美国学生文学简史(英文原版)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：(美)亨利·A·比尔斯

出版社：天津人民出版社

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INTRODUCTION

At the request of the publishers the undersigned has prepared this Introduction and two Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general reader and student of religious history, the pursuit of the study of literature is a necessity.The sermon itself is a part of literature, must have its literary fnish and proportions, and should give ample proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue.

The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the infnite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superfcial observer, resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity.Literature is the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless universe of thought.As in physics the correlation and conservation of force bind all the material sciences together into one, so in the world of intellect all the diverse departments of mental life and action fnd their common bond in literature.Even the signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing—the stenography of those exact sciences.The simple chronicles of the annalist, the fowing verses of the poet, clothing his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in Church or State, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression of cruelty, all have their literature.

The minister of the Gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and inquiring. Perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American.The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly and scarcely more than opens these broad and inviting fields, which are ever growing richer and more fascinating.While man continues to think he will weave the fabric of the mental loom into infnitely varied and beautiful designs.

In the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover the entire history of English and American literature, the following directions, it is hoped, will be of value.

1.Fix the great landmarks, the general periods—each marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped.In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, or William Makepeace Thackeray.

A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in letters：Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Noah Webster or James Kent, James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, or Nathaniel Hawthorne.

2.The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of several ways, according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of the student.Attention might proftably be concentrated on the literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up individual authors, or by classifying all the writers of the period on the basis of the character of their writings, such as poetry, history, belles-lettres, theology, essays, and the like.

3.Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to its infuence on the religious, commercial, political, or social life of the people among whom it has circulated；or as the result of certain forces which have preceded its production.It is well worth the time and effort to trace the infuence of one author upon another or many others, who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in style or method of production unconsciously molded by their confréres of the pen.The divisions of writers may, again, be made with reference to their opinions and associations in the different departments of life where they have wrought their active labors, such as in politics, religion, moral reform, or educational questions.

The influence of the great writers in the languages of the Continent upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of absorbing interest, and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require.JOHN F. HURST，Washington.

PART Ⅰ　Outline Sketch of English Literature

CHAPTER 1　FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER

The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections.For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school, and university.During all this time there were two languages spoken in England.Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower.When the latter finally got the better in the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred.It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its infections.It had lost a half of its old words, and had flled their places with French equivalents.The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms；the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy.The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase.The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason.The art of cooking was French.The naming of the living animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman master.The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224，became intermediaries between the high and the low.They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English.In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day；their medicine, botany, and astronomy displaced the old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning, and star-craft.And, fnally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularlywhen the former supplied them with a rhyme.But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that voice drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and color, use, and place made good their footing beside hue, wont, and stead.A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new.Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than from the latter's.To Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us.

The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a“king's English”or any literary standard.The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires.Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its infections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest.The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect；while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.

The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the continent.Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons.They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys.They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans.English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks.Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French.English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant.After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works.The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.

The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating.R_este hine thâr_úm-heort；r_éced hlifadeG_eáp and g_óld-fâh, gäst inne swäf.Rested him then the great-hearted；the hall toweredRoomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.

This rude energetic verse the Saxon scôp had sung to his harp or glee-beam, dwelling on the emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the line.It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse ftted to be recited rather than sung.The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century.But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was doomed to give way.Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian.Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule.

The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere.The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events, though occasionally they become full and animated.The fen country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries.Here were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ely minster.One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.Merie sungen muneches binnen ElyTha Cnut chyning reu ther by；Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land，And here we thes muneches sang.

It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen country that the bold outlaw Hereward，“the last of the English，”held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Burch or Peterborough, the ancient Medeshamstede（meadow-homestead）that the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154，the date of King Stephen's death.Peterborough had received a new Norman abbot, Turold，“a very stern man，”and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were frst removed to Ely, and then carried off bythe Danish feet and sunk, lost, or squandered.The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon.It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death（1086）by one who had“looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court.”“He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet……Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will……Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt.He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he should be blinded.As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father.”

With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for three hundred years. The thread of the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent.The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon chronicle.The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273.About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century.In the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend.All real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgrave's Chronicle of England, written in prose in 1463-64，hardly any thing of it is left.In history as in literature the English had forgotten their past, and had turned to foreign sources.It is noteworthy that Shakspere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether.And Spenser, who gives in his second book of the Faerie Queene, a resumé of the reigns of fabulous British kings—the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron—has nothing to say of the real kings of early England.So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets.The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur, and the conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogiesupon the dynasty of the conquerors.In the Roman de Rou, a verse chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is related that at the battle of Hastings the French jongleur, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of William’s army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of“Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals.”This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to win over England.The lines which Taillefer sang were from the Chanson de Roland, the oldest and best of the French hero sagas.The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become in the course of one hundred and fifty years, completely identified with the French.They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native women, and forgotten their own Norse tongue.The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe.The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness of wit and fondness for display.The Normans were a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy.Their architecture was at once strong and graceful.Their women were skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in which the conqueror’s wife, Matilda, and the ladies of her court wrought the history of the Conquest.

This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales.These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court to castle.There is a whole literature of these romans d'aventure in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French.Many of them are very long—often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand lines—written sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet.Numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th，14th, and 15th centuries.The translations were usually inferior to the originals.The French trouvere（finder or poet）told his story in a straight-forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc.He invented plots and situations full of fne possibilities by which later poets have profted, but his own handling of them was feeble and prolix.Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the trouveres which the rude, unformed English failed to catch.

The heroes of these romances were of various climes：Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, strangely enough, the favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and their victor in twelve great battles.The language and literature of the ancient Cymry or Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors.There are a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech, such as bard and druid；but in the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over six hundred years.But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe.The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places：in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh.

About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, seemingly of Welsh descent, who lived at the court of Henry the First and became afterward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin a so-called Historia Britonum in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom called after him, and his city of New Troy（Troynovant）on the site of the later London.An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings, and the author referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford.Here appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson：Lear and his three daughters；Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562；Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in Milton's Comus, and became the heroine of the tragedy of Locrine, once attributed to Shakspere；and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round.In 1155 Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, turned Geoffrey's work into a French poem entitled Brut d'Angleterre，“brut”being a Welsh word meaning chronicle.About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn.Layamon's Brut is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pureSaxon English with hardly any French words.The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative.Wace had amplified Geoffrey’s chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border.In particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness.He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard；of the unfaithfulness of Arthur’s queen, Guenever；and the treachery of his nephew, Modred.His narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modred；of the wounding of the king—“ffteen fendly wounds he had, one might in the least three gloves thrust—”；and of the little boat with“two women therein, wonderly dight，”which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante，“sheenest of all elves，”whence he shall come again, according to Merlin’s prophecy, to rule the Britons；all this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his Death of Arthur.This new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers.The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afoat.Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II.，in two French prose romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England.Then it miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul’s desire, an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of the great Launcelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey’s history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever.In like manner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga.This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall.Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fxed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idyls of the King, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others.There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other tongues.But the fnal form which the Saga took in mediaeval England was the prose Morte Dartur of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of the 15th century.This was a digest of the earlier romances and is Tennyson’s main authority.

Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister. There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English, consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the Ancren Riwle（Rule of Anchoresses），1225；the Ayenbite of Inwyt（Remorse of Conscience），1340，both in prose；the Handlyng Sinne，1303；the Cursor Mundi，1320；and the Pricke of Conscience，1340，in verse；metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the Ormulum, or Book of Orm，1205；legends and miracles of saints；poems in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the fve joys of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the seven deadly sins, the ffteen tokens of the coming judgment, and dialogues between the soul and the body.These were the work not only of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in smaller part of the secular or parish clergy.They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of hell with its grisly fends, the vileness of the human body and the loathsome details of its corruption after death.Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse.A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve Ron（A Love Counsel）by the Minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon's Balade of Dead Ladies, with its refrain.

“Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?”

“Where are the snows of yester year?

Where is Paris and Heleyne[1]

That weren so bright and fair of blee

Amadas, Tristan, and Idéyne[2]

Yseudë and allë the，

Hector with his sharpë main，

And Caesar rich in worldës fee?[3]

They beth ygliden out of the reign[4]

As the shaft is of the dee.”

A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others, The Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III.（1216-1272），an Estrif, or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom.The Land of Cokaygne is an amusing little poem of some two hundred lines, belongingto the class of fabliaux, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse.It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where the geese fy down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the bills for their dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, like the hall of little King Pepin, are“of pie-crust and pastry crust，”with fouren cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins.

There are a few songs dating from about 1300，and mostly found in a single collection（Harl, MS.，2253），which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are written in French strophic forms in the southern dialect, and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines.They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them very pretty.They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its daisies and woodruff.

“When the nightingalë sings the woodës waxen green

Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween，

And love is to my hertë gone with a spear so keen，[5]

Night and day my blood it drinks my hertë.doth me tene.”

Others are love plaints to“Alysoun”or some other lady whose“name is in a note of the nightingale；”whose eyes are as gray [6]as glass, and her skin as“red as rose on ris.”Some employ a burden or refrain.“Blow, northern wind，Blow thou me, my sweeting.Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow！”Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter.“Winter wakeneth all my careNow these leavës waxeth bare.Oft I sigh and mournë sareWhen it cometh in my thoughtOf this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought”

Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced Mariolatry and the imagery of the Song of Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made this feeling of divine love familiar.Toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints, a sort of English Golden Legend, was prepared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on saints'days.The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic, as the lives of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael；partly from the calendar of the English Church, as the lives of St.Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin—who is mentioned by Shakspere—and Kenelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the Nonne Presto's Tale.The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets.Thus the legend of St.Brandan's search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris.

About the middle of the 14th century there was a revival of the Old English alliterative verse in romances like William and the Werewolf, and Sir Gawayne, and in religious pieces such as Clannesse（purity），Patience and The Perle, the last named a mystical poem of much beauty, in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the glorifed. Some of these employed rhyme as well as alliteration.They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that alliteration was most common in the north.“I am a sotherne man，”says the parson in the Canterbury Tales.“I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by my letter.”But the most important of the alliterative poems was the Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.In the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother-tongue of any considerable part of the population of England.By a statute of Edward III.，in 1362，it was displaced from the law courts.By 1386 English had taken its place in the schools.The Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress，“after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe.”The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories in the wars of Edward III.against the French.It was the bows of the English yeomanry that won the fght at Crecy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman baronage.But at home the times were bad.Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, pressed upon the poor and wasted the land.The Church was corrupt；the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, and apparitors.The social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes, which fnally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw.This state of things is reflected in the Vision of Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362，by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country.It is in form an allegory, and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the Pilgrim's Progress.The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a“fair feld full offolk，”representing the world with its various conditions of men.There were pilgrims and palmers；hermits with hooked staves, who went to Walsingham—and their wenches after them—great lubbers and long that were loth to work：friars glossing the Gospel for their own proft；pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences；parish priests who forsook their parishes—that had been poor since the pestilence time—and went to London to sing there for simony；bishops, archbishops, and deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the Exchequer, or King's Bench；in short, all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics.A lady, who represents holy Church, then appears to the dreamer, explains to him the meaning of his vision, and reads him a sermon the text of which is，“When all treasure is tried, truth is the best.”A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced, Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, etc.，and after a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations, and fnally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of St.Truth, fnding no guide to direct them save Piers the Plowman, who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the sound heart of the English common folk.The poem was originally in eight divisions or“passus，”to which was added a continuation in three parts, Vita Do Wel, Do Bet, and Do Best.About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author.

Piers Plowman was the frst extended literary work after the Conquest which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but the allegorical cast which the Roman de la Rose had made fashionable in both countries.But even here such personifed abstractions as Langland's Fair-speech and Work-when-time-is, remind us less of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt of the French courtly allegories than of Bunyan's Mr.Worldly Wiseman, and even of such Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and Zeal-of-the-land Busy.The poem is full of English moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality.It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables, and scenes.It is all astir with the actual life of the time.We see the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying“Hote pies, hote！Good gees and grys.Go we dine, go we！”Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a fner artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been, like Chaucer's, among the lasting glories of our tongue.As it is, it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history.Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of MSS.which are extant, and by imitations, suchas Piers the Plowman's Crede（1394），and the Plowman's Tale, for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales.Piers became a kind of typical fgure, like the French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century.

The attack upon the growing corruptions of the Church was made more systematically, and from the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist, by John Wyclif, the rector of Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation.But his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother tongue.This he made about 1380，with the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten years later.There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time, and the Wiclifte versions were made not from the original tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate.In his anxiety to make his rendering close, and mindful, perhaps, of the warning in the Apocalypse，“If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life，”Wiclif followed the Latin order of construction so literally as to make rather awkward English, translating, for example, Quid sibi vult hoc somnium?by What to itself wole this sweven?Purvey's revision was somewhat freer and more idiomatic.In the reigns of Henry IV.and V.it was forbidden to read or to have any of Wiclif's writings.Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned.In spite of this, copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers.Forshall and Madden, in their great edition（1850），enumerate one hundred and ffty MSS.which had been consulted by them.Later translators, like Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, or“King James'Bible”（1611），followed Wiclif's language in many instances；so that he was, in truth, the frst author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative infuence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to many strong, pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost.In 1415；some thirty years after Wiclif's death, by decree of the Council of Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast into the Swift.“The brook，”says Thomas Fuller, in his Church History，“did convey his ashes into Avon；Avon into Severn；Severn into the narrow seas；they into the main ocean.And thus the ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over.”

Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language, and the historian of English manners and culture, they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer（died 1400）we meet with a poet of the frst rank, whose works are increasingly read and will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the general reader as well as a“well of English undefled”to the professional man of letters.With the exception of Dante, Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, and he remains one of the greatest of English poets, and certainly the foremost of English story-tellers in verse.He was the son of a London vintner, and was in his youth in the service of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III.He made a campaign in France in 1359-60，when he was taken prisoner.Afterward he was attached to the court and received numerous favors and appointments.He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where, in all probability, he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.He was appointed at different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty Customs, and Clerk of the Works.He sat for Kent in Parliament, and he received pensions from three successive kings.He was a man of business as well as books, and he loved men and nature no less than study.He knew his world；he“saw life steadily and saw it whole.”Living at the center of English social and political life, and resorting to the court of Edward III.，then the most brilliant in Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of those feudal pomps which fll the high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler, Froissart.His description of a tournament in the Knight's Tale is unexcelled for spirit and detail.He was familiar with dances, feasts, and state ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, in bower and hall, the“trompes with the loude minstralcie，”the heralds, the ladies, and the squires，“What hawkës sitten on the perch above, What houndës liggen on the foor adown.”

But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and that“trewe swynkere and a good，”the plowman whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of“Aprille with her showres sweet”and the“foulës song，”of“May with all her floures and her greenë，”of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new powdered with the daisy, the mystic Marguerite of his Legend of Good Women.A fresh vernal air blows through all his pages.

In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose（if that be his），the Boke of the Duchesse, the Parlament of Foules, the Hous of Fame, as well as in the Legend of Good Women, which was later, theinspiration of the French court poetry of the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the mediaeval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces, temples, portraitures, etc.，which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, and Jean Machault's La Fontaine Amoureuse.In some of these the infuence of Italian poetry is also perceptible.There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the Parlament of Foules and the Hous of Fame, and Troilus and Cresseide is a free handling rather than a translation of Boccaccio's Filostrato.In all of these there are passages of great beauty and force.Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of all time.This position he owes to his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales.Here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the artifcial literary fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things.

The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories written at different times, but put together, probably, toward the close of his life. The frame-work into which they are ftted is one of the happiest ever devised.A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine of St.Thomas à Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London.The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell two tales, and two more on their way back, and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn.He himself accompanies them as judge and“reporter.”In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors.The little“head-links”and“end-links”which bind them together, give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the Wife of Bath, to full and almost dramatic character-sketches.The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators.The general prologue is a series of such character-sketches, the most perfect in English poetry.The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missals, and with the same quaint precision in traits of expression and in costume.The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn.The presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or apparitor, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England, as we know it, than like the Italy of some thirty years ago.But however the outward face of society may have changed, the Canterburypilgrims remain, in Chaucer’s description, living and universal types of human nature.The Canterbury Tales are twenty-four in number.There were thirty-two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered one hundred and twenty-eight stories.

Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English Middle Age. Like many another great poet, he put the final touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation.Thus his Knight's Tale, based upon Boccaccio's Teseide, is the best of English mediaeval romances.And yet the Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions.The tales of the prioress and the second nun are saints'legends.The Monk's Tale is a set of dry, moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary, the“moral Gower.”The stories told by the reeve, miller, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant, belong to the class of fabliaux, a few of which existed in English, such as Dame Siriz, the Lay of the Ash, and the Land of Cokaygne, already mentioned.The Nonne Preste's Tale, likewise, which Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of fabliaux, and was suggested by a little poem in forty lines, Dou Coc et Werpil, by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century.It belonged, like the early English poem of The Fox and the Wolf, to the popular animal-saga of Reynard the Fox.The Franklin’s Tale, whose scene is Brittany, and the Wife of Baths’Tale, which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belong to the class of French lais, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin, the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful lais of Marie de France.

Chaucer was our frst great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos.His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and life-like.He is the kindliest of satirists.The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world.His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompnour of whom he says，“And yet in sooth he was a good felawe.”

Whether he shared Wiclif's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV.，who was Chaucer's life-long patron, was likewise Wiclif's great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is, perhaps, not without signifcance that the poor parson in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be a“loller，”that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, and that because he objects to the jovial inn-keeper's swearing“by Goddes bones.”

Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakspere's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is correct and melodious.The early English was, in some respects, more“sweet upon the tongue”than the modern language.The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutturals and vocalic syllables, like the endings ën，ës, andë，which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together.

Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers；cites“auctours”and gives long catalogues of names and objects with a naïve display of learning；and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages.There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages—at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold.But Chaucer’s artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like a child’s sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise.

The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI.（1422-1471）.Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his Speculum Meditantis（a lost poem），and a number of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantis（1393）in English.The last named is a dreary, pedantic work, in some 15，000 smooth, monotonous, eight-syllabled couplets, in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel Pucell.

References

1.Early English Literature.By Bernhard ten Brink.Translated from the German by H.M.Kennedy.New York：Henry Holt＆Co.，1883.

2.Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English.（Clarendon Press Series.）Oxford.

3.Langland's Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman.Wright's Edition；or Skeat's, in Early English Text Society publications.

4.Chaucer：Canterbury Tales.Tyrwhitt's Edition；or Wright's, in Percy Society publications.

5.Complete Writings.Morris's Edition.6 vols.（In Aldine Series.）[1]Hue.[2]Those.[3]Realm.[4]Bowstring.[5]Pain.[6]Branch.

CHAPTER 2　FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER

The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly two hundred years after Chaucer's death before any poet came, whose name can be written in the same line with his.He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language and verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them.The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, remains his own secret.Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works, as the Court of Love, the Flower and the Leaf, the Cuckow and the Nightingale, are now regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers.If not Chaucer's, they are of Chaucer's school, and the frst two, at least, are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces, such as the Boke of the Duchesse and the Parlament of Foules.

Among his professed disciples was Thomas Occleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his Governail of Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413，drew, or caused to be drawn, on the margin of his MS. a colored portrait of his“maister dere and fader reverent，”“This londes verray tresour and richesse，Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparableUnto us done；hir vengeable duresseDispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesseOf Rhetoryk.”

Another versifer of this same generation was John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk, of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix writer, who composed, among other things, the Story of Thebes, as an addition to the Canterbury Tales.His ballad of London Lyckpenny, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice.“But for lack of mony I could not speede，”

is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London street life.

Chaucer's infuence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whither it was carried by James I.，who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State. There he wrote during the reign of Henry V.（1413-1422）a poem in six cantos, entitled the King's Quhair（King's Book），in Chaucer's seven lined stanza which had been employed by Lydgate in his Falls of Princes（from Boccaccio），and which was afterward called the“rime royal，”from its use by King James, The King's Quhair tells how the poet, on a May morning, looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges, and fair arbors set with“The sharpë，greenë，sweet.juniper.”

He was listening to“the little sweetë nightingale，”when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his“heart became her thrall.”The incident is precisely like Palamon’s frst sight of Emily in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and almost in the very words of Palamon, the poet addresses his lady：“Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly crëatureOr heavenly thing in likeness of natúre?Or are ye very Nature, the goddéss，That have depainted with your heavenly handThis garden full of fowrës as they stand?”

Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to the courts of Venus, Minerva, and Fortune, and receives their instruction in the duties belonging to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of red gillyfowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in golden letters, with a message of encouragement.

James I. may be reckoned among the English poets.He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate as his masters.His education was English, and so was the dialect of his poem, although the unique MS.of it is in the Scotch spelling.The King's Quhair is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser.The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV.She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424.Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins.The story of the murder has been told of late by D.G.Rossetti, in his ballad, The King's Tragedy.

The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance.

The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of literary style, and to confirm the authority of the East-Midland English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had, at least, a definite model to follow.As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French, homilies and saints'legends and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured.But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate and James I.had helped to polish and refne the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian tradition.The literary English never again slipped back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer.

In the history of every literature the development of prose is later than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artifcial, is cultivated as a fne art, and its records preserved in an early stage of society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of being written and kept.English prose labored under the added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries.Latin was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and scholar were convertible terms.The word clerk meant either priest or scholar.Two of the Canterbury Tales are in prose, as is also the Testament of Love, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same man who wrote the Knight's Tale and the story of Griselda.The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundeville—the forerunner of that great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern literature—was written, according to its author, first in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the year 1356，translated into English for the behoof of“lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and worthi men, that conne not Latyn but litylle.”The author professed to have spent over thirty years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far as Farther India and the“iles that ben abouten Indi，”to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and, at another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of Tartary.But there is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant；the French seems to be much later than 1356，and the English MS.to belong to the early years of the fifteenth century, and to have been made by another hand.Recent investigations make it probable that Maundeville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many sources, and particularly from the narrative of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote about 1330.Some doubt is even cast upon the existenceof any such person as Maundeville.Whoever wrote the book that passes under his name, however, would seem to have visited the Holy Land, and the part of the“voiage”that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to the truth.The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about gryfouns that fy away with yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc.

During the 15th century English prose was gradually being brought into a shape ftting it for more serious uses. In the controversy between the Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly employed, but Wiclif had written some of his tracts in English, and, in 1449，Reginald Peacock, Bishop of St.Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same controversy, The Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy.Sir John Fortescue, who was chief-justice of the king's bench from 1442-1460，wrote during the reign of Edward IV.a book on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which may be regarded as the frst treatise on political philosophy and constitutional law in the language.But these works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very good, examples of English prose in a barren time.The 15th century was an era of decay and change.The Middle Age was dying, Church and State were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual infuences that were working secretly under ground.In England the civil wars of the Red and White Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the Tudors.Toward the close of that century, and early in the next, happened the four great events, or series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and, in a succession of shocks, overthrew the mediaeval system of life and thought.These were the invention of printing, the Renascence, or revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the Protestant Reformation.

William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne. In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at Westminster.Just before the introduction of printing the demand for MS.copies had grown very active, stimulated, perhaps, by the coming into general use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment.The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and illuminating of MSS.went on, professional copyists resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging to the monastic library.Caxton's choice of a spot was, therefore, significant.His new art for multiplying copies began tosupersede the old method of transcription at the very head-quarters of the MS.makers.The frst book that bears his Westminster imprint was the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV.The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the time, as he naturally selected what was most in demand.The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like the Order of Chivalry, Faits of Arms, and the Golden Legend, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as Reynard the Fox, and a French version of the Aeneid.He also printed, with continuations of his own, revisions of several early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate.A translation of Cicero on Friendship, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, but no edition of a classical author in the original.The new learning of the Renascence had not, as yet, taken much hold in England.Upon the whole, the productions of Caxton's press were mostly of a kind that may be described as mediaeval, and the most important of them, if we except his edition of Chaucer, was that“noble and joyous book，”as Caxton called it, Le Morte Darthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469，and printed by Caxton in 1485.This was a compilation from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet been written.It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes of simple story telling, the picturesque charm of Malory's style has been improved upon.The episode which lends its name to the whole romance, the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has followed Malory's narrative closely, even to such details of the scene as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer which Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when bidden to throw Excalibur into the water，“‘What saw thou there?'said the king.‘Sir，’he said，‘I saw nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.’”“I heard the ripple washing in the reedsAnd the wild water lapping on the crag.”

And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector over Launcelot, in Malory's fnal chapter：“‘Ah, Launcelot，'he said，‘thou were head of all Christian knights；and now I dare say，'said Sir Ector，‘thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight's hand；and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield；and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse；and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman；and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword；and thou were the goodliest person ever came among pressof knights；and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies；and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'”

Equally good, as an example of English prose narrative, was the translation made by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, of that most brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer's contemporary, Sir John Froissart. Lord Berners was the English governor of Calais, and his version of Froissart's Chronicles was made in 1523-25，at the request of Henry VIII.In these two books English chivalry spoke its last genuine word.In Sir Philip Sidney the character of the knight was merged into that of the modern gentleman.And although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spenser cast his Faery Queene into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away.How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545，by Roger Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane Grey.“In our forefathers'time, when Papistry as a standing pool covered and overfowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons：as one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two special points, in open manslaughter and bold bawdry.This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at.Yet I know when God's Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure received into the prince's chamber.”

The fashionable school of courtly allegory, frst introduced into England by the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, and Good Operacion, fnally won the love of La Belle Pucel.Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively mediaeval.His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning.In his Bowge of Courte（Court Entertainment or Dole），and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza.But his later poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him Skeltonical.This was a sort of glorifed doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional intermixture of French and Latin.“Her beautye to augment.Dame Nature hath her lentA warte upon her cheke，Who so lyst to sekeIn her vyságe a skar，That semyth from afarLyke to the radyant star，All with favour fret，So properly it is set.She is the vyolet，The daysy delectáble，The columbine commendáble，The jelofer amyáble；For this most goodly foure，This blossom of fressh coloúr，So Jupiter me succoúr，She forysheth new and newIn beaute and vertew；Hac claritate gemina，O gloriosa femina, etc.”

Skelton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon；coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character.His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's Jolly Beggars.His Phyllyp Sparowe is a sportive, pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catullus's elegy on Lesbia's sparrow.In Speke, Parrot, and Why Come ye not to Courte?he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529.Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII.The great humanist, Erasmus, spoke of him as the“one light and ornament of British letters.”Caxton asserts that he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds，“I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon's well.”

In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk-poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but chiefy in what is known as the ballad stanza.[1][2]

“In somer, when the shawesbe sheyne，

And leves be large and longe，

Hit is full merry in feyre forést

To here the foulys song.

“To se the dere draw to the dale，[3]

And leve the hilles hee，

And shadow them in the leves grene，

Under the grene-wode tree.”

