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A MANUAL

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE

AND OF THE HISTORY OF

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

2EXit!) Jlumcrcus Specimens,

BY

GEORGE L. CEAIK, LL.LX,

LATK PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IB
QfEBN'8 COLLEGE, BELTAS1.

NINTH EDITION,
WITH AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER ON RECENT LITERATURE,

BY HENRY CRAIK, M.A.,

AU1HOK OF "LIFE OF bWIFT."

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PREFACE TO THE NINTH EDITION.

IN preparing a new Edition of this work for the press, the
Publishers deemecj that its usefulness might be increased by
an additional chapter, dealing more fully with the Prose
Literature of the earlier part of the century, and with the
different phases of our Literature from the beginning of the
Victorian age. In former editions these were very shortly
summarized.

While no change has been made in the 6ther parts of the
book, the sections following p. 511 are, therefore, either
altogether new, or have been so much re-cast that only a few
sentences of the former summary are retained.

The difficulties in the way of reducing any sketch of
Contemporary Literature to the proportions of a Manual are
sufficiently obvious. It is in regard to this literature that
the individual taste of each reader tells most powerfully on
his judgment: and yet any decided expression of opinion
on questions which are still matters of controversy must
necessarily be out of place. It has been thought that the
purpose of the book would best be served by rigidly avoiding
disputed points of criticism, and dwelling only upon those
features of recent literature, the impression of which is most
distinct, and may, with some confidence, be expected to be
most permanent.

The Series of Test-Questions, appended at the request of
the Publishers, will, it is hoped, prove of service to Students,
especially to such as are studying alone.

April, 1833. H. C.

ADVEETISEMENT.

THE present volume consists of so much of a larger work
recently published on the same subject as seemed sufficient to
make a convenient and comprehensive text-book for schools and
colleges, and to supply all the information needed by students
in preparing themselves for the Civil Service and other com-
petitive examinations. The concluding section is nearly all that
has been added.

The reader will do well to keep in mind, or under his eye,
the four following Schemes, or Synoptical Views, according to
which the history of the English Language in its entire extent
may be methodized : —

I.

1. Original, Pure, Simple, or First English (commonly called

Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon) ; Synthetic, or Inflectional, in its
Grammar, and Homogeneous in its Vocabulary ;

2. Broken, or Second English (commonly called Semi-Saxon),

— from soon after the middle of the eleventh century to about
the middle of the thirteenth — when its ancient Grammatical
System had been destroyed, and it had been converted from
an Inflectional into a Non-Inflectional and Analytic lan-
guage, by the first action upon it of the Norman Conquest ;

3. Mixed, or Compound, or Composite, or Third English, — since

the middle of the thirteenth century — about which date its
Vocabulary also began to be changed by the combination of
its original Gothic with a French (Bomance or Neo-Latin)
element, under the second action upon it of the Nonnaa
Conquest.

( vi )

II.

1. The Original form, in which, the three vowel -endings a, e, and

u are employed in the declension of nouns and the conju-
gation of verbs ;

2. The Second form, in which the single termination e repre-

sents indiscriminately the three ancient vowel-endings, but
still constitutes a distinct syllable ;

3. The Third form, in which this termination e of nouns and

Terbs, though still written, is no longer oyllabically pro-
nounced.

III.

1. Saxony or Anglo-Saxon ; throughout the period before the Nor-

man Conquest;

2. Semi-Saxon; from about the niiddle of the eleventh to the

middle of the thirteenth century; the period of the Infancy
and Childhood of our existing national speech ;

3. Old, or rather Early, English ; from the middle of the thirteenth

to the middle of the fourteenth century ; the period of the
Boyhood of our existing speech ;

4. Middle English ; from the middle of the fourteenth to tho

middle of the sixteenth century ; the Youth, or Adolescence
of our existing speech ;

5. Modern English ; since the middle of the sixteenth century ;

the Manhood of our existing speech.

IV.
A.n.

450. Commencement of the conquest and occupation of South
Britain by the Angles and Saxons, bringing with them
their ancestral Gothic speech ;

10C6. Conquest of England by the Normans ; Establishment of
French as the courtly and literary language of the coun-
try ; Commencement of the reduction of the ancient ver-
nacular tongue to the condition of a patois, and of its
conversion from a synthetic to an analytic tongue ;

1154 End of the reign of the four Norman kings and accession
of the Plantagenet dynasty ; Beginning of the connexion
with Southern France through the marriage of Henry II.
with Eleanor of Poitou ; Termination of the National
Chronicle, the latest considerable composition in the
regular form of the ancient language ; Full commencement
of the intermixture of the two races ;

I0?1'. New age of the Edwards; Commencement of the con-
nexion of the English royal family with that of France
by the second marriage of Edward I. with a daughter of
Philip III. ; Employment, at first occasionally, afterwards
habitually, of French instead of Latin as the language
of the Statutes ; Commencement of its active intermixture
with the vernacular tongue ;

r viii )

1362 Trials at law in the King's Courts directed by the statute
of 36 Edward III. to be conducted no longer in French
but in English ; Victory of the native tongue in its new
composite form over its foreign rival, and recovery of its
old position as the literary language of the country, under
the impulse of the war with France, and of the genius of
Minot, Langland, and Chaucer ;

1455. Outbreak of the desolating War of the Eoses, and complete
extinction for a time of the light of literature in England ;

1558. Accession of Elizabeth; Commencement of a new literary
era, with the native language in sole dominion ;

1660. Restoration of the Stuarts; Noonday of the Gallican age
of English literature ;

1760. Accession of George III.; Complete association in tho
national literature of Scottish and Irish writers with those
of England.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY

The Languages of Modem Europe 1

Early Latin Literature in Britain ..... 3

The Celtic Languages and Literatures

Decay of the Earliest English Scholarship . ... 13

The English Language 13

Original English (commonly called Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon) 20

The Norman Conquest 24

Arabic and other New Learning .... 29
Schools and Universities ....

Rise of the Scholastic Philosophy \ 39

Classical Learning ; Mathematics; Medicine; Law; Books 41

The Latin Language

Latin Chroniclers ....

The French Language in England ....

The Langue D'Oc and the Lan.^ue D Oyl .

Vernacular Language and Literature :— A.D. 1066—1216 .

The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries :— Ascendancy of the

Scholastic Philosophy 67

Mathematical and other Studies . 59

Universities and Colleges 73

Cultivation and Employment of the Learned Tongues in the

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries . . • 7-

Last Age of the French Language in England . . 79

Re-emergence of the English as a Literary Tongue . 82

Second English (commonly called Semi-tiaxon) . 85

The Brut of Layamon ...... 89

The Ormulum . . ;

The Ancren Riwle . '. . . ". [ 99

Early English Metrical Romances . 102

Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester 104

Robert Mannyng, or De Brunne . . 105

Lawrence Minot log

Alhterati ve Verse :— Piers Ploughman 1 1 o

Piers Ploughman's Creed •.' 113

46
47
48
53
56

£ CONTEXTS.

I'AOS

THIRD ENGLISH (Mixed or Compound English) . . .121

Geoffrey Chaucer

JohnGower {?£

JohnBarbour ,r • . • _ • . • i5'

Compound English Prose: — Sir John Mandevil ; Trevisa;

Wiclif; Chaucer ........ 164

Printing in England :— Cazton . • • 1 J/

English Chroniclers 1™

Bishop Pecock ; Fortescue ; Malory *«

English Poets :— Occleve ; Lydgate . . . . . . 174

Scottish Poets :— Wynton ; James I. ; Hemyson ; Holland ;

Blind Harry .176

Prose Writers :— More ; Elyot ; Tyndal ; Cranmer ; Latimer . 183

Scottish Prose Writers 190

English Poets :— Hawes ; Barklay 191

Skelton 192

Koy ; John Heywood 194

Scottish Poets :— Gawin Douglas ; Dunbar ; Lyndsay . .195

Surrey ; Wyatt 196

The Elizabethan Literature

The Mirror for Maistrates . .... 198

Origin of the Regular Drama
Interludes of John Heywood
UdalTs Ralph Roister Doister
Gammer Gurton's Needle .
Misogonus

200
202
203
205
206

Chronicle Histories : — Bale's Kynge Johan, etc. . . . 207

Tragedy of Gorboduc :— Blank Veree ..... 208

Other Early Dramas .... ..... 211

Second Stage of the Regular Drama :— Peele ; Greene . .212

Marlow ........... 214

Lyly; Kyd; Lodge ......... 215

Earlier Elizabethan Prose : — Lyly ; Sidney ; Spenser ; Nash ; etc. 21 9

Edmund Spenser ......... 224

Other Elizabethan Poetry ........ 237

William Warner ...... . , .238

Samuel Daniel .'•'.... . 242

Michael Drayton ......... 246

Joseph Hall ........ . 249

Joshua Sylvester ...... . 249

Chapman's Homer ...... 251

Harington ; Fairfax ; Fanshawe ...... 252

William Drummond ......... 553

Sir John Davies ..... 253

John Donne ..... '. 25 4

Shakespeare's Minor Pooms . . . ! 25 7

Shakespeare's Dramatic Works . 258

CONTENTS. XI
THIRD ENGLISH— continued.

MM

Dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare .... 265

Beaumont and Fletcher 266

Jonson 270

Massinger; Ford 271

Later Elizabethan Prose Writers 2/2

Translation of the Bible .273

Theological Writers :— Bishop Andrews ; Donne ; Hall ; Hooker 274

Francis Bacon 275

Robert Burton 277

Historical Writers » 278

MIDDLE AND LATTER PART OF THE SEVENTEENTH

CENTURY 280

Shirley, and end of the Old Drama 280

Giles Fletcher ; Phineas Fletcher

Other Religious Poets : — Quarles ; Herbert ; Herrick ; Craahaw . 283

Cartwright; Randolph; Corbet 284

Poets of the French School :— Carew ; Lovelace ; Suckling . . 286

Denham .....•••••• 28£

Cleveland . . . . T 289

Wither • • 290

William Browne

Prose Writers :— Charles I

Milton's Prose Works 299

Hales; Chillingworth

Jeremy Taylor 302

Fuller 303

Sir Thomas Browne 306

Sir James Harrington 308

Newspapers 30'

Retrospect of the Commonwealth Literature ....

Poetry of Milton 312

Cowley 321

Butle/ 323

Waller 323

Marvel -325

Other Minor Poets

Dryden 328

Dramatists

Prose Writers :— Clarendon 333

Hobbes

Henry Nevile 33(

Other Prose Writers :— Cud worth ; More ; Barrow ; Bunyan ; &c. 337

CONTENTS.

TAG*

THE CENTURY BETWEEN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION . . .. . 341

First Effects of the Revolution on our Literature . . . . 341

Surviving Writers of the preceding Period . . 342

Bishop Burnet ^

Thomas Burnet 34b

Other Theological Writers :—Tillotson ; South . . . .346

T rvlrA • • • • 348

•».•:•:.: »g

Pope 353

Addison and Steele 357

Shaftesbury; Mandeville 359

Gay; Arbuthnot; Atterbury 362

Prior; Parnell 363

Bolingbroke 364

Garth; Blackmore 365

Defoe 366

Dramatic Writers 369

Minor Poets .370

Collins ; Shenstone ; Gray . . ' 376

Young; Thomson 377

Armstrong; Akenside; Wilkie; Glover 379

Scottish Poetry 380

The Novelists Richardson; Fielding; Smollett . . . .382

Sterne . . .v . . 387

Goldsmith 388

Churchill 392

Falconer ; Beattie ; Mason 393

The Wartons ; Percy ; Chatterton ; Macpherson .... 394

Dramatic Writers 396

Female Writers . 397

Periodical Essayists 398

Political Writing:— Wilkes; Juniug . . . . .401

Johnson 401

Burke '. . 408

Metaphysical and Ethical Writers 421

Historical Writers :— Hume ; Robertson ; Gibbon . . . 422

Political Economy ; Theology ; Criticism and Belles Lettres . 426

THE LATTER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 427

Cowper . * . . . 427

Darwin 437

Burns .... ... 440

CONTEXTS. xiii

PAGE

THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY 457

POETICAL LITERATURE.

Last Age of the Georges. — Wordsworth 459

Coleridge 474

Southey 481

Scott 482

Crabbe; Campbell; Moore 488

I'.yroQ 49G

Shdley 497

K< atS 501

Hunt 505

Other Poetical Writers of the earlier part of the Nineteenth Century 510

PROSE LITERATURE.

Scott, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth 611

Philosophy and Political Economy 516

Historians: Henry Hallam 518

Biographers: Lock hart and others . • . . . .519

Essayists: Charles Lamb and others 52 1

Criticism, Theology, and Science 522

THE VICTORIAN AGE.

POETICAL LITERATURE.

Tennyson 525

Mrs. Browning 629

Robert Browning 629

Dobell and Alexander Smith 632

Arnold, Morris, Swinburne, and other Poetical Writers . .634

PROSE LITERATURE.

Lytton and Beaconsfield 535

Thackeray and Dickens 536

Charlotte Bronte* and George Eliot 538

Historians : Macaulay, Grote, Merivale, and others . • . 540

Biographers: G. H. Lewes and others 541

Thomas Carlyle 643

Philosophy : J. 8. Mill, Spencer, and others . . . .644

Science: Darwin and others 546

Essayists: De Quincey, Ruskin, and others 547

Classical Literature and Theology 549

APPENDIX.

Questions and Subjects for Essays in English Literature . . 653

INDEX 557

SPECIMENS,

Song of Canute 87

Archbishop Aldred's Curse

St. Godric's Hymn 87

Sister's Khyme 88

Hymn to St. Nicholas 88

Rhyme of Flemings and Normans (1173) ..... 88

Hugh Bigott's Boast 88

The Here Prophecy 88

Layamon's Brut : — Part of Introduction

The Ormulum : — Part of Dedication 96

n „ Injunction as to Spelling 98

The Ancren Riwle : — Eating and Fasting 101

Kobert of Gloucester's Chronicle : — French Language in England . 105
Minot ; First Invasion of France by Edward III. . . .108

Vision of Piers Ploughman : — Commencement . . . .113
Piers Ploughman's Creed : — Description of Piers . . . .118
Chaucer :— House of Fame ; Eagle's Address to Chaucer . . . 138
„ „ „ Notice of Fire-arms .... 140

„ „ „ Old Mechanical Artillery . . .141

„ Canterbury Tales ; The Prioress (from the Prologue) . 142
The Mendicant Friar (from the Prologue) 143
Emily (from the Knight's Tale) . . 145
Temple of Mars (from the Knight's Tale) 146
Passages relating to the Host . . 148
Part of the Clerk's Tale of Griselda . 153

Barbour : — The Bruce ; Eulogy on Freedom 162

Mandevil : — Travels ; part of Prologue 164

Chaucer (Prose) : — Canterbury Tales ; Pride in Dress, etc. . . 166
Bishop Pecock : — Represser ; Midsummer Eve . . . .170
Fortescue : — Difference, etc. ; French King and People . . .171
Malory : — Morte Arthur ; Death of Lancelot . . . . . 173

Wyntoun: — Chronicle *. 177

Blind Harry: — Wallace ; his Latin Original . .* .' * .' igl

„ „ „ The same subject 181

„ „ „ Commencement of the Poem 181

L'Envoy

Sir Thomas More :— Letter to his Wife .
Udall :— Ralph Roister Doister ....
Spenser : — Fairy Queen ; Belphoebe
Warner : — Albion's England ; Old Man and hig Ass

Fall of Richard the Third

Fair Rosamund and Queen Eleanor

SPECIMENS. if

MM

Blind Harry :— Wallace ; Tart of Battle of Short woodah aw 182

183
185
204
234
241
241
242

Daniel : — Musophilus ; Defence of Poetry 244

Drayton :— Polyolbion ; Stag-hunt 246

„ Nymphidia ; Queen of tho Fairies 248

Sylvester :— Divine Weeks and Worka ; Praise of Night . . .250

Donne: — Song 256

Cleveland :— Epitaph on Ben Jonson 290

„ Eulogy on Jonson 29C

Wither :— Amygdala Britannica ; Prophecy ;f . . . .293

„ Songs and Hymns ; Thanksgiving for Seasonable Weather 295

„ „ ,, Thanksgiving for Victory . . 296

Fuller : — Worthies ; Shakespeare and Ben Jonson .... 304

„ „ Philemon Holland 304

Milton: — College Exercise ; His Native Language . . . .313

Waller:— His Last Verses 324

Marvel :— The Picture of T. C 326

Mandeville : — Fable of the Bees ; Anticipation of Adam Smith . 360

Burke : — S{>eech on Nabob of Arcot ; Devastation of the Carnatic . 414

„ Reflections on French Revolution ; Hereditary Principle . 415

„ Letter to Mr. Elliot ; True Reform . . . .417

„ Letters on a Regicide Peace ; Right Way of making War . 419

Cowper:— Table Talk; National Vice 432

„ Truth; Voltaire 433

„ Conversation ; Meeting on the Road to Emmaus . . 433

„ Lines on his Mother's Picture 434

Darwin :— Botanic Garden ; « Flowers of the Sky * . . . . 43t

TheCompast 439

Bums :— To a Mouse 443

„ To a Mountain Daisy 444

„ Epistle to a Young Friend 446

The Vision (part) 449

Highland Mary 453

„ Verses from various Songs 458

Wordsworth : — The Fountain, a Conversation .... 463

„ The Affliction of Margaret 465

„ "Her Eyes are wild * 467

Laodamia 469

Coleridge:— "Maid of my Love" 475

„ Time, Real and Imaginary 476

„ Work without Hope 477

Youth and Age 477

„ "Yes, yes! that boon!" 479

xvi SPECIMENS.

PAGE

Coleridge: — Love, Hope, and Patience, in Education . . .480

Scott: — Marmion; The Battle (part) 484

Campbell: — Adel^itha 491

„ Theodoric; Letter of Constance 491

Crabbe : — Tales of the Hall; Story of the Elder Brother (part) . 492

Moore: LallahKookh; Calm after Storm 495

Shelley: — Ode to a Skylark 499

Keats : — Ode to a Nightingale ....... 503

Hunt : — The Sultan Mahmoud . . 505

„ The Fancy Concert . ^. 507

Tennyson : (Enone — The Lament 526

„ „ Address of Pallas . . . . . 527

„ Ulysses — Soliloquy 527

R. Browning : — The Lost Leader . . . . 530

„ The Grammarian's Funeral (part) .... 530

„ Piabbi Ben Ezra (part) . • • . 531

MANUAL OF THE HISTOKY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

THE LANGUAGES OF MODERN EUROPE.

THE existing European languages may be nearly all compre-
hended under five divisions. First, there are the Celtic tongues
of Ireland and Wales, and their subordinate varieties. Secondly,
there are the tongues founded upon the Latin spoken by the
old Romans, and thence called the Romance or the Neo-Latin,
that is, the New Latin, tongues; of these, the principal are
the Italian, the Spanish, and the French. The Romaic, or
Modern Greek, may be included under the same head. Thirdly,
there are what have been variously designated the Germanic,
Teutonic, or Gothic tongues, being those which were originally
spoken by the various barbarian races by whom the Roman
empire of the West was overthrown and overwhelmed (or at the
least subjugated, revolutionized, and broken up) in the fifth and
sixth centuries. Fourthly, there are the Slavonic tongues, of
which the Russian and the Polish are the most distinguished.
Fifthly, there are the Tschudic tongues, as they have been deno-
minated, or those spoken by the Finnic and Laponnic races.
Almost the only language which this enumeration leaves out is
that still preserved by the French and Spanish Biscayans, and
known as the Basque, or among those who speak it as the
Euskarian, which seems to stand alone among the tongues not
only of Europe but of the world. It is supposed to be a remnant
of the ancient Iberian or original language of Spain.

The order in which four at least of the five sets or classes of
languages have been named may be regarded as that of their
probable introduction into Europe from Asia or the East, or at
any rate of their establishment in the localities of which they
are now severally in possession. First, apparently, came the
Celtic, now driven on to the farthest west ; after which followed

3 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

in succession the Latin, the Gothic, and the Slavonic, pressing
iinon and urging forward one another like so many waves.

Their present geographical position may also be set forth
in fet words Tghos°e of the Celtic type are found « ; just
mentioned, in the West, the Latin .generally in the South the
Slavonic in the East, the Tschudic in ^^ J^2^
over the whole of the central region. Ihe chief exception is,
that one Tschudic language, theMadgyar, is spoken in Hungary,
at the south-eastern extremity of Europe.

The English is essentially or fundamentally a Gothic tongue.
That is to say, it is to be classed among those which were spoken
by the main division of the barbaric invaders and conquerors of
the Eoman empire, and which are now spread over the whole c
the central portion of the European continent, or what we ma>
call the body of Europe as distinguished from its head and
limbs These Gothic tongues have been subdivided _mto the
High-Germanic, the Low-Germanic, and the Scandinavian ; and
each of these subordinate groups or clusters has a certain
character of its own in addition to the common character by
which they are all allied and discriminated from those belonging
to quite other stocks. They may be said to present different
shades of the same colour. And even in their geographical dis-
tribution they lie as it were in so many successive ridges ;—-tJ
High-Germanic languages farthest south ; next to them, the Low-
Germanic, in the middle ; and then, farthest north, the Scandi-
navian. The High-Germanic may be considered to be principally
represented by the modern classic German; the Low-Germanic
by the language of the people of Holland, or what we call the
Low Dutch, or simply the Dutch; the Scandinavian, by the
Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic.

It may be remarked, too, that the gradation of character
among the three sets of languages corresponds to their geo-
graphical position. That is to say, their resemblance is in pro-
portion to their proximity. Thus, the High-Germanic and the
Scandinavian groups are both nearer in character, as well as in
position, to the Low-Germanic than they are to each other ; and
the Low-Germanic tongues, lying in the middle, form as it were
•A sort of link, or bridge, between the other two extreme groups.
Climate, and the relative elevation of the three regions, may
have something to do with this. The rough and full-mouthed
pronunciation of the High-Germanic tongues, with their broad
vowels and guttural combinations, may be the natural product
of the bracing mountain air of the south ; the clearer and noat^r
articulation of the Low-Germanic ones, that of the milder

EARLY LATIN LITERATURE. 3

influences of the plain ; the thinner and sharper sounds of tho
Scandinavian group, that of the more chill and pinching hyper-
borean atmosphere in which they have grown tip and been

formed.

EARLY LATIN LITERATURE IN BRITAIN".

When the South of Britain became a part of the Roman empire
the inhabitants, at least of the towns, seem to have adopted <rene-
rally the Latin language and applied themselves to the study of
the Latin literature. The diffusion among them of this new taste
was one of the first means employed by their politic conquerors,
as soon as they had fairly established themselves in the island,
to rivet their dominion. A more efficacious they could not have
devised ; and, happily, it was also the best fitted to turn their
subjugation into a blessing to the conquered people. Agricola
having spent the first year of his administration -in establishing
m the province the order and tranquillity which is the first
necessity of the social condition, and the indispensable basis of
all civilization, did not allow another winter to pass without
beginning the work of thus training up the national mind to a
Roman character. Tacitus informs us that he took measures for
having the sons of the chiefs educated in the liberal arts, excit-
ing them at the same time by professing to prefer the natural
genius of the Britons to the studied acquirements of the Gauls ;
the effect of which was, that those who lately I ad disdained to
use the Roman tongue now became ambitious of excelling in
eloquence. In later times, schools were no doubt established
and maintained in all the principal towns of Roman Britain, as
they were throughout the empire in general. There are still
extant many imperial edicts relating to these public seminaries,
m which privileges are conferred upon the teachers, and regula-
tions laid down as to the manner in which they were to be
appointed, the salaries they were to receive, and the branches of
learning they were to teach. But no account of the British
jchools m particular has been preserved. It would appear, how-
ever, that, for some time at least, the older schools of Gaul were
resorted to by the Britons who pursued the study of the law •
Juvenal, who lived in the end of the first and the beginning of
the second century, speaks, in one of his Satires, of eloquent
«Taul instructing the pleaders of Britain. But even already
forensic acquirements must have become very general in tho
latter country and the surrounding regions, if we may place any
reliance on the assertion which ho makes in the next line, tha*

4 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

in Thulo itself people now talked of hiring rhetoricians to manage
their causes. Thule, whatever may have been the particular
island or country to which that name was given, was the most
northern land known to the ancients.

It is somewhat remarkable that, whilo a good many names of
natives of Gaul are recorded in connexion with the last age of
Roman literature, scarcely a British name of that period of any
literary reputation has been preserved, if we except a few which
figure in the history of the Christian Church. The poet Ausonius,
who flourished in the fourth century, makes frequent mention of
a contemporary British writer whom he calls Sylvius Bonus, and
whose native name is supposed to have been Coil the Good ; but
of his works, or even of their titles or subjects, we know nothing.
Ausonius, who seems to have entertained strong prejudices
against the Britons, speaks of Sylvius with the same animosity
as of the rest of his countrymen. Of ecclesiastical writers in Latin
belonging to the sixth century, the heresiarch Pelagius and his
disciple Celestius, St. Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, with his
friend Bishop Secundinus, and the poet Sedulius, are generally
regarded as having been natives of the British islands.

Gildas, our earliest historian of whom anything remains, also
wrote in Latin. St. Gildas the Wise, as he is styled, was a son
of Caw, Prince of Strathclyde, in the capital of which kingdom,
the town of Alcluyd, now Dunbarton, he is supposed to have
been born about the end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth
century. Caw was also father of the famous bard Aneurin :
one theory, indeed, is that Aneurin and Gildas were the same
person. In his youth Gildas is said to have gone over to
Ireland, and to have studied in the schools of the old national
learning that still flourished there; and, like his brother
Aneurin (if Aneurin was his brother), he also commenced his
career as a bard, or composer of poetry in his native tongue.
He was eventually, however, converted to Christianity, and
became a zealous preacher of his new religion. The greater
part of his life appears to have been spent in. his native island ;
but at last he retired to Armorica, or Little Britain, on the Con'
tinent, and died there. He is said to lie buried in the Cathedral
of Vannes. Gildas is the author of two declamatory effusions,
the one commonly known as his History (De Excidio Britan-
niae Liber Querulus), the other as his Epistle (De Excidio
Britannia et Britonum Exulatione), which have been often
printed. The latest edition is that contained in the Monumenta
Historica Bntannica, 1848 ; and there is also an edition prepared
bv Mr. Joseph Stevenson for the English Historical Society

EARLr LATIN LITERATURE. 5

Bvo. London : 1834. A translation of the Epistle was published
in 1638; and both works are included in Dr. Giles's Six Old
English Chronicles, 1848. They consist principally of violent
invectives directed against his own countrymen as well as their
continental invaders and conquerors ; and throw but little light
upon the obscure period to which they relate.

Our next historical writer is Nennius, said to have been a
monk of Bangor, and to have escaped from tho massacre of his
brethren in 613. He too, like Gildas, is held to have been of
Welsh or Cumbrian origin: his native name is conjectured to
have been Ninian. But there is much obscurity and confusion
in the accounts we have of Nennius : it appears to be probable
that there were at least two early historical writers of that name.
The author of a late ingenious work supposes that the true
narrative of the ancient Nennius only came down to the invasion
of Julius Caesar, and is now lost, although we probably have an
abridgment of it in tho British History (Eulogium Britannia,
sive Historia Britonum), published by Gale in his Scriptores
Quindecim, Oxon. 1691, which, however, is expressly stated in
the preface by the author himself to have been drawn up in 858.
A very valuable edition of ' The Historia Britonum, commonly
attributed to Nennius, from a M& lately discovered in the
Library of the Vatican Palace at Rome,' was published in 8vo.
at London, in 1819, by the Rev. W. Gunn, B.D., rector of Instead,
Norfolk ; and his greatly improved text has been chiefly followed
in tho subsequent edition prepared by Mr. Stevenson for the
Historical Society (8vo. London, 1838). The most complete text,
however, is probably that given in the Monumenta Historica
Britannica, from a collation of no fewer than twenty-six manu-
scripts. An English version, originally published by Mr. Gunn
in his edition of the Vatican text, is reprinted by Dr. Giles in his
Six Old English Chronicles. But the most curious and impor-
tant volume connected with Nennius is that published in 1847
by the Irish Archaeological Society, containing an Irish version
of his History executed in the fourteenth century, with a transla-
tion and Notes by Dr. Todd, together with a large mass of Addi-
tional Notes, and an Introduction, by the Hon. Algernon Herbert.

Of the Latin writers among the Angles and Saxons any of
whose works remain, the most ancient is Aldhelm, abbot of
Malmesbury, and afterwards the first bishop of Sherborn, who
died in 709. Aldhelm was of the stock of the kings of Wessex,
and was initiated in Greek and Latin learning at the school in
Kent presided over by the Abbot Adrian, who, like his friend
Archbishop Theodore, appears to have been a native of Asia

C ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Minor, so that Greek was his native tongue. We are assured by
one of his biographers that Aldhelm could write and speak
Greek like a native of Greece. He also early associated him-
self with the monastic brotherhood of Malmesbury, or Meildulfes-
byrig, that is, burgh or town of Meildulf, Maildulf, or Meldun,
an Irish exile, by whom the monastery had been founded about
half a century before the birth of Aldhelm. Among the studies
of Aldhelm's after-life are mentioned the Eoman law, the rules
of Latin prosody, arithmetic, astronomy, and astrology.

But the English name of the times before the Norman Con-
quest that is most distinguished in literature is that of Beda, or
Bede, upon whom the epithet of " The Venerable " has been
justly bestowed by the respect and gratitude of posterity. All
that we have written by Bede is in the Latin language. He was
born some time between the years 672 and 677, at Jarrow, a
village near the mouth of the Tyne, in the county of ^Durham,
and was educated in the neighbouring monastery of Wearmouth
under its successive abbots Benedict and Ceolfrid. He resided
here, as he tells us himself, from the age of seven to that of
twelve, during which time he applied himself with all diligence,
he says, to the meditation of the Scriptures, the observance of
regular discipline, and the daily practice of singing in the church.
" It was always sweet to me," he adds, ** to learn, to teach, and
to write." In his nineteenth year he took deacon's orders, and
in his thirtieth he was ordained priest. From this date till his
death, in 735, he remained in his monastery, giving up his
whole time to study and writing. His principal task was the
composition of his celebrated Ecclesiastical History of England,
which he brought to a close in his fifty-ninth year. It is our
chief original authority for the earlier portion even of the civil
history of the English nation. But Bede also wrote many other
works, among which he has himself enumerated, in the brief
account he gives of his life at the end of his Ecclesiastical
History, Commentaries on most of the books of the Old and
New Testaments and the Apocrypha, two books of Homilies,
a Martyrology, a chronological treatise entitled On the Six
Ages, a book on orthography, a book on the metrical art, and
various other theological and biographical treatises. He like-
wise composed a book of hymns and another of epigrams. Most
of these writings have been preserved, and have been repeatedly
printed. It appears, from an interesting account of Bede's last
hours by his pupil St. Cuthbert, that he was engaged at the
time of his death in translating St. John's Gospel into his
frmgue. Among his last utterances to his affectionate

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. 7

disciples watching around his bed were some recitations in
the English language: "For," says the account, "he was very
learned in our sougs ; and, putting his thoughts into English
verse, he spoke it with compunction."

Another celebrated English churchman of this age was St.
Boniface, originally named \Yinfrith, who was bom in Devon-
shire about the year 680. Boniface is acknowledged as the
Apostle of Germany, in which country he founded various
monasteries, and was greatly instrumental in the diffusion both
of Christianity and of civilization. He eventually became arch-
bishop of Mentz, and was killed in East Friesland by a band of
heathens in 755. Many of his letters to the popes, to the Eng-
lish bishops, to the kings of France, and to the kings of the
various states of his native country, still remain, and are printed
in the collections entitled Bibliothecae Patrum.

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES.

No other branch of what is called the Indo-European family of
languages is of higher interest in certain points of view than the
Celtic. The various known forms of the Celtic are now regarded
as coming under two great divisions, the Gaelic and the Cymric ;
Ireland being the head seat of the Gaelic (which may therefore
also be called Irish), Wales being the head seat of the Cymric
(which accordingly is by the English commonly called Welsh).
Subordinate varieties of the Irish are the Gaelic of Scotland
(often called Erse, or Ersh, that is, Irish), and thr Manks, or
Isle of Man tongue (now fast dying out) : other Cymric dialects
are the Cornish (now extinct as a spoken language), and the
Aimorican, or that still spoken in some parts of Bretagne.

The probability is, that the various races inhabiting the
British islands when they first became known to the civilized
world were mostly, if not all, of Celtic speech. Even in the
parts of the country that were occupied by the Caledonians, the
Picts, and the Belgian colonists, the oldest topographical names,
the surest evidence that we have in all cases, and in this case
almost our only evidence, are all, so far as can be ascertained,
Celtic, either of the Cymric or of the Gaelic form. And then there
are the great standing facts of the existence to this day of a large
Cymric population in South Britain, and of a still larger Gaelic-
speaking population in North Britain and in Ireland. No other
account of these Celtic populations, or at least of the Welsh,
has been attempted to bo given, than that, as their own traditions
and records are unanimous in asserting, they are the remnants

3 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of the races by which the two islands were occupied when they
first attracted the attention of the Eomans about half a century
before the commencement of the Christian era.

And both the Welsh and the Irish possess a Jarge mass of
literature in their native tongues, much of which has been
printed, in great part no doubt of comparatively modern pro-
duction, but claiming some of it, in its substance if not exactly
in the very form in which it now presents itself, an antiquity
transcending any other native literature of which the country
can boast.

Neither the Welsh nor the Irish language and literature, how-
ever, can with any propriety be included in a history of English
literature and of the English language. The relationship of
English to any Celtic tongue is more remote than its relation-
ship not only to German or Icelandic or French or Italian or
Latin, but even to Eussian or Polish, or to Persian or Sanscrit.
Irish and Welsh are opposed in their entire genius and structure
to English. It has indeed been sometimes asserted that the
Welsh is one of the fountains of the English. One school of
last-century philologists maintained that full a third of our
existing English was Welsh. No doubt, in the course of the
fourteen centuries that the two languages have been spoken
alongside of each other in the same country, a considerable
number of vocables can hardly fail to have been borrowed by
each from the other ; the same thing would have happened if it
had been a dialect of Chinese that had maintained itself all that
time among the Welsh mountains. If, too, as is probable, a
portion of the previous Celtic population chose or were suiferecl
to remain even upon that part of the soil which came to be
generally occupied after the departure of the Eomans by the
Angles, Saxons, and other Teutonic or Gothic tribes, the im-
porters of the English language and founders of the English
nation, something of Celtic may in that way have intermingled
and grown up with the new national speech. But the English
language cannot therefore be regarded as of Celtic parentage.
The Celtic words, or words of Celtic extraction, that are found
in it, be they some hundreds in number, or be they one or two
thousands, are still only something foreign. They arfe products
of another seed that have shot up here and there with the proper
crop from the imperfectly cleared soil ; or they are fragments of
another mass which have chanced to come in contact with the
body of the language, pressed upon by its weight, or blown upon
it by the wind, and so have adhered to it or become imbedded in
it It would perhaps be going farther than known facts warrant

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. 9

us if we were to say that a Gothic tongue and a Celtic tongue aro
incapable of a true amalgamation. But undoubtedly it would
require no common pressure to overcome so strong an opposition
of nature and genius. The Gothic tongues, and the Latin or
Romance tongues also, indeed, belong to distinct branches of what
is called the Indo-European family; but the Celtic branch,
though admitted to be of the same tree, has much more of a
character of its own than any of the others. Probably any other
two languages of the entire multitude held to be of this general
stock would unite more readily than two of which only one was
Celtic. It would be nearly the same case with that of the inter-
mixture of an Indo-European with a Semitic language. It has
been suggested that the Celtic branch must in all probability
have diverged from the common stem at a much earlier date
than any of the others. At any rate, in point of fact the
English can at most be said to have been powdered or sprinkled
•with a little Celtic. Whatever may be the number of words
which it has adopted, whether from the ancient Britons or from
their descendants the Welsh, they are only single scattered
words. No considerable department of the English dictionary
i- Welsh. No stream of words has flowed into the language
from that source. The two languages have in no sense met and
become one. They have not mingled as two rivers do when
they join and fall into the same channel. There has been no
chemical combination between the Gothic and the Celtic ele-
ments, but only more or less of a mechanical intermixture.

As the forms of the original English alphabetical characters
are the same with those of the Irish, it is probable that it was
from Ireland the English derived their first knowledge of
letters. There was certainly, however, very little literature in
the country before the arrival of Augustine, in the end of the
sixth century. Augustine is supposed to have established
schools at Canterbury ; and, about a quarter of a century after-
wards, Sigebert, king of the East Angles, who had spent part of
his early life in France, is stated by Bede to have, upon his
coming to the throne, founded an institution for the instruction
of the youth of his dominions similar to those he had seen abroad.
The schools planted by Augustine at Canterbury were afterwards
greatly extended and improved by his successor, Archbishop
Theodore, who obtained the see in 668. Theodore and his
learned friend Adrian, Bede informs us, delivered instructions to
crowds of pupils, not only in divinity, but also in astronomy,
medicine, arithmetic, and the Greek and Latin languagCR.
Bede states that some of the scholars of these accomplished

10 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

foreigners were alive in his time, to whom the Greek and Latin
were as familiar as their mother-tongue. Schools now began to
multiply in other parts, and were generally to be found in all
the monasteries and at the bishops' seats. Of these episcopal
and monastic schools, that founded by Bishop Benedict in his
abbey at Wearmouth, where Bede was educated, and that which
Archbishop Egbert established at York, were among the most
famous. But others of great reputation at a somewhat later date
were superintended by learned teachers from Ireland. One was
that of Maildulf at Malmesbury. At Glastonbury, also, it is
related in one of the ancient lives of St. Dunstan, some Irish
ecclesiastics had settled, the books belonging to whom Dunstan
is recorded to have diligently studied. The northern parts of the
kingdom, moreover, were indebted for the first light of learning
as well as of religion to the missionaries from lona, which was
an Irish foundation.

For some ages Ireland was the chief seat of learning in
Christian Europe; and the most distinguished scholars who
appeared in other countries were mostly either Irish by birth
or had received their education in Irish schools. We are
informed by Bede that in his day, the earlier part of the eighth
century, it was customary for his English fellow-countrymen of
all ranks, from the highest to the lowest, to retire for study
and devotion to Ireland, where, he adds, they were all hospitably
received, and supplied gratuitously with food, with books, and
with instruction.* The glory of this age of Irish scholarship and
genius is the celebrated Joannes Scotus, or Erigena, as he is as
frequently designated, — either appellative equally proclaiming
his true birthplace. He is supposed to have first made his appear-
ance in France about the year 845, and to have remained in that
country till his death, which appears to have taken place before
875. Erigena is the author of a translation from the Greek of
certain mystical works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite,
which he executed at the command of his patron, the French
king, Charles the Bald, and also of several original treatises on
metaphysics and theology. ^ His productions may be taken as
furnishing clear and conclusive evidence that the Greek language
was taught at this time in the Irish schools. Mr. Turner has
given a short account of his principal work, his Dialogue De;
Divisione Naturae (On the Division of Nature), which he cha-
racterises as "distinguished for its Aristotelian acuteness and
extensive information." In one place "he takes occasion," it is
observed, "to give concise and able definitions of the seven
* Hist. Eccles. iii. 28.

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. n

liberal arts, and to express his opinion on the composition of
things. In another part he inserts a very elaborate discussion
on arithmetic, which he says he had learnt from his infancy.
He also details a curious conversation on the elements of things,
on the motions of the heavenly bodies, and other topics of
astronomy and physiology. Among these he even gives the
means of calculating the diameters of the lunar and solar circles.
Besides the fathers Austin, the two Gregories, Chrysostom, Basil,
Epiphanius, Origen, Jerome, and Ambrosius, of whose works,
with the Platonising Dionysius and Maximus, ho gives largo
extracts, he also quotes Virgil, Cicero, Aristotle, Pliny, Plato,
and Boethius ; he details the opinions of Eratosthenes and of
Pythagoras on some astronomical topics ; he also cites Martianus
Capella. His knowledge of Greek appears almost in every
page." * The subtle speculations of Erigena have strongly
attracted the notice of the most eminent among the modern
inquirers into the history of opinion and of civilization ; and the
German Tenneman agrees with the French Cousin and Guizot in
attributing to them a very extraordinary influence on the phi-
losophy of his own and of succeeding times. To his writings
and translations it is thought may be traced the introduction into
the theology and metaphysics of Europe of the later Platonism
of the Alexandrian school. It is remarkable, as Mr. Moore has
observed, that the learned Mosheim had previously shown the
study of the scholastic or Aristotelian philosophy to have been
also of Irish origin. " That the Hibernians," says that writer,
"who were called Scots in this [the eighth] century, wero
lovers of learning, and distinguished themselves in these times
of ignorance by the culture of the sciences beyond all the other
European nations, travelling through the most distant lands,
both with a view to improve and to communicate their know-
ledge, is a fact with which I have been long acquainted ; as we
see them in the most authentic records of antiquity discharging,
with the highest reputation and applause, the function of doctor
in France, Germany, and Italy, both during this and the follow-
ing century. But that these Hibernians were the first teachers
of the scholastic theology in Europe, and so early as the eighth
century illustrated the doctrines of religion by the principles of
philosophy, I learned but lately." | And then he adduces tho
proofs that establish his position.

* Turner, Anglo-Sax, iii. 393.

t Translated in Moore's Ireland, i. 302.

12 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

DECAY OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP.

It should seem not to be altogether correct to attribute the
decline and extinction of the earliest literary civilization of the
Angles and Saxons wholly to the Danish invasions. The North-
men did not make their appearance till towards the close of the
eighth century, nor did their ravages occasion any considerable
public alarm till long after the commencement of the ninth ; but
for a whole century preceding this date, learning in England
appears to have been falling into decay. Bede, who died in 735,
exactly ninety-seven years before that landing of the Danes in the
Isle of Sheppey, in the reign of Egbert, which was followed by
incessant attacks of a similar kind, until the fierce marauders at
last won for themselves a settlement in the country, is the last
name eminent for scholarship that occurs in this portion of the
English annals. The historian William of Malmesbury, indeed,
affirms that the death of Bede was fatal to learning in England,
and especially to history; "insomuch that it maybe said," he
adds, writing in the early part of the twelfth century, " that almost
all knowledge of past events was buried in the same grave with
him, and hath continued in that condition even to our times."
" There was not so much as one Englishman," Malmesbury
declares, " left behind Bede, who emulated the glory which he
had acquired by his studies, imitated his example, or pursued the
path to knowledge which he had pointed out. A few, indeed, of
his successors were good men, and not unlearned, but they
generally spent their lives in an inglorious silence ; while the
far greater number sunk into sloth and ignorance, until by
degrees the love of learning was quite extinguished in this
island for a long time."

The devastations of the Danes completed what had probably
been begun by the dissensions and confusion that attended the
breaking up of the original political system established by the
Angles and^ Saxons, and perhaps also by the natural decay of the
national spirit among a race long habituated to a stirring and
adventurous life, and now left in undisturbed ease and quiet
before the spirit of a new and more intellectual activity had been
sufficiently diffused among them. Nearly all the monasteries
and the schools connected with them throughout the land were
either actually laid in ashes by the northern invaders, or were
deserted in the general terror and distraction occasioned by their
attacks. When Alfred was a young man, about the middle of the
ninth century, he could find no masters to instruct him in any of
tho higher branches of learning : there were at that lime, accord-

DECAY OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP. 13

ing to his biographer Asser, few or none among the West Saxons
who had any scholarship, or could so much as read with pro-
priety and ease. The reading of the Latin language is probably
what is here alluded to. Alfred has himself stated, in the pre-
face to his translation of Gregory's Pastorale, that, though many
of the English at his accession could read their native language
well enough, the knowledge of the Latin tongue was so much
decayed, that there were very few to the south of the Huinber
who understood the common prayers of the church, or were
capable of translating a single sentence of Latin into English ;
and to the south of the Thames he could not recollect that there
was one possessed of this very moderate amount of learning.
Contrasting this lamentable state of things with the better days
that had gone before, he exclaims, " I wish thee to know that it
comes very often into my mind, what wise men there were in
England, both laymen and ecclesiastics, and how happy those
times were to England ! The sacred profession was diligent
both to teach and to learn. Men from abroad sought wisdom
and learning in this country, though we must now go out of it to
obtain knowledge if we should wish to have it."

It was not tul he was nearly forty yearg of age that Alfred
himself commenced his study of the Latin language. Before
this, however, and as soon as he had rescued his dominions from
the hands of the Danes, and reduced these foreign disturbers to
subjection, he had exerted himself with his characteristic activity
in bringing about the restoration of letters as well as of peace
and order. He had invited to his court all the most learned men
he could discover anywhere in his native land, and had even
brought over instructors for himself and his people from other
countries. Werfrith, the bishop of Worcester ; Ethelstan and
Werwulf, two Mercian priests; and Plegmund, also a Mercian,
who afterwards became archbishop of Canterbury, were some of
the English of whose superior acquirements he thus took advan-
tage. Asser he brought from the western extremity of Wales.
Griinbald he obtained from France, having sent an embassy of
bishops, presbyters, deacons, and religious laymen, bearing
valuable presents to his ecclesiastical superior Fulco, the arch-
bishop of Kheims, to ask permission for the great scholar to be
allowed to come to reside in England. And so in other instances,
like the bee, looking everywhere for honey, to quote the simili-
tude of his biographer, this admirable prince sought abroad in
all directions for the treasure which his own kingdom did not
aflbrd.

His labours in translating the various works that have been

H ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

mentioned above from the Latin, after he had acquired that
language, he seems himself to have been half inclined to regard
as to be justified only by the low state into which all learning
had fallen among his countrymen in his time, and as likely per-
haps to be rather of disservice than otherwise to the cause of real
scholarship. Eeflecting on the erudition which had existed in
the country at a former period, and which had made those
volumes in the learned languages useful that now lay unopened,
" I wondered greatly," he says in the Preface to his translation
of the Pastorale, " that of those good wise men who were formerly
in our nation, and who had all learned fully these books,
none would translate any part into their own language ; but I
*oon answered myself, and said, they never thought that men
could be so reckless, and that learning would be so fallen. They
intentionally omitted it, and wished that there should be more
wisdom in the land, by many languages being known." He then
called to recollection, however, what benefit had been derived
by all nations from the translation of the Greek and Hebrew
Scriptures, first into Latin, and then into the various modern
tongues ; and, " therefore," he concludes, " I think it better, if
you think so (he is addressing Wulfsig, the bishop of London),
that we also translate some books, the most necessary for all men
to know, that we all may know them ; and we may do this, with
God's help, very easily, if we have peace ; so that all the youth
that are now in England, who are freemen, and possess suffi-
cient wealth, may for a time apply to no other task till they
first well know how to read English. Let those learn Latin
afterwards, who will know more, and advance to a higher con-
dition." In this wise and benevolent spirit he acted. The old
writers seem to state that, besides the translations that have
come down to us, he executed many others that are now lost.

It is probable, though there is no suificient authority for the
statement, that Alfred re-established many of the old monastic
and episcopal schools in the various parts of the kingdom.
Asser expressly mentions that he founded a seminary for the
sons of the nobility, to the support of which he devoted no less
than an eighth part of his whole revenue. Hither even some
noblemen repaired who had far outgrown their youth, but never-
theless had scarcely or not at all begun their acquaintance with
looks. ^ In another place Asser speaks of this school, to which
Alfred is stated to have sent his own son Ethel ward, as being
attended not only by the sons of almost all the nobility of the realm,
but also by many of the inferior classes. It was provided with
several masters. A notion that has been eagerly maintained by

DECAY OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SCHOLARSHIP. 15

some antiquaries is, that this seminary, instituted by Alfred, IN
to bo considered as the foundation of the University of Oxford.

Up to this tinio absolute illiteracy seems to have been com-
mon even among the highest classes of the English. We have
ju>t seen that, when Alfred established his schools, they were as
much needed for the nobility who had reached an advanced or
mature age as for their children ; and, indeed, the scheme of in-
struction seems to have been intended from the first to embrace
the former as well as the latter, for, according to Asser's account,
every person of rank or substance who, either from age or want
of capacity, was unable to learn to read himself, was compelled
to send to school either his son or a kinsman, or, if he had
neither, a servant, that ho might at least be read to by some one.
The royal charters, instead of the names of the kings, sometimes
exhibit their marks, used, as it is frankly explained, in conse-
quence of their ignorance of letters.

The measures begjun by Alfred for effecting the literary
civilization of his subjects were probably pursued under his suc-
cessors ; but the period of the next three quarters of a century,
notwithstanding some short intervals of repose, was on the whole
too troubled to admit of much attention being given to the carry-
ing out of his plans, or even, it may be apprehended, the mainte-
nance of what he had set up. Dunstan, indeed, during his
administration, appears to have exerted himself with zeal in
enforcing a higher standard of learning as well as of morals, or
of asceticism, among the clergy. But the renewal of the Danish
wars, after the accession of Ethelred, and the state of misery and
confusion in which the country was kept from this cause till its
conquest by Canute, nearly forty years after, must have again
laid in ruins the greater part of its literary as well as ecclesi-
astical establishments. The concluding portion of the tenth
century was thus, probably, a time of as deep intellectual dark-
ness in England as it was throughout most of the rest of Europe.
Under Canute, however, who was a wise as well as a powerful
sovereign, the schools no doubt rose again and flourished. Wo
have the testimony, so far as it is to be relied upon, of the history
attributed to Ingulphus, which professes to be written imme-
diately after the Norman conquest, and the boyhood of the author
of which is made to coincide with the early part of the reign
of the Confessor, that at that time seminaries of the higher as
well as of elementary learning existed in England. Ingulphus,
according to this account, having been born in the city of
London, was first sent to school at Westminster ; and from
Westminster he proceeded to Oxford, where he studied tho

16 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Aristotelian philosophy and the rhetorical writings of Cicero.
This is the earliest express mention of the University of Oxford,
if a passage in Asser's work in which the name occurs be, as is
generally supposed, spurious, and if the History passing under
his name was really written by Ingulphus.

The studies that were cultivated in those ages were few in
number and of very limited scope. Alcuin, in a letter to his
patron Charlemagne, has enumerated, in the fantastic rhetoric
of the period, the subjects in which he instructed his pupils in
the school of St. Martin at Paris. " To some," says he, «
administer the honey of the sacred writings ; others I try to
inebriate with the wine of the ancient classics. I begin the
nourishment of some with the apples of grammatical subtlety.
I strive to illuminate many by the arrangement of the stars, as
from the painted roof of a lofty palace." In plain language, his
instructions embraced grammar, the Greek and Latin languages,
astronomy, and theology. In the poem in which he gives an
account of his own education at York, the same writer informs
us that the studies there pursued comprehended, besides grammar,
rhetoric, and poetry, " the harmony of the sky, the labour of the
sun and moon, the five zones, the seven wandering planets : the
laws, risings, and settings of the stars, and the aerial ^ motions
of the sea ; earthquakes ; the nature of man, cattle, birds, and
wild beasts, with their various kinds and forms ; and the sacred
Scriptures."

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

The earliest historically known fact with regard to the English
language is, that it was the language generally, if not universally,
spoken by the barbaric invaders, apparently for the greater part
of one race or blood, though of different tribes, who, upon the
breaking up of the empire of the West in the fifth century, came
over in successive throngs from the opposite continent, and, after
a protracted struggle, acquired the possession and dominion of the
principal portion of the province of Britain. They are stated to
have consisted chiefly of Angles and Saxons. But, although it is
usual to designate them rather by the general denomination of
the Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons, it is probable that the Saxons
were in reality only a section of the Angles. The Angles, of
which term our modern English is only another form, appears
to have been always recognized among themselves as the proper
national appellation. They both concurred, Angles and Saxonf

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. I?

alike, after their establishment in Britain, in calling their com-
mon country Aiigk-land, or England, and their common language
English — that is, the language of the Angles, — as there can bo
little doubt it had been called from the time when it first became
known as a distinct form of human speech.

This English language, since become so famous, is ordinarily
regarded as belonging to the Low-Germanic, or middle, group
of the Gothic tongues. That is to say, it is classed with the
Dutch and the Flemish, and the dialects generally of the more
northern and low-lying part of what was anciently called Ger-
many, under which name were included the countries that we
call Holland and the Netherlands, as well as that to which it is
now more especially confined. It appears to have been from
this middle region, lying directly opposite to Britain, that the
Angles and Saxons and other tribes by whom the English lan-
guage was brought over to that island chiefly came. At any
rate, they certainly did not come from the more elevated region
of Southern Germany. Nor does the language present the dis-
tinguishing characteristics of a High-Germanic tongue, \\li.r,
is now called the German language, therefore, though of the
same Gothic stock, belongs to a different branch from our own.
We are only distantly related to the Germans proper, or the race
among whom the language and literature now known as the
German have originated and grown up. We are, at least in
respect of language, more nearly akin to the Dutch and the
Flemings than we are to the Germans. It may even be doubted
if the English language ought not to be regarded as having more
of a Scandinavian than of a purely Germanic character, — ap, in
other words, more nearly resembling the Danish or Swedish
than the modern German. The invading bands by whom it was
originally brought over to Britain in the fifth and sixth cen-
turies were in all probability drawn in great part from the
Scandinavian countries. At a later date, too, the population of
England was directly recruited from Denmark, and the other
regions around the Baltic to a large extent. From about the
middle of the ninth century the population of all the eastern anu
northern parts of the country was as much Danish as English.
And soon after the beginning of the eleventh century the sove-
reignty was acquired by the Danes.

The English language, although reckoned among modem lan-
guages, is already of respectable antiquity. In one sense, indeed,
all languages may be held to be equally ancient ; for we can in
no case get at the beginning of a language, any more than we
can get at the beginning of a lineage. Each is merely the con-

18 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

tinuation of a preceding one, from which it cannot be separated
in any case except by a purely arbitrary mark of distinction.
Take two portions of the line at some distance from one another,
and they may be very unlike ; yet the change which has trans-
formed the one into the other, or produced the one out of the
other, has been, even when most active, so gradual, so perfectly
free always from anything that can be called a convulsion or
catastrophe, so merely a process of growth, however varying in
its rate of rapidity, that there is no precise point at which it can
be said to have begun. This is undoubtedly the way in which
all languages have come into existence ; they have all thus grown
out of older forms of speech ; none of them have been manufac-
tured or invented. It would seem that human skill could as
soon invent a tree as invent a language. The one as well as the
other is essentially a natural production.

But, taking a particular language to mean what has always
borne the same name, or been spoken by the same nation or
race, which is the common or conventional understanding of the
matter, the English may claim to be older than the great majority
of the tongues now in use throughout Europe. The Basque,
perhaps, and the various Celtic dialects might take precedence
of it ; but hardly any others. No one of the still spoken Ger-
manic or Scandinavian languages could make out a distinct proof
of its continuous existence from an equally early date. And the
Itomance tongues, the Italian, the Spanish, the French, are all,
recognized as such, confessedly of much later origin.

The English language is recorded to have been known by
that name, and to have been the national speech of the same
race, at least since the middle of the fifth century. It was
then, as we have seen, that the first settlers by whom it was
spoken established themselves in the country of which their
descendants have ever since retained possession. Call them
either Angles (that is, English) or Saxons, it makes no differ-
ence ; it is clear that, whether or no the several divisions of the
invaders were all of one blood, all branches of a common stock,
they spoke all substantially the same language, the proper name
of which, as has been stated, was the Anglish, or English, as
England, or Angle-land (the land of the Angles), was the name
which the country received from its new occupants. And these
names of England and English the country and the language have
each retained ever since.

JSTor can it be questioned that the same tongue was spoken by
the same race, or races, long before their settlement in Britain.
The Ano-les figure as one of the nations occupying the forest land

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 19

cf Germany in the picture of that country sketched by Tacitus
iu tho first century of our era.

The most distinct and satisfactory record, however, of a lan-
guage is afforded by what exists of it in a written form. ]n
applying this tost or measure of antiquity, the reasonable rule
would seem to be, that, wherever we havo the clear beginning
or end of a distinct body or continuous series of literary remains,
there we have tho beginning or end of a language. Thus, of
what is called the Moesogothic we have no written remains
of later date than the fourth century (or, at any rate, than the
sixth, if we reckon from what is probably the true age of the
transcripts which we actually possess) ; and accordingly we
hold the Moesogothic to be a language which has passed away
and perished, notwithstanding that there may be some other lan-
guage or languages still existing of which there is good reason
to look upon it as having been the progenitor. "But of the
English language we have a continuous succession of written
remains since the seventh century at least ; that is to say, we
have an array of specimens of it from that date such as that no
two of them standing next to one another in the order of time
could possibly be pronounced to belong to different languages,
'out only at most to two successive stages of the same language.
Thoy afford us a record or representation of the language in
which there is no gap. This cannot be said of any other existing
European tongue for nearly so great a length of time, unless we
may except the two principal Celtic tongues, the Welsh and the
1 1 ish.

The movement of tho language, however, during this extended
existence, has been immense. No language over ceases to move
until it becomes what is called dead, which term, although com-
monly understood to mean merely that the language has ceased
to be spoken, really signifies, here as elsewhere, that the life is
gone out of it, which is indeed the unfailing accompaniment
of its ceasing to be used as an oral medium of communication.
It cannot grow after that, even if it should still continue to a
certain extent to be used in writing, as has been the case with
the Sanscrit in the East and the Latin in the West, — except
perhaps as the hair and the nails are said sometimes to grow
after the animal body is dead. It is only speaking that keeps
a language alive ; writing alone will not do it. That has no
more than a conservative function and effect; tho progressive
power, the element of fermentation and change, in a language
is its vocal utterance.

We shall find that the English language, moving now faster,

2;) ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

now slower, throughout the twelve or thirteen centuries over
which our knowledge of it extends, although it has never been
all at once or suddenly converted from one form into another-
which is what the nature of human speech forbids— has yet
within that space undergone at least two complete revolutions,
or, in other words, presents itself to us in three distinct forms.

ORIGINAL ENGLISH :—
COMMONLY CALLED SAXON, OR ANGLO-SAXON.

The English which the Angles and Saxons brought over with
them from the Continent, when they came and took possession
of the greater part of South Britain in the fifth and sixth cen-
turies, differed from the English that we now speak and write
in two important respects. It was an unmixed language ; and it
was what is called a synthetic, in contradistinction to an analytic,
language. Its vocables were all of one stock or lineage ; and it
expressed the relations of nouns and verbs, not by separate
words, called auxiliaries and particles, but by terminational or
other modifications, — that is, by proper conjugation and de-
clension,— as our present English still does when it says, / loved
instead of I did love, or The King's throne instead of The throne of the
Jung. These two characteristics are what constitute it a distinct
f( >rm. or stage, of the language : — its synthetic or generally in-
flected grammatical structure, and its homogeneous vocabulary.

As a subject of philological study the importance of tnis
earliest known form of the English language cannot be over-
estimated ; and much of what we possess written in it is also
of great value for the matter. But the essential element of a
literature is not matter, but manner. Here too, as in everything
else, the soul of the artistic is form ; — beauty of form. Now of
that what has come down to us written in this primitive English
is, at least for us of the present day, wholly or all but wholly
destitute.

There is much writing in forms of human speech now extinct, or
no longer in oral use, which is still intelligible to us in a certain
sort, but in a certain sort only. It speaks to us as anything that
is dead can speak to us, and no otherwise. We can decipher it,
rather than read it. \Ve make it out as it were merely by the touch,
getting some such notion of it as a blind man might get of a piece
of sculpture by passing his hand over it. This, for instance, to
take an extreme case, is the position in which we stand in
reference to the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the ancient monu

OKIGINAf, ENGLISH 21

: :. They can be read as the multiplication tablo
can bo read. But that is all. There may be nothing ruore in
them than there IB in the multiplication table ; but if there were,
we could not get at it. M. Chainpollion, indeed, in his enthu-
siasm, saw a vision of an amatory or bacchanalian song laughing
imd'.r the venerable veil of one of them ; but it is plain that thia
must have been an illusion. A mummy from one of the neigh-
bouring toinbs, embalmed some three or four thousand years
ago, might almost as soon be expected to give forth a living
voice.

Even the ancient Assyrian inscriptions, which are in alpha-
betical characters, will certainly never be made to render up to
us more than the dead matters of fact that may be buried in
them. If there be any grace in the manner in which the facts
;ue related, any beauty ot style in the narrative, it has perished
irretrievably. But this is what also appears to happen, in a
greater or less degree, in the case even of a language the vocabu-
lary of which we have completely in our possession, and which we
are therefore quite able to interpret so far as regards the substance
of anything written in it, whenever it has for some time — for a
single generation, it may bo — ceased both to be spoken and to be
written. Something is thus lost, which seems to be irrecover-
able. The two great classic tongues, it is to be observed, the
old Greek and Latin, although they have both long passed out of
popular use, have always continued to be not only studied and
read by all cultivated minds throughout Europe, but to be also
extensively employed by the learned, at least in writing. And
this has proved enough to maintain the modern world in what
may be called a living acquaintance with them — such an ac-
quaintance as we have with a person we have conversed with,
or a place where we have actually been, as distinguished from
our dimmer conception of persons and places known to us only
by description. The ancient classic literature charms us as well
as informs us. It addresses itself to the imagination, and to our
sense of the beautiful, as well as to the understanding. It has
shape, and colour, and voice for us, as well as mere substance.
Every word, and every collocation of words, carries with it a
peculiar meaning, or effect, which is still appreciated. The
whole, in short, is felt and enjoyed, not simply interpreted.
But a language, which has passed from what we may call its
natural condition of true and full vitality as a national speech
cannot, apparently, be thus far preserved, with something of the
pulse of life still beating in it, merely by such a knowledge of
it being kept up as enables us to read and translate it Still lose

22 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

can a language, the very reading of which has been for a tiiuo
suspended^ and consequently all knowledge whatever of it for-
gotten, ever be restored to even the appearance of life. It has
become a fossil, and cannot be resuscitated, but only dug up. A
thousand facts warrant us in saying that languages, and even
words, are subject to decay and dissolution as well as the human
beings of whose combined mental and physical organizations they
are the mysterious product ; and that, once really dead, nothing
can reanimate their dust or reclothe their dry bones with flesh.

The original form of the English language is in this state. It
is intelligible, but that is all. What is written in it can, in a
certain sense, be read, but not so as to bring out from the most
elaborate compositions in it any artistic element, except of the
most dubious and unsatisfactory kind. Either such an element
is not present in any considerable degree, or the language is not
now intimately enough known for any one to be able to detect it.
If it is not literally dumb, its voice has for us of the present day
entirely lost its music. Even of the system of measure and ar-
rangement according to which it is ordinarily disposed for the
purposes of poetry we have no proper apprehension or feeling.
Certain mechanical principles or rules may have been discovered
in obedience to which the versification appears to be constructed ;
but the verse as verse remains not the less for our ears and hearts
wholly voiceless. When it can be distinguished from prose at
all it is only by certain marks or characteristics which may
indeed be perceived by the eye, or counted on the fingers, but
which have no expression that excites in us any mental emotion.
It is little better than if the composition merely had the words
** This is verse " written over it or under it.

In respect of everything else appertaining to the soul of the
language, our understanding of it is about equally imperfect.
The consequence is, that, although it can be translated, it cannot
be written. The late Mr. Conybeare, indeed, has left us a few
specimens of verse in it of his own composition; but his at-
tempts are of the slightest character, and, unadventurous as they
are, nobody can undertake to say, except as to palpable points of
right or wrong in grammar, whether they are well or ill done.
The language, though so far in our hands as to admit of being
analyzed in grammars and packed up in dictionaries, is not
recoverable in such a degree as to make it possible to pronounce
with certainty whether anything written in it is artistically
good or bad. As for learning to speak it, that is a thing as
little dreamt of as learning to speak the language )f Swift's
Houyhnhnms.

ORIGINAL ENGLISH. 23

"When the study of this original form of the national speech
was revived in England in the middle of the sixteenth century,
it had heen for well-nigh four hundred years not only what is
commonly called a dead language, but a buried and an utterly
forgotten one. It may be questioned if at least for three pre-
ceding centuries any one had been able to read it. It was first
recurred to as a theological weapon. Much in the same manner
as the Reformers generally were drawn to the study of the
Greek language in maintaining the accordance of their doc-
trines with those of the New Testament and of the first ages
of Christianity, the English Reformers turned to the oldest
writings in the vernacular tongue for evidence of the com
paratively unromanized condition of the early English church.
In the next age history and law began to receive illustration
from the same source. It was not till a considerably later date
that the recovered language came to be studied with much of a
special view to its literary and philological interest. And it is
only within the present century that it has either attracted any
attention in other countries, or been investigated on what are
now held to be sound principles. The specially theological
period of its cultivation may be regarded as extending over the
latter half of the sixteenth century, the legal and historical
period over the whole of the seventeenth, the philological of the
old school over the whole of the eighteenth, and the philological
of the modern school over the nineteenth, so far as it has gone.

If the English language as it was written a thousand years
ago had been left to itself, and no other action from without had
interfered with that of its spontaneous growth or inherent prin-
ciples of change and development, it might not have remained
so stationary as some more highly-cultivated languages have
done throughout an equal space of time, but its form in the
nineteenth century would in all probability have been only n
comparatively slight modification of what it was in the ninth.
It would have been essentially the same language. As the caso
stands, the .English of the ninth century is onelanguage, ana
!!nu;li>h of the nineteenth century another. Th.-y <iiiU T at
as much as the Italian differs from flie "Latin ^r as Efogljsh
differs from German. The most familiar acquaintance with the
one leaves the other unintelligible. So much is this so that it
has long been customary to distinguish them by different names,
and to call the original form of the national speech Saxon, or
Anglo-Saxon, as if it were not English at all. If the notion be
that the dialect in which most of the ancient English that has
come down to us is written in that which was in use among tho

?i ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

specially Saxon part of the population, that would have been
better indicated by calling it, not Anglo-Saxon, but Saxon
English. But even such a designation would be inapplicable to
those specimens of the language in which there is unquestion-
ably nothing whatever that is specially Saxon, and which recent
investigations have shown to be not inconsiderable in amount, as
well as of high philological importance ; and it would also leave
the limitation of the name English to the more modern form of the
language without any warrant in the facts of the case. Objec-
tionable, however, as may be the common nomenclature, it is
still indisputable that we have here, for all practicable purposes,
not one language, but two languages. The one may^have grown
out of the other, and no doubt has done so at least in part or in
the main ; but in part also the modern language is of quite a
distinct stock from the ancient. Of English Literature, there-
fore, and the English Language, commonly so called, the language
and literature of the Angles and Saxons before the twelfth century
make no proper part.

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

The year 1066 is memorable as that of the Norman Conquest,
—the conquest of England by the Normans. The conquests of
which we read in the history of nations are of three kinds.
Sometimes one population has been overwhelmed by or driven
before another as it might have been by an inundation of the
sea, or at the most a small number of the old inhabitants of the
invaded territory have been permitted to remain on it as the
bondsmen of their conquerors. This appears to have been the
usual mode of proceeding of the barbarous races, as we call
them, by which the greater part of Europe was occupied in early
times, in their contests with one another. When the Teuton or
Goth from the one side of the Ehine attacked the Celt on the
other side, the whole tribe precipitated itself upon what was the
object at once of its hostility and of its cupidity. Or even if it
was one division of the great Gothic race that made war upon
another, as, for instance, the Scandinavian upon any Germanic
country, the course that was taken was commonly, or at least
frequently, the same. The land was cleared by driving away
all who could fly, and the universal massacre of the rest. This
primitive kind of invasion and conquest belonged properly to the
night of barbarism, but in certain of the extreme parts of the
European system something of it survived down to a compara-
tively late date. Much that we are told of the manner in which

THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 25

Britain was wrested from its previous Celtic occupants by tho
Angles and Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era
would lead us to think that the enterprise of the.se invaders was
both originally conceived and conducted throughout in this
spirit. Nay, for some centuries after this we have the Danes in
their descents and inroads upon all parts of the British territories
*till acting, apparently, in the same style. But, ever from the
time of tho settlement of the barbarous nations in the more
central provinces of the old Roman empire, another kind of
conquest had come into use among them. Corrupted and
enfeebled as it was, the advanced civilization which they now
encountered seems to have touched them as with a spell, or
rather could not but communicate to its assailants something of
its own spirit. A policy of mere destruction was evidently not
the course to be adopted here. The value of the conquest lay
mainly in preserving as far as possible both the stupendous
material structures and the other works of art by which the soil
was everywhere covered and adorned, and the living in-
telligence and skill of which all these wonders were the pro-
duct. Hence the second kind of conquest, in which for the
first time the conquerors were contented to share the conquered
country, usually according to a strictly defined proportional
division, with its previous occupants. But this system too was
only transitory. It passed away with the particular crisis which
gave birth to it; and then arose the third and last kind of
conquest, in which there is no general occupation of the soil of
the conquered country by the conquerors, but only its dominion
is acquired by them.

The first of the three kinds of conquest, then, has for its object
and effect the complete displacement of the ancient inhabitants.
It is the kind which is proper to the contests of barbarians with
barbarians. Under the second form of conquest the conquerors,
recognizing a superiority to themselves in many other things
even in those whom their superior force or ferocity has subdued,
feel that they will gain most by foregoing something of their
right to the wholesale seizure and appropriation of the soil, and
neither wholly destroying or expelling its ancient possessors, nor
even reducing them to a state of slavery, but only treating them
as a lower caste. This is the form proper and natural to the ex-
ceptional and rare case of the conquest of a civilized by a bar-
barous people. Finally, there is that kind of subjugation of one
people or country by another which results simply in the over-
throw of the independence of the former, and the substitution in
it or over it of a foreign for a native government. This is geno«

tG ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

rally llie only kind of conquest which attends upon the wars of
civilized nations with one another.

The conquest of England by the Normans in the year 1066
may be regarded as having been professedly a conquest of this
last description. The age of both the first and the second kinds
of conquest was over, at least everywhere throughout Europe
except it may be only along some few portions of its extreme
northern boundary. Both the English and the Normans stood
indisputably within the pale of civilization, the former boasting
the possession both of Christianity and of a national literature for
four or five centuries, the latter, if more recently reclaimed from
paganism and barbarism, nevertheless already recognized as one
of the most brilliantly gifted of European races, and distinguished
for their superior aptitude in the arts both of war and of peace,
of polity and of song. And the Norman leader, having with
him in his enterprise the approval and sanction of the Church,
claimed the English crown as his by right ; nor were there pro-
bably wanting many Englishmen, although no doubt the general
national feeling was different, who held his claim to be fully as
good in law and justice as that of his native competitor. In
taking the style of the Conqueror with respect to England, as he
had been wont to take that of the Bastard with reference to his
ancestral Normandy, William, as has been often explained,
probably meant nothing more than that he had acquired his
English sovereignty for himself, by the nomination or bequest
of his relation King Edward, or in whatever other way, and had
not succeeded to it under the ordinary rule of descent. Such a
right of property is still, in the old feudal language, technically
described in the law of Scotland as acquired by conquest, and in
that of England by purchase, which is etymologically of the
same meaning,— the one word being the Latin Conqucestusr or
Conquisitio, the other Perquisitio.

And in point of fact the Normans never transferred themselves
in a body, or generally, to England. They did not, like the
barbarous populations of a preceding age, abandon for this new
country the one In which they had previously dwelt. England
was never thus taken possession of by the Normans. It wab
never colonized by these foreigners, or occupied by them in any
other than a military sense. The Norman Duke invaded it with
an army, raised partly among his own subjects, partly drawn from
other regions of the Continent, and so made himself master of it
It received a foreign government, but not at all a new population.

Two causes, however, meeting from opposite points, and work-
ing together, soon produced a result which was to some extent

THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 21

tbe same that would liave been produced by a Norman coloniza-
tion. The first was the natural demand on the part of William's
followers or fellow-soldiers for a share in the profits and advan-
tages of their common enterprise, which would probably in any .
case have compelled him eventually to surrender his new sub-
jects to spoliation ; the second was the equally natural restless-
ness of the latter under the foreign yoke that had been imposed
upon them, by which they only facilitated the process of their
general reduction to poverty and ruin.

And to the overthrow thus brought about of the native civili-
zation was added, in the present case, the intrusion of another
..•m of social organization, and of another language possessing
also its own literature, to take the place of what was passing
away. So that here again were two distinct forces harmoniously,
though by movements in opposite directions, co-operating to a
common end. At the same time that English culture shrunk
and faded, Norman culture flourished and advanced. And the
two forces were not balanced or in any way connected, but quite
independent the one of the other. English culture went down,
not under the disastrous influence of the rival light, but from the
failure of its own natural aliment, or because the social structure
of which it was the product had been smitten with universal dis-
organization. It was the withering of life throughout the whole
frame that made the eye dim.

The difference, then, between the case of England conquered
by the Normans in the eleventh century and that of Italy over-
ran by the Goths in the fifth, was twofold. First, the Normans
did not settle in England, as the barbarous nations of the North
did in Italy and other provinces of the subjugated Western em-
pire ; but, secondly, on the other hand, the new power which
the Norman invasion and conquest of England established in the
country was not a barbarism, but another civilization in most
respects at least as advanced as the indigenous one ; — if younger,
only therefore the stronger and more aspiring, and yet, as it
proved, not differing so far from that with which it was brought
into competition as to be incapable of coalescing with it, if need
were, as well as, in other circumstances, with its advantages of
position, outshining it or casting it into the shade.

In this way it came to pass that the final result to both the
language and the literature of the conquered people was pretty
much the same in the two cases. \Vhat the barbaric influence,
iu its action upon the Latin language and literature, wanted of
positive vital force it made up for by its mass and weight ; tho
' Norman influence, on the contrary, compensated by quality for

*x ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

its deficiency in quantity. There was considerable difference,
however, in the process by which the transformation was effected
in the two cases, and in the length of time which it occupied.
The Gothic barbarism was in the first instance simply destruc-
tive ; it was not till after some centuries that it came to be visibly
or appreciably anything else. But the Norman influence, in
virtue of being that, not of a barbarism, but of a civilization,
and especiall}7 of a civilization still in all the radiant bloom and
buoyant pride of youth, never could have been directly de-
structive; from the first moment of their actual contact it
must have communicated to the native civilization something
of new life.

One thing further may be noted. In both the cases that we
have been comparing the result was the combination, both in the
language and the literature, of the same two elements ; namely,
the Latin (or Classical) and the Gothic (or Germanic, in the
largest sense). But the important difference was, that, the basis
of the combination remaining in each case what it originally
was, — Latin in Italy, in France, in Spain, but Gothic in Eng-
land— while the language and literature that grew up in each of
the former countries came to be in general spirit and character
what is called Eomance, which must be understood to mean
modified Roman, the English language and literature retained
their original fundamentally Gothic character, only modified by
so much as it has absorbed of a Latin element.

And the remarkable distinction of the English language is,
that it is the only one of all the languages of the European
world which, thus combining the two elements of the Classic
and the Gothic — that is, as we may say, of ancient and of
modern civilization — is Gothic, or modern, in its skeleton, or
bony system, and in its formative principle, and Classic, or
antique, only in what of it is comparatively superficial and
non-essential. The other living European languages are either
without the Classic element altogether, as are all those of the
Scandinavian and Teutonic branches, or have it as their principal
and governing element, as is the case with the Italian, the
French, and the Spanish, which may all be described as only
modernized forms of the Latin. Even in the proportion, too.
in which the two elements are combined the English has greatly
the advantage over these Eomance tongues, as they are called,
in none of which is there more than a mere sprinkling of the
modern element, whereas in English, although here that con-
stitutes the dominant or more active portion of the compound, the
counterpoising ingredient is also present in large quantity, and

ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING 29

is influential to a very high degree upon the general character
of the language.

It should seem to follow from all this, that, both in its inner
spirit and in its voice, both in its constructional and in its mu-
sical genius, the English language, and, through that, English
literature, English civilization or culture generally, and the
•whole temper of the English mind, ought to have a capacity of
sympathizing at once with the Classical and the Gothic, with the
antique and the modern, with the past and the present, to an ex-
tent not to be matched by any other speech or nation of Europe.

It so happens, too, that the political fortunes of this English
tongue have been in singular accordance with its constitution
and natural adaptation, inasmuch as, at the same time that it
stands in this remarkable position in the Old World, its position
is still more pre-eminent in the New \Vorld, whether that desig-
nation be confined to the continent of America or understood as
including the entire field of modern colonization in every quarter
of the globe. The English are the only really colonizing people
now extant. As we remember Coleridge once expressing it, it is
the natural destiny of their country, as an island, to be the mother
of nations. Their geographical position, concurring with their
peculiar genius, and with all the other favourable circumstances
of the case, gives them the command of the readiest access to the
most distant parts of the earth, — a universal highway, almost as
free as is the air to the swarming bees. And, accordingly, all
the greatest communities of the future, whether they be seated
beyond the Atlantic or beyond the Pacific, promise to be com-
munities of English blood and English speech.

ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING.

The space of about a thousand years, extending from the over-
throw of the Western Roman empire, in the middle of the fifth
century, to that of the Eastern, in the middle of the fifteenth,
may be divided into two nearly equal parts ; the first of which
may be considered as that of the gradual decline, the second as
that of the gradual revival of letters. The former, reaching to the
close of the tenth century, nearly corresponds, in its close as well
as in its commencement, with the domination in England of the
Angles and Saxons. In Europe generally, throughout this long
space of time, the intellectual darkness, notwithstanding some
brief and partial revivals, deepens more and more on the whole,
in the same manner as in the natural day the gray of evening passes
into the gloom of midnight. The Latin learning, properly so called,

30 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE-.

may be regarded as terminating with Boethius, who wrote in the
early part of the sixth century. The Latin language, however,
continued to be used in literary compositions, as well as in the
services of the Church, both in our own country and in the other
parts of Europe that had composed the old empire of Rome.

The Danish conquest of England, as completed by the acces-
sion of Canute, preceded the Norman by exactly half a century,
and throughout this space, the country had, with little interrup-
tion, enjoyed a government which, if not always national, — and
it was that too for rather more than half of the fifty years — was
at any rate acknowledged and submitted to by the whole nation.
The public tranquillity was scarcely ever disturbed for more
than a moment by any internal commotion, and never at all by
attacks from abroad. During this interval, therefore, many of
the monastic and other schools that had existed in the days
of Alfred, Athelstan, and Edgar, but had been swept away or
allowed to fall into decay in the disastrous forty years that suc-
ceeded the decease of the last-mentioned monarch, were probabl}r
re-established. The more frequent communication with the
Continent that began in the reign of the Confessor must also
have been favourable to the intellectual advancement of the
country. The dawn of the revival of letters in England, there-
fore, may be properly dated from a point about fifty years ante-
cedent to the Norman Conquest, or from not very long after the
commencement of the eleventh century.

Still at the date of the Conquest the country was undoubtedly
in regard to everything intellectual in a very backward state.
Ordericus Vitalis, almost a contemporary writer, and himself a
native of England, though educated abroad, describes his
countrymen generally as having been found by the Normans a
rustic and almost illiterate people (agrestes et pene illiterates). The
last epithet may be understood as chiefly intended to characterize
the clergy, for the great body of the laity at this time were
everywhere illiterate. A few years after the Conquest, the king
took ^ad vantage of the general illiteracy of the native clergy to
deprive great numbers of them of their benefices, and to supply
their places with foreigners. His real or his only motive for
?naking this substitution may possibly not have been that which
he avowed; but he would scarcely have alleged what was
notoriously not the fact, even as a pretence.

The Norman Conquest introduced a new state of things in
this as in most other respects. That event made England, as it
were, a part of the Continent, where, not long before, a revival
of letters had taken place scarcely less remarkable, if we take

ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING. 31

into consideration the circumstances of the time, than the next
great revolution of the same kind in the beginning of the
nfteenth century. In France, indeed, the learning that had
flourished in the time of Charlemagne had never undergone so
great a decay as had befallen that of England since the days of
Alfred. The schools planted by Alcuin and the philosophy
taught by Erigena had both been perpetuated by a line of tho
disciples and followers of these distinguished masters, which had
never been altogether interrupted. But in the tenth century
this learning of the West had met and been intermixed with a
new learning originally from the East, but obtained directly
from the Arab conquerors of Spain. The Arabs had first become
acquainted with the literature of Greece in the beginning of the
eighth century, and it instantly exercised upon their minds an
awakening influence of the same powerful kind with that with
which it again kindled Europe seven centuries afterwards. One
difference, however, between the two cases is very remarkable.
The mighty effects that arose out of the second revival of the
ancient Greek literature in the modern world were produced
almost solely by its eloquence and poetry ; but these were pre-
cisely the parts of it that were neglected by the Arabs. The
Greek books which they sought after with such extraordinary
avidity were almost exclusively those that related either to
metaphysics and mathematics on tho one hand, or to medicine,
chemistry, botany, and the other departments of physical know-
ledge, on the other. All Greek works of these descriptions that
they could procure they not only translated into their own
language, but in course of time illustrated with voluminous
commentaries. The prodigious magnitude to which this Arabic
literature eventually grew will stagger the reader who has
adopted the common notion with regard to what are called the
middle or the dark ages. '* The royal library of the Fatimites"
(sovereigns of Egypt), says Gibbon, " consisted of 100,000 mami
scripts, elegantly transcribed and splendidly bound, which were
lent, without jealousy or avarice, to the students of Cairo. Yet
this collection must appear moderate if we can believe that the
Ommiades of Spain had formed a library of 600,000 volumes,
44 of which were employed in the mere catalogues. Their
capital Cordova, with the adjacent towns of Malaga, Almeria,
Jind Murcia, had given birth to more than 300 writers, and above
70 public libraries were opened in the cities of the Andalusian
kingdom."* The difficulty we have in conceiving the existence
t'f a state of things such as that here described arises in great part
* Decline and Fall of the Rom. Emp. c. lii.

82 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

from the circumstance of the entire disappearance now, and for KO
lon«- a period, of all this Arabic power and splendour from tho
scene of European affairs. But, long extinct as it has been, the
dominion of the Arabs in Europe was no mere momentary blaze.
It lasted, with little diminution, for nearly five hundred years,
a period as long as from the age of Chaucer to the present
day, and abundantly sufficient for the growth of a body of
literature and science even of the wonderful extent that has
been described. In the tenth century Arabic Spain was the
fountain-head of learning in Europe. Thither students were
accustomed to repair from every other country to study in the
Arabic schools ; and many of the teachers in the chief towns of
France and Italy had finished their education in these semi-
naries, and were now diffusing among their countrymen the new
knowledge which they had thence acquired. The writings of
several of the Greek authors, also, and especially those of Aris-
totle, had been made generally known to scholars by Latin
versions of them made from the Arabic.

There is no trace of this new literature having found its way
to England before the Norman Conquest. But that revolution
immediately brought it in its train. " The Conqueror himself/'
observes a writer who has illustrated this subject with a pro-
fusion of curious learning, " patronized and loved letters. He
filled the bishoprics and abbacies of England with the most
learned of his countrymen, who had been educated at the
University of Paris, at that time the most flourishing school in
Europe. He placed Lanfranc, abbot of the monastery of St.
Stephen at Caen, in the see of Canterbury — an eminent master
of logic, the subtleties of which he employed with great dex-
terity in a famous controversy concerning the real presence.
Anselm, an acute metaphysician and theologian, his immediate
successor in the same see, was called from the government of the
#bbey of Bee, in Normandy. Herman, a Norman, bishop of Salis-
bury, founded a noble library in the ancient cathedral of that
"see. Many of the Norman prelates preferred in England by the
Conqueror were polite scholars. Godfrey, prior of St. Swithin's
at Winchester, a native of Cambray, was an elegant Latin epi-
grammatist, and wrote with the smartness and ease of Martial ; a
circumstance which, by the way, shows that the literature of the
monks at this period was of a more liberal cast than that which
we commonly annex to their character and profession." * Geoffrey,
also, another learned Norman, came over from the University of

* Warton's Dissertation on Introduction of Learning into England, prefixed
to History of English Poetry, p. cxii. (edit, of 1840).

ARABIC AND OTHER NEW LEARNING. 53

Paris, and established a school at Dunstable, where, according to
Matthew Paris, he composed a play, called the Play of St.
Catharine, which was acted by his scholars, dressed character-
istically in copes borrowed from the sacrist of the neighbouring
abbey of St. Albans, of which Geoffrey afterwards became abbot.
" The king himself," Warton continues, " gave no small counte-
nance to the clergy, in sending his son Henry Beauclerc to the
abbey of Abingdon, where he was initiated in the sciences under
the care of the abbot Grimbald, and Faritius, a physician of
Oxford. Kobert d'Oilly, constable of Oxford Castle, was ordered
to pay for the board of the young prince in the convent, which
the king himself frequently visited. Nor was William wanting
in giving ample revenues to learning. He founded the mag-
nificent abbeys of Battle and Selby, with other smaller convents.
His nobles and their successors co-operated with this liberal
spirit in erecting many monasteries. Herbert do Losinga, a
monk of Normandy, bishop of Thetford in Norfolk, instituted
and endowed with large possessions a Benedictine abbey at Nor-
wich, consisting of sixty monks. To mention no more instances,
such great institutions of persons dedicated to religious and
literary leisure, while they diffused an air of civility, and soft-
ened the manners of the people in their respective circles, must
have afforded powerful incentives to studious pursuits, and have
consequently added no small degree of stability to the interests
of learning."*

To this it may be added, that most of the successors of the
Conqueror continued to show the same regard for learning of
which he had set the example. Nearly all of them had them-
selves received a learned education. Besides Henry Beauclerc,
Henry II., whose father Geoffrey Plantagenet, Earl of Anjou,
was famous for his literary acquirements, had been carefully
educated under the superintendence of his admirable uncle, the
Earl of Gloucester ; and he appears to have taken care that his
children should not want the advantages he had himself enjoyed ;
for at least the three eldest, Henry, Geoffrey, and Hichard, are
all noted for their literary as well as their other accomplishments.

What learning existed, however, was still for the most part
confined to the clergy. Even the nobility — although it cannot
be supposed that they were left altogether without literary in-
struction— appear to have been very rarely initiated in any of
those branches which were considered as properly constituting
the scholarship of the times. The familiar knowledge of the

* Ibid. Some inaccuracies in Warton's account of Geoffrey and his play arc
corrected from a note by Mr. Douce.

D

34 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Latin language in particular, which was then the "key to all
other erudition, seems to have been almost exclusively confined
to churchmen, and to those few of the laity who embraced the
profession of schoolmasters, as some, at least on the Continent,
were now wont to do. The contemporary writer of a Life of
Becket relates, that when Henry II., in 1164, sent an embassy
to the Pope, in which the Earl of Arundel and three other
noblemen were associated with an archbishop, four bishops, and
three of the royal chaplains, four of the churchmen, at the
audience to which they were admitted, first delivered themselves
in as many Latin harangues ; and then the Earl of Arundel stood
up, and made a speech in English, which he began with tLe
words, " We, who are illiterate laymen, do not understand one
word of what the bishops have said to your holiness."

The notion that learning properly belonged exclusively to the
clergy, and that it was a possession in which the laity were
unworthy to participate, was in some degree the common belief
of the age, and by the learned themselves was almost universally
held as an article of faith that admitted of no dispute. Nothing
can be more strongly marked than the tone of contempt which is
expressed for the mass of the community, the unlearned vulgar,
by the scholars of this period : in their correspondence with one
another especially, they seem to look upon all beyond their own
small circle as beings of an inferior species. This pride of theirs,
however, worked beneficially upon the whole : in the first place,
it was in great part merely a proper estimation of the advantages
of knowledge over ignorance ; and, secondly, it helped to make
the man of the pen a match for him of the sword — the natural
liberator of the human race for its natural oppressor. At the
same time, it intimates very forcibly at once the comparative
rarity of the highly prized distinction, and the depth of the
darkness that still reigned far and wide around the few scattered
points of light.

SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES.

Schools and other seminaries of learning, however, were greatly
multiplied in this age, and were also elevated in their character,
in England as well as elsewhere. Both Archbishop Lanfranc
and his successor Anselm exerted themselves with great zeal in
establishing proper schools in connexion with the cathedrals and
monasteries in all parts of the kingdom ; and the object was one
which was also patronized and promoted by the general voice
of the Church. In 1179 it was ordered by the third general

SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. 35

eouncil of Lateran, that in every cathedral there should be
appointed and maintained a head teacher, or scholastic, as was
the title given to him, who, besides keeping a school of his own,
should have authority over all the other schoolmasters of the
diocese, and the sole right of granting licences, without which
no one should be entitled to teach. In former times the bishop
himself had frequently undertaken the office of scholastic of the
diocese ; but its duties were rarely efficiently performed under
tliat arrangement, and at length they seem to have come to be
generally altogether neglected. After the custom was intro-
duced of maintaining it as a distinct office, it was filled in many
cases by the most learned persons of the time. And besides
these cathedral schools there wore others established in all the
religious houses, many of which were also of high reputation.
It is reckoned that of religious houses of all kinds there were
founded no fewer than five hundred and fifty seven between the
Conquest and the death of King John ; and, besides these, there
still existed many others that had been founded in earlier times.
All these cathedral and conventual schools, however, appear to
have been intended exclusively for the instruction of persons
proposing to make the Church their profession. But mention is
also made of others established both in many of the principal
cities and even in the villages, which would seem to have been
open to the community at large ; for it may be presumed that
the laity, though generally excluded from the benefits of a
learned education, were not left wholly without the means of
obtaining some elementary instruction. Some of these city
schools, however, were eminent as institutes of the highest de-
partments of learning. One in particular is mentioned in the
History ascribed to Matthew Paris as established in the town ot
St. Albans, which was presided over by Matthew, a physician,
who had been educated at the famous school of Salerno, in Italy,
and by his nephew Garinus, who was eminent for his knowledge
of the civil and canon laws, and where we may therefore sup-
pose instructions were given both in law and in medicine.
According to the account of London by William Stephanides, or
Fitz-Stephen, written in the reign of Henry II., there were then
three of these schools of a higher order established in London,
besides several others that were occasionally opened by distin-
guished teachers. The London schools, however, do not seem
to have been academies of science and the higher learning, like
that of St. Albans : Fitz-Stephen's description would rather lead
UK to infer that, although they were attended by pupils of dif
fereut ages and degrees of proficiency, they were merely schools

36 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics. " On holidays," he says,
'4it is usual for these schools to hold public assemblies in the
churches, in which the scholars engage in demonstrative or
logical disputations, some using enthyrnems, and others perfect
syllogisms ; some aiming at nothing but to gain the victory, and
make an ostentatious display of their acuteness, while Bothers
have the investigation of truth in view. Artful sophists on
these occasions acquire great applause; some by a prodigious
inundation and flow of words, others by their specious but fal-
lacious arguments. After the disputations other scholars deliver
rhetorical declamations, in which they observe all the rules of
irt, and neglect no topic of persuasion. Even the younger boys
in the different schools contend against each other, in verse,
about the principles of grammar, and the preterites and supines
of verbs."

The twelfth century may be considered as properly the age of
the institution of what we now call Universities in Europe,
though many of the establishments that then assumed the
regular form of universities had undoubtedly existed long before
as schools or studia. This was the case with the oldest of the
European universities, with Bologna and Paris, and also, in all
probability, with Oxford and Cambridge. But it may be ques-
tioned if even Bologna, the mother of all the rest, was entitled
by any organization or constitution it had received to take a
higher name than a school or studium before the latter part of
this century. It is admitted that it was not till about the year
1200 that the school out of which the University of Paris arose
had come to subsist as an incorporation, divided into nations,
and presided over by a rector.* The University of Oxford,
properly so called, is probably of nearly the same antiquity. It
seems to have been patronized and fostered by Richard I., as
that of Paris was by his great rival, Philip Augustus. Both
Oxford and Cambridge had undoubtedly been eminent seats of
learning long before this time, as London, St. Albans, and other
cities had also been ; but there is no evidence that either the one
or the other had at an earlier date become anything more than a
great school, or even that it was distinguished by any assigned
rank or privileges above the other great schools of the kingdom.
Tn the reign of Richard I. we find the University of Oxford
lecognized as an establishment of the same kind with the
University of Paris, and as the rival of that seminary.

We have the following account of what is commonly deemed
the origin of the University of Cambridge in the continuation of
* See Crevier, Hist, de 1'Univ. de Paris, i. 255.

SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. 37

the history of Ingulphus, attributed to Peter of Blois, under the
year 1109: — " Joffrid, abbot of Croyland, sent to his manor
of Cottenham, near Cambridge, Master Gislebert, his fellow
monk, and professor of theology, with three other monks who
had followed him into England ; who, being very well instructed
in philosophical theorems and other primitive sciences, went
every day to Cambridge, and, having hired a certain public barn,
taught the sciences openly, and in a little time collected a great
concourse of scholars ; for, in the very second year after their
arrival, the number of their scholars from the town and country
increased so much that there was no house, barn, nor church
capable of containing them. For this reason they separated into
different parts of the town, and, imitating the plan of the
Studium of Orleans, brother Odo, who was eminent as a gram-
marian and satirical poet, read grammar, according to the
doctrine of Priscian and of his commentator Kemigius, to the
boys and younger students, that were assigned to him, early in
the morning. At one o'clock, brother Terricus, a most acute
sophist, read the Logic of Aristotle, according to the Intro-
ductions and Commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes,* to those
who were further advanced. At three, brother William read
lectures on Tully's Rhetoric and Quintilian's Institutions. But
Master Gislebert, being ignorant of the English, but very expert
in the Latin and French languages, preached in the several
churches to the people on Sundays and holidays." f The history
in which this passage occurs is, as will presently be shown, as
apocryphal as that of which it professes to be the continuation ;
but even if we waive the question of its authenticity, there is
here no hint of any sort of incorporation or public establishment
whatever ; the description is merely that of a school set on foot
and conducted by an association of private individuals. And
even this private school would seem to have been first opened
only in the year 1109, although there may possibly have been
other schools taught in the place before. It may be gathered
from what is added, that at the time when the account, if it was
written by Peter of Blois, must have been drawn up (the latter
part of the same century), the school founded by Gislebert and
his companions had attained to great celebrity; but there is

* The works of Averroes, however, who died in 1198, were certainly not in
existence al the time here referred to. Either Peter of Blois must have been
ignorant of this, or— if he was really the author of the statement — the name
must have been the insertion of some later transcriber of his text.

t Petri Blesensis Continuatio ad Historiam Ingulphi : in Rcrum Anglicarum
Script. Vet. : Oxon. 1G84, p. 114. The translation is that given by Henry in
his History of Britain.

S3 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

nothing to lead us to suppose that it had even then become
more than a very distinguished school. " From this little
fountain," he says, " which hath swelled into a great river, we
now behold the city of God made glad, and all England rendered
fruitful, by many teachers and doctors issuing from Cambridge,
after the likeness of the holy Paradise."

Notwithstanding, however, the rising reputation of Oxford
and Cambridge, the most ambitious of the English students con-
tinued to resort for part of their education to the more distin-
guished foreign schools during the whole of the twelfth century.
Thus, it is recorded that several volumes of the Arabian phi-
losophy were brought into England by Daniel Merlac, who,
in the year 1185, had gone to Toledo >to study mathematics.
Salerno was still the chief school of medicine, and Bologna of
law, although Oxford was also becoming famous for the latter
study. But, as a place of general instruction, the University of
Paris stood at the head of all others. Paris was then wont to be
styled, by way of pre-eminence, the City of Letters. So many
Englishmen, or, to speak more strictly, subjects of the English
crown, were constantly found among the students at this great
seminary, that they formed one of the four nations into which
the members of the university were divided. The English
students are described by their countryman, the poet Nigellus
Wireker, in the latter part of the twelfth century, in such a
manner as to show that they were already noted for that spirit
of display and expense which still makes so prominent a part of
our continental reputation : —

Moribus egregii, verbo vultuque venusti,

Ingenio pollent, consilioqne vigent ;
Dona pluunt populis, et detestantur avaros,

Fercula multiplicant, et sine lege bibunt.*

Of noble manners, gracious look and speech,
Strong sense, with genius brightened, shines in each.
Their free hand still rains largess ; when they dine
Course follows course, in rivers flows the wine.

Among the students at the University of Paris in the twelfth
century are to be found nearly all the most distinguished names
among the learned of every country. One of the teachers, the
celebrated Abelard, is said to have alone had as pupils twenty
persons who afterwards became cardinals, and more than fifty

* These verses are quoted by A. Wood, Antiq. Oxon., p. 55. The poem in
which they occur is entitled Speculum Stultorum, or sometimes Brunellua (from
its principal personage). It has been repeatedly printed.

RISE OF THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. 39

who rose to be bishops and archbishops. Thomas a Eecket
received part of his education here. Several of the most
eminent teachers were Englishmen. Among these may be par-
ticularly mentioned Robert of Melun (so called from having
first taught in that city), and Robert White, or Pullus, as he is
called in Latin. Robert of Melun, who afterwards became
bishop of Hereford, distinguished himself by the zeal and ability
with which he opposed the novel views which the rising sect of
the Nominalists were then introducing both into philosophy and
theology. He is the author of several theological treatises, none
of which, however, have been printed. Robert White, after
teaching some years at Paris, where he was attended by
crowded audiences, was induced to return to his own country,
where he is said to have read lectures on theology at Oxford for
five years, which greatly contributed to spread the renown of
that rising seminary. After having declined a bishopric offered
to him by Henry I., he went to reside at Rome in 1143, on the
invitation of Celestine II., and was soon after made a cardinal
and chancellor of the holy see. One work written by him has
been printed, a summary of theology, under the then common
title of The Book of Sentences, which has the reputation of
being distinguished by the superior correctness of its style and
the lucidness of its method.

Another celebrated name among the Englishmen who are
recorded to have studied at Paris in those days is that of Nicolas
Breakspear, who afterwards became pope by the title of Adrian
IV. But, above all others, John of Salisbury deserves to be
here mentioned. It is in his writings that we find the most
complete account that has reached us not only of the mode of
study followed at Paris, but of the entire learning of the age.

RISE OF THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.

At this time those branches of literary and scientific know-
ledge which were specially denominated the arts were considered
as divided into two great classes,— the first or more elementary
of which, comprehending Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic, was
called the Trivium ; the second, comprehending Music, Arith-
metic, Geometry, and Astronomy, the Quadrivium. The seven
arts, so classified, used to be thus enumerated in a Latin hexa-
meter : —

Lingua, Tropus, Ratio, Numerug, Tonus, Angulus, Astra;

40 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

or, with definitions subjoined, in two still more singularly con-
structed verses, —

Gram, loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Khet. verba colorat,
Mus. cadit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra.

John of Salisbury speaks of this system of the sciences as an
ancient one in his day. " The Trivium and Quadrivium," he
says, in his work entitled Metalogicus, "were so much ad-
mired by our ancestors in former ages, that they imagined they
comprehended all wisdom and learning, and were sufficient for
the solution of all questions and the removing of all difficulties ;
for whoever understood the Trivium could explain all manner of
books without a teacher ; but he who was farther advanced, and
was master also of the Quadrivium, could answer all questions
and unfold all the secrets of nature." The present age, however,
had outgrown the simplicity of this arrangement ; and various
new studies had been added to the Ancient seven, as necessaiy to
complete the circle of the sciences and the curriculum of a liberal
education.

It was now, in particular, that Theology first came to be
ranked as a science. This was the age of St. Bernard, the last of
the Fathers, and of Peter Lombard, the first of the Schoolmen.
The distinction between these two classes of writers is, that the
latter do, and the former do not, treat their subject in a system-
atizing spirit. The change was the consequence of the culti-
vation of the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. When these
studies were first introduced into the schools of the West, they
were wholly unconnected with theology. But, especially at a
time when all the learned were churchmen, it was impossible
that the great instrument of thought and reasoning could long
remain unapplied to the most important of all the subjects
of thought — the subject of religion. It has already been re-
marked that John Erigena and other Irish divines introduced
philosophy and metaphysics into the discussion of questions
of religion as early as the ninth century ; and they are conse-
quently entitled to be regarded as having first set the example
of the method afterwards pursued by the schoolmen. But,
although the influence of their writings may probably be traced
in preparing the way for the introduction of the scholastic
system, and also, afterwards, perhaps, in modifying its spirit,
that system was derived immediately, in the shape in which it
appeared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, from another
source. Erigena was a Platonist ; the spirit of his philosophy
was that of the school of Alexandria. But the first schoolmen,

CLASSICAL LEARNING.— MATHEMATICS. ai

properly so called, were Aristotelians : they drew their logic and
metaphysics originally from the Latin translations of the works of
Aristotle made from the Arabic. And they may also have been
indebted for some of their views to the commentaries of the
Arabic doctors. But, whether they took their method of phi-
losophy entirely from the ancient heathen sage, or in part from
his modern Mahomedan interpreters and illustrators, it could in
neither case have had at first any necessary or natural alliance
with Christianity. Yet it very soon, as we have said, formed
this alliance. Both Lanfranc and Anselm, although not com-
monly reckoned among the schoolmen, were imbued with the
spirit of the new learning, and it is infused throughout their
theological writings. Abelard soon after, before he was yet a
churchman, may almost be considered to have wielded it as a
weapon of scepticism. Even so used, however, religion was
still the subject to which it was applied. At last came Peter
Lombard, who, by the publication, about the middle of the twelfth
century, of his celebrated Four Books of Sentences, properly
founded the system of what is called the Scholastic Theology.
The schoolmen, from the Master of the Sentences, as Lombard
was designated, down to Francis Suarez, who died after the
commencement of the seventeenth century, were all theologians.
Although, however, religious speculation was the field of thought
upon which the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy chiefly
expended itself, there was scarcely any one of the arts or
sciences upon which it did not in some degree seize. The
scholastic logic became the universal instrument of thought and
study : every branch of human learning was attempted to be
pursued by its assistance ; and most branches were more or less
affected by its influence in regard to the forms which they
assumed.

CLASSICAL LEARNING. — MATHEMATICS. — MEDICINE. — LAW. —
BOOKS.

The classical knowledge of this period, however, was almost
confined to the Koman authors, and some of the most eminent of
these were as yet unstudied and unknown. Even John of
Salisbury, though a few Greek words are to be found in his com-
positions, seems to have had only the slightest possible acquaint-
ance with that language. Both it and the Hebrew, nevertheless,
were known to Abelard and Eloisa; and it is probable that
there were both in England and other European countries a few
students of the oriental tongues, for the acquisition of which

42 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

inducements and facilities must have been presented, not only
by the custom of resorting to the Arabic colleges in Spain, and
the constant intercourse with the East kept up by the pil-
grimages and the crusades, but also by the numbers of learned
Jews that were everywhere to be found. In England the Jews
had schools in London, York, Lincoln, Lynn, Norwich, Oxford,
Cambridge, and other towns, which appear to have been attended
by Christians as well as by those of their own persuasion. Some
of these seminaries, indeed, were rather colleges than schools.
Besides the Hebrew and Arabic languages, arithmetic and me-
dicine are mentioned among the branches of knowledge that
were taught in them ; and the masters were generally the most
distinguished of the rabbis. In the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, the age of Sarchi, the Kimchis, Mairnonides, and other
distinguished names, rabbinical learning was in an eminently
flourishing state.

There is no certain evidence that the Arabic numerals were yet
known in Europe : they certainly were not in general use.
Although the Elements of Euclid and other geometrical works
had been translated into Latin from the Arabic, the mathematical
sciences appear to have been but little ^studied. " The science of
demonstration," says John of Salisbury, in his Metalogicus,
"is of all others the most difficult, and alas ! is almost quite
neglected, except by a very few who apply to the study of the
mathematics, and particularly of geometry. But this last is at
present very little attended to amongst us, and is only studied
by some persons in Spain, Egypt, and Arabia, for the sake of
astronomy. One reason of this is, that those parts of the works
of Aristotle that relate to the demonstrative sciences are so ill
translated, and so incorrectly transcribed, that we meet with
insurmountable difficulties in every chapter." The name of the
mathematics at this time, indeed, was chiefly given to the science
of astrology. " Mathematicians," says Peter of Blois, " are those
who, from the position of the stars, the aspect of the firmament,
and the motions of the planets, discover things that are to come."
Astronomy, however, or the true science of the stars, which was
zealously cultivated by the Arabs in the East and in Spain,
eeems also to have had some cultivators among the learned of
Christian Europe. Latin translations existed of several Greek
and Arabic astronomical works. In the History attributed to
Ingulphus, is the following curious description of a sort of
scheme or representation of the planetary system called the
Nadir, which is stated to have been destroyed when the abbey of
Croyland was burnt in 1091 : " We then lost a most beautiful an<i

MEDICINE AND LAW. 43

precious table, fabricated of different kinds of metals, according to
the variety of the stars and heavenly signs. Saturn was of copper,
Jupiter of gold, Mars of iron, the Sun of latten, Mercury of amber,
Venus of tin, the Moon of silver. The eyes were charmed, as
well as the mind instructed, by beholding the colure circles, with
the zodiac and all its signs, formed with wonderful art, of metals
and precious stones, according to their several natures, forms,
figures, and colours. It was the most admired and celebrated
Nadir in all England." These last words would seem to imply
that such tables were then not uncommon. This one, it is stated,
had been presented to a former abbot of Croyland by a king of
France.

John of Salisbury, in his account of his studies at Paris, makes
no mention either of medicine or of law. \Vith regard to the
former, indeed, he elsewhere expressly tells us that the Parisians
themselves used to go to study it at Salerno and Montpellier.
By the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, we find a
school of medicine established at Paris, which soon became very
celebrated. Of course there were, at an earlier date, persons who
practised the medical art in that city. The physicians in all the
countries of Europe at this period were generally churchmen.
Many of the Arabic medical works were early translated into
Latin ; but the Parisian professors soon began to publish treatises
on the art of their own. The science of the physicians of this
age, besides comprehending whatever was to be learned respect-
ing the diagnostics and treatment of diseases from Hippocrates,
Galen, and the other ancient writers, embraced a considerable
body of botanical and chemical knowledge. Chemistry in par-
ticular the Arabs had carried far beyond the point at which it
had been left by the ancients. Of anatomy little could as yet be
accurately known, while the dissection of the human subject was
not practised. Yet it would appear that physicians and surgeons
were already beginning to be distinguished from each other.
Both the canon and civil laws were also introduced into the
routine of study at the University of Paris soon after the time
when John of Salisbury studied there. The canon law was
originally considered to be a part of theology, and only took the
form of a separate study after the publication of the systematic
compilation of it called the Decretum of Gratian, in 1151.
Gratian was a monk of Bologna, and his work, not the first
collection of the kind, but the most complete and the best-
arranged that had yet been compiled, was immediately introduced
as a text-book in that university. It may be regarded as having
laid the foundation of the science of the canon law, in the sanio

4i ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

manner as the system of the scholastic philosophy was founded by
Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences. Kegular lecturers upon it
very soon appeared at Orleans, at Paris, at Oxford, and all the
other chief seats of learning in western Christendom ; and before
the end of the twelfth century no other study was more eagerly
pursued, or attracted greater crowds of students, than that of the
canon law. One of its first and most celebrated teachers at
Paris was Girard la Pucelle, an Englishman, who afterwards
became bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Girard taught the
canon law in Paris from 1160 to 1177 ; and, in consideration of
his distinguished merits and what was deemed the great im-
portance of his instructions, he received from Pope Alexander III.
letters exempting him from the obligation of residing on his
preferments in England while he was so engaged ; this being, it
is said, the first known example of such a privilege being
granted to any professor.* The same professors who taught the
canon law taught also, along with it, the civil law, the syste-
matic study of which, likewise, took its rise in this century, and
at the University of Bologna, where the Pandects of Justinian, of
which a more perfect copy than had before been known is said
to have been found in 1137 at Amalfi,'f were arranged and first
lectured upon by the German Irnerius, — the Lamp of the Law,
as he was called, — about the year 1150. Both the canon and
the civil law, however, are said to have been taught a few years
before this time at Oxford by Eoger, surnamed the Bachelor, a
monk of Bee, in Normandy. The study was, from the first,
vehemently opposed by the practitioners of the common law;
but, sustained by the influence of the Church, and eventually also
favoured by the government, it rose above all attempts to put it
down. John of Salisbury affirms that, by the blessing of God,
the more it was persecuted the more it flourished. Peter oi
Blois, in one of his letters, gives us the following curious account
of the ardour with which it was pursued under the superintend-
ence of Archbishop Theobald : — "In the house of my master,
the Archbishop of Canterbury, there are several very learned
men, famous for their knowledge of law and politics, who spend
the time between prayers and dinner in lecturing, disputing,
and debating causes. To us all the knotty questions of the

* Crevier, Hist, de 1'Univ. de Paris, i. 244.

,. t " ^he discovery of the Pandects at Amalfi," says Gibbon, « is first noticed
(in 1501) by Ludovicus Bologninus, on the faith of a Pisan Chronicle, without
a name or date. The whole story, though unknown to the twelfth century,
embellished by ignorant ages, and suspected by rigid criticism, is not however
destitute of much internal probability."

BOOKS. 45

kingdom are referred, which are produced in the common hall,
and every one in his order, having first prepared himself, de-
clares, with all the eloquence and acuteness of which he is
capable, but without wrangling, what is wisest and safest to be
done. If God suggests the soundest opinion to the youngest
amongst us, we all agree to it without envy or detraction."*

Study in every department must have been still greatly im-
peded by the scarcity and high price of books ; but their multi-
plication now went on much more rapidly than it had formerly
done. We have already noticed the immense libraries said to
have been accumulated by the Arabs, both in their oriental and
European seats of empire. No collections to bo compared with
these existed anywhere in Christian Europe ; but, of the numerous
monasteries that were planted in every country, few were with-
out libraries of greater or less extent. A convent without a
library, it used to be proverbially said, was like a castle without
an armoury. When the monastery of Croyland was burnt in
1091, its library, according to Ingulphus, consisted of 900
volumes, of which 300 were very large. " In every great
abbey," says Warton, " there was an apartment called the Scrip-
torium; whore many writers were constantly busied in tran-
scribing not only the service-books for the choir, but books for
the library. The Scriptorium of St. Albans abbey was built by
Abbot Paulin, a Norman, who ordered many volumes to be
written there, about the year 1080. Archbishop Lanfranc fur-
nished the copies. Estates were often granted for the support
of the Scriptorium. ... I find some of the classics written in the
English monasteries very early. Henry, a Benedictine monk of
Hyde Abbey, near Winchester, transcribed in the year 1178
Terence, Boethius, Suetonius, and Claudian. Of these he formed
one book, illuminating the initials, and forming the brazen
bosses of the covers with his own hands." Other instances of
the same kind are added. The monks were much accustomed
both to* illuminate and to bind books, as well as to transcribe
them. " The scarcity of parchment," it is afterwards observed,
" undoubtedly prevented the transcription of many other books
in these societies. About the year 1120, one Master Hugh,
being appointed by the convent of St. Edmondsbury, in Suffolk,
to write and illuminate a grand copy of the Bible for their
library, could procure no parchment for this purpose in Eng-
land." f Paper made of cotton, however, was certainly in com-
mon use in the twelfth century, though no evidence exists that

* Ep. vi., as translated in Henry's History of Britain.
t In trod, of Learning into England, p cxvi.

iC ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

that manufactured from linen rags was known till about tlio
middle of the thirteenth.

THE LATIN LANGUAGE.

During the whole of the Anglo-Norman period, and down to a
much later date, in England as in the other countries of Christen-
dom, the common language of literary composition, in all works
intended for the perusal of the educated classes, was still the
Latin, the language of religion throughout the western world, as
it had been from the first ages of the Church. Christianity had
not only, through its monastic institutions, saved from destruc-
tion, in the breaking up of the Eoman empire, whatever we
still possess of ancient literature, but had also, by its priesthood
and its ritual, preserved the language of Kome in some sort still
a living and spoken tongue — corrupted indeed by the introduc-
tion of many new and barbarous terms, and illegitimate accepta-
tions, and by much bad taste in style and phraseology, but still
wholly unchanged in its grammatical forms, and even in its
vocabulary much less altered than it probably would have been
if it had continued all the while to be spoken and written by an
unmixed Eoman population. It would almost seem as if, even
in the Teutonic countries, such as England, the services of the
church, uninterruptedly repeated in the same words since the
first ages, had kept up in the general mind something of a dim
traditionary understanding of the old imperial tongue. We read
of some foreign ecclesiastics, who could not speak English, being
accustomed to preach to the people in Latin. A passage quoted
above from the Croyland History seems to imply that Gislebert,
or Gilbert, one of the founders of the University of Cambridge,
used to employ Latin as well as French on such occasions. So,
Giraldus Cambrensis tells us that, in a progress which he made
through Wales in 1186, to assist Archbishop Baldwin in preach-
ing a new crusade for the delivery of the Holy Land, ne was
always most successful when he appealed to the people in a
Latin sermon ; he asserts, indeed, that they did not understand a
word of it, although it never failed to melt them into tears, and
to make them come in crowds to take the cross. No doubt they
were acted upon chiefly through their ears and their imaginations,
and for the most part only supposed that they comprehended
what they were listening to ; but it is probable that their self-
deception was assisted by their catching a word or phrase here
and there the meaning of which they really understood. The
Latin tongue must in those days have been heard in common life

LATIN CHRONICLERS. 47

on a thousand occasions from which it has now passed away. It
^as the language of all the learned professions, of law and physio
as well as of divinity, in all their grades. It was in Latin that
the teachers at the Universities (many of whom, as well as of tho
ecclesiastics, were foreigners) delivered their prelections in all
the sciences, and that all the disputations and other exercises
among the students were carried on. It was the same at all the
monastic schools and other seminaries of learning. The number
of persons by whom these various institutions were attended was
very great : they were of all ages from boyhood to advanced
manhood; and poor scholars must have been found in every
village, mingling with every class of the people, in some one or
other of the avocations which they followed in the intervals of
their attendance at the Universities, or after they had finished
their education, from parish priests down to wandering beggars.

LATIN CHRONICLERS.

By far the most valuable portion of our Latin literature of
this age consists of the numerous historical works which it has
bequeathed to us. These works have a double interest for the
English reader, belonging to the country and the age in which
they were written by their subject as well as by their authorship.
All that we can do here, however, is to enumerate the principal
collections that have been made in modern times of our old Latin
historians or chroniclers : —

1. Rerum Britannioarum, id est, Angliae, Scotiae, Vicinarumque
Insularum ac Regionum, Scriptores Vetustiores ac Praecipui : (a
HIER. COMMKLINO). Fol. Heidelb. & Lugd. 1587.

2. Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam Prsecipui, ex
Vetustissimis MSS. nunc primum in Imcem editi : (a HEN. SAVILE).
Fol. Lon. 1596, and Francof. 1601.

3. Anglica, Nonnannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a veteribus
Scripta, ex Bibl. GUOJELMI CAMDENI. Fol. Francof. 1602 and
1603.

4. Historic Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui ; studio ANDREW
BCCHESNE. Fol. Paris. 1619.

5. Historic Anglican® Scriptores Decem, ex vetustis MSS,
nunc primum in lucem editi : (a Roo. TWYSDEN et JOAN. SELDEN),
Fol. Lon. 1652.

6. Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Veterum Tomus I""*;
Quorum Ingulfus nunc primum integer, ceteri nunc primum,
prodeunt : (a JOAN. FELL, vel potius GUL. FULM AN). Fol. Oiou

48 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

1684. (Sometimes incorrectly cited as the 1st vol. of Gale's
Collection.)

7. Historic Anglicanae Scriptores Quinque, ex vetustis Codd.
MSS. nunc primum in lucem editi : (a THOM. GALE). Fol. Oxon.
1687. (This is properly the 2nd vol. of Gale's Collection.)

8. Historic Britannicse, Saxonicae, Anglo-Danicae, Scriptores
Quindecim, ex vetustis Codd. MSS. editi, opera THOM.E GALK.
Fol. Oxon. 1691. (This is properly the 1st vol. of Gale's Col-
lection, though often cited as the 3rd.)

9. Anglia Sacra ; sive Collectio Historiarum . . . de Archie-
piscopis et Episcopis Angliae; (a HENRICO WHARTON). 2 Tom.
Fol. Lon. 1691.

10. Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Varii, e Codd. MSS. nunc
primum editi : (a Jos. SPARKE). Fol. Lon. 1723.

11. Historiae Anglicanae circa tempus Conquestus Angliae a
Guilielmo Notho, Normannorum Duce, selecta Monumenta ;
excerpta ex volumine And. Duchesne ; cum Notis, &c. : (a
FRANCISCO MASERES). 4to. Lon. 1807.

12. Monumenta Historica Britannica; or, Materials for the
History of Britain from the earliest period to the end of the reign
of King Henry VII. Published by command of her Majesty.
Vol. 1st (extending to the Norman Conquest). Fol. Lon. 1848.
(By PETRIE, SHARPE, and HARDY.)

To which may be added : —

13. The series of works printed by the HISTORICAL SOCIETY,
from 1838 to 1856, extending to 29 vols. 8vo. ; and,

14. The series entitled Rerum Britannicarum Medii JEvi
Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and
Ireland during the Middle Ages. Published by authority of
her Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of
the Rolls. 8vo. Lon. 1857, &c.

THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN ENGLAND.

It is commonly asserted that for some reigns after the Norman
Conquest the exclusive language of government and legislation
in England was the French,— that all pleadings, at least in the
supreme courts, were carried on in that language, — and that in
it all deeds were drawn up and all laws promulgated. " This
popular notion," observes a late learned writer, "cannot bo

easily supported Before the reign of Henry III. we cannot

discover a deed or law drawn or composed in French. Instead
of prohibiting the English language, it was employed by the
Conqueror and his successors in their charters until the reign

THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN ENGLAND. 49

of Henry II., when it was superseded, not by the French but
by the Latin language, which had been gradually gaining, or
rather regaining, ground ; for the charters anterior to Alfred are
invariably in Latin."* So far was the Conqueror from showing
any aversion to the English language, or making any such
attempt as is ascribed to him to effect its abolition, that, accord
ing to Ordericus Vitalis, when he first came over he strenuously
applied himself to learn it for the special purpose of under-
standing, without the aid of an interpreter, the causes that were
pleaded before him, and persevered in that endeavour till the
tumult of many other occupations, and what the historian calls
" durior aetas " — a more iron time f — of necessity compelled him
to give it up.J The common statement rests on the more than
suspicious authority of the History attributed to Ingulphus, the
fabricator of which, in his loose and ignorant account of the
matter, has set down this falsehood along with some other things
that are true or probable. Even before the Conquest, the Con-
fessor himself, according to this writer, though a native of
England, yet, from his education and long residence in Nor-
mandy, had become almost a Frenchman ; and when ho suc-
ceeded to the English throne he brought over with him great
numbers of Normans, whom he advanced to the highest dignities
in the church and the state. " Wherefore," it is added, " the
whole land began, under the influence of the king and the other
Normans introduced by him, to lay aside the English customs,
and to imitate the manners of the French in many things ; for
example, all the nobility in their courts began to speak French
as a great piece of gentility, to draw up their charters and other
writings after the French fashion, and to grow ashamed of their
old national habits in these and many other parti culars."§
Further on we are told, •' They [the Normans] held the language
[of the natives] in such abhorrence that the laws of the land and
the statutes 01 the English kings were drawn out in the Gallic
[or French] tongue ; and to boys in the schools the elements of
grammar were taught in French and not in English ; even the
English manner of writing was dropped, and the French manner
introduced in all charters and books."|| The facts are more
correctly given by other old writers, who, although not con-

* Sir Francis Palgrave, Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth,
? ol. i. p. 56.

t Quid nos dura refugimus aetas? — Hor. Od. i. 35.

i Kxcerpta ex Libro iv. Orderici Vitalis, p. 247 ; edit. Mast res.

§ lugalpki Historia, in Savile, 895; or in Fulman, 62. The translation,
which is sufficiently faithful, is Henry's.

(I I'l. Savi'e, 901 : Fulman. 71

r,o ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

temporary with the Conquest, are probably of as early^a date as
the compiler of the Croyland History. The Dominican friar
Robert Holcot, writing in the earlier part of the fourteenth cen-
tury, informs us that there was then no institution of children in
the old English — that the first language they learned was the
French, and that through that tongue they were afterwards
taught Latin ; and he adds that this was a practice which had
been introduced at the Conquest, and which had continued ever
since.* About the middle of the same century Eanulf Higden,
in his Polychronicon, says, as the passage is translated by
Trevisa, " This apayringe (impairing) of the birthe tonge is by
cause of tweye thinges ; oon is for children in scole, aghenes
(against) the usage and maner of alle other naciouns, beth (be)
compelled for to leve her (their) owne langage, and for to con-
strewe her lessouns and her thingis a Frensche, and haveth siththe
(have since) that the Normans come first into England. Also
gentil mennes children beth y taught (be taught) for to epeke
Frensche from the time that thei beth rokked in her cradel, ana
cunneth (can) speke and playe with a childes brooche ; and
uplondish (rustic) men wol likne hem self (will liken them-
selves) to gentilmen, and fondeth (are fond) with grete bisy-
nesse for to speke Frensche, for to be the more ytold of."t
The teachers in the schools, in fact, were generally, if not uni-
versally, ecclesiastics ; and the Conquest had Normanized the
church quite as much as the state. Immediately after that
revolution great numbers of foreigners were brought over, both
to serve in the parochial cures and to fill the monasteries that
now began to multiply so rapidly. These churchmen must have
been in constant intercourse with the people of all classes in
various capacities, not only as teachers of youth, but as the
instructors of their parishioners from the altar, and as holding
daily and hourly intercourse with them in all the relations that
subsist between pastor and flock. They probably in this way
diffused their own tongue throughout the land of their adoption
to a greater extent than is commonly suspected. We shall have
occasion, as we proceed, to mention some facts which would
seem to imply that in the twelfth century the French language
was very generally familiar to the middle classes in England, at
least in the great towns. It was at any rate the only language
spoken for some ages after the Conquest by our kings, and not

* Lect. in Libr. Sapient. Lect. ii., 4to. Paris, 1518 ; as referred to by
Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry, i. 5.

f Quoted from MS.Harl. 1900, by Tyrwhitt, in Essay on the Language and
Versification of Chaucer, prefixed to his edition of the faanterburv Tales.

THE FRENCH LANG CAGE IN ENGLAND. 51

only by nearly all the nobility, but by a large proportion even
of the inferior landed proprietors, most of whom also were of
Norman birth or descent. Ritson, in his rambling, incoherent
Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy, prefixed to his
Ancient English Metrical Romances, has collected, but not in
the most satisfactory manner, some of the evidence we have
as to the speech of the first Norman kings. He does not
notice what Ordericus Vitalis tells us of the Conqueror's meri-
torious attempt, which does not seem, however, to have been
more successful than such experiments on the part of grown-up
gentlemen usually are ; so that he may be allowed to be correct
enough in the assertion with which he sets out, that we have no
infonnation " that William the Bastard, his son Kufus, his
daughter Maud, or his nephew Stephen, did or could speak the
Anglo-Saxon or English language." Reference is then made to
a story told in what is called Bromton's Chronicle respecting
Henry II., which, however, is not very intelligible in all its
parts, though Ritson has slurred over the difficulties. As
Henry was passing through Wales, the old chronicler relates,
on his return from Ireland in the spring of 1172, he found him-
self on a Sunday at the castle of Cardiff, and stopped there to
hear mass ; after which, as he was proceeding to mount his
horse to be off again, there presented itself before him a some-
what singular apparition, a, man with red hair and a round
tonsure,* lean and tall, attired in a white tunic and barefoot,
who, addressing him in the Teutonic tongue, began, " Gode
Olde Kinge/'f and proceeded to deliver a command from Christ,
as he said, and his mother, from John the Baptist and Peter,
that he should suffer no traffic or servile works to be done
throughout his dominions on the sabbath-day, except only such
as pertained to the use of food ; " which command, if thou
observest," concluded the speaker, " whatever thou mayest
undertake thou shalt happily accomplish." The king immedi-
ately, speaking in French, desired the soldier who held the
bridle of his horse to ask the rustic if he had dreamed all this.
The soldier made the inquiry, as desired, in English ; and then,
it is added, the man replied in the same language as before, and
addressing the king said, " Whether I have dreamed it or no,

* Tonsura rotunda. Scriptpres Decem, 1079. The epithet would seem to
imply that there were still in Wales some priests of the ancient British
Church who retained the old national crescent-shaped tonsure, now deemed
heretical.

t Henry and his son of the same name were commonly distinguished as the
Old and the Young King from the date of the coronation of the latter (whon
his father survived) in 1170.

52 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

mark this day ; for, unless thou shalt do what I have told thee,
and amend thy lifo, thou shalt within a year's time hear such
news as thou shalt mourn to the day of thy death." And, having
so spoken, the man vanished out of sight. With the calamities
which of course ensued to the doomed king we have here nothing
to do. Although the chronicler reports only the three com-
mencing words of the prophet's first address in what he calls the
Teutonic tongue, there can be no doubt, we conceive, that the
rest, though here translated into Latin, was also delivered in the
same Teutonic (by which, apparently, can only have been meant
the vernacular English, or what is commonly called Saxon). The
man would not begin his speech in one language, and then sud-
denly break away into another. But, if this was the case,
Henry, from his reply, would appear to have understood English,
though he might not be able to speak it. The two languages,
thus subsisting together, were probably both understood by
many of those who could only speak one of them. We have
another evidence of this in the fact of the soldier, as we have
seen, speaking English and also understanding the king's French.
It is, we suppose, merely so much affectation or bad rhetoric in
the chronicler that makes him vary his phrase for the same
thing from " the Teutonic tongue " (Teutonica lingua) in one place
to " English" (Anglice) in another, and immediately after to
"the former language" (lingua priori) ; for the words which he
gives as Teutonic are English words, and, when Henry desired
the soldier to address the priest in English and the soldier did
so, it must have been because that was the language in which he
had addressed the king.*

" King Eichard," Bitson proceeds, " is never known to have
uttered a single English word, unless one may rely on the
evidence of Robert Mannyng for the express words, when, of
Isaac King of Cyprus, '0 dele,' said the king, 'this is a fole
Breton.' The latter expression seems proverbial, whether it
alludes to the Welsh or to the Armoricans, because Isaac was
neither by birth, though he might be both by folly. Many great
nobles of England, in this century, were utterly ignorant of the
English language." As an instance, he mentions the case, before
noticed by Tyrwhitt, of William Longchamp, bishop of Ely,

* A somewhat different view of this story is taken by Mr. Luders in hia
tract On the Use of the French Language in our ancient Laws and Acts of
State. (Tracts on Various Subjects, p. 400.) He remarks : " The author does
not tell why the ghost spoke German to the king in Wales, or how this
German became all at once good English ; nor how it happened that tho
groom addressed the German ghost in English." Mr. Luders, therefore, un-
derstands "the Teutonic tongue " to mean, not English, but German.

THE LANGUE DOC AND THE LANGUE D'OYL. 53

chancellor and prime minister to Richard I., who, according to a
remarkable account in a letter of his contemporary Hugh bishop
of Coventry, preserved by Hoveden, did not know a word of
English.* The only fact relating to this subject in connexion
with John or his reign that Eitson brings forward, is the speech
which that king's ambassador, as related by Matthew Paris, made
to the King of Morocco : — " Our nation is learned in three idioms,
that is to say, Latin, French, and English." f This would go to
support the conclusion that both the French and the Latin
languages were at this time not unusually spoken by persons of
education in England.

THE LANGUE n'Oc AND THE LANGUE D'OYL.

French as well as Latin was at least extensively employed
among us in literary composition. The Gauls, the original
inhabitants of the country now called France, were a Celtic
people, and their speech was a dialect of the same great
primitive tongue which probably at one time prevailed over
the whole of Western Europe, and is still vernacular in
Ireland, in Wales, and among the Highlanders of Scotland.
After the country became a Homan province this ancient
language gradually gave place to the Latin ; which, how-
ever, here as elsewhere, soon became corrupted in the mouths
of a population mixing it with their own barbarous vocables
and forms, or at least divesting it of many of its proper charac-
teristics in their rude appropriation of it. But, as different
depraving or obliterating influences operated in different cir-
cumstances, and a variety of kinds of bad Latin were thus
produced in the several countries which had been provinces of
the empire, so even within the limits of Gaul there grew up
two such distinct dialects, one in the south, another in the north.
All these forms of bastard Latin, wherever they arose, whether

* Linguam Anglicanam prorsus ignorabat. — Hoveden, 704. Ritson, omitting
all mention either of Hoveden or Tyrwhitt, chooses to make a general refer-
ence to the chronicle called Bromton's, a later compilation, the author of
which (vide col. 1227) has quietly appropriated Bishop Hugh's Letter, and
made it part of his narrative.

t This was a secret mission despatched by John, the historian tells us, in
1213, "ad Admiralium Munnelium, regom magnum Aphrica?, Marrochia% et
HispaniaB, quern vulgus Miramumelinum vocat. ' The words used by Thomas
HttdingtOD, the one of the three commissioners selected, on account of his
superior gift of eloquence, to be spokesman, were " Gens nostra speciosa et
ingeniosa tribus pellet idiomatibus erudita, scilicet Latino, Gallico, ol An*
glico."— Mutt. Paris, 243.

{# ENGLISH LITERATDKfi AND LANGUAGE.

in Italy, in Spain, or in Gaul, were known "by the common name
of Eoman, or Eomance, languages, or the Kustic Eoman (Eomana
Eustica), and were by that generic term distinguished from the
barbarian tongues, or those that had been spoken by the Celtic,
German, and other uncivilized nations before they came into
communication with the Eomans. From them have sprung
what are called the Latin languages of modern Europe— tho
Italian, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, as well as what we now
denominate the French. The Eomance spoken in the south of
Gaul appears to have been originally nearly, if not altogether,
identical with that spoken in the north-east of Spain ; and it
always preserved a close resemblance and affinity to that and the
other Eomance dialects of Spain and Italy. It is in fact to be
accounted a nearer relation of the Spanish and Italian than of
the modern French. The latter is exclusively the offspring of
the Eomance of northern Gaul, which, both during its first
growth and subsequently, was acted upon by different influences
from those which modified the formation of the southern tongue.
It is probable that whatever it retained of the Celtic ingredient
to begin with was, if not stronger or of larger quantity than
what entered into the Eomance dialect of the south, at any rate
of a somewhat different character; but the peculiar form it
eventually assumed may be regarded as having been mainly
owing to the foreign pressure to which it was twice afterwards
exposed, first by the settlement of the Franks in the north and
north-east of Gaul in the fifth century (while the Visigoths and
Burgundians had spread themselves over the south), and again
by that of the Normans in the north-west in the tenth. What
may have been the precise nature or amount of the effect pro-
duced upon the Eomance tongue of Northern Gaul by either or
both of these Teutonic occupations of the country, it is not
necessary for our present purpose to inquire ; it is sufficient to
observe that that dialect could not fail to be thereby peculiarly
affected, and its natural divergence from the southern Eomance
materially aided and promoted. The result, in fact, was that
the two dialects became two distinct languages, differing from
one another more than any two other of 'the Latin languages did
— the Italian, for example, from the Spanish, or the Spanish
from the Portuguese, and even more than the Eomance of the
south of Gaul differed from that either of Italy or of Spain.
This southern Eomance, it only remains further to be observed,
came in course of time to be called the Provencal tongue ; but
it does not appear to have received this name till, in the begin-
ning of the twelfth century, the county of Provence had fallen

THE LANGUE D'OC AND THE LANGUE D'OYL 55

to be inherited by Raymond Berenger, Count of Catalonia, who
thereupon transferred his court to Aries, and made that town the
centre and chief seat of the literary cultivation which had
previously flourished at Barcelona. There had been poetry
written in the Romance of Southern Gaul before this ; but it
was not till now that the Troubadours, as the authors of that
poetry called themselves, rose into much celebrity ; and hence it
has been maintained, with great appearance of reason, that what
is best or most characteristic about the Prove^al poetry is really
not of French but of Spanish origin. In that case the first
inspiration may probably have been caught from the Arabs.
The greater part of Provence soon after passed into the possession
of the Counts of Toulouse, and the Troubadours flocked to that
city. But the glory of the Provencal tongue did not last alto-
gether for much more than a century ; and then, when it had
ceased to be employed in poetry and literature, and had declined
into a mere provincial patois, it and the northern French
were wont to be severally distinguished by the names of
the Langue d'Oo (sometimes called by modern writers the
Occitanian) and the Langue d'Oyl, from the words for yes, which
were oc in the one, and oyl, afterwards oy or out, in the other.
Dante mentions them by these appellations, and with thia
explanation, in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquio, written in the end
of the thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century ; and one
of them still gives its name to the great province of Languedoc,
where the dialect formerly so called yet subsists as the popular
speech, though, of course, much changed and debased from what
it was in the days of its old renown, when it lived on the lips of
rank and genius and beauty, and was the favourite vehicle of love
and song.

The Langue d'Oyl, on the other hand, formerly spoken only to
the north of the Loire, has grown up into what we now call the
French language, and has become, at least for literary purposes,
and ior all the educated classes, the established language of the
whole country. Some fond students of the remains of the other
dialect have deplored this result as a misfortune to France, which
they contend would have had a better modern language and lite-
rature if the Langue d'Oc, in the contest between the two, had
prevailed over the Langue d'Oyl. It is probable, indeed, that
accident and political circumstances have had more to do in
determining the matter as it has gone than the merits of the
case ; but in every country as well as in France — in Spain, in
Italy, in Germany, in England — some other of the old popular
dialects than the one that has actually acquired the ascendancy

56 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

has in like manner had its enthusiastic reclaimers against the
unjust fortune which has condemned it to degradation or
oblivion ; and we may suspect that the partiality which the
mind is apt to acquire for whatever it has made the subject of
long investigation and study, especially if it be something which
has been generally neglected, and perhaps in some instances a
morbid sympathy with depression and defeat, which certain
historical and philosophical speculators have in common with
the readers and writers of sentimental novels, are at the bottom
of much of this unavailing and purposeless lamentation. The
question is one which we have hardly the means of solving, even
if any solution of it which might now be attainable could have
any practical effect. The Langue d'Oyl is now unalterably esta-
blished as the French language ; the Langue d'Oc is, except as a
local patois, irrecoverably dead. Nor are there wanting French
archaeologists, quite equal in knowledge of the subject to their
opponents, who maintain that in this there is nothing to regret,
but the contrary — that the northern Eomance tongue was as
superior to the southern intrinsically as it has proved in fortune,
and that its early literature was of far higher value and promise
than the Provencal.*

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE : — A.D. 1066 — 1216.

From the Norman Conquest to the termination of the reign of
the seventh Norman sovereign, King John, is almost exactly a
century and a half, even to a day. The victory of Hastings was
gained on the 14th of October, 1066, and John died on the 19th
of October, 1216. His death, happening at the time it did, was
probably an event of the greatest importance. The political con
stitution, or system of government, established by the Conquest,
— a system of pure monarchy or absolutism — had been formally
brought to an end the year before by the grant of the Great
Charter wrung from the crown by the baronage, which at any
rate tempered the monarchical despotism by the introduction of
the aristocratic element into the theory of the constitution ; but

* What has come to be called the French tongue, it may be proper to
notice, has no relationship whatever to that of the proper French, or Franks,
who were a Teutonic people, speaking a purely Teutonic language, resembling
the German, or more nearly the Flemish. This old Teutonic French, which
the Franks continued to speak for several centuries after their conquest of
Gaul, is denominated by philologists the Prankish, or Frantic. The modern
French, which is a Latin tongue, has come to be so called from the accident
of the country in which it was spoken having been conquered by the French
or Franks — the conquerors, as in other cases, in course of time adopting tho
language of the conquered, and bestowing upon it their own name.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 57

this might have proved little more than a theoretical or nominal
innovation if John had lived. His death, and the non-age of
his son and heir, left the actual management of affairs in the
hands of those by whom the constitutional reform had been
brought about ; and that reform became a practical reality. At
the least, its legal character and authority never were disputed ;
no attempt ever was made to repeal it ; on the contrary it was
ratified no less than six times in the single reign of Henry III.,
John's successor ; and it has retained its proper place at tho
head of the Statute Book down to onr own day. Its proper
place ; for it is indeed our first organic law, the true commencement
or foundation-stone, of the constitution. Before it there was no
mechanism in our political system, no balance of forces or play of
counteracting elements and tendencies ; nothing but the sort of
life and movement that may belong to a stone or a cannon-ball
or any other mere mass. The royal power was all in all. With
the Charter, and the death of the last despotic king, from whom
it was extorted, begins another order of things both political and
social. It may be likened to the passing away of the night and
the dawning of a new day. In particular, the Charter may be
said to have consummated by a solemn legislative fiat the blend-
ing and incorporation of the two races, the conquerors and the
conquered, which had been actively going on without any such
sanction, and under the natural influence of circumstances only,
throughout the preceding half-century, — having commenced,
we may reckon, perhaps, half a century earlier, or about the
middle of the reign of Henry I. There is, at least, not a word
in this law making the least reference to any distinction between
the two races. Both are spoken of throughout only as English ;
the nation is again recognized as one, as fully as it had been
before either William the Norman or Canute the Dane.

We have thus four successive periods of about half a century
each : — The first, from the Danish to the Norman Conquest, —
half English, half Danish ; the Second, from the Norman Con-
quest to the middle of the reign of Henry I., in which the sub-
jugated English and their French or Norman rulers were com-
pletely divided ; the Third and Fourth extending to the date of
Magna Charta, and presenting, the former the comparatively
slow, the latter the accelerated, process of the intermixture and
fusion of the two races. Some of our old chroniclers would
make the third half-century also, as well as the first and second,
to have been inaugurated by a great constitutional or political
event: as the year 1016 is memorable for the Danish and the
year 1066 for the Norman Conquest, so in 1116, wo are told by

58 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Stow, " on the 19th day of April, King Henry called a council
of all the States of his realm, both of the Prelates, Nobles, and
Commons, to Salisbury, there to consult for the good government
of the Commonwealth, and the weighty affairs of the same, which
council, taking the name and fame of the French, is called a Par-
liament ;" " and this," he adds, " do the historiographers note to
be the first Parliament in England, and that the kings before
that time were never wont to call any of their Commons or
people to council or lawmaking." This theory of the origin of
our parliamentary government must, indeed, be rejected;* but
the year 1116 will still remain notable as that in which Henry,
reversing what had been done fifty years before, crossed the sea
with an army of English to reduce his ancestral Normandy, or
prevent it from falling into the hands of the son of his unfortu-
nate elder brother. Even the next stage, half a century further
on, when we have supposed the amalgamation of the two races to
have assumed its accelerated movement, may be held to be less
precisely indicated by such events as the appointment of Becket,
said to be the first Englishman since the Conquest promoted to
high office either in the Church or the State, to the archbishopric
of Canterbury in 1161, — the enactment in 1164 of the Constitu-
tions of Clarendon, by which the clergy, a body essentially
foreign in feeling and to a great extent even of foreign birth,
were brought somewhat more under subjection to the law of the
land — and the Conquest of Ireland in 1172, to the vast exalta-
tion of the English name and power.

What was the history of the vernacular language for this first
century and a half after the Norman Conquest, throughout
which everything native would thus seem to have been in a
course of gradual re-emergence from the general foreign inunda-
tion that had overwhelmed the country ? We have no historical
record or statement as to this matter": the question can only be
answered, in so far as it can be answered at all, from an examina-
tion of such compositions of the time in the vernacular tongue
as may have come down to us.

The principal literature produced in England during this
period was in the Latin and French languages. In the former
were written most works on subjects of theology, philosophy,
and history; in the latter most of those intended rather to
amuse than to inform, and addressed, not to students and pro-
fessional readers, but to the idlers of the court and the upper
classes, by whom they were seldom actually read, or much
expected to be read, but only listened to as they were recited
* See Sir H. Spelman, Concilia ; ad an. 1116.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. O'J

or chanted (for most of them were in verse) by others. How
far over society such a knowledge of the imported tongue came
to extend as was requisite for the understanding and enjoyment
of what was thus written in it has been matter of dispute. The
Abbe de la Rue conceives that a large proportion even of the
middle classes, and of the town population generally, must have
been so far frenchified ; but later authorities look upon this as an
extravagant supposition.

It is, at all events, this French literature only that is to be
considered as having come into competition with, or to have
taken the place of, the old vernacular literature. The employ-
ment of the Latin language in writing by monks, secular church-
men, and other persons who had had a learned education, was
what had always gone on in England as in every other country
of Western Christendom ; there was nothing new in that ; we
continue to have it after the Conquest just as we had it before
the Conquest. But it is quite otherwise with the writing of
French ; that was altogether a new thing in England, and indeed
very much of a new thing everywhere, in the eleventh century :
no specimen of composition in the Langue d'Oyl, in fact, either in
verse or in prose, has come down to us from beyond that century,
nor is there reason to believe that it had been much earlier
turned to account for literary purposes even in France itself.
The great mass of the oldest French literature that has been
preserved was produced in England, or, at any rate, in
the dominions of the King of England, in the twelfth cen-
tury.

To whatever portion of society in England an acquaintance
with this French literature was confined, it is evident that it was
for some time after the Conquest the only literature of the day
that, without addressing itself exclusively to the learned classes,
still demanded some measure of cultivation in its readers or
auditors as well as in its authors. It was the only popular lite-
rature that was not adapted to the mere populace. We might
infer this even from the fact that, if any other ever existed, it has
mostly perished. The various metrical chronicles, romances,
and other compositions in the French tongue, a good many of
which are still extant, are very nearly the only literary works
which have come down to us from this age. And, while thn
mass of this produce that has been preserved is, as we have
said, very considerable, we have distinct notices of much more
which is now lost. How the French language should have
acquired the position which it thus appears to have held in
England for some time after the Conquest is easily explained

60 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

The advantage which it derived from being the language of the
court, of the entire body of the nobility, and of the opulent and
influential classes generally, is obvious. This not only gave it
the prestige and attraction of what we now call fashion, but, in
the circumstances to which the country was reduced, would very
speedily make it the only language in which any kind of regular
or grammatical training could be obtained. With the native
population almost everywhere deprived of its natural leaders,
the old landed proprietary of its own blood, it cannot, be sup-
posed that schools in which the reading and writing of the
vernacular tongue was taught could continue to subsist. This
has been often pointed out. But what we may call the social
cause, or that arising out of the relative conditions of the two
races, was probably assisted by another which has not been so
much attended to. The languages themselves did not compete
upon fair terms. The French would have in the general esti-
mation a decided advantage for the purposes of literature over
the English. The latter was held universally to be merely a
barbarous form of speech, claiming kindred with nothing except
the other half-articulate dialects of the woods, hardly one of
which had ever known what it was to have any acquaintance
with letters, or was conceived even by those who spoke it to be
fit to be used in writing except on the most vulgar occasions, or
where anything like either dignity or precision of expression
was of no importance; the former, although somewhat soiled
and disfigured by ill usage received at the hands of the un-
educated multitude, and also only recently much employed in
formal or artistic eloquence, could still boast the most honour-
able of all pedigrees as a daughter of the Latin, and was thus
besides allied to the popular speech of every more civilized

Cvince of Western Christendom. The very name by which it
^ been known when it first attracted attention with reference
to its literary capabilities was, as we have seen, the Eustic
Latin, or Roman (Lingua Romano, Rustled). Even without being
favoured by circumstances, as it was in the present case, a
tongue having these intrinsic recommendations would not have
been easily worsted, in a contest for the preference as the organ
of fashionable literature, by such a competitor as the unknown
and unconnected English.

There was only one great advantage possessed by the national
tongue with which it was impossible for the other in the long run
to cope. This was the fact of its being the national tongue, the
speech, actual and ancestral, of the great body of the people.
Even that, indeed, might not have enabled it to maintain its

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Cl

grouud if it had been a mere unwritten form of speech. But it
had been cultivated and trained for centuries both by the
practice of composition, in prose as well as in verse, and by the
application to it of the art of the grammarian. It already pos-
sessed a literature considerable in volume, and embracing a
variety of departments. It was not merely something floating
upon men's breath, but had a substantial existence in poems and
histories, in libraries and parchments. In that state it might
cease, in the storm of national calamity, to be generally either
written or read, but even its more literary inflexions and con-
structions would be less likely to fall into complete and universal
oblivion. The memory, at least, of its old renown would not
altogether die away ; and that alone would be found to be much
when, after a time, it began to be again, although in a somewhat
altered form, employed in writing.

