[fie oiuay 
 
 \ Literature 
 
(?nrneU Hmueraitg iCibrarg 
 
 Jtlfara, Sfem ^arb 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 85.Y78 
 
 Introduction to the study of English lit 
 
 3 1924 013 356 823 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013356823 
 
Introduction to the Study of 
 English Literature 
 
Introduction to the Study 
 of English Literature 
 
 From the Earliest Times to the Close of 
 The Victorian Age 
 
 By 
 
 W. T. Young, M.A. 
 
 Lecturer in English Literature in the University of London 
 Goldsmiths' College. Joint Editor of The 
 
 Caatbridge Anthologies « 
 
 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons 
 Cambridge, England: University Press 
 
 1914 
 
Copyright, 1514 
 
 BY 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 %be 'Rnfcftecbocftetf ptces, VUw UJotft 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The study of literature is, rightly, a pursuit in 
 which the faculties are liberated and disciplined by 
 the freshness and variety of imaginative experience, 
 and are made strong and supple so that they learn to 
 enjoy the pleasure of their own activity. The follow- 
 ing pages attempt to present the outlines of English 
 literature in accordance with this ideal. The book is 
 offered as a companion to studies, not as a short cut 
 to a superficial and specious knowledge of the classics 
 of our language. It does not seek to pronounce any 
 final criticism, or to dictate on matters of judgment 
 or taste; for these are the greatest disservices a teacher 
 can render to a student. Its intention is, rather, to 
 prospect in company with the reader, to unearth and 
 investigate clues with him, to lure his curiosity, and 
 to challehge him to thought. The student will 
 eventually discover that certain periods or writers are 
 more to his taste than others; he will require, above 
 all, bibliographical guidance. This he will find in 
 The Cambridge History of English Literature, to which 
 this Primer may serve as an introduction. 
 
 V 
 
vi Preface 
 
 I am under a debt of obligation to Professor Elton, 
 who read through the proofs of the book, and also to 
 Professor P. G. Thomas, who generously revised the 
 medieval section in minute detail. But I must accept 
 the responsibility for the final form of the statements 
 in the book throughout. 
 
 W. T. Y. 
 
 August, 1013. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Book I. 
 
 Book II. 
 
 Book III. 
 Book IV. 
 
 Book V. 
 Book VI. 
 Appendix 
 Index 
 
 Old English Literature to the 
 Norman Conquest 
 
 The Middle Ages 
 
 The Renascence 
 
 The Literature of the Middle 
 Classes 
 
 The Revival of Romance 
 
 The Victorian Age . 
 
 I 
 
 H 
 45 
 
 109 
 143 
 174 
 207 
 211 
 
 II may be well to explain that the division into prose and verse in 
 each period is fairly rigidly maintained. If this seems sometimes 
 to disperse the work of one writer under several headings, there are 
 compensations for this disadvantage, and the disadvantage is mini- 
 mised almost to extinction by the index. 
 
Introduction to the 
 Study of English Literature 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE TO THE NOR- 
 MAN CONQUEST 
 
 I. Poetry 
 
 The earliest poem still extant in the English 
 speech is Widsith, " the far-traveller," recording the 
 joumeyings of an imaginary singer 
 among the Teutonic tribes of the con- * pagan 
 
 tinent in the fourth, fifth, and sixth 
 centuries. It gives us an outline, which we may fill 
 in with detail from other poems, such as Dear's 
 Lament and Beowulf, of the place of the " scop," or 
 king's harper and remembrancer, in the social fabric 
 of our ancestors. He appears as the honoured com- 
 panion of kings, the recorder of heroic exploits, the 
 memoriser of lays and stories of the past, which he 
 chanted in the meadhall after the hunt or the battle. 
 These lays developed, in time, by the passage from 
 
 I 
 
2 Old English Literature 
 
 mouth to mouth, and, no doubt, by the finer artistic 
 skill of some individual "scop," into epic poetry. 
 This may be the evolutionary history of the early 
 Beowulf English epic Beowulf, shaped from pre- 
 
 Christian lays in Northumberland in 
 the eighth century, though the only MS. existing is in 
 a dialect of King Alfred's time. Beowulf may interest 
 us in various ways : as a story ; as a picture of a social 
 system ; as a repository of fragments of other Teutonic 
 epics; and as an example of heroic style. Its three 
 thousand lines tell, with many digressions, the life 
 story of Beowulf, who sails from his native Gautland 
 in Sweden to the succour of Hrothgar, a king in 
 Zealand, because his Hall Heorot is being ravaged by 
 Grendel, such a monster as vivid imaginations might 
 suppose to inhabit the damp and gloomy forests be- 
 hind the sea-board. Beowulf, who has the strength 
 of thirty men, tears an arm from the monster and 
 drives the fiend to its lair. Attacks are resumed by 
 Grendel's mother, and Beowulf achieves a second 
 hard- won victory in a cave beneath a lake, power- 
 fully described by the poet. Thus, peace is restored 
 to Heorot, and Beowulf returns to Gautland to be- 
 come, after many years, its trusted and honoured king. 
 He engages, finally, in a third conflict, with a dragon, 
 keeper of a buried treasure (a common feature of 
 Teutonic stories), in defence of his own hall and 
 country. By the aid of his shield-bearer, Wiglaf, he 
 is victorious, but at the cost of his life. The poem 
 ends with a eulogy of his justice and valour by his 
 thegns over the mound where his ashes are buried. 
 In all probability, these three splendid fights are 
 based on a myth, or on some folktale, adapted to the 
 
Xo tKe Norman Conquest 3 
 
 hero's story. But we can discern behind these events 
 a strongly marked social economy, at its head the 
 king, round him the thegns, and, more dimly seen, 
 the lower ranks or ceorls. It is a life lived, like the 
 Homeric, in the open, with little enough privacy; and 
 the poetry is a poetry of action, devoid of subtle- 
 ties of thought and feeling, a record of things done. 
 Hunting, feasting, voyages, warfare, savage, and 
 sometimes treacherous, feud, are the chief con- 
 cerns. There is much about the ocean and ships, 
 but no feeling of affection for the sea, rather the 
 pride of conquest, as in Beowulf's swimming match. 
 Strength, daring, and the instinct for command are 
 the most approved qualities, though the hero himself 
 has many gentler traits, and, in a rugged way, is con- 
 scious of the lack of wife and children. There are 
 references to institutions like the king's body com- 
 panions, were-gild or blood-money, the nightly feast 
 in the meadhall, with the gracious figure of the queen, 
 held in highest reverence, pouring out the mead, and 
 bestowing gifts, collar, armlet, and mantle upon the 
 hero. Then, benches are pushed aside, bolsters are 
 spread, and the thegns sleep with arms at hand. 
 Many arts have developed ; the Hall Heorot is finely 
 ornamented with gold, rich in famous swords and 
 trophies of adventure, hung with embroidered tapes- 
 try; people are skilled in fashioning war-gear, ringed 
 mail, and boar-crested helmets; and the art of song 
 is almost universal. They have no humour except 
 that of grim challenge and competitive boasting — 
 a common national trait, not to be judged by our 
 standards. The religious feeling of the poem is, as 
 it were, in two strata, pagan and Christian. The 
 
4 Old En^lisK Literature 
 
 characters submit unprotestingly to "wyrd, " or fate; 
 and there is both melancholy and dignity in this 
 fatalism, which never condones dishonour. "Death 
 is better for every warrior than a life of infamy, " is 
 Beowulf's standard. The customs and rites, too, are 
 heathen throughout. But the sentiment and reflection 
 are largely Christian; King Hrothgar, for instance, 
 speaks warningly of pride of strength and possessions. 
 We are forced to conclude, therefore, that the poem 
 was still in the process of making when it passed to 
 minstrels who had been influenced by Christianity. 
 This full, well-ordered life, this grave discourse, 
 these courtly manners, this long-practised art of epic 
 poetry — for it must have taken centuries to perfect 
 the verse-form and establish the current synonyms 
 for hero, sword, sea, ship, and the like — show us that 
 we are viewing the advanced civilisation of a race with 
 a great and varied history, the Germania, in fact, of 
 Tacitus. The poem, also, is the repository of frag- 
 ments of other sagas. We hear of Scyld, a Dane; of 
 Sigemund, father of Sigurd the Volsung; of another 
 Beowulf, a Dane; of Finn, a Frisian, who has some 
 relation with another Old English poem. The Fight at 
 Finnsburh, describing a typical fierce onset, with the 
 ringing clash of separate blows, by small bodies of 
 men in a tight corner. Beowulf is evidently but a 
 fragment of the great northern corpus of stories which 
 includes the Nibelungenlied, and the tales told in 
 magnificent narrative prose in the Icelandic sagas. 
 The racial tradition, the dignity and valour of the hero, 
 and the style give the poem an epic rank, which its 
 mere story, as it exists to-day, would not win for it. 
 It is written in Old English alliterative measure, in 
 
To tKe Norman Conquest 5 
 
 which the rhythm depends upon accent; the line is 
 divided into two parts, each containing two main 
 accents. These accents must fall on the emphatic 
 words in the sentence; as a general, but not quite 
 invariable, rule, two of these accented syllables in the 
 first part, and one in the second part, of the line are 
 alliterated, that is, they begin with the same letter 
 (in the case of vowels, any vowel may be supposed to 
 give alliteration with any other). The number of 
 unaccented syllables is indifferent so long as they 
 do not put too large a strain upon the normal rhythm. 
 A line with so much freedom as this adapts itself 
 readily to the poet's moods and purposes; landscape, 
 battle, description of valiant exploits, and elegiac 
 meditation are equally well expressed in this vigorous 
 and flexible measure; the style of the poem, in fact, 
 often seems to be greater than its matter. There are 
 few complete similes in the Homeric manner, but the 
 diction is essentially figurative, and some of these 
 figures become picturesque conventions; the sea is 
 the whale-path; a ship, the foamy-necked one; the 
 king, a gift-bestower; an arrow, a war-adder. Fur- 
 thermore, there is a tendency to excessive use of 
 apposition, which, together with a deficiency of par- 
 ticles, makes the story, however vigorously told, 
 move slowly. 
 
 With this early poetry must be classed some short 
 charms or pagan incantations for such occasions as 
 bewitched land or stolen cattle ; and of finer quality 
 are five elegiac lyrics, the most original j^.^ 
 
 of all Old English poetry. In The 
 Wanderer, the person spoken of, bereft by destiny of 
 his chief and comrades, seeks to evade the bitter com- 
 
6 Old En^lisK Literature 
 
 panionship of sorrow; a dream restores a momentary 
 vision of joy, but, soon, the solitary poet awakens to 
 realise that man is at the mercy of night, storm, winter, 
 and mortality. The Ruin is a picture of a town 
 (possibly a Roman settlement, such as Bath) laid 
 waste by violence and time; the poet conjures up in 
 imagination its towers, pinnacles, courts, its flowing 
 springs, and halls filled with the mirth of warriors; 
 these, he contrasts with the ruined masonry, fallen 
 gates, and frost-bespangled lime. The Seafarer de- 
 scribes, perhaps in a dialogue, the emotion and fasci- 
 nation of a sailor, lured to the bitter and lonely sea 
 again, in spite of its peril and hardship. The Lover's 
 Message and The Wife's Complaint are the only Old 
 English verse based on the theme of love; the former 
 is a message carried by a wooden tablet, recalling old 
 affections and bidding the one addressed to join the 
 sender beyond the sea; the latter, the plaint of a 
 woman falsely accused and banished, is full of the 
 despair of separation. 
 
 This group of poems, evidently the mere wreckage 
 of a great literature, is decisively pagan in origin; but 
 the Christian elements are intimately fused; there is 
 a kind of compromise between the old and new beliefs. 
 The pagan system of society, art, and morals out of 
 which the poems arose suffered three successive 
 shocks from the southern world of Roman culture and 
 religion. The first, at the conversion by St. Augustine 
 (though Irish missionaries from lona had been long at 
 work, and Whitby was a Celtic monastery). The 
 second, at the accession of the scholar-king Alfred. 
 The third, at the Norman conquest. What is left 
 of Old English poetry enables us to mark the encroach- 
 
To tKe Norman Conquest 7 
 
 ment, at first very gradual, of Christianity upon 
 pagan feeling. 
 
 Before the Christian spirit was fully manifested 
 in literature, the Church had been established a 
 hundred years. Most Old English 
 poetry was written in the dialect of christiani ed 
 Northumbria, though preserved for us ^gj^e 
 
 in the dialect of Saxon Wessex; for 
 Northumbrian civilisation, with its libraries at Jarrow, 
 where Bede dwelt, and at Whitby, was the centre of 
 European culture for a century, and Charles the 
 Great found there his educational Adviser, Alcuin, just 
 before it was destroyed by Danish invasions. 
 
 Only two names (one of them, Cynewulf, doubt- 
 fully authentic) can be assigned as authors of the 
 Biblical verse of Northumbria, Caed- 
 mon and Cynewulf. There is a well- 
 known story, told by the Venerable Bede, of how, 
 at Whitby, Caedmon the neatherd, who had not the 
 gift of song, was suddenly inspired to sing about 
 the creation ; the song Bede attributes to him is closely 
 parallel to the opening of the poem Genesis, which, 
 with Exodus, Crist and Satan, and Daniel, forms 
 the school of Casdmon. Genesis, to which the pic- 
 ttu-e of Satan's torments in Paradise Lost may be 
 indebted, has two parts, divergent in style, A and B. 
 ^ is a paraphrase of the scriptural text, with expan- 
 sions of the warlike episodes and the flood; 5, the finer 
 part, records again the fall of the angels. Exodus 
 is a forceful description of the disaster of the Egyp- 
 tians at the Red Sea. Crist and Satan gives one of 
 several pictures in Old English of the harrowing of hell. 
 
 In this way, the Christian religion first found its 
 
8 Old En^IisK Literature 
 
 lodgment in Old English verse; from the Bible 
 were eagerly taken certain stories, especially those 
 animated by a spirit akin to the existing heroic lays; 
 the grim, primitive pugnacity common both to He- 
 brews of the Old Testament and to our forefathers 
 makes possible such an association of poetry with the 
 sacred book of Christianity as we may see in Genesis 
 and Exodus. 
 
