Chapter VI

.) _Phillis_ is especially remarkable for the grace and refinement with which the author elaborates the Sidneian model. Lodge, indeed, as it seems to me, was one of the not uncommon persons who can always do best with a model before them. He euphuised with better taste than Lyly, but in imitation of him; his tales in prose are more graceful than those of Greene, whom he copied; it at least seems likely that he out-Marlowed Marlowe in the rant of the _Looking-Glass for London_, and the stiffness of the _Wounds of Civil War_, and he chiefly polished Sidney in his sonnets and madrigals. It is not to be denied, however, that in three out of these four departments he gave us charming work. His mixed allegiance to Marlowe and Sidney gave him command of a splendid form of decasyllable, which appears often in _Phillis_, as for instance--

"About thy neck do all the graces throng And lay such baits as might entangle death,"

where it is worth noting that the whole beauty arises from the dexterous placing of the dissyllable "graces," and the trisyllable "entangle," exactly where they ought to be among the monosyllables of the rest. The madrigals "Love guards the roses of thy lips," "My Phillis hath the morning sun," and "Love in my bosom like a bee" are simply unsurpassed for sugared sweetness in English. Perhaps this is the best of them:--

"Love in my bosom like a bee, Doth suck his sweet; Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet. Within mine eyes he makes his nest His bed amidst my tender breast, My kisses are his daily feast; And yet he robs me of my rest? 'Ah, wanton! will ye?'

"And if I sleep, then percheth he, With pretty flight,[26] And makes his pillow of my knee The livelong night. Strike I my lute, he tunes the string. He music plays, if so I sing. He lends me every lovely thing Yet cruel! he, my heart doth sting. 'Whist, wanton! still ye!'

"Else I with roses, every day Will whip you hence, And bind you, when you want to play, For your offence. I'll shut my eyes to keep you in, I'll make you fast it for your sin, I'll count your power not worth a pin. Alas, what hereby shall I win If he gainsay me?

"What if I beat the wanton boy With many a rod? He will repay me with annoy Because a god. Then sit thou safely on my knee, And let thy bower my bosom be. Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee. O Cupid! so thou pity me, Spare not, but play thee."

[26] Printed in _England's Helicon_ "sleight."

1594 was the most important of all the sonnet years, and here we are chiefly bound to mention authors who will come in for fuller notice later. The singular book known as Willoughby's _Avisa_ which, as having a supposed bearing on Shakespere and as containing much of that personal puzzlement which rejoices critics, has had much attention of late years, is not strictly a collection of sonnets; its poems being longer and of differing stanzas. But in general character it falls in with the sonnet-collections addressed or devoted to a real or fanciful personage. It is rather satirical than panegyrical in character, and its poetical worth is very far from high. William Percy, a friend of Barnes (who dedicated the _Parthenophil_ to him), son of the eighth Earl of Northumberland, and a retired person who seems to have passed the greater part of a long life in Oxford "drinking nothing but ale," produced a very short collection entitled _Coelia_, not very noteworthy, though it contains (probably in imitation of Barnes) one of the tricky things called echo-sonnets, which, with dialogue-sonnets and the like, have sometimes amused the leisure of poets. Much more remarkable is the singular anonymous collection called _Zepheria_. Its contents are called not sonnets but canzons, though most of them are orthodox quatorzains somewhat oddly rhymed and rhythmed. It is brief, extending only to forty pieces, and, like much of the poetry of the period, begins and ends with Italian mottoes or dedication-phrases. But what is interesting about it is the evidence it gives of deep familiarity not only with Italian but with French models. This appears both in such words as "jouissance," "thesaurise," "esperance," "souvenance," "vatical" (a thoroughly Ronsardising word), with others too many to mention, and in other characteristics. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his most valuable collection of these sonneteers, endeavours to show that this French influence was less uncommon than has sometimes been thought. Putting this aside, the characteristic of _Zepheria_ is unchastened vigour, full of promise, but decidedly in need of further schooling and discipline, as the following will show:--

"O then Desire, father of Jouissance, The Life of Love, the Death of dastard Fear, The kindest nurse to true persèverance, Mine heart inherited, with thy love's revere. [?] Beauty! peculiar parent of Conceit, Prosperous midwife to a travelling muse, The sweet of life, Nepenthe's eyes receipt, Thee into me distilled, O sweet, infuse! Love then (the spirit of a generous sprite, An infant ever drawing Nature's breast, The Sum of Life, that Chaos did unnight!) Dismissed mine heart from me, with thee to rest. And now incites me cry, 'Double or quit! Give back my heart, or take his body to it!'"

This cannot be said of the three remarkable collections yet to be noticed which appeared in this year, to wit, Constable's _Diana_, Daniel's _Delia_, and Drayton's _Idea_. These three head the group and contain the best work, after Shakespere and Spenser and Sidney, in the English sonnet of the time. Constable's sonnets had appeared partly in 1592, and as they stand in fullest collection were published in or before 1594. Afterwards he wrote, like others, "divine" sonnets (he was a Roman Catholic) and some miscellaneous poems, including a very pretty "Song of Venus and Adonis." He was a close friend of Sidney, many of whose sonnets were published with his, and his work has much of the Sidneian colour, but with fewer flights of happily expressed fancy. The best of it is probably the following sonnet, which is not only full of gracefully expressed images, but keeps up its flight from first to last--a thing not universal in these Elizabethan sonnets:--

"My Lady's presence makes the Roses red, Because to see her lips they blush for shame. The Lily's leaves, for envy, pale became; And her white hands in them this envy bred. The Marigold the leaves abroad doth spread; Because the sun's and her power is the same. The Violet of purple colour came, Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed. In brief all flowers from her their virtue take; From her sweet breath, their sweet smells do proceed; The living heat which her eyebeams doth make Warmeth the ground, and quickeneth the seed. The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers, Falls from mine eyes, which she dissolves in showers."

Samuel Daniel had an eminently contemplative genius which might have anticipated the sonnet as it is in Wordsworth, but which the fashion of the day confined to the not wholly suitable subject of Love. In the splendid "Care-charmer Sleep," one of the tournament sonnets above noted, he contrived, as will be seen, to put his subject under the influence of his prevailing faculty.

"Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my anguish, and restore the light, With dark forgetting of my cares, return; And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth; Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth. Cease, Dreams, th' imag'ry of our day-desires, To model forth the passions of the morrow, Never let rising sun approve you liars, To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow. Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain; And never wake to feel the day's disdain."

But as a rule he is perhaps too much given to musing, and too little to rapture. In form he is important, as he undoubtedly did much to establish the arrangement of three alternate rhymed quatrains and a couplet which, in Shakespere's hands, was to give the noblest poetry of the sonnet and of the world. He has also an abundance of the most exquisite single lines, such as

"O clear-eyed rector of the holy hill,"

and the wonderful opening of Sonnet XXVII., "The star of my mishap imposed this pain."

The sixty-three sonnets, varied in different editions of Drayton's _Idea_, are among the most puzzling of the whole group. Their average value is not of the very highest. Yet there are here and there the strangest suggestions of Drayton's countryman, Shakespere, and there is one sonnet, No. 61, beginning, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part," which I have found it most difficult to believe to be Drayton's, and which is Shakespere all over. That Drayton was the author of _Idea_ as a whole is certain, not merely from the local allusions, but from the resemblance to the more successful exercises of his clear, masculine, vigorous, fertile, but occasionally rather unpoetical style. The sonnet just referred to is itself one of the very finest existing--perhaps one of the ten or twelve best sonnets in the world, and it may be worth while to give it with another in contrast:--

"Our flood's Queen, Thames, for ships and swans is crowned; And stately Severn for her shore is praised. The crystal Trent for fords and fish renowned; And Avon's fame to Albion's cliffs is raised; Carlegion Chester vaunts her holy Dee; York many wonders of her Ouse can tell. The Peak her Dove, whose banks so fertile be; And Kent will say her Medway doth excel. Cotswold commends her Isis to the Tame; Our northern borders boast of Tweed's fair flood Our western parts extol their Wily's fame; And the old Lea brags of the Danish blood. Arden's sweet Ankor, let thy glory be That fair Idea only lives by thee!"