The nature of the altered form which distinguishes the written
vernacular tongue when it reappears after the Norman Conquest
from the aspect it presents before that date (or the earliest
modern English from what is commonly designated Saxon or
Anglo-Saxon) is not matter of dispute. " The substance of the
change," to adopt the words of Mr. Price, the late learned editor
of Warton, " is admitted on all hands to consist in the suppres-
sion of those grammatical intricacies occasioned by the inflection
of nouns, the seemingly arbitrary distinctions of gender, the
government of prepositions, &c."* It was, in fact, the con-
version of an inflectional into a non-inflectional, of a synthetic
into an analytic, language. The syntactical connexion of words,
and the modification of the mental conceptions which they
represent, was indicated, no longer, in general, by those varia-
tions which constitute what are called declension and conjugation,
but by separate particles, or simply by juxtaposition ; and what-
ever seemed to admit of being neglected without injury to the
prime object of expressing the meaning of the speaker, or writer,
— no matter what other purposes it might serve of a merely
ornamental or artistic nature — was ruthlessly dispensed with.

A change such as this is unquestionably the breaking up of a
language. In the first instance, at least, it amounts to the
destruction of much that is most characteristic of the language,
— of all that constitutes its beauty to the educated mind, imbued
with a feeling for the literature into which it has been wrought,
— of something, probably, even of its precision as well as of its
expressiveness in a higher sense. It has become, in a manner,
but the skeleton of what it was, or the skeleton with only the
* Preface to Warlon'a Hist, of Eng. Poetry, p. 86.

62 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

skin hanging loose upon it : — all the covering and rounding flesh
gone. Or we may say it is the language no longer with its old
natural bearing and suitable attire, but reduced to the rags and
squalor of a beggar. Or it may be compared to a material
edifice, once bright with many of the attractions of decorative
architecture, now stripped of all its splendours and left only a
collection of bare and dilapidated walls. It may be, too, that, as
is commonly assumed, a synthetic tongue is essentially a nobler
and more effective instrument of expression than an analytic
one, — that, often comprising a whole sentence, or at least a whole
clause, in a word, it presents thoughts and emotions in flashes
and pictures where the other can only employ comparatively
dead conventional signs. But perhaps the comparison has been
too commonly made between the synthetic tongue in its per-
fection and the analytic one while only in its rudimentary state.
The language may be considered to have changed its constitution,
somewhat like a country which should have ceased to be a
monarchy and become a republic. The new political system
could only be fairly compared with the old one, and the balance
struck between the advantages of the one and those of the other,
after the former should have had time fully to develop itself
under the operation of its own peculiar principles. Even if it
be inferior upon the whole, and for the highest purposes, an
analytic language may perhaps have some recommendations
which a synthetic one does not possess. It may not be either
more natural or, properly speaking, more simple, for the original
constitution of most, if not of all, languages seems to have been
synthetic, and a synthetic language is as easy both to acquire
and to wield as an analytic one to those to whom it is native ;
nor can the latter be said to be more rational or philosophical
than the former, for, as being in the main natural products, and
not artificial contrivances, languages must be held to stand all
on an equality in respect of the reasonableness at least of the
principle on which they are constituted; but yet, if compa-
ratively defective in poetical expressiveness, analytic languages
will probably be found, whenever they have been sufficiently
cultivated, to be capab'e, in pure exposition, of rendering
thought with superior minuteness and distinctness of detail.
With their small tenacity or cohesion, they penetrate into every
chink and fold, like water or fine dust.

But the great question in every case of the apparent conver-
sion of a synthetic into an analytic language is, how, or under
the operation of what cause or causes, the change was brought
about. In the particular case before us, for instance, what was

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. 63

it that converted the form of our vernacular tongue which we find
alone employed in writing before the Norman Conquest into the
comparatively uninflected form in which it appears in the
generality of the compositions which have come down to us from
the first ages after that great political and social catastrophe ?

First, however, we may remark that there is no proof of the
latter form having been really new, or of recent origin, about the
time of the Conquest. All that we can assert is, that soon after
that date it first appears in writing. If it was ever so employed
before, no earlier specimens of it have been preserved. It was
undoubtedly the form of the language popularly in use at the
time when it thus first presents itself in our national literature.
But did it not exist as an oral dialect long before ? May it not
have so existed from the remotest antiquity alongside of the
more artificial form which was exclusively, or at least usually,
employed in writing? It has been supposed that even the
classical Greek and Latin, such as we find in books, may have
always been accompanied each by another form of speech, of looser
texture, and probably more of an analytical character, which
served for the ordinary oral intercourse of the less educated
population, and of which it has even been conjectured we may
nave some much disguised vestige or resemblance in the modern
Romaic and Italian. The rise, at any rate, of what was long a
merely oral dialect into a language capable of being employed in
literature, and of thereby being gradually so trained and im-
proved as to supplant and take the place of the ancient more
highly inflected and otherwise more artificial literary language of
the country, is illustrated by what is known to have happened in
France and other continental provinces of the old Empire of the
West, where the Romana Rustica, as it was called, which was a
corrupted or broken-down form of the proper Latin, after having
been for some centuries only orally used, came to be written
as well as spoken, and, having been first taken into the service
of the more popular kinds of literature, ended by becoming the
language of all literature and the only national speech. So in
this country there may possibly have been in use for colloquial
purposes a dialect of a similar character to our modern analytic
English even from the earliest days of the old synthetic English ;
and the two forms of the language, the regular and the irregu-
lar, the learned and the vulgar, the mother and the daughter, or
rather, if you will, the elder and the younger sister, may have
subsisted together for many centuries, till there came a crisis
which for a time laid the entire fabric of the old national
civilization in the dust, when the rude and hardy character of

64 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the one carried it through the storm which the more delicate
structure of the other could not stand.

Or was the written English of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries the same English (or Anglo-Saxon) that was written in
the ninth and tenth, only modified by that process of gradual
change the principle of which was inherent in the constitution of
the language ? Was the former neither the sister nor the daugh-
ter of the latter, but the latter merely at a different stage of its
natural growth ? This is the view that has been maintained by
some eminent authorities. The late Mr. Price, acknowledging it
to be a matter beyond dispute "that some change had taken
place in the style of composition and general structure of the
language " from the end of the ninth to the end of the twelfth
century, adds : — " But that these mutations were a consequence
of the Norman invasion, or were even accelerated by that event,
is wholly incapable of proof ; and nothing is supported upon a
firmer principle of rational induction, than that the same effects
would have ensued if William and his followers had remained in
their native soil."* The change, as we have seen, may be said to
have amounted to the transformation of the language from one
of a synthetic to one of an analytic constitution or structure;
but Mr. Price contends that, whether it is to be considered as the
result of an innate law of the language, or of some general law
in the organization of those who spoke it, its having been in no
way dependent upon external circumstances, — upon foreign
influence or political disturbances, — is established by the undeni-
able fact that every other language of the Low-German stock
displays the same simplification of its grammar. " In all these
languages," he observes, " there has been a constant tendency to
relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol
for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinc-
tions, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of
opinion. Yet, in thus diminishing their grammatical forms and
Amplifying their rules, in this common effort to evince a strik-
ing contrast to the usual effects of civilization, all confusion has
been prevented by the very manner in which the operation has
been conducted ; for the revolution produced has been so gradual
in its progress, that it is only to be discovered on a comparison
of the respective languages at periods of a considerable in-
terval."!

The interval that Mr. Price has taken in the present case is
certainly wide enough. What has to be explained is the difference
that we find between the written English of the middle of the
* Preface to Warton, 85. t ib., 86.

VERNACULAR LANGUAGE AND L1TERATURK. 65

twelfth century and that, not of the age of Alfred, or the end of
the ninth century, but rather of the end of the eleventh. The
question is, how we are to account for a great change which
would appear to have taken place in the language, as employed
for literary purposes, not in three centuries, but in one century,
or even in half a century. The English of Alfred continues to
be in all respects the English of Alfric, who lived and w*rote
more than a century later. The National Chronicle, still
written substantially in the old language, comes down even to
the year 1154. It is probable that we have here the continued
employment, for the sake of uniformity, of an idiom which had
now become antique, or what is called dead ; but there is
certainly no evidence or trace of any other form of the national
speech having ever been used in writing before the year 1100 at
the earliest. The overthrow of the native government and
civilization by the Conquest in the latter part of the eleventh
century would not, of course, extinguish the knowledge of the
old literary language of the country till after the lapse of about
a generation. \Ve may fairly, then, regard the change in
question as having taken place, in all probability, not in three
centuries, as Mr. Price puts the case, but within at most the
third part of that space. This correction, while it brings the
breaking up of the language into close connexion in point of time
with the social revolution, gives it also much more of a sudden and
convulsionary character than it has in Mr. Price's representation.
The gradual and gentle flow, assumed to have extended over
three centuries, turns out to have been really a rapid precipitous
descent — something almost of the nature of a cataract — effected
possibly within the sixth or eighth part of that space of time.

It may be that there is a tendency in certain languages, or in
all languages, to undergo a similar simplification of their gram-
mar to that which the English underwent at this crisis. And it
is conceivable that such a tendency constantly operating un-
checked may at last produce such a change as we have in the
present case, the conversion of the language from one of a
synthetic to one of an analytic structure. That may have hap-
pened with those other languages of the Low-Germanic stock to
which Mr. Price refers. But snch was certainly not the case
with the English. We have that language distinctly before us
for three or four centuries, during which it is not pretended that
there is to be detected a trace of the operation of any such
tendency. The tendency, therefore, either did not exist, or
must have been rendered inoperative by some counteracting
influence. If, on the other hand, we are to miuuose that, in our

GG ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

own or in any other language, the tendency suddenly developed
itself or became active at a particular moment, that would
necessarily imply the very operation of a new external cause
which Mr. Price's theory denies. It is no matter whether we
may or may not be able to point out the cause ; that a cause there
must have been is unquestionable.

In the case before us, the cause is sufficiently obvious. The
integrity of the constitution or grammatical system of the
language was preserved so long as its literature flourished ;
when that ceased to be read and studied and produced, the
grammatical cultivation and knowledge of the language also
ceased. The two things, indeed, were really one and the same.
The literature and the literary form of the language could not
but live and die together. Whatever killed the one was sure
also to blight the other. And what was it that did or could
bring the native literature of England suddenly to an end in the
eleventh or twelfth century except the new political and social
circumstances in which the country was then placed ? What
other than such a cause ever extinguished in any country the
light of its ancient literature ?

Of at least two similar cases we have a perfect knowledge.
How long did the classical Latin continue to be a living
language ? Just so long as the fabric of Latin civilization in the
Western Empire continued to exist; so long, and no longer.
When that was overthrown, the literature which was its pro-
duct and exponent, its expression and in a manner its very soul,
and the highly artificial form of language which was the material
in which that literature was wrought, were both at once struck
with a mortal disease under which they perished almost with the
generation that had witnessed the consummation of the barbaric
invasion. Exactly similar is the history of the classic Greek,
only that it continued to exist as a living language for a
thousand years after the Latin, the social system with which it
was bound up, of which it was part and parcel, lasting so much
longer. When that fell, with the fall of the Eastern Empire in
the fifteenth century, the language also became extinct. The
ancient Greek gave place to the modern Greek, or what is called
the Bomaic. The conquest of Constantinople by the Turks was, so
far, to the Greek language the same thing that the Norman Con-
quest was to the English.

67

THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES. — ADCENDANCY
OF THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.

Ever since the appearance of Peter Lombard's Four Books of
Sentences, about the middle of the twelfth century, a struggle
for ascendancy had been going on throughout Europe between
the Scholastic Theology, or new philosophy, and the grammatical
and rhetorical studies with which men had previously been
chiefly occupied. At first the natural advantages of its position
told in favour of the established learning ; nay an impulse and a
new inspiration were probably given to poetry and the belles-
lettres for a time by the competition of logic and philosophy, and
the general intellectual excitement thus produced : it was in
the latter part of the twelfth century that the writing of Latin
verse was cultivated with the greatest success ; it was at the
very end of that century that Geoffrey de Vinsauf, or de Vino
Salvo, composed and published his poem on the restoration of
the legitimate mode of versification, under the title of Nova
Poetria, or the New Poetry. But from about this date the tide
began to turn ; and the first half of the thirteenth century may
be described as the era of the decline and fall of elegant litera-
ture, and the complete reduction of studious minds under the
dominion of the scholastic logic and metaphysics.

In the University of Paris, and it was doubtless the same elso
where, from about the middle of the thirteenth century, the
ancient classics seem nearly to have ceased to be read ; and all that
was taught of rhetoric, or even of grammar, consisted of a few
lessons from Priscian. The habit of speaking Latin correctly
and elegantly, which had been so common an accomplishment of
the scholars of the last age, was now generally lost : even at the
universities, the classic tongue was corrupted into a base jargon,
in which frequently all grammar and syntax were disregarded.
This universal revolt from the study of words and of aesthetics to
that of thoughts and of things is the most remarkable event in
the intellectual history of the species. Undoubtedly all its
results were not evil. On the whole, it was most probably the
salvation even of that learning and elegant literature which it
seemed for a time to have overwhelmed. The excitement of its
very novelty awakened the minds of men. Never was there
Mich a ferment of intellectual activity as now sprung up in
Europe. The enthusiasm of the Crusades seemed to have been
succeeded by an enthusiasm of study, which equally impelled its
successive inundations of devotees. In the beginning of the
fourteenth century there were thirty thousand students at the

68 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

University of Oxford ; and that of Paris could probably boast of
the attendance of a still vaster multitude. This was something
almost like a universal diffusion of education and knowledge.
The brief revival of elegant literature in the twelfth century was
a premature spring, which could not last. The preliminary pro-
cesses of vegetation were not sufficiently advanced to sustain any
general or enduring efflorescence ; nor was the state of the world
such as to call for or admit of any extensive spread of the kind
of scholarship then cultivated. The probability is, that, even if
nothing else had taken its place, it would have gradually become
feebler in character, as .well as confined within a narrower circle
of cultivators, till it had altogether evaporated and disappeared.
The excitement of the new learning, turbulent and in some
respects debasing as it was, saved Western Europe from the com-
plete extinction of the light of scholarship and philosophy which
would in that case have ensued, and kept alive the spirit of
intellectual culture, though in the mean while imprisoned and
limited in its vision, for a happier future time when it should
have ampler scope and full freedom of range.

Almost the only studies now cultivated by the common herd
of students were the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. Yet it
was not till after a struggle of some length that the supremacy
of Aristotle was established in the schools. The most ancient
statutes of the University of Paris that have been preserved,
those issued by the pope's legate, Eobert de Courgon, in 1215,
prohibited the reading either of the metaphysical or the physical
works of that philosopher, or of any abridgment of them. This,
however, it has been remarked, was a mitigation of the treatment
these books had met with a few years before, when all the copies
of them that could be found were ordered to be thrown into the
fire.* Still more lenient was a decree of Pope Gregory IX. in
1231, which only ordered the reading of them to be suspended
until they should have undergone correction. Certain heretical
notions in religion, promulgated or suspected to have been
entertained by some of the most zealous of the early Aristotelians,
had awakened the apprehensions of the Church ; but the general
orthodoxy of their successors quieted these fears ; and in course
of time the authority of the Stagirite was universally recognized
both in theology and in the profane sciences.

Some of the most distinguished of the scholastic doctors of this
period were natives of Britain. Such, in particular, were Alex-
ander de Hales, styled the Irrefragable, an English Franciscan,
who died at Paris in 1245, and who is famous as the master of
* Crevier, Histoire de 1'Univ. de Paris, i. 313.

MATHEMATICAL AND OTHER STUDIES. G9

St. Bonaventura, and the first of the long list of commentators
on the Four Books of the Sentences ; the Subtle Doctor, John
Duns Scotus, also a Franciscan and the chief glory of that order,
who, after teaching with unprecedented popularity and applause
at Oxford and Paris, died at Cologne in 1308, at the early age
of forty-three, leaving a mass of writings, the very quantity of
which would be sufficiently wonderful, even if they were not
marked by a vigour and penetration of thought which, down to
our own day, has excited the admiration of all who have exa-
mined them ; and William Occam, the Invincible, another Fran-
ciscan, the pupil of Scotus, but afterwards his opponent on the
great philosophical question of the origin and nature of Universals
or General Terms, which so long divided, and still divides, logi-
cians. Occam, who died at Munich in 1347, was the restorer,
and perhaps the most able defender that the middle ages pro-
duced, of the doctrine of Nominalism, or the opinion that general
notions are merely names, and not real existences, as was con-
tended by the Realists. The side taken by Occam was that of the
minority in his own day, and for many ages after, and his views
accordingly were generally regarded as heterodox in the schools ;
but his high merits have been recognized in modern times, when
perhaps the greater number of speculators have come over to his
way of thinking.

MATHEMATICAL AND OTHER STUDIES.

In the mathematical and physical sciences, Roger Bacon is the
great name of the thirteenth century, and indeed the greatest
that either his country or Europe can produce for some centuries
after this time. He was born at Ilchester about the year 1214,
and died in 1292. His writings that are still preserved, of which
the principal is that entitled his Opus Majus (or Greater Work),
show that the range of his investigations included theology,
grammar, the ancient languages, geometry, astronomy, chrono-
logy, geography, music, optics, mechanics, chemistry, and most
of the other branches of experimental philosophy. In all these
sciences he had mastered whatever was then known; and his
knowledge, though necessarily mixed with much error, extended
in various directions considerably farther than, but for the evidence
of his writings, we should have been warranted in believing that
scientific researches had been carried in that age. In optics, for
instance, he not only understood the general laws of reflected
and refracted light, and had at least conceived such an instru-
ment as a telescope, but he makes some advances towardo an

70 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

explanation of the phenomena of the rainbow. It may bt*
doubted whether what have been sometimes called his inventions
and discoveries in mechanics and in chemistry were for the
greater part more than notions he had formed of the possibility
of accomplishing certain results ; but, even regarded as mere
speculations or conjectures, many of his statements of what
might be done show that he was familiar with mechanical prin-
ciples, and possessed considerable acquaintance with the powers
of natural agents. He appears to have been acquainted with the
effects and composition of gunpowder, which indeed there is
other evidence for believing to have been then known in Europe.
Bacon's notions on the right method of philosophizing are remark-
ably enlightened for the times in which he lived; and his general
views upon most subjects evince a penetration and liberality
much beyond the spirit of his age. With all his sagacity and
freedom from prejudice, indeed, he was a believer both in astro-
logy and alchemy ; but, as it has been observed, these delusions
did not then stand in the same predicament as now : they were
" irrational only because unproved, and neither impossible nor
unworthy of the investigation of a philosopher, in the absence
of preceding experiments."*

Another eminent English cultivator of mathematical science
in that age was the celebrated Robert Grosseteste, or Grostete, or
Grosthead, bishop of Lincoln, the friend and patron of Bacon.
Grostete, who died in 1253, and of whom we shall have more to say
presently, is the author of a treatise on the sphere, which had been
printed. A third name that deserves to be mentioned along with
these is that of Sir Michael Scott, famous in popular tradition as
a practitioner of the occult sciences, but whom his writings, of
which several are extant, and have been printed, prove to have
been possessed of acquirements, both in science and literature,
of which few in those times could boast. He is commonly as
sumed to have been proprietor of the estate of Balwearie, in
Fife, and to have survived till near the close of the thirteenth
century ; but all that is certain is that he was a native of Scot-
land, and one of the most distinguished of the learned persons

* Penny Cyclopaedia; iii. 243. Bacon's principal work, the Opus Majlis, was
published by Dr. Jebb, in a folio volume, at London iu 1733 ; and several of
his other treatises had been previously printed at Francfort, Paris, and else-
where. His Opus Minus has also now been edited by Professor Brewer, of
King's College, London, and forms one of the volumes of the series entitled
Rerum Britannicarum Medii ^Evi Scriptores, or Chronicles and Memorials of
Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages ; published by the authority
of Her Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls,
Xvo. London, 1857, &e.

ASTROLOGY AND ALCHEMY. 71

who flourished at the court of the Emperor Frederick II., who
died in 1250.* Like Koger Bacon, Scott was addicted to the
study of alchemy and astrology ; but these were in his eyes also
i arts of natural philosophy. Among other works, a History of
Animals is ascribed to him; and he is said to have translated
several of the works of Aristotle from the Greek into Latin, at
the command of the Emperor Frederick. He is reputed to have
been eminently skilled both in astronomy and medicine ; and a
contemporary, John Bacon, himself known by the title of Prince
of the Averroists, or followers of the Arabian doctor Averroes,
celebrates him as a great theologian.f

These instances, however, were rare exceptions to the general
rule. Metaphysics and logic, together with divinity — which
was converted into little else than a subject of metaphysical and
logical contention— so occupied the crowd of intellectual inquirers,
that, except the professional branches of law and medicine, scarcely
any other studies were generally attended to. Roger Bacon him-
self tells us that he knew of only two good mathematicians among
his contemporaries— one John of Leyden, who had been a pupil
of his own, and another whom he does not name, but who is
supposed to have been John Peckham, a Franciscan friar, who
afterwards became archbishop of Canterbury. Few students of
the science, he says, proceeded farther than the fifth proposition
of the first book of Euclid — the well-known asses' bridge. The.
study of geometry was still confounded in the popular under-
standing with the study of magic — a proof that it was a very rare
pursuit. In arithmetic, although the Arabic numerals had found
their way to Christian Europe before the middle of the fourteenth
century, they do not appear to have come into general use till
a considerably later date. Astronomy, however, was sufficiently
cultivated at the University of Paris to enable some of the mem-
bers to predict an eclipse of the sun which happened on the 31st
of January, 1310.J This science was indebted for part of tho
attention it received to the belief that was universally enter-
tained in the influence cf the stars over human affairs. And, as
astrology led to the cultivation and improvement of astronomy
so the other imaginary science of alchemy undoubtedly aided the
progress of chemistry and medicine. Besides Koger Bacon and
Michael Scott in the thirteenth century, England contributes
the names of John Daustein, of Richard, and of Cremer abbot
<jf Westminster, the disciple and friend of the famous Raymond

* Soe article in Penny Cyclopaedia, xxi. 101.
t See an article on Michael Scott in Bayle.

* Lrcv.tr. ii. 224.

72 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Lully, to the list of the writers on alchemy in the fourteenth.
Lully himself visited England in the reign of Edward I., on the
invitation of the king ; and he affirms in one of his works, that,
in the secret chamber of St. Katharine in the Tower of London,
he performed in the royal presence the experiment of trans-
muting some crystal into a mass of diamond, or adamant as he
calls it, of which Edward, he says, caused some little pillars to
be made for the tabernacle of God. It was popularly believed,
indeed, at the time, that the English king had been furnished by
Lully with a great quantity of gold for defraying the expense
of an expedition he intended to make to the Holy Land.
Edward III. was not less credulous on the subject than his
grandfather, as appears by an order which he issued in 1329, in
the following terms : — " Know all men, that we have been assured
that John of Eous and Master William of Dalby know how to
make silver by the art of alchemy ; that they have made it in
former times, and still continue to make it; and, considering
that these men, by their art, and by making the precious metal,
may be profitable to us and to our kingdom, we have com-
manded our well-beloved Thomas Gary to apprehend the afore-
said John and William, wherever they can be found, within
liberties or without, and bring them to us, together with all the
instruments of their art, under safe and sure custody." The
earliest English writer on medicine, whose works have been
printed, is Gilbert English (or Anglicus), who flourished in the
thirteenth century ; and he was followed in the next century by
John de Gaddesden. The practice of medicine had now been
taken in a great measure out of the hands of the clergy ; but the
art was still in the greater part a mixture of superstition and
quackery, although the knowledge of some useful remedies, and
perhaps also of a few principles, had been obtained from the
writings of the Arabic physicians (many of which had been
translated into Latin) and from the instructions delivered in the
schools of Spain and Italy. The distinction between the phy-
sician and the apothecary was already well understood. Surgery
also began to be followed as a separate branch : some works are
still extant, partly printed, partly in manuscript, by John
Ardern, or Arden, an eminent English surgeon, who practised at
Newark in the fourteenth century. A lively picture of the state
of the surgical art at this period is given by a French writer,
Guy de Cauliac, in a system of surgery which he published in
1363 : " The practitioners in surgery," he says, " are divided
into five sects The first follow Roger and Roland, and the four
masters, and apply poultices to all wounds and abscesses; the

UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES. 73

second follow Brunus and Theodoric, and in the same cases use
wine only ; the third follow Saliceto and Lanfranc, and treat
wounds with ointments and soft plasters ; the fourth are chiefly
Germans, who attend the armies, and promiscuously use charms,
potions, oil, and wool; the fifth are old women and ignorant
people, who have recourse to the saints in all cases."

Yet the true method of philosophising, by experiment and the
collection of facts, was almost as distinctly and emphatically laid
down in this age by Roger Bacon, as it was more than three
centuries afterwards by his illustrious namesake. Much know-
ledge, too, must necessarily have been accumulated in various
departments by the actual application of this method. Some of
the greatest of the modern chemists have bestowed the highest
praise on the manner in which the experiments of the alche-
mists, or hermetic philosophers, as they called themselves, on
metals and other natural substances appear to have been con-
ducted. In another field — namely, in that of geography, and
the institutions, customs, and general state of distant countries —
a great deal of new information must have been acquired from the
accounts that were now published by various travellers, especially
by Marco Polo, who penetrated as far as to Tartary and China, in
the latter part of the thirteenth century, and by our country-
man, Sir John Mandevil, who also traversed a great part of the
East about a hundred years later. Roger Bacon has inserted a
very curious epitome of the geographical knowledge of his time
in his Opus Majus.

UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES.

About the middle of the thirteenth century, both in England
and elsewhere, the universities began to assume a new form, by
the erection of colleges for the residence of their members as
separate communities. The zeal for learning that was displayed
in these endowments is the mos( honourable characteristic of the
age. Before the end of the fourteenth century the following
colleges were founded at Oxford : — University Hall, by William,
archdeacon of Durham, who died in 1249 ; Baliol College, by
John Baliol, father of King John of Scotland, about 1263 ; Mer-
ton College, by Walter Merton, bishop of Rochester, in 1268 ;
Exeter College, by Walter Stapleton, bishop of Exeter, about
1315; Oriel College, originally called the Hall of the Blessed
Virgin of Oxford, by Edward II. and his almoner, Adam de
Brom, about 1324 ; Queen's College, by Robert Eglesfield, chap-
lain to Queen Philippa, in 1340; and New College, in 1379, by

74 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the celebrated William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the
munificent founder also of Winchester School or College. In
the University of Cambridge the foundations were, Peter House,
by Hugh Balsham, sub-prior and afterwards bishop of Ely, about
1256 ; Michael College (afterwards incorporated with Trinity
College), by Herby de Stanton, Chancellor of the Exchequer to
Edward II., about 1324; University Hall (soon afterwards
burnt down), by Richard Badew, Chancellor of the University,
in 1326 ; King's Hall (afterwards united to Trinity College), by
Edward III. ; Clare Hall, a restoration of University Hall, by
Elizabeth de Clare, Countess of Ulster, about 1347 ; Pembroke
Hall, or the Hall of Valence and Mary, in the same year, by
Mary de St. Paul, widow of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pem-
broke ; Trinity Hall, in 1350, by William Bateman, bishop of
Norwich ; Gonvil Hall, about the same time, by Edmond Gonvil,
parson of Terrington and Bushworth, in Norfolk ; and Corpus
Christi, or Ben'et (that is, Benedict) College, about 1351, by the
United Guilds of Corpus Christi and St. Mary, in the town of Cam-
bridge. The erection of these colleges, besides the accommoda-
tions which they afforded in various ways both to teachers and
students, gave a permanent establishment to the universities,
which they scarcely before possessed. The original condition of
these celebrated seats of learning, in regard to all the conve-
niences of teaching, appears to have been humble in the extreme.
Great disorders and scandals are also said to have arisen, before
the several societies were thus assembled each within its own
walls, from the intermixture of the students with the townspeople,
and their exemption from all discipline. But, when the members
of the University were counted by tens of thousands, discipline,
even in the most favourable circumstances, must have been
nearly out of the question. The difficulty would not be lessened
by the general character of the persons composing the learned
mob, if we may take it from the quaint historian of the Univer-
sity of Oxford. Many of them, Anthony a Wood affirms, were
mere " varlets who pretended to be scholars;" he does not
scruple to charge them with being habitually guilty of thieving
and other enormities ; and he adds, " They lived under no dis-
cipline, neither had any tutors, but only for fashion sake would
sometimes thrust themselves into the schools at ordinary lec-
tures, and, when they went to perform any mischiefs, then would
they be accounted scholars, that so they might free themselves
from the jurisdiction of the burghers." To repress the evils
of this state of things, the old statutes of the University of Paris,
in 1215, had ordained that no one should be reputed a scholar

UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES. 75

wlto had not a certain master. Another of these ancient regu-
lations may be quoted in illustration of the simplicity of the
times, and of the small measure of pomp and circumstance that
the heads of the commonwealth of learning could then affect.
It is ordered that every master reading lectures in the faculty
of arts should have his cloak or gown round, black, and falling
as low as the heels — " at least," adds the statute, with amusing
naivete, " while it is new." But this famous seminary long con-
tinued to take pride in its poverty as one of its most honourable
distinctions. There is something very noble and affecting in
the terms in which the rector and masters of the faculty of arts
are found petitioning, in 1362, for a postponement of the
hearing of a cause in which they were parties. " We have diffi-
culty," they say, " in finding the money to pay the procurators
and advocates, whom it is necessary for us to employ — we whose
profession it is to possess no wealth." * Yet, when funds were wanted
for important purposes in connexion with learning or science,
they were supplied in this age with no stinted liberality. AVe
have seen with what alacrity opulent persons came forward to
build and endow colleges, as soon as the expediency of such
foundations came to be perceived. In almost all these establish-
ments more or less provision was made for the permanent main-
tenance of a body of poor scholars, in other words, for the
admission of even the humblest classes to a share in the benefits
of that learned education whose temples and priesthood were
thus planted in the land. It is probable, also, that the same
kind of liberality was often shown in other ways. Roger Bacon
tells us himself that, in the twenty years in which he had been
engaged in his experiments, he had spent in books and instru-
ments no less a sum than two thousand French livres, an amount
of silver equal to about six thousand pounds of our present
money, and in effective value certainly to many times that sum.
He must have been indebted for these large supplies to the
generosity of rich friends and patrons.

CULTIVATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF THE LEARNED TONGUES IN THE
THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES.

Notwithstanding the general neglect of its elegancies, and of
the habit of speaking it correctly or grammatically, the Latin
tongue still continued to be in England, as elsewhere, the
common language of the learned, and that in which books were
generally written that were intended for their perusal. Among
* Crevier, ii. 404.

70 ENGLISH LITERATURE ANP LANGUAGE.

this class of works may be included the contemporary chronicles,
most of which were compiled in the monasteries, and the authors
of almost all of which were churchmen.

Latin was also, for a great part of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the usual language of the law, at least in writing.
There may, indeed, be some doubt perhaps as to the Charter of
John. It is usually given in Latin ; but there is also a French
text first published in the first edition of D'Achery's Spicilegium
(1653-57), xii. 573, <fec., which there is some reason for believing
to be the original. " An attentive critical examination of the
French and Latin together," says Mr. Luders, " will induce
any person capable of making it to think several chapters of the
latter translated from the former, and not originally composed in
Latin."* Yet the Capitula, or articles on which the Great
Charter is founded, are known to us only in Latin. And all the
other charters of liberties are in that language. So is every
statute down to the year 1275. The first that is in French is the
Statute of Westminster the First, passed in that year, the 3rd of
Edward I. Throughout the remainder of the reign of Edward
they are sometimes in Latin, sometimes in French, but more
frequently in the former language. The French becomes more
frequent in the time of Edward II., and is almost exclusively
used in that of Edward III. and Kichard II. Still there are
statutes in Latin in the sixth and eighth years of the last-men-
tioned king. It is not improbable that, from the accession of
Edward I., the practice may have been to draw up every statute
in both languages. Of the law treatises, Bracton (about 1265)
and Fleta (about 1285) are in Latin; Britton (about 1280) and
the Miroir des Justices (about 1320), in French.

Latin was not only the language in which all the scholastic
divines and philosophers wrote, but was also employed by all
writers on geometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and the
other branches of mathematical and natural science. All the
works of Roger Bacon, for example, are in Latin; and it is
worth noting that, although by no means a writer of classical
purity, this distinguished cultivator of science is still one of the
most correct writers of his time. He was indeed not a less
zealous student of literature than of science, nor less anxious for
the improvement of the one than of the other : accustomed him-
self to read the works of Aristotle in the original Greek, he
denounces as mischievous impositions the wretched Latin trann-

* Tracts on the Law and History of England (1810), p. 393. D'Achery's
1 lench text may also be read in a more common book, Johnson's History of
I agna Charta, 2nd edit. (1772), pp. 182—234.

ORIENTAL LEARNING. 77

lations by which alone they were known to the generality of his
contemporaries : he warmly recommends the study of grammar
and the ancient languages generally; and deplores the little
attention paid to the Oriental tongues in particular, of which he
says there were not in his time more than three or four persons
in Western Europe who knew anything. It is remarkable that
the most strenuous effort made within the present period to
revive the study of this last-mentioned learning proceeded from
another eminent cultivator of natural science, the famous Ray-
mond Lully, half philosopher, half quack, as it has been the
fashion to regard him. It was at his instigation that Clement V.,
in 1311, with the approbation of the Council of Vienne, published
a constitution, ordering that professors of Greek, Hebrew,
Arabic, and Chaldaic should be established in the universities of
Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. He had, more than
twenty years before, urged the same measure upon Honorius IV.,
and its adoption then was only prevented by the death of that
pope. After all, it is doubtful if the papal ordinance was ever
carried into effect. There were, however, professors of strange,
or foreign, languages at Paris a few years after this time, as
appears from an epistle of Pope John XXII. to his legate there
in 1325, in which the latter is enjoined to keep watch over the
said professors, lest they should introduce any dogmas as strange
as the languages they taught.*

Many additional details are collected by Warton in his
Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning into England.
He is inclined to think that many Greek manuscripts found
their way into Europe from Constantinople in the time of the
Crusades. " Robert Grosthead, bishop of Lincoln," he proceeds,
" an universal scholar, and no less conversant in polite letters
than the most abstruse sciences, cultivated and patronized the
Btudy of the Greek language. This illustrious prelate, who is
said to have composed almost two hundred books, read lectures
in the school of the Franciscan friars at Oxford about the year
1230. He translated Dionysius the Areopagite and Damascenus
into Latin. He greatly facilitated the knowledge of Greek by
a translation of Suidas's Lexicon, a book in high repute among
the lower Greeks, and at that time almost a recent compilation.
He promoted John of Basingstoke to the archdeaconry of
Leicester, chiefly because he wa« a Greek scholar, and possessed
many Greek manuscripts, which he is said to have brought from
Athens into England. He entertained, as a domestic in his
palace, Nicholas, chaplain of the abbot of St. Albans, surnamod
* Crevier, Hist, de 1'Univ. de Paris, ii. 112, 227.

78 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Grcccus, from liis uncommon proficiency in Greek ; and by his
assistance he translated from Greek into Latin the testaments of
the twelve patriarchs. Grosthead had almost incurred the
censure of excommunication for preferring a complaint to the
pope that most of the opulent benefices in England were occu-
pied by Italians. But the practice, although notoriously founded
on the monopolizing and arbitrary spirit of papal imposition,
and a manifest act of injustice to the English clergy, probably
contributed to introduce many learned foreigners into England,
and to propagate philological literature."* " Bishop Grosthead,"
Warton adds, " is also said to have been profoundly skilled in
the Hebrew language. William the Conqueror permitted great
numbers of Jews to come over from Eouen, and to settle in
England, about the year 1087. Their multitude soon increased,
and they spread themselves in vast bodies throughout most of
the cities and capital towns in England, where they built syna-
gogues. There were fifteen hundred at York about the year
1189. At Bury in Suffolk is a very complete remain of a Jewish
synagogue of stone, in the Norman style, large and magnificent.
Hence it was that many of the learned English ecclesiastics of
those times became acquainted with their books and language.
In the reign of William Kufus, at Oxford the Jews were re-
markably numerous, and had acquired a considerable property ;
and some of their rabbis were permitted to open a school in the
university, where they instructed not only their own people,
but many Christian students, in the Hebrew literature, about the
year 1054. Within two hundred years after their admission or
establishment by the Conqueror, they were banished the king-
dom. This circumstance was highly favourable to the circulation
of their learning in England. The suddenness of their dis-
mission obliged them, for present subsistence, and other reasons,
to sell their moveable goods of all kinds, among which were large
quantities of Rabbinical books. The monks in various parts
availed themselves of the distribution of these treasures. At
Huntingdon and Stamford there was a prodigious sale of their
effects, containing immense stores of Hebrew manuscripts, which
were immediately purchased by Gregory of Huntingdon, prior
of the abbey of Eamsey. Gregory speedily became an adept in
the Hebrew, by means of these valuable acquisitions, which he
bequeathed to his monastery about the year 1250. Other mem-
bers of the same convent, in consequence of these advantages,
are said to have been equal proficients in the same language^
after the death of Prior Gregory ; among whom were
* Hist, of Eng. Poet., i. cxxxv.

LAST AGE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE. 79

Ilobert Dodford, librarian of Ramsey, and Laurence Holbeck,
who compiled a Hebrew Lexicon. At Oxford, great multitudes
of their books fell into the hands of Roger Bacon, or were bought
by his brethren, the Franciscan friars of that university."* The
general expulsion of the Jews from England did not take place
till the year 1290, in the reign of Edward I. ; but they had been
repeatedly subjected to sudden violence, both from the populace
and from the government, before that grand catastrophe.

LAST AGE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IN ENGLAND.

The French language, however, was still in common use
among us down to the latter part of the reign of Edward III.
It is well remarked by Pinkerton that we are to date the ces-
sation of the general use of French in this country from the
breaking out of " the inveterate enmity " between the two
nations in the reign of that king.f Higden, as wo have seen,
writing before this change had taken place, tells us that French
was still in his day the language which the children of gentle-
men were taught to speak from their cradle, and the only
language that was allowed to be used by boys at school ; the
effect of which was, that even the country people generally
understood it and affected its use. The tone, however, in which
this is stated by Higden indicates that the public feeling had
already begun to set in against these customs, and that, if they
still kept their ground from use and wont, they had lost their
hold upon any firmer or surer stay. Accordingly about a quarter
of a century or thirty years later his translator Trevisa finds it
necessary to subjoin the following explanation or correction : —
44 This maner was myche yused tofore the first moreyn [before
the first murrain or plague, which happened in 1349\ and is
siththe som dele [somewhat] ychaungide. For John Cornwaile,
a maister of gramer, chaungide the lore [learning] in gramer scole
and construction of [from] Frensch into Englisch, and Richard
Pencriche lerned that maner teching of him, and other men of
Pencriche. So that now, the yere of owre Lord a thousand thre
hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde King Rychard after
the Conquest nyne, in alle the gramer scoles of England children
leveth Frensch, and construeth and lerneth an [in] Englisch, and

* Hist, of Eng. Poet., i. cxxxvi.

t Essay on the Origin of Scotish Poetry, pro6xcd to Ancient Scptish
Poems, 1786, vol. i. p. Ixiii. Some curious remarks upon the peculiar political
position in which England was held to stand in relation to Franco in the first
reigns after the Conquest may be read in Gale's Preface to iiLs Scriptorea
Quindeciin.

80 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

liavetli thereby avauntage in oon [one] side and desavauntage in
another. Her [their] avauntage is, that thei lerneth her [their]
gramer in lasse tyme than children were wont to do ; desavaun-
tage is, that now children of gramer scole kunneth [know] no
more Frensch than can her lifte [knows their left] heele ; and
that is harm for hem [them], and [if] thei schul passe the see and
travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also. Also
gentilmen haveth now mych ylefte for to teche her [their] chil-
dren Frensch."*

A few years before this, in 1362 (the 36th of Edward III.),
was passed the statute ordaining that all pleas pleaded in the
king's courts should be pleaded in the English language, and
entered and enrolled in Latin ; the pleadings, or oral arguments,
till now having been in French, and the enrolments of the
judgments sometimes in French, sometimes in Latin. The
reasons assigned for this change in the preamble of the act are :
" Because it is often showed to the king by the prelates, dukes,
earls, barons, and all the commonalty, of the great mischiefs
which have happened to divers of the realm, because the laws,
customs, and statutes of this realm be not commonly holden and
kept in the same realm, for that they be pleaded, shewed, and
judged in the French tongue, which is much unknown in the
said realm, so that the people which do implead, or be impleaded,
in the king's court, and in the courts of other, have no know-
ledge nor understanding of that which is said for them or against
them by their sergeants and other pleaders ; and that reasonably
the said laws and customs the rather shall be perceived and
known, and better understood, in the tongue used in the said
realm, and by so much every man of the said realm may the
better govern himself without offending of the law, and the
better keep, save, and defend his heritage and possessions ; and
in divers regions and countries, where the king, the nobles, and
other of the said realm have been, good governance and full right
is done to every person, because that their laws and customs be
learned and used in the tongue of the country."

Yet, oddly enough, this very statute (of which we have here
quoted the old translation) is in French, which, whatever might
be the case with the great body of the people, continued down
to a considerably later date than this to be the mother-tongue of
our Norman royal family, and probably also that generally
spoken at court and at least in the upper house of parliament.
Eitson asserts that there is no instance in which Henry III. is

* As quoted by Tyrwhitt, from Harl. MS. 1900, iii Essay on the Language,
&c., of Chaucer.

LAST AGE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE. 81

known to have expressed himself in English. '* King Edward 1.
generally," he continues, " or, according to Andrew of Wyntoun,
constantly, spoke the French language, both in the council arid
in the field, many of his sayings in that idiom being recorded by
our old historians. \Vhen, in the council at Norham, in 129i-2,
Anthony Beck had, as it is said, proved to the king, by reason
and eloquence, that Bruce was too dangerous a neighbour to bo
king of Scotland, his Majesty replied, Par le sang de dieu, vous aces
Ken eschante, and accordingly adjudged the crown to Baliol; of
whom, refusing to obey his summons, he afterwards said, A ce fol
felon tel folie fais ? S'il ne voult venir a nous, nous viendrons a hi.*
There is but one instance of his speaking English; which was
when the great sultan sent ambassadors, after his assassination,
to protest that he had no knowledge of it. These, standing at a
distance, adored the king, prone on the ground ; and Edward said
in English (in Anglico), You, indeed, adore, but you little love, me.
Nor understood they his words, because they spoke to him by an
interpreter.! King Edward II., likewise, who married a French
princess, used himself the French tongue. Sir Henry Spelman
had a manuscript, in which was a piece of poetry entitled De le
roi Edward le fiz roi Edward, le chanson qu'il fist mesmes, which Lord
Orford was unacquainted with. His son Edward III. always
wrote his letters or despatches in French, as we find them pre-
served by Robert of Avesbury ; and in the early part of his reign
even the Oxford scholars were confined in conversation to Latin
or French. J .... There is a single instance preserved of thia
monarch's use of the English language. He appeared in 1349 in
a tournament at Canterbury with a white swan for his impress,
and the following motto embroidered on his shield : —

Hay, hay, the wythe swan !
By Godes soul I am thy man !§

Lewis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, 1317, understood not a
word of either Latin or English. In reading the bull of his
appointment, which he had been taught to spell for several days
before, he stumbled upon the word metropolitice, which he in vain
endeavoured to pronounce; and, having hammered over it a

* For these two speeches, the latter of which, by-the-by, he points as if lie
did not understand it, Ritson quotes the Scotichronicon (Fordun), ii. 147, 156.

f For this anecdote Ritson quotes Hemingford (in Gale), p. 591 .

J The authority for this last statement is a note in Warton's Hist, of Eng.
Poet. i. 6 (edit, of 1824).

§ " See Warton's Hist, of Eng. Poet. ii. 251 (i. 86, in edit, of 1824). He had
another, 'It is as it is;' and may have had a third, 'Ha St. Edward! Ha
St. George.' "

G

82 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

considerable time, at last cried out, in his mother tongue, Seit
pour dtie ! Par Seynt Lowys *7 ne fu pas curteis qui ceste parole id
escrit.* The first instance of the English language which Mr.
Tyrwhitt had discovered in the parliamentary proceedings was
the confession of Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, in 1398. He
might, however, have met with a petition of the mercers of
London ten years earlier (Rot. Parl iii. 225). The oldest English
instrument produced by Kymer is dated 1368 (vii. 526) ; but an
indenture in the same idiom betwixt the abbot and convent of
Whitby, and Eobert the son of John Bustard, dated at York in
1343,| is the earliest known."}

EE-EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH AS A LITERARY TOXGUE.

French metrical romances and other poetry, accordingly, con-
tinued to be written in England, and in many instances by
Englishmen, throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Down to the end of the twelfth century verse was probably
the only form in which romances, meaning originally any com-
positions in the Romance or French language, then any narrative
compositions whatever, were written : in the thirteenth, a few
may have appeared in prose; but before the close of the
fourteenth prose had become the usual form in which such
works were produced, and many of the old metrical romances
had been recast in this new shape. The early French prose
romances, however, do not, like their metrical predecessors,
belong in any sense to the literature of this country : many of
them were no doubt generally read for a time in England as well
as in France ; but we have no reason for believing that any of
them were primarily addressed to the English public, or were
written in England or by English subjects, and even during the
brief space that they continued popular they seem to have been
regarded as foreign importations.

For the last fifty years of the fourteenth century, however, the
French language had been rapidly losing the position it had
held among us from the middle of the eleventh, and becoming
among all classes in England a foreign tongue. To the testi-

* " Robert de Graystanes, Anglia Sacra, i. 761—' Take it as said ! By
St. Lewis, he was not very civil who wrote this word here.' "

f " Charlton's History of Whitby, 247."

j Dissertation on Komance and Minstrelsy, pp. Ixxv.-lxxxvi. We have not
thought it necessary to preserve Eitson's peculiar spelling, adopted, apparently,
on no principle except that of deviating from the established usage.

HE-EMERGENCE OF ENGLISH 83

monies above produced of ITigden writing immediately befr re
the commencement of this change, and of Trevisa after it had
been going on for about a quarter of a century, may be added
what Chaucer writes, probably within ten years after the date
(1385) which Trevisa expressly notes as that of his statement.
In the Prologue to his Testament of Love, a prose work, which
seems to have been far advanced, if not finished, in 1392* the
great father of our English poetry, speaking of those of his
countrymen who still persisted in writing French verse, ex-
presses himself thus : — ** Certes there ben some that speke thyr
poysy mater in Frenche, of whyche speche the Frenche men
have as good a fantasye as we have in hearing of French mennes
Englyshe." And afterwards he adds, " Let, then, clerkes
endyten in Latyn, for they have the propertye in science and the
knowinge in that facultye, and lette Frenchmen in theyr
Frenche also endyte theyr queynt termes, for it is kyndly
[natural] to theyr mouthes ; and let us shewe our fantasyes in
suche wordes as we learneden of our dames tonge." French, it
is evident from this, although it might still be a common acquire-
ment among the higher classes, had ceased to be the mother-
tongue of any class of Englishmen, and was only known to thoso
to whom it was taught by a master. So, the Prioress in tho
Canterbury Tales, although she could speak French " ful fayre
and fetisly," or neatly, spoke it only

" After the srole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frenche of Paris was to hire [her] unknowe."t

From this, as from many other passages in old writers, we learn
that the French taught and spoken in England had, as was indeed
inevitable, become a corrupt dialect of the language, or at least
very different from the French at Paris. But, as the foreign

* See Tyrwhitt's Account of the Works of Chaucer, prefixed to his
Glossary.

t It is impossible to believe with Sir Harris Nicolas, in his otherwise very
clear and judicious Life of Chaucer (8vo. Lend. 1843 ; additional note, p. 112),
that Chaucer perhaps here meant to intimate that the prioress could not
apeak French at all, on the ground that the expression " French of Stratford-
at-Bow" is used in a tract published in 1586 (Feme's Blazon of GentrieJ, to
describe the language of English heraldry. In the first place the phrase is not
there " a colloquial paraphrase for English," but for the mixed French and
English, or, as it might be regarded, Anglicized or corrupted French, of our
heralds. But, at any rate, can it be supposed for a moment that Chaucer
wciuM take so roundabout and fantastic a way as this of telling his readers
so simplo A fact, as that his prioress could speak her native tongue? Ho
would never have spent three words upon such a matter, much less tliree
lim-s.

84 ENGLISH Lll'ERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

tongue lost its hold and declined in purity, the old Teutonic
speech of the native population, favoured by the same circum-
stances and course of events which checked and depressed its
rival, and having at last, after going through a process almost
of dissolution and putrefaction, begun to assume a new organiza-
tion, gradually recovered its ascendancy.

We have already examined the first revolution which the
language underwent, and endeavoured to explain the manner in
which it was brought about. It consisted in the disintegration
of the grammatical system of the language, and the conversion of
it from an inflectional and synthetic into a comparatively non-
inflected and analytic language. The vocabulary, or what we
may call the substance of the language, was not changed ; that
remained still purely Gothic, as it always had been ; only the
old form or structure was broken up or obliterated. There was
no mixture or infusion of any foreign element ; the language
was as it were decomposed, but was not adulterated, and the
process of decomposition may be regarded as having been mainly
the work of the eleventh century, and as having been begun by
the Danish Conquest and consummated by the Norman.

This first revolution which the language underwent is to be
carefully distinguished from the second, which was brought
about by the combination of the native with a foreign element,
and consisted essentially in the change made in the vocabulary
of the language by the introduction of numerous terms borrowed
from the French. Of this latter innovation we find little trace
till long after the completion of the former. For nearly two
centuries after the Conquest the English seems to have been
spoken and written (to the small extent to which it was written)
with scarcely any intermixture of Norman. It only, in fact,
began to receive such intermixture after it came to be adopted as
the speech of that part of the nation which had previously
spoken French. And this adoption was plainly the cause of the
intermixture. So long as it remained the language only of those
who had been accustomed to speak it from their infancy, and
who had never known any other, it might have gradually become
changed in its internal organization, but it could scarcely acquire
any additions from a foreign source. What should have tempted
the Saxon peasant to substitute a Norman term, upon any occa-
sion, for the word of the same meaning with v/Kich the language
of his ancestors supplied him ? As for things and occasions for
which new names were necessary, they must have come com-
paratively little in his way ; and, when they did, the capabilities
of his native tongue were sufficient to furnish him with appro

SECOND ENGLISH. S£

priatc forms of expression from its own resources. The corrup-
tion of the English by the intermixture of French vocables musl
have proceeded from those whose original language was French,
and who were in habits of constant intercourse with French
customs, French literature, and everything else that was French,
at the same time that they, occasionally at least, spoke English.
And this supposition is in perfect accordance with the historical
fact. So long as the English was the language of only a part of
the nation, and the French, as it were, struggled with it for
mastery, it remained unadulterated ; — when it became the speech
of the whole people, of the higher classes as well as of the lower,
then it lost its old Teutonic purity, and received a larger alien
admixture from the alien lips through which it passed. Whether
this was a fortunate circumstance, or the reverse, is another
question. It may just be remarked, however, that the English,
if it had been left to its own spontaneous and unassisted deve-
lopment, would probably have assumed a character resembling
rather that of the Dutch or the Flemish than that of the German
of the present day.

The commencement of this second revolution, which changed
the very substance of the language, may most probably be dated
from about the middle of the thirteenth century, or about a
century and a half after the completion of the first, which affected,
not the substance or vocabulary of the language, but only its
form or grammatical system.

SECOND ENGLISH: —

COMMONLY CALLED SEMI-SAXON.

The chief remains that we have of English verse for the first
two centuries after the Conquest have been enumerated by Sir
Frederic Madden in a comprehensive paragraph of his valuable
Introduction to the romance of Havelock, which we will take
leave to transcribe : — " The notices by which we are enabled to
trace the rise of our Saxon poetry from the Saxon period to the
end of the twelfth century are few and scanty. We may, indeed,
comprise them all in the Song of Canute recorded by the monk
of Ely [Hist. Elyens. p. 505 apud Gale], who wrote about 1166 ;
the words put into the mouth of Aldred archbishop of York,
who died in 1069 [W. Malmesb. de Gest. Pontif. 1. i. p. 271] ;
the verses ascribed to St. Godric, the hermit of Finchale, who
died in 1170 [Rits. Bibliogr. Poet.]; the few lines preserved by
Lambarde and Camden attributed to the same period [Kits. Anc.
Songs, Diss. p. xx viii.~( ; and the prophecy said to have been set up

86 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

at Here in the year 1189, as recorded by Benedict Abbas, T?ogei
Hoveden, and the Chronicle of Lanercost [Eits. Metr. Rom. Diss.
p. Ixxiii.]. To the same reign of Henry II. are to be assigned
the metrical compositions of Layamon [MS. Cott. Cal. A. ix., and
Otho C. xiii.] and Orm [MS. Jim. 1], and also the legends of St.
Katherine, St. Margaret, and St. Julian [MS. Bodl. 34], with
some few others, from which we may learn with tolerable
accuracy the state of the language at that time, and its gradual
formation from the Saxon to the shape it subsequently assumed.
From this period to the middle of the next century nothing
occurs to which we can affix any certain date ; but we shall pro-
bably not err in ascribing to that interval the poems ascribed to
John de Guldevorde [MSS. Cott. Cal. A.ix., Jes. Coll. Oxon. 29],
the Biblical History [MS. Bennet Cant. E. 11] and Poetical
Paraphrase of the Psalms [MSS. Cott. Vesp. D. vii., Coll. Benn.
Cant. 0. 6, Bodl. 921] quoted by Warton, and the Moral Ode
published by Hickes [MSS. Digby 4, Jes. Coll. Oxon. 29].
Between the years 1244 and 1258, we know, was written the
versification of part of a meditation of St. Augustine, as proved
by the age of the prior who gave the MS. to the Durham Library
[MS. Eccl. Dun. A. iii. 12, and Bodl. 42]. Soon after this time
also were composed the earlier Songs in Eitson and Percy (1264),
with a few more pieces which it is unnecessary to particularize.
This will bring us to the close of Henry Ill.'s reign and begin-
ning of his successor's, the period assigned by our poetical
antiquaries to the romances of Sir Tristrem, Kyng Horn, and
Kyng Alesaunder." *

The verse that has been preserved of the song composed by
Canute as he was one day rowing on the Nen, while the holy
music came floating on the air and along the water from the choir
of the neighbouring minster of Ely — a song which we are told
by tho historian continued to his day, after .the lapse of a
century and a half, to be a universal popular favourite f — is very
nearly such English as was written in the fourteenth century.
This interesting fragment properly falls to be given as the first
of our specimens : —

Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely
Tha Cnut Ching rew there by :
Roweth, cnihtes, noer the lant,
And here we thes muneches saeng.

* The Ancient English Eomance of Havelok the Dane; Introduction,
p. xlix. We have transferred the references, inclosed in brackets, from the
bottom of the page to the text.

f Quae usque hodie in choris publice cantantur, et in proverbiis memo-
antur.

ST. GODlliC. b7

That is, literally,—

Merry (sweetly) sung the monks within Ely
That (when) (Jnute King rowed thereby :
Row, knights, near the land,
And hear we these monks' song.

Being in verse and in rhyme, it is probable that the words ar«
reported in their original form ; they cannot, at any rate, be much
altered.

The not very clerical address of Archbishop Aldred to Ureus
Earl of Worcester, who refused to take down one of his castles
the ditch of which encroached upon a monastic churchyard, con-
sists, as reported by William of Malme&bury (who by-the-by
praises its elegance) of only two short lines : —

Hatestthou* Urse?
Have thou God's curse.

fhe hymn of St. Godric has more of an antique character. It
is thus given by Ritson, who professes to have collated the Royal
MS. 5 F. vii., and the Harleian MS. 322, and refers also to Matt,
Parisiensis Historia, pp. 119, 120, edit. 1640, and to (MS. Cott.)
Nero D. v : —

Saiiite Marie [clane] virgine,

Moder Jhesu Cristes Nazaroue,

On fo [or fongl schild, help thin Godric,

On fang bring hegilich with the in Godes riche.

Sainte Marie, Christe's bur,

Maidens clenhad, moderes flur,

Dilie min sinne [or seuneu], rix in min mod,

Bring me to winne with the selfd God.

•' By the assistance of the Latin versions," adds Ritson, " one
is enabled to give it literally in English, as follows: — Saint
Mary [chaste] virgin, mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, take,
shield, help thy Godric ; take, bring him quickly with thco
into God's kingdom. Saint Mary, Christ's chamber, purity of a
maiden, flower of a mother, destroy my sin, reign in my mind,
bring me to dwell with the only God."

Two other short compositions of tho same poetical eremite are
much in the same style. One is a couplet said to have been sung
to him by the spirit or ghost of his sister, who appeared to him
after her death and thus assured him of her happiness : —

* That is, Hightest thou (art thou called) ? Malmesbury's Latin translatioi
i«, u\ocaris Ureus : habeas Dei maledictionem." But the first line seems U
be interrogative.

88 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Crist and Sainte Marie swa on scamel me iledde

That ic on this erde ne silde with mine bare fote itredde.

Which Eitson translates:—" Christ and Mary, thus supported,
have me brought, that I on earth should not with my bare foot
tread."

The other is a hymn to St. Nicholas : —

Sainte Nicholaes, Codes druth,

Tymbre us faire scone hus.

At thi burth, at thi bare,

Sainte Nicholaes, bring us wel there.

" That is," says Kitson, " Saint Nicholas, God's lover, build us a
fair beautiful house. At thy birth, at thy bier, Saint Nicholas,
bring us safely thither."

As for the rhymes given by Lambarde and Camden as of the
twelfth century, they can hardly in the shape in which we have
them be of anything like that antiquity : they are, in fact, in
the common English of the sixteenth century. Lambarde (in
his Dictionary of England, p. 36) tells us that a rabble of Flem-
ings and Normans brought over in 1173 by Eobert Earl of
Leicester, when they were assembled on a heath near St.
Edmonds Bury, " fell to dance and sing,

Hoppe Wylikin, hoppe Wyllykin,
Ingland is thyne and myne, &c."

Camden's story is that Hugh Bigott, Earl of Norfolk, in the
reign of Stephen used to boast of the impregnable strength of his
castle of Bungey after this fashion : —

" Were I in my castle of Bungey,
Upon the river of Waveney,
I would ne care for the king of Cockeney."

What Sir Frederick Madden describes as " the prophecy said
to have been set up at Here in the year 1189 " is given by Eitson
as follows : —

Whan thu sees in Here hert yreret,

Than sulen Engles in three be ydelet :

That an into Yrland al to late waie,

That other into Puille mid prude bileve,

The thridde into Airhahen herd all wreken drechegen.

These lines, which he calls a "specimen of English poetry
apparently of ihe same age '- (the latter part of the 12th century)
Eitson says are preserved by Benedictus Abbas, by Hoveden, and
by the Chronicle of Lanercost ; and he professes to give them

THE BRUT OF LAYAMON. 89

and the account by which they are introduced, from "the
former," by which he means the first of the three. But in truth
the verses do not occur as he has printed them in any of the
places to which he refers. And there is no ground for supposing,
thet they were ever inscribed or set up upon any house at
"Here" or elsewhere. AVhat is said both by Benedict and
Hoveden (who employ nearly the same words) is simply that
the figure of a hart was set upon the pinnacle of the house, in
order, as was believed, that the prophecy contained in the verses
might be accomplished — which prophecy, we are told im-
mediately before, had been found engraven in ancient charac-
ters upon stone tables in the neighbourhood of the place. It is
clearly intended to be stated that the prophecy was much older
than the building of the house, and the erection of the figure of
a stag, in the year 1190.

THE BRUT OF LA.YAMON.

Layamon, or, as he is also called, Laweman — for the old cha-
racter represented in this instance by our modern y is really
only a guttural (and by no means either a j or a z, by which it
is sometimes rendered) — tells us himself that he was a priest,
and that he resided at Ernley, near Kadstone, or Redstone,
which appears to have been what is now called Arley Regis, or
Lower Arley, on the western bank of the Severn, in Worcester-
shire. He seems to say that he was employed in the services of
the church at that place: — "ther he bock radde" (there he
book read). And the only additional information that he gives
us respecting himself is, that his father's name was Leovenath
(or Leuca, as it is given in the later of the two texts).

His Brut, or Chronicle of Britain (from the arrival of Brutus
to the death of King Cadwalader in A.D. 689), is in the main,
though with many additions, a translation of the French Brut
d'Angleterre of the Anglo-Norman poet Wace, which is itself
a translation, also with considerable additions from other
sources, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin Historia Britonum,
which again professes, and probably with truth, to be trans-
lated from a Welsh or Breton original. So that tho genealogy
of the four versions or forms of the narrative is :— first, a Celtic
origmul, believed to bo now lost; secondly, tfie Latin of
f Monmouth ; thirdly, the French of Waco ; fourthly,
the English of Layamon. The Celtic or British version is ot
unknown date; the Latin is of the earlier, the French of the

90 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

latter, half of the twelfth century ; and that of Layarnon would
appear to have been completed in the first years of the thirteenth.
We shall encounter a second English translation from Wace's
French before the middle of the fourteenth.

The existence of Layamon's Chronicle had long been known,
but it had attracted very little attention till comparatively recent
times. It is merely mentioned even by Warton and Tyrwhitt —
the latter only remarking (in his Essay on the Language and
Versification of Chaucer), that, "though the greatest part of
this work of Layamon resembles thirtrtd Saxon poetry, without
rhyme or metre, yet he often intermixes a number of short
verses of unequal lengths, but rhyming together pretty exactly,
and in some places he has imitated not unsuccessfully the regular
octosyllabic measure of his French original." George Ellis, in
his Specimens of the Early English Poets, originally pub-
lished in 1790, was, we believe, the first to introduce Layamon
to the general reader, by giving an extract of considerable
length, with explanatory annotation s, from what he described
as his " very curious work," which, he added, never had been,
and probably never would be, printed. Subsequently another
considerable specimen, in every way much more carefully and
learnedly edited, and accompanied with a literal translation
throughout into the modern idiom, was presented by Mr. Guest
in his nistory of English Khythms, 1838 (ii. 113-123). But
now the whole work has been edited by Sir Frederic Madden,
for the Society of Antiquaries of London, in three volumes 8vo.
1847. This splendid publication, besides a Literal Translation,
Notes, and a Grammatical Glossary, contains the Brut in two
texts, separated from each other by an interval apparently of
about half a century, and, whether regarded in reference to
the philological, to say nothing of the historical, value and
importance of Layamon's work, or to the admirable and alto-
gether satisfactory manner in which the old chronicle is ex-
hibited and illustrated, may fairly be characterized as by far
the most acceptable present that has been made to the students
of early English literature in our day.

His editor conceives that we may safely assume Layamon's
English to be that of North Worcestershire, the district in which
he lived and wrote. But this western dialect, he contends, was
also that of the southern part of the island, having in fact
originated to the south of the Thames, whence, he says, it
gradually extended itself " as far as the courses of the Severn,
the Wye, the Tame, and the Avon, and more or less pervaded
tiio counties of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire.

THE BRUT OF LAYAMON. 91

Warwickshire, and Oxfordshire," — besides prevailing " through-
out the channel counties from east to west," — notwithstanding
that several of the counties that have been named, and that ot
Worcester especially, had belonged especially to the non-Saxon
kingdom of Mercia. " The language of Layamon," he farther
holds, " belongs to that transition period in which the ground-
work of Anglo-Saxon phraseology and grammar still existed,
although gradually yielding to the influence of the popular
forms of speech. We find in it, as in the later portion of the
Saxon Chronicle, marked indications of a tendency to adopt
those terminations and sounds which characterise a language
in a state of change, and which are apparent also in some other
branches of the Teutonic tongue." As showing " the progr<
made in the course of two centuries in departing from tLo
ancient and purer grammatical forms, as found in Anglo-Saxon
maiiusi -ripts," he mentions " the use of a as an article; — the I
change 01 the Anglo-Saxon terminations a and an into e and en, 2.
as well as the disregard of inflexions and genders ; — the mas- •*
culine forms given to neuter nouns in the plural ; — the neglect w
of the feminine terminations of adjectives and pronouns, and ^~
confusion between the definite and indefinite declensions ; the *
introduction of the preposition to before infinitives, and occa- „
sional use of weak preterites of verbs and participles instead of
strong ; — the constant occurrence of en for on in the plurals of '
verbs, and frequent elision of the final e ; — together with the )
uncertainty in the rule for the government of prepositions."
In the earlier text one of the most striking peculiarities is
what has been termed the nunnation, defined by Sir Frederic
as " consisting of the addition of a final n to certain cases of
nouns and adjectives, to some tenses of verbs, and to several
other parts of speech." The western dialect, of which both
texts, and especially the earlier, exhibit strong marks, is further
described as perceptible in the " termination of the present tense
plural in th, and infinitives in t, ie, or y ; the forms of the plural
personal pronouns, heo, heore, heom ; the frequent occurrence of
the prefix t before past participles ; the use of v for /; and pre-
valence of the vowel u for t or y, in such words as dude, hudde,
hutte, putte, hure> <fec." " But," it is added, " on comparing tho
two texts carefully together, some n markaLle variations are,
apparent in the later, which seem to arise, not from its having
been composed at a more recent period, but from the infusion
of an Anglian or Northern element into* the dialect." Prom
these indications the learned editor is disposed to think that
t*ie later text "may have been composed or transcribed in ono

92 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of the counties conterminous to the Anglian border, and ho
suggests that "perhaps we might fix on the eastern side of
Leicestershire as the locality."

One thing in the English of Layamon that is eminently de-
serving of notice with reference to the history of the language
is the very small amount of the French or Latin element that is
found in it. " The fact itself," Sir F. Madden observes, " of a
translation of Wace's poem by a priest of one of the midland
counties is sufficient evidence how widely the knowledge of the
writings of the trouveres was dispersed, and it would appear a
natural consequence, that not only the outward form of the
Anglo-Norman versification, but also that many of the terms
used in the original would be borrowed. This, however, is
but true in a very trifling degree, compared with the extent of
the work ; for, if we number the words derived from the French
(even including some that may have come directly from the
Latin), we do not find in the earlier text of Layamon's poem so
many asliFEy, several of which were in usage, as appears by the
Saxon Chronicle, previous to the middle of the twelfth century.
Of this number the later text retains about thirty, and adds to
them rather more than forty which are not found in the earlier
version ; so that, if we reckon ninety words of French origin in
both texts, containing together more than 56,800 lines, we shall
be able to form a tolerably correct estimate how little the Eng-
lish language was really affected by foreign converse, even as
late as the middle of the thirteenth century."*

Layamon's poem extends to nearly 32,250 lines, or more than
double the length of Wace's Brut. This may indicate the
amount of the additions which the English chronicler has
made to his French original. That, however, is only one,
though the chief, of several preceding works to which he
professes himself to have been indebted. His own account
is: —

He nom tha Englisca hoc
Tha makede Seint Beda ;
An other he nom on Latin,
Tha makede Seinte Albin,
And the feire Austin,
The fulluht broute hider in.
Boc he nom the thriddo,
Leide ther amidden,

Preface xxili.

THE BRUT OF LAYAMOX S3

Tha makede a Frenchis clerc,

AVace was ihoten,

The wel conthe writen,

And lie hoe yef thare aethele?;

Aelienor, the wes Henries queue,

Thes heyes kinges.

Layamon leide theos boc,

And tha leaf wende.

He heom leofliche bi-hoold

Lithe him beo Drihten.

Fetheren he nom mid fingrez;,

And fiede on boo-felle,

And tha sothe word

Sette to-gathere,

And tha thre boc

Thrumde to ane.

That is, literally :—

He took the English book

That Saint Bede made ;

Another he took in Latin,

That Saint Albin made,

And the fair Austin,

That baptism brought hither in.

The third book he took,

[And] laid there in midst,

That made a French clerk,

Wace was [he] called,

That well could write,

And he it gave to the noble

Eleanor, that was Henry's queen,

The high king's.

Layamon laid [before him] these book*

And the leaves turned.

He them lovingly beheld ;

Merciful to him be [the] Lord.

Feather (pen) he took with fingers,

And wrote on book-skin,

And the true words

Set together,

And the three books

Compressed into one.

His English book was no doubt the translation into the ver
nacular tongue, commonly attributed to King Alfred, of Bede's
Ecclesiastical History, which Layamon does not seem to have
known to have been originally written in Latin. What he says
about his Latin book is unintelligible. St. Austin died in

94 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

A.D. 604 ; and the only Albin of whom anything is known was
Albin abbot of St. Austin's at Canterbury, who is mentioned^
Bede as one of the persons to whom he was indebted for assist-
ance in the compilation of his History ; but he lived more than
a century after St. Austin (or Augustine). Some Latin chronicle,
however, Layamon evidently had ; and his scholarship, there-
fore, extended to an acquaintance with two other tongues in
addition to the now obsolete classic form of his own.

The principal, and indeed almost the only, passage in Laya-
mon's poem from which any inference can be drawn as to the
precise time when it was written, is one near the end (p. 31,
979-80) in which, speaking of the tax called Kome-feoh, Korne-
scot, or Peter-pence, he seems to express a doubt whether it will
much longer continue to be paid —

Drihte wat hu longe
Theo lagen scullen ilaeste
(The Lord knows how long
The law shall last).

This his learned editor conceives to allude to a resistance which
it appears was made to the collection of the tax by King John
and the nobility in the year 1205; and that supposition, he
further suggests, may be held to be fortified by the manner in
which Queen Eleanor, who had retired to Aquitaine on the
accession of John, and died abroad at an advanced age in 1204,
is spoken of in the passage quoted above from what we may call
the Preface, written, no doubt, after the work was finished —
" Aelienor, the wes Henries quene."

" The structure of Layamon's poem," Sir Frederic observes,
" consists partly of lines in which the alliterative system of the
Anglo-Saxons is preserved, and partly of couplets of unequal
length rhiming together. Many couplets, indeed, occur which
have both of these forms, whilst others are often met with which
possess neither. The latter, therefore, must have depended
wholly on accentuation, or have been corrupted in transcription.
The relative proportion of each of these forms is not to be ascer-
tained without extreme difficulty, since the author uses them
everywhere intermixed, and slides from alliteration to rhime, or
from rhime to alliteration, in a manner perfectly arbitrary. The
alliterative portion, however, predominates on the whole greatly
ov-^r the lines rhiming together, even including the imperfect or
assonant terminations, which are very frequent." Mr. Guest,
Sir Frederic notes, has shown by the specimen which he has
given with the accents marked in his English Rhythms (ii. 114

THE ORMULUM. 05

J 24;, " that the rhiming couplets of Layamon are founded on Iho
models of accentuated Anglo-Saxon rhythms of four, five, six, or
beven accents."

Layamon's poetical merit, and also his value as an original
authority, are rated rather high by his editor. His additions to
and amplifications of VVace, we are told, consist in fhe earlier
part of the work " principally of the speeches placed in the
lumiths of different personages, which are often given with quite
a dramatic effect." " The text of AVace," it is added, " is enlarged
fli'roughout, and in many passages to such an extent, particularly
after the birth of Arthur, that one line is dilated into twenty ;
names of persons and localities are constantly supplied, and not
unfrequently interpolations occur of entirely new matter, to the
extent of more than an hundred lines. Layamon often embel-
lishes and improves on his copy; and the meagre narrative of
the French poet is heightened by graphic touches and details,
which give him a just claim to be considered, not as a mere
translator, but as an original writer."

THE ORMULUM.

Another metrical work of considerable extent, that known as
the Ormulum, from Orm, or Ormin, which appears to have been
the name of the writer, has been usually assigned to the same, or
nearly the same age with the Brut of Layamon. It exists only
in a single manuscript, which there is some reason for believing
to be the author's autograph, now preserved in the Bodleian
Library among the books bequeathed by the great scholar
Francis Junius, who appears to have purchased it at the Hague
in 1659 at the sale of the books of his deceased friend Janus
riitius, or Vlitius (van Vliet), also an eminent philologist and
book-collector. It is a folio volume, consisting of 90 parchment
leaves, besides 29 others inserted, upon which the poetry is
written in double columns, in a stiff but distinct hand, and
without division into verses, so that the work had always been
assumed to be .in prose till its metrical character was pointed out
l>y Tyrwhitt in his edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 1775.
Accordingly no mention is made of it by Warton, the first
volume of whose History was published in 1774. But it had
previously been referred to by Hickes and others; and it has
attracted a large share of the attention of all recent investigators
of the history of the language. It has now been printed in full,
under the title of The Ormulum; Now first edited from tho

96 ENGLISH LITERATURE ANT) LANGUAGE.

Original Manuscript in the Bodleian, with Notes and a glossary,
by Eobert Meadows White, D.D., late Fellow of St. Mary
Magdalene College, and formerly Professor of Anglo-Saxon in
the University of Oxford ; 2 vols. 8vo. Oxford, at the University
Press, 1852.

The Ormulum is described by Dr. White as being "a series of
Homilies, in an imperfect state, composed in metre without
alliteration, and, except in very few cases, also without rhyme ;
the subject of the Homilies being supplied by those portions of
the New Testament which were read in the daily service of the
Church." The plan of the writer is, we are further told, ** first
to give a paraphrastic version of the Gospel of the day^ adapting
the matter to the rules of his verse, with such verbal additions
as were required for that purpose. He then adds an exposition
of the subject in its doctrinal and practical bearings, in the
treatment of which he borrows copiously from the writings of
St. Augustine and ^Elfric, and occasionally from those of Beda."
" Some idea," it is added, " may be formed of the extent of
Ormin's labours when we consider that, out of the entire series
of Homilies, provided for nearly the whole of the yearly service,
nothing is left beyond the text of the thirty-second." We have
still nearly ten thousand long lines of the work, or nearly
twenty thousand as Dr. WThite prints them, with the fifteen
syllables divided into two sections, the one of eight the other of
seven syllables, — the latter, which terminates in an unaccented
syllable, being prosodically equivalent to one of six, so that the
wtidlels simply our still common alternation of the eight-syllabled
and the six-syllabled line, only without eTther rhyme or even
alliteration, which makes it as pure a species of blank verse,
though a different species, as tnat which is now in use.

The list of the texts, or subjects of the Homilies, as preserved
in the manuscript, extends to 242, and it appears to be imper-
fect. Ormin plainly claims to have completed his long self-
imposed task. Here is the beginning of the Dedication to his
brother Walter, which stands at the head of the work : —

Ku, brotherr Wallterr, brotherr min

[Now, brother Walter, brother mine]
Affterr the flaeshes kinde ;

[After the flesh's kind (or nature)]
Annd brotherr min i Crisstenndom

[And brother mine in Christendom (or Christ'c kingdom )]
Thurrh fulluhht and thurrh trowwthe ;

[Through baptism and through truth]
A.nnd brotherr min i Godess hus,

[And brother mine in God's house"!

THE ORMULUM. 97

Yet o the thride wise,

[Yet on (in) the third wise]
Thurrh thatt witt hafenn takenD ba

[Though that we two nave taken both]
An reghellboc to folghenn,

[One rule-book to follow]
Unnderr kammnkess bad and lif,

[Under canonic's (canon's) rank and lifej
Swa summ JSannt Awwstin sette ;

[So as St. Austin set (or ruled)]
Ice bafe don swa summ tbu badd

[I have done so as thou bade]
Annd forthedd te thin wille ;

[And performed thee thine will (wish)]
Ice hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh

[I have wended (turned) into English]
Goddspclless ballgbe lare,

[Gospel's holy lore]
Affterr thatt little witt tatt me

[After that little wit that me]
Min Drihbtin hafetbth lenedd.

[My Lord hath lent]

One remarkable feature in this English is evidently some-
thing very peculiar in the spelling. And the same system
is observed throughout the work. It is found on a slight
examination to consist in the duplication of the consonant
whenever it follows a vowel having any other than the sound
which is now for the most part indicated by the annexation of a
silent e to the single consonant, or what may be called the name
sound, being that by which the vowel is commonly named or
spoken of in our modern English. Thus pane would by Ormin
be written pan, \>utpan pann; mean men, but men menn ; pine pin,
but pin pinn ; own on, but on onn ; tune tun, but tun tunn. This, as
Mr. Guest has pointed out, is, after all, only a rigorous cSfTying
out of a principle which has always been applied to a certain
extent in English orthography, — as in tatty, or tatt, beiry, witty,
fifty, duR, as compared with tale, beer, white, lone, mule. The effect,
however, in Ormin's work is on a hasty inspection to make his
English seem much more rude and antique than it really is. The
entry of the MS. in the catalogue of Vliet's library, as quoted
by Dr. \Vhite, describes it as an old Swedish or Gothic book.
Other early notices speak of it as semi-Saxon, or half Danish, or
possibly old Scottish. Even Hickes appears to have regarded it
as belonging to the first age after the Conquest.

Ormin attaches the highest importance to his peculiar system
of orthography. Nevertheless, in quoting what he says upon

96 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the subject in a subsequent passage of his Dedication we
will take the liberty, for the sake of giving a clear and just idea
of his language to a reader of the present day, to strip it of a
disguise which so greatly exaggerates its apparent antiquity: —

And whase willen shall this book

[And whoso shall wish this book]
Eft other sithe writen,

[After (wards) (an) other time (to) write]
Him bidde ice that he't write right,

[Him bid I that he it write right]
Swa sum this book him teacheth,

[So as this book him teacheth]
All thwert out after that it is

[All athwart (or through) out after that (or what) it ir]
Upo this firste bisne.

[Upon this first example]
With all suilk rime als here is set

[With all such rhyme as here is set]
With all se fele wordes

[With all so many words]
And tat he looke well that he

[And that he look well that he]
An bookstaff write twies

[A letter write twice]
Eywhere there it upo this book

[Wherever there (or where) it upon this look)
Is written o that wise.

[Is written on (or in) that wise]
Looke he well that he't write sway

[Look he well that he it write so]
For he ne may nought elles

[For he may not else]
On English writen right te word,

f On (or in) English write right the word]
That wite he well to soothe.

[That wot (or know) he well to (or for) sooth (or truth)]

Thus presented, Ormin's English certainly seems to differ
much less from that of the present day than Layamon's. His

j vocabulary may have as little in it of any foreign admixture ;

-but it appears to contain many fewer words that have now
become obsolete; and both " his "grammar and his construction
have much more of a modern character and air.

Oh the whole, it may be assumed that, while we have a dialect
founded on that of the Saxons specially so called in Layamon,
we have a specially Anglian form of the national language in the
Ormulum; and perhaps that distinction willbe enough, without
supposing any considerable difference of date, to explain tho

THE ANCREN RIWLE. 90

linguistic differences between the two. There is good reason for
believing that the Anglian part of the country shook off the
shackles of tho old inflectional system sooner than the Saxon,
and that our modern comparatively uninflected and analytic
English was at least in its earliest stage more the product of
Anglian than of purely Saxon influences, and is to be held as
having grown up rather in the northern and north-eastern parts
of the country than in the southern or south-western.

THE AXCREN KIWLE.

There is also to be mentioned, along with the Brut of Layamon
and the Ormulum, a work of considerable extent in prose which
has been assigned to the same interesting period in the history of
the language, the Ancren Riwle, that is, the Anchorites', or
rather Anchoresses', Kule, being a treatise on the duties of the
monastic life, written evidently by an ecclesiastic, and probably
one in a position of eminence and authority, for the direction of
three ladies to whom it is addressed, and who, with their domestic
servants or lay sisters, appear to have formed the entire com-
munity of a religious house situated at Tarente (otherwise called
Tarrant-Kaines, Kaineston, or Kingston) in Dorsetshire. This
work too has now been printed, having been edited for the
Camden Society in 1853 by the Rev. James Morton, B.D. It is
preserved in four manuscripts, three of them in the Cottonian
Collection, the other belonging to Corpus Christi College, Cam-
bridge ; and there is also in the Library of Magdalen College,
Oxford, a Latin text of the greater part of it. The entire work
extends to eight Parts, or Books, which in the printed edition
cover 215 quarto pages. Mr. Morton, who has appended to
an apparently careful representation of the ancient text both a
glossary and a version in the language of the present day, has
clearly shown, in opposition to the commonly received opinion,
that the work was originally written in English, and that the
Latin in so far as it goes is only a translation. This, indeed,
might have been inferred as most probable in such a case, on the
mere ground that we have here a clergyman, however learned,
drawing up a manual of practical religious instruction for
readers of the other sex, even without the special proofs which
Mr. Morton has brought forward. The conclusion to which he
states himself to have come, after carefully examining the text
which ho prints, and comparing it with the Oxford MS., is, that
the Latin is '* a translation, in many parts abridged and in soiuo

100 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

enlarged, made at a comparatively recent period, when the lan-
guage in which the whole had been originally written was
becoming obsolete." In many instances, in fact, the Latin trans-
lator has misunderstood his original. Mr. Morton has also thrown
great doubts upon the common belief that the authorship of the
work is to be ascribed to a certain Simon de Gandavo, or Simon
de Ghent, who died Bishop of Salisbury in 1315. This belief
rests solely on the authority of an anonymous note prefixed to
the Latin version of the work preserved in Magdalen College,
Oxford ; and Mr. Morton conceives that Simon is of much too
late a date. It might have been thought that the fact of the
work having been written in English would of itself be con-
clusive against his claim ; but the Bishop of Salisbury, it seems,
was born in London or Westminster ; it was only his father who
was a native of Flanders. On the whole, Mr. Morton is inclined
to substitute in place of Bishop Simon a Kichard Poor, who
was successively Bishop of Chichester, of Salisbury, and of
Durham, and who was a native of Tarente, where also, it seems,
he died in 1237. Of this prelate Matthew Paris speaks in very
high terms of commendation.

Two other mistakes in the old accounts are also disposed of: —
that the three recluses to whom the work is addressed belonged
to the monastic order of St. James, and that they were the
sisters of the writer. He merely directs them, if any ignorant
person should ask them of what order they were, to say that
they were of the order of St. James, who in his canonical epistle
has declared that pure religion consists in visiting and relieving
the widow and the orphan, and in keeping ourselves unspotted
from the world ; and in addressing them as his dear sisters,
" he only," as Mr. Morton explains, " uses the form of speech
commonly adopted in convents, where nuns are usually spoken
of as sisters or mothers, and monks as brothers or fathers."

Upon what is the most important question relating to the
work, regarded as a documentary monument belonging to the
history of the language, the learned editor has scarcely succeeded
in throwing so much light. Of the age of the manuscripts, or
the character of the handwriting, not a word is said. It does
not even appear whether any one of the copies can be supposed
to be of the antiquity assumed for the work upon either the new
>f the old theory of its authorship. The question is left to rest
entirely upon the language, which, it is remarked, is evidently
that of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, not greatly
differing from that of Layamon, which has been clearly shown
by Sir F. Madden to have been written not later than 1205.

THE ANCREN RHVLK. 101

The English of the Ancren Bule is, indeed, rude enough for the
highest antiquity that can bo demanded for if. 4k The spelling,"
Mr. Morton observes, " whether from carelessnes'sTor want of
system, is of an uncommon and unsettled character, and may be
pronounced barbarous and uncouth." The inflections which
"originally marked the oblique cases of substantive nouns, and
also the distinctions of gender, are, it is added, for the most part
discarded.

In one particular, however, the English of the Eule differs
remarkably from Layamon's. In that, as we have seen, Sir F.
Madden found in above 32,000 verses of the older text only
about 50 words of French derivation, and only about 90 in all in
the 57,000 of both texts; whereas in the present work the
infusion of Norman words is described as large. But this, as
31r. Morton suggests, is " owing probably to the peculiar subjects
treated of in it, which are theological and moral, in speaking of
which terms derived from the Latin would readily occur to the
mind of a learned ecclesiastic much conversant with that lan-
guage, and with the works on similar subjects written in it."

A few sentences from the Eighth or last Part, which treats of
domestic matters, will afford a sufficient specimen of this curious
work : —

Ye ne schulen cten vlcschs ne seim buten ine muchele secnesse ; other
hwoso is euer feble eteth potage blitheliche; and wunieth ou to lutel
drunch. Notheleas, leoue sustren, ower mete and ower drunch haueth
ithuht me lesse then ich wolde. Ne ueste ye nenne dei to bread and to
watere, bute ye habben leaue. Sum ancre maketh hire bord mid hire
gistes withuten. Thet is to muche ureondschipe, uor, of alle ordres
theonne-ds hit unkumdelukeat and mest ayean ancre ordre, thct is al dead
to the worlde. Me haueth i-herd ofte siggen thet deade men speken mid
c\vikc men ; auh thet heo eten mid cwike men ne uond ich neuer yete.
Ne makie ye none gistninges; ne ne tulle ye to the yete non unkuthe
harloz; thauh ther nere non other vuel of [hit?] bute hore rnethlease
muth, hit wolde other hwule letten heouendliche thouhtes.

[That is, literally : — Ye not shall eat flesh nor lard but iu
much sickness ; or whoso is ever feeble may eat potage blithely :
and accustom yourselves to little drink. Nevertheless, dear
sisters, your meat and your drink have seemed to me less than I
would (have it). Fast ye not no day to bread and to water but
ye have leave. Some anchoresses make their board (or meals)
with their friends without. That is too much friendship, for, of
all orders, then is it most unnatural and most against anchoress
order, that is all dead to the world. One has heard oft say that
dead men speak with quick (living) men ; but that they eat with

102 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

quick men not found I never yet. Make not ye no ban quotings,
nor allure ye not to the gate no strange vagabonds; though
there were cot none other evil of it but their measureless mouth
(or talk), it would (or might) other while (sometimes) hinder
heavenly thoughts.]

EARLY ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCES.

From the thirteenth century also we are probably to date the
origin or earliest composition of English metrical romances ; at
least, none have descended to the present day which seem to
have a claim to any higher antiquity. There is no absolutely
conclusive evidence that all our old metrical romances are trans-
lations from the French; the French original cannot in every
case be produced ; but it is at least extremely doubtful if any
such work was ever composed in English except upon the
foundation of a similar French work. It is no objection that
the subjects of most of these poems are not French or continental,
but British — that the stories of some of them are purely English or
Saxon : this, as has been shown, was the case with the ear]y
northern French poetry generally, from whatever cause, whether
simply in consequence of the connection of Normandy with this
country from the time of the Conquest, or partly from the
earlier intercourse of the Normans with their neighbours the
people of Armorica, or Bretagne, whose legends and traditions,
which were common to them with their kindred the Welsh, have
unquestionably served as the fountain-head to the most copious
of all the streams of romantic fiction. French seems to have
been the only language of popular literature (apart from mere
songs and ballads) in England for some ages after the Conquest ;
if even a native legend, therefore, was to be turned into a
romance, it was in French that the poem would at that period
be written. It is possible, indeed, that some legends might
have escaped the French trouveurs, to be discovered and taken
up at a later date by the English minstrels; but this is not
likely to have happened with any that were at all popular or
generally known ; and of this description, it is believed, are all
those, without any exception, upon which our existing early
English metrical romances are founded. The subjects of these
compositions— Tristrem, King Horn, Havelok, &c. — could hardly
have been missed by the French poets in the long period during
which they had the whole field to themselves : we have the most
conclusive evidence with regard to some of the legends in
question that they were well known at an early date to tho

EARLY ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCES. 103

writers in that language ; — the story of Havelok, for instance, is
in Gaimar's Chronicle ; — upon this general consideration alone,
therefore, which is at least not contradicted by cither the internal
or historical evidence in any particular case, it seems reasonable
to infer that, where we have both an English and a French
metrical .romance upon the same subject, the French is the
earlier of the two, and the original of the other. From this it is,
in the circumstances, scarcely a step to the conclusion come to by
Tyrwhitt, who has intimated his belief " that we have no English
romance prior to the age of Chaucer which is not a translation or
imitation of some earlier French romance." * Certainly, if this
judgment has not been absolutely demonstrated, it has not been
refuted, by the more extended investigation the question has
since received.

The history of the English metrical romance appears shortly to
be, that at least the first examples of it were translations fronTthe
French ; — that there is no evidence of any such having been pro-
duced before the close of the twelfth century ; — that in the thir-
teenth century were composed the earliest of those we now possess
in their original form ; — that in the fourteenth the English took the
place of the French metrical romance with all classes, and that
this was the era alike of its highest ascendancy and of its most
abundant and felicitous production ; — that in the fifteenth it was
supplanted by another species of poetry among the more edu-
cated classes, and had also to contend with another rival in the
prose romance, but that, nevertheless, it still continued to be
produced, although in less quantity and of an inferior fabric, —
mostly, indeed, if not exclusively, by the mere modernization
of older compositions — for the use of the common people ; — and
that it did not altogether cease to be read and written till after
the commencement of the sixteenth. From that time the taste
for this earliest form of our poetical literature (at least counting
from the Norman Conquest) lay asleep in the national heart till
it was re-awakened in our own day by Scott, after the lapse
of three hundred years. But the metrical romance was then
become quite another sort of thing than it had been in its proper
era, throughout the whole extent of which, while the story was
generally laid in a past age, the manners and state of society
described were, notwithstanding, in most respects those of the
poet's and of his readers' or hearers' own time. This was
strictly the case with the poems of this description which were
produced in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ;
and even in those which were accommodated to the popular taste
* Essay on the Language of Chaucer, note 55.

104 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of a later day much more than the language had to be partially
modernized to preserve them in favour. When this could no
longer be done without too much violence to the composition, or
an entire destruction of its original character, the metrical romance
lost its hold of the public mind, and was allowed to drop into
oblivion. There had been very little of mere antiquarianism in
the interest it had inspired for three centuries. It had pleased
principally as a picture or reflection of manners, usages, and a
general spirit of society still existing, or supposed to exist. And
this is perhaps the condition upon which any poetry must ever
expect to be extensively and permanently popular. We need not
say that the temporary success of the metrical romance, as revived
by Scott, was in great part owing to his appeal to quite a dif-
ferent, almost an opposite, state of feeling.

METRICAL CHRONICLE OF EGBERT OF GLOUCESTER.

Nearly what Biography is to History are the metrical romances
to the versified Chronicle of Kobert of Gloucester, a narrative of
British and English affairs from the time of Brutus to the end of
the reign of Henry III., which, from events to which it alludes,
must have been written after 1297.* All that is known of the
author is that he was a monk of the abbey of Gloucester. His
Chronicle was printed—" faithfully, I dare say," says Tyrwhitt,
"but from incorrect manuscripts" — by Hearne, in 2 vols. 8vo.,
at Oxford, in 1724 ; and a re-impression of this edition was
produced at London in 1810. The work in the earlier part of it
may be considered a free translation of Geoffrey of Momnouth's
Latin History ; but it is altogether a very rude and lifeless com-
position. "This rhyming chronicle," says Warton, " is totally
destitute of art or imagination. The author has clothed the
fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth in rhyme, which have often a
more poetical air in Geoffrey's prose." Tyrwhitt refers to
Eobert of Gloucester in proof of the fact that the English
language had already acquired a strong tincture of French;
Warton observes that the language of this writer is full of
Saxonisms, and not more easy or intelligible than that of what he
calls "the Norman Saxon poems" of Kyng Horn and others
which he believes to belong to the preceding century.

Kobert of Gloucester's Chronicle, as printed, is in long lines
of fourteen syllables, which, however, are generally divisible

* This has been shown by Sir F. Madden in his Introduction toHaveloc ttio
Dane, p. lii.

ROBERT MANNYNG. 105

into two of eight and six, and were perhaps intended to be
so written and read. The language appears to be marked by
the peculiarities of West Country English. Ample specimens
are given by Warton and Ellis ; we shall not encumber our
limited space with extracts which are recommended by no
attraction either in the matter or manner. We will only
transcribe, as a sample of the language at the commencement of
the reign of Edward L, and for the sake of the curious evidence
it supplies in confirmation of a fact to which we have more than
once had occasion to draw attention, the short passage about the
prevalence of the French tongue in England down even to this
date, more than two centuries after the conquest : —

44 Thus come lo ! Engelonde into Nonnannes honde,
And the Normans ne couthe speke tho bote her owe speche,
And speke French as dude atom, and here chyldren dude al so teche,
So that heymen of thys lond, that of her blod come,
Holdeth alle thulke speche that hii of hem nome.
Vor bote a man couthe French, me tolth of hym well lute :
Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss and to her kunde speche yute.
Ich wene ther be ne man in world contreyes none
That ne holdeth to her kuude speche, but Engelond one.
Ac wel me wot vor to conne bothe wel yt ys,
Vor the more that a man con the more worth he ys.'*

That is, literally : — Thus lo ! England came into the hand of
the Normans : and the Normans could not speak then but their
own speech, and spoke French as they did at home, and their
children did all so teach ; so that high men of this land, that
of their blood come, retain all the same speech that they of them
took. For, unless a man know French, one talketh of him
little. But low men hold to English, and to their natural speech
yet. I imagine there be no people in any country of the world
that do not hold to their natural speech, but in England alone.
But well I wot it is well for to know both ; for the more that a
man knows, the more worth he is.

A short composition of Robert of Gloucester's on the Martyrdom
of Thomas a Beket was printed by the Percy Society in 1845.

ROBERT MANNYNG, OR DE BRUNNE.

Along with this chronicle may be mentioned the similar per-
formance of Robert Mannyng, otherwise called Robert de Brunne
(from his birthplace,* Brunne, or Bourne, near Deping, or

* See a valuable note on De Brunne in Sir Frederic Madden' s Havel oc.
Introduction, p. xiii.

103 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Market Deeping, in Lincolnshire), belonging as it does to a dato
not quite half a century later. The work of Kobert de Brunne is
in two parts, both translated from the French : the first, coming
down to the death of Cadwalader, from Wace's Brut; the
second, extending to the death of Edward I., from the French
or Romance chronicle written by Piers, or Peter, de Langtoft,
a canon regular of St. Austin, at Bridlington, in Yorkshire,
who wrote various works in French, and who appears to have
lived at the same time with De Brunne. Langtoft, whose
chronicle, though it has not been printed, is preserved in more
than one manuscript, begins with Brutus ; but De Brunne, for
sufficient reasons it is probable, preferred Wace for the earlier
portion of the story, and only took to his own countryman and
contemporary when deserted by his older Norman guide. It is
the latter part of his work, however, which, owing to the subject,
has been thought most valuable or interesting in modern times ;
it has been printed by Hearne, under the title of Peter Langtoft's
Chronicle (as illustrated and improved by Robert of Brunne),
from the death of Cadwalader to the end of K. Edward the First's
reign ; transcribed, and now first published, from a MS. in the
Inner Temple Library, 2 vols. 8vo. Oxford, 1725; [reprinted
London, 1810.] This part, like the original French of Langtoft, is
in Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables ; the earlier part, which
remains in manuscript, is in the same octosyllabic verse in which
its original, Wace's chronicle, is written. The work is stated in
a Latin note at the end of the MS. to have been finished in
1338. Ritson (Bibliographia Poetica, p. 33) is very wroth with
Warton for describing De Brunne as having " scarcely more
poetry than Robert of Gloucester;" — "which only proves,"
Ritson says, "his want of taste or judgment." It may be
admitted that De Brunne's chronicle exhibits the language in a
considerably more advanced state than that of Gloucester, and
also that he appears to have more natural fluency than his pre-
decessor; his work also possesses greater interest from his
occasionally speaking in his own person, and from his more
frequent expansion and improvement of his French original by
new matter ; but for poetry, it would probably require a " taste
or judgment " equal to Ritson's own to detect much of it.

LAWRENCE MINOT.

Putting aside the authors of some of the best of the early
metrical romances, whose names are generally or universally

LAWRENCE MINOT. 107

unknown, perhaps the earliest writer of English verse subsequent
to the Conquest who deserves the name of a poet is Lawrence
Minot, who lived and wrote about the middle of the fourteenth
century, and of the reign of Edward III. His ten poems in cele-
bration of the battles and victories of that king, preserved in the
Cotton MS. Galba E. ix., which the old catalogue had described
as a manuscript of Chaucer, the compiler having been misled by
the name of some former proprietor, Richard Chawfer, inscribed
on the volume, were discovered by Tyrwhitt while collecting
materials for his edition of the Canterbury Tales, in a note to the
Essay on the Language and Versification of Chaucer prefixed to
which work their existence was first mentioned. This was in 1775.
In 1781 some specimens of them were given (out of their chro-
nological place) by Warton in the third volume of his History of
Poetry. Finally, in 1796, the whole were published by Ritson
under the title of Poems written anno MCCCLII., by Lawrence Minot;
with Introductory Dissertations on the Scottish Wars of Edward
III., on his claim to the throne of France, and Notes and Glossary,
8vo. London ; and a reprint of this volume appeared in 1825.
Of the 250 pages, or thereby, of which it consists, only about
50 are occupied by the poems, which are ten in number, their
subjects being the Battle of Halidon Hill (fought 1333); the
Battle of BannocKDurn (1314), or rather the manner in which
that defeat, sustained by his father, had been avenged by
Edward III.; Edward's first Invasion of France (1339); the
Sea-fight in the Swine, or Zwin* (1340) ; the siege of Tournay
(the same year); the Landing of the English King at La
Hogue, on his Expedition in 1346 ; the Siege of Calais (the
same year); the Battle of Neville's Cross (the same year);
the Sea-fight with the Spaniards off Winchelsea (1350) ; and
the Taking of the Guisnes (1352). It is from this last
date that Ritson, somewhat unwarrantably, assumes that all
the poems were written in that year. As they are very various
in their form and manner, it is more probable that they were
produced as the occasions of them arose, and therefore that they
ought rather to be assigned to the interval between 1333 and
1352. They are remarkable, if not for any poetical qualities of a
high order, yet for a precision and selectness, as well as a force,
of expression, previously, so far as is known, unexampled in
English verse. There is a true martial tone and spirit too in
them, which reminds us of the best of our old heroic ballads,
while it is better sustained, and accompanied with more re-
finement of style, than it usually is in these popular and anony-
* To the south of the Isle of Cadsand. at the mouth of the West Scheldt

10* ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

mous compositions. As a sample we will transcribe the one on
Edward's first expedition to France, omitting a prologue, which
is in a different measure, and modernizing the spelling where it
does not affect the rhyme or rhythm : —

Edward, owre comely king,
In Braband has his wonmg1

With many comely knight ;
And in that land, trueljr to tell,
Ordains he still for to dwell

To time2 he think to fight.

Now God, that is of mightes mast,8
Grant him grace of the Holy Ghast

His heritage to win ;
And Mary Moder, of mercy free,
Save our king and his meny4

Fro sorrow, shame, and sin.

Thus in Braband has he been,
Where he before was seldom seen

For to prove their japes ;6
Now no langer will he spare,
Bot unto France fast will he faro

To comfort him with grapes.

Furth he fared into France ;
God save him fro mischance,

And all his company !
The noble Duke of Braband
With him went into that land,

Heady to live or die.

Then the rich flower de lice6
Wan there full little price ;

Fast he fled for feared :
The right heir of that countree
Is comen,7 with all his knightes free,

To shake him by the beard.

Sir Philip the Valays8
Wit his men in tho days

To battle had he thought :9
He bade his men them purvey
Withouten langer delay ;

But he ne held it nought.

Dwelling. 2 Till the time> 3 Mogt of ir . Lt

Followers. * Jeers. e Fleur &Q lis.

Come. Philip VI. de Valois, king of France.

The meaning; seems to be, " informed his men in those days that he had
a design to fight." Unless, indeed, wit be a mistranscription of uyith.

LAWRENCE MINOT. 10D

He brought folk full great won,1
Aye seven agains2 one,

That full well weaponed were,
Bot soon when he heard ascry*
That king Edward was near thereby,

Then durst he nought come near.

In that morning fell a mist,

And when our Englishmen it wist,

It changed all their cheer ;
Our king unto God made his boon,4
And God sent him good comfort soon ;

The weader wex full clear.

Our king and his men held the field
Stalworthly with spear and shield,

And thought to win his right ;
With lordes and with knightes keen,
And other doughty men bydeen*

That war full frek8 to fight.

When Sir Philip of France heard tell
That king Edward in field wald7 dwell,

Then gained him no glee :8
He traisted of no better boot,9
Bot both on horse and on foot

He hasted him to flee.

It seemed he was feared for strokes
When he did fell his greate oaks

Obout10 his pavilioun ;
Abated was then all his pride,
For langer there durst he nought bide ;

His boast was brought all down.

The king of Berne11 had cares cold,
That was full hardy and bold

A steed to umstride :u
He and the king alsu of Naverne14
War fair feared" in the fern

Their hevids1' for to hide.

« Number. 2 Against. » Beport

* Prayer, request. — Rite. Perhaps, rather, vow or bond.

Perhaps "besides." The word is of common occurrence, but of doubtful
or various meaning. ' Were full eager. ^ Would (was dwelling,.

8 The meaning seems to be, " then no glee, or joy, was given him "
(aecefgit et). 'He trusted in no better expedient, or alternative.

w About " Bohemia. u Bestride. u Also.

* Navarre. » Were fairly frightened. 16 Head*.

110 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And leves1 well it is no lie,
And field hat2 Flemangry3

That king Edward was in,
With princes that were stiff and bold,
And dukes that were doughty told4

In battle to begin.

The princes, that were rich on raw,5
Gert6 nakers7 strike, and trumpes blaw,

And made mirth at their might,
Both alblast8 and many a bow
War ready railed9 upon a row,

And full frek for to fight.

Gladly they gave meat and drink,
So that they suld the better swink,10

The wight11 men that there were.
Sir Philip of France fled for doubt,
And hied him hame with all his rout :

Coward ! God Give him care !

For there then had the lily flower
Lorn all halely12 his honour,
. That so gat fled13 for feard ;
Bot our king Edward come full still14
When that he trowed no harm him till,1*
And keeped him in the beard.18

ALLITERATIVE YEKSE. — PIERS PLOUGHMAN.

It may be observed that Minot's verses are thickly sprinkled
•with what is called alliteration, or the repetition of words having
the same commencing letter, either immediately after one another,
or with the intervention only of one or two other words generally
imernphatic or of subordinate importance. Alliteration, which
we find here combined with rhyme, was in "an earlier stage of
our poetry employed, more systematically, as the substitute for
that decoration — the recurrence, at certain regular intervals, of
like beginnings, serving the same purpose which is now accom-

1 Believe. 2 Was called. 5 The village of La Flamengrie.

4 Reckoned. 5 Apparently, " arranged richly clad in a row."

6 Caused. 7 Tymbals. 8 Arblast, or crossbow.

9 Placed. 10 Should the better labour.

11 Stout. l2 Lost wholly. M Got put to flight?

14 Came back quietly at his ease.
13 When he perceived there was no harm intended him.
M Perhaps, "kept his beard untouched."

ALLITERATIVE VERSE.— PIERS PLOUGHMAN. Ill

plished by what Milton has contemptuously called " the jing-
ling sound of like endings." To the English of the period
before the Conquest, until its very latest stage, rhyme was un
known, and down to the tenth century our verse appears to have
known no other ornament except that of alliteration. Hence, v
naturally, even after we had borrowed the practice of rhyme!
from the French or Romance writers, our poetry retained for a \
time more or less of its original habit. In Layamon, as we have
seen, alliterative and rhyming couplets are intermixed ; in other
cases, as in Minot, we have the rhyme only pretty liberally be-
spangled with alliteration. At this date, in fact, the difficulty pro-
bably would have been to avoid alliteration in writing verse ; all
the old customary phraseologies of poetry had been moulded upon
that principle ; and indeed alliterative expression has in every
age, and in many other languages as well as our own, had a charm
for the popular ear, so that it has always largely prevailed in
proverbs and other such traditional forms of words, nor is it yet by
any means altogether discarded as an occasional embellishment
of composition, whether in verse or in prose. But there is one
poetical work of the fourteenth century, of considerable extent,
and in some respects of remarkable merit, in which the verse is
without rhyme, and the system of alliteration is almost as regular
as what we have in the poetry of the times before the Conquest.
This is the famous Vision of Piers Ploughman, or, as the subject
is expressed at full length in the Latin title, Visio Willielini de
Petro Ploughman, that is, The Vision of William concerning
Piers or Peter Ploughman. The manuscripts of this poem,
which long continued to enjoy a high popularity, are very
numerous, and it has also been repeatedly printed : first in
1550, at London, by Robert Crowley, " dwelling in Elye rentes
in Holburne," who appears to have produced three successive
impressions of it in the same year; again in 1561, by Owen
Rogers, " dwellyng neare unto great Saint Bartelmewes gate, at
the sygne of the Spred Egle ;" next in 1813, under the super-
intendence of the late Thomas Dunham Whitaker, LL.D. ; lastly,
in 1 842, under the care of Thomas Wright, Esq., M. A., F.R.S., &c.
Of the author of Piers Ploughman scarcely anything is
known. He has commonly been called Robert Langland : but
there are grounds for believing that his Christian name was
William, and it is probable that it is himself of whom he speaks
under that name throughout his work. He is supposed to have
been a monk, and he seems to have resided in the West of Eng-
land, near the Malvern Hills, where he introduces himself at
the commencement of his poem as falling aeleep " on a May

112 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

morwenynge, ' and entering upon his dreams or visions. Tho
date may be pretty7 nearly" fixed. In one place inere is an
allusion to the treaty of Bretigny made with France in 1360,
and to the military disasters of the previous year which led to
it ; in another passage mention is made of a remarkable tempest
which occurred on the 15th of January, 1362, as of a recent
event. " It is probable," to quote Mr. Wright, " that the poem
of Piers Ploughman was composed in the latter part of this year,
when the effects of the great wind were fresh in people's me-
mory, and when the treaty of Bretigny had become a subject of
popular discontent."* We may assume, at least, that it was in
hand at this time.

We shall not attempt an analysis of the work. It consists, in
Mr. Wright's edition, where the long line of the other editions is
divided into two, of 14,696 verses, distributed into twenty sec-
tions, or Passus as they are called, fiach passus forms, or pro-
fesses to form, a separate vision ; and so inartificial or confused is
the connection of the several parts of the composition (notwith-
standing Dr. Whitaker's notion chat it had in his edition " for
the first time been shown that it was written after a regular and
consistent plan"), that it may be regarded as being in reality not
so much one poem as a succession of poems. The general sub-
ject may be said to be the same with that of Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress, the exposition of the impediments and temptations
which beset the crusade of this our mortal life ; and the method,
too, like Bunyan's, is the allegorical ; but the spirit of the poetry
is not so much picturesque, or even descriptive, as satirical
Vices and abuses of all sorts come in for their share of the ex-
posure and invective ; but the main attack throughout is directed
against the corruptions of The church, and the hypocrisy and
worldliness, the ignorance, indolence, anoT" sensuality, of the
ecclesiastical order. To this favourite theme the author con-
stantly returns with new affection and sharper zest from any
less high matter which he may occasionally take up. Hence
it has been commonly assumed that he must have himself be-
longed to the ecclesiastical profession, that he was probably a
priest or monk. And his Vision has been regarded not only as
mainly a religious poem, butaa almost a puritanical and Protes-
tant work, although produced nearly two centuries before eiHier
Protestanism or Puritanism was ever heard of. In this notion,
as we have seen, it was brought into such repute at the time of
the Reformation that three editions of it were printed in one
year. There is nothing, however, of anti-Eomanism, properly
* Introduction, p. xii.

PIERS PLOUGHMAN. US

BO called, in Langland, either doctrinal or constitutional ; and even
the anti- clerical spirit of his poetry is not more decided than what
is found in the writings of Chaucer, and the other popular litera-
ture of the time. In all ages, indeed, it is the tendency of popular
literature to erect itself into a power adverse to that of the priest-
hood, as has been evinced more especially by the poetical litera-
ture of modem Europe from the days of the Provencal trouba-
dours. In the Canterbury Tales, however, and in most other
works where this spirit appears, the puritanism (if so it is
to be called) is merely one of the forms of the poetry ; in Piers
Ploughman the poetiy is principally a form or expression of the
Puritanism.

The rhythm or measure of the verse in this poem must be con-
vulrifil as a'veiitual rather than syllabical — that is to say, it
iTepi-mls rather upon the number of ilie invents than of the syl-
lables. This is, perhaps, the original principle of all verse ; and
it still remains the leading principle in various kinds of verse,
both in our own and in other languages. At first, probably,
only the accented syllables were counted, or reckoned of any
rhythmical value ; other syllables upon which there was no
emphasis went for nothing, and might be introduced in any
part of the verse, one, two, or three at a time, as the poet chose.
Of course it would at all times be felt that there were limits
beyond which this licence could not be carried without destroy-
ing or injuring the metrical character of the composition ; but
these limits would not at first be fixed as they now for the most
part are. The elementary form of the verse in Piers Ploughman
demands a ion of four accenfed syllal)l« inlflie 'first

Fit •mi.-tH -h or short line, and two in the second; but, while each
of those in the first line is usually preceded by either one or two
unaccented syllables, commonly only one of those in the second
line is so preceded. The second line, therefore, is for the most
part shorter than the first. And they also differ in regard to the

alliteration : \tjjfiing required that in the first both the accented

uld
rst

accented sllable should bein with that letter. This is tho

initial syllables, should
.second only the first

or emphatic syllables, which are generally i

f> gin witli file same letter, but thatln the..

accented syllable should begin with that letter.

general rule ; but, eith« -r from tho text being corrupt or from

the irregularity of the composition, the exceptions are very

numerous.

The poem begins as follows-: —

In a summer season,
When soft was the sun,

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

1 shoop me into shrowds1

As I a sheep2 were;
In habit as an hermit

Unholy of werkes,*
Went wide in this world

Wonders to hear ;
Ac4 on a May morwening

On Malvern hills
Me befel a ferly,6

Of fairy me thought.
I was weary for-wandered,*

And went me to rest
Under a brood7 bank,

By a burn's8 side ;
And as I lay and leaned,

And looked on the water;,
I slombered into a sleeping,

It swayed so mury.9
Then gan I meten10

A marvellous sweven,11
That I was in a wilderness,

Wist I never where :
And, as I beheld into the east

On high to the sun,
I seigh19 a tower on a toft13

Frieliche ymaked,14
A deep dale beneath,

A donjon therein,
With deep ditches and darke,

And dreadful of sight.
A fair field full of folk

Found I there between,
Of all manner of men,

The mean and the rich,
Werking15 and wandering

As the world asketh.
Some putten hem16 to the plough,

Playden full seld,^

1 I put myself into clothes. * A shepherd.

1 Whitaker's interpretation is, "in habit, not like an anchorite who keeps
nis cell, but like one of those unholy hermits who wander about the world to
8f?e and hear wonders." He reads, " That went forth in the worl," &c.

4 And. 5 Wonder. 6 Worn out with wandering.

~ Broad. 8 Stream's. 9 It sounded so pleasant.

10 Meet » Dream. . 12 gaw.

13 An elevated ground. u Handsomely built. 15 Working.

16 Pot them. v Played full seldom.

PIF.RS PLOUGHMAN. 115

In setting and sowing

Swoukeii1 full hard,
And wounen that wasters

With gluctony destroyeth.1
And some putten hem to pridit,

Apparelled hem thereafter,
In countenance of clothing

Comen deguised,8
In prayers and penances

Putten hem many,4
All for the love of our Lord

Liveden full strait,5
In hope to have after

Heaven-riche bliss ;•
As anchors and heremites7

That holden hem in hir8 cello,
And coveten nought in country

To carryen about,
For no likerous liflode

Hir likame to please.'
And some chosen chaffer :10

They cheveden" the better,
As it seemeth to our sight

That swich me thriveth.u
And some murths to make

As minstralles con,13
And geten gold with hir glee,14

Guiltless, I lieve.15
Ac japers and jaugellers"

Judas' children,
Feignen hem fantasies

And fools hem maketh,
And han hir17 wit at will

To werken if they wold.
That Poul preacheth of hem

I wol nat preve18 it here :
But qui loquitur turpiloquium1*

Is Jupiter's hine.80

Laboured. * Wan that which wasters with gluttony destroy.

Game disguised. Whitaker reads, " In countenance and in clothing."
Many put them, applied themselves to, engaged in.

* Lived full strictly. • The bliss of the kingdom of heaven.

" Anchorites and eremites or hermits. 8 Hold them in their.

* By no likerous living their body to please. 10 Merchandise.
11 Achieved their end. " That such men thrive.

13 And some are skilled to make mirths, or amusements, as minstrels.

14 And get gold with their minstrelsy. w Believe.

M But jesters and jugglers. *< Have their. l8 Will not prove.

19 Whoso speaketh ribaldry. * Our modern hind, or servant.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE,

Bidders1 and beggars

Fast about yede,8
With hir bellies and hir bags

Of bread full y-crammed,
Faiteden3 for hir food,

Foughten at the ale :
In gluttony, God wot,

Go they to bed,
And risen with ribaudry,4

Tho Roberd's knaves ;*
Sleep and sorry slewth6

Sueth7 hem ever. ^
Pilgrims and palmers, '

Plighten hem togider8
For to seeken Saint Jame

And saintes at Rome :
They wenten forth in hir way9

With many wise tales,
And hadden leave to lien10

All hir life after.
I seigh some that seiden11

They had y-sought saints :
To each a tale that they told

Hir tongue was tempered to lie12
More than to say sooth,

It seemed by hir speech.
Hermits on an heap,13

With hooked staves,
Wenten to Walsingham,

And hir wenches after ;
Great loobies and long,

That loath were to swink,14
Clothed hem in copes

To be knowen from other,
And shopen hem15 hermits

Hir ease to have.
I found there freres,

All the four orders,
Preaching the people
For profit of hem selve

1 Petitioners. 2 Went. 3 Flattered. 4 Rise with ribaldry.

* Those Robertsmen — a class of malefactors mentioned in several statutee
of the fourteenth century. The name may have meant originally Robin
Hood's men, as Whitaker conjectures.
6 Sloth. 7 Pursue.

8 Gather them together. 9 They went forth on their way.

10 To lie. " I saw some that said.

^ in every tale that they told their tongue was trained to lie.
13 In a crowd. M Labour. * Made themselves.

PIERS PLOUGHMAN. Ii7

Glosed the gospel

As hem good liked ;l
For covetise of copes8

Construed it as they would.
Many of these master freres

Now clothen hem at liking,3
For hir money and hir merchandize

Marchen togeders.
For sith charity hath been chapman,

And chief to shrive lords,
Many ferlies han fallen4

In a few years :
But holy church and hi*

Hold better togeders,
The most mischief on mould8

Is mounting well fast.
There preached a pardoner,

As he a priest were ;
Brought forth a bull

With many bishops' seals,
And said that himself might

Assoilen hem all,
Of falsehede of fasting,7

Of avowes y-broken.
Lewed8 men leved9 it well,

And liked his words ;
Comen up kneeling

To kissen his bulls :
He bouched10 hem with his brevet,"

And bleared hir eyen,18
And raught with his ragman18

Hinges and brooches.

Here it will be admitted, we have both a well-filled canvas
and a picture with a good deal of life and stir in it. The satiric
touches are also natural and effective ; and the expression clear,
easy, and not deficient in vigour.

1 As it seemed to them good. * Covetousness of copes or rich clothing.

* Clothe themselves to their liking. 4 Many wonders have happened.

* Unless holy church and they. • The greatest mischief on earth.
7 Of breaking fast-days. 8 Ignorant 9 Loved.

10 Stopped their mouths. " Little brief. u Bedimmed their eyes.

'•' Beached, drew in, with his catalogue or roll of names?

118 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

PIERS PLOUGHMAN'S CKEED.

The popularity of Langland's poem appears to have brought
alliterative verse into fashion again even for poems of consider-
able length : several romances were written in it, such as that of
William and the Werwolf, that of Alexander, that of Jerusalem,
and others; and the use of it was continued throughout the
greater part of the fifteenth century. But the most remarkable
imitation of the Vision is the poem entitled Piers the Plough-
man's Creed, which appears to have been written about the end
of the fourteenth century: it was first printed separately at
London, in 4to. by Keynold Wolfe, in 1553 ; then by Rogers,
along with the Vision, in 1561. In modern times it has also
been printed separately, in 1814, as a companion to Whitaker's
edition of the Vision; and, along with the Vision, in Mr.
Wright's edition of 1842. The Creed is the composition of a
follower of Wyclif, and an avowed opponent of Romanism.
Here, Mr. WTright observes, " Piers Ploughman is no longer an
allegorical personage: he is the simple representative of the
peasant rising up to judge and act for himself — the English
sans-culotte of the fourteenth century, if we may be allowed the
comparison." The satire, or invective, in this effusion (which
consists only of 1697 short lines), is directed altogether against
the clergy, and especially the monks or friars ; and Piers or
Peter is represented as a poor ploughman from whom the writer
receives that instruction in Christian truth which he had sought
for in vain from every order of these licensed teachers. The
language is quite as antique as that of the Vision, as may appear
from the following passage, in which Piers is introduced : —

Then turned I me forth,

And talked to myself
Of the falsehede of this folk,

How faithless they weren
And as I went by the way

Weeping for sorrow,
I see a seely1 man me by

Opon the plough hongen.2
His coat was of a clout3

That cary4 was y-called ;
His hood was full of holes,

And his hair out ;

1 Simple. 2 Hung, bent, over. 3 Cloth.

4 This is probably the same word that we have elsewhere in cowry roaury.
[t \rould seem to be the name of a kind of cloth.

PI£RS PLOUGHMAN'S CREED.

With his knopped shoon1

Clouted full thick,
His ton2 toteden8 out

As he the lond treaded :
His hosen overhongen his hooshynes4

On everich a side,
All beslomered* in fen'

As he the plough followed.
Twey7 mittens as meter8

Made all of clouts,
The fingers weren for-weard*

And full of fen honged.
This whit10 wasled11 in the feeii"

Almost to the ancle :
Four rotheren" him beforn,

That feeble were worthy ;u
Men might reckon each a rib15

So rentful18 they weren.
His wife walked him with,

With a long goad,
In a cutted coat

Gutted full high,
Wrapped in a winnow17 sheet

To wearen her fro weders,1*
Barefoot on the bare ice,

That the blood followed.
And at the lond's end19 lath39

A little crom-bolle,21
And thereon lay a little child

Lapped in clouts,
And tweyn of twey years old3*

Opon another side.
And all they songen83 o14 song,

That sorrow was to hearen ;
They crieden all o cry,

A careful note.

Knobbed shoes. * Toes. 3 Peeped.

Neither of Mr. Wright's explanations seems quite satisfactory : " crooked
•h ns ;" or " the shin towards the hock or ankle ?"

Bedaubed. • Mud. 7 Two.

Mr. Wright suggests Jitter; which does not seem to make sense.

Were worn out 10 Wight. ll Dirtied himself.

13 Fen, inud. u Oxen (the Four Evangelists).

M Become ? Perhaps the true reading is forthy, that is, for that.
15 Each rib. 16 Meagre? I7 Winnowing.

18 The meaning seems to be, " to protect her from the weather."

19 The end of the field. » Lieth ?
21 Mr. Wright explains by " crum-bowl."

82 Two of two years old. a Sung. * Ouo.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

The seely man sighed sore,

And said, " Children, beth1 still."
This man looked opon me,

And leet the plough stonden ;*
And said, " Seely man,

Why sighest thou so hard ?
Gif thee lack lifelode,3

Lene thee ich will4
Swich5 good as God hath sent :

Go we, leve brother."6

i Be. 3 Let the plough staiuL

3 If livelihood lack, or be wanting to, thoo.
* Give or lend thee I will. 6 Such.

6 Let us go, dear brother.

121

THIKD ENGLISH.
( MIXED os COMPOUND ENGLISH.)

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

The Vision of Piers Ploughman is our earliest poetical work of
any considerable extent that may still be read with pleasure ;
but not much of its attraction lies in its poetry. It interests us
chiefly as rather a lively picture (which, however, would have
been nearly as effective in prose) of much in the manners and
general social condition of the time, and of the new spirit of
opposition to old things which was then astir; partly, too, by
the language and style, and as a monument of a peculiar species
of versification. TiATifrlftTid or whoever was the author, probably
contributed by this great work to the advancement of his native
tongue to a larger extent than he has had credit for.

grammatical forms of his English will be found to .be very
nearly, if not exactly the same with those of Chaucer's; his

nearly, it

il.trv. if more sparingly admitting the non-Teutonic eleT
menT, still »l..«.-s nut abjure the principle of the same composite
-tUujtiojj ; nor is his style much inferior in mere regularity
and clearness. So long a work was not likely to have been
undertaken except by one who felt himself to be in full pos-
session of the language as it existed : the writer was no doubt
prompted to engage in such a task in great part by his gift of
ready expression ; and he could not fail to gain additional fluency
and skill in the course of the composition, especially with a
construction of verse demanding so incessant an attention to
words and syllables. The popularity of the poem, too, would I
diffuse and establish whatever improvements in the language it I
may have introduced or exemplified. In addition to the ability
displayed in it, and the popular spirit of the day with which it
was animated, its position in the national literature naturally
and deservedly gave to *-hft VJiBlflft rf _pjftra. .Plmijrhrpa.fi n.n extra-
ordinary influence ; for .it feajBilgfcjJtJpJiMttpJx (so far as is either
known or probable) of being the earliest original work, o£jany
.magnitude, in the presunt form of the language. l^hort of
Gloucester and Robert de Bmnne, Langland's predecessors, were
both, it may be remembered, only translators or paraphraste.

122 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

If Langland, however, is our earliest original writer, (Jhaucex
is still our first great poet, and the true father of our literature,
properly so called. Compared with his productions, ajl that
precedes is barbarism. But what is much more remarkable is,
that very little of what has followed in the space of nearly five
centuries that has elapsed since he lived and wrote is worthy of
being compared with what he has left us. He is in our English
poetry almost what Homer is in that of Greece, and Dante in
that of Italy — at least in his own sphere still the greatest light.

Although, therefore, according to the scheme of the history of
the language which has been propounded, the third form of it, or
that which still subsists, may be regarded as having taken its
commencement perhaps a full century before the date at which
we are now arrived, and so as taking in the works, not only of
Langland, but of his predecessors from Robert of Gloucester
inclusive, our living English Literature may be most fitly held
to begin with the poetry of Chaucer. It will thus count an
existence already of above five centuries. Chaucer is supposed
to have been born about the beginning of the reign of Edward
III. — in the year 1328, if we may trust what is said to have
been the ancient inscription on his tombstone ; so that he had
no doubt begun to write, and was probably well known as
a poet, at least as early as Langland. They may indeed
have been contemporaries in the strictest sense of the word,
for anything that is ascertained. If Langland wrote the
Creed of Piers Ploughman, as well as the Vision, which
(although it has not, we believe, been suggested) is neither
impossible nor very unlikely, he must have lived to as late, or
very nearly as late, a date as Chaucer, who is held to have died
in 1400. At the same time, as Langland's greatest, if not only,
work appears to have been produced not long after the middle of
the reign of Edward III., and the composition of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales not to have been begun till about the middle of
that of Richard II., the probability certainly is, regard being
had to the species and character of these poems, each seemingly
impressed with a long experience of life, that Langland, if not
the earlier writer, was the elder man.

Tho writings of Chaucer are very voluminous ; compiising, in
so rar as they have come down to us, in verse, The Canterbury
Tales; the Romaunt of the Rose, in 7701 lines, a translation
from the French Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun; Troilus and Creseide, in Five Books, on the
same subject as the FHostrato of Boccaccio ; The House of Fame,
in Three Books ; Chaucer's Dream, in 2235 lines ; the Book of

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 123

the Duchess (sometimes called the Dream of Chaucer), 1334
lines ; the Assembly of Fowls, 694 lines ; the Flower and the
Leaf, 595 lines ; the Court of Love, 1442 lines ; together with
many ballads and other minor pieces : and in prose (besides
portions of the Canterbury Tales), a translation of Boethius
De Consolatione Philosophise ; the Testament of Love, an imi-
tation of the same treatise ; and a Treatise on the Astrolabe,
addressed to his son Lewis in 1391, of which, however, we have
only two out of five parts of which it was intended to consist.
All these works have been printed, most of them more than
once ; and a good many other pieces have also been attributed to
Chaucer which are either known to be the compositions of other
poets, or of which at least there is no evidence or probability
that he is the author. Only the Canterbury Tales, however,
have as yet enjoyed the advantage of anything like careful
editing. Tyrwhitt's elaborate edition was first published, in
4 vols. 8vo., in 1775, his Glossary to all the genuine works of
Chaucer having followed in 1778 ; and another edition, present-
ing a new text, and also accompanied with notes and a Glossary,
was brought out by Mr. T. Wright for the Percy Society in
1847.

In his introductory Essay on the Language and Versification
of Chaucer, Tyrwhitt observes, that it thft timft whftn thift great
\siitcr made his first essays the use of rhyme was established in
sh poetry, not exclusively (as we have seen by the example
of the Vision of Piers Ploughman), l^v^ix^euwill^ " sa.tlial
in this respect he had little to do but to imitate Lis predecessors."
But the metrical part of our poetry, the learned editor conceives,
" was capable of more improvement, by the polishing of the
measures already in use, as well as by the introduction of new
modes of versification." " With respect," he continues, " to the
regular measures then in use, they may be reduced, I think, to
four. First, the long Iambic metre, consisting of not more than
fifteen nor less than fourteen syllables, and broken by a caesura
at the eighth syllable. Secondly, the Alexandrine metre, con-
sisting of not more than thirteen syllables nor less than twelve,
with a caesura at the sixth. Thirdly, the Octosyllable metre,
which was in reality the ancient dimeter Iambic. Fourthly, the
stanza of six verses, of which the first, second, fourth, and fifth
were in the complete octosyllable metre, and the third and last
catalectic— that is, wanting a syllable, or even two." The first
of these metres Tyrwhitt considers to be exemplified in the
Ormulum, arid probably also in the Chronicle of Robert of
Gloucester, if the genuine text could be recovered ; the second,

124 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

apparently, by Eobert de Brunne, in imitation of his French
original, although his verse in Hearne's edition is frequently
defective : the third and fourth were very common, being then
generally used in lighter compositions, as they still are. " In
the first of these metres," he proceeds, " it does not appear that
Chaucer ever composed at all (for I presume no one can imagine,
that he was the author of Gamelyn), or in the second; and in'
the fourth we have nothing of his but the Rhyme of Sire Thopas,
which, being intended to ridicule the vulgar romancers, seems
to have been purposely written in their favourite metre. In the
third, or octosyllable metre, he has left several compositions,
particularly an imperfect translation of the Roman de la Rose,
which was probably one of his earliest performances, The House
of Fame, The Dethe of the Duchesse Blanche, and a poem
called his Dreme : upon all which it will be sufficient here to
observe in general, that, if he had given no other proofs of his
poetical faculty, these alone must have secured to him the pre-
eminence above all his predecessors and contemporaries in point
of versification. But by far the most considerable part of
Chaucer's works is written in that kind of metre which we now
calTtne Heroic, either in distichs or stanzas ; and, as I have not
been able to discover any instance of this metre being used by
any English poet before him, I am much inclined to suppose
that he was the first introducer of it into our language." It had
been long practised by the writers both in the northern and
southern French; and within the half century before Chaucer
wrote it had been successfully cultivated, in preference to every
other metre, by the great poets of Italy — Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio. Tyrwhitt argues, therefore, that Chaucer may have
borrowed his new English verse either from the French or from
the Italian.

That the particular species of verse in which Chaucer has
written his Canterbury Tales and some of his other poems had
not been used by any other English poet before him, has not, we
believe, been disputed, and does not appear to be disputable, at
least from such remains of our early poetical literature as we
now possess. Here, then, is one important fact. It is certain,
also, that the French, if not likewise the Italian, poets who
employed the decasyllabic (or more properly hendecasyllabic *)

* In the Italian language, at least, the original and proper form of the verse
appears to have consisted of eleven syllables ; whence the generical name of
the metre is endecasillabo, and a verse of ten syllables is called endecasillabo
tronco, and one of twelve, endecasillabo sdrucciolo. But these variations do not
affect the prosodical character of the verse, which requires only that the tenth

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 125

metre were well known to Chaucer. The presumption, there-
fore, that his new metre is, as Tyrwhitt asserts, this same Italian
or French metre of ten or eleven syllables (our present heroic
verse) becomes very strong.

Moreover, if Chaucer's verse Le not constructed upon the
principle of syfiubical as well as accentual regularity, wjjen was
this principle, which is now the law and universal practice of
our p<>«-try, introduced? It will not be denied to have been
completely < -tul>li>hed ever since the language acquired in all
material respects its present form and pronunciation — that is to
say, at least since the middle of the sixteenth century : if it was
not by Chaucer at the end of the fourteenth, by whom among
his followers in the course of the next hundred and fifty years
was it first exemplified ?

At present it is sufficient to say that no one of his successors
throughout this space has hinted that any improvement, any
change, had been made in the construction of English verse
since Chaucer wrote. On the contrary, he is generally recog-
nized by them as the %reat reformer of our

put-try, and as their master and instructor in tlu-ir common an.
By his friend and disciple Occleve he is called " the first finder
of our fair langage." So Lydgate, in the next generation,
celebrates him as his master — as •* chief poet of Britain " — as

— " he that was of making soverain,
Whom all this lande of right ought prefer,
Sith of our langage he was the lode-ster " —

and as —

" The noule rhethor poet of Britain,
That worthy was the laurer to have

should be in all cases the last accented syllable. The modem English heroic,
or, as we commonly call it, ten-syllabled verse, still admits of being extended
by an eleventh or even a twelfth unaccented syllable ; although, from the con-
stitution of our present language as to syllabic emphasis, such extension is
with us the exception, not the rule, as it is (at least to the length of eleven
syllables) in Italian. It may be doubted whether Chaucer's type or model
line is to be considered as decasyllabic or hendecusyllabic ; Tyrwhitt was of
opinion that the greater number of his verses, when properly written and pro-
nounced, would be found to consist of eleven syllables ; and this will seem
probable, if we look to what is assumed, on the theory of his versification
which we are considering, to have been the pronunciation of the language in
his day. At the same time many of his lines evidently consist (even on thin
theory) of ten syllables only ; and such a construction of verse for ordinary
purposes is become so much more agreeable to modern usage and taste that
nis poetry had better be so read whenever it can be done, even at the cost
of thereby somewhat violating the exactness of the ancient pronunciation.

126 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Of poetrye, and the palm attain ;

That made first to distil and rain

The gold dew-drops of speech and eloquence

Into our tongue through his excellence,

And found the flowres first of rhetoric

Our rude speech only to enlumine," &c.

A later writer, Gawin Douglas, sounds his praise

" Venerable Chaucer, principal poet but l peer,
Heavenly trumpet, orlege,2 and regulere ; 3
In eloquence balm, condict,4 and dial,
Milky fountain, clear strand, and rose rial," 5

in a strain, it must be confessed, more remarkable for enthusiastic
vehemence than for poetical inspiration. The learned, and at
the same time elegant, Leland, in the next age describes him as
the writer to whom his country's tongue owes all its beauties : —

" Anglia Chaucerum veneratur nostra poetam,
Cui veneres debet patria lingua suas ;"

and again, in another tribute, as having first reduced the language
into regular form : —

" Linguam qui patriam redegit illam
In formam."

And such seems to have been the unbroken tradition down to
Spenser, who, looking back through two centuries, hails his
great predecessor as still the " well of English undefiled."

If now we proceed to examine Chaucer's verse, do we find it
actually characterized by this regularity, which indisputably
has at least from within a century and a half of his time been the
law of our poetry? Not, if we assume that the English of
Chaucer's time was read in all respects precisely like that of our
own day. But are we warranted in assuming this ? We know
that some changes have taken place in the national pronun
ciation within a much shorter space. The accentuation of
many words is different even in Shakespeare and his contempo-
raries from what it now is : even since the language has been
what we may call settled, and the process of growth in it nearly
stopped, there has still been observable a disposition in the accent
or syllabic emphasis to project itself with more precipitation than
formerly, to seize upon a more early enunciated part in dissyl-
lables and other polysyllabic words than that to which it was

1 Without. 2 Horologe, clock or watch.

3 Kegulator. 4 Condiment. 5 KoyaL,

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 127

\vont to be attached. For example, we now always pronounce
the word aspect with the accent on the first syllable ; in the time
of Shakespeare it was always accented on the last. We now call
a certain short composition an essay ; but only a century ago it
was called an essay : " And write next winter," says Pope,
" more essays on man." Probably at an earlier period, when
this change was going on more actively, it was part of that
general process by which the Teutonic, or native, element in our
language eventually, after a long struggle, acquired the as-
cendancy over the French element ; and, if so, for a time the
accentuation of many words would be unfixed, or would oscillate
between the two systems — the French habit of reserving itself
for the final syllable, and the native tendency to cling to a prior
portion of the word. This appears to have been the case in
Chaucer's day : many words are manifestly in his poetry accented
differently from what they are now (as is proved, upon either
theory of his prosody, when they occur at the end of a verse),
and in many also lie seems to vary the accent— pronouncing, for
instance, Idngage in one line, langdge in another — as suits his con-
venience. But again, under the tendency to elision and abbre-
viation, which is common to all languages in a state of growth,
there can be no doubt that, in the progress of the English
tongue, from its first subjection to literary cultivation in the
middle of the thirteenth century to its final settlement in the
middle of the seventeenth, it dropt and lost altogether many
short or unaccented syllables. Some of these, indeed, our
poets still assert their right to revive in pressing circumstances :
thus, though we now almost universally elide or suppress the e
before the terminating d of the preterites and past participles of
our verbs, it is still sometimes called into life again to make a
distinct syllable in verse. Two centuries ago, when perhaps it
was generally heard in the common speech of the people (as it
still is in some of our provincial dialects), and when its sup-
pression in reading prose would probably have been accounted
an irregularity, it was as often sounded in verse as not, and the
licence was probably considered to be taken when it was elided.
The elision, when it took place, was generally marked by the
omission of the vowel in the spelling. If we go back another
century, we find the pronunciation of the termination as a
distinct syllable to be clearly the rule and the prevailing
practice, and the suppression of the vowel to be the rare ex-
ception. But even at so late a date as the end of the sixteenth
and the beginning of the seventeenth century, other short vowels
a* well as this were still occasionally pronounced, as they wero

128 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

almost always written. Both the genitive or possessive singular
and the nominative plural of nouns were, down to this time,
made by the addition not of s only, as now, but of es to the
nominative singular ; and the es makes a distinct syllable some-
times in Shakespeare, and often in Spenser. In Chaucer, there-
fore, it is only what we should expect that it should generally be
so pronounced : it is evident that originally, or when it first
appeared in the language, it always was, and that the practice of
running it and the preceding syllable together, as we now do,
has only been gradually introduced and established. .

The deficiencies of Chaucer's metre, Tyrwhitt contends, are to
be ^chiefly supplied by the pronunciation of what he calls " the
e feminine ;" by which he means the e which still terminates so
many of our words, but is now either totally silent and ineffective
in the pronunciation, or only lengthens or otherwise alters the
sound of the preceding vowel — in either case is entirely in-
operative upon the syllabication. Thus, such words as large,
strange, time, &c., he conceives to be often dissyllables, and such
words as Romaine, sentence, often trisyllables, in Chaucer. Some
words also he holds to be lengthened a syllable by the inter-
vention of such an e, now omitted both in speaking and writing,
in the middle — as mjug-e-ment, command-e-ment, vouch-e-safe, &c.

Wallis, the distinguished mathematician, in his Grammar of
the English Language (written in Latin, and published about
the middle of the seventeenth century) had suggested that the
origin of this silent e probably was, that it had originally been
pronounced, though somewhat obscurely, as a distinct syllable,
like the French e feminine, which still counts for such in the
prosody of that language. Wallis adds, that the surest proof of
this is to be found in our old poets, with whom the said e some-
times makes a syllable, sometimes not, as the verse requires.
" With respect to words imported directly from France,"
observes Tyrwhitt, "it is certainly quite natural to suppose
that for some time they retained their native pronunciation."
" We have not indeed," he continues, "so clear a proof of the
original pronunciation of the Saxon part of our language ; but
we know, from general observation, that all changes of pro-
nunciation are generally made by small degrees ; and, therefore,
when we find that a great number of those words which in
Chaucer's time ended in e originally ended in a, we may reason-
ably presume that our ancestors first passed from the broader
sound of a to the thinner sound of e feminine, and not at once
from a to e mute. Besides, if the final e in such words was not
pronounced, why was it added ? From the time that it has con-

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 129

fessedly ceased to be pronounced it has been gradually omitted in
them, except where it may be supposed of use to lengthen or
soften the preceding syllable, as in Aope, name, &c. But according
to the ancient orthography it terminates many words of Saxon
original where it cannot have been added for any such purpose,
as herte, chdde, olde, wilde, &c. In these, therefore, we must
suppose that it was pronounced as e feminine, and made part of a
second syllable, and so, by a parity of reason, in all others in
which, as in these, it appears to have been substituted for the
Saxon a." From all this Tyrwhitt concludes that " the pro-
nunciation of the e feminine is founded on the very nature of
both the French and Saxon parts of our language," and therefore
that ** what is generally considered as an e mute, either at the
end or in the middle of words, was anciently pronounced, but
obscurely, like the e feminine of the French." In a note,
referring to an opinion expressed by Wallis, who, observing that
the French very often suppressed this short e in their common
speech, was led to think that the pronunciation of it would
perhaps shortly be in all cases disused among them, as among
ourselves, he adds : " The prediction has certainly failed ; but,
notwithstanding, I will venture to say that when it was made it
was not unworthy of Wallis's sagacity. Unluckily for its
success, a number of eminent writers happened at that very time
to be growing up in France, whose works, having since been
received as standards of style, must probably fix for many
centuries the ancient usage of the e feminine in poetry, and of
course give a considerable check to the natural progress of the
language. If the age of Edward III. had been as favourable to
letters as that of Louis XIV. ; if Chaucer and his contemporary
poets had acquired the same authority here that Corneille,
Moliere, liacine, and Boileau have obtained in France ; if their
works had been published by themselves, and perpetuated in a
genuine state by printing ; 1 think it probable that the e femi-
nine would still have preserved its place, in our poetical
language at least, and certainly without any prejudice to the
smoothness of our versification."

In supporting his views by these reasons, Tyrwhitt avoid.",
having recourse to any arguments that might be drawn from the
practice of Chaucer himself— that being in fact the matter in
dispute ; but his main proposition, to the extent at least of the
alleged capacity of the now silent final e to make a distinct
syllable in Chaucer's day, appears to be demonstrated by some
instances in the poet's works. Thus, for example, in the follow-
ing couplet from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, unless

130 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the word Rome which ends the first line be pronounced as a dis-
syllable, there will be no rhyme : —

" That straight was comen from the court of Home ;
Full loud he sang — Come hither, love, to me."

Bo again, in the Canon Yeoman's Tale, we have the following
lines : —

" And when this alchymister saw his time,
Kis'th up, Sir Priest, quod he, and stondeth by me,"

in the first of which time must evidently in like manner be read
as a word of two syllables. The same rhyme occurs in a quatrain
in the Second Book of the Troilus and Creseide : —

" All easily now, for the love of Marte,

Quod Pandarus, for every thing hath time,
So long abide, till that the night departe
For all so sicker as thou liest here by me.'*

Finding Rome and time to be clearly dissyllables in these pas-
sages, it would seem that we ought, as Tyrwhitt remarks (Note
on Prol. to Cant. Tales, 674), to have no scruple so to pronounce
them and other similar words wherever the metre requires it.

" The notion, probably, which most people have of Chaucer,"
to borrow a few sentences of what we have written elsewhere,
" is merely that he was a remarkably good poet for his day ;
but that, both from his language having become obsolete, and
from the advancement which we have since made in poetical
taste and skill, he may now be considered as fairly dead and
buried in a literary, as well as in a literal, sense. This, we
suspect, is the common belief even of educated persons and of
scholars who have not actually made acquaintance with Chaucer,
but know him only by name or by sight; — by that antique-
sounding dissyllable that seems to belong to another nation and
tongue, as well as to another age ; and by that strange costume
of diction, grammar, and spelling, in which his thoughts are
clothed, fluttering about them, as it appears to do, like the rags
upon a scarecrow.

" Now, instead of this, the poetry of Chaucer is really, in all
essential respects, about tHe greenest and freshest in our lan-
guage. We have some higher poetry than Chaucer's — poetry
that has more of the character of a revelation, or a voice from
another world: we have none in which there is either a more
abounding or a more bounding spirit of life, a truer or fuller
natural inspiration. He may be said to verify, in another sense,
the remark of Bacon, that what we commonly call antiquity was

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 131

really the youth of the world : his poctiy seems to breathe <>f a
time when humanity was younger and more joyous-hearted than
it now is. Undoubtedly he had an advantage as to this matter,
m having been the first great poet of his country. Occupying
this position, he stands in some degree between each of his suc-
cessors and nature. The sire of a nation's minstrelsy is of neces-
sity, though it may be unconsciously, regarded by all who come
after him as almost a portion of nature — as one whose utterances
are not so much the echo of hers as in very deed her own living
voice— carrying in them a spirit as original and divine as the
music of her running brooks, or of her breezes among the leaves.
And there is not wanting something of reason in this idolatry.
It is he alone who has conversed with nature directly, and
without an interpreter — who has looked upon the glory of her
countenance unveiled, and received upon his heart the per-
fect image of what she is. Succeeding poets, by reason of his
intervention, and that imitation of him into which, in a greater
or less degree, they are of necessity drawn, see her only, as it
were, wrapt in hazy and metamorphosing adornments, which
human hands have woven for her, and are prevented from per-
fectly discerning the outline and the movements of her form by
that encumbering investiture. They are the fallen race, who
have been banished from the immediate presence of the divinity,
and have been left only to conjecture from afar off the bright-
ness of that majesty which sits throned to them behind impene-
trable clouds : he is the First Man, who has seen God walking
in the garden, and communed with him face to face.

" But Chaucer is the Homer of his country, not only as
having been the earliest of her poets (deserving to be so called),
but also as being still one of her greatest. The^names of
Spenser, of Shakspeare, and of Milton are the only other names
that can be placed on the same line with his.

''His poetry exhibits, in as remarkable a degree perhaps as
any other in any language, an intermixture and combination
of what are usually deemed the most opposite excellences.
Great poet as he is, we might almost say of him that his genius
has as much about it of the spirit of prose as of poetry, and that,
if he had not sung so admirably as he has done of flowery
meadows, and summer skies, and gorgeous ceremonials, and high
or tender passions, and the other themes over which the imagi-
nation loves best to pour her vivifying light, he would have won
to himself the renown of a Montaigne or a Swift by £he origi-
nality and pi-netrating sagacity of his observations mi ordinary
life, Ins^ insight Into motives and character, the richness" "and

132 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

peculiarity of his humour, the sharp edge of his satire, and the
propriety, flexibility, and exquisite expressiveness of his refined
yet natural diction. Even like the varied visible creation
around us, his poetry too has its earth, its sea, and its sky, and
all the " sweet vicissitudes " of each. Here you have the clear-
eyed observer of man as he is, catching ' the manners living as
they rise,' and fixing them in pictures where not their minutest
lineament is or ever can be lost : here he is the inspired dreamer,
by whom earth and all its realities are forgotten, as his spirit
soars and sings in the finer air and amid the diviner beauty of
some far-off world of its own. Now the riotous verse rings loud
with the turbulence of human merriment and laughter, casting
from it, as it dashes on its way, flash after flash of all the forms
of wit and comedy ; now it is the tranquillizing companionship
of the sights and sounds of inanimate nature of which the poet's
heart is full — the springing herbage, and the dew-drops on the
leaf, and the rivulets glad beneath the morning ray and dancing
to their own simple music. From mere narrative and playful
humour up to the heights of imaginative and impassioned song,
his genius has exercised itself in all styles of poetry, and won
imperishable laurels in all."*

It has been commonly believed that one of the chief sources
from which Chaucer drew both the form and the spirit of his
poetry was the recent and contemporary poetry of Italy — that
eldest portion of what is properly called the literature of modern
Europe, the produce of the genius of Petrarch and Boccaccio and
their predecessor and master, Dante. But, although this may
have been the case, it is by no means certain that it was so ; and
some circumstances seem to make it rather improbable that
Chaucer was a reader or student of Italian. Of those of his
poems which have been supposed to be translations from the
Italian, it must be considered very doubtful if any one was
really derived by him from that language. The story of his
Palamon and Arcite, which, as the Knight's Tale, begins the
Canterbury Tales, but which either in its present or another
form appears to have been originally composed as a separate
work, is substantially the same with that of Boccaccio's heroic
poem in twelve books entitled Le Teseide — a fact which, we
believe, was first pointed out by Warton. But an examination
of the two poems leads rather to the conclusion that they are
both founded upon a common original than that the one was
taken from the other. Boccaccio's poem extends to about 12,000
octosyllabic, Chaucer's to not many more than 2000 decasyllabic,
* Printing Machine, No. 37 (1835).