 The later school of Cynewulf, who is supposed to 
 have signed his name in runic characters in Crist, 
 C wulf Juliana, Fates of the Apostles, and 
 
 Elene, is also responsible for Andreas, 
 The Dream of the Rood, Guthlac, and The Phcenix. 
 The titles of the poems are indicative of the change in 
 the choice of material; in place of the more ferocious 
 themes of the Old Testament, we find here stories of the 
 New Testament, of saints'lives andof themartyrology ; 
 the mystical introspective spirit of Christianity is re- 
 flected in them and the pictures of landscape and sea- 
 scape are gentler. They have, at the same time, a more 
 polished art, though this may seem to be at the cost 
 of the rude vigour of their predecessors. Andreas, 
 the story of a voyage of the apostle Andrew to rescue 
 St. Matthew, contains a sublime description of storm; 
 Elene tells of the finding of the true cross by Helena, 
 mother of the Emperor Constantine ; its descriptions of 
 the sea and of the embarking hosts close with the 
 poet's conversion and adoration of the cross, a theme 
 dealt with in the dramatic though brief Dream of the 
 Rood. The cross speaks with subtle and passionate 
 emotion of the agony it shared with the young hero 
 Christ. Guthlac is a martyr's conflict with fiends. 
 The Phoenix is the most inventive creation of the school, 
 
Xo the Norman Conquest 9 
 
 giving to the legend an allegorical significance and a 
 background of exquisite natural and mystical beauty 
 in the sinless land. Some of the Riddles, with their 
 finely descriptive effects, may be by Cynewulf. The 
 remaining verse includes a Physiologus, which is 
 concerned with the animal symbolism of the art 
 of the catacombs, and a dialogue, Salomon and 
 Saturn. 
 
 Reviewing the poems of the two schools, all written 
 in the alliterative measure, we may see that religious 
 innovations are more vital in the Cynewulfian group ; 
 in the Caedmonian, only the matter — the narrative 
 of the Pentateuch and the book of Daniel — is given 
 from without: the working up is by a poet similar in 
 temper to the composer of Beowulf, and everything is 
 translated into terms of the viking heroic age. The 
 Cynewulfian poets, dealing with the contrasted matter 
 of the gospels, remote from pagan sentiment, bring 
 to its treatment a gentler spirit, though they still use 
 some of the phrases of Beowulf. The Caedmonian 
 hero wars with his foes and with the sea for fame, 
 admitting no master but fate, and finding battle the 
 necessary outlet for a natural instinct in him; the 
 instinct did not die out of Old English life, for we find 
 it in full activity in the war poetry of the Chronicle 
 in the tenth century. The Cynewulfian hero, whether 
 Christ or the saint, battles with fiends or with perse- 
 cution or with torments for the sake of his fellows and 
 for the glory of God. Thus is indicated the passage into 
 a new world; from the civilisation which lies at the 
 back of Beowulf and Old Norse verse, the Icelandic 
 sagas, and the Old German epic to the civilisation of 
 Latin Christianity. 
 
lo Old EnglisH Literatvire 
 
 2. Old English Prose 
 
 We may first name briefly writers in Latin : Gildas, 
 author of The Destruction of Britain; the shadowy 
 
 Nennius, a historian ; Bishop Aldhelm ; 
 
 the Venerable Bede; and Alcuin, who, 
 in 792, went to serve Charles the Great. Bede lived 
 at Jarrow from 672-735, and wrote numerous scientific 
 and theological manuals, all overshadowed by his 
 Ecclesiastical History of the English Race, 731. Its 
 five books cover the period from the invasion of Cassar 
 to the year 731 , Bede was a writer whose scholarship 
 and discernment entitle him to rank among the great 
 historians of our literature. This wide Latin culture, 
 centred both in Northumbria and at Canterbury, was 
 swept away by the Scandinavian irruptions, and learn- 
 ing did not raise its head again till, a century later, the 
 
 idealist Alfred sought its alliance in 
 ■^^ consolidating the kingdom of Wessex. 
 
 No worker in the cause of education ever faced more 
 disheartening circumstances. In all the country south 
 of the Thames not a priest could be found able to 
 read Latin, and only two north of it. The Latin 
 Life of Alfred by the Welsh cleric, Asser, and Alfred's 
 own preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care, inform us of 
 the enterprises which the King set on foot in his two 
 periods of comparative leisure, 888-93 and 897- 
 901. He instituted a court school for the reading of 
 Latin and English, sought out scholars abroad, and 
 translated or instigated the translation of the chief 
 works of erudition of his day. Bishop Werferth of 
 Worcester translated the Dialogues of Gregory the 
 Great. Alfred, with other help, translated the Cura 
 
To tKe Norman Conquest ii 
 
 Pastoralis of Gregory; the Universal History of 
 Orosius was freely adapted and extended, as in the 
 voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, and in the, geo- 
 graphical description of Germania. The English 
 versions of Bede's Ecclesiastical History and Boethius's 
 De Consolatione Philosophic^ were other channels by 
 which he brought to his people new streams of know- 
 ledge in ethics, philosophy, and history. At the same 
 time, he acquired a prose style, remarkable, in the 
 passages which are not merely translations, for an 
 attractive simplicity, which seems the direct reflection 
 of his high-minded and courageous personality. To 
 Alfred we owe in all probability the fuller records of 
 the Old English Chronicle, which, in some recensions, 
 dates back to B.C. 60. But, with the exception of a 
 barbaric incident of Cynewulf (not, of course, the 
 poet) and Cyneheard in 755, the monkish annals are 
 bald enough till we come to the reigns of Alfred and his 
 son. From 893-7 ^^nd from 911-24, the tale of the 
 Danish wars is full and practised in expression; and 
 this is true, Ukewise, of the years 975-1001 . Between 
 these two periods comes a barren patch, completely 
 redeemed, however, by the war poetry which ranks 
 with the earlier epic as the finest outcome of the 
 pagan Enghsh spirit. Under the date 937 is a verse 
 record of Athelstan's victory at Brunanburh. Tenny- 
 son made a poem of his son's prose . 
 translation of these lines. Of much ^^ chronicle 
 finer quality is The Battle of Maldon, 
 991, the story of the raid of Anlaf the Dane for 
 tribute, in which the noble Byrhtnoth fell. The 
 insolent demand for gold; the reply that the op- 
 pressed will yield only the tribute of sword and 
 
12 Old En^lisK Literature 
 
 spear; the fierce clamour of hand-to-hand fighting; 
 the heroic death of Byrhtnoth at the head of his band ; 
 the maintenance of the battle by ^Ifwine, Offa, and 
 Dunnere with their proud, simple talk — these are 
 set forth in a vigorous narrative which rings with 
 loyalty and valour and in which we single out each 
 stroke and fall as we do in the poems of the heroic 
 tradition, Beowulf and Finnsburh. Judith, once 
 thought to be Caedmon's, is now dated in the tenth 
 century also. The poem is a frag- 
 ' ment based on the Apocrypha, and 
 
 records with intense dramatic energy the slaughter of 
 Holofernes, and Judith's summons to the Israelites. 
 Like the war poems, Judith is in the alliterative mea- 
 sure ; and we should have said that alliteration as the 
 normal form of verse made a noble ending in these 
 poems, were it not for the remarkable revival of it 
 in the fourteenth century, in the western parts of 
 England. 
 
 To the religious revival under Dunstan and his 
 pupils in the middle of the tenth century we owe 
 _,jf. other prose in Old English. The nine- 
 
 teen Blickling Homilies are sermons and 
 legends, rough prototypes of the more finished Homi- 
 lies of iElfric, 990-5, these last some eighty in all, 
 expounding the mysteries of religion on various 
 occasions of the church year. .lElfric's writing is 
 impassioned and symbolical in his later works and 
 has a loose alliterative rhythm, like a broken-down 
 form of the older verse. He died about 1020 and, 
 for generations, was the most famous of English 
 theologians. 
 
 Wulfstan was a contemporary of JEXinc, but 
 
To tKe Norman Conquest 13 
 
 more closely in contact with affairs; he, also, wrote 
 Homilies, of which the most memorable is The 
 Address to the English, which castigates his country, 
 describes the demolition of the villages and the terror 
 of the people, and affirms that they are suffering for 
 crimes for which they must now repent. There is 
 mingled gloom and patriotism in the picture of the 
 England over which Danish invasions were encroach- 
 ing ; it is like a late echo of the plaint of Gildas concern- 
 ing the harrying of Britain by the EngUsh themselves. 
 Henceforth, judging from the records extant, Old 
 English prose ebbs away, leaving insignificant traces, 
 such as the continuation of the Chronicle at Peter- 
 borough till Stephen's reign, when the cry of a ravaged 
 land is repeated a third time. Some legends of the 
 East are found, which are prophetic of the incoming 
 tide of that fashion of romance. Two hundred years 
 elapse before a prose as accomplished as .^Ifric's is 
 evolved again in English. 
 
BOOK II 
 THE MIDDLE AGES, 1066-1500 
 I. Poetry from the Conquest to Chaucer 
 
 It is hardly possible to overstate the importance 
 of the Norman conquest in the history of our litera- 
 ture. All the changes which it brought 
 
 e language j^ j^^ train did not become imme- 
 diately apparent; but they were implicit in the his- 
 torical fact. By the time of Chaucer, a new nation 
 had been evolved by the crossing of English and 
 Norman stocks. The process, at first slow, was 
 accelerated by the separation from Normandy in 
 1204, with the result that, in poems such as Richard 
 Cceur de Lion and Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, 
 c. 1300, a sense of patriotic unity is completely devel- 
 oped. The vital requirement of a new speech was 
 met by the acceptance of the Teutonic trunk, upon 
 which was grafted the vocabulary of the invaders for 
 all the interests and enterprises which the new ruling 
 and leisured class had brought into national life. At 
 the same time, the natural tendency of Old English 
 to shed some of its many inflections was hastened by 
 the Norman, following quickly upon the Danish, 
 invasion. The process was almost completed by 
 
 14 
 
The Middle A^es. I066-1500 15 
 
 Chaucer's time, and the language thus formed is one 
 of the marvellous accidents of history. 
 
 While this formative process was at work, books 
 were written in Latin. Latin was the tongue of the 
 schoolmen and of the vast compendia 
 of theology, philosophy, and law which " 
 
 are characteristic of the Middle Ages. Anselm, 
 John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Robert Grosseteste, 
 Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and 
 Richard of Bury, author of Philobiblon, csltty the 
 story of scholarship from 1089 to about 1350. Latin 
 chroniclers had great influence on succeeding lit- 
 erature, as, for instance, William of Malmesbury, 
 Giraldus Cambrensis, who describes Wales and Ire- 
 land, and Matthew Paris, d. 1259, a historiographer 
 of rare historical sense and fine independence. Geof- 
 frey of Monmouth has no. standing among the ex- 
 act historians; but he has a higher title to fame, 
 for his History of the Kings of Britain, c. 1136, is the 
 parent-stock, not only of the stories of Lear, Cymbe- 
 line, and Sabrina, but of the legends of King Arthur as 
 well. 
 
 Anglo-French did a greater work in conveying 
 Norman culture to England than in producing 
 literature. The chroniclers, Gaimar 
 and Wace, followed, in Anglo-French 
 verse, the romantic track of Geoffrey of Monmouth. 
 Marie de France, c. 11 80, who lived in England, wrote 
 her delightful lais of virgin-worship, love, and fairy- 
 lore in almost pure French. A Bestiary and some 
 saints' lives were also written under the religious 
 impulse which was strong among the Normans. 
 
 English was preserved only by the conquered 
 
i6 The Middle Ages. 1066-1500 
 
 people, much more numerous than its conquerors, 
 but excluded from all offices of author- 
 to MW ^^^'' '^^^ writings, therefore, were rather 
 depressed and halting. In the main, 
 they followed the tradition of Old English sacred 
 verse; a rapid review of them, however, will show 
 some of the steps by which was evolved the final 
 form of English verse; syllabic, accentual, rimed, 
 not alliterative by principle, as in Old English, not 
 quantitative, as in Latin, not having a fixed cassura, 
 as in French, though each of these speeches con- 
 tributed something to the final result. 
 
 The Moral Ode, c. 1170, a religious exhortation, 
 has rimed lines of fourteen syllables with little allit- 
 eration. Ormulum, c. 1200, by one Orm (a homilist 
 and phonetician whose most valuable quality is that 
 he doubled the consonant after every short vowel in 
 a closed syllable, in the ten thousand lines of his 
 poem) , has alternate lines of eight and seven syllables, 
 with neither rime nor alliteration. A Bestiary, c. 12 10, 
 an allegorical interpretation of a mythical natural 
 history, has, generally, six-syllabled riming lines 
 with some alliteration. The Orison of our Lady, 
 c. 12 10, has riming couplets of uncertain length and 
 occasional alliteration. Genesis and Exodus, c. 1250, 
 a paraphrase, has riming verse of four beats, an 
 amazing forerunner of the metre of Christabel, though 
 it had no immediate followers. The Proverbs of 
 Hendyng, c. 1270, about twenty years later than the 
 Proverbs of Alfred, have six-lined stanzas with a regu- 
 lar rime scheme. From all this we may draw the con- 
 clusion that regular metre and rime were gradually 
 ousting the older alliterative verse. 
 
The Middle Ages. 1066-1500 17 
 
 Two poems of this date have intrinsic worth and 
 show how English was coming to its own, though 
 dealing with matter imported from France; these 
 are Layamon's Brut (one version of 1200 and one 
 of c. 1250), and The Owl and the Nightingale, c. 1220. 
 
 The age was full of Bruts; Layamon's material 
 was derived from one of the copies of Wace's chronicle, 
 and he distils his original into English ; in the thirty- 
 two thousand short lines of his poem there are not a 
 hundred French words. Being a priest on the borders 
 of Wales, he incorporated stories and legends from his 
 own country and he probably had sources of which as 
 yet we know nothing. His fame lies in the fact that 
 he was the first Englishman to treat the story of Arthur 
 in English. In Layamon, the elves are concerned in 
 Arthur's birth, the King becomes a more knightly 
 and courteous figure, and his mysterious passing is 
 added; we hear more of the Round Table than in 
 Wace; the poet tells, also, with occasional power 
 and poetry, the tales of Lear and Cymbeline and other 
 legendary kings. The shambling measure of his poem, 
 chiefly alliterative but often drifting towards rime, 
 with no certain principle of line division, illustrates 
 afresh the passage from the old to the new romance 
 metres. 
 