* * * * *

"Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part! Nay, I have done. You get no more of me And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath, When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies; When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes: Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might'st him yet recover!"

1595 chiefly contributed the curious production called _Alcilia_, by J. C., who gives the name of sonnets to a series of six-line stanzas, varied occasionally by other forms, such as that of the following pretty verses. It may be noted that the citation of proverbs is very characteristic of _Alcilia_:--

"Love is sorrow mixed with gladness, Fear with hope, and hope with madness. Long did I love, but all in vain; I loving, was not loved again: For which my heart sustained much woe. It fits not maids to use men so, Just deserts are not regarded, Never love so ill rewarded. But 'all is lost that is not sought,' 'Oft wit proves best that's dearest bought.'

"Women were made for men's relief; To comfort, not to cause their grief. Where most I merit, least I find: No marvel, since that love is blind. Had she been kind as she was fair, My case had been more strange and rare. But women love not by desert, Reason in them hath weakest part. Then henceforth let them love that list, I will beware of 'had I wist.'"

1596 (putting the _Amoretti_, which is sometimes assigned to this year, aside) was again fruitful with Griffin's _Fidessa_, Lynch's _Diella_, and Smith's _Chloris_. _Fidessa_, though distinctly "young," is one of the most interesting of the clearly imitative class of these sonnets, and contains some very graceful poetry, especially the following, one of the Sleep class, which will serve as a good example of the minor sonneteers:--

"Care-charmer Sleep! sweet ease in restless misery! The captive's liberty, and his freedom's song! Balm of the bruisèd heart! man's chief felicity! Brother of quiet Death, when Life is too too long! A Comedy it is, and now an History; What is not sleep unto the feeble mind? It easeth him that toils, and him that's sorry; It makes the deaf to hear; to see, the blind; Ungentle Sleep! thou helpest all but me, For when I sleep my soul is vexèd most. It is Fidessa that doth master thee If she approach; alas! thy power is lost. But here she is! See, how he runs amain! I fear, at night, he will not come again."

_Diella_, a set of thirty-eight sonnets prefixed to the "Amorous poem of Diego and Genevra," is more elaborate in colouring but somewhat less fresh and genuine; while _Chloris_, whose author was a friend of Spenser's, approaches to the pastoral in the plan and phrasing of its fifty sonnets.

Such are the most remarkable members of a group of English poetry, which yields to few such groups in interest. It is connected by a strong similarity of feeling--if any one likes, even by a strong imitation of the same models. But in following those models and expressing those feelings, its members, even the humblest of them, have shown remarkable poetical capacity; while of the chiefs we can only say, as has been said more than once already, that the matter and form together acknowledge, and indeed admit of, no superior.

In close connection with these groups of sonnets, displaying very much the same poetical characteristics and in some cases written by the same authors, there occurs a great body of miscellaneous poetical writing produced during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and ranging from long poems of the allegorical or amatory kind to the briefest lyrics and madrigals. Sometimes this work appeared independently; sometimes it was inserted in the plays and prose pamphlets of the time. As has already been said, some of our authors, notably Lodge and Greene, did in this way work which far exceeds in merit any of their more ambitious pieces, and which in a certain unborrowed and incommunicable poetic grace hardly leaves anything of the time behind it. Shakespere himself, in _Venus and Adonis_ and _Lucrece_, has in a more elaborate but closely allied kind of poetry displayed less mature, but scarcely less, genius than in his dramatic and sonnet work. It is my own opinion that the actual poetical worth of Richard Barnfield, to whom an exquisite poem in _The Passionate Pilgrim_, long ascribed to Shakespere, is now more justly assigned, has, owing to this assignment and to the singular character of his chief other poem, _The Affectionate Shepherd_, been considerably overrated. It is unfortunately as complete if not as common a mistake to suppose that any one who disdains his country's morality must be a good poet, as to set down any one who disdains it without further examination for a bad one. The simple fact, as it strikes a critic, is that "As it fell upon a day" is miles above anything else of Barnfield's, and is not like anything else of his, while it is very like things of Shakespere's. The best thing to be said for Barnfield is that he was an avowed and enthusiastic imitator and follower of Spenser. His poetical work (we might have included the short series of sonnets to _Cynthia_ in the division of sonneteers) was all written when he was a very young man, and he died when he was not a very old one, a bachelor country-gentleman in Warwickshire. Putting the exquisite "As it fell upon a day" out of question (which, if he wrote it, is one of the not very numerous examples of perfect poetry written by a very imperfect poet), Barnfield has, in no extraordinary measure, the common attributes of this wonderful time--poetical enthusiasm, fresh and unhackneyed expression, metrical charm, and gorgeous colouring, which does not find itself ill-matched with accurate drawing of nature. He is above the average Elizabethan, and his very bad taste in _The Affectionate Shepherd_ (a following of Virgil's Second Eclogue) may be excused as a humanist crotchet of the time. His rarity, his eccentricity, and the curious mixing up of his work with Shakespere's have done him something more than yeoman's service with recent critics. But he may have a specimen:--

"And thus it happened: Death and Cupid met Upon a time at swilling Bacchus' house, Where dainty cates upon the board were set, And goblets full of wine to drink carouse: Where Love and Death did love the liquor so That out they fall, and to the fray they go.

"And having both their quivers at their back Filled full of arrows--the one of fatal steel, The other all of gold; Death's shaft was black, But Love's was yellow--Fortune turned her wheel, And from Death's quiver fell a fatal shaft That under Cupid by the wind was waft.

"And at the same time by ill hap there fell Another arrow out of Cupid's quiver; The which was carried by the wind at will, And under Death the amorous shaft did shiver.[27] They being parted, Love took up Death's dart, And Death took up Love's arrow for his part."

[27] Not, of course = "break," but "shudder."

There is perhaps more genuine poetic worth, though there is less accomplishment of form, in the unfortunate Father Robert Southwell, who was executed as a traitor on the 20th of February 1595. Southwell belonged to a distinguished family, and was born (probably) at Horsham St. Faiths, in Norfolk, about the year 1560. He was stolen by a gipsy in his youth, but was recovered; and a much worse misfortune befell him in being sent for education not to Oxford or Cambridge but to Douay, where he got into the hands of the Jesuits, and joined their order. He was sent on a mission to England; and (no doubt conscientiously) violating the law there, was after some years of hiding and suspicion betrayed, arrested, treated with great harshness in prison, and at last, as has been said, executed. No specific acts of treason were even charged against him; and he earnestly denied any designs whatever against the Queen and kingdom, nor can it be doubted that he merely paid the penalty of others' misdeeds. His work both in prose and poetry was not inconsiderable, and the poetry was repeatedly printed in rather confusing and imperfect editions after his death. The longest, but by no means the best, piece is _St. Peter's Complaint_. The best unquestionably is _The Burning Babe_, which, though fairly well known, must be given:--

"As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow, Surpris'd I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow; And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, A pretty Babe all burning bright, did in the air appear, Who scorchèd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed, As though His floods should quench His flames which with His tears were fed; 'Alas!' quoth He, 'but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel My fire but I! My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals; The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defilèd souls, For which, as now on fire I am, to work them to their good So will I melt into a bath to wash them in My blood:' With these He vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away, And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas Day."

Something of the glow of this appears elsewhere in the poems, which are, without exception, religious. They have not a little of the "hectic" tone, which marks still more strongly the chief English Roman Catholic poet of the next century, Crashaw; but are never, as Crashaw sometimes is, hysterical. On the whole, as was remarked in a former chapter, they belong rather to the pre-Spenserian class in diction and metre, though with something of the Italian touch. Occasional roughnesses in them may be at least partly attributed to the evident fact that the author thought of nothing less than of merely "cultivating the muses." His religious fervour is of the simplest and most genuine kind, and his poems are a natural and unforced expression of it.