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 133

verses ; and not only is the stoiy in the one much less detail, d
than in the other, but the two versions differ in some of the
main circumstances.* Chaucer, moreover, nowhere mentions
Boccaccio as his original ; on the contrary, as Warton has him-
self noticed, he professes to draw his materials, not from tho
works of any contemporary, but from " olde Stories," and " olde
bookes that all this story telleth more plain."f Tyrwhitt, too,
while holding, as well as AVarton, that Chaucer's original was
Boccaccio, admits that the latter was in all probability not the
inventor of the story. J Boccaccio himself, in a letter relating to
his poem, describes the story as very ancient, and as existing in
what he calls Latino volgare, by which he may mean rather the
Provencal than the Italian. § In fact, as both Warton and
Tyrwhitt have shown, there is reason to believe that it had pre-
viously been one of the themes of romantic poetry in various
languages. The passages pointed out by Tyrwhitt in his notes
to Chaucer's poem, as translated or imitated from that of Boc-
caccio, are few and insignificant, and the resemblances they
present would be sufficiently accounted for on the supposition of
both writers having drawn from a common source. Nearly the
same observations apply to the supposed obligations of Chaucer
in his Troilus and Creseide to another poetical work of Boc-
caccio's, his Filostrato. The discovery of these was first an-
nounced by Tyrwhitt in his Essay prefixed to the Canterbury
Tales. But Chaucer himself tells us (ii. 14) that he trans-
lates his poem " out of Latin ;" and in other passages (i. 394,
and v. 1653), he expressly declares his "auctor" or author,

* See this pointed out by Dr. Nott (who nevertheless assumes the one
poem to be a translation from the other), iu a note to his Dissertation on the
State of English Poetry before the Sixteenth Century, p. cclxiiv.

t Warton's Hist. Eng. Poetry, ii. 179.

J Introductory Discourse to Canterbury Tales, Note (13).

§ The letter is addressed to his mistress (la Fiametta), Mary of Aragon, a
natural daughter of Robert king of Naples. " Trovato," he says, «• una anti-
chissima storia, ed al piii delle genti non ma ni testa, in Latino volgare," &c.
The expression here lias a curious resemblance to the words used by Chaucer
in enumerating his own works in the Legende of Good Women, i>. 420, —

" He made the boke that hight the House of Fame, &c.
And all the love of Palamon and Arcito
Of Thebes, thowjh the story is knowen lite"

Tyrwhitt's interpretation of these last words is, that they seem to imply that
the poem to which they allude, the Palamon and Arcite (as first composed),
had not made itself very popular. Both he and Warton understand the
Latino volgare, as meaning tho Italian language in this passage of the letter
to La Fiametta, as well as in a stanza which he quotes from the Teseide in
Discourse, Note (£).

134 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

to be named Lollius. In a note to the Parson's Tale, in the
Canterbury Tales, Tyrwhitt assumes that Lollius is another
name for Boccaccio, but how this should be he confesses himself
unable to explain. In his Glossary (a later publication), he
merely describes Lollius as " a writer from whom Chaucer pro-
Besses to have translated his poem of Troilns and Creseide,"
idding, " I have not been able to find any further account of
him." It is remarkable that he should omit to notice that Lollius
is mentioned by Chaucer in another poem, his House of Fame
(iii. 378), as one of the writers of the Trojan story, along with
Homer, Dares Phiygius, Livy (whom He calls Titus), Guido of
Colonna, and " English Galfrid," that is, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The only writer of the name of Lollius of whom anything is
now known appears to be Lollius Urbicus, who is stated to
have lived in the third century, and to have composed a history
of his own time, which, however, no longer exists.* But our
ignorance of who Chaucer's Lollius was does not entitle us to
assume that it is Boccaccio whom he designates by that name.
Besides, the two poems have only that general resemblance
which would result from their subject being the same, and their
having been founded upon a common original. Tyrwhitt (note
to Parson's Tale), while he insists that the fact of the one being
borrowed from the other " is evident, not only from the fable
and characters, which are the same in both poems, but also from
a number of passages in the English which are literally trans-
lated from the Italian," admits that " at the same time there are
several long passages, and even episodes, in the Troilns of which
there are no traces in the Filostrato ;" and Warton makes the
same statement almost in the same words. f Tyrwhitt acknow-
ledges elsewhere, too, that the form of Chaucer's stanza in the
Troilns does not appear ever to have been used by Boccaccio,
nor does he profess to have been able to find such a stanza in any
early Italian poetiy.J The only other composition of Chaucer's
for which he can be imagined to have had an Italian original is
his Clerk's Tale in the Canterbury Tales, the matchless story of
Griselda. This is one of the stories of the Decameron ; but it
was not from Boccaccio's Italian that Chaucer took it, but from
Petrarch's Latin, as he must be understood to intimate in the
Prologue, where he says, or makes the narrator say —

* SGA Warton, Hist. En-. Poetry, ii. 220; and Vossius, do Historicis La-
tuns, cd. 1051, p. 170.
t Hist; Eng. Poetry, ii. p. 221, note,
t Essay, § y.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 336

"I woll you tell a tale which that I
Learned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
As preved by his wordes and his work :
He is now dead and nailed in his chest;
I pray to God so yeve his soule rest
Francis Petrarch, the laureat poet,
Highte this clerk, whose rhethoricke sweet
Enlumined all Itaille of poetrie."

Petrarch's Latin translation of Boccaccio's tale is, as Tyrwhitt
states, printed in all the editions of his works, under the title of
De Obedieiitia et Fide Uxoria Mytholoyia (a Myth on Wifely
Obedience and Faithfulness). But, indeed, Chaucer may not
have even had Petrarch's translation before him ; for Petrarch, in
his letter to Boccaccio, in which he states that he had translated
it from the Decameron, only recently come into his bands, in-
forms his friend also that the story had been known to him
many years before. He may therefore have communicated it
orally to Chaucer, through the medium of what was probably
their common medium of communication, the Latin tongue, if
they ever met, at Padua or elsewhere, as it is asserted they did.
All that we are concerned with at present, is the fact that it does
not appear to have been taken by Chaucer from the Decameron :
he makes no reference to Boccaccio as his authority, and, while
it is the only one of the Canterbury Tales which could otherwise
have been suspected with any probability to have been derived
from that work, it is at the same time one an acquaintance with
which we know he had at least the means of acquiring through
another language than the Italian. To these considerations may
be added a remark made by Sir Harris Nicolas : — " That Chaucer
was not acquainted with Italian," says that writer, " may be in-
ferred from his not having introduced any Italian quotation into
his works, redundant as they are with Latin and French words
and phrases." To which he subjoins in a note : " Though
Chaucer's writings have not been examined for the purpose, the
remark in the text is not made altogether from recollection ; for
at the end of Speght's edition of Chaucer's works translations aro
given of the Latin and French words in the poems, but not a
single Italian word is mentioned."*

* Life of Chaucer, p. 25. Sir Harris had said before : — M Though Chaucer
undoubtedly knew Latin and French, it is by no means certain, notwithstand-
ing his supposed obligations to the Decameron, that he was as well acquainted
with Italian. There may have been a common Latin original of the main
incidents of many if not of all the Tales for which Chaucer is supposed t»
have been wholly indebted to Boccaccio, and from which original Boccaccio
himself may have taken them." Beside the Clerk's Tale, which has lx.ru

136 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

It may be questioned, then, if much more than the fame of
Italian song had reached the ear of Chaucer ; but, at all events,
the foreign poetry with which he was most familiar was cer-
tainly that of France. This, indeed, was probably still ac-
counted everywhere the classic poetical literature of the modern
world ; the younger poetry of Italy, which was itself a deriva-
tion from that common fountain-head, had not yet, with all its
real superiority, either supplanted the old lays and romances of
the trouveres and troubadours, or even taken its place by their
side. The earliest English, as well as the earliest Italian, poetry
\yns for the most part a translation or imitation of that of France.
1 )f the poetry written in the French language, indeed, in the
eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, the larger portion, as
we have seen, was produced in England, for English readers,
and to a considerable extent by natives of this country. French
poetry was not, therefore, during this era, regarded among us as
a foreign literature at all ; and even at a later date it must have
been looked back upon by every educated Englishman as rather
a part of that of his own land. For a century, or perhaps more,
before Chaucer arose, the greater number of our common versi-
fiers had been busy in translating the French romances and
other poetry into English, which was now fast becoming the
ordinary or only speech even of the educated classes ; but this
work had for the most part been done with little pains or skill,
and with no higher ambition than to convey the mere sense of
the French original to the English reader. By the time when
Chaucer began to write, in the latter half of the fourteenth cen-
tury, the French language appears to have almost gone out of
use as a common medium of communication ; the English on the
other hand, as we may see by the poetry of Langland and Minot
as compared with that of Robert of Gloucester, had, in the course
of the preceding hundred years, thrown off much of its primitive
rudeness, and acquired a considerable degree of regularity and
flexibility, and general fitness for literary composition. In these

noticed above, the only stories in the Canterbury Tales which are found
in the Decameron are the Eeeve's Tale, the Shipman's Tale, and the
Franklin's Tale ; but both Tyrwhitt and Warton, while maintaining Chaucer's
obligations in other respects to the Italian writers, admit that the two former
are much more probably derived from French Fabliaux (the particular fabliau,
indeed, on which the Keeve's Tale appears to be founded has been published
by Le Grand) ; and the Franklin's Tale is expressly stated by Chaucer himself
to be a Breton lay. He nowhere mentions Boccaccio or his Decameron, or
any other Italian authority. Of the Pardoner's Tale, " the mere outline," ap
Tyrwhitt states, is to be found in the Cento NoveJle Antiche ; but the greater
part of that collection is borrowed from the Contes and Fabliaux of the French.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 137

circumstances, writing in French in England was over for any
good purpose : Chaucer himself observes in the prologue to his
prose treatise entitled the Testament of Love : — " Certes there
ben some that speak their poesy matter in French, of which
speech the Frenchmen have as good a fantasy as we have in hear-
ing of Frenchmen's English." And again : — " Let, then, clerks
enditen in Latin, for they have the property of science and the
knowinge in that faculty ; and let Frenchmen in their French
also endite their quaint terms, for it is kindly [natural] to their
mouths; and let us show our fantasies in such words as we
learneden of our dames' tongue." The two languages, in short,
like the two nations, were now become completely separated, and
in some sort hostile : as the Kings of England were no longer
either Dukes of Normandy or Earls of Poitou, and recently a
fierce war had sprung up still more effectually to divide the one
country from the other, and to break up all intercourse between
them, so the French tongue was fast growing to be almost as
strange and distinctly foreign among us as the English had
always been in France. Chaucer's original purpose and aim
may be supposed to have been that of the generality of his imme-
diate predecessors, to put his countrymen in possession of some
of the best productions of the French poets, so far as that could
be done by translation ; and with his genius and accomplish-
ments, and the greater pains he was willing to take with it, we
may conjecture that he hoped to execute his task in a manner
very superior to that in which such work had hitherto been per-
formed. With these views he undertook what was probably hi§
earliest composition of any length, his translation of the Roman
de la Rose, begun by Guillaume de Lorris, who died about 1260,
and continued and finished by Jean de Meun, whose date is
about half a century later. " This poem," says Warton, " is
esteemed by the French the most valuable piece of their old
poetry. It is far beyond the rude efforts of all their preceding
romancers ; and they have nothing equal to it before the reign
of Francis the First, who died in the year 1547. But there is a
considerable difference in the merit of the two authors. William
of Lorris, who wrote not one quarter of the poem, is remarkable
for his elegance and luxuriance of description, and is a beautiful
painter of allegorical personages. John of Meun is a writer of
another cast. He possesses but little of his predecessor's inven-
tive and poetical vein ; and in that respect, he was not properly
qualified to finish a poem begun by William of Lorris. But ho
has strong satire and great liveliness. He was one of the wits of
the court of Charles le Bel. The difficulties and dangers of a

133 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

lover in pursuing and obtaining the object of his desires aie tlio
literal argument of this poem. This design is couched under the
argument of a rose, which our lover after frequent obstacles
gathers in a delicious garden. He traverses vast ditches, scales
lofty walls, and forces the gates of adamantine and almost im-
pregnable castles. These enchanted fortresses are all inhabited
by various divinities ; some of which assist, and some oppose,
the lover's progress."* The entire poem consists of no fewer
than 22,734 verses, of which only 4,149 are the composition of
William of Lorris. All this portion has been translated by
Chaucer, and also about half of the 18,588 lines written by
De Meun : his version comprehends 13,105 lines of the French
poem. These, however, he has managed to comprehend in 7701
(Warton says 7699) English verses : this is effected by a great
compression and curtailment of De Meun's part ; for, while the
4149 French verses of De Lorris are fully and faithfully ren-
dered in 4432 English verses, the 8956 that follow by De Meun
are reduced in the translation to 3269. Warton, who exhibits
ample specimens both of the translation and of the original, con-
siders that Chaucer has throughout at least equalled De Lorris,
and decidedly surpassed and improved De Meun.

No verse so flowing and harmonious as what we have in this
translation, no diction at once so clear, correct, and expressive,
had, it is probable, adorned and brought out the capabilities of
his native tongue when Chaucer began to write. Several of his
subsequent poems are also in whole or in part translations ; the
Troilus and Creseide, the Legend of Good Women (much of
which is borrowed from Ovid's Epistles), and others. But we
must pass over these, and will take our first extract from his
House of Fame, no foreign original of which has been dis-
covered, although Warton is inclined to think that it may have
been translated or paraphrased from the Provencal. Chaucer,
however, seems to appear in it in his own person ; at least the
poet or dreamer is in the course of it more than once addressed
by the name of Geoffrey. And in the following passage he
eeems to describe his own occupation and habits of life. It is
addressed to him by the golden but living Eagle, who has
carried him up into the air in his talons, and by whom tlio
xnarvellous sights he relates are shown and explained to him : —

First, I, that in my feet have thee,

Of whom thou hast great fear and wonder,

Hist. Bug. Poetry, ii. 209.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

Am dwelling with the God of Thunder,
Which men ycallen Jupiter,
That doth me flyen full oft fer l
To do all his commandement ;
And for this cause he hath me sent
To thee ; harken now by thy trouth ;
Certain he hath of thee great routh,2
For that thou hast so truely
So long served ententifly8
His blinde nephew Cupido,
And the fair queen Venus also,
Withouten guerdon ever yet ;
And natheless 4 hast set thy wit
Althoughe in thy head full lit is
To make bokes, songs, and dittes,
In rhime or elles in cadence,
As thou best canst, in reverence
Of Love and of his servants eke,
That have his service sought and seek ;
And paincst thee to praise his art,
Although thou haddest never part ;
Wherefore, so wisely God me blesa,
Jovis yhalt 5 it great humbless,
And virtue eke, that thou wilt make
Anight 8 full oft thine head to ache
In thy study, so thou ywritest,
And ever more of Love enditest,
In honour of him and praisings,
And in his folkes furtherings,
And in their matter all devisest,
And not him ne his folk despisest,
Although thou may*st go in
Of them that him list not avance :
Wherefore, as I now said, ywis,
Jupiter considreth well this,
And als, beau sire,7 of other things,
That is, that thou hast no tidings
Of Loves folk if they be glade,
Ne of nothing else that God made,
And not only fro8 fer countree
That no tidinges comen to thee,
Not of thy very neighebores,
That dwellen almost at thy dores,
Thou nearest neither that ne this ;
For, when thy labour all done *&,

1 Far. a Ruth, pity. 3 Attentively.

* Nevertheless. • Jove held. « O 'nights, at night.

" Fair sir. s From.

140 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And hast made all thy reckonings,

Instead of rest and of new things,

Thou goest home to thine house anon,

And, all so dumb as any stone,

Thou sittest at another book,

Till fully dazed is thy look,

And livest thus as an hermit,

Although thine abstinence is lit ;

And therefore Jovis, through his grace,

Will that I bear thee to a place

Which that yhight the House of Fame, &c.

From the mention of Ms reckonings in this passage, Tyrwhitt
conjectures that Chaucer probably wrote the House of Fame
while he held the office of Comptroller of the Customs of Wools,
to which he was appointed in 1374. It may be regarded, there-
fore, as one of the productions of the second or middle stage of
his poetical life, as the Eomaunt of the Eose is supposed to have
been of the first. The Honse of Fame is in three books, com-
prising in all 2190 lines, and is an exceedingly interesting poem
on other accounts, as well as for the reference which Chaucer
seems to make in it to himself, and the circumstances of his own
life. In one place, we have an illustration drawn from a novelty
which we might have thought had hardly yet become familiar
enough for the purposes of poetry. The passage, too, is a sample
of the wild, almost grotesque imagination, and force of expres-
sion, for which the poem is remarkable : —

What did this ^Bolus ? but he

Took out his blacke trompe of brass,

That fouler than the devil was,

And gan this trompe for to blow

As all the world should overthrow.

Throughout every region

Ywent this foule trompes soun,

As swift as pellet out of gun

When fire is in the powder run :

And such a smoke gan out wend

Out of the foule trompes end,

Black, blue, and greenish, swartish, red,

As doeth where that men melt lead,

Lo all on high from the tewel :*

And thereto one thing saw I well,

That aye the ferther that it ran

The greater wexen it began,

As doth the river from a well ;

And it stank as the pit of hell.

Funnel.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. ]4i

The old mechanical artillery, however, is alluded to in another
passage as if also still in use : —

And the noise which that I heard,
For all the world right so it fered !
As doth the routing2 of the stone
That fro the engine is letten gone.

Through such deeper thinking and bolder writing as we have
in the House of Fame, Chaucer appears to have advanced from the
descriptive luxuriance of the Romaunt of the Rose to his most
matured style in the Canterbury Tales. This is not only his
greatest work, but it towers above all else that he has written,
like some palace or cathedral ascending with its broad and lofty
dimensions from among the common buildings of a city. His
genius is another thing here altogether from what it is in his
other writings. Elsewhere he seems at work only for the day that
is passing over him ; here, for all time. All his poetical faculties
put forth a strength in the Canterbury Tales they have nowhere
else shown; not only is his knowledge of life and character greater,
his style firmer, clearer, more flexible, and more expressive, his
humour more subtle and various, but his fancy is more nimble-
winged, his imagination far richer and more gorgeous, his sensi-
bility infinitely more delicate and more profound. And this great
work of Chaucer's is nearly as remarkably distinguished by its
peculiar character from the great works of other poets as it is
from the rest of his own compositions. Among ourselves at
least, if we except Shakespeare, no other poet has yet arisen to
rival the author of the Canterbury Tales in the entire assemblage
of his various powers. Spenser's is a more aerial, Milton's
a loftier song ; but neither possesses the wonderful combination
of contrasted and almost opposite characteristics which we have in
Chaucer : — the sportive fancy, painting and gilding everything,
with the keen, observant, matter-of-fact spirit that looks through
whatever it glances at ; the soaring and creative imagination,
with the homely sagacity, and healthy relish for all the realities
of things; the unrivalled tenderness and pathos, with the
quaintest humour and the most exuberant merriment; the
wisdom at once and the wit ; the all that is best, in short, both
in poetry and in prose, at the same time.

The Canterbury Tales is an unfinished, or at least, as we have

it, an imperfect work; but it contains above 17,000 verses,

besides more than a fourth of that quantity of matter in prose.

The Tales (including the two in prose) are twenty-four in

1 Fared, proceeded. 2 Roared.

142 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

number; and they are interspersed with introductions to each,
generally short, called prologues, besides the Prologue to tho
whole work, in which the pilgrims or narrators of the tales are
severally described, and which consists of between 800 and 900
lines. The Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale is fully as long.
All the twenty-four tales are complete, except only the Cook's
Tale, of which we have only a few lines, the Squire's Tale,
which remains " half- told," and the burlesque Tale of Sir
Thopas, which is designedly broken off in the middle. Of the
nineteen complete tales in verse, the longest are the Knight's
Tale of 2250 verses, the Clerk's Tale of 1156, and the Merchant's
Tale of 1172. The entire work, with the exception of the
prose tales and the Kime of Sir Thopas (205 lines), is in deca-
syllabic (or hendecasyllabic) verse, arranged either in couplets
or in stanzas.

The general Prologue is a gallery of pictures almost un-
matched for their air of life and truthfulness. Here is one of
them : —

There was also a nun, a Prioress

That of her smiling was full simple and coy,

Her greatest oathe n'as but by Saint Loy j1

And she was cleped 2 Madame Eglantine.

Full well she sange the service divine,

Eutuned in her nose full sweetely ;

And French she spake full fair and fetisly 3

After the school of Stratford atte Bow,

For French of Paris was to her unknow.4

At meate was she well ytaught withal ;

She let no morsel from her lippes fall,

Ne wet her fingers in her sauce deep ;

Well could she carry a morsel and well keep

Thatte no droppe ne fell upon her breast :

In curtesy was set full much her lest.5

Her over-lippe wiped she so clean

That in her cuppe was no ferthing 6 seen

Of grease when she drunken had her draught.

Full seemely after her meat she raught.7

And sickerly 8 she was of great disport,

And full pleasant and amiable of port,

And pained 9 her to counterfeiten cheer

Of court, and been estatelich of manere,

1 That is, Saint Eloy or Eligius. Oathe here, according to Mr. Guest is the
old genitive plural (originally atha), meaning of oaths.
3 Called. 3 Neatly. « Unknown.

* Pleasure. 6 Smallest spot.

7 Reached. 8 Surely. 9 Took pains.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 11 'J

And to been holden digne l of reverence

But for to speaken of her conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous
She wolde weep if that she saw a mouse
Caught in a trap, if it were dead or bled.
Of smale houndes had she that she fed
"With roasted flesh, and milk, and wastel bread ;
But sore wept she if one of them were dead,
Or if men smote it with a yerde* smart :
And all was conscience and tender heart.

Full seemely her wimple ypinched was ;
Her nose tretis,8 her eyen grey as glass ;
Her mouth full small, and thereto 4 soft and red,
But sickerly she had a fair forehead ;
It was almost a spanne broad, I trow ;
For hardily 5 she was iiot undergrow.6

Full fetise 7 was her cloak, as I was ware.
Of smale coral about her arm she bare
A pair of beades gauded all with green ;8
And thereon heng9 a brooch of gold full sheen,
On which was first ywritten a crowned A,
And after, Amor vincit omnia.

As a companion to this perfect full length, we will add that of
the Mendicant Friar : —

A Frere there was, a wanton and a merry,
A limitour,10 a fuH solemne man ;
In all the orders four is none that can
SSo much of dalliance and fair langage.
He had ymade full many a marriage
Of younge women at his owen cost ;
Until u his order he was a noble post.
Full well beloved and familier was he
With franklins u over all in his countree,
And eke with worthy women of the town ;
For he had power of confessioun,
As said him selfc, more than a curat,
For of his order he was a licenciat.
Full sweetly hearde he confession,
And pleasant was his absolution.
He was an easy man to give penance
There as he wist to han a good pitance ;u

1 Worthy. a Yard, rod. * Long and well proportioned.

4 In addition to that. * Certainly. • Undergrovm, of a low stature.

7 Neat. 8 Having the gauds of beads coloured green.

9 Hung. w A friar licensed to beg within a certain district

u Unto. u Freeholders of the superior class.

u Where he knew ho should liave a good pittance or feo.

144 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

For unto a poor order for to give
Is signe that a man is well yshrive j1
For, if he gave, he durste make avant,8
He wiste that a man was repentant ;
For many a man so hard is of his heart
He may not weep although him sore smart •
Therefore, instead of weeping and prayerep,
Men mote give silver to the poore freres.

His tippet was aye farsed 3 full of knives
And pinnes for to given faire wives :
And certainly he had a merry note ;
Well could he sing and playen on a rote.4
Of yeddings 5 he bare utterly the pris.6
His neck was white as is the flower de lis ; 7
Thereto he strong was as a champioun,
And knew well the taverns in every town,
And every hosteler and gay tapstere,
Better than a lazar or a beggere ;
For unto swich8 a worthy man as he
Accordeth nought9 as,10 by his facultec,11
To haven with sick lazars acquaintance ;
It is not honest, it may not avance,12
As 1S for to dealen with no swich poorail 14
But all with rich and sellers of vitail.15
And, over16 all, there as17 profit should ari.^,
Curteis 18 he was, and lowly of service ;
There n'as no man no where so virtuous ;
He was the best beggar in all his house ;
And gave a certain ferme 19 for the grant
None of his brethren came in his haunt ;
For, though a widow hadde but a shoe,
So pleasant was his In principio,
Yet would he have a ferthing or he went ;
His purchase 20 was well better than his rent.
And rage he could as it had been a whelp :
In lovedays21 there could he mochel22 help ;
For there was he nat23 like a cloisterere
With threadbare cope, as is a poor scholere ;

Shriven, 2 Boast. 3 Stuffed.

4 A musical instrument so called. 5 Stories, romances. 6 Priza.

• Fleur de lis, lily. ^ 8 Such. 9 It suits not, is not fitting.

10 As in this and in other forms seems to have the effect of merely gene-
ralizing or giving indefiniteness to the expression.

11 Having regard to his quality or functions ? 12 Profit.
13 Aa in the fourth line preceding. 14 Poor people.

1 Victual. 16 In addition to. r* Wherever. M Courteous.

19 Farm. w What he got by begging and the exercise of his profession.

31 Days formerly appointed for the amicable settlement of differences.
c Much. 23 Not.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 145

Dut he was like a maister or a pope :
Of double worsted was his semi-cope,
That round was as a bell out of the press.1
Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness,
To make his English sweet upon his tongue ;
And in his harping, when that he had sung,
His eyen twinkled in his head aright,
As don the sterres * in a frosty night.
This worthy limitour, was clep'd Huberd.

It may be observed in all these extracts how fond Chaucer ie
of as it were welding one couplet and one paragraph to another,
by allowing the sense to flow on from the last line of the one
through the first of the other, thus producing an alternating
movement of the sense and the sound, instead of making the one
accompany the other, as is the general practice of our modern
poetry. This has been noticed, and a less obvious part of the
effect pointed out, by a poet of our own day, who has shown how
well he felt Chaucer by something more and much better than
criticism. '* Chaucer," observes Leigh Hunt, " took the custom
from the French poets, who have retained it to this day. It
surely has a fine air, both of conclusion and resumption ; as
though it would leave off when it thought proper, knowing how
well it could recommence." * It is so favourite a usage with
Chaucer, that it may be sometimes made available to settle the
reading, or at least the pointing and sense of a doubtful passage.
And it is also common with his contemporary Gower.

The following is the first introduction to the reader of Emily,
the heroine of the Knight's Tale of Palamon and Arcite : —

Thus passeth year by year, and day by day,
Till it fell ones in a morrow of May
That Emily, that fairer was to seen
Than is the lilly upon his stalke green,
And fresher than the May with floures new
(For with the rose colour strof * her hue ;
I n'ot 4 which was the finer of them two)
Ere it was day, as she was wont to do,
She was arisen and all ready dight,
For May wol have no slogardy * a night ;

1 Not understood. It is the bell or the semicope that is described as out of
the preul * As do the stare.

* Preface to Poetical Works, 8vo. Lon. 1832. See also Mr. Hunt's fiue
imitation and continuation of the Squire's Tale in the Fourth Number of the
Liberal. Lon. 1823.

1 Strove. 4 Wot not, know not. * Slotb.

L

14C ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

The season pricketh every gentle heart,
And maketh him out of his sleep to start,
And saith, Arise, and do thine observance.

This maketh Emily han l remembrance
To don honour to May, and for to rise.
Yclothed was she fresh for to devise :2
Her yellow hair was broided 3 in a tress
Behind her back, a yerde long I guess ;
And in the garden as the sun uprist4
She walketh up and down where as her list :5
She gathereth floures partie 6 white and red
To make a sotel7 gerlond8 for her head :
And as an angel heavenlich she sung.

Of the many other noble passages in this Tale we can only
present a portion of the description of the Temple of Mars : —

Why should I not as well eke tell you all

The portraiture that was upon the wall

Within the Temple of mighty Mars the Eed ?

All painted was the wall in length and bred 9

Like to the estres 10 of the grisley place

That hight11 the great Temple of Mars in Trace,12

In thilke 13 cold and frosty region

There as Mars hath his sovereign mansion.

First on the wall was painted a forest,
In which there wonneth 14 neither man ne beast ;
With knotty knarry barren trees old,
Of stubbes sharp and hidous to behold,
In which there ran a rumble and a swough,15
As though a storm should bresteii 16 every bough ;
And downward from an hill under a bent 17
There stood the Temple of Mars Armipotent,
Wrought all of burned 18 steel, of which the entree
Was long, and strait, and ghastly for to see ;
And thereout came a rage and swich a vise 1S>
That it made all the gates for to rise.
The northern light in at the dore shone;
For window on the wall ne was there none
Through which men mighten any light discern.
The door was all of athamant20 etern,

1 Have. * With exactness (point devise). 3 Braided

4 Uprises. 5 Where it pleaseth her. 6 Mixed of.

7 Subtle, artfully contrived. 8 Garland. 8 Breadth.

10 The interior. u Is called. ^ Thrace.

u That same. M Dwelleth.

u A long sighing noise, such as in Scotland is called a sugh.

w Was going to break. J7 A declivity. la Burnished.

•r 41 violent blast ? 20 Adamant.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 1 17

/clenched overthwart and endelong *

With iron tough, and, for to make it strong,

Every pillar the temple to sustene

Was tonne-great,2 of iron bright and shetiu.

There saw I first the dark imagining

Of Felony, and all the compassing ;

The cruel Ire, red as any gled ;8

The Picke-purse, and eke the pale Dread ;

The Smiler with the knife under the cloak ;

The shepen 4 brenning * with the blake snioko i

The treason of the murdering in the bed ;

The open wer,a with woundes all bebled ;

Contek 7 with bloody knife and sharp menace ;

All full of chirking 8 was that sorry place.

The sleer 9 of himself yet saw I there ;

His hearte-blood hath bathed all his hair ;

The nail ydriven in the shod 10 on bight ;

The colde death, with mouth gaping upright.

Amiddes of the Temple sat Mischance,

With discomfort and sorry countenance :

Yet saw I Woodness ll laughing in his rage,

Armed Complaint, Outhees,13 and fierce Outrage ;

The carrain u in the bush, with throat ycorveii ;14

A thousand slain, and not of qualm ystorven ;u

The tyrant, with the prey by force yraft ;18

The town destroyed ; — there was nothing laft.17

The statue of Mars upon a carte 18 stood
Armed, and looked grim as he were wood ;|f
And over his head there shineii two figures
Of sterres, that been cleped in scriptures80
That one Puella, that other Rubeus.
This God of Armes was arrayed thus :
A wolf there stood beforn him at his feet
With eyen red, and of a man he eat.

Chaucer's merriment, at once hearty and sly, has of course
the freedom and unscrupulousness of his time ; and ranch of tho
best of it cannot bo produced in our day without offence to our
greater sensitiveness, at least in the matter of expression.
Besides, humour in poetry, or any other kind of writing, can

1 Across and lengthways. * Of the circumference of a tun.

* Burning coal. 4 Stable. • Burning. • War.

7 Contention. ' Disagreeable sound. 9 Slayer.

10 Hair of the head. " Madness. » Outcry.

u Carrion. " Cut. * Dead (starved).

» Reft. n Left. » Car, chariot. :» Mail

" Stars that are called in books.

K8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

least cf all qualities be effectively exemplified in extract: its
subtle life, dependent upon the thousand minutiae of place and
connection, perishes under the process of excision ; it is to
attempt to exhibit, not the building by the brick, but the living
man by a " pound of his fair flesh." We will venture, however,
to give one or two short passages. Nothing is more admirable
in the Canterbury Tales than the manner in which the character
of the Host is sustained throughout. He is the moving spirit of
the poem from first to last. Here is his first introduction to us
presiding over the company at supper in his own

gentle hostelry,
That highte the Tabard faste by the Bell,

in Southwark, on the evening before they set out on their pil-
grimage : —

Great cheere made our Host us everich one,

And to the supper set he us anon,

And served us with vitail of the best ;

Strong was the wine, and well to drink us lest.1

A seemly man our Hoste was with all

For to han been a marshal in an hall ;

A large man he was, with eyen steep ;

A fairer burgess is there none in Cheap ;

Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught,

And of manhood ylaked2 right him naught :

Eke thereto 3 was he a right merry man ;

And after supper playen he began,

And spake of mirth amonges other things,

When that we hadden made our reckonings,

And said thus : Now, Lordings, triiely

Ye been to me welcome right heartily ;

For, by my troth, if that I shall not lie,

I saw nat this yer swich 4 a company

At ones in this herberwe 5 as is now ;

Fain would I do you mirth an I wist how ;

And of a mirth I am right now bethought

To don you ease, and it shall cost you nought.

Ye gon to Canterbury ; God you speed,

The blissful martyr quite you your meed :

And well I wot as ye gon by the way

Ye shapen 6 you to talken and to play ;

For triiely comfort ne mirth is none

To riden by the way dumb as the stone ;

And therefore would I maken you disport,

1 It pleased us. * Lacked. * In addition, besides, also.

* Such. 5 Inn. « Prepare yourselves, intend.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. Hfl

As I said erst, and don you some comfort.
And if you liketh all by one assent
Now for to stonden l at my judgement,
And for to werchen 3 as I shall you say
To morrow, when ye riden on the way,
Now, by my fader's soule that is dead,
But ye be merry s smiteth * off my head :
Hold up your hondes withouten more speech.

They all gladly assent; upon which mine Host proposes
further that each of them (they were twenty-nine in all, besides
himself) should tell two stories in going, and two more in
returning, and that, when they got back to the Tabard, the one
who had told the " tales of best sentence and most solace " should
have a supper at the charge of the rest. And, adds the eloquent,
sagacious, and large-hearted projector of the scheme,

— for to make you the more merry
I woll my selven gladly witli you ride
Right at mine owen cost, and be your guide.
And who that woll my judgement withsay *
Shall pay for all we spenden by the way.

Great as the extent of the poem is, therefore, what has been
executed, or been preserved, is only a small part of the design ;
for this liberal plan would have afforded us no fewer than a
hundred and twenty tales. Nothing can be better than the
triumphant way in which mine Host of the Tabard is made to
go through the duties of his self-assumed post ; — his promptitude,
his decision upon all emergencies, and at the same time his
good feeling never at fault any more than his good sense, his in-
exhaustible and unflagging fun and spirit, and the all-accom-
modating humour and perfect sympathy with which, without for
a moment stooping from his own frank and manly character, he
bears himself to every individual of the varied cavalcade. He
proposes that they should draw cuts to decide who was to
begin ; and with how genuine a courtesy, at once encouraging
and reverential, he first addresses himself to the modest Clerk,
and the gentle Lady Prioress, and the Knight, who also was '• oi
his port as meek as is a maid :" —

Sir Knight, quod he, my maister and my lord,
Now draweth cut, for that is mine accord.

1 Stand. * Work, do. * If ye shall not be merry.

4 Smite. The imperative has generally this termination.
1 Resist, oppose, withstand.

1M ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Cometh near, quod he, my Lady Prioress ;
And ye, Sir Clerk, let be your shamefastness,
Ne studieth nought ; lay hand to, every man.

But for personages of another order, again, he is another man,
giving and taking jibe and jeer with the hardest and boldest in
their own style and humour, only more nimbly and happily than
any of them, and without ever compromising his dignity. And
all the while his kindness of heart, simple and quick, and yet
considerate, is as conspicuous as the cordial appreciation and
delight with which he enters into the spirit of what is going
forward, and enjoys the success of his scheme. For example, —

When that the Knight had thus his tale told,
In all the company n'as there young ne old
That he ne said it was a noble storie,
And worthy to be drawen to memorie,1
And namely 8 the gentles everich one.
Our Hoste lough 3 and swore, So mote I gone,4
This goth aright ; unbokeled is the male ;*
Let see now who shall tell another tale,
For triiely this game is well begonne :
Now telleth ye, Sir Monk, if that ye conne,6
Somewhat to quiten with 7 the Knighte's tale.

The Miller, that for-dronken 8 was all pale,
So that unneaths 9 upon his horse he sat,
He n'old avalen 10 neither hood ne hat,
Ne abiden ll no man for his courtesy,
But in Pilate's voice 12 he gan to cry,
And swore, By armes, and by blood and bones,
I can 13 a noble tale for the nones,14
With which I wol now quite the Knightes tale.

Our Hoste saw that he was dronken of ale,
And said, Abide, Eobin, my leve 15 brother ;
Some better man shall tell us first another ;
Abide and let us werken 16 thriftily.

By Goddes soul, quod he, that woll not 1,
For I woll speak, or elles go my way.

Our Host answered, Tell on a devil way ;

1 Probably pronounced stb-ri-e and me-mb-ri-e. * Especially.

Laughed. 4 So may I fare well. * Unbuckled is the budget.

Can. 7 To requite. 8 Very drunk

9 With difficulty. 10 Would not doff or lower. » Stop for.

" In such a voice as Pilate was used to speak with in the Mysteries
I ilate, being an odious character, was probably represented as speaking with a
harsh disagreeable voice." — Tyrwhitt.

13 Know. 14 For the nonce, for the occasion. 15 Dear.

16 Go to work.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. i:,l

Thou art a fool ; thy wit is overcome.

Now, hearkeneth, quod the Miller, all and some :

But first I make a protestatioun

That I am drunk, I know it by my soun,

And therefore, if that I misspeak or say,

Wite it * the ale of South wark, I you pray.

The Miller is at last allowed to tell his tale — which is more
accordant with his character, and the condition he was in, than
with either good morals or good manners ; — as the poet ob-
serves : —

What should I more say, but this Millcre
He n'old his wordes for no man forbere,
But told his cherle's * tale in his manere ;
Methinketh that I shall rehearse it here :
And therefore every gentle wight I pray
For Goddes love, as deem not that I say,
Of evil intent, but that 1 mote rehearse
Their tales all, al be they better or werse,
Or elles falsen some of my matere :
And, therefore, whoso list it not to hear,
Turn over the leaf, and chese 8 another tale ;
For he shall find enow, both great and smale,
Of storial thing that toucheth gentiless,
And eke morality and holiness.

The Miller's Tale is capped by another in the same style from
his fellow " churl " the Reve (or Bailiff) — who before he begins,
however, avails himself of the privilege of his advanced years to
prelude away for some time in a preaching strain, till his elo-
quence is suddenly cut short by the voice of authority : —

When that our Host had heard this sermoning,
He gan to speak as lordly as a king,
And saide, What amounteth all this wit?
What, shall we speak all day of holy writ?
The devil made a Reve for to preach,
Or of a souter 4 a shipman or a leech.*
Say forth thy tale, and tarry not the time ;
Lo Depeford,6 and it is half way prime ; 7
Lo Greenewich, there many a shrew is in ^
It were all time thy Tale to begin.

1 Lay the blame of it on. 8 Churl's. » Chocse.

4 Cobbler. * Physician. • Deptford.

7 Tyrwhitt supposes this means half-post seven in the morning.
* In which (wherein) is many a shrew.

15a ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

The last specimen we shall give of " our Host " shall l>e from
the Clerk's Prologue : —

Sir Clerk of Oxenford, our Hoste said,
Ye ride as still aud coy as doth a maid
Were newe spoused, sitting at the board ;
This day ne heard I of your tongue a word.
I trow ye study abouten some sophime,1
But Salomon saith that every thing hath time.
For Godde's sake as beth2 of better cheer;
It is no time for to studien here.
Tell us some merry tale by your fay ;3
For what man that is entered in a play
He needes must unto the play assent.
But preacheth not, as freres don in Lent,
To make us for our olde sinnes weep,
Ne that thy tale make us not to sleep.
Tell us some merry thing of aventures ;
Your terms, your coloures, and your figures,
Keep them in store till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write.
Speaketh so plain at this time, I you pray,
That we may understonden what ye say.

This worthy Clerk benignely answerd;
Hoste, quod he, I am under your yerde ;
Ye have of us as now the governance,
And therefore would I do you obeisance,
As fer as reason asketh hardily.4
I wol you tell a tale which that I
Learned at Padow of a worthy clerk,
As preved 5 by his wordes and his werk : x
He is now dead and nailed in his chest ;
I pray to God so yeve his soule rest.
Francis Petrarch, the laureat poete
Highte this clerk, whose rhethoricke sweet
Enlumined all Itaille of poetry,
As Linian6 did of philosophy,
Or law, or other art particulere ;
But death, that wol not suffre us dwellen here
But as it were a twinkling of an eye,
Them both hath slain, and alle we shall die.

And our last specimen of the Canterbury Tales, and also of
Chaucer, being a passage exhibiting that power of pathos in the
delicacy as well as in the depth of which he is unrivalled, shall

1 Sophism, perhaps generally for a logical argument.

a Be. » Faith. 4 Surely.

* Proved. 6 A great lawyer of the fourteenth century.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER. 153

be taken from this tale told by the Clerk, the exquisite tale of
Griselda. Her husband has carried his trial of her submission
and endurance to the last point by informing her that she must
return to her father, and that his new wife is " coming by tho
way :"—

And she again answerd in patience :

My lord, quod she, I wot, and wist alway,

How that betwixen your magnificence

And my povert no wight ne can ne may

Maken comparison : it is no nay :

I ne held me never digne * in no manere

To be your wife, ne yet your chamberere.*

And in this house there 8 ye me lady made
(The highe God take I for my witness,
And all so wisly 4 ho my soule glade)
I never held me lady ne maistress,
But humble servant to your worthiness,
And ever shall, while that my life may dure,
Aboven every worldly creature.

That ye so long, of your benignity,
Han s holden me in honour and nobley,6
Whereas 7 1 was not worthy for to be,
That thank I God and you, to whom 1 pray
Foryeld8 it you : there is no more to say.
Unto my fader gladly wol I wend,
And with him dwell unto my lives end.

God shielde swich a lordes wife to take
Another man to husband or to make.*

And of your newe wife God of his grace
So grant you weale and prosperity ;
For I wol gladly yielden her my place,
In which that I was blissful wont to bo :
For, sith it liketh you, my lord, quod she,
That whilome weren all my heartes rest,
That I shall gon, I wol go where you list.

But, thereas 10 ye me profer swich dowair "
As I first brought, it is well in my mind
It were my wretched clothes, nothing fair,
The which to me were hard now for to find.
0 goode Oodl how gentle and how kind
Te seemed by your speech and your visage
•rhe day that maked tuas our marriage !

1 Worthy. * Chambermaid. * Where. « Suroly.

• Have. • Nobility. 7 Where. 8 Kepay.

• Mate. u Whereas. u Such dower.

154 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

But sooth is said, algate1 I find it true,
For in effect it preved 3 is on me,
Love is not old as when that it is new.
But certes, Lord, for non adversity*
To dien in this case, it shall not be
That ever in word or werk I shall repent
That I you yave mine heart in whole inteiit,

My lord, ye wot that in my fader's place
Ye did me strip out of my poore weed,
And richely ye clad me of your grace :
To you brought I nought elles, out of drede,,*
But faith, and nakedness, and maidenhede :
And here again your clothing I restore,
And eke your wedding ring, for evermore.

The remnant of your jewels ready be
Within your chamber, 1 dare it safely sayD-
Naked out of my fader's house, quod she,
I came, and naked I mote turn again.
All your pleasance wold I follow fain :
But yet I hope it be not your intent
That I smockless out of your palace went.

Let me not like a worm go by the way :
Remember you, mine owen lord so dear,
I was your wife, though I unworthy were.

The smock, quod he, that thou hast on thy bake
Let it be still, and bear it forth with thee.
But well uimeathes 6 thilke 6 word he spake,
But went his way for ruth and for pitee.
Before the folk herselven strippeth she,
And in her smock, with foot and head all bare,
Toward her father's house forth is she fare.7

The folk her followen weeping in her way,
And Fortune aye they cursen as they gone r.
But she fro weeping kept her eyen drey,8
Ne in this time word ne spake she none.
Her fader, that this tiding heard anon,
Curseth the day and time that nature
Shope him 9 to been a lives 10 creature.

1 In every way. 2 Proved.

4 For no unhappiness that may be my lot, were it even to die?

4 Doubt. 5 With great difficulty. e This same.

7 Gone. 8 Dry. 9 Formed. I0 Living.

JOHN GOWER. 155

There is scarcely perhaps to be found anywhere in poetry a
finer burst of natural feeling than in the lines we have printed
in italics.

JOHN GOWER.

Contemporary with Chaucer, and probably born a few years
earlier, though of the two he survived to the latest date, for hia
death did not take place till the year 1408, was John Gower.
Moral Gower, as he is commonly designated, is the author of three
great poetical works (sometimes spoken of as one, though they
do not seem to have had any connection of plan or subject) : — the
Speculum Meditantis, which is, or was, in French; the Vox
Clamantis, which is in Latin ; and the Confessio Amantis,
which is in English. But the first, although an account of it,
founded on a mistake, has been given by Warton, has certainly
not been seen in modern times, and has in all probability perished.
The Vox Clamantis was edited for the Koxburghe Club in
1850 by the Kev. H. G. Coxe. It consists of seven Books in
Latin elegiacs. " The greater bulk of the work," says Dr. Pauli,
*4 the date of which its editor is inclined to fix between 1382
and 1384, is rather a moral than an historical essay ; but the
First Book describes the insurrection of Wat Tyler in an alle-
gorical disguise; the poet having a dream on the llth of June
1381, in which men assumed the shape of animals. The Second
Book contains a long sermon on fatalism, in which the poet
shows himself no friend to Wiclif 's tenets, but a zealous advo-
cate for the reformation of the clergy. The Third Book points
out how all orders of society must suffer for their own vices and
demerits ; in illustration of which he cites the example of the
secular clergy. The Fourth Book is dedicated to the cloistered
clergy and the friars, the Fifth to the military ; the Sixth
contains a violent attack on the lawyers ; and the Seventh
subjoins the moral of the whole, represented in Nebuchadnezzar's
dream, as interpreted by Daniel." * The allusion in the title
seems to be to St John the Baptist, and to the general clamour
then abroad in the country. The Confessio Amantis has been
several times printed; — by Caxton in 1483, by Berthelet in 1532
and again in 1554; and by Alexander Chalmers in the second
volume of his English poets, 1810 ; but all these previous edi-
tions have been superseded by the very commodious and beautiful
one of Dr. Reinhold Pauli, in 3 vole. 8vo., London, 1857.

Wo will avail ourselves of Dr. Pauli's account of the course in
* Introd. Easay to Confessio Amantis.

156 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

which the work proceeds : — " The poem opens by introducing
the author himself, in the character of an unhappy lover in
despair. Venus appears to him, and, after having heard his
prayer, appoints her priest called Genius, like the mystagogue in
the picture of Cebes, to hear the lover's confession. This is the
frame of the whole work, which is a singular mixture of classical
notions, principally borrowed from Ovid's Ars Amandi, and
of the purely medieval idea, that as a good Catholic the unfor-
tunate lover must state his distress to a father confessor. This
is done with great regularity and even pedantry: all the
passions of the human heart, which generally stand in the way
of love, being systematically arranged in the various books and
subdivisions of the work. After Genius has fully explained the
evil affection, passion, or vice under consideration, the lover
confesses on that particular point; and frequently urges his
boundless lore for an unknown beauty, who treats him cruelly,
in a tone of affectation which would appear highly ridiculous in a
man of more than sixty years of age, were it not a common
characteristic of the poetry of the period. After this profession
the confessor opposes him, and exemplifies the fatal effects of
each passion by a variety of opposite stories, gathered from
many sources, examples being then, as now, a favourite mode of
inculcating instruction and reformation. At length, after a
frequent and tedious recurrence of the same process, the con-
fession is terminated by some final injunctions of the priest — •
the lover's petition in a strophic poem addressed to Venus — the
bitter judgment of the goddess, that he should remember his old
age and leave off such fooleries .... his cure from the wound
caused by the dart of love, and his absolution, received as if by
a pious Roman Catholic." *

Such a scheme as this, pursued through more than thirty thou
sand verses, promises perhaps more edification than entertain-
ment ; but the amount of either that is to be got out of the Con-
fessio Amantis is not considerable. Ellis, after charitably
declaring that so long as Moral Gower keeps to his morality he
is " wise, impressive, and sometimes almost sublime," is com-
pelled to add, " But his narrative is often quite petrifying ; and,
when we read in his work the tales with which we had been
familiarized in the poems of Ovid, we feel a mixture of surprise
and despair at the perverse industry employed in removing every
detail on which the imagination had been accustomed to fasten.
The author of the Metamorphoses was a poet, and at least suffi-
ciently fond of ornament ; Gower considers him as a mere
* Introductory Esaay. p. xxxiv.

BARBOUR. 13!

annalist ; scrupulously preserves his facts ; relates them with
great perspicuity ; and is fully satisfied when he has extracted
from them as much morality as they can be reasonably expected
to furnish."* In many cases this must be little enough.

BARBOUR.

This latter part of the fourteenth century is also the age of the
birth of Scottish poetry ; and Chaucer had in that dialect a far
more worthy contemporary and rival than his friend and fellow-
Englishman Gower, in John Barbour. Of Barbour' s personal
history but little is known. He was a churchman, and had at-
tained to the dignity of Archdeacon of Aberdeen by the year
1357 ; so that his birth cannot well be supposed to have been
later than 1320. He is styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen in a
passport granted to him in that year by Edward III. at the
request of David de Bruce (that is, King David II. of Scotland),
to come into England with three scholars in his company, for
the purpose, as it is expressed, of studying in the University of
Oxford; and the protection is extended to him and his com-
panions while performing their scholastic exercises, and generally
while remaining there, and also while returning to their own
country. It may seem strange that an Archdeacon should go to
college ; but Oxford appears to have been not the only seat of
learning to which Barbour resorted late in life with the same
object. Three other passports, or safe-conducts, are extant
which were granted to him by Edward at later dates : — the first,
in 1364, permitting him to come, with four horsemen, from
Scotland, by land or sea, into England, to study at Oxford, or
elsewhere, as he might think proper; the second, in 1365, by
which he is authorized to come into England, and travel through-
out that kingdom, with six horsemen as his companions, as far as
to St. Denis in France ; and the third, in 1368, securing him
protection in coming, with two valets and two horses, into
England, and travelling through the same to the king's other
dominions, on his way to France (versus Franciam) for the pur-
pose of studying there, and in returning thence. Yet he had
also been long before this employed, and in a high capacity, in
civil affairs. In 1357 he was appointed by the Bishop of Aber-
deen one of his two Commissioners deputed to attend a meeting
at Edinburgh about the ransom of the king. Nothing more is
heard of him till 1373, in which year he appears as one of tho

* Specimens of the Early English Poets, i. 179.

158 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

auditors of Exchequer, being styled Archdeacon of Aberdeen,
and clerk of probation (clerico probationis) of the royal household
In his later days he appears to have been in the receipt of two
royal pensions, both probably bestowed upon him by Robert II.,
who succeeded David II. in 1370; the first one of 10Z. Scots
from the customs of Aberdeen, the other one of 20s. from the
borough mails, or city rents, of the same town. An entry in the
records of Aberdeen for 1471 states on the authority of the
original roll, now lost, that the latter was expressly granted to
him " for the compilation of the book of the Acts of King Robert
the First." In a passage occurring in the latter part of this work,
he himself tells us that he was then compiling it in the year 1375.
All that is further known of him is, that his death took place
towards the close of 1395. Besides his poem commonly called
The Bruce, another metrical work of his entitled The Broite or
The Brute, being a deduction of the history of the Scottish kings
from Brutus, is frequently referred to by the chronicler Wynton
in the next age ; but no copy of it is now believed to exist. Of
the Bruce the first critical edition was that by Pinkerton, pub-
lished in 3 vols. 8vo. at London in 1790 ; the last and best, is
that by the Rev. Dr. John Jamieson, forming the first volume of
The Bruce and Wallace, 2 vols. 4to. Edinburgh, 1820.

The Scotch in which Barbour's poem is written was undoubt-
edly the language then commonly in use among his countrymen,
for whom he wrote and with whom his poem has been a popular
favourite ever since its first appearance. By his countrymen, of
course, we mean the inhabitants of southern and eastern, or
Lowland Scotland, not the Celts or Highlanders, who have always
been and still are as entirely distinct a race as the native Irish
are, and always have been, from the English in Ireland, and to
confound whom either in language or in any other respect with
the Scottish Lowlanders is the same sort of mistake that it would
be to speak of the English as being either in language or lineage
identical with the Welsh. Indeed, there is a remarkable simi-
larity as to this matter in the circumstances of the three coun-
tries : in each a primitive Celtic population, which appears to
have formerly occupied the whole soil, has been partially ex-
pelled by another race, but still exists, inhabiting its separate
locality (in all the three cases the maritime and mountainous
wilds of the west), and retaining its own ancient and perfectly
distinct language. The expulsion has been the most sweeping
in England, where it took place first, and where the Welsh form
now only about a sixteenth of the general population ; it hag
been carried to a less extent in Scotland, where it was not

BARBOUR. 159

effected till a later age, and where the numbers of the High-
landers are still to those of the Lowlanders in the proportion of
one to five or six ; in Ireland, where it happened last of all, the
new settlers have scarcely yet ceased to be regarded as foreigners
and intruders, and the ancient Celtic inhabitants, still covering,
although not possessing, by far the greater part of the soil, the
larger proportion of them, however, having relinquished their
ancestral speech, continue to be perhaps six or eight times as
numerous as tho *Vixons or English. For in all the three cases it
is the same Saxon, or at least Teutonic, race before which the Celts
have retired or given way : the Welsh, the Scottish Highlanders,
and the native Irish, indeed, all to this day alike designate the
stranger who has set himself down beside them by the common
epithet of the Saxon. We know that other Teutonic or northern
races were mixed with the Angles and Saxons in all the three
cases : not only were the English, who settled in Scotland in
great numbers, and conquered Ireland, in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, in part French Normans, but the original
Normans or Danes had in the eighth and ninth centuries
effected extensive settlements in each of the three countries.
Besides, the original English were themselves a mixed people ;
and those of them who were distinctively Saxons were even
the old hereditary enemies of the Danes. Still, as the Saxons,
Angles, and Jutes were as one people against the Scandi-
navian Danes, or their descendants the French Normans, so
even Saxons and Danes, or Normans, were united everywhere
against the Celts. As for the language spoken by the Lowland
Scots in the time of Barbour, it must have sprung out of the
same sources, and been affected by nearly the same influences,
with the English of the same age. Nobody now holds that any
part of it can have been derived from the Picts, who indeed
originally occupied part of the Lowlands of Scotland, but who
were certainly not a Teutonic but a Celtic people. Lothian, or
all the eastern part of Scotland to the south of the Forth, was
English from the seventh century, as much as was Northumber-
land or Yorkshire : from this date the only difference that could
have distinguished the language there used from that spoken in
the south of England was probably a larger infusion of the
Danish forms ; but this characteristic must have been shared in
nearly the same degree by all the English then spoken to tho
north of the Thames. Again, whatever effect may have been
produced by the Norman Conquest, and the events consequent
upon that revolution, would probably be pretty equally diffused
over the two countries. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries

160 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

both the Normans themselves and their literature appear to have
acquired almost the same establishment and ascendancy in Scot-
land as in England. French was the language of the court in
the one country as well as in the other, and Scottish as well
as English writers are found figuring among the imitators of
the Norman trouveurs and romance poets. Afterwards the con-
nexion of Scotland with France became much more intimate
and uninterrupted than that of England; and this appears
to have affected the Scottish dialect in a way which will be
presently noticed. But in Barbour's day, the language of
Teutonic Scotland was distinguished from that of the south of
England (which had now acquired the ascendancy over that of
the northern counties as the literary dialect), by little more than
the retention, perhaps, of a good many vocables which had be-
come obsolete among the English, and a generally broader enun-
ciation of the vowel sounds. Hence Barbour never supposes
that he is writing in any other language than English any more
than Chaucer ; that is the name by which not only he, but his
successors Dunbar and even Lyndsay, always designate their
native tongue : down to the latter part of the sixteenth century,
by the term Scotch was generally understood what is now called
the Gaelic, or the Erse or Ersh (that is, Irish), the speech of the
Celts or Highlanders. Divested of the grotesque and cumbrous
spelling of the old manuscripts, the language of Barbour is quite
as intelligible at the present day to an English reader as that of
Chaucer ; the obsolete words and forms are not more numerous
in the one writer than in the other, though some that are used
by Barbour may not be found in Chaucer, as many of Chaucer's
are not in Barbour ; the chief general distinction, as we have
said, is the greater breadth given to the vowel sounds in the
dialect of the Scottish poet. The old termination of the present
participle in and is .also more frequently used than in Chaucer,
to whom however it is not unknown, any more than its modern
substitute ing is to Barbour. The most remarkable peculiarity of
the more recent form of the Scottish dialect that is not found in
Barbour is the abstraction of the final I from syllables ending in
that consonant preceded by a vowel or diphthong : thus he never
has a\ fa\ fu[ or fou\ pow, how, for all, fall, full, poll, hole, &c. The
subsequent introduction of this habit into the speech of the
Scotch is perhaps to be attributed to their imitation of the lique-
faction of the I in similar circumstances by the French, from
whom they have also borrowed a considerable number of their
modern vocables, never used in England, and to whose accentu-
ation, both of individual words and of sentences, theirs has

B ARBOUR. 161

much general resemblance, throwing the emphasis, contrary, ay
already noticed, to the tendency of the English language, upon
one of the latter syllables, and also running into the rising in
many cases where the English use the falling intonation.

The Bruce is a very long poem, comprising between twelve and
thirteen thousand lines, in octosyllabic metre, which the two
last editors have distributed, Pinkerton into twenty, Jainieson
into fourteen, Books. It relates the history of Scotland, and
especially the fortunes of the great Bruce, from the death of
Alexander III. in 1286, or rather, from the competition for the
crown, and the announcement of the claims of Edward I. as lord
paramount, on that of his daughter, Margaret the Maiden of
Norway, in 3 290 — the events of the first fifteen or sixteen years,
however, before Bruce comes upon the stage, being very suc-
cinctly given — to the death of Bruce (Robert I.) in 1329, and
that of his constant associate and brother of chivalry, Lord
James Douglas, the bearer of the king's heart to the Holy Land,
in the year following. The 12,500 verses, or thereby, may be
said therefore to comprehend the events of about twenty-five
years ; and Barbour, though he calls his work a " romaunt," as
being a narrative poem, professes to relate nothing but what he
believed to be the truth, so that he is to be regarded not only as
the earliest poet but also as the earliest historian of his country.
Fordun, indeed, was his contemporary, but the Latin chronicle
of that writer was probably not published till many years after
his death. And to a great extent Barbour's work is and has
always been regarded as being an authentic historical monu-
ment ; it has no doubt some incidents or embellishments which
may be set down as fabulous; but these are in general very
easily distinguished from the main texture of the narrative,
which agrees substantially with the most trustworthy accounts
drawn from other sources, and has been received and quoted as
good evidence by all subsequent writers and investigators of
Scottish history, from Andrew of Wynton to Lord Hailes inclu-
sive.

Barbour is far from beinp: a poet equal to Chaucer ; but there
is no other English poet down to a century and a half after their
day who can be placed by the side of the one any more than of
tne other. He has neither Chaucer's delicate feeling of the beau-
tiful, nor his grand inventive imagination, nor his wit or
humour ; but in mere narrative and description he is, with his
clear, strong, direct diction, in a high degree both animated and
picturesque, and his poem is pervaded by a glow of generous
sentiment, well befitting its subject, and lending grace as well as

162 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

additional force to the ardent, bounding spirit of life with which
it is instinct from beginning to end. The following passage,
which occurs near the commencement, has been often quoted (at
least in part) ; but it is too remarkable to be omitted in any
exemplification of the characteristics of Barbour's poetry. He is
describing the oppressions endured by the Scots during the occu-
pation of their country by the English king, Edward 1., after hifr
deposition of his puppet Baliol : —

And gif that ony man them by

Had ony thing that wes worthy,

As horse, or hund, or other thing,

That war pleasand to their liking !

With right or wrang it wald have they.

And gif ony wald them withsay,

They suld swa do, that they suld tine1

Other2 land or life, or live in pine.

For they dempt8 them efter their will,

Takand na kepe4 to right na skill.5

Ah ! what they dempt them felonly !6

For gud knightes that war worthy,

For little enchesoim7 or then8 nane

They hangit be the neckbane.

Alsv that folk, that ever was free,

And in freedom wont for to be,

Through their great mischance and folly,

Wor treated then sa wickedly,

That their faes10 their judges ware :

What wretchedness may man have mair ? **

Ah ! Freedom is a noble thing !
Freedom mays12 man to have liking ;u
Freedom all solace to man gives :
He lives at ease that freely lives !
A noble heart may have nane ease,
Ne elles nought that may him please
Giflf freedom failye : for free liking
Is yarnit14 ower15 all other thing.
Na he that aye has livit free
May nought knaw well the property,18

1 Lose. * Either. ' Doomed, judged.

4 Taking no heed, paying no regard. 6 Reason.

6 Ah ! how cruelly they judged them ! ^ Cause.

8 Both the sense and the metre seem to require that this then (in orig.
tlinuld be transferred to the next line ; " they hangit then."

9 Also, thus. 10 Foes. » More. 12 Makes.
3 Pleasure. M Yearned for, desired. ls Over, above.

18 The quality, the peculiar state or condition?

BARBOUR.

The anger, na the wretched doom,
That is couplit1 to foul thirldoom.1
But gif he had assayit it,
Then all perquer3 he suld it wit ;
And suld think freedom mair
Than all the gold in warld that is.

It is, he goes on to observe, by its contrary, or opposite, that
the true nature of everything is best discovered : — the value and
blessing of freedom, for example, are only to be fully felt in
slavery ; and then the worthy archdeacon, who, although the
humorous is not his strongest ground, does not want slyness or a
sense of the comic, winds up with a very singular illustration,
which, however, is more suited to his own age than to ours, and
may be suppressed here without injury to the argument.

But Harbour's design, no doubt, was to effect by means of this
light and sportive conclusion an easy and harmonious descent
from the height of declamation and passion to which he had been
carried in the preceding lines. Throughout his long work he
shows, for his time, a very remarkable feeling of the art of
poetry, both by the variety which he studies in the disposition
and treatment of his subject, and by the rare temperance and
self-restraint which prevents him from ever overdoing what he is
about either by prosing or raving. Even his patriotism, warm
and steady as it is, is wholly without any vulgar narrowness or
ferocity : he paints the injuries of his country with distinctness
and force, and celebrates the heroism of her champions and
deliverers with all admiration and sympathy ; but he never runs
into either the gasconading exaggerations or the furious depre-
ciatory invectives which would, it might be thought, have better
pleased the generality of those for whom he wrote. His under-
standing was too enlightened, and his heart too large, for that.
His poem stands in this respect in striking contrast to that of
Harry, the blind minstrel, on the exploits of Wallace, to be
afterwards noticed ; but each poet suited his hero — Barbour, the
magnanimous, considerate, and far-seeing king; Blind Harry,
the indomitable popular champion, with his one passion and
principle, hatred of the domination of England, occupying his
whole soul and being.

1 Coupled, attached. * Thraldom. » Exactly.

1G4 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

COMPOUND ENGLISH PROSE.— MANDEVIL ; TREVISA; WICIJF;
CHAUCER.

To the fourteenth century belong the earliest specimens of
prose composition in our present mixed English that have been
preserved.

Our oldest Mixed English prose author is Sir John Mandevil,
whose Yoyages and Travels, a singular repertory of the marvellous
legends of the middle ages, have been often printed. The best
editions are that published in 8vo., at London, in 1725, and the
reprint of it in the same form in 1839, "with an introduction,
additional notes, and a glossary, by J. 0. Halliwell, Esq., F.S.A.,
F.R.A.S." The author's own account of himself and of his book
is given in an introductory address, or Prologue : —

And, for als moch as it is long time passed that there was no general
passage ne vyage over the sea, and many men desiren for to hear speak of
the Holy Lond, and han l thereof great solace and comfort, I, John Maun-
deville, knight, all be it I be not worthy, that was bora in Englond, in the
town of Saint Albons, passed the sea in the year of our Lord Jesu Christ
1322, in the day of Saint Michel ; and hider-to have ben 2 longtime over
the sea, and have seen and gone thorough many divers londs, and many
provinces, and kingdoms, and isles, and have passed thorough Tartary,
Persie, Ermonie 3 the Little and the Great ; thorough Libye, Chaldee, and
a great part of Ethiop ; thorough Amazoyn, Ind the Lass and the More, a
great party ; and thorough out many other isles, that ben abouten Ind ;
where dwellen many divers folks, and of divers manners and laws, and of
divers shapps of men. Of which londs and isles ] shall speak more plainly
hereafter. And I shall devise you some party of things that there ben,
whan time shall ben after it may best come to my mind ; and specially
for hem5 that will6 and are in purpose for to visit the Holy City ot
Jerusalem, and the holy places that are thereabout. And I shall tell the
way that they should holden thider. For I have often times passed and
ridden the way, with good company of many lords, God be thonked.

And ye shull tmderstond that I have put this book out of Latin into
French, and translated it agen out of French into English, that every
man of my nation may understond it. But lords and knights, and other
noble and worthy men, that con 7 Latin but little, and han ben beyond
the sea, knowen and understonden gif I err in devising, for forgetting or
else; that they mowe8 redress it and amend it. For things passed out,
of long time, from a man's mind, or from his sight, turnen soon into for-
getting; because that mind of man ne may not ben comprehended ne
withholden for the freelty of mankind.

1 Have. 2 Been. 3 Armenia. 4 Be.

* Them (em). 6 Wish. 7 Know. 8 May,

MAN DEVIL. 165

.Miindovil is said to have returned to England in 13r>6, or after
an absence of thirty-four years ; and, as he is recorded to have
died at Liege in 1371, his book must have been written early in
the latter half of the fourteenth century.

The oldest English translation we have of the Bible is that of
Wiclif. John de Wiclif, or Wycliffe, died at about the age of sixty
in 1384, and his translation of the Scriptures from the Vulgate
appears to have been finished two or three years before. The
New Testament has been several times printed ; first in folio in
1731 under the care of the Rev. John Lewis ; next in 4to. in
1810 under that of the Rev. H. H. Baber; lastly in 4to. in 1841,
and again in 1846, in Bagster's English Ilexapla. And now the
Old Testament has also been given to the world from the
Clarendon press, at the expense of the University of Oxford,
admirably edited by the Rev. J. Forshall and Sir Frederick
Madden, in four magnificent quartos, Oxford, 1850. Wiclif is also
the author of many original writings in his native language, in
defence of his reforming views in theology and church govern-
ment, some of which have been printed, but most of which that
are preserved still remain in manuscript. His style is every-
where coarse and slovenly, though sometimes animated by a
popular force or boldness of expression.

Chaucer is the author of three separate works in prose ; a
translation of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophise, printed by
Caxton, in folio, without date, under the title of The Boke of
Consolacion of Philosophic, wich that Boecius made for his
Comforte and Consolacion ; a Treatise on the Astrolabe, ad-
dressed to his son Lewis, in 1391, and printed (at least in part)
in the earlier editions of his works ; and The Testament of Love,
an apparent imitation of the treatise of Boethius, written towards
the end of his life, and also printed in the old editions of his col-
lected works. But, perhaps, the most highly finished, and in
other respects also the most interesting, of the great poet's prose
compositions are the Tale of Meliboeus and the Parson's Tale,
in the Canterbury Tales. The Parson's Tale, which winds up
the Canterbury Tales, as we possess the work, is a long moral
discourse, which, for the greater part, is not very entertaining,
but which yet contains some passages curiously illustrative of
the age in which it was written. Here is part of what occurs in
the section headed De Superbia (Of Pride), the first of the seven
mortal sins. Tyrwhitt justly recommends that the whole
*' should be read carefully by any antiquary who may mean
to write De re Vestiaria of the English nation in the fourteenth
oentury."

1G6 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Now ben there two manner of prides : that on of hem * is within tho
heart of a man, and that other is without ; of which soothly these foresaid
things, and mo9 than I have said, appertainen to pride that is within
the heart of man. And there be other spices 3 that ben withouten ; but,
natheless, that on of these spices of pride is sign of that other, right as the
gay levesell 4 at the tavern is sign of the wine that is in the cellar. And
this is in many things, as in speech and countenance, and outrageous
array of clothing ; for certes if there had ben no sin in clothing Christ wold
not so soon have noted and spoken of the clothing of thilk rich man in the
Gospel : and, as Saint Gregory saith, that precious clothing is culpable,
for the dearth of it, and for his softness, and for his strangeness and
disguising, and for the superfluity or for the inordinate scantiness of it.
Alas ! may not a man see as in our days the sinful costlew array of clothing,
and namely5 in too much superfluity, or else in too disordinate scantness.

As to the first sin, in superfluity of clothing, which that maketh it so
dear, to the harm of the people, not only the cost of the embrouding,6
the disguising, indenting or barring, ownding,7 paling,8 winding, or
bending, and semblable waste of cloth in vanity ; but there is also the
costlew furring in hir gowns, so moch pounsoning 9 of chisel to maken
holes, so moch dagging10 of shears, with the superfluity in length of the
foresaid gowns, trailing in the dong and in the mire, on horse and eke on
foot, as well of man as of woman, that all thilk training is verily (as in
effect) wasted, consumed, threadbare, and rotten with dong, rather than it
is yeven to the poor, to great damage of the foresaid poor folk, and that in
sondry wise ; this is to sayn, the more that cloth is wasted, the more must
it cost to the poor people, for the scarceness ; and, furthermore, if so be
that they wolden yeve swich pounsoned and dagged clothing to the poor
people, it is not convenient to wear for hir estate, ne suffisant to bote11 hir
necessity, to keep hem fro the distemperance of the firmament. . . .

Also the sin of ornament or of apparel is in things that appertain to
riding, as in too many delicate horse that ben holden for delight, that ben
so fair, fat, and costlew ; and also in many a vicious knave that is sus-
tained because of hem ; in curious harness, as in saddles, croppers, peitrels,
and bridles, covered with precious cloth and rich, barred and plated of
gold and of silver ; for which God saith by Zachary the prophet, I wol
confound the riders of swich horse. These folk taken little regard of the
riding of God's son of heaven, and of his harness, whan he rode upon the
ass, and had none other harness but the poor clothes of his disciples, ne we
read not that ever he rode on ony other beast. I speak this for the sin of
superfluity, and not for honesty whan reason ti requireth. And, moreover,

1 The one of them. 2 More. 3 Species, kinds.

4 The meaning of this word, which at a later date appears to have been
pronounced and written lessd, is unknown. See Tyrwhitt's note to Cant.
Tales, v. 4059, and Glossary, ad verbum ; and note by the editor, Mr. Albert
Way, OH pp. 300, 301, of the Promptorium Parvulorurn, vol. i., printed for
the Camden Society, 4to. Lond. 1843. 5 Especially.

6 Embroidering. 7 Imitating waves. 8 Imitating pales.

9 Punching. 10 Slitting. " Help (boot).

PRINTING IN ENGLAND. 107

ccrtes pride is greatly notified in holding of great meiny,1 whan they ben
of little profit, or of right no profit, and namely whan that meiny is
felonious and damageous to the people by hardiness of high lordship, or by
way of office ; for certes swich lords sell than hir lordship to the devil of
hell, whan they sustain the wickedness of hir meiny; or else whan these
folk of low degree, as they that holden hostelries, sustainen theft of hir
hostellers, and that is in many manner of deceits ; thilk manner of folk
ben the flies that followen the honey, or else the hounds that followen the
carrain ; swich foresaid folk stranglen spiritually hir lordships ; for which
thus saith David the prophet, Wicked death mot come unto thilk lord-
ships, and God yeve that they mot descend into hell all down, for in hir
houses is iniquity and shrewedness, and not God of heaven : and certes,
but if they done amendment, right as God yave his benison to Laban by
the service of Jacob, and to Pharaoh by the service of Joseph, right so wol
God yeve his malison to swich lordships as sustain the wickedness of hir
servants, but they come to amendment. Pride of the table appeareth
eke full oft; for certes rich men be cleped2 to feasts, and poor folk be put
away and rebuked ; and also in excess of divers meats and drinks, and
namely swich manner bake meats and dish meats brenning * of wild fire,
and painted and castled with paper, and semblable waste, so that it is
abusion to think ; and eke in too great preciousness of Vessel, and curiosity
of minstrelsy, by which a man is stirred more to the delights of luxury.

PRINTING IN ENGLAND. — CAX.TON.

The art of printing had been practised nearly thirty years in
Germany before it was introduced either into England or France
— with so tardy a pace did knowledge travel to and fro over the
earth in those days, or so unfavourable was the state of these
countries for the reception of even the greatest improvements in
the ails. At length a citizen of London secured a conspicuous
place to his name for ever in the annals of our national literature,
by being, so far as is known, the first of his countrymen that
learned the new art, and certainly the first who either practised
it in England, or in printing an English book. \Villiam Caxton
was born, as he tells us himself, in the Weald of Kent, it is sup-
posed about the year 1412. Thirty years after this date his
name is found among the members of the Mercers' Company in
London. Later in life he appears to have repeatedly visited the
Low Countries, at first probably on business of his own, but
afterwards in a sort of public capacity, — having in 1464 been
commissioned, along with another person, apparently also a mer-
chant, by Edward IV. to negotiate a commercial treaty with tho
Duke of Burgundy. He was afterwards taken into the house-
1 Body of menials. * Called, invited. Burning.

16S ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

hold of Margaret Duchess of Burgundy. It was probably while
resident abroad, in the Low Countries or in Germany, that he
commenced practising the art of printing. He is commonly
supposed to have completed before the end of the year 1471
impressions of Eaoul le Fevre's Eecueil des Histoires de Troyes,
in folio ; of the Latin oration of John Eussell on Charles Duke
of Burgundy being created a Knight of the Garter, in quarto ;
and of an English translation by himself of Le Fevre's above-
mentioned history, in folio; "whyche sayd translacion and
werke," says the title, " was begonne in Brugis in 1468, and
ended in the holy cyte of Colen, 19 Sept. 1471." But these
words undoubtedly refer only to the translation ; and sufficient
reasons have lately been advanced by Mr. Knight for enter-
taining the strongest doubts of any one of the above-mentioned
books having been printed by Caxton.* The earliest work now
known, which we have sufficient grounds for believing to have
been printed by Caxton, is another English translation by him-
self, from the French, of a moral treatise entitled The Game and
Playe of the Chesse, a folio volume, which is stated: to have been
" finished the last day of March, 1474." It is generally sup-
posed that this work was printed in England ; and the year 1474
accordingly is assumed to have been that of the introduction of
the art into this country. It is certainly known that Caxton
was resident in England in 1477, and had set up his press in the
Almonry, near Westminster Abbey, where he printed that year,
in folio, The Dictes and Notable Wyse Sayenges of the Phylo-
sophers, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Earl
Rivers. From this time Caxton continued both to print and
translate with indefatigable industry for about a dozen years, his
last publication with a date having been produced in 1490, and
his death having probably taken place in 1491, or 1492. Before
he died he saw the admirable art which he had introduced into
his native country already firmly established there, and the
practice of it extensively diffused. Theodore Eood, John Lettow,
William Machelina, and Wynkyn de Worde, foreigners, and
Thomas Hunt, an Englishman, all printed in London both before
and after Caxton's death. It is probable that the foreigners had
been his assistants, and were brought into the country by him.
A press was also set up at St. Albans by a schoolmaster of that
place, whose name has not been preserved ; and books began to
be printed at Oxford so early as the year 1478.

* See William Caxton, a Biography, 12mo. Lond. 1844, pp. 103, &c
This work has since been expanded into The Old Printer and the Modern
Press, 8vo. 1854.

BISHOP PECOCK. 1C9

ENGLISH CHRONICLERS.

The series of our Modern English chronicles may perhaps be
most properly considered as commencing with John de Trevisa's
translation of Higden, with various additions, which, as already
mentioned, was finished in 1387. and was printed, with a con-
tinuation to 1460, by Caxton, in 1482. After Trevisa comes
John Harding, who belongs to the fifteenth century ; his metrical
Chronicle of England coming down to the reign of Edward IV.*
The metre is melancholy enough; but the part of the work
relating to the author's own times is not without value. Harding
is chiefly notorious as the author, or at least the collector and
producer, of a great number of charters and other documents
attesting acts of fealty done by the Scottish to the English kings,
which are now generally admitted to be forgeries. Caxton
himself must be reckoned our next English chronicler, as the
author both of the continuation of Trevisa and also of the con-
cluding part of the volume entitled The Chronicles of England,
published by him in 1480, — the body of which is translated from
a Latin chronicle by Douglas, a monk of Glastonbury, who lived
in the preceding century. Neither of these performances, how-
ever, is calculated to add to the fame of the celebrated printer.
To this period we may also in part assign the better known
Concordance of Histories of Kobert Fabyan, citizen and draper
of London; though the author only died in 1512, nor was his
work printed till a few years later. Fabyan 's history, which
begins with Brutus and comes down to his own time, is in the
greater part merely a translation from the preceding chroniclers ;
its chief value consists in a number of notices it has preserved
relating to the city of London.f

BISHOP PECOCK; FORTESCUE; MALORY.

Of the English theological writers of the age immediately
following that of Wiclif, the most noteworthy is Reynold
Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph and afterwards of Chichester. As
may be inferred from these ecclesiastical dignities, Pecock was no
Wiclifite, but a defender of the established system both of doc-
trine and of church government : he tells us himself, in one of his

* First printed by Grafton in 1543. The most recent edition is that by Sir
H. Ellis, 4 to. Lend. 1812.

t First published in 1516. The last edition is that of Sir H. Ellis, Loud.
4to. 1811.

170 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

books, that twenty years of his life had been spent for the greater
part in writing against the Lollards. But, whatever effect his
arguments may have produced upon those against whom they
were directed, they gave little satisfaction to the more zealous
spirits on his own side, who probably thought that he was too
fond of reasoning with errors demanding punishment by a cautery-
sharper than that of the pen ; and the end was that he was him-
self, in the year 1457, charged with heresy, and, having been found
guilty, was first compelled to read a recantation, and to commit
fourteen of his books, with his own hands, to the flames at
St. Paul's Cross, and then deprived of his bishopric, and con-
signed to an imprisonment in which he was allowed the use
neither of writing materials nor of books, and in which he is
supposed to have died about two years after. One especial
heresy alleged to be found in his writings was, that in regard
to matters of faith the church was not infallible. Bishop
Pecock's Life has been ably and learnedly written by the
Rev. John Lewis, to whom we also owe biographies of Wiclif
and of Caxton. His numerous treatises are partly in English,
partly in Latin. Of those in English the most remarkable is one
entitled The Eepressor, which he produced in 1449. A short
specimen, in which the spelling, but only the spelling, is
modernized, will give some notion of his manner of writing,
and of the extent to which the language had been adapted to
prose eloquence or reasoning of the more formal kind in that
age:—

" Say to nie, good sir, and answer hereto : when men of the country
upland hringen into London in Midsummer eve branches of trees fro
Bishop's Wood, and flowers fro the field, and betaken tho l to citizens of
London for to therewith array her2 houses, shoulden men of London,
receiving and taking tho branches and flowers, say and hold that tho
branches grewen out of the carts which broughten hem * to London, and
that tho carts or the hands of the bringers weren grounds and fundaments
of tho branches and flowers? God forbid so little wit be in her heads.
Certes, though Christ and his apostles weren now living at London, and
would bring, so as is now said, branches from Bishop's Wood, and flowers
from the fields, into London, and woulden hem deliver to men, that they
make therewith her houses gay, into remembrance of St. John Baptist,
and of this that it was prophesied of him, that many shoulden joy of his
birth, yet tho men of London, receiving so tho branches and flowers,
oughten not say and feel that tho branches and flowers grewen out of
Christ's hands. Tho branches grewen out of the boughs upon which they
in Bishop's Wood stooden, and tho boughs grewen Dut of stocks ci

Take them, or those. " Their. 3 Them.

SIR JOHN FORTESCUE. 171

truncheons, and the truncheons or shafts grewen out of the root, and tho
root out of the next earth thereto, upon which and in which the root ia
buried. So that neither the cart, neither the hands of the bringers, neither
tho bringers ben the grounds or fundaments of tho branches."

The good bishop, we see, has a popular and lively as well as
clear and precise way of putting things. It may be doubted,
nevertheless, if his ingenious illustrations would be quite as
convincing to the earnest and excited innovators to whom they
were addressed as they were satisfactory to himself.

Another eminent English prose writer of this date was Sir
John Fortescue, who was Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench
under Henry VI., and to whom the king is supposed to have
also confided the great seal at some time during his expulsion
from the throne. Fortescue is tho author of various treatises,
some in English, some in Latin, most of which, however, still
remain in manuscript. One in Latin, which was first sent to
press in the reign of Henry VIII., and has been repeatedly
reprinted since, is commonly referred to under the title of De
Landibus Legum Angliae. It has also been several times trans-
lated into English. This treatise is drawn up in the form of a
dialogue between the author and Henry's unfortunate son,
Edward Prince of Wales, so barbarously put to death after the
battle of Tewkesbury. Fortescue's only English work that has
been printed was probably written at a later date, and would
appear to have had for its object to secure for him, now that the
Lancastrian cause was beaten to the ground, the favour of the
Yorkist king, Edward IV. It was first published, in 1714, by
Mr. John Fortescue Aland, of the Middle Temple, with the title
of The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy,
as it more particularly regards the English Constitution, — which,
of course, is modern, but has been generally adopted to designate
the work. The following passage (in which the spelling is again
reformed) will enable the reader to compare Fortescue as a writer
with his contemporary Pecock, and is also curious both for its
matter and its spirit : —

And how so be it that the French king reigneth upon his people dominio
regali, yet St. Lewis, sometime king there, ne any of his predecessors set
never tallies lie other impositions upon the people of that land without the
consent of the three estates, which, when they may be assembled, are like
to the court of Parliament in England. And this order kept many of
his successors till late days, that Englishmen kept such a war in France
that the three estates durst not come together. And then, for that cause,
and for great necessity which the French king had of goods for the defence
of that land, he took upon him to set tallies and other impositions upon

172 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the commons without the assent of the three estates ; but yet he would
not set any such charges, nor hath set, upon the nohles, for fear of rebellion.
And, because the commons, though they have grudged, have not rebelled,
nor be hardy to rebel, the French kings have yearly sithen1 set such
charges upon them, and so augmented the same charges as the same
commons be so impoverished and destroyed that they may uneath 3 live.
They drink water, they eat apples, with bread, right brown, made of rye.
They eat no flesh, but if it be selden 3 a little lard, or of the entrails or
heads of beasts slain for the nobles and merchants of the land. They wear
no woollen, but if it be a poor coat under their uttermost garment, made of
great canvas, and passen not their knee ; wherefore they be gartered and
their thighs bare. Their wives and children gone barefoot. They may in
none otherwise live ; for some of them that was wont to pay to his land-
lord for his tenement which he hireth by the year a scute 4 payeth now to
the king, over5 that scute, five scutes. Where-through thoy be artied 6
by necessity, so to watch, labour, and grub in the ground for their sus-
tenance, that their nature is much wasted, and the kind of them brought
to nought. They gone crooked, and are feeble, not able to fight nor to
defend the realm ; nor have they weapon, nor money to buy them weapon,
withal ; but verily they live in the most extreme poverty and misery ;
and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile realms of the world. Where-
through the French king hath not men of his own realm able to defend
it, except his nobles, which bearen not such impositions, and therefore they
are right likely of their bodies ; by which cause the king is compelled to
make his armies, and retinues for defence of his land, of strangers, as Scots,
Spaniards, Aragoners, men of Almayne,7 and of other nations ; else all his
enemies might overrun him ; for he hath no defence of his own, except his
castles and fortresses. Lo ! this the fruit of his jus regale.

It is in the, same spirit that the patriotic chief justice else-
where boasts, that there were more Englishmen hanged for
robbery in one year than Frenchmen in seven, and that " if an
Englishman be poor, and see another having riches which may
be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so."

Fortescue was probably born not much more than thirty years
after Pecock ; but the English of the judge, in vocabulary, in
grammatical forms, in the modulation of the sentences, and in its
air altogether, might seem to exhibit quite another stage of the
language.

Although both Pecock and Fortescue lived to see the great
invention of printing, and the latter at any rate survived tho
introduction of the new art into his native country, no production

1 Since. a Scarcely, with difficulty (uneasily >.

3 Seldom, on rare occasions

4 An escut, or ecu (d'or), about three shillings and ftmrpence.

5 In addition to, over and above. « Compelled.
7 Germany.

SIR THOMAS MALORY. 173

of either appears to have been given to the world through the
press in the lifetime of the writer. Perhaps this was also the
case with another prose writer of this date, who is remembered,
however, less by his name than by the work of which he is the
author, and which still continues to be read, the famous history
of King Arthur, commonly known under the name of the Morte
Arthur. This work was first printed by Caxton in the year
1485. He tells us in his prologue, or preface, that the copy was
given him by Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, who took it, out of
certain books in French, and reduced it into English. Malory
himself states at the end, that he finished his task in the ninth
year of King Edward IV., which would be in 1469 or 1470.
The Morte Arthur was several times reprinted in the course of
the following century and a half, the latest of the old editions
having appeared in a quarto volume in 1634. From this, two
reprints were brought out by different London booksellers in the
same year, 1816; one in three duodecimos, the other in two.
But the standard modern edition is that which appeared in two
volumes quarto in the following year, 1817, exactly reprinted
from Caxton's original edition, with the title of The Byrth, Lyfe,
and Actes of Kyng Arthur ; of his noble Knyghtes of the Rounde
Table, &c., with an Introduction and Notes, by Robert Southey.
.Mul»ry, whoever he may have been (Leland says he was Welsh),
and supposing him to have been in the main only a translator,
must be admitted to show considerable mastery of expression ;
his English is always animated and flowing, and, in its earnest-
ness and tenderness, occasionally rises to no common beauty and
eloquence. The concluding chapters in particular have been
much admired. We extract a few sentences : —

Then Sir Lancelot, ever after, eat but little meat, nor drank, but con-
tinually mourned until he was dead ; and then he sickened ^nore and
more, and dried and dwindled away. For the bishop, nor none of his
fellows, might not make him to eat, and little he drank, that he was soon
waxed shorter by a cubit than he was, that the people could not know
him. For evermore day and night he prayed [taking no rest], but need-
fully as nature required ; sometimes he slumbered a broken sleep ; and
always he was lying grovelling upon King Arthur's and Queen Guenever's
tomb ; and there was no comfort that the bishop, nor Sir Bors, not none of
all his fellows could make him ; it availed nothing.

Oh ! ye mighty and pompous lords, winning in the glorious transitory
of this unstable life, as in reigning over great realms and mighty great
countries, fortified with strong castles and towers, edified with many a
rich city ; yea also, ye fierce and mighty knights, so valiant in adventurous
deeds of arms, behold ! behold ! see how this mighty conqueror, King

174 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Arthur, whom in his human life all the world doubted,1 yea also the noble
Queen Guenever, which sometime sat in her chair adorned with gold, pearls,
and precious stones, now lie full low in obscure foss, or pit, covered with
clods of earth and clay ! Behold also this mighty champion, Sir Lancelot,
peerless of all knighthood ; see now how he lieth grovelling upon the cold
mould ; now being so feeble and faint, that sometime was so terrible :
how, and in what manner, ought ye to be so desirous of worldly honour so
dangerous ? Therefore, me thinketh this present book is right necessary
often to be read ; for in all 2 ye find the most gracious, knightly, and vir-
tuous war, of the most noble knights of the world, whereby they got
praising continually ; also me seemeth, by the oft reading thereof, ye shall
greatly desire to accustom yourself in following of those gracious knightly
deeds ; that is to say, to dread God and to love righteousness, faithfully
and courageously to serve your sovereign prince ; and, the more that God
hath given you the triumphal honour, the meeker ought ye to be, ever
fearing the unstableness of this deceitful world.

And so, within fifteen days, they came to Joyous Guard, and there they
laid his corpse in the body of the quire, and sung and read many psalters
and prayers over him and about him ; and even his visage was laid open
and naked, that all folk might behold him. For such was the custom in
those days, that all men of worship should so lie with open visage till that
they were buried. And right thus as they were at their service there came
Sir Ector de Maris, that had sought seven years all England, Scotland, and
Wales, seeking his brother Sir Lancelot. . . .

And then Sir Ector threw his shield, his sword, and his helm from him ;
and when he beheld Sir Lancelot's visage, he fell down in a swoon ; and,
when he awoke, it were hard for any tongue to tell the doleful complaints
that he made for his brother. " Ah, Sir Lancelot," said he, " thou wert
head of all Christian knights." — " And now, I dare say," said Sir Bors, " that
Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou wert never matched of none earthly
knight's hands. And thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare
shield ; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode
horse ; and thou wert the truest lover, of a sinful man, that ever loved
woman ; and thou wert the kindest man that ever stroke with sword ; and
thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights ;
and thou wert the meekest man, and the gentlest, that ever eat in hall
among ladies ; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that
ever put spear in rest."

ENGLISH POETS.— OCCLEVE ; LYDGATE.

The most numerous class of writers in the mother tongue

belonging to this time, are the poets, by courtesy so called. Wo

must refer to the learned and curious pages of Warton, or to tho

still more elaborate researches of Eitson,* for the names of a

1 Dreaded (held as redoubtable). 2 it ?

* Bibliographia Poetica

LYDGATE. 175

crowd of worthless and forgotten versifiers that fill up the annals
of our national minstrelsy from Chaucer to Lord Surrey. The
last-mentioned antiquary has furnished a list of about seventy
English poets who flourished in this interval. The first known
writer of any considerable quantity of verse after Chaucer is
Thomas Occleve. Warton places him about the year 1420. He
is the author of many minor pieces, which mostly remain in
manuscript — although " six of peculiar stupidity," says Ritson,
"were selected and published" by Dr. Askew in 1796; — and
also of a longer poem, entitled De Regimine Principum (On the
Government of Princes), chiefly founded on a Latin work, with
the same title, written in the thirteenth century by an Italian
ecclesiastic Egidius, styled the Doctor Fundatissimus, and on
the Latin treatise on the game of chess of Jacobus de Casulis,
another Italian writer of the same age — the latter being the
original of the Game of the Chess, translated by Caxton from the
French, and printed by him in 1474. Occleve's poem has never
been published — and is chiefly remembered for a drawing of
Chaucer by the hand of Occleve, which is found in one of the
manuscripts of it now in the British Museum.* Occleve
repeatedly speaks of Chaucer as his master and poetic father,
and was no doubt personally acquainted with the great poet.
All that Occleve appears to have gained, however, from his
admirable model is some initiation in that smoothness and regu-
larity of diction of which Chaucer's writings set the first great
example. His own endowment of poetical power and feeling
was very small — the very titles of his pieces, as Warton remarks,
indicating the poverty and frigidity of his genius.

By far the most famous of these versifiers of the fifteenth
century is John Lydgato, the monk of Bury, whom the Historian
of our Poetry considers to have arrived at his highest point of
eminence about the year 1430. Ritson has given a list of about
250 poems attributed to Lydgate. Indeed he seems to have
followed the manufacture of rhymes as a sort of trade, furnishing
any quantity to order whenever he was called upon. On one
occasion, for instance, we find him employed by the historian
Whethamstede, who was abbot of St. Albans, to make a trans-
lation into English, for the use of that convent, of the Latin
legend of its patron saint. " The chronicler who records a part
of this anecdote," observes Warton, " seems to consider Lydgate's
translation as a matter of mere manual mechanism ; for he adds,

* Harl. MS. 4866. This portrait, which is a half-length, is coloured. There
is a full-length portrait in another copy of Occleve'tf Poems in Koyal MS.
17 D. vi.— See Life of Chaucer, by Sir Harris Nicolas, pp. 104, &c.

176 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

that Whethamstede paid for the translation, the writing, and
illuminations, one hundred shillings."* Lydgate, however,
though excessively diffuse, and possessed of very little strength
or originality of imagination, is a considerably livelier and more
expert writer than Occleve. His memory was also abundantly
stored with the learning of his age ; he had travelled in France
and Italy, and was intimately acquainted with the literature of
both these countries ; and his English makes perhaps a nearer
approach to the modern form of the language than that of any
preceding writer. His best-known poem consists of nine books
of Tragedies, as he entitles them, respecting the falls of princes,
translated from a Latin work of Boccaccio's : it was printed at
London in the reign of Henry VIII. A Selection from the
Minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate, edited by Mr. Halliwell,
has been printed for the Percy Society, 8vo. Lon. 1840.

SCOTTISH POETS.— WYNTON; JAMES I.; HENRYSON; HOLLAND;
BLIND HENRY.

The most remarkable portion of our poetical literature belong-
ing to the fifteenth century (as also, we shall presently find, of
that belonging to the first half of the sixteenth), was contributed
by Scottish writers. The earliest successor of Barbour was
Andrew of Wyntown, or Wynton, a canon regular of the Priory
of St. Andrews, and Prior of the Monastery of St. Serfs Inch in
Lochleven, one of the establishments subordinate to that great
house, who is supposed to have been born about 1350, and whose
Originale Cronykil of Scotland appears to have been finished in
the first years of the fifteenth century. It is a long poem, of
nine books, written in the same octosyllabic rhyme with the
Bruce of Barbour, to which it was no doubt intended to serve
as a kind of introduction. Wynton, however, has very little of
the old archdeacon's poetic force and fervour; and even his
style, though in general sufficiently simple and clear, is, if any-
thing, rather ruder than that of his predecessor — a difference
which is probably to be accounted for by Barbour's frequent
residences in England and more extended intercourse with the
world. The Chronykil is principally interesting in an historical
point of view, and in that respect it is of considerable value and
authority, for Wynton, besides his merits as a distinct narrator,
had evidently taken great pains to obtain the best information
within his reach with regard to the events both of his own aiul

* Hist. Eng. Poetry, vol. ii. p. 363,

JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND. 177

of preceding times. The work begins (as was then the fashion),
with the creation of the world, and comes down to the year 1408 ;
but the first five books are occupied rather with general than
with Scottish history. The last four books, together with such
parts of the preceding ones as contain anything relating to
British affairs, were very carefully edited by the late Mr. David
Macpherson (the author of the well-known Annals of Com-
merce and other works), in two volumes 8vo. Lon. 1795. It
is deserving of notice that a considerable portion of Wynton's
Chronicle is not his own composition, but was the contribution
of another contemporary poet.; namely, all from the 19th chapter
of the Eighth to the 10th chapter of the Ninth Book inclusive,
comprising the space from 1324 to 1390, and forming about a
third of the four concluding books. This he conscientiously
acknowledges, in very careful and explicit terms, both at the
beginning and end of the insertion. We may give what he sa} s
in the latter place, as a short sample of his style : —

This part last treated beibrn,

Fra Davy the Brus our king wes bora,

While l his sister son Robert

The Second, our king, than called Stuert,

That nest2 him reigned successive,

His days had ended of his live,

Wit ye well, wes nought my elite j*

Thereof I dare me well acquite.

Wha that it dited, nevertheless,

He showed him of mair cunnandness

Than me commendis4 his treatise,

But5 favour, whae will it clearly prize.

This part wes written to me send ;

And I, that thought for to mak end

Of that purpose I took on hand,

Saw it was well accordand

To my matere ; I wes right glad ;

For I was in my travail sad ;

I eked7 it here to this dite,

For to mak me some respite.

This is interesting as making it probable that poetical, or a
least metrical, composition in the national dialect was common
in Scotland at this early date.

Of all our poets of the early part of the fifteenth century
the one of greatest eminence must be considered to be King

1 Till. * Next. 3 Writing.

4 lie showed himself of more cunning (skills than I who commend
» Without. • Whosoever. ? Added.

N

178 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Jaines I. of Scotland, even if he be only the author of TLo
King's Quair (that is, the King's quire or book), his claim to which
has scarcely been disputed. It is a serious poem, of nearly
1400 lines, arranged in seven-lino stanzas; the style in great
part allegorical ; the subject, the love of the royal poet for the
lady Joanna Beaufort, whom he eventually married, and whom
he is said to have first beheld walking in the garden below from
the window of his prison in the Bound Tower of Windsor Castle.
The poem was in all probability written during his detention in
England, and previous to his marriage, which took place in
February 1424, a few months before his return to his native
country. In the concluding stanza James makes grateful mention
of his —

maisters dear

Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate
Of rhetorick while they were livand here,

Superlative as poets laureate,

Of morality and eloquence ornate ;

and he is evidently an imitator of the great father of English
poetry. The poem too must be regarded as written in English
rather than in Scotch, although the difference between the two
dialects, as we have seen, was not so great at this early date as
it afterwards became, and although James, who was in his
eleventh year when he was carried away to England in 1405 by
Henry IV., may not have altogether avoided the peculiarities
of his native idiom. The Quair was first published from the
only manuscript (one of the Selden Collection in the Bodleian
Library), by Mr. W. Tytler at Edinburgh, in 1783 ; there have
been several editions since. Two other poems of considerable
length, in a humorous style, have also been attributed to James I.
— Peebles to the Play, and Christ's Kirk on the Green, both in
the Scottish dialect; but they are more probably the produc-
tions of his equally gifted and equally unfortunate descendant
James V. (b. 1511, d. 1542). Chalmers, however, assigns the
former to James I. As for the two famous comic ballads of
The Gaberlunyie Man, and the Jolly Beggar, which it has been
usual among recent writers to speak of as by one or other
of these kings, there seems to be no reasonable ground — not
even that of tradition of any antiquity — for assigning them to
either.

Chaucer, we have seen, appears to have been unknown to his
contemporary Barbour ; but after the time of James I. the Scot-
tish poetry for more than a century bears evident traces of the
imitation of the great English master. It was a consequence

ROBERT HENRYSON. ITS

of the relative circumstances of the two countries, that, while
the literature of Scotland, the poorer and ruder of the two, could
exert no influence upon that of England, the literature of England
could not fail powerfully to affect and modify that of its more
backward neighbour. No English writer would think of study-
ing or imitating Barbour; but every Scottish poet who arose
after the fame of Chaucer had passed the border would seek, or,
even if he did not seek, would still inevitably catch, some
inspiration from that great example. If it could in any cir-
cumstances have happened that Chaucer should have remained
unknown in Scotland, the singular fortunes of James I. were
shaped as if on purpose to transfer the manner and spirit of his
poetry into the literature of that country. From that time for-
ward the native voice of the Scottish muse was mixed with this
other foreign voice. One of the earliest Scottish poets after
James I. is Robert Henryson, or Henderson, the author of the
beautiful pastoral of Robin and Makyne, which is popularly
known from having been printed by Bishop Percy in his
Reliques. He has left us a continuation or supplement to
Chaucer's Troilus and Creseide, which is commonly printed
along with the works of that poet under the title of The Testa-
ment of Fair Creseide. All that is known of the era of Henryson
is that he was alive and very old about the close of the fifteenth
century. He may therefore probably have been born about the
time that James I. returned from England. Henryson is also
the author of a translation into English or Scottish verse of
^Esop's Fables, of which there is a MS. in the Harleian Collec-
tion (No. 3865), and which was printed at Edinburgh in 8vo. in
1621, under the title of The Moral Fables of ^sop the Phrygian,
compyled into eloquent and ornamental meter, by Robert Hen-
rison, schoolemaster of Dumferling. To Henryson, moreover,
it may be noticed, Mr. David Laing attributes the tale of Orpheus
and Eurydice contained in the collection of old poetry, entitled
The Knightly Tale of Golagrus and Gawane, &c., reprinted by
him in 1827.

Contemporary, too, with Henryson, if not perhaps rather before
him, was Sir John or Richard Holland. His poem entitled The
Buke of the Howlat (that is, the owl), a wild and rugged effu-
sion in alliterative metre, cannot be charged as an imitation of
Chaucer, or of any other English writer of so late a date.

Another Scottish poet of this time the style and spirit as well
as the subject of whose poetry must be admitted to be exclusively
national is Henry the Minstrel, commonly called Blind Harry,
author of the famous poem on the life and acts of Wallace. Tho

180 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

testimony of the historian John Major to the time at which
Henry wrote is sufficiently express : " The entire book of William
Wallace," he says, " Henry, who was blind from his birth, com-
posed in the time of my infancy (meae infantiae tempore cudii), and
what things used popularly to be reported wove into popular verse,
in which he was skilled." Major is believed to have been bora
about 1469 ; so that Henry's poem may be assigned to the end of
the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The standard edition
is that published from a manuscript dated 1488 by Dr. Jamieson
along with Barbour's poem, 4to. Edin. 1820. The Wallace, which
is a long poein of about 12,000 decasyllabic lines, used to be a
still greater favourite than was The Bruce with the author's
countrymen ; and Dr. Jamieson does not hesitate to place Harry
as a poet before Barbour. In this judgment, however, probably
few critical readers will concur, although both Warton and Ellis,
without going so far, have also acknowledged in warm terms the
rude force of the Blind Minstrel's genius. It may be remarked,
by the way, that were it not for Major's statement, and the
common epithet that has attached itself to his name, we should
scarcely have supposed that the author of Wallace had been
either blind from his birth or blind at all. He nowhere himself
alludes to any such circumstance. His poem, besides, abounds
in descriptive passages, and in allusions to natural appearances
and other objects of sight : perhaps, indeed, it might be said that
there is an ostentation of that kind of writing, such as we meet
with also in the modern Scotch poet Blacklock's verses, and
which it may be thought is not unnatural to a blind person.
Nor are his apparent literary acquirements to be very easily
reconciled with Major's account, who represents him as going
about reciting his verses among the nobility (coram principibus) ,
and thereby obtaining food and raiment, of which, says the his-
torian, he was worthy (victum, et vestitum, quo dignus erat, nactus
est). "He seems," as Dr. Jamieson observes, "to have been
pretty well acquainted with that kind of history which was
commonly read in that period." The Doctor refers to allusions
which he makes in various places to the romance histories of
Hector, of Alexander the Great, of Julius Csesar, and of Charle-
magne; and he conceives that his style of writing is more
richly strewed with the more peculiar phraseology of the writers
of romance than that of Barbour. But what is most remarkable
is that he distinctly declares his poem to be throughout a trans-
lation from the Latin. The statement, which occurs toward the
conclusion, seems too express and particular to be a mere imita-
tion of the usage of the romance -writers, many of whom appeal,

HENRY THE MINSTREL. 181

but generally in very vague terms, to a Latin original for their
marvels : —

Of Wallace life wha has a further feel1

May show furth mair with wit and eloquence ;

For I to this have done my diligence,

Efter the proof given fra the Latin book

Whilk Maister Blair in his time undertook,

In fair Latin compiled it till ane end :

With thir witness the mair is to commend.2

Bishop Sinclair than lord was of Dunkell ;

He gat this book, and confirmed it himsell

For very true ; therefore he had no drede ;'

Himself had seen great part of Wallace deed.

His purpose was till have sent it to Rome,

Our fader of kirk thereon to give his doom.

But Maistre Blair and als Shir Thomas Gray

Efter Wallace they lestit4 mony day :

Thir twa5 knew best of Gud Schir William's dml,

Fra sixteen year while6 nine and twenty yeid.7

In another place (Book V. v. 538 et seq.) he says : —

Maistre John Blair was oft in that message,
A worthy clerk, baith wise and right savage.
Lewit8 he was before in Paris town
Amang maisters in science and renown.
Wallace and he at hame in schul had been :
Soon efterwart, as verity is seen,
He was the man that principal undertook,
That first compiled in dite9 the Latin book
Of Wallace life, right famous in renown ;
And Thomas Gray, person of Libertown.

Blind Harry's notions of the literary character are well exem-
plified by his phrase of a " worthy clerk, baith wise and right
savage." He himself, let his scholarship have been what it may,
is in spirit as thorough a Scot as if he had never heard the sound
of any other than his native tongue. His gruff patriotism speaks
out in his opening lines : —

Our antecessors, that we suld of read,
And hold in mind their noble worthy deed,

• Knowledge.

2 We do not profess to understand this line. Thir is Scotch for then*
Mair is mar in Jamieson. 8 Doubt.

4 Survived (lasted). 6 These two.

6 Till. 7 Went, passed.

• Dr. Jamieson's only interpretation is " allowed, left." 9 Writing.

182 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

We lat owerslide,1 through very sleuthfulness,

And casts us ever till other business.

Till honour enemies is our hail2 intent ;

It has been seen in thir times by went :

Our auld enemies comen of Saxons blud,

That never yet to Scotland wald do gud,

But ever on force and contrar hail their will,

How great kindness there has been kythe3 them till.

It is weil knawn on mony divers side

How they have wrought into their mighty pride

To hald Scotland at under evermair :

But God above has made their might to pair.4

Of the fighting and slaying, which, makes up by far the greater
part of the poem, it is difficult to find a sample that is short
enough for our purpose. The following is a small portion of what
is called the battle of Shortwoodshaw : —

On Wallace set a bicker bauld and keen ;

A bow he bare was big and well beseen,

And arrows als, baith lang and sharp with aw ;5

No man was there that Wallace bow might draw.

Eight stark he was, and in to souer gear ;8

Bauldly he shot amang they7 men of wer.8

Ane angel heade9 to the huiks he drew

And at a shot the foremost soon he slew.

Inglis archers, that hardy war and wight,

Amang the Scots bickered with all their might ;

Their aweful shot was felon10 for to bide ;

Of Wallace men they woundit sore that tide ;

Few of them was sicker11 of archery ;

Better they were, an they gat even party,

In field to bide either with swerd or spear.

Wallace perceivit his men tuk mickle deir :12

He gart13 them change, and stand nought in to stead ;14

He cast all ways to save them fra the dead.15

Full great travail upon himself tuk he ;

Of Southron men feil18 archers he gart dee.17

Of Longcashier18 bowmen was in that place

A sair19 archer aye waitit on Wallace,

1 Allow to slip out of memory. 2 Whole.

* Shown. 4 Diminish, impair.

5 Dr. Jamieson's only interpretation is owe. It would almost seem as if wo
had here the modern Scottish witha' for wiihall.

I In sure warlike accoutrements. 7 These.

» War. 9 The barbed head of an arrow. 10 Terrible.

1 Sure. & Took much hazard, ran much risk. l3 Caused.

II Stand not in their place. Perhaps it should be "o stead," that is,
one place. » Death. ie Many.

17 Caused die. 18 Lancashire. » Skilful.

HENRY THE MINSTREL. 185

At ane opine,1 \vhar he usit to repair ;
At him he drew a sicker shot and sair
Under the chin, through a collar of steel
On the left side, and hurt his halse2 some deal.
Astonied he was, but nought greatly aghast ;
Out fra his men on him he followit fast ;
In the turning with gud will has him ta'en
Upon the crag,8 in sunder straik the bain.

It will be seen from this specimen that the Blind Minstrel is
a vigorous versifier. His descriptions, however, though both
clear and forcible, and even not unfrequently animated by a dra-
matic abruptness and boldness of expression, want the bounding
airy spirit and flashing light of those of Barbour. As a speci-
men of his graver style we may give his Envoy or concluding
lines : —

Go, noble book, fulfillit of gud sentence,
Suppose thou be barren of eloquence :
Go, worthy book, fulfillit of suthfast deed ;
But in langage of help thou hast great need.
Whan gud makers4 rang weil into Scotland,
Great harm was it that nane of them ye fand.5
Yet there is part that can thee weil avance ;
Now bide thy time, and be a remembrance.
I you besek of your benevolence,
Wha will nought lou,8 lak nought7 my eloquence ;
(It is weil knawn I am a burel8 man)
For here is said as gudly as I can ;
My sprite feeles ne termes asperans.*
Now beseek God, that giver is of grace,
Made hell and erd,10 and set the heaven above,
That he us grant of his dear lestand" love.

PROSE WRITERS: — MORE; ELYOT; TYNDAL; CRANMER; LATIMER

The fact most deserving of remark in the progress of English
literature, for the first half of the sixteenth century, is the
cultivation that now came to be bestowed upon the language in
the form of prose composition,— a form always in the order of
time subsequent to tliut of verso in the natural development of a

1 Open place? 2 Neck. 'Throat.

4 Poets. * Found. • Love?

7 Scoff not at. 8 Boorish, clownish.

9 Understands no lofty (aspiring) terms. But it seems impossible tLat
atperang can rhyme to grace.

w Earth. » Lasting.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

A iitorA+nrp Lonff before this date, indeed,
citot ™H? did in hgis proper field had given

Sat wMch it could be so advantageously employed in prose
^ veree At all events Chaucer had no worthy successor as a
writer of prose, any more than as a writer of poetry, tall more
Zn a century after his death. Meanwhile, however, the
aZage though not receiving much artificial pnltivatifflj, W£

e

a

of what, in a certain sense, mi

skill to the task of composition, it must, as a mere language, or
system of vocables and grammatical forms, have not only sustained
many changes and modifications, but, it is probable, acquired ^on
the whole considerable enlargement of its capacities and powers
and been generally carried forward towards maturity under the
impulse of a vigorous principle of growth and ^expansion But
t is not till some time after the commencement of the sixteenth
century that we can properly date the rise of our classical prose
literature. Perhaps the earliest compositions that are entitled to
be included under that name are some of those of Sir Thomas
More, especially his Life and Eeign of King Edward J., which
Kastell his brother-in-law, by whom it was first printed in 1557,
from, as he informs us, a copy in More's handwriting states to
have been written by him when he was under-sheriff of London,
in the year 1513 * Most of More's other English writings are

* Sir Henry Ellis, however, in the Preface ^M jfffSafLSi
Chronicle (4to. 1812), has called attention to what had not before bee
noticed, namely, that the writer speaks as if he had been present witn

uld not have been, Wg

PROSE WRITERS. 185

of a controversial character, and are occupied about subjects both
of very temporary importance, and that called up so much of
the eagerness and bitterness of the author's party zeal as con-
siderably to disturb and mar both his naturally gentle and be-
nignant temper and the oily eloquence of his style ; but this his-
toric piece is characterized throughout by an easy narrative flow
which rivals the sweetness of Herodotus. It is certainly the
first English historic composition that can be said to aspire to
be more than a mere chronicle.

The letter which Sir Thomas More wrote to his wife in 1528.
after the burning of his house at Chelsea, affords one of the best
specimens of the epistolary style of this period : —

Maistres Alyce, in my most harty wise I recommend me to you ; and,
whereas I am enfourmed by my son Heron of the losse of our harnes and
of our neighbours also, with all the corn that was therein, albeit (saving
God's pleasure) it is gret pitie of so much good come lost, yet sith it hath
liked hym to sende us such a chaunce, we must and are bounden, not only
to be content, but also to be glad of his visitacion. He sente us all that
we have loste : and, sith he hath by such a chaunce taken it away againe,
his pleasure be fulfilled. Let us never grudge ther at, but take it in good
worth, and hartely thank him, as well for adversitie as for prosperite. And
peradventure we have more cause to thank him for our losse then for our
winning ; for his wisdome better seeth what is good for vs then we do our
•elves. Therfore I pray you be of good chere, and take all the howsold
with you to church, and there thanke God, both for that he hath given us,
and for that he hath taken from us, and for that he hath left us, which if
it please hym he can encrease when he will. And if it please hym to leave
us yet lesse, at his pleasure be it.

I pray you to make some good ensearche what my poore neighbours
have loste, and bid them take no thought therfore : for and I shold not
leave myself a spone, ther shal no pore neighbour of mine here no losse by
any chauuce happened in my house. I pray you be with my children and
your household merry in God. And devise some what with your frendes,
what waye wer best to take, for provision to be made for corne for our
household, and for sede thys yere comming, if ye thinke it good that we
kepe the ground stil in our handes. And whether ye think it good that
we so shall do or not, yet I think it were not best sodenlye thus to leave
it all up, and to put away our fplke of our farme till we have somwhat
advised us thereon. How beit if we have more nowe then ye shall nede,
and which can get them other maisters, ye may then discharge us of them.
But I would not that any man were sodenly sent away he wote nere
wether.

although Morton was a person of distinguished eloquence, the style is surely
far too modern to have proceeded from a writer who was born within ten
veare after the close of the fourteenth century, the senior of More by seventy
years.

186 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

At my comming hither I perceived none other but that I shold tary still
with the Kinges Grace. But now I shal (I think), because of this chance,
get leave this next weke to come home and se you : and then shall wo
further devyse together uppon all thinges what order shalbe best to take.
And thus as hartely fare you well with all our children as ye can wishe.
At Woodestok the thirde daye of Septembre by the hand of

your louing husbande

THOMAS MOKE Knight.*

Along with More, as one of the earliest writers of classic
English prose, may be mentioned his friend Sir Thomas Elyot,
the author of the political treatise entitled The Governor, and of
various other works, one of which is a Latin and English
"Dictionary, the foundation of most of the compilations of the
same kind that were published for a century afterwards. More
was executed in 1535, and Elyot also died some years before the
middle of the century. William Tyndal's admirable translations
of the New Testament and of some portions of the Old, and also
numerous tracts by the same early reformer in his native tongue,
which he wrote with remarkable correctness as well as with
great vigour and eloquence, appeared between 1526 and his
death in 1536. Next in the order of time among our more
eminent prose writers may be placed some of the distinguished
leaders of the Keforrnation in the latter part of the reign of
Henry VIII. and in that of Edward VI. , more especially
Archbishop Cranmer, whose compositions in his native tongue
are of considerable volume, and are characterized, if not by any
remarkable strength of expression or weight of matter, yet by a
full and even flow both of words and thought. On the whole,
Cranmer was the greatest writer among the founders of the
English Eeformation. His friends and fellow-labourers, Eidley
and Latimer, were also celebrated in their day for their ready
popular elocution ; but the few tracts of Eidley's that remain are
less eloquent than learned, and Latimer's discourses are rather
quaint and curious than either learned or eloquent in any lofty
sense of that term. Latimer is stated to have been one of the
first English students of the Greek language ; but this could
hardly be guessed from his Sermons, which, except a few scraps
of Latin, show scarcely a trace of scholarship or literature of any
kind. In addressing the people from the pulpit, this honest,
simple-minded bishop, feeling no exaltation either from his
position or his subject, expounded the most sublime doctrines of
religion in the same familiar and homely language in which the
humblest or most rustic of his hearers were accustomed to ehaffei

* Sir Thomas More's Works, by Bastell, 4to. 1557, pp. 1418, 1419.

PROSE WRITERS. 187

with one another in the market-place about the price of a yard of
cloth or a pair of shoes. Nor, indeed, was he more fastidious
as to matter than as to manner : all the preachers of that age
were accustomed to take a wide range over things in general, but
Latimer went beyond everybody else in the miscellaneous assort-
ment of topics he used to bring together from every region of
heaven and earth, — of the affairs of the world that now is as well
as of that which is to come. Without doubt his sermons must have
been lively and entertaining far beyond the common run of that
kind of compositions ; the allusions with which they abounded to
public events, and to life in all its colours and grades, from the
palace to the cottage, from the prince to the peasant, — the
anecdotes of his own experience and the other stories the old
man would occasionally intersperse among his strictures and
exhortations, — the expressiveness of his unscrupulous and often
startling phraseology, — all this, combined with the earnestness,
piety, and real goodness and simplicity of heart that breathed
from every word he uttered, may well be conceived to have had
no little charm for the multitudes that crowded to hear his living
voice ; even as to us, after the lapse of three centuries, these
sermons of Latimer's are still in the highest degree interesting
both for the touches they contain in illustration of the manners
and social condition of our forefathers, and as a picture of a very
peculiar individual mind. They are also of some curiosity and
value as a monument of the language of the period ; but to what
is properly to be called its literature, as we have said, they can
hardly be considered as belonging at all.

Generally it may be observed, with regard to the English
prose of the earlier part of the sixteenth century that it is both
more simple in its construction, and of a more purely native
character in other respects, than the style which came into fashion
in the latter years of the Elizabethan period. When first made
use of in prose composition, the mother-tongue was written as it
was spoken ; even such artifices and embellishments as are
always prompted by the nature of verse were here scarcely
aspired after or thought of; that which was addressed to and
specially intended for the instruction of the people was set down
as far as possible in the familiar forms and fashions of the popular
speech, in genuine native words, and direct unincumbered
sentences ; no painful imitation of any learned or foreign model
was attempted, nor any species of elaboration whatever, except
what was necessary for mere perspicuity, in a kind of writing
which was scarcely regarded as partaking of the character ot
literary composition at all. The delicacy of a scholarly taste no

188 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

doubt influenced even the English style of such writers as More
and his more eminent contemporaries or immediate followers ;
but whatever eloquence or dignity their compositions thus ac-
quired was not the effect of any professed or conscious endeavour
to write in English as they would have written in what were
called the learned tongues.

The age, indeed, of the critical cultivation of the language for
the purposes of prose composition had already commenced ; but
at first that object was pursued in the best spirit and after the
wisest methods. Erasmus, in one of his Letters, mentions that
his friend Dean Colet laboured to improve his English style by
the diligent perusal and study of Chaucer and the other old poets,
in whose works alone the popular speech was to be found turned
with any taste or skill to a literary use ; and doubtless others of
our earliest classic prose writers took lessons in their art in the
same manner from these true fathers of our vernacular literature.
And even the first professed critics and reformers of the lan-

fuage that arose among us proceeded in the main in a right
irection and upon sound principles in the task they undertook.
The appearance of a race of critical and rhetorical writers in any
country is, in truth, always rather a symptom or indication than,
what it has frequently been denounced as being, a cause of the
corruption and decline of the national literature. The writings
of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and of Quintilian, for instance,
certainly did not hasten, but probably rather contributed to
retard, the decay of the literature of ancient Greece and Eome.
The first eminent English writer of this class was the celebrated
Eoger Ascham, the tutor of Queen Elizabeth, whose treatise
entitled Toxophilus, the School or Partitions of Shooting, was
published in 1545. The design of Ascham, in this performance,
was not only to recommend to his countrymen the use of their
old national weapon, the bow, but to set before them an example
and model of a pure and correct English prose style. In his
dedication of the work, To all the Gentlemen and Yeomen of
England, he recommends to him that would write well in any
tongue {he counsel of Aristotle, — " To speak as the common
people do, to think as wise men do." From this we may perceive
that Ascham had a true feeling of the regard due to the great
fountain-head and oracle of the national language — the vocabulary
of the common people. He goes on to reprobate the practice of
many English writers, who by introducing into their composi-
tions, in violation of the Aristotelian precept, many words of
foreign origin, Latin, French, and Italian, made all things dark
and hard. " Once," he says, ** I communed with a man which

PROSE WRITERS. 1S9

reasoned the English tongue to be enriched and increased thereby,
saying, Who will not praise that feast where a man shall drink at
a dinner both wine, ale, and beer ? Truly, quoth I, they be all
good, every one taken by himself alone : but if you put malmsey
and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer and all, in one pot,
you shall make a drink neither easy to be known, nor yet whole-
some for the body." The English language, however, it may be
observed, had even already become too thoroughly and essentially
a mixed tongue for this doctrine of purism to be admitted to the
letter ; nor, indeed, to take up Ascham's illustration, is it univer-
sally true, even in regard to liquids, that a salutary and palatable
beverage can never be made by the interfusion of two or more
different kinds. Our tongue is now, and was many centuries
ago, not, indeed, in its grammatical structure, but in its vocabu-
lary, as substantially and to as great an extent Neo-Latin as
Gothic ; it would be as completely torn in pieces and left the
mere tattered rag of a language, useless for all the purposes of
speaking as well as of writing, by having the foreign as by
having the native element taken out of it. Ascham in his own
writings uses many words of French and Latin origin (the latter
mostly derived through the medium of the French) ; nay, the
common people themselves of necessity did in his day, as they do
still, use many such foreign words, or words not of English
origin, and could scarcely have held communication with one
another on the most ordinary occasions without so doing. It is
another question whether it might not have been more fortunate
if the original form of the national speech had remained in a state
of celibacy and virgin purity ; by the course of events the
Gothic part of the language has, in point of fact, been married to
the Latin part of it ; and what God or nature has thus joined
together it is now beyond the competency of man to put asunder
The language, while it subsists, must continue to be the product
of that union, and nothing else. As for Ascham's own style,
both in his Toxophilus, and in his Schoolmaster, published in
1571, three years after the author's death, it is not only clear and
correct, but idiomatic and muscular. That it is not rich or
picturesque is the consequence of the character of the writer's
mind, which was rather rhetorical than poetical. The publica-
tion of Ascham's Toxophilus was soon followed by an elaborate
treatise expressly dedicated to the subject of English composi-
tion— The Art of Rhetorick, for the use of all such as are studious
of Eloquence, set forth in English, by Thomas Wilson. Wilson,
whose work appeared in 1 553, takes pains to impress the same
principles that Ascham had laid down before him with regard to

tOO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

purity of style and the general rule of writing well But the
very solicitude thus shown by the ablest and most distinguished
of those who now assumed the guardianship of the vernacular
tongue to protect it from having its native character overlaid
and debased by an intermixture of terms borrowed from other
languages, may be taken as evidence that such debasement was
actually at this time going on; that our ancient English was
beginning to be oppressed and half suffocated by additions from
foreign sources brought in upon it faster than it could absorb and
assimilate them. Wilson, indeed, proceeds to complain that this
was the case. While some "powdered their talk with over-sea
language " others, whom he designates as " the unlearned or
foolish fantastical, that smell but of learning," were wont, lie
says " so to Latin their tongues," that simple persons could not
but wonder at their talk, and think they surely spake by some
revelation from heaven. It may be suspected, however, that
this affectation of unnecessary terms, formed from the ancient
languages, was not confined to mere pretenders _ to learning.
Another well-known critical writer of this period, Webster
Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy, published in 1582 but
believed to have been written a good many years earlier, in like
manner advises the avoidance in writing of such words and
modes of expression as are used "in the marches and iron hers,
or in port towns where strangers haunt for traffic sake, or yet in
universities, where scholars use much peevish affectation ot
words out of the primitive languages ;" and he warns his readers
that in some books were already to be found " many inkhom
terms so ill affected, brought in by men of learning, as preachers
and schoolmasters, and many strange terms of other languages by
secretaries, and merchants, and travellers, and many dark words,
and not usual nor well-sounding, though they be daily spoken at
court." On the whole, however, Puttenham considers the best
standard both for speaking and writing to be " the usual speech
of the court, and that of London and the shires lying about
London within sixty miles, and not much above." This judg-
ment is probably correct, although the writer was a gentleman
pensioner, and perhaps also a cockney by birth.

SCOTTISH PROSE WRITERS.

Before the middle of the sixteenth century a few prose writers
had also appeared in the Scottish dialect. The Scottish History
of Hector Boethius, or Boecius (Bo«oe or Boyce), translated from

HAWES; BARKLAY 191

the Latin by John Bellenden, was printed at Edinburgh in 1537 ;
and a translation by the same person of the first Five Books ol
Livy remained in MS. till it was published at Edinburgh, in 4to.
in 1829 ; a second edition of the translation of Boeeius having
also been brought out there, in two vols. 4to., the same year.
But the most remarkable composition in Scottish prose of this
era is The Complaynt of Scotland, printed at St. Andrews in
1548, which has been variously assigned to Sir James Inglis,
knight, a country gentleman of Fife, who died in 1554 ; to \Ved-
derburn, the supposed author of the Compendious Book of Godly
and Spiritual Sangs and Ballats (reprinted from the edition of
1621 by Sir John Grahame Dalzell, 8vo. Edinburgh, 1801); and
by its modern editor, the late John Leyden, in the elaborate
and ingenious Dissertation prefixed to his reprint of the work,
8vo. Edinburgh, 1801, to the famous poet, Sir David Lyndsay.

It is worthy of remark, that, although in this work we have
unquestionably the Scottish dialect, distinctly marked by various
peculiarities (indeed the author in his prologue or preface ex-
pressly and repeatedly states that he has written in Scotch, ** in
our Scottis langage," as he calls it), yet one chief characteristic
of the modern Scotch is still wanting — the suppression of the
final I after a vowel or diphthong — just as it is in Barbour and
Blind Harry. This change, as we before remarked, is probably
very modern. It has taken place in all likelihood since Scotch
ceased to be generally used in writing ; the principle of growth,
which, after a language passes under the government of the pen,
is to a great extent suspended, having recovered its activity on
the dialect being abandoned again to the comparatively lawless
liberty, or at least looser guardianship, of the lips.

LNOUSH POETS: — HAWES; BARKLAY.

The English poetical literature of the first half of the six-
teenth century may be fairly described as the dawn of a new
day. Two poetic names of some note belong to the reign of
Henry VII. — Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barklay. Hawes
is the author of many pieces, but is chiefly remembered for his
Pastime of Pleasure, or History of Grand Amour and La Belle
Pucelle, first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1517, but
written about two years earlier. Warton holds this performance
to be almost the only effort of imagination and invention which
had appeared in our poetry since Chaucer, and eulogizes it as
containing no common touches of romantic and allegoric fiction.

192 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Hawes was both a scholar and a traveller, and was perfectly
familiar with the French and Italian poetry as well as with that
of his own country. It speaks very little, however, for his
taste, that, among the preceding English poets, he has evidently
made Lydgate his model, even if it should be admitted that,
as Warton affirms, he has added some new graces to the manner
of that cold and wordy versifier. Lydgate and Hawes may
stand together as perhaps the two writers who, in the century
and a half that followed the death of Chaucer, contributed most
to carry forward the regulation and modernisation of the lan-
guage which he began. Barklay, who did not die till 1552,
when he had attained a great age, employed his pen principally
in translations, in which line his most celebrated performance
is his Ship of Fools, from the German of Sebastian Brandt,
which was printed in 1508. Barklay, however, besides con-
sulting both a French and a Latin version of Brandt's poem,
has enlarged his original with the enumeration and descrip-
tion of a considerable variety of follies which he found
flourishing among his own countrymen. This gives the work
some value as a record of the English manners of the time ;
but both its poetical and its satirical pretensions are of the very
humblest order. At this date most of our writers of what was
called poetry seem to have been occupied with the words in
which they were to clothe their ideas almost to the exclusion
of all the higher objects of the poetic art. And that, perhaps,
is what of necessity happens at a particular stage in the pro-
gress of a nation's literature — at the stage corresponding to the
transition state in the growth of the human being between the
termination of free rejoicing boyhood and the full assurance of
manhood begun ; which is peculiarly the season not of achieve-
ment but of preparation, not of accomplishing ends, but of
acquiring the use of means and instruments, and also, it may be
added, of the aptitude to mistake the one of these things for the
other.

SKELTON.

But the poetry with the truest life in it produced in the reign,
of Henry the Seventh and the earlier part of that of his son
is undoubtedly that of Skelton. John Skelton may have been
born about or soon after 1460 ; he studied at Cambridge, if not
at both universities ; began to write and publish compositions in
verse between 1480 and 1490; was graduated as poet laureat

SKELTON. 193

(a degree in grammar, including versification and rhetoric) at
Oxford before 1490 ; was admitted ad eundem at Cambridge in
1493; in 1498 took holy orders; was probably about the same
time appointed tutor to the young prince Henry, afterwards
Henry the Eighth ; was eventually promoted to be rector of
Diss in Norfolk; and died in 1529 in the sanctuary at West-
minster Abbey, where he had taken refuge to escape the ven-
geance of Cardinal Wolsey, originally his patron, but latterly the
chief butt at which he had been wont to shoot his satiric shafts.
As a scholar Skelton had a European reputation in his own day ;
and the great Erasmus has styled him Britannicarum literarum
decus et lumen (the light and ornament of English letters). His
Latin verses are distinguished by their purity and classical
spirit. As for his English poetry, it is generally more of a
mingled yarn, and of a much coarser fabric. In many of his
effusions indeed, poured forth in sympathy with or in aid of some
popular cry of the day, he is little better than a rhyming buffoon ;
much of his ribaldry is now nearly unintelligible ; and it may
be doubted if a considerable portion of his grotesque and appa-
rently incoherent jingle ever had much more than the sort of
half meaning with which a half-tipsy writer may satisfy readers
as far gone as himself. Even in the most reckless of these com-
positions, however, he rattles along, through sense and nonsense,
with a vivacity that had been a stranger to our poetry for many
a weary day; and his freedom and spirit, even where most
unrefined, must have been exhilarating after the long fit of
somnolency in which the English muse had dozed away the last
hundred years. But much even of Skelton's satiric verse is in-
stinct with genuine poetical vigour, and a fancy alert, sparkling,
and various, to a wonderful degree. The charm of his writing
lies in its natural ease and freedom, its inexhaustible and un-
tiring vivacity; and these qualities are found both in their
greatest abundance and their greatest purity where his subject
is suggestive of the simplest emotions and has most of a uni-
versal interest. His Book of Philip Sparrow, for instance, an
elegy on the sparrow of fair Jane Scroop, slain by a cat in the
nunnery of Carow, near Norwich, extending (with the " com-
mendation" of the "goodly maid") to nearly 1400 lines, is un-
rivalled in the language for elegant and elastic playfulness, and
a spirit of whim that only kindles into the higher blaze the
longer it is kept up. The second part, or •* Commendation,"
in particular, is throughout animated and hilarious to a woudw-
tu) degree : — the refrain, —

104 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

For this most goodly flower,
This blossom of fresh colour,
So Jupiter me succour,
She flourisheth new and new
In beauty and virtue ;
Hoc claritate gemina,
0 Gloriosafemina, &c. —

recurring often so suddenly and unexpectedly, yet always PO
naturally, has an effect like that of the harmonious evolutions of
some lively and graceful dance. Have we not in this poem, by-
the-by, the true origin of Skelton's peculiar dancing verse ? Is
it not Anacreontic, as the spirit also of the best of his poetry
undoubtedly is ?*

EOT; JOHN HEYWOOD.

Along with Skelton, viewed as he commonly has been only as
a satirist, is usually classed William Roy, a writer who assisted
Tyndal in his translation of the New Testament, and who is
asserted by Bale to be the author of a singular work entitled,
Read me and be not wroth, For I say nothing but troth, which
is supposed to have been first printed abroad about 1525. j" This
is also a satire upon Wolsey and the clergy in general, and is as
bitter as might be expected from the supposed author, who,
having begun his life as a friar, spent the best part of it in the
service of the Reformation, and finished it at the stake. Among
the buffoon-poets of this age, is also to be reckoned John Hey-
wood, styled the Epigrammatist, from the six centuries of Epi-
grams, or versified jokes, which form a remarkable portion of
his works. Hey wood's conversational jocularity has the equivo-
cal credit of having been exceedingly consoling both to the old
age of Henry VIII. and to his daughter Queen Mary : it must
have been strong jesting that could stir the sense of the ludicrous
in either of these terrible personages. Besides a number of
plays, which are the most important of his productions, Hey-
wood also wrote a long burlesque allegory, which fills a thick
quarto volume, on the dispute between the old and the new
religions, under the title of A Parable of the Spider and the
Fly ; where it appears that by the spider is intended the Pro-

* A most valuable and acceptable present has been made to the lovers of
our old poetry in a collected edition of Skelton's Poetical Works, 2 vols. Svo.
Lond. Eodd, 1843, by the Rev. Alexander Dyce, who has performed hip
difficult task in a manner to leave little or nothing further to be desired.

t Ritson's Bibliog. Poet., p. 318.

SCOTTISH POETS. 19C

tesfanl party, by the fly the Catholic, but in which, according
to the judgment of old Harrison, " he dealeth so profoundly,
and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himself that
made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach unto the
meaning thereof."*

Scorn su POETS : — GAWIN DOUGLAS ; DUNBAR ; LYNDSAY.

But, while in England the new life to which poetry had
awakened had thus as yet produced so little except ribaldry and
buffoonery, it is remarkable that in Scotland, where general
social civilization was much less advanced, the art had con-
tinued to be cultivated in its highest departments with great
success, and the language had already been enriched with some
compositions worthy of any age. Perhaps the Scottish poetry
of the earlier part of the sixteenth century may be regarded
as the same spring which had visited England in the latter
part of the fourteenth, — the impulse originally given by the
poetry of Chaucer only now come to its height in that northern
clime. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who flourished in
the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and who is famous for
his translation of the ^Ineid, the first metrical version of any
ancient classic that had yet appeared in the dialect of eithev
kingdom, affects great anxiety to eschew " Southron," or Eng-
lish, and to write his native tongue in all its breadth and plain-
ness ; but it does not follow, from his avoidance of English
words, that he may not have formed himself to a great extent
on the study of English models. At the same time it may be
admitted that neither in his translation nor in his original works
of King Hart, and the Palace of Honour, — which are two long
allegories, full, the latter especially, of passages of great de-
scriptive beauty, — does Douglas convict himself of belonging to
the school of Chaucer. He is rather, if not the founder, at least
the chief representative, of a style of poetry which was attempted
to be formed in Scotland by enriching and elevating the sim-
plicity of Barbour and his immediate followers with an infusion
of something of what was deemed a classic manner, drawn in
part directly from the Latin writers, but more from those of the
worst than those of the best age, in part from the French poetry,
which now began in like manner to aspire towards a classic
tone. This preference, by the Scottish poets, of Latin and
French to " Southron," as a source from which to supply the
* Description of England.

Iffcj ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

deficiencies of their native dialect, had probably no more reason-
able origin thai) the political circumstances and feelings of the
nation : the spirit of the national genius was antagonistic to it,
and it therefore never could become more than a temporary
fashion. Yet it infected more or less all the writers of this
age-; and amongst the rest, to a considerable extent, by far the
greatest of them all, William Dunbar. This admirable master,
alike of serious and of comic song, may justly be styled the Chaucer
of Scotland, whether we took to the wide range of his genius,
or to his eminence in every style over all the poets of his country
who preceded and all who for ages came after him. That of
Burns is certainly the only name among the Scottish poets that
can yet be placed on the same line with that of Dunbar ; and
even the inspired ploughman, though the equal of Dunbar in
comic power, and his superior in depth of passion, is not to be
compared with the elder poet either in strength or in general
fertility of imagination. Finally, to close the list, comes another
eminent name, that of Sir David Lyndsaj^, whose productions
are not indeed characterised by any high imaginative power, but
yet display infinite wit, spirit, and variety in all the forms of
the more familiar poetry. Lyndsay was the favourite, through-
out his brief reign and life, of the accomplished and unfortunate
James V., and survived to do perhaps as good service as any in
the war against the ancient church by the tales, plays, and other
products of his abounding satiric vein, with which he fed, and
excited, and lashed up the popular contempt for the now crazy
and tumbling fabric once so imposing and so venerated. Per-
haps he also did no harm by thus taking off a little of the acrid
edge of mere resentment and indignation with the infusion of a
dash of merriment, and keeping alive a genial sense of the
ludicrous in the midst of such serious work. If Dunbar is to
be compared to Burns, Lyndsay may be said to have his best
representative among the more recent Scottish poets in Allan
Ramsay, who does not, however, come so near to Lyndsay by a
long way as Burns does to Dunbar.

SURREY; WYATT.

Lyndsay is supposed to have survived till about the year 1567.
Before that date a revival of the higher poetry had come upon
England like the rising of a new day. Two names are commonly
placed together at the head of our new poetical literature, Lord
Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

SURREY; WYATT. 197

memorable in our history as the last victim of the capricious
and sanguinary tyranny of Henry VIII., had already, in his
short life, which was terminated by the axe of the executioner
in his twenty-seventh year, carried away from all his countrymen
the laurels both of knighthood and of song. The superior
polish alone of the best of Surrey's verses would place him at
an immeasurable distance in advance of all his immediate prede-
cessors. So remarkable, indeed, is the contrast in this respect
which his poetry presents to theirs, that in modern times there
has been claimed for this noble poet the honour of having been
the first to introduce our existing system of rhythm into the
language. TiiojErue merit of Surrey is. tfratr proceeding
the same system' vereigcatiQii-'

" yrinniplft been followed

by all the writers after Chaucer, however rudely or imper-
tectly some of them may Have~succeeded in the practice of
it- >fl refitprad fn oi:r p<><trya correctness, polish, ajud general
spirit of iviinciiicnt .^n'h as it had not known since (.-ham--
iimft,.and of which, therefore, in the language as now spoken,
there was no previous example whatever. To this it may be
added that he appears to have been the first, at least in this
as^e, who sought to modulate his strains after that elder poetry
of Italy, which thenceforward became one of the chief fountain-
heads of inspiration to that of England throughout the whole
space of time over which is shed the golden light of the names
of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Milton. Surrey's own imagi-
nation was neither rich nor soaring ; and the highest qualities
of his poetry, in addition to the facility and general mechanical
perfection of the versification, are delicacy and tenderness. It
is altogether a very light and bland Favonian breeze. The
poetry of his friend Wyatt is of a different character, neither so
flowing in form nor so uniformly gentle in spirit, but perhaps
making up for its greater rnggedness by a force and a depth of
sentiment occasionally which Surrey does not reach. The poems
of Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt were first published
together in 1557.

'I'" Surrey we owe the introduction into the language of our. I
present form of blank verse, the suggestion of which he pro
bably took from the earliest Italian example of that form of
poetry, a translation of the First and Fourth Books of the JEneid
by the Cardinal Hippolito d-.-' Medici (or, as some say, by Fran-
cesco Maria Molza), which was published at Venice in 1541.
A translation of the same two Books into English blank verso
appeared in the collection of Surrey's Poems published by Tottel

198 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

in 1557. Dr. Nott has shown that this translation was founded
apon the metrical Scottish version of Gawin Douglas, which,
although not published till 1553, had been finished, as the
author himself informs us, in 1513. But it ought not to be
forgotten that, as already remarked, we have one example at
least of another form of blank verse in the Ormulum, centuries
before Surrey's day.

THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.

Of what is commonly called our Elizabethan literature, the
greater portion appertains to the reign, not of Elizabeth, but of
James --to the seventeenth, not to the sixteenth century. The
common name, nevertheless, is the fair and proper one. It
sprung up in the age of Elizabeth, and was mainly the product
of influences which belonged to that age, although their effect
extended into another. It was born of and ripened by that
sunny morning of a new day, — "great Eliza's golden time," —
when a general sense of security had given men ease of mind
and disposed them to freedom of thought, while the economical
advancement of the country put life and spirit into everything,
and its growing power and renown filled and elevated the
national heart. But such periods of quiet and prosperity seem
only to be intellectually productive when they have been pre-
ceded and ushered in by a time of uncertainty and struggle
which has tried men's spirits : the contrast seems to be wanted
to make the favourable influences be felt and tell ; or the faculty
required must come in part out of the strife, and conre5SS3k
The literature of our Elizabethan age, more emphatically, may
be said to have had this double parentage : if that brilliant day
was its mother, the previous night of storm was its father.

THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES.

Our classical Elizabethan poetry and other literature dates only
from about the middle of the reign ; most of what was produced
in the earlier half of it, constrained, harsh, and immature, still
bears upon it the impress of the preceding barbarism. Nearly
coincident with its commencement is the first appearance of a
singular work, The Mirror for Magistrates. It is a collection of
narratives of the lives of various remarkable English historical
personages, taken, in general, with little more embellishment

THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES. 199

than their reduction to a metrical form, from the common popu-
lar chronicles ; and the idea of it appears to have been borrowed
from a Latin work of Boccaccio's, which had been translated
and versified many years before by Lydgate, under the title of
The Fall of Princes. It was planned and begun (it is supposed
about the year 1557) by Thomas Sackville, afterwards distin-
guished as a statesman, and ennobled by the titles of Lord
Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. But Sackville soon found himself
obliged to relinquish the execution of his extensive design,
which contemplated a survey of the whole range of English
history from William the Conqueror to the end of the wars of
the Roses, to other hands. The two writers to whom he recom-
mended the carrying on of the work were Richard Baldwynne,
who was in orders, and had already published a metrical version
of the Song of Solomon, and George Ferrers, who was a person
of some rank, having sat in parliament in the time of Henry
VIII., but who had latterly been chiefly known as a composer of
occasional interludes for the diversion of the Court. It is a trait
of the times that, although a member of Lincoln's Inn, and
known both as a legal and an historical author, Ferrers was in
1 552-3 appointed by Edward VI. to preside over the Christmas
revels at the royal palace of Greenwich in the office of Lord of
Misrule : Stow tells us that upon this occasion he "so pleasantly
and wisely behaved himself, that the king had great delight in
his pastimes." Baldwynne and Ferrers called other writers
to their assistance, among whom were Thomas Churchyard,
Phaer, the translator of Virgil, &c. ; and the book, in its first
form and extent, was published in a quarto volume in 1559. The
Mirror for Magistrates immediately acquired and for a consider-
able time retained great popularity; a second edition of it was
published in 1563 ; a third in 1571 ; a fourth, with the addition of
a series of new lives from the fabulous history of the early Britons,
by John Higgins, in 1574 ; a fifth, in 1587 ; a sixth, with further
additions, in 1610, by Richard Nichols, assisted by Thomas
Blenerhasset (whose contributions, however, had been separately
printed in 1578). * The copiousness of the plan, into which any
narrative might be inserted belonging to either the historical or
legendary part of the national annals, and that without any
trouble in the way of connexion or adaptation, had made the
work a receptacle for the contributions of all the ready versifiers
of the day — a common, or parish green, as it were, on which a
fair was held to which any one who chose might bring his ware**

* A reprint of the Mirror for Magistrates, in 2 (sometimes divided into 3)
rols. 4to.t was brought out by the late Mr. Hazlewood in 1815.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

—or rather a sort of continually growing monument, or cairn,
to which every man added his stone, or little separate specimen
of brick and mortar, who conceived himself to have any skill in
•building the lofty rhyme. There were scarcely any limits to the
size to which the book might have grown, except the mutability
of the public taste, which will permit no one thing, good or bad,
to go on for ever. The Mirror for Magistrates, however, for all
its many authors, is of note in the history of our poetry for
nothing else which it contains, except the portions contributed
by its contriver Sackville, consisting only of one legend, that of
Henry, Duke of Buckingham (Kichard the Third's famous ac-
complice and victim, and grandfather of Lord Stafford, the great
patron of the work), and the introduction, or Induction, as it is
called, prefixed to that narrative, which however is said to have
been originally intended to stand at the head of the whole work.
Both for his poetical genius, and in the history of the language,
Sackville and his two poems in the Mirror for Magistrates —
more especially this Induction — must be considered as forming
the connecting link or bridge between Chaucer and Spenser,
between the Canterbury Tales and the Fairy Queen.

Nothing is wanting to Sackville that belongs to force either of
conception or of expression. In his own world of the sombre
and sad, also, he is almost as great an inventor as he is a
colourist ; and Spenser has been indebted to him for many hints,
as well as for example and inspiration in a general sense : wjmt
most marks the immaturity of his style is a certain operose and
constrained air, a stiffness and hardness of manner, like what
we find in the works of the earliest school of the Italian painters,
before Eaphael and Michael Angelo arose to convert the art from
a painful repetition or mimicry of reality into a process of
creation — from the timid slave of nature into her glorified rival.
Of the flow and variety, the genuine spirit of light and life, that
we have in Spenser and Shakespeare, there is little in Sackville ;
his poetry— ponderous, gloomy, and monotonous — is still op-
pressed by the shadows of night; and we see that, although the
darkness is retiring, the sun has not yet risen.

ORIGIN OF THE KEGTTLAR DRAMA.

