part I

object to in our author’s criticism is his abuse of Marston; and that, not because he says what is severe, but because he says what is not true of him. Anger may sharpen our insight into men’s defects; but nothing should make us blind to their excellences. The whole passage is, however, so curious in itself (like the Edinburgh Review lately published for the year 1755) that I cannot forbear quoting a great part of it. We find in the list of candidates for praise many a name—

‘That like a trumpet, makes the spirits dance:’

there are others that have long since sunk to the bottom of the stream of time, and no Humane Society of Antiquarians and Critics is ever likely to fish them up again.

‘Read the names,’ says Judicio.

_‘Ingenioso._ So I will, if thou wilt help me to censure them.

Edmund Spenser, Henry Constable, Thomas Lodge, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, John Davis, John Marston, Kit. Marlowe, William Shakespear;’ and one Churchyard [who is consigned to an untimely grave.]

‘Good men and true, stand together, hear your censure: what’s thy judgment of Spenser?

_Jud._ A sweeter swan than ever sung in Po; A shriller nightingale than ever blest The prouder groves of self-admiring Rome. Blithe was each valley, and each shepherd proud, While he did chaunt his rural minstrelsy. Attentive was full many a dainty ear: Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tongue, While sweetly of his Faëry Queen he sung; While to the water’s fall he tuned her fame, And in each bark engrav’d Eliza’s name. And yet for all, this unregarding soil Unlaced the line of his desired life, Denying maintenance for his dear relief; Careless even to prevent his exequy, Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye.

_Ing._ Pity it is that gentler wits should breed, Where thick-skinn’d chuffs laugh at a scholar’s need. But softly may our honour’d ashes rest, That lie by merry Chaucer’s noble chest.

But I pray thee proceed briefly in thy censure, that I may be proud of myself, as in the first, so in the last, my censure may jump with thine. Henry Constable, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Watson.

_Jud._ Sweet Constable doth take the wondering ear, And lays it up in willing prisonment: Sweet honey-dropping Daniel doth wage War with the proudest big Italian, That melts his heart in sugar’d sonnetting. Only let him more sparingly make use Of others’ wit, and use his own the more, That well may scorn base imitation. For Lodge and Watson, men of some desert, Yet subject to a critic’s marginal: Lodge for his oar in every paper boat, He that turns over Galen every day, To sit and simper Euphues’ legacy.

_Ing._ Michael Drayton.

_Jud._ Drayton’s sweet Muse is like a sanguine dye, Able to ravish the rash gazer’s eye.

_Ing._ However, he wants one true note of a poet of our times; and that is this, he cannot swagger in a tavern, nor domineer in a hot-house. John Davis—

_Jud._ Acute John Davis, I affect thy rhymes, That jerk in hidden charms these looser times: Thy plainer verse, thy unaffected vein, Is graced with a fair and sweeping train. John Marston—

_Jud._ What, Monsieur Kinsayder, put up man, put up for shame, Methinks he is a ruffian in his style, Withouten bands or garters’ ornament. He quaffs a cup of Frenchman’s helicon, Then royster doyster in his oily terms Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoe’er he meets, And strews about Ram-alley meditations. Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch’d terms, Cleanly to gird our looser libertines? Give him plain naked words stript from their shirts, That might beseem plain-dealing Aretine.

_Ing._ Christopher Marlowe—

_Jud._ Marlowe was happy in his buskin’d Muse; Alas! unhappy in his life and end. Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.

_Ing._ Our theatre hath lost, Pluto hath got A tragic penman for a dreary plot. Benjamin Jonson.

_Jud._ The wittiest fellow of a bricklayer in England.

_Ing._ A mere empirick, one that gets what he hath by observation, and makes only nature privy to what he endites: so slow an inventor, that he were better betake himself to his old trade of bricklaying, a blood whoreson, as confident now in making of a book, as he was in times past in laying of a brick.

William Shakespear.

_Jud._ Who loves Adonis’ love, or Lucrece’ rape, His sweeter verse contains heart-robbing life, Could but a graver subject him content, Without love’s lazy foolish languishment.’

This passage might seem to ascertain the date of the piece, as it must be supposed to have been written before Shakespeare had become known as a dramatic poet. Yet he afterwards introduces Kempe the actor talking with Burbage, and saying, ‘Few (of the University) pen plays well: they smell too much of that writer Ovid, and of that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here’s our fellow Shakespear puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson too.’—There is a good deal of discontent in all this; but the author complains of want of success in a former attempt, and appears not to have been on good terms with fortune. The miseries of a poet’s life form one of the favourite topics of The Return from Parnassus, and are treated, as if by some one who had ‘felt them knowingly.’ Thus Philomusus and Studioso chaunt their griefs in concert.

‘_Phil._ Bann’d be those hours, when ‘mongst the learned throng, By Granta’s muddy bank we whilom sung.

_Stud._ Bann’d be that hill which learned wits adore, Where erst we spent our stock and little store.

_Phil._ Bann’d be those musty mews, where we have spent Our youthful days in paled languishment.

_Stud._ Bann’d be those cozening arts that wrought our woe, Making us wandering pilgrims to and fro....

_Phil._ Curst be our thoughts whene’er they dream of hope; Bann’d be those haps that henceforth flatter us, When mischief dogs us still, and still for aye, From our first birth until our burying day. In our first gamesome age, our doting sires Carked and car’d to have us lettered: Sent us to Cambridge where our oil is spent: Us our kind college from the teat did tent, And forced us walk before we weaned were. From that time since wandered have we still In the wide world, urg’d by our forced will; Nor ever have we happy fortune tried; Then why should hope with our rent state abide?’

‘Out of our proof we speak.’—This sorry matter-of-fact retrospect of the evils of a college-life is very different from the hypothetical aspirations after its incommunicable blessings expressed by a living writer of true genius and a lover of true learning, who does not seem to have been cured of the old-fashioned prejudice in favour of classic lore, two hundred years after its vanity and vexation of spirit had been denounced in the Return from Parnassus:

‘I was not train’d in Academic bowers; And to those learned streams I nothing owe, Which copious from those fair twin founts do flow: Mine have been any thing but studious hours. Yet can I fancy, wandering ‘mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap. My brow seems tightening with the Doctor’s cap; And I walk gowned; feel unusual powers. Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech; Old Ramus’ ghost is busy at my brain, And my skull teems with notions infinite: Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen’s vein; And half had stagger’d that stout Stagyrite.[28]

Thus it is that our treasure always lies, where our knowledge does not; and fortunately enough perhaps; for the empire of imagination is wider and more prolific than that of experience.

The author of the old play, whoever he was, appears to have belonged to that class of mortals, who, as Fielding has it, feed upon their own hearts; who are egotists the wrong way, ‘made desperate by too quick a sense of constant infelicity;’ and have the same intense uneasy consciousness of their own defects that most men have self-complacency in their supposed advantages. Thus venting the dribblets of his spleen still upon himself, he prompts the Page to say, ‘A mere scholar is a creature that can strike fire in the morning at his tinder-box, put on a pair of lined slippers, sit reuming till dinner, and then go to his meat when the bell rings; one that hath a peculiar gift in a cough, and a licence to spit: or if you will have him defined by negatives, he is one that cannot make a good leg, one that cannot eat a mess of broth cleanly, one that cannot ride a horse without spur-galling, one that cannot salute a woman, and look on her directly, one that cannot——’

If I was not afraid of being tedious, I might here give the examination of Signor Immerito, a raw ignorant clown (whose father has purchased him a living) by Sir Roderick and the Recorder, which throws considerable light on the state of wit and humour, as well as of ecclesiastical patronage in the reign of Elizabeth. It is to be recollected, that one of the titles of this play is A Scourge for Simony.

‘_Rec._ For as much as nature has done her part in making you a handsome likely man—in the next place some art is requisite for the perfection of nature: for the trial whereof, at the request of my worshipful friend, I will in some sort propound questions fit to be resolved by one of your profession. Say what is a person, that was never at the university?

_Im._ A person that was never in the university, is a living creature that can eat a tythe pig.

_Rec._ Very well answered: but you should have added—and must be officious to his patron. Write down that answer, to shew his learning in logic.

_Sir Rad._ Yea, boy, write that down: very learnedly, in good faith. I pray now let me ask you one question that I remember, whether is the masculine gender or the feminine more worthy?

_Im._ The feminine, Sir.

_Sir Rad._ The right answer, the right answer. In good faith, I have been of that mind always: write, boy, that, to shew he is a grammarian.

_Rec._ What university are you of?

_Im._ Of none.

_Sir Rad._ He tells truth: to tell truth is an excellent virtue: boy, make two heads, one for his learning, another for his virtues, and refer this to the head of his virtues, not of his learning. Now, Master Recorder, if it please you, I will examine him in an author, that will sound him to the depth; a book of astronomy, otherwise called an almanack.

_Rec._ Very good, Sir Roderick; it were to be wished there were no other book of humanity; then there would not be such busy state-prying fellows as are now a-days. Proceed, good Sir.

_Sir Rad._ What is the dominical letter?

_Im._ C, Sir, and please your worship.

_Sir Rad._ A very good answer, a very good answer, the very answer of the book. Write down that, and refer it to his skill in philosophy. How many days hath September?

_Im._ Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November, February hath twenty-eight alone, and all the rest hath thirty and one.

_Sir Rad._ Very learnedly, in good faith: he hath also a smack in poetry. Write down that, boy, to shew his learning in poetry. How many miles from Waltham to London?

_Im._ Twelve, Sir.

_Sir Rad._ How many from New Market to Grantham?

_Im._ Ten, Sir.

_Sir Rad._ Write down that answer of his, to shew his learning in arithmetic.

_Page._ He must needs be a good arithmetician that counted [out] money so lately.

_Sir Rad._ When is the new moon?

_Im._ The last quarter, the 5th day, at two of the clock, and thirty-eight minutes in the morning.

_Sir Rad._ How call you him that is weather-wise?

_Rec._ A good astronomer.

_Sir Rad._ Sirrah, boy, write him down for a good astronomer. What day of the month lights the queen’s day on?

_Im._ The 17th of November.

_Sir Rad._ Boy, refer this to his virtues, and write him down a good subject.

_Page._ Faith, he were an excellent subject for two or three good wits: he would make a fine ass for an ape to ride upon.

_Sir Rad._ And these shall suffice for the parts of his learning. Now it remains to try, whether you be a man of a good utterance, that is, whether you can ask for the strayed heifer with the white face, as also chide the boys in the belfry, and bid the sexton whip out the dogs: let me hear your voice.

_Im._ If any man or woman—

_Sir Rad._ That’s too high.

_Im._ If any man or woman—

_Sir Rad._ That’s too low.

_Im._ If any man or woman can tell any tidings of a horse with four feet, two ears, that did stray about the seventh hour, three minutes in the forenoon, the fifth day—

_Sir Rad._ Boy, write him down for a good utterance. Master Recorder, I think he hath been examined sufficiently.

_Rec._ Aye, Sir Roderick, ’tis so: we have tried him very thoroughly.

_Page._ Aye, we have taken an inventory of his good parts, and prized them accordingly.

_Sir Rad._ Signior Immerito, forasmuch as we have made a double trial of thee, the one of your learning, the other of your erudition; it is expedient, also, in the next place, to give you a few exhortations, considering the greatest clerks are not the wisest men: this is therefore first to exhort you to abstain from controversies; secondly, not to gird at men of worship, such as myself, but to use yourself discreetly; thirdly, not to speak when any man or woman coughs: do so, and in so doing, I will persevere to be your worshipful friend and loving patron. Lead Immerito in to my son, and let him dispatch him, and remember my tythes to be reserved, paying twelve-pence a-year.’

Gammer Gurton’s Needle[29] is a still older and more curious relic; and is a regular comedy in five acts, built on the circumstance of an old woman having lost her needle, which throws the whole village into confusion, till it is at last providentially found sticking in an unlucky part of Hodge’s dress. This must evidently have happened at a time when the manufacturers of Sheffield and Birmingham had not reached the height of perfection which they have at present done. Suppose that there is only one sewing-needle in a parish, that the owner, a diligent notable old dame, loses it, that a mischief-making wag sets it about that another old woman has stolen this valuable instrument of household industry, that strict search is made every where in-doors for it in vain, and that then the incensed parties sally forth to scold it out in the open air, till words end in blows, and the affair is referred over to the higher authorities, and we shall have an exact idea (though perhaps not so lively a one) of what passes in this authentic document between Gammer Gurton and her Gossip Dame Chat, Dickon the Bedlam (the causer of these harms), Hodge, Gammer Gurton’s servant, Tyb her maid, Cocke, her ‘prentice boy, Doll, Scapethrift, Master Baillie his master, Doctor Rat, the Curate, and Gib the Cat, who may be fairly reckoned one of the _dramatis personæ_, and performs no mean part.

‘Gog’s crosse, Gammer’ (says Cocke the boy), ‘if ye will laugh, look in but at the door, And see how Hodge lieth tumbling and tossing amidst the floor, Raking there, some fire to find among the ashes dead’ [That is, to light a candle to look for the lost needle], ‘Where there is not a spark so big as a pin’s head: At last in a dark corner two sparks he thought he sees, Which were indeed nought else but Gib our cat’s two eyes. Puff, quoth Hodge; thinking thereby to have fire without doubt; With that Gib shut her two eyes, and so the fire was out; And by and by them open’d, even as they were before, With that the sparks appeared, even as they had done of yore: And even as Hodge blew the fire, as he did think, Gib, as he felt the blast, strait way began to wink; Till Hodge fell of swearing, as came best to his turn; The fire was sure bewitch’d, and therefore would not burn. At last Gib up the stairs, among old posts and pins, And Hodge he hied him after, till broke were both his shins; Cursing and swearing oaths, were never of his making, That Gib would fire the house, if that she were not taken.’

Diccon the strolling beggar (or Bedlam, as he is called) steals a piece of bacon from behind Gammer Gurton’s door, and in answer to Hodge’s complaint of being dreadfully pinched for hunger, asks—

‘Why Hodge, was there none at home thy dinner for to set?

_Hodge._ Gog’s bread, Diccon, I came too late, was nothing there to get: Gib (a foul fiend might on her light) lick’d the milk-pan so clean: See Diccon, ’twas not so well wash’d this seven year, I ween. A pestilence light on all ill luck, I had thought yet for all this, Of a morsel of bacon behind the door, at worst I should not miss: But when I sought a slip to cut, as I was wont to do, Gog’s souls, Diccon, Gib our cat had eat the bacon too.’

Hodge’s difficulty in making Diccon understand what the needle is which his dame has lost, shows his superior acquaintance with the conveniences and modes of abridging labour in more civilised life, of which the other had no idea.

‘_Hodge._ Has she not gone, trowest now thou, and lost her neele?’ [So it is called here.]

‘_Dic._ (_says staring_). Her eel, Hodge! Who fished of late? That was a dainty dish.’

_Hodge._ Tush, tush, her neele, her neele, her neele, man, ’tis neither flesh nor fish: A little thing with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller [silver], Small, long, sharp at the point, and strait as any pillar.

_Dic._ I know not what a devil thou meanest, thou bring’st me more in doubt.

_Hodge._ (_answers with disdain_). Know’st not with what Tom tailor’s man sits broching through a clout? A neele, a neele, my Gammer’s neele is gone.’

The rogue Diccon threatens to shew Hodge a spirit; but though Hodge runs away through pure fear before it has time to appear, he does not fail, in the true spirit of credulity, to give a faithful and alarming account of what he did not see to his mistress, concluding with a hit at the Popish Clergy.

‘By the mass, I saw him of late call up a great black devil. Oh, the knave cried, ho, ho, he roared and he thunder’d; And ye had been there, I am sure you’d murrainly ha’ wonder’d.

_Gam._ Wast not thou afraid, Hodge, to see him in his place?

_Hodge_ (_lies and says_). No, and he had come to me, should have laid him on his face, Should have promised him.

_Gam._ But, Hodge, had he no horns to push?

_Hodge._ As long as your two arms. Saw ye never Friar Rush, Painted on a cloth, with a fine long cow’s tail, And crooked cloven feet, and many a hooked nail? For all the world (if I should judge) should reckon him his brother: Look even what face Friar Rush had, the devil had such another.’

He then adds (quite apocryphally) while he is in for it, that ‘the devil said plainly that Dame Chat had got the needle,’ which makes all the disturbance. The same play contains the well-known good old song, beginning and ending—

‘Back and side, go bare, go bare, Both foot and hand go cold: But belly, God send thee good ale enough, Whether it be new or old. I cannot eat but little meat, My stomach is not good; But sure I think, that I can drink With him that wears a hood: Though I go bare, take ye no care; I nothing am a-cold: I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old. Back and side go bare, &c.

I love no roast, but a nut-brown toast, And a crab laid in the fire: A little bread shall do me stead, Much bread I not desire. No frost nor snow, no wind I trow, Can hurt me if I wolde, I am so wrapt and thoroughly lapt In jolly good ale and old. Back and side go bare, &c.

And Tib, my wife, that as her life Loveth well good ale to seek; Full oft drinks she, till ye may see The tears run down her cheek: Then doth she troll to me the bowl, Even as a malt-worm sholde: And saith, sweetheart, I took my part Of this jolly good ale and old. Back and side go bare, go bare, Both foot and hand go cold: But belly, God send thee good ale enough, Whether it be new or old.

Such was the wit, such was the mirth of our ancestors:—homely, but hearty; coarse perhaps, but kindly. Let no man despise it, for ‘Evil to him that evil thinks.’ To think it poor and beneath notice because it is not just like ours, is the same sort of hypercriticism that was exercised by the person who refused to read some old books, because they were ‘such very poor spelling.’ The meagreness of their literary or their bodily fare was at least relished by themselves; and this is better than a surfeit or an indigestion. It is refreshing to look out of ourselves sometimes, not to be always holding the glass to our own peerless perfections: and as there is a dead wall which always intercepts the prospect of the future from our view (all that we can see beyond it is the heavens), it is as well to direct our eyes now and then without scorn to the page of history, and repulsed in our attempts to penetrate the secrets of the next six thousand years, not to turn our backs on old long syne!

The other detached plays of nearly the same period of which I proposed to give a cursory account, are Green’s Tu Quoque, Microcosmus, Lingua, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Pinner of Wakefield, and the Spanish Tragedy. Of the spurious plays attributed to Shakespear, and to be found in the editions of his works, such as the Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, The Widow of Watling Street, &c. I shall say nothing here, because I suppose the reader to be already acquainted with them, and because I have given a general account of them in another work.

Green’s Tu Quoque, by George Cook, a contemporary of Shakespear’s, is so called from Green the actor, who played the part of Bubble in this very lively and elegant comedy, with the cant phrase of _Tu Quoque_ perpetually in his mouth. The double change of situation between this fellow and his master, Staines, each passing from poverty to wealth, and from wealth to poverty again, is equally well imagined and executed. A gay and gallant spirit pervades the whole of it; wit, poetry, and morality, each take their turn in it. The characters of the two sisters, Joyce and Gertrude, are very skilfully contrasted, and the manner in which they mutually betray one another into the hands of their lovers, first in the spirit of mischief, and afterwards of retaliation, is quite dramatic. ‘If you cannot find in your heart to tell him you love him, I’ll sigh it out for you. Come, we little creatures must help one another,’ says the Madcap to the Madonna. As to style and matter, this play has a number of pigeon-holes full of wit and epigrams which are flying out in almost every sentence. I could give twenty pointed conceits, wrapped up in good set terms. Let one or two at the utmost suffice. A bad hand at cards is thus described. Will Rash says to Scattergood, ‘Thou hast a wild hand indeed: thy small cards shew like a troop of rebels, and the knave of clubs their chief leader.’ Bubble expresses a truism very gaily on finding himself equipped like a gallant—‘How apparel makes a man respected! The very children in the street do adore me.’ We find here the first mention of Sir John Suckling’s ‘melancholy hat,’ as a common article of wear—the same which he chose to clap on Ford’s head, and the first instance of the theatrical _double entendre_ which has been repeated ever since of an actor’s ironically abusing himself in his feigned character.

‘_Gervase._ They say Green’s a good clown.

_Bubble._ (_Played by Green, says_) Green! Green’s an ass.

_Scattergood._ Wherefore do you say so?

_Bub._ Indeed, I ha’ no reason; for they say he’s as like me as ever he can look.’

The following description of the dissipation of a fortune in the hands of a spendthrift is ingenious and beautiful.

‘Know that which made him gracious in your eyes, And gilded o’er his imperfections, Is wasted and consumed even like ice, Which by the vehemence of heat dissolves, And glides to many rivers: so his wealth, That felt a prodigal hand, hot in expence, Melted within his gripe, and from his coffers Ran like a violent stream to other men’s.’

Microcosmus, by Thomas Nabbes, is a dramatic mask or allegory, in which the Senses, the Soul, a Good and a Bad Genius, Conscience, &c. contend for the dominion of a man; and notwithstanding the awkwardness of the machinery, is not without poetry, elegance, and originality. Take the description of morning as a proof.

‘What do I see? Blush, grey-eyed morn and spread Thy purple shame upon the mountain tops: Or pale thyself with envy, since here comes A brighter Venus than the dull-eyed star That lights thee up.’

But what are we to think of a play, of which the following is a literal list of the _dramatis personæ_?

‘NATURE, a fair woman, in a white robe, wrought with birds, beasts, fruits, flowers, clouds, stars, &c.; on her head a wreath of flowers interwoven with stars.

JANUS, a man with two faces, signifying Providence, in a yellow robe, wrought with snakes, as he is _deus anni_: on his head a crown. He is Nature’s husband.

FIRE, a fierce-countenanced young man, in a flame-coloured robe, wrought with gleams of fire; his hair red, and on his head a crown of flames. His creature a Vulcan.

AIR, a young man of a variable countenance, in a blue robe; wrought with divers-coloured clouds; his hair blue; and on his head a wreath of clouds. His creature a giant or silvan.