It is difficult in the brief space which can here be allotted to the subject to pass in review the throng of miscellaneous poets and poetry indicated under this group. The reprints of Dr. Grosart and Mr. Arber, supplemented in a few cases by recourse to the older recoveries of Brydges, Haslewood, Park, Collier, and others, bring before the student a mass of brilliant and beautiful matter, often mixed with a good deal of slag and scoriæ, but seldom deficient in the true poetical ore. The mere collections of madrigals and songs, actually intended for casual performance at a time when almost every accomplished and well-bred gentleman or lady was expected to oblige the company, which Mr. Arber's invaluable _English Garner_ and Mr. Bullen's _Elizabethan Lyrics_ give from the collections edited or produced by Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others, represent such a body of verse as probably could not be got together, with the same origin and circumstances, in any quarter-century of any nation's history since the foundation of the world. In Campion especially the lyrical quality is extraordinary. He was long almost inaccessible, but Mr. Bullen's edition of 1889 has made knowledge of him easy. His birth-year is unknown, but he died in 1620. He was a Cambridge man, a member of the Inns of Court, and a physician in good practice. He has left us a masque; four _Books of Airs_ (1601-17?), in which the gems given below, and many others, occur; and a sometimes rather unfairly characterised critical treatise, _Observations on the Art of English Poesy_, in which he argues against rhyme and for strict quantitative measures, but on quite different lines from those of the craze of Stanyhurst and Harvey. Some of his illustrations of his still rather unnatural fancy (especially "Rose-cheeked Laura," which is now tolerably familiar in anthologies) are charming, though never so charming as his rhymed "Airs." The poetry is, indeed, mostly in flashes, and it is not very often that any song is a complete gem, like the best of the songs from the dramatists, one or two of which will be given presently for comparison. But by far the greater number contain and exemplify those numerous characteristics of poetry, as distinguished from verse, which at one time of literary history seem naturally to occur--seem indeed to be had for the gathering by any one who chooses--while at another time they are but sparingly found in the work of men of real genius, and seem altogether to escape men of talent, accomplishment, and laborious endeavour. Here are a few specimens from Peele and others, especially Campion. As it is, an exceptional amount of the small space possible for such things in this volume has been given to them, but there is a great temptation to give more. Lyly's lyrical work, however, is fairly well known, and more than one collection of "Songs from the Dramatists" has popularised others.

_Æ._ "Fair and fair, and twice so fair, As fair as any may be; The fairest shepherd on our green, A love for any lady.

_Par._ Fair and fair, and twice so fair, As fair as any may be: Thy love is fair for thee alone, And for no other lady.

_Æ._ My love is fair, my love is gay, As fresh as bin the flowers in May, And of my love my roundelay Concludes with Cupid's curse, They that do change old love for new Pray gods, they change for worse!

_Ambo, simul._ They that do change, etc., etc.

_Æ._ Fair and fair, etc.

_Par._ Fair and fair, etc.

_Æ._ My love can pipe, my love can sing, My love can many a pretty thing, And of his lovely praises ring My merry, merry roundelays. Amen to Cupid's curse, They that do change, etc."

PEELE.

"His golden locks time hath to silver turned; O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing: Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen. Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

"His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, And lovers' songs be turned to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are old age's alms: But though from court to cottage he depart, His saint is sure of his unspotted heart.

"And when he saddest sits in homely cell, He'll teach his swains this carol for a song: 'Blessed be the hearts that wish my Sovereign well, Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong.' Goddess allow this aged man his right, To be your beadsman now that was your knight."

PEELE.

"Fain would I change that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long, long to sing by rote Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, 'Love is the perfect sum Of all delight!' I have no other choice Either for pen or voice To sing or write.

"O Love, they wrong thee much That say thy sweet is bitter, When thy rich fruit is such As nothing can be sweeter. Fair house of joy and bliss Where truest pleasure is, I do adore thee; I know thee what thou art. I serve thee with my heart And fall before thee.

_Anon. in_ BULLEN.

"Turn all thy thoughts to eyes, Turn all thy hairs to ears, Change all thy friends to spies, And all thy joys to fears: True love will yet be free In spite of jealousy.

"Turn darkness into day, Conjectures into truth, Believe what th' curious say, Let age interpret youth: True love will yet be free In spite of jealousy.

"Wrest every word and look, Rack every hidden thought; Or fish with golden hook, True love cannot be caught: For that will still be free In spite of jealousy."

CAMPION _in_ BULLEN.

"Come, O come, my life's delight! Let me not in languor pine! Love loves no delay; thy sight The more enjoyed, the more divine. O come, and take from me The pain of being deprived of thee!

"Thou all sweetness dost enclose Like a little world of bliss; Beauty guards thy looks, the rose In them pure and eternal is: Come, then, and make thy flight As swift to me as heavenly light!"

CAMPION.

"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet! Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet! There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love. But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain, Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again.

"All that I sang still to her praise did tend, Still she was first, still she my songs did end; Yet she my love and music both doth fly, The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy: Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight! It shall suffice that they were breathed and died for her delight."

CAMPION.

"What if a day, or a month, or a year, Crown thy delights with a thousand sweet contentings! Cannot a chance of a night or an hour Cross thy desires with as many sad tormentings? Fortune, Honour, Beauty, Youth, are but blossoms dying, Wanton Pleasure, doating Love, are but shadows flying. All our joys are but toys! idle thoughts deceiving: None have power, of an hour, in their lives bereaving.

"Earth's but a point to the world, and a man Is but a point to the world's comparèd centre! Shall then a point of a point be so vain As to triumph in a silly point's adventure? All is hazard that we have, there is nothing biding; Days of pleasure are like streams through fair meadows gliding. Weal and woe, time doth go! time is never turning; Secret fates guide our states, both in mirth and mourning."

CAMPION.

"'Twas I that paid for all things, 'Twas others drank the wine, I cannot now recall things; Live but a fool, to pine. 'Twas I that beat the bush, The bird to others flew; For she, alas, hath left me. Falero! lero! loo!

"If ever that Dame Nature (For this false lover's sake) Another pleasing creature Like unto her would make; Let her remember this, To make the other true! For this, alas! hath left me. Falero! lero! loo!

"No riches now can raise me, No want makes me despair, No misery amaze me, Nor yet for want I care: I have lost a World itself, My earthly Heaven, adieu! Since she, alas! hath left me. Falero! lero! loo!"

_Anon. in_ ARBER.

Beside these collections, which were in their origin and inception chiefly musical, and literary, as it were, only by parergon, there are successors of the earlier Miscellanies in which, as in _England's Helicon_ and the celebrated _Passionate Pilgrim_, there is some of the most exquisite of our verse. And, yet again, a crowd of individual writers, of few of whom is much known, contributed, not in all cases their mites by any means, but often very respectable sums, to the vast treasury of English poetry. There is Sir Edward Dyer, the friend of Raleigh and Sidney, who has been immortalised by the famous "My mind to me a kingdom is," and who wrote other pieces not much inferior. There is Raleigh, to whom the glorious preparatory sonnet to _The Faërie Queene_ would sufficiently justify the ascription of "a vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate," if a very considerable body of verse (independent of the fragmentary _Cynthia_) did not justify this many times over, as two brief quotations in addition to the sonnet will show:--

"Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay, Within that temple where the vestal flame Was wont to burn: and, passing by that way To see that buried dust of living fame, Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept, All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queen, At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from henceforth those graces were not seen, For they this Queen attended; in whose stead Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse. Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed, And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce: Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief, And curse the access of that celestial thief."

* * * * *

"Three things there be that prosper all apace, And flourish while they are asunder far; But on a day they meet all in a place, And when they meet they one another mar.

"And they be these--the Wood, the Weed, the Wag: The Wood is that that makes the gallows tree; The Weed is that that strings the hangman's bag; The Wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee.

"Now mark, dear boy--while these assemble not, Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the Wag is wild; But when they meet, it makes the timber rot, It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.

"God bless the Child!"

* * * * *

"Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope's true gage; And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

"Blood must be my body's balmer; No other balm will there be given; Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer, Travelleth towards the land of heaven; Over the silver mountains Where spring the nectar fountains: There will I kiss The bowl of bliss; And drink mine everlasting fill Upon every milken hill. My soul will be a-dry before, But after it will thirst no more."