From the first introduction of dramatic representations in Eng-
land, probably as early, at least, as the beginning of the twelfth
century, down to the beginning of the fifteenth, or perhaps some-
what later, the only species of drama known was that styled the

ORIGIN OF THE REGULAR DRAMA. 201

Miracle, or Miracle-play. The subjects of the miracle -plays were
all taken from the histories of the Old and New Testament, or
from the legends of saints and martyrs ; and, indeed, it is pro-
bable that their original design was chiefly to instruct the people
in religious knowledge. They were often acted as well as written
by clergymen, and were exhibited in abbeys, in churches, and in
churchyards, on Sundays or other holidays. It appears to have
been not till some time after their first introduction that miracle-
plays came to be annually represented under the direction and at
the expense of the guilds or trading companies of towns, as at
Chester and elsewhere. The characters, or dramatis persona, of
the miracle-plays, though sometimes supernatural or legendary,
were always actual personages, historical or imaginary ; and in
that respect these primitive plays approached nearer to the regu-
lar drama than those by which they were succeeded — the Morals,
or Moral-plays, in which, not a history, but an apologue was re-
presented, and in which the characters were all allegorical. The
moral-plays are traced back to the early part of the reign of
Henry VI., and they appear to have gradually arisen out of the
miracle -plays, in which, of course, characters very nearly ap-
proaching in their nature to the impersonated vices and virtues
of the new species of drama must have occasionally appeared.
The Devil of the Miracles, for example, would very naturally
suggest the Vice of the Morals ; which latter, however, it is to
be observed, also retained the Devil of their predecessors, who
was too amusing and popular a character to be discarded. Nor
did the moral-plays altogether put down the miracle-plays : in
many of the provincial towns, at least, the latter continued to be
represented almost to as late a date as the former. Finally, by a
process of natural transition very similar to that by which the
sacred and supernatural characters of the religious drama had
been converted into the allegorical personifications of the moral-
plays, these last, gradually becoming less and less vague and
shadowy, at length, about the middle of the sixteenth century,
boldly assumed life and reality, giving birth to the first examples
of regular tragedy and comedy.

Both moral-plays, however, and even the more ancient miracle-
plays, continued to be occasionally performed down to the very
end of the sixteenth century. One of the last dramatic represent-
ations at which Elizabeth was present, was a moral-play, entitled
The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality, which was
performed before her majesty in 1600, or 1601. This production
was printed in 1602, and was probably written not long before
that time : it has been said to have been the joint production of

202 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Thoin«is Lodge and Robert Greene, the last of whom died in
1592. The only three manuscripts of the Chester miracle-plays
now extant were written in 1600, 1604, and 1607, most probably
while the plays still continued to be acted. There is evidence
that the ancient annual miracle-plays were acted at Tewkesbury
at least till 1585, at Coventry till 1591, at Newcastle till 1598,
and at Kendal down even to the year 1603.

As has been observed, however, by Mr. Collier, the latest and
best historian of the English drama, the moral-plays were enabled
to keep possession of the stage so long as they did, partly by
means of the approaches they had for some time been making to
a more improved species of composition, " and partly because,
under the form of allegorical fiction and abstract charactei, the
writers introduced matter which covertly touched upon public
events, popular prejudices, and temporary opinions."* He men-
tions, in particular, the moral entitled The Three Ladies of Lon-
don, printed in 1584, and its continuation, The Three Lords and
Three Ladies of London, which appeared in 1590 (both by R. W.),
as belonging to this class.

INTERLUDES OF JOHN HEYWOOD.

Meanwhile, long before the earliest of these dates, the an-
cient drama had, in other hands, assumed wholly a new form,
Mr. Collier appears to consider the Interludes of John Heywood,
the earliest of which must have been written before 1521, as first
exhibiting the moral-play in a state of transition to the regular
tragedy and comedy. " John Hey wood's dramatic productions,"
he says, "almost form a class by themselves: they are neither
miracle-plays nor moral-plays, but what may be properly and
strictly called interludes, a species of writing of which he has a
claim to be considered the inventor, although the term interlude
was applied^ generally to theatrical productions in the reign of
Edward IV." A notion of the nature of these compositions may
be collected from the plot of one of them, A Merry Play betwene
the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and neighbour Pratte,
printed in 1533, of which Mr. Collier gives the following ac-
count :— " A pardoner and a friar have each obtained leave of the
curate to use his church, — the one for the exhibition of his relics,
and the other for the delivery of a sermon— the object of both
being the same, that of procuring money. The friar arrives first,
and is about to commence his discourse, when the pardoner enters
* Hist, of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 413.

UDALL'S RALPH ROISTER DOISTER. 203

and disturbs him; each is desirous of being heard, and, after
many vain attempts by force of lungs, they proceed to force of
arms, kicking and cuffing each other unmercifully. The curate,
called by the disturbance in his church, endeavours, without
avail, to part the combatants; he therefore calls in neighbour
Pratte to his assistance, and, while the curate seizes the friar,
Pratte undertakes to deal with the pardoner, in order that they
may set them in the stocks. It turns out that both the friar and
the pardoner are too much for their assailants; and the latter,
after a sound drubbing, are glad to come to a composition, by
which the former are allowed quietly to depart."* Here, then,
\vc have a dramatic fable, or incident at least, conducted not by
.ill- -orical personifications, but by characters oT real life, which
is the essential difference that distinguishes the true tragedy or
comedy from the mere moral. Heywood's interludes, however,
of which there are two or three more of the same description
with this (besides others partaking more of the allegorical cha-
racter), are all only single acts, or, more properly, scenes, and
exhibit, therefore, nothing more'than the mere rudiments or
embryo of the regular comedy.

UDALL'S RALPH ROISTER DOISTER.

The earliest English comedy, properly so called, that has yet
been discovered, is commonly considered to be that of Ralph
Roister Doister, the production of Nicholas Udall, an eminent
classical scholar in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and
one of the masters, first at Eton, and afterwards at Westminster.
Its existence was unknown till a copy was discovered in 1818,
which perhaps (for the title-page is gone) was not printed earlier
than 1566, in which year Thomas Hackett is recorded in the
register of the Stationers' Company to have had a licence for
printing a play entitled Rauf Ruyster Duster ; but the play is
quoted in Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason, first printed in 1551,
so that it must have been written at least fifteen or sixteen years
before.f This hypothesis would carry it back to about the same
date with the latest of Heywood's interludes; and it certainly
was produced while that writer was still alive and in the height
of his popularity. It may be observed that Wilson calls Udall's
play an interlude, which would therefore seem to have been at
this time the common name for any dramatic composition, as,
indeed, it appears to have been for nearly a century preceding.
* Hist, of Dramatic Poetry, il 386. f See Collier, ii. 446.

204

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

JT he author himself, however, in his prologue, announces it as a
Comedy, or Interlude, and as an imitation of the classical models
of Plautus and Terence.

And, in truth, both in character and in plot, Ealph Roister
Doister has every right to be regarded as a true comedy, showing
indeed, in its execution, the rudeness of the age, but in its plan,
and in reference to the principle upon which it is constructed, as
regular and as complete as any comedy in the language. It is
divided into acts and scenes, which very few of the moral-plays
are ; and, according to Mr. Collier's estimate, the performance
could not have been concluded in less time than about two hours
and a half, while few of the morals would require more than
about an hour for their representation.* The dramatis personse
are thirteen in all, nine male and four female ; and the two prin-
cipal ones at least — Ealph himself, a vain, thoughtless, bluster-
ing fellow, whose ultimately baffled pursuit of the gay and rich
widow Custance forms the action of the piece ; and his servant,
Matthew Merrygreek, a kind of flesh- and-blood representative of
the Vice of the old moral-plays — are strongly discriminated, and
drawn altogether with much force and spirit. The story is not
very ingeniously involved, but it moves forward through its
gradual development, and onwards to the catastrophe, in a suffi-
ciently bustling, lively manner; and some of the situations,
though the humour is rather farcical than comic, are very
cleverly conceived and managed. The language also may be said
to be on the whole, racy and characteristic, if not very polished.
A few lines from a speech of one of the widow's handmaidens,
Tibet Talkapace, in a conversation with her fellow-servants on
the approaching marriage of their masters, may be quoted as a
specimen : —

And I heard our Nourse speake of an husbande to-day

Ready for our mistresse ; a rich man and a gay :

And we shall go in our French hoodes every day ;

In our silke cassocks (I warrant you) freshe and gay ;

In our tricke ferdigews, and billiments of golde,

Brave in our sutes of chaunge, seven double folde.

Then shall ye see Tibet, sires, treade the mosse BO trimme ;

Nay, why said I treade ? ye shall see hir glide and swimme,

Not lumperdee, clumperdee, like our spaniell Rig.

* S*e Collier, ii. 451.

205

GAMMER GORTON'S NEEDLE.

Ralph Roister Doister is in every way a very superior produc-
tion to Gammer Gurton's Needle, which, before the discovery of
UdalTs piece, had the credit of being the first regular English
comedy. At the same time, it must be admitted that the superior
antiquity assigned to Ralph Roister Doister is nut very conclusively
made out. All that we know with certainty with regard to the
date of the play is, that it was in existence in 1551. The oldest
edition of Gammer Gurton's Needle is dated 1575 : but how long
the play may have been composed before that year is uncertain.
The title-page of the 1575 edition describes it as "played on the
stage not long ago in Christ's College, in Cambridge ;" and
Warton, on the authority of a manuscript memorandum by Oldys,
the eminent antiquary of the early part of the last century, says
that it was written and first printed in 1551. Wright also, in
his Historia Histrionica, first printed in 1669, states it as his
opinion that it was written in the reign of Edward VI. In refu-
tation of all this it is alleged that " it could not have been pro-
duced so early, because John Still (afterwards bishop of Bath and
Wells V the author of it, was not born until 1543; and, conse-
quently, in 1552, taking Warton's latest date, would only have
been nine years old.* But the evidence that Bishop Still was
the author of Gaiuiner Gurton's Needle is exceedingly slight.
The play is merely stated on the title-page to have been " made
by Mr. S., Master of Arts ;" and even if there was, as is asserted,
no other Master of Arts of Christ's College whose name began
with S. at the time when this title-page was printed, the author
of the play is not stated to have been of that college, nor, if he
were, is it necessary to assume that he was living in 1575. On
the whole, therefore, while there is no proof that Ralph Roister
Doister is older that the year 1551, it is by no means certain
that Gammer Gurton's Needle was not written in that same
year.

This " right pithy, pleasant, and merie comedie," as it is
designated on the title-page, is, like Udall's play, regularly
divided into acts and scenes, and, like it too, is written in rhyme
— the language and versification being, on the whole, perhaps
rather more easy than flowing — a circumstance which, more than
any external evidence that has been produced, would incline us
to assign it to a somewhat later date. But it is in all respects
?, very tame and poor performance —the plot, if so it can be
* Collier, ii. 444.

206 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

called, meagre to insipidity and silliness, the characters only a
few slightly distinguished varieties of the lowest life, and the
dialogue in general as feeble and undramatic as the merest
monotony can make it. Its merriment is of the coarsest and
most boisterous description, even where it is not otherwise offen-
sive ; but the principal ornament wherewith the author endea-
vours to enliven his style is a brutal filth and grossness of
expression, which is the more astounding when we consider that
the piece was the production, in all probability, of a clergyman
at least, if not of one who afterwards became a bishop, and that
it was certainly represented before a learned and grave univer-
sity. There is nothing of the same high seasoning in Ralph
Roister Doister, though that play seems to have been intended
only for the amusement of a common London audience. The
Second Act of Gammer Gurton's Needle is introduced by a song,

I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good, &c.

which is the best thing in the whole play, and which is well
known from having been quoted by Warton, who describes it as
the earliest chanson a boire, or drinking ballad, of any merit in the
language ; and observes that " it has a vein of ease and humour
which we should not expect to have been inspired by the simple
beverage of those times." But this song is most probably not by
the author of the play : it appears to be merely a portion of a
popular song of the time, which is found elsewhere complete, and
has recently been so printed, from a MS. of the sixteenth cen-
tury, by Dr. Dyce, in his edition of Skelton.*

MISOGONUS.

Probably of earlier date than Gammer Gurton's Needle, is
another example of the regular drama, which, like Ralph Roister
Doister, has been but lately recovered, a play entitled Misogonus,
the only copy of which is in manuscript, and is dated 1577. An
allusion, however, in the course of the dialogue, would seem to
prove that the play must have been composed about the year
1560. To the prologue is appended the name of Thomas
Rychardes, who has therefore been assumed to be the author.
The play, as contained in the manuscript, consists only of the

* See Account of Skelton and his Writings, vol. i. pp. 7—9. Mr. Dyce
states that the MS. from which he has printed the song is certainly of an
earlier date than the oldest-known edition of the play (1575).

BALE'S KYNGE JOHAN. 207

unusual number of four acts, but the story, nevertheless, appears
to be completed. The piece is written throughout in rhyming
quatrains, not couplets, and the language would indicate it to
he of about the same date with Gammer Gurton's Needle. It
contains a song, which for fluency and spirit may very well bear
to be compared with the drinking-song in that drama. Neither
in the contrivance and conduct of the plot, however, nor in the
force with which the characters are exhibited, does it evince the
same free and skilful hand with Ralph Roister Doister, although
it is interesting for some of the illustrations which it affords of
the manners of the time.

CHRONICLE HISTORIES : — BALE'S KYNGE JOHAN ; ETC.

If the regular drama thus made its first appearance among us
in the form of comedy, the tragic muse was at least not far
U'hind. There is some ground fur supposing, indeed, that one
species of the graver drama of real life may have begun to emerge
rather sooner than comedy out of the shadowy world of the old
allegorical representations ; that, namely, which was long distin-
guished from both comedy and tragedy by the name of History,
or Chronicle History, consisting, to adopt Mr. Collier's defini-
tion, " of certain passages or events detailed by annalists put
into a dramatic form, often without regard to the course in which
they happened ; the author sacrificing chronology, situation, and
circumstance, to the superior object of producing an attractive
play."* Of what may be called at least the transition from
the moral-play to the history, we have an example in Bale's
lately recovered drama of Kynge Johan,f written in all proba-
bility some years before the middle of the sixteenth century, in
which, while many of the characters are still allegorical abstrac-
tions, others are real personages ; King John himself, Pope Inno-
cent, Cardinal Pandulphus, Stephen Langton, and other histo-
rical figures moving about in odd intermixture with such mere
notional spectres as the Widowed Britannia, Imperial Majesty,
Nobility, Clergy, Civil Order, Treason, Verity, and Sedition.
The play is accordingly described by Mr. Collier, the editor, as
occupying an intermediate place between moralities and histo-
rical plays ; and " it is," he adds, '* the only known existing
specimen of that species of composition of so early a date."

* Hist. Dram. Poet. ii. p. 414.

t Published by the Camden Society. 4to. 1838, under the caic of Mr.
(Jollier.

*08 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

TRAGEDY OF GORBODUC. — BLANK VERSE.

But the era of genuine tragedies and historical plays had
already commenced some years before these last-mentioned pieces
saw the light. On the 18th of January, 1562, was "shown
before the Queen's most excellent Majesty," as the old title-pages
of the printed play inform us, ** in her Highness' Court of White-
hall, by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple," the Tragedy of
Gorboduc, otherwise entitled the Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex,
the production of the same Thomas Sackville who has already
engaged our attention as by far the most remarkable writer in
The Mirror for Magistrates, and of Thomas Norton, who is said to
have been a puritan clergyman, and who had already acquired
a poetic reputation, though in a different province of the land of
song, as one of the coadjutors of Sternhold and Hopkins in their
metrical version of the Psalms. On the title-page of the first
edition, printed in 1565, which, however, was surreptitious, it is
stated that the three first acts were written by Norton, and the
two last by Sackville ; and, although this announcement was
afterwards withdrawn, it was never expressly contradicted, and
it is not improbable that it may have a general foundation of
truth. It must be confessed, however, that no change of style
gives any indication which it is easy to detect of a succession of
hands ; and that, judging by this criterion, we should rather be
led to infer that, in whatever way the two writers contrived to
combine their labours, whether by the one retouching and
improving what the other had rough- sketched, or by the one
taking the quieter and humbler, the other the more im-
passioned, scenes or portions of the dialogue, they pursued the
same method throughout the piece. Charles Lamb expresses
himself "willing to believe that Lord Buckhurst supplied the
more vital parts."* At the same time he observes that "the
style of this old play is stiff and cumbersome, like the dresses
of its times ;" and that, though there may be flesh and blood
underneath, we cannot get at it. In truth, Gorboduc is a drama
only in form. In spirit and manner it is wholly undramatic.
^The story has no dramatic capabilities, no evolution either of
[action or of character, although it affords some opportunities for
Idescription and eloquent declamation; neither was there any-
thing of specially dramatic aptitude in the genius of Sackville
(to whom we may safely attribute whatever is most meritorious
in the composition), any more than there would appear to have
been in Spenser or in Milton, illustrious as they both stand ic
* Specimens of Eng. Dram. Poets, i. 6 (edit, of 1835).

TRAGEDY OF GORBODUC, 209

the front line of the poets of their country and of the world.
Gorboduc, accordingly, is a most unaffecting and uninteresting
tragedy ; as would also be the noblest book of the Fairy Queen
or of Paradise Lost — the portion of either poem that soars the
highest — if it were to be attempted to be transformed into a drama
by merely being divided into acts and scenes, and cut up into the
outward semblance of dialogue. In whatever abundance all else
of poetry might be outpoured, the spirit of dialogue and of dra-
raat ic action would not be there. Gorboduc, however, though a
dull play, is in some other respects a remarkable production for
the time. The language is not dramatic, but it is throughout,
singularly correct, easy, and perspicuous ; in many parts it is even
elevated and poetical ; and there are some passages of strong
painting not unworthy of the hand to which we owe the Induc-
tion to the Legend of the Duke of Buckingham in the Mirror for
Magistrates. The piece has accordingly won much applause in
quarters where there was little feeling of the true spirit of dra-
matic writing as the exposition of passion in action, and where
the chief thing deinanoecl in a tragedy was a certain orderly
pomp of expression, and monotonous respectability of sentiment,
to fill the ear, and tranquillize rather than excite and disturb the
mind. One peculiarity of the more ancient national drama
retained in Gorboduc is the introduction, before every act, of
a piece of machinery called the Dumb Show, in which was
shadowed forth, by a sort of allegorical exhibition, the part of
the story that was immediately to follow. This custom survived
on the English stage down to a considerably later date: the
reader may remember that Shakespeare, though he rejected it in
his own dramas, has introduced the play acted before the King
and Queen in Hamlet by such a prefigurative dumb show.*

Another expedient, which Shakespeare has also on two occasions
made use of, namely, the assistance of a chorus, is also adopted
in Gorboduc : but rather by way of mere decoration, and to
keep the stage from being at any time empty, as in the old
Greek drama, than to carry forward or even to explain the

* Besides the original 15C5 edition of Gorboduc, there \vos another in 15€'J
or 1570, and a third in 1590. It was again reprinted in 1736 ; and it has alw»
appeared in all the editions of Dodsley's Old Plays, 1744. 1780, and 1825. It
has now been edited for the Shakespearian Society by Mr. W. D. Cooper, in
the same volume with Ralph Roister Doister. Mr. Cooper has shown that the
edition of 1590 was not, as had been supposed, an exact reprint of that of
1505. He has also given us elaborate biographies both of Norton and of
Suckville, in the latter of which he has shown that Sackville, who died sud-
denly at the Council- table in 1608, was born in 1536, and not in 1527, as com
Cxuily supposed.

P

210 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

action, as in Henry the Fifth and Pericles. It consists, to
quote the description given by Warton, " of Four Ancient and
Sage Men of Britain, who regularly close every act, the last
excepted, with an ode in long-lined stanzas, drawing back the
attention of the audience to the substance of what has just passed,
and illustrating it by recapitulatory moral reflections and poetical
or historical allusions."* These effusions of the chorus are all in
rhyme, as being intended to be of the same lyrical character with
those in the Greek plays ; but the dialogue in the rest of the
piece is in blank verse, of the employment of which in dramatic
composition it affords the earliest known instance in the lan-
guage. The first modern experiment in this " strange metre,"
as* it was then called, had, ajTlias already been noticed, been
made only a few years before by Lord Surrey, in his translation of
the Second and Fourth Books of tjie JEneid, which was published
in 1557, but must have been written more than ten years before,
Surrey having been put to death in January, 1547. In the mean
time the new species of verse had been cultivated in several
original compositions by Nicholas Grimoald, from whom, in the
opinion of Warton, the rude model exhibited by Surrey received
"new strength, elegance, and modulation/'^ Grimoald's pieces
in blank verse were first printed in 1557, along with Surrey's
translation, in Tottel's collection entitled Songs and Sonnets of
"Uncertain Authors ; and we are not aware that there was any
more English blank verse written or given to the world till the
production of Gorboduc. In that case, Sackville would stand
as our third writer in this species of verse ; in the use of which
also, he may be admitted to have surpassed Grimoald fully as
much as the latter improved upon Surrey. Indeed, it may ]t>e
said to have been Gorboduc that really established blank verse
i n. the language ; for its employment from the time of the appeal
ance of that tragedy became common in dramatic composition,
while in other kinds of poetry, notwithstanding two or three
early attempts, it never made head against rhyme, nor acquired
any popularity, till it was brought into repute by the Paradise
Lost, published a full century after Sackville' s play. Even in
dramatic composition the use of blank verse appears to have been
for some time confined to pieces not intended for popular re-
presentation.

* Hist, of Eng. Poet. iv. 181. . f Ibid. iii. 346.

211

OTHER EARLY DRAMAS.

Among the very few original plays of this period that have COHK>
down to us is one entitled Damon and Pytheas, which was acted
before the queen at Christ Church, Oxford, in September, 1566,
the production of Kichard Edwards, who, in the general estima-
tion of his contemporarTes7seemJ8 to have been accounted the
greatest dramatic genius of his day, at least in the comic style.
His Damon and Pytheas does not justify their laudation to a
modern taste; it is a mixture of comedy and tragedy, between
which it woul J~"rjo" hard to 'decide wln-ther the grave writing or
^he gay is the rudest and dullest. The play is in rLvin
some variety is produced by the measure or length of the line
being occasionally changed. Mr. Collier thinks that the notoriety
Edwards attained may probably have been in great part owing
to the novelty of his subjects ; Damon and Pytheas befog ong.of
the earliest attempts to bring stories from profane history upon
the Kn^lish stn^e. K<1 wards, however, besiaes his plays, wroto
many other things in verse, some of which h.ivo an ease, and
even an elegance, that neither Surrey himself nor any other
writer of that age has excelled. Most of these shorter composi-
tions are contained in the miscellany called the Paradise of Dainty
Devices, which, indeed, is stated on the title-page to have been
44 devised and written for the most part " by Edwards, who had,
however, been dead ten years when the first edition appeared in
1576. Among them are the very beautiful and tender lines,
which have been often reprinted, in illustration of Terence's
apophthegm,—

" Amantium irae amoris redintegratio est ;*
or, as it is here rendered in the burthen of each stanza, —
" The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love."

Edwards, who, towards the end of his life, was appointed one of
the gentlemen of the Chapel Royal and master of the queen's
singing-boys, "united," says Warton, •• all those arts and accom-
plishments which minister to popular pleasantry: he was the
first fiddle, the most fashionable sonnetteer, the readiest rhymer,
and the most facetious mimic, of the court."* Another surviving
play produced during this interval is the Tragedy of Tancret!
and Gismund, founded upon Boccaccio's well-known story, whicL
was presented before Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1568, the

» Hist of Eng. Poet. ir. 110.

?12 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

five acts of which it consists being severally written by five
gentlemen of the society, of whom one, the author of the third
act, was Christopher Hatton, afterwards the celebrated dancing
lord chancellor. The play, however, was not printed till 1592,
when Robert Wilmot, the writer of the fifth act, gave it to the
world, as the title-page declares, " newly revived, and polished
according to the decorum of these days." The meaning of this
announcement, Mr. Collier conceives to be, that the piece was in
the first instance composed in rhyme ; but, rhymed plays having
by the year 1592 gone out of fashion even on the public stagey
Wilmot's reviving and polishing consisted chiefly in cutting off
many of the " tags to the lines," or turning them differently.
The tragedy of Tancred and Gisnmnd, which, like Gorboduc, has
a dumb show at the commencement and a chorus at the close of
every act, is, he observes, " the earliest English play extant the
plot of which is known to be derived from an Italian novel."*
To this earliest stage in the history of the regular drama belong,
finally, seme plays translated or adapted from the ancient and
from foreign languages, which doubtless also contributed to
excite and give an impulse to the national taste and genius in
this department.

SECOND STAGE OF THE REGULAR DRAMA : — PEELE ; GREENE.

It thus appears that numerous pieces entitled by their form to
be accounted as belonging to the regular drama had been pro-
duced before the year 1580 ; but nevertheless no dramatic work
had yet been written which can be -said to have taken its place
in our literature, or to have almost any interest for succeeding
generations on account of its intrinsic merits and apart from its
mere antiquity. The next ten years disclose a new scene.
{Within that space a crowd of dramatists arose whose writings
.still form a portion of our living poetry, and present the regular
Idrama, no longer only painfully struggling into the outward
shape proper to that species of composition, but having the
breath of life breathed into it, and beginning to throb and stir
with the pulsations of genuine passion. We can only here
shortly notice some of the chief names in this numerous company
of our early dramatists, properly so called. One to whom much
attention has been recently directed is George Peele, the first of
whose dramatic productions, The Arraignment of Paris, a sort

* Hist. Dram. Poet. Hi. 13.

PEELE; GREENE. 2l.'{

of masque or pageant which had been represented before the
queen, was printed anonymously in 1584. But Peele's i&osfc
celebrated drama is his Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe/
first published in 1599, two or three years after the author's
death. This play Mr. Campbell has called " the earliest fountain
of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry ;"
and he adds, "there is no such sweetness of versification and
imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare."*
David and Bethsabe was, in all probability, written not anterior
to Shakespeare, but after he had been at least six or seven years
a writer for the stage, and had produced perhaps ten or twelve
of his plays, including some of those in which, to pass over all
other and higher things, the music of the \crse has ever been
accounted the most perfect and delicious. We know at least
that The Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The
Merchant of Venice, Richard II., King John, and Richard III.,
were all written and acted, if not all printed, before Peele's play
was given to the world* But, independently of this considera-
tion, it must be admitted that the best of Peele's blank verse,
though smooth and flowing, and sometimes tastefully decorated
with the embellishments of a learned and imitative fancy, is both
deficient in richness or even variety of modulation, and without
any pretensions to the force and fire of original poetic genius.
Contemporary with Peele was Robert Greene, the author of
five plays, besides one written in conjunction with a friend.
Greene died in 1592, and he appears only to have begun to
write for the stage about 1587. Mr. Collier thinks that, in
facility of expression, and in the flow of his blank verse, he is
not to be placed below Peele. But Greene's nm.st characteristic
attribute is his turn for mejrriment, of which Peele in his dramatic
productions shows little or nothing. His comedy, or farce rather,
is no doubt usually coarse enough, but the turbid stream flows
at least freely and abundantly. Among his plays is a curious
one on the subject of the History of Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay, which is supposed to have been written in 1588 or 1589,
though first published in 1594. This, however, is not so much
a story of diablerie as cf mere legerdemain, mixed, like all the
rest of Greene's pieces, with a good deal of farcical incident and
dialogue ; even the catastrophe, in which one of the characters is
carried off to hell, being so managed as to impart no supernatural
interest to the drama.

* Spec, of Eng. Poet. i. 140.

2M ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

MARLOW. ^ &/lro£

f» j • i 11 t •

Of a different and far higher order of poetical and dramatic
character is another play of this date upon a similar subject, the
Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, by
Christopher Marlow. Mario w died at an early age in 1593, the
year after Greene, and three or four years before Peele. He had
been a writer for the stage at least since 1586, in which year, or
before, was brought out the play of Tamburlaine the Great, his
claim to the authorship of which has been conclusively established
by Mr. Collier, who has further shown that this was the first
play written in blank verse that was exhibited on the public
stage.* " Marlow's mighty line " has been celebrated by Ben
Jonson in his famous verses on Shakespeare ; but Drayton, the
author of the Polyolbion, has extolled him in the most glowing
description, — in words the most worthy of the theme : —

Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had : his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear :
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.f

Marlow is, by nearly universal admission, our greatest dramatic
writer before Shakespeare. He is frequently, indeed, turgid and
bombastic, especially in his earliest play, Tamburlaine the Great,
which has just been mentioned, where his fire, it must be con-
fessed, sometimes blazes out of all bounds and becomes a mere
wasting conflagration — sometimes only raves in a furious storm
of sound, filling the ear without any other effect. But in his fits
of truer inspiration, all the magic of terror, pathos, and beauty
flashes from him in streams. The gradual accumulation of the
agonies of Faustus, in the concluding scene of that play, as the
moment of his awful fate comes nearer and nearer, powerfully
drawn as it is, is far from being one of those coarse pictures of
wretchedness that merely oppress us with horror: the most
admirable skill is applied throughout in balancing that emotion
by sympathy and even respect for the sufferer, —

^ • for he was a scholar once admired

For wondrous knowledge in our German schools, —

* Hist. Dram. Poet. iii. pp. 107—126.

t Elegy, "To my dearly beloved friend Henry Reynolds, Of Poets aud
Poesy."

LYLY. 215

and yet without disturbing our acquiescence in the justice of his
doom; till we close the book, saddened, indeed, but not dis-
satisfied, with the pitying but still tributary and almost consoling
words of the Chorus on our hearts, —

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

L nd burned is Apollo's laurel-bough

That sometime grew within this learned man.

Still finer, perhaps, is the conclusion of another of Marlow's
dramas — his tragedy of Edward the Second. " The reluctant
pangs of dedicating royalty in Edward," says Charles Lamb,
"furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his
Eichard the Second ; and the death-scene of Marlow's king moves
pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which
I am acquainted."* Much splendour of poetry, also, is expended
upon the delineation of Barabas, in The Rich Jew of Malta : but
Marlow's Jew, as Lamb has observed, "does not approach so
near to Shaiespeare's [in the Merchant of Venice] as his Edward
the Second" We are more reminded of some of Barabas's
speeches by the magnificent declamation of Mammon in Jonson's
Alchymist.

. LYLY; KYD; LODGE.

Marlow, Greene, and Peele are the most noted names among
those of oir dramatists who belong exclusively to the age of
Elizabeth ; but some others that have less modern celebrity may
perhaps b« placed at least on the same line with the two latter.
John Lyly, the Euphuist, as he is called, from one of his prose
works, wlich will be noticed presently, is, as a poet, in his
happiest jfforts, elegant and fanciful ; but his genius was better
suited fir the lighter kinds of lyric poetry than for the drama.
He is the author of nine dramatic pieces, but of these seven are
in prose, and only one in rhyme and one in blank verse. All of
them, according to Mr. Collier, " seem to have been written for
court entertainments, although they were also performed at thea-
tres, most usually by the children of St. Paul's and the Eevels."
They 'were fitter, it might be added, for beguiling the listless-
ness of courts than for the entertainment of a popular audience,
athirst for action and passion, and very indifferent to mere
ingentities of style. All poetical readers, however, remember
some longs and other short pieces of verse with which some of
* Spec, of Eng. Dram. Poei; i. 31.

±1G ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

them are interspersed, particularly a delicate little anacreontic
in that entitled Alexander and Canrpaspe, beginning —

Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses, &c.

Mr. Collier observes that Malone must have spoken from a very
superficial acquaintance with Lyly's works when he contends
that his plays are comparatively free from those affected conceits
and remote allusions that characterise most of his other produc-
tions. Thomas Kyd, the author of the two plays of Jeronimo
and the Spanish Tragedy (which is a continuation of tie former),
besides a translation of another piece from the French, appears
to be called Sporting Kyd by Jonson, in his verses on Shake-
speare, in allusion merely to his name. There K, at least,
nothing particularly sportive in the little that has copae down to
us from his pen. Kyd was a considerable master of language ;
but his rank as a dramatist is not very easily settled J seeing that
there is much doubt as to his claims to the authorsrjp of by far
the most striking passages in the Spanish Tragedy] the best of
his two plays. Lamb, quoting the scenes in questidn, describes
them as " the very salt of the old play," which, without them,
he adds, " is but a caput mortuum" It has been genenjlly assumed
that they were added by Ben Jonson, who certainly w^s employed
to make some additions to this play ; and Mr. Collier attributes
them to him as if the point did not admit of a doubt — acknow-
ledging, however, that they represent Jonson in a nev light, and
that " certainly there is nothing in his own entire play^ equalling
in pathetic beauty some of his contributions to tie Spanish
Tragedy." Nevertheless, it does not seem to be perfectly clear
that the supposed contributions by another hand migflt not have
been the work of Kyd himself. Lamb says, " There |s nothing
in the undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorise us to
suppose that he could have supplied the scenes in question. I
should suspect the agency of some * more potent spirit.' Webster
might have furnished them. They are full of that wild, solemn,
preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Dtchess of
Malfy." The last of these early dramatists we shall notice,
Thomas Lodge, who was born about 1556, and began to yrite for
the stage about 1580, is placed by Mr. Collier " in a rank
superior to Greene, but in some respects inferior to Kyd?' His
principal dramatic work is entitled The Wounds of Civl War,
lively set forth in the true Tragedies of Marius and SylU ; and
is written in blank verse with a mixture of rhyme. It shows
him, Mr. Collier thinks, to have unquestionably the advantage

KYD; LODGE. 217

ever Kyd as a drawer of character, though not equalling that
writer in general vigour and boldness of poetic conception.
His blank verse is also much more monotonous than that of Kyd.
Another strange drama in rhyme, written by Lodge in conjunc-
tion with Greene, is entitled A Looking-glass for London and
England, and has for its object to put down the puritanical out-
cry against the immorality of the stage, which it attempts to
accomplish by a grotesque application to the city of London of
the Scriptural story of Nineveh. The whole performance, in
Mr. Collier's opinion, " is wearisomely dull, although the authoi
have endeavoured to lighten the weight by the introduction of
scenes of drunken buffoonery between * a clown and his crew of
ruffians,' and between the same clown and a person disguised as
the devil, in order to frighten him, but who is detected and well
beaten." Mr. Hallam, however, pronounces that there is groat
talent shown in this play, "though upon a very strange
canvass."* Lodge, who was an eminent physician, has left a
considerable quantity of other poetry besides his plays, partly in
the form of novels or tales, partly in shorter pieces, many of
which may be found in the miscellany called England's Helicon,
from which a few of them have been evtracted by Mr. Ellis, in
his Specimens. They are, perhaps, on the whole, more credit-
able to his poetical powers than his dramatic performances. He
is also the author of several short wo ks in prose, sometimes
interspersed with verse. One of his prose tales, first printed in
1590, under the title of Rosalynde : Euphues' Golden Legacie,
found in his cell at Silextra (for Lodge was one of Lyly's
imitators), is famous as the source from which Shakespeare
appears to have taken the story of his As You Like It. " Of
this production it may be said," observes Mr. Collier, '* that our
admiration of many portions of it will not be diminished by a
comparison with the work of our great dramatist."!

It is worthy of remark, that all these founders and first
builders-up of the regular drama in England were, nearly if not
absolutely without an exception, classical scholars and men who
had received a university education. Nicholas Udall was of
Corpus Christi College, Oxford ; John Still (if he is to be con-
sidered the author of Gammer Gurton's Needle) was of Christ's
College, Cambridge ; Sackville was educated at both universities ;
so was Gascoigne ; Richard Edwards was of Corpus Christi,
Oxford ; Marlow was of Benet College, Cambridge ; Greene, of

* Literature of Eur. ii. 274.

t Hist, of Dram. Poet. iii. 213.— See upon this subject the Introductory
Notice to As You Like It in Knight's Shukspere, vol. iii. 247—265.

218 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

St: John's, Cambridge ; Peele, of Christ's Church, Oxford ; Lyly,
of Magdalen College, and Lodge of Trinity College, in the same
university. Kyd was also probably a university man, though
we know nothing of his private history. To the training
received by these writers the drama that arose among us after
the middle of the sixteenth century may be considered to owe
not only its form, but in part also its spirit, which had a learned
and classical tinge from the first, that never entirely wore out.
The diction of the works of all these dramatists betrays their
scholarship ; and they have left upon the language of our higher
drama, and indeed of our blank verse in general, of which they were
the main creators, an impress of Latinity, which, it can scarcely
be doubted, our vigorous but still homely and unsonorous Gothic
speech needed to fit it for the requirements of that species of
composition. Fortunately, however, the greatest and most
influential of them were not mere men of books and readers of
Greek and Latin. Greene and Peele and Marlow all spent the
noon of their days (none of them saw any afternoon) in the
busiest haunts of social life, sounding in their reckless course all
the depths of human experience, and drinking the cup of passion,
and also of suffering, to the dregs. And of their great successors,
those who carried the drama to its height among us in the next
age, while some were also accomplished scholars, all were men
of the world — men who knew their brother-men by an actual
and intimate intercourse with them in their most natural and
open-hearted moods, and over a remarkably extended range of
conditions. We know, from even the scanty fragments of their
history that have come down to us, that Shakespeare and
Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher all lived much in the open
air of society, and mingled with all ranks from the highest to
the lowest ; some of them, indeed, having known what it was
actually to belong to classes very far removed from each other at
different periods of their lives. But we should have gathered,
though no other record or tradition had told us, that they must
have been men of this genuine and manifold experience from
the drama alone which they have bequeathed to us, — various,
rich, and glowing as that is, even as life itself.

219

EARLIER ELIZABETHAN PROSE: — LYLY; SIDNEY; SPENSER;
NASH; ETC.

Before leaving the earlier part of tlie reign of Elizabeth, a few
of the more remarkable writers in prose who had risen into
notice before the year 1590 may be mentioned. The singular
affectation known by the name of Euphuism was, like some other
celebrated absurdities, the invention of a man of true genius —
John Lyly, noticed above as a dramatist and poet— the first part
of whose prose romance of Euphues appeared in 1578 or 1579.
44 Our nation," says Sir Henry Blount, in the preface to a collec-
tion of some of Lyly's dramatic pieces which he published in
1632, " are in his debt for a new English which he taught them.
Euphues and his England* began first that language; all OUT
ladies were then his scholars ; and that beauty in court which
could not parley Euphuism — that is to say, who was unable to
converse in that pure and reformed English, which he had
formed his work to be the standard of — was as little regarded as
she which now there speaks not French." Some notion of this
44 pure and reformed English" has been made familiar to the
reader of our day by the great modern pen that has called back
to life so much of the long-vanished past, though the discourse
of Sir Piercie Shafton, in the Monastery, is rather a caricature
than a fair sample of Euphuism. Doubtless, it often became a
purely silly and pitiable affair in the mouths of the courtiers,
male and female ; but in Lyly's own writings, and in those of
his lettered imitators, of whom he had several, and some of no
common talent, it was only fantastic and extravagant, and
opposed to truth, nature, good sense, and manliness. Pedantic
and far-fetched allusion, elaborate indirectness, a cloying smooth-
ness and drowsy monotony of diction, alliteration, punning, and
other such puerilities, — these are the main ingredients of
Euphuism ; which do not, however, exclude a good deal of wit,
fancy, and prettiness, occasionally, both in the expression and
the thought. Although Lyly, in his verse as well as in his
prose, is always artificial to excess, his ingenuity and finished
elegance are frequently very captivating. Perhaps, indeed, our
language is, after all, indebted to this writer and his Euphuism
for not a little of its present euphony. From the strictures
Shakespeare, in Love's Labour's Lost, makes Holofernes pass on
the mode of speaking of his Euphuist, Don Adriano de Armadc

* This is the title of the second port of the Euphues, published in 1581
The first part is entitled Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit.

220 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE,

— " a man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight — that hath a
mint of phrases in his brain — one whom the music of his own
vain tongue doth ravish like enchanting harmony " — it should
almost seem that the now universally adopted pronunciation of
many of our words was first introduced by such persons at this
refining " child of fancy :" — " I abhor such fanatical fantasms,
such insociable and point-device companions ; such rackers of
orthography as to speak dout, fine, when he should say doubt ; det,
when he should pronounce debt, d, e, b, t ; not d, e, t : he clepeth a
calf, cauf; half, hauf; neighbour vocatur nebour ; neigh, abbreviated
ne ; this is abhominable (which he would call abominable) : it
insinuateth me of insanie." Here, however, the all-seeing poet
laughs rather at the pedantic schoolmaster than at the fantastic
knight; and the euphuistic pronunciation which he makes
Holofernes so indignantly criticise was most probably his own
and that of the generality of his educated contemporaries.

A renowned English prose classic of this age, who made Lyly's
affectations the subject of his ridicule some years before Shake-
speare, but who also perhaps was not blind to his better qualities,
and did not disdain to adopt some of his reforms in the language,
if not to imitate even some of the peculiarities of his style, was
Sir Philip Sidney, the illustrious author of the Arcadia. Sidney,
who was born in 1554, does not appear to have sent anything to
the press during his short and brilliant life, which was terminated
by the wound he received at the battle of Zutphen, in 1586;
but he was probably well known, nevertheless, at least as a
writer of poetry, some years before his lamented death. Putten-
ham, whose Art of English Poesy, at whatever time it may have
been written, was published before any work of Sidney's had been
printed, so far as can now be discovered, mentions him as one of
the best and most famous writers of the age "for eclogue and
pastoral poesy." The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, as Sidney's
principal work had been affectionately designated by himself, in
compliment to his sister, to whom it was inscribed — the " fair,
and good, and learned" lady, afterwards celebrated by Ben
Jonson as " the subject of all verse " — was not given to the world
even in part till 1590, nor completely till 1593. His collection
of sonnets and songs entitled Astrophel and Stella first appeared
in 1591, and his other most celebrated piece in prose, The
Defence of Poesy, in 1595. The production in which he satirises
the affectation and pedantry of the modern corrupters of the
vernacular- tongue is a sort of masque, supposed, to pass before
Queen Elizabeth in Wanstead garden, in which, among other
characters, a village schoolmaster called Eombus appears, and

GREENE.

declaims in a jargon not unlike that of Shakespeare's Holofernes
.Sidney's own prose is the most flowing and poetical that had yet
been written in English ; but its graces are rather those of artful
elaboration than of a vivid natural expressiveness. The thought,
in fact, is generally more poetical than the language; it is a
spirit of poetry encased in a rhetorical form. Yet, notwithstand-
ing the conceits into which it frequently runs—and which, after
all, are mostly rather the frolics of a nimble wit, somewhat too
solicitous of display, than the sickly perversities of a coxcombical
or effeminate taste— and, notwithstanding also some want of
animation and variety, Sidney's is a wonderful style, always
flexible, harmonious, and luminous, and on fit occasions rising to
great stateliness and splendour ; while a breath of beauty and
noble feeling lives in and exhales from the whole of his great
work, like the fragrance from a garden of flowers.

Among the most active occasional writers in prose, also, about
this time were others of the poets and dramatists of the day,
besides Lodge, who has been already mentioned as one of
Lyly's imitators. Another of his productions, besides his tale of
liosalynd, which has lately attracted much attention is a Defence
of Stage Plays, which he published, probably in 1579, in answer
to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse, and of which only two
copies are known to exist, both wanting the title-page. Greene
was an incessant pamphleteer upon all sorts of subjects ; the list
of his prose publications, so far as they are known, given by
Mr. Dyce extends to between thirty and forty articles, the earliest
being dated 1584, or eight years before his death. Morality,
fiction, satire, blackguardism, are all mingled together in the
stream that thus appears to have flowed without pause from his
ready pen. " In a night and a day," says his friend Nash,
" would he have yarked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years ;
and glad was that printer that might be so blest to pay him dear
for the very dregs of his wit."* His wit, indeed, often enough
appears to have run to the dregs, nor is it very sparkling at the
best ; but Greene's prose, though not in general very animated,
is more concise and perspicuous than his habits of composition
might lead us to expect. He has generally written from a well-
informed or full mind, and the matter is interesting even when
there is no particular attraction in the manner. Among his
most curious pamphlets are his several tracts on the rogueries of
London, which he describes under the name of Coney-catching
—a favourite subject also with other popular writers of that day.

* Strange News, in answer to Gabriel Harvey's Four Letters.

222 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

But the most remarkable of all Greene's contributions to our
literature are his various publications which either directly
relate or are understood to shadow forth the history of his own
wild and unhappy life— his tale entitled Never too Late ; or, A
Powder of Experience, 1590; the second part entitled Francesco's
Fortunes, the same year ; his Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a
Million of Repentance, and The Repentance of Robert Greene,
Master of Arts, which both appeared, after his death, in 1592.
Greene, as well as Lodge, we may remark, is to be reckoned
among the Euphuists; a tale which he published in 1587, and
which was no less than five times reprinted in the course of the
next half- century, is entitled Menaphon; Camilla's Alarum to
slumbering Euphues, in his melancholy cell at Silexedra, &c. ;
and the same year he produced Euphues his Censure to Philantus ;
wherein is presented a philosophical combat between Hector
and Achilles, &c. But he does not appear to have persisted in
this fashion of style. It may be noticed as curiously illustrating
the spirit and manner of our fictitious literature at this time,
that in his Pandosto, or, History of Dorastus and Fawnia,
Greene, a scholar, and a Master of Arts of Cambridge, does
not hesitate to make Bohemia an island, just as is done by
Shakespeare in treating the same story in his Winter's Tale.
The critics have been accustomed to instance this as one of
the evidences of Shakespeare's ignorance, and Ben Jonson
is recorded to have, in his conversation with Drummond of
Hawthornden, quoted it as a proof that his great brother-
dramatist " wanted art,* and sometimes sense." The truth is, as
has been observed, j such deviations from fact, and other incon-
gruities of the same character, were not minded, or attempted to
be avoided, either in the romantic drama, or in the legends out
of which it was formed. They are not blunders, but part and
parcel of the fiction. The making Bohemia an island is not
nearly so great a violation of geographical truth as other things
in the same play are of all the proprieties and possibilities of
chronology and history — for instance, the co-existence of a
kingdom of Bohemia at all, or of that modern barbaric name,
with anything so entirely belonging to the old classic world as
the Oracle of Delphi. The story (though no earlier record of it
has yet been discovered) is not improbably much older than
either Shakespeare or Greene : the latter no doubt expanded and

* Yet Jonson has elsewhere expressly commended Shakespeare for his art.
See his well-known verses prefixed to the first folio edition of the Plays.

t See Notice on the Costume of the Winter's Tale in Knight's Shakspere,
vol. iy.

NASH. 223

adorned it, and mainly gave it its present shape ; out it is most
likely that he had for his groundwork some rude popular legend
or tradition, the characteristic middle age geography and chrono-
logy of which he most properly did not disturb.

But the most brilliant pamphleteer of this age was Thomas
Nash. Nash is the author of one slight dramatic piece, mostly
in blank verse, but partly in prose, and having also some lyrical
poetry interspersed, called Summer's Last Will and Testament,
which was exhibited before Queen Elizabeth at Nonsuch in
1592; and he also assisted Marlow in his Tragedy of Dido,
Queen of Carthage, which, although not printed till 1594, is
supposed to have been written before 1 590. But his satiric was
of a much higher order than his dramatic talent. There never
perhaps was poured forth such a rushing and roaring torrent of
wit. ridicule, and invective, as in the rapid succession of pam-
jihlrts which he published in the course of the year 1589 against
the Puritans and their famous champion (or rather knot of cham-
pions) taking the name of Martin Mar-Prelate ; unless in those
in which he began two years after to assail poor Gabriel Harvey,
his persecution of and controversy with whom lasted a much
longer time — till indeed the Archbishop of Canterbury (Whitgift)
interfered in 1597 to restore the peace of the realm by an order
that all Harvey's and Nash's books should be taken wherever
they might be found, " and that none of the said books be ever
printed hereafter." Mr. D'Israeli has made both these contro-
versies familiar to modern readers by his lively accounts of the
one in his Quarrels, of the other in his Calamities, of Authors ;
and ample specimens of the criminations and recriminations
hurled at one another by Nash and Harvey have also been given
by Mr. Dyce in the Life of Greene prefixed to his edition of that
writer's dramatic and poetical works. Harvey too was a man of
eminent talent ; but it was of a kind very different from that of
Nash. Nash's style is remarkable for its airiness and facility ;
clear it of its old spelling, and, unless it be for a few words and
idioms which have now dropt out of the popular speech, it has
quite a modern air. This may show, by-the-by, that the lan-
guage has not altered so much since the latter part of the six-
teenth century as the ordinary prose of that day would lead us to
suppose ; the difference is rather that the generality of writers
were more pedantic then than now, and sought, in a way that
is no longer the fashion, to brocade their composition with what
were called ink-horn terms, and outlandish phrases never used
except in books. If they had been satisfied to write as they
*poke, the style of that day (as we may perceive from the examplu

221 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of Nash) would have in its general character considerably moro
resembled that of the present. Gabriel Harvey's mode of writing
exhibits all the peculiarities of his age in their most exaggerated
form. He was a great scholar— and his composition is inspired
by the very genius of pedantry ; full of matter, full often of good
sense, not unfrequently rising to a tone of dignity, and even
eloquence, but always stiff, artificial, and elaborately unnatural
to a degree which was even then unusual. We may conceive
what sort of chance such a heavy-armed combatant, encumbered
and oppressed by the very weapons he carried, would have in a
war of wit with the quick, elastic, inexhaustible Nash, and the
showering jokes and sarcasms that flashed from his easy, natural
pen. Harvey, too, with all his merits, was both vain and
envious ; and he had some absurdities whioh afforded tempting
game for satire.

EDMUND SPENSER.

Edmund Spenser has been supposed to have come before the
world as a poet so early as the year 1569, when some sonnets
translated from Petrarch, which long afterwards were reprinted
with his name, appeared in .Vander Noodt's Theatre of World-
lings : on the 20th of May in that year he wa-s entered a sizer of
Pembroke Hall, Cambridge ; and in that same year, also, an entry
in the Books of the Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber records
that there was " paid upon a bill signed by Mr. Secretary, dated
at Windsor 18° Octobris, to Edmund Spenser, that brought letters
to the Queen's Majesty from Sir Henry Norris, Knight, her
Majesty's ambassador in France, being at Thouars in the said
realm, for his charges the sum of 61 13s. 4rf., over and besides
9£. prested to him by Sir Henry Norris."* It has been sup-
posed that this entry refers to the poet. The date 1510, given
as that of the year of his birth upon his monument in West-
minster Abbey, erected long after his death, is out of the ques-
tion ; but the above-mentioned facts make it probable that he was
born some years before 1553, the date commonly assigned.

He has himself commemorated the place of his birth : " At
length," he says in his Prothalamion, or poem on the marriages
of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester,

* First published in Mr. Cunningham's Introduction (p. xxx.) to his Ex-
tracts from the Accounts of the Bevels at Court, printed for the Shakespeare
Society, 8vo. Lond. 1842.

SPENSER. 22-5

At length they all to merry London came,
To merry London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of ancient fame.

It is commonly said, on the authority of Oldys, that he was born
in East Smithfield by the Tower. It appears from the register
of tLe University that he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts in
1572, and that of Master of Arts in 1576. On leaving Cambridge
he retired for some time to the north of England. Here he ap-
pears to have written the greater part of his Shepherd's Calendar,
which, having previously come up to London, he published in
1579. In the beginning of August, 1580, on the appointment of
Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton as Lord Deputy of Ireland, he accom-
panied his lordship to that country as his secretary ; in March,
the year following, he was appointed to the office of Clerk in the
Irish Court of Chancery; but on Lord Grey being recalled in
1582 Spenser probably returned with him to England.

Of how he was employed for the next three or four years
nothing is known ; but in 1 586 he obtained from the crown a
grant of above 3000 acres of forfeited lands in Ireland : the grant
is dated the 27th of July, and, if it was procured, as is not im-
probable, through Sir Philip Sidney, it was the last kindness of
that friend and patron, whose death took place in October of this
year. Spenser proceeded to Ireland to take possession of his
estate, which was a portion of the former domain of the Earl ot
Desmond in the county of Cork ; and here he remained, residing
in what had been the earl's castle of Kilcolman, till he returned
to England in 1590, and published at London, in 4to., the first
three Books of his Fairy Queen. If he had published anything
else since the Shepherd's Calendar appeared eleven years before, it
could only have been a poem of between four and five hundred
lines, entitled Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterfly, which he
dedicated to the Lady Carey. He has himself related, in his
Colin Clout's Come Home Again, how he had been visited in his
exile by the Shepherd of the Ocean, by which designation he
means Sir Walter Raleigh, and persuaded by him to make this
visit to England for the purpose of having his poem printed.
Raleigh introduced him to Elizabeth, to whom the Fairy Queen
was dedicated, and who in February, 1591, bestowed on the
author a pension of 50J. This great work immediately raised
Spenser to such celebrity, that the publisher hastened to collect
whatever of his other poems he could find, and, under the gene
rol title of Complaints ; Containing sundry small poems of tlio

Q

226 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

World's Vanity ; printed together, in a 4to. volume, The Ruins
of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgil's Gnat, Mother Hub-
berd's Tale, The Euins of Kome (from the French of Bellay),
Muiopotmos (which is stated to be the only one of the pieces
that had previously appeared), and The Visions of Petrarch, &c.,
already mentioned. Many more, it is declared, which the author
had written in former years were not to be found.

Spenser appears to have remained in England till the begin-
ning of the year 1592 : his Daphnaida, an elegy on the death of
Douglas Howard, daughter of Lord Howard, and wife of Arthur
Gorges, Esq., is dedicated to the Marchioness of Northampton in
an address dated the 1st of January in that year, and it was
published soon after. He then returned to Ireland, and, probably
in the course of 1592 and 1593, there composed the series of
eighty-eight sonnets in which he relates his courtship of the lady
whom he at last married,* celebrating the event by a splendid
Epithalamion. But it appears from the eightieth sonnet that he
had already finished six Books of his Fairy Queen. His next
publication was another 4to. volume which appeared in 1595,
containing his Colin Clout's Come Home Again, the dedication
of which to Raleigh is dated "From my house at Kilcolman,
December the 27th, 1591," no doubt a misprint for 1594 ; and also
his Astrophel, an elegy upon Sir Philip Sidney, dedicated to his
widow, now the Countess of Essex ; together with The Mourning
Muse of Thestylis, another poem on the same subject. The same
year appeared, in 8vo., his sonnets, under the title of Amoretti,
accompanied by the Epithalamion. In 1596 he paid another visit
to England, bringing with him the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth
Books of his Fairy Queen, which were published, along with a
new edition of the preceding three books, in 4to., at London in
that year. In the latter part of the same year appeared, in a
volume of the same form, a reprint of his Daphnaida, together
with his Prothalamion, or spousal verse on the marriages of the
Ladies Elizabeth and Catharine Somerset, and his Four Hymns
in honour of Love, of Beauty, of Heavenly Love, and of Hea-
venly Beauty, dedicated to the Countesses of Cumberland and
Warwick, in an address dated Greenwich, the 1st of September,
1596. The first two of these Hymns he states had been composed
in the greener times of his youth ; and, although he had been
moved by one of the two ladies to call in the same, as " having

* She was not, as has been commonly assumed, a peasant girl, but evidently
a gentlewoman, a person of the same social position with Spenser himself. I
have shown this, for the first time, in Spenser and his Poetry, vol. iii. pp. 223,
fee.

SPENSER. 22T

too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which, being
too vehemently carried with that kind of affection, do rather
suck out poison to their strong passion than honey to their
honest delight," ho " had been unable so to do, by reason that
many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad." At this
time it was still common for literary compositions of all kinds to
be extensively circulated in manuscript, as used to be the mode
of publication before the invention of printing. These Hymns
were the last of his productions that he sent to the press. It
was during this visit to England that he presented to Elizabeth,
and probably wrote, his prose treatise entitled A View of the
State of Ireland, written dialogue-wise between Eudoxus and
Irenaeus ; but that work remained imprinted, till it was published
at Dublin by Sir James Ware in 1633.

Spenser returned to Ireland probably early in 1597 ; and was
the next year recommended by the Queen to be sheriff of Cork ;
but, soon after the breaking out of Tyrone's rebellion in October,

1598, his house of Kilcolman was attacked and burned by the
rebels, and, one child having perished in the flames, it was with
difficulty that he made his escape with his wife and two sons.
He arrived in England in a state of destitution ; but it seems
unlikely that, with his talents and great reputation, his power-
ful friends, his pension, and the rights he still retained, although
doprived of the enjoyment of his Irish property for the moment,
ho could have been left to perish, as has been commonly said, of
want : the breaking up of his constitution was a natural conse-
quence of the sufferings he had lately gone through. All that we
know, however, is that, after having been ill for some time, he
died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, on the 1 Gth of January,

1599. Two Cantos, undoubtedly genuine, of a subsequent Book
of the Fairy Queen, and two stanzas of a third Canto, entitled Of
Mutability, and forming part of the Legend of Constancy, were
published in an edition of his collected works, in a folio volume,
in 1 609 ; and it may be doubted if much more of the poem was

written.

The most remarkable of Spenser's poems written before hia
great work, The Fairy Queen, are his Shepherd's Calendar and
his Mother Hubberd's Tale. Both of these pieces are full of the
spirit of poetry, and his genius displays itself in each in a variety
of styles.

The Shepherd's Calendar, though consisting of twelve distinct
poems denominated ^Eclogues, is less of a pastoral, in the or-
dinary acceptation, than it is of a piece of polemical or party
divinity. Spenser's shepherds are, for the most part, pastors of

228 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the church, or clergymen, with only pious parishioners for sheep.
One is a good shepherd, such as Algrind, that is, the puritanical
archbishop of Canterbury, Grindall. Another, represented in a
much less favourable light, is Morell, that is, his famous anta-
gonist, Elmore, or Aylmer, bishop of London. The puritanical
spirit of some parts of the Shepherd's Calendar, probably con-
tributed to the popularity which the poem long retained. It was
reprinted four times during the author's lifetime, in 1581, 1586,
1591, and 1597. Yet it is not only a very unequal composition,
but is, in its best executed or most striking parts, far below the
height to which Spenser afterwards learned to rise. This
earliest work of Spenser's, however, betrays his study of
our elder poetry as much by its diction as by other indi-
cations : he has thickly sprinkled it with words and phrases
which had generally ceased to be used at the time when
it was written. This he seems to have done, not so much
that the antiquated style might give the dialogue an air of
rusticity proper to the speech of shepherds, but rather in the
same spirit and design (though he has carried the practice much
farther) in which Virgil has done the same thing in his heroic
poetry, that his verse might thereby be the more distinguished
from common discourse, that it might fall upon the ears of men
with something of the impressiveness and authority of a voice
from other times, and that it might seem to echo, and, as it
were, continue and prolong, the strain of the old national min-
strelsy ; thus at once expressing his love and admiration of the
preceding poets who had been his examples, and, in part, his
instructors and inspirers, and making their compositions reflect
additional light and beauty upon his own. This is almost the
only advantage which the later poets in any language have
over the earlier ; and Spenser has availed himself of it more or
less in most of his writings, though not in any later work to the
same extent as in this first publication.

Executed in a firmer and more matured style, and, though
with more regularity of manner, yet also with more true bold-
ness and freedom, is the admirable Prosopopoia, as it is desig-
nated, of the adventures of the Fox and the Ape, or Mother
Hubberd's Tale, notwithstanding that this, too, is stated to have
been an early production — " long sithens composed," says the
author in his dedication of it to the Lady Compton and Mont-
eagle, " in the raw conceit of my youth." Perhaps, however,
this was partly said to avert the offence that might be taken at
the audacity of the satire. It has riot much the appearance,
either in manner or in matter, of the production of a very young

SPENSER. 220

writer. We should say that Mother Hubberd's Tale represents
the middle ago of Spenser's genius, if not of his life — the stage in
his mental and poetical progress when his relish and power of
the energetic had attained perfection, but the higher sense of the
beautiful had not yet been fully developed. Such appears to be
the natural progress of every mind that is capable of the highest
things in both these directions: the feeling of force is first
awakened, or at least is first matured ; the feeling of beauty is of
later growth. With even poetical minds of a subordinate class,
indeed, it may sometimes happen that a perception of the beau-
tiful, and a faculty of embodying it in words, acquire a consider-
able development without the love and capacity of the energetic
having ever shown themselves in any unusual degree : such may
be said to have been the case with Petrarch, to quote a remark-
able example. But the greatest poets have all been complete
men, with the sense of beauty, indeed, strong and exquisite, and
crowning all their other endowments, which is what makes them
the greatest ; but also with all other passions and powers cor-
respondingly vigorous and active. Homer, Dante, Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, were all of them mani-
festly capable of achieving any degree of success in any other field
as well as in poetry. They were not only poetically, but in all
other respects, the most gifted intelligences of their times ; men
of the largest sense, of the most penetrating insight, of the most
general research and information ; nay, even in the most worldly
arts and dexterities, able to cope with the ablest, whenever
they chose to throw themselves into that game. They may not
any of them have attained the highest degree of what is called
worldly success ; some of them may have even been crushed by
the force of circumstances or evil days ; Milton may have died
in obscurity, Dante in exile ; " the vision and the faculty
divine " may have been all the light that cheered, all the estate
that sustained, the old age of Homer ; but no one can suppose
that in any of these cases it was want of the requisite skill or
talent that denied a different fortune. As for Spenser, we shall
certainly much mistake his character if we suppose, from the
romantic and unworldly strain of much — and that, doubtless,
the best and highest — of his poetry, that he was anything
resembling a mere dreamer. In the first place, the vast extent
of his knowledge, comprehending all the learning of his age, and
his voluminous writings, sufficiently prove that his days were
not spent in idleness. Then, even in the matter of securing a
livelihood and a position in the world, want of activity or eager-
ness is a fault of which he can hardly be accused. Bred, lor

280 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

whatever reason, to no profession, it may be doubted if ho had
any other course to take, in that age, upon the whole so little
objectionable as the one he adopted. The scheme of life with
which he set out seems to have been to endeavour, first of all, to
secure for himself, by any honourable means, the leisure neces-
sary to enable him io cultivate and employ his poetical powers.
With this view he addressed himself to Sidney, the chief pro-
fessed patron of letters in that day (when, as yet, letters really
depended to a great extent for encouragement and support upon
the patronage of the great), hoping, through his interest, to
obtain such a provision as he required from the bounty of the
crown. In thus seeking to be supported at the public expense,
and to withdraw a small portion of a fund, pretty sure to be
otherwise wasted upon worse objects, for the modest maintenance
of one poet, can we say that Spenser, being what he was, was
much, or at all, to blame ? Would it have been wiser, or more
highminded, or in any sense better, for him to have thrown
himself, like Greene and Nash, and the rest of that crew, upon
the town, and, like them, wasted his fine genius in pamphleteer-
ing and blackguardism ? He knew that he would not eat that
public bread without returning to his country what she gave
nim a hundred and' a thousand fold ; he who must have felt and
known well that no man had yet uttered himself in the English
tongue so endowed for conferring upon the land, the language,
and the people what all future generations would prize as their
best inheritance, and what would contribute more than laws or
victories, or any other glory, to maintain the name of England
in honour and renown so long as it should be heard of among
men.

But he did not immediately succeed in his object. It is
probably true, as has been commonly stated, that Burghley
looked with but small regard upon the poet and his claims.
However, he at last contrived to overcome this obstacle ; and
eventually, as we have seen, he obtained from the crown both
lands, offices, and a considerable pension. It is not at all likely
that, circumstanced as he was at the commencement of his
career, Spenser could in any other way have attained so soon to
the same comparative affluence that he thus acquired. Probably
the only respect in which he felt much dissatisfied or disap-
pointed was in being obliged to take up his residence in Ireland,
without which, it may have been, he would have derived little
or no benefit from his grant of land. Mother Hubberd's Tale
must be supposed to have been written before he obtained that
grant. It is a sharp and shrewd satire upon the common modes

SPENSER. 23 L

of rising in the church and state ; not at all passionate or de-
clamatory,— on the contrary, pervaded by a spirit of quiet
humour, which only occasionally gives place to a tone of greater
elevation and solemnity, but assuredly, with all its high-minded
and even severe morality, evincing in the author anything rather
than either ignorance of the world or indifference to the ordinary
objects of human ambition. No one will rise from its perusal
with the notion that Spenser was a mere rhyming visionary, or
einging somnambulist. No ; like every other greatest poet, he
was an eminently wise man, exercised in every Held of thought,
and rich in all knowledge — above all, in knowledge of mankind,
the proper study of man. In this poem of Mother Hubberd's
Tale we still find also both his puritan ism and his imitation of
Chaucer, two things which disappear altogether from his later
poetry. Indeed, he has written nothing else so much in
Chaucer's manner and spirit; nor have we nearly so true a
reflection, or rather revival, of the Chaucerian narrative
style — at once easy and natural, clear and direct, firm and
economical, various and always spirited — in any other modern
Terse.

The Fairy Queen was designed by its author to be taken as an
allegory — " a continued allegory, or dark conceit," as he calls it
in his preliminary Letter to Raleigh " expounding his whole
intention in the course of this work." The allegory was even
artificial and involved to an unusual degree ; for not only was
the Fairy Queen, by whom the knights are sent forth upon their
adventures, to be understood as meaning Glory in the general
intention, but in a more particular sense she was to stand for
" the most excellent and glorious person " of Queen Elizabeth ;
and some other eminent individual of the day appears in like
manner to have been shadowed forth in each of the other figures.
The most interesting allegory that was ever written carries uft
along chiefly by making us forget that it is an allegory at all
The charm of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is that all the persons
and all the places in it seem real — that Christian, and Evan-
gelist, and Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. Greatheart, and the
Giant Despair, and all the rest, are to our apprehension not
shadows, but beings of flesh and blood ; and the Slough of
Despond, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Valley of Hu-
miliation, and the Enchanted Ground, all so many actual
scenes or localities which we have as we read before us or
around us. For the moral lessons that are to be got out of the
parable, it must no doubt be considered in another manner ; but
we speak of the delight it yields as a work of imagination

232 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

That is not increased, but impaired, or destroyed, by regarding
it as an allegory — just as would be the humour of Don Quixote,
or the marvels of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, by either
work being so regarded. In the same manner, whoever would
enjoy the Fairy Queen as a poem must forget that it is an
allegory, either single or double, either compound or simple.
Nor in truth is it even much of a story. Neither the personages
that move in it, nor the adventures they meet with, interest us
much. For that matter, the most ordinary novel, or a police
report in a newspaper, may often be much more entertaining.
One fortunate consequence of all this is, that the poem scarcely
loses anything by the design of the author never having been
completed, or its completion at least not having come down to
us. What we have of it is not injured in any material respect
by the want of the rest. This Spenser himself no doubt felt
when he originally gave it to the world in successive portions ; — •
and it would not have mattered much although of the six Books
he had published the three last before the three first.

These peculiarities — the absence of an interesting story or
concatenation of incidents, and the want of human character and
passion in the personages that carry on the story, such as it is —
are no defects in the Fairy Queen. On the contrary, the poetry
is only left thereby so much the purer. Without calling Spenser
the greatest of all poets, we may still say that his poetry is the
most poetical of all poetry. Other poets are all of them some-
thing else as well as poets, and deal in reflection, or reasoning,
or humour, or wit, almost as largely as in the proper product of
the imaginative faculty ; his strains alone, in the Fairy Queen,
are poetry, all poetry, and nothing but poetry. It is vision
unrolled after vision, to the sound of endlessly varying music.
The "shaping spirit of imagination," considered apart from moral
sensibility — from intensity of passion on the one hand, and
grandeur of conception on the other — certainly never was pos-
sessed in the like degree by any other writer ; nor has any other
evinced a deeper feeling of all forms of the beautiful ; nor have
words ever been made by any other to embody thought with
more wonderful art. On the one hand invention and fancy in
(the creation or conception of his thoughts ; on the other the most
•exquisite sense of beauty, united with a command over all the
[resources of language, in their vivid and musical expression —
•these are the great distinguishing characteristics of Spenser's
(poetry. What of passion is in it lies mostly in the melody of
the verse ; but that is often thrilling and subduing in the highest
degree. Its moral tone, also, is very captivating: a soul of

SPENSER. 233

nobleness, gentle and tender as the spirit of its own chivalry,
modulates every cadence.

Spenser's extraordinary faculty of vision-peeing and picture-
drawing can fail to strike none of his readers ; but he will not
be adequately appreciated or enjoyed by those who regard verse
either as a non-essential or as a very subordinate element of
poetry. Such minds, however, must miss half the charm of all
poetry. Not only all that is purely sensuous in poetry must
escape them, but likewise all the pleasurable excitement that
lies in the harmonious accordance of the musical expression with
the informing idea or feeling, and in the additional force or
brilliancy that in such inter-union is communicated by the one
to the other. All beauty is dependent upon form : other things
may often enter into the beautiful, but this is the one thing that
can never be dispensed with ; all other ingredients, as they must
l>e contained by, so must be controlled by this ; and the only
thing that standing alone may constitute the beautiful is form or
outline. Accordingly, whatever addresses itself to or is suited
to gratify the imagination takes this character : it falls into more
or less of regularity and measure. Mere passion is of all things
the most unmeasured and irregular, naturally the most opposed
of all things to form. But in that state it is also wholly unfitted
for the purposes of art ; before it can become imaginative in any
artistic sense it must have put off its original merely volcanic
character, and worn itself into something of measure and music.
Thus all impassioned composition is essentially melodious, in a
higher or lower degree ; measured language is the appropriate
and natural expression of passion or deep feeling operating artis-
tically in writing or speech. • The highest and most perfect kind
of measured language is verse ; and passion expressing itself in
verse is what is properly called poetry. Take away the verse,
and in most cases you take away half the poetry, sometimes
much more. The verse, in truth, is only one of several things
by the aid of which the passion seeks to give itself effective
expression, or by which the thought is endowed with additional
animation or beauty ; nay, it is only one ingredient of the musical
expression of the thought or passion. If the verse may be
dispensed with, so likewise upon the same principle may every
decoration of the sentiment or statement, everything else that
would do more than convey the bare fact. Let the experiment
be tried, and see how it will answer. Take a single instance.
" Immediately through the obscurity a great number of flags
were seen to be raised, all richly coloured :" out of these words,
no doubt, the reader or hearer might, after some meditation,

231 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

extract the conception of a very imposing scene. But, although
they 'intimate with sufficient exactness and distinctness the same
literal fact, they are nevertheless the deadest prose compared
with Milton's glorious words : —

" All in a moment through the gloom were seen
Ten thousand banners rise into the air,
With orient colours waving."

And so it would happen in every other case in which true
poetry was divested of its musical expression : a part, and it
might be the greater part, of its life, beauty, and effect, would
always be lost ; and it would, in truth, cease to be what is dis-
tinctively called poetry or song, of which verse is as much one
of the necessary constituents as passion or imagination itself.
Those who dispute this will never be able to prove more than
that their own enjoyment of the sensuous part of poetry, which
is really that in which its peculiar character resides, is limited
or feeble ; which it may very well be in minds otherwise highly
gifted, and even endowed with considerable imaginative power.
The feeling of the merely beautiful, however, or of beauty unim-
pregnated by something of a moral spirit or meaning, is not
likely in such minds to be very deep or strong. High art,
therefore, is not their proper region, in any of its departments.
In poetry they will probably not very greatly admire or enjoy
either Spenser or Milton — and perhaps would prefer Paradise
Lost in the prose version which Osborne the bookseller in the
last century got a gentleman of Oxford to execute for the
use of readers to whom -the sense was rather obscured by the
verse.

Passing over several of the great passages towards the com-
mencement- of the poem — such as the description of Queen
Lucifera and her Six Counsellors in the Fourth Canto of the First
Book, that of the visit of the Witch Duessa to Hell in the Fifth,
and that of the Cave of Despair in the Ninth — which are pro-
bably more familiarly known to the generality of readers, we
will take as a specimen of the Fairy Queen the escape of the
Enchanter Archimage from Bragadoccio and his man Trompart,
and the introduction and description of Belphoebe, in the Third
Canto of Book Second : —

He stayed not for more bidding, but away
Was sudden vanished out of his sight :
The northern wind his wings did broad display
At his command, and reared him up light,
From off the earth to take his airy flight.

SPENSER. 235

They looked about, but nowhere could espy
Tract of his foot ; then dead through great affright
They both nigh were, and each bade other fly ;
Both fled at once, ne ever back returned eye ;

Till that they come unto a forest green,

In which they shrowd themselves from causeless fear ;

Yet fear them follows still, whereso they been ;

Each trembling leaf and whistling wind they hear

As ghastly bug1 does greatly them afear ;

Yet both do strive their fearfulness to feign.*

At last they heard a horn, that shrilled clear

Throughout the wood, that echoed again,

And made the forest ring, as it would rive in twain.

Kft* through the thick they heard one rudely rush,

With noise whereof he from his lofty steed

Down fell to ground, and crept into a bush,

To hide his coward head from dying dreed ;

But Trompart stoutly stayed, to taken heed

Of what might hap. Eftsoon there stepped foorth

A goodly lady clad in hunter's weed,

That seemed to be a woman of great worth,

And by her stately portance4 born of heavenly birth.

Her face so fair as flesh it seemed not,
But heavenly pourtrait of bright angels' hue,
Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot,
Through goodly mixture of complexions due ;
And in her cheeks the vermeil red did shew
Like roses in a bed of lillies shed,
The which ambrosial odours from them threw,
And gazers' sense with double pleasure fed,
Able to heal the sick, and to revive the dead.

In her fair eyes two living lamps did flame,

Kindled above at the heavenly Maker's light,

And darted fiery beams out of the same,

So passing persant and so wondrous bright

That quite bereaved the rash beholder's sight :

In them the blinded god his lustful fire

To kindle oft assayed, but had no might ;

For with dread majesty and awful ire

She broke his wanton darts, and quenched base tkwre.

Her ivory forehead, full of bountv brave,
Like a broad table did itself dispread
For Love his lofty triumphs to engrave,
And write the battles of his great godhead :

1 Bugbear. 5 Conceal. * Soon. 4 Carriage.

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

All good and honour might therein be read,

For there their dwelling was ; and, when she spake,

Sweet words like dropping honey she did shed,

And twixt the pearls and rubins1 softly brake

A silver sound, that heavenly music seemed to make,

Upon her eyelids many graces sate,

Under the shadow of her even brows,

Working belgardes3 and amorous retrate ;»

And every one her with a grace endows,

And every one with meekness to her bows :

So glorious mirror of celestial grace,

And sovereign moniment of mortal vows,

How shall frail pen descrive4 her heavenly face,

For fear through want of skill her beauty to disgrace J

So fair, and thousand thousand times more fair,
She seemed, when she presented was to sight ;
And was yclad, for heat of scorching air,
All in a silken camus8 lilly white,
Purfled8 upon with many a folded plight/
Which all above besprinkled was throughout
With golden aigulets, that glistened bright,
Like twinkling stars ; and all the skirt about
Was hemmed with golden fringe.

Below her ham her weed8 did somewhat train ;9

And her straight legs most bravely were embailed18

In gilden11 buskins of costly cordwain,12

All barred with golden bends, which were entailed13

With curious an ticks,14 and full fair aumailed ;14

Before they fastened were under her knee

In a rich jewel, and therein en trailed16

The ends of all the knots, that none might see

How they within their foldings close enwrapped be.

Like two fair marble pillars they were seen,

Which do the temple of the gods support,

Whom all the people deck with girlonds17 green,

And honour in their festival resort ;

Those same with stately grace and princely port

She taught to tread, when she herself would grace ;

But with the woody nymphs when she did sport,

Or when the flying libbard18 she did chase,

She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace.

- Kubies. 2 Beautiful looks. 3 Aspect. 4 Describe.
Thin gown. 6 Gathered. ' " Plait. 8 Dress.

* Hang. 10 Enclosed. n Gilded. 12 Spanish leather.
13 Engraved, marked. 14 Figures. 15 Enamelled.

16 Interwoven, » Garlands. 18 Leopard.

SPENSER. 237

And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held,

And at her back a bow and quiver gay

Stuffed with steel-headed darts, wherewith she qucllod

The salvage beasts in her victorious play,

Knit with a golden baldric, which forelay

Athwart her snowy breast, and did divide

Her dainty paps ; which, like young fruit in May,

Xow little, gan to swell, and, being tied,

Through her thin weed their places only signified.

Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire,

About her shoulders weren loosely shed,

And, when the wind amongst them did inspire,

They waved like a penon wide dispread,

And low behind her back were scattered ;

And, whether art it were or heedless hap,

As through the flowering forest rash she fled,

In her rude hairs sweet flowers themselves did lap,

And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap.

Such as Diana, by the sandy shore
( )i' swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus green,
Where all the nymphs have her unwares forlore,*
\Vandereth alone, with bow and arrows keen,
To seek her game ; or as that famous queen
Of Amazons, whom Pyrrhus did destroy,
The day that first of Priam she was seen
Did show herself in great triumphant joy,
To succour the weak state of sad afflicted Troy.

OTHER ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

In the six or seven years from 1590 to 1596, what a world of
wealth had thus been added to our poetry by Spenser alone !
what a different thing from what it was before had the English
language been made by his writings to natives, to foreigners, to
all posterity ! But England was now a land of song, and the
busiest and most productive age of our poetical literature had
fairly commenced, \\hat are commonly called the minor poets
of the Elizabethan age are to be counted by hundreds, and few
of them are altogether without merit. If they have nothing
else, the least gifted of them have at least something of the fresh-
ness and airiness of that balmy morn, some tones caught from
their greater contemporaries, some echoes of the spirit of music
thut then filled the universal air. For the most part the minor

1 Forssikeu.

238

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Elizabethan poetry is remarkable for ingenuity and elaboration,
often carried to the length of quaintness, both in the thought
and the expression ; but, if there be more in it of art than of
nature, the art is still that of a high school, and always consists
in something more than the mere disguising of prose in the dress
of poetry. If it is sometimes unnatural, it is at least very seldom
simply insipid, like much of the well-sounding verse of more
recent eras. The writers are always in earnest, whether with
their nature or their art ; they never write from 110 impulse, and
with no object except that of stringing commonplaces into rhyme
or rhythm ; even when it is most absurd, what they produce is
still fanciful, or at the least fantastical. The breath of some
sort of life or other is almost always in it. The poorest of it is
distinguished from prose by something more than the mere
sound.

WARNER.

The three authors of Ihe poems of most pretension, with the
exception of the Fairy Queen, that appeared during the period
aow under review, are Warner, Drayton, and Daniel. William
Warner is supposed to have been born about the year 1558 ; he
died in 1609. Hehas^told us himself (in his Eleventh Book,
chapter 62), that his birthplace was London, and that his father
was one of those who sailed with Chancellor to Muscovy, in
1555: this, he says, was before he himself was born. Warner's
own profession was the not particularly poetical one of an attor-
ney of the Common Pleas. According to Anthony Wood, who
makes him to have been a Warwickshire man, he had before
1586 written several pieces of verse, "whereby his name waa
cried up among the minor poets ;" but this is probably a mistake ;
none of this early poetry imputed to Warner is now known to
exist ; and in the Preface to his Albion's England, he seems to
intimate that that was his first performance in verse. In the Dedi-
cation to his poem he explains the meaning of the title, which is
not very obvious : "This our whole island," he observes, "an-
ciently ^ called Britain, but more anciently Albion, presently
containing two kingdoms, England and Scotland, is cause (right
honourable) that, to distinguish the former, whose only occur-
rents [occurrences] I abridge from our history, I entitle this mv
book Albion's England." Albion's England first appeared, iu
thirteen Books, in 1586: and was reprinted in 1589, in 1592,
in 1596, in 1597, and in 1602. In 1606 the author added a

WARNER. 239

Continuance, or continuation, in three Books ; and the whole
work was republished (without, however, the last three Books
having been actually reprinted) in 1612. In this last edition
it is described on the title-page as " now revised, and newly
enlarged [by the author] a little before his death." It thus
appears that, so long as its popularity lasted, Albion's England
was one of the most popular long poems ever written. But that
was only for about twenty years : although the early portion of
it had in less than that time gone through half a dozen editions,
the Continuation, published in 1606, sold so indifferently that
enough of the impression still remained to complete the book
when the whole was republished in 1612, and after that no other
edition was ever called for, till the poem was reprinted in
Chalmers's collection in 1810. The entire neglect into which
it so soon fell, from the height of celebrity and popular favour,
was probably brought about by various causes. Warner, ac-
cording to Anthony Wood, was ranked by his contemporaries
on a level with Spenser, and they were called the Homer and
Virgil of their age. If he and Spenser were ever equally
admired, it must have been by very different classes of readers.
Albion's England is undoubtedly a work of very remarkable
talent of its kind. It is in form a history of England, or Southern
Britain, from the Deluge to the reign of James I., but may fairly
be said to be, as the title-page of the last edition describes it,
" not barren in variety of inventive intermixtures." Or, to use
the author's own words in his Preface, he certainly, as he hopes,
has no great occasion to fear that he has grossly failed " in verity,
brevity, invention, and variety, profitable, pathetical, pithy, and
pleasant." In fact, it is one of the liveliest and most amusing
poems ever written. Every striking event or legend that the
old chronicles afford is seized hold of, and related always clearly,
often with very considerable spirit and animation. But it is far
from being a mere compilation ; several of the narratives are not
to be found anywhere else, and a large proportion of the matter
is Warner's own, in every sense of the word. In this, as well
as in other respects, it has greatly the advantage over the Mirror
for Magistrates, as a rival to which work it was perhaps origi-
nally produced, and with the popularity of which it could
scarcely fail considerably to interfere. Though a long poem
(not much under 10,000 verses), it is still a much less ponderous
work than the Mirror, absolutely as well as specifically. Its
variety, though not obtained by any very artificial method, is
infinite: not only are the stories it selects, unlike those in the
Mirror, generally of a merry cast, and much more briefly and

210 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

smartly told, but the reader is never kept long even on the same
track or ground : all subjects, all departments of human know-
ledge or speculation, from theology down to common arithmetic,
are intermixed, or rather interlaced, with the histories and
legends in the most extraordinary manner. The verse is the
favourite fourteen-syllable line of that age, the same in reality
with that which has in modern times been commonly divided
into two lines, the first of eight, the second of six syllables, and
which in that form is still most generally used for short compo-
sitions in verse, more especially for those of a narrative or other-
wise popular character. What Warner was chiefly admired for
in his own day was his style. Meres in his Wit's Treasury
mentions him as one of those by whom the English tongue in
that age had been " mightily enriched, and gorgeously invested
in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments." And for
fluency, combined with precision and economy of diction,
Warner is probably unrivalled among the writers of English
verse. We do not know whether his professional studies and
habits may have contributed to give this character to his style ;
but, if the poetry of attorneys be apt to take this curt, direct,
lucid, and at the same time flowing shape, it is a pity that we
had not a little more of it. His command of the vulgar tongue,
in particular, is wonderful. This indeed is perhaps his most
remarkable poetical characteristic; and the tone which was
thus given to his poem (being no doubt that of his own mind)
may be conjectured to have been in great part the source both of
its immense popularity for a time, and of the neglect and oblivion
into which it was afterwards allowed to drop. Nevertheless,
the poem, as we have said, has very remarkable merit in some
respects, and many passages, or rather portions of passages, in it
may still be read with pleasure. It is also in the highest degree
curious both as a repository of our old language, and for many
notices of the manners and customs of our ancestors which are
scattered up and down in it. All that is commonly known of
Warner is from the story of Argentile and Curan, which has
been reprinted from his Fourth Book by Mrs. Cooper in The
Muses' Library (1738), and by Percy in his Eeliques, and that
of The Patient Countess, which Percy has also given from his
Eighth Book.

The following passage from the Third Book, being the con-
clusion of the 17th Chapter, is a specimen of Warner's very
neatest style of narration. — He has related Caesar's victory over
the Britons, which he says was won with difficulty, the conquest
of the country having been only accomplished through the

WAKNER. 241

submission of that " traitorous knight, the Earl of London,"
whose disloyal example in yielding his charge and city to the foe
was followed by the other cities ; and then he winds up thus : —

But he, that won in every war, at Rome in civil robe
Was stabbed to death : no certainty is underneath this globe ;
The good are envied of the bad, and glory finds disdain,
And people are in constancy as April is in rain ;
Whereof, amidst our serious pen, this fable entertain : —

An Ass, an Old Man, and a Boy did through the city pass ;
And, whilst the wanton Boy did ride, the * Old Man led the Ass.
See yonder doting fool, said folk, that crawleth scarce for age,
Doth set the boy upon his ass, and makes himself his page.
Anon the blamed Boy alights, and lets the Old Man ride,
And, as the Old Man did before, the Boy the Ass did guide.
But, passing so, the people then did much the Old Man blame,
And told him, Churl, thy limbs be tough ; let ride the boy, for shame.
The fault thus found, both Man and Boy did back the ass and ride ;
Then that the ass was over-charged each man that met them cried.
Now both alight and go on foot, and lead the empty beast ;
But then the people laugh, and say that one might ride at least.
The Old Man, seeing by no ways he could the people please,
Not blameless then, did drive the ass and drown him in the seas.
Thus, whilst we be, it will not be that any pleaseth all ;
Else had been wanting, worthily, the noble Caesar's fall.

The end of Eichard the Third, in the Sixth Book (Chaptej
26th), is given with much spirit : —

Now Richard heard that Richmond was assisted, and on shore,
And like unkenneled Cerberus the crooked tyrant swore,
And all complexions act at once confusedly in him ;
He studieth, striketh, rnreats, entreats, and looketh mildly grim ;
Mistrustfully he trustetn, and he dreadingly doth 2 dare,
And forty passions in a trice in him consort and square.
But when, by his convented force, his foes increased more,
He hastened battle, finding his corrival apt therefore.

When Richmond orderly in all had battailed his aid,
Enringed by his complices, their cheerful leader said : —
Now is the time and place, sweet friends, and we the persons bo
That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we.
No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was indeed,
Woise than our foe, whose works will act my words if well he speed.
For ills 8 to ills superlative are easily enticed,
But entertain amendment as the Gergesites did Christ.

1 In the printed copy " a." The edition before us, that of 1612, abounds
with typographical errata.

3 There can be no question that this is the true word, which is misprinted
" did " in the edition before us. 8 Misprinted 'til.'

242 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Be valiant then ; he biddeth so that would not be outbid
For courage, yet shall honour him, though base, that better did.
I am right heir Lancastrian, he in York's destroyed right
Usurpeth 1 but, though cither's ours,1 for neither claim I fight,
But for our country's long-lacked weal, for England's peace, I war j
Wherein He speed us, unto whom I all events refar.

Meanwhile had furious Richard set his armies in array.
And then, with looks even like himself, this or the like did say —
Why, lads ? shall yonder Welshman, with his stragglers, overmatch ?
Disdain ye not such rivals, and defer ye their dispatch ?
Shall Tudor from Plantagenet the crown by craking snatch ?
Know Richard's very thoughts (he touched the diadem he wore)
Be metal of this metal : then believe I love it more
Than that for other law than life to supersede my claim ;
And lesser must not be his plea that counterpleads the same.

The weapons overtook his words, and blows they bravely change,
When like a lion, thirsting blood, did moody Richard range,
And made large slaughters where he went, till Richmond he espied,
Whom singling, after doubtful swords, the valorous tyrant died.

There are occasionally touches of true pathos in Warner, and
one great merit which he has is, that his love of brevity gene-
rally prevents him from spoiling any stroke of this kind by mul-
tiplying words and images with the view of heightening the
effect, as many of his contemporaries are prone to do. His
picture of Fair Rosamond in the hands of Queen Eleanor is very
vouching i—-
Fair Rosamund, surprised thus ere thus she did expect,
Fell on her humble knees, and did her fearful hands erect :
She blushed out beauty, whi'st the tears did wash her pleasing face,
And begged pardon, meriting no less of common grace.
So far, forsooth, as in me lay, I did, quoth she, withstand ;
But what may not so great a king by means or force command ?
And dar'st thou, minion, quoth the Queen, thus article to me ?

With that she dashed her on the lips, so dyed double red :

Hard was the heart that gave the blow ; soft were those lips that bled.

Then forced she her to swallow down, prepared for that intent,

A poisoned potion

DANIEL.

The great work of Samuel Daniel, who was bora at Taunton,
in Somersetshire, in 1562, and died in 1619, is his Civil Wars
between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, in eight Books,

1 We owe to an ingenious friend this happy emendation of the " through
withers ours " of the old copies.

DANIEL. 213

the first four published in 1595, the fifth in 1599, the sixth in
1602, the two last in 1(]09 ; the preceding Books being always,
we believe, republished along with the new edition. He is also
the author of various minor poetical productions, of which the
principal are a collection of fifty-seven Sonnets entitled Delia,
his Musophilus, containing a General Defence of Learning, some
short epistles, and several tragedies and court masques. And he
wrote, besides, in prose, a History of England, from the Conquest
to the end of the reign of Edward III., as well as a Defence of
Rhyme. Very opposite judgments have been passed upon Daniel.
Ben Jonson, in his conversations with Drummond, declared him
to be no poet : Drummond, on the contrary, pronounces him
" for sweetness of rhyming second to none." His style, both in
prose and verse, has a remarkably modern air : if it were weeded
of a few obsolete expressions, it would scarcely seem more
antique than that of Waller, which is the most modern of the
seventeenth century. Bishop Rennet, who has republished
Daniel's History, after telling us that the author had a place at
Court in the reign of King James I., being groom of the privy
chambers to the Queen, observes, that he " seems to have taken
all the refinement a court could give him ;" and probably the
absence of pedantry in his style, and its easy and natural flow,
are to be traced in great part to the circumstance of his having
been a man of the world. His verse, too, always careful and
exact, is in many passages more than smooth ; even in his dra-
matic writings (which, having nothing dramatic about them
except the form, have been held in very small estimation) it is
frequently musical and sweet, though always artificial. The
highest quality of his poetry is a tone of quiet, pensive reflection
in which he is fond of indulging, and which often rises to dignity
and eloquence, and has at times even something of depth and
originality. Daniel's was the not uncommon fate of an attendant
upon courts and the great : he is believed to have experienced
some neglect from his royal patrons in his latter days, or at least
to have been made jealous by Ben Jonson being employed to
furnish part of the poetry for the court entertainments, the supply
of which he used to have all to himself; upon which he retired
to a life of quiet and contemplation in the country. It sounds
strange in the present day to be told that his favourite retreat
from the gaiety and bustle of London was a house which he
rented in Old Street, St. Luke's. In his gardens here, we are
informed by the writer of the Life prefixed to his collected poems,
he would often indulge in entire solitude for many months, or at
most receive the visits of only a few select friends. It is said to

244 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

nave been here that he composed most of his dramatic pieces.
Towards the end of his life he retired to a farm which he had at
Beckington, near Philip's Norton, in Somersetshire, and his
death took place there. " He was married," says the editor of
his works, " but whether to the person he so often celebrates
under the name of Delia, is uncertain." Fuller, in his Worthies,
tells us that his wife's name was Justina. They had no children.
Daniel is said to have been appointed to the honorary post of
Poet Laureate after the death of Spenser.

In his narrative poetry, Daniel is in general wire-drawn, flat,
,or»d feeble. He has no passion, and very little descriptive power.
His Civil Wars has certainly as little of martial animation in it
as any poem in the language. There is abundance, indeed, of
" the tranquil mind;" but of "the plumed troops," and the rest
of *' the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," Daniel
seems, in composing this work (we had nearly written in this
composing work) to have taken as complete a farewell as Othello
himself. It is mostly a tissue of long-winded disquisition and
cold and languid declamation, and has altogether more of the
qualities of a good opiate than of a good poem. We will there-
fore take the few extracts for which we can make room from
some of his other productions, where his vein of reflection is more
in place, and also better in itself. His Musophilus is perhaps
upon the whole his finest piece. The poem, which is in the form
of a dialogue between Philocosmus (a lover of the world) au<!
Musophilus (a lover of the Muse), commences thus: —

Philocosmus.

Fond man, Musophilus, that thus dost spend
In an ungaiuful art thy dearest days,
Tiring thy wits, and toiling to no end
But to attain that idle smoke of praise !
Now, when this busy world cannot attend
The untimely music of neglected lays,
Other delights than these, other desires,
This wiser profit-seeking age requires.

Musophilus.

Friend Philocosmus, I confess indeed

I love this sacred art thou set'st so light :

And, though it never stand my life in stead,

It is enough it gives myself delight,

The whilst my unafflicted mind doth feed

On no unholy thoughts for benefit.

Be it that my unseasonable song

Come out of time, that fault is in the time ;

DANIEL. 2*5

And I must not do virtue so much wrong
As love her aught the worse for others' crime ;
And yet I find some blessed spirits among
That cherish me, and like and grace my rhyme,

A gain that 1 1 do more in soul esteem

Than all the gain of dust the world doth crave ;

And, if I may attain but to redeem

^Iy name from dissolution and the grave,

I shall have done enough ; and better deem

To have lived to be than to have died to have.

Short-breathed mortality would yet extend
That span of life so far forth as it may,
And rob her fate ; seek to beguile her end
Of some few lingering days of after-stay ;
That all this Little All might not descend
Into the dark an universal prey ;
And give our labours yet this poor delight
That, when our days do end, they are not done,
And, though we die, we shall not perish quite,
But live two lives where others have but one.

Afterwards Musophilus replies very finely to an objection of
Philocosmus to the cultivation of poetry, from the small number
of those who really cared for it : —

And for the few that only lend their ear,
That few is all the world ; which with a few
Do ever live, and move, and work, and stir.
This is the heart doth feel, and only know ;
The rest, of all that only bodies bear,
Roll up and down, and fill up but the row ;

And serve as others' members, not their own,
The instruments of those that do direct
Then, what disgrace is this, not to be known
To those know not to give themselves respect ?
And, though they swell, with pomp of folly blown,
They live ungraced, and die but in neglect.

And, for my part, if only one allow
The care my labouring spirits take in this,
He is to me a theatre large enow,
And his applause only sufficient is ;
All my respect is bent but to his brow •,
That is my all, and all I am is his.

1 Erroneously printed in the edition before us (2 vols. 12ino. 1718" " Agair
that."

246 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And, if some worthy spirits be pleased too,
It shall more comfort breed, but not more will.
But what if none ? It cannot yet undo
The love I bear unto this holy skill :
This is the thing that I was born to do ;
This is my scene ; this part must I fulfil.

It is in another poem, his Epistle to the Lady Margaret
Countess of Cumberland (mother of Lady Anne Clifford, after-
wards Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery, to whom
Daniel had been tutor), that we have the stanza ending with the
striking exclamation —

Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man !

DRAYTON.

Michael Drayton, who is computed to have been born in 1563,
and who died in 1631, is one of the most voluminous of our old
poets ; being the author, besides many minor compositions, of
three works of great length : — his Barons' Wars (on the subject
of the civil wars of the reign of Edward II.), originally entitled
Mortimeriados, under which name it was published in 1596 ; his
England's Heroical Epistles, 1598; and his Polyolbion, the first
eighteen Books of which appeared in 1612, ^Bid the whole, con-
sisting of thirty Books, and extending to as many thousand lines,
in 1622. This last is the work on which his fame principally
rests. It is a most elaborate and minute topographical descrip-
tion of England, written in Alexandrine rhymes ; and is a very
remarkable work for the varied learning it displays, as well as
for its poetic merits. The genius of Drayton is neither very ima-
ginative nor very pathetic; but he is an agreeable and weighty
writer, with an ardent, if not a highly creative, fancy. From
{EeTTieight to which he occasionally ascends, as well as from his
power of keeping longer on the wing, he must be ranked, as he
always has been, much before both Warner and Daniel. He has
greatly more elevation than the former, and more true poetic life
than the latter. The following is from the commencement of
the Thirteenth Book, or Song, of the Polyolbion, the subject of
which is the County of Warwick, of which Drayton, as he here
tells us, was a native : —

Upon the mid-lands now tho industrious muse doth fall ;
That shire which we thl \earl of England well may call,

DRAYTON. 217

As she herself extends (the midst which is decreed)
Betwixt St. Michael's Mount and Berwick bordering Tweed,
Brave Warwick, that abroad so long advanced her Bear,
By her illustrious Earls renowned every where ;
Above her neighbouring shires which always bore her hear).
My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred,
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth,
Or any good of thine thou bred'st into my birth,
Accept it as thine own, whilst now 1 sing of thee,
Of all thy later brood the unworthiest though I be.

When Phoebus lifts his head out of the water's l wave,

No sooner doth the earth her flowery bosom brave,

At such time as the year brings on the pleasant spring

But Hunt's up to the morn the feathered sylvans sing ;

And, in the lower grove as on the rising knowl,

Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole

These quiristers are perched, with many a speckled breast :

Then from her burnished gate the goodly glittering East

Gilds every mountain-top, which late the humorous night

Bespangled had with pearl, to please the morning's sight ;

On which the mirthful quires, with their clear open throat o,

Unto the joyful morn so strain their warbling notes

Thai hills and valleys ring, and even the echoing air

Seems all composed of sounds about them every where.

The throstle with shrill sharps, as purposely he song

To awake the lustless sun, or chiding that so long

He was in coming forth that should the thickets thrill ;

The woosel near at hand ; that hath a golden bill,

As nature him had marked of purjose t' let us see

That from all other birds his tunes should different be :

For with their vocal sounds they sing to pleasant May ;

Upon his dulcet pipe the merle doth only play.

When in the lower brake the nightingale hard by

In such lamenting strains the joyful hours doth ply

As though the other birds she to her tunes would draw

And, but that Nature, by her all-constraining law,

Each bird to her own kind this season doth invite,

They else, alone to hear that charmer of the night

(The more to use their ears) their voices sure would spare,

That moduleth her notes so admirably rare

As man to set in parts at first had learned of her.

To Philomel the next the linnet we prefer ;

And by that warbling the bird woodlark place we then,

The red-sparrow, the nope, the redbreast, and the wren ;

The yellow-pate, which, though she hurt the blooming tree,

Yet scarce hath any bird a finer pipe than she.

Or, perhaps, " watery." The common text gives " winter §.'

248 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And, of these chanting fowls, the goldfinch not behind,
That hath so many sorts descending from her kind.
The tydy, for her notes as delicate as they ;
The laughing hecco ; then, the counterfeiting jay.
The softer with the shrill, some hid among the leaves,
Some in the taller trees, some in the lower greaves,
Thus sing away the morn, until the mounting sun
Through thick exhaled fogs his golden head hath run,
And through the twisted tops of our close covert creeps
To kiss the gentle shade, this while that sweetly sleeps.

We will add a short specimen of Drayton's lighter style from
his Nymphidia — the account of the equipage of the Queen of
\he Fairies, when she set out to visit her lover Pigwiggeu. The
reader may compare it with Mercutio's description in Borneo and
Juliet :—

Her chariot ready straight is made ;
Each thing therein is fitting laid,
That she by nothing might be stayed,

For nought must be her letting ;
Four nimble guests the horses were,
Their harnesses of gossamer,
Fly Cranion, her charioteer,

Upon the coach-box getting.

Her chariot of a snail's fine shell,
Which for the colours did excel,
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 pied butterflee ;

I trow 'twas simple trimming.

The wheels composed of cricket's bones,
And daintily made for the nonce ;
For fear of rattling on the stones

With thistle down they shod it ;
For all her maidens much did fear
If Oberon had chanced to hear
That Mab his queen should have been them

He would not have abode it

She mounts her chariot with a trice,
Nor would she stay for no advice
Until her maids, that were so nice,

To wait on her were fitted ;
But ran herself away alone ;
Which when they heard, there was not or«r-
But hasted after to be gone,

As she had been diswitted.

JOSEPH HALL. 249

Hop, and Mop, and Drab so clear,
Pip and Trip, and Skip, that were
To Mab their sovereign so dear,

Her special maids of honour ;
Fib, and Tib, and Pink, and Pin,
Tick, and Quick, and Jill, and Jin,
Tit, and Kit, and Wap, and Win,

The train that wait upon ker.

Upon a grasshopper they got,

And, what with amble and with trot,

For hedge nor ditch they spared not,

But after her they hie them :
A cobweb over them they throw,
To shield the wind if it should blow ;
Themselves they wisely could bestow

Lest any should espy them.

JOSEPH HALL.

Joseph Hall was born in 1574, and was successively bishop
of Exeter and Norwich, from the latter of which sees having
been expelled by the Long Parliament, he died, after protracted
sufferings from imprisonment and poverty, in 1656. Hall began
his career of authorship by the publication of Three Books of
Satires, in 1597, while he was a student at Cambridge, and only
in his twenty-third year. A continuation followed the next
year under the title of Virgidemiarum the Three last Books ;
and the whole were afterwards republished together, as Virgi-
demiarum Six Books; that is, six books of bundles of rods.
" These satires," says Warton, who has given an elaborate
analysis of them, " are marked with a classical precision to which
English poetry had yet early attained. They are replete with
animation of style and sentiment. . . . The characters are
delineated in strong and lively colouring, and their discrimina-
tions are touched with the masterly traces of genuine humour.
The versification is equally energetic and elegant, and the fabric
of the couplets approaches to the modern standard."* Hall's
Satires have been repeatedly reprinted in modern times.

SYLVESTER.

One of the most popular poets of this date was Joshua Syl-
vester, the translator of The Divine Weeks and Works, and

* Hist, of Eng. Poet. iv. 338.

250 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

other productions, of the French poet Du Bartas. Sylvester has
the honour of being supposed to have been one of the early
favourites of Milton. In one of his publications he styles him-
self a Merchant- Adventurer, and he seems to have belonged to
the Puritan party, which may have had some share in influencing
Milton's regard. His translation of Du Bartas was first published
in 1605; and the seventh edition (beyond which, we believe, its
popularity did not carry it) appeared in 1641. Nothing can be
more uninspired than the general run of Joshua's verse, or more
fantastic and absurd than the greater number of its more ambi-
tious passages ; for he had no taste or judgment, and, provided
the stream of sound and the jingle of the rhyme were kept up,
all was right in his notion. His poetry consists chiefly of transla-
tions from the French ; but he is also the author of some original
pieces, the title of one of which, a courtly offering from the
poetical Puritan to the prejudices of King James, may be quoted
as a lively specimen of his style and genius : — " Tobacco battered,
and the pipes shattered, about their ears that idly idolize so base
and barbarous a weed, or at leastwise overlove so loathsome a
vanity, by a volley of holy shot thundered from Mount Helicon."*
But, with all his general flatness and frequent absurdity, Syl-
vester has an uncommon flow of harmonious words at times, and
occasionally even some fine lines and felicitous expressions. His
contemporaries called him the " Silver-tongued Sylvester," for
what they considered the sweetness of his versification — and
some of his best passages justify the title. Indeed, even when
the substance of what he writes approaches nearest to nonsense,
the sound is often very graceful, soothing the ear with something
like the swing and ring of Dryden's heroics. The commence-
ment of the following passage from his translation of Du Bartas
may remind the reader of Milton's " Hail, holy light ! offspring
of heaven first-born ": —

All hail, pure lamp, bright, sacred, and excelling ;
Sorrow and care, darkness and dread repelling ;
Thou world's great taper, wicked men's just terror,
Mother of truth, true beauty's only mirror,
God's eldest daughter ; 0 ! how thou art full
Of grace and goodness ! 0 ! how beautiful !

Bit yet, because all pleasures wax unpleasant
If without pause we still possess them present,
And none can right discern the sweets of peace
That have not felt war's irksome bitterness,

* 8vo. Lond. 1615.

CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

A ud swans seem whiter if swart crows be by

(For contraries each other best descry),

The All's architect alternately decreed

That Night the Day, the Day should Night succeed.

The Night, to temper Day's exceeding drought,
Moistens our air, and makes our earth to sprout :
The Night is she that all our travails eases,
Buries our cares, and all our griefs appeases :
The Night is she that, with her sable wing
In gloomy darkness hushing every thing,
Through all the world dumb silence doth distil,
And wearied bones with quiet sleep doth fill.

Sweet Night ! without thee, without thee, alas !
Our life were loathsome, even a hell, to pass ;
For outward pains and inward passions still,
With thousand deaths, would soul and body thrill.
0 Night, thou pullest the proud masque away
Wherewith vain actors, in this world s great play,
By day disguise them. For no difference
Night makes between the peasant and the prince,
The poor and rich, the prisoner and the judge,
The foul and fair, the master and the drudge,
The fool and wise, Barbarian and the Greek ;
For Night's black mantle covers all alike.

CHAPMAN'S HOMER.

George Chapman was born at Hitching Hill, in the county
Of Hertford, in 1557, and lived till 1634. Besides his plays,
which will be afterwards noticed, he is the author of several
original poetical pieces ; but he is best and most favourably
known by his versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. " He
would have made a great epic poet," Charles Lamb has said,
in his Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, turning to
these works after having characterized his dramas, " if, indeed,
he has not abundantly shown himself to be one : for his Homer
is not so properly a translation as the stories of Achilles
and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion which
he has put into every part of these poems would be incredible
to a reader of mere modern translations. His almost Greek zeal
for the honour of his heroes is only paralleled by that fierce
spirit of Hebrew bigotry with which Milton, as if personating
one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he sat
down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised.
The great obstacle to Chapman's translations being read is their

252 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

unconquerable quaintness. He pours out in the same breath the
most just and natural, and the most violent and forced expres-
sions. He seems to grasp whatever words come first to hand
during the impetus of inspiration, as if all other must be inade-
quate to the divine meaning. But passion (the all in all in
poetry) is everywhere present, raising the low, dignifying the
mean, and putting sense into the absurd. He makes his readers
glow, weep, tremble, take any affection which he pleases, be
moved by words or in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome
that disgust." Chapman's Homer is, in some respects, not un-
worthy of this enthusiastic tribute. Few writers have been
more copiously inspired with the genuine frenzy of poetry.
With more judgment and more care he might have given to his
native language, in his version of the Iliad, one of the very
greatest of the poetical works it possesses. In spite, however,
of a hurry and impetuosity which betray him into many mis-
translations, and, on the whole, have the effect perhaps of
giving a somewhat too tumultuous and stormy representation of
the Homeric poetry, the English into which Chapman transfuses
the meaning of the mighty ancient is often singularly and deli-
cately beautiful. He is the author of nearly all the happiest of
the compound epithets which Pope has adopted, and of many
others equally musical and expressive. '* Far-shooting Phoebus,"
— "the ever-living gods," — " the many-headed hill," — " the ivory-
wristed queen," — are a few of the felicitous combinations with
which he has enriched his native tongue. Carelessly executed,
indeed, as the work for the most part is, there is scarcely a page
of it that is not irradiated by gleams of the truest poetic genius.
Often in the midst of a long paragraph of the most chaotic versi-
fication, the fatigued and distressed ear is surprised by a few
lines, — or it may be sometimes only a single line, — " musical as
is Apollo's lute," — and sweet and graceful enough to compensate
for ten times as much ruggedness.

HAEINGTON; FAIRFAX; FANSHAWE.

Of the translators of foreign poetry which belong to this
period, three are very eminent. Sir John Harington's transla-
tion of the Orlando Furioso first appeared in 1591, when the
author was in his thirtieth year. It does not convey all the glow
and poetry of Ariosto ; but it is, nevertheless, a performance of
great ingenuity and talent. The translation of Tasso's great epic
by Edward Fairfax was first published, under the title of Godfrey

DRUMMOND. 258

of Bulloigne, or the Recoverie of Jerusalem, in 1600. This is a
work of true genius, full of passages of great beauty; and,
although by no means a perfectly exact or servile version of the
Italian original, is throughout executed with as much care as
taste and spirit.* Sir Richard Fanshawe is the author of versions
of Camoens's Lusiad, of Guarini's Pastor Fido, of the Fourth
Book of the ./Eneid, of the Odes of Horace, and of the Querer
por Solo Querer (To love for love's sake) of the Spanish dra
matist Mendoza. Some passages from the last-mentioned work,
which was published in 1649, may be found in Lamb's Speci-
mens, t the ease and flowing gaiety of which never have been
excelled even in original writing. The Pastor Fido is also
rendered with much spirit and elegance. Fanshawe is, besides,
the author of a Latin translation of Fletcher's Faithful Shep-
herdess, and of some original poetry. His genius, however, was
sprightly and elegant rather than lofty, and perhaps he does not
succeed so well in translating poetry of a more serious style.

DRUMMOND.

One of the most graceful poetical writers of the reign of
James I. is William Drummond, of Hawthornden, near Edin-
burgh ; and he is further deserving of notice as the first of his
countrymen, at least of any eminence, who aspired to write in
English. He has left us a quantity of prose as well as verse ;
the former vory much resembling the style of Sir Philip Sidney
in his Arcadia, — the latter, in manner and spirit, formed more
upon the model of Surrey, or rather upon that of Petrarch and
the other Italian poets whom Surrey and many of his English
successors imitated. No early English imitator of the Italian
poetry, however, has excelled Drummond, either in the sustained
melody of his verse, or its rich vein of thoughtful tenderness.

DAYIES.

A remarkable poem of this age, first published in 1599, is
the Nosco Teipsum of Sir John Davies, who was successively
solicitor- and attorney-general in the reign of James, and had
been appointed to the place of Chief Justice of the King's Bench,
when he died, before ho could enter upon its duties, in 1626.

* Kcprinted in the Tenth and Fourteenth Volnmes of KNIGHT'S WEEKLY
VOLUME. t Vol. ii. pp. 242—253.

2M ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Davies is also the author of a poem on dancing entitled Orchestra,
and of some minor pieces, all distinguished by vivacity as well
as precision of style ; but he is only now remembered for his
philosophical poem, the earliest of the kind in the language. It
is written in rhyme, in the common heroic ten-syllable verse, but
disposed in quatrains. No other writer has managed this difficult
stanza so successfully as Davies : it has the disadvantage of
requiring the sense to be in general closed at certain regularly
and quickly recurring turns, which yet are very ill adapted for
an effective pause ; and even all the skill of Dryden has been
unable to free it from a certain air of monotony and languor, — a
circumstance of which that poet may be supposed to have been
himself sensible, since he wholly abandoned it after one or two
early attempts. Davies, however, has conquered its difficulties ;
and, as has been observed, "perhaps no language can produce a
poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of
thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found."* In
fact, it is by this condensation and sententious brevity, so
carefully filed and elaborated, however, as to involve no sacri-
fice of perspicuity or fullness of expression, that he has attained
his end. Every quatrain is a pointed expression of a separate
thought, like one of Rochefoucault's Maxims ; each thought being,
by great skill and painstaking in the packing, made exactly to
fit and to fill the same case. It may be doubted, however,
whether Davies would not have produced a still better poem if
he had chosen a measure which would have allowed him greater
freedom and real variety ; unless, indeed, his poetical talent was
of a sort that required the suggestive aid and guidance of such
artificial restraints as he had to cope with in this, and what
would have been a bondage to a more fiery and teeming imagi-
nation was rather a support to his.

DONNE.

The title of the Metaphysical School of poetry, which in one
sense of the words might have been given to Davies and his
imitators, has been conferred by Dryden upon another race of
writers, whose founder was a contemporary of Davies, the
famous Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. Donne, who died
at the age of fifty-eight, in 1631, is said to have written most of
his poetry before the end of the sixteenth century, but none of it
was published till late in the reign of James. It consists of
* Hallam, Lit, of Europe, ii. 227

DONNE. 255

lyrical pieces (entitled Songs and Sonnets), epithalamions or
marriage songs, funeral and other elegies, satires, epistles, and
divine poems. On a superficial inspection, Donne's verses look
like so many riddles. They seem to be written upon the
principle of making the meaning as difficult to be found out as
possible — of using all the resources of language, not to express
thought, but to conceal it. Nothing is said in a direct, natural
manner ; conceit follows conceit without intermission ; the most
remote analogies, the most far-fetched images, the most un-
expected turns, one after another, surprise and often puzzle the
understanding; while things of the most opposite kinds — the
harsh and the harmonious, the graceful and the grotesque, the
grave and the gay, the pious and the profane — meet and mingle
in the strangest of dances. But, running through all this bewil-
derment, a deeper insight detects not only a vein of the most
exuberant wit, but often the sunniest and most delicate fancy,
and the truest tenderness and depth of feeling. Donne, though
in the latter part of his life he became a very serious and devout
poet as well as man, began by writing amatory lyrics, the strain
of which is anything rather than devout; and in this kind of
writing he seems to have formed his poetic style, which, for such
compositions, would, to a mind like his, be the most natural
and expressive of any. The species of lunacy which quickens
and exalts the imagination of a lover, would, in one of so seeth-
ing a brain as he was, strive to expend itself in all sorts of novel
and wayward combinations, just as Shakespeare has made it do in
his Romeo and Juliet, whose rich intoxication of spirit he has by
nothing else set so livingly before us, as by making them thus
exhaust all the eccentricities of language in their struggle to
give expression to that inexpressible passion which had taken
captive the whole heart and being of both. Donne's later poetry,
in addition to the same abundance and originality of thought,
often running into a wildness and extravagance not so excusable
here as in his erotic verses, is famous for the singular movement
of the versification, which has been usually described as the
extreme degree of the lugged and tuneless. Pope has given us a
translation of his four Satires into modern language, which he
calls The Satires of Dr. Donne Versified. Their harshness, as
contrasted with the music of his lyrics, has also been referred to
as proving that the English language, at the time when Donne
wrote, had not been brought to a sufficiently advanced state for
the writing of heroic verse in perfection.* That this last notion
is wholly unfounded, numerous examples sufficiently testify:
* See article on Donne In Penny Cyclopaedia, voL ix. p. 85.

25C ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

not to speak of the blank verse of the dramatists, the rhymed
heroics of Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Jonson, of Spenser, and
of other writers contemporary with and of earlier date than
Donne, are, for the most part, as perfectly smooth and regular as
any that have since been written; at all events, whatever
irregularity may be detected in them, if they be tested by Pope's
narrow gamut, is clearly not to be imputed to any immaturity in
the language. These writers evidently preferred and cultivated,
deliberately and on principle, a wider compass, and freer and
more varied flow, of melody than Pope had a taste or an ear for.
Nor can it be questioned, we think, that the peculiar construction
of Donne's verse in his satires and many of his other later poems
was also adopted by choice and on system. His lines, though
they will not suit the see-saw style of reading verse, — to which
he probably intended that they should be invincibly impracti-
cable,— are not without a deep and subtle music of their own, in
which the cadences respond to the sentiment, when enunciated
with a true feeling of all that they convey. They are not smooth
or luscious verses, certainly ; nor is it contended that the en-
deavour to raise them to as vigorous and impressive a tone as
possible, by depriving them of all over-sweetness or liquidity,
has not been carried too far ; but we cannot doubt that whatever
harshness they have was designedly given to them, and was
conceived to infuse into them an essential part of their relish.
Here is one of Donne's Songs : —

Sweetest love, I do not go

For weariness of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter love for me ;

But, since that I
Must die at last, 'tis best
Thus to use myself in jest
By feigned death to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence,

And yet is here to-day ;

He hath no desire nor sense,

Nor half so short a way :

Then fear not me,
But believe that I shall make
Hastier journeys, since I take

More wings and spurs than ho
0 how feeble is man's power !

That, if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
.,. . Nor a lost hour recall ;

SHAKESPEARE. 257

But come bad chance,
And we join to it our strength,
And we teach it art and length

Iteclf o'er us to advance.

When thou sigh'st thou sigh'st not wJTid,

But sigh'st my soul away ;
When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,
My life's blood doth decay.

It cannot be

That thou lov'st me as thou say'st,
If in thine my life thou waste.
Which art the life of me.

Let not thy divining heart

Forethink me any ill ;
Destiny may take thy part
And may thy fears fulfil ;

But think that we
Are but laid aside to sleep :
They who one another keep
Alive ne'er parted be.

Somewhat fantastic as this may be thought, it is surely,
notwithstanding, full of feeling; and nothing can be more
delicate than the execution. Nor is it possible that the writer
of such verses can have wanted an ear for melody, however
capriciously he may have sometimes experimented upon lan-
guage, in the effort, as we conceive, to bring a deeper, more
expressive music out of it than it would readily yield.

SHAKESPEARE'S MINOR POEMS.

In the long list of the minor names of the Elizabethan poetry
appears the bright name of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare
published his Venus and Adonis in 1593, and his Tarquin and
Lucrece in 1594; his Passionate Pilgrim did not appear till
1599 ; the Sonnets not till 1609. It is probable, however, that
the first mentioned of these pieces, which, in his dedication of it
to the Earl of Southampton, he calls the first heir of his invention,
was written some years before its publication; and, although
the Tarquin and Lucrece may have been published immediately
after it was composed, it, too, may be accounted an early pro-
duction. But, although this minor poetry of Shakespeare sounds
throughout like the utterance of that spirit of highest invention
and sweetest song before it had found its proper theme, much is
lero also, immature as it may be, that is still all Shakespearian

258 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

—the vivid conception, the inexhaustible fertility and richness
of thought and imagery, the glowing passion, the gentleness
withal that is ever of the poetry as it was of the man, the
enamoured sense of beauty, the living words, the ear-delighting
and heart-enthralling music; nay, even the dramatic instinct
itself, and the idea at least, if not always the realization, of that
sentiment of all subordinating and consummating art of which
his dramas are the. most wonderful exemplification in literature.

SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMATIC WORKS.

Shakespeare, born in 1564, is enumerated as one of the
proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1589; is sneered at
by Robert Greene in 1592, in terms which seem to imply that
he had already acquired a considerable reputation as a dramatist
and a writer in blank verse, though the satirist insinuates that
he was enabled to make the show he did chiefly by the plunder
of his predecessors ;* and in 1598 is spoken of by a critic of the
day as indisputably the greatest of English dramatists, both for
tragedy and comedy, and as having already produced his Two
Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labours Lost,
Love's Labours Won (generally supposed to be All's Well that
Ends Well),! Midsummer Night's Dream, Merchant of Venice,
Eichard II., Eichard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andro-
nicus, and Eomeo and Juliet.J There is no ground, however,
for feeling assured, and, indeed, it is rather improbable, that we
have here a complete catalogue of the plays written by Shake-
speare up to this date ; nor is the authority of so evidently loose
a statement, embodying, it is to be supposed, the mere report of
the town, sufficient even to establish absolutely the authenticity
of every one of the plays enumerated. It is very possible, for

^ * " There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his
tiger's heart wrapt in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast
out a blank verse as the best of you ; and, being an absolute Johannes Fac-
totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Sh*,ke-8cene in a country." — Greene's
Groatsworth of Wit, 1592.

f But the Bev. Joseph Hunter, in the Second Part of New Illustrations of
the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, 8vo. Lond. 1844, and pre-
viously in a Disquisition on the Tempest, separately published, has contended
(.hat it must be the Tempest ; and I have more recently stated some reasons
for supposing that it may be the Taming of the Shrew (see The English of
Shakespeare, 1857 ; Prolegomena, pp. 8, 9).

t Palladis Tamia ; Wit's Treasury. Being the Second Part of Wit's Com-
monwealth. By Francis Meres. 1598, p. 282.

SHAKESPEARE. 259

example, that Meres may be mistaken in assigning Titus Airlro-
aiciis to Shakespeare ; and, on the other hand, he may be the
author of Pericles, and may havo already written that play and
some others, although Meres does not mention them. The only
other direct or positive information we possess on this subject is,
that a History called Titus Andronicus, presumed to be the play
afterwards published as Shakespeare's, was entered for publica-
tion at Stationers' Hall in 1 593 ; that the Second Part of Henry
VI. (if it is by ShakespeareX in its original form of The First
Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York
and Lancaster, was published in 1594; the Third Part of Henry
VI. (if by Shakespeare), in its original form of The True Tragedy
of Richard Duke of York, in Io95 ; his Richard II., Richard III.,
and Romeo and Juliet, in 1597 ; Love's Labours Lost and the
First Part of Henry IV. in 1598 (the latter, however, having
been entered at Stationers' Hall the preceding year) ; "a
corrected and augmented" edition of Romeo and Juliet in 1599 ;
Titus Andronicus (supposing it to be Shakespeare's), the Second
Part of Henry IV., Henry V., in its original form, the Mid-
summer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and tho
Merchant of Venice, in 1600 (the last having been entered at
Stationers' Hall in 1598) ; the Merry Wives of Windsor, in its
original form, in 1602 (but entered at Stationers' Hall the year
before*); Hamlet in 1603 (entered likewise the year before); a
second edition of Hamlet, " enlarged to almost as much again as
it was, according to the true and perfect copy," in 1604; Lear
•n 1608, and Troilus and Cressida, and Pericles, in 1609 (each
being entered the preceding year) ; Othello not till 1622, six
years after tho author's death ; and all the other plays, namely,
the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Winter's Tale, the Comedy
of Errors, King John, All's Well that Ends Well, As You Liko
It, King Henry VIII., Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, Macbeth;
the Taming of the Shrew, Julius Csesar, Antony and Cleopatra,
Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, the Tempest, Twelfth Night, the
First Part of Henry VI. (if Shakespeare had anything to do with
that playfj, and also the perfect editions of Henry V., the Merry
Wives of Windsor, and the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI.,

* This first sketch of the Merry Wives of Windsor has been reprinted for
the Shakespeare Society, under the care of Mr. Halliwell, 1842.

t See upon this question Mr. Knight's Essay upon the Three Parts of Kin?:
Henry VI., and King Richard ILL, in the Seventh Volume of his Library
Edition of Shakspere, pp. 1—119. And see also Mr. Halli well's Introduc-
tion to the reprint of The First Sketches of the Second and Third Parts 01
King Henry the Sixth (the First Part of the Contention and the True Tra-
gedy), edited by him for the Shakespeare Society, 1843.

2GO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

rot, so far as is known, till they appear, along with tho*j
formerly printed, in the first folio, in 1 623.

Such then is the sum of the treasure that Shakespeare has left
us; hut the revolution which his genius wrought upon our
national drama is placed in the clearest light by comparing his
earliest plays with the hest which the language possessed before
his time. He has made all his predecessors obsolete. While
his Merchant of Venice, and his Midsummer Night's Dream, and
his Eomeo and Juliet, and his King John, and his Richard II.,
and his Henry IV., and his Richard III., all certainly produced,
as we have seen, before the year 1598, are still the most univer-
sally familiar compositions in our literature, no other dramatic
work that had then been written is now popularly read, or
familiar to anybody except to a few professed investigators of the
antiquities of our poetry. Where are now the best productions
even of such writers as Greene, and Peele, and Marlow, and
Decker, and Marston, and Webster, and Thomas Heywood, and
Middleton ? They are to be found among our Select Collections
of Old Plays, — publications intended rather for the mere preserv-
ation of the pieces contained in them, than for their diffusion
among a multitude of readers. Or, if the entire works of a few
of these elder dramatists have recently been collected and
republished, this has still been done only to meet the demand of
a comparatively very small number of curious students, anxious
to possess and examine for themselves whatever relics are still
recoverable of the old world of our literature. Popularly known
and read the works of these writers never again will be : there
is no more prospect or probability of this than there is that the
plays of Shakespeare will ever lose their popularity among his
countrymen. In that sense, everlasting oblivion is their portion,
as everlasting life is his. In one form only have they any chance
of again attracting some measure of the general attention — namely,
in the form of such partial and very limited exhibition as Lamb
has given us an example of in his Specimens. And herein we
see the first great difference between the plays of Shakespeare
and those of his predecessors, and one of the most immediately
conspicuous of the improvements which he introduced into
dramatic writing. He did not create our regular drama, but ho
regenerated and wholly transformed it, as if by breathing into it
a new soul. We possess no dramatic production anterior to his
appearance that is at once a work of high genius and of anything
[ike equably sustained power throughout. Very brilliant flights
of poetry there are in many of the pieces of our earlier dramatists ;
but the higher they soar in one scei'.e, the lower they generally

SHAKESPEARE. 261

*eem to think it expedient to sink in the next. Their great
efforts are made only by fits and starts : for the most part il
must be confessed that the best of them are either merely extra-
vagant and absurd, or do nothing but trifle or doze away ovei
their task with the expenditure of hardly any kind of faculty at
all. This may have arisen in part from their own want of
judgment or want of painstaking, in part from the demands of a
very rude condition of the popular taste ; but the effect is to
invest all that they have bequeathed to us with an air of bar-
barism, and to tempt us to take their finest displays of successful
daring for more capricious inspirations, resembling the sudden
impulses of fuiy by which the listless and indolent man of the
woods will sometimes be roused for the instant from his habitual
laziness and passiveness to an exhibition of superhuman strength
and activity. From this savage or savage-looking state our
drama was first redeemed by Shakespeare. Even Milton has
spoken of his " wood-notes wild ;" and Thomson, more uncere-
moniously, has baptized him " wild Shakespeare,"* — as if a sort
of half insane irregularity of genius were the quality that chiefly
distinguished him from other great writers. If he be a " wild "
writer, it is in comparison with some dramatists and poets of
succeeding times, who, it must be admitted, are sufficiently
tame : compared with the dramatists of his own age and of the
age immediately preceding, — with the general throng of the
writers from among whom he emerged, and the coruscations of
whose feebler and more desultory genius he has made pale, — he
is distinguished from them by nothing which is more visible at
the first glance than by the superior regularity and elaboration
that mark his productions. Marlow, and Greene, and Kyd may
be called wild, and wayward, and careless ; but the epithets are
inapplicable to Shakespeare, by whom, in truth, it was that tho
rudeness of our early drama was first refined, and a spirit of high
art put into it, which gave it order and symmetry as well as
elevation. JJu_was the union of the most consummate judgment
with the highest creative power that m;ule Shakespeare the
le that he was, — if, indeed, we ought not rather to say that
8"nch an endowment as his of the poetical faculty necessarily
implied the clearest and truest discernment as well as the utmost
productive energy, — even as the most intense heat must illuminate
as well as warm.

But, undoubtedly, his dramas are distinguished from those of
his predecessors by much more than merely this superiority in

• " Is not wild Shakespeare thine and Nature's boast ?' —Thomson's Summer.

202 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the general principles upon which they are constructed. Sucb
rare passages of exquisite poetry, and scenes of sublimity or true
passion, as sometimes brighten the dreary waste of their produc-
tions, are equalled or excelled in almost every page of his ; —
" the highest heaven of invention," to which they ascend only
in far distant flights, and where their strength of pinion never
sustains them long, is the familiar home of his genius. Other
qualities, again, which charm us in his plays are nearly unknown
in theirs. He first informed our drama with true wit and
humour. Or boisterous, uproarious, blackguard merriment and
buffoonery there is no want in our earlier dramatists, nor oi'
mere gibing and jeering and vulgar personal satire ; but of true
airy wit there is little or none. In the comedies of Shakespeare
the wit plays and dazzles like dancing light. This seems to have
been the excellence, indeed, for which he was most admired by
his contemporaries ; for quickness and felicity of repartee they
placed him above all other play- writers. But his humour was
still more his own than his wit. In that rich but delicate and
subtile spirit of drollery, moistening and softening whatever it
touches like a gentle oil, and penetrating through all enfoldings
and rigorous encrustments into the kernel of the ludicrous that
is in everything, which mainly created Malvolio, and Shallow,
and Slender, and Dogberry, and Verges, and Bottom, and Lance-
lot, and Launce, and Costard, and Touchstone, and a score of
other clowns, fools, and simpletons, and which, gloriously over-
flowing in Falstaff, makes his wit exhilarate like wine, Shake-
speare has had almost as few successors as he had predecessors.

And in these and all his other delineations he has, like eveiy
other great poet, or artist, not merely observed and described,
but, as we have said, created, or invented. It is often laid down
that the drama should be a faithful picture or representation of
real life ; or, if this doctrine be given up in regard to the tragic
or more impassioned drama, because even kings and queens in
the actual world never do declaim in the pomp of blank verse, as
they do on the stage, still it is insisted that in comedy no
character is admissible that is not a transcript, — a little em-
bellished perhaps, — but still substantially a transcript from some
genuine flesh and blood original. But Shakespeare has shown
that it belongs to such an imagination as his to create in comedy,
as well as in tragedy or in poetry of any other kind. Most of
the characters that have just been mentioned are as truly the
mere creations of the poet's brain as are Ariel, or Caliban, or the
Witches in Macbeth. If any modern critic will have it that
Sahkespeare must have actually seen Malvolio, and Launce, and

SHAKESPEARE. 263

Touchstone, before he could or at least would have drawn them,
we would ask the said critic if he himself has ever seen such
characters in real life ; and, if he acknowledge, as he needs must,
that he never has, we would then put it to him to tell us why
the contemporaries of the great dramatist might not have enjoyed
them in his plays without ever having seen them elsewhere, just
as we do, — or, in other words, why such delineations might not
have perfectly fulfilled their dramatic purpose then as well as
now, when they certainly do not represent anything that is to be
seen upon earth, any more than do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
There might have been professional clowns and fools in the ago
of Shakespeare such as are no longer extant ; but at no time did
there ever actually exist such fools and clowns as his. These
and other similar personages of the Shakespearian drama are as
much mere poetical phantasmata as are the creations of the
kindred humour of Cervantes. Are they the less amusing or in-
teresting, however, on that account ? — do we the less sympathize*
with them ?— nay, do we feel that they are the less naturally
drawn ? that they have for us less of a truth and life than tho
most faithful copies from the men and women of the real
world ?

But in the region of reality, too, there is no other drama so
rich as that of Shakespeare. He has exhausted the old world of
our actual experience as well as imagined for us new worlds
of his own.* What other anatomist of the human heart has
searched its hidden core, and laid bare all the strength and
weakness of our mysterious nature, as he has done in the gush-
ing tenderness of Juliet, and the "fine frenzy" of the discrowned
Lear, and the sublime melancholy of Hamlet, and the wrath of
the perplexed and tempest-torn Othello, and the eloquent mis-
anthropy of Timon, and the fixed hate of Shylock? What other
poetry has given shape to anything half so terrific as Lady
Macbeth, or so winning as Rosalind, or so full of gentlest
womanhood as Desdemona ? In what other drama do we behold
so living a humanity as in his ? Who has given us a scene
either so crowded with diversities of character, or so stirred
with the heat and hurry of actual existence ? The men and the
manners of all countries and of all ages are there : the lovers
and warriors, the priests and prophetesses, of the old heroic and
kingly times of Greece,— the Athenians of the days of Pericles
and Alcibiades, — the proud patricians and turbulent commonal ty
of the earliest period of republican Rome, — Crcsar, and Brutus,

* " Each change of many-coloured life he drew.

Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."— Johnson.

2G4, ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

and Cassius, and Antony, and Cleopatra, and the other splendid
figures of that later Koman scene,— the kings, and queens, and
princes, and courtiers of barbaric Denmark, and Roman Britain,
nnd Britain before the Romans, — those of Scotland before the
Norman Conquest, — those of England and France at the era
of Magna Charta,— all ranks of the people of almost every
reign of our subsequent history from the end of the fourteenth
to the middle of the sixteenth century, — not to speak of Venice,
and Verona, and Mantua, and Padua, and Illyria, and Navarre,
and the Forest of Arden, and all the other towns and lands
which he has peopled for us with their most real inhabitants.

Nor even in his plays is Shakespeare merely a dramatist.
Apart altogether from ;his dramatic power he is the greatest
;poet that ever lived. His sympathy is the most universal, his
imagination the most plastic, his diction the most expressive,
ever given to any writer. His 'poetry has in itself the power and
varied excellences of all other poetry. While in grandeur, and
beauty, and :passion, and sweetest music, and all the other higher
gifts of song, he may be ranked with the greatest, — with Spenser,
and Chaucer, and Milton, and Dante, and Homer, — he is at the
same time more nervous than Dryden, and more sententious than
Pope, and more sparkling and of more abounding conc&it, when
he chooses, than Donne, or Cowley, or Butler. In whose
handling was language ever such a flame of fire as it is in his ?
His wonderful potency in the use of this instrument would alone
set him above all other writers.* Language has been called the
costume of thought : it is such a costume as leaves are to the
tree or blossoms to the flower, and grows out of what it adorns.
Every great and original writer accordingly has distinguished,
and as it were individualised, himself as much by his diction as
by even the sentiment which it embodies ; and the invention of
such a distinguishing style is one of the most unequivocal
evidences of genius. But Shakespeare has invented twenty
styles. He has a style for every one of his great characters, by

* Whatever may be the extent of the vocabulary of the English language,
it is certain that the most copious writer has not employed more than a frac-
tion of the entire number of words of which it consists. It has been stated
that some inquiries set on foot by the telegraph companies have led to the
conclusion that the number of words in ordinary use does not exceed 3000.
A rough calculation, founded on Mrs. Clarke's Concordance, gives about
21,000 as the number to be found in the Plays of Shakespeare, without count-
ing inflectional forms as distinct words. Probably the vocabulary of no other
of our great writers is nearly so extensive. Todd's Verbal Index would not
give us more than about 7000 for Milton ; so that, if we were to add even fifty
per cent, to compensate for Milton's inferior voluminousness, the Miltouic
vocabulary would still be not more than half as copious as the Shakespearian.

SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES. 2G5

which that character is distinguished from every other as much
as Pope is distinguished by his style from Dryden, or Milton
From Spenser. And yet all the while it is he himself with his
own peculiar accent that we hear in every one of them. The
style, or manner of expression, that is to say, — and, if the manner
of expression, then also the manner of thinking, of which the
expression is always the product —is at once both that which
belongs to the particular character and that which is equally
natural to the poet, the conceiver and creator of the character.
This double individuality, or combination of two individuali-
ties, is inherent of necessity in all dramatic writing ; it is what
distinguishes the imaginative here from the literal, the artistic
from the real, a scene of a play from a police report. No more
in this than in any other kind of literature, properly so called,
can we dispense with that infusion of the mind from which the
work has proceeded, of something belonging to that mind and to
no other, which is the very life or constituent principle of all
art, the one thing that makes the difference between a creation
and a copy, between the poetical and the mechanical.

DRAMATISTS CONTEMPORARY WITH SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare died in 1616. The space of a quarter of a
century, or more, over which his career as a writer for the stage
extends, is illustrated also by the names of a crowd of other
dramatists, many of them of very remarkable genius ; but Shake-
speare is distinguished from the greater number of his contem-
poraries nearly as much as he is from his immediate predecessors.
\Vith regard to the latter, it has been well observed by a critic
cf eminent justness and delicacy of taste, that, while they " pos-
sessed great power over the passions, had a deep insight into the
darkest depths of human nature, and were, moreover, in the
highest sense of the word, poets, of that higher power of creation
with which Shakespeare was endowed, and by which he was
enabled to call up into vivid existence all the various characters
of men and all the events of human life, Mario w and his con
temporaries had no great share, — so that their best dramas may
be said to represent to us only gleams and shadowings of mind,
confused and hurried actions, from which we are rather led to
guess at the nature of the persons acting before ns than instan-
taneously struck with a perfect knowledge of it ; and, even amid
their highest efforts, with them the fictions of the drama are felt
to be but faint semblances of reality. If we seek for a poetical

266 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

image, a burst of passion, a beautiful sentiment, a trait of nature,
we seek not in vain in the works of our very oldest dramatists,
But none of the predecessors of Shakespeare must be thought of
along with him, when he appears before us, like Prometheus,
moulding the figures of men, and breathing into them the anima-
tion and all the passions of life."* " The same," proceeds this
writer, "maybe said of almost all his illustrious contemporaries.
Few of them ever have conceived a consistent character, and
given a perfect drawing and colouring of it ; they have rarely,
indeed, inspired us with such belief in the existence of their
personages as we often feel towards those of Shakespeare, and
which makes us actually unhappy unless we can fully under-
stand everything about them, so like are they to living men. . . .
The plans of their dramas are irregular and confused, their
characters often wildly distorted, and an air of imperfection and
incompleteness hangs in general over the whole composition; so
that the attention is wearied out, the interest flags, and we
rather hurry on, than are hurried, to the horrors of the final
catastrophe. "j" In other words, the generality of the dramatic
writers who were contemporary with Shakespeare still belong
to the semi-barbarous school which subsisted before he began to
write.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Of the dramatic writers of the present period that hold rank
the nearest to Shakespeare, the names of Beaumont and Fletcher
must be regarded as indicating one poet rather than two, for it is
impossible to make anything of the contradictory accounts that
have been handed down as to their respective shares in the plays
published in their conjoint names, and the plays themselves
furnish no evidence that is more decisive. The only ascertained
facts relating to this point are the following : — that John Fletcher
was about ten years older than his friend Francis Beaumont, the
former having been born in 1576, the latter in 1585; that
Beaumont, however, so far as is known, came first before the
world as a writer of poetry, his translation of the story of
Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, from the Fourth Book of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, having been published in 1602, when he was
only in his seventeenth year ; that the Masque of the Inner
Temple and Gray's Inn (consisting of only a few pages), pro-

* Analytical Essays on the Early English Dramatists (understood to be bj
the late Henry MacKenzie), in Blackwood's Magazine, vol. ii. p. 657
f Blackwood's Magazine, vol. ii. p. 657

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 2G7

duced in 1612, was written by Beaumont alone; that the
pastoral drama of the Faithful Shepherdess is entirely Fletcher's ;
«,hat the first published of the pieces which have been ascribed
to the two associated together, the comedy of The \Voman-Hater,
appeared in 1607 ; that Beaumont died in March, 1616 ; and
that, between that date and the death of Fletcher, in 1625, there
were brought out, as appears from the note -book of Sir Henry
Herbert, Deputy Master of the Revels, at least eleven of the
plays found in the collection of their works, besides two others
that were brought out in 1626, and two more that are lost.
Deducting the fourteen pieces which thus appear certainly to
belong to Fletcher exclusively (except that in one of them, The
Maid in the Mill, he is said to have been assisted by Eowlcy),
there still remain thirty-seven or thirty-eight which it is possible
they may have written together in the nine or ten years over
which their poetical partnership is supposed to have extended.*
Eighteen of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, including the
Masque by the former and the Pastoral by the latter, were pub-
blished separately before 1640 ; thirty-four more were first pub
lished together in a folio volume in 1647 ; and the whole were
reprinted, with the addition of a comedy, supposed to have been
lost (The Wild Goose Chase), f making a collection of fifty-three
pieces in all, in another folio, in 1679. Beaumont and Fletcher
want altogether that white heat of passion by which Shakespeare
fuses all things into life and poetry at a touch, often making a
single brief utterance flash upon us a full though momentary
view of a character, which all that follows deepens and fixes,
and makes the more like to actual seeing with the eyes and
hearing with the ears. His was a deeper, higher, in every way
more extended and capacious nature than theirs. They want his
profound meditative philosophy as much as they do his burning
poetry. Neither have they avoided nearly to the same degree
that he has done the degradation of their fine gold by the inter-
mixture of baser metal. They have given us all sorts of writing,
good, bad, and indifferent, in abundance. Without referring in
particular to what we now deem the indecency and licentious-
ness which pollutes all their plays, but which, strange to say,
seems not to have been looked upon in that light by anybody in
their own age, simply because it is usually wrapped in very
transparent double entendre, they might, if judged by nearly one-

* One, the comedy of The Coronation, is also attributed to Shirley.

t This play, one of the best of Fletcher's comedies, for it was not produced
till some years after Beaumont's death, had been previously recovered and
printed by itself in 1652.

263 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

half of all they have left us, be held to belong to almost tho
lowest rank of our dramatists instead of to the highest. There
is scarcely one of their dramas that does not bear marks of haste
and carelessness, or of a blight in some part or other from the
playhouse tastes or compliances to which they were wont too
easily to give themselves up when the louder applause of the
day and the town made them thoughtless of their truer fame.
But fortunately, on the other hand, in scarcely any of their
pieces is the deformity thus occasioned more than partial : the
circumstances in which they wrote have somewhat debased the
produce of their fine genius, but their genius itself suffered
nothing from the unworthy uses it was often put to. It springs
up again from the dust and mud, as gay a creature of the
element as ever, soaring and singing at heaven's gate as if it
had never touched the ground. Nothing can go beyond the
flow and brilliancy of the dialogue of these writers in their
happier scenes ; it is the richest stream of real conversation,
edged with the fire of poetry. For the drama of Beaumont and
Fletcher is as essentially poetical and imaginative, though not in
so high a style, as that of Shakespeare ; and they, too, even if
they were not great dramatists, would still be great poets.
Much of their verse is among the sweetest in the language;
and many of the lyrical passages, in particular, with which their
plays are interspersed, have a diviner soul of song in them than
almost any other compositions of the same class. As dramatists
they are far inferior to Shakespeare, not only, as we have said,
in striking development and consistent preservation of character,
'— in other words, in truth and force of conception, — but also
both in the originality and the variety of their creations in that
department ; they have confined themselves to a comparatively
small number of broadly distinguished figures, which they
delineate in a dashing, scene-painting fashion, bringing out their
peculiarities rather by force of situation, and contrast with, one
another, than by the form and aspect with, which each individually
looks forth and emerges from the canvas. But all the resources
of this inferior style of art they avail themselves of with the
boldness of conscious power, and with wonderful skill and effect.
Their invention of plot and incident is fertile in the highest
degree ; and in the conduct of a story for the mere purposes of
the stage, — for keeping the attention of an audience awake and
their expectation suspended throughout the whole course of the
action, — they excel Shakespeare, who, aiming at higher things,
and producing his more glowing pictures by fewer strokes, is
careless about the mere excitement of curiosity, whereas they

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 2G9

are tempted to linger as long as possible over every scene, both
for that end, and because their proper method of evolving cha-
racter and passion is by such delay and repetition of touch upon
touch. By reason principally of this difference, the plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher, in the great days of the stage, and so
long as the state of public manners tolerated their licence and
grossness, were much greater favourites than those of Shake-
speare in our theatres; two of theirs, Dryden tells us, were
acted in his time for one of Shakespeare's ; their intrigues, —
their lively and florid but not subtle dialogue, — their strongly-
marked but somewhat exaggerated representations of character,
— their exhibitions of passion, apt to run a little into the melo-
dramatic,— were more level to the general apprehension, and
were found to be more entertaining, than his higher art and
grander poetry. Beaumont and Fletcher, as might be inferred
from what has already been said, are, upon the whole, greater in
comedy than in tragedy ; and they seem themselves to have fell
that their genius led them more to the former, — for, of their
plays, only ten are tragedies, while their comedies amount to
twenty -four or twenty- five, the rest being what were then called
tragi- comedies — in many of which, however, it is true, the
interest is, in part at least, of a tragic character, although the
story ends happily.* But, on the other hand, all their tragedies
have also some comic passages ; and, in regard to this matter,
indeed, their plays may be generally described as consisting, in
the words of the prologue to one of them,! of

" Passionate scenes mixed with no vulgar mirth."

Undoubtedly, taking them all in all, they have left us the richest
and most magnificent drama we possess after that of Shakespeare ;
the most instinct and alive both with the true dramatic spirit
and with that of general poetic beauty and power; the most
brilliantly lighted up with wit and humour; the freshest and
most vivid, as well as various, picture of human manners and
passions ; the truest mirror, and at the same time the finest em-
bellishment, of nature.

* The following definition of what was formerly understood by the terra
tragi-coraedy, or tragic-comedy, is given by Fletcher in the preface to big
Faithful Shepherdess :— " A tragic-comedy is not so called in respect of
mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths (which is enough to make it
no tragedy) : yet brings some near to it (wliich is enough to make it no
comedy) : which [viz. tragic-comedy] must be a representation of familiar
people, with such kind of trouble as no life can be without ; so tliat ft god n
as lawful in 1 1 is as in a tragedy ; and rneau people as in a comedy/

t The Custom of the Country.

270 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

JONSON.