WATER, a young woman in a sea-green robe, wrought with waves; her hair a sea-green, and on her head a wreath of sedge bound about with waves. Her creature a syren.

EARTH, a young woman of a sad countenance, in a grass-green robe, wrought with sundry fruits and flowers; her hair black, and on her head a chaplet of flowers. Her creature a pigmy.

LOVE, a Cupid in a flame-coloured habit; bow and quiver, a crown of flaming hearts &c.

PHYSANDER, a perfect grown man, in a long white robe, and on his head a garland of white lilies and roses mixed. His name ἀπο τῆς φύσεος καὶ τῶ ἀνδρος.

CHOLER, a fencer; his clothes red.

BLOOD, a dancer, in a watchet-coloured suit.

PHLEGM, a physician, an old man; his doublet white and black; trunk hose.

MELANCHOLY, a musician: his complexion, hair, and clothes, black; a lute in his hand. He is likewise an amorist.

BELLANIMA, a lovely woman, in a long white robe; on her head a wreath of white flowers. She signifies the soul.

BONUS GENIUS, an angel, in a like white robe; wings and wreath white.

MALUS GENIUS, a devil, in a black robe; hair, wreath, and wings, black.

The Five Senses—SEEING, a chambermaid; HEARING, the usher of the hall; SMELLING, a huntsman or gardener; TASTING, a cook; TOUCHING, a gentleman usher.

SENSUALITY, a wanton woman, richly habited, but lasciviously dressed, &c.

TEMPERANCE, a lovely woman, of a modest countenance; her garments plain, but decent, &c.

A Philosopher,│all properly habited. An Eremite, │ A Ploughman, │ A Shepherd, │

Three Furies as they are commonly fancied.

FEAR, the Crier of the Court, with a tipstaff.

CONSCIENCE, the Judge of the Court.

HOPE and DESPAIR, an advocate and a lawyer.

The other three Virtues, as they are frequently expressed by painters.

The Heroes, in bright antique habits, &c.

The front of a workmanship, proper to the fancy of the rest, adorned with brass figures of angels and devils, with several inscriptions; the title is an escutcheon, supported by an Angel and a Devil. Within the arch a continuing perspective of ruins, which is drawn still before the other scenes, whilst they are varied.

THE INSCRIPTIONS.

_Hinc gloria._ _Hinc pœna._ _Appetitus boni._ _Appetitus Mali._’

Antony Brewer’s Lingua (1607) is of the same cast. It is much longer as well as older than Microcosmus. It is also an allegory celebrating the contention of the Five Senses for the crown of superiority, and the pretensions of Lingua or the Tongue to be admitted as a sixth sense. It is full of child’s play, and old wives’ tales; but is not unadorned with passages displaying strong good sense, and powers of fantastic description.

Mr. Lamb has quoted two passages from it—the admirable enumeration of the characteristics of different languages, ‘The Chaldee wise, the Arabian physical,’ &c.; and the striking description of the ornaments and uses of tragedy and comedy. The dialogue between Memory, Common Sense, and Phantastes, is curious and worth considering.

‘_Common Sense._ Why, good father, why are you so late now-a-days?

_Memory._ Thus ’tis; the most customers I remember myself to have, are, as your lordship knows, scholars, and now-a-days the most of them are become critics, bringing me home such paltry things to lay up for them, that I can hardly find them again.

_Phantastes._ Jupiter, Jupiter, I had thought these flies had bit none but myself: do critics tickle you, i’faith?

_Mem._ Very familiarly: for they must know of me, forsooth, how every idle word is written in all the musty moth-eaten manuscripts, kept in all the old libraries in every city, betwixt England and Peru.

_Common Sense._ Indeed I have noted these times to affect antiquities more than is requisite.

_Mem._ I remember in the age of Assaracus and Ninus, and about the wars of Thebes, and the siege of Troy, there were few things committed to my charge, but those that were well worthy the preserving; but now every trifle must be wrapp’d up in the volume of eternity. A rich pudding-wife, or a cobbler, cannot die but I must immortalize his name with an epitaph; a dog cannot water in a nobleman’s shoe, but it must be sprinkled into the chronicles; so that I never could remember my treasure more full, and never emptier of honourable and true heroical

## actions.’

And again Mendacio puts in his claim with great success to many works of uncommon merit.

‘_Appe._ Thou, boy! how is this possible? Thou art but a child, and there were sects of philosophy before thou wert born.

_Men._ Appetitus, thou mistakest me; I tell thee three thousand years ago was Mendacio born in Greece, nursed in Crete, and ever since honoured every where: I’ll be sworn I held old Homer’s pen when he writ his Iliads and his Odysseys.

_Appe._ Thou hadst need, for I hear say he was blind.

_Men._ I helped Herodotus to pen some part of his Muses; lent Pliny ink to write his history; rounded Rabelais in the ear when he historified Pantagruel; as for Lucian, I was his genius; O, those two books _de Vera Historia_, however they go under his name, I’ll be sworn I writ them every tittle.

_Appe._ Sure as I am hungry, thou’lt have it for lying. But hast thou rusted this latter time for want of exercise?

_Men._ Nothing less. I must confess I would fain have jogged Stow and great Hollingshed on their elbows, when they were about their chronicles; and, as I remember, Sir John Mandevill’s travels, and a great part of the Decad’s, were of my doing: but for the Mirror of Knighthood, Bevis of Southampton, Palmerin of England, Amadis of Gaul, Huon de Bourdeaux, Sir Guy of Warwick, Martin Marprelate, Robin Hood, Garagantua, Gerilion, and a thousand such exquisite monuments as these, no doubt but they breathe in my breath up and down.’

The Merry Devil of Edmonton which has been sometimes attributed to Shakespear, is assuredly not unworthy of him. It is more likely, however, both from the style and subject-matter to have been Heywood’s than any other person’s. It is perhaps the first example of sentimental comedy we have—romantic, sweet, tender, it expresses the feelings of honour, of love, and friendship in their utmost delicacy, enthusiasm, and purity. The names alone, Raymond Mounchersey, Frank Jerningham, Clare, Millisent, ‘sound silver sweet like lovers’ tongues by night.’ It sets out with a sort of story of Doctor Faustus, but this is dropt as jarring on the tender chords of the rest of the piece. The wit of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is as genuine as the poetry. Mine Host of the George is as good a fellow as Boniface, and the deer-stealing scenes in the forest between him, Sir John the curate, Smug the smith, and Banks the miller, are ‘very honest knaveries,’ as Sir Hugh Evans has it. The air is delicate, and the deer, shot by their cross-bows, fall without a groan! Frank Jerningham says to Clare,

‘The way lies right: hark, the clock strikes at Enfield: what’s the hour?

_Young Clare._ Ten, the bell says.

_Jern._ It was but eight when we set out from Cheston: Sir John and his sexton are at their ale to-night, the clock runs at random.

_Y. Clare._ Nay, as sure as thou livest, the villainous vicar is abroad in the chase. The priest steals more venison than half the country.

_Jern._ Millisent, how dost thou?

_Mil._ Sir, very well. I would to God we were at Brian’s lodge.’

A volume might be written to prove this last answer Shakespear’s, in which the tongue says one thing in one line, and the heart contradicts it in the next; but there were other writers living in the time of Shakespear, who knew these subtle windings of the passions besides him,—though none so well as he!

The Pinner of Wakefield, or George a Greene, is a pleasant interlude, of an early date, and the author unknown, in which kings and coblers, outlaws and maid Marians are ‘hail-fellow well met,’ and in which the features of the antique world are made smiling and amiable enough. Jenkin, George a Greene’s servant, is a notorious wag. Here is one of his pretended pranks.

_Jenkin._ This fellow comes to me, And takes me by the bosom: you slave, Said he, hold my horse, and look He takes no cold in his feet. No, marry shall he, Sir, quoth I, I’ll lay my cloak underneath him. I took my cloak, spread it all along, And his horse on the midst of it.

_George._ Thou clown, did’st thou set his horse upon thy cloak?

_Jenk._ Aye, but mark how I served him. Madge and he was no sooner gone down into the ditch But I plucked out my knife, cut four holes in my cloak, and made his horse stand on the bare ground.’

The first part of Jeronymo is an indifferent piece of work, and the second, or the Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, is like unto it, except the interpolations idly said to have been added by Ben Jonson, relating to Jeronymo’s phrensy ‘which have all the melancholy madness of poetry, if not the inspiration.’

LECTURE VI ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, F. BEAUMONT, P. FLETCHER, DRAYTON, DANIEL, &C. SIR P. SIDNEY’S ARCADIA, AND OTHER WORKS.

I shall, in the present Lecture, attempt to give some idea of the lighter productions of the Muse in the period before us, in order to shew that grace and elegance are not confined entirely to later times, and shall conclude with some remarks on Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.

I have already made mention of the lyrical pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher. It appears from his poems, that many of these were composed by Francis Beaumont, particularly the very beautiful ones in the tragedy of the False One, the Praise of Love in that of Valentinian, and another in the Nice Valour or Passionate Madman, an Address to Melancholy, which is the perfection of this kind of writing.

‘Hence, all you vain delights; As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly: There’s nought in this life sweet, If man were wise to see ‘t, But only melancholy, Oh, sweetest melancholy. Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, A sight that piercing mortifies; A look that’s fasten’d to the ground, A tongue chain’d up without a sound; Fountain heads, and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves: Moon-light walks, when all the fowls Are warmly hous’d, save bats and owls; A midnight bell, a passing groan, These are the sounds we feed upon: Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley; Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.’

It has been supposed (and not without every appearance of good reason) that this pensive strain, ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ gave the first suggestion of the spirited introduction to Milton’s Il Penseroso.

‘Hence, vain deluding joys, The brood of folly without father bred!... But hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy, Hail, divinest melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, &c.’

The same writer thus moralises on the life of man, in a set of similes, as apposite as they are light and elegant.

‘Like to the falling of a star, Or as the flights of eagles are, Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue, Or silver drops of morning dew, Or like a wind that chafes the flood, Or bubbles which on water stood: Even such is man, whose borrow’d light Is straight call’d in and paid to night:— The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring intomb’d in autumn lies; The dew’s dried up, the star is shot, The flight is past, and man forgot.’

‘The silver foam which the wind severs from the parted wave’ is not more light or sparkling than this: the dove’s downy pinion is not softer and smoother than the verse. We are too ready to conceive of the poetry of that day, as altogether old-fashioned, meagre, squalid, deformed, withered and wild in its attire, or as a sort of uncouth monster, like ‘grim-visaged comfortless despair,’ mounted on a lumbering, unmanageable Pegasus, dragon-winged, and leaden-hoofed; but it as often wore a sylph-like form with Attic vest, with faery feet, and the butterfly’s gaudy wings. The bees were said to have come, and built their hive in the mouth of Plato when a child; and the fable might be transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of five and twenty. One of these writers makes Bellario the Page say to Philaster, who threatens to take his life—

——‘’Tis not a life; ’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.’

But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, growing reputation, cut off like a flower in its summer-pride, or like ‘the lily on its stalk green,’ which makes us repine at fortune and almost at nature, that seem to set so little store by their greatest favourites. The life of poets is or ought to be (judging of it from the light it lends to ours) a golden dream, full of brightness and sweetness, ‘lapt in Elysium;’ and it gives one a reluctant pang to see the splendid vision, by which they are attended in their path of glory, fade like a vapour, and their sacred heads laid low in ashes, before the sand of common mortals has run out. Fletcher too was prematurely cut off by the plague. Raphael died at four and thirty, and Correggio at forty. Who can help wishing that they had lived to the age of Michael Angelo and Titian? Shakespear might have lived another half-century, enjoying fame and repose, ‘now that his task was smoothly done,’ listening to the music of his name, and better still, of his own thoughts, without minding Rymer’s abuse of ‘the tragedies of the last age.’ His native stream of Avon would then have flowed with softer murmurs to the ear, and his pleasant birthplace, Stratford, would in that case have worn even a more gladsome smile than it does, to the eye of fancy!—Poets however have a sort of privileged after-life, which does not fall to the common lot: the rich and mighty are nothing but while they are living: their power ceases with them; but ‘the sons of memory, the great heirs of fame’ leave the best part of what was theirs, their thoughts, their verse, what they most delighted and prided themselves in, behind them—imperishable, incorruptible, immortal!—Sir John Beaumont (the brother of our dramatist) whose loyal and religious effusions are not worth much, very feelingly laments his brother’s untimely death in an epitaph upon him.

‘Thou should’st have followed me, but death to blame Miscounted years, and measured age by fame: So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines, Their praise grew swiftly; so thy life declines. Thy Muse, the hearer’s Queen, the reader’s Love, All ears, all hearts (but Death’s) could please and move.’

Beaumont’s verses addressed to Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, are a pleasing record of their friendship, and of the way in which they ‘fleeted the time carelessly’ as well as studiously ‘in the golden age’ of our poetry.

[_Lines sent from the Country with two unfinished Comedies, which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid._]

‘The sun which doth the greatest comfort bring To absent friends, because the self-same thing They know they see, however absent is, (Here our best hay-maker, forgive me this, It is our country style) in this warm shine I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine: Oh, we have water mixt with claret lees, Drink apt to bring in drier heresies Than here, good only for the sonnet’s strain, With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain:— Think with one draught a man’s invention fades, Two cups had quite spoil’d Homer’s Iliads. ’Tis liquor that will find out Sutclift’s wit, Like where he will, and make him write worse yet: Fill’d with such moisture, in most grievous qualms[30] Did Robert Wisdom write his singing psalms: And so must I do this: and yet I think It is a potion sent us down to drink By special providence, keep us from fights, Make us not laugh when we make legs to knights; ’Tis this that keeps our minds fit for our states, A medicine to obey our magistrates.

· · · · ·

Methinks the little wit I had is lost Since I saw you, for wit is like a rest Held up at tennis, which men do the best With the best gamesters. What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid! Hard words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtile flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolv’d to live a fool the rest Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past, wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly, Till that were cancell’d; and when that was gone, We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty, though but downright fools more wise.’

I shall not, in this place repeat Marlowe’s celebrated song, ‘Come live with me and be my love,’ nor Sir Walter Raleigh’s no less celebrated answer to it (they may both be found in Walton’s Complete Angler, accompanied with scenery and remarks worthy of them); but I may quote as a specimen of the high and romantic tone in which the poets of this age thought and spoke of each other the ‘Vision upon the conceipt of the Fairy Queen,’ understood to be by Sir Walter Raleigh.

‘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 Faery Queen: At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept; And from thenceforth 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 Heav’ns did pierce, Where Homer’s spright did tremble all for grief, And curst th’ access of that celestial thief.’

A higher strain of compliment cannot well be conceived than this, which raises your idea even of that which it disparages in the comparison, and makes you feel that nothing could have torn the writer from his idolatrous enthusiasm for Petrarch and his Laura’s tomb, but Spenser’s magic verses and diviner Faery Queen—the one lifted above mortality, the other brought from the skies!

The name of Drummond of Hawthornden is in a manner entwined in cypher with that of Ben Jonson. He has not done himself or Jonson any credit by his account of their conversation; but his Sonnets are in the highest degree elegant, harmonious, and striking. It appears to me that they are more in the manner of Petrarch than any others that we have, with a certain intenseness in the sentiment, an occasional glitter of thought, and uniform terseness of expression. The reader may judge for himself from a few examples.

‘I know that all beneath the moon decays, And what by mortals in this world is wrought In time’s great periods shall return to nought; That fairest states have fatal nights and days. I know that all the Muse’s heavenly lays, With toil of spright which are so dearly bought, As idle sounds, of few or none are sought; That there is nothing lighter than vain praise. I know frail beauty’s like the purple flow’r, To which one morn oft birth and death affords: That love a jarring is of minds’ accords, Where sense and will bring under reason’s pow’r. Know what I list, this all cannot me move, But that, alas! I both must write and love.’

Another—

‘Fair moon, who with thy cold and silver shine Mak’st sweet the horror of the dreadful night, Delighting the weak eye with smiles divine, Which Phœbus dazzles with his too much light; Bright queen of the first Heav’n, if in thy shrine By turning oft, and Heav’n’s eternal might, Thou hast not yet that once sweet fire of thine, Endymion, forgot, and lovers’ plight: If cause like thine may pity breed in thee, And pity somewhat else to it obtain, Since thou hast power of dreams as well as he That holds the golden rod and mortal chain; Now while she sleeps,[31] in doleful guise her show, These tears, and the black map of all my woe.’

This is the eleventh sonnet: the twelfth is full of vile and forced conceits, without any sentiment at all; such as calling the Sun ‘the Goldsmith of the stars,’ ‘the enameller of the moon,’ and ‘the Apelles of the flowers.’ This is as bad as Cowley or Sir Philip Sidney. Here is one that is worth a million of such quaint devices.

‘_To the Nightingale._

Dear chorister, who from these shadows sends,[32] Ere that the blushing morn dare show her light, Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends (Become all ear[33]) stars stay to hear thy plight. If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends, Who ne’er (not in a dream) did taste delight, May thee importune who like case pretends, And seem’st to joy in woe, in woe’s despite: Tell me (so may thou milder fortune try, And long, long sing!) for what thou thus complains,[32] Since winter’s gone, and sun in dappled sky Enamour’d smiles on woods and flow’ry plains? The bird, as if my questions did her move, With trembling wings sigh’d forth, ‘I love, I love.’

Or if a mixture of the Della Cruscan style be allowed to enshrine the true spirit of love and poetry, we have it in the following address to the river Forth, on which his mistress had embarked.

‘Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a chrystal plain, Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace The boat that earth’s perfections doth contain. Winds wonder, and through wondering hold your peace, Or if that you your hearts cannot restrain From sending sighs, feeling a lover’s case, Sigh, and in her fair hair yourselves enchain. Or take these sighs, which absence makes arise From my oppressed breast, and fill the sails, Or some sweet breath new brought from Paradise. The floods do smile, love o’er the winds prevails, And yet huge waves arise; the cause is this, The ocean strives with Forth the boat to kiss.’

This to the English reader will express the very soul of Petrarch, the molten breath of sentiment converted into the glassy essence of a set of glittering but still graceful conceits.

‘The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,’ and the critic that tastes poetry, ‘his ruin meets.’ His feet are clogged with its honey, and his eyes blinded with its beauties; and he forgets his proper vocation, which is to buz and sting. I am afraid of losing my way in Drummond’s ‘sugar’d sonnetting;’ and have determined more than once to break off abruptly; but another and another tempts the rash hand and curious eye, which I am loth not to give, and I give it accordingly: for if I did not write these Lectures to please myself, I am at least sure I should please nobody else. In fact, I conceive that what I have undertaken to do in this and former cases, is merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical _formulas_ of criticism that can do no good to any body. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or a ruler in my pocket, to see whether a poem is round or square, or to measure its mechanical dimensions, like a meter and alnager of poetry: it is not in my bond to look after excisable articles or contraband wares, or to exact severe penalties and forfeitures for trifling oversights, or to give formal notice of violent breaches of the three unities, of geography and chronology; or to distribute printed stamps and poetical licences (with blanks to be filled up) on Mount Parnassus. I do not come armed from top to toe with colons and semicolons, with glossaries and indexes, to adjust the spelling or reform the metre, or to prove by everlasting contradiction and querulous impatience, that former commentators did not know the meaning of their author, any more than I do, who am angry at them, only because I am out of humour with myself—as if the genius of poetry lay buried under the rubbish of the press; and the critic was the dwarf-enchanter who was to release its airy form from being stuck through with blundering points and misplaced commas; or to prevent its vital powers from being worm-eaten and consumed, letter by letter, in musty manuscripts and black-letter print. I do not think that is the way to learn ‘the gentle craft’ of poesy or to teach it to others:—to imbibe or to communicate its spirit; which if it does not disentangle itself and soar above the obscure and trivial researches of antiquarianism is no longer itself, ‘a Phœnix gazed by all.’ At least, so it appeared to me (it is for others to judge whether I was right or wrong). In a word, I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to ‘give a reason for the faith that was in me’ when necessary, and when in my power. This is what I have done, and what I must continue to do.

To return to Drummond.—I cannot but think that his Sonnets come as near as almost any others to the perfection of this kind of writing, which should embody a sentiment and every shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and place and humour, with the extravagance or lightness of a momentary impression, and should, when lengthened out into a series, form a history of the wayward moods of the poet’s mind, the turns of his fate; and imprint the smile or frown of his mistress in indelible characters on the scattered leaves. I will give the two following, and have done with this author.

‘In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs, To quench the fever burning in my veins: In vain (love’s pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains I over-run; vain help long absence brings. In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains To fly, and place my thoughts on other things. Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings, The more I move the greater are my pains. Desire, alas! desire a Zeuxis new, From the orient borrowing gold, from western skies Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes In every place her hair, sweet look and hue; That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain; My life lies in those eyes which have me slain.’

The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch’s description of the bower where he first saw Laura.

‘Alexis, here she stay’d, among these pines, Sweet hermitress, she did alone repair: Here did she spread the treasure of her hair, More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines; Here sat she by these musked eglantines; The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear: Her voice did sweeten here thy sugar’d lines, To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear. She here me first perceiv’d, and here a morn Of bright carnations did o’erspread her face: Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born, Here first I got a pledge of promised grace; But ah! what serves to have been made happy so, Sith passed pleasures double but new woe!’

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond’s Sonnets to Spenser’s; and they leave Sidney’s, picking their way through verbal intricacies and ‘thorny queaches,’[34] at an immeasurable distance behind. Drummond’s other poems have great, though not equal merit; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old English classics.

Ben Jonson’s detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by ‘the laborious foolery’ of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparagement of Ben Jonson’s comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in the following speech of Crites in Cynthia’s Revels.

