ELIZABETHAN TIMES General Influences, and Prologue to 1579.—The history of letters in England from More's Utopia (1516), the first Platonic vision, to Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called "Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age preceding, and also from the classical or "Augustan" age that followed. The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase ; but it was still a phase of the Renaissance ; and the break that declared itself about 166o counts as nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the whole change in art, thought and temper, which re created the European mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages, not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the Falls of Princes, lived on; and so did the characteristic mediaeval form, allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of the his tories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages are not transformed, as in the Mirror for Magistrates, they strike us as survivals from a lost world.
So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of letters only came into full flower during the last 20 years of the i6th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives, or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the end fertilize these workings of genius.
What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the nar rower meaning of the term. It was culture—the prefatory work of culture and education, which at once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. "Elizabethan" literature took its com plexion from the circumstance that all these three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's Faerie Queene, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Henry V. came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces, political, religious and educational, were of very different duration and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the years 1600–io, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels ; and literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than religious. But Renaissance culture, in its rami fications and consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to 166o. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied chronicle. Before passing to narra tive, a short review of each of these elements is required.
The English Reformation, so long political rather than doc trinal or imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's Institution is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for millions of later men and marking a term of depar ture in the national prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of vernacular English were sharpened—somewhat jaggedly—in the pamphlet battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were proved for de scriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lup set, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and forth right jests in the sermons of Latimer (d. . Foxe's reports of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563) ; but the reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's Steel Glass as in Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar; and the English Reformation lived partly on its pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new Church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence—trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for ioo years.
The direct impact of the classics on "Elizabethan" literature, whether through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe. But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex. The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiams of Rome and Athens constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early play wrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Mon taigne's reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distin guished the original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit was immediate as well as constant ; and so was that of the conciser Roman masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history— the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliog raphy of 16th century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It in spired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, alle gory, song, pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts upon government and conduct formed both by. the old and the new Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time—and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and cul ture—if we forgot the sway of French in the later i 7th and i 8th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the i 6th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journey men like Boisteau and Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of Spanish mannerists, above all of Gue vara upon sententious prose, and of the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German legend is found not only in Marlowe's Faustus, but in the byways of play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science. The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in unexpected spots.
As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or the French of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence in the Faerie Queene (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville's house, lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epoch-marking Italian dialogues dur his two years' stay (1583-85) in London. The debates in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are heard in the Nosce Teipsum (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoi cism, "of the schools" as well as "of the blood," animates Cassius and also the French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca's old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare, is penetrated with the freer read ing of life and conduct suggested by Montaigne. Platonism— with its vox angelica sometimes a little hoarse—is present from the youthful Hymns of Spenser to the last followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the Christianized doc trine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.
The period down to 1580 in the departments of prose, verse and drama was a time which left few memorials of form.
Spenser's moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio and Giordano Bruno. But The Faerie Queene lives by its poetry; and its poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the "magnificent" Prince Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out of his tapestry, with its "glooming light much like a shade," pace his figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their languor; but his ground-tone is a sombre melancholy—unlike that of Jaques—and his deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his 40,000 and more lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style, amongst English poets who have written pro fusely, he has no equals but Chaucer, Milton and Shelley. His "artificial" diction, drawn from middle English, from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and ex quisite implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser's strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous slowness of tempo, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief technical invention, the nine-line stanza (ababbcbcc) was developed not from the Italian octave (abababcc), but by adding an alexandrine to the eight-line stave (ababbcbc) of Chaucer's Monk's Tale. It is naturally articulated twice—at the fifth line, where the turn of repeated rhyme in evitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming, Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is shown in. his fable, Mother Hubbard's Tale, and in his curious verse memoir, Colin Clout; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery. With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless the style of Spenser remains. His Muiopotmos is the lightest-handed of mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the law of beauty.
the witty translator of Ariosto 0590 and spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the Christ's Victory and Triumph of the younger Giles Fletcher (i6io), and Spenser's emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in The Purple Island (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton. The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in Henry More's and Joseph Beau mont's verse disquisitions on the soul. Spenser's pastoral and allusive manner was followed by Drayton in his Shepherd's Gar land (1593), and differently by William Browne in Britannia's Pastorals (1613-16), and by William Basse; while his more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in Britain's Ida (now known to be by Phineas Fletcher) and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was buoyantly echoed in Orchestra (1596), Sir John Davies' poem on the dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th century verse, blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris, and constantly between.