There is Lord Oxford, Sidney's enemy (which he might be if he chose), and apparently a coxcomb (which is less pardonable), but a charming writer of verse, as in the following:--

"Come hither, shepherd swain! Sir, what do you require? I pray thee, shew to me thy name! My name is Fond Desire.

"When wert thou born, Desire? In pomp and prime of May. By whom, sweet boy, wert thou begot? By fond Conceit, men say.

"Tell me, who was thy nurse Fresh youth, in sugared joy. What was thy meat and daily food? Sad sighs, with great annoy.

"What hadst thou then to drink? Unfeigned lovers' tears. What cradle wert thou rocked in? In hope devoid of fears.

"What lulled thee then asleep? Sweet speech which likes me best. Tell me, where is thy dwelling-place? In gentle hearts I rest.

"What thing doth please thee most? To gaze on beauty still. Whom dost thou think to be thy foe? Disdain of my good will.

"Doth company displease? Yes, surely, many one. Where doth desire delight to live? He loves to live alone.

"Doth either time or age Bring him unto decay? No, no! Desire both lives and dies A thousand times a day.

"Then, fond Desire, farewell! Thou art no mate for me; I should be loath, methinks, to dwell With such a one as thee.

There is, in the less exalted way, the industrious man of all work, Nicholas Breton, whom we shall speak of more at length among the pamphleteers, and John Davies of Hereford, no poet certainly, but a most industrious verse-writer in satiric and other forms. Mass of production, and in some cases personal interest, gives these a certain standing above their fellows. But the crowd of those fellows, about many of whom even the painful industry of the modern commentator has been able to tell us next to nothing, is almost miraculous when we remember that printing was still carried on under a rigid censorship by a select body of monopolists, and that out of London, and in rare cases the university towns, it was impossible for a minor poet to get into print at all unless he trusted to the contraband presses of the Continent. In dealing with this crowd of enthusiastic poetical students it is impossible to mention all, and invidious to single out some only. The very early and interesting _Posy of Gillyflowers_ of Humphrey Gifford (1580) exhibits the first stage of our period, and might almost have been referred to the period before it; the same humpty-dumpty measure of eights and sixes, and the same vestiges of rather infantine alliteration being apparent in it, though something of the fire and variety of the new age of poetry appears beside them, notably in this most spirited war-song:--

(_For Soldiers._)

"Ye buds of Brutus' land, courageous youths now play your parts,[28] Unto your tackle stand, abide the brunt with valiant hearts, For news is carried to and fro, that we must forth to warfare go: Then muster now in every place, and soldiers are pressed forth apace. Faint not, spend blood to do your Queen and country good: Fair words, good pay, will make men cast all care away.

"The time of war is come, prepare your corslet, spear, and shield: Methinks I hear the drum strike doleful marches to the field. Tantara, tantara the trumpets sound, which makes our hearts with joy abound. The roaring guns are heard afar, and everything announceth war. Serve God, stand stout; bold courage brings this gear about; Fear not, forth run: faint heart fair lady never won.

"Ye curious carpet-knights that spend the time in sport and play, Abroad and see new sights, your country's cause calls you away: Do not, to make your ladies' game, bring blemish to your worthy name. Away to field and win renown, with courage beat your enemies down; Stout hearts gain praise, when dastards sail in slander's seas. Hap what hap shall, we soon shall die but once for all.

"Alarm! methinks they cry. Be packing mates, begone with speed, Our foes are very nigh: shame have that man that shrinks at need. Unto it boldly let us stand, God will give right the upper hand. Our cause is good we need not doubt: in sign of courage give a shout; March forth, be strong, good hap will come ere it be long. Shrink not, fight well, for lusty lads must bear the bell.

"All you that will shun evil must dwell in warfare every day. The world, the flesh, the devil always do seek our souls' decay. Strive with these foes with all your might, so shall you fight a worthy fight. That conquest dost deserve most praise, whose vice do[th] yield to virtue's ways. Beat down foul sin, a worthy crown then shall ye win: If ye live well, in Heaven with Christ our souls shall dwell."

[28] I print this as in the original, but perhaps the rhythm, which is an odd one, would be better marked if lines 1 and 2 were divided into sixes and eights, lines 3 and 4 into eights, and lines 5 and 6 into fours and eights as the rhyme ends.

Of the same date, or indeed earlier, are the miscellaneous poems of Thomas Howell, entitled _The Arbour of Amity_, and chiefly of an ethical character. Less excusable for the uncouthness of his verse is Matthew Grove, who, writing, or at least publishing, his poems in 1587, should have learnt something, but apparently had not. It has to be said in excuse of him that his date and indeed existence are shadowy, even among the shadowy Elizabethan bards; his editor, in worse doggerel than his own, frankly confessing that he knew nothing about him, not so much as whether he was alive or dead. But his work, Howell's, and even part of Gifford's, is chiefly interesting as giving us in the very sharpest contrast the differences of the poetry before and after the melodious bursts of which Spenser, Sidney, and Watson were the first mouthpieces. Except an utter dunce (which Grove does not seem to have been by any means) no one who had before him _The Shepherd's Calendar_, or the _Hecatompathia_, or a MS. copy of _Astrophel and Stella_, could have written as Grove wrote. There are echoes of this earlier and woodener matter to be found later, but, as a whole, the passionate love of beauty, the sense--if only a groping sense--of form, and the desire to follow, and if possible improve upon the models of melodious verse which the Sidneian school had given, preserved even poetasters from the lowest depths.

To classify the miscellaneous verse of 1590-1600 (for the second decade is much richer than the first) under subjects and styles is a laborious and, at best, an uncertain business. The semi-mythological love-poem, with a more or less tragic ending, had not a few followers; the collection of poems of various character in praise of a real or imaginary mistress, similar in design to the sonnet collections, but either more miscellaneous in form or less strung together in one long composition, had even more; while the collection pure and simple, resembling the miscellanies in absence of special character, but the work of one, not of many writers, was also plentifully represented. Satirical allegory, epigram, and other kinds, had numerous examples. But there were two classes of verse which were both sufficiently interesting in themselves and were cultivated by persons of sufficient individual repute to deserve separate and detailed mention. These were the historical poem or history--a kind of companion production to the chronicle play or chronicle, and a very popular one--which, besides the names of Warner, Daniel, and Drayton, counted not a few minor adherents among Elizabethan bards. Such were the already-mentioned Giles Fletcher; such Fitz-Geoffrey in a remarkable poem on Drake, and Gervase Markham in a not less noteworthy piece on the last fight of _The Revenge_; such numerous others, some of whom are hardly remembered, and perhaps hardly deserve to be. The other, and as a class the more interesting, though nothing actually produced by its practitioners may be quite equal to the best work of Drayton and Daniel, was the beginning of English satire. This beginning is interesting not merely because of the apparent coincidence of instinct which made four or five writers of great talent simultaneously hit on the style, so that it is to this day difficult to award exactly the palm of priority, but also because the result of their studies, in some peculiar and at first sight rather inexplicable ways, is some of the most characteristic, if very far from being some of the best, work of the whole poetical period with which we are now busied. In passing, moreover, from the group of miscellaneous poets to these two schools, if we lose not a little of the harmony and lyrical sweetness which characterise the best work of the Elizabethan singer proper, we gain greatly in bulk and dignity of work and in intrinsic value. Of at least one of the poets mentioned in the last paragraph his modern editor--a most enthusiastic and tolerant godfather of waifs and strays of literature--confesses that he really does not quite know why he should be reprinted, except that the original is unique, and that almost every scrap of literature in this period is of some value, if only for lexicographic purposes. No one would dream of speaking thus of Drayton or of Daniel, of Lodge, Hall, Donne, or Marston; while even Warner, the weakest of the names to which we shall proceed to give separate notice, can be praised without too much allowance. In the latter case, moreover, if not in the first (for the history-poem, until it was taken up in a very different spirit at the beginning of this century, never was a success in England), the matter now to be reviewed, after being in its own kind neglected for a couple of generations, served as forerunner, if not exactly as model, to the magnificent satiric work of Dryden, and through his to that of Pope, Young, Churchill, Cowper, and the rest of the more accomplished English satirists. The acorn of such an oak cannot be without interest.

