husband. The poet Donne, 
 as Somerset's adviser, and the poet Campion, as a physician connected with 
 a courtier more or less concerned in the affair, were entangled in this odious 
 and mysterious matter. Overbury, on the other hand, was opposed to the 
 unholy marriage of Somerset, and is thought to have written his popular 
 poem " The Wife," to show him that Lady Essex was not what a wife should 
 be. She plotted in various ways to get rid of Overbury. The offer of a 
 diplomatic post in Paris he refused, with insolence it seems ; he was sent to 
 
28o English Literature 
 
 the Tower, and there, through the instigation of Lady Essex, was poisoned, 
 with circumstances of bungling cruelty : for as we know in the Spanish case of 
 Escovedo, the science of poisoning was then quite tn its infancy. Overbury 
 died on 15 September, 1613. His death provoked many elegies and gave 
 popularity to liis poem " The Wife " (1614), which is of very slight merit, 
 and to his " Characters," brief mordant sketches of types of men, in prose 
 by Overbury and his friends. They appear to have been suggested rather by 
 the Characters of the Greek Theophrastus, than by Montaigne or Bacon. 
 Some pieces are ideal, " The Good Wife," and the charming " Fair and 
 Happy Milkmaid," worthy of Izaak Walton. " She is never alone for she 
 is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short 
 ones. . . . Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, 
 to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet." Most of the other 
 characters are drawn in a mocking style. Of " A Mere Scholar " we learn 
 that " the antiquity of his University is his creed ; and the excellency of his 
 College, though but for a match of football, an article of his faith ". " The 
 Mere Fellow of a House," or don, with his airs of a man of the world, pro- 
 vokes the handsome courtier, and ex-undergraduate of Queen's. This on the 
 scholar is good, " University jests are his universal discourse and his news 
 the demeanour of the Proctors". Overbury jests at "The Melancholy Man", 
 Melancholy, as Ben Jonson's Master Stephen had proved, was the fashion ; 
 a curious proof of this is the " Niobe " of Stafford {1611), a wonderful piece 
 of railing at "the damnable times," of which a copy bears the arms ol 
 Charles I when Prince of Wales. "Straggling thoughts," says Overbury, 
 "are the Melancholy Man's content, they make him dream waking; there's 
 his pleasure 1 " 
 
 Translators. 
 
 Translation was a great, if not to the toilers a profitable industry between 
 the reigns of Edward VI and James I. The wealth of classical, French, Span- 
 ish, and Italian learning, thought, and poetry was rapidly and strenuously con- 
 veyed into English, sometimes rough and ready, and rich in flowers of slang, 
 sometimes replete with elegance and vigour. The translators certainly pro- 
 duced most idiomatic English ; the ancients, in their versions, were not, as in 
 reality, concise and classically self-restrained. There was, as a rule, no 
 thought of minute accuracy. In fact, if some learned men were good Greek 
 scholars, they did not write translations : the earlier translators in England 
 used French and Italian versions of the Greek originals. Thus Thomas 
 Nichols did Thucydides, the greatest of Greek historians, out of a French 
 translation of an Italian version of the difficult original (1550). Nevertheless 
 if you turn to the tragic pages on the utter ruin of the Athenian expedition to 
 Sicily, the tale is still moving and rich in melancholy. Whoever B. R. was 
 (Barnaby Rich ? ) the translator of the first two books of Herodotus (including 
 iiis account of " the beastly devices " (as B. R. says) of the Egyptians), you 
 cannot complain, as Macaulay did of another version, that Herodotus is " as 
 flat as champagne in tumblers "- B. R. uses slang, as " the Greeks were in 
 
Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose Writers 281 
 
 the wrong box''. Sir Thomas North, whose translation of Plutarch (1579) 
 Shakespeare uses in his Roman plays, merely rendered the French version by 
 Amyot. Whereas Plutarch's Greek lives of great men are, though in manner 
 quiet, not frigid. North " picturesqued it everywhere "- In fact these trans- 
 lators made Greeks and Romans speak as if they had come back to life and 
 were writing in lusty Elizabethan England. Unluckily their volumes are not 
 often to be picked up at bookstalls, and as magnificently printed in " Tudor 
 Translations " they are expensive. 
 
 It is strange that the great Athenian dramatists, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, 
 Euripides, and the comic Aristophanes, were left untranslated ; probably be- 
 cause no contemporary foreign versions were easily procurable. What our 
 ancestors knew of ancient tragedy was mainly through the rhetorical Roman 
 imitations by Seneca. Of Plato scarce anything was translated. By 1600 
 Philemon Holland (born 1552), who actually went to the ancient originals for 
 his texts, published his translation of Livy. As early as 1547 John Wylkin- 
 son Englished the Ethics of Aristotle, — out of an Italian version. Philemon 
 was rapid, racy, indefatigable. He translated Plutarch's " Morals " in a year, 
 using but one quill. It was through Florio's English version that Shakes- 
 peare read Montaigne's Essays. It is hardly necessary to name Richard 
 Stanyhurst's " Four Books of Virgil's ' Aeneid ' " (1582) written in hideous En- 
 glish hexameters; and Thomas Phaer's Virgil, in " fourteeners " like Chap- 
 man's Homer, is even more helpless as a reproduction of " the stateliest 
 measure 
 
 Ever moulded by the lips of man," 
 
 than Conington's modern version in the metres of " The Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel". It was clearly through Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's 
 "Metamorphoses" (1567, Four Books in 1565) that Shakespeare knew Ovid 
 best. Golding also did Cesar's " De Bello Gallico " (1565), and Sir Henry 
 Savile, Provost of Eton, undertook Tacitus. 
 
 Among books from foreign modern authors, William Painter's " Palace 
 of Pleasure" (1566- 1567) with tales from Boccaccio, Queen Margaret of 
 Navarre, Bandello, and Straparola (as well as from classical sources) was a 
 treasure-house of plots and situations for the playwrights. In the tragedies 
 and comedies of the age, Italian characters are predominant. The Spanish 
 novel of the roads and inns and adventures, " Lazarillo de Tormes," was 
 done out of Spanish in 1576, and set the example of this kind of fiction to 
 Nash. Ariosto and Tasso were translated, the former by Sir John Harington 
 (1591). the latter by Edward Fairfax (in 1600), and Richard Carew, but Dante 
 was neglected. Of Chapman's " Homer," elsewhere spoken of, seven books 
 appeared in 1598, and Shakespeare either glanced at it for his " Troilus and 
 Cressida," or used, in places, a French or Latin version of Homer. It is im- 
 possible to enumerate all the translators, most of them are very readable, more 
 so, in fact, than our most exact literal renderings of Greek and Latin originals 
 into prose. 
 
282 English Literature 
 
 The Authorized Version of the Bible. 
 
 The noblest and most enduring monument of Elizabethan 
 prose is, of course, the Authorized Version of the Bible. The 
 nature of the texts to be translated suppressed all tendency to 
 wilful conceits ; a substratum of simple English from the time of 
 Wyclif s versions in Chaucer's day, and from Tyndale's learned 
 rendering, was retained ; the lofty poetry of the ancient prophets 
 was echoed in English as stately, balanced, and harmonious ; and 
 if it be said that the English does not represent " the speech " of 
 any one age in the life of England, we may reply that the original 
 texts also are the work of a thousand years in different languages. 
 
 Pulpit Eloquence. 
 
 It has often been remarked that sermons, in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries, " discharged one part of the function of the modern newspaper " 
 (though this is more true of Scotland than of England), and that sermons, 
 where published, were a favourite form of reading. That is proved by their 
 abundance in country house libraries, where old sermons usually occupy much 
 valuable wall-space, as they cannot be sold, and present an imposing array 
 of calf-backed volumes. Our space does not permit us to do more than name 
 the famous preachers of the Elizabethan age, such as Lancelot Andrewes 
 (155S-1626), Bishop of Winchester under James I ; James Ussher, Arch- 
 bishop of Armagh (1581-1656), a man of varied learning who arranged the 
 chronology of the Bible ; Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) and Donne whose 
 prose has many of the merits and defects of his age. 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 LATE ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETS. 
 
 It may have occurred to the reader that the words which Ben 
 Jonson quoted about Shakespeare, Sufflaminandus erat — he 
 flowed so freely that he needed stopping — indicate the great fault 
 of Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature. The authors did not 
 know where to stop. The age was luxuriantly rich in genius ; and 
 was over-wealthy in new ideas, gained from Greece, Rome, France, 
 Spain, and Italy ; from the clash of religions, the discoveries in the 
 new world, and the re-discoveries of the treasures of the old world. 
 What the English poets did not re-discover was the Greek lucidity, 
 brevity, condensation, and orderliness. Even in plays of Shakes- 
 peare these graces are lacking : even Shakespeare's construction is 
 not his strong point. The intellectual wealth of the poets 
 tempted them to prolixity ; the abundance of their ideas provoked 
 them to that fashion of " conceits,'' of comparisons between the 
 things most remote in heaven, earth, and the world of fancy. 
 There was a taste which reappears now and then in literature, 
 from early Icelandic poetry to Browning and George Meredith, 
 for wilful abruptness, harshness, and obscurity. But industrious 
 prolixity is not the fault of Donne, whom we now approach : his 
 error lay in harshness, obscurity, and a measureless indulgence in 
 conceit. Through these the light which is in him is darkened. 
 Meanwhile rank over-abundance, the inability to stop, renders 
 Daniel and Drayton and Phineas Fletcher burdensome, while 
 Giles Fletcher crowds with conceits and points of wit a poem 
 on the most sacred theme. These poets are not now commonly 
 read, except in selections of their best things, and such selections 
 give no idea of their pervading faults. When we extend our 
 knowledge of the authors, and mark the formless character of the 
 
 2H3 
 
284 English Literature 
 
 age in poetry, the sudden appearance of Milton indicates as great 
 a miracle of genius as the existence of Chaucer, Spenser, and 
 Shakespeare in the throng of their contemporaries. 
 
 John Donne was born in London, in 1573. His father was an 
 eminent ironmonger, of a Catholic family ;' nis mother's kin, the 
 Heywoods, had suffered much from Protestant persecution. One 
 of them was the writer of Interludes which amused the melancholy 
 of Mary Tudor. John entered Hart Hall, Oxford, later Mag- 
 dalen Hall, in 1584, he also studied at Cambridge, and entered 
 Lincoln's Inn in 1592. A portrait of him in 1591 shows a young 
 man holding the hilt of a very large rapier, and wearing a large 
 earring shaped as a cross. He has a look of audacity, perhaps of 
 sensuality, with a tinge of melancholy. He seems at this time 
 to have studied the controversy between Catholics and Protestants, 
 and in his " Epistle " (rhymed heroic couplets) we perceive that he 
 was of no fervent piety, but rather a doubter. His satires appear 
 to have been written about 1593. They are obscure, and the 
 versification is bad, apparently of set purpose. Often the reader 
 is puzzled to guess how a line is meant to be scanned, the natural 
 rules of accent are set at defiance, as Ben Jonson remarked. 
 Probably Donne aimed at imitating Persius, the obscure young 
 Roman satirist. The satires can scarcely be read except by curious 
 students tracing the evolution of Donne's thought and style. 
 
 In 1596 he sailed with Essex to the victory over Spain at 
 Cadiz. Before starting he wrote one of his poetical " Elegies " to 
 a lady with whom he had an intrigue. In 1597 he went on "the 
 Islands Voyage" with Essex, to capture plate ships. He ex- 
 perienced a tempest, was driven back to Falmouth, wrote " The 
 Storm," and later, in the Tropics "The Calm". The men are 
 roasted by the sun and bathe, then 
 
 back to the ships we turn 
 Like parboiled wretches on the deck to burn. 
 
 The poems are rude in versification and exaggeration, but most 
 vivid are their pictures of Nature and the sea. Returning in the 
 autumn of 1597, Donne is supposed to have travelled in Italy and 
 Spain, if it be not more probable that he visited these countries in 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 285 
 
 1592-1596. If Ben Jonson rightly said that Donne wrote "all 
 his best pieces of verse" before he was 25, they must have been 
 finished by 1598. They were not printed till 1633, but circu- 
 lated in manuscript. 
 
 Probably most of the pieces in his " Elegies " and " Songs and " 
 Sonnets " were composed in his tempestuous youth. The amorous 
 conceits in "The Flea'' are equally rich in ingenious fancies 
 and in bad taste. " Woman's Constancy " and many other poems 
 have the same moral burden as 
 
 'T was last night I swore to thee 
 That fond impossibility,— 
 
 to be constant. The sun is chidden for too early rising — ■ 
 
 Go tell Court-huntsmen that the King will ride, — 
 
 but leave lovers undisturbed. In " The Indifferent " he brags that 
 he can love all sorts and conditions of women, like Lord Byron 
 and other amorists. He finds in himself " something like a heart," 
 but rather rumpled. Of a later period, when he met his future 
 wife, may be a charming song, 
 
 Just such disparity 
 As is 'twixt air and angel's purity 
 'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be. 
 
 But the Elegies address ladies of whose nature purity is no part, 
 and it may be admitted that the confessions do not win admira- 
 tion for Donne's taste and temper, not to mention his morals, when 
 he wrote them. " The Curse " on a woman, or a man who loves 
 his mistress, far outdoes the Epodes of Horace in cold ferocity. 
 " The Bait " contains remarks on the cruelty of angling which 
 must have vexed Izaak Walton to the heart. "Love's Deity," 
 opening with the charmed lines 
 
 I long to tallt with some old lover's ghost, 
 
 Who died before the God of Love was born, 
 
 thence descends into crabbed and difficult conceits. Two songs, 
 "The Funeral" and "The Relic," are on a bracelet of his 
 mistress's hair : whoever exhumes the poet's body will find 
 
 A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. 
 
286 English Literature 
 
 These verses of Donne's disturbed and adventurous youth, poems 
 ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the 
 music as of birds' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age : 
 nor have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser's. Donne in 
 youth was not at ease with himself : he speculates too curiously. 
 He may try to play the sensualist, but there is a dark backward 
 in his genius ; there are chords not in tune with mirth and 
 pleasure. He is as unique as Browning, as little like other poets. 
 If his Elegies contain, as has been supposed, the story of a love 
 affair, it was of a nature to make him uneasy. 
 
 In 1597 Donne became secretary of the Lord Keeper, Sir 
 Thomas Egerton, and met his niece, Anne More, daughter of Sir 
 George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. He married her secretly 
 at the end of 160 1, and therefore was imprisoned in the Fleet jail, 
 in February, 1602, thanks to the lady's angry father, who soon after 
 forgave the young lovers. 
 
 By 1 60 1 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or 
 "Metempsychosis," the adventures of a soul "placed in most 
 shapes," ^ for example, in that fabulous and mortuary weed, a man- 
 drake, in the roe of a fish, in a sparrow, and so forth, all to little 
 purpose. He was unemployed, eager for employment, given to 
 writing long letters, and laments for deaths in verse, and he assisted 
 in a controversy with the Catholics. 
 
 Now come such more or less theological works as " Pseudo- 
 Martyr," " Ignatius His Conclave," and " Biathanatos " : the first 
 (1610) is addressed to the King, who finally induced Donne to 
 take holy orders. " Divine " poems he also wrote, but he was 
 not anxious to be a professional divine. Donne's conceits were 
 daring to the border of profanity. A visit to Paris with his patron. 
 Sir Robert Drury, while Mrs. Donne was about to become a 
 mother, was marked by a telepathic experience — Donne saw his 
 wife, then in England, with a dead baby in her arms. Walton 
 says that the day of the vision was that of the child's birth and 
 death, but the dates do not bear out the statement. Walton's 
 remark that Drury sent an express messenger to England, to in- 
 quire about Mrs. Donne, is certainly untrue. 
 
 ' Was Donne copying a poem by Erapedocles ? 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 287 
 
 In honour of a daughter of Drury who died young, Donne 
 had written two extraordinary poems: "The First Anniversary" 
 of the decease was published in 161 1, "The Second Anniversary" 
 was written in 16 12. There seemed reason to fear that Donne 
 would celebrate Miss Drury, whom he had never seen, once a year, 
 while his life endured. The poem as a whole is " An Anatomy 
 of the World, wherein, by occasion of the death of Mistress 
 Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole world is re- 
 presented". Donne indulges in an exaggeration of hyperbole 
 equalled only by the ancient Irish bards who sang the feats of 
 Cuchulainn. For example, when Elizabeth joined the Saints 
 
 This world in that great earthquake languished, 
 For in a common bath of tears it bled, 
 
 an allusion to Seneca bleeding to death in a bath full of hot water. 
 This manner of hyperbole flourished after Donne's time, infecting 
 Crashaw and others, 
 
 For there's a kind of world remaining still, 
 
 as Donne admits. Poetry on the deplorable brevity of life and 
 the instability of things may be excellent, and that instability is 
 the theme of Donne, but Mistress Drury is harped upon too much, 
 and Donne was taking this paragon on trust : — 
 
 she whose rich eyes and breast 
 Gilt the West Indies and perfumed the East. 
 
 It is impossible to understand how a poet, now of the mature 
 age of thirty-nine, could write in this fashion if he had any humour. 
 
 "The Second Anniversary " dwelt on the incommodities of the 
 soul in this life, and her exaltation in the next. Donne says that 
 the world still has a semblance of life, as when the eyes and 
 tongue of a decapitated man twinkle and roll, while 
 
 He grasps his hands and he pulls up his feet. 
 So struggles this dead world, 
 
 without Elizabeth, whom Donne never saw! There are good 
 lines such as 
 
 Her pure and eloquent blood 
 
 Spoke on her cheeks, 
 
2 88 English Literature 
 
 and the satiric remarks on 
 
 A spongy slack divine, 
 who 
 
 Drinks and sucks in th' instructions of great men. 
 
 In return for these poems Drury housed and took care of 
 Donne and his large family. The poet now became the adviser 
 of the Earl of Somerset in the hideous suit of nullity, and, when 
 things went against Somerset, who had done nothing for him, 
 Donne proposed to publish his poems in " a few copies ". " I 
 apprehend some incongruities in the resolution," and indeed, as 
 Donne at this momgnt intended to take holy orders, which he did 
 in January, 1615, he was wise in breaking his resolution. He 
 now obtained some clerical appointments, but in August, 161 7, 
 lost his wife. There is little doubt that his grief changed him 
 from a worldly man into a man of heartfelt piety, the man whom 
 Izaak Walton knew and adored. 
 
 His "Holy Sonnets," written at this time, have some noble 
 almost Miltonic passages, mingled with lines that cannot be made 
 to scan, and with hyperbolical conceits. Thus, though 
 
 Thou my thirst hast fed, 
 A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. 
 
 He requests the American explorers to lend him " new seas," so 
 that he may drown his world in tears of penitence. He makes 
 " yet " rhyme to " spirit ". The excuse made for such things is 
 that Donne thought Elizabethan poetry too dulcet. 
 
 He is a poet by flashes, which are very brilliant with strange 
 coloured fires. He is not really so obscure as he is reckoned : 
 he can be understood, though Ben Jonson, who " esteemed him 
 the first poet in the world in some things," added that "Donne 
 from not being, understood would perish ". 
 
 Donne died on March 31, 1631. His poetry, styled by Dr. 
 Johnson " metaphysical," exercised an influence not wholly favour- 
 able on his successors; happily it did not aff"ect Lovelace and 
 Herrick. 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 289 
 
 Minor Lyrists. 
 
 In the Elizabethan age it might almost be said that every 
 man was his own poet. The name of poet became a term of con- 
 tempt, as we learn from Ben Jonson and other sources. Of the 
 best lyrists we have spoken in treating of the dramatists, of Sidney, 
 Raleigh, and the chief sonneteers. Another sonneteer is Thomas 
 Watson, an Oxford man, and allied to Spenser's circle (1557- 
 1592). His " Hecatompathia " (1582) and "Tears of Fancy" 
 (posthumously published) are sonnets, either informal or formal 
 in structure; the " Hecatompathia " mainly consists of translations 
 from modern laiiguages. Watson had learning and some skill, but 
 not much natural music in his soul. 
 
 Henry Constable, a Yorkshire man and a Catholic, may have 
 been bom about 1562 or earlier, judging by his degree taken at 
 Cambridge in 1580. He passed much of his life abroad, and, on 
 his return, part of it in the Tower, in the last years of Elizabeth. 
 His sonnets (" Diana," 1592-1594) are pleasing, more tunable than 
 many sonnets of his own and the succeeding age. Others have 
 been exhumed from manuscript ; some are devotional. 
 
 Willoughby's " Avisa " (the sonnet sequences usually bore 
 girls' names) would be forgotten but for the magic initials " W. S." 
 and allusions to W.'s love affairs. He may have been William 
 Shakespeare ; or he may have been Walter Smith, or William 
 Smith, author of another such book as " Avisa," " Chloris " (1596). 
 With him may pair off Lynch, with "Diella," and Griffin with 
 "Fidessa," love-sonneteers. 
 
 Richard Barnfield (15 74- 162 7), an Oxford man, was fertile in 
 1594-1598, publishing "The Affectionate Shepherd" (1594), 
 "Cynthia" (1595), "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia" (1598). 
 The Shepherd is much too affectionate for Christian and Northern 
 tastes, in the style of Virgil's second Eclogue, 
 
 that horrid one 
 Beginning ardebat formosum pastor Corydon, 
 
 as Byron describes it. In " Cynthia " he enthusiastically admires 
 Spenser. If he wrote the sonnet " If Music and sweet Poetry 
 agree," which appears in poems published with "Lady Pecunia," 
 
 19 
 
290 English Literature 
 
 and the charming "As it fell upon a day" (often ascribed to 
 Shakespeare), in the miscellany "England's Helicon," Barnfield 
 was among the true lyrists of his time. " Lady Pecunia " is a 
 satire on what wealth can do, and " The Complaint of Poetry for 
 the death of Liberality," a satire on what it does not usually care 
 to do. He made experiments in English hexameters : after the 
 age of 24 he ceased to write or ceased to publish. 
 
 Thomas Campion (died in 1620) was, fortunately, a more per- 
 severing poet. Though his name was hardly known to modern 
 readers till of recent years, because his lyrics were mainly pub- 
 lished with music of his own composition, he was one of the most 
 exquisite and delightful singers in the whole of English literature. 
 Born in London, he went in 1581 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, 
 left in 1585, and entered Gray's Inn in 1586. Five of his poems 
 appear in a Miscellany of 159 1 : his Latin poems are of 1595. 
 In 1601 appeared his first " Booke of Ayres," the music by him- 
 self and his friend Philip Rosseter. In 1602 he put forth "Ob- 
 servations on the Art of English Poesie," written, strange as it 
 appears, in favour of verses in quantitative metres, without rhyme. 
 He had taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine : he also wrote 
 (1613) three Masques, one was for the wedding of the Princess 
 Elizabeth, " the Queen of Hearts," another was for the shameful 
 nuptials of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard, stained as they 
 were with vice, vulgarity, and murder. Campion's later " Bookes 
 of Ayres " are of 1612 and 1617. He died in March, 1619-1620. 
 
 Some of Campion's lyrics may have been suggested by and 
 adapted to his own music, in other cases he composed the music 
 for his own words. He employs a great number of metres, all 
 tunable : with him music and sweet poesy agree. To think of 
 these songs, as Thackeray said of some of Scott's novels, is to wish 
 to run to the bookshelves, take them down and read them. No- 
 thing can be more charming than the verses on " The Fairy Queen, 
 Proserpina," and "Give Beauty all her right," 
 
 Silly boy, 'tis full moon yet, 
 Thy night as day shines clearly, 
 
 Now let her change ! and spare not I 
 Since she proves strange, I care not I 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 291 
 
 Kind are het answers, 
 
 But her performance keeps no day, 
 
 Breaks time, as dancers 
 
 From their own music when they stray. 
 
 Drayton. 
 
 Michael Drayton (born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, 1563, 
 died 1 631) is a poet of nearly the same character and calibre as 
 Daniel (of whom later), with the same beginnings as a sonneteer, 
 the same prolixity in versifying history, and the same steady 
 laborious cast of mind. From the age of 10, as he tells us, he 
 was bent on being a Poet, and like greater poets. Burns, for 
 example, he was usually inspired by some model, which, unlike 
 Burns, he did not transfigure and excel. His earUest work, " The 
 Harmony of the Church " (1591), contains rhymed paraphrases of 
 Biblical songs and prayers. Drayton, like Milton, addresses the 
 Heavenly M[use, singing "not of toys on Mount Ida, but of 
 triumphs on Mount Sion ". Thus from Exodus xv., the triumph 
 over Egypt, 
 
 The Lord Jehovah is a Man of War, 
 
 Pharaoh, his chariots, and his mighty host, 
 
 Were by his hand in the wild waters lost. 
 His captains drownfed in Red Sea so far. 
 
 In 1593 appears his "Shepherd's Garland". Spenser had 
 made shepherds fashionable ; and eclogues were the mode. In 
 one, " Beta," Queen Elizabeth was praised ; in another. Sir Philip 
 Sidney was lamented. The work, with improvements, was re- 
 published in 1606. The ballad of Dowsabel was a pleasant and 
 fortunate addition. Anne Goodere, later Lady Rainsford, a 
 daughter of Drayton's patron, Sir Henry Goodere, is the person 
 named Idea, in the sonnets collected under that title. If the one 
 famous and immortal sonnet, 
 
 Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part, 
 
 be really by Drayton, he here showed mastery ; and the addresses 
 to Idea may not be mainly fanciful. Another sonnet on rivers, 
 Drayton's favourite theme in the " Polyolbion," identifies Idea's 
 
 19 * 
 
292 English Literature 
 
 home — so far she was certainly a real person. But there are critics 
 who deny to him, 
 
 Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part. 
 
 It has even been attributed to Shakespeare, because of its excel- 
 lence. 
 
 Following Daniel's " Complaint of Rosamond," Drayton 
 versified the stories of Piers Gaveston, Matilda, daughter of Lord 
 Robert Fitzwater, Robert Duke of Nprmandy, and " The Great 
 Cromwell" (Thomas). Like Daniel, he gave little sack to a 
 monstrous deal of bread, in a close following of prose chronicles. 
 " Mortimeriados " (1596) is another legend, in rhyme royal, of the 
 wars of the barons against the second and third Edwards, later 
 recast as " The Barons' Wars," in an eight-lined stanza. " The 
 English Historical Epistles " were a following of the Letters of 
 Ovid's heroines ; there are twelve lovers and ladies, each writes a 
 letter and receives a reply. Rosamond, Jane Shore, and Geraldine 
 are, naturally, among the ladies. Drayton employs the rhymed 
 decasyllabic couplet, and adds learned notes, comparing, for 
 example, the Maze of Rosamond to the Cnossian Labyrinth of 
 the Minotaur in Crete. The verses are curiously modern in 
 some places. 
 
 The poet now did work for Henslowe and the stage. Like 
 Daniel he wrote a panegyric of the new King, James VI and I, in 
 1603 : it brought him no advancement, and in the next year he 
 made " The Owle " the mouthpiece of a satire, opening with the 
 outworn dream-formula which had so long haunted verse. 
 
 In 1606 he attempted odes: the best Known is on "The 
 Virginian Voyage " : Virginia is a paradise, doubtless the laurel 
 is indigenous, and Drayton foresees a Virginian poet (possibly 
 Edgar Poe, in a way a Virginian). By the famous patriotic 
 "Ballad of Agincourt," Drayton holds his most secure title to 
 popularity. 
 
 He had long been working at his " Polyolbion," in which the 
 rivers of England, and the great events which Dccurred in their 
 valleys, are celebrated. The first thirteen books were published 
 in 1612-1613. Drayton's best Muse is the patriotic. He was 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 293 
 
 not encouraged by the reception of the book (reprinted with twelve 
 new songs in 1622), and unhappily he stopped at the Cumber- 
 land Eden, and did not, like Richard Franck in prose, celebrate 
 the Scottish rivers from the Debatable Land to the Naver. 
 Drayton's ambling Alexandrine couplets are, at least, interesting 
 to the angler, for he has a minute knowledge of even such burns 
 as the "roaring Yarty" (mark the Yar, as in Cretan and Greek 
 Jardanus, Yarrow, and the Australian Yarra-Yarra) and the trout- 
 ful Mimram, which he calls the Mimer. Had Drayton spoken 
 more particularly of the streams, and been less copious in en- 
 deavours " the battle in to bring," battles Celtic, or of the many 
 civil wars, his poem would have more attractions. History, 
 copious and minute, is a stumbling-block to poetry in Drayton, and 
 as to history, the public, he says, " take a great pride to be ignorant 
 thereof": "the idle humorous world must hear of nothing that 
 savours of antiquity ". 
 
 Perhaps the idle world was more kind to the playful poem 
 " Nimphidia " (162 7) where Titania, to the wrath of Oberon, wooes 
 a new Bottom, Pigwiggen. The tripping measure is that of 
 Chaucer's " Sir Thopas " : the Fairy Queen's equipage is thus de- 
 scribed, 
 
 Her chariot of a snail's fine shell, 
 Which for the colours did excell, 
 The fair Queen Mab becoming well, 
 
 So lively was the limning : 
 The seat the soft wool of the bee, 
 The cover, gallantly to see, 
 The wing of a py'd butterflee, 
 
 I trow, was ample trimming. 
 
 The venerable and undefeated singer returned to pastoral, " The 
 Quest of Cynthia," and (1630) gave "The Muses' Elizium," full of 
 pretty innocent ditties, while " Noah's Flood " is naturally in a 
 more solemn strain, as are " Moses, His Birth and Miracles," and 
 " David and Goliath ". These prolix paraphrases do not greatly 
 improve on the heroic prose of Genesis and Samuel. 
 
 Drayton died in 163 1, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, 
 but not in the Poets' Corner. 
 
294 English Literature 
 
 Daniel. 
 
 Samuel Daniel is one more of the poets whose names linger on 
 in histories of literature because they were contemporaries of 
 Shakespeare and Spenser and may more or less have " taken Eliza 
 and our James ". A privately printed edition of 150 copies of 
 Daniel's works (edited by Dr. Grosart) keeps his laurels green in 
 such abundance as his intrinsic literary merits deserve. He seems 
 to have been born near Taunton about 1562-63: his father is 
 described as a music-master ; he was at Oxford for three years or 
 thereabouts. He published a translation of a tract by Paulus 
 Jovius, "of rare inventions both military and amorous called Im- 
 prese," in 1585. He was patronized by "Sidney's sister, Pem- 
 broke's mother," and resided at Wilton, where she received much 
 literary society and he may have enjoyed excellent trout-fishing in 
 the Nadder and the Wily. In 1591 he "commenced poet" with 
 twenty-seven of the stereotyped love sonnets (not in the regular 
 Petrarchian form) which appeared unsigned in Nashe's edition 
 of " Astrophel ". In 1592- 15 94, three editions, emended, were 
 published ; the collection is entitled "Delia". 
 
 So sounds my Muse according as she strikes 
 On my heart-strings attuned unto her fame. 
 
 Probably Delia did not strike her Samuel's heart-strings with much 
 skill and vigour. 
 
 What though my Muse no honour got thereby, 
 Each bird sings to herself, and so will I. 
 
 With " Delia " appeared a long and very tedious " Complaint 
 of Rosamond " (who sleeps in Godstow near Oxford). The 
 piece is in stanzas of seven lines, and is as woeful as "The 
 Mirror for Magistrates ". The abbey built by " the credulous 
 devout and apt-believing ignorant" was already ruined by the 
 Great Pillage, and the melancholy place by the grey waters is 
 Rosamond's only monument. Her ghost left Daniel "to pro- 
 secute the tenor of my woes " : there is abundance of moral but 
 very little of music in Rosamond's " Complaint ". 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 295 
 
 Daniel visited Italy about 1592, and in 1594 published 
 " Cleopatra," a tragedy in imitation of Seneca, with a chorus. 
 The chorus commences thus 
 
 Now every mouth can tell 
 What close was muttered : 
 How that she did not well, 
 To take the course she did I 
 
 The prologue and the chorus are the first act. Naturally 
 in Senecan drama Cleopatra does not commit suicide on the stage. 
 A messenger narrates the moving incident in two hundred and 
 fifty rhyming verses. 
 
 In 1595 appeared the first four books of Daniel's "Civil 
 Wars"; a fifth book came out in 1599. In 1600 the poet be- 
 came tutor to Lady Ann Clifford, but he longed to return to his 
 Muse, and did so in 1602. His "Civil Wars'' were now a Seven 
 Years' War, and he achieved Book VI. In 1603 he addressed 
 a panegyric to James VI and I, the new King : he obtained a 
 Court post in connexion with the Queen's Masques, and held his 
 place and salary till 1618; wrote a History of England, and died 
 at Beckington, Somerset, in 1619. He had written Masques, and 
 a " Defence of Rhyme " against the friends of unrhymed verse in 
 classical metres. His " Civil Wars " are a chronicle in rhyme — 
 he spares neither himself nor the infrequent reader. Daniel 
 opens by stating that had England devoted herself solely to fight- 
 ing abroad, she might have annexed Europe to the Alps, the 
 Rhine, and the Pyrenees. But this is an error : in 1429 the tide of 
 English conquest recoiled from the standard of the Maj^, and 
 even before the civil wars at home England had failed to hold 
 the Loire. 
 
 The poem traces civil war from Richard II onwards to 
 Edward IV, and, as Aristotle rightly said, an Epic poem cannot be 
 written in that way. Daniel was an excellent man ; a most in- 
 dustrious author, and we may say of him in the words of his own 
 Epistle to Lord Henry Howard, 
 
 Vertue, though luckless, yet shall 'scape contempt, 
 And though it hath not hap, it shall have fame. 
 
296 English Literature 
 
 Daniel had little of the exuberant fantasy of his time ; he is 
 " well-languaged Daniel," and easily intelligible. But even his 
 most frequently quoted sonnet, 
 
 Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, 
 
 is far from being one of the best of poetic Hymns to Sleep, and 
 his best gnomic poem, 
 
 He that of such a height hath built his mind, 
 
 is far too long. 
 
 Davies. 
 
 Sir John Davies, of Tisbury in Wilts, was born about 1569, 
 we may suppose, if he went to Queen's, Oxford, in 1585. As a 
 young Templar he is said to have been a brawler, and to have 
 been expelled from the society for his vivacities in 1598. In 
 1599 Davies published his " Nosce Teipsum " (" Know Thyself"), 
 on the nature and properties of the Soul and on its Immortality. 
 The psychology may be old fashioned, but the versification is 
 not. Only the best poets of the age could write the four-lined 
 decasyllabic verses, with alternate rhymes, with the fluency and 
 harmony of Davies. He has an answer to all objections, 
 
 But still this crew with questions me pursues, 
 
 " If souls deceased," say they, " still living be, 
 
 Why do they not return, to bring us news 
 
 Of that strange world where they such wonders see ? " 
 
 " Why do not the Esquimaux visit us and tell us about the North 
 Pole ?*' Davies replies, not quite convincingly. Henry More or 
 Glanvill would have answered that souls do return, and made the 
 question one of evidence. 
 
 Davies's " The Orchestra," on dancing, is extremely graceful, 
 melodious and ingenious ; the stanzas describing Queen Elizabeth 
 dancing " high and disposedly " are unfortunately lost. Even his 
 acrostics on " Elizabetha Regina " are charming, and wonderfully 
 varied in ornament and compliment — as vers de societe none of that 
 age are more admirable. 
 
 Davies returned to the Temple, rose in his profession, sat in 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 297 
 
 the House of Commons, was admired by James VI for his poetry, 
 was knighted, and in 1606 became Attorney-General in Ireland. 
 In 161 2 he published a valuable book on the Irish Question, 
 which should be read with that of Spenser. 
 
 He died after his return to England, Parliament, and the de- 
 fence of the cause of an Irish Parliament for Ireland, in 1626. 
 
 Giles and Phineas Fletcher. 
 
 Drayton and Daniel were not influenced by their great fore- 
 runner Spenser, as were the two clerical brothers and poets, Phineas 
 (born 1582 ?) and Giles Fletcher (born 1588). They were the sons 
 of Giles Fletcher, author of "Licia," one of the many collec- 
 tions of sonnets published in 1593- He was a scholar, a man 
 of business, and a diplomatist. "Christ's Victory and Triumph " 
 (1610), the chief poem of the younger Giles is in stanzas one line 
 shorter than the Spenserian ; it begins by observing that 
 
 the Infinite far greater grew 
 By growing less, 
 
 so that " 'twere greatest were it none at all," as in the case of 
 the other poet whose wound was "so great because it was so 
 small "- 
 
 Thus does an unhappy point of wit, a "conceit," disturb the 
 reader at the opening of a poem on the same solemn theme as 
 Milton's " Paradise Regained ". The poet admits us to the 
 Councils of Eternity, and thus sets forth the topic of his sacred 
 song ; the stanza is a fair example of his manner : — 
 
 Ye sacred writings, in whose antique leaves 
 
 The memories of Heav'n entreasur'd lie, 
 
 Say what might be the cause that Mercy heaves 
 
 The dust of Sin above th' industrious sky. 
 
 And lets it not to dust and ashes fly ? 
 
 Could Justice be of sin so overwooed, 
 
 Or so great ill be cause of so great good, 
 
 That, bloody man to save, man's Saviour shed his blood 
 
 The phrase 
 
 that Mercy heaves 
 The dust of Sin above th' inrfwsirious sky, 
 
298 English Literature 
 
 is typical of late Elizabethan mannerism. " Heaves " is used to 
 rhyige to " leaves " ; " the dust of sin " is apparently the redeemed 
 soul, why the sky is " industrious," except as a kind of pun on the 
 preceding " dust," is not apparent ; we are to wonder why the 
 dust of sin is not allowed " to fly to dust and ashes," — in short 
 a solemn and sacred poem can hardly be written in a style more 
 unhappily out of keeping. When the fate of fallen man is trem- 
 bling in the balance, Mercy " smooths the wrinkles of the Father's 
 brow," and Justice, observing this with displeasure (it is like a 
 Homeric quarrel of Athene and Aphrodite 1), throws herself 
 between Mercy and the Father, like " a vapour from a • moory 
 slough," and begins a virulent invective against 
 
 That wretch, beast, caitiff, Monster-Man, 
 
 who, in Egypt, is disgracing himself by animal worship, while in 
 Greece, 
 
 Neptune spews out the lady Aphrodite. 
 
 Your songs exceed your matter — 
 says Giles to other poets, — 
 
 this of mine 
 The matter which it sings, shall make divine. 
 
 Alas ! the poem, though it has fine occasional passages, some 
 music, and much energy, is written in a style of conceits, and of 
 ingenious antitheses, which are wholly out of accord with "the 
 matter ". We cannot but see that the poet, in regard to taste, is 
 wholly lost, is too much a child of his time, so rich in everything 
 but perception of form and limit, so fantastically over-adorned in 
 verse as in vesture. 
 
 Giles wrote of Phineas as 
 
 the Kentish lad, that lately taught 
 His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound. 
 
 Phineas did this in his vast allegorical poem, "The Purple 
 Island " (1633) (the human body). His stanzas are of seven lines, 
 the first four rhyming alternately, the last three have all the same 
 rhyme. Both poets imitate Spenser with a difference in stanza, 
 and a notable difference in genius ; both have musical passages, 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 299 
 
 and both anticipate Milton in their choice of sacred subjects. 
 Quarles saluted Phineas as " The Spenser of this age ". Phineas 
 is the more musical, but also by far the more lengthy of these 
 Kentish swains. His " Piscatory Eclogues " follow Spenser's 
 pastorals. They are of a moral tendency and would not have 
 interested Izaak Walton. The fisher (in salt water there are no 
 anglers), is born " To sweat, to freeze, to watch, to fast, to toil ". 
 Phineas attacks the indolent clergy, as Milton did. 
 They are 
 
 a crew of idle grooms, 
 Idle and bold that never saw the seas. 
 
 It is probable that Milton, as a Cambridge man, and a man with views 
 like those of Phineas, was well acquainted with the poems of both the 
 Fletchers, which are in fact the sunken stepping-stone from Spenser 
 to Milton. 
 
 The puritanism of Phineas's long poem, "The Locusts or 
 Apollyonists " (1627) preludes to the civil war. The poet will tell 
 
 Of priests, O no I Mass-priests, priests cannibal, 
 and 
 
 Thou purple whore, mounted on scarlet beast, 
 
 namely the Church of Rome. Satan says, 
 
 Meantime I burn, I broil, I burst with spite, 
 
 as the puritans in fact, between fear of popery and hatred of Laud 
 and his measures, were actually broiling and bursting. Satan, 
 however, is vexed by the triumphs of Protestantism in England. 
 His fiends form Jesuits out of matter, "foul hearts, sear'd con- 
 sciences, feet swift to blood," — and all this when Jesuit mission- 
 aries were dying under unspeakable tortures at the hands of the 
 Iroquois. While Catholics were being hanged in England, and 
 dreaded a massacre in Scotland, Phineas ends loyally, 
 
 Thrice happy who that Whore shall doubly pay, 
 This, royal Charles, this be thy happy meed, — 
 
 unhappy Charles who found in the Catholics his most loyal 
 subjects! It is easy but erroneous to confuse the "Piscatory 
 Dialogues " of Phineas with his drama, " Sicelides, a Piscatory," 
 acted at King's College, Cambridge (published, 1631). The 
 
300 English Literature 
 
 dialogue is partly in rhymed heroic couplets of much fiuency and 
 partly in prose ; the play is of a happier date (1614) than " The 
 ApoUyonists," and is written " in a merry pin ". Phineas wrote 
 many other things, including a pretty bashful Epithalamium. 
 
 Corbet. 
 Richard Corbet (1582-1635) born at Ewell in Surrey, and 
 educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, was a merry 
 clergyman, who laughed at but did not abuse Puritans; was 
 liked at Court, and successively held the Sees of Oxford and 
 Norwich. In Aubrey's gossip there are well-known tales about 
 the Bishop's gaieties, and his rhymes on a tour to Paris and on 
 another in the North were reckoned choicely facetious. His best 
 poem has lost nothing in the course of time. 
 
 Farewell rewards and Fairies, 
 Good house-wives now may say, 
 For now foul sluts in dairies 
 Do fare as well as they. 
 
 There is also a pretty piece to his son Vincent, on attaining his third 
 birthday. Corbet's humorous pieces have much more vigour than 
 refinement : his verses were not intended for publication, and did 
 not appear till ten years after his death. 
 
 Sir John Beaumont. 
 Sir John Beaumont was the elder brother of Francis Beaumont, 
 the celebrated partner of Fletcher in the drama. He was born 
 (1582) at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire, was of Broadgates Hall 
 (now Pembroke College) in Oxford (1596), lived chiefly at his 
 country place, was created a baronet in 1626, and died in 1628. 
 A sacred poem of his, " The Crown of Thorns," in eight books, is 
 lost ; his " Bosworth Field " with other pieces was brought out by 
 his eldest son, in 1629, and dedicated to Charles I. Ben Jonson, 
 in prefatory verses, wrote 
 
 This book will live, it hath a genius 
 Above his reader, 
 
 Few readers are below the level of the poem, which Ben calls 
 
 The bound and frontier of our poesy. 
 
Late Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets 301 
 
 " Bosworth Field " is written in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, 
 which come near to the measure as later used for heroic and 
 satiric poetry, though the lines sometimes carry on the sense in 
 the style disused by Pope. The story of the death of Richard III, 
 disdaining to fly, is spirited, though it cannot rival the old ballad 
 on the same subject. In translations from the " Satires of Horace," 
 Beaumont comes nearer to the model of Dryden and Pope. " An 
 Ode of the Blessed Trinity " is perhaps the most pleasing of the 
 sacred poems. Beaumont could have taught much to the Royal 
 'Prentice in verse, James I, whom he salutes as his master, 
 
 Your judicious rules have been my guide. 
 
 He translated the " Tenth Satire of Juvenal," and wrote many 
 verses to friends, and elegies. 
 
 William Browne, born about 1590-91, of a Devonshire family, 
 went to Exeter College, Oxford, and to the Inns of Court. In 
 1 6 13 he published the first part of his "Britannia's Pastorals," 
 with commendatory verses, including some, more cautious than 
 usual, by Ben Jonson. The pastorals have the usual defects of 
 the obsolete kind of composition and of Browne's own age of 
 conceits. They are extremely prolix, very artificial, rich in classical 
 allusions, and occasionally in puns. The rhymed decasyllabic 
 couplets carry on the sense, as was usual before Waller and 
 Pope. 
 
 "The Shepherd's Pipe " is a collection of eclogues and dia- 
 logues between long-winded shepherds, in a variety of metres. 
 The popular tale of the father's bequests, the ring, cloth, and 
 brooch of magical quilities, is told in stanzas of seven lines. The 
 swains occasionally conduct themselves very like " our liberal 
 shepherds " ; at other times their songs of nature and the birds 
 are pretty and pleasing. A pastoral elegy for Mr. Thomas Elwood 
 is an elegy and pastoral, in these respects alone it resembles 
 " Lycidas ". In " The Inner Temple Masque," taken from the 
 Odyssey about Ulysses and Circe, the Sirens' song and Circe's 
 charm are pretty, but not on the highest level of the contemporary 
 lyrics. 
 
 About 1624 Browne is said to have been the tutor at Oxford 
 
302 English Literature 
 
 of the Hon. Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Caernarvon, who 
 fell, on the* Royalist side, at Newbury in 1643: the date of 
 Browne's own death is unknown. 
 
 His poems seem never to have been popular. In the vast 
 realm of Spenser can be found all the merits of Browne on a far 
 higher level; and Browne's defects, for he even drops into the 
 allegoric style which dominated the latter Middle Ages and 
 seemed immortal, are exceedingly abundant in all the pastoral 
 verse between Spenser and Milton. 
 
 George Wither (1588-1667) was one of the poets who " wrote 
 too much and lived too long ". Only his song, " Shall I wasting in 
 despair," can be said to live, despite his pleasant fluency and 
 love of country contentments in " Philarete " (1622), " Fidelia," and 
 " The Shepherd's Hunting '' (1615). He was among the favourites 
 of Charles Lamb, who discovered the neglected poet, the laugh- 
 ing-stock of the wits of the Restoration. He is also highly praised 
 by Swinburne in a most interesting essay, " Charles Lamb and 
 George Wither ". Wither is sometimes good, always copious. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 LATE JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE PROSE. 
 
 Burton. 
 
 Robert Burton, author of " The Anatomy of Melancholy," would 
 have been despised by Overbury both as " a mere Fellow of a 
 House" and as "a melancholy man," while to Milton he must 
 have seemed one of those spiritual pastors whose " hungry sheep 
 look up and are not fed," with sufficiency of sermons. Burton 
 (born 1577) was of a landholding family, in Leicestershire, was edu- 
 cated at the grammar schools of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield, 
 went to Brasenose, Oxford, in 1593, and got a "studentship" 
 (the House's name for a fellowship) at Christ Church. He never 
 married, though he professes himself not ignorant of love, and he 
 held one living in Leicestershire, and another in Oxford. He 
 lived to do the work that he was born to do, " The Anatomy of 
 Melancholy," first published in 162 1, with great success and with 
 a following of later and amplified editions. He escaped the Civil 
 War, which hit no class of men harder than the clergy, by dying 
 in 1640. 
 
 Melancholy, we have seen, was then a literary and social 
 fashion. Burton analysed it, reduced it to a vast number of 
 classes or categories, explored all its causes, physical, patho- 
 logical, amorous, magical (witchcraft), and "immediately from 
 God " ; all its cures, lawful and unlawful — incantation, prayer, diet, 
 exercise ; all its moral alleviations ; all medical prescriptions — 
 blood-letting, purging, herbs; everything. He made an en- 
 cyclopaedia of melancholy. The reader had but to ask, " What 
 kind of 'melancholy is mine, amorous, worldly, witch-sent, or 
 religious ? " look up the right chapter, and forget his gloom in the 
 
 303 
 
304 English Literature 
 
 huge collection of anecdotes and curious, vast, classic, medical 
 and pleasantly useless learning. " The Anatomy '' was what 
 Thackeray called "a bedside book," but for the inconvenience of 
 the edition in folio. The modern reader escapes trouble by 
 using Mr. Shilleto's edition in three handy volumes. To the 
 modern reader trouble is otherwise caused by the abundance of 
 Latin, and by endless names of authors whom all the world has, 
 for the most part not unjustly, forgotten. 
 
 Under "Exercise Rectified" will be found matter for Izaak 
 Walton, matter on angling, from which pastime, says Nic. Hein- 
 selius, in his Silesiographia, the Silesians are so eccentric as to 
 suck great pleasure. James Dubravius, an author dear to Walton, 
 once met a Moravian nobleman in waders, " booted up to the 
 groins," but this unworthy Earl was not angling, he was netting ; 
 or, as he described his pitiful pastime, "hunting carps". In 
 England, says Burton, many gentlemen wade " up to the arm- 
 holes," but not after salmon, not in Frank's " glittering and resolute 
 streams of Tweed " with salmon rod in hand. They are " hunting 
 carps," a fish that loves the mud, a kind of ground-game. Bur- 
 ton admires " false flies," he does not appear to have used them 
 much. But he is always wise, so much so that he steals the con- 
 templative man's consolation (when his creel is empty) without 
 acknowledgment, from the charming passage in the " treatise per- 
 taining to fish," printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496. This 
 treatise influences all angling books, Leonard Mascal's, Walton's, 
 and the rest. 
 
 Burton cannot have been a melancholy man ; he was too la- 
 borious in omnivorous reading, and in writing was so copious and 
 so pleasantly successful. His face, if his portrait at Brasenose be 
 authentic (the ruff seems of an earlier date), is that of a pleasant 
 old humorist. He is charitably disposed towards suicides; we 
 know so little! He leaves them to the measureless mercy of 
 Him who, understanding all, can pardon all. He is a very serious 
 consoler of persons under religious despair ; perhaps Cowper 
 studied him unavailingly, Bunyan probably did not try his cures. 
 It is vain, he says, to reason with the insane, the hallucinated, 
 " who hear and see, many times, devils, bugbears, and Morme- 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 305 
 
 luches, noisome smells, etc.". He has prescribed for these curses 
 when they arise from normal " internal causes ". Sapphires, 
 chrysolites, carbuncles may be worn by the afflicted ; " Penny- 
 royal, Rue, Mint, Angelica, Piony " may be exhibited. There is 
 no harm in trying St. John's wort. The physician of the Emperor 
 Augustus relied on betony. Where spirits haunt, fumigations are 
 useful. 
 
 A stout Protestant, Burton has no belief in exorcisms, though 
 Presbyterians used them in the eighteenth century. The clerical 
 father of the poet James Thomson tried exorcism on a ghost, 
 but failed, and was slain by a ball of fire, says legend. 
 
 Ye wretched, Hope t 
 
 Ye that are happy, Beware I 
 
 ends Burton. 
 
 Burton's style is admirable, if we do not weary of very long 
 sentences, weighted with a dozen references to his queer author- 
 ities. But the art of skipping can meet the occasion, and Burton 
 can write as tersely as any man when he pleases. If Burton left 
 his rural parish to a curate, he preached well and wisely to the 
 largest of congregations. If he really were, at heart, a melancholy 
 moping man, he found happiness in the long task of his life ; the 
 book which teaches the lesson of the Vanity of Melancholy. 
 
 Herbert of Cherbury. 
 
 Born in 1583, the brother of George Herbert, the poet, Lord 
 Herbert of Cherbury is best remembered for his curious and 
 amusing autobiography (edited and published by Horace Walpole 
 in 1 764). Wealthy, beautiful, and, by his own account a desperate 
 swordsman, Herbert was deaf in childhood, spoke late, and then 
 asked his nurse how he had come into this world ; for an answer to 
 this problem "I could not imagine," and no wonder. He pur- 
 sued his reflections on the theme of birth and death in Latin 
 verse and in prose. His soul, he averred, had developed faculties 
 "almost useless for this life," hope, faith, love, and joy. They 
 must therefore be destined to higher employment upon subjects 
 not transitory, "the perfect, eternal, and infinite''. But he was 
 
 20 
 
3o6 English Literature 
 
 not orthodox, his " De Veritate," and " Religio Laid," both in 
 Latin, are deemed heretical. 
 
 He was privately educated till he went to University College, 
 Oxford, where he preferred Greek to Latin composition. While 
 he was a very young undergraduate his father died, and he 
 was married. He was all accomplished ; astrology and medicine, 
 many languages and music were mastered by him, with fencing, of 
 course : he dilates on the fencer's need of good feet and eyes, 
 on the " lunge," and on equestrian duels. Having provided him- 
 self with a family, Herbert went abroad, distinguished himself 
 at the siege of Juliers under the Prince of Orange, snubbed de 
 Balagny, a great French duellist, behaved like a paladin, and writes 
 of himself like a Bobadil. His triumphs with the sex are equally 
 celebrated, and a husband who deemed himself to be, but was not 
 " injured," lurked, to murder Herbert, in Scotland Yard, not now 
 a favourite ambush for criminals. In the fight that followed of 
 one man against five, Herbert, with a broken sword, fought in a 
 manner to be described only by himself or Alexandre Dumas. If 
 he fought like le brave Bussy, he was also favoured by a miracle 
 like Colonel Gardiner, a miracle sanctioning the publication of his 
 book, "De Veritate" (1624). 
 
 In 1629 he became a peer of England: in later politics he 
 deserted the cause of Charles I: finding himself at 60 (1643) 
 extremely debilitated, and quite disinclined to draw his sword. 
 He died in 1648: his "History of Henry VIII," much praised 
 by Horace Walpole, was published in the following year. His 
 verses, in which he uses the metre of " In Memoriam," were never 
 so popular as his brother George's, but his autobiography is 
 highly diverting in its exhibition of character. 
 
 Browne. 
 
 Thomas Browne, best known as Sir Thomas Browne, came of 
 a Cheshire family. He was born in London on 19 October, 
 1605. Early left fatherless, "he was, according to the common 
 fate of orphans,'" says Dr. Johnson, " defrauded by one of his 
 guardians," who seems to have lacked opportunity to strip the 
 orphan absolutely bare. Browne was educated at Winchester, 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 307 
 
 went on to Broadgates Hall, Oxford, graduated (1629), travelled 
 in Ireland, took a doctor's degree at Leyden; is said to have 
 practised medicine at Halifax, and about 1637 settled at Norwich 
 for the fifty remaining years of his life. 
 
 His earliest and probably his most popular book, the " Religio .. 
 Medici ," appears to have been written about 1635-1637. Several 
 transcripts existed; in 1642 one of them, imperfect enough, was 
 printed without Browne's knowledge and consent, and was ciiti- 
 cized by Sir Kenelm Digby and others. Browne therefore issued 
 an authorized edition, and the work was extremely successful both 
 in England and on the Continent. 
 
 Naturally this confessor of his private ideas about religion was 
 attacked on all sides, as an atheist, a papist, a deist, by the scrib- 
 blers of the hostile sects. Browne, in fact, was a Christian who 
 did not, as at that time was especially common, regard hatred of 
 all who differed with him about a surplice or a sermon as a holier 
 thing than the virtue of charity. 
 
 In his preface he says that almost every man suffers by the 
 Press, and that he " has lived to behold the highest perversion 
 of that excellent invention," the King defarried, the honour of 
 Parliament impaired, a flood of printed falsehoods submerging 
 everything, and carrying erroneous copies of Browne's private 
 papers into the market. Browne opens his work by declaring 
 that, in spite of his profession (and of the proverb, " one doctor 
 out of three is an atheist"), he is a Christian, and a tolerant 
 Christian. " Holy water and crucifix (dangerous to the common 
 people) deceive not my judgment, nor abuse my devotion at all. 
 ... I should violate my own arm rather than a church; nor 
 willingly deface the name of saint or martyr. At the sight of a 
 cross or crucifix I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the 
 thought or memory of my Saviour.'' 
 
 At Norwich in the Cathedral the Puritans publicly destroyed 
 and burned all works of art (including the organ), which they were 
 pleased to regard as monuments of idolatry : a bitter sight for 
 Browne. " I have no genius to dispute in religion," says he. 
 As for " sturdy doubts and boisterous objections, wherewith the un- 
 happiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us, more of these 
 
3o8 English Literature 
 
 no man hath known than myself ; which I confess I conquered, not 
 in a martial posture, but on my knees ". In that world of frenzied 
 pamphleteers, "hating each other for the love of God," the charm 
 and fragrance of Browne's style, the "peace ! peace I " which, like 
 Falkland, he "ingeminates," his refined humour, and smiling 
 pitying sympathy, and curiosity about all things knowable, made 
 his book delightful ; and delightful to readers tolerant of exquisite- 
 ness in manner the " Religio Medici '' can never cease to be. 
 
 We are astonished, to-day, as much by the things which 
 Browne knows, or believes, t.s by those which he does not know 
 and does not believe. ",I do now know that there are witches " 
 has a surprise in it, but what does he precisely mean by 
 "witches"? "I think at first a great part of philosophy" 
 (science) "was witchcraft." Here he agrees with modern writers 
 who regard magic as an early and uninstructed sort of science. 
 He believes in guardian angels, but his " metaphysics of them are 
 very shallow," and, in modern terms, what he believes in is "the 
 subconscious self". As for hell, "the heart of a man is the place 
 the devils dwell in . . . Lucifer keeps his court in my breast. 
 Legion is revived in me." 
 
 In short this good physician is a mystic : " we must therefore 
 say that there is something in us that is not in the jurisdiction of 
 Morpheus ... we are somewhat more than ourselves in our 
 sleep ; and the slumbering of the body seems to be but the 
 wakening of the soul! " a very old belief of the Greeks. 
 
 In "Pseudodoxia Epidemica, " " Vulgar Errors "(1646), Browne's 
 manner somewhat resembles that of Burton, but his medley of 
 strange stories, scientific, pseudo-scientific, or plainly supersti- 
 tious, is even more entertaining and much more carefully and 
 artfully written than "The Anatomy of Melancholy". He con- 
 sciously aims at harmony and balance of style, and at selecting 
 the right word {le mot propri], while he ranges over all ancient 
 knowledge and modern fable. " Many and false conceptions 
 there are of mandrakes," and Browne thinks but little of them, 
 and less of the false etymologies from which his age had not de- 
 livered itself. He is engaged, like the scholar in Lytton's novel 
 "The Caxtons," on a "History of Human Error," and with his 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Frose 309 
 
 humour, sympathy, learning, and irony, he makes a most enter- 
 taining book. 
 
 His "Urn Burial" with "The Garden of Cyrus" (1658) begins 
 with antiquarianism, and ends with the famous passages on the 
 vanity of desiring " to subsist in lasting monuments ". " But Man 
 is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, 
 solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting 
 ceremonies of bravery in the infamy" (infimy?) "of his nature." 
 " The Garden of Cyrus " concerning the mystic virtues of the 
 quincunx (like cinq in dice) is more fantastic and Pythagorean. The 
 motto for the posthumously published " Christian Morals " might 
 be selected from one line in its counsels. 
 
 Yet hold thou unto old Morality. 
 
 It wears better than the new article 1 
 
 To know Browne's works is no small part of a liberal educa- 
 tion. He lived in quiet and opulence, "his whole house and 
 garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities,'' says Evelyn ; he 
 was much occupied in correspondence with the learned and with 
 his eldest son, and with local history, till his death on 19 October, 
 1682. 
 
 Charles II had dubbed him knight at Norwich in 1671. 
 Charles, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, had skill to discover excellence, 
 and virtue to reward it, with such honorary distinctions, at least, 
 as cost him nothing. 
 
 CAROLINE PROSE. 
 
 Milton 
 
 The greater part of Milton's prose works is so deeply concerned 
 with politics, mainly religious or concerned with Church govern- 
 ment, that it cannot easily be criticized without controversial in- 
 terruptions, here out of place. His earliest important piece (1641) 
 treats of the Reformation in England. It had never come up to 
 Strafford's standard, Thorough, never shaken off "the rags of 
 Rome " — that is Milton's theme. Nor, in Scotland, had reforma- 
 tion really been more successful, for the preachers claimed at least 
 all the powers of the priests over the liberties of the subject. 
 
3IO English Literature 
 
 Milton at once attacks that which, to Laud, was part of " the 
 beauty of Holiness," Jewish and Catholic survivals of " fantastic 
 dresses, palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws fetched from Aaron's 
 old wardrobe ". " The piebald frippery and ostentation of cere- 
 monies " the Church styled " decency " ; Henry VIH " stuck 
 where he did ". Under Edward VI, if his sister Mary were not 
 to be persecuted most righteously, who were the slaves that in- 
 terfered to secure for her liberty of conscience ? Who but Bishops 1 
 Bishops were therefore " followers of this world," they always were 
 and always will be. You reply that th€y, Cranmer and Latimer, 
 were also martyrs ? Well, says Milton, " What then ? " A man 
 may " give his body to the burning and yet not have charity ". 
 The Bishops had not charity, clearly, or they would have aided 
 in depriving the Princess of freedom of conscience. Elizabeth, 
 aided by Bishops, persecuted Puritans, but then Puritans have a 
 right to freedom of conscience, for themselves, and a right to 
 prevent other people from exercising the same privilege. If there 
 are to be Bishops they must be of popular election, but when 
 preachers with powers in some respects greater were elected by 
 the people in Scotland, Milton did not approve of them either. 
 
 His next important tract. The Apology for Smectymnuus (five 
 preachers. Marshal, Calamy, Young, Newcomen and Spurstow, 
 who had attacked Episcopacy), is of 1642. Bishop Hall, who, in 
 youth, had boasted that he was the first English satirist, had 
 replied to the Five in his Defence of the Remonstrance ; Milton 
 had answered ; Hall in his turn published " A Modest Confuta- 
 tion," and Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus ensued. The ad- 
 versary had made scurrilous remarks, had attacked Milton's 
 manners and morals, quite causelessly, in the controversial fashion 
 of the age. Milton replied that his adversary was a "rude 
 scavenger," and then gave that account of his own way of life in 
 youth which lends its value to this passage in the discussion. 
 He had never haunted " bordelloes," houses of ill-fame ; he calls 
 the women who keep them " prelatesses ". A Bishop, to Milton, 
 is a male of the same species. As for the theatre he had seen 
 his fellow-students act at college, "prostituting the shame of that 
 ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 311 
 
 of courtiers and court ladies. ..." He had always, he declares, 
 been a remarkably pure young man ; hence his life-long love of 
 romances of chivalry, where every knight is bound by oath to de- 
 fend, with his life if need be, the chastity of ladies. " The first and 
 chiefest office of love begins and ends in the soul," he says nobly. 
 
 We need not dwell on his " Doctrine and Discipline of 
 Divorce," written, it seems, a few weeks after his hapless marriage 
 in 1643. If all men were Miltons and all women worthy of 
 them, his doctrine of freedom of divorce would not have thorny 
 consequences. 
 
 His "Tenure of Kings and Magistrates" was published in 
 February, 1649; Charles I had been slain on 30 January of that 
 year. It is desirable, in a history of Literature, to " keep King 
 Charles's head out of the Memorial ". 
 
 In the " Areopagitica " (1644) Milton, defending freedom of 
 printing against these friends of liberty, the then dominant Pres- 
 byterians, in many passages gives us the prose of a great poet. 
 Here is a passage which must have irritated the Puritans who 
 were not so after the manner of Milton. 
 
 " If we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, 
 we must rectify our recreations and pastimes, all that is delight- 
 ful to man. No music must be heard, no song be set or sung, but 
 what is grave and Doric. There must be licensing dancers, that 
 no gesture, motion, or deportment be taught our youth but what 
 by their allowance shall be thought honest : for such Plato was 
 provided of. It will ask more than the work of twenty licensers 
 to examine all the lutes, and violins, and the guitars in every 
 house ; they must not be suffered to prattle as they do, but must 
 be licensed what they may say. And who shall silence all the airs 
 and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers ? The windows 
 also, and the balconies must be thought on ; there are shrewd 
 books, with dangerous frontispieces, set to sale ; who shall pro- 
 hibit them ? shall twenty licensers ? The villages also must have 
 their visitors to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebeck 
 reads, even to the ballatry, and the gamut of every municipal 
 fiddler, for these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Monte 
 Mayors." The fanious sentence " I cannot praise a fugitive and 
 
312 English Literature 
 
 cloistered virtue " is familiar to all memories, but such things are 
 not common in his prose: the search for the limbs of slain and 
 mutilated Truth compared to the search for the fragments of " the 
 good Osiris " by Isis, might not have been written had Milton 
 remembered the details of that savage fable, common to ancient 
 Egypt and the Australian Arunta. His cause has triumphed, as 
 triumph it must, in a world where no all-wise and infallible 
 Licenser of Books can be found. 
 
 " The defence of the people of England " in answer to Sal- 
 masius's " Defence of the King,'' had not, perhaps, the right client. 
 It was not the People of England who slew the King. Milton 
 tells his own story of that unhappy reign (in " Eiconoclastes," his 
 reply to " Eikon Basilike," attributed to Charles, really, as is be- 
 lieved, by Gauden) it may be read with more profit in the history 
 of Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Milton declares the charge against the 
 Scots of " selling their king " to be " a foul infamy and dishonour ". 
 The Scots, every soul of them who had a touch of chivalry, took 
 up the sword to cleanse the blot, died on the field, or on the 
 scaffold, or were sold as slaves, or were starved to death in Dur- 
 ham Cathedral. There are, in short there could not but be, noble 
 and harmonious and stirring passages in Milton's prose ; but 
 poetry was his native language, and his themes were such as to 
 place sobriety of view, and delicate discrimination of good and 
 evil almost beyond his power. For, as Argyll said of himself, he 
 was "a distraught man in distraught times"- Otherwise Milton, 
 the proudest of men, would not have answered railing with railing. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor. 
 Among the pulpit orators of the seventeenth century, none 
 has left a name more fragrant than Jeremy Taylor. His devo- 
 tional works, such as "Holy Living," and still more "Holy 
 Dying," are still in the hands of the devout. But it is not easy to 
 suppose that many readers who are not profound students of style in 
 prose often read the many volumes of sermons, works of casuistry, 
 and works of controversy which Jeremy has left. He is not of 
 our world or way of thinking ; he dwells, for example, on 
 " special " and easily distinguishable " providences ". Now when a 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 313 
 
 tempest flooded a river, so that Montrose's men could not cross 
 and despoil the lands of a contemporary of Jeremy's, Brodie of 
 Brodie, that devout Covenanter confided to his journaUthe occur- 
 rence of this " special providence ". But when the river fell, and 
 Montrose crossed and drove the kye, Brodie remarks in his 
 journal that we ought not to interpret the Divine Will, for we 
 may be mistaken. Jeremy insists on his own interpretations. 
 "From Adam to the Flood, by the patriarchs were eleven genera- 
 tions ; but by Cain's line there were but eight, so that Cain's pos- 
 terity were longer lived : because God, intending to bring the flood 
 upon the world, took delight to rescue his elect from the dangers 
 of the present impurity and the future deluge.'' In the same way 
 Abraham lived five years less than his son Isaac, and Jeremy 
 knows why. " The Jewish doctors " inform him that the idea 
 was to prevent Abraham from seeing " the iniquity of his grand- 
 child, Esau ". Later, speaking of other times and lands, Jeremy 
 says that " such fancies do seldom serve either the ends of truth 
 or charity," — for which he has the highest Authority in the Gospel. 
 We are no longer apt to reason as Taylor does about the 
 Patriarchs, or on hundreds of other points, and this cannot but 
 diminish our pleasure in reading his books. But he pleases us, 
 exactly as Burton does in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," by 
 illustrations drawn from his amazing knowledge of books. Thus, 
 immediately after the passage last cited, he says " Pierre Cauchon 
 died under the barber's hand : there wanted not some who said 
 it was a judgement upon him for condemning to the fire the 
 famous Pucelle of France, who prophesied the expulsion of the 
 English out of the kingdom. They that thought this believed her 
 to be a prophetess " (as she certainly was), " but others that 
 thought her a witch, were willing to find out another conjecture 
 for the sudden death of the gentleman." "The sudden death 
 of the gentleman '' is a courteous phrase to apply to Cauchon ; 
 and very unexpected in " The History of the Life and Death of 
 the Holy Jesus ". But whence did Jeremy get his story of 
 Cauchon? From the Latin hexameters of Valerandus, a book 
 so entirely out of the common way that perhaps not three persons 
 in the England of to-day have read it. 
 
314 English Literature 
 
 So our author runs on, telling of " that famous person and of 
 excellent learning, Giacchettus of Geneva,'' whose morals were not 
 Genevan, while his death was, in an extreme degree, remarkable. 
 Jeremy more than once insists that many thousand men were slain, 
 in one night, in the Assyrian camp, for committing the offence of 
 that famous person, Giacchettus. Nobody has ever found out his 
 authority for his statement ; he may have learned it " from the 
 Jewish doctors ". In any case, however entertaining and instruc- 
 tive his divine works may be, he often raises a smile which he 
 never dreamed of provoking. Other times, other tastes 1 
 
 Jeremy Taylor was born under James VI and I, was the son of 
 a barber in Cambridge, and was baptized on 15 August, 16 13. 
 Unless he was christened two years after his birth, it is not plain 
 how he could have been in his fifteenth year when (August, 1626) 
 he was admitted to Caius College as a sizar (at Oxford, " servitor ") ; 
 Jeremy's eloquence attracted the notice of Archbishop Laud, who 
 had him made a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford (1636). At Oxford, 
 a Cavalier University, Jeremy studied casuistry, the topic of his 
 large book " Ductor Dubitantium,'' a Guide to the Doubting. In 
 1638, Jeremy obtained the cure of souls at Uppingham, and in the 
 same year preached, in the University pulpit, a Guy Fawkes Day 
 sermon. In 1639 he married. In 1640, Laud was impeached of 
 treason ; in 1642, as chaplain, Jeremy served under the standard 
 of King Charles. Parliament abolished Bishops; Jeremy de- 
 fended Episcopacy (" Of the Sacred Order of Episcopacy "). In 
 February, 1645, he was captured in a Royalist defeat, but was pro- 
 tected by Lord Carbery, and became his private chaplain at Golden 
 Grove in Carmarthenshire, where he was safe from the persecution 
 of the friends of freedom of conscience that called themselves "the 
 godly ". At Golden Grove, though far from what had been his 
 library, he wrote "An Apology for Liturgy" (abolished by Parlia- 
 ment in 164s). In 1647 appeared his "Liberty of Prophesying," 
 a plea for toleration. Such pleas always came from the religious 
 party which was being persecuted, though, even when persecuted, 
 the Covenanters always denounced "the vomit of toleration," 
 their aim being, in power or out of power, to force all mankind to 
 be presbyterian covenariters. The frenzy of arr^ed religious 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 315 
 
 fanatics made Taylor, like Falkland, as described by Clarendon, 
 " ingeminate peace ! peace ! " But he himself was to be in prisons 
 often, under the persecution of the Commonwealth, and when he 
 unhappily became, under the Restoration, Bishop of Dromore in a 
 covenanting part of Ireland, he replaced the Presbyterian ministers 
 by Anglican clergymen. 
 
 Taylor's plea for toleration was an offence to all parties. 
 These years of the King's disasters and death must have been 
 bitterness to Taylor. 
 
 He now composed his work " The Great Exemplar," a Life of 
 Christ, filled with persuasions to godliness, with reflections far 
 fetched but charmingly phrased, and he did not disdain legends 
 destitute of scriptural authority. " In the country of Thebais, 
 whither they first arrived, the child Jesus being by design or pro- 
 vidence carried into a temple, all the statues of the Idol gods fell 
 down, like Dagon at the presence of the Ark, and suffered their 
 timely and just dissolution and dishonour." The book majces no 
 attempt at criticism, and is of an immense length : in those days 
 " a great book " was not deemed " a great evil ". 
 
 He also wrote his manual of devotion, " Holy Living " (1650), 
 followed in 165 1 by the more charming " Holy Dying ". Sermons 
 for each week in the year, sermons preached at Golden Grove, 
 appeared in 1653. In 1655, "Unum Necessarium," a treatise 
 on repentance, was thought less than orthodox, and gave displea- 
 sure to the retired bishop to whom it was, without his permission, 
 dedicated. Jeremy had his doubts as to whether Man, after the 
 Fall, was so abjectly and utterly corrupt a creature as other 
 divines held him to be. From 1655 onwards he suffered much, 
 losing his refuge at Golden Grove, reduced to extreme poverty, 
 and now and again imprisoned. In 1657 he lost two young sons. 
 He wrote a work on Friendship for a very friendly lady, Katherine 
 Philips, a poetess, called " The Matchless Orinda " ; in this he 
 quoted the ancients freely. Later, unfortunately, he was employed 
 in Ireland as chaplain to Lord Conway at Portmore, and was 
 much disturbed by the Presbyterian preachers. Then came the 
 Restoration (29 May, 1660)," and by 6 August, Taylor was 
 sent to the Irish bishopric of Down and Connor, and Dromore, 
 
3i6 English Literature 
 
 where he was so troubled by the Presbyterians that he asked the 
 Duke of Ormonde to let him withdraw to "a parsonage in 
 Munster " ; or to reorganize Trinity College, Dublin. But, after 
 ejecting a number of the Presbyterian ministers, he died in 
 September, 1667, worn out, it may be, by the civil and religious 
 ferocities of his time. 
 
 Taylor's writings are by no means all of them very copiously 
 decorated with ornaments of style, and musical with organ tones 
 of language. Even when highly decorated, and when the music 
 of his periods is prolonged, his sentences are lucid. " So have I 
 seen " (thus he introduces his similes), " a rose newly springing 
 from the clefts of its hood, at first it was fair as the morning, and 
 full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece ; but when a ruder 
 breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too 
 youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and 
 to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age ; it bowed 
 the head and broke its stalk ; and at night, having lost some of its 
 leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and 
 outworn faces." It is not Herrick's and Ronsard's lesson of the 
 roses ; with Taylor it is a persuasion to piety, nor is any preacher 
 more sweetly persuasive. But Jeremy, though he wrote a work to 
 persuade the Irish Catholics of the errors of Rome, did not alter 
 their doctrines, and, as to them that are "the godly party," "the 
 good people of God," he speaks his mind thus : " They may 
 disturb kingdoms, and break the peace of a well-ordered Church, 
 and rise up against their fathers, and be cruel to their brethren, 
 and stir up the people to sedition ; and all this with a cold 
 stomach and a hot liver, with a hard heart and a tender con- 
 science, with humble carriage and a proud spirit." 
 
 Preaching to " the little but excellent University of Dublin," 
 Taylor laid before them every way by which men, since the Re- 
 formation, had sought religious peace and had failed to find it. 
 The last way was toleration, " a way of peace rather than of 
 truth". "If we cannot have both, for heaven's sake give us 
 peace," was the view of some good men, but, as each sect thought 
 that it possessed truth, each, as it had the opportunity, tried to 
 make peace by forcing the others into conformity. The godly " are 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 317 
 
 not content that you permit them ; for they will not permit you, 
 but rule over your faith, and say that their way is not only true, 
 but necessary ''. Taylor gave his own counsel thus, " the way to 
 judge of religion is by doing our duty ; and theology is rather a 
 Divine life than a Divine knowledge. . . . Let your adversaries 
 have no evil thing to say of you, and then you will best silence 
 them. . . ." Leighton tried this method in Scotland, Taylor in 
 Ireland, but who can number " all the horrid things they said " 
 about these prelates in both countries ! 
 
 Other Anglican divines can scarcely be treated within our 
 space, of these Robert South (born at Hackney, 1634, and edu- 
 cated at Westminster and Christ Church) lived till 17 16. He was 
 in controversies often, and a rather tart critic of both Fuller and 
 Jeremy Taylor ; he had much force and not a little wit. Chil- 
 lingworth. Hales, and others, are to us little more than shadows of 
 great names, with Isaac Barrow, equally great in Greek and 
 mathematics, and a preacher whom Charles II could hear with 
 pleasure. Richard Baxter (1615-1691), whose conscience after 
 the Restoration caused him to throw in his lot with the Non- 
 conformists, by his "Saints' Everlasting Rest" (1650) won and 
 deserved popularity ; he shared with Glanvill and Henry More the 
 love of a good ghost story, and has left on record an excellent 
 death-wraith. Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) and Henry More 
 (16 1 4- 1687), in verse and prose a mystic and a Platonist or Neo- 
 platonist, are still dear to a fit though limited audience. 
 
 Thomas Fuller. 
 
 Thomas Fuller, born (1608) like Dryden, later, at the 
 village of Aldwinkle, is a writer of the same group as Jeremy 
 Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne : that is, h is manri er is quaint and 
 
 his matter ig_ full-jQf ¥lTi'';!VifI ,/'""'? glil.ilSaFt'af^ mmpin. 
 
 Royalist and in orders, during the Civil War, he was not an ex- 
 tremist ; and his humour and love of a jest qualified him for the 
 post of a chaplain in a Cavalier army. 
 
 No great harm befell him when the Royal cause was ruined, 
 but he died (1661) too soon after the Restoration to be rewarded 
 or disappointed. His " Holy and Profane States " (1642) is a set 
 
3i8 English Literature 
 
 of sketches of historic characters ; most readable, especially in the 
 first edition, with the curious engravings. Despite the vivacity of 
 Fuller's most popular work, he is but little read, in face of the 
 hearty commendations of Charles Lamb, a critic who imparted his 
 own merits to all his favourites. Fuller never could resist a joke, a 
 humorous parallel or allusion ; and in works on serious subjects, 
 " The Worthies of England," and " Church History," his severe 
 contemporaries detected more than "a little judicious levity". 
 Fuller loved antiquarian details and historical study, but history to 
 history as Amurath to Amurath succeeds, and Fuller is read, when 
 he is read, for his quaintnesses and for the humour that runs away 
 with him. 
 
 HOBBES. 
 
 It is impossible, within our space, to give an adequate account 
 of the life and works of Thomas Hobbes. Born in April, 1588, 
 when his mother's fear of the Spanish Armada is said to have 
 hastened his appearance in this world, Hobbes lived into the reign 
 of terror of the Titus Oates's Plot, in 1679. He was born at 
 Malmesbury, thespn of an unlettered clergyman, and, about 1603, 
 went to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where he liked neither the 
 puritanism of the seniors, nor the roistering ways of the juniors. 
 He took no interest in logic and philosophy as then taught in 
 Oxford, and is said to have never seen an Euclid till he- was 
 middle-aged. It might have been better for him had he never 
 seen Euclid at all. Taking his degree in 1608, Hobbes became 
 tutor in the family of the Earls of Devonshire (Cavendish), and, 
 with a few interruptions, was their obliged friend till he died at 
 Hardwick Hall, built by the famous " Bess of Hardwick," the she- 
 jailer of Mary Queen of Scots. 
 
 Hobbes travelled with his pupil, making the acquaintance of 
 foreign men of science. In England, in 1629, a man of 40, 
 Hobbes published his first book, a translation' of the great Athenian 
 historian, Thucydides. The English is excellent, but the transla- 
 tion is extremely free, and of no use to the reader who desires a 
 "crib," or literal version. The ideas of Thucydides about the 
 qualities of a democracy, as in Athens, were congenial to Hobbes, 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 319 
 
 while the task of rendering into idiomatic English a writer so con- 
 densed as Thucydides, combined with study of the other classics, 
 and practice in Latin prose composition, made up for the indolence 
 of his youth. In 1631 he became tutor to the new young Earl of 
 Devonshire, and gave him an admirable education, including law, 
 astronomy, logic, rhetoric and the "opinions of a good Christian ". 
 
 In 1634 he went to Paris, Florence, and Rome with his pupil, 
 returning to England in 1637. He now, at 55, began to reckon 
 himself as a philosopher in a kind of metaphysics, and physics 
 about which he did not know much. An unfortunate accident 
 had led him to read " Euclid," Book I, proposition 47. " Begad,'' 
 said Hobbes, " this is impossible ! '' He pursued his studies, found 
 out that it was possible, and became convinced that it is also pos- 
 sible to square the circle. Easy as it seems, this feat has never 
 been accomplished with pedantic accuracy, and Hobbes, from 
 about 60 to 80, was engaged in controversy on the subject. 
 
 Oxford mathematicians, annoyed by his attacks on the Univer- 
 sity, replied with scientific precision, and such banter as mathe- 
 maticians enjoy when they would be merry among themselves. In 
 this long war, Hobbes was mercilessly handled, partly by way of 
 discrediting his ideas in politics and religion. He had laid out 
 for himself a system of the Universe, " Of the Body," " Of the 
 Man," " Of the Citizen ". In the political storm and stress of the 
 Great Rebellion he wrote, in Latin, his book of "The Citizen," 
 " De Cive," much of which he had already done, with other such 
 work, in English. 
 
 These papers had been circulated ; Hobbes thought himself in 
 danger — it was " time for him to go," and in 1640 he fled to Paris. 
 He hated Puritans without loving Bishops. In 1642 he published 
 " De Cive " ; he then turned to philosophy, and next worked at 
 his great work on the relations of rulers and ruled, and on religion, 
 called "Leviathan". In 1646- 1647 he tutored Charles, Prince 
 of Wales, in Jersey, and Charles always liked him as a witty 
 companion. 
 
 In 1647, believing himself to be on the point of death, he be- 
 haved in an orthodox manner. To the witness. Dr. Cosin, later 
 Bishop of Durham, he always referred when his orthodoxy was 
 
320 English Literature 
 
 doubted. When Charles I had been slain, in 1649, Hobbes, who 
 in 1650 had pubHshed his "Human Nature," the briefest state- 
 ment of his general view of mankind, thought of returning home, 
 for now a Government, that of Cromwell, was firmly seated, and 
 Hobbes's main political principle was " settled government ". 
 
 By 1651 he had " Leviathan" fairly written out as a present for 
 Charles II in Paris. But the King's advisers thought it a most 
 unholy book (not that Charles himself cared, or had a bad opinion 
 of Hobbes) ; he was rebuffed ; he was afraid of being murdered for 
 his religion (which, says De Quincey, " is a high joke ; Tom Hobbes 
 afraid of suffering for his religion 1 ") and he fled back to England. 
 
 Hobbes, by 1655, had published his " De Corpore,"and with 
 that and " Leviathan," his most popular work, his philosophy of 
 the Universe was before the public. He gives his natural history 
 of religion, as (saving Christianity), the result of curiosity about 
 First Causes, belief in ghosts (of which he is said to have been 
 afraid), of superstitions about luck, and of priestly imposture de- 
 signed to keep men in order. In politics he believes in an imagin- 
 ary state of Nature, or anarchy, from which men, who are naturally 
 equals, sought shelter in a contract, never to be broken, with a 
 sovereign power, in fact with the State, though Hobbes prefers a 
 single despot. The sovereign is supreme in religion as well as in 
 secular matters, and Hobbes hates nothing more than the so-called 
 " Kingdom of Christ " of the Presbyterian preachers, which really, 
 he says, means their own domination. Hobbes's general doctrine, 
 with its reservations and subterfuges, cannot be discussed here : it 
 made enemies for him in every camp, religious and political, and 
 now his unlucky mathematics were fallen upon, while he had an 
 endless controversy with Bishop Bramhall on the Freedom of 
 the Will. 
 
 At the Restoration Charles II renewed his friendly intercourse 
 with his old tutor, granting him a pension, when Hobbes could get 
 it paid. In 1666 he was threatened with a persecution for heresy, 
 and went to church, but did not wait for the sermon. 
 
 His " Behemoth," a history of the Civil War, was suppressed 
 by the King, and was posthumously published. He translated the 
 " Iliad " and the " Odyssey " into very poor verse ; he wrote his 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 321 
 
 autobiography in Latin verse, and was still writmg in 1679 when 
 he died on 4 December. 
 
 The style of Hobbes is lucid and succinct, without added 
 ornaments. He had a clear idea of what he wanted to say, 
 though inconsistencies appear as his mood varied, or as his 
 argument led him into difficult places. His ideas provoked many 
 replies which pervade English literature for long after his death ; 
 but such exercises in psychology and metaphysics belong rather 
 to the history of philosophy than of literature. The doctrine of 
 Hobbes is not optimistic. " When all the world is overcharged 
 with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is War, which pro- 
 videth for every man, by victory or death." The idea is that ex- 
 pressed in a Greek poem " the Cypria," of about 750 b.c. Hobbes 
 thought himself an authority on Epic poetry, among other things, 
 and especially commended, in Davenant's " Gondibert," the really 
 pleasing passage which describes the birth of love in the heart of 
 Bertha. Hobbes expanded his ideas about the Epic in his trans- 
 lation of Homer. We do not know what he thought of " Paradise 
 Lost". 
 
 IzAAK Walton. 
 
 Born near Stafford in 1593, Izaak Walton went to London, 
 lived in Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane, and was 
 in business as an ironmonger. Donne the poet was then vicar of 
 the neighbouring church of St. Dunstan's ; Walton and he became 
 friends : Walton was also intimate with Hales of Eton, Sir Henry 
 Wotton, Bishop King, and Ben Jonson. In 1640 Walton's brief 
 life of Donne, already quoted, was published. In 1651 Walton 
 had the dangerous task of carrying secretly to a Royalist in Lon- 
 don the smaller George jewel of Charles II, after the King's 
 crushing defeat at Worcester, on 3 September. A Royalist 
 and a sound Churchman (his wives were of the families of 
 Cranmer and Ken), Walton's natural cheerfulness, his sincere 
 religion, and his habit of angling "with N. and R. Roe," were 
 needed to keep him from melancholy in the evil days of 1642- 
 1660. But he, for a writer of his age, is strangely free from the 
 melancholy then in fashion, and his "Compleat Angler," first 
 
 21 
 
322 English Literature 
 
 published in 1653, might have been composed in days of idyllic 
 peace. This famous work is too well known to need description 
 or praise. The natural history is as fantastic as that of Euphues, 
 the instructions on angling come from a mere' fisher with bait, but 
 the beauty of the style, the sweetness of the thought, keep the book 
 fresh as with lavender and rosemary. To later editions Charles 
 Cotton and Colonel Venables added practical instruction on fly 
 fishing, up stream, in clear water like Cotton's own Dove in Derby- 
 shire. The brief biographies by Walton of Donne, Wotton, Her- 
 bert, Hooker, and Sanderson are little masterpieces in their manner. 
 Walton lived in old age at Farnham with Bishop Morley and 
 then at Winchester where he doubtless fished with worm in the 
 pellucid streams of the Itchen. Walton's connexion with a pas- 
 toral poem " Thealma and Clearchus," is of doubtful nature. Was 
 he author, or did he edit the work of Chalkhill ? He died at the 
 age of 90, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Byron is al- 
 most the only critic who has thrown a stone at the kind memory 
 of Izaak Walton, to which Wordsworth devoted a sonnet. 
 
 John Bunyan. 
 
 The two writers of this period whose works now come most 
 closely home " to men's bosoms and business " are John Bunyan 
 and Izaak Walton. Copies of the little plain volumes clad in 
 sheepskin which they published at a shilling or eighteen -pence, 
 fetch sums like ;^iooo, more or less, when they come into the 
 market. The masterpieces of both are constantly being repub- 
 lished, and though perhaps few people have a fairly good know- 
 ledge of the contents of " The Pilgrim's Progress," or " The 
 Compleat Angler," yet most people have~Kad theie works in their 
 hands. 
 
 The popularity of Bunyan, the non-resisting ever-preaching 
 Dissenter ; and of Walton, the angling Churchman, rests to a 
 great extent on their characters. Differing as they did about the 
 right of Bishops to exist, and about Justification by Faith, could 
 the two men have met, and kept off these topics, they would 
 " have had good talk ". Each had abundant humgur, ea-ch was a 
 keen observer of Nature and of human natureTeach was a loyer of 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 323 
 
 peace, each had a modest little fount of poetry within him. Of 
 each it may Be "said, as of Scott, "he is such a friendly writer," 
 and each is plain and intelligible, Bunyan had no artifices of style, 
 though Walton sometimes, by study, is able to rival the harmonies 
 of Sir Thomas Browne. 
 
 Bunyan, who came of a very old landed family which had 
 steadily lost all its lands to the last acre, was born in a cottage at 
 Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. He was taught reading and writ- 
 ing; and pursued his father's trade — that recommended by Mr. 
 Dick for David Copperfield, — he was a brasier, or tinker, but not a 
 wandering tinker. In early youth he was a leader in sports and 
 games ; you would have said " he wasna the stuff they mada 
 Whigs o' ". Far from that, a native genius for expression first de- 
 clared itself in his being " the ungodliest fellow for swearing " — 
 which was nob recognized as a literary exercise. He was under 
 arms, like other lads of his age, but we have no reason to suppose 
 that he was ever under fire, and his militia (Parliamentary, probably) 
 was soon disbanded. 
 
 In his "Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners " (1666) he 
 writes his religious. mibo biography ; a work composed in prison, to 
 which he was consigned because he would not cease to be instant 
 in preaching. "The Philistines understand me not," he says in 
 his Preface. He writes for lowly devotees, "Have you forgot 
 the Close, the Milk House, the Stable, the Barn, and the like 
 where God did visit your souls," — with " terrors of conscience and 
 fears of Death aad Hell?'' Even in his joyous youth, Bunyan 
 had dreamed of " devils and wicked spirits," which probably did 
 not-trouble Shakespeare or Walton. At 9 years old he suffered from 
 the nightmare sjhat haunted R. L. Stevenson. His book is the 
 most^ vivid description possible of the life of an imaginative lad, 
 standing between gross pleasures and terrors of hell. A Voice and 
 an Appearance came to him while playing at a kind of rudimentary 
 cricket : he went on playing, but fell into religious hypochondria! 
 The vividness of his imagination conjured up such scenery as he uses 
 in his great Allegory: he beheld comforting words "that seemed 
 to be -writ in great letters," and so at last found consolation in faith. 
 
 Thus, and in his conflicts against the magistrates, he acted 
 21 *■' 
 
324 English Literature 
 
 and suffered, in his youth, all the adventures of his own Christian 
 and Faithful, in "The Pilgrim's Progress " (published in 1678). 
 He left an unfading picture of some elements in English society : 
 seventy years later he might have been a Fielding. " He was a 
 born novelist," it has been said : but the novels of his day were 
 the interminable romances of the French type of Scud^ry. •His 
 " Grace Abounding " is as brilliant in its way as the " Confessions 
 of Saint Augustine ''. His secular characters in " The Pilgrim's 
 Progress " are as good, by way of sketches, as are the finished 
 portraits in " Tom Jones ". 
 
 In 1680 he published " The Life and Death of Mr. Badman " ; 
 in which Mr. Wiseman gives convincing reasons for his opinion 
 " that Mr. Badman has gone to Hell ". Mr. Badman, in life's 
 gay morn, like St. Augustine, had " great pleasure in robbing 
 orchards and gardens ''. " The beginning of the Lord's Day was, 
 to Mr. Badman, as if he was going to prison." As for his 
 eloquence he was " a Damme Blade ". In literature his taste was 
 all for " beastly Romances ". In church he either slept or flirted, 
 like Mr. Pepys. In the long run, Mr. Badman departed from his 
 prodigal life, " quietly, peaceably, and like a lamb ". It can- 
 not be said of Mr. Badman that he had no redeeming vices ; he 
 was ill-tempered and envious ; he occasionally went on the High 
 Toby lay, and his masterpiece was a fraudulent bankruptcy. Mr. 
 Badman is amusing, but his history, interwoven with many strong 
 and simple anecdotes of other ruffians, cannot be compared in 
 merit with " The Pilgrim's Progress," where the characters are so 
 many and various; the imagination so vivid, many passages so 
 rich in poetic qualities, and the language so simple. It is a great 
 prose epic, a great novel of the road ; and beside it " The Holy 
 War " is tame and indistinct. 
 
 Bunyan wrote many works, now forgotten, on religious themes, 
 and in controversial style his weapon was the cudgel. In his later 
 days he was the most popular of Dissenting preachers. He died 
 just before "King James was walked out of his kingdom," in 
 1688. If critics sneered at Bunyan throughout the nineteenth 
 century, Dr. Johnson, at least, heartily appreciated the genius of 
 the Non- conformist brasier. 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 325 
 
 With Bunyan the student of the religious ferment of England 
 in his age may well read the " Journal " of the founder of the 
 Society of Friends, Quakers, George Fox (1624-1691). Like 
 Bunyan, Fox was an untrained thinker and author ; like Bunyan 
 he was persecuted : he had not the genius, but he had the art of 
 Bunyan in drawing " with his eye on the object ". 
 
 Clarendon. 
 
 Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) of a 
 Cheshire family, was educated at Magdalen Hall, in Oxford, 
 and proceeded to the Middle Temple. He inherited his family's 
 property, was distinguished for his legal knowledge, sat in Parlia- 
 ment when the strife between the King and the Parliament began, 
 and took part in preparing the indictment against the great Straf- 
 ford. None the less, when a general attack was made on the 
 order of Bishops, he came over to the King's party, in 1641 ; and 
 in 1646 accompanied the young Prince of Wales in his flights 
 and wanderings, in March, to the Scilly Isles (where he began his 
 History), and presently to Jersey. He remained with Charles H 
 after the death of Charles I, and, if he and Montrose had been 
 heard, the young King would never have disgraced himself by 
 signing the Covenant ; and consequently his Cause would never 
 have been defeated at Dunbar, nor his very life imperilled after 
 Worcester fight. 
 
 Clarendon, seven years after the Restoration, was banished by 
 the influence of faction, as Thucydides was exiled at an early 
 period of the war which he chronicles. It is not conceivable that 
 histories written in such circumstances should be free from parti- 
 sanship and bias : in fact no historians are exempt from prejudice. 
 
 Clarendon's history was, in the making, somewhat of a patch- 
 work. What he wrote far away from books and papers, in 1646- 
 1648, depends much on his memory : the book improves when he 
 obtains contemporary narratives and letters. In exile, in 1668- 
 1670 he wrote a Life of himself, which he later interwove with his 
 "History of the Rebellion". Clarendon's heirs did not permit 
 the publication of his History till 1704, from regard to the feelings 
 of the descendants of the King's opponents. The book, in one 
 
326 English Literature 
 
 respect, resembles the History of the Peloponnesian War by 
 Thucydides. Much of it was written during the actual course of 
 the events by one who bore a great part in them. 
 
 Whether in favour or in exile, Clarendon was too loyal to say 
 all that he knew and thought about Charles I and Charles II. 
 But when we look at his pages " touching the Scottish Canons," 
 which preceded the despotic introduction of the Liturgy, the 
 cause of "the Bishops' wars " (1639), we perceive, the fairness of 
 Clarendon. He makes it perfectly clear that these Canons could 
 only be accepted by a people inclined tamely to endure the worst 
 excesses of tyranny. But, on Scottish affairs, Clarendon is not 
 always trustworthy ; for example he dislocates the dates as to the 
 General Assembly of 1638, permitted (though he does not say so) 
 by the King, and the subscribing of the Covenant, which he places 
 after the Assembly. Mr. Gardiner, a fair historian, speaks of 
 Clarendon's " usual habit of blundering ". In his remarks on 
 the Catholics, too, under Charles I, Clarendon can scarcely be 
 acquitted of unfairness ; considering how bitterly, in Scotland at 
 least, they were persecuted under Charles I, and how loyally they 
 stood by him. 
 
 However, a historical examination of Clarendon's great work 
 is not here in place. The occasional defect of his style is the 
 enormous bulk of some of his sentences. Two occupy two large 
 pages and each contains some 400 words. Here are structureless 
 agglutinations of parentheses : with the promising word " lastly " 
 left stranded far from the conclusion. But such examples are not 
 very common, and Clarendon describes action and intrigue with 
 lucidity, and especially excels in his set pieces, delineations of 
 characters, for example of CromwelP and Argyll. His "char- 
 acters " may not be exact, of course, but his knowledge of secret 
 motives was extensive, and such knowledge, if not always accurate, 
 is ever entertaining. All histories, as sources of knowledge, are 
 sure to be superseded by the discoverer of new information. But 
 the History of Clarendon can never cease to be of the highest 
 interest, moral, political, and personal. He possessed, in his own 
 
 ^ To h im he attributes a coarse pun which might seem more familiar in 
 the mouth of James I. 
 
Late Jacobean and Caroline Prose 327 
 
 words, "the genius, spirit, and soul of an historian," combined 
 with knowledge of great affairs, important personages, and in- 
 trigues of Court. 
 
 Among writers of prose of the age it would be ungrateful not 
 to mention an author so familiar and readable as the gossiping 
 James Howell (1594-1666) of the "Epistolse Ho-Elianse," a 
 favourite bedside book of Thackeray. Howell was imprisoned 
 by the Puritans, and wrote essays in form of letters which are full 
 of curious anecdotes and reminiscences of travel. 
 
 Much later comes the prince of gossips, Mr. Samuel Pepys 
 (1633- 1 703), whose Diary in shorthand, written for his personal 
 diversion, can never cease to divert, and, in a way, as a picture of 
 a strange age and a strange character, to instruct. Each new dip 
 into Mr. Pepys's manuscript, by each bolder editor, makes us like 
 him less from the extended candour of his unparalleled confessions, 
 which is a pity. 
 
 John Evelyn (1620-1706) depicts the same period as Pepys, 
 as it was seen by a gentleman of stainless honour, unblemished 
 virtue, and great curiosity in the arts, and in the nascent science. 
 His Diary is much more entertaining than his memoir of the Lady 
 in the " Comus " of the merry Monarch's Court, the lovely and 
 religious Mistress Margaret Godolphin {nee Blague), to whom 
 Evelyn was virtuously devoted. 
 
 Roger North (1653-1733), is admirably readable, and very 
 modem in the tone of his satire of the godly Whigs, in the 
 " Examen," — when he drops into slang it is with the careless grace of 
 Thackeray. His " Lives of the Norths," himself and his brothers, 
 is most interesting. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 CAROLINE POETS. 
 
 It is difficult, or even impossible, to mark out the Caroline from 
 the Jacobean poets, who, again, overlap with the Elizabethan 
 poets. The chief schools of the Caroline poets were (i) the 
 writers occupied mainly with holy things, such as Crashaw, 
 Herbert, and Vaughan. Next (2) come the crowd of "gentlemen 
 who wrote with ease," now and then triumphantly well, but often 
 loosely and carelessly, such are Lovelace, Carew, Suckling, and 
 minor names. Herrick stands by himself as a consummate lyrist, 
 but his mood is often, though he was a parish priest, that of the 
 gay cavalier. Marvell had many facets, and Milton, of course, is 
 apart, a world of poetry in himself. 
 
 Crashaw. 
 
 Richard Crashaw, the son of a controversial Protestant preacher, 
 was born in London, early in the second ten years of the seventeenth 
 century. He went to the Charterhouse School and to Peterhouse 
 in Cambridge, where he took his Master's degree in 1638. His 
 earlier verses were Latin exercises. He was expelled from his 
 Fellowship at Cambridge because he would not take the Solemn 
 League and Covenant, in 1 644 : that odd document was forced on 
 men under " the new liberty ". He had written a hymn to St. 
 Theresa while still a Protestant ; when he retired to France he be- 
 came a Catholic. In 1 646 the poet Cowley, his friend, found him 
 in great poverty, and induced the almost equally poor exiled Queen 
 of England to use her influence in his favour. He obtained a 
 canonry at Loretto, where he died in 1649. His poems, sacred 
 and secular, "Steps to the Temple,'' were published in 1646; 
 
 328 
 
Caroline Poets 329 
 
 another edition, with an interesting preface concerning his saintly 
 life at Cambridge, is of 164 8- 1649. 
 
 Pope, at the age of 22, criticized Crashaw with much superior- 
 ity; "he writ like a gentleman " (that is, like an amateur), not "to 
 establish a reputation ". What Pope did in his anxiety to establish 
 a reputation was not done " like a gentleman ". " Nothing regular 
 or just can be expected from him," " no man can be a poet who 
 writes for diversion only ". Crashaw's pious outpourings were 
 scarcely " writ for diversion," but things "just and regular " are 
 not his chief care. A fiery vehemence, an overloaded ornament 
 are his quality and his defect. For example in " The Weeper " 
 (St. Mary Magdalen) he writes : — 
 
 Not in the Evening's eyes 
 
 When they red with weeping are 
 For the Sun that dies, 
 
 Sits Sorrow with a face so fair, 
 Nowhere but here did ever meet 
 Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet 
 
 Here he has his style in hand. But when he calls the Magdalen's 
 tears 
 
 Ye simpering sons of those fair eyes 
 
 he has certainly found the most inappropriate epithet. 
 
 Many of his sacred poems are a kind of brief religious 
 epigrams in four lines. His " Hymn of the Nativity " is a "fade " 
 thing, compared with Milton's. In longer poems he uses rhymed 
 decasyllabic couplets with some skill : " On a Prayer Book Sent 
 to Mrs. M." is a good ode in the irregular verse and conceited 
 manner of the time, but to speak of what Carew does speak of as 
 Mrs. M.'s " heavenly armful " is to remind us of a letter of 
 Robert Burns on a purely secular subject. Save for the Hymn to 
 St. Theresa, with "That not Impossible She,'' "The Flaming 
 Heart," and some pretty translations, Crashaw, like all the Cavalier 
 poets except Carew, is usually on a low poetic level. But in the 
 pieces mentioned, and above all towards the close of "The Flam- 
 ing Heart," 
 
 Singing still he soars and soaring ever singeth. 
 
33^ English Literature 
 
 Herbert. 
 
 George Herbert, author of "The Temple," was born on 13 
 April, 1593 ; was of noble descent, and a younger brother of Lord 
 Herbert of Cherbury. From his fifth to his twelfth year George 
 probably lived at Oxford with his mother. He then went to 
 Westminster School; thence to Trinity College, Cambridge (1609), 
 where he obtained a Fellowship (1616) and early in 1619 was 
 chosen Public Orator. In this capacity he wrote the letters of 
 the University to kings, princes, and the great in general who 
 visited it. He became a friend of Bacon and of Bishop Andrewes, 
 Ludovick, Duke of Lennox, and James, Marquis of Hamilton. 
 As a schoolboy he had written Latin epigrams against the Hilde- 
 brand of Scottish Presbyterianism, the learned and truculent Andrew 
 Melville, for whose tyranny in Scotland James VI and I took an 
 unconstitutional revenge when safe on the throne of England. In 
 a war of Latin verse Andrew was very capable of holding his own. 
 
 Herbert, while at Cambridge, was a somewhat assiduous 
 courtier of " gentle King Jamie," though we do not know that he 
 gratified the monarch by adopting the Scottish and continental 
 pronunciation of Latin and Greek. The death of James probably 
 disappointed any hopes he may have had of State employment. 
 
 In 1627 he resigned his oratorship, and according to Izaak 
 Walton retired to a country place in Kent where he meditated on 
 the choice of a secular or saintly life. He preferred the saintly, 
 took holy orders, lost his beloved mother in 1627, married Jane 
 Danvers in 1629, and was presented to the living of Bemerton, 
 between Wilton and Salisbury, in the next year. He died in 
 1633, and Walton must be consulted for' "an almost incredible 
 story of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life ". 
 On the Sunday before his death he rose, took a musical instru- 
 ment, and " sang to it such hymns as the angels and he and Mr. 
 Ferrar '' (of Little Gidding) " now sing in heaven ". 
 
 His poems, "The Temple," were published in 1633, and 
 their great popularity is a proof that piety had not wholly deserted 
 the Anglican Church for the Sects. " The Temple " opens with 
 "The Porch," a series of moral and religious counsels, in verses 
 
Caroline Poets 331 
 
 of six stanzas. The poem "Affliction" is autobiographical: at 
 first, in his career, "There was no month but May". Then 
 came maladies and the deaths of friends 
 
 Whereas my birth and spirit rather took 
 
 The way that takes the Town, 
 Thou didst betray me to a lingering book 
 
 And wrap me in a gown . . . 
 Ah, my dear God, though I am quite forgot. 
 Let me not love thee, if I love thee not. 
 
 Sacred poetry is of all kinds the most difficult. Herbert's is full 
 of conceits, though he has not the extravagances that mar the 
 work of Donne and Crashaw. Verses in the shape of altars and of 
 wings are examples of extreme decadence, but these are rare. 
 Herbert's simplest poem is his best, the famous 
 
 Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
 
 The bridal of the earth and sky, 
 The dew shall weep thy fall to-night. 
 
 For thou must die. 
 
 " The Pearl " is also of great beauty and autobiographic interest. 
 He knows the ways of Learning, Honour, and Pleasure, and he 
 has chosen the better way. The British Church is commended as 
 the Midway between " Her on the hills " (the Seven Hills) and 
 Her that 
 
 in the valley is so shy 
 Of dressing, that her hair doth lie 
 
 About her ears ; 
 While she avoids her neighbour's pride, 
 She wholly goes on th' other side. 
 
 And nothing wears ; 
 
 better than wearing "rags of Aaron's old wardrobe" said Milton. 
 " The Quip " hath a certain holy gaiety, as of a ballad. Herbert 
 was not a great poet, he never storms the cloudcapt towers, and 
 "flaming walls of the world," like Crashaw. But he has been 
 dear to many holy and humble men of heart. 
 
 Vaughan. 
 
 Henry Vaughan and his twin brother Thomas were born in 
 1622, at Newton St. Bridget, on the Usk, in South Wales, hence 
 
332 English Literature 
 
 he chose to style himself "Silurist " from the name of the ancient 
 tribe of that region. There is some confusion between him and 
 his brother Thomas, who certainly went (i 638) to Jesus College, 
 Oxford, while Henry's name, is not on the books. Henry is said 
 to have studied law in London. In the Civil War he may have 
 taken up arms, at least he saw, if he did not fight in the battle of 
 Rowton Heath (24 Sept., 1645) and he commemorates in a poem 
 the courage of a friend, Mr. R. W., who fell on the Cavalier side. 
 In some humorous verses about a huge cloak borrowed from an- 
 other friend he speaks of weaiing it during the Royalist retreat 
 from the Dee, and about the Puritan soldiery that seized him. 
 In a Latin poem, " Ad Posteros," he says that he merely lamented 
 the war ; in any case he won no laurels and probably shed 
 no blood. " The Bard does not fight," says a Gaelic proverb. 
 He studied medicine, and lived retired at Brecknock. His first 
 verses (1641) congratulate Charles I on his return from Scotland. 
 In 1646 appeared his " Poems," including a rather tame translation 
 of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal on " The Vanity of Human 
 Wishes," with some pretty love lyrics to Amoret. Unlike Suckling 
 and Carew, these volatile hearts, 
 
 I not for an hour did love, 
 
 Or for a day desire, 
 But with my soul had from above 
 
 This endless holy fire. 
 
 He " courted the mind," not the body. 
 
 His volume, " Olor Iscanus " (the swan of Usk) appeared 
 in 1651, opening with a eulogy of his beautiful native river, 
 in smooth rhymed octosyllabic verse, mixed with decasyllabic 
 couplets. There are also epistles to friends, one deplores the 
 antiquated dullness of Brecknock, another celebrates the match- 
 less Orinda, Mrs. Phillips, and there are translations from Latin 
 verse. 
 
 Vaughan lives, not by these poems, nor by "Thalia Rediviva," 
 but by his "Silex Scintillans," the sparkling flint, sacred poems 
 of 1 65 0-165 5. He professedly follows George Herbert, being 
 " the least of his many pious converts ". Direct imitations of 
 
Caroline Poets 333 
 
 Herbert are not infrequent in these hymns, which, like Herbert, 
 sigh for the far-away days when angels sat at Abraham's board, 
 
 O, how familiar then was heaven 1 
 
 There is a party who prefer Herbert to Vaughan, another that 
 prefer Vaughan to Herbert. The Silurist perhaps strikes the 
 higher and the deeper note, when he does strike it, for all the 
 Cavalier poets, sacred or secular, blossomed but rarely into perfect 
 and memorable song : they would excel in an opening verse, in a 
 phrase, but their full inspiration was occasional. A line like the 
 second in " Vanity of Spirit " is rare : — 
 
 Quite spent with thoughts, I left my cell and lay 
 Where a shrill spring tuned to the early day. 
 
 " The Retreat ' 
 
 Happy those early days, when I 
 Shone in my angel infancy 
 
 IS perfect, and has a forenote of Wordsworth's " Intimations of 
 Immortality ". 
 
 Like Wordsworth, Vaughan finds the divine near him every- 
 where : — 
 
 There's not a wind can stir, 
 
 Or beam pass by, 
 But straight I think, though far 
 Thy hand is nigh. 
 
