XXI. ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE WRITERS…

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, defending or attacking the Established Church with its usages; or Puritanism 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 themes 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 business and bosoms"; and, of all the manners which we have described, that of Bacon remains by far the most easily and most commonly appreciated.

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 century 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.

Hooker.

"It is not to be doubted but that Richard Hooker was born at Heavytree" (near Exeter), says Izaak Walton, about 1553. 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 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 circumstances, 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 maintained that all Catholics are not necessarily damned to all eternity. In 1591 Hooker obtained the living of Boscombe 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 Ecclesiastical Polity," is an argument against the Puritans who, from matters like the surplice 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 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 reasonable 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 introduced 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. Manifestly an opponent would blow away this argument with any isolated scriptural text, whatever its original application, which as he thought backed his opinion.

Hooker analysed Puritan demagogic methods, spiritual pretensions, 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 Newgate, and their blood was up. What they desired was not to be 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 delighteth 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 facility 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 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 controversial 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 Whitgift (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 palpable 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-Martinists 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 vindicated in the great work of Richard 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 of 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 leaving Trinity College, Cambridge, and studying law at Gray's Inn, Bacon followed to Paris Sir Amyas Paulet, later the jailer of Queen Mary Stuart at Fotheringay. He was called to the Bar in 1582, and in 1584 entered Parliament, 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 followed 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 seize the Royal person, was no true English political move; it led to his trial, and Bacon was the leading speaker in his benefactor's prosecution. "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 Scotland, 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 King James's favourite, Buckingham, Bacon received promotion; he became Attorney-General; in 1617, Keeper of the Seals, like his father; in 1618, Chancellor, and Baron Verulam; in 1621 Viscount St. Albans. In the same year he was accused of taking gifts from suitors (then a not uncommon practice), pled guilty, with qualifications, and was disgraced. 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. 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 himself 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 have 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 Montaigne'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 anecdotes 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," 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 generalities 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 existence, "in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury". "No great and worthy person" (except Mark Antony and Appius Claudius, famed for his adoration of Virginia) "hath been transported to the mad degree of love". "It is impossible 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 assuming 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?" "Against atheists the very savages take part with the very subtlest philosophers," which is perfectly true. To the dog "man is instead 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 themselves, they become in the end themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy 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 advice 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, pensées. 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 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 endowment 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 escape 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 conspirators who used them.

"Poesy," he says, "was ever thought to have some anticipation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things." He conceived that there was a mystic meaning, a record 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 biography. 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, and the encyclopædic organization of knowledge. This work he never completed; the "Novum Organum" (1620), written in Latin, is the most important fragment. 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 brilliant 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 disenchanted by the results, as regards human happiness, of the discoveries 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 instances," a method always, in accordance with human eagerness, too much neglected.[1]

Bacon's mind, in fact, was encyclopædic, and shared the faults common to encyclopædias. 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, 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 unlike 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 Bensalem, 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 miraculous 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. 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 industrious, in fact are a sort of scientific Phæacians; "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" (on Elizabeth) to tracts on practical points; accounts of voyages and of South America, and the gigantic" History of the World," give proof of extraordinary 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 exploration (1595) of Guiana, with a description of "the great and golden City of Manoa,"--a mirage.

On the death of Elizabeth, James I, on grounds of not unnatural if baseless suspicion, imprisoned Raleigh in the Tower, where he was well treated 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 expedition 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 before 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 and 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, Oxford, 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 dissuaded 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 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 in its infancy. Overbury died on 15 September, 1613. His death provoked many elegies and gave popularity to his 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, provokes 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 of 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!"

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, Spanish, and Italian learning, thought, and poetry was rapidly and strenuously conveyed into English, sometimes rough and ready, and rich in flowers of slang, sometimes replete with elegance and vigour. The translators certainly produced 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 Nicolls 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 his 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 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 translators 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, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the comic Aristophanes, were left untranslated; probably because 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 Wylkinson 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 Shakespeare read Montaigne's Essays. It is hardly necessary to name Richard Stanyhurst's "Four Books of Virgil's 'Æneid'" (1582) written in hideous English hexameters; and Thomas Phaer's Virgil, in "fourteeners" like Chapman'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 Cæsar'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 impossible 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.

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 (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester under James I; James Ussher, Archbishop 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.

[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, infers 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.

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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 Shakespeare 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 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; his 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 Magdalen 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 experienced 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

from the sea into the ship we turn, Like parboiled wretches, on the coals 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 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 circulated 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 admiration 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 talk 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.