The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton ; who followed Spenser in pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and who yet remained himself. His Endimion and Phoebe in passages stands near Hero and Leander; his Eng land's Heroical Epistles (1597) are in ringing rhetorical couplets; his Odes (1606 ), like the Ballad of Agincourt and the Virginian Voyage, forestall and equal Cowper's or Campbell's ; his Nym phidia (1627) was the most popular of burlesque fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his Poly Olbion (1612-2 2 ), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems ; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from "fine madness" and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his favoured forms, and in his Musophilus as well as in his admirable prose Defence of Rhyme (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes and glories of that illustre vulgare, the literary speech of England. All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder Albion's England (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey's poem upon Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by the last 20 years of the queen's reign ; and the same is true of Shake speare's and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the Mirror for Magistrates, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however full of zeal, started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and remained therefore the more shapeless.
Sonnets.—The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and 1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his Hekatompathia (1582), a string of translations in one of the exceptional measures that were freely entitled "sonnets." But from the first, in the hands of Sidney, whose Astrophel and Stella (1591) was written, as remarked above, about 158 i, the sonnet was ever ready to pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost. Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge's Phillis which is often a translation from Ron sard. Literal judges have announced that Shakespeare's Sonnets are but his mode of taking exercise. Ptit there is poetry in "God's plenty" almost everywhere; and few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable's Diana (1592), of the Parthenophil and Parthenoph, of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with poetry, and of the stray minor groups, Alcilia, Licks, Caelia; while the Caelica of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full of meta physical passion struggling to be delivered. Astrophel and Stella Drayton's Idea (1594-1619), Spenser's Amoretti and Shake speare's Sonnets (printed 1609) are addressed to definite an probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage, ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are alsc intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done foi solace. In most of these series, as in Daniel's paler but exquisitely wrought Delia (1591-92), the form is that of the three separate quatrains with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax ; a scheme slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceablf gradations, from that stricter one of Italy, which Drummond anc Milton revived, and where the crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.
The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whos( Metamorphoses, familiar in Golding's old version furnished descriptions, decorations and many tales, while hi; Heroides, of which Turberville's translation went through fiv( editions between 1567 and 1600, provided a model for the self. anatomy of tragic or plaintive sentiment. Within ten years between 1588 and 1598, during the early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Drayton': Endimion and Phoebe. Shakespeare owed something to Lodge. and Drayton to Marlowe. All these poets describe a love situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection ; he says everything, and is equal to every thing that he has to say. In Venus and Adonis the poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in The Rape of Lucrece he is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indig nation, in which he has a spectator's interest. Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.
Lyric.—If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Moliere's Alceste loved and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away disappointed, and think the old poetry heartless. But it is not heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal ; it is decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and grouping (in Venus and Adonis), or the delicate beating out of rhyme in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the case in the sonnet ; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation. Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser's there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, power fully schooled and coloured lyric : in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-19) of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion's songs are not only supremely musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality. Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also ; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler play wrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation, are all there; and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the various Miscellanies, A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584) , the Phoenix Nest and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (1602) ; while other such collections, like England's Helicon (i600), were chiefly garlands of verse that was already in print.
There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply wearisome in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt, however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.
Verse from Donne to Milton.—As the age of Elizabeth receded, some changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson as in John Donne (1573-1631), one of the greater poets of England, and in many writers after Donne, may be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion against the natural man and his claims to pleasure—a revulsion from which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (The Temple, 1633), the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (The Flaming Heart) and occasional golden stanzas"; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to 1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Habington with his Castara who show the same temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter section of the famous "metaphysical" or "fantastic" school, which includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like Cartwright and Cleve land (in whom survives the vein of satire that also marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the century. In his Life of Cowley Johnson tramples on the "metaphysical" poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their historical importance.