Ben Jonson was born in 1574, or two years before Fletcher,
whom he survived twelve years, dying in 1637. He is supposed
to have begun to write for the stage so early as 1593 ; but
nothing that he produced attracted any attention till his Comedy
of Every Man in his Humour was brought out at the Eose
Theatre in 1596. This play, greatly altered and improved, was
published in 1598 : and between that date and his death Jonson
produced above fifty more dramatic pieces in all, of which ten
are comedies, three what he called comical satires, only two
tragedies, and all the rest masques, pageants, or other court en-
tertainments. His two tragedies of Sejanus and Catiline are
admitted on all hands to be nearly worthless : and his fame rests
almost entirely upon his first comedy, his three subsequent
comedies of Volpone or The Fox, Epicoene or The Silent Woman,
and The Alchemist, his court Masques, and a Pastoral entitled
The Sad Shepherd, which was left unfinished at his death. Ben
Jonson's comedies admit of no comparison with those of Shake-
speare or of Beaumont and Fletcher : he belongs to another school.
His plays are professed attempts to revive, in English, the old
classic Koman drama, and aim in their construction at a rigorous
adherence to the models afforded by those of Plautus, and
Terence, and Seneca. They are admirable for their elaborate
art, which is, moreover, informed by a power of strong concep-
tion of a decidedly original character ; they abound both in wit
and eloquence, which in some passages rises to the glow of
poetry ; the figures of the scene stand out in high relief, every
one of them, from the most important to the most insignificant,
being finished off at all points with the minutest care ; the
dialogue carries on the action, and is animated in many parts
with the right dramatic reciprocation ; and the plot is in general
contrived and evolved with the same learned skill, and the same
attention to details, that are shown in all other particulars.
But the execution, even where it is most brilliant, is hard and
angular ; nothing seems to flow naturally and freely ; the wh.ile
lias an air of constraint, and effort, and exaggeration; and the
effect that is produced by the most arresting passages is the most
undramatic that can be, — namely, a greater sympathy with the
performance as a work of art than as anything else. It may bo
added that Jonson's characters, though vigorously delineated,
and though not perhaps absolutely false to nature, are most
of them rather of the class of her occasional excrescences or
eccentricities than samples of any general humanity; they «jre

MASSiNGER; FORD. 271

the oddities and perversions of a particular age or state of
manners, and have no universal truth or interest. What is
called the humour of Jonson consists entirely in the exhibition
of the more ludicrous kinds of these morbid aberrations ; like
everything about him, it has force and raciness enough, but
will be most relished by those who are most amused by dancing
bears and other shows of that class. It seldom or never makes
the heart laugh, like the humour of Shakespeare, — which is,
indeed, a quality of altogether another essence. • As a poet,
Jonson is greatest in his masques and other court pageants.
The airy elegance of these compositions is a perfect contrast to
the stern and rugged strength of his other works ; the lyrical
parts of them especially have often a grace and sportiveness, a
flow as well as a finish, the effect of which is very brilliant.
Still, even in these, we want the dewy light and rich coloured
irradiation of the poetry of Shakespeare and Fletcher: the
lustre is pure and blight, but at the same time cold and sharp,
like that of crystal. In Jonson's unfinished pastoral of The Sad
Shepherd there is some picturesque description and more very
harmonious verse, and the best parts of it (much of it is poor
enough) are perhaps in a higher style than anything else he has
written ; but to compare it, as has sometimes been done, either
as a poem or as a drama, with The Faithful Shepherdess of
Fletcher seems to us to evince a deficiency of true feeling for the
highest things, equal to what would be shown by preferring, as
has also been done by some critics, the humour of Jonson to
that of Shakespeare. Fletcher's pastoral, blasted as it is in some
parts by fire not from heaven, is still a green and leafy wilder-
ness of poetical beauty ; Jonson's, deformed also by some brutality
more elaborate than anything of the same sort in Fletcher, is at
the best but a trim garden, and, had it been ever so happily
finished, would have been nothing more.

MASSINGER; FORD.

After Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Jonson, the
next great name in our drama is that of Philip Massinger, whc
was born in 1584, and is supposed to have begun to write for
the stage soon after 1606, although his^first published play, his
tragedy of The Virgin Martyr, in which he was assisted by
Decker, did not appear till 1622. Of thirty-eight dramatic
pieces which he is said to have written, only eighteen have been

272 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

preserved ; eight others were in the collection of Mr. Warburton,
•which his servant destroyed. Massinger, like Jonson, had
received a learned education, and his classic reading has coloured
his style and manner ; but he had scarcely so much originality
of genius as Jonson. He is a very eloquent writer, but has little
power of high imagination or pathos, and still less wit or comic
power. He could rise, however, to a vivid conception of a charac-
ter moved by some single aim or passion ; and he has drawn
some of the darker shades of villany with great force. His
Sir Giles Overreach, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and his
Luke in the City Madam, are perhaps his most successful
delineations in this style. In the conduct of his plots, also, he
generally displays much skill. In short, all that can be reached
by mere talent and warmth of susceptibility he has achieved;
but his province was to appropriate and decorate rather than to
create.

John Ford, the author of about a dozen plays that have sur-
vived, and one of whose pieces is known to have been acted so
early as 1613, has one quality, that of a deep pathos, perhaps
more nearly allied to high genius than any Massinger has
shown ; but the range of the latter in the delineation of action
and passion is so much more extensive, that we can hardly
refuse to regard him as the greater dramatist. Ford's blank
verse is not so imposing as Massinger's; but it has often a
delicate beauty, sometimes a warbling wildness and richness,
beyond anything in Massinger's fuller swell.

LATER ELIZABETHAN PROSE WRITERS.

By the end of the sixteenth century, our prose, as exhibited
in its highest examples, if it had lost something in ease and
clearness, had gained considerably in copiousness, in sonorous-
ness, and in splendour. In its inferior specimens, also, a
corresponding change is to be traced, but of a modified character.
In these the ancient simplicity and directness had given place
only to a long-winded wordiness, and an awkwardness and
intricacy, sometimes so excessive as to be nearly unintelligible,
produced by piling clause upon clause, and involution upon
involution, in the endeavour to crowd into every sentence as
much meaning or as many particulars as possible. Here the
change was nearly altogether for the worse; the loss in one
direction was compensated by hardly anything that could be
called a gain in another. It ought also to be noticed that

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 273

towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth a singularly artificial
mcde of composition became fashionable, more especially in
sermons and other theological writings, consisting mainly in
the remotest or most recondite analogies of thought and the
most elaborate verbal ingenuities or conceits. This may be
designated the opposite pole in popular preaching to what we
have in the plainness and simplicity, natural sometimes even
to buffoonery, of Latimer,

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.

The authorized translation of the Bible, on the whole so
admirable both for correctness and beauty of style, is apt, on tho
first thought, to be regarded as exhibiting the actual state of
the language in the time of James I., when it was first pub
lished. It is to be remembered, however, that the new transla-
tion was formed, by the special directions of the king, upon the
basis of that of Parker's, or the Bishops' Bible, which had been
made nearly forty years before, and which had itself been
founded upon that of Cranmer, made in the reign of Heniy VIII.
The consequence is, as Mr. Hallam has remarked, that, whether
the style of King James's translation be the perfection of the
English language or no, it is not the language of his reign. " It
may, in the eyes of many," adds Mr. Hallam, "be a better
English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Ealeigh, or
Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact,
especially in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and
with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in
provincial use."* This is, perhaps, rather strongly put; for
although the preceding version served as a general guide to
the translators, and was not needlessly deviated from, they have
evidently modernized its style, not perhaps quite up to that of
their own day, but so far, we apprehend, as to exclude nearly all
words and phrases that had then passed out even of common and
familiar use. In that theological age, indeed, few forms of
expression found in the Bible could well have fallen altogether
into desuetude, although some may have come to be less apt and
significant than they once were, or than others that might now
be substituted for them. But we believe the new translators, in
any changes they made, were very careful to avoid the employ-
ment of any mere words of yesterday, the glare of whose recent
coinage would have contrasted offensively with the general

* Lit of Eur. ii. 464.

T

274 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGF,

autiquo colour of diction which they desired to retain. If over
their version were to be revised, whether to improve the render-
ing of some passages by the lights of modern criticism, or to
mend some hardness and intricacy of construction in others,
it ought to be retouched in the same spirit of affectionate
veneration for the genius and essential characteristics of its
beautiful diction; and a good rule to be laid down might be,
that no word should be admitted in the improved renderings
which was not in use in the age when the translation was
originally made. The language was then abundantly rich enough
to furnish all the words that could be wanted for thft purpose.

THEOLOGICAL WRITERS : — BISHOP ANDREWS ; DONNE ; HALL ;
HOOKER.

Besides the translation of the Bible, the portion of the English
literature of the present period that is theological is very great
in point of quantity, and a part of it also possesses distinguished
claims to notice in a literary point of view. Eeligion was the
great subject of speculation and controversy in this country
throughout the entire space of a century and a half between the
Keformation and the Eevolution.

One of the most eminent preachers, perhaps the most eminent,
of the age of Elizabeth and James, was Dr. Lancelot Andrews,
who, after having held the sees of Chichester and Ely, died
bishop of Winchester in 1626. Bishop Andrews was one of the
translators of the Bible, and is the author, among other works, of
a folio volume of Sermons published, by direction of Charles I.,
soon after his death; of another folio volume of Tracts and
Speeches, which appeared in 1629 ; of a third volume of Lectures
on the Ten Commandments, published in 1642; and of a fourth,
containing Lectures delivered at St. Paul's and at St. Giles's,
Cripplegate, published in 1657. Both the learning and ability
of Andrews are conspicuous in everything he has written;
but his eloquence, nevertheless, is to a modern taste grotesque
enough. In his more ambitious passages he is the very prince of
verbal posture-masters, — if not the first in date, the first in
extravagance, of the artificial, quibbling, syllable-tormenting
school of our English pulpit rhetoricians ; and he undoubtedly
contributed more to spread the disease of that manner of writing
than any other individual.

Donne, the poet, was also a voluminous writer in prose ;
having left a folio volume of Sermons, besides a treatise against

HOOKER; BACON. 275

Popery entitled The Pseudo-Martyr, another singular perform-
ance, entitled Biathanatos, in confutation of the common notion
about the necessary sinful ness of suicide, and some other pro-
fessional disquisitions. His biographer, Izaak Walton, says
that he preached "as an angel, from a cloud, but not in a cloud;"
out most modern readers will probably be of opinion that he has
not quite made his escape from it. His manner is fully as quaint
in his prose as in his verse, and his way of thinking as subtle
and peculiar.

Another of the most learned theologians and eloquent preachers
of those times was as well as Donne an eminent poet, Bishop
Joseph Hall. Hall's English prose works, which are very volu-
minous, consist of sermons, polemical tracts, paraphrases of Scrip-
ture, casuistical divinity, and some pieces on practical religion,
of which his Contemplations, his Art of Divine Meditation, and his
Enochismus, or Treatise on the Mode of Walking with God, are
the most remarkable. The poetic temperament of Hall reveals
itself in his prose as well as in his verse, by the fervour of his
piety, and the forcible and often picturesque character of his
style.

Last of all may be mentioned, among the great theological
writers of this great theological time, one who stands alone,
Kichard Hooker, the illustrious author of the Eight Books of
the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity ; of which the first four were
published in 1594, the fifth in 1597, the three last not till 1632,
many years after the author's death. Hooker's style is almost
without a rival for its sustained dignity of march; but that
which makes it most remarkable is its union of all this learned
gravity and correctness with a flow of genuine, racy English,
almost as little tinctured with pedantry as the most familiar
popular writing. The effect also of its evenness of movement is
the very reverse of tameness or languor ; the full river of the
argument dashes over no precipices, but yet rolls along without
pause, and with great force and buoyancy.

BACON.

Undoubtedly the principal figure in English prose literature,
as well as in philosophy, during the first quarter of the seven-
teenth century, is Francis Bacon. Bacon, born in 1561, pub-
lished the first edition of his Essays in 1597 ; his Two Books of
the Advancement of Learning in 1605; his Wisdom of the
Ancients (in Latin) in 1610 ; a third edition of his Essays, greatly

276 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

extended, in 1612; his Two Books of the Novum Organum, or
Second Part of the Instauratio Magna, designed to consist of Six
Parts (also in Latin), in 1620; his Histoiy of the Keign of
Henry VII., in 1622 ; his Nine Books De Augmentis Scientiarum,
a Latin translation and extension of his Advancement of Learn-
ing, in 1623. He died in 1626. The originality of the Baconian
or Inductive method of philosophy, the actual service it has
rendered to science, and even the end which it may be most cor-
rectly said to have in view, have all been subjects of dispute
almost ever since Bacon's own day; but, notwithstanding all
differences of opinion upon these points, the acknowledgment that
he was intellectually one of the most colossal of the sons of men
has been nearly unanimous. They who have not seen his great-
ness under one form have discovered it in another; there is a
discordance among men's ways of looking at him, or their theories
respecting him; but the mighty shadow which he projects
athwart the two bygone centuries lies there immovable, and
still extending as time extends. The very deductions which are
made from his merits in regard to particular points thus only
heighten the impression of his general eminence, — of that some-
thing about him not fully understood or discerned, which, spite
of all curtailment of his claims in regard to one special kind of
eminence or another, still leaves the sense of his eminence as
strong as ever. As for his Novurn Organum, or so-calledjgigw
instrument of philosophy, it may be that it was not really new
when he announced it as such, either as a process followed in the
practice of scientific discovery, or as a theory of the right method
of discovery. Neither may Bacon have been the first writer, in
his own or the immediately preceding age, who recalled attention
to the inductive method, or who pointed out the barrenness of
what was then called philosophy in the schools. Nor can it be
affirmed that it was really he who brought the reign of that
philosophy to a close : it was falling fast into disrepute before he
assailed it, and would probably have passed away quite as soon
as it did although his writings had never appeared. Nor possibly
has he either looked at that old philosophy with a very pene-
trating or comprehensive eye, or even shown a perfect under-
standing of the inductive method in all its applications and
principles. As for his attempts in the actual practice of the in-
ductive method, they were, it must be owned, either insignificant
or utter failures ; and that, too, while some of his contemporaries,
who in no respect acknowledged him as their teacher, were
turning it to account in extorting from nature the most brilliant
revelations. But this was not Bacon's proper province. He

BUKTON. 277

belongs not to mathematical or natural science, but to literature
and to moral science in its most extensive acceptation, — to
the realm of imagination, of wit, of eloquence, of aesthetics,
of history, of jurisprudence, of political philosophy, of logic, of
metaphysics and the investigation of the powers and operations
of the human mind. He is either not at all or in no degree
worth mentioning an investigator or expounder of mathematics,
or of mechanics, or of astronomy, or of chemistry, or of any other
branch of geometrical or physical science ; but he is a most pene-
trating and comprehensive investigator, and a most magnificent
expounder, of that higher wisdom in comparison with which all
these things are but a more intellectual sort of legerdemain. All
his works, his essays, his philosophical writings, commonly so
called, and what he has done in history, are of one and the same
character; reflective and, so to speak, poetical, not simply de-
monstrative, or elucidatory of mere matters of fact. \Vhat, then,
is his glory ? — in what did his greatness consist ? In this, we
should say ; — that an intellect at once one of the most capacious
and one of the most profound ever granted to a mortal — in its
powers of vision at the same time one of the most penetrating and
one of the most far-reaching — was in him united and reconciled
with an almost equal endowment of the imaginative faculty ; and
that he is, therefore, of all philosophical writers, the one in whom
ajre found together, in_the largest proportions, depth of thought
and spl«.-n<l..ur of eloquence. His intellectual ambition, also,— a
quality of the imagination, — was of the most towering character ;
and no other philosophic writer has taken up so grand a theme
as that on which he has laid out his strength in his greatest
works. But with the progress of scientific discovery that has
taken place during the last two hundred years, it would be diffi-
cult to show that these works have had almost anything to do.
His Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum have
more in them of the spirit of poetry than of science ; and we
should almost as soon think of fathering modern physical science
upon Paradise Lost as upon them.

BURTON.

A remarkable prose work of this age, which ought not to be
passed over without notice, is Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
Robert Burton, who, on his title-page, takes the name of Democri-
tus Junior, died in 1640, and his book wis first published in 1621.
It is an extraordinary accumulation of out-of-the-way learning,

273 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

interspersed, somewhat in the manner of Montaigne's Essays,
with original matter, but with this among other differences, —
that in Montaigne the quotations have the air of being introduced,
as we know that in fact they were, to illustrate the original
matter, which is the web of the discourse, they but the em-
broidery; whereas in Burton the learning is rather the web,
upon which what he has got to say of his own is worked in by
way of forming a sort of decorative figure. Burton is far from
having the variety or abundance of Montaigne ; but there is con-
siderable point and penetration in his style, and he says many
striking things in a sort of half-splenetic, half-jocular humour,
which many readers have found wonderfully stimulating. Dr.
Johnson declared that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy was the
only book that ever drew him out of bed an hour sooner than he
would otherwise have got up.

HISTORICAL WRITERS.

Among the historical writers of the reign of James may be first
mentioned the all- accomplished Sir Walter Raleigh. Ealeigh is
the author of a few short poems, and of some miscellaneous pieces
in prose ; but his great work is his History of the World, com-
posed during his imprisonment in the Tower, and first published
in a folio volume in 1614. It is .an unfinished work, coming
down only to the first Macedonian war ; and there is no reason
to suppose that any more of it was ever written, although it has
been asserted that a second volume was burnt by the author.
Raleigh's History, as a record of facts, has long been superseded ;
the interest it possesses at the present day is derived almost en-
tirely from its literary merits, and from a few passages in which
the author takes occasion to allude to circumstances that have
fallen within his own experience. Much of it is written without
any ambition of eloquence ; but the style, even where it is most
careless, is still lively and exciting, from a tone of the actual
world which it preserves, and a certain frankness and heartiness
coming from Raleigh's profession and his warm impetuous cha-
racter. It is not disfigured by any of the petty pedantries to
some one or other of which most of the writers of books in that
day gave way more or less, and it has altogether comparatively
little of the taint of age upon it; while in some passages the
composition, without losing anything of its natural grace and
heartiness, is wrought up to great rhetorical polish and elevation.

Another celebrated historical work of this time is Richard

HISTORICAL WRITERS. 279

Knolles's History of the Turks, published in 1610. Johnson,
in one of his Kamblers, has awarded to Knolles the first place
among English historians ; and Mr. Hallam concurs in thinking
that his style and power of narration have not been too highly
extolled by that critic. " His descriptions," continues Mr.
Hallam, "are vivid and animated; circumstantial, but not to

feebleness ; his characters are drawn with a strong pencil

In the style of Knolles there is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted,
a slight excess of desire to make every phrase effective ; but he
is exempt from the usual blemishes of his age ; and his com-
mand of the language is so extensive, that we should not err in
placing him among the first of our elder writers."* Much of
this praise, however, is to be considered as given to the uni-
formity or regularity of Knolles's style ; the chief fault of which
perhaps is, that it is too continuously elaborated and sustained
for a long work. We have already mentioned Samuel Daniel's
History of England from the Conquest to the reign of Ed-
ward III., which was published in 1618. It is of little his-
torical value, but is remarkable for the same simple ease and
purity of language which distinguish Daniel's verse. The con-
tribution to this department of literature of all those that the
early part of the seventeenth century produced, which is at
the same time the most valuable as an original authority and
the most masterly in its execution, is undoubtedly Bacon's
History of the reign of Henry VII.

* LitofEnr.iii. 87*

£80 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

MIDDLE AND LATTER PAKT OF THE SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY.

EXCLUDING from our view the productions of the last fifty or
sixty years, as not yet ripe for the verdict of history, we may
affirm that our national literature, properly so called, that is,
whatever of our literature by right of its poetic shape or spirit is
to be held as peculiarly belonging to the language and the
country, had its noonday in the period comprehending the last
quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century.
But a splendid afternoon flush succeeded this meridian blaze,
which may be said to have lasted for another half century, or
longer. Down almost to the Revolution, or at least to the middle
of the reign of Charles II., our higher literature continued to
glow with more or less of the coloured light and the heart of fire
which it had acquired in the age of Elizabeth and James. Some
of the greatest of it indeed— as the verse of Milton and the prose
poetry of Jeremy Taylor — was not given to the world till towards
the close of the space we have just indicated. But Milton, and
Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Cudworth, and Henry
More, and Cowley, the most eminent of our English writers in
the interval from the Restoration to the Revolution (if we except
Dryden, the founder of a new school, and Barrow, whose
writings, full as they are of thought, have not much of the
poetical or untranslatable) were all of them, it is worthy of
observation, born before the close of the reign of James I. Nor
would the stormy time that followed be without its nurture for
such minds. A boyhood or youth passed in the days of Shakes-
peare and Bacon, and a manhood in those of the Great Rebellion,
was a training which could not fail to rear high powers to their
highest capabilities.

SHIRLEY, AND THE END OF THE OLD DRAMA.

The chief glory of our Elizabethan literature, however, belongs
almost exclusively to the time we have already gone over. The
only other name that remains to be mentioned to complete our
sketch of the great age of the Drama, is that of James Shirley,

SHIRLEY, AND THE END OF THE OLD DRAMA. 281

who was born about the year 1594, and whose first play, the
comedy of The Wedding, was published in 1629. He is the
fiuthor of about forty dramatic pieces which have come down to
us. " Shirley," observes Lamb, " claims a place among the
worthies of this period, not so much for any transcendent genius
in himself, as that he was the last of a great race, all of whom
spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings
and notions in common. A new language and quite a new turn
of tragic and comic interest came in with the Bestoration." * Of
this writer, who survived till 1666, the merits and defects have
been well stated, in a few comprehensive words, by Mr.
Hallain : — " Shirley has no originality, no force in conceiving or
delineating character, little of pathos, and less, perhaps, of wit ;
his dramas produce no deep impression in reading, and of course
can leave none in the memory. But his mind was poetical : his
better characters, especially females, express pure thoughts in
pure language ; he is never tumid or affected, and seldom obscure ;
the incidents succeed rapidly ; the personages are numerous, and
there is a general animation in the scenes, which causes us to
read him with some pleasure." f

A preface by Shirley is prefixed to the first collection of part
of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, which, as already men-
tioned, appeared in 1647. " Now, reader," he says, " in this
tragical age, where the theatre hath been so much outacted, con-
gratulate thy own happiness that, in this silence of the stage,
thou hast a liberty to read these inimitable plays, — to dwell and
converse in these immortal groves, — which were only showed
our fathers in a conjuring-glass, as suddenly removed as repre-
sented." At this time all theatrical amusements were prohibited ;
and the publication of these and of other dramatic productions
which were their property, or rather the sale of them to the
booksellers, was resorted to by the players as a way of making a
little money when thus cut off from the regular gains of their
profession ; the eagerness of the public to possess the said works
in print being of course also sharpened by the same cause.

The permanent suppression of theatrical entertainments was
the act of the Long Parliament. An ordinance of the Lords and
Commons passed on the 2nd of September, 1642, — after setting
forth that " public sports do not well agree with public cala-
mities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation,
this being an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other
being spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious
mirth and levity," — ordained, " that, while these sad causes and
* Specimens, ii. 119. t Lit. of Eur. iii. 345.

282 ENGLISH L1TERATCJRE AND LANGUAGE.

set times of humiliation do continue, public stage-plays shall
cease and be forborne." It has been plausibly conjectured that
this measure originated, " not merely in a spirit of religious dis-
like to dramatic performances, but in a politic caution, lest play
writers and players should avail themselves of their power over
the minds of the people to instil notions and opinions hostile to
the authority of a puritanical parliament."* This ordinance cer-
tainly put an end at once to the regular performance of plays ;
although it is known to have been occasionally infringed.

GILES FLETCHER; PHINEAS FLETCHER.

Nor is the poetical produce other than dramatic of the quarter
of a century that elapsed from the death of James to the establish-
ment of the Commonwealth, of very considerable amount. Giles
and Phineas Fletcher were brothers, cousins of the dramatist, and
both clergymen. Giles, who died in 1623, is the author of a
poem entitled Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and
Earth over and after Death, which was published in a quarto
volume in 1610. It is divided into four parts, and is written in
stanzas somewhat like those of Spenser, only containing eight
lines each instead of nine : both the Fletchers, indeed, were pro-
fessed disciples and imitators of the great author of the Fairy
Queen. Phineas, who survived till 1650, published in 1633,
along with a small collection of Piscatory Eclogues and other
Poetical Miscellanies, a long allegorical poem, entitled The Purple
Island, in twelve Books or Cantos, written in a stanza of seven
lines. The idea upon which this performance is founded is one
of the most singular that ever took possession of the brain even of
an allegorist: the purple island is nothing else than the human
body, and the poem is, in fact, for the greater part, a system of
anatomy, nearly as minute in its details as if it were a scientific
treatise, but wrapping up everything in a fantastic guise of
double meaning, so as to produce a languid sing-song of laborious
riddles, which are mostly unintelligible without the very know-
ledge they make a pretence of conveying. After he has finished
his anatomical course, the author takes up the subject of psycho-
logy, which he treats in the same luminous and interesting
manner. Such a work as this has no claim to be considered a
poem even of the same sort with the Fairy Queen. In Spenser,
the allegory, whether historical or moral, is little more than
formal : the poem, taken in its natural and obvious import, as a
* Collier, Hist. Dram. Poet. ii. 106.

GILES FLETCHER; PHINEAS FLETCHER. 283

tale of " knights' and ladies' gentle deeds" — a song of their
" fierce wars and faithful loves" — has meaning and interest
enough, without the allegory at all, which, indeed, except in a
very few passages, is so completely concealed behind the direct
narrative, that we may well suppose it to have been nearly as
much lost sight of and forgotten by the poet himself as it is by
his readers : here, the allegory is the soul of every stanza and of
every line — that which gives 1x> the whole work whatever
meaning, and consequently whatever poetry, it possesses— with
which, indeed, it is sometimes hard enough to be understood, but
without which it would be absolute inanity and nonsense. The
Purple Island is rather a production of the same species witlp
Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden ; but, forced and false enough ai
Darwin's style is in many respects, it would be doing an injustice
to his poem to compare it with Phineas Fletcher's, either in
regard to the degree in which nature and propriety are violated
in the principle and manner of the composition, or in regard to
the spirit and general success of the execution. Of course, there
is a good deal of ingenuity shown in Fletcher's poem ; and it is
not unimpregnated by poetic feeling, nor without some passages
of considerable merit. But in many other parts it is quite gro-
tesque ; and, on the whole, it is fantastic, puerile, and wearisome.

OTHER RELIGIOUS POETS: — QUARLES; HERBERT; HERRICK;
CRASHAW.

The growth of the religious spirit in the early part of the
seventeenth century is shown in much more of the poetry of the
time as well as in that of the two Fletchers. Others of the most
notable names of this age are Quarles, Herrick, Herbert, and
Crashaw. Francis Quarles, who died in 1644, was one of the
most popular as well as voluminous writers of the day, and is
still generally known by his volume of Emblems. His verses
are characterized by ingenuity rather than fancy, but, although
often absurd, he is seldom dull or languid. There is a good
deal of spirit and coarse vigour in some of his pieces, as for
instance in his well-known Song of Anarchus, portions of which
have been printed both by Ellis and Campbell, and which may
perhaps have suggested to Cowper, the great religious poet of a
later day, his lines called The Modern Patriot. Quarles, how-
ever, though ke appears to have been a person of considerable
literary acquirement, must in his poetical capacity be regarded
tcs mainly a writer for tho populace. George Herbert, a younger

2S4 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

brother of the celebrated Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
was a clergyman. His volume, entitled The Temple, was first
published soon after his death in 1633, and was at least six or
seven times reprinted in the course of the next quarter of a
century. His biographer, Izaak Walton, tells us that when he
wrote, in the reign of Charles II., twenty thousand copies of it
had been sold. Herbert was an intimate friend of Donne, and
no doubt a great admirer of his poetry ; but his own has been to
a great extent preserved from the imitation of Donne's peculiar
style, into which it might in other circumstances have fallen,
in all probability by its having been composed with little effort
or elaboration, and chiefly to relieve and amuse his own mind by
the melodious expression of his favourite fancies and contempla-
tions. His quaintness lies in his thoughts rather than in their
expression, which is in general sufficiently simple and luminous
Robert Herrick, who was also a clergyman, is the author of a
thick octavo volume of verse, published in 1648, under the title
of Hesperides. It consists, like the poetry of Donne, partly of
love verses, partly of pieces of a devotional character, or, as the
two sorts are styled in the title-page, Works Human and Divine.
The same singular licence which even the most reverend per-
sons, and the purest and most religious minds, in that age allowed
themselves to take in light and amatory poetry is found in
Herrick as well as in Donne, a good deal of whose singular
manner, and fondness for conceits both of sound and sense,
Herrick has also caught. Yet some both of his hymns and of
his anacreontics — for of such strange intermixture does his
poetry consist — are beautifully simple and natural, and full of
grace as well as fancy. Richard Crashaw was another clergy-
man, who late in life became a Roman Catholic, and died a canon
of Loretto in 1650. He is perhaps, after Donne, the greatest of
these religious poets of the early part of the seventeenth century.
He belongs in manner to the same school with Donne and
Herrick, and in his lighter pieces he has much of their lyrical
sweetness and delicacy; but there is often a force and even
occasionally what may be called a grandeur of imagination in
his more solemn poetry which Herrick never either reaches or
aspires to.

CARTWRIGHT; RANDOLPH; CORBET.

All the poetical clergymen of this time, however, had not
such pious muses. The Rev. William Cartwright, who died at
an early age in 1643, is said by Anthony Wood to have been "a

CARTWRIGHT; RANDOLPH; CORBET. 285

most florid and seraphic preacher ; " but his poetry, which is
mostly amatory, is not remarkable for its brilliancy. He is the
author of several plays, and he was one of the young writers
who were honoured with the title of his sons by Ben Jonson,
who said of him, " My son Cartwright writes all like a man."
Another of Ben's poetical eons was Thomas Kandolph, who was
likewise a clergyman, and is also the author of several plays,
mostly in verse, as well as of a quantity of other poetry. Kan-
dolph has a good deal of fancy, and his verse flows very melo-
diously ; but his poetry has in general a bookish and borrowed
air. Much of it is on subjects of love and gallantry; but
the love is chiefly of the head, or, at most, of the senses — the
gallantry, it is easy to see, that merely of a fellow of a college
and a reader of Ovid. Randolph died under thirty in 1 634, and
his poems were first collected after his death by his brother.
The volume, which also contains his Plays, was frequently re-
printed in the course of the next thirty or forty years ; the
edition before us, dated 1<>68, is called the fifth.

One of the most remarkable among the clerical poets of this
earlier half of the seventeenth century was Dr. Kichard Corbet,
successively Bishop of Oxford and of Norwich. Corbet, who
was born in 1582, became famous both as a poet and as a wit
early in the reign of James ; but very little, if any, of his poetry
was published till after his death, which took place in 1635.
It is related, that after Corbet was a doctor of divinity he
once sang ballads at the Cross at Abingdon : " On a market
day," Aubrey writes, *' he and some of his comrades were
at the tavern by the Cross (which, by the way, was then the
finest in England ; I remember it when I was a freshman ; it
was admirable curious Gothic architecture, and fine figures
in the niches ; 'twas one of those built by King .... for his
Queen). The ballad-singer complained he had no qustom — he
could not put off" his ballads. The jolly doctor puts off his
gown, and puts on the ballad-singer's leathern jacket, and,
being a handsome man, and a rare full voice, he presently vended
a great many, and had a great audience." Aubrey had heard,
however, that as a bishop " he had an admirable grave and
venerable aspect." Corbet's poetry, too, is a mixture or alter-
nation of gravity and drollery. But it is the subject or occasion,
rather than the style or manner, that makes the difference ; ho
never rises to anything higher than wit ; and he is as witty in
his elegies as in his ballads. As that ingredient, however, is not
so suitable for the former as for the latter, his graver per-
formances are worth very little. Nor is his merriment of a high

2SG ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

order ; when it is most elaborate it is strained and fantastic, and
when more natural it is apt to run into buffoonery. But much
of his verse, indeed, is merely prose in rhyme, and very indif-
ferent rhyme for the most part. His happiest effusions are the
two that are best known, his Journey into France and his ballad
of The Fairies' Farewell. His longest and most curious poem is
his Iter Boreale, describing a journey which he took in company
with other three university men, probably about 1620, from
Oxford as far north as Newark and back again.

POETS OF THE FRENCH SCHOOL : — CAREW ; LOVELACE ;
SUCKLING.

Both our poetry and our prose eloquence continued to be
generally infected by the spirit of quaintness and conceit, or
over-refinement and subtlety of thought, for nearly a century
after the first introduction among us of that fashion of writing.
Even some of the highest minds did not entirely escape the
contagion. If nothing of it is to be found in Spenser or Milton,
neither Shakespeare nor Bacon is altogether free from it. Of
our writers of an inferior order, it took captive not only the
greater number, but some of the greatest, who lived and wrote
from the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to nearly the middle of
that of Charles II. — from Bishop Andrews, whom we have
already mentioned, in prose, and Donne both in prose and verse,
to Cowley inclusive. The style in question appears to have
been borrowed from Italy : it came in, at least, with the study
and imitation of the Italian poetry, being caught apparently
from the school of Petrarch, or rather of his later followers,
about the same time that a higher inspiration was drawn from
Tasso and Ariosto. It is observable that the species or depart-
ments of our poetry which it chiefly invaded were those which
have always been more or less influenced by foreign models:
it made comparatively little impression upon our dramatic
poetry, the most truly native portion of our literature ; but our
lyrical and elegiac, our didactic and satirical verse, was overrun
and materially modified by it, as we have said, for nearly a
whole century. The return to a more natural manner, however,
was begun to be made long before the expiration of that term.
And, as we had received the malady from one foreign literature,
so we were indebted for the cure to another. It is commonly
assumed that our modern English poetry first evinced a dis-
position to imitate that of France after the Restoration. But

CAREW; LOVELACE. 287

the truth is that the influence of French literature had begun to
be felt by our own at a considerably earlier date. The court
of Charles I. was far from being so thoroughly French as that of
Charles II. ; but the connexion established between the two
kingdoms through Queen Henrietta could not fail to produce a
partial imitation of French models both in writing and in other
things. The distinguishing characteristic of French poetry (and
indeed of French art generally), neatness in the dressing of the
thought, had already been carried to considerable height by
Malherbe, Eacan, JVlalleville, and others ; and these writers are
doubtless to be accounted the true fathers of our own Waller,
Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling, who all began to write about
this time, and whose verses may be said to have first exemplified
in our lighter poetry what may be done by correct and natural
expression, smoothness of flow, and all that lies in the ars celare
artem — the art of making art itself seem nature. Of the four,
Waller was perhaps first in the field ; but he survived almost till
the Revolution, and did not rise to his greatest celebrity till
after the Restoration, so that he will more fitly fall to be noticed
in a subsequent page. The other three all belong exclusively to
the times of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth.

Thomas Carew, styled on the title-page " One of the Gentle-
men of the Privy Chamber, and Sewer in Ordinary to His
Majesty," is the author of a small volume of poetry first printed
in 1640, the year after his death. In polish and evenness of
movement, combined with a diction elevated indeed in its tone,
as it must needs be by the very necessities of verse, above that
of mere good conversation, but yet in ease, lucidity, and direct-
ness rivalling the language of ordinary life, Carew's poetry is
not inferior to Waller's ; and, while his expression is as correct
and natural, and his numbers as harmonious, the music of his
verse is richer, and his imagination is warmer and more florid.
But the texture of his composition is in general extremely slight,
the substance of most of his pieces consisting merely of the elabo-
ration of some single idea ; and, if he has more tenderness than
Waller, he is far from having so much dignity, variety, or power
cf sustained effort.

The poems of Colonel Richard Lovelace are contained in two
small volumes, one entitled Lucasta, published in 1649 ; tho
other entitled Posthume Poems, published by his brother in 1659,
the year after the author's death. They consist principally of
songs and other short pieces. Lovelace's songs, which are mostly
amatory, are many of them carelessly enough written, and there
are very few of them not defaced by some harshness or deformity ;

288 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

but a few of his best pieces are as sweetly versified as Carew's,
with perhaps greater variety of fancy as well as more of vital
force ; and a tone of chivalrous gentleness and honour gives to
some of them a pathos beyond the reach of any mere poetic art.

Lovelace's days, darkened in their close by the loss of every-
thing except honour, were cut short at the age of forty; his
contemporary, Sir John Suckling, who moved gaily and thought-
lessly through his short life as through a dance or a merry game,
died, in 1641, at that of thirty-two. Suckling, who is the author
of a small collection of poems, as well as of four plays, has none
of the pathos of Lovelace or Carew, but he equals them in fluency
and natural grace of manner, and he has besides a sprightliness
and buoyancy which is all his own. His poetry has a more
impulsive air than theirs ; and, while, in reference to the greater
part of what he has produced, he must be classed along with
them and Waller as an adherent to the French school of pro-
priety and precision, some of the happiest of his effusions are
remarkable for a cordiality and impetuosity of manner which has
nothing foreign about it, but is altogether English, although there
is not much resembling it in any of his predecessors any more
than of his contemporaries, unless perhaps in some of Skelton's
pieces. His famous ballad of The Wedding is the very perfection
of gaiety and archness in verse ; and his Session of the Poets, in
which he scatters about his wit and humour in a more careless
style, may be considered as constituting him the founder of a
species of satire which Cleveland and Marvel and other subse-
quent writers carried into new applications, and which only
expired among us with Swift.

DENHAM.

To this date belongs a remarkable poem, the Cooper's Hill of
Sir John Denham, first published in 1642. It immediately drew
universal attention. Denham, however, had the year before
made himself known as a poet by his tragedy of The Sophy, on
the appearance of which Waller remarked that he had broken
out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when
nobody was aware or in the least suspected it. Cooper's Hill
may be considered as belonging in point of composition to the
same school with Sir John Davies's Nosce Teipsum ; and, if it
has not all the concentration of that poem, it is equally pointed,
correct, and stately, with, partly owing to the subject, a warmer
tone of imagination and feeling, and a fuller swell of versa. The

CLEVELAND. 2#j

spirit of the same classical style pervades both ; and they are tho
two greatest poems in that style which had been produced down
to the date at which we are now arrived. Denham is the author
of a number of other compositions in verse, and especially of
some songs and other shorter pieces, several of which are very
Npirited ; but the fame of his principal poem has thrown every-
thing else he has written into the shade. It is remarkable that
many biographical notices of this poet make him to have survived
nearly till the Revolution, and relate various stories of the mise-
ries of his protracted old age ; when the fact is, that he died in
16C8, at the age of fifty-three.

CLEVELAND.

But, of all the cavalier poets, the one who did his cause the
neartiest and stoutest service, arid who, notwithstanding much
carelessness or mggedness of execution, possessed perhaps, even
considered simply as a poet, the richest and most various faculty,
was John Cleveland, the most popular verse-writer of his own
day, the most neglected of all his contemporaries ever since.
Cleveland was the eldest son of the Eev. Thomas Cleveland,
vicar of Hinckley and rector of Stoke, in Leicestershire, and he
was born at Loughborough in that county in 1613. Down to
the breaking out of the civil war, he resided at St. John's College,
Cambridge, of which he was a Fellow, and seems to have distin-
guished himself principally by his Latin poetiy. But, when every
man took his side, with whatever weapons he could wield, for king
or parliament, Anthony Wood tells us that Cleveland was the first
writer who came forth as a champion of the royal cause in Eng-
lish verse. To that cause he adhered till its ruin ; at last in
1655, after having led for some years a fugitive life, he was
caught and thrown into prison at Yarmouth.; but, after a de-
tention of a few months, Cromwell, on his petition, allowed him
to go at large. The transaction was honourable to both parties.

Cleveland is commonly regarded as a mere dealer in satire and
invective, and as having no higher qualities than a somewhat
rude force and vehemence. His prevailing fault is a straining
after vigour and concentration of expression; and few of hi*
pieces are free from a good deal of obscurity, harshness, or other
disfigurement, occasioned by this habit or tendency, working in
association with an alert, ingenious, and fertile fancy, a neglect
of and apparently a contempt for neatness of finish, and the turn
for quaintness and quibbling characteristic of the school to which

U

230 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

lie belongs — for Cleveland must be considered as essentially one
of the old wit poets. Most of his poems seem to have been
thrown off in haste, and never to have been afterwards corrected
or revised. There are, however, among them some that are not
without vivacity and sprightliness ; and others of his more
solemn verses have considerable dignity.

The following epitaph on Ben Jonson is the shortest and
best of several tributes to the memory of that poet, with whose
masculine genius that of Cleveland seems to have strongly sym-
pathised : —

The Muses' fairest light in no dark time ;

The wonder of a learned age ; the line

Which none can pass ; the most proportioned wit

To nature ; the best judge of what was fit ;

The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen ;

The voice most echoed by consenting men ;

The soul which answered best to all well said

By others, and which most requital made ;

Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,

Returning all her music with his own ;

In whom with Nature Study claimed a part,

Yet who unto himself owed all his art ;

Here lies Ben Jonson : every age will look

With sorrow here, with wonder on his book.

Elsewhere he thus expresses his preference for Jonsoii, as a
dramatist, over the greatest of his contemporaries : —

Shakespeare may make griefs, merry Beaumont's style
/ Ravish and melt anger into a smile ;
lu winter nights or after meals they be,
I must confess, very good company ;
But thou exact' st our best hours' industry ;
We may read them, we ought to study thee ;
Thy scenes are precepts ; every verse doth give
Counsel, and teach us, not to laugh, but live.

WITHER.

These last-mentioned writers — Carew, Lovelace, Suckling,
Denham, and Cleveland — were all, as we have seen, cavaliers ;
but the cause of puritanism and the parliament had also its poets
as well as that of love and loyalty. Of these the two most emi-
nent were Marvel and Wither. Marvel's era, however, is rather
after the Eestoration. George Wither, who was born in 1588,
<-overs nearly seventy years of the seventeenth century with his
Jife, and not very far from sixty with his works : his first pnbli-

vy ;THER. 291

cation, his volume of satires entitled Abuses Stript and Whipt,
having appeared in \ 611, and some of his last pieces only a short
time before his death in 1667. The entire number of his separate
works, as they have been reckoned up by modern bibliographers,
exceeds a hundred.

One excellence fbr which all Wither's writings are eminent,
his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His
unaffected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it,
— but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill.

Down to the breaking out of the war between the king and
the parliament, Wither, although his pious poetry made him
a favourite with the puritans, had always professed himself a
strong church and state man ; even at so late a date as in 1630,
when he- was above fifty, he served as a captain of horse in the
expedition against the Scotch Covenanters ; and when two or three
years after he took arms on the other side, he had yet his new
principles in a great measure to seek or make. It appears not
to have been till a considerable time after this that his old ad-
miration of the monarchy and the hierarchy became suddenly
converted into the conviction that both one and other were,
and had been all along, only public nuisances — the fountains of
all the misrule and misery of the nation. What mainly in-
stigated him to throw himself into the commencing contest with
such eagerness seems to have been simply the notion, which
possessed and tormented him all his life, that he was born with
a peculiar genius for public affairs, and that things had very-
little chance of going right unless he were employed. With his
head full of this conceit, it mattered comparatively little on
which side he took his stand to begin with : he would speedily
make all even and right; the one thing needful in the first
instance was, that his services should be taken advantage of.
Of course, Wither's opinions, like those of other men, were in-
fluenced by his position, and he was no doubt perfectly sincere
in the most extreme of the new principles which he was ulti-
mately led to profess. The defect of men of his temper is not
insincerity. But they are nevertheless apt to be almost as
unstable as if they had no strong convictions at all. Their con-
victions, iri truth, however strong, do not rest so much upon
reason or principle, as upon mere passion. They see everything
through so thick and deeply coloured an atmosphere of self,
that its real shape goes for very little in their conception of it ;
change only the hue of the haze, or the halo, with which it is
thus invested, and you altogether change to them the thing
itself— making the white appear black, the bright dim, the

292 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

round square, or the reverse. Wither, with all his ardour and
real honesty, appears never in fact to have acquired any credit
for reliability, or steadiness in the opinions he held, either from
friends or opponents. Ho very naively lets out this himself in
a prose pamphlet which he published in 1624, entitled The
Scholar's Purgatory, being a vindication of himself addressed to
the Bishops, in which, after stating that he had been offered
more money and better entertainment if he would have em-
ployed himself in setting forth heretical fancies than he had
any chance of ever obtaining by the profession of the truth, he
adds, " Yea, sometimes I have been wooed to the profession of
their wild and ill-grounded opinions by the sectaries of so many
several separations, that, had I liked, or rather had not God
been the more merciful to me, I might have been Lieutenant, if
not Captain, of some new band of such volunteers long ere this
time." Overtures of this land are, of course, only made to persons
who are believed to be open to them. It is plain from his own
account that Wither was thus early notorious as a speculator or
trader in such securities — as one ready, not precisely to sell him-
self, his opinions, and his conscience, to the highest bidder, but
yet to be gained over if the offer were only made large enough to
convert as well as purchase him. There is a great deal of very
passable wearing and working honesty of this kind in the world.
The history of Wither's numerous publications has been
elaborately investigated by the late Mr. Park in the first and
second volumes of the British Bibliographer ; many of his
poems have been reprinted by Sir Egerton Brydges, and others
of his admirers ; and an ample account of his life and writings,
drawn up with a large and intimate knowledge, as well as
affectionate zeal and painstaking, which make it supersede what-
ever had been previously written on the subject, forms the prin-
cipal article (extending over more than 130 pages) of Mr.
Wilmott's Lives of Sacred Poets (8vo. Lon. 1834). Much
injustice, however, has been done to Wither by the hasty judg-
ment that has commonly been passed, even by his greatest
admirers, upon his later political poetry, as if it consisted of mere
party invective and fury, and all that he had written of any
enduring value or interest was to be found in the productions
of the early part of his life. Some at least of his political pieces
are very remarkable for their vigour and terseness. As a speci
men we will give a portion of a poem which he published
without his name in 1647, under the title of " Amygdala Bri-
tennica ; Almonds for Parrots ; A Dish of Stone-fruit, partly
shelled and partly unshelled ; which, if cracked, picked, and

WITHER. oftt

well digested, may be wholesome against those epidemic dis-
tempers of the brain now predominant, and prevent some malig-
nant diseases likely to ensue : Composed heretofore by a wefi-
known modern author, and now published according to a copy
found written with his own hand. Qui bene latuit bene vixit" This
fantastic title-page (with the manufacture of which the book-
seller may have had more to do than Wither himself) was suited
to the popular taste of the day, but would little lead a modern
reader to expect the nervous concentration and passionate ear-
nestness of such verses as the following : —

The time draws near, and hasteth on,
In which strange works shall be begun ;
And prosecutions, whereon shall
Depend much future bliss or bale.
If to the left hand you decline,
Assured destruction they divine ;
But, if the right-hand course ye take,
This island it will happy make.

A time draws nigh in which you may
As you shall please the chess-men play ;
Remove, confine, check, leave, or take,
Dispose, depose, undo, or make,
Pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, or king,
And act your wills in every thing :
But, if that time let slip you shall,
For yesterday in vain you call.

A time draws nigh in which the sun
Will give more light than he hath done :
Then also you shall see the moon
Shine brighter than the sun at noon ;
And many stars now seeming dull
Give shadows like the moon at full.
Yet then shall some, who think they see,
Wrapt in Egyptian darkness be.

A time draws nidi when with your blood
You shall preserve the viper's brood,
And starve your own ; yet fancy than 1
That you have played the pelican ;
But, when you think the frozen snakes
Have changed their natures for your sakes,
They, in requital, will contrive
Your mischief who did them revive.

A time will come when they that waxp
Shall dream ; and sleepers undertake

' Then.

29* ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGJUAGS.

The grand affairs ; yet,1 few men know
Which are the dreamers of these two ;
And fewer care by which of these
They guided be, so they have ease :
But an alarum shall advance
Your drowsy spirits from that trance.

A time shall come ere long in which
Mere beggars shall grow soonest rich ;
The rich with wants be pinched more
Than such as go from door to door ; .
The honourable by the base
Shall be despited to their face;
The truth defamed be with lies ;
The fool preferred before the wise;
And he that fighteth to be free.
By conquering" ensiaved shall be.

A time will come when see you shall
Toads fly aloft and eagles crawl ;
Wolves walk abroad in human shapes ;
Men turn to asses, hogs, and apes :
But, when that cursed time is come,
Well 's he that is both deaf and dumb ;
That nothing speaketn, nothing hears,
And neither hopes, desires, nor fears.

When men shall generally confess
Their folly and their wickedness ;
Yet act as if there neither were
Among them conscience, wit, or fear ;
When they shall talk as if they had
Some brains, yet do as they were mad ;
And nor by reason, nor by noise,
By human or by heavenly voice,
By being praised or reproved,
By judgments or by mercies, moved :
Then look for so much sword and fire
As such a temper doth require.

Ere God his wrath on Balaam wreaks,
First by his ass to him he speaks ;
Then shows him in an angel's hand
A sword, his courses to withstand ;
But, seeing still he forward went,
Quite through his heart a sword he scut.

1 As yofc.

WITHER. 295

And God will thus, if thus they do,
Still deal with kings, and subjects too ;
That, where his grace despised is grown,
He by his judgments may be kuown.

Neither dmrchhill nor Cowper ever wrote anything in tLo
game style better than this. The modern air, too, of the whole,
with the exception of a few words, is wonderful. But this, as
we have said, is the character of all \Vither's poetry — of his
earliest as well as of his latest. It is nowhere more conspicuous
than in his early religious verses, especially in his collection
entitled Songs and Hymns of the Church, first published in
1624. There is nothing of the kind in the language imre
perfectly beautiful than some of these. We subjoin two of
them : —

Thanksgiving f of Seasonable Weather. Song 85.

Lord, should the sun, the clouds, the wind,

The air, and seasons be
To us so froward and unkind

As we are false to thee ;
All fruits would quite away be burned,

Or lie in water drowned,
Or blasted be or overturned,

Or chilled on the ground.

But from our duty though we swerve,

Thou still dost mercy show,
And deign thy creatures to preserve,

That men might thankful grow :
Yea, though from day to day we siii,

Ajid thy displeasure gain,
No sooner we to cry begin

But pity we obtain.

The weather now thou changed hast

That put us late to fear,
And when our hopes were almost past

Then comfort did appear.
The heaven the earth's complaints hath hood I

They reconciled be ;
And thou such weather hast prepared

As we desired of thee.

For which, with lifted hands and eyec,

To thee we do repay
The due and willing sacrifice %

Of giving thanks to-day,
Because such offerings w« should not

To render thee be slow,
Nor let that mercy be forgot

Which thou art pleased to show.

2»C ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE,

Thanksgiving for Victory. Song 88.

We love thee, Lord, we praise thy name,

Who, by thy great almighty arm,
Hast kepi us from the spoil and shame

Of those that sought our causeless harm ;
Thou art our life, our triumph-song,

The joy and comfort of our heart ;
To thee all praises do belong,

And thou the God of Armies art.

We must confess it is thy power

That made us masters of the field ;
Thou art our bulwark and our tower,

Our rock of refuge and our shield :
Thou taught'st our hands and arms to fight j

With vigour thou didst gird us round ;
Thou mad'st our foes to take their flight,

And thou didst beat them to the ground.

With fury came our armed foes,

To blood and slaughter fiercely bent ;
And perils round did us inclose,

By whatsoever way we went ;
That, hadst not thou our Captain been,

To lead us on, and off again,
We on the place had dead been seen,

Or masked in blood and wounds had lain.

This song we therefore sing to thee,

And pray that thou for evermore
Would'st our Protector deign to be,

As at this time and heretofore ;
That thy continual favour shown

May cause us more to thee incline,
And make it through the world be known

That such as are our foes are thine.

BROWNE.

Along with Wither ought to be mentioned a contemporary
poet of a genius, or at least of a manner, in some respects
kindred to his, and whose fate it has been to experience the
same long neglect, William Browne, the author of Britannia's
Pastorals, of which the first part was published in 1613, the
second in 1616, and of The Shepherd's Pipe in Seven Eclogues,
which appeared in 1614. Browne was a native of Tavistock in
Devonshire, where he was born in 1590, and he is supposed to
have died in 1645. It is remarkable that, if he lived to so late

CHARLES I. 297

a date, he should not have written more than he appears to have
done : the two parts of his Britannia's Pastorals were reprinted
together in 1625 ; and a piece called The Inner Temple Masque,
and a few short poems, were published for the first time in an
edition of his works brought out, under the care of Dr. Farmer,
in 1772 ; but the last thirty years of his life would seem, in so
far as regards original production, to have been a blank. Yet
a remarkable characteristic of his style, as well as of Wither's,.
is its ease and fluency ; and it would appear, from what he says
in one of the songs of his Pastorals, that he had written part of
that work before he was twenty. His poetry certainly does not
read as if its fountain would be apt soon to run dry. His facility
of rhyming and command of harmonious expression are very
great ; and, within their proper sphere, his invention and fancy
are also extremely active and fertile. His strength, however,
lies chiefly in description, not the thing for which poetry or
language is best fitted, and a species of writing which cannot be
carried on long without becoming tiresome ; he is also an elegant
didactic declaimer; but of passion, or indeed of any breath of
actual living humanity, his poetry has almost none. This, no
doubt, was the cause of the neglect into which after a short
time it was allowed to drop ; and this limited quality of his
genius may also very probably have been the reason why he
so soon ceased to write and publish. From the time when
religious and political contention began to wax high, in the
latter years of King James, such poetry as Browne's had little
chance of acceptance : from about that date Wither, as we have
seen, who also had previously written his Shepherd's Hunting,
and otler similar pieces, took up a new strain ; and Browne, if
he was to continue to be listened to, must have done the same,
which he either would not or could not. Yet, although without
the versatility of Wither, and also with less vitality than Wither
even in the kind of poetry which is common to the two, Browne
rivals that writer both in the abundance of his poetic vein and
the sweetness of his verse; and the English of the one has
nearly all the purity, perspicuity, and unfading freshness of
stylo which is so remarkable in the other.

PROSE WRITERS :— CHARLES I.

Most of the prose that was written and published in England
in the middle portion of the seventeenth century, or the twenty
years preceding the Restoration, was political and theological,

299 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

but very little of it has any claim to be considered as belonging
to the national literature. A torrent of pamphlets and ephemeral
polemics supplied the ravenous public appetite with a mental
sustenance which answered the wants of the moment, much as
the bakers' ovens did with daily bread for the body. It was all
devoured, and meant to be devoured, as fast as it was produced
— devoured in the sense of being quite used up and consumed,
so far as any good was to be got out of it. It was in no respect
intended for posterity, any more than the linen and broad-cloth
then manufactured were intended for posterity. Still even this
busy and excited time produced some literary performances
which still retain more or less of interest.

The writings attributed to Charles I. were first collected and
published at the Hague soon after his death, in a folio volume
witnout date, under the title of Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinse, and
twice afterwards in England, namely, iii 1660 and 1687, with
tne title of BA2IAIKA : The Works of King Charles the Martyr.
If we except a number of speeches to the parliament, letters,
despatches, "and other political papers, the contents of this col-
lection are all theological, consisting of prayers, arguments, and
disquisitions on the controversy about church government, and
the famous Eikon Basilike, or, The Portraiture of his Sacred
Majesty in his Solitude and Sufferings ; which, having been
printed under the care of Dr. Gauden (after the Eestoration
successively bishop of Exeter and Worcester), had been first
published by itself immediately after the king's execution. It
is now generally admitted that the Eikon was really written by
Gauden, who, after the Restoration, openly claimed it as his
own. Mr. Hallam, however, although he has no doubt of Gauden
being the author, admits that it is, nevertheless, superior to his
acknowledged writings. " A strain of majestic melancholy," he
observes, "is well kept up; but the personated sovereign is
rather too theatrical for real nature ; the language is too rhe-
torical and amplified, the periods too artificially elaborated.
None but scholars anil practised writers employ such a style as
this."* It is not improbable that the work may have been
submitted to Charles's revisal, and that it may have received
both his approval and his corrections. Charles, indeed, was
more in the habit of correcting what had been written by others
than of writing anything himself. " Though ho was of as slow
a pen as of speech," says Sir Philip Warwick, " yet both were
very significant; and he had that modest esteem of his own
parts, that he would usually say, he would willingly make his
* Lit. of Eur. iii. 376.

MILTON'S PROSE WORKS. 299

own despatches, but that he found it better to be a cobbler than
a shoemaker. I have been in company with very learned men,
when I have brought them their own papers back from him with
his alterations, who ever confessed his amendments to have been
very material. And I once, by his commandment, brought him
a paper of my own to read, to see whether it was suitable to his
directions, and he disallowed it slightingly : I desired him I
might call Dr. Sanderson to aid me, and that the doctor might
understand his own meaning from himself; and, with his
majesty's leave, I brought him whilst he was walking and
taking the air ; whereupon we two went back ; but pleased him
as little when we returned it: for, smilingly, he said, a man
might have as good ware out of a chandler s shop ; but afterwards
he set it down with his own pen very plainly, and suitably to
his own intentions.*" The most important of the literary pro-
ductions which are admitted to be wholly Charles's own, are his
papers in the controversy which he carried on at Newcastle in
June and July, 1646, with Alexander Henderson, the Scotch
clergyman, on the question between episcopacy and presbytery,
and those on the same subject in his controversy with the par-
liamentary divines at Newport in October, 1 648. These papers
show considerable clearness of thinking and logical or argu-
mentative talent ; but it cannot be said that they are written
with any force or elegance.

MILTOX'S PROSE WORKS.

We have already mentioned Bishop Hall, both as a poet and
as a writer of prose. A part which Hall took in his old age in
the grand controversy of the time brought him into collision
with one with whose name in after ages the world was to
resound. John Milton, then in his thirty-third year, and re-
cently returned from his travels in France and Italy, had
already, in 1641, lent the aid of his pen to the war of the
Puritans against the established church by the publication of
his treatise entitled Of Reformation, in Two Books. The same
year Hall published his Humble Remonstrance in favour of
Episcopacy ; which immediately called forth an Answer by
Smectymnuus, — a word formed from the initial letters of the
names of five Puritan ministers by whom the tract was written
— Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew
Newcomen, and William (or, as he was on this occasion reduced
io designate himself, Uuilliam) Spurstow. The Answer pro-

300 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

duced a Confutation by Archbishop Usher ; and to this Milton
replied in a treatise entitled Of Prelatical Episcopacy. Hall
then published a Defence of the Humble Eemonstrance ; and
Milton wrote Animadversions upon that. About the same time
he also brought out a performance of much greater pretension,
tinder the title of The Keason of Church Government urged
against Prelaty, in Two Books. This is the work containing
the magnificent passage in which he makes the announcement
of his intention to attempt something in one of the highest kinds
of poetry " in the mother-tongue," long afterwards accomplished
in his great epic. Meanwhile a Confutation of the Animadver-
sions having been published by Bishop Hall, or his son, Milton
replied, in 1642, in an Apology for Smectymnuus, which was the
last of his publications in this particular controversy. But ,
nearly all his other prose writings were given to the world
within the period with which we are now engaged : — namely,
his Tractate of Education, addressed to his friend Hartlib, and
his noble Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed
Printing, in 1644; his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and
his Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce, the same
year; his Tetrachordon, and Colasterion (both on the same
subject) in 1645; his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, his
Eikonoclastes, in answer to the Eikon Basilike, and one or two
other tracts of more temporary interest, all after the execution
of the king, in 1649 ; his Defence for the People of England, in
answer to Salmasius (in Latin), in 1651 ; his Second Defence
(also in Latin), in reply to a work by Peter du Moulin, in 1654 ;
two additional Latin tracts in reply to rejoinders of Du Moulin,
in 1655 ; his treatises on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Cases,
and on The Means of Eemoving Hirelings out of the Church, in
1659 ; his Letter concerning the Euptures of the Common-
wealth, and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, the
same year ; and, finally, his Eeady and Easy Way to establish
a F?ee Commonwealth, and his Brief Notes upon a Sermon
preached by Dr. Griffith, called The Fear of God and the King,
in the spring of 1660, immediately before the king's return.
Passages of great poetic splendour occur in some of these pro-
ductions, and a fervid and fiery spirit breathes in all of them,
though the animation is as apt to take the tone of mere coarse
objurgation and abuse as of lofty and dignified scorn or of
vigorous argument ; but, upon the whole, it cannot be said that
Milton's English prose is a good style. It is in the first place,
not perhaps in vocabulary, but certainly in genius and construc-
tion, the most Latinized of English styles; but it does not

HALES; CHILLINGWORTH. 301

merit the commendation bestowed by Pope on another style
which he conceived to be formed after the model of the Roman
eloquence, of being " so Latin, yet so English all the while."
It is both soul and body Latin, only in an English dress.
Owing partly to this principle of composition upon which he
deliberately proceeded, or to the adoption of which his educa-
tion and tastes or habits led him, partly to the character of his
mind, fervid, gorgeous, and soaring, but having little involun-
tary impulsiveness or self-abandonment, rich as his style often
is, it never moves with any degree of rapidity or easy grace even
in passages where such qualities are most required, but has
at all times something of a stiff, cumbrous, oppressive air, as
if every thought, the lightest and most evanescent as well as
the gravest and stateliest, were attired in brocade and whale-
bone. There is too little relief from constant straining and
striving; too little repose and variety; in short, too little
nature. Many things, no doubt, are happily said; there is
much strong and also some brilliant expression ; but even such
imbedded gems do not occur so often as might be looked for
from so poetical a mind. In fine, we must admit the truth of
what he has himself confessed — that he was not naturally
disposed to " this manner of writing ;" " wherein," he adds,
44 knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of
nature to another task, I have the use, as 1 may account it, but
of my left hand." * With all his quick susceptibility for what-
ever was beautiful and bright, Milton seems to have needed
the soothing influences of the regularity and music of verse
fully to bring out his poetry, or to sublimate his imagination to
the true poetical state. The passion which is an enlivening
flame in his verse half suffocates him with its smoke in his
prose.

HALES; CHI LUNG WORTH.

Two other eminent names of theological controversialists
belonging to this troubled age of the English church may be
mentioned together — those of John Hales and William Chilling-
worth. Hales, who was born in 1584, and died in 1656, the
same year with Hall and Usher, published in his lifetime a few
short tracts, of which the most important is a Discourse on
Schism, which was printed in 1642, and is considered to have
been one of the works that led the way in that bold revolt

* Reason of Church Government, Book II.

302 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

against the authority of the fathers, so much cried np by the
preceding school of Andrews and Laud, upon which has since
been founded what many hold to be the strongest defence of
the Church of England against that of Koine. All Hales's
writings were collected and published after his death, in 1659,
in a quarto volume, bearing the title of Golden Remains of the
Ever-Memorable Mr. John Hales, — a designation which has
stuck to his name. The main idea of his treatise on Schism had,
however, been much more elaborately worked out by his friend
Ohillingworth — the Immortal Chillingworth, as he is styled by
his admirers — in his famous work entitled The Eeligion of
Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, published in 1637. This
is one of the most closely and keenly argued polemical treatises
ever written: the style in which Chillingworth presses his
reasoning home is like a charge with the bayonet. He was still
only in his early manhood when he produced this remarkably
able work ; and he died in 1644 at the age of forty-two.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

But the greatest name by far among the English divines of the
middle of the seventeenth century is that of Jeremy Taylor.
He was born in 1613, and died bishop of Down and Connor in
1667 ; but most of his works were written, and many of them
were also published, before the Eestoration. In abundance of
thought ; in ingenuity of argument ; in opulence of imagination ;
in a soul made alike for the feeling of the sublime, of the beau-
tiful, and of the picturesque ; and in a style, answering in its
compass, flexibility, and sweetness to the demands of all these
powers, Taylor is unrivalled among the masters of English
eloquence. He is the Spenser of our prose writers ; and his
prose is sometimes almost as musical as Spenser's verse. His
Sermons, his Golden Grove, his Holy Living, and, still more,
his Holy Dying, all contain many passages, the beauty and
splendour of which are hardly to be matched in any othei
English prose writer. Another of his most remarkable works.
Theologia Eclectica, a Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying,
first published in 1647, may be placed beside Milton's Areopa-
gitica, published three years before, as doing for liberty of con-
science the same service which that did for the liberty of the
press. Both remain the most eloquent and comprehensive
defences we yet possess of these two great rights.

303

FULLER.

The last of the theological writers of this era that we shall
notice is Fuller. Dr. Thomas Fuller was born in 1604, and died
in 1661 ; and in the course of his not very extended life produced
a considerable number of literary works, of which his Church
History of Britain from the Birth of Jesus Christ until the Year
1648, which appeared in 1656, and his History of the Worthies
of England, which was not published till the year after his death,
are the most important. He is a most singular writer, full of
verbal quibbling and quaintness of all kinds, but by far the most
amusing and engaging of all the rhetoricians of this school,
inasmuch as his conceits are rarely mere elaborate feats of in-
genuity, but are usually informed either by a strong spirit of
very peculiar humour and drollery, or sometimes even by a
warmth and depth of feeling, of which too, strange as it may
appear, the oddity of his phraseology is often a not ineffective
exponent, lie was certainly one of the greatest and truest wits
that ever lived : he is witty not by any sort of effort at all, but
as it were in spite of himself, or because he cannot help it. But
wit, or the faculty of looking at and presenting things in their
less obvious relations, is accompanied in him, not only by
humour and heart, but by a considerable endowment of the irra-
diating power of fancy. Accordingly, what he writes is always
lively and interesting, and sometimes even eloquent and poetical,
though the eccentricities of his characteristic manner are not
favourable, it must be confessed, to dignity or solemnity of style
when attempted to be long sustained. Fuller, and it is no
wonder, was one of the most popular writers, if not the most
popular, of his own day : he observes himself, in the opening
chapter of his Worthies, that hitherto no stationer (or publisher)
had lost by him ; and what happened in regard to one of his
works, his Holy State, is perhaps without example in tne history
of book-publishing : — it appeared originally in a folio volume in
1642, and is believed to have been four times reprinted before
the Restoration; but the publisher continued to describe the
two last impressions on the title-page as still only the third
edition, as if the demand had been so great that he felt (for what-
ever reason) unwilling that its extent should be known. It is
conjectured that his motive probably was " a desire to lull sus-
picion, and not to invite prohibition from the ruling powers."*

* Preface by the Editor, Mr. James Nichols, to The Holy State. 8vo. Lon.
1241.

E04 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Hardly anything can be found in Fuller that is dull or weari-
some. The following interesting passage, often referred to,
makes part of the account of Warwickshire in the Worthies : —

William Shakespeare was bora at Stratford on Avon in this county ; ill
whom three eminent poets may seem in some sort to be compounded :
1. Martial, in the -warlike sound of his surname (whence some may con-
jecture him of a military extraction), Hastivibrans, or Shakespeare. 2.
Ovid, the most natural and witty of all poets ; and hence it was that Queeu
Elizabeth, coming into a grammar-school, made this extemporary verse,

•' Persius a Crabstaff, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine wag."
3. Plautus, who was an exact comedian, yet never any scholar ; as our
Shakespeare, if alive, would confess himself. Add to all these, that,
though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining him to festivity, yet
he could, when so disposed, be solemn and serious, as appears by his
tragedies ; so that Heraclitus himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might
afford to smile at his comedies, they were so merry ; and Democritus
scarce forbear to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournful.

He was an eminent instance of the truth of that rule, Poeta non fit, sed
nascitur ; one is not made, but born a poet. Indeed his learning was very
little, so that, as Cornish diamonds are not polished by any lapidary, but
are pointed, and smoothed even, as they are taken out of the earth, so
nature itself was all the art which was used upon him.

Many were the wit combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson. Which two
I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master
Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning ; solid, but slow,
in his performances. Shakenpeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in
bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take
advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He
died anno Domini 16 . . , and was buried at Stratford upon Avon, the
town of his nativity.

We may add another Warwickshire worthy, of a different
order : —

Philemon Holland, where born is to me unknown, was bred in Trinity
College in Cambridge a Doctor in Physic, and fixed himself in Coventry.
He was the translator general in his age, so that those books alone of his
turning into English will make a country gentleman a competent library
for historians ; in so much that one saith,

" Holland with his translations doth so fill us,
He will not let Suetonius be Tranquittiu."

Indeed, some decry all translators as interlopers, spoiling the trade of
learning, which should be driven amongst scholars alone. Such also allege
that the best translations are works rather of industry than judgment, and,
in easy authors, of faithfulness rather than industry ; that many be but
bunglers, forcing the meaning of the authors thev translate, " forcing the
lock when they cannot open it."

FULLER. 30f

But their opinion resents too much of envy, that such gentlemen who
cannot repair to the fountain should be debarred access to the stream.
Besides, it is unjust to charge all with the faults of some; and a distinction
must be made amongst translators betwixt cobblers and workmen, and our
Holland had the true knack of translating.

Many of these his books he wrote with one pen, whereon he himself
thus plrasa^tly versified : —

" With one sole pen I writ this book,

Made of a grey goose quill ;
A pen it was when it I took,
And a pen I leave it still."

This monumental pen he solemnly kept, and showed to my reverend
tutor, Doctor Samuel Ward. It seems he leaned very lightly on the neb
thereof, though weightily enough in another sense, performing not slightly
but solidly what he undertook.

But what commendeth him most to the praise of posterity is his
translating Camden's Britannia, a translation more than a translation, with
many excellent additions not found in the Latin, done fifty years since in
Master Camden's lifetime, not only with his knowledge and consent, but
also, no doubt, by his desire and help. Yet such additions (discoverable
in the former part with asterisks in the margent) with some antiquaries
obtain not equal authenticalness with the rest. This eminent translator
was translated to a better life anno Domini 16 ...

The translation of the translator took place in fact in 1636,
when he had reached the venerable age of eighty-five, so that
translating would seem to be not an unhealthy occupation. The
above sketch is Fuller all over, in heart as well as in head and
hand — the last touch especially, which, jest though it be, and
upon a solemn subject, falls as gently and kindly as a tear on
good old Philemon and his labours. The effect is as if we were
told that even so gently fell the touch of death itself upon the
ripe old man — even so easy, natural, and smiling, his labours
over, was hifl leave-taking and exchange of this earth of many
languages, the confusion or discord of which he had done his
best to reduce, for that better world, where there is only one
tongue, and translation is not needed or known. And Fuller's
wit and jesting are always of this character ; they have not in
them a particle either of bitterness or of irreverence. No man
ever (in writing at least) made so many jokes, good, bad, and
indifferent ; be the subject what it may, it does not matter ; in
season and out of season he is equally facetious ; he cannot let
slip an occasion of saying a good thing any more than a man who
is tripped can keep himself from falling; the habit is as irre-
sistible with him as the habit of breathing ; and yet there is pro-
bably neither an ill-natured nor a profane witticism to be found

x

30G ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

in all that he has -written. It is the sweetest-blooded wit that
was ever infused into man or hook. And how strong and
weighty, as well as how gentle and beautiful, much of his writing
is ! The work perhaps in which he is oftenest eloquent and
pathetic is that entitled The Holy State and the Profane State,
the former great popularity of which we have already noticed.
Almost no writer whatever tells a story so well as Fuller — with
so much life and point and gusto.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

Another of the most original and peculiar writers of the middle
portion of the seventeenth century is Sir Thomas Browne, the
celebrated author of the Keligio Medici, published in 1642 ; the
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common
Errors, in 1646 ; and the Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Dis-
course on the Sepulchral Urns found in Norfolk; and The
Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge, or Network Plan-
tations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Con-
sidered, which appeared together in 1658. Browne died in 1682,
at the age of seventy-seven ; but he published nothing after the
Kestoration, though some additional tracts found among his
papers were given to the world after his death. The writer of a
well-known review of Browne's literary productions, and of the
characteristics of his singular genius, has sketched the history of
his successive acts of authorship in a lively and striking passage :
— " He had no sympathy with the great business of men. In
that awful year when Charles I. went in person to seize five
members of the Commons' House, — when the streets resounded
with shouts of * Privilege of Parliament,' and the king's coach
was assailed by the prophetic cry, * To your tents, 0 Israel,' —
in that year, in fact, when the civil war first broke out, and when
most men of literary power were drawn by the excitement of the
crisis into patriotic controversy on either side, — appeared the
calm and meditative reveries of the Eeligio Medici. The war
raged on. It was a struggle between all the elements of govern-
ment. England was torn by convulsion and red with blood.
But Browne was tranquilly preparing his Pseudodoxia Epidemica ;
as if errors about basilisks and grifiins were the paramount and
fatal epidemic of the time ; and it was published in due order in
that year when the cause which the author advocated, as far as
he could advocate anything political, lay at its last gasp. Tlio
king dies on the scaffold. The Protectorate succeeds. Men are

SIR THOMAS BROWNE. 307

again fighting on paper the solemn cause already decided in the
field. Drawn from visions more sublime, — forsaking studies
more intricate and vast than those of the poetical Sage of
Norwich, — diverging from a career bounded by the most splendid
goal, — foremost in the ranks shines the naming sword of Milton :
Sir Thomas Browne is lost in the quincunx of the ancient
gardens; and the year 1658 beheld the death of Oliver Crom-
well, and the publication of the Hydriotaphia."* The writings of
Sir Thomas Browne, to be relished or rightly appreciated, must
of course be read in the spirit suited to the species of literature
to which they belong. If we look for matter-of-fact information
in a poem, we are likely to be disappointed ; and so are we like-
wise, if we go for the passionate or pictured style of poetry to an
encyclopaedia. Browne's works, with all their varied learning,
contain very little positive information that can now be accounted
of much value ; very little even of direct moral or economical
counsel by which any person could greatly profit ; very little, in
short, of anything that will either put money in a man's pocket,
or actual knowledge in his head. Assuredly the interest with
which they were perused, and the charm that was found to
belong to them, could not at any time have been due, except in
very small part indeed, to the estimation in which their readers
held such pieces of intelligence as that the phoenix is but a fable
of the poets, and that the griffin exists only in the zoology of the
heralds. It would fare ill with Browne if the worth of his books
were to be tried by the amount of what they contain of this kind
of information, or, indeed, of any other kind of what is commonly
called useful knowledge ; for, in truth, he has done his best to
diffuse a good many vulgar errors as monstrous as any he had
corrected. For that matter, if his readers were to continue to
believe with him in astrology and witchcraft, we shall all agree
that it was of very little consequence what faith they may hold
touching the phoenix and the griffin. Mr. Hallam, we think, has,
in a manner which is not usual with him, fallen somewhat into
this error of applying a false test in the judgment he has passed
upon Browne, It is, no doubt, quite true that the Inquiry into
Vulgar Errors " scarcely raises a high notion of Browne himself
*s a philosopher, or of the state of physical knowledge in
England ;"f that the Eeligio Medici shows its author to have
been " far removed from real philosophy, both by his turn of
mind and by the nature of his erudition;" and likewise that

* Article in Edinburgh Review for October, 1836 ; No. 129, p. 34. (Under-
•tood to be by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.)
t Lit. of Eur. iii. 461.

B08 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

" be seldom reasons," that " his thoughts are desultory," that
'• sometimes he appears sceptical or paradoxical," but that " cre-
dulity and deference to authority prevail" in his habits of
thinking.* Understanding philosophy in the sense in which the
term is here used, that is to say, as meaning the sifting and
separation of fact from fiction, it may be admitted that there is
not much of that in Sir Thomas Browne ; his works are all
rather marked by a very curious and piquant intermixture of the
two. Of course, such being the case, what he writes is not to be
considered solely or even principally with reference to its ab-
solute truth or falsehood, but rather with reference to its relative
truth and significance as an expression of some feeling or notion
or other idiosyncracy of the very singular and interesting mind
from which it has proceeded. Bead in this spirit, the works of
Sir Thomas Browne, more especially his Eeligio Medici, and his
Urn Burial, will be found among the richest in our literature —
full of uncommon thoughts, and trains of meditation leading far
away into the dimmest inner chambers of life and death — and
also of an eloquence, sometimes fantastic, but always striking,
not seldom pathetic, and in its greatest passages gorgeous with
the emblazonry of a warm imagination. Out of such a writer
the rightly attuned and sympathizing mind will draw many
things more precious than any mere facts.

SIR JAMES HARRINGTON.

We can merely mention Sir James Harrington's political
romance entitled Oceana, which was published in 1656. Har-
rington's leading principles are, that the natural element of power
in states is property ; and that, of all kinds of property, that in
land is the most important, possessing, indeed, certain charac-
teristics which distinguish it, in its natural and political action,
from all other property. " In general," observes Mr. Hallam,
" it may be said of Harrington that he is prolix, .dull, pedantic,
yet seldom profound ; but sometimes redeems himself by just
observations. "f This is true in so far as respects the style of
the Oceana; but it hardly does justice to the ingenuity, the
truth, and the importance of certain of Harrington's views and
deductions in the philosophy of politics. If he has not the merit
of absolute originality in his main propositions, they had at least
never been so clearly expounded and demonstrated by any
preceding writer.

* Lit. of Eur. iii. 153. f Id. iv. 200.

NEWSPAPERS.

It has now been satisfactorily shown that the three news-
papers, entitled The English Mercuric, Nos. 50, 51, and 54,
preserved among Dr. Birch's historical collections in the British
Museum, professing to be "published by authority, for the
contradiction of false reports," at the time of the attack of the
Spanish Armada, on the credit oi' which the invention of news-
papers used to be attributed to Lord Burleigh, are modern
forgeries,—; -jeux tf esprit, in fact, of the reverend Doctor.* Occa-
sional pamphlets, containing foreign news, began to be pub-
lished in England towards the close of the reign of James I.
The earliest that has been met with is entitled News out of
Holland, dated 1619; and other similar papers of news from
different foreign countries are extant which appeared in 1620,
1621, and 1622. The first of these news-pamphlets which
came out at regular intervals appears to have been that entitled
The News of the Present Week, edited by Nathaniel Butler,
which was started in 1622, in the early days of the Thirty Years'
War, and was continued, in conformity with its title, as a weekly
publication. But the proper era of English newspapers, at least
of those containing domestic intelligence, commences with the
Long Parliament. The earliest that has been discovered is a
quarto pamphlet of a few leaves, entitled The Diurnal Occur-
rences, or Daily Proceedings of Both Houses, in this great and
happy parliament, from the 3rd of November, 1640, to the 3rd
of November, 1641 ; London, printed for William Cooke, and
are to be sold at his shop at FurmvaTs Inn Gate, in Holborn,
1641.f More than a hundred newspapers, with different titles,
appear to have been published between this date and the death
of the king, and upwards of eighty others between that event
and the Restoration.^ " When hostilities commenced," says the
writer from whom we derive this information, " every event,
during a most eventful period, had its own historian, who com-
municated News from Hull, Truths from York, Warranted Tidings
from Ireland, and Special Passages from several places. These were
all occasional papers. Impatient, however, as a distracted
people were for information, the news were never distributed
daily. The various newspapers were published weekly at first ;

* See A Letter to Antonio Panizzi, Esq. By Thomas Watts, of the British
Museum. 8vo. Lond. 1839.

t See Chronological List of Newspapers from the Epoch of the Civil Wars,
in Chalmers's Life of Ruddiman, pp. 404—442.

J See Chalmers's Life of Buddiman, p. 114.

810 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

but in the progress of events, and the ardour of curiosity, they
were distributed twice or thrice in every week.* Such were
the French Intelligencer, the Dutch Spy, the Irish Mercury,
and the Scots Dove, the Parliament Kite, and the Secret Owl.
Mercurius Acheronticus brought them hebdomadal News from Hell ;
Mercurius Democritus communicated wonderful news from the
World in the Moon; the Laughing Mercury gave perfect news
from the Antipodes; and Mercurius Mastix faithfully lashed all
Scouts, Mercuries, Posts, Spies, and other Intelligencers."!
Besides the newspapers, also, the great political and religious
questions of the time were debated, as already mentioned, in
a prodigious multitude of separate pamphlets, which appear
to have been read quite as universally and as eagerly. Of such
pamphlets printed in the twenty years from the meeting of the
Long Parliament to the Kestoration there are still preserved
in the British Museum, forming the collection called the King's
Pamphlets, no fewer than thirty thousand, which would give
a rate of four or five new ones every day.

Where our modern newspapers begin, the series of our old
chroniclers closes with Sir Eichard Baker's Chronicle of the
Kings of England, written while its author was confined for
debt in the Fleet Prison, where he died in 1645, and first pub-
lished in a folio volume in 1641. It was several times reprinted,
and was a great favourite with our ancestors for two or three
succeeding generations ; but it has now lost all interest, except
for a few passages relating to the author's own time. Baker,
however, himself declares it to be compiled " with so great
care and diligence, that, if all others were lost, this only will be
sufficient to inform posterity of all passages memorable or worthy
to be known." Sir Richard and his Chronicle are now popularly
remembered principally as the trusted historical guides and
authorities of Addison's incomparable Sir Eoger de Coverley. J '

RETROSPECT OF THE COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE.

It thus appears that the age of the Civil War and the Com-
monwealth does not present an absolute blank in the history of
our highest literature ; but, unless we are to except the Areopa-

* In December, 1642, however, Spalding, the Aberdeen annalist, in a
passage which Mr. Chalmers has quoted, tells us that " now printed papera
daily came from London, called Diurnal Occurrences, declaring what is done
in parliament." — Vol. i. p. 336.

f Chalmers, p. 116. J See Spectator, No. 32U.

RETROSPECT OF THE COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE. 311

gitica of Milton, the Liberty of Prophesying, and a few other
controversial or theological treatises of Jeremy Taylor, somo
publications by Fuller, and the successive apocalypses of the
imperturbable dreamer of Norwich, no work of genius of the first
class appeared in England in the twenty years from the meeting
of the Long Parliament to the Restoration ; and the literary
productions having any enduring life in them at all, that are to
be assigned to that space, make but a very scanty sprinkling.
It was a time when men wrote and thought, as they acted,
merely for the passing moment. The unprinted plays of Beau-
mont and Fletcher, indeed, were now sent to the press, as well
as other dramatic works written in the last age ; the theatres,
by which they used to be published in another way, being shut
up — a significant intimation, rather than anything else, that the
great age of the drama was at an end. A new play continued to
drop occasionally from the commonplace pen of Shirley — almost
the solitary successor of the Shakespeares, the Fletchers, the
Jonsons, the Massingers, the Fords, and the rest of that bright
throng. All other poetry, as well as dramatic poetry, was
nearly silent — hushed partly by the din of arms and of theolo-
gical and political strife, more by the frown of triumphant
puritanism, boasting to itself that it had put down all the other
fine arts as well as poetry, never again to lift their heads in
England. It is observable that even the confusion of the contest
that lasted till after the king's death did not so completely
banish the Muses, or drown their voice, as did the grim tran-
quillity under the sway of the parliament that followed. The
time of the war, besides the treatises just alluded to of Milton,
Taylor, Fuller, and Browne, produced the Cooper's Hill, and
some other poetical pieces, by Denham, and the republication
of the Comus and other early poems of Milton ; the collection of
the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Cowley's volume en-
titled The Mistress, appeared in 1647, in the short interval of
doubtful quiet between the first and the second war ; the volume
of Herrick's poetry was published the next year, while the second
war was still raging, or immediately after its close ; Lovelace's
first volume, in 1649, probably before the execution of the king.
Hobbes's Leviathan, and one or two other treatises of his, all
written some time before, were printed at London in 1650 and
1651, while the author was resident in Paris. For some years
from this date the blank is nearly absolute. Then, when the
more liberal despotism of Cromwell had displaced the Presby-
terian moroseness of the parliament, we have Fuller's Church
History printed in 1655 ; Harrington's Oceana, and the collec-

312 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

tion of Cowley's poetry, in 1656 ; Browne's Hydriotaphia and
Garden of Cyrus, in 1658 ; Lovelace's second volume, and Hales's
Kemains, in 1659 ; together with two or three philosophical
publications by Hobbes, and a few short pieces in verse by
Waller, of which the most famous is his Panegyric on Oliver
Cromwell, written after the Protector's death, an occasion which
also afforded its first considerable theme to the ripening genius
of Dryden. It is to be noted, moreover, that, with one illus*
trious exception, none of the writers that have been named
belonged to the prevailing faction. If Waller and Dryden took
that side in their verses for a moment, it must be admitted that
they both amply made up for their brief conformity ; Denham,
Browne, Taylor, Herrick, Lovelace, Fuller, Hales, Hobbes,
Cowley, were all consistent, most of them ardent, royalists ;
Harrington was a theoretical republican, but even he was a
royalist by personal attachments ; Milton alone was in life and
heart a Commonwealth-man and a Cromwellian.

POETRY OF MILTON.

From the appearance of his minor poems, in 1645, Milton had
published no poetry, with the exception of a sonnet to Henry
Lawes, the musician, prefixed to a collection of Psalm tunes by
that composer in 1648, till he gave to the world his Paradise
Lost, in Ten Books, in 1667. In 1671 appeared his Paradise
Regained and Samson Agonistes ; in 1 673 a new edition of his
minor poems, with nine new sonnets and other additions ; and
in 1674, what is properly the second edition of the Paradise
Lost, now distributed (by the bisection of the seventh and tenth)
into twelve books. He died on Sunday the 8th of November, in
that year, when within about a month of completing the sixty-
sixth year of his age. His prose writings have been already
noticed. Verse, however, was the form in which his genius had
earliest expressed itself, and also that in which he had first come
forth as an author. Passing over his paraphrases of one or two
Psalms, done at a still earlier age, we have abundant promise of
the future great poet in his lines On the Death of a Fair Infant,
beginning,

0 fairest flower, no sooner blown

written in his seventeenth year ; and still more in the College
Exercise, written in his nineteenth year. A portion of this
latter is almost as prophetic as it is beautiful; and, as the

POETRY OF MILTON. 812

verses have not been much noticed,* we will here give a few of

them : —

Hail, native Language, that hy sinews weak
Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak.
And mad'st imperfect words with childish trips,
Half-unpronounced, slide through my infant lips :
• •••••

J have some naked thoughts that rove ahout,
And loudly knock to have their passage out ;
And, weary of their place, do only stay
Till thou hast deck'd them in their best array.

Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,

Thy service in some graver subject use,

Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,

Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound ;

Such where the deep transported mind may soar

Above the wheeling poles, and at heaven's door

Look in, and see each blissful deity

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie,

Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings

To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings

Immortal nectar to her kingly sire :

Then, passing through the spheres of watchful fire,

And misty regions of wide air next under,

And hills of snow, and lofts of piled thunder,

May tell at length how green-eyed Neptune raves,

In heaven's defiance mustering all his waves ;

Then sing of secret things that came to pass

When beldame Nature in her cradle was ;

And last of kings, and queens, and heroes old,

Such as the wise Demodocus once told

In solemn songs at King Alcinous' feast,

"While sad Ulysses' soul and all the rest

Are held with his melodious harmony

In willing chains and sweet captivity.

This was written in 1627. Fourteen years later, after his retum
from Italy, where some of his juvenile Latin compositions, and
some others in the same language, which, as he tells us, he " had
shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst
them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian
is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps;" and
when assenting in so far to these commendations, and not less

* Mr. Hallam, in his work on the Literature of Europe (iii. 269), inad-
vertently assumes that we have no English verse of Milton's written before hif
twenty-second year.

314 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon him, he
had ventured to indulge the hope that, by labour and study —
"which I take," he nobly says, "to be my portion in this
life " — joined with the strong propensity of nature, he " might
perhaps leave something so written in after-times as they
should not willingly let it die " — he continued still inclined to
fix all the industry and art he could unite to the adorning of his
native tongue — or, as he goes on to say, " to be an interpreter
and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own
citizens, throughout this island, in the mother-dialect; — that
what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Eome, or modern
Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country, I, in my
proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might
do for mine ; not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps
I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as
my world ; " and he again, more distinctly than before, though
still only in general expressions, announced the great design,
" of highest hope and hardest attempting," which he proposed
to himself one day to accomplish — whether in the epic form, as
exemplified by Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, or after the dramatic,
"wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign" — or in the style of
" those magnific odes and hymns " of Pindarus and Callimachus ;
not forgetting that of all these kinds of writing the highest
models are to be found in the Holy Scriptures — in the Book
of Job, in the Song of Solomon and the Apocalypse of St. John,
in the frequent songs interspersed throughout the Law and the
Prophets. *' The thing which I had to say," concluded this
remarkable announcement, "and those intentions which have
lived within me ever since I could conceive myself anything
worth to my country, I return to crave excuse that urgent reason
hath plucked from me by an abortive and foredated discovery.
And the accomplishment of them lies not but in a power above
man's to promise ; but that none hath by more studious ways
endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit that none shall,
that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and free leisure
will extend ; and that the land had once enfranchised herself
from this impertinent yoke of prelaty , under whose inquisitorious
and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.
Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing
reader, that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him
toward the payment of what I am now indebted ; as being a
work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of
wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar
amourist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite ; nor to be

POETRY OF MILTON. 315

obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her Siren
daughters ; but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can
enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his
seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify
the lips of whom he pleases. To this must be added industrious
and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly
and generous arts and affairs. Till which in some measure be
accomplished, at mine own peril and cost I refuse not to sustain
this expectation from as many as are not loth to hazard as much
credulity upon the best pledges that I can give them."*

Before this, there had appeared in print of Milton's poetry only
his Comus and Lycidas ; the former in 1637, the latter with some
other Cambridge verses on the same occasion, the loss at sea of
his friend Edward King, in 1638 : but, besides some of his
sonnets and other minor pieces, he had also written the fragment
entitled Arcades, and the two companion poems the L' Allegro
and the II Penseroso. These productions already attested the
worthy successor of the greatest writers of English verse in the
preceding age — recalling the fancy and the melodv of the
poems of Spcn.-<T and Shakespeare,, and^^WFa^^l
nerdess of Fletcher. The Comus. indeg^mightDe cons

n of the. last-mentioned production. The

ice in poetical character between the two sylvan dramas
of Fletcher and Milton is very close; and they may be said to
stand apart from all else in our literature — for Ben Jonson's Sad
Shepherd is not for a moment to be compared with either, and
in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare, ever creative,
passionate, and dramatic beyond all other writers, has soared so
high above both, whether we look to the supernatural part of his
fable or to its scenes of human interest, that we are little re-
minded of his peopled woodlands, his fairies, his lovers, or his
glorious '* rude mechanicals," either by the Faithful Shepherdess
or the Comus. Of these two compositions, Milton's must be
admitted to have the higher moral inspiration, and it is also the
more elaborate and exact as a piece of writing ; but in all that
goes to make up dramatic effect, in the involvement and conduct
of the story, and in the eloquence of natural feeling, Fletcher's is
decidedly superior. It has been remarked that even in Shakes-
peare's earty narrative poems — his Venus and Adonis, and his
Tarquin and Lucrece — we may discern the future great dramatist
by the full and un withholding abandonment with which he there
projects himself into whatever character he brings forward, and
* The Benson of Church Government urged against Prelaty (published iu
1611).

318

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the power of vivid conception with which he realizes the
visionary scene, and brings it around him almost in the distinct-
ness of broad daylight, as shown by a peculiar directness and life
of expression evidently coming everywhere unsought, and escap-
ing from his pen, one might almost say without his own con-
sciousness, — without apparently any feeling, at least, of either
art exercised or feat achieved.* In the case of Milton, on the
contraiy, his first published poem and earliest poetical attempt
of any considerable extent, although in the dramatic form, affords
abundant evidence that his genius was not dramatic. Qorrms is
an exquisitely beautiful poem, but nearly destitute of everything
we more especially look for in a drama— of passion, of character,
of story, of action or movement of any kind. It flows on in a
continued stream of eloquence, fancy, and most melodious versi-
fication ; but there is no dialogue, properly so called, no replica-
tion of diverse emotions or natures ; it is Milton alone who sings
or declaims all the while, — sometimes of course on one side of the
argument, sometimes on the other, and not, it may be, without
changing his attitude and the tone of his voice, but still speaking
only from one head, from one heart, from one ever-present and
ever-dominant constitution of being. And from this imprison-
ment within himself Milton never escapes, either in his dramatic
or in his other poetry ; it is the characteristic which distinguishes
him not only from our great dramatists, but also from other great
epic and narrative poets. His poetry has been sometimes de-
scribed as to an unusual degree wanting in the expression of his
own personal feelings ; and, notwithstanding some remarkable
instances of exception, not only in his minor pieces, but in his
great epic, the remark is true in a certain sense. He is no ha-
bitual brooder over his own emotions, no self-dissector, no system-
atic resorter for inspiration to the accidents of his own personal
history. His subject in some degree forbade this ; his proud and
lofty nature still more withheld him from it. But, although dis-
daining thus to picture himself at full length either for our pity
or admiration, he has yet impressed the stamp of his own indi-
viduality — of his own character, moral as well as intellectual — as
deep on all he has written as if his theme had been ever so
directly himself. Compare him in this respect with Uomer. We
scarcely conceive of the old Greek poet as having a sentient
existence at all, any more than we do of the sea or the breezes
of heaven, whose music his continuous, undulating verse, ever
ever the same, resembles. Who in the delineation of

See this illustrated in Coleridge's Biographia Literari^ vol. ii.

POETRY OF MILTON. 317

the wrath of Achilles finds a trace of the temper or character of
the delineator ? Who in Milton's Satan does not recognize much
of Milton himself? But, although the spirit of his poetry is thus
essentially egotistic, the range of his poetic power is not thereby
confined within narrow limits. He had not the ''myriad-minded"
nature of Shakespeare — the all-penetrating sympathy by which
the greatest of dramatists could transform himself for the time
into any one of the other existences around him, no matter how
high, no matter how low : conceive the haughty genius of Milton
employed in the task of developing such a character as Justice
Shallow, or Bottom the weaver, or a score of others to be found
in the long, various, brilliant procession headed by Falstaff and
ending with Dogberry ! Anything of this kind he could scarcely
have performed much better than the most ordinarily gifted of
the sons of men ; he had no more the wit or humour requisite for
it than he had the power of intense and universal sympathy.
But his proper region was still a vast one ; and there, his vision,
though always tinged with the colour of his own passions and
opinions, was, notwithstanding, both as far reaching and as
searching as any poet's ever was. In its style or form his poetry
may be considered to belong rudimentally to the same Italian
seho"! with that <>f the greatest of his predecessors — of Spenser
and of Shakespeare, if not also of Chaucer. But, as of these
others, so it is true of him, that the inspiration of his Italian
models is most perceptible in his earlier and minor verses, and
that in his more mature and higher efforts he enriched this ori-
ginal basis of his poetic manner with so much of a different
character, partly derived from other foreign sources, partly pe-
culiar to himself, that the mode of conception and expression
which he ultimately thus worked out is most correctly described
by calling it his own. Conversant as he was with the language
and literature of Italy, his poetry probably acquired what it has
of Italian in its character principally through the medium of the
elder poets of his own country ; and it is, accordingly, still more
English than Italian. Much of its inner spirit, and something

f its outward fashion, is of Hebrew derivation : 1L may fo
afiirnn-d that from the fountain of no other foreign literaturemd
Milt'»n drink with so much eagerness as from this, and that by

M<M was his genius so much nourished and strengthened.
!Cot a little, also, one so accomplished in the lore of classic anti-
quity must needs have acquired from that source ; the toneB of
the poetry of Greece and Komo are heard more or less audibly
everywhere in that of the great epic poet of England. But do we
go too far in holding that in what he has actually achieved in his

818 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

proper domain, the modern writer rises high "above all Greek,
above all Roman fame?" Where in the poetry of the ancient
world shall we find anything which approaches the richness and
beauty, still less the isn blimey, of the most triumphant passages
in Paradise Lost ? The First Book of that poem is probably the
most splendid and perfect of human compositions — the one, that
is to say, which unites these two qualities in the highest degree ;
and the Fourth is as unsurpassed for grace and luxuriance as that
is for magnificence of imagination. And, though these are
perhaps the two greatest books in the poem, taken each as a
whole, there are passages in every one of the other books equal
or almost equal to the finest in these. And worthy of the
thoughts that breathe are the words that burn. A tide of
gorgeous eloquence rolls on from beginning to end, like a river of
molten gold ; outblazing, we may surely say, everything of the
kind in any other poetry. Finally, Milton's blank verse, both
for its rich and varied music and its exquisite adaptation, would
in itself almost deserve to be styled poetry, without the words ;
alone of all our poets, before or since, he has brought out the full
capabilities of the language in that form of composition. Indeed,
out of the drama, he is still our only great blank verse writer.
Compared to his, the blank verse of no other of our narrative or
didactic poets, unless we are to except a few of the happiest at-
tempts at the direct imitation of bis pauses and cadences, reads
like anything else than a sort of nmffied rhyme — rhyme spoilt by
the ends being blunted or broken off. Who remembers, who can
repeat, any narrative blank verse but his? In whose ear does
any other linger ? What other has the true organ tone which
makes the music of this form of verse — either the grandeur or the
sweetness ?

It is natural, in comparing, or contrasting, Milton's Paradise
Lost with his Paradise Eegained, to think of the two great
Homeric epics; the Iliad commonly believed by antiquity to
have proceeded from the inspired poet in the vigour and glow of
his manhood or middle age, the Odyssey to reflect the milder
radiance of his imagination in the afternoon or evening of his
life. It has been common accordingly to apply to the case of the
English poet also the famous similitude of Longinus, and to say
that in the Paradise Eegained we have the sun on his descent,
the same indeed as ever in majesty (TO niyeQog), but deprived
of his overpowering ardour (S/xa rfc ff^oSpori/roc). Some have
gone farther, not claiming for the Paradise Regained the honour
of being sunshine at all, but only holding it worthy of being
applauded in the spirit and after the fashion in which Pope

POETRY OF MILTW. 319

hns eulogized the gracious though not dazzling qualities of his
friend Martha Blount : —

So, when the sun's broad beam has tired the sight,

All mild ascends the moon's more sober light;

Serene in virgin modesty she shines,

And unobserved the glaring orb declines.

An ingenious theory has been put forth by one of the editors of
the Paradise Regained, Mr. Charles Dunster ; he conceives that
Milton designed this poem for an example of what he has himself
in the remarkable passage of his Eeason of Church Government,
to which we have already had occasion to refer, spoken of as the
brief epic, and distinguished from the great and diffuse epic, such as
those of Homer and of Virgil, and his own Paradise Lost.
Milton's words in full are : — " Time serves not now, and, per-
haps, I might seem too profuse, to give any certain account of
what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing,
hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and
hardest attempting ; whether that epic form, whereof the two
poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a
diffuse, and the book of Job a brief, model." Dunster accordingly
thinks that we may suppose the model which Milton set before
him in his Paradise Regained to have been in a great measure
the book of Job.*

But surely the comparison which the companionship or se-
quence of the two Miltonic epics most forcibly suggests to a true
feeling of both their resemblance and their difference, and of the
prevailing spirit that animates each, is that of the Old and the
New Testament. The one is distinctively Hebrew, the other as
distinctively Christian. With much in common, they have also,
like the two religions, and the two collections of sacred books,
much in which they are unlike, and in a certain sense opposed to
one another, both in manner and in sentiment. The poetry of
the Paradise Lost, all life and movement, is to that of the Para-
dise Regained what a conflagration is to a sunlit landscape. In
the one we have the grandeur of the old worship, in the other
the simplicity of the new. The one addresses itself more to the
sense, the other to the understanding. In respect either of force
or of variety, either of intense and burning passion or of ima-
ginative power mingling and blending all the wonders of bright-
ness and gloom, there can be no comparison between them.
There is the same poetic art, it is true, in both poems ; they are
more unmistakeably products of the same mind, perhaps, than are

* Paradise Regained ; with notes. By Charles Dunster, M.A. 4to. Lend.
1795. p. 2.

520 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the Iliad and the Odyssey ; and yet the difference between them
in tone and character is greater than that between the two Greek
epics. It is in some respects like the difference between an oil-
painting and a painting in water-colours. The mere brevity of
the one as compared with the other would stamp it as a work of
inferior pretension, and it is still more limited in subject or scope
than it is in dimensions. The Paradise Regained must be con-
sidered, in fact, as only an appendage to the Paradise Lost. Yet,
comparatively short as it is, the thread of the narrative is felt to
be spun out and over-much attenuated. It contains some highly
finished and exquisite passages; but perhaps the only poetical
quality in which it can be held to match, if it does not sometimes
even surpass, the Paradise Lost, is picturesqueness. In that it
more resembles the L'Allegro and the 11 Penseroso than it does its
companion epic. Even the argumentative eloquence, of which it
is chiefly made up, brilliant as it is, is far from being equal to
the best of that in the Paradise Lost. It has the same ingenuity
and logic, with as much, or perhaps even more, concentration in
the expression ; but, unavoidably, it may be, from the circum-
stances of the case, it has not either the same glow and splendour
or even the same tone of real feeling. The fallen spirits throng-
ing Pandemonium, or stretched on the burning lake before that
gorgeous pile " rose like an exhalation," consult and debate, in
their misery and anxious perplexity, with an accent of human
earnestness which it was impossible to give either to the conscious
sophistry of their chief in that other scene or to the wisdom more
than human by which he is refuted and repelled.

It is commonly said that Milton himself professed to prefer the
Paradise Eegained to the Paradise Lost. The probability is that,
if he asserted the former to be the better poem of the two, it was
only in a qualified sense, or with reference to something else than
its poetical merits, and in the same feeling with which he ex-
plained the general prevalence of the opposite opinion by attri-
buting it to most people having a much stronger feeling of regret
for the loss of Paradise than desire for the recovery of it, or at
least inclination for the only way in which it was to be recovered.
It was very characteristic of him, however, to be best pleased
with what he had last produced, as well as to be only confirmed
in his partiality by having the general voice against him and by
his contempt for what of extravagance and injustice there was in
the popular depreciation of the new poem. He was in all things
by temper and mental constitution essentially a partisan ; seeing
clearly, indeed, all that was to be said on both sides of any ques-
tion, but never for all that remaining in suspense between them

COWLEY. 321

or hesitating to make up his mind and to take his place distinctly
on one side. This is shown by the whole course of his life. Nor
is it less expressively proclaimed not only by the whole tone and
manner of his poetry, everywhere so ardent, impetuous, and
dogmatical, and so free from the faintest breath either of suspi-
cion or of any kind of self-distrust, but even in that argumenta-
tive eloquence which is one of its most remarkable characteris-
tics. For one of the chief necessary conditions of the existence
of oratorical or debating power, and, indeed, of every kind of
fighting ability, is that it should, at one and the same time, botli
feel passionately in favour of its own side of the question and
discern clearly the strength of the adverse position. Whatever
may be the fact as to his alleged preference of the Paradise Re-
gained to the Paradise Lost, Milton has, at any rate, pronounced
judgment in a sufficiently decisive and uncompromising way upon
another point in regard to which both these works stand con-
trasted with much of his earlier poetry. We refer to his vehement
denunciation, in a notice prefixed to the Paradise Lost,* of rhyme
as being, in all circumstances, for he makes no exception, "a
thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no tine musical
delight," and as having no claim to be regarded as anything else
than the barbarous invention of a barbarous age, and a mere
jingle and life-repressing bondage. We certainly rejoice that the
Paradise Lost is not written in rhyme ; but we are very glad
that these strong views were not taken up by the great poet till
after he had produced his L'Allegro and II Penseroso, his Ly-
cidas and his Sonnets.

COWLEY.

The poetry of Milton, though principally produced after the
Restoration, belongs in everything but in date to the preceding
age ; and this is also nearly as true of that of Cowley. Abraham
Cowley, born in London in 1018, published his first volume of
verse, under the title of Poetic Blossoms, in 1633, when he was
yet only a boy of fifteen : one piece contained in this publication,
indeed— The Tragical History of Pyramus and Thisbe— was
written when he was only in his tenth year. The four books of
his unfinished epic entitled Davideis were mostly written while
he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. His pastoral

* This notice, commonly headed The Verte in modern editions cf the poem,
is found in three of the five various forms of the first edition (16C7, 1668, and
1669), and there bears the superscription The Printer to tJie Reader ; but tLero
can bo no doubt that it is Milton's own.

322 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

drama of Love's Eiddle, and his Latin comedy called Naufragiuin
Joculare, were 'both published in 1638. In 1647 appeared his col-
lection of amatory poems entitled The Mistress, and in 1653 his
comedy of The Guardian, afterwards altered, and republished as
The Cutter of Coleman Street. After the Restoration he collected
such of his pieces as he thought worth preserving, and repub-
lished them, together with some additional productions, of which
the most important were his Davideis, and his Pindarique Odes.
Few poets have been more popular, or more praised, in their
own time than Cowley. Milton is said to have declared that the
three greatest English poets were Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Cowley; though it does not follow that he held all three to be
equally great. Sir John Denham,. in some verses on Cowley's
Death and Burial on the 3rd of August, 1667, in Westminster
Abbey, sets him above all the English poets that had gone before
him, and prophesies that posterity will hold him to have been
equalled by Virgil alone among those of antiquity. For a long
time, too, his works appear to have been more generally read
than those of any other English poet, if a judgment -may be formed
from the frequency with which they were reprinted, and the
numerous copies of them in various forms that still exist.* This
popular favour they seem to have shared with those of Donne,
whose legitimate successor Cowley was considered to be ; or
rather, when the poetry of Donne became obsolete or unfashion-
able, that of Cowley took its place in the reading and admiration
of the poetical part of the public. Cowley, indeed, is in the main
a mere modernization and dilution of Donne. With the same
general characteristics of manner, he is somewhat less forced and
fantastical, a good deal less daring in every way, but unfortu-
nately also infinitely less poetical. Everything about him, in
short, is less deep, strong, and genuine. His imagination is
tinsel, or mere surface gilding, compared to Donne's solid gold ;
his wit little better than word-catching, to the profound medita-
tive quaintness of the elder poet ; and of passion, with which all
Donne's finest lines are tremulous, Cowley has none. Consider-
able grace and dignity occasionally distinguish his Pindaric
Odes (which, however, are Pindaric only in name) ; and he has
shown much elegant playfulness of style and fancy in his transla-
tions from and imitations of Anacreon, and in some other verses
written in the same manner. As for what he intends for love
verses, some of them are pretty enough frost-work ; but the only
sort of love there is in them is the love of point and sparkle.

* A twelfth edition of the collection formed by Cowley himself was pub-
lished by Tonson in 1721.

323

BUTLER.

This manner of writing is more fitly applied by another cele-
brated poet of the same date, Samuel Butler, the immortal author
of Hudibras. Butler (b. 1612, d. 1680) is said to have written most
of his great poem during the interregnum ; but the first part of
it was not published till 1663. The poetry of Butler has been
very happily designated as merely the comedy of that style of
composition which Donne and Cowley practised in its more
serious form — the difference between the two modes of writing
being much the same with that which is presented by a counte-
nance of a peculiar cast of features when solemnized by deep
reflection, and the same countenance when lighted up by cheer-
fulness or distorted by mirth.* And it may be added, that the
gayer and more animated expression is here, upon the whole, the
more natural. The quantity of explosive matter of all kinds
which Butler has contrived to pack up in his verses is amazing ;
it is crack upon crack, flash upon flash, from the first line of his
long poem to the last. Much of this incessant bedazzlement is,
of course, merely verbal, or otherwise of the humblest species of
wit ; but an infinite number of the happiest things are also thrown
out. And Hudibras is far from being all mere broad farce.
Butler's power of arguing in verse, in his own way, may almost
be put on a par with Dryden's in his ; and, perseveringly as he
devotes himself upon system to the exhibition of the ludicrous
and grotesque, he sometimes surprises us with a sudden gleam of
the truest beauty of thought and expression breaking out from the
midst of the usual rattling fire of smartnesses and conundrums —
as when in one place he exclaims of a thin cloud drawn over the
moon —

Mysterious veil ; of brightness made,

At once her lustre and her shade !

He must also be allowed to tell his story and to draw his charac-
ters well, independently of his criticisms.

WALLER.

The most celebrated among the minor poets of the period be-
tween the Restoration and the Revolution was Waller. Edmund
Waller, born in 1605, had, in point of fact, announced himself
as a writer of verse before the close of the reign of James I., by

* Scott; in Life of Dryden.

324

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGES

his lines on the escape of Prince Charles at the port of San
Andero, in the Bay of Biscay, on his return from Spain, in Sep-
tember, 1623 ; and he continued to write till after the accession
of James II., in whose reign he died, in the year 168*7. His last
production was the little poem concluding with one of his
happiest, one of his most characteristic, and one of his best-
known passages : —

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made :

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become

As they draw near to their eternal home :

Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,

That stand upon the threshold of the new.

Fenton, his editor, tells us that a number of poems on religious
subjects, to which these verses refer, were mostly written when
he was about [above ?] eighty years old ; and he has himself
intimated that his bodily faculties were now almost gone : —

When we for age could neither read nor write,
The subject made us able to indite.

Waller, therefore, as well as Milton, Cowley, and Butler, may be
considered to have formed his manner in the last age ; but his
poetry does not belong to the old English school even so much as
that of either Butler or Cowley. The contemporaries of the
earlier portion of his long career were Carew and Lovelace ; and
with them he is properly to be classed in respect of poetical style
and manner. Both Lovelace and Carew, however, as has been
already intimated, have more passion than Waller, who, with all
his taste and elegance, was incapable of either expressing or feel-
ing anything very lofty or generous — being, in truth, poet as he
was, a very mean-souled description of person, as his despicable
political course sufficiently evinced. His poetry accordingly is
beyond the reach of critical animadversion on the score of such
extravagance as is sometimes prompted by strong emotion.
Waller is always perfectly master of himself, and idolizes his
mistress with quite as much coolness and self-possession as he
flatters his prince. But, although cold and unaffecting at all
times, he occasionally rises to much dignity of thought and
manner. His panegyric on Cromwell, the offering of his grati-
tude to the Protector for the permission granted to him of re-
turning to England after ten years' exile, is one of the most
graceful pieces of adulation ever offered by poetry to power ; and
the poet is here probably more sincere than in most of hie
effusions, for the occasion was one on which he was likely to be

MARVEL. 325

moved to more than usual earnestness of feeling. A few years
after he welcomed Charles II. on his restoration to the throne of
his ancestors in another poem, which has been generally con-
sidered a much less spirited composition : Fenton accounts for
the falling off by the author's advance in the meanwhile from his
forty-ninth to his fifty*-fifth year — " from which time," he ob-
serves, ** his genius began to decline apace from its meridian ;"
but the poet himself assigned another reason : — when Charles
frankly told him that he thought his own panegyric much inferior
to Cromwell's, " Sir," replied Waller, " we poets never succeed so
well in writing truth as in fiction." Perhaps the true reason,
after all, might be that his majesty's return to England was not
quite so exciting a subject to Mr. Waller's muse as his own re-
turn had been. One thing must be admitted in regard to
Waller's poetry; it is free from all mere verbiage and empty
sound ; if he rarely or never strikes a very powerful note, there
is at least always something for the fancy or the understanding,
as well as for the ear, in what he writes. He abounds also in
ingenious thoughts, which he dresses to the best advantage, and
exhibits with great transparency of style. Eminent, however, as
he is in his class, he must be reckoned in that subordinate class
of poets who think and express themselves chiefly in similitudes,
not among those who conceive and write passionately and meta-
phorically. He had a decorative and illuminating, but not a
transforming imagination.

MARVEL.

The chief writer of verse on the popular side after the
Restoration was Andrew Marvel, the noble-minded member for
Hull, the friend of Milton, and, in that age of brilliant pro-
fligacy, renowned alike as the first of patriots and of wits.
Marvel, the son of the Rev. Andrew Marvel, master of the
grammar-school of Hull, was born there in 1620, and died in
1678. His poetical genius has scarcely had justice done to it.
He is the author of a number of satires in verse, in which a rich
vein of vigorous, though often coarse, humour runs through a
careless, extemporaneous style, and which did prodigious execu-
tion in the party warfare of the day ; but some of his other
poetry, mostly perhaps written in the earlier part of his life,
is eminent both for the delicate bloom of the sentiment and
for grace of form. His Song of the Exiles, beginning " Where
the remote Bermudas ride," is a gem of melody, picturesqueness,

S2G ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

and sentiment, nearly without a flaw, and is familiar to every
lover of poetry. The following verses, which are less known,
are exquisitely elegant and tuneful. They are entitled The
Picture of T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers : —

See with what simplicity

This nymph begins her golden days f

In the green grass she loves to lie,

And there with her fair aspect tames

The wilder flowers, and gives them names ;

But only with the roses plays,

And them does tell

What colour best becomes them, and what smelL

Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born ?
See this is she whose chaster laws
The wanton Love shall one day fear,
And, under her command severe,
See his bow broke and ensigns torn.
Happy who can
Appease this virtuous enemy of man !

0 then let me in time compound,

And parley with those conquering eyes ;

Ere they have tried their force to wound,

Ere with their glancing wheels they drive

In triumph over hearts that strive,

And them that yield but more despise.

Let me be laid

Where I may see the glory from some shad 5.

Meantime, whilst every verdant thing
Itself does at thy beauty charm,1
Reform the errors of the spring :
Make that the tulips may have share
Of sweetness, seeing they are fair ;
And roses of their thorns disarm :
But most procure
That violets may a longer age endure.

But oh, young beauty of the woods,
Whom nature courts with fruits and flowers.
Gather the flowers, but spare the buds ;
Lest Flora, angry at thy crime
To kill her infants in their prime,
Should quickly make the example yours ;
And, ere we see,
Nip in the blossom all our hopes in thee.

Charm itself, that is, delight itselt

OTHER MINOR POETS. 327

Certainly neither Carew, nor Waller, nor any other court
poet of that day, has produced anything in the -same style finer
than these lines. But Marvel's more elaborate poetry is not
confined to love songs and other such light exercises of an
ingenious and elegant fancy. Witness his verses on Milton's
Paradise Lost— " When I beheld the poet blind, yet bold "—
which have throughout almost the dignity, and in parts more
than the strength, of Waller. , % "•

OTHER MINOR POETS.

Of the other minor poets of this date we shall only mention
the names of a few of the most distinguished. Sir Charles
Sedley is the Suckling of the time of Charles II., with less
impulsiveness and more insinuation, but a kindred gaiety and
sprightliness of fancy, and an answering liveliness and at the
same time courtly ease and elegance of diction. King Charles,
a good judge of such matters, was accustomed to say that
Sedley's style, either in writing or discourse, would be the
standard of the English tongue; and his contemporary, the
Duke of Buckingham (Villiers) used to call his exquisite art of
expression Sedley's witchcraft. Sedley's genius early ripened
and bore fruit: he was born only two or three years before the
breaking out of the Civil War ; and he was in high reputation
as a poet and a wit within six or seven years after the Restora-
tion. He survived both the Revolution and the century, dying
in the year 1701. Sedley's fellow debauchee, the celebrated
Earl of Rochester (Wilmot) — although the brutal grossness of
the greater part of his verse has deservedly made it and its
author infamous — was perhaps a still greater genius. There is
immense strength and pregnancy of expression in some of the
best of his compositions, careless and unfinished as they are.
Rochester had not completed his thirty-third year when he
died, in July 1680. Of the poetical productions of the othei
court wits of Charles's reign the principal are, the Duke of
Buckingham's satirical comedy of the Rehearsal, which was very
effective when first produced, and still enjoys a great reputation,
though it would probably be thought but a heavy joke now by
most readers not carried away by the prejudice in its favour ;
the Earl of Roscommon's very commonplace Essay on Trans-
lated Verse ; and the Earl of Dorset's lively and well-known
song, " To all you ladies now on land," written at sea the night
before the engagement with the Dutch on the 3rd of June, 1665,

ma ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

or rather professing to have been then written, for the asserted
poetic tranquillity of the noble author in expectation of the
morrow's fight has been disputed. The Marquis of Halifax and
Lord Godolphin were also writers of verse at this date; but
neither of them has left anything worth remembering. Among
the minor poets of the time, however, -we ought not to forget
Charles Cotton, best known for his humorous, though somewhat
coarse, travesties of Virgil and Lucian, and for his continuation
of Izaak Walton's Treatise on Angling, and his fine idiomatic
translation of Montaigne's Essays, but also the author of some
short original pieces in verse, of much fancy and liveliness.
One entitled an Ode to Winter, in particular, has been highly
,praised by Wordsworth.

DKTDEN.

By far the most illustrious name among the English poets of
'the latter half of the seventeenth century — if we exclude
Milton as belonging properly to the preceding age — is that of
John Dtyden. Born in 1632, Dryden produced his first known
•composition in verse in 1649, his lines on the death of Lord
Hastings, a yotmg nobleman of great promise, who was suddenly
'cut off by small-pox, on ^he eve of his intended marriage, in
that year. This earliest of Dryden's poems is in the most am-
bitious style of the school of Donne and Cowley : Donne him-
self, indeed, 'has scarcely penned anything quite so extravagant
as one passage, in which the fancy of the young poet runs riot
among the phenomena of the loathsome disease to which Lord
Hastings had fallen a victim :—

So many spots, like naeves on Venus' soil,

One jewel set off with so many a foil :

Blisters with pride swell'd, which through 's flesh did sprout

Like rose-buds stuck i* the lily skin about.

Each little pimple had a tear in it,

To wail the fault its rising did commit : —

and so forth. Almost the only feature of the future Dryden
which this production discloses is his deficiency in sensibility
or heart ; exciting as the occasion was, it does not 'contain an
affecting line. Perhaps, on comparing his imitation with
Donne's own poetry, so instinct with tenderness and passion,
Dryden may have seen or felt that his own wanted the very
auality which was the light and life of that of his master; at

DRYDEN. S29

any rate, wiser than Cowley, who had the same reason for
shunning a competition with Donne, he abandoned this stylo
with his first attempt, and, indeed, for anything that appears,
gave np the writing of poetry for some years altogether. His
next verses of any consequence are dated nine years later, — his
Heroic Stanzas on the death of Oliver Cromwell, — and, destitute
AS they are of the vigorous conception and full and easy flow of
versification which he afterwards attained, they are free from
any trace of the elaborate and grotesque absurdity of the Elegy
on Lord Hastings. His Astraea Eedux, or poem on the return
of the king, produced two years after, evinces a growing free-
dom and command of style. But it is in his Annus Mirabilis,
written in 1666, that his genius breaks forth for the first time
with any promise of that full effulgence at which it ultimately
arrived ; here, in spite of the incumbrance of a stanza (the
quatrain of alternately rhyming heroics) which he afterwards
wisely exchanged for a more manageable kind of verse, we have
much both of the nervous diction and the fervid fancy which
characterize his latest and best works. From this date to the
end of his days Dryden's life was one long literary labour;
eight original poems of considerable length, many shorter pieces,
twenty-eight dramas, and several volumes of poetical translation
from Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ovid, Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace,
Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil, together with numerous discourses
in prose, some of them very long and elaborate, attest the
industry as well as the fertility of a mind which so much toil
and so many draughts upon its resources were so far from
exhausting, that its powers continued not only to exert them-
selves with unimpaired elasticity, but to grow stronger and
brighter, to the last. The genius of Dryden certainly did not,
as that of Waller is said to have done, begin "to decline apace
from its meridian" after he had reached his fifty-fifth year.
His famous Alexander's Feast and his Fables, which are among
his happiest performances, were the last he produced, and were
published together in the year 1700, only a few months before
his death, at the age of sixty-eight.

Dryden has commonly been considered to have founded a new
school of English poetry ; but perhaps it would be more strictly
correct to regard him as having only carried to higher perfection
— perhaps to the highest to which it has yet been brought —
a style of poetry which had been cultivated long before his
day. The satires of Hall and of Marston, and also the Nosce
Teipsum of Sir John Davies, all published before the end of the
sixteenth century, not to refer to other less eminent examples,

£80 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

may be classed as of the same school with his poetry. It is a
school very distinguishable from that to which Milton and the
greatest of our elder poets belong, deriving its spirit and cha-
racter, as it does, chiefly from the ancient Roman classic poetry,
whereas the other is mainly the offspring of the middle ages, of
Gothic manners and feelings and the Romance or Prove^al
literature. The one therefore may be called, with sufficient
propriety, the classic, the other the romantic school of poetry.
But it seems to be a mistake to assume that the former first
arose in England after the Eestoration, under the influence of
the imitation of the French, which then became fashionable ;
the most that can be said is, that the French taste which then
became prevalent among us may have encouraged its revival;
for undoubtedly what has been called the classic school of poetry
had been cultivated by English writers at a much earlier date ;
nor is there any reason to suppose that the example of the
modern poetry of France had had any share in originally
turning our own into that channel. Marston and Hall, and
Sackville in his Ferrex and Porrex, and Ben Jonson in his
comedies and tragedies, and the other early writers of English
poetry in the classic vein, appear not to have imitated any
French poets, but to have gone to the fountain-head, and sought
in the productions of the Roman poets themselves, — in the plays
of Terence and Seneca, and the satires of Juvenal and Persius,
— for examples and models. Nay, even Dry den, at a later
period, probably formed himself almost exclusively upon the
same originals and upon the works of these his predecessors
among his own countrymen, and was little, if at all, indebted to
or influenced by any French pattern. His poetry, unlike as it
is to that of Milton or Spenser, has still a thoroughly English
character — an English force and heartiness, and, with all its
classicality, not a little even of the freedom and luxuriance of
the more genuine English style. Smooth Waller, who preceded
him, may have learned something from the modern French poets ;
and so may Pope, who came after him; but Dryden's fiery
energy and "full-resounding line" have nothing in common
with them in spirit or manner. Without either creative imagina-
tion or any power of pathos, he is in argument, in satire, and
in declamatory magnificence, the greatest of our poets. His
poetry, indeed, is not the highest kind of poetry, but in that
kind he stands unrivalled and unapproached. Pope, his great
disciple, who, in correctness, in neatness, and in the brilliancy
of epigrammatic point, has outshone his master, has not como
Dear him in easy flexible vigour, in indignant vehemence, in

DRAMATISTS. 33J

narrative rapidity, any more than he has in sweep and variety
\<f versification. Dryden never writes coldly, or timidly, or
drowsily. The movement of verse always sets him on fire, and
whatever he produces is a coinage hot from the brain, not
slowly scraped or pinched into shape, but struck out as from
a die with a few stout blows or a single wrench of the screw.
It is this fervour especially which gives to his personal sketches
their wonderful life and force : his Absalom and Achitophel is
the noblest portrait-gallery in poetry.

It is chiefly as a dramatic writer that Dryden can be charged
with the imitation of French models. Of his plays, nearly thirty
in number, the comedies for the most part in prose, the tragedies
in rhyme, few have much merit considered as entire works,
although there are brilliant passages and spirited scenes in most
of them. Of the whole number, he has told us that his tragedy
of All for Love, or the World well Lost (founded on the story
of Antony and Cleopatra), was the only play he wrote for
himself ; the rest, he admits, were sacrifices to the vitiated taste
of the age. His Almanzor, or the Conquest of Granada (in two
parts), although extravagant, is also full of genius. Of his
comedies, the Spanish Friar is perhaps the best; it has some
most effective scenes.

DRAMATISTS.

Many others of the poets of this age whose names have been
already noticed were also dramatists. Milton's Comus was
never acted publicly, nor his Samson Agonistes at all. Cowley's
Love's Riddle and Cutter of Coleman Street were neither of
them originally written for the stage ; but the latter was brought
out in one of the London theatres after the Restoration, and was
also revived about the middle of the last century. Waller
altered the fifth act of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy,
making his additions to the blank verse of the old dramatists in
rhyme, as he states in a prologue : —

In this old play what's new we have expressed
In rhyming verse distinguish'd from the rest ;
That, as the Rhone its hasty way does make
(Not mingling waters) through Geneva's lake,
So, having here the different styles in view,
You may compare the former with the new.

Villiors, Duke of Buckingham, besides his Rehearsal, wrote a

*32 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

farce entitled the Battle of Sedgmoor, and also altered Bean-
raont and Fletcher's comedy of The Chances. The tragedy of
Valentinian of the same writers was altered by the Earl of
Rochester. Sedley wrote three comedies, mostly in prose, and
three tragedies, one in rhyme and two in blank verse. And
Davenant is the author of twenty-five tragedies, comedies, and
masques, produced between 1629 and his death in 1668. But
the most eminent dramatic names of this era are those of Thomas
Otway, Nathaniel Lee, John Crowne, Sir George Etherege,
William Wycherley, and Thomas Southerne. Of six tragedies
and four comedies written by Otway, his tragedies of the
Orphan and Venice Preserved still sustain his fame and popu-
larity as the most pathetic and tear-drawing of all our dramatists.
Their licentiousness has necessarily banished his comedies from
the stage, with most of those of his contemporaries. Lee has
also great tenderness, with much more fire and imagination
than Otway ; of his pieces, eleven in number — all tragedies —
his Theodosius, or the Force of Love, and his Eival Queens, or
Alexander the Great, are the most celebrated. Crowne, though
several of his plays were highly successful when first produced,
was almost forgotten, till Mr. Lamb reprinted some of his scenes
in his Dramatic Specimens, and showed that no dramatist of
that age had written finer things. Of seventeen pieces produced
by Crowne between 1671 and 1698, his tragedy of Thyestes and
his comedy of Sir Courtley Nice are in particular of eminent
merit the first for its poetry, the second for plot and character.
Etherege is the author of only three comedies, the Comical
Revenge (1664), She Would if She Could (1668), and the Man
of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) ; all remarkable for the
polish and fluency of the dialogue, and entitled to be regarded
as having first set the example of that modern style of comedy
which was afterwards cultivated by Wycherley, Farquhar, Van-
brugh, and Congreve. Wycherley, who was born in 1640, and
lived till 1715, produced his only four plays, Love in a Wood,
The Gentleman Dancing Master, The Country Wife, and The
Plain Dealer, all comedies, between the years 1672 and 1677.
The two last of these pieces are written with more elaboration
than anything of Etherege's, and both contain some bold
delineation of character and strong satiric writing, reminding us
at times of Ben Jonson ; but, like him, too, Wycherley is defi-
cient in ease and nature. Southerne, who was only born in the
year of the Restoration, and lived till 1746, had produced no
more than his two first plays before the Revolution of 1688,
—his tragedy of The Loyal Brother in 1682, and his comedy

CLARENDON. 333

of The Disappointment in 1G84. Of ten dramatic pieces of which
he is the author, five are comedies, and are of little value ; but
his tragedies of The Fatal Marriage (1692), Oroonoko (1696), and
The Spartan Dame (1719), are interesting and affecting.

PROSE WRITERS : — CLARENDON.

Eminent as he is among the poets of his age, Dryden is also
one of the greatest of its prose writers. In ease, flexibility, and
variety, indeed, his English prose has scarcely ever been excelled.
Cowley, too, is a charming writer of prose : the natural, pure,
and flowing eloquence of his Essays is better than anything in
his poetry. Waller, Suckling, and Sedley, also, wrote all well in
prose ; and Marvel's literary reputation is founded more upon his
prose than upon his verse. Of writers exclusively in prose be-
longing to the space between the Restoration and the Revolution,
Clarendon may be first mentioned, although his great work, his
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars, was not published till
the year 1702, nor his Life and Continuation of his History,
before 1759. His style cannot be commended for its correctness
the manner in which he constructs his sentences, indeed, often
sets at defiance all the rules of syntax ; but yet he is never unin-
telligible or obscure — with such admirable expository skill is the
matter arranged and spread out, even where the mere verbal
sentence-making is the most negligent and entangled. The style,
in fact, is that proper to speaking rather than to writing, and had,
no doubt, been acquired by Clarendon, not so much from books
as from his practice in speaking at the bar and in parliament ;
for, with great natural abilities, he does not seem to have had
much acquaintance with literature, or much acquired knowledge
of any kind resulting from study. But his writing possesses the
quality that interests above all the graces or artifices of rhetoric
—the impress of a mind informed by its subject, and having a
complete mastery over it ; while the broad full stream in which
it flows makes the reader feel as if he were borne along on its
tide. The abundance, in particular, with which he pours out
his stores of language and illustration in his characters of the
eminent persons engaged on both sides of the great contest
seems inexhaustible. The historical value of his history, how-
over, is not very considerable ; it has not preserved very many
facts which are not to be found elsewhere ; and, whatever may
be thought of its general bias, the inaccuracy of its details is so
great throughout, as demonstrated by the authentic evidences of

884 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the time, that there is scarcely any other contemporary history
which is so little trustworthy as an authority with regard to
minute particulars. Clarendon, in truth, was far from being
placed in the most favourable circumstances for giving a per-
fectly correct account of many of the events he has undertaken
to record : he was not, except for a very short time, in the midst
of the busy scene : looking to it, as he did, from a distance, while
the mighty drama was still only in progress, he was exposed to
some chances of misconception to which even those removed from
it by a long interval of time are not liable ; and, without im-
puting to him any further intention to deceive than is implied in
the purpose which we may suppose he chiefly had in view in
writing his work, the vindication of his own side of the question,
his position as a partisan, intimately mixed up with the affairs
and interests of one of the two contending factions, could not
fail both to bias his own judgment, and even in some measure to
distort or colour the reports made to him by others. On the
whole, therefore, this celebrated work is rather a great literary
performance than a very valuable historical monument.

HOBBES.

Another royalist history of the same times and events to which
Clarendon's work is dedicated, the Behemoth of Thomas Hobbes
of Malmesbury, introduces one of the most distinguished names
both in English literature and in modern metaphysical, ethical,
and political philosophy. Hobbes, born in 1588, commenced
author in 1628, at the age of forty, by publishing his translation
of Thucydides, but did not produce his first original work, his
Latin treatise entitled De Cive, till 1642. This was followed by
his treatises entitled Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, in
1650 ; his Leviathan, in 1651 ; his translations in verse of the
Iliad and Odyssey, in 1675 ; and his Behemoth, or History of the
Causes of the Civil Wars of England, and of the Counsels and
Artifices by which they were carried on, from the year 1640 to
the year 1660, a few months after his death, at the age of ninety-
two, in 1679. Eegarded merely as a writer of English, there
can be little difference of opinion about the high rank to be
assigned to Hobbes. He has been described as our first uni-
formly careful and correct writer ;* and he may be admitted to
have at least set the first conspicuous and influential example in

* Hallam, Lit. of Eur. iv. 316.

HOBBES. 335

what may be called our existing English (for Roger Ascham, Sir
Thomas Elyot, and one or two other early writers, seem to havo
aimed at the same thing in a preceding stage of the language),
of that regularity of style which has since his time been generally
attended to. This, however, is his least merit. No writer has
succeeded in making language a more perfect exponent of thought
than it is as employed by Hobbes. His style is not poetical or
glowingly eloquent, because his mind was not poetical, and the
subjects about which he wrote would have rejected the ex-
aggerations of imaginative or passionate expression if he had
been capable of supplying such. But in the prime qualities
of precision and perspicuity, and also in economy and succinct-
ness, in force and in terseness, it is the very perfection of a merely
expository style. Without any affectation of point, also, it often
shapes itself easily and naturally into the happiest aphoristic and
epigrammatic forms. Hobbes's clearness and aptness of expres-
sion, the effect of which is like that of reading a book with a
good light, never forsake him — not even in that most singular
performance, his version of Homer, where there is scarcely a
trace of ability of any other kind. It has been said that there are
only two lines in that work in which he is positively poetical ;
those describing the infant Astyanax in the scene of the parting of
Hector and Andromache, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad : —

Now Hector met her with her little hoy,

That in the nurse's arms was carried ;
And like a star upon her bosom lay

His beautiful and shining golden head.

But there are other passages in which by dint of mere directness
and transparency of style he has rendered a line or two happily
enough— as, for instance, in the description of the descent of
Apollo at the prayer of Chryses, in the beginning of the
poem: —

His prayer was granted by the deity,

Who, with his silver how and arrows keen,
Descended from Olympus silently,
In likeness of the sable night unseen.

As if expressly to proclaim and demonstrate, however, that this
momentary success was merely accidental, immediately upon the
back of this stanza comes the following : —

His bow and quiver both behind him hang,

The arrows chink as often as he jogs,
And as he shot the bow was heard to twang,

And first his arrows Mew at mules and dog*.

330 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

For the most part, indeed, Hobbes's Iliad and Odyssey are no
better than travesties of Homer's, the more ludicrous as being un-
designed and unconscious. Never was there a more signal ro-
venge than that which Hobbes afforded to imagination and poetry
over his own unbelieving and scoffing philosophism by the publi-
cation of this work. It was almost as if the man born blind, who
had all his lifetime been attempting to prove that the sense which
he himself wanted was no sense at all, and that that thing, colour,
which it professed peculiarly to discern, was a mere delusion,
nhould have himself at last taken the painter's brush and pallet in
hand, and attempted, in confirmation of his theory, to produce a
picture by the mere senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing.*

NEVILE.

The most remarkable treatise on political philosophy which
appeared in the interval between the Eestoration and the Revo-
lution is Henry Nevile's Plato Redivivus, or a Dialogue concern-
ing Government; which was first published in 1681, and went
through at least a second edition the same year. Nevile, who
was born in 1620, and survived till 1694, had in the earlier part
of his life been closely connected with Harrington, the author of
the Oceana, and also with the founders of the Commonwealth,
and he is commonly reckoned a republican writer ; but the
present work professes to advocate a monarchical form of govern-
ment. Its leading principle is the same as that on which Har-
rington's work is founded, the necessity of all stable government
being based upon property ; but, in a Preface, in the form of an
Address from the Publisher to the Reader, pains are taken to
show that the author's application of this principle is different
from Harrington's. It is observed, in the first place, that the
principle in question is not exclusively or originally Harring-
ton's ; it had been discoursed upon and maintained in very many
treatises and pamphlets before ever the Oceana came out; in
particular in A Letter from an Officer in Ireland to His Highness
the Lord Protector, printed in 1653, "which was more than three
years before Oceana was written." Besides, continues the writer,

* It is right, however, to state that Coleridge, in a note to the second
(1819) edition of the Friend, Introd. Essay iv., admits that in the original
edition of that work he had spoken too contemptuously of Hobbes's Odyssey,
which when he so wrote of it he had not seen. " It is doubtless," he adds,
" as much too ballad-like as the later versions are too epic ; but still, on the
whole, it leaves a much truer impression of the originaL"

CUDWORTH ; MORE. 337

who is evidently Nevile himself, " Oceana was written (it being
thought lawful so to do in those times) to evince out of these
principles that England was not capable of any other government
than a democracy. And this author, out of the same maxims or
aphorisms of politics, endeavours to prove that they may be
applied, naturally and fitly, to the redressing and supporting one
of the best monarchies in the world, which is that of England."
The tenor of the work is throughout in conformity with this
declaration.

OTHER PROSE WRITERS: — CUDWORTH, MORE; BARROW; BUNYAN; &c.

The most illustrious antagonist of metaphysical Hobbism,
when first promulgated, was Dr. Ealph Cudworth, the First Part
of whose True Intellectual System of the Universe, wherein all
the Eeason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted, was first
published in 1678. As a vast storehouse of learning, and also as
a display of wonderful powers of subtle and far-reaching specu
lation, this celebrated work is almost unrivalled in our literature ;
and it is also written in a style of elastic strength and compass
which places its author in a high rank among our prose classics.
Along with Cudworth may be mentioned his friend and brother
Platonist, Dr. Henry More, the author of numerous theological
and philosophical works, and remarkable for the union of some
of the most mystic notions with the clearest style, and of the
most singular credulity with powers of reasoning of the highest
order. Other two great theological writers of this age were the
voluminous Richard Baxter and the learned and eloquent Dr.
Robert Leighton, Archbishop of Glasgow. •' Baxter," says
Bishop Burnet, " was a man of great piety ; and, if he had not
meddled in too many things, would have been esteemed one of
the learned men of the age. He writ near two hundred books ;
of these three are large folios: he had a very moving and
pathetical way of writing, and was his whole life long a man of
great zeal and much simplicity ; but was most unhappily subtle
and metaphysical in everything."* Of Leighton, whom he
knew intimately, the same writer has given a much more copious
account, a few sentences of which we will transcribe : — " His
preaching had a sublimity both of thought and expression in it.
The grace and gravity of his pronunciation was such that few
heard hini without a very sensible emotion. ... It was so
different from all others, and indeed from everything that one

* Own Time, i. 180.

Z

338 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

oould hope to rise up to, that it gave a man an indignation at
himself and all others. . . . His style was rather too fine ; but
there was a majesty and beauty in it that left so deep an im-
pression that I cannot yet forget the sermons I heard him preach
thirty years ago."* The writings of Archbishop Leighton that
have come down to us have been held by some of the highest
minds of our own day — Coleridge for one — to bear out Burnet's
affectionate panegyric. But perhaps the greatest genius among
the theological writers of this age was the famous Dr. Isaac
Barrow, popularly known chiefly by his admirable Sermons, but
renowned also in the history of modern science as, next to
Newton himself, the greatest mathematician of his time. " As a
writer," the late Professor Dugald Stewart has well said of
Barrow, " he is equally distinguished by the redundancy of his
matter and by the pregnant brevity of his expression ; but what
more peculiarly characterizes his manner is a certain air of
powerful and of conscious facility in the execution of whatever
he undertakes. Whether the subject be mathematical, meta-
physical, or theological, he seems always to bring to it a mind
which feels itself superior to the occasion, and which, in con-
tending with the greatest difficulties, puts forth but half its
strength. He has somewhere spoken of his Lectiones Mathe-
maticae (which it may, in passing, be remarked, display meta-
physical talents of the highest order) as extemporaneous effusions
of his pen ; and I have no doubt that the same epithet is still
more literally applicable to his pulpit discourses. It is, indeed,
only thus that we can account for the variety and extent of his
voluminous remains, when we recollect that the author died at
the age of forty-six."! But the name that in popular cele-
brity transcends all others, among the theological writers of
this age, is that of John Bunyan, the author of various religious
works, and especially of the Pilgrim's Progress. One critic
has in our time had the courage to confess in print, that to him
this famous allegory appeared " mean, jejune, and wearisome."
Our late brilliant essayist, Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, in
a paper published in 1830, has written : — " We are not afraid
to say, that, though there were many clever men in England
during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were
only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a
very eminent degree. One of those minds produced the
Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim's Progress." And, to tho

* Own Time, i. 135.

t Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy, p. 45.

BUNYAN. 339

end of his life, we find him faithful to the same enthusiasm.*'
He conceives it to be the characteristic peculiarity of the Pil
grim's Progress " that it is the only work of its kind which
possesses a strong human interest." The pilgrimage of the great
Italian poet through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is of course
regarded as not properly an allegory. But high poetry is
treated somewhat unceremoniously throughout this paper. Of
the Fairy Queen it is said: — " Of the persons who read the
first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first hook, and
not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very
few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the
Blatant Beast. If the last six books, which are said to have
been destroyed in Ireland, had been preserved, we doubt whether
any heart less stout than that of a commentator would have held
out to the end." It must be admitted that, as a story, the
Pilgrim's Progress is a great deal more interesting than the
Fairy Queen. And we suspect that, if we are to take the verdict
of the most numerous class of readers, it will carry off the palm
quite as decidedly from the Paradise Lost. Very few, com-
paratively, and very weary, we apprehend, are the readers of
that great poem, too, who have made their way steadily through
it from the beginning of the First Book to the end of the Twelfth.
Still, although Bunyan had undoubtedly an ingenious, shaping,
and vivid imagination, and his work, partly from its execution,
partly from its subject, takes a strong hold, as Macaulay has well
pointed out, of minds of very various kinds, commanding the
admiration of the most fastidious critics, such, for instance, as
Doctor Johnson, while it is loved by those who are too simple to
admire it, we must make a great distinction between the power
by which such general attraction as this is produced and what
we have in the poetry of Milton and Spenser. The difference is
something of the same kind with that which exists between any
fine old popular ballad and a tragedy of Sophocles or of Shake-
speare. Bunyan could rhyme too, when he chose ; but he has
plenty of poetry without that, and we cannot agree with the
opinion expressed by good Adam Clarke, " that the Pilgrim's
Progress would be more generally read, and more abundantly
useful to a particular class of readers, were it turned into decent
rhyme." We suspect the ingenious gentleman who, in the
early part of the last century, published an edition of Paradise
Lost turned into prose had a more correct notion of what would

* See the Ueview of Ranke'a Histoiy of the Popes (1840) ; and again the
lively, though alight, sketch of Bunyan's history in the Biographies.

340 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

be most useful, and also most agreeable, to a pretty numerous
class of readers.

What Lord Macaulay says of Bunyan's English, though his
estimate is, perhaps, a little high-pitched, is worth quoting : — •
" The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable
as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide com-
mand over the English language. The vocabulary is the voca-
bulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we
except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle
the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do
not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no
writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For mag-
nificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle dis-
quisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the
divine, this homely dialect, the dialect of plain working men,
was perfectly sufficient. There is no book in our literature on
which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted
English language, no book which shows so well how rich that
language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been
improved by all that it has borrowed."

To the names that have been mentioned may be added those
of Izaak Walton, the mild-tempered angler and biographer ; Sir
William Temple, the lively, agreeable, and well-informed essayist
and memoirist ; and many others that might be enumerated if it
were our object to compile a catalogue instead of noticing only
the principal lights of our

841

ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE THE REVOLUTION OF

1688.

FIRST EFFECTS OF THE REVOLUTION ON OUR LITERATURE.

THK Revolution, brought on by some of the same causes that had
given birth to the Commonwealth, and restoring something of
the same spirit and condition of things, came like another nightfall
upon our higher literature, putting out the light of poetry in the
land still more effectually than had even that previous triumph of
the popular principle. Up to this date English literature had
grown and flourished chiefly in the sunshine of court protection
and favour ; the public appreciation and sympathy were not yet
sufficiently extended to afford it the necessary warmth and
shelter. Its spirit, consequently, and affections were in the
main courtly ; it drooped and withered when the encouragement
of the court was withdrawn, from the deprivation both of its
customary support and sustenance and of its chief inspiration.
And, if the decay of this kind of light at the Revolution was, as
we have said, still more complete than that which followed upon
the setting up of the Commonwealth, the difference seems to have
been mainly owing to there having been less of it to extinguish
at the one epoch than at the other. At the Restoration the
impulse given by the great poets of the age of Elizabeth and
James was yet operating, without having been interrupted and
weakened by any foreign influence, upon the language and the
national mind. Doubtless, too, whatever may be thought of the
literary tendencies of puritanism and republicanism when they
had got into the ascendant, the nurture both for head and heart
furnished by the ten years of high deeds, and higher hopes and
speculations, that ushered in the Commonwealth, must have been
of a far other kind than any that was to be got out of the thirty
years, or thereby, of laxity, frivolity, denationalization, and in-
sincerity of all sorts, down the comparatively smooth stream of
which men slid, without effort and without thought, to the
Revolution, No wonder that some powerful minds wsre trained
by the former, and almost none by the latter.

9*2 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

SURVIVING WRITERS OP THE PRECEDING PERIOD.

With the exception of some two or three names, none of them
of the highest class, to be presently mentioned, almost the only
writers that shed any lustre on the first reign after the Revolu-
tion are those of a few of the survivors of the preceding era.
Dryden, fallen on what to him were evil days and evil tongues,
and forced in his old age to write for bread with less rest for his
weaiied head and hand than they had ever had before, now pro-
duced some of his most laborious and also some of his most
happily executed works: his translation of Virgil, among others,
liis Fables, and his Alexander's Feast. Lee, the dramatic poet,
discharged from Bedlam, finished two more tragedies, lais Princess
of Cleve and his Massacre of Paris, before, " returning one night
from the Bear and Harrow, in Butcher-Row, through Clare Market,
to his lodgings in Duke Street, overladen with wine, he fell down
on the ground as some say, according to others on a bulk, and
was killed or stifled in the snow," early in the year 1692. The
comic Etherege also outlived the deposition of his patron
James II., but is not known to have written anything after that
event ; he followed James to France, and is reported to have died
characteristically at Ratisbon a year or two after : " having
treated some company with a liberal entertainment at his house
there, where he had taken his glass too freely, and, being,
through his great complaisance, too forward in waiting on his
guests at their departure, flushed as he was, he tumbled down
stairs and broke his neck, and so fell a martyr to jollity and
civility." Wycherley, who at the date of the Revolution was
under fifty, lived to become a correspondent of Pope, and even
saw out the reign of Anne ; but he produced nothing in that of
William, although he published a volume of poems in 1704, and
left some other trifles behind him, which were printed long after-
wards by Theobald. Southerne, indeed, who survived till 1746,
continued to write and publish till within twenty years of his
death ; his two best dramas — his Fatal Marriage and his Oroo-
noko — were both produced in the reign of William. Southerne,
though not without considerable pathetic power, was fortunate in
a genius on the whole not above the appreciation of the unpoeti-
cal age he lived in : " Dryden once took occasion to ask him how
much he got by one of his plays ; to which he answered that he
was really ashamed to inform him. But, Mr. Dryden being a
little importunate to know, he plainly told him that by his last
play he cleared seven hundred pounds, which appeared astonish-
ing to Dryden, as he himself had never been able to acquire more

SURVIVING WRITERS OF THE PRECEDING PERIOD. S43

than one hundred by his most successful pieces."* Southerne,
who, whatever estimate may be formed of his poetry, was not, we
may gather from this anecdote, without some conscience and
modesty, had worse writers than himself to keep him in counte-
nance by their preposterous prosperity, in this lucky time for
mediocrity and dulness. Shadwell was King William's first poet-
laureate, and Nahum Tate his next. Tate, indeed, and his friend
Dr. Nicholas Brady, were among the most flourishing authors
and greatest public favourites of this reign : it was now that they
perpetrated in concert their version, or perversion, of the Psalms,
with which we are still afflicted. Brady also published a play,
and, at a later date, some volumes of sermons and a translation of
the -iJEneid, which, fortunately, not having been imposed or re-
commended by authority, are all among the most forgotten of
books. Elkanah Settle, too, was provided for as City poet.