 The Owl and the Nightingale was the work of a 
 practised writer making use of the Proven gal form 
 of the tengon known, later, in Scots, as a "fiyting, " 
 that is to say, a heated dispute. In this case, the 
 nightingale states and illustrates the case for the 
 poetry of noble love; the owl replies on behalf of 
 the poetry of religion. The underlying contrast is 
 that between art and morality. The natural back- 
 
i8 The Middle A^es, 1066-1500 
 
 ground is pleasing, and the poet has command of 
 many resources of characterisation and humorous 
 abuse. Though the poet does not definitely take 
 sides, his work is one of the first pleas in English 
 for gaiety, and, at this period, it comes like an oasis 
 in the dreary waste of homiletic verse; it is written 
 in a perfectly accomplished form of rimed octosyl- 
 labic couplets. 
 
 The poem of Layamon may serve to introduce us 
 to the vast province of romance, the taste for which, 
 Romance ^^ "°* °^ Norman origin, was cer- 
 
 tainly of Norman importation. The epic 
 temper of Beowulf, or of Le Chanson de Roland in 
 France, gives way to this new spirit, how completely 
 we may see by a comparison of the enterprises of 
 Beowulf with those of people of his rank in Chaucer's 
 Knight's Tale. The ideals of court, battlefield, and 
 monastery pervade nearly all the stories which the 
 age gathered from the story-loving East, from late 
 Greek romances, from history and legend, and from 
 such prolific soil as that of Wales and Brittany. 
 The transformation may be seen at work in the 
 crusading zeal^ of Roland, whose anti-Saracenic 
 heroism is far removed from the simple patriotic 
 courage of Byrhtnoth. The Frank is dislodging the 
 Teuton. Upon this type of prowess were brought 
 to bear many influences to which we may give the 
 general name courtoisie. The Church fostered the 
 chivalric zeal of the Crusades; the castles of the feudal 
 system provided a polite and refined audience, largely 
 dominated by women, for whose approval these 
 later trouvhes and jongleurs (makers and singers) 
 sought. Here came into play the softening influence 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1300 19 
 
 of the troubadours and the Provengal courts of love, 
 and, indirectly, of the amorist poet, Ovid. All this 
 was as powerful in England as in Normandy, and the 
 final result was that England became a literary ap- 
 panage of the Latin nations and looked for its faith 
 and ancestry no longer to Old English mythology and 
 history, but, in common with the rest of Christendom, 
 to the mythical Brutus of Troy and Rome. 
 
 Romances were classified by an old French poet, 
 Jean Bodel, under the headings of France, Britain, and 
 "Rome the great"; but, even if we allow Rome to 
 signify all antiquity, there are other "matters" (as 
 they were called) not comprehended in his classi- 
 fication. We have little of the Carolingian matter of 
 France in England ; the best in this cycle is Sir Ferum- 
 bras. Of the matter of Britain, the Arthurian stories 
 are discussed separately; but there are other Celtic 
 tales: Sir Tristrem, Ywain and Gawain, and the allit- 
 erative Awntyrs of Arthur, which came from Wales 
 or Brittany, as, also, fairy stories such as Sir Orfeo 
 (Orpheus), Sir Gowther, and the riming Mart Arthur. 
 There are Old English stories which were put into 
 French romance forms and then back again into 
 English, such as Havelok and Horn, of which the 
 former retains more of their common Anglo-Danish 
 origin than the latter. Guy of Warwick, also, in the 
 first place, was Anglo-Danish. Bevis of Hampton, 
 the most lengthy and popular, though not the 
 most distinguished of native romances, similarly be- 
 longs to the matter of England. As for the matter 
 of Rome or antiquity, the Troy legends will be dis- 
 cussed in connection with Chaucer's Troilus and 
 Criseyde; there exists a romance of King Alisaunder; 
 
20 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 Chaucer used Thebes in The Knight's Tale and Lyd- 
 gate wrote The Story of Thebes. Chaucer made some 
 use of the Mneid also. The matter of the East 
 provided Floris and Blancheflour and The Seven 
 Sages of Rome, and Chaucer found it useful in The 
 Squire's Tale. Some are outside these cycles, such as 
 CcEur de Lion, and other tales of famous kings; the 
 perfect story of Amis and Amiloun, The Squire of 
 Low Degree, and Ipomedon are unattached tales of 
 chivalry. Most of these romances share the same 
 unlocalised, often enchanted, background; they have 
 not any national or patriotic note; they are alto- 
 gether aristocratic, and do not touch at any point 
 the actual life of their day. They consist, generally, 
 of thousands of lines, mostly in the octosyllabic coup- 
 let of their French progenitors; but English stanza 
 forms of the type which Chaucer quizzed unmercifully 
 in Sir Thopas developed alongside the couplet. 
 
 It is not profitable to discuss whether the Arthur 
 of legend has any historical prototype; he is not 
 mentioned in the Old English Chronicle, 
 ^^ nor in Bede, nor in Gildas; the first 
 
 historical reference is in the Historia Britonum of 
 Nennius, where he has miraculous powers, and wars 
 against the Saxons. Early Welsh and Breton lays 
 know him as a wizard and a hero. Through the 
 contact between Breton and Norman he was trans- 
 formed into a romantic and chivalrous hero and he 
 finds his way prominently into literature in Geoffrey 
 of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain, 
 c. 1 1 36, in which the chronicler's fertile imagination 
 evolved a complete genealogy of British kings from 
 Brute to Cadwalader, including such names as 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 21 
 
 Sabrina, King Lear, and Gorboduc. So late as Milton, 
 it was taken for authentic history. In this book are 
 recounted tales of Merlin and of Arthur's miraculous 
 birth, his conquests throughout Europe, the advance 
 upon Rome, and his recall to fight a last battle 
 with his faithless nephew Mordred. The book had 
 enormous popularity and, from this time, Arthur 
 became one of the major heroes of European romance. 
 The Brut of the Jersey poet Wace developed the hint 
 of the Round Table; many heads and pens, mostly 
 French, busily wove separate legends into this main 
 fabric. Chrestien de Troyes inwove the tale of 
 Lancelot and the faithless Guenever, whose courtly 
 love is worlds apart from the elemental passion of 
 the Celtic lovers, Tristram and Iseult. Robert de 
 Borron is thought to have attached the Graal story, 
 with which are Unked up the monastic legends of 
 Joseph of Arimathea. At first, Gawain was the hero 
 of the quest, but he is deprived of this honour in 
 Malory and Tennyson; Sir Percival is also deposed 
 later in favour of the still more ascetic Sir Galahad. 
 From these five main sources, the stories of Merlin, of 
 Lancelot, of Tristram, of the Graal, and of the death 
 of Arthtu-, Malory drew the scenes and motives, the 
 groupings and the colouring, with which he composed 
 the pictures, in his enchanted gallery, Le Morte Arthur. 
 The Auchinleck MS., which contains a number of 
 these romances, is of about 1320, and romances con- 
 tinue long after Chaucer's death; his 
 
 pointed satire of them in Sir Thopas, ^^^^ '°™ 
 
 :.,,.. „ 1250 to 1400. 
 
 if it intended extinction as well as ^ Religious 
 
 ridicule, was ineffective. The other 
 
 verse of the period consists largely of homiletic work, 
 
22 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 the religious impulse being reinforced by the Domini- 
 cans and Franciscans about 122 1. The poems of 
 William of Shoreham, c. 1300, on church rites and the 
 like, are in lyrical stanzas which may faintly remind 
 us of George Herbert. He also made a prose transla- 
 tion of the Psalter. Robert of Gloucester wrote 
 saints' lives c. 1300, after he had composed a chronicle 
 from the siege of Troy to his own day, in riming lines 
 of fifteen syllables. Cycles of saints' legends exist in 
 the north and south but they are inferior to the Old 
 English Andreas. Akin to these cycles are the didac- 
 tic poems Handlynge Sinne, 1303, and The Pricke of 
 Conscience, I349(?), the former by Robert Mannynge 
 of Brunne, a popular sermon-maker of anecdotical 
 turn, who also wrote a chronicle; the latter either by 
 Richard Rolle of Hampole, some of whose prose 
 works have an impetuous emotionalism, verging at 
 times on mysticism, or by others of his school. Of 
 equal importance in the same school is Cursor Mundi, 
 1300, a popular compendium of accredited and apo- 
 cryphal Christian legend, exalting the Trinity, the 
 Holy Rood, and the Virgin Mary; its octosyllabic 
 couplets are lucid and clear, and its numerous stories 
 told with no mean skill. It may well have influenced 
 the analogous material of the miracle plays. 
 
 Some scraps of social satire, such as The Land of 
 Cockaigne, making mock of friars and of cheating 
 professions, presage Chaucer and Lang- 
 land, as Dame Siriz, c. 1260, anticipates 
 Chaucer's Miller's Tale. The Fox and the Wolf, 
 with Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, are almost all we 
 have of the great continental beast-epic, Reynard the 
 Fox. The Battle of Lewes, 1264, points tp the 
 
TKe Middle Ages, 1066-1300 23 
 
 political and patriotic verse, vigorous and scornful, 
 if not highly imaginative, in which Laurence Minot 
 castigated the French and the Scots and celebrated 
 the prowess of Englishmen at the sieges and battles 
 of Edward III from 1332 to 1352. 
 
 The solitary Love-Song, c. 1240, of Thomas de 
 Hales, treating of the passing of earthly beauty, is 
 all that precedes an outburst of lyric, . 
 
 including Sumer is i-cumen in, Alysoun, 
 and Lenten is come with love to toune: daintiness of 
 feeling, skilful choice of fitting natural imagery, and 
 gaiety of treatment make these songs memorable in 
 the history of English lyric; others have a note of 
 melancholy, not unlike Wyatt's; others are religious 
 and penitential. 
 
 There is a brilliant renascence of the Old English 
 alliterative measure, with marked technical changes, 
 in the fourteenth century. The know- 
 ledge and practice of this old prosody *• "^^ 
 , , . 1 . , 1 , alliterative 
 presumably survived xn the western revival 
 
 counties. There are romances, such 
 as Gawayne and the Grene Knight, Morte d' Arthur e. 
 The Awntyrs of Arthur and William of Palerne; re- 
 ligious and satirical poems, as those of Langland 
 and his followers; homiletic and allegorical poems. 
 Cleanness (inculcating purity). Patience, and Pearl; 
 together with other things, such as The Pistil (epis- 
 tle) of Susan, which has some rare touches of pathos. 
 Sir Gawayne, c. 1370, which mixes romance measures, 
 at irregular intervals, with the alliterative, records 
 the coming of the Green Knight to challenge the 
 knights of Camelot to an exchange of blows. Sir 
 Gawayne at length accepts and cuts off the stranger's 
 
24 The Middle A^es, 1066-1500 
 
 head. The mysterious and adventurous sequel to 
 this deed is told in a narrative, enriched with colour 
 and pageantry, diversified by surprises of enchant- 
 ment and suggestions of terror, and set in a back- 
 ground of rare scenic beauty. By virtue of its art 
 and its individuality the poem ranks among the 
 major products of medieval romance. 
 
 Pearl is an elegiac vision of the spirit of the child 
 of the writer, probably a married priest in minor 
 orders. The poet creates a land of crystal cliffs, 
 magic streams, and flowered fields, where he meets 
 his daughter. Pearl, and, after much play upon the 
 name, begins to speak in terms of rebellious grief, 
 to which the child replies with heavenly wisdom. 
 Scriptural imagery and story run through the poem, 
 consummating in a finely imaginative picture of the 
 new Jerusalem and of the brides of the Lamb. It is 
 the climax of English medieval religious poetry. 
 These two poems, together with Cleanness and 
 Patience, are in one MS. and, probably, by one au- 
 thor. The proposal to father these and other al- 
 literative poems of this period on a Scottish poet 
 called Huchowne is still a matter of debate. 
 
 There have been recent attempts to dissolve the 
 shadowy personality of William Langland, I332(?)- 
 99(?), into some five unnamed persons; 
 ^^ *" be this as it may, we shall, for the pre- 
 
 sent, regard him as a poor minor clerk, or priest, 
 whose wanderings acquainted him with peasants 
 about the Malvern hills, dwellers in London, pro- 
 fessional beggars, and, generally, with the classes 
 most affected by the oppressions of the rich, the 
 corruption of the Church, famine, the black death, 
 
TKe Middle A^es. 1066-1500 
 
 25 
 
 and war-taxation. The poem attributed to Langland, 
 entitled The Vision of William concerning Piers 
 the Plowman, was made public in three forms, now 
 known as the A-, B-, and C-texts, the short A-text 
 in 1362, the longer (generally printed) B-text in 
 1377, and the C-text in I398(?). The B-text has 
 a prologue and seven sections followed by the visions 
 of Do-wel, Do-bet, and Do-best. It is rather form- 
 less and inconsequent, being made up of a series of 
 abruptly introduced dreams and sermons, such as 
 those of Holy Church and Reason; allegories melting 
 into reaHstic scenes, such as the field full of folk, the 
 trial of Lady Meed at Westminster, and the gather- 
 ing of the seven deadly sins; fables, such as the rats 
 and the mice; and pilgrimages in search of truth. 
 AU these are unified, not by any constructive scheme, 
 but by the prophetic spirit of the writer, working, 
 at times, through satire and, again, through exhor- 
 tation. He is not a Lollard, nor a factionist defying 
 authority; he is "a church and king man," well 
 content with the organisation of the state, but dis- 
 tressed that not a single class is fulfilling its divinely 
 appointed function. Piers, the honest peasant, is 
 the saviour of the state, affording it subsistence, 
 leading pilgrimages in search of truth, and providing 
 the immediately practicable remedy for social ills 
 by setting all classes to work. The writer pictures 
 the Church, as did Chaucer and all other contemporary 
 witnesses, as a nest of hypocrites, but he does not 
 propose its abolition ; his wish is that its orders should 
 resist the blandishments of Lady Meed and live well. 
 Realism and allegory meet in the subtly conceived 
 figure of Lady Meed, a woman of wanton graces. 
 
26 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 fallen from the high estate of just reward to that of 
 dishonest bribery. The later sections, Do-wel, Do-bet, 
 and Do-best, are less realistic and more doctrinal. 
 The first is a vision of Activa-Vita, in the main, a 
 picture of Piers the peasant ; the second is a vision of 
 faith, hope, and charity, closing with Easter bells; 
 the third, in a darker mood, paints anti-Christ and 
 death, and leaves the dreamer setting out anew in 
 search of Piers (or Christ) throughout the world. 
 The undoubted power of the work lies in its spiritual 
 and mystic ideal, its urgent sincerity, its vivid obser- 
 vation and realistic detail, its hatred of abuses, and 
 the plain-spoken earnestness of its teaching. It is 
 the chief product of the alliterative renascence of the 
 fourteenth century. Of the same school are the 
 contemporary poems, Richard the Redeless and Piers 
 the Plowman's Creed. 
 