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 1601, 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 1601 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or "Metempsychosis," the adventures of a soul "placed in most shapes,"[1] for example, in that fabulous and mortuary weed, a mandrake, 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 inquire about Mrs. Donne, is certainly untrue.

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 1611, "The Second Anniversary" was written in 1612. 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 represented". 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 in her cheeks,

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 moment 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, 1617, 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 "spi_rit._". 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 favourable on his successors; happily it did not affect Lovelace and Herrick.

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 contempt, 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 (15571592). 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 languages. 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 born 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 an 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 (1574-1627), 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 with 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," 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 persevering poet. Though his name was hardly known to modern readers till of recent years, because his lyrics were mainly published 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 1591: his Latin poems are of 1595. In 1601 appeared his first "Booke of Ayres," the music by himself and his friend Philip Rosseter. In 1602 he put forth "Observations 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. Nothing 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 I and spare not! Since she proves strange, I care not!

Kind are her 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 1631) 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 earliest work, "The Harmony of the Church" (1591), contains rhymed paraphrases of Biblical songs and prayers. Drayton, like Milton, addresses the Heavenly Muse, 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 drownèd 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 republished 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 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 excellence.

Following Daniel's "Complaint of Rosamond," Drayton versified the stories of Piers Gaveston, Matilda, daughter of Lord Robert Fitzwater, Robert Duke of Normandy, 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 Heroical 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 occurred in their valleys, are celebrated. The first thirteen books were published in 1612-1613. Drayton's best Muse is the patriotic. He was not encouraged by the reception of the book (reprinted with twelve new songs in 1622), and unhappily he stopped at the Cumberland 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 troutful Mimram, which he calls the Mimer. Had Drayton spoken more particularly of the streams, and been less copious in endeavours "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" (1627) 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 described,

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 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, but not in the Poets' Corner.

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 Imprese," in 1585. He was patronized by "Sidney's sister, Pembroke'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 1592-1594, 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 prosecute the tenor of my woes": there is abundance of moral but very little of music in Rosamond's "Complaint".

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!

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 became 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 fighting 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 Maid, 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 industrious 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.

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 société none of that age are more admirable.

Davies returned to the Temple, rose in his profession, sat in the House of Commons, was admired by James VI for his poetry, was knighted, and in 1606 became Attorney-General in Ireland. In 1612 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 defence of the cause of an Irish Parliament for Ireland, in 1626.

Giles and Phineas Fletcher.

Drayton and Daniel were not influenced by their great forerunner 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 "Lida," one of the many collections 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' in_dust_rious sky,

is typical of late Elizabethan mannerism. "Heaves" is used to rhyme 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 trembling in the balance, Mercy "smooths the wrinkles of the Fathers brow," and Justice, observing this with displeasure (it is like a Homeric quarrel of Athene and Aphrodite!), 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, 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! 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 consciences, feet swift to blood,"--and all this when Jesuit missionaries 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 dialogue is partly in rhymed heroic couplets of much fluency and partly in prose; the play is of a happier date (1614) than "The Apollyonists," 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.

"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 1613 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 dialogues between long-winded shepherds, in a variety of metres. The popular tale of the father's bequests, the ring, cloth, and brooch of magical qualities, 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 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 laughing-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.

[1] Was Donne copying a poem by Empedocles?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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 educated 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 1621, 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, pathological, 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 encyclopædia 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 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. Heinselius, 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 armholes," 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. Burton admires "false flies," he does not appear to have used them much. But he is always wise, so much so that he steals the contemplative man's consolation (when his creel is empty) without acknowledgment, from the charming passage in the "treatise pertaining 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 laborious 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 Mormeluches, 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: "Pennyroyal, 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! Ye that are happy, Beware!

ends Burton.

Burton's style is admirable, if we do not weary of very long sentences, weighted with a dozen references to his queer authorities. 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 1764). 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 pursued 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 not orthodox, his "De Veritate," and "Religio Laici," 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 himself 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, 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 criticized 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 scribblers 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 defamed, 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 unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us, more of these 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!" 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 exquisiteness 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, as 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 superstitious, is even more entertaining and much more carefully and artfully written than "The Anatomy of Melancholy". He consciously aims at harmony and balance of style, and at selecting the right word (le mot propre), 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 delivered itself. He is engaged, like the scholar in Lytton's novel "The Caxtons," on a "History of Human Error," and with his humour, sympathy, learning, and irony, he makes a most entertaining 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!