In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper disquisitive and introspective. The poet's emotion is played with in a cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne's passion is so real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical. His satires, his Val entine, his Litany, and his lyric or odic pieces in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by deep seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of "wit" or intelligence, and "will" or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are but one idiosyncrasy of Donne's intricate soul, whose progress, so far as his often dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction, to a mystical and otherworldly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The Anatomy of the World and other ambitious pieces have the same quality amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance truth and passion ; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the omnipresence of the poetic gift. The "fantastic" school, if it contains some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was be setting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.
Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry were modified. Donne's frequent use of roughly accentual, almost tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in general came to be studied more for its own sake, and the study was rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew's amorous iambics, or of Wither's trochees, or of Crashaw's odes, or of Marvell's octosyllables, has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly "Pindaric" in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly "Pindaric" as in Cow ley's experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated, balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and Sylvester, the translator (1S9o-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used, began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller's for two generations; but Denham's over estimated Cooper's Hill (1642), Cowley's Davzdeis (1656), and even Ogilby's Aeneid made the path plainer for Dryden, the first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who shows the general drift of verse towards seques tered and religious feeling. Drummond's Poems of 1616 and Flowers of Zion (1623) are full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a Spenserian, but his .Bri tannia's Pastorals (1613-16), with their slowly-rippling and over flowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter fol lowers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical marrative, and the devotional poets. But his Shepherd's Hunting and other pieces in his volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.
Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his 2,000 lyrics and epigrams, gathered in Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not excelled within his range of topic, which includes flowers and maidens—whom he treats as creatures of the same race—and the swift decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for his own paganism. The Hes perides are pure Renaissance work, in natural sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon. Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics outlives his "epic and Pindaric art." There are many writers who last by virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept play fulness, Lovelace and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless poet by many a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of or unattempted in England, was the "long poem," heroical and noble, the "phantom epic," that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant's Gondibert (1651), Cowley's Davideis and Chamberlayne's Pharonnida (1659) attest the effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness, faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in each of them, and in Pharonnida there is far more than enough poetry to save it.
Milton also had a mediaeval side to his brain, as the History of Britain shows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the Christian heaven and hell in serted. The time, indicated by retrospect and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to the popular mystery play ; and Milton at 'first planned out Paradise Lost as such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied. But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the epic. The subject, therefore, was partly mediaeval, partly Protestant—for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment, with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their journeys between Olympus, earth and hell, invocations, set similes, battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the Renais sance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of equal gift ; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and absolute expression of something that in the English stock is inveterate—the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton's doctrine and his sym pathies in Paradise Lost (r 667) has never escaped notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out in Paradise Regained (1671), when he has at once to reprobate and glorify Athens, the "mother of arts." In this afterthought to the earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury. In Samson Agonistes (r 67r) the ethical treatment as well as the machinery is Sophoclean, and the theol ogy not wholly Christian. But the fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton's own; and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.
The essential solitude of Milton's energies is best seen in his later style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most recent memories of the drama were also the worst ; the forms of Cowley and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser's manner was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater dramatists (including John Ford) ; and their tragic diction and measure are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of the Paradise Lost and its divided sym pathies are cemented, at least superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton's youth and prime—possibly kept fresher by his blindness—are felt through the sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton's artistry, as of his self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the known powers and liberties of the metre ; and yet, as has often been shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metrical ictus is at times hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and representative character ensure attention, so long as the op positions of soul and temper in the England of Milton's time remain, as they still are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit ; but he does not do this, for nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton ; all his culture only gives im mortal form to its expression. The critics have instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is quenched in English civilization.