 Geoffrey Chaucer, i34o(?)-i400, towers like a peak 
 above the rest of contemporary poets; he was a man 
 of more varied experience than they, 
 being tradesman's son, squire at court, 
 soldier, diplomat, ambassador, keeper of customs, 
 warden of the banks of the Thames, member of 
 Parliament, clerk of the royal works, scholar and 
 scientist. His first training was in French, and he 
 wrote ballades, virelais, and roundels (now partly 
 lost), complaints, unto Pity and the like, an A.B.C., 
 a verse-prayer, and The Book of the Duchess, on the 
 occasion of the death of John of Gaunt's first wife 
 (Chaucer afterwards married the sister of the Duke's 
 third wife). Of lasting import was his translation 
 of part of Le Roman de la Rose, the French poem 
 of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, of whom 
 
TKe Middle A^es, 1066-1500 27 
 
 the former personified the perils that beset lovers, 
 whilst the latter shrewdly satirised the whole social 
 economy of his day. In this exercise, Chaucer 
 acquired practice in the octosyllabic couplet, and a 
 store of medieval conventions — the dream motive, 
 allegory, the garden with legend-haunted walls, and 
 the May morning scene. Much of his learning came 
 from this source, and some of his later characters, 
 as the friar and the prioress, may be discerned in 
 embryo in the French poem. 
 
 Chaucer never completely discarded his French 
 training, but he is distinguished from all his fellows by 
 his contact with the Italian renascence; 
 the two influences are seen contending oeriod 
 
 in Anelida and Arcite. His first Italian 
 journey in 1372 made him acquainted with Latin 
 works and, for a time, he turned to church legend 
 and martyrology for themes, writing the tales of 
 St. Cecile, of Griselda, and of the tragedies of fallen 
 princes, later incorporated in The Canterbury Tales 
 as those of the Second Nun, the Clerk of Oxford, and 
 the Monk respectively. After his second Italian 
 visit in 1378-9, he tired of this partial attitude to 
 life. He wrote The Parliament of Fowls, 1382, a 
 dramatic picture of a bustling vivacious crowd of 
 birds, with much humorous observation and fine 
 feeUng; in The House of Fame, which owes some 
 debt to Dante, he is initiated by the cheerful ex- 
 planatory eagle into the "quick forge and working- 
 house" of Lady Fame, and the caprices of rumour. 
 The prologue of The Legend of Good Women is 
 Chaucer's last use of the allegorical dream: the legends 
 are Ovid's Heroides re-told. Chaucer left it, like 
 
28 The Middle Ages. 1066-1500 
 
 many other experiments, unfinished. Troilus and 
 Criseyde belongs to the Troy section of the "matter 
 of antiquity," which reached Chaucer by devious 
 ways. The forged Latin chronicles of Dictys the 
 Cretan and Dares the Phrygian, supposed eye- 
 witnesses of the fate of Troy, gave rise to extended 
 fabrications, first by Benoit de Ste. More, c. 1165, in 
 French verse, and then by Guido delle Colonne, 1287, 
 in Latin prose, whence The Geste Historyale of Troy 
 in English and the Filostrato of Boccaccio in Italian. 
 Filostrato has a finely studied portrait of Troilus. 
 Chaucer revised and enlarged Boccaccio's tale in his 
 Troilus. It is, in fact, a long novel, though written 
 in rime royal. In construction, appropriateness of 
 detail, blending of humour and tragedy, skill in 
 dialogue, sense for the romantic background and 
 historic figures of Troy, and, above all, in its char- 
 acterisation of Pandarus, no mean predecessor of 
 FalstafI, and of the "graceful mutable soul" of 
 Criseyde, it immeasurably surpasses all other ro- 
 mances of Catholic Christendom. 
 
 By this time the poet had won — a difficult accom- 
 plishment in the Middle Ages — freedom for his own 
 individuality. The years from 1386 to 
 matiuitv 1400 are often called, only half rele- 
 
 vantly, his English period. He had 
 already made collections of stories in The Monk's 
 Tale and in The Legend of Good Women. The Canter- 
 bury Tales are far more varied, for Chaucer's art 
 is evident, not only in his choice of the framework 
 of a pilgrimage, but, also, in the vivacity with which 
 the conception is sustained. The initial jest of the 
 host, Harry Bailey, and his efforts to ensure its 
 
The Middle A^es, 1066-1500 29 
 
 success, the coercing of the recalcitrant pilgrims, the 
 frank expressions of opinion, the diverse qualities of 
 the travellers' mounts, the incidents in the open lanes 
 and at stopping places, all combine to impart an 
 air of lifelikeness and animation, not attained even 
 by Chaucer's accomplished competitor, Boccaccio, in 
 his Decameron. The company numbers thirty-one, 
 of whom a third belong to the Church. All men in 
 orders save one are offenders against their vows, as 
 the poet's penetrating, though never violent, satire 
 makes plain. There are gentlefolks, men of profes- 
 sional rank and of the wealthy middle classes, coarse 
 underlings and the ploughman, who, with his brother, 
 the poor parson of a town, does his duty and wins 
 Chaucer's approval. There is no bishop, no noble, 
 no professional soldier (the knight is a crusader), 
 and no beggar, but, these apart, all classes of four- 
 teenth-century England are sketched to the life in 
 Chaucer's masterpiece of portraiture, the Prologue. 
 The persons in the wonderfully managed crowd are 
 characterised by dress, temperament, manners, and 
 pursuits, by the tales they tell, by the links of con- 
 versation between them, and, once or twice, in lengthy 
 monologues. Dryden did not overstate the case when 
 he said, "Here is God's plenty." The tales are of 
 every kind and, generally, though not always, suited 
 to the teller. The Pardoner's Tale is of narrative skill 
 all compact; The Knight's and Squire's show how 
 Chaucer strengthened and refined romance ; the coarse 
 fabliaux of the Miller and Reeve have brilliant farcical 
 humour, which takes a decisively satirical turn in 
 The Somnour's Tale. The religious legend told by 
 the Prioress has the purest and most sustained melody 
 
30 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 in Chaucer ; The Nun's Priest'' s Tale, a fragment of the 
 beast epic, opens quietly and closes with furious speed. 
 This variety of material shows the suppleness of his 
 imagination, shaping, with equal ease, realism, satire, 
 enchantment, frolic, and romance. 
 
 Chaucer had the keenest enjoyment of the pano- 
 rama of life, focussing his vision on its lighter, rather 
 than on its more sombre, side; it has been remarked 
 that, in his poetry, he avoids the large events of his 
 time; his mental temperament was unfitted for the 
 supreme themes of tragedy. He met minor disasters 
 with a buoyant spirit, as in his genial salute to hard 
 times, The Complaint to his Empty Purse. His truest 
 quality was his humour; he viewed mankind with 
 tolerant worldly irony; he loved nothing better than to 
 set rogues betraying themselves. Upon nature, too, 
 he had a fresh and joyous outlook; he invests his con- 
 ventional landscape with a touch of Botticellian grace; 
 the May mornings in Chaucer are lit with sunshine 
 and alive with woodland sounds. There are qualities 
 in which he differs from the modern poet : we are apt 
 to resent (forgetting that Chaucer was, in many 
 things, of his age) the irrelevant learning which 
 clogs the movement of his narrative; he may con- 
 done faults which we cannot allow to be venial; his 
 immovable benignity may not be so stimulating as 
 the exacting moral challenge of later poets. But 
 he is our first humanist, our first lover of the life 
 and mind of man at large, not making any reserves 
 and bestowing the same zest and sureness and art on 
 the portrayal of the noble, the tender, the mirthful, 
 and the base. This he did in incomparable narra- 
 tive verse, and his only rival in English is his poetical 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 31 
 
 kinsman and disciple, William Morris. For this, he 
 wrought out for himself a measure, bolder, charged 
 with a more subtle music, and demanding a greater 
 mastery than French romantic models offered, 
 namely, the ten-syllabled line, which for centuries 
 proved the inevitable medium of most English verse, 
 except lyric. Chaucer used it first in rime royal, 
 and then in the heroic couplet. Whether Chaucer 
 derived this from Guillaume de Machault, or detected 
 it among earlier native experiments by his own 
 prescient ear, or took the suggestion from the couplets 
 at the close of his rime royal, is uncertain; in any 
 case, this is the verse in which he achieved the "di- 
 vine liquidness of diction" and "fluidity of move- 
 ment ' ' which charmed the ear of Matthew Arnold. It 
 is no longer contended that Chaucer imported French 
 words wholesale into our speech; Spenser called him 
 the "well of English undefiled"; and it is proved 
 now, that Chaucer, like Gower, employed the normal 
 vocabulary of the London of his day. No doubt, 
 his practice, together with many accessory circum- 
 stances, established the eastern midland dialect as 
 the standard form of English. 
 
 Sir John Gower, i325(?)-i4o8, is what Chaucer 
 might have been without genius and without Italy. 
 He wrote first in French his Mirrour 
 de I'Omme, a book of edification and 
 allegory, which may have provoked Chaucer's refer- 
 ence to him as "moral Gower," though this reference 
 may equally have been to some of the less improving 
 of Gower's tales. Next, in Latin verse, he wrote 
 Vox Clamantis. 1382, much of which deals with the 
 social conditions out of which arose the peasants' 
 
32 The Middle Agea, 1066-1300 
 
 rebellion of 1381 : the successive versions of the poem 
 indicate his dwindling faith in Richard II, and his 
 Latin Cronica Tripartita, 1400, records the events 
 preceding Richard's fall and Bolingbroke's triumph. 
 His third poem, Confessio Amantis, 1390, in English 
 octosyllabic couplets, turns from these disquieting 
 matters to the courtly subject of love, "somewhat of 
 lust, somewhat of lore. " The lover makes confession 
 to Genius, the priest of Venus, and is instructed by 
 means of some scores of fluently told stories from the 
 classics, the chronicles, and medieval collections 
 (though not Gesta Romanorum), how to remedy his 
 faults, and atone for his delinquencies. All this 
 resembles Le Roman de la. Rose, and Gower, in fact, 
 belonged to the Rose generation by the make of his 
 mind. He is neglected now, but he was a great 
 collector of stories, and told them well, though not 
 with the iridescent gleams of humour and insight 
 which colour those of Chaucer. He is clear and has 
 some sense of form; his verse and language are sound 
 and regular; it may be that the very regularity of his 
 verse induces the feeling of monotony which causes us 
 to neglect him: there are too few prominences in his 
 landscape. 
 
 2. Prose from the Conquest to 1400 
 
 The prose of this period does not show well beside 
 the best prose of Old English; for, following French 
 ReHgious prose PJ"actice, English writers put the most 
 prosaic subjects into verse. Apart from 
 the Old English Chronicle, which closes gloomily in 
 1 1 54 with the death of Stephen, the existing prose 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 33 
 
 is of the type of homily — as, for instance, part of 
 The Soul's Ward, c. 1210 — or of saints' lives — as, for 
 instance, of St. Margaret and others, full of crude 
 incitements to the conventual life; these, with Holy 
 Maidenhood, c. 12 10, are in a heavily alliterated prose, 
 very near to verse. One memorable exception to the 
 dulness of this catalogue is the Ancren Riwle or 
 Rule for Anchoresses, c. 1210. Its eight books define 
 the duties and observances for three nuns, settled in 
 a Dorset convent. Its engaging humanity, freedom 
 from pedantry, — though its framework is entirely 
 medieval, — sympathy, and enlightenment have won 
 for it universal recognition as the expression of a 
 fine and delightful religious mind. The Ayenbite 
 of Inwit or Remorse of Conscience, another collection 
 of sermons, by Dan Michel, c. 1340, has not much 
 value as literature or translation, though it is interest- 
 ing to see the ever-present seven deadly sins (they 
 appear in Ancren Riwle, Chaucer, Langland, Wyclif, 
 Dunbar, and, later, in Marlowe) here treated allegori- 
 cally. Richard RoUe of Hampole has been named 
 elsewhere. Chaucer wrote prose both secular and 
 religious, always competent, and rising to high levels 
 at times in his Boece. His religious prose includes 
 this translation of Boethius, his portentous "littel 
 thing in prose" the tale of Melibeus and Prudence, 
 and The Parson's Tale, which expounds the whole 
 doctrine of sin, penitence, confession, and discipline. 
 But the best religious prose of this age was written 
 by Wyclif and writers belonging to his school. 
 
 John Wyclif, i32o(?)-84, like Richard Rolle a York- 
 shireman, was closely connected with Balliol College, 
 where an arduous training in the scholastic curriculum 
 
34 The Middle A^es. 1066-1300 
 
 put him in the front rank of controversialists. He 
 . opposed the Church on such doctrines 
 
 th B'bi ^^ transubstantiation, the tenure of 
 
 . property and the superiority of Scrip- 
 ture over tradition. Political events, in which he was 
 supported by John of Gaunt, his own independent 
 disposition, and his growing disbelief in the papacy, 
 accentuated by the existence of two rival popes in 
 1378, drove him to appeal to the people at large, 
 first by his institution of poor priests, and, secondly, 
 by inspiring (his personal share in the work remains 
 unidentified) the translation of the Vulgate version 
 of the Bible. Of the two versions of the translation, 
 one partly composed by Nicholas of Hereford, and 
 the other revised by John Purvey, the latter is by 
 far the superior. No doubt it had been preceded by 
 many translations of portions of the Bible; but, all 
 things considered, the version known as Wyclif's 
 may be taken as the worthy inauguration of the 
 great series of translations of the Bible. It has two 
 of the qualities of the Authorised Version — simplicity 
 and dignity; it is lacking in the grace and power of 
 rhythm which the subtler ear of a later generation 
 added. Whatever part Wyclif took in the version, 
 he must have credit for the generous intention and 
 courage of the undertaking. He and his allies 
 poured out a multitude of tracts and sermons on 
 the abuses of the age, and the Lollards afterwards 
 carried these charges and doctrines to extremes. 
 The pamphlets are awkward in composition, but their 
 purpose demanded popular qualities, and a keen, 
 vigorous, democratic speech. 
 
 By the year 1400, proceedings in law-co\irts were 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 35 
 
 conducted in English, Parliament had been opened 
 
 in an English speech, and boys con- _ 1 
 
 J ^1 • T ■• • \ ,. ^ ,. , Secular prose 
 strued their Latin m school into Enghsh 
 
 instead of French. Nevertheless, all prose, until 
 
 the time of Chaucer, was in the form of translation. 
 