The example of _The Mirror for Magistrates_ is perhaps sufficient to account for the determination of a certain number of Elizabethan poets towards English history; especially if we add the stimulating effect of Holinshed's _Chronicle_, which was published in 1580. The first of the so-called historians, William Warner, belongs in point of poetical style to the pre-Spenserian period, and like its other exponents employs the fourteener; while, unlike some of them, he seems quite free from any Italian influence in phraseology or poetical manner. Nevertheless _Albion's England_ is, not merely in bulk but in merit, far ahead of the average work of our first period, and quite incommensurable with such verse as that of Grove. It appeared by instalments (1586-1606-1612). Of its author, William Warner, the old phrase has to be repeated, that next to nothing is known of him. He was an Oxfordshire man by birth, and an Oxford man by education; he had something to do with Cary, Lord Hunsdon, became an Attorney of the Common Pleas, and died at Amwell suddenly in his bed in 1609, being, as it is guessed rather than known, fifty years old or thereabouts. _Albion's England_ was seized as contraband, by orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury--a proceeding for which no one has been able to account (the suggestion that parts of it are indelicate is, considering the manners of the time, quite ludicrous), and which may perhaps have been due to some technical informality. It is thought that he is the author of a translation of Plautus's _Menæchmi_; he certainly produced in 1585? a prose story, or rather collection of stories, entitled _Syrinx_, which, however, is scarcely worth reading. _Albion's England_ is in no danger of incurring that sentence. In the most easily accessible edition, that of Chalmers's "Poets," it is spoilt by having the fourteeners divided into eights and sixes, and it should if possible be read in the original arrangement. Considering how few persons have written about it, an odd collection of critical slips might be made. Philips, Milton's nephew, in this case it may be hoped, not relying on his uncle, calls Warner a "good plain writer of moral rules and precepts": the fact being that though he sometimes moralises he is in the main a story-teller, and much more bent on narrative than on teaching. Meres calls him "a refiner of the English tongue," and attributes to him "rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments of the pen": the truth being that he is (as Philips so far correctly says) a singularly plain, straightforward, and homely writer. Others say that he wrote in "Alexandrines"--a blunder, and a serious one, which has often been repeated up to the present day in reference to other writers of the seven-foot verse. He brings in, according to the taste and knowledge of his time, all the fabulous accounts of the origins of Britain, and diversifies them with many romantic and pastoral histories, classical tales, and sometimes mere _Fabliaux_, down to his own time. The chief of the episodes, the story of Argentile and Curan, has often, and not undeservedly, met with high praise, and sometimes in his declamatory parts Warner achieves a really great success. Probably, however, what commended his poem most to the taste of the day was its promiscuous admixture of things grave and gay--a mixture which was always much to the taste of Elizabeth's men, and the popularity of which produced and fostered many things, from the matchless tragi-comedy of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ to the singularly formless pamphlets of which we shall speak hereafter. The main interest of Warner is his insensibility to the new influences which Spenser and Sidney directed, and which are found producing their full effect on Daniel and Drayton. There were those in his own day who compared him to Homer: one of the most remarkable instances of thoroughly unlucky critical extravagance to be found in literary history, as the following very fair average specimen will show:--

"Henry (as if by miracle preserved by foreigns long, From hence-meant treasons) did arrive to right his natives' wrong: And chiefly to Lord Stanley, and some other succours, as Did wish and work for better days, the rival welcome was. Now Richard heard that Richmond was assisted and ashore, And like unkennel'd Cerberus, the crookèd tyrant swore, And all complexions act at once confusedly in him: He studieth, striketh, threats, entreats, and looketh mildly grim, Mistrustfully he trusteth, and he dreadingly did dare, And forty passions in a trice, in him consort and square. But when, by his consented force, his foes increasèd more, He hastened battle, finding his co-rival apt therefore. When Richmond, orderly in all, had battlèd his aid, Inringèd by his complices, their cheerful leader said: 'Now is the time and place (sweet friends) and we the persons be That must give England breath, or else unbreathe for her must we. No tyranny is fabled, and no tyrant was in deed Worse than our foe, whose works will act my words, if well he speed: For ill to ills superlative are easily enticed, But entertains amendment as the Gergesites did Christ. Be valiant then, he biddeth so that would not be outbid, For courage yet shall honour him though base, that better did. I am right heir Lancastrian, he, in York's destroyèd right Usurpeth: but through either ours, for neither claim I fight, But for our country's long-lack'd weal, for England's peace I war: Wherein He speed us! unto Whom I all events refer.' Meanwhile had furious Richard set his armies in array, And then, with looks even like himself, this or the like did say: 'Why, lads, shall yonder Welshman with his stragglers overmatch? Disdain ye not such rivals, and defer ye their dispatch? Shall Tudor from Plantagenet, the crown by cracking snatch? Know Richard's very thoughts' (he touch'd the diadem he wore) 'Be metal of this metal: then believe I love it more Than that for other law than life, to supersede my claim, And lesser must not be his plea that counterpleads the same.' The weapons overtook his words, and blows they bravely change, When, like a lion thirsting blood, did moody Richard range, And made large slaughters where he went, till Richmond he espied, Whom singling, after doubtful swords, the valorous tyrant died."

Of the sonnet compositions of Daniel and Drayton something has been said already. But Daniel's sonnets are a small and Drayton's an infinitesimal part of the work of the two poets respectively. Samuel Daniel was a Somersetshire man, born near Taunton in 1562. He is said to have been the son of a music master, but was educated at Oxford, made powerful friends, and died an independent person at Beckington, in the county of his birth, in the year 1619. He was introduced early to good society and patronage, became tutor to Lady Anne Clifford, a great heiress of the North, was favoured by the Earl of Southampton, and became a member of the Pembroke or _Arcadia_ coterie. His friends or his merits obtained for him, it is said, the Mastership of the Revels, the posts of Gentleman Extraordinary to James I., and Groom of the Privy Chamber to Anne of Denmark. His literary production besides _Delia_ was considerable. With the first authorised edition of that collection he published _The Complaint of Rosamond_; a historical poem of great grace and elegance though a little wanting in strength. In 1594 came his interesting Senecan tragedy of _Cleopatra_; in 1595 the first part of his chief work, _The History of the Civil Wars_, and in 1601 a collected folio of "Works." Then he rested, at any rate from publication, till 1605, when he produced _Philotas_, another Senecan tragedy in verse. In prose he wrote the admirable _Defence of Rhyme_, which finally smashed the fancy for classical metres dear even to such a man as Campion. _Hymen's Triumph_, a masque of great beauty, was not printed till four years before his death. He also wrote a History of England as well as minor works. The poetical value of Daniel may almost be summed up in two words--sweetness and dignity. He is decidedly wanting in strength, and, despite _Delia_, can hardly be said to have had a spark of passion. Even in his own day it was doubted whether he had not overweighted himself with his choice of historical subjects, though the epithet of "well-languaged," given to him at the time, evinces a real comprehension of one of his best claims to attention. No writer of the period has such a command of pure English, unadulterated by xenomania and unweakened by purism, as Daniel. Whatever unfavourable things have been said of him from time to time have been chiefly based on the fact that his chaste and correct style lacks the fiery quaintness, the irregular and audacious attraction of his contemporaries. Nor was he less a master of versification than of vocabulary. His _Defence of Rhyme_ shows that he possessed the theory: all his poetical works show that he was a master of the practice. He rarely attempted and probably would not have excelled in the lighter lyrical measures. But in the grave music of the various elaborate stanzas in which the Elizabethan poets delighted, and of which the Spenserian, though the crown and flower, is only the most perfect, he was a great proficient, and his couplets and blank verse are not inferior. Some of his single lines have already been quoted, and many more might be excerpted from his work of the best Elizabethan brand in the quieter kind. Quiet, indeed, is the overmastering characteristic of Daniel. It was this no doubt which made him prefer the stately style of his Senecan tragedies, and the hardly more disturbed structure of pastoral comedies and tragi-comedies, like the _Queen's Arcadia_ and _Hymen's Triumph_, to the boisterous revels of the stage proper in his time. He had something of the schoolmaster in his nature as well as in his history. Nothing is more agreeable to him than to moralise; not indeed in any dull or crabbed manner, but in a mellifluous and at the same time weighty fashion, of which very few other poets have the secret. It is perhaps by his scrupulous propriety, by his anxious decency (to use the word not in its modern and restricted sense, but in its proper meaning of the generally becoming), that Daniel brought upon himself the rather hard saying that he had a manner "better suiting prose."