It is not possible to assign a defnite date to these ballads. They lived on the lips of the people, and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and sung.Meanwhile they underwent repeated changes, so that we have numerous versions of the same story.They belonged to no particular author, but, like all folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modernized their language, added to them, or corrupted them, and passed them along.Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no poet's name, but are ferae naturae, and have the flavor of wild game.In the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older than the 17th century, or the latter part of the 16th century, though many, in their original shape, are, doubtless, much older.A very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century, and to the same period is assigned the charming ballad of the Nut Brown Maid and the famous border ballad of Chevy Chase, which describes a battle between the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy.It was this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote，“I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet；[4]and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder，with no rougher voice than rude style.”But the style of the ballads was not always rude.In their compressed energy of expression, in the impassioned abrupt, yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to Chaucer in the quality of intensity.The true home of the ballad literature was“the north country，”and especially the Scotch border, where the constant forays of moss-troopers and the raids and private warfare of the lords of the marches supplied many traditions of heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of the Battle of Otterbourne, and in the Hunting of the Cheviot, or Chevy Chase, already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English；the dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, differ much from that of Northumberland and Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times.Other ballads were shortened, popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of fashion among educated readers in the 16th century, and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers.Others preserved the memory of local countryside tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly historical and partly legendary, associated often with particular spots.Such are, for example, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow, Fair Helen of Kirkconnell, The Forsaken Bride, and The Twa Corbies.Others, again, have a coloring of popular superstition, like the beautiful ballad concerning Thomas of Ersyldoune, who goes in at Eldon Hill with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy land.

But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about the name of that good outlaw, Robin Hood, who, with his merry men, hunted the forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the king's deer and waylaid rich travelers, but was kind to poor knights and honest workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common people, as Arthur was of the nobles.The names of his Confessor, Friar Tuck；his mistress, Maid Marian；his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much, the Miller's son, were as familiar as household words.Langland, in the 14th century, mentions“rimes of Robin Hood，”and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage, as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon de Montfort in his war against Henry III.But there seems to be nothing historical about Robin Hood.He was a creation of the popular fancy.The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive, and there were, doubtless, dim memories still cherished among the Saxon masses of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defed the power of the Conqueror, as well as of later freebooters, who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder.Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character.He had the English love of fair-play, the English readiness to shake hands and make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square fght.He beat and plundered the rich bishops and abbots, who had more than their share of wealth, but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed, and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood.He was a mighty archer, with those national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard-shaft.He tricked and baffed legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness andadventure which marked the free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England.And fnally the scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of“the old Robin Hood of England”and his merry men.

The ballads came, in time, to have certain tricks of style, such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is their use of conventional epithets；“the red, red gold，”“the good, green wood，”“the gray goose wing.”Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like，“But out and spak their stepmother.”

Such is, fnally, a kind of sing-song repetition, which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock, as, for example，“She had'na pu'd a double rose，A rose but only twae.”

Or again，“And mony ane sings o'grass, o'grass，And mony ane sings o'corn；An mony ane sings o'Robin Hood，Kens little whare he was born.It was na in the ha'，the ha'，Nor in the painted bower；But it was in the gude green wood，Amang the lily fower.”

Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter，“broad sides，”or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489，A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject.In the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies, called Garlands.Early in the 18th century the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a number of Scotch ballads in the Evergreen and Tea-Table Miscellany.But no large and important collection was put forth until Percy's Reliques，1765，a book which had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott.In Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th century, such as Jane Elliott's Lament for Flodden, and the fne ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.Walter Scott's Proud Maisie is in the Wood, is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad makers.

In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and many Greek scholars, with their MSS.，fed into Italy, where they began teaching their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a veryimperfect knowledge of the Latin classics.Ovid and Statius were widely read, and so was the late Latin poet, Boethius, whose De Consolatione Philosophiae had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer.Little was known of Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard, who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as a magic mirror and statue.Caxton's so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Vergil's epic.Of the Roman historians, orators, and moralists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Seneca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and Catullus.The gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century, and largely in Italy, worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe.MSS.were brought out of their hiding places, edited by scholars and spread abroad by means of the printing-press.Statues were dug up and placed in museums, and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the fine arts.In the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England.William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence under the refugee, Demetrius Chalcondylas, began teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early as 1491.A little later John Colet, Dean of St.Paul's and the founder of St.Paul's School, and his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and frst master of St.Paul's（1500），also studied Greek abroad, Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in the city of Rome.Thomas More, afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII.，was among the pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford.Thither also, in 1497，came in search of the new knowledge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the foremost scholar of his time.From Oxford the study spread to the sister university, where the first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno.Cheke, who“taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek，”became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540.Among his pupils was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose time St.John’s College, Cambridge, was the chief seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nash testifes that it“was as an universitie within itself；having more candles light in it, every winter morning before four of the clock, than the four of clock bell gave strokes.”Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent opposition from the conservative element, who were nicknamed Trojans.The opposition came in part from the priests, who feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy.Yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture, among them Thomas More, whose Catholicismwas undoubted and who went to the block for his religion.Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as chancellor, was also a munifcent patron of learning and founded Christ Church College, at Oxford.Popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies, and over twenty endowed grammar schools were established in England in the frst twenty years of the 16th century.Greek became a passion even with English ladies.Ascham in his Schoolmaster, a treatise on education, published in 1570，says, that Queen Elisabeth“readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day, than some prebendarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole week.”And in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in Leicestershire, he“found her in her chamber reading Phaedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delite as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocase，”and when he asked her why she had not gone hunting with the rest, she answered，“I wisse, all their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I fnd in Plato.”Ascham’s Schoolmaster, as well as his earlier book, Toxophilus, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles with quotations from the Greek and Latin classics, and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden.

One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the Scriptures into English, out of the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndal printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek.Ten years later Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin.These were the basis of numerous later translations, and the strong beautiful English of Tyndal's Testament is preserved for the most part in our Authorized Version（1611）.At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England.Numbers of copies were brought into the country, however, and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation.After Henry VIII.had broken with the Pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people.Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants.Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homely sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary.The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52.More was, perhaps, the best representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from inside, but who refused to follow Henry VIII.in his breach with Rome.Dean Colet and JohnFisher, Bishop of Rochester, belonged to the same company, and Fisher was beheaded in the same year（1535）with More, and for the same offense, namely, refusing to take the oath to maintain the act confrming the king's divorce from Catherine of Arragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn.More's philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the description of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on Plato's Republic, and printed in 1516.The name signifies“no place”（Outopos），and has furnished an adjective to the language.The Utopia was in Latin, but More’s History of Edward V.and Richard III.，written in 1513，though not printed till 1557，was in English.It is the frst example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle；that is, it is a reasoned and artistic presentation of an historic period, and not a mere chronological narrative of events.

The frst three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original work of literature in England. It was a season of preparation, of education.The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary renascence through the reigns of Henry VIII.，Edward VI.，and Queen Mary.When Elizabeth came to the throne, in 1558，a more settled order of things began, and a period of great national prosperity and glory.Meanwhile the English mind had been slowly assimilating the new classical culture, which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors.A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy.In 1557 appeared Tottel's Miscellany, containing songs and sonnets by a“new company of courtly makers.”Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before, by gentlemen of Henry VIII.'s court, and circulated in MS.The two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one time English embassador to Spain, and that brilliant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king's arms with his own.Both of them were dead long before their work was printed.The pieces in Tottel's Miscellany show very clearly the influence of Italian poetry.We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch.But the sonnet, which Petrarch had brought to great perfection, was frst introduced into England by Wiat.There was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 16th century, and a number of Wiat's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Petrarch and later poets.Others were imitations of Horace’s satires and epistles.Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid.The love poetry of Tottel’s Miscellany is polished and artifcial, like the models which it followed.Dante’s Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch’s Laura.Following their example, Surrey addressed his love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine.The Amourists, or love sonneters, dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, and the conventional nature of their sighs and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems：“Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart；”“Hell tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore as unkindness the lover；”“The lover prayeth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken，”etc.The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor—a cage where so many a song-bird has grown vocal.And Wiat’s little piece of eight lines，“Of his Return from Spain，”is worth reams of his amatory affectations.Nevertheless the writers in Tottel’s Miscellany were real reformers of English poetry.They introduced new models of style and new metrical forms, and they broke away from the mediaeval traditions which had hitherto obtained.The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer’s time, which made his scansion obsolete.The accent of many words of French origin, like natúre, couráge, virtúe, matére, had shifted to the frst syllable, and the e of the fnal syllables ës，ën，ëd, and ë，had largely disappeared.But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still fnd such lines as these：

“But he my strokës might right well endure，He was so great and [5]huge of puissánce.”

Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so is his contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the reader frst feels sure that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion.

But Chaucer's example still continued potent. Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both in his pastorals and in his Faery Queene, thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he“writ no language.”A poem that stands midway between Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chaucer's school—such as Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure—was the Induction contributed by Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the Mirrour for Magistrates.The whole series was the work of many hands, modeled upon Lydgate's Falls of Princes（taken from Boccaccio），and was designed as a warning to great men of the fckleness of fortune.The Induction is the only noteworthy part of it.It was an allegory, written in Chaucer’s seven-lined stanza and described with a somber imaginative power, the fgure of Sorrow, her abode in the“griesly lake”of Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville was the author of the frst regular English tragedy, Gorboduc, and it was at his request that Ascham wrote the Schoolmaster.

Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spenser（1552-99）. While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some of the Visions of Petrarch, and the Visions of Bellay, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his Shepheard's Calendar announced the coming of a great original poet, the frst since Chaucer.The Shepheard's Calendar was a pastoral in twelve eclogues—one for each month in the year.There had been a great revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, with one or two insignificant exceptions, Spenser's were the first bucolics in English.Two of his eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I.The pastoral machinery had been used by Vergil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of rustic life；but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds.Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sidney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel and Hobbinol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia, and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer, and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal.The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry, and represents a very unreal Arcadia.Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden, and the only piece of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's wonderful Lycidas.The Shepheard's Calendar, however, though it belonged to an artifcial order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style.There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, and music which were new to English poetry.It was written while Spenser was in service with the Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney, and was, perhaps, composed at the latter’s country seat of Penshurst.In the following year Spenser went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that kingdom.After flling several clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser received a grant of the castle and estate of Kilcolman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond.Here, among landscapes richly wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land，“under the cooly shades of the green alders by the Mulla’s shore，”Sir Walter Raleigh found him, in 1589，busy upon his Faery Queene.In his poem, Colin Clouts Come Home Again, Spenser tells, in pastoral language, how“the shepherd of the ocean”persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the Queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great poem were printed, in 1590.A volume of minor poems, entitled Complaints, followed in 1591，and the three remaining books of the Faery Queene in 1596.In 1595-96 he published also his Daphnaida, Prothalamion, and the four hymns On Love and Beauty, and On Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty.In 1598，in Tyrone’s rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, fed to London, where he died in January，1599.

The Faery Queene reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary infuences of the renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture.Its immediate models were Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515，and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, printed in 1581.Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the frst based upon the old Charlemagne epos—Orlando being identical with the hero of the French Chanson de Roland—the second upon the history of the first Crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen.But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude mediaeval romances.Ariosto and Tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness and power.The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of knight-errantry.Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and fgures of Gothic romance；distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc.But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personifed abstractions of fashionable allegory.Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Superstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land.Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of the Palace of Pride in the manner of the Romaunt of the Rose.But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution.He removed them to an ideal sphere“apart from place, withholding time，”where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream.

The poem was to have been“a continued allegory or dark conceit，”in twelve books, the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written.By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to makehis allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract.Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, to whom the poem was dedicated.Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence.Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots.Grantorto is Philip II.of Spain.Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton.Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV.of France, etc.；and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable.In this way the poem refects the spiritual struggle of the time, the warfare of young England against Popery and Spain.

The allegory is not always easy to follow. It is kept up most carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem.It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure.The“Spenserian stanza，”in which the Faery Queene was written, was adapted from the ottava riwa of Ariosto.Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the frst eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse.It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similes, especially—each of which usually fills a whole stanza—have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's.Spenser was, in fact, a great painter.His poetry is almost purely sensuous.The personages in the Faery Queene are not characters, but richly colored fgures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth.Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty.Not until Keats did another English poet appear so flled with the passion for all outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses.Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet.It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting passages from the Faery Queene.Those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life.But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination.His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air.“Their birth was of the womb of morning dew，And their conception of the glorious prime.”

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithalamion. The first was a“spousal verse，”made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet fgures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears“like a bride's chamber-foor.”

“Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song，”is the burden of each stanza. The Epithalamion was Spenser's own marriage song, written to crown his series of Amoretti, or love sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language.Hardly less beautiful than these was Muiopotmos；or, the Fate of the Butterfy, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider.The four hymns in praise of Love and Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned.Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius.He was a seer of visions, of images full, brilliant, and distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of ideas, typical and emblematic, the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.

References

1.A First Sketch of English Literature.By Henry Morley.

2.English Writers.By the same.Vol.iii.From Chaucer to Dunbar.

3.Skeat's Specimens of English Literature，1594-1579.Clarendon Press Series.

4.Morte Darthur.Globe Edition.

5.Child's English and Scottish Ballads.8 vols.

6.Hale's edition of Spenser.Globe.

7.“A Royal Poet.”Irving's Sketch-Book.[1]Woods.[2]Bright.[3]High.[4]Fiddler.[5]Trisyllable—like creature, neighebour, etc, in Chaucer.