 " Silence and Stealth of Days " is excellent, but never quite re- 
 captures the charm of the opening phrase. " The Burial of an 
 Infant " has the purity of a snowdrop : and " They are all gone 
 into the World of Light " haunts the memory ; while " The 
 Timber" is a set of variants on a brief melancholy note of 
 Homer. There are lovely lines, not unlike Herrick's, on "St. 
 Mary Magdalen," and her locks, 
 
 Which with skill'd negligence are shed 
 About thy curious, wild, young head. 
 
 Vaughan lived to see another Revolution, and died in 1695. 
 
334 English Literature 
 
 Herrick. 
 
 Robert Herrick, son of a prosperous goldsmith of a Leicester- 
 shire family, was born in London, in 1591, and for twelve years was 
 an " Elizabethan," though his poems are "Caroline". In 1607 
 Herrick was apprenticed to his uncle; in 16 13 entered as a 
 Fellow Commoner at St. John's, Cambridge, he migrated to 
 Trinity Hall, and took his Master's degree in 1620. He had 
 friends and patrons at Court, was one of the sons of Ben Jon- 
 son, and lived on his wits and on his patrons, in a poetical, 
 musical, pleasant idleness. He took holy orders, not in the spirit 
 of George Herbert, and in 1629 received the living of Dean Prior, 
 in Devonshire. He did not desert, and probably did not neglect, 
 his parish, from which he was thrust by the Puritans in 1 647 ; in 
 the next year his "Noble Numbers,'' and "Hesperides" was 
 printed in " a rich disorder " — the lines are on various levels in this 
 most desirable volume. The frontispiece shows a fleshly, muscular 
 rather Roman-looking poet to whose lips the bees bring honey. At 
 the Restoration, Herrick was restored to Dean Pripr, where he 
 died in October, 1674. 
 
 " Dull'Devonshire " he calls the county, in his verses ; he did 
 not live long to resent its rural torpor. His delightful poems are 
 all full of the^count-r-yJife,Jthey_,sinelLApril--a r i d May - His book 
 is like a large laughing meadow in early June, all diapered with 
 flowers, and sweet with the songs of birds, some a mere note or 
 two of merry music, some as prolonged and varied, though never 
 so passionate, as the complaint of the nightingale. 
 
 I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers. 
 Of April, May, of June and July flowers ; 
 I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, 
 Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. 
 
 Everything is sweet, spontaneous, glad and musical. Some pieces 
 are far from straitlaced of course, but, even setting these apart, 
 " The Hesperides " hold the greatest and richest bouquet of 
 English songs. Favourites are "Delight in Disorder," "Gather 
 Ye Rose buds while Ye May," " Corinna's Going a Maying," 
 
Caroline Poets 335 
 
 To Anthea (Bid me to live and I will live 
 Thy Protestant to be.) 
 
 To Meadows (Ye have been fresh and green, 
 
 Ye have been filled with flowers.) 
 
 To Daffodils (Fair daffodils, we weep to see.) 
 
 To Blossoms (Fair pledge.s of a fruitful tree. 
 Why do ye fall so fast ?) 
 
 and so on ; every reader culls and chooses for himself, and can- 
 not go wrong. Herrick speaks in his "Noble Numbers " of 
 
 my unbaptized rhymes 
 Writ in my wild unhallowed times, 
 
 but his "^Noble Numbers," or poems on sacred themes, show an 
 almost unregenerate happiness. 
 
 TKe" CKild of his " Ode oh the Birth of our Saviour " is, first 
 of all, a human child to Herrick, and he was in love with children 
 as with roses. His " Litany to the Holy Spirit " is extremely 
 human in its foresight of death, 
 
 When the artless doct'or sees 
 No one hope but of his fees. 
 
 His " Grace for a Child " is a miniature of the pathos of a child's 
 devotion. 
 
 Of Herrick's epigrams, as of Ben Jonson's, there is no good to 
 be said : we can only marvel how the poets stooped to imitate the 
 worst faults of Martial, their Latin model. 
 
 GareW; 
 
 Thomas Carew was one qf the farnous-Carews or Careys of the 
 West : his family was settled in Gloucestershire. He was prob- 
 ably born about 1598 : Clarendon, says that he died about the age 
 of 50; and his death was in 1638 or 1639. His life "was spent 
 with less severity or exactness than it ought to have been,'' but he 
 made a good end. He seems to haye been at Corpus, Oxford, 
 where he took no degree ; he was Sew^r (a Court office of value), 
 to Charles I, and was among those of " the tribe of Ben Jonson ". 
 His poems were published (1640-1642) after his decease. 
 
336 English Literature 
 
 Suckling, in his Sessions of the Poets declares that Carew's 
 poems, were " seldom brought forth but with trouble and pain," 
 in fact he did take trouble, and it is a pity that most of his con- 
 temporaries took none. His " Persuasions to Love " is a most 
 musical version of that old lesson of the brief-lived rose which is 
 taught by the Greek lyrists of the Anthology and by Ronsard and 
 Herrick so sweetly, and so often. "Give me more love or more 
 disdain," "When thou, poor excommunicate," "He that loves a 
 rosy cheek," the poems "In Absence," "Mark how the bashful 
 morn in vain," the "Elegy on Maria Wentworth," "Ask me no 
 more where Jove bestows,'' and many other pieces by the lover of 
 Celia, are admirable in versification, and in their own philosophy, 
 which is not remarkable for " severity and exactness ". Carew 
 never approaches the elevation of Lovelace at his best, but he per- 
 haps never falls to the pitch of Lovelace when uninspired. There 
 are graceful turns and songs in his Masque " Coelum Britannicum " 
 (1634). Carew's verse is a moment in the development from 
 careless speed towards the less varied and more " correct " style 
 that passed from Waller to Dryden and onwards. 
 
 Lovelace. 
 
 Richard Lovelace is when at his best the greatest of the Cavalier 
 poets, and is personally one of the most sympathetic of men. 
 The eldest son of Sir William Lovelace of " Woolidge " (Woolwich), 
 he was born in 161 8, educated at Charterhouse School, and at 
 Gloucester Hall, in Oxford. . He is styled " Adonis " in some 
 pleasant verses by a friend, and, like that more glorious cavalier, 
 Wogan, as described by Clarendon, was "accounted the most 
 amiable and beautiful person that eye ever beheld," according to 
 the Oxford antiquary. Wood. Under Goring, to whom he wrote 
 a ringing song of camp revelry, he served in the inglorious ex- 
 pedition of Charles I to Scotland, in 1639 J ^nd wrote a lost play, 
 "The Soldier". For presenting a Royalist petition from the 
 county of Kent to Parliament (April, 1642) he was imprisoned for 
 some weeks, and then let out on bail of ;^4o,ooo (?) not to leave 
 the Parliamentary lines. 
 
 He and his brothers were devoted to each other, as ap- 
 
Caroline Poets ^2)7 
 
 pears from poems which passed between them. He provided 
 Francis and William, slain at Carmarthen, with money and men 
 for the Royal service, and Dudley with the expenses of a 
 military education. In 1646 he raised a regiment for the French 
 service, was wounded at Dunkirk, and was reported dead. His 
 Lucasta, Lucy Sacheverell, then married another man, and, in 
 1 648, Richard returned to England, and, with Dudley, was taken 
 and imprisoned. 
 
 in 1649 he published his "Lucasta," with engravings after 
 Lely (who signs himself " P. Lilly "), it is a strangely ill-printed 
 little volume. After the death of Charles I, Lovelace was reduced 
 to great poverty, and died "in Gunpowder Alley, near Shoe 
 Lane," in 1658. His friend^ Charles Cotton, the pupil and friend 
 of Walton, is said to have helped to support him. A second 
 part of " Lucasta," containing little of merit, was published by 
 Dudley Lovelace in 1659. 
 
 Like so many of the poets of his day, Lovelace was inspired 
 but seldom, and, when uninspired fell into sterile conceits and 
 below mediocrity. His unrivalled poems of true love, " To 
 Lucasta, Going beyond Seas," "To Althasa, from Prison," "To 
 I^ucasta, Going to the Wars " (strangely attributed by Scott to 
 Montrose), are beyond praise or rivalry. " Honour is my Life," 
 wrote Montrose in his Bible ; love and honour inspire Lovelace 
 with faultless and immortal verse. "To Amarantha, that she 
 would dishevel her hair," 
 
 But shake your head and scatter day, 
 
 is also a charming song ; and Suckling could not exceed the 
 cheerful impudence of 
 
 Why shouldst thou swear I am forsworn, 
 
 Since thine I vowed to be, 
 Lady, it is already Morn, 
 
 And 'twas last night I swore to thee 
 
 That fond impossibility. 
 
 We can but wish for Lovelace that he had ridden with Wogan 
 from Dover to the North, and died with the last of the loyal on 
 the hills. 
 
 22 
 
338 English Literature 
 
 Suckling. 
 
 Sir John Suckling, the son of a wealthy man, who held various 
 offices at Court, was born at Whitton in 1609 (?). Not much is 
 known of his education, but in town he was one of the tribe of 
 Ben Jonson, wits and courtiers, such as Davenant, Carew, and 
 Endymion Porter. His " Session of the Poets " is inelegant 
 banter of his friends. His plays " Aglaura," "The Goblins," 
 " Brennoralt," are very decadent in style, and a man must have a 
 strong passion for the drama who can read them " for human 
 pleasure ". 
 
 In Charles's expedition against the Scottish Covenanters, in 
 1639, each army occupied itself in observation, Charles at Berwick, 
 Leslie at Duns Law. The commanders on both sides were dis- 
 pirited, and if a troop of horse, equipped by Suckling at great 
 expense, ran away, it was probably from Kelso, where a small 
 Royalist command was driven in. We know nothing with cer- 
 tainty, but derisive ballads were made against the poet's courage, 
 though there never was a braver man than Colonel Gardiner, whose 
 dragoons on every occasion used their spurs, in 1 745. Suckling died 
 in Paris in 1642 ; various tales are told of the cause of his decease. 
 
 Suckling is the typical jolly, audacious, amorous, now constant, 
 now amusingly volatile Cavalier poet. His verses are well made 
 but seldom so well as Carew's ; and though he is not always on 
 pleasure bent he never approaches the heights of Lovelace. The 
 first edition of his poems, "Fragmenta Aurea," is of 1646, and the 
 frontispiece exactly meets our natural theory of Suckling's personal 
 aspect. He looks very pleasant in his armour. Among his suc- 
 cesses in verse are 
 
 'Tis now since I sate down before 
 That foolish fort, a heart 
 
 and "A Ballad of a Wedding" (the most charming thing of its 
 kind in English poetry) : 
 
 Out upon it, I have loved 
 Three whole days together, 
 
 When, dearest, I but think of thee, 
 and 
 
 Why so pale and wan, fond lover ? 
 
Caroline Poets 339 
 
 It was with very slight trouble that the gay Suckling stormed 
 the gates of poetic immortality. 
 
 Habington. 
 
 William Habington (1605-1654) was of a Catholic family ; his 
 father (of Hindlip in Worcestershire), had suffered on the 
 occasions of Babington's and of the Gunpowder plots. The poet 
 was educated abroad (St. Omer's and Paris). He married Lucy, 
 daughter of Lord Powys ; his Muse was the domestic, and he 
 ceaselessly celebrated his wife under the name of " Castara ". 
 His play, "The Queen of Arragon," had some success. Many 
 of the lyrics to .Castara are quite pretty, whether they be pre- 
 nuptial or written in wedlock, whether Castara is " sick," or " in a 
 trance," or beginning to recover, or weeping, or setting forth on 
 a journey. In lines to the celebrated first and only Marquess of 
 Argyll, Habington applauds those feats of military daring which 
 History does not recognize in the vanquished of Inverlochy and 
 Kilsyth. A Catholic who thought the cause of the Covenant 
 " just," must have had a very open mind. Wood says, in fact, that 
 Habington "did run with the times, and was not unknown to 
 Oliver Cromwell ". Habington's relations with Argyll are rather 
 puzzling. In addition to his many poems on his wife, Habington 
 composed eight elegies on the death of George Talbot, Esquire. 
 
 Cartwright. 
 
 William Cartwright (161 1- 1643) must have been a most 
 amiable man, agreeable University wit, and " florid and seraphical 
 preacher". He passed much of his life at Oxford, being a 
 student of Christ Church; he was an active military organizer 
 when King Charles and the Court were at Oxford, he was Junior 
 Proctor, lectured on the Metaphysics, was lamented by the King 
 and University on his death, and was admired in his life by 
 Dr. Fell. 
 
 His poems are mainly birthday odes, and complimentary 
 addresses to ladies. In the person of Lady Carlisle he celebrated, 
 
 Masses of ivory blushing here and there, 
 22 * 
 
340 English Literature 
 
 and he wrote disdainfully of what is called " Platonic " Love. He 
 also wrote a song called " The Ordinary ". 
 
 Davenant. 
 Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was more interesting as a 
 man, and in his relations with greater men of letters, than as a 
 poet. His vast "epic" "Gondibert," concerned with the heroic 
 age of Lombardy, and written in quatrains of alternately rhyming 
 decasyllabic lines, is a monument of misplaced ambition. Dave- 
 nant's father was landlord of the Croifrn Inn, at Oxford, and 
 Davenant did not discourage the legend that Shakespeare was his 
 mother's admirer. At a very early age, Davenant wrote the briefest 
 of elegiac odes on Shakespeare's death. His best lyric is 
 
 The lark now leaves his watery nest. 
 
 And climbing, shakes his dewy wings, 
 He takes this window for the east, 
 
 And to implore your light, he sings : 
 " Awake, awake, the Morn will never rise 
 Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes ". 
 
 Davenant was of Lincoln College, Oxford ; was one of the 
 London wits, and is bantered by Suckling in " The Session of the 
 Poets" for a sad misfortune. To Lombardy, Davenant turned, in 
 1629, for the topic of his tragedy of Albovine, a theme with which 
 poets have rarely been successful. In 1638 Davenant was made 
 Poet Laureate ; he managed a theatre ; in 1 64 1 was accused of 
 being engaged in a Cavalier enterprise, escaped to France, re- 
 turned, was knighted (1643) for his services at the siege of 
 Gloucester; failed, in 1646, to make Charles accept the terms of 
 the Covenanters, and, after various loyal adventures, was placed 
 in the Tower (1650). Milton is said to have pleaded for him, 
 and he, later, for Milton. On the Restoration he was rewarded 
 by the patent of a theatre, where he produced plays by no means 
 Shakespearean. 
 
 He forms a link between the Shakespeare of his childish years, 
 Milton, and the young Dryden. Waller and Cowley wrote the 
 only recommendatory verses for his "Gondibert," which is de- 
 dicated, with Davenant's ideas on the Art of Poetry, to Thomas 
 
Caroline Poets 341 
 
 Hobbes. Davenant modestly compared himself to Homer. He 
 trusts that his verses in " Gondibert " will be " sung at village 
 feasts," "like the works of Homer ere they were joined together 
 and made a volume by the Athenian king ". A stranger combina- 
 tion of vanity with erroneous pedantry has seldom been printed. 
 
 Cowley. 
 
 The name of Abraham Cowley is likely to live as long as 
 histories of English literature are written, and yet some students 
 who are not passionately fond of Lydgate would much liefer read 
 Lydgate than Cowley. To Charles Lamb, on the other hand, 
 Cowley's was " one of the sweetest names, which carry a perfume 
 in the mention". He was born in London in 1618, and Dr. 
 Johnson suspected that his father was not only a Puritan but a 
 grocer. 
 
 A copy of " The Faery Queen " which lay on the window-seat 
 of his mother's chamber is said to have wakened Cowley's ambi- 
 tion. He " lisped in numbers," and published his verses at 
 Westminster School, whence he went on to Cambridge. There he 
 is said to have written much of his Biblical epic, the " Davideis ". 
 The poem is in the heroic couplet, thus 
 
 Rais'd with the news he from high heaven receives, 
 Straight to his diligent God just thanks he gives 
 To divine Nob directs he then his flight, 
 A small town, great in fame, by Levi's right. 
 
 The poem breaks off at the passage where Jonathan, after fighting 
 all day, tastes some honey of the wild bees. 
 
 To compare with Milton's Satan the Satan of Cowley, 
 
 Thrice did he knock his iron teeth, thrice howl 
 And into frowns his wrathful forehead roll 
 
 is to perceive that the Cavalier was no match for the Puritan poet 
 in sacred epic. 
 
 Cowley had done much secretary's work for Charles I during 
 the war, he was employed by the Queen in Paris, and returned in 
 1656 to England, where he was arrested, but presently released. 
 He returned to France just as the star of Molifere was rising, came 
 
342 English Literature 
 
 home at the Restoration, was dissatisfied with such reward as his 
 loyalty obtained, and left town for a very pleasant house at 
 Chertsey, where he died in 1667. His set of amatory verses, 
 " The Mistress,'' holds a high place in collections. He revelled in 
 what Dr. Johnson called " metaphysical " conceits. Odes he wrote 
 in great numbers, in imitation of Pindar ; one of them is addressed 
 to the Royal Society and hails the new birth of divine Science. 
 
 Pindaric Odes became a fashion that lasted long, and, in its 
 day, produced little of merit till Dryden came. Not much of 
 Cowley in verse is now read for pleasure except the lively and 
 graceful " Chronicle " of the names of his mistresses. If we 
 could suppose that without Cowley the great Odes in the language 
 would not have been written, Cowley might be regarded as an 
 important influence. But when we turn to his " Praise of Pindar," 
 
 Pindar is imitable by none ; 
 
 The Phoenix Pindar is a vast sp ecies alone, 
 
 Cowley does not seem very inspiring ! But Dr. Johnson held that 
 Cowley "was the first who imparted to English nuihbers the 
 enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less," while 
 " he left such specimens of excellence " in versification " as en- 
 abled succeeding poets to improve it ''. 
 
 Denham. 
 
 The poems of Sir John Denham (1615-1669) might, had they 
 perished, have been reckoned in " the veniable part of things lost ". 
 He was of the Royalist party, and his occasional political rhymes 
 are humourless libels. In 1642 he published "The Sophy," and 
 surprised the wits, for he had been best known as a dicer and 
 gambler. In 1642 his " Cooper 's Hill," an early example of local 
 poetry, appeared, and in tins was utti? of what Dr. Johnson called 
 " the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse 
 to verse," which disfigured his translation of the Second Book of 
 the " ^neid". For restricting the sense to the couplet, Denham 
 was reckoned with Waller among the reformers of English poetry. 
 
 Four lines of " Cooper's Hill," admired by Dryden, are all that 
 men remember; he wrote not ungracefully on Cowley, and he 
 
Caroline Poets 343 
 
 succeeded in getting ;£^i 0,000 for the Royal cause from the 
 Scottish traders in Poland. He is no longer, as by Dr. Johnson, 
 deservedly considered as one of the fathers of our English poetry, 
 " who improved our taste and advanced our language ". 
 
 Sherburne, Stanley, Browne, Cotton. 
 
 It is customary to mention among English poets of the seven- 
 teenth century Sir Edward Sherburne, Thomas Stanley his kins- 
 man, Alexander Browne, and Charles Cotton, whose birth and 
 death dates range from i6i8to 1702 — Sherburne's life occupied the 
 whole space. All but Cotton, the latest born (1630), were of the 
 Royalist party. Sherburne dealt most in translations and sacred 
 verses ; Browne in ditties of love, wine, and politics, with epistles 
 and elegies ; Stanley was a scholar — his amorous verses often ap- 
 proach excellence; Cotton celebrated Chloris with little inspira- 
 tion, wrote angling songs, and was the friend of Izaak Walton, a 
 fact that preserves his name in lavender. He wrote the part on 
 fly-fishing (in which Walton was no expert) for a late edition of 
 "The Compleat Angler," and (1681) celebrated in verse "The 
 Wonders of the Peak," as he had sung the praises of his well-loved 
 river, the Dove. His " Scarronides or Virgil Travestie," in the 
 manner of Scarron gave offence to reverent admirers of the 
 " ^neid ". 
 
 Waller. 
 
 Edmund Waller, certainly the greatest wit of his time (for it 
 would be sacrilege to speak of Milton as " a wit "), was born at 
 Coleshill in Bucks, on 3 March, 1606. He was early left a rich 
 orphan, was educated at Eton, and King's, Cambridge, entered 
 Parliament at 18, and was familiar with the Court of James I. 
 His first-known poem, on " The Escape of the Prince at Saint 
 Andero," is in the same correct and elegant heroic verse as that 
 of his later measures : Waller had at 18 command of the in- 
 strument to which Dryden fell heir. Possibly the poem, with some 
 of his other loyal pieces of almost the same period, may have been 
 improved by Waller in later days, but his ear was already as ex- 
 cellent as that of Davies in his " Nosce te Ipsum " or of Fairfax in 
 
344 English Literature 
 
 his translation of Tasso. Waller had no taste for the venture- 
 some irregular lines of his contemporaries, and seldom, like so 
 many of them, drew amorous conceits from the depths of the 
 fanciful science of the age. 
 
 Adulation of people in power from Charles I and his Queen 
 to Charles II and his Queen, or to Cromwell in " The Panegyric," 
 was the common theme of Waller. As he is always tuneful and 
 always vivacious he may be read with interest, whether he con- 
 gratulates Prince Charles on his escape from shipwreck, or the 
 King on his fortitude when he heard of the murder of Buckingham, 
 or Cromwell on his victories, or Mary of Modena on a tea-party, 
 or Monmouth on the defeat of the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge. 
 His love verses to Sacharissa (Lady Dorothea Sidney) or to 
 Amoret (Lady Sophia Murray ?) are seldom tedious, and his " On 
 a Girdle," and " Go, lovely Rose," and " Tell me, lovely loving 
 pair" are among the imperishable flowers of the English an- 
 thology. 
 
 While he lived, and he lived to be 8i, Waller always wrote 
 well, nor was he less distinguished as an orator in Parliament, 
 and a delightful companion. In the Short and Long Parliaments 
 he appeared as a moderate member of the Parliamentary party, 
 and opposed the abolition of Episcopacy. Revolution, not reform, 
 was the winning card; and Waller slid into what was called 
 Waller's Plot. He organized what may be called a scheme of 
 constitutional resistance to the King's enemies, but with this co- 
 existed, as usually happens, a more strenuous and violent conspir- 
 acy under Sir Nicholas Crispe. 
 
 The affair was detected on 31 May, 1643, Waller and his 
 brother-in-law, Tompkyns, were arrested : Waller lost head and 
 heart, ;confessed all that he knew, and more that he conjec- 
 tured ; lost honour, and kept his life at the ransom of a heavy 
 fine, and exile (at Rouen). He made his peace with Cromwell 
 who had nothing to fear and something to gain from him, the 
 famous panegyric of 1654. When Charles returned. Waller's 
 congratulations were deemed by the King less good than his 
 compliments to Cromwell. " Poets, Sir," answered Waller, " suc- 
 ceed better in fiction than in truth." The treacherous politician 
 
Caroline Poets 345 
 
 was forgiven on every side, the witty poet was welcome in Parlia- 
 ment and everywhere. 
 
 Waller's first wife was rich, his second was fertile. When at 
 last his doctor pronounced his sentence of death, he quoted some 
 lines of Virgil, and went home to die. John Evelyn had been " his 
 worthy Friend " : to no man were men more charitable than to 
 Waller. 
 
 His " Battle of the Summer Islands " is mildly mock-heroic : 
 the compliments which he lavished on other poets, as to Evelyn 
 on his translation of Lucretius, outlive their works which he 
 praised. Dryden esteemed him generously, and all the more be- 
 cause he was judiciously applauded by Sir George Mackenzie, the 
 " bluidy Mackenzie " of the Covenanters. 
 
 With his songs Waller has one foot in the paradise of Love- 
 lace and Suckling and Carew ; as represented by his heroic coup- 
 lets he almost enters the Augustan age. Waller well understood 
 the transitoriness of poetic popularity, shifting with every change 
 of manners, language and taste 
 
 Poets that lasting marble seek 
 Must carve in Latin or in Greek ; 
 We write in sand, our language grows, 
 And, like the tide, our work o'er flows. 
 Chaucer his sense can only boast 
 The glory of his numbers lost. 
 
 Happily the glory of Chaucer's "numbers" has been recovered; 
 nor is that of Waller's lost : his " sense " sometimes can only be 
 appreciated by aid of some knowledge of history. 
 
 Marvell. 
 
 In a sense and as regards the better part of his poetry, Andrew 
 Marvell may be reckoned among Cavalier poets. He had not, in 
 full measure, the occasional but unique inspiration of Lovelace, 
 but he is comparatively free from wanton conceits, and never falls 
 into the abyss. He haSj_iii_additiQn to the charm of the Cavaliers 
 at their best, a certain delicacy and reserve^ and a sense of 
 natural beauty and a rural felicity in wTiich they do not abound. 
 He has none of the stains of the tavern. 
 
346 English Literature 
 
 Marvell was born on 31 March, 1621, at Winestead, near Hull, 
 being son of the parson of Winestead. He went to Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, at an early age, did not wait to take his 
 Master's degree, and in 1641-1646, travelled widely on the Con- 
 tinent. In 1649 he wrote commendatory verses to Lovelace's 
 "Lucasta," and in these he speaks as a sympathetic Cavalier, 
 though, like other quiet people who loved a settled government, 
 he later addressed Cromwell as "an angel," which may have made 
 Noll smile grimly. In 1650 Marvell became tutor to the daughter 
 of Lord Fairfax, the Parliamentary General, but no regicide. At 
 Appleton House, near Bilborow Hill, Marvell wrote hisjnpst charm- 
 ing pQems^Jj^unt^Jife^and-innpcent loves. He compared the 
 hill to the delicately pencilled curve of an eyebrow, and assures 
 "mountains more unjust," such at the Alps, that they "The Earth 
 deform, and Heaven fright ". For more than a century any 
 peaked mountain or rocky eminence was reckoned " horrid ". 
 
 Marvell made at this time the acquaintance of Milton, who re- 
 commended him as acquainted with foreign languages and classical 
 literature for the post of Assistant Secretary : which he obtained 
 in 1657. In the circle of Government, Marvell learned to appreci- 
 ate and was induced to applaud Cromwell on his return from his 
 visit of conquest and massacre to Ireland. This poem contains 
 the familiar and beautiful lines appreciative of the behaviour of 
 Charles I on the scaffold. In 1659-1660 Marvell entered Parlia- 
 ment as Member for Hull : in 1 663 -1 665 he went abroad on various 
 embassies, and, after playing the part of a fierce satirist of the 
 sinners of the Restoration, he died on 18 August, 1678. 
 
 His prose satires "The Rehearsal Transprosed" and others 
 (1672-1678) were inspired by that terror of a restoration of 
 Catholicism, which flamed up in the cowardly ferocities of Titus 
 Oates's " Popish Plot ". Though a Catholic in sympathy, Charles 
 II knew well that if he announced his change of religion he would 
 be " sent off on his travels " again ; and to travel he was not in- 
 clined. The satires of Marvell in verse "we still read," says 
 Swift, who speaks of the author's " genius ". It had none of 
 the majesty of Dryden's nor of Pope's polish, and Marvell is best 
 known for what is best in his poetry : " The Nymph complaining 
 
Caroline Poets 347 
 
 for her Fawn " ; " The. Garden," which has much of the merit of 
 Milton's " L' Allegro " and " II Penseroso " ; " The Mower to the 
 Glowworms," "Bermudas," "To His Coy Mistress," with its 
 charming humour ; and "The Definition of Love," which scarcely 
 maintains the level of its first noble stanza. Such poems on 
 divine subjects as " The Coronet " are reminiscent of Herbert, but 
 less conceited, retaining Marvell's grace of flowers and gardens. 
 
 Milton. 
 
 John Milton, son of a " money-scrivener," was born in Bread 
 Street, London, on 9 December, 1608. His father, though a 
 Puritan, was in sympathy with literature, and his wealth permitted 
 his son to devote himself, as long as he pleased, to studies of 
 many kinds, and to train himself sedulously for the great poetic 
 task which he deemed himself " born to do ". Milton was thus 
 one of the first of our strictly professional non-dramatic poets, — 
 like Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, and Wordsworth 1 — who were 
 able to devote themselves deliberately to the cultivation of their 
 genius. Milton never wrote for his livelihood, and, except when 
 he gave himself up to political and theological controversy, he was 
 always preparing himself for the great poem which he was de- 
 termined to make. He entered at St. Paul's School in 1620, and 
 thence went to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his beauty and 
 refined morals won for him the name of the Lady of Christ's. He 
 put on his Master's gown in 1632, and then for six years resided 
 at his father's place, Horton, in Buckinghamshire, the county of 
 John Hampden. 
 
 A man's best poems are usually written before he is 30. 
 Milton was 21 when (1629) he produced the ode "On the 
 Morning of Christ's Nativity ". In this splendid and immortal 
 piece he invokes, as always, "the heavenly Muse," and, in addi- 
 tion to the beautiful measure of the Hymn, in harmony rivalling 
 Spenser's, he already strikes his own sonorous note, as in " The 
 trumpet spoke not to the armed throng," a glorious combination 
 and harmony of sounds. Here advance 
 
 ' All five wrote dramas, but none was a professional playwright. 
 
348 English Literature 
 
 The helmed cherubim 
 And sworded seraphim, 
 
 who are, in "Paradise Lost," to make the floor of heaven 
 
 Ring to the roar of an angel onset. 
 
 The stanzas on the flight of the ancient classic deities, even the 
 genius of "haunted spring and dale," and the nymphs, are of a 
 high and melancholy imagination. But Milton " found the sub- 
 ject to be above the years he had when he wrote it," and " was 
 nothing satisfied with what he had done ". After deliberately 
 selecting and weighing many themes, for example that of Arthur, 
 he returned when old, blind, and fallen on what he deemed "evil 
 days," to the topic of wars in heaven, and man's Fall and Re- 
 demption. 
 
 " L'Allegro " and " II Penseroso " are impeccable early poems. 
 Milton is not yet so Puritan as to denounce Merry England, "the 
 jocund rebecks," the dancing youths and maids, the tales of fairy 
 Mab and the Brownie, and the stage : if Jonson and sweetest 
 Shakespeare be the playwrights. Milton was deeply learned in 
 the classics, but there is none of the pedantry of his age in his 
 allusions to Prince Memnon, or "that starr'd Aethiop Queen," 
 though now many readers must turn to notes for information about 
 them. -Octosyllabic lines had never before been written with such 
 variety of grave and gay as by Milton, who in verse is a supreme 
 master and " inventor of harmonies ". Spenser had not his 
 variety : in Milton's poems, as in his lines " On a Solemn Music '' 
 
 The bright Seraphim, in burning row 
 Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow. 
 
 Yet Milton's party in the State set its face like a flint against 
 the " solemn music " of the churches as against the " joyous re- 
 becks " of the lads and lasses. 
 
 In 1634 Milton produced a masque, the one great and en- 
 during masque of the many that were played in the' halls of princes 
 and peers. " Comus " was presented at Ludlow Castle, the house 
 of Lord Bridgewater, President of Wales, and the actors were his 
 family. The Muse is heavenly, the theme is divine Chastity : 
 
Caroline Poets 349 
 
 there is no such awful contrast to the purity of the Lady as that 
 which Fletcher, in "The Faithful Shepherdess," presents in the 
 person of the deplorable Cloe. As in the plays of Euripides, an 
 explanatory prologue is spoken by a Spirit, who later appears as the 
 shepherd Thyrsis. We learn that Comus (Revelry) the son of 
 Dionysus the Wine God and Circe the enchantress of the 
 " Odyssey," has settled in " this ominous wood " in Britain ; 
 tempts travellers with the crystal cup of his sorceries, and changes 
 them into beast-headed adventurers. Then Comus enters with 
 his torch-bearing company, swine, bulls, goats, bears, and in 
 beautiful lines, recommends his unholy ethics. 
 
 Come, let us our rites begin, 
 'Tis only daylight that makes sin. 
 
 But something warns him that a chaste being draws near ; he dis- 
 misses his troop ; the Lady enters, she has lost her way in the 
 dark wood, her brothers have strayed apart, she hopes to meet 
 merry peasants who will guide her ; she calls them by a song, 
 and Comus appears, summoned by the notes 
 
 How sweetly did they float upon the wings 
 Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night 
 At every fall smoothing the raven down 
 Of darkness, till it smiled. 
 
 Thinking Comus an honest shepherd, the Lady follows hira : her 
 brothers enter in search of her, the Spirit warns them of her 
 danger, and gives them such virtuous herbs as Hermes gives to 
 Odysseus in Circe's isle. Armed with these they scatter the 
 satyrs of Comus, but only Sabrina, nymph of the Severn, called 
 and replying in lyrics of ineffable beauty, , can release the Lady from 
 the enchanted chair of Comus. The majesty, delicacy, and beauty 
 of the ideas are matched by the exquisite music of the blank verse 
 and lyric passages, for at the age of 26 and in his poetic prime of 
 youth, Milton was already a master of every technical resource of 
 poetry ; of everything, except humour and the power of creating 
 human characters. He might compose poetry more august and 
 sustained than " Comus,'' but he never could be a better poet than 
 he was in 1634. Sanity, order, form, absence of vain conceit and 
 
350 English Literature 
 
 ingenious antithesis were as natural to Milton as they were un- 
 known to Donne and the Fletchers. 
 
 Milton's next great poem, " Lycidas," was composed shortly be- 
 fore he left Horton, early in 1638, on a visit to Italy. The occasion, 
 which other Cambridge poets celebrated, was the death of a friend, 
 Edward King, drowned in crossing the Irish Channel. We do 
 not know from external evidence that Milton was more attached to 
 King, personally, than Shelley was to Keats. " Lycidas " is not a cry 
 from an almost broken heart, as are parts of the " In Memoriam " 
 of Tennyson. It has been said that admiration of " Lycidas " is 
 a test of a man's capacity for appreciating poetry, — a hard saying 
 for Dr. Johnson. That Milton had a true affection for King the 
 classic allusions and the pastoral guise of his ode may cause some 
 to doubt. But there is deep natural feeling in the plangent 
 words, 
 
 But oh ! the heavy change now thou art gone, 
 Now thou art gone and never must return ! 
 
 The story disguised as a friendship between Theocritean shep- 
 herds is really that of a college friendship between two boyish 
 poets, and no later friendships can be so tender, close, dear ; the 
 lost voice ever echoing in the memory. The verse is a solemn 
 music : the mingling of the figures of classical mythology with St. 
 Peter, and with Camus, "reverend sire,'' vexed Dr. Johnson, but 
 he would have been equally vexed by the only Oxford pendant to 
 this Cambridge lament, the " Thyrsis '' of Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Indeed what really annoyed the good Doctor was the certainly 
 regrettable introduction of an attack on his beloved Church of 
 England, and the ominous mention of " that two-handed engine 
 at the door," which did not strike once, but often, nor only at the 
 neck of an Archbishop, but slew Strafford, Hamilton, and the King. 
 
 " The dread voice " comes across the shepherd's dirge ; the 
 Sicilian Muse, the Muse of Theocritus, is bidden to return, but to 
 Milton she will not come again. We think of him, at this time, 
 as " young but intolerably severe," like Apollo in Matthew 
 Arnold's " Empedocles on Etna ". Like Wordsworth and Shelley 
 he was devoid of humour, — and thus fails — as Shelley did not 
 
Caroline Poets 351 
 
 fail, thanks to his geniality, and kindness and charms — to win 
 universal sympathy. Think of Shakespeare, — who does not love 
 the man, and who does dare to love Milton 1 He was not vain 
 with the childlike vanity of some poets, but he was as proud as 
 his own Satan. He not only had genius next to the highest, but 
 he knew it, tended it, cared for it, and could scarcely find a task 
 that was great enough for his powers. We respect his self- 
 knowledge, applaud his resolution, and are much happier with 
 Shakespeare and Scott, who never gave a thought to their genius. 
 On returning from Italy to his country, the country of " the 
 Bishops' Wars," Milton, in Aldersgate Street, devoted himself to 
 the education of his nephews, to sonnets, and then to prose works, 
 as already mentioned, all written in the cause of sacred Liberty. 
 He, like the old Scots Earl, did not love " the new liberty " as-offered 
 by the Presbyterian, whose name was " old priest writ large ". His 
 marriage, in 1643, to a lady of a loyal family, Mary Powell, was 
 unhappy : she went back, in a short time, to her own people. In 
 1645 she returned, had three daughters, and died in 1652. His 
 private unhappiness made Milton plead vainly for freedom of 
 divorce, a remedy which has its own unsatisfactory aspect. In 
 1652 Milton lost his eyesight, like his 
 
 Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, 
 And Teiresias and Phineus, prophets old. 
 
 His sonnets are his only poems of this period; when he 
 argued for divorce, and for liberty of printing, defended the slay- 
 ing of his King, wrangled with political opponents in English and 
 Latin, and was Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth. An 
 accomplished sonneteer in Italian, Milton in English observed, 
 usually, the strict Petrarchian rules; and had the wisdom and 
 self-restraint to write not too many sonnets, most of them choicely 
 good. Even that in which he commemorates the noble Aboyne, 
 and the son of Col of the left hand, and Gilespie Grumach is a 
 good sonnet. He mourned for the late Massacre in Piedmont, 
 but not for those of Drogheda and Dundee. His nobility of 
 soul never declares itself more gloriously than in the sonnets on 
 his blindness, of these eyes 
 
35^ English Literature 
 
 OverpUed, 
 In Liberty's defence, my glorious task. 
 
 But there was no liberty left for Anglicans, Catholics, or Presby- 
 terians in Scotland, who were turned out of their court of General 
 Assembly. 
 
 After rejecting many topics which had occurred to him as 
 possible subjects for his life-long purpose to write a great Epic, 
 Milton returned to the inspiration of the Heavenly Muse, and 
 settled (1655-1667) on "Paradise Lost". He did wisely, for a 
 human epic like the others, the "Iliad," the "Odyssey," and all the 
 Greek, Roman, Italian, and French imitations of these, demands 
 a pell-mell of human characters, noble, treacherous, and humorous. 
 In creating human characters Milton had little skill, and, in 
 " Paradise Lost " there are but two, Adam and Eve. In Genesis 
 they are extremely human, but Milton had to make them at first 
 perfect, and place them in a situation where no other human 
 beings ever were. For the rest, he had the magnificent Satan, 
 fallen through a pride and independence of character with which 
 the poet was in sympathy ; while Belial and Abdiel are also, each 
 in his own way, heroic. The heavenly angels are less clearly 
 marked and discriminated. 
 
 In Athens, Milton would have rivalled ^Eschylus ; with Euri- 
 pides he does not pair. He has the greatest of stages, the uni- 
 verse, chaos, heaven and hell. His theme is the mystery of human 
 fortunes ; man, what he might be, what he is. He uses a non- 
 Biblical poetic legend, the war in heaven, which had been treated, 
 we saw, by an Anglo-Saxon poet, and has a parallel in the myth- 
 ology of the Kaitish, a savage tribe of Central Australia. There 
 too the great self-created Atnatu of the highest heaven hurls his dis- 
 obedient children down to earth. It was inevitable that Satan, not 
 Adam, should become the Hero, as Mephistopheles, not Faust, is 
 the hero of Goethe's play — is the interesting character. Milton in 
 his Puritan way describes himself as " Not sedulous by nature to 
 indite wars," hitherto "alone heroic deemed," while modest 
 domestic patience and heroic martyrdom are unsung, or as in the 
 case of Jeanne d'Arc, have proved too lofty a theme for any poet. 
 But Milton being a poet is subject to inevitable'poetic limitations. 
 
Caroline Poets 353 
 
 The patience which Eve displayed in everyday domestic life, after 
 her expulsion from Paradise, would not be a theme for the epic ; 
 and Milton " never stoops his wing " when he sings of the Raising 
 of the Banner of Satan, and " the banner cry of Hell ". 
 
 In the true spirit of epics, his poem ends with no clash of 
 arms, no blare of trumpets, but with " a dying fall " ; 
 
 They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, 
 Through Eden took their solitary way ; 
 
 in such manner, too, ceases the " Iliad," 
 
 Thus held they funeral for knightly Hector. 
 
 Milton's blank verse is the stateliest, most variously tuneful, and 
 most relieved by varieties of pause, most sonorous with the mysteri- 
 ous music of ancient names. All in this is perfect. The verse- 
 paragraphs — the opening paragraph is of thirty lines — could only 
 be arrayed by Milton. We do not often meet what seems to us 
 a. bathos, as when Satan, fallen from heaven, " views the dismal 
 situation ". After viewing the dismal situation Satan is him- 
 self again : — 
 
 All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, 
 
 And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
 
 And courage never to submit or yield, 
 
 And what is else not to be overcome. 
 
 That glory never shall His wrath or might 
 
 Extort from me. 
 
 Milton is not pedantic, but as Homer has his catalogue of ships 
 and heroes, Milton outdoes him with his catalogue of fallen 
 angels, gods of the nations, Moloch, Chemosh, Ashtoreth, Dagorf, 
 Osiris, Isis, Horus, " the Ionian gods of Javan's issue," and they 
 
 who with Saturn old 
 Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields, 
 And o'er the Celtic roam'd the utmost isles. 
 
 Milton's knowledge was equal to every demand, and his were 
 
 the unconquerable will 
 And courage never to submit or yield. 
 
 But, magnificent as he is, Milton has always his eye on that 
 
 23 
 
354 English Literature 
 
 Achseaii " father of the rest," and he copies Homer's bridal-bed 
 of Zeus and Hera 
 
 under foot the violet, 
 Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay 
 Broidered the ground. 
 
 " And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh new grass, 
 and dewy lotus, crocus, and hyacinth." But Milton gives twenty 
 lines where Homer gives four. 
 
 In comparing the two greatest of epic poets — the first, Homer, 
 with the last, Milton, — we observe that each sums up in him- 
 self the whole thought and experience, and the poetic expres- 
 sion of a world that lies behind hirn. Each " takes his own 
 where he finds it," "makes all men's wit his own," as Ben Jonson 
 said, in an invidious sense, of Shakespeare. Homer has his 
 debts to old nameless poets ; Milton displays his debts to Homer, 
 and to Greek, Roman, and Celtic poets and historians, to Anglo- 
 Saxons, Dutch, Italians, to all song and all learning, and all that 
 he takes he transfigures, and rounds into a harmonious whole, the 
 immortal Epic. 
 
 "Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, four years after 
 Milton's third marriage. It is not apparent that he was in any 
 danger from the Government of the Restoration. Charles II 
 avowed to Clarendon, in a scribbled note now in the Bodleian, his 
 constitutional dislike of hanging men. The book did not sell 
 badly for a Puritan poem produced while the revel of the com- 
 pany of Comus was maddest, and, when Milton died, Dryden, the 
 literary dictator, gave due praise to the greatest of literary epics, 
 ^e loftiest, the most splendidly adorned ; and poets of the eight- 
 eenth century adored the style which became ridiculous, or dull, 
 in their imitations. 
 
 In "Paradise Regained," a sequel which Mr. Ellwood, a 
 Quaker, reports himself to have suggested to Milton, the great 
 qualities of the poet are unimpaired. His verse is that which he 
 alone could wield. His sonorous catalogues, the music of names, 
 the eagle glance over all the kingdoms of qa,rth and the glory of 
 them, the triumph of the pure spirit over carnal joys; nay the 
 haunting memories of old romance, 
 
Caroline Poets 355 
 
 Of fairy damsels, met in forest wide, 
 By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 
 Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore, 
 
 these are all present, all are captivating. 
 
 It is natural to wish that, while young, Milton had followed 
 his dominant motive into Arthur's fairy land, and told the story 
 of Galahad and the Holy Grail : the purity that wins the Beatific 
 Vision. 
 
 His " Samson Agonistes," in the severest style of Greek 
 tragedy, sets forth his own strength foiled by blindness, mocked 
 by the dull triumphs of the wanton crowd, and triumphant in 
 death. The occasional unrhymed verse of the chorus, not in 
 decasyllabic lines, stands for Milton's curious antipathy for rhyme, 
 in which, when he chose, he excelled. The subtleties and 
 sophistries of Delilah express his idea of one type of womanhood, 
 the other type shines in the steadfast love of the repentant Eve. 
 The poem, with all the strength, has less of the charm of Milton 
 than his other great works. 
 
 Milton died in 1674 ; a poet who in one sense might be 
 styled "self-taught," for while he was so deeply read, his verse 
 was no echo, nor ever can be re-echoed. It is foolish but natural 
 to appraise the relative greatness of great poets, but, Shakespeare 
 apart, it is to the lonely Milton that the world has always awarded 
 the crown of England's greatest. 
 
 Samuel Butler. 
 
 If we could take the " God-gifted organ-voice of England," 
 Milton, as representing the anti-Royalist parties in the Civil War, 
 and Samuel Butler, with his " Hudibras," as the representative of 
 those who stood for Church and King, we could not hesitate in 
 our choice between the two factions. But Milton's was a soul 
 that dwells apart, making its own special music, while Butler 
 produced a unique epic-satire on the furies and follies of the once 
 triumphant Presbyterians, Independents, and a multitude of wild 
 contending sects. Of Samuel Butler's life but little is known. 
 Born at Strensham in Worcestershire in 161 2, he was educated at 
 the school of Worcester, but could not afford to proceed to either 
 
 23 * 
 
35^ English Literature 
 
 university. He was clerk to a justice of the peace, was later in 
 the service of the Countess of Kent, where he had leisure for 
 study, at Wrest in Bedfordshire, during the war, and in the same 
 shire resided with Sir Samuel Luke, an active Presbyterian, who, 
 however, was opposed to the Regicide. Butler thus saw plenty of 
 the people whom, in 1663, he satirized in the first part of 
 " Hudibras ". That Presbyterian Don Quixote, with his Inde- 
 pendent Squire, Ralph, is the wildest caricature of a type, not of 
 an individual, and the adventures of the pair are merely bur- 
 les.que. The discussions and descriptions are a tempest of 
 ridicule falling on the fallen Cause in showers of jigging and 
 strangely rhymed octosyllabics, often so piquant that many of 
 them are still commonly quoted though the historic allusions are 
 forgotten. The associations of ideas in the author's mind bring 
 out a learning as multifarious as that of Burton or of Browne; 
 the book was adored at Court, not least by the King, and was 
 pirated ; all three parts were put forth by Walton's publisher, 
 Richard Harriot, though they may have been little to the taste of 
 the pacific author of "The Compleat Angler". 
 
 Builer seems to have been no roysterer, but a retired, bookish, 
 sardonic humorist, who " asked for nothing and got nothing ". 
 The Court wits who sought his acquaintance did not find in him 
 what they expected. He certainly received no notable rewards : 
 and later poets found in him the type of neglected merit. He 
 died in London in 1680. 
 
 After a war of Religion in which all the countless factions felt 
 certain of their own infallibility, Butler, a disillusioned wit, saw 
 nothing in the strife but what the saintly Leighton called " a 
 scuffle of drunken men in the dark ''. The Parliamentarians 
 
 Call fire and sword and desolation 
 A godly thorough Reformation, 
 Which always must be carried on, 
 And still be doing, never done. 
 As if Religion were intended 
 For nothing else but to be mended . . , 
 They with more care keep holy-day 
 The wrong, than others the right way, 
 
 for Christmas was kept as a fast, . and Good Friday as a feast. 
 
Caroline Poets 357 
 
 The whole poem has rather less of a constructed plot than 
 "Tristram Shandy''; and the strange rhymes — as o{ flambeau 
 to " damn'd blow " — tickled the merry Cavaliers more than they 
 amuse later generations. Whatis " topical " in " Hudibras " is, of 
 course, transitory, but much of permanent and brilliant wit re- 
 mains and is current in quotations : for example, 
 
 Compound for sins they are inclined to 
 By damning those they have no mind to : 
 Still so perverse and opposite 
 As if they worshipped God for spite. 
 
 Butler wrote other things, the best is a dialogue in which Puss 
 and Cat mimic the conversations of the lovers in the "heioic'' 
 tragedies of the Restoration. 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 RESTORATION THEATRE. 
 
 In England, when the King came to his own again (29 May, 1660) 
 and the reign of the Saints was ended, it was certain thdt "tfl5 
 Theatre also would come to her own. The stage had been bad 
 enough, in verse, taste, and manners, before the doors were closed 
 in 1642. When the dramatic Muse returned, she brought with 
 her, like the man in the parable, seven other devils worse than 
 herself. The morals and tastes of the town and Court were what, 
 after so many years of Puritan sway, they might be expected to be. 
 They are most livehly delineated in the " Diary " of Mr. Pepys;tV 
 and the drama of the Restoration was their child, and Wdi'thy' of 
 them. At first the stage was occupied by the older plays of 
 Fletcher, Jonson, and Shirley ; no new names of note appear till 
 Dryden's "Wild Gillant" failed in 1663, and Sir George Etherege's 
 "Love in a Tub " prospered in 1664. 
 
 No age will be content with old plays, the mould and fashion 
 of the time must be exhibited. Pictures of the brutal mirth and 
 •the horseplay of triumphant licence, of the flirtations and intrigues 
 of lackeys and lords and ladies, all genteel and witty a la mode of 
 the Court and town as we know them from Pepys and Grammont, 
 were presented. 
 
 Everything must be " new ". As we hear of " the new 
 morality," "the new theology," and so on, so, in "The Rehearsal" 
 (1671), a burlesque by the Duke of Buckingham and other hands, 
 on the plays of the last ten years, the word "new" is constantly 
 reiterated. " You must know this is the new way of writing, and 
 these hard things please forty times better than the old plain way 
 of writing." 
 
 358 
 
Restoration Theatre 359 
 
 The butt of "The Rehearsal," Bayes, a mixture of Davenant 
 with the mannerisms of Dryden, keeps bragging that this or that 
 absurdity is " new ". " New," certainly, and not worthy to wax old, 
 was the extravagant " heroic " tragedy, copying the flights of the 
 French school of bombastic romances, and written in rhyming 
 couplets. The authors of " The Rehearsal " stitch together scraps 
 and parodies of the new plays, in that which is being rehearsed, 
 with plenty of farcical "business" under Mr. Bayes, who gives 
 amusing snatches of his "Ars Poetica,'' while there are gibes at 
 the new style of prologues and epilogues, which Dryden wrote so 
 copiously. But "The Rehearsal" is less witty than Sheridan's 
 " The Critic ". As for the " new " rhyming " heroic " plays, 
 Dryden ascribes their origin to Davenant. Forbidden to act the 
 old sort of plays under the Reign of the Saints, he introduced ex- 
 amples of moral virtue, " writ in verse " (in rhyme), " and performed 
 in recitative music ". He combined the Italian opera with char- 
 acters in the manner of Corneille. At the Restoration, he turned 
 his " Siege of Rhodes " into " a just drama," but without " de- 
 sign and variety of characters ". Dryden took the manner up, 
 and, inspired by Ariosto, made love and valour the theme of the 
 new heroic tragedy on a superhuman scale, and with supernatural 
 incidents, ghosts for example. Then came rant and extravagance 
 expressed in rhymed couplets, and even triplets, till Dryden re- 
 turned to blank verse, and Lee and Otway and others followed him. 
 But the drama remained as heroic and absurd as when Dryden 
 wrote that masterpiece "The Conquest of Granada". In this he 
 has a ghost, the ghost of the mother of the heroic Almanzor. 
 Scott supposes that she was brought in to prove the courage of 
 her son, even in face of an apparition. Really, the courtesy of 
 Almanzor is more to be admired; the stage direction shows that 
 he bowed to the spectre 1 
 
 Many critics of the age regarded the heroic tragedy with no 
 more respect than we are apt to do now. Dryden replied with 
 arguments which are not quite to the point. The heroic tragedy 
 is a perfectly legitimate form of art ; the Greek tragedies deal 
 with divine heroes and gods, and ^schylus in " The Persians " 
 does not disdain the ghost of Darius, and in " The Eumenides " 
 
360 English Literature 
 
 introduces the Furies. Dryden pleaded for a similar licence in 
 the heroic play, but all depends on the manner of the doing. His 
 ghosts are not majestic, like that of Darius ; they are absurd. For 
 boldness of language he also claimed a privilege ; persons engaged 
 in superhuman struggles may talk above the pitch of ordinary men. 
 But they must not, like the heroes of the Caroline tragedies, soar 
 or slip into bombast ; they must rise on the wings of poetry, not on 
 bladders full of gas. " Are all the flights of heroic poetry to be 
 concluded bombast, unnatural, and mere madness because they," 
 the critics, " are not affected by their excellences ? " asks Dryden, in 
 his " Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence " " No, not 
 all," the critics might have answered, " but many of your flights 
 of heroic poetry are bombast " ; and they might, indeed they did, 
 produce examples. For instance, in his " The State of Inno- 
 cence," in which, accepting Milton's permission given in blank 
 verse. 
 
 Ay, you may tag my verses if you will, 
 
 he rhymed " Paradise Lost " into an opera, Dryden wrote thus : — 
 
 Seraph and cherub, careless of their charge, 
 And wanton, in full ease, who live at large, 
 Unguarded leave the passes of the sky, 
 And all dissolved in hallelujahs lie. 
 
 The spectacle of wanton seraphs lying dissolved in hallelujahs 
 naturally provoked laughter, but Glorious John did not see the 
 absurdity of the situation. He took his image from Virgil, he 
 says, where the Greeks enter Troy which " lay buried in sleep and 
 wine ". But Trojans were not seraphs, and sleep and wine are 
 not dissolving hallelujahs. In the same way Virgil, following 
 Homer, describes the Cyclops as a monster of mountainous height, 
 as in fact he was. Goliath was only about ten feet high. But 
 Dryden applauds Cowley for writing of Goliath — 
 
 The valley, now, this monster seemed to fill, 
 
 And we, methought, looked up to him from our hill. 
 
 "The passage is horrible bombast," says Scott. Not living in 
 an early heroic age, in which exaggeration is natural and pardon- 
 able, but in the age of scepticism and the Royal Society, Dryden 
 
Restoration Theatre 3(3 1 
 
 exceeded the ancient licence, and, as when a hero takes off his hat 
 to his mother's ghost, mingled modern manners with more than 
 heroic audacities. Criticism should look for beauties, not faults, 
 said Dryden, but the critics could reply that the whole scheme of 
 the heroic drama was faulty. The result is extravagance and rant, 
 indeed rant was then the fault of the actors on the French stage. 
 Moliere had to warn his company that a King, conversing with his 
 Minister, " does not necessarily speak like a dseraoniac ''. 
 
 Turning to comedyj we find it but little instructed, in refine- 
 ment, creation of character, and wit, by the example of Moliere. 
 
 Etherege's three plays " Love in a Tub " (1664), " She Would 
 if She Could" (1667), and "The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling 
 Flutter" (1676), are the work of a courtier and amateur concern- 
 ing whose life and death little is known. The merriment of" Love 
 in a Tub " is a picture of contemporary manners ; compared with its 
 prose, the rhyming ten-syllabled couplets of the graver and senti- 
 mental characters are almost a relief. 
 
 The author (1635-1691 ?), in the Prologue, admits that "wit" 
 (dramatic genius in this case), " has now declined " ; avers that 
 "the older and graver sort" would decry new plays in the manner 
 of Fletcher and Ben Jonson ; and bids the audience " Only think 
 upon the modern way of writing". In an Epilogue to "Sir 
 Fopling Flutter," Dryden characterizes the hero admirably : — 
 
 True fops help Nature's work, and go to school, 
 To file and finish God Almighty's fool. 
 
 If these pieces have wit, they "have not wit enough to keep them 
 sweet ". 
 
 Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) was made immortal when he 
 became the butt of Dryden's satire. His plays are useful to 
 students of contemporary manners, and he was the Laureate of 
 William and Mary in succession to " Glorious John "- 
 
 Sir Charles Sedley and Mrs. Aphra Behn have left nothing 
 imperishable but a few songs, the swan songs of the dying Muse 
 
 of lyric. 
 
 All these playwrights had before their eyes the inimitable and 
 immortal comedies with which MoHere was endowing the litera- 
 
362 English Literature 
 
 ture of France. But, even when they tried to follow this model, 
 their imitations were barbarous : for compared with the literary 
 taste and manners of the Court of Louis XIV, those of the reign 
 of Charles II were brutal. 
 
 The least unsuccessful of those who directed themselves by 
 the light of Molifere was William Wycherley (i 640 ?-i 7 16 ?). Here 
 we sketch his career and that of his successors, reserving for a 
 separate section the great name of Dryden. Wycherley. was of 
 an old family in Shropshire, had a handsome person, was brought 
 up, in boyhood, at Paris, in the literary circle of Madame de 
 Montausier, later resided at Oxford, and, if we could believe what 
 Pope says that Wycherley reported of himself, wrote his first play, 
 " Love in a Wood," before he came to London, to the Middle 
 Temple. This would make Wycherley prior to Etherege, but 
 either his own or Pope's memory is supposed to have been in- 
 correct. The play was not acted till 1672 : it was not much in 
 advance of Etherege in merit. 
 
 Of " The Gentleman Dancing Master " (1673), "The Country 
 Wife" (1673), and " The Plain Dealer " (1674) the last is by far 
 the best. In the ProldgH^, i;he line 
 
 And with faint praises one another damn, 
 
 was remembered, unconsciously, by Pope, in his " Damn with faint 
 praise " (in the character of " Atticus," Addison). 
 
 " The Plain Dealer " is a comedy of humours, like Jonson's, the 
 chief humorist being the benevolent railing Manly, taken from 
 the Alceste of Molifere's "Le Misanthrope''. Manly "of an 
 honest, surly, nice humour," is a gallant British sea captain, who 
 holds all the world in contempt but -his friend and his love, who, 
 of course, betray him. He is beloved by Fidelia, who, for his 
 sake, has abandoned her large fortune, and taken service as a sea- 
 man with Captain Manly. Many scenes of conversation, in imi- 
 tation of Moliere, are vigorous; one perhaps was in Sheridan's_ 
 mind when he wrote " The School for Scandal ". Wycherley de- 
 fends his ^Coimtry_Wife "-from the assaults of a false prude, who, 
 at leaft, shows us that, ev^n under Charles II, " The Country 
 Wife" was thought superfluously indecent. The Widow Black- 
 
Restoration Theatre 363 
 
 acre, a female Peter Peebles, a litigious she-lawyer, with her 
 oaf of a son, is "in very gracious fooling". The intrigue, and the 
 part assigned to Fidelia, are odious enough, and impossible enough, 
 but the nobility of Fidelia is demonstrated by allowing her, oc- 
 casionally, to talk in blank verse. When we remember Wycherley's 
 French education, we may suppose that he dealt so much in 
 matter which a French audience would not have endured, because 
 he knew the taste of the theatre-going part of his countrymen. 
 
 Wycherley is said to have suffered much from a jealous wife 
 of noble birth, who caused him a world of legal troubles by the 
 bequest of her money. He married again at 75, and shortly 
 afterwards died. The most interesting thing in his later years 
 was his acquaintance with Pope, then a lad, and the characteristic 
 use which Pope made of his opportunity. 
 
 CONGREVE. 
 
 Heaven, that but once was prodigal before, 
 
 To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more 
 
 than she conferred on Congreve. So wrote Dryden: and prob- 
 ably half believed what he wrote. Dryden was a literary dictator ; 
 literary opinion followed his lead ; and there was a period when 
 the town recognized the equal of Shakespeare in the sprightly 
 author of comedies no longer ravishing. 
 
 WiUiam Congreve was born (1670) near Leeds : his family was 
 of Staffordshire. His father settling in Ireland, Congreve was 
 educated at the grammar school of Kilkenny, and at Trinity 
 College, Dublin. He was a very handsome man, with an air of 
 greatness ; he easily conquered both the courtly and the literary 
 world when he came to London; he won the admiration and 
 affection of the generous Dryden, who applauded and opened the 
 doors of the theatre to his first comedy, "The Old Bachelor". 
 The play is not better than a fair specimen of Wycherley's manner, 
 but "The Double Dealer" (1693) is much more readable and in- 
 teresting. The complicated passions of Lady Touchwood have a 
 kind of greatness, the more complicated plots of Maskwell nearly 
 lead to a sanguinary conclusion ; Maskwell being as near an 
 
364 English Literature 
 
 approach to the regular villain of comedy as the conditions of 
 comedy permitted. Lady Froth is rather more learned than Mrs. 
 Malaprop, and as vicious under her zeal for astronomy and " mathe- 
 macular proof" as the unkindness of man will allow her to be. 
 The haughty refusal of Lord Froth to laugh, even when he is 
 amused, is amusing ; Brisk and Careless are agreeable rattles. Sir 
 Paul Plyant is almost to an incredible degree " an uxorious, fool- 
 ish, fond old knight," and the heroine, Cynthia, is a good girl. 
 The constant bustle, and the involutions of a plot full of surprises 
 ought to have made the play more popular on the stage than it 
 was at first. Leigh Hunt, who edited "The Comedies of the 
 Restoration " (or rather of the date from the Restoration to Queen 
 Anne), candidly says, "speaking for ourselves, we can never attend 
 sufficiently to the plots of Congreve. They soon puzzle us and we 
 cease to think of them." 
 
 The student who would enjoy Congreve must first peruse each 
 play very carefully, and make out a summary of the plot, with 
 diagrams illustrating the secret staircases, back doors, screens, 
 and other places of ambush : he must also master the details of 
 the various marriages which are arranged for the various heiresses, 
 amiable bankrupts, and old gentlemen. When the reader has thus 
 given his full attention to the details he may re-read the plays with 
 more ease and pleasure. 
 
 In " Love for Love" (1695) Sir Sampson Legend has some of 
 the diverliri'gtraili. UT'Sir Anthony Absolute ; there are unlooked-for 
 glimpses of romance in the assumed madness of his^impoverished 
 son Valentine (the sympathetic rake of comedy — the Charles 
 Surface of an earlier day). The sailor son, Ben Legend, is the 
 stock simple sailor, with some gross sense under the breezy manners 
 of the untutored mariner. Foresight, with his rich collection of 
 superstitions, is a " character part " of interest to the folklorist ; 
 one scene between two moral sisters who simultaneously detect 
 each other's sins is diverting : the wit of Jeremy the valet, however, 
 does not come within sight of the wit of Moliere's Mascarille ; and 
 Miss Prue is a tomboy not remarkable for innocence. 
 
 The pearl of "Th^ \yav pf th^ w^.i^" (i-joo) is the high- 
 hearted Millamant, who, when she at last rewards one of the thou- 
 
Restoration Theatre 365 
 
 sands that sigh for her, makes a very spirited private marriage 
 contract with her adorer. Her song, 
 
 If there's delight in love, 'tis when I see 
 
 That heart, which others bleed for, bleed for me, 
 
 is famous among the lyrics of Congreve. We do not often care for 
 Congreve's characters, nor do they try to win our affection, but 
 Millamant conquers all hearts. 
 
 Congreve's tragedy in blank verse "The Mourning Bride," 
 holds much the same place in his plays as " Don Garcie de 
 Navarre " does in those of Moliere. 
 
 After a long, fashionable, and applauded life, Congreve died in 
 1729, deeply lamented by the Duchess of Marlborough (daughter 
 of the great Duke), and by the once beautiful and delightful 
 actress, Mrs. Bracegirdle. He held rich sinecures under Govern- 
 ment, as did other wits while the Tories were in office. 
 
 Vanbrugh. 
 
 He writes your comedies, draws schemes, and models, 
 And builds Dukes' houses upon very odd hills 
 
 is a contemporary couplet which sums up a few of the accomplish- 
 ments of Sir John Vanbrugh. His family seem to have been 
 Protestants driven from Ghent in the wars of Alva. He was 
 born in 1666 ^ "in a French bastile " he said. He was educated 
 in France ; entered the English army.; produced his first play, 
 "The Relapse," in 1696J and was the architect of Castle Howard, 
 the Earl of Carlisle's house, in 17 01. Carlisle procured for him 
 the herald's post of Clarencieux ; as a Whig he was sent to carry 
 the Order of the Garter to the Elector of Hanover (later 
 George I) ; he built the palace of Blenheim, and, like all who met 
 her, was insulted by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He seems 
 to have been friendly with the wits of both parties, being as jovial 
 as versatile. He died on 26 March, 1726. 
 
 " The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger. " is a kind of continua- 
 tion of Colley Gibber's " Love's Last Shift " ; as Fielding's " Joseph 
 
 ^In 1664 in the Parish of St. Nicholas Aeons {see " Diet, of Nat. Biog." 
 referring to the list of Baptisms in that Church). 
 
366 English Literature 
 
 Andrews " continues and burlesques Richardson's " Pamela ". 
 From the Preface we learn that, as the second title leads us to 
 think probable, "The Relapse" was accused of obscenity and 
 blasphemy. The Prologue, spoken by Miss Cross on the first 
 night, would, in our delicate age, clear all the women out of the 
 stalls and boxes. The piece opens with a long dialogue in blank 
 verse, between Loveless, a newly married r^ke, rejoicing in 
 
 the happy cause of my content, 
 
 and Amanda, his bride, that happy cause. They are going to 
 town, and Amanda is afraid that Loveless's Virtue will Relapse. 
 An amusing character is Lord Foppington, a knight newly made a 
 peer ; " While I was but a knight I was a very nauseous fellow," 
 he confesses. He holds an absurd levee with his tailor, wigmaker, 
 and hosier, and snubs his brother, Tom Fashion, who is penniless. 
 Through an old nauseous match-maker, Coupler, Tom learns that 
 the peer is contracted to a rustic heiress, whom he has never seen. 
 Miss Hoyden, daughter to Sir Tunbelly Clumsey. Tom decides 
 to go down, personate his brother, and marry the wealthy Miss 
 Hoyden. Yet he has a qualm of conscience and will give Fop- 
 pington another chance. 
 
 Arrived in town. Loveless and Amanda drop blank verse for 
 prose. Amanda confesses her distaste for the obscenities of the 
 stage. Loveless admits that he has admired a lady at the play ; 
 Amanda flutters with jealousy ; her cousin, Berinthia, enters ; 
 she is the woman admired by Loveless. Enter Lord Foppington 
 bent on the conquest of Amanda. He dislikes the quiet of a 
 country life: "For 'tis impossible to be quiet without thinking; 
 now thinking is to me the greatest fatigue in the world ". His 
 lordship is- a lover of books, of their bindings, " The inside, I 
 must confess, I am not altogether so fond of". For this he 
 gives his exquisite reasons, and describes the glories of his every- 
 day occupations. From 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. he drinks. "Thus, 
 ladies, you see my life is a perpetual round of delights." This 
 peer is worth a wilderness of Sir Fopling Flutters. On Sundays, " a 
 vile day I must confess," Foppington imitates the course of Mr. 
 Badman. He ends by making a declaration to Amanda, who 
 
Restoration Theatre 367 
 
 replies with a box on the ear. Loveless and P''opping;ton fight, 
 Foppington falls, exclaiming "Ah, — quite through .the body. 
 Stap my vitals ! " 
 
 Like Shakespeare, Vanbrugh "has brave notions," and like 
 him, as Ben Jonson said, " he needs to be stopped " before swords 
 are drawn in ladies' company. His Lordship, of course, is no 
 more killed than was the Master of Ballantrae when the sword 
 hilt "dirled on his breast-bone". 
 
 Berinthia and Amanda now discuss not "the practical part 
 of unlawful love," " Ma/ is abominable " ; " but for the speculative ; 
 that, we must all confess, is entertaining ". Amanda admits an 
 interest in a speculative inquirer, her husband's friend, Mr. Worthy, 
 and, most unnaturally, for she is very jealous, invites Berinthia, 
 a merry widow, to be her guest. 
 
 Lord Foppington, happily recovered, airs his original phil- 
 osophy of life for his brother's edification. " Look you, Tam, of 
 all things that belong to a woman I have an aversion to her heart. 
 For when once a woman has given you her heart, you can never 
 get rid of the rest of her body." This philosopher declines to give 
 Tom a penny, and Tom returns to the raid upon Miss Hoyden 
 and her fortune. 
 
 Loveless is now found — ah ! woful change — not only talking in 
 blank verse — ^indicative of a serious passion — with Berinthia, but 
 kissing her : the discovery is made by Worthy, her old lover. " O 
 God ! " exclaims Berinthia. Worthy now knows that Berinthia 
 adores Loveless, and Berinthia — that Worthy adores Amanda. 
 They contrive a plot against Amanda very worthy of their in- 
 genuous principles. 
 
 We next find Tom at Sir Tunbelly Clumsey's door, which is 
 garrisoned like the Tower, and all to seclude that Danae, Miss 
 Hoyden. Both Tom and Miss Hoyden are eager to be married 
 with no more delay than Tom Jones and Sophia, but Sir Tunbelly 
 is more set on ceremonies than Squire Western. 
 
 The proceedings of Berinthia now justify the censures of the 
 moialist, and "turning the other page," as Chaucer recommends, 
 we find Tom and Miss Hoyden privately married by Chaplain 
 Bull, when Foppington arrives with two coaches and twenty foot- 
 
368 English Literature 
 
 men, the military skill of Sir Tunbelly, convinced that the new- 
 comer is an impostor, enables him to rout Lord Foppington's 
 guard and arrest his person. Presently a Sir John Friendly 
 arrives ; he knows and recognizes the genuine Foppington, who 
 has admirably preserved the calm dignity of his philosophy. The 
 blushless Hoyden now avows to her Nurse and the Chaplain her 
 resolve to prevent trouble by at once wedding the real Lord Fop- 
 pington. 
 
 Meanwhile, by aid of virtue and blank verse, Amanda con- 
 verts the passion of Mr. Worthy into profound admiration and 
 esteem. The natural denouement follows : Miss Hoyden is re- 
 cognized as Mrs. Tom Fashion, and Lord Foppington, who would 
 have gone to the guillotine as gallantly as any gentleman, con- 
 gratulates his brother: "Dear Tam, you have married a woman 
 beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent in her 
 conduct, canstant in her inclinations, and of a nice marality. 
 Split my windpipe ! " 
 
 Vanbrugh's quality, his absence of sentiment, his large and 
 lively handling of old comic types, may be guessed at from this 
 brief analysis of his first play. He was thought to have surpassed 
 it in "The Provoked Wife " (1697) and "The Confederacy " (1705). 
 He also adapted pieces by Moliere, and a French writer nearly 
 forgotten, Boursault. 
 
 George Farquhar. 
 
 George Farquhar, born 1678, at Londonderry, was the son of a 
 clergyman, and was a University wit of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 He early became an actor, and early left the stage ; it is said 
 because he had done accidentally what Mr. Lenville proposed to do 
 of set purpose to Nicholas Nickleby, severely wounded a fellow- 
 player in a stage duel. He then obtained a commission in the 
 army, and wrote plays, " A Trip to the Jubilee," " Sir Harry Wil- 
 dair," " The Way to Win Him," " The Recruiting Officer," "The 
 Beaux' Stratagem " (1707), and others; the characters, such as 
 Scrab, Sergeant TCite, Archer, Lady Bountiful, Captain Plume, 
 and others, were great favourites with Sir Walter Scott, and by 
 him are often quoted. Farquhar died young, at about the age 
 
Restoration Theatre 369 
 
 of 30. George Farquhar with his gaiety, his gallantry, his happy 
 mihtary swagger, his heroes who are not lost to honour, his plots, 
 so comprehensible, and sources of so many merry adventures, 
 wins more sympathy and affection,— dying in the arms of 
 Victory as he did, during the triumph of his last and best play, 
 — than any of the other comic writers of the Restoration. 
 
 Otway. 
 
 Otway, like most dramatists of his day, cannot be fairly judged 
 by his printed works. They want the splendid costumes and 
 decor, the setting of the stage, and the pathos and brilliance of the 
 beautiful actresses, for Otway was most successful in sucjjjgjid^ 
 and distraught heroines as Belvidera a nd Monimja . Born in 1652, 
 T l TOma i i OLWgy"Hlit? '^ft"''^tK'e"^^c!orarWo^eding, in Sussex, 
 entered Christ Church, Oxford, in 1669, but soon left it, on the 
 death of his father, for London. Here he hung about the Duke 
 of York's Theatre, where he failed as an actor. In 1675 he pro- 
 duced a play, " Alcibiades," though, as he says in a preface to his 
 " Don Carlos," " I might as well have called it ' Nebuchadnezzar,' " 
 for Alcibiades acted in a way not consistent with his character. 
 The caprice of the witty, miserable Earl of Rochester won the 
 good will, if nothing more substantial, of the Duke of York for 
 the poet, who dedicates to him the heroic play of " Don Carlos " 
 (1676). In this, according to Otway, Dryden declared that "I 
 know not a line I would not be author of," so the play must have 
 been, and in fact was, a success. It is written in rhyming coup- 
 lets, and even triplets ; the rhymes are often surprisingly bad. 
 The history of the death of Don Carlos, who was mad, is obscure, 
 and Otway treats it with extreme poetic licence. Philip of Spain 
 is here a tender, though avenging, father and husband, who re- 
 pents and rants monstrously, though rant is not the common fault of 
 Otway. There is tenderness and pathos enough to account for 
 the popularity of the play; moreover Otway was known to be 
 hopelessly in love with Mrs. Barry, the beautiful actress ; Rochester, 
 who presently satirised Otway, being his rival. After a luckless 
 campaign with Monmouth in Flanders, Otway, following Dry den's 
 example, abandoned rhyme for blank verse in " T he Orphan" // 
 
 24 " ' " 
 
37o English Literature 
 
 (1680), based on a stock situation in a novel of the seventeenth 
 century. The intrigue, though the crucial situation is not accept- 
 able now on the stage, is ingeniously contrived to bring out the 
 characters of the rival brothers, and Monimia, a very pathetic 
 character, must have drawn many tears. There is the usual 
 number of deaths in the last act. The blank verse has no great 
 distinction, and abounds in redundant feet. Otway, in fact, did 
 not take by literary perfections, but " The Orphan " has no lines 
 so far below the tragic level as the words of the Queen in " Don 
 Carios ". 
 
 How hard it is his passion to confine, 
 I'm sure 'tis so if I may judge by mine I 
 
 The phrase of Monimia when she learns the depth of her 
 misery, " Oh, when shall I be mad indeed ! " is of other metal. 
 
 In 1682, Otway produced his "Venice Preserved ," certainly 
 his best play, which long held the stag^ an(5^asacted now and 
 then up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The conspira- 
 tors in the play may be said to rant, but ifioderation of language 
 does not mark the eloquence of violent revolutionaries with the 
 most bitter personal wrongs to avenge. Eelvidera m ay be " stagey,'' 
 but she has genuine tenderness and pathos ; there is dramatic de- 
 velopment of character in Tafifier : " the moving incident " is 
 abundant ; the absence of poetry was not marked or missed. 
 The scenes with Antonio, a caricature of the Shaftesbury of Titus 
 Oates's plot, with Tiis " I'll prove there's a plot with a vengeance, 
 a bloody, horrid, execrable, damnable, and audacious plot," must 
 have delighted audiences who had just escaped from Oates's reign 
 of lies and'terror. The bloody ghosts who appear in the conclusion 
 are an unhappy reversion to the devices of Chapman. Otway 
 wrote other things, the comedy of " The Soldier's Fortune,'' for 
 example, which, even then, was " so filthy, no modest woman 
 ought to be seen at it," as, Otway tells us, a woman of " a nice 
 marality " declared. Certainly Otway had no real comic genius. 
 Before he wrote "Venice Preserved " Otway was destitute, till re- 
 lieved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, to whom the play is dedi- 
 cated. On the death of Charles II the Duchess ceased, it appears, 
 to succour the poet, who died in deep distress, in April, 1685 ; as 
 
Restoration Theatre 371 
 
 to the manner of his death, stories vary. Probably he was not a 
 careful liver ; profits from plays were slight ; and patrons were 
 niggardly. Otway is undeniably more coherent, more capable in 
 construction than the majority of the tragedians from Chapman 
 to Ford ; but he did not inherit that remarkable, if occasional, 
 gift of greatness in style which was their common portion. 
 
 Nat Lee. 
 
 The reader of the plays in which Nat Lee (1653-1692J em- 
 ploys blank verse, finds it much more satisfactory in its cadences 
 and in movement than the blank verse of Otway. There is some- 
 thing of the old ring in 
 
 For I am doz'd so weary with complaining. 
 That I could stand and listen to the winds, 
 or 
 
 For straight when the sick priest had breathed his last. 
 
 The sacred oil which for a hundred years 
 
 Supplied the sun behind the golden veil, 
 
 Went out and all the mystic lights were quenched. 
 
 Undeniably there was poetry in Lee, but to the pathos, con- 
 centration, and construction of Otway he does not attain. He 
 was bom in Hertfordshire, and educated in Westminster, and 
 Trinity, Cambridge. He was at intervals insane, and while read- 
 ing the speeches of his characters we sometimes seem to " stand 
 and listen to the winds " of a wild night of autumn. 
 
 There is a kind of furious magnificence in the tempestuous 
 tirades of Pharnaces with which the play of " Mithradates " opens, 
 and throughout the terrors of that piece " The old winds cease not 
 blowing and all the night thunders ". The same vigour displays 
 itself in his first tragedy (1675), written partly in " new" rhymed 
 heroic couplets. The ghost of Caligula would 
 
 Burn palaces ; like Thunder I would rove, 
 Tear the tall woods, and rend each sacred grove. 
 
 Lee is, by the way, far too prodigal of his ghosts. His age, 
 at all events the theatre-going part of his contemporaries, was apt 
 to jest at ghosts, following Webster and Wagstaffe, and uncon- 
 
 24 * 
 
372 English Literature 
 
 vinced by Henry More, Glanvill in " Sadducismus Triutnphatus,'' 
 and the other founders of " Psychical Research ". 
 
 In 1677, Lee, with " The Rival Queens," made a success which 
 long held the stage, and t he names of Statira and Roxana, rivals 
 for the love of Alexander the Great, live in memory. Dryden 
 wrote the prologue of the piece, protesting that he was not " log- 
 rolling," and comparing the poet to " Titian and Angelo ". Lee 
 loved a ghost, and that of Philip of Macedon " shakes his trun- 
 cheon at 'em," at the conspirators against Alexander, whom two 
 queens adore with furious passion. Statira's first words demand 
 
 a knife, a draught of poison, flames I 
 
 but, instantly relenting, for she has heard that Alexander loves 
 Roxana, she praises the faithless conqueror : — 
 
 Not the Spring's mouth, nor breath of jesamin, 
 Nor violets' infant sweets, nor opening buds. 
 Are half so sweet as Alexander's breast. 
 
 Though "well-matched for a pair of quiet ones," Statira, of the 
 two, is of milder mood. 
 
 The staging of the play must have been arduous, a battle of 
 crows and ravens fills the air, an eagle and dragon meet and fight ; 
 the eagle and birds drop dead, the dragon flies away, and "soldiers 
 walk off, shaking their heads," and no wonder ! especially as the 
 ghost of Philip is still walking, and a " monstrous child " is weep- 
 ing blood into a silver bowl and throwing the gore over the per- 
 cipients. When the jealous Roxana reaches Babylon, she is as 
 passionate as Statira, and cries to the spectators, 
 
 Away, be gone, and give a whirlwind room ! 
 
 The two queens meet with gentle words, but when their blood 
 is up their language is on the level of the situation. Roxana is 
 the readier with her knife ; the dying Statira forgives her ; Alex- 
 ander dies in a delirium, with a lucid interval at the close. 
 
 Dryden and Lee worked together in " The Duke of Guise ' 
 (assassinated by order of Henri III) and in " OEdipus ". The last 
 is worth reading as an example of the taste of the time. The foun- 
 dation is the " CEdipus Tyrannus " of Sophocles, from which 
 
Restoration Theatre 373 
 
 passages are translated in blank verse. In the preface we learn 
 that Corneille's " CEdipe " " is inferior to the original ". The 
 " CEdipus " of Lee and Dryden goes very far beyond, — and in 
 that sense surpasses — the masterpiece of the Athenian. "All 
 that one could gain out of Corneille was that an episode must lie, 
 l)ut not his way." For " custom has obtained that there must be 
 an underplot of second persons," as, alas 1 there is, while the over- 
 elaboration of the loves of CEdipus and Jocasta. " very curious 
 and disgusting,'' would have seemed to Sophoc'.s the work of 
 Lsestrygonians or some such uncouth barbarians. Jocasta mur- 
 ders all her children — she hangs the girls and stabs the boys, which 
 proves that the taste of Englishmen was infinitely more brutal 
 than that of the prehistoric framers of the original legend. CEdi- 
 pus, after putting out his eyes as in the Greek, commits suicide 
 — by jumping out of an upper floor window ! The love affair of 
 Eurydice, and the charge against her of being the murderess of 
 Laius, are supremely absurd, while the ghost of Laius drives about 
 in a chariot with those of three of his retainers. Even this non- 
 sense is capped by a song about fiends who use red-hot tongs, 
 and boiling cauldrons, and torture " with molten lead in it ". 
 
 Lee and Dryden seem to have stimulated each the other's am- 
 bition to outdo the worst excesses of the most frantic Elizabethan 
 playwrights. They knew, of course, that CEdipus, in the Attic 
 myth, did not kill himself, like a distraught housemaid, by jumping 
 out of a window ; they knew that he lived, and that the children 
 of Jocasta lived and furnished the materials for two noble dramas 
 of Sophocles. But they thought that the blood could not be 
 spread too thick.^ 
 
 Dryden. 
 
 Though Dryden was a dramatist of the Restoration, he was so 
 much else, was a link «j iJirurig llTTRS'fSl'Se'n'^cK^iirof our poetry 
 and prose, that he must be considered apart from smaller wits. 
 
 John Dryden was born ir/iejTT^t Aldwinkle, Northampton- 
 shire. His nameis common irileviotdale : his family was landed, 
 
 'In the Achaean myth, first mentioned in the " IHad," we read that 
 " CEdipus fell," the Greek word is that used for falling in battle. 
 
374 English Literature 
 
 and had a baronetcy : in Scotland it is not a landed name. From 
 Westminster school Dryden went to Trinity, Cambridge, where 
 he was known to Mr. Samuel Pepys. He entered in 1650, at 
 19, an age later than was usual. For some reason he did not 
 like his University. 
 
 Thebes did his green unknowing youth engage, 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age, 
 
 that is Oxford, the home of lost causes, like his own. In 1663 he 
 married Lady Elizabeth Howard ; wrote plays for a livelihood 
 (his rents were small) ; in 1670 became Poqt Laureate and Historio- 
 grapher Royal : acted, we may say, in both capacities in his great 
 satires of the troubles following on the Popish Plot and other 
 poems down to the birth of the Prince of Wales (10 June, 1688), 
 and, after the Revolution, supported himself by playwriting, trans- 
 lating Virgil, by his " Fables," and other works, till his death on 
 I May, 1700. 
 
 Setting aside Milton, who dwelt apart, Dryden was by far the 
 greatest man of letters of the Restoration and the reign of our 
 Dutch deliverer. Under Dryden, and to a great extent through 
 
 \ his versatile and manly genius, English literature matured and 
 clarified itself. Though not averse to far-fetched "conceits" 
 in his early poems, Dryden shook them off; he made the heroic 
 couplet the instrument for Pope and his successors, he gave it a 
 nobility, a richness and depth of music which it had not possessed : 
 it was stronger, more varied, more poetical, in his hands than in 
 those of Pope. Prose, touched by him, became much more lucid 
 and rapid than it had been in the long involved periods of Claren- 
 don, if not so purely simple as the prose of Swift. 
 
 It was, in a sense, the misfortune of Dryden that he was the 
 poet of an age immersed in its own complicated and exciting, and 
 now, to all but careful historical students, not easily understood 
 affairs. We have no adequate and intelligent history of the 
 Restoration. Dryden's verses, for the most part, 'are " topical," 
 deal with events of the day: there is little time for meditation 
 
 ^Von what is universal ; he is an urban poet, too ! nature and land- 
 scape are rarely handled by him. If our ideal of poetry is derived 
 from study of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and other 
 
Restoration Theatre 375 
 
 recent moderns, we do not and cannot find in Dryden what they 
 have taught us to desire and expect. His themes are of his time 
 and of the men and the political passions of his time. His plays, 
 many of them rhymed, are but little read ; nobody strongly re- 
 commends his comedies, which are more coarse than comic ; he 
 did not, himself, think that comedy set his genius. 
 
 His lyrics, though spirited, have not the sweet spontaneity of the 
 true English lyric from " Love has come with Lent te town " to 
 those of the best nineteenth century makers. To read his best 
 satires with entire enjoyment we need to be well acquainted with 
 the obscure intrigues of an age of plots, royal, political, and 
 religious. Yet, through all his poetic work, from his early " Heroic 
 Stanzas " on the death of Cromwell, down to "Alexander's Feast," 
 we see the note and hear the voice of a great poet ; a voice new, 
 noble, sonorous, and his own. There is, in almost all that Dryden 
 did, in his criticism in prose not less than in his verse, a kind of 
 conquering supremacy, an ease, an impetus, and a consciousness 
 of his own greatness which is not arrogance, but lends facility and 
 a triumphant speed to his verse ; while his criticism is that of zest, 
 of delight in excellence wherever he finds it ; from Homer to Virgil, 
 from Virgil to the then little understood Chaucer, to Spenser, 
 Shakespeare, and Milton. 
 
 His "Heroic Stanzas" (published in 1659) in quatrains, may 
 or may not have been inspired by appreciation of Cromwell ; 
 Dryden's kinsfolk were Presbyterian and Parliamentarian ; but his 
 heart and natural inclinations as a man and a poet, were more en- 
 gaged (1660) in his "Astraea Redux," and verses to Charles II 
 on his coronation. Dryden, like Waller, was (to our taste) more 
 successful in praising the great usurper than the Merry Monarch. 
 The first stanza in the poem on Cromwell strikes a ringing and a 
 novel note, but the reader also requires a footnote on Roman 
 imperial funereal ritual before he can understand what is meant. 
 To say of Cromwell, 
 
 To our crown he did fresh jewels bring, 
 while, in fact, he sold the jewels, was to invite satire; to talk of 
 Stanching the blood by breathing of the vein, 
 
376 English Literature 
 
 was thought an odd way of alluding to regicide : though Dryden 
 may perhaps have spoken of the wars in general. 
 
 Her safety rescued Ireland to him owes 
 
 is a strange compliment to the man of the Drogheda massacre. 
 Dryden, at this time, wrote as a Protestant ; much later he was 
 reconciled to the ancient Church. 
 
 His "Astrsea Redux,'' and poem on the Coronation of 
 Charles II show his early mastery of the heroic couplet. Scott 
 thought that in these poems the Muse awoke, like the Sleeping 
 Beauty of the fairy tale " in the same antiquated and absurd vest- 
 ments in which she had fallen asleep twenty years before ". This 
 means that the so-called "metaphysical " style of far-fetched conceits 
 and comparisons (which Sir Walter heartily hated) still prevailed. 
 There are, indeed, traces of the habits attributed by fable to 
 elephants, and remote classical allusions, and abrupt changes of 
 metaphor from anatomy to bait-fishing (of which Dryden was 
 fond) and it is rather absurd to make a ship of war " groan beneath 
 the weight " of a lad like the Duke of Gloucester ! But the verse 
 is excellent, and the spirit high and joyous, as became the great 
 occasion. As. much may be said of the lines addressed to 
 Clarendon. 
 
 In the "Annus Mirabilis " (1667), concerning the naval war 
 with Holland^ncl'Vne \jrear Fire of 1666, Dryden reverted to the 
 quatrains made fashionable by Davenant's "Gondibert". Mr. 
 Pepys, of the Admiralty, thought this " a very good poem," it 
 came home to his bosom and business, and, as a poem of waiv.is 
 much superior to Addison's " Campaign ". There are still con- 
 ceits, as when Dutch mariners killed on board a ship laden with 
 spices and Oriental porcelain "by shattered porcelain fall," or "by 
 aromatic splinters die ". To appreciate the poem the reader needs 
 a good chart and an intimate knowledge of naval history, but the 
 vigour of the verses on the fire carries them on like the confla- 
 gration itself. The " Prayer of Charles II " is royal, and worthy of 
 David, to whom Dryden had already compared him in " Astraea 
 Redux," as later in " 4bsalom ," "^ ^p)^;i-^pU„i » Indeed Charles 
 in certain points of conduct resembled the Psalmist. 
 
Restoration Theatre 2)11 
 
 For some fifteen years Dryden was now to be occupied with 
 playwriting, and his tragedies and comedies, as his latest editor 
 says, supply the historian with " the most troublesome and perhaps 
 the most thankless . . . part of his task ". But Dryden does not 
 live by the merits of his dramas. When we have said that Scott, 
 with all his zeal for old plays, did not like Dryden's, it is clear 
 that people less omnivorous in literature and less devoted to the 
 drama, will leave them alone. 
 
 Of Dryden's first comedy, "The Wild Gallant," 1663, Mr. 
 Pepys said it was " so poor a thing as I ever saw in my life ". It 
 was condemned, but was amended and repeated. The judgment 
 of Mr. Pepys was well deserved. The play is in prose. 
 
 "The Rival Ladies" (published 1664) was reckoned "inno- 
 cent and most pretty witty " by Pepys : it is partly in poor blank 
 verse, partly in rhymed couplets : in the preface Dryden says that 
 Waller " first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly in 
 distiches, which, in the verse before him, runs on for so many lines 
 together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it ". The 
 plot is reckless of probability, but, on the whole, the thing is not 
 coarse as well as shocking to the credulity of the reader. 
 
 In "The Indian Queen" (1664) Dryden added some scenes 
 to a " heroic " play by Sir Robert Howard, and is credited with 
 the part of Montezuma. The "heroic" play resembled the im- 
 mense extravagant romances of the day (" Gondibert " is a versi- 
 fied romance of this kind) ; written by Mdlle. de Scudery and her 
 imitators. Intricate prolonged extravagance was then character- 
 istic and Sir George Mackenzie (" Bluidy Mackenzie "), who wrote 
 sucn^a romance about the civil war, reclioned these heroic tales 
 the final and perfect type of the novel. 
 
 "The Indian Emperor," in rhyme (1665), was a contribution by 
 Dryden to this class of drama. Cortez and Pizarro go conquer- 
 ing together, which is odd, " in a pleasant Indian country," within 
 two leagues of Mexico. The High Priest's morning sacrifice has 
 disposed of 500 human victims — love scenes with ladies of such 
 Mexican names as Almeria and Cydaria follow ; Cortez and 
 Pizarro approach in arms, Cydaria and Cortez fall in love, in a 
 song, and after much heroic passion, all ends happily for the 
 
2,78 English Literature 
 
 lovers. The merits of the versification and the rhetoric are great ; 
 Montezuma is racked on the stage ; and holds a dialogue about 
 religion, in fine distiches, with his equally tormented High Priest. 
 The priest expires, but Cortez releases Montezuma, and throws 
 the blame on Pizarro. 
 
 "The Conquest of Granada" (1670) was a yet more triumphant 
 play of the heroic variety; "The Rehearsal," a satirical piece, 
 partly by the Duke of Buckingham, partly by collaborators, derided 
 " Bayes " (as we have seen) ; and as Dryden received the Laureate's 
 bays in 1670, he is, at least, in part, the object of the mockery. 
 He took it very unconcernedly, and went on writing heroic plays, 
 but in 1 677-1 678, in "All for Love," abandoned rhyme for blank 
 verse. " The Spanis h Friar" (1681) was a "topical" play, full of 
 the Protestantism ol'T)arS!?B Popish Plot. 
 
 The sequels of the Whig and Protestant lunacy of the Popish 
 Plot, and the political turmoil and Whig conspiracies in the 
 interests of Monmouth, and against the successiop of the Duke 
 of York (James II.), found Dryden on the side of the King, and 
 gave occasion for his greatest works, the political satires, " Absalom 
 and Achitophel " (Monmouth and Shaftesbury) and " The Medal " 
 (1681-1682), while more amusing if less monumental, is "Mac- 
 Flecknoe," the attack on the Whig playwright and versifier. Shad- 
 well. " The Hind and Panther " (the Roman and Anglican 
 Churches) is not very appropriate in its allegory, but magnificent 
 in many passages of verse. Dryden came into the religion of the 
 Duke of York, apparently from conviction, and so threw in his 
 lot with a doomed cause. After the Revolution of 1688, no 
 longer Laureate, he simply worked hard at literature for his live- 
 lihood. He translated Virgil with much spirit, into rhymed ten 
 syllabled couplets ; and wrote that Ode to the Pious Memory of 
 Mrs. Anne Killigrew which contains his repentance for the pros- 
 titution of the Muse throughout the revel of the Restoration. 
 
 O gracious God ! how far have we 
 Profaned thy heavenly grace of poesy f 
 Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, 
 Debased to each obscene and impious use, 
 Whose harmony was first ordained above 
 For tongues of angels and for hymns of love. 
 
Restoration Theatre 379 
 
 Dryden's old age, as the dictator to the wits at Will's Coffee 
 House, was tranquil and happy : he had sown his literary wild 
 oats, his life was one of peaceful and honoured industry, with- 
 out failure of mental force. He died in May, 1700, and was 
 buried near Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, with strangely maimed 
 rites, according to Farquhar, the author of " The Beaux' Stratagem," 
 who was present. 
 
 Dryden's prose, chiefly critical, was addressed to that part of 
 the literary world, the Court and the Town, and the Templars, 
 which was mainly interested in the theatre. He could thus write 
 with freedom, alertness, and gaiety, to appreciative readers con- 
 cerned with the problems of the drama. It had almost expired 
 by a kind of natural decay, moral and literary, before the theatres 
 were closed by the Puritans. Now writers of plays looked back 
 on the glories of the " former temple," to Jonson, Fletcher, and 
 Shakespeare, and also looked abroad to the French stage then 
 flourishing under Corneille and Moliere. Which was the better 
 way? Was the rhyme of French tragedy, and of many French 
 comedies, to be imitated? It was imitated, and in his rhymed 
 tragedies Dryden acquired his mastery of the couplet. What was 
 to be said for and against the English practice of an upper and an 
 under plot? What were the famous " unities " of time, place, and 
 action ? Should deaths be merely reported or presented on the 
 stage ? Dryden observes that the audiences used to laugh at dying 
 scenes in tragedies : " it is the most comic part of the whole play ". 
 
 Having such topics to discuss, Dryden adopted the prose style 
 so justly appreciated, though it was the reverse of his own manner, 
 by Dr. Johnson. Dryden's prefaces to his plays " have not the 
 formality of a settled style, in which the first half of the sentence 
 betrays the other. The clauses are never balanced, nor 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." 
 
 The most famous essays are those of " Dramatic Poesy," and 
 "The Preface to the Fables," adaptations or " translations " of 
 Chaucer and Boccaccio. The former essay is, in form, a 
 
380 English Literature 
 
 dialogue, held in a boat on the Thames, while the thunder of the 
 guns, in a great naval battle against the Dutch (3 June, 1665) dies 
 away from the English shores, with promise of an English victory. 
 The speakers are Lord Buckhurst, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden's 
 brother-in-law, the poet himself, and Sir Charles Sedley, the gay- 
 est of the four, though his knowledge of Aristotle's " Poetics " is 
 far from adequate. The speeches are rather long ; there is no 
 rapid interchange of opinions. In Dryden's lips are placed the 
 words, " Shakespeare was the man who of all modern, and perhaps 
 ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul ". Yet 
 " he is many times flat, insipid ; his comic wit degenerating into 
 clinches, his serious swelling into bombast ". Dryden, here, and 
 in " The Preface to the Fables,'' was much more keen to praise 
 Shakespeare than to blame him : in the second place the zest with 
 which he applauds Shakespeare and Chaucer (whose scansion, 
 unluckily, he did not understand), is worthy of himself and of 
 them. He translated Virgil, but, when he did some Homeric 
 passages into English, we see how entirely the Greek, to his taste, 
 overcomes the Mantuan poet. " I have found, by trial. Homer 
 a more pleasing task than Virgil . . . the Grecian is more ac- 
 cording to my genius than the Latin poet." 
 
 Dryden himself, at the meeting of the ways of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries, belonged by genius more to the past 
 than the immediate future. His criticisms are like the conversation 
 of a great artist, speaking of his art, and also (Dr. Johnson thought 
 him too copious on this subject) of himself. But here Johnson 
 resembles Dryden when he rebukes Andromache, at her last leave- 
 taking with Hector, for speaking of her utter bereavement of father 
 and brothers by the spear of Achilles. " The devil was in Hector," 
 says Dryden, "if he knew not all this matter, as well as she who 
 told it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years to- 
 gether" — an error in fact, and an example of Dryden's occasional 
 frivolity. 
 
 The work of Thomas Southerne has for long been neglected, though 
 Garrick, by making excisions and modifications, restored part of it to the 
 stage. Southerne was born before the Restoration (i65o), and lived to see 
 the last effort of the Stuart cause crushed in 1746. Born in Dublin, he went 
 
Restoration Theatre 381 
 
 to Oxford, neglected the law, gave his first play in 1682, paid court to the 
 Duke of York, got <t commission in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and 
 wrote, in 1687, a play, not acted till 1721, in which he satirized Mary, the 
 daughter of James II. Dryden doubled, in Southerne's case, the price of a 
 prologue, raising it from £5 to ;£io, but Southerne raised the gains of authors, 
 getting ;£700 for a single piece, while Dryden never received more than 
 ;f 100. Southerne's new comedies were popular after the Revolution of 1688. 
 The plot of his " Innocent Adultery " (dear to Lydia Languish) was taken 
 from a novel by Mrs. Aphra Behn — the play, in 1758, was revived by 
 Garrick ; — from Mrs. Behn also Southerne dramatized " Oroonoko, or the 
 Loyal Slave "- This piece, with the licentious comic scenes removed, was 
 revived in 1759, and a new age saw how Southerne 
 
 " Touch'd their fathers' hearts with gen'rous woe. 
 And taught their mothers' youthful eyes to flow," 
 though 
 
 " With ribald mirth he stained his sacred page ". 
 
 In 1725, the poetic fire of Southerne died out in " Money the Mistress ". 
 The author was liked by everybody, even by Pope, known to all as " honest 
 Tom," and addressed by the Earl of Orrery in a letter as " My Dear Old 
 Man ". Southerne did not affect the development of the stage, and the 
 better part of his " Oroonoko " is due to Mrs. Behn: people who laughed ax 
 the sub-plot were easily amused. 
 
 Of Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) space suffices only for the statement that 
 he was made Poet Laureate under George I., edited Shakespeare, and wrote 
 " Jane Shore," " in imitation of Shakespeare's style "- Here is a sample of 
 the imitation : — 
 
 " If poor, weak woman swerve from Virtue's rule, 
 If strongly charmed she leave the thorny way, 
 And in the softer paths of pleasure stray, 
 Ruin ensues, reproach and endless shame. 
 And one false step entirely damns her fame." 
 
 The blank verse too is remote firom the Shakespearean. 
 
 The Stage (like the world after the death of Donne's Miss 
 Drury) continued to exist after the death of Steele. Young and 
 Johnson, Thomson and John Home wrote tragedies, and acting 
 comedies abounded, but we do not find comedies that live and 
 give, pleasure in the reading till we come to Goldsmith and 
 Sheridan. 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 AUGUSTAN POETRY. 
 
 Alexander Pope. 
 
 Alexander Pope, the son of Catholic parents in the trading class, 
 was born in the year of Revolution, 1688. His education was 
 private, priests were his tutors, but he acquired Latin, and was 
 from childhood a great reader of poetry, and an imitator of what 
 he read. He was not born deformed, but overstudy, perhaps, or 
 unnoted accident, made him the stunted and crooked thing that 
 he became, while his health, and the hideous personal insults 
 which his enemies used as freely as Hazlitt did in later times, ex- 
 asperated his temper. 
 
 His parents withdrew to Windsor Forest, a centre of Catholic 
 families like the Blounts and Englefields. Pope was early intro- 
 duced to the coffee-house wits by the most chivalrous and accom- 
 plished of men, Charles Wogan, who, in 17 19, rescued from prison 
 in Austria, and brought to her affianced prince in Italy, Clementina 
 Sobieska, mother of Prince Charles. 
 
 Pope corresponds very early, on literary subjects, with the 
 veteran Wycherley (of whom Pope's account is, as always, quite 
 untrustworthy) and with " knowing Walsh ". He taught himself 
 verse by translating the Latin poet Statius, and at 2 1 published, in 
 1709, his "Pastorals,'' "written at the age of 16," according to 
 Pope. 
 
 It is not possible here to examine all Pope's statements about 
 his works, all his really ingenious ways of fishing for fame, of mys- 
 tifying; and, with none of the coarseness of our contemporary 
 literary advertisement, of acting as his own interviewer and his own 
 
 38a 
 
Augustan Poetry 383 
 
 advertiser. He had no need to practise these arts, but his metliods 
 are amusing as exposed by his learned and hostile editor, Elwin. 
 Pope's great delight was in literary quarrels, and he managed to pick 
 some very pretty quarrels out of remarks on his pastorals and those 
 of Philips which appeared in "The Guardian". Pope preluded 
 his pastorals by an essay on pastoral poetry in general ; a genre 
 of which it may be said that Theocritus (using literary models, 
 such as Stesichorus, and also familiar with the songs of Sicilian 
 peasants) introduced it in immortal poems ; Virgil imitated Theo- 
 critus : and Pope thinks that Virgil " refines upon his original, and 
 in all points when judgment is principally concerned, he is much 
 superior to his master". It would have been pleasant to set down 
 Pope to the construing of a few passages from Theocritus. Pope 
 kept pretty close to his originals ; and follows his own advice 
 " the numbers should be the smoothest, the most easy and flowing 
 imaginable ". The brevity of the pastorals, their smoothness, and 
 their avoidance of the " burning questions " of the day, so com- 
 monly intruded into Elizabethan pastorals, permit Pope's to be 
 read with ease and even with pleasure. 
 
 In the " Essay on Criticism " (i 7 11) we find Pope with an ambi- 
 tion to reform the world of literature. It is not easy to find out ex- 
 actly what he would be at, for he uses such terms as " Nature," " wit," 
 " judgment," in various ways. Nature seems permanent enough, 
 but human views of " Nature '' differ perpetually, and when Pope 
 says, " First follow Nature," what does he mean by " Nature " ? 
 Why are " wit " and " judgment " " at strife '' ? The poet refers 
 them to Nature as interpreted by Greek art for a verdict ; and of 
 Greek art he knew very little. Read Homer and Virgil, especially 
 Virgil, he says. The poem, though it teaches us little about criti- 
 cism, is full of lines so witty and so pointed that they are now 
 proverbial. 
 
 In 1 7 13 he published "Windsor Forest," admired by Swift, 
 his life-long friend; with Addison he was on apparently good 
 terms, but he was already suspicious. He attacked Dennis, who had 
 assailed Addison's "Cato," and he did so in a style which 
 Addison, through^Steele, repudiated. Addison's praise of Philips's 
 pastorals, with their Fairies, to Pope appeared dispraise of his 
 
384 English Literature 
 
 own ; and in an article in " The Guardian " he made fun of Philips 
 with ingenious irony of commendation. 
 
 Pope's great work, his version of the " Iliad," appearing in por- 
 tions (17 15 -17 20), met a kind of challenge in Tickell's version of 
 the First Book. Addison spoke well of Tickell's specimen ; did 
 he write it, or inspire it, or set it up as a rival to Pope's ? Pope, 
 much later, told his own story of his wrongs and of his noble 
 and dignified treatment of Addison. His most loyal biographer 
 cannot accept the tale : at all events Pope wrote, and much later 
 published, his famous verses on Addison (Atticus). (Published, 
 1722, after Addison's death.) The two men ceased to be friends, 
 but Addison never hit back. Pope had also suspected him for 
 doubts as to the wisdom of adding to the first shape of "The Rape 
 of the Lock " (17 12) the machinery ®f Sylphs and Gnomes in the 
 second form (17 14). The addition was deservedly successful, 
 but Addison might well hesitate to recommend a change in that 
 tiny mock-epic of a quarrel about the stealing of a lock of hair. 
 It is perfection in its way, in its wit, sauciness, and gaiety. 
 
 The " Iliad," a terrible task for Pope, executed through long 
 years of advice from all quarters, of doubt, and of weariness, wa5,a 
 triumph, celebrated in charming verses by Gay's " Welcome to Mr. 
 Pope on His Return from Greece ". In that strange age the noble, 
 the great, the beautiful swelled Pope's triumph ; literature was 
 fashionable. Pope's " Iliad " can never be superseded as a master- 
 piece of English literature. He was no scholar, but he had many 
 friends to help him, and his plan was to give the .spirit of the 
 Epic, as he conceived it, in a form which his age could appreciate. 
 It is almost as if he had talcen Homer's theme and written the 
 poem himself. The minor characteristics of the antique rnanner 
 are gone ; but his age would have thought them barbarous and 
 fatiguing. Wherever there is rhetoric, as in the speeches of the 
 heroes, Pope is magnificent ; where there are pictures of external 
 nature he is conventional. But he is never slow. His conventions 
 were those of his age, and are extinct, but time cannot abate the 
 splendour of his spirit. 
 
 In doing the " Odyssey," of which the first part appeared in 1725, 
 he was aided by Fenton and Broome, who, under his supervision, 
 
Augustan Poetry 385 
 
 wrote exactly like himself. With them, too, there were quarrels ; 
 they were not paid in what they reckoned a satisfactory style. 
 Pope received about ^10,000 in all for Homer, a large sum in 
 those days, and not likely to be equalled by the gains of any later 
 translator of Homer. He dabbled in the shares of the South Sea 
 Bubble, and appears to have been rather a winner than a loser. 
 
 He had accumulated quarrels to his heart's content, hence 
 "The Dunciad" of 1728-1729 : a satire on minor men of letters, 
 in which he shows wit and ill-nature enough, with a vein of true 
 poetry in the conclusion ; but the dirt and the personalities are 
 now rather amazing than agreeable; while the necessary notes 
 below drive the text into the garrets of the page. Not even Lady 
 Mary Wortley Montagu, who had laughed at Pope's attempts to 
 make love to her, escaped a flick of the whip of scandal in " The 
 Dunciad ". Perhaps Pope had not been gently treated, but nobody 
 admires his revenges. The business of publication was managed 
 with all the intricate wiles and subterfuges in which he took such 
 strange delight. One of his butts, Gibber, retorted in kind, and 
 was successful in giving pain : Theobald, a useful editor of Shakes- 
 peare, Pope assailed, because Theobald had not spared the errors 
 in- his own edition (1728). 
 
 His later works, Epistles to Burlington and Arbuthnot, " The 
 Essay on Man," the " Imitations of Horace," are full of the wit 
 and polished verse that were natural to Pope, and were fostered 
 by his friendships with St. John (Bolingbroke), Swift, Gay, and Ar- 
 buthnot ; friendships that never failed, and eternally testify to the 
 better part in Pope, despite his tempers of malice and his feline 
 arts. His enthusiasm for Atterbury, exhibited in letters written 
 before the bishop's too well-merited exile, is the most romantic 
 point in his career. Late in life he was kind to Johnson and 
 Thomson ; he had been a good son ; his character greatly irritated 
 his most learned editor, Mr. Elwin ; but nobody suffered so much 
 from his faults of jealousy and suspiciousness as Pope himself. 
 He died on 30 May, 1744. 
 
 Ever since the romantic movement of the early nineteenth 
 century, people have asked "Was Pope a poet?" He was, in 
 the highest degree, the kind of poet that his age and the English 
 
 25 
 
386 English Literature 
 
 society of his age desired and deserved ; a town poet — -where rural 
 nature is concerned, conventional and unobservant ; where Man 
 is concerned a poet of Man, literary, political, and fashionable. 
 In the great fight over Pope's claim to be a poet, of 1819, when 
 Bowles was the assailant, Byron was the champion of Pope : Byron 
 himself being a satirist and a poet of mankind, urban, political, 
 and fashionable, as well as piratical. Horace was busied with 
 the same field of human nature (not with the desperate pirate and 
 remorseful Giaour) but nobody has asked " Was Horace a poet ? " 
 
 Pope wrote in reaction against the conceited poetry of the 
 seventeenth century ; he did well, though the manner was already 
 dead, but he never came within sight or hearing of the inspired 
 songs of Lovelace and Carew. The world of Pope was in many 
 ways a limited and evanescent and artificial world ; but in his 
 verse it lives eternally, and that is enough for his fame, and testi- 
 mony sufificient to his genius. He brought his instrument, the 
 decasyllabic couplet, to the perfection required for his purpose, 
 each couplet existing in and for itself. But in reading him we 
 feel that " paper-sparing Pope " wrote down his best passages, de- 
 tached, on the backs of letters ; they are separate inspirations, and 
 are fitted into the whole like fragments of a mosaic : for ex- 
 ample the lines on Atticus are fitted into " The Epistle to Arbuth- 
 not ". His rhymes, as " fault " to " thought," are not the things 
 on which he bestowed most pains. 
 