 In 1387 appeared John of Trevisa's version of Higden's 
 
 Latin Polychronicon, a history of the world from the 
 
 creation. It gives the first topographical description 
 
 of England in English and set a long-enduring fashion. 
 
 In 1398, he completed a translation of the De Pro- 
 
 prietatibus Rerum of Bartolomaeus, the best-known 
 
 medieval encyclopcedia of nature. Trevisa's style, 
 
 though not polished, is robust and colloquial, and 
 
 gained for his writings a wide popularity. Chaucer 
 
 wrote his Astrolabe, mostly translation, in 1391, for 
 
 his "little son Lewis." 
 
 The first book of entertainment in English prose 
 
 is The Voyage and Travel of Sir John Mandeville, 
 
 Knight, written originally in French, m d vill 
 
 1 37 1, and put into English by an 
 
 unknown translator. Mystery surrounds the titular 
 
 author; we do know that Sir John never existed, 
 
 but we do not know whether to attribute his creation 
 
 to one D'Outremeuse, or another Jean de Bourgogne. 
 
 The book professes to be a manual for pilgrims to 
 
 the Holy Land, and, in the first part, describes 
 
 Constantinople, Egypt, and Palestine. The second 
 
 part, based on the authentic travels of friar Odoric, 
 
 ranges afield, introducing Prester John, the great 
 
 Cham, the "islands" of China, growing diamonds, 
 
 loadstone mountains, and the valley of devils. By 
 
 a process of thoroughgoing and unacknowledged 
 
 filching from all the travellers' books within reach, 
 
36 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 the writer gathers a corpus of fictions and marvels 
 and relates them with an air of ingenuous purpose- 
 fulness and candour that would have left any but 
 his credulous medieval audience aghast either at his 
 daring or his humour. As prose, it is technically 
 little better than any other of its time; but, until 
 Berners's Froissart, it is the only book which fascinates 
 a modern reader. This it does by its firm resolve to 
 entertain at all costs, and also by the absence of the 
 deadening sense of anonymity which renders many 
 medieval books unimpressive and commonplace. 
 
 3. Verse from Chaucer to the Renascence 
 
 There were devoted followers of Chaucer — though 
 generally of his immature work — in England, such 
 
 as Lydgate and Occleve, but their 
 The Chaucer- 1 • j , . c 
 
 . ,.^. volummousness does not compensate for 
 
 lan tradition , . , . . , , n ■, ^ , 
 
 their almost invariable flatness and lack 
 
 of inspiration ; Chaucer's mantle did not descend upon 
 them but upon the contemporary lowland Scots. 
 John Lydgate, i37o(?)-i45i(?) wrote a Troy Book of 
 30,000 lines and, at still greater length, The Falls of 
 Princes, embodying the same medieval conception of 
 tragedy as The Monk's Tale and, later, The Mirror 
 for Magistrates; his Story of Thebes he proposed to 
 insert in The Canterbury Tales. The Pilgrimage of 
 Man combines all the medieval forms of allegory, 
 and, in some remote way, may have influenced 
 Bunyan. London Lickpenny, a piece of realistic 
 social satire, describing the undoing of a country- 
 man by the sharps about Westminster, is not now 
 credited to Lydgate. The chief poem of Occleve, 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 37 
 
 c. 1368 (?)-c. 1450 (?) is his De Regimine Principum, 
 which gives advice to the Prince of Wales, based 
 on "a blending of Aristotle and Solomon"; in La 
 Male R&gle, the poet confesses himself a pale kind 
 of wastrel. These writers do not bring anything 
 new in theme or treatment, and their attempts at 
 rime royal and heroic couplet only show how com- 
 pletely they had lost hold of all that Chaucer had 
 won for English prosody. More pleasing are several 
 poems once thought Chaucer's but now detached 
 from his canon. To Clanvowe is assigned The 
 Cuckoo and the Nightingale, 1403-10; to Lydgate, 
 The Complaint of the Black Knight; and to an un- 
 known writer The Flower and the Leaf, c. 1450, 
 picturing the retinue and livery, green and white, 
 of those who serve the transitory flower and the 
 permanent leaf. Dryden thought it Chaucer's and 
 reset it in his Fables. The Court of Love, that is 
 to say, of Venus, instances the prolonging of the 
 Chaucerian tradition of Le Roman de la Rose well 
 into the sixteenth century. It was resumed in the 
 reign of Henry VII by Stephen Hawes, 1475-1530. 
 The training and practice of the knight in learning 
 and chivalry is the theme of his allegorical Pastime 
 of Pleasure; but Hawes's dream has no magic and 
 his personifications are anemic; the subject awaited 
 its predestined master, Spenser. John Skelton soon 
 turned from the fashion of allegory in rime royal, but 
 not finding any adequate models to hand, took to 
 writing a quick short line, sufficiently superior to 
 doggerel to acquire the label Skeltonic verse; "ragged, 
 tattered, and jagged" he calls it, though it has more 
 music than this description suggests, and it has pith. 
 
38 The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 
 
 In this metre he wrote the playful Book of Philip 
 Sparrow, on the death of a nun's pet bird, and Colin 
 Clout, one of many satires of which the most sting- 
 ing was his attack on Wolsey, "Why come ye not to 
 Court?" Skelton came too early; sixty years later, 
 his audacity and learning would have made him a 
 university wit. Alexander Barclay freely translated 
 the Narrenschiff of the German Brant into The Ship of 
 Fools, 1509; he also brought into English, without 
 adorning it, the- form of the eclogue. The feebly 
 flowing currents of inspiration in fifteenth century 
 work in England were soon to be refreshed by a 
 torrent; the renascence was at our shores. Mean- 
 while, we may turn to the truer disciples of Chaucer 
 in the north. 
 
 The literature of Scotland is written in a north- 
 ern dialect of English; Barbour, the first consider- 
 able poet, called it "our Ynglis." His 
 Brus, c. 1376, is a heroic presentment 
 of the national hero Bruce, full of fervid patriotism, 
 closing with the triumph of Bannockburn. The 
 same pride of country is in the Orygynal Cronykyl, 
 1406, of Andrew of Wyntoun, fabulous in its earlier 
 parts like the English Bruts. Blind Harry (the 
 minstrel) produced a violently Anglophobe Wallace, 
 1470-80, which touched and stirred Burns four 
 centuries later. None of these felt the influence 
 of Chaucer, nor, in the next century, did Sir David 
 Lindsay, whose Satire of the Three Estates, 1535, a 
 rough dramatic composition, is bitter and penetrat- 
 ing and does not shrink from any extreme of licence 
 and indecency. But The Kingis Quair, or book of 
 the king, c. 1423, written, in all probability, by King 
 
TKe Middle Ages, 1066-1500 39 
 
 James I, during his imprisonment in England, is made 
 in the image of Chaucer and his school and has 
 resemblances to The Court of Love. Its theme is the 
 tremulous awakening passion of the youthful lover, 
 and its delicate beauty is in consonance with its 
 subject. It may be that it represents the King's own 
 feeling towards the Lady Joan Beaufort whom he 
 afterwards married. It is in rime royal; the mea- 
 sure may, in fact, derive its name from the kingly 
 composition. Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and 
 Gavin Douglas are later Chaucerians; the perfervid 
 Scotticism of the chroniclers is scarcely heard in 
 them. Henryson's Fables of Msop has many topi- 
 cal hits and plentiful moralising; The Testament of 
 Cressid completes Chaucer's Troilus with a pathetic 
 relation of Cressida's beggaring and death; Robene 
 and Makyne is a pastoral dialogue of rare freshness 
 and independence of form, more akin to The Nut- 
 Browne Maid than to the English poet. Dunbar is 
 the greatest, but the least like Chaucer, of these 
 poets; his many short poems scarcely admit of classi- 
 fication. He has an allegory. The Thistle and the 
 Rose, 1503, and The Lament for the Makaris (poets), 
 closing with the refrain, Timor mortis conturbat me, 
 and exalted by its manifest sincerity. But most 
 typical are his boisterous satires. The Two married 
 Women, and The Seven Deadly Sins; the sins are bidden 
 by Satan to dance "as varlets do in France"; the 
 grotesque orgy is described in verse astonishing in its 
 brilliance and indelicate humour. These poems seal 
 Dunbar of the clan of Rabelais and Burns by bent of 
 mind, though he revered and is indebted to Chaucer 
 for gentler qualities; he is also, like Chaucer, a master 
 
40 The Middle A^es. 1066-1500 
 
 of metrical effect, though his music is harsher. Gavin 
 Douglas translated Vergil, condemning Caxton's 
 romantic Eneydos without getting much further 
 away from its medieval temper; to each book he pre- 
 faced a prologue and some of these present, with real 
 poetic power, Scottish country scenes. Summing up 
 the matter briefly, we may say that the narrow pre- 
 Chaucerian patriotism gives way to qualities more 
 intimately national in the force of satiric invective and 
 comic phrasing in Dunbar and Lindsay and in the 
 genuinely observed landscape of Douglas. It is in- 
 teresting to note in these poets a fitful occurrence of 
 alliteration in the manner of Old English verse; in 
 everj^hing else, they are the true disciples of Chaucer. 
 We have little evidence for assigning any date 
 to British ballads; the first invaluable collection is 
 
 in the MS. called the Percy folio, of 
 The ballads 1650. Most appear to have been com- 
 an pop ar posed between iioo and 1500; but they 
 
 were still being made in the eighteenth 
 century. Scholars are coming to the conclusion that 
 they originated, as their refrains seem to indicate, in a 
 song accompanied by dancing and a chorus, not 
 unlike the French Carole. They are not to be thought 
 of, for the, most part, as degenerate romances; they 
 are not degenerate at all, but an elaborate form of art, 
 admirably fitted for a definite type of narrative of a 
 temper more akin to the epic than the romance. The 
 first short love-song or nonsense rime gave place to a 
 longer narrative, and this, after a time, came to be 
 sung or recited by itself; in one case, a number of these 
 narratives were shaped together, attaining almost 
 to epic proportions, as in The Little Geste of Robin 
 
The Middle Ages, 10&6-1500 41 
 
 Hood. Their themes are as numerous and often as 
 untraceable as those of the romances. Some are 
 of border warfare, as The Hunting of the Cheviot, 
 some of fairyland, as Thomas of Ercildoune, some 
 of the supernatural, as The Wife of Usher's Well, 
 some of romance, as Clerk Saunders and Fair Annie, 
 some of treachery and murder, as Farcy Reed and 
 Childe Maurice, some of outlawry, as Robin Hood, 
 who makes a splendid ballad end. Though some, 
 like the romances, end happily, the best of them are 
 tragic, portraying, in stark outline, hot and violent 
 action, barbarously heroic in its sentiment, with a 
 curious untrained art, which gets the most powerful 
 effects out of naive repetitions and out of economy 
 and purity of speech. One of the most moving of all 
 baUads, The Nut-Browne Maid, is almost too elaborate 
 to have the title of ballad at all. It is a dramatic 
 dialogue telling, with a surer touch of pathos than 
 Chaucer has in Griselda, of a maid's constancy in 
 face of the almost intolerable exactions of her lover. 
 In addition to ballads there are many contemporary 
 popular songs, carols, drinking-songs, religious songs, 
 and love-songs; these are generally of a rather primi- 
 tive type, but they witness to the universal taste for 
 song and dance. Some of the Latin student songs, such 
 as Gaudeamus igitur, date from this century as well. 
 
 4. Prose FROM Chaucer TO THE Renascence 
 
 In the line of chroniclers, Capgrave, c. 1450, Fabian, 
 c. 1510, and Hall, c. 1530, lead on to the Elizabethan 
 chroniclers Holinshed and Stow; here, too, should be 
 mentioned Leland's 7/iree?'07'3', c. 1540, and the Paston 
 
42 The Middle A^es, 10e)6-1500 
 
 Letters, 1424-1506, intimate revelations of fifteenth- 
 century life, some of them still warm with the personal 
 feeling of the writers. Pecock's Repressor 0/ over much 
 Blaming of the Clergy, c. 1455, defended the Church 
 against the assaults of the Lollards; but, since he 
 based his argument on reason, in place of authority, 
 the Church found him disquietingly progressive and 
 discarded him ; he had brilliant gifts both in dialectics 
 and in the adaptation of language. Something of the 
 same modernity is to be found in Sir John Fortescue's 
 Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Mon- 
 archy, 1 47 1, a short plea recommending constitutional 
 relations between king and people. We cannot do 
 more than mention the sermons, c. 1509, of Bishop 
 Fisher — who was something of a rhetorician — and 
 of Latimer — the first of a number, Bunyan, Cobbett, 
 Bright, who gain simplicity and force by holding 
 fast to the English stock in the vocabulary. Sir 
 Thomas Elyot's Governour, 1531, is a treatise from 
 Italian sources on education and politics, which, 
 incidentally, gives the story of Gascoigne and Prince 
 Hal. There is also a pious biography of Wolsey by 
 his usher, George Cavendish. But the more capti- 
 vating works of the time are still concerned with 
 chivalry; the greatest is Le Morte Arthur of Sir Thomas 
 jj^ Malory. He professed to translate 
 
 from a French book which as yet has 
 eluded identification; the five main threads of the 
 romance have already been named (see p. 21). 
 Malory made the search for the Graal the central 
 motive of his story, though it is sometimes obscured 
 by lengthy interludes; the whole is rounded off with 
 marvellous art; the separation and deaths of Lance- 
 
The Middle Ages, 1066-1500 43 
 
 lot and Guenever move us like a tragedy. "Here 
 may be seen, " says Caxton, "noble chivalry, courtesy, 
 humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, 
 cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin." Caxton 
 adds, "Do after the good and leave the evil and it 
 shall bring you to good fame and renown"; a more 
 humane judgment than Ascham's harsh strictures on 
 the book. Malory has the magic control of words 
 and rhythms which makes us grant him the "willing 
 suspension of disbelief," while he creates an imagina- 
 tive world. The natural grace and beauty of his 
 writing are touched with a faint melancholy, which 
 seems to reflect the soft and bewitching tints of 
 twilight; in 1470, the nightfall of extinction was upon 
 the ages of faith and chivalry. We cannot here 
 attempt an estimate of the gain to letters through 
 Caxton's introduction of printing into England in 1476 ; 
 he printed many translations, including Malory's, 
 making some of them himself; his original prefaces 
 reveal a splendid personality keenly interested in 
 romance and in the transitional world about him. 
 This is true, again, of Lord Berners, the translator of 
 Froissart's Chronicles, c. 1523. Here are the trappings 
 of knighthood, "trumpets blown for . 
 
 wars," sieges and sea-fights, stratagems 
 and parleys, set down with a persuasive touch of 
 intimacy; it is not the sifted history of the modern 
 scholar, but it is singularly faithful to the speech 
 and life of the fighters and rulers of his time. He 
 uses, for the most part, a simple graphic prose in 
 the chronicles, but he envied those who possessed 
 the " facundious art of rhethorique, " and, in his ver- 
 sion of the Spaniard Guevara's Dial of Princes, he 
 
44 The Middle Ages, 1060-1500 
 
 anticipated some of the extravagances of Euphuism. 
 It is credited to him, also, that, in his translation of 
 Huon of Bordeaux, he enriched the fairy lore of 
 England by the kingly figure of Oberon. 
 