CHAPTER 3　THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, in 1579，and closed with the printing of Milton's Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature.Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries.But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elisabethan.In strictness the Elisabethan age ended with the queen's death, in 1603.But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners；and“the spacious times of great Elisabeth”have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration（1660）.There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance, and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen’s seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression“Victorian poetry”has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time.But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central fgure.She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea；she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII.，and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night's Dream.“That very time I marked—but thou could'st not—Flying between the cold moon and the earth，Cupid all armed. A certain aim he tookAt a fair vestal throned by the west，And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bowAs he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts.But I might see young Cupid's fery dartQuenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon，And the imperial votaress passed onIn maiden meditation, fancy free”—

an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elisabeth's hand.

The praises of the queen, which sound through all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment.England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary.When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister, the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown.The poets idealized Elisabeth.She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the confict against popery and Spain.Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman.In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfgured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage.Like her father, she“loved a man，”and she had the magnifcent tastes of the Tudors.She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic flattery.In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day.“When the queen paraded through a country town，”says Warton, the historian of English poetry，“almost every pageant was a pantheon.When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the Penates.In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids；the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower；and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs.When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon.”The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575.An account ofthese was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth, and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenilworth.Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have“heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back，Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath，That the rude sea grew civil at the sound.”

But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's reign it will be convenient to speak frst of the prose. While following up Spenser's career to its close（1599），we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding.In 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English prose.This was John Lyly's Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit.It was in form a romance, the history of a young Athenian who went to Naples to see the world and get an education；but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love, friendship, religion, etc.，written in language which, from the title of the book, has received the name of Euphuism.This new English became very fashionable among the ladies, and“that beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism，”says a writer of 1632，“was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French.”

Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his novel the Monastery, but the peculiar jargon which Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous natural history.“Descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and stark-blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust；be merry, but with modesty；be sober, but not too sullen；be valiant, but not too venturous.”“I see now that, as the fsh Scolopidus in the food Araxes at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow, and at the waning as black as the burnt coal；so Euphues, which at the first increasing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at the last cast become most faithless.”Besides the fsh Scolopidus, the favorite animals of Lyly's menagerie are such as the chameleon, which，“though he have most guts draweth least breath；”the bird Piralis，“which sitting upon white cloth is white, upon green, green；”and the serpent Porphirius, which，“though he be full of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but himself.”

Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. The vice of Euphuism was its monotony.On every page of the book there was something pungent, something quotable；but many pages of such writing became tiresome.Yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, by lending it point and polish.His carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, and his book became a manual of polite conversation and introduced that fashion of witty repartee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's comic dialogue.In 1580 appeared the second part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598.Lyly had many imitators.In Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse, a tract directed against the stage and published about four months later than the first part of Euphues, the language is distinctly Euphuistic.The dramatist, Robert Greene, published, in 1587，his Menaphon；Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, and his Euphues's Censure to Philautus.His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, published；in 1590，Rosalynde：Euphues’s Golden Legacy, from which Shakspere took the plot of As You Like It.Shakspere and Ben Jonson both quote from Euphues in their plays, and Shakspere was really writing Euphuism, when he wrote such a sentence as“Tis true，’tis pity；pity’tis’tis true.”

That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of Elizabethan England. He was scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, soldier, all in one.Educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, he had been sent to France when a lad of eighteen, with the embassy which went to treat of the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Massacre of St.Bartholomew, in 1572.Afterward he had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the Emperor's Court, and every-where won golden opinions.In 1580，while visiting his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her pleasure, the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which remained in MS.till 1590.This was a pastoral romance, after the manner of the Italian Arcadia of Sanazzaro, and the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor, a Portuguese author.It was in prose, but intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney finished only two books and a portion of a third.It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta.The plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance：disguises, surprises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single combats.Although the insurrection of the Helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story, the Arcadia is not thereal Arcadia of the Hellenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the Faery Land of Spenser.

Sidney was our frst writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says that he“did frst reduceOur tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use，Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fshes, fies，Playing with words and idle similes.”

Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style was as“Italianated”as Lyly's, though in a different way. His English was too pretty for prose.His“Sidneian showers of sweet discourse”sowed every page of the Arcadia with those fowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer age finds insipid.This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers appears in Sidney, chiefy in the form of an excessive personifcation.If he describes a feld full of roses, he makes“the roses add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty.”If he describes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the water break into twenty bubbles, as“not content to have the picture of their face in large upon him, but he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them.”And even a passage which should be tragic, such as the death of his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with conceits like these：“For her exceeding fair eyes having with continued weeping got a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbor Death；in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them；her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own beauties；so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white，”etc.

The Arcadia, like Euphues, was a lady's book. It was the favorite court romance of its day, but it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and confuses him with its tangle of adventures.The lady for whom it was written was the mother of that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been dedicated.And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.“Underneath this sable herseLies the subject of all verse，Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother；Death, ere thou hast slain anotherLearn'd and fair and good as she，Time shall throw a dart at thee.”

Sidney's Defense of Poesy, composed in 1581，but not printed till 1595，was written in manlier English than the Arcadia, and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time. He was also the author of a series of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, in which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penelope Rich（with whom he was not at all in love），according to the conventional usage of the amourists.

Sidney died in 1586，from a wound received in a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an officer in the English contingent, sent to help the Dutch against Spain. The story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded soldier with the words，“Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.”Sidney was England's darling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain“the meed of some melodious tear.”Spenser's Ruins of Time were among the number of these funeral songs；but the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, concerning whom little is known.

Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth's reign was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile than Sidney, and more representative of the restless spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, practical enterprise that marked the times. He fought against the Queen's enemies by land and sea in many quarters of the globe；in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain, with the Huguenot Army against the League in France.Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery of English seamen.He was half-brother to the famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard Grenville.He sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure feet, and in 1591 he published a report of the fght, near the Azores, between Grenville's ship, the Revenue, and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said Francis Bacon，“memorable even beyond credit, and to the height of some heroical fable.”Raleigh was active in raising a feet against the Spanish Armada of 1588.He was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex“singed the Spanish king's beard，”in the harbor of Cadiz.The year before he had sailed to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, destroying on the way the Spanish town of San José，in the West Indies；and on his return he published his Discovery of the Empire of Guiana.In 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the Azores.He took a prominent part in colonizing Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe.

America was still a land of wonder and romance, full of rumors, nightmares, and enchantments. In 1580，when Francis Drake，“the Devonshire Skipper，”had dropped anchor in Plymouth harbor, after his voyage around the world, theenthusiasm of England had been mightily stirred.These narratives of Raleigh, and the similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sailors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Drake；but especially the great cyclopedia of nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt, in 1589，The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by the English Nation, worked powerfully on the imaginations of the poets.We see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had been reading the narrative of Sir George Somers's shipwreck on the Bermudas or“Isles of Devils.”

Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's successor, James I. He was sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of high treason.The sentence hung over him until 1618，when it was revived against him and he was beheaded.Meanwhile, during his twelve years'imprisonment in the Tower, he had written his magnum opus, the History of the World.This is not a history, in the modern sense, but a series of learned dissertations on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc.A chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays：“Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon；and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the air.”The preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft-quoted apostrophe to Death.“O eloquent, just：and mighty Death！Whom none could advise, thou has persuaded；what none hath dared, thou hast done；and whom all the world hath fattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised；thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, hic jacet.”

Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to be a poet. Spenser calls him“the summer's nightingale，”and George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy（1589），finds his“vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate.”Puttenham used insolent in its old sense, uncommon；but this description is hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning.Raleigh's most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva indignatio of Swift.The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage.It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS.or by tradition to have been“made by Sir Walter Raleigh the night before he was beheaded.”Of one such poem the assertion is probably true, namely, the lines“found in his Bible in the gate-house at Westminster.”“Even such is Time, that takes in trust，Our youth, our joys, our all we have，And pays as but with earth and dust；Who in the dark and silent grave，When we have wandered all our ways，Shuts up the story of our days；But from this earth, this grave, this dust，My God shall raise me up, I trust！”

The strictly literary prose of the Elisabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse. Many entire departments of prose literature were as yet undeveloped.Fiction was represented—outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already mentioned—chiefy by tales translated or imitated from Italian novelle.George Turberville's Tragical Tales（1566）was a collection of such stories, and William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure（1576-1577）a similar collection from Boccaccio's Decameron and the novels of Bandello.These translations are mainly of interest, as having furnished plots to the English dramatists.Lodge's Rosalind and Robert Greene's Pandosto, the sources respectively of Shakspere’s As You Like It and Winter’s Tale, are short pastoral romances, not without prettiness in their artifcial way.The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against“Martin Marprelate，”an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them.The most noteworthy of them were Nash’s Piers Penniless’s Supplication to the Devil, Lyly’s Pap with a Hatchet, and Greene’s Groat’s Worth of Wit.Of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the Chronicle of England, compiled by Ralph Holinshed in 1577.This was Shakspere’s English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III.and other characters in his historical plays.In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot.

Of books belonging to other departments than pure literature, the most important was Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, the first four books of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on the philosophy of law and a defense, as against the Presbyterians, of the government of the English Church by bishops.No work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English prose.It was written in sonorous, stately and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir Thomas Browne.Had theEcclesiastical Polity been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, years earlier, it would doubtless have been written in Latin.

The life of Francis Bacon，“the father of inductive philosophy，”as he has been called—better, the founder of inductive logic—belongs to English history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin and English, to the history of English philosophy. But his volume of Essays was a contribution to general literature.In their completed form they belong to the year 1625，but the frst edition was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims—the text for an essay—than that developed treatment of a subject which we now understand by the word essay.They were, said their author，“as grains of salt that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety.”They were the frst essays so-called in the language.“The word，”said Bacon，“is late, but the thing is ancient.”The word he took from the French essais of Montaigne, the frst two books of which had been published in 1592.Bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings because they“came home to men's business and bosoms.”Their alternate title explains their character：Counsels Civil and Moral, that is, pieces of advice touching the conduct of life，“of a nature whereof men shall fnd much in experience, little in books.”The essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of men.The truth and depth of his sayings, and the extent of ground which they cover, as well as the weighty compactness of his style, have given many of them the currency of proverbs.“Revenge is a kind of wild justice.”“He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”Bacon's reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his noble English rises now and then, as in his essay On Death, into eloquence—the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion.In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that lumen siccum which he loved to commend，“not drenched or bloodied by the affections.”Dr.Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was a dry wine.

A popular class of books in the 17th century were“characters”or“witty descriptions of the properties of sundry persons，”such as the Good Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate；much as in some modern Heads of the People where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. A still more modern instance of the kind is George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which derives its title from the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the original models of this kind of literature.The most popular character-book in Europe in the 17th century was La Bruyère’s Caractères.But this was not published till 1588.In England the fashion had been set in 1614，by the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the year before his book was printed.One of Overbury’s sketches—the Fair and Happy Milkmaid—is justly celebrated for its old-world sweetness and quaintness.“Her breath is her own, which scents all the year long of June, like a new-made hay-cock.She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with pity；and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she sings defance to the giddy wheel of fortune.She bestows her year’s wages at next fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency.The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer for it.She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none；yet to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones.Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the spring-time, to have store of fowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.”

England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company；songs, said Bishop Joseph Hall, which were“sung to the wheel and sung unto the pail.”Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy；he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of them through his plays, and wrote others like them himself：“Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song，That old and antique song we heard last night，Methinks it did relieve my passion much，More than light airs and recollected termsOf these most brisk and giddy-paced times.Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.The knitters and the spinners in the sunAnd the free maids that weave their threads with bonesDo use to chant it；it is silly soothAnd dallies with the innocence of loveLike the old age.”

Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names.Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists.Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's Amoretti and Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary.Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia’s Pastorals and Shephera’s Pipe（1613-1616）and Marlowe’s charmingly rococo little idyl, The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply.There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke’s Romeo and Juliet（the source of Shakspere’s tragedy），Marlowe’s fragment, Hero and Leander, and Shakspere’s Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece, the frst of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner.Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he“could not have written an epic：he would have died of a plethora of thought.”Shakspere’s two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind.The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand.It is signifcant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the Rape of Lucrece especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have done.

In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in some sort, get forward；but in the continuation, by George Chapman（who wrote the last four“sestiads”），the path is utterly lost，“with woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown.”

One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's Hero and Leander with Byron's ringing lines：“The wind is high on Helle's wave，As on that night of stormy water，When Love, who sent, forgot to saveThe young, the beautiful, the brave，The lonely hope of Sestos'daughter.”

Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a great Elisabethan poem, inspired by Homer.It has Homer's fre, but not his simplicity；the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner offigures and conceits.It was written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman's time.Certainly all later versions—Pope's and Cowper’s and Lord Derby’s and Bryant’s—seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman’s English.His verse was not the heroic line of ten syllables, chosen by most of the standard translators, but the long fourteen-syllabled measure, which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist.In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer’s hexameters.“From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fre，Like rich Autumnus'golden lamp, whose brightness men admire，Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face，Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase.”

Keat's fne ode, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, is well-known. Fairfax's version of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered（1600）is one of the best metrical translations in the language.

The national pride in the achievements of Englishmen, by land and sea, found expression, not only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's Survey of London, and Harrison's Description of England（prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicle），but in long historical and descriptive poems, like William Warner's Albion's England，1586；Samuel Daniel’s History of the Civil Wars，1595-1602；Michael Drayton’s Baron’s Wars，1596，England’s Heroical Epistles，1598，and Polyolbion，1613. The very plan of these works was fatal to their success.It is not easy to digest history and geography into poetry.Drayton was the most considerable poet of the three, but his Polyolbion was nothing more than“a gazeteer in rime，”a topographical survey of England and Wales, with tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and valleys, in thirty books and nearly one hundred thousand lines.It was Drayton who said of Marlowe, that he“had in him those brave translunary things that the frst poets had；”and there are brave things in Drayton, but they are only occasional passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand.His Agincourt is a spirited war-song, and his Nymphidia；or, Court of Faery, is not unworthy of comparison with Drake’s Culprit Fay, and is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, and the popular fairy lore of Shakspere’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The“well-languaged Daniel，”of whom Ben Jonson said that he was“a good honest man, but no poet，”wrote, however, one fne meditative piece, his Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland, a sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet Lucretius's famous passage in praise of philosophy，“Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis，”etc.