Tamburlaine, in two parts (part r, c. 1587), The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II. (the first chronicle play of genius), and the incomplete poem Hero and Leander are Christopher Marlowe's title-deeds (1564-93) . He established tragedy, and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not obscure his power, in his greater pas sages (describing the descent of Helen, the passing of Mortimer and the union of Hero and Leander), to attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal beauty, for end less empire and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has better ex pressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures, gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him : their type recurs through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden's orotund heroes; but in Faustus and in Edward II. they become real, almost human beings. His constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised the planning-out of Faustus. The glory and influ ence of Marlowe on the side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines,which are varied not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names to the point of splendid ex travagance ; and their sound is heard in Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in Marlowe's own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe's Jew, launched his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe's oratory and modu lated, in Richard II., his master's type of chronicle tragedy.
Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-99), and the comedies of wit and romance (1599-160o), in which Shake speare perfected his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most popular as he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons, dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of Henry IV., and its interlude or offshoot, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant, diversified with mighty orations and cheer ful humours, and filled wit) the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, "dying in his excellence and flower," is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the "middle comedies," As You Like It, Much Ado and Twelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it ; for their wit now gives the note ; and Shakespeare's prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it.
Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare's trage dies. The energy which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they were not out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief tragedies of Jonson, Chap man, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and The White Devil, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Maid's Tragedy, and A Woman Killed with Kindness. But, in spite of Shakespeare's affinities with these authors at many points, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not together), and the two quasi-antique plays Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all Shakespeare stands apart ; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North's Plutarch; others did this also; but the intel lectual movement of the time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest scope ; and Florio's translation (1603) of Montaigne's Essays, coming out between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, counted probably for more than any other book. The Sonnets (published 1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations of the stranger dramas like Troilus and Measure for Measure. But whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of a great poet's suffering and friendship.
Shakespeare's last period, that of his tragicomedies, begins about i 6o8 with his contributions to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. For unknown reasons he was moved, about the time of his retire ment home, to record, as though in justice to the world, the happy turns by which tragic disaster is at times averted. Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest all move, after a series of crimes, calumnies or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty, where the lost reappear and love is recov ered ; as though after all the faint and desperate last partings—of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and Horatio—which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the experi enced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere of the roman d'aventure, which had already been adapted by Beau mont and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his handiwork. In The Tempest this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy music. Even if it be true that in Prospero's words the poet bids farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the composition of Henry VIII.; and not improbably also in The Two Noble Kinsmen. His share in two early pieces, Arden of Feversham (1592) and Edward III., has been urged but never established, and of many other dramas he was once idly accused.
Shakespeare's throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action ; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare's conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of man kind, but. except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich, harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through discord. He is also many persons in one; in his Sonnets he is even, it may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality not of his own fancying—with something in it of C i'liban, of Dogberry and of Cleopatra—that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chap man whose works chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare's mastery of this art is approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him eternally actable—the skill of raising, straining and relieving the suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will tolerate—he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his fanfare over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified England, as in Cyxtbeline, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the chief of play wrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly. Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.
Jonson.—Shakespeare's method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in poetical intuition, was the great est of dramatic influences down to the shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples even after i 66o. He had "the devouring eye and the portraying hand"; he could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burden some memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine, drawn from the Poetics and Horace, which moulded his creative practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too seldom free and genial; it is thQ of the satirist who thinks that his office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does this by begin ning with the "humour," or abstract idiosyncrasy or quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so that it may pass for a man ; and indeed the result is as real as many a man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy Every Man in his Humour (acted 1S98), it is very like life. In Jonson's monu mental pieces, Volpone or the Fox (acted 1605) and The Alchemist (acted 161o), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given for an instant by The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614), or The Staple of News, still less by topical plays like Cynthia's Revels, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged with contempt. The erudite tragedies, Sejanus (acted 1603) and Catiline, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson's finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary Sad Shepherd, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose is of the best, especially in his Discoveries, a series of ethical essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and various, those of Dryden. The "sons" of Jonson, Randolph and Browne, Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of "humours," his learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his architectural power or his relieving graces.
The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity of his romantic love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies on Bussy d'Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman's life. Their virtues are only partially Homer's, but the general epic nobility and the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer's limpidity and continuity and the translator's imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric ruggedness unites Jonson and Chap man with Marston and Hall, the professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same strain spoils Marston's plays, and obscures his genuine command of the language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.