‘Oh, how despised and base a thing is man, If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts Above the strain of flesh! But how more cheap, When even his best and understanding part (The crown and strength of all his faculties) Floats like a dead-drown’d body, on the stream Of vulgar humour, mix’d with common’st dregs: I suffer for their guilt now; and my soul (Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes) Is hurt with mere intention on their follies. Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me: Or is’t a rarity or some new object That strains my strict observance to this point: But such is the perverseness of our nature, That if we once but fancy levity, (How antic and ridiculous soever It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it, &c.’

Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self-reflection enough to apply this to himself. His tenaciousness on the score of critical objections does not prove that he was not conscious of them himself, but the contrary. The greatest egotists are those whom it is impossible to offend, because they are wholly and incurably blind to their own defects; or if they could be made to see them, would instantly convert them into so many beauty-spots and ornamental graces. Ben Jonson’s fugitive and lighter pieces are not devoid of the characteristic merits of that class of composition; but still often in the happiest of them, there is a specific gravity in the author’s pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his subject, though buoyed up for a time with art and painted plumes, and produces a strange mixture of the mechanical and fanciful, of poetry and prose, in his songs and odes. For instance, one of his most airy effusions is the Triumph of his Mistress: yet there are some lines in it that seem inserted almost by way of burlesque. It is however well worth repeating.

‘See the chariot at hand here of love, Wherein my lady rideth! Each that draws it is a swan or a dove; And well the car love guideth! As she goes all hearts do duty Unto her beauty: And enamour’d, do wish so they might But enjoy such a sight, That they still were to run by her side, Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. Do but look on her eyes, they do light All that love’s world compriseth! Do but look on her hair, it is bright As love’s star when it riseth! Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother Than words that soothe her: And from her arch’d brows, such a grace Sheds itself through the face, As alone there triumphs to the life All the gain, all the good of the elements’ strife.

Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touch’d it? Ha’ you mark’d but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutch’d it? Ha’ you felt _the wool of beaver_? Or swan’s down ever? Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar? Or _the nard in the fire_? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? Oh, so white! Oh so soft! Oh so sweet is she!’

His Discourse with Cupid, which follows, is infinitely delicate and _piquant_, and without one single blemish. It is a perfect ‘nest of spicery.’

‘Noblest Charis, you that are Both my fortune and my star! And do govern more my blood, Than the various moon the flood! Hear, what late discourse of you, Love and I have had; and true. ‘Mongst my Muses finding me, Where he chanc’t your name to see Set, and to this softer strain; ‘Sure,’ said he, ‘if I have brain, This here sung can be no other, By description, but my mother! So hath Homer prais’d her hair; So Anacreon drawn the air Of her face, and made to rise, Just about her sparkling eyes, Both her brows, bent like my bow. By her looks I do her know, Which you call my shafts. And see! Such my mother’s blushes be, As the bath your verse discloses In her cheeks, of milk and roses; Such as oft I wanton in. And, above her even chin, Have you plac’d the bank of kisses, Where you say, men gather blisses, Rip’ned with a breath more sweet, Than when flowers and west-winds meet. Nay, her white and polish’d neck, With the lace that doth it deck, Is my mother’s! hearts of slain Lovers, made into a chain! And between each rising breast Lies the valley, call’d my nest, Where I sit and proyne my wings After flight; and put new stings To my shafts! Her very name With my mother’s is the same.’— ‘I confess all,’ I replied, ‘And the glass hangs by her side, And the girdle ‘bout her waste, All is Venus: save unchaste. But, alas! thou seest the least Of her good, who is the best Of her sex; but could’st thou, Love, Call to mind the forms, that strove For the apple, and those three Make in one, the same were she. For this beauty yet doth hide Something more than thou hast spied. Outward grace weak love beguiles: She is Venus when she smiles, But she’s Juno when she walks, And Minerva when she talks.’

In one of the songs in Cynthia’s Revels, we find, amidst some very pleasing imagery, the origin of a celebrated line in modern poetry—

‘Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, &c.’

This has not even the merit of originality, which is hard upon it. Ben Jonson had said two hundred years before,

‘Oh, I could still (Like melting snow upon some craggy hill) Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a wither’d daffodil.’

His Ode to the Memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morrison, has been much admired, but I cannot but think it one of his most fantastical and perverse performances.

I cannot, for instance, reconcile myself to such stanzas as these.

—‘Of which we priests and poets say Such truths as we expect for happy men, And there he lives with memory; and Ben

THE STAND

Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went Himself to rest, Or taste a part of that full joy he meant To have exprest, In this bright asterism; Where it were friendship’s schism (Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry) To separate these twi— Lights, the Dioscori; And keep the one half from his Harry. But fate doth so alternate the design, While that in Heaven, this light on earth doth shine.’

This seems as if because he cannot without difficulty write smoothly, he becomes rough and crabbed in a spirit of defiance, like those persons who cannot behave well in company, and affect rudeness to show their contempt for the opinions of others.

His Epistles are particularly good, equally full of strong sense and sound feeling. They shew that he was not without friends, whom he esteemed, and by whom he was deservedly esteemed in return. The controversy started about his character is an idle one, carried on in the mere spirit of contradiction, as if he were either made up entirely of gall, or dipped in ‘the milk of human kindness.’ There is no necessity or ground to suppose either. He was no doubt a sturdy, plain-spoken, honest, well-disposed man, inclining more to the severe than the amiable side of things; but his good qualities, learning, talents, and convivial habits preponderated over his defects of temper or manners; and in a course of friendship some difference of character, even a little roughness or acidity, may relish to the palate; and olives may be served up with effect as well as sweetmeats. Ben Jonson, even by his quarrels and jealousies, does not seem to have been curst with the last and damning disqualification for friendship, heartless indifference. He was also what is understood by a _good fellow_, fond of good cheer and good company: and the first step for others to enjoy your society, is for you to enjoy theirs. If any one can do without the world, it is certain that the world can do quite as well without him. His ‘verses inviting a friend to supper,’ give us as familiar an idea of his private habits and character as his Epistle to Michael Drayton, that to Selden, &c., his lines to the memory of Shakespear, and his noble prose eulogy on Lord Bacon, in his disgrace, do a favourable one.

Among the best of these (perhaps the very best) is the address to Sir Robert Wroth, which besides its manly moral sentiments, conveys a strikingly picturesque description of rural sports and manners at this interesting period.

‘How blest art thou, canst love the country, Wroth, Whether by choice, or fate, or both! And though so near the city and the court, Art ta’en with neither’s vice nor sport: That at great times, art no ambitious guest Of sheriff’s dinner, or of mayor’s feast. Nor com’st to view the better cloth of state; The richer hangings, or the crown-plate; Nor throng’st (when masquing is) to have a sight Of the short bravery of the night; To view the jewels, stuffs, the pains, the wit There wasted, some not paid for yet! But canst at home in thy securer rest, Live with un-bought provision blest; Free from proud porches or their guilded roofs, ‘Mongst lowing herds and solid hoofs: Along the curled woods and painted meads, Through which a serpent river leads To some cool courteous shade, which he calls his, And makes sleep softer than it is! Or if thou list the night in watch to break, A-bed canst hear the loud stag speak, In spring oft roused for their master’s sport, Who for it makes thy house his court; Or with thy friends, the heart of all the year, Divid’st upon the lesser deer; In autumn, at the partrich mak’st a flight, And giv’st thy gladder guests the sight; And in the winter hunt’st the flying hare, More for thy exercise than fare; While all that follows, their glad ears apply To the full greatness of the cry: Or hawking at the river or the bush, Or shooting at the greedy thrush, Thou dost with some delight the day out-wear, Although the coldest of the year! The whil’st the several seasons thou hast seen Of flow’ry fields, of copses green, The mowed meadows, with the fleeced sheep, And feasts that either shearers keep; The ripened ears yet humble in their height, And furrows laden with their weight; The apple-harvest that doth longer last; The hogs return’d home fat from mast; The trees cut out in log; and those boughs made A fire now, that lent a shade! Thus Pan and Sylvan having had their rites, Comus puts in for new delights; And fills thy open hall with mirth and cheer, As if in Saturn’s reign it were; Apollo’s harp and Hermes’ lyre resound, Nor are the Muses strangers found: The rout of rural folk come thronging in, (Their rudeness then is thought no sin) Thy noblest spouse affords them welcome grace; And the great heroes of her race Sit mixt with loss of state or reverence. Freedom doth with degree dispense. The jolly wassail walks the often round, And in their cups their cares are drown’d: They think not then which side the cause shall leese, Nor how to get the lawyer fees. Such, and no other was that age of old, Which boasts t’ have had the head of gold. And such since thou canst make thine own content, Strive, Wroth, to live long innocent. Let others watch in guilty arms, and stand The fury of a rash command, Go enter breaches, meet the cannon’s rage, That they may sleep with scars in age. And show their feathers shot and colours torn, And brag that they were therefore born. Let this man sweat, and wrangle at the bar For every price in every jar And change possessions oftener with his breath, Than either money, war or death: Let him, than hardest sires, more disinherit, And each where boast it as his merit, To blow up orphans, widows, and their states; And think his power doth equal Fate’s. Let that go heap a mass of wretched wealth, Purchas’d by rapine, worse than stealth, And brooding o’er it sit, with broadest eyes, Not doing good, scarce when he dies. Let thousands more go flatter vice, and win, By being organs to great sin, Get place and honour, and be glad to keep The secrets, that shall breake their sleep: And, so they ride in purple, eat in plate, Though poyson, think it a great fate. But thou, my Wroth, if I can truth apply, Shalt neither that, nor this envy: Thy peace is made; and, when man’s state is well, ’Tis better, if he there can dwell. God wisheth none should wrack on a strange shelf; To him man’s dearer than t’ himself. And, howsoever we may think things sweet, He alwayes gives what he knows meet; Which who can use is happy: such be thou. Thy morning’s and thy evening’s vow Be thanks to him, and earnest prayer, to find A body sound, with sounder mind; To do thy country service, thy self right; That neither want do thee affright, Nor death; but when thy latest sand is spent, Thou mayst think life a thing but lent.’

Of all the poetical Epistles of this period, however, that of Daniel to the Countess of Cumberland, for weight of thought and depth of feeling, bears the palm. The reader will not peruse this effusion with less interest or pleasure, from knowing that it is a favourite with Mr. Wordsworth.

‘He that of such a height hath built his mind, And rear’d the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved pow’rs; 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 wilds of man survey! And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil, Where all the storms of passions mainly beat On flesh and blood: where honour, pow’r, 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 enterprize. Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails: Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still Conspires with pow’r, 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 this smoke of wit. Nor is he mov’d with all the thunder-cracks Of tyrants’ threats, or with the surly brow Of pow’r, 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 ally’d to earth) Cannot but pity the perplexed 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 deceived; 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.’

Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion is a work of great length and of unabated freshness and vigour in itself, though the monotony of the subject tires the reader. He describes each place with the accuracy of a topographer, and the enthusiasm of a poet, as if his Muse were the very _genius loci_. His Heroical Epistles are also excellent. He has a few lighter pieces, but none of exquisite beauty or grace. His mind is a rich marly soil that produces an abundant harvest, and repays the husbandman’s toil, but few flaunting flowers, the garden’s pride, grow in it, nor any poisonous weeds.

P. Fletcher’s Purple Island is nothing but a long enigma, describing the body of a man, with the heart and veins, and the blood circulating in them, under the fantastic designation of the Purple Island.

The other Poets whom I shall mention, and who properly belong to the age immediately following, were William Brown, Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, and Marvell. Brown was a pastoral poet, with much natural tenderness and sweetness, and a good deal of allegorical quaintness and prolixity. Carew was an elegant court-trifler. Herrick was an amorist, with perhaps more fancy than feeling, though he has been called by some the English Anacreon. Crashaw was a hectic enthusiast in religion and in poetry, and erroneous in both. Marvell deserves to be remembered as a true poet as well as patriot, not in the best of times.—I will, however, give short specimens from each of these writers, that the reader may judge for himself; and be led by his own curiosity, rather than my recommendation, to consult the originals. Here is one by T. Carew.

‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows, When June is past, the fading rose: For in your beauties, orient deep These flow’rs, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more, whither do stray The golden atoms of the day; For in pure love, Heaven did prepare Those powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more, whither doth haste The nightingale, when May is past; For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note.

Ask me no more, where those stars light, That downwards fall in dead of night; For in your eyes they sit, and there Fixed become, as in their sphere.

Ask me no more, if east or west The phœnix builds her spicy nest; For unto you at last she flies, And in your fragrant bosom dies.’

The Hue and Cry of Love, the Epitaphs on Lady Mary Villiers, and the Friendly Reproof to Ben Jonson for his angry Farewell to the stage, are in the author’s best manner. We may perceive, however, a frequent mixture of the superficial and common-place, with far-fetched and improbable conceits.

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite and threadbare. But neither is he likely to become so. He is a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. From his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary instead of a poet. One of his pieces is entitled

‘_The Rock of Rubies, and the Quarry of Pearls._

Some ask’d me where the rubies grew; And nothing I did say; But with my finger pointed to The lips of Julia.

Some ask’d how pearls did grow, and where; Then spoke I to my girl To part her lips, and shew them there The quarrelets of pearl.’

Now this is making a petrefaction both of love and poetry.

His poems, from their number and size, are ‘like the motes that play in the sun’s beams;’ that glitter to the eye of fancy, but leave no distinct impression on the memory. The two best are a translation of Anacreon, and a successful and spirited imitation of him.

‘_The Wounded Cupid._

Cupid, as he lay among Roses, by a bee was stung. Whereupon, in anger flying To his mother said thus, crying, Help, oh help, your boy’s a dying! And why, my pretty lad? said she. Then, blubbering, replied he, A winged snake has bitten me, Which country-people call a bee. At which she smiled; then with her hairs And kisses drying up his tears, Alas, said she, my wag! if this Such a pernicious torment is; Come, tell me then, how great’s the smart Of those thou woundest with thy dart?’

The Captive Bee, or the Little Filcher, is his own.

‘As Julia once a slumbering lay, It chanced a bee did fly that way, After a dew or dew-like show’r, To tipple freely in a flow’r. For some rich flow’r he took the lip Of Julia, and began to sip: But when he felt he suck’d from thence Honey, and in the quintessence; He drank so much he scarce could stir; So Julia took the pilferer. And thus surpris’d, as filchers use, He thus began himself to excuse: Sweet lady-flow’r! I never brought Hither the least one thieving thought; But taking those rare lips of yours For some fresh, fragrant, luscious flow’rs, I thought I might there take a taste, Where so much syrup ran at waste: Besides, know this, I never sting The flow’r that gives me nourishing; But with a kiss or thanks, do pay For honey that I bear away. This said, he laid his little scrip Of honey ‘fore her ladyship: And told her, as some tears did fall, That that he took, and that was all. At which she smil’d, and bid him go, And take his bag, but thus much know, When next he came a pilfering so, He should from her full lips derive Honey enough to fill his hive.’

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise, as appears to me his due, on another occasion: but the public are deaf, except to proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore give an example of the sweetness and power of his verse.

‘_To his Coy Mistress._

Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Should’st rubies find: I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast; But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should shew your heart. For, Lady, you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lye Desarts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor in thy marble vault shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long preserved virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now, therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapp’d pow’r. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball; And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Thorough the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.’

In Brown’s Pastorals, notwithstanding the weakness and prolixity of his general plan, there are repeated examples of single lines and passages of extreme beauty and delicacy, both of sentiment and description, such as the following Picture of Night.

‘Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd’s song, And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongue Talk’d to the echo; Satyrs broke their dance, And all the upper world lay in a trance, Only the curled streams soft chidings kept; And little gales that from the green leaf swept Dry summer’s dust, in fearful whisp’rings stirr’d, As loth to waken any singing bird.’

Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over the green lap of nature through almost every page of our author’s writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable others might be quoted.

His Philarete (the fourth song of the Shepherd’s Pipe) has been said to be the origin of Lycidas: but there is no resemblance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a friend. The Inner Temple Mask has also been made the foundation of Comus, with as little reason. But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after: and every writer that finds an ingenious or

## partial editor, will be made to set up his claim of originality against

him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged against the principal character in Paradise Lost (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this, we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw’s translation of Marino’s Sospetto d’Herode. The description of Satan alluded to, is given in the following stanzas:

‘Below the bottom of the great abyss, There where one centre reconciles all things, The world’s profound heart pants; there placed is Mischief’s old master; close about him clings A curl’d knot of embracing snakes, that kiss His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies.

The judge of torments, and the king of tears, He fills a burnish’d throne of quenchless fire; And for his old fair robes of light, he wears A gloomy mantle of dark flames; the tire That crowns his hated head, on high appears; Where seven tall horns (his empire’s pride) aspire; And to make up hell’s majesty, each horn Seven crested hydras horribly adorn.

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night, Startle the dull air with a dismal red; Such his fell glances as the fatal light Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead. From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite Of hell’s own stink, a worser stench is spread. His breath hell’s lightning is; and each deep groan Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone.

His flaming eyes’ dire exhalation Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath; Whose unconsum’d consumption preys upon The never-dying life of a long death. In this sad house of slow destruction (His shop of flames) he fries himself, beneath A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash, While his steel sides sound with his tail’s strong lash.’

This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton’s description.

——‘His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear’d Less than archangel ruin’d and the excess Of glory obscured.’

Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical _insignia_ of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the _ideal_ and classical. Certainly Milton’s mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton’s boldest imagery, though its effect is injured by the incongruous mixture above stated.

‘Struck with these great concurrences of things,[35] Symptoms so deadly unto death and him; Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings Eternally bind each rebellious limb. He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings, Which like two bosom’d sails[36] embrace the dim Air, with a dismal shade, but all in vain; Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain.

While thus heav’n’s highest counsels, by the low Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well, He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell. With his foul claws he fenced his furrow’d brow, And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night.’

The poet adds—

‘The while his twisted tail he knaw’d for spite.’

There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan’s soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time.

‘Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given? The nimblest of the lightning-winged loves? The fairest and the first-born smile of Heav’n? Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves, Reverently circled by the lesser seven: Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes Opprest the common people of the skies? Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine eyes Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shews?’ &c.

This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue: but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot reascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot, without a violent effort, picture to itself.

In our author’s account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton’s description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates.

‘Thrice howl’d the caves of night, and thrice the sound, Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes, Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound: At last her listening ears the noise o’ertakes, She lifts her sooty lamps, and looking round, A general hiss,[37] from the whole tire of snakes Rebounding through hell’s inmost caverns came, In answer to her formidable name.

‘Mongst all the palaces in hell’s command, No one so merciless as this of hers, The adamantine doors forever stand Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears. The wall’s inexorable steel, no hand Of time, or teeth of hungry ruin fears.’

On the whole, this poem, though Milton has undoubtedly availed himself of many ideas and passages in it, raises instead of lowering our conception of him, by shewing how much more he added to it than he has taken from it.

Crashaw’s translation of Strada’s description of the Contention between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not equal to Ford’s version of the same story in his Lover’s Melancholy. One line may serve as a specimen of delicate quaintness, and of Crashaw’s style in general.

‘And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings.’

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said, ‘he could not love the French Republic’—so I may say, that I cannot love the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, with all my good-will to it. It will not do for me, however, to imitate the summary petulance of the epigrammatist.

‘The reason why I cannot tell, But I don’t like you, Dr. Fell.’

I must give my reasons, ‘on compulsion,’ for not speaking well of a person like Sir Philip Sidney—

‘The soldier’s, scholar’s, courtier’s eye, tongue, sword, The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’

the splendour of whose personal accomplishments, and of whose wide-spread fame was, in his life time,

——‘Like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, that renders back His figure and his heat’—

a writer too who was universally read and enthusiastically admired for a century after his death, and who has been admired with scarce less enthusiastic, but with a more distant homage, for another century, after ceasing to be read.

We have lost the art of reading, or the privilege of writing, voluminously, since the days of Addison. Learning no longer weaves the interminable page with patient drudgery, nor ignorance pores over it with implicit faith. As authors multiply in number, books diminish in size; we cannot now, as formerly, swallow libraries whole in a single folio: solid quarto has given place to slender duodecimo, and the dingy letter-press contracts its dimensions, and retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless margin. Modern authorship is become a species of stenography: we contrive even to read by proxy. We skim the cream of prose without any trouble; we get at the quintessence of poetry without loss of time. The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy bullion of books is driven out of the market of learning, and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating medium of magazines and reviews. Those who are chiefly concerned in catering for the taste of others, and serving up critical opinions in a compendious, elegant, and portable form, are not forgetful of themselves: they are not scrupulously solicitous, idly inquisitive about the real merits, the _bona fide_ contents of the works they are deputed to appraise and value, any more than the reading public who employ them. They look no farther for the contents of the work than the title page, and pronounce a peremptory decision on its merits or defects by a glance at the name and party of the writer. This state of polite letters seems to admit of improvement in only one respect, which is to go a step further, and write for the amusement and edification of the world, accounts of works that were never either written or read at all, and to cry up or abuse the authors by name, although they have no existence but in the critic’s invention. This would save a great deal of labour in vain: anonymous critics might pounce upon the defenceless heads of fictitious candidates for fame and bread; reviews, from being novels founded upon facts, would aspire to be pure romances; and we should arrive at the _beau ideal_ of a commonwealth of letters, at the euthanasia of thought, and Millennium of criticism!