To know Browne's works is no small part of a liberal education. 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 government, that it cannot easily be criticized without controversial interruptions, 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 reformation really been more successful, for the preachers claimed at least all the powers of the priests over the liberties of the subject.

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 ceremonies" the Church styled "decency"; Henry VIII "stuck where he did". Under Edward VI, if his sister Mary were not to be persecuted most righteously, who were the slaves that interfered to secure for her liberty of conscience? Who but Bishops! Bishops were therefore "followers of this world," they always were and always will be. You reply that they, 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 Confutation," and Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus ensued. The adversary 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 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 defend, 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 Presbyterians, 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 delightful 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 prohibit 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 famous sentence "I cannot praise a fugitive and 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 Salmasius'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 "Eikonoklastes," his reply to "Eikon Basilike," attributed to Charles, really, as is believed, 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 Durham 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 devotional 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 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 journal the occurrence 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 generations; but by Cain's line there were but eight, so that Cain's posterity 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 grandchild, 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.

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 instructive his divine works may be, he often raises a smile which he never dreamed of provoking. Other times, other tastes!

Jeremy Taylor was born under James VI and I, was the son of a barber in Cambridge, and was baptized on 15 August, 1613. 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 defended Episcopacy ("Of the Sacred Order of Episcopacy"). In February, 1645, he was captured in a Royalist defeat, but was protected 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 Parliament in 1645). 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 covenanters. The frenzy of armed religious 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 providence 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 makes 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 1651 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 displeasure 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, 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 conscience, 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 Reformation, 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 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 educated at Westminster and Christ Church) lived till 1716. 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. Chillingworth, 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 Nonconformists, 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 (1614-1687), 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, his manner is quaint and his matter is full of learning from all quarters. Though a Royalist and in orders, during the Civil War, he was not an extremist; 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 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, the son 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 translation 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, while the task of rendering into idiomatic English a writer so condensed 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 possible 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 University, replied with scientific precision, and such banter as mathematicians 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 behaved in an orthodox manner. To the witness, Dr. Cosin, later Bishop of Durham, he always referred when his orthodoxy was doubted. When Charles I had been slain, in 1649, Hobbes, who in 1650 had published his "Human Nature," the briefest Statement 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!") 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 designed to keep men in order. In politics he believes in an imaginary 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 autobiography in Latin verse, and was still writing 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 provideth for every man, by victory or death." The idea is that expressed 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 translation 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 London 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 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 Derbyshire. The brief biographies by Walton of Donne, Wotton, Herbert, 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 pastoral 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 almost 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 spurns like £1000, more or less, when they come into the market. The masterpieces of both are constantly being republished, and though perhaps few people have a fairly good knowledge of the contents of "The Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Compleat Angler," yet most people have had these 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 humour, each was a keen observer of Nature and of human nature, each was a lover of 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 Sip 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 writing; 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 made Whigs o'". Far from that, a native genius for expression first declared itself in his being "the ungodliest fellow for swearing"--which was not 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 autobiography; 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 and 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 nightmares that 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 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 Scudéry. 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 cannot 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.

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 Parliament when the strife between the King and the Parliament began, and took part in preparing the indictment against the great Strafford. 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 II 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 partisanship and bias: in fact no historians are exempt from prejudice.

Clarendon's history was, in the making, somewhat of a patchwork. 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 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 Cromwell[1] and Argyll. His "characters" 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 words, "the genius, spirit, and soul of an historian," combined with knowledge of great affairs, important personages, and intrigues 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 "Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ," 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 (1633-1703), 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 (née Blague), to whom Evelyn was virtuously devoted.

Roger North (1653-1733), is admirably readable, and very modern 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.

[1] To him he attributes a coarse pun which might seem more familiar in the mouth of James I.

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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 (1) 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 1644: 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 became a Catholic. In 1646 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; another edition, with an interesting preface concerning his saintly life at Cambridge, is of 1648-1649.

Pope, at the age of 22, criticized Crashaw with much superiority; "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 Flaming Heart,"

Singing still he soars and soaring ever singeth.

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 Hildebrand 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 instrument, 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 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 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 (1638) 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 another friend he speaks of wearing 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 matchless 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 1650-1655. He professedly follows George Herbert, being "the least of his many pious converts". Direct imitations of 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!

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 everywhere:--

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 recaptures 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.

Herrick.

Robert Herrick, son of a prosperous goldsmith of a Leicestershire 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 1613 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 Jonson, 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 1647; 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 Prior, 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 country life, they smell April and 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,"

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 pledges of a fruitful tree, Why do ye fall so fast?)

and so on; every reader culls and chooses for himself, and cannot 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.