 Concerning other poets — Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare — we 
 feel that, in any age of literature, in any period of taste, under any 
 conventions, they must have been great. Pope, on the other hand, 
 cannot easily be thought of as having the capacity for greatness, 
 except in the literary conditions of the early eighteenth century. 
 But in that period he was supreme. 
 
 Prior. 
 
 From the galaxy of wits who dined with Harley and St. John 
 and were addressed in that splendid society by their Christian 
 names, Jonathan or Mat, Matthew Prior stands somewhat apart. 
 His duties as a diplomatist carried him abroad ; he owed his 
 diplomatic posts to his wit, not to his birth, which Queen Anne 
 
Augustan Poetry 387 
 
 spoke of as unpleasantly obscure. He was born on 14 July, 1664, 
 at Wimborne or Winburn, in Dorsetshire ; Westminster was his 
 school, and St. John's, Cambridge, his college. Here he took his 
 degree, in 1686, and obtained a fellowship in 1688. He attracted 
 the notice of the Whigs by parodying Dryden's " Hind and Pan- 
 ther," in "The Town and Country Mouse,'' aided in the jest by 
 Charles Montagu. Dryden is very improbably said to have wept ; 
 the Whigs, at all events, laughed, and in 1691 made Prior secre- 
 tary to the Embassy in Holland. He held the same post at 
 Versailles later ; at this time he was a sincere eulogist of our 
 Dutch deliverer, William III, whom he celebrated in " The Car- 
 men Seculare" (1700), indeed constantly, like Horace, he "prais- 
 ing his tyrant sung ". Reviewing history, he places William before 
 a number of Roman heroes, and, remembering that William's wife 
 is a Stuart, bids the god Janus 
 
 Finding some of Stuart's race 
 Unhappy, pass their annals by. 
 
 But, as thou dwell'st upon that heavenly name 
 To grief for ever sacred, as to fame, 
 O ! read it to thyself: in silence weep I 
 
 Is the name Charles or Mary ? At this time there was a 
 fashionable cult of Mary Stuart. This long ode, granting the 
 mythology, has considerable merit, though, says Dr. Johnson, 
 " Who can be supposed to have laboured through it ? " Not the 
 Doctor, as he candidly confesses. 
 
 Under Queen Anne, Prior was tempted over to the Tory party, 
 and his doings, as a negotiator with France, were thought, and 
 perhaps not unjustly, to smack of Jacobitism. He was in Paris 
 when Beatrix Esmond's Duke of Hamilton was about to go thither 
 on a mission, and there seems little doubt (from a record by 
 Lockhart of Carnwath, the leader of the Scottish Cavaliers) that 
 Hamilton was to bring over to England, in disguise, the exiled 
 son of James II, "the Pretender," as Colonel Esmond does in 
 Thackeray's novel. But Hamilton fell in a duel with Mohun, and 
 that chance was lost. 
 
 As acknowledged ambassador, Prior was at the French Court 
 
 25 * 
 
388 English Literature 
 
 from August, 17 12, to August, 17 14, when the death of Queen 
 Anne scattered the Tories. Early in 1715 he was locked up on 
 suspicion of treason, and was not released till three years later. 
 
 The hope of the Whigs was to decapitate Harley, who lay in 
 the Tower ; but Harley could have involved Marlborough, possess- 
 ing a fatal letter of his, and finally Prior and Harley were released. 
 He had now no resources except his college fellowship, but his 
 friends by securing a large subscription for his poems, and by the 
 generosity of the family of Harley, placed him beyond want. He 
 died on September 18, 1721. 
 
 Prior does not live by his "Alma, or the Progress of the 
 Mind,'' a long poem in rhymed eight syllable couplets, in the 
 manner of Butler's " Hudibras ''. This work is a kind of comic 
 history of Psychology, and ends with Barry Lyndon's rhyme to 
 Aristotle, " Here, Jonathan, your master's bottle ! " Prior's 
 "Solomon," on the vanity of knowledge, pleasure, and power, 
 in heroic rhymed verse, is best remembered for two lines to 
 Abra, and might, so easily does the author take his theme, be 
 called the vanity of melancholy, though it closes in serious ad- 
 monitions to " the weary King Ecclesiast ". 
 
 Prior's tales in the manner of Fontaine's " Contes," are lively, 
 like these ; and like these, may have seemed coarse to such a 
 moralist as Sir Richard Steele. 
 
 Prior, in fact, lives by his merry, tender, light, and bright 
 social verses, in tripping measures, for example, " Thus Kitty, 
 beautiful and young " (for Gay's patroness, the Duchess of Queens- 
 berry), "To a Child of Quality," "The Merchant, to Secure His 
 Treasure," " Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face," and 
 many other things ; the best reminding us more of the charming 
 trifles in the Greek Anthology than of Horace. 
 
 Gay. 
 
 The spoiled improvident child in the group of wits was John 
 Gay, to whom Pope and Swift were attached by the most tender 
 affection. Gay was an author who never aimed high, but who 
 almost always hit his mark and pleased the Town. But his success 
 was so much the consequence of choosing the happy moments, 
 
Augustan Poetry 389 
 
 his poems are so completely poems of his age, that he is now 
 praised at a venture rather than read. He was born at Barnstaple, 
 in Devonshire (1685); though of an old family he "was without 
 prospect of hereditary riches,'' and was "placed apprentice with 
 a silk-mercer " in London. 
 
 Perhaps some fair customer discovered that he had a soul 
 above silk ; the Duchess of Monmouth, the heiress of the Scotts 
 of Buccleuch, made him her secretary (17 12). Becoming acquainted 
 with Pope, Gay dedicated to him (17 13) his "Rural Spoits " in 
 the usual heroic rhymed couplets. Gay's descriptions of nature, 
 and his praises, are more genuine than, in that age of the Town, 
 such things usually were. He writes of angling " with his eye on 
 the object," in Wordsworth's phrase. His remarks on fishing with 
 the worm, a theme unworthy of the Muse, are judicious. As to fly 
 fishing, Gay is among those who advocate a search for the insect 
 in the waters and an exact imitation. He would have us fish 
 " fine and far off," with "a single hair" next the hook, and per- 
 haps he is the first to recommend the use of the "dry " or^floating 
 fly : " Upon the curling surface let ft glide," not sunk. The catch- 
 ing of a salmon is not ill described, but as Gay retains his "single 
 hair," he must always have been broken if he did happen to hook 
 a fish. For his own part, he never uses either worm or the natural 
 fly : never tries for coarse fish — pike, perch, and so forth, — and this 
 justifies the affection of his friends. 
 
 In "The Shepherd's Week" (17 14) his Idylls describe real 
 peasants with their folklore superstitions, but Virgil, or Theo- 
 critus, is still imitated. The pastoral is an extinct species of 
 literature, but Gay's were more natural and popular than Pope's. 
 Dedicated to St. John, in verses celebrating the recovery of Queen 
 Anne, who presently .died, the poems were ungrateful to the 
 Hanoverian Court, and Gay lost the secretaryship to an 
 ambassador. 
 
 Gay's "Welcome from Greece, to Mr. Pope on his having 
 finished his translation of the ' Iliad,' " has already been mentioned 
 as one of. the most charming relics of that golden age of letters, 
 wit, and friendship. 
 
 Friendship did not aid wit, when Pope and Arbuthnot took 
 
390 English Literature 
 
 hands in, and ruined, Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," a 
 comedy which was not comic ( 1 7 1 7). In 1 7 20 his collected poems 
 brought Gay ;^iooo : but a gift of stock in the South Sea Bubble 
 was profitless, as Gay would not sell out in time. In 1 7 2 7 he 
 was oflfered by George II a Court place so small and ludicrous 
 that it was declined 
 
 Gay next made an immense but not a lucrative success with 
 "The Beggar's Opera," which had an unexampled run of seven 
 weeks. A sequel was not licensed by the censor; Gay was 
 recouped by a subscription, and fell out of Court favour. 
 The Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty), carried him to her 
 place in the country, and here he was petted till his death, which 
 seems to have been caused by indolence and the pleasures of 
 the table. 
 
 His " Trivia,'' on walking the streets of London, is a vivacious 
 picture of the crowds, dirt, and bustle : liis " Fables," though 
 original and witty, are, like pastorals, an obsolete form of 
 literary entertainment. He wrote his own epitaph. 
 
 Life is a jest, and all things show it, 
 I thought so once, but now I know iti 
 
 He took a different view of this important theme in " Thoughts 
 on Eternity ". 
 
 Ambrose Philips. 
 
 But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his 
 " Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical 
 review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remem- 
 bered. The modern art of " booming " was illustrated in Philips's 
 case. A whole 'Spectator'" was devoted to a puff of his 
 adaptation ("The Distressed Mother") of the "Andromache" 
 of Racine : and another told how it affected Sir Roger de 
 Coverley. As has occasionally happened more recently, though 
 advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch Pope, 
 " Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd 
 admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, 
 became the ludicrous nickname. Namby-pamby. But for Philips 
 
Augustan Poetry 391 
 
 there was not lacking a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, 
 and in Ireland places were found for the exile. Philips trans- 
 lated several Odes of Pindar, and though he had not the pinion 
 of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are plainly visible 
 in his versions, 
 
 TiCKELL. 
 
 Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's 
 reign scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 
 1686, educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in 
 connexion with Pope's story that to damage his translation of the 
 " Iliad," Addison translated the First Book and published it, aver- 
 ring that Tickell was the author. That Addison was guilty of a 
 villainous action is, says Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell 
 was capable of a villainy is highly improbable, that the twain were 
 united in a base conspiracy is improbable " out of all whooping ". 
 But that Pope's mind, resentful, brooding, and inventive, came to 
 believe in the conspiracy, is, unfortunately, only too natural. We 
 know the figments of all sorts which the imagination of Shelley 
 imposed on him ; they were, at least, more romantic than the 
 figments of Pope. In both cases there is a resemblance to the 
 fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane. 
 
 Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addi- 
 son, and wrote verses commendatory of his opera, " Rosamond," 
 and of his tragedy, " Cato ". His translation of the First Book of 
 the " Iliad " is really good, when we consider the poetic conventions 
 of the age, and the inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. 
 He who would estimate the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's 
 task, should endeavour, himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer 
 into the classical metre of Queen Anne's day. When Tickell pakes 
 Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis, say 
 
 Not Clytasmnestra boasts a nobler race, 
 A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face, 
 
 he is comically remote from what Agamemnon«does say in Homer, 
 and the sweetness of Clytseninestra's temper was never famous. 
 Tickell's " Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul " is much 
 
392 English Literature 
 
 less spirited and literal than Pope's " Thou dog in forehead and in 
 heart a deer " (" Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," 
 is the literal version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his 
 age than Pope, shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's 
 version is spirited and lucid ; the course of events can be easily 
 followed : the reader is enabled to understand the tragic situation 
 from which the whole epic evolves itself. If Pope had not written, 
 if Tickell had finished his version as well as he began it, he would 
 have satisfied public taste, and won considerable fame. 
 
 Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, " most Whiggish of 
 Whigs," Swift said. This makes his line on "An Original 
 Picture of King Charles I, Taken at the Time of His Trial," all 
 the more curious. The portrait, of which several replicas exist, 
 was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy in Tickell's day, about 
 1 7 14. (Bower was the painter.) 
 
 How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care. 
 What steady sadness and august despair I 
 
 says Tickell. The look is one of melancholy scorn rather than of 
 despair. Tickell falls foul of the artist : 
 
 Thy steady hands thy savage heart betray, 
 Near thy bad work the stunn'd spectators faint, 
 Nor see unmoved what thou unmoved could'st paint. 
 
 Bower, in fact, produced the most sympathetic portrait of the King. 
 Tickell proceeds to curse Cromwell, bless the Restoration, and 
 salute Queen Anne as a Stuart. 
 
 Not much Whiggery here ! But when the Hanoverian dynasty 
 and the Whigs came in, Tickell was strong on the winning side. 
 His " Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman at 
 Avignon," from a Jacobite lady to a gentleman at James's Court, is 
 very prettily written, and the following lines are true. 
 
 Then mourn not, hapless prince, thy kingdoms lost ; 
 A crown, though late, thy sacred brows may boast ; 
 Heaven s^ras, through us, thy empire to decree. 
 Those who win hearts have given their hearts to thee. 
 
 On his side "James reckons half the fair''. 
 
Augustan Poetry 393 
 
 Say, will he come again ? 
 
 Nay, Lady, never. 
 Say, will he never reign ? 
 
 Ay, Lady, ever, 
 
 sings a modern poet, whose heart is true to George ? How- 
 ever, Tickell's lady reflects that the Hanoverian sway is good for 
 trade, and in the end prefers London to Avignon. 
 
 Ini 7 1 7 Addison made Tickell his under-secretary — Tickell had 
 always been his "understudy". In 1740 Tickell died, in the 
 enjoyment of one of these lucrative places which rewarded the 
 loyalty of literary Whigs. 
 
 With Tickell, the name of Thomas Parnell (i679-i7r8) goes 
 naturally. He was a minor light among the wits ; was befriended 
 by Swift, and is remembered for "The Hermit," "The Night- 
 Piece on Death," and one or two other effusions. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 AUGUSTAN PROSE, 
 
 Steele. 
 
 Steele and Addison are the Twins among the stars of the age . 
 of Queen Anne. Swift impresses us as a greater genius than 
 either Steele or Addison, but he is not loved, and he is not read as 
 they are. Their lives, till two or three years before Addison's 
 death, were united. They were schoolfellows at Charterhouse, 
 fellow-undergraduates at Oxford, each was apt to take a hand in 
 the other's play when the stage >attracted them ; they wrote to- 
 gether in the two famous journals, " The Tatler " and " The 
 Spectator," which Steele created ; some essays therein are a patch- 
 work of pieces from both hands. They were both anxious to 
 cleanse the stage ; to bring decent morals and manners into fashion. 
 In the original manuscript of Steele's comedy, " The Conscious 
 Lovers" (1722), are rough notes for a preface, written after 
 Addison's death, " The fourth act was the business of the play. 
 The case of duelling I have fought nor shall I ever fight again . . . 
 Addison told me I had a faculty of drawing tears ... Be that 
 as it will, I shall endeavour to do what I can to promote noble 
 things. ..." 
 
 Both men were moralists, but while Addison was the more 
 moral, Steele was infinitely the more greatly given to moralizing. 
 His heart was in the right place. He honoured women and 
 pure affection, and temperance, and the wedded state. But his 
 many brief notes to his second wife " Prue " (Miss Scurlock), 
 written from all manner of places and at all sorts of hours, prove 
 that poor Prue had often to dine alone. Business detained her 
 Richard ; he came home with the milk, and had a terrible head- 
 
 394 
 
Augustan Prose 395 
 
 ache next day. With the posts which he held under Government, 
 with what he gained by his pen (and he was the owner of his own 
 paper, and his own paymaster), with Mrs. Steele's fortune, they had 
 resources enough, but Richard at intervals sends Prue a guinea or 
 two ; Richard is constantly in hiding from the bailiffs ; is never out 
 of debt ; sometimes there is no coal, candle, or meat in the house. 
 Steele was the most affectionate of men and the most generous. 
 He boasted that the world owed Addison's essays to him, be- 
 cause he had made Addison overcome his laziness, and he told 
 the world how greatly Addison was his superior. He wishes that 
 they might write together some work to be called " The Monu- 
 ment," the memorial of their friendship. He took the side of 
 poor discharged soldiers, whipped from parish to parish for their 
 poverty. He adored children ; his tears were as ready and heroic 
 as the tears of Homer's warriors. But when he yielded to the 
 temptations of the bottle and of extravagance, his wife and. 
 children had to suffer just as much as if Richard, in place of being 
 a Christian Hero, had been no better than the wicked. Like 
 Balzac he was a man of debts and of projects ; he even wasted 
 money on alchemy, and had a scheme for getting wealth in con- 
 nexion with a lottery, a scheme which even then was found to be 
 illegal. Mr. Swinburne called Steele " a sentimental debauchee," 
 and indeed he shone more in preaching than in practice. Addi- 
 son calls him " poor Dick," he is "poor Dick " to all the world now, 
 if he were Sir Richard " to all Europe ". But, when he preached, 
 he meant what he said, and his pleasant sermons, or rather pleas 
 for goodness, kindness, faith, did " promote noble things,'' and he 
 left the world more decent and more human than he found it. 
 
 Steele was born in Dublin in 1672 ; his family were not Celtic 
 Irish folk ; his father was in what is reckoned the less noble 
 branch of the legal profession. When Sir Richard assumed 
 heraldic bearings he calmly annexed those of another family of 
 Steele, as the elder Osborne, in " Vanity Fair," was supplied by 
 his coachbuilder with the arms of the House of Leeds. Like the 
 cousin of Mr. Isaac BickerstafF, in "The Tatler " (No. 14), he was 
 guilty of "treason against the Kings at Arms". Of his child- 
 hood we know only what he tells in that pathetic passage 
 
396 English Literature 
 
 about his father's funeral : " I had a battledore in my hand and 
 fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa, for, I know not how, I 
 had some idea that he was locked up there. . . . My mother was 
 a very tieautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity 
 in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which me- 
 thought struck me with an instinct of sorrow that, before I was 
 sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul and has made 
 pity the weakness of my heart ever since" ("Tatler," No. 181). 
 " Hence it is that in me good nature is no merit, but having been 
 so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause 
 of any affliction ... I imbibed consideration, remorse, and an 
 unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten 
 thousand calamities. . . ." So a " Night of Memories and Sighs " 
 is consecrated by Richard to his beloved dead, " when my servant 
 knocked at the door with a letter, attended by a hamper of wine, 
 of the same sort with that which is to be put on sale at Garraway's 
 coffee house. Upon the receipt of it I sent for three friends. . . . 
 We drank two bottles a man,'' and, as Mr. Arthur Pendennis says, 
 found that there " was not a headache in a hogshead ". 
 
 The fluid, in fact, as we know from the advertisement in this 
 number of " The Tatler," was " extraordinary French claret ''. 
 Dick conscientiously tested its merits, and gave it a puff in addi- 
 tion to the advertisement which was paid for. Thus he "pro- 
 moted everything noble," including the vintage of Bordeaux, and, 
 as Thackeray saw, there is no more characteristic essay of Steele's 
 than this meditation on 'death and grief and loyal memory : i leal 
 souvenir I 
 
 Steele lost his mother also in his childhood. He had an uncle, 
 Henry Gascoigne, who, like Swift's uncle, provided for his education, 
 but more generously. Attached to " Erin's high Ormonde," Gas- 
 coigne obtained for Steele a nomination to Charterhouse (1684) 
 (Thackeray's school), where Steele met Addison, and their friend- 
 ship began. In 1689 Steele went up to Christ Church, Addison 
 being at Magdalen ; in 1691 Steele gained a " postmastership " (a 
 scholarship) at Merton, a college to which he was warmly attached, 
 presenting its ancient library with the volumes of "The Tatler "- 
 He left just before his Schools (that is his examination for a 
 
Augustan Prose 397 
 
 degree). In 1694 he entered the Duke of Ormonde's Guards as a 
 trooper, apparently gentlemen did this as a way of approaching a 
 commission. Steele got his as a reward for a poem on the death 
 of Queen Mary — the piece was dedicated to Lord Cutts, Colonel 
 of the Coldstreams. He befriended Steele, who, stationed at the 
 Tower, made the acquaintance of Congreve and the wits, and de- 
 feated Captain Kelly in a duel. Probably the contrast between 
 the delicacy of Steele's sentiments, and his vein of sincere piety, on 
 one hand, with his addiction to mundane pleasures, on the other, 
 made him as notable in his regiment as Aramis, Abb6 d'Herblay, 
 among the Musketeers of Louis XIV. 
 
 Steele, when once he took a pen in his hand, wrote much 
 against duelling, exposing the ludicrousness of the institution. 
 His remarks had no effect ; what killed the duel in England was 
 the use of the pistol : unromantic, fatal, and fortuitous. His 
 duel may have made men more wary of bantering Steele, 
 but his "Christian Hero," a work of military devotion (1701) 
 lowered his character in the regiment. To restore it he wrote his 
 comedy "The Funeral" (1701); to show that blasphemy and 
 intrigue were no necessary components of a play : for he was 
 wholly of the party of Jeremy Collier. The idea of the plot, the 
 revival of Lord Brampton while his coffin is waiting for him, and 
 his watching of the manoeuvres of his hateful widow, while his fair 
 ward. Lady Sharlot, escapes in the coffin from her enemies (a com- 
 mon situation in ancient ballads) is too grotesque. But the 
 scenes with the hired mutes, with the poor broken soldiers, with 
 Lady Brampton and her maid, are very amusing. Steele's ex- 
 posure of the low tricks of lawyers, his appeal for cheap and acces- 
 sible justice for all, are much in Dickens's manner, and the loves 
 of Lord Hardy and Lady Sharlot are as pure as bonny Kilmeny, 
 while Lady Sharlot, in her encounter with Lady Brampton, gives 
 proof of high spirit, and Lady Harriet is a flirt as harmless as 
 lively. 
 
 Like the other wits, Steele was 1 presented with lucrative posts, 
 such as the editorship of the colourless official " Gazette ''. In 
 tHk same year, 1707, he married his second wife, Miss Scurlock, 
 the adored Prue, a woman of some property. He had a house at 
 
398 English Literature 
 
 Hampton Wick, horses, gardeners, footmen, everything handsome 
 about him. In 1709 he founded "The Tatler," a folio sheet of 
 printed matter, appearing thrice a week and containing news, 
 political and social, correspondence, and the charming essays 
 which soon became most important. Steele wrote 1 88 of these 
 papers, Addison, forty-two, in thirty-six both men took a hand. 
 Swift wrote very seldom. The essays, with those which he wrote 
 in " The Spectator," and in other papers, are the foundation of the 
 fame of Steele. They vary much in theme and style. To digest 
 the " Iliad " into a journal, and reckon up the days of the events, 
 cannot have much amused the public. There is plenty of 
 dramatic criticism. Steele openly avows that he is a member of 
 the Society for the Reformation of Manners ; blames the plays of 
 Wycherley and the rest, and calls in the name of Virtue for fre- 
 quent representations of Shakespeare. " The apt use of the 
 theatre is the most agreeable and easy way of making a polite and 
 moral gentry, which would end in making the rest of the people 
 regular in their behaviour," a pleasing opinion which is not quite 
 justified by experience. 
 
 Dick was a constant patron of the best plays, but regular his 
 behaviour was not. Various, excellent, and amiable as are Steele's 
 essays, neither in style nor in thought do they wear quite so well 
 as Addison's. Yet it is scarcely just to draw a distinction which 
 may rest only on individual taste. 
 
 "The Tatler's" last appearance was on 2 January, 17 n. 
 Steele ended with a paper in which he generously attributes to 
 his friend the essays which he deemed of most value. On 
 I March the first number of " The Spectator " appeared — it ceased 
 to exist on 6 December, 1712. Steele's new journal, "The 
 Guardian," lasted for six months in 17 13; he was elected as 
 member for Stockbridge, and theri came a quarrel of Whig and 
 Tory with Swift, who wrote in "The Examiner". The arrival 
 of George I from Hanover procured various lucrative posts, a 
 patent for a theatre, and a knighthood for Steele : he edited " The 
 Englishman," and attacked Swift's fallen friends, Harley and St. 
 John; and in 17 16 he got an income of ;^iooo a year as one Cf 
 the commissioners of the estates forfeited by the Scottish Jaco- 
 
Augustan Prose 399 
 
 bites who were out for their King in the rising of 1715. This was 
 not a pleasant appointment to a man of feeUng. Of the coolness 
 between Steele and Addison we speak elsewhere. 
 
 In 1722 Steele's "Conscious Lovers," with another attack on 
 duelling, was acted with success, and dedicated to the "gracious 
 and amiable sovereign," George I. Gibber the actor added scenes 
 rather more gay than the rest, for so moral is this drama that Field- 
 ing's Parson Adams, in " Joseph Andrews," said " it contains some 
 things almost solemn enough for a sermon ''. His connexion with 
 the theatre brought Steele into more than one lawsuit ; his failing 
 health, and the assiduities of his creditors caused him to prefer to 
 reside in Wales ; he died in Carmarthen on i September, 1729. 
 Like Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Walton, and Scott, he has made 
 all his readers his friends, and if his plays are not acted much, the 
 Lydia Languish of Sheridan, and the Tony Lumpkin x)f Goldsmith, 
 are reflections from his Biddy and Humphrey in "The Tender 
 Husband," a not successful comedy of 1705. 
 
 Addison. 
 
 There were few forms of literature, from the sacred hymn to 
 the libretto of an opera, in which Addison did not adventure 
 himself with ■ success more than respectable. It is, however, as 
 an essayist that he survives, and is read and admired. Born on 
 I May, 1672, he was the eldest son of the Rev. Lancelot Addison, 
 who, after acting as chaplain to the garrisons of Dunkirk and, later, 
 of Tangier, obtained the small living of Milston, married the 
 sister of a bishop, and in 1683 received the Deanery of Lichfield. 
 He was something of a Jacobite, and as an author had pleasing 
 traits of humour and irony. His son Joseph passed through two 
 local schools, and thence to Charterhouse (Thackeray's school) 
 whence first to Queen's, then to Magdalen, Oxford, where he held 
 a demyship (scholarship), and was later a Fellow. 
 
 "Addison's Walk" is in the little wood round which two 
 branches of the Cherwell meander with a mazy motion. Addison 
 was soon admired for the excellence of his Latin verses : he made 
 Dryden's acquaintance, and complimented him in verse ; he began 
 
400 English Literature 
 
 a translation of Ovid for Tonson, in the usual ten-syllable rhyming 
 couplets. 
 
 Some of the stories of the Metamorphoses remain, with notes 
 of literary criticism, including a compliment to William III. 
 "The smoothness of our English verse," he casually remarks, "is 
 too much lost by the repetition of proper names," which, in fact, 
 are sonorous ornaments of the verse of Milton, Scott, Tennyson, 
 and others. But Addison, bent on "smoothness" had not yet 
 come to appreciate Milton; still less, in his early "Account of 
 the English Poets," Spenser, who 
 
 Can charm an understanding age no more. 
 
 The young champion of smoothness and common sense unblush- 
 ingly rhymed " success " to " verse ". 
 
 Reluctant to take Orders, without which his Fellowship must 
 lapse, Addison, through Congreve, was introduced to Charles 
 Montagu (later Halifax) who, with Somers, wished to enlist Addi- 
 son for his powers as a writer. They obtained for him a travel- 
 ling pension of ;^3oo yearly, and in December, 1699, he left 
 Marseilles for Italy. 
 
 His published remarks on Italy, written in a simple and easy 
 style, are of interest mainly because they are so unlike modern 
 ecstasies about the country. What most pleased Addison was to 
 compare the scenes and towns which he saw, with the descriptions 
 of them which, in Latin authors, he had read. To the natural 
 beauties of the land, and to the works of Christian art, he is al- 
 most blind ; Paul Veronese leaves him cold ; at Verona he says 
 nothing of the tomb of Romeo and Juliet, which, perhaps, was not 
 yet shown. At Venice he is most concerned about the military 
 strength of the place; "Tintoret is in greater esteem than in other 
 parts of Italy," and that is enough about Tintoret ! The Vene- 
 tian comedies " are more lewd than in other countries ". Addi- 
 son paid a good deal of attention to ancient coins; and Pope 
 wrote commendatory verses for his " Dialogues on Medals," and 
 hoped that, on medals, Addison and Craggs will be represented : 
 Craggs's' effigy is to have an inscription in six heroic lines. 
 Though the Dialogues be antiquated as archaeology the descrip- 
 
Augustan Prose 401 
 
 tion of collectors of coins is amusing : one of the speakers 
 hastens to add that the science " must appear ridiculous to those 
 who have not taken the pains to examine it ". Addison, in a 
 kind humorous way, strove to convince his age that ignorance is 
 not the best judge of the historical, social, and artistic value of 
 numismatics. 
 
 Returning to England in 1703 Addison was poor, and had no 
 prospect of employment. The Whigs, however, wanted to make 
 the most of Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. Strange as it 
 seems to us, poetry had influence, a poet was needed, Halifax re- 
 commended Addison ; the Chancellor of the Exchequer found him 
 " up three pairs of stairs," and " The Campaign " was written. 
 The scene is familiar to readers of " Esmond ". Thackeray, de- 
 voted to Addison as he was, asks " how many fourth form boys at 
 Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that 
 now ? " as well as Addison writes in several passages of " The Cam- 
 paign ". Probably no fourth form boys would write 
 
 With floods of gore that from the vanquished fell, 
 The marshes stagnate, and the rivers swell. 
 
 However the simile of the Angel has been reckoned fine, and the 
 poem " fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strength- 
 ened the position of the Whig Ministry " (what a task for the Muse !) 
 and obtained patent places for the poet. As Under-secretary of 
 State, Addison had leisure to write the libretto of " Rosamond," 
 an opera, in which Queen Eleanor does not poison Rosamond, but 
 gives her, like Juliet, a sleeping draught. The King says 
 
 O quickly relate 
 This riddle of fate! 
 My impatience forgive 
 Does Rosamond live ? 
 
 Eleanor explains the situation : — 
 
 Soon the waking nymph shall rise 
 And, in a convent placed, admire 
 The cloistered walls and virgin choir : 
 With them in songs and hymns divine 
 The beauteous penitent shall join. 
 26 
 
402 English Literature 
 
 Finally the King and Queen sing 
 
 Who to forbidden joys would rove 
 That know the sweets of virtuous love ? 
 
 Who indeed? 
 
 The rise of Blenheim Palace is prophesied, and Marlborough 
 is flattered ingeniously by the Muse of Whiggery. The " under- 
 standing age " was not charmed : it was not absolutely destitute of 
 humour. Nor was Addison. The intentionally funny parts of the 
 opera, though not so comic as the serious passages, are not un- 
 worthy of Sir W. S. Gilbert. Sir Trusty, finding Rosamond's 
 corpse, as he supposes, says 
 
 The King this doleful news shall read 
 In lines of my inditing ; 
 Great Sir 
 
 Your Rosamond is dead, 
 As I'm at present writing. 
 
 Addison's unacknowledged comedy, "The Drummer," based 
 on the famous rapping spirit at Tedworth (1662), was a failure, 
 and died on its third night (1715). 
 
 Of his lucky tragedy, " Cato," he seems to have written four 
 acts in Italy. As early as April, 1 7 1 1, Addison confided his ideas 
 on Tragedy to the Town ('■' Spectator,", No. 39). They show us 
 how far the wits of " the understanding age " of Anne, had moved 
 from the taste of the Restoration stage. Addison is " very much 
 offended when I see a play in rhyme ; which is as absurd in 
 English, as a tragedy of hexameters would have been in Greek or 
 Latin". But blank verse is "in such due medium between 
 rhyme and prose that it seems wonderfully adapted to tragedy," 
 as the Elizabethan tragedians had not failed to discover. The 
 thoughts of English tragic writers, especially of Shakespeare, "are 
 often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and 
 forced expressions in which they are qjothed ". These expressions, 
 however, have been admired by many. The English tragedian 
 is apt to make his hero successful in the fifth act : Addison does 
 not approve of a modernization of " Lear," in which, as in the 
 chronicles which told the story. King Lear and Cordelia triumph 
 
Augustan Prose 403 
 
 in the end. Aristotle says, Addison reports, that the populace 
 preferred tragedies which ended ill (but Addison himself has made 
 the tale of Fair Rosamond end happily). He makes no universal 
 rule, only protests that a tragedy should not be compelled to con- 
 clude with comfort. There is "nothing which delights and 
 terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when 
 he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a 
 play." Addison applauds the handling of the ghost in " Hamlet " : 
 ghosts, in fact, need delicate handling. For the moving of pity, 
 our principal machine is the handkerchief; and the introduction 
 of an orphan or two, but not of half a dozen fatherless children. 
 "That dreadful butchering of one another,'' with the use of racks, 
 thumbscrews, and other instruments of torture, gives occasion to 
 French critics to think us a people who delight in blood. 
 
 In practice, Addison produced a tragedy which political ac- 
 cidents made highly successful at the moment, and which has 
 enriched the stock of quotations. But Dr. Johnson described it as 
 rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just 
 sentiments in elegant language than a representation of natural 
 affections. . . . The events are expected without solicitude, and 
 are remembered without joy or sorrow. The " love interest," 
 Pope says, was a popular after-thought, and Pope told Addison 
 that the play was better fitted to be read than to be acted. 
 Thanks to the habit of mingling literature with politics, the play 
 (13 April, 17 13) was "expected" with "solicitude" by Whigs and 
 Tories. " All the foolish industry possible has been used to make 
 it thought a party play," says Pope. The leaders of each party 
 clapped loudly at each remark that might be twisted into a 
 political allusion, while Addison, with Dr. Berkeley and two or 
 three friends, in a side-box " had a table and two or three flasks 
 of Burgundy and champagne, with which the author (though a 
 very sober man) thought necessary to support his spirits ". A 
 run of thirty-five nights, a great marvel then, also sustained the 
 spirits of Addison. 
 
 Addison does not hold his high and enviable place in our 
 literature by virtue of his plays, poems, and work on Medals, but 
 of his brief Essays in " The Tatler " and " The Spectator ". We 
 
 26 * 
 
404 English Literature 
 
 have already seen how Steele and he worked, in the most pleasant, 
 kindly, and humorous tone, for the improvement of morals and 
 manners in the Court and Town. 
 
 The aim of Addison was " to temper wit with morality and to 
 enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this 
 day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, 
 one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes be- 
 fore us in all its aspects — toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, 
 masquerades : there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections 
 at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at West- 
 minster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office,'' 
 asking for advice on points of etiquette ; there are musical strains 
 of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter ; there are crea- 
 tions of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the 
 rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back 
 from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived 
 lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry 
 of the past, " songs and fables that are come from father to son, 
 and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries 
 through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he 
 says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, " the favourite ballad of the 
 common people of England ''. In our time, a critic would fall 
 back on the history of the ballad, showing how " Chevy Chase " 
 is a later version of " Otterbourne," a poem common, with 
 patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison " Chevy 
 Chase " is an heroic poem : as such he treats it, and shows how 
 touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil. 
 
 Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of con- 
 ceits ; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and 
 " The Lay of the Last Minstrel ". In quite another style take 
 Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand 
 odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. 
 Leonora has "all the Classic Authors — in wood," dummies 1 "A 
 set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, 
 " by the same hand " — the cabinetmaker's. There are several of 
 the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of 
 Human Understanding, with, a paper of patches in it " : " Clelia, 
 
Augustan Prose 405 
 
 which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a 
 bower." Most of the books were bought, not " for her own use," 
 but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she 
 had seen the authors of them ". 
 
 Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of 
 the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is 
 serious indeed ; but, we ask, are either men or women more seri- 
 ously inclined, oil the whole, to study than they were in Queen 
 Anne's day?. Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world 
 watching women's pretty humours — fashions, follies, flirtations, 
 rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It 
 was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society " a liberal 
 education ". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu proclaimed to be " the best companion in the world ''. 
 
 There is still no better companion : we can still hear him 
 "sweetly talk and sweetly smile "in his Essays. He knows so 
 much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Cole- 
 ridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories : and this child 
 of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious 
 remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe 
 that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet " makes no doubt 
 of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after 
 their death ... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which 
 he could not have the confidence to deny. . . ." He explains by 
 "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever 
 started " — in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius 
 has lately been revived. 
 
 What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns 1 
 His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save 
 in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead. 
 
 The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy 
 humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they 
 reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must 
 be admitted that Addison's manner o'i ^x\'iva% sent son vieux temps, 
 is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. 
 Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the " Odyssey " where the 
 
4o6 English Literature 
 
 hero beholds, in the next world, " the far-renowned brides of an- 
 cient song,'' would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the 
 finest women ". Nor, when the hero says " each of them gave me 
 an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say " this 
 is a gentle satire upon female vanity " ! To give such an account 
 is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether 
 men or women. 
 
 " The Spectator " was dropped after running for about two years, 
 not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's " Essay on 
 Criticism ". Steele introduced Pope to Addison ; perhaps they 
 never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense 
 could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain 
 and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions pro- 
 duced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead. Pope emitted his 
 venom in the poisonous character of " Atticus " : — 
 
 Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
 And born to live, converse, and write with ease ; 
 yet, 
 
 Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne," 
 
 and so forth. Nothing that inspired skill and spite can do is 
 better than this satire; had Addison been alive when it was 
 given to the world he could not have hit a return blow, for cruelty 
 was not in his nature, and Pope was so sensitive that any retort 
 on him was cruel. 
 
 In 1715 Addison conducted for six months another paper, 
 "The Freeholder," in the Whig interest; was made one of the 
 Commissioners for Trade and the Colonies, and married the 
 Dowager-Countess of Warwick. He died in 17 19, "three years 
 after that splendid but dismal union," says Thackeray. A dowager- 
 countess is not usually splendid, and we really have no reason to 
 think that the union was " dismal ". Addison's position as Secre- 
 tary of State was sufficiently good, not to speak of his fame, 
 popularity, and genius. In 17 19 Addison was matched against 
 Steele in a newspaper controversy : Steele probably was not welcome 
 to Lady Warwick at Holland House, but the two men, says Steele, 
 "still preserved the most passionate concern for their mutual 
 welfare. When they met they were as unreserved as. boys. . . ." 
 
Augustan Prose 407 
 
 Addison with Steele, founded a school of essayists of merit, 
 who never came near the supremacy of their masters : Addison 
 not only delighted his world, but left it better than he found it ; 
 not by preaching violent sermons, not by "lashing the vices of 
 the age," but by sensibly lowering the tyranny of the fashion which 
 insisted on the duty of being vicious. 
 
 Swift. 
 
 Concerning the genius, character, and career of Jonathan 
 Swift there are interesting varieties of opinion, but nobody denies 
 that the genius was great or that the career was sad, strange, even 
 mysterious. In an old-fashioned comedy of Humours, Swift 
 would have been cast for the part of Wycherley's Captain Manly 
 in "The Plain Dealer"; the man of tender heart who hates an 
 age and a society that do not come up to his ideals. Swift had, 
 indeed, depths of affection, and a noble capacity for friendship, 
 but, unlike Captain Manly, he would never have made Fidelia, 
 or any other woman, happy. He lived in this world the life of a 
 flogging schoolmaster. He expresses a hope, at about the age of 
 26, that, in his poems. 
 
 Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire. 
 
 He hopes, at the same hopeful period, that 
 
 My hate, whose lash just heaven has long decreed, 
 Shall on a day make Sin and Folly bleed. 
 
 He lashed away, but Sin and Folly remained " more than usual 
 calm," they did not hear, they did not heed him; and the pre- 
 sentable part of his most comprehensive and ferocious satire of 
 humanity, the one book published by him which is still generally 
 known, " Gulliver's Travels," has been an innocent source of 
 amusement to many generations of children. 
 
 At about the age of 37, Swift, in a private letter, wrote 
 thus of his own case, "I envy very much your prudence and 
 temper, and love of peace and settlement : the reverse of 
 which has been the great uneasiness of my life, and is like to con- 
 tinue so". He recognizes one source of his sorrows. As to 
 
4o8 English Literature 
 
 "prudence," Swift had even too much of it, if "prudence" were 
 the motive which made him put off marriage with the woman 
 (" Stella," Esther Johnson) whom he loved, and who loved him. 
 But for "peacei and settlement," he had no partiality; and his 
 temper was no better than he deemed it. 
 
 The curses of Swift were, first, his just consciousness of powers 
 far superior to those of the great politicians who adulated, and 
 used, and failed to reward him. With their wine, and their 
 amours, and their bitter, petty jealousies, they let the great oppor- 
 tunity go by, and, lo ! Harley is in the Tower ; and Bolingbroke, a 
 fugitive, drinks, and loves, and intrigues in France, vituperating 
 the Prince whose cause he has helped to ruin ; while Swift eats out 
 his own heart in that Ireland which he hated. 
 
 Another curse was that he had attached himself as a priest to 
 the Church of England; while the author of "The Tale of a 
 Tub," however loyal he might be in practice, certainly cannot 
 have been " a trusty and undoubting Church of England man ". 
 Of all the creeds, of all the Churches > and Sects, in his heart he 
 thought like the Jupiter of his poem, 
 
 You, who in various Sects were shamm'd, 
 And come to hear each other damn'd. 
 
 This bleak lucidity of soul, this consciousness of being able 
 "to see forward with a fatal clearness," this knowledge of the 
 greatness of his own genius, — thwarted by poverty, driven wild 
 by servitude, lacerated by the torments of a mysterious disease, 
 crushed by terrible forebodings of the appointed end ; these things 
 drove Swift to cut himself among the tombs, and to curse in the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Though born in Dublin (30 Nov. 1667) Swift was no Irish- 
 man : his father belonged to an old Yorkshire, his mother to an 
 old Leicestershire family. But on his father's death, his mother 
 being left ill-provided, Swift's was the position of a poor relation. 
 His training at Kilkenny school and Trinity College, Dublin, was 
 paid for by his uncle, Godwin Swift, who was either poor or 
 penurious. Men like Swift seldom yield much attention to their 
 tutors ; and Swift, though he did well in Greek and Latin, failed 
 
Augustan Prose 400 
 
 in physics and took no pains with his Latin essay. He was, how- 
 ever, allowed to pass. In 1688 he went to England, to his mother 
 at Leicester, and in the following year entered the household of 
 Sir William Temple, a politician and diplomatist, retired from 
 active life, busy with literature and gardening, but in friendly 
 relations with William III and with men of affairs. 
 
 Sir William Temple (1628-1699) was himself a writer ad- 
 mired for his style, especially in his Essay on Poetry. His 
 periods, though long, are graceful and well balanced, but seldom 
 have such brief melancholy cadences as this reflection " when all 
 is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a 
 froward child, that must be played with and humoured a little to 
 keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over ". 
 
 Swift's position, at first, was between those of a secretary and 
 an upper servant ; he left Temple's house for Ireland, in 1 690 ; 
 returned in 1691 : next year obtained a degree at Oxford; and in 
 1694, in Ireland, took Orders, and received a small benefice, 
 Kilroot, near Belfast, where the people were Presbyterians, and he 
 bad no congregation worth mentioning. He entangled himself 
 with a Miss Waring (Varina) and wrote " Pindaric " poems. 
 Dryden, a remote cousin of his, told him that he would never be 
 a poet, and no other reason has been discovered for Swift's flouts and 
 jeers at Dryden's reputation. The anecdote may be untrue, and, 
 as a Catholic, Dryden would be disapproved of by Swift. 
 
 In 1696 Swift was reconciled with Temple, and during the 
 next two years was treated with more favour, met politicians, 
 met the King ; educated Stella, an inmate of Temple's house, 
 then a girl of 15 ; read much in Temple's library, and was 
 about to attach himself to the double-dyed traitor, Sunderland, 
 when Sunderland was dismissed from ofifice. Swift went back to 
 Ireland, held a living at Laracor, lived much with Lord Berkeley 
 at the Castle, Dublin ; wrote lively verses of the lighter sort, 
 wrote a political pamphlet which was successful, and showed 
 leanings towards the Whig party. In London (1704) his "Tale 
 of a Tub" was published anonymously: it had been composed in 
 1696-1697. 
 
 In "An Apology " (1709) Swift, still, as always, anonymous. 
 
4IO English Literature 
 
 writes " the book seems calculated to live as long as our language 
 and our taste admit no great alterations". In taste great altera- 
 tions have been admitted. Though excellent judges still ap- 
 plaud this whimsical allegory, few readers who approach it with 
 high expectations are likely to escape disappointment. The alle- 
 gory of Peter (Rome) Martin (Anglicans and Lutherans) and 
 Jack (Presbyterians and all other Protestant sects), is utterly in- 
 coherent. At present no self-respecting person would write of the 
 religions of Islam and Buddha in such terms and such temper as 
 Swift wrote about the Churches and sects of Christianity. What- 
 ever we may think of Transubstantiation and Vestments, we do 
 not make uproarious fun of them. 
 
 Already Swift indulges his half- insane delight in malodorous 
 references ; the wit of the dirty schoolboy scrawling on the 
 walls. Few things in the work are more witty than this on 
 Dryden : "he has often said to me in confidence, that the world 
 would never have suspected him to be so great a poet, if he had 
 not assured them so frequently in his prefaces, that it was im- 
 possible they could ever doubt or forget it ". 
 
 Thackeray remarks, " I think the world was right, and the 
 Bishops who advised Queen Anne not to appoint the author of 
 ' The Tale of the Tub ' to a Bishopric, gave perfectly good ad- 
 vice ". James IV did not give Dunbar a benefice : the line must 
 be drawn somewhere. Swift, in his "Apology," denied that he 
 had attacked religion : be it so, he had written on matters ecclesi- 
 astical with amazingly bad taste. His " Argument against Abol- 
 ishing Christianity" (1708) is not the sort of argument that we 
 expect from a bishop-postulant, but its irony seems as charming and 
 dexterous now as it did two centuries ago. In " The Tale of a 
 Tub," on the other hand, we seldom find a passage that wins a 
 smile, except in " those fine curses " which Peter spoke, and in 
 some of the gambols of Jack. The apologue, in fact, is heavy- 
 handed ; the author does not clearly know where he is making 
 for ; the perfect clearness of his later style is absent. (These ob- 
 servations, entirely candid, are at odds with the usual applause of 
 " The Tale of a Tub ".) 
 
 With " The Tale of a Tub " was published, in the same volume, 
 
Augustan Prose 4 1 1 
 
 "The Battle of the Books,'' written about 1697 ; this was a now 
 belated contribution to the controversy as to the relative merits of 
 the Ancients and the Moderns, begun in France by Charles Perrault, 
 the author of our most familiar fairy tales. As it happened. 
 Temple, in an essay, had taken up the cause of the Ancients, and 
 had chosen, as proofs of superiority of the oldest books, the 
 Fables ascribed to ^sop, and the Letters attributed to Phalaris, 
 the half-mythical tyrant of Agrigentum. The matter of the fables 
 is prehistoric, but the crooked slave, ^sop, did not contribute 
 their form ; and the Letters of Phalaris were a literary exercise 
 composed long after the tyrant's date. Wotton, with some help 
 from the greatest scholar of his day, Richard Bentley, King's 
 Librarian, and (1700) Master of Trinity, Cambridge, replied to 
 Temple, and Charles Boyle, of Christ Church, Oxford, introduced 
 a personal squabble with Bentley. The Christ Church wits, in- 
 cluding the formidable Atterbury, sided with Boyle, — there was a 
 war between elegant scholars, on Boyle's side; and the nascent 
 science of the Royal Society allied with perfect scholarship and 
 Bentley, on the other. Boyle did not insist that the Letters of 
 Phalaris were genuine ; Bentley displayed his sagacious learning 
 in his proof that they were not. Temple was discreetly silent, but 
 Swift espoused the cause of the wits in " The Battle of the Books ". 
 The Books in the King's Library, Ancient and Modern, meet in a 
 parody of a fight in Homer. The goddess, Dulness, befriends 
 the Moderns, as Aphrodite, in Homer, protects Paris and ^neas. 
 The mock- Homeric manner was not then outworn, and it amused ; 
 while Swift heaped personal scorn on Bentley, and, of course, on 
 Dryden, who is ridiculed for being old. Bentley, crooked-legged 
 and hump-backed, is armed with a flail, and "a vessel full of 
 ordure ". Boyle transfixes Bentley and Wotton as a cook spits a 
 brace of woodcocks — and that is the humour of it. 
 
 Infinitely more amusing were Swift's predictions of the death 
 of a prophetic almanac- maker. Partridge (1708), and the sequel 
 of that jest. Swift styled himself Isaac Bickerstaff, and lent the 
 name to Steele, for use in his new paper "The Tatler''. He 
 lived in close friendship with Addison, Steele, Congreve, and 
 Prior ; and began his love affair with Miss Vanhomrigh, the 
 
412 English Literature 
 
 unfortunate Vanessa, rival of Stella. Like Lord Foppington, Swift 
 probably coveted nothing less than her heart, which she gave,^and 
 his difficulty was " to get rid of the rest of her body ". 
 
 After a visit to Ireland, Swift returned to find the Tories in 
 power, " a new world " (September, 1710). He met Harley (Lord 
 Oxford), took service under him, and for three years was the 
 Achitophel of the Tories, writing for them lampoons and political 
 pamphlets which "were cried up to the skies" For half a year 
 (17 10-17 11) Swift's papers appeared in " The Examiner ". Swift 
 dined with Harley and St. John — they called him, "Jonathan " ; he 
 snubbed their attempts to treat him as a mere gentleman of the 
 Press ; and in the delightful pages of his familiar " Journal to Stella," 
 he paints the age, and himself, triumphant, adulated, powerful, but 
 " seeing all his own mischance"; "I believe they will leave me 
 Jonathan as they found me ". 
 
 Among the pamphlets of this period are " The Hue and Cry 
 after Dismal" (Lord Nottingham, ancestor of Horace Walpole's 
 " black funereal Finches "), and the more important " Conduct 
 of the Allies" By 17 13 Swift hoped "that the present age and 
 posterity would learn who were the real enemies of the country ". 
 The old question of Tory Short and Whig Codlin ! But he had 
 cruelly offended the Duchess of Somerset by "The Windsor 
 Prophecy " ; and the Queen could not endure the author of " The 
 Tale of a Tub "- He asked for his reward, and with much 
 trouble obtained the Deanery of St. Patrick's, Dublin (June, 1713). 
 He went to Ireland, but he could not get rid of Vanessa. Her 
 letters pursued him ; other letters called him to town — Harley and 
 St. John were at odds, and he was needed. He engaged in a 
 paper war with Steele, now an enemy ; he wrote " The Public 
 Spirit of the Whigs " ; he offended the Scottish members, and the 
 Duke of Argyll, the hero of Malplaquet, an ill man to meddle 
 with. He was consoled by the friendship of Pope, Gay, and 
 Arbuthnot, a good man and a great humorist. They founded 
 the Martinus Scriblerus Club, for the writing of facetious papers : 
 but politics went ill, Harley and St. John quarrelled in the Queen's 
 presence: her death was near; Harley was overthrown by St. 
 John ; St. John had no courage, and, on the death of Anne, was 
 
Augustan Prose *" 413 
 
 checked by Argyll and his regiment. Bishop Atterbury would 
 have proclaimed the King, King James over the Water ; the lay- 
 men dared not back him ; the Elector of Hanover occupied the 
 throne ; and of Swift's great friends St. John fled to France, and 
 Harley was imprisoned in the Tower ; while Swift, hooted by the 
 pressmen whom he had bullied, made for Ireland. The Jacobite 
 Cause was lost, and we cannot here ask, would Swift (as St. John 
 says in " Esmond ") have accepted the Primacy of England from 
 la bonne cause, the young Catholic King ? 
 
 My life is now a burden grown 
 To others, ere it be my own, 
 
 Swift wrote. He corresponded (1716) with Atterbury, and Atter- 
 bury was at the head of the Jacobite party in England. In 1 7 1 9 
 Swift dedicated to a Swedish diplomatist, Count Gyllenborg, a 
 History of England. " My intention was to inscribe it to the King, 
 your late Master, for whose great virtues I had ever the highest 
 admiration, as I shall continue to bear to his memory." This 
 King, Charles XII, in 17 16 meant to land in Britain with an army 
 in support of the Jacobites, and Gyllenborg, his ambassador, 
 managed the plot in England. Charles had invited Swift, at an 
 earlier date, to Sweden: now Swift dwells "in a most obscure 
 disagreeable country " (Ireland), " and among a most profligate and 
 abandoned people ". 
 
 All this does not look like zeal for the Protestant succession. 
 
 The years 171 9- 1723 saw the completion of Swift's ambiguous 
 poem, " Cadenus and Vanessa," and the arrival of Vanessa in Swift's 
 neighbourhood. " In vain he protested, he vowed, he soothed 
 and bullied ; the news of the Dean's marriage to Stella at last 
 reached her ; and it killed her, — ^Vanessa died of that passion " 
 (Thackeray). The marriage is still matter of controversy. 
 
 In 1724 Swift, who hated the English Government if he did 
 not love Ireland, wrote the famous " Drapier's Letters " against a 
 job in copper currency, and gained high popularity. 
 
 In 1726 he gave to the world the most famous of his books, 
 "Gulliver's Travels," in which his gift of narrative, his amaz- 
 ing power of being truthful in the minutest details of the most 
 
414 * English Literature 
 
 extravagant imaginations, liis misanthropy, his irony, and his de- 
 light in unsavoury things, are all carried to the highest perfection. 
 In 1729 came the "Modest Proposal" for eating Irish children; 
 in 1738 his "Polite Conversation" and "Directions to Servants," 
 with the same merit of humour, and the same inveterate fault. 
 
 In visits to London (1726, 1727) Swift had enjoyed the society 
 of his old friends and comrades in letters; and hoped there, 
 perhaps, to find a fountain of Youth. He felt himself slipping 
 into the vice of hoarding ; and rusting in a second-rate society, 
 Bolingbroke had been allowed to return from exile ; the banished 
 King had found him worthless as a statesman : he had said his 
 worst against the banished King ; nobody wanted Bolingbroke and 
 nobody was afraid of him. He played the philosopher, and Swift 
 did not believe in his affectation of philosophy. Arbuthnot, Swift 
 loved, Pope he had always admired ; and he tried to protect Gay 
 from his own reckless improvidence. He ridiculed, in " Gulliver," 
 the proofs brought against Atterbury as a Jacobite agent : if Swift 
 was not convinced by the evidence he must have shut his eyes 
 very hard. 
 
 In January, 1728, Stella died: Swift tried to fill the gap in 
 his life by activity in Irish politics. His disease, apparently some 
 malady of the ear which gradually affected the brain, became 
 more unendurable, but he had still to write some of his most 
 powerful satires in verse. Then his memory began to fail, and 
 he drifted slowly into the half-unconscious dotage of his last five 
 years, dying on 19 October, 1745, unconscious, probably, of the 
 meteoric adventure of Prince Charles. 
 
 The failure of his party, of his political ambition, and measure- 
 less hopes of greatness, gave Swift the retirement and the leisure 
 to produce his greatest works. If fortune had " bantered us " as 
 Bolingbroke said, he turned and bantered Fate and mankind. In 
 the long array of his volumes, so seldom opened, are many brief 
 flights, in verse and prose, which are full of entertainment, of wild 
 fancy, orderly and gravely presented ; and there is the " Journal 
 to Stella," with its infinite tenderness of affection ; and the Letters, 
 the confidences of the wits from romantic Charles Wogan, who 
 rescued from prison the bride of a King, and died as Governor of 
 
Augustan Prose 415 
 
 the appropriate province of La Mancha, to those of Pope and 
 Arbuthnot and Gay. The works of Swift are a library in them- 
 selves. 
 
 De Foe. 
 
 " One man in his time plays many parts," and no man played 
 more parts than Daniel Foe or De Foe. The son of a butcher in 
 St. Giles's, born in 1661, he received at a Nonconformist school 
 an education that was a sufficient basis for literary undertakings, 
 but not tending to such " classical " flights as led young University 
 men to profitable sinecures under Government. He is said to 
 have been out under Monmouth in 1685. He betook himself to 
 commerce of various kinds, thus acquiring little or no money (in 
 1692 he "broke," like Mr. Badman), but a competent knowledge 
 of the currents of trade, and the courses of financial speculation, 
 exhibited in his " Essay on Projects," projects educational and 
 social as well as financial (1698). In 1701 his "True Born 
 Englishman," showing in the interest of William HI that the 
 English are a mixed race, was successful. 
 
 In 1702 his famous "Shortest Way with the Dissenters" was 
 discovered to be, not a candid plea for the Church of England, 
 but an irritating parody of High Church pretensions, nearly as 
 seiious as Swift's apology for cannibalism. De Foe was pilloried, 
 but not pelted, and imprisoned for his waggery ; was released, 
 probably through the agency of Harley, Lord Oxford, the waver- 
 ing and enigmatic " Dragon " of Swift's correspondence ; and while 
 editing and indeed writing a weekly " Review," the precursor in 
 its social columns of Steele's " Tatler," De Foe served Harley in 
 divers subterranean ways. In Scotland, imthe autumn of 1706, he 
 acted as Harley's spy and newsagent : his letters to Harley con- 
 tain an admirable picture of the struggles for and against the 
 Union of Scotland and England, and of De Foe's own versatile, 
 acute and daring character. He made himself " all things to all 
 men," could talk to each citizen as a member of his own trade, 
 explained all the economic conditions of the country, understood, 
 and did not revere, the Kirk, and the preachers ; and, by securing 
 the services of that lively and humorous rogue and sham-fanatic, 
 
4i6 English Literature 
 
 Ker of Kersland, broke up an unholy alliance between the extreme 
 " Cameronians " and the Jacobite gentry and clansmen of Perth- 
 shire and Angus. They had intended to break up the Parliament ; 
 but the wild Whigs did not keep tryst. 
 
 It is plain that Harley treated D'e Foe very ill, and that, like 
 most spies, he was underpaid. Still he was working for a cause 
 which he had at heart ; as he was later, when, to all appearance, 
 playing the part of journalist in the Tory or even Jacobite interest 
 under Government. 
 
 The needy De Foe was a man of dark corners, an absolute 
 " Johannes Factotum ". Swift called him " a grave, sententious, 
 dogmatical rogue ''. He professed that he received assistance 
 from "The Divine Spirit". 
 
 No man who wrote so much and so variously has written so 
 well. His favourite topic, if we may judge by the frequency with 
 which he handled it, was " psychical research ". Like Glanvill, 
 Henry More, and other writers in the sceptical age of the Restora- 
 tion, he collected, and told in his own inimitable manner, many 
 current anecdotes of wraiths, death-warnings, second sight, and 
 phantasms of the dead. The most prominent merit of De Foe, in 
 fiction, is his power of convincing the reader by the minute and 
 sober realism of his details. Some of his novels, in autobiographic 
 form, have caused disputes as to whether they be romances, or 
 actual, memoirs. 
 
 " A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, on 
 September 8, 1705" (published in 1706) has been described as 
 " the first instance of De Foe's wonderful lies like truth ". " This 
 relation is matter of fact," said De Foe in the Preface. Sir Walter 
 Scott, a ghost-hunter himself, explained the " fact " by saying that 
 De Foe invented and wrote the story as a puff of Drelincourt 
 " On Death," which the appearance of Mrs. Veal, on the day after 
 her death recommended to her friend (who believed her to be 
 alive), Mrs. Bargrave. 
 
 "But Mr. George Aitken has proved " that the piece was, as De 
 Foe said, ' a true relation of matter of fact,' " that is, De Foe 
 merely wrote the story as told by Mrs. Bargrave — " the percipient " 
 — the person who saw and conversed with the dead Mrs. Veal 
 
Augustan Prose 417 
 
 about her gown — " a scoured silk, newly made up ". Mr. Aitken 
 found a manuscript note of 21 May, 17 14, by some one who had 
 interviewed Mrs. Bargrave, and for whom Mrs. Bargrave made 
 three or four minute additions. As for Mrs. Veal herself, she 
 died on 7 September, appeared on 8 September to Mrs. Bar- 
 grave, and we have the record of her burial on 10 September, in 
 the register of St. Mary's, Dover. 
 
 In another case, " The Botethan Ghost," told in an appendix 
 to De Foe's " Duncan Campbell," the tale was really written, as 
 De Foe says, not by himself, but by one of the people who saw 
 the spectre, the- Rev. Mr. Ruddle of Launceston in Cornwall, in 
 June, 1665; the narrative was written on 4 September of the 
 same year. 
 
 Thus De Foe's extraordinary gift of making things fictitious 
 seem true has caused him to be charged with inventing stories 
 which he merely retold, or printed from the manuscript of another. 
 
 De Foe was 60 years of age, and had suffered from apoplexy, 
 when he wrote the masterpiece which made him immortal, 
 " Robinson Crusoe "(1719). New editions appeared in May, June, 
 and August ; a sequel followed which few read ; still more scarce 
 are readers of De Foe's " Serious Reflections and Vision of the 
 Angelic World " (1720). The " metapsychical " world was always 
 very near De Foe, practical and shrewd man as he was. 
 
 " Crusoe " is based on Captain Rogers's narrative of the ad- 
 ventures of Alexander Selkirk, a mariner of Largo, in Fife, 
 marooned (1704) on the Island of Juan Fernandez. An allegory 
 of De Foe's own life has been suspected, the idea is unimportant. 
 
 It is superfluous to dilate on the sterling merits of "Robinson 
 Crusoe". Before he published it a critic had recognized "the 
 little art he is truly master of, of forging a story, and imposing it 
 on the world for truth ". The style is as simple as Swift's, and 
 more " homely ". The tale of love was not De Foe's trade, any 
 more than "the moving incident" was Wordsworth's. "Moll 
 Flanders,'-' and " Roxana " are no doubt meant to have a moral 
 influence ; but their readers are looking for something else : like 
 the readers of the edifying Monsieur Zola. 
 
 De Foe was one of the fathers of journalism, and almost " the 
 
 27 
 
4i8 English Literature 
 
 only begetter " of the story of adventure, the desert island romance, 
 and, in "Memoirs of a Cavalier," and "A Journal of the Plague 
 Year," of the historical autobiographical novel. " It was about the 
 beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neigh- 
 bours, heard, in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned 
 again in Holland. . . ." That keynote reverberates in scores of the 
 historical romances of 1 885-1 900. 
 
 The modern novelist, of course, avoids De Foe's strict statis- 
 tical method. De Foe's story reads precisely like a historical 
 document, and the modern. reader dislikes nothing more than that 
 sort of reading. De Foe's hero saw a number of people looking 
 at "a ghost walking on a grave stone ". Less fortunate Mr. Pepys 
 " went forth to see (God forgive my presumption !) whether I 
 could see any dead corpse going to the grave, but, as God would 
 have it, did not "- 
 
 By a truly realistic touch De Foe's contemplative saddler 
 closes his journal with "a coarse but sincere stanza of my own," 
 
 A dreadful plague in London was 
 
 In the year sixty-five, 
 Which swept an hundred thousand souls 
 
 Away ; yet I alive 1 
 
 The modem reader finds that De Foe's fictions are too like 
 facts, and, often, in the moral and religious reflections, too like 
 tracts, for his taste. On the other hand, to a contemplative mind, 
 " Robinson Crusoe,'' carefully read, and compared with its de- 
 scendants in fiction, is a source of delight. De Foe, at the age 
 of 60, must have been, while he wrote it, as happy as his in- 
 numerable readers. For example, we compare Robinson's felling 
 of a cedar tree "five feet ten inches diameter at the lower part 
 . . ." and his construction of a vessel " fit to carry twenty-six 
 men," a vessel quite unlaunchable, with the practicable coracle, 
 the most " home-made " of things in " Treasure Island ". We 
 compare the trial trips of the two crafts (Robinson's second boat) ; 
 we see that R. L. Stevenson has produced the less impossible 
 narrative of the twain, and that both rejoice the heart. 
 
 The mass, and the variety, of what must be called the " pot- 
 
Augustan Prose 419 
 
 boilers" of De Foe are unequalled. In better conditions of 
 authorship he would have been a rich man, but he died poor, in 
 distress, and under a cloud, in 1731. 
 
 A history of literature is not necessarily a history of philosoph- 
 ical, metaphysical, and theological speculation. In such specula- 
 tion the age was rich that saw the volcanic eruption of sects and 
 heresies during the religious frenzy of the Civil War, and also 
 beheld the reaction from all " enthusiasm " to the passion for com- 
 mon sense and for science as "organized common sense" which 
 came in with the Restoration. Hobbes's works did not encourage 
 religious " enthusiasm," or mysticism, or belief in the ineffable spirit- 
 ual experiences of devout men, from John Bunyan with his visions, 
 to Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), an Anglican divine, with his Neo- 
 platonic hints at Union with the Absolute ("True Intellectual 
 System of the Universe," "Eternal and Immutable Morality"). 
 The learned and the unlearned wrote books on either side, 
 sceptical or in favour of belief. 
 
 The Royal Society impartially included Joseph Glanvill (1636- 
 1680) with his "Vanity of Dogmatising," and his "Sadducismus 
 Trmmphatus," the pioneer of Psychical Research, with its tales 
 oi Poltergeists, wraiths, and levitations, some of them fairly well 
 authenticated. The Royal Society also gave a place to the 
 far more famous philosopher of liberal common sense philo- 
 sophy, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke's first eighteen years 
 were passed under the shadow of the Great Rebellion, and at 
 Christ Church, Oxford, under a Head who was an Independent 
 divine. He did not like the new freedom, in which he found the 
 old slavery, but after the Restoration he found liberty for discus- 
 sion, in which "enthusiasm" was not permitted to enter. His 
 attitude towards mental philosophy was not unlike that of Bacon. 
 He disliked Aristotelianism as then held at Oxford, thinking that 
 words usurped the place of facts, and in his "Essay on the 
 Human Understanding " he employed that plain style which the 
 Royal Society enjoined. The work was written at intervals during 
 seventeen years, disturbed when as a friend of Shaftesbury, 
 Dryden's Achitophel, the turbulent patron of Titus Gates, he was 
 sent into exile. The burden of the essay, which appeared in 1690, 
 
420 English Literature 
 
 is opposition to the theory of "innate ideas " — the terms need de- 
 fining — and insistence that we derive our ideas from the presenta- 
 tions of our senses. " Average common sense was always kept 
 in his view," and "he wrote for the most part in the language of 
 the market-place "- He wanted man to think as a human being 
 very limited in his faculties, " to distinguish between what is, and 
 what is not comprehensible by us," and his treatise had the most 
 potent and enduring effects on continental as well as on English 
 Philosophy. He was a friend of his junior, Berkeley, whose 
 philosophic fancy took a wider and more audacious range. His 
 "Treatise on Government " and " Thoughts on Education" fol- 
 lowed rapidly. He obtained a place as Commissioner of Trade 
 and Plantations (Colonies), and advised England to anticipate 
 Scotland in founding an emporium at Darien, in Spanish territory, 
 as the Scots were to discover. 
 
 We have not space for much more than the names of other prose 
 writers of this great age. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), a Scot in 
 London, was an admirable humorist, a great physician, and the 
 friend of all the wits ; himself a good-humoured Swift in prose 
 satire. Bishop Atterbury (1662-1732) excited an enthusiastic 
 devotion in Pope, who proposed to accompany this clerical con- 
 spirator into exile, after his great Jacobite plot was crushed in 
 1723. Atterbury was an accomplished general writer, while the 
 great scholar and Master of Trinity, Richard Bentley (1662- 1742), 
 gave to his classical criticism of the forged " Epistles of Phalaris " 
 the merit of vigorous literature. His conjectural various readings 
 in Milton's text are now and then comical, and seem a parody of 
 classical criticism. The Viscount Bolingbroke, Henry St. John 
 (1678-1751), was a wit among politicians, the patron, friend, and 
 inspiration of the wits ; he had his fame as an eloquent rhetorician 
 in his life, and as a daring thinker, but he really wrote best when 
 he wrote simply and humorously, as in his satire of his Jacobite 
 allies, " TheiEpistle to Windham " (i 71 6). His " Ideal of a Patriot 
 King " also preserves his literary reputation (1738). Anthony 
 Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an elegant 
 philosopher, a thinker of taste ; while George Berkeley, Bishop 
 of Cloyne (born at Kilkenny 1685, died 1753), was an idealistic 
 
Augustan Prose 421 
 
 philosopher and man of science ("The Theory of Vision") 
 whose style, in grace and irony, is akin to the manners of Plato 
 and of Pascal. The best and most delightful of his works is the 
 dialogue " Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher," directed 
 against the Sceptics, and deistical writers. Berkeley's character was 
 not less admirable than his works. 
 
CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 GEORGIAN POETRY. 
 
 I. 
 
 Edward Yoxjng. 
 
 " Is it to the credit or discredit of Young, as a poet, that of his 
 'Night Thoughts' the French are particularly fond?" So asks 
 Croft, the sardonic author of a notice on Young in Dr. Johnson's 
 "Lives of the Poets" The preference is certainly not to the 
 credit of the French! Born in Hampshire in 1683, the son of a 
 clergyman, Young lived till 1 765 : writing much verse, and more 
 prodigal of praises to "the Great " than any other poet of any age. 
 
 Young'-s father, in 1703, appears to have been poor, for the 
 son, to save expense, was hospitably entertained in the lodges of 
 the Warden of New College and the President of Corpus. A 
 Fellowship was found for him at All Souls', and as he was chosen 
 to make and speak the Latin oration at the founding of the fine 
 Codrington Library, it may be supposed that, at All Souls', he 
 was held to be more than mediocriter doctus (the qualifications for 
 a Fellow were said to be "well born, well dressed, moderately 
 learned "). 
 
 Young's earlier poems, and his dedications always, seem bids 
 for patronage and preferment. In his "Last Day" (17 10), 
 
 An archangel eminently bright 
 From off his silver staff of wondrous height 
 Unfurls the Christian flag, which waving flies 
 And shuts and opens more than half the skies. 
 
 Angels are asked, on the annihilation of the universe, to say 
 where Britannia is now ? 
 
 422 
 
Georgian Poetry 423 
 
 All, all is lost, no monument, no sign, 
 
 Where once so proudly blazed the great machine. 
 
 In the Dedication, which Young later suppressed, nothing was 
 left but Queen Anne, whom the poet distinctly saw floating up- 
 wards, and leaving the fixed stars behind her. The clever but 
 eccentric and unfortunate Jacobite Duke of Wharton was a patron 
 of Young, and the defender of Atterbury. The Duke died, under 
 arms for the exiled James III, or Chevalier de St. George, at 
 Lerida; he was then composing a tragedy on Mary, Queen of 
 Scots. Young suppressed, in later years, the dedication to 
 Wharton of his successful tragedy, "The Revenge" (1721). 
 
 In 1725-1726 Young published his Satires, "The Universal 
 Passion ". They read like a poor imitation of Pope's satires, but in 
 point of time they precede the "Dunciad". 
 
 Why slumbers Pope, who leads the tuneful train, 
 Nor hears that Virtue, which he loves, complain ? 
 
 Pope was not slumbering, he was counting every groan of Virtue, 
 to whom he was so devoted, and was about to lash Vice with the 
 best of them. The Universal Passion which Young flogs, is the 
 Love of Fame. Every one is the fool of Fame except this earl or 
 that, at whom Young dedicates his strings of epigrams which remind 
 us of Pope, with a difference. Sloane and Ashmole are derided 
 for their Museums. Young even dedicated a satire to Sir Robert 
 Walpole ; he must smile, " or the Nine inspire in vain " He also 
 adulated the Duke of Newcastle in 1745, when 
 
 meanmg, 
 
 a pope-bred princeling crawled ashore, 
 
 The Prince who did in Moidart land 
 With seven men at his right hand, 
 ^nd all to conquer kingdoms three, 
 Oh, he's the lad to wanton me ! 
 
 as a poet of the opposite party exclaimed. The inglorious Duke 
 
 is 
 
 Holies I immortal in far more than fame I 
 
 In 1727 Young became a clergyman, at the ripe age of 44. 
 
424 English Literature 
 
 His "Night Thoughts" in blank verse, are of 1 741 -1742, in Nine 
 Nights 
 
 My song the midnight raven has outwinged, 
 
 and the midnight owl was outshrieked. 
 
 From short (as usual) and disturbed repose 
 I wake, how happy they who wake no more 1 
 Yet that were vain, if dreams infest the grave. 
 
 We remember 
 
 In that sleep of death what dreams may come ! 
 
 A few lines are in the common stock of quotations such as, 
 
 An undevout astronomer is mad. 
 
 There are good passages, here and there, but long sermons in a 
 kind of blank verse which " does not overstimulate " are not im- 
 mortal. " Young has the trick of joining the turgid with the familiar 
 . . . but with all his faults he was a man of genius and a poet." 
 He was not, as people, misled by the existence of one William 
 Young, foolishly supposed, the original of Fielding's Parson Adams 
 in "Joseph Andrews ". But Young may be the original of Robert 
 Montgomery, who added to the piety of Young the ebullitions of 
 an unprecedented genius for nonsense. 
 
 James Thomson. 
 
 Romance secured a firm footing in English literature, after the 
 artificialities of the eighteenth century had sunk into dotage, 
 through the genius of a Borderer, Sir Walter Scott. But another 
 Borderer, long before, had seen glimmerings and had heard strains 
 of the fairy world and the fairy songs. This was James Thom- 
 son, son of the parish minister of Ednam in Roxburghshire. The 
 father was presently translated to Southdean, in the Cheviots, 
 and on the old line of Scottish marches : by th^t way they rode, 
 as Froissart shows, to Otterboume fight. Thomson's father died 
 while trying to lay a ghost in a house near Southdean, when the 
 son was at the University of Edinburgh. The haunted house was 
 demolished. Thomson studied divinity, but abandoned the pro- 
 spective pulpit for poetry, and went to London to seek his fortune 
 in 1725. He lost his letters of introduction, and he needed a 
 
Georgian Poetry 425 
 
 pair of shoes; his only resource was the manuscript of his 
 " Winter," in " The Seasons ". A dedication brought to Thomson 
 twenty guineas : the piece was praised by Aaron Hill and Malloch 
 (or Mallet, Malloch is a Macgregor name) ; the poem was liked ; 
 "Spring" and "Summer" followed, and Thomson dallied over 
 "Aututfln" till 1730. 
 
 In 1730 he had been successful with the moral tragedy of 
 " Sophonisba " : though in opposition to the Court party, Thom- 
 son had obtained several noble patrons, and they did their best 
 for his drama. A long poem on Liberty was not a triumph : but 
 the Prince of Wales gave the author a pension of ;^ioo yearly. 
 His tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda" was popular (1745), 
 and a patent place brought to the poet ;^30o a year, which he 
 did not long enjoy, dying on 27 August, 1748. Thomson was 
 notoriously indolent, and his last, perhaps his best, work is " The 
 Castle of Indolence " in the Spenserian stanza. 
 
 "The Seasons" are in blank verse, a welcome change from the 
 eternal rhyming couplets, and prove that Thomson, unlike his 
 contemporaries, wrote "with his eye on the object". He had 
 been bred in "the wide places of the shepherds," among the 
 lonely Border moors and hills ; he had not always been a man of 
 towns. In the sunless winter day 
 
 scarce 
 The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht 
 To shake the sounding maish ; or from the shore 
 The plovers when to scatter o'er the heath, 
 And sing their wild notes to the listening waste. 
 
 This was a new voice. Being a Borderer, Thomson was an an- 
 gler, and describes fly-fishing well, though not better than Gay. 
 
 In that old theme of the Middle Ages "the symphony of 
 spring," the songs of birds, he shows knowledge of their ways, and if 
 he makes the hen nightingale the singer, so does Homer, follow- 
 ing the myth. In "Summer," Thomson describes, with wonder- 
 ful tact, sultry climes in which he never breathed, and adds the 
 little idyll of Musidora. 
 
 " Autumn " includes a picture of fox-hunting, a sport which 
 James probably did not indulge in, and celebrates the Argyll of 
 
426 English Literature 
 
 Malplaquet and Duncan Forbes of CuUoden, and the water of 
 Tweed, 
 
 Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed. 
 
 Despite his power of rendering nature, the artificiality of his 
 age is still strong with Thomson, and it cannot be said thart "The 
 Seasons " are very attractive to modern readers. 
 
 "The Castle of Indolence," by virtue of the poet's return to 
 the measure of an author in his day despised, Spenser, yields a 
 welcome change from the eternal rhymed couplets. 
 
 A pleasant land of drowsyhead it was. 
 
 like the land of the Lotus-eaters in Tennyson. The stanza be- 
 ginning 
 
 And when a shepherd of the Hebrid isles, 
 Set far amid the melancholy main 
 
 is the voice of reviving poetry, and is immortal. Nobody has the 
 slightest sympathy with 
 
 The Knight of arts and industry. 
 
 And his achievements fair ; 
 That by his castle's overthrow 
 
 Secur'd and crowned were. 
 
 The castle is a very good castle, it is good to be there, where no 
 cocks disturb the dawn, no dogs murder sleep, "no babes, no 
 wives, no hammers " make a din. 
 
 But soft-embodied Fays through airy portals stream. 
 
 William Collins. 
 
 "The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance, 
 were always desired by Collins, but not always attained," says Dr. 
 Johnson. After half a century of tame poets, we are happy to 
 meet with one who did not cultivate the trim parterre, and who 
 sometimes did attain to being " exquisitely wild ". 
 
 Collins was born at Chichester on Christmas Day, 172 1, was 
 educated at Winchester, and at Oxford was a " demy," or scholar 
 of Magdalen, like Addison. About 1744 he came to London 
 
Georgian Poetry 427 
 
 with many literary projects in his mind, and very little money in 
 his pockets. Johnson met him, while "immured by a bailiff". 
 Collins cleared his debt with money advanced by a confiding 
 bookseller on the credit of a contemplated translation of Aristotle's 
 " Poetics," with a commentary. A legacy of ;^20oo from an 
 uncle. Colonel Martin, was " a sum which Collins could scarcely 
 think exhaustible, and which he did not live to exhaust ". His 
 mind weakened : he died in 1759 : sane, but incapable of com- 
 position. His Odes (i 746- 1 747) are the firm base of his renown : 
 the little volume is extremely scarce ; Collins is said to have 
 burned, in disappointment, the greater part of the edition.- 
 
 Of his "Persian Eclogues" (1742) Collins said that they were 
 his " Irish Eclogues," being inadequately Oriental in local colour. 
 The brief " Ode " (i 746) " How Sleep the Brave " (of Fontenoy 
 and Culloden) in ten lines has the magic of an elder day, and of 
 all time. The "Ode to Evening,'' where the poet sees 
 
 hamlets brown and dim discovered spires 
 And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all 
 Thy dewy fingers draw 
 The gradual dusky veil, 
 
 has escaped from the manner of the eighteenth century, and pre- 
 ludes to Keats. 
 
 There are fine free passages in " The Ode to the Passions,'' 
 and the " Dirge in Cymbeline " is not unworthy of its place. The 
 "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands," was long 
 lost, and did not receive the poet's final touches. He obtained 
 his knowledge of the Second Sight from John Home, author of 
 " Douglas'" who was a Hanoverian volunteer in the Forty-five, 
 and inspired in Collins an unfulfilled desire to visit Tay and Teviot- 
 dale and Yarrow. j^The conventions of his age sometimes dis- 
 figure CoUins's poems, but his face was set towards the City of 
 Romance. Tastes still vary as to the relative merit of Collins and 
 Gray : Matthew Arnold being the advocate of Gray ; Swinburne of 
 Collins. There is no way of settling such disputes ; each writer, 
 at his best, was truly a poet; neither, at his best, is staled or 
 dimmed by time ; both were almost portentous exceptions, when 
 really inspired, to the conventional rules of their age in England. 
 
428 English Literature 
 
 Thomas Gray. 
 
 Nature occasionally brings into the world pairs of men des- 
 tined to be distinguished in literature, and, without their own 
 consent, to be pitted against each other as rivals. We have Scott 
 and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and 
 Collins and Gray. Gray was the elder, born in 17 16 (Collins was 
 bom in 1721). If CoUins's father was a hatter, Gray's mother was 
 a bonnet-maker, if milliners make bonnets. Collins went to 
 Oxford, after being at Winchester ; Gray, before going to Peter- 
 house, Cambridge, was at Eton. Both poets wrote little : the 
 health of Collins broke down ; Gray, from his boyhood, was of a 
 gentle morbid melancholy, and had humour enough to laugh at 
 himself Collins was neglected; Gray died, later, at the age of 
 54, beyond competition or dispute the foremost of English 
 poets at the moment. Both men had their faces set to the 
 North as the home of old poetry and poetic beliefs. Collins 
 wrote his Ode on Highland Superstitions; Gray was delighted 
 (at first) by Macpherson's "Ossian," he translated ancient Norse 
 poems, visited Scotland, and appreciated the Highlands, and the 
 lakes that Wordsworth was to make famous. Both men were 
 scholars : Collins meant to translate Aristotle's " Poetics " ; Gray 
 meant to write a history of English Poetry. Both broke away 
 from the tyranny of the rhymed heroic couplet ; both especially 
 cultivated the Ode. 
 
 There is no doubt as to which of the two is and always has 
 been the more popular. Eton has made Gray her own. The 
 great General Wolfe, before falling in the arms of Victory at 
 Quebec, recited the " Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to one 
 of his officers, saying, " I would prefer being the author of that 
 poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow ". 
 
 It is not easy to criticize Gray, because so many of his lines 
 are household words, and have been familiar to us from childhood. 
 It may perhaps be said that Gray never attains to the magical 
 effect of Collins's " How Sleep the Brave," and of the " Ode to 
 Evening ". But there are cadences in " The Elegy," and senti- 
 ments noble, pure, pious, and modest in his poems which lend to 
 
Georgian Poetry 429 
 
 them an unspeakable charm, while the ideas are such as come 
 home ta men's bosoms. It is true that his habit of personifying 
 abstract ideas is an unfortunate survival of the weary allegorical 
 company of the "Romance of the Rose," and no more than 
 Collins does he escape from the mannerisms of his age. But 
 like Collins, and indeed like his friend Horace Walpole, he was 
 passing towards the kingdom of Romance. 
 
 At Eton he acquired Walpole's friendship ; and if, after 
 leaving Cambridge, he and Walpole quarrelled in Italy, Walpole 
 confessed that he was to blame, made the first steps to recon- 
 ciliation, and cherished, admired, and at last regretted Gray with 
 " all the ardour of a heart devoted and constant in friendship. 
 
 For the rest, Gray's life was passed quietly, and in a melan- 
 choly way, at Cambridge, which he reckoned a bear garden, 
 and a home of Indolence ; and, with his mother and aunt at 
 Stoke Pogis, where he wrote the Elegy. His poems distilled 
 very slowly from his genius : the Eton Ode appeared, and was 
 unnoticed, in 1747. In the same year were written, to Horace 
 Walpole, the rather hard-hearted lines on Walpole's handsome cat, 
 
 'Twas on a lofty vase's side. 
 
 The Eton Ode was composed, with a beautiful sonnet commemor- 
 atkig a private sorrow, in 1 742 : — 
 
 In vain to me the smiling mornings shine. 
 
 Earlier in the same year the "Ode to Spring," marked "to be 
 sent to Fav," — to West, his friend commemorated in the sonnet, — 
 had been written, "not knowing he was then dead". Again, in 
 October, 1742, another death prompted "The Elegy," which lay 
 unfinished for about eight years. Grief had shaken Gray out of 
 causeless melancholy, and 1742 was his great poetic year. In 
 1750 he wrote the light and bright "Long Story," on an unex- 
 pected visit from some poet-hunting ladies. In 1753, Walpole 
 had Gray's " Six Poems " published, in twenty-one pages, with 
 illustrations by Bentley. In 1754 he began the " Pindaric Odes," 
 of which " The Progress of Poesy " is the noblest, and displays 
 most of 
 
430 English Literature 
 
 the pride and ample pinion 
 That the Theban eagle bear 
 Sailing with supreme dominion 
 Thro' the azure deep of air. 
 
 To compose "The Bard ".(the Welsh Bard) took two years and a 
 half, and neither the style nor the ideas of the Odes were thought 
 pleasing, or comprehensible, by the public and Dr. Johnson. In 
 his demure way the little poet was a rebel, and Dr. Johnson knew 
 it. Gray never practised the adulation of " the great " that was 
 customary ; he asked for no places, he refused the Laureateship. 
 Late in life a sinecure Professorship at Cambridge was given to 
 him. The professor never lectured : not to lecture was the conven- 
 tion, and against this happy convention Gray did not rebel. He 
 studied, made notes, learned Norse, translated, visited haunted 
 Glamis, with the chamber where Malcolm II was murdered, visited 
 the Lakes, wrote the most delightful letters, and died at 54 in 
 1771, the year of the birth of Sir Walter Scott, the year of 
 Burns's twelfth birthday. 
 
 Gray had genius — not a great, but a new genius, and had many 
 accomplishments. His satires were surprisingly sharp and fierce. 
 He had the light French touch of the day in verses of society. 
 There is something of the noble pensiveness and mysteriously ap- 
 pealing music of Virgil in his best poems : if he be " a second-rate 
 poet '' (an unkind way of saying that he is not a Shakespeare or 
 Homer), he shares with first-rate poets the power of moving all 
 readers ; he is not the poet of a set of refined amateurs. He who 
 moved and soothed the heart of James Wolfe in the crisis of his 
 fortunes, and who has charmed every generation of the English 
 race since Wolfe and Montcalm gloriously fell, has done more 
 than ettough for fame. 
 
 The Wartons. 
 
 Gray's taste for ancient Scandinavian poetry, itself a symp- 
 tom of the tendency to study all poetry, however old, exotic, and 
 unconscious of the rules of the eighteenth century, was not a new 
 thing. We are apt to think of Swift's patron, Sir William Temple, 
 as an example of mere gentlemanly and conventional ideas, 
 
Georgian Poetry 431 
 
 though happy in the gift of a pure and sometimes exquisite style in 
 prose. But Temple in his essay " Of Heroic Virtue " shows 
 that he was capable of taking sincere pleasure in old Norse poetry, 
 though he knew it only through the Latin translations " by Olaus 
 Wormius in his 'Literatura Runica' (who has very much de- 
 served from the commonwealth of learning, and is very well worth 
 reading by any that love poetry) ; and to consider the several stamps 
 of that coin, according to several ages and climates ". Temple 
 speaks of "The Death Song" of Ragnar Lodbrog as a "sonnet" 
 and applauds " An Ode of Scallogrim " (Skalagrira) ; but his re- 
 marks, " I am deceived if in this sonnet and ode there be not a vein 
 truly poetical, and in its kind Pindaric, taking it with the allowance 
 of the different climates, fashions, opinions, and languages of such 
 different countries," though well meant, show a curious idea of 
 the nature of the sonnet. 
 
 Here we have, before the end of the seventeenth century, the 
 essence of historical comparative criticism of literature ; and ad- 
 miration for a kind of poetry as remote as possible from the . 
 standards of the eighteenth century. Temple handed on the torch 
 to the elder Thomas Warton, Professor of Poetry at Oxford in his 
 day, who himself translated from the Latin, as " a Runic ode," 
 two stanzas of the Death Song of Regnar Lodbrog.' 
 
 One of Warton's sons, Thomas (born 1728), was Professor of 
 Poetry at Oxford (1757-1767), and, from 1774 onwards (he died 
 in 1790), published a History of English Poetry, which may be 
 unsystematic, but is both interesting and erudite. Warton had to 
 read the earlier and later mediaeval poets, French and English, in 
 the manuscripts, and he quoted profusely from sources then scarcely 
 known. " Partly through the store of new matter that is provided 
 for 'the reading public,' partly through the zest and enthusiasm of 
 its students — the spirit of adventure which is the same in Warton 
 as in Scott " — his book " did more than any theory to correct the 
 narrow culture, the starved elegance, of the preceding age". 
 The elder brother of Thomas, Joseph Warton, born 1722, was a 
 schoolfellow of Collins, and published " Odes " in the same year 
 
 1 Posthumously published in 1748. See Mr. W. P. Ker's " Warton Lec- 
 ture on English Poetry," " Proceedings of the British Academy," Vol. IV. 
 
432 English Literature 
 
 as he (1746). In his preface he boldly said that "the fashion of 
 moralizing in vevse has been carried too far,'' and "he looks upon 
 invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet ". 
 He preached what Collins practised ; he wrote good criticism in 
 Dr. Johnson's paper, " The Adventurer " ; in his essay on Pope 
 he tried " to impress on the reader that a clear head and acute 
 understanding are not sufficient alone to make a Poet," " that it 
 is a creative and glowing imagination . . . and that alone, that 
 can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character. 
 . . . These were to be the watchwords of the Romantic move- 
 ment, into which Warton, dying in 1800, did not live to enter. 
 
 John Dyer. 
 
 Of John Dyer we know from his most famous poem, " Grongar 
 Hill," that, on a certain occasion, he 
 
 Sate upon a flowery bed 
 
 With my hand beneath my head. 
 
 If he had lain upon a flowery bed the posture would have been 
 more poetical. In blank verse, deserting Grongar Hill, he found 
 
 Ixj, the resistless theme, imperial Rome. 
 
 His " Ruins of Rome " are less impressive than Spenser's son- 
 nets translated from Du Bellay. His " Fleece," an instructive 
 epic of the wool trade, though praised by the illustrious Akenside, 
 proved no golden fleece to its publisher. The prose summaries 
 are pleasing. "Disputes between France and England on the 
 coast of Coromandel, censured." 
 
 Dyer, at his best, is less successful than Thomson. He was 
 born in 1700, son of an eminent solicitor of Carmarthen, was edu- 
 cated at Westminster, attempted the painter's art, visited Italy, 
 took holy orders, published "The Fleece," in 1757, and died in 
 
 1758. 
 
 Briefer notes must suffice for the Rev. Mr. Blair of Athelstane- 
 ford (1699-1746) who wrote "The Grave," later recommended 
 to amateurs by Blake's illustrations ; and Matthew Green, who 
 wrote "The Spleen" (1696-1737), a somewhat lively subsatirical 
 effort. 
 
Georgian Poetry 433 
 
 William Shenstone. 
 
 Shenstone was one of the many poets who owe their reputa- 
 tion to their luck in being contemporaries of their biographer, Dr. 
 Johnson. No Johnson could keep records of all the versifiers of 
 the nineteenth century who have occasionally written good things. 
 William Shenstone was born in November, 17 14, at the Leasowes, 
 in Halesowen. His life was much devoted to landscape garden- 
 ing ; and his harmless taste made him a noted character in his 
 day. " He learned to read of an old dame," and pleasantly de- 
 scribed her, or some other old dame, in " The School Mistress," 
 an agreeable idyll in the Spenserian measure. 
 
 In 1732 Shenstone went to Johnson's college, his "nest of 
 singing birds," Pembroke, in Oxford. He took no degree, he 
 rhymed, printed his rhymes, and " The School Mistress " appeared 
 in 1 742. Thenceforth he landscape-gardened, being so little of an 
 angler that he was indignant, says Johnson, when asked if there 
 were any trout in his purely ornamental water. His expenses in 
 gardening brought the haunting forms of bailiffs into his groves, 
 but Johnson informs us gravely that " his life was unstained by 
 any crime ". He died in February, 1763. Several of his innocent 
 poems, such as 
 
 I have found out a gift for my fair, 
 
 I have found where the wood pigeons breed, 
 
 are still familiar to many memories : they are from the " Pastoral 
 Ballad ". He perceived the demerits of the rhyming heroic coup- 
 let (as it was then written), as "apt to render the expression either 
 scanty or constrained," and preferred the verse of four lines with 
 alternate rhymes. Thus, on the death of Pope 
 
 Now sadly lorn from Twitnam's widow'd bower 
 The drooping Muses take their casual way ; 
 
 And where they step a flood of tears they pour ; 
 
 And where they weep, no more the fields are gay. 
 
 Of such matter are Shenstone's Elegies composed : his ballad on 
 Jemmy Dawson, a martyr of the Jacobite cause, was celebrated 
 and popular ; poor Jemmy's lady-love died of grief and horror at 
 his execution. 
 
 28 
 
CHAPTER XXIX. 
 GEORGIAN POETRY. 
 
 II. 
 
 Thomas Chatterton. 
 
 The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short- 
 lived of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace 
 Walpole. Born at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the 
 shadow of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatter- 
 ton from infancy became, as it were, possessed by the charm of 
 the edifice and of the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's 
 family had for more than a century been associated with the church 
 as sextons ; probably they had never given a thought to its beauty 
 and historical associations, but these haunted their descendant, and 
 the story of his childhood reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Haw- 
 thorne. Among the clergy and people of Bristol the spirit of the 
 eighteenth century, indeed the natural, usual contempt for things 
 old, beautiful, and not understood, was complacently active. The 
 chests which contained the archives of the church had been broken 
 into by the Vestry, and quantities of old parchment documents, 
 some of them illuminated, had been thrown about. Chatterton's 
 father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff 
 as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother 
 were used Tor domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 
 6, had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful) ; the sight 
 of the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect ; he stored all 
 that he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious 
 reader. In 1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school re- 
 sembling Christ's Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age 
 
 434 
 
Georgian Poetry 435 
 
 of I o, a versifier, his Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric ; 
 but already, by the age of 11, he had made for himself, as 
 some children do, a society of "invisible playmates," notably "T. 
 Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age of Henry VI and Edward IV, 
 and already he was writing, in a kind of old English made up out 
 of glossaries, poems which he passed off as Rowlie's, found by 
 himself in the derelict archives of the church. 
 
 In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of 
 "split personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other 
 secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an 
 attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius 
 was precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not 
 quite sane. But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, 
 and, in December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley's 
 ancient poems," including " The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the 
 publisher. The success of Percy's ballads from the Old Folio 
 (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley 
 was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first edition 
 of "The Castle of Otranto " at the end of 1764. He used the 
 conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in 
 the third century A.D.) of pretending to have found the tale in an 
 ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries 
 in manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years 
 old; in Horace Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, 
 and offered to show Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a 
 history of English painters by the same learned divine. Walpole 
 replied very courteously and gratefully, but " I have not the happi- 
 ness of understandbg the Saxon language ". In a reply Chatterton 
 explained his circumstances ; his youth and position ; and Gray 
 had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent were forgeries. 
 Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his profession, 
 adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness of the 
 papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton, 
 and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent 
 back the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no 
 more of the matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of 
 the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had committed suicide in 
 
 28* 
 
436 English Literature 
 
 London. After an attempt to support himself by hackwork, 
 political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not stoop to 
 soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24 August, 
 1 770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending presents 
 of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister ; twelve days 
 before his death he had written that he intended to go abroad as 
 a surgeon's mate. 
 
 Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed 
 rare precocity. When he wrote in " Rowleian," in an invented 
 dialect as remote from real English of any day as the language of 
 the planet Mars, evolved by Mile. Hel^ne Smith, is remote from 
 French, Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in 
 "The Tragedy of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the 
 Spenserian stanza. His touches in descriptions of Nature are 
 sometimes charming. But he never quite escapes, as is natural, 
 from the conventions of the eighteenth century ; and his best in- 
 spiration is derived from Percy's " Reliques ". What he might 
 have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is 
 impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the 
 wonted abnormality of genius. 
 
 William Cowper. 
 
 The overlapping of styles in poetry and of tastes in poetry is 
 pleasantly illustrated in the case of Cowper. He was born in 1 731, 
 Scott was born in 1771, and in Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensi- 
 bility " we find the sensible Marianne Dashwood hesitating be- 
 tween the rival charms of Cowper and Scott ; Byron, it appears, 
 had not yet reached her fair hands. Cowper is a bridge between 
 Thomson and Wordsworth. He was av"eii.e lU the rupBlai'l' ti"(Tu|jKt ; 
 in his translation of irlomer he preferred a blank verse which, 
 at best, is not rapid. In writing of Nature he " had his eye on 
 the object ". His exit from the triumphant common sense of the 
 eighteenth century was by way of spiritual religion, the Evangelical 
 Revival promoted by Wesley, Whitefield, and their followers. 
 They made appeal to the souls, not to the passions, of the popu- 
 lace ; and Cowper's own sympathy with their bodies, with their 
 
Georgian Poetry 437 
 
 poverty, like his love of retirement, and of newspapers, makes him 
 akin to Wordsworth. 
 
 Born of the powerful Whig family of Cowper, th%poet was the 
 son of the rector of Great Berkhampstead ; his mother, whom he 
 lost when he was 6 years of age, yet ever remembered daily with 
 intense affection, was of the name and lineage of Donne. He was 
 cruelly bullied in childhood at a preparatory school. The innate 
 savagery of boys of fifteen sometimes wreaks itself on a single 
 small child, and we might think that his sufferings had their share 
 in depressing the spirits of Cowper, did he not tell us that, at his 
 public school^ Westminster, he was eminent in cricket, which 
 Horace Walpole and Gray despised at Eton. His master, " Vinny " 
 Bourne, a Latin poet, was dear to him ; he made many clever and 
 lively friends, and, despite his attack on public schools, in " Tiro- 
 cinium " (1784), he seems to have been reasonably happy at West- 
 minster, though he learned no more in one way than to write 
 " lady's Greek without the accents ". 
 
 " Tirocinium " is a vigorous satire in Pope's metre. But 
 Cowper, despite the vices and brutalities of school life, confesses 
 his affection for the old place. The clergy at large come under 
 Cowper's birch. 
 
 The parson knows enough who knows a Duke I 
 Behold your Bishop I well he plays his part, 
 Christian in name and infidel in heart. 
 
 In denouncing emulation for prizes, Cowper hit a blot that seems 
 to have vanished, for anything like ungenerous emulation of this 
 kind appears to be a lost vice. No boy studies 
 
 Less for improvement than to tickle spite. 
 
 Macaulay's victims, Warren Hastings and Elijah Impey, were at 
 school with Cowper. He went to no University, but was articled to 
 a solicitor ; and idly " giggled and made giggle " with his cousins, 
 Theodora and Harriet. He was in love with Theodora, but was 
 disappointed, Harriet (Lady Hesketh) was one of his best friends. 
 At the age of 32 (1763) hypochondria or hysteria shattered 
 his life ; in a private asylum he was suddenly converted, and re- 
 covered, and religion was henceforth, now his joy and happiness. 
 
438 English Literature 
 
 now, when the black cloud came over him, the cause of his despair. 
 At Huntingdon, and later, at the uninviting village of Olney, he 
 lived retired,»the friend of Mrs. Unwin (" My Mary ") and of a 
 clerical ex-slave-trader, the Rev. John Newton. With Newton, 
 Cowper wrote hymns, the ladies encouraged him to occupy him- 
 self with moral poems, "Table Talk," "Truth," "The Progress 
 of Error," "Retirement," "Charity," "Hope," all in the metre of 
 Pope; and all more or less satirical. Kings, in "Table Talk," 
 are the first to suffer : one of the speakers in the dialogue is rather 
 revolutionary. Indeed the mild tea -drinking Cowper, with his de- 
 nunciations of "the great," the clergy, and the unthinking squires, 
 preludes to the French Revolution, which he took very calmly. 
 After politics comes talk of poetry : and the well-known lines on 
 Pope occur ; he 
 
 Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
 
 And every warbler has his tune by heart. 
 
 Of poets in his own age Cowper prefers the reckless satirist, 
 Churchill ; of Gray and Collins nothing is said. In " The Progress 
 of Error " the much-enduring Nimrod is attacked, in company with 
 the well-graced popular preacher ; and novelists are assailed as 
 "flesh-flies of the land," while men who study art in Italy come 
 home worse dunces than they went, and finally the deist and 
 atheist are publicly birched. 
 
 It is not for his satires that Cowper is remembered : they were 
 suggested to him, in the interests of religion and morals, by Mrs. 
 Unwin, while Lady Austen, a lively person of quality, appointed 
 to Cowper "The Task," or rather gave him the subject of "The 
 Sofa," out of which grew " The Task ". The poet ambles, in an 
 essay in blank verse, as much at his ease and as fond of digressions 
 as Montaigne, from the days when man squatted on the ground, 
 to his invention of a three-legged stool, the addition of a fourth 
 leg, cushions, arm-chairs, the settee, finally the sofa. The sofa 
 pleases the gouty ; never may the poet have gout ; he has done 
 nothing to deserve it ; in boyhood he 
 
 Has fed on scarlet and strong haws, 
 
 The bramble, black as jet, and sloes austere. 
 
Georgian Poetry 439 
 
 This introduces a rural digression. 
 
 Here Ouse, slow winding through a level plain 
 Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o'er, 
 Conducts the eye 'along his sinuous course, 
 Delighted. 
 
 We think of 
 
 a river winding slow 
 By cattle, on an endless plain; 
 The ragged rims of thunder brooding low 
 With shadow streaks of rain. 
 
 How different are the methods of the two painters in words 1 
 The poet, finding geologists in the course of his wanderings, 
 pities them, truth disclaiming them. Like Wordsworth he praises 
 "retirement," welcomes the newspaper, and welcomes tea. In 
 the charming lines, "The Retired Cat," temporarily shut up in 
 a drawer lined " with linen of the softest kind," he seems to smile 
 at his own cosy retirement ; the teacups, the happy listening 
 ladies. He is full of human kindness, of love for children, cats, 
 and his own tame hares ; he sets out to gather flowers, he says, 
 and comes home laden with moral fruits, and religious reflections, 
 and with his sketch book full of landscapes like Gainsborough's, 
 and studies of cattle like Morland's. " The Task " won for the 
 poet countless friends who never saw his face ; and, though we 
 have become attuned to blank verse of many beautiful modulations 
 which he never dreamed of (though now and then they were at- 
 tained by Thomson), "The Task " may still be read^with sympathy 
 and pleasure. 
 
 Many of Cowper's shorter poems, grave or gay, are in all 
 memories : " The Wreck of the Royal George," as spirited and sad 
 as a ballad -; the ringing notes of " Boadicea " ; the idyllic sweet- 
 ness of 
 
 The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade 
 And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade ; 
 
 the lines, " Addressed to a Young Lady," brief and beautiful as 
 the most tender epigrams of " The Greek Anthology," from which 
 Cowper's translating hand gathered a little garland. Of these 
 " The Swallow," " Attic Maid with Honey Fed," are worthy of the 
 
440 English Literature 
 
 original, as is " The Grass-hopper". Cowper shone in occasional 
 verses on trifling matters such as " The Dog and the Water-lily " ; 
 and pretty kindly compliments, such as " Gratitude " (to his 
 cousin. Lady Hesketh), and things tender and touched with the 
 sense of tears in mortal things, as in the "Epitaph on a Hare," 
 and the " To Mary " (of 1 793). His " John Gilpin " is an unusual 
 frolic. 
 
 The translations, in blank verse, of the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " 
 could not displace those of Pope, who, in Cowper's opinion, had 
 done all that could be done in rhyme. Blank verse, especially 
 that of Cowper, cannot convey, as Pope does, the sense of the 
 speed of t'he great epic ; nor was Cowper's scholarship exempt 
 from curious errors. He was overworked ; Mrs. Unwin fell into 
 the condition described in "To Mary," his terrible melancholy 
 returned, but his last original verses, "The Cast-away " (1798), are 
 penned by no " maniac's hand," nor can a poet have written them 
 without pleasure in his own genius. Cowper died in 1800. 
 
 His letters are reckoned among the best in our language, and 
 their delightful wit and gaiety fortunately assure us that there was 
 much happiness in a life so blameless. 
 
 Literature in Scotland (1550-1790). 
 
 Before approaching the great northern contemporary of Cowper, 
 Robert Burns, it is necessary to cast a backward glance at his 
 predecessors in Scottish letters. We left them in the reign of 
 James V, when Sir David Lyndsay was the reigning poet of 
 the Court and of the people. It is not easy to fit some remarks 
 on Scottish literature after Sir David Lyndsay into a chrono- 
 logical sequence parallel with the development of literature in 
 England. The Scottish writers under James VI and I produced 
 no effect on their English contemporaries : the King's " Reulis 
 and Cautelis " in poetical criticism, and his " Basilikon Doron," 
 a treatise on king-craft, with his " Counterblast to Tobacco," and 
 his " Demonology " are the work of a clever general writer, but 
 now only interest the curious. Alexander Scott and Alexander 
 Montgomery continued to practise in Scots, the style of Dunbar, 
 
Georgian Poetry 441 
 
 though Scott shone most in love lyrics, often musical, while 
 Montgomery survives in an allegory of the old sort, " The 
 Cherry and the Slae " ; and an old-fashioned " fiyting ". Sir 
 Kobert Ayton (1570-1638) lived in London with the wits of the 
 time, and, like the Earl of Stirling (died in 1640) and William 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, deserted for English the Scots ver- 
 nacular. The most distinguished of these poets William Drum- 
 mond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) entertained Ben Jonson at his 
 beautiful house, and has left brief notes of Ben's rather crabbed 
 criticisms of his great contemporaries. In the previous year, when 
 James, "with a salmonlike instinct" (1617) revisited his native 
 country, Drummond celebrated the event in " Forth Feasting," a 
 panegyric in fairly regular rhymed heroic couplets. Some of his 
 sonnets have charm and are not forgotten ; but the times darkened, 
 and Drummond (who showed common sense and public spirit 
 when Charles I unjustly persecuted Lord Balmerino (1633), advis- 
 ing the King to read George Buchanan's book on the Royal power 
 in Scotland), was unlikely to find an audience for his learned verse 
 during the subsequent troubles. His " Cypress Grove,'' a medita- 
 tion in prose on death, is poetic in phrasing and cadences, while 
 the periods are not overrlong and over burdened. But the brief 
 years in which Scottish wits might have learned many lessons from 
 the great contemporary literature of England soon went by ; and 
 Scottish writers for nearly a century were confined to wranglings 
 over theology and sermons, and to bitter itracts and pamphlets, 
 valuable to the historical but not to the literary student. 
 
 The great Marquis of Montrose is credited with one charming 
 Cavalier lyric, " My dear and only love, I pray," and with verses 
 sincere but rugged and full of conceits on his own death and his 
 King's, but he " tuned his elegies to trumpet sounds ". The 
 favourite measure of Burns was kept alive by Sempill of Beltrees, 
 in his vernacular elegy over a piper, 
 
 On bagpipes now no body blaws 
 Sen Habbie's dead. 
 
 The translation of Rabelais (1653) by the learned, militant, and 
 eccentric Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty (i6ii?-i66o) is an 
 imperishable monument of the author's amazing wealth of strange 
 
442 English Literature 
 
 vocabularies, and vigour of appropriate style. The task of making 
 Rabelais talk in English seemed little fit for a Scottish Cavalier 
 who fought at Worcester, but Urquhart, aided by Rabelais, won a 
 kind of immortality by his success. His translation is final and 
 decisive ; in which it stands alone. Of the preachers and contro- 
 versialists, bitter or humorous, there is no space to speak, but 
 the saintly character and gentle eloquence of Archbishop Leighton 
 (1611-1684) live in his Commentary on the First Epistle of St. 
 Peter and his other expository writings. The historical works of 
 Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, are English, ex- 
 cept in their occasional Scotticisms, as much of his life was spent 
 in England. He had seen much of the inner wheels and springs 
 of politics, was fond of talking of himself and of his part in great 
 affairs, and, like Leighton, represents the Scottish divine, politician, 
 and author, who has been Anglicized out of the Presbyterian pre- 
 cision and acerbity, and is as English as he can make himself. 
 His very conceit, and his almost incredible want of tact, make this 
 " Scotch dog," as Swift loves to call him, a most entertaining gos- 
 sip. His " History of My Own Times " was judiciously kept from 
 publication till after his death. Burnet cannot be relied on as a 
 safe authority either in what he insinuates most basely, against 
 William III, or states, without an atom of corroboration, against 
 James II. In the latter case, however, Macaulay has accepted 
 and given circulation to Burnet's narrative. 
 
 By far the greatest man of letters of the Restoration, north of 
 Tweed, is "that noble wit of Scotland," in Dryden's phrase, Sir 
 George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636 ?-i69i). Beginning with 
 a " heroic romance," " Aretina," influenced by Sidney's "Arcadia" 
 {1660), and the French school of heroic romances, and with verses, 
 in which he did not shine, Mackenzie, in the " Religio Stoici " 
 (1663) shows that he, like R. L. Stevenson, has been " the sedu- 
 lous ape " of Sir Thomas Browne. He has many admirably har- 
 monious sentences, a very lively wit, and a becomingly pensive 
 air of disenchantment. "The scuffle of drunken men in the 
 dark,'' the bloodshed and bitterness of the wars of the Covenant, 
 have saddened him, and left him an enthusiast for Montrose, 
 
 At once his country's glory and her shame, 
 
Georgian Poetry 443 
 
 But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away 
 from pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on 
 the Criminal Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as 
 great legal merit ; his observations on the persecution of witches 
 are of great interest; and the worst of his "Memoirs of the 
 Affairs of Scotland " is the fragmentary condition of the manu- 
 script. Mackenzie was the cause of the foundation of the Ad- 
 vocates' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution of 1688 he 
 retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed. 
 