But the Elisabethan genius found its fullest and truest expression in the drama. It is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without having any thing poured into it worth keeping, until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and passion.Such was in England the fortune of the stage play.At a time when Chaucer was writing character-sketches that were really dramatic, the formal drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever.These were taken from the Bible and acted at first by the priests as illustrations of Scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and saints'days.Afterward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took hold of them and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air.In some English cities, as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be performed almost to the close of the 16th century.And in the celebrated Passion Play, at Oberammergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a miracle play that has survived to our own day.These were followed by the moral plays, in which allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty Juventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, were the persons of the drama.The comic character in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract vice, who became the clown or fool of Shaksperian comedy.The“formal Vice, Iniquity，”as Shakspere calls him, had it for his business to belabor the roaring Devil with his wooden sword“with his dagger of lathIn his rage and his wrathCries‘Aha！'to the Devil，‘Pare your nails, Goodman Evil！'”

He survives also in the harlequin of the pantomimes, and in Mr. Punch, of the puppet shows, who kills the Devil and carries him off on his back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes.

Masques and interludes—the latter a species of short farce—were popular at the Court of Henry VIII. Elisabeth was often entertained at the universities or at the inns of court with Latin plays, or with translations from Seneca, Euripides, and Ariosto.Original comedies and tragedies began to be written, modeled upon Terence, and Seneca, and chronicle histories founded on the annals of English kings.There was a Master of the Revels at court, whose duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen, and these were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel, or by the choir boys of St.Paul's Cathedral.Theseearly plays are of interest to students of the history of the drama, and throw much light upon the construction of later plays, like Shakspere's；but they are rude and inartistic, and without any literary quality.

There were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy noblemen, like the Earl of Leicester, and bands of strolling players, who acted in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until stationary theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and established, that any plays were produced which deserve the name of literature.In 1576 the first play-house was built in London.This was the Black Friars, which was located within the liberties of the dissolved monastery of the Black Friars, in order to be outside of the jurisdiction of the Mayor and Corporation, who were Puritan, and determined in their opposition to the stage.For the same reason the Theater and the Curtain were built in the same year, outside the city walls in Shoreditch.Later the Rose, the Globe, and the Swan, were erected on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play-goers resorting to them were accustomed to“take boat.”

These early theaters were of the rudest construction. The six-penny spectators, or“groundlings，”stood in the yard, or pit, which had neither floor nor roof.The shilling spectators sat on the stage, where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence they chaffed the actors or the“opposed rascality”in the yard.There was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys.Plays were acted in the afternoon.A placard, with the letters“Venice，”or“Rome，”or whatever, indicated the place of the action.With such rude appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets.The dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of that day, that it responded to the appeal.It suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and“with aid of some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long jars.”Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place, to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy.But the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the audience, and they decided for freedom and action, rather than restraint and recitation.Hence our national drama is of Shakspere, and not of Racine.By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and ffty thousand inhabitants.

Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the Englishman of that time than it has ever been before or since.It was his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one.No great drama has ever fourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the Elisabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors and familiar with stage effect.Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be put on.

It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their generation, made large fortunes.Shakspere himself made enough from his share in the profits of the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven years before his death, and purchase a handsome property in his native Stratford.Accordingly, shortly after 1580，a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career.These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights.Most of them were wild and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness.Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil courses；Greene, in extreme destitution, from a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring；and Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl.

The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays from 1584 to 1601. They were written for court entertainments, in prose and mostly on mythological subjects.They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them.All the characters talk Euphuism.The best of these was Alexander and Campaspe, the plot of which is briefly as follows.Alexander has fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the artist Apelles to paint her portrait.During the sittings, Apelles becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion, which is returned.Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the lovers'hands.The situation is a good one, and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist.But Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.For example：“Apel. Whom do you love best in the world?“Camp. He that made me last in the world.“Apel. That was a God.“Camp. I had thought it had been a man，”etc.

Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.

The most important of the dramatists, who were Shakspere's forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or—as he was familiarly called—Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere（1564），he died in 1593，at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost.Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his Tamburlaine, written before 1587，and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it.Tamburlaine was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase，“Marlowe's mighty line.”Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his Discoveries, the“scenical strutting and furious vociferation”of Marlowe’s hero；and Shakspere put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol.Marlowe’s Edward II.was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays.It was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has provoked with the latter’s Richard II.But the most interesting of Marlowe’s plays, to a modern reader, is the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.The subject is the same as in Goethe’s Faust, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned.The opening of Marlowe’s Faustus is very similar to Goethe’s.His hero, wearied with unproftable studies, and flled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power.The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdemain；but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious.The love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe’s drama, is entirely wanting in Marlowe’s, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe’s Mephistophiles.Marlowe’s handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as beftted an age which believed in witchcraft.The greatest part of the English Faustus is the last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn.“O lente, lente currile, noctis equi！The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.O soul, be changed into little water-drops，And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found！”

Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery.

George Peele's masterpiece, David and Bethsabe, was also, in many respects, a fne play, though its beauties were poetic rather than dramatic, consisting not in the characterization—which is feeble—but in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There is one noble chorus—“O proud revolt of a presumptuous man，”etc.

which reminds one of passages in Milton's Samson Agonistes, and occasionally Peele rises to such high Aeschylean audacities as this：“At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt，And his fair spouse, with bright and fery wings，Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.”

Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage.He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace than either Marlowe or Peele.In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and his Pinner of Wakefield, there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such passages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfeld.

In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection, hesitation, experiment.Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are certainly not equal to theirs.They wrote in a more developed state of the art.But the work of this early school settled the shape which the English drama was to take.It fxed the practice and traditions of the national theater.It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action.It decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death.It established blank verse，with occasional riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and“business”parts. And it introduced songs, a feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use.Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer purposes, refning every thing, discarding nothing.Even the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.

Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to construct a theory—and support it with some show of reason—that the plays which pass under his name were really written by Bacon or some one else. There is no danger of this paradox ever making serious headway, for the historical evidence that Shakspere wrote Shakspere's plays, though not overwhelming, is suffcient.But it is startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day, or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only two hundred and ffty years after the event.That the single authorship of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric.But Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the time of his death the first English colony in America was already nine years old.The important known facts of his life can be told almost in a sentence.He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564，married when he was eighteen, went to London probably in 1587，and became an actor, playwriter, and stockholder in the company which owned the Blackfriars and the Globe Theaters.He seemingly prospered in his calling and retired about 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that he had bought some years before, and where he died in 1616.His Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593，the Rape of Lucrece in 1594，and his Sonnets in 1609.So far as is known, only eighteen of the thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakspere were printed during his life-time.These were printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little more than stage books, or librettos.The frst collected edition of his works was the so-called“First Folio”of 1623，published by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell.No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player.There are a number of references to him in the literature of the time；some generous, as in Ben Jonson's well-known verses；others singularly unappreciative, like Webster's mention of“the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakspere.”But all these together do not beginto amount to the sum of what was said about Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson.There is, indeed, nothing to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among them in the person of“Our English Terence, Mr.Will Shakespeare！”The age, for the rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly given to review writing and literary biography.Nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shakspere's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion of the man.He lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays, as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do.His sonnets have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character and life, but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than convincing.

Shakspere probably began by touching up old plays. Henry VI.and the bloody tragedy of Titus Andronicus, if Shakspere's at all, are doubtless only his revision of pieces already on the stage.The Taming of the Shrew seems to be an old play worked over by Shakspere and some other dramatist, and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in parts of Henry VIII.，Pericles, and Timon of Athens.Such partnerships were common among the Elisabethan dramatists, the most illustrious example being the long association of Beaumont and Fletcher.The plays in the First Folio were divided into histories, comedies, and tragedies, and it will be convenient to notice them briefy in that order.

It was a stirring time when the young adventurer came to London to try his fortune. Elisabeth had finally thrown down the gage of battle to Catholic Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587.The following year saw the destruction of the colossal Armada, which Spain had sent to revenge Mary's death, and hard upon these events followed the gallant exploits of Grenville, Essex, and Raleigh.

That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of the times, and the sense of their aloofness from the continent of Europe, which was now born in the breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a passage in his plays.“This happy breed of men, this little world，This precious stone set in a silver sea，This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England，This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land，England, bound in with the triumphant sea！”

His English histories are ten in number. Of these King John and Henry VIII.are isolated plays.The others form a consecutive series, in the following order：Richard III.，the two parts of Henry IV.，Henry V.，the three parts of Henry VI.，and Richard III.This series may be divided into two, each forminga tetralogy, or group of four plays.In the frst the subject is the rise of the house of Lancaster.But the power of the Red Rose was founded in usurpation.In the second group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil wars of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the tyranny of Gloucester.The happy conclusion is fnally reached in the last play of the series, when this new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry VII.，the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne, and restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, by bloody atonement, from the stain of Richard II.'s murder.These eight plays are, as it were, the eight acts of one great drama；and if such a thing were possible, they should be represented on successive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy.In order of composition, the second group came frst.Henry VI.is strikingly inferior to the others.Richard III.is a good acting play, and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great tragedians, who have taken the part of the king.But, in a literary sense, it is unequal to Richard II.，or the two parts of Henry IV.The latter is unquestionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, and it contains his master-creation in the region of low comedy, the immortal Falstaff.

The constructive art with which Shakspere shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that subject, which were already on the stage. These, like all the other old“Chronicle histories，”such as Thomas Lord Cromwell and the Famous Victories of Henry V.，follow a merely chronological, or biographical, order, giving events loosely, as they occurred, without any unity of effect, or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe.Shakspere's order was logical.He compressed and selected, disregarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of the higher truth of fiction；bringing together a crime and its punishment, as cause and effect, even though they had no such relation in the chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.

Shakspere's frst two comedies were experiments. Love's Labour's Lost was a play of manners, with hardly any plot.It brought together a number of humors, that is, oddities and affectations of various sorts, and played them off on one another, as Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of humor.Shakspere never returned to this type of play, unless, perhaps, in the Taming of the Shrew.There the story turned on a single“humor，”Katherine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's Silent Woman turned on Morose’s hatred of noise.The Taming of the Shrew is, therefore, one of the least Shaksperian of Shakspere’s plays；a bourgeois, domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest.It belongs to the school of French comedy, like Moliere’s Malade Imaginaire, not to the romantic comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher.

The Comedy of Errors was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind. It was a play, purely of incident；a farce, in which the main improbability being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be distinguished, all the amusing complications follow naturally enough.There is little character-drawing in the play.Any two pairs of twins, in the same predicament, would be equally droll.The fun lies in the situation.This was a comedy of the Latin school, and resembled the Menaechmi of Plautus.Shakspere never returned to this type of play, though there is an element of“errors”in Midsummer Night's Dream.In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he fnally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works of his predecessors.In this play, as in the Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Winters Tale, All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and the Tempest, the plan of construction is as follows.There is one main intrigue carried out by the high comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or underplot, by the low comedy characters.The former is by no means purely comic, but admits the presentation of the noblest motives, the strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of romantic poetry.In some of the plays it has a prevailing lightness and gayety, as in As You Like It and Twelfth Night.In others, like Measure for Measure, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy by the happy close.Shylock certainly remains a tragic fgure, even to the end, and a play like Winter's Tale, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy.Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the title-pages of the time，“tragi-comedies.”The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic.It was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by way of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touchstone and Audrey, in As You Like It；sometimes closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in Much Ado about Nothing, where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the denouement of the main action.The Merry Wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction.It is Shakspere's only play of contemporary, middle-class English life, and is written almost throughout in prose.It is his only pure comedy, except the Taming of the Shrew.

Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy, though he turned it to a new account. The two species graded into one another.Thus Cymbeline is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of a comedy as Winter's Tale—to which its plot bears a resemblance—and is only technically a tragedy, becauseit contains a violent death.In some of the tragedies, as Macbeth and Julius Caesar, the comedy element is reduced to a minimum.But in others, as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, it heightens the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast.Akin to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old Vice, or Clown, of the moralities.The Fool in Lear, Touchstone in As You Like It, and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus, commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter, or half-crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man's nature.

The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless Titus Andronicus be his, was, doubtless, Romeo and Juliet, which is full of the passion and poetry of youth and of frst love. It contains a large proportion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in Shakspere of early work.He dropped rime more and more in his later plays, and his blank verse grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet.Romeo and Juliet is also unique, among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the Greek drama.It was Shakspere's habit to work out his tragic conclusions from within, through character, rather than through external chances.This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero.This is so, in a special sense, in Hamlet, the subtlest of all Shakspere's plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest minds.It is observable that in Shakspere's comedies there is no one central fgure, but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensifed and concentrated the attention upon a single character.This difference is seen, even in the naming of the plays；the tragedies always take their titles from their heroes, the comedies never.

Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies already mentioned, were the three Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he invented the plot of none of his plays, but took material that he found at hand.In these Roman tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian novelist.It is most instructive to compare Julius Caesar with Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus.Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text.In Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero's frst oration against Catiline.Sejanus is a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius.There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's play.Having grasped the conception of the characters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as Plutarchgave them, he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act, so independently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's own.Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted tragedies, and Troilus and Cressida, said Coleridge, is the hardest to characterize.The figures of the old Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakspere turns upon them.Ajax becomes a stupid bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction.In losing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the Iliad lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment.

