Brief History of English and American Literature

by Henry A. Beers · English · Gutenberg #21090 · 966,414 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Brief History of English and American Literature

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Brief History of English and American Literature

Author: Henry A. Beers

Release date: April 15, 2007 [eBook #21090]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21090

Credits: E-text prepared by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE ***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

Transcriber's note:

The volume from which this e-book was prepared contains two of
Beers' books, "An Outline Sketch of English Literature" and
"An Outline Sketch of American Literature," which start on
pages 7 and 317, respectively.

Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in
curly braces, e.g. {99}, to facilitate use of the index. They
have been located where page breaks occurred in the original
book. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the
start of that section.

BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

HENRY A. BEERS

Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on
the Religious and Theological Literature
of Great Britain and the United States

John Fletcher Hurst

New York: Eaton & Mains
Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye

{3}

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 finish 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
infinite variety, so strikingly apparent to the superficial 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 find
their common bond in literature. Even the {4} 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 flowing 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 infinitely 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 {5} 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 profitably 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 {6}
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 influence 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 influence 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 _confreres_
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_.

{7}

PREFACE.

In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to
get room enough to give, not an adequate impression--that is
impossible--but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I
have crowded out everything but _belles-lettres_. Books in philosophy,
history, science, etc., however important in the history of English
thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at
all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period,
which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman
to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a
part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I
have also left out {8} the vernacular literature of the Scotch before
the time of Burns. Up to the date of the union Scotland was a separate
kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the
English, though parallel with it.

In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some
modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his
excellent little _Primer of English Literature_. A short reading
course is appended to each chapter.

HENRY A. BEERS.

{9}

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400 . . . . . 11
II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 . . . . . . . 42
III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 . . . . . . . . . 76
IV. THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 . . . . . . . . . . 125
V. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF
POPE, 1660-1744 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH
REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH
OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT
TIME, 1832-1886 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
IX. THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN
GREAT BRITAIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

{11}

OUTLINE SKETCH

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER.

1066-1400.

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
{12} stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words,
and had filled 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,
finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to
transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym,
particularly when 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,_ {13} _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 inflections 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 {14}
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 tha _r_um-heort; _r_eced hlifade
_G_eap and _g_old-fah, gaest inne swaef.

Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered
Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.

This rude energetic verse the Saxon _scop_ had sung to his harp or
_glee-beam_, dwelling on the {15} 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 fitted 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 {16} king Cnut
was softened by the singing of the monks in Ely.

Merie sungen muneches binnen Ely
Tha 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 first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the
Danish fleet 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." {17} "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 {18} 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 _resume_ 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 genealogies upon 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 {19} 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 {20}
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 fine possibilities by which
later poets have profited, 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 {21} 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 {22} 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 pure Saxon 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--"fifteen
fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least {23} 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 afloat.
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 fixed
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 {24} 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 final 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 five joys
of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the
seven deadly sins, the fifteen 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 {25} 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 fiends, 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
That weren so bright and fair of blee[1]
Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne
Yseude and alle the,[2]
Hector with his sharpe main,
And Caesar rich in worldes fee?
They beth ygliden out of the reign[3]
As the shaft is of the dee." [4]

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_, {26} 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,
belonging to the class of _fabliaux_, short humorous tales or satirical
pieces in verse. It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where
the geese fly 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
flouren 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 nightingale sings the woodes waxen green
Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween,
And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen,
Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene."[5]

{27} Others are love plaints to "Alysoun" or some other lady whose
"name is in a note of the nightingale;" whose eyes are as gray as
glass, and her skin as "red as rose on ris." [6] 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 care
Now these leaves waxeth bare.
Oft I sigh and mourne sare
When it cometh in my thought
Of 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 {28} 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 glorified. 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 {29} 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 fight 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 finally 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 field
full of folk," representing the world with its various conditions of
men. There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with hooked staves, who
went to Walsingham--and {30} their wenches after them--great lubbers
and long that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel for their
own profit; 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 finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage
in search of St. Truth, finding 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 first extended literary work after the Conquest
which was purely English in character. It owed nothing to France but
the {31} allegorical cast which the _Roman de la Rose_ had made
fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified
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 finer 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, such as _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 figure, like the French
peasant, _Jacques Bonhomme_, and was {32} 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 Wiclifite 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 {33} 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 fifty 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 first author of our biblical
dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which
has been the main conservative influence 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 first rank, whose works are increasingly read and {34} will
always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the
general reader as well as a "well of English undefiled" 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 fill the
high-colored pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler, {35}
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 hawkes sitten on the perch above,
What houndes liggen on the floor 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 "foules song," of "May with all her floures
and her greene," 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, the inspiration 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, {36} 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 influence 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
artificial 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 fitted is one of the happiest ever
devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the shrine
of St. Thomas a 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 {37} 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 Canterbury pilgrims remain, in Chaucer's
description, living and universal types of human nature. The
_Canterbury Tales_ are twenty-four in number. There were {38}
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' {39} 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 first 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 significance 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."