Among writers of another class, perhaps the most eminent who,
having been distinguished before the Revolution, survived and
continued to write after that event, was Sir William Temple.
His Miscellanies, by which he is principally known, though
partly composed before, were not published till then. John
Evelyn, who, however, although a very miscellaneous as well as
voluminous writer, has hardly left any work that is held in esteem
for either style or thought, or for anything save what it may
contain of positive information or mere matter of fact, also pub-
lished one or two books in the reign of William, which he saw to
an end; for he died, at the age of eighty-five, in 1706. Bishop
Still ingfleet, who had been known as an author since before the
Restoration, for his Irenicum appeared in 1659, when he was only
in his twenty-fourth year, and who had kept the press in employ-
ment by a rapid succession of publications during the next five-
and-twenty years, resumed his pen after the Revolution, which
raised him to the bench, to engage in a controversy with Locke
about some of the principles of his famous essay ; but, whether
it was that years had abated his powers, or that he had a worse
cause to defend, or merely that the public taste was changed, he
gained much less applause for his dialectic skill on this than on
most former occasions. Stillingfleet lived to the year 1699.

John N orris, also, one of the last of the school of English Pla-
tonists, which may be considered as having been founded in the
latter part of the seventeenth century by Cudworth and Henry
More, had, we believe, become known as a writer some years be-
fore the Revolution ; but the greater number of his publications
first appeared in the reign of William, and he may be reckoned
* Biog. Dram.

344 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

one of the best writers properly or principally belonging to that
reign. Yet he is not for a moment to be compared for learning,
compass of thought, or power and skill of expression, to either
Cudworth or More. Norris's principal work is his Essay on the
Ideal World, published in two parts in 1701 and 1702. He is
also the author of a volume of religious poetry, of rather a feeble
character, which has been often reprinted. Bishop Sprat, though a
alergyman, as well as a writer both of prose and verse, cannot be
called a divine ; he had in earlier life the reputation of being the
finest writer of the day, but, although he lived till very nearly
the end of the reign of Anne, he published nothing, we believe,
after the Eevolution, nor indeed for a good many years before it.
His style, which was so much admired in his own age, is a
Frenchified English, with an air of ease and occasionally of viva-
city, but without any true grace or expressiveness.

Good old Eichard Baxter, who had been filling the world with
books for half a century, just lived to see the Revolution. He
died, at the age of seventy-six, in the beginning of December,
1691. And in the end of the same month died, a considerably
younger man, Kobert Boyle, another of the most voluminous
writers of the preceding period, and famous also for his services
in the cause of religion, as well as of science. In the preceding
May, at a still less advanced age, had died the most eminent
Scotch writer of the period between the Restoration and the
Revolution, Sir George Mackenzie, lord-advocate under both
Charles II. and his successor; the author of the Institution of
Jhe Laws of Scotland, and many other professional, historical,
and antiquarian works, but the master also of a flowing pen in
moral speculation, the belles lettres, and even in the department
of fancy and fiction— as may be gathered from the titles of his
Aretina, or the Serious Romance, 1660; Religio Stoici, or the
Virtuoso, 1663 ; Solitude preferred to Public Employment, 1665 ;
Moral Gallantry, 1667. Mackenzie may be regarded as the first
successor of his countryman Drummond of Hawthornden in the
cultivation of an English style; he was the correspondent of
Dry den and other distinguished English writers of his day ; but
he has no pretensions of his own to any high rank either for the
graces of his expression or the value of his matter. Whatever
may have been his professional learning, too, his historical dis-
quisitions are as jejune and uncritical as his attempts at fine
writing are, with all their elaboration, at once pedantic and
clownish. He has nothing either of the poetry or the elegance
of Drummond.

34.r>

BISHOP BURNET.

The most active and conspicuous undoubtedly of the prose
writers who, having acquired distinction in the preceding period,
continued to prosecute the "business of authorship after the Revo-
lution, was the celebrated Dr. Gilbert Burnet, now Bishop of
Salisbury. Of 145 distinct publications (many of them, however,
only single sermons and other short pamphlets), which are enu-
merated as having proceeded from his incessant pen between 1669
and his death, at the age of seventy-two, in 1715 (including, in
deed, his History of his Own Time, and his Thoughts on Educa-
tion, which did not appear till after his death), we find that 71,
namely 21 historical works and 50 sermons and tracts, belong to
the period before the Eevolution ; 36, namely 5 historical works
and 31 sermons and tracts, to the reign of William; and the re-
maining 38, namely one historical work and 37 pamphlets, to
a later date. Many of what we have called historical works,
however, are mere pamphlets : in fact Burnet's literary perform-
ances of any considerable extent are only three in number : — his
Memoirs of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton, published,
in one volume folio, in 1676; his History of the Reformation of
the Church of England, 3 volumes folio, 1679, 1681, and 1714:
and his History of his Own Time, in two volumes folio, published
after his death in 1723 and 1734. There is enough of literary
labour, as well as of historical value, in these works to preserve
to the author a very honourable name ; each of them contains
much matter now nowhere else to be found, and they must al-
ways continue to rank among the original sources of our national
history, both ecclesiastical and civil. In regard to their execu-
tion, too, it must be admitted that the style is at least straight-
forward and unaffected, and generally as unambiguous as it is
unambitious ; the facts are clearly enough arranged ; and the
story is told not only intelligibly, but for the most part in rather
a lively and interesting way. On the other hand, to any high
station as a writer Burnet can make no claim ; he is an indus-
trious collector of intelligence, and a loquacious and moderately
lively gossip : but of eloquence, or grace, or refinement of any
sort, he is as destitute as he is (and that is altogether) of imagi-
nation, and wit, and humour, and subtlety, and depth and weight
of thought, and whatever other qualities give anything either of
life or lustre to what a man utters out of his own head or heart.
We read him for the sake of his facts only ; he troubles us with
but few reflections, but of that no reader will complain. He
does not see fai into anything, nor indeed, properly speaking,

316 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

into it at all ; for that matter he is little more, to adopt a modern
term, than a penny-a-liner on a large scale, and best performs his
task when he does not attempt to be anything else. Nor is he a
neat-handed workman even of that class ; in his History of his
Own Time, in particular, his style, with no strength, or flavour,
or natural charm of any kind, to redeem its rudeness, is the most
slovenly undress in which a writer ever wrapt up what he had to
communicate to the public. Its only merit, as we have obperved,
is that it is without any air of pretension, and that it is evi-
dently as extemporaneous and careless as it is unelevated, shape-
less, and ungrammatical. Among the most important and best
known of Burnet's other works are, that entitled Some Passages
of the Life and Death of the Eight Honourable John Wilmot,
Earl of Kochester, 1680; his Life of Bishop Bedel, 1685; his
Travels through France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, 1685 ;
and his Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 1699. The first
mentioned of these is the best written of all his works.

THOMAS BURNET.

In the same year with Bishop Burnet, but at a more advanced
age, died Dr. Thomas Burnet, the learned and eloquent author of
the Telluris Sacra Theoria, first published in Latin in 1680, and
afterwards translated into English by the author ; of the Archaeo-
logia Philosophica, published in 1692 ; anjd of two or three other
treatises, also in Latin, which did not appear till after his death.
Burnet's system of geology has no scientific value whatever ;
indeed, it must be considered as a mere romance, although, from
the earnestness of the author's manner and his constant citation
of texts of Scripture in support of his positions, as well as from
more than one answer which he afterwards published to tho
attacks made upon his book, it is evident that he by no means
intended it to be so received. But, with his genius and imagi-
nation and consummate scholarship, he is a very different species
of writer from his garrulous and mitred namesake : his English
style is singularly flowing and harmonious, as well as per-
spicuous and animated, and rises on fit occasions to much majesty
and even splendour.

OTHER THEOLOGICAL WRITERS : — TILLOTSON ; SOUTH.

Another name that may be here mentioned is that of Arch-
bishop Tillotson, who was a very popular preacher among the

TJLLOTSON ; SOUTH. 347

Presbyterians before the Bestoration, and began publishing
sermons so early as in the year 1661, while he stiD belonged to
that sect. He died in 1694, in his sixty-fourth year. Tillotson's
Sermons, still familiarly known by reputation, long continued to
be the most generally esteemed collection of such compositions in
the language ; but are probably now very little read. They are
substantial performances, such as make the reader feel, when he
has got through one of them, that he has accomplished something
of a feat ; and, being withal as free from pedantry and every
other kind of eccentricity or extravagance as from flimsiness, and
exceedingly sober in their strain of doctrine, with a certain blunt
cordiality in the expression and manner, they were in all re-
spects very happily addressed to the ordinary peculiarities of the
national mind and character. But, having once fallen into
neglect, Tillotson's writings have no qualities that will ever
revive attention to them. There is much more of a true vitality
in the sermons of Dr. Robert South, whose career of authorship
commenced in the time of the Protectorate, though his life was
extended till after the accession of George I. He died in 1716,
at the age of eighty-three. South's sermons, the first of which
dates even before the earliest of Tillotson's, and the last after
Tillotson's latest, are very well characterised by Mr. Hallam : —
" They were," he observes, *' much celebrated at the time, and
retain a portion of their renown. This is by no means surpris-
ing. South had great qualifications for that popularity which
attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time original.
Not diffuse, nor learned, nor formal in argument like Barrow,
with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed though
by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning, with
a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding
with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now be-
come vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing
no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment
to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some
stroke of vigorous sense and language : such was the witty
Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons
want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness ;
but there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with
their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches
where he might be heard."* Both South and Tillotson are con-
sidered to belong as divines to the Arminian, or, as it was then
commonly called, the Latitudinarian school — as well as Cudwoi1h;
More, and Stillingfleet.

* Lit. of Europe, IT. 56.

348 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

LOCKE.

The only considerable literary name that belongs exclusively,
or almost exclusively, to the first reign after the Revolution is
that of Locke. John Locke, born in 1632, although his Adver-
sariorum Methodus, or New Method of a Common-Place-Book,
had appeared in French in Leclerc's Bibliotheque for 1686, and
an abridgment of his celebrated Essay, and his first Letter on
Toleration, both also in French, in the same publication for 1687
and 1688, had published nothing in English, or with his name,
till he produced in 1690 the work which has ever since made him
one of the best known of English writers, both in his own and
in other countries, his Essay concerning Human Understanding.
This was followed by his Second Letter on Toleration, and his
two Treatises on Government, in the same year ; his Considera-
tions on Lowering the Interest of Money, in 1691 ; his Third
Letter on Toleration, in 1692 ; his Thoughts concerning Educa-
tion, in 1693 ; his Reasonableness of Christianity, in 1695 ; and
various controversial tracts in reply to his assailants, Dr. Edwards
and Bishop Stillingfleet, between that date and his death in 1704.
After his death appeared his Conduct of the Understanding, and
several theological treatises, the composition of which had been
the employment of the last years of his industrious and produc-
tive old age. Locke's famous Essay was the first work, perhaps
in any language, which professedly or systematically attempted
to popularise metaphysical philosophy. It is the first comprehen-
sive survey that had been attempted of the whole mind and its
faculties ; and the very conception of such a design argued an
intellect of no common reach, originality, and boldness. It will
remain also of very considerable value as an extensive register of
facts, and a storehouse of acute and often suggestive observations
on psychological phenomena, whatever may be the fate of the
views propounded in it as aspiring to constitute a metaphysical
system. Further, it is not to be denied that this work has
exercised a powerful influence upon the course of philosophical
inquiry and opinion ever since its appearance. At first, in, par-
ticular, it did good service in putting finally to the rout some
fantastic notions and methods that still lingered in the schools ;
it was the loudest and most comprehensive proclamation that had
yet been made of the liberation of philosophy from the dominion
of authority ; but Locke's was a mind stronger and better fur-
nished for the work of pulling down than of building up : he had
enough of clearsightedness and independence of mental character
for the one ; whatever endowments of a different kind he pos-

SWIFT. 849

sessed, he had too little imagination, or creative power, for tho
other. Besides, tho very passionless character of his mind would
have unfitted him for going far into the philosophy of our
complex nature, in which the passions are the revealers and
teachers of all the deepest truths, and alone afford us any intima-
tion of many things which, even with the aid of their lurid light,
we discern but as fearful and unfathomable mysteries, \\hat
would Shakespeare's understanding of the philosophy of human
nature have been, if he had had no more imagination and passion
in his own nature than Locke ?

SWIFT.

His renowned Tale of a Tub and a tract entitled The Battlo
of the Books, published together in 1704, were the first announce
ment of the greatest master of satire at once comic and caustic-
that has yet appeared in our language. Swift, born in Dublin in
1667, had already, in the last years of the reign of King William,
made himself known by two volumes of Letters selected from
the papers of his friend Temple (who died in 1699), and also by
a political pamphlet in favour of the ministry of the day, whicli
attracted little notice, and gave as little promise of his future
eminence as a writer. To politics and to satire, however, he
adhered throughout his career — often blending the two, but pro-
ducing scarcely anything, if we may not except some of hi?
effusions in verse, that was not either satirical or political.
His course of authorship as a political writer may be considered
properly to begin with his Letter concerning the Sacramental
Test, and another high Tory and high Church tract, which he
published in 1708; in which same year he also came forward
with his ironical Argument for the Abolition of Christianity,
and, in his humorous Predictions, first assumed his nom de guerre
of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, subsequently made so famous by
other jeux d'esprit in the same style, and by its adoption soon
after by the wits of the Tatler. Of his other most notable per-
formances, his Conduct of the Allies was published in 1712; his
Public Spirit of the Whigs, in 1714; his Drapier's Letters, in
1724; his immortal Gulliver's Travels, in 1727; and his Polite
Conversation, which, however, had been written many years
before, in 1738. His poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, besides,
had appeared, without his consent, in 1723, soon after the death
of Miss Hester Vanhomrigh, its heroine. The History of the
Four Last Years of Queen Anne (if his, which there can hardly

SSO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

be a doubt that it is), the Directions for Servants, many of his
verses and other shorter pieces, and his Diary written to Stella
(Miss Johnson, whom he eventually married), were none of them
printed till after, some of them not till long after, his death,
which took place in 1745.

" 0 thou!" exclaims his friend Pope,

" whatever title please thine ear,

Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver !

Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air,

Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair,

Or praise the court, or magnify mankind,

Or thy grieved country's copper chains unbind," —

lines that describe comprehensively enough the celebrated dean's
genius and writings — what he did and what he was. And the
first remark to be made about Swift is, that into everything that
came from his pen he put a strong infusion of himself ; that in
his writings we read the man — not merely his intellectual ability,
but his moral nature, his passions, his principles, his prejudices,
his humours, his whole temper and individuality. The common
herd of writers have no individuality at all ; those of the very
highest class can assume at will any other individuality as per-
fectly as their own — they have no exclusiveness. Next under
this highest class stand those whose individuality is at once
their strength and their weakness ;— their strength, inasmuch
as it distinguishes them from and lifts them far above the multi-
tude of writers of mere talent or expository skill ; their weakness
and bondage, in that it will not be thrown off, and that it with-
holds them from ever going out of themselves, and rising from
the merely characteristic, striking, or picturesque, either to the
dramatic or to the beautiful, of both of which equally the spirit is
unegotistic and universal. To this class, which is not the
highest but the next to it, Swift belongs. The class, however,
like both that which is above and that which is below it, is one
of wide comprehension, and includes many degrees of power, and
even many diversities of gifts. Swift was neither a Cervantes
nor a Rabelais; but yet, with something that was peculiar to
himself, he combined considerable portions of both. He had
more of Cervantes than Rabelais had, and more of Rabelais than
was given to Cervantes. There cannot be claimed for him the
refinement, the humanity, the pathos, the noble elevation of the
Spaniard — all that irradiates and beautifies his satire and drollery
as the blue sky does the earth it bends over ; neither, with all his
ingenuity and fertility, does our English wit and humourist

SWIFT. 3^

anywhere display either the same inexhaustible abimdance of
grotesque invention, or the same gaiety and luxuriance of fancy,
with the historian of the Doings and Sayings of the Giant Gar-
gantua. Yet neither Cervantes nor Rabelais, nor both combined,
oould have written the Tale of a Tub. The torrent of triumphant
merriment is broader and more rushing than anything of the
.same kind in either. When we look indeed to the perfection
and exactness of the allegory at all points, to the biting sharp
iiesq and at the same time the hilarity and comic animation of
the satire, to its strong and unpausing yet easy and natural flow,
to the incessant blaze of the wit and humour, and to the style
so clear, so vivid and expressive, so idiomatic, so English, so
true and appropriate in all its varieties, narrative, didactic, rhe-
torical, colloquial, as we know no work of its class in our own
language that as a whole approaches this, so we doubt if there be
another quite equal to it in any language.

Swift was undoubtedly the most masculine intellect of his age,
the most earnest thinker of a time in which there was less among
us of earnest and deep thinking than in any other era of our lite-
rature. In its later and more matured form, his wit itself becomes
earnest and passionate, and has a severity, a fierceness, a sceva in-
dignatio, that are all his own, and that have never been blended in
any other writer with so keen a perception of the ludicrous and
so much general comic power. The breath of his rich, pungent,
original jocularity is at the same time cutting as a sword and con-
suming as fire. Other masters of the same art are satisfied if they
can only made their readers laugh ; this is their main, often their
sole aim : with Swift, to excite the emotion of the ludicrous is,
in most of his writings, only a subordinate purpose, — a means
employed for effecting quite another and a much higher end ; if
he labours to make anything ridiculous, it is because he hates
it, and would have it trodden into the earth or extirpated. This,
at least, became the settled temper of all the middle and latter
portion of his life. No sneaking kindness for his victim is to be
detected in his crucifying raillery ; he is not a mere admirer of
the comic picturesque, who will sometimes rack or gibbet an un-
happy individual for the sake of the fantastic grimaces he may
make, or the capers he may cut in the air ; he has the true spirit
of an executioner, and only loves his joke as sauce and seasoning
to more serious work. Few men have been more perversely pre-
judiced and self-willed than Swift, and therefore of absolute truth
his works may probably contain less than many others not so
earnestly written ; but of what was truth to the mind of the
writer, of what he actually believed and desired, no works

352 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

tain more. Here, again, as well as in the other respect already
noticed, Swift is in the middle class of writers ; far above those
whose whole truth is truth of expression — that is, correspond-
ence between the words and the thoughts (possibly without any
between the thoughts and the writer's belief); but below those
who both write what they think, and whose thoughts are pre-
eminently valuable for their intrinsic beauty or profoundness.
Yet in setting honestly and effectively before us even his own
passions and prejudices a writer also tells us the truth — the
truth, at least, respecting himself, if not respecting anything else.
This much Swift does always ; and this is his great distinction
among the masters ot wit and humour ; — the merriest of his jests
is an utterance of some real feeling of his heart at the moment,
as much as the fiercest of his invectives. Alas ! with all his jest-
ing and merriment, he did not know what it was to have a mind
at ease, or free from the burden and torment of dark, devouring
passions, till, in his own words, the cruel indignation that tore
continually at his heart was laid at rest in the grave. In truth,
the insanity which ultimately fell down upon and laid prostrate
his fine faculties had cast something of its black shadow athwart
their vision from the first — as he himself probably felt or sus-
pected when he determined to bequeath his fortune to build an
hospital in his native country for persons afflicted with that
calamity; and sad enough, we may be sure, he was at heart, when
he gaily wrote that he did so merely

To show, by one satiric touch,
No nation wanted it so much.*

Yet the madness, or predisposition to madness, was also part and
parcel of the man, and possibly an element of his genius — which
might have had less earnestness and force, as well as less activity,
productiveness, and originality, if it had not been excited and
impelled by that perilous fervour. Nay, something of their
power and peculiar character Swift's writings may owe to the
exertions called forth in curbing and keeping down the demon
which, like a proud steed under a stout rider, would have
mastered him, if he had not mastered it, and, although support
and strength to him so long as it was held in subjection, would,

* " I have often," says Lord Orrery, " heard him lament the state of child-
hood and idiotism to which some of the greatest men of this nation were
reduced before their death. He mentioned, as examples within his own
time, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Somers ; and, when he cited these
melancholy instances, it was always with a heavy sigh, and with gestures that
showed great uneasiness,- as if he felt an impulse of what was to happen to
him before be died." — Kemarks, p. 188.

POPE. S53

dominant over him, have rent him in pieces, as in the end it did.
Few could have maintained the struggle so toughly and so long.

Swift would probably have enjoyed a higher reputation as a
poet if he had not been so great a writer in prose. His produc-
tions in verse are considerable in point of quantity, and many of
them admirable of their kind. But those of them that deserve to
be so described belong to the humblest kind of poetry — to that
kind which has scarcely any distinctively poetical quality or
characteristic about it except the rhyme. He has made some
attempts in a higher style, but with little success. His Pindaric
Odes, written and published when he was a young man, drew
from Dryden (who was his relation) the emphatic judgment,
" Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet :" and, though Swift
never forgave this frankness, he seems to have felt that the
prognostication was a sound one, for he wrote no more Pindaric
Odes. Nor indeed did he ever afterwards attempt anything
considerable in the way of serious poetry, if we except his
Cadenus and Vanessa (the story of Miss Vanhomiigh), his
effusion entitled Poetry, a Rhapsody, and that on his own death
— and even these are chiefly distinguished from his other pro-
ductions by being longer and more elaborate, the most elevated
portions of the first mentioned scarcely rising above narrative
and reflection, and whatever there is of more dignified or solemn
writing in the two others being largely intermixed with comedy
and satire in his usual easy ambling style. With all his liveli-
ness of fancy, he had no grandeur of imagination, as little feeling
of the purely graceful or beautiful, no capacity of tender emotion,
110 sensibility to even the simplest forms of music. With these
deficiencies it was impossible that he should produce anything
that could be called poetical in a high sense. JBut of course he
could put his wit and fancy into the form of verse — and so as to
make the measured expression and the rhyme give additional
point and piquancy to his strokes of satire and ludicrous nar-
ratives or descriptions. Some of his lighter verses are as good as
anything of the kind in the language.

POPE.

OF Swift's contemporaries, by far the most memorable name is
that of Alexander Pope. If Swift was at the head of the prose
writers of the early part of the last century, Pope was as incon-
testably the first of the writers in verse of that day, with no other
cither equal or second to him. Born a few months before the

2 A

351 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Revolution, lie came forth as a poet, by the publication of his
Pastorals in Tonson's Miscellany, in 1709, when he was yet only
in his twenty-first year ; and they had been written five years
before. Nor were they the earliest of his performances ; his Ode
on Solitude, his verses upon Silence, his translations of the First
Book of the Thebais and of Ovid's Epistle from Sappho to Phaon,
and his much more remarkable paraphrases of Chaucer's January
and May and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, all pre-
ceded the composition of the Pastorals. His Essay on Criticism
(written in 1709) was published in 1711 ; the Messiah the same
year (in the Spectator); the Eape of the Lock in 1712; the
Temple of Fame (written two years before) the same year ; his
Windsor Forest (which he had commenced at sixteen) in 1713 ;
the first four books of his translation of the Iliad in 1715 ; his
Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard (written some years before) we
believe in 1717, when he published a collected edition of his
poems ; the remaining portions of the Iliad at different times, the
last in 1720; his translation of the Odyssey (in concert with
Fenton and Broome) in 1725 ; the first three books of the
Dunciad in 1728; his Essay on Man in 1733 and 1734; his
Imitations of Horace, various other satirical pieces, the Pro-
logue and Epilogue to the Satires, his four epistles styled
Moral Essays and his modernised version of Donne's Satires
between 1730 and 1740 ; and the fourth book of the Dunciad in
1742. Besides all this verse, collections of his Letters were
published, first surreptitiously by Curl, and then by himself, in
1737; and, among other publications in prose, his clever jeu
(fesprit entitled a Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis ap-
peared in 1713 ; his Preface to Shakespeare, with his edition of
the works of that poet, in 1721 ; his Treatise of the Bathos, or Art
of Sinking in Poetry, and his Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of This
Parish (in ridicule of Burnet's History of his Own Time), in
1727. He died in May, 1744, about a year and a half before his
friend Swift, who, more than twenty years his senior, had
naturally anticipated that he should be the first to depart, and
that, as he cynically, and yet touchingly too, expressed it, while
Arbuthnot grieved for him a day, and Gay a week, he should be
lamented a whole month by "poor Pope," — whom, of all those
he best knew, he seems to have the most loved.

Pope, with talent enough for anything, might deserve to be
ranked among tbe most distinguished prose writers of his time,
if he were not its greatest poet ; but it is in the latter character
that he falls to be noticed in the history of our literature. And
what a broad and bright region would be cut off from our poetry

POPE. 355

If he had never lived ! If we even confine ourselves to his own
works, without regarding the numerous subsequent writers who
have formed themselves upon him as an example and model, and
may be said to constitute the school of which he was the founder,
how rich an inheritance of brilliant and melodious fancies do we
not owe to him ! For what would any of us resign the Eape of
the Lock, or the Epistle of Eloisa, or the Essay on Man, or the
Moral Essays, or the Satires, or the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, or
the Dunciad ? That we have nothing in the same style in the
language to be set beside or weighed against any one of these
performances will probably be admitted by all ; and, if we could
say no more, this would be to assign to Pope a rank in OUT poetic
literature which certainly not so many as half a dozen other
names are entitled to share with his. Down to his own day at
least, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden alone
had any pretensions to be placed before him or by his side. It
is unnecessary to dilate upon what has been sufficiently pointed
out by all the critics, and is too obvious to be overlooked, the
general resemblance of his poetry, in both its form and spirit, to
that of Dryden rather than to that of our elder great writers. A
remarkable external peculiarity of it is, that he is probably the
only one of our modern poets of eminence who has written
nothing in blank verse ; while even in rhyme he has nearly
confined himself to that one decasyllabic line upon which it
would almost seem to have been his purpose to impress a new
shape and character. He belongs to the classical school as
opposed to the romantic, to that in which a French rather than
to that in which an Italian inspiration may be detected. Whether
this is to be attributed principally to his constitutional tempera-
ment and the native character of his imagination, or to the
influences of the age in which he lived and wrote, we shall not
stop to inquire. It is enough that such is the fact. But, though
he may be regarded as in the main the pupil and legitimate suc-
cessor of Dryden, the amount of what he learned or borrowed
from that master was by no means so considerable as to prevent
his manner from having a great deal in it that is distinctive and
original. If Dryden has more impetuosity and a freer flow,
Pope has far more delicacy, and, on fit occasions, far more ten
derness and true passion. Dryden has written nothing in the
same style with the Rape of the Lock on the one hand, or with
the Epistle to Abelard and the Elegy on the Death of an Unfor-
tunate Lady on the other. Indeed, these two styles may be said
to have been both, in so far as the English tongue is concerned,
invented by Pope. In what preceding writer had he an example

556 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of either ? Nay, did either the French or the Italian language
furnish him with anything to copy from nearly so brilliant and
felicitous as his own performances? In the sharper or more
severe species of satire, again, while in some things he is inferior
to Dryden, in others he excels him. It must be admitted that
Dry den's is the nobler, the more generous scorn ; it is passionate,
while Pope's is frequently only peevish : the one is vehement,
the other venomous. But, although Pope does not wield the
ponderous, fervid scourge with which his predecessor tears and
mangles the luckless object of his indignation or derision, he
knows how, with a lighter touch, to inflict a torture quite as
maddening at the moment, and perhaps more difficult to heal.
Neither has anything of the easy elegance, the simple natural
grace, the most exquisite artifice simulating the absence of all
art, of Horace ; but the care, and dexterity, and superior refine-
ment of Pope, his neatness, and concentration, and point, supply
a better substitute for these charms than the ruder strength, and
more turbulent passion, of Dryden. If Dryden, too, has more
natural fire and force, and rises in his greater passages to .a
stormy grandeur to which the other does not venture to commit
himself, Pope in some degree compensates for that by a dignity,
a quiet, sometimes pathetic, majesty, which we find nowhere in
Dryden's poetry. Dryden has translated the jiEneid, and Pope
the Iliad ; but the two tasks would apparently have been better
distributed if Dryden had chanced to have taken up Homer, and
left Virgil to Pope. Pope's Iliad, in truth, whatever may be its
merits of another kind, is, in spirit and style, about the most
unhomeric performance in the whole compass of our poetry, as
Pope had, of all our great poets, the most unhomeric genius. He
was emphatically the poet of the highly artificial age in which
he lived ; and his excellence lay in, or at least was fostered and
perfected by, the accordance of all his tastes and talents, of his
whole moral and intellectual constitution, with the spirit of that
condition of things. Not touches of natural emotion, but the
titillation of wit and fancy, — not tones of natural music, but the
tone of good society, — make up the charm of his poetry; the
polish, pungency, and brilliance of which, however, in its most
happily executed passages leave nothing in that st}de to be
desired. Pope, no doubt, wrote with a care and elaboiatim that
were unknown to Dryden ; against whom, indeed, i< is a re-
proach made by his pupil, that, copious as he was, he

• wanted or forgot

The last and greatest art — the art to blot.

ADOISON AND STEELE. 357

And so perhaps, although the expression is a strong and a
startling one, may the said art, not without some reason, l>o
called in reference to the particular species of poetry which
Dry den and Pope cultivated, dependent as that is for its success
in pleasing us almost as much upon the absence of faults as upon
the presence of beauties. Such partial obscuration or distortion
of the imagery as we excuse, or even admire, in the expanded
mirror of a lake reflecting the woods and hills and overhanging
sky, when its waters are ruffled or swayed by the fitful breeze,
would be intolerable in a looking-glass, were it otherwise the
most splendid article of the sort that upholstery every furnished.

ADDISON AND STEELE.

Next to the prose of Swift and the poetry of Pope, perhaps the
portion of the literature of the beginning of the last century that
was both most influential at the time, and still lives most in
the popular remembrance, is that connected with the names of
Addison and Steele. These two writers were the chief boast of
the Whig party, as Swift and Pope were of the Tories. Addison's
poem, The Campaign, on the victory of Blenheim, his imposing
but frigid tragedy of Cato, and some other dramatic productions,
besides various other writings in prose, have gi ven him a repu-
tation in many departments of literature ; and Steele also holds
a respectable rank among our comic dramatists as the author of
The Tender Husband and The Conscious Lovers ; but it is as the
first, and on the whole the best, of our English essayists, the
principal authors (in every sense) of the Tatler, the Spectator,
and the Guardian, that these two writers have sent down their
names with most honour to posterity, and have especially earned
the love and gratitude of their countrymen. Steele was in his
thirty-ninth, and his friend Addison in his thirty-eighth year,
when the Tatler was started by the former in April, 1709. The
paper, published thrice a week, had gone on for about six weeks
before Addison took any part in it; but from that time he
became, next to Steele, the chief contributor to it, till it was
dropped m January, 1711. "I have only one gentleman/' says
Steele in his preface to the collected papers, •• who will be name-
less, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, which indeed it
would have been barbarous in him to have denied to one with
whom he has lived in an intimacy from childhood, considering
the great ease with which he is able to dispatch the most enter
taining pieces of this nature." The person alluded to is Addisou.

K58 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

44 This good office," Steele generously adds, " he performed with
such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning, that I fared like
a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid :
I was undone by my auxiliary ; when I had once called him in,
I could not subsist without dependence on him." By far the
greater part of the Tatler, however, is Steele's. Of 271 papers
of which it consists, above 200 are attributed either entirely cr
in the greater part to him, while those believed to have been
written by Addison are only about fifty. Among the other
contributors Swift is the most frequent. The Spectator was
"begun within two months after the discontinuance of the Tatler,
jtnd was carried on at the rate of six papers a week till the 6th
of December, 1712, on which day Number 555 was published.
In these first seven volumes of the Spectator Addison's papers
are probably more numerous than Steele's ; and between them
they wrote perhaps four-fifths of the whole work. The Guardian
was commenced on the 12th of March, 1713, and, being also
published six times a week, had extended to 175 numbers, when
\fc was brought to a close on the 1st of October in the same year.
There is only one paper by Addison in the first volume of the
Guardian, but to the second he was rather a more frequent con-
tributor than Steele. This was the last work in which the two
friends joined; for Addison, we believe, wrote nothing in the
Englishman, the fifty-seven numbers of which were published,
at the rate of three a week, between the 6th of October, 1713,
and the 15th of February following ; nor Steele any of the papers,
eighty in number, forming the eighth volume of the Spectator,
of which the first was published on the 18th of June, 1714, the
last on the 20th of December in the same year, the rate of pub-
lication being also three times a week. Of these additional
Spectators twenty-four are attributed to Addison. The friendship
of nearly half a century which had united these two admirable
writers was rent asunder by political differences some years
before the death of Addison, in 1719 : Steele survived till 1729.

Invented or introduced among us as the periodical essay may
be said to have been by Steele and Addison, it is a species of
writing, as already observed, in which perhaps they have never
been surpassed, or on the whole equalled, by any one of their
many followers. More elaboration and depth, and also more
brilliancy, we may have had in some recent attempts of the
same kind; but hardly so much genuine liveliness, ease, and
cordiality, anything so thoroughly agreeable, so skilfully adapted
to interest without demanding more attention than is naturally
and spontaneously given to it. Perhaps so large an admixture

SHAFTESBURY ; MANDEVILLE. 3f,9

of the speculative and didactic was never made so easy of appre-
hension and so entertaining, so like in the reading to the merely
narrative. But, besides this constant atmosphere of the pleasur-
able arising simply from the lightness, variety, and urbanity of
these delightful papers, the delicate imagination and exquisite
humour of Addison, and the vivacity, warmheartedness, and
altogether generous nature of Steele, give a charm to the best of
them, which is to be enjoyed, not described. We not only admire
the writers, but soon come to love them, and to regard both them
«'ind the several fictitious personages that move about in the other
little world they have created for us as among our best and best-
known friends.

SHA.FTESBURY ; MANDEVILLE.

Among the prose works of the early part of the last century
which used to have the highest reputation for purity and
elegance of style, is that by Lord Shaftesbury entitled Charac-
teristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Things. Its author,
Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (grandson of
the first Earl, the famous meteoric politician of the reign of
Charles II.), was born in 1671 and died in 1713 ; and the Cha-
racteristics, which did not appear in its present form, or with
that title, till after his death, consists of a collection of disquisi-
tions on various questions in moral, metaphysical, and critical
philosophy, most of which he had previously published separately.

But the most remarkable philosophical work of this time, at least
in a literary point of view, is Mandeville's Fable of the Bees.
Bernard de Mandeville was a native of Holland, in which
country he was born about the year 1670 ; but, after having
studied medicine and taken his doctor's degree, he came over to
England about the end of that century, and he resided here till
his death in 1733. His Fable of the Bees originally appeared in
1708, in the form of a poem of 400 lines in octosyllabic verse,
entitled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turned Honest, and it
was not till eight years afterwards that he added the prose notes
which make the bulk of the first volume of the work as we now
have it. The second volume, or part, which consists of a series
of six dialogues, was not published till 1729. The leading idea
of the book is indicated by its second title, Private Vices Public
Benefits ; — in other words, that what are called and what really
are vices in themselves, and in the individual indulging in them,
are nevertheless, in many respects, serviceable to the community.
Mandeville holds in fact, to quote the words in which he sums

360 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

up his thoory at the close of his first volume, " that neither the
friendly qualities and kind affections that are natural to man,
nor the real virtues he is capable of acquiring by reason and
self-denial, are the foundation of society ; but that what we call
evil in this world, moral as well as natural, is the grand principle
that makes us sociable creatures, the solid basis, the life and
support, of all trades and employments without exception ; that
there we must look for the true origin of all arts and sciences ;
and that the moment evil ceases the society must be spoiled, if
not totally destroyed/' The doctrine had a startling appearance
thus nakedly announced ; and the book occasioned a great com-
>motion ; but it is now generally admitted that, whatever may be
the worth, or worth! essness, of the philosophical system pro-
pounded in it, the author's object was not an immoral one. In-
dependently altogether of its general principles and conclusions,
the work is full both of curious matter and of vigorous writing.

Mandeville, certainly, is no flatterer of human nature ; his
book, indeed, is written throughout in a spirit not only satirical,
but cynical. Every page, however, bears the stamp of inde-
pendent thinking; and many of the remarks he throws out
indicate that he had at least glimpses of views which were not
generally perceived or suspected at that day. It would probably
be found that the Fable of the Bees has been very serviceable
in the way of suggestion to various subsequent writers who have
not adopted the general principles of the work. The following
paragraphs, for example, are remarkable as an anticipation of a
famous passage in the Wealth of Nations : —

If we trace the most flourishing nations in their origin, we shall find,
that, in the remote beginnings of every society, the richest and most con-
siderable men among them were a great while destitute of a great many
comforts of life that are now enjoyed by the meanest and most humble
wretches ; so that many things which were once looked upon as the inven-
tions of luxury are now allowed even to those that are so miserably poor as
to become the objects of public charity, nay counted so necessary that we

think no human creature ought to want them A man would

be laughed at that should discover luxury in the plain dress of a poor
creature that walks along in a thick parish gown, and a coarse shirt under-
neath it ; and yet what a number of people, how many different trades, and
what a variety of skill and tools must be employed to have the most
ordinary Yorkshire cloth ! What depth of thought and ingenuity, what
toil and labour, and what length of time must it have cost, before man
could learn from a seed to raise and prepare so useful a product as linen !
—Remark T, vol. i. pp. 182-183 (edit, of 1724).

What a bustle is there to be made in several parts of the world before a
nine scarlet cr crimson cloth can be produced ; what multiplicity of trades

MANDEVILLE. 8C1

And artificers must be employed ! Not only such as are obvious, as wool-
combers, spinners, the weaver, the cloth-worker, the scourer, the dyer, the
setter, the drawer, and the packer ; but others that are more remote, and
might seem foreign to it,— as the mill-wright, the pewterer, and the
chemist, which yet are all necessary, as well as a great number of other
handicrafts, to have the tools, utensils, and other implements belonging to
the trades already named. But all these things are done at home, and
may be performed without extraordinary fatigue or danger; the most
frightful prospect is left behind, when we reflect on the toil and hazard that
are to be undergone abroad, the vast seas we are to go over, the different
climates we are to endure, and the several nations we must be obliged to
for their assistance. Spain alone, it is true, might furnish us with wool to
make the finest cloth; but what skill and pains, what experience and
ingenuity, are required to dye it of those beautiful colours ! How widely
are the drugs and other ingredients dispersed through the universe that are
to meet in one kettle ! Alum, indeed, we have of our own ; argot we
might have from the Rhine, and vitriol from Hungary: all this is in
Europe. But then for saltpetre in quantity we are forced to go as far as
the East Indies. Cochenil, unknown to the ancients, is not much nearer
to us, though in a quite different part of the earth ; we buy it, 'tis true,
from the Spaniards : but, not being their product, they are forced to fetch
it for us from the remotest corner of the new world in the West Indies.
Whilst so many sailors are broiling in the sun and sweltered with heat in
the East and West of us, another set of them are freezing in the North to
fetch potashes from Russia. — Search into the Nature of Society (appended
to the second edition), pp. 411-413.

In another place, indeed (Remark Q, pp. 213-216), Mandeville
almost enunciates one of the great leading principles of Smith's
work : after showing how a nation might be undone by too much
money, he concludes, " Let the value of gold and silver either
rise or fall, the enjoyment of all societies will ever depend upon
the fruits of the earth and the labour of the people ; both which
joined together are a more certain, a more inexhaustible, and a
more real treasure than the gold of Brazil or the silver of Potosi."
It might be conjectured also from some of his other writings that
Smith was a reader of Mandeville : the following sentence, for
instance (Remark C, p. 55), may be said almost to contain the
germ of the Theory of the Moral Sentiments : — " That we are
often ashamed and blush for others ... is nothing else but that
sometimes we make the case of others too nearly our own ; — so
people shriek out when they see others in danger : — whilst we
are reflecting with too much earnest on the effect which such
a blameable action, if it was ours, would produce in us, the
spirits, and consequently the blood, are insensibly moved after
the same manner as if the action was our own, and so the same
symptoms must appear."

3C2 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

GAY; ARBUTHNOT; ATTERBURY.

Along with Pope, as we have seen, Swift numbers among thoso
who would most mourn his death, Gay and Arbuthnot. He
survived them both, Gay having died, in his forty-fourth year, in
1732, and Arbuthnot at a much more advanced age in 1735.

John Gay, the author of a considerable quantity of verse and
of above a dozen dramatic pieces, is now chiefly remembered for
his Beggar's Opera, his Fables, his mock-heroic poem of Trivia,
or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, and some of his
ballads. He has no pretensions to any elevation of genius, but
there is an agreeable ease, nature, and sprightliness in every-
thing he has written ; and the happiest of his performances are
animated by an archness, and light but spirited raillery, in
which he has not often been excelled. His celebrated English
opera, as it was the first attempt of the kind, still remains the
only one that has been eminently successful. Now, indeed, that
much of the wit has lost its point and application to existing
characters and circumstances, the dialogue of the play, apart
from the music, may be admitted to owe its popularity in some
degree to its traditionary fame ; but still what is temporary in it
is intermixed with a sufficiently diffused, though not very rich,
vein of general satire, to allow the whole to retain considerable
piquancy. Even at first the Beggar's Opera was probably in-
debted for the greater portion of its success to the music ; and
that is so happily selected that it continues still as fresh and as
delightful as ever.

Dr. John Arbuthnot, a native of Scotland, besides various
professional works of much ability, is generally regarded as the
author of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, printed in the
works of Pope and Swift, and said to have been intended as the
commencement of a general satire on the abuses of learning, of
which, however, nothing more was ever written except Pope's
treatise already mentioned on the Bathos, and one or two shorter
fragments. The celebrated political satire entitled The History
of John Bull, which has been the model of various subsequent
imitations, but of none in which the fiction is at once so apposite
and so ludicrous, is also attributed to Arbuthnot. Pope's highly
wrought and noble Prologue to his Satires, which is addressed
to Arbuthnot, or rather in which the latter figures as the poet's
interlocutor, will for ever preserve both the memory of their
friendship, and also some traits of the character and manner of
the learned, witty, and kind-hearted physician.

The commencement of the reign of the Whigs at the accessiou

PRIOR; PARNELL. £03

of the House of Hanover, which deprived Arbuthnot of his ap-
pointment of one of the Physicians Extraordinary — leaving him,
however, in the poet's words,

social, cheerful, and serene,
And just as rich as when he served a queen —

was more fatal to the fortunes of another of Pope's Tory or
Jacobite friends, Francis Atterbury, the celebrated Bishop of
Rochester, believed to have been the principal author of the reply
to Bentley's Dissertation on Phalaris. Atterbury also took a
distinguished part in the professional controversies of his day,
and his sermons and letters, and one or two short copies of verse
by him, are well known ; but his fervid character probably
flashed out in conversation in a way of which we do not gather
any notion from his writings. Atterbury was deprived and
outlawed in 1722 ; and he died abroad in 1731, in his sixty-ninth
year.

PRIOR; PARNELL.

Matthew Prior is another distinguished name in the band of the
Tory writers of this age, and he was also an associate of Pope
and Swift, although we hear less of him in their epistolary cor-
respondence than of most of their other friends. Yet perhaps no
one of the minor wits and poets of the time has continued to
enjoy higher or more general favour with posterity. Much that
he wrote, indeed, is now forgotten ; but some of the best of his
comic tales in verse will live as long as the language, which
contains nothing that surpasses them in the union of ease and
fluency with sprightliness and point, and in all that makes up
the spirit of humorous and graceful narrative. They are our
happiest examples of a style that has been cultivated with more
frequent success by French writers than by our own. In one
poem, his Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, extending to three
cantos, he has even applied this light and airy manner of treat-
ment with remarkable felicity to some of the most curious
questions in mental philosophy. In another still longer work,
again, entitled Solomon on the Vanity of the World, in three
Books, leaving his characteristic archness and pleasantry, he
emulates not unsuccessfully the dignity of Pope,, not without
home traces of natural eloquence and picturesqueness of expres-
sion which are all his own. Prior, who was born in 1664,
commenced author before the Revolution, by the publication in
1688 of his City Mouse and Country Mouse, written in concert

SG4 EXGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

with Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax, in ridicule of
Dryden's Hind and Panther ; and. he continued a Whig nearly to
the end of the reign of William ; hut he then joined the most
extreme section of the Tories, and acted cordially with that
party down to his death in 1721. Such also was the political
course of Parnell, only that, being a younger man, he did not
make his change of party till some years after Prior. The Kev.
Dr. Thomas Parnell was horn at Dublin in 1679, and left his
original friends the Whigs at the same time with Swift, on the
ejection of Lord Godolphin's ministry, in 1710. He died in
1718. Parnell is always an inoffensive and agreeable writer;
and sometimes, as, for example, in his Nightpiece on Death,
which probably suggested Gray's more celebrated Elegy, he rises
to considerable impressiveness and solemn pathos. But, although
his poetry is uniformly fluent and transparent, and its general
spirit refined and delicate, it has little warmth or richness, and
can only be called a sort of water-colour poetry. One of Parnell's
pieces, we may remark, — his Fairy Tale of Edwin and Sir Topaz,
— may have given some hints to Burns for his Tarn o' Shanter.

BOLING BROKE.

The mention of Prior naturally suggests that of his friend and
patron, and also the friend of Swift and Pope — Henry St. John,
better known by his title of the Lord Viscount Bolingbroke,
although his era comes down to a later date, for he was not born
till 1678, and he lived to 1751. Bolingbroke wrote no poetry,
but his collected prose works fill five quarto volumes (without
including his letters), , and would thus entitle him by their
quantity alone to be ranked as one of the most considerable
writers of his time ; of which we have abundant testimony that
lie was one of the most brilliant orators and talkers, and in every
species of mere cleverness one of the most distinguished figures.
His writings, being principally on subjects of temporary politics,
have lost much of their interest ; but a few of them, especially
his Letters on the Study and Use of History, his Idea of a Patriot
King, and his account and defence of his own conduct in his
famous Letter to Sir William Windham, will still reward perusal
even for the sake of their matter, wnile in style and manner
almost everything he has left is of very remarkable merit.
Bolingbroke's style, as we have elsewhere observed, " was a
happy medium between that of the scholar and that of tlie man
of society — or rather it was a happy combination of the best

GARTH; BLACKMORE. 365

qualities of both, heightening the ease, freedom, fluency, and
liveliness of elegant conversation with many of the deeper and
richer tones of the eloquence of formal orations and of books.
The example he thus set has probably had a very considerable
effect in moulding the style of popular writing among us since
his time."*

GARTH; BLACKMORE.

In one of the passages in which he commemorates the friend-
ship of Swift, Atterbury, and Bolingbroke, Pope records also the
encouragement his earliest performances in rhyme received from
a poet and man of wit of the opposite party, "well-natured
Garth."! Sir Samuel Garth, who was an eminent physician and
a zealous Whig, is the author of various poetical pieces published
in the reigns of William and Anne, of which the one of greatest
pretension is that entitled The Dispensary, a mock epic, in six
short cantos, on the quarrels of his professional brethren, which
appeared in 1699. The wit of this slight performance may have
somewhat evaporated with age, but it cannot have been at any
time very pungent. A much more voluminous, and also more
ambitious, Whig poet of this Augustan age, as it is sometimes
called, of our literature, was another physician, Sir Richard
Blackmore. Blackmore made his debut as a poet so early as the
year 1696, by the publication of his Prince Arthur, which was
followed by a succession of other epics, or long poems of a serious
kind, each in six, ten, or twelve books, under the names of King
Arthur, King Alfred, Eliza, the Eedeemer, the Creation, &c.,
besides a Paraphrase of the Book of Job, a new version of the
Psalms, a Satire on Wit, and various shorter effusions both in
verse and prose. The indefatigable rhymester — " the everlasting
Blackmore," as Pope calls him — died at last in 1729. Nothing
can be conceived wilder or more ludicrous than this incessant
discharge of epics ; but Blackmore, whom Dryden charged with
writing «* to the rumbling of his coach's wheels," may be pro-
nounced, without any undue severity, to have been not more a
fool than a blockhead. His Creation, indeed, has been praised
both by Addison and Johnson ; but the politics of the author
may be supposed to have blinded or mollified the one critic, and
his piety the other; at least the only thing an ordinary reader

* Article on Bolingbroke in Penny Cyclopaedia, v. 78.
+ See Prologue to the Satires, 135, &c.

SCO ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

will be apt to discover in this his chef-d'ceuvre, that is not tho
flattest commonplace, is an occasional outbreak of the most
ludicrous extravagance and bombast. Altogether this knight,
droning away at his epics for above a quarter of a century, is as
absurd a phenomenon as is presented to us in the history of
literature. Pope has done him no more than justice in assigning
him the first place among the contending "brayers" at the
immortal games instituted by the goddess of the Dunciad : —

But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain :
Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again.
In Tot'nam fields the brethren, with amaze,
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze ;
Long Chancery-lane retentive rolls the sound,
And courts to courts return it round and round ;
Thames wafts it thence to Kufus' roaring hall,
And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl.
All hail him victor in both gifts of song,
Who sings so loudly and who sings so long.

DEFOE.

The Whigs, however, had to boast of one great writer of prose
fiction, if, indeed, one who, although taking a frequent and
warm part in the discussion of political subjects, really stood
aloof from and above all parties, and may be said to have been
in enlargement of view far in advance of all the public men of
his time, can be properly claimed by any party. Nor does
Daniel Defoe seem to have been recognized as one of them-
selves by the Whigs of his own day. He stood up, indeed,
from first to last, for the principles of the Eevolution against
those of the Jacobites ; but in the alternating struggle between
the Whig and Tory parties for the possession of office he took
little or no concern ; he served and opposed administrations of
either colour without reference to anything but their measures :
thus we find him in 1 706 assisting Godolphin and his colleagues
to compass the union with Scotland ; and in 1713 exerting
himself with equal zeal in supporting Harley and Bolingbroke
in the attempt to carry through their commercial treaty with
France. He is believed to have first addressed himself to his
countrymen through the press in 1C83, when he was only in his
twenty-third year. From this time for a space of above thirty
years he may be said never to have laid down his pen as a
political writer ; his publications in prose and verse, which aro
far too numerous to be here particularized, embracing nearly

DEFOE. 367

*vory subject which either the progress of events made of
prominent importance during that time, or which was of emi-
nent popular or social interest independently of times and
circumstances. Many of these productions, written for a tem-
porary purpose, or on the spur of some particular occasion, still
retain a considerable value, even for their matter, either as
directories of conduct or accounts of matters of fact; some,
indeed, such as his History of the Union, are the works of
highest authority we possess respecting the transactions to
which they relate ; all of them bear the traces of a sincere,
earnest, manly character, and of an understanding unusually
active, penetrating, and well-informed. Evidence enough there
often is, no doubt, of haste and precipitation, but it is always
the haste of a full mind : the subject may be rapidly and some-
what rudely sketched out, and the matter not always very
artificially disposed, or set forth to the most advantage; but
Defoe never wrote for the mere sake of writing, or unless when
he really had something to state which he conceived it important
that the public should know. He was too thoroughly honest
to make a trade of politics.

Defoe's course and character as a political writer bear a con-
siderable resemblance in some leading points to those of one of
the most remarkable men of our own day, the late William
Cobbett, who, however, had certainly much more passion and
wilfulness than Defoe, whatever we may think of his claims to
as much principle. But Defoe's political writings make the
smallest part of his literary renown. At the age of fifty-eight —
an age when other writers, without the tenth part of his amount
of performance to boast of, have usually thought themselves .
entitled to close their labours — he commenced a new life of
authorship with all the spirit and hopeful alacrity of five-and-
twenty. A succession of works of fiction, destined, some of
them, to take and keep the highest rank in that department of
our literature, and to become popular books in every language
of Europe, now proceeded from his pen with a rapidity evincing
the easiest flow as well as the greatest fertility of imagination.
Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719 ; the Dumb Philosopher, the
same year; Captain Singleton, in 1720 ; Duncan Campbell, the
same year; Moll Flanders, in 1721; Colonel Jacque, in 1722;
the Journal of the Plague, and probably, also, the Memoirs of
a Cavalier (to which there is no date), the same year; the
Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana, in 1724; the New Voyage
Round the World, in 1725; and the Memoirs of Captain
Carleton, in 1728. But these effusions of his inventive faculty

80S ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

seem to have been, after all, little more than the amusements
of his leisure. In the course of the twelve years from 1719 to
his death in 1731, besides his novels, he produced about twenty
miscellaneous works, many of them of considerable extent. It
may be piQtty safely affirmed that no one who has written
so much has written so well. No writer of fictitious narrative
has ever excelled him in at least one prime excellence — the
air of reality which he throws over the creations of his fancy ;
an effect proceeding from the strength of conception with which
he enters into the scenes, adventures, and characters he under-
takes to describe, and his perfect reliance upon his power of
interesting the reader by the plainest possible manner of re-
lating things essentially interesting. Truth and nature are
never either improved by flowers of speech in Defoe, or
smothered under that sort of adornment. In some of his po-
litical writings there are not wanting passages of considerable
height of style, in which, excited by a fit occasion, he employs
to good purpose the artifices of rhetorical embellishment and
modulation ; but in his works of imagination his almost constant
characteristic is a simplicity and plainness, which, if there be
any affectation about it at all, is chargeable only with that
of a homeliness sometimes approaching to rusticity. His
writing, however, is always full of idiomatic nerve, and in a
high degree graphic and expressive; and even its occasional
slovenliness, whether the result of carelessness or design, aids
the illusion by which the fiction is made to read so like a
matter of fact. The truthful air of Defoe's fictions, we may
just remark, is of quite a different character from that of Swift's,
in which, although there is also much of the same vivid con-
ception, and therefore minutely accurate delineation, of every
person and thing introduced, a discerning reader will always
perceive a smile lurking beneath the author's assumed gravity,
telling him intelligibly enough that the whole is a joke. It is
said, indeed, that, as the Journal of the Plague is quoted as an
authentic narrative by Dr. Mead, and as Lord Chatham was,
in all simplicity, in the habit of recommending the Memoirs
of a Cavalier to his friends as the best account of the Civil
Wars, and as those of Captain Carleton were read even by
Samuel Johnson without a suspicion of their being other than
a true history, so some Irish bishop was found with faith enough
to believe in Gulliver's Travels, although not a little amazed
by some things stated in the book. But it is not probable that
there ever was any second instance, even on the Irish episcopal
bench, of so high a pitch of innocence.

see

DRAMATIC WRITERS.

To this age, also, belong three of the greatest of our comic
dramatists. Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar were born in
the order in which we have named them, and also, we believe,
successively presented themselves before the public as writers
for the stage in the same order, although they reversed it in
making their exits from the stage of life, — Farquhar dying in
1707 at the age of twenty-nine, Vanbrugh in 1726 at that of fifty-
four, Congreve not till 1729 in his fifty-ninth or sixtieth year.

Congreve's first play, The Old Bachelor, was brought out in
1693, the author having already, two or three years before,
made himself known in the literary world by a novel called The
Incognita, or Love and Duty Keconciled. The Old Bachelor
was followed by The Double Dealer in 1694, and by Love for
Love in 1695 ; the tragedy of The Mourning Bride was produced
in 1697; and the comedy of The Way of the World, in 1700:
a masquerade and an opera, both of slight importance, were the
only dramatic pieces he wrote during the rest of his life. The
comedy of Congreve has not much character, still less humour,
and no nature at all ; but blazes and crackles with wit and
repartee, for the most part of an unusually pure and brilliant
species,— not quaint, forced, and awkward, like what we find
in some other attempts, in our dramatic literature and elsewhere,
at the same kind of display, but apparently as easy and spon-
taneous as it is pointed, polished, and exact. His plots are also
constructed with much artifice.

Sir John Vanbrugh is the author of ten or twelve comedies,
of which the first, The Eelapse, was produced in 1697, and of
which The Provoked Wife, The Confederacy, and The Journey
to London (which last, left unfinished by the author, was com-
pleted by Colley Cibber), are those of greatest merit. The wit
of Vanbrugh flows rather than flashes ; but its copious stream
may vie in its own way with the^dazzling fire-shower of Con-
greve's ; and his characters have much more of real flesh and
blood in their composition, coarse and vicious as almost all the
more powerfully drawn among them are.

George Farquhar, the author of The Constant Couple and The
Beaux' Stratagem, and of five or six other comedies, was a native
of Ireland, in which country Congreve also spent his childhood
and boyhood. Farquhar's first play, his Love in a Bottle, was
brought out with great success at Drury Lane in 1698; The
Beaux' Stratagem, his last, was in the midst of its mn when the
illness during which it had been written terminated in the poor

2 B

3-/0 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

author's early death. The thoughtless and volatile, but good-
natured and generous, character of Farquhar is reflected in his
comedies, which, with less sparkle, have more natural life and
airiness, and are animated by a finer spirit of whim, than those
of either Vanbrugh or Congreve. His morality, like theirs, is
Abundantly free and easy ; but there is much more heart about
his profligacy than in theirs, as well as much less grossness or
hardness.

To these names may be added that of Colley Gibber, who has,
however, scarcely any pretensions to be ranked as one of our
classic dramatists, although, of about two dozen comedies, tra-
gedies, and other pieces of which he is the author, his Careless
Husband and one or two others may be admitted to be lively
and agreeable. Gibber, who was born in 1671, produced his
first play, the comedy of Love's Last Shift, in 1696, and was
still an occasional writer for the stage after the commencement
of the reign of George II. ; one of his productions, indeed, his
tragedy entitled Papal Tyranny, was brought out so late as the
year 1745, when he himself performed one of the principal
characters; and he lived till 1757. His well-known account
of his own life, or his Apology for his Life, as he modestly or
affectedly calls it, is an amusing piece of something higher than
gossip ; the sketches he gives of the various celebrated actors of
his time are many of them executed, not perhaps with the deepest
insight, but yet with much graphic skill in so far as regards
those mere superficial characteristics that meet the ordinary eye.

The chief tragic writer of this age was Nicholas Eowe,the author
of The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore, of five other tragedies, one
comedy, and a translation in rhyme of Lucan's Pharsalia. Eowe,
who was born in 1673, and died in 1718, was esteemed in his
own day a great master of the pathetic, but is now regarded as
little more than a smooth and occasionally sounding versifier.

MINOR POETS.

The age of the first two Georges, if we put aside what was done
by Pope, or consider him as belonging properly to the preceding
reign of Anne, was not very prolific in poetry of a high order;
but there are several minor poets belonging to this time whose
names live in our literature, and some of whose productions are
Ktill read. Matthew Green's poem entitled The Spleen ori-
ginally appeared, we believe, in his lifetime in the first volume
of Dodsley's Collection — although his other pieces, which are

DYER; SOMERVILE; TICKELL. 371

few in number and of little note, were only published by his
friend Glover after the death of the author" in 1737, at the age
of forty-one. The Spleen, a reflective effusion in octo-syllabic
verse, is somewhat striking from an air of originality in the
vein of thought, and from the laboured concentration and epi-
grammatic point of the language; but, although it was much
cried up when it first appeared, and the laudation has continued
to be duly echoed by succeeding formal criticism, it may be
doubted if many readers could now make their way through
it without considerable fatigue, or if it be much read in fact at
all. With all its ingenious or energetic rhetorical posture-
making, it has nearly as little real play of fancy as charm of
numbers, and may be most properly characterized as a piece of
bastard or perverted Hudibrastic — an imitation of the manner of
Butler to the very dance of his verse, only without the comedy
— the same antics, only solemnized or made to carry a moral
and serious meaning. The Grongar Hill of Dyer was published
in 1726, when its author was in his twenty-seventh year; and
was followed by The Ruins of Rome in 1740, and his most
elaborate performance, The Fleece, in 1757, the year before his
death. Dyer's is a natural and true note, though not one of
much power or compass. What he has written is his own ;
not borrowed from or suggested by " others' books," but what
he has himself seen, thought, and felt. He sees, too, with an
artistic eye — while at the same time his pictures are full of the
moral inspiration which alone makes description poetry. There
is also considerable descriptive power in Somervile's blank verse
poem of The Chase, in four Books, which was first published
in 1735. Somervile, who was a Warwickshire squire, and the
intimate friend of Shenstone, and who, besides his Chase, wrote
various other pieces, now for the most part forgotten, died in
1742. Tickell, Addison's friend, who was born in 1686 and
lived till 1740, is the author of a number of compositions, of
which his Elegy on Addison and his ballad of Colin and Lucy
are the best known. The ballad Gray has called " the prettiest
in the world " — and if prettiness, by which Gray here probably
means a certain easy simplicity and trimness, were the soul of
ballad poetry, it might carry away a high prize. Nobody writes
better grammar than Tickell. His style is always remarkably
clear and exact, and the mere appropriateness and judicious
collocation of the words, aided by the swell of the verse in his
more elaborate or solemn passages, have sometimes an impos-
ing effect. Of his famous Elegy, the most opposite opinions
have been expressed. Goldsmith has called it " one of the

372 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

finest in our language ;" and Johnson has declared that " a more
sublime or elegant funeral poem is not to be found in the whole
compass of English literature." So Lord Macaulay : — " Tickell
bewailed his friend in an Elegy which would do honour to
the greatest name in our literature, and which unites the energy
and magnificence of Dry den to the tenderness and purity of
Cowper." * Steele on the other hand has denounced it as being
nothing more than " prose in rhyme." And it must be admitted
that it is neither very tender nor very imaginative ; yet rhyme
too is part and parcel of poetry, and solemn thoughts, vigorously
expressed and melodiously enough versified, which surely we
have here, cannot reasonably be refused that name, even though
the informing power of passion or imagination may not be
present in any very high degree.

The notorious Richard Savage is the author of several poetical
compositions, published in the last fifteen or twenty years of
his tempestuous and unhappy life, which he closed in Bristol
jail in 1743, at the age of forty-six. Savage's poem called The
Bastard has some vigorous lines, and some touches of tenderness
as well as bursts of more violent passion ; but, as a whole, it ia
crude, spasmodic, and frequently wordy and languid. His other
compositions, some of which evince a talent for satire, of which
assiduous cultivation might have made something, have all
passed into oblivion. The personal history of Savage, which
Johnson's ardent and expanded narrative has made universally
known, is more interesting than his verse ; but even that owes
more than half its attraction to his biographer. He had, in fact,
all his life, apparently, much more of another kind of madness
than he ever had of that of poetry.

Fenton and Broome — the former of whom died in 1730 at the
age of forty-seven, the latter in 1745, at what age is not known,
— are chiefly remembered as Pope's coadjutors in his translation
of the Odyssey. Johnson observes, in his Life of Fenton, that
the readers of poetry have never been able to distinguish their
Books from those of Pope ; but the account he has given here
and in the Life of Broome of the respective shares of the three,
on the information, as he says, of Mr. Langton, who had got it
from Spence, may be reasonably doubted. It differs, indeed, in
some respects from that given in Spence's Anecdotes, since
published. A critical reader will detect very marked varieties
of style and manner in the different parts of the work. It is
very clear, for instance, that the nineteenth and twentieth Books
are not by Pope, and have not even received much of his revi-
* Essay on Aaaison.

FENTON AND BROOME. 373

sion : they are commonly attributed to Fenton, and we should
think rightly. But it is impossible to believe, on the other
hand, that the translator of these two Books is also the trans-
lator of the whole of the fourth Book, which is likewise
assigned to Fenton in Johnson's statement. Could any one
except Pope have written the following lines, which occur in
that Book ?—

But, oh, beloved by heaven, reserved to thee,

A happier lot the smiling fates decree ;

Free from that law, beneath whose mortal sway

Matter is changed, and varying forms decay,

Elysium shall be thine ; the blissful plains

Of utmost earth, where Ehadamanthus reigns.

Joys ever young, unmixed with pain or fear,

Fill the wide circle of the eternal year :

Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime,

The fields are florid with unfading prime ;

From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow,

Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow ;

But from the breezy deep the blest inhale

The fragrant murmurs of the western gale.

This grace peculiar will the Gods afford

To thee. the son of Jove, the beauteous Helen's lord.

Tope, indeed, may have inserted this and other passages in this
and other Books, of which he did not translate the whole.
Broome was a much more dexterous versifier than Fenton, and
would come much nearer to Pope's ordinary manner : still we
greatly doubt if the twenty-third Book in particular (which
passes for Broome's) be not entirely Pope's, and also many parts
of the second, the eighth, the eleventh, and the twelfth. On the
other hand, the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and twenty-
fourth seem to us to be throughout more likely to be by him
than by Pope. Pope himself seems to have looked upon Broome
as rather a clever mimic of his own manner than as anything
much higher. When they had quarrelled a few years after
this, he introduced his old associate in the Dunciad, in a
passage which originally ran : —

See under Ripley rise a new Whitehall,

While Jones and Boyle's united labours fall ;

While Wren with sorrow to the grave descends,

Gay dies unpensioned with a hundred friends ;

Hibernian politics, 0 Swift, thy doom,

And Pope's, translating ten whole years with Broome.

It was pretended, indeed, in a note, that no harm was meant to
poor Broome by this delicate crucifixion of him. Yet he is

87-1 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

understood to be the W. B. who, in the sixth chapter of the Art
of Sinking in Poetry, entitled " Of the several kinds of geniuses in
the Profound, and the marks and characters of each," heads the
list of those described as "the Parrots, that repeat another's
words in such a hoarse, odd voice, as makes them seem their
own." And Broome, as Johnson has observed, is quoted more
than once in the treatise as a proficient in the Bathos. Johnson
adds, " I have been told that they were afterwards reconciled ;
but I am afraid their peace was without friendship." The
couplet in the Dunciad, at least, was ultimately altered to —

Hibernian politics, 0 Swift ! thy fate,

And Pope's, ten years to comment and translate.

Both Broome and Fenton published also various original compo-
sitions in verse, but nothing that the world has not very will-
ingly let die. Fenton, however, although his contributions to the
translation of the Odyssey neither harmonize well with the rest
of the work, nor are to be commended taken by themselves, had
more force and truth of poetical feeling than many of his verse-
making contemporaries : one of his pieces, his ode to Lord Gower,
is not unmusical, nor without a certain lyric glow and elevation.

Another small poet of this age is Ambrose Philips, whose Six
Pastorals and tragedy of The Distressed Mother brought him vast
reputation when they were first produced, but whose name has
been kept in the recollection of posterity, perhaps, more by
Pope's vindictive satire. An ironical criticism on the Pastorals
in the Guardian, which took in Steele, who published it in the
40th number of that paper (for 27th April, 1713), was followed
long afterwards by the unsparing ridicule of the Treatise on th»
Art of Sinking in Poetry, in which many of the illustrations are
taken from the rhymes of poor Philips, who is held up in one
place as the great master both of the infantine and the inane in
style, and is elsewhere placed at the head of the class of writers
designated the Tortoises, who are described as slow and dull,
and, like pastoral writers, delighting much in gardens : " they
have," it is added, " for the most part, a fine embroidered shell,
and underneath it a heavy lump."* Philips, in some of his later
effusions, had gone, in pursuit of what he conceived to be nature

I

* According to Johnson, Gay's Pastorals were written at Pope's instigation,
in ridicule of those of Philips ; " but," it is added, " the effect of reality and
truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovel-
ling and degraded. These Pastorals became popular, and were read with
delight, as just representations of rural manners and occupations, by those
who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the critical
dispute." — Life of Gay.

PHILIPS; HAMMOND. S75

and simplicity, into a style of writing in short verses with not
overmuch meaning, which his enemies parodied under the name
of Namby-pamby. On the whole, however, he had no great
reason to complain : if his poetry was laughed at by Pope and
the Tories, it was both lauded, and very substantially rewarded,
by the \Vhigs, who not only made Philips a lottery commissioner
and a justice of peace for Westminster, but continued to push
him forward till he became member for the county of Armagh
in the Irish parliament, and afterwards judge of the Irish Prero-
gative Court. His success in life is alluded to in the same part
of the Dunciad where Broome is brought in — in the line,

Lo ! Ambrose Philips is preferred for wit !

This Nam&y-pa/n&y Philips, who was born in 1671 and lived
till 1749, must not be confounded with John Philips, the author
of the mock-heroic poem of The Splendid Shilling (published in
1703), and also of a poem in two books, in serious blank verse,
entitled Cider, which has the reputation of being a good practical
treatise on the brewing of that drink. John Philips, who pub-
lished likewise a poem on the battle of Blenheim, in rivalry of
Addison, was a Tory poet, and the affectation of simplicity, at
least, cannot be laid to his charge, for what he aims at imitating
or appropriating is not what is called the language of nature, but
the swell and pomp of Milton. His serious poetry, however, is
not worth much, at least as poetry. John Philips was born in
1676, and died in 1708.

Two or three more names may be merely mentioned. Leonard
Welsted, who was born in 1689, and died in 1747, also, like
Ambrose Philips, figures in the Dunciad and in the Treatise of
Martinus Scriblerus, and produced a considerable quantity both
of verse and prose, all now utterly forgotten. Thomas Yalden,
who died a Doctor of Divinity in 1736, was a man of wit as well
as the writer of a number of odes, elegies, hymns, fables, and
other compositions in verse, of which one, entitled a Hymn to
Darkness, is warmly praised by Dr. Johnson, who has given the
author a place in his Lives of the Poets. In that work too may
be found an account of Hammond, the author of the Love
Klegies, who died in 1742, in his thirty-second year, driven
mad, and eventually sent to his grave, it is affirmed, by the
inexorable cruelty of the lady, a Miss Dashwood, who, under the
name of Delia, is the subject of his verses, and who, we are told,
survived him for thirty-seven years without finding any one elso
either to marry or fall in love with her. The character, as
Johnson remarks, that Hammond bequeathed her was not likely

576 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

to attract courtship. Hammond's poetry, however, reflects "but
coldly the amorous fire which produced all this mischief; it is
correct and graceful, "but languid almost to the point of drowsi-
ness. Gilbert West was born about 1705, and died in 1756 :
besides other verse, he published a translation of a portion of the
odes of Pindar, which had long considerable reputation, but is not
very Pindaric, though a smooth and sonorous performance. The
one of his works that has best kept its ground is his prose tract
entitled Observations on the Eesurrection, a very able and
ingenious disquisition, for which the university of Oxford made
West a Doctor of Laws. Aaron Hill, who was born in 1685 and
died in 1750, and who lies buried in Westminster Abbey, was at
different periods of his life a traveller, a projector, a theatrical
manager, and a literary man. He is the author of no fewer
than seventeen dramatic pieces, original and translated, among
which his versions of Voltaire's Zaire and Merope long kept
possession of the stage. His poetry is in general both pompous
and empty enough ; and of all he has written, almost the only
passage that is now much remembered is a satiric sketch of Pope,
in a few lines, which have some imitative smartness, but scarcely
any higher merit. Pope had offended him by putting him in
the Dunciad, though the way in which he is mentioned is really
complimentary to Hill.

COLLINS; SHENSTONE; GHAY.

By far the greatest of all the poetical writers of this age who,
from the small quantity of their productions, or the brevity of
each of them separately considered, are styled minor poets, is
Collins. William Collins, born in 1720, died at the early age of
thirty-six, and nearly all his poetry had been written ten years
before his death. His volume of Odes, descriptive and allegori-
cal, was published in 1746 ; his Oriental Eclogues had appeared
some years before, while he was a student at Oxford. Only his
unfinished Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders
was found among his papers after his death, and it is dated 1749.
The six or seven last years of his short life were clouded with a
depression of spirits which made intellectual exertion impossible.
All that Collins has written is full of imagination, pathos, and
melody. The defect of his poetry in general is that there is too
little of earth in it : in the purity and depth of its beauty it
resembles the bright blue sky. Yet Collins had genius enough
for anything ; and in his ode entitled The Passions he has shown

YOUNG; THOMSON. 377

with how strong a voice and pulse of humanity he could, when
lie chose, animate his verse, and what extensive and enduring
popularity he could command.

Gray and Shenstone were both born before Collins, though
they both outlived him, — Shenstone dying at the age of fifty in
1763, Gray at that of fifty -five in 1771. Shenstone is remem-
bered for his Pastoral Ballad, his Schoolmistress, and an elegy
or two ; but there was very little potency of any kind in the
music of his slender oaten pipe. Gray's famous Elegy written
in a Country Churchyard, his two Pindarics, his Ode on Eton
College, his Long Story, some translations from the Norse and
Welsh, and a few other short pieces, which make up his contri-
butions to the poetry of his native language, are all admirable
for their exquisite finish, nor is a true poetical spirit ever want-
ing, whatever may be thought of the form in which it is some-
times embodied. When his two celebrated compositions, The
Progress of Poesy and The Bard, appeared together in 1757,
Johnson affirms that " the readers of poetry were at first content
to gaze in mute amazement;" and, although the difficulty or
impossibility of understanding them which was then, it seems,
felt and confessed, is no longer complained of, much severe
animadversion has been passed on them on other accounts. Still,
whatever objections may be made to the artificial and unnatural
character and over-elaboration of their style, the gorgeous
brocade of the verse does not hide the tr^e fire and fancy
beneath, or even the real elegance of taste that has arrayed itself
so ambitiously. But Gray often expresses himself, too, as
naturally and simply in his poetry as he always does in his
charming Letters and other writings in prose : the most touch-
ing of the verses in his Ode to Eton College, for instance, are so
expressed ; and in his Long Story he has given the happiest
proof of his mastery over the lightest graces and gaieties of song.

YOUNG; THOMSON.

Of the remaining poetical names of this age the two most
considerable are those of Young and Thomson. Dr. Edward
Young, the celebrated author of the Night Thoughts, was born
in 1681 and lived till 1765. He may be shortly characterized
as, at least in manner, a sort of successor, under the reign of
Pope and the new style established by him and Dryden, of the
bonnes and the Cowleys of a former age. He had nothing,
however, of Donne's subtle fancy, and as little of the gaiety and

378 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

playfulness that occasionally break out among the quibbles and
contortions of Cowley. On the other hand, he has much more
passion and pathos than Cowley, and, with less elegance, perhaps
makes a nearer approach in some of his greatest passages to the
true sublime. But his style is radically an affected and false
one ; and of what force it seems to possess, the greater part is
the result not of any real principle of life within it, but of mere
strutting and straining. Nothing can be more unlike the poetry
of the Night Thoughts than that of the Seasons. If Young is
all art and effort, Thomson is all negligence and nature ; so
negligent, indeed, that he pours forth his unpremeditated song
apparently without the thought ever occurring to him that he
could improve it by any study or elaboration, any more than if he
were some winged warbler of the woodlands, seeking and caring for
no other listener except the universal air which the strain made
vocal. As he is the poet of nature, so his poetry has all the
intermingled rudeness and luxuriance of its theme. There is no
writer who has drunk in more of the inmost soul of his subject.
If it be the object of descriptive poetry to present us with pic-
tures and visions the effect of which shall vie with that of the
originals from which they are drawn, then Thomson is the
greatest of all descriptive poets ; for there is no other who sur-
rounds us with so much of the truth of Nature, or makes us feel
so intimately the actual presence and companionship of all her
hues and fragrances. His spring blossoms and gives forth its
beauty like a daisied meadow ; and his summer landscapes have
all the sultry warmth and green luxuriance of June ; and his
harvest fields and his orchards " hang the heavy head " as if
their fruitage were indeed embrowning in the sun ; and we see
and hear the driving of his winter snows, as if the air around us
were in confusion with their uproar. The beauty and purity
of imagination, also, diffused over the melodious stanzas of the
Castle of Indolence, make that poem one of the gems of the lan-
guage. Thomson, whose Winter, the first portion of his Seasons,
was published in 1726, died in 1748, in his forty-eighth year.
Two years before had died his countryman, the Eev. Eobert
Blair, born in 1699, the author of the well-known poem in blank
verse called The Grave, said to have been first published in
1743. It is remarkable for its masculine vigour of thought and
expression, and for the imaginative solemnity with which it
invests the most familiar truths ; and it has always been one of
our most popular religious poems.

379

ARMSTRONG; AKENSIDE; WILKIE; GLOVER.

Among the more eminent, again, of the second-rate writers
of longer poems about this date, the latter part of the reign of
George II., immediately after the death of Pope, may be noticed
Dr. John Armstrong, who was born in Scotland in 1709, and
whose Art of Preserving Health, published in 1744, has the rare
merit of an original and characteristic style, distinguished by
raciness and manly grace ; and Dr. Mark Akenside, likewise a
physician, the author, at the age of twenty-three, of The
Pleasures of Imagination, published in the same year with
Armstrong's poem, and giving another example of the treatment
of a didactic subject in verse with great ingenuity and success.
Akenside's rich, though diffuse, eloquence, and the store of fan-
ciful illustration which he pours out, evidence a wonderfully full
mind for so young a man. Neither Akenside nor Armstrong
published any more verse after the accession of George III. ;
though the former lived till 1770, and the latter till 1779.
Wilkie, the author of the rhyming epic called The Epigoniad,
who was a Scotch clergyman and professor of natural philosophy
at St. Andrews, would also appear from the traditionary accounts
we have of him to have been a person of some genius as well as
learning, though in composing his said epic he seems not to have
gone much farther for his model or fount of inspiration than to
the more sonorous passages of Pope's Homer. The Epigoniad,
published in 1753, can scarcely be said to have in any proper
sense of the word long survived its author, who died in 1772.
Nor probably was Glover's blank verse epic of Leonidas, which
appeared so early as 1737, much read when he himself passed
away from among men, in the year 1785, at the age of seventy-
four — although it had had a short day of extraordinary popu-
larity, and is a performance of considerable rhetorical merit.
Glover, who was a merchant of London, and distinguished as a
city political leader on the liberal side (a circumstance which
helped the temporary success of his epic), also wrote two trage-
dies, Boadicea, which was brought out in 1753 ; Medea, which
appeared in 1761 : they have the reputation of being cold and
declamatory, and have both been long ago consigned to oblivion
He is best remembered for his ballad of Admiral Hosier's Ghos\
— which he wrote when he was seven-and-twenty, and was
accustomed, it seems, to sing to the end of his life,— though
Hannah More, who tells us she heard him sing it in his last
days, is mistaken in saying that he was then past eighty.

530 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

SCOTTISH POETRY.

Thomson was the first Scotsman who won any conspicuous
place for himself in English literature. He had been preceded,
indeed, in the writing of English by two or three others of his
countrymen ; by Drummond of Hawthornden, who has been
mentioned in a preceding page, and his contemporaries — the
Earl of Stirling, who is the author of several rhyming tragedies
and other poems, well versified, but not otherwise of much
poetical merit, published between 1603 and 1637, the Earl of
Ancrum, by whom we have some sonnets and other short pieces,
and Sir Kobert Ayton, to whom is commonly attributed the well-
known song, " I do confess thou'rt smooth and fair," and who is
also the author of a considerable number of other similar effusions,
many of them of superior polish and elegance. At a later date,
too, Sir George Mackenzie, as already noticed, had written some
English prose ; as, indeed, Drummond had also done, besides his
poetry. But none of these writers, belonging to the century
that followed the union of the crowns, can be considered as having
either acquired any high or diffused reputation in his own time,
or retained much hold upon posterity. Even Drummond is
hardly remembered as anything more than a respectable son-
netteer ; his most elaborate work, his prose History of the
Jameses, has passed into as complete general oblivion as the
tragedies and epics of Lord Stirling and the Essays of Sir George
Mackenzie. If there be any other writer born in Scotland of
earlier date than Thomson, who has still a living and consider-
able name among English authors, it is Bishop Burnet ; but those
of his literary performances by which he continues to be chiefly
remembered, however important for the facts they contain, have
scarcely any literary value. Leighton, the eloquent archbishop
of Glasgow, although of Scotch descent, was himself born in Lon-
don. The poetry of Thomson was the first produce of the next
era, in which the two countries were really made one by their
union under one legislature, and English became the literary-
language of the one part of the island as much as of the other.

The Scottish dialect, however, still continued to be employed
in poetry. The great age of Scottish poetry, as we have seen,
extends from about the beginning of the fifteenth to about the
middle of the sixteenth century, the succession of distinguished
names comprehending, among others, those of James I., and
Henderson, and Holland, and Henry the Minstrel, and Gawin
Douglas, and Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay.* It is remarkable
* See pp. 176—183.

SCOTTISH POETRY. S81

that this space of a hundred and fifty years exactly corresponds to
the period of the decay and almost extinction of poetry in England
which intervenes between Chaucer and Surrey. On the other
hand, with the revival of English poetry in the latter part of the
sixteenth century the voice of Scottish song almost died away.
The principal names of the writers of Scottish verse that occur for
a hundred and fifty years after the death of Lyndsay are those of
Alexander Scot, who was Lyndsay's contemporary, but probably
survived him, and who is the author of several short amatory
oompositions, which have procured him from Pinkerton the
designation of the Scottish Anacreon ; Sir Ki chard Maitland of
Lethington, who died at a great age in 1586, and is less
memorable as a poet than as a collector and preserver of poetry,
the two famous manuscript volumes in the Pepysian Library,
in which are found the only existing copies of so many curious
old pieces, having been compiled under his direction, although
his own compositions, which have, with proper piety, been
printed by the Maitland Club at Glasgow, are also of some bulk,
and are creditable to his good feeling and good sense ; Captain
Alexander Montgomery, whose allegory of The Cherry and the
Slae, published in 1597, is remarkable for the facility and flow
of the language, and long continued a popular favourite, its
peculiar metre (which, however, is of earlier orjgin than this
poem) baring been on several occasions adopted by Burns ; and
Alexander Hume, who was a clergyman and died in 1609,
having published a volume of Hymns, or Sacred Songs, in his
native dialect, in 1599. Other Scottish poets of the sixteenth
century, of whom nothing or next to nothing is known except
the names and a few short pieces attributed to some of them,
are John Maitland Lord Thirlstane (second son of Sir Richard),
Alexander Arbuthnot, who was a clergyman, Clapperton,
Flemyng, John Blyth, Mofifat, Fethy, Balnavis, Sempil, Norval,
Allan Watson, George Bannatyne (the writer of the Bannatyne
manuscript in the Advocates' Library), who was a canon of the
cathedral of Moray, and Wedderburn, the supposed author of tho
Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs, of which the
first edition in all probability appeared in the latter part of this
century, and also, according to one theory, of The Complaint
of Scotland, published in 1548.* But it is possible that some
of these names may belong to a date anterior to that of Lyndsay.
King James, also, before his accession to the English throne,
published in Edinburgh two collections of Scottish verse by
himself; the first, in 1585, entitled The Essays of a Prentice in

• See p. 191.

382 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the Divine Art of Poesy; the other, in 1591, His Majesty's
Poetical Exercises at vacant hours ; but the royal inspiration is
peculiarly weak and flat.

In the whole course, we believe, of the seventeenth century
not even the name of a Scottish poet or versifier occurs. The
next that appeared was Allan Ramsay, who was the contem-
porary of Thomson, and must be accounted the proper successor
of Sir David Lyndsay, after the lapse of more than a century
and a half. Eamsay was born in 1686, and lived till 1758.
He belongs to the order of self-taught poets, his original pro-
fession having been that of a barber; his first published per-
formance, his clever continuation of the old poem of Christ's
Kirk on the Green (attributed by some to James I. of Scotland,
by others to James V.) appeared in 1712 ; his Gentle Shepherd,
in 1725; and he produced besides numerous songs and other
shorter pieces from time to time. Eamsay 's verse is in general
neither very refined nor very imaginative, but it has always
more or less in it of true poetic life. His lyrics, with all their
frequent coarseness, are many of them full of rustic hilarity and
humour ; and his well-known pastoral, though its dramatic pre-
tensions otherwise are slender enough, for nature and truth both
in the characters and manners may rank with the happiest com-
positions of its- class.

THE NOVELISTS, EICHARDSON, FIELDING, SMOLLETT.

A very remarkable portion of the literature of the middle of the
last century is the body of prose fiction, the authors of which
we familiarly distinguish as the modern English novelists, and
which in some respects may be said still to stand apart from
everything in the language produced either before or since. If
there be any writer entitled to step in before Eichardson and
Fielding in claiming the honour of having originated the English
novel, it is Daniel Defoe. But, admirable as Defoe is for his
inventive power and his art of narrative, he can hardly be said
to have left us any diversified picture of the social life of his time,
and he is rather a great raconteur than a novelist, strictly and
properly so called. He identifies himself, indeed, as perfectly as
any writer ever did, with the imaginary personages whose adven-
tures he details; — but still it is adventures he deals with rather
than either manners or characters. It may be observed that there
is seldom or ever anything peculiar or characteristic in the lan-
guage of his heroes and heroines : some of them talk, or write,
through whole volumes, but all in the same style ; in fact, as to

KICHARDSON; FIELDING; SMOLLETT. 333

this matter, every one of them is merely a repetition of Defoe
himself. Nor even in professed dialogue is he happy in indi-
vidualizing his characters by their manner of expressing them-
selves; there may be the employment occasionally of certain
distinguishing phrases, but the adaptation of the speech to the
speaker seldom goes much beyond such mere mechanical arti-
fices ; the heart and spirit do not flash out as they do in nature ;
we may remember Robinson Crusoe's man Friday by his broken
English, but it is in connexion with the fortunes of their lives
only, of the full stream of incident and adventure upon which
they are carried along, of the perils and perplexities in which
they are involved, and the shifts they are put to, that we think
of Colonel Jacque, or Moll Flanders, or even of Eobinson Crusoe
himself. What character they have to us is all gathered from
the circumstances in which they are placed ; very little or none
of it from either the manner or the matter of their discourses.
Even their conduct is for the most part the result of circum-
stances ; any one of them acts, as well as speaks, very nearly as
any other would have done similarly situated. Great and original
as he is in his proper line, and admirable as the fictions with
which he has enriched our literature are for their other merits,
Defoe has created no character which lives in the national mind —
no Squire Western, or Trulliber, or Parson Adams, or Strap, or
Pipes, or Trunnion, or Lesmahago, or Corporal Trim, or Uncle
Toby. He has made no attempt at any such delineation. It
might be supposed that a writer able to place himself and his
readers so completely in the midst of the imaginary scenes he
describes would have excelled in treating a subject dramatically.
But, in truth, his genius was not at all dramatic. With all his
wonderful power of interesting us by the air of reality he throws
over his fictions, and carrying us along with him whithersoever
he pleases, he has no faculty of passing out of himself in the
dramatic spirit, of projecting himself out of his own proper
nature and being into those of the creations of his brain. How-
ever strong his conception was of other things, he had no strong
conception of character. Besides, with all his imagination and
invention, he bad little wit and no humour — no remarkable skill
in any other kind of representation except merely that of the
plain literal truth of things. Vivid and even creative as his
imagination was, it was still not poetical. It looked through no
atmosphere of ideal light at anything ; it saw nothing adorned,
beautified, elevated above nature ; its gift was to see the reality,
and no more. Its pictures, therefore, partake rather of the cha-
racter of fac-similes than that of works of art in the true sense.

384 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

On turning our eyes from his productions to those either of
Fielding or Kichardson, we feel at once the spell of quite another
sort of inventive or creative power. Yet no two writers could
well be more unlike than the two we have mentioned are to
one another both in manner and in spirit. Intellectually and
morally, by original constitution of mind as well as in the cir-
cumstances of their training and situation, the two great con-
temporary novelists stood opposed the one to the other in the
most complete contrast. Fielding, a gentleman by birth, and
liberally educated, had been a writer for the public from the
time he was twenty : Eichardson, who had nearly attained that
age before Fielding came into the world (the one was born in
1689, the other in 1707), having begun life as a mechanic, had
spent the greater part of it as a tradesman, and had passed his
fiftieth year before he became an author. Yet, after they had
entered upon the same new field of literature almost together,
they found themselves rivals upon that ground for as long as
either continued to write. To Kichardson certainly belongs
priority of date as a novelist : the first part of his Pamela was
published in 1740, the conclusion in 1741 ; and Fielding's
Joseph Andrews, originally conceived with the design of turn-
ing Eichardson's work into ridicule, appeared in 1742. Thus,
as if their common choice of the same species of writing, and
their antipathies of nature and habit, had not been enough to
divide them, it was destined that the two founders of the new
school of fiction should begin their career by having a personal
quarrel. For their works, notwithstanding all the remarkable
points of dissimilarity between those of the one and those of the
other, must still be considered as belonging to the same school
or form of literary composition, and that a form which they had
been the first to exemplify in our language. Unlike as Joseph
Andrews was to Pamela, yet the two resembled each other more
than either did any other English work of fiction. They were
still our two first novels properly so called — our two first
artistically constructed epics of real life. And the identity of
the species of fictitious narrative cultivated by the two writers
became more apparent as its character was more completely
developed by their subsequent publications, and each proceeded
in proving its capabilities in his own way, without reference to
what had been done by the other. Fielding's Jonathan Wild
appeared in 1743 ; Eichardson's Clarissa Harlowe — the greatest
oi7 his works — was given to the world in 1748 ; and the next
year the greatest birth of Fielding's genius — his Tom Jones —
saw the light. Finally, Fielding's Amelia was published in

RICHARDSON; FlELDiNG; SMOLLETT. 38*

1751 ; and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison in 1753. Field-
ing died at Lisbon in 1754, at the age of forty-seven; Richard-
son survived till 1761, but wrote nothing more.

Meanwhile, however, a third writer had presented himself
upon the same field — Smollett, whose Eoderick Random had
appeared in 1748, his Peregrine Pickle in 1751, and his Count
Fathom in 1754, when the energetic Scotsman was yet only
in liis thirty-fourth year. His Sir Launcelot Greaves followed
in 1762, and his Humphrey Clinker in 1771, in the last year of
the author's active life. Our third English novelist is as much
a writer sui generis as either of his two predecessors, as com-
pletely distinguished from each of them in the general character
of his genius as they are from each other. Of the three, Richard-
son had evidently by far the richest natural soil of mind ; his
defects sprung from deficiency of cultivation; his power was
his own in the strictest sense ; not borrowed from books, little
aided even by experience of life, derived almost solely from
introspection of himself and communion with his own heart.
He alone of the three could have written what hq did without
having himself witnessed and lived through the scenes and cha-
racters described, or something like them which only required
to be embellished and heightened, and otherwise artistically
treated, in order to form an interesting and striking fictitious
representation. His fertility of invention, in the most com-
prehensive meaning of that term, is wonderful, — supplying him
on all occasions with a copious stream both of incident and of
thought that floods the page, and seems as if it might so flow on
and diffuse itself for ever. Yet it must be confessed that he has
delineated for us rather human nature than human life — rather
the heart and its universal passions, as modified merely by a few
broad distinctions of temperament, of education, of external cir-
cumstances, than those subtler idiosyncracies which constitute
what we properly call character. Many characters, no doubt,
there are set before us in his novels, very admirably drawn and
discriminated : Pamela, her parents, Mr. B., Mrs. Jewkes,
Clarissa, Lovelace, Miss Howe, Sir Charles Grandison, Miss
Byron, Clementina, are all delineations of this description for
the most part natural, well worked out, and supported by many
happy touches : but (with the exception, perhaps, of the last
mentioned) they can scarcely be called original conceptions of
a high order, creations at once true to nature and new to litera-
ture ; nor have they added to that population of the world of
fiction among which every reader of books has many familiar
acquaintances hardly less real to his fancy cind feelings than any

386 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

he has met with in the actual world, and for the most part muct
more interesting. That which, besides the story, interests us in
Richardson's novels, is not the characters of his personages but
their sentiments — not their modes but their motives of action —
the anatomy of their hearts and inmost natures, which is un-
folded to us with so elaborate an inquisition and such matchless
skill. Fielding, on the other hand, has very little of this, and
Smollett still less. They set before us their pictures of actual
life in much the same way as life itself would have set them
before us if our experience had chanced to bring us into contact
with the particular situations and personages delineated; we
see, commonly, merely what we should have seen as lookers-on,
not in the particular confidence of any of the figures in the
scene ; there are they all, acting or talking according to their
various circumstances, habits, and humours, and we are welcome
to look at them and listen to them as attentively as we please ;
but, if we want to know anything more of them than what is
visible to all the world, we must find it out for ourselves in the
best way we can, for neither they nor the author will ordinarily
tell us a word of it. What both these writers have given us
in their novels is for the most part their own actual experience
of life, irradiated, of course, by the lights of fancy and genius,
and so made something much more brilliant and attractive than
it was in the reality, but still in its substance the product not
of meditation but of observation chiefly. Even Fielding, with
all his wit, or at least pregnancy of thought and style — for the
quality in his writings to which we allude appears to be the
result rather of elaboration than of instinctive perception —
would probably have left us nothing much worth preserving
in the proper form of a novel, if he had not had his diversified
practical knowledge of society to draw upon and especially his
extensive and intimate acquaintance with the lower orders of
all classes, in painting whom he is always greatest and most at
home. Within that field, indeed, he is the greatest of all our
novelists. Yet he has much more refinement of literary taste
than either Smollett or Eichardson ; and, indeed, of the works
of all the three, his alone can be called classical works in
reference to their formal character. Both his style and the
construction of his stories display a care and artifice altogether
unknown to the others, both of whom, writing on without plan
or forethought, appear on all occasions to have made use alike
of the first words and the first incidents that presented them-
selves. Smollett, a practised writer for the press, had the com-
mand, indeed, of a style the fluency of which is far from being

STERNE. 837

without force, or rhetorical parade either ; but it is animated bv
no peculiar expressiveness, by no graces either of art or of
nature. His power consists in the cordiality of his conception
and the breadth and freedom of his delineation of the humorous,
both in character and in situation. The feeling of the humorous
in Smollett always overpowers, or at least has a tendency to
overpower, the merely satirical spirit; which is not the case
with Fielding, whose humour has generally a sly vein of satire
running through it, even when it is most gay and genial.

STERNE.

But he to whom belongs the finest spirit of whim among all
our writers of this class is the immortal author of The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Sterne, born in Ireland in 1713,
had already published one or two unregarded sermons when the
first and second volumes of his most singular novel were brought
out at York in the year 1759. The third and fourth volumes
followed in 1761 ; the fifth and sixth in 1762; the seventh and
eighth not till 1765 ; the ninth in 1767. The six volumes of
his Yorick's Sermons had also come out in pairs in the intervals ;
his Sentimental Journey appeared in 1768 ; and his death took
place the same year. Sterne has been charged with imitation
and plagiarism ; but surely originality is the last quality that
can be denied to him. To dispute his possession of that is much
the same as it would be to deny that the sun is luminous because
Homo spots have been detected upon its surface. If Sterne has
borrowed or stolen some few things from other writers, at least
no one ever had a better right to do so in virtue of the amount
that there is in his writings of what is really his own. If he has
been much indebted to any predecessor, it is to Eabelais ; but,
except in one or two detached episodes, he has wholly eschewed
the extravagance and grotesqueness in which the genius of
Rabelais loves to disport itself, and the tenderness and humanity
that pervade his humour are quite unlike anything in the mirth
of Eabelais. There is not much humour, indeed, anywhere out
of Shakespeare and Cervantes which resembles or can be com-
pared with that of Sterne. It would be difficult to name any
writer but one of these two who could have drawn Uncle Toby
or Trim. Another common mistake about Sterne is, that the
mass of what he has written consists of little better than nonsense
or rubbish— that his beauties are but grains of gold glittering
here and thore in a heap of sand, or, at most, rare spots of green

S88 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

scattered over an arid waste. Of no writer could this be said
with less correctness. Whatever he has done is wrought with
the utmost care, and to the highest polish and perfection. With
all his apparent caprices of manner, his language is throughout
the purest idiomatic English ; nor is there, usually, a touch in
any of his pictures that could be spared without injury to the
eifect. And, in his great work, how completely brought out,
how exquisitely finished, is every figure, from Uncle Toby, and
Brother Shandy, and Trim, and Yorick, down to Dr. Slop, and
Widow Wadman, and Mrs. Bridget, and Obadiah himself! Who
would resign any one of them, or any part of any one of them ?

GOLDSMITH.

It has been observed, with truth, that, although Eichardson
has on the whole the best claim to the title of inventor of the
modern English novel, he never altogether succeeded in throw-
ing off the inflation of the French romance, and representing
human beings in the true light and shade of human nature.
Undoubtedly the men and women of Fielding and Smollett are
of more genuine flesh and blood than the elaborate heroes and
heroines who figure in his pages. But both Fielding and
Smollett, notwithstanding the fidelity as well as spirit of their
style of drawing from real life, have for the most part confined
themselves to some two or three departments of the wide field
of social existence, rather abounding in strongly marked pecu-
liarities of character than furnishing a fair representation of the
common national mind and manners. And Sterne also, in his
more aerial way, deals rather with the oddities and quaintnesses
of opinion and habit that are to be met with among his country-
men than with the broad general course of our English way
of thinking and living. Our first genuine novel of domestic
life is Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, written in 1761, when
its author, born in Ireland in 1728, was as yet an obscure doer of
all work for the booksellers, but not published till 1766, when
his name had already obtained celebrity by his poem of The
Traveller. Assuming the grace of confession, or the advantage
of the first word, Goldsmith himself introduces his performance
by observing, that there are a hundred faults in it ; adding, that
x hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. The
case is not exactly as he puts it : the faults may have compen-
sating beauties, but are incontrovertibly faults. Indeed, if we
look only to what is more superficial or external in the work

GOLDSMITH. 3S9

to tne construction and conduct of the story, and even to much
of the exhibition of manners and character, its faults are unex-
ampled and astounding. Never was there a story put together
in such an inartificial, thoughtless, blundering way. It is little
better than such a " concatenation accordingly " as satisfies one
in a dream. It is not merely that everything is brought about
by such sudden apparitions and transformations as only happen
at the call of Harlequin's wand. Of this the author himself
seems to be sensible, from a sort of defence which he sets up in
one place : u Nor can I go on," he observes, after one of his
sharp turns, " without a reflection on those accidental meetings
which, though they happen every day, seldom excite our sur-
prise but upon some extraordinary occasion. To what a for-
tuitous occurrence do we not owe every pleasure and convenience
of our lives ! How many seeming accidents must unite before
we can be clothed or fed ! The peasant must be disposed to
labour, the shower must fall, the wind fill the merchant's sail,
or numbers must want the usual supply." But, in addition to
this, probability, or we might almost say possibility, is violated
at every step with little more hesitation or compunction than in
a fairy tale. Nothing happens, nobody acts, as things would
happen, and as men and women would naturally act, in real
life. Much of what goes on is entirely incredible and incom-
prehensible. Even the name of the book seems an absurdity.
The Vicar leaves Wakefield in the beginning of the third chapter,
and, it must be supposed, resigns his vicarage, of which we hear
no more; yet the family is called the family of Wakefield
throughout. This is of a piece with the famous bull that occurs
in the ballad given in a subsequent chapter : —

The dew, the blossoms on the tree,
With charms inconstant shine ;

Their charms were his, but, woe to me,
Their constancy was mine.

But why does the vicar, upon losing his fortune, give up his
vicarage ? Why, in his otherwise reduced circumstances, does
he prefer a curacy of fifteen pounds to a vicarage of thirty-five ?
Are we expected to think this quite a matter of course (there is
not a syllable of explanation), upon the same principle on which
we are called upon to believe that he was overwhelmed with
surprise at finding his old friend Wilmot not to be a monogamist ?
— the said friend being at that time actually courting a fourth
wife. And it is all in the same strain. The whole story of the
two Thornhills, the uncle and nephew, is a heap of contradictions
and absurdities. Sir William Thornhill is universally known ;

390 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

and yet in his assumed character of Burchell, without even, an
far as appears, any disguise of his person, he passes undetected
in a familiar intercourse of months with the tenantry of his own
estate. If, indeed, we are not to understand something even
beyond this — that, while all the neighbours know him to be Sir
William, the Primroses alone never learn that fact, and still
continue to take him for Mr. Burchell. But what, after all, is
Burchell's real history ? Nothing that is afterwards stated con-
firms or explains the intimation he is made unintentionally to let
fall in one of the commencing chapters, about his early life.
How, by-the-by, does the vicar come to know, a few chapters
afterwards, that Burchell has really been telling his own story in
the account he had given of Sir William Thornhill ? Compare
chapters third and sixth. But, take any view we will, the
uncle's treatment of his nephew remains unaccounted for. Still
more unintelligible is his conduct in his self-adopted capacity of
lover of one of the vicar's daughters, and guardian of the virtue
and safety of both. The plainest, easiest way of saving them
from all harm and all danger stares him in the face, and for no
reason that can be imagined he leaves them to their fate. As for
his accidental rescue of Sophia afterwards, the whole affair is
only to be matched for wildness and extravagance in Jack the
Giant-killer or some other of that class of books. It is beyond
even the Doctor of Divinity appearing at the fair with his horse
to sell, and in the usual forms putting him through his paces.
But it is impossible to enumerate all the improbabilities with
which the story is filled. Every scene, without any exception,
in which the squire appears involves something out of nature or
which passes understanding; — his position in reference to his
uncle in the first place, the whole of his intercourse with the
clergyman's family, his dining with them attended by his two
women and his troop of servants in their one room, at other times
his association there with young farmer Williams (suddenly pro-
vided by the author when wanted as a suitor for Olivia), the
unblushing manner in which he makes his infamous proposals,
the jstill more extraordinary indulgence with which they are
forgiven and forgotten, or rather forgotten without his ever
having asked or dreamt of asking forgiveness, all his audacious
ruffianism in his attempts to possess himself of the two sisters at
once, and finally, and above all, his defence of himself to his
uncle at their meeting in the prison, which surely outrants any-
thing ever before attempted in decent prose or rhyme. Nor
must that superlative pair of lovers, the vicar's eldest son George
and Miss Arabella Wilinot, be overlooked, with the singularly

GOLDSMITH. 30!

cool and easy way in which they pass from the most violent
affection to the most entire indifference, and on the lady's part
even transference of hand and heart to another, and back again
as suddenly to mutual transport and confidence. If Goldsmith
intended George for a representation of himself (as their adven-
tures are believed to have been in some respects the same), we
should be sorry to think the likeness a good one ; for he is the
most disagreeable character in the book. His very existence
seems to have been entirely forgotten by his family, and by the
author, for the first three years after he left home; and the
story would have been all the better if he had never chanced to
turn up again, or to be thought of, at all. Was ever such a letter
read as the one he is made in duty and affection to write to his
father in the twenty-eighth chapter ! Yet there is that in the
book which makes all this comparatively of little consequence ;
the inspiration and vital power of original genius, the charm of
true feeling, some portion of the music of the great hymn of
nature made audible to all hearts. Notwithstanding all its
improbabilities, the story not only amuses us while we read, but
takes root in the memory and affections as much almost as any
story that was ever written. In truth, the critical objections to
which it is obnoxious hardly affect its real merits and the proper
sources of its interest. All of it that is essential lies in the
development of the characters of the good vicar and his family,
and they are one and all admirably brought out. He himself,
simple and credulous, but also learned and clear-headed, so
guileless and affectionate, sustaining so well all fortunes, so great
both in suffering and in action, altogether so unselfish and noble-
minded ; his wife, of a much coarser grain, with her gooseberry-
wine, and her little female vanities and schemes of ambition, but
also made respectable by her love and reverence for her husband,
her pride in, if not affection for, her children, her talent of
management and housewifery, and the fortitude and resignation
with which she too bears her part in their common calamities ;
the two girls, so unlike and yet so sister-like ; the inimitable
Moses, with his black ribbon, and his invincibility in argument
and bargain- making ; nor to be omitted the chubby-cheeked
rogue little Bill, and the " honest veteran " Dick ; the homely
happiness of that fireside, upon which worldly misfortune can
cast hardly a passing shadow ; their little concerts, their dances ;
neighbour Flamborough's two rosy daughters, with their red
top-knots ; Moses's speculation in the green spectacles, and the
vicar's own subsequent adventure (though running somewhat
into the extravaganza style) with the same venerable arch-rogue,

392 ENGLISH LITERATURK AND LANGUAGE.

" with grey hair, and no flaps to his pocket-holes ;" the immortal
' family picture ; and, like a sudden thunderbolt falling in tho
sunshine, the flight of poor passion-driven Olivia, her few dis-
tracted words as she stept into the chaise, " 0 ! what will my
poor papa do when he knows I am undone!" and the heart-
shivered old man's cry of anguish — •" Now, then, my children,
go and be miserable ; for we shall never enjoy one hour more ;"
— these, and other incidents and touches of the same kind, are
the parts of the book that are remembered ; all the rest drops off,
as so much mere husk, or other extraneous enwrapment, after we
have read it ; and out of these we reconstruct the story, if wo
will have one, for ourselves, or, what is better, rest satisfied with
the good we have got, and do not mind though so much truth
and beauty will not take the shape of a story, which is after all
the source of pleasure even in a work of fiction which is of the
lowest importance, for it scarcely lasts after the first reading.
Part of the charm of this novel of Goldsmith's too consists
in the art of writing which he has displayed in it. The style,
always easy, transparent, harmonious, and expressive, teems with
felicities in the more heightened passages. And, finally, the
humour of the book is all good-humour. There is scarcely a
touch of ill-nature or even of satire in it from beginning to end —
nothing of either acrimony or acid. Johnson has well charac-
terized Goldsmith in his epitaph as sive risus essent movendi sive
lacrymoe, affectuum potens at lenis dominator — a ruler of our affec-
tions, and mover alike of our laughter and our tears, as gentle
as he is prevailing. With all his loveable qualities, he had
also many weaknesses and pettinesses of personal character ; but
his writings are as free from any ingredient of malignity, either
great or small, as those of any man. As the author, too, cf the
Traveller and the Deserted Village, published in 1765 and 1771,
Goldsmith, who lived till 1774, holds a distinguished place
among the poetical writers of the middle portion of the last
century. He had not the skyey fancy of his predecessor Collins,
but there is an earnestness and cordiality in his poetry which
the school of Pope, to which, in its form at least, it belongs, had
scarcely before reached, and which make it an appropriate pre-
lude to the more fervid song that was to burst forth among us in
another generation.

CHURCHILL.

But perhaps the writer who, if not by what he did himself, yet
by the effects of his example, gave the greatest impulse to our

CHURCHILL. 393

poetry at this time, was Churchill. Charles Churchill, born in
1731, published his first poem, The Rosciad, in 1761; and the
rest of his pieces, his Apology to the Critical Reviewers — his
epistle to his friend Lloyd, entitled Night — The Ghost, eventually
extended to four Books — The Prophecy of Famine — his Epistle
to Hogarth — The Conference — The Duellist — The Author —
Gotham, in three Books — The Candidate — The Farewell— The
Times — Independence — all within the next three years and a
half. He was suddenly carried off by an attack of fever in
November, 1764. If we put aside Thomson, Churchill, after all
deductions, may be pronounced, looking to the quantity as well
us the quality of his productions, to be the most considerable
figure that appears in our poetry in the half- century from Pope
to Cowper. But that is, perhaps, rather to say little for the said
half-century than much for Churchill. All that he wrote being
not only upon topics of the day, but addressed to the most
sensitive or most excited passions of the mob of readers, he made
an immense impression upon his contemporaries, which, how-
ever, is now worn very faint. Some looked upon him as Dryden
come to life again, others as a greater than Dryden. As for
Pope, he was generally thought to be quite outshone or eclipsed
by the new satirist. Yet Churchill, in truth, with great rhetorical
vigour and extraordinary fluency, is wholly destitute of either
poetry or wit of any high order. He is only, at the most, a
better sort of Cleveland, not certainly having more force or pun-
gency than that old writer, but a freer flow and broader sweep in
his satire. Of the true fervour and fusing power of Dryden he
has nothing, any more than he has of what is best and most
characteristic in Pope, to whose wit his stands in the relation or
contrast of a wooden pin to a lancet. The most successful ten
continuous lines he ever wrote in the same style are certainly
not worth the ten worst of Pope's. But, indeed, ho scarcely has
anywhere ten lines, or two lines, without a blemish. In reading
Pope, the constant feeling is that, of its kind, nothing could be
better; in reading Churchill, we feel that nearly everything
might be better, that, if the thought is good, the setting is defec-
tive, but generally that, whatever there may be of merit in
either, there are flaws in both.

FALCONER; BEATTIE; MASON.

To the present date belongs Falconer's pleasing descriptive poem,
The Shipwreck, the truth, nature, and pathos of which, withort
much imaginative adornment, have made it a general favourite.

«H ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

It was first published in 1762, and its author, who was a native
of Scotland, was lost at sea in 1769, in his thirty-ninth year.
Another poem of this age, by a countryman of Falconer's, is
Beattie's Minstrel, the first book of which was published in 1770,
the second in 1774. The Minstrel is an harmonious and eloquent
composition, glowing with poetical sentiment ; but its inferiority
in the highest poetical qualities may be felt by comparing it with
Thomson's Castle of Indolence, which is perhaps the other work
in the language which it most nearly resembles, but which yet it
resembles much in the same way as gilding does solid gold, or as
coloured water might be made to resemble wine. We may also
notice the celebrated Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers,
which, with several other effusions in the same vein, appeared in
1773, and is now known to have been, what it was always sus-
Dected to be, the composition of Gray's friend, Mason, who
commenced poet so early as 1 748 by the publication of a satire
on the University of Oxford, entitled Isis, and afterwards pro-
duced his tragedies of Elfrida in 1752 and Caractacus in 1759,
and the four Books of his English Garden in 1772, 1777, 1779,
and 1781, besides a number of odes and other shorter pieces,
some of them not till towards the close of the century. Mason,
who died, at the age of seventy-two, in 1797, enjoyed in his day
a great reputation, which is now become very small. His satiric
verse is in the manner of Pope, but without the wit ; and the
staple of the rest of his poetry too is mostly words.

THE WARTONS; PERCY; CHATTERTON; MACPHERSON.

There is much more of fancy and true poetry, though less
sound and less pretension, in the compositions of Thomas Warton,
who first made himself known by a spirited reply to Mason's Isis
in 1749, when he was only a young man of twenty-one, and
afterwards produced many short pieces, all evidencing a genuine
poetic eye and taste. Thomas Warton, however, who lived till
1790, chiefly owes the place he holds in our literature to his
prose works — his Observations on the Fairy Queen, his edition
of the Minor Poems of Milton, and, above all, his admirable
History of English Poetry, which, unfinished as it is, is still
perhaps our greatest work in the department of literary history.
Of the three quarto volumes the first appeared in 1774, the
second in 1778, the last in 1781. Dr. Joseph Warton, the elder
brother of Thomas, is also the writer of some agreeable verses ;
but the book by which his name will live is his Essay on the

CHATTERTON; MACPHERSON. 395

Genius and Writings of Pope, the first volume of which was
published, anonymously, in 1756, the second not till 1782. He
died in 1800, in his seventy-eighth year.

The Wartons may be regarded as the founders of a new school
"f poetic criticism in this country, which, romantic rather than
classical in its spirit (to employ a modern nomenclature), and
professing to go to nature for its principles instead of taking
them on trust from the practice of the Greek and Eoman poets,
or the canons of their commentators, assisted materially in guid-
ing as well as strengthening the now reviving love for our older
national poetry. But perhaps the publication which was as yet
at once the most remarkable product of this new taste, and the
most effective agent in its diffusion, was Percy's celebrated Re-
liques of Ancient English Poetry, which first appeared in 1765.
The reception of this book was the same that what is natural and
true always meets with when brought into fair competition with
the artificial ; that is to say, when the latter is no longer new any
more than the former : —

" As one who, long in populous city pent,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound ;"

such pleasure took the reader of those rude old ballads in their
simplicity, directness, and breezy freshness and force, thus sud-
denly coming upon him after being sated with mere polish and
ornament. And connected with the same matter is the famous
imposture of Rowley's poems, by which a boy of seventeen, the
marvellous Chatterton, deceived in the first instance a large
portion of the public, and, after the detection of the fraud, secured
to himself a respectable place among the original poets of his
country. Chatterton, who terminated his existence by his own
hand in August, 1770, produced the several imitations of ancient
English poetry which he attributed to Thomas Rowley, a monk
of the fifteenth century, in that and the preceding year. But
this was the age of remarkable forgeries of this description ;
Chatterton's poems of Rowley having been preceded, and perhaps
in part suggested, by Macpherson's poems of Ossian. The first
specimens of the latter were published in 1760, under the title
of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, collected in the Highlands of
Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language ; and
they immediately excited both an interest and a controversy,
neither the one nor the other of which has quite died away even

396 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

to the present hour. One circumstance, which has contributed
to keep up the dispute about Ossian so much longer than that
about Kowley, no doubt, is, that there was some small portion of
truth mixed up with Macpherson's deception, whereas there was
none at all in Chatterton's ; but the Ossianic poetry, after all
that has been said about its falsehood of style and substance as
well as of pretension, making it out to be thus a double lie, must
still have some qualities wonderfully adapted to allure the
popular taste. Both Chatterton and Macpherson wrote a quantity
of ^modern English verse in their own names ; but nothing either
did in this way was wbrth much : they evidently felt most at
ease in their masks.

DRAMATIC WRITERS.

The dramatic literature of the earlier part of the reign of
George III. is very voluminous, but consists principally of
comedies and farces of modern life, all in prose. Home, indeed,
the author of Douglas, which came out in 1757, followed that
first successful effort by about half a dozen other attempts in the
same style, the last of which, entitled Alfred, was produced in
1778; but they were all failures. Horace Walpole's great
tragedy, the Mysterious Mother, although privately printed in
1768, was never acted, and was not even published till many years
after. The principal writers whose productions occupied the stage
were Goldsmith, Garrick, and Foote, who all died in the earlier
part of the reign of George III. ; and Macklin, Murphy, Cumber-
land, Colman, Mrs. Cowley, and Sheridan, who mostly survived
till after the commencement of the present century. Goldsmith's
two capital comedies of the Good-Natured Man, and She
Stoops to Conquer, were brought out, the former in 1768, the
latter in 1773. But the most brilliant contributions made to
our dramatic literature in this age were Sheridan's celebrated
comedies of The Eivals, brought out in 1775, when the author
was only in his twenty-fifth year, The Duenna, which followed
the same year, and The School for Scandal, which crowned the
reputation of the modern Congreve, in 1777. After all that had
been written, indeed, meritoriously enough in many instances, by
his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, these plays of
Sheridan's were the only additions that had yet been made to the
classic comedy of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and
perhaps we may say that they are still the last it has received.
Sheridan's wit is as polished as Congreve's, and its flashes, if not
quite so quick and dazzling, have a softer, a more liquid light ;

FEMALE WRITERS. 397

he may be said to stand between the highly artificial point and
concentration of Congreve and the Irish ease and gaiety of
Farquhar, wanting, doubtless, what is most characteristic of
either, but also combining something of each. Sheridan had
likewise produced all his other dramatic pieces — The Trip to
Scarborough, The Critic, &c. — before 1780 ; although he lived for
thirty-six years after that date.

FEMALE WRITERS.

The direction of so large a portion of the writing talent of this
age to the comic drama is an evidence of the extended diffusion
of literary tastes and accomplishments among the class most con-
versant with those manners and forms of cocial life which chiefly
supply the materials of modern comedy. To this period has been
sometimes assigned the commencement of the pursuit of literature
as a distinct profession in England ; now, too, we may say, began
its domestic cultivation among us — the practice of writing for
the public as the occupation and embellishment of a part of that
leisure which necessarily abounds in an advanced state of society,
not only among persons possessing the means of living without
exertion of any kind, but almost throughout the various grades
of those who are merely raised above the necessity of labouring
with their hands. Another indication of the same thing is the great
increase that now took place in the number of female authors.
To the names of Mrs. Cowley, Mrs. Sheridan, Mrs. Brooke, Mrs.
Lennox, Miss Sophia Lee, and Miss Frances Burney, afterwards
Madame D'Arblay, whose two first novels of Evelina and Cecilia
appeared, the former in 1777, the latter in 1782, may be added,
as distinguished in other kinds of writing than plays and novels,
blind Anna Williams, Dr. Johnson's friend, whose volume of
Miscellanies in prose and verse was published in 1766; the
learned Miss Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus,
however, and we believe all her other works, had appeared
oefore the commencement of the reign of George III., although
she lived till the year 1806 ; her friend Miss Catherine Talbot,
the writer of a considerable quantity both of prose and verse,
now forgotten ; Mrs. Montagu (originally Miss Elizabeth Eobin-
son), the pupil of Dr. Conyers Middleton, and the founder of the
Blue Stocking Club, whose once famous Essay on the Writings
and Genius of Shakespeare was published in 1769, and who
survived till the year 1800 ; Mrs. Chapone (Miss Hester Mulso),
another friend of Miss Cartor, and the favourite correspondent of
Samuel Richardson, whose Letters on the Improvement of the

S98 ENGLISH LITERATURE 4ND LANGUAGE.

Mind appeared in 1773 ; Mrs. Macu.tlay (originally Miss Catherine
Sawbridge, finally Mrs. Graham), the notorious republican histo-
rian and pamphleteer, whose History of England from the Acces-
sion of James I. to the ^Restoration was published in a succession
of volumes between the years 1763 and 1771, and then excited
much attention, though now neglected; and the other female
democratic writer, Miss Helen Maria Williams, who did not,
however, begin to figure as a politician till after the French Ee-
volution, her only publications that fall to be noticed in this
place being some volumes of verse which she gave to the world
in 1782 and the two or three following years. Mrs. Hannah
More, Mrs. Barbauld, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, and
some other female writers who did not reach the height of their
reputation till a later date, had also entered upon the career of
authorship within the first quarter of a century of the reign of
George III. And to the commencement of that reign is to be
assigned perhaps the most brilliant contribution from a female
pen that had yet been added to our literature, the collection of
the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which, although
written many years before, were first published in 1763, about a
year after Lady Mary's death. The fourth volume, indeed, did
not appear till 1767.

PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS.

To the latter part of the reign of George II. belongs the revival
of the Periodical Essay, which formed so distinguishing a feature
of our literature in the age of Anne. Political writing, indeed,
in this form had been carried on from the era of the Examiner,
and the Englishman, and the Freeholder, and Defoe's Eeview
and Mercator, and the British Merchant, with little, if any inter-
mission, in various publications ; the most remarkable being The
Craftsman, in which Bolingbroke was the principal writer, and
the papers of which, as first collected and reprinted in seven
volumes, extend from the 5th of December, 1726, to the 22nd of
May, 1731 ; nor was the work dropped till it had gone on for
some years longer. Some attempts had even been made during
this interval to supply the place of the Tatler, Spectator, and
Guardian, by periodical papers, ranging, in the same strain, over
the general field of morals and manners : Ambrose Philips, for
instance, and a number of his friends, in the year 1718 began the
publication of a paper entitled " The Free-thinker, or Essays on
Ignorance, Superstition, Bigotry, Enthusiasm, Craft, &c., inter-
mixed with several pieces of wit and humour designed to restore

PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS. 399

the deluded part of mankind to the use of reason and common
sense," which attracted considerable attention at the time, and
was kept up till the numbers made a book of three volumes,
which were more than once reprinted. The Museum was another
similar work, which commenced in 1746, and also ran to three
volumes — Horace Walpolo, Akenside, the two Wartons, and other
eminent writers, being among the contributors. But nothing
of this kind that was then produced has succeeded in securing
for itself a permanent place in our literature. The next of our
periodical works after The Guardian that is recognized as one of
the classics of the language is The Eambler, the first number of
which appeared on Tuesday, the 20th of March, 1750, the last
(the 208th) on Saturday, the 14th of March, 1752, and all the
papers of which, at the rate of two a week, with the exception
only of three or four, were the composition of Samuel Johnson,
who may be said to have first become generally known as a
writer through this publication. The Rambler was succeeded
by The Adventurer, edited and principally written by Dr.
Hawkesworth, which was also published twice a week, the first
number having appeared on Tuesday, the 7th of November, 1752,
the last (the 139th) on Saturday, the 9th of March, 1754. Mean-
while Tne World, a weekly paper, had been started under the
conduct of Edward Moore, the author of the Fables for the
Female Sex, the tragedy of The Gamester and other dramatic
productions, assisted by Lord Lyttelton, the Earls of Chesterfield,
Bath, and Cork, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and other con-
tributors: the first number appeared on Thursday, the 4th of
January, 1753; the 209th, and last, on the 30th of December,
1 756. And contemporary with The World, during a part of this
space, was The Connoisseur, established and principally written
by George Colman, in conjunction with Bonnell Thornton, a
writer possessed of considerable wit and humour, which, how-
ever, he dissipated for the most part upon ephemeral topics,
being only now remembered for his share in a translation of
Plautus, also undertaken in concert with his friend Colman, the
first two of the fivo volumes of which were published in 1766,
two years before his death, at the age of forty-four. The Con-
noisseur was, like The World, a weekly publication, and it was
continued in 140 numbers, from Thursday, the 31st of January,
1754, to the 30th of September, 1756. Mrs. Frances Brooke's
weekly periodical work entitled The Old Maid, which subsisted
from November, 1755, to July in the following year, is not usually
admitted into the collections of the English essayists. The next
publication of this class which can be said still to hold a place

400 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

in our literature is Johnson's Idler, which appeared once a week
from Saturday, the 15th of April, 1758, to Saturday, the 5th of
April, 1760. And with The Idler closes what may be called the
second age of the English periodical essayists, which commences
with The Eambler, and extends over the ten years from 1750 to
1760, the concluding decade of the reign of George II. After
this occurs another long interval, in which that mode of writing
was dropped, or at least no longer attracted either the favour of
the public or the ambition of the more distinguished literary
talent of the day ; for no doubt attempts still continued to be
made, with little or no success, by obscure scribblers, to keep
up what had lately been so popular and so graced by eminent
names. But we have no series of periodical papers of this
time, of the same character with those already mentioned, that is
still reprinted and read. Goldsmith's Citizen of the World,
occupied as it is with the adventures and observations of an indi-
vidual, placed in very peculiar circumstances, partakes more of
the character of a novel than of a succession of miscellaneous
papers ; and both the letters composing that work and the other
delightful essays of the same writer were published occasionally,
not periodically or at regular intervals, and only as contributions
to the newspapers or other journals of the day, — not by them-
selves, like the numbers of the Spectator, the Kambler, and the
other works of that description that have been mentioned. Our
next series of periodical essays, properly so called, was that
which began to be published at Edinburgh, under the name of
The Mirror, on Saturday, the 23rd of January, 1779, and was
continued at the rate of a number a week till the 27th of May,
1780. The conductor and principal writer of The Mirror was
the late Henry Mackenzie, who died in Edinburgh, at the age of
eighty-six, in 1831, the author of The Man of Feeling, published
anonymously in 1771, The Man of the World, 1773, and Julia de
Eoubigne, 1777, novels after the manner of Sterne, which are
still universally read, and which have much of the grace and
delicacy of style as well as of the pathos of that great master,
although without any of his rich and peculiar humour. The
Mirror was succeeded, after an interval of a few years, by The
Lounger, also a weekly paper, the first number of which appeared
on Saturday, the 5th of February, 1785, Mackenzie being again
the leading contributor; the last (the 101st) on the 6th of
January, 1787. But with these two publications the spirit of
periodical essay-writing, in the style first made famous by Steele
and Addison, expired also in Scotland, as it had already done a
quarter of a century before in England.

401

POLITICAL WRITING. — WILKES ;. JDNIUS,

A hotter excitement, in truth, had dulled the public taste to
(he charms of those ethical and critical disquisitions, whether
#rave or gay, which it had heretofore found sufficiently stimu-
lating ; the violent war of parties, which, after a lull of nearly
twenty years, was resumed on the accession of George III., made
political controversy the only kind of writing that would now go
down with the generality of readers ; and first Wilkes's famous
North Briton, and then the yet more famous Letters of Junius,
came to take the place of the Ramblers and Idlers, the Adven-
turers and Connoisseurs. The North Briton, the first number of
which appeared on Saturday, the 5th of June, 1762, was started
in opposition to The Briton, a paper set up by Smollett in defence
of the government on the preceding Saturday, the 29th of May,
the day on which Lord Bute had been nominated first lord of
the Treasury. Smollett and Wilkes had been friends up to this
time ; but the opposing papers were conducted in a spirit of the
bitterest hostility, till the discontinuance of The Briton on the
12th of February, 1763, and the violent extinction of The North
Briton on the 23rd of April following, fifteen days after the
resignation of Bute, with the publication of its memorable " No.
Forty-five." The celebrity of this one paper has preserved the
memory of the North Briton to our day, in the same manner as
in its own it produced several reimpressions of the whole work,
which otherwise would probably have been as speedily and com-
pletely forgotten as the rival publication, and as the Auditors and
Monitors, and other organs of the two factions, that in the same
contention helped to fill the air with their din for a season, and
then were heard of no more than any other quieted noise.
Wilkes's brilliancy faded away when he proceeded to commit his
thoughts to paper, as if it had dissolved itself in the ink. Like
all convivial wits, or shining talkers, he was of course indebted
for much of the effect he produced in society to the promptitude
and skill with which he seized the proper moment for saying his
good things, to the surprise produced by the suddenness of the
flash, and to the characteristic peculiarities of voice, action,
and manner with which the jest or repartee was set off, and
which usually serve as signals or stimulants to awaken the sec so
of the ludicrous before its expected gratification comes ; in
writing, little or nothing of all this could be brought into play ;
but still some of Wilkes's colloquial impromptus that have been
preserved are so perfect, considered in themselves, and without
regard to the readiness with which they may have been struck

2 D

402 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

out, — are so true and deep, and evince so keen a feeling at once
of the ridiculous and of the real, — that one wonders at finding so
little of the same kind of power in his more deliberate efforts.
In all his published writings that we have looked into — and,
what with essays, and pamphlets of one kind and another, they
fill a good many volumes — we scarcely recollect anything that
either in matter or manner rises above the veriest commonplace,
unless perhaps it be a character of Lord Chatham, occurring in a
letter addressed to the Duke of Grafton, some of the biting things
in which are impregnated with rather a subtle venom. A few of
his verses also have some fancy and elegance, in the style of
Carew and Waller. But even his private letters, of which two
collections have been published, scarcely ever emit a sparkle.
And his House of Commons speeches, which he wrote before-
hand and got by heart, are equally unenlivened. It is evident,
indeed, that he had not intellectual lung enough for any pro-
tracted exertion or display. The soil of his mind was a hungry,
unproductive gravel, with some gems imbedded in it. The
author of the Letters of Junius made his debut about four years
after the expiration of The North Briton, what is believed to be
his first communication having appeared in the Public Advertiser
on the 28th of April, 1767 ; but the letters, sixty-nine in number,
signed Junius, and forming the collection with which every
reader is familiar, extend only over the space from the 21st of
January, 1769, to the 2nd of November, 1771. Thus it appears
that this celebrated writer had been nearly two years before the
public before he attracted any considerable attention ; a proof
that the polish of his style was not really the thing that did
most to bring him into notoriety ; for, although we may admit
that the composition of the letters signed Junius is more elaborate
and sustained than that of the generality of his contributions to
the same newspaper under the name of Brutus, Lucius, Atticus,
and Mnemon, yet the difference is by no means so great as to be
alone sufficient to account for the prodigious sensation at once
excited by the former, after the slight regard with which the
latter had been received for so long a time. What, in the first
instance at least, more than his rhetoric, made the unknown
Junius the object of universal interest, and of very general
terror, was undoubtedly the quantity of secret intelligence he
showed himself to be possessed of, combined with the unscru-
pulous boldness with which he was evidently prepared to use it.
As has been observed, " ministers found, in these letters, proofs
of some enemy, some spy, being amongst them." It was im-
mediately perceived in the highest circle of political society that

JUNIUS 4(w

the writer was either actually one of the members of the govern
inent, or a person who by some means or other had found access
to the secrets of the government. And this suspicion, generally
diffused, would add tenfold interest to the mystery of the author-
ship of the letters, even where the feeling which it had excited
was one of mere curiosity, as it would be, of course, with the
mass of the public. But, although it was not his style alone, or
even chiefly, that made Junius famous, it is probably that, more
than anything else, which has preserved his fame to our day.
More even than the secret, so long in being penetrated, of his
real name : that might have given occasion to abundance of con-
jecture and speculation, like the problem of the Iron Mask and
other similar enigmas ; but it would not have prompted tho
reproduction of the letters in innumerable editions, and made
them, what they long were, one of the most popular and generally
read books in the language, retaining their hold upon the public
mind to a degree which perhaps never was equalled by any other
literary production having so special a reference, in the greater
part of it, to topics of a temporary nature. The history of litera-
ture attests, as has been well remarked, that power of expression
is a surer preservative of a writer's popularity than even strength
of thought itself; that a book in which the former exists in a
remarkable degree is almost sure to live, even if it should have
very little else to recommend it. The style of Junius is wanting
in some of the more exquisite qualities of eloquent writing ; it has
few natural graces, little variety, no picturesqueness ; but still it
is a striking and peculiar style, combining the charm of high
polish with great nerve and animation, clear and rapid, and at the
same time sonorous, — masculine enough, and yet making a very
imposing display of all the artifices of antithetical rhetoric. As for
the spirit of these famous compositions, it is a remarkable attesta-
tion to the author's power of writing that they were long univer-
sally regarded as dictated by the very genius of English liberty,
and as almost a sort of Bible, or heaven-inspired exposition, of
]K>pular principles and rights. They contain, no doubt, many
sound maxims, tersely and vigorously expressed ; but of profound
or fareighted political philosophy, or even of ingenious dis-
quisition having the semblance of philosophy, there is as little
in the Letters of Junius as there is in the Diary of Dodington or
of Pepys ; and, as for the writer's principles, they seem to be as
much the product of mere temper, and of his individual animosi-
ties and spites, as even of his partisan habits and passions. He
defends the cause of liberty itself in the spirit of tyranny ; there
is no generosity, or even common fairness, in his mode of com-

40-i ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

bating ; the newest lie, or private scandal, of the day serves as
well, and as frequently, as anything else to point his sarcasm, or
to arm with its vivid lightning the thunder of declamatory in-
vective that resounds through his pages.

JOHNSON.

The character of Junius was drawn, while the mysterious
shadow was still occupying the public gaze with its handwriting
upon the wall, by one of the most distinguished of his contem-
poraries, in a publication which made a considerable noise at the
time, but is now very much forgotten : — " Junius has sometimes
made his satire felt; but let not injudicious admiration mistake
the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow. He has some-
times sported with lucky malice ; but to him that knows his
company it is not hard to be sarcastic in a mask. While he
walks, like Jack the Giant-killer, in a coat of darkness, he may

do much mischief with little strength Junius burst

into notice with a blaze of impudence which has rarely glared
upon the world before, and drew the rabble after him as a
monster makes a show. When he had once provided for his
safety by impenetrable secrecy, he had nothing to combat but
truth and justice — enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the
dark. Being then at liberty to indulge himself in all the immu-
nities of invisibility ; out of the reach of danger, he has been
bold ; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a
rhetorician, he has had the art of persuading when he seconded
desire ; as a reasoner, he has convinced those who had no doubt
before ; as a moralist, he has taught that virtue may disgrace ;
and, as a patriot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the high.
Finding sedition ascendant, he has been able to advance it ; find-
ing the nation combustible, he has been able to inflame it

It is not by his liveliness of imagery, his pungency of periods, or
his fertility of allusions that he detains the cits of London and
the boors of Middlesex. Of style and sentiment they take no
Cognizance : they admire him for virtues like their own, for con-
tempt of order and violence of outrage, for rage of defamation
and audacity of falsehood Junius is an unusual pheno-
menon, on which some have gazed with wonder, and some with
terror ; but wonder and terror are transitory passions. He will
soon be more closely viewed, or more attentively examined ; and
what folly has taken for a comet, that from his flaming hair shook
pestilence and war, inquiry will find to be only a meteor formed

JOHNSON. 40.1

by the vapours of putrefying democracy, and kindled into flamo
by the effervescence of interest struggling with conviction ;
which, after having plunged its followers into a bog, will leave
us inquiring why we regard it." Thus wrote, in his ponderous
but yet vigorous way, Samuel Johnson, in his pamphlet entitled
Thoughts on the late Transactions respecting Falkland's Islands,
published in 1771, in answer, as is commonly stated, to Junius' s
Forty-second Letter, dated the 30th of January in that year.
Junius, although he continued to write for a twelvemonth longer,
never took any notice of this attack ; and Mrs. Piozzi tells us that
Johnson " often delighted his imagination with the thoughts of
having destroyed Junius." The lively lady, however, is scarcely
the best authority on the subject of Johnson's thoughts, although
we may yield a qualified faith to her reports of what he actually
said and did. He may, probably enough, have thought, and said
too, that he had beaten or silenced Junius, referring to the
question discussed in his unanswered pamphlet ; although, on the
other hand, it does not appear that Junius was in the habit of
ever noticing such general attacks as this : he replied to some of
the writers who addressed him in the columns of the Public
Advertiser, the newspaper in which his own communications
were published, but he did not think it necessary to go forth to
battle with any of the other pamphleteers by whom he was
assailed, any more than with Johnson.

The great lexicographer winds up his character of Junius by
remarking that he cannot think his style secure from criticism,
and that his expressions are often trite, and his periods feeble.
The style of Junius, nevertheless, was probably to a considerable
extent formed upon Johnson's own. It has some strongly
marked features of distinction, but yet it resembles the John-
sonian style much more than it does that of any other writer in
the language antecedent to Johnson. Born in 1709, Johnson,
after having while still resident in the country commenced his
connexion with the press by some work in the way of translation
and magazine writing, came to London along with his friend and
pupil, the afterwards celebrated David Garrick, in March, 1737 ;
and forthwith entered upon a career of authorship which extends
over nearly half a century. His poem of London, an imitation
of the Third Satire of Juvenal, appeared in 1738 ; his Life of
Savage, in a separate form, in 1744 (having been previously
published in the Gentleman's Magazine) ; his poem entitled Tho
Vanity of Human Wishes, an imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire,
in 1749 ; his tragedy of Irene (written before he came up to
London) the same year ; The Rambler, as already mentioned,

406 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

between March, 1750, and March, 1752; his Dictionary of the
English Language in 1755 ; The Idler between April, 1758, arid
April, 1760 ; his Easselas in 1759 ; his edition of Shakespeare in
1765 ; his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland in 1775;
his Lives of the Poets in 1781 ; the intervals between these more
remarkable efforts having given birth to many magazine articles,
verses, and pamphlets, which cannot be here enumerated. His
death took place on the 13th of December, 1784. All the works
the titles of which have been given may be regarded as having
taken and kept their place in our standard literature ; and they
form, in quantity at least, a respectable contribution from a single
mind. But Johnson's mind is scarcely seen at its brightest if we
do not add to the productions of his own pen the record of his
colloquial wit and eloquence preserved by his admirable biogra-
pher, Boswell, whose renowned work first appeared, in two
volumes quarto, in 1790 ; having, however, been preceded by
the Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, which was published
the year after Johnson's death. It has been remarked, with
truth, that his own works and Boswell's Life of him together
have preserved a more complete portraiture of Johnson, of his
intellect, his opinions, his manners, his whole man inward and
outward, than has been handed down from one age to another of
any other individual that ever lived. Certainly no celebrated
figure of any past time still stands before our eyes so distinctly
embodied as he does. If we will try, we shall find that all others
are shadows, or mere outlines, in comparison ; or, they seem to
skulk about at a distance in the shade, while he is there fronting
us in the full daylight, so that we see not only his worsted
stockings and the metal buttons on his brown coat, but every
feature of that massive countenance, as it is solemnized by medi-
tation or lighted up in social converse, as his whole frame rolls
about in triumphant laughter, or, as Cumberland saw the tender-
hearted old man, standing beside his friend Garrick's open grave, at'
the foot of Shakespeare's monument, and bathed in tears. A noble
heroic nature was that of this Samuel Johnson, beyond all con-
troversy : not only did his failings lean to virtue's side— his very
intellectual weaknesses and prejudices had something in them of
strength and greatness ; they were the exuberance and excess of
a rich mind, not the stinted growth of a poor one. There was no
touch of meanness in him : rude and awkward enough he was in
many points of mere demeanour, but he had the soul of a prince
in real generosity, refinement, and elevation. Of a certain kind
of intellectual faculty, also, his endowment was very high. His
quickness of penetration, and readiness in every way, were pro-

JOHNSON.

bably as great as had ever been combined with the same solid
qualities of mind. Scarcely before had there appeared so
thoughtful a sage, and BO grave a moralist, with so agile and
sportive a wit. .Rarely has so prompt and bright a wit been
accompanied by so much real knowledge, sagacity, and weight
of matter. But, as we have intimated, this happy union ot
opposite kinds of power was most complete, and only produced
its full effect, in his colloquial displays, when, excited and
unformalized, the man was really himself, and his strong nature
forced its way onward without regard to anything but the im-
mediate object to be achieved. In writing he is still the strong
man, working away valiantly, but, as it were, with fetters upon
his limbs, or a burden on his back ; a sense of the convention-
alities of his position seems to oppress him ; his style becomes
artificial and ponderous; the whole process of his intellectual
exertion loses much of its elasticity and life ; and, instead of hard
blows and flashes of flame, there is too often, it must be confessed,
a mere raising of clouds of dust and the din of inflated common-
place. Yet, as a writer, too, there is much in Johnson that is o<
no common character. It cannot be said that the world is
indebted to him for many new truths, but he has given novel and
often forcible and elegant expression to some old ones ; the spirit
of his philosophy is never other than manly and high-toned, as
well as moral ; his critical speculations, if not always very pro-
found, are frequently acute and ingenious, and in manner
generally lively, not seldom brilliant. Indeed, it may be said
of Johnson, with all his faults and shortcomings, as of every man
of true genius, that he is rarely or ever absolutely dull. Even
his Ramblers, which we hold to be the most indigestible of his
productions, are none of them mere leather or prunello ; and his
higher efforts, his Easselas, his Preface to Shakespeare, and many
passages in his Lives of the Poets, are throughout instinct with
animation, and full of an eloquence which sometimes rises almost
to poetry. Even his peculiar style, whatever we may allege
against it, bears the stamp of the man of genius; it was
thoroughly his own; and it not only reproduced itself, with
variations, in the writings of some of the most distinguished of
his contemporaries, from Junius's Letters to Macpherson's
Ossian, but, whether for good or for evil, has perceptibly
influenced our literature, and even in some degree the progress
of the language, onwards to the present day. Some of the cha-
racteristics of the Johnsonian style, no doubt, may be found in
older writers, but, as a whole, it must be regarded as the inven-
tion of Johnson. No sentence-making at once so uniformly

40S ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

clear and exact, and so elaborately stately, measured, and
sonorous, liad proceeded habitually from any previous English
pen. The pomposity and inflation of Johnson's composition
abated considerably in his own later writings, and, as the
cumbering flesh fell off, the nerve and spirit increased : the
most happily executed parts of the Lives of the Poets offer almost
a contrast to the oppressive rotundity of the Eamblers, produced
thirty years before ; and some eminent writers of a subsequent
date, who have yet evidently formed their style upon his, have
retained little or nothing of what, to a superficial inspection,
seem the most marked characteristics of his manner of expres-
sion. Indeed, as we have said, there is perhaps no subsequent
English prose-writer upon whose style that of Johnson has been
altogether without its effect.*

BURKH;.

But the greatest, undoubtedly, of all our writers of this a-ge
was Burke, one of the most remarkable men of any age.
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, in 1730 ; but he came over
in 1750 to the British metropolis, and from this time he mostly
resided in England till his death, in 1797. In 1756 he published
his celebrated Vindication of Natural Society, an imitation of the
style, and a parody on the philosophy, of Lord Bolingbroke ;
and the same year his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of
our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In 1757 appeared
anonymously his Account of the European Settlements in
America. In 1759 came out the first volume of The Annual
Kegister, of which he is known to have written, or superintended
the writing of, the historical part for several years. His public
life commenced in 1761, with the appointment of private secretary
to the chief secretary for Ireland, an office which carried him
back for about four years to his native country. In 1766 he
became a member of the English House of Commons ; and from
that date almost to the hour of his death, besides his exertions as
a front figure in the debates and other business of parliament,
from which he did not retire till 1794, he continued to dazzle
the world by a succession of political writings such as certainly
had never before been equalled in brilliancy and power. Wo
can mention only those of greatest note :— his Thoughts on the

* Every reader who takes any interest in Johnson will remember the bril •
liant papers of Lord Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review, for September, 1831,
rtiid Mr. Carlyle, in the twenty-eighth number of Eraser's Magazine, foi
April, 1832.

BURKE. 40c,

Cause of the Present Discontents, published in 1770 ; his Reflec-
tions on the Eevolution in France, published in 1790 ; his Appeal
from the New to the Old Whigs, in 1792 ; his Letter to a Noble
Lord on his Pension, in 1796 ; his Letters on a Regicide Peace,
in 1796 and 1797; his Observations on the Conduct of the
Minority, in 1797 ; besides his several great speeches, revised
and sent to the press by himself ; that on American Taxation, in
1774; that on Conciliation with America, in 1775; that on the
Economical Reform Bill, in 1780 ; that delivered in the Guild-
hall at Bristol previous to his election, the same year ; that on
Mr. Fox's India Bill, in 1783 ; and that on the Nabob of Arcot's
Debts, in 1785. Those, perhaps the most splendid of all, which
he delivered at the bar of the House of Lords in 1788 and 1789,
on the impeachment of Mr. Hastings, have also been printed
since his death from his own manuscript.