It was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius. Even Milton could describe him as“warbling his native wood-notes wild.”But a truer criticism, beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown that he was also a profound artist.It is true that he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not every-where and at all points perfect.But a great artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, with the fner requirements of his art.Strained interpretations have been put upon this or that item in Shakspere's plays；and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case than that“the audience liked puns，”or，“the audience liked ghosts.”Compare, for example, his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlowe's procedure in Faustus.Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and apparitions；and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such machinery.The ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion.Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience.The witches in the same play are but the promptings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as to become actors in the drama.In the same way, the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream are the personifed caprices of the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes and dislikes they control, save in the instance where Bottom is“translated”（that is, becomes mad）and has sight of the invisible world.So in the Tempest, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban of the earth, ministering, with more or less of unwillingness, to man’s necessities.

Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He touches more men at more points than Homer, or Dante, or Goethe.The deepest wisdom, the sweetest poetry, the widest range of character, are combined in his plays.He made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history ofliterature.Yet he is not an English poet simply, but a world-poet.Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races, though at frst hindered in a true appreciation of him by the canons of classical taste, have at length learned to know him.An ever-growing mass of Shaksperian literature, in the way of comment and interpretation, critical, textual, historical, or illustrative, testifes to the durability and growth of his fame.Above all, his plays still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage.It is common to speak of Shakspere and the other Elisabethan dramatists as if they stood, in some sense, on a level.But in truth there is an almost measureless distance between him and all his contemporaries.The rest shared with him in the mighty infuences of the age.Their plays are touched here and there with the power and splendor of which they were all joint heirs.But, as a whole, they are obsolete.They live in books, but not in the hearts and on the tongues of men.The most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was Ben Jonson, whose robust fgure is in striking contrast with the other's gracious impersonality.Jonson was nine years younger than Shakspere.He was educated at Westminster School, served as a soldier in the low countries, became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was twice imprisoned—once for killing a fellow-actor in a duel, and once for his part in the comedy of Eastward Hoe, which gave offense to King James.He lived down to the times of Charles I.（1635），and became the acknowledged arbiter of English letters and the center of convivial wit combats at the Mermaid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns.“What things have we seenDone at the Mermaid；heard words that have beenSo nimble and so full of subtle fame，As if that every one from whom they cameHad meant to put his whole wit in a jest，And had resolved to live a fool the rest[1]Of his dull life.”

The inscription on his tomb, in Westminster Abbey, is simply

“O rare Ben Jonson！”

Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the vetus comaedia of Aristophanes, which was satirical in purpose, and they belonged to an entirely different school from Shakspere's. They were classical and not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting no admixture of tragic motives.There is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his dramatic creations.

They were comedies not of character, in the high sense of the word, but of manners or humors. His design was to lash the follies and vices of the day, and his dramatis persona consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors, fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and“Pauls men.”In his frst play, Every Man in his Humor（acted in 1598），in Every Man Out of his Humor, Bartholomew Fair, and indeed, in all of his comedies, his subject was the“spongy humors of the time，”that is, the fashionable affectations, the whims, oddities, and eccentric developments of London life.His procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic humorists, to play them off upon each other, involve them in all manner of comical misadventures, and render them utterly ridiculous and contemptible.There was thus a perishable element in his art, for manners change；and however effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been, before an audience of Jonson's day, it is as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a reader two hundred years hence to understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day, as Patience or the Colonel.Nevertheless, a patient reader, with the help of copious foot-notes, can gradually put together for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy dwells, and can admire the dramatist's solid good sense, his great learning, his skill in construction, and the astonishing fertility of his invention.His characters are not revealed from within, like Shakspere's, but built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute, laborious particulars.The difference will be plainly manifest if such a character as Slender, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, be compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Jonson's plays；with Master Stephen, for example, in Every Man in his Humor；or, if Falstaff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in the same comedy, perhaps Jonson’s masterpiece in the way of comic caricature.Cynthia’s Revels was a satire on the courtiers and the Poetaster on Jonson’s literary enemies.The Alchemist was an exposure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, but somewhat overweighted with learning.Volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh and disagreeable piece；and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy.The Silent Woman is, perhaps, the easiest of all Jonson’s plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate.There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is extremely ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon single humor or eccentricity, as in some of Moliere’s lighter comedies, like Le Malade Imaginaire, or Le Médecin malgrê lui.

In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry. His songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakspere's, but they havea grace of their own.Such pieces as his Love's Triumph, Hymn to Diana, The Noble Mind, and the adaptation from Philostratus，“Drink to me only with thine eyes，”and many others entitle their author to rank among the frst English lyrists. Some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous verse, the Forest and Underwoods；others in the numerous masques which he composed.These were a species of entertainment, very popular at the court of James I.，combining dialogue with music, intricate dances, and costly scenery.Jonson left an unfnished pastoral drama, the Sad Shepherd, which, though not equal to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, contains passages of great beauty, one, especially, descriptive of the shepherdess“Earine，Who had her very being and her nameWith the frst buds and breathings of the spring，Born with the primrose and the violetAnd earliest roses blown.”

References

1.Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature.

2.Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.

3.The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Montrose.Edited by J.Hannah.

4.Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia.（First and Second Books.）

5.Bacon's Essays.Edited by W.Aldis Wright

6.The Cambridge Shakspere.[Clark＆Wright.]

7.Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.

8.Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman.（Cunningham's or Gifford's Edition.）[1]Francis Beaumont.Letter to Ben Jonson.

CHAPTER 4　THE AGE OF MILTON

The Elisabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the accession of James I.，in 1603，but the literature of the fifty years following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought and style which had marked the writers of her reign, prolonged themselves in their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart kings and the Commonwealth.Yet there was a change in spirit.Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself.In periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times.There were seeds of civil and religious discord in Elisabethan England.As between the two parties in the Church there was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement.The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian.The form of government was Episcopal, but there was a large body of Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change.In the ritual and ceremonies many“rags of popery”had been retained, which the extreme reformers wished to tear away.But Elisabeth was a worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes.Though circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe, she kept many Catholic notions, disapproved, for example, of the marriage of priests, and hated sermons.She was jealous of her prerogative in the State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity.The authors of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets against the bishops, were punished by death or imprisonment.While the queen lived things were kept well together and England was at one in face of the common foe.Admiral Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a Catholic.

But during the reigns of James I.（1603-1625）and Charles I.（1625-1649）Puritanism grew stronger through repression.“England，”says the historian Green，“became the people of a book, and that book the Bible.”The power ofthe king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent became also political discontent, and fnally overthrew the throne. The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile camps.On the side of Church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time.But on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern conviction, the fery zeal, the excited imagination of English Puritanism.The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great fgure dominates the literary history of his generation, as Shakspere's does of the generation preceding.

The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's example, until the theaters were closed, by Parliament, in 1642. Of the Stuart dramatists, the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I.These were fifty-three in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions.Francis Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, and died a few years before him.He was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas.His collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of London, was five years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine years.He was much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays.Although the life of one of these partners was conterminous with Shakspere's, their works exhibit a later phase of the dramatic art.The Stuart dramatists followed the lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson.Their plays, like the former's, belong to the romantic drama.They present a poetic and idealized version of life, deal with the highest passions and the wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic.But while Shakspere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his successors ran into every license.They sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character, unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.

Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry.Dryden said that after the Restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's throughout the year, and he added, that they“understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done.”Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark ofa gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher.Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous—according to the fashion of their times—and sensitive on the point of honor.They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration comedy.Still the manners and language in Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays are extremely licentious, and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, The Unloveliness of Lovelocks, attacked the stage, in 1633，with Histrio-mastix：the Player’s Scourge；an offense for which he was fned, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped.Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross.He had the healthy coarseness of nature herself.But Beaumont and Fletcher’s pages are corrupt.Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought.They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind.Chastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.

Among the best of their light comedies are The Chances, The Scornful Lady, The Spanish Curate, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. But far superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, The Maia's Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King—all written jointly—and Valentinian and Thierry and Theodoret, written by Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont.The tragic masterpiece of Beaumont and Fletcher is The Maid's Tragedy, a powerful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon its authors'dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which grew up under the Stuarts.The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a mistress of the king, who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding night，“I must have oneTo father children, and to bear the nameOf husband to me, that my sin may beMore honorable.”

This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king as her paramour, Amintor exclaims：“O thou hast named a word that wipes awayAll thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name’The king'there lies a terror. What frail manDares lift his hand against it?Let the godsSpeak to him when they please；till when, let usSuffer and wait.”

And the play ends with the words“On lustful kings，Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent，But cursed is he that is their instrument.”

Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he, by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her.This is a common type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere's Ophelia.All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion, a“gentle forlornness”under wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness.In Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster—who is in love with Arethusa—puts on the dress of a page and enters his service.He employs her to carry messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in Twelfth Night, is sent by the Duke to Olivia.Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword.Afterward, convinced of the boy's fdelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies，“Alas, my lord, my life is not a thingWorthy your noble thoughts.'Tis not a life，’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”

Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly, but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural pathos—the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character—of that one brief question and answer in King Lear.“Lear. So young and so untender?“Cordelia. So young, my lord, and true.”

The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the romantic drama；and the fact, that on the Elisabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys, made the deception easier. Viola's situation in Twelfth Night is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his contemporaries.The audience in Twelfth Nightis taken into confdence and made aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while Euphrasia’s incognito is preserved till the fifth act, and then disclosed by an accident.This kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakspere.In this instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability.Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position.Such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragi-comedies.Their characters have not the depth and truth of Shakspere’s, nor are they drawn so sharply.One reads their plays with pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry, or a noble or lovely trait.But their characters, as wholes, leave a fading impression.Who, even after a single reading or representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?

The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a play as A King and No King. Here Arbaces falls in love with his sister, and, after a furious confict in his own mind, fnally succumbs to his guilty passion.He is rescued from the consequences of his weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister.But this is to cut the knot and not to untie it.It leaves the denouement to chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakspere always wrought his conclusions.Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator.In one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the play.Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher.His best play, the Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings.

Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is the best English pastoral drama. Its choral songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the infuence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his Comus.The Knight of the Burning Pestle, written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling.Beaumont and Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine endings.

In John Webster the fondness for the abnormal and sensational themes, which beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere—as in the great murder scene in Macbeth—is a pure passion；but in Webster it is mingled with something physically repulsive.Thus his Duchess of Malfi is presented in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband.She is shown a dance of madmen and，“behind a traverse, the artifcial fgures of her children, appearing as if dead.”Treated in this elaborate fashion, that“terror，”which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its dignity.Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about them.“She would not after the report keep freshAs long as fowers on graves.”“We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves，That, ruined, yield no echo.O this gloomy world！In what a shadow or deep pit of darknessDoth womanish and fearful mankind live！”

Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most Shaksperian of the Elisabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams of beauty among his dark horrors, which light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of feeling.

“Cover her face；mine eyes dazzle；she died young，”

says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and stands before the corpse. Vittoria Corombona is described in the old editions as“a night-piece，”and it should, indeed, be acted by the shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to punctuate the speeches.The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy—the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had such a fascination for the Elisabethan imagination.It was to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci；of families of proud nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious cunning；subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan；parricides, atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin.

But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elisabeth, James I.，and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666，and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I.and the Commonwealth.

In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought, which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not without its attraction for a nice literary palate.Prose became now of greater relative importance than ever before.Almost every distinguished writer of the time lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and political controversy of the time.There were famous theologians, like Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter；historians and antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton；philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist；and writers in rural science—which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under the stimulus of Bacon's writings—among whom may be mentioned Wallis, the mathematician；Boyle, the chemist, and Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood.These are outside of our subject, but in the strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject which is proper to the scientifc attitude of mind.The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been drawn.The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of antiquity.Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy，1621；and Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors，1646.The former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of barge-men, and in compiling this Anatomy, in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections.The work is a mosaic of quotations.All literature is ransacked for anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of out-of-the-way learning, in which later writers have dug.Lawrence Sterne helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr.Johnson said that the Anatomy was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.

The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to refute, were such as these：That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifing ends, was the same author's Garden of Cyrus；or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the Ancients, in which a mystical meaning is sought in the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx or lozenge.Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library, museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special visit by the Royal Society.He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian fathers.He was a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson.Two of his books belong to literature, Religio Medici, published in 1642，and Hydriotaphia；or, Urn Burial，1658，a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in Norfolk.Browne's style, though too highly Latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had something of the flow and measure of verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing.Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men.His Religio Medici is full of a wise tolerance and a singular elevation of feeling.“At the sight of a cross, or crucifix, I can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my Saviour.”“They only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith, who lived before his coming.”“They go the fairest way to heaven, that would serve God without a hell.”“All things are artifcial, for Nature is the art of God.”The last chapter of the Urn Burial is an almost rithmical descant on mortality and oblivion.The style kindles slowly into a somber eloquence.It is the most impressive and extraordinary passage in the prose literature of the time.Browne, like Hamlet, loved to“consider too curiously.”His subtlety led him to“pose his apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity—with incarnation and resurrection；”and to start odd inquiries；“what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women；”or whether, after Lazarus was raised from the dead，“his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance.”The quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn.“Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector.”“Generations pass, while some trees stand, and old families survive not three oaks.”“Mummy is become merchandise；Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.”