 The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, 
 would gladly have taken all knowledge for his province ; his was 
 a most inquiring mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his 
 parochial duties ever left behind him so huge a mass of un- 
 published manuscript. His great work is "The History of the 
 Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the 
 Revolution ". He was, of course, a partisan, but an honest partisan ; 
 he consulted all accessible documents, and often printed them at 
 full length ; he occasionally makes errors in the direction of his 
 bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects not one of 
 the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to the 
 extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized 
 by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his " Ana- 
 lecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences " 
 (published long after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost- 
 stories, and tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is ex- 
 tremely frail. Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an 
 American divine, as simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the 
 Rev. Cotton Mather. Wodrow, after 17 14, saw the beginnings 
 of " Latitudinarianism," or " Moderatism," in the Kirk : young 
 ministers began to study the " Characteristics " of that polite 
 philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (r 671-17 13); to doubt 
 whether virtuous heathens and Catholics must inevitably be ex- 
 cluded from salvation ; to wander from the Calvinism of John 
 Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and to regard the 
 chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These Moder- 
 ates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian 
 leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates 
 
444 English Literature 
 
 attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish them- 
 selves in secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, be- 
 ing patrons of the stage. 
 
 To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among 
 the clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and 
 life of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694- 
 1 746) a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on aesthetics and on 
 moral philosophy. But for a true, lively, and humorous picture of 
 ministers who loved society, the stage, and the company of the 
 wits, in London and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobio- 
 graphy, posthumously published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander 
 Carlyle, minister of Inveresk (1722-1805). In youth he had re- 
 velled and drunk deep with the wicked Lord Lovat, and that stern 
 Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lordi Grange, well remembered for 
 his energy in packing off his termagant wife to seclusion on the 
 Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir John Cope at 
 Prestonpans ; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the Thames, 
 by the accuracy of his driving at golf ; he had championed his 
 brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by 
 writing the once famous play of " Douglas " ; and he lived to be 
 the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter 
 Carlyle " from his noble presence, knew every one worth knowing 
 in Scotland ; and if we think him a kind of good-humoured pagan, 
 he is nevertheless reported to have been an excellent parish 
 minister. " For human pleasure " in the reading, the memoirs of 
 this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the literary 
 revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish 
 writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in 
 the period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in 
 the cases of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton dur- 
 ing the Restoration. But the papers of Addison and Steele, " The 
 Tatles " and " The Spectator," went everywhere, were eagerly read 
 in Scotland, and provoked imitation in the matter of style. 
 Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns : and men corresponded 
 with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie had corre- 
 sponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the 
 literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop 
 
Georgian Poetry 445 
 
 of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wig- 
 maker to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Ever- 
 green," a collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made 
 by George Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague 
 (1568). 1 Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a 
 medley of old Scots and new songs and lyrics : the new made by 
 Ramsay and his disciples to be sung to the old Scots tunes. The 
 old verses were the basis of the new, which are a mixture of the 
 simple ancient matter with that of the eighteenth century. 
 Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing Blind Harry's 
 "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a con- 
 temporary of Ramsay : they wrote to each other " epistles '' in 
 verse, in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay's " Gentle 
 Shepherd" (1725) contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd 
 life than is common in pastoral poetry : and Ramsay's elegies, in 
 Burns's favourite metre, on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, 
 an ale-wife, were models for Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no 
 friend of the more rigid Presbyterian party, and once, at least, in 
 the pretty song of " The Blackbird," he showed the colours of the 
 Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour (17 04- 17 54) was 
 actually out with Prince Charles in 1745 ; his slim volume of 1744, 
 "Poems on Several Occasions,'' contains little that dwells in the 
 memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow, 
 
 Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny Bride. 
 
 In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on 
 the romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was 
 taken for an old ballad, " Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that 
 he ever learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed 
 "a poetic child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". 
 Ladies like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my 
 heart licht I wad dee," and Miss Jean Elliot of Minto, with " The 
 Flowers of the Forest," a lament for Flodden, were surpasse4. in 
 the number, and equalled in the merit of their songs by Lady 
 
 ' The Bannatyne Club, for the printing and preservation of old manu- 
 scripts, a kind of Scottish Roxburghe Club, was founded by Sir Walter Scott 
 in memory of the old lover of poetry. 
 
44^ English Literature 
 
 Nairne (an Oliphant of Gask, and a hereditary Jacobite) (1766- 
 1845). She was the best of the known and named poets of the 
 Cause which has had so many singers ; and her strains were con- 
 tinued by the last of these lady minstrels and musicians, Lady 
 John Scott, a Spottiswoode (1810-1900). The new day was 
 dawning in Scotland, thus early in the eighteenth century, and the 
 birds were singing prelusive to Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Indeed, 
 Lady Nairne's " Will ye no come back again? "and " The Auld 
 House," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a'," and "The Land o' 
 the Leal," are far better remembered than the poems of Robert 
 Fergusson (1750-1774) who died so young, the harmless, hapless 
 Villon of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and, in certain poems, the 
 model of Burns. 
 
 These poets were not more determined to be Scots (though 
 Ramsay and Fergusson also wrote in English) than the wits who 
 attempted prose were set on speaking English with the English 
 accent, and on avoiding Scotticisms. The Select Society (1754) 
 was a debating society whose members were taught to speak 
 English by an Irishman, the father of the famous author of "The 
 School for Scandal ". The results were matter of admiration. 
 They produced an " Edinburgh Review " which survived into two 
 numbers: it had intended to appear every six months, but ex- 
 pired, though Edinburgh was full of literati, including the Rev. 
 Hugh Blair, a once celebrated preacher, and Hume's friend, the 
 Rev. John Home (1722-1808) whose tragedy, "Douglas," "gave 
 the clergy cause for speculation"- Hume declared that Home 
 possessed " the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, re- 
 fined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licentiousness 
 of the other ''. Posterity has not confirmed Hume's verdict, but 
 Home is the one " mellow glory " of the Scottish stage. 
 
 The Rev. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), as chaplain of the 
 Black Watch, went in at Fontenoy with the claymore. " Remem- 
 ber your commission, Sir,'' shouted his colonel. "D my 
 
 commission. Sir ! " shouted the chaplain. His " History of 
 Margaret, otherwise called Sister Peg" (1760), is a humorous and 
 valuable sketch of the antipathy between England and Scotland 
 in 1760-1770. These men, and many others, — Lord Karnes, 
 
Georgian Poetry 447 
 
 Lord Monboddo, Lord Hailes, a serviceable critical historian, 
 Beattie, the poet of "The Minstrel," and the satirist of the dead 
 Churchill, — ^kept alive the interest in all forms of literature. The 
 great men of the time, to be treated in a later chapter, alas I fall under 
 the censure of Charles Lamb, that their " books are no books," 
 but Cliarles's sympathy with Scotland was confessedly imperfect. 
 Out of this medley of new and old, of the vernacular Scots with 
 the affected English of Edinburgh, out of the ancient ballads and 
 old frolicsome rural ditties, arose the style of Burns. 
 
 Robert Burns. 
 
 The place of Burns in poetry may be called unique. His 
 genius was the incarnation, as it were, of his country people's 
 through many centuries, generations, from the one musical stanza 
 on the death of Alexander III (1285) to the simplest song that 
 the milkmaids crooned at their work. In literary poetry, as we 
 have seen, -the part played by Scotland had been partly derivative. 
 The greatest poets, those of the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen- 
 turies, were professed followers of Chaucer : Drummond of Haw- 
 thornden was a lyrist and sonneteer under ItaUan and Elizabethan 
 influences. Of Barbour and Blind Harry, Burns had little but the 
 burning patriotism : his real predecessors were the many named 
 or nameless popular song-makers, and makers of lays of rural 
 merriment ; and the music of the Scottish tunes to which their 
 words were wedded. Of the popular ballads, romantic or histori- 
 cal, he professed no high esteem : no " white plumes were dancing 
 in his eye,'' chivalry was not his subject : his matter was rural life 
 and Nature ; and he had the true Scottish love of the rivers and 
 burns of his country. In the furnace of his genius all the ancient 
 poetic material, all the folk-song (but not " the fairy way of writ- 
 ing ") was recast and refashioned in forms singularly varied, vivid, 
 and real : while, to pursue the metaphor, the furnace was fanned 
 by all the winds of his age — now of democracy ; now of loyalty to 
 " a man undone," and a dying dynasty ; now of patriotic resistance 
 to " haughty Gaul," and her threats of invasion. 
 
 In the fire of his nature and of his passions Burns resembled 
 Byron, but his humour was kindlier, his ear more tuneful, and his 
 
448 English Literature 
 
 gift of creating character was infinitely more varied. He had the 
 eye of Moliere or of Fielding for a hypocrite ; and combined the 
 delusion that the Covenanters were the friends of freedom, with a 
 scornful contempt of the discipline and doctrines of the successors 
 of the Covenanters. In affairs of the heart he exhibits the usual 
 pastoral morality, that of the shepherds and goatherds of Theocritus, 
 with little of the Sicilian grace and charm. 
 
 The life of Burns is so familiarly known that the briefest survey 
 must suffice. Born on 25 January, 1759, in a clay bigging in the 
 parish of Alloway, in Ayrshire, he was the son of a small labouring 
 farmer of the class whence so many of the martyrs and stout fight- 
 ing men of the Covenant sprang. His father, a "grave liver" 
 and devout, like them, managed to obtain for Burns, and out of 
 every book which came in his way Burns picked up for himself, 
 a fair literary education. He owed much, especially many op- 
 portunities of reading, to a young tutor, Mr. Murdoch. He never 
 was such a bookish man as Hogg, neglected as Hogg's education 
 was in youth, but he acquired a knowledge of French, and studied 
 Moliere. The hardships of a poor farmer, in a cold soil, under a 
 heartless "factor," the severest struggles for existence were known 
 to Burns, but he also had his fill of dancing and " daffing," and 
 the consequent " Kirk discipline". On this aspect of his life and 
 adventures what is best to say has been said by Keats, in a letter 
 written from Burns's country. 
 
 Entanglements of love affairs, and despair of success in life, 
 caused Burns to contemplate emigration to the West Indies, but 
 first he published at Kilmarnock (July, 1786), a collection of his 
 songs and verses which instantly made him famous. ■ Invited to 
 Edinburgh, he passed a winter there in learned, noble, and festive 
 society, carrying the celebrated Duchess of Gordon '' off her feet," 
 as she said, but winning far more admirers and boon companions 
 than serviceable friends. 
 
 The Earl of Glencaim, whom Burns immortalized in sincere 
 and glowing verse, died young ; the age of Harley and Boling- 
 broke, of pensions and places for poets, was long dead. Burns 
 met Scott, then a boy of 15 ; Scott later said that he was unworthy 
 to tie Burns's shoes, but had the men been of equal age, better work 
 
Georgian Poetry 449 
 
 would have been found for Burns than the perilous and bitterly 
 uncongenial task of the exciseman (1789). 
 
 Not successful as a farmer at EUisland (his capital was no 
 more than the scanty profits of his poems), Burns settled in the 
 pretty little town of Dumfries. Here his wit and genius made him 
 the guest of the town and country, of lairds and tourists, and 
 tradesmen. A constitution naturally robust, though injured by 
 early privation, broke down ; he had not the energy to continue 
 in the vein of "Tarn o' Shanter"; but poured out his songs, 
 original, or re-creations of old popular ditties, till his death on 
 21 July, 1796. 
 
 Burns was singular as a poet, in one point : he needed, as it 
 were, to have a key-note struck for him, and he prolonged and 
 glorified the note which had inspired him. Far from concealing 
 the fact, he acknowledged, with perfect candour and generosity, 
 his debt to Robert Fergusson. This poet, born in Edinburgh 
 (1750), and educated at the University of St. Andrews, died, after 
 an interval of madness, in 1774. He, like Burns, had been too 
 welcome a guest of more seasoned convivialists for the sake of his 
 wit. His verses in English are commonplace, but his lyrics, in 
 Burns's favourite measure, on the rude pleasures of Edinburgh 
 tavern life, his "Leith Races," "The Farmer's Ingle," "Ode to 
 the Gowdspink," and other pieces, gave Bums the needed key-note 
 for "The Cottar's Saturday Night," "The Holy Fair" (the sacra- 
 mental meeting in the open air, a relic of Covenanting days), and, 
 perhaps, for the poems on "The Mouse," and "The Mountain 
 Daisy". Burns has so entirely eclipsed Fergusson that he is 
 scarcely remembered, even in Scotland. 
 
 "Poor Mailie's Elegy" had a much older predecessor; and, 
 generally, Burns's songs start from an old tune, to which, through 
 the ages, new verses had been set in new generations. There was 
 a Jacobite "Auld Lang Syne," there was a Jacobite "For a' that," 
 there was a very improper " Green grows the Rashes, o' " and so 
 on, endlessly. But Burns, in many cases, transfigured his original. 
 That he shone more in Scots than in English is admitted — but 
 the best verses in his " Jolly Beggars " are in English, and there 
 is only one word spelled in the Scots fashion in 
 
 29 
 
450 English Literature 
 
 Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
 Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
 Never met or never parted — 
 We had ne'er been broken hearted. 
 
 The same song contains the conventional lines — 
 
 tears I'll pledge thee, 
 thee. 
 
 Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledg 
 Warring sighs and groans I'll wage 
 
 The vigour and variety, the humour, the pity, the scorn, and 
 the sentiment of Burns were h.11 entirely new when he wrote, and 
 his variety enabled him to please the most widely different tastes. 
 Critics who were horrified by "The Jolly Beggars," and "The 
 Holy Fair," and the reckless song to Anna found consolation in 
 "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lament for "Highland 
 Mary " 
 
 Thou ling'ring star with lessening ray, 
 
 in English. Poems in the manner of these two last are some- 
 times spoken of as " sentimental," but the sentiment was as real 
 a mood, while it lasted, as the scorn, or the revelry. 
 
 Of Bums it may be said that, beloved as he has been, not 
 always for his best qualities, by the uncritical, he has been no less 
 admired by the greatest poets of the age that followed his own, 
 Keats, Scott, and Wordsworth. No poet ever was more truly 
 national ; none had more of the genius of the popular past, and 
 the aspirations of the popular future ; none was more essentially 
 and spontaneously lyrical ; none was more at home with Nature, 
 with human society (with the life of the animal world, too, as 
 in " The Twa Dogs "), and, in the humorous tale, none has ex- 
 celled " Tam o' Shanter ". No poet wears better in the changes 
 of circumstance and taste. His letters, though of capital bio- 
 graphical interest, are sometimes of a comic complexion ; " the 
 style of the Bird of Paradise " prevails, now and then, in his Eng- 
 lish prose. But his English verse, as Scott found to be the way 
 with his countrymen when they had, in passionate moments, 
 "gotten to their English," is sometimes the natural vehicle of high 
 reflection or of sincere grief. 
 
Georgian Poetry 451 
 
 Charles Churchill. 
 
 Satire is the least worthy kind of poetry ; for it is almost never 
 sincere. The writer is always in a fatiguing state of virtuous in- 
 dignation about matters for which he really cares very little, except 
 when his virulence is brewed out of personal spite. Satire, in 
 fact, is only tolerable when combined with the smiling humour of 
 Horace, the occasional majesty of Juvenal, the grace, wit, and 
 finish of Pope, or the airy contempt and sonorous lines of Dryden. 
 Charles Churchill had little of the qualities of these poets, yet was, 
 no doubt, the most popular writer of satire in the rhymed heroic 
 couplet between Pope and Byron. He was born in 1731, the 
 son of the Rector at Rainham ; was at Westminster School a con- 
 temporary of Cowper and Warren Hastings ; did not study at either 
 University, though he was admitted to Trinity, Cambridge ; married 
 at 18, and married unwisely ; took orders, and returned to lay 
 costume and pursuits, and in 1761, looking about for a theme of 
 satire that promised notoriety, had the happy thought of attack- 
 ing the actors and actresses of the day in " The Rosciad ". " The 
 profession " is sensitive ; the actors were not silent about their 
 wrongs ; there was plenty of hubbub, and the satire was remunera- 
 tive. Any man who stoops to taunt actors, and even actresses, 
 by personal attacks in rhyme, can make himself notorious. Per- 
 haps the best-known rhymes of Churchill are 
 
 On my life 
 That Davies hath a very pretty wile. 
 
 There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The 
 Apology,'' assailed Garrick as " the vain tyrant " with 
 His puny green-room wits and venal baids. 
 
 Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, 
 and to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he 
 " took the Wilkes and Liberty " to assail Scotland in "The Pro- 
 phecy of Famine ". 
 
 Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream 
 
 Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep 
 And seem themselves to own the power of sleep. 
 
 29 * 
 
452 English Literature 
 
 In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old 
 Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and 
 sleepy in the " dubs " where England provides their flat southern 
 bank. 
 
 In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth 
 replied in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several 
 other satires and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. John- 
 son's incursion into psychical research, in the matter of the famous 
 Cock Lane Ghost. Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 
 1764, and is buried at Dover. In private life he displayed some 
 kindly and honourable qualities, and Byron, before leaving England 
 for ever, in i8i6, consecrated a poem to his grave. To the dis- 
 credit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned Churchill — after he 
 was dead ! 
 
 George Crabbe. 
 
 Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first 
 noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe be- 
 longs in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In 
 verse he follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith ; writing, in his 
 best-known works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced 
 by Goldsmith's " Deserted Village," and by reaction against the 
 smiling conventional " pastorals ''. But perhaps Crabbe's genius, 
 stern and almost grim, was unfortunate in finding no other vend- 
 ible vehicle of his thought than verse, for his natural bent was to 
 the modern " realistic " novel on the squalor, sufferings and sins 
 of the neglected rural poor. He had a genius like that of several 
 modern novelists, for painting all that in nature or human nature 
 is dark, lowering, and sullen ; he is unsparingly devoted to actual 
 study from the life ; and yet he has a peculiar humour of his own. 
 His later works were " Tales," short stories in the measure of Pope, 
 but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that, though 
 these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than the 
 contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal 
 popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers 
 even in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by 
 Dr. Johnson, lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, 
 Miss Austen, and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. 
 
Georgian Poetry 453 
 
 But as, in the beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper 
 as the supplanter of poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found 
 that the world preferred novels in prose to short tales of modern 
 life in verse. He profited by the brief period of the bloom of 
 poetry, but his biographer, Canon Ainger, observes that " Crabbe 
 is practically unknown to the readers of the present day ''. The 
 gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate with gloom, and 
 make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not elements 
 in the genius of Crabbe. 
 
 He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on 
 Christmas Eve, 1754, the son of a man who had been a school- 
 master, but later obtained a small post in the Customs. In 
 Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as now, a watering-place, but 
 through the inroads of the sea, was become a squalid smuggling 
 village with a desolate background of poor and ill-cultivated land : 
 as described in " The Village ". Crabbe was from childhood a 
 great devourer of books, and at the second of his two country 
 schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was 
 apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize 
 for a magazine poem, " Hope,'' made songs to his mistress's 
 eyebrow, printed (1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich 
 practised medicine in a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to 
 London with his surgical instruments and three pounds in his 
 pocket. He wrote poems which were declined by publishers ; 
 though there was an opening for a poet — 
 
 When Verse her wintry prospect weeps, 
 Wheii Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps, 
 When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar. 
 And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more. 
 
 (Lines of 1 780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and 
 Crabbe was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by 
 him to Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 
 1 78 1. Burke offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow 
 gave money ; Crabbe was introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. 
 Johnson, took orders, was made curate of his native village, liked 
 it not, and became chaplain of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. 
 Later he held a variety of livings, and, for a poet so satirical about 
 
454 English Literature 
 
 clerical neglect of the poor, was, inconsistently, a pluralist and an 
 absentee, till his Bishop made him mend his ways. 
 
 His first poem of any note, "The Library" (i 781-2) has 
 no great merit : we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was 
 represented by the old heroic romance, 
 
 bloody deeds 
 Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds. 
 
 In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic 
 descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse 
 that her day is over : — 
 
 I paint the cot, 
 As Truth will paint it, and as bards will not. 
 
 There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, 
 "the thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning 
 sands " ; the blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy 
 mallow, the tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild am- 
 phibious race" of smugglers and fishers ; the farm-labourers 
 
 hoard up aches and agues for their age, 
 and 
 
 mend the broken hedge with icy thorn. 
 
 In the poorhouse, amidst unspeakable filth, the dying are neg- 
 lected by the doctor and the sporting curate, and the dead are 
 buried without rites. There is not -a gleam of hope or sunshine, 
 except in the accidental mention of " the flying ball, the bat, the 
 wicket ". The poet ends with applause of the heroic death in 
 action of Lord Robert Manners, and with consolatory remarks to 
 the Duke of Rutland. 
 
 The poem was successful and was admired by Scott, then a 
 lad of 18: a few lines had been contributed by Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Deserting the topics in which he was strongest, Crabbe (1785) 
 published " The Newspaper " ; the papers are 
 
 A daily swarm that banish every Muse, 
 
 For these unread the noblest volumes lie, 
 
 For these unsoiled in sheets the Muses die. , . . 
 
 For daily bread the dirty trade they ply. 
 Coin their firesh tales and live upon the lie. 
 
 ' The puffing poet " is also censured. 
 
Georgian Poetry 455 
 
 Crabbe continued to write, but not till 1807 did he publish 
 "The Parish Register," which returns to the theme of "The 
 Village". He was now doing duty at his parish, Muston, and, 
 not unnaturally, found that, in various forms, the people had be- 
 come Nonconformists. He now took a much more cheerful view 
 of " the cot," and found its book-shelf well occupied by the Bible, 
 Bunyan, and old English fairy tales ; while the garden was rich 
 in salads, carnations, hyacinths, and tulips. But Crabbe turns with 
 more zest 
 
 To this infected row we term our street, 
 
 he enumerates the smells, and describes the horrible results of 
 overcrowded dwellings ; and catalogues the disguises, the weapons, 
 and the implements of the poacher. There follows the sad story 
 of " The Miller's Daughter" ; and another girl who thus addresses 
 her clerical rebuker, 
 
 Alas I your Reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant, 
 Were once my motive, now the thoughts of want. 
 
 This is a fair example of Crabbe's favourite punning antitheses, 
 
 like 
 
 loose in his gaiters, looser in his gait. 
 
 In " The Parish Register " Crabbe reduces the story of a life to 
 the brevity of an anecdote, and in the dearth of novels his book 
 was very popular. A better book of a similar scope and aim, in 
 prose, Gait's " Annals of the Parish,'' was being written, but,"taking 
 time by the forelock, Crabbe, in 1810, produced "The Borough," 
 descriptions of a large country town, including tales in verse of 
 more considerable length. But, in 1804-1805, he had written a 
 poem which is strange in his work, "Sir Eustace Grey," a tale 
 told by a madman, a record of the dreams of madness, closely 
 resembling De Quincey's account of the visions begotten by opium, 
 and, in essence, not unlike Coleridge's " Pains of Sleep ". The 
 metre is that of the French ballade, and of the oldest Scottish 
 ditty on the death of Alexander III. Thus 
 
 They hung me on a bough so small, 
 
 The rook could build her nest no higher, 
 
 They fixed me on the trembling ball 
 
 That crowns the steeple's quivering spire ; 
 
456 English Literature 
 
 They set me where the seas retire, 
 
 But drown with their returning tide ; 
 
 And made me flee the mountain's fire 
 When rolling from its burning side. 
 
 This adventure into romance has imaginative merits, and a speed 
 of movement elsewhere unexampled in the work of Crabbe. The 
 hymn with which poor Sir Eustace consoles himself might have 
 been written by Cowper when first converted and " from cells of 
 madness unconfined '' : — 
 
 Pilgrim, burdened with thy sin. 
 Come the way to Zion's gate ; 
 There, till Mercy let thee in, 
 Knock and weep, and watch and wait. 
 Knock I He knows the sinner's cry : 
 Weep 1 He loves the mourner's tears : 
 Watch I for saving grace is nigh : 
 Wait ! till heavenly light appears. 
 
 Crabbe thought it necessary to apologize for the " enthusiasm " 
 of the hymn, and to point out that Sir Eustace, had he been sane, 
 would not have been converted by " a methodistic call ". " The 
 World of Dreams," in the same stanza, might take its place in 
 "Sir Eustace Grey," so similar are the processions- of terrible 
 fantastic visions. These things are very strange among the vigorous 
 but heavy-footed marches of Crabbe's habitual style. 
 
 To return to "The Borough," Crabbe paints its very aspect 
 with his Dutch precision ; and, incidentally, strikes at, his rivals, 
 the enthusiasts of various sects, who were much more popular 
 preachers than himself. 
 
 Their earth is crazy and their heaven is base, 
 
 he says of the followers of Swedenborg. As for the Jews, 
 
 They will not study and they dare not fight, 
 
 he exclaims ; making an exception for Mendoza and other famed 
 Semitic bruisers. The poem is of some value to the social his- 
 torian, and the tales of the country coquette, and the horrible and 
 haunted Peter Grimes, have a gloomy vigour, and somewhat re- 
 semble, in poetry, the moral pictures of Hogarth. 
 
Georgian Poetry 457 
 
 Crabbe's later works were collections of tales in verse, and 
 with all their merits their versification condemns them to general 
 neglect. His " Lady Barbara, or the Ghost " is not so successful 
 in rendering the well-known story of "The Beresford Ghost "as 
 is Scott's early ballad " The Eve of St. John ". To read with at- 
 tention novels of everyday life narrated in the metre of Pope, 
 without the skill of Pope, requires a vigorous effort. 
 
 In his Tales (as when a sturdy orthodox farmer expels the 
 demon of scepticism from his son by a sound trouncing) Crabbe 
 is often somewhat remote from our sympathetic modern tolerance 
 of honest doubt. His method of narration is obsolete. In "The 
 Patron,'' the patronized youth of humble birth, who has loved the 
 Squire's daughter, is neglected, 
 
 And in the bed of death the youth reposed. 
 
 The nymph of his adoration is thus corrected by her mother : — 
 
 " Emma," the lady cried, " my words attend. 
 Your syien-smiles have killed your humble friend ; 
 The hopes you raised can now delude no more, 
 Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore. 
 
 People did not speak in that style in Miss Austen's day ; or in any 
 other day. 
 
 Crabbe died in the same year as Sir Walter Scott, who, like 
 Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, appreciated that in him which 
 was rare, excellent, and original. 
 
CHAPTER XXX. 
 GEORGIAN PROSE. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Great Novelists. 
 
 The novel, since the days of the mediaeval romances, and the 
 Elizabethan prose stories from Sidney's "Arcadia" to the tales of 
 Greene and Nash, was never quite unrepresented in England, for 
 example, there were translations and imitations of the huge French 
 "Heroic" romances; Banyan's stories are religious and moral 
 novels, and under the Restoration Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) 
 wrote short novels of love which do not quite deserve the bad 
 reputation conferred on them by an anecdote told by Sir Walter 
 Scott. Eliza Haywood (1693-1 756) was prolific in prose tales, 
 and is the author of a little romance of Prince Charles's adven- 
 tures in 1749-1750, disguised as "A Letter of H G ," 
 
 Henry Goring, the Prince's equerry. But in literary circles, the 
 novel was held in as high disdain as it was later, before Scott 
 produced "Waverley" (18 14). 
 
 The novel of modern life, manners, and sentiment first came 
 to its own as the universal joy of reading mankind in Richardson's 
 "Pamela"; advertised as it was, in modern fashion, from the 
 pulpits of all denominations. 
 
 Samuel Richardso n, the son of a Yorkshire joiner, was born 
 in 1689, and after bemg educated at the Charterhouse was ap- 
 prenticed to a London printer. As a boy he made small 
 sums by writing love-letters for maidservants and others who were 
 unable to write for themselves ; and when, as a middle-aged man, 
 tie turned to writing novels, he cast them in the form of letters. 
 
 458 
 
Georgian Prose 459 
 
 !^4mgl^^ which he began to publish in 1740, is the story of a 
 girl who is a waiting-maid to a lady and is persecuted by her 
 mistress's son ; in the end he marries her and becomes a model 
 husband. It may annoy us from the very strange and unnatural 
 way in which all the characters behave. Pamela strikes us less as 
 a being of equal innocence and virtue, mistress of her own passion 
 for " the dear obliger," Mr. B. (only the initial is given), than as a 
 young woman who knows her game and plays her cards most 
 adroitly. Her snobbishness was, no doubt, in the manner of her 
 class in her day, but we approve of Pamela no more than Fielding 
 did, when he overwhelmed it with the sturdy laughter of his 
 parody, "Joseph Andrews," brother of Pamela, and as virtuous 
 as that paragon, yet no milksop. But " Pamela " was admired 
 beyond " this side idolatry ". 
 
 " Clarissa " ' (1748) is another novel of Virtue in danger and 
 distress, but Clarissa is a lady of good family and fortune, and of 
 a pure and heroic spirit. Decoyed from her home and friends by 
 the wiles of the professional seducer, Lovelace, a rake so brilliant 
 and witty and reckless as to win the hearts, if not of Clarissa, of 
 all Richardson's lady readers, Clarissa is exposed to the last ex- 
 treme of misery, steadily refuses to marry the scoundrel who has 
 wronged her, and dies slowly among the sobs of the congregation. 
 
 " S ir Charles Grandis on," whose name has become a proverb 
 in theT!ngnsnTat^uager*appeared in 1753, and is one of the 
 longest books that ever was printed. It is very badly constructed 
 too, and contains lengthy episodes which have nothing to do with 
 the story, and only HUSJilfi JBA"' confuse the reader. Properly 
 speaking it is not so much a novel as a series of incidents, all 
 tending to the glorification of the hero, who is made up of long 
 words, fine sentiments and whalebone. The women of the tale 
 are less exasperating than the men, though they can hardly be 
 considered attractive. The reason of this may be found in the 
 fact that Richardson neither sought nor was sought by men, while 
 he was in the habit of reading his manuscripts to a group of en- 
 thusiastic young ladies (among whom was the future Mrs. Chapone) 
 in his garden at Fulham. Unluckily his audience, who might 
 have been of service to him in pointing out that well-bred people 
 
460 English Literature 
 
 had other manners than those of the characters of Richardson, 
 were too deeply engulfed in admiration to be capable of criticism ; 
 or possibly they may not have been aware, as Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu was, that Richardson did not know the society which he 
 described. The letters themselves, besides showing a frankness 
 and lack of reticence which it may confidently be said few real 
 letters could ever parallel, are of a length which even on a desert 
 island no one could write. The genuine letters in his correspond- 
 ence, between him and the unknown but worshipping Lady Brads- 
 haigh, and their romantic and elaborate arrangements to discover 
 each other in Hyde Park, are far more amusing reading. Richard- 
 son has been accused, and justly, of a portentous lack of humour, 
 but if his reader has any of his own, he will not read the novels 
 in vain. 
 
 These censures are the candid criticism of the "modern reader 
 who finds that he cannot think himself back into the circle of 
 Richardson, who finds its Virtue and its Sentiment hardly intelligible, 
 though he is entirely at home with the society of all degrees that 
 Fielding describes, or that lives in Boswell's "Life of Johnson," 
 and in the " Letters " of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu, expressing themselves like people of this world. But 
 though Richardson lived in a kind of moral and sentimental hot - 
 house, w here one can scarcely breathe ; though he had a more than 
 femmme liking for accumulated minutenesses of details and a 
 more than mediaeval prolixity ; yet his full-length pictures of his 
 personages, stippled like a miniature in a ring, delighted not only 
 English but continental, especially French readers. It was an 
 age when people took little exercise, w ere little in the onen ai r, 
 and p assed endless hours in conversation on the ethics and philo - 
 so phy "of love and sentiment.. The Memoirs of Madame d'Kpinav 
 are partly a romance m the manner of Richardson, and to read 
 them is to understand the society which found in him its ideal 
 novelist. "The man would hang himself who tried to read 
 'Clarissa' for its story," said Dr. Johnson, a friend of the author, 
 partly because the author was the friend of Virtue. We, if we 
 please, may detest and disbelieve in Lovelace, who was, none the 
 less, the conqueror of the hearts of the ladies of the time, that im- 
 
Georgian Prose 461 
 
 plored Richardson to convert a hero so brilliant, witty and amiable. 
 But for Richardson it had been enough to convert Mr. B., and he 
 was artist enough to refuse to gratify tastes which, in the manner 
 of Charles II., demanded that all tragedies should end happily. 
 Scott, with the resurrection of Athelstane ; Dickens, with the 
 conversion of Estella, were more good-naturedly and erroneously 
 amenable to the requests of friends. 
 
 There was a blush between Charles Lamb and the girl who 
 sat down beside him to read " Pamela," and, in fact, Richardson's 
 way of educating girls in virtue may seem apt to have effects which 
 he did not contemplate. Other times, other manners. 
 
 Henry Fielding. 
 
 To say anything at once new and true about Henry Fielding passes 
 the power of man. His defects and his qualities ; the good in him 
 and in his work, and the not so good, are so conspicuous that his 
 contemporaries, and later generations down to our own, have passed 
 on them the same remarks. There are the admirers of Fielding, 
 who justly see in him one of the three very greatest of English 
 novelists of contemporary life and manners as exhibited in the por- 
 tions of society which he knew and illustrated. But he did not 
 take all contemporary society for his province. Born at Sharpham 
 Park, in Somerset, in 1707, he had far greater advantages of birth 
 than other men of the pen. The House of Fielding is ancient 
 and noble, though, unlike Gibbon in his monumental compliment 
 to Fielding, Mr. Horace Round cannot accept its connexion with 
 the House of Hapsburg. 
 
 The Fieldings had two Earldoms, of Desmond (in Ireland) and 
 of Denbigh ; Fielding's father was of a cadet branch of the family : 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a kind of cousin of the novelist. 
 He was educated at Eton and in the law-loving University of 
 Leyden; but when he "came upon the town," in 1728, he did not 
 associate himself with the circle of Pope and Bolingbroke and the 
 wits and the great ladies ; he does not draw his characters from 
 that splendid society, though Lady Bellaston, in "Tom Jones," 
 is a member thereof. 
 
 Fielding had to live by his brains, by writing comedies, and by 
 
462 English Literature 
 
 journalism. He showed his genius for parody of the heroic tire- 
 some tragedy that was " such an unconscionable time adying,'' in 
 " Tom Thumb the Great " ; and his dangerous turn for political 
 satire in "The Historical Register" (1737). But the Licensing 
 Act, making the Lord Chamberlain, or his subaltern, Licencer of 
 Plays, excluded Fielding from that course ; he was called to the Bar 
 (1740), where he did not practise much. He was married in 1735 
 to the original, it is said, of the exquisite Sophia of " Tom Jon es " ; 
 he wrote in the Press ; in 1 745 he took the HanovenarTsTSe, in 
 " The True Patriot," and " The Jacobite's Journal," in mockery 
 so named ; and during all this period he saw a great deal of the 
 world, especially the world of the stage and of light literature. 
 
 But of all this he makes little display in his novels. He falls 
 back on the humours of the country : on the country parson, 
 Adams ; the Tory Squire, Squire Western ; a neighbour, in char- 
 acter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and so good an Englishman that he 
 rejoices when he hears that "twenty thousand honest Frenchmen 
 are landed in Kent " to back the Rightful King, and the landed 
 interest, against Hanoverians, financiers, and Whigs in general. 
 His excellent AUworthy is no townsman ; Mr. Thomas Jones, a 
 Foundling, is country born and country bred ; most of the adven- 
 tures of Joseph Andrews take place in the country ; in " Amelia " 
 we are in town, and in taverns and prisons often, but by no means 
 " in society ". 
 
 " Jonathan Wild " is a tale of town villains and rogues ; and 
 Fielding's minor characters, from postilions to philosophers, like 
 Philosopher Square, landlords, landladies, serving-men, lawyers, 
 parsons, unfortunate ladies, people on the road, are of ordinary 
 humanity, with a considerable sprinkling of hypocrites. He had 
 heard the chimes at midnight and much later ; he had hunted ; 
 he had lived the tavern life, the life of debts and expedients, but 
 he "had kept the bird in his bosom," the sterling excellence of 
 his heart ; pity for the poor and oppressed ; honour, good humour, 
 tolerance, and manly indignation. 
 
 To Fielding, Richardson's "Pamela," the text of many a 
 sermon, the snow-pure prudent Pamela, with Virtue rewarded by 
 the hand of the enterprising Mr. B., was even as a red rag to a 
 
Georgian Prose 463 
 
 bull. He did not weep over Pamela's tears, these " pearly fugi- 
 tives". He no more believed in Mr. B.'s return to virtue than in 
 that of Vanbrugh's Loveless. Respectability was so far from 
 being his favourite virtue, that, like many very inferior writers, he 
 inclined to identify it, unjustly, with hypocrisy. 
 
 Consequently he began " Joseph Andrew s " as a parody or 
 burlesque of " Pamela ". That paragon had a brother, appro- 
 pnatel^amed J osepli ; and the virtue of Joseph is assailed like 
 that of his sister, but in vain. Joseph is invincibly respectable, 
 yet no hypocrite, but a very manly young fellow with an honest 
 love in his own rank. The story soon ceased to be a parody ; that 
 grotesque, learned, excellent, and extremely muscular Christian, 
 Parson Adams, came into the tale, with the egregious Mrs. Slip- 
 slop ; and the thing became a "picaresque " novel, a tale of the 
 road and of chance meetings : with the lesson that kind hearts are 
 more than coronets, and a postilion, later guilty of robbing a hen 
 roost, is a better Christian than a whole coach-load of Pharisees. 
 Indeed St. Augustine, once at least, robbed an orchard, yet be- 
 came a shining light, having been misled (as regards the apples 
 and pears) by his sense of humour. 
 
 "Joseph Andrews," though its language is occasionally coarse, 
 as regards its meaning is not obscure, and it is certainly one of 
 the most amusing works in our language : though it is not written 
 for small boys and little girls. We meet Pamela and Mr. B. 
 (cruelly styled Mr. Booby), again at the close, and they behave ill 
 in church, when Joseph is married. 
 
 Richardson was very much hurt, of course, and spoke very ill 
 of Fielding ; if he forgave Fielding, he " forgave him as a Chris- 
 tian," like Rowena in Ivanhoe, " ' which means,' said Wamba, 
 ' that she does not forgive him at all ' ". 
 
 There is an endless discussion about Fielding's morality. 
 Natural goodness of heart is everything with him. Of his Tom 
 Jones the epitaph might be that devised by Joe Gargery in " Great 
 Expectations " for his reprobate of a father, 
 Whatsume'er the failings on his part, 
 Remember reader he were that good in his hart. 
 
 Thomas w^s " that good at his heart " and lectures young 
 
464 English Literature 
 
 Nightingale very nobly on the infamy of corrupting virtue. But 
 where theye is no virtue to corrupt in others, Thomas pays no 
 attention to his own. Perhaps he could have resisted temptation, 
 in Nightingale's circumstances, but he is wisely kept out of it by 
 the author. He does what is thought the very basest thing that 
 a man can do ; Colonel Newcorae never forgave him ; if we are 
 to pardon Tom it must be, as Dumas urges in the case of Porthos, 
 because, "other times, other manners''. 
 
 This affair is the dangerous step in " Tom Jones " (1749), that 
 epic of the eighteenth century. Fielding thought of it as an epic 
 in prose ; he is fond of burlesquing Homer and of quoting Aris- 
 totle. The plot has been praised by Coleridge and justly, as on 
 a level with that of the " CEdipus Tyrannus " of Sophocles. The 
 construction of plots has not been the strong point of most great 
 novelists, but Fielding set this good example, not immaculate of 
 course, but admirable. 
 
 The real merit of the book lies in its pell-mell of characters, 
 all delineated with exquisite humourj wit, and observation, from 
 the mysterious mother of the hero, and the adorable Sophia, to 
 the adroit hypocrite, Blifil ; the uproarious stupid fox-hunter, the 
 Jacobite who drinks healths. Squire Western ; the philanthropic 
 yet really good Allworthy ; the delightful pedantic Partridge, with 
 his tags of Latin quotations ; the rural ruffian. Black George ; the 
 harmless vanity of Missi Western (the aunt), the sternly Protestant 
 and Anglican, but not immaculately virtuous Philosopher Square, 
 and all the attendant crowd. 
 
 The moral introductory reflections may, of course, be skipped, 
 yet not by wise readers, for they are full of Fielding's humour, 
 and display his confidence in the immortality of his book. 
 
 Fielding was Thac l^ p^i y'" majitpr f^n d model ; in his too fre- 
 quent reflections he follows Fielding too closely. If all men were 
 equally fortunate, they would all read " Tom Jones " in the six 
 small volumes of the First Edition : but in any edition the book 
 is delightfiil. Charlotte Bronte thought it corrupting to such 
 young fellows as her brother, the unhappy Branwell, but Bran- 
 wells will go their own w^ay, with or without the aid of the too 
 fortunate Foundling. 
 
Georgian Prose 465 
 
 Fielding was a sturdy Hanoverian, but he was mortal and an 
 author. He must have been pleased had he known that the hero 
 of 1745 (the year in which the tale is cast), that Prince Charles 
 then lurking in a Parisian convent, purchased " Tom Jones," both 
 in French and English. 
 
 Earlier than " Tom Jones " is " Jonathan Wild the Great," the 
 romance of a thief- taker and sharer of spoils with thieves, who was 
 gibbeted in 1725. It is customary to speak of this book, a satire 
 of the " greatness " of men like Julius Caesar, as a masterpiece of 
 irony, and as a success in the field where Thackeray, on the same 
 estimate, failed with "Barry Lyndon". If irony is to be openly 
 and noisily unveiled in every page, then " Jonathan Wild " may be 
 a masterpiece of irony. The reader may be left, if he can read 
 " Jonathan Wild," to compare it with " Barry Lyndon " for him- 
 self, and to draw his own conclusions as to the relative merits of 
 these books. The deliciously absurd adventures of Mrs. Heartfree, 
 like those of the heroines of late Greek romances, are, at all events, 
 intentionally or unintentionally funny. Sir Walter Scott disliked 
 this masterpiece, and after reading it, and the commendations which 
 eminent modern critics bestow upon it, the writer cannot honestly 
 dissent from the disrelish of Sir Walter. He is said not to have 
 understood Fielding's meaning which Fielding constantly proclaims 
 and avows, namely that greatness of intellect and ambition with- 
 out goodness of heart is a mischievous monstrosity. Mr. Carlyle, 
 in some moods of hero-worship, might have differed, but we can 
 give a general assent without wading through " Jonathan Wild ". 
 
 Fielding's own heart was as good as Steele's. He adored his 
 beautiful wife as Steele adored Prue. But, while " the greatest 
 blessing is a faithful and beloved wife," says our author in 
 " Amelia," " it rather tends to aggravate the misfortune of dis- 
 tressed circumstances from the consideration of the share which 
 she is to bear in them ". But the circumstances were distressed 
 because Fielding, like Amelia's Captain Booth, was "a good 
 fellow," and, like Johnson's friend. Savage, was at no time of his 
 life the first to leave any company, — over the punch bowl. And 
 Amelia was listening for every footstep, and dreading every acci- 
 dent of the streets, and money was a minus quantity, and a scrag 
 
 30 
 
466 English Literature 
 
 of muUon was a rare festival, because Captain Booth had every 
 generosity except that of a little self-denial. 
 
 By 1749 Mr. Fielding, as his friendly biographer says, "was a 
 rfiartyr to gout ". " He had not stolen it," and we have heard of 
 another sufferer, " a martyr to delirium tremens ''. By this time 
 his wife was dead ; later he married her maid, an excellent woman, 
 Mary Daniel, probably of an old and ruined Jacobite family of 
 Daniel. At the end of 1 748 Fielding had been made a stipendiary 
 magistrate for Westminster. Unlike his Jonathan Thrasher, Esq., 
 J.P., who was infamously corrupt, and as ignorant of the law as 
 the country justice before whom Frank Osbaldistone appears in 
 " Rob Roy,'' Fielding brought to his work his honesty, courage, 
 and sympathy with the poor. 
 
 The first chapters of his "Amelia" (1751) contain pictures of 
 the contemporary corruption of justice, and the laxity of the 
 prisons. Thence came the misfortunes of Captain Booth, a true 
 lover, but also a young man in the prime of life. From this error 
 of the Captain's, who met a Circe in prison, and from the great- 
 ness of his wife's character, the beautiful Amelia, the plot of the 
 novel adroitly develops itself. She was "too good to be true". 
 On the other hand the high spirit and temper of Miss Matthews 
 make her a kind (?f shady Brynhild ; and only coincidences in which 
 Captain Booth recognized the hand of Providence prevent the 
 most tragical catastrophe. " Men worship women on their knees ; 
 when they get up they go away," says Fielding's great successor. 
 They never get up and go away when they worship Amelia. 
 
 The book, in addition to her and Miss Matthews, presents the 
 delightfully amusing characters of Colonel Bath, " old honour and 
 dignity," who fights Booth in Hyde Park from motives of the 
 purest friendship; Colonel James, with a philosophy of love 
 rather like Lord Foppington's ; Sergeant Atkinson, a kind of later 
 Great Heart ; Mrs. Ellison, a lady " not of the nicest delicacy " ; 
 Murphy, a Jonathan Wild as attorney.; and a score of other 
 characters worthy of their creator. With "Joseph Andrews" and 
 "Tom Jones," "Amelia" is an immortal glory of English fiction. 
 
 Fielding's experiences led him into plans for suppressing law- 
 lessness, and for important social reforms. In 1753 he took the 
 
Georgian Prose 467 
 
 side of Elizabeth Canning in that unsolved mystery of a girl who, 
 if not a good girl, " has been too hard for me," says Fielding. 
 His own behaviour, in the case of Miss Virtue's examination, is 
 rather startling to the modern student ; and whether he ended as 
 a partisan of the Gipsy or of Elizabeth Canning is uncertain 
 (1753-1754). Elizabeth made a good marriage, in America, 
 whither she was banished, and lived and died respected. 
 
 In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and 
 divided London for more than a year. Fielding speaks of his ill- 
 ness and overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in 
 his public duties ; was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his 
 "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is 
 the record of his sufferings and reflections. He sailed in the 
 "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had intervals of enjoyment, 
 and sketched, with his usual humour, the events and incidents 
 of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754. 
 
 Tobias Smollett. 
 
 The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of 
 Fielding as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smol- 
 lett and Fielding were contemporaries : both came of ancient 
 families ; each had a profession ; — Smollett was a physician while 
 Fielding was a barrister, — but each lived mainly by journalism, 
 literature and fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were 
 divided in their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Figl^^Jjog. 
 The reason is obvious : Fielding is full of good humour ; in him 
 there is no rancour; he admires good women almost to adora- 
 tion, and paints them as only the very greatest poets have done. 
 Again, his tal es are well constructed , especially "Tom Jones". 
 On the other hand Smollett allows 'his story to wander in the 
 roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque adventures ; 
 he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially against 
 his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by 
 his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be 
 plain, are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish 
 rufiSans ; and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly 
 surpassed by that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have 
 
 30 * 
 
468 English Literature 
 
 made SmoUet); unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life ; his 
 irresistible power of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. 
 But, if he drew ^MMri"^ PanHrim and Peregrine Pickle from 
 himself, he gave them bad qualities far in excess of his own, and 
 did not endow thera with many of his own better attributes. 
 Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as Roderick Ran- 
 dom often does ; and was incapable of what may be styled the 
 dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated 
 Richardson's Lovelace. 
 
 Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of 
 the ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch 
 Lomond. An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the 
 Spanish Armada in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act 
 of suborned treachery. Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his 
 native stream ; like Burns in boyhood he devoured the truculent 
 romance of " Wallace '' by Blind Harry. He was poor, and be- 
 lieved himself to be badly treated by his kinsfolk ; after studying at 
 Glasgow University he was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1739 he 
 went to London to push his fortunes, carrying with him a foolish 
 tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the apple of his eye. 
 No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett raged against 
 Garrick and Lord Lyttelton : he puts the story of his woes into 
 " Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the 
 sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, 
 the post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war ; lived through the dis- 
 tresses of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that know- 
 ledge of naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of 
 sea-men, which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the 
 characters of Bowling and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married 
 in Jamaica, came to town, practised as a physician, and certainly 
 lived in most fashionable quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's 
 method of advertisement by being hastily called out of church as 
 an old trick ; perhaps Dickens, a reader of Smollett from his child- 
 hood, borrowed here from " Count Fathom ". His patriotism was 
 stirred by the fatal disaster of CuUoden, and he boldly published 
 his "Tears of Scotland" (1746). 
 
 In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a 
 
Georgian Prose 469 
 
 meritorious orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a 
 gambler, and enriches himself in the slave trade ; but all is to 
 be forgiven to Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional senti- 
 mentalism. There are countless changes of scene and varieties of 
 character, from the ocean to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures 
 in French service, from Strap and Bowling to the literary Miss 
 Snapper and the unfortunate Miss Williams. Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu supposed her cousin. Fielding, to be the author, which 
 showed little discrimination, though her ladyship's letters are among 
 the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing of her century. Smollett 
 had a bitter feud with Fielding ; we do not know, or care, for what 
 cause. The briskness of the book, and the novelty of the nautical 
 horrors, made Smollett's reputation. 
 
 Going to I'aris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters 
 who appear in the crowd of " Peregrine Pickle " (1751), ofwhich the 
 first edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. 
 It is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour : the irrepres- 
 sible Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick ; and 
 an infamous Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle 
 for his pseudonym. Emilia is more than too good for the rascal 
 to whom she descends in marriage, after escaping plots of his which 
 might have disgusted Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, 
 Hatchway and Pipes, and Commander Hawser Trunnion are im- 
 mortal characters ; it is cruel to call Trunnion caricatured ; he is 
 a comic masterpiece. 
 
 The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous 
 son of a suttler and murderess, is not a much worse man than 
 Peregrine, but, in place of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained 
 with a queer attempt at romance in the loves of Rinaldo and 
 Monimia, who meets her lover as he weeps over her empty tomb. 
 " Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don Quixote, armour and all, 
 was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild," and, despite the patent 
 absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much more agreeable 
 story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling hypo- 
 chondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more senti- 
 mental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) 
 is a scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his " Humphry 
 
470 English Literature 
 
 Clinker" (i7'7i), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English 
 travellers in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more 
 amusing than any of his other stories — Matthew Bramble is a 
 favourable study of his later self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind 
 of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than a century later than the laird 
 of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and innocent good-hearted 
 absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every reader, as a con- 
 trast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here we meet 
 Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character ! 
 
 Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, 
 as a social observer : he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney 
 and Dickens. His History of England has been justly described 
 by Sir Pitt Crawley as less interesting but less dangerous than that 
 by Hume. Smollett, revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near 
 Leghorn, in the early autumn of 177 1. 
 
CHAPTER XXXI. 
 GEORGIAN PROSE, 
 
 II. 
 
 Samuel Johnson. 
 
 We could scarcely understand how Dr. Johnson gained his 
 immense influence and acknowledged chiefship in literature if we 
 had only his works of various kinds before us. But he had a friend 
 and biographer, James Boswell, Esq. (younger of Auchinleck in 
 Ayrshire), and " Bozzy," by showing Johnson as he was and talked, 
 explains his supremacy. In an age when classical learning counted 
 for something, Johnson was, especially in Roman literature, vastly 
 learned. In a time when people who could tear themselves from 
 cards, took little exercise, but sat and talked, over wine or over 
 tea, or as they slowly sauntered, Johnson was probably the best 
 and certainly the best reported of the talkers. While politicians 
 like Burke, and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and musicians 
 like Burney (Fanny Burney's father), were men of letters, critics, 
 talkers, a scholar and author who could talk like Johnson was 
 certain of his reward, was sure to be at the front. Though he 
 confessed himself not specially partial to clean linen ; though he 
 did not eat in a neat and cleanly fashion ; though he had the strange 
 tricks which we know so well ; though if his pistol missed fire in 
 argument he knocked you down with the butt ; though he had 
 curious prejudices, was at heart a Jacobite, and could be extremely 
 rude, yet the excellence of his heart, his large sagacity, his im- 
 mense knowledge and readiness, his humour, all of him that is 
 immortally delightful to read about in Boswell's Life, won his for- 
 giveness and his welcome from the most refined of men and women, 
 
 471 
 
472 English Literature 
 
 He thought himself a lady's man, he said, and a man of the world, 
 and he was thoroughly a man's man, with heart, and tongue, and 
 hands, if that were necessary. 
 
 As a playwriter, he had not great success, and his friend Gold- 
 smith's comedies keep the stage, unlike Johnson's tragedy. John- 
 son's tale " Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," has wisdom and humour 
 enough, " wit enough to keep it sweet," but it never did nor ever 
 can share the popularity of Goldsmith's " Vicar of Wakefield ". 
 
 Johnson's essays, in "The Rambler" and "The Idler,'' may 
 still be but are seldom read : they are far less alive than the essays 
 of Addison and Steele, and are weighed down by the ponderous 
 harmonies of the Latinised style. 
 
 Of his books, "The Lives of the Poets," written in his old 
 age, are, to some, we may hope to many, readers, entrancing. 
 Here we find the Johnson of conversation. He is not, indeed, 
 a scientific biographer, a searcher among old letters and old re- 
 cords. But his memory was rich in anecdotes of the half century 
 before his own ; his style contains many a humorous comment, 
 and his criticism is often acute, and always honest, and unaffectedly 
 tinged, especially when he writes of the republican and puritan 
 Milton, or of the dainty, yet, in poetry, revolutionary Gray, with 
 all the literary and political prejudices that gave salt to his con- 
 versation. There may have been more enlightened critics, but 
 none was ever more entertaining. 
 
 If his literary biographies are not of the most exact, they are 
 occasionally minute enough. " Pope's weakness was so great, 
 that he constantly wore stays, as I have been assured by a water- 
 man (of Twickenham) who, in lifting him into his boat, had often 
 felt ihem.'' Again, "Pope once slumbered at his own table while 
 the Prince of Wales was talking of poetry". In his "Life of 
 Swift " Johnson is by no means friendly, and publishes an anecdote 
 which was indignantly denied. His life of his friend, Richard 
 Savage, a most detestable person, is an example of Johnson's 
 loyalty and tolerance. Supposing that Savage was the son of the 
 Countess of Macclesfield, and was persecuted by her with incred- 
 ible cruelty, yet his conduct in most ways was detestable, though 
 Johnson, who candidly narrates the facts, good-humpuredly con- 
 
Georgian Prose 473 
 
 dones them. The conversation of Savage must, apparently, have 
 won the heart of " the great Lexicographer ". Even the Dictionary 
 of the Doctor contains several of his good sayings, and perhaps 
 the learning and persevering industry which Johnson displayed as 
 a "drudge" increased his reputation, and won for him friends and 
 admirers, as much as his more literary works. 
 
 The outlines of his life are too well known to need more than 
 a brief summary. His family was matter of interest to the High- 
 landers when he visited them, was he a Maclan of Glencoe or a 
 Johnston of the Border ? He was born at Lichfield (18 September, 
 1 709), his father was a bookseller. His Oxford career, at Pem- 
 broke College, was embittered by poverty, but he retained a great 
 affection for his college and University, which delighted to honour 
 him. He kept a school without much profit, and, coming to 
 London with Garrick in 1737, lived the life of Grub Street, doing 
 translations, writing for Cave's "Gentleman's Magazine," com- 
 piling parliamentary debates in which he " took care not to let 
 the Whig dogs have the best of it ". Of his doings in 1 745 Bos- 
 well could learn nothing, and there was a fancy that he was in- 
 clined to take part in what he called "a gallant enterprise,'' that 
 of Prince Charles. 
 
 His " London," an imitation of Juvenal, was well thought of 
 by Pope, and Scott took more pleasure in no modern poem than 
 in Johnson's manly, resolute, and mournful "Vanity of Human 
 Wishes," also based on Juvenal's satire (1749). The " Rambler" 
 and " Idler," were his next works (with the Dictionary), and in 
 1759 he rapidly wrote "Rasselas," to pay the expenses of his 
 mother's funeral. In 1762 he accepted, from a King who "gloried 
 in the name of Briton," a pension of .^^300 yearly. He lived much, 
 after this date, at the house of Mrs. Thrale and her husband, " my 
 Master " as she called him, the rich brewer. Here he was happy 
 in the society of many wits, of the beautiful Sophy Streatfield, " with 
 nose and notions k la Grecque," and of Fanny Burney, blessed 
 in the success of " Evelina". Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney have 
 left many reminiscences of him which complete the account by 
 his young Scottish adorer and butt, Boswell. 
 
 Johnson founded the Club, and such was his influence that 
 
474 English Literature 
 
 the Club did not blackball Bozzy. With him Johnson made his 
 difficult journey to the Western Islands of Scotland ; so happily 
 described both by Boswell and himself; stayed at Dun vegan 
 Castle, was entertained by Flora Macdonald, met a learned minister 
 in Skye who was a sceptic about Homer, inquired into the Second 
 Sight ; stayed at Inveraray Castle with the Duke of Argyll ; and 
 at St. Andrews was told that at Oxford they had nothing like the 
 St. Andrews University Library. On hearing this Dr. Johnson, 
 for once, made no reply. 
 
 His "Lives of the Poets" was written in 1779-1781, when he 
 was 70 years of age and more. His cruel last illness was 
 nobly borne; he died on 13 December, 1784, one of the best, 
 greatest, wisest, and most humorous of Englishmen. 
 
 His " Lives,'' and the Life of him are among the works which 
 time cannot stale ; read ten times over they please the more, and 
 more excellencies are discovered. No man of times past is known 
 so well, and none was so well worth knowing. His critical tastes 
 and rules are not ours, and perhaps even in his own day were 
 falling out of fashion; but they are none the less historically 
 valuable. 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith. 
 
 Dr. Johnson carried all his set with him into renown, and 
 though Oliver Goldsmith was a writer of versatile and charming 
 genius, but for his friendship with Johnson he would have been 
 much less successful in life, and less well loved and remembered 
 after his death. 
 
 Like several great writers born in Ireland, Goldsmith was of an 
 English family, but they had been so long settled in Ireland that 
 they had become " more Irish than the Irish ". Goldsmith's 
 father had the care of Protestant souls at Pallasmore, County 
 Longford, where (10 November, 1728) the poet was bom. The 
 father obtained a cure worth more than the " forty pounds a year " 
 at Lissoy in West Meath, and Lissoy contributes some features to 
 the Auburn of the " Deserted Village," an ideal village, in an ideal 
 state of desertion. His father, according to Goldsmith's poetry 
 and prose, was a most excellent man ; more capable of teaching 
 
Georgian Prose 475 
 
 his family how to spend large fortunes in benevolence than how 
 to earn a maintenance, 
 
 More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise. 
 
 He was the generous host of "all the vagrant train," of "the long- 
 remembered beggar," an Irish Edie Ochiltree, of "the ruined 
 spendthrift,'' who "claimed kindred," and came to "scorn," and 
 of " the broken soldier ". 
 
 Careless their merits or their faults to scan 
 His pity gave ere charity began. 
 
 This pity was Goldsmith's own characteristic. When an exceed- 
 ingly poor scholar at Trinity College, Dublin, his feats of charity 
 matched those of St. Francis or St. Martin of Tours. He is said 
 to have given away his blanket, and slept in the ticking of his bed. 
 
 A love of fine clothes was no less part of his nature than love 
 of his neighbours, while he liked "the cards," and the bowl and 
 tavern talk. He took his bachelor's degree in February, 1 749 : 
 idled away a year or two at home, learned to play the flute, failed 
 to take holy orders, and, as a law student, went to Edinburgh 
 University (1752-1754) lived on the benevolence of an uncle, 
 Contarine, and, on his way to Leyden, was taken in the company 
 of five or six Scottish gentlemen in French service, who had been 
 recruiting for King Louis in the Highlands. Alan Breck may 
 have been in this adventura Throughout 1755-1756, Goldsmith 
 roamed about the Continent, supporting himself by his flute, and 
 entertained by the hospitality of the Universities. 
 
 "Sir," said Johnson, "he disputed his way through Europe," 
 as the Admirable Crichton had done, a hundred and seventy years 
 earlier. At Padua, it is thought, if anywhere, he obtained his 
 Doctor's degree : his adventures later gave him materials for essays, 
 for the wandering scholar in " The Vicar of Wakefield," and for 
 his poem, " The Traveller ''. " He was making himself all the 
 time." 
 
 Returning to England in 1756, he lived as an usher in a 
 small school ; as a corrector for the press ; as a kind of indentured 
 reviewer and general hack to Griffiths the publisher ; failed to pass 
 as a naval surgeon ; wrote with Smollett's literary gang, conducted 
 
476 English Literature 
 
 a weekly booklet or magazine, "The Bee," for a few numbers 
 (1759); and publish'ed "An Enquiry into the Present State of 
 Polite Learning in Europe". He was much more successful 
 (1760) with letters in "The Public Ledger," in the assumed 
 character of a Chinese visitor to London. 
 
 In the former work Goldsmith complains that young genius 
 effervesces at college and is unrewarded, while dull plodders 
 fatten. "The link" between "the great" and the literary "now 
 seems entirely broken ". " An author " is a thing only to be 
 laughed at. "His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of 
 the company." Indeed Goldsmith's person was quaint, his 
 attire, when in funds, was that of the bird of paradise; while 
 his wit flowed from his pen, not from his tongue ; his repartee was 
 not ready ; eager he was but apparently absent-minded in com- 
 pany. As for the publisher, " it is his interest to allow as little as 
 possible for writing, and of the author to write as much as possible ". 
 Writers for the stage suffer from the competition of the dead. 
 Like two or three men of genius of our day, Goldsmith asks " who 
 will deliver us from Shakespeare?" from "these pieces of forced 
 humour, far-fetched conceit, and unnatural hyperbole which have 
 been ascribed to Shakespeare ". Here is scepticism I Managers 
 make new authors wait some years before giving their plays a 
 chance : a malady most incident to managers ; and Garrick be- 
 lieved that he was attacked. 
 
 The not unnatural acrimony of a neglected man appears in 
 some of the Chinese Letters (published in book form as "The 
 Citizen of the World "), notably in the visit to Westminster Abbey. 
 Goldsmith had a spite against the patronage given to the art of 
 painting, and made his Chinaman share it. The same critic looks 
 on Sterne's " Tristram Shandy " as a lewd compound of pertness, 
 vanity, ana obscene bulioonery. 
 
 The Chinaman also attacked the brutality of the criminal law 
 (that of his own country being so mild), and generally inveighed 
 against the state of society. The Letters are an unflattering picture 
 of the times. By 1761 Johnson had made the acquaintance of 
 Goldsmith, and henceforth Goldsmith had not to complain of 
 neglect from wits and authors. In 1764 he published his moral 
 
 • 
 
Georgian Prose 477- 
 
 and contemplative poem " The Traveller " ; with his " Deserted 
 Village" it is perhaps the last good thing of the old school of 
 poems in rhymed heroic couplets. The dedicatory preface to the 
 author's brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, tells us that, as 
 society becomes refined, painting and music "offer the feeble 
 mind a less laborious entertainment " than poetry, which they 
 supplant, while "what criticisms have we not heard of late in 
 favour of blank verse, and Pindaric Odes, anapests {sic) and iam- 
 bics, alliterative care and happy negligence ! Every absurdity has 
 now a champion to defend it ! " 
 
 Goldsmith, in social matters rather a Socialist, is, in poetry, 
 opposing the slowly dawning freedom, and upholding the school 
 of Pope. But there is, in both of his longer poems, a kind of 
 softness in the versification, and of sincerity in the sentiments 
 and descriptions of Nature, which we miss in Pope, while each 
 piece, as the man said of " Hamlet," " is made up of quotations,'' of 
 lines which live in many memories like household words. The 
 pictures of the parish clergyman, of the schoolmaster, of the harm- 
 less old rustic ale-house, in the " Deserted Village," may be called 
 imperishable ; and Goldsmith cries " back to the land " and de- 
 nounces "landlordism," and forced migration to North America, 
 
 Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey. 
 
 Goldsmith, in fact, never revisited " the decent church," " the 
 hawthorn bush," the harmless pot-house, and other scenes of his 
 infancy : in his poem he blends an ideal Irish with an ideal Eng- 
 lish village, and ascribes the result to a tyrannical landlord with 
 admirable pathetic success. 
 
 Of his other poems " The Haunch of Venison," imitated from 
 Horace, and the witty and kind raillery of " Retaliation," in which 
 his pen supplies the wit that often failed his tongue in the wit- 
 combats of " the Club," are both in " anapests " and are the most 
 important. The " Lament for Madame Blaise " is a lively adapta- 
 tion from the French, and the " Elegy on the Death of a Mad 
 Dog" is a most vivacious piece. As a ballad "Edwin and 
 Angelina," though popular, is too unballad-like. 
 
 The works on which Goldsmith's fame depends are not his 
 
478 English Literature 
 
 essays, histories, or view of "Animated Nature," genially unscien- 
 tific, but his "Vicar of Wakefield" (written earlier, but sold by 
 Johnson for ;^6o, while Goldsmith was in a sponging house in 1 764), 
 and his two plays "The Good Matured Man," and "She Stoops 
 to Conquer" (1768, 1773). 
 
 "The Vicar of Wakefield" drew the highest possible praise 
 from Goethe, and the most furious of attacks from the critical pen 
 of Mark Twain. Nobody says that it shines in construction, but 
 its humour and sweetness, the goodness, the simplicity, the true 
 wisdom, and the learned foibles of the Vicar, with the humours of 
 his wife, daughters, and wandering scholar son, an usher, a 
 dweller in Grub Street, make "The Vicar of Wakefield "a book 
 to be read once a year. " Finding that the best things had not 
 been said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that 
 should be wholly new . . . the learned world said nothing to my 
 paradoxes, nothing at all, sir." In the son's narrative Goldsmith 
 has his usual flout at art and amateurs of art, and Pietro Perugino. 
 
 The plays are too well known for comment, with Croaker and 
 Lofty, the Bailiffs, Tony Lumpkin, Mrs. Hardcastle, the revellers 
 at the Three Pigeons, and young Marlow, they are at least as 
 familiar on the amateur as on the professional boards. They 
 brought to Goldsmith fame, some money and more credit, but he 
 was still a drudge, still working for booksellers, and deep in debt, 
 when his death on 4 April, 1774, made Reynolds for once lay 
 down his brush, saddened the Club, and filled the stairs of his 
 chambers in Brick Court with poor weeping women to whom he 
 had been kind, — their only friend. " Nullum fere scribendi genus 
 non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit," wrote Johnson in 
 his epitaph, adding a new phrase to Latin proverbial philosophy. ^ 
 
 Edmund Burke. 
 
 "It seems probable," says Burke's biographer, Lord Morley, 
 "that Burke will be more frequently and more seriously referred 
 to within the next twenty years" (from 1899) "than he has been 
 within the whole of the last eighty." Yet we do not find many 
 
 1 There was scarce a literary form which he did not touch, none which he 
 touched did he fail to adorn. 
 
Georgian Prose 479 
 
 references to Burke, who, living, speaking, and writing through 
 some thirty years of discontents and revolutions (the American 
 and the French) and bringing to problems like our own a mascu- 
 line judgment, and a lucid and energetic style, might seem worthy 
 of general study. 
 
 In a sketch of the history of literature space for the works of 
 Burke, saturated with politics as they are, and only to be under- 
 stood in the light of ample historical knowledge, cannot be pro- 
 vided. The speeches of most successful orators are brilliant, and 
 persuasive for the hour, with crowds who wish to be persuaded. 
 The speeches of Burke are sometimes, when his pity and indigna- 
 tion are stirred (as by the fate of Marie Antoinette, or the alleged 
 infamies of Warren Hastings), rich in floral components, in im- 
 passioned rhetoric. But, as a rule, his best orations required to 
 be read if they were to be appreciated ; they are too full of thought 
 and knowledge and too logically built to be generally effective at 
 the moment. 
 
 Whatever our political opinions may be, we cannot but find 
 Burke's "Speech on Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with 
 the Colonies " (22 March, 1775) a very great and noble literary 
 work. For its purpose it was futile ; fierce peoples are not to be 
 guided by all the eloquence and all the wisdom of the wise. " We 
 are called upon, as it were by a superior warning Voice, again to 
 attend to America; to attend to the whole of it together; and to 
 review the subject with an unusual degree of care and calmness. 
 Surely it is an awful subject ; or there is none so on this side of 
 the grave." 
 
 It was an awful subject; but it was also a party question. 
 Knowledge, care, and calmness were, therefore, put out of action. 
 On an infamous proposal to " reduce the high aristocratic spirit of 
 Virginia and the southern colonies " by proclaiming the freedom 
 of the black slaves and raising a servile war, Burke said : "Slaves 
 as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from 
 slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from 
 that very nation which has sold them to their present masters ? 
 from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters 
 IS their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic ? " — the 
 
480 English Literature 
 
 Slave Trade. The idea of sending, in the same ship, samples of 
 fresh "black ivory" and a proclamation of freedom for all blacks, 
 not unreasonably seemed absurd, to Burke. 
 
 This speech, so moving to the reader, is said to have driven 
 members out of the House ; the gestures of the orator being 
 clumsy, his tones harsh, and his delivery hasty. Johnson said that 
 his wit was "blunt"; Goldsmith, on the other hand, that he "cut 
 blocks with a razor". He "to party gave up what was meant 
 for mankind," but, save through party, mankind is not to be helped 
 by the politicians. 
 
 To glance at the mairyfacts of Burke's life, he appears to have 
 been, as far as his name sb0w§,~ of Norman but long Hibernicised 
 stock on his father's side ; of native Irish blood on that of his 
 mother, a Miss Nagle, a Catholic. He was born in Dublin, ap- 
 parently on 12 January, 1729. His father was a solicitor. After 
 two years at a small school kept by a learned Quaker, Burke went 
 to Trinity College, Dublin, where he showed eager intellectual 
 appetites, without paying much heed to the academic round of 
 studies. In 1750 he went to London, to the Middle Temple, and 
 studied law, but did not practise. In 1755 his father cut off his 
 allowance, in T756 he married. He cannot have made money by 
 his "Vindication of Natural Society" (1756), written in the rhe- 
 torical manner of Bolingbroke. The book is an ironical reply to . 
 Bolingbroke's argument for " natural " against " revealed " religion. 
 Transfer the view to society : our religion may have its anomalies, 
 yet our society has far more and worse. Do you propose, there- 
 fore, to return to " natural society " ? " Natural " society was then 
 supposed by the wise and learned to be a happy go-as-you-please 
 innocent communism. In fact, if savage society be " natural " 
 society it is emmeshed in the strangest and most artificial, cruel, 
 and filthy set of laws and customs : the marriage laws, when carried 
 (as they sometimes are) to their logical conclusion, make marri- 
 age impossible! All this was not understood, but Burke, while 
 arguing against a sudden and violent break-up of society, did per- 
 ceive and state brilliantly, the glaring injustices of our society, as 
 Goldsmith did in "The Deserted Village". 
 
 Burke's " Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas 
 
Georgian Prose 481 
 
 of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1756) is a study in the science of 
 " Esthetics," a science which, if it has reached no very conspicuous 
 results, is now pursued with instruments and by a method not 
 extant in Burke's day. He only sought for " the Origin of our 
 ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ". He went into the psychology 
 of pain and pleasure, and found Beauty to be " some quality in 
 bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the inter- 
 vention of the senses ". But what is the quality and why does it 
 automatically produce the effect? The qualities which auto- 
 matically excite in the mind the apperception of the beautiful are 
 comparatively small, smooth, varied without angularity, delicate, 
 and in colour clear and bright, but not strong or glaring. But a 
 mountain, or fire, are beautiful yet — do not present the six qualities. 
 Consequently we must not call a huge rough mountain beautiful 
 but sublime. 
 
 Burke does not pretend to know " the ultimate cause " of the 
 emotions produced in the mind, and he censures the daring of 
 Sir Isaac Newton in accounting for things by Ether. But Ether 
 seems to prosper in modern scientific thought. 
 
 We cannot follow Burke into metaphysics, but the ordinary 
 reader may test, by experience, his description of a lover in the 
 presence of the beloved. " As far as I could observe," says Burke, 
 "the head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more 
 closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to 
 the Object; the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn 
 slowly, with now and then a low sigh ; the whole body is composed, 
 and the hands fall idly by the side." Thus it seems probable 
 "that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system ". On 
 the other hand, the Sublime ought to string up the solids, and we 
 do hear of sublime objects which " petrify " the percipient. Burke 
 sought, at all events, for the answer to his problem in the nature 
 of man, in psychology. 
 
 The nature of Burke's financial resources, beyond what he 
 made by writing in the new "Annual Register " (1759, — a hundred 
 a year from Dodsley the publisher) is as mysterious as the address 
 of his fellow-countryman. The Mulligan, in Thackeray's book. In 
 1759 the so-called " Single Speech Hamilton " employed him; in 
 
 ■ 31 
 
482 English Literature 
 
 1 761 he went to Ireland with Hamilton, who was secretary to Lord 
 Halifax. Hamilton treated him badly, and in 1765 he became 
 secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, entered Parliament as 
 member for Wendover, a pocket borough, made his mark at once ; 
 wrote "Observations on the Present State of the Nation" (1769), 
 and the admirable "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," a 
 book always in season. How Burke, in 1768, contrived to buy 
 Beaconsfield in Bucks (_;^22,ooo) and to live at a rate of ;^25oo 
 a year, the rental being ;£s°°> is a mystery deeper than that of 
 "The Man in the Iron Mask". Apparently there was a suffering 
 Marquis in the background : at least Burke owed large sums to 
 Lord Rockingham, who forgave the debt. No discreditable source 
 of Burke's fairy gold can be conjectured or conceived, as Gold- 
 smith said he was 
 
 Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit, 
 
 " too nice " meaning " too scrupulous ". 
 
 Burke did not hold office, save for one year (1782-1783). 
 Though a Whig and a " Pro- American," Burke never liked, never 
 approved of the French Revolution. Early in 1790, he spoke in 
 Parliament, breaking away from those enthusiasts for Liberty in 
 her wildest mood, Fox and Sheridan. 
 
 His "Reflections on the French Revolution" (1790) had a 
 large sale and wide influence. People will judge Burke's influence, 
 conduct and eloquence, at this time, in accordance with their 
 politics and prejudices ; his " Letters on a Regicide Peace," and 
 other work of his last years cannot be discussed without partisan- 
 ship. He died on 9 July, 1797. "The age of chivalry is gone,'' 
 is one of Burke's best-remembered phrases. When was there an 
 age of chivalry ? If no swords leaped from their sheaths for Marie 
 Antoinette, in 1793, not one was drawn for Jeanne d'Arc in 143 1, 
 not one for Mary Stuart in 1587. 
 
 The Revival of the Ballad. 
 
 Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of 
 Pope and his followers, and the poetry of the Town ; despite the 
 sturdy resistance of Johnson ; despite Goldsmith's complaints 
 against Odes and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy 
 
Georgian Prose 483 
 
 negligence," there were streams of tendency making for literary 
 freedom. Addison had lovingly praised both the blank verse of 
 Milton, and the purely popular art of the ancient ballads. Men 
 were beginning to look back with personal interest at antiquity ; 
 not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but at all the art 
 and poetry of times past. As early as 1 706-1 711 Watson's 
 "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published: and 
 Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his " Ever- 
 green," and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727 ; 
 others appeared in d'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (17 19), 
 others in "Old Ballads" (1723). 
 
 We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations 
 from the Norse, and his interest in Macpherson's so-called 
 " Ossian " (i 760-1 763). Though there was no written Highland 
 epic in existence, there were, and are, " Ossianic ballads " in Gaelic, 
 late popular survivals of Irish poetry. Working in his own way 
 on these, and on prose legends, apparently, Macpherson led men's 
 fancies back to the racing " sounds " of the north ; back to the High- 
 land beliefs that had already fascinated Collins ; and emancipated 
 poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house and the tavern. The 
 charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any one could 
 write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but 
 Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic 
 a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic 
 researches. 
 
 In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript 
 folio by Bishop Percy (" The Reliques ") not only gave a new and 
 popular source of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a 
 noisy controversy, which, again, led to close research. Percy 
 " restored," altered, added to, and omitted from his materials as 
 taste and fancy prompted ; arousing the wrath of the crabbed anti- 
 quary, Joseph Ritson, who denied that the manuscript folio ex- 
 isted. Had Percy published it as it stood (which Furnivall and 
 Hales at last succeeded in doing) the book would have been un- 
 read except by a few antiquaries. Arranged by Percy, the ballads 
 became truly popular. They were followed, from 1 7 74, by Thomas 
 Warton's "History of English Poetry," the work of an Oxford 
 
 31* 
 
484 English Literature 
 
 Professor of Poetry (1757-1767) who, in a lazy University, was a 
 serious student. 
 
 Nothing is more rubous to literature than ignorance, excitedly 
 absorbed in the momentary present. In the manner briefly de- 
 scribed, men's minds became awake to the merits of the English 
 literature of many remote ages, and even to the interest of 
 chivalry and chivalrous romance, to the beauty of all art that had 
 been discredited as "Gothic" and "barbarous". 
 
 Horace Walpole. 
 
 A man who, if in an amateur and dandified way, assisted the 
 advance in literature, was the son of the famous and far from 
 literary Whig Minister of George I. and George II., Sir Robert 
 Walpole. Born at the end of September, 171 7, Horace Walpole 
 went to Eton in 1727, where he won the friendship of Gray and 
 prided himself on avoiding cricket and fights with bargees. 
 For Conway (Marshal Conway) and George Selwyn, famous later 
 as an eccentric wit, he had a life-long affection. From Eton, 
 Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied 
 French, Italian, and painting, being congenitally incapable of the 
 mathematics, like Tennyson and Macaulay. His letters- were 
 already witty and amusing. He began his tour with Gray in 1739, 
 and, at Rome, was " far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. 
 ... I would buy the ■ Coliseum if I could ". Though he wrote 
 fleeringly of his own tastes, he was, in fact, far in advance of his 
 age in appreciation of the best old art, whether of classical Greece 
 and Rome or of the early Italians. To collect, to study society, 
 to write his famous correspondence with Horace Mann and many 
 others — an informal social, political, and literary history of his 
 time, — was the business of Walpole's long life. He gave himself 
 dandified airs ; he knew that he was not in the strict sense a 
 scholar, but he had an eagerly inquiring mind, and we owe 
 more to him than to Mr. Pepys. He practically began neo-Gothic 
 architecture — ^with all its faults he meant well, — by the building of 
 his VUla, Strawberry Hill, and " in a concatenation accordingly " 
 wrote the earliest pseudo-historic novel of supernatural terror, 
 "The Castle of Otranto " (1764). Like stories of R. L. Steven- 
 son, and Coleridge's " Kubla Khan,'' the tale is based on a dream. 
 
Georgian Prose 485 
 
 The author found himself in a Gothic castle, and " on the upper- 
 most bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in 
 armour ". The rest, with its odd horrors and comic interludes of 
 the servants, Walpole wrote without plan : making his characters 
 natural, not "heroic," his events as much "supernatural" as he 
 could. 
 
 From this fantasy came the novels of Mrs. RadcHffe (whose' 
 habit of explaining the supernatural away Walpole derided), and, 
 from Mrs. Radcliffe, in part, came the impulse of Scott, and the 
 moody heroes of Byron. From the mustard seed of " Otranto " 
 grew " a tree with birds in all its boughs ". 
 
 Walpole's play "The Mysterious Mother," was even morbidly 
 romantic in conception (1768). His "Historic Doubts" on 
 Richard III. show a new spirit of historic scepticism, and a desire 
 to trace accepted historical ideas to their ultimate sources of evi- 
 dence. Such minute inquiry was not common, when Hume and 
 Smollett were our historians. Walpole, who had succeeded to the 
 Earldom of Orford, died on 2 March, 1797. 
 
 His " Anecdotes of Painting " and " Royal and Noble 
 Authors " are all they aimed at being ; his Letters, in extent, 
 observation, inner knowledge of society, and wit, have no rivals 
 in English, but his real position in literature and taste is that of a 
 pioneer. The true, the essential Horace was very unlike Mac- 
 aulay's splenetic portrait of him, and did not deserve Thackeray's 
 nickname "Horace Waddlepoodle ". 
 
 Under his many affectations he was a true friend and a good 
 patriot, a delightful wit and an agency in the advance of literature 
 and taste. Between him and Dr. Johnson, of course, there was a 
 gulf that neither man dreamed of trying to cross. 
 
 Laurence Sterne. 
 
 Laurence Sterne can scarcely be ranged in any species of 
 writers. He was not a novelist, though his most humorous and 
 exquisitely finished characters, Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Cor- 
 poral Trim, Obadiah, Dr. Slop, Yorick, and Mrs. Shandy appear 
 in what professed to be a kind of novel, " The Life and Opinions 
 of Tristram Shandy, Gent" (1760-1767). These characters are 
 really studies like those of Addison, but they appeared in a long 
 
486 English Literature 
 
 succession of volumes which obtained their great vogue first of 
 all, perhaps, by wild eccentricity — with blank pages, asterisks, 
 erasions, and even pages of marbled paper ; next, now by an 
 undercurrent, now by an overflow, of indecent or indecorous story 
 or suggestion ; thirdly, by the fact that these were the recreations 
 of a country parson. These allurements were the first and 
 'transient causes of Sterne's popularity, these and a quantity of 
 odd anecdotes, often borrowed wholesale from Burton's then for- 
 gotten " Anatomy of Melancholy,'' as the lewd anecdotes were 
 taken from French collections of the sixteenth century. But 
 while these baits, this " merriment of a parson," allured the town, 
 every reader of taste had the noblest excuse for reading the 
 book. It contained the grave and logical humours and exquisite 
 intellectual caprices of Shandy the father ; the patient, kind, dull 
 tolerance of Mrs. Shandy (whose unexpected associations of ideas 
 resemble those of Mrs. Nickleby), the gallantry, simplicity, and 
 noble goodness of Uncle Toby (a person not wholly unlike 
 a Colonel Newcome of the eighteenth century), the similar 
 qualities of his more chivalrous Sancho, Corporal Trim ; the 
 wiles of the Widow Wadman ; and, what is pleasing to reflective 
 minds, the Curse of Ernulphus, bestowed " on him, Obadiah ". 
 " Our men swore terribly in Flanders,'' said Uncle Toby, but the 
 ancient formulae of Catholic curses went far beyond our men. 
 For the sentimental there was the death of Lefevre, which, in 
 school reading books, but ineffectually appealed for tears to men 
 now old. 
 
 Thus much of " Tristram Shandy " is as good as good can be, and 
 might be coflected, with explanatory passages, and exhibited with- 
 out harm or offence to any reader. But, so presented, it would 
 lose the attraction on which Sterne deliberately counted ; the 
 intermixture of insinuation and buffoonery with character and 
 sentiment. Great parts of "Tristram Shandy," once, it seems, 
 essential to its success, are now detrimental to its general diffu- 
 sion : all the more because the high and low tumbling is that of a 
 clergyman. 
 
 The author (born 1713) was English by family and descent, 
 grandson of a Cavalier English clergyman of the Great Rebellion, 
 
Georgian Prose 487 
 
 and Archbishop of the Restoration. We meet his father, Roger 
 Sterne, an ensign in a regiment of foot, in Thackeray's " Esmond," 
 where, in his wild way, he makes a very sensible remark, when 
 the exiled King, fighting for France, rides up to the English lines. 
 For several years, Laurence Sterne followed the drums of his 
 father's regiment, till, at 10 years old, a kinsman sent him to 
 school at Halifax (1723), and the life of a camp where men swore 
 terribly inspires his pictures of soldiers, but was not the most 
 chaste school for a little boy. 
 
 In 1733, rather old, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, 
 and made the friendship of John Hall (Stevenson) of Skelton 
 Castle. A humorist, a reckless liver, he had a great and 
 unholy influence on Sterne, who took orders and two small 
 livings in Yorkshire, and (1741) married a lady of some property, 
 after a sentimental wooing. Sentiment did not last; Sterne, an 
 accomplished philanderer, became "passing weary of her love," 
 and the pair were only kept together by Sterne's affection for his 
 daughter, Lydia. 
 
 Not till 1760 did the first volume of "Tristram Shandy" 
 appear : born of a casual spite against Dr. Slop (Dr. Burton, a 
 Jacobite physician of York), "Tristram" instantly made Sterne 
 a " lion " in London, a friend of the great, and a diner-out. 
 In winter he wrote more "Shandy," and published sermons on 
 the strength of his success ; in the summer he worked at home, till 
 a consumptive tendency sent him to the least desirable parts of 
 Southern France (by way of Paris where he met everybody), and, 
 later, to Italy. He died in London, alone (1768) save for the 
 lodging-house keeper, and a footman, a Macdonald of the Keppoch 
 branch, whose father followed Prince Charlie, and whose own 
 childish adventures, in 1745, as he has described them, were a 
 subject made for the hand of the expiring humorist. 
 
 He had kept on publishing, with varying success, new volumes 
 of " Tristram Shandy " almost to the end, when he had the 
 happy thought of beginning his "Sentimental Journey," with its 
 bewildering mixture of the old favourite matter with pretty vig- 
 nettes of southern scenes and manners, pictures with the pretti- 
 ness and other qualities of the French painter, Greuze. Here we 
 
488 English Literature 
 
 have both the admired hungry donkey, fed by Sterne with maca- 
 roons, and the sentimentalized dead donkey, which provoked 
 the scepticism of Mr. Samuel Weller. Sterne sketched the French 
 as Hogarth did, but with infinitely more sensibility and sympathy, 
 he is a classic in France, no less than in England. Sterne's letters 
 and " Journal to Eliza," a very characteristic piece, are collected 
 in Mr. Lewis Melville's "Life and Letters of Sterne". His 
 biographer (Mr. H. D. Traill, 1882) says that Sterne "undergoes, 
 I suspect, even more than an English classic's ordinary share of 
 reverential neglect ". If this be so, Sterne himself, with his 
 acrobatic clowning, is to blame, but the loss lies on the readers 
 of mature age who neglect this contemplator of human life, this 
 creator of characters, this painter of manners irrevocably past. ^ 
 
 David Hume. • 
 
 David Hume, a younger son of the laird ot Ninewells in 
 Berwickshire, was born in April, 1711. He attended lectures in 
 the University of Edinburgh at a very early age, and, when about 
 17, devoted himself entirely to solitary study, classical, poet- 
 ical, and philosophic. The ruling passion of his life was the 
 desire of literary fame, of which, with all his success, he never 
 obtained more than he wanted. Various attempts in other pro- 
 fessions ended in his return to his studies; he was only 25 when 
 he wrote his " Treatise of Human Nature," he published it in 
 1739; was disappointed by its reception; affected to disavow it, 
 but reproduced, in more finished literary form, many of its doctrines 
 in his later essays. The earlier essays, of 1741-1742, were suc- 
 cessful : the Philosophical Essays (i 748), were attacked by orthodox 
 divines, whom the " Essay on Miracles " (of which the central 
 idea occurred to Hume while arguing with a Jesuit in France) 
 was not apt to conciliate. Some essays he left for posthumous 
 publication; he was in evil odour on account of his opinions, 
 and obtained no better post in Scotland than the keepership of 
 the Advocates' Library. But in Scotland his genialit)', good 
 
 1 The writer observes that Sterne is unmentioned in Mr. Pancoast's " In- 
 troduction to English Literature," Third Edition, Enlarged, New York, 1907. 
 " Alas, poor Yorick I " 
 
Georgian Prose 489 
 
 humour, and practical wisdom, made him dear even to those who 
 thought his opinions dangerous. By great frugality he made 
 himself independent of the great, while his " History of England " 
 begun in 1 754, though, like most honest histories it at first offended 
 all parties, proved not unprofitable and greatly increased his 
 reputation. In 1765, he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris ; 
 later he obtained the post of Under-Secretary for Home Affairs ; 
 and finally returned to Edinburgh "in opulence," as he said, with 
 _;^iooo a year. He had many friends among the preachers of 
 "the Moderate party," and died in 1776, contented, and not 
 without some parade. Dr. Johnson thought, of his philosophic 
 fearlessness. In Paris he was highly popular ; but, though Eng- 
 land had done much for him, he used to express great dislike of 
 the English. He laboured, none the less, to purge his style of 
 Scotticisms, of which he drew up a list — "alleuarly " and "alongst " 
 are to be avoided; and he determined to write "a pretty girl 
 enough" in place of "a pretty enough girl". Hume's philosoph- 
 ical ideas belong to the history, not of literature, but of philosophy. 
 His position, in a continuation of Locke, was sceptical, and had 
 immense influence in causing a reaction and a closer criticism, 
 first in Germany, then in England. Professor Huxley, Hume's bio- 
 grapher, has exposed many of the. fallacies in his " Essay on 
 Miracles," and others are glaring. Of " The Natural History of 
 Religion " he wrote unembarrassed by much knowledge of the 
 subject, for early men, as far as we know, often reasoned 
 otherwise than Hume thought that they would necessarily reason. 
 Philosophy and history are always in a state of flux, through the 
 influence of criticism, of new discoveries, and of historical docu- 
 ments, with which Hume had little acquaintance. But a study of 
 modem metaphysics must still begin with the works of Hume, 
 though no one can go to his History for full and accurate infor- 
 mation. Unable, or reluctant, to speak his mind quite freely, he 
 adopted the ironical method, without the sometimes elephantine 
 frivolity of Gibbon. Like his fellow-countryman. Dr. Robertson, 
 he was no enthusiastic worshipper of the heroes of the Reformation ; 
 and, though nothing less than a Jacobite, he was Tory enough to 
 be tolerant of the Stuart Kings, or rather to study them in the 
 
49° English Literature 
 
 light of the conditions under which they lived. It is in the same 
 light that Hume and his philosophy must be regarded. His 
 letters are among his most interesting works, and his attack on 
 Macpherson's "Ossian," with his defence of the "Epigoniad," 
 the Theban epic of his friend Professor Wilkie, in themselves give 
 a correct and rather amusing view of his tastes and limitations. 
 
 Robertson. 
 
 William Robertson (17 21- 1793) the son of a parish minister 
 in Midlothian, was also a minister of the Church of Scotland, and 
 the leader of the moderate party, as against the enthusiastic 
 spiritual descendants of the Covenanters. The moderates aimed 
 at taste, learning, and the acquisition of a style free from Scottish 
 idioms. This style Robertson displayed (1759) in his history of 
 Scotland. A topic could scarcely be more unpopular than his, 
 the publisher said, but his book had a very wide success south of 
 the Border, and his later works on the reign of Charles V. and on 
 American history were not less popular. His manner is calm, re- 
 flective, and studiously destitute of enthusiasm. Both he and 
 Hume viewed the religious history of their country with a critical 
 tranquillity very unlike the spirit introduced by Carlyle. His defect 
 lay, not in the art of clear and definite presentation, but in limited 
 knowledge of original documents. 
 
 Edward Gibbon. 
 
 " The old reproach, that no British altars had been erected to 
 the Muse of History, was recently disproved," says Gibbon, " by 
 the first performances of Robertson and Hume, the histories of 
 Scotland and the Stuarts. . . . The perfect composition, the 
 nervous language, the well-turned periods of Dr. Robertson, in- 
 flamed me to the ambitious hope that I might one day tread in 
 his footsteps : the calm philosophy, the careless inimitable 
 beauties of his friend and rival " (Hume) " often forced me to 
 close the volume with a mixed sensation of delight and despair.'' 
 After ten years' work by Gibbon at his " Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire" "a letter from Mr. Hume" (1776) "overpaid 
 
Georgian Prose 491 
 
 the labour, but I have never presumed to accept a place in the 
 triumvirate of British historians." 
 
 The fondness of Caledonian patriotism cannot accept the 
 compliment paid to Robertson and Hume by the modesty of the 
 author of " The Decline and Fall ". The works of the two 
 Scottish historians, though still very readable, and distinguished 
 in style, are superseded by histories much more learned and based 
 on documents not accessible to the Scots. But the monumental 
 edifice of Gibbon is " a possession for ever ". 
 
 Born at Putney, early in May, 1737, Edward Gibbon came of 
 an ancient though not historically distinguished family, whose 
 wealth was impaired by the connexion of his grandfather with the 
 South Sea Bubble, and by his father's lack of economy. Gibbon's 
 health, in boyhood, was bad, and his education irregular : he was 
 a suffecer in an age when " the schoolboy may have been whipped 
 for misapprehending a passage " (in Phaedrus) " which Bentley 
 could not restore, and which Burman could not explain ". Thus 
 he writes in his Autobiography : in this work he affects to com- 
 pose with artless effort, but the rounded periods of his great book 
 come unbidden to his pen, or rather, he devoted elaborate care 
 to the six drafts of his memoirs. 
 
 In two years passed at Westminster School, Gibbon did not 
 master Greek and Latin. His next three years were passed in 
 wide desultory reading, in translation of the classics, and in 
 modern history, which from boyhood was his passion. Going to 
 Magdalen College, Oxford, before he was 15, "with a stock 
 of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of 
 ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed," he 
 was disgusted by the indolent ignorance of the Fellows of his 
 college, "decent easy men," at whose table as a gentleman com- 
 moner he dined. In close grammatical study under his tutor he 
 found neither profit nor pleasure ; he lived in or out of Oxford as he 
 pleased; read Catholic books, professed himself a Catholic — 
 "the offence," says Blackstone, " amounts to High Treason ". It 
 amounted to petty treason ; Gibbon's father removed him from 
 Magdalen to the tuition of Mallet, a free-thinker, and thence he 
 was carried to Lausanne and the house of a Calvinist minister, 
 
492 English Literature 
 
 who in two years brought him within the Presbyterian fold. 
 After such a series of theological adventures it is not strange 
 that Gibbon's aversion to Christianity declares itself wherever 
 he has a chance of sneering at that religion. He returned to 
 England in 1758, after sighing as a lover and obeying as a son, 
 when his father commanded him to resign his passion for Made- 
 moiselle Curchod, later Madame Necker, the mother of Madame 
 de Stael. At Lausanne he had studied very widely and with 
 elaborate organization of his work : in England he still read, 
 " never handled a gun, seldom mounted a horse," but devoted ' 
 himself to his duties as an officer in the Hampshire militia. Here 
 he acquired some practical knowledge of military affairs which 
 was valuable to him in his remarks on the discipline of the Roman 
 Army : he meditated several historical topics ; returned to the 
 Continent, and at Rome (15 October, 1764) conceived, as-he has 
 told us in imperishable words, the idea of writing " The Decline 
 and Fall," " as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while 
 the bare- footed friars were singing Vespers in the temple of 
 Jupiter ". The distractions of society, and of politics, for he had 
 a seat in Parliament, and belonged to White's, Boodle's, Brooks's 
 and The Club of Dr. Johnson, did not draw Gibbon from his 
 great ambition. He had studied style till, in conversation, " his 
 polish was occasionally finical ... he moved to flutes and 
 hautboys ". George Colman the Younger has left a portrait of 
 Gibbon in verse, which is corroborated, as far as his manner in 
 conversation went, by a letter of his own (1764). 
 
 His person looked as funnily pbese 
 
 As if a Pagod, growing large as Man, 
 
 Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece, 
 
 To visit a Chinese upon a fan. 
 
 Such his exterior, curious 'twas to scan ! 
 
 And oit he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout, 
 
 And ere his polished periods he began, 
 
 Bent forwards, stretching his forefinger out, 
 
 And talked in phrase as round as he was round about. 
 
 Roundness, meditated balance, are the characteristics of Gibbon's 
 style. " Before he wrote a note or a letter he arranged completely 
 
Georgian Prose 493 
 
 in his mind what he wished to express." He says : " It has al- 
 ways been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, 
 to try it in my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend 
 the action of my pen till I had given the last polish to my work ". 
 As one consequence, " my first rough manuscript, without any 
 intermediate copy, has been sent to the press ". Gibbon's History, 
 in the vast whole, as well as in each sentence, was thus pre- 
 meditated, under his ruling philosophic idea of what such a 
 history should be. He had completely assimilated his mass of 
 materials, and each topic was reduced to its proper dimensions, 
 without encumbering details, while all marched to the flutes and 
 hautboys of his rounded music. We may think it occasionally 
 monotonous, and marvel that so many periods should conclude 
 with a clause introduced by the preposition "of". But this is a 
 trifling criticism, he had chosen his vehicle ; and, though we 
 should not imitate his style, yet a style it is, admirably adapted to 
 its purpose. His reading was enormous in every branch of learn- 
 ing, including the science of coins ; he constantly refers "to the 
 medals as well as the historians ". It may be curious to note 
 that while he devotes four pages to the criticism of the iron cage 
 of Bajazet (1402) he neglects to mention that such cages or huches 
 were commonly used for the safeguarding of important prisoners 
 of war by the contemporary chivalry of France and England. 
 
 It is, of course, impossible, it would not be easy for the most 
 learned of historians, to criticize in a few words a historical work 
 of such vast survey, and concerned with so many and such various 
 topics, with the affairs of so many races and religions, throughout 
 so many centuries. The faults which have been chiefly criticized 
 are Gibbon's total inability to be generous towards Christianity ; 
 and the bad taste of some of his notes ; which appear to be the 
 refreshments of a natural fatigue. In his day, he says, " History 
 was the most popular species of composition," and he "is at a 
 loss how to describe the success of the work, without betraying 
 the vanity of the writer". He ended his task, and he has de- 
 scribed his emotions when all was done, on 27 June, 1787, at 
 Lausanne, the place of his boyish exile and of his solitary affair of 
 the heart. He died in 1794, having been mainly busy with the 
 
494 English Literature 
 
 drafts of his Autobiography. These drafts, with his most interest- 
 ing letters, have been published by the piety of the Earl of Sheffield, 
 the grandson of his devoted friend, John Holroyd, first Lord 
 Sheffield. In his early letters Gibbon is no purist, " I tipped the 
 boy with a crown," he says, an early use of a familiar modern term. 
 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), like Burke and Gold- 
 smith, was an Irishman by birth ; his family provided Prince 
 Charles, in Sir Thomas Sheridan, with a most inefficient tutor, 
 and an unfortunate comrade in war. Sheridan's own family was 
 Protestant, his grandfather was a friend of Dean Swift in Ireland, 
 and a humorist. His son, though in Dr. Johnson's set, was re- 
 garded by the great lexicographer as a prodigy of natural dullness, 
 highly cultivated and improved by art. Educated at Harrow, 
 young Richard never gave any cause for the complaint that he 
 was dull. At twenty-one he eloped from Bath with the beautiful 
 Miss Linley, a charming singer, the Saint Cecilia of Reynolds's 
 painting. In 1775, Sheridan produced "-The Rivals" at Covent 
 Garden ; one of the few plays of the eighteenth century which 
 still live on the stage, and perhaps can never cease to amuse, 
 thanks to Mrs. Malaprop's exquisitely well-chosen derangement 
 of epithets, and the unexpected variety of her parts of speech. 
 Malapropisms may be styled a mechanical form of humour, 
 but Mrs. Malaprop's own are happily expressive of her character. 
 To know Lydia Languish is to love her ; and Sir Luc'us O'Trigger 
 scarcely caricatures the ideas of his duelling fellow-countrymen ; 
 whilst Bob Acres is the most sympathetic of all the comic pol- 
 troons of the stage, though too sanguine in his belief that "damns 
 have had their day ". Sir Anthony Absolute is a delightful variation 
 on the stock character of the Angry Father ; and these diverting 
 figures make the sentimental parts of the serious lovers, Falkland 
 and Julia, rather ungrateful. "The School for Scandal" may 
 be called conventional in the contrast of hypocrisy and reckless 
 goodness of heart in Joseph and Charles Surface ; but convention 
 is permitted to the stage, while Sir Peter and Lady Teazle, with 
 the happy high spirits of the whole farcical comedy, and the variei 
 
Georgian Prose 495 
 
 ties in the candofiir of the scandal-mongers, make the play at least 
 the rival of " The Rivals," as it is far more provocative of mirth 
 than the wit of Congreve. " The Critic," again, in its delicious 
 nonsense and satire of authors, actors, and critics — Sir Fretful 
 Plagiary is as diverting as realistic — infinitely surpasses its old. 
 model, "The Rehearsal". We laugh aloud as we read, and are 
 convulsed as we look on when the piece is acted. _ Who forgets 
 the nod of Lord Burleigh in the drama of the Armada, and the 
 exquisite reason for which the characters cannot behold the gal- 
 leons of Spain, and the romantic demeanour of the two Tilburinas, 
 and the Governor who remains fixed, while the Father is moved? 
 Of Sheridan's other plays " St. Patrick's Day " is not seen on the 
 stage, while " The Duenna " does not " attain unto the first Three ". 
 As manager and owner of Drury Lane Theatre, Sheridan 
 proved himself to be not more skilled in finance than Balzac ; in 
 debt always, he somehow kept afloat. You would have said that 
 "he was not the stuff they make Whigs of"; any more than 
 Charles Fox. In Parliament, however (1780), he attached himself 
 to that statesman's party ; attacked Warren Hastings, and amused 
 the Prince of Wales (George IV.) who certainly appreciated literary 
 genius, from Sheridan and Scott to Miss Austen. 
 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 
 
 Born a Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl of Kingston (1689-1762) 
 and wife of Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, a toast at 
 eight, lived through the great age of Anne and Pope, her absurd 
 admirer before he was her shameless satirist. She was equally 
 celebrated for her beauty, her wit, and her introduction of inocu- 
 lation against small-pox, from Constantinople, where her husband 
 was English ambassador (17 16). Her light verses are sparkling 
 and malicious ; her fame rests on her letters, from the East, from 
 England among the wits, to her sister (who married the Jacobite 
 Earl of Mar, and lived in France), and, in later life, to Lady Bute, 
 from Avignon, with its Jacobite colony, and from Italy, where she 
 read and remarked on the great novelists of the day. Even 
 Walpole's letters are scarcely more entertaining, and more brilliant 
 records of society in the eighteenth century do not exist. Lady 
 
496 English Literature 
 
 Mary was not sentimental, and laughed at Pipe's lightning- 
 stricken lovers ; or rather at the artificiality of Pope's sentiment 
 concerning them. 
 
 Junius. 
 
 Stat Nominis Umbra. Because we do not know who wrote the 
 letters of political invective signed " Junius,'' and published by 
 Woodfall in "The Public Advertiser" (1768-1773), much has 
 been written about the mystery of the author's identity. From Sir 
 Philip Francis (who seems to be tne favourite, like Matthioli for 
 the Man in the Iron Maskship) to the wicked Lord Lyttelton and 
 Edward Gibbon, there have been about a score of candidates. 
 Matthioli was certainly not the Man in the Iron Mask, and per- 
 haps Sir Philip Francis was not Junius, who gives himself — very 
 cleverly if he were Sir Philip, — the air of being some great one. 
 The letters, except to the professed historian, are repulsive. The 
 worst quality of satire, spite masquerading as virtuous indignation, 
 is their chief characteristic, their style is that of antithetical 
 rhetoric, highly inflated ; their subject is party politics and per- 
 sonal invective. 
 
CHAPTER XXXII. 
 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT. 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
 The so-called Romantic Movement in the English Literature 
 of the early nineteenth century, was, first, the result of a tendency 
 to expansfon in every conceivable direction. There was delight 
 in the freedom of the open air and of Nature : in the late seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, most men who were not fox 
 hunters were devoted to " the stuffy business of living in houses," 
 and passed the greater part of the day in coffee houses and 
 taverns, drinking wine, tea, chocolate, and ceaselessly conversing. 
 The fat Georgian faces of Hume and Gibbon, the early corpu- 
 lence and early gout are indications of the life led, when they 
 could afford it, by men of letters. " The Return to Nature," in 
 po.etry implied a reaction against these habits. 
 
 Politically, there was, in connexion with the French Revolur 
 tion, expansion in the direction of Universal Brotherhood. " Be 
 my Brother or I will cut your throat " (Sot's monfrere, ouje te iue) 
 was the motto of extreme philanthropists. 
 
 It's comin' yet for a' that 
 That man to man the world o'er 
 Shall brithers be for a' that, 
 
 wrote Burns while the guillotine was in the making, and the 
 thunder was approaching of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic 
 wars. 
 
 These emotions of hope for the near future entered, no less 
 than the love and study of Nature, into the Romantic literature, 
 and the minds .of the poets also expanded in theological and 
 
 497 32 
 
498 English Literature 
 
 mystical speculation, half German, half in the style of Greek 
 Platonic philosophy. 
 
 The sentiment of human unity also turned to the past ; 
 history was revivified ; mediaeval art was appreciated ; chivalry was 
 an ideal — and a very excellent ideal, were human nature capable 
 of carrying it into practice. Verse was emancipated, all that 
 Goldsmith protested against, — sonnets, blank verse, happy negli- 
 gence, "anapests " — flourished, and the characteristics of the new 
 age were variously illustrated by men all born within some five 
 years of each other, in the north or the south, William Wordsworth 
 (1770), Walter Scott (1771), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772), 
 Robert Southey (1774), and Charles Lamb (1775), to whom we 
 may add Walter Landor (1775). 
 
 Of these the most inspiring influence was probably that of the 
 man who produced the least in bulk of great literature, Coleridge. 
 He was, as it were, the Socrates of the time, the talker. Coleridge 
 was born at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the Devonshire 
 which Herrick and Keats so much disliked, on 21 October, 1772. 
 His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar and master of the 
 Grammar School, and for goodness, learning, and ignorance of 
 the world was compared by his son to Fielding's Parson Adams. 
 Coleridge describes himself as a dreamy child, useless at games, 
 "timorous, and a tell-tale," "despising most boys of my own 
 age''. "You can't think how ignorant these boys arel" said 
 Scott, when asked, as a child, why he was not playing with his 
 little neighbours. Like R. L. Stevenson, Coleridge suffered from 
 night fears and visions of fever, born of "The Arabian Nights ". 
 He "had seen too many ghosts to believe in them". After the 
 death of his father, who appreciated hina, Coleridge went to 
 Christ's Hospital in London (1782), and Lamb has described his 
 life, and his early home-sickness at that painfully Spartan academy. 
 Though he revived 
 
 by internal light, 
 The trees, the meadows, and his native stream, 
 
 while a schoolboy Coleridge's spirits were high ; he made friends 
 enough, Charles Lamb being the first ; read widely ; dipped, like 
 
The Romantic Movement 499 
 
 other curious boys, into the dreams of the post-Christian Neo- 
 platonists, — lamblichus, the great authority on spiritualism, and 
 Plotinus, so good in parts — and adored, at 1 7, the Twenty Sonnets 
 of the Rev. Mr. Bowles (i 762-1850), afterwards the opponent of 
 Byron in the question " Was Pope a poet ? " Bowles, at all events, 
 handed the torch of non-Popeian poetry to Coleridge, who won 
 scholarships and exhibitions that maintained him at Jesus College, 
 Cambridge (1791). Here he met Wordsworth of St. John's, 
 already a printed poet, at a meeting of an Essay Society. But 
 Coleridge had not written his essay ! 
 
 He now fled from Cambridge " to be a dragoon," which did 
 not suit his genius. He returned to Cambridge : visited Oxford 
 in 1794, met Southey of Balliol, and with him made a plan to 
 migrate with kindred souls to the States, and found a pantisocratic 
 society, wherein all should be brothers and equals. Coleridge 
 was as fit to be a farming colonist as Mr. Micawber, and, being 
 just off with one love, he presently engaged himself to another. 
 Miss Sara Fricker, a sister of Southey 's bride. Coleridge at this 
 time wrote a good deal of verse and described his own hand as 
 "graspless"; his genius as "sloth-jaundiced all," while, else- 
 where, he spoke of his " fat vacuity of face," an eighteenth cen- 
 tury face, with full lax lips, redeemed by dark intelligent eyes. 
 Coleridge was 
 
 Like some bold seer in a trance 
 Seeing all his own mischance. 
 
 He left Cambridge without a degree, married on the prospects 
 of his poetry ; started a weekly serial, " The Watchman," and 
 (1796) published "Poems". Some of them were written at 
 school; many of them are full of Gray's allegorical figures, one, 
 " Religious Musings " in blank verse, is on the Nativity and the 
 evils of Society, others are imitative of Bowles, an " Ode to a 
 Young Jackass," 'is reminiscent of Sterne's donkey. Perhaps 
 some stanzas named " Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt " 
 alone suggest the essential qualities of Coleridge. 
 