The sentence will scarcely be echoed by any one who has his best things before him, however much a reader of some of the duller parts of the historical poems proper may feel inclined to echo it. Of his sonnets one has been given. The splendid Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland is not surpassed as ethical poetry by anything of the period, and often as it has been quoted, it must be given again, for it is not and never can be too well known:--

"He that of such a height hath built his mind, And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolvèd powers; nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same: What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey!

"And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil! Where all the storms of passion mainly beat On flesh and blood: where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth; and only great doth seem To little minds, who do it so esteem.

"He looks upon the mightiest monarch's wars But only as on stately robberies; Where evermore the fortune that prevails Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars The fairest and the best fac'd enterprise. Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails: Justice, he sees (as if seducèd) still Conspires with power, whose cause must not be ill.

"He sees the face of right t'appear as manifold As are the passions of uncertain man; Who puts it in all colours, all attires, To serve his ends, and make his courses hold. He sees, that let deceit work what it can, Plot and contrive base ways to high desires, That the all-guiding Providence doth yet All disappoint, and mocks the smoke of wit.

"Nor is he mov'd with all the thunder cracks Of tyrants' threats, or with the surly brow Of Power, that proudly sits on others' crimes; Charg'd with more crying sins than those he checks. The storms of sad confusion, that may grow Up in the present for the coming times Appal not him; that hath no side at all, But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.

"Although his heart (so near allied to Earth) Cannot but pity the perplexèd state Of troublous and distress'd Mortality, That thus make way unto the ugly birth Of their own sorrows, and do still beget Affliction upon imbecility: Yet seeing thus the course of things must run, He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done.

"And whilst distraught ambition compasses, And is encompass'd; whilst as craft deceives, And is deceiv'd: whilst man doth ransack man And builds on blood, and rises by distress; And th' inheritance of desolation leaves To great-expecting hopes: he looks thereon, As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye, And bears no venture in impiety."

In sharp contrast with this the passage from _Hymen's Triumph_,

"Ah, I remember well, and how can I,"

shows the sweetness without namby-pambyness which Daniel had at constant command. Something of the same contrast may be found between the whole of _Hymen's Triumph_ and the _Queen's Arcadia_ on the one side, and _Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_ on the other. All are written in mixed blank and rhymed verse, much interlaced and "enjambed." The best of the historical poems is, by common consent, _Rosamond_, which is instinct with a most remarkable pathos, nor are fine passages by any means to seek in the greater length and less poetical subject of _The Civil Wars of York and Lancaster_. The fault of this is that the too conscientious historian is constantly versifying what must be called mere expletive matter. This must always make any one who speaks with critical impartiality admit that much of Daniel is hard reading; but the soft places (to use the adjective in no ill sense) are frequent enough, and when the reader comes to them he must have little appreciation of poetry if he does not rejoice in the foliage and the streams of the poetical oasis which has rewarded him after his pilgrimage across a rather arid wilderness.

Michael Drayton was much better fitted for the arduous, and perhaps not wholly legitimate, business of historical poetry than Daniel. If his genius was somewhat less fine, it was infinitely better thewed and sinewed. His ability, indeed, to force any subject which he chose to treat into poetry is amazing, and can hardly be paralleled elsewhere except in a poet who was born but just before Drayton's death, John Dryden. He was pretty certainly a gentleman by birth, though not of any great possessions, and is said to have been born at Hartshill, in Warwickshire, in the year 1563. He is also said, but not known, to have been a member of the University of Oxford, and appears to have been fairly provided with patrons, in the family of some one of whom he served as page, though he never received any great or permanent preferment.[29] On the other hand, he was not a successful dramatist (the only literary employment of the time that brought in much money), and friend as he was of nearly all the men of letters of the time, it is expressly stated in one of the few personal notices we have of him, that he could not "swagger in a tavern or domineer in a hothouse" [house of ill-fame]--that is to say, that the hail-fellow well-met Bohemianism of the time, which had led Marlowe and many of his group to evil ends, and which was continued in a less outrageous form under the patronage of Ben Jonson till far into the next age, had no charms for him. Yet he must have lived somehow and to a good age, for he did not die till the 23d December 1631. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a fact which drew from Goldsmith, in _The Citizen of the World_, a gibe showing only the lamentable ignorance of the best period of English poetry, in which Goldsmith was not indeed alone, but in which he was perhaps pre-eminent among contemporaries eminent for it.

[29] Drayton has been thoroughly treated by Professor Oliver Elton in _Michael Drayton_ (London, 1905), enlarged from a monograph for the Spenser Society.

Drayton's long life was as industrious as it was long. He began in 1591 with a volume of sacred verse, the _Harmony of the Church_, which, for some reason not merely undiscovered but unguessed, displeased the censors, and was never reprinted with his other works until recently. Two years later appeared _Idea, The Shepherd's Garland_--a collection of eclogues not to be confounded with the more famous collection of sonnets in praise of the same real or fancied mistress which appeared later. In the first of these Drayton called himself "Rowland," or "Roland," a fact on which some rather rickety structures of guesswork have been built as to allusions to him in Spenser. His next work was _Mortimeriados_, afterwards refashioned and completed under the title of _The Barons' Wars_, and this was followed in 1597 by one of his best works, _England's Heroical Epistles_. _The Owl_, some _Legends_, and other poems succeeded; and in 1605 he began to collect his Works, which were frequently reprinted. The mighty poem of the _Polyolbion_ was the fruit of his later years, and, in strictness, belongs to the period of a later chapter; but Drayton's muse is eminently one and indivisible, and, notwithstanding the fruits of pretty continual study which his verses show, they belong, in the order of thought, to the middle and later Elizabethan period rather than to the Jacobean.

Few poets of anything like Drayton's volume (of which some idea may be formed by saying that his works, in the not quite complete form in which they appear in Chalmers, fill five hundred of the bulky pages of that work, each page frequently containing a hundred and twenty-eight lines) show such uniform mixture of imagination and vigour. In the very highest and rarest graces of poetry he is, indeed, by common consent wanting, unless one of these graces in the uncommon kind of the war-song be allowed, as perhaps it may be, to the famous and inimitable though often imitated _Ballad of Agincourt_, "To the brave Cambro-Britons and their Harp," not to be confounded with the narrative "Battle of Agincourt," which is of a less rare merit. The Agincourt ballad,

"Fair stood the wind for France,"

is quite at the head of its own class of verse in England--Campbell's two masterpieces, and Lord Tennyson's still more direct imitation in the "Six Hundred," falling, the first somewhat, and the last considerably, short of it. The sweep of the metre, the martial glow of the sentiment, and the skill with which the names are wrought into the verse, are altogether beyond praise. Drayton never, unless the enigmatical sonnet to Idea (see _ante_) be really his, rose to such concentration of matter and such elaborate yet unforced perfection of manner as here, yet his great qualities are perceptible all over his work. The enormous _Polyolbion_, written in a metre the least suitable to continuous verse of any in English--the Alexandrine--crammed with matter rebel to poetry, and obliging the author to find his chief poetical attraction rather in superadded ornament, in elaborately patched-on passages, than in the actual and natural evolution of his theme, is still a very great work in another than the mechanical sense. Here is a fairly representative passage:--