One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among other things, a Church History of Britain；a book of religious meditations, Good Thoughts in Bad Times, and a“character”book, The Holy and Profane State. His most important work, the Worthies of England, was published in 1662，the year after his death.This was a description of every English county；its natural commodities, manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc.，with brief biographiesof its memorable persons.Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and excellent common sense.Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expressions, and bits of eccentric suggestion.His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy.His dry vein of humor was imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.

Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II.，Bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological writer, and his Holy Living and Holy Dying are religious classics.Taylor, like Sidney, was a“warbler of poetic prose.”He has been called the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle elaboration, the“linked sweetness long drawn out”of the poet of the Faery Queene.In fullness and resonance, Taylor's diction resembles that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy.His pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's pictorial amplitude.Some of them have become commonplaces for admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise, which“frst opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills.”Perhaps the most impressive single passage of Taylor's is the concluding chapter in Holy Dying.From the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates, rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect things in its wording, in all our prose literature：“But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at frst it was as fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's feece；but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age；it bowed the head and broke its stock；and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces.”

With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider extension. Of this sort are the Letters from Italy, and other miscellanies included in the Reliquiae Wottonianae, or remains of Sir Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I.，and subsequently Provost of Eton College.Also the Table Talk—full of incisive remarks—left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the frst scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's Polyolbion, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel marbles.Literary biography was represented by the charming little Lives of good old Izaak Walton, the first edition of whose Compleat Angler was printed in 1653.The lives were fve in number, of Hooker, Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson.Several of these were personal friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle.The Compleat Angler, though not the first piece of sporting literature in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a favorite with“all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling.”As in Ascham's Toxophilus, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.Piscator and his pupil Venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle hedge or a sycamore tree during a passing shower.They repair, after the day's fshing, to some honest ale-house, with lavender in the window, and a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing catches—“old-fashioned poetry but choicely good”—composed by the author or his friends, drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub.They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never cease their praises of the angler's life, of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.

The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the Elisabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors.That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance.Thus Phineas Fletcher—a cousin of the dramatist—composed a long Spenserian allegory, the Purple Island, descriptive of the human body.George Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter wings.This group of poets was named, by Dr.Johnson, in his life of Cowley, the metaphysical school.Other critics have preferred to call them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists, or the English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain.The English conceptistas were mainly clergymen of the established Church, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick.But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, and Cowley—the latest of them—a layman.

The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne.Dean of St.Paul's, whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be forgotten for want of being understood.Besides satires and epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles.When this poet has occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses：“Such wilt thou be to me, who must，Like the other foot obliquely run；Thy frmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.”

If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a fea—“Me it sucked frst and now sucks thee，And in this fea our two bloods mingled be.”

He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp.He ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes.He was in verse what Browne was in prose.He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.

“Thou canst not every day give me thy heart：

If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it；

Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart，

It stays at home and thou with losing sav'st it.”

Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a pure fame darts up, as in the justly admired lines：

“Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought

That one might almost say her body thought.”

This description of Donne is true, with modifcations, of all the metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style.The ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them.It was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.“Their attempts，”said Johnson，“were always analytic：they broke every image into fragments.”The fnest spirit among them was“holy George Herbert，”whose Temple was published in 1631.The titles in this volume were such as the following：Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday.Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's Christian Year, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican Church—the“beauty of holiness”—found such sweet expression in poetry.The verses entitled Virtue—

“Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright，”etc.

are known to most readers, as well as the line，“Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes thatand the action fne.”

The quaintly named pieces, the Elixir, the Collar, the Pulley, are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is constantly disfgured by bad taste.Take this passage from Whitsunday，“Listen, sweet dove, unto my song，And spread thy golden wings on me，Hatching my tender heart so long，Till it get wing and fy away with thee，”

which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, written by his contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul……“grew so fast withinIt broke the outward shell of sin，And so was hatched a cherubin.”

Another of these Church poets was Henry Vaughan，“the Silurist，”or Welshman, whose fine piece, the Retreat, has been often compared with Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. Francis Quarles'Divine Emblems long remained a favorite book with religious readers, both in Old and New England.Emblem books, in which engravings of a fgurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century.The most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.

One of the most delightful of English lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose Hesperides，1648 has lately received such sympathetic illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A.Abbey.Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church, and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire.The most quoted of his religious poems is, How toKeep a True Lent.But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical；his poetry certainly was not.He was a disciple of Ben Jonson and his boon companion at……“those lyric feastsMade at the Sun，The Dog, the Triple Tun；Where we such clusters hadAs made us nobly wild, not mad.And yet each verse of thineOutdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”

Herrick's Noble Numbers seldom rises above the expression of a cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody, sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse.The conceits of the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an occasional pretty quaintness.He is the poet of English parish festivals and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil.He sang the praises of the country life, love songs to“Julia，”and hymns of thanksgiving for simple blessings.He has been called the English Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of Carpe diem, and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known poems, such as Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, and To Corinna, To Go a Maying.

Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of Essays, published after the Restoration；but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of love songs—the Mistress—is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner；but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling.He introduced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject—the Davideis—now quite unreadable.Cowley was a royalist and followed the exiled court to France.Side by side with the Church poets were the cavaliers—Carew, Waller, Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others—gallant courtiers and offcers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their strains.Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's service and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs—To Lucasta on going to the Wars—in which occur the lines，“I could not love thee, dear, so much，Loved I not honor more.”

and To Althaea from Prison, in which he sings“the sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories of his king，”and declares that“stone walls do not a prisonmake, nor iron bars a cage.”Another of the cavaliers was sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford, raised a troop of horse for Charles I.，was impeached by the Parliament and fed to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of gay trifes, but has been saved from oblivion chiefy by his exquisite Ballad upon a Wedding.Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp—graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling.Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of two songs, which are still favorites, Go, Lovely Rose, and On a Girdle, and he frst introduced the smooth correct manner of writing in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection.Gallantry rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers.In such verses as Carew's Encouragements to a Lover, and George Wither's The Manly Heart—“If she be not so to me，What care I how fair she be?”

we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the Elisabethan sonneteers, and the note of persifage that was to mark the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers reached its high-water mark in one fery-hearted song by the noble and unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in the interest of Charles II.，and was taken prisoner and put to death at Edinburgh in 1650.“My dear and only love, I prayThat little world of theeBe governed by no other swayThan purest monarchy.”

In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his mistress against synods or committees in her heart；swears to make her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword；and with that fine recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert, he adds, in words that have been often quoted，“He either fears his fate too much，Or his deserts are small，That dares not put it to the touchTo gain or lose it all.”

John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a musical composer of some merit.At his home Milton was surrounded with all the infuences of a refned and well ordered Puritan household of the better class.He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during the latter part of his life, he spent a part of every afternoon in playing the organ.No poet has written more beautifully of music than Milton.One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer, who wrote the airs to the songs in Comus.Milton's education was most careful and thorough.He spent seven years at Cambridge where, from his personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called“The lady of Christ's.”At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence.Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition“for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought.”Milton is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets.His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's；and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars.But his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fne and chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance.“My father，”he wrote，“destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters.”He was also destined for the ministry, but，“coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the Church，……I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the sacred offce of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.”Other hands than a bishop's were laid upon his head.“He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter，”he says，“ought himself to be a true poem.”And he adds that his“natural haughtiness”saved him from all impurity of living.Milton had a sublime self-respect.The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance.Born into an age of spiritual confict, he dedicated his gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the war for liberation.He was the poet of a cause, and his song was keyed to“The Dorian moodOf futes and soft recorders such as raisedTo heighth of noblest temper, heroes oldArming to battle.”

On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than dramatic；its singer must be in the fght and of it.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge, the most important was his splendid ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, L'Allegro and II Penseroso, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with two contrasted moods.Comus, which belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elisabethan court masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634，on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity and temperance.Lycidas, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elisabethan pastoral elegy.It was contributed to a volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637.In one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St.Peter, the author“foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height.”“But that two-handed engine at the doorStands ready to smite once and smite no more.”

This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In technical quality Lycidas is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems.The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed language with its fullness of meaning and allusion make it worthy of the minutest study.In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is at his best.Something of the Elisabethan style still clings to them；but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own.His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's La Sepmaine, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher’s effeminacy, or Sylvester’s quaintness is found in Milton’s pure, energetic diction.He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to a fner edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry.He was the last of the Elisabethans, and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new.In masque, elegy, and sonnet, he set the seal to the Elisabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.

In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton back from Italy.“I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty.”For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the various public questions at issue.Asa political thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls“the humor of a scholar.”In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy.At the very moment when England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his left hand only.There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer.But in general his sentences are long and involved, full of inventions and latinized constructions.Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic lines.Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his own position.These authorities he deployed at tedious length and followed them up with heavy scurrilities and“excusations，”by way of attack and defense.The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I.was like a duel between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces.The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a modern reader：A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation.The most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his Areopagitica：A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing，1644.The arguments in this are of permanent force；but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying, with Locke's Letters on Toleration, he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State.In the diplomatic correspondence which was his official duty, and in the composition of his tract, Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, he overtasked his eyes, and in 1654 became totally blind.The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public occasions.By the Elisabethans the sonnet had been used mainly in love poetry.In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth，“the thing became a trumpet.”Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane；and of these the best is, perhaps, the sonnetwritten on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants—“a collect in verse，”it has been called—which has the fre of a Hebrew prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel.Two were on his own blindness, and in these there is not one selfsh repining, but only a regret that the value of his service is impaired—

“Will God exact day labor, light denied?”

After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660，Milton was for a while in peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But“On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues，In darkness and with dangers compassed roundAnd solitude，”

he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic and affecting fgure in English literary history.Years before he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred tragedy on man's fall and redemption.These experiments fnally took shape in Paradise Lost, which was given to the world in 1667.This is the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity.It was Milton's purpose to“assert eternal ProvidenceAnd justify the ways of God to men，”

or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost, which injure its effect as a poem.His“God the father turns a school divine：”his Christ, as has been wittily said, is“God's good boy：”the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures：Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is somewhat insipid.The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature, and whose words of defance might almost have come from some Republican leader when the Good Old Cause went down.

“What though the feld be lost?

All is not lost, the unconquerable will

And study of revenge, immortal hate，

And courage never to submit or yield.”

But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualifcation, Paradise Lost remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never languid.Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a stylemore massive and splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like Tertullian's Latin, to a river of molten gold.Of the countless single beauties that sow his page

“Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks

In Valombrosa，”

there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance and multitude of thoughts which have caused the Paradise Lost to be called the book of universal knowledge.“The heat of Milton's mind，”said Dr. Johnson，“might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts.”The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton's description of the creation, for example, with corresponding passages in Sylvester's Divine Weeks and Works（translated from the Huguenot poet, Du Bartas），which was, in some sense, his original.But the most heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton.There are no strains in Paradise Lost so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the majestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to Urania, which open the third and seventh books.Every-where, too, one reads between the lines.We think of the dissolute cavaliers, as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of“the sons of Belial fown with insolence and wine，”or when the Puritan turns among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce

“court amours

Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball，

Or serenade which the starved lover sings

To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.”

And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of the Seraph Abdiel“faithful found among the faithless.”

“Nor number nor example with him wrought

To swerve from truth or change his constant mind，

Though single. From amidst them forth he passed，

Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained

Superior, nor of violence feared aught：

And with retorted scorn his back he turned

On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published in 1671. The frst of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander, in his Christ's Victory and Triumph，1610.The superiority of Paradise Lost to its sequel is not without signifcance.The Puritans were Old Testament men.Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, whose single divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints.They identifed themselves in thought with his chosen people, with the militant theocracy of the Jews.Their sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.“To your tents, O Israel，”was the cry of the London mob when the bishops were committed to the Tower.And when the fog lifted, on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed，“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered：like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive them away.”

Samson Agonistes, though Hebrew in theme and in spirit, was in form a Greek tragedy. It had chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the so-called dramatic unities；that is, the scene was unchanged, and there were no intervals of time between the acts.In accordance with the rules of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once, and there was no violent action.The death of Samson is related by a messenger.Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is obvious.He himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and alone among enemies；given over

“to the unjust tribunals, under change of times，

And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude.”

As Milton grew older he discarded more and more the graces of poetry, and relied purely upon the structure and the thought. In Paradise Lost, although there is little resemblance to Elisabethan work—such as one notices in Comus and the Christmas hymn—yet the style is rich, especially in the earlier books.But in Paradise Regained it is severe to bareness, and in Samson, even to ruggedness.Like Michelangelo, with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became impatient of fnish or of mere beauty.He blocked out his work in masses, left rough places and surfaces not flled in, and inclined to express his meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail.It was a part of his austerity, his increasing preference for structural over decorative methods, to give up rime for blank verse.His latest poem, Samson Agonistes, a metrical study of the highest interest.

Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the popular cause. Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration, was a good Republican, and wrote a fine Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland.There is also a rare imaginative quality in his Song of the Exiles in Bermuda, Thoughts in a Garden, and The Girl Describes her Fawn.George Wither, whowas imprisoned for his satires, also took the side of the Parliament, but there is little that is distinctively Puritan in his poetry.

References

1.Milton's Poetical Works.Edited by David Masson.Macmillan.

2.Selections from Milton's Prose.Edited by F.D.Myers.（Parchment Series.）

3.England's Antiphon.By George Macdonald.

4.Robert Herrick's Hesperides.

5.Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia.Edited by Willis Bund.Sampson Low＆Co.，1873.

6.Thomas.Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times.

7.Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler.

CHAPTER 5　FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE

The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination to wit and understanding. The serious, exalted mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion.There followed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle.The characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts.The age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry.The Royal Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662.There were able divines in the pulpit and at the universities—Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others：scholars, like Bentley；historians, like Clarendon and Burnet；scientists, like Boyle and Newton；philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke.But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray.