 In 1796-1797, Coleridge took a cottage at Stowey : "The 
 Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage 
 
 32 * 
 
500 English Literature 
 
 window ''. He was busy with an unfinished poem on Jeanne 
 d'Arc, in blank verse (fragments appear in " The Destiny of 
 Nations "). He represented her as seeing her Saints first when 
 of the age ot 20, to which she never attained : her eyebrows 
 were " wildly haired ". The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to Jeanne 
 about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred 
 matters, not much in her way. Jeanne has suffered as much 
 at the hands of poets as from her B'rench judges. Lamb induced 
 Coleridge to abandon these absurdities. 
 
 In midsummer, 1797, Coleridge met Wordsworth and his "ex- 
 quisite sister," Dorothy, who paid a visit to Stowey, and settled 
 near him. A play, " Osorio,'' was not accepted for the stage : the 
 two poets formed various projects of collaboration, one resulted 
 in "The Ancient Mariner "(March, 1798) the quintessence of 
 romance. In 1798 Coleridge met and carried captive Hazlitt, who 
 later broke his bonds with a glee and fury unworthy of him. By 
 this time, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge had made experiments in 
 opium, of which the bondage was never broken. 
 
 In 1798 the famous volume, "Lyrical Ballads," by Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth, challenged the world with Wordsworth's " Idiot 
 Boy "and " Tintern Abbey," examples ot the opposite poles of 
 his genius; with " The Ancient Mariner," among other things. In 
 1798-1799 Coleridge was studying in Germany, absorbing phil- 
 osophies: in 1800 he removed with his family to Greta Hall near 
 Keswick, or to Windermere, while the Wordsworths were at Gras- 
 mere ; hence the name of the Lake Poets. 
 
 Coleridge was now working at the second part of the never-to- 
 be-finished " Christabel," begun at Stowey. Sir John Stoddart 
 read or repeated some stanzas of " Christabel " to Scott, who 
 followed the metres of Coleridge in "The Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel" (1805). Coleridge (who did not publish "Christabel," 
 and the extraordinary fragment composed in sleep " Kubla Khan," 
 with "The Pains of Sleep," till 18 16) was not unjustifiably annoyed 
 by the anticipation of his metre, which was not new, but was first 
 used by Coleridge in romantic poetry. Scott seems to have been 
 quite unconscious of sin. 
 
 Despite the large number of Coleridge's poems, it is generally 
 
The Romantic Movement 501 
 
 confessed that only " The Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," " Kubla 
 Khan," "Love," 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 
 "Youth and Age" (182 2- 183 2), "Time, Real and Imaginary," with 
 " Dejection " (an ode, 1802), and parts of " France " (an ode, 1 798) 
 represent that in the poet which was absolutely his, and his alone. 
 The vision, supernaturally clear, the music, the glow, the strange 
 beauty, are present in these poems, things inimitable and un- 
 equalled. Coleridge was always a " teacher " and had been a 
 Unitarian preacher : his early poems are constantly didactic, but, 
 in his poems which live, there is no " lesson " (unless we regard 
 " The Ancient Mariner " as a tract for the prevention of cruelty to 
 animals). The great poems appear to have been given to him in 
 flashes of vision, as " Kubla Khan " certainly was given in sleep, 
 and broken by the arrival of " a person from Porlock " on busi- 
 ness. It is fairly apparent that " Christabel " had its germ in a 
 brief vision of the meeting of the innocent heroine with a being 
 beautiful and horrible, 
 
 I guess, \vi3s frightful there to see 
 A lady so richly clad as she — 
 Beautiful exceedingly. 
 
 We may even conjecture at the close of the vision, a thing so 
 grotesque as well as terrible, that the poem could never find a 
 conclusion. 
 
 It is not clear that Coleridge's poems had much efFect on 
 those of younger contemporaries. Without Coleridge, Shelley 
 would have written as he did write ; if anything by Keats is in- 
 fluenced by Coleridge it is " La Belle Dame sans Merci ". To 
 Scott, Coleridge gave only the idea of the metre of " Christabel ". 
 In close intimacy Coleridge and Wordsworth stimulated each 
 other. In other respects Coleridge's critical and philosophical 
 ideas welled from him in lectures, orally delivered ; his Shakes 
 pearean criticism was of the highest merit in spiritual appreciation. 
 In " The Friend," an unsuccessful and unexhilarating periodical ; 
 in his "Biographia Literaria " (1817-1818) which is not so bio- 
 graphical or so literary as it is reflective, and critical of Hartley's 
 
502 English Literature 
 
 philosophy and Wordsworth's poems, he is too discursive to be 
 easily read ; and the systematic works on philosophy about which 
 he dreamed and talked were never produced. 
 
 His life, after his visit to Italy and Malta in 1804- 1806, was 
 desultory ; his friendship with the Wordsworths was interrupted ; 
 Lamb, always true to him, could describe him as " a damaged 
 Archangel " ; Hazlitt, furious with Coleridge's later conservatism, 
 insulted his " Christabel" in the "Edinburgh Review " : and declared 
 that the praises given to it by Scott and Byron were inspired by 
 desire of praise from Coleridge. From 18 16 to his death in 1834 
 Coleridge lived quietly and more happily with Mr. Gillman at 
 Hampstead, much visited by people who hoped to be instructed 
 as well as charmed by his conversation, or rather by his mono- 
 logues. 
 
 In 1820 Keats met him and walked two miles with him. 
 " He broached a thousand things — nightingales, poetry — on 
 poetical sensation — metaphysics, different genera and species of 
 dreams — a dream accompanied by a sense of touch, a dream 
 related — first and second consciousness — the difference explained 
 between will and volition — so say metaphysicians from a want of 
 smoking " (that is detecting) " the second consciousness — monsters 
 — the Kraken — mermaids, Southey believed in them — Southey's 
 belief too much diluted — a ghost story 1 " 
 
 "The second consciousness" may be the "subconsciousness" 
 or " subliminal self " of modern psychologists. " He is a kind 
 good soul," says the sardonic Carlyle, " full of religion and affec- 
 tion, and poetry and animal magnetism." Scott met "this extra- 
 ordinary man " at dinner. Coleridge (after dinner) lectured on 
 the Samothracian Mysteries as the origin of all fairy tales ; and on 
 the " Iliad " as a miscellany contributed to by many authors 
 during a century. "Zounds, I never was so bethumped with 
 words." 
 
 Walter Scott. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, descended from the Harden branch of the great 
 clan that had kept the Marches through centuries of English wars, 
 was born in Edinburgh on 15 August, 1771. Neither from his 
 
The Romantic Movement 503 
 
 father (the father of Allan Fairford, in " Redgauntlet ") nor from his 
 mother, of another Border clan, the Rutherfords, can he be 
 supposed to have drawn his genius, though Mrs. Scott appreciated 
 literature. In early childhood a mysterious malady inflicted on 
 him a life-long lameness, in contrast with his great physical strength, 
 and his preference for the profession of arms. His early childhood 
 was passed in the heart of the Borders, at Smailholme tower, over- 
 looking Tweed, Teviot, and the scenes of a hundred battles. 
 The old ballads were his earliest reading, and tales of Prince 
 Charles's war, told by veterans of the Forty-five, his great delight. 
 At school he flashed from end to end of the form, rising by his 
 general information, and falling by his indifference to grammar. 
 He was an omnivorous reader, forgetting nothing, a teller of tales, 
 a roamer on foot through the country-side, and he left the High 
 School of Edinburgh, quite Greekless, for the University, — where 
 he learned no Greek. But of Latin, including mediaeval Latin, 
 he had enough for his purposes (his quotations show indifference 
 to quantity and metre) ; and French, Italian, and German he 
 acquired for the purpose of reading their poetry and romances. 
 His native appreciation of verse astonished people in his childhood ; 
 love of the past was his dominant passion ; and in nature the 
 historical memories of places were even more to him than natural 
 beauty. 
 
 After the customary training in his father's ofBce, he was 
 called to the Scottish Bar, enjoying little practice, but making 
 friends in every rank, and enduring a disappointment in love, by 
 which his heart, though fairly mended by his marriage in 1797, to 
 a Miss Charpentier, was broken but not embittered. 
 
 His earliest published verses were translations from German 
 ballads, including the famous " Lenore " of Biirger, and he published 
 a translation of the " Gotz von Berlichingen " of Goethe. These 
 essays attracted little attention : more was paid to such imitations of 
 the old ballads as " Glenfinlas," and " Cadzow," and " The Eve of 
 St. John," abounding in poetic spirit, though not archaic in diction. 
 
 He obtained a long-deferred reversion of a place as Clerk in 
 the Parliament House, and the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire (the 
 Forest of Ettrick) where in summer he resided, first at Ashesciel 
 
504 English Literature 
 
 on Tweed, the centre of the beauties and legends of the Border. 
 In yearly raids into almost roadless Liddesdale, he learned to 
 know the Dandie Dinmonts, and collected the traditions, and the 
 ballads of " The Border Minstrelsy,'' of which the first edition, with 
 copious historical and antiquarian notes, was published in 1802. 
 
 The famous False Alarm of invasion of 1803, described in 
 "The Antiquary," sent him on a ride of a hundred miles, to Dal- 
 keith, the house of his chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the 
 trysting-place of the Borderers. A command of the Duchess 
 suggested a ballad on a tradition of a goblin page ; parts of 
 Coleridge's unpublished " Christabel," which he had heard recited, 
 gave the model of the irregular octosyllabic verse, and in 1805 
 the result, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," made Scott by far the 
 most popular of poets. " The Lay " was the most spontaneous, 
 and in many ways the best, of his romances in verse. " Marmion " 
 (1808) more studied, more tragical, and fortunate in the magnificent 
 canto on the battle of Flodden : and "The Lady of the Lake " 
 (t8io), with its blending of Highland and Lowland characters and 
 scenes in the reign of James V. (about 1535) only confirmed his 
 popularity and success. " Rokeby " (181 2) was, despite its 
 excellent songs, and a highly Byronic outlaw preceding Byron, less 
 favourably received ; and "The Lord of the Isles" (18 15), on the 
 adventures of Bruce, a subject long meditated, was not saved by 
 its battle of Bannockburn, a fight only inferior to the Flodden 
 of " Marmion ''. Byron, with his modern romance and his living 
 celebrity, had defeated the historical Muse ; and Scott did not 
 put forth his strength in "Harold the Dauntless" and "The 
 Bridal of Triermain''. 
 
 He was the best judge of his own poetry, written " for young 
 people of spirit," he said, though he did not allow his own young 
 people to read it ; a deprivation which they took very uncon- 
 cernedly. It is not to Scott's poetry, except in some of his lyrics, 
 that we look for deep reflection on human destinies, or for 
 delicate subtlety of phrase, 
 
 All the charm of all the Muses 
 Often flowering in a lonely word. 
 
 His reflections he kept to himself; he told his story in his gallop- 
 
The Romantic Movement 505 
 
 ing " light horseman " style of verse ; he made the dead past live 
 again ; he repeopled with their dreams the roofless towers of the 
 Borders, the Highland caves and bothies, the deserted palaces 
 and castles, whose last native king was then dying, a priest, in 
 Rome. His verses, read aloud to Wellington's men in Spain, in- 
 spirited them in the charge, as they awoke among all men what 
 had long been slumbering, the love of poetry. Scott, like Yama, 
 the first of men who died, " opened a pathway unto many " : 
 inclined men to give an ear to verse. He set Byron the model 
 for his popular versified tales of Oriental adventure ; and he was 
 unceasing in recommending the poetry, so unlike his own, of 
 Wordsworth, and in applauding Byron with unfeigned gener- 
 osity ; while his devotion to the old English drama displays itself in 
 quotations in his prose, and in imitations, improvised chapter- 
 headings, in his novels. From his first translations of ballads, to 
 the snatches sung by Madge Wildfire, the song of " Proud 
 Maisie," and the ringing lyric of "Bonnie Dundee," he fiirst 
 awoke and then kept vigilant the spirit of ancient popular min- 
 strelsy. 
 
 In,aliort his poe try wa s such as cam e to a man of his g enius, 
 dnrin^his "grand gallopT among the hilTs^ jiyhile he was thin king 
 o!^' Matmion '"". — HiS lixifies in form are, indeed, less glaring 
 than those of Byron, but, from the first, were conspicuous to 
 himself and to his critics. His appeal to names of hill and loch 
 and sea-strait, rivers and burns and towers and glens, makes half 
 of his charm in the ears of those to whom the places are dear and 
 familiar. He was "the latest minstrel," the Homer, the creative 
 and unifying successor of many nameless men who left great verse 
 unto a little clan. Above all he was a narrator, a story-teller, a 
 creator of characters, a humorist, and his essential genius, his 
 dramatic gift, his knowledge of the past and the present, found its 
 true vehicle in the prose of his novels. 
 
 Scott's career falls naturally into two parts : first from the 
 " Minstrelsy " (1802) to " The Lord of the Isles " (1815), and next 
 from "Waverley" (1814) to the author's death in 1832. But in 
 the earlier years were sown the seeds of disaster; Scott had, 
 before 1813, been entangled in financial troubles, owing to his 
 
5o6 English Literature 
 
 association with the printing and publishing affairs of his old friends, 
 James and John Ballantyne. Despite his common sense, Scott 
 was sanguine and unpractical as a publisher ; his enterprises were 
 dominated by preferences, personal or antiquarian ; his hospitality 
 and his tastes were expensive, and his associates were not the 
 men to control and direct him ; or even to keep the commercial 
 books of the concern. In fact shipwreck, once at least, seemed 
 inevitable, before Scott struck a vein of fairy gold in prose romance. 
 Before speaking of Scott as a novelist it should be said that he 
 was the most copious, various, and readable of the critics and 
 general writers of his time. His great edition of Dryden, now 
 reinforced by the notes of Mr. Saintsbury, still holds its ground, in 
 despite of the contempt of Leigh Hunt ; and his " Life of Swift " 
 is still the most valuable, for the judgment of so sane and generous 
 a mind on the mystery of Swift's character and career. Scott's 
 many essays, collected from periodicals, mainly from "The 
 Quarterly Review,'' which he practically founded, are treasures of 
 information and anecdote. His criticism for example in the 
 "Lives of the Novelists " errs most in the direction of generosity. 
 His "Tales of a Grandfather," written for his little grandson, 
 John Lockhart, who died in childhood, combines delightful 
 versions of historic legends of early times with the most impartial 
 treatment of such difficult and disputable periods as the Reforma- 
 tion and the age of the Covenant. Scott had strong sentimental 
 leanings towards Mary Stuart, the Cavaliers, and the Jacobites, 
 but, in writing history for the young, he deliberately corrected his 
 bias. A life of Mary .Stuart he refuged to write, because his 
 reason was at variance with his feelings. His " Napoleon " was a 
 piece of task-work, executed with cruel rapidity, and, of course, 
 he had not access to many sources ot > information now open. Of 
 course, too, like any man who had lived through the Napoleonic 
 wars, he was a partisan, in his case of his country's party. But he 
 did not carry political partisanship into literature ; he had no part 
 (despite ignorant assertions) in the attacks on " the Cockney 
 School"; he tried to tempt Charles Lamb to visit him at Abbotsford; 
 and he seized an opportunity of applauding Mrs, Shelley's " Frank- 
 enstein " because he believed it to be by Shelley. 
 
The Romantic Movement 507 
 
 William Wordsworth. 
 
 The contrast between the friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 
 was that which poets observe between the South and the North. 
 The child of the soft enervating air of Devonshire, Coleridge, ac- 
 cording to his own early diagnosis already quoted, had every other 
 gift, mental and moral, but lacked energy and resolution, his hand 
 was " graspless ''. Wordsworth, on the contrary (born at Cocker- 
 mouth, 7 April, 1770) was a child of the North and of the Border, 
 and a grandchild of Dorothy, born Crackanthorp, a member ,of 
 a family which, in the, old Border laws, is named among the 
 Watchers of the Fords, against the Scottish raiders. To a genius 
 as great if not as diversified as Coleridge's, Wordsworth united an 
 iron will to be a poet, and, as he said, " a teacher ". With the 
 keenest love of universal nature from the mountains and the 
 storms to " the meanest flower that blows," he combined that 
 sense of unity with Nature, and with " something still more deeply 
 interfused," which Coleridge speaks of in a poem (1795) 
 composed before he and Wordsworth became intimate. Says 
 Coleridge 
 
 O the one life within us and abroad, 
 Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, 
 A light in sound, a soundlike power in light, 
 Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere. 
 
 Coleridge adds that when he lies at midday on the side of a hill, 
 his fancies traverse his brain 
 
 As wild and various as the random gales 
 That swell and flutter on this subject lute, 
 
 namely an .<Eolian harp placed in the open window. 
 
 Wordsworth, to the same emotions as of a conscious ^olian 
 harp vibrating to the universe, added an invincible resolve to ex- 
 tract the moral out of every vibration, and to register it in verse. 
 In this task he knew no slackness, he was daily observing, daily 
 composing, consequently the mass of his poetry is very great, and 
 very unequally inspired, since " it needs heaven-sent moments for 
 this skill " of the poet, while Wordsworth was busy at all moments. 
 
 After a boyhood happily passed, when he was out of school, in 
 
5o8 English Literature 
 
 angling, skating, boating, and setting springes for woodcock, 
 Wordsworth went to St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1787, 
 taking his bachelor's degree in 1791. He was an orphan; his 
 father, a solicitor, had been far from prosperous, and it was perhaps 
 to the generosity of his uncle that he owed the advantage of being 
 allowed to " mew his mighty youth " in what the world calls idle- 
 ness. He had the same intense consciousness of and reverence 
 for his own genius as Milton and Tennyson possessed : he would 
 be a poet and nothing but a poet, for the position of Stamp Dis- 
 tributor which he later enjoyed was a sinecure. Concerning all 
 his poetic childhood and boyhood, and residence in France (from 
 the end of 179 1 to the opening of 1793), 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. 
 But to be young was very heaven, 
 
 down to his " wantoning in wild poesy " with Coleridge (1797), he 
 has told his tale in " The Prelude " (1799-1805). 
 
 This extremely long poem in blank verse was regarded by 
 Wordsworth as " subsidiary to the preparation " for " the con- 
 struction of a literary work that should live ". After thus " investi- 
 gating the origin and progress of his own powers as far as he was 
 acquainted with them," Wordsworth intended to produce " a 
 philosophical Poem . . . having for its principal subject the sen- 
 sations and opinions of a poet living in retirement ". This poem, 
 also in blank verse, was to be called " The Recluse " ; whereof 
 only a few hundred lines exist, but " The Excursion " was 
 designed for the second part. " The Recluse," Wordsworth says, 
 was to be a kind of Gothic Cathedral : " The Prelude " is the 
 " antechapel " ; and the lyrics, sonnets, and other poems not so 
 large as the antechapel " may be likened to the little cells, ora- 
 tories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in these 
 edifices ". These oratories are the most favourite portions of 
 Wordsworth's cathedral ; and all his poems, long or short, 
 except the tragedy " The Borderers," " have for their principal 
 subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retire- 
 ment," but listening with a keen ear to hints and murmurs of the 
 world. 
 
The Romantic Movement 509 
 
 From enthusiasm • for the French Revolution, Wordsworth, 
 like Burns, "when haughty Gaul invasion threats," turned gradu- 
 ally to patriotism, as the French armies of emancipation conquered 
 Switzerland, invaded Spain, and menaced England. Now, like 
 Glenbucket at the battle of Sheriffmuir (17 15) he prayed "for 
 one hour of Dundee ! " This unprincipled change of sides 
 caused Wordsworth's poems to be insulted by Hazlitt, and in 
 " The Edinburgh Review ". He was constant, indeed, to his 
 sympathy with poverty and toil, detested the factory system, and 
 loved his mountains and lakes not only for the beauty of the 
 clouds, mists, and gleams of sunlight, but because 
 
 Labour here preserves 
 His rosy face, a servant only here 
 Of the fireside or of the open field, 
 A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired 
 
 — (" The Recluse "). 
 
 But Wordsworth had not a noble scorn of " militarism '' ; he sang 
 of Nelson, and "The Happy Warrior," as well as of "The 
 Lesser Celandine," and was attached to the Anglican Establish- 
 ment ; these things were not forgiven to the poetic renegade by 
 Whig critics, or to Coleridge, or to Southey, while Scott, it was 
 admitted, had never turned his coat. 
 
 Wordsworth was singularly fortunate in the ideal affection of 
 his sister Dorothy, — whose eye for natural beauty was as keen as 
 his own, — and in his wife, to whom he attributed two lines in 
 " The Daffodils "— 
 
 They flash upon that inward eye 
 Which is the bliss of solitude. 
 
 Of his friendship with Coleridge, and of their volume " Lyrical 
 Ballads," we have spoken. They contain examples of his theory, 
 first given in the preface of the second edition of " Lyrical Ballads," 
 that " the poet ought to imitate and, as far as is possible, adopt 
 the very language of men ... I have taken as much pains to avoid 
 what is usually called poetical diction as others ordinarily take 
 to produce it ". But Wordsworth could not, of course, keep up 
 
5IO English Literature 
 
 to his own standard. Asked " What has become of the wild 
 swans ? " no mortal could reply 
 
 The Dalesmen may have aimed the deadly tube 
 
 — (" The Recluse "). 
 
 Thus, in "Lyrical Ballads," in "The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth 
 wrote (and " I never wrote anything with so much glee ") : — 
 
 And he must post without delay 
 Across the bridge and through the dale, 
 And by the church, and o'er the down, 
 To bring a Doctor from the town, 
 Or she will die, old Susan Gale. 
 
 Dr. Johnson had anticipated this theory of non-poetic diction 
 in poetry : — 
 
 As with my hat upon my head, 
 I walk'd along the Strand, 
 I there did meet another man 
 With his hat in his hand. 
 
 Wordsworth stood courageously — all the more stiffly because he 
 was laughed at — by his theory. In practice he made the poor 
 woman of " The Affliction of Margaret " talk of " the incom- 
 municable sleep " of the dead, here the not ordinary word has a 
 meaning not ordinary. 
 
 " The Lyrical Ballads " contained poetry so remote from " The 
 Idiot Boy " as the lines on Tintern Abbey ; with 
 
 A sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 
 And the round ocean and the living air. 
 And the blue sky, and iu the mind of man, 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
 Mens agitat molem : it is the philosophy of Virgil. The con- 
 sciousness of this unity with nature and of both with that which is 
 divine had been with Wordsworth from his childhood, as he 
 records in " The Prelude " and elsewhere, and this aspect of 
 
The Romantic Movement 511 
 
 his thought even affected Byron, in the last part of " Childe 
 Harold ". 
 
 Wordsworth's life was uneventful. He made tours, very fruit- 
 ful in poetry, to Scotland (18 13, 1814,1831, 1833); theyaredated 
 by "Yarrow Unvisited," " Yarrow Visited," "Yarrow Revisited". 
 The tour of 1831 gave occasion to the noble and tender sonnet 
 " A Trouble not of Clouds, or Weeping Rain,"' on the departure of 
 the dying Scott for Italy. With this (1831) in our memories we 
 cannot say that save for the ode " Composed on an Evening of 
 Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty," "all Wordsworth's good 
 work was done in the decade between 1798 and 1808"- His 
 poems of the year 1807 are, no doubt, the least lacking in uniform 
 success. Among them is the ode " On Intimations of Immor- 
 tality ". But "The White Doe of Rylstone," published in 1815, 
 and proclaimed by " The Edinburgh Review " to be the very 
 worst poem that ever appeared in quarto, was written in 1807 : 
 written in such stress of the spirit that the poet was not punctual 
 to the dinner bell, as he informs us. The poem was an excursion 
 into Scott's metres, and one of Scott's historic periods, but its 
 intention was purely spiritual, and very unpopular. 
 
 The "Laodamia" (1814), the meeting of the heroine with the 
 spirit of her lord, the first man slain at Troy, has been highly 
 praised by an excellent judge (Mr. F. W. Myers). But when the 
 Appearance says " thy transports moderate 1 " we are in touch with 
 the poetic diction of the eighteenth century and far from the in- 
 spiration of the Greek " thrice 1 sprang toward the shadow of my 
 mother dead; thrice she flitted from my hands as a shadow or 
 even as a dream ". It is, in fact, true that after 1808, with forty- 
 two years of life and poetry before him, Wordsworth often failed. 
 
 Hail, Orient conqueror of gloomy night 
 
 is an address to the sun which any follower of Pope might have 
 written (" Ode for the Morning of the General Thanksgiving 
 1816"). 
 
 Many of Wordsworth's most inspired passages are to be found 
 in the long, lofty, and rather bleak antechapel and nave of " The 
 Prelude " and " The Excursion ". But lovers of poetry are most 
 apt to kneel in his chapels and oratories ; and to read, with un- 
 
512 English Literature 
 
 ceasing delight and gratitude " In the Sweet Shire of Cardigan," 
 "I Heard a Thousand Blended Notes," "There was a Boy, Ye Knew 
 Him Well, Ye Cliffs " ; " She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways," 
 "Lucy Gray," "Beggars," "Sweet Highland Girl," "To the 
 Cuckoo," " The Ode to Duty," " The Happy Warrior," and the 
 multitude of sonnets of the highest and most varied excellence, in 
 which his genius, like the follet of Moliere, rides his pen and his 
 power comes to its own. 
 
 Science or stupidity may some day trj^to compile the statistics 
 of " inspiratiorf^ifl poeLiy. TSispifationcanriOt. easily be defined, 
 but may be described as represented, in a poet's work, by the 
 passages in which, according to the common consent of readers, 
 he reaches a level immeasurably higher than that of versified 
 matter in general, and of his own efforts in particular. 
 
 In any such calculation the proportion of Wordsworth's in- 
 spired verse — of verse of the very highest and most singular merit 
 — is far above the proportion in Coleridge. Few readers who may 
 amuse themselves by trying to " place " modern English poets after 
 MUton will give Wordsworth anything lower than the second, while 
 very many will give him the foremost rank. But the amount of 
 his uninspired verse — of verse immeasurably below his best — is 
 enormous, and this, with some other circumstances, accounts for 
 the opposition, the refusal to accept him or take him seriously, 
 which he had to encounter in his long life (7 April, 1770-23 April, 
 
 Another_obsta£le,to be plain, was the infinite number of oc- 
 
 casions in whic t) the little pronottn- " I " occurs in his poetry. 
 Great, beneficent, and unique as was the g uiiius o f WiHta aa. 
 Wordsworth when he conceived " The Prelude '' as only the be- 
 ginning of what he wanted to say about himself, and about the 
 universe as mirrored in his own intelligence, it became only too 
 manifest that he was, in an unexampled degree, destitute of 
 humour. Amusing anecdotes are told, by Lockhart, of conversa- 
 tions between Wordsworth and Scott in which Wordsworth's 
 poetry was the sole theme, by no means to Sir Walter's discontent. 
 On no contemporary but Burns and Coleridge did he bestow his 
 approval : it may be doubted if he had spent half an hour with 
 
The Romantic Movement 513 
 
 Byron's, Shelley's, and Keats's verse. To be sure this self-absorp- 
 tion is a malady most incident to poets I 
 
 In later life (1820-1837) Wordsworth visited the Continent, 
 even reaching Italy. In 1839 he received a noble welcome and 
 an honorary degtee from Oxford; in 1843, on Southey's death, he 
 accepted the Laureateship, which, before Southey's appointment, 
 Scott had refused; and on 23 April, 1850, he passed away, leaving 
 to Tennyson the laurels. He wished to teach us wisdom ; he did 
 something better, he gave us happiness. 
 
 Robert Southey. 
 
 The name of Robert Southey (born at Bristol, 12 August, 
 1774) was always connected with the names of the Lake School of 
 poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his theory and practice 
 in poetry were quite distinct from those of the authors of " Lyrical 
 Ballads ". Southey was educated at Westminster, where his troubles 
 began in his editorship of a little paper, "The Flagellant," which 
 was opposed to flogging. On entering Balliol College, Oxford 
 (1792), he declared himself a rebel, wearing his hair long, as be- 
 comes men of genius, while women of genius commonly wear 
 their hair short. He also despised his Dons, and, nearly twenty 
 years later, on meeting Shelley, then aged 19, he found in Shelley 
 the counterpart of his undergraduate self. Shelley, however, did 
 not, when at Oxford, contemplate taking Holy Orders. Southey 
 soon abandoned the idea, and, meeting Coleridge at Oxford in 
 June, 1794, devised with him the scheme of a " pantisocratic " 
 community in America. 
 
 ' With Coleridge, Southey wrote " The Fall of Robespierre," and, 
 by himself, an epic in blank verse on Jeanne d'Arc. Of this boyish 
 effort — ambitious, and, in history, ill-informed — he had a high 
 opinion, writing, in 1800, "my Joan of Arc has revived the epic 
 mania . . . but it is not every one who can shoot with the bow of 
 Ulysses, and the gentlemen who think they can bend the bow be- 
 cause I made the string twang will find themselves disappointed ", 
 Southey was always twanging the string of epic poetry. Even at 
 school he had contemplated a series of epics, to be written at the 
 rate of one a year, on the mythological legends of the world. In 
 
 33 
 
,514 English Literature 
 
 1795 ^^ married Miss Edith Fricker, a sister of the wife of 
 Coleridge, and visited Portugal, acquiring, then and on a later 
 visit, an unusual knowledge of the languages and literatures of the 
 Peninsula. 
 
 After an attempt to study law, he went to I've at Westbury, 
 near Bristol, began " Madoc," an epic in blank verse on a le- 
 gendary Welsh prince who discovered America, and fought the 
 Aztecs, and he also began " Kehama," an epic on Hindoo myth- 
 ology, and "Thalaba, the Destroyer," an epic based on the myth- 
 ology of Islam ; while " Madoc " deals largely with the sanguinary 
 religion of Anahuac. 
 
 In " Madoc," which was not completed till after Southey 
 settled at Keswick, near Wordsworth, but not too near, he had 
 chosen for a theme perhaps the most romantic adventure in 
 human history. He assigns to his fabulous Welsh prince the part 
 actually taken by Cortes, the Cymri defeated the Aztecs as did the 
 Spaniards. 
 
 Southey 's blank verse is somewhat Miltonic, though he was 
 no such "inventor of harmonies" as Milton, while in descriptions 
 of adventure among unknown peoples, and fighting with Aztec 
 weapons, he reminds the reader of some of the romances of Mr. 
 Rider Haggard. Books xiv.-xv. (" The Stone of Sacrifice " and 
 "The Battle") cannot but delight any boy who reads them, they 
 are full of spirit and abundantly picturesque ; while the notes are 
 as rich as Scott's in the charm of strange lore, and delightful 
 passages from forgotten books. Thus from the Jesuit missionary, 
 Lafitau (for Southey fully appreciated the virtues of Jesuit mis- 
 sionaries), he culls a Red Indian legend, one of the world-wide 
 variants of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sir Walter Scott, in 
 1807, wrote to Southey " I have read ' Madoc' three times since 
 my first cursory perusal, and each time with an increasing admira- 
 tion. But a poem whose merits are of that high tone does not 
 immediately take with the public at large." 
 
 In fact "Thalaba," written in a strange unrhymed measure, 
 devised by Dr. Sayres, deals with topics of no earthly interest, the 
 feud of Thalaba and the demons of Domdaniel. Southey himself 
 said that " Thalaba " was like highly seasoned turtle soup, while 
 
The Romantic Movement 515 
 
 Wordsworth's poems were like asparagus and artichokes, whole- 
 some, and edible with the aid of melted butter. But the world did 
 not care for "Thalaba," nor for the monstrosities of Hindoo myth- 
 ology in the eccentric measures of " Kehama ". Landor, whose 
 " Gebir " Southey heartily admired, offered to pay for the printing 
 of as many epics as Southey chose to write ; he cast a longing eye 
 on Zoroaster; but Southey had a wife and family, "a sacrifice 
 was made," " Kehama " was his last epic, unless we reckon 
 "Roderick" as an epic poem. Southey was not destitute of 
 poetic genius ; passages in his epics, and among his lyrics, " My 
 Days among the Dead are Past," and "The Holly Tree," attest his 
 gift, but the Epic has seldom indeed been written with success, 
 and never anywhere in such measures as those of " Kehama " 
 and "Thalaba". 
 
 It was necessary for Southey to turn his hand to prose, and he 
 supported his family and bought his books by reviewing and poli- 
 tical writing, first in "The Annual Register," then in "The Quar- 
 terly Review," though it was against the grain that he wrote in a 
 political serial. He was a friend of his country as against Bona- 
 parte ; he was a friend of order, while he was clear-sighted about 
 the oppression and abuses which sheltered themselves under the 
 shield of order; and he was a religious man. Like Scott he was 
 anxious that the "Quarterly" reviewers "should keep their swords 
 clean as well as sharp," but the political blades of both the 
 "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh" were dirty and poisoned, and 
 were wont to slash about in literary criticism. Southey was the 
 common butt of abuse from Liberal reviewers, and was supposed 
 by Shelley and Byron to have attacked them in criticisms to 
 which he was a perfect stranger : though of " the new morality" 
 of both poets he expressed his opinion privately, and publicly 
 struck back at Byron for his brilliant assault on Southey's English 
 hexameters concerning the admission of George HI. to heaven. 
 Southey must have been deserted by the sense of humour when he 
 wrote that astonishing piece of verse in the capacity of Poet 
 Laureate. This little piece of preferment Southey obtained in 
 1813. Sir Walter, to whom it was offered, despite the "rapacity" 
 of which Macaulay accused him, had declined the laurels, and, 
 
 33* 
 
5i6 English Literature 
 
 believing that the post was much better paid than it is, had sug- 
 gested the appointment of Southey. The little salary, under a 
 hundred pounds, enabled Southey to provide for his family by 
 insuring his life. In answering Scott's letter — " I am not such an 
 ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry " ; Southey 
 said " there has been no race ; we have both got to the top of the 
 hill by different paths ". 
 
 There is something very winning in Southey's noble simplicity 
 of nature. Neither he nor Scott had won to the top of Parnassuj 
 hill, and Scott was well aware of it. But Southey to the last, in 
 spite of public neglect, believed in his own success as a supreme 
 poet ; yet abandoned his epics for the homely task of winning a 
 poor competence for his family by reviewing, and by doing job- 
 work for the publishers. As his prose was of the first quality he 
 was able to earn ;^3oo by his masterpiece, the immortal "Life of 
 Nelson ". As an article for the " Quarterly " it brought a hundred, 
 another hundred when enlarged, a third when published in " The 
 Family Library ". His " Life of John Wesley " was only second 
 to his " Nelson " in merit. His " History of Brazil " could not ex- 
 pect a due reward ; his general writings, though full of pleasant 
 erudition and fanciful humour, were not popular ; towards the end 
 of his life the revenues which he derived from a score of books 
 amounted only to ;^26. He mentions the fact without bitterness, 
 without complaint. His long and noble life of industry ended in 
 1843 ; for some time he had sat in the library which he had made 
 without the power to read his books. 
 
 Shelley. 
 
 Percy Bysshe Shelley (born 4 August, 1792, at Field Place, 
 Horsham, the seat of his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, Bart.) seems 
 to have incarnated the spirit of the Revolution. He had no 
 brothers to check his tastes and impulses ; he ruled his sisters, was 
 lonely at a private school, but at Eton, where he already defied 
 tyrants, — boys and masters, — ^he seems to have become popular, 
 despite his eccentricities. Like many other boys he made chemical 
 smells and explosions in place of mastering his Greek grammar. 
 He read Godwin, in whom he invested his great natural powers of 
 
The Romantic Movement 517 
 
 belief to the neglect of more orthodox securities, and he combined 
 Godwinism with the romantic mechanism of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels 
 in two schoolboy romances, "Zastrozzi," the more amusing of 
 the pair, and " St. Irvyne'V He is said to have received some 
 money for " Zastrozzi " ; if he did the case was unparalleled in his 
 later experience. When at University College, Oxford, he pub- 
 lished " Poems by Victor and Cazire '' (his sister Elizabeth) and a 
 little incoherent volume, "Posthumous Fragments of Margaret 
 Nicholson," a maniac who aimed at murdering George IH. 
 
 He had no intimate friend except his future biographer, 
 Thomas Hogg, a sceptic, but a Tory ; and his studies were de- 
 sultory, self- directed, and much concerned with efforts to retain or 
 ruin some remnants of beUef His little thesis on "The Necessity 
 of Atheism,'' and his distribution of the paper, were perhaps as 
 much inspired by his humourless love of practical jokes and aver- 
 sion to the authorities as by conviction. His expulsion, which 
 Hogg insisted on sharing, was the rash reply of dons who were 
 tired of being baited ; and Shelley, now a martyr, rejoiced in pro- 
 claiming the ideas for which he and Hogg had suffered. 
 
 On ill terms with his father, he married Miss Harriet West- 
 brook, a very young girl, more from a sense of duty and honour 
 than from love ; and in various rural places he lived, wrote, read 
 Godwin, corresponded with him, preached his ideas in Ireland, and 
 idealized and quarrelled wijh various friends of both sexes, till he 
 met Mary Godwin, the very young daughter of the philosopher. 
 
 Shelley had grown passing weary of his wife, who now declined 
 to live with him as a sister while Mary took her natural place ; he 
 retired with Mary and her stepsister, Jane Clairmont, calling 
 herself Claire, to Switzerland, and returned to England — because 
 the stove in his room smoked badly. 
 
 Reconciled to Hogg (whom he had accused, truly or falsely, 
 of trying to put his own ideas of free love into practice with Mrs. 
 Shelley), he wrote " Queen Mab " (18 13), (in which his natural 
 genius shines unmistakably,) and "Alastor" (1816), the story of a 
 lonely spirit fleeing from itself through scenes of grandeur and de- 
 solation ; homeless, like Shelley, and like him unsatisfied. His 
 own wanderings were restless rather than remote ; to Geneva, 
 
5i8 English Literature 
 
 where Claire Clairmont carried out his ideas with the aid of the 
 reluctant Byron ; back to Great Marlow ; and thence, after 
 marrying Mary Godwin, on the suicide of his injured wife, to 
 various parts of Italy, Claire being still his camp-follower. 
 
 He had become the friend and benefactor of I^eigh Hunt ; 
 Godwin's demands for money followed him like harpies ; he was 
 deprived of his children by his first marriage ; his long romance 
 in Spenserian stanzas, " Laon and Cythna," though expurgated 
 and rechristened "The Revolt of Islam" (1818), attracted little 
 but unfriendly attention, despite- its many and extraordinary 
 beauties and radiant visions of storm and rainbow, clouds and 
 winds and fire. With unwonted humour Shelley said that you 
 might as well ask for a leg of mutton in a gin shop as apply to 
 him for studies in human nature. Madness, said Medwin, a man 
 who was much in his company, hung over Shelley like the sword 
 of Damocles. 
 
 In his earlier years he was like an ^olian harp on which all 
 the winds of the spirit played, making strange music and strange 
 discords. He was even too fluent, Keats told him ; as Jonson 
 said of Shakespeare, sufflaminandus erat. Ideas of beauty spring- 
 ing up in his mind, he follov^ed them, followed the cloud, the 
 shower, the meteor, the evanescent loveliness, was borne up by 
 the "wild west wind, the breath of autumn's being," leaving his 
 narrative of human fortunes. He was a born visionary and 
 mystic, beholding things unapparent; believing in experiences 
 that never were actual. Yet withal, when control was needed, he 
 could control himself wonderfully, as was especially notable in his 
 difficult and dangerous relations with the wild Claire Clairmont 
 and Byron. 
 
 In his poetic art, this growing power of control is especially mani- 
 fest in his drama, "TheCenci" (1819), and his swan-song, the 
 matchless "Adonais" (182 1), the lament for Keats. But "The 
 Cenci," a drama on a theme which was made to the hand of Ford or 
 Webster, — the story of a soul more devilish in limitless cruelty and 
 desire of evil than the soul of Volpone ; of a maiden martyr more 
 cruelly entreated than Jeanne d'Arc,^ — was not possible on the 
 modern stage. 
 
The Romantic Movement 519 
 
 The polemics of " Prometheus Unbound " against the world as 
 it is, and in favour of suffering and oppressed humanity, lost 
 themselves, the contradictions vanished unreconciled in the music 
 of the immortal lyrics. The escape from a world in which "as 
 God made it ye canna hae everything as ye wad like it,'' to reach 
 an undisturbed haven of love and loneliness, "to live for climate 
 and the affections " inspires "The Witch of Atlas" (1820) and 
 " Epipsychidion " (1821). Shelley's soul was always seeking its 
 predestined and ideal mate, with whom "the wilderness were 
 paradise enow," and then these ideal friends or mistresses, in a 
 moment, became horrors to him, — and Mary remained; Mary 
 and " a song in the ears of men yet to be born ". 
 
 In his many immortal lyrics the poetry of Shelley is most ac- 
 cessible to all ; in them he is not baffled and foiled by the world 
 as it is. What his powers might have become, for they were 
 maturing rapidly, cannot be guessed. By a death in strange 
 harmony with his genius, portended by omens, and predicted in 
 his own words, he " was borne darkly fearfully afar," being drowned 
 in a brief sudden tempest in the Gulf of Spezzia (19 July, 1822). 
 The fire received what the water returned to earth, and his ashes 
 sleep beside those of Keats in "a place so beautiful that it makes 
 one in love with death "- 
 
 Byron. 
 
 George Gordon Byron (born 1788) who succeeded in 
 boyhood to the title of Lord Byron, was the son of a wild father, 
 John Byron, and of a mother as much wilder, as the blood of the 
 Gordons of Gight, in Aberdeenshire, could make her. Of all 
 " the gay Gordons " her family carried to the most extreme point 
 the least estimable and more ferocious qualities of their glorious 
 fighting clan. It is impossible to judge by a common measure 
 the child of John Byron and Catherine Gordon. Byron was a 
 man of all-conquering personal beauty, and great strfength, marred 
 by a painful and disfiguring blemish of lameness ; and possessed 
 by rather than possessing an intellectual fire that burned lawlessly 
 where it listed. 
 
 At Harrow, Byron was, as always, inordinately conscious of his 
 
520 English Literature 
 
 title; he was passionately affectionate, sullen, capricious, and, 
 despite his lameness, played for the school against Eton.^ When 
 at Harrow, Byron, who from the age of 8 was often in love, lost 
 his heart to a girl older than himself, Miss Mary Chaworth, who 
 married Mr. Musters in 1805. On this affection, among others, 
 he never ceased to brood and write verses : now protesting that 
 he had been "jilted," and now denying the charge. 
 
 At Cambridge, Byron was most noted for insubordination, and 
 contempt of the dons. His earliest volume of verse, " Hours of 
 Idleness (1807-1808, first privately printed in various forms), 
 which showed some promise, in places, was attacked in the 
 " Edinburgh Review " ; the trifle was noticed because the author 
 had a title, and Jeffrey, in the words of Thackeray's bargee, 
 " liked wopping a lord ". This lord countered heavily, in 
 " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " (1809). 
 
 For a satirist of 21 this is a fine exhibition of hard hitting 
 in every direction. On looking through a number of his works 
 later, Byron pronounced his satire to be the best of them. 
 Byron's feud extended to the whole of his mother's country, and 
 he did not spare Scott, who merely remarked to a friend that the 
 satirist was "a young whelp". Sir Walter was not the man to.be 
 dragged into a quarrel of words, and, in his own phrase, would 
 rather meet an opponent " where the muircock was Bailie ". 
 
 Between 1809 and 18 n Byron voyaged about the borders of 
 the Grecian sea, doing and suffering what adventures and misfor- 
 tunes nobody precisely knows. In 1812 appeared the two first 
 cantoes of his " Childe Harold," in Spenserian verse, and Byron, 
 in his own phrase, " awoke one day to find himself famous ". 
 Here was a poetical and satirical picture of Spain and the Levant, 
 here was living romance with a living young lord for the hero ; a 
 peer of a reckless and defiant character ; as beautiful as a fallen 
 angel. This was more thrilling than lays of the moss-troopers 
 and Scottish kingly adventurers of the remote past, and Scott 
 frankly owned that he "was bet" by the brilliant young rival with 
 
 ' By a strange coincidence the printed score of the match (the manu- 
 script was burned in a fire at Lord's) docks Byron of half his runs, and ap- 
 parently confers them on Mr. Shakespeare ! Byron was a change-bowler. 
 
• The Romantic Movement 521 
 
 whom he was, henceforth, on the best of terms. Sir Walter 
 produced but one more romance in rhyme, while Byron was the 
 most enthusiastic admirer of Sir Walter's novels. Indeed it is to 
 Scott's descriptions, with their serene tolerance, sympathy, and 
 charity, that we must look for the best portrait of Byron, at his 
 best. Of Byron at his worst we have enough in some of his own 
 letters, in a very few of Shelley's, and in the " revelations " pub- 
 lished in an evil hour by Leigh Hunt. 
 
 While a " lion," as the term was then used, in society, a con- 
 queror of hearts, a dandy, and a student of the noble art of 
 self-defence under "Gentleman Jackson," Byron wrote and pub- 
 lished his Oriental tales in imitation of Scott's measures. The 
 history of these poems (1813-1816) is certainly a veiled revelation of 
 Byron's life during these strange years. In 1818, two years after 
 their separation, his wife wrote to another lady that " egotism is 
 the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to 
 kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests 
 are not identified " ; but that he veiled " his poetical disclosures " 
 bv " introducing fictitious incidents, and changes of scene and 
 time ". 
 
 " The Giaour" (18 13) grew, in successive editions (5 June -27 No- 
 vember), from 800 to more than 1300 lines, and the additions con- 
 tained, like " The Bride of Abydos," cryptic references to Byron's 
 own loves and attendant remorses during that period. To these 
 affairs many dark references occur in his Letters and Journal, from 
 August, 18 1 3, to March, or later, in 181 4. Byron always rushed 
 into print at the earliest moment, in the new editions of " The 
 Giaour," " The Bride of Abydos " (written in a week, of passion, 
 November, 1814), "The Corsair," "Lara" (1814), and the separate 
 lyrics published with each of these. It is not very difficult, but it 
 is neither pleasant nor profitable, to disentangle history from fic- 
 tion in these " poetical disclosures ". The " Siege of Corinth," and 
 "Parisina" were written in Byron's year of married life. The 
 famous passage in "The Giaour" — 
 
 He who hath bent him o'er the dead, 
 
 is compared, by Byron's latest Editor, with a passage in Mrs. 
 
52 2 English Literature 
 
 Radcliffe's "Mysteries of Udolpho," and Mrs. Radcliffe appears 
 to have been a common source of Byron's inspiration. Between 
 " He who hath bent " and the poet's return to " He " and to the 
 structure of the sentence, twenty lines interfere ; so hurried is the 
 composition. The magnificent rhetoric of " Clime of the unfor- 
 gotten brave," the waking chant of Greek freedom, was an addi- 
 tion to the second edition. 
 
 None of these poems of 1813-1816 can perhaps now be read 
 with the enthusiasm which greeted their first appearance. Of 
 "The Corsair" 10,000 copies were sold on the first day of publi- 
 cation. The extreme rapidity of the composition, " the fatal fa- 
 cility of the octosyllabic verse," as Byron says, adding that Scott 
 alone " had triumphed over it," and something theatrical in the 
 Giaours and Turks, Zuleikas and Leilas, no longer command in- 
 tense interest. Byron himself saw the objections to the facile 
 measures in narrative poetry ; in blank verse he feared to find " a 
 rough and barren rock," and in "The Corsair" he tried "the 
 good old and now neglected heroic couplet ". He always main- 
 tained that the age of the heroic couplet was the great age of 
 English poetry, that Pope was its chief, and that the new 
 " romantic " movement was a blunder. He was conscious that 
 his strength lay in satire ; but his passionate nature, and the fashion 
 set by Scott, combined to lead him into romantic narrative 
 verse. 
 
 Early in 1815 Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress, at 
 least in expectations, though his motive was not mercenary. He 
 was instantly pursued by creditors ; his temper and behaviour 
 became insufferable ; and, as soon as possible after the birth of a 
 daughter, his wife returned to her own people, and early in 181 6 
 left him for ever. Her whole conduct, and the conduct of all 
 concerned, is difficult to explain on any theory, and Byron, under 
 a heavy cloud, left England for Switzerland and the society, for a 
 few months, of Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont, 
 The party were pursued by curiosity, and scandalous rumour was 
 as active on the Continent as at home. 
 
 The play of " Manfred," in which the mysterious hero, in his 
 moods of romantic remorse about nobody knows what, courts 
 
The Romantic Movement 523 
 
 peril among Alpine peaks, tempests, and glaciers, was supposed to 
 represent the passions and the pursuits of the noble poet. 
 
 Goethe was much interested in " Manfred " ; his own "Faust," 
 partly translated to Byron by Shelley or Monk Lewis, was certainly 
 one of the elements in the making of the poem. 
 
 Byron fed the public curiosity about himself and his wife and 
 sister by various pieces of verse, including the admired " Dream,'' 
 in which he displayed his moods repentant, or angry, but always 
 annoying to the persons at whom he wrote. The third canto of 
 " Childe Harold," written in Switzerland, was full of personal " dis- 
 closures," and contained the familiar stanzas on the Duchess of 
 Richmond's ball on the eve of Quatre Bras. There are curious 
 traces of Wordsworthian influence, received through Shelley, in 
 this canto. Byron proceeded to Venice, where he lived an un- 
 wholesome life for several years ; finishing " Childe Harold " after' 
 a trip to Rome : in this part he introduced descriptions of many 
 works of ancient art, and expressed his contempt for its critics. 
 His ecstasies over the Venus de Medici were in accordance with 
 the taste of a period that knew not the Greek a rt of the age of 
 Pheidias, till the "Elgin marbles," reft (to Byron's natural and 
 laudable indignation), from the Parthenon, had been studied. 
 The Dying Gladiator was the motive of one of the most admired 
 passages of the fourth canto of " Childe Harold ". 
 
 The spirited "Mazeppa"; the lively "Beppo" (the verse 
 fashioned on an Italian model), the dramas of " Marino Faliero," 
 "The Two Foscari," "Cain" (dedicated to Scott), "Heaven and 
 Earth" (much admired by Goethe), and the beginnings of " Don 
 Juan," with, later, the continuation of " Don Juan," and " The 
 Island " and several minor things, proved the astonishing energy 
 of Byron, while living at Venice, Ravenna, Genoa, and elsewhere. 
 " The Vision of Judgment," an attack on S.outhey through his 
 poem on the death of George III., and " Don Juan," show the 
 high-water mark of his powers as a satirist. Always ready at free- 
 dom's call, Byron went to inspire and direct the Greek war of 
 national independence, and, after struggling to reconcile the feuds 
 and jealousies of the patriots, died of fever, malaria , and the re- 
 sults of the climate, at Missolonghi, on 19 April, 1824. 
 
524 English Literature 
 
 The question as to whether Byron was a great poet, or merely 
 a man of extraordinary mental energy, wit, and rhetorical force, 
 expressing himself in verse, must be decided by the taste of the 
 reader. No discoverable rule seems to guide the verdicts of 
 critics. The resonance of Byron's name, due in great part to his 
 title, his beauty, his mystery, his love affairs, to " the pageant of 
 his bleeding heart,'' and to his fiery attacks on convention, still 
 echoes on the Continent. Byron's reputation abroad (especially 
 among those who have not read much of him, and of Shakespeare 
 have read little or nothing), is perhaps the highest that is accorded 
 of any English poet. At home, if he " bet " Scott, it was rather 
 in popularity than in performance. While Wordsworth, Keats, 
 Shelley, and Coleridge were neglected (though Wordsworth from 
 the first had a small but constantly growing flock of devotees), 
 Byron, by " Don Juan," and by the romance of his death, re- 
 covered a vogue that had been waning, till a new generation 
 aro^e ; and the contemporaries of Tennyson's undergraduate time 
 declared, like Thackeray, that Byron " was never sincere ". 
 
 It is impossible to conjecture what the reaction to the poetry 
 of Byron will be in each reader's case. He was revolutionary ; 
 Matthew Arnold was not ; but it is the placid Arnold who hails 
 Byron as "the greatest force" in the English literature of the 
 nineteenth century ; and it is the revolutionary Swinburne whose 
 copious vocabulary is over-tasked in the effort to find epithets of 
 disdain and disgust. The intellectual energy of Byron is like a 
 meteoric force of Nature, that is undeniable, whether we admire 
 his poetry, or think it but rhetoric carried to an unexampled 
 pitch in verse. It is for future generations and not for the or- 
 dinary critic to pronounce a verdict on so much humour, wit, and 
 capricious genius. There is at this hour no complete and critical 
 life of the poet : many letters and other documents remain un- 
 published. But if ever a biography, critical and complete, is 
 produced, the discredit thrown on English hypocrisy because of 
 English treatment of the poet will probably be seen to be based 
 on ignorance and sentiment. Byron was, undeniably, dowered 
 with " the scorn of scorn " : it was his humour to mock at what 
 was best in his own impulses and in the nature of man ; and it is 
 
The Romantic Movement 525 
 
 probable that his excellencies were sincere while his mockery was 
 an affectation ; the result of inherited qualities, and of the amari 
 aliquid always mixed with the cup whereof he had to drink. He 
 was, unquestionably, in so far sincere, that his poetry was the re- 
 flection of his character, which never overcame the noble toler- 
 ance of Scott, though, at last, it repelled and disgusted the not 
 intolerant Shelley. His poetry has now to meet the rivalry of 
 contemporaries little heeded in his day, — Shelley, Keats, and 
 Wordsworth, — and of such successors as Tennyson ; as careful as 
 Byron was disdainful of form ; so that new generations are not apt 
 to begin with enthusiasm for the author of " Childe Harold ". 
 
 Keats. 
 
 John Keats, born in London (1795), was the son of a livery- 
 stable keeper. His education was not neglected, though he had no 
 Greek, and in boyhood he could appreciate the magic of Virgil 
 (which does not usually charm boys), and made some progress 
 with a translation. In physique he was powerful, and no mean 
 boxer, despite the inherent weakness of his constitution. He be- 
 came acquainted with Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, who introduced 
 him to some of the old English poets ; Spenser he found out for 
 himself, like Cowley, and revelled in "The Faery Queen," like a 
 •young horse turned loose in a pasture. Another friend of Keats 
 was the witty John Hamilton Reynolds, whose parody of Words- 
 worth's " Peter Bell " was published before the original. Shelley 
 and Keats were acquainted but were never intimate, Shelley ad- 
 vising Keats not to publish " his first blights," and Keats admon- 
 ishing Shelley to write less rapidly and copiously and to "load 
 every rift with ore ". In no long time Keats discovered in Leigh 
 Hunt certain unendearing qualities which never appear to have 
 been noticed by Shelley ; for of Hunt, which is strange, Shelley's 
 good opinion never altered. 
 
 Keats, at first, by imitation, or through inexperience, rivalled 
 the peay-greeny verdurousness of Hunt's urban rusticities, — which 
 was unfortunate; and, as an intimate of Hunt, he was included by 
 the noisy and brutal literary Tories of the Press in their assaults 
 on the literary Radicals of " The Cockney School "- 
 
526 English Literature 
 
 To appreciate Keats, and to understand the manly and reso- 
 lute character which was falsely supposed to be effeminate, it is 
 necessary to read his delightful correspondence. His first small 
 volume of verse {18 17) contains but occasional promise of his 
 greatness; one suffices, the sonnet on first reading Chapman's 
 Homer. 
 
 In " Endymion " (1818) he attempted a long narrative, holding 
 that readers might like to wander here and there on Mount Latmos 
 with him, even if they did not pursue the tale from cover to cover. 
 Shelley declared that Keats seemed to have tried to make him- 
 self unreadable, and, indeed, if we read for the story's sake alone, 
 we are more unfortunate than if we take up " Clarissa Harlowe " 
 with the same purpose. On the other hand the frequent passages 
 of beauty proclaim the author a poet, who has not yet arrived at 
 his later perfection. 
 
 Keats was violently attacked as a Cockney and as an apothe- 
 cary's boy, in " Blackwood's Magazine," and in " The Quarterly 
 Review ". These libels are as base as the assault on Coleridge in 
 the "Edinburgh Review," though not nearly so abominable as 
 what Byron wrote about Keats in private letters now published. 
 The Scots who attacked Keats might have repented had they 
 read his enthusiastically sympathetic appreciations of Burns, in 
 the letters written during his tour north of the Border. 
 
 It was not criticism but the consumption which killed his 
 brother Tom, increased in feverishness by a love affair, that slew 
 John Keats, in Rome (13 February, 182 1), a year after the 
 publication of his third volume, " Lamia," which in brief com- 
 pass contained verse that placed him in the first rank of the 
 poets of England. His character had rapidly advanced in noble 
 seriousness, high ambition, and sympathy with mankind. His 
 best sonnets, as " On Reading Chapman's Homer," are on a level 
 with the greatest by Milton and by Wordsworth. His " Odes to 
 the Nightingale," to " Autumn," " On a Grecian Urn," and others 
 have the classic -beauty of Greek art of the Periclean age, with all 
 the magic of romance, the mysterious charm of words that 
 evoke visions of inefiFable beauty. Romance herself inspires "La 
 Belle Dame Sans Merci ". Keats had divined and made his own all 
 
The Romantic Movement 527 
 
 that is best in the Greek which he could not read, and in the 
 early mediaeval French lyrics which in his day were unpublished. 
 
 In " The Pot of Basil " he exalts beyond itself the genius of 
 Boccaccio, of a time when the classical revival was dawning in 
 Italy, and in " Lamia " tells a story that had fascinated Burton in his 
 "Anatomy of Melancholy ''. The fragment of " Hyperion," again, 
 recalls Greek art as no other modern has succeeded in reviving 
 its majestic simplicity, while the measure of " In a drear-nighted 
 December" preludes to the music of Swinburne's "Garden of 
 Proserpine ". 
 
 In all that is best of Keats we look, as in his own poem, 
 
 through 
 
 magic casements opening on tiie foam 
 Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn. 
 
 English non-dramatic poetry contains no greater example of pure 
 inexplicable inspiration than the genius of Keats : while his char- 
 acter, some ebullitions of poetic youth, and of torturing ill-health 
 apart, excites the strongest affection and admiration. 
 
 Walter Savage Landor. 
 
 Contemporary with all of these great poets, and with Tenny- 
 son and Browning, and the youth of William Morris, the two 
 Rossettis and Swinburne, was Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), 
 who thus, like Nestor, reigned through three generations. He was 
 coeval with, but was not influenced by "the romantic movement," 
 but followed his own path. He was a very copious writer both in 
 prose and verse ; he did not aim at and did not win popularity. 
 
 Landor is said to have prophesied that he would " dine late," 
 but in good company, — that recognition when it came to him, 
 would come from the best judges. The essay on Landor, by 
 Swinburne, places his plays, such as " Count Julian," and his poem 
 in blank verse (" Gebir ") on "topless towers," of panegyric. To 
 smaller, other eyes, those of the ordinary reader, "Gebir" (1798) 
 seems well described as " concentrated and majestic," just as Mr. 
 Wopsle's Hamlet was "concrete 'and massive" But "Gebir" is 
 not, as a narrative, interesting or plausible ; its blank verse is rather 
 
528 English Literature 
 
 frigid, as a rule, and the poem is best remembered for the two 
 lines on the shell held to the ear. 
 
 And it remembers its august abode, 
 And murmurs as the Ocean murmurs there. 
 
 The blank verse is somewhat in the manner of Milton, with far less 
 life and variety. The wrestling match between Gebir's brother, 
 the piping shepherd, and the lovely lady unknown who lands from 
 a boat and challenges the swain, indicated Landor's colossal lack 
 of humour, which, to be sure, is no small part of a noble and 
 haughty poetic nature. If the play, " Count Julian " be academic, 
 if it have found even fewer admirers than "Gebir," Mr. Swin- 
 burne as an admirer was himself a host. The huge body of short 
 verses, in which every reader will find many delightful things, is 
 crowned by "Rose Aylmer," which would be a pearl of great 
 price even in the treasure-house of the Greek Anthology. His 
 lyric verse is always graceful, and occasionally moving. 
 
 Landor left Trinity College, Oxford, under the wrath of his 
 dons. He had only fired a fowling piece out of his windows, at 
 the shuttered windows of a room occupied by a noisy wine-party, 
 and no harm was done. Many persons may remember similar 
 excesses at Oxford which caused no expulsions, but Landor (the 
 Boythorn of " Bleak House ") was extremely explosive, and his 
 dons, like Shelley's, took the first fair opportunity to send him 
 down for a term. He " came to Oxford and his friends no more ". 
 In England his life was more or less turbulent and perturbed : 
 most of his literary work was done in Italy, and the greater part 
 of his abundant prose is written in the form of imaginary conver- 
 sations. In one ("Southey and Landor") he says, "from my 
 earliest days I have avoided society as much as I could decorously, 
 for I received more pleasure in the cultivation and improvement 
 of my own thoughts than in walking up and down among the 
 thoughts of others ". If Landor had remembered Lord Fopping- 
 ton's similar explanation of his own avoidance of books, and pre- 
 ference for "the sprouts of his own wit," Landor might have 
 been less frank ! In this conversation Landor and Southey com- 
 pare Milton and Homer, and it is to be hoped that Southey had 
 
The Romantic Movement 529 
 
 no sympathy with the purblind criticisms which are put into his 
 lips. Landor ends "a rib of Shakespeare would have made a 
 Milton ; the same portion of Milton, all pqels born ever since ". 
 It is certainly in his " Conversations," and in the long series of 
 imaginary letters entitled " Pericles and Aspasia," that the late diners 
 with Landor are most likely to find desirable things — lofty thoughts, 
 impassioned language, and deep meditation. The conversations, 
 naturally, differ in merit ; that between Bothwell and Mary Stuart, 
 after her abduction, is not in anything likely to have been their 
 manner, and has no tragic touch (though no scene could be richer 
 in the elements of tragedy), while in the talk of Jeanne d'Arc and 
 Agnes Sorel two persons were brought together who were not 
 likely to meet, especially at the moment when " many of our 
 wisest and most authoritative churchmen," says Agnes, " believe 
 you in their conscience to act under the instigation of Satan ". 
 When Agnes addresses the Maid as " sweet enthusiast,'' we are 
 far away from the style of 1430 ! In the dialogues of even re- 
 mote historic personages, more than half the mind of Landor is 
 with his own day and its problems and politics ; while he was 
 perhaps the last Englishman who lived with the Roman genius so 
 much that a good deal of his prose and verse is written in Latin. 
 He even wrote a version of "Gebir" in the language of Virgil. 
 He was the friend of, or was admired by, many of the best minds 
 of his long stay on earth, Southey, De Quincey, Browning, and 
 Swinburne. In two sentences Sir Sidney Colvin has put forward 
 the character of much of Landor's work : " He drones. It is a 
 classical, and from the point of view of style an exemplary form of 
 droning, but it is droning still." 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER XXXIII. 
 LATER GEORGIAN NOVELISTS. 
 
 With the death of Sterne it might have been said that the 
 English novel expired for the time, though of course, as Donne 
 admitted in the case of the decease of Miss Drury, " a kind of 
 world" lingered in existence. Indeed, plenty of novels were 
 published and read. But they are forgotten. Experience proves 
 that nobody need waste his time over the tales of Clara Reeve, 
 such as " The Old English Baron " ; and only infinite leisure and 
 curiosity need try to disengage the qualities from the defects of 
 Brooke's " Fool of Quality," while Beckford's " Vathek " is cer- 
 tainly worth notice as the ingenious and in places impressive feat 
 of a millionaire. It is curious that the most poignant detail of 
 the Hall of Eblis, the phantasms of lost souls, wandering each 
 with his hand pressed to his heart, occurs in the mythology of an 
 Australian tribe, the Euahlayi. Research might discover a wilder- 
 ness of forgotten novels, probably quite as good, given the con- 
 ditions of the ages, as the myriads of "masterpieces," which 
 our newspaper critics daily receive with stereotyped formulae of 
 applause. 
 
 Frances Burney. 
 
 When a novelist did appear, a girl gifted with a delight in ob- 
 serving traits of character, and recording them from her early teens 
 in a diary ; when Fanny Burney came, she received such a welcome 
 as warms the heart after all these years. Frances Burney (1752- 
 1840) was born while the Elibank Plot for kidnapping the Royal 
 family in the interests of the King over the water was maturing, 
 and she outlived by eight years the author of " Waverley, or 'Tis 
 Sixty Years Since ". 
 
 S30 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 531 
 
 The daughter of Dr. Burney, a teacher and historian of music, 
 and a friend of the great wits, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, 
 and the rest, Miss Burney, from childhood, was observing man- 
 kind and womankind ; was reading " The Vicar of Wakefield," 
 and Sterne, the novels of the Abbd Prevost and of Marivaux, and 
 apparently of Smollett no less than of the moral Richardson. She 
 was writing, too, in secret ; but at the command of her step- 
 mother, probably when she herself was about i6 or 17, she 
 burned all her works, including a novel on which her first pub- 
 lished romance,' "Evelina" (1778), was based, or rather out 
 of which it was developed. We cannot estimate the merits of 
 those " first blights," as Keats says, but " the little character- 
 monger," as Johnson called her, continued to make her sketches 
 of character in her Journal and in letters to her kind old mentor, 
 " Daddy Crisp," a man much older than her father, who had re- 
 tired from society and the sorrows of the playwright to a hospit- 
 able country house near Epsom. As the favourite and assistant 
 of her musical and historical father, the retiring observant girl 
 lived till, at about the age of 24, she returned to her first 
 love, and, under great difficulties, wrote, and copied in a feigned 
 hand, her " Evelina ". With secrecy enough for a Jacobite con- 
 spiracy the book was conveyed to a bookseller, accepted, and 
 published in i 778. Among her burned works was "The History 
 of Caroline Evelyn," a young woman of moving adventures, whose 
 mother was a vulgar barmaid, married, for the second time, in 
 France, to a Monsieur Duval. As Caroline died of a broken 
 heart, leaving a legitimate daughter, Evelina, Miss Burney told 
 the story of that daughter's fortunes, situated as she was between 
 her well-born English father's kin and her barmaid Frenchified 
 mother, with her grotesque associates. The scheme had great 
 possibilities, of which the author took full advantage ; her chief 
 successes being the members of the City family, the Branghtons, 
 their smart low-bred friend, Mr. Smith, and the naval Captain 
 Mirvan, whose language is discreetly veiled, while his bullying of 
 Madame Duval and other persons is rather more than Smollettian. 
 Evelina, through all the dangers which then beset the fair at 
 Vaaxhall and other resorts of the gay, reaches the haven where 
 
 34* 
 
532 English Literature 
 
 she and Lord Orville would be, and all ends happily, as in a novel 
 all ought to end. There is an extraordinary wealth of characters, 
 Burke thought them too abundant. The novel set literary society 
 on fire with delight and admiration, Dr. Johnson leading the 
 chorus of praise, and Miss Burney was his darling, and was wel- 
 comed by Mrs. Thrale, Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Mrs. Montagu; 
 even Horace Walpole, though he kept his head, applauded. 
 The triumphs of Fanny are recorded in her Diary and Letters, a 
 contribution to history even more delightful than her " Evelina ". 
 All the good fortunes that Miss Austen missed, or shunned, fell to 
 Miss Burney, who well deserved them. Her later novel, 
 "Cecilia " (1782) is not really inferior to " Evelba," but it is not 
 " the first sprightly runnings ". After her years as a tiring woman 
 of Queen Charlotte (whereof the record in her Diary is at least on 
 a level with her novels), her " Camilla " appeared, was subscribed 
 for by all the world and Miss Austen, and was censured by John 
 Thorpe in "Northanger Abbey". This immortal crown is hardly 
 deserved by " Camilla ". The story of Miss Burney's marriage to 
 that amiable emigri, the Comte d'Arblay, is told in Macaulay's 
 famous essay, which, again, is toned down and corrected by Mr. 
 Austin Dobson (" Fanny Burney " in " English Men of Letters "). 
 But the novels themselves, and the Diary, remain monuments, 
 and not dull but delightful monuments, of social and personal 
 history. We need not dwell on that lucrative failure, "The 
 Wanderer" (18 14). Miss Burney had opened the way, which 
 was later to be trodden by the lighter feet of a far greater genius, 
 whom some men have named with Shakespeare — Jane Austen. 
 
 Mrs. Radcliffe. 
 It is impossible to restore a faded popularity, and in a gener- 
 ation which sees at least two dozen new novels bloom every week, 
 the desire to revive the taste for Mrs. Radcliffe's romances is a 
 " vain hope and vision vain ". None the less, Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann 
 Ward, born in the birth year of Horace Walpole's "Castle of 
 Otranto," 1764, and married to a Mr. Radcliffe in 1787), was the 
 grandmother, as Horace Walpole was the great-grandfather, of the 
 Romantic school of fiction. Her first tale, " The Castles of Athlin 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 533 
 
 and Dunbayne " (i 789) is but a pioneer work : Mrs. Radcliffe knew 
 nothing of the castles and manners of the Mackays, Sinclairs, and 
 Gunns "in the dark ages". In 1790, with "The Sicilian 
 Romance," Mrs. Radcliffe " found herself," and opened the way 
 for all the terrors of Mr. Rochester's house in " Jane Eyre ". 
 The remarkable phenomena of the haunted Sicilian castle are not 
 supernormal, but, till you discover that they are caused by the 
 concealed wife of the proprietor (Ferdinand, fifth Marquis of 
 Mazzini), they strike terror ; later they move pity. " Northanger 
 Abbey " is the inspired parody of Mrs. Radcliffe's effects in this 
 work, which also contains the germ of a thrilling scene in R. L. 
 Stevenson's "Kidnapped". In "The Romance of the Forest " 
 (1791) Mrs. Radcliffe struck the keynote of the novels about the 
 Valois Court, which we owe to her spiritual descendants, Alexandre 
 Dumas and Mr. Stanley Weyman. To " local colour " and the 
 historical "atmosphere," Mrs. Radcliffe was indifferent; but she 
 always had a story to tell, a story new and startling; and she 
 managed her chiaroscuro with the touch of genius. She awak- 
 ened curiosity, she struck terror; she skilfully interwove the 
 many threads of her plots ; she was far from being destitute of 
 humour; and her Italian landscapes are designed after Poussin 
 and Salvator Rosa. "Every reader,". says Scott, "felt her force, 
 from the sage in his study to the family group in middle life." 
 Her " Mysteries of Udolpho " is hardly worthy of its reputation. 
 But in " The Italian " she anticipates the manner of Hawthorne ; 
 her wicked Monk, Schedoni, is (as Scott himself saw and said), the 
 original of Byron's Giaour, and his other darkling lurid heroes ; 
 and her comic valet, Paolo, who loyally follows his master into the 
 dungeon of the Inquisition, is the model of Sam Weller, in the 
 Fleet Prison, with Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Radcliffe's genius is not 
 appreciated merely because she is not read. The student who 
 gives her a fair chance is carried away by the spell of this "great 
 enchantress"; and "The Italian" is by far the best romantic 
 novel that ever was written before Scott. He applauded her with 
 his wonted generosity, but objected to her habit of explaining 
 away her supernormal incidents. But this was done in homage to 
 the stupid " common sense " of her age. After her masterpiece 
 
534 English Literature 
 
 "The Italian," Mrs. Radcliffe deserted fiction; wrote "The 
 Female Advocate " in defence of " Woman's Rights," and suffered 
 from unhappy domestic circumstances for which she was in no 
 way responsible. She died in 1823. 
 
 Maria Edgeworth. 
 
 A more fortunate and prosperous pioneer than Mrs. Radcliffe 
 in the way of novel-writing was Maria Edgeworth. Born on 
 I January, 1767, at Black Bourton, not far from Oxford, Miss 
 Edgeworth was the daughter of Richard Edgeworth, an Irish 
 landlord and British moralist. In the words of " Hudibras" he 
 
 Married his punctual dose of wives 
 
 to the number of four, and had four families. They were wonder- 
 fully harmonious, and as Maria Edgeworth was of the first family, 
 and only some twenty-two years younger than her father, she was 
 the constant companion of an energetic and intelligent man, 
 reckoned one of the leading bores of his age, and tinctured with 
 the ideas of his friend, the humourless Mr. Thomas Day, author 
 of " Sandford and Merton "- Miss Edgeworth saw much of Irish 
 life, fashionable and rustic, at Edgeworthstown, and very early 
 began to write under the direction of her father, whose Muse was 
 the didactic. She wrote the stories in " The Parents' Assistant " 
 for her own little brothers and sisters, to whom, as to children 
 generally, she was devoted. The self-consciously virtuous Frank 
 is her father, idealized (we cannot believe that she consciously 
 satirized him), and the ever-delightful Rosamond is herself. 
 Modem children may rage against the cruelty of the mother of 
 Rosamond, in the tale of " The Purple Jar," but probably chil- 
 dren of an earlier date were too much interested in Rosamond and 
 the jar to grieve over the heroine's lack of shoes. " Lazy Law- 
 rence," "Simple Susan," "Waste Not, Want Not," and the rest, 
 are all dear to persons who read them at the right age, and draw 
 from the last-named tale an undying love of long, sound pieces of 
 string, saved from parcels. 
 
 It seems to be a matter of ascertained fact that Mr. Edge- 
 worth too often had his oar in the paper boats of his daughter's 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 535 
 
 novels, that he altered, and transposed, and suggested, and in- 
 . serted moral sentiments ; and could not keep the maxims of Mr. 
 Thomas Day out of the memorial. Miss Edgeworth had abun- 
 dance of humour, and would not have made Sir James Brook 
 lecture to Lord Colambie, a total stranger, " on all ancient and 
 modern authors on Ireland from Spenser " (why not from Giraldus 
 Cambrensis ?) " to Young and Beaufort ". In " Castle Rackrent " 
 (1800) Mr. Edgeworth had no hand, and it is reckoned the best 
 of Miss Edgeworth's books on Ireland. It is not a novel : Thady, 
 an ancient peasant, merely tells the tale of four generations of 
 O'Shaughneseys, squires who much resembled the Osbaldistone 
 family as described by Diana Vernon. All were greedy and 
 reckless oppressors of their devoted tenantry, but one was more 
 of a drunkard, another more of a litigant, another more of a cruel 
 debauchee, and the last more of a good-natured fool, as innocent of 
 worldly matters as I^eigh Hunt (but not so much to his own ad- 
 vantage), than the rest. Their wives are worthy of them. Poor 
 Thady maintains his " great respect for the family " throughout, 
 and there is a humorous pathos in his topsy-turvy code of ethics, 
 constructed out of insanely depraved Irish moral conventions of 
 the period. The fairy belief, and the Banshee, peep out in the 
 notes : Miss Edgeworth was the precise reverse of Mrs. Radcliffe 
 in the matter of romance. The book at once became popular, 
 with " Belinda," a very readable story of London society, and 
 "The Absentee," in which the Irish characters are much better 
 when in their own green isle than when abroad. The horrors of 
 an estate ruled by a corrupt and cruel agent are barely credible, 
 and the hero is a wooden if generous puppet, while Lady Col- 
 brony, trying to be more English than the English, in London, is 
 not really so amusing as similar characters in Thackeray. Scott, 
 with his usual generosity, publicly asserted more than once that 
 Miss Edgeworth's example led him to attempt the delineation of 
 his own country-folks ; and perhaps the happiest of weeks at Ab- 
 botsford was spent during Miss Edgeworth's visit. In Paris, 
 Edinburgh, and London she was a licness, and enjoyed all the 
 pleasant rewards of friendship and fame which fortune denied to 
 Miss Austen. Her later novels, "Ormonde," " Harrington," and 
 
536 English Literature 
 
 "Helen,"' were duly appreciated; in May, r849, she ended a 
 long, happy, and beneficent life. 1 
 
 Charles Brockden Brown. 
 
 Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) is commonly regarded 
 as the first American novelist. He came at an unfortunate moment, 
 for in the years of his activity as a romancer (1797-1801) English 
 fiction was at a low ebb, and, uninfluenced by Fielding and Sterne, 
 and neglectful of Fanny Burney, he followed Godwin (in " Caleb 
 Williams "), and adopted the mysterious effects of Mrs. Radcliffe. 
 In his "Wieland," the terrific and fatal agency which brings down 
 fate, is akin to that which Monsieur de Saint Luc used to frighten 
 Henri HI., and which Chicot exposed, in Dumas's novel. In 
 " Arthur Mervyn," Brown wrote with much vigour a realistic de- 
 scription of a yellow fever hospital. His friendly critics place him 
 above Mrs. Radcliffe in his mastery of the truly horrid; but 
 though his books were republished in England, they do not ap- 
 pear in the list of Miss Catherine Morland in " Northanger 
 Abbey". If Brown were superior to the great enchantress, at 
 least he followed the model which she had created, without the 
 humour which affords relief in "The Italian ". He did not deal 
 in Italian castles and abbeys of the Valois period, but cast his 
 romances in his native Philadelphia. 
 
 Jane Austen. 
 
 Scott's first novel was finished and published in 1814. His 
 friend, Morritt of Rokeby, said that before "Waverley" appeared, 
 novels were read only by ladies' maids and seamstresses. Yet, 
 eighteen or nineteen years before the birth of "Waverley," novels 
 as great in their own style as Scott's, and as imperishable, had 
 been written by a girl of 21, whose first published works of fiction 
 came earlier than "Waverley" into the world. Before r797, Jane 
 Austen (born 1775) had written " Northanger Abbey " ; before the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century " Pride and Prejudice " and 
 " Sense and Sensibility," were completed by her. But though a 
 speculative publisher bought "Northanger Abbey "in 1797, he 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 537 
 
 never published it, and "Sense and Sensibility" (181 1) with 
 " Pride and Prejudice " (1813), lay long neglected, like the poems 
 of Theocritus in their dark chest, before they were given to the 
 world. They were not received, like Miss Burney's " Evelina," 
 with triumphant acclaims ; the author was not surrounded and 
 flattered by the wits, as was Miss Burney. Indeed Jane Austen, 
 in her lifetime, was never made a lioness. Slow and all but 
 silent approval of her genius advanced by degrees and deepened 
 into the diapason of her ever-widening renown. 
 
 She was the daughter of a country clergyman, the Rector of 
 Steventon in Hampshire, much of her later life (she died at 42, 
 in 1817) was passed at the hamlet of Chawton near Win- 
 chester. Bath was her metropolis ; she describes its pleasure and 
 society with inimitable charm and humour in " Northanger Abbey," 
 and "Persuasion," published after her death, in i8r8. She lived 
 in the heart of a kind and happy family, among her nephews and 
 nieces, brothers and sisters, with such sqjiires, clerics, doctors, 
 solicitors, sportsmen, naval officers, and old maids as clustered 
 round or visited Steventon and Chawton. She watched them 
 with a smiling intense observation ; she winced from their mind- 
 less gregariousness ; they are never out of their neighbours' 
 houses. But she was only a very little cruel, even to the most 
 brainless of baronets, or the stupidest of mothers, or the least 
 well-bred of jolly good-humoured matrons, or the noisiest of 
 children. She does show the trifling defects of spoiled children, 
 but she was the kindest and best-beloved of aunts. Meanness 
 she does brand in the really awful characters of John Dashwood 
 and his wife ; stupid pride in Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Cather- 
 ine de Bourgh (who receives her deserts from Miss Elizabeth 
 Bennet), and clerical sycophancy in the immortal Mr. Collins. 
 But Mr. Collins is so amusing that we can no more be angry with 
 him than with Mr. Pecksniff. Mr. Woodhouse, in " Emma," is 
 next door to an idiot, and in actual life he would have been in- 
 sufferable, except to the good and gentle. But the excellence of 
 his heart, and the sweetness of his manners, cause him to be sur- 
 rounded by patient and silent affection from all who know him ; 
 and not less good and fortunate is the most voluble of chatter- 
 
53^ English Literature 
 
 Doxes, Miss Bates. Only for a single moment is Emma, the 
 heroine, unable to hold her peace when Miss Bates is too intol- 
 erable ; and this youthful excess is bitterly repented by the 
 beautiful sinner. Emma was extremely young when she was a 
 snob. Miss Austen did not draw an angel in Emma, but a good, 
 human girl. We cannot really call Miss Austen severe, though 
 we cannot but see how much she must have suffered among 
 people so dull that a lady's recollection of the name of her dead 
 son's naval Captain is described as " one of those extraordinary 
 bursts of mind that sometimes do happen "- 
 
 Less than twenty years divided Miss Burney's "Evelina" 
 (1778) from the composition of " Northanger Abbey" and 
 '' Pride and Prejudice ". These years had brought an astonishing 
 change. The Smollettian element in Miss Burney's books and 
 the horse-play have vanished ; vanished has that amazing style 
 which the fair Fanny evolved. The manners of naval officers 
 have passed from the brutal to the courtly. Miss Burney is 
 antiquated, she is archaic, she belongs to another world than ours, 
 while Miss Austen is perennially fresh, and sparkling with wit ; 
 she recaptures, without imitation, the humour and the ease of 
 Addison. Unlike Scott, she is almost never stilted : her people, 
 as a rule, talk like men and women of this world, not like Helen 
 Macgregor. " Northanger Abbey," which is in part meant as a 
 quiet but delightful mockery of Mrs. Radcliffe's haunted abbeys, 
 secret panels, and mysterious sounds, was written but six years 
 after " The Sicilian Romance " sent a shudder through its myriad 
 readers ; and is almost of the year of " The Mysteries of Udolpho ". 
 The gir) of the Steventon rectory was already mocking "The 
 Great Enchantress," and the smile outlives the shriek. 
 
 Miss Austen shunned the romantic — like Wordsworth she might 
 have said " the moving incident is not my trade," but her inci- 
 dents move us (for example, Louisa Musgrove's fall off the cob at 
 Lyme Regis) ; and the mystery of Jane Fairfax's piano in 
 " Emma," is as exciting as the black curtain behind which Ca- 
 therine Morland expected to discover the skeleton of Laurentina. 
 John Thorpe said of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels (which he had not 
 read), " there is some fun and nature in them " (and there is plenty 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 539 
 
 of fun), Miss Austen found in them much more of fun than of 
 nature. 
 
 It is said that she is afraid of the passions, but what can be more 
 passionate than the constancy of Anne Elliot, or more ardent than 
 the first love of Marianne Dashwood ? All the family of the 
 Bennets are charming or diverting in their various ways ; the 
 humorous father, the foolish mother, the witty and spirited Eliza- 
 beth, the gentle, beautiful Jane, the pedantic Mary, the colourless 
 Kitty, and Lydia who might have shone in a comedy by Vanbrugh. 
 It is rather hard to believe that Elizabeth could accept Darcy 
 after he, like the Master of Ravenswood, had told his lady that 
 her father was not a gentleman. But then Elizabeth came to see 
 Darcy's house and place in Derbyshire ! 
 
 If one novel is not quite so good as the rest, it is " Mansfield 
 Park " ; but to name it recalls Mrs. Norris, and the return of the 
 heavy father as his progeny are rehearsing a dubious play from the 
 German ; and one has a tenderness for the good little heroine, 
 and for her rather squalid kinsfolk, and for both of the naughty 
 Crawfords. " Mansfield Park " is a masterpiece like the rest. 
 Perhaps Miss Austen's heroes are not so good as her heroines ; but 
 Henry Crawford and Frank Churchill, in " Emma " prove that her 
 young men are not mere lay figures. 
 
 She never went outside of the life she knew to draw wicked 
 dukes and the virtuous poor ; she had no villains, no rebels ; if 
 she read Crabbe's lurid and realistic studies of poverty and crime, 
 she did not imitate them in prose. Her characters are perfectly 
 indiiiferent to public affairs, throughout the struggle with Napoleon ; 
 except when the authoress cannot conceal her passionate en- 
 thusiasm for the men who fought under Nelson and Collingwood. 
 But the expression is not enthusiastic in terms. , 
 
 Miss Austen's art has the exquisite balance and limit of 
 Greek art in the best period. She knew what she could do, she 
 did it to perfection ; and, naturally, the humourless Charlotte Bronte 
 thought her tame and dull. But from Scott himself to Macaulay 
 and Archbishop Whately, nay, from the Prince Regent (George 
 IV., who had a set of her novels in each of his houses), the best 
 judges recognized the greatness of one of the six greatest English 
 
540 English Literature 
 
 writers of fiction, and, a century after the publication of " Pride 
 and Prejudice," she is a, more popular favourite by far than in her 
 own brief day. To judge by a miniature of Miss Austen, done 
 when she was of the age when Catherine Morland began to give 
 up playing cricket and baseball, her face and figure were as bright 
 and charming as her genius. Like Milton's Eve, Miss Austen 
 is " fairest of her daughters " in art, though among them are Mrs. 
 Gaskell and Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie). 
 
 Walter Scott. 
 T/ie Novelist. 
 
 When Scott, in 1814, sought for some fly-hooks in a bureau, 
 and found the lost first chapter of "Waverley,'' a novel begun 
 in 1805, prose fiction seemed to be under general contempt, 
 was only fit for milliners, said his friend Morritt of " Rokeby ". 
 Yet, in fact, the good novel was not left without a witness. Miss 
 Edgeworth's tales of Irish life and manners excited, said Scott, his 
 own wish to write of his own people, and Miss Edgeworth's " Castle 
 Rackrent" is of 1800. Jane Austen had written "Nortbanger 
 Abbey" in 1797; it remained unpublished, but "Sense and 
 Sensibility " is of 181 1, " Pride and Prejudice " of 1813 ; thus both 
 were prior to "Waverley"- But neither, great as are their merits, 
 attracted attention then, as Miss Burney's novels had done from 
 the first ; and probably the contempt of novels was one of the 
 various causes, the chief being that " it was his humour," which 
 made Scott conceal his authorship of his prose romances. 
 
 " Waverley '' — in the first and long-lost chapters — is reckoned 
 tame ; but th^ hero's youth in peaceful rural England was deliber- 
 ately designed as a quiet approach to his richly varied adventures 
 under the White Cockade. From the moment when Waverley 
 enters the village, so strange to English eyes, and the still stranger 
 castle, of TuUyveolan, he passes into the land of romance ; all 
 was, to English readers, as novel and unexpected as if Edward had 
 joined a tribe of Central Africa. The ancient feudal manners. 
 Lowland or Highland ; the learned, eccentric, brave old baron ; 
 the half idiot jester, Davy Gellatley ; the Bailie, Balmawhapple ; 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 541 
 
 the clansmen, the Celtic chief, Fergus Maclvor ; the survivor o< the 
 Remnant, gifted GilfiUan, were humorous and masterly creations, 
 while the gallant figure of the doomed Prince and his wonderful 
 adventure, narrated with sympathy, completed the charm. The 
 world was taken by storm, believed in Flora Maclvor, and wept 
 afresh over the shambles of Carlisle. 
 
 Written in six weeks, the romance of " Guy Mannering " 
 (181 5), with its pell-mell of characters from the Colonel (who 
 was thought like Scott), and his lively dark-eyed daughter Julia, 
 (certainly like Mrs. Scott), to Pleydel, Meg Merrilies, Glossin, the 
 bankrupt Bertram laird, to Dominie Sampson, and Dandie Din- 
 mont with his dogs, was only less popular from the first. " The 
 Antiquary" (1816) added a romance of dark complexion to a 
 study of modern manners of the preceding decade ; while " Old 
 Mortality," at the end of the year, did for 1679 and the Coven- 
 anters, with even greater skill, what " Waverley " had done for 
 the clans and the Forty-five. " Old Mortality " is probably the 
 greatest of Scott's historical novels. The friends of the persecuted 
 Remnant exclaimed against historical unfairness, but the friends 
 of the " Indulged " of 1679, and of Claverhouse, had as good a 
 right to pick a quarrel. 
 
 " The Black Dwarf " was condemned by Blackwood the 
 publisher, and posterity has not differed from his verdict. The 
 story had been written on a larger scale, but was truncated, said 
 Scott, to the proportions of the dwarf. In 181 7 "Rob Roy" 
 gave us the best of all Scott's heroines, Diana Vernon, and the 
 deathless Andrew Fairservice, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, and the 
 Dougal creature, with Rob himself, a tower of strength ; but 
 Helen, his wife, is somewhat melodramatic (as probably she 
 actually was) and the plot, with its financial embroilment, is " only 
 good for bringing in fine things " 
 
 It is difficult to decide between the rival excellences of " The 
 Heart of Midlothian" (18 18) (with another heroine, Jeanie 
 Deans, as good and original in her way as Diana Vernon) and of 
 " Old Mortality ". We are apt to prefer the novel which we read 
 last. Written " in torments," and totally forgotten by Scott after 
 he had composed it, " The Bride of Lammermoor " has won tears 
 
542 English Literature 
 
 for generations, though the doomed Master is something of a lay 
 figure, and the pathos of the old Steward is better than his humour, 
 which grows mechanical. The darkening of the omens towards 
 the close is matched only in the " Odyssey " and " Njal's Saga " ; 
 for, though the novel is not in the first rank, it contains much 
 of the author's best, and could have been written by no other 
 mortal. With "The Bride "came the brief "Legend of Mon- 
 trose,'' in which the great Marquess is half-forgotten, for Dugald 
 Dalgetty, that matchless creation, runs away with Scott's fancy, 
 happily carrying him to meet the rival Marquess of Argyll. Con- 
 fessedly Scott could adhere to no predetermined plan (he tried 
 to do so, again and again, but was conscious of failure) ; his char- 
 acters were alive and masterful, and led him where they would, but 
 he had never contemplated a romance in a theme above romance, 
 the Action and Passion of Montrose. 
 
 Leaving Scotland — lest the field should be overworked — for 
 England and the Middle Ages, Scott, in 1819, won the hearts of 
 most boys and many men, by " Ivanhoe," the crusader who returns 
 disguised, like de Wilton in " Marmion " It is to be believed that 
 Scott disliked Rowena at least as much as Thackeray did, and 
 was no less in love than he with Rebecca. Merely to think of 
 the characters is a pleasure — Gurth, Wamba, Locksley, de Bracy, 
 Friar Tuck, Isaac, the Abbot, while, if Urfried is extremely inco- 
 herent in her pagan creed, the Templar is Byronic enough for 
 the taste of that day; Scott, in fact, could draw a dark Byronic 
 dare-devil before Byron came into the field. " The Monastery " 
 (1820) with the White Lady of Avenel, and the Euphuist Knight, 
 was not well received, but Sir Wal ter boldly carried on the tale in 
 an infinitely better sequel, "The Abbot," with all the charm and 
 horror of Mary Stuart at Loch Leven, with a hero full of spirit, 
 and a heroine worthy of him in Catherine Seyton. 
 
 In " Kenilworth " (182 1), a most audaciously anachronistic 
 tale, Scott treated Queen Elizabeth with a chivalry amazing in a 
 Scot ; his fated heroine, Amy Robsart, has unusual spirit and 
 womanliness, and his villain, Varney, is his lago, while Michael 
 Lambourne is a perfect sketch of the Elizabethan adventurer of 
 the baser sort. 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 543 
 
 In "The Pirate" (182 1) Scott chose the scene of his tour in 
 the Orkney Islands (1814), and his hero is, like George Staunton 
 in " The Heart of Midlothian,'' rather a Byronic being. Minna 
 and Brenda, the two fair sisters, were immensely admired, but 
 Noma of the Fitful Head is much inferior to Madge Wildfire and 
 Meg Merrilies as a seeress and a romantically eccentric being ; 
 while Claude Halcro and Triptolemus Yellowley are the least en- 
 tertaining of " Scott's bores ". 
 
 "The Fortunes of Nigel" (1822) is enriched with all the 
 wealth of Scott's knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays 
 and pamphlets, and the unsatisfactory hero, much the least sym- 
 pathetic of Scott's jeunes premiers, is redeemed by the delightful 
 humours of gentle King Jamie, by the two grim Trapbois, father and 
 daughter, by the flower of Scottish serving-men, Richie Moniplies, 
 and by all the life of the Court, of the Ordinary, and of Alsatia. 
 
 . In " Peveril of the Peak" (1823) Scott is less fortunate in his 
 treatment of English society during the Popish Plot, a theme 
 which seemed " made to his hand ". His Charles II. is the least 
 excellent of his kings, and the plot is more than commonly 
 rambling, while Fenella is the feeblest of his romantic and 
 eccentric puppets. " Quentin Durward," on the other hand, with 
 the adventures of a gallant but canny Scot at the perilous Court 
 of Louis XL, is perhaps the best constructed of all his novels. 
 In drawing Louis XL the author excels himself; we have not too 
 much of Leslie le Balafrk, the Dugald Dalgetty of the age ; the ad- 
 ventures are many and exciting, and the book was welcomed eagerly 
 in France, though at first it was scarcely appreciated at home. 
 
 " St. Ronan's Well " was a tale of contemporary manners, but 
 Scott was not skilled in describing the humours of a Tweedside 
 watering-place, interwoven as they are with a dark domestic 
 tragedy, spoiled by an incongruous conclusion which was forced 
 on the author by the prudery of James Ballantyne. In " Red- 
 gauntlet," Scott recovered himself: the manners and characters 
 are a little earlier than those of his own boyhood, and mingled 
 with the adventures of the hero on the Border is the last tragic 
 appearance of that Prince who, twenty years earlier, had shaken 
 the three kingdoms with the claymores of the clans. 
 
544 English Literature 
 
 The brief " Wandering Willie's Tale," in " Redgauntlet," is Sir 
 Walter's masterpiece of humour and terror : this story he worked 
 on very carefully, and his care was rewarded. The Edinburgh 
 lawyers, the eccentrics, Nanty Ewart, and the heroine of the 
 Green Mantle, are worthy of their places in this great romance, 
 made the more moving by many touches of autobiography. 
 
 "The Talisman" (1825) is a brilliant tale of Coeur de t-ion 
 and Saladin ; " The Betrothed " is less appreciated than it ought 
 to be. In 1825-1826 came the ruin of Scott, entailed by that of 
 his publisher. Constable. How he bore it, how he laboured and 
 died to redeem it, by long heavy task work at " The Life of Na- 
 poleon," — by " Woodstock," in which the characters of Cromwell 
 and of Charles II. in youth, are among his best creations ; by 
 "The Fair Maid of Perth," with the great character of the timid 
 chief, and the finale of the Clan Battle of Perth ; by "The Chron- 
 icles of the Canongate,'' and by his latest works, written with a 
 half-palsied hand, composed by a brain in ruin, yet again and again 
 inspired, — is a familiar story. The eyes are dimmed as these 
 words are penned ; so potent is the spell of that rich, kind genius, 
 of that noble character, over the hearts of those who love and 
 honour the great and good Sir Walter. 
 
 He created the historical novel ; he opened the way in which 
 no man or woman has followed him with such genius as his : we 
 may say this even while we remember "Esmond" and "The 
 Virginians''; "Kidnapped," "Catriona" and "The Master of 
 Ballantrae"; "Les Trois Mousquetaires " and "La Dame de 
 Monsoreau ". 
 
 After a voyage to Italy, Sir Walter returned to Abbotsford, 
 where he died in his own house with the murmur of Tweed in 
 his ears as he passed away (September, 1832). " I say," wrote 
 Byron emphatically, " that Walter Scott is as nearly a thoroughly 
 good man as a man can be, because I know it by experience to 
 be the case." 
 
 James Fenimore Cooper. 
 
 James Fenimore Cooper (1789-185 1), bearing a name dear to 
 grateful boyhood, is even now, with Hawthorne — an infinitely 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 545 
 
 greater man — the American novelist best known on the Continent 
 of Europe. In France as in England, he was the delight of the 
 youth of men of letters ; among the characters of fiction concern- 
 ing whom Thackeray says Amo he places Leather Stocking with 
 Dugald Dalgetty. Many of us, no doubt, at about the age of 10, 
 have made stone heads for our arrows, like the noble neolithic 
 Indian braves of Cooper, and have found (like Scottish savages, 
 when flint was scarce) that slate served our purpose. 
 
 Cooper was born in New Jersey, and passed his childhood on 
 his father's new settlement at Otsego Lake. Here were real deer 
 and real Red Indians, and here Cooper's ply was taken. He was 
 sent down from Yale, as inappreciative of the studious habits of 
 the Pale Faces. He went to sea, thus obtaining another string to 
 his bow as a novelist ; next saw service in the Navy, by lake and 
 sea ; and, after a subsequent life of leisure, was stimulated by a 
 bad English novel to vow that he could write a better, — his tale of 
 English life, " Precaution,'' has not had the vogue of " Per- 
 suasion ". Cooper turned to American topics in " The Spy," a 
 story of the War of Independence ; Scott's example may have 
 led him to choose a recent historical topic ; his knowledge of the 
 forests and his remarkable hero, Harvey Birch, did the rest, and 
 his success was assured ; his work was welcomed both in France 
 and England. Then came "The Pioneers," the first in com- 
 position of the five tales where Leather-Stocking, with his peculiar 
 and silent laugh, leads us through forests, haunted by the Mingo 
 and other fearful wild fowl. Then he turned to the sea, to Paul 
 Jones, that renegade of Galloway, and Long Tom Coffin ; this was 
 the first of various novels of the Navy which are to American boys 
 what Marryat's were and ought to be to our own. "The Last of 
 the Mohicans," of 1826, marks the culmination of Cooper's talent, 
 and Chingachgook, the Great Serpent, and Uncas, if not the pale- 
 face heroine, are imperishable in the memory. Cooper's visit to 
 Europe led him into writings which rather exacerbated the Ameri- 
 can Eagle and the British Lion. Most of his very numerous later 
 works are more or less polemical. He was no psychologue, his 
 heroines are forlorn of admirers ; in style he had nothing to touch 
 R. L. Stevenson ; he is " Cooper of the wood and wave ". 
 
 35 
 
546 English Literature 
 
 Washington Irving. 
 
 The true beginner of accomplished Hterature in America was 
 Washington Irving, born in New York, 3 April, 1783 ; his father 
 was of the old Border family of the name, his mother, the daughter 
 of an English clergyman. In his twenty-first year he visited 
 Europe ; on his return, with friends named Paulding, wrote light 
 essays in a serial named "Salmagundi," and, later, a burlesque 
 " History of New York," with the humours of " Diedrich Knicker- 
 bocker," a book in which Scott recognized gleams of Sterne and 
 Swift. After the war ending in 181 5, when he was under canvas, 
 if not under fire much, he revisited England, and stayed with 
 Scott at Abbotsford, of which he has left a pleasant record. In 
 18 19 appeared his "Sketch Book" with the immortal story of 
 Rip Van Winkle, and the " Legend of Sleepy Hollow ". He 
 had not quite shared Scott's enthusiasm for the scenery about 
 Abbotsford, mainly resting for its charm on historical and legendary 
 associations unfamiliar to him, but he gave legends to his native 
 Catskill Hills, and the Hudson River. His style has an Addi- 
 sonian felicity and kind humour ; and in his " Bracebridge Hall " 
 he handled old-fashioned England as if he loved it. His " Tales 
 of a Traveller " (he now visited Italy, France, and Spain) are not, 
 throughout, of his best work. Spain and the Spanish inspired his 
 " Life of Columbus," which in England was deservedly popular, 
 and the picturesque " Conquest of Granada," and " The Alham- 
 bra." In 1829, Irving became secretary of the American Lega- 
 tion in London, and, returning, produced " Astoria," to boys, at 
 least, a delightful account of the wilds. In 1842 he went as 
 American Minister to Spain, and, at home, wrote an attractive 
 " Life of Mahomet ". He carried into historical work the grace 
 of his essays, and the power of visualizing characters and events. 
 He did not write of Europe as an American, with his eyes very 
 open to the comparative merits of his own country ; and he 
 did not write of America as a European. He was at home in 
 the past as in the present, and though in his country's literature 
 he was a pioneer, his performance has none of the roughness of 
 pioneering work. He had the amiability of his favourite Gold- 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 547 
 
 smith, whose biography he wrote. He died in November, 18^9 
 K he were not a great writer, he is a delightful writer ; we think of 
 him with Addison and Goldsmith, without the occasional little 
 petulancies of the author of "The Vicar of Wakefield". When 
 he began his work America had no literature, when he died her 
 chief poets and historians had given full assurance of their 
 powers. 
 
 MAGAZINES AND ESSAYISTS. 
 
 Magazines, critical, literary, social, and antiquarian magazines, 
 had flourished in the later years of the eighteenth century. With the 
 nineteenth, in 1 802, appeared " The Edinburgh Review," critical and 
 political, edited by Francis Jeffrey (born at Edinburgh, 1773, died 
 1850). Though a man of ability and of a crackling kind of clever- 
 ness, Jeffrey was wholly incompetent to criticize the works of the 
 great romantic poets, the chief glories in literature of an age so 
 rich in the renowns of war. Scott aided Jeffrey at first, but partly 
 vexed by the coxcombry of his review of " Marmion," more by the 
 pro-French tone of his Whig review, the Sheriff deserted the " Blue 
 and Buff," and helped to found the Tory "Quarterly Review," 
 published by Murray, and edited by the learned but crabbed and 
 dilatory Gifford. Both magazines had esteemed contributors : the 
 "Edinburgh" was enlivened by the high spirits and wit of Sydney 
 Smith (1771-1845), qualities not always controlled by good taste 
 when he made merry with Nonconformists — Bishops, of course, 
 were reckoned fair game — and with squires, old familiar butts of 
 every wit. Henry Brougham, later Lord Brougham (i 778-1868), 
 was always ready to write the whole magazine, if needful ; what 
 Macaulay thought of him, much later, may be read in the letters 
 of the historian. Edinburgh professors and Francis Horner helped. 
 Horner died young; much had been expected of him. The 
 modem reader of the old "Edinburghs" will not find in them 
 much entertainment, except from Sydney Smith's gaiety and 
 Jeffrey's exhibitions of conceited incompetence as a judge of poetry. 
 Both the " Edinburgh " and the " Quarterly," carried politi- 
 cal rancour into literary criticism ; both dealt in insolent personal 
 bludgeon-work. From such matter the contributions in the 
 
 35 * 
 
54^ English Literature 
 
 " Quarterly " of Southey and Scott were free, and as Scott dealt 
 with topics of permanent literary and historical interest, his essays 
 retain their value : though Canning and other contributors to the 
 " Anti- Jacobin " wrote for the " Quarterly," their buoyant humour 
 of parody and their high spirits did not lighten up its august 
 pages. As the younger poets, Shelley, Byron, and Keats, were 
 either revolutionary or, in Keats's case, supposed to be, at least, 
 Whigs and associates of Whigs, the " Quarterly " was more fre- 
 quently disgraced by political abuse of poetical works than the 
 "Edinburgh". 
 
 " Blackwood's Magazine," after a few months of stagnation, 
 came into the hands of Mr. Blackwood, a bookseller of sound sense 
 and masterful character, who was practically his own editor, though 
 he allowed John Wilson (1785-1854) and John Gibson Lockhart 
 (1794-1854) to play their pranks. Wilson, of Magdalen College, 
 Oxford, was a splendid athlete, and excelled in country sports ; 
 Lockhart, of Balliol, very young in 181 7, was of remarkable 
 beauty, with a strongly sarcastic pen (" The Scorpion "), and as 
 sardonic as his far-away cousin in the past, Lockhart of Carnwath, 
 the manager of Jacobite affairs under James VIII. and III., and 
 the author of valuable Memoirs. These two, on a night of claret 
 and mirth, composed "The Chaldee Manuscript," a jape written 
 in Scriptural style on all the notables of Scottish literary society. 
 To persons who understand the allusions, it is still full of 
 very mirthful matter, but many grave sufferers were as little 
 amused as John Knox was by a delightful parody of himself and 
 his associates by young Thomas Maitland, brother of Maidand 
 of Lethington, Secretary of State to Queen Mary. Thenceforth, 
 "Blackwood's," was for several years engaged in broils, which 
 culminated in the death of John Scott, then Editor of " The 
 London Magazine " in which Lamb often wrote. In this serial 
 Scott attacked Lockhart, who went to London to fight him. 
 Scott kept advancing reasons for not meeting Lockhart, who 
 " posted " him and went home. Scott then entangling himself in 
 a dispute with Lockhart 's college friend, Christie, put himself in 
 the hands of Horace Smith of "The Rejected Addresses," and 
 of Mr. Patmore. Mr. Patmore's ignorance of the laws of the 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 549 
 
 duello made it necessary for Christie (who had fired once in the 
 air, and thereby legally ended the duel) to shoot in the direction of 
 Scott, who fell mortally wounded. The brawls of " Blackwood's " 
 were detested by Sir Walter Scott, whose daughter Lockhart had 
 married. Wilson, who had no connexion with this tragedy, was 
 an early devotee of Wordsworth's poetry, and himself wrote " The 
 Isle of Palms," " The City of the Plague," and two or three 
 " Kailyard " novels. His memory is best preserved by the high 
 spirits and occasional sentiment and humour of his " Noctes Am- 
 brosianse," dialogues in which the Ettrick Shepherd is the most 
 conspicuous hero ; not always with his own good will or to his 
 own advantage. Wilson was of a most mercurial temperament ; 
 his fiery style was apt to be too florid ; his caprices of temper were 
 unaccountable; and probably his most permanent work is found 
 in his descriptions of nature and of sport. He was for long 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. 
 Lockhart is seen to most advantage in his immortal " Life of Sir 
 Walter Scott," a noble union of perfect candour with passionate 
 affection for the great man of whom he wrote. His social fastidi- 
 ousness must always have been vexed by Scott's intimacy with the 
 Ballantyne brothers, who, again, had been incapable of controlling 
 Scott's tendency to large expenditure ; indeed, the books of the 
 firm were in a state of chaos. The strictures on these Ballantynes 
 were a blemish in a book which, with Boswell's "Johnson,'' 
 holds the highest place in English literary biography. It is even 
 more in a few pieces of original verse (such as Carlyle's favourite, 
 "It is an Old Belief") than in the best of his " Spanish Ballads " 
 that Lockhart reveals the poetry yyithin him, and the tenderness 
 of a heart on which he laid the fetter lock of his ancient scut- 
 cheon. Of his novels, as we have said, " Adam Blair " is by far 
 the best. He became Editor of the " Quarterly Review "in 1825 ; 
 his death (1854) took him from a world darkened for him by many 
 bereavements and other sorrows. His body sleeps in Dryburgh 
 Abbey, " at the feet of Sir Walter Scott ". 
 
 We now turn to the great essayists of the early nineteenth 
 century. 
 
550 English Literature 
 
 Charles Lamb. 
 
 He who would write briefly of Charles Lamb is under this dis- 
 advantage : to open a volume of Lamb's essays or letters is to re- 
 main absorbed in them, and in wondering affectionate admiration. 
 A man is fascinated by the book, however often read before, and 
 cannot tate up the pen. 
 
 Born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple (lo February, 
 1775)1 Lamb was the son of the clerk of a barrister, Samuel Salt, a 
 Lincolnshire man ; his maternal grandmother was housekeeper at 
 the ancient house of Blakesware, in Herts. Lamb has described 
 these people and that place in his essays, " Old Benchers of the 
 Inner Temple," " Blakesmoor in H shire,'' and his own in- 
 fantile mental state (much like that of R. L. Stevenson in some 
 ways), in "Witches and Other Night Fears," while his own and 
 Coleridge's school days are commemorated in " Recollections of 
 Christ's Hospital," a,nd (here he assumes the part of Coleridge), 
 in " Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago ''. To begin the 
 study of Lamb with these essays is in part to understand him, and 
 is wholly to fall in love with him. We see his father, with his 
 honesty, courtesy, and courage ; with his " merriest quips and 
 conceits " and many little artistic accomplishments, " a brother of 
 the angle, moreover," devoted to the theatre, an enthusiast for 
 Garrick, and, too early, "in the last sad state of human 
 weakness," babbling of his boyhood. Lamb inherited the " merry 
 quips," and was an inveterate punster. The " conceits " derived 
 from constant reading of Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, and the 
 then neglected early dramatists, abound in his style. The love of 
 the stage he also inherited, and constantly expresses ; and, he says, 
 " from my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches 
 and witch stories," and fond of a picture in a great book on the 
 Bible " of the Witch Raising of Samuel, which I wish I had never 
 seen ". (The present writer's childhood was dominated by the 
 -same picture.) He never laid his head on the pillow, from his 
 fourth to his eighth year, " without an assurance which realized its 
 own prophecy " of seeing some frightful spectres. He supposed 
 that these imaginations might date from " our ante-mundane con- 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 551 
 
 dition ". They were, in fact, proofs of his imaginative genius in 
 infancy, for any child may have the fears, yet never fancy that it 
 sees the phantasms. Conceivably the strain of madness in Lamb's 
 blood, the madness which made his sister Mary slay her own 
 mother, and affected her at frequent intervals, was also for some- 
 thing in his childish terrors. In later life his dreams wandered in 
 great cities never visited by him, which he saw " with a map-like 
 distinctness of trace, a daylight vividness of vision ". He thought 
 that " the degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish 
 no whimsical criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident 
 in the same soul waking''. His verses, like "When maidens 
 such as Hester die," though exquisite, give less proof of his 
 poetical faculty than his essay on " Dream Children," and on his 
 lost love, which is perhaps the most beautiful example of his 
 peculiar pathos. 
 