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia was written, those middle men, the critics, were not known. The author and reader came into immediate contact, and seemed never tired of each other’s company. We are more fastidious and dissipated: the effeminacy of modern taste would, I am afraid, shrink back affrighted at the formidable sight of this once popular work, which is about as long (_horresco referens!_) as all Walter Scott’s novels put together; but besides its size and appearance, it has, I think, other defects of a more intrinsic and insuperable nature. It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time which are grown obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic; not poetry, but casuistry; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author’s mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and maliciously, in order to aggrandize our idea of himself. Out of five hundred folio pages, there are hardly, I conceive, half a dozen sentences expressed simply and directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise the object, instead of displaying it in its true colours and real proportions. Every page is ‘with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er;’ his Muse is tattooed and tricked out like an Indian goddess. He writes a court-hand, with flourishes like a schoolmaster; his figures are wrought in chain-stitch. All his thoughts are forced and painful births, and may be said to be delivered by the Cæsarean operation. At last, they become distorted and ricketty in themselves; and before they have been cramped and twisted and swaddled into lifelessness and deformity. Imagine a writer to have great natural talents, great powers of memory and invention, an eye for nature, a knowledge of the passions, much learning and equal industry; but that he is so full of a consciousness of all this, and so determined to make the reader conscious of it at every step, that he becomes a complete intellectual coxcomb or nearly so;—that he never lets a casual observation pass without perplexing it with an endless, running commentary, that he never states a feeling without so many _circumambages_, without so many interlineations and parenthetical remarks on all that can be said for it, and anticipations of all that can be said against it, and that he never mentions a fact without giving so many circumstances and conjuring up so many things that it is like or not like, that you lose the main clue of the story in its infinite ramifications and intersections; and we may form some faint idea of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which is spun with great labour out of the author’s brains, and hangs like a huge cobweb over the face of nature! This is not, as far as I can judge, an exaggerated description: but as near the truth as I can make it. The proofs are not far to seek. Take the first sentence, or open the volume any where and read. I will, however, take one of the most beautiful passages near the beginning, to shew how the subject-matter, of which the noblest use might have been made, is disfigured by the affectation of the style, and the importunate and vain activity of the writer’s mind. The passage I allude to, is the celebrated description of Arcadia.

‘So that the third day after, in the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which that night had been their pavilion) they went on their journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus’ eyes (wearied with the wasted soil of Laconia) with welcome prospects. There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees: humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade were witnessed so to, by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dam’s comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music. As for the houses of the country (for many houses came under their eye) they were scattered, no two being one by the other, and yet not so far off, as that it barred mutual succour; a shew, as it were, of an accompaniable solitariness, and of a civil wildness. I pray you, said Musidorus, (then first unsealing his long-silent lips) what countries be these we pass through, which are so divers in shew, the one wanting no store, the other having no store but of want. The country, answered Claius, where you were cast ashore, and now are past through is Laconia: but this country (where you now set your foot) is Arcadia.’

One would think the very name might have lulled his senses to delightful repose in some still, lonely valley, and have laid the restless spirit of Gothic quaintness, witticism, and conceit in the lap of classic elegance and pastoral simplicity. Here are images too of touching beauty and everlasting truth that needed nothing but to be simply and nakedly expressed to have made a picture equal (nay superior) to the allegorical representation of the Four Seasons of Life by Georgioni. But no! He cannot let his imagination or that of the reader dwell for a moment on the beauty or power of the real object. He thinks nothing is done, unless it is his doing. He must officiously and gratuitously interpose between you and the subject as the Cicerone of Nature, distracting the eye and the mind by continual uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering every thing, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature. The moving spring of his mind is not sensibility or imagination, but dry, literal, unceasing craving after intellectual excitement, which is indifferent to pleasure or pain, to beauty or deformity, and likes to owe everything to its own perverse efforts rather than the sense of power in other things. It constantly interferes to perplex and neutralise. It never leaves the mind in a wise passiveness. In the infancy of taste, the froward pupils of art took nature to pieces, as spoiled children do a watch, to see what was in it. After taking it to pieces they could not, with all their cunning, put it together again, so as to restore circulation to the heart, or its living hue to the face! The quaint and pedantic style here objected to was not however the natural growth of untutored fancy, but an artificial excrescence transferred from logic and rhetoric to poetry. It was not owing to the excess of imagination, but of the want of it, that is, to the predominance of the mere understanding or dialectic faculty over the imaginative and the sensitive. It is in fact poetry degenerating at every step into prose, sentiment entangling itself in a controversy, from the habitual leaven of polemics and casuistry in the writer’s mind. The poet insists upon matters of fact from the beauty or grandeur that accompanies them; our prose-poet insists upon them because they are matters of fact, and buries the beauty and grandeur in a heap of common rubbish, ‘like two grains of wheat in a bushel of chaff.’ The true poet illustrates for ornament or use: the fantastic pretender, only because he is not easy till he can translate every thing out of itself into something else. Imagination consists in enriching one idea by another, which has the same feeling or set of associations belonging to it in a higher or more striking degree; the quaint or scholastic style consists in comparing one thing to another by the mere process of abstraction, and the more forced and naked the comparison, the less of harmony or congruity there is in it, the more wire-drawn and ambiguous the link of generalisation by which objects are brought together, the greater is the triumph of the false and fanciful style. There was a marked instance of the difference in some lines from Ben Jonson which I have above quoted, and which, as they are alternate examples of the extremes of both in the same author and in the same short poem, there can be nothing invidious in giving. In conveying an idea of female softness and sweetness, he asks—

‘Have you felt the wool of the beaver, Or swan’s down ever? Or smelt of the bud of the briar, Or the nard in the fire?’

Now ‘the swan’s down’ is a striking and beautiful image of the most delicate and yielding softness; but we have no associations of a pleasing sort with the wool of the beaver. The comparison is dry, hard, and barren of effect. It may establish the matter of fact, but detracts from and impairs the sentiment. The smell of ‘the bud of the briar’ is a double-distilled essence of sweetness: besides, there are all the other concomitant ideas of youth, beauty, and blushing modesty, which blend with and heighten the immediate feeling: but the poetical reader was not bound to know even what _nard_ is (it is merely a learned substance, a non-entity to the imagination) nor whether it has a fragrant or disagreeable scent when thrown into the fire, till Ben Jonson went out of his way to give him this pedantic piece of information. It is a mere matter of fact or of experiment; and while the experiment is making in reality or fancy, the sentiment stands still; or even taking it for granted in the literal and scientific sense, we are where we were; it does not enhance the passion to be expressed: we have no love for the smell of nard in the fire, but we have an old, a long-cherished one, from infancy, for the bud of the briar. Sentiment, as Mr. Burke said of nobility, is a thing of inveterate prejudice, and cannot be created, as some people (learned and unlearned) are inclined to suppose, out of fancy or out of any thing by the wit of man. The artificial and natural style do not alternate in this way in the Arcadia: the one is but the Helot, the eyeless drudge of the other. Thus even in the above passage, which is comparatively beautiful and simple in its general structure, we have ‘the bleating oratory’ of lambs, as if anything could be more unlike oratory than the bleating of lambs; we have a young shepherdess knitting, whose hands keep time not to her voice, but to her ‘voice-music,’ which introduces a foreign and questionable distinction, merely to perplex the subject; we have meadows enamelled with all sorts of ‘eye-pleasing flowers,’ as if it were necessary to inform the reader that flowers pleased the eye, or as if they did not please any other sense: we have valleys refreshed ‘with _silver_ streams,’ an epithet that has nothing to do with the refreshment here spoken of: we have ‘an accompaniable solitariness and a civil wildness,’ which are a pair of very laboured antitheses; in fine, we have ‘want of store, and store of want.’

Again, the passage describing the shipwreck of Pyrochles, has been much and deservedly admired: yet it is not free from the same inherent faults.

‘But a little way off they saw the mast (of the vessel) whose proud height now lay along, like a widow having lost her mate, of whom she held her honour;’ [This needed explanation] ‘but upon the mast they saw a young man (at least if it were a man) bearing show of about eighteen years of age, who sat (as on horseback) having nothing upon him but his shirt, which being wrought with blue silk and gold, had a kind of resemblance to the sea’ [This is a sort of alliteration in natural history] ‘on which the sun (then near his western home) did shoot some of his beams. His hair, (which the young men of Greece used to wear very long) was stirred up and down with the wind, which seemed to have a sport to play with it, as the sea had to kiss his feet; himself full of admirable beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of his seat and gesture; for holding his head up full of unmoved majesty, he held a sword aloft with his fair arm, which often he waved about his crown, as though he would threaten the world in that extremity.’

If the original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit could be weeded out of this passage, there is hardly a more heroic one to be found in prose or poetry.

Here is one more passage marred in the making. A shepherd is supposed to say of his mistress,

‘Certainly, as her eyelids are more pleasant to behold, than two white kids climbing up a fair tree and browsing on his tenderest branches, and yet are nothing, compared to the day-shining stars contained in them; and as her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer; and yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry; no more all that our eyes can see of her (though when they have seen her, what else they shall ever see is but dry stubble after clover grass) is to be matched with the flock of unspeakable virtues, laid up delightfully in that best-builded fold.’

Now here are images of singular beauty and of Eastern originality and daring, followed up with enigmatical or unmeaning common-places, because he never knows when to leave off, and thinks he can never be too wise or too dull for his reader. He loads his prose Pegasus, like a pack-horse, with all that comes and with a number of little trifling circumstances, that fall off, and you are obliged to stop to pick them up by the way. He cannot give his imagination a moment’s pause, thinks nothing done, while any thing remains to do, and exhausts nearly all that can be said upon a subject, whether good, bad, or indifferent. The above passages are taken from the beginning of the Arcadia, when the author’s style was hardly yet formed. The following is a less favourable, but fairer specimen of the work. It is the model of a love-letter, and is only longer than that of Adriano de Armada, in Love’s Labour Lost.

‘Most blessed paper, which shalt kiss that hand, whereto all blessedness is in nature a servant, do not yet disdain to carry with thee the woeful words of a miser now despairing: neither be afraid to appear before her, bearing the base title of the sender. For no sooner shall that divine hand touch thee, but that thy baseness shall be turned to most high preferment. Therefore mourn boldly my ink: for while she looks upon you, your blackness will shine: cry out boldly my lamentation, for while she reads you, your cries will be music. Say then (O happy messenger of a most unhappy message) that the too soon born and too late dying creature, which dares not speak, no, not look, no, not scarcely think (as from his miserable self unto her heavenly highness), only presumes to desire thee (in the time that her eyes and voice do exalt thee) to say, and in this manner to say, not from him, oh no, that were not fit, but of him, thus much unto her sacred judgment. O you, the only honour to women, to men the only admiration, you that being armed by love, defy him that armed you, in this high estate wherein you have placed me’ [_i.e._ the letter] ‘yet let me remember him to whom I am bound for bringing me to your presence: and let me remember him, who (since he is yours, how mean soever he be) it is reason you have an account of him. The wretch (yet your wretch) though with languishing steps runs fast to his grave; and will you suffer a temple (how poorly built soever, but yet a temple of your deity) to be rased? But he dyeth: it is most true, he dyeth: and he in whom you live, to obey you, dyeth. Whereof though he plain, he doth not complain, for it is a harm, but no wrong, which he hath received. He dies, because in woeful language all his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure: for if you will not that he live, alas, alas, what followeth, what followeth of the most ruined Dorus, but his end? End, then, evil-destined Dorus, end; and end thou woeful letter, end: for it sufficeth her wisdom to know, that her heavenly will shall be accomplished.’

Lib. ii. p. 117.

This style relishes neither of the lover nor the poet. Nine-tenths of the work are written in this manner. It is in the very manner of those books of gallantry and chivalry, which, with the labyrinths of their style, and ‘the reason of their unreasonableness,’ turned the fine intellects of the Knight of La Mancha. In a word (and not to speak it profanely), the Arcadia is a riddle, a rebus, an acrostic in folio: it contains about 4000 far-fetched similes, and 6000 impracticable dilemmas, about 10,000 reasons for doing nothing at all, and as many more against it; numberless alliterations, puns, questions and commands, and other figures of rhetoric; about a score good passages, that one may turn to with pleasure, and the most involved, irksome, improgressive, and heteroclite subject that ever was chosen to exercise the pen or patience of man. It no longer adorns the toilette or lies upon the pillow of Maids of Honour and Peeresses in their own right (the Pamelas and Philocleas of a later age), but remains upon the shelves of the libraries of the curious in long works and great names, a monument to shew that the author was one of the ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth.

His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, far-fetched and frigid. I shall select only one that has been much commended. It is to the High Way where his mistress had passed, a strange subject, but not unsuitable to the author’s genius.

‘High-way, since you my chief Parnassus be, And that my Muse (to some ears not unsweet) Tempers her words to trampling horses’ feet More oft than to a chamber melody; Now blessed you bear onward blessed me To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet; My Muse, and I must you of duty greet With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. Be you still fair, honour’d by public heed, By no encroachment wrong’d, nor time forgot; Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed; And that you know, I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, Hundreds of years you Stella’s feet may kiss.’

The answer of the High-way has not been preserved, but the sincerity of this appeal must no doubt have moved the stocks and stones to rise and sympathise. His Defence of Poetry is his most readable performance; there he is quite at home, in a sort of special pleader’s office, where his ingenuity, scholastic subtlety, and tenaciousness in argument stand him in good stead; and he brings off poetry with flying colours; for he was a man of wit, of sense, and learning, though not a poet of true taste or unsophisticated genius.

LECTURE VII CHARACTER OF LORD BACON’S WORKS—COMPARED AS TO STYLE WITH SIR THOMAS BROWN AND JEREMY TAYLOR.

Lord Bacon has been called (and justly) one of the wisest of mankind. The word _wisdom_ characterises him more than any other. It was not that he did so much himself to advance the knowledge of man or nature, as that he saw what others had done to advance it, and what was still wanting to its full accomplishment. He stood upon the high ‘vantage ground of genius and learning; and traced, ‘as in a map the voyager his course,’ the long devious march of human intellect, its elevations and depressions, its windings and its errors. He had a ‘large discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ He had made an exact and extensive survey of human acquirements: he took the gauge and meter, the depths and soundings of the human capacity. He was master of the comparative anatomy of the mind of man, of the balance of power among the different faculties. He had thoroughly investigated and carefully registered the steps and processes of his own thoughts, with their irregularities and failures, their liabilities to wrong conclusions, either from the difficulties of the subject, or from moral causes, from prejudice, indolence, vanity, from conscious strength or weakness; and he applied this self-knowledge on a mighty scale to the general advances or retrograde movements of the aggregate intellect of the world. He knew well what the goal and crown of moral and intellectual power was, how far men had fallen short of it, and how they came to miss it. He had an instantaneous perception of the quantity of truth or good in any given system; and of the analogy of any given result or principle to others of the same kind scattered through nature or history. His observations take in a larger range, have more profundity from the fineness of his tact, and more comprehension from the extent of his knowledge, along the line of which his imagination ran with equal celerity and certainty, than any other person’s, whose writings I know. He however seized upon these results, rather by intuition than by inference: he knew them in their mixed modes, and combined effects rather than by abstraction or analysis, as he explains them to others, not by resolving them into their component parts and elementary principles, so much as by illustrations drawn from other things operating in like manner, and producing similar results; or as he himself has finely expressed it, ‘by the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’ He had great sagacity of observation, solidity of judgment and scope of fancy; in this resembling Plato and Burke, that he was a popular philosopher and a philosophical declaimer. His writings have the gravity of prose with the fervour and vividness of poetry. His sayings have the effect of axioms, are at once striking and self-evident. He views objects from the greatest height, and his reflections acquire a sublimity in proportion to their profundity, as in deep wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest fixed stars. The chain of thought reaches to the centre, and ascends the brightest heaven of invention. Reason in him works like an instinct: and his slightest suggestions carry the force of conviction. His opinions are judicial. His induction of particulars is alike wonderful for learning and vivacity, for curiosity and dignity, and an all-pervading intellect binds the whole together in a graceful and pleasing form. His style is equally sharp and sweet, flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive, expressing volumes in a sentence, or amplifying a single thought into pages of rich, glowing, and delightful eloquence. He had great liberality from seeing the various aspects of things (there was nothing bigotted or intolerant or exclusive about him) and yet he had firmness and decision from feeling their weight and consequences. His character was then an amazing insight into the limits of human knowledge and acquaintance with the landmarks of human intellect, so as to trace its past history or point out the path to future enquirers, but when he quits the ground of contemplation of what others have done or left undone to project himself into future discoveries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead of original. His strength was in reflection, not in production: he was the surveyor, not the builder of the fabric of science. He had not strictly the constructive faculty. He was the principal pioneer in the march of modern philosophy, and has completed the education and discipline of the mind for the acquisition of truth, by explaining all the impediments or furtherances that can be applied to it or cleared out of its way. In a word, he was one of the greatest men this country has to boast, and his name deserves to stand, where it is generally placed, by the side of those of our greatest writers, whether we consider the variety, the strength or splendour of his faculties, for ornament or use.

His Advancement of Learning is his greatest work; and next to that, I like the Essays; for the Novum Organum is more laboured and less effectual than it might be. I shall give a few instances from the first of these chiefly, to explain the scope of the above remarks.

The Advancement of Learning is dedicated to James I. and he there observes, with a mixture of truth and flattery, which looks very much like a bold irony,

‘I am well assured that this which I shall say is no amplification at all, but a positive and measured truth; which is, that there hath not been, since Christ’s time, any king or temporal monarch, which hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human (as your majesty). For let a man seriously and diligently revolve and peruse the succession of the Emperours of Rome, of which Cæsar the Dictator, who lived some years before Christ, and Marcus Antoninus were the best-learned; and so descend to the Emperours of Grecia, or of the West, and then to the lines of France, Spain, England, Scotland, and the rest, and he shall find his judgment is truly made. For it seemeth much in a king, if by the compendious extractions of other men’s wits and labour, he can take hold of any superficial ornaments and shews of learning, or if he countenance and prefer learning and learned men: but to drink indeed of the true fountain of learning, nay, to have such a fountain of learning in himself, in a king, and in a king born, is almost a miracle.’

To any one less wrapped up in self-sufficiency than James, the rule would have been more staggering than the exception could have been gratifying. But Bacon was a sort of prose-laureat to the reigning prince, and his loyalty had never been suspected.

In recommending learned men as fit counsellors in a state, he thus points out the deficiencies of the mere empiric or man of business in not being provided against uncommon emergencies.—‘Neither,’ he says, ‘can the experience of one man’s life furnish examples and precedents for the events of one man’s life. For as it happeneth sometimes, that the grand-child, or other descendant, resembleth the ancestor more than the son: so many times occurrences of present times may sort better with ancient examples, than with those of the latter or immediate times; and lastly, the wit of one man can no more countervail learning, than one man’s means can hold way with a common purse.’—This is finely put. It might be added, on the other hand, by way of caution, that neither can the wit or opinion of one learned man set itself up, as it sometimes does, in opposition to the common sense or experience of mankind.

When he goes on to vindicate the superiority of the scholar over the mere politician in disinterestedness and inflexibility of principle, by arguing ingeniously enough—‘The corrupter sort of mere politiques, that have not their thoughts established by learning in the love and apprehension of duty, nor never look abroad into universality, do refer all things to themselves, and thrust themselves into the centre of the world, as if all times should meet in them and their fortunes, never caring in all tempests what becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save themselves in the cock-boat of their own fortune, whereas men that feel the weight of duty, and know the limits of self-love, use to make good their places and duties, though with peril’—I can only wish that the practice were as constant as the theory is plausible, or that the time gave evidence of as much stability and sincerity of principle in well-educated minds as it does of versatility and gross egotism in self-taught men. I need not give the instances, ‘they will receive’ (in our author’s phrase) ‘an open allowance:’ but I am afraid that neither habits of abstraction nor the want of them will entirely exempt men from a bias to their own interest; that it is neither learning nor ignorance that thrusts us into the centre of our own little world, but that it is nature that has put a man there!

His character of the school-men is perhaps the finest philosophical sketch that ever was drawn. After observing that there are ‘two marks and badges of suspected and falsified science; the one, the novelty or strangeness of terms, the other the strictness of positions, which of necessity doth induce oppositions, and so questions and altercations’—he proceeds—‘Surely like as many substances in nature which are solid, do putrify and corrupt into worms: so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) _vermiculate_ questions: which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the school-men, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading; but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning, which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby: but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.’

And a little further on, he adds—‘Notwithstanding, certain it is, that if those school-men to their great thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit, had joined variety and universality of reading and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights, to the great advancement of all learning and knowledge; but as they are, they are great undertakers indeed, and fierce with dark keeping. But as in the inquiry of the divine truth, their pride inclined to leave the oracle of God’s word, and to varnish in the mixture of their own inventions; so in the inquisition of nature, they ever left the oracle of God’s works, and adored the deceiving and deformed images, which the unequal mirror of their own minds, or a few received authors or principles did represent unto them.’

One of his acutest (I might have said profoundest) remarks relates to the near connection between deceiving and being deceived. Volumes might be written in explanation of it. ‘This vice therefore,’ he says, ‘brancheth itself into two sorts; delight in deceiving, and aptness to be deceived, imposture and credulity; which although they appear to be of a diverse nature, the one seeming to proceed of cunning, and the other of simplicity, yet certainly they do for the most part concur. For as the verse noteth _Percontatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est_; an inquisitive man is a prattler: so upon the like reason, a credulous man is a deceiver; as we see it in fame, that he that will easily believe rumours, will as easily augment rumours, and add somewhat to them of his own, which Tacitus wisely noteth, when he saith, _Fingunt simul creduntque_, so great an affinity hath fiction and belief.’

I proceed to his account of the causes of error, and directions for the conduct of the understanding, which are admirable both for their speculative ingenuity and practical use.

‘The first of these,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘is the extreme affection of two extremities; the one antiquity, the other novelty, wherein it seemeth the children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children; so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other; while antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add, but it must deface. Surely, the advice of the prophet is the true direction in this respect, _state super vias antiquas, et videte quænam sit via recta et bona, et ambulate in ea_. Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way, but when the discovery is well taken, then to take progression. And to speak truly,’ he adds, ‘_Antiquitas seculi juventus mundi_. These times are the ancient times when the world is ancient; and not those which we count ancient _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation backwards from ourselves.