The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Molière, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and versifed essays of Boileau.Many of the Restoration writers—Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others—had been in France during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes.John Dryden（1631-1700），who is the great literary figure of his generation, has been called the first of the moderns.From the reign of Charles II.，indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life.What we call“society”was forming, the town, the London world.“Coffee, which makes the politician wise，”had just been introduced, and the ordinaries of Ben Jonson’s time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will’s and Button’s, which became the head-quarters of literary and political gossip.The two great Englishparties, as we know them to-day, were organized：the words Whig and Tory date from this reign.French etiquette and fashions came in and French phrases of convenience—such as coup de grace, bel esprit, etc.—began to appear in English prose.Literature became intensely urban and partisan.It reflected city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of authors.The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic proportions, and found ftting expression in song.Rut in the Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers.Measures were in question rather than principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and Acts of Settlement.

Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and James II.，were shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction against Puritanism went to great extremes.The social life of the time is faithfully refected in the diary of Samuel Pepys.He was a simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself, secretary to the admiralty.His diary was kept in cipher, and published only in 1825.Being written for his own eye, it is singularly outspoken；and its naïve, gossipy, confdential tone makes it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one.

Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's Hudibras（1663-64），a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans. The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifes that it was quoted and praised on all sides.Ridicule of the Puritans was nothing new.Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, is an early instance of the kind.There was nothing laughable about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane.But even the French Revolution had its humors；and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer sectaries pressed to the front—Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy Men, Ranters, etc.—its grotesque sides came uppermost.Butler's hero is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho—an Independent and Anabaptist—like Don Quixote with Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings.（Macaulay, it will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.）The humor of Hudibras is not of the fnest.The knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly removed from the rough, physical drolleries of a pantomime or a circus.The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler.But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of verbal antics.He is almost as great aphrase-master as Pope, though in a coarser kind.His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock sayings, as, for example，

“‘Tis strange what difference there can be'

Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.”

Hudibras has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire M'Fingal, some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for example，

“No man e'er felt the halter draw

With good opinion of the law.”

The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the Restoration, and the stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the Duke of York.The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant—who had fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two years—had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656，by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an“opera，”with instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy.This he brought out again in 1661，with the dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion.Movable painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the female parts formerly played by boys.This last innovation was said to be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater.

Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called“classical”rules of the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV.writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his contemporaries in England, but critical and self-conscious.The Academy had been formed in 1636，for the preservation of the purity of the French language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art.Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and one in particular on the Three Unities.Dryden followed his example in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie（1667），in which he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in preference to blank verse.His own practice varied.Most of his tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, All for Love，1678，founded on Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, he returned to blank verse.One of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct.The tragic dramatists of the Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed what they called“heroic plays，”such as the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Granada, the Duke of Lerma, the Empress of Morocco, the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival Queens.The titles of these pieces indicate their character.Their heroes were great historic personages.Subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life.The diction was stilted and artificial, and pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion.The tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphigenie, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic Love.These bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671 at the King's Theater.The indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation.Dryden's comedy, An Evening's Love, was adapted from Thomas Corneille’s Le Feint Astrologue, and his Sir Martin Mar-all, from Molière’s L’Etourdi.Shadwell borrowed his Miser from Molière, and Otway made versions of Racine’s Bérénice and Molière’s Fourberies de Scapin.Wycherley’s Country Wife and Plain Dealer, although not translations, were based, in a sense, upon Molière’s Ecole des Femmes and Le Misanthrope.The only one of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was Otway, whose Venice Preserved, written in blank verse, still keeps the boards.There are fne passages in Dryden’s heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language.There is one great scene（between Antony and Ventidius）in his All for Love.And one, at least, of his comedies, the Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed.But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he“forced his genius.”

In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van Brugh, Congreve, and others；plays like the Country Wife, the Parson's Wedding, She Would if She Could, the Beaux'Stratagem, the Relapse, and the Way of the World. These were in prose, and represented the gay world and the surface of fashionable life.Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme.Some of them were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans.Such was the Committee of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the estates of royalists.Such were also the Roundheads and the Banished Cavaliersof Mrs.Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of Charles II.，at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians.The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman.The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profigate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue.His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour.Virtue was bourgeois—reserved for London trades-people.A man must be either a rake or a hypocrite.The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were hypocrites.Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen, and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their husbands'money.For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh turned against the dishonored husband and the honest man.（Contrast this with Shakspere's Merry Wives of Windsor.）The women were represented as worse than the men—scheming, ignorant, and corrupt.The dialogue in the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty；the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief.Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal.The loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher’s theater retain a fineness of feeling and that politesse de coeur—which marks the gentleman.They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion.But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts.Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on“The Artifcial Comedy of the Last Century，”apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application.

But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepys's Diary, and in the Memoirs of the Chevalier de Grammont.This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed，“artificial”at all, in the sense in which the contemporary tragedy—the“heroic play”—was artificial.It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of much higher value.In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which did much toward reforming the practice of the dramatists.The formal characteristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy, re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's She Stoops toConquer，1772，and Sheridan's Rival, School for Scandal, and Critic，1775-9，our last strictly“classical”comedies.None of this school of English comedians approached their model, Molière.He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity—the polished wit and delicate grace of his style—but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character.It is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere’s plays were rewritten for the Restoration stage.Davenant made new versions of Macbeth and Julius Caasar, substituting rime for blank verse.In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda—a youth who had never seen a woman.Shadwell“improved”Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate furnished a new ffth act to King Lear, which turned the play into a comedy！In the prologue to his doctored version of Troilus and Cressida, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of himself as

“Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age.”

Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe upon Shakspere in his Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age；and in his Short View of Tragedy，1693，he said，“In the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than, many times, in the tragical fights of Shakspere.”“To Deptford by water，”writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20，1666，“reading Othello, Moor of Venice；which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play；but, having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, it seems a mean thing.”

In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France, took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good sense.Boileau's L'Art Poetique，1673，inspired by Horace's Ars Poetica, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in Germany and England.It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets.The Earl of Mulgrave published two“poems”of this kind, an Essay on Satire, and an Essay on Poetry.The Earl of Roscommon—who, said Addison，“makes even rules a noble poetry”—made a metrical version of Horace's Ars Poetica, and wrote an original Essay on Translated Verse.Of the same kind were Addison's epistle to Sacheverel, entitled An Account of the Greatest English Poets, and Pope’s Essay on Criticism，1711，which was nothing more than versifiedmaxims of rhetoric, put with Pope’s usual point and brilliancy.The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was a classicism in red heels and a periwig.It was Latin rather than Greek；it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.

The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had, of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer.The greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplets.But now a new strength and precision were given to the familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself.Edmund Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I.He, said Dryden，“first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it.”Sir John Denham, also, in his Cooper's Hill，1643，had written such verse as this：“O, could I fow like thee, and make thy streamMy great example as it is my theme！Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull，Strong without rage, without o'erfowing full.”

Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.“Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to joinThe varying verse, the full resounding line，The long resounding march and energy divine.”

Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to such monotonous perfection that he“made poetry a mere mechanic art.”

The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless. The dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville, and the“mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”threw off a few amatory trifles；but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song.Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly artifcial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury, signifying nothing.Cowley's Pindarics were flled with something which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out.Nevertheless, the fashion spread, and“he who could do nothing else，”said Dr.Johnson，“couldwrite like Pindar.”The best of these odes was Dryden's famous Alexander's Feast, written for a celebration of St.Cecilia's day by a musical club.To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray’s two fne odes, the Progress of Poesy and the Bard, written a half-century later.

Dryden was not so much a great poet, as a solid thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political argument and satire. His frst noteworthy poem, Annus Mirabilis，1667，was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666，namely：the Dutch war and the great fre of London.The subject of Absalom and Ahitophel—the frst part of which appeared in 1681—was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II.，by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II.The parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping.He was at his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor, Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri.The latter was Dryden's reply to the Rehearsal.Absalom and Ahitophel was followed by the Medal, a continuation of the same subject, and Mac Flecknoe, a personal onslaught on the“true blue Protestant poet，”Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden.Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.“The rest to some faint meaning make pretense，But Shadwell never deviates into sense……The midwife laid her hand on his thick skullWith this prophetic blessing—Be thou dull.”

Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written in the reign of Elisabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell, and others；but all of these failed through an over violence of language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral.They had no lightness of touch, no irony and mischief.They bore down too hard, imitated Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms beftting the corruption of Imperial Rome.They denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing but satirize.The satirist must raise a laugh.Donne and Hall abused men in classes：priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious, etc.But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm, infnitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire.Dryden was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse.His Religio Laici，1682，was a poem in defense of the English Church.But when James II.came to the throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the Hind and Panther，1687，to vindicate his new belief.Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage.He sold his pen to the court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted.Milton's“soul was like a star and dwelt apart，”but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude.He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature.He had that masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion, and grows better with age.His Fables—modernizations from Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio—written the year before he died, are among his best works.

Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.But his Essay on Dramatic Poesie, which Dr.Johnson called our“frst regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing，”was in the shape of a Platonic dialogue.When not misled by the French classicism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound sense.He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose.If the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to prose.The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of the Gallicised Restoration age—Cowley, Sir William Temple, and, above all, Dryden—who gave modern English prose that simplicity, directness, and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne.

A few books whose shaping infuences lay in the past belong by their date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678，published his Pilgrim's Progress, the greatest of religious allegories.Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, landscapes.It is the simplest, the most transparent of allegories.Unlike the Faery Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or Aladdin’s palace.

It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of ParadiseLost. They represent the poles of the Puritan party.Yet it may admit of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory.They both came out quietly and made little noise at first.But the Pilgrim's Progress got at once into circulation, and not even a single copy of the frst edition remains.Milton, too—who received 10 pounds for the copyright of Paradise Lost—seemingly found that“ft audience though few”for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in fve years（1672）.Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera.“Ay，”said Milton, good humoredly，“you may tag my verses.”And accordingly they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the State of Innocence.In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nut-shell：the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.

The literary period covered by the life of Pope，1688-1744，is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical school.Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed itself less to public issues.The literature of the“Augustan age”of Queen Anne（1702-1714）was still more a literature of the town and of fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been.It was also closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Conduct of the Allies, were rewarded with the deanery of St.Patrick's, Dublin.Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig government.Prior was in the diplomatic service.Daniel De Foe, the author of Robinson Crusoe，1719，was a prolific political writer, conducted his Review in the interest of the Whigs and was imprisoned and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held various public offces, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament.After the Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the mend.The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open profigacy as that of Charles II.But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in the Spectator.The women were mostly frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast.They are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele.“Every woman，”wrote Pope，“is at heart a rake.”The reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession.Dr.Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the book-seller took the place of the patron.His translation of Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine thousand pounds and made him independent.But the activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's Dunciad, or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation.The politics of the time were sordid and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for offce.The Whigs were fghting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts.Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty.The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness.Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to political favorites.Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers.The growing religious skepticism appeared in the Deist controversy.Numbers of men in high position were Deists；the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend, Henry St.John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance, Voltaire.Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there is little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his famous Essay on Man was furnished him by Bolingbroke.The letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfeld to his son were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld’s cynical maxims were quoted as authority on life and human nature.Said Swift：“As Rochefoucauld his maxims drewFrom nature, I believe them true.They argue no corrupted mindIn him；the fault is in mankind.”

The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed, morbidly precocious, and spiteful；nevertheless he joined on to and continued Dryden.He was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example, to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art.Dryden hadtranslated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer.The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber.There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like fies in amber, are now quite unknown.But, although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing.The sketch of Addison—who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer—as“Atticus，”is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in Dryden.Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's.He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most cleverly.

Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a“dwarf Iliad，”recounting, in fve cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor.Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated, with the same epic dignity, a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a parish church.Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the omber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the lap-dogs.This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those“Teacup times of hood and hoop，And when the patch was worn，”

with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray said of Gay's pastorals：“It is to poetry what charming little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty always accompanying them.”The Rape of the Lock, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree.In imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy.We may measure the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these little flagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it was“To tread the ooze of the salt deep，Or run upon the sharp wind of the north，……Or on the beached margent of the sea，To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind.”Very different were the offces of Pope's fays：“Our humble province is to tend the fair；Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care；To save the powder from too rude a gale，Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale……Nay oft in dreams invention we bestowTo change a founce or add a furbelow.”

Pope was not a great poet；it has been doubted whether he was a poet at all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true poet always does.In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of passion, he was altogether impotent.His Windsor Forest and his Pastorals are artificial and false, not written with“the eye upon the object.”His epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is declamatory and academic, and leaves the reader cold.The only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.But he was a great literary artist.Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable.He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like Dr.Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous verse of a dignifed kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope.He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its expression.His language was closer-grained than Dryden's.His great art was the art of putting things.He is more quoted than any other English poet, but Shakspere.He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no longer needed to“vent its observation in mangled terms，”but could pour itself out compactly, artistically, in little, ready-made molds.But his high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue.His poems read like a series of epigrams；and every line has a hit or an effect.

From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the Civil War；at first irregularly, and then regularly.But no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele started the Tatler, in 1709.In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph Addison and in its successor the Spectator, the first number of which was issued March 1，1711，Addison's contributions outnumbered Steele's.The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator on six, days of the week.The Tatler gave political news, but each number of the Spectator consisted of a single essay.The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the town.“I shall endeavor，”wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the Spectator，“to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality……It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven to inhabit

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