 Thus, throughout his essays, Lamb is constantly studying and 
 revealing himself, his sister, his friends, with varying disguises and 
 alterations of circumstance. In his " Character of the Late Elia," 
 (his pseudonym) he is his own ciitic. " Better it is that a writer 
 should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a 
 naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him." Unnatural 
 it would have been to him, even in the briefest note to a friend, to 
 write in a plain forthright style, but his quaintnesses and his con- 
 ceits are never obscure. Elia "gave himself too little concern 
 about what he uttered and in whose presence ". That this is too 
 true appears in the famous scene where he desired " to feel the 
 bumps " of a very stupid comptroller of stamps, and was not to 
 be restrained by Wordsworth's mild " My dear Charles ! " What 
 pranks, with his confessed " imperfect sympathy " with Scots, he 
 may have played before the avenging Carlyle, no man knows. 
 His friends " were, for the most part, persons of uncertain fortune 
 . . . a ragged regiment ". " He never greatly cared for the society 
 of what are called good people." "The impressions of infancy 
 had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of man- 
 hood." Passing all his best hours at a desk in the India Office, 
 he returned to his gambols when free. His essays were part of 
 his playtime ; in them he was his real self. 
 
55^ English Literature 
 
 From 1782 to 1789 he was at Christ's Hospital, but did not 
 attain to the high rank of Grecian, nor enter either of the Uni- 
 versities which he loved. He continued to meet Coleridge during 
 vacations at "The Salutation and Cat," and contributed verses 
 to Coleridge's volume of 1796 (Cottle, Bristol). In 1796 be- 
 fell the tragedy in his family, and henceforth the care of his sister 
 Mary (the Bridget of Elia) dominated his existence of unrepining 
 self-sacrifice. In literature (in addition to the old writers), he ad- 
 mired Burns, and Wordsworth, from the 1 first. It is more curious 
 that Burger's ballad of Lenore (the Death-ride) struck Lamb as 
 potently as it inspired Scott, who appreciated Lamb much more 
 than he was by Lamb appreciated, and in vain invited this resolute 
 Cockney to visit Abbotsford. In 1797 he contributed more son- 
 nets to a volume by Coleridge and Lloyd, and in 1798 published 
 his tale "Rosamund Gray". 
 
 Friends going up to examine it 
 
 Observe a good deal of Charles Lamb in it 
 
 (to parody Browning), it has passages of his style, quotations 
 from his favourite old authors ; one chapter is an essay in his 
 own manner, and there is even an anticipation of " Dream Chil- 
 dren ". Shelley praised the story highly, but Lamb was not 
 enthusiastic about Shelley's poems or Byron's. His " John Wood- 
 vil " was intended for the stage, and the tragedy was published 
 in 1802. It contains fine passages of verse, and a great deal of 
 the " local colour " of the Restoration ; perhaps the chief merit 
 lies in the restoration of the accents of old poetry. The farce of 
 " Mr. H." was a foredoomed failure. There is room for variety of 
 opinion as to the suitability of the " Tales from Shakespeare " 
 (much of which was executed by Mary Lamb), for children ; but 
 the peculiar merits of the • style are beyond dispute. The same 
 remark may be made on " The Adventures of Ulysses ". On the 
 other hand the notes to the "Specimens of English Dramatic 
 Poets" (1808) reveal Lamb at his best as a critic and a master of 
 language, while the selections are invaluable to readers who have 
 not the time nor the taste for the perusal of the entire works of 
 many most unequal dramatists. The book was a revelation to 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 553 
 
 all but a few readers who, like Scott, had dwelt much with Mar- 
 lowe, Chapman, Ford, Webster, and the rest. 
 
 Lamb " found himself " and found a public, at first small but 
 ever increasing, when he wrote his first essays for " The London 
 Magazine " in 1820, under the name of Elia. (Republished as 
 " Essays of Elia " in 1823.) The very names of the essays are 
 fragrant in the memory, and the characters drawn have become 
 household words, while the personal touches are, with Lamb's 
 delightful and fantastic letters, his best biography. In 1825, Lamb 
 retired, with a liberal pension, from the India Office, and was " a 
 freed man after thirty-three years' slavery " (see his essay " The 
 Superannuated Man "). Lamb's " Last Essays " were published in 
 
 1833, and the author did not long survive the death of his life-long 
 friend, Coleridge, in July, 1834 ; he passed away on 27 December, 
 
 1834. His name stands with those of Addison and Steele 
 among English essayists : indeed he is much more read than 
 they, as he was nearer to our own time, while more closely con- 
 nected than they with the best literature of the great centuries 
 which preceded the eighteenth. His self-revelations too are more 
 serious than those of his famous predecessors, and the character 
 revealed is more potently attractive. 
 
 Leigh Hunt. 
 
 Born nine years after Lamb (in 1784) and, like Lamb and 
 Coleridge, educated at Christ's Hospital, Leigh Hunt perhaps 
 holds, after Lamb and Hazlitt, the third place among the English 
 essayists of his age. While love of literature, of wide and very 
 miscellaneous reading in old English and Italian poetry was the 
 chief pleasure of Hunt, he also took, with great vigour, a side in 
 the politics of his age. A " Friend of the People," a contemner 
 of kings, and no sympathizer with his country in the Napoleonic 
 wars, Hunt, with his brother John, started, in 1808, "The Exam- 
 iner," a Radical weekly journal of politics and literature. In 181 2 
 he published what the law called a libel on the Prince Regent, and 
 for two years occupied prison rooms which he decorated in his own 
 taste (leaning to roses on the wall-paper, and plaster casts), among 
 these he received his friends. Though he had a rapid percep- 
 
554 English Literature 
 
 tion of new poetic excellence, though he was the first to perceive 
 and welcome the star of Keats, and, almost alone, encouraged and 
 applauded Shelley, Hunt was blind to the merits of poets who 
 were not of his own political party. In the text and notes of his 
 "Feast of the Poets" (1814), first published in "The Reflector," 
 he insulted Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, — and made 
 " for " rhyme to " straw ". When his " Story of Rimini " ap- 
 peared (18 1 6), it told Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca with 
 a Cockney jauntiness, and abounded in such epithets as " perky," 
 " bosomy,'' " farmy," " winy ''. Hunt's theory was that " the 
 harmonious freedom of our old poets " — " their freedom in con- 
 tinuing the sense of the heroic rhyming couplets," should be 
 " united with the vigour of Dryden". His verse was based on 
 Chaucer's, and on some examples of the seventeenth century, and 
 his metrical example influenced Shelley, while Keats followed him 
 in re-telling Italian stories, and, at first, even in his affectations. 
 
 "Rimini" and its author were furiously attacked, for reasons 
 of politics, by the young Tory writers in " Blackwood's Magazine," 
 to whom Hunt's ineradicable vanity and lack of taste lent handles. 
 He was dubbed " King of the Cockneys," and Keats himself shrank 
 from his ways and manners. He joined Byron and Shelley in Italy 
 in 1822 ; they were to work together on a journal, "The Liberal," 
 but, from the first, and especially after the death of Shelley, the 
 relations of Byron with the needy and familiar Hunt were intoler- 
 ably unpleasant. In 1828, after Byron's death. Hunt avenged 
 himself in his " Lord Byron and His Contemporaries," a book 
 which, as he came to see, should never have been written. 
 
 The rest of Hunt's life was spent in journalism, mainly literary ; 
 his essays, often delightful reading, were republished in " Men, 
 Women, and Books," " Imagination and Fancy," " A Jar of Honey 
 from Mount Hybla," while in his last work, " Autobiography," he 
 forgives all his enemies, among whom he had actually reckoned 
 Sir Walter Scott. He was the friend of Dickens and Carlyle. He 
 wrote concerning Carlyle's style : " How could he exculpate this 
 style, in which he denounces so many 'shams,' of being itself a 
 sham ? of being afi"ected, unnecessary, and ostentatious ? a jargon 
 got up to confound pretension with performance, and reproduce 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 555 
 
 endless German talk under the guise of novelty?" Here was 
 candour : Leigh Hunt cultivated the virtue described as " the in- 
 dependence of, the heart ". 
 
 William Hazlitt. 
 
 Lamb as a man was universally beloved, except by Carlyle, and 
 as a writer he is the friend of the human race. On the other side, 
 Lamb's friend and fellow-essayist, William Hazlitt, in a letter to 
 Leigh Hunt, says, "I want to know why everybody has such a 
 dislike to me ". There is much pathos and a plentiful lack of 
 humour in the question. The brief answer ia that Hazlitt acted 
 as if he were trying to make himself disliked. In this he was 
 pretty successful ; he quarrelled even with Lamb, but never shook 
 Lamb's constant affection. There is so much of Hazlitt's self in 
 his works that, greatly as his good qualities delight us, there are 
 times when we can scarcely forgive his defects, and are apt to con- 
 ceive a personal grudge against him. 
 
 Born at Maidstone on 10 April, 1778, Hazlitt was the son of 
 a distinguished Nonconformist minister. After visiting America, 
 which was not tolerant of his doctrines, the elder Hazlitt returned, 
 to England, where the son resided from 1788 to 1802. In 1798 
 he met Coleridge preaching in a blue coat and white waistcoat. 
 The great and peculiar merit of Hazlitt's essays is his power of ex- 
 pressing and communicating the zest of his enjoyment of nature, 
 human nature, preaching, juggling performances, prize-fighting, 
 painting, fiction, sculpture, and the game of fives. In his descrip- 
 tion of the voice, the manner, the personal magic of Coleridge, then 
 in his glorious youth, Hazlitt outshines himself, as he does in his 
 criticism of Cavanagh's style in the fives-court. Hazlitt visited 
 Coleridge at Stowey, and heard Wordsworth read his " Peter Bell " ; 
 heard Coleridge speak with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance 
 of Pope, and express a dislike of Dr. Johnson ! 
 
 These were divine days ; but politics crossed the friendships 
 of Hazlitt. The others had been enthusiasts, like himself, for the 
 French Revolution, but not for Napoleon, as objecting to be 
 emancipated by a hero who subdued hereditary kings, and supplied 
 to conquered nations his own brothers and captains to be their 
 
556 English Literature 
 
 princes. Hazlitt, on the other hand, rejoiced in the superb genius 
 of Napoleon as he did in that of Shakespeare and in the sunlight. 
 Bonaparte he could no more keep out of his essays on Poetry 
 than Mr. Dick could banish " that comely head " of Charles I. 
 from his memorial. To Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other 
 friends became anathema, as renegades ; and it is when we read 
 his odious attack on Coleridge's poetry, in " The Edinburgh Re- 
 view," that we understand " why everybody has such a dislike 
 of me ". 
 
 People who have read his "Liber Amoris,'' still more they 
 who have studied the original letters partly published in that book, 
 perceive other ways in which Hazlitt became antipathetic to human 
 nature. He was, in the Scots phrase, " thrawn," and as he could 
 seldom avoid exhibiting his temper in his writings, he may be and 
 is admired for his generous qualities, and power of interpreting 
 poetry and art, of elevating and enlivening the appreciative powers 
 of his readers ; but he can never be liked without reserve. His 
 course of life, after he abandoned the study of metaphysics and 
 the art of painting for the lecture-room and the pen of the ready 
 essayist, put him too much in the way of temptation. He was too 
 free to bring his personal and political animosities into his work, 
 " it is such easy writing ". He was also unskilled in the manage- 
 ment of his life, and both his marriages (not to mention the 
 unsuccessful passion of his " Liber Amoris ") were fountains of 
 bitterness. Living in London (1812-1820), Hazlitt gave his lec- 
 tures on "English Poetry,"and "Comic Writers" (1818-1819). Of 
 18 1 7 are his " Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," and his " Round 
 Table," essays on all sorts of subjects reprinted from Leigh Hunt's 
 paper "The Examiner". In the work on poetry it is surprising 
 to find him ranking Ossian with Homer, the Bible, and Dante, but 
 when he gives his reasons it is natural to envy his powers of ap- 
 preciation and enjoyment. To read him on Chaucer and Spenser 
 is to desire to read Spenser and Chaucer themselves, so nobly does 
 he recommend them, and Shakespeare, and so on, till, over Burns, 
 he falls into a quarrel with Wordsworth, and then lashes "The Lake 
 School," sniffs at Scott, and discovers but "one fine passage" in 
 " Christabel". His politics prevent him from appreciating what 
 
> Later Georgian Novelists 557 
 
 is excellent in the Cavalier poets, and even when writing of Milton, 
 Satan suggests to him Bonaparte, and he goes off full-mouthed on 
 that trail. Among the novelists he is as much at home, and as 
 convincingly right in his criticisms, especially of Richardson, as he 
 is lost in a mist when he touches on Racine and Molifere. Over 
 Scott's novels he first breaks into a passion of admiration, and 
 then, remembering politics, pelts the author (who never gave a 
 thought to him) in the manner of Gulliver's Yahoos. 
 
 Hazlitt, unhappily, lived at a time when both parties in the 
 State carried, with inconceivable rancour and stupidity, their poli- 
 tics into the field of literary criticism. His " Characters of Shakes- 
 peare" was slandered by Gifford in "The Quarterly Review," 
 and he keeps telling us the sale of the book was stopped. Why 
 members of his own party did not continue to buy it, he does 
 not ask. In "Blackwood's Magazine" (1817-1818) he was styled 
 "pimply-faced Hazlitt,'' a leader of "the Cockney School," and 
 he says that Keats died of being called a Cockney. In fact, 
 these stupidities did not affect Keats more than any other man of 
 sense, while Hazlitt never ceased to avenge on people perfectly in- 
 nocent, and on the guilty Gifford, the insults which he ought to 
 have disregarded. For these reasons, and because he wrote so 
 much, his essays are unequal, though when he is at his best, and 
 he is often at his best, he is in the foremost rank of critics. He 
 died in 1830. "Well, I have had a happy life," was among his 
 latest words, and his finest works are reflections of his happiest 
 hours. 
 
 Thomas de Quincey. 
 
 An essayist whose works are probably more read than those 
 of Leigh Hunt is Thomas de Quincey, one of the extraordinary 
 men whose boyhood was in the eighteenth, and whose works were 
 produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in 
 Manchester in 1785, and dying in Edinburgh in 1859, De Quincey 
 was precisely the contemporary of Hunt. His father, dying young, 
 left his children adequately provided for, and, to judge by De 
 Quincey's Autobiography, they were extraordinary children. Wil- 
 liam, the invincibly amusing, died young, and De Quincey's first 
 
558 English Literature 
 
 great sorrow was the death of Elizabeth, when he himself was 6 
 and she was not 10 years of age. His description of the vision 
 and the mysterious music which attended his visit to her as she 
 lay dead, is one of the most remarkable and characteristic passages 
 in his writings. Sixty-nine years later, " his very last act was to 
 throw up his arms and utter, as if with' a cry of surprised recog- 
 nition, ' Sister! Sister 1 Sister 1 ' " He was, indeed, a born seer; and 
 probably other persons, if so ill-advised as to follow his example 
 in taking quantities of laudanum, would not behold the visions 
 which first charmed and then tormented "The English Opium 
 Eater". 
 
 De Quincey was a wanderer and a fugitive from his schSol 
 days, at least such he became after receiving an accidental stroke 
 on the head from a cane, which prostrated him for weeks, and 
 quite conceivably was one cause of his eccentricities. As he has 
 told us he ran away, quite needlessly, from school at 16 or 17, 
 tramped, a sentimental traveller, in North Wales, starved, lurked, 
 and walked the midnight streets of London with Ann, ran away 
 from Oxford (Worcester College) when his papers had astonished 
 and delighted the examiners, and, generally, flew in the face of com- 
 mon sense. He came into his little fortune, behaved to Coleridge 
 with the generosity of Shelley, settled long near Wordsworth at 
 Grasmere, made the acquaintance of John Wilson (Christopher 
 North), married a country girl, and fell into the miseries of the 
 opium eater. Poverty ensued, De Quincey returned to his fugi- 
 tive life of lurking in London, and, in 1821, astonished the world 
 of readers by "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater," 
 published in "The London Magazine," for which Lamb and 
 Hazlitt used to write. De Quincey was acquainted with Lamb, 
 and Wordsworth and Coleridge he knew well. But he belonged 
 to none of the rival sets of writers, " Cockneys " or Edinburgh wits ; 
 and, in his freakish moods of schoolboy-like high spirits, he wrote 
 personal banter of his best friends, deriding Coleridge's corpulence 
 and " large expanse of cheek " ; the retort, as to cheek, was obvious. 
 In 1830 De Quincey moved to Edinburgh ; and in lodgings 
 there, and at a cottage near Lasswade on the Esk, he mainly passed 
 the rest of his strange, industrious, eccentric life. He wrote 
 
Later Georgian Novelists 559 
 
 alternately for Blackwood's and Tait's magazines : almost the 
 whole matter of his sixteen volumes appeared originally in maga- 
 zines, and was written with the wolf and the printer's boy at the 
 door. His vast store of reading, accumulated before 182 1, em- 
 braced the old English writers and the new German philosophers, 
 magic, political economy, and the records of police trials. 
 
 That sketch for a murder with a pair of dumb-bells, by the mur- 
 derer Thurtell, " the same who was generally censured for murder- 
 ing the late Mr. Weare," occurs, not only in the essay on " Murder 
 Considered as One of the Fine Arts," but in the long essay on 
 " Style ". The story of the very mysterious murder, at noon-day, 
 of Mrs. Ruscombe in Bristol, is very well told in "Autobiographic 
 Sketches " (" The Priory "). Confessedly some essays, such as 
 "Dream-fugue" in "The English Mail Coach," are records of 
 visions inspired by opium : " the Dream knows best ; and the 
 Dream, I say again, is the responsible party ". These essays on 
 the Mail Coach, then the marvel of rapidity of travel, offer, in 
 miniature, the type of De Quincey's style, with its sonorous poetic 
 cadences, its quaint colloquial familiarities, — with his insatiable in- 
 tellectual curiosity, and his digressiveness — he discusses the origin 
 of the word " snob ". Finally the Dream has its way, after the 
 wonderful description of the laurelled coach bearing news of Wel- 
 lington's and Bliicher's victory to England, and to two lovers the 
 sudden face of death. 
 
 De Quincey, with his wide reading, with the songless poet in 
 his nature, and with his strange freakish habits, his following a 
 chance association of ideas far beyond the field of his essay, is, 
 naturally, one of the most unequal of writers. His prose is, on 
 occasion, " aureate " or ornate, in a manner which has, perhaps, 
 had its day ; and again he deals in schoolboy slang. Only parts 
 of Ilia famous essay on Jeanne d'Arc are excellent : taste has moved 
 away from, and may return to, the mystic eloquence of " The Three 
 Ladies of Sorrow ". But in De Quincey there is variety enough for 
 all tastes, and he is perhaps especially inspiring and delightful to 
 young readers. He died at Edinburgh on 8 December, 1859. 
 
CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 POETS AFTER WORDSWORTH. 
 
 We now turn to the poets of the nineteenth century, after Words- 
 worth, though the first on the list was his senior in years. He is 
 less important for his work than as the pioneer of the poets who, 
 in the United States, contributed to the poetic literature of the 
 English language. 
 
 Philip Freneau. 
 
 Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the first American poet of 
 any note. America, colonial or independent, has scarcely any 
 early literary history, which may be mainly accounted for by the 
 preoccupation of men's minds in taming the waste, in dispossess- 
 ing the warlike natives, in establishing the Puritan theocracy in 
 New England, and in war, whether colonial, against France and 
 her Indian allies, or against the Old Country. Yet we might have 
 expected lyrics, at least, from the non-Puritan settlers of the very 
 literary age of Elizabeth and James I. and from Cavalier exiles of 
 the period of Charles I. They must have been in love ; but that 
 poetic passion, among the colonists, was singularly tuneless. We 
 might have looked for volumes on the new country in addition to 
 the learned volume of William Strachey (who compares the re- 
 ligion, rites, and legends of the Red Tribes with those of Greece 
 and Rome) and the larger and more romantic tome of Captain 
 John Smith. The Anglo-Saxon colonists of this Isle of Britain 
 lived even more hardly than the colonists in America ; yet we 
 have seen that, even in its scanty fragments, their poetry has dis- 
 tinction, sentiment, and pathos. But American poetry did not 
 begin at the beginning in poems of personal sentiment and ex- 
 perience and in heroic lays. Religion, theological controversy, 
 colonial history, and witchcraft fully occupied the flowing pen of 
 
 560 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 561 
 
 \ 
 Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The theocracy, like that of Calvin, 
 
 Knox, and Andrew Melville, which he supported, was broken by 
 
 the turn of public opinion in 1692, against the hangings of witches 
 
 on " spectral evidence " (subjective apparitions of the witches to 
 
 their victims). On the witches, on religion, on colonial history 
 
 with a controversial purpose (" Magnalia "), and on many other 
 
 themes, Cotton Mather wrote at enormous length. He was a 
 
 Bostonian, a Harvard man, and learned; in fact, he was the 
 
 counterpart of his correspondent, Wodrow, the author of the 
 
 " History of the Sufferings of the Kirk under the Restoration ". 
 
 His style is Jacobean rather than late Caroline, ' and the curious 
 
 will find him "full of matter ". 
 
 Religion inspired Jonathan Edwards; politics, science, and 
 homely Hesiodic advice occupied Benjamin Franklin, but, as for 
 poetry in America, it begins with Freneau, who was born eight 
 years before Prince Charles's last hope of recovering England 
 failed, and who died in the death year of Sir Walter Scott {1832). 
 Freneau was a sailor, a journalist, a writer of patriotic verse during 
 the War of Independence, and his best known poem is "The 
 Indian Cemetery," which displays the same regret for a vanished 
 people as the Anglo-Saxon " The Ruined City ". 
 
 Thomas Campbell stole, consciously or unconsciously, a line 
 from this piece. Here is Campbell, in "O'Connor's Child" — 
 
 Now on the grass-green turf he sits, 
 
 His tasselled horn beside him laid ; 
 Now o'er the hills in chase he flits, 
 
 The hunter and the deer — a shade. 
 
 Freneau has — 
 
 By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
 
 In habit for the chase arrayed, 
 The hunter still the deer pursues, 
 
 The hunter and the deer — a shade. 
 
 This plagiarism, by a Scot who ought to have known better, 
 
 must be taken as a real case of extremely petty larceny. Any mortal 
 
 who cared for grammar would have written, not " The hunter and 
 
 the deer — a shade " — for arithmetically there were two shades — but 
 
 The hunter like the deer, a shade. ^ 
 
 36 
 
562 English Literature 
 
 Campbell, if not Freneau, must have known that the passage 
 coincides with the scene in Homer (" Odyssey," Book XI.) where the 
 shade of Heracles pursues the shades of the animals which on 
 earth he had slain. The cadences of Freneau are those of Mickle 
 in "CumnorHall". 
 
 The dews of summer night did fall, 
 
 The Moon, sweet Regent of the sky, 
 
 Silver'd the walls of Cumnor Hall 
 
 And many an oak that grew thereby. 
 
 As a rule, Freneau's " Muse," like that of Mr. Lothian Dodd 
 when slightly exhilarated, "was the patriotic," inspiriting to the 
 contemporary warrior, but not of imperishable literary value. As 
 senior in years to Tennyson and Browning, Freneau's compatriots, 
 Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow, may here follow him in chrono- 
 logical order. 
 
 William Cullen Bryant. 
 
 William Cullen Bryant (1794- 1878) was one of those concerning 
 whom Sainte-Beuve says that they carry about in them a poet 
 who died young. His tendency was to write Hymns to Proserpine ; 
 among the works which fascinated his boyhood were Blair's " Grave," 
 Bishop Porteous on "Death" (the ghost of Mrs. Veal (1705), a 
 qualified critic, preferred Drelincourt), and the hectic verses of 
 Kirke White. Later came Wordsworth, perhaps too late ;. for 
 Bryant's " Thanatopsis," written when he was 17, descends from 
 such later works as follow the author of the Anglo-Saxon poem 
 of "The Grave". Not much later came "The Water Fowl," 
 a favourite of the compilers of anthologies. "Thanatopsis" 
 was frequently retouched, and now closes with a passage of the 
 highest ethical dignity, though to be sure there is little of hope in 
 the idea that 
 
 each shall take 
 His chamber in the silent halls of Death. 
 
 He was successful as a journalist, 
 
 the friend of Freedom's cause 
 As far away as Paris is, 
 
 and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not 
 cease when an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 563 
 
 into blank verse. In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see 
 that he offered the best wine first, in pieces like " To a Water 
 Fowl" and " The Yellow Violet ". The former is full of charm 
 in atmosphere and cadence, though the concluding moral, as in 
 " The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth. His best pieces 
 of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are somewhat remin- 
 iscent of Cowper. " The Ages," a summary of the world's history 
 in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy patri- 
 otism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is really 
 amusing to see his inabiUty to escape from the charms of the tomb, — 
 tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, " in dusty dark- 
 ness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral" 
 the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant, 
 prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself. 
 
 John Greenleaf Whittier. 
 
 Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in 
 Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught ; he early commenced 
 journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery ; and he 
 retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote 
 much in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough 
 to publish Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and 
 during the great war he was one of the bards who stimulated the 
 valour of the North ; much as another Quaker, by waving his hat, 
 encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons at Prince Charles's 
 rearguard action at Clifton. But there the side befriended by the 
 English Quaker was not victorious. In "Snow-Bound" (1866) 
 (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a happy winter's 
 night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood) Whittier first 
 met a popular success as a poet, though already some of his poems 
 (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a good, 
 earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome, 
 rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his 
 verses are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of 
 nature, his lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a 
 level with the best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish 
 form were naturally popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best 
 
 36* 
 
564 English Literature 
 
 known in England; he had a variety of themes, colonial, Red 
 Indian, and generally historical. He even went to the " Rig-Veda " ; 
 and catholicity of taste is shown when an American Quaker sings 
 of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra and other deities 
 of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should be energetic, 
 while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote from the 
 practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose. ^ 
 
 His life, — his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular educa- 
 tion, his absorption in the poUtics of his own country, his enthusiasm 
 for Freedom's cause, — ^has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and 
 makes him distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumer- 
 ate the points in Burns which are missing in Whittier ! 
 
 Perhaps an alien may venture to utftr an idea which was in his 
 mind before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow- 
 countryman of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, con- 
 cerning some of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school 
 of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical 
 columns of country newspapers ". The verse of the country news- 
 paper was the wild-stock of Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of 
 Bums was the folk-song of Scotland. Whittier had to educate 
 himself, and his genius often lifted him far above the artless. verse 
 of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In his famous 
 appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read — 
 
 And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray ; 
 
 And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay, 
 
 Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill. 
 
 And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill, 
 
 And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle I 
 
 It is Macaulay's " Armada " ! 
 
 There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of 
 the renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in • days be- 
 fore the war, had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow 
 than in anger, the poem called " Ichabod ". 
 
 1 See "English Conspiracy and Dissent, 1660-1674," by Professor Wilbur 
 C.Abbott, "American Historical Review," April, July, 1909. 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 565 
 
 So fallen I so lostl the light withdrawn 
 
 Which once he wore I 
 The glory from his grey hairs gone 
 
 For ever more. 
 
 Much later, in a kind of palinode, he, addressing the shade of 
 Webster, gave a good example of the vigour of his octosyllabics ! 
 
 But, where the native mountains bare 
 Their foreheads to diviner air, 
 Fit emblem of enduring fame, 
 One lofty summit keeps thy name. 
 For thee, the cosmic forces did 
 The rearing of that pyramid. 
 The prescient ages shaping with 
 Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith. 
 
 The rigorous critic may say that the idea is derived from Byron ; 
 and object to 
 
 forces did 
 The rearing of that pyramid, 
 
 as a somewhat colloquial idiom, but the lines have very great speed 
 and vigour. 
 
 If we insist that a very young literature must produce for in- 
 spection her national poet (and Mr. Lowell says that foreign critics 
 made this demand very early indeed) the poet cannot be Poe, and 
 Whitman is hardly eligible. Whittier seems, so far, to . be the 
 best candidate for the bays. 
 
 Many admirers of Burns will be eager to confess that Whittier's 
 " Snow-bound " has merits superior to those of the Ayrshire plough- 
 man's companion-piece, " The Cottar's Saturday Night ". 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
 
 Longfellow, by far the most popular, in his own country and in 
 England, of American poets, was born at Portland, Maine, in 
 1807 ; he was two years older than Tennyson. He was a con- 
 temporary at Bowdoin College of his country's greatest novelist, 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. In r826 he began three "travel-years" 
 which prepared him for the Chair of French and Spanish literature, 
 first held by George Ticknor in 181 7 ; he first taught at Bowdoin, 
 and in 1836 succeeded Ticknor at Harvard. American literature 
 
566 English Literature 
 
 now began to be affected by the poets of the European continent, 
 which had, ever since Chaucer, and especially in the Elizabethan 
 age, fostered the poetry of England. Only the morally pure and 
 elevating elements in continental literature affected Longfellow; 
 and this was not precisely the case where Chaucer and the Eliza- 
 bethans were concerned. Indeed, the greater literature of the 
 United States is not mastered by the Passions; Byron, Shelley, 
 and Burns were never its idols, and Hawthorne did a daring thing 
 when he wrote " The Scarlet Letter ''. Longfellow, whom Poe ab- 
 surdly accuses of plagiarism, was no imitator. He had a note, simple 
 indeed, but his own. As far as any traces in his work of Scott, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, are apparent, 
 we might suppose that he had never read them. This kind of 
 originality is not always found even in considerable poets. The 
 measure of Scott's "Lay" is borrowed from " Christabel " ; Burns 
 usually had a model which he transfigured ; Byron's Oriental tales 
 in verse are bad copies from Scott in versification ; — but the minor 
 poet is always imitative. 
 
 Longfellow, like the enemy of Bonaparte mentioned by Heine, 
 was "still a professor" till 1854, when he was succeeded by Mr. 
 Lowell. While occupying an academic Chair he published per- 
 haps his best-known work, " The Voices of the Night" (1839), his 
 "Evangeline" (pathos in English hexameters) in 1847, and "The 
 Golden Legend" in 1851. In his first book Longfellow " made a 
 bull's-eye " in hitting the public taste. The bull's-eye rang to the 
 anvil strokes of " The Village Blacksmith ". Young men shouted 
 "Excelsior" as they walked the streets, like the two Writers to the 
 Signet who met each other shouting lines from Flodden in " Mar- 
 mion " on the North Bridge of Edinburgh. It is true that 
 
 To the Lords of Convention 'twas Claverhouse spoke, 
 or 
 
 The stubborn spearmen still made good 
 Their dark impenetrable wood, 
 or 
 The laurel, the palms, and the pjean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake, 
 
 are perhaps even more provocative than " Excelsior " to him who 
 shouts " for his personal diversion ". But it is much to write verses 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 567 
 
 which provoke this kind of enthusiasm among persons not apt to 
 be stirred by literature. On mature reflection, the maiden in 
 " Excelsior " was rather " in a coming on disposition," 
 
 He answered as he turned away, 
 
 " What would the Junior Proctor say ? " 
 
 is a pardonable academic parody. If you analyse the similes in 
 " The Psalm of Life," you meet some shipwrecked brother who, 
 though he has piled up his bark on some reef, is still sailing o'er 
 Time's dreary main, and taking comfort in observing, through his 
 glass, that somebody has left footprints on the sands. Enfin, these 
 poems have " that ! " as Reynolds said, though the metaphors are 
 mixed as if by the master-hand of Sir Boyle Roche. These things 
 are not Longfellow's masterpieces, and they, with the apocryphal 
 viking's " Skeleton in Armour," are best read in happy and uncritical 
 boyhood. At any age we may appreciate such lines as — 
 
 The welcome, the thrice prayed for, the most fair, 
 The best beloved Night, 
 and 
 
 I remember the black wharves and the slips. 
 
 And the sea-tide, tossing free, 
 And Spanish sailors with bearded lips. 
 And the beauty and the mystery of the ships. 
 And the magic of the sea. 
 
 Simplicity is dominant in Longfellow's verse ; and he kas " a mes- 
 sage '' on which he is perhaps too fond of dwelling. In one of 
 his anti-slavery poems the hero, like Aphra- Behn's Oroonoko, is a 
 king in his own country, though the slave trade in " black ivory " 
 direct from Africa was no longer extant. In '' Hiawatha" he re- 
 produced the measure of the Finnish " Kalewala " with much of the 
 woodland perfume of the original poem. To boys fresh from 
 Cooper's novels the tale is a delight if it has palled on more sophisti- 
 cated tastes. Theocritus hoped that his verses " would be on men's 
 lips, above all on the lips of the young ". If this were Longfellow's 
 ambition he had his reward in full. He wrote for a young people, in 
 the boyhood of its own literature, and opened for it the magical 
 volume of old romance, and his hold on those who read him in 
 youth can never be shaken, being strengthened by all happy and 
 tender memories. His muse 
 
568 English Literature 
 
 Sits and gazes at us, 
 With those deep and tender eyes. 
 Like the stars, so still and saint-like. 
 Looking downwards from the skies. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson. 
 
 Born in 1809, the son of the Rev. George Tennyson, Rector 
 of the parish at Somersby in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Alfred 
 Tennyson was a schoolboy when Keats and Byron died. At the 
 age of 8, he says, " I remember making a line I thought grander 
 than Campbell, or Byron, or Scott ... it was this — 
 With slaughterous sons of thunder rolled the flood. 
 The context is absent, but the line is sonorous, and utterly unlike 
 anything that the child could find in the poems with which he was 
 already acquainted, those of Thomson, Scott, Byron, and Camp- 
 bell. Even if he had read Milton, the line gave promise of his 
 originality as an " inventor of harmonies " in blank verse. After 
 imitating Pope, and, on a large scale (6000 verses), copying Scott, 
 Tennyson wrote, at 14, a drama in blank verse. Of this a chorus 
 survives in Tennyson's volume of 1830, and in such lines as 
 these about the mountains riven 
 
 By secret fire and midnight storms 
 
 That wander round their windy cones, 
 
 we already find his manner, his use of a favourite epithet, and his 
 interest in the forces that 
 
 Draw down the seonian hills and sow 
 The dust of continents to be. 
 
 At 17 (1826), after bebg "dominated by Byron," he "put him 
 away altogether,'' and this was the tendency of his generation at 
 Cambridge, of Thackeray, Monckton Milnes, and others. In 1827 
 "Poems by Two Brothers," Alfred and his brother Frederick 
 (Charles, too, contributed) were published, but contained none of 
 the verses stamped with his own unmistakable mark which he had 
 already composed. Among these the ballad on a wooing like 
 that of the Bride of Lammermoor is specially original. At 19 
 (1828) Tennyson wrote "The Lover's Tale" in blank verse, — he 
 had not yet read Shelley, but the Italian scenery, and the rich 
 imagery, are somewhat in Shelley's manner. The book was pub- 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 569 
 
 lished fifty years later (1879) ; only the two first parts were written 
 in youth. Tennyson went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 
 1828, where he met Thackeray, FitzGerald, Milnes (Lord Hough- 
 ton), and Arthur Hallam, son of the historian, and the foremost of 
 his friends. He contributed to the essays of this set, — "The 
 Apostles," a paper on " Ghosts,'' and won the prize poem on 
 "Timbuctoo" by an obscure production in blank verse. Con- 
 cerning the cause of its success there is an amusing if apocryphal 
 anecdote. 
 
 In 1830, when Bulwer Lytton was declaring that novels had 
 killed the taste for poetry, Tennyson's first volume appeared. 
 The obvious fault was the affected diction ; babblings as of Leigh 
 Hunt ; but in " Mariana in the Moated Grange," Tennyson de- 
 clared his real self; as in "The Ode to Memory," "The Dying 
 Swan," " Recollections of the Arabian Nights," and " Oriana ". 
 Here we discern Tennyson's mastery of original cadences; his 
 close observation of Nature ; his opulent language, and his visions 
 of romance. " The Supposed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensi- 
 tive Mind " displays the doubts that recur in " In Memoriam " ; 
 and " The Mystic " reveals a very potent element in his character, 
 that of the visionary with elusive experiences of " dissociation " 
 approaching to " trance ". In a beautiful passage of " In Mem- 
 oriam,'' these experiences are again cast, as far as possible, "in 
 matter moulded forms of speech''. Before 1830 Tennyson had 
 anticipated, in an essay, the modern doctrine of the evolution of 
 man from the lowest rudimentary forms of life, and had also per- 
 sonal psychological experiences like those of Plotinus and other 
 late Platonic philosophers. 
 
 In 1832 almost all of the poems of the new volume of 1833 
 had been composed. This book included the first shape, magical 
 but more or less humorous, and confused in form, of " The Lady of 
 Shalott " ; with the first form of " CEnone " (written in the Pyrenees 
 during a tour with Hallam), " The Miller's Daughter," which needed 
 and received much correction, as did " The Palace of Art ". Here, 
 too, first appeared the passion of " Fatima," the perfect " Mariana 
 in the South," and "The Lotus Eaters,'' which has, in brief space, 
 all the languor and all the charm of Spenser ; it is a poem never 
 
570 English Literature 
 
 excelled by Tennyson. A very amusing review, by Lockhart in 
 " The Quarterly," mocked at all the many faults, but never alluded 
 to the more numerous and essential beauties of the book. Ten 
 years later Lockhart repented, and handed Tennyson's two vol- 
 umes of 1842 to his friend Sterling, for criticism which could not 
 be mocking. The poet, though naturally sensitive to criticism, 
 had bowed to censures which, as he saw, were deserved, and had 
 substituted noble lines for the earlier inequalities and eccentricities. 
 
 The sudden death at Vienna, of Arthur Hallam, in September, 
 1833, was a shock and a sorrow which left an indelible mark on 
 the poet's character and genius. He composed, not much later, 
 " The Two Voices," and the resolute and noble " Ulysses " ; with 
 " Sir Galahad," that absolute romantic lyric ; " Tithonus," perhaps 
 the most perfect of all his poems on classical mythology; "The 
 Morte d' Arthur," the greatest of his idylls on the cycle of Arthur; 
 and he wrote many parts of "In Memoriam". He had chosen 
 Poverty for his mate, with poetry, like Wordsworth. 
 
 In 1842 appeared the two volumes which contain the flower 
 and fruit of Tennyson's youth. Much that was new, with more 
 that was re-formed from early immature phases, was offered ; and 
 such excellence in so many various styles, including the rural 
 idylls — the light and charming " Day Dream " (The Sleepmg 
 Beauty), "The Talking Oak," and again "The Dream of Fair 
 Women," the strange romantic " Vision of Sin " ; the classical 
 and Arthurian poems — to mention no others, — was never ex- 
 hibited by a young English poet. There was little to regret or 
 discard, and even "The May Queen" had this merit or demerit 
 that it at once became extremely popular. Here was a fortunate 
 "alacrity in sinking"! In the opinion of "Old Fitz" (Fitz 
 Gerald), Tennyson never regained the level of these two thin 
 volumes of 1842: perhaps we may say that he never rose above 
 that level. 
 
 "The Princess" (1847) contains several of his most perfect 
 lyrics, and all the charm of his blank verse, but it is professedly a 
 fantasy; the poet "is not always wholly serious,'' he writes some- 
 what in the vein of " Love's Labour's Lost ". In 1850 appeared, 
 anonymously, "In Memoriam," the record of three years of pain. 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 571 
 
 and of strivings with the Giant of Bunyan's Doubting Castle. 
 We cannot discuss the reasonings, the waverings, the reviewings 
 of the then most recent theories of evolution, with their presumed 
 theological consequences ; but the lover of poetry who cannot find 
 it in " In Memoriam " may perhaps be regarded as not destitute 
 of prejudices. Tennyson would be more universally appreciated 
 as a great and delightful poet if he had never expressed any of 
 his personal opinions about politics, society, morals, or religion in 
 verse. His two volumes of 1 842 contain nothing, or very little, 
 that can annoy the most sensitive up-to-date spirit. 
 
 In 1850, Tennyson, by that time married, succeeded Words- 
 worth in the Laureateship. The firstfruits of his office was the* 
 magnificent " Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington " 
 (1852). In 1855 appeared " Maud," which is prejudiced by the 
 "topical " allusions to the Crimean War, and by the appearance, 
 as hero and narrator, of a modern Master of Ravenswood, who is, 
 according to the poet himself " a morbid poetic soul ... an 
 egotist with the makings of a cynic ". The love-poetry is beauti- 
 ful ; and most beautiful are the exquisite lines " O that 'twere 
 possible ". But the day for a kind of tale or novel of modern life, 
 in verse, had passed before the death of Crabbe. 
 
 In 1859 appeared the first four " Idylls of the King," " Enid," 
 from a mediaeval tale in the Welsh " Mabinogion " ; " Elaine," and 
 " Guinevere," from the " Morte d' Arthur," and " Vivien," the 
 beguiler of the wise Merlin, from the same source. All are rich 
 in beauties of style, in visions of Nature, in such characters as 
 Elaine and Lancelot, and in delicate observation ; except 
 " Vivien " all the Idylls were eagerly welcomed ; though some 
 critics held that Arthur preached too much to his fallen Queen. 
 
 Thackeray wrote to his " dear old Alfred " that the Idylls had 
 given him " a splendour of happiness. . . . Gold and purple and 
 diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and 
 if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an 
 ardour of gratitude ? But I have had out of that dear book the 
 greatest delight that has come to me since I was a young man." 
 Old men who were schoolboys when Thackeray wrote thus, felt, 
 and feel, what Thackeray expresses. The Idylls were continued 
 
572 English Literature 
 
 later, to the number of twelve ; — not all are of equal merit ; none 
 perhaps is so good as the " Morte d'Arthur " of 1842, but the 
 whole are the poetic rival, in romantic charm, in haunting evasive 
 allegory, and in ethics, of Malory's great old book. In the 
 Idylls, as in Malory, we find, as Caxton had written four hundred 
 years earlier, " the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights 
 used in these days, noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentle- 
 ness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, 
 courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, 
 virtue, and sin." The tragedy of Lancelot and Guinevere, the 
 mystic interlude of the Quest for the Grail, the ruin of that world, 
 *and the passing of Arthur, were all given by old romance, and are 
 all beautified by charm of diction, and countless pictures of 
 Nature, and similes worthy of Homer, such as 
 
 So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, 
 As on a dull day in an Ocean cave 
 The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall 
 In silence. 
 
 In "Enoch Arden " (1864) Tennyson again displayed his 
 matchless variety of command over all classes of poetic themes, 
 and added to " In Memoriam " a lyric full of the tranquil tender- 
 ness of an immortal love, " In the Valley of Cauteretz ". Once 
 more choosing a novel and difficult and sublime topic, he gave us 
 •' Lucretius," a study of the magnificent ruin of a supreme heart 
 and soul and intellect. 
 
 Of the seven plays published between 1875 ^"d 1892 there is 
 not space to speak; but by common admission the genius of 
 Tennyson was not fitted for the drama of the stage. In 1880 the 
 poet, unconquerable by Time, gave, in "Ballads and Other 
 Poems," the nobly passionate dramatic monologue of " Rizpah " ; 
 and his most thrilling war-song, "The Revenge". With 1885 
 came the Virgilian cadences of the lines to Virgil, written for the 
 poet's townsmen, the Mantuans, on that 
 
 Golden branch amid the shadows, 
 
 Kings and realms that pass to rise no more. 
 
 Tennyson's genius was, indeed, akin to that of Virgil in tenderness, 
 in "the sense of tears in rhortal things," in elaborate and exquisite 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 573 
 
 art, and in the selecting and polishing and re-setting of jewels from 
 the poetry of ancient Greece. We saw, in the opening of this 
 volume, how from age to age Homer's descriptions of the 
 Elysian land, and of the home of the gods, reached an Anglo- 
 Saxon minstrel; and now Tennyson recasts the thoughts in his 
 picture of " the island valley of Avilion,'' the Celtic paradise. 
 
 At the age of 81, like Sophocles unsubdued by time, and 
 still absolute master of his art, he composed one of his supreme 
 lyrics, "Crossing the Bar": we repeat it and we marvel at the 
 exquisite unison of thought with music. Even in "The Death of 
 CEnone " the aged hand no " uncertain warbling made ". 
 
 The poet crossed the bar on 6 October, 1892, his Shakespeare 
 by his side, and his open chamber-window flooded by moonlight. 
 It is probable that we live too near Tennyson to appreciate his 
 greatness. " Men hardly know how beautiful fire is," says Shelley ; 
 the phenomenon is too familiar ; but later generations will know 
 and understand, and through the darkness of time will follow the 
 light of this " Golden Branch among the Shadows ". 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 Born three years later than Tennyson, in May, 181 2, Robert 
 Browning's first published poem, " Pauline," appeared in the 
 same year as Tennyson's second volume of verse, namely in 1833. 
 Thenceforward the careers of the two poets were, in some respects, 
 curiously similar, as each "flourished" most decisively in 1840- 
 1850. Browning was a native of a London suburb, his father was 
 a man of very active intelligence, a reader of old books ; and 
 though Browning, in boyhood, was educated at a private school, 
 his essential instruction was that which he gave himself in his 
 father's library. At an early age, about 16, he read Shelley, 
 and an intense enthusiasm for Shelley, as a man and poet, per- 
 vades his " Pauline ". The poem is a monologue addressed to 
 Pauline, on " the incidents in the development of a soul: little 
 else is worth study," as Browning wrote in the dedication of 
 " Sordello ". The poem is, naturally, more or less autobiographi- 
 cal; like Wordsworth's "The Prelude," it was intended to be but 
 part of a large work, " so many utterances of so many imaginary 
 
574 English Literature 
 
 persons, not mine — poetry always dramatic in principle," so the 
 author wrote in 1867, and the speaker in " Pauline " is really but 
 as one of Browning's " Men and Women," and " Dramatis Per- 
 son£E ". The work contains several passages of great beauty, 
 written in a " regular " style of blank verse without eccentricity, and 
 is full of promise of success in a path which, later, as far as form 
 is concerned. Browning did not follow. The construction of the 
 paragraphs of blank verse is in places difficult, indeed obscure, a 
 fault which haunted the poet's manner. 
 
 Of " Pauline " not a single copy was purchased : and it was 
 with reluctance that Browning, much later, permitted it to appear 
 among his works. His "Paracelsus" (1835) is in form a drama 
 with four characters, and is, again, a story of " incidents in the 
 development of a soul," that of a famous chemist, half mystic, 
 half charlatan (i 493-1 541) who 
 
 determined to become 
 The greatest and most glorious man on earth. 
 
 For him unattainable Science is " La Belle Dame Sans Merci," 
 and her dead votaries call to him 
 
 Lost, lost I yet come I 
 
 With our wan troop make thy home. 
 
 There are one or two charming lyrics, but there is a weight of 
 prolixity, and almost entire absence of action. The poem, how- 
 ever, obtained for Browning recognition among men of letters and 
 special students of poetry, when he was not yet 24 years of age. 
 He knew Talfourd, whose "Ion" (1835) was a recognized 
 dramatic triumph at the moment ; Forster, the friend and bio- 
 grapher of Dickens (with Forster, Browning's relations later were 
 stormy), and Macready, the actor, who (1837) put his " Strafford " 
 on the stage, with but slight success. Browning's dramas in- 
 tended to be acted have had even less hold on the scenic world than 
 Tennyson's; "A Blot in the Scutcheon," (1843) might have fared 
 better but was thwarted by the internal politics of the stage. 
 " Sordello " (1840), a narrative in heroic verse, though of an originah 
 sort that would have puzzled Dryden, was again the study of " a 
 soul," that of a legendary Mantuan mediaeval poet and soldier, 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 575 
 
 mentioned by Dante. The abundance of mediaeval Italian his- 
 tory, — introducing, as familiar to all, matters which were but 
 vaguely known by few, — and the long hurrying sentences, follow- 
 ing trains of ideas associated only in the poet's mind, defeated 
 the ordinary reader. As 
 
 Here the Chief immeasurably yawned 
 
 in a long passage of exposition, so did the world, and " Sordello " 
 was a stumbling-block in the path of the poet's fame. 
 
 On the other hand, in "Pippa Passes" (1841) Browning pro- 
 duced a drama partly lyrical, partly in prose, partly in blank verse, 
 full of variety, humour, strength, and charm, and with that vein 
 of optimism which is never unwelcome. Just as Tennyson " came 
 to his own " with his two volumes of 1842, so the works published 
 by Browning (1841-1846) in cheap numbers, as "Bells and Pome- 
 granates," gave assurance of his originality and his greatness. 
 His dramatic lyrics, when they came, were poetry of a new kind, 
 in measures as various as the moods ; here was a " garden of the 
 souls " so rich and strange, so full of novelty of incident, of ob- 
 servation in Italy and in England, as had never before been 
 presented to a world which, for the moment, regarded it not. 
 The strangeness in places might throw a shade on the beauty ; 
 the poet did not by any means always choose to make audible, in 
 his verse, the music to which, as an art, he was devoted. In 1855 
 his " Men and Women " did at last win to the favour first of an 
 enthusiastic few, then of all lovers of poetry. The very names of 
 the poems, from "Bishop Blougram" to "In a Gondola," "Por- 
 phyria's Lover," "Fra Lippo Lippi," "The Last Ride together," 
 " Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," " A Grammarian's 
 Funeral," call up a troop of visionary pictures ; while " Christmas 
 Eve and Easter Day " (1850) opens Browning's series of meditations 
 on faith and the mysteries of existence. The poet's life, from his 
 marriage to another poet. Miss Barrett (1846), to her death in 
 1861, was spent, in great part, in Italy, mainly in Florence ; and 
 Italian history, literature, art, and politics constantly inspired him. 
 
 In 1864 appeared his "Dramatis Personse," of the same 
 varied character as " Men and Women ". Of the new poems the 
 
576 English Literature 
 
 speculations of " Abt Vogler," the musician, of " Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra," — the faith pronouncing all things very good, — the gallant 
 resolution in face of death of " Prospice," won for Browning the 
 applause of readers who value " thought '' in poetry. Of these, 
 many preferred the passages most difficult of comprehension, and 
 found joy in mysteries where the difficulties were really caused by 
 the manner of the poet. 
 
 In 1868 a world which had neglected Browning fell with en- 
 thusiasm on the four successive volumes of " The Ring and the 
 Book ". Here all persons concerned in a peculiarly brutal set ot 
 murders of 1698, and many lookers-on, give their own versions 
 and their own views of the characters and events, while the 
 lawyers have their say, and the Pope sums up all in a poem by a 
 fourth part longer than the "Iliad". 
 
 The last twenty years of the poet's life were prolific in books 
 very various in character from " Fifine at the Fair" (1872), and 
 "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" (1873), to "Asolando," in 
 1889, the year of his death. His "Transcript" from Euripides is 
 not merely rugged, but very quaint. The method is the old 
 method, but a growing wilfulness often mars the results — the 
 defect of Browning's quality. His resolute courage never failed ; 
 he was firm on the rock of his belief ; but it is probable that he 
 will always be best known by the work of his central period, from 
 " Pippa Passes "to " Dramatis Personse ". He is the poet of 
 love, of life, and of the will to live ; here and beyond the grave ; 
 and he is the expounder, and, indeed, the creator, of innumerable 
 characters, while, if his poetry lacks "natural magic," and 
 supreme felicity of phrase, his pictures are largely and vigorously 
 designed and coloured. No poet perhaps, save Scott, showed so 
 httle of the poet in general society ; no man was more kindly and 
 natural in his ways. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe. 
 
 Edgar Poe, born in 1809 at Boston, was on the mother's side 
 English, but in genius he was of no nationality. His parents, who 
 were actors, died early, and he was adopted at the age of 2 by 
 a gentleman of Virginia, Mr. Allan, with whom he passed five 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 577 
 
 years in Europe (1815-1820). From the University of Virginia 
 he passed, as poets are apt to do, in the disfavour of his dons, 
 nor did he long abide at West Point, the military school, leaving 
 in 183 1 in very unfortunate circumstances. Like Shakespeare in 
 the tradition he " was given to all manner of unluckiness," such as 
 losing more money at cards than he could pay, which estranged 
 his guardian. In 1827, at the age of 18, he had published the now 
 almost indiscoverable volume of verse, "Tamerlane and Other 
 Poems ". He betook himself to journalism, writing verses, criti- 
 cisms (whereby he made many enemies) and short stories. With 
 his genius for these, whether tales of gruesome mystery, or of 
 treasure-hunting, or of a marvellous detective, he would, in the, 
 America of to-day, have been rich, as authors count riches. But 
 his pay was infinitesimal, and he lived in dire poverty, always 
 longing for a magazine of his own ; but his engagements as 
 an editor were neither permanent nor lucrative. He was, in 
 "The Gold Bug," the founder of all stories of hidden treasure, 
 and all detective stories descend from "The Murders in the Rue 
 Morgue". In composing "crawlers," as R. L. Stevenson called 
 tales of horror, he had no rival. He always avoided the super- 
 natural ; his effects were mortuary, and he was too partial to pre- 
 mature burials. His style was that of an artist, clean and sober, 
 in "The Gold Bug," but in such pieces as "The Fall of the 
 House of Usher'' he aimed at poetical effects in prose. The 
 doors of the doomed mansion "threw slowly back their ponderous 
 and ebony jaws". Poe appears to have had the wish to be a 
 scholar ; he may even, by many allusions to unfamiliar books, give 
 the impression that his reading is very wide, but scholarship was 
 inconsistent with his restless and poverty-stricken life. Yet some- 
 thing of the fastidiousness of the scholar possessed him, and made 
 him a student of style, and a relentless reviewer of the many no- 
 bodies who formed the majority of his literary contemporaries. 
 His poetry is the very reverse of " a criticism of life ". His heroes, 
 if in love at all, are constant to some belle morte, Annabel Lee or 
 the Lost Lenore ; and he has no hope of attaining to the love of 
 his most beautiful poem, — 
 
 37 
 
57^ English Literature 
 
 Helen, thy beauty is to me 
 
 Like those Nicfean barques of yore, 
 
 (where Nicfean seems to mean Phaeacian). He combines the 
 maximum of music in his verse with the minimum of human 
 nature, of flesh and blood. His "Ulalume," with its recurrent 
 and re-echoing double rhymes, trembles on the verge between 
 pure nonsense and some realm beyond the bounds of known 
 romanticism : — 
 
 Hard by the dim lake of Auber, 
 In the misty mid region of Weir. 
 
 Weir, we surmise, is not far from 
 
 the sunset land of Boshen, 
 In the midmost of the Ocean, 
 
 where dwelt the Yonghi Bonghi Bo. 
 
 The celebrated "Raven," probably by far his most popular 
 poem, winged his way to Poe's study from the cliffs which frown 
 on the dim lake of Auber. His fancy for ever dwells " out of space, 
 out of time," where it has learned that mysterious music of his 
 which can be parodied, but cannot be recaptured. He has heard 
 the harping of Israfel, and follows it in " a mortal melody ". 
 Thus, in " The Haunted Palace," 
 
 Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 
 
 On its roof did float and flow, 
 (This — all this — was in the olden 
 
 Times long ago.) 
 And every gentle air that dallied 
 
 In that sweet day. 
 Along the ramparts plumed and pallid 
 
 A wingfed odour went away. 
 
 Poe's versification was self-taught, and his verse, so small in 
 volume and so original, was precisely adapted to the dreams of 
 which his poetry is made. He wrote "There is no such thing as 
 a long poem," meaning that no long poem can be uniformly 
 exquisite. Yet he never attained to what is most entirely exquisite, 
 apart from actuality, and dreamlike, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". 
 As has been said of Gerard de Nerval, " his urgent spirit leads 
 him over the limit of this earth, and far from human shores, his 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 579 
 
 fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars " ; 
 night is light to him, and daytime is darkness. Like Gdrard's, his 
 overword is 
 
 OU sont nos amoureuses ? 
 
 Elles sont au tombeau I 
 Elles sont plus heureuses 
 
 Dans un sejour plus beau. 
 
 Perhaps because he is so non-American, so decidedly a citizen 
 of no city, Poe has been more admired on the Continent, and 
 translated into more languages than any poet of America. His 
 works were admirably rendered into French by Charles Baude- 
 laire, himself an adorer of 
 
 The love whom I shall never meet, 
 The land where I shall never be. 
 
 Poe died in 1849 ; legends of his life are many and negligible. 
 He is a poet who has not much honour in his own country, or 
 who, at least, has more honour in countries not his own. To call 
 him a great poet is impossible, but he is a haunting poet. His 
 prose stories were dismissed as " Hawthorne and delirium 
 tremens " by a great Enghsh critic, but really his horrors are care- 
 fully designed and elaborated works, polished ad unguem ; rather 
 cold than frenzied, — -witness "The Cask of Amontillado". 
 
 Critics, and many readers, have a passion for " classing " 
 poets, as if they were in an examination. We cannot call Poe great, 
 for poetry deals with life, with action, with passion, with duty, and 
 with the whole of the great spectacle of Nature. To the Muse of 
 Poe these things are indifferent ; but to the singing of the dreams 
 with which he dwells he brings such originality of tone and touch 
 as is rare indeed in the poetry of any people. As a critic, too, he 
 is a pioneer of the school of I' art pour Part, of art for art's sake — 
 a school distinctly decadent, and therefore in modern Europe he, 
 rather than Aristotle, is hailed as a prince of critics. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803) was born at Boston of what 
 the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table liked to call " the Brahmin 
 caste " ; that is the educated clerical class, ministers from father to 
 
 37* 
 
580 English Literature 
 
 son. A similar class existed in Scotland after the Reformation. ^ 
 Preaching was in the blood of these gentlemen of Boston. 
 Emerson, after breaking away from Unitarianism in a singular 
 sermon at Boston (1832), continued to preach, when he could find 
 an audience, and then betook himself to lecturing, first on scientific 
 subjects, and next on literature and things in general. In 1837 
 he delivered to the <1> B K Society at Harvard a lecture on " The 
 American Scholar ". He said : " Mr. President and Gentlemen, 
 This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all 
 motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American 
 Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of 
 Europe ". Indeed Ticknor, Longfellow, and Lowell successively 
 held a Chair founded for the precise purpose of listening to the 
 courtly Muses of mediaeval and modern Europe. But the Ameri- 
 can scholar, it seems, was to listen neither to them nor to Homer, 
 Virgil, and Horace, nor even to Isaiah, who was much about an 
 Asiatic Court. Walt Whitman must be the typical American 
 scholar, from the point of view of Emerson. 
 
 The position of Emerson, as poet and essayist, is matter of 
 controversy among the learned of his own country. In a poem 
 styled " Nature,'' Emerson writes : — 
 
 She is gamesome and good 
 But of mutable mood, — 
 No dreary repeater now and again, 
 She will be all things to all men, 
 She who is old but nowise feeble 
 Pours her power into the people. 
 
 As to his prose. Prof. Barrett Wendell of Harvard writes : 
 " The Essays are generally composed of materials which he col- 
 lected for purposes of lecturing. ... He would constantly make 
 note of any idea which occurred to him ; and when he wished to 
 give a lecture he would huddle together as many of those notes as 
 would fill the assigned time, trusting with all the calm assurance 
 of his unfaltering individualism that the truth inherent in the 
 separate memoranda would give them all together the unity 
 
 'The Simpsons produced ministers in every generation from 1560 to 
 1730, when one of them fell into heresy. 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 581 
 
 implied in the fact of their common sincerity. . . . The fact that 
 these essays were so often delivered as lectures should remind us 
 of what they really are. . . . Emerson's essays, in short, prove to 
 be an obvious development from the endless sermons with which 
 for generations his ancestors had regaled the New England 
 fathers." 
 
 Professor Trent of Columbia University asks : " Shall we 
 not follow Emerson's own lead, and call him frankly a great 
 poet, basing the title on these and similar essays " (" Circles " 
 and " The Oversoul ") " and on the somewhat scanty but 
 still important mass of his compositions in authentic poetic 
 form '' — of which a poor specimen has just been given. Some 
 of Emerson's fellow -citizens. Professor Trent says, answer his 
 question in the affirmative. Emerson, on the strength of 
 his prose and verse, is " a great poet ". " Others equally 
 cultivated maintain that many of his poems are only versi- 
 fied versions of his essays, and declare that save in rare 
 passages he is deficient in passion, in sensuousness, in simplicity 
 ..." while Mr. Trent, speaking for himself, says that Emerson 
 " is prone to jargon, to bathos, to lapses of taste ". Mr. Matthew 
 Arnold, and Charles Baudelaire, agreed with the second and less 
 favourable party of American critics. Baudelaire's remarks were 
 intemperate in style, but Mr. Trent thinks that, "it seems as if 
 the time had come for Emerson's countrymen frankly to accept 
 the verdict " of Matthew Arnold, that Emerson's prose " was not of 
 sufficient merit to entitle him to be ranked as a great man of 
 letters ". 
 
 It does not become an alien to interfere in this unsettled con- 
 troversy. In literary criticism of modern English poetry Emerson 
 said that Pope " wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake ". 
 Walter Scott " wrote a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland," 
 Wordsworth had the merit of being " conscientious," Byron was 
 " passional," Tennyson " factitious ". 
 
 It is, of course, impossible here to discuss Emerson as a 
 philosopher. He is spoken of as an Idealist, but he seems to lean 
 a little to Pragmatism. "The advantage of the ideal theory over 
 the popular theory is this, that it presents the world in precisely 
 
582 English Literature 
 
 that view which is most desirable to the mind." To whose mind ? 
 Emerson visited England twice ; after the second tour he wrote 
 " English Traits ". Dickens had done, regrettably, the same 
 sort of work in "American Notes," and " Martin Chuzzlewit ". 
 Authors on each side of the Atlantic took the advice of the elder 
 Mr. Weller, and abused the countries and peoples that they 
 visited, Emerson hitting the darker blots in our society. He 
 had an influence, mainly over young men, in both countries, 
 scarcely inferior to that of Carlyle ; but left nothing so massive 
 and concrete as Carlyle's "Frederick," "Cromwell," and "The 
 French Revolution " Having quoted from Professor Barrett 
 Wendell passages which ieave rather a mournful impression, we 
 must add that, in his opinion, Emerson's work "surely seems alive 
 with such unconditioned freedom of temper as makes great litera- 
 ture so inevitably lasting". Professor Trent, while confessing 
 " that true poetic glow and flow are almost entirely absent from 
 Emerson's verses, and that his ever-recurring and often faulty 
 octosyllabic couplets soon become wearisome," declines to rank 
 him with Tennyson, Shelley, or Longfellow, and ends ; " But to 
 Americans, at least, Emerson is an important poet, whose best 
 work seems likely to gain rather than to lose value ". 
 
 James Russell Lowell. 
 
 The poetic qualities of Whittier and of James Russell Lowell 
 (1819-1891) are pleasantly indicated in Mr. Lowell's sonnet to 
 Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday.^ 
 
 Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of 
 his anti-slavery Tyrtsean verse, while the poet betrays his own 
 affection for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, 
 " The Song of Roland ". 
 
 The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as differ- 
 ent as possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like 
 Holmes, Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily 
 cultivated class of New England, clergymen from generation to 
 generation. He was born at his father's place, Elmwood, near 
 
 'Vol. IV, p. 134, "To Whittier". 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 583 
 
 Cambridge, was educated at Harvard, lived there, as Matthew 
 Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it had been a great country 
 house,'' was sent down, for some frolic, to Concord, where he met 
 the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher and Carlyle in 
 rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the undergraduate. 
 Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance, was, 
 though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a " foreigner ". 
 He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, 
 and wrote prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began 
 the first set of " The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American 
 politics as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird 
 o' Freedom Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, 
 he was supreme from the first. In 1848, he produced " A Fable for 
 Critics " ; the idea may have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed 
 and bantering criticism of contemporary minstrels, in his " Session 
 of the Poets". The rhymes in "The Festival of the Poets" are 
 more than Hudibrastic ; the measure is anapaestic. It is the work 
 of a young man who is amusing himself in a crowd of scribblers, 
 each claiming to be " the American Scott," " the American 
 Dante," and so forth. Even the illustrious Cheever finds a place ; 
 Cheever, who, at all events, mastered the metre of Swinburne's 
 " Dolores," and invented sonorous words, when the poverty of our 
 language provided nothing of adequate magnificence. Of Emerson 
 
 His 'prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows, 
 Is some of it pr — ; no, it's not even prose. 
 
 All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got, 
 To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what. 
 
 As for Bryant, somebody 
 
 Calls B. the American Wordsworth ; but Wordsworth 
 May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth, 
 
 cries this patriot. 
 
 Whittier's manliness is applauded, 
 
 But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes, 
 And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes. 
 
 Concerning Poe, 
 
 Three-fifths of him's genius and two-fifths sheer fudge, 
 
584 English Literature 
 
 which is perfectly true, but where, except in Poe and Hawthorne, 
 was the man with even two-fifths of genius ? That Theocritus, 
 were he living, "would scarce change a line" in the hexameters 
 of Longfellow's " Evangeline," is a criticism dictated by friendship. 
 The mere name of " The Vision of Sir Launfal " suggests the in- 
 fluence of Tennyson. The verse, however, is not imitative ; the 
 moral is excellent, and "American children," we learn, have been 
 set to studying "Sir Launfal" in annotated editions, perhaps a 
 pathetic illustration of what may be called " the patriotic fallacy 
 in matters connected with literature ".^ 
 
 In 1862-1863, the Civil War gave a motive for new "Biglow 
 Papers," which were deservedly popular in England as well as in 
 America. " The Commemoration Ode " has the same origin, in 
 patriotism and resentment of the European attitude. This Ode is 
 perhaps the seal of Mr. Lowell's diploma as a poet ; the third and 
 fifth sections, on the Harvard men who fell in battle, are swift, 
 sonorous, and inspiring. When the poet exclaims, " Tell us not 
 of Plantagenets," the critic can only murmur that he had no notion 
 of telling of persons like Richard Cceur de Lion, " whose thin blood 
 crawls ". "'Tis with Lincoln, not with Richard, that the poem has 
 to do," Bret Harte might have said. Indeed the Ode is too long. 
 The ode " Under the Old Elm," practically an ode to Washington, 
 is dignified, and of historic interest ; perhaps no other poet has more 
 worthily celebrated "that unblemished gentleman," the national 
 hero ; and the last section, addressed to Virginia, has a noble dying 
 fall, like the close of the " Iliad ". But not of popular appeal are 
 such lines as these : — 
 
 O for a drop of that Cornelian ink 
 
 Which gave Agricola dateless length of days. 
 
 Here the Professor (who held Longfellow's chair at Harvard) 
 interrupts the poet. The reference is to the brief biography by 
 Tacitus of his father-in-law. 
 
 In 1877 Mr. Lowell went as American Minister to Spain, a 
 country always of high attraction to American men of letters, 
 historians, or poets. From 1880 to 1885 Mr. Lowell represented 
 
 I Professor W. P. Trent 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 585 
 
 his country at the Court of St. James, and won the hearts of all 
 who had the honour of his friendship. As a speaker on many 
 occasions where literature and art were concerned he was without 
 a rival ; in conversation his humour, wit, vast knowledge of men 
 and of books, and his simple spontaneous kindness, endeared him 
 to all. With Tacitus his friends might say, " Quam melius tui 
 meminisse quam cum caeteris versari," — "Memory of him is 
 dearer than life with others ". 
 
 Concerning the mass of Mr. Lowell's shorter poems, many of 
 them occasional, it may, perhaps, be said that few of them stamp 
 themselves on the memory by any strong individuality of thought 
 and cadence, and that he did not take Keats's advice to Shelley, 
 "load every rift with ore ". In a favourite passage opening : — 
 
 And what is so rare as a day in June ? 
 
 Then, if ever, come perfect days ; 
 Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 
 
 And over it softly her warm ear lays, 
 
 the last line has a certain dissonance. His critical essays are of 
 many various degrees of value. In his essay on " Swinburne's 
 Tragedies" (1866, "Chastelard" and "Atalanta") he never 
 seems to perceive the extraordinary and unprecedented merit of 
 the lyrical measures, which are something better than "grace- 
 ful, flowing, and generally simple in sentiment and phrase ". In 
 quite a different field the long essay on "Witchcraft" is rather 
 antiquated, because we now know so much more about the psych- 
 ology of the subject than was known when the essay was written. 
 After philosophizing with Mr. E. B. Tylor on the origin of the 
 belief in spirits, the critic honestly exclaims : " I am puzzled, I 
 confess, to explain the appearance of the first ghost, especially 
 among men who thought death to be the end-all here below ". 
 That is the puzzle, and Lucretius, who is quoted, could not solve 
 it, nor had Mr. Lowell heard of "deferred telepathic impressions". 
 This kind of topic allowed the author to bring in countless illustra- 
 tions from his wide knowledge of all literatures, especially from the 
 early mediaeval French, of which he was a votary before " Aucassin 
 et Nicolete " and the heroic epics and sweet earliest lyrics were 
 appreciated out of France. The essay on Rousseau contains the 
 
586 English Literature 
 
 usual apologies which critics of English blood make for a man of 
 genius whom at heart they do not like, while the criticism of 
 Pope is true and just, but not specially original ; and the paper on 
 Milton (a review of a recent biography and edition) would be 
 better if purged of comments on Professor Masson. The com- 
 ments on Wordsworth are extremely amusing to non-Words- 
 worthians, for the Wordsworthian draws a decent veil over the 
 poet's incredible treatment of " Helen of Kirkconnel ". 
 
 And Bruce (as soon as he had slain 
 The Gordon), sailed away to Spain, 
 And fought with rage incessant. 
 Against the Moorish crescent, 
 
 using, no doubt, the javelin with which he had pinked Lochinvar. 
 " In ' The Excursion ' we are driven to the subterfuge of a 
 French verdict of extenuating circumstances." It is not that Mr. 
 Lowell judged Wordsworth by his feet of clay, but having once 
 observed the absurdities of the bard of Rydal he did not know 
 where to stop in treating a theme so diverting. To Dunbar he 
 was absolutely ruthless : " whoso is national enough to like 
 thistles may browse there to his heart's content ". " I would 
 rather have written that half stanza of Longfellow's in ' The 
 Wreck of the Hesperus,' of ' the billow that swept her crew like 
 icicles from her deck ' than all Gawain Douglas's tedious enumera- 
 tion of meteorological phenomena put together." Mr. Lowell was 
 not a Scot, and was an attached friend of Professor Longfellow, 
 whose half stanza is not of ravishing merit. This raid across 
 the Border is made in an essay on Spenser, wherein Nash is said 
 "to have far better claims than Swift to be called the English 
 Rabelais ". This is extremely severe on Rabelais ! The undying 
 youth of Mr. Lowell as of Matthew Arnold, may bear the blame 
 of such freaks as theirs in criticism. Shelley's letters are not 
 really of more merit than his lyrics, nor, if we are to call any one 
 an English Rabelais, is Nash more worthy of the compliment than 
 the author of " Gulliver " ! 
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was the son of the Rev. Thomas 
 Arnold, the famous Head Master of Rugby, and author of a 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 587 
 
 History of Rome. At Rugby and Balliol he gained the prize- 
 poems ; he was a Fellow of Oriel, where he did not reside long, 
 marrying and becoming an Inspector of Schools in 1851. Melan- 
 choly as much of his poetry seems, he was known to his friends as 
 " Glorious Mat," and, in his own words, he and his brother Thomas 
 hved in Balliol as in a large country house. He was a great walker 
 in Wordsworth's country and a keen trout-fisher. His first verses, 
 signed A, "The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems,'' appeared in 
 a slim volume in 1849; they have nothing of the amateur, and 
 possess a note of their own, though the influence of Wordsworth 
 is discernible. " He is the man for me," Arnold might have said, 
 as Boileau did of Molifere. Arnold did not think Tennyson un 
 esprit puissant ; indeed Wordsworth was the last of our poets 
 whom he greatly admired, though he placed Byron (for other than 
 Wordsworth's qualities) on the same eminence ; and preferred 
 Shelley's letters to his lyrics. Such were what most amateurs think 
 the freaks of Arnold as a critic. 
 
 Of the play, or masque, or whatever it should be called, " Em- 
 pedocles on Etna," his taste later rejected all but a few glorious 
 passages ; but again he relented, and admitted " Empedocles " 
 within the canon of his works. He put forth a new volume of 
 verse in 1855 ; " Merope," an imitation of the Greek tragedy, not 
 of much merit, in 1858, and "New Poems" in 1867. The pre- 
 faces to " Empedocles '' and " Merope " are good examples of his 
 more sober style of criticism. Like his own Apollo he is " young 
 but intolerably severe," and, like Milton, he freely used, as in 
 "The Strayed Reveller,'' verse in short unrhymed measures. 
 Though these are distasteful to some critics, others, in Arnold's 
 and Milton's employment of them, find grace and harmony so de- 
 lightful that they do not regret the absence of rhyme. Arnold's 
 rhymed verse is in simple old-fashioned forms, in lyrics and in the 
 beautiful stanzas of two of his most beautiful poems, where ma- 
 jesty and sweetness meet, "The Scholar Gipsy," and "Thyrsis," 
 an elegy on A. H. Clough, the friend of his Oxford days. 
 
 Never has the scenery around Oxford been so nobly cele- 
 brated; he makes classical "the stripling Thames," "Bablock 
 Hythe," "the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills," "the Fyfield 
 
588 English Literature 
 
 tree," all the landscape through which Shelley wandered and left 
 unsung. Thus Arnold has for Oxford men the same charm as 
 Scott for Borderers ; he is their own poet ; and the pieces called 
 " Switzerland " seem to recall a long vacation in the Alps. They 
 are full of beauty in the descriptions of Nature and of Marguerite, a 
 daughter of France, who seems to have inherited the charm of 
 Manon Lescaut in the famous novel of the Abb6 Prevost. For 
 the rest, Arnold did not pen, or did not publish, sonnets to his 
 mistress's eyebrow, and his lyrics reveal no more of his personality 
 than his love of natural beauty, his delight in Nature, and a melan- 
 choly not unconnected with instability of religious belief; as in 
 the flux and reflux of the sonorous lines in " Dover Beach," and 
 "Yes, in the sea of life enisled". There are moments in youth 
 (perhaps confined to Oxonians) when the grave charm of Arnold 
 (as in the verses in the conclusion of " Sohrab and Rustum ") seems 
 the pearl highest of price in modern poetry. But in narrative, even 
 in "Sohrab and Rustum" with its Homeric similes, still more in 
 the narrative of " Tristram and Iseult," Arnold does not shine, and 
 in " Merope " he certainly does not overstimulate. His " Forsaken 
 Merman " is perhaps most admired by readers who are least de- 
 lighted with the mass of his best poems, and least appreciative of 
 " Requiescat,'' which is a worthy mate of the noblest "swallow 
 flights of song " in the Greek Anthology, as hopeless and as beauti- 
 ful as they. In his genius there was something Greek ; there was 
 nothing of frenzy and false excitement. 
 
 Arnold's criticism cannot always be termed " unaffected," and 
 his manner and tone varied with the nature of the subject which 
 he was discussing. It must be admitted that he "was not always 
 wholly serious," and his banter, his " educated insolence " as Aris- 
 totle says, was apt rather to provoke than to convert people who 
 differed from him, as to education, politics, social problems, or 
 literature. But he had an unsurpassed skill in provoking discus- 
 sion, and the public, which for long did not read him, became ac- 
 quainted with his name, and his views through the newspapers. 
 It is said that a meeting of persons connected with the Income 
 Tax complained to him that his returns of his literary gains did 
 not correspond with his immense literary reputation. He then, 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 589 
 
 with his habitual urbanity, catechized his catechizers. Had any 
 one of them ever bought or read a book of his ? Not one could 
 answer in the affirmative; "So there, you see," he remarlced. 
 
 His " Lectures on Translating Homer," delivered at Oxford 
 when he was Professor of Poetry (1857-1867) are not only admir- 
 able expositions of Homeric art, and " the grand style," but rich 
 in his peculiar vein of lofty irony and academic "chaflf" — of a 
 translator who did the " Iliad " into the metre of " Yankee Doodle ". 
 He advocated the use of English hexameters — which, indeed, would 
 be excellent, if any one could write readable hexameters. His 
 "Essays in Criticism'' (1865) pleaded vainly for an Academy on 
 the French model, for " ideas," and for culture, a term caught at 
 and misapplied by feebler folk. His remarks on two unessen- 
 tial French writers illustrated his inability to appreciate the poetry 
 as compared with the prose of France. He conceived, however, 
 " of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual 
 purposes, one great confederation . . . whose members have a 
 due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, 
 and of one another ". He had the knowledge, though appreciation 
 did not always accompany it, while the French, he com- 
 plained, were almost wholly ignorant of his favourite Words- 
 worth. Yet, much as he rejoiced in Wordsworth's " criticism 
 of life" (a favourite phrase), he admitted that, save in 1 798-1808, 
 the poet was devoid of inspiration, though "a great and 
 powerful body of work remains,'' when the dross is cleared 
 away. Generally, Arnold had a trick of taking a single line or 
 two, perhaps of the worst, from a poet, using this inferior brick 
 as a sample of the building, and contrasting it with specimens 
 superlatively excellent from poets whom he wanted to extol. 
 Thus he contrasted Theophile Gautier with Wordsworth, taking 
 Theo as an inn on the road, and Wordsworth as a home eternal 
 in the heavens. But surely we may tarry at an inn on our way 
 and enjoy ourselves, though perhaps only one human being has 
 seriously exclaimed : "I place Theophile only after Shakespeare ". 
 In this case the trick of setting a verse from Gautier beside a 
 verse from Wordsworth was not played. After the appreciation 
 of Wordsworth it is curious to find Arnold speaking of Moli^re 
 
590 English Literature 
 
 as "altogether a larger and more splendid luminary in the 
 poetical heaven " than the Bard of Rydal, because the two 
 authors are not in any way comparable with each other. The 
 " high seriousness " in which Wordsworth is pre-eminent was 
 indeed familiar to the comic author called " le Cont^mplateur," 
 but the nature of his art did not permit him to hint at the exist- 
 ence of this quality, except in irony ; while Lucretius, not, as in 
 Wordsworth's case, Plato, was his favourite philosopher. 
 
 Arnold's eager curiosity led him into fields of which he had 
 no first-hand knowledge, as in his delightful book on " The Study 
 of Celtic Literature ". We cannot assign all " natural magic " in 
 poetry to the Celtic strain of blood in the population, and the 
 peculiar wistfulness of old Gaelic and Welsh poetry may be found in 
 Greek, Finnish, and even savage poetry. Though the book led 
 others into much senseless writing, it is in itself full of revelations 
 of beauty. Arnold was no Orientalist, and had no special know- 
 ledge of New Testament Greek, nor of the comparative study 
 of religions. These defects, with surprising errors in taste, pre- 
 vent his " St. Paul and Protestantism," " God and the Bible," and 
 " Literature and Dogma " from reaching a high level in their way. 
 But Arnold wrote beautiful prose, and wrote with that high sense 
 of critical superiority which was his own, as it had been Dryden's. 
 Both occasionally surprise, or even shock, by their idiosyncrasies, 
 as do Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt ; but they all delight and excite 
 and instruct. 
 
 GENERAL WRITERS. 
 
 To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corre- 
 sponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, 
 justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a 
 rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred 
 among books and works of art, and, without attending any public 
 school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He 
 won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first 
 volume of his " Modern Painters ". His primary object was to 
 assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a compara- 
 tive study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the in- 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 591 
 
 tellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in 
 which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe 
 Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the develop- 
 ment of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of " the meanest 
 flower that blows ". He drew excellently, and many of the 
 copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His 
 own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different 
 times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as 
 highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect 
 of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting 
 and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed 
 himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but 
 his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to 
 himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections 
 were with les primitifs, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, 
 before the Revival of learning, before Raphael ; and he was 
 actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. " The Seven Lamps 
 of Architecture " (1849) and " The Stones of Venice '' (1852) con- 
 tinued the teaching of " Modern Painters ". In his " Academy 
 Notes " his attitude was thus described by a painter in " Punch ". 
 
 I sits and paints, 
 Hears no complaints, 
 
 I sells before I'm dry ; 
 Comes savage Ruskin, 
 Puts his tusk in — 
 
 And nobody will buy. 
 
 Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphael- 
 ite Brotherhood, including Rossetti — whom he knew well, and 
 bought from gladly — Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less cele- 
 brated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward 
 Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, 
 often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern 
 life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long 
 been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist,'' and the libel 
 action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appeal- 
 ing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one 
 farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial 
 
592 English Literature 
 
 mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in " Unto This Last " have had 
 infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his aes- 
 thetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the 
 highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. 
 There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, 
 whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money 
 that he lavishly bestowed. In the 'sixties and later he produced 
 many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all 
 things from personal confessions to social problems : he was Slade 
 Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, 
 and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came 
 out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, 
 that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great 
 Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over 
 Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is 
 visible 1 In " Fors " Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affec- 
 tion about Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his com- 
 plicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a 
 vision of " the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his 
 work with eccentricity ; and he sought retirement near Coniston 
 Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn. 
 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread, 
 
 of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people 
 participators, for while others had written on art, none had done 
 so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and 
 magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as 
 often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according 
 to R. L, Stevenson, an eruption of blank verse into prose is a 
 symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swin- 
 burne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read : — 
 
 Behind him and beneath we see. . . . 
 The Hazlitts prattling at his heel, 
 The Dyces labouring in his wake. 
 
 Two Other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) 
 and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent 
 
Poets after Wordsworth 593 
 
 that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted 
 to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. 
 Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, 
 but somewhat Corinthian ; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of 
 hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in 
 which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Sy- 
 monds sufflaminandus erat ; in his "History of the Renaissance 
 in Italy " he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning 
 and enthusiasm within its banks ; while an impatient reader might 
 demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement 
 in'the style of Pater. His first volume, " Studies in the History of 
 the Renaissance " (1873), brought to young readers the same kind 
 of pleasant surprise as "The Defence ofGuenevere" or " Atalanta 
 in Calydon ". The essay on Coleridge, and the " little poem in 
 prose " on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models 
 of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the 
 author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged 
 perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, 
 without ceasing " still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his re- 
 flective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in 
 which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense 
 of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The 
 book, like " Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for 
 the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, 
 and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the 
 pictures of the manners of the age. " Plato and Platonism " is a 
 valuable study, and " Imaginary Portraits " shows more imagina- 
 tion in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which 
 he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was priciosite, 
 over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase. 
 
 38 
 
CHAPTER XXXV. 
 LATE VICTORIAN POETS. 
 
 Edward FitzGerald. 
 
 Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883), a contemporary at Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, of Thackeray and Tennyson, was in later life 
 the friend of both. Though he vehemently admired Tennyson's 
 poems up to 1842, he never was quite contented with them later; 
 yet detested all the work of both of the Brownings, as if jealous 
 of the supremacy of his friend. He was, indeed, a humorous 
 person, and a person "of humours," in Ben Jonson's sense of the 
 word. He was a great reader, a delicate and sound critic, where 
 prejudice did not interfere ; a most interesting letter-writer ; and, 
 for the rest, passed away his life with his books, his garden, his 
 boat, and his pipe. Nothing of the little that he wrote, for 
 example, translations from ^Eschylus and Calderon, reached the 
 public, nor for long did his very free version of quatrains in the 
 Persian, attributed to Omar Khayyam, an astronomer. It is im- 
 possible here to discuss how many of these quatrains are really by 
 Omar, how many are masterless verses assigned to him by tradition, 
 and how much of the merit of the " Rubaiykt " is due to FitzGerald. 
 But it is hardly too bold to say that but for the new music and 
 melancholy of FitzGerald's verse, but for FitzGerald's own contri- 
 bution of a sad and humorous stoicism under an Epicurean wash 
 of colour, Omar and his company would never have been known 
 to the general English reader. The slim pamphlet of the 
 "Rubaiykt" (1859) was "a drug in the market" till the set of 
 Rossetti and Swinburne discovered it and talked about it. Then 
 a wider circle of young University men made it an idol ; to adore 
 
 594 
 
Late Victorian Poets 595 
 
 it was a sign of grace ; and, in the long run, to admire Omar and 
 the old French tale of " Aucassin et Nicolete " became a substi- 
 tute for a liberal education. It was no longer necessary to have 
 read anything else. It was not FitzGerald's fault that the saying 
 of the Alexandrian Philistine in Theocritus, " Homer is enough 
 for all," became "Omar is enough for all". But, though idolised 
 by the worst judges, FitzGerald's little masterpiece remains a very 
 original and, in Wordsworth's phrase, " a very pretty piece of 
 paganism ". His letters are probably the best and most interest- 
 ing ©f any letters much concerned with literature that have been 
 published since those of Byron. 
 
 George Meredith. 
 
 As a poet, Meredith attained, when he chose (and he often 
 did choose) to a pitch of obscurity no less deserving of admira- 
 tion, and of interpretative commentaries, than the darkest verses 
 of Browning. He did not begin in this manner ; his early verses, 
 such as "Juggling Jerry," "The Old Chartist," "Marian," "Love 
 in the Valley," have the charm of being fresh, natural, and easily 
 readable by him who runs ; while, like most of Meredith's 
 verses, they are the poetry of a lover of the Earth, with all that 
 she bears and nourishes. Many poems read like hymns to Earth 
 by an Earth-intoxicated pagan. But " Modern Love '' — a long 
 sequence of pieces of sixteen lines, which exceed the sonnet in length 
 without possessing its answering and echoing rhymes — contains 
 a story, and a sad story, of the pangs of two wedded lovers. What 
 that story is, perhaps some commentator has told in prose ; if not, 
 the poet needs such a commentary. The preluding sonnet to 
 " Modern Love " may contain the secret, it closes thus : — 
 
 But listen in the thought ; so may there come 
 Conception of a newly added chord, 
 Commanding space beyond where ear has home. 
 In labour of the trouble at its fount, ' 
 Leads Life to an intelligible Lord 
 The rebel discords up the sacred Mount. 
 
 We "listen in the thought," but conception of a newly added 
 chord does not readily arrive, not where ear has home at all events, 
 
 38* 
 
596 English Literature 
 
 and nothing leads us to an intelligible Lord, if that means an in- 
 telligible poet. Persons cultivated enough to love English poetry 
 more obscure than an " unseen " piece of Pindar, find fnuch matter 
 in verses like these. 
 
 The two lovers, married apparently, in " Modern Love," are 
 " condemned to do the flitting of the bat," but, in the dark, we 
 lose sight of them, and can only admire luminous breaks of two 
 or three lines here and there, glow-worms in the darkness of the 
 grass. The mystery of Byron's "Manfred," reckoned fine in its 
 day, the new poet explains as " an after dinner's indigest ''. Byron, 
 no doubt, could have said something not less witty about " The 
 Nuptials of Attila ". 
 
 Meredith's manner, in short, " is not of the centre ". Great 
 poets rarely conceal their meaning like hidden wealth ; he who 
 does so, values too cheaply the leisure of the reader, or values too 
 highly the reader's industry and ingenuity. 
 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 Elizabeth Barrett, later the wife of the poet Robert Browning, 
 was born on 6 March, 1806 (died in 1861). Her father was a 
 man of considerable wealth and eccentricity ; at least he appears 
 to have resented almost as much as Queen Elizabeth the idea of 
 any one marrying. His daughter had a good education, some 
 knowledge of Greek, and wrote verse early. In several of her 
 most pleasing verses, such as " Little Ellie, " and "Hector in the 
 Garden," we hear echoes of the memories of her childhood. She 
 translated from the Greek, and also wrote a kind of romantic ballads 
 (not in the manner of the Border ballads) which had abundant life 
 and movement. She took up the cause of children overworked 
 in factories at an age when they should not have worked at all. 
 Her health became deplorable, her life that of a valetudinarian, 
 till, in 1846, Robert Browning married her and took her out of 
 her father's sphere of influence. Thenceforth her health improved ; 
 at this time her fame and popularity as a poet of great variety and 
 passion far exceeded those of the author of " Men and Women ". 
 Her sonnets, really original, though published as " From the Por- 
 tuguese," were not so popular as her lyrics and romances, but her 
 
Late Victorian Poets 597 
 
 genius, somewhat too eager and careless, especially in her reck- 
 lessness of correct rhymes, was in need of the formal restraints of 
 the sonnet. Her " Casa Guidi Windows " (185 1) and other poems 
 displayed her enthusiasm for a free and united Italy ; her " Aurora 
 Leigh," a tendens novel in verse, attracted much attention, if it 
 does not bear the test of time so well as her briefer poems ; her 
 " Poems before Congress " were of somewhat temporary interest. 
 Mrs. Browning, with Miss Rossetti, holds the highest place among 
 the women-poets of England, but her Muse is neither trimly 
 girdled nor neatly shod ; and her manner not infrequently does 
 injustice to the pity and passion of her sympathies, conceptions, 
 and emotions. 
 
 Christina Rossetti. 
 
 Christina Rossetti (1830- 1894) as a poet resembled her 
 brother as much as a woman who lived a somewhat fugitive and 
 cloistered life, practising the rites of her religion and in the exer- 
 cise of good works, could resemble an artist so unapt for self-con- 
 trol as Dante Rossetti. Both felt the same half-exotic influences 
 of a family half-Italian ; both shared the same early enthusiasm 
 for mediaeval art, and there is a certain sameness in the colour 
 and harmonies of their verse and in their use of words. In 1862 
 Miss Rossetti published, in brief, irregular rhymed lines, "Gob- 
 lin Market," a tale of the affection of sisters dwelling in a rural 
 England that marches with a country of fantastic malevolent 
 elves, a species of fairy of her own invention. The whole effect is 
 magical yet moral " which is strange,'' and the moral is not strained 
 or didactic, but natural, and a great part of the charm of this de- 
 lightful composition; " The Prince's Progress," in the same way, is 
 suggested by the beautiful tale of "The Black Bull of Norroway," 
 but the suggestion is remote and the bewitched Prince comes too 
 late to his bride. The best lyrics of the author are singularly 
 musical with an anticipation of some of Swinburne's effects, as in 
 " Dreamland ". 
 
 She left the rosy morn, 
 
 She left the fields of corn, 
 
 For twilight lone and lorn 
 And water springs. 
 
598 English Literature 
 
 Through sleep as through a veil, 
 She sees the sky look pale, 
 And hears the nightingale 
 That sadly sings. 
 
 "When I am dead, my dearest," is not less musical and 
 melancholy. Many of the sacred poems have great sincerity as 
 well as original beauty of form ; and some of th^se, with some of 
 the sonnets, half reveal the sorrow of a life and its religious con- 
 solations, — see the sequence of sonnets styled " Monna Innomi- 
 nata " and " Later Life ". She is, indeed, a true poet of the inner 
 life and of nature. To institute comparisons between her and 
 Mrs. Browning is apt to cause injustice to either or to both. 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
 While Tennyson was in the mid-flush of his fame, there arose 
 a school, in poetry and pictorial art, which, like him, turned to the 
 Middle Ages for subjects and inspiration, but also reverted to the 
 ideals of the great Italian painters who were before Raphael. The 
 leader and the eldest of the little Brotherhood was Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, son of Gabriel Rossetti, a devout interpreter of Dante, 
 and of his wife, a Miss Polidori, a kinswoman of Byron's strange 
 and ill-fated young Italian physician. Dante was born in 1828, 
 from his earliest days wrote verses and drew, and, after passing 
 through King's College School, became a student of art, and a 
 painter whose colour was undoubtedly excellent, while his subjects 
 were chosen from religion and romance ; his portraits being in a 
 high degree romantic, and his mannerisms tending towards the 
 monotonous. They were the paintings of a poet, and his poetry 
 is that of a painter.* While some of his poetry,' like "The Blessed 
 Damozel," his most characteristic piece, appeared early in " The 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine " (1856) and " The Germ," he 
 published no book before 1861, when his translations from the early 
 Italian poets gave evidence that, as a translator, he was unique and 
 unapproached. Bizarre circumstances, connected with his grief for 
 the death of his wife, delayed the appearance of his collected son- 
 nets and other verses till 1870, when the work excited enthusiasm 
 among all who desired some new thing in poetry ; while certain 
 
Late Victorian Poets 599 
 
 mannerisms of slight importance spoiled the pleasure of others, 
 and the choice of themes in two or three cases offended the pre- 
 cise. Indeed, the sonnet has no wide popular appeal, and the se- 
 quence styled "The House of Life," with its kind of mysticism 
 proved nearly as puzzling, in another way, as the sonnets of 
 Shakespeare. The pictorial and visionary beauty and the novel 
 harmonies of the verse, could not but be admired. The ballads 
 were too artificial for the ballad form, which is nothing if not 
 simple, though the ballads also have Rossetti's special note and 
 impress, his colour, passion, mystery, and romance. Rossetti, 
 after many years, vexed by insomnia and by sleepy drugs, died 
 in 1882. It is not easy to say whether he was fortunate or un- 
 fortunate in that the newness of his manner had been to some 
 extent anticipated, through the delay of his own poems, by the 
 not dissimilar newness of his sister Christina, and of Swinburne. 
 Their works made some aspects of his manner seem not so new, 
 and at the same time not so likely to deter by entire unfamiliarity 
 of tone. 
 
 William Morris. 
 
 A younger associate of Rossetti was William Morris, educated 
 at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. His Muse was 
 " pre-Raphaelite " and mediaeval in his early prose stories in " The 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine " (1856), and his later fictions, in 
 the same archaic and fantastic manner (there were seven of them 
 between 1889 and 1898), never could wholly recapture the magic 
 of " The Hollow Land " of his undergraduate days. It is even 
 the author's opinion that Morris never, in his voluminous later 
 poetry, reached the same level of original effect as in several 
 poems in his "Defence of Guenevere," published when his age 
 was 24, in 1858. This opinion can scarcely be the result of 
 " ossification of the intellect," which seldom sets in when 
 the critic is an undergraduate, and is eagerly expecting a new 
 poem from a favourite author. That poem, " The Life and 
 Death of Jason" (1867), was, to some devotees of "The De- 
 fence of Guenevere," a disappointment. The vigour and 
 melancholy of "The Haystack in the Floods," and "Sir Peter 
 
6oo English Literature 
 
 Harpdon's End," and "The Sailing of the Sword," and the un- 
 analysable magic of " The Blue Closet " and " The Wind," were not 
 in " Jason," and could not be, and never will be anywhere again. 
 In the earlier book the young poet had caught a rare element in 
 mediaeval romance and song, a vague but poignant sense of colour 
 and yearning and mystery, not to be defined in prose, and 
 scarcely, except perhaps in " Sir Galahad,'' apprehended by 
 Tennyson. We were carried again into such chambers as that 
 wherein — 
 
 Beside the bed there was a stone 
 Corpus Ckristi written thereon ; 
 
 or we were brought face to face with some forgotten tragedy of 
 the Hundred Years' War, and saw the true lovers and the parting 
 that they had beside the haystack in the floods, such dull grey 
 floods in a dull green land as Shelley saw in fact, and recognized 
 with terror that he had seen before — in vision. 
 
 The new poem, " Jason," retold, with an approach to 
 Chaucer's manner in versification and in mediaeval tone, the 
 immortal pre-Homeric story of the adventure of the Fleece of 
 Gold. The poem, in rhymed decasyllabic couplets, with songs 
 interspersed, should be compared with the ancient poems on the 
 subject, especially with the " Argonautica " of Apollonius Rhodius. 
 Morris had succeeded in telling of the love of Medea and the ad- 
 ventures of the heroes, in the tone of romance, with abundant 
 fluency, distinctness, and distinction. He had already in 
 hand many of the tales in " that ocean of the sea of stories," 
 "The Earthly Paradise" in four volumes (1868-1870). Of the 
 twenty-four tales half are from classical, half from romantic sources. 
 To some readers the opening, the adventure of English voyagers 
 of the time of Edward III., who find the Earthly Paradise, is 
 more congenial, the heroes being men of this world, than the 
 languor which seems to hang over the personages in the tales of 
 Lotusland. The tales are more like work in tapestry than in 
 painting ; the manner tends to monotony ; we need a wind from 
 the wings of the Muse of Homer. Morris called himself " the 
 idle singer of an empty day ". No man was more industrious, not 
 
Late Victorian Poets 60 1 
 
 only in his great poetic task, but in Icelandic studies, — hence the 
 ringing anapaests of his " Sigurd the Volsung " — in study of the 
 arts of the Middle Ages ; in manufacture and sale of objects 
 of household decoration, and of furniture, in glass for church 
 windows, and in printing. Coming into close touch with artisans 
 and labourers, and being more and more impressed by the hide- 
 ousness of their modern conditions of life, and by the contrasted 
 mindless luxury of many of the rich, he founded a social democratic 
 league, tersely described as meant " to blow the guts out of 
 everybody". The beauty and happy aesthetic simplicity of the 
 society which is to follow after this initial process he described in 
 " News from Nowhere," and he chanted for the toilers in " Poems 
 by the Way ". Not for the people, perhaps, in fact for few, he 
 produced translations of the Volsunga Saga, combining the 
 fragments from Icelandic prose and poetry about that glorious 
 tragic fable ; and also rendered the Saga of " Grettir the 
 Strong " and others, into an English of his own, with archaicisms 
 of various ages blended. His verse translation of " Beowulf " 
 is obscure, owing to his effort to find living words in the form of 
 their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. These things, and even the 
 series of his tales, such as " The Story of the Glittering Plain,'' 
 and " The Roots of the Mountains," are delightful to the few but 
 " caviare to the general ". In things aesthetic, literary, and 
 revolutionary, the idle singer of an empty day has been a most 
 active and enduring influence.^ 
 
 It has been said of Morris that he is "the most Homeric "' of 
 English poets. Despite the excellence of his fighting scenes, as 
 in "The Story of Sigurd the Volsung,'' and the interest in the 
 details of the arts and crafts which he shares with Homer, he 
 has neither the strength nor the simplicity nor the speed of the 
 "Iliad" and "Odyssey," nor the delicate power in the drawing 
 of character, nor the unconscious magic of the Achaean " Father 
 of the Rest ". Indeed no English poetry after " Beowulf" is, or 
 in any way could be, Homeric. 
 
 * See his Life by Mr. Mackail and the admirable biographical " Introduc- 
 tions" by his daughter, Miss May Morris, to each volume of the new edition 
 of his Collected Works. Longmans & Co. 
 
6o2 English Literature 
 
 Swinburne. 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, of an old Northumbrian family, 
 which, according to the poet's verses, had suffered in the cause of 
 Mary Stuart and of the last Stuarts, was born in 1837, the eldest 
 son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane Ashburnham. He was 
 educated at Eton, where, as he tells us, Charles Lamb led him to 
 study the early dramatists. When he was aged 12 he com- 
 posed a tragedy in imitation of Cyril Tourneur's works ("The 
 Atheist's Tragedy,'' "The Revenger's Tragedy "), but exceeding 
 greatly their average of rapes and murders. The choice of 
 themes, and of the model, argues unsurpassed precocity — among 
 other things. Many of Swinburne's lyrics 
 
 Sang themselves to him in class time, 
 When idle of hand as of tongue. 
 
 He went up to Balliol, where he took no part whatever in the sports 
 and amusements of the College, and appears to have lived in the 
 society of Mr. T. H. Green (later the critic of Hume, and exponent 
 of Hegel), and of Mr. John Nichol, later Professor of English 
 Literature in the University of Glasgow. Swinburne obtained the 
 Taylor Scholarship in Modern Languages, open to the whole Uni- 
 versity, and like Shelley and Landor, but not for the same sort of 
 reasons, left Oxford without entering the Final Schools. He made 
 the acquaintance at Oxford of Morris, Burne-Jones, and Dante 
 Rossetti, who were painting on the ceiling of the Union the ro- 
 mantic pictures which instantly vanished away owing to some de- 
 fect in the medium employed. Swinburne must already have had 
 an extensive and peculiar knowledge of literature. In his last 
 year as an undergraduate he began his play of " Chastelard," pub- 
 lished in 1865, and he was contributing to " The Spectator" some 
 of his poems including " Faustine ". He must already have been 
 the master of his rapid, ringing, and infinitely varied metres ; his 
 blank verse, taste, and manner were already themselves in his 
 neglected volume of two plays, "The Queen Mother" (Catherine 
 de Medici) and "Rosamund" (Fair Rosamund) (i860), and he 
 had made an intimate study of the manners and absence of morals 
 at the Court of the Valois. He had the cruelty to poison Chicot, 
 
Late Victorian Poets 603 
 
 who, in Dumas, survives immortally. In 1865 appeared "Ata- 
 lanta in Calydon," a small quarto with a decorative white cloth 
 binding. The poem at once swept every young reader off his feet 
 by the wonderfully original and novel metres of the choruses, and by 
 the remarkable beauty of the blank verse, which was entirely inde- 
 pendent of the then reigning influence of Tennyson. Swinburne was 
 indeed an "inventor of harmonies," and if his persons were not 
 strictly Greek, the verdict of youth was that they were something 
 much better 1 The action of the tragedy, the avenging by Althaea 
 of her brothers on their slayer, her son, was more in the Germanic 
 than the Greek taste, so here we had a " Revenger's Tragedy " 
 wholly unlike that of Cyril Tourneur, and dignified by the beauti- 
 ful figure of the maiden Atalanta. 
 
 It is probable that "Atalanta" remains Swinburne's masterpiece 
 in poetry ; but, owing to its classical character, it did not achieve the 
 instantaneous popularity of his " Poems and Ballads " of 1 866. Here 
 was a nest of singing birds of every note, from the sonorous splen- 
 dour of "The Triumph of Time," in a new stanza already employed 
 in " Atalanta," to " The Garden of Proserpine " (in the measure, 
 improved, of Keats's " Some drear-nighted December ") and " The 
 Hymn to Proserpine " with the surge and reflux of its anapaests, and 
 " Dolores " in a measure which Mr. Cheevers, an American poet, 
 had already used, with a poor ha'porth of sense to a monstrous 
 dealofsound. Some of the subjects ("very curious and disgusting") 
 and some of the sentiments (distinctly anticlerical, to state it mildly) 
 were unfavourably criticized, not unnaturally, and the volume was 
 transferred from Mr. Moxon, long the poets' publisher, to Messrs. 
 Chatto & Windus.^ But most of Swinburne's readers, at Oxford 
 at least, were quite indifferent as to the nature of his opinions and 
 sentiments, which were suspected to be, in Lamb's words, " only 
 his fun". He was staunch to them, however, always, both in 
 prose and poetry ; indeed, whatever be the subject of his prose, he 
 usually gets in hits at the clergy of aU denominations, " The blood 
 on the hands of the King, and the He on the lips of the priest "- 
 
 ' On the back of my copy of the original edition I found three superim- 
 posed paper tickets with three publishers' names, Pickering, Moxon, and 
 Chatto & Windus. 
 
6o4 English Literature 
 
 He also attacks Carlyle, in and out of season, and is severe on a 
 race of reptiles unnamed who haunt his imagination. Meanwhile 
 his " Chastelard " had not the attraction of his lyrics. " Bothwell," 
 the second in the trilogy of Queen Mary, was of excessive length, 
 though the natural limit of a play is almost as much defined as 
 that of a sonnet ; and the last of the trilogy, " Mary Beaton " was 
 rather too daring in contradiction of historic fact. Mistress Beaton 
 was not in love with Chastelard any more than Queen Mary was. 
 She did not vengefuliy pursue her mistress to Fotheringay, but 
 married Ogilvy of Boyne, when Lady Jane Gordon (in love with 
 Ogilvy) married the Earl of Bothwell, who was in love with her, 
 never with the Queen. 
 
 In his poem of farewell to the Queen of Sc ots, Swinburne sang 
 other eyes as "blue," a curious error to make after so many years 
 of study. " Songs before Sunrise " were often of great technical 
 beauty, abounding in the old political enthusiasms and aver- 
 sions; while lovers of poetry almost wished, with all respect, that 
 the applause of Victor Hugo could be " taken as read," with the 
 panegyrics of babies, and the abuse of " Bonaparte the Bastard ". 
 The tragedy " Erechtheus " more closely conformed to the early 
 Greek model than " Atalanta," but the subject was of inferior in- 
 terest, and what FitzGerald, speaking of Tennyson's later poems, 
 called " the old champagney flavour " was, in the choruses, less 
 exhilarating. Narrative was not the poet's forte, he was too 
 ebullient, and neither " Tristram " (in rhymed heroic couplets) 
 nor "Balin and Balan " (in the stanza of "The Lady of 
 Shalott ") was on a level with the early triumphs. Three or four 
 later volumes of verse were marked by the tour deforce of using 
 lines of extraordinary length ; the skill never failed the poet, what 
 failed more and more was the interest of his readers. The genera- 
 tion which first welcomed him had grown grey, it may be said, 
 and cold to new poetry, but it did not appear that the new genera- 
 tion was warmer. In his delight in the sea, tempest, frost and 
 fire, and all meteoric forces and elemental things, Swinburne re- 
 sembled Shelley, but Shelley's music is more spontaneous and 
 of a more natural charm than Swinburne's, who relied so much on 
 "apt alliteration's artful aid," and on double rhymes. His char- 
 
Late Victorian Poets 605 
 
 acters, in play and narrative poetry, do not dwell in the memory 
 like the creations of great tragedians and narrators; they are 
 rather sonorous than sympathetic, more "heroic" than human. 
 Queen Mary and her Maries did not speak in Swinburne's tones, 
 but like women of this world. " Before his fortieth year," Mr. 
 Gosse informs us, " there had set in a curious ossification of Swin- 
 burne's intellect." But this appears merely to mean that he saw 
 no merit in Ibsen, Stevenson, Dostoieffsky. As to Ibsen, it was 
 not likely that he should see any merit ; as to the others, most 
 ageing men rather shun new novelists, there is nothing " curious " 
 in that ; while with his " hostility to Zola " it is easy to sympa- 
 thise. The ossification left him as exuberant as ever in his old 
 tastes, which included all that is best in the literature of the world, 
 and as vehement in the old way on the old themes. But if, by 
 forty, he "had done his do" in Cromwell's phrase, the phenome- 
 non is usual among poets, "ihenewmne is best," with most of 
 them, and perhaps none, save Scott, has ever been able to turn 
 with success to an entirely fresh field. 
 
 As a critic, Swinburne had a transcendent knowledge of litera- 
 ture, and a power of appreciation only rivalled by Charles Lamb ; 
 but whether he loved or hated an author, his language was cer- 
 tainly too violent in praise or dispraise. His essay on Words- 
 worth and Byron, and incidentally on Matthew Arnold, contains 
 many things that are true, and needed to be said, but their truth 
 would not be less apparent if the critic did not speak in the tones 
 of a demoniac, and write sentences longer, and less easily to be 
 construed, than those of Clarendon. Of his prose works the 
 "George Chapman," "Essays and Studies," "Note on Charlotte 
 Bronte," " Study of Shakespeare," and " Miscellanies," may all be 
 read with pleasure, instruction, and gratitude, though here and 
 there with surprise and regret. The vehemence and turbulence 
 appear almost incompatible with the possession of humour, of 
 which, none the less, whether in Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, or 
 the Bab Ballads, Swinburne had a very keen appreciation. Humour 
 was not conspicuous in his book of parodies, "Cap and Bells," and 
 memory recalls no amusing comic relief in his tragedies. But he 
 must have meant to be amusing when he said that "in all things 
 
6o6 English Literature 
 
 he desired to preserve the golden mean of scrupulous modera- 
 tion ". There is somewhat lacking to that remarkable genius of 
 almost the last true English poet ; we can but say " he was born 
 to be so". As English in heart he was as Shakespeare, but a 
 patriot need not have insulted the enemies of his country, especi- 
 ally, in one instance, when they were Republicans. 
 