Burke was our first, and is still our greatest, writer on the
philosophy of practical politics. The mere metaphysics of that
Kcience, or what we may call by that term for want of a better,
meaning thereby all abstract speculation and theorizing on the
general subject of government without reference to the actual
circumstances of the particular country and people to be go-
verned, he held from the beginning to the end of his life in
undisguised, perhaps in undue, contempt. This feeling is as
strongly manifested in his very first publication, his covert
attack on Bolingbroke, as either in his writings and speeches
on the contest with the American colonies or in those on the
French Revolution. He was, as we have said, emphatically
a practical politician, and, above all, an English politician. In
discussing questions of domestic politics, he constantly refused
to travel beyond the landmarks of the constitution as he found
it established ; and the views he took of the politics of other
countries were as far as possible regulated by the same principle ,
The question of a revolution, in so far as England was con
cerned, he did not hold to be one with which he had anything to
do. Not only had it never been actually presented to him by
the circumstances of the time ; he did not conceive that it ever
could come before him. He was, in fact, no believer in the
possibility of any sudden and complete re-edification of the
institutions of a great country ; he left such transformations to
Harlequin's wand and the machinists of the stage ; he did not
think they could take place in a system so mighty and so in-
finitely complicated as that of the political organization of a
nation. A constitution, too, in his idea, was not a thing, liko
» steam-engine, or a machine for threshing corn, that could

410 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

be put together and set up in a few weeks or months, and that
would work equally well wherever it was set up ; Le looked
upon it rather as something that must in every case grow and
gradually evolve itself out of the soil of 1he national mind and
character, that must take its shape in a great measure from the
prevalent hahits and feelings to which it was to be accommo-
dated, that would not work or stand at all unless it thus formed
an integral part of the social system to which it belonged.
The notion of a constitution artificially constructed, and merely
as it were fastened upon a country by bolts and screws, was to
him much the same as the notion of a human body performing
fhe functions of life with no other than such a separable ar-
tificial head stuck upon it. A constitution was with him a
thing of life. It could no more be set up of a sudden than
a full-grown tree could be ordered from the manufacturer's and
BO set up. Like a tree, it must have its roots intertwisted
with the earth on which it stands, even as it has its branches
extended over it. In the great fields of politics and religion,
occupied as they are with men's substantial interests, Burke
regarded inquiries into first principles as worse than vain and
worthless, as much more likely to mislead and pervert than
to afford instruction or right guidance ; and it is remarkable
that this feeling, though deepened and strengthened by the
experience of his after-life, and, above all, exasperated by
the events to which his attention was most strongly directed
in his latest days into an intense dread and horror of the
confusion and wide-spread ruin that might be wrought by the
assumption of so incompetent a power as mere human ratio-
cination to regulate all things according to its own conceit, was
entertained and expressed by him with great distinctness at
the outset of his career. It was in this spirit, indeed, that he
wrote his Vindication of Natural Society, with the design of
showing how anything whatever might be either attacked or
defended with great plausibility by the method in which the
highest and most intricate philosophical questions were discussed
by Lord Bolingbroke. He " is satisfied," he says in his Preface,
" that a mind which has no restraint from a sense of its own
weakness, of its subordinate rank in the creation, and of the
extreme danger of letting the imagination loose upon some sub-
jects, may very plausibly attack everything the most excellent
and venerable; that it would not be difficult to criticise tho
Creation itself; and that, if we were to examine the divine
fabrics by our ideas of reason and fitness, and to use the same
method of attack by which some men have assaulted revealed

BURKE. 4li

religion, we might, with as good colour, and wiili the samo
success, make the wisdom and power of God in his Creation
appear to many no better than foolishness." But, on the other
hand, within the boundary by which he conceived himself to be
properly limited and restrained, there never was either a more
ingenious and profound investigator or a bolder reformer than
Burke. He had, indeed, more in him of the orator and of the
poet than of the mere reasoner; but yet, like Bacon, whom
altogether he greatly resembled in intellectual character, an
instinctive sagacity and penetration generally led him to see
where the truth lay, and then his boundless ingenuity supplied
him readily with all the considerations and arguments which
the exposition of the matter required, and the fervour of his
awakened fancy with striking illustration and impassioned elo-
quence in a measure hardly to be elsewhere found intermingled
and incorporated with the same profoundness, extent, and
many-sidedness of view. For in this Burke is distinguished
from nearly all other orators, and it is a distinction that some-
what interferes with his mere oratorical power, that he is both
too reflective and too honest to confine himself to the contempla-
tion of only one side of any question he takes up : he selects, of
course, for advocacy and inculcation the particular view which
he holds to be the sound one, and often it will no doubt be
thought by those who dissent from him that he does not do
justice to some of the considerations that stand opposed to his
own opinion ; but still it is not his habit to overlook such
adverse considerations; he shows himself at least perfectly
aware of their existence, even when he possibly underrates their
importance. For the immediate effect of his eloquence, as we
have said, it might have been better if his mind had not been
so Argus-eyed to all the various conflicting points of every case
that he discussed — if, instead of thus continually looking before
and after on all sides of him, and stopping, whenever two or
more apparently opposite considerations came in his way, to
balance or reconcile them, he could have surrendered himself to
the one view with which his hearers were prepared strongly to
sympathise, and carried them along with kim in a whirlwind of
passionate declamation. But, " born for the universe," and for
all time, he was not made for such sacrifice of truth, and all
high, enduring things, to the triumph of an hour. And he has
not gone without his well-earned reward. If it was objected
to him in his own day that, " too deep for his hearers," he

" still went on refining,
And thought of convincing while thej thought of dining,"

H2 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

that searching philosophy which pervades his speeches and
writings, and is there wedded in such happy union to glowing
words and poetic imagery, has rescued them alone from the
neglect and oblivion that have overtaken all the other oratory
and political pamphleteering of that day, however more loudly
lauded at the time, and has secured to them an existence as
extended as that of the language, and to their eloquence and
wisdom whatever admiration and whatever influence and au-
thority they may be entitled to throughout all coming genera -
tions. The writings of Burke are, indeed, the only English
political writings of a past age that continue to be read in the
present. And they are now perhaps more studied, and their
value, both philosophical and oratorical, better and more highly
appreciated, than even when they were first produced. They
were at first probably received, even by those who rated them
highest and felt their power the most, as little more than mere
party appeals — which, indeed, to a considerable extent most
of them were, for their author, from the circumstances of his
position and of the time, was of necessity involved in the great
battle of faction which then drew into its maelstrom everything
littlest and greatest, meanest and loftiest. — and, as was his
nature, he fought that fight, while that was the work to be done,
like a man, with his whole heart, and mind, and soul, and
strength. But it can hardly be said in prosaic verity, as it has
been said in the liveliness and levity of verse, that he "to
party gave up what was meant for mankind." He gave up
nothing to his party, except his best exertions for the time
being, and for the end immediately in view, while he continued
to serve under its banner. He separated himself from his
party, and even from the friends and associates with whom
he had passed his life, when, whether rightly or wrongly, he
conceived that a higher duty than that of fidelity to his party-
banner called upon him to take that course. For that Burke,
in leaving the ranks of the opposition in the year 1790, or rather
in declining to go along with the main body of the opposition
in the view which they took at that particular moment of the
French Eevolution, acted from the most conscientious motives
and the strongest convictions, we may assume to be now com-
pletely admitted by all whose opinions anybody thinks worth
regarding. The notion that he was bought off by the ministry
— he who never to the end of his life joined the ministry, or
ceased to express his entire disapprobation of their conduct of
the war with France — he, by whom, in fact, they were con-
trolled and coerced, not he by them — the old cry that he was

BURKE. 413

paid to attack the French Revolution, by the pension, forsooth,
that was bestowed upon him five years after — all this is now
left to the rabid ignorance of your mere pothouse politician.
Those who have really read and studied what Burke has
written know that there was nothing new in the views he
proclaimed after the breaking out of that mighty convulsion,
nothing differing from or inconsistent with the principles and
doctrines on the subject of government he had always held and
expressed. In truth, he could not have joined in the chorus of
acclamation with which Fox and many of his friends greeted the
advent of the French Eevolution without abandoning the poli-
tical philosophy of his whole previous life. As we have else-
where observed, "his principles were altogether averse from
a purely democratic constitution of government from the first.
He always, indeed, denied that he was a man of aristocratic
inclinations, meaning by that one who favoured the aristocratic
more than the popular element in the constitution : but he no
more for all that ever professed any wish wholly to extinguish

the former element than the latter The only respect in

which his latest writings really differ from those of early date
is, that they evince a more excited sense of the dangers of
popular delusion and passion, and urge with greater earnestness
the importance of those restraining institutions which the author
conceives, and always did conceive, to be necessary for the
stability of governments and the conservation of society. But
this is nothing more than the change of topic that is natural
to a new occasion." * Or, as he has himself finely said, in
defending his own consistency — " A man, who, among various
objects of his equal regard, is secure of some, and full of anxiety
for the fate of others, is apt to go to much greater lengths in
his preference of the objects of his immediate solicitude than
Mr. Burke has ever done. A man so circumstanced often seems
to undervalue, to vilify, almost to reprobate and disown, those
that are ont of danger. This is the voice of nature and truth,
and not of inconsistency and false pretence. The danger ot
anything very dear to us removes, for the moment, every other
affection from the mind. When Priam has his whole thoughts
employed on the bo<1y of his Hector, he repels with indignation,
and drives from him with a thousand reproaches, his surviving
sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to offer
their assistance. A good critic would say that this is a master-
stroke, and marks a deep understanding of nature in the father
of poetry. He would despise a Zoilus, who would conclude
* Art. on Burke, in Penny Cyclopaedia, vi. 35.

41* ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

from this passage that Homer meant to represent this man of
affliction as hating, or being indifferent and cold in his affections
to, the poor relics of his house, or that he preferred a dead
carcase to his living children." *

As a specimen of Burke's spoken eloquence we will give
from his Speech on the case of the Nabob of Arcot, delivered in
the House of Commons on the 28th of February, 1785, the passage
containing the description of Hyder Ali's devastation of the
Carnatic : —

When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either
would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind,
and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he
decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predesti-
nated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the
gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Car-
natic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desola-
tion as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds
the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became
at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made
no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his
disputes with every enemy, and every rival, who buried their mutual ani-
mosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of
Arcot,f he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add
to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction ; and, compounding all the
materials of fury, havoc, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for
a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all
the evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which
blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole
of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe,
the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue
can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were
mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field,
consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabit-
ants, flying from their naming villages, in part were slaughtered ; others,
without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of
function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a
whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the
trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown
and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the
walled cities. But, escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the
jaws of famine.

The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly
liberal ; and all was done by charity that private charity could do ; but it

* Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

t The designs upon Hyder, which provoked this retaliation on his part;
are represented in the speech as the scheme of the Nabob's English
creditors.

BURKE. 415

was ft people in beggary, a nation which stretched out its hands for food.
For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and
luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our
austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance,
almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of
Madras ; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on
tiie glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I
was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-
citizens by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague
of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man,
this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us
all feels himself to be nothing more than he is : but I find myself unable
to manage it with decorum ; these details are of a species of horror so
nauseous and disgusting ; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the
hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself; that, on better
thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object,
and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months without intermission, this destruction raged from
the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore ; and so completely did these
masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his ferocious son, absolve themselves
of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did,
the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole
line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one
child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead,
uniform silence reigned over the whole region.

It is a mistake to suppose that either imagination or passion
is apt to become weaker as the other powers of the mind
strengthen and acquire larger scope. The history of all the
greatest poetical minds of all times and countries confutes
this notion. Burke's imagination grew with his intellect, by
which it was nourished, with his ever-extending realm of
thought, with his constantly increasing experience of life
and knowledge of every kind; and his latest writings are
his most splendid as well as his most profound. Undoubtedly
the work in which his eloquence is at once the most highly
finished, and the most impregnated with philosophy and depth
of thought, is his Reflections on the French Revolution. But
this work is so generally known, at least in its most striking
passages, that we may satisfy ourselves with a single short
extract : —

You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right*
it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our
liberties as an entailed inheritance, derived to us from our forefathers, and
to be transmitted to our posterity ; as an estate specially belonging to the
people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more,
general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity
in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown ; au

41G ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

inheritable peerage ; and a House of Commons and a people inheriting
privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection ; or rather
the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection,
and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish
temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who
never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England
well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of con-
servation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a
principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free : but it secures what
it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on
these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement : grasped as
in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after
the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government
and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit
our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of for-
tune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the
same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspond-
ence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of
existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts ; where-
in, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole at one time is never
old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable con-
stancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, reno-
vation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the
conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new ; in
what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner,
and on these principles, to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the super-
stition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this
choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a
relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our
dearest domestic ties ; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of
our family affections ; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth
of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths,
our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial insti-
tutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to
fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived
several other, and those no small, benefits from considering our liberties
in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence
of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to mis-
rule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal
descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents
that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those
who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty
becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It
has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns
armorial. It has its gallery of portraits ; its monumental inscriptions ; its
records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institu-
tions on the principle- upon which nature Reaches us to revere indi

BURKE. 417

men ; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they
are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce any thing better
adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we
have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations,
our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.

The Reflections appeared in 1790. We shall not give any
extract from the Letter to a Noble Lord on the attacks made
upon him in the House of Lords by the Duke of Bedford and the
Earl of Lauderdale, which, as it is one of the most eloquent and
spirited, is also perhaps the most generally known of all Burke's
writings. The following passage from another Letter, written
in 1795 (the year before), to \Villiam Elliot, Esq., on a speech
made in the House of Lords by the Duke of Norfolk, will probably
be less familiar to many of our readers : —

I wish to warn the people against the greatest of all evils — a blind and
furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform. I was indeed well
aware that power rarely reforms itself. So it is undoubtedly when all is
quiet about it. But I was in hopes that provident fear might prevent
fruitless penitence. I trusted that danger might produce at least circum-
spection ; I flattered myself, in a moment like this, that nothing would be
added to make authority top-heavy ; that the very moment of an earth-
quake would not be the time chosen for adding a story to our houses. I
hoped to see the surest of all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform, the
ceasing to do ill. In the meantime, I wished to the people the wisdom of
knowing how to tolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render
much more than tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which every
thing was to be found that could enable them to live to nature, and, if so
they pleased, to live to virtue and to honour.

I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished well
than they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far from
repenting, I would to God that new faculties had been called up in me, in
favour not of this or that man, or this or that system, but of the general
vital principle, that whilst in its vigour produced the state of things trans-
mitted to us from our fathers ; but which, through the joint operations of
the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish in our hands. I am not of
opinion that the race of men, and the commonwealths they create, like the
bodies of individuals, grow effete, and languid, and bloodless, and ossify,
by the necessities of their own conformation and the fatal operation of
longevity and time. These analogies between bodies natural and politic,
though they may sometimes illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of
themselves. They are but too often used, under the colour of a specious
philosophy, to find apologies for the despair of laziness and pusillanimity,
and to excuse the want of all manly efforts when the exigencies of our
country call for them most loudly.

How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin
by the seasonable energy of a single man ! Have we no such man amongst
as ? I am as sure as I am of my being that one vigorous mind, without

2E

118 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

office, without situation, without public functions of any kind (at a time
when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is), 1 say, one such
man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own for-
titude, vigour, enterprise, and perseverance, would tirst draw to him some
few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in exist-
ence, would appear, and troop about him.

If I saw this auspicious beginning, baffled and frustrated as I am, yet, on
the very verge of a timely grave, abandoned abroad and desolate at home,
stripped of my boast, my hope, my consolation, my helper, my counsellor,
and my guide (you know in part what I have lost, and would to God 1
could clear myself of all neglect and fault in that loss), yet thus, even thus,
I would rake up the fire under all the ashes that oppress it. I am no
longer patient of the public eye ; nor am I of force to win my way, and to
justle and elbow in a crowd. But, even in solitude, something may be
done for society. The meditations of the closet have affected senates with
a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies. The
cure might come from the same source with the distemper. I would add
my part to those who would animate the people (whose hearts are yet
right) to new exertions in the old cause.

Novelty is not the only source of zeal. Why should not a Maccabeus
and his brethren arise to assert the honour of the ancient laws, and to
defend the temple of their forefathers, with as ardent a spirit as can inspire
any innovator to destroy the monuments of the piety and the glory of
ancient ages ? It is not a hazarded assertion, it is a great truth, that, when
once things are gone out of their ordinary course, it is by acts out of the
ordinary course they can alone be re-established. Republican spirit can
only be combated by a spirit of the same nature : of the same nature, but
informed with another principle, and pointed to another end. I would per-
suade a resistance both to the corruption and to the reformation that pre-
vails. It will not be the weaker, but much the stronger, for combating
both together. A victory over real corruptions would enable us to baffle
the spurious and pretended reformations. I would not wish to excite, or
even to tolerate, that kind of evil which invokes the powers of hell to rectify
the disorders of the earth. No ! I would add my voice, with better, and,
I trust, more potent charms, to draw down justice, and wisdom, and forti-
tude from heaven, for the correction of human vice, and the recalling of
human error from the devious ways into which it has been betrayed. I
would wish to call the impulses of individuals at once to the aid and to the
control of authority. By this, which I call the true republican spirit, para-
doxical as it may appear, monarchies alone can be rescued from the imbe-
cility of courts and the madness of the crowd. This republican spirit
would not suffer men in high place to bring ruin on their country and on
themselves. It would reform, not by destroying, but by saving the great,
the rich, and the powerful. Such a republican spirit we, perhaps fondly,
conceive to have animated the distinguished heroes and patriots of old, who
knew no mode of policy but religion and virtue. These they would have
paramount to all constitutions ; they would not suffer monarchs, or senates,
or popular assemblies, under pretences of dignity, or authority, or freedom,
to shake off those moral riders which reason has appointed to govern eveiy
sort of rude power. These, in appearance loading them by their weight,

BURKE. 419

«io by that pressure augment their essential force. The momentum is
increased by the extraneous weight. It is true in moral, as it is in mecha-
nical science. It is true, not only in the draught but in the race. Thes •
riders of the great, in effect, hold the reins which guide them in their
course, and wear the spur that stimulates them to the goals of honour and
of safety. The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and ol
virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

From the second of the Letters on a Regicide Peace, or to
ti-anscribe the full title, Letters addressed to a Member of the
present Parliament on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide
Directory of France,* published in 1796, we give as our last
extract the following remarkable observations on the conduct of
the war : —

It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed ; in
ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our
superiors. They saw the thing right from the very beginning. Whatever
were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its
npirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war ; and as such they pursued it.
It is a war between the partisans of the ancient, civil, moral, and political
order of Europe, against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists, which
means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire
over other nations ; it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning
with the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured the centre
of Europe ; and, that assured, they knew that, whatever might be the event
of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious. Whether its territory had
a little more or a little less peeled from its surface, or whether an island or
two was detached from its commerce, to them was of little moment. The
conquest of France was a glorious acquisition. That once well laid as a
basis of empire, opportunities never could be wanting to regain or to replace
what had been lost, and dreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of
their adversaries.

They saw it was a civil war. It was their business to persuade their
adversaries that it ought to be a foreign war. The Jacobins everywhere
set up a cry against the new crusade ; and they intrigued with effect in the
cabinet, in the field, and in every private society in Europe. Their task
was not difficult. The condition of princes, and sometimes of first mioisters
too, is to be pitied. The creatures of the desk, and the creatures of favour,
had no relish for the principles of the manifestoes.1 They promised no
governments, no regiments, no revenues from whence emoluments might
arise by perquisite or by grant. In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians
are the lowest of our species. There is no trade so vile and mechanical as

* There are four Letters in all ; of which the two first appeared in 1796 (a
Biirreptitious edition being also brought out at the same time by Owen, a
bookseller of Piccadilly), the third was passing through the press when Burke
died, in July, 1797, and the fourth, which is unfinished, and had been written
•o far as it goes, before the three others, after his death.

* Of the Emperor and the King of Prussia, published in August, 1792.

420 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

government in their hands. Virtue is not their habit. They are out 01
themselves in any course of conduct recommended only by conscience and
glory. A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of states passes
with them for romance; and the principles that recommend it for the
wanderings of a disordered imagination. The calculators compute them
out of their senses. The jesters and buffoons shame them out of every-
thing grand and elevated. Littleness in object and in means to them
appears soundness and sobriety. They think there is nothing worth pur-
suit but that which they can handle — which they can measure with a two-
foot rule — which they can tell upon ten fingers.

Without the principles of the Jacobins, perhaps without any principles
at all, they played the game of that faction They aimed, or pre-
tended to aim, at defending themselves against a danger from which there

can be no security in any defensive plan This error obliged them,

even in their offensive operations, to adopt a plan of war, against the success
of which there was something little short of mathematical demonstration.
They refused to take any step which might strike at the heart of affairs.
They seemed unwilling to wound the enemy in any vital part. They
acted through the whole as if they really wished the conservation of the
Jacobin power, as what might be more favourable than the lawful govern-
ment to the attainment of the petty objects they looked for. They always
kept on the circumference ; and, the wider and remoter the circle was, the
more eagerly they chose it as their sphere of action in this centrifugal war.
The plan they pursued in its nature demanded great length of time. In its
execution, they who went the nearest way to work were obliged to cover
an incredible extent of country. It left to the enemy every means of
destroying this extended line of weakness. Ill success in any part was
sure to defeat the effect of the whole. This is true of Austria. It is still
more true of England. On this false plan even good fortune, by further
weakening the victor, put him but the further off from his object.

As long as there was any appearance of success, the spirit of aggran-
dizement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all
the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory at the expense
of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third
parties ; and, when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found
common distress a treacherous bond of faith and friendship.

The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has been
employed ; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the
false policy of the war. The operations of the field suffered by the errors
of the cabinet. If the same spirit continues when peace is made, the peace
will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war

Had we carried on the war on the side of France which looks towards
the Channel or the Atlantic, we should have attacked our enemy on his
weak or unarmed side. We should not have to reckon on the loss of a
man who did not fall in battle. We should have an ally in the heart of
the country, who, to one hundred thousand, would at one time have added
eighty thousand men at the least, and all animated by principle, by enthu-
siasm, and by vengeance ; motives which secured them to the cause in a
very different manner from some of those allies whom we subsidized with
millions. This ally (or rather this principal in the war), by the confession

METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL WRITERS. 421

of the regicide himself, was more formidable to him than all his olhci i'ws
united. Warring there, we should have led our arms to the capital of
wrong. Defeated, we could not fail (proper precautions taken) of a sure
retreat. Stationary, and only supporting the royalists, an impenetrable
barrier, an impregnable rampart, would have been formed between the
enemy and his naval power. We are probably the only nation who have
declined to act against an enemy, when it might have been done, in his own
country ; and who, having an armed, a powerful, and a long victorious ally
in that country, declined all effectual co-operation, and suffered him to
perish for want of support. On the plan of a war in Fiance, every advan-
tage that our allies might obtain would be doubtful in its effect. Disasters
on the one side might have a fair chance of being compensated by victories
on the other. Had we brought the main of our force to bear upon that
quarter, all the operations of the British and imperial crowns would have
been combined. The war would have had system, correspondence, and a
certain connection. But, as the war has been pursued, the operations of
the two crowns have not the smallest degree of mutual bearing or relation.1

METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL WRITERS.

The most remarkable metaphysical and speculative works
which had appeared in England since Locke's Essay were,
Dr. Samuel Clarke's Sermons on the Evidences of Natural and
Revealed Religion, 1705, in which he expounded his famous
a priori argument for the existence of a God ; Berkeley's Theory
of Vision, 1709; his Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710, in
which he announced his argument against the existence of
matter; his Dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, 1713; his
Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, 1732; his Analyst, 1734;
the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners,
Opinions, and Times, first published in the form in which we
now have them in 1713, after the author's death ; Mandeville's
Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, 1714 ;
Dr. Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Ideas of Beauty and
Virtue, 1725; Andrew Baxter's Inquiry into tbe Nature of the
Human Soul, 1730 (?) ; Bishop Butler's Sermons preached at the
Rolls Chapel, 1726 ; and his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Re-
vealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736. David
Hume, who was bora in 1711, and died in 1776, and who has
gained the highest place in two very distinct fields of intellectual
and literary enterprise, commenced his literary life by the pub-

1 These prophetic views are very similar to those that were urged twelve
years later m a memorable article in the Edinburgh Keview, known to be by
a great living orator. (See No. XXV., Don Cevallos on the French Usurpa-
tion of Spain.)

122 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

lication of his Treatise on Human Nature, in 1739. The work,
which, as he has himself stated, was projected before he left
college, and written and published not long after, fell, to use his
own words, "dead -born from the press;" nor did the specula-
tions it contained attract much more attention when republished
ten years after in another form under the title of Philosophical
Essays concerning Human Understanding ; but they eventually
proved perhaps more exciting and productive, at least for a time,
both in this and in other countries, than any other metaphysical
views that had been promulgated in modern times. Hume's
Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals appeared in 1752,
nis Natural History of Religion in 1755 ; and with the latter
publication he may be regarded as having concluded the exposi-
tion of his sceptical philosophy. Among the most distinguished
writers on mind and morals that appeared after Hume within
the first quarter of a century of the reign of George III. may be
mentioned Hartley, whose Observations on Man, in which he
unfolded his hypothesis of the association of ideas, were published
in 1749 ; Lord Kames (Henry Home), whose Essays on the
Principles of Morality and Natural Eeligion were published in
1752; Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments was
published in 1759 ; Keid, whose Inquiry into the Human Mind
on the Principles of Common Sense was published in 1764;
Abraham Tucker (calling himself Edward Search, Esq.), the
first part of whose Light of Nature Pursued was published in
1768, the second in 1778, after the author's death ; and Priestley,
whose new edition of Hartley's work, with an Introductory
Dissertation, was published in 1775 ; his Examination of
Dr. Eeid's Inquiry, the same year ; and his Doctrine of Philo-
sophical Necessity, in 1777. We may add to the list Campbell's
very able Dissertation on Miracles, in answer to Hume, which
appeared in 1763 ; and Beattie's Essay on Truth, noticed in a
former page, which appeared in 1770, and was also, as every-
body knows, an attack upon the philosophy of the great sceptic.

HISTORICAL WRITERS: — HUME; EOBERTSON; GIBBON.

In the latter part of his literary career Hume struck into
altogether another line, and the subtle and daring metaphysician
suddenly came before the world in the new character of an his-
torian. He appears, indeed, to have nearly abandoned meta-
physics very soon after the publication of his Philosophical
lys. In a letter to his friend Sir Gilbert Elliott, which,

HlStOUlCAl, WRITERS. 428

though without date, seems from its contents, according to
Mr. Stewart, to have been written about 1750 or 1751, he says,
44 1 am sorry that our correspondence should lead us into these
abstract speculations. I have thought, and read, and' composed
very little on such questions of late. Morals, politics, and
literature have employed all my time." The first volume of
his History of Great Britain, containing the Reigns of James I.
and Charles I., was published, in quarto, at Edinburgh, in 1754;
the second, containing the Commonwealth and the Reigns of
Charles II. and James II., at London, in 1757. According to
his own account the former was received with " one cry of
reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation ;" and after the
first ebullitions of the fuiy of his assailants were over, he adds,
44 what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into
oblivion : Mr. Miller told me that in a twelvemonth he sold only
forty-five copies of it." He was so bitterly disappointed, that,
he tells us, had not the war been at that time breaking out
between France and England, he had certainly retired to some
provincial town of the former kingdom, changed his name, and
never more returned to his native country. However, after a
little time, in the impracticability of executing this scheme of
expatriation, he resolved to pick up courage and persevere, the
more especially as his second volume was considerably advanced.
That, he informs us, " happened to give less displeasure to the
\Vhigs, and was better received: it not only rose itself, but
helped to buoy up its unfortunate brother." The work, indeed,
seems to have now rapidly attained extraordinary popularity.
Two more volumes, comprehending the reigns of the princes of
the House of Tudor, appeared in 1759 ; and the remaining two,
completing the History, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to
the accession of Henry VII., in 1762. And several new editions
of all the volumes were called for in rapid succession. Hume
makes as much an epoch in our historical as he does in our
philosophical literature. His originality in the one department
is as great as in the other; and the influence he has exerted
upon those who have followed him in the same path has been
equally extensive and powerful in both cases. His History,
notwithstanding some defects which the progress of time and of
knowledge is every year making more considerable, or at least
enabling us better to perceive, and some others which probably
would have been much the same at whatever time the work had
been written, has still merits of so high a kind as a literary
performance that it must ever retain its place among our few
classical works in this department, of which it is as yet perhaps

424 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

the greatest. In narrative clearness, grace, and spirit, at least,
it is not excelled, scarcely equalled, by any other completed his-
torical work in the language ; and it has besides the high charm,
indispensable to every literary performance that is to endure, of
being impressed all over with the peculiar character of the
author's own mind, interesting us even in its most prejudiced
and objectionable passages (perhaps still more, indeed, in some
of these than elsewhere) by his tolerant candour and gentleness
of nature, his charity for all the milder vices, his unaffected
indifference to many of the common objects of human passion,
and his contempt for their pursuers, never waxing bitter or
morose, and often impregnating his style and manner with a vein
of the quietest but yet truest and richest humour. One effect
which we may probably ascribe in great part to the example of
Hume was the attention that immediately began to be turned to
historic composition in a higher spirit than had heretofore been
felt among us, and that ere long added to the possessions of the
language in that department the celebrated performances of
Robertson and Gibbon. Robertson's History of Scotland during
the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI. was published
at London in 1759 ; his History of the Reign of the Emperor
Charles V., in 1769; and his History of America, in 1776.
Robertson's style of narration, lucid, equable, and soberly em-
bellished, took the popular ear and taste from the first. A part
of the cause of this favourable reception is slily enough indicated
by Hume, in a letter which he wrote to Robertson himself on
the publication of the History of Scotland : — " The great success
of your book, besides its real merit, is forwarded by its prudence,
and by the deference paid to established opinions. It gains also
by its being your first performance, and by its surprising the
public, who are not upon their guard against it. By reason of
these two circumstances justice is more readily done to its merit,
which, however, is really so great, that I believe there is scarce
another instance of a first performance being so near perfection."*
The applause, indeed, was loud and universal, from Horace
Walpole to Lord Lyttelton, from Lord Mansfield to David
Garrick. Nor did it fail to be renewed in equal measure on
the appearance both of his History of Charles V. and of his His-
tory of America. But, although in his own day he probably
bore away the palm from Hume in the estimation of the majority,
the finest judgments even then discerned, with Gibbon, that
there was something higher in " the careless inimitable graces " of
the latter than in his rival's more elaborate regularity, flowing
* Account of the Life and Writings of Robertson, by Dugald Stewart.

ROBERTSON. 425

Mid perspicuous as it usually is ; and, as always happens, timo
lias brought the general opinion into accordance with this feeling
of the- wiser few. The first volume of Gibbon's History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776, a few
months before the death of Hume, and about a year before the
publication of Robertson's America; the second and third fol-
lowed in 1781 ; the three additional volumes, which completed
the work, not till 1788. Of the first volume, the author tells us,
" the first impression was exhausted in a few days ; a second and
third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand ; and a scarcely
diminished interest followed the great undertaking to its close,
notwithstanding the fear which he expresses in the preface to
his concluding volumes that " six ample quartos must have tried,
and may have exhausted, the indulgence of the public." A
performance at once of such extent, and of so sustained a bril-
liancy throughout, perhaps does not exist in ancient or modern
historical literature ; but it is a hard metallic brilliancy, which
even the extraordinary interest of the subject and the unflagging
animation of the writer, with the great skill he shows in the
disposition of his materials, do not prevent from becoming some-
times fatiguing and oppressive. Still the splendour, artificial as
it is, is very imposing; it does not warm, as well as illuminate,
like the light of the sun, but it has at least the effect of a
theatrical blaze of lamps and cressets; while it is supported
everywhere by a profusion of real erudition such as would make
the dullest style and manner interesting. It is remarkable,
however, that, in regard to mere language, no one of these three
celebrated historical writers, the most eminent we have yet to
boast of, at least among those that have stood the test of time,
can be recommended as a model. No one of the three, in fact,
was of English birth and education. Gibbon's style is very
impure, abounding in Gallicisms ; Hume's, especially in the first
edition of his History, is, with all its natural elegance, almost as
much infested with Scotticisms ; and, if Robertson's be less
incorrect in that respect, it is so unidiomatic as to furnish a still
less adequate exemplification of genuine English eloquence.
Robertson died at the age of seventy-one, in 1793; Gibbon, in
1794, at the age of fifty-seven.

POLITICAL ECONOMY ; THEOLOGY ; CRITICISM AND BELLES LETTRES.
Besides his metaphysical and historical works, upon which his
fame principally rests, the penetrating and original genius of
Hume also distinguished itself in another field, that of economical

fc£6 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

speculation, which had for more than a century before his time
to some extent engaged the attention of inquirers in this country.
There are many ingenious views upon this subject scattered up
and down in his Political Discourses, and his Moral and Political
Essays. Other contributions, not without value, to the science
of political economy, for which we are indebted to the middle
of the last century, are the Rev. R. Wallace's Essay on the
Numbers of Mankind, published at Edinburgh in 1753: and
Sir James Steuart's Inquiry into the Principles of Political
Economy, which appeared in 1767. But these and all other
preceding works on the subject have been thrown into the shade
by Adam Smith's celebrated Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations, which, after having been long ex-
pected, was at last given to the world in the beginning of the
year 1776. It is interesting to learn that this crowning per-
formance of his friend was read by Hume, who died before the
close of the year in which it was published : a letter of his to
Smith is preserved, in which, after congratulating him warmly
on having acquitted himself so as to relieve the anxiety and
fulfil the hopes of his friends, he ends by saying, " If you were
here at my fireside, I should dispute some of your principles. . . .
But these, and a hundred other points, are fit only to be dis-
cussed in conversation. I hope it will be soon, for I am in a
very bad state of health, and cannot afford a long delay." Smith
survived till July, 1790.

A few other names, more or less distinguished in the literature
of this time, we must content ourselves with merely mention-
ing : — in theology, Warburton, Lowth, Horsley, Jortin, Madan,
Gerard, Blair, Geddes, Lardner, Priestley; in critical and
grammatical disquisition, Harris, Monboddo, Kames, Blair,
Jones ; in antiquarian research, Walpole, Hawkins, Burney,
Chandler, Barrington, Steevens, Pegge, Farmer, Vallancey,
Grose, Gough ; in the department of the belles lettres and mis-
cellaneous speculation, Chesterfield, Hawkesworth, Brown,
Jenyns, Bryant, Hurd, Melmoth, Potter, Francklin, &c.

427

THE LATTER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

COWPER.

THE death of Samuel Johnson, in the end of the year 1784, makes
a pause, or point of distinction, in our literature, hardly less
notable than the acknowledgment of the independence of America,
the year before, makes in our political history. It was not only
the end of a reign, but the end of kingship altogether, in our
literary system. For King Samuel has had no successor ; nobody
since his day, and that of his contemporary Voltaire, who died
in 1778, at the age of eighty-five, has sat on a throne of literature
either in England or in France.

It is a remarkable fact that, if we were to continue our notices
of the poets of the last century in strict chronological order, the
first name we should have to mention would be that of a writer
who more properly belongs to what may almost be called our
own day. Crabbe, whose Tales of the Hall, the most striking
production of his powerful and original genius, appeared in
1819, and who died so recently as 1832, published his first
poem, The Library, in 1781 : some extracts from it are given in
the Annual Register for that year. But Crabbe's literary career
is divided into two parts by a chasm or interval, during which
he published nothing, of nearly twenty years; and his proper
era is the present century.

One remark, however, touching this writer may be made
here : his first manner was evidently caught from Churchill more
than from any other of his predecessors. And this was also the
case with his contemporary Cowper, the poetical writer whose
name casts the greatest illustration upon the last twenty years
of the eighteenth century. William Cowper, born in 1731,
twenty-three years before Crabbe, — we pass over his anonymous
contributions to his friend the Rev. Mr. Newton's collection of
the Olney Hymns, published in 1776, — gave to the world the
first volume of his poems, containing those entitled Table-Talk,
The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Charity,
Conversation, and Retirement, in 1782; his famous History of
John Gilpin appeared the following year, without his name, iu

428 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

a publication called The Bepository; his second volume, con-
taining The Task, Tirocinium, and some shorter pieces, was
published in 1785; his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey
in 1791 ; and his death took place on the 25th of April, 1800.
It is recorded that Cowper's first volume attracted little atten-
tion : it certainly appears to have excited no perception in the
mind or eye of the public of that day that a new and great light
had arisen in the poetical firmament. The Annual Eegister for
1781, as we have said, gives extracts from Crabbe's Library; a
long passage from his next poem, The Village, is given in the
volume for 1783 ; the volume for 1785 in like manner treats its
readers to a quotation from The Newspaper, which he had pub-
lished in that year ; but, except that the anonymous History of
John Gilpin is extracted in the volume for 1783 from the Repo-
sitory, we have nothing there of Cowper's till we come to the
volume for 1786, which contains two of the minor pieces pub-
lished in his second volume. Crabbe was probably indebted for
the distinction he received in part to his friend and patron
Burke, under whose direction the Register was compiled ; but
the silence observed in regard to Cowper may be taken as not
on that account the less conclusive as to the little or next to no
impression his first volume made. Yet surely there were both
a force and a freshness of manner in the new aspirant that might
have been expected to draw some observation. Nor had there
of late been such plenty of good poetry produced in England as
to make anything of the kind a drug in the market. But here,
in fact, lay the main cause of the public inattention. The age
was not poetical. The manufacture of verse was carried on,
indeed, upon a considerable scale, by the Hayleys and the
Whiteheads and the Pratts and others (spinners of sound and
weavers of words not for a moment to be compared in inventive
and imaginative faculty, or in faculty of any kind, any more
than for the utility of their work, with their contemporaries the
Arkwrights and Cartwrights) ; but the production of poetry had
gone so much out, that, even in the class most accustomed to
judge of these things, few people knew it when they saw it. It
has been said that the severe and theological tone of this poetry
of Cowper's operated against its immediate popularity ; and that
was probably the case too ; but it could only have been so, at
any rate to the same extent, in a time at the least as indifferent
to poetry as to religion and morality. For, certainly, since the
days of Pope, nothing in the same style had been produced
among us to be compared with these poems of Cowper's for ani-
mation, vigour, and point, which are among the most admired

COWPER. 423

qualities of that great writer, any more than for the cordiality,
earnestness, and fervour which are more peculiarly their own.
Smoother versification we had had in great abundance ; more pomp
and splendour of rhetorical declamation, perhaps, as in Johnson's
paraphrases from Juvenal ; more warmth and glow of imagina-
tion, as in Goldsmith's two poems, if they are to he considered
as coming into the competition. But, on the whole, verse of
such bone and muscle had proceeded from no recent writer, —
not excepting Churchill, whose poetry had little else than its
coarse strength to recommend it, and whose hasty and careless
workmanship Cowper, while he had to a certain degree been his
imitator, had learned, with his artistical feeling, infinitely to
surpass. Churchill's vehement invective, with its exaggerations
and personalities, made him the most popular poet of his day :
Cowper, neglected at first, has taken his place as one of the
classics of the language. Each has had his reward — the reward
he best deserved, and probably most desired.

As the death of Samuel Johnson closes one era of our literature,
so the appearance of Cowper as a poet opens another. Notwith-
standing his obligations both to Churchill and Pope, a main
characteristic of Cowper's poetry is its originality. Compared
with almost any one of his predecessors, he was what we may
call a natural poet. He broke through conventional forms and
usages in his mode of writing more daringly than any English
poet before him had done, at least since the genius of Pope had
bound in its spell the phraseology and rhythm of our poetry.
His opinions were not more his own than his manner of express-
ing them. His principles of diction and versification were
announced, in part, in the poem with which he introduced him-
self to the public, his Table-Talk, in which, having intimated
his contempt for the " creamy smoothness " of modern fashion-
able vense, where sentiment was so often

sacrificed to sound,
And truth cut short to make a period round,

he exclaims,

Give me the line that ploughs its stately course
Like a proud swan, conquering the stream by force ;
That, like some cottage beauty, strikes the heart,
Quite unindebted to the tricks of art.

But, although he despised the "tricks" of art, Cowper, like
every great poet, was also a great artist ; and, with all its in
that day almost unexampled simplicity and naturalness, his style
is the very reverse of a slovenly or irregular one. ]f his verse

430 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

be not so highly polished as that of Pope, — who, he complains,
has

Made poetry a mere mechanic art,

And every warbler has his tune by heart, —

it is in its own way nearly as " well disciplined, complete, coin-
pact," as he has described Pope's to be. With all his avowed
admiration of Churchill, he was far from being what he has
called that writer —

Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force.

On the contrary, he has in more than one passage descanted on

" the pangs of a poetic birth" — on

the shifts and turns,

The expedients and inventions multiform,
To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms,
Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win ; —

and the other labours to be undergone by whoever would attain
to excellence in the work of composition. Not, however, that,
with all this elaboration, he was a slow writer. Slowness is the
consequence of indifference, of a writer not being excited by his
subject — not having his heart in his work, but going through it
as a mere task ; let him be thoroughly in earnest, fully possessed
of his subject and possessed by it, and, though the pains he takes
to find apt and effective expression for his thoughts may tax his
whole energies like wrestling with a strong man, he will not
write slowly. He is in a state of active combustion — consuming
away, it may be, but never pausing. Oowper is said to have
composed the six thousand verses, or thereby, contained in his
first volume, in about three months.

Not creative imagination, nor deep melody, nor even, in
general, much of fancy or grace or tenderness, is to be met with
in the poetry of Cowper ; but yet it is not without both high
and various excellence. Its main charm, and that which is
never wanting, is its earnestness. This is a quality which gives
it a power over many minds not at all alive to the poetical ; but
it is also the source of some of its strongest attractions for those
that are. Hence its truth both of landscape-painting, and of the
description of character and states of mind; hence its skilful
expression of such emotions and passions as it allows itself to
deal with; hence the force and fervour of its denunciatory
eloquence, giving to some passages as fine an inspiration of the
moral sublime as is perhaps anywhere to be found in didactic
poetry. Hence, we may say, even the directness, simplicity,
and manliness of Cowper's diction — all that is best in the form,

COWI'ER. 4£i

or. \vell as in the spirit, of his verse. It was this quality, or
temper of mind, in short, that principally made him an original
poet ; and, if not the founder of a new school, the pioneer of a
now era, of English poetry. Instead of repeating the unmeaning
conventionalities and faded affectations of his predecessors, it led
him to turn to the actual nature within him and around him,
and there to learn both the truths he should utter and the words
in which he should utter them.

After Cowper had found, or been found out by, his proper
audience, the qualities in his poetry that at first had most
repelled ordinary readers rather aided its success. In par-
ticular, as we have said, its theological tone and spirit made it
acceptable in quarters to which poetry of any kind had rarely
penetrated, and where it may perhaps be affirmed that it keeps
its ground chiefly perforce of this its most prosaic peculiarity ;
although, at the same time, it is probable that the vigorous
verse to which his system of theology and morals has been
married by Cowper has not been without effect in diffusing not
only a more indulgent toleration but a truer feeling and love for
poetry throughout what is called the religious world. Nor is it
to be denied that the source of Cowper's own most potent in-
spiration is his theological creed. The most popular of his
poems, and also certainly the most elaborate, is his Task ; it
abounds in that delineation of domestic and every-day life which
interests everybody, in descriptions of incidents and natural
appearances with which all are familiar, in the expression of sen-
timents and convictions to which most hearts readily respond :
it is a poem, therefore, in which the greatest number of readers
find the greatest number of things to attract and attach them.
Besides, both in the form and in the matter, it has less of what
is felt to be strange and sometimes repulsive by the generality ;
the verse flows, for the most part, smoothly enough, if not with
much variety of music; the diction is, as usual with Cowper,
clear, manly, and expressive, but at the same time, from being
looser and more diffuse, seldomer harsh or difficult than it is in
some of his other compositions ; above all, the doctrinal strain
is pitched upon a lower key, and, without any essential point
being given up, both morality and religion certainly assume a
countenance and voice considerably less rueful and vindictive.
But, although The Task has much occasional elevation and elo-
quence, and some sunny passages, it perhaps nowhere rises to the
passionate force and vehemence to which Cowper had been carried
by a more burning zeal in some of his earlier poems. Take, for
instance, the following fine burst in that entitled Table-Talk : —

432 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUA02L

Not only vice disposes and prepares

The mind, that slumbers sweetly in her snares,

To stoop to tyranny's usurped command,

And bend her polished neck beneath his hand

(A dire effect, by one of Nature's laws,

Unchangeably connected with its cause) ;

But Providence himself will intervene

To throw his dark displeasure o'er the scene.

All are his instruments ; each form of war,

What burns at home, or threatens from afar,

Nature in arms, her elements at strife,

The storms that overset the joys of life,

Are but his rods to scourge a guilty land,

And waste it at the bidding of his hand.

He gives the word, and mutiny soon roars

In all her gates, and shakes her distant shores j

The standards of all nations are unfurled ;

She has one foe, and that one foe the world :

And, if he doom that people with a frown,

And mark them with a seal of wrath pressed down,

Obduracy takes place ; callous and tough

The reprobated race grows judgment-proof ;

Earth shakes beneath them, and heaven wars above ;

But nothing scares them from the course they love.

To the lascivious pipe, and wanton song,

That charm down fear, they frolic it along,

With mad rapidity and unconcern,

Down to the gulf from which is no return.

They trust in navies, and their navies fail —

God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail !

They trust in armies, and their courage dies ;

In wisdom, wealth, in fortune, and in lies ;

But all they trust in withers, as it must,

When He commands, in whom they place no trust.

Vengeance at last pours down upon their coast

A long-despised, but now victorious, host ;

Tyranny sends the chain, that must abridge

The noble sweep of all their privilege ;

Gives liberty the last, the mortal shock ;

Slips the slave's collar on, and snaps the lock.

And, even when it expresses itself in quite other forms, and
with least of passionate excitement, the fervour which inspires
these earlier poems occasionally produces something more bril-
liant or more graceful than is anywhere to be found in The Task.
How skilfully and forcibly executed, for example, is the following
moral delineation in that called Truth : —

The path to bliss abounds with many a snare ;
Learning is one, and wit, however rare.

COWPER. 433

The Frenchman first in literary fame —

(Mention him, if you please. Voltaire ? — The same)

With spirit, genius, eloquence, supplied,

Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily, and died.

The Scripture was his jest-book, whence he dre\?

Bon mots to gall the Christian and the Jew ;

An infidel in health ; but what when sick ?

Oh — then a text would touch him at the quick.

View him at Paris in his last career ;

Surrounding throngs the demigod revere ;

Exalted on his pedestal of pride,

And fumed with frankincense on every side,

He begs their flattery with his latest breath,

And, smothered in 't at last, is praised to death.

Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door,
Pillow and bobbins all her little store ;
Content though mean, and cheerful if not gay,
8hufiling her threads about the livelong day,
/ust earns a scanty pittance, and at night
Lies down secure, her heart and pocket light;
She, for her humble sphere by nature fit,
Has little understanding, and no wit,
Deceives no praise ; but, though her lot be such,
(Toilsome and indigent) she renders much ;
Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true —
A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew ;
And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes
Her title to a treasure in the skies.

0 happy peasant ! 0 unhappy bard f
His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward ;
He praised perhaps for ages yet to come,
She never heard of half a mile from home ;
He lost hi errors his vain heart prefers,
She safe in the simplicity of hers.

Still more happily executed, and in a higher style of art, is the
following version, BO elaborately finished, and yet so severely
simple, of the meeting of the two disciples with their divine Master
on tho road to Eminaus, in the piece entitled Conversation : —

It happened on a solemn eventide,
Soon after He that was our surety died,
Two bosom friends, each pensively inclined,
The scene of all those sorrows left behind,
Sought their own village, busied as they wont
In musings worthy of the great event :
They spake of him they loved, of him whose life,
Though blameless, had incurred perpetual strife,
Whose deeds had left, in spite of hostile arts,
A deep memorial graven on their hearts.

2 r

tSi ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

The recollection, like a vein of ore,
The farther traced, enriched them still the more ;
They thought him, and they justly thought him, oti«?
Sent to do more than he appeared to have done ;
To exalt a people, and to place them high
Above all else ; and wondered he should die.
Ere yet they brought their journey to an end,
A stranger joined them, courteous as a friend,
And asked them, with a kind, engaging air,
What their affliction was, and begged a share.
Informed, he gathered up the broken thread,
And, truth and wisdom gracing all he said,
Explained, illustrated, and searched so well
The tender theme on which they chose to dwell,
That, reaching home, The night, they said, is near
We must not now be parted, — sojourn here.
The new acquaintance soon became a guest,
And, made so welcome at their simple feast,
He blessed the bread, but vanished at the word,
And left them both exclaiming, 'Twas the Lord !
Did not our hearts feel all he deigned to say ?
Did not they burn within us by the way ?

For one thing, Cowper's poetry, not organ-toned, or informed
with any very rich or original music, any more than soaringly
imaginative or gorgeously decorated, is of a style that requires
the sustaining aid of rhyme : in blank verse it is apt to overflow
in pools and shallows. And this is one among other reasons
why, after all, some of his short poems, which are nearly all in
rhyme, are perhaps what he has done best. His John Gilpin,
universally known and universally enjoyed by his countrymen,
young and old, educated and uneducated, and perhaps the only
English poem of which this can be said, of course at once suggests
itself as standing alone in the collection of what he has left us
for whimsical conception and vigour of comic humour; but
there is a quieter exercise of the same talent, or at least of *
kindred sense of the ludicrous and sly power of giving it expres-
sion, in others of his shorter pieces. For tenderness and pathos,
again, nothing else that he has written, and not much that is
elsewhere to be found of the same kind in English poetry, can
be compared with his Lines on receiving his Mother's Picture : —

0 that those lips had language ! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine — thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me :
Voirft only fails, else how distinct they say,
" Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away I"

COWPER. 435

The meek intelligence of those clear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalize,
The art that baffles Time's gigantic claim
To quench it) here shines on me still the aair.e.
Faithful remembrancer of one so dear,

0 welcome guest, though unexpected here !
Who bidd'st me honour with an artless song,
Affectionate, a mother lost so long.

1 will obey, not willingly alone,

But gladly, as the precept were her own :
And, while that face renews my filial grief,
Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief,
Shah1 steep me in Elysian reverie,
A momentary dream that thou art she.

My mother ! when I learned that thou wast ne&»;,
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed ?
Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son,
Wretch even then, life's journey just begun ?
Perhaps thou gav'st me, though unfelt, a kiss ;
Perhaps a tear, if souls can melt in bliss —
Ah that maternal smile ! it answers — Yes.
I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day,
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away,
And, turning from my nursery window, drew
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu !
But was it such ? — It was. — Where thou art gone,
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown :
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore,
The parting word shall pass my lips no more !
Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern
Oft gave me promise of thy quick return.
What ardently I wished I long believed,
And, disappointed still, was still deceived ;
By expectation every day beguiled,
Dupe of to-morrow even from a child,
Thus many a sad to-morrow came and went,
Till, all my stock of infant sorrow spent,
I learned at last submission to my lot,
But, though I less deplored thee, ne'er forgot.

Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more.
Children not thine have trod my nursery floor ;
And where the gardener Robin, day by day,
Drew me to school along the public way,
Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped
In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet-capped,
Tis now become a history little known
That once we called the pastoral house our own.
Short-lived possession ! but the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm, that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.

•136 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Thy n;ght!y visits to my chamber made,

That thou might's! know me safe and warmly laiJ ;

Thy morning bounties ere I left my home,

The biscuit, or confectionary plum ;

The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed

By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed :

All this, and, more endearing still than all,

Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,

Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks,

That humour interposed too often makes ;

All this still legible in memory's page,

And still to be so to my latest age,

Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay

Such honours to thee as my numbers may ;

Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere,

Not scorned in heaven, though little noticed here.

Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hoiirc,
When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers,
The violet, the pink, and jessamine,
I pricked them into paper with a pin,
(And thou wast happier than myself the while,
Would'st softly speak, and stroke my head, and smilo)
Could those few pleasant days again appear,
Might one wish bring them, would 1 wish them here?
I would not trust my heart ; — the dear delight
Seems so to be desired, perhaps I might. —
But no : — what here we call our life is such,
So little to be loved, and thou so much,
That I should ill requite thee to constrain
Thy unbound spirit into bonds again.

Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast
(The storms all weather'd and the ocean crossed),
Shoots into port at some well-havened isle,
Where spices breathe, and brighter seasons smile,
There sits quiescent on the floods, that show
Her beauteous form reflected clear below,
While airs impregnated with incense play
Around her, fanning light her streamers gay ;

So thou, with sails how swift ! hast reached the shore
w Where tempests never beat, nor billows roar."1

And thy loved consort on the dangerous tide
Of life long since has anchored by thy side.
But me, scarce hoping to attain that rest,
Always from port withheld, always distressed —
Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tossed,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost |
And day by day some current's thwarting force
Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.
Yet 0 the thought that thou art safe, and he 1
That thought is joy, arrive what may to me.
1 Garth.

DARWIN. 457

My boast is not, that I deduce my birth
From loins enthroned, and rulers of the earth ;
But higher far my proud pretensions rise —
The son cf parents passed into the skies.

And now farewell. — Time unrevoked has run
His wonted course ; yet what I wished is done.
By contemplation's help, not sought in vain,
I seem to have lived my childhood o'er again ;
To have renewed the joys that once were mine,
Without the sin of violating thine ;
And, while the wings of fancy fltill are free,
And I can view this mimic show of thee,
Time has but half succeeded in his theft —
Thyself removed, thy power to soothe me left.

This is no doubt, as a whole, Cowper's finest poem, at onco
springing from the deepest and purest fount of passion, and
happy in shaping itself into richer and swueter music than he
has reached in any other. It shows what his real originality,
and the natural spirit of art that was in him, might have done
under a better training and more favourable circumstances of
personal situation, or perhaps in another age. Generally,
indeed, it may be said of Cowper, that the more he was left to
himself, or trusted to his own taste and feelings, in writing, the
better he wrote. In so far as regards the form of composition,
the principal charm of what he has done best is a natural ele-
gance, which is most perfect in what he has apparently written
with the least labour, or at any rate with the least thought of
rules or models. His Letters to his friends, not written for
publication at all, but thrown off in the carelessness of his hours
of leisure and relaxation, have given him as high a place among
the prose classics of his country as he holds among our poets.
His least successful performances are his translations of the
Iliad and Odyssey, throughout which he was straining to imitate
a style not only unlike his own, but, unfortunately, quite as
unlike that of his original — for these versions of the most natural
of all poetry, the Homeric, are, strangely enough, attempted in
the manner of the most artificial of all poets, Milton.

DARWIN.

Neither, however, did this age of our literature want its ar
tificial poetry. In fact, the expiration or abolition of that
manner among us was brought about not more by the example of
a fresh and natural style given by Cowper, than by the exhibition
of the opposite style, pushed to its extreme, given by his con-

438 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

temporary Darwin. Our great poets of this era cannot be
accused of hurrying into print at an immature age. Dr. Erasmus
Darwin, born in 1721, after having risen to distinguished reputa-
tion as a physician, published the Second Part of his Botanic
Garden, under the title of The Loves of the Plants, in 1789 :
and the First Part, entitled The Economy of Vegetation, two
years after. He died in 1802. The Botanic Garden, hard,
brilliant, sonorous, may be called a poem cast in metal — a sort
of Pandemonium palace of rhyme, not unlike that raised long
ago in another region, —

where pilasters round

Were set, and Doric pillars, overlaid

With golden architrave ; nor did there want

Cornice, or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven :

The roof was fretted gold.

The poem, however, did not rise exactly " like an exhalation."
" The verse," writes its author's sprightly biographer, Miss Anna
Seward, " corrected, polished, and modulated with the most
sedulous attention ; the notes involving such great diversity of
matter relating to natural history; and the composition going
forward in the short recesses of professional attendance, but chiefly
in his chaise, as he travelled from one place to another ; the Botanic
Garden could not be the work of one, two, or three years ; it was
ten from its primal lines to its first publication." If this account
may be depended on, the Doctor's supplies of inspiration must
have been vouchsafed to him at the penurious rate of little more
than a line a day. At least, therefore, it cannot be said of him, as
it was said of his more fluent predecessor in both gifts of Apollo,
Sir Richard Blackmore, that he wrote " to the rumbling of his
chariot wheels." The verse, nevertheless, does in another way
smack of the travelling-chaise, and of " the short recesses of
professional attendance." Nothing is done in passion and
power ; but all by filing, and scraping, and rubbing, and other
painstaking. Every line is as elaborately polished and sharpened
as a lancet; and the most effective paragraphs have the air of
a lot of those bright little instruments arranged in rows, with
their blades out, for sale. You feel as if so thick an array of
points and edges demanded careful handling, and that your
fingers are scarcely safe in coming near them. Darwin's theory
of poetry evidently was, that it was all a mechanical affair — only
a higher kind of pin-making. His own poetry, however, with
all its defects, is far from being merely mechanical. The
Botanic Garden is not a poem which any man of ordinary intelli-
gence could have produced by sheer care and industry, or such

DARWIN. *;«*

faculty of writing as could be acquired by serving an apprentice-
ship to the trade of poetry. Vicious as it is in manner, it is
even there of an imposing and original character; and a true
poetic fire lives under all its affectations, and often blazes up
through them. There is not much, indeed, of pure soul or high
imagination in Darwin ; he seldom rises above the visible and
material ; but he has at least a poet's eye for the perception of
that, and a poet's fancy for its embellishment and exaltation.
No writer has surpassed him in the luminous representation of
visible objects in verse ; his descriptions have the distinctness of
drawings by the pencil, with the advantage of conveying, by
their harmonious words, many things that no pencil can paint.
His images, though they are for the most part tricks of language^
rather than transformations or new embodiments of impas-
sioned thought, have often at least an Ovidian glitter and
prettiness, or are striking from their mere ingenuity and novelty
— as, for example, when he addresses the stars as " flowers of
the sky." or apostrophizes the glowworm as " Star of the earth,
and diamond of the night." These two instances, indeed, thus
brought into juxtaposition, may serve to exemplify the principle
upon which he constructs such decorations: it is, we see, an
economical principle ; for, in truth, the one of these figures is
little more than the other reversed, or inverted. Still both are
happy and effective enough conceits — and one of them is applied
and carried out so as to make it more than a mere momentary
light flashing from the verse. The passage is not without a tone
of grandeur and meditative pathos : —

Roll on, ye stars ! exult in youthful prime,

Mark with bright curves the printless steps of time t

Near and more near your beamy cars approach,

And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach ; —

Flowers of the Sky ! ye too to age must yield,

Frail as your silken sisters of the field !

Star after star from heaven's high arch shall rush,

Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,

Headlong, extinct, to one dark centre fall,

And death and night and chaos mingle all !

— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm.

Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,

Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,

And soars and shines, another and the same.

There is also a fine moral inspiration, as well as tlie usual
rhetorical brilliancy, in the following lines : —

Hail, adamantine Steel ! magnetic Lord !

King of the fcrow, the ploughshare, and the sword !

k40 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

True to the pole, by thee the pilot guides
His steady helm amid the struggling tides,
Braves with broad sail the immeasurable sea,
Cleaves the dark air, and asks no star but thee !

•BURNS.

It was in October or November of the year 1786 that Uio
press of the obscure country town of Kilmarnock gave to the
world, in an octavo volume, the first edition of the Poems,
chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, of Kobert Burns. A second
edition was printed at Edinburgh early in the following year.
Burns, born on the 25th of January, 1759, had composed most
of the pieces contained in this publication in the two years
preceding its appearance : his life — an April day of sunshine
and storm — closed on the 21st of July, 1796; and in his last
nine or ten years he may have about doubled the original
quantity of his printed poetry. He was not quite thirty-seven
and a 'half years old when he died — about a year and three
months older than Byron. Burns is the greatest peasant-poet
that has ever appeared ; but his poetry is so remarkable in
itself that the circumstances in which it was produced hardly
add anything to our admiration. It is a poetry of very limited
compass — not ascending towards any '* highest heaven of inven-
tion," nor even having much variety of modulation, but yet in
its few notes as true and melodious a voice of passion as was
ever heard. It is all light and fire. Considering how little
the dialect in which he wrote had been trained to the purposes
of literature, what Burns has done with it is miraculous.
Nothing in Horace, in the way of curious felicity of phrase,
excels what we find in the compositions of this Ayrshire plough-
man. The words are almost always so apt and full of life, at
once so natural and expressive, and so graceful and musical in
their animated simplicity, that, were the matter ever so trivial,
they would of themselves turn it into poetry. And the same
•aative artistic feeling manifests itself in everything else. One
characteristic that belongs to whatever Burns has written is
that, of its kind or in its own way, it is a perfect production.
It is perfect in the same sense in which every production of
nature is perfect, the humblest weed as well as the proudest
flower; and in which, indeed, every true thing whatever is
perfect, viewed in reference to its species and purpose. His
poetry is, throughout, real emotion melodiously uttered. As

BURNS. 441

such, it is as genuine poetry as was ever written or snug. Not,
however, although its chief and best inspiration is passion rather
than imagination, that any poetry ever was farther from being
a mere JEolian warble addressing itself principally to the nerves.
Burns's head was as strong as his heart ; his natural sagacity,
logical faculty, and judgment were of the first order ; no man,
of poetical or prosaic temperament, ever had a more substantial
intellectual character. And the character of his poetry is like
that of the mind and the nature out of which it sprung — instinct
with passion, but not less so with power of thought — full of
light, as we have said, as well as of fire. More of matter and
meaning, in short, in any sense in which the terms may be
understood, will be found in no verses than there is in his.
Hence the popularity of the poetry of Burns with all classes of
his countrymen — a popularity more universal, probably, than
any other writer ever gained, at least so immediately ; for his
name, we apprehend, had become a household word among all
classes in every part of Scotland even in his own lifetime.
Certainly at the present day, that would be a rare Lowland
Scotchman, or Scotchwoman either, who should be found never
to have heard of the name and fame of Robert Burns, or even to
be altogether ignorant of his works. It has happened, however,
from this cause, that he is not perhaps, in general, estimated by
the best of his productions. Nobody, of course, capable of
appreciating any of the characteristic qualities of Burns's poetry
will ever think of quoting even the best of the few verses he has
written in English, as evidence of his poetic genius. In these
he is Samson shorn of his hair, and become as any other man.
But even such poems as his Cotter's Saturday Night, and his tale
of Tarn o' Shanter, convey no adequate conception of what is
brightest and highest in his poetry. The former is a true and
touching description in a quiet and subdued manner, suitable to
the subject, but not adapted to bring out much of his illuminat-
ing fancy and fusing power of passion : the other is a rapid,
animated, and most effective piece of narrative, with some
vigorous comedy, and also some scene-painting in a broad, dash-
ing style, but exhibiting hardly more of the peculiar humour
of Burns than of his pathos. Of a far rarer merit, much richer
in true poetic light and colour, and of a much more original and
distinctive inspiration, are many of his poems which are much
less frequently referred to, at least out of his own country. Take,
for instance, that entitled To a Mouse, on turning her up in her
Nost with the Plough, November, 1785 :—

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Wee,1 sleekit,2 cow'rin,3 timorous beastie,*

0 what a panic 's in thy breastie !4
Thou need na 5 start awa 6 sa hastie,

Wi' bickerin' brattle !7

1 wad be laith 8 to rin 9 an' chase thee,

Wi' murderin' pattle.10

I 'm truly sorry man*s dominion
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion

Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor earth-born companion,

An' fellow mortal.

I doubt na, whiles,11 but thou may thieve ;
What then ? Poor beastie, thou maun 12 live!
A daimen icker 13 in a thrave 14

'S a sma' l5 request :
I '11 get a blessin' wi' the lave,16

An' never miss 't.

Thy wee bit housie,17 too, in ruin !
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin' I18
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,19

0' foggage 20 green !
An' bleak December's winds ensuin',

Baith snell 2V and keen !

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin' fast ;
An' cozie * here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell ;
Till crash ! the cruel coulter passed

Out through thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble ffl
Has cost thee monie 24 a weary nibble !
Now thou 's 25 turned out, for a' thy trouble,

But house or hald,26
To thole27 the winter's sleety dribble ;

An' cranreuch cald.28

1 Little. 3 Sleek. s Cowering.

4 Diminutives of " beast," and " breast." 5 Not.

8 Away. 7 With scudding fury. 8 Would (should) be loth

9 Run. 10 With murderous ploughstaff. u Sometimes.
u Must. u An occasional ear of corn.

14 A double shock. w Is a small. 16 Remainder.

17 Triple diminutive of house — untranslatable into English,

18 Its weak walls tho winds are strewing.

19 Nothing now to build a new one. 2° Moss. 21 Biting.
22 Snug. a Very small quantity of leaves and stubble. ** Many.
25 Thou is Cart). 26 Without honse or hold. r Endure.
28 Hoar-frost cold.

BURNS. 4±8

But, Mousie,1 thou art no thy lane *
In proving foresight may be vain :
The beat-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft a-gley,8
An* leave us nought but grief and pain,

For promised joy.

Still thou art blest compared wi' me I
The present only toucheth thee :
But och ! 4 I backward cast my ee *

On prospects drear ;
An* forward, thougli I canna 6 see,

I guess an' fear.

A simple and common incident poetically conceived has never
been rendered into expression more natural, delicately graceful,
and true. Of course, however, our glossarial interpretations
can convey but a very insufficient notion of the aptness of the
poet's language to those to whom the Scottish dialect is not
familiar. Such a phrase as " bickering brattle," for instance, is
not to be translated. The epithet "bickering" implies that
sharp, explosive, fluttering violence, or impetuosity, which
belongs to any sudden and rapid progressive movement of short
continuance, and it expresses the noise as well as the speed. It
is no doubt the same word with the old English " bickering,"
but used in a more extensive sense : a " bicker " means commonly
a short irregular fight, or skirmish : but Milton has " bickering
flame," where, although the commentators interpret the epithet
as equivalent to quivering, we apprehend it includes the idea of
<racfcling also. Darwin has borrowed the phrase : " bursts," he
says, "through bickering flames." Nor is it possible to give
the effect of the diminutives, in which the Scottish language is
almost as rich as the Italian. While the English, for example,
has only its manikin, the Scotch has its mannie, mannikie, Ut mannie,
bit mannikie, wee bit mannie, wee bit mannikie, little wee lit mannie, little
wee bit mannikie ; and so with wife, wifie, wifikie, and many other
terms. Almost every substantive noun has at least one diminu-
tive form, made by the affix ie, as mousie, fiousie. We ought to
notice also, that the established or customary spelling in these
.and other similar instances does not correctly represent the pro-
nunciation : — the vowel sound is the soft one usually indicated
by oo ; as if the words were written moosie, hoosie, coorin, &G. It
is an advantage that the Scottish dialect possesses, somewhat
akin to that possessed by the Greek in the time of Homer, that,
from having been comparatively but little employed in literary

1 Diminutive of " mouse." 2 Not alone. 3 Go oft awry.

* Ah. * Eye. 6 Cannot.

*44 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

composition, and only imperfectly reduced under the dominion
of grammar, many of its words have several forms, which are not
only convenient for tne exigencies of verse, but are used with
different effects or shades of meaning. In particular, the English
form is always available when wanted ; and it is the writer's
natural resource when he would rise from the light or familiar
style to one of greater elevation or earnestness. Thus, in the
above verses, while expressing only half-playful tenderness and
commiseration, Burns writes '* Now thou 's turned out" (pro
nounce oot), in his native dialect; but it is in the regular
English form, " Still thou art blest," that he gives utterance to
the deeper pathos and solemnity of the concluding verse.

The proper companion to this short poem is that addressed
To a Mountain Daisy, on turning one down with the Plough,
in April, 1786 ; but in that the execution is not so pure
throughout, and the latter part runs somewhat into common-
place. The beginning, however, is in the poet's happiest
manner : —

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r,
Thou 's met nie in an evil hour ;
For I maun crush amang the stour2

Thy tender stem ;
To spare thee now is past my pow'r,

Thou bonnie8 gem.
Alas ! its no 4 thy neebor 5 sweet,
The bonnie lark, companion meet !
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet 6
Wi' spreckled 7 breast,
When upward springing, blythe, to greet

The purpling east.
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble, birth ;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted 8 forth

Amid the storm,
Scarce reared above the parent earth

Thy tender form.

The flaunting flowers our gardens yield
High sheltering woods and wa's maun 9 shield ;
But thou beneath the random bield 10

0' clod or stane u
Adorns the histie 12 stibble-field,
Unseen, alane.

1 Thou hast 2 Dugt (pronounce floor, Tioor, stoor, poor).

» Lovely. 4 Not. 6 Neighbour. « Wet. 1 Speckled

8 Peeped, or rather glanced (glanced'st). » Walls must.

»3 Shelter. ll Stone. & Dry and rugged.

BURNS. 4.JH

There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawy l bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head

In humble guise ;
But now the share uptears thy bed,

And low thou lies !
Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet floweret of the rural shade !
By love's simplicity betrayed,

And guileless trust,
Till she, like thee, all soiled is laid

Low i' the dust.
Such is the fate of simple bard,
On life's rough ocean luckless-starred 1
Unskilful he to note the card

Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,

And whelm him o'er !
Such fate to suffering worth is given,
Who long with wants and woes has striven,
By human pride or cunning driven

To misery's brink,
Till, wrenched of every stay but heaven,

He, ruined, sink !

Even thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate,
That fate is thine — no distant date ;
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,

Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight

Shall be thy doom !

The most brilliant comic power, again, animates the pieces
entitled Scotch Drink, Death and Dr. Hornbook, the Holy
Fair, the Ordination, and others of his more irreverent or
reckless effusions. As a picture of manners, however, his Hal-
lowe'en is Burns's greatest performance — with its easy vigour,
ite execution absolutely perfect, its fulness of various and busy
life, the truth and reality throughout, the humour diffused over
it like sunshine and ever and anon flashing forth in changeful
or more dazzling light, the exquisite feeling and rendering both
of the whole human spirit of the scene, and also of its accessories
in what we can scarcely call or conceive of as inanimate nature
while reading such lines as the following : —

Whiles2 ow'r3 a linn 4 the burnie5 plays,
As through the glen 6 it wimpled ; 7

1 Snowy. * Sometimes. 3 Over. 4 Waterfall.

* Rivulet 6 Dale. 7 Nimbly meandered.

146 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Whiles round a rocky scar l it strays ;

Whiles in a wiel2 it dimpled ;
Whiles glittered to the nightly rays,

Wi' bickering, dancing dazzle ;
Whiles cookit 3 underneath the braes,

Below the spreading hazel.

But this poem is too long for quotation, and is besides well
known to every reader who knows anything of Burns. We will
rather present our English readers with one or two shorter
pieces that may serve to illustrate another quality of the man
and of his poetry — the admirable sagacity and good sense, never
separated from manliness and a high spirit, that made so large
a part of his large heart and understanding. All the more
considerate nature of Burns speaks in the following Epistle to
a Young Friend, dated May, 1786 : —

I lang hae 4 thought, my youthfu' friend,

A something to have sent you,
Though it should serve nae 5 other end

Than just a kind memento ;
But how the subject-theme may gang

Let time and chance determine ;
Perhaps it may turn out a sang,

Perhaps turn out a sermon.

Ye '11 try the world soon, my lad,

And, Andrew dear, believe me,
Ye '11 find mankind an unco squad,8

And muckle7 they may grieve ye :
For care and trouble set your thought,

Ev'n when your end 's attained ;
And a' 8 your views may come to nought,

Where every nerve is strained.

1 '11 no 9 say men are villains a* ;

The real, hardened wicked,
Wha hae nae 10 check but human law,

Are to a few restricked ; ll
But oh ! mankind are unco w weak,

An' little to be trusted ;
If self the wavering balance shake,

It 's rarely right adjusted !

Yet they wha fa' 13 in fortune's strife,
Their fate we should na 14 censure ;

i Cliff, 2 Small whirlpool.

3 Slily disappeared by dipping down, skulked. [Dr. Currie interprets it,
" appeared and disappeared by fits."] 4 Long have. 6 No.

3 Strange crew. ? Much. 8 All. 9 Not. 10 Who have no
» Restricted. n Very, strangely. u Who fall. 14 Not

BURNS. 447

For still the important end of life

They equally may answer :
A man may hae an honest heart,

Though poortith l hourly stare him ;
A man may tak 3 a neebor's * part,

Yet hae nae cash to spare him.

Aye free aff han* 4 your story tell,

When \vi* a bosom crony ; *
But still keep something to yoursel •

You scarcely tell to ony.7
Conceal yoursel as weel's8 ye can

Frae ' critical dissection ;
But keek 10 through every other man

Wi' sharpened, slee u inspection.

The sacred lowe u o' weel-placed love,

Luxuriantly indulge it ;
But never tempt the illicit rove,

Though naething should divulge it :
1 wave the quantum o' the sin,

The hazard of concealing ;
But oh ! it hardens a' within,

And petrifies the feeling !

To catch dame Fortune's golden smile,

Assiduous wait upon her ;
And gather gear by every wile

That's justified by honour ;
Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Not for a train attendant ;
But for the glorious privilege

Of being independent.

The fear o' hell 's a hangman's whip

To haud u the wretch in order ;
But where ye feel your honour grip,

Let that aye be your border ;
Its slightest touches— instant pause ;

Debar a* side pretences ;
And resolutely keep its laws,

Uncaring consequences.

The great Creator to revere

Must sure become the creature ;
But still the preaching cant forbear,

And even the rigid feature :

' Poverty. » Take. s Neighbour's.

' Off-hand. * Intimate associate. 6 Yourself. 7 Any

' Aa well as. • From. w Look slily. » Sly.

* Flame. a Hold.

448 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Yet ne'er with wits profane to range

Be complaisance extended ;
An Atheist's laugh 's a poor exchange

For Deity offended.
When ranting round in pleasure 's riLg

Religion may be blinded ;
Or, if she gie l a random sting,

It may be little minded ;
But when on life we 're tempest-driveu —

A conscience but a canker —
A correspondence fixed wi' heaven

Is sure a noble anchor.
Adieu, dear, amiable youth !

Your heart can ne'er be wanting ;
May prudence, fortitude, and truth,

Erect your brow undaunting !
In ploughman phrase, " God send you speed,'*

Still daily to grow wiser ;
And may you better reck the rede2

Than ever did the adviser.

This poem, it will be observed, is for the greater pail in
English ; and it is not throughout written with all the purity of
diction which Burns never violates in his native dialect. For
instance, in the fourth stanza the word " censure " is used
to suit the exigencies of the rhyme, where the sense demands
some such term as deplore or regret; for, although we might
censure the man himself who fails to succeed in life (which,
however, is not the idea here), we do not censure, that is blame
or condemn, his fate ; we can only lament it ; if we censure
anything, it is his conduct. In the same stanza, the expression
" stare him " is, we apprehend, neither English nor Scotch :
usage authorizes us to speak of poverty staring a man in the
face, but not of it staring him, absolutely. Again, in the tenth
stanza, we have " Keligion may be blinded," apparently, for may
be blinked, disregarded, or looked at as with shut eyes.* "We
notice these things, to prevent an impression being left with
the English reader that they are characteristic of Burns. No
such vices of style, we repeat, are to be found in his Scotch,
where the diction is uniformly as natural and correct as it is
appropriate and expressive.

In a far more elevated and impassioned strain is the poem

1 Give.

2 " Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own read." — Shakespeare, Hamlet
* Unless, indeed, we may interpret the word as meaning deprive! of the
power of seeing.

BURNS. 440

entitled The Vision. It is too long to be quoted entire; l.ut tL«»
following extracts will be sufficiently intelligible : —

The sun had closed the winter day,
The curlers quat l their roaring play,
An* hungered mawkin * ta'en her way

To kail-yards * green,
While faithless snaws4 ilk 5 step betray

Whare a she has been

The thresher's weary flingin* tree ?

The lee-lang8 day had tired me ;

And, whan • the day had closed his e'e *°

Far i' the west,
Ben i* the spence,11 right pensivelie,

I gaed u to rest.

frhere, lanely,13 by the ingle-cheek,14
I sat and eyed the spewing reek,"
That filled wi* hoast-provoking smeek w

The auld clay biggin' p
An* heard the restless rattons w squeak

About the riggin'.19

All in this mottie,90 misty clime,
I backward mused on wasted time,
How I had spent my youthfu* prime,

An* done nae thing
But stringin' blethers21 up in rhyme,

For fools to sing.

Had I to guid advice but harkit,82
I might, by this,23 hae led a market,
Or strutted in a bank an' clarkit84

My cash account :
While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarkit,*

Is a' the amount.

I started, muttering Blockhead! Goof!3'
And heaved on high my waukit loof,27
To swear by a* yon starry roof,

Or some rash aith,*
That I henceforth would be rhyme-proof

Till my last breath —

1 Quitted. * The hare. 3 Colewort gardens.

4 Snows. * Every. 6 Where [pronounce u»/*ar]

? Flail. • Live-long. • When. w Eye.

u Within in the sitting apartment. u Went » Lonely.

14 Fireside. u Smoke issuing out. w Cough-provoking smoke.

»7 The old clay building, or house. u Rats. u, The roof of the house.
80 Full of motes. n Nonsense, idle words. a Hearkened

» By this time. » Written * Half-shirted.

» Fool. =? My palm thickened (with labour). » Oath.

J50 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

When click ! the string the snick l did draw ;
And jee ! the door gaed to the wa* ;
An* by my ingle-lowe I saw,

Now bleezin' 2 bright,
A tight, outlandish hizzie,3 braw,

Come full in sight.

Ye need na doubt I held my whisht ;4
The infant aith, half-formed, was crushed ;
I glowr'd as eerie 's I 'd been dushed 5

In some wild glen ;
When sweet, like modest worth, she bluchel

And steppit ben.6

Green, slender, leaf-clad holly boughs
Were twisted, gracefu', round her brows ;
I took her for some Scottish Muse

By that same token ;
An* come to stop those reckless vows

Would soon been 7 broken.
A hair-brained, sentimental trace
Was strongly marked in her face ,
A y/ildly witty, rustic grace

Shone full upon her ;
Her eye, even turned on empty space,

Beamed keen with honour.

With musing, deep, astonished stare,
I viewed the heavenly-seeming fair ;
A whispering throb did witness bear

Of kindred sweet :
When, with an elder sister's air,

She did me greet : —
** All hail ! my own inspired bard !
In me thy native Muse regard !
Nor longer mourn thy fate is hard,

Thus poorly low !
I come to give thee such reward

As we bestow.

" Know the great Genius of this land
Has many a light aerial band,
Who, all beneath his high command,

Harmoniously,
As arts or arms they understand,

Their labours ply.

1 Latch. * Blazing. 8 Hussy. 4 Silence*

* I smred as frightened as if I Lad been attacked by a butting ram.

• Milked into the room. 7 Which would soon have been.

BURNS.

•* Of these am I — Coila my name ;
And this district as mine I claim,
Where once the Campbells, chiefs of fam*,

Held ruling power : —
I marked thy embryo tuneful flame

Thy natal hour.

** With future hope I oft would gaze
Fond on thy little early ways,
Thy rudely carolled chiming phrase

In uncouth rhymes,
Fired at the simple, artless lays

Of other times.

4< I saw thee seek the sounding shore,
Delighted with the dashing roar ;
Or, when the North his fleecy store

Drove through the sky,
I saw grim nature's visage hoar

Struck thy young eye.

" Or, when the deep-green-mantled earth
Warm cherished every floweret's birth,
And joy and music pouring forth

In every grove,
f saw thee eye the general mirth

With boundless love.

M When ripened fields and azure skies
< 'ailed forth the reapers' rustling noise
[ saw thee leave their evening joys,

And lonely stalk
To vent thy bosom's swelling rise

In pensive walk.

*• When youthful love, warm-blushing,
Keen-shivering shot thy nerves along,
Those accents, grateful to thy tongue,

The adored name,
I taught thee how to pour in song,

To soothe thy flame.

" I saw thy pulse's maddening play
Wild send thee pleasure's devious \\«>,
Misled by fancy s meteor ray,

By passion driven ;
But yet the light that led astray

Was light from he&ven.

** To give my counsels all in one,
Thy tuneful flame still careful fau ;

452 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Reserve the dignity of man

With soul erect ;
Vnd trust the universal plan

Will all protect.

» And wear thou this"— she solemn said,
And bound the holly round my head :
The polished leaves and berries red

Did rustling play ;
And like a passing thought, she fled

In light away.

BURNS.

Ye banks and braes, and streams around

The castle o' Montgomery
Green be your woods, and fair your flower*

Your waters never drumlie M

!re/!fimer first "nfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry!
For there I took the last farewell
3 my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloomed the gay green birk *

How rich the hawthorn's bloSom!
As underneath their fragrant shade

I clasp d her to my bosom !
The golden hours on angel wincrs

* lew o'er me and my dearie •
For dear to me as light and life

Was my sweet Highland Mary.

Wi* mony a vow and locked embrace

Our parting was fu' tender ;
Ano\ pledging aft to meet again,

We tore oursels asunder;
Bu* °h ! fell death's untimely frost,

Inat nipt my flower sae early !
Now green 's the sod, and cauld 's the clay

Phat wraps my Highland Mary!

0 pale, pale now those rosy lips

I aft hae kissed sae fondly !
And closed for aye the sparkling glance

That dwelt on me sae kindly |
And mouldering now in silent dust

That heart that lo'ed » me dearly !
But still within my bosom's core

Shall live my Highland Mary.

These compositions are so universally known, that it is i
less to give any others at full length? but we may hrow
* V -

we may row
Shim .--* Ver8eS half-verses gathered from several of

When o'er the hill the eastern star
Tells bughtin' 4 time is near, my joe •

And owsen8 frae the furrowed field
Return sae dowf • and weary, 0 ;

Birc1'-

451 ENGLISH LITERATURE ANt LANGUAdK.

Down by the burn, where scented birks
Wi' dew are hanging clear, my joe,

1*11 meet thee on the lea-rig,1
My ain 2 kind dearie, 0.

In mirkest 8 glen, at midnight hour,

1 'd rove, and ne'er be eerie,4 0,
If through that glen I gaed 5 to thee,

My ain kind dearie, O.
Although the night were ne'er sae wiltL,

And I were ne'er sae weary, 0,
I'd meet thee on the lea-rig,

My ain kind dearie, 0.

I hae sworn by the heavens to my Mary,

I hae sworn by the heavens to be true;
And sae may the heavens forget me,

When I forget my vow !
0 plight me your faith, my Mary,

And plight me your lily-white hand ;
0 plight me your faith, my Mary,

Before I leave Scotia's strand.
We hae plighted our troth, my Mary,

In mutual affection to join ;
And cursed be the cause that shall part us }

The hour, and the moment o' time !

0 poortith 6 cauld, and restless love,
Ye wreck my peace between ye ;

Yet poortith a' I could forgive,
An* 'twere na for my Jeanie.

O why should fate sic 7 pleasure have
Life's dearest bands untwining ?

Or why sae sweet a flower as love
Depend on fortune's shining ?

To thy bosom lay my heart.
There to throb and languish ;

Though despair had wrung its core,
That would heal its anguish.

On\s.«y ridge. 2 Own. 3 Darkest.

Frightened by dread of spirits. 8 Went. 6 Poverty. 7 Sucfc,

BURNS.

Take away those rosy lips,

Hich with balmy treasure :
Turn away thine eyes of love,

Lest I die with pleasure.

9 1 • . • • *

Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear,

Here 's a health to ane I lo'e dear ;
Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet.

And soft as their parting tear, Jessy I

Although thou maun l never be mine,

Although even hope is denied,
Tie sweeter for thee despairing

Than aught in the world beside, Jessy 1

Ae * fond kiss, and then we sever ;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever 1

Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted^
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
Fare thee weel, thou first and fairest !
Fare thee weel, thou best and dearest !

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever ;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever !

In all, indeed, that he has written best, Burns may be said to
have given us himself, — the passion or sentiment which swayed
or possessed him at the moment, — almost as much as in his
songs. In him the poet was the same as the man. He could
describe with admirable fidelity and force incidents, scenes,
manners, characters, or whatever else, which had fallen within
his experience or observation ; but he had little proper dramatic
imagination, or power of going out of himself into other natures,
and, as it were, losing his personality in the creations of his
fancy. His blood was too hot, his pulse beat too tumultuously,
for that ; at least he was during his short life too much the sport
both of his own passions and of many other stormy influences to
acquire such power of intellectual self-command and self-sup-
pression. What he might have attained to if a longer earthly
i Must J One.

•158

ENGLISH LITERATUKE AND LANGUAGE.

existence had been granted to him — or a less tempestuous one —
who shall say ? Both when his genius first blazed out upon the
world, and when its light was quenched by death, it seemed as
if he had been born or designed to do much more than he has
done. Having written what he wrote before his twenty-seventh
year, he had doubtless much more additional poetry in him than
he gave forth between that date and his death at the age of
thirty-seven — poetry which might now have been the world's
for ever" if that age had been worthy of such a gift of heaven aa
its glorioTMS poet.

THE MNETEENTH CENTURY.

Jr might almost seem as if there were something in the inv.
pressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the ter-
mination of one century and the commencement of another that
had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power
upon literary genius in these islands. Of the three last great
sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been
called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry,
threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and
the first of the seventeenth century ; the second, famous as the
Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the
eighteenth ; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the
third. At the tennination of the reign of George III., in
the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor
names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, each (whatever
discordance of opinion there might be about either their relative
or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from
the reading world to whatever he produced : — Crabbe (to take
them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we
ought to add Keats, though more for the shining promise of his
great but immature genius than for what he had actually done.
Many other voices there were from which divine words were
often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose
inspiration all men acknowledged. It is such crowding and
clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished
the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent
writers at other times, but they come singly or in small numbers,
as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Au-
gustan age of Roman literature ; as our own Milton and Dryden
did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of
Anne ; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper
and Burns, in twos and threes, or one by one, preceded and as it
were led in the rush and crush of our last revival. For such
single swallows, though they do not make, do yet commonly
herald the summer; and accordingly those remarkable writers
who have thus appeared between one great age of literature
and another have mostly, it may be observed, arisen not in the
earlier but in the later portion of the interval — have been not the

458 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

lagging successors of the last era, but the precursors of the next
However the fact is to be explained or accounted for, it does
indeed look as if Nature in this, as in other things, had her times
of production and of comparative rest and inactivity— her autumns
and her winters — or, as we may otherwise conceive it, her alter-
nations of light and darkness, of day and night. After a busy
and brilliant period of usually some thirty or forty years, there
has always followed in every country a long term during which
the literary spirit, as if overworked and exhausted, has mani-
fested little real energy or power of life, and even the very
demand and taste for the highest kind of literature, for depth,
and subtlety, and truth, and originality, and passion, and beauty,
has in a great measure ceased with the supply — a sober and
slumbrous twilight of imitation and mediocrity, and little more
than mechanical dexterity in bookmaking, at least with the gene-
rality of the most popular and applauded writers.

After all, the reawakening of our English literature, on each of
the three occasions we have mentioned, was probably brought
about mainly by the general political and social circumstances of
the country and of the world at the time. The poetical and dra-
matic wealth and magnificence of the era of Elizabeth and James
came, no doubt, for the most part, out of the passions that had
been stirred and the strength that had been acquired in the
mighty contests and convulsions which filled, here and through-
out Europe, the middle of the sixteenth century ; another break-
ing up of old institutions and re-edification of the state upon a
new foundation and a new principle, the work of the last sixty
years of the seventeenth centuiy, if it did not contribute much
to train the wits and fine writers of the age of Anne, at least
both prepared the tranquillity necessary for the restoration of
elegant literature, and disposed the public mind for its enjoy-
ment ; the poetical dayspring, finally, that came with our own
century was born with, and probably in some degree out of, a
third revolution, which shook both established institutions and
the minds and opinions of men throughout Europe as much
almost as the Reformation itself had done three centuries and a
half before. It is also to be observed that on each of these three
occasions the excitement appears to have come to us in part from
a foreign literature which had undergone a similar reawakening,
or put forth a new life and vigour, shortly before our own : in
the Elizabethan age the contagion or impulse was caught from
the literature of Italy ; in the age of Anne from that of France ;
in the present period from that of Germany.

459

THE LAST AGE OF THE GEORGES.
WORDSWORTH.

Tnis German inspiration operated most directly, and produced
the most marked effect, in the poetry of Wordsworth. Words-
worth, who was born in 1770, has preserved in the editions of
his collected works some of his verses written so long ago as
1 786 ; and he also continued to the last to reprint the two
earliest of his published poems, entitled An Evening Walk,
addressed to a Young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of
England, and Descriptive Sketches, taken during a pedestrian
tour among the Alps, both of which first appeared in 1793. The
recollection of the former of these poems probably suggested to
somebody, a few years later, the otherwise not very intelligible
designation of the Lake School, which has been applied to this
writer and his imitators, or supposed imitators. But the Even-
ing Walk and the Descriptive Sketches, which are both written
in the usual rhyming ten-syllabled verse, are perfectly orthodox
poems, according to the common creed, in spirit, manner, and
form. The peculiarities which are conceived to constitute what is
called the Lake manner first appeared in the Lyrical Ballads ; the
first volume of which was published in 1798, the second in 1800.

In the Preface to the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, the
author himself described his object as being to ascertain how far
the purposes of poetry might be fulfilled " by fitting to metrical
arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of
vivid sensation." It might, perhaps, be possible to defend this
notion by the aid of certain assumptions as to what is implied in,
or to be understood by, a state of vivid sensation, which it may
be contended is only another phrase for a state of poetical excite-
ment : undoubtedly the language of a mind in such a state, se-
lected, or corrected, and made metrical, will be poetry. It is
almost a truism to say so. Nay, we might go farther, and assert
that, in the circumstances supposed, the selection and the adapta-
tion to metrical arrangement would not be necessary ; the lan-
guage would flow naturally into something of a musical shape
(that being one of the conditions of poetical expression), and,
although it might be improved by correction, it would have all
the essentials of poetry as it was originally produced. But what
is evidently meant isf that the real or natural language of any
and every mind when simply in a state of excitement or passion
is necessarily poetical. The respect in which the doctrine differs
from that commonly held is, that it assumes mere passion or vivid
sensation to be in all men and in all cases substantially identical

460 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

with poetical excitement, and the language in which passir-tr
expresses itself to be consequently always poetry, at least after it
has undergone some purification or pruning, and been reduced to
metrical regularity. As for this qualification, we may remark
that it must be understood to mean nothing more than that the
language of passion is improved with reference to poetical effect
by being thus trained and regulated: otherwise the statement
would be contradictory and would refute itself; for, if passion,
or vivid sensation, always speaks in poetry, the metrical arrange-
ment and the selection are unnecessary and unwarrantable ; if
these operations be indispensable, the language of vivid sensation
is not always poetry. But surely it is evident from the nature of
the thing that it is altogether a misconception of what poetry is
to conceive it to be nothing more than the language naturally
prompted by passion or strong emotion. If that were all, all
men, all women, and all children would be poets. Poetry, in
the first place, is an art, just as painting is an art ; and the one
is no more to be practised solely under the guidance of strong
emotion than the other. Secondly, poetical emotion is something
as distinct from mere ordinary passion or excitement as is musical
emotion, or the feeling of the picturesque or the beautiful or the
grand in painting or in architecture ; the one may and often does
exist where there exists nothing of the other. Nobody has ever
thought of defining music to be merely the natural vocal utter-
ance of men in a state of vivid sensation, or painting to be nothing
more than their natural way of expressing themselves when in
such a state by lines and colours : no more is poetry simply their
real language, or expression by words, when in such a state. It
makes no difference that words are a mode of expression of which
men have much more generally the use than they have the use of
either colours or musical sounds ; if all men could sing or could
handle the brush, they still would not all be musicians and
painters whenever they were in a passion.

It is true that even in the rudest minds emotion will tend to
make the expression more vivid and forcible ; but it will not for
all that necessarily rise to poetry. Emotion or excitement alone
will not produce that idealization in which poetry consists. To
have that effect the excitement must be of a peculiar character,
and the mind in which it takes place must be peculiarly gifted.
The mistake has probably arisen from a confusion of two things
which are widely different — the real language of men in a state
of excitement, and the imaginative imitation of such language
in the artistic delineation of the excitement. The lattor alone
will necessarily or universally be poetical ; the former may be

WORDSWORTH. 46J

the veriest of prose. It may be said, indeed, that it is not men's
real language, but the imitation of it, which is meant to be
called poetry by Wordsworth and his followers— that, of course,
their own poetry, even when most conformable to their own
theory, can only consist of what they conceive would be the real
language of persons placed in the circumstances of those from
whom it professes to proceed. But this explanation, besides that
it leaves the theory we are examining, considered as an account
or definition of poetry, as narrow and defective as ever, still
assumes that poetical imitation is nothing more than transcrip-
tion, or its equivalent — such invention as comes as near as
possible to what literal transcription would be ; which is the
very misapprehension against which we are arguing. It is
equally false, we contend, to say that poetry is nothing more
than either the real language of men in a state of excitement, or
the mere imitation, the closer the better, of that real language.
The imitation must be an idealized imitation — an intermingling
of the poet with his subject by which it receives a new charac-
ter ; just as, in painting, a great portrait, or other picture from
nature, is never a fac-simile copy, but always as much a reflec-
tion from the artist's own spirit as from the scene or object it
represents. The realm of nature and the realm of art, although
counterparts, are nevertheless altogether distinct the one from
the other ; and both painting and poetry belong to the latter,
uot to the former.

We cannot say that Wordsworth's theory of poetry has been
altogether without effect upon his practice, but it has shown
itself rather by some deficiency of refinement in his general
manner than by very much that he has written in express con-
formity with its requisitions. We might affirm, indeed, that its
principle is as much contradicted and confuted by the greater
part of his own poetry as it is by that of all languages and all
times in which poetry has been written, or by the universal past
experience of mankind in every age and country. He is a great
poet, and has enriched our literature with much beautiful and
noble writing, whatever be the method or principle upon which
he constructs, or fancies that he constructs, his compositions.
His Laodamia, without the exception of a single line, his Lonely
Leech-gatherer, with the exception of very few lines ; his Ruth,
his Tintern Abbey, his Feast of Brougham, the Water Lily, the
greater part of the Excursion, most of the Sonnets, his great
Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood, and
many of his shorter lyrical pieces, are nearly as unexceptionable
iu diction as they are deep and true in feeling, judged according

i62 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

to any rules or principles of art that are now patronized by auy
body. It is true, indeed, that it will not do to look at anything
that Wordsworth has written through the spectacles of that
species of criticism which was in vogue among us in the last
century ; we believe that in several of the pieces we have named
even that narrow and superficial doctrine (if it could be recalled
from the tomb) would find little or nothing to object to, but we
fear it would find as little to admire ; it had no feeling or under-
standing of the poetry of any other era than its own, — neither of
that of Homer, nor that of the Greek dramatists, nor that of our
own Elizabethan age, — and it certainly would not enter far into
the spirit either of that of Wordsworth or of any of his eminent
contemporaries or successors. It is part, and a great part, of
what the literature of Germany has done for us within the last
sixty years, that it has given a wider scope and a deeper insight
to our perception and mode of judging of the poetical in all its
forms and manifestations ; and the poetry of Wordsworth has
materially aided in establishing this revolution of taste and
critical doctrine, by furnishing the English reader with some of
the earliest and many of the most successful or most generally
appreciated examples and illustrations of the precepts of the
new faith. Even the errors of Wordsworth's poetical creed and
practice, the excess to which he has sometimes carried his em-
ployment of the language of the uneducated classes, and his
attempts to extract poetical effects out of trivial incidents and
humble life, were fitted to be rather serviceable than injurious
in the highly artificial state of our poetry when he began to write.
He may not have succeeded in every instance in which he has
tried to glorify the familiar and elevate the low, but he has
nevertheless taught us that the domain of poetry is much wider
and more various than it used to be deemed, that there is a greaf
deal of it to be found where it was formerly little the fashion to
look for anything of the kind, and that the poet does not abso-
lutely require for the exercise of his art and the display of his
powers what are commonly called illustrious or distinguished
characters, and an otherwise dignified subject, any more than
long and learned words. Among his English contemporaries
Wordsworth stands foremost and alone as the poet of common
life. It is not his only field, nor perhaps the field in which he
is greatest ; but it is the one which is most exclusively his own.
He has, it is true, no humour or comedy of any kind in him
(which is perhaps the explanation of the ludicrous touches that
Bometimes startle us in his serious poetry), and therefore he is not,
and seldom attempts to be, what Burns was for his countrymen,

WORDSWORTH. 4G3

the poetic interpreter, and, as such, refiner as well as embalmer,
of the wit and merriment of the common people : the writer by
whom that title is to be won is yet to arise, and probably from
among the people themselves : but of whatever is more tender
or more thoughtful in the spirit of ordinary life in England the
poetry of Wordsworth is the truest and most comprehensive
transcript we possess. Many of his verses, embodying as they
do the philosophy as well as the sentiment of this every-day
human experience, have a completeness and impressiveness, as of
texts, mottoes, proverbs, the force of which is universally felt,
and has already worked them into the texture and substance of
the language to a far greater extent, we apprehend, than has
happened in the case of any contemporary writer.

Wordsworth, though only a few years deceased, for he sur-
vived till 1850, nearly sixty years after the publication of his
first poetry, is already a classic ; and, extensively as he is now
read and appreciated, any review of our national literature
would be very incomplete without at least a few extracts from
his works illustrative of the various styles in which he has
written. As a specimen of what may be called his more peculiar
manner, or that which is or used to be more especially under-
stood by the style of the Lake School of poetry, we will begin
with the well-known verses entitled The Fountain, a Conversa-
tion, which, in his own classification, are included among what
he designates Poems of Sentiment and Keflection, and are stated
to have been composed in 1799 : —

We talked with open heart, and tongue

Affectionate and true,
A pair of friends, though I was young,

And Matthew seventy-two.
We lay beneath a spreading oak,

Beside a mossy seat ;
And from the turf a fountain broke,

And gurgled at our feet.
" Now, Matthew !" said I, u let us match

This water's pleasant tune
With some old Border-song, or catch

That suits a summer's noon ;
Or of the church-clock and the chimes

Sing here, beneath the shade,
That half-mad thing of witty rhymes

Which you last April made I"
In silence Matthew lay, and eyed

The spring beneath the tree ; •
And thus the dear old man replied,
The grey-haired man of glee :

461 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

** No check, no stay, this streamlet feare^

How merrily it goes !
Twill murmur on a thousand years,

And flow as now it flows.

And here, on this delightful day,
I cannot choose but think

How oft, a vigorous man, I lay
Beside this fountain's brink.

My eyes are dim with childish tears,

My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears

Which in those days I heard.

Thus fares it still in our decay :

And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away

Than what it leaves behind.

The blackbird amid leafy trees,

The lark above the hill,
Let loose their carols when they please,

Are quiet when they will.

With nature never do they wage
A foolish strife ; they see

A happy youth, and their old agi
Is beautiful and free :

But we are pressed by heavy laws :

And often, glad no more,
We wear a face of joy, because

We have been glad of yore.

If there be one who need bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,

The household hearts that were his cxw.
It is the man of mirth.

My days, my friend, are almost gone.
My life has been approved,

And many love me ; but by none
Am I enough beloved."

"Now, both himself and me he wrongB,
The man who thus complains !

I live and sing my idle songs
Upon these happy plains,

And, Matthew, for thy children dead

I'll be a sou to thee!"
At this he grasped my hand, and said.

"Alas! that cannot be !"

WORDSWORTH. iC5

We rose up from the fountain-side ;

And down the smooth descent
Of the green sheep-track did we glide ,

And through the wood we went ;

And, ere we came to Leonard's Rock,

He sang those witty rhymes
About the crazy old church-clock,

And the bewildered chimes.

The following, entitled The Affliction of Margaret, dated 1804,
and classed among the Poems founded on the Affections, is moro
impassioned, but still essentially in the same style : —

Where art thou, my beloved son,
Where art thou, worse to me than dead ?
Oh find me, prosperous or undone !
Or, if the grave be now thy bed,
Why am I ignorant of the same,
That I may rest ; and neither blame
Nor sorrow may attend thy name ?

Seven years, alas ! to have received
No tidings of an only child ;
To have despaired, have hoped, believed,
And been for evermore beguiled ;
Sometimes with thoughts of very bliss !
I catch at them, and then I miss ;
Was ever darkness like to this ?

He was among the prime in worth,
An object beauteous to behold ;
Well born, well bred ; 1 sent him forth
Ingenuous, innocent, and bold :
If things ensued that wanted grace,
As hath been said, they were not base ;
And never blush was on my face.

Ah ! little doth the young one dream,
When full of play and childish cares,
What power is in his wildest scream,
Heard by his mother unawares !
He knows it not, he cannot guess :
Years to a mother bring distress ;
But do not make her love the less.

Neglect me ! no, I suffered long
From that ill thought ; and, being blind,
Said, " Pride shall help me in my wrong i
Kind mother have I been, as kind
As ever breathed :" and that is true ;
fve wet my path with tears like dew,
Weeping for him when no one knew.

2 H

106 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

My son, if thou "be humbled, poor,
Hopeless of honour and of gain,
Oh ! /do not dread thy mother's door;
Think not of me with grief and pain :
I now can see with better eyes ;
And worldly grandeur I despise,
And Fortune with her gifts and lies.

Alas ! the fowls of heaven have wings,
And blasts of heaven will aid their flight »
They mount — how short a voyage bringa
The wanderers back to their delight !
Chains tie us down by land and sea ;
And wishes, vain as mine, may be
All that is left to comfort thee.

Perhaps some dungeon hears thec groan,
Maimed, mangled, by inhuman men ;
Or thou, upon a desert thrown,
Inheritest the lion's den ;
Or hast been summoned to the deep,
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep
An incommunicable sleep.

I look for ghosts ; but none will force
Their way to me : — 'tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead ;
For, surely, then I should have sight
Of him I wait for day and night
With love and longings infinite.

My apprehensions come in crowds;
I dread the rustling of the grass ;
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass ;
I question things, and do not find
One that will answer to my mind ;
And all the world appears unkind.

Beyond participation lie
My troubles, and beyond relief :
If any chance to heave a sigh,
They pity me, and not my grief.
Then come to me, my Son, or send
Some tidings that my woes may end ;
I have no other earthly friend 1

Here is another from the same class, and still in the samo
style, dated 1798. The verses are very beautiful; they bear
some resemblance to the touching old Scotch ballad called Lady
Anna Bothwell's Lament, beginning

TORDSWORTH. 4<TT

Balow, my boy, lie still and sleep ;
It grieves me sair to see thee weep —

of which there is a copy in Percy's Eeliques, and others, differ-
ing considerably from that, in other collections : —

Her eyes are wild, her head is bare,
The sun has burned her coal-black hair ;
Her eyebrows have a rusty stain,
And she came far from over the main.
She has a baby on her arm,

Or else she were alone :
And underneath the haystack warm,

And on the greenwood stone,
She talked and sung the woods among,
And it was in the English tongue.

" Sweet babe, they say that I am mad
But nay, my heart is far too glad ;
And I am happy when I sing
Full many a sad and doleful thing :
Then, lovely baby, do not fear !
I pray thee, have no fear of me ;
But safe as in a cradle, here,
My lovely baby, shalt thou be :
To thee I know too much I owe ;
I cannot work thee any woe.

A fire was once within my brain ;
And in my head a dull, dull pain ;
And fiendish faces, one, two, three,
Hung at my breast, and pulled at me;
But then there came a sight of joy,
It came at once to do me good ;
I waked, and saw my little boy,
My little boy of flesh and blood ;
Oh joy for me that sight to see I
For he was there, and only he.

Suck, little babe, oh suck again !
It cools my blood, it cools my brain ;
Thy lips I feel them, baby ! they
Draw from my heart the pain away.
Oh ! press me with thy little hand ;
It loosens something at my chest ;
About that tight and deadly baud
I feel thy little fingers prest.
The breeze I see is in the tree :
It comes to cool my babe and ino.

Oh ! love me, love me, little boy 1
Thou art thy mother's only joy ;

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And do not dread the waves below
When o'er the sea-rock's edge we go ;
The high crag cannot work me harm,
Nor leaping torrents when they howl ;
The babe I carry on my arm
He saves for me my precious soul ;
Then happy lie ; for blest am I ;
Without me my sweet babe would dio.

Then do not fear, my boy ! for thee
Bold as a lion will I be :
And I will always be thy guide,
Through hollow snows and rivers \vidr.
I'll build an Indian bower ; I know
The leaves that make the softest bed :
And if from me thou wilt not go,
But still be true till I am dead,
My pretty thing, then thou shalt sing
As merry as the birds in spring.

Thy father cares not for my breast,
'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest ;
'Tis all thine own ! — and, if its hue
Be changed, that was so fair to view,
'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove !
My beauty, little child, is flown,
But thou wilt live with me in love ;
And what if my poor cheek be brown ?
'Tis well for thee, thou canst not see
How pale and wan it else would be.

Dread not their taunts, my little life ;
I am thy father's wedded wife ;
And underneath the spreading tree
We two will live in honesty.
If his sweet boy he could forsake,
With me he never would have stayed ;
From him no harm my babe can take ;
But he, poor man ! is wretched made ;
And every day we two will pray
For him that 's gone and far away.

I '11 teach my boy the sweetest things,
I '11 teach him how the owlet sings.
My little babe ! thy lips are still,
And thou hast almost sucked thy fill.

Where art thou gone, my own dear chilu ?

What wicked looks are those I see ?
Alas ! alas ! that look so wild,
It never, never came from rne :
If thou art mad, my pretty lad,
Then I must be for ever sad.

WORDSWORTH. 4G9

Oh ! smile on me, my little lamb !
For I thy own dear mother am.
My love for thee has well been tried :
I 've sought thy father far and wide.
I knew the poisons of the shade,

know the earth-nuts fit for food :
Then, pretty dear, be not afraid :
We '11 find thy father in the wood.
Ndw laugh and be gay, to the woods away !
And there, my babe, we '11 live for aye."

But much, perhaps we might say the greater part, of Words-
worth's poetry is in a very different style or manner. Take, for
example, his noble Laodamia, dated 1814, and in the later editions
placed among what he calls Poems of the Imagination, thougu
formerly classed as one of the Poems founded on the Affec-
tions: —

" With sacrifice before the rising morn
Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired ;
And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required :
Celestial pity I again implore : —
Restore him to my sight — great Jove, restore !"

So speaking, and by fervent love endowed

With faith, the suppliant heavenward lifts her hands ;

While, like the sun emerging from a cloud,

Her countenance brightens — and her eye expands ;

Her bosom heaves and spreads, her stature grows ;

And she expects the issue in repose.

0 terror ! what hath she perceived ? 0 joy !
What doth she look on ? Whom doth she behold ?
Her Hero slain upon the beach of Troy ?
His vital presence ? his corporeal mould ?
It is — if sense deceive her not — 'tis He !
And a God leads him, winged Mercury !

Mild Hermes spake — and touched her with his wand

That calms all fear ; " Such grace hath crowned thy prayor,

Laodamia ! that at Jove's command

Thy husband walks the paths of upper air :

He comes to tarry with thee three hours' space ;

Accept the gift, behold him face to face !"

Forth sprang the impassioned Queen her Lord to clasp ;

Again that consummation she assayed ;

But unsubstantial form eludes her grasp

As often as that eager grasp was made.

The Phantom parts—but parts to re-unite,

And re-assume his place before her sight.

470 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

" Protesilaus, lo ! thy guide is gone !

Confirm, I pray, the Vision with thy voice :

This is our palace, — yonder is thy throne ;

Speak, and the floor thou tread'st on will rejoice.

Not to appal me have the Gods bestowed

This precious boon ; and blest a sad abode."

" Great Jove, Laodamia ! doth not leave

His gifts imperfect : — Spectre though I be^

I am not sent to scare thee or deceive ;

But in reward of thy fidelity.

And something also did my worth obtain ;

For fearless virtue bringeth boundless gain.

Thou knowest, the Delphic oracle foretold

That the first Greek 'vho touched the Trojan strand

Should die ; but me the threat could not withhold ;

A generous cause a victim did demand ;

And forth I leapt upon the sandy plain ;

A self-devoted chief — by Hector slain."

" Supreme of Heroes — bravest, noblest, best I

Thy matchless courage I bewail no more,

Which then, when tens of thousands were deprest

By doubt, propelled thee to the fatal shore :

Thou found'st — and I forgive thee — here thou art—

A nobler counsellor than my poor heart.

But thou, though capable of sternest deed,

Wert kind as resolute, and good as brave ;

And he, whose power restores thee, hath decreed

That thou should'st cheat the malice of the grave ;

Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair

As when their breath enriched Thessalian air.

No Spectre greets me, — no vain Shadow this ;

Come, blooming Hero, place thee by my side !

Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss

To me, this daj% a second time thy bride !"

Jove frowned in heaven : the conscious Parcae thre

Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue.

" This visage tells thee that my doom is past :

Nor should the change be mourned, even if the joyc

Of sense were able to return as fast

And surely as they vanish. — Earth destroys

Those raptures duly — Erebus disdains :

Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains.

Be taught, 0 faithful Consort, to control

Rebellious passion : for the Gods approve

The depth, and not the tumult of the soul ;

A fervent, not ungovernable love.

Thy transports moderate ; and meekly inoum

When I depart, for brief is my sojourn." —

WORDSWORTH.

•' Ah, wherefore ? — Did not Hercules by force
Wrest from the guardian monster of the tomb
Alcestis, a reanimated corse,
Given back to dwell on earth in vernal bloom ?
Medea's spells dispersed the weight of years,
And Aeson stood a youth 'mid youthful peers.
The Gods to us are merciful — and they
Yet further may relent : for mightier far
Than strength of nerve and sinew, or the sway
Of magic potent over sun and star,
Is love, though oft to agony distrest,
And though his favourite seat be feeble woman's brewd
But if thou goest I follow "— -" Peace !" he said-
She looked upon him and was calmed and cheered ;
The ghastly colour from his lips had fled ;
In his deportment, shape, and mien appeared
Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive, though a happy place.
He spake of love, such love as Spirits feel
In worlds whose course is equable and pure ;
No fears to beat away — no strife to heal —
The past unsighed for, and the future sure ;
Spake of heroic acts in graver mood
Revived, with finer harmony pursued ;
Of all that is most beauteous — imaged there
In happier beauty ; more puilucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams ;
Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day
Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey.
Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned
That privilege by virtue. — " 111," said he,
" The end of man's existence I discerned,
Who from ignoble games and revelry
Could draw, when we had parted, vain delight,
While tears were thy best pastime day and night :
And while my youthful peers before my eyes
(Each hero following his peculiar bent)
Prepared themselves for glorious enterprise
By martial sports, — or, seated in the tent,
Chieftains and kings in council were detained ;
What time the fleet at Aulis lay enchained.
The wished-for wind was given :— I then revolved
The- oracle upon the silent sea ;
And,.if no worthier led the way, resolved
That, of a thousand vessels, mine should be
The iuremost prow in pressing to the strand, —
Mine the first blood that tinged the Trojan sand.

'173 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Yet bitter, oftiraes bitter, was the pang

When of thy loss I thought, beloved wife !

On thee too fondly did my memory hang,

And on the joys we shared in mortal life, —

The paths which we had trod — these fountains, flowers ;

My new-planned cities, and unfinished towers.

But should suspense permit the foe to cry,
* Behold, they tremble ! — haughty their array,
Yet of their number no one dares to die ?'
In soul I swept the indignity away :
Old frailties then recurred : — but lofty thought,
In act embodied, my deliverance wrought.

And thou, though strong in love, art all too weak

In reason, in self-government too slow ;

I counsel thee by fortitude to seek

Our blest reunion in the shades below.

The invisible world with thee hath sympathised ;

Be thy affections raised and solemnised.

-Learn, by a mortal yearning, to ascend —
Seeking a higher object. Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for that end ;
!For this the passion to excess was driven —
That self might be annulled ; her bondage prove
The fetters of a dream, opposed to love." l

Aloud she shrieked ! for Hermes reappears !

Bound the dear shade she would have clung — ' tis vftia

The hours are past — too brief had they been years ;

And him no mortal effort can detain :

Swift, towards the realms that know not earthly day

He through tjie portal takes his silent way,

And on the palace floor a lifeless corse she lay.

She — who, though warned, exhorted, and reproved,
Thus died, from passion desperate to a crime —
By the just Gods, whom no weak pity moved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time,
Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers.

Yet tears to mortal suffering are due ;
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, — and not by man alone,

1 The reader of Milton will remember the same idea in the Eighth Book of
I 'artuliso Lost : —

" Love refines , ^

The thoughts, and heart enlarges ; hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious ; is the scale
By which to heavenly love thou may'st ascend."

WORDSWORTH. 473:

As fondly he believes. — Upon the side
Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained)
A knot of spiry trees for ages grew
From out the tomb of him for whom she died ;
And ever, when such stature they had gained
That Ilium's walls were subject to their view,
The trees' tall summits withered at the sight ;
A constant interchange of growth and blight.

In the same grand strain is very much especially of Words-
worth's later poetry. Neither puerility nor over familiarity of
diction, with whatever other faults they may be chargeable, can
well be attributed to either the Excursion, or the Sonnets, or
tbe Odes. But it is, on the other hand, a misconception to
imagine that this later poetry is for the most part enveloped in a
haze through which the meaning is only to be got at by initiated
eyes. Nothing like this is the case. The Excursion, published
in 1814, for instance, with the exception of a very few passages,
is a poem that he who runs may read, and the greater part of
which may be apprehended by readers of all classes as readily as
almost any other poetry in the language. We may say the same
even of The Prelude, or Introduction to the Kecluse (intended to
consist of three Parts, of which The Excursion is the second, the
'first remaining in manuscript, and the third having been only
^planned), which was begun in 1799 and completed in 1805,
although not published till a few months after the author's death
in 1850 ; an elaborate poem, in fourteen books, of eminent interest
as the poet's history of himself, and of the growth of his own
mind, as well as on other accounts, and long before charac-
terized by Coleridge, to whom it is addressed, as

" An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted."*

* In reference, no doubt, to Wordsworth's own lines, in the First Book of
the Poem : —

" Some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life ;
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man's heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to tbe Orphean lyre."

And here, again, we have the echo of Milton's line, in the Third Book cf
Paradise Lost : —

•• With other notes than to the Orphean lyre. '

474 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

COLERIDGE.

In all that constitutes artistic character the poetry of Coleridgo
is a contrast to that of Wordsworth. Coleridge, born in 1772,
published the earliest of his poetry that is now remembered in
1796, in a small volume containing also some pieces by Charles
Lamb, to which some by Charles Lloyd were added in a second
edition the following year. I* was not till 1800, after he had
produced and printed separately his Ode to the Departing Year
(1796), his no Die ode entitled France (1 79 7 J, his Fears in Soli-
tude (1798), and his translations of both parts of Schiller's
Wallenstein, that he was first associated as a poet and author
with Wordsworth, in the second volume of whose Lyrical Ballads,
published in 1800, appeared, as the contributions of an anonymous
friend, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Foster Mother's Tale, Night-
ingale, and Love. " I should not have requested this assist-
ance," said Wordsworth, in his preface, " had I not believed
that the poems of my friend would, in a great measure, have the
same tendency as my own, and that, though there would be
found a difference, there would be found no discordance, in the
colours of our style ; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do
almost entirely coincide." Coleridge's own account, however, is
somewhat different. In his Biographia Literaria, he tells us
that, besides the Ancient Mariner, he was preparing for the
conjoint publication, among other poems, the Dark Ladie and
the Christabel, in which he should have more nearly realized his
ideal than he had done in his first attempt, when the volume
was brought out with so much larger a portion of it the produce
of Wordsworth's indust^ than his own, that his few compo-
sitions, " instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an inter-
polation of heterogeneous matter ;" and then he adds, in reference
to the long preface in which Wordsworth had expounded his
theory of poetry, «* With many parts of this preface in the sense
attributed to them, and which the words undoubtedly seem to
authorize, I never concurred ; but, on the contrary, objected to
them as erroneous in principle and contradictory (in appearance
at least) both to other parts of the same preface, and to the
author's own practice in the greater number of the poems them-
selves."

Coleridge's poetry is remarkable for the perfection of its exe-
cution, for the exquisite art with which its divine spirit is
endowed with formal expression. The subtly woven words, with
all their sky colours, seem to grow out of the thought or emotion,

COLERIDGE. 475

as the flower from its stalk, or the flame from its feeding oil.
The music of his verse, too, especially of what he has written
in rhyme, is as sweet and as characteristic as anything in the
language, placing him for that rare excellence in the same small
band with Shakespeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher (in their
lyrics), and Milton, and Collins, and Shelley, and Tennyson. It
was probably only quantity that was wanting to make Coleridgo
the greatest poet of his day. Certainly, at least, some things
that he has written have not been surpassed, if they have been
matched, by any of his contemporaries. And (as indeed has
been the case with almost all great poets) he continued to write
better and better the longer he wrote ; some of his happiest
verses were the produce of his latest years. To quote part of
what we have said in a paper published immediately after Cole-
ridge's death : — " Not only, as we proceed from his earlier to his
later compositions, does the execution become much more artistic
and perfect, but the informing spirit is refined and purified — the
tenderness grows more delicate and deep, the fire brighter and
keener, the sense of beauty more subtle and exquisite. Yet from
the first there was in all he wrote the divine breath which essen-
tially makes poetry what it is. There was * the shaping spirit
of imagination,' evidently of soaring pinion and full of strength,
though as yet sometimes unskilfully directed, and encumbered
in its flight by an affluence of power which it seemed hardly to
know how to manage : hence an unselecting impetuosity in
these early compositions, never indicating anything like poverty
of thought, but producing occasionally considerable awkwardness
and turgidity of style, and a declamatory air, from which na
poetry was ever more free than that of Coleridge in its maturer
form. Yet even among these juvenile productions are many
passages, and some whole pieces, of perfect gracefulness, and
radiant with the purest sunlight of poetry. There is, for example,
the most beautiful delicacy of sentiment, as well as sweetness
of versification and expression, in the following lines, simple as
they are ; —

Maid of my love, sweet Genevieve !

In beauty's light you glide along ;

Your eye is like the star of eve,

And sweet your voice as Seraph's song.

Yet not your heavenly beauty gives

This heart with passion soft to glow :

Within your soul a voice there lives !

Jt bids you hear the tale of woe.

When, sinking low, the sufferer wan

Beholds no hand outstretched to save.

4761. ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Fair, as the bosom of the swan

That rises graceful o'er the wave,

I 've seen your breast with pity heave ;

And therefore love I you, sweet Genevieve !

And the following little picture, entitled Time, Real and
Imaginary, is a gem worthy of the poet in the most thoughtful
and philosophic strength of his faculties : —

On the wide level of a mountain's head
(I knew not where, but 'twas some fairy place),
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails outspread,
Two lovely children ran an endless race ;

A sister and a brother !

That far outstripped the other ;
Yet ever runs she with reverted face,
And looks and listens for the boy behind :

For he, alas ! is blind !

O'er rough and smooth with even step he passed,
And knows not whether he be first or last.

In a different manner, and more resembling that of these early
poems in general, are many passages of great power in the
Monody on the Death of Chattel-ton, and in the Eeligious
Musings, the latter written in 1794, when the author was only
in his twenty-third year. And, among other remarkable pieces
of a date not much later, might be mentioned the ode entitled
France, written in 1797, which Shelley regarded as the finest
ode in the language ; his Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, written,
we believe, about the same time; his ode entitled Dejection;
his blank verse lines entitled The Nightingale ; his Rime of the
Ancient Mariner, and his exquisite verses entitled Love, to
which last for their union of passion with delicacy, and of both
with the sweetest, richest music, it would be difficult to find a
match in our own or any language.

" Of Coleridge's poetry, in its most matured form and in its
best specimens, the most distinguishing characteristics are vivid-
ness of imagination and subtlety of thought, combined with
unrivalled beauty and expressiveness of diction, and the most
exquisite melody of verse. With the exception of a vein of
melancholy and meditative tenderness, flowing rather from a
contemplative survey of the mystery — the strangely mingled
good and evil — of all things human, than connected with any
individual interests, there is not in general much of passion in
his compositions, and he is not well fitted, therefore, to become
a very popular poet, or a favourite with the multitude. His
love itself, warm and tender as it is, is still Platonic and spiritual

COLERIDGE. 477

in its tenderness, rather than a thing of flesh and blood. Thoro
is nothing in his poetry of the pulse of fire that throbs in that
of Burns ; neither has he much of the homely every-day truth,
the proverbial and universally applicable wisdom, of Words-
worth. Coleridge was, far more than either of these poets, * of
imagination all compact.' The fault of his poetry is the same
that belongs to that of Spenser ; it is too purely or unalloyedly
poetical. But rarely, on the other hand, has there existed an
imagination in which so much originality and daring were asso
ciated and harmonized with so gentle and tremblingly delicate a
sense of beauty. Some of his minor poems especially, for the
richness of their colouring combined with the most perfect
finish, can be compared only to the flowers which spring up
into loveliness at the touch of * great creating nature.' The
words, the rhyme, the whole flow of the music seem to be not so
much the mere expression or sign of the thought as its blossoming
or irradiation — of the bright essence the equally bright though
sensible effluence."*

In most of Coleridge's latest poetry, however, along with this
perfection of execution, in which he was unmatched, we have
more body and warmth — more of the inspiration of the heart
mingling with that of the fancy. The following lines are
entitled Work without Hope, and are stated to have b3en com-
posed 21st February, 1827 : —

All nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair —
The bees are stirring— birds are on the wing —
And winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring !
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, 0 ye amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away !
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll :
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ?
AVork without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
To about the same date belongs the following, entitled Youth

*nd Age : —

Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying,
Where Hope clung feeding, like a bee —

Printing Machine, No. 12, for 16th August, 1834

473 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Both were mine ! Life went a maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy,

When I was young !

When I was young? — Ah, woeful when !
Ah ! for the change 'twixt now and then !
This breathing house not built with hands,
This body that does me grievous wrong,
O'er airy cliffs and glittering sands
How lightly then it flashed along : —
Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore,
On winding lakes and rivers wide,
That ask no aid of sail or oar,
That fear no spite of wind or tide !
Nought cared this body for wind or weather
When youth and I lived in't together.

Flowers are lovely ; love is flower-like ;
Friendship is a sheltering tree ;
0 ! the joys that came down shower-like,
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty,
Ere I was old !

Ere I was old ? — Ah, woeful ere,
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here !

0 Youth ! for years so many and sweet
*Tis known that thoti and I were one ;
I'll think it but a fond conceit —

It cannot be, that thou art gone !
Thy vesper-bell hath not yet tolled : —
And thou wert aye a masker bold !
What strange disguise hast now put on.
To make believe that thou art gone ?

1 see these locks in silvery slips,
This drooping gait, this altered size :
But springtide blossoms on thy lips,
And tears take sunshine from thine eyes 1
Life is but thought : so think I will
That Youth and I are house-mates still.

Dew-drops are the gems of morning,
But the tears of mourn ful eve !
Where no hope is, life's a warning
That only serves to make us grieve,

When we are old :
That only serves to make us grieve,
With oft and tedious taking leave ;
Like some poor nigh-related guest,
That may not rudely be dismist,
Yet hath outstayed his welcome while,
And tells the jest without the smile.

The following may have been written a few years I&tor,

COLERIDGE. 479

It winds up a prose dialogue between two girls and their elderly
male friend the Poet, or Improvisatoro, as he is more familiarly
styled, who, after a most eloquent description of that rare mutual
love, the possession of which he declares would be more than
an adequate reward for the rarest virtue, to the remark, " Surely,
he who has described it so well must have possessed it ?" replies,
" If he were worthy to have possessed it, and had believingly
anticipated and not found it, how bitter the disappointment !"
and then, after a pause, breaks out into verse thus : —

Yes, yes ! that boon, life's richest treat,
He had, or fancied that he had ;
Say, 'twas but in his own conceit —

The fancy made him glad !
Crown of his cup, and garnish of his dish,
The boon prefigured in his earliest wish^
The fair fuliilment of his poesy,
"When his young heart first yearned for sympathy
But e'en the meteor offspring of the brain

CJnnourished wane ;
Faith asks her daily bread,
And fancy must be fed.
Now so it chanced — from wet or dry,
It boots not how — I know not why —
She missed her wonted food ; and quickly
Poor fancy staggered and grew sickly.
Then came a restless state, 'twixt yea and nay,
His faith was fixed, his heart all ebb and flow ;
Or like a bark, in some half-sheltered bay,
Above its anchor driving to and fro.
That boon, which but to have possest
In a belief gave life a zest —
Uncertain both what it had been,
And if by error lost, or luck ;
And what it was ; — an evergreen
Which some insidious blight had struck,
Or annual flower, which, past its blow,
No vernal spell shall e'er revive I
Uncertain, and afraid to know,

Doubts tossed him to and fro :
Hope keeping Love, Love Hope, alive,
Like babes bewildered in the snow,
That cling and huddle from the cold
In hollow tree or ruined fold.
Those sparkling colours, once his boast,

Fading, one by one away,
Thin and hueless as a ghost,

Poor fancy on her sick-bed lay ;

430 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Ill at a distance, worse when near,
Telling her dreams to jealous fear !
Where was it then, the sociable sprite
That crowned the poet's cup and decked his dish !
Poor shadow cast from an unsteady wish,
Itself a substance by no other right
But that it intercepted reason's light ;
It dimmed his eye, it darkened on his brow :
A peevish mood, a tedious time, I trow !
Thank heaven ! 'tis not so now.

0 bliss of blissful hours !
The boon of heaven's decreeing,
"While yet in Eden's bowers
Dwelt the first husband and his sinless mate !
The one sweet plant, which, piteous heaven agreeing,
They bore with them through Eden's closing gate !
Of life's gay summer tide the sovran rose !
•...." Late autumn's amaranth, that more fragrant blows
When passion's flowers all fall or fade ;
If this were ever his in outward being,
Or but his own true love's projected shade,
Now that at length by certain proof he knows
That, whether real cr a magic show,
Whate'er it was, it is no longer so ;
Though heart be lonesome, hope laid low,
Yet, lady, deem him not unblest ;
The certainty that struck hope dead
Hath left contentment in her stead :
And that is next to best !

And still more perfect and altogether exquisite, we tLink,
than anything we have yet given, is the following, entitled
Love, Hope, and Patience, in Education : —

O'er wayward childhood would'st thou hold firm rule,
And sun thee in the light of happy faces ;
Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.
For, as old Atlas on his broad neck places
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it, — so
Do these upbear the little world below
Of Education, — Patience, Love, and Hope.
Methinks, I see them grouped in seemly show,
The straitened arms upraised, the palms aslope,
And robes that touching, as adown they flow,
Distinctly blend, like snow embossed in snow.

0 part them never ! If Hope prostrate lie,
Love too \vill sink xnd die.

SOUTHEY.

But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive

From her own life that Hope is yet alive ;

And, bending o'er with soul-transfusing eyes,

And the soft murmurs of the mother dove,

Woos back tne fleeting spirit, and half supplies : —

Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Lovo.

Yet haply there will come a weary day,

When overtasked at length
Both Love and Hope beneath the load give way.
Then, with a statue's smile, a statue's strength,
Stands the mute sister, Patience, nothing loth,
And both supporting does the work of both.

SOUTHEY.

Coleridge died in 1834 ; his friend Southey, born three years
later, survived to 1843. If Coleridge wrote too little poetry,
Southey may be said to have written too much and too rapidly.
Southey, as well as Coleridge, has been popularly reckoned one
of the Lake poets ; but it is difficult to assign any meaning to
that name which should entitle it to comprehend either the one
or the other. Southey, indeed, was, in the commencement of
his career, the associate' of Wordsworth and Coleridge ; a portion
of his first poem, his Joan of Arc, published in 1796, was written
by Coleridge ; and he afterwards took up his residence, as well
as Wordsworth, among the lakes of Westmoreland. But, although
in his first volume of minor poems, published in 1797, there was
something of the same simplicity or plainness of style, and choice
of subjects from humble life, by which Wordsworth sought to
distinguish himself about the same time, the manner of tne one
writer bore only a very superficial resemblance to that of the
;>ther; whatever it was, whether something quite original, or
only, in the main, an inspiration caught from the Germans, that
gave its peculiar character to Wordsworth's poetry, it was
wanting in Southey's ; he was evidently, with all his ingenuity
and fertility, and notwithstanding an ambition of originality
which led him to be continually seeking after strange models,
from Arabian and Hindoo mythologies to Latin hexameters, of
a genius radically imitative, and not qualified to put forth its
strength except while moving in a beaten track and under the
guidance of long-established rules. Southey was by nature a
conservative in literature as well as in politics, and the eccen-
tricity of his Thalabas and Kehamas was as merely spasmodic
ab tho Jacobinism ot his Wat Tyler. But oven Thalaba and

2i

182 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Kehama, whatever they may be, are surely not poems of tho
Lake school. And in most of his other poems, especially in his
latest epic, Roderick, the Last of the Goths, Southey is in verse
what he always was in prose, one of the most thoroughly and
unaffectedly English of our modern writers. The verse, how-
ever, is too like prose to be poetry of a very high order ; it is
flowing and eloquent, but has little of the distinctive? life or
lustre of poetical composition. There is much splendour and
beauty, however, in the Curse of Kehama, the most elaborate of
bis long poems.

SCOTT.

Walter Scott, again, was never accounted one of the Lake
poets ; yet he, as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge, was early
a drinker at the fountain of German poetry ; his commencing
publication was a translation of Burger's Lenore (1796), and
the spirit and manner of his original compositions were, from
the first, evidently and powerfully influenced by what had thus
awakened his poetical faculty. His robust and manly character
of mind, however, and his strong nationalism, with the innate
disposition of his imagination to live in the past rather than in
the future, saved him from being seduced into either the
puerilities or the extravagances to which other imitators of the
German writers among us were thought to have, more or less,
given way ; and, having soon found in the popular ballad-poetry
of his own country all the qualities which had most attracted
him in his foreign favourites, with others which had an equal or
still greater charm for his heart and fancy, he henceforth gave
himself up almost exclusively to the more congenial inspiration
of that native minstrelsy. His poems are all lays and romances
of chivalry, but infinitely finer than any that had ever before
been written. With all their irregularity and carelessness
(qualities which in some sort are characteristic of and essential
to this kind of poetry), that element of life in all writing, which
comes of the excited feeling and earnest belief of the writer, is
never wanting ; this animation, fervour, enthusiasm, — call it by
what name we will, — exists in greater strength in no poetry
than in that of Scott, redeeming a thousand defects, and triumph-
ing over all the reclamations of criticism. It was this, no
doubt, more than anything else, which at once took the public
admiration by storm. All cultivated and perfect enjoyment of
poetry, or of any other of the fine arts, is partly emotional, partlv

SCOTT. 483

critical ; the enjoyment and appreciation are only perfect whc?
these two qualities are blended ; but most of the poetry that had
been produced among us in modern times had aimed at affording
chiefly, if not exclusively, a critical gratification. The Lay of
the Last Minstrel (1805) surprised readers of all degrees with a
long and elaborate poem, which carried them onward with an
excitement of heart as well as of head which many of them had
never experienced before in the perusal of poetry. The narrative
form of the poem no doubt did much to produce this effect, giving
to it, even without the poetry, the interest and enticement of a
novel ; but all readers, even the least tinctured with a literary
taste, felt also, in a greater or less degree, the charm of the
verse, and the poetic glow with which the work was all alive.
Marmion (1808) carried the same feelings to a much higher
pitch; it is undoubtedly Scott's greatest poem, or the one at
any rate in which the noblest passages are found ; though the
more domestic attractions of the Lady of the Lake (1810) made
it the most popular on its first appearance. Meanwhile, his
success, the example he had set, and the tastes which he had
awakened in the public mind, had affected our literature to an
extent in various directions which has scarcely been sufficiently
appreciated. Notwithstanding the previous appearance of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and some other writers, it
was Scott who first in his day made poetry the rage, and witl
him properly commences the busy poetical production of th\
period we are now reviewing ; those who had been in the field
before him put on a new activity, and gave to the world their
principal works, after his appearance ; and it was not till then
that the writer who of all the poets of this age attained the
widest blaze of reputation, eclipsing Scott himself, commenced
his career. But what is still more worthy of note is, that Scott's
poetry impressed its own character upon all the poetry that was
produced among us for many years after : it put an end to long
works in verse of a didactic or merely reflective character, and
directed the current of all writing of that kind into the form of
narrative. Even Wordsworth's Excursion (1814) is for the
most part a collection of tales. If Scott's own genius, indeed,
were to be described by any single epithet, it would be called
a narrative genius. Hence, when he left off writing verse, he
betook himself to the production of fictions in prose, which were
really substantially the same thing with his poems, and in that
freer form of composition succeeded in achieving a second repu-
tation still more brilliant than his first.

We cannot make room for the whole of the battle in Mannion ;

4Si ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

and the following extracts, which describe the fighting, lose part
of their effect by being separated from the picture of Marmion's
death-scene, with the pathos and touching solemnity of which they
are in tho original canvas so finely intermingled and relieved ;
but, even deprived of the advantages of this contrast, most
readers will probably agree with a late eloquent critic, that, " of
all the poetical battles which have been fought from the days of
Homer, there is none comparable for interest and animation — for
breadth of drawing and magnificence of effect — with this :"* —

Blount and Fitz-Eustace rested still
With Lady Clare upon the hill ;
On. which (for far the day was spent)
The western sun-beams now were bent.
The cry they heard, its meaning knew,
Could plain their distant comrades view :
Sadly to Blount did Eustace say,
" Unworthy office here to stay !
No hope of gilded spurs to-day. —
But see ! look up — on Flodden bent,
The Scottish foe has fired his tent."

And sudden, as he spoke,
From the sharp ridges of the hill,
All downward to the banks of Till

Was wreathed in sable smoke.
Volumed and fast, and rolling far,
The cloud enveloped Scotland's war,

As down the hill they broke ;
Nor martial shout, nor minstrel tone,
Announced their march ; their tread alone,
At times one warning trumpet blown,

At times a stifled hum,
Told England, from his mountain throne

King James did rushing come. —
Scarce could they hear, or see, their foes
Until at weapon point they close.
They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust;

And such a yell was there
Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought upon the earth

And fiends in upper air ;
0 life and death were in the shout,
Recoil and rally, charge and rout,

And triumph and despair.
Long looked the anxious squires ; their eye
Could in the darkness nought descry.

* Joffroy, in Edinburgh Review.

SCUTT.

At length the freshening western blast
Aside the shroud of battle cast.
And, first, the ridge of mingled spears
Above the brightening cloud appears ;
And in the smoke the pennons flew,
As in the storm the white sea-mew.
Then marked they, dashing broad and far
The broken billows of the war,
And plumed crests of chieftains bravo,
Floating like foam upon the wave ;

But nought distinct they see :
Wide raged the battle on the plain ;
Spears shook and falchions flashed amain ;
Fell England's arrow-flight like rain ;
Crests rose, and stooped, and rose again,

Wild and disorderly.
Amid the scene of tumult, high
They saw Lord Marmion's falcon fly :
And stainless Tunstall's banner white,
And Edmund Howard's lion bright,
Still bear them bravely in the fight ;

Although against them come
Of gallant Gordons many a one,
And many a stubborn Badenoch man,
And many a rugged border clan,
With Huntley, and with Home.

Far on the left, unseen the while,
Stanley broke Lennox and Argyle ;
Though there the western mountaineer
Rushed with bare bosom on the spear,
And flung the feeble targe aside,
And with both hands the broadsword plied.
'Tvvas vain : — but Fortune, on the right,
With fickle smile cheered Scotland's fight.
Then fell that spotless banner white,

The Howard's lion fell ;
Yet still Lord Marmion's falcon flew
With wavering flight, while fiercer grew

Around the battle-yell.
The Border slogan rent the sky !
A Home ! a Gordon ! was the cry :

Loud were the clanging blows ;
Advanced, — forced back, — now low, now high

The pennon sunk and rose ;
As bends the bark's mast in the gale,
When rent are rigging, shrouds, and sail,

It wavered 'mid the foes.
No longer Blount the view could bear :
" By Heaven, and all its saints ! I swear

186 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

I will not see it lost !
Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare
May bid your beads, and patter prayer, —

f gallop to the host."
And to the fray he rode amain,
Followed by all the archer train.
The fiery youth, with desperate charge^
Made, for a space, an opening large, —

The rescued banner rose ; —
But darkly closed the war around ;
Like pine-tree, rooted from the ground,

It sunk among the foes.
Then Eustace mounted too, yet staid,
As loth to leave the helpless maid,

When, fast as shaft can fly,
Bloodshot his eyes, his nostrils spread,
The loose rein dangling from his head,

Housing and saddle bloody red,

Lord Marmion's steed rushed by ;
And Eustace, maddening at the sight,
A look and sign to Clara cast,
To mark he would return in haste,

Then plunged into the fight.

The war, that for a space did fail,

Now trebly thundering swelled the gale,

And Stanley ! was the cry : —
A light on Marmion's visage spread,

And fired his glazing eye :
With dying hand, above his head,
He shook the fragment of his blade,

And shouted " Victory !"—
* Charge, Chester, charge ! On, Stanley, ofc f
Were the last words of Marmion.

By this, though deep the evening fell,
Still rose the battle's deadly swell ;
For still the Scots, around their king,
Unbroken, fought in desperate ring.
Where's now their victor vaward wing?
Where Huntley, and where Home ?
0, for a blast of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,

That to King Charles did come,
When Roland brave, and Olivier,
And every paladin and peer,

On Roncesvalles died !

Such blast might warn them, not in VKIV
To quit the plunder of the slain,
And turn the doubtful day again,

SCOTT. £87

While yet on Flodden side,
Afar, the Royal standard flies,
And round it toils, and bleeds, and dies

Our Caledonian pride !
In vain the wish — for far away,
While spoil and havoc mark their way,
Near Sybil's Cross the plunderers stray.—
" 0 lady," cried the Monk, " away !" '

And placed her on her steed,
And led her to the chapel fair

Of Tilmouth upon Tweed.

But, as they left the darkening heath,
More desperate grew the strife of death.
The English shafts in volleys hailed ;
In headlong charge their horse assailed ;
Front, flank, and rear the squadrons sweep
To break the Scottish circle deep,

That fought around their king :
But yet, though thick the shafts as snow,
Though charging knights like whirlwinds go,
Though billmen ply the ghastly blow,

Unbroken was the ring ;
The stubborn spearmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
Each stepping where his comrade stood

The instant that he fell.
No thought was there of dastard flight ;
Linked in the senied phalanx tight,
Groom fought like noble, squire like knight*

As fearlessly and well ;
Till utter darkness closed her wing
O'er their thin host and wounded king.
Then skilful Surrey's sage commands
Led back from strife his shattered bands ;

And from the charge they drew,
As mountain waves from wasted lands

Sweep back to ocean blue.
Then did their loss his foemen know;
Their king, their lords, their mightiest low,
They melted from the field as snow,
When streams are swollen and south winds blovr.

Dissolves in silent dew.

Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless plash,

While many a broken bond,
Disordered, through her currents dash,

To gain the Scottish land ;
To town and tower, to down and dale,
To tell red Flodden's dismal tale,

*H8 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

And raise the universal wail.
Tradition, legend, tune, and song
Shall many an age that wail prolong :
Still from the sire the son shall hear
Of the stern strife, and carnage drear,

Of Flodden's fatal field,
Where shivered was fair Scotland's spear,

And broken was her shield !

Scott, born in 1771, died in 1832.

CRABBE; CAMPBELL; MOORE.

Crabbe, Campbell, and Moore, were all known as poetical
writers previous to the breaking forth of Scott's bright day:
Crabbe had published bis first poem, The Library, so far back as in
1781, The Village in 1783, and The Newspaper in 1785; Camp-
bell, his Pleasures of Hope in 1799 ; Moore, his Anacreon in
1800. But Campbell alone had before that epoch attracted any
considerable share of the public attention ; and even he, after
following up 'his first long poem with his Hohenlinden, his Battle
of the Baltic, his Mariners of England, and a few other short
'pieces, had laid aside his lyre for some five or six years. Neither
Crabbe nor Moore had as yet produced anything that gave pro-
mise of the high station they were to attain in our poetical lite-
rature, or had even acquired any general notoriety as writers of
verse. No one of the three, however, can be said to have caught
any part of his manner from Scott. Campbell's first poem,
juvenile as its execution in some respects was, evinced in its
glowing impetuosity and imposing splendour of declamation the
genius of a true and original poet, and the same general character
that distinguishes his poetry in its maturest form, which may
be described as a combination of fire and elegance ; and his early
lyrics, at least in their general effect, are not excelled by any-
thing he subsequently wrote, although the tendency of his stylo
towards greater purity and simplicity was very marked in all his
later compositions. It was with a narrative poem — his Pennsyl-
vanian Tale of Gertrude of Wyoming — that Campbell (in 1809)
returned to woo the public favour, after Scott had made poetry,
and that particular form of it, so popular ; and, continuing to obey
the direction which had been given to the public taste, he after-
wards produced his exquisite O'Connor's Child and his Theodric ;
the former the most passionate, the latter the purest, of all his
longer poems. Crabbe, in like manner, when he at last, in 1807,
broke his silence of twenty years, came forth with a volume, all

CRABBE ; CAMPBELL ; MOORE. 4§9

that \vas new in which consisted of narrative poetry, and he
never afterwards attempted any other style. Narrative, indeed,
had formed the happiest and most characteristic portions of
Crabbe's former compositions ; and he was probably led now to
resume his pen mainly by the turn which the taste and fashion
of the time had taken in favour of the kind of poetry to which
his genius most strongly carried him. His narrative manner,
however, it is scarcely necessary to observe, has no resemblance
either to that of Scott or to that of Campbell. Crabbe's poetry,
indeed, both in its form and in its spirit, is of quite a peculiar
and original character. It might be called the poetry of matter-
of-fact, for it is as true as any prose, and, except the rhyme, has
often little about it of the ordinary dress of poetry ; but the effect
of poetry, nevertheless, is always there in great force, its power
both of stirring the affections and presenting vivid pictures to the
fancy. Other poets may be said to exalt the truth to a heat
naturally foreign to it in the crucible of their imagination ; he,
by a subtler chemistry, draws forth from it its latent heat, making
even things that look the coldest and deadest sparkle and flash
with passion. It is remarkable, however, in how great a degree,
with all its originality, the poetical genius of Crabbe was acted
upon and changed by the growth of new tastes and a new spirit
in the times through which he lived, — how his poetry took a
warmer temperament, a richer colour, as the age became more
poetical. As he lived, indeed, in two eras, so he wrote in two
styles : the first, a sort of imitation, as we have already observed,
of the rude vigour of Churchill, though marked from the begin-
ning by a very distinguishing quaintness and raciness of its own,
but comparatively cautious and commonplace, and dealing rather
with the surface than with the heart of things ; the last, with all
the old peculiarities retained, and perhaps exaggerated, but
greatly more copious, daring, and impetuous, and infinitely
improved in penetration and general effectiveness. And his
poetical power, nourished by an observant spirit and a thought-
ful tenderness of nature, continued to grow in strength to the
end of his life ; so that the last poetry he published, his Tales of
the Hall, is the finest he ever wrote, the deepest and most
passionate in feeling as well as the happiest in execution. In
Crabbe's sunniest passages, however, the glow is still that of a
melancholy sunshine : compared to what we find in Moore's
poetry, it is like the departing flush from the west, contrasted
with the radiance of morning poured out plentifully over earth
and sky, and making all things laugh in light. Rarely has there
been seen so gay, nimble, airy a wonder-worker in verse as

«0 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Moore ; rarely such a conjuror with words, which he makes to
serve rather as wings for his thoughts ihan as the gross attire or
embodiment with which they must be encumbered to render them
palpable or visible. His wit is not only the sharpest and
brightest to be almost anywhere found, but is produced apparently
with more of natural facility, and shapes itself into expression
more spontaneously, than that of any other poet. But there is
almost as much humour as wit in Moore's gaiety ; nor are his wit
and humour together more than a small part of his poetry, which,
preserving in all its forms the same matchless brilliancy, finish,
and apparent ease and fluency, breathes in its tenderer strains
the very soul of sweetness and pathos. Moore, after having risen
to the ascendant in his proper region of the poetical firmament,
at last followed the rest into the walk of narrative poetry, and
produced his Lalla Rookh (1817) : it is a poem, with all its
defects, abounding in passages of great beauty and splendour ;
but his Songs are, after all, probably, the compositions for which
he will be best remembered.

No poetry of this time is probably so deeply and universally
written upon the popular heart and memory as Campbell's great
lyrics ; these, therefore, it is needless to give here ; some things
that he has written in another style will have a greater chanco
of being less familiar to the reader. With all his classic
taste and careful finish, Campbell's writing, especially in his
earlier poetry, is rarely altogether free for any considerable
number of lines from something hollow and false in expression,
into which he was seduced by the conventional habits of the pre-
ceding bad school of verse-making in which he had been partly
trained, and from which he emerged, or by the gratification of his
ear lulling his other faculties asleep for the moment ; even in his
Battle of the Baltic, for instance, what can be worse than the
two lines —

But the might of England flushed

To anticipate the scene ?

And a similar use of fine words with little or no meaning, or with
a meaning which can only be forced out of them by torture, is
occasional in all his early compositions. In the Pleasures of
Hope, especially, swell of sound without any proportionate
quantity of sense, is of such frequent occurrence as to be almost
a characteristic of the poem. All his later poetry, however, is of
much purer execution ; and some of it is of exquisite delicacy
and grace of form. A little incident was never, for example,
more perfectly told than in the following verses : —

CAMPBELL. 4U1

The ordeal's fatal trumpet soundeti,

And sad pale Adelgitha came,
When forth a valiant champion bounded,

And slew the slanderer of her fame.

She wept, delivered from her danger ;

But, when he knelt to claim her glove-
" Seek not," she cried, " oh ! gallant stranger,

For hapless Adelgitha's love.

" For he is in a foreign far land

Whose arm should now have set me free ;

And I must wear the willow garland
For him that's dead or false to me."

" Nay ! say not that his faith is tainted !"

He raised his vizor — at the sight
She fell into his arms and fainted ;

It was indeed her own true knight.

Equally perfect, in a higher, more earnest style, is the letter
to her absent husband, dictated and signed by Constance in hoi
last moments, which closes the tale of Theodric : —

" Theodric, this is destiny above
Our power to baffle ; bear it then, my love !
Rave not to learn the usage I have borne,
For one true sister left me not forlorn ;
And, though you 're absent in another land,
Sent from me by my own well-meant command,
Your soul, I know, as firm is knit to mine
As these clasped hands in blessing you now join :
Shape not imagined horrors in my fate —
Even now my sufferings are not very great ;
And, when your griefs first transports shall subcide,
I call upon your strength of soul and pride
To pay my memory, if 'tis worth the debt,
Love's glorying tribute — not forlorn regret :
I charge my name with power to conjure up
Reflection's balmy, not its bitter, cup.
My pardoning angel, at the gates of heaven,
Shall look not more regard than you have given
To me ; and our life's union has been clad
In smiles of bliss as sweet as life e'er had.
Shall gloom be from such bright remembrance cast?
Shall bitterness outflow from sweetness past?
No ! imaged in the sanctuary of your breast,
There let me smile, amidst high thoughts at rest j
And let contentment on your spirit shine,
As if its peace were still a part of mine : ^
For, if you war not proudly with your pain,
For you I shall have worse than lived in vain.

ij2 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANG [i AGE.

But I conjure your manliness to bear

My loss with noble spirit — not despair ;

I ask you by our love to promise this,

And kiss these words, where I have left a kiss, —

The latest from my living lips for yours."