The Child of his "Ode on 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 doctor 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.

Carew.

Thomas Carew was one of the famous Carews or Careys of the West: his family was settled in Gloucestershire. He was probably 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 have been at Corpus, Oxford, where he took no degree; he was Sewer (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.

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 contemporaries 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 perhaps 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 Dry den 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 1618, 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 expedition of Charles I to Scotland, in 1639; and 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 £40,000 (?) not to leave the Parliamentary lines.

He and his brothers were devoted to each other, as appears 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 1648, Richard returned to England, and, with Dudley, was taken and imprisoned.

In 1649 be 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 Althæa, from Prison," "To Lucasta, 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.

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 dispirited, 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 certainty, 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 1745. 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 successes 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?

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 prenuptial 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 (1611-1643) 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,

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. Davenant's father was landlord of the Crown 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 1641 was accused of being engaged in a Cavalier enterprise, escaped to France, returned, 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 dedicated, with Davenant's ideas on the Art of Poetry, to Thomas 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 combination 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 ambition. 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 Molière was rising, came 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 Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone,

Cowley does not seem very inspiring! But Dr. Johnson held that Cowley "was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less," while "he left such specimens of excellence" in versification "as enabled 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 this was little 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 "Æneid". 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 succeeded in getting £10,000 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 seventeenth century Sir Edward Sherburne, Thomas Stanley his kinsman, Alexander Browne, and Charles Cotton, whose birth and death dates range from 1618 to 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 approach excellence; Cotton celebrated Chloris with little inspiration, 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 "Æneid".

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 instrument 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 excellent as that of Davies in his "Nosce te Ipsum" or of Fairfax in 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 congratulates 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 anthology.

While he lived, and he lived to be 81, 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 coexisted, as usually happens, a more strenuous and violent conspiracy 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 conjectured; 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, "succeed better in fiction than in truth." The treacherous politician was forgiven on every side, the witty poet was welcome in Parliament 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 because 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 Lovelace and Suckling and Carew; as represented by his heroic couplets 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 has, in addition 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 which they do not abound. He has none of the stains of the tavern.

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 Continent. 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 his most charming poems of country life and innocent 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 recommended 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 appreciate 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 Parliament as Member for Hull: in 1663-1665 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 inclined. 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 for her Fawn"; "The Garden," which has much of the merit of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il 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 determined 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 addition 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

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 subject 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 Redemption.

"L'Allegro" and "Il 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 rebecks" of the lads and lasses.

In 1634 Milton produced a masque, the one great and enduring 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; 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 dismisses 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 him: 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 man he was in 1634. Sanity, order, form, absence of vain conceit and ingenious antithesis were as natural to Milton as they were unknown to Donne and the Fletchers.

Milton's next great poem, "Lycidas," was composed shortly before 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 shepherds 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 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! 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 slaying 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.

Overplied, In Liberty's defence, my glorious task.

But there was no liberty left for Anglicans, Catholics, or Presbyterians 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 Æschylus; with Euripides he does not pair. He has the greatest of stages, the universe, 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 mythology of the Kaitish, a savage tribe of Central Australia. There too the great self-created Atnatu of the highest heaven hurls his disobedient 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. 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 mysterious 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 himself 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, Dagon, Osiris, Isis, Horns, "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 Achæan "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 himself the whole thought and experience, and the poetic expression of a world that lies behind him. 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 company of Comus was maddest, and, when Milton died, Dryden, the literary dictator, gave due praise to the greatest of literary epics, the loftiest, the most splendidly adorned; and poets of the eighteenth 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 earth and the glory of them, the triumph of the pure spirit over carnal joys; nay the haunting memories of old romance,

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 1612, he was educated at the school of Worcester, but could not afford to proceed to either 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 Independent Squire, Ralph, is the wildest caricature of a type, not of an individual, and the adventures of the pair are merely burlesque. 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 Marriot, though they may have been little to the taste of the pacific author of "The Compleat Angler".

Butler 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. The whole poem has rather less of a constructed plot than "Tristram Shandy"; and the strange rhymes--as of flambeau to "damn'd blow"--tickled the merry Cavaliers more than they amuse later generations. What is "topical" in "Hudibras" is, of course, transitory, but much of permanent and brilliant wit remains 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 "heroic" tragedies of the Restoration.

[1] All five wrote dramas, but none was a professional playwright.

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