 One field in which he worked industriously has yet to be men- 
 tioned, his punctual and frequent celebration of the recently dead. 
 Of his many elegies that on Charles Baudelaire is perhaps the 
 best, but it attains not unto " Lycidas," " Adonais," and " Thyrsis ". 
 
 Poetic Underwoods. 
 
 There was, in the age of the great poets of the early nineteenth 
 century, a considerable growth of underwood. Among the more 
 conspicuous plants are Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore. 
 Campbell (177 7- 1844) was born and bred at Glasgow. His first 
 verses, " The Pleasures of Hope," in rhyming heroic couplets, ap- 
 peared in a poetic dearth (1799) ^'^'^ w^^re fair samples of a kind 
 of poetry which was near its death. His " Gertrude of Wyoming " 
 was pathetic (1809), few have even heard of his "Pilgrimage of 
 Glencoe,'' and Campbell lives by short spirited things, " Hohen- 
 linden," "Ye Mariners of England," "Of Nelson and the North," 
 "Lochiel, Lochiel, Beware of the Day,'' and the longer piece 
 which displays the resolution and fortitude of " The Last Man " 
 in a very pleasing light. Campbell lived by ordinary writing, 
 critical and editorial. He was a scrupulous, almost a timid cor- 
 rector of his own verses. A draft for one of his great naval songs, 
 in the library at Abbotsford, is much longer and not nearly so 
 good as the published version. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was 
 a man of wealth, and the friend of men of letters, especially of 
 Byron, through as many generations as Nestor reigned over. His 
 " Italy " (1822) se sauve sur les planches, on the plates by Turner. 
 
 Thomas Moore (1779-1852) had greater intelligence, vivacity, 
 agility, an endearing if trivial lyric note of his own, and plenty of 
 witty banter. His songs were meant to be sung, and were sung 
 to the accompaniment of the piano, or the Harp of Erin. He was 
 born in Dublin, and at 26 translated Anacreon, or the poems 
 
Late Victorian Poets 607 
 
 that were attributed to Anacreon, while his " Poems by Thomas 
 Little '' were more than Anacreontic. A duel with the editor 
 of the " Edinburgh Review," Jeffrey, would have advertised 
 him better if Byron had not spoken of the pistols as leadless ; 
 Byron and he, thereafter, became bosom friends (see Byron's 
 Correspondence, in which he tells whom he has been kissing). As 
 the biographer of the noble poet, Moore's asterisks are not often 
 successful in wrapping the facts in a mystery. By " Irish Mel- 
 odies " (1807) Moore chiefly lives ; "The Twopenny Postbag," 
 being "topical '' and dealing in Whig witticisms, cannot be popu- 
 lar with an age in which few have read " The Rovers,'' " The Loves 
 of the Triangles," and the other classical drolleries of the " Anti- 
 jacobin " (mainly by Ellis, Frere, and Canning). Not to have read 
 these is to be deficient in liberal education. " Lalla Rookh," 
 Oriental stories in verse, was welcomed almost as eagerly as Byron's 
 "Giaour," "Lara," and similar romances of the land of the 
 cypress and myrtle. The "Life of Byron" (1830) was also, 
 though hampered by disputes and the burning of Byron's Me- 
 moirs, a great success, but neither then nor now can a complete 
 view of Byron's life be given. Moore enjoyed his reputation and 
 social opportunities in his own day, but the competition of the 
 great contemporary and of later poets has injured his laurels. 
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849) was at the opposite pole 
 from Moore as a man and a poet. Educated at Charterhouse and 
 Pembroke, Oxford, he made poetry his main object in a lonely 
 and dissatisfied life, always struggling with a chaotic tragedy in 
 the most sombre Elizabethan manner, " Death's Jest Book, or 
 the Fool's Tragedy ". He could not satisfy himself with it ; 
 chaotic it remains, but it contains beautiful passages, and, among 
 other admirable lyrics, he produced — 
 
 If there were Dreams to sell, 
 What would you buy ? 
 
 His letters, though frequently morbid, are often interesting. He 
 died abroad, dubiously sane. What is poetic in the mass of 
 Beddoes's writings is true poetry. 
 
 It is not possible here to do more than mention Thomas Hood 
 (1799-1845) whose abundant animal spirits and puns were, and 
 
6o8 English Literature 
 
 if any one cares to look into his facetious works still are, highly 
 entertaining. His " Plea of the Midsummer Fairies " is in a 
 serious vein, and though it has much charm, it never was ap- 
 preciated. " The Song of the Shirt " and " The Bridge of Sighs '' 
 made for him a name by their pathos. While his character, his 
 fortitude, and irrepressible spirits, not to be subdued by hack-work 
 and misfortune, made him an honour to his profession. 
 
 Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839, Eton and Cambridge) 
 is remembered for his lively and adroit occasional verses, more 
 than for his essay in the grotesque and terrible, " The Red Fisher- 
 man ". Praed was certainly the foremost writer of vers de sociite 
 of his day, though he was not a Gay or a Prior. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 LATEST GEORGIAN AND VICTORIAN NOVELISTS. 
 
 Scott's example and success naturally attracted many writers 
 towards the novel. Byron, Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, and Claire Clair- 
 mont, with Polidori, Byron's physician, all amused themselves with 
 writing romances in the " truly, horrid " style during a period of 
 rainy weather on the Lake of Geneva. Byron's first chapters of a 
 romance of a vampire, with the opening scene, in the desert near 
 Ephesus, are admirable and tantalizing. Completed as heaven 
 pleased by Polidori, the story was popular on the Continent, was 
 made the theme of more than one opera, and was dramatized by 
 Charles Nodier. Mrs. Shelley's " Frankenstein," highly praised by 
 Scott, really is very satisfactorily horrid ; her later novels are for- 
 gotten. 
 
 So far, and also in the three Scottish novels of Miss Susan 
 Ferrier (1782-1854) there was no imitation of Scott, indeed her 
 tale "Marriage" (1818) was published four years after " Waver- 
 ley''. This work, with "Inheritance," and "Destiny," contained 
 humorous studies of Scottish character — of these Miss Pratt is the 
 best remembered. 
 
 John Gait (17 7 9- 183 9) was a man 'of affairs and a prolific 
 general writer, an acquaintance of Byron. The best of his books, 
 " The Annals of the Parish," is very good indeed : the old innocent 
 minister records the humours and sorrows of his flock from year 
 to year, throughout the commercial "awakening of Scotland". 
 Except for the fact that the book deals with Scottish life it is not 
 an imitation of Sir Walter ; nor is " The Provost," or " The Ayr- 
 shire Legatees," who travel south as Humphry Clinker travelled 
 north of Tweed, and, like Humphry's company, narrate their ad- 
 venfures and record their reflections. Gait's best books are still 
 
 P09 39 
 
6io English Literature 
 
 well worth reading ; they, not Scott's romances, are the ancestors 
 of the modern " Kailyard School," as it was called in its day. 
 
 Beginning with an imitation of Scott, William Harrison Ains- 
 worth (born 1805) became a literary man very young, pub- 
 lished for the first time in "A Christmas Box," Scott's "Bonny 
 Dundee," and, as editor, advertised himself colossally (he was a 
 strikingly handsome person), and poured out historical novels, 
 "The Tower," " Rook wood," "Jack Sheppard," and many 
 others. He "crammed" for the historical details, of which he 
 was too lavish, and, aided by Cruikshank's designs, attained a 
 wide popularity, which has vanished. He continued to write 
 almost till his death in 1882. 
 
 G. P. R. James (1799-1860) is only remembered for his 
 famous two horsemen in his opening scenes ; long before his 
 death his vogue had passed. 
 
 His contemporary. Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli, 
 1804-1881), for a man so active in politics, wrote a great mass of 
 fiction, from the " Vivian Grey " of his boyhood, to more mature 
 works in which many of the characters were easily recognized by 
 contemporaries. The political novels, such as " Coningsby " 
 abound in satire, " Sybil " in reflections on society ; all are full of a 
 fantasy rather Oriental, and " Lothair,'' in 1870, was as personal 
 in its allusions as " Coningsby ". " Ixion " and " The Infernal 
 Marriage " are brief apologues, full of mocking mirth ; every- 
 where there is brilliance ; but substance in the way of human 
 character and of " convincing " narrative is rare. The author 
 was amusing himself and his world between the innings of a 
 greater game. Thackei'ay's burlesque " Codlingsby " may sur- 
 vive "Coningsby". 
 
 Perhaps Thackeray's "Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety 
 Oneth," may also outlive its originals, the military novels of Charles 
 Lever (i 806- 1 87 z), tales of the camp, the march and the battle. Yet 
 they lose great pleasure who neglect Major Monsoon, Micky Free, 
 and Baby Blake, in Lever's " Charles O'Malley " ; the major is a 
 jewel of a character. The early scenes at Trinity College, Dublin, 
 and in the Galway of the old days of claret and pistols are admir- 
 able ; and Lever knew many anecdotes of the Peninsular War to 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 6ii 
 
 which he does full justice. He was in his early years a most 
 spirited narrator, full of humour, with sometimes a cloud of melan- 
 choly crossing the landscape which dwells in the memory. No 
 man could always maintain the high spirits of " Charles O'Malley " 
 and " Harry Lorrequer," and Lever turned to tales of a more sub- 
 dued and ordinary kind. One of them, " A Day's Ride : a Life's 
 Romance," considerably lowered the circulation of Dickens's "All 
 the Year Round ". But it will be in a sad kind of world that 
 " Charles O'Malley " will die. 
 
 Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was (perhaps 
 after Robert Chambers, but far more conspicuously) the most 
 versatile man of letters of his age. He entered Parliament very 
 early, before the passing of the Reform Bill, and already he had 
 impressed Scott by his novel "Pelham". Sir Walter wrote to 
 Lockhart, curious about " Pelham " and its author. Lockhart, re- 
 plied curtly that "Pelham is a puppy,'' and its author, like Dis- 
 raelii certainly aimed at being a dandy, and had a Byronic pose. 
 Perhaps for this reason Thackeray regarded Lytton as a mass of 
 affectations in thought and style, with his pretensions to classical 
 learning and Neo-Platonic lore, and mysticism, and his affection for 
 virtuous criminals as in " Eugene Aram ". Thackeray's burlesque 
 of Lytton, "George de Barnwell," was his favourite among his 
 own works, and is a joy for ever with its sham history, sham 
 classics, and sham sentiment. When Lytton, in a satire, attacked 
 Tennyson as " Miss Alfred " the poet finished the fight in a single 
 round. However, Lytton's novels continued to win admiration, 
 whether they were historical romances (of these "The Last Days 
 of Pompeii " is probably the best of all tales which introduce early 
 Christians, and is still very readable) or whether they were stories 
 of modern life. " Zanoni " has several times defeated the present 
 writer ; but " The Caxtons " is full of interest. There is no better 
 romance of the supernormal than " A Strange Story " ; and perhaps 
 a kind of sketch for it, "The Haunted and the Haunters," is at 
 least as^ood. The marvels, we may say, are " spread too thick," 
 but Lytton manifestly had in his mind the well-authenticated story 
 of Willington Mill. To the last Lytton kept changing his manner 
 and working, with wonderful freshness, in new fields. He missed 
 
 39* 
 
6i2 English Literature 
 
 being in the first rank of novelists, and the bloom is very early off 
 the rye of novelists who fall short of that rank. 
 
 Of Lockhart's novels, though he tried his hand four times 
 (once in the unlucky early Christian period with " Valerius "), only 
 one is read, " Adam Blair," a vigorous and gloomy study of the 
 temptation and fall of a Scottish parish muiister. Hogg's " Con- 
 fessions of a Justified Sinner " is a most astonishing work, when 
 once it gets under way, anticipating R. L. Stevenson's handling of 
 the terrible in a lonely upland parish (see "Thrawn Janet"). 
 But if the story is tardy in its earlier chapters, in the later, it 
 rivals not only Stevenson but Hawthorne, yet few people can be 
 induced to give it a trial. 
 
 Captain Frederick Marryat (i 792-1848) is a novelist of the 
 days of Nelson's fleet, and nothing is more surprising, nothing in 
 the same field more distressing, than the neglect into which the 
 nautical novels of the creator of " Peter Simple," " Mr. Midship- 
 man Easy," " Masterman Ready " and " Snarley-yow " appear to 
 have fallen. They are full of humour, high spirits, genuine ad- 
 ventures, and sound honest views of life and duty. Carlyle un- 
 gratefully called them " nonsense," but he read them when under 
 the blow of the destruction of his manuscript of the French Re- 
 volution. They are the best sort of boys' books, but the inexplicable 
 taste of boys leads them to prefer the works of Mr. Henty to 
 those which their grandfathers read, the books of Scott, Dumas, 
 Thackeray, Dickens, and Captain Marryat. 
 
 They were not so fond of Michael Scott's " Tom Cringle's 
 Log," and " The Cruise of the Midge," but they did read and 
 shudder over Mrs. Shelley's best novel, " Frankenstein ". Of 
 infinitely more merit than these novelists are the glories of the 
 Victorian period, Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Bronte. 
 
 Dickens. 
 
 " A star danced and under that was he born " might have 
 been the astrological explanation of the genius of Charles Dickens 
 (born at Portsmouth, 1812). Explorers of "heredity" can find 
 no source of the humour and art of Dickens in his father (Mr. 
 Micawber), a dockyard clerk whose fortunes were never so high as 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 613 
 
 his buoyant hopes ; and who was in prisons often for debt. As 
 Mrs. Dickens, the mother, confessedly lent traits to Mrs. Nickleby, 
 we need not look for genius on that side. Dickens's early literary 
 education was mainly derived from some old books which he found 
 in a cupboard. There were "The Arabian Nights," for example, 
 and Fielding's novels (he played at being Tom Jones, a child's 
 Tom Jones, an innocent creature), stories of shipwrecks (he went 
 about in fear of savages and determined to sell his life dearly), in 
 fact there was plenty of good reading. He seems also to have 
 had a nurse who told stories delightfully " frightening ". We see 
 many traits of his fantastic childish thoughts and dreams in the 
 early Pip of " Great Expectations " ; there are memories, too, in 
 Little Dombey, and in the infancy of David Copperfield. He was, 
 in short, born with an elfish imagination ; always he retained the 
 primitive habit of giving souls and characters to lifeless things. 
 His power of minute observation was precocious, and he was a 
 dreamer of day-dreams till the poverty, and negligence, of his 
 family sent, him to win his tiny wages and choose his own poor 
 meals, in the service of a warehouse. 
 
 All this bitter part of his life made him a close observer of 
 poverty ; a schemer of expedients ; a little man of a child. The 
 improvement of his family's affairs gave him some rather irregular 
 schooling ; it was enough to teach him to draw inimitably well the 
 various kinds of schoolboy, except the cruel bully, whom he 
 would have found rampant and abominable at any public school. 
 Like David Copperfield he learned shorthand, was a reporter in 
 Parliament, and conceived a contempt for Parliamentary institu- 
 tions. We all know how he felt when his first magazine article 
 was published: in 1836 papers of his appeared as "Sketches by Boz," 
 and in them his peculiar humour, not without debt to Theodore 
 Hook and other well forgotten comic contemporaries, is already 
 conspicuous. 
 
 In 1836 he was asked to write papers of the comic and 
 sporting sort, for illustrations of the adventures of a club of 
 citizens. " I thought of Mr. Pickwick," he says, and, though Mr. 
 Pickwick did not often run, he ran away with Dickens's fancy as 
 Dugald Dalgetty ran away with Scott's. The peripatetic Socrates 
 
6i4 English Literature 
 
 of his younger companions, Messrs. Snodgrass, Winkle, and 
 Tracy Tupman, Mr. Pickwick kept on improving as vir pietate 
 gravis, cTiivalrous as Don Quixote, adventurous as he, bene- 
 volent, and innocent as a child, yet dignified, and to be 
 trifled with by no man or cabman. We remember Mr. Pickwick's 
 idea of an attitude of self-defence ! The influence of Smollett is 
 on Dickens as on Fanny Burney ; " Pickwick " is a sequel of 
 adventures of the road and of the inn, filled full of the highest 
 animal-spirits, witness the adventure of The Lady with Yellow 
 Curl-papers ! Some extraneous stories are placed in the middle 
 of the tale, as by Fielding and Smollett : the book is not a novel, 
 it is something better, it is " Pickwick " 1 
 
 Already, like Fielding, and with more pertinacity, Dickens was 
 attacking social abuses, imprisonment for debt, the Fleet Prison, 
 the Law, as represented by Messrs. Dodson and Fogg and Mr. 
 Justice Stareleigh. Accidental happy thoughts occurred to him, Mr. 
 Samuel Waller for one, as the tale went on appearing in monthly 
 numbers, and the author was never much ahead of the printer. 
 This mode of publication is responsible for the length and diifuse- 
 ness of many of the novels both of Dickens and Thackeray. The 
 sheets had to be filled : compression and construction could not 
 be attained ; and, in later works, when Dickens did labour hard 
 to construct a plot, we find it, often, as involuted and obscure as 
 the plots of Congreve's comedies. 
 
 " Pickwick " was an overwhelming success ; Dickens found 
 himself famous and entangled in engagements to produce more 
 concurrent fictions than even Scott could have kept up simulta- 
 neously. Yet his high animal spirits and glowing fancy poured 
 themselves out in "Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist," "The 
 Old Curiosity Shop," "Barnaby Rudge," and "Martin Chuzzle- 
 wit " (the American scenes are due to his experiences of the 
 United States), between 1838 and 1843. Consider the immense 
 variety, the humour, the crowd of eternally amusing characters ; 
 caricatures, if any one pleases, but the most laughable of cari- 
 catures. The Squeerses, the Crummleses, the Dodger, Mrs. Nickle- 
 by, Mr. Pecksniff, Bailey junior, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Richard Swiv- 
 eller, the Marchioness — ^he who loves them not knows them not ! 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 615 
 
 The melodramatic and pathetic characters and scenes are less uni- 
 versally admired ; Ralph Nickleby, Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit 
 rather try our belief, and all the world does not weep over Little 
 Nell. To say, with R. L. Stevenson, that Dickens, in delineating 
 Little Dombey, Tiny Tim, Little Nell, and Dora in " David Cop- 
 perfield," "wallowed naked in the pathetic," is to offend many 
 devout admirers. We can take Chaucer's counsel and " turn the 
 other page ". 
 
 In "David Copperfield" (1849-1850), with the charm of the 
 infancy of David, the pain of his days in the warehouse, with Mr. 
 and Mrs. Micawber, Spenlow and Jorkins, Peggotty, Mr. Dick, 
 Betsy Trotwood, and the rest, Dickens reached, perhaps, the high- 
 est mark of his genius. In "Bleak House" (1852-1853), despite 
 the Jellybys, and Harold Skimpole, he was too much engaged in 
 the work of reform, and trysted with too difficult a plot, to reach 
 similar success. The plot of "Little Dorrit" (1855-1857) is not 
 readily intelligible ; the book was disappointing. In " A Tale of 
 Two Cities " he won the votes of very many readers who do not 
 care for his lighter works : In " Great Expectations '' he was 
 himself again, and the plot is the best that he ever constructed, 
 his Pip, from childhood onwards, is a masterpiece ; Mr. Wopsle, 
 and Mr. Pumblechook are joys for ever; and Miss Havisham, 
 though severely criticized, is not, perhaps, untrue to nature, or at 
 least to the actual facts of the case on which Dickens worked. 
 
 Of " Our Mutual Friend," it must be confessed that the plot 
 is difficult : in " Dombey and Son " (1846-1848) Dickens appears 
 to have deserted his idea, on an important point, as Scott did in 
 " St. Ronan's Well," in deference to the wishes of a friend, and 
 the same change seems to have been made, for a similar reason, 
 in the fortunes of Estella, in " Great Expectations ". 
 
 In " Edwin Drood," written in the last year of Dickens's life, 
 (1869-1870), when he was outworn by the feverish energy of his 
 nature, and by the fatigues of travel and of giving readings in 
 hospitable America, Dickens at least left an unsolved puzzle to his 
 students. What was "the Mystery" of Edwin Drood? Did 
 Jasper murder him, or fail to murder him ? Some external and 
 some internal evidence favours the idea that Jasper succeeded, but 
 
6i6 English Literature 
 
 we have seen that Dickens was very capable of relenting at the last 
 moment. In this novel, as in some of his short stories, Dickens 
 shows that leaning to the " supernormal " which he usually kept 
 well in hand ; so much, indeed, that in his " Child's History of 
 England," he treats Jeanne d'Arc as a conceited, hysterical little 
 prig. DickeiSs had none of the qualities of a historian, and all 
 the contempt of a Liberal of his day for the Middle Ages. He 
 was not a man of much bookish knowledge : he was a unique 
 genius presenting, as in a magic mirror, worlds that appeared to 
 himself alone, but that all were rejoiced to see as he saw them. 
 
 He did not see the world of " Society " as others see it who 
 live in it (he avoided it), but then what world did he see as other 
 people do ? Other worlds he beheld with more sympathy, indeed, 
 but all things presented a kind of fantastic vividness in that en- 
 chanted crystal of his imagination. That some of his mannerisms 
 are vexatious is not to be denied : that there are moments of want 
 of balance, of excitement born of fatigue, of breaking into uncon- 
 scious blank verse, in the great mass of his work is too manifest : 
 in his letters we see the causes and occasions of these defects. 
 But it is ill work, in so brief a sketch, to find faults in the produc- 
 tions of a genius so unique that it has, in our literature, no 
 parallel, and can never be an example. Dickens had imitators, 
 but he could not found a school : he was " the only Boz ". His 
 defects were perfectly visible to the critics of his own day, who did 
 not spare them, but the world did not suffer its pleasure to be 
 darkened by the spots on the sun. We flatter ourselves that 
 Dickens is peculiarly English, and so he is in his idealization of 
 punch and other creature comforts ; yet he is remarkably popular, 
 even in translations, among the French, and by the Poles he is, 
 among our authors, the most admired. 
 
 Thackeray. 
 
 It has been the lot of Thackeray to be constantly pitted 
 against Dickens, like Gray against Collins, and Browning against 
 Tennyson. People have taken sides for one or another, as taste 
 and fancy led, for they were contemporaries, they were novelists, 
 humorists, satirists. But while Dickens, like the minstrel of 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 617 
 
 Odysseus, was " self-taught," and was never a man of books, 
 Thackeray (born at Calcutta in 181 1) was educated at Charter- 
 house, and, with Tennyson, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where 
 his career was not unlike that of his Arthur Pendennis, though he 
 took no degree. To Thackeray, Charterhouse was what Christ's 
 Hospital was to Lamb, a constant rather rueful memory ; a 
 memory, in Thackeray's case, of fagging, fights (in one he 
 received an honourable scar), of idleness, story-telling, rhyming, 
 caricaturing, and of the classics, stupidly taught. But, like 
 Fielding, he did not forget his classics. His bent was to the art 
 of design : many of his sketches, though often out of drawing, are 
 very humorous ; his Becky Sharp, carrying a coal scuttle, is the 
 actual Becky, and Emmy, in the dance at Pumpernickel, wears 
 the charming face that haunted his pencil. On leaving Cam- 
 bridge he visited Germany and met Goethe : he lost his patri- 
 mony, partly to Mr. Deuceace, partly in the attempt to found a 
 newspaper. In Paris, and in London, after an early marriage 
 (1836), broken by a lifelong sorrow (Mrs. Thackeray survived 
 him), he wrote for the press, continuing the vein of his scribbling 
 in undergraduate papers like " The Snob," and of his comic 
 prize poem, " Timbuctoo,'' with its dominant note " Africa for the 
 Africans ". 
 
 I see her sons the hill of glory mount 
 And sell their sugars on their own account. 
 
 His Parisian miscellanies in "The Paris Sketchbook" (1840) 
 are of varied quality, but are all characteristic. He had found his 
 style, with its harmonies, as in the essay on George Sand : and 
 his British scorn of some French vagaries is offensive to many 
 cosmopolitan minds. Unlike Dickens he is unpopular in France ; 
 he trod the soil with an air of remembering Agincourt and Water- 
 loo. He wrote for " The Times," and in " Fraser," published 
 the " Yellowplush Papers " of that great menial whose Christian 
 names, Charles James, reveal the Stuart " mistry " in which his 
 " ma " wrapped up his " buth ". Jeames was a critic, much too 
 personal, of Bulwer Lytton and Dionysius Lardner, that encyclo- 
 paedist ; and, as a momentary capitalist, as de la Pluche, is a satirist 
 of the age of rapid railway-made fortunes. The simple humours 
 
6i8 English Literature 
 
 of his spelling recall Smollett's Winifred Jenkins in "Humphry 
 Clinker"; while Thackeray's Major Gahagan is a delightful Irish 
 Captain Bobadil. "Catherine" was a burlesque on the heroes 
 and heroines of novels of virtuous criminals, showing that know- 
 ledge of the eighteenth century which was Thackeray's favourite 
 period (" Barry Lyndon," "Esmond," "The English Humorists," 
 " Denis Duval," " The Four Georges "). 
 
 Thackeray was much inclined to historical studies. " I like 
 History, it is so gentlemanly," he said, but a man, not being a 
 professor, cannot live by history alone, and he never finished, prob- 
 ably never began, his contemplated " Reign of Queen Anne ". 
 
 Everywhere among his early essays and burlesques, his tender- 
 ness peeps out, his pathos, his love of children, and of goodness ; 
 and his haunting melancholy. These are especially conspicuous 
 in " The Shabby Genteel Story," written at a time of great sorrow 
 and struggle with poverty. " Barry Lyndon " was overlooked, 
 despite its masterly ironic study of the vain-glorious Irish adven- 
 turer of the eighteenth century ; its pictures, from the gambler's 
 point of view, of Berlin under Frederick the Great, of the little 
 German duchies, of the wild half-ruined Irish gentry ; of the 
 Chevalier de Balibari, so perfect as a Catholic, a disillusioned 
 Jacobite, a gentleman, and a swindler. The later adventures of 
 Barry are drawn from Robertson, and the Dowager Lady Strath- 
 more, and their squalid romance. This book, among Thackeray's, 
 corresponds to Fielding's "Jonathan Wild," though the irony is 
 broken by the author's comments, which are deemed inartistic. 
 There are moments when Barry's blackguardism breaks down, and 
 he yields to what some may call sentiment, and others, the soul 
 of good in things evil. Nothing so great and nothing more un- 
 like Dickens, had appeared since Fielding's day, but " Barry 
 Lyndon " passed without a welcome. 
 
 "The Irish Sketchbook" (1843) was the best Irish sketchbook 
 since that of Giraldus Cambrensis, but neither that, nor "From 
 Cornhill to Cairo" (1846) "caught this great stupid public by the 
 ears". " Mrs. Perkins's Ball" (1847), a Christmas trifle, contains 
 the immortal figure of The Mulligan, to think of whom is to laugh 
 as one writes. He wa,s sketched from a well-known Irishman of 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 619 
 
 the day. The little vignettes of other guests of Mrs. Perkins are 
 worthy of Addison, down to the greengrocer butler. 
 
 In " Punch," Thackeray had been writing and drawing things 
 good and things commonplace. His burlesques of novelists 
 include " George de Barnwell " (Lytton) which he is said to have 
 thought his masterpiece, and " Codlingsby " (Disraeli), which is 
 hardly inferior ; but Lever was annoyed by his " Phil Fogarty of 
 the Fighting Onety Oneth "- Thackeray is the classic parodist ; his 
 gift of imitation is as wonderful in the " Burlesques " as in 
 "Esmond". Scott, who was privately on the side of Rebecca, 
 in " Ivanhoe,'' and who had deliberately made Rowena " very 
 English," would not have been vexed, like Lever, by Thackeray's 
 " Rowena and Rebecca," wherein, on false news of Wilfrid's 
 death, the English princess espouses Athelstane. 
 
 It was " The Book of Snobs," with its cruel satire of our 
 British vice, that came home, when republished from " Punch," to 
 men's bosoms. Thackeray avowed that de mefabula, that he was 
 a snob himself : and, to some readers, it is matter for regret that 
 he dwelt so long and so intensely on the mean admiration of 
 things mean. He told Motley (1858) that he could not read 
 " The Book of Snobs ". 
 
 At last, in " Vanity Fair," which appeared, like Dickens's 
 novels, in monthly parts (with yellow covers), Thackeray, after so 
 many vain endeavours, " took this great stupid public by the ears ". 
 Here was another epic, like " Tom Jones," of English life, from 
 the year preceding Waterloo : though the Marquis of Steyne was 
 too closely studied from a contemporary wicked Marquis. From 
 the first chapter, the scene of Becky with the Dictionary, to the 
 end where (quite out of character, say Becky's admirers) she 
 appears as a melodramatic Clytaemnestra, the author " never 
 stoops his wing ". Never, surely, did man create, in a single 
 novel, characters so many, so varied, so justly conceived, so 
 immortal. Fielding has not a quarter of Thackeray's variousness, 
 does not see so wide a vision of life. Think of them ; all the 
 Crawleys, the two Sir Pitts, Rawdon {amo Rawdon), Jim Crawley ; 
 Miss Crawley, the old patrician Whig and sceptic ; the two 
 Osbornes, the little boys, Osborne III. and little Rawdon ; Mrs. 
 
620 English Literature 
 
 O'Dowd ; the spunging-house keeper ; Mr. Wenham, Ensign 
 Stubble, Lord Steyne, the Misses Pinkerton, Briggs, Waterloo 
 Sedley, the Belgian courier, Glorvina, the Lady Bareacres, — the 
 catalogue is endless. Dobbin is as good as that honest gentle- 
 man can be made : we can only say that Thackeray's good 
 women are not at once as human and as angelic as Fielding's 
 Sophia and Amelia., Emmy is not clever; Emmy can be 
 jealous ; a vice from which Mrs. Rawdon Crawley is nobly free. 
 The nearest woman to Sophia in Thackeray is Theo in " The 
 Virginians ''. But Sophia is a paragon. 
 
 Thackeray was now, by no fault of his, set up as the rival of 
 Dickens, whose -works he constantly praised, in season and out of 
 season, in public and in private. But as every man is born an 
 Aristotelian or a Platonist, a Whig or a Tory, so men are born to 
 take one side or other about the Great Twin Brethren of English 
 fiction, in place of admiring and enjoying both. Each has his 
 masterpieces, Dickens with " Pickwick," "David Copperfield," and 
 "Great Expectations"; Thackeray with "Vanity Fair," "Es- 
 mond," " The Newcomes," and " Pendennis ". That admirable but 
 lengthy picture of the life of school, of the University, literature, 
 and Society, and of Mr. Henry Foker, bears traces, in discrepan- 
 cies and fatigue, of a severe illness which affected the author's 
 memory of part of the tale, as a malady swept from Scott's the 
 whole of " The Bride of Lammermoor ". 
 
 The noble tour de force of " Esmond " (1852) was, for the most 
 part, dictated in disturbing conditions, which makes yet greater 
 the marvel of its style of Queen Anne's date ; not uniform, to be 
 sure, not all antique (any more than Colonel Esmond's political 
 views are all antique or uniform), but still, a kind of prodigy. 
 Beatrix Esmond is indeed, as her lover said, a "paragon," and it 
 is historically impossible that, in the end, she should have betrayed 
 " the blameless king," King James IIL, whom Thackeray con- 
 verted from a melancholy Quietist into a witty and profligate 
 prince. There was no " Queen Oglethorpe ". Scott never took 
 this kind of liberty with an historical character, in fiction; and 
 Thackeray rivalled Scott's other licences by making the Duke of 
 Hamilton an unmarried man. But nobody thinks of these things 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 621 
 
 when " Esmond " admits him into the society of the Augustan 
 age, and when Bolingbroke hiccups about Jonathan's readiness to 
 command the fleet. 
 
 "The Newcomes" (1855) revived the public taste for Thack- 
 eray ; the pubhc did not, it is said, quite understand " Esmond ". 
 Like all novels published in parts throughout two years, "The 
 Newcomes " is too long, and has its languors, but every one wept 
 over the good Colonel, loathed the Campaigner, delighted in Fred 
 Bayham, wished "to beat Barnes Newcome on the nose," was 
 afraid of Lady Kew ; sighed with Clive, was more or less in love 
 with Ethel, and was anxious, vainly anxious, to see no more of 
 Laura Pendennis : an angel perhaps, but a recording angel. 
 
 At Rome, in winter, 1853, Thackeray, to amuse some children, 
 wrote "The Rose and the Ring," a classic of the nursery, of the 
 schoolroom, and of the " grown up ". He who writes was a child 
 in 1855, and to him Bulbo, Hedzoff, King Valoroso, and the 
 Countess Gruffanuif, with the usual contrasted heroines, Angelica 
 and Rosalba, were not dearer then than they are now. Even 
 then the equation was plain : — 
 
 Angelica Rosalba . 
 
 Fair and Becky Emmy 
 
 false. Blanche Amory Laura 
 
 Rowena Rebecca 
 
 Dark and 
 •true and 
 tender. 
 
 Thackeray's naughty women are " fair and false," his good women 
 are " dark, and true, and tender ". 
 
 The novelist's is a " dreadful trade ''. He has to raise ever 
 new crops from soil more or less exhausted. Dickens had his 
 "Dombey," his "Little Dorrit," his "Mutual Friend"; and 
 Thackeray had his "Virginians," the grandsons of Colonel Es- 
 mond, with their kinswoman, Beatrix Esmond, fallen into an old 
 age of cards, and rouge and powder. Beatrix, for her beauty's 
 sake, should have been translated, like the fairest woman of the 
 ancient world, Helen, to the plain Elysian. We do not want to 
 see her in old age, or to hear her last wild words, " Mesdames, Je 
 suis la " La Reine, the Queen. 
 
 " The Virginians " is full pf excellent things, wonderful studies 
 
62 2 English Literature 
 
 of the later eighteenth century ; and Harry is a dear, brave, stupid 
 lad, and George is a sardonic, melancholy descendant of Colonel 
 Esmond, and ancestor of " Stunner Warrington " in Pendennis ; 
 and Will Esmond and Chaplain Sampson are worthy of Fielding, 
 but the author was tired ; after " Vanity Fair " he was always tired, 
 and the book has barren expanses and languors. " ' The Virgini- 
 ans,' " he said to Motley, " is devilish stupid, but at the same time 
 most admirable." Thackeray's health was worn out ; as a change 
 of work he founded, but soon wearied of editing, "The Cornhill 
 Magazine"; was at his lowest level in " Lovel the Widower " ; was 
 so weary in " Philip " that he styled the hero " Clive " by inad- 
 vertence, though he endowed his clumsy Philip with one of his 
 best women, Charlotte. He ventured into melodrama, which he 
 liked, but could not write well ; yet his "Roundabout Papers " show 
 that he was, as an essayist, equal to his younger self. 
 
 His " Denis Duval " seemed to promise a return of his genius, 
 but Christmas Day, 1863, was a black Christmas, for the author 
 had died, suddenly and alone, in the night of Christmas Eve. 
 
 He had a great faculty of enjoyment, a generous heart sorely 
 tried, a melancholy that was not causeless : immense kindness and 
 love of the young, in short the character, in these respects, of 
 Moliere and of Charles Lamb. Let us confess that he was unjust 
 to Becky Sharp and Beatrix Esmond. But he had a Shakesr 
 pearean tenderness for his rogues, and having conceived the 
 draconic design of hanging Colonel Altamont, he respited that 
 bold adventurer. From boyhood he had his own originality of 
 style. 
 
 In the cultivated town of Highbury 
 My father kept a circulating library, 
 
 are boyish lines of his, and we recognize him even there, begin- 
 ning to be what he is in his " Book of Ballads," so various, so 
 merry, so melancholy, so fresh as they are. Though the influ- 
 ences of the prose of Queen Anne and of Fielding helped to form 
 his style, it is entirely his own ; with the blended accents of his 
 own humour and pathos, and harmonies before unheard; ex^ 
 quisite passages of verbal music. ' 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 623 
 The Bronte Sisters. 
 
 Concerning the Bronte sisters much, mainly personal, has 
 been written, in proportion to the amount of their works. Their 
 novels, especially those of Charlotte ("Jane Eyre," "Shirley," 
 "Vilette," "The Professor"), seem like the extraordinary and 
 almost automatic products of their parentage and surroundings. 
 The father, the Rev. Patrick Prunty or Bronte, was an Irish Pro- 
 testant of County Down, who, after struggles with circumstances, 
 was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and took holy 
 orders. His Protestantism and politics were those of an Orange- 
 man : his hero (who could have a better ?) was the Duke of Wel- 
 lington, and he was addicted to the composition of verse. His 
 wife, a Cornish woman, was of feeble health, and died after giving 
 birth to six children, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 
 early youth; the others were Charlotte (1816), Branwell (1817), 
 Emily (1818), and Anne (1820). On the mother's death the father 
 lived a sequestered studious life in a bleak parsonage on the York- 
 shire moors, and the children were entirely devoted to drawing, 
 reading books and magazines meant for their elders, to writing, 
 day-dreaming, and to wandering from the grim rectory over the 
 open moors. Their health was blighted by the conditions of the 
 school called Lowood in " Jane Eyre " ; their tempers were hard- 
 ened and sharpened by poverty and the white slave's life of the 
 governess, so much dreaded and so well understood by Miss 
 Austen's Jane Fairfax in "Emma". The unhappy Branwell, in 
 the end, haunted the rectory, an awful presence of intellect de- 
 graded, and while Emily wrapped herself up in a kind of Christian 
 stoicism, Charlotte was left to the contrast between the dreams of 
 her fiery genius, and the facts of her narrow life. In 1842 Char- 
 lotte and Emily became inmates of the school of Monsieur 
 and Madame Heger at Brussels, which later afforded to Charlotte 
 the scene and two characters in " Villette". In 1846 the three 
 sisters published " Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell ". Of 
 this book two copies were sold, of the poems Emily's alone are 
 still admired for their sombre energy and resolute spirit. 
 
 The sisters now wrote novels, Emily, "Wuthering Heights," 
 
624 English Literature 
 
 Charlotte, "The Professor"; Anne, " Agnes Grey ". In August, 
 1846, Charlotte began "Jane Eyre," which, when finished, came 
 into the hands of Thackeray's publishers, Messrs. Smith & Elder, 
 and filled them with amazement and enthusiasm. The book ap- 
 peared in autumn, 1847, pleased Lockhart, then editor of "The 
 Quarterly Review," no less than it pleased Mr. Smith, and at once 
 became the "daughter of debate," discussed everywhere, praised 
 and reviled, and, in some unintelligible way, most reviled by " The 
 Quarterly ". The critic detected in the author an unregenerate, 
 violent rebel against society, and a woman who was a dishonour to 
 her sex ! Certainly — 
 
 A wounded human spirit turns 
 Here on its bed of pain. 
 
 The unparalleled vigour and genius of the early scenes, the cruelties 
 which the lonely child supports with unconquered spirit, were things 
 new in fiction, while the repressed passion of the plain yet seduc- 
 tive governess during the wooing of the too Byronic Mr. Rochester, 
 and in a house as terrible as the castle of Mrs. Radcliflfe's " Sicilian 
 Romance," excited a lively romantic interest, accompanied by a 
 tendency to smile at an ignorant imagination. Borrowed romance 
 combined with instinctive realism, bitter experience blended with 
 the day-dreams of a life, a frankness long forgotten by early Vic- 
 torian fiction, made the novel a strange and triumphantly success- 
 ful combination. That mentor of young novelists, George Lewes, 
 recommended to the author the study of Miss Austen, whose 
 novels Charlotte Bronte was not happy enough (because she never 
 had been happy) to appreciate. That she had no humour we 
 cannot say, but she had none of the kindly humour of her great 
 predecessor. 
 
 Meanwhile "Wuthering Heights," that strange and strenuous 
 study of violent characters, was eclipsed by " Jane Eyre," though 
 it has now come to its own, thanks to the appreciations of Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne. The author did not live to 
 find herself famous ; Anne Bronte also died, leaving their sister in 
 deeper solitude. Charlotte's "Shirley " (1849), with its caricatures 
 of the local curates, caused the discovery of her authorship ; the 
 curates were forgiving, and the novel was welcomed. 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 625 
 
 Miss Bronte visited London, a shy and tameless lioness, and 
 met Thackeray, whom she had regarded as a Saul among the 
 prophets, and discovered to be something rather different. Her 
 shyness permitted her to rebuke him in good set terms, but 
 blighted his guests. Her last novel, "Villette" (1852), with ro- 
 mantic situations, is a record of her personal experiences at Brus- 
 sels ; unfortunate for her hosts, and a cause of much gossip and 
 personal discussion. The book is not destitute of the hungry bit- 
 terness which Matthew Arnold detected and disliked ; and we 
 ask how in the nature of things it could be otherwise ? Her ex- 
 perience had been narrow, atrocious, and on her experience and 
 from her experience she always drew when she did not borrow 
 from her day-dreams. In life she did not find the love of which 
 she dreamed : in 1854 (she had rejected several other suitors) she 
 married the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, her father's curate, and died in 
 the following year. Her life, her character, and her books were 
 one, and were unique. "This little Jeanne d'Arc," as Thack- 
 eray called her, this eager rebel and ardent Tory, broke into the 
 placidity of the contemporary novel, and opened a pathway 
 unto many, who had little or none of her genius. 
 
 The best estimate of the Brontes, clear of and contemptuous 
 of trivialities and gossip, is in French, "Les Soeurs Bronte," by the 
 Abbd Dimnet. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
 The end of all that Greeks and Trojans suffered for Helen's sake 
 was " that there might be a song in the ears of men of after times ". 
 In the view of the interests of art (and in no other) the end of 
 Puritanism in New England was to inspire the novels of Nathaniel 
 Hawthorne (1804- 1864). He was more certainly the classical 
 author of American fiction than either Thackeray or Dickens is 
 in England. They were prodigal of their genius, giving "as 
 rich men give who care not for their gifts," or, if you please, 
 as poor men when the printer's devil is at the door, even as did 
 Sir Walter, who never thought about "art". But Hawthorne 
 hoarded his inspirations, and when he used them gave them in 
 the best form which was within his means. The inspiration was 
 always moral, and usually bizarre. In his published note-books 
 we see his method; he conceived some strange situations; over 
 some of these he brooded till the characters disengaged themselves 
 
 40 
 
626 English Literature 
 
 and lived before his eyes, and worked out their wyrd under stress 
 of sin and remorse. He thought of the effect of a sudden homicidal 
 act on a character gay, innocent, and faunlike, and we have Dona- 
 tello in " The Marble Faun " (or " Transformation"). He thought 
 of the amour of a Puritan preacher (like Lockhart in "Adam 
 Blair ") and the idea grew into " The Scarlet Letter ". He thought 
 of the beautiful poisonous girl (an old legend) and we have " Rap- 
 pacini's Daughter ". The Puritan sense of sin, and the old New 
 England sorrows of the witchcraft trials, and the shadows of the 
 woods, and the fear of the Indians, among whom Meikle John 
 Gibb (a Covenanter who went too far even for the Rev. Mr. Car- 
 gill) was a great medicine-man, dwelt in his imagination. He felt 
 acutely, though not a man of religion, the horrors of the Genevan 
 creed, which did npt make the people who believed in it more un- 
 happy than their Episcopalian neighbours. They were accustomed 
 to the doctrines which horrified Hawthorne's contemporaries in 
 America, and, like the Black Laird of Ormistoun, hanged for 
 Darnley's murder, and richly deserving to be hanged for his daily 
 misdeeds, they saw their way out of a doom of eternal fire which 
 Hawthorne supposed them always to anticipate. Nervousness had 
 not set in, the climate had not produced its effect on the sturdy 
 Puritans of New England. By Hawthorne's time the climate had 
 produced its effect, and he brooded blackly over what his ancestors 
 should have felt — but did not feel. The Black Laird of Ormistoun 
 had only to convince himself that he was of the Elect, as he did, 
 and death, to him, meant, as he said, that he should sup that night 
 in Paradise. Not understanding this buoyancy of temperament, 
 Hawthorne dwelt on the horrors which he supposed his ancestors 
 to have fed full of, and, in his stories, expressed his emotions in 
 terms of imperishable art. Though he had no theological basis 
 he remained a Puritan. He, to whom beauty was everything, 
 talked of " the squeamish love of beauty ". In Europe he is said 
 (like an excellent Pope who had tin aprons made for the classic 
 nude figures of Graeco-Roman sculpture) to have been horrified by 
 the innocent nudities of ancient art. They had never seen anything 
 so improper at Salem, Massachusetts, a decaying seaport where 
 he was born, and lived for fourteen years after taking his degree 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 627 
 
 at Bowdoin in 1825. Here he wrote short tales with little accept- 
 ance; and he did not till 1849-1854, publish his best known 
 novels, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," 
 and (a result of a stay at a peaceful and purely amateur socialist 
 settlement, Brook Farm) "The Blithedale Romance". His 
 " Tanglewood Tales," from Greek myths (in which Hermes is called 
 "Quicksilver") at first repel, for obvious reasons, but, in fact and 
 on reflection, have much charm, and with Kingsley's "The 
 Heroes " ought not to be neglected by parents and guardians, but 
 rather " placed in the hands " of children. Though some amateurs 
 may prefer " The House of the Seven Gables," haunted as it is by 
 the blood which chokes the Justice, and a little enlivened by the 
 dusty humour of Hepzibah, a decayed gentlewoman, and pervaded 
 by the pretty charm of Phoebe, " The Scarlet Letter " is probably 
 Hawthorne's masterpiece. It may be, and has been, denied by 
 specialists that the hectic and craven Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale could 
 possibly have been the father of the elf-like child Pearl, but these 
 are "oppositions of science, falsely so called". Hester's aveng- 
 ing husband may be, in conception, Dickenslike, but the treat- 
 ment is far from suggesting Dickens, while the passion of Hester 
 is a masterpiece of poetical fiction. Knots may be sought and 
 found in any reed of fictitious narrative, but "The Scarlet Letter" 
 remains, in its human characters and its dim lights, in its purpose- 
 ful limitations, and hints at something unrevealed, a masterpiece 
 of romance written under classical conditions. "The Marble 
 Faun " (the plot and mystery were suggested by the murder, by 
 a French duke, of his wife ; Miriam is the British governess 
 in that unholy affair) has noble moments and passages, and un- 
 consciously reveals what his Note Books publicly avow, that Haw- 
 thorne was terribly ill at ease in Europe, and among monuments 
 of classic and mediaeval art. He had some scruple about enjoy- 
 ing them — they were not at all Afaerican, and he was rather bitterly 
 patriotic, one might almost say parochial, in certain moods. But 
 he had lived for most of his life in Salem, Massachusetts ; he had, 
 for several years, been American consul at Liverpool ; he was a 
 genius of the most exquisite nature, and no more is needed to 
 explain some acerbities and some misappreciations, while we can 
 
 40 * 
 
628 English Literature 
 
 all sympathize with his criticisms of the adiposity of some British 
 matrons. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
 
 What has been said about Longfellow may be whispered about 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was at once poet, essayist, and 
 novelist. Both authors should be read first while the reader is 
 young, and can enjoy their books with the freshness of an un- 
 sophisticated taste. This is not true of the very great things in 
 literature, in these with advancing experience we ever find new 
 merits, while in studying some early favourites we can scarcely 
 recapture our original delight. 
 
 Holmes was born in the same year as Edgar Allan Poe (1809) 
 at Cambridge in New England, where his father was " Orthodox 
 minister of the First Church ". This appears to mean that he was 
 a Calvinist, while Harvard, where the son was educated, was de- 
 voted to the Unitarian creed, of which the Articles are, to the 
 writer, unknown. Holmes accepted them. Medicine was his 
 profession, he held for some time a Chair of Anatomy ; in Boston, 
 where he lived for the greater part of his life, he practised for some 
 time, but his productions in verse and prose gradually caused him 
 to occupy himself mainly with letters. In 1831 he first produced 
 part of his " Autocrat of the Breakfast Table," monologues with rare 
 interruptions from the fellow guests of a pension. In 1857 he re- 
 turned to this pleasant form of discursive essays, the other guests 
 breaking in occasionally according to their ages and characters. 
 Hitherto Holmes had been best known for " occasional verses," 
 especially verses written for the Phi Beta Kappa Society of his 
 University, and for college anniversaries. The " One Hoss Shay " 
 is, in England, with "The Nautilus," the best known of these 
 social feats. In his discursive essays he frequently breaks a lance 
 with his old enemy, Calvinistic theology. This is not very ex- 
 hilarating ; at least to readers who never learned, or if they learned 
 never attached any meaning to the Shorter Catechism. Holmes, 
 who, to be sure, had a minister as his tutor, and Hawthorne, ap- 
 pear to have understood the doctrines, which were useful to 
 Holmes as a butt, and to Hawthorne as a background in his 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 629 
 
 novels, gloomy and alarming, — "the ghoul-haunted region of 
 Weir". Naturally Holmes found the sciences to which he was 
 bred -very useful in supplying anecdotes and illustrations to his 
 essays and romances. In " Elsie Venner," the heroine, on good 
 Calvinistic principles, is of the seed of the Serpent, and inherits its 
 nature, owing to some mishap of her mother with a rattlesnake. 
 Whether this be scientifically conceivable or not, Elsie is, by in- 
 heritance, a perfectly original young woman in an ordinary en- 
 vironment of New England. We do not expect to meet Melusine 
 so far from Lusignan. In " The Guardian Angel " the heroine has 
 several complex personalities, derived from different ancestors, one 
 of them a Red Indian. These devices are in Hawthorne's manner 
 of fantastic invention, without Hawthorne's grasp and power, but 
 the heroines are surrounded by characters more humorous and 
 natural than Hawthorne's people, and the stories are extremely 
 good reading, as are the discursive essays. There is abund- 
 ance of knowledge of the world, of wit, of humour, and of kind 
 good-humour. There is plenty of strange lore from old books of 
 mystic medicine, and Holmes confessed to being " a little super- 
 stitious". Near the house of his boyhood there were "Devil's 
 Footsteps " in a field, and a house from which a portion of the wall 
 had been carried away " from within outward ". The marks were 
 associated with a story of a diabolical apparition at a Hell Fire 
 Club, just as at Brasenose College, Oxford. The terrors of his 
 childhood left their mark on his books. There was the faintest 
 touch of Cotton Mather in this foe of Cotton's creed, which, out of 
 fashion or not, was the nurse of many virtues inherited by its tire- 
 less opponent. His enduring fame rests on his " Autocrat " and 
 other essays. "No man in England," said Thackeray in 1858, 
 "can write with his charming mixture of wit, pathos, and imagina- 
 tion." 
 
 Charles Kingsley. 
 
 Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) was a novelist "by way of by- 
 work," and had intellect and energy which might have found for 
 themselves other fields ; born thirty years earlier he might have 
 distinguished himself under Wellington or Nelson. But in piping 
 
630 English Literature 
 
 times of peace, after living the life of an athlete, sportsman, and 
 reading man at Magdalene, Cambridge, he took holy orders, as 
 Colonel Gardiner might have done, had he been earlier converted. 
 As Rector of Eversley in Hampshire, he was an energetic parish 
 priest, and had opportunities of angling for those uneducated 
 trout which he commemorates in his pleasant " Chalk Stream 
 Studies," for he was a born naturalist and observer of nature. The 
 agitation among the labouring classes in the times of the Chartists 
 awakened him to social questions and " Christian Socialism " ; but 
 as the excitement of the populace lulled, his interest slackened. 
 The fruits of it were the novels of " Yeast " and " Alton Locke " 
 (1848, 1850) which well deserve to be read, and repay the reader. 
 It is almost incredible that Cambridge crews, in Kingsley's day, 
 rowed in the May week after wine-parties and much eating of ices ; 
 but the sympathy with " sweated " artisans and the delineation of 
 rural scenes and sports, are fiery, forcible, and sincere, whatever the 
 truth may be about Cambridge training at that distant date. In 
 1853 he produced "Hypatia," a romance of the pagan girl-philo- 
 sopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob of Alexandria. The 
 advent of Goths who cut up these beasts is a welcome relief, but 
 the Jew who attempts humorous philosophy is merely a proof of 
 Kingsley's lack of humour and an example of his characteristically 
 strenuous efforts to be humorous. The book is, indeed, a boy's 
 book, and has something in it, Kingsley's preoccupation with 
 sexual ethics, which is not so agreeable to reflective seniors. 
 Somewhat of this, with an aggressive Protestantism, and the sin 
 of " jocking wi' deeficulty," mar the otherwise delightful romance 
 of " Westward Ho ! " the adventures of Amyas Leigh on the 
 Spanish Main and in tropical forests in the great days of Eliza- 
 bethan adventure. Kingsley hates and execrates the Spaniards. 
 We have ourselves exterminated some savage peoples, and nearly 
 exterminated others, and have no right to throw the first stone at 
 the Spanish conquerors in America, odious beyond words as their 
 dealings with Aztecs and Incas were ; while the Privy Council, 
 under Cecil, could give points in cruelty to the Spanish Inquisition 
 of the day. But the boy who reads, or ought to read, " Westward 
 Ho I " has none of these chilling reflections, nor had Kingsley. 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 631 
 
 Taking the facts as Kingsley saw them, in the old English way, 
 the novel is a superlatively excellent romance of English virtue 
 and valour ; and there is no doubt as to the valour, and the ad- 
 venturers had no doubts as to their own virtues. The whole is 
 the work of a poet — for a poet Kingsley was, — and of a patriot, 
 sympathizing with Drake's England in the crucial trial whence 
 she emerged a victor. " Where are the galleons of Spain ? " 
 
 " Two Years Ago," a novel of the Crimean War, must take its 
 chances with the historical facts ; and, in " Hereward the Wake," 
 the bloodthirsty hero, despite the glory of his final fight, which rivals 
 that of the brave Bus.sy or of Grettir the Strong in the Saga, in 
 places awakes the smile even of the reflective schoolboy, to whom, 
 however, it may be recommended. " The Water Babies " is not 
 always defective in humour, and would be excellent as a tale for 
 children were it not for satire directed at the parents of the period. 
 "The Heroes " initiate the young into the glories of the romance 
 of Minyans and Minoans, and can only be spoken of by those 
 who read it in early boyhood with entire gratitude and the re- 
 membrance of delight. Indeed, no one who has read Kingsley 
 after the age of 16 is a fair critic of an author who, like R. L. 
 Stevenson, was always at heart a boy ; to appreciate him we must 
 put away grown-up things ; while, as to his verse, his songs and 
 ballads, in "Andromeda'" (1858), and even his hexameters, de- 
 serve immortality. He was not fitted for the Chair of History at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Froude thinks that Kingsley's a divine. 
 And Kingsley goes to Froude for history, 
 
 said the poet. His controversy with Cardinal Newman brought 
 him into contact with a prettier fighter, and he did not come up 
 to time against the author of the " Apologia ". His essays, es- 
 pecially that on the Puritan aversion to the Caroline drama, are 
 vigorous, and well worth reading. 
 
 The brother of Charles Kingsley, Henry (1830-1876) either 
 wanted leisure or lacked care and constructive faculty, but in his 
 earlier works he displayed high spirits, and kind humour, with a 
 good deal of skill in drawing character, and an engaging reckless 
 manner. His most careful book, " Geoffrey Hamlyn," though 
 
632 English Literature 
 
 promising, is not so dear to its readers as " Ravenshoe," a delight- 
 ful topsy-turvy romance. The children in Henry Kingsley's books 
 are especially fascinating. 
 
 Here we may briefly advert to two writers who with remarkable 
 originality of character and outlook as novelists appeal to but 
 small but devoted audiences. Thomas Love Peacock (i 785-1866) 
 was" an almost self-made classical scholar, and a friend of Shelley's. 
 His contributions to Shelley's biography are those of a rather can- 
 did though intensely admiring friend. His novels, from the early 
 " Headlong Hall " and " Melincourt," and " Nightmare Abbey," 
 to " Gryll Grange,'' at the end of his career, are not so much 
 romances as discursive and satirical studies of, and dialogues about, 
 contemporary society, opinion, and taste. Some of the characters 
 are drawn, in part, from real personages, for example, from Shelley 
 himself. The wit which Shelley called so keen, occasionally yields 
 place to somewhat florid burlesque. The interest of Peacock is 
 partly that which we feel in his own character and satiric views of 
 life ; partly it is historical. 
 
 George Borrow (1803-1881), a Norfolk man, who in childhood 
 had followed his father's regiment as Sterne had done, can be 
 best estimated by a study of his " Lavengro," really a sort of auto- 
 biography. Here he paints himself as a genius in the study of 
 many languages, a friend of gypsies and their fellow- wanderer ; 
 an expert in the art of boxing, and altogether as a character 
 equally vigorous and eccentric, and a sturdy Low Churchman 
 who hates Papists, snobs, and Sir Walter Scott. Whether on the 
 moors with the Viper-catcher ; or at horse-fairs with jockeys and 
 thimble-riggers ; or as the hack of a niggardly publisher ; or fight- 
 ing the Flaming Tinman under the eyes of the lovely but uncon- 
 vincing Isopel Berners, Borrow is always the strong, wild, tameless 
 heroic figure. As an agent for the Bible Society in Spain he was 
 in a place which suited his genius, and his " The Bible in Spain " 
 is at least as romantic as evangelical. " The Romany Rye " is of 
 the same fantastically autobiographical form as "Lavengro"; 
 brilliantly capricious and picturesque. Other books are "The 
 Gypsies in Spain," and " Wild Wales ". Borrow plumed himself 
 much on his wide range of philological learning, from Welsh to 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 633 
 
 Manchu, but the strict modern science does not regard him as a 
 very great scholar. There are dull stagnant places in his books, 
 and there are passages aflame with genius. 
 
 Mrs. Oliphant (Mary Margaret Wilson (1828-1897)) was a 
 woman of letters who heroically undertook incessant labour for 
 the sake of others who were dependent on her pen. Conse- 
 quently her gifts were diluted, and she must always be best known 
 for the novels styled " The Chronicles of Carlingford," which are 
 remarkable for their placid unstrained humour. More than once 
 'she displayed a very unusual power of dealing with the super- 
 natural, especially in " A Beleaguered City," and " Old Lady 
 Mary ". In these pieces her manner is unique for tenderness 
 and sympathy. In her historical biographies, as of Moliere and 
 Jeanne d'Arc, she suffered from want of strict training, and if she 
 found a good thing of apocryphal source, inserted it on its literary 
 merits. Her work on the publishing " House of Blackwood " is 
 valuable to the student of literature and literary lives in the days 
 of Wilson and Lockhart. Few who have written so much have 
 written so well. 
 
 Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), a close associate of Dickens, was 
 an assiduous professional novelist, who strenuously did his best 
 and achieved two or three immense popular successes. His main 
 strength lay in the construction of plots which powerfully excited 
 curiosity, as in " The Woman in White," " No Name," and " The 
 Moonstone " ; the former was apparently suggested by the mystery 
 of a French law suit, which dragged on from before the Revolution 
 to the reign of Louis Philippe. The central puzzle, a question of 
 identity, never was solved. Collins did his best to create characters, 
 as well as to tell stories, but his humour was laboured (Captain 
 Wragge is his chief success), and he shared with Dickens the man- 
 nerism of constantly dwelling on the tricks and hobbies of his 
 people. For a long and warm appreciation of Collins, Mr. Swin- 
 burne's essay may be consulted. The work of his later years and 
 overtasked fancy, such as " Poor Miss Finch " and " The Haunted 
 Hotel," may be neglected ; some of his short stories are good. 
 
 Popular novelists were Major Whyte- Melville, best in tales of 
 sport and the affections, but ranging all fields from ancient Assyria 
 
634 English Literature 
 
 to " The Queen's Maries " ; George Lawrence, the author of that 
 joy of boyhood, " Guy Livingstone," ■ " Sword and Gown," and 
 other tales military and sporting. He was the intellectual father 
 of " Ouida " (Miss de la Ramee) with her magnificent guardsmen, 
 and innocent descriptions of racing and of field sports. She was 
 for long very prolific and very popular, she lashed the vices of 
 society, and was the constant friend of animals. Gorgeous is the 
 epithet that may be applied to her style, and humour did not enter 
 into her genius, which may be called " heroic " in the manner of 
 the seventeenth century tragedies. 
 
 James Payn, on the other hand, had almost too much humour 
 for the purposes of a novelist, accompanied by the most delightful 
 high spirits. These would have interfered with the success of his 
 novels, from " Lost Sir Massingberd " onwards, in which he pro- 
 vided the public with highly wrought melodramas, — the style of 
 the serious characters being " heroic " in a high degree, — had the 
 public perceived that he was laughing in his sleeve. But his do- 
 mestic sentiment, and his spirited heroes and heroines, carried the 
 serious reader on, while light-hearted readers were convulsed with 
 laughter. His best novels proper are perhaps " By Proxy " and 
 " Halves ". He was one of the best and kindest of men, and 
 most hospitable, as editor of " The Cornhill Magazine," to the work 
 of younger authors, such as Mr. Stanley Weyman and R. L. Steven- 
 son. The " John Inglesant " of Mr. Shorthouse, a dignified and 
 thoughtful novel of the Great Rebellion, which had a resonant 
 success, Mr. Payn declined when it came before him in manu- 
 script ; he also took no pleasure in the works of ^schylus. 
 
 George Meredith. 
 
 George Meredith, novelist and poet, was, in his literary for- 
 tunes, a somewhat mysterious power ; a somewhat thwarted force. 
 His early novels, the comic Oriental tale of " The Shaving of 
 Shagpat," " The Ordeal of Richard Feverel," " Evan Harrington," 
 " Rhoda Fleming," were full of humour, wit, pathos, the charm 
 of Love's young dream ; were peopled by delightful heroines, 
 whose heroes were appropriate, brave, and not too staid. Rose 
 Jocelyn, Lucy, the Countess, the dark Rhoda Fleming, the beauti- 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 635 
 
 ful hapless Dahlia, certainly very young readers in those old days 
 of the early 'sixties were in love with them — thought the aphorisms 
 of " The Pilgrim's Scrip " the acme of witty wisdom ; rejoiced in 
 Mrs. Berry as in the Nurse of Julia, delighted in the hypochon- 
 driac Hippy, and in Adrian, the Wise Young Man ; nearly shed 
 tears over Clare Doria Forey, who let concealment, like the worm 
 i' the bud, feed on her damask cheek ; admired the Glorious 
 Mel ; laughed sympathetically over Algernon, the Young Fool, 
 and his Derby day, and generally were a most favourable public. 
 But the general public was unfavourable. Meredith's " Evan 
 Harrington " nearly ruined " Once a Week," — even aided by Charles 
 Keene's designs it was a failure ; and the editor had to call in 
 Shirley Brooks, with "The Silver Cord," which no man remem- 
 bereth, perhaps, except him who writes. Those early novels were 
 not obscure, even to the reading boy ; the wit was not too subtle 
 and alembicated, or too profuse ; the humour was English — beer 
 and cricket were provided — there was pathos, comedy, character 
 in abundance, but the novels did not appeal to that happy reading 
 public which had still Thackeray and Dickens ; and George Eliot 
 for the thoughtful, and Miss Braddon, in the full flush of her early 
 genius, for all who liked a plain tale well told, a humorous melo- 
 drama (such as " The Doctor's Wife ") ; or while Mrs. Henry Wood 
 poured forth romances that deans and princes and everybody 
 could appreciate. It is said to be a fact that Her Majesty Queen 
 Victoria took pleasure in Mrs. Wood's novels ; and it is quite 
 certain that another lady, believed by many to be the great grand- 
 daughter of Charles III. (better known as Prince Charlie) shared 
 the royal taste. 
 
 Possibly this competition caused Meredith's grace to be hid ; 
 possibly, curious as it may seem, he was best appreciated by 
 readers in extreme youth. This is probably the truth, for, in 
 much later years, the writer has seen quite unaffected young girls 
 absorbed in " The Egoist " or " Diana of the Crossways," while 
 he, after gallant efforts, was defeated by both in a very early round, 
 tripped up on every page by the Leg of Sir Wilfrid, the Egoist. 
 Too much seemed to be made of that limb. But with "The 
 Egoist," which is doubtless a triumph in wit and knowledge of 
 
636 English Literature 
 
 human nature (as such it was rapturously hailed by R. L. Stpvenson), 
 Meredith's fortunes turned. The enthusiasm of young critics at 
 last communicated itself to the more cultured public, and to the 
 public which wished to seem cultured, a lucrative circle. It was 
 like the success of Mr. Browning, which came so many years after 
 " Men and Women ". People then turned back on Meredith's 
 early novels, and discovered the manifold virtues which had been 
 overlooked by contemporaries. They who had been boys in the 
 'sixties might think that by the 'eighties an over-excessive strain- 
 ing after wit and epigram, and a subtlety which was too near 
 neighbour to obscurity, with a mannerism of style too precious 
 and too easily imitable, had overtaken the Master. The truth 
 may be that age had dulled the wits of these critics ; that they 
 had lost wit and zest. To them the "English prose of " One of 
 Our Conquerors " seemed darkling and decadent, and in " The 
 Amazing Marriage " the baby was the most astonishing element. 
 Whether they were in the right or in the wrong, the admiration of 
 Meredith, like the admiration of FitzGerald's " Omar Khayyam," 
 had become, not only a " cult " (it had already, as in Omar's 
 case, been a cult with the few), but a cult with mysteries open to 
 what Coleridge did not love, " the reading public ". Be it as it 
 may, the Master came to his own, as a novelist who to wit, fancy, 
 humour, and power of creating characters, added the still rarer 
 qualities of a true though decidedly difficult poet. 
 
 Anthony Trollope. 
 
 " The pace is too good " in the world of novel-writing and of 
 novel readers to inquire deeply into the characteristics of the 
 genius of Anthony Trollope, who was born in the year of Waterloo, 
 held a place in the Post Office, pursued the fox ; knew much of 
 many sides of life in London, and much of a cathedral town, but 
 .did not make a great impression on public taste till, in 1855, he 
 began his series of tales of Barchester. The Bishop, Dr. Proudie, 
 his termagant wife, his chaplain, his Archdeacon Grantley, with the 
 loves and marriages of their children, and the ecclesiastical poli- 
 tics of the age, were the farrago libelli. Trollope had a good 
 deal of humour, his heroines, Lily Dale and Lucy Robartes and 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 637 
 
 the rest were, in various degrees, " nice girls,'' his political char- 
 acters and Dukes were of their date ; he was extremely fluent ; 
 and he stamped his own ideas of his art and of the true method 
 of composition on his brief life of Thackeray.^ 
 
 People who have read Trollope will probably bear witness 
 that many of his characters live in memory, and are friendly in- 
 mates of her cell. This can scarcely be said of the characters of 
 Lytton, for example, and in his power of creating characters 
 Trollope comes before any novelist of his own rank, and of his 
 now neglected age. It would be easy to write a long catalogue of 
 Trollope's memorable people, mainly, but by no means solely, 
 dwellers in Barchester. The Grantleys, the Proudies, - Bertie 
 Stanhope and his sister, "the last of the Neros," the Crawleys 
 (not of Queen's Crawley) Adolphus Crosby, Johnny Eames, 
 Amelia Roper, " Planty Pal " (so justly driven back to the path of 
 virtue by Griselda), Mr. Slope, these are only a few of his creations. 
 With this creative gift, Trollope, though not refined, or '' daring," 
 or emancipated, or passionate, has a claim to be remembered ; 
 and the right readers will still find in his works abundance of 
 entertainment. 
 
 George Eliot. 
 
 In 1857 "Blackwood's Magazine," always notable for dis- 
 covering good new hands, began to publish " Scenes from Clerical 
 Life," which at once attracted notice by their humour, tenderness, 
 and quiet accomplished style. Were they by a man or a woman ? 
 Dickens voted that " George Eliot " was a woman ; he was right. 
 She was Miss Mary Ann Evans, born in Warwickshire in 1819. 
 Familiar from childhood with the rural characters whom she drew 
 so admirably (perhaps this art was her true forte, in other fields 
 her humour was inconspicuous or absent), she went to London, 
 associated with advanced philosophers, such as Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer, changed her theological views and made her home with 
 George Henry Lewes, author of a " Life of Goethe," and of a sur- 
 prising " History of Philosophy ". He was a married man, separ- 
 
 ' " English Men of Letters Series.' 
 
638 English Literature 
 
 ated from his wife with no chance of a divorce, and he was the con^ 
 stant mentor of the new novehst, though his 'own essays in the art 
 of fiction were absolute failures. In 1859 George Eliot made a very 
 great success with " Adam Bade," which, to the merits of her 
 " Scenes from Clerical Life," added a plot and a story of a not 
 heartless seducer who fights and is knocked out of time by a hardy 
 TJarpenter, his rival, the hero. The little victim, Hetty, is like a 
 more heartless Effie Deans, and her crime, not committed by poor 
 Effie, caused many sympathetic tears. The Jeanie Deans of the 
 story is a female preacher, with considerable strength of character. 
 "The Mill on the Floss," which followed, is excellent in the 
 humorous parts, and the heroine, Maggie TuUiver, is delightful as 
 a child, less interesting when she falls in love with a distasteful! 
 admirer. " Silas Marner,'' a much shorter is perhaps a still better 
 tale, and marks the central period of the author's genius. In 
 " Romola " (1863), a story of the Florentine Renaissance, the 
 author was out of the environment which she knew, and was 
 thought to be too moral and didactic. In " Middlemarch " her 
 heroes were, to men, distasteful, and they preferred her pretty to 
 her noble heroine, while Mr. Casaubon, of the ".Key to All Mytho- 
 logies," was held to be too closely studied from the life. " Daniel 
 Deronda " was very long, and a kind of scientific jargon had been 
 taking the place of the old rustic humours. Moreover people felt 
 that they were being preached at, and Mr. Swinburne, contrasting 
 Charlotte Bronte with George Eliot, helped to turn the tide from 
 worship of the living to adoration of the dead woman of genius. 
 George Eliot (Mrs. Cross after I^ewes's death, and her own marriage 
 to Mr. Cross in 1880) wrote no more than a book of reflections, 
 "The Opinions of Theophrastus Such". She died in 1880. 
 " Culture," which had exaggerated her merits, began unjustly to 
 disparage them. To understand the injustice it is only necessary 
 to read her books written before " Romola ". There has been no 
 better novelist since the death of Dickens. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 To Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) no one who found his 
 works were sympathetic will deny the title of a man of genius. 
 
Latest Georgian and Vicforian Novelists 639 
 
 It is unnecessary to dwell on the details of his life ; the essence of 
 them is to be gathered from his own essays and from his published 
 correspondence. From his earliest childhood his health was so 
 unstable that he appeared to live on his astonishing intellectual 
 and moral energy rather than on his physical basis. His educa- 
 tion was casual and frequently interrupted by recurrent maladies ; 
 from childhood a dreamer of dreams and teller of tales, he edu- 
 cated himself, by study of great models mainly in old French and 
 English, in the formation of style and the choice of words. His 
 contributions to magazines, essays and short stories, revealed the 
 last successor of the school of Lamb and Hazlitt, a scholar with a 
 philosophy of life of his own, the philosophy of youth : see the Essays 
 collected and published in "Virginibus Puerisque" (i88r), and 
 " Familiar Studies of Men and Books " (1882). At the same time 
 such brief tales of his as "A Lodging for the Night," and "The 
 Sire de Mal^troit's Door," and " Thrawn Janet," in periodicals, 
 proved him to be a master of romance, and a master with a 
 thorough understanding of historical characters, surroundings, 
 superstition, and the power of communicating the ancestral thrill of 
 superstition. His interest in history was intense and sympathetic, 
 and was even a danger in Jiis path, as he would willingly have en- 
 gaged himself in that unpopular study. But he was, as Johnson 
 told Boswell that he was, " longer a boy than other people," and in 
 1878 he wrote for an obscure periodical "The New Arabian Nights," 
 a fantasy of humour and of perilous adventure, " in a spirit of mock- 
 ery " like his own " Young Man with the Cream Tarts ". In 1881, 
 in a boy's paper, he wrote " Treasure Island," a story meant for 
 boys, but delightful to a critic so little apt to notice his juniors as 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold. " Prince Otto " (1885) is a Court romance 
 of the eighteenth century, full of brilliant passages, but confessedly 
 written and rewritten again and again under the influence of 
 George Meredith. In r886 "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 
 and Mr. Hyde," a fantasy not uninfluenced, perhaps, by Edgar 
 Poe, but rich in his own philosophy, humour, and style, at last 
 captured public attention, caused "a new shudder," and was 
 rapturously welcomed, as a moral allegory, from the pulpits " of 
 all denominations ". The story, or at least the mechanism of the 
 
640 • English Literature 
 
 story, came, like " Kubla Khan," to the author in a dream. What 
 is probably his best novel (without a woman in it), " Kidnapped " 
 was suggested by his studies of Highland history after 1745. It 
 was planned on a much larger scale, but now, as sometimes oc- 
 curred, the pen simply dropped from the author's hand, in one of 
 his many maladies. Such studies of Highland and Lowland char- 
 acter as he gave in "Kidnapped " (though the evil uncle is, in his 
 own phrase, " too steep ") are only equalled or excelled in those 
 of Sir Walter Scott, while the pictures of Highland and Lowland 
 life and society at a period (just after Culloden) untouched by 
 Scott, are historically accurate. The same period is again viewed 
 in that bitter study of almost insane fraternal hatred, " The Master 
 of Ballantrae " (1889), supposed to be narrated by a loyal servitor 
 who is also a constitutional coward. There is little relief in this 
 romance except that which comes from one of Prince Charles's 
 Irish officers, the inimitable Chevalier Bourke. In 1893 appeared 
 " Catriona," the sequel to " Kidnapped," in which (for the first 
 time except in the exotic " Prince Otto," and in a short story, 
 " The Pavilion on the Links ") Stevenson introduced " the love- 
 interest," and drew an admirably chivalrous and amiable heroine, 
 Catriona herself; with her even more attractive foil, the daring 
 and dominating Barbara Grant. Alan Breck in this sequel is 
 worthy of himself in " Kidnapped," and James More Macgregor is 
 a masterly historical portrait. 
 
 " The Wrong Box" (i88g) is a humorous fantasy somewhat 
 in the manner of " The New Arabian Nights," with many scenes 
 which provoke laughter unquenchable. " The Wrecker " (1892) 
 is rich in reminiscences of the author's youth in Paris and of Fon- 
 tainebleau, and the plot, up to a certain point, strongly excites 
 curiosity, but, despite the brilliance of some oceanic adventures, 
 the story is not well constructed, and is rather disappointing. 
 "The Ebb Tide" (1894) was spoken of by the author as "his 
 blooming failure," for his colloquial style was not classical. 1 
 "St. Ives" (1897), left unfinished, and completed by Sir Arthur 
 Quiller Couch, shows signs of fatigue, but the fragment of " Weir ' 
 
 'In these three books Mr. Stevenson's stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne,, 
 collaborated. 
 
Latest Georgian and Victorian Novelists 641 
 
 of Hermiston," in which his foot is on his native heath, gave all 
 promise of a masterpiece in its many delineations of character. 
 In all his work, in whatever kind, the charm of his style accom- 
 panied the reader like the murmur of a burn that runs by the 
 wayside. 
 
 Of his verses, " A Child's Garden of Verses " (1885) is the most 
 like himself: a few of his serious poems in English have noble 
 effects, but perhaps the best of his poems in the Lowland ver- 
 nacular are to be preferred. His plays, written in collaboration 
 with Mr. W. E. Henley, were too literary, or for some other reason 
 were unsuccessful on the stage (" Deacon Brodie," " Beau Austin,'' 
 " Admiral Guinea "). 
 
 When we consider the great variety of Stevenson's works, their 
 wide range, their tenderness, their sympathy, their mastery of 
 terror and pity, their gloom and their gaiety ; when we remember 
 that his sympathy and knowledge are as conspicuous in his tales 
 of the brown natives of the Pacific (" The Beach of Falesa ") as of 
 Highlanders and Lowlanders, and the French of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury ; we can have little doubt concerning his place in literature. 
 
 Minor Novelists. 
 
 Among other novelists not hitherto named, the author of Char- 
 lotte Bronte's biography, Mrs. Gaskell {nee Stevenson) was born at 
 Chelsea, but lived and married in Manchester, and in 1848 rendered 
 the life of a manufacturing population, with their strikes and grimy 
 lives, then a new theme for fiction, in her story of " Mary Barton " 
 (1848). Her "Cranford " (1853), in a very different field, pictures 
 the placid existence of maiden ladies in a quiet village. Her 
 "Sylvia's Lovers," "North and South," and her delightful (unfin- 
 ished) "Wives and Daughters '' (1866) (the author died in 1865), 
 all deservedly hold their place among the.classics of our fiction. 
 
 With them " a little clan " would place novels unjustly for- 
 gotten, "The School for Fathers," by Talbot Gwynne, and "The 
 Initials," by the Baroness Tautphoeus. 
 
 Charles Reade (1814-1884) was a very prominent and em- 
 phatic character of his age, a kind of Lawrence Boythorn, en- 
 ga,ged in fiction and the drama. He was a Fellow of Magdalen, 
 
 41 
 
642 English Literature 
 
 Oxford, a barrister who did not practise, a philanthropist, some of 
 whose novels had a purpose, a combatant whose lance was ever in 
 rest, and as kind and generous as he was pugnacious. For a 
 thoroughly appreciative study of Reade a characteristic essay by 
 Mr. Swinburne should be read. His "Never too Late to Mend," 
 a study, very painful, of the torture of prisoners in jails, and a 
 much more pleasant picture of adventurous life in Australia 
 (Jacky, the black fellow, is a jewel), was most successful (1856), 
 and some reckon " The Cloister and the Hearth," a moving ro- 
 mance of latest mediaeval life in Germany and Italy, a masterpiece 
 of historical fiction. The tone is perhaps too modern and cer- 
 tainly too "robustious". "Peg Woffington" (1852) is perhaps 
 really better as a historical tale. " Griffith Gaunt " and " A Ter- 
 rible Temptation," with " Foul Play " and " The Wandering Heir '' 
 (the claimant in the great Annesley case of 1 743) have but few to 
 praise them, and the last mentioned is too manifestly made up of 
 the materials in the never-decided law case ; itself stranger than 
 fiction, but destitute of a single sympathetic character. 
 
 Space affords room for no more than a grateful mention of Mr. 
 William Black, whose pictures of Scottish characters, sport, and 
 landscape gave much pleasure to his contemporaries ; and of Sir 
 Walter Besant whose gift of humour in character and incident was 
 combined, on occasion, with a singular power of fantasy, while his 
 " Dorothy Forster," a tale of the Rising of 1 7 1 5, is probably the best 
 historical romance of that period after " Rob Roy ". 
 
CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 HISTORIANS. 
 
 After the appearance of the works of Hume and Robertson, 
 History became, as we have heard Gibbon say, the most popular 
 theme with the reading public. His own monumental work gave 
 new impetus to historical study. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) de- 
 voted himself mainly to Anglo-Saxon researches. Sir Francis Pal- 
 grave (i 788-1861) distinguished himself by research into the insti- 
 tutions and events of England and of English history from the 
 Conquest to the days of the Plantagenets. Dr. Lingard,^ Catholic 
 priest (1771-1851), produced a general history of the country up 
 to 1688, which perhaps has not yet been superseded by any book 
 of similar scope, and which is the more valuable as indicating the 
 aspect of events in the eyes of a Catholic. Necessarily the works 
 of these authors lack much information, contained in manuscripts 
 not then accessible to them, but now opened to students by the 
 better arrangement and cataloguing of State Papers. The his- 
 torians of the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty or forty 
 years of the nineteenth century, were not so heavily laden with 
 documents as historical writers of to-day, and they had leisure 
 enough to assimilate their less ponderous materials and to arrange 
 them with more of reflection and of art than is now common. 
 
 The historian who wears best is decidedly Henry Hallam 
 (1777-1859). The son of a Canon of Windsor, he was educated 
 at Eton and Christ Church. He entered the Middle Temple, but 
 obtained a fairly lucrative post in the Civil Service, had property 
 of his own, and devoted himself, in his leisure, to literary and 
 historical study. His " View of the State of JIurope during the 
 Middle Ages " holds its ground, despite the absence of materials 
 
 e43 41 * 
 
644 English Literature 
 
 now made common coin by Stubbs, Maitland, and others. Con- 
 sidering the immensity of the ground which Hallam surveys, his 
 accuracy is remarkable (for example he corrects, all in vain, an 
 important if minute error of detail which still infests the latest 
 works on Jeanne d'Arc), and, though he is compelled to be con- 
 cise, we see in his pages, for instance on Charlemagne, that he 
 can combine spirit and interest with brevity. The same praise 
 must be given to his " Constitutional History of England " (Henry 
 VII. - George II.). It is commonly said that an impartial his- 
 torian cannot be interesting. On the other hand, Hallam's con- 
 scientious efforts to be impartial lend much interest to his books. 
 He has no flights of impetuous rhetoric ; he is the last man to let 
 his imagination transfigure prosaic facts into glittering fancies. 
 We see an honourable, learned, and sober-minded man, who sums 
 up life like a judge and does not plead like an advocate. " Eu- 
 logy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold 
 rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not 
 where else to look," says Macaulay in his review of Hallam's book, 
 a review even unusually rich in the unmeasured invective of the 
 more popular historian. If we think Hallam "dull," the dullness 
 is in ourselves. Hallam has not the current delusion that the 
 Protestant reformers, from 1550 to 1688, were friends of freedom 
 of conscience. 
 
 His last important book " An Introduction to the Literature 
 of Europe '' (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is very deficient 
 in taste for the early works of les primitifs : "we cannot 
 place the ' Iliad ' on a level with the Jerusalem of Tasso," in some 
 essential respects. On the other hand, Hallam speaks thus of 
 Christopher North (Professor Wilson) : " A living writer of the 
 most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the 
 rush of mighty waters,'' with more to the same effect. Spenser's 
 stanza " is particularly inconvenient and languid in narration ". 
 Hallam has, in fact, very little space for inspiriting literary criti- 
 cism, on account of the vast scope of his theme. He has to treat 
 of Scioppius, his " Infamia Famiani," and of Ubbo Emmius, of 
 Grffivius and Spanheim, Camerarius and Grew. The encyclo- 
 paedic nature of Hallam's task made it impossible for him to avoid 
 
Historians 645 
 
 aridity, and to mingle much pleasure with instruction. He is 
 otherwise associated with poetry, as his son Arthur was the friend 
 of Tennyson, and dying early, inspired the long elegy of " In 
 Memoriam," and the beautiful Unes on " The Valley of Cauteretz ". 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay. 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, born at Rothley Temple in Lei- 
 cestershire, on 25 October, 1800, is an ideal representative of one 
 mood of the English mind and character during the first half of 
 the nineteenth century. Though the Mac in his patronymic be 
 Gaelic, he and his forefathers had little in them of the typical Celt. 
 The name Macaulay means MacOlaf (Olafson) and the Norseman 
 rather than the Celt predominated in Macaulay. His great grand- 
 father, the Rev. Aulay, and his grandfather the Rev. John, are re- 
 ported by Bishop Forbes (in "The Lyon in Mourning") to have 
 been personally and peculiarly active in attempting to gain the 
 prize of ^^30,000 offered by the English Government for Prince 
 Charles. Their enterprise did not suit the Celtic character. 
 Macaulay's father, Zachary, was a deeply religious man, a member 
 of the so-called " Clapham Sect " of Evangelicals. Though he 
 was at one time prosperous in business, so much of his time and 
 energy were given to negro emancipation that misfortunes came, 
 and Macaulay had to work hard for his livelihood. 
 
 There are no more delightful chapters in Biography than those 
 in which Sir George Trevelyan describes Macaulay's childhood. 
 His intelligence was precocious ; his memory was a marvel. At 
 the age of 9 he read once through " The Lay of the Last Min- 
 strel,'' and was able to repeat the whole of the poem. This exceeds 
 even Scott's feat of repeating the whole of a ballad of eighty verses 
 which he had heard read once by the author. Macaulay's memory 
 lasted throughout his life, and gave him, naturally, that amazing 
 readiness and richness in literary and historical allusions which have 
 made his Essays and History popular beyond rivalry. No doubt 
 like Scott he relied on memory too confidently ; styling Claver- 
 house, for example, "James Graham". He read with a rapidity 
 inconceivable; and he read everything, from Plato, Herodotus, 
 and ^schylus to the worst novels, forgetting nothing in them 
 
646 English Literature 
 
 that was accidentally good or exquisitely absurd. Even in child- 
 hood he was a copious and accomplished writer, his " Family Epic 
 on Olaf, King and Saint," presents a remarkably successful imita- 
 tion of Scott's style in " The Lady of the Lake ". With these in- 
 tellectual gifts he combined intense affection, good humour, and 
 a turn for loud and vehement argument. Going from a private 
 school to Trinity College, Cambridge, Macaulay regretted that he 
 had not chosen Oxford ; for mathematics were his abomination. 
 He twice gained, as Tennyson did once, the Chancellor's medal 
 for a prize poem, but in the Tripos of 1822 " Macaulay of Trinity 
 was gulfed," by " the cross-grained Muses of the cube and square ". 
 They did not prevent him from obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity. 
 He won a prize essay on William III., which is written in the very 
 cadences of style that mark his History; and, at intervals, in 
 the same short sentences. " He knew where to pause. He out- 
 raged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He 
 altered no venerable name." Possibly it is a pity that these sen- 
 tences do not describe William's conduct in Scottish affairs. 
 
 His early pieces, Macaulay contributed to " Knight's Quarterly 
 Magazine". At the age of 25 he wrote in "The Edinburgh 
 Review," that essay on poetry in general and on Milton as 
 poet, man, and politician in particular, which took the world 
 as suddenly and as completely as Byron's " Childe Harold " 
 had done. " The family breakfast-table was covered with cards 
 of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London." To 
 readers who in our day read the essay this enthusiasm seems 
 creditable to the world, but rather surprising. Of .^schylus, 
 Macaulay wrote : " considered as plays, his works are absurd ; 
 considered as choruses, they are above all praise ". Milton's 
 admiration of Euripides reminds him of " Titania kissing the long 
 ears of Bottom ". 
 
 Grateful as every reader is to Macaulay for the vivid and lucid 
 expression of his knowledge and thought in his essays, we must 
 admit that, like Charles Lamb, he was a man of " imperfect sym- 
 pathies ''. Miss Edgeworth, delighted to find her own name 
 in a footnote to his " History of England," expressed to him her 
 regret that Scott, who had written with entire impartiality about 
 
Historians 647 
 
 Macaulay's period, was not once mentioned. In truth, after read- 
 ing Lockhart's "Life of Scott," with its magnificent and melan- 
 choly close in the " Journal " of a man working himself to death 
 for honour's sake, Macaulay wrote thus of Sir Walter : " In poli- 
 tics a bitter and unscrupulous partisan ; profuse and ostentatious 
 in expense ; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler, . . . 
 sacrificing the perfection of his compositions to his eagerness for 
 money ... in order to satisfy wants which were produced by his 
 extravagant waste or rapacious speculations ; this is the way in 
 which he appears to me". Scott was a Tory : and from Macau - 
 lay's remarks we understand the justice of his studies of historical 
 characters. 
 
 The rapacious speculator, in fact, had shown " extravagant 
 waste " in publishing books (not his own) of disinterested research ; 
 when he was ruined he gave away his work, because he had not 
 money to give ; the " bitter and unscrupulous partisan " as a historian 
 of his country was more than scrupulously fair. Of Brougham's 
 essays Macaulay wrote : " All the characters are either too black 
 or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to 
 maintain the decent appearance of impartiality." These are the 
 very charges brought against Macaulay's own "characters" of 
 William Penn the Quaker, and Claverhouse the Cavalier ; while 
 no historian, perhaps, can defend his account of Sir Elijah Impey. 
 Had a Stuart King behaved as William III. did in the matter of 
 the Darien enterprise, we can easily imagine the style in which 
 Macaulay would have "dusted the varlet's jacket". But with 
 lapse of time his bias, his prejudices, can be discounted. As 
 early as 1828 he wrote "a perfect historian must possess an 
 imagination sufiSciently powerful to make his narrative affecting 
 a,n<i picturesque ''. That power of imagination he possessed and 
 exercised so delightfully that his History was at once purchased 
 more eagerly than a poem or romance. Both as a collector of 
 materials and as a traveller to the scenes of which he was to write, 
 Macaulay toiled with his own unexampled energy and rapidity. 
 It is well worth while to read his account of his own methods both 
 in study and in composition. ^ 
 
 'Sir George Trevelyan's "Life of Lord Macaulay," Chapter xi. 
 
648 English Literature 
 
 It is not the good fortune of most historians to possess even 
 Macaulay's private means, the savings of five years passed in India 
 as legal member of the Indian Council. Nor can his practical 
 knowledge of politics and of the world be often found among 
 students, while his natural gifts of imagination and of expression 
 are almost unexampled. His intellect had the limits of his class, 
 his age, and his robust and hasty temperament. 
 
 His poems, " The Lays of Ancient Rome," have been as popu- 
 lar as his prose. He tried at 40 to write such ballads as he con- 
 ceived the folk-songs of republican Rome to have been, and 
 nobody can deny that the " Lays " have abundance of spirit and 
 " go ". The ballad of the Armada, and of " The Last Buccaneer " 
 possess the same virtues and will always be dear to young people 
 of spirit. Arrived at the age of 50, Macaulay wrote, in the very 
 words of the dying Hazlitt, " Well, I have had a happy life ! " It 
 was extended to 1859, he died on 28 December, leaving a name 
 justly honourable and a cherished memory. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 Carlyle (1795-1881), with Burns, Knox, and Scott, is the chief 
 representative in letters of " the good and the not so good " (in 
 his own words applied to Sir Walter) of the Scottish character. 
 Unlike the other three, Carlyle was " thrawn," a word not easily 
 translated, but implying a certain twist, or perversion, towards the 
 whole nature of things. The apostle of silence was the most vol- 
 uble of mortals ; the peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath 
 a heap of mattresses as keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy 
 tale. 
 
 Carlyle was first of all a Scottish humorist ; that peculiar 
 humour of which Southrons deny the existence underlay the fate- 
 ful gloom of the philosopher and historian who beheld his country 
 " shooting Niagara," who saw that society was rotten and doomed, 
 and who found no remedy except in the arrival of a Cromwell or 
 a Frederic. He " praised the keen unscrupulous force " of such 
 heroes : though he did not use the term " superman," he believed 
 in the idea. It is quite certain that he had great tenderness and 
 friendliness ; his affection for Lockhart, so unlike him superficially 
 
Historians 649 
 
 (though Lockhart, too, was tender, melancholy, and " thrawn ") is 
 really touching. Carlyle had " our Scottish kindness," in Knox's 
 phrase, that is attachment to kin and clan. Even in his dourest 
 moods of personal invective his bark was worse than his bite, but 
 there was a great deal of bark. The conclusion of the whole 
 matter in the long dispute as to the relations of Carlyle and Mrs. 
 Carlyle is that, with a deep mutual affection, theirs was a life of 
 cat and dog. 
 
 Born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was 
 the son of a stone mason, though his genealogy traces him back 
 behind the Conquest to the Carlyle Lords of Torthorwald. Edu- 
 cated at the Grammar School of Annan, and the University of 
 Edinburgh, Carlyle was for some years a dominie, much at odds 
 with himself and the universe. He found guidance in Goethe and 
 other Germans ; wrote in " Eraser s Magazine," and elsewhere, 
 essays often historical ; in London met Coleridge and Lamb, who 
 was in one of his wildest moods ; wrote a " Life of Schiller " in 
 the style of a man of this world ; married in 1826, and for six years 
 was brooding, grumbling, studying, writing, and " making him- 
 self," in the bitter solitude of his wife's little lairdship, Craigen- 
 puttock. Here he produced, in his own characteristic manner, 
 "Sartor Resartus," a disguised autobiography, a humorous and 
 mournful version of his own struggles to find bottom in a uni- 
 verse apparently bottomless. That most things are shams, and 
 that shams are doomed, was Carlyle's message. The fate of 
 shams was illustrated in the fiery pages of his " French Revolu- 
 tion," written after he went to his life-long home in Cheyne Walk, 
 Chelsea, where it could not be said that, as in Kilmeny's fairyland, 
 " the cock never crew ". When, despite cocks and other disturb- 
 ances, Carlyle, with heroic efforts of study, had finished the first 
 volume, John Stuart Mill lent it to a lady, and it was never seen 
 again. Her cook may have been a Betty Barnes. Carlyle re- 
 turned to his task, and in 1837 the book astonished the world. 
 It had all the colour of romance, and despite the discoveries of 
 recent research, it seems substantially accurate in detail. 
 
 " Heroes and Hero-Worship," and the " Past (mediaeval) 
 and Present," preluded to his very laborious "Letters and 
 
650 English Literature 
 
 Speeches of Oliver Cromwell " (i 845). With many a groan over the 
 confusion of his materials, and with many a shout of applause to 
 the orator of the speeches, Carlyle set Oliver in the light of day, 
 interpreting the studied ambiguities of such speeches of the hero 
 as he makes to the puzzled Wildrake in " Woodstock ". Sir 
 Walter's Cromwell is probably as correct a portrait of the Pro- 
 tector as Carlyle's, and Carlyle's must be compared with the less 
 enthusiastic study by Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Carlyle took con- 
 scientious pains with the military part of his history, visiting the 
 battlefields, and becoming epic in the fiery spirit of his descrip- 
 tion of the defeat of his countrymen at Dunbar. A chart-picture 
 of the battle evaded his research, and his account is not absolutely 
 correct. After another prophetic cry of doom in " Latter Day 
 Pamphlets " (1850) Carlyle plunged for many years into the labour 
 of studying " Frederic the Great ". The toil outwore his force, 
 and it may be complained that he did not focus his subject. Yet 
 none of his books is of greater interest, and he is the prophet of 
 the modern greatness of Germany. We see how fortis Etruria 
 crevit ; through discipline, patriotism, self-sacrifice, " enduring 
 hardness," and obedient to her greatest men. No other than 
 Carlyle could have told the story with so much alluring anima- 
 tion; his military history, too, is most conscientiously studied. 
 His native gift of observing and divining, and describing (in his 
 own words on a singularly private scene, witnessed by him) " with 
 perhaps some humorous exaggeration," found ample scope in his 
 work on Frederic, as well as in his " French Revolution ". No 
 doubt he overdid the trick of reiterating traits in Dickens's man- 
 ner ; — for a truly candid censure of his style an essay by his obliged 
 friend, Leigh Hunt, may be consulted (see remarks on Leigh 
 Hunt). 
 
 Occasionally, as in his essays on " Cagliostro " and " The 
 Diamond Necklace," Carlyle's freedom of style, and his attacks 
 on his authorities, are somewhat infuriating ; the reader wants to 
 be told a plain tale without these excursions, exclamations, and 
 imaginations. Carlyle regarded imagination as one of the wings 
 of history, and perhaps encouraged the too freely imaginative 
 narrations of his friend Froude. 
 
Historians 651 
 
 To him, unhappily, he bequeathed the autobiographical papers 
 of himself and his wife, which Froude handled, to the best of his 
 ■ power, as he understood that Carlyle had desired that they should 
 be treated. There followed outcries from the more ferocious ad- 
 mirers of Carlyle, though Froude had done his best to obey his 
 master ! That he could not be absolutely accurate is certain ; but 
 disloyal he never was. There is no doubt that Carlyle, irritable, 
 absorbed in his work, and taking his wife's exemplary care of him 
 for granted, was " gey ill to live wi'," while " she had a tongue with 
 a tang ". These facts have produced a jungle of deplorable writ- 
 ings ; but of Carlyle's genuine goodness and kindness no one who 
 saw him could reasonably doubt. 
 
 The style of Carlyle was unique, unimaginable except by him- 
 self,' the worst of models for others, and exquisitely fitted to em- 
 body his own idiosyncrasies — in short, it is, in prose, not wholly 
 unlike that of Browning in many of his poems. To address the 
 world in this voice, when he was almost unknown, demanded a 
 cow'age and confidence in which Carlyle was not deficient. One 
 is occasionally reminded of the methods, illegitimate but effective, 
 of the author of " Tristram Shandy," and, again, of Rabelais. 
 
 James Anthony Froude. 
 
 In one way, as a historian, Froude (1818-1894) may be called 
 the pupil, as he was the devoted friend, of Carlyle. That sage 
 worshipped force in men, and Froude, failing a Cromwell or a 
 Frederic, made a hero of Henry VIII., " that blot of blood and 
 grease on the pages of English history," as Dickens called the 
 king who found " the gospel light in Boleyn's eyes ". It is not 
 from Carlyle that a young historian can learn the unpopular grace 
 of impartiality. To read Froude you would suppose that the Pro- 
 testant party in the sixteenth century were innocent of the blood 
 shed by pohtical assassins ; whereas the godly slayers of Beaton, 
 Riccio, and the Due de Guise, like Elizabeth when she bade Paulet 
 murder Mary Stuart, were precisely on a level with the would-be 
 murderers of Elizabeth ; and Henry VIII. was burning martyrs 
 of all shades in England, while the Beatons were doing the same 
 thing to heretics in Scotland. Henry was perhaps even more 
 
652 English Literature 
 
 treacherous than he was lustful and cruel, but it is in the original 
 sources, not in Froude's History, that you discover the fact. 
 
 However, impartial history is notoriously dull, whereas that of 
 Froude is so entertaining that to take up a volume is to go on 
 reading, fascinated by his charm, and delighted by a style remote 
 as the poles from Carlyle's. It is as simple as Swift's, admirably 
 lucid, excelling in the gift of narrative, without imitable peculiar- 
 ities, and as entirely spontaneous as if the author were writing an 
 ordinary letter. 
 
 Froude, with his brother Richard, was at Oxford when New- 
 man was the great influence among the junior Fellows (Exeter was 
 Froude's College), and Froude went so far with the Movement as 
 to work at the Lives of some early English Saints. But the in- 
 nocent legends of their miracles were too much for his belief, despite 
 the excellent evidence for some of those of St. Thomas of Canter- 
 bury. His scepticism extended, and his short anti-religious novel, 
 " The Nemesis of Faith " (1849), is said to have been thrown into 
 the fire by a don of his own college. 
 
 He turned to History — that of England from the reign of 
 Henry VIII. to the defeat of the Armada, and he resolutely at- 
 tacked the great masses of Spanish contemporary manuscripts at 
 Simancas. It was a knightly deed, when we think of the handwrit- 
 ing of the period, and the sometimes inextricably bad grammar 
 of the writers. Different modern historians, in one case, give di- 
 verse translations of one crucial passage, and it seems that all of 
 them are wrong. But Froude committed many errors which were 
 not perceived by his furious assailant. Freeman (who did not know 
 where to have him), but are conspicuous when we compare his work 
 with his authorities. He is quite untrustworthy; he has taken 
 fragments from three letters of three different dates, and printed 
 them, with marks of quotation, as if they occurred in a single letter. 
 He accuses Mary Stuart of a certain action, on the authority 
 of the English ambassador, and when we read his letter we find 
 him saying that rumour charges Mary with the fact, but that he 
 does not believe it. 
 
 Froude describes a dramatic scene in which Elizabeth triumphs 
 over the Scottish envoys sent to plead for Mary's life ; and when 
 we examine the authorities, to which an erroneous reference is 
 
Historians 653 
 
 given, we find in them no such matter, no such scene. The im- 
 pression given is that Froude read his authorities, let what he read 
 simmer in his mind, let his fancy play freely over it, and then wrote 
 in picturesque and alluring fashion, on the dictates of romance, 
 without ever comparing what he wrote with what his authorities re- 
 corded. They are uninteresting, Froude is extremely interesting : 
 as a maker of literature he is in the first rank ; as a chronicler of 
 the truth he is not always trustworthy. He did not know his sub- 
 ject " all round " ; of Scotland he knew little, and was wedded to 
 the belief that James I. was the firstxif the Stuart line. He gravely 
 repeats and embellishes Knox's mythical account of the disaster 
 of Solway Moss, but probably the English despatches of the day 
 were not accessible to him. How much of the interest of his 
 book would survive if it were reduced to the sober verities one 
 cannot estimate, but his wonderful power of giving a kind of 
 bird's-eye views of most complicated European situations in poli- 
 tics must remain unmatched. 
 
 Froude, against his bias, made it seem almost certain that 
 Elizabeth had guilty foreknowledge of the death of Amy Robsart. 
 He leaned on a letter of the Spanish ambassador, and reading 
 the Spanish for " last month " as " the present month," he left an 
 erroneous impression. At the moment (1856-1869) there seems 
 to have been no English reviewer who had the necessary know- 
 ledge ; for Freeman merely picked holes in the fringes of Froude's 
 work. Froude wrote " The English in Ireland," wrote books of 
 political observations made in our colonies, and, succeeding 
 Freeman as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, lectured on 
 Erasmus and published his lectures, which were flown upon by 
 the critics. He also wrote a good " Life of Bunyan," and a 
 longer biography of Caesar. His " Short Studies " are as interesting 
 as his History, which is not likely to be superseded. As a literary 
 view of a great period of history, it has no rival. It is as rich in 
 original research as in portraits of characters. All that it lacks 
 is a final comparison of the results with the authorities. 
 
 Edward Augustus Freeman. 
 Freeman (1823-1892) will always be best known by his long 
 " History of the Norman Conquest," a work which embraces most 
 
654 English Literature 
 
 of our island story before the great event of 1066. The author, 
 a Fellow of Trinity, Oxford, was also a squire in Somerset, and 
 could afford to devote his time to a gentlemanly but usually un- 
 remunerative form "of literature. His work is protracted, minute, 
 and influenced by a passion for the ideal English in the national 
 character. Prodigiously industrious in his study of the original 
 sources in print ; he had a kind of dislike of research in manu- 
 scripts. He was well versed in architecture, topography, and local 
 history ; he was as much at home in Sicily as in England, with 
 Graeco-Roman as with Norman remains ; he was combative, and, 
 in an earlier age, would probably have invited Mr. Robertson to 
 settle the question of the English overlordship of Scotland in the 
 lists. His great work is more profitable to the serious student 
 than interesting to the general reader. He wrote much in " The 
 Saturday Review " without adding to the popularity of that periodi- 
 cal. He was constantly correcting the errors of others, and died 
 during a controversy with Mr. Horace Round on the existence or 
 non-existence of a palisade at the Battle of Hastings (or Senlac). 
 His friend and pupil, J. R. Green (1837-1883), is celebrated for his 
 "Short History of the English People" (1874), a work written 
 in a style rather acrocorinthian, and in its first edition rich in 
 errors, later corrected. The book is written with so much spirit 
 and sympathy that it may tempt many a reader to go more deeply 
 into books less popular. Green had the power of exciting interest 
 in topics generally deemed arid, and, with Freeman, contributed 
 to the success of the History School at Oxford, though even more 
 was due to the work of Bishop Stubbs on charters and constitu- 
 tional history, and to the tutorial lectures and influence of the late 
 Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, author of a history of the 
 Popes. 
 
 William Hickling Prescott. 
 
 William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859), the celebrated his- 
 torian of the two greatest adventures of the modern world, was 
 born, like Hawthorne, at Salem, and was educated at Harvard. 
 Here sonje student threw a piece of bread at him in hall, his eye 
 was struck, and his sight was so much injured that he could only 
 
Historians 655 
 
 write by aid of a kind of framework with cross lines ; while his 
 reading, whether from books or manuscripts, was almost wholly 
 done by proxy. The works were read aloud, he listened ; prob- 
 ably had notes made of the passages which he meant to use in 
 his histories, composed his periods and then dictated them to a 
 copyist. His " Ferdinand and Isabella," the history of Spain in 
 her glory, is of 1837. Six years later he published " The Conquest 
 of Mexico" (1843), "The Conquest of Peru" in 1847, and, up 
 till his death in 1859, he was at work on the first decadence of 
 Spain, under Philip II. 
 
 In glancing over the list of historical writers in English, from 
 Gibbon downwards, we remark that almost all were men who could 
 afford to deal with a theme so generally unpopular as the past. 
 Hume and Robertson and Gibbon were all, when they worked at 
 history, men in possession of a competence, or more than a com- 
 petence. So was Hallam, so was Sir Walter Scott ; Grote, Pres- 
 cott. Freeman, Macaulay, were at least equally fortunate, while 
 Carlyle, by dint of the strictest economy, was at least able to wait 
 for years before reaping the emoluments of his labours. The 
 man of letters who must live by his pen must live by hackwork 
 of various kinds, and cannot afford the time to collect and digest 
 his information, to select the little ore from the quarry of docu- 
 ments, and then present in an artistic form the result of his re- 
 searches. Professors of history who must employ their days by 
 lecturing to and correcting the essays of pupils, " live from the 
 altar " of history, but are almost never great and are never popular 
 nistorians. 
 
 The chief American and English historical writers of 1840- 
 1890 were fortunate in another way; of which Prescott took full 
 advantage. They might dare to be interesting, to describe strik- 
 ing events with what eloquence they had at command, and ven- 
 ture to dwell on the characters and fortunes of historical persons, 
 famous or obscure. Science, through the lips of a hundred pro- 
 fessors, did not then insist that historical writers must be dry, im- 
 personal, impartial weighers of anise and cummin, students of 
 economics. Scores of unread specialists were not lying in wait 
 to pounce upon every slip, and blot out every touch of colour. 
 
656 English Literature 
 
 Indeed, Mr. Froude could, and did, go as he pleased, and his most 
 unfriendly critics did not know the period of which he wrote. 
 Nobody, like Mr. Gardiner later, gave a whole year of study to the 
 documents of a single year. Now accuracy is a precious thing, 
 but historians who live in constant fear of making a slip have not 
 hitherto produced books which stand high as literature, books 
 which are read " for human pleasure "- Again, in the last golden 
 age of history which was literature, " the reading public," always 
 a minute minority, was not wholly absorbed in new novels. Thus 
 the historians of that time had many advantages, and they were 
 men who deserved their opportunities. 
 
 Once more, when Prescott set to work, the States of Europe 
 at last began to permit men of letters to make free use of their 
 collections of old public documents, letters, despatches, books of 
 accounts, while the Royal Academy of History at Madrid gave 
 the greatest facilities to the assistants of Prescott, — a favour denied, 
 in the eighteenth century, to Dr. Robertson. The President of 
 the Academy placed his own fine collection of documents at the 
 disposal of the American historian, as did Sir Thomas Phillipps in 
 England, and the archives of Mexico were opened to him, while 
 he read, of course, through the remarkable book composed, after 
 the Conquest, from the evidence of the learned Aztecs, by Saha- 
 gun ; and the delightful chronicle of one of the conquerors, 
 Bernal Diaz. New materials may since have come to light, but 
 Prescott, rejoicing in the rich mine of true romance ; writing with 
 zest and spirit and wide erudition, produced his two books on the 
 two great adventures of Cortes and Pizarro in such a form that 
 his works cannot be superseded. It is said by an American critic 
 that " the Imperial palaces which he saw in an imagination kindled 
 by that of the Spanish conquerors have dwindled to large com- 
 munal houses inhabited by barbarians,'' and that " he lived too 
 early to make use of the results of archaeological research ". But 
 any one who looks at the scanty relics of ancient Anahuac in the 
 British Museum knows what kind of " barbarians " produced such 
 objects of art. Moreover, the Spaniards came from a land of 
 palaces, the land of the Alhambra, and of glorious cathedrals 1 it 
 is not possible to believe that they were deceived, and described 
 
Historians 657 
 
 Aztec buildings as palaces, while they were merely " long houses " 
 like those of the Iroquois. This appears to the writer to be a 
 vain imagination, and the works of Prescott, though romantic, are 
 not romances. 
 
 John Lothrop Motley. 
 
 The chief historical writers of the United States occur 
 in a group, between the years of Macaulay and Froude. One 
 of the most popular, and deservedly popular, is John Lothrop 
 Motley (1814-1877). He chose neither American nor English 
 history for his theme, but, in selecting the Dutch Republic, found 
 a topic exciting to republicans in one country and to Protestants 
 and friends of Freedom's cause in both. 
 