 Encouraged by Erasmus's pronouncement for a 
 Bible in the native speech, Tyndale worked devotedly 
 at the New Testament and other parts 
 of the Scriptures until his martyrdom 
 in 1536; his original was not the Vulgate but the 
 Greek New Testament of Erasmus, and, substantially, 
 though with revisions of detail, his translation is 
 the Authorised Version; he conferred upon it that 
 popular but dignified idiom which proved admirably 
 in consonance with the Semitic matter of the Old 
 Testament. Coverdale had a hand in the first Great 
 Bible, 1539, Cranmer in the second Great Bible, 1540, 
 Archbishop Parker in the Bishops' Bible, 1568. Forty- 
 seven divines were entrusted with the making of 
 the Authorised Version, 1606-11; they retained from 
 the earlier Bible its simplicity, its unaffected archaism, 
 its picturesqueness, its predominantly English word- 
 ing, with occasional doublets, sin and transgression, 
 and the like, and added some indefinable quality, never 
 again to be attained; it is impossible to degrade the 
 English of the Bible, and, apart from the fact that it is 
 "the anchor of national seriousness, " it has remained 
 a permanent and undisputed standard of prose, the 
 most powerful plea in our language for the virtues 
 of simplicity and rhythmic grace in writing. The 
 Book of Common Prayer, also, is a product of many 
 minds; chief among them ranks Archbishop Cranmer, 
 though prayers were added down to 1661. 
 
BOOK III 
 
 THE RENASCENCE, 1500-1660 
 
 I. The New Forces at Work 
 
 Nothing in the past at this date, except the per- 
 sistently ignored later work of Chaucer, prophesied 
 what was to come. The tired mechanism of medieval 
 existence had almost stopped when history gathered 
 that immense volume of force which we call the 
 renascence and drove it forward with well-nigh 
 ungovernable speed. It is astonishing that litera- 
 ture should have been able to cope with this torrential 
 energy of thought and discovery and conserve it with 
 little loss for later times. But literattire faced the 
 task and mounted with its opportunity. Faustus and 
 Bacon took aU knowledge for their province, Spenser 
 all ethic and political art, Shakespeare plumbed the 
 profoundest depths of human passion, groping for the 
 point where the endurance of the spirit breaks before 
 accumulated ills, discovering in his quest the un- 
 suspected grandeurs which trials reveal in men. 
 The driving forces were many. First, the revival 
 of learning, in its twofold aspect, the unfolding 
 of ancient civilisations, and the stimulation of native 
 literary endeavour. The vision of civilisations like 
 
 45 
 
46 TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 those of Greece and Rome, the work of men's hands, 
 based on beauty and harmony, and on law and order, 
 made people question the medieval organisation 
 based on traditions of the Church, tyrannous and indis- 
 putable. People enquired into the axioms of this 
 philosophy and found them too full of assumptions ; 
 they called in the senses to adjust the distortions of the 
 scholastic vision. Hence, in Bacon, the foundations 
 of science, and the revolt of the early freethinkers and 
 speculative pioneers, such as Giordano Bruno, Ralegh, 
 and Marlowe. Marlowe's Faustus is the expression of 
 the desire of the Elizabethan mind for untried fields. 
 Invaluable MSS., sole repositories of the records of 
 older civilisations, were being expounded by Greek 
 doctors in Italian city-states , the magnet of all Europe. 
 An honoured line of English scholars taught the new 
 doctrines in the universities, men like Grocyn, Linacre, 
 and Colet at Oxford, Erasmus, Cheke, and Ascham 
 at Cambridge. The other power which the renascence 
 exercised as a creative stimulant was due to its coming 
 to us colotired by Italian writers; its wealth of learning, 
 art, story, music, state-policy, philosophy, as well' as 
 of vice, was brought over by diplomats, men of the 
 world, and courtiers. Adherents of learning, strictly 
 as learning, hated Italianate culture, and there were 
 persistent attempts by rigid classicists to fetter it. 
 Ascham proffered his hard dry Hellenism; Sidney, a 
 drama "climbing to the height of Seneca his style"; 
 Gabriel Harvey, a metrical scheme borrowed directly 
 from classical exemplars. Through all this, the ro- 
 mantic impulse, at first fretting, finally burst forth 
 in such Elizabethan restatements of the classics as 
 Chapman's Iliad, and Marlowe's Hero and Leander; 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 47 
 
 in drama, untrammelled by any canons (except in the 
 case of Ben Jonson, who welcomed them); in the 
 wave-like independence and diversity of Spenser's 
 stanzas ; and in the golden treasure of harmony which 
 Marlowe conjured from his new blank verse. These 
 writers flung off the classical tradition ; but the debt to 
 Italy in thought and form grew larger with each 
 new writer. The second of these rejuvenating forces 
 was the Reformation (coming in by a "side door" 
 finally, but inevitable since Wyclif), with all its con- 
 flict and stimulus to freedom, on "which followed the 
 religious compromise of Elizabeth. Out of this 
 came the eloquence of the Anglican divines on the one 
 hand, and, on the other, the militant inarticulate 
 rebelling of nonconformity; for, though there were 
 pamphlets in plenty in England — witness the Marpre- 
 late campaign — ^it was abroad that the new theology 
 was elaborated in Calvin's Institutes, 1536. In 1563 
 came Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the treasury of anti- 
 papist animus. The third force was the Tudor 
 monarchy, with its ingenious but effective diplomacy, 
 beginning now to tell heavily in the councils of Europe. 
 With characteristic astuteness, it established an abso- 
 lute sovereignty, at the same time making an appeal 
 to the nation's affections which became an almost 
 fevered and uncontrollable patriotism when Elizabeth 
 turned to it for support. This was the real bond 
 which held together the activities of Drake and his 
 freebooters, Spenser and the poets. Hooker and the 
 divines ; at its bidding, men saddled themselves with 
 tasks like Drayton's Poly-Olbion; and the chronicle 
 play, a purely English offshoot of the drama, has no 
 other origin. Fourth, there is the new epoch of 
 
48 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 adventurous voyaging and world discovery, whose 
 prose epic was written by Hakluyt, and whose effects 
 are plain in Chapman's De Guiana and in The Tempest. 
 The centre of humanity shifted from the narrow 
 bounds of the Mediterranean (discovery falsified the 
 very name), and England's naval war was fought in 
 the Atlantic, for the prize of the riches of Eldorado, 
 richer, in the sequel, in letters than in treasure. 
 Fifth, science struggled for truth, and, in spite of some 
 early setbacks and envious hostility, contrived to 
 inspect the processes of nature and unravel some of 
 its mystery. Galileo's E pur si muove was the motto 
 of the conquering doctrine of Copernicus as against the 
 fated, though picturesque, errors of Ptolemy. Sys- 
 tematised experimental science begins with Bacon. 
 Finally, to serve as bulwark for all that had been won 
 against such an inundation as had swept Greek civil- 
 isation from memory, there had come the intro- 
 duction of printing, 1476, and the rapid distribution 
 of books. 
 
 The Middle Ages did not, however, disappear in 
 a cataclysm; many things had in them the seeds 
 of evolution and still bear fruit. The 
 survivals Middle Ages and the renascence over- 
 
 lap in Chaucer, who, at his greatest, is 
 a humanist, though not a scholarly one, and was 
 acknowledged by the Elizabethans. There are fila- 
 ments between medieval Provence and Petrarch, the 
 pervading influence in Elizabethan lyric. Sackville, 
 a true poet, though he deserted the muses for politics, 
 exemplifies the new imagination at work within old 
 forms. His Induction and Complaint of Buckingham in 
 the otherwise dreary Mirror for Magistrates, 1559- 
 
TKe Renascence. 1500-1660 49 
 
 63 (a continuation in rime royal of Lydgate's Falls 
 of Princes) have grandeur and power, especially 
 in portraying the gallery of allegorical shades, to 
 whose abode, Dante-like, he is led by Sorrow. He 
 is a strong, sombre genius, with more poetry in re- 
 serve than all the fifteenth century poets had ever 
 exercised. Spenser, too, is an allegorist, and uses 
 for his "dark conceit" feudal chivalry, hke that of 
 Sidney; his pageant of the seven deadly sins (Mar- 
 lowe has one, too) is archaic like some of the ingred- 
 ients of his dialect. He brought over to the new 
 age what has been the perpetual rival of classicism 
 in England, the love of legend. Henry V prays like a 
 medieval churchman, and the pictures of the world 
 of spirits in Hamlet and Macbeth are formed by 
 popular religious fears and hopes. The folk-lore 
 and fairy world and the legendary British history 
 of Shakespeare hark back to these earlier centuries. 
 Finally, popular tastes in jest, song, and drama 
 were formed in the Middle Ages, and traditions as 
 deep-seated as these were bound to shape in some 
 way the practice of those who appealed to this wide 
 audience. 
 
 The impetus of the renascence is continuous and 
 fairly homogeneous from Sir Thomas Wyatt to the 
 death of Milton; but we may allow ourselves a breath- 
 ing space in the survey of this long period at the end of 
 the reign of James I, taking the prose, verse, and 
 drama of Elizabeth and James, and then the prose 
 and verse of the Caroline and Commonwealth periods, 
 indicating, on the way, the change of temper which 
 took place in the early years of the seventeenth 
 century. 
 
50 The Renascence. 1300-1660 
 
 2. Poetry to the Death of James I 
 
 The age was prolific both in poetry and prose, 
 but, in excellence and variety, the accomplishment 
 in poetry is the higher; only outlines of the record 
 can be given. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of 
 Surrey, scholars and diplomats, pretending that their 
 art was but a pastime, were the pioneers of the 
 Italian fashions in verse; they were called the "courtly 
 makers." Wyatt naturalised the sonnet form, and 
 with it came the necessity for standardising accent, 
 and for settling the question of the inflectional -e. 
 The subject, ornament, and much of the phrasing of 
 Wyatt's and many following sonnets come from 
 Petrarch; unrequited passion and the lover's melan- 
 choly are the gist of most of them. But Wyatt's 
 lyrics for the lute have a more direct sincerity and a 
 studious art. He was, moreover, one of the few in 
 England who caught the strain of Horatian satire. 
 Surrey was a lesser man, but, profiting by the ex- 
 perience of Wyatt, he proved a more graceful writer; 
 he struck out the sonnet form of three quatrains and 
 a couplet, but used only three rimes to Shakespeare's 
 seven; a more historic innovation was the blank verse 
 measure, clumsy though it was, in which he translated 
 Books II and IV of the jEneid. Neither Wyatt nor 
 Surrey published any writings, but an astute book- 
 seller, Richard Tottel, gathered their work, together 
 with other courtly poems, into his miscellany, Songs 
 and Sonnets, 1557. 
 
 The interval between Surrey and Spenser is void 
 of any great poetical product; but, meanwhile, two 
 things call for notice: first, the experimenters, Turber- 
 
The Renascence. 1500-1660 51 
 
 vile, Googe, Churchyard, Whetstone, Tusser, a versi- 
 fier of agricultural lore, and Gascoigne, only the last 
 calling for remark; his versatile experimenting in- 
 cluded a prose comedy from Ariosto, The Supposes, 
 1566, Jocasta, a blank verse Senecan play, a satire in 
 the same measure, The Steel Glass, 1576, and an essay 
 on English verse, Notes of Instruction; secondly, the 
 increasing influence of the Pliiade, the academic 
 poets of the French renascence, Du Bellay, Desportes, 
 Ronsard, on the development of the sormet. 
 
 The fashion of the sonnet sequence, derived from 
 Petrarch's Laura, had enormous sway in England 
 as abroad; one of the earliest disciples 
 
 was Sir Philip Sidney, whose Astrophel ^ ^ 
 
 ^ sonneteers 
 
 and Stella, 1580-4, was addressed to Pe- 
 nelope Devereux, sister of Queen Elizabeth's Essex, 
 and, afterwards. Lady Rich; in sincerity, Sidney had 
 few rivals, and he employs the conventional form 
 with unusual grace, but it is not often that he can 
 fuse it to the glow of passion. The series, more 
 than a hundred in number, contains some exalted 
 religious feeling. Watson, a secondary person, wrote 
 his Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Sonnets, 
 1582, in eighteen-lined stanzas, showing how loosely 
 the word sonnet was used by the Elizabethans; he 
 advertises the source of all his material in preliminary 
 prose paragraphs. 
 
 Spenser, in his Amoretti, 1595, possibly addressed 
 to his wife, falls far below the passionate adoration 
 of his Epithalamium; his sonnets are mannered and 
 full of conceits; the best of them involve his Platonic 
 doctrine of beauty; he made, characteristically, some 
 metrical innovations. Other poets, Barnes, Constable, 
 
52 The Renascence. 130O-1660 
 
 Lodge, Fulke Greville, Daniel, and Drayton — these 
 last two rising once or twice, in Delia and Idea re- 
 spectively, to the heights of inspiration, — attempted 
 the form, as did Sir William Alexander and Drum- 
 niond of Hawthornden in the reign of James. The 
 sonnet came to be used as an introduction to other 
 poetic ventures, and the best in this kind is Ralegh's 
 preface to The Faerie Queene. But all these are 
 utterly outdistanced by the sonnets of Shakespeare, 
 written, probably, between 1590 and 1600, though not 
 published till 1609. They raise unsolved problems — 
 how far do they mirror actual events? who are the 
 dramatis persona? do they bear any relation to the 
 changed tone of the plays about 1600? Though, 
 to some extent, they draw on the common fund of 
 renascence ornament, they are written with less 
 conscious artifice; the sinister history of twofold 
 treachery and resignation is revealed with stirrings 
 of passion, with subtle shades of emotion, from the 
 deepest shame to exultant triumph, which give it a 
 moving power not found elsewhere. The sequence 
 has some motives common to all; the havoc wrought 
 by time and decay upon beauty, and the vaunt of the 
 eternising power of verse are familiar themes; but, 
 whether in treating of these or of the poignant bitter 
 story, the lines have a wealth of natural imagery, 
 a rich sonorous harmony, a mastery of vowel-sound 
 and alliteration, in short, a variety of music and 
 mood which preserves them alone among all the 
 sonnet sequences from the charges of unreality and 
 monotony. 
 