‘Another error induced by the former, is a distrust that any thing should be now to be found out which the world should have missed and passed over so long time, as if the same objection were to be made to time that Lucian makes to Jupiter and other the Heathen Gods, of which he wondereth that they begot so many children in old age, and begot none in his time, and asketh whether they were become septuagenary, or whether the law _Papia_ made against old men’s marriages had restrained them. So it seemeth men doubt, lest time was become past children and generation: wherein contrary-wise, we see commonly the levity and unconstancy of men’s judgments, which till a matter be done, wonder that it can be done, and as soon as it is done, wonder again that it was done no sooner, as we see in the expedition of Alexander into Asia, which at first was prejudged as a vast and impossible enterprise, and yet afterwards it pleaseth Livy to make no more of it than this, _nil aliud quam bene ausus vana contemnere_. And the same happened to Columbus in his western navigation. But in intellectual matters, it is much more common; as may be seen in most of the propositions in Euclid, which till they be demonstrate, they seem strange to our assent, but being demonstrate, our mind accepteth of them by a kind of relation (as the lawyers speak) as if we had known them before.

‘Another is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action, commonly spoken of by the Ancients. The one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable: the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even; so it is in contemplation, if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

‘Another error is in the manner of the tradition or delivery of knowledge, which is for the most part magistral and peremptory, and not ingenuous and faithful; in a sort, as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined. It is true, that in compendious treatises for practice, that form is not to be disallowed. But in the true handling of knowledge, men ought not to fall either on the one side into the vein of Velleius the Epicurean; _nil tam metuens quam ne dubitare aliqua de re videretur_: nor on the other side, into Socrates his ironical doubting of all things, but to propound things sincerely, with more or less asseveration; as they stand in a man’s own judgment, proved more or less.’

Lord Bacon in this part declares, ‘that it is not his purpose to enter into a laudative of learning or to make a Hymn to the Muses,’ yet he has gone near to do this in the following observations on the dignity of knowledge. He says, after speaking of rulers and conquerors:

‘But the commandment of knowledge is yet higher than the commandment over the will; for it is a commandment over the reason, belief, and understanding of man, which is the highest part of the mind, and giveth law to the will itself. For there is no power on earth which setteth a throne or chair of estate in the spirits and souls of men, and in their cogitations, imaginations, opinions, and beliefs, but knowledge and learning. And therefore we see the detestable and extreme pleasure that arch-heretics and false prophets and impostors are transported with, when they once find in themselves that they have a superiority in the faith and conscience of men: so great, as if they have once tasted of it, it is seldom seen that any torture or persecution can make them relinquish or abandon it. But as this is that which the author of the Revelations calls the depth or profoundness of Satan; so by argument of contraries, the just and lawful sovereignty over men’s understanding, by force of truth rightly interpreted, is that which approacheth nearest to the similitude of the Divine Rule.... Let us conclude with the dignity and excellency of knowledge and learning in that whereunto man’s nature doth most aspire, which is immortality or continuance: for to this tendeth generation, and raising of houses and families; to this tendeth buildings, foundations, and monuments; to this tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect, the strength of all other humane desires; we see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years and more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been decayed and demolished? It is not possible to have the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar, no, nor of the kings, or great personages of much later years. For the originals cannot last; and the copies cannot but lose of the life and truth. But the images of men’s wits and knowledge remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages. So that, if the invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which as ships, pass through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions the one of the other?’

Passages of equal force and beauty might be quoted from almost every page of this work and of the Essays.

Sir Thomas Brown and Bishop Taylor were two prose-writers in the succeeding age, who, for pomp and copiousness of style, might be compared to Lord Bacon. In all other respects they were opposed to him and to one another.—As Bacon seemed to bend all his thoughts to the practice of life, and to bring home the light of science to ‘the bosoms and businesses of men,’ Sir Thomas Brown seemed to be of opinion that the only business of life, was to think, and that the proper object of speculation was, by darkening knowledge, to breed more speculation, and ‘find no end in wandering mazes lost.’ He chose the incomprehensible and impracticable as almost the only subjects fit for a lofty and lasting contemplation, or for the exercise of a solid faith. He cried out for an _ob altitudo_ beyond the heights of revelation, and posed himself with apocryphal mysteries, as the pastime of his leisure hours. He pushes a question to the utmost verge of conjecture, that he may repose on the certainty of doubt; and he removes an object to the greatest distance from him, that he may take a high and abstracted interest in it, consider it in its relation to the sum of things, not to himself, and bewilder his understanding in the universality of its nature and the inscrutableness of its origin. His is the sublime of indifference; a passion for the abstruse and imaginary. He turns the world round for his amusement, as if it was a globe of paste-board. He looks down on sublunary affairs as if he had taken his station in one of the planets. The Antipodes are next-door neighbours to him, and Dooms-day is not far off. With a thought he embraces both the poles; the march of his pen is over the great divisions of geography and chronology. Nothing touches him nearer than humanity. He feels that he is mortal only in the decay of nature, and the dust of long forgotten tombs. The finite is lost in the infinite. The orbits of the heavenly bodies or the history of empires are to him but a point in time or a speck in the universe. The great Platonic year revolves in one of his periods. Nature is too little for the grasp of his style. He scoops an antithesis out of fabulous antiquity, and rakes up an epithet from the sweepings of Chaos. It is as if his books had dropt from the clouds, or as if Friar Bacon’s head could speak. He stands on the edge of the world of sense and reason, and gains a vertigo by looking down at impossibilities and chimeras. Or he busies himself with the mysteries of the Cabbala, or the enclosed secrets of the heavenly quincunxes, as children are amused with tales of the nursery. The passion of curiosity (the only passion of childhood) had in him survived to old age, and had superannuated his other faculties. He moralizes and grows pathetic on a mere idle fancy of his own, as if thought and being were the same, or as if ‘all this world were one glorious lie.’ For a thing to have ever had a name is sufficient warrant to entitle it to respectful belief, and to invest it with all the rights of a subject and its predicates. He is superstitious, but not bigotted: to him all religions are much the same, and he says that he should not like to have lived in the time of Christ and the Apostles, as it would have rendered his faith too gross and palpable.—His gossipping egotism and personal character have been preferred unjustly to Montaigne’s. He had no personal character at all but the peculiarity of resolving all the other elements of his being into thought, and of trying experiments on his own nature in an exhausted receiver of idle and unsatisfactory speculations. All that he ‘differences himself by,’ to use his own expression, is this moral and physical indifference. In describing himself, he deals only in negatives. He says he has neither prejudices nor antipathies to manners, habits, climate, food, to persons or things; they were alike acceptable to him as they afforded new topics for reflection; and he even professes that he could never bring himself heartily to hate the Devil. He owns in one place of the _Religio Medici_, that ‘he could be content if the species were continued like trees,’ and yet he declares that this was from no aversion to love, or beauty, or harmony; and the reasons he assigns to prove the orthodoxy of his taste in this respect, is, that he was an admirer of the music of the spheres! He tells us that he often composed a comedy in his sleep. It would be curious to know the subject or the texture of the plot. It must have been something like Nabbes’s Mask of Microcosmus, of which the _dramatis personæ_ have been already given; or else a misnomer, like Dante’s Divine Comedy of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. He was twice married, as if to shew his disregard even for his own theory; and he had a hand in the execution of some old women for witchcraft, I suppose, to keep a decorum in absurdity, and to indulge an agreeable horror at his own fantastical reveries on the occasion. In a word, his mind seemed to converse chiefly with the intelligible forms, the spectral apparitions of things, he delighted in the preternatural and visionary, and he only existed at the circumference of his nature. He had the most intense consciousness of contradictions and non-entities, and he decks them out in the pride and pedantry of words as if they were the attire of his proper person: the categories hang about his neck like the gold chain of knighthood, and he ‘walks gowned’ in the intricate folds and swelling drapery of dark sayings and impenetrable riddles!

I will give one gorgeous passage to illustrate all this, from his Urn-Burial, or Hydriotaphia. He digs up the urns of some ancient Druids with the same ceremony and devotion as if they had contained the hallowed relics of his dearest friends; and certainly we feel (as it has been said) the freshness of the mould, and the breath of mortality, in the spirit and force of his style. The conclusion of this singular and unparalleled performance is as follows:

‘What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these Ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietors of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarianism: not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their reliques, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities; antidotes against pride, vain glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories, which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion. Even old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of their vain glories, who, acting early, and before the probable meridian of time, have, by this time, found great accomplishment of their designs, whereby the ancient heroes have already outlasted their monuments, and mechanical preservations. But in this latter scene of time we cannot expect such mummies unto our memories, when ambition may fear the prophecy of Elias, and Charles the Fifth can never hope to live within two Methuselah’s of Hector.

‘And therefore restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations, seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names as some have done in their persons: one face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. ’Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs. To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for, and whose duration we cannot hope, without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excuseably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.

‘Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle, must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years: generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks. To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets, or first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.

‘To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man, not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in Cardan: disparaging his horoscopal inclination and judgment of himself, who cares to subsist like Hippocrates’ patients, or Achilles’ horses in Homer, under naked nominations without deserts and noble acts, which are the balsam of our memories, the Entelechia and soul of our subsistences. To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name, than Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good thief, than Pilate?

‘But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations: and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon, without the favour of the everlasting register. Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah’s long life had been his only chronicle.

‘Oblivion is not to be hired: the greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twenty-seven names make up the first story, and the recorded names ever since, contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? Every hour adds unto that current arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even Pagans could doubt

whether thus to live, were to die: since our longest sun sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time that grows old itself, bids us hope no long duration: diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.

‘Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory, a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their souls. A good way to continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural successions, they could not but act something remarkable in such variety of beings, and enjoying the fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, conserving their bodies in sweet consistences, to attend the return of their souls. But all was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise, Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams.

‘In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon: Men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dog-star. While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we find they are but like the earth; durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts: whereof beside comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales. And the spots that wander about the sun, with Phaeton’s favour, would make clear conviction.

‘There is nothing immortal, but immortality; whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. All others have a dependent being, and within the reach of destruction, which is the peculiar of that necessary essence that cannot destroy itself; and the highest strain of omnipotency to be so powerfully constituted, as not to suffer even from the power of itself. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death, makes a folly of posthumous memory. God who can only destroy our souls, and hath assured our resurrection, either of our bodies or names hath directly promised no duration. Wherein there is so much of chance, that the boldest expectants have found unhappy frustration; and to hold long subsistence, seems but a scape in oblivion. But man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature.

‘Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. A small fire sufficeth for life, great flames seemed too little after death, while men vainly affected precious pyres, and to burn like Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an urn.

‘Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus; the man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by Angels, and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing humane discovery. Enoch and Elias without either tomb or burial, in an anomalous state of being, are the great examples of perpetuity, in their long and living memory, in strict account being still on this side death, and having a late part yet to act on this stage of earth. If in the decretory term of the world we shall not all die but be changed, according to received translation; the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures; some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the covering of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilation shall be courted.

‘While some have studied monuments, others have studiously declined them: and some have been so vainly boisterous, that they durst not acknowledge their graves; wherein Alaricus seems most subtle, who had a river turned to hide his bones at the bottom. Even Sylla that thought himself safe in his urn, could not prevent revenging tongues, and stones thrown at his monument. Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world, that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who when they die, make no commotion among the dead, and are not touched with that poetical taunt of Isaiah.

‘Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vain-glory, and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride, and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity, unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.

‘Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them.

‘To subsist in lasting monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names, and prædicament of Chimeras, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elysiums. But all this is nothing in the metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed is to be again ourselves, which being not only an hope but an evidence in noble believers: ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt: ready to be any thing, in the extasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.’

I subjoin the following account of this extraordinary writer’s style, said to be written in a blank leaf of his works by Mr. Coleridge.

‘Sir Thomas Brown is among my first favourites. Rich in various knowledge, exuberant in conceptions and conceits; contemplative, imaginative, often truly great and magnificent in his style and diction, though, doubtless, too often big, stiff, and _hyperlatinistic_: thus I might, without admixture of falshood, describe Sir T. Brown; and my description would have this fault only, that it would be equally, or almost equally, applicable to half a dozen other writers, from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth to the end of the reign of Charles the Second. He is indeed all this; and what he has more than all this, and peculiar to himself, I seem to convey to my own mind in some measure, by saying, that he is a quiet and sublime _enthusiast_, with a strong tinge of the _fantast_; the humourist constantly mingling with, and flashing across the philosopher, as the darting colours in shot silk play upon the main dye. In short, he has brains in his head, which is all the more interesting for a little twist in the brains. He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne; but from no other than the general circumstance of an egotism common to both, which, in Montaigne, is too often a mere amusing gossip, a chit-chat story of whims and peculiarities that lead to nothing; but which, in Sir Thomas Brown, is always the result of a feeling heart, conjoined with a mind of active curiosity, the natural and becoming egotism of a man, who, loving other men as himself, gains the habit and the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as about other men. Fond of the curious, and a hunter of oddities and strangenesses, while he conceives himself with quaint and humorous gravity, an useful inquirer into physical truths and fundamental science, he loved to contemplate and discuss his own thoughts and feelings, because he found by comparison with other men’s, that _they_, too, were curiosities; and so, with a perfectly graceful interesting ease, he put _them_, too, into his museum and cabinet of rarities. In very truth, he was not mistaken, so completely does he see every thing in a light of his own; reading nature neither by sun, moon, or candle-light, but by the light of the fairy glory around his own head; that you might say, that nature had granted to _him_ in perpetuity, a patent and monopoly for all his thoughts. Read his _Hydriotaphia_ above all, and, in addition to the peculiarity, the exclusive _Sir Thomas Browne-ness_, of all the fancies and modes of illustration, wonder at, and admire, his _entireness_ in every subject which is before him. He is _totus in illo_, he follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be his subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that Hydriotaphia, or treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk—how _earthy_, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is every line! You have now dark mould; now a thigh-bone; now a skull; then a bit of a mouldered coffin; a fragment of an old tombstone, with moss in its _hic jacet_; a ghost, a winding sheet; or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind: and the gayest thing you shall meet with, shall be a silver nail, or gilt _anno domini_, from a perished coffin top!—The very same remark applies in the same force, to the interesting, though far less interesting treatise on the Quincuncial Plantations of the Ancients, the same _entireness_ of subject! Quincunxes in heaven above; quincunxes in earth below; quincunxes in deity; quincunxes in the mind of man; quincunxes in tones, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in every thing! In short, just turn to the last leaf of this volume, and read out aloud to yourself the seven last paragraphs of chapter 5th, beginning with the words “_More considerable_.” But it is time for me to be in bed. In the words of Sir T. Brown (which will serve as a fine specimen of his manner), “But the quincunxes of Heaven (the _hyades, or five stars about the horizon, at midnight at that time_) run low, and it is time we close the five parts of knowledge; we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantoms of sleep, which often continue precogitations, making cables of cobwebs, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer, were to _act_ our antipodes! The huntsmen are up in Arabia; and they have already passed their first sleep in Persia.” Think you, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight; to wit, that if we did not, we should be _acting_ the part of our antipodes! And then, “THE HUNTSMEN ARE UP IN ARABIA,”—what life, what fancy! Does the whimsical knight give us thus, the _essence_ of gunpowder tea, and call it an _opiate_?‘[38]

Jeremy Taylor was a writer as different from Sir Thomas Brown as it was possible for one writer to be from another. He was a dignitary of the church, and except in matters of casuistry and controverted points, could not be supposed to enter upon speculative doubts, or give a loose to a sort of dogmatical scepticism. He had less thought, less ‘stuff of the conscience,’ less ‘to give us pause,’ in his impetuous oratory, but he had equal fancy—not the same vastness and profundity, but more richness and beauty, more warmth and tenderness. He is as rapid, as flowing, and endless, as the other is stately, abrupt, and concentrated. The eloquence of the one is like a river, that of the other is more like an aqueduct. The one is as sanguine, as the other is saturnine in the temper of his mind. Jeremy Taylor took obvious and admitted truths for granted, and illustrated them with an inexhaustible display of new and enchanting imagery. Sir Thomas Brown talks in sum-totals: Jeremy Taylor enumerates all the particulars of a subject. He gives every aspect it will bear, and never ‘cloys with sameness.’ His characteristic is enthusiastic and delightful amplification. Sir Thomas Brown gives the beginning and end of things, that you may judge of their place and magnitude: Jeremy Taylor describes their qualities and texture, and enters into all the items of the debtor and creditor account between life and death, grace and nature, faith and good works. He puts his heart into his fancy. He does not pretend to annihilate the passions and pursuits of mankind in the pride of philosophic indifference, but treats them as serious and momentous things, warring with conscience and the soul’s health, or furnishing the means of grace and hopes of glory. In his writings, the frail stalk of human life reclines on the bosom of eternity. His Holy Living and Dying is a divine pastoral. He writes to the faithful followers of Christ, as the shepherd pipes to his flock. He introduces touching and heartfelt appeals to familiar life; condescends to men of low estate; and his pious page blushes with modesty and beauty. His style is prismatic. It unfolds the colours of the rainbow; it floats like the bubble through the air; it is like innumerable dew-drops that glitter on the face of morning, and tremble as they glitter. He does not dig his way underground, but slides upon ice, borne on the winged car of fancy. The dancing light he throws upon objects is like an Aurora Borealis, playing betwixt heaven and earth—

‘Where pure Niemi’s faery banks arise, And fringed with roses Tenglio rolls its stream.’

His exhortations to piety and virtue are a gay _memento mori_. He mixes up death’s-heads and amaranthine flowers; makes life a procession to the grave, but crowns it with gaudy garlands, and ‘rains sacrificial roses’ on its path. In a word, his writings are more like fine poetry than any other prose whatever; they are a choral song in praise of virtue, and a hymn to the Spirit of the Universe. I shall give a few passages, to shew how feeble and inefficient this praise is.

The Holy Dying begins in this manner:

‘A man is a bubble. He is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful. Others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being over-laid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble empty and gay, and shines like a dove’s neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are phantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour; and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing, were equally the issues of an Almighty power.’

Another instance of the same rich continuity of feeling and transparent brilliancy in working out an idea, is to be found in his description of the dawn and progress of reason.

‘Some are called _at age_ at fourteen, some at one and twenty, some never; but all men late enough; for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to mattins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shews a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly: so is a man’s reason and his life.’

This passage puts one in mind of the rising dawn and kindling skies in one of Claude’s landscapes. Sir Thomas Brown has nothing of this rich finishing and exact gradation. The genius of the two men differed, as that of the painter from the mathematician. The one measures objects, the other copies them. The one shews that things are nothing out of themselves, or in relation to the whole: the one, what they are in themselves, and in relation to us. Or the one may be said to apply the telescope of the mind to distant bodies; the other looks at nature in its infinite minuteness and glossy splendour through a solar microscope.

In speaking of Death, our author’s style assumes the port and withering smile of the King of Terrors. The following are scattered passages on this subject.

‘It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday or a maid servant to-day; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools; and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die.’...

‘I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, while living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends’ desire by giving way that after a few days’ burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death _unto the life_. They did so, and found his face half-eaten, and his midriff and back-bone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors.’...

‘It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us, who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five and twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days’ burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as the lamb’s fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age, it bowed the head and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves, and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? What friends to visit us? What officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our races from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funerals?’

‘A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more: and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsires’ head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like Gods to die like men. There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that when we die, our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less.[39] To my apprehension, it is a sad record which is left by Athenæus concerning Ninus the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words: “Ninus the Assyrian had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire among the Magi; nor touched his God with the sacred rod according to the laws: he never offered sacrifice, nor worshipped the deity, nor administered justice, nor spake to the people; nor numbered them: but he was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulchre, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion: the wealth with which I was blessed, my enemies meeting together shall carry away, as the mad Thyades carry a raw goat. I am gone to hell: and when I went thither, I neither carried gold nor horse, nor silver chariot. I that wore a mitre, am now a little heap of dust.“’

He who wrote in this manner also wore a mitre, and is now a heap of dust; but when the name of Jeremy Taylor is no longer remembered with reverence, genius will have become a mockery, and virtue an empty shade!