"The haughty Cambrian hills enamoured of their praise, (As they who only sought ambitiously to raise The blood of God-like Brute) their heads do proudly bear: And having crown'd themselves sole regents of the air (Another war with Heaven as though they meant to make) Did seem in great disdain the bold affront to take, That any petty hill upon the English side, Should dare, not (with a crouch) to veil unto their pride. When Wrekin, as a hill his proper worth that knew, And understood from whence their insolency grew, For all that they appear'd so terrible in sight, Yet would not once forego a jot that was his right, And when they star'd on him, to them the like he gave, And answer'd glance for glance, and brave for brave: That, when some other hills which English dwellers were, The lusty Wrekin saw himself so well to bear Against the Cambrian part, respectless of their power; His eminent disgrace expecting every hour Those flatterers that before (with many cheerful look) Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook, And muffled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black, Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack: That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear (Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear; He, having none but them, they having none but he Which to their mutual joy might either's object be) Within their secret breast conceivèd sundry fears, And as they mix'd their streams, for him so mix'd their tears. Whom, in their coming down, when plainly he discerns, For them his nobler heart in his strong bosom yearns: But, constantly resolv'd, that dearer if they were The Britons should not yet all from the English bear; 'Therefore,' quoth he, 'brave flood, tho' forth by Cambria brought, Yet as fair England's friend, or mine thou would'st be thought (O Severn) let thine ear my just defence partake.'"

Happy phrases abound, and, moreover, every now and then there are set pieces, as they may be called, of fanciful description which are full of beauty; for Drayton (a not very usual thing in a man of such unflagging industry, and even excellence of work) was full of fancy. The fairy poem of _Nymphidia_ is one of the most graceful trifles in the language, possessing a dancing movement and a felicitous choice of imagery and language which triumphantly avoid the trivial on the one hand, and the obviously burlesque on the other. The singular satirical or quasi-satirical poems of _The Mooncalf_, _The Owl_, and _The Man in the Moon_, show a faculty of comic treatment less graceful indeed, but scarcely inferior, and the lyrics called _Odes_ (of which the _Ballad of Agincourt_ is sometimes classed as one) exhibit a command of lyric metre hardly inferior to the command displayed in that masterpiece. In fact, if ever there was a poet who could write, and write, perhaps beautifully, certainly well, about any conceivable broomstick in almost any conceivable manner, that poet was Drayton. His historical poems, which are inferior in bulk only to the huge _Polyolbion_, contain a great deal of most admirable work. They consist of three divisions--_The Barons' Wars_ in eight-lined stanzas, the _Heroic Epistles_ (suggested, of course, by Ovid, though anything but Ovidian) in heroic couplets, _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ in the same stanza as _The Barons' Wars_, and _Four Legends_ in stanzas of various form and range. That this mass of work should possess, or should, indeed, admit of the charms of poetry which distinguish _The Faërie Queene_ would be impossible, even if Drayton had been Spenser, which he was far from being. But to speak of his "dull creeping narrative," to accuse him of the "coarsest vulgarities," of being "flat and prosaic," and so on, as was done by eighteenth-century critics, is absolutely uncritical, unless it be very much limited. _The Barons' Wars_ is somewhat dull, the author being too careful to give a minute history of a not particularly interesting subject, and neglecting to take the only possible means of making it interesting by bringing out strongly the characters of heroes and heroines, and so infusing a dramatic interest. But this absence of character is a constant drawback to the historical poems of the time. And even here we find many passages where the drawback of the stanza for narrative is most skilfully avoided, and where the vigour of the single lines and phrases is unquestionable on any sound estimate.

Still the stanza, though Drayton himself defends it (it should be mentioned that his prose prefaces are excellent, and constitute another link between him and Dryden), is something of a clog; and the same thing is felt in _The Miseries of Queen Margaret_ and the _Legends_, where, however, it is again not difficult to pick out beauties. The _Heroical Epistles_ can be praised with less allowance. Their shorter compass, their more manageable metre (for Drayton was a considerable master of the earlier form of couplet), and the fact that a personal interest is infused in each, give them a great advantage; and, as always, passages of great merit are not infrequent. Finally, Drayton must have the praise (surely not quite irrelevant) of a most ardent and lofty spirit of patriotism. Never was there a better Englishman, and as his love of his country spirited him up to the brilliant effort of the _Ballad of Agincourt_, so it sustained him through the "strange herculean task" of the _Polyolbion_, and often put light and life into the otherwise lifeless mass of the historic poems. Yet I have myself no doubt that these historic poems were a mistake, and that their composition, though prompted by a most creditable motive, the burning attachment to England which won the fight with Spain, and laid the foundation of the English empire, was not altogether, perhaps was not by any means, according to knowledge.

The almost invariable, and I fear it must be said, almost invariably idle controversy about priority in literary styles has been stimulated, in the case of English satire, by a boast of Joseph Hall's made in his own _Virgidemiarum_--

"Follow me who list, And be the _second_ English satirist."

It has been pleaded in Hall's favour that although the date of publication of his _Satires_ is known, the date of their composition is not known. It is not even necessary to resort to this kind of special pleading; for nothing can be more evident than that the bravado is not very serious. On the literal supposition, however, and if we are to suppose that publication immediately followed composition, Hall was anticipated by more than one or two predecessors, in the production of work not only specifically satirical but actually called satire, and by two at least in the adoption of the heroic couplet form which has ever since been consecrated to the subject. Satirical poetry, of a kind, is of course nearly if not quite as old as the language, and in the hands of Skelton it had assumed various forms. But the satire proper--the following of the great Roman examples of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius in general lashing of vice and folly--can hardly trace itself further back in England than George Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_, which preceded Hall's _Virgidemiarum_ by twenty years, and is interesting not only for itself but as being ushered in by the earliest known verses of Walter Raleigh. It is written in blank verse, and is a rather rambling commentary on the text _vanitas vanitatum_, but it expressly calls itself a satire and answers sufficiently well to the description. More immediate and nearer examples were to be found in the Satires of Donne and Lodge. The first named were indeed, like the other poetical works of their marvellously gifted writer, not published till many years after; but universal tradition ascribes the whole of Donne's profane poems to his early youth, and one document exists which distinctly dates "John Donne, his Satires," as early as 1593. We shall therefore deal with them, as with the other closely connected work of their author, here and in this chapter. But there has to be mentioned first the feebler but chronologically more certain work of Thomas Lodge, _A Fig for Momus_, which fulfils both the requirements of known date and of composition in couplets. It appeared in 1595, two years before Hall, and is of the latest and weakest of Lodge's verse work. It was written or at least produced when he was just abandoning his literary and adventurous career and settling down as a quiet physician with no more wild oats to sow, except, perhaps, some participation in popish conspiracy. The style did not lend itself to the display of any of Lodge's strongest gifts--romantic fancy, tenderness and sweetness of feeling, or elaborate embroidery of precious language. He follows Horace pretty closely and with no particular vigour. Nor does the book appear to have attracted much attention, so that it is just possible that Hall may not have heard of it. If, however, he had not, it is certainly a curious coincidence that he, with Donne and Lodge, should all have hit on the couplet as their form, obvious as its advantages are when it is once tried. For the rhyme points the satirical hits, while the comparatively brief space of each distich prevents that air of wandering which naturally accompanies satire in longer stanzas. At any rate after the work (in so many ways remarkable) of Donne, Hall, and Marston, there could hardly be any more doubt about the matter, though part of the method which these writers, especially Donne and Marston, took to give individuality and "bite" to their work was as faulty as it now seems to us peculiar.

Ben Jonson, the least gushing of critics to his contemporaries, said of John Donne that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," and I own that without going through the long catalogue of singularly contradictory criticisms which have been passed on Donne, I feel disposed to fall back on and adopt this earliest, simplest, and highest encomium. Possibly Ben might not have meant the same things that I mean, but that does not matter. It is sufficient for me that in one special point of the poetic charm--the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by a flood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capable imagination--Donne is surpassed by no poet of any language, and equalled by few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highest poetry with the lowest doggerel, the noblest thought with the most trivial crotchet--all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it only chequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts and graces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets, although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlier than 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappeared wholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence of no poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towards his own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, except that of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as

"A king who ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit,"

expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headed by Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in the same monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet" (that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifying which Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of the nation."