 Lyric, like the sonnet, is apt to draw on French 
 and Italian sources, but its triumphs are vastly 
 
TKe Renascence. 1500-1660 53 
 
 more numerous. Some breath laden with the 
 pollen of lyrical fertility swept across the . 
 
 age. There is the graceful trilling of 
 artificial notes by Greene, Dekker, Peele, Breton, 
 and Lodge, whose songs are too impersonal to be 
 distinguished from one another; the more closely 
 observed nature, the finer music, the perfect emo- 
 tional truth of the songs of Shakespeare, deftly 
 modulated in the larger harmony of the plays; the 
 polished classical art, wanting only in spontaneity, 
 of Ben Jonson, whose successor is Thomas Campion, 
 a master, as his Four Books of Airs prove, of rime, 
 metre, and lyric diction as well as of music; there 
 are also the admonitory stanzas of Dyer, Wotton, 
 and Daniel; the lofty insolence of Ralegh; the pas- 
 torals of Marlowe and Drayton, who is also the 
 best of the patriotic balladists. Of the numerous 
 lyric miscellanies, only two can be named, England's 
 Helicon, 1600, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 1602; 
 of the song-books, only the madrigals of Wilbye and 
 the songs for the lute of Byrd and Dowland, wherein 
 is the keenest rivalry between exquisite words and 
 melodious tunes. The relations between EUzabethan 
 music and lyric poetry await further study. 
 
 This brief chronicle of sonnet and lyric has carried 
 us past the date of Edmund Spenser, 1552-99, whose 
 independently published work begins 
 with The Shepherd's Calendar, 1579, by 
 which time he had shaken off the heresies about 
 classical metres in English propagated at Cambridge 
 by his pedantic friends, Abraham Fraunce and Gabriel 
 Harvey. These Eclogues of the months turn back to 
 Theocritus, Vergil, Mantuanus, Sannazaro, and Marot ; 
 
54 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 the conventional pastoral pretence is employed on 
 divers themes, love-lays, allegorical fables, church- 
 controversy, a plea for poetry, a verse-contest, love- 
 complaints (against his first and unresponsive love 
 Rosalind), and the praise of Elizabeth. But it was 
 chiefly the metrical versatility and unwonted musical 
 skill of the idylls that won for him the title, "the new 
 poet." The archaic speech was condemned now by 
 Sidney and afterwards by Ben Jonson, but Spenser 
 never abandoned it. Courtly office was found for 
 him in 1580 as secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton 
 in Ireland. There he wrote the first three books of 
 The Faerie Queene, on whose publication Ralegh, 
 a neighbour of Spenser in Ireland, insisted in 1590. 
 Meanwhile, he was working out for himself a moral 
 philosophy of which one element, Platonism as ex- 
 pounded by the Italian humanist Ficino, may be 
 discerned in his early Hymns to Love and Beauty; 
 while the other element, Christian doctrine, may be 
 seen blended with Platonism in the later Hymns to 
 Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty; all four were 
 published together in 1596. But the full harvest of 
 his genius is garnered in the romantic allegorical 
 epic. The Faerie Queene; of this. Books I-III were 
 published in 1590, Books IV- VI in 1596, and the 
 complete form, including the stanzas on mutability 
 in the fragmentary Book VII, in 1609. The intention 
 of Spenser was "to fashion a gentleman or noble 
 person in vertuous and gentle discipline"; and this 
 he achieves by the spirit of his work, though not 
 by his detail. His method was a continued "dark 
 conceit" or allegory, and in this he fails; for the 
 allegory is discontinuous, and the appearances of 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 55 
 
 Prince Arthur (representative of the comprehensive 
 virtue of magnanimity) have not the binding effect 
 that Spenser designed. For the most part he modelled 
 the narrative on Ariosto, though deriving his sixth 
 book from Malory; the religious and crusading tone 
 owes something to his Italian contemporary Tasso's 
 Gerusalemme Liberata. But the figures in The Faerie 
 Queene are not the romantic knights errant of Ariosto, 
 nor the crusaders of Tasso, but personified virtues, 
 Biblical, Platonic, and Aristotelian, to wit. Holiness, 
 Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Cour- 
 tesy; upon these shadowy figures he confers titles 
 such as The Red Cross Knight, Sir Guyon, and the 
 like. He projected twenty-four books treating the 
 twelve private and the twelve political virtues in this 
 manner; only the first six books have come down to 
 us. The conflicts, perils, and adventures are very 
 much like those of the romances, and they go on 
 before a scenic background of the poet's own elabora- 
 tion. The scheme was ambitious like most Eliza- 
 bethan schemes, but Spenser had little constructive 
 skill; he lets the story drift, interrupts it with delight- 
 ful but inconsequent episodes, and, worse still, he 
 confuses the allegorical plan. Sometimes, he is por- 
 trajring the conflict between truth and falsehood, 
 sometimes, between Mary and Elizabeth, sometimes, 
 between. Protestantism and Rome, sometimes, be- 
 tween England and Spain. Then, again, the knightly 
 mask and armour and titles may be stripped from the 
 abstract virtues and disconcertingly fitted to real 
 persons; thus, Duessa may be theological error, 
 or Mary Queen of Scots; and Prince Arthur may 
 be Sidney, or Leicester, or Grey de Wilton; or one 
 
56 The Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 person may figure in several guises, as Queen Eliza- 
 beth, who is the fairy queen, as well as Belphoebe 
 and Britomart. We watch an unending series of 
 metamorphoses. To go to Spenser as we might to 
 Bunyan for clear narrative and easily translatable 
 allegory is to go in vain; his strength, as we shall see, 
 lies elsewhere, in his lofty spiritual inspiration and in 
 his art. In any scene drawn from the real world it 
 would be impossible to persuade us of the co-existence 
 of beings brought from the diverse realms of romance, 
 Protestant theology, neo-Platonism, contemporary 
 history, legendary lore, and classical mythology. The 
 poet does not attempt it ; he folds their hard outlines 
 about with the softening veil of allegory and presents 
 them in pageants and processions, in a dream atmo- 
 sphere and enchanted landscape, in golden noon, or 
 starlit night, or in magical forests, often near the 
 sound of waters, which, with the perfumed air, lulls 
 all incredulity; or he may establish them in the more 
 firm and solid caves, like those of Mammon and 
 Despair, or pleasaunces Uke the Bower of Acrasia, 
 where a wonderful dreamy activity pervades the 
 scene. This art, which weaves words and rhythms 
 into pictures, is one great quality of Spenser's genius. 
 Though Spenser usually took refuge in allegory 
 and disguise, he was not incapable of dealing with 
 life at first hand, as we may see in Book V of The 
 Faerie Queene, treating of affairs in the Netherlands, 
 and the drastic proposals for the harrying of Ireland 
 in his prose View of the present State of Ireland. 
 His Complaints, 1591, again, contain, besides the 
 delightful Muiopotmos and some elegiac poems like 
 The Ruins of Time, Prosopopoia, or Mother Hub- 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 57 
 
 herd's Tale, a sarcastic delineation of the intrigues 
 of court and church. He often laments the low- 
 estate and mean rewards of poetry now that poli- 
 ticians of the type of Burleigh have succeeded Sidney. 
 His picture of the ignominy of the suppliant at 
 court, in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 1591, is 
 based on observation and bitter experience. By 
 virtue of these realistic things, he takes a high place 
 among Elizabethan satirists. Yet love and beauty 
 drew from him his richest music ; when he sings most 
 exquisitely, as in his perfect marriage songs, Epi- 
 thalamium and Prothalamium, no tone of cynicism or 
 harsh note of any kind mars their wonderful melody. 
 Besides his skill in word-painting, and his un- 
 wavering fidelity to the poet's creed of beauty, we 
 should note how his spirit is stirred by the nobler 
 aspects of all the activities of his day; his verse 
 refines them all; heroic adventure, patriotic fervour, 
 queen- worship, puritan exaltation of truth, each 
 yields a finer essence to him to blend with the chivalric 
 temper of which his friend Sidney was the supreme 
 exemplar. Finally, we may note his command of his 
 medium of music, rhythm, and stanza form; in the 
 technical skill which distils the utmost subtlety, 
 grace, and strength of expression from sound, he is 
 one of the great masters; the Spenserian stanza (a 
 nine-lined stanza, of which the chief features are the 
 riming bridge at the fourth and fifth lines, and the 
 closing alexandrine) is only the most triumphant 
 among many experiments; its later history has been 
 honourable, for it served as a channel of romance 
 to the arid tracts of eighteenth century poetry. 
 Keats, Byron, and Shelley and many more poured 
 
58 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 their music into it; it is our greatest stanzaic measure. 
 
 The poetry of the age is "thick inlaid" with 
 
 mythological allusion, and there are many poems 
 
 retelling mythological tales. The first 
 Mythological ^^ j j^ j^ Marlowe's Hero and 
 
 poems 
 
 Leander, in which the gracious, passion- 
 ate story is told with a purity of imagination to which 
 neither Chapman's continuation of the poem nor 
 Shakespeare's two ventures in classic legend, Venus 
 and Adonis and Lucrece, 1593-4, ^ver quite attain; 
 Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla, 1589, and the anonymous 
 Britain's Ida, are surpassed by Drayton's En- 
 dymion and Phcebe, 1594, a piece of splendid pastoral 
 pageantry on the legend of the moon-goddess. Beau- 
 mont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus comes late in 
 the same school. With these, we may name the 
 
 translators of classical and Italian verse. 
 
 Stanyhurst's ridiculous hexametric Ver- 
 gil, 1582, could not displace Phaer's version, 1560, in 
 " fourteeners, " the measure employed by Arthur Gold- 
 ing in his popular and much-used Metamorphoses of 
 Ovid, 1567, and in the vastly greater work of George 
 Chapman, the Iliad, 1593-161 1 . Chapman's Odyssey, 
 1616, was written, for some reason, in heroic couplets, 
 which do not so well recover the pace and energy of 
 the original; both the translations are Elizabethan 
 in their elaborate and frequently ingenious phrasing 
 and in their expansions of the original. A comparison 
 of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, and Lang and Leaf in 
 their treatment of Homer would throw much light on 
 the changing current of literary taste. George Sandys 
 the traveller did the Metamorphoses again into coup- 
 lets, 1621. These are by no means all the classical 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 59 
 
 translators, and the industry was so widespread 
 
 that it sought its raw material in France, Spain, 
 
 and Italy as well. Sir John Harrington made a 
 
 courtly version of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 1591; 
 
 Edward Fairfax admirably translated Tasso's Geru- 
 
 salemme Liber ata in 1600; Joshua Sylvester's feebly 
 
 fluent Divine Weeks and Works, 1590-2, from Du 
 
 Bartas, had wide influence down to Milton's age. 
 
 The group of philosophical and religious poets 
 
 sounds a note which becomes more insistent in the 
 
 sequel; Drummond of Hawthornden's 
 
 religious sonnets, Flowers of Sion, 1623, ^^^°"\!^^ 
 
 illustrate the transition in temper. Be- „„.„„ 
 
 ^ poems 
 
 fore them come Sir John Davies's Orches- 
 tra, 1596, in which the movements of the planets, the 
 sea, and human affairs are poetically symbolised in a 
 harmonious dance; and the quatrains of his No see 
 Teipsum, 1598, which, with Dryden-like clearness of 
 verse-argument, discusses the immortality of the soul 
 and the intimate union of soul and body. Fulke 
 Greville's rigidly intellectual poems. Of Humane Know- 
 ledge, Of Monarchy, not published till 1633, are too 
 formidable; something of the same quality marks 
 Chapman's Tears of Peace; the praise of learning in it 
 is noble, but it is "craggy" and rather apt to "break" 
 than refresh the mind. Robert Southwell, the poet 
 of the Roman Catholic religion in Elizabeth's days, 
 gives fire by his devotion to the curious conceits and 
 fancies in his Saint Peter's Complaint, 1615. 
 
 The figure of the most profound originality in 
 this group and this age is John Donne, t j, n 
 most of whose writings were posthum- 
 ously published in 1633. Elegies, Satires (described 
 
6o The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 below), verse Letters and Songs are all distinguished 
 by the spirit of rebellion, the intensest thrill 
 of emotion, subtlety of intellect, and lightning 
 flashes of brilliant phrasing. He rebelled against 
 the long imitative tradition of the Petrarchans; he 
 could no more speak simply of love, like Burns, than 
 they; but he replaced their fine-spun sentiment, worn 
 thin through age-long use, by feeling which retains 
 the furnace heat of experience, animal passion, or 
 an over-intellectualised contempt for women. In 
 general, he is the poet of the metaphysics of sex, 
 moving more rarely on normal levels as in his most 
 exquisite song, "Sweetest love, I do not go." For 
 the ritualised diction of the Petrarchans, with its 
 circulating catalogue of simile and mythological allu- 
 sion, he substituted a speech in the main strong 
 and rugged rather than poetical (though often achiev- 
 ing splendid rhythm and colour), and metaphors 
 and parallels drawn from mathematics, alchemy, 
 law, scholasticism, and from the most prosaic and 
 unpromising affairs of every day. Carew crystal- 
 lised the judgment of his time about Donne in his 
 lines, " A king that ruled . . . the universal monarchy 
 of wit." Wit, the fiery rapidity of thought and the 
 swift summoning of some image, bizarre but fitting, 
 from his richly-stored erudition, might well be the 
 possession of one who passed from the Roman to the 
 Anglican Church, a master of both their theologies. 
 This mental g3nnnastic contributed to the character- 
 istic "metaphysical" blend of passion and intellectual 
 ingenuity whether of forensic argument or far-sought 
 conceit which may be seen in the haunting fragment, 
 The Progress of the Soul, and the extravagantly eulo- 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 61 
 
 gistic elegies, with outbursts of magnificent poetry, 
 entitled An Anatomy of the World. Neither his 
 intense individuality, nor the imagination which 
 peers into the backward and abysm of things and is 
 shadowed by the thought of death, could be passed 
 on to his followers; but some habits natural to him 
 became, in them, mere conceits and fantastic ingenu- 
 ities which were duly castigated in Johnson's Life 
 of Cowley. These habits are characteristic of both 
 the secular and the reUgious " metaphysicals, " the 
 latter taking their origin from Donne's Divine Poems, 
 written when the insolent libertinism of youth had 
 given way to the ascetic devotion of the Dean of 
 St. Paul's, Donne having by this time been rewarded 
 with belated office in the Church. 
 