LECTURE VIII ON THE SPIRIT OF ANCIENT AND MODERN LITERATURE—ON THE GERMAN DRAMA, CONTRASTED WITH THAT OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH

Before I proceed to the more immediate subject of the present Lecture, I wish to say a few words of one or two writers in our own time, who have imbibed the spirit and imitated the language of our elder dramatists. Among these I may reckon the ingenious author of the Apostate and Evadne, who in the last-mentioned play, in particular, has availed himself with much judgment and spirit of the tragedy of the Traitor by old Shirley. It would be curious to hear the opinion of a professed admirer of the Ancients, and captious despiser of the Moderns, with respect to this production, before he knew it was a copy of an old play. Shirley himself lived in the time of Charles I. and died in the beginning of Charles II.[40]; but he had formed his style on that of the preceding age, and had written the greatest number of his plays in conjunction with Jonson, Deckar, and Massinger. He was ‘the last of those fair clouds that on the bosom of bright honour sailed in long procession, calm and beautiful.’ The name of Mr. Tobin is familiar to every lover of the drama. His Honey-Moon is evidently founded on The Taming of a Shrew, and Duke Aranza has been pronounced by a polite critic to be ‘an elegant Petruchio.’ The plot is taken from Shakespear; but the language and sentiments, both of this play and of the Curfew, bear a more direct resemblance to the flowery tenderness of Beaumont and Fletcher, who were, I believe, the favourite study of our author. Mr. Lamb’s John Woodvil may be considered as a dramatic fragment, intended for the closet rather than the stage. It would sound oddly in the lobbies of either theatre, amidst the noise and glare and bustle of resort; but ‘there where we have treasured up our hearts,’ in silence and in solitude, it may claim and find a place for itself. It might be read with advantage in the still retreats of Sherwood Forest, where it would throw a new-born light on the green, sunny glades; the tenderest flower might seem to drink of the poet’s spirit, and ‘the tall deer that paints a dancing shadow of his horns in the swift brook,’ might seem to do so in mockery of the poet’s thought. Mr. Lamb, with a modesty often attendant on fine feeling, has loitered too long in the humbler avenues leading to the temple of ancient genius, instead of marching boldly up to the sanctuary, as many with half his pretensions would have done: ‘but fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.’ The defective or objectionable parts of this production are imitations of the defects of the old writers: its beauties are his own, though in their manner. The touches of thought and passion are often as pure and delicate as they are profound; and the character of his heroine Margaret is perhaps the finest and most genuine female character out of Shakespear. This tragedy was not critic-proof: it had its cracks and flaws and breaches, through which the enemy marched in triumphant. The station which he had chosen was not indeed a walled town, but a straggling village, which the experienced engineers proceeded to lay waste; and he is pinned down in more than one Review of the day, as an exemplary warning to indiscreet writers, who venture beyond the pale of periodical taste and conventional criticism. Mr. Lamb was thus hindered by the taste of the polite vulgar from writing as he wished; his own taste would not allow him to write like them: and he (perhaps wisely) turned critic and prose-writer in his own defence. To say that he has written better about Shakespear, and about Hogarth, than any body else, is saying little in his praise.—A gentleman of the name of Cornwall, who has lately published a volume of Dramatic Scenes, has met with a very different reception, but I cannot say that he has _deserved_ it. He has made no sacrifice at the shrine of fashionable affectation or false glitter. There is nothing common-place in his style to soothe the complacency of dulness, nothing extravagant to startle the grossness of ignorance. He writes with simplicity, delicacy, and fervour; continues a scene from Shakespear, or works out a hint from Boccacio in the spirit of his originals, and though he bows with reverence at the altar of those great masters, he keeps an eye curiously intent on nature, and a mind awake to the admonitions of his own heart. As he has begun, so let him proceed. Any one who will turn to the glowing and richly-coloured conclusion of the Falcon, will, I think, agree with me in this wish!

There are four sorts or schools of tragedy with which I am acquainted. The first is the antique or classical. This consisted, I apprehend, in the introduction of persons on the stage, speaking, feeling, and acting _according to nature_, that is, according to the impression of given circumstances on the passions and mind of man in those circumstances, but limited by the physical conditions of time and place, as to its external form, and to a certain dignity of attitude and expression, selection in the figures, and unity in their grouping, as in a statue or bas-relief. The second is the Gothic or romantic, or as it might be called, the historical or poetical tragedy, and differs from the former, only in having a larger scope in the design and boldness in the execution; that is, it is the dramatic representation of nature and passion emancipated from the precise imitation of an actual event in place and time, from the same fastidiousness in the choice of the materials, and with the license of the epic and fanciful form added to it in the range of the subject and the decorations of language. This is

## particularly the style or school of Shakespear and of the best writers

of the age of Elizabeth, and the one immediately following. Of this class, or genus, the _tragedie bourgeoise_ is a variety, and the antithesis of the classical form. The third sort is the French or common-place rhetorical style, which is founded on the antique as to its form and subject-matter; but instead of individual nature, real passion, or imagination growing out of real passion and the circumstances of the speaker, it deals only in vague, imposing, and laboured declamations, or descriptions of nature, dissertations on the passions, and pompous flourishes which never entered any head but the author’s, have no existence in nature which they pretend to identify, and are not dramatic at all, but purely didactic. The fourth and last is the German or paradoxical style, which differs from the others in representing men as

## acting not from the impulse of feeling, or as debating common-place

questions of morality, but as the organs and mouth-pieces (that is, as

## acting, speaking, and thinking, under the sole influence) of certain

extravagant speculative opinions, abstracted from all existing customs, prejudices and institutions.—It is my present business to speak chiefly of the first and last of these.

Sophocles differs from Shakespear as a Doric portico does from Westminster Abbey. The principle of the one is simplicity and harmony, of the other richness and power. The one relies on form or proportion, the other on quantity and variety and prominence of parts. The one owes its charm to a certain union and regularity of feeling, the other adds to its effects from complexity and the combination of the greatest extremes. The classical appeals to sense and habit: the Gothic or romantic strikes from novelty, strangeness and contrast. Both are founded in essential and indestructible principles of human nature. We may prefer the one to the other, as we chuse, but to set up an arbitrary and bigotted standard of excellence in consequence of this preference, and to exclude either one or the other from poetry or art, is to deny the existence of the first principles of the human mind, and to war with nature, which is the height of weakness and arrogance at once.—There are some observations on this subject in a late number of the Edinburgh Review, from which I shall here make a pretty long extract.

‘The most obvious distinction between the two styles, the classical and the romantic, is, that the one is conversant with objects that are grand or beautiful in themselves, or in consequence of obvious and universal associations; the other, with those that are interesting only by the force of circumstances and imagination. A Grecian temple, for instance, is a classical object: it is beautiful in itself, and excites immediate admiration. But the ruins of a Gothic castle have no beauty or symmetry to attract the eye; and yet they excite a more powerful and romantic interest, from the ideas with which they are habitually associated. If, in addition to this, we are told, that this is Macbeth’s castle, the scene of the murder of Duncan, the interest will be instantly heightened to a sort of pleasing horror. The classical idea or form of any thing, it may also be observed, remains always the same, and suggests nearly the same impressions; but the associations of ideas belonging to the romantic character may vary infinitely, and take in the whole range of nature and accident. Antigone, in Sophocles, waiting near the grove of the Furies—Electra, in Æschylus, offering sacrifice at the tomb of Agamemnon—are classical subjects, because the circumstances and the characters have a correspondent dignity, and an immediate interest, from their mere designation. Florimel, in Spenser, where she is described sitting on the ground in the Witch’s hut, is not classical, though in the highest degree poetical and romantic: for the incidents and situation are in themselves mean and disagreeable, till they are redeemed by the genius of the poet, and converted, by the very contrast, into a source of the utmost pathos and elevation of sentiment. Othello’s handkerchief is not classical, though “there was magic in the web:”—it is only a powerful instrument of passion and imagination. Even Lear is not classical; for he is a poor crazy old man, who has nothing sublime about him but his afflictions, and who dies of a broken heart

‘Schlegel somewhere compares the Furies of Æschylus to the Witches of Shakespear—we think without much reason. Perhaps Shakespear has surrounded the Weird Sisters with associations as terrible, and even more mysterious, strange, and fantastic, than the Furies of Æschylus; but the traditionary beings themselves are not so petrific. These are of marble,—their look alone must blast the beholder;—those are of air, bubbles; and though “so withered and so wild in their attire,” it is their spells alone which are fatal. They owe their power to metaphysical aid: but the others contain all that is dreadful in their corporal figures. In this we see the distinct spirit of the classical and the romantic mythology. The serpents that twine round the head of the Furies are not to be trifled with, though they implied no preternatural power. The bearded Witches in Macbeth are in themselves grotesque and ludicrous, except as this strange deviation from nature staggers our imagination, and leads us to expect and to believe in all incredible things. They appal the faculties by what they say or do;—the others are intolerable, even to sight.

‘Our author is right in affirming, that the true way to understand the plays of Sophocles and Æschylus, is to study them before the groupes of the Niobe or the Laocoon. If we can succeed in explaining this analogy, we shall have solved nearly the whole difficulty. For it is certain, that there are exactly the same powers of mind displayed in the poetry of the Greeks as in their statues. Their poetry is exactly what their sculptors might have written. Both are exquisite imitations of nature; the one in marble, the other in words. It is evident, that the Greek poets had the same perfect idea of the subjects they described, as the Greek sculptors had of the objects they represented; and they give as much of this absolute truth of imitation, as can be given by words. But in this direct and simple imitation of nature, as in describing the form of a beautiful woman, the poet is greatly inferior to the sculptor: it is in the power of illustration, in comparing it to other things, and suggesting other ideas of beauty or love, that he has an entirely new source of imagination opened to him: and of this power, the moderns have made at least a bolder and more frequent use than the ancients. The description of Helen in Homer is a description of what might have happened and been seen, as “that she moved with grace, and that the old men rose up with reverence as she passed;” the description of Belphœbe in Spenser is a description of what was only visible to the eye of the poet.

“Upon her eyelids many graces sat, Under the shadow of her even brows.”

The description of the soldiers going to battle in Shakespear, “all plumed like estriches, like eagles newly baited, wanton as goats, wild as young bulls,” is too bold, figurative, and profuse of dazzling images, for the mild, equable tone of classical poetry, which never loses sight of the object in the illustration. The ideas of the ancients were too exact and definite, too much attached to the material form or vehicle by which they were conveyed, to admit of those rapid combinations, those unrestrained flights of fancy, which, glancing from heaven to earth, unite the most opposite extremes, and draw the happiest illustrations from things the most remote. The two principles of imitation and imagination, indeed, are not only distinct, but almost opposite.

‘The great difference, then, which we find between the classical and the romantic style, between ancient and modern poetry, is, that the one more frequently describes things as they are interesting in themselves,—the other for the sake of the associations of ideas connected with them; that the one dwells more on the immediate impressions of objects on the senses—the other on the ideas which they suggest to the imagination. The one is the poetry of form, the other of effect. The one gives only what is necessarily implied in the subject, the other all that can possibly arise out of it. The one seeks to identify the imitation with the external object,—clings to it,—is inseparable from it,—is either that or nothing; the other seeks to identify the original impression with whatever else, within the range of thought or feeling, can strengthen, relieve, adorn or elevate it. Hence the severity and simplicity of the Greek tragedy, which excluded every thing foreign or unnecessary to the subject. Hence the Unities: for, in order to identify the imitation as much as possible with the reality, and leave nothing to mere imagination, it was necessary to give the same coherence and consistency to the different parts of a story, as to the different limbs of a statue. Hence the beauty and grandeur of their materials; for, deriving their power over the mind from the truth of the imitation, it was necessary that the subject which they made choice of, and from which they could not depart, should be in itself grand and beautiful. Hence the perfection of their execution; which consisted in giving the utmost harmony, delicacy, and refinement to the details of a given subject. Now, the characteristic excellence of the moderns is the reverse of all this. As, according to our author, the poetry of the Greeks is the same as their sculpture; so, he says, our own more nearly resembles painting,—where the artist can relieve and throw back his figures at pleasure,—use a greater variety of contrasts,—and where light and shade, like the colours of fancy, are reflected on the different objects. The Muse of classical poetry should be represented as a beautiful naked figure: the Muse of modern poetry should be represented clothed, and with wings. The first has the advantage in point of form; the last in colour and motion.

‘Perhaps we may trace this difference to something analogous in physical organization, situation, religion, and manners. First, the physical organization of the Greeks seems to have been more perfect, more susceptible of external impressions, and more in harmony with external nature than ours, who have not the same advantages of climate and constitution. Born of a beautiful and vigorous race, with quick senses and a clear understanding, and placed under a mild heaven, they gave the fullest developement to their external faculties: and where all is perceived easily, every thing is perceived in harmony and proportion. It is the stern genius of the North which drives men back upon their own resources, which makes them slow to perceive, and averse to feel, and which, by rendering them insensible to the single, successive impressions of things, requires their collective and combined force to rouse the imagination violently and unequally. It should be remarked, however, that the early poetry of some of the Eastern nations has even more of that irregularity, wild enthusiasm, and disproportioned grandeur, which has been considered as the distinguishing character of the Northern nations.

‘Again, a good deal may be attributed to the state of manners and political institutions. The ancient Greeks were warlike tribes encamped in cities. They had no other country than that which was enclosed within the walls of the town in which they lived. Each individual belonged, in the first instance, to the state; and his relations to it were so close, as to take away, in a great measure, all personal independence and free-will. Every one was mortised to his place in society, and had his station assigned him as part of the political machine, which could only subsist by strict subordination and regularity. Every man was, as it were, perpetually on duty, and his faculties kept constant watch and ward. Energy of purpose and intensity of observation became the necessary characteristics of such a state of society; and the general principle communicated itself from this ruling concern for the public, to morals, to art, to language, to every thing.—The tragic poets of Greece were among her best soldiers; and it is no wonder that they were as severe in their poetry as in their discipline. Their swords and their styles carved out their way with equal sharpness.—After all, however, the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection of the classical style, are hardly tragedies in our sense of the word.[41] They do not exhibit the extremity of human passion and suffering. The object of modern tragedy is to represent the soul utterly subdued as it were, or at least convulsed and overthrown by passion or misfortune. That of the ancients was to shew how the greatest crimes could be perpetrated with the least remorse, and the greatest calamities borne with the least emotion. Firmness of purpose and calmness of sentiment are their leading characteristics. Their heroes and heroines act and suffer as if they were always in the presence of a higher power, or as if human life itself were a religious ceremony, performed in honour of the Gods and of the State. The mind is not shaken to its centre; the whole being is not crushed or broken down. Contradictory motives are not accumulated; the utmost force of imagination and passion is not exhausted to overcome the repugnance of the will to crime; the contrast and combination of outward accidents are not called in to overwhelm the mind with the whole weight of unexpected calamity. The dire conflict of the feelings, the desperate struggle with fortune, are seldom there. All is conducted with a fatal composure; prepared and submitted to with inflexible constancy, as if Nature were only an instrument in the hands of Fate.

‘This state of things was afterwards continued under the Roman empire. In the ages of chivalry and romance, which, after a considerable interval, succeeded its dissolution, and which have stamped their character on modern genius and literature, all was reversed. Society was again resolved into its component parts; and the world was, in a manner, to begin anew. The ties which bound the citizen and the soldier to the state being loosened, each person was thrown back into the circle of the domestic affections, or left to pursue his doubtful way to fame and fortune alone. This interval of time might be accordingly supposed to give birth to all that was constant in attachment, adventurous in

## action, strange, wild, and extravagant in invention. Human life took the

shape of a busy, voluptuous dream, where the imagination was now lost amidst “antres vast and deserts idle;” or suddenly transported to stately palaces, echoing with dance and song. In this uncertainty of events, this fluctuation of hopes and fears, all objects became dim, confused, and vague. Magicians, dwarfs, giants, followed in the train of romance; and Orlando’s enchanted sword, the horn which he carried with him, and which he blew thrice at Roncesvalles, and Rogero’s winged horse, were not sufficient to protect them in their unheard-of encounters, or deliver them from their inextricable difficulties. It was a return to the period of the early heroic ages; but tempered by the difference of domestic manners, and the spirit of religion. The marked difference in the relation of the sexes arose from the freedom of choice in women; which, from being the slaves of the will and passions of men, converted them into the arbiters of their fate, which introduced the modern system of gallantry, and first made love a feeling of the heart, founded on mutual affection and esteem. The leading virtues of the Christian religion, self-denial and generosity, assisted in producing the same effect.—Hence the spirit of chivalry, of romantic love, and honour!

‘The mythology of the romantic poetry differed from the received religion: both differed essentially from the classical. The religion or mythology of the Greeks was nearly allied to their poetry: it was material and definite. The Pagan system reduced the Gods to the human form, and elevated the powers of inanimate nature to the same standard. Statues carved out of the finest marble, represented the objects of their religious worship in airy porticos, in solemn temples, and consecrated groves. Mercury was seen “new-lighted on some heaven-kissing hill;” and the Naiad or Dryad came gracefully forth as the personified genius of the stream or wood. All was subjected to the senses. The Christian religion, on the contrary, is essentially spiritual and abstracted; it is “the evidence of things unseen.” In the Heathen mythology, form is every where predominant; in the Christian, we find only unlimited, undefined power. The imagination alone “broods over the immense abyss, and makes it pregnant.” There is, in the habitual belief of an universal, invisible principle of all things, a vastness and obscurity which confounds our perceptions, while it exalts our piety. A mysterious awe surrounds the doctrines of the Christian faith: the infinite is everywhere before us, whether we turn to reflect on what is revealed to us of the divine nature or our own.

‘History, as well as religion, has contributed to enlarge the bounds of imagination: and both together, by shewing past and future objects at an interminable distance, have accustomed the mind to contemplate and take an interest in the obscure and shadowy. The ancients were more circumscribed within “the ignorant present time,”—spoke only their own language,—were conversant only with their own customs,—were acquainted only with the events of their own history. The mere lapse of time then, aided by the art of printing, has served to accumulate an endless mass of mixed and contradictory materials; and, by extending our knowledge to a greater number of things, has made our particular ideas less perfect and distinct. The constant reference to a former state of manners and literature is a marked feature in modern poetry. We are always talking of the Greeks and Romans;—_they_ never said any thing of us. This circumstance has tended to give a certain abstract elevation, and ethereal refinement to the mind, without strengthening it. We are lost in wonder at what has been done, and dare not think of emulating it. The earliest modern poets, accordingly, may be conceived to hail the glories of the antique world, dawning through the dark abyss of time; while revelation, on the other hand, opened its path to the skies. So Dante represents himself as conducted by Virgil to the shades below; while Beatrice welcomes him to the abodes of the blest.’

The French are the only people in modern Europe, who have professedly imitated the ancients; but from their being utterly unlike the Greeks or Romans, have produced a dramatic style of their own, which is neither classical nor romantic. The same article contains the following censure of this style:

‘The true poet identifies the reader with the characters he represents; the French poet only identifies him with himself. There is scarcely a single page of their tragedy which fairly throws nature open to you. It is tragedy in masquerade. We never get beyond conjecture and reasoning—beyond the general impression of the situation of the persons—beyond general reflections on their passions—beyond general descriptions of objects. We never get at that something more, which is what we are in search of, namely, what we ourselves should feel in the same situations. The true poet transports you to the scene—you see and hear what is passing—you catch, from the lips of the persons concerned, what lies nearest to their hearts;—the French poet takes you into his closet, and reads you a lecture upon it. The _chef d’œuvres_ of their stage, then, are, at best, only ingenious paraphrases of nature. The dialogue is a tissue of common-places, of laboured declamations on human life, of learned casuistry on the passions, on virtue and vice, which any one else might make just as well as the person speaking; and yet, what the persons themselves would say, is all we want to know, and all for which the poet puts them into those situations.’

After the Restoration, that is, after the return of the exiled family of the Stuarts from France, our writers transplanted this artificial, monotonous, and imposing common-place style into England, by imitations and translations, where it could not be expected to take deep root, and produce wholesome fruits, and where it has indeed given rise to little but turgidity and rant in men of original force of genius, and to insipidity and formality in feebler copyists. Otway is the only writer of this school, who, in the lapse of a century and a half, has produced a tragedy (upon the classic or regular model) of indisputable excellence and lasting interest. The merit of Venice Preserved is not confined to its effect on the stage, or to the opportunity it affords for the display of the powers of the actors in it, of a Jaffier, a Pierre, a Belvidera: it reads as well in the closet, and loses little or none of its power of rivetting breathless attention, and stirring the deepest yearnings of affection. It has passages of great beauty in themselves (detached from the fable) touches of true nature and pathos, though none equal or indeed comparable to what we meet with in Shakespear and other writers of that day; but the awful suspense of the situations, the conflict of duties and passions, the intimate bonds that unite the characters together, and that are violently rent asunder like the

## parting of soul and body, the solemn march of the tragical events to the

fatal catastrophe that winds up and closes over all, give to this production of Otway’s Muse a charm and power that bind it like a spell on the public mind, and have made it a proud and inseparable adjunct of the English stage. Thomson has given it due honour in his feeling verse, when he exclaims,

‘See o’er the stage the Ghost of Hamlet stalks, Othello rages, poor Monimia mourns, And Belvidera pours her soul in love.’

There is a mixture of effeminacy, of luxurious and cowardly indulgence of his wayward sensibility, in Jaffier’s character, which is, however, finely relieved by the bold intrepid villainy and contemptuous irony of Pierre, while it is excused by the difficulties of his situation, and the loveliness of Belvidera: but in the Orphan there is little else but this voluptuous effeminacy of sentiment and mawkish distress, which strikes directly at the root of that mental fortitude and heroic cast of thought which alone makes tragedy endurable—that renders its sufferings pathetic, or its struggles sublime. Yet there are lines and passages in it of extreme tenderness and beauty; and few persons, I conceive (judging from my own experience) will read it at a certain time of life without shedding tears over it as fast as the ‘Arabian trees their medicinal gums.’ Otway always touched the reader, for he had himself a heart. We may be sure that he blotted his page often with his tears, on which so many drops have since fallen from glistening eyes, ‘that sacred pity had engendered there.’ He had susceptibility of feeling and warmth of genius; but he had not equal depth of thought or loftiness of imagination, and indulged his mere sensibility too much, yielding to the immediate impression or emotion excited in his own mind, and not placing himself enough in the minds and situations of others, or following the workings of nature sufficiently with keenness of eye and strength of will into its heights and depths, its strongholds as well as its weak sides. The Orphan was attempted to be revived some time since with the advantage of Miss O’Neill playing the part of Monimia. It however did not entirely succeed (as it appeared at the time) from the plot turning all on one circumstance, and that hardly of a nature to be obtruded on the public notice. The incidents and characters are taken almost literally from an old play by Robert Tailor, called HOG HATH LOST HIS PEARL.