His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, in the earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at both universities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, a law-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the Roman Church, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced some religious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean of St. Paul's, and died in 1631.

It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition of most, and that all but certain documentary evidence points to the composition of some, of his poems in the earlier part of his life. Unless the date of the Harleian MS. is a forgery, some of his satires were written in or before 1593, when he was but twenty years old. The boiling passion, without a thought of satiety, which marks many of his elegies would also incline us to assign them to youth, and though some of his epistles, and many of his miscellaneous poems, are penetrated with a quieter and more reflective spirit, the richness of fancy in them, as well as the amatory character of many, perhaps the majority, favour a similar attribution. All alike display Donne's peculiar poetical quality--the fiery imagination shining in dark places, the magical illumination of obscure and shadowy thoughts with the lightning of fancy. In one remarkable respect Donne has a peculiar cast of thought as well as of manner, displaying that mixture of voluptuous and melancholy meditation, that swift transition of thought from the marriage sheet to the shroud, which is characteristic of French Renaissance poets, but less fully, until he set the example, of English. The best known and most exquisite of his fanciful flights, the idea of the discovery of

"A bracelet of bright hair about the bone"

of his own long interred skeleton: the wish--

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost Who died before the god of love was born,"

and others, show this peculiarity. And it recurs in the most unexpected places, as, for the matter of that, does his strong satirical faculty. In some of his poems, as the _Anatomy of the World_, occasioned by the death of Mrs. Elizabeth Drury, this melancholy imagery mixed with touches (only touches here) of the passion which had distinguished the author earlier (for the _Anatomy_ is not an early work), and with religious and philosophical meditation, makes the strangest amalgam--shot through, however, as always, with the golden veins of Donne's incomparable poetry. Expressions so strong as this last may seem in want of justification. And the three following pieces, the "Dream," a fragment of satire, and an extract from the _Anatomy_, may or may not, according to taste, supply it:--

"Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream. It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy: Therefore thou wak'dst me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it: Thou art so true, that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams true, and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

"As lightning or a taper's light Thine eyes, and not thy noise, wak'd me; Yet I thought thee (For thou lov'st truth) an angel at first sight, But when I saw thou saw'st my heart And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, then thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake me, and cam'st then; _I must confess, it could not choose but be_ _Profane to think thee anything but thee._

"Coming and staying show'd thee thee, But rising makes me doubt that now Thou art not thou. That love is weak where fears are strong as he; 'Tis not all spirit, pure and brave, If mixture it of fear, shame, honour, have. Perchance as torches which must ready be Men light, and put out, so thou deal'st with me. Thou cam'st to kindle, goest to come: then I Will dream that hope again, or else would die."

* * * * *

"O age of rusty iron! some better wit Call it some worse name, if ought equal it. Th' iron age was, when justice was sold: now Injustice is sold dearer far; allow All claim'd fees and duties, gamesters, anon The money, which you sweat and swear for's gone Into other hands; so controverted lands 'Scape, like Angelica, the striver's hands. If law be in the judge's heart, and he Have no heart to resist letter or fee, Where wilt thou appeal? power of the courts below Flows from the first main head, and these can throw Thee, if they suck thee in, to misery, To fetters, halters. But if th' injury Steel thee to dare complain, alas! thou go'st Against the stream upwards when thou art most Heavy and most faint; and in these labours they 'Gainst whom thou should'st complain will in thy way Become great seas, o'er which when thou shalt be Forc'd to make golden bridges, thou shalt see That all thy gold was drowned in them before."

* * * * *

"She, whose fair body no such prison was But that a soul might well be pleased to pass An age in her; she, whose rich beauty lent Mintage to other beauties, for they went But for so much as they were like to her; She, in whose body (if we dare prefer This low world to so high a mark as she), The western treasure, eastern spicery, Europe and Afric, and the unknown rest Were easily found, or what in them was best; And when we've made this large discovery Of all, in her some one part then will be Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is Enough to make twenty such worlds as this; She, whom had they known, who did first betroth The tutelar angels and assigned one both To nations, cities, and to companies, To functions, offices, and dignities, And to each several man, to him and him, They would have giv'n her one for every limb; She, of whose soul if we may say 'twas gold, Her body was th' electrum and did hold Many degrees of that; we understood Her by her sight; _her pure and eloquent blood_ _Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought_ _That one might almost say, her body thought_; She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is gone And chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl upon Our prison's prison earth, nor think us well Longer than whilst we bear our brittle shell."

But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a full anthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of English literature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry," though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedly glaring faults.

Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other hand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere better shown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their just admiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, instead of going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature, merely give us fresh studies of _Ibam forte via sacra_ or the Tenth of Juvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne is not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the _Transformed Metamorphosis_ of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients intended the _Satura_ to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure of all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (as far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire. At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian lengthening of the mute _e_; at another the writer seems to be emulating Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.

These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess, to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest writer of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the most sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed by their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argues either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoble simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed over in any account of it.

Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeoman rank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel at Cambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living of Hawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich, of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and, not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburb of his cathedral city. His later life was important for religious literature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter of which he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger and greater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his early Cambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They have on the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matter and the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time to some extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, is the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral indignation. Indeed the want of sincerity--the evidence of the literary exercise--injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We do not, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist--a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one may be given:--

"A gentle squire would gladly entertain Into his house some trencher-chaplain;[30] Some willing man that might instruct his sons And that would stand to good conditions. First, that he lie upon the truckle bed, Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head. Second, that he do, on no default,[31] Ever presume to sit above the salt. Third, that he never change his trencher twice. Fourth, that he use all common courtesies; Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait. Last, that he never his young master beat, But he must ask his mother to define, How many jerks she would his breech should line. All these observ'd he could contented be To give five marks and winter livery."

[30] "Chaplain"--trisyllable like "capellan."

[31] Missing syllable.

John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in 1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of his--_Pigmalion's Image_ and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same year by a sequel, entitled _The Scourge of Villainy_. In these works he called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both the earlier Satires and _The Scourge_ denounce lewd verse most fullmouthedly, _Pigmalion's Image_ is a poem in the _Venus and Adonis_ style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious descriptions. It was, in fact, with the _Satires_ and much similar work, formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate "society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make the identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writers who delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history of the world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusations against their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partly draws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however, has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent; and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not come quite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought.

"Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth'd Lamians, Shape-changing Proteans, damn'd Briarians, Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep, That ye thus dare unto Jove's palace creep? What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip, That ye dare strive on Hebe's cup to sip? Ye know Apollo's quiver is not spent, But can abate your daring hardiment. Python is slain, yet his accursed race Dare look divine Astrea in the face; Chaos return and with confusion Involve the world with strange disunion; For Pluto sits in that adorèd chair Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir. O hecatombs! O catastrophe! From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary! Prometheus, who celestial fire Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind, Whereby we might the depth of nature find, Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart Which did such deep philosophy impart To mortal men."

The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches of Marston's own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of the style, is very curious.

Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book _Skialetheia_, published between the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist from either, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is the same exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity of phrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But the fine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous _Transformed Metamorphosis_, attributed to the powerful but extravagant dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing:--

"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto, Whereon in female shape a serpent stands. Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow, With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants, And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts The pleasure that doth seem there to be found, She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.

"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue; The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale There minulize their pleasing lays anew, This welcome to the bitter bed of rue; This little room will scarce two wights contain T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.

"But next thereto adjoins a spacious room, More fairly fair adorned than the other: (O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom, That to these shadows hath his mind given over) For (O) he never shall his soul recover: If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack And his repentant hand him hales not back."[32]

[32] Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna of fancy,--a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from minurizô, "I sing." "To awhape" = "to confound."

We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy and the serene loveliness of _The Faërie Queene_.

##