{40} 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 en, es, and e,
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 _naive_ 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 {41} 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.

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.

{42}

CHAPTER II.

FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER.

1400-1599.

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 first
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 {43} 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 irreparable
Unto us done; hir vengeable duresse
Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse
Of Rhetoryk."

Another versifier 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 influence 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 {44} 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 sharpe, greene, sweete juniper."

He was listening to "the little sweete 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 first 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 creature
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature?
Or are ye very Nature, the goddess,
That have depainted with your heavenly hand
This garden full of flowres 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 gillyflowers, 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 {45} 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 refine the tongue and to
prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again
slipped {46} 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, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine 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 {47} 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 existence of 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 fly 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 fitting 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 {48} 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 first 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 influences 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 {49}
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
to supersede the old method of transcription at the very head-quarters
of the MS. makers. The first 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 {50} 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 reeds
And 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 final 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 {51} 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 press of 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 {52} tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and
of Lady Jane Grey. "In our forefathers' time, when Papistry as a
standing pool covered and overflowed 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, first 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, finally 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 {53} poems were mostly written in a verse of his own
invention, called after him _Skeltonical_. This was a sort of
glorified doggerel, in short, swift, ragged lines, with occasional
intermixture of French and Latin.

"Her beautye to augment.
Dame Nature hath her lent
A warte upon her cheke,
Who so lyst to seke
In her vysage a skar,
That semyth from afar
Lyke to the radyant star,
All with favour fret,
So properly it is set.
She is the vyolet,
The daysy delectable,
The columbine commendable,
The jelofer amyable;
For this most goodly floure,
This blossom of fressh colour,
So Jupiter me succour,
She florysheth new and new
In 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 {54} 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 chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza.

"In somer, when the shawes[1] be sheyne,[2]
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full merry in feyre forest
To here the foulys song.

"To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,[3]
And shadow them in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tree."

[55]

It is not possible to assign a definite 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;
and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder,[4] with no rougher voice
than rude style." But the style of the ballads was not always rude.
{56} 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 {57} _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 defied 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 {58} make up, and keep no malice when worsted in a square
fight. 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 baffled legal authority in the
person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that
secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the
free-born, vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally 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, finally, 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."

{59}

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 flower."

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 fine
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, {60} and many Greek
scholars, with their MSS., fled 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 very imperfect 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
{61} 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
first 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 testifies
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 {62} 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 Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the
block for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More succeeded as
chancellor, was also a munificent 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 first 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 find 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 {63} 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 {64} 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 John
Fisher, 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
confirming 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 first 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 first 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
{65} 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 first 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 artificial,
like the models which it followed. Dante's {66} 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 _nature_, _courage_,
_virtue_, _matere_, had shifted to the first syllable, and the _e_ of
the final syllables _es_, _en_, _ed_, and _e_, had largely disappeared.
But the language of poetry tends {67} to keep up archaisms of this
kind, and in Stephen Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we still
find such lines as these:

"But he my strokes might right well endure,
He was so great and huge of puissance." [5]

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 first 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 fickleness 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 figure of Sorrow, her abode {68} in the "griesly lake" of
Avernus and her attendants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville
was the author of the first 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 first 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, {69} 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 artificial 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 filling 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
{70} 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,
fled to London, where he died in January, 1599.

The _Faery Queene_ reflects, perhaps, more fully than any other English
work, the many-sided literary influences 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 first 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 {71} 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 figures 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
personified 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 make his 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, {72} 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
reflects 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 first 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 {73} is almost purely sensuous. The
personages in the _Faery Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored
figures, 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 filled 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 {74} Elizabeth
Somerset, whom the poet figures 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-floor."

"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 Butterfly_, 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.

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

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

{75}

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.

{76}

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

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 {77} 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 figure. 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 took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free"--

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

The praises of the queen, which sound through {78} 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
conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great
woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which
disfigured 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 magnificent 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 {79} 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 of these 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."