Addison’s Cato, in spite of Dennis’s criticism, still retains possession of the stage with all its unities. My love and admiration for Addison is as great as any person’s, let that other person be who he will; but it is not founded on his Cato, in extolling which Whigs and Tories contended in loud applause. The interest of this play (bating that shadowy regret that always clings to and flickers round the form of free antiquity) is confined to the declamation, which is feeble in itself, and not heard on the stage. I have seen Mr. Kemble in this part repeat the Soliloquy on Death without a line being distinctly heard; nothing was observable but the thoughtful motion of his lips, and the occasional extension of his hand in sign of doubts suggested or resolved; yet this beautiful and expressive dumb-show, with the propriety of his costume, and the elegance of his attitude and figure, excited the most lively interest, and kept attention even more on the stretch, to catch every imperfect syllable or speaking gesture. There is nothing, however, in the play to excite ridicule, or shock by absurdity, except the love-scenes which are passed over as what the spectator has no proper concern with: and however feeble or languid the interest produced by a dramatic exhibition, unless there is some positive stumbling-block thrown in the way, or gross offence given to an audience, it is generally suffered to linger on to a _euthanasia_, instead of dying a violent and premature death. If an author (particularly an author of high reputation) can contrive to preserve a uniform degree of insipidity, he is nearly sure of impunity. It is the mixture of great faults with splendid passages (the more striking from the contrast) that is inevitable damnation. Every one must have seen the audience tired out and watching for an opportunity to wreak their vengeance on the author, and yet not able to accomplish their wish, because no one part seemed more tiresome or worthless than another. The philosophic mantle of Addison’s Cato, when it no longer spreads its graceful folds on the shoulders of John Kemble, will I fear fall to the ground; nor do I think Mr. Kean likely to pick it up again, with dauntless ambition or stoic pride, like that of Coriolanus. He could not play Cato (at least I think not) for the same reason that he will play Coriolanus. He can always play a living man; he cannot play a lifeless statue.

Dryden’s plays have not come down to us, except in the collection of his printed works. The last of them that was on the list of regular acting plays was Don Sebastian. The Mask of Arthur and Emmeline was the other day revived at one of our theatres, without much success. Alexander the Great is by Lee, who wrote some things in conjunction with Dryden, and who had far more power and passion of an irregular and turbulent kind, bordering upon constitutional morbidity, and who might have done better things (as we see from his Œdipus) had not his genius been perverted and rendered worse than abortive by carrying the vicious manner of his age to the greatest excess. Dryden’s plays are perhaps the fairest specimen of what this manner was. I do not know how to describe it better than by saying that it is one continued and exaggerated common-place. All the characters are put into a swaggering attitude of dignity, and tricked out in the pomp of ostentatious drapery. The images are extravagant, yet not far-fetched; they are outrageous caricatures of obvious thoughts: the language oscillates between bombast and bathos: the characters are noisy pretenders to virtue, and shallow boasters in vice; the versification is laboured and monotonous, quite unlike the admirably free and flowing rhyme of his satires, in which he felt the true inspiration of his subject, and could find modulated sounds to express it. Dryden had no dramatic genius either in tragedy or comedy. In his plays he mistakes blasphemy for sublimity, and ribaldry for wit. He had so little notion of his own powers, that he has put Milton’s Paradise Lost into dramatic rhyme to make Adam look like a fine gentleman; and has added a double love-plot to the Tempest, to ‘relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude’ of that solitude of the imagination, in which Shakespear had left the inhabitants of his Enchanted Island. I will give two passages out of Don Sebastian in illustration of what I have said above of this mock-heroic style.

Almeyda advising Sebastian to fly from the power of Muley-Moluch addresses him thus:

‘Leave then the luggage of your fate behind; To make your flight more easy, leave Almeyda. Nor think me left a base, ignoble prey, Exposed to this inhuman tyrant’s lust. My virtue is a guard beyond my strength; And death my last defence within my call.’

Sebastian answers very gravely:

‘Death may be called in vain, and cannot come: Tyrants can tye him up from your relief: Nor has a Christian privilege to die. Alas, thou art too young in thy new faith: Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, And give them furloughs for another world: But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand, In starless nights, and wait the appointed hour.’

Sebastian then urging her to prevent the tyrant’s designs by an instant marriage, she says,

‘’Tis late to join, when we must part so soon.

_Sebastian._ Nay, rather let us haste it, e’er we part: Our souls for want of that acquaintance here May wander in the starry walks above, And, forced on worse companions, miss ourselves.’

In the scene with Muley-Moluch where she makes intercession for Sebastian’s life, she says,

‘My father’s, mother’s, brother’s death I pardon: That’s somewhat sure, a mighty sum of murder, Of innocent and kindred blood struck off. My prayers and penance shall discount for these, And beg of Heaven to charge the bill on me: Behold what price I offer, and how dear To buy Sebastian’s life.

_Emperor._ Let after-reckonings trouble fearful fools; I’ll stand the trial of those trivial crimes: But since thou begg’st me to prescribe my terms, The only I can offer are thy love; And this one day of respite to resolve. Grant or deny, for thy next word is Fate; And Fate is deaf to Prayer.

_Almeyda._ May heav’n be so At thy last breath to thine: I curse thee not: For who can better curse the plague or devil Than to be what they are? That curse be thine. Now do not speak, Sebastian, for you need not, But die, for I resign your life: Look heav’n, Almeyda dooms her dear Sebastian’s death But is there heaven, for I begin to doubt? The skies are hush’d; no grumbling thunders roll: Now take your swing, ye impious: sin, unpunish’d. Eternal Providence seems over-watch’d, And with a slumbering nod assents to murder.... Farewell, my lost Sebastian! I do not beg, I challenge Justice now: O Powers, if Kings be your peculiar care, Why plays this wretch with your prerogative? Now flash him dead, now crumble him to ashes: Or henceforth live confined in your own palace; And look not idly out upon a world That is no longer yours.’

These passages, with many like them, will be found in the first scene of the third act.

The occasional striking expressions, such as that of souls at the resurrection ‘fumbling for their limbs,’ are the language of strong satire and habitual disdain, not proper to tragic or serious poetry.

After Dryden there is no writer that has acquired much reputation as a tragic poet for the next hundred years. In the hands of his successors, the Smiths, the Hughes, the Hills, the Murphys, the Dr. Johnsons, of the reigns of George I. and II., tragedy seemed almost afraid to know itself, and certainly did not stand where it had done a hundred and fifty years before. It had degenerated by regular and studied gradations into the most frigid, insipid, and insignificant of all things. It faded to a shade, it tapered to a point, ‘fine by degrees, and beautifully less.’ I do not believe there is a single play of this period which could be read with any degree of interest or even patience, by a modern reader of poetry, if we except the productions of Southern, Lillo and Moore, the authors of the Gamester, Oroonoko, and Fatal Curiosity, and who instead of mounting on classic stilts and making rhetorical flourishes, went out of the established road to seek for truth and nature and effect in the commonest life and lowest situations. In short, the only tragedy of this period is that to which their productions gave a name, and which has been called in contradistinction by the French, and with an express provision for its merits and defects, the _tragedie bourgeoise_. An anecdote is told of the first of these writers by Gray, in one of his Letters, dated from Horace Walpole’s country-seat, about the year 1740, who says, ‘Old Mr. Southern is here, who is now above 80: a very agreeable old man, at least I think so when I look in his face, and think of Isabella and Oroonoko.’ It is pleasant to see these traits of attachment and gratitude kept up in successive generations of poets to one another, and also to find that the same works of genius that have ‘sent us weeping to our beds,’ and made us ‘rise sadder and wiser on the morrow morn,’ have excited just the same fondness of affection in others before we were born; and it is to be hoped, will do so, after we are dead. Our best feelings, and those on which we pride ourselves most, and with most reason, are perhaps the commonest of all others.

Up to the present reign, and during the best part of it (with another solitary exception, Douglas, which with all its feebleness and extravagance, has in its style and sentiments a good deal of poetical and romantic beauty) tragedy wore the face of the Goddess of Dulness in the Dunciad, serene, torpid, sickly, lethargic, and affected, till it was roused from its trance by the blast of the French Revolution, and by the loud trampling of the German Pegasus on the English stage, which now appeared as pawing to get free from its ancient trammels, and rampant shook off the incumbrance of all former examples, opinions, prejudices, and principles. If we have not been alive and well since this period, at least we have been alive, and it is better to be alive than dead. The German tragedy (and our own, which is only a branch of it) aims at effect, and produces it often in the highest degree; and it does this by going all the lengths not only of instinctive feeling, but of speculative opinion, and startling the hearer by overturning all the established maxims of society, and setting at nought all the received rules of composition. It cannot be said of this style that in it ‘decorum is the principal thing.’ It is the violation of decorum, that is its first and last principle, the beginning, middle, and end. It is an insult and defiance to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy. The action is not grave, but extravagant: the fable is not probable, but improbable: the favourite characters are not only low, but vicious: the sentiments are such as do not become the person into whose mouth they are put, nor that of any other person: the language is a mixture of metaphysical jargon and flaring prose: the moral is immorality. In spite of all this, a German tragedy is a good thing. It is a fine hallucination: it is a noble madness, and as there is a pleasure in madness, which none but madmen know, so there is a pleasure in reading a German play to be found in no other. The world have thought so: they go to see the Stranger, they go to see Lovers’ Vows and Pizarro, they have their eyes wide open all the time, and almost cry them out before they come away, and therefore they go again. There is something in the style that hits the temper of men’s minds; that, if it does not hold the mirrour up to nature, yet ‘shews the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.’ It embodies, it sets off and aggrandizes in all the pomp of action, in all the vehemence of hyperbolical declamation, in scenery, in dress, in music, in the glare of the senses, and the glow of sympathy, the extreme opinions which are floating in our time, and which have struck their roots deep and wide below the surface of the public mind. We are no longer as formerly heroes in warlike enterprise; martyrs to religious faith; but we are all the partisans of a political system, and devotees to some theory of moral sentiments. The modern style of tragedy is not assuredly made up of pompous common-place, but it is a tissue of philosophical, political, and moral paradoxes. I am not saying whether these paradoxes are true or false: all that I mean to state is, that they are utterly at variance with old opinions, with established rules and existing institutions; that it is this tug of war between the inert prejudice and the startling novelty which is to batter it down (first on the stage of the theatre, and afterwards on the stage of the world) that gives the excitement and the zest. We see the natural always pitted against the social man; and the majority who are not of the privileged classes, take part with the former. The hero is a sort of metaphysical Orson, armed not with teeth and a club, but with hard sayings and unanswerable sentences, ticketted and labelled with extracts and mottos from the modern philosophy. This common representative of mankind is a natural son of some feudal lord, or wealthy baron: and he comes to claim as a matter of course and of simple equity, the rich reversion of the title and estates to which he has a right by the bounty of nature and the privilege of his birth. This produces a very edifying scene, and the proud, unfeeling, unprincipled baron is hooted from the stage. A young woman, a sempstress, or a waiting maid of much beauty and accomplishment, who would not think of matching with a fellow of low birth or fortune for the world, falls in love with the heir of an immense estate out of pure regard to his mind and person, and thinks it strange that rank and opulence do not follow as natural appendages in the train of sentiment. A lady of fashion, wit, and beauty, forfeits the sanctity of her marriage-vow, but preserves the inviolability of her sentiments and character,

‘Pure in the last recesses of the mind’—

and triumphs over false opinion and prejudice, like gold out of the fire, the brighter for the ordeal. A young man turns robber and captain of a gang of banditti; and the wonder is to see the heroic ardour of his sentiments, his aspirations after the most godlike goodness and unsullied reputation, working their way through the repulsiveness of his situation, and making use of fortune only as a foil to nature. The principle of contrast and contradiction is here made use of, and no other. All qualities are reversed: virtue is always at odds with vice, ‘which shall be which:’ the internal character and external situation, the actions and the sentiments, are never in accord: you are to judge of everything by contraries: those that exalt themselves are abased, and those that should be humbled are exalted: the high places and strongholds of power and greatness are crumbled in the dust; opinions totter, feelings are brought into question, and the world is turned upside down, with all things in it!—‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil’—and there is some soul of goodness in all this. The world and every thing in it is not just what it ought to be, or what it pretends to be; or such extravagant and prodigious paradoxes would be driven from the stage—would meet with sympathy in no human breast, high or low, young or old. _There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark._ Opinion is not truth: appearance is not reality: power is not beneficence: rank is not wisdom: nobility is not the only virtue: riches are not happiness: desert and success are different things: actions do not always speak the character any more than words. We feel this, and do justice to the romantic extravagance of the German Muse.

In Germany, where this _outré_ style of treating every thing established and adventitious was carried to its height, there were, as we learn from the Sorrows of Werter, seven-and-twenty ranks in society, each raised above the other, and of which the one above did not speak to the one below it. Is it wonderful that the poets and philosophers of Germany, the discontented men of talent, who thought and mourned for themselves and their fellows, the Goethes, the Lessings, the Schillers, the Kotzebues, felt a sudden and irresistible impulse by a convulsive effort to tear aside this factitious drapery of society, and to throw off that load of bloated prejudice, of maddening pride and superannuated folly, that pressed down every energy of their nature and stifled the breath of liberty, of truth and genius in their bosoms? These Titans of our days tried to throw off the dead weight that encumbered them, and in so doing, warred not against heaven, but against earth. The same writers (as far as I have seen) have made the only incorrigible Jacobins, and their school of poetry is the only real school of Radical Reform.

In reasoning, truth and soberness may prevail, on which side soever they meet: but in works of imagination novelty has the advantage over prejudice; that which is striking and unheard-of, over that which is trite and known before, and that which gives unlimited scope to the indulgence of the feelings and the passions (whether erroneous or not) over that which imposes a restraint upon them.

I have half trifled with this subject; and I believe I have done so, because I despaired of finding language for some old rooted feelings I have about it, which a theory could neither give or can it take away. The Robbers was the first play I ever read: and the effect it produced upon me was the greatest. It stunned me like a blow, and I have not recovered enough from it to describe how it was. There are impressions which neither time nor circumstances can efface. Were I to live much longer than I have any chance of doing, the books which I read when I was young, I can never forget. Five-and-twenty years have elapsed since I first read the translation of the Robbers, but they have not blotted the impression from my mind: it is here still, an old dweller in the chambers of the brain. The scene in particular in which Moor looks through his tears at the evening sun from the mountain’s brow, and says in his despair, ‘It was my wish like him to live, like him to die: it was an idle thought, a boy’s conceit,’ took fast hold of my imagination, and that sun has to me never set! The last interview in Don Carlos between the two lovers, in which the injured bride struggles to burst the prison-house of her destiny, in which her hopes and youth lie coffined, and buried, as it were, alive, under the oppression of unspeakable anguish, I remember gave me a deep sense of suffering and a strong desire after good, which has haunted me ever since. I do not like Schiller’s later style so well. His Wallenstein, which is admirably and almost literally translated by Mr. Coleridge, is stately, thoughtful, and imaginative: but where is the enthusiasm, the throbbing of hope and fear, the mortal struggle between the passions; as if all the happiness or misery of a life were crowded into a moment, and the die was to be cast that instant? Kotzebue’s best work I read first in Cumberland’s imitation of it in the Wheel of Fortune; and I confess that that style of sentiment which seems to make of life itself a long-drawn endless sigh, has something in it that pleases me, in spite of rules and criticism. Goethe’s tragedies are (those that I have seen of them, his Count Egmont, Stella, &c.) constructed upon the second or inverted manner of the German stage, with a deliberate design to avoid all possible effect and interest, and this object is completely accomplished. He is however spoken of with enthusiasm almost amounting to idolatry by his countrymen, and those among ourselves who import heavy German criticism into this country in shallow flat-bottomed unwieldy intellects. Madame De Stael speaks of one passage in his Iphigenia, where he introduces a fragment of an old song, which the Furies are supposed to sing to Tantalus in hell, reproaching him with the times when he sat with the Gods at their golden tables, and with his after-crimes that hurled him from heaven, at which he turns his eyes from his children and hangs his head in mournful silence. This is the true sublime. Of all his works I like his Werter best, nor would I part with it at a venture, even for the Memoirs of Anastasius the Greek, whoever is the author; nor ever cease to think of the times, ‘when in the fine summer evenings they saw the frank, noble-minded enthusiast coming up from the valley,’ nor of ‘the high grass that by the light of the departing sun waved in the breeze over his grave.’

But I have said enough to give an idea of this modern style, compared with our own early Dramatic Literature, of which I had to treat.—I have done: and if I have done no better, the fault has been in me, not in the subject. My liking to this grew with my knowledge of it: but so did my anxiety to do it justice. I somehow felt it as a point of honour not to make my hearers think less highly of some of these old writers than I myself did of them. If I have praised an author, it was because I liked him: if I have quoted a passage, it was because it pleased me in the reading: if I have spoken contemptuously of any one, it has been reluctantly. It is no easy task that a writer, even in so humble a class as myself, takes upon him; he is scouted and ridiculed if he fails; and if he succeeds, the enmity and cavils and malice with which he is assailed, are just in proportion to his success. The coldness and jealousy of his friends not unfrequently keep pace with the rancour of his enemies. They do not like you a bit the better for fulfilling the good opinion they always entertained of you. They would wish you to be always promising a great deal, and doing nothing, that they may answer for the performance. That shows their sagacity and does not hurt their vanity. An author wastes his time in painful study and obscure researches, to gain a little breath of popularity, meets with nothing but vexation and disappointment in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred; or when he thinks to grasp the luckless prize, finds it not worth the trouble—the perfume of a minute, fleeting as a shadow, hollow as a sound; ‘as often got without merit as lost without deserving.’ He thinks that the attainment of acknowledged excellence will secure him the expression of those feelings in others, which the image and hope of it had excited in his own breast, but instead of that, he meets with nothing (or scarcely nothing) but squint-eyed suspicion, idiot wonder, and grinning scorn.—It seems hardly worth while to have taken all the pains he has been at for this!

In youth we borrow patience from our future years: the spring of hope gives us courage to act and suffer. A cloud is upon our onward path, and we fancy that all is sunshine beyond it. The prospect seems endless, because we do not know the end of it. We think that life is long, because art is so, and that, because we have much to do, it is well worth doing: or that no exertions can be too great, no sacrifices too painful, to overcome the difficulties we have to encounter. Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot. But as we approach the goal, we draw in the reins; the impulse is less, as we have not so far to go; as we see objects nearer, we become less sanguine in the pursuit: it is not the despair of not attaining, so much as knowing there is nothing worth obtaining, and the fear of having nothing left even to wish for, that damps our ardour, and relaxes our efforts; and if the mechanical habit did not increase the facility, would, I believe, take away all inclination or power to do any thing. We stagger on the few remaining paces to the end of our journey; make perhaps one final effort; and are glad when our task is done!

End of LECTURES ON THE AGE OF ELIZABETH

PREFACE AND CRITICAL LIST OF AUTHORS FROM SELECT BRITISH POETS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The first edition of the _Select British Poets_ (5¾ in. × 9 in.) was published in 1824 with the following title-page: ‘Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time, with Critical Remarks. By William Hazlitt. Embellished with Seven Ornamented Portraits, after a Design by T. Stothard, R.A. London: Published by Wm. C. Hall, and sold by all Booksellers. 1824.’ The frontispiece bore the imprint ‘London. Published by T. Tegg, 73, Cheapside, June 1824.’ This edition included selections from the works of living poets, and was suppressed upon a threat of legal proceedings on behalf of some of the copyright owners. There is a copy in the British Museum, but the volume is exceedingly rare. In the following year (1825), a second edition was published with a fresh title-page, the copyright poems being omitted. The title-page ran: ‘Select Poets of Great Britain. To which are prefixed, Critical Notices of Each Author. By William Hazlitt, Esq. Author of “Lectures on the English Poets,” “Characters of Shakspeare’s Plays,” “Lectures on Dramatic Literature,” etc. London: Printed by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars, for Thomas Tegg, 73, Cheapside; R. Griffin and Co., Glasgow; also R. Milliken, Dublin; and M. Baudry, Paris. 1825.’ The pages which follow are printed from the first (complete) edition of 1824.

PREFACE

The volume here presented to the public is an attempt to improve upon the plan of the Elegant Extracts in Verse by the late Dr. Knox. From the length of time which had elapsed since the first appearance of that work, a similar undertaking admitted of considerable improvement, although the size of the volume has been compressed by means of a more severe selection of matter. At least, a third of the former popular and in many respects valuable work was devoted to articles either entirely worthless, or recommended only by considerations foreign to the reader of poetry. The object and indeed ambition of the present compiler has been to offer to the public a BODY OF ENGLISH POETRY, from Chaucer to Burns, such as might at once satisfy individual curiosity and justify our national pride. We have reason to boast of the genius of our country for poetry and of the trophies earned in that way; and it is well to have a collection of such examples of excellence inwoven together as may serve to nourish our own taste and love for the sublime or beautiful, and also to silence the objections of foreigners, who are too ready to treat us as behindhand with themselves in all that relates to the arts of refinement and elegance. If in some respects we are so, it behoves us the more to cultivate and cherish the superiority we can lay claim to in others. Poetry is one of those departments in which we possess a decided and as it were natural pre-eminence: and therefore no pains should be spared in selecting and setting off to advantage the different proofs and vouchers of it.

All that could be done for this object, has been attempted in the present instance. I have brought together in one view (to the best of my judgment) the most admired smaller pieces of poetry, and the most striking passages in larger works, which could not themselves be given entire. I have availed myself of the plan chalked out by my predecessor, but in the hope of improving upon it. To possess a work of this kind ought to be like holding the contents of a library in one’s hand without any of the refuse or ‘baser matter.’ If it had not been thought that the former work admitted of considerable improvement in the choice of subjects, inasmuch as inferior and indifferent productions not rarely occupied the place of sterling excellence, the present publication would not have been hazarded. Another difference is that I have followed the order of time, instead of the division of the subjects. By this method, the progress of poetry is better seen and understood; and besides, the real subjects of poetry are so much alike or run so much into one another, as not easily to come under any precise classification.