It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be broadly grouped as follows. (a) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatises and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in Old Fortunatus and The Honest Whore, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in his English Traveller and Woman killed with Kindness, excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest care lessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (b) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—"the moral sense of our ancestors" ; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those in The Changeling and Women beware Women. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (whose "pity," when it came, was "nothing akin to him"). In Webster's other principal play, Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil, the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare's ever-arch ing rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, in The Re venger's Tragedy, is even more of a poet than Webster ; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province. (c) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beau mont is nearest the prime, with his vein of Cervantesque mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy. Fletcher brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like Bonduca, can not cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic ; but it over flows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its hendecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. ''Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare's heroines. These faults are present also in Philip Massinger, who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beau mont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an of ten splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits. A New Way to Pay Old Debts is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare's, and one of the best. Massinger's interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as in The Bondman and The Roman Actor, is often a triumph of arrangement ; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline. (d) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or at tached to a mere name, baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such as Arden of Feversham; scions of the vindictive drama, like The Second Maiden's Tragedy; historic or half historic tragedies like Nero. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford's Perkin Warbeck, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin to The Merry Wives, like Porter's refreshing Two Angry Women of Abingdon; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue pieces like Field's and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (e) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, like The Return from Parnassus and Lingua, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or enter tainments in the Italian style, like The Faithful Shepherdess; versified character-sketches, of which Day's Parliament of Bees, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in his Comus, the trans figurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel's and Fulke Greville's; and Latin comedies, like Ignoramus. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the 600 or 70o dramas of the time remain unreprinted.
There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in 1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated power (reflected in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest of Annabella in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, or the high crazed heroism of Calantha in The Broken Heart, is beyond the pale, if only he can dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.
The Novel.—The Elizabethan novel always unhappily mannered, and is mostly dead. It fed the drama, which de voured it. The tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of Navarre, and various other writers were purveyed in the for gotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf in the playwrights' libraries. The first of famous English novels, Lyly's Euphues (1578), and its sequel Euphues and his England, are documents of form. They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model for some years to many fol lowers like Lodge and Greene. It did not merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence, complex or co ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constit uent clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping. Sidney's unfinished Arcadia (of which the earlier and relatively plainer version has recently been made accessible), de spite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms, with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned senti ment and situation, through which the writer's eager and fretted spirit shines. Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone that they were meant In chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe's drastic and photographic tale of masculine life, Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin declamation, of Nashe himself—by far the most powerful of the group—and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. There are also Deloney's vivid pictures of bourgeois life. Thus the English novel was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.
The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great achievements from Berners' Froissart (1523-25) to Urqu hart's Rabelais (1 653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often obscure, their number witnesses to that far-spread dif fusion of the talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch's Morals and Camden's Britannia, and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his translation, made from Amyot's classic French, of Plutarch's Lives disclosed one of the master-works of old example ; Florio, in Montaigne's Essays (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental exploration ; and Shelton, in Don Quixote (1612), the chief tragicomic creation of Continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (I591), Apuleius, Heliodorus, Commines, Celestina and many others, is so good and often so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose trans lators, unless it be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other into the virulent rag sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of historical and social but not of artistic note, being only a fragment of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque, excitable or dull.
Rise of Science.—The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science and speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not encouraged. The activities of the newly founded Royal Society told directly upon literature, and counted powerfully in the organization of a clear, uniform prose—the "close, naked, natural way of speaking," which the historian of the Society, Sprat, cites as part of its programme. And the style of Sprat, as of scientific masters like Newton and Ray the bot anist, itself attests the change. A time of profound and peaceful and fruitful scientific labour began; the whole of Newton's Principia appeared in 1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit of method and observation and induction spread over the whole field of thought and was typified in John Locke, whose Essay concerning Human Understanding came out in English in r 690, and who applied the same deeply sagacious and cautious calculus to education and religion and the "conduct of the understanding." But his works, though their often mellow and dignified style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and pugnacity are gene; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science, on the literature of reflection is gone ; the eccentrics, the fantasts, the dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious transitional writers like Joseph Glanvil (Scepsis scientifica, 1665) or Thomas Burnet (Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684). This change was in part a conscious and an angry change, as is clear from the attacks made in Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663-68) upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical sects and their disputes, upon poetic "heroic" enthusiasm and intellectual whim.
Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital, which, despite Milton's dream in Areopagitica of its humming and surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court served to rally them. Charles II. relished Hudibras, used and pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own trag edies and criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular argumentation and elegy. The social and con versational instinct was the master-influence in prose. It pro duced a subtle but fundamental change in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech, it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed unknown in the earlier part of the century, became strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was created.
Prose and Criticism.—The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for the good reason that it pre supposes a change of spoken style lying deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is nearest living talk—the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the diary of Pepys (1659-69)—that supreme disclosure of our mother-earth —or the evidence in a State trial, or the dialogue in the more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L'Estrange's pamphlets, or Burnet's History of My Own Time, a solid Whig memoir of historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like Dryden's Preface to his Fables (I 700), or the maxims of Halifax;—if we do this,we are aware,amid all varieties, survivals and reversions, of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating of the working, daily lan guage, and even of the language of appeal and eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the mid-16th and the mid-i8th century, the process is visible by which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and secured it for good and all. In Dryden's diction there is a nearly perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a sensitive tact in Galli cizing; in his build of sentence there is the same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he finds out its harmonies ; he is a seeming-careless but an ab solute master of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled ; and we only regret that he could not have written prose oftener in stead of plays. We should thus, however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of Dryden's criticisms appear. From the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (i 668) down to the Preface to Fables (i 700) runs a series of essays : On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, On Heroic Plays, On Translated Verse, On Satire and many more; which form the first connected body of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden's prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.
Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden's in the work of reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax. Sprat, though clear and easy, has little range ; Tillotson, though lucid, orderly, and a very popular preacher, has little distinction ; Temple, the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims of Halifax are the most typically modern prose between Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness and manner liness and sharpness. The Character of a Trimmer and Advice to a Daughter are the best examples.
Religious Literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief re maining department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of Isaac Barrow, the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the larger and older manner of the church. In its balance of logic, learning and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force, it deserves a recog nition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit, Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the re vulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far; it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and dis harmony, which had to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison saved our daily written Eng lish, may be seen in the vigorous slangy hackwork of Roger L'Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.
Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first two of them were also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely fertile writer, is best remembered by those of his own f old for his Saint's Everlasting Rest (I 65o) and his autobiography, John Howe for his evangelical apologia The Living Temple of God (1675), Fox for his Journal and its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His creed and point of view were those of half the nation—the half that was usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius. His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his class. The Pilgrim's Progress, of which the first part appeared in 1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth of barren plants of the same tribe. The Progress is a dream, more vivid to its author than most men's waking memories to themselves; the emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that Christian's journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual vision of this earth and our neighbours. Grace Abounding, Bunyan's diary of his own voyage to salvation, The Holy War, an overloaded fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, and The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan's other contributions to literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and power of simple speech consum mately chosen, mark his work off alike from his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of his time. Transitional Verse.—The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems of John Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Both of them begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend Morwent is poorly exchanged for the Satires on the Jesuits (1681), and the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and the spiritual love sadly give place to his Last Instructions to a Painter (1669). In his Horatian Ode Marvell had nobly and impartially applied his earlier style to national affairs ; but the time proved too strong for this de lightful poet. Another and a stranger satire had soon greeted the Restoration, the Hudibras (1663-78) of Samuel Butler, with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming couplets thenceforth called "Hudibrastics," Butler founded a small and peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II. The songs of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, are usually malicious, some times passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandon ment such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a century afterwards.
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden's many comedies often show his more boister ous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities. Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and vulgarizes Moliere without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and inso lence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and Congreve, at first seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good spirits and with careful cynicism. The Plain Dealer (1677), a skilful transplantation, as well as a de pravation of Moliere's Le Misanthrope, is his best piece : he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent, modern and lifelike.