 Motley, who was born near Boston, had a father of substantial 
 wealth who liked literature. He went to Harvard, and then 
 studied at Berlin and Gottingen, where he became the friend of 
 the great Bismarck. Like Macaulay, Hallam, and others, he 
 spent his leisure in the most intellectual society, whether abroad 
 or in America, and in constant touch with men of literary genius, 
 Lowell, Holmes, Longfellow, Thackeray ; and also with diplo- 
 matists occupied with national affairs. He was not a student 
 and recluse, who can scarcely ever be a historian, in the literary 
 sense, however serviceable he may be as an archivist, a collector 
 and critic of the materials of history. 
 
 Motley, returning to America, tried to write novels, without 
 success ; then chose his subject, for years toiled at the massive 
 printed books of the Dutch, and for some four years worked at 
 manuscript documents in Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere. 
 
 Between 1851 and 1856 he accomplished his task, "The Rise 
 of the Dutch Republic ". The firm of Murray declined to em- 
 bark in it, and might rue their caution, for, once published, the 
 book was received with acclaim, both by critics, including Mr. 
 Froude, and by the purchasing public, who found it " as interest- 
 ing as a novel ". " The Saturday Review," then in the academic 
 and educated arrogance of its youth, was unfriendly ; perhaps 
 partly because the author was an American, partly because of his 
 Protestant enthusiasm. Prescott, who was working at the same 
 
 42 
 
658 English Literature 
 
 period, and generously welcomed the enterprise of the younger 
 man, told Motley that he had " whittled away " Philip II., and 
 that he saw the- events "through Dutch spectacles ". But these 
 were popular spectacles ; and few persons know the Spanish and 
 Catholic side of the shield. Dutch critics, while they praised, 
 made their reserves ; and an old feud reawoke when, later, Motley ' 
 wrote on the Arminian, not the Calvinist side of the great party 
 quarrel in Holland, and on the career of John Barneveld. 
 
 As a diplomatist (in 1869 American Minister in England) 
 Motley knew the nature of the inmost political councils ; he knew 
 European society ; he had, in much the same measure as Froude, 
 the art of making the dry bones of the past clothe themselves in 
 flesh and blood, in steel armour, or in satins and veivets. He 
 had access to many despatches, often in cipher, always in the hard- 
 est of all handwritings (that of the sixteenth century before the 
 " Roman hand " was adopted), and he laboured at these with iron 
 endurance, turning his results " to favour and to prettiness " by the 
 graces of his pictorial style. 
 
 His continuation of his work, "The History of the United 
 Netherlands" (published by Mr. Murray) was completed in 1865 ; 
 his "Life of John of Barneveld" in 1874. He died in England 
 (1877) and there is buried. His work has not been, and for Eng- 
 lish readers is never likely to be, superseded, though it would gain 
 by addition of notes from eminent Dutch critical historians. He 
 was of a beautiful presence, and, according to Lady Byron, had 
 a " most wonderful " likeness to the poet. His letters are full of 
 amusing gossip about the world of Thackeray and Macaulay. 
 
 Other Historians. 
 
 Sir William Napier (i 785-1860) who fought with distinction 
 under Wellington in the Peninsula, combined with his great per- 
 sonal knowledge of the war conscientious research in documents, 
 and a style of the most brilliant eloquence. Impartial he was not, 
 and he had the fiery temper of the Napiers ; but modern research, 
 as in Mr. Oman's great work, now corrects him, and now com- 
 plements his information. 
 
Historians 659 
 
 The great work of George Grote (1794-1871), a Radical in 
 politics, a banker by profession, is " The History of Greece ". It is 
 too well known to need description. Though Grote's aim was to 
 set Athenian democracy in what he held to be its true light, he 
 laboured not less assiduously among the mythic legends and the 
 heroic poetry of Hellas ; he was most erudite in every fragment of 
 Greek records, and his work, though destitute of much new light 
 recently discovered by excavations of Greek sites and from in- 
 scriptions, yet holds its place, unsurpassed, as a general history of 
 Hellas. 
 
 Henry Hart Milman (i 791-1868) was educated at Eton and 
 Brasenose College, Oxford, and began his literary career as a 
 writer of verse. 
 
 The poet-priest Milman 
 So ready to kill man, 
 
 is thus mentioned by Byron, who thought that Milman had attacked 
 him, or Shelley, or both, in " The Quarterly Review ". He later 
 wrote "The History of the Jews,'' now out of date, and his chief 
 and very meritorious work " The History of Latin Christianity " 
 
 (1855)- 
 
 Space, and the nature of his subjects, logical, philosophical, 
 political, and social, forbid more than a mention of a man so 
 prominent and influential as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill 
 was privately educated and forced into precocity by his father, 
 James Mill, a Liberal doctrinaire. In 1 843 he gave to the world 
 his "System of Logic,'' in 1848 his "Political Economy"; the 
 former, at least, was for many years read almost as much as the 
 "Ethics " of Aristotle by competitors for honours at Oxford. His 
 " Liberty " (1859) was an extremely advanced book in its day ; as 
 was his " Subjection of Women ". Mill sowed large handfuls of 
 the seed of the dragon's teeth. He was an earnest, precise, and 
 lucid writer ; but not successful in Parliament. 
 
 Newman. 
 
 The bearers of some of the greatest literary names of the nine- 
 teenth century produced books which had vast influence on the 
 
 42 * 
 
66o English Literature 
 
 development of thought, and yet left little work that, as mere 
 literature, is of the highest merit. They were concerned with the 
 religious, theological, social, and political ideas of their own time, 
 which, like all the ideas personal, as it were, to one or two genera- 
 tions, could not remain fixed, but glided into protean forms of 
 change. Thus John Henry Newman (born in London, 1801, 
 educated at Trinity College, Oxford; Fellow of Oriel, 1822) passed 
 through various phases of religious and ecclesiastical belief ; was 
 a leader with Pusey, Keble, and many others in the Oxford 
 Anglican Movement ; found that his reason led him into the 
 Roman fold (he was made a Cardinal finally) and wrote volumin- 
 ously, and in a style confessedly of the highest merit. Yet no 
 doubt his most widely and permanently interesting work took the 
 form of a defensive autobiography ("Apologia pro Vita Sua," 
 1864), which is more read for its vivid study of his own mental 
 vicissitudes, and personal experiences, than for its theological 
 science. It answers, in his generation, to the " Confessions " of 
 St. Augustine. 
 
 Newman describes himself as not only religious but super- 
 stitious in boyhood ; he read Law's "Serious Call," and crossed 
 himself when he went into the dark. His search for truth was 
 earnest, his nature was almost sceptical but hospitable towards the 
 marvellous, and his own party, to whatsoever party he belonged at 
 any period, never knew where or how far his theory of the De- 
 velopment of Doctrine would carry him. As a tutor of Oriel, and- 
 Vicar of St. Mary's, he exercised, as much by his personality and 
 sanctity of life as by his intellect, an unprecedented influence over the 
 minds of the young. In 1843-4 he began to publish " Lives of the 
 English Saints " from the earliest period : many of these were done 
 by Newman's disciples. 'The narratives abound in miracles of all 
 sorts which proved too much for the faith of J. A. Froude. New- 
 man's doctrine developed in a way which puzzled himself and 
 others. His heart and his tastes drew him towards Catholicism ; 
 his earlier ideas caused him to preach against the old faith ; 
 at last his reason sided with his "secret longing love of 
 Rome," his "Tract 90 " in "Tracts for the Times," alarmed the 
 academic authorities. " I hardly knew where I stood . . . when 
 
Historians 66 1 
 
 I wanted to be in peace and silence I had to speak out, and 
 I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mys- 
 teriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority." 
 He retired from the University pulpit, and after a period of retreat 
 and reflection, crossed the Rubicon. There was a long and bitter 
 period of trials, of broken friendships, of charges of duplicity and so 
 forth. In reviewing Froude's " History," Charles Kingsley spoke 
 as if more than doubtful of Newman's respect for truth as such ; a 
 correspondence followed ; Kingsley wrote an offensive pamphlet : 
 "What then does Dr. Newman Mean?" Newman, by this 
 time a man of 63, answered the question in his " Apologia " ; 
 first making a terrible display of acute personal irony, and then 
 giving a narrative of the development of his opinions. In later 
 editions he omitted the polemical pages, and when Kingsley died 
 said a Mass for his soul. The book was received with almost 
 universal applause — yet it had not been easy for Kingsley to under- 
 stand what Newman meant. His " Grammar of Assent " was so 
 many times rewritten as to leave the impression that he himself 
 did not easily ascertain his own meaning. It is curious to find 
 him quoting a writer in " The Penny Cyclopaedia " as an authority 
 on the religion of the Australian tribes; the writer was not 
 correctly informed. 
 
 Newman's works range from twelve volumes of sermons, 
 through treatises and essays, historical and critical, and polemical 
 works, to novels of which " Callista," a tale of the early Christians 
 in Africa, is the best, and to poetry. In this, " The Dream of 
 Gerontius " displays intense imaginative power ; and " Lead, 
 Kindly Light " is the most admired of his religious lyrics. Per- 
 haps this great and good man is most intelUgible in his " Life," by 
 Mr. Wilfrid Ward (1912). 
 
 In his love of truth, and in his courage and natural independ- 
 ence of mind, Newman was what we call " thoroughly English ". 
 " I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to 
 breathe by another's lungs," he wrote. As much might be said 
 for two authors who differed from him so widely as Charles Dar- 
 win .(1809-1882) and Thomas Huxley (i 825-1 895). The nature 
 of their studies was, as a rule, remote from the literary, and 
 
662 English Literature 
 
 must find record and criticism in the History of Science. The 
 greatness of Darwin's character and intellect is among the chief 
 intellectual glories of his country. Huxley, apart from his own 
 special researches, was the Thangbrand of Evolution, the popular 
 fighting man, of a brisk humorous pugnacity; his mental lungs 
 expanding in an atmosphere which would have asphyxiated New- 
 man. He had very wide general reading ; of his more literary 
 works his "Life of David Hume " in the series of " English Men 
 of Letters " is an admirable example. He is not to be accepted 
 as an impeccable authority on the religions of the more backward 
 races. The same caution must be extended to the anthropological 
 works of Herbert Spencer, a single-hearted seeker after truth, with 
 a very peculiar scientific style of his own. Of all men who wrote 
 much, and earnestly, and persuasively, Spencer was the least of a 
 reader ; to much good literature he was even antipathetic. His 
 tastes may be studied in his autobiography. 
 
 W. E. H. Lecky. 
 
 Among historians of the later Victorian age, W. E. H. 
 Lecky (1838- 1903) held a position which was all his own. He 
 was not an explorer among difficult and ancient archives like 
 Froude; he had not Froude's imaginative and pictorial' genius, 
 and power of bringing dead times and personages vividly before 
 the inner eye. He had neither the wide general historical 
 knowledge of Freeman, nor Green's combination of effective 
 rhetoric with very considerable learning. The minute and labori- 
 ous accuracy of Gardiner, focused on a space comparatively 
 limited, was not his ; it was said of him at the moment when, still 
 very young, he produced his " History of the Rise and Influence 
 of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe" (1865) that beseemed 
 infinitely more familiar with Latin and French than with Greek 
 and German, and so he continued to be. But he gave, to the 
 general reader, the results of wide reading ; he was as lucid as he 
 was fluent ; his style was unborrowed, but descended from that 
 of the eighteenth century ; and so candid was he, that he spoke 
 of the honesty of "The Old Pretender" (James VHI and III) as 
 
Historians 663 
 
 " heroic ". Few historians have been so precocious ; few more 
 popular. Born in 1838, of a landed Irish family of Scottish 
 descent, he was educated at Cheltenham College, and Trinity 
 College, Dublin. In his twenty-third year he was already a pub- 
 lished historical writer ("Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland"). 
 He travelled in Spain, Italy, and France, and in 1865 published 
 his work on the " History of Rationalism," which was warmly 
 welcomed, and remains a justly popular book. But, in accordance 
 with the nature of historical science, it is such a history of Ration- 
 alism, beginning with a study of the belief in witchcraft and the 
 attendant cruelties, as ajfoung man of talent, taking up the subject to- 
 day, could no longer write. Much is adopted from Michelet, Maury, 
 and Guerinet ; the psychology of the topic was, in 1 865, unknown : 
 and to-day only a very daring youth could aver that the Rev. Mr. 
 Kirk published "A Secret Commonwealth" in 1691 or at any 
 other date. But the work is full of interest for the general reader : 
 the author won a deserved success, and was 31 years of age 
 when he followed it up with his " History of European Morals," a 
 topic that might have taxed the erudition of the maturity of 
 Gibbon. It involved a philosophical dissertation on the origin of 
 morality, Lecky professing a theory ef "intuition," which, though 
 opposed to " rationalistic " ideas, is not unsympathetic to some 
 anthropologists; though in knowledge of the ethics of savages, 
 he could not, at the period when he wrote, be accompUshed. 
 Again, a study of Neoplatonism was involved, and had to be 
 written without the aid of much psychological inquiry, posterior 
 to the date of the work. The researches of the future antiquate 
 works on such large subjects as the History of Morals with ruthless 
 rapidity. Lecky's works, so far, were in the manner of Montes- 
 quieu and other great French philosophes, but, while severe 
 enough on the errors of the clergy, he had none of Gibbon's mis- 
 chievous love of degrading the early Christian ideal. 
 
 The central part of Lecky's literary career, till 1890, was en- 
 gaged with his great work "The History of England in the 
 Eighteenth Century ". This vast and important book is the use- 
 ful successor of Macaulay's History, and is written with much fair- 
 ness, though, as usual, a considerable mass of information has since 
 
664 English Literature 
 
 accraed from materials not accessible to the author. This work is 
 not only valuable as a political record, but for its close attention to 
 the changes in thought, manners, literature, and society. Lecky 
 was not, as an Irishman, likely to neglect the affairs of his native 
 island where he had access to the Archives in Dublin public 
 offices. He was in politics a Unionist, but did not conceal his 
 dislike of "the manner of the wooing". His other best-known 
 works are " Democracy and Liberty,'' and " Historical and Political 
 Essays ". He sat in Parliament as the representative of his Uni- 
 versity ; was the friend of all the most eminent men of letters 
 of his time; and, thanks to the amiability of his character, he 
 probably never had an enemy. 
 
 With the name of Lecky this work must close, leaving in such 
 brief record much excellent work unchronicled, as too recent to 
 have passed into history. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A List of Authors is given on page xi at the beginning of the book 
 
 Abbot, Scott's, 542. 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden's, 
 
 376, 378. 
 Absentee, Miss Edgeworth's, 535. 
 Abt Vogler, Browning's, 576. 
 Actois, in the reign of Elizabeth, 193, 
 
 194, 225. 235- 
 Adam Bede, G. Eliot's, 638. 
 Adam Blaii, Lockhait's, 549, 612, 
 
 626. 
 Admiral Guinea, Stevenson's, 641. 
 Adonais, Shelley's, 518. 
 Advancement of Learning, 
 
 Bacon's, 272, 274, 275. 
 Adventurer, the, 432. 
 Adventures of an Atom, Smollett's, 
 
 469. 
 Adventures of Ulysses, Lamb's, 552. 
 ^sop's Fables, sprung from the 
 
 primitive "beast-story," i. 
 Affectionate Shepherd, Barnfield's, 
 
 289. 
 Ages, Bryant's, 563. 
 Agincourt, Drayton's ballad of, 292. 
 Aglaura, Suckling's, 338. 
 Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte's, 624. 
 Alarum against Usurers, Lodge's, 
 
 201. 
 Alastor, Shelley's, 517. 
 Alboin, Lombardian legend of, 3, 108. 
 Albovine, Davenant's, 340. 
 Alchemist, Jonson's, 237, 238. 
 Alcibiades, Otway's, 369. 
 Alciphron, or the Minute Philo- 
 sopher, Berkeley's, 421. 
 Alfred, Life of, Asser's, 27, 28. 
 / / Alhambra, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Alisaundre, King, Romance, 70. 
 All Fools, Chapman's, 249. 
 All for Love, Dryden's, 378. 
 Alliteration, 4, 25, 53, 72, 97, 99, 168. 
 
 Alma, or the Progress of the Mind, 
 
 Prior's, 388. 
 Alphonsus, King of Arragon, 
 
 Greene's, 199. 
 Alton Locke, C. Kingsley's, 630. 
 Amazing Marriage, G. Meredith's, 
 
 636. 
 Amelia, Fielding's, 462, 466. 
 American Notes, Dickens's, 582. 
 American Scholar, Emerson's Lec- 
 ture on the, 580. 
 Analecta, Wodrow's, 443. 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton's, 
 
 303-30S, 308, 313, 486. 
 Ancient Mariner, Coleridge's, 500, 
 
 501. 
 Ancren Riwle, the, 53. 
 Andreas, the, 19, 120. 
 Andromeda, C. Kingsley's, 631. 
 Anecdotes of Painting, H. Wal- 
 
 pole's, 485. 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the, 28, 29, 
 
 30. 31. 37- 
 Anglo-Saxons, their Early Literature, 
 
 I. 
 Anglo-Saxon Language, influence of 
 
 Normans on the, 41. 
 Animated Nature, Goldsmith's, 478. 
 Annals of the Parish, Gait's, 455, 
 
 6og. 
 Annual Register, the, 481, 515. 
 Annus Mirabilis, Dryden's, 376. 
 Antiquary, Scott's, 140, 503, 541. 
 Antonio and Mellida, Marston's, 
 
 251. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, Shakes- 
 peare's, 232. 
 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua, Newman's, 
 631, 660, 661. 
 
 Apology, Churchill's, 451. 
 
 Apology, Swift's, 409, 410. 
 
 665 
 
666 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Apology for Heroic Poetry and 
 Poetic Licence, Dryden's, 360. 
 
 Apology for Liturgy, Taylor's, 314. 
 
 Apology for Smectymnuus, Milton's, 
 310. 
 
 Appius and Virginia, Webster's, 
 259. 
 
 Arcadia, Sidney's, 179, 182, 183, 
 442. 
 
 Areopagitica, Milton's, 311, 312. 
 
 Aretina, Mackenzie's, 183, 442. 
 
 Argument against Abolishing Chris- 
 tianity, Swift's, 410. 
 
 Ariosto, 162, 186, 200, 359. ' 
 
 Ariosto, Harington's translation of, 
 281. 
 
 Aristotle's Ethics, Wylkinson's trans- 
 lation of, 281. 
 
 Armada, Macaulay's, 564, 648. 
 
 Arminius, 3. 
 
 Arraignment of Paris, Peele's Masque, 
 
 193. 197- 
 Arthour and Merlin, the Romance 
 
 of, 67. 
 Arthur, Legends of King, 41, 42-47, 
 
 49. 57, 60. 67. 124. 
 Arthur Mervyn, C. B. Brown's, 536. 
 Arts of Empire, Raleigh's, 279. 
 Asolando, Browning's, 576. 
 Astoria, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Astrsea Redux, Dryden's, 375, 376. 
 Astrolabe, Chaucer on the, 115, 118. 
 As You Like It, Shakespeare's, 200, 
 
 201, 227, 228, 229. 
 Atalanta in Calydon, Swinburne's, 
 
 593. 603. 
 Atheist's Tragedy, Tourneur's, 259, 
 
 602. 
 Attila, the legend of, 3. 
 Auld House, the. Lady Nairne's, 
 
 446. 
 Aurora Leigh, E. B. Brownmg s, 557. 
 Autobiography, Hunt's, 554. 
 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 
 
 O. W. Holmes's, 628. 
 Avisa, Willoughby's, 289. 
 Awntyrs of Arthur, the, 75, 76. 
 Ayenbite of Inwyt, the, 58, 98. 
 Ayrshire Legatees, Gait's, 609, 
 
 Badman, Life and Death of Mr., 
 Bunyan's, 324. 
 
 Balin and Balan, Swinburne's, 604. 
 Ballad, definition and origin of the, 
 
 147-150. 
 Ballads and other Poems, Tenny- 
 son's, 572. 
 Banquet of Sense, Chapman's, 248. 
 Barnaby Rudge, Dickens's 614. 
 Barneveld, Life of John of, Motley's, 
 
 658. 
 Barons' Wars, Drayton's, 292. 
 Barry Lyndon, Thackeray's, 465, 618. 
 Bartholomew Fair, Jonson's, 237, 
 
 238. 
 Basilikon Doron, of James I, 440. 
 Battle of Alcazar, Peele's, 198. 
 Battle of the Books, Swift's, 411. 
 Battle of the Summer Islands, 
 
 Waller's, 345. 
 Beach of Falesa, Stevenson's, 641. 
 Beau Austin, Stevenson's, 641. 
 Beaux' Stratagem, Farquhar's, 368. 
 Bee, the, 476. 
 
 Beggar's Opera, Gay's, 390. 
 Behemoth, Hobbes's, 320. 
 Beleaguered City, Mrs. Oliphant's, 
 
 633- 
 Belinda, Miss Edgeworth's, 535. 
 Belle Dame sans Merci, Keats's, 
 
 501, 526. 
 Bells and Pomegranates, Browning's, 
 
 575- 
 Benoit de Ste Maure, 62, 87. 
 Beowulf, 712. 
 Beowulf, W. Morris's translation of 
 
 the, 601. 
 Beppo, Byron's, 523. 
 Betrothed, Scott's, 544. 
 Beues of Hampton, Romance of, 66. 
 Bible, the Authorized Version of the, 
 
 117, 174, 282. 
 Bible, Coverdale's translation of the, 
 
 174. 
 Bible, Revised Version of the, 174. 
 Bible, Tyndale's translation of the, 
 
 282. 
 Bible, Wyclif's translation of the, 
 
 116, 117, 282. 
 Bible in Spain, G. Borrow's, 632. 
 Biglow Papers, Lowell's, 583, 584. 
 Biographia Literaria, Coleridge's, 
 
 501. 
 Bird in a Cage, Shirley's, 263. 
 
Index 
 
 667 
 
 Black Bull of Norroway, Christina 
 Rossetti's, 597. 
 
 Black Dwarf, Scott's, 541. 
 
 Black Knight, Lydgate's, iii. 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 548, 554, 557, 
 559. 637. 
 
 Bleak House, Dickens's, 615. 
 
 Blessed Damozel, D. G. Rossetti's, 
 598. 
 
 Blithedale Romance, N. Haw- 
 thorne's, 627. 
 
 Blot in the Scutcheon, Browning's, 
 
 574- 
 Blue Closet, W. Morris's, 600. 
 Boadicea, Cowper's, 439. 
 Boccaccio, 87, 93, 96, 97, 169. 
 Boethius, Chaucer's translation of, 
 
 115, 118. 
 Bonnie Dundee, Scott's, 505, 610. 
 Bonny Earl o' Murray, ballad, 149. 
 Booke of Ayres, Campion's, 290. 
 Book of Ballads, Thackeray's, 622. 
 Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's, 82. 
 Book of Faith, Pecock's, 121. 
 Book of Snobs, Thackeray's, 619. 
 Borderers, Wordsworth's, 508. 
 Border Minstrelsy, Scott's, 150, 504, 
 
 505- 
 Borough, Crabb's, 455, 456. 
 Bosworth Field, Beaumont's, 300, 
 
 301. 
 Bothwell, Swinburne's, 604. 
 Bowge of Court, Skelton's, 151. 
 Boy singers ("children"), of Chapel 
 
 Royal and St. Paul's, 193, 196, 
 
 197, 203, 235. 
 Bracebridge Hall, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Brazil, History of, Southey's, 516. 
 Brennoralt, Suckling's, 338. 
 Bretwalda, 3, 
 
 Bridal of Triermain, Scott's, 504. 
 Bride of Abydos, Byron's, 521. 
 Bride of Lammermoor, Scott's, 541, 
 
 542. 
 Bridge of Sighs, Hood's, 608. 
 Britannia's Pastorals, Browne's, 301. 
 Britons, History of the, of Geoffrey 
 
 of Monmouth, 42, 45. 
 Britons, History of the, of Nennius, 
 
 43. 45- 
 Broken Heart, Ford's, 262. 
 Prus, Barbour's, 130, 
 
 Brut, the, Layamon's, 48. 
 
 Bulk of Alexander, Barbour's, 130. 
 
 Buke of the Howlat, Holland's, 142. 
 
 Bunyan, Life of, Froude's, 653. 
 
 Burlesques, Thackeray's, 619. 
 
 By Proxy, J. Payn's, 634. 
 
 Byron's Conspiracy, Chapman's, 249. 
 
 Byron, Life of, Moore's, 607. 
 
 Byrhtnoth, Anglo-Saxon poem, 30. 
 
 Cabinet Council, see Arts of Empire. 
 
 Cadenus and Vanessa, Swift's, 413. 
 
 Caesar, Froude's, 653. 
 
 Caesar's, De Bello Gallico, Golding's 
 translation of, 281. 
 
 Cagliostro, Carlyle's, 650. 
 
 Cain, Byron's, 523. 
 
 Caleb Williams, Godwin's, 536. 
 
 Callista, Newman's, 661. 
 
 Camilla, Fanny Burney's, 532. 
 
 Campaign, Addison's, 401. 
 
 Campaspe, Lyly's, ig6. 
 
 Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's, 78, 
 91-98. 
 
 Cap and Bells, Swinburne's, 605. 
 
 Cardinal, Shirley's, 263. 
 
 Carmen Seculare, Prior's, 387. 
 
 Casa Guidi Windows, E. B. Brown- 
 ing's, 597. 
 
 Cask of Amontillado, Poe's, 579. 
 
 Castle of Health, Elyot's, 174. 
 
 Castle of Indolence, Thomson's, 
 425, 426. 
 
 Castle of Labour, Barclay's, 152. 
 
 Castle of Otranto, H. Walpole's, 435 
 484, 485, 532. 
 
 Castle Rackrent, Miss Edgeworth's, 
 
 535. 540. 
 Castles of Athlin and Dunboyne, Mrs. 
 
 Radcliffe's, 532, 533. 
 Catherine, Thackeray's, 618. 
 Catiline and his Conspiracy, Jonson's, 
 
 237- 
 
 Cato, Addison's, 383, 391, 402, 403. 
 
 Catriona, Stevenson's, 544, 640. 
 
 Caxtons, Lytton's, 308, 611. 
 
 Cecilia, Fanny Burney's, 532. 
 
 Celts, influence of, on Literature, i. 
 
 Cenci,- Shelley's, 260, 518. 
 
 Certayne Notes of Instruction con- 
 cerning the making of Verse in 
 English, Gascoigne's, i58. 
 
668 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Chaldee Manuscript, Wilson and 
 
 Lockhart's, 548. 
 Chalk Stream Studies, C. Kingsley's, 
 
 630. 
 Changeling, Middleton's, 254. 
 Chapman's Homer, Keats's Sonnet 
 
 on, 526. 
 Characteristics, Earl of Shaftesbury's, 
 
 443- 
 
 Characters, Overbury's, 280. 
 
 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 
 Hazlitt's, 556, 557. 
 
 Charity, Cowper's, 438. 
 
 Charlemagne, Stories of, 26, 57, 61. 
 
 Charles O'Malley, Lever's, 610, 611. 
 
 Chastelard, Swinburne's, 602, 604. 
 
 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Middle- 
 ton's, 255. 
 
 Cherry and the Slae, A. Mont- 
 gomery's, 441. 
 
 Chevy Chase, ballad of, 150, 181, 
 
 Childe Harold, Byrorfs, 520, 533, 525. 
 
 Child's Funeral, Bryant's, 563. 
 
 Child's Garden of Verses, Stevenson's, 
 641. 
 
 Child's History of England, Dick- 
 ens's, 616. 
 
 Chloris, William Smith's, 289. 
 
 Choice Collection, Watson's, 483. 
 
 Chretien de Troyes, 62. 
 
 Christabel, Coleridge's, 500, 501, 502, 
 504. 
 
 Christian Hero, Steele's, 397. 
 
 Christian Morals, Browne's, 309. 
 
 Christ's Kirk on the Green, poem, 
 144. 
 
 Christ's Triumph, Giles Fletcher's, 
 297. 
 
 Chronicle, Cowley's, 342. 
 
 Chronicle, the, of Jocelin de Brake- 
 lond, 38. 
 
 Chronicle History of Edward I., 
 Peele's, 197. 
 
 Chronicle of England, Capgrave's, 122. 
 
 Chronicles of the Canongate, Scott's, 
 
 544- 
 Chronicles of Carlingford, Mrs. Oli- 
 
 phant's, 633. 
 Chronicon ex Chronicis, the, 36. 
 Chronique de Lorraine, the, 62. 
 Church History of the Race of Angles, 
 
 Bede's, 24, 26, 27, 37, 42, 43. 
 
 Church History, Fuller's, 318. 
 Cicero, translation's from, by Skelton, 
 
 151. 
 Citizen of the World, Goldsmith's, 
 
 476. 
 City of the Plague, J. Wilson's, 549. 
 Civil Wars, Daniel's, 295. 
 Clarissa, Richardson's, 459. 
 Cleopatra, Daniel's, 295. 
 Clerk Sanders, ballad, 149. 
 Cloister and the Hearth, Reade's, 642. 
 Cockney School, the, 506, 525, 557. 
 Codlingsby, Thackeray's, 610, 619. 
 Coelum Britannicum, masque, by 
 
 Carew, 336. 
 Colin Clout, 185. 
 
 Columbus, Life of, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Colyn Clout, Skelton 's, 151. 
 Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's, 
 
 218, 220. 
 
 Come Live with Me and be My Love, 
 
 Marlowe's, 207. 
 Comic Writers, Hazlitt's, 556. 
 Commemoration Ode, Lowell's, 584. 
 Complaint of Buckingham, Sack' 
 
 ville's, 170. 
 Complaint of Philomene, Gascoigne'^ 
 
 167, 169. 
 Complaint of Rosamond, Daniel's, 
 
 292, 294. 
 Compleat Angler, Walton's, 321, 322, 
 
 343- 
 
 Comus, Milton's, 197, 348, 349. 
 
 Conchobar, Stories of, 61. 
 
 Conduct of the Allies, Swift's, 412. 
 
 Confederacy, Vanbrugh's, 368. 
 
 Confessio Aroantis, see Lover's Con- 
 fession. 
 
 Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 
 Hogg's, 612. 
 
 Confessions of an English Opium 
 Eater, De Quincey's, 558. 
 
 Coningsby, Beaconsfield's, 610. 
 
 Conquest of Granada, Dryden's, 359, 
 378. 
 
 Conquest of Granada, W. Irving's, 
 
 • 546- 
 Conquest of Mexico, Prescott's, 655. 
 Conquest of Peru, Prescott's, 655, 
 Conscious Lovers, Steele's, 394, 399. 
 Consolation, the, of Boethius, 27, 
 87. 
 
Index 
 
 669 
 
 Constitutional History of England, 
 
 Hallam's, 644. 
 Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, 
 
 Shirley's, 264. 
 Cony-catching, Greene's, igg. 
 Cooper's Hill, Denham's, 342. 
 Coriolanus, Shakespeare's, 232. 
 Cornhill Magazine, 622, 634. 
 Corpus Poeticum Boreale, the, 3. 
 Corsair, Byron's, 521, 522. 
 Cosenage, Greene's, igg. 
 Cottar's Saturday Night, Burns's, 44g, 
 
 450, 565. 
 Counterblast to Tobacco, of James I., 
 
 440. 
 Count Julian, Landor's, 527, 528. 
 Country Wife, Wycherley's, 362. 
 Cranford, Mrs. Gaskell's, 641. 
 Criminal Law of Scotland, Mackenzie 
 
 on the, 443. 
 Crist, 18, ig. 
 
 Critic, Sheridan's, 35g, 495. 
 Cromwell, Carlyle's, 582. 
 Crossing the Bar, Tennyson's, 573. 
 Crown of Laurel, Skelton's, 152. 
 Crown of Thorns, Beaumont's, 300. 
 Cruise of the Midge, Scott's, 612. 
 Cuchulain, the Hero, i, 61. 
 Cursor Mundi, 57, 103. 
 Cymbeline, Shakespeare's, 216, 232. 
 Cynthia, Barnfield's, 289. 
 Cynthia's Revels, Jonson's, 235. 
 Cypress Srove, Drummond's, 441. 
 
 Damon and Pythias, 162. 
 
 Danes, History of the, by Saxo Gram- 
 
 maticus, 230. 
 Daniel Deronda, G. Eliot's, 638. 
 Dante, 8g. 
 David and Bathsheba, Peele's, 
 
 198. 
 David Copperfield, Dickens's, 615. 
 David and Goliath, Drayton's, 293. 
 Davideis, Cowley's, 341. 
 Day Dream, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Day's Ride, Lever's, 611. 
 Deacon Brodie, Stevenson's, 641. 
 Death, Drelincourt on, 416, 562. 
 Death, Bishop Porteous on, 562. 
 Death of Oenone, Tennyson's, 573. 
 Death's Jest Book, or The Fool's 
 
 "Tragedy, Beddoes's, 607. 
 
 De Augmenlis, see Advancement of 
 Learning. 
 
 Decameron, of Boccaccio, 97. 
 
 De Cive, Hobbes's, 319. 
 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman Em- 
 pire, Gibbon's, 490, 4gi, 492, 4g3. 
 
 De Corpora, Hobbes's, 3ig, 320. 
 
 Deeds of King Stephen, the, 36, 38. 
 
 Defence of Guenevere, W. Morris's, 
 
 593, 599- 
 Defence of the King, Salmasius's, 312. 
 Defence of the people of England, 
 
 Milton's, 312. 
 Defence of Poesie, Sidney's, 178, 
 
 180-3. 
 Defence of the Remonstrance, Hall's, 
 
 310. 
 Defence of Rhyme, Daniel's, 2g5. 
 Dejection, Coleridge's, 501. 
 Delia, Daniel's, 2g4. 
 Democracy and Liberty, Lecky's, 664. 
 Demonology, by James I, 440. 
 Denis Duval, Thackeray's, 618, 622. 
 De Nugis Curialium, the, 40. 
 Deor, the Plaint of, 12, 13. 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum, Trevisa's. 
 
 118. 
 De Scaccario, the Dialogue, 38. 
 Deserted Village, Goldsmith's, 452, 
 
 474. 477.' 480. 
 Destiny, Miss Ferrier's, 6og. 
 De Veritate, Lord Herbert's, 306. 
 Devil is an Ass, the, Jonson's, 23g. 
 Devil's Lawsuit, Webster's, 25g. 
 Devotional Books, Early English, 58. 
 Dialogue between Experience and a 
 
 Courtier, Lyndsay's, 146. 
 Dialogues on Medals, Addison's, 400, 
 
 401. 
 Diamond Necklace, Carlyle's, 650. 
 Diana, Constable's, 289. 
 Diana of the Crossways, G, Mere- 
 dith's, 635. 
 Diarmaid, the Hero, i. 
 Diary, Fanny Burney's, 532. 
 Diary, Evelyn's, 327. 
 Diary, Pepys's, 327, 358. 
 Dictionary, Johnson's, 473. 
 Dido, Nash and Marlowe's, 203. 
 Diella, Lynch's, 289. 
 Digby Plays, the, 155. 
 Directions to Servants, Swift's, 414. 
 
670 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Distressed Mother, Philips's, 390. 
 Dr. Faustus, Marlowe's, 206. 
 Doctor's Wife, Braddon's, 633. 
 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 
 
 Milton's, 311. 
 Dolores, Swinburne's, 603. 
 Dombey and Son, Dickens's, 615. 
 Don Carlos, Otway's, 369, 370. 
 Don Juan, Byron's, 523, 524. 
 Dorothy Forster, Besant's, 642. 
 Double Dealer, Congreve's, 363. 
 Douglas, Home's, 444, 446. 
 Douglas Tragedy, ballad, 149. 
 Dover Beach, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Dowie Dens o' Yarrow, ballad, 149. 
 Down a down. Lodge's, 211. 
 Drama, origins of, i. 
 Drama, Rise of the, 153. 
 Dramatic Poesy, Dryden's, 379, 380. 
 Dramatis Personse, Browning's, 574, 
 
 575. 576. 
 Drapier's Letters, Swift's, 413. 
 Dream, B3Ton's, 523. 
 Dreame, Lyndsay's, 145. 
 Dream-fugue, De Quincey's, 559. 
 Dream of Fair Women, Tennyson's, 
 
 570- 
 Dream of Gerontius, Nevnnan's, 661. 
 Dream of the Rood, the, 20. 
 Dreamland, Christina Rossetti's, 597. 
 Drummer, Addison's, 402; 
 Dryden, Scott's edition of, 506. 
 Duchess of Malfi, Webster's, 257, 
 
 258. 
 Ductor Dubitantium, Taylor's, 314. 
 Duenna, Sheridan's, 495, 
 Duke of Guise, Lee and Dryden's, 
 
 372. 
 Duke of Milan, Massinger's, 260. 
 Duncan Campbell, De Foe's, 417. 
 Dunciad, Pope's, 385. 
 Dying Swan, Tennyson's, 569. 
 
 Earthly Paradise, W. Morris's, 600. 
 
 Eastward Ho, satire, 249, 251. 
 
 Ebb Tide, Stevenson's, 640. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, the, 502, 509, 511, 
 520, 547. 548. 556. 646. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, the Select So- 
 ciety's, 446. 
 
 Edward II, Marlowe's, 207, 217, 
 262, 
 
 Edwin and Angelina, Goldsmith's, 
 
 477- 
 
 Edwin Drood, Dickens's, 615. 
 
 Egoist, G. Meredith's, 635, 636. 
 
 Eiconoclastes, Milton's, 312. 
 
 Eikon Basilike, 312. 
 
 Elaine, Tennyson's, 571. 
 
 Elegy, Gray's, 428, 429. 
 
 Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, 
 Goldsmith's, 477. 
 
 Elene, the, 20, 21. 
 
 Elsie Venner, O. W. Holmes's, 629. 
 
 Emma, Jane Austen's, 537, 538, 539, 
 623. 
 
 Empedocles on Etna, M. Arnold's, 
 587. 
 
 Encomion of Lady Pecunia, Barn- 
 field's, 289. 
 
 Endymion, Keats's, 526. 
 
 Endymion, Lyly's, 196. 
 
 England, History of, Froude's, 652, 
 
 653- 
 
 England, History of, Hume's, 489. 
 
 England in the Eighteenth Century, 
 History of, Lecky's, 663. 
 
 England, History of, Smollett's, 470. 
 
 England, History of. Swift's, 413. 
 
 England's Helicon, miscellany, 290. 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
 Byron's, 520. 
 
 English Historical Epistles, Dray- 
 ton's, 292. ^ 
 
 English Humorists, Thackeray's, 618, 
 
 English in Ireland, Froude's, 653. 
 
 English Mail Coach, De Quincey's, 
 
 559. 
 
 Englishman, the, 398. 
 
 English Poetry, Hazlitt's, 556. 
 
 English Supplanting French in Gram- 
 mar Schools, 118. 
 
 English Traits, Emerson's, 582. 
 
 English Traveller, Heywood's, 256. 
 
 Enid, Tennyson's, 571. 
 
 Enoch Arden, Tennyson's, 57a. 
 
 Enquiry into the Present State of 
 Polite Learning in Europe, Gold- 
 smith's, 476. 
 
 Epigoniad, Wilkie's, 490. 
 
 Epipsychidion, Shelley's, 519. 
 
 Epistle to Arbuthnot, Pope's, 386. 
 
 Epistle to Windham, Bolingbroke's, 
 420. 
 
Index 
 
 671 
 
 Epistolae Ho-Elianse, Howells, 327. 
 Epithalamium, Spenser's, 191. 
 Erasmus, 151, 172. 
 Erasmus, Froude's, 653. 
 Erechtheus, Swinburne's, 604. 
 Esmond, Thackeray's, 487, 544, 618, 
 
 6ig, 620. 
 Essay on Criticism, Pope's, 383, 406. 
 Essay on the Human Understanding, 
 
 Locke's, 419. 
 Essay on Man, Pope's, 385. 
 Essay on Miracles, Hume's, 488, 
 
 489. 
 Essay on Poetry, Sir W. Temple's, 
 
 409. 
 Essay on Projects, De Foe's, 415. 
 Essays, Addison's, 403-407, 444. 
 Essays, Bacon's, 240, 265, 271, 272, 
 
 273- 
 Essays and Studies, Swinburne's, 
 
 605. 
 Essays in Criticism, M. Arnold's, 
 
 589. 
 Essays of Elia, Lamb's, 553. 
 Essays, Emerson's, 580, 581. 
 Essays, Hume's, 488. 
 Essays, Johnson's, 472. 
 Essays, Lowell's, 585, 586. 
 Essays, Macaulay's, 645, 646, 647. 
 Essays, Montaigne's, 272, 281. 
 Essays, Steele's, 398, 444. 
 Eton Ode, Gray's, 429. 
 Eugene Aram, Bulwer Lytton's, 611. 
 Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, Lyly's, 
 
 177. 
 Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, 
 
 Greene's, igg. 
 Euphues and His England, Lyly's, 
 
 177. 
 Euphues' Shadow, Lodge's, 202. 
 Evangeline, Longfellow's, 566, 584. 
 Evan Harrington, G. Meredith's, 634, 
 
 635. 
 Eve of St. John, Scott's, 457, 503. 
 Evelina, Fanny Burney's, 473, 531, 
 
 532, 537. 538- 
 Evergreen, the, Ramsay's, 445, 483. 
 Everyman, 156. 
 Every Man in His Humour, Jonson's, 
 
 233. 234- 
 Every Man out of His Humour, Jon- 
 son's, 234. 
 
 Examiner, the, 398, 412. 
 Examiner, the. Hunt's, 553, 556. 
 Example of Virtue, Hawes's, 113. 
 Excelsior, Longfellow's, 566, 567. 
 Excursion, Wordsworth's, 508, 586. 
 
 Fablbs, Dryden's, 374. 
 
 Fable for Critics, Lowell's, 583. 
 
 Faery Queen, Spenser's, 186, 187, 
 
 i88-go, 341. 
 Fair Annie, ballad, 149. 
 Fair Maid of Perth, Scott's, 544. 
 Fair Maid of the West, Heywood's, 
 
 256. 
 Fair Quarrel, Middleton's, 255. 
 Fairy tales, the earliest form of 
 
 novel, I. 
 Faithful Shepherdess, Beaumont and 
 
 Fletcher's, 247, 349. 
 Fall of the House of Usher, Poe's, 
 
 577- 
 Fall of Robespierre, Southey's, 513. 
 Falls of Princes, Boccaccio's, i6g. 
 False One, Beaumont and Fletcher's, 
 
 246. 
 Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 
 
 Stevenson's, 63g. 
 Fatal Dowry, Massingei;'s, 260. 
 Faust, Goethe's, 523. 
 Faustine, Swinburne's, 602. 
 Feast of the Poets, Hunt's, 554. 
 Female Advocate, Mrs. Radcliflfe's. 
 
 534- 
 Ferdinand, Count Fathom, Smollett's, 
 
 468, 46g. 
 Ferdinand and Isabella, Prescott's, 
 
 655- 
 Festival of the Poets, Lowell's, 583. 
 
 Fidelia, Wither's, 302. 
 
 Fidessa, Griffin's, 289. 
 
 Fifine at the Fair, Browning's, 576. 
 
 Fig for Momus, Lodge's, 202. 
 
 Finn, the Hero, i. 
 
 Finnsburg, the Fight at, 15. 
 
 Fionn, Stories of, 61. 
 
 Firrailian, Aytoun's, 206. 
 
 Flagellant, the, 513. 
 
 Fleece, Dyer's, 432. 
 
 Flodden Field, ballad of, 148. 
 
 Flower of Curtesie, Lydgate's, in. 
 
 Flowers of the Forest, J. Elliot's, 445. 
 
 Fool of Quality, Brooke's, 530. 
 
672 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Forbonius and Prisceria, Lodge's, 
 
 201, 
 
 Forsaken Merman, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Fors Clavigera, Ruskin's, 592. 
 Forth Feasting, Drummond's, 441. 
 Fortunatus, Dekker's, 252. 
 Fortunes of Nigel, Scott's, 251, 252, 
 
 54?. 
 Foul Play, Reade's, 642, 
 Four Elements, the, 156. 
 Four P's, the, 157. 
 Fox, Jonson's, see " Volpone ". 
 Fragmenta Aurea, Suckling's, 338. 
 France, Coleridge's, 501. 
 Frankenstein, Mrs. Shelley's, 506, 
 
 609, 612. 
 Fraser's Magazine, 649. 
 Frederick the Great, Carlyle's, 582, 
 
 630. 
 Freeholder, the, 406. 
 French Revolution, Carlyle's, 582, 649, 
 
 650. 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 
 
 Greene's, 200. 
 Friend, the, 501. 
 Froissart, Lord Bemer's translation 
 
 of, 122, 123. 
 From Cornhill to Cairo, Thackeray's, 
 
 618. 
 Funeral, Steele's, 397. 
 
 Gaelic language, the, 129. 
 
 Gaelic tribes, influence of, on Litera- 
 ture, I. 
 
 Galatea, Lyly's, 196. 
 
 Game of Chess, Middleton's, 255. 
 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle, 160, 161. 
 
 Garden of Cyrus, Browne's, 309. 
 
 Garden of Proserpine, Swinburne's, 
 527, 603. 
 
 Gawain and the Green Knight, 72, 
 
 73- 
 Gebir, Landor's, 515, 527, 528, 529. 
 Gentleman Dancing Master, Wycher- 
 
 ley's, 362. 
 Gentleman's Magazine, the, 473. 
 Gentle Shepherd, Ramsay's, 445. 
 Geoffrey Hamlyn, H. Kingsley's, 631, 
 
 632. 
 George de Barnwell, Thackeray's, 
 
 611, 6ig. 
 George Chapman, Swinburne's, 605. 
 
 Germ, the, 598. 
 
 Germanic peoples, legends of the, 3. 
 
 Gertrude of Wyoming, Campbell's, 
 
 606. 
 Giaour, Byron's, 521, 533. 
 Glaucus and Scilla, Lodge's, zoi. 
 Gleeman, the Anglo-Saxon, 3. 
 Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti's, 
 
 597- 
 Goblins, Suckling's, 338. 
 God and the Bible, M. Arnold's, 
 
 590- 
 Godfrey of Strasbourg, 63. 
 Goethe, Life of, Lewes's, 637. 
 Gold Bug, Poe's, 577. 
 Golden Legend, Longfellow's, 566. 
 Gondibert, Davenant's, 340, 341, 376, 
 
 377- 
 
 Good Natured Man, Goldsmith's, 
 478. 
 
 Gorboduc, Sackville's, 161, 162, 169. 
 
 Gotz von Berlichingen, Scott's trans- 
 lation of, 503. 
 
 Governour, Elyot's, 173. 
 
 Grace Abounding, Bunyan's, 323, 
 
 324- 
 Grammar of Assent, Newman's, 661. 
 Grail, Story of the Holy, 40, 47, 61, 
 
 125, 126. 
 Grave, Blair's, 432, 562. 
 Great Exemplar, Taylor's, 315. 
 Great Expectations, Dickens's, 613, 
 
 615. 
 Greece, History of, Grote's, 659. 
 Greek, revival of, in England, 172, 
 
 174. 
 Grettir the Strong, W. Morris's, 601. 
 Griffith Gaunt, Reade's, 642. 
 Groatsworth of Wit, Greene's, 199, 
 
 215. 
 Grongar Hill, Dyer's, 432. 
 Gryll Grange, Peacock's, 632. 
 Guardian, the, 398. 
 Guardian Angel, O. W. Holmes's,' 
 
 629. 
 Guinevere, Tennyson's, 571. 
 Gulliver's Travels, Swift's, 407, 413, 
 
 414. 
 Gull's Hornbook, Dekker's, 252. 
 Guy Livingstone, G. Lawrence's, 
 
 634- 
 Guy Mannering, Scott's, 541. 
 
Index 
 
 673 
 
 Guy of Warwick, 67. 
 
 Gypsies in Spain, G. Borrow's, 632. 
 
 Halves, J. Payn's, 634. 
 
 Hamlet, Ae first play of (" Ur-Ham- 
 
 let ") attributed to Kyd, 208, 209, 
 
 230. 
 Hamlet, Shakespeare's, 208, 209, 2ig, 
 
 229, 230. 
 Happy Warrior, Wordsworth's, 509, 
 
 512. 
 Hardyknute, Lady Wardlaw's, 445. 
 Harmony of the Church, Drayton's, 
 
 291. 
 Harold the Dauntless, Scott's, 504, 
 Harrington, Miss Edgeworth's, 535. 
 Harrowing of Hell, the, 153. 
 Harry Lorrequer, Lever's, 611. 
 Hart, King, Gawain Douglas's, 143. 
 Haunch of Venison, Goldsmith's, 
 
 477- 
 Haunted and the Haunters, Bulwer 
 
 Lytton's, 611. 
 Haunted Hotel, Wilkie CoUins's, 633. 
 Haunted Palace, Poe's, 578. 
 Havelok, 64. 
 Have with you to Saffron Walden, 
 
 Nash's, 203. 
 Haystack in the Floods, W. Morris's, 
 
 599. 
 
 Headlong Hall, Peacock's, 632. 
 
 Heart of Midlothian, Scott's, 541, 543. 
 
 Heaven and Earth, Byron's, 523. 
 
 Hecatompathia, Watson's, 289. 
 
 Hector in the Garden, E. B. Brown- 
 ing's, 596. 
 
 Helen, Miss Edgeworth's, 536. 
 
 Henry IV, Sh^espeare's, 220, 227, 
 228. 
 
 Henry V, Shakespeare's, 227, 228. 
 
 Henry VI, Shakespeare's, 207, 215. 
 
 Henry VIII, History of, Lord Her- 
 bert's, 306. 
 
 Henry VIII, Shakespeare's, 232. 
 
 Hereward the Wake, C. Kingsley's, 
 631. 
 
 Hermit, Parnell's, 393. 
 
 Hero and Leander, Marlowe's, 207, 
 220, 248. 
 
 Heroes, C. Kingsley's, 627, 631. 
 
 Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle's, 
 649. 
 
 Heroic Stanzas, Dryden's, 375. 
 
 Herodotus, translation from, by Rich, 
 201, 280. 
 
 Hesperides, Herrick's, 334. 
 
 Hiawatha, Longfellow's, 567. 
 
 Higden's Chronicles, translated by 
 Trevisa, 115, 118. 
 
 Hind and Panther, Dryden's, 378. 
 
 His own Time, History of, Bp. Bur- 
 net's, 442. 
 
 Historical and Political Essays, 
 Lecky's, 664. 
 
 Historical Register, Fielding's, 462. 
 
 Historic Doubts, H. Walpole's, 485. 
 
 History of Caroline Evelyn, Fanny 
 Burney's, 531. 
 
 Histriomastix, Prynne's, 262, 263. 
 
 Hohenlinden, Campbell's, 606. 
 
 Hollow Land, W. Morris's, 599. 
 
 Holly Tree, Southey's, 515. 
 
 Holy Dying, Taylor's, 312, 315. 
 
 Holy Fair, Burns, 449, 450. 
 
 Holy Living, Taylor's, 312, 315. 
 
 Holy and Profane States, Fuller's, 
 
 317. 318- 
 
 Holy War, Bunyan's, 324. 
 
 Homer, Chapman's translation of, 
 247, 248, 249, 281. 
 
 Homer, Cowper's translation of, 436, 
 440. 
 
 Homer, Hobbes's translation of, 320. 
 
 Homilies, the Blickling, 32. 
 
 Honest Whore, Dekker's, 251, 252. 
 
 Honour of the Garter, Peele's, 197. 
 
 Hope, Cowper's, 438. 
 
 Horace's Satires, Beaumont's trans- 
 lations from, 301. 
 
 Horn, King, 64. 
 
 Hours of Idleness, Byron's, 520. 
 
 Householder's Philosophy, Kyd's, 
 208. 
 
 House of Blackwood, Mrs. Oliphant's, 
 633. 
 
 House of Fame, Chaucer's, 8g, 90. 
 
 House of Life, D. G. Rossetti's, 599. 
 
 House of the Seven Gables, N. Haw- 
 thorne's, 627. 
 
 Hudibras, Butler's, 355-357- 
 
 Hue and Cry after Dismal, Swift's, 
 412. 
 
 Human Nature, Hobbes's, 320. 
 
 Hume, Life of David, Huxley's, 662. 
 
 43 
 
674 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Humorous Lieutenant, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's, 247. 
 
 Humphry Clinker, Smollett's, 470. 
 
 Hundred Sundry Flowers, Gas- 
 coigne's, 167. 
 
 Husband's Message, the, 2. 
 
 Hydriotaphia, see Urn Burial. 
 
 Hymns to Love and Beauty, Spen- 
 ser's, igr. 
 
 Hymn to Proserpine, Swinburne's, 
 603. 
 
 Hypatia, C. Kingsley's, 630. 
 
 Hyperion, Keats's, 527. 
 
 IcHABOD, Whittier's, 564, 563. 
 
 Idea, Drayton's, 291. 
 
 Ideal of a Patriot King, Bolingbroke's, 
 
 420. 
 Idiot Boy, Wordsworth's, 500. 
 Idler, the, 472, 473. 
 Idylls of the King, Tennyson's, 42, 
 
 72, 125, 128, 571, 572. 
 Iliad, Pope's translation of the, 384. 
 Iliad, Tickell's translation from the, 
 
 384, 391, 392. 
 Illustrious Henrys, Capgrave's, 122. 
 II Penseroso, Milton's, 348. 
 Imaginary Conversations, Landor's, 
 
 528, 529. 
 Imaginary Portraits, Pater's, 593. 
 Imagination and Fancy, Hunt's, 554. 
 Imitations of Horace, Pope's, 385. 
 Indian Cemetery, Freneau's, 561. 
 Indian Emperor, Dryden's, 377, 378. 
 Indian Queen, Howard and Dryden's, 
 
 377- 
 Induction, Sackville's, 170, 171. 
 Inductive Method, Bacon's, 275. 
 Infernal Marriage, Beaconsfield's, 610. 
 Inheritance, Miss Ferrier's, 609. 
 Initials, Baroness Tautphoeus's, 641. 
 In Memoriam, Tennyson's, 569, 570, 
 
 57i> 645. 
 
 Inner Temple Masque, Browne's, 
 301. 
 
 Innocent Adultery, Southerne's, 381. 
 
 Instauratio Magna, Bacon's, 275. 
 
 Intimations of Immortality, Words- 
 worth's, 511. 
 
 Introduction to the Literature of 
 Europe, Hallam's, 644. 
 
 Ion, Talfourd's, 574. 
 
 Ireland, description of, by Gerald of 
 
 Wales, 39. 
 Irish Melodies, Moore's, 607. 
 Irish Sketchbook, Thackeray's, 618. 
 Iron Age, Heywood's, 257. 
 Isaac Bickerstaff, 411. 
 Island, Byron's, 523. 
 Isle of Dogs, Nash's, 204. 
 Isle of Palms, J. Wilson's, 549. 
 Italian, Mrs. Radcliffe's, 533, 534, 
 
 536. 
 Italy, Rogers's, 606. 
 It is an old Belief, Lockhart's, 549. 
 Ivanhoe, Scott's, 183, 54a, 6ig. 
 Ivy and Holly, songs of, 149, 150. 
 Ixion, Beaconsfield's, 610. 
 
 Jacobite's Journal, Fielding's, 462. 
 Jack Sheppard, Ainsworth's, 610. 
 James IV, Greene's, 200. 
 Jamie Telfer, the ballad of, 56. 
 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's, 533, 
 
 623, 624. 
 Jane Shore, Rowe's, 381. 
 Jar of Honey from Mount HybIa, 
 
 Hunt's, 554. 
 Jeanne d'Arc, Southey's, 513. 
 Jew of Malta, Marlowe's, 206. 
 Jews, History of the, Milman's, 659. 
 Joachim du Bellay, 185. 
 Jocasta, Gascoigne's, 162, 168. 
 John, King, Shakespeare's, 220. 
 John Inglesant, Shorthouse's, 634. 
 Johnson, Life of, Boswell's, 460, 471, 
 
 549- 
 John Woodvil, Lamb's, 552. 
 Jolly Beggars, Burns's, 449, 450. 
 Jonathan Wild, Fielding's, 462, 465, 
 
 618. 
 Jonson on Bacon and Shakespeare, 
 
 241. 
 Jonson's Lyrics, 240. 
 Joseph Andrews, Fielding's, 366, 399, 
 
 462, 463. 
 Journal to Eliza, Sterne's, 488. 
 Journal, George Fox's, 325. 
 Journal of the Plague Year, De Foe's, 
 
 418. 
 Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Field- 
 ing's, 467. 
 Judith, Anglo-Saxon Poem of, 18. 
 Juggling Jerry, Meredith's, 595. 
 
Index 
 
 675 
 
 Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's, 227, 229, 
 
 230. 
 Juvenal, Beaumont's translation from, 
 
 301. 
 Juvenal, Vaughan's translation from, 
 
 332. 
 
 Kehama, Southey's, 514, 515. 
 
 Kenilworth, Scott's, 168, 178, 542. 
 
 Kidnapped, Stevenson's, 533, 544, 
 640. 
 
 King and No King, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's, 246. 
 
 Kingis Quhair, of James I, 133-5. 
 
 King James and Brown, ballad, 
 149. 
 
 Kings of England, History of the, of 
 William of Malmesbury, 36, 37. 
 
 Kinmont Willie, ballad, 149. 
 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher's, 245, 247. 
 
 Kubla Khan, Coleridge's, 17, 500, 501, 
 578. 
 
 La Dame de Monsoreau, 544. 
 
 Lady Barbara, Crabbe's, 457. 
 
 Lady Bessy, ballad, 148. 
 
 Lady of the Lake, Scott's, 504. 
 
 Lady of Pleasure, Shirley's, 263. 
 
 Lady of Shalott, Tennyson's, 569, 
 604. 
 
 Lake Poets, the, 500, 513, 556. 
 
 Lalla Rookh, Moore's, 607. 
 
 L' Allegro, Milton's, 348. 
 
 Lament for Madame Blaise, Gold- 
 smith's, 477. 
 
 Lament for the Makaris, Dunbar's, 
 
 139- 
 Lamia, Keats's, 526, 527. 
 Land of the Leal, Lady Nairne's, 
 
 446. 
 Laodamia, Wordsworth's, 511. 
 Lara, Byron's, 521. 
 Last Buccaneer, Macaulay's, 648. 
 Last Day, Young's, 422, 423. 
 Last Days of Pompeii, Bulwer Lyt- 
 
 ton's, 611. 
 Last Essays, Lamb's, 553. 
 Last Man, Campbells, 606. 
 Last of the Mohicans, Fenimore 
 
 Cooper's, 545. 
 Later Life, Christina Rossetti's, 598. 
 
 Latin Christianity, History of, Mil- 
 man's, 659. 
 
 Latin, use of, among the Anglo- 
 Saxons, 4, 16, 23, 25, 26, 27, 41. 
 
 Latter Day Pamphlets, Carlyle's, 650, 
 
 Lavengro, G. Borrow's, 632. 
 
 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 
 Hooker's, 267. 
 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott'S, 
 500, 504. 
 
 Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay's, 
 648. 
 
 Leaders of Public Opinion in Ire- 
 land, Lecky's, 663. 
 
 Lead, Kindly Light, Newman's, 661. 
 
 Lear, King, Shakespeare's, 183, 216, 
 219, 230, 243. 
 
 Lectures on Translating Homer, M. 
 Arnold's, 589. 
 
 Leechdoms, the, 33. 
 
 Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's, 
 90. 
 
 Legend of Montrose, Scott's, 542. 
 
 Lenore, Scott's translation of Biir- 
 ger's, 503. 
 
 Lesser Celandine, Wordsworth's, 509. 
 
 Les Trois Mousquetaires, Dumas's, 
 
 544- 
 Letters, Cowper's, 440. 
 Letters of Lady M. Wortley Montagu, 
 
 495- 
 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke's, 
 482. 
 
 Letters and Speeches of Oliver Crom- 
 well, Carlyle's, 650. 
 
 Letters, of H. Walpole, 485. 
 
 Leviathan, Hobbes's, 319, 320. 
 
 Liberal, the, 554. 
 
 Liber Amoris, Hazlitt's, 556. 
 
 Liberty, Mill's, 659. 
 
 Liberty of Prophesying, Taylor's, 
 
 314- 
 Library, Crabbe's, 454. 
 Licia, Giles Fletcher's, 297. 
 Life and Death of Jason, W. Morriss, 
 
 599, 600. 
 Literature and Dogma, M. Arnold's, 
 
 590- 
 Little Dorrit, Dickens's, 615. 
 Little Ellie, E. B. Browning's, 596. 
 Little French Doctor, Beaumont and 
 
 Fletcher's, 247. 
 
 43 
 
676 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Liturgy of the Church of England, 
 
 the, 174. 
 Lives of the English Saints, 652, 660. 
 Lives of the Norths, R. North's, 327. 
 Lives of the Novelists, Scott's, 506. 
 Lives of the Poets, Dr. Johnson's, 
 
 422, 472, 474. 
 Lives of the Saints, 33, 57. 
 Livy, Holland's translation of, 281. 
 Lochiel, Lochiel, Beware of the Day, 
 
 Campbell's, 606. 
 Locusts or ApoUyonists, Phineas 
 
 Fletcher's, 299, 300. 
 Lodging for the Night, Stevenson's, 
 
 639- 
 Logic, Mill's, 659. 
 
 Lollards, the, 94, 100, loi, 106, 121. 
 Lombards, Songs of the, 3. 
 London, Johnson's, 473. 
 London Lickpenny, Lydgate's, in. 
 London Magazine, the, 548, 553, 
 
 558. 
 Looking-Glass for London and Eng- 
 land, Greene and Lodge's, 200, 
 
 202. 
 Lord Byron and His Contemporaries, 
 
 Hunt's, 554. 
 Lord of the Isles, Scott's, 504, 505. 
 Lost Sir Massingberd, J. Payn's, 
 
 634- 
 Lothair, Beaconsfield's, 610. 
 Lotus Eaters, Tennyson's, 569. 
 Love, Coleridge's, 501. 
 Love in my bosom like a bee, Lodge's, 
 
 211. 
 Love for Love, Congreve's, 364. 
 Love in a Tub, Etheridge's, 358, 361. 
 Love in the Valley, Meredith's, 595. 
 Love in a Wood, Wycherley's, 362. 
 Lovel the Widower, Thackeray's, 
 
 622. 
 Lover's Confession, Gower's, 107, 
 
 108. 
 Lover's Melancholy, Ford's, 261. 
 Lover's Tale, Tennyson's, 568. 
 Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's, 
 
 193, ig6, 216, 2i8, 220. 
 Love's Last Shift, Cibber's, 365, 
 Love's Tricks, Shirley's, 263. 
 Lucasta, Lovelace's, 337. 
 Lucrece, Shakespeare's, 2ig, 220, 
 
 221. 
 
 Lucretius, Evelyn's translation of, 
 
 345- 
 Lucretius, Tennyson's, 572. 
 Lycidas, Milton's, 301, 350. 
 Lyon in Mourning, Forbes's, 645. 
 Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge and 
 
 Wordsworth's, 500, 509, 510, 
 
 513- 
 Lyrics, Early English, 55. 
 Lytil Geste of Robin Hood, Wynkyn 
 
 de Worde's, 148. 
 
 Mabinoqion, the, 45, 571. 
 Macaulay, Life of Lord, Trevelyan's, 
 
 645, 647. 
 Macbeth, Shakespeare's, 229, 230. 
 Mac-Flecknoe, Dryden's, 378. 
 Madoc, Southey's, 514. 
 Mad World, Middleton's, 255. 
 Magnalia, Mather's, 561. 
 Magnetic Lady, Jonson's, 239. 
 Magnificence, Morality by Skelton, 
 
 151. 
 Mahomet, Life of, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Maid's Tragedy, Beaumont and 
 
 Fletcher's, 243, 244. 
 Malcontent, Marston's, 251. 
 Manfred, Byron's, 522, 523. 
 Mankind, the Macro play, 156. 
 Man of Mode, Etheridge's, 361. 
 Mansfield Park, Jane Austen's, 539. 
 Marble Faun, N. Hawthorne's, 626, 
 
 627. 
 Margaret, History of, Ferguson's, 
 
 446. 
 Margarite of America; Lodge's, 202. 
 Marian, Meredith's, 595; 
 Mariana in the Moated Grange, 
 
 Tennyson's, 569. 
 Marino Faliero, Byron's, 523. 
 Marius the Epicurean, Pater's, 593. 
 Marmion, Scott's, 504, 505. 
 Marriage, Miss Ferrier's, 609. 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens's, 582, 
 
 614, 
 Martin 'Marprelate, Tracts, 267, 
 
 270. 
 Martin Scriblerus Club, the, 412. 
 Mary Barton, Mrs. Gaskell's, 641. 
 Mary Beaton, Swinburne's, 604. 
 Mary Hamilton, ballad, 148. 
 Masque of Blackness, Jonson's, 236. 
 
Index 
 
 677 
 
 Masques, Court, in the reigns of 
 
 Elizabeth and James I, 193, 236. 
 Massachusetts to Virginia, Whittier's, 
 
 564. 
 Massacre of Paris, Marlowe's, 207, 
 Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson's, 
 
 544, 640. 
 Masterman Ready, Marryat's, 612. 
 Maud, Tennyson's, 571. 
 Maud MuUer, Whittier's, 563. 
 Mayor of Quinborough, Middleton's, 
 
 254. 
 May Queen, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Mazeppa, Byron's, 523. 
 Measure for Measure, Shakespeare's, 
 
 231- 
 Medal, Dryden's, 378. 
 Melincourt, Peacock's, 632. 
 Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland, 
 
 Mackenzie's, 443. 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier, De Foe's, 418. 
 Men and Women, Browning's, 574, 
 
 575, 636. 
 Menaphon, Greene's, 203. 
 Men, Women, and Books, Hunt's, 
 
 554- 
 
 Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare s, 
 218, 2ig, 220. 
 
 Merope, M. Arnold's, 587, 588. 
 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakes- 
 peare's, 214, 227, 228. 
 
 Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Im- 
 age, Marston's, 250. 
 
 Middlemarch, G. Eliot's, 638. 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakes- 
 peare's, 218, 220. 
 
 Miller's Daughter, Crabbe's, 45';. 
 
 Mill on the Floss, G. Eliot's, 638. 
 
 Milton, supposed knowledge of Caed- 
 mon, 17. 
 
 Minstrel, Beattie's, 447. 
 
 Miracle play, the, 156. 
 
 Mirour de I'Omme, Gower's, 107. 
 
 Mirror for Magistrates, the, i6g, 182, 
 294. 
 
 Miscellanies, Swinburne's, 605. 
 
 Mistress, Cowley's, 342. 
 
 Mithridates, Nat. Lee's, 371. 
 
 Modern Love, Meredith's, 595, 596. 
 
 Modern Painters, Ruskin's, 590, 591. 
 
 Modest Confutation, Hall's, 310. 
 
 Modest Proposal, SwiTt's, 414. 
 
 Moll Flanders, De Foe's, 417. 
 
 Monastery, Scott's, 542. 
 
 Money the Mistress, Southerne's, 
 381. 
 
 Monna Innominata, Christina Ros- 
 setti's, 598. 
 
 Montaigne's Essays, Florio's transla- 
 tion of, 281. 
 
 Moonstone, Wilkie CoUins's, 633. 
 
 Moral Fabillis of Esope, Henryson's, 
 
 135. 
 Morality, the, 156. 
 Morals, History of European, Lecky's, 
 
 663. 
 Morte Arthure, Huchown's, 75, 76, 
 
 124, 141. 
 Morte d'Arthur, Malory's, 42, 61, 63, 
 
 68, 73, "3, 124-128, 175, 183, 
 
 188. 
 Morte d'Arthur, Tennyson's, 127, 
 
 570, 572. 
 
 Mortimeriados, Drayton's, 292. 
 
 Moses, his Birth and Miracles, 
 Drayton's, 293. 
 
 Mother Bombie, Lyly's, 196. 
 
 Mother Hubbard's Tale, Spenser's, 
 191. 
 
 Mourning Bride, Congreve's, 365. 
 
 Mr. H., Lamb's, 552. 
 
 Mr. Midshipman Easy, Marryat's, 
 612. 
 
 Mrs. Perkins's Ball, Thackeray's, 618. 
 
 Much Ado about Nothing, Shakes- 
 peare's, 227, 228. 
 
 Murder Considered as One of the 
 Fine Arts, De Quincey's, 559. 
 
 Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe's, 
 
 577- 
 Muses' Elizium, Drayton's, 293. 
 My Days among the Dead are Past, 
 
 Southey's, 515. 
 My dear and only love, I pray. 
 
 Marquis of Montrose's, 441. 
 Mysteries of Udolpho, Mrs. Rad- 
 
 cliffe's, 522, 533, 538. 
 Mysterious Mother, H. Walpole's, 
 
 485. 
 Mystic, Tennyson's, 569. 
 
 Napoleon, Life of, Scott's, 506, 544. 
 Narrenschiff, Brandt's, see Ship of 
 Fools. 
 
678 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Natural History of Religion, Hume's, 
 
 489. 
 Nature, the return to, in poetry, 497. 
 Nautilus, O. W. Holmes's, 628. 
 Navy and Sea Service, Raleigh on, 
 
 279. 
 Necessity of Atheism, Shelley's, 517, 
 Nelson, Life of, Southey's, 516. 
 Nemesis of Faith, Froude's, 652. 
 Nero, Nat. Lee's, 371. 
 Never too Late to Mend, Reade's, 
 
 642. 
 New Arabian Nights, Stevenson's, 
 
 639-' 
 New Atlantis, Bacon's, 277, 278. 
 Newcomes, Thackeray's, 621. 
 New Era, the, 563. 
 New Inn, Jonson's, 239, 240. 
 Newman, Life of Cardinal, Ward's, 
 
 661. 
 New Poems, M. Arnold's, 587. 
 News from Nowhere, W, Morris's, 
 
 601. 
 Newspaper, Crabbe's, 454. 
 New Way to pay Old Debts, Mas- 
 singer's, 260. 
 New York, History of, W. Irving's, 
 
 546. 
 Nibelungenlied, the, 3. 
 Niblungs, the, 3. 
 
 Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens's, 614. 
 Nightmare Abbey, Peacock's, 632. 
 Night-piece on Death, Parnell's, 393. 
 Night Thoughts, Young's, 422, 424. 
 Nimphidia, Drayton's, 293, 
 Niobe, Stafford's, 280. 
 Noah's Flood, Drayton's, 293. 
 Noble Numbers, Herrick's, 334, 335. 
 Noctes Ambrosianae, J. Wilson's, 
 
 549- 
 No Name, Wilkie CoUins's, 633. 
 Norman Conquest, changes brought 
 
 by the, 35, 41. 
 Norman Conquest, History of the. 
 
 Freeman's, 653, 654. 
 North and South, Mrs. Gaskell's, 641. 
 Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's, 
 
 532, 533.536, 537. 538, 540- 
 Northward Ho, Webster's, 257. 
 Nosce Teipsum, Davies', 296. 
 Notes on Charlotte Bronte, Swin- 
 burne's, 605. 
 
 Novel, the origins of the, i, 60-71. 
 Novum Organum, Bacon's, 272, 276. 
 Nut Brown Maid, the, 150, 151. 
 
 Observations on the Art of English 
 Poesie, Campion's, 290. 
 
 Observations on the Present State of 
 the Nation, Burke's, 482. 
 
 Ode of the Blessed Trinity, Beau- 
 mont's, 301. 
 
 Ode on the Death of the Duke of 
 Wellington, Tennyson's, 571. 
 
 Ode to Memory, Tennyson's, 569. 
 
 Odes, Collins's, 427. 
 
 Odes, Gray's, 429, 430. 
 
 Odyssey, Pope's translation of the, 
 
 384- 
 Oedipus, Lee and Dryden's, 372, 
 
 373- 
 Oenone, Tennyson's, 569. 
 Of Nelson and the North, Campbell's, 
 
 606. 
 Old Bachelor, Congreve's, 363. 
 Old Chartist, Meredith's, 595. 
 Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens's, 614. 
 Old English Baron, Reeve's, 530. 
 Old Lady Mary, Mrs. Oliphant's, 
 
 633. 
 
 Old Law, the, Middleton, Massinger 
 and Dekker's, 253. 
 
 Old Mortality, Scott's, 183, 541. 
 
 Old Wives' Tale, Peele's, 197. 
 
 Oliver Twist, Dickens's, 614. 
 
 Olor Iscanus, Vaughan's, 332. 
 
 One Hoss Shay, O. W. Holmes's, 
 628. 
 
 One of Our Conquerors, G. Mere- 
 dith's, 636. 
 
 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 
 Milton's, 347. 
 
 Opinions of Theophrastus Such, G. 
 Eliot's, 638. 
 
 Orchestra, Davies, 296. 
 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Meredith's, 
 
 634- 
 Oriana, Tennyson's, 569. 
 Orlando Furioso, Greene's, 200. 
 Ormonde, Miss Edgeworth's, 535. 
 Ormulum, the, 51, 52. 
 Oroonoko, or the Loyal Slave, South. 
 
 erne's, 381, 567. 
 Orosius, 27, 28. 
 
Index 
 
 679 
 
 Orphan, Otway's, 369, 370. 
 Oipheus and Eurydice, Henryson's, 
 
 137- 
 
 Orygynale Cronykil, Wyntoun's, 75, 
 132. 
 
 Osorio, Coleridge's, 500. 
 
 Ossian, Macpherson's, 428, 483, 490, 
 
 Othello, Shakespeare's, 229, 230, 231. 
 
 Otterburne, ballad, 149. 
 
 Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's, 615. 
 
 Ovid's Amores, translated by Mar- 
 lowe, 204. 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, i, 90. 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, Addison's 
 translation from, 400. 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, Golding's 
 translation of, 281. 
 
 Owl and the Nightingale, the, 54. 
 
 Owle, Drayton's, 292. 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 598, 
 .599- 
 
 Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day, 
 
 Haywood's, 257. 
 Pains of Sleep, Coleridge's, 455, 500. 
 Palace of Pleasure, Painter's, 281. 
 Palice of Honour, Gawain Douglas, 
 
 143. 
 Palladis Tamia, Meres's, 220, 222, 233. 
 Pamela, Richardson's, 458, 459, 461, 
 
 462, 463. 
 Panegyric, Waller's, 344. 
 Pantisocratic Community, the, 499, 
 
 513- 
 Papacy, History of the, Creighton's, 
 
 654. 
 Paracelsus, Brovniing's, 574. 
 Paradise Lost, Milton's, 17, 352-354; 
 
 360. 
 Paradise Regained, Milton's, 297, 354, 
 
 355- 
 Parents' Assistant, the, 534. 
 Parish Register, Crabbe's, 455. 
 Parisina, Byron's, 52 r. 
 Paris Sketchbook, Thackeray's, 617. 
 Passetyme of Pleasure, Hawes's, 113 
 
 114. 
 Past and Present, Carlyle's, 649. 
 Pastoral Ballad, Shenstone's, 433. 
 Pastorals, Philips's, 390. 
 Pastorals, Pope's, 382. 
 Patient Grissil, Dekker's, 252. 
 
 Patron, Crabbe's, 457. 
 
 Pauline, Browning's, 573, 574, 
 
 Pavilion on the Links, Stevenson's,640. 
 
 Pearl, the, 73. 
 
 Peebles at the Play, poem, 144. 
 
 Peg Woffington, Reade's, 642. 
 
 Pelham, Bulwer Lytton's, 611. 
 
 Pendennis, Thackeray's, 620.1 
 
 Peninsular War, Napier's, 658. 
 
 Peregrine Pickle, Smollett's, 469. 
 
 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Shakes- 
 peare's, 109, 232. 
 
 Perkin Warbeck, Ford's, 262, 277. 
 
 Persian Eclogues, CoUins's, 427. 
 
 Persuasion, Jane Austen's, 537, 545. 
 
 Peter Bell, Wordsworth's, 555. 
 
 Peter Simple, Marryat's, 612. 
 
 Petrarch, 96. 
 
 Petrarch's Sonnets, 163, 164, 185. 
 
 Petrarch, Supposed meeting of Chau- 
 cer and, 80. 
 
 Peveril of the Peak, Scott's, 543. 
 
 Phalaris, Letters of, 411, 420. 
 
 Philarete, Wither's, 302. 
 
 Philaster, Beaumont and Fletcher's, 
 242, 244, 245. 
 
 Phil Fogarty of the Fighting Onety 
 Oneth, Thackeray's, 610, 6ig. 
 
 Philip, Thackeray's, 622. 
 
 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin 
 of Our Ideas of the Sublime and 
 Beautiful, Burke's, 480, 481. 
 
 Philosophy, History of, Lewes's, 637. 
 
 Phoenix, the, 22. 
 
 Pickwick Papers, Dickens's, 533, 613, 
 614. ' 
 
 Pierce Penniless, Nash's, 204. 
 
 Piers Plowman, Langland's, 99-106, 
 190. 
 
 Pilgrimage of Glencoe, Campbell's, 
 606. 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's, 322, 
 
 324- 
 Pills to Purge Melancholy, D'Urfey's, 
 
 483. 
 Pioneers, Fenimore Cooper's, 545. 
 Pippa Passes, Browning's, 575, 576. 
 Pirate, Scott's, 543. 
 Piscatory Dialogues, Phineas 
 
 Fletcher's, 299, 300. 
 Piscatory Eclogues, Phineas 
 
 Fletcher's, 299. 
 
68o 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Plain Dealer, Wycherley's, 362, 407. 
 
 Plato and Platonism, Pater's, 593. 
 
 Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, 
 Hood's, 608. 
 
 Pleasures of Hope, Campbell's, 606. 
 
 Pluck the Fruit and Taste the Pleas- 
 ures, Lodge's, 211. 
 
 Plutarch's Lives, Sir T. North's trans- 
 lation of, 22g, 281. 
 
 Plutarch's Morals, Wylkinson's trans- 
 lation of, 281. 
 
 Poema Morale, the, 53, 54. 
 
 Poems and Ballads, Swinburne's, 603. 
 
 Poems before Congress, E. B. Brown- 
 ing's, 597- 
 
 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton 
 Bell, Bronte Sisters, 623. 
 
 Poems by the Way, W. Morris's, 601. 
 
 Poems by Thomas Little, Moore's, 
 607. 
 
 Poems on Several Occasions, Hamil- 
 ton of Bangour's, 445. 
 
 Poems by Two Brothers, Tennyson's, 
 568. 
 
 Poems by Victor and Cazire, Shelley's, 
 
 517- 
 Poetaster, Jonson's, 235, 251. 
 Poetry, History of English, Warton's, 
 
 431. 483- 
 Poet's poet, the, 192. 
 Polite Conversation, Swift's, 414. 
 Political Economy, Mill's, 659. 
 Political Songs, Early English, 56. 
 Polychronicon, the, see Higden's 
 
 Chronicles. 
 Polyolbion, Drayton's, igo, 291, :292, 
 
 293- 
 Pompey the Great, Kyd's, 208. 
 Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie CoUins's, 
 
 633- 
 Poor priests, Wyclirs, 116, 117. 
 Popular poetry, definition of, 147. 
 Posthumous Fragments of Margaret 
 
 Nicholson, Shelley's, 517. 
 Pot of Basil, Keats's, 527. 
 Precaution, Fenimore Cooper's, 545. 
 Preface to the Fables, Dryden's, 379, 
 
 380. 
 Prelude, Wordsworth's, 508, 510, 512. 
 Prerogative of Parliaments, Raleigh's, 
 
 279. 
 Prick of Conscience, the, 58, 
 
 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's, 
 
 536, S37. 538, 540. 
 Prince's Progress, the, Christina Ros- 
 
 setti's, 597. 
 Prince Otto, Stevenson's, 639, 640. 
 Princess, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Professor, Charlotte Bronte's, 623, 
 
 624. 
 Progress of Error, Cowper's, 438. 
 Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's, 519. 
 Promus of Elegancies, Bacon's, 274. 
 Prophecy of Famine, Churchill's, 45T. 
 Prospice, Browning's, 576. 
 Prothalamium, Spenser's, 184, 191. 
 Proverbs of King Alfred, the, 54. 
 Proverbs of Hendyng, the, 55. 
 Provoked Wife, Vanbrugh's, 368. 
 Provost, Gait's, 609. 
 Psalm of Life, Longfellow's, 567. 
 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne's, 
 
 308. 
 Public Advertiser, the, 496. 
 Public Ledger, the, 476. 
 Public Spirit of the Whigs, Swift's, 
 
 412. 
 Purple Island, Phineas Fletcher's, 
 
 298. 
 Pyramus and Thisbe, Gower's, 108. 
 Pystyll of Swete Susane, the, 75, 76. 
 
 Quarterly Review, the, 506, 515, 
 
 516, 547, 548, 549. 557. 624. 
 Queen of Arragon, Habington's, 339. 
 Queen Mab, Shelley's, 517. 
 Queen Mother, Swinburne's, 602. 
 Queen's Maries, Whyte-Melville's, 
 
 634- 
 Quentin Durward, Scott's, 543. 
 Quest of Cynthia, Drayton's, 293. 
 Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 
 
 Greene's, 203. 
 
 Raebi Ben Ezra, Browning's, 576. 
 
 Rabelais, translation by Sir T. 
 Urquhart, 140, 441. 
 
 Ralph Roister Doister, 159, 160. 
 
 Rambler, the, 472, 473. 
 
 Rape of the Lock, Pope's, 384. 
 
 Rape of Lucrece, Heywood's, 257. 
 
 Rappacini's Daughter, N, Haw- 
 thorne's, 626. 
 
 Rasselas, Johnson's, 472, 473. 
 
Index 
 
 68 1 
 
 Rationalism, Leclcy's, 662. 
 Raven, Poe's, 578. 
 Ravenshoe, H. Kingsley's, 632. 
 Rebellion, History of the, Claren 
 
 don's, 325-327- 
 Recent Times in England, History of, 
 
 Eadmer's, 36. 
 Recluse, Wordsworth's, 508. 
 Recollections of the Arabian Nights, 
 
 Tennyson's, 569. 
 Recruiting Officer, Farquhar's, 368. 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 
 
 Browning's, 576. 
 Redgauntlet, Scott's, 543. 
 Reflections on the French Revolution, 
 
 Burke's, 482. 
 Reflector, the, 554. 
 Reformation, History of the, Knox's, 
 
 146. 
 Reformation, Milton's tract on the, 
 
 309, 310. 
 Rehearsal, Duke of Buckingham's, 
 
 358, 359, 378, 495- 
 Rehearsal Transprosed, Macvell's, 346. 
 Reign of Henry VII, Bacon's, 276. 
 Rejected Addresses, Horace Smith's, 
 
 548. 
 Relapse, Vanburgh's, 365-368. 
 Religio Laici, Lord Herbert's, 306. 
 Religio Medici, Browne's, 307, 308. 
 Religio Stoici, Mackenzie's, 442. 
 Reliques, Percy's, 150, 435, 436, 483. 
 Renaissance in Italy, History of the, 
 
 Symonds's, 593. 
 Repentance, Greene's, igg. 
 Repressor of overmuch blaming of the 
 
 Clergy, Pecock's,- 120, 121. 
 Requiescat, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Retaliation, Goldsmith's, 477. 
 Retirement, Cowper's, 438. 
 Return from Parnassus, play, zoi, 
 
 221, 251. 
 Reulis and Cautelis, of James I, 440. 
 Revenge, Tennyson's, 572. 
 Revenge, Young's, 423. 
 Revenge of Bussy, Chapman's, 250. 
 Revenger's Tragedy, Tourneur's, 259, 
 
 602, 603. 
 Revolt of Islam, Shelley's, 518. 
 Rhoda Fleming, Meredith's, 634. 
 Rhyme Royal, the, 85, 113, 135, 152, 
 
 292. 
 
 Richard II, Shakespeare's, 207, 217, 
 
 220, 228. 
 Richard III, Shakespeare's, 217, 220. 
 Riding Rhyme, the, 140, 
 Ring and the Book, Browning's, 576. 
 Rip Van Winkle, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, Motley's, 
 
 657. 
 Rival Ladies, Dryden's, 377. 
 Rival Queens, Nat. Lee's, 372. 
 Rivals, Sheridan's, 494. 
 Rizpah, Tennyson's, 572. 
 Roaring Girl, Middleton's, 255. 
 Robene and Makyne, Henryson's, 
 
 137- 
 Robert de Borron, 61. 
 Robin Hood ballads, the, 148. 
 Robinson Crusoe, De Foe's, 417, 418. 
 Rob Roy, Scott's, 541. 
 Roderick Random, Smollett's, 468, 
 
 469. 
 Rokeby, Scott's, 504. 
 Roman Actor, Massinger's, 260. 
 Romance of the Forest, Mrs. Rad- 
 
 cliffe's, 533. 
 Romances, English and Scottish, 
 
 60-77. 
 Roman de la Rose, the, 75, 83, 133, 
 
 143- 
 
 Romantic Movement, the, 497, 527. 
 
 Romany Rye, G. Borrow's, 632. 
 
 Romaunt of the Rose, Chaucer's, 83, 
 84. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's, 
 218, 220. 
 
 Romola, G. Eliot's, 638. 
 
 Rom, Ram, Ruf, see Alliteration. 
 
 Ronsard, 163, 211. 
 
 Rookwood, Ainsworth's, 610. 
 
 Roots of the Mountains, W. Morris's, 
 601. 
 
 Rosalynde : Euphues' Golden Leg- 
 acy, Lodge's, 201, 202. 
 
 Rosamond, Addison's, 391, 401, 402. 
 
 Rosamund, Swinburne's, 602. 
 
 Rosamund Gray, Lamb's, 552. 
 
 Rosciad, Churchill's, 451. 
 
 Rose and the Ring, Thackeray's, 621. 
 
 Rose Aylmer, Landor's, 528. 
 
 Roundabout Papers, Thackeray's, 
 622. 
 
 Round Table, Hazlitt's, 556. 
 
682 
 
 English Literature 
 
 liowena and Rebecca, Thackeray's, 
 6ig. 
 
 Rowley's Ancient Poems, Chatter- 
 ton's, 435. 
 
 Roxana, De Foe's, 417. 
 
 Royal and Noble Authors, H. Wal- 
 pole's, 485. 
 
 Royal Society, the, 419. 
 
 RubSiyat of Omar Khayydm, Fitz- 
 Gerald's, 594, 595, 636. 
 
 Ruined City, the, Anglo-Saxon poem, 
 7, 12, 561. 
 
 Ruins of Rome, Dyer's, 432. 
 
 Ruines of Rome, Spenser's the, igi. 
 
 Ruines of Time, Spenser's the, 191. 
 
 Runes, 2, 20. 
 
 Rural Sports, Gay's, 389. 
 
 Sacred Order of Episcopacy, 
 
 Taylor's, 314. 
 Sadducismus Triumphatus, Glanvill's, 
 
 419- , 
 Sailing of the Sword, W. Morris's, 600. 
 St. Irvyne, Shelley's, 517. 
 St. Ives, Stevenson's, 640. 
 St. Patrick's Day, Sheridan's, 495. 
 St. Paul and Protestantism, M. 
 
 Arnold's, 590. 
 St. Ronan's Well, Scott's, 543. 
 Saints' Everlasting Rest, Baxter's, 
 
 317- 
 Salmagundi, 546. 
 Samson Agonistes, Milton's, 355. 
 Sandford and Merton, Day's, 534. 
 Sartor Resartus, Carlyle's, 649. 
 Satire of the Three Estates, 145. 
 Satiro-Mastix, Dekker's, 235, 251, 252, 
 
 253- 
 
 Saturday Review, 654, 657. 
 
 Saxo Grammaticus, 230. 
 
 Scarlet Letter, N. Hawthorne's, 566, 
 626, 627. 
 
 Scarronides or Virgil Travestie, Cot- 
 ton's, 343. 
 
 Scenes from Clerical Life, G. Eliot's, 
 
 637. 
 Schiller, Life of, Carlyle's, 649. 
 Schir William Wallace, Blind Harry's, 
 
 140, 141. 
 Scholar Gipsy, M. Arnold's, 587. 
 School for Fathers, Talbot Gwynne's, 
 
 641. 
 
 School Master, Ascham's, 176. 
 School of Abuse, Gosson's, 180, 
 
 201. 
 
 School Mistress, Shenstone's, 433. 
 School for Scandal, Sheridan's, 362, 
 
 494- 
 Scop, see Gleeman. 
 Scornful Lady, Beaumont and Flet- 
 cher's, 247. 
 Scotichronicon, Fordun's, 133. 
 Scotland, History of, Bp. Leslie's, 
 
 148. 
 Scotland, History of, Robertson's, 
 
 490. 
 Scots, the Scottish tongue, 129. 
 Scott, Life of Sir Walter, Lockhart's, 
 
 549, 647. 
 Scourge of Villainy, Marston's, 250. 
 Seafarer, the, 13. 
 Seasons, Thomson's, 425, 426. 
 Sejanus, Jonson's, 236, 237. 
 Seneca, translations from, 162. 
 Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen's, 
 
 436, 536, 537. 540. 
 Sentimental Journey, Sterne's, 487, 
 
 488. 
 Serious Reflections and Vision of the 
 
 Angelic World, De Foe's, 417. 
 Session of Poets, Suckling's, 336, 338 
 
 340. 583- 
 Seven Deadly Sins of London, 
 
 Dekker's, 252. 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture, Rus- 
 
 kin's, 591. 
 Shabby Genteel Story, Thackeray's. 
 
 618. 
 Shadow of Night, Chapman's, 247. 
 Shakespeare's Debt to Homer, 231. 
 Shakespeare's patriotism, 228. 
 Shall I wasting in despair, 302. 
 Shaving of Shagpat, Meredith's, 634. 
 Shepherd's Calendar, the, 182, 184, 
 
 185. 
 Shepherd's Garland, Drayton's, 291. 
 Shepherd's Hunting, Wither's, 302. 
 Shepherd's Pipe, Browne's, 301. 
 Shepherd's Week, Gay's, 389. 
 She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith's, 
 
 478. 
 She Would if She Could, Etheridge's, 
 
 361. 
 Ship of Fools, Barclay's, 152. 
 
Index 
 
 683 
 
 Shirley, Charlotte Bronte's, 623, 624. 
 Shoe Maker's Holiday, Dekker's, 
 
 252. 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, De 
 
 Foe's, 415. 
 Short History of the English People, 
 
 Green's, 654. 
 Short Studies, Froude's, 653. 
 Sicelides, a Piscatory, Phineas 
 
 Fletcher's, 299. 
 Sicilian Romance, Mrs. Radcliffe's, 
 
 533. 538- 
 Siege of Corinth, Byron's, 521. 
 Siege of Rhodes, Dryden's, 359. 
 Sigurd the Volsung, W. Morris's, 
 
 601. 
 Silas Mamer, G, Eliot's, 638. 
 Silent Woman, Jonson's, 237, 238, 
 
 239. 
 Silex Scintillans, Vaughan's, 332. 
 Silver Cord, Shirley Brooks's, 635. 
 Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson's, 
 
 459- 
 Sire de MalStroit's Door, Stevenson's, 
 
 639. 
 Sir Eustace Grey, Crabbe's, 455, 456. 
 Sir Galahad, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Sir Harry Wildair, Farquhar's, 368. 
 Sir Lancelot Greaves, Smollett's, 469. 
 Sir Peter Harpdon's End, W. Morris's, 
 
 • 600. 
 Sir Thopas, Chaucer's, 70, 91. 
 Skeleton in Armour, Longfellow's, 
 
 567. 
 Sketch Book, W. Irving's, 546. 
 Sketches by Boz, Dickens's, 613. 
 Snarley-yow, Marryat's, 612. 
 Snob, the, 617. 
 
 Snow- Bound, Whittier's, 563, 565. 
 Socialism, the, of Lollards and 
 
 Wyclif s " poor priests," 100, loi, 
 
 117. 
 Sohrab and Rustum, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Soldier, Lovelace's, 336. 
 Soldier's Fortune, Otway's, 370. 
 Solomon, Prior's, 388. 
 Some drear - nighted December, 
 
 Keats's, 603. 
 Song of the Shirt, Hood's, 608. 
 Songs before Sunrise, Swinburne's, 
 
 604. 
 Sonnet, the, 164, 165. 
 
 Sonnet-form, Early Suggestion of the, 
 
 73- 
 Sonnets, Bowles's, 499. 
 Sonnets, Keats's, 526. 
 Sonnets, Milton's, 351. 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, E. B. 
 
 Browning's, 596. 
 Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 166, 212, 220, 
 
 222-227. 
 Sonnets, Sir P. Sidney's, 179, 180. 
 Sonnets, Spenser's, 185, igi. 
 Sonnets, Surrey's, 166. 
 Sonnets, Wordsworth's, 526. 
 Sonnets, Wyatt's, 164. 
 Sophonisba, Marston's, 251. 
 Sophonisba, Thomson's, 425. 
 Sophy, Denham's, 342. 
 Sordello, Browning's, 573, 574, 575. 
 Spanish Ballads, Lockhart's, 549. 
 Spanish Comedy, Beaumont and 
 
 Fletcher's, 246, 247. 
 Spanish Friar, Dryden's, 378. 
 Spanish Gipsy, Middleton's, 255. 
 Spanish Tragedy, Kyd's, 208, 209, 
 
 233> 234. 257- 
 Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 
 
 Lamb's, 552. 
 Spectator, the, 394, 398, 403, 406, 
 
 444. 
 Speech on moving his Resolutions for 
 
 Conciliation with the Colonies, 
 
 Burke's, 479. 
 Spleen, Green's, 432. 
 Spy, Fenimore Cooper's, 545. 
 Squire Meldrum, Lyndsay's, 145. 
 State of Europe during the Middle 
 
 Ages, Hallam's, 643. 
 State of Innocence, Dryden's, 360. 
 Statins, Pope's translation of, 382. 
 Steel Glass, Gascoigne's the, 167, 169, 
 
 278. 
 Steps to the Temple, Crashaw's, 328, 
 
 329. 
 Sterne, Life and Letters of, by Mel- 
 ville, 488. 
 Stones of Venice, Ruskin's, 591. 
 Story of the Glittering Plain, W. 
 
 Morris's, 6ot. 
 Story of Rimini, Hunt's, 554. 
 Strafford, Browning's, 574. • 
 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 
 Hyde, Stevenson's, 639. 
 
684 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Strange Story, Bulwer Lytton's, 6ii. 
 
 Strayed Reveller, M. Arnold's, 587. 
 
 Studies in the History of tlie Renais- 
 sance, Pater's, 593. 
 
 Study of Celtic Literature, M. Ar- 
 nold's, 590. 
 
 Study of Shakespeare, Swinburne's, 
 605, 
 
 Style, De Quincey's, 559. 
 
 Subjection of Women, Mill's, 659. 
 
 Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 
 History of the, Wodrow's, 443, 
 561. 
 
 Suite de Merlin, Romance, 61. 
 
 Summer's Last Will and Testament, 
 Nash's, 203. 
 
 Sun's Darling, Ford and Dekker's, 
 252. 
 
 Supposed Confessions of a Second- 
 rate Sensitive Mind, Tennyson's, 
 
 569- 
 Supposes, the, 162. 
 Swift, Life of, Scott's, 506. 
 Switzerland, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Sword and Gown, G. Lawrence's, 
 
 634- 
 Sybil, Beaconsfield's, 6io. 
 Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon's, 277. 
 Sylvia's Lovers, Mrs. Gaskell's, 641. 
 
 Table Talk, Cowper's, 438. 
 
 Tacitus, Savile's translation of, 281. 
 
 Tale of Troy, the, 68-70. 
 
 Tale of Troy, Peele's, 197. 
 
 Tale of a Tub, Jonson's, 239. 
 
 Tale of a Tub, Swift's, 408, 409, 410, 
 
 412. 
 Tale of Two Cities, Dickens's, 615. 
 Tales of a Grandfather, Scott's, 506. 
 Tales from Shakespeare, Lamb's, 
 
 552. 
 Tales of a Traveller, W. Irving's, 
 
 546. 
 Talisman, Scott's, 544. 
 Talking Oak, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Tamburlaine, Marlowe's, 204-206. 
 Tamerlane and Other Poems, Poe's, 
 
 577- 
 Tamlane, ballad, 149. 
 Tam o' Shanter, Burns's, 449, 450. 
 Tancred and Sigismunda, Thomson's, 
 
 42S. 
 
 Tanglewood Tales, N. Hawthorne's, 
 627. 
 
 Task, Cowper's, 438, 439. 
 
 Tasso, Fairfax and Carew's transla- 
 tions of, 281. 
 
 Tatler, the, 394, 395, 396, 398, 444. 
 
 Tears of Fancy, Watson's, 289. 
 
 Tears of the Muses, Spenser's, 191. 
 
 Tears of Peace, Chapman's, 248. 
 
 Tears of Scotland, Smollett's, 468. 
 
 Tea-table Miscellany, Ramsay's, 445, 
 
 483. 
 Tempest, Shakespeare's, 232. 
 Temple, George Herbert's, 330, 331. 
 Temple of Glass, Lydgate's, in. 
 Tender Husband, Steele's, 399. 
 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 
 
 Milton's, 311. 
 Terrible Temptation, Reade's, 642, 
 Testament of Cresseyde, Henryson's, 
 
 136. 
 Thackeray, Life of, A. TroUope's, 637. 
 Thalaba, Southey's, 514, 515. 
 Thalia Rediviva, Vaughan's, 332. 
 Thanatopsis, Bryant's, 562. 
 Thealma and Clearchus, Walton's, 
 
 322. 
 Theatre of Worldlings, Van der 
 
 Noodt's, 185. 
 Theatres, in the reign of Elizabeth, 
 
 194, 214. 
 Theory of Vision, Berkeley's, 421. 
 There was a haggis in Dunbar, 
 
 152. 
 Thersites, 158. 
 Thierry and Theodoret, Beaumont 
 
 and Fletcher's, 246. 
 Thistle and the Rose, Dunbar's, 139. 
 Thoughts on Education, Locke's, 420. 
 Thoughts on Eternity, Gay's, 390. 
 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 
 
 Burke's, 482. 
 Thrawn Janet, Stevenson's, 612, 639. 
 Three Hours after Marriage, Gay's, 
 
 390- 
 
 Three Ladies of Sorrow, De Quin- 
 cey's, 559. 
 
 Thucydides, Hobbes's, translation of, 
 318, 319, 
 
 Thucydides, Nichols' translation of, 
 280. 
 
 Thus Phyllis sung. Lodge's, 211. 
 
Index 
 
 685 
 
 Thyrsis, M. Arnold's, 587. 
 
 Timber, or Discoveries made upon 
 Men and Matter, Jonson's, 240. 
 
 Timbuctoo, Thackeray's, 617. 
 
 Timbuctoo, Tennyson's, 569. 
 
 Time, Real and Imaginary, Cole- 
 ridge's, 501. 
 
 Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's, 23 1 
 
 Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth's, 500, 
 Sro. 
 
 Tirocinium, Cowper's, 437. 
 
 'Tis Pity she's a Whore, Ford's, 262. 
 
 Tithonus, Tennyson's, 570. 
 
 Titus Andronicus.iShakespeare's, 207, 
 2og, 216, 217. 
 
 Tom Cringle's Log, Scott's, 612. 
 
 Tom Jones, Fielding's, 462, 463, 464, 
 467, 613. 
 
 Tom Thumb the Great, Fielding's, 
 462. 
 
 Tottel's Miscellany, 166, 167. 
 
 Tower of London, Ainsworth's, 610. 
 
 Town and Country Mouse, Prior's, 
 
 387. 
 Townley Plays, the, 153. 
 Toxophilus, Ascham's, 175, 176. 
 Trade and Commerce, Raleigh on, 
 
 279. 
 Tragedy of Aella, Chatterton's, 435, 
 
 436. 
 Tragedy of the Cardinal, Lyndsay's, 
 
 145. 
 Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, 
 
 Chapman's, 249. 
 Traitor, Shirley's, 263. 
 Transcript from Euripides (in Balaus- 
 
 tion's Adventure), Browning's, 
 
 576. 
 Transformation, N. Hawthorne s, 
 
 626, 627. 
 Traveller, Goldsmith's, 475, 477. 
 Treasure Island, Stevenson's, 41S, 639. 
 Treatise of Government, Locke's, 
 
 420. 
 Treatise on Human Nature, Hume's, 
 
 488. 
 Trick to Catch the Old One, Middle- 
 ton's, 254, 260. 
 Triolet, the French, 140. 
 Trip to the Jubilee, Farquhar's, 368. 
 Tristram, Romance of, 62. 
 Tristram, Swinburne's, 604. 
 
 Tristram and Iseult, M. Arnold's, 588. 
 Tristram Shandy, Sterne's, 476, 485, 
 
 486, 487. 
 Triumph of Time, Swinburne's, 603. 
 Trivia, Gay's, 390. 
 Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare's, 
 
 88, 231. 
 
 Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer's, 87- 
 
 89, 181. 
 
 Troy Book, Lydgate's, in. 
 
 True Born Englishman, De Foe's, 
 415. 
 
 True Patriot, Fielding's, 462. 
 
 True Relation of the Apparition ol 
 One Mrs. Veal, De Foe's, 416. 
 
 Truth, Cowper's, 438. 
 
 Tunning of Eleanor Rummyng, 
 Skelton's, 152. 
 
 Twa Dogs, the, Burns's, 450. 
 
 Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's, 227, 
 228, 229. 
 
 Two Foscari, Byron's, 523. 
 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakes- 
 peare's, 218, 220. 
 
 Two Married Women and the Widow, 
 Dunbar's, 139. 
 
 Two Mice, Henryson's, 136. 
 
 Twopenny Postbag, Moore's, 607. 
 
 Two Voices, Tennyson's, 570. 
 
 Two Years Ago, C. Kingsley's, 631. 
 
 Ulalume, Poe's, 578. 
 
 Ulysses, Tennyson's, 570. 
 
 Uncle Tom's Cabin, Beecher Stowe's, 
 
 563- 
 Under the Old Elm, Lowell's, 584. 
 Unfortunate Traveller, Nash's, 204. 
 United Netherlands, History of the. 
 
 Motley's, 658. 
 Universal Passion, Young's, 423. 
 Unnatural Combat, Massinger's, 260. 
 Unto This Last, Ruskin's, 592. 
 Unum Necessarium, Taylor's, 315. 
 Urn Burial, Browne's, 309. 
 Utopia, More's, 173, 277. 
 
 Valentinian, Beaumont and Flet- 
 cher's, 246. 
 
 Valerius, Lockhart's, 612. 
 
 Valley of Cauteretz, Tennyson's, 572, 
 645- 
 
686 
 
 English Literature 
 
 Vanity of Dogmatising, Glanvill's, 
 
 419. 
 Vanity Fair, Thackeray's, 619, 620, 
 
 622. 
 Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson's, 
 
 473- 
 Vathefc, Beckford's, 530. 
 Vaughan's Poems, 332. 
 Venice Preserved, Otway's, 370. 
 Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's, 
 
 207, 219, 220, 221. 
 Vicar of Wakefield, Goldsmith's, 472, 
 
 475> 478. 
 View of the Present State of Ireland, 
 
 Spenser's, 187, 266. 
 Villette, Charlotte Bronte's, 623, 
 
 625. 
 Village, Crabbe's, 453, 454. 
 Village Blacksmith, Longfellow's, 
 
 566. 
 Vindication of Natural Society, 
 
 Burke's, 480. 
 Virgil, Conington's translation of, 
 
 281. 
 Virgil, Denham's translation from, 
 
 342- 
 Virgil, Dryden's translation of, 374, 
 
 378. 
 Virgil, Gawain Douglas's translation 
 
 of, i43> M4- 
 Virgil, Phaer's translation of, 281. 
 Virgil's Aeneid, Stanyhurst's transla- 
 tion from, 281, 
 Virgil, Surrey's translation from, 
 
 166. 
 Virginians, Thackeray's, 544, 621, 
 
 622. 
 Virginia Voyage, Drayton's, 292. 
 Virginibus Puerisque, Stevenson's, 
 
 639- 
 Virgin Martyr, Massinger's, 259. 
 Vision of Judgment, Byron's, 523. 
 Vision of Sin, Tennyson's, 570. 
 Vision of Sir Launfal, Lowell's, 584. 
 Vivian Grey, Beaconsfield's, 610. 
 Vivien, Tennyson's, 571. 
 Voiage and Travaile, Mandeville's, 
 
 118. 
 Voices of the Night, Longfellow's, 
 
 566. 
 Volpone, Jonson's, 237, 238, 242. 
 Volsungs, the, 3. 
 
 Vox Clamantis, Gower's, 107. 
 Vulgar Errors, Browne's, 308. 
 
 Waldhere, 13-15. 
 
 Wallace, Blind Harry's, 445. 
 
 Wanderer, the, 12. 
 
 Wanderer, Fanny Burney's, 532. 
 
 Wandering Heir, Reade's, 642. 
 
 War with Spain, Raleigh's, 279. 
 
 Watchman, the, 499. 
 
 Water Babies, C. Kingsley's, 631. 
 
 Water Fowl, Bryant's, 562, 563. 
 
 Waverley, Scott's, 505, 536, 540, 
 
 541- 
 Way to Win Him, Farquhar's, 368. 
 Way of the World, Congreve's, 364, 
 
 365- 
 Weir of Hermiston, Stevenson's, 641. 
 Welcome from Greece, Gay's, 384, 
 
 389. 
 Welsh, influence of, on Literature, i. 
 Were na my heart licht I wad dee, 
 
 Lady G. Baillie's, 445. 
 Wesley, Life of John, Southey's, 
 
 516. 
 Westward Hoi C, Kingsley's, 630, 
 
 631. 
 Westward Ho, Webster's, 257. 
 What does Dr. Newman mean, C. 
 
 Kingsley's, 629, 661. 
 What You Will, Marston's, 251. 
 White Devil, Webster's, 257, 258, 
 
 259- 
 White Doe of Rylstone, Words- 
 worth's, 511. 
 Why Come ye not to Court, Skel- 
 
 ton's, 151. 
 Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a'. Lady 
 
 Nairne's, 446. 
 Widsith, 5, iig. * 
 Wieland, C. B. Brown's, 536." 
 Wife, Overbury's, 279, 280. 
 Wife of Usher's Well, ballad, 149. 
 Wild Gallant, Dryden, 358, 377. 
 Wild-goose Chase, Beaumont and 
 
 Fletcher's, 247. 
 Wild Wales, G. Sorrow's, 632. 
 Will ye no come back again ? Lady 
 
 Nairne's, 446. 
 Wind, William Morris's, 600. 
 Windsor Forest, Pope's, 383. 
 Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's, 232. 
 
Index 
 
 687 
 
 Wise Woman of Hogsdon, Hey- 
 
 wood's, 256. 
 Witch, Middleton's, 255. 
 Witch of Atlas, Shelley's, 519. 
 Witch of Edmonton, Ford's, 261. 
 Wit's Treasury, see Palladis Tamia. 
 Witty Fair One, Shirley's, 263. 
 Wives and Daughters, Mrs. Gaskell's, 
 
 641. 
 Woman in the Moon, Lyly's, 196. 
 Woman in White, Wilkie Collins's, 
 
 633. 
 Woman Killed with Kindness, Hey- 
 
 wood's,.256. 
 Woodstock, Scott's, 544. 
 World, History of the, by Orosius, 
 
 27. 
 World, History of the, Raleigh's, 265, 
 
 278, 279. 
 World of Dreams, Crabbe's, 456. 
 Worthies of England, Fuller's, 318. 
 Wounds of Civil War, Lodge's, 202. 
 Wreck of the Hesperus, Longfellow's, 
 
 586. 
 
 Wreck of the Royal George, Cowper's, 
 
 439- 
 Wrecker, Stevenson's, 640. 
 Wrong Box, Stevenson's, 640. 
 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's, 
 
 623, 624. 
 
 Yarrow Unvisited, etc., Words- 
 worth's, 511. 
 
 Yeast, C. Kingsley's, 630. 
 
 Yellowplush Papers, Thackeray's, 
 617. 
 
 Yellow Violet, Bryant's, 563. 
 
 Ye Mariners of England, Campbell's, 
 606. 
 
 Yes, in the sea of life enisled, M. 
 Arnold's, 588. 
 
 Ynglys, development of, in Scotland, 
 1 29. 
 
 Young Beichan, ballad, 149. 
 
 Youth and Age, Coleridge's, 501. 
 
 Zanoni, Bulwer Lytton's, 611. 
 Zastrozzi, Shelley's, 517. 
 
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