{80} But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's reign it will be
convenient to speak first 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; {81} be
valiant, but not too venturous." "I see now that, as the fish
_Scolopidus_ in the flood _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
fish _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
{82} 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 {83} 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 the real Arcadia of the Hellenic
Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of pastoral romance, an unreal
clime, like the Faery Land of Spenser.

Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The poet Drayton says
that he

"did first reduce
Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use,
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
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 flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies
which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer {84}
age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers
appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification.
If he describes a field 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 {85}
dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben Jonson's famous epitaph.

"Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Learn'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.

{86} 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 fleet, and in 1591 he published a report
of the fight, 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 fleet 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
Jose, 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 {87} 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, the enthusiasm 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 {88} 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 flattered, 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 {89} 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--chiefly 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 artificial
way. The satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against
"Martin Marprelate," an anonymous writer, or {90} 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 the _Ecclesiastical Polity_
been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty, {91} 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 first 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 first 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 first 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 find much in experience, little in books." The essays contain
the quintessence of Bacon's practical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the
world of {92} 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 Bruyere's _Caracteres_. But {93} 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 defiance 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 flowers 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 {94} 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 terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The knitters and the spinners in the sun
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like 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, {95} _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 first 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 significant 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 {96} 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 save
The 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 fire, but
not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run
beyond his text into all manner of figures 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.

{97}

"From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
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."

Keats's fine 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 first poets
had;" and there are brave {98} 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 fine 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 {99} 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 lath
In his rage and his wrath
Cries '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 {100} 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.
These early 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
{101} _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, {102} 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 fifty
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
flourished 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
{103} 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 {104} 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 {105}
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 unprofitable studies, and filled 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 befitted an age which believed in
witchcraft. The {106} 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 fine 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 fiery 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 {107} 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 Fressingfield.

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 fixed 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, {108} 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, refining 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 sufficient. 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 fifty 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 {109} 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 first 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 begin to
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 {110} 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
briefly 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. {111} 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 forming a tetralogy, or group
of four plays. In the first 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 finally reached in the last play of the series, when this
new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry {112} 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 first. _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 {113} though they had no such relation in the
chronicle, and were separated, perhaps, by many years.

Shakspere's first 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 {114} play, though
there is an element of "errors" in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In the
_Two Gentlemen of Verona_ he finally 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 figure, 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 {115} 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, because it 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 {116} Juliet_, which is full of the
passion and poetry of youth and of first 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 figure,
but that, in passing into tragedy, he intensified 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 {117} 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 first 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
Plutarch gave 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.

{118}

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 finer 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 personified caprices of
the lovers, and they are unseen by the human characters, whose likes
and dislikes they control, save in the instance where {119} 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 of literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply,
but a world-poet. Germany has made him her own, and the Latin races,
though at first 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,
testifies 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 influences 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 {120} most
remarkable of the dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was Ben
Jonson, whose robust figure 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 seen
Done at the Mermaid; heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whom they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life." [1]

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 {121} 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 first
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 {122} 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 Medecin malgre 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 have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his
{123} _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 first 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 unfinished 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 name
With the first buds and breathings of the spring,
Born with the primrose and the violet
And earliest roses blown."

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

{124}

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_.

{125}

CHAPTER IV.

THE AGE OF MILTON.

1608-1674.

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 {126} 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 of the king was used to impose the power of the
bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent
became also political discontent, and finally 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 fiery zeal, the excited
imagination of English Puritanism. The {127} spokesman of this
movement was Milton, whose great figure 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 {128} 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 of a
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 {129} Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked the stage, in
1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an offense for which
he was fined, 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, {130} because, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding
night,

"I must have one
To father children, and to bear the name
Of husband to me, that my sin may be
More 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 away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
'The king' there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer 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, {131} 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 fidelity, he asks forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia
replies,

"Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy 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
{132} 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 Night_ is taken into
confidence 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 conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs
to his guilty passion. He is rescued from {133} 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 influence 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 {134} 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 artificial figures 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 fresh
As long as flowers 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 darkness
Doth 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 {135} 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 {136} 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 scientific 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 {137} 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 trifling 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 {138} 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
artificial, 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 {139} 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 biographies of 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 {140} 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 "first 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
{141} _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 first it was as fair as the morning, and
full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath
had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and
unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to
softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head and broke
its 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
first 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 {142} edition of whose
_Compleat Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five 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 fishing, 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 {143} 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 {144} 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 firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/21090