The great deficiency which I have to lament is the small portion of Shakespear’s poetry, which has been introduced into the work; but this arose unavoidably from the plan of it, which did not extend to dramatic poetry as a general species. The extracts from the best parts of Chaucer, which are given at some length, will, it is hoped, be acceptable to the lover both of poetry and history. The quotations from Spenser do not occupy a much larger space than in the Elegant Extracts; but entire passages are given, instead of a numberless quantity of shreds and patches. The essence of Spenser’s poetry was a continuous, endless flow of indescribable beauties, like the galaxy or milky way:—Dr. Knox has ‘taken him and cut him out in little stars,’ which was repugnant to the genius of his writings. I have made it my aim to exhibit the characteristic and striking features of English poetry and English genius; and with this view have endeavoured to give such specimens from each author as showed his peculiar powers of mind and the peculiar style in which he excelled, and have omitted those which were not only less remarkable in themselves, but were common to him with others, or in which others surpassed him, who were therefore the proper models in that particular way. _Cuique tribuitur suum._ In a word, it has been proposed to retain those passages and pieces with which the reader of taste and feeling would be most pleased in the perusal of the original works, and to which he would wish oftenest to turn again—and which consequently may be conceived to conduce most beneficially to form the taste and amuse the fancy of those who have not leisure or industry to make themselves masters of the whole range of English poetry. By leaving out a great deal of uninteresting and common-place poetry, room has been obtained for nearly all that was emphatically excellent. The reader, it is presumed, may here revel and find no end of delight, in the racy vigour and manly characteristic humour, or simple pathos of Chaucer’s Muse, in the gorgeous voluptuousness and romantic tenderness of Spenser, in the severe, studied beauty and awful majesty of Milton, in the elegance and refinement and harmony of Pope, in the strength and satire and sounding rhythm of Dryden, in the sportive gaiety and graces of Suckling, Dorset, Gay, and Prior, in Butler’s wit, in Thomson’s rural scenes, in Cowper’s terse simplicity, in Burns’s laughing eye and feeling heart (among standard and established reputations)—and in the polished tenderness of Campbell, the buoyant heart-felt levity of Moore, the striking, careless, picturesque beauties of Scott, the thoughtful humanity of Wordsworth, and Byron’s glowing rage (among those whose reputation seems less solid and towering, because we are too near them to perceive its height or measure its duration). Others might be mentioned to lengthen out the list of poetic names

‘That on the steady breeze of honour sail In long possession, calm and beautiful:’—

but from all together enough has been gleaned to make a ‘perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, where no crude surfeit reigns.’ Such at least has been my ardent wish; and if this volume is not pregnant with matter both ‘rich and rare,’ it has been the fault of the compiler, and not of the poverty or niggardliness of the ENGLISH MUSE.

W. H.

A CRITICAL LIST OF AUTHORS CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME

CHAUCER is in the first class of poetry (the _natural_) and one of the first. He describes the common but individual objects of nature and the strongest and most universal, because spontaneous workings of the heart. In invention he has not much to boast, for the materials are chiefly borrowed (except in some of his comic tales); but the masterly execution is his own. He is remarkable for the degree and variety of the qualities he possesses—excelling equally in the comic and serious. He has little fancy, but he has great wit, great humour, strong manly sense, great power of description, perfect knowledge of character, occasional sublimity, as in parts of the _Knight’s Tale_, and the deepest pathos, as in the story of _Griselda_, _Custance_, _The Flower and the Leaf_, &c. In humour and spirit, _The Wife of Bath_ is unequalled.

SPENSER excels in the two qualities in which Chaucer is most deficient—invention and fancy. The invention shown in his allegorical personages is endless, as the fancy shown in his description of them is gorgeous and delightful. He is the poet of romance. He describes things as in a splendid and voluptuous dream. He has displayed no comic talent, except in his _Shepherd’s Calendar_. He has little attempt at character, an occasional visionary sublimity, and a pensive tenderness approaching to the finest pathos. Nearly all that is excellent in the _Faery Queen_ is contained in the three first Books. His style is sometimes ambiguous and affected; but his versification is to the last degree flowing and harmonious.

Sir PHILIP SIDNEY is an affected writer, but with great power of thought and description. His poetry, of which he did not write much, has the faults of his prose without its recommendations.

DRAYTON has chiefly tried his strength in description and learned narrative. The plan of the _Poly-Olbion_ (a local or geographical account of Great Britain) is original, but not very happy. The descriptions of places are often striking and curious, but become tedious by uniformity. There is some fancy in the poem, but little general interest. His Heroic Epistles have considerable tenderness and dignity; and, in the structure of the verse, have served as a model to succeeding writers.

DANIEL is chiefly remarkable for simplicity of style, and natural tenderness. In some of his occasional pieces (as the _Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland_) there is a vast philosophic gravity and stateliness of sentiment.

Sir JOHN SUCKLING is one of the most piquant and attractive of the Minor poets. He has fancy, wit, humour, descriptive talent, the highest elegance, perfect ease, a familiar style and a pleasing versification. He has combined all these in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, which is a masterpiece of sportive gaiety and good humour. His genius was confined entirely to the light and agreeable.

GEORGE WITHER is a poet of comparatively little power; though he has left one or two exquisitely affecting passages, having a personal reference to his own misfortunes.

WALLER belonged to the same class as Suckling—the sportive, the sparkling, the polished, with fancy, wit, elegance of style, and easiness of versification at his command. Poetry was the plaything of his idle hours—the mistress, to whom he addressed his verses, was his real Muse. His lines on the _Death of Oliver Cromwell_ are however serious, and even sublime.

MILTON was one of the four great English poets, who must certainly take precedence over all others, I mean himself, Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespear. His subject is not common or _natural_ indeed, but it is of preternatural grandeur and unavoidable interest. He is altogether a serious poet; and in this differs from Chaucer and Shakespear, and resembles Spenser. He has sublimity in the highest degree: beauty in an equal degree; pathos in a degree next to the highest; perfect character in the conception of Satan, of Adam and Eve; fancy, learning, vividness of description, stateliness, decorum. He seems on a par with his subjects in _Paradise Lost_; to raise it, and to be raised with it. His style is elaborate and powerful, and his versification, with occasional harshness and affectation, superior in harmony and variety to all other blank verse. It has the effect of a piece of fine music. His smaller pieces, _Lycidas_, _L’Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, the Sonnets, &c., display proportionable excellence, from their beauty, sweetness, and elegance.

COWLEY is a writer of great sense, ingenuity, and learning; but as a poet, his fancy is quaint, far-fetched, and mechanical, and he has no other distinguishing quality whatever. To these objections his Anacreontics are a delightful exception. They are the perfection of that sort of gay, unpremeditated, lyrical effusion. They breathe the very spirit of love and wine. Most of his other pieces should be read for instruction, not for pleasure.

MARVELL is a writer almost forgotten: but undeservedly so. His poetical reputation seems to have sunk with his political party. His satires were coarse, quaint, and virulent; but his other productions are full of a lively, tender, and elegant fancy. His verses leave an echo on the ear, and find one in the heart. See those entitled BERMUDAS, TO HIS COY MISTRESS, ON THE DEATH OF A FAWN, &c.

BUTLER (the author of _Hudibras_) has undoubtedly more wit than any other writer in the language. He has little besides to recommend him, if we except strong sense, and a laudable contempt of absurdity and hypocrisy. He has little story, little character, and no great humour in his singular poem. The invention of the fable seems borrowed from Don Quixote. He has however prodigious merit in his style, and in the fabrication of his rhymes.

Sir JOHN DENHAM’S fame rests chiefly on his _Cooper’s Hill_. This poem is a mixture of the descriptive and didactic, and has given birth to many poems on the same plan since. His _forte_ is strong, sound sense, and easy, unaffected, manly verse.

DRYDEN stands nearly at the head of the second class of English poets, _viz._ the _artificial_, or those who describe the mixed modes of artificial life, and convey general precepts and abstract ideas. He had invention in the plan of his Satires, very little fancy, not much wit, no humour, immense strength of character, elegance, masterly ease, indignant contempt approaching to the sublime, not a particle of tenderness, but eloquent declamation, the perfection of uncorrupted English style, and of sounding, vehement, varied versification. The _Alexander’s Feast_, his _Fables_ and _Satires_, are his standard and lasting works.

ROCHESTER, as a wit, is first-rate: but his fancy is keen and caustic, not light and pleasing, like Suckling or Waller. His verses cut and sparkle like diamonds.

ROSCOMMON excelled chiefly as a translator; but his translation of _Horace’s Art of Poetry_ is so _unique_ a specimen of fidelity and felicity, that it has been adopted into this collection.

POMFRET left one popular poem behind him, THE CHOICE; the attraction of which may be supposed to lie rather in the subject than in the peculiar merit of the execution.

Lord DORSET, for the playful ease and elegance of his verses, is not surpassed by any of the poets of that class.

J. PHILIPS‘s SPLENDID SHILLING makes the fame of this poet—it is a lucky thought happily executed.

HALIFAX (of whom two short poems are here retained) was the least of the Minor poets—one of ‘the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease.’

The praise of PARNELL‘s poetry is, that it was moral, amiable, with a tendency towards the pensive; and it was his fortune to be the friend of poets.

PRIOR is not a very moral poet, but the most arch, piquant, and equivocal of those that have been admitted into this collection. He is a graceful narrator, a polished wit, full of the delicacies of style amidst gross allusions.

POPE is at the head of the second class of poets, viz. the describers of artificial life and manners. His works are a delightful, never-failing fund of good sense and refined taste. He had high invention and fancy of the comic kind, as in the _Rape of the Lock_; wit, as in the _Dunciad_ and _Satires_; no humour; some beautiful descriptions, as in the _Windsor Forest_; some exquisite delineations of character (those of Addison and Villiers are master-pieces); he is a model of elegance everywhere, but more particularly in his eulogies and friendly epistles; his ease is the effect of labour; he has no pretensions to sublimity, but sometimes displays an indignant moral feeling akin to it; his pathos is playful and tender, as in his Epistles to _Arbuthnot_ and _Jervas_, or rises into power by the help of rhetoric, as in the _Eloisa_, and _Elegy on the Death of an Unfortunate Lady_; his style is polished and almost faultless in its kind; his versification tires by uniform smoothness and harmony. He has been called ‘the most sensible of poets:’ but the proofs of his sense are to be looked for in his single observations and hints, as in the _Essay on Criticism_ and _Moral Epistles_, and not in the larger didactic reasonings of the _Essay on Man_, which is full of verbiage and bombast.

If good sense has been made the characteristic of Pope, good-nature might be made (with at least equal truth) the characteristic of GAY. He was a satirist without gall. He had a delightful placid vein of invention, fancy, wit, humour, description, ease and elegance, a happy style, and a versification which seemed to cost him nothing. His _Beggar’s Opera_ indeed has stings in it, but it appears to have left the writer’s mind without any.

The _Grave_ of BLAIR is a serious and somewhat gloomy poem, but pregnant with striking reflections and fine fancy.

SWIFT‘s poetry is not at all equal to his prose. He was actuated by the spleen in both. He has however sense, wit, humour, ease, and even elegance when he pleases, in his poetical effusions. But he trifled with the Muse. He has written more agreeable nonsense than any man. His _Verses on his own Death_ are affecting and beautiful.

AMBROSE PHILIPS‘s _Pastorals_ were ridiculed by Pope, and their merit is of an humble kind. They may be said rather to mimic nature than to imitate it. They talk about rural objects, but do not paint them. His verses descriptive of a NORTHERN WINTER are better.

THOMSON is the best and most original of our descriptive poets. He had nature; but, through indolence or affectation, too often embellished it with the gaudy ornaments of art. Where he gave way to his genuine impulses, he was excellent. He had invention in the choice of his subject (_The Seasons_), some fancy, wit and humour of a most voluptuous kind; in the _Castle of Indolence_, great descriptive power. His elegance is tawdriness; his ease slovenliness; he sometimes rises into sublimity, as in his account of the _Torrid_ and _Frozen Zones_; he has occasional pathos too, as in his _Traveller Lost in the Snow_; his style is barbarous, and his ear heavy and bad.

COLLINS, of all our Minor poets, that is, those who have attempted only short pieces, is probably the one who has shown the most of the highest qualities of poetry, and who excites the most intense interest in the bosom of the reader. He soars into the regions of imagination, and occupies the highest peaks of Parnassus. His fancy is glowing, vivid, but at the same time hasty and obscure. Gray’s sublimity was borrowed and mechanical, compared to Collins’s, who has the true inspiration, the _vivida vis_ of the poet. He heats and melts objects in the fervour of his genius, as in a furnace. See his _Odes to Fear_, _On the Poetical Character_, and _To Evening_. The _Ode on the Passions_ is the most popular, but the most artificial of his principal ones. His qualities were fancy, sublimity of conception, and no mean degree of pathos, as in the _Eclogues_, and the _Dirge in Cymbeline_.

DYER‘s _Grongar Hill_ is a beautiful moral and descriptive effusion, with much elegance, and perfect ease of style and versification.

SHENSTONE was a writer inclined to feebleness and affectation: but when he could divest himself of sickly pretensions, he produces occasional excellence of a high degree. His SCHOOL-MISTRESS is the perfection of _naïve_ description, and of that mixture of pathos and humour, than which nothing is more delightful or rare.

MALLET was a poet of small merit—but every one has read his _Edwin and Emma_, and no one ever forgot it.

AKENSIDE is a poet of considerable power, but of little taste or feeling. His thoughts, like his style, are stately and imposing, but turgid and gaudy. In his verse, ‘_less_ is meant than meets the ear.’ He has some merit in the invention of the subject (the _Pleasures of Imagination_) his poem being the first of a series of similar ones on the faculties of the mind, as the _Pleasures of Memory_, _of Hope_, &c.

YOUNG is a poet who has been much over-rated from the popularity of his subject, and the glitter and lofty pretensions of his style. I wished to have made more extracts from the _Night Thoughts_, but was constantly repelled by the tinsel of expression, the false ornaments, and laboured conceits. Of all writers who have gained a great name, he is the most meretricious and objectionable. His is false wit, false fancy, false sublimity, and mock-tenderness. At least, it appears so to me.

GRAY was an author of great pretensions, but of great merit. He has an air of sublimity, if not the reality. He aims at the highest things; and if he fails, it is only by a hair’s-breadth. His pathos is injured, like his sublimity, by too great an ambition after the ornaments and machinery of poetry. His craving after foreign help perhaps shows the want of the internal impulse. His _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, which is the most simple, is the best of his productions.

CHURCHILL is a fine rough satirist. He had sense, wit, eloquence, and honesty.

GOLDSMITH, both in verse and prose, was one of the most delightful writers in the language. His verse flows like a limpid stream. His ease is quite unconscious. Every thing in him is spontaneous, unstudied, unaffected, yet elegant, harmonious, graceful, nearly faultless. Without the point or refinement of Pope, he has more natural tenderness, a greater suavity of manner, a more genial spirit. Goldsmith never rises into sublimity, and seldom sinks into insipidity, or stumbles upon coarseness. His _Traveller_ contains masterly national sketches. The _Deserted Village_ is sometimes spun out into a mawkish sentimentality; but the characters of the _Village Schoolmaster_, and the _Village Clergyman_, redeem a hundred faults. His _Retaliation_ is a poem of exquisite spirit, humour, and freedom of style.

ARMSTRONG‘s _Art of Preserving Health_ displays a fine natural vein of sense and poetry on a most unpromising subject.

CHATTERTON‘s _Remains_ show great premature power, but are chiefly interesting from his fate. He discovered great boldness of spirit and versatility of talent; yet probably, if he had lived, would not have increased his reputation for genius.

THOMAS WARTON was a man of taste and genius. His SONNETS I cannot help preferring to any in the language.

COWPER is the last of the English poets in the first division of this collection, but though last, not least. He is, after Thomson, the best of our descriptive poets—more minute and graphical, but with less warmth of feeling and natural enthusiasm than the author of THE SEASONS. He has also fine manly sense, a pensive and interesting turn of thought, tenderness occasionally running into the most touching pathos, and a patriotic or religious zeal mounting almost into sublimity. He had great simplicity with terseness of style: his versification is neither strikingly faulty nor excellent. His occasional copies of verses have great elegance; and his _John Gilpin_ is one of the most humorous pieces in the language.

BURNS concludes the series of the ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD; and one might be tempted to write an elegy rather than a criticism on him. In _naïveté_, in spirit, in characteristic humour, in vivid description of natural objects and of the natural feelings of the heart, he has left behind him no superior.

Of the living poets I wish to speak freely, but candidly.

ROGERS is an elegant and highly polished writer, but without much originality or power. He seems to have paid the chief attention to his style—_Materiam superabat opus_. He writes, however, with an admiration of the muse, and with an interest in humanity.

CAMPBELL has equal elegance, equal elaborateness, with more power and scope both of thought and fancy. His _Pleasures of Hope_ is too artificial and antithetical; but his _Gertrude of Wyoming_ strikes at the heart of nature, and has passages of extreme interest, with an air of tenderness and sweetness over the whole, like the breath of flowers. Some of his shorter effusions have great force and animation, and a patriotic fire.

BLOOMFIELD‘s excellence is confined to a minute and often interesting description of individual objects in nature, in which he is surpassed perhaps by no one.

CRABBE is a writer of great power, but of a perverse and morbid taste. He gives the very objects and feelings he treats of, whether in morals or rural scenery, but he gives none but the most uninteresting or the most painful. His poems are a sort of funeral dirge over human life, but without pity, without hope. He has neither smiles nor tears for his readers.

COLERIDGE has shewn great wildness of conception in his _Ancient Mariner_, sublimity of imagery in his _Ode to the Departing Year_, grotesqueness of fancy in his _Fire, Famine, and Slaughter_, and tenderness of sentiment in his _Genevieve_. He has however produced nothing equal to his powers.

Mr. WORDSWORTH‘s characteristic is one, and may be expressed in one word;—a power of raising the smallest things in nature into sublimity by the force of sentiment. He attaches the deepest and loftiest feelings to the meanest and most superficial objects. His peculiarity is his combination of simplicity of subject with profundity and power of execution. He has no fancy, no wit, no humour, little descriptive power, no dramatic power, great occasional elegance, with continual rusticity and boldness of allusion; but he is sublime without the Muse’s aid, pathetic in the contemplation of his own and man’s nature; add to this, that his style is natural and severe, and his versification sonorous and expressive.

Mr. SOUTHEY‘s talent in poetry lies chiefly in fancy and the invention of his subject. Some of his oriental descriptions, characters, and fables, are wonderfully striking and impressive, but there is an air of extravagance in them, and his versification is abrupt, affected, and repulsive. In his early poetry there is a vein of patriotic fervour, and mild and beautiful moral reflection.

Sir WALTER SCOTT is the most popular of our living poets. His excellence is romantic narrative and picturesque description. He has great bustle, great rapidity of action and flow of versification, with a sufficient distinctness of character, and command of the ornaments of style. He has neither lofty imagination, nor depth or intensity of feeling; _vividness of mind_ is apparently his chief and pervading excellence.

Mr. C. LAMB has produced no poems equal to his prose writings: but I could not resist the temptation of transferring into this collection his _Farewell to Tobacco_, and some of the sketches in his _John Woodvil_; the first of which is rarely surpassed in quaint wit, and the last in pure feeling.

MONTGOMERY is an amiable and pleasing versifier, who puts his heart and fancy into whatever he composes.

Lord BYRON‘s distinguishing quality is intensity of conception and expression. He _wills_ to be sublime or pathetic. He has great wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, caustic wit, but no humour. Gray’s description of the poetical character—‘Thoughts that glow, and words that burn,’—applies to him more than to any of his contemporaries.

THOMAS MOORE is the greatest wit now living. His light, ironical pieces are unrivalled for point and facility of execution. His fancy is delightful and brilliant, and his songs have gone to the heart of a nation.

LEIGH HUNT has shewn great wit in his _Feast of the Poets_, elegance in his occasional verses, and power of description and pathos in his _Story of Rimini_. The whole of the third canto of that poem is as chaste as it is classical.

The late Mr. SHELLEY (for he is dead since the commencement of this publication) was chiefly distinguished by a fervour of philosophic speculation, which he clad in the garb of fancy, and in words of Tyrian die. He had spirit and genius, but his eagerness to give effect and produce conviction often defeated his object, and bewildered himself and his readers.

Lord THURLOW has written some very unaccountable, but some occasionally good and feeling poetry.

Mr. KEATS is also dead. He gave the greatest promise of genius of any poet of his day. He displayed extreme tenderness, beauty, originality, and delicacy of fancy; all he wanted was manly strength and fortitude to reject the temptations of singularity in sentiment and expression. Some of his shorter and later pieces are, however, as free from faults as they are full of beauties.

Mr. MILMAN is a writer of classical taste and attainments rather than of original genius. _Poeta nascitur—non fit._

Of BOWLES‘s sonnets it is recommendation enough to say, that they were the favourites of Mr. Coleridge’s youthful mind.

It only remains to speak of Mr. BARRY CORNWALL, who, both in the drama, and in his other poems, has shewn brilliancy and tenderness of fancy, and a fidelity to truth and nature, in conceiving the finer movements of the mind equal to the felicity of his execution in expressing them.

Some additions have been made in the Miscellaneous part of the volume, from the Lyrical effusions of the elder Dramatists, whose beauty, it is presumed, can never decay, whose sweetness can never cloy!

NOTES

LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH POETS

I. ON POETRY IN GENERAL

Any differences between the text quoted by Hazlitt and the texts used for the purposes of these notes which seem worth pointing out are indicated in square brackets.

For Sergeant Talfourd’s impressions of these lectures, and other matters of interest connected with their delivery, the reader may be referred to the _Memoirs of William Hazlitt_, vol. i., pp. 236 _et seq._

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1. _Spreads its sweet leaves._ _Romeo and Juliet_, I. 1.

2. _The stuff of which our life is made._ Cf. _The Tempest_, IV. 1.

_Mere oblivion._ _As You Like It_, II. 7.

_Man’s life is poor as beast’s._ _King Lear_, II. 4. [‘Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s.’]

_There is warrant for it._ Cf. _Richard III._, I. 4, and _Macbeth_, II. 3.

_Such seething brains_ and _the lunatic_. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, V. 1.

3. _Angelica and Medoro._ Characters in Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_ (1516).

_Plato banished the poets._ _The Republic_, Book X .

_Ecstasy is very cunning in._ _Hamlet_, III. 4.

_According to Lord Bacon._ An adaptation of a passage in the _Advancement of Learning_,