Words that will solace him while life endureo :
For, though his spirit from affliction's surge
Could ne'er to life, as life had been, emerge,
Yet still that mind, whose harmony elate
Bang sweetness even beneath the crush of fate, —
That mind in whose regard all things were placed
In views that softened them, or light that graced, —
That soul's example could not but dispense
A portion of its own blest influence ;
Invoking him to peace and that self-sway
Which fortune cannot give, nor take away ;
And, though he mourned her long, 'twas with such woe
As if her spirit watched him still below.

It is difficult to find a single passage, not too long for quota-
tion, which will convey any tolerable notion of the power and
beauty of Crabbe's poetry, where so much of the effect lies in the
conduct of the narrative — in the minute and prolonged but won-
derfully skilful as well as truthful pursuit and exposition of the
course and vicissitude of passions and circumstances ; but we will
give so much of the story of the Elder Brother, in the Tales of
the Hall, as will at least make the catastrophe intelligible. We
select this tale, among other reasons, for its containing one of
those pre-eminently beautiful lyric bursts which seem to contrast
so strangely with the general spirit and manner of Crabbe's
poetry. After many years, the narrator, pursuing another
inquiry, accidentally discovers the lost object of his heart's
passionate but pure idolatry living in infamy : —

Will you not ask, ,how I beheld that face,
Or read that mind, and read it in that place ?
1 have tried, Richard, ofttimes, and in vain,
• To trace my thoughts, and to review their train —
If train there were— that meadow, grove, and stile,
The fright, the escape, her sweetness, and her smile ;
Years since elapsed, and hope, from year to year,
To find her free — and then to find her here !

But is it she ? — 0 ! yes ; the rose is dead,
All beauty, fragrance, freshness, glory, fled ;
But yet 'tis she — the same and not the same — * •
Who to my bower a heavenly being came ;
Who waked my soul's first thought of real bliss,
Whom long I sought, and now I find her — this.

CRABBE. 493

I cannot paint her — something I had seen
So pale and slim, and tawdry and unclean ;
With haggard looks, of vice and woe the prey,
Laughing in languor, miserably gay :
Her face, where face appeared, was amply spread,
By art's warm rx ncil, with ill-chosen red,
The flower's fictitious bloom, the blushing of the dead :
But still the features were the same, and strange
My view of both — the sameness and the change,
That fixed me gazing, and my eye enchained,
Although so little of herself remained ;
It is the creature whom I loved, and yet
Is far unlike her — would I could forget
The angel or her fall ; the once adored
Or now despised ! the worshipped or deplored !
" O ! Rosabella 1" I prepared to say,
" Whom I have loved ;" but Prudence whispered, Nay,
And Folly grew ashamed — Discretion had her day.
She gave her hand ; which, as I lightly pressed,
The cold but ardent grasp my soul oppressed ;
The ruined girl disturbed me, and my eyes
Looked, I conceive, both sorrow and surprise.

If words had failed, a look explained their style •
She could not blush assent, but she could smile :
Good heaven ! I thought, have I rejected fame,
Credit, and wealth, for one who smiles at shame ?

She saw me thoughtful — saw it, as I guessed,
With some concern, though nothing she expressed.
" Come, my dear friend, discard that look of care," &c.

Thus spoke the siren in voluptuous style,
While I stood gazing and perplexed the while,
Chained by that voice, confounded by that smile.
And then she sang, and changed from grave to gay,
Till all reproach and anger died away.

" My Damon was the first to wake

The gentle flame that cannot die ;
My Damon is the last to take

The faithful bosom's softest sigh :
The life between is nothing worth,

0 ! cast it from thy thought away j
Think of the day that gave it birth,

And this its sweet returning day.

• Buried be all that has been done.
Or say that nought is done umiae ;

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

For who the dangerous path can shun
In such bewildering world as this ?

But love can every fault forgive,
Or with a tender look reprove ;

And now let nought in memory live,
But that we meet, and that we love."

And then she moved my pity ; for she wept,
And told her miseries, till resentment slept ;
For, when she saw she could not reason "blind,
1 She poured her heart's whole sorrows on my micd
With features graven on my soul, with sighs
Seen, but not heard, with soft imploring eyes,
And voice that needed not, but had, the aid
Of powerful words to soften and persuade.
" 0 ! I repent me of the past ;" &c.

Softened, I said, «' Be mine the hand and heart,
If with your world you will consent to part."
She would— she tried. — Alas ! she did not know
How deeply-rooted evil habits grow :
She felt the truth upon her spirits press,
But wanted ease, indulgence, show, excess,
Voluptuous banquets, pleasures — not refined,
But such as soothe to sleep the opposing mind-
She looked for idle vice, the time to kill,
And subtle, strong apologies for ill.
And thus her yielding, unresisting soul
Sank, and let sin confuse her and control :
Pleasures that brought disgust yet brought relief,
And minds she hated helped to war with grief.

I had long lost her ; but I sought in vain
To banish pity ; — still she gave me pain.

There came at length request

That I would see a wretch with grief oppressed,
By guilt affrighted — and I went to trace
Once more the vice-worn features of that face,
That sin- wrecked being ! and I saw her laid
Where never worldly joy a visit paid :
That world receding fast ! the world to come
Concealed in terror, ignorance, and gloom ;
Sin, sorrow, and neglect ; with not a spark
Of vital hope, — all horrible and dark. —
It frightened me ! — I thought, and shall not I
?hus feel ? — thus fear ?— this danger can I fly ?
Do I so wisely live that I can calmly die ?

MOORE. 495

Still as I went came other change — the frame
And features wasted, and yet slowly came
The end ; and so inaudible the breath,
And still the breathing, we exclaimed — 'Tis death ;
But death it was not : when indeed she died
I sat and his last gentle stroke espied :
When — as it came — or did my fancy trace
That lively, lovely flushing o'er the face ?
Bringing back all that my young heart impressed !
It came — and went ! — She sighed, and was at rest !

From Moore, whose works are more, probably, than those of any
of his contemporaries in the hands of all readers of poetry, we will
make only one short extract. Here is the exquisitely beautiful
description in the Fire Worshippers, the finest of the four tales
composing Lalla Rookh, of the calm after a storm, in whieh the
heroine, the gentle Hinda, awakens in the war-bark of her lover
Mafed, the noble Gheber chief, into which she had been trans-
ferred from her own galley while she had swooned with terror
from the tempest and the fight : —

How calm, how beautiful comes on
The stilly hour when storms are gone !
When warring winds have died away,
And clouds, beneath the dancing ray,
Melt off, and leave the land and sea
Sleeping in bright tranquillity —
Fresh as if day again were born,
Again upon the lap of mom !
When the light blossoms, rudely torn
And scattered at the whirlwind's will,
Hang floating in the pure air still,
Filling it all with precious balm,
In gratitude for this sweet calm : —
And every drop the thunder-showers
Have left upon the grass and flowers
Sparkles, as 'twere that lightning gem
Whose liquid flame is born of them .

When, 'stead of one unchanging breezy
There blow a thousand gentle airs,
And each a different perfume bears, —

As if the loveliest plants and trees
Had vassal breezes of their own,
To watch and wait on them alone,
And waft no other breath than theirs 1
When the blue waters rise and fall,
Jn sleepy sunshine mantling all ;
And even that swell the tempest leavci
IB like the full and silent heavea

496 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Of lovers' hearts when newly blest —
Too newly to be quite at rest !
Such was the golden hour that broke
Upon the world, when Hinda woke
From her long trance, and heard around
No motion but the water's sound
Kippling against the vessel's side,
As slow it mounted o'er the tide. —
But where is she 1 — her eyes are dark,
Are wildered still — is this the bark,
The same that from Harmozia's bay
Bore her at morn — whose bloody way
The sea-dog tracks ? — No ! strange and new
Is all that meets her wondering view
Upon a galliot's deck she lies,

Beneath no rich pavilion's shade,
No plumes to fan her sleeping eyes,

Nor jasmin on her pillow laid.
But the rude litter, roughly spread
With war-cloaks, is her homely bed,
And shawl and sash, on javelins hung,
For awning o'er her head are flung.
Shuddering she looked around — there lay

A group of warriors in the sun
Resting their limbs, as for that day
Their ministry of death were done ;
Some gazing on the drowsy sea,
Lost in unconscious reverie ;
And some, who seemed but ill to brook
That sluggish calm, with many a look
To the slack sail impatient cast,
As loose it flagged before the mast.

Crabbe, born in 1754, lived till 1832 ; Campbell, born in 1777,
died in 1844, Moore, born in 1780, died in 1851

BYRON.

Byron was the writer whose blaze of popularity it mainly was
that threw Scott's name into the shade, and induced him to
abandon verse. Yet the productions which had this effect — the
Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, &c., published in 1813
and 1814 (for the new idolatry was scarcely kindled by the two
respectable, but somewhat tame, cantos of Childe Harold, in quite
another style, which appeared shortly before these effusions),

SHELLEY. 497

were, in reality, only poems written in \vliat may be called a
variation of Scott's own manner — Oriental lays and romances,
Turkish Marmions and Ladies of the Lake. The novelty of
scene and subject, the exaggerated tone of passion in the out-
landish tales, and a certain trickery in the writing (for it will
hardly now be called anything else), materially aided by the
mysterious interest attaching to the personal history of the noblo
bard, who, whether he sung of Giaours, or Corsairs, or Laras,
was always popularly believed to be " himself the great sublime
he drew," wonderfully excited and intoxicated the public mind
at first, and for a time made all other poetry seem spiritless and
wearisome ; but, if Byron had adhered to the style by which his
fume was thus originally made, it probably would have proved
transient enough. Few will now be found to assert that there
is anything in these earlier poems of his comparable to the great
passages in those of Scott — to the battle in Marmion, for instance,
or the raising of the clansmen by the fiery cross in the Lady of
the Lake, or many others that might be mentioned. But Byron's
vigorous and elastic genius, although it had already tried various
styles of poetry, was, in truth, as yet only preluding to its proper
display. First, there had been the very small note of the Hours
of Idleness ; then, the sharper, but not more original or much
more promising, strain of the English Bards and Scotch
Keviewers (a satirical attempt in all respects inferior to Gilford's
Baviad and Maeviad, of which it was a slavish imitation) ; next,
the certainly far higher and more matured, but still quiet and
commonplace, manner of the first two cantos of Childe Harold ;
after that, suddenly the false glare and preternatural vehemence
of these Oriental rhapsodies, which yet, however, with all their
hollowness and extravagance, evinced infinitely more power than
anything he had previously done, or rather were the only poetry
he had yet produced that gave proof of any remarkable poetic
genius. The Prisoner of Chillon and Parisina, The Siege of
Corinth and Mazeppa, followed, all in a spirit of far more truth,
and depth, and beauty than the other tales that had preceded
them ; but the highest forms of Byron's poetry must be sought
lor in the two concluding cantos of Childe Harold, and in what
else he wrote in the last seven or eight years of his short life.

bHELLEY.

Yet the greatest poetical genius of this time, if it was not that
of Coleridge, was, probably, that of Shelley. Byron died in

J98 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

1824, at the age of thirty-six; Shelley in 1822, at that oi
twenty-nine. What Shelley produced during the brief term
allotted to him on earth, much of it passed in sickness and
sorrow, is remarkable for its quantity, but much more wonderful
for the quality of the greater part of it. His Queen Mab,
written when he was eighteen, crude and defective as it is, and
unworthy to be classed with what he wrote in his maturer years,
was probably the richest promise that was ever given at so early
an age of poetic power, the fullest assurance that the writer was
born a poet. From the date of his Alastor, or The Spirit of
Solitude, the earliest written of the poems published by himself,
to his death, was not quite seven years. The Kevolt of Islam,
in twelve cantos, or books, the dramas of Prometheus Unbound,
The Cenci, and Hellas, the tale of Eosalind and Helen, The
Masque of Anarchy, The Sensitive Plant, Julian and Maddalo,
The Witch of Atlas, Epipsychidion, Adonais, The Triumph of
Life, the translations of Homer's Hymn to Mercury, of the
Cyclops of Euripides, and of the scenes from Calderon and
from Goethe's Faust, besides many short poems, were the addi-
tional produce of this springtime of a life destined to know no
summer. So much poetry, so rich in various beauty, was pro-
bably never poured forth with so rapid a flow from any other
mind. Nor can much of it be charged with either immaturity
or carelessness: Shelley, with all his abundance and facility,
was a fastidious writer, scrupulously attentive to the effect of
words and syllables, and accustomed to elaborate whatever he
wrote to the utmost ; and, although it is not to be doubted that
if he had lived longer he would have developed new powers and
a still more masterly command over the several resources of his
art, anything that can properly be called unripeness in his
composition had, if not before, ceased with his Eevolt of Islam,
the first of his poems which he gave to the world, as if the
exposure to the public eye had burned it out. Some haziness
of thought and uncertainty of expression may be found in some
of his later, or even latest, works ; but that is not to be con-
founded with rawness ; it is the dreamy ecstasy, too high for
speech, in which his poetical nature, most subtle, sensitive, and
voluptuous, delighted to dissolve and lose itself. Yet it is
marvellous how far he had succeeded in reconciling even this
mood of thought with the necessities of distinct expression:
witness his Epipsychidion (written in the last year of his life),
which may be regarded as his crowning triumph in that kind of
writing, and as, indeed, for its wealth and fusion of all tho
highest things — of imagination, of expression, of music,— ono

SHELLEY. 499

of the greatest miracles ever wrought in poetry. In other styles,
again, all widely diverse, are the Cenci, the Masque of Anarchy,
the Hymn to Mercury (formally a translation, but essentially
almost as much an original composition as any of the others).
It is hard to conjecture what would have been impossible to him
by whom all this had been done.

It will suffice to give one of the most brilliant and charac-
teristic of Shelley's shorter poems — his Ode, or Hymn, as it may
bo called, To a Skylark, written in 1820 :—

Hail to thee, blithe spirit,

Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest ;
Like a cloud of fire

The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,

Thou dost float and run ;
Like an embodied Joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight ;
Like a star of heaven

In the broad daylight,
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear,
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overfl jv;e<X,

What thou art we know not :

What is most like thee I
From rainbow clouds there How not

Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

500 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not :

Like a highborn maiden

In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower •.

Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden

Its aerial hue .

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view :

Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,

Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves !

Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,
Bain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine ;
I have never heard

Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal,

Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all

But an empty vaunt —
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want

What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain ?
What fields, or waves, or mountains ?

What shapes of sky or plain ?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pam ?

With thy clear keen Joyance

Languor cannot be :
Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee :
Thou lovest ; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

KEATS. 501

Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream ?
We look before and after,

And pine for what is not ;
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught ;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought
Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground !
Teach me half the gkdness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

KEATS.

Keats, born in 1796, died the year before Shelley, and, of
course, at a still earlier age. But his poetry is younger than
Shelley's in a degree far beyond the difference of their years.
He was richly endowed by nature with the poetical faculty, and
all that he has written is stamped with originality and power ,
it is probable, too, that he would soon have supplied, as far as
was necessary or important, the defects of his education, as
indeed he had actually done to a considerable extent, for he was
full of ambition as well as genius; but he can scarcely be said
to bave given full assurance by anything he has left that he
would in time have produced a great poetical work. The charac-
ter of his mental constitution, explosive and volcanic, was adverse
to every kind of restraint and cultivation ; and his poetry is a
tangled forest, beautiful indeed and glorious with many a majestic
oak and sunny glade, but still with the unpruned, untrained
savagery everywhere, constituting, apparently, so much of its
essential character as to be inseparable from it, and indestructible

502 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

without the ruin at the same time of everything else. There is
not only the absence of art, but a spirit antagonistic to that of
art. Yet this wildness and turbulence may, after all, have been
only an affluence of true power too great to be soon or easily
brought under regulation, — the rankness of a tropic vegetation,
coming of too rich a soil and too much light and heat. Cer-
tainly to no one of his contemporaries had been given more of
passionate intensity of conception (the life of poetry) than to
Keats. Whatever he thought or felt came to him in vision, and
wrapped and thrilled him. Whatever he wrote burns and
blazes. And his most wanton extravagances had for the most
part a soul of good in them. His very affectations were mostly
prompted by excess of love and reverence. In his admiration
and worship of our Elizabethan poetry he was not satisfied
without mimicking the obsolete syllabication of the language
which he found there enshrined, and, as he conceived, con-
secrated. Even the most remarkable of all the peculiarities of
his manner — the extent, altogether, we should think, without a
parallel in our literature, to which he surrenders himself in
writing to the guidance of the mere wave of sound upon which
he happens to have got afloat, often, one would almost say,
making ostentation of his acquiescence and passiveness — is a
fault only in its excess, and such a fault, moreover, as only a
true poet could run into. Sound is of the very essence of song ;
and the music must always in so far guide the movement of the
verse, as truly as it does that of the dance. It only is not the
all in all. If the musical form be the mother of the verse, the
sense to be expressed is the father. Yet Keats, by what he has
thus produced in blind obedience to the tune that had taken
possession of him — allowing the course of the composition to be
directed simply by the rhyme sometimes for whole pages — has
shown the same sensibility to the musical element in poetry, and
even something of the same power of moulding lauguage to his
will, which we find in all our greatest poets — in Spenser espe-
cially, whose poetry is ever as rich with the charm of music as
with that of picture, and who makes us feel in so many a vic-
torious stanza that there is nothing his wonder-working mastery-
over words cannot make them do for him. Keats's Endy-
mion was published in 1817 ; his Lamia,* Isabella, Eve of St.

* *' If any one," Leigh Hunt has said, " could unite the vigour of Dryden
with the ready and easy variety of pause in the works of the late Mr. Crabbe
and the lovely poetic consciousness in the Lamia of Keats, in which the linea
eeem to take pleasure in the progress of their own beauty, like sea-nymphs
luxuriating through tbe water, he would be a perfect master of rhyming heroio
vorse."

KEATS. 50S

Agnes, and the remarkable fragment, Hyperion, together in
1820, a few months before his death. The latter volume also
contained several shorter pieces, one of which, of great beauty,
1 he Ode to a Nightingale, may serve as a companion to Shelley'a
Skylark :—

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-ward had sunk :
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness, —

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot

Of becchen green, and shadows numberless,

Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

0 for a draught of vintage that hath been

Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,

Dance, and Provencal song, and sun-burnt mirth 1
0 for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blissful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth ;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim :

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves hast never known,

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs ;

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dicsj
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs ;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

Away ! away ! for I will fly to thee,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
Jut on the viewless wings of Poesy,

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards !
Already with thee ! Tender is the night,

And haply the Queen-moon is on her throne,

Clustered around by all her starry fays ;
But here there is no light

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy wayn.

504 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE,

1 cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But in embalmed darkness guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild ;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine ;
Fast-fading violets, covered up in lea\*es ;

And mid-day's eldest child,
The coming musk -rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen, and, for many a time,

I have been half in love with easeful Death,1

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath ;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To seize upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy !

Still would'st thou sing, and I have ears in vain—-
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird !
No hungry generations tread thee down ;

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown ;

Perhaps the self-same song hath found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for homo
She stood hi tears amid the alien corn ;

The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn ! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my soul's self!

Adieu ! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side ; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades :
Was it a vision, or a waking dream ?
Fled is that music : — do I wake or sleep ?

1 Shelley had probably this line in his ear, when in the Preface to Lis
Adonais, which is an elegy on Keats, he wrote— describing •« the romantic and
lonely cemetery of the Protestants " at Borne, where his friend was buried—
•' The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with
violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that ono
should be buried in so sweet

505

HUNT.

Theso last names can hardly be mentioned without suggesting
another — that of one who has only the other day been taken
from us. Leigh Hunt, the friend of Shelley and Keats, had
attracted the attention of the world by much that he had done,
both in verse and prose, long before the appearance of either.
His Story of Rimini, published in 1816, being, as it was, in-
disputably the finest inspiration of Italian song that had yet
been heard in our modern English literature, had given him a
place of his own as distinct as that of any other poetical writer
of the day. Whatever may be thought of some peculiarities in
his manner of writing, nobody will now be found to dispute
either the originality of his genius, or his claim to the title of
a true poet. Into whatever he has written he has put a living
soul ; and much of what ho has produced is brilliant either with
wit and humour, or with tenderness and beauty. In some of
the best of his pieces too there is scarcely to be found a trace
of anything illegitimate or doubtful in the matter of diction or
versification. Where, for example, can we have more unex-
ceptionable English than in the following noble version of the
Eastern Tale?—

There came a man, making his hasty moan,

Before the Sultan Mahmoud on his throne,

And crying out — " My sorrow is my right,

And I will see the Sultan, and to-night."

" Sorrow," said Mahmoud, " is a reverend thing ,

I recognise its right, as king with king ;

Speak on." " A fiend has got into my house,"

Exclaimed the staring man, " and tortures us ;

One of thine officers — he comes, the abhorred,

And takes possession of my house, my board,

My bed : — I have two daughters and a wife,

And the wild villain comes, and makes me mad with life."

u Is he there now ?" said Mahmoud :— " No ; he left

The house when I did, of my wits bereft ;

And laughed me down the street, because I vowed

1 M bring the prince himself to lay him in his shroud.

I 'm mad with want — I 'm mad with misery,

And, oh thou Sultan Mahmoud, God cries out for thee 1"

The Sultan comforted the man, and said,
" Go home, and I will send thee wine and bread "
(For he was poor), " and other comforts. Go :
And, should the wretch return, let Sultan Mahmoud know. '

60C ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

In three days' time, with haggard eyes and beard,
And shaken voice, the suitor re-appeared,
And said, " He 's come." — Mahmoud said not a word,
But rose and took four slaves, each with a sword,
And went with the vexed man. They reach the place,
And hear a voice, and see a female face,
That to the window fluttered in affright :
" Go in,*' said Mahmoud, " and put out the light ;
But tell the females first to leave the room ;
And, when the drunkard follows them, we come."

The man went in. There was a cry, and hark .
A table falls, the window is struck dark :
Forth rush the breathless women ; and behind
With curses comes the fiend in desperate mind.
Jn vain : the sabres soon cut short the strife,
And chop the shrieking wretch, and drink his blood j life,

" Now light the light," the Sultan cried aloud.
'Twas done ; he took it in his hand, and bowed
Over the corpse, and looked upon the face ;
Then turned and knelt beside it in the place,
And said a prayer, and from his lips there crept
Some gentle words of pleasure, and he wept.

In reverent silence the spectators wait,
Then bring him at his call both wine and meat ;
And when he had refreshed his noble heart,
He bade his host be blest, and rose up to depart.

The man amazed, all mildness now, and tears,
Fell at the Sultan's feet, with many prayers,
And begged him to vouchsafe to tell his slave
The reason, first, of that command he gave
About the light ; then, when he saw the face,
Why he knelt down ; and lastly, how it was
That fare so poor as his detained him in the place.

The Sultan said, with much humanity,
" Since first I saw thee come, and heard thy cry,
I could not rid me of a dread, that one
By whom such daring villanies were done
Must be some lord of mine, perhaps a lawless son.
Whoe'er he was, I knew my task, but feared
A father's heart, in case the worst appeared ;
For this I had the light put out ; but when
I saw the face, and found a stranger slain,
I knelt, and thanked the sovereign arbiter,
Whose work I had performed through pain and fear ;
And then I rose, and was refreshed with food,
The first time since thou cam'st, and marr'dst my solitude.

HUN I. 507

Other short pieces in Ihe same style are nearly as good — such
as those entitled The Jaffar and The Inevitable. Then there
are the admirable modernizations of Chaucer — of whom and oi
Spenser, whom he has also imitated with wonderful cleverness,
no one of all his contemporaries probably had so true and deep
a feeling as Hunt. But, passing over likewise his two greatest
works, The Story of Rimini and The Legend of Florence (pub-
lished in 1840), we will give one other short effusion, which
attests, we think, as powerfully as anything he ever produced,
the master's triumphant hand, in a style which he has made his
own, and in which, with however many imitators, he has no
rival : —

THE FANCY CONCERT.

They talked of their concerts, their singers, and scores,

And pitied the fever that kept me in doors ;

And I smiled in my thought, and said, " 0 ye sweet fancies,

And animal spirits, that still in your dances

Come bringing me visions to comfort my care,

Now fetch me a concert, — imparadise air."

Then a wind, like a storm out of Eden, came pouring
Fierce into my room, and made tremble the flooring,
And filled, with a sudden impetuous trample
Of heaven, its corners ; and swelled it to ample
Dimensions to breathe in, and space for all power ;
Which falling as suddenly, lo 1 the sweet flower
Of an exquisite fairy-voice opened its blessing ;
And ever and aye, to its constant addressing,
There came, falling in with it, each in the last,
Flageolets one by one, and flutes blowing more fast,
And hautboys and clarinets, acrid of reed,
And the violin, smoothlier sustaining the speed
As the rich tempest gathered, and buz-ringing moons
Of tambours, and huge basses, and giant bassoons ;
And the golden trombone', that darteth its tongue
Like a bee of the gods ; nor was absent the gong,
Like a sudden fate-bringing oracular sound
Of earth's iron genius, burst up from the ground,
A terrible slave come to wait on his masters
The gods, with exultings that clanged like disasters ;
And then spoke the organs, the very gods they,
Like thunders that roll on a wind-blowing day ;
And, taking the rule of the roar in their hands,
Lo ! the Genii of Music came out of all lands ;
And one of them said, u Will my lord tell his slave
What concert 'twould please his Firesideship to have?"

608 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Then I said, in a tone of immense will and pleasure,

" Let orchestras rise to some exquisite measure ;

And let their be lights and be odours ; and let

The lovers of music serenely be set ;

And then, with their singers in lily-white stoles,

And themselves clad in rose-colour, fetch me the souls

Of all the composers accounted divinest,

And, with their own hands, let them play me their finest."

Then, lo ! was performed my immense will and pleasure,

And orchestras rose to an exquisite measure ;

And lights were about me and odours ; and set

Were the lovers of music, all wondrously met ;

And then, with their singers in lily-white stoles,

And themselves clad in rose-colour, in came the souls

Of all the composers accounted divinest,

And, with their own hands, did they play me their finest.

Oh ! truly was Italy heard then, and Germany,

Melody's heart, and the rich brain of harmony ;

Pure Paisiello, whose airs are as new

Though we know them by heart, as May-blossoms and dew

And nature's twin son, Pergolesi ; and Bach,

Old father of fugues, with his endless fine talk ;

And Gluck, who saw gods ; and the learned sweet feeling

Of Haydn ; and Winter, whose sorrows are healing j

And gentlest Corelli, whose bowing seems made

For a hand with a jewel ; and Handel, arrayed

In Olympian thunders, vast lord of the spheres,

Yet pious himself, with his blindness in tears,

A lover withai, and a conqueror, whose marches

Bring demi-gods under victorious arches ;

Then Arae, sweet and tricksome ; and masterly Purcell,

Lay-clerical soul ; and Mozart universal,

But chiefly with exquisite gallantries found,

With a grove in the distance of holier sound ;

Nor forgot was thy dulcitude, loving Sacchini ;

Nor love, young and dying, in shape of Bellini ;

Nor Weber, nor Himmel, nor Mirth's sweetest name,

Cimarosa ; much less the great organ-voiced fame

Of Marcello, that hushed the Venetian sea ;

And strange was the shout, when it wept, hearing thoe,

Thou soul full of grace as of grief, my heart-cloven,

My poor, my most rich, my all-feeling Beethoven.

O'er all, like a passion, great Pasta was heard,

As high as her heart, that truth-uttering bird ;

And Banti was there ; and Grassini, that goddess I

Dark, deep-toned, large, lovely, with glorious boddioo ;

And Mara ; and Malibran, stung to the tips

Of her fingers with pleasure ; and rich Fodor's lips

HUNT. 009

And, manly in face as in tone, Angrisani ;

And Naldi, thy whim ; and thy grace, Tramezzani ;

And was it a voice ?— or what was it ? — say —

That, like a fallen angel beginning to pray,

Was the soul of all tears and celestial despair !

Paganini it was, 'twixt his dark-flowing hair.

So now we had instrument, now we had song —

Now chorus, a thousand-voiced one-hearted throng ;

Now pauses that pampered resumption, and now —

But who shall describe what was played us, or how ?

Twas wonder, 'twas transport, humility, pride ;

Twas the heart of the mistress that sat by one's side ;

Twas the graces invisible, moulding the air

Into all that is shapely, and lovely, and fair,

And running our fancies their tenderest rounds

Of endearments and luxuries, turned into sounds ;

Twas argument even, the logic of tones ;

'Twas memory, 'twas wishes, 'twas laughters, 'twas moans ;

Twas pity and love, in pure impulse obeyed ;

Twas the breath of the stuff of which passion is made.

And these are the concerts I have at my will ;

Then dismiss them, and patiently think of your " bill." —

(Aside) Yet Lablache, after all, makes me long to go, still.

Leigli Hunt died, at the age of seventy-five, in 1859, — the last
survivor, although the earliest born, of the four poets, with the
other three of whom he had been so intimately associated, and
the living memory of whom he thus carried far into another
time, indeed across an entire succeeding generation.* To the
last, even in outward form, he forcibly recalled Shelley's fine
picture of him in his Elegy on Keats, written nearly forty years
before : —

" What softer voice is hushed over the dead ?

Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown ?
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,

In mockery of monumental stone,
The heavy heart heaving without a moan ?

If it be he, who, gentlest of the wise,
Taught, soothed, loved, honoured the departed one,

Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs,
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice."

• Hunt— Byron— Shelley— Keats, born in that order (in 1784, 1788, 1793,
a:ui 1796), died in exactly the reverse, and also at ages running in a series
contrary thronghout to that of their births ; Keats, at 25, in 1821, — Shelley
at 29, in 1822,— Byron, at 3G, in 1824, Hunt, at 75, in 1859.

51J ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

OTHER POETICAL WRITERS OF THE EARLIER PART OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The names that have been mentioned are the chief of thoso
belonging, wholly or principally, to the earlier part of the pre-
sent century, or to that remarkable literary era which may be
regarded as having expired with the reign of the last of the
Georges. Many others, however, also brighten this age of our
poetical literature, which cannot be here noticed.

On the whole, this space of somewhat less than half a century,
dating from the first appearance of Cowper and Burns, must be
pronounced to be the most memorable period in the history of
our poetical literature after the age of Spenser and Shakespeare.
And if, in comparing the produce of the two great revivals, the
one happening at the transition from the sixteenth century into
the seventeenth, the other at that from the eighteenth into
the nineteenth, we find something more of freshness, freedom,
raciness, and true vigour, warmth, and nature, in our earlier
than in our recent poetry, it is not to be denied, on the other
hand, that in some respects the latter may claim a preference
over the former. It is much less debased by the intermixture of
dross or alloy with its fine gold — much less disfigured by
occasional pedantry and affectation — much more correct and free
from flaws and incongruities of all kinds. In whatever regards
form, indeed, our more modern poetry must be admitted, taken
in its general character, to be the more perfect ; and that notwith-
standing many passages to be found in the greatest of our elder
poets which in mere writing have perhaps never since been
equalled, nor are likely ever to be excelled ; and notwithstanding
also something of greater boldness with which their position
enabled them to handle the language, thereby attaining some-
times a force and expressiveness not so much within the reach of
their successors in our own day. The literary cultivation of the
language throughout two additional centuries, and the stricter
discipline under which it has been reduced, may have brought
loss or inconvenience in one direction, as well as gain in another ;
but the gain certainly preponderates. Even in the matter of
versification, the lessons of Milton, of Dry den, and of Pope have
no doubt been upon the whole instructive and beneficial ; what-
ever of misdirection any of them may have given for a time to
the form of our poetry passed away with his contemporaries and
immediate followers, and now little or nothing but the good
remains — the example of the superior care and uniform finish,
nnd also something of sweetest and deepest music, as well as

PROSE LITERATURE.

much of spirit and brilliancy, that were unknown to <
earlier poets. In variety and freedom, as well as in beau
majesty, and richness of versification, some of our lat
writers have hardly been excelled by any of their predecessor ,
and the versification of the generality of our modern poets is
greatly superior to that of the common run of those of the
age of Elizabeth and James.

PROSE LITERATURE OP THE EARLIER PART OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.*

Brilliant as were the achievements of the first quarter of
this century in poetry, they do not exhaust the inheritance
which it left to its successors. The activity in prose litera-
ture was no less remarkable. Much of that activity, it may
be, was misspent. Against some of it we may be able to
trace a reaction in later years. But there remains much that
is of solid value; much of interest, if only for the vivid
energy with which it reflects the stirring movements of the
day — movements slowly ripening towards their later results ;
abundant eagerness to gather in the harvest of the past. Even
the exaggerations of the age have not been without their
lesson for the generations that have followed.

It is natural to turn from the poetical literature of the
time, which has already been dealt with, to the prose writings
of those who also held high places as poets; and first, as
most allied to poetry in subject, to the prose of fiction.
1'nikiHy no li tunny achievement of the first quarter of the
f-i-ntury was so lasting and so wide in its influence as that of
the Wiiverley novels. They began with Waverley in 1814, and
t-xteiided to Count Robert of Paris in 1831, when the genius

* In previous editions this part of our literature was dealt with very
shortly. The reason of this is sufficiently obvious. Twenty years ago, it
was possible to speak with some confidence as to the place which posterity
would assign to the poets of the firbt quarter of this century. But it was
a more hazardous tusk at that time to tell what was to be the ultimate
fate of the leading names in prose literature. The latter, if it does not
cover a wider ground, is necessarily more varied in its subjects. It pro-
duces its impression, nut so much by fixed and invariable rules of art, as
by the fidelity with which it reflects the thoughts and occupations of men ;
And we are apt, in judging of the prose literature of a time too near our
own, to mistake the immediate and, it may be, temporary interest of the
subject for the qualities thut, independently of that immediate interest,
ensure permanence iu literary work.

512 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

of Scott was on the wane, and when his health was broken.
As we have already seen, Scott, with characteristic modesty,
avowed himself to have retired from the domain of poetry on
the rise of the more brilliant genius of Byron ; and he no
doubt considered that he had stepped down to a lower
literary grade when he began his later work. But we of
this generation, to whom the Waverley novels are one of the
richest treasures of our literature, are not likely to agree
with his estimate ; and the name of Scott could never have
held the place it now does, had it been known only by The
Lady of the Lake, or The Lay of the Last Minstrel, or even by
Marmion. It was in the novels that the full maturity of his
genius showed itself; it is on these that his literary fame
must depend.

Although Scott changed his subject as well as his manner
in passing from poetry to prose, the source of his inspiration
was the same in each sphere of work. The reaction against
the formalism of the previous century, which had given rise
to the English Eomantic School, exercised a powerful in-
fluence over him. The antiquarian zeal which had led Bishop
Percy to gather together the relics of ^poetry left by a more
simple age, found sympathy from Scott ; and this tendency,
which the taste of the previous generation had fostered, was
increased in him, both by the surroundings and the asso-
ciations of his chilcQiood, by his early study of the poetry
and traditions of the Scottish border, and by the contact
which accident gave him with the rising romantic school
of Germany.

The taste had been ridiculed by Johnson, and had, in
weaker hands, led to lamentable exaggeration. But Scott's
genius served to give him the true key to the meaning of the
movement. He had been faithful to it in his poetry, and
now he carried the same impulse into his fiction. But he
necessarily showed it under new conditions. Fiction, as a
picture or reflexion of life and manners, was not yet a century
old in England when Scott began to write. Its great names
were few, and they had all belonged to one of two schools,
each of which was restricted in its aim. Samuel Eichardson
had dwelt, with what was perhaps unnatural detail, upon
certain problems of psychological analysis. He had drawn
character in its various phases as affected by outside circum-
stances ; but his code of morality was so conventional that he
had surrounded his picture of life with a glamour of arti-

PROSE LITERATURE. 513

ficiality. Fielding, and after him Smollett, had rushed into
the opposite extreme, had delineated more manly and robust
types of character, and had striven to show that a moral
substratum of honour and bravery and healthy sincerity
could carry a man heart-whole, however damaged, through
the temptations and mistakes and follies of life. But both
schools had equally limited their view to contemporary life.
They looked upon their time with very different eyes ; they
extracted from it a very different lesson ; but each looked
upon it, and upon it only. They marked its whims and its
humours; they dwelt upon its follies; they analysed its
motives, and made its types of character stand out with
reality for us. But they never reached to the height of
imaginative and creative power which was the distinguishing
characteristic of Scott's ^ -nius. It was in the vivid reality
\\hl«-li li<- o-jive to characters drawn from various ages ; in the
{Hnlllng inf 0! est with which he made us follow their fortunes ;
in the cunning art by which he was able to knit the story
of the past to our sympathy, — that Scott showed the strength
of his imagination, trained, as it was, by living in the past.
It was his imagination which taught him to look even upon
those types of contemporary character which he portrayed,
as inheritors of that past. It is impossible to attempt here
anv analysis of the novels. Criticism will always be divided
as to the method of some of his historical novels ; as to his
use of contemporary records ; as to the dress with which he
has invested his characters, or the language in which he has
made them speak. An antiquarian colouring is often given
by merely conventional devices, and by a t»tilted diction
which has something of the mock heroic about it. But with
all this, the central qualities of Scott's genius are untouched :
such novels as The Talisman, and Ivanfioe, and Quentin Dur-
ward, stand out as real pictures of human life, whatever
deductions we may make from the historical accuracy of
their details, or the conventional representation of archaic
language which Scott has chosen to adopt. The best of the
novels are probably, on the whole, those which deal with
a time bufficiently removed from his own to give 1;
to his historic imagination, and yet not >o Tar separated a»
10 jiive a M-nse of inn>ngruity to the ideas and language
that are introduced — such novels as Waverlty, Old Mortality,,
The Heart of Midlothian, and The Bride of Lammerniocnr— ITio
last of which is the beat counterpart, perhaps, in all our

2L

514 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

literature, of the spirit of the Greek drama. But even in the
novels which we may call contemporary, the same historical
impulse is present. Thus, for instance, in The Antiquary,
Scott presents us with no type of character that was not
drawn from his own experience. It deals with no remote
past, but with the years of his own early manhood. Yet one
secret, at least, of its interest, is the wealth of imagination
which makes each character to have some link with the past,
to typify some picturesque phase of national life. We see
this in the gloomy figure of Lord Glenallan, representing the
traditions of Scottish Catholicism ; in Old buck, shaped at
once by his inherited Presbyterianism, and by his Dutch
descent ; in Edie Ochiltree, with his almost aristocratic pride
as King's Bedesman ; even in the fisherman and his family,
clinging passionately to the pride and prejudices of their race,
and refusing to be shaken out of the virtues or the vices of
their Norse blood. When we look at the gallery of portraits
in this light, they are no longer mere figures helping out the
plot, but living realities, giving to the story the aspect of a
fragment of history, with its roots fixed in the past, and
repeating all the deepest instincts of the national life.

The influence of what we may call the historical imagina-
tion of Scott, by which he was able to invest the past with
the impressive force of reality, told, as we shall find, upon
other branches of our literature. But before we pass from
the fiction of his day, we must glance at some varieties of it
which stand in marked contrast with his genius. Another
school of fiction had already gained an audience. It may be said
to have begun in the previous generation, with the Evelina
of FRANCES BURNEY (bom 1742, died 1840). Miss Burney
had won early triumphs, had pleased a critic so severe as
Johnson, and yet lived to see her work overlaid and super-
seded by that of two generations of successors. She had no
claim to original or powerful genius. She gained attention
only by drawing her characters, with an observation careful
though never profound, from the every-day life around her.
The same qualities of faithful portraiture that earned admira-
tion for her own work, helped her to found the school, whose
later achievements made her own to be forgotten. Such art
as she showed, was carried to far greater perfection by JANE
AUSTEN (born 1775, died 1817). Miss Austen published only
four novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mans-
field Paris, and Emma ; two more (Northanger Abbey and Per-

PROSE LITERATURE. 515

suasion) were published after her untimely death. But scanty
as her work is, it has unquestionably won an enduring place
in our literature. Her genius has nothing in common with
that of Scott, and any comparison would obviously be unfair
to her. She attempts no flights of imagination ; she never
trusts herself out of the sphere of contemporary narrative.
She invents no thrilling incidents ; the elements of romance
and poetry are almost studiously avoided ; and there is even
an impression of restraint in the limits which she imposes on
herself. But her art is shown in the delicacy and truth of
her delineation of character ; in her penetrating observation
of ordinary life ; and, above all, in her power of quiet and
sarcastic analysis of motives. The very nature of her genius
forbade her attaining wide popularity ; but even if we call
her pictures miniatures, there is something in their artistic
finish which will always find her an audience fit though few.

The novels of MARIA EDGEWORTH (born 1767, died 1849),
widely as they are separated from those of Miss Austen, yet
stand in equally strong contrast with those of Scott. Like
her predecessors of her own sex, she never attempted to
revivify the past, nor to rise to any great imaginative
creation. Less careful, less minute and subtle in analysis,
more prone to exaggeration, than Miss Austen, she had also a
more lively and quick invention. Her common sense was,
however, stronger and more vigorous than her artistic faculty
or her literary tact. She was ever anxious to grasp some
social question, and the forced and didactic manner which
is the result of the constant desire to impress a moral, mars
the effect of her novels. It is this defect which has perhaps
caused her more important works to be forgotten in our own
day, while her stories for children retain their place as classics.
But popularity has its ebbs and flows ; and the place of Miss
Edgeworth in our literature is based upon a foundation so
sure and so worthy, that we may with confidence predict that
the neglect will not be permanent.

The quick development of various types of fiction in the
early part of the century, betokens a generation prone at
once to analyze its own conditions, and to seek new bonds of
sympathy with the past. The literature of imagination
naturally catches up and makes its own the divergent
tendencies of the time. These were chiefly two : on the one
hand the keen and bold aspirations started by the great
political movements on the continent, and on the other the

516 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

reaction against the excesses bred of these movements, which
threw men back upon the past. Each finds expression in
the literature of imagination, but it is when we get to the
literature of thought that the divergencies become still more
apparent.

The school of philosophy which prevailed in England to-
wards the close of the eighteenth century had been practical
in its aim and limited in its range. Its teachers had
prided themselves above all upon lucidity of exposition and
orderliness of method. Its objects and characteristics are
fairly described by the name of the Common Sense School,
by which its exponents came to be known. It traced the
growth of ideas, of moral sentiments, of notions of taste, not
upon any metaphysical theory, but chiefly as they might be
seen developing themselves through the very palpable pro-
cesses of education and experience. It assumed certain
axioms as proved sufficiently for all practical purposes, and
sought to raise no questions as to the foundations of our
knowledge, or as to the relation between thought and matter.
If the Idealism of Berkeley was remembered, it was chiefly
as the subject of ridicule. In his philosophical essays Hume
had actually adopted the limitations of this Common Sense
School. Like them, he had set aside what are known in
philosophy as absolute truths, and proceeding upon the same
distaste for metaphysics, he had constructed a system ot
universal scepticism.

It was inevitable that there should be a reaction against
this. The method had, in itself, no principle of philosophical
advance. It diverged or transformed itself into disquisitions
on questions of taste, of literature, of casuistry. As a system
of philosophy, it was destined inevitably to be superseded ;
and accordingly the next generation saw the beginning of
two distinct and new schools of thought. As yet one of
these only was giving indications of its approach. It was to
be seen in the new impulse given to thought by COLERIDGE,
who had caught something at least of the spiiit of German
mysticism.

It was perhaps the most permanent result of Coleridge's
•work in prose literature to introduce this new tendency into
English thought; and this he began in The Friend (1809),
and continued not only throughout other parts of his prose
work (the BiograpJiia Literaria, Aids to Reflection, and other
fragments of the great religious and philosophical work which

PROSE LITERATURE. 517

he planned), but also throughout the years during which his
personal influence was affecting so powerfully many of the
men of light and leading amongst his later contemporaries.
Coleridge had indeed too little of perseverance, of method,
and of telf-dibcipline, to be the founder of any systematic
school. But what he did was to start a new train of thought,
to which we may be said to owe that careful study of the
critical philosophy of Germany, which came with the next
generation.

In strong opposition to the mysticism of Coleridge, there
arose another body of thinkers, whose later influence has
been scarcely less than his. These turned their attention
specially to the practical, social, and political problems of
the day. The excesses of the French Revolution had pro-
duced a strong reaction against the abstract political theories
which its early leaders had advanced. But, however un-
popular they were, these theories had never been altogether
abandoned, and they found an almost unbroken succession of
representatives in England. In 1797, WILLIAM GODWIN
(b"rn 1756, died 1836) had published his Inquiry concerning
Political Justice, which may be considered as one of the earliest
manifestoes of the school. It succeeded in attracting a good
deal of attention ; and for thirty years thereafter the author
attempted, by essays and by works of fiction, to keep his
theories and his name before the public. It was, however, in
the hands of JEREMY BKNTHAM (born 1748, died 1832), who
wrote at intervals between 1776 and 1824, that these social
theories developed into a consistent system of Utilitarianism.
He began with A Fragment on Government in 1776 ; his Intro-
duction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was published
in 1780; and the Discourses on Civil and Penal Legislation in
1802. Many other works of the same character followed, in
which he advocated, as containing the first principle of
legislation and government, the much discussed and somewhat.
indefinite phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number." The best qualities in his works are acuteuess and
independence, rather than great depth or breadth of view.
With whatever truth, it is not unusual to regard them as
contributing to some of the legal changes which the next
generation saw.

Others, who belonged to this school of social and political
investigation, devoted themselves more exclusively to the
problems of political economy. THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS

518 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

(born 1766, died 1834) published his Essays on the Principle
of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society in
1798, in which he argues that the natural tendency of
population, which it was important to counteract, was to
increase beyond the means of subsistence. DAVID RICARDO
(born 1772, died 1823) and JOHN RAMSAY McCuLLOCH (born
1789, died 1864), each in certain directions, made solid con-
tributions to the study of political economy, then attaining
to a popularity which it continued to command for one
generation, but from which more recent years have perhaps
made some abatement.

These speculations on questions of society and government
naturally lead us to another sphere of literature— that of
History, in which the activity of the first generation of our
century was no less marked. The work of Hume on English
History, lucid as was its style, and striking as was the ability
of special passages, had been at once careless and uncritical.
The work of Gibbon, on the other hand, stood alone by
the strength and grasp of its genius, and was more likely to
daunt imitators than to found a school of historical literature.
Though he stood on a level altogether lower than that of
Gibbon, Principal Robertson, the historian of Scotland and of
the age of Charles V. and Philip II., had perhaps done more
by his calm reasoning and patient inquiry to establish
historical literature on a firm foundation ; and the opening
of the new century saw a large activity in that field.
WILLIAM MITFORD (born 1744, died 1827) completed in 1810
the first History of Greece which really deserved the name.
It was biassed by the political opinions of the author to such
an extent as to render his estimate of Greek life unjust and
even untrue ; but although now superseded by works of later
research, it deserves the credit of being the first in a field
which was hitherto untilled. In 1819 appeared the History
of England by Dr. JOHN LINGARD (born 1771, died 1851),
which though coloured by the Roman Catholic views of the
author, as Mitford's was by his politics, yet marks, in point
of care, research, and erudition, a new era in the writing of
English History. But a far greater name than either, in our
historical literature, is that of HENRY HALLAM (born 1777,
died 1859), whose View of the State of Europe during the
Middle Ages in 1818, was followed by the Constitutional
History of England in 1827, and his Introduction to the Literature
of Europe in 1837. He combines in a singular degree the

PROSE LITERATURE. 519

careful research, the balanced opinion, and the keen deductive
faculties necessary in the highest order of historian ; and he
adds to them the perspicuity and intuitive tact of the
literary critic. It is hardly too much to say that he
revolutionized our study of history, by opening up to it new
fields of inquiry ; by arranging, side by side, the various
influences which are silently at work in constitutional and
political changes ; by presenting to us in a clear and consistent
picture the connecting links between each phase of national
growth, which serve to illustrate a nation's history. Hallani
had not, indeed, the picturesqneness of touch which enlivens
history and gives to it dramatic or romantic interest.
"Whether for good or ill, that was a quality which was to
come only with a later generation of historians. But his
task was to lay very sure foundations on which a philo-
sophical and scientific school of history might be built ; and
this task he performed without any of the pedantic insist-
ance upon trifles which the specialist is apt to mistake for
accuracy.

From History, it seems natural to turn to the kindred
sphere of Biography. Here also the opening years of the
century were energetic and productive. A generation keenly
alive to the influences that were moulding society, stirred by
great political movements, and filled with high aspirations
for humanity, is of all others most prone to exalt its leaders ;
and such a generation was not likely to be neglectful of the
portraiture of individuals. The last decade of the eighteenth
century had seen the production of that great model of
biography, the Life of Johnson by Boswell, which holds
indisputably the first place amongst all the works of its class.
There is plenty to account for the hold it has taken upon
men's minds, and for the vivid interest it retains for us,
without resorting to the foolish paradox of criticism, that
Boswell wrote a great book because he was a small man.
Nowhere is there less room for such paradox than in literary
judgments; and nowhere has literary judgment been more
led astray by it than in this instance. The biography was
indeed one of consummate art. It appealed to the widest
audience by the very character of its hero ; by the massive
heroism of the struggle it portrayed ; by the intense sym-
pathy roused at once by Johnson's virtues and his faults, by
his strong judgment and his strong prejudice. But all these,
unskilfully depicted, might have lost their interest. As it

520 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

was, the book gave a stimulus to the writing of biography,
•which quickly enriched that corner of our national literature
by a crowd of portraits, whose art, whose truth, whose well-
balanced arrangement, stamp them as masterpieces. Their
writers strove to make their pictures at once faithful in
detail, and broad in conception. They caught something in
each life that made it typical of its age, something that lifted
it above the common level ; and they were careful to make
the background and setting of the picture consistent with
the whole of which it formed part. Amid much sound work,
Southey left nothing which will outlive his Life of Nelson,
published in 1813, and his Life of Wesley, published in 1820.
In 1808, Scott, attracted by the general taste, wrote a Life
of Dryden, which remains a classic, not only for the sympathy
with which he invests the story of Dryden's fiery energy
and admitted failings, but for the skill with which he has
woven into that story a clear and compact account of the
literary history of the later Stuart days, and of the genealogy
of the rhymed drama. In his Life of Swift, written in 1814,
with more haste, and while he was busy gathering in the
harvest of his own genius, Scott still contrives to breathe
human sympathy into the sad and mysterious story, which
had before found only timid or hostile narrators; and at a
much later day, the same taste led him to expend labour on
a Life of Napoleon, which added nothing to his fame. The
example of Southey and of Scott produced many imitators.
Biographies followed in rapid succession, of which not a few
stand out as classical. In 1828 MOORE published his Life of
Eichard Brinsley Sheridan, and in 1830 the Life of Byron; but
the life which has secured for itself perhaps the second place
in our national biography, is that of Scott himself, published
in 1837, b}7 his son-in-law, JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART (born 1794,
died 1854). It is only when we think how much literary
tact was needful to trace the real meaning of Scott's life and
work ; how easy it would have been to have marred the
picture by exaggeration, or to have distorted it by dwelling
on the sadness that clouded Scott's later years ; how hard it
was to steer between the pitfalls of a cold and critical
judgment, and the undue partiality of a son, — that we can
appreciate the work. It is only thus that we can recognize
what it is in the genius of Lockhart that has made the
nation accept his portrait as the faithful representation of
one, the story of whose life asserts so much of vital influence

PROSE LITERATURE. 521

over us, and whose personality, side by side with his work,
remains to us as that of a friend.

The activity of these years thus shows itself in every
branch of prose literature. Fiction developed new resources
of interest. Philosophy outstript the narrow bounds that
had been prescribed to her. Political science learned to apply
itself in a more definite form to the problems of society.
History opened up new inquiries ; and biography presented
with fuller sympathy, with greater art, and with higher aims
and lessons, the lives of the leaders of men. There remain
some other spheres, not less characteristic of the age, but
more hard to classify in any general view of our literature.
In CHARLES LAMB (born 1775, died 1834) and SYDNEY SMITH
(born 1771, died 1845) we have two humorists, each reflect-
ing something characteristic of the age, yet standing, one
to another, in the strongest contrast. Lamb represents the
reaction against the restless energy that was seething round
him. The sadness of his own lot, the tenderness with which
he devoted himself to the care of a sister, bound to him by
the strongest ties of affection, but living under the cloud of
recurrent insanity, confirmed his love for the quiet and
recluse path in literature. His Essays of Elia have not only
become classical in their kind, but by the very quaintness
and originality of their subtle and versatile humour, they have
left their imprint upon a very wide range of literary taste.
But Lamb sought to play no part amidst the active contests
of his fellowmen. Sydney Smith, on the other band, drew
the inspiration of his wit from the questions of the hour.
Although it is convenient to classify both as humorists, yet
it is Lamb alone who typifies the faculty of humour, as Sydney
Smith does the very different one of wit. His wit was
limpid and bright ; it was sprightly and forcible as a we «pon
in contioverxy ; but it had all the superficiality that entire
conformity with a prevailing taste is apt to breed. His chief
works were contributions to the Edinburgh Review (which had
been started in 1802), and est-ays on various political and
ecclesiastical questions which aroused interest in his day.
He delivered, during 1805 and 1806, some lectures on Moral
Philosophy, which were published after his death, and in
which he devotes himself chiefly to attacking, by a light and
easy ridicule, the metaphysical theories upon which various
ethical systems were based. The ring of his wit is always
true, but it is never deep or resonant. Effective as it is ia

522 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

controversy, it never enlarges the range of the passing dis-
pute, by an appeal to the far-reaching and universal truths
of humanity. The fact that both were largely employed in
political disputes has, perhaps not unnaturally, prompted a
comparison between the wit of Sydney Smith and that of
Swift. But the similarity never really goes deeper than the
surface ; and there is, in truth, more of contrast than likeness
between the trim, shallow, and complacent wit of the Pre-
bendary of St. Paul's, and the grim and far-reaching humour,
with its background of deep and abiding melancholy, which
we find in the Dean of St. Patrick's.

In the sphere of literary criticism, two names stand forward
as counterparts to those of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith
in wit and humour. The first is WILLIAM HAZLITT (born
1778, died 1830), the subtlety and delicacy of whose literary
insight brought a new influence to bear on our literature.
In criticism, his genius answers to that of Lamb in humour.
We cannot, indeed, say that Hazlitt established any such
rules of literary criticism as gave it the perfection which it
attained in the hands of the French masters of the art. But
it is his very independence of rules, his versatility, his
ingenuity even in paradox, that have given charm to what he
has written, especially on the Elizabethan dramatists. The
second of the pair, belonging to a totally different type, is
FRANCIS JEFFREY (born 1773, died 1850). The Edinburgh
Review was started in 1802, as the mouthpiece of the Whig
party. It soon acquired a literary character of its own ; and
as Sydney Smith well represents its wit and humour, so
Francis Jeffrey may be taken as typical of its style of literary
criticism. He cultivated literature only amid the engrossing
occupations of a lawyer, a politician, and a judge; and his
essays, keen, trenchant, and pointed as they are, lack the
higher qualities of a wide intellectual sympathy, and are
often oppressive by their over-confident tone of criticism, and
by their want of appreciation for all that stands outside of
the narrow and transient clique of which he was the mouth-
piece.

To meet the organ of the Whigs, there were started a few
years later, on the Tory side, the Quarterly Review and
Blackwood's Magazine. The first was edited by WILLIAM
GIFFORD (born 1757, died 1826), the translator of Juvenal,
who had also done much to revive the study of our earlier
dramatists. In both magazines, especially in their early

PROSE LITERATURE. 523

«"!ay?, the fierce heat of the political struggle was reflected
with a vehemence from which literature of the same class
is, in our own day, fortunately free. But both sides obtained
the aid of the most prominent literary men of the day ; and
besides those named, Scott, Southey, Canning, Lord Brougham,
Lockhart, and John Wilson (better known by his pseudonym
of "Christopher North "), became frequent contributor to a
current liteiature which, with all its over- vehemence of con-
troversy, and its frequent bitterness of personalities, was full
of force, eloquence, and genuine power.

The Theological literature of the earlier part of the century
had characteristics of its own, the merits of which we in this
generation may possibly be inclined to underrate. The mass
of theological literature during the eighteenth century, since
the days of South and Tillotson, had been framed alter a cold
and almost scholastic type. There had been a great exception
in Bishop Butler, but his high place in literature is due
much more to his work as a religious moralist than as a
theologian. The revival from this formalism had come with
the preaching of Wesley ; but although the movement
identified with his name, in its earlier phases, was not without
some permanent effect in literature, it soon became separated
from the higher intellectual life of the nation. The Church,
as an agent in the religious movements of the time, ttill
seemed to many to retain too much of its old formalism ; and
pending a new impulse, such energy as was exerted in the
domain of religious literature belonged chiefly to the Evan-
gelical school, and to the Dissenting bodies, to the type of
whose religious opinions that school most nearly approached.
That Evangelical school was now at the period of its highest
influence. It rested upon a solid foundation of real scholar-
ship and eloquence. It had not yet become identified with
that part of the nation which has least interest in literary
movements. It was powerful in the Universities. It made
contributions to our literature of solid value. Looking at
once to England and Scotland, we may trace during thif
period a long line of theological writers and preachers, all
animated by something of the same spirit, and appealing to
much the same audience. That line extended from WILLIAM
WILBERFORCE, the leading layman of the strictest sect of the
Evangelical school, who first wrote in 1797, through ROBERT
HALL, the Baptist minister of Cambridge, and JOHN FOSTER,
the Baptist minister of Bristol, down to the most eloquent

524 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

and powerful representative of Scotch Presbyterianism ii?
his day, Dr. THOMAS CHALMKRS, who died in 1847. The schooV
to which all these belonged was still strong and flourishing,
when a new movement began, which was destined in great
measure to supersede its iufluence.

PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.*

A few of the most memorable facts connected with the
progress of scientific discovery in England, during this period,
may be very briefly noted. In astronomy Herschel continued
to pursue his observations, commenced a short time before
1781, in which year he discovered the planet Uranus; in
1802 appeared in the Philosophical Transactions his catalogue
of 500 new nebulae and nebulous stars ; in 1803 his announce-
ment of the motions of double stars around each other ; and a
long succession of other important papers, illustrative of the
construction of the heavens, followed down to within a few
years of his death, at the age of eighty-four, in 1822. In
chemistry, Davy, who had published his account of the effects
produced by the respiration of nitrous oxide (the laughing
gas) in 1800, in 1807 extracted metallic bases from the fixed
alkalis, in 1808 demonstrated the similar deeompusability of
the alkaline earths, in 1811 detected the true nature of chloride
(oxymuriatic acid), and in 1815 invented his safety lamp; in
1804 Leslie published his Experimental Enquiry in'o the
Nature and Properties of Heat ; in 1808 the Atomic Theory
was announced by Dalton; and in 1814 its development and
illustration were completed by Wollaston, to whom both
chemical science and optics are also indebted for various
other valuable services.

* This section is reprinted as it stood in the former editions.

( 525 )

THE LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIAN AGE.

POETRY.

WHAT is properly the history of our literature closes with
the age or generation preceding the present ; for history
takes cognizance only of that which is past. But the earlier
part of the Victorian age, which can scarcely be said to have
parsed away when the earliest edition of this book was
published, is now sufficiently removed to allow us, with some
measure of confidence, to select a few of its leading names,
and to trace itscalient features, without raising such disputed
points of criticism as would here be out of place. Time has
winnowed, in part at least, the weightier grain from tho
chaff which at first may not easily be distinguished from it.

If the previous generation was especially strong in poetry,
the literal y greatness of the Victorian age has shown itself
chiefly in prose. The increasing interest of social questions ;
the rapid progress of scientific discovery ; the changed con-
ditions of ordinary life ; above all, perhaps, the quick move-
ments on the political scene, — have given abundant food
for the literature of disquisition, of exposition, and of
argument, and have perhaps turned attention away from the
more permanent and stable interests, from the more simple
forms of thought, which must always serve as the best
subjects for poetic treatment. In spite of this, however, the
age has not wanted, even in poetry, a few names which are
worthy to be named with their great predecessors of the
earlier years of the century.

Amongst these, common consent places first the name of
the Poet Laureate, ALFRED TENNYSON. Born in 1810, Mr.
Tennyson publi.-shed his earliest poems so long ago as 1827,
and his Poems, chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. At the very outset of
his career, his genius attracted the attention both of Coleridge
and of Wordsworth ; and these, the latest representatives of
the great poetic company that had made the previous genera-
tion so rich, recognized in him one who was worthy to
receive the torch from their hands. These Lyrical Poems
bhowed tho influence, upon the young poet, of each poetic

526 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

phase wTiifh was strongly marked in that preceding genera-
tion. If he was stirred by the rich and luxuriant fancy of
Shelley and of Keats, he added to it not a little of the ethical
tendency that was so pronounced in Wordsworth. In the
Ode to Memory, beginning —

" Thou who stealest fire,
From the fountains of the past,
To glorify the present ; oh, haste,

Visit my low desire !
Strengthen me, enlighten me !
I faint in this obscurity,
Thou dewy dawn of memory ! "

the influence of Shelley and of Keats is constantly present ;
nor is it less apparent in such of the early poems as that
entitled Fatima. In 1832, other poems followed ; and about
ten years later Mr. Tennyson published two volumes, which
consisted in part of reprints, but which also gave evidence,
in new work, of matured artistic power, as well as added
dignity of subject. In (Enone, TitTionus, and Ulysses, we
have poems which, fragmentary as they are, evince a faculty
that in its perfection seems almost peculiar to Mr. Tenny-
son— the faculty of investing with modern interest a
classical legend. The following extracts show to what per-
fection Mr. Tennyson had already brought his art of
rhythmical expression.

In the first, from the lament of (Enone, we may notice the
skill with which the spirit of the classical legend, while
retaining traces of its origin at once in language and metaphor,
is blended with an intricacy and variety of thought that is
altogether modern : —

" ' O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida,
Dear mother, Ida, barken ere I die.
For now the noonday quiet holds the hill :
The grasshopper is silent in the grass :
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Bests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps.
The purple flowers droop : the golden bee
Is lily-cradled : I alone awake.
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.

" « O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida,
Dear mother, Ida, barken ere I die.
Hear me, O Earth, hear me, O Hills, O Caves
That house the cold-crowned snake I O mountain brookg,

POETRY. 527

I am the daughter of a River-God ;
Hear me, for I will speak, and build up all
My sorrow with my song, as yonder walla
Rose slowly to a music slowly breathed,
A cloud that gathered shape : for it may be
That, while I speak of it, a little while
My heart may wander from iU deeper woe."

The following lines from the address of Pallas in the
same poem, show in a manner equally distinct the ethical
side, which never remains long out of sight in Mr. Tennyson's
work : —

u * Self -reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
Yet not for power, (power of hertelf
Would come uncalled for,) but to live by law,
Acting the law we live by without fear ;
And, because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom iu the bourn of consequence.' "

The following is from the soliloquy of Ulysses, a poem of
which the suggestion, as well as occasional turns of the
expression, is drawn from the passage at the end of the
twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, beginning —

tt Ne dolcezza del flglio, nfe la pieta

Del vecchio padre, ne '1 debito amore,
Lo q mil dnv.il Penelope far lieta,

Vincer potero dentro a me T union-," etc.

" There lies the port : the vessel puffs her sail :
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads— you and I are old ;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil ;
Death closes all : but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks :
The long day wanes : the slow moon climbs : the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
Tia not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and bitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows ; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

528 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Though much is taken, much abides ; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

What was still wanting in his work, however, was a
subject capable of sustained poetic treatment ; nor can this
be said to be found even in The Princess, which appeared
in 1847. In 1850 was published In Memoriam, which caught
and retained, with marvellous skill, what was more than a
passing mood in the religious development of the age. In
the same year, Mr. Tennyson was chosen to succeed Words-
worth as the wearer of

«' That laurel greener from the brows
Of him that uttered nothing base."

In 1855, appeared Maud, a poem which expressed the
enthusiasm an/used throughout the nation by the outbreak,
after a long period of peace, of a war which was accepted
as a great national enterprise, likely to dissipate the evils
of too selfish prosperity. It was no part of the poet's task to
discriminate the moral bearing of that national emotion ; but
the inspiration, whatever its ground, certainly helped him,
in Maud, to attain to a strength of poetic utterance which he
has never surpassed.

In 1859, appeared the first of those Idylls of the King,
which deal with the Arthurian Epic in a manner which Mr.
Tennyson had long before planned, and of which he had
given an early specimen in the Morte <C Arthur. The cycle
was completed only in 1872 ; and in the course of its
execution the scheme had undergone considerable change.
The colouring and imagery became less rich ; the word-paint-
ing less elaborate ; but the allegorical meaning attached to
the legend was more carefully worked out.

Mi a i) while, Mr. Tennyson had interrupted the course of
this, his longest work, by many smaller pieces. Enoch Arden
and The Northern Fatmer appeared in 1864; and in the last we
have a specimen of character drawing, which is all the more
interesting that it had its source in the poet's recollection of
his early surroundings. Since the completion of the Idylls,
Mr. Tennyson's pen has been almost constantly at work ; and
in Queen Mary, Harold, and one or two other dramatic

POETRY. 529

pieces he has given specimens of a new, though probably
not equally rich, vein of his genius.

Next, in order of time, though not of poetic rank, comes
the name of ELIZABETH BARRETT-BROWNING (born 1809, died
1861). Mrs. Browning cannot be said to have attained to a
place amongst poets of the first, or even of the second, grade ;
and the years that have followed since her death have not,
perhaps, shown that her works are capable of retaining the
hold which at first they succeeded in gaining. But she stands
first amongst the English poets of her sex ; and with what-
ever her poetry may be charged in the way of defect or of
excess, it has two of the vital elements of true poetry —
subtlety of imagination, and force of conception and feeling.
Her chief work is Aurora Leigh, published in 1856. It has
faults, both in manner and spirit ; an overstrained style, and
occasionally a tone of somewhat morbid plaintiveness. But
with all this, it has a subtlety, a spontaneous strength of
it -ding, and a descriptive force, which are likely to give it
an enduring title to admiration.

Mrs. Barrett-Browning's poetry seems already to belong to
a past generation ; but the same cannot be said of Mr. ROBERT
UuoWNiNQ (born 1812), who, next to Mr. Tennyson, holds a
place in our contemporary poetry which none can dispute.
II is genius, independent and original almost to ruggedness,
as it is, has nevertheless proved itself most capable of creating
the new taste necessary for its own appreciation. His
Paracelsus was published in 1836, when he was only three
and twenty ; and marvellous as it was for the depth and
completeness of its conception, it was remarkable still more
for the ingenuity of its execution, after the manner — repul-
sive indeed to many — which he chose to make his own.
lie ostentatiously refused adherence to established models ;
but he elaborated an ideal of his own with masterly skill.
Paracelsus was followed by Bordello, in 1839, which repeated
the same qualities ; and of the middle period of his work,
perhaps the most important specimens are Men and Women
(1855) and Dramatis Personse (1864). Mr. Browning has
also published many dramas ; but it may be doubted whether
any of these give evidence of his dramatic skill so great as
is afforded by some of his smaller lyrical pieces. To quote
from any of his longer works would be impossible; but the
following show something of his power of giving dramatic
force to lyrical poetry. The first is called The Lost Leader.

2M

530 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

" Just for a handful of silver he left us,

Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat-
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,

Lost all the others she lets us devote ;
They, with the gold to give, dealt him out silver,

So much was theirs who so little allowed ;
How all our copper had gone for his service !

Rags — were they purple his heart had been proud f
We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,

Lived in his mild and beneficent eye ;
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him our pattern to live and to die 1
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,

Burns, Shelley, were with us — they watch from their graves ?
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen ;

He alone sinks to the rear and slaves !

" We shall march prospering— not through his presence;

Songs may inspirit us — not from his lyre ;
Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quiescence,

Still bidding crouch whom the rest bid aspire ;j
Blot out his name, then ; record one lost soul more ;

One task more declined, one more footpath untrod ;
One more triumph for devils, and sorrow for angels,

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God !
Life's night begins : let him never come back to us 1

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain,
Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twilight,

Never glad, confident morning again !
Best fight on well, for we taught him — strike gallantly,

Aim at our heart ere we pierce through his own ;
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,

Pardoned in heaven, the first of the throne 1 "

The next extract, from The Grammarian's Funeral, supposed
to be spoken soon after the revival of learning, shows even
more strikingly the dramatic force of some of Mr. Browning's
lyrics.

" Let us begin and carry up this corpse,

Singing together ;
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes.

Each in bis tether,
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,

Cared for till cock-crow.
Look out if yonder's not the day again

Rimming the rock-row ;
That's the appropriate country ; there, man's thought,

Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,

Chafes in its censer !
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop ;

Seek we sepulture

POETRT. 531

On a tall mountain, citied to the top,

Crowded with culture !
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels—

Clouds overcome it ;
No, yonder sparkle is the citadel's

Circling its summit !
Thither our path lies ; wind we np the heights—

Wait ye the warning ?
Our low lite was the level's and the night's ;

lie's for the morning 1
Step to a tune, square chests, erect the head,

'Ware the beholders !
This is our master, famous, calm, nnd dead,

Borne on our shoulders."

After describing the long struggle of the master's life,
the poem ends thus :—

** Here's the top-peak ! The multitude below

Live, for they can there.
This man decided not to Live but Know —

Bury this man there ?
Here— here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go ! Let joy break with the storm —

Peace let the dew send !
Lofty designs must close in like effects ;

Loftily lying,
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects

Living and dying."

The following are a few verses from Rabbi Ben Ezra, a
poem which strikes an even deeper chord in the philosophy
of life. It begins : —

«* Grow old along with me t

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made ;

Our tunes are in jblis hand

Who saith * A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half: trust God : see all, nor be afraid ! '
• * * * • •

" Poor vaunt of life, indeed,

Were man but formed to feed

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast ;

Such feasting ended, then,

As sure an end to men ;

Irks care the crop-full bird ? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ?

»•»•»*
•* Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each bting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go

532 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

Be our joys three parts pain !

Strive and hold cheap the strain ;

Learn, nor account the pang : dare, never grudge the throe ! "

He then shows the folly of useless regrets, the certainty
that all experience moulds us under the potter's wheel of
providence, and concludes thus : —

" Cut I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men ;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Bid I— to the wheel of life,
With shapes and colours rife
Bound dizzily— mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst.

*' So, take and use Thy work !
Amend what flaws may lurk,

"What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim !
My times be in Thy hand !
Perfect the cup as planned !
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same ! "

These specimens are enough to prove the occasional ease
and grace of his lyrical expression, as well as its dramatic
force ; and they make us all the more regret, that, with the
waj^wardness of genius, he has chosen to throw that ease
and grace aside, to spend his skill in inventing new and
intricate modes of expression, to dwell upon subjects in which
simplicity was impossible. In the Ring and the Book (1868)
he has dealt with a story repulsive in itself; and he has
done so with an elaboration of argument and analysis that
makes the work appear a feat of literary ingenuity rather
than a spontaneous product of genius. But in spite of his
contempt for the means by which popularity may be secured,
Mr. Browning has retained a real and powerful hold upon
his time. It remains to be seen whether a future age will
pardon the intricacy and faults of form for the rich mine of
thought and invention which they conceal.

"We have had to name Tennyson and Browning first
amongst the poets of the Victorian age ; and it is somewhat
curious to find them, after half a century of work, still the
leaders of our poetry. They had already given full evidence
of ripened powers, when a younger school arose, which
flourished for a time, and then passed away. It was about
1850 that attention was first attracted to a company of young
poets, of whom the chief was SYDNEY DOBELL (born 1824,
died 1874), whose peculiarities earned for them the name of

POETRY'. 533

the Spasmodic school. Sydney Dobell published TJie .Roman,
a drama, in 1850; it was followed in 1854 by Balder ; and
subsequently by Sonnets on the War in 1855 ; and by England
in Time of War, in 1856. His closest literary companion was
ALEXANDER SMITH (born 1830, died 1867), who, besides some
poems published along with Dobell, wrote a longer work,
called A Life Drama, in 1853. Of the two, Sydney Dobell at
least showed something more than a mere promise of genius.
His fancy and his imagery were rich even to excess; his
language, at times bombastical, is often dignified and
sublime; and if his thoughts do not lift us into the region of
purest poetry, they yet rai.se us, by their very earnestness,
into something of a higher moral atmosphere. His aspira-
tions are noble ; but we feel a certain sense of artificiality in
aspirations that are ever on the strain, that are carried
forward by nothing of the keen and yet unconscious passion
that belongs to the highest forms of genius. We find in him,
what is still more visible with the lesser muse of Alexander
Smith, the presence of a strained and one-sided system, the
exaggeration of a philosophy which seems out of place in
poetry, the dogmatism of one who seeks to proselytize, and
to press the tenets of the peculiar school to which he
belonged. We are wearied by the perpetual striving after
effect; and we are compelled, while recognizing the real
blossom of genius that might have matured under better
influence, to admit the justice of the verdict of time, which
has passed over the school, at one time so full of promise, as
marking nothing more than an episode in our literature.

It is the natural result of such a school to produce a
reaction against its own exaggerations. The error of an
overstrained individuality and of a contempt for rules was
soon perceived. Poetry sought for older and more classical
models, fashioned itself on the permanent rules of art, and
avoided with almost excessive care all that was exaggerated
or overstrained. This gives, no doubt, a sense of timidity
which does not belong to the highest genius: but in an age
where that highest genius is wanting, it is the safest course
for poetry to follow. If there are no other poets who can
rank beside the two oldest of the company, there are several
whose work faithfully maintains a high ideal of poetic Art,
and, if it makes no material addition to the permanent
treasure of our literature, at least cultivates and educates the
literary taste of the day. This is no small praise; short,

534 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

indeed, of the very highest achievement of genius, it is the
most honourable function which literary skill can perform.
The first place in this order of poets belongs to Mr. MATTHEW
ARNOLD (born 1822). His first volume of poems, The Strayed
Reveller, and other Poems, was published in 1848 ; Empedocles
on Etna in 1853; and others at frequent intervals down to
the present day. It would give but a poor idea of the debt
under which Mr. Arnold has laid his generation, were we
to speak of him merely as following the classical spirit, as
chastening his poetry by such imitation of the rigid and
statuesque simplicity of the ancients as is possible in our day.
He has done this, but he has also done more ; his poetry is
not only true to the highest ideal of art, but by its truth
to this ideal its moral effect is made more certain. It is by
the very perfection of form of such a piece as Thyrsis* that
the poet can most fitly give expression to that instinct which
in a busy and struggling age seeks for something permanent
and restful, — that instinct which Mr. Arnold has made it his
chief aim to satisfy.

The same reverence for art, with a more marked pursuit
of archaic models, is to be found in the poetry of Mr. WILLIAM
MORRIS (born 1834), whose Jason appeared in 1864, and his
Earthly Paradise in 1869 and 1870. It is in such poetry
as his that we may perhaps most easily trace the close
connection which has grown up between recent forms of
poetry and recent development of the kindred arts. Mr.
A. 0. SWINBURNE, in Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Chastelard
(1865), and other poems, has studied with equal care and
with wider resources of genius and expression, if with less
tutored judgment, the models of ancient art ; and by what-
ever exaggeration his work is marred, he has earned a place
in the roll of our poets which time may obscure, but cannot
altogether obliterate.

In different degrees, all these belong to that class of
literature which is poetical in aim and in subject, no less than
in the accident of form. Contrasted with this there is
another kind of verse, poetical in form rather than in spirit,
and possessing, we may perhaps say, the rhetorical qualities
of poetry rather than the imaginative inspiration which is
its most essential part. Of such verse almost every age
marked by literary activity has produced much; and the

* Thyrsis is a monody on the author's friend. AKTHUB HUGH CLOUGH,
who died in 1861,

PROSE LITERATURE. 533

Victorian age is no exception to the rule. THOMAS HOOD
(born 1798, died 1845) pretends to no depth of poetic
inspiration ; but his verse, whether humorous or pathetic,
although restricted, indeed, in range, is always perfect in its
kind. The Odes of MACAULAY are rhetorical exercises rather
than real poetry, but they are not likely soon to lose that
hold on the popular taste which they gain as recalling more
than an echo of the ballad poetry of Scott. Even AYTOUN
(born 1813, died 1865), although he falls below Macaulay
almost as much as Macaulay falls below Scott, has yet written
with a spirit and enthusiasm likely to ensure vitality for a
species of verse in which the rhetoric has always a certain
attraction, and which troubles the rapid reader by no painful
effort of thought for its appreciation.

PROSE LITERATURE.

When we come to the prose literature of the same epoch,
it is an even harder task to bring into the compass of any
short summary, types so various as almost to defy classifica-
tion. We must be content with little more than a catalogue
of the prominent names, and a glance at the salient tendencies
of current literature.

In prose fiction the Victorian age has been peculiarly
strong. No name, indeed, can stand on the same level with
that of Scott. In his work the English Romantic School
may with truth be said to have begun and ended. The
historical romance, at all times difficult, seems in our own
day to have lost its charm; possibly because few were bold
enough to challenge the inevitable comparison, but more
probably because the age became impatient of what did not
seem to Lave a direct bearing on the questions in which it
was itself chiefly interested. The late Lord LYTTON (born
1805, died 1873) did, indeed, give us in Rienzi, The Last of
the Barons, and Harold, specimens of historical romance ; but
they are too artificial to retain a firm hold on our attention ;
and among his many and various works, his novels of con-
temporary life, such as Pelham (1828) and The Caxtons (1849),
are likely to obtain more enduring popularity.

To the works of BENJAMIN DISRAELI, EAJIL OF BEACONSFIELD
(born 1804, died 1881), it would be impossible to assign any
»et placo in a formal classification of fiction. The daring

538 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

independence of his genius was as little inclined to submit
to tradition in literature as in politics. A longer and more
entire devotion to literature would doubtless have at once
ripened his literary genius, and would have shown us more
clearly its true proportions. As it was, the statesman neces-
sarily overcame the author ; and however rich the promise
of his early novels, however keen their observation, however
picturesque their description, however striking they were
in their eccentric brilliancy, they bear too many signs of
rapid workmanship, and of immature art. Between Vivian
Grey, written when he was one and twenty, and Endymion,
which came at the close of a long and illustrious career, there
lie fifty-five years ; and to produce two such works at such an
interval is itself an achievement unique in literature. From
1826 to 1838, when he became absorbed in politics, he produced
Contarini Fleming, Henrietta Temple, Alroy, and several other
novels, along with essays in poetry and drama; even the first
decade of his political life saw three more novels ; but from
1852, when he first took office, he wrote no more till 1870,
when, after the close of his first premiership, he published
Lothair. Endymion appeared in 1880. Both the later works
showed traces of the old brilliancy of epigram and fancy ;.
but forty years of incessant combat in the forefront of politics
had been an experience unfit to ripen literary art.

For the most part, the fiction of our day has followed other
models, and has developed other tendencies. It was in Field-
ing, with his broad and strong drawing of~character, and
with his subtle humour, that WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
(Born 1811, died 1863) found the type which he preferred to
follow. Thackeray was not, indeed, insensible to the pos-
sTETlities of the Komantic school ; but he judged, deliberately
and probably correctly, that it was unsuited to the taste of
the daj, and did not admit oF the sarcastic painting of the
world around us wherein his own strength lay. From
Fielding he borrows not only the spirit of sarcastic and" un-
flattering portraiture of the vice and vanities and follies of
society, but he adopts oftentimes even the types and portraits
from his predecessor's canvas, to transfer them, with subtler
delineation and a deeper pathos, to his own. Vanity Fair,
Hs first great work, appeared in 1846; Pendennis in 1848;
Esmond (which is in form, though not in spirit, an historical
novel) in 1852; and The Newcomes in 1854. If, his sarcasm
was keen, BO, too, was his tenderness ; and it is in the union

PROSE LITERATURE. 537

of light and shade, of tragedy and playfulness, of cynicism
ami pathos, that the peculiarity and the charm of Thackeray's
is ] iv. T>nt even apart from this, his masculine grasp
of character ami native, no less tliati the grace and vigour
of his English, would suffice to give him a high and enduring
place in our literature.

If Thackeray took Fielding as his model, so it is often
said that his compeer, CHARLES DICKENS (born 1812, died
1870), followed Smollett. But this is true only so far that
Dickens frequently produces his effects by the same grotesque-
ness and exaggeration that are to be found in Smollett; that
his pictures are graphic and forcible rather than sketched
with the half- res trained sarcasm of Thackeray's touch ; and
that he cares less for the subtle delineation of character
than for the reproduction of fanciful types. In variety, in
tragic power, as well as in the boundless vitality of his
comedy, Dickens excelled Smollett infinitely more than
Thackeray surpassed Fielding in the subtlety of his character-
drawing, and in the range of his sarcasm and pathos. The
genius of Dickens came more rapidly to maturity than that
of Thackeray. It was in 1837 that he began the Pickwick
Papers, which gained him at once a boundless popularity,
and that popularity he sustained unbroken till his Heath in
1870. Almost each one of his novels dealt with some
palpable abuse, pursued and stigmatized with a vehemence
of ridicule and invective which often mars the art of the
story. Many of these abuses, once nourishing, have already
passed away before the force of enlightened opinion ; but it
would be unjust to deny to the novelist the praise of having
at least helped to make them impossible. In Nicholas Nickleby
the educational impostures that were founded on cruelty and
brutality were exposed. In Oliver Twist he pointed out the
responsibility of society for the crimes fostered by its neglect ;
and BO in David Copperfield, and each of the novels that fol-
lowed, there was always some moral, often more forcible
than subtle, to be preached. Perhaps no author ever had
during his life-time, a popularity so wide and so unfailing;
but it was not without its baneful influence on Diokens him-
self. The pathos became at times unreal and affected ; the
tragedy was drawn in shades more lurid than terrible ; the
moral was often blunted to suit the perception of an audience
which by its very nature could not be fastidious. If literary
criticism is not to abrogate its functions and to bend sub-

533 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

missively to the verdict whose strength lies in the irrespon-
sibility of numbers, it must not blind itself to the evil
effects on the genius of Dickens wrought by that boundless
popularity.

Another school of fiction, with aims and aspirations of its
own, grew up after the fame of Dickens and Thackeray was
already secure, and passed away while they were still in their
full powers. CHARLOTTE BRONTE was born in Yorkshire, in
1816, and died in 1855. In the loneliness of their moorland
home at Haworth, she and her sisters developed a type of
romance which was all their own, and which they laid with
the natural timidity of isolated genius before the world.
The most enduring of their works was the Jane Eyre of
Charlotte Bronte: strained, exaggerated, wanting, it may
be, balance, grasp and humour, but nevertheless instinct with
thrilling emotion, and with that impression of vivid and
enthralling feeling which nothing but true genius could
give. Its passionate straining after something that might
break through the dreary routine of life, that might light up
its dullest drudgery with the poetry of emotion, that might
enlarge the scope of women's sympathies, had not a little
in it that reflected the tendencies of the day ; and Jane Eyre
deserves notice even in a summary of our literature, not
because it is intrinsically greater than other works which we
must pass over in silence, but because it represents a nascent
influence, broadening and throwing out new offshoots as time
goes on.

With the authoress who wrote under the nom de plume of
GEORGE ELIOT we reach a type of fiction in some respects
more profound than any which our literature had yet seen.
It was in the detached tales forming her Scenes from Clerical
Life (1857) that the advent of a new power in literature was
first recognized. From the form of these tales there was
scarcely an opportunity for the subtle analysis of character in
which she afterwards proved her special gifts ; but they had
all her sarcastic force, all her intensity of feeling, all her
power of evolving tragedy out of simple elements, which are
BO striking in her later novels ; and they had, too, a freshness
of touch that we may miss in the latter. In 1859 appeared
Adam Bede, followed by The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner;
and in these, perhaps, her genius was seen at its best. They
show a wealth of humour, free, natural, and spontaneous,
combined with abundant subtlety of character drawing, not

PROSE LITERATURE. 539

as yet overburdened with any painful elaboration of analysis.
In Romola, which came next, George Eliot made what was
perhaps the greatest demand upon her intellectual powers ;
and if in this, and the novels which followed (Felix Holt,
Middlemarch, and Daniel Derondd), we miss some of the
facility of touch and the freshness of humour that we find in
the earlier works, yet we are compelled to admit the mental
grasp which they show, the breadth of judgment upon men
and things, the keen and courageous foresight with which
she gauges the processes of social change. If the purely
creative and imaginative power is allowed less free play, the
elaboration of the study which she lavishes upon the problems
of modern life is all the more full and, we might even say,
scientific. Her work in prose fiction was interrupted for a
time by a drama in blank Terse — The Spanish Gipsy — which
appeared in 1868 ; and by another volume of poems in 1874.
But powerful as these are, they have added nothing to the
poetical literature of our day. It is true that by very force
of intellectual power she occasionally rises to what is scarcely
to be distinguished from poetry ; but at all times the paint-
ing of character and the analysis of motives overshadow the
accident of the poetical form.

In History, the Victorian epoch may claim not to have
fallen below its predecessor. Posterity, as well as our own
day, will probably accept, as the most striking manifestation
of the historical faculty of this epoch, the brilliant and graphic
•vork of MACAULAY (born 1800, died 1859), which brings
history home to us with all the fascination of romance.
There can be little doubt that Macaulay drew some inspiration
from the romances of Sir Walter Scott, who in this way perhaps
affected the writing of history more decisively than the
writing of fiction. Opinions will differ as to the scientific
value of Macaulay 's History of England, which was received,
on the publication of the earlier volumes in 1848, with a
Budden popularity that no historical work has ever achieved,
either before or since. He has been accused of undue bias :
of painting in colours too striking for scientific accuracy ; oi
allowing his love for graphic and dramatic description to
make him forget the duties of the philosophical historian.
He has been blamed for setting an example, dangerously
attractive, of writing history so that it might rival fiction,
rather than scrupulously represent the measured truth.
Without admitting the justice of all these charges, we may

540 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

recognize why it is that they are made. But, none the less,
there remain the most sterling qualities in Macaulay's work.
His memory; the extent and variety of his knowledge; above
all, his marvellous power of bringing it to bear for the purposes
of illustration, of contrast, of comparison — all place him on
a height, in his own special domain of literature, which no
other has reached. His style tempts others to imitation ; his
wealth of illustration may encourage, in those who travesty
his method, a slipshod and allusive habit. But the true
secret of his power is best seen when his work is compared
with such imitations; when we set his clear and balanced
periods side by side with the travesty, and analyze the
wealth of knowledge contained in those illustrations, the out-
side manner of which his imitators seem to repeat. It is the
best tribute to Macaulay's genius that, however much his
views have been combated and his accuracy impugned, his
version of any period on which he has touched, and, above
all, of the Eevolution epoch, retains a vividness of impression,
and has indeed affected current political ideas, to a degree
equalled by none of his opponents.

But Macaulay, and the new school of historical writing
which he founded, do not exhaust the historic activity of our
time. Mr. GEOTE carried on further the work of MITFORD
and of THIRLWALL, and gave us, between 1845 and 1856, a
History of Greece, written from the democratic point of view,
in which he embodied the latest results of investigation.
Others had acted as pioneers ; but Grote's history was the
first in which the mythological and legendary epochs in Greek
history were submitted to careful criticism, and in which the
conditions of later Greek life were minutely investigated, and
the real bearing of their political and social institutions
thoroughly estimated. To the latter part of his history,
Grote added an important supplement when, in 1866, he
published his Plato, in which he endeavoured to weigh the
tendencies of the ethical schools of Athens. Another history
of antiquity, of almost equal value, is that of The Romans
under the Empire, by Uean MERIVALE, published in 1865.

In this minute and critical study of antiquity, English
scholars no doubt owed much to the critical schools of
Germany, the results of whose inquiries were only appre-
ciated in England early in the Victorian epoch. But other
tracts of history were investigated, in which no such assistance
was possible. The late Lord STANHOPE (born 1805, died 1875)

PROSE LITERATURE. 541

published, in 1836, his long and careful History of England
from 1713 to 1783; and this he supplemented afterwards
by his Life of Pitt, and by his History of tlie Reign of Queen
Anne, in 1870. In no one of his works can he be said to have
uttered the last word on the period, or to have given either
a picture complete in all its details, or a philosophical estimate
of the underlying forces. But his narrative is always careful,
just, and well balanced ; and his selection and arrangement
of authorities are guided by a historical conscience admirably
scrupulous. Mr. E. A. FREEMAN has carried on the historical
work of Sir Francis Palgrave and Sharon Turner in
Early English History; and in his Norman Conquest (1867-
1876) he has thrown a flood of light upon the condition of
England before the invasion of William, and upon the causes
that led up to his expedition. It may be thought by some
that he has pushed certain theories too far, and that he has
exaggerated the Teutonic influence in our national genius;
but none can deny the strict accuracy, the elaborate care, and
the wide learning which must give to his work permanent
value. Mr. J. ANTHONY FROUDE, in his History of England
under Elizabeth, published between 1856 and 1869, has appealed
to a widely different class of readers. He cannot claim the
same scientific accuracy as Mr. Freeman ; but represents, in
a graphic and attractive narrative, some of the peculiarities
of that more popular school of history of which Lord Macaulay
was at once the founder and the most brilliant example.

Turning from history to Biography, we do not find that
the Victorian age has forgotten the example of its predecessor.
"We can point perhaps to no contemporary works which equal,
in artistic merit, such biographies as those of Dryden by Scott,
of Nelson and Wesley by Southey, or of Scott by Lockhart;
but our age has certainly not failed in industry and learning,
and has produced a few biographies which have secured an
enduring place in literature. Amongst these may be named
the Life of Hume, by JOHN HILL BUHTON, which first brought
a clear and certain light to dispel the cloud of malignant
gossip that had gathered round the name of Hume, and
revealed new traits in his character, which his retired and
self-contained life had hidden from the world. The Life of
Goethe, by GEORGE HENRY LEWES (born 1817, died 1878), was
published in 1859, and has attained an almost unique success
in being accepted 'by Goethe's own countrymen, from the hand
of a foreigner, as the standard life of the most prominent

542 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

name in their literature. The Life of Goldsmith, by JOHN
FORSTER (born 1812, died 1878), lent new attraction to the
memory of one who commands our sympathy, combined with
our admiration, as hardly any other name in our literature
does; and a work whose learning, care, and thoroughness
give it a permanent value is the Life of Milton, by Professor
MASSON (completed in 1878). We have had two series of
biographies which have both commanded attention — that of
the Chancellors, by Lord- Chancellor CAMPBELL, whose work
attained currency rather by the prominence of its author in
public life, than by its own intrinsic merits ; and that of the
Archbishops of Canterbury, by Dean HOOK, which must con-
tinue to hold a high place in the esteem of all students of
our history. But the most valuable, probably, of all the
contributions of our age to biography, is the Life of Bacon,
by Mr. SPEDDING, who has pronounced what is likely to be,
for all practical purposes, the final verdict upon the character,
the public life, and the place in speculative progress of the
founder of English inductive philosophy. In addition to
these, which represent the comments of our age upon the
characters, the actions, and the motives of great figures in
the past, our literature has been enriched by not a few
biographies which represent the record of lives closed within
the current generation: the most notable, perhaps, being
that of Dr. Arnold, of Eugby, by the late Dean Stanley ;
that of Charles Dickens, by Mr. Forster ; and that of Lord
Macaulay, by Mr. Trevelyan.

From history and biography we naturally turn to that
wide domain of literature which eludes any very strict classi-
fication, ranging as it does, from the didactic treatment of
history or biography on the one hand, to the application of
scientific reasoning to political and social questions on the
other. It is separated clearly enough from history and
biography ; but it uses them both. By the didactic essayist,
history and biography are used as the groundwork of his
moral lesson ; by the exponent of political or social science,
they are used as illustrations of his reasoning. From this
class of literature we will pass to the strictly scientific and
philosophical writings of the day; and from these again to
the literature of criticism which, important as it is, must
necessarily be engrafted on a full-grown literature, and can
scarcely be dealt with as a plant of natural or spontaneous
growth.

PROSE LITERATURE. 543

Amongst those who "belong to this somewhat indeterminate
class of half-historical, half-ethical essayists, the most typical
figure is that of THOMAS CARLYLE (born 1795, died 1881). His
literary work lay in many spheres — those of translator, of
historian, of biographer, and of controversialist; but he has
suffused each with so much of his own peculiar temperament
that he stands out as an individual rather than as a
representative of any class. Earnestly as he strove to point
out new meanings which he fancied himself to have found in
special phases of literature, he was by no means a literary
critic ; widely as he ranged over history, he was in no
sense a scientific historian. By those who appreciated his
work most highly, and reckoned their debt to him the greatest,
he has been prized chiefly for the vivid energy with which
he pressed his lessons home, for the lofty ideal which he strove
to maintain, and for the weird power of his style, rugged,
strained, and even affected, as it appears to some. As with
many others of his time, his earliest intellectual impulse was
stirred by contact with the German writers of the first part
of the century ; and one of his first works was a translation
of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, in 1824. The same German
suggestion is found in his first important original work,
Sartor Resartus, which develops an idea borrowed from Swift's
sarcasm on the philosophy of clothes, and represents in a
dramatic form the leading principle of one school of German
philosophy. Carlyle's French Revolution appeared in 1837 ; and
its scope and aim are best described by the titles given to each
of the three volumes — The Bastille, The Constitution, and The
Guillotine. It is in no sense an exact or systematic history of
the Revolution ; but it groups together, in dramatic form, the
most striking features which each crisis in the movement
brings upon the stage. Hero Worship, published in 1841,
was first delivered as a series of lectures; and it is in these
that Carlyle set forth with most elaboration of detail, the
views he held of the part played by great men in shaping
history and in affecting the de&tiny of their fellow-men.
His Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, in 1845, showed the
application of these principles to the full and minute
portraiture of one man ; but here also the attitude of the
preacher was much more prominent than that of the sys-
tematic historian or biographer. Interspersed with all these
works was a long series of political pamphlets and essays ;
and in the years between 1858 and 1865 appeared what was

544 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

his longest work, the History of Frederick the Great. In it,
the peculiar qualities for which Mr. Carlyle demanded respect
for his heroes, were shown in their most pronounced form.
Acts, which the general verdict of the world has condemned,
were shown to proceed from a character whose strength,
vigour, and tenacity of purpose gave it a claim to dignity
and greatness ; and if Carlyle has not succeeded in overturn-
ing the conclusions of more commonplace historians, or in
extorting our respect for his hero, he has at least placed that
hero's attitude throughout the long struggle of his life with
dramatic force before us, and has given to the story of
Frederick the interest which necessarily belongs to a vivid
personality, graphically portrayed. But the importance of
Oarlyle's work is not to be gauged by the extent of his
achievements in any one literary sphere, so much as by the
unquestionable influence which he exercised over many of
the leading minds of his time. How that influence may be
estimated in the judgment of posterity, it is, as yet, impossible
to say.

JOHN STUART MILL (born 1806, died 1873) stood in many
respects at the opposite pole of thought from Carlyle. The
whole tendency of his mind lay in the direction of careful
and logical reasoning, suspicious of the possible delusions of
dramatic force. In his study of history, he sought not for
the effect of strong personal character, but for the origin of
the wide movements that were changing the face of society.
Instead of rivalling the rugged force of Carlyle, he made
it his object to pursue the dry light of reason, to allow no
personal feeling to interfere with his strict application of
logic, to confine his style within the most strict and accurate
expression pf conclusions carefully weighed. As CarlyJe
was accepted as the type of the Idealist in English
literature, so Mill was taken as the typical Utilitarian ; and
he pushed to the most extreme limits the doctrines of a
system which, since his death, has lost rather than gained
ground in England. His System of Logic appeared in 1843;
his Principles of Political Economy, in 1844; and in 1859 his
volume On Liberty, which, even beyond the circle of his own
adherents, has become for many purposes a standard text-
book in its treatment of the principles which ought to regulate
the functions of government in civilized society. Amongst
his later works, the chief were his Representative Government,
in 1861 ; and a Review of the Philosophy of Sir William

PROSE LITERATURE. 545

Hamilton, in 18G5. It is a necessary condition of all the
studies to which Mr. Mill devoted himself, that they pass
from one stage to another; and already new phases have
opened up in the science of logic, as well as in that of
political economy, which have so far superseded his teaching.
But the work that he did cannot lose that enduring value
which belongs to scrupulous accuracy of thought and a keen
mental vision.

Another, who has carried on the same pursuits as Mr. Mill,
and with the same scrupulous and scientific accuracy of
thought, is Mr. HERBERT SPENCER. Like Mr. Mill, he has
based his study of society on psychology ; and his Principles
of Psychology appeared so long ago as 1855. Since then he
has published many essays developing and elaborating his
theories, and finally brought out his Study of Sociology in
1873. The one peculiarity of his teaching, which marks it
off from that of Mr. Mill, is his application of the Theory of
Evolution, elaborated by the physical researches of the age,
to the moral sciences. Of the probable result of the school of
thought of which he is the leader, it would be premature to
speak.

In Mr. Mill and Mr. Spencer we see two of the leaders of
thought as it is applied to the problems of society and of
government. In the domain of mental philosophy strictly
so called, the movements of the first part of the century have
now developed into two distinct schools. One has been that
which we may trace back to Coleridge, from whose influence
German philosophy came to have a vital interest for English
thinkers. Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON (born 1788, died 1856),
whose Discussions in Philosophy were published in 1852, and
whose lectures as Professor of Logic in Edinburgh University
were collected after his death, did much to stimulate the
study of Kant ; and to the same school of thought belonged
Dr. MANSEL, Dean of St. Paul's, whose Philosophy of the Con-
ditioned was published in 1866. Another, who possessed a
metaphysical acumen of rare keenness and originality, and
the small bulk of whose writings alone has probably caused
him to fall into undue oblivion, was Professor TERRIER (born
1808, died 1864), whose Institutes of Metaphysics presented the
chief features of the system of Fichte, with admirable lucidity
and grace of literary form. As a later phase of this study
of German philosophy, the system of Hegel has found numerous
adherents amongst contemporary students of metaphysics

2 31

546 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

amongst ourselves. On the other hand, the Materialistic
school of philosophy has not been without its representatives,
and one of the most energetic of these has been a follower
of Mill, Professor BAIN, who published The Senses and the
Intellect in 1855, and who has followed out and applied his
system in numerous subsequent books.

It is no part of the proper business of literary history to
chronicle those achievements of Physical Science, however im-
portant, which are confined to the strictly scientific domain.
We are concerned only with the degree to which these achieve-
ments affect the general thought of the time, reflect a change in
ideas, or mark a distinct advance in method. So far as they
do so, but so far only, can they have a direct bearing upon
literature, or acquire a place in literary history ; but it is one
of the chief features of the progress which this age has made
in physical science, that such progress has had peculiar signi-
ficance in every sphere of thought. MICHAEL FARADAY (born
1791, died 1867), did much in showing how the highest forms
of scientific discovery might be stripped of technicalities, and
set forth in language the most lucid and simple. Such a
lesson could not fail to stimulate accuracy of thinking in
other and different spheres. Something of the same work has
been carried on by his friend and successor, Professor TYNDALL,
whose popularizing of physical science has encouraged the
application of its methods and results in other fields of
inquiry. But the name which under this aspect naturally
holds the first place in the Victorian age is that of CHARLES
DARWIN (born 1809, died 1882), to whom we are mainly
indebted for that theory of Natural Selection which, violently
opposed when first enunciated, has gradually come to be
accepted, in all its leading features, as matter of common
assent, and has penetrated more or less distinctly into almost
every sphere of inquiry. We are not concerned with its
strictly scientific validity, or with its possible scientific results ;
but no one acquainted with our current literature, can fail to
recognize its widespread influence. After a voyage in H.M.S.
Beagle, Mr. Darwin published, in 1839, A Journal of Ee-
searches into Natural History and Geology, which he had
prosecuted in the course of it. But it was not till 1859 that
he published his greatest work, that on the Origin of Species
ty Natural Selection, in which his hypothesis of the transmuta-
tion of the lower grades of beings into the higher by the
natural "survival of the fittest," is elaborated and explained.

PROSE LITERATURE. 547

His later works developed the theory, and gave new exam]»i«-s
in support of it ; and the thesis which he thus promulgated
has been developed by his disciple, Professor T. H. HUXLEY,
who has asserted, with greater boldness than any of his con-
temporaries, and with a lucidity and grace of literary style
rarely found in scientific treatises, not only the right, but the
primary scientific duty, of absolute and unflinching freedom
of inquiry. In another field of scientific research, Professor
OWEN, by his development of the comparative method in
Anatomy, has directly stimulated the application of that
method in widely different spheres, including that of philo-
logical inquiry.

There remains another class of what may be called the
literature of exposition, which almost defies formal definition.
In a highly developed civilization, and with a literature in
full maturity, a series of themes find literary expression which
Tinder different conditions would remain inarticulate, or find
expression only in the language of everyday life. They
consist of discussions of minute forms of social usage, of
questions of casuistry which can scarcely be called ethical, of
analyses of current opinion in matters of taste. To this class
we may assign our literary and artistic criticism ; and all the
more readily, because such criticism has never attained
amongst ourselves to the formal and almost scientific
regularity which has been found possible in French literature,
but seems inevitably in England to deviate into cognate dis-
cussions upon the problems of society and politics, and upon
various phases even of religious thought. At the best, we
seem never to get beyond suggestion in our criticism. The
critic, pure and simple, seems afraid of tiring his audience by
keeping too closely to his task, and seeks to impart additional
interest to it by deviating into questions that affect the
current of our daily life. The earliest amongst the prominent
writers of that class in the Victorian epoch is THOMAS DE
QUJNCEY (born 1785, died 1859). He began his long series of
contributions to the current literature of the day before tho
period when this epoch opens ; but so few were the works
which he published in a separate form, that there was no
real material for forming a judgment on his genius until his
scattered essays were collected into one series late in his life.
He wrote on philosophy, on political economy, on literary
criticism; he has given us fragments of autobiography, in
which imagination is avowedly mixed with personal

548 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

reminiscences; lie has left sketches of famous contemporaries,
which attract by their vivid force and subtle analysis. But
with all his marvellous astuteness of intellect and richness
of fancy, it is doubtful whether he has left anything of solid
and permanent value. His work is too discursive to have
completeness on any side. His style is often so overloaded
with ornament, and his fancy is placed under so little control,
that we must discount much of what he wrote as merely
freaks of paradox, and must constantly be on the alert to
detect real gems of thought amid his exuberance of verbiage.
If his work lives, it will be for its suggestiveness, rather than
for any real constructive or original power. Coming down
to a more recent day, two names stand pre-eminent, the one
in the field of literary, the other in that of artistic, criticism.
Mr. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in addition to his contributions to our
poetical literature, of finished and classical perfection of
form in their own kind, has given us some specimens of
literary criticism approaching even to the masterpieces of
Sainte-Beuve. His Essays in Criticism were published in a
collected form in 1865, and their aim may best be described
in his own words : "To try and approach truth on one side
after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing
forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will." These
were followed by a series of lectures on The Study of Celtic
Literature in 1867, and by another volume on Culture and
Anarchy, in 1869. Mr. Arnold's work in literary criticism
has gone so far to supply a need sorely felt in our literature
as to make us regret that many of his later volumes have
been devoted to the discussion of questions of religion and
politics, in which his influence has been considerably less.
In the sphere of art criticism, Mr. JOHN RUSKIN has exercised
an even more potent influence, by the very strength and
fervour of his conviction, combined with the surpassing
beauty of his style. In few others has so keen a sense
of the beautiful been united with so much depth of thought,
and so much earnestness of moral power. His tenets in
what he holds to be the religion of art are embodied
mainly in his three chief works — Modern Painters, published
between 1843 and 1860, The Seven Lamps of Architecture,
published in 1849, and the Stones of Venice in 1851-53. But
besides these he has published a long series of works, rang-
ing over a wide extent of subjects, including political economy,
religion, politics, and social science. In all of these, he

PROSE LITERATURE. 549

compels us to listen to him by the magic .of his style as well
as by the tenacity of his opinions ; but they neither add t. >
nor diminish the debt we owe for what he has accomplished
in that sphere of which he is undisputed master.

AVe should omit an important and material part of the
contribution of the past generation to our literature, were we
to forget all mention of the work done in elucidating and
illustrating the works of Classical Antiquity. Our literature
and our language both owe so much to classical influences,
that no more serious symptom of decay could show its-It'
than the failure of interest in that great field of Scholarship.
Our age is not, indeed, able to point to any achievements in
this sphere, which can be compared with those of such older
scholars as Bentley or Person ; but the general standard of
higher scholarship has not fallen short of that of any previous
age, and we can boast not only of works that have brought
home the masterpieces of classical literature to a vastly
larger reading public, but also of some commentaries that
have carried accurate scholarship at least one stage forward.

The first, and in some respects the most important con-
tribution to the scholarship of what we have called tho
Victorian age, is the commentary on Thucydidcs, by Dr.
ARNOLD, first published in 1832, but subsequently revised.
It is marked by all the breadth and sanity of criticism which
have distinguished the best typo of English scholarship from
what is often the more erudite but more narrow scholarship of
Germany. In more recent years, work of a similar kind has
been carried on in the commentary on Virgil, by the lato
Professor CONINGTON of Oxford, and in the elaborate critical
edition of Lucretius, by Professor MUNRO of Cambridge. But
for the most part English scholars of this generation havo
endeavoured rather to illustrate ancient literature, to show
its bearing upon history and social life, and to open up its
treasures to a wider class of readers, than to dwell upon tho
niceties of critical scholarship. If wo have no translations*
which can claim an independent place in literature, such as
those of Chapman, Dryden, and Pope, those of the present
age certainly surpass them infinitely in scholarship, and in ;i
faithful representation of the original works which they
profess to reproduce. Amongst works of this kind may bo
mentioned Mr. Conington's translation of Virgil, in the metro
of Scott's poems ; the translation of the Iliad by the late Lord
DERBY ; and that of the Odyssey by the late Mr. WORSLEY. Still

550 ENGLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE.

more important, as works of permanent value, are the trans-
lations by Mr. JOWETT of Plato and of Thucydides, which are
likely to remain as the best standard representations of these
authors which we can hope for in an English dress.

Besides these, we have had many works throwing a side
light upon the literature and life of Greece and Rome.
Colonel MURE'S History of Greek Literature appeared in 1853.
It was followed a few years later by the history of the same
literature begun by KARL OTFRIED MULLER, and completed
by the late Dr. J. W. DONALDSON, who also wrote a valuable
work on the Theatre of the Greeks. Professor SELLAR has
written critical dissertations on the Roman poets; and the
literature of the Homeric question has received large additions.
The most distinguished amongst the contributors to it is
Mr. GLADSTONE, whose Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age,
in 1858, Juventus Mundi, in 1869, and Homeric Synchronisms,
in 1876, constitute the chief part of that literary work, in
which, like his great political rival in another sphere, he has
given himself relaxation from the cares and vast responsi-
bilities of a long and intensely active career.

It remains only to state, very briefly, some of the phases
of religious and theological literature by which this age is
distinguished from its predecessors. In the previous genera-
tion, as we have seen, the most active religious movement
had been that of the Evangelical theologians. But they had
failed to satisfy the religious aspirations of many in the new
epoch ; their traditions had fallen into the hands of a lower
and less intellectual class ; and, side by side with their some-
what uncultured energy, a cold and formal lethargy appeared
to pervade theological literature. With the new generation
there came a movement against this formalism ; and it took
shape chiefly in Oxford, where a study of the Patristic theology
had produced a particular type of earnest religious thought
and doctrine. The leaders of the new party were JOHN KEBLE,
EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, and JOHN HENRY NEWMAN; and from
the series of tracts in which they promulgated their views, the
movement became currently known as Tractarianism. Into
its later ecclesiastical manifestations it would be out of place
to enter ; but unquestionably it influenced thought, taste,
literature, and life, far beyond the limits of any ecclesiastical
circle. A rejection of formalism, a distrust of the inactivity
of habit, a desire for some logical and settled basis of belief,
lay at the root of the movement; and the same impulse

PROSE LITERATURE, 551

pressed others into a position in many respects contrasted
with that of the Tractarian theologians, but at one with them
in the distrust of any lethargical acceptance of authority.
The same earnestness, the same power of influencing con-
temporaries, the same zeal for truth, which were apparent in
some of the leaders of the Oxford movement, were also the
secret of the power exerted over many leading men of the
generation by FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE (born 1805, died
1872). In the points of contrast, as well as in those of
likeness, between him and John Henry Newman, we see
illustrations of much that is characteristic in the religious and
theological side of the literature of this age.

APPENDIX.

QUESTIONS AND SUBJECTS FOR ESSAYS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE.

1. How would you classify the
languages of modern Europe ? To
which group is English to be
assigned?

2. What traces in language or
literature were left by the early
occupation of Britain by the
Romans ?

3. To what degree do yon believe
our literature to have been affected
by the Teutonic and the Celtic
spirit respectively ?

4. Write a short account of the
life and works of Bede.

5. Compare the contributions to
our literature before the Danish
invasions by northern and southern
England respectively.

6. Account for the decay, in the
ninth century, of early English
scholarship.

7. Describe the literary and edu-
cational aims of Alfred, and show
how he endeavoured to attain them.

8. Show the successive stages
through which the English lan-
guage has passed, and name two
or three works distinctive of each
stage.

9. Give some of the symptoms of
the revived study of early English
in the sixteenth century. What
were the motives of the revival ?

10. Through what channels has
the classical influence chiefly come
to the English language and
literature ?

U. Compare the position of the

English and the Normans, as re-
gards education and literature, at
the date of the Norman Conquest

12. The influence of the Church
upon literature down to the Refor-
mation.

18. At what time, and in what
manner, do the English Univer-
sities first influence our literature?

14. How far can any English
writers be said to have founded an
original philosophical system ? Of
what systems, that have had their
origin elsewhere, has the influence
in England been chiefly felt ?

15. Show the influence of the
study of the Canon Law in Eng-
land in the twelfth century. From
what foreign seats of learning was
it chiefly derived?

16. What accounts have we of
the process by which the French
language came to supersede the
English after the Norman Con-
quest? To what extent did tho
English language continue to be
used?

17. Name the principal chroni-
clers from the twelfth to the end of
the fourteenth century, and state
something of the characteristics of
each.

18. Explain the nature of the
change in English between the
age of Alfred, and the end of
the twelfth century. How do you
account for tht m ?

19. Name the principal English

554

APPENDIX.

exponents of Scholastic philo-
sophy.

20. What is your estimate of the
place of Roger Bacon in science and
philosophy?

21. About what period do we find
the English language re-emerge, in
place of the French, as the literary
language of England? How far is
the change affected by political
causes ?

22. Explain the importance, in
the history of our language and
literature, of the Brut of Layamon.
To what period is it to be assigned ?

23. Name some of the chief early
English Metrical Romances. To
what period do they belong ? From
what source were they derived ?

24. Give an account of the
"Vision of Piers Ploughman."
What abuses does the author attack,
and what is its value as a picture
of manners ?

25. What are the chief character-
istics by which the English of
Chaucer is distinguished from that
of his predecessors ?

26. To what foreign sources was
Chaucer indebted for the plots and
incidents of the Canterbury Tales ?

27. Name the poems (other than
the Canterbury Tales) ascribed to
Chaucer. What grounds are there
for thinking some of these spurious ?

28. Quote the testimony of
Chaucer's immediate successors as
to his influence upon the English
language.

29. How do you account for the
decay of literature during the
fifteenth century ?

30. Examine the validity of the
grounds for asserting that Chaucer
was acquainted with Italian litera-
ture.

31. Estimate the amount of
Chaucer's influence upon later
poets.

32. Give some account of Grower's
Confessio Amantis. What was his
relation to the political struggles of
his day ?

33. Name the chief prose works
of the fourteenth century.

34. What are the chief character-
istics of the English prose of Sir
Thomas More ?

35. What rules does Roger
Ascham lay down for the writing
of prose? How far does he carry
them out in his own style ?

36. What are the characteristics
of John Skelton's poetry ? To
what extent can he be said to have
affected later satiric literature ?

37. Estimate the influence upon
our literature of the " New Learn-
ing " in the sixteenth century.

38. What additions were made
by Surrey and Wyatt to the forms
of English verse ?

39. Explain the origin of the
Drama in England, and its develop-
ment down to the Elizabethan age.

40. Name the chief works of
Christopher Marlowe, and give an
estimate of his genius.

41. What is meant by Euphuism?
What is the origin of the name ?

42. Explain the character and
motives of Spenser's antiquarianism.

43. Estimate the influence of the
genius of Spenser on the poetic
literature of the generation that
followed him.

44. What is the character of
Drayton's verse? What is the
subject of his Polyolbion?

45. Into what groups may the
plays of Shakespeare be arranged
in order of time ? By what special
characteristic is each group dis-
tinguished ?

46. At what periods has the in-
terest in Shakespeare's plays been
most marked? How do you ac-
count for the fluctuations of taste
in regard to them ?

47. Show how Ben Jonson was
indebted to the dramatic writers of
Rome for the form of his drama.
Illustrate this by examples.

48. What are the characteristics
of Hooker's prose style ? What is
the relation of the Ecclesiastical

APPENDIX.

555

Polity to the religious controversies
of the day ?

49. What are the claims of
Francis Bacon to original philo-
sophical speculation?

50. Estimate the merits and
defects of Beaumont, Fletcher,

i^er, and Ford as dramatists.

51. Of what features in the
literature of the time is Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy typical ?

52. Account for the decay of the
dr. i m;i in the reign of James I.

. 53. What are the characteristics
of the so-called Metaphysical school
of poetry? How far id the name
rightly applied ?

54. Compare and contrast Cra-
shaw, Herbert, and Vaughan, as

; >us poets.

55. Name the principal cavalier
poets, giving some account of the
characteristics of each.

56. Contrast the literary taste of
the age of Elizabeth with that of
the age of James I., and trace the
connection between the literary and
political ideas of each age.

57. Give proofs of the influence of
Italian literature in England at the
close of the sixteenth and the early
part of the seventeenth century.

58. Through what channels did
the Renaissance influence chiefly
come to England ?

59. Estimate the amount of the
direct and indirect influence of
Erasmus upon literature and learn-
ing in England.

GO. To what agencies are we
chiefly indebted for the stimulus
given to education in the early
part of the sixteenth century ? In
what way do you consider that this
affected literature ?

61. What were the stepe by
which the authorized translation of
the Bible assumed its present form ?
Discuss the influence it has Lad
upon English prose.

62. What are the characteristics

my Taylor's genius? Con-
trol his style with that of the

theological writers of the next
generation.

63. Give the dates of Milton's
poetical works. How far do they
help us to trace the development
of his genius, and of his aims in
poetry?

64. Name some examples of so-
calh'd Pindaric Odes. With whom
did the fashion originate, and how
long did it last ?

65. What are the chief character-
istics of the wit of Samuel Butler ?
What later writers have been
chiefly influenced by the style and
manner of Hudibras f

66. What models were chiefly
followed by Dry den in his dramas
and in his miscellaneous poems ?

67. Give some examples of Eng-
lish allegorical literature, and con-
trast the methods pursued in each.

68. Estimate the amount of the
French and of the Spanish influence
respectively upon English drama
in the later Stuart period.

69. Trace the effects of the
Revolution upon literature.

70. What were the results upon
literature of the increased study of
science in the later part of the
seventeenth century ?

71. Explain the chief points in
Locke's philosophical system. How
far can he be said to have advanced
metaphysical study ?

72. Contrast the humour of Swift
and Addison. What use does each
make of the faculty in his political
writings ?

73. In what points does Swift
resemble Rabelais and Cervantes
fMDectively?

74. What maxims are chiefly
upheld by Pope in the Essay on
Criticism ?

75. To what extent do you con-
ceive Pope's satire upon his literary
contemporaries to have been justi-
fied? Name some of the chief
objects of his attack, and explain
his relations with them.

76. Estimate the influence of

556

APPENDIX.

Bolingbroke on the political ideas
and the prose style of the later part
of the eighteenth century.

77. Name the principal series of
Essays from the Spectator to the
Idler, and state by whom each
series was chiefly conducted. H< >w
do you account for the popularity
of this species of literature ?

78. Compare and contrast Collins,
Gray, and Thomson. Of which do
you consider the influence upon
the succeeding generation to be
most apparent ?

79. Name some of the characters
created by Sterne and Goldsmith,
and compare the methods by which
each works, and the feelings to
which he appeals.

80. For what do you consider
literature to be chiefly indebted to
Dr. Johnson ? What objections
have been made to his style, and
with what justice ?

81. What are the leading prin-
ciples inculcated by Burke in his
political writings, and to what
qualities do you ascribe the sub-
sequent influence of these writings ?

82. Nanie the principal historical
writers of the last half of the
eighteenth century, and compare
their methods.

83. Estimate the influence of the
French Kevolution upon poetical
literature in England.

84. Account for the rise of the
Eomantic movement during the
latter part of the eighteenth
century. What are its most valuable
contributions to our literature ?

85. To what do you attribute the
wide popularity of Cowper's poems ?

86. Show by examples in what
directions the German influence on
our literature was most strongly
felt early in the present century.

87. Explain Wordsworth's theory
of poetry.

88. What is understood by the
" Lake " School of poetry ? To what
objections is the name open ?

89. What are the chief character-
istics of the poetry of Coleridge?
Explain the structure of the metre
in the Ancient Mariner.

90. To what causes do you
attribute the poetical fertility of
the first generation of our century ?

91. What poetical models were
followed by Keats and Shelley ?
What has been the special influence
of each upon our subsequent
poetical literature ?

92. Estimate the effect on litera-
ture of the political movements con-
nected with the Reform Bill of
1832.

93. State shortly the stages
through which English fiction has
passed, and give your opinion as to
the types of it which are likely to
be most permanent.

94. Give examples of the various
schools of history recently developed
in England, and state what are the
chief characteristics of each.

95. Name the principal contribu-
tions of the last generation to
philosophical literature. What
metaphysical theories have been
chiefly maintained, and whence
have they been derived ?

96. What scientific theories of
recent development have chiefly
influenced thought and literature ?

97. Discuss the possibility of an
Academy in England on the model
of that of France.

98. To what extent has any
formed school of criticism ever
existed in England ?

99. To what do you attribute the
diversities in poetical taste between
our own century and last ?

100. What effects on literature
may be expected from the spread of
popular education ?

INDEX.

ACCENTUAL verse, 113, 124
A dd iron, Joseph, 357
Akenaide, Dr. Mark, 379
Alchemists, 71

Aldred, Archbishop, Curse of, 87
Alfred the Great, 13
Alliterative verse, 110
Ancren Riwle, 99
Andrews, Bishop, 276
Anglo-Saxon, or Saxon, 20
Anne, Age of, 457, 458
Auselm, 32, 34, 41
Arabic learning, 29
Arabic numerals, 71
Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 302
Armstrong, Dr. John, 379
Arnold, Matthew, 534, 548
Arnold, Dr., 549
Ascham, Roger, 188
Atterbury, Bishop, 363
Austen, Jane, 514
Aytoun, Profeaaor, 535

Bacon, Francis, 275

Bacon, Roger, 73, 96
r, Sir Richard, 310
> Kynge Johan, 207

Barbour, John, 157

Barklay, Alexander, 191

Barrow, Dr. Isaac, 338

Baxter, Richard, 337

B« aconsfield, Earl of, 535

Ik-attic, James, 394

];. aumont, Francis, 266, 281, 331

B n Jonson, 270

Bentham, Jeremy, 517

Bible, Translation of the, 273

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 305

];i;ink verse, 210

B -lingbroke, Lord, 364

Boswell's Life of Johnson, 519

Bronte, Charlotte, 538

Browne, Sir Thomas, 308

Browne, William, 296

Browning, Mrs., 529

Browning, Robert, 529

Brunne, Robert de, 105

liiifkl.urst, Lord, vid* Sackvilb, T.

Buuyaii, John, 338

Burko, Edmuad, 408

Buriiet, Bisliop. 345

Buruet, Thomas, 346

Burney, Frances, 514

Bums,* Robert, 440

Burton, John Hill, 541

Burton, Robert, 277

Butler, Samuel, 323

Byron, Lord, 496

Campbell, Lord -Chancellor, 542
Campbell, Thomas, 490
Curew, Thomas, 287
Carlyle, Thomas, 543
Cartwright, William, 284
Celtic Languages and Literatures, 7
Chapman, George, 251
Charles I., 297
Chatterton, Thomas, 395
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 121
Chaucer's prose, 165
Chillingworth, William, 301
Chroniclers, 169
Churchill, Charles, 239
Gibber, Colley, 370
Clarendon, Lord, 333
Classical learning, 41
Cleveland, John, 289
Coleridge, 8. T., 474, 516
Collins, William, 376
Commonwealth Literature, 310
Compound English, 121
Congreve, William, 309
Conington, Professor, 549
Conquests, the Norman, 24

558 INDEX.

Corbet, Bishop, 285
Cowley, Abraham, 321
Cowper, William, 427
Crabbe, George, 427, 488, 492
Oanmer, Archbishop, L^6
Cudworth, Dr. Ralph, 337

Daniel, Samuel, 242, 279

Darwin, Charles, 546

Darwin, Erasmus, 437

Davies, Sir John, 253

Davy, Sir Humphrey, 52 1

Defoe, Daniel, 366

Denham, Sir John, 288

De Quincy, Thomas, 547

Derby, Lord, 549

Dickens, Charles, 537, 542

Dobell, Sydney, 532

Donaldson, J. W., 550

Donne, Dr. John, 254, 274

Dorset, Earl of, vide Sackville, T.

Douglas, Gawin, 195

Drama, end of the old, 280

Drama, the regular, 200

Dramatists of Eighteenth Century,

369, 396
Dramatists of Seventeenth Century,

331

Drayton, Michael, 246
Drummond, Sir William, 253
Dryden, John, 328, 520
Dunbar, William, 196
Dyer, John, 371

Edgeworth, Maria, 515

Edwards, Richard, 211

Eighteenth Century, latter part of,
427

Eliot, George, 538

Elizabethan Literature, 198

Elizabethan Poetry, 237

Elizabethan Prose Writers, 219, 272

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 186

English after the Conquest, 56

English as a literary tongue, 82

English Language, 16, 28

English, Original (Saxon or Anglo-
Saxon), 20

English, Revolutions of, 84

Essayists, Periodical, 398

Euphuism, 219

Europe, Languages of Modern, 1

Fairfax, Edward, 252

Falconer, William, 393

Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 253

Faraday, Michael, 546

Farquhar, George, 369

Female Writers, 397

Ferrex and Porrex, 208

Ferrier, Professor, 545

Fielding, Henry, 384, 537

Fletcher, Giles, 282

Fletcher, John, 266, 281, 331

Fletcher, Phineas, 282

Ford, John, 272

Fortescue, Sir John, 171

Foster, John, 523

Freeman, E. A., 541

French Language in England, 48, 79

French School of Poetry, 286

Froude, J. A., 541

Fuller, Thomas, 303

Gammar Gurton's Needle, 205
Garth, Sir Samuel, 365
Gay, John, 362
Georges, last Age of the, 459
Gibbon, Edward, 425
Gifford, William, 522
Gladstone, W. E., 550
Gloucester, Robert of, 104
Glover, Richard, 379
Godwin, William, 517
Goldsmith, Oliver, 388
Gorboduc, Tragedy of, 208
Gower, John, 155
Gray, Thomas, 377
Greene, Robert, 213, 221
Grote, George, 540

Hales, John, 301
Hall, Bishop, 275
Hall, Joseph, 249
Hall, Robert, 523
Hallam, Henry, 518
Hamilton, Sir William, 545
Hariugton, Sir John, 252
Harrington, Sir James, 308
Hawes, Stephen, 191
Hazlitt, William, 522
Henry the Minstrel, 179
Henryson, Robert, 179
Herbert, George, 283
Herrick, Robert, 284
Heywood, John, 194, 202

INDEX.

559

Historical Writers, 278
Hobbes, Thomas, 334
Hood, Thomas, 535
Hook, Dean. :< r_>
Hooker, Richard, 275
Hume, David, -I'Jii
Huut, Leigh, 505

James I. of Scotland, 177
Jeffrey, Francis, 522
Johnson, Samuel, 404, 519
Junius, 402

Eeats, John, 501
Knolles, Richard, 279
Kyd, Thomas, 216

Lamb, Charles, 521

Langne d'Oc and Langae d'Oyl, 53

Latimer, Bishop, 186

Latin after the Conquest, 46

Latin Chroniclers, 47

Latin Literature of Britain, early, 3

Layamon, 89

Learned tongues, the, 75

Leighton, Archbishop, 337

Lewes, G. H., 541

Lingard, John, 518

Locke, John, 348

Lockhart, John Gibson, 520

Lodge, Thomas, 216

Lovelace, Richard, 287

Lydgate, John, 175

Lyly, John, 215, 219, 221

Lyndsay, Sir David, 1'JG

Lytton, Lord, 535

Macaulay, Lord, 535, 539, 542
Malory, Sir Thomas, 173
Mandevil, Sir John, 164
Mandeville, Bernard de, 359
Mannyng, Robert, 105
Hansel, Dean, 545
Marlowe, Christopher, 214
Marvel, Andrew, 325
Mason, William, 394
Massinger, Philip, 271
Masson, Professor, 542
Mathematical Studies, C9
Maurice, F. D., 551
McCulloch, J. R., 518
Merivale, Dean, 540
Metaphysical Writers, 421

Mill, J. S , 5-14

Milton, John, Poetry of, 312

Milton, John, Prose of, 299

Minor Poets of Eighteenth Century,

370

Minot, Lawrence, 106
Miracle Plays, 201
Mirror for Magistrates, 198
Misogonus, 206
Mitford, William, 518
Mixed English, 121
Moore, Thomas, 489, 495, 520
Moral Plays, 201
More, Dr. Henry, 337
More, Sir Thomas, 184
Morris, William, 534
Munro, Professor, 549

Nash, Thomas, 223
Nevile, Henry, 336
Newspapers, 309
Nineteenth Century, 457
Nineteenth Century, early part of, 510

Occleve, Thomas, 174
Oriental Learning, 77
Ormulum, the, 95
Ossian, Macphersnn's, 395
Owen, Professor, 547

Parnell, Dr. Thomas, 3CI
Pecock, Bishop, ItJ'J
Peele, George, 212
Percy's Reliques, 395
Piers Ploughman, 110
Political Economy, 426
Pope, Alexander, 353
Present day, Literature of, 513
Printing in England, 167
Prior, Matthew, 363
Prose, English, 164, 183

Quarles, Francis, 283

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 278
Ralph Roister Doistcr, 203
Randolph, Thomas, 285
Religious Poets, 283
Revolution, Effects of, 341
Revolution, Survivors of, 342
Ricardo, David, 518
Richardson, Samuel, 382
Ridley, Bishop, 186

560 INDEX.

Robertson, William, 424
Roman de la Rose, 137
Romance, Metrical, 102
Roy, William, 194
Ruskin, John, 548

Sackville, Thomas, 199, 208
Saxon, or Anglo-Saxon, 20
Scholarship, English, Earliest, 12
Scholastic Philosophy, 39, 67
Scott, Sir Walter, 482, 511, 520
Scottish Poetry, 380
Scottish Poets, 176, 195
Scottish Prose Writers, 190
Second English, 85
Sedley, Sir Charles, 327
Sellar, Professor, 550
Semi-Saxon, 85
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 359
Shakespeare, William, 257, 258
Shakespeare's Dramatic Contempo-
raries, 265
Shelley, P. B., 497
Shenstone, William, 377
Shirley, James, 280
Sidney, Sir Philip, 220
Skelton, John, 192
Smith, Alexander, 533
Smith, Sydney, 521
Smollett, Tobias, 385, 537
South, Dr. Robert, 347
Southey, Robert, 481, 520
Spedding, James, 542
Spencer, Herbert, 545
Spenser, Edmund, 224
Steele, Sir Richard, 357

Sterne, Laurence, 387
Suckling, Sir John, 288
Surrey, Earl of, 196
Swift, Jonathan, 349, 520, 522
Swiaburne, A. C., 534
Sylvester, Joshua, 249

Taylor, Jeremy, 302

Tennyson, Alfred, 525

Thackeray, W. M., 536

Theological Elizabethan Writers, 274

Third English, 121

Thomson, James, 378

Tillotson, Archbishop, 346

Udall, Nicholas, 203
Universities and Schools, 34, 73

Vanbrugh, Sir John, 369
Victorian Age, Poetry of, 525
Victorian Prose Literature, 533

Waller, Edmund, 323
Warner, William, 238
Warton, Thomas and Joseph, 394
Wiclif (or Wycliffe), John de, 165
Wilkes, John, 401
^Wilkie, William, 379
Wilson, Thomas, 189
Wither, George, 290
Wordsworth, William, 459
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 197
Wynton, Andrew of, 176

Young, Dr. Edward, 377

THE END.

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hurst College, and ALEXANDER JARDINE, C.E.

VOL. 9.— MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.— The Properties of Matter,
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WALTER MITCHELL, M.A., J. R. YOUNG, and JOHN IMRAY.

12 CHARLES GRIFFIN & COMPANY'S

THE CIRCLE OF THE SCIENCES.

In Separate Treatises. Cloth.

s. d.

1. ANSTED'S Geology and Physical Geography . . .26

2. BREEM'S Practical Astronomy 26

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5. GORE'S Theory and Practice of Electro-Deposition . .16

6. iMRAY's Practical Mechanics .16

7. JARDINE'S Practical Geometry . . . . . .10

8. LATHAM'S Varieties of the Human Species . . .16

9. MITCHELL & TENNANT'S Crystallography and Mineralogy 3 o

10. MITCHELL'S Properties of Matter and Elementary Statics I 6

11. OWEN'S Principal Forms of the Skeleton and the Teeth . I 6

12. SCOFFERN'S Chemistry of Heat, Light, and Electricity . 3 o

13. SCOFFERN'S Chemistry of the Inorganic Bodies . .30

14. SCOFFERN'S Chemistry of Artificial Light . . .16

15. SCOFFERN and LOWE'S Practical Meteorology . . .16

16. SMITH'S Introduction to Botany : Structural and Systematic 2 o

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18. TwiSD£N on Logarithms '. .10

19. YOUNG'S Elements of Algebra I o

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21. YOUNG'S Navigation and Nautical Astronomy . . .26

22. YOUNG'S Plane Geometry. . . . . . .16

23. YOUNG'S Simple Arithmetic . . . . . . I o

24. YOUNG'S Elementary Dynamics . . . . .16

DALLAS (W. S., F.L.S.):

A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE ANIMAL CREATION :
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Engineers, East India Govt. Telegraph Department, &c.) :

A MANUAL OF TELEGRAPH CONSTRUCTION : The
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%* Published with the Approval of the Director-General of Telegraphs in
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GENERAL CONTENTS.
PART I.— GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF STRENGTH AND STABILITY.

PART II.— PROPERTIES AND APPLICATIONS OF MATERIALS,
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SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS. 13

DOUGLAS'S TELEGRAPH CONSTRUCTION— (continued).

PART III.— TELEGRAPH CONSTRUCTION, MAINTENANCE AND
ORGANISATION.

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evidently a practical Telegraphic Engineer. ... • The amount of information given
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GRIFFIN (John Joseph, F.C.S.):

CHEMICAL RECREATIONS : A Popular Manual of Experimental
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NAPIER (James, F.R.S.E., F.C.S.):

A MANUAL OF ELECTRO-METALLURGY. With numerous
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GENERAL CONTENTS.

I. — HISTORY of the ART.
II. — DESCRIPTION of GALVANIC BATTERIES
and their RESPECTIVE PECULIARITIES.
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IV.— BRONZING.

V.— MISCELLANEOUS APPLICATIONS of the
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VI.— DEPOSITION of METALS upon one

another.

VII.— ELECTRO-PLATING. ""
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IX.— RESULTS of EXPERIMENTS on the
DEPOSITION of other METALS as
COATINGS.
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A work that has become an established authority on Electro-Metallurgy, an art
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NAPIER (James, F.R.S.E., F.C.S.) :

A MANUAL OF THE ART OF DYEING AND DYEING
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GENERAL CONTENTS:

I.— HEAT AND LIGHT.
JI.— A CONCISE SYSTEM OF CHEMISTRY,

with special reference to Dyeing.
III. — MORDANTS AND ALTERANTS.

IV.— VEGETABLE MATTERS in use in the

Dye-house.
V. — ANIMAL DYES.
VI — COAL-TAR COLOURS.

APPENDIX— RECEIPTS FOR MANIPULATION.

"The numerous Dyeing Receipts and the Chemical Information furnished will be

exceedingly valuable to the Practical Dyer A Manual of necessary reference to

all those who wish to master their trade, and keep pace with the scientific discoveries of
the time." — Journal of Applied Science.

In Preparation. Demy 8vo., Third Edition : thoroughly Revised, Augmented,
and in part Re-written,

Ql (Ulanuaf of

THEORETICAL & PRACTICAL,

By JOHN PHILLIPS, M.A., F.R.S.,

Late Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford.

EDITED BY
ROBERT ETHERIDGE, F.R.S.,

Palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain, President
of the Geological Society ; and

HARRY GOYIER SEELEY, F.R.S.,

Professor of Geography in King's College, London.
With Numerous Tables, Sections, and Figures of Characteristic Fossils.

it

work is now at Press, and will shortly be issued. The names of the Editors
are sufficient guarantee for the thoroughness and high scientific accuracy
with which the revision has been conducted. While brought fully abreast of
the most recent developments in Geological Science, the Manual retains
those features which rendered the former Editions exceptionally efficient both
for teaching purposes and as a philosophical work of reference, and in no
case has the method of treatment adopted by. the author been needlessly
departed from. The New Edition will thus be found to maintain in every
point the prestige of the original work, and to offer distinctive features in
the several departments of Geology and Palaeontology, which are calculated
to make the present issue an important event in the History of Geological
Progress.

16 CHARLES GRIFFIN & COMPANY'S

PHILLIPS (J. Arthur, M. Inst. C.E., F.C.S., F.G.S.,

Ancien Eleve de 1'Ecole des Mines, Paris) :

ELEMENTS OF METALLURGY : a Practical Treatise on the
Art of Extracting Metals from their Ores. With over Two Hundred
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Royal 8vo., 764 pages, cloth, 34/-.

GENERAL CONTENTS :

I. — A TREATISE on FUELS and REFRACTORY MATERIALS.
II. — A Description of the principal METALLIFEROUS* MINERALS, with

their DISTRIBUTION.

III. — STATISTICS of the amount of each METAL annually produced
throughout the World, obtained from official sources, or, where
this has not been practicable, from authentic private information.
IV. — The METHODS of ASSAYING the different ORES, together with
the PROCESSES of METALLURGICAL TREATMENT, comprising :
Refractory Materials. Antimony. Iron.

Fire-Clays. Arsenic. Cobalt.

Fuels, &c. Zinc. Nickel.

Aluminium. Mercury. Silver.

Copper. Bismuth. Gold.

Tin. Lead. Platinum.

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best work ever written on the subject with a view to its practical treatment." — West-
minster Review.

" There can be no possible doubt that ' Elements of Metallurgy' will be eagerly
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amount of time and labour bestowed on it is enormous There is certainly no

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which gives greater evidence of the extensive metallurgical knowledge of its author."
— Mining Journal.

PORTER: (Surgeon-Major J. H., Late Assistant-

Professor of Military Surgery in the Army Medical School, and Hon.
Assoc. of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem) :

THE SURGEON'S POCKET-BOOK : an Essay on the Best Treat-
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"A capital little book . . . of the greatest practical value. ... A surgeon
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"So fully Illustrated that for LAY-READERS and AMBULANCE-WORK it will prove
eminently useful." — Medical Times and Gazette.

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS. 17

SCIENTIFIC MANUALS.

BY

W. J. MACQUORN RANKINE, C.E., LLD., F.R.S.,

Late Regius Professor of Civil Engineering in the University of Glasgow.

I. RANKINE (Prof.): APPLIED MECHANICS

(A Manual of) ; comprising the Principles of Statics and Cinematics,
and Theory of Structures, Mechanism, and Machines. With numerous
Diagrams. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 12/6. Tenth Edition.

"Cannot fail to be adopted as a text-book The whole of the information is

so admirably arranged that there is every facility lor reference."— Mining Journal.

II. RANKINE (Prof.): CIVIL ENGINEERING

(A Manual of) ; comprising Engineering Surveys, Earthwork,
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Canals, Rivers, Water-works, Harbours, &c. With numerous Tables and
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" Far surpasses in merit every existing work of the kind. As a Manual for the
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should like to express."— The Engineer.

III. RANKINE (Prof.) : MACHINERY AND

MILL WORK (A Manual of) ; comprising the Geometry, Motions,
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IV. RANKINE (Prof.): THE STEAM EN-
GINE and OTHER PRIME MOVERS (A Manual of). With Diagram of

the Mechanical Properties of Steam, Folding Plate, numerous Tables
and Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 12/6. Tenth Edition.

V. RANKINE (Prof.): USEFUL RULES and

TABLES for Engineers and others. With Appendix : TABLES, TESTS,
and FORMULA for the use of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS; comprising
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of Power. By ANDREW JAMIESON, C.E., F.R.S.E. Sixth Edition.
(Nearly Ready.}

" Undoubtedly the most useful collection of engineering data hitherto produced."—
Mining Journal.

VI. RANKINE (Prof.) : A MECHANICAL

TEXT-BOOK. By Prof. MACQUORN RANKINE and E. F. BAMBER, C.E.
With numerous Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 9/-. Second Edition.

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nishing a useful and reliable outline of the subjects treated of"— Mining Journal.

i8 CHARLES GRIFFIN & COMPANY'S

PROF. RANKINE'S WORKS — (continued).

VII. RANKINE (Prof.): MISCELLANEOUS

SCIENTIFIC PAPERS, from the Transactions and Proceedings of the
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PART I. — Papers relating to Temperature, Elasticity, and Expansion of
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PART II. — Papers on Energy and its Transformations.

PART III. — Papers on Wave-Forms, Propulsion of Vessels, &c.

With Memoir by P. G. TAIT, M.A., Prof, of Natural Philosophy in the
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time. ' ' — A rchitect.

SEATON (A. E., Lecturer on Marine Engineering

to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and Member of the Institute
of Naval Architects) :

A MANUAL OF MARINE ENGINEERING : Comprising the
Designing, Construction, and Working of Marine Machinery. With
numerous Illustrations. (In preparation,}

SHELTON (W. Vincent, Foreman to the Imperial

Ottoman Gun-Factories, Constantinople) :

THE MECHANIC'S GUIDE: A Hand-Book for Engineers and
Artizans. With Copious Tables and Valuable Receipts for Practical
Use. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. Cloth, 7/6.

GENERAL CONTENTS.

PART I. — Arithmetic.
PART II. — Geometry.
PART III. — Mensuration.
PART IV. — Velocities in Boring and
Wheel-Gearing.

PART V.— Wheel and Screw Cut-
ting.

PART VI. — Miscellaneous Subjects.
PART VII.— The Steam Engine.
PART VIII.— The Locomotive.

" THE MECHANIC'S GUIDE will answer its purpose as completely as a whole series of
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" Ought to have a place on the bookshelf of every Mechanic." — Iron.

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" A sine qua non to every practical Mechanic." — Railway Service Gazette.

*V* This Work is specially intended for Self-Teachers, and places before the Reader a
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adaptation to Practical Purposes.

SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS. 19

THOMSON (Spencer, M.D., L.R.C.S. Edinburgh):

A DICTIONARY of DOMESTIC MEDICINE and HOUSE-
HOLD SURGERY. Thoroughly revised and brought down to the
present state of Medical Science. With an additional chapter on the
Management of the Sick Room ; and Hints for the Diet and Comfort of
Invalids. Many Illustrations. Demy 8vo., 750 pages. Cloth, 8/6.
Fifteenth Edition.

"The best and safest book on Domestic Medicine and Household Surgery which has
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" Dr. Thomson has fully succeeded in conveying to the public a vast amount of useful
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•' Worth its weight in gold to families and the clergy." — Oxford Herald.

WYLDE (James, formerly Lecturer on Natural

Philosophy at the Polytechnic) :

THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE : A Manual of Easy and Amusing
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"To those who need to be allured into the paths of Natural Science by witnessing the
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20 CHARLES GRIFFIN & COMPANY'S

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VIRGILII OPERA. Text from HEYNE and WAGNER. English
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Or, in Three Parts :

Part I. BUCOLICS and GEORGICS 2/6

Part II. THE ^NEID, Books I.-VI 2/6

Part III. THE ^NEID, Books VII.-XII. ... 2/6

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" The most complete, as well as elegant and correct edition of Virgil ever published
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" The best commentary on Virgil which a student can obtain."— Scotsman.

COBBETT (William): ENGLISH GRAMMAR,

in a Series of Letters, intended for the use of Schools and Young Per-
sons in general. With an additional chapter on Pronunciation, by the
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COBBETT (William) : A FRENCH GRAMMAR.

Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, 3/6. Fifteenth Edition.

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COBBETT (James Paul) : A LATIN GRAMMAR.

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COBBIN'S MANGNALL: MANGNALL'S

HISTORICAL AND iMISCELLANEOUS QUESTIONS, for the use
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COLERIDGE (Samuel Taylor): A DISSERTA-
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EDUCATIONAL PUBLICATIONS. 21

GRAINS ENGLISH LITERATURE.

k COMPENDIOUS HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND
OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE from the Norman Conquest. With
numerous Specimens. By GEORGE LILLIE CRAIK, LL.D., late Professor
of History and English Literature, Queen's College, Belfast. " In two
vols. Royal 8vo. Handsomely bound in cloth, 2$/-. New Edition.

GENERAL CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTORY.

I.— THE NORMAN PERIOD— The Conquest.
II.— SECOND ENGLISH— commonly called Semi-Saxon.
III.— THIRD ENGLISH— Mixed, or Compound English.
IV.— MIDDLE AND LATTER PART OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
V.— THE CENTURY BETWEEN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION AND

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

VI. — THE LATTER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
VII.— THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (a) THE LAST AGE OF THE

GEORGES.-
(&) THE VICTORIAN AGE.

With numerous Excerpts and Specimens of Style.

"Anyone who will take the trouble to ascertain the fact, will find how completely
even our great poets and other writers of the l.-isi generation have already faded from
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NOTHING IS MOKE CERTAIN THAN THAT NO TRUE CULTIVATION CAN BE SO ACQUIRED.

This is the extreme case of that entire ignorance of history which has been affirmed,

not with more point than truth, to leave a person always a child

The present work combines the HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE with the HISTORY OP
THE LANGUAGE. The scheme of the course and revolutions of the language which is
followed here is extremely simple, and resting not upon arbitrary but upon natural
or real distinctions, gives us the only view of the subject that can claim to be regarded
as of a scientific character."— Extract from the Anthers Preface.

" Professor Craik's book going, as it does, through the whole history of the language,
probably takes a place quite by itself. The great value of the book is its thorough
comprehensiveness. It is always clear and straightforward, and deals not in theories
but in facts." — Saturday Review.

" Professor Craik has succeeded in making a book more than usually agreeable.' —
The Times.

CRAIK (Prof.): A MANUAL OF ENGLISH

LITERATURE, tor the use of Colleges, Schools, and Civil Service
Examinations. Selected from the larger work, by Dr. CRAIK. Crown 8vo.
Cloth, 7/6. Eighth Edition.

" A Manual of English Literature from so experienced and well-read a scholar as
Professor Craik needs no other recommendation than the mention of its existence." —
Spectator.

"This augmented effort will, we doubt not, be received with decided approbation
by those who are entitled to judge, and studied with much protit by those who want

to learn If our young readers will give healthy perusal to Dr. Craik's work, they

will greatly benefit by the wide and sound views he has placed before them." —
A thfiufum. •

22 CHARLES GRIFFIN & COMPANY'S

WORKS by CHARLES T. CRUTTWELL, M.A.,

Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and Head Master of Malvern College.

I.— A HISTORY OF ROMAN LITERATURE : from the Earliest
Period to the Times of the Antonines. Crown 8vo. Cloth bevelled, 8/6.
Third Edition.

"Mr. CRUTTWELL has done a real service to all Students of the Latin Language
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"This elaborate and very careful work, in every respect of high merit. Nothing ac
all equal to it has hitherto been published in England." — British Quarterly Review.

Companion Volun>e. Second Edition.

IL— SPECIMENS OF ROMAN LITERATURE : from the Earliest
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85 A manual of English

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1883

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