 Another group includes patriotic chroniclers in 
 verse, for prose, verse, and drama all take heavy 
 toll of this material. After Spenser, the first of 
 them is William Warner, whose Albion's England, 
 1 586- 1 602, is a history of the usual uncritical kind 
 from the Flood to his own day. Its rugged fourteen- 
 syllabled lines are not often poetic nor is its narrative 
 skill very remarkable; it is saved by its patriot- 
 ism. Peele has his famous Farewell to N orris and 
 Drake, 1589, and Fitzgeffrey his classically adorned 
 elegy on Drake, 1596. Romance and chronicle meet 
 in " well-languaged " Daniel's Complaint . . 
 
 of Rosamond, 1592-1623; chronicle and Daniel 
 
 reflection are the substance of his Civil 
 Wars, 1595-1623, fluent, distinguished, but unexciting. 
 Tethys' Festival is the finest of the masques he wrote 
 for the Queen between 1604 and 1610. His patriotic 
 enthusiasm is stirred to its most powerful expression 
 
62 The Renascence, 1300-1660 
 
 in Musophilus, 1599, in praise of learning, with an 
 inspired prophecy of the triumphs of English speech ; 
 his vein of high-minded morality runs through 
 Ulysses and the Siren, and the gravely dignified 
 Epistle to the Lady Margaret. Musical grace, a noble 
 austerity of temper, a fine taste in diction, and a 
 slight want of robustness characterise Samuel Daniel ; 
 his contemporary, and, in some things, 
 pupil, Michael Drayton, enriched and 
 polished his talent through a lifetime's assiduous 
 exercise, passing from an earlier heaviness of matter 
 and style to the levity, suppleness, and metrical ease 
 of Nimphidia, 1627, a source book of fairy lore to 
 Herrick. His Barons' Wars, 1603, and Poly-Olbion, 
 1613-22, are pious tributes to England, immense in 
 scale, especially the Poly-Olbion; its thirty songs in 
 twelve-syllabled riming lines survey the counties, 
 hills, streams, sports, legends, and historic moments 
 of England; the learned notes which accompany them 
 are by the scholar and antiquary John Selden. Like 
 Daniel, Drayton blends together romance and chroni- 
 cle in England's Heroical Epistles, 1 597-1 605 (based 
 on Ovid's Heroides), letters of lovers of exalted rank, 
 suggestive of their time and circumstance, expressing 
 real passion, and using the heroic couplet with ease 
 and vigour. His sonnet-sequence Idea has been 
 named; his concern with the stage was unprofitable, 
 and his satires are almost negligible; but his Odes, 
 pastora;ls in The Muses' Elizium, 1630, and Dowsabel 
 snatch a grace beyond the reach of his own art. His 
 Odes have metrical range and a sure felicity ; his mock 
 gallantry anticipates Suckling; his Ballad of A gin- 
 court sets a standard, only attained by Henry V, of 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 63 
 
 patriotic exaltation. The incessant industry, the 
 
 varied accomplishment, and the Roman massiveness 
 
 of Drayton make him the most typical of EUzabethan 
 
 poets. 
 
 The pastoral writers are numerous; besides those 
 
 named as lyrists, George Wither wrote his Shepherd's 
 
 Hunting , 1615, and Philarete, 1622, 
 
 and William Browne of Tavistock, Bri- „ • * 
 
 • . T. 7 , ^ .... Spensenans 
 
 tanma s Pastorals, 1613-5, descnbmg, m 
 
 graceful limpid couplets, country scenes, sometimes 
 
 simple, sometimes ornate, but less literary than those 
 
 of his master Spenser; he is a pale anticipatory shadow 
 
 of Keats. Spenser's mantle of allegory fell upon 
 
 the shoulders of the Fletchers, cousins of John 
 
 Fletcher, the dramatist. The elder brother, Phineas, 
 
 wrote Piscatory Eclogues, a novel and agreeable 
 
 form of pastoral; but more famous is The Purple 
 
 Island (not published till 1633). In this poem, 
 
 Phineas (like Giles in Christ's Victory) tampered 
 
 with the Spenserian stanza. The Purple Island is 
 
 an over-elaborate allegory of the human body as 
 
 an island; the faculties of the mind are treated as 
 
 inhabitants; and the whole is rounded off with a 
 
 warfare of vices and virtues, not unlike Bunyan's 
 
 Mansoul; except in its pedantic plan, the work is 
 
 poetical, being rich in melody and imagery, though 
 
 often defaced by an excess of conceit. Giles Fletcher's 
 
 Christ's Victory and Triumph, 1610, an epic of the 
 
 redemption, links Spenser and Milton ; the description 
 
 of the Bower of Vain Delight is not unworthy of 
 
 Spenser's Bower of Acrasia, while Milton's Paradise 
 
 Regained, of about the same length as Fletcher's 
 
 poem, owes much to some of the temptations de- 
 
64 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 scribed in it, besides the picture of Satan as an "aged 
 sire." Henry More's Philosophical Poems, 1647, and 
 Joseph Beaumont's Psyche, 1648, carry on the Spen- 
 serian tradition in thought and verse, with an ever- 
 growing tendency to abstraction and neoplatonism; 
 they belong to the influential school of Cambridge 
 Platonists. 
 
 Post-renascence satire begins tentatively with 
 Wyatt; Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale and Colin 
 
 _ ^. Clout's Come Home Asain are born of 
 
 Satire ..... - 
 
 genuine indignation, as are the satires 
 
 of Ben Jonson. Much Elizabethan satire is of the 
 nature of the "character" in verse; Joseph Hall 
 claimed priority for his Virgidemiarum, 1597; Lodge's 
 A Fig for Momus, 1589, Marston's Satires, 1598, 
 Guilpin's Skialethia, and Donne's Satires, published 
 1633, are all written in heroic couplets with a rough 
 unmusical cadence of which the general explanation 
 is that poets were taught by Persius to regard it as 
 the inevitable medium for satire; Juvenal is also a 
 much followed model. Donne alone has the genius 
 to make his characters memorable; the acid of con- 
 tempt bites the lines of his portraits deep into the 
 plate. But, speaking generally, besides their obvious 
 immaturity, these satires suffer through the lack of 
 large inspiring interests, such as Dryden's politics, 
 and Pope's solicitude for the dignity of letters. 
 
 3. Prose to the Death of James I 
 
 We may classify the prose of the time under the 
 following headings. 
 
 Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, 15 16 (in English, 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 65 
 
 1551)1 shows the rare constructive dissatisfaction 
 which figures forth ideal common- 
 wealths, combined with the still rarer ^'^^^"^^^f^ 
 grip of facts which makes his book a ^^^^^^ 
 
 social prophecy, still awaiting reasonable 
 fulfilment, of communal possession, universal labour, 
 religious toleration, even-handed justice, and healthful 
 contentment. Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's 
 tutor, published in 1545 his Toxophilus, a eulogy of 
 archery, with many asides; and, in 1570, the School- 
 master, discussing classical learning — ItaUan he hated 
 — sport, the means to make education palatable, and 
 the making of character. He sets down his very 
 sane conclusions in a plain prose which purposely 
 avoids the ink-horn terms rife in fifteenth century 
 verse and prose. Richard Hooker's Laws of Eccle- 
 siastical Polity (Books I-IV, 1594) is a defence of the 
 Anglican position against the Roman Catholic and the 
 Puritan; its stately rhetoric and rhythmic periods 
 assert with wide philosophical grasp the universal 
 prevalence of law. Hooker rescued theology from 
 the menace of narrowness by his liberal interpre- 
 tation of the relations between natural law and the 
 divine law of the Scriptures. 
 
 The contradictions in the character of Francis 
 Bacon, 1561-1626, come to light, on the one hand, in 
 
 his impeachment for corruption, and, „, .. 
 
 , , . , , , 2. Philosophy 
 
 on the other, m the vast conquests he 
 
 projected for science. In The Advancement of Learn- 
 ing, 1605, afterwards expanded in the 
 Latin De Augmentiis Scientiarum, 1623, 
 he surveys all knowledge, mapping out three pro- 
 vinces, memory, imagination, and reason ; in the Latin 
 
66 The Renascence, 1300-1660 
 
 Novum Organum, he tracks down the idols (or phan- 
 toms) of the tribe, the den, the market-place, and 
 the theatre ; next he proposes to interrogate nature by 
 the method of systematic induction, as opposed to the 
 scholastic way of formal deduction. Novum Organum 
 is the part brought nearest to perfection of Instauratio 
 Magna, Bacon's vast dream of the development of 
 science, through the stages of experiment, ascertain- 
 ment of causes, and prophetic theory, to the final 
 record of all attainable knowledge. It is true that 
 Bacon himself was not a very accurate observer, that 
 he lagged behind the scientific knowledge of his time, 
 and that his method of inquiry has been superseded; 
 yet it was he who definitely turned the tide of inves- 
 tigation from medieval to modern methods. The 
 Essays, ten in 1597, thirty-eight in 1612, fifty-eight 
 in 1625, are, however. Bacon's securest title to literary 
 fame. They owe something to Montaigne, but, in 
 place of a leisured abundance, they have, in the 
 typical instances, a terse compact brevity, the result 
 of a long process of sifting. They may be divided into 
 those in which he speaks as politician and statesman 
 (here he is indebted to Plutarch and Machiavelli) ; 
 as moralist and adviser; and as thinker and imagina- 
 tive writer. His prudence and sagacity, though of 
 the earth earthy, are almost unassailable. His de- 
 votion to the cause of knowledge is that of a supreme 
 idealist: "he moved the intellects which moved the 
 world." Nevertheless, in more human relationships 
 his mental force and subtlety are mated curiously 
 with emotional poverty. His prose has great pliancy ; 
 some essays are in the periodic sentence of complex 
 structure, some in his "folded enigmatical way," 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 67 
 
 balanced clauses accumulating sometimes three deep. 
 His pages are studded with salient anecdote, quota- 
 tion, and misquotation, especially from the Roman 
 world, Bacon's model in antiquity. At their best, 
 they have a magisterial fulness of thought, a splendour 
 of rhythmic art, an economy of wording, and an arrest- 
 ing quality of figurative statement far outweighing 
 their lack of orderliness and coherence; not many 
 things with so many imperfections upon them are so 
 freely admitted to be classic. The New Atlantis is 
 Bacon's version of Utopia. Burton's Anatomy of 
 Melancholy, 1621, groups its encyclopaedic learning 
 about the symptoms of melancholy; it is a mine of 
 bookish wit, of modem and antique instances, of 
 scholarlike irony and humour, and its sentences are 
 stiff with Latin quotations; it could only have been 
 produced in an age before experimental science had 
 won its footing. Feltham's Resolves, 1620, are like 
 diluted Essays of Bacon. 
 
 More's History of Richard III and Bacon's Henry 
 VII are both weighty historical studies of the newer 
 trustworthy kind which may be con- 
 trasted with the older chronicle type 3- History, 
 in Ralegh's History of the World, only ^^ ^|^^^J 
 memorable now for some passages of a 
 sonorous gloomy eloquence. Holinshed and Speed 
 are less truthful than Camden, whose more critical 
 Britannia is in Latin. Stow was the careful chronicler 
 of London, as Harrison, in Holinshed's Chronicles, 
 was of English life in town and country. Hakluyt, 
 in his Principal Navigations, 1589-1600, was the en- 
 thusiastic editor of travellers' tales of voyagers and 
 buccaneers, and, in some subtle way, his direct un- 
 
68 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 adorned prose conveys perfectly the sense of action, 
 adventure, and colonisation on the Spanish Main and 
 in the north-west passage. His work was continued 
 by Samuel Purchas in his Pilgrimage, 1613. Coryat's 
 Crudities, 161 1, are European travel-notes, unpre- 
 tentious and amusing. 
 
 Criticism is afoot, as may be seen in Webbe's 
 Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, and Puttenham's 
 Art of English Poesie, 1589. Gosson's 
 School of Abuse, 1579, provoked Sidney, 
 in the next year, to write his Apology, which was 
 published posthumously in 1595. Sidney enthrones 
 poetry high above philosophy and history, repelling 
 the puritan assault on the worth and delight of 
 poetry and drama, and, through all the controversy, 
 keeping an alert ear for the true ring of poetry in 
 Chevy Chase, Troilus and Criseyde, and the "new 
 poet's" Shepherd's Calendar. But Sidney holds fast 
 to his learning, upholds the unities and the Senecan 
 drama, and condemns by forecast the romantic school ; 
 in 1580, we must remember, there was nothing to 
 show that it had any capacity for grandeur. His 
 prose has the clear eloquence and felicity of phrasing 
 of his poetry. Daniel for, and Campion against 
 (though he was an exquisite rimer himself), debated 
 the question of rime. Bacon philosophised about 
 poetry in De Augmentiis, and Ben Jonson, in the 
 brief paragraphs of his Discoveries, 1641, uttered 
 pregnant criticism of Bacon and Shakespeare, and 
 added to the vocabulary of criticism a terminology 
 derived from Roman rhetoricians. 
 
 The novel, already past its zenith in Italy, makes 
 an abortive beginning in England with Lyly's Euphues, 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 69 
 
 I579> and Euphues and his England, didactic tales 
 through which move the shadows of 
 renascence youth, discussing at length 
 and often shrewdly the point of honour, the purpose of 
 education, the durability of passion, friendship, and 
 atheism, in a tone addressed to the ladies of Elizabeth's 
 court. Here, Euphuism— a style already embryonic 
 in Bemers's and North's translations of Guevara's 
 Dial of Princes, and in Pettie's Petite Palace of Pleasure, 
 1576, a compilation of tales — develops to maturity, 
 to be quickly followed by senility and ridicule. Eu- 
 phuism gets its artificial emphasis by repetition, an- 
 tithesis, alliteration, rhetorical questioning, thickly 
 strewn mythological anecdote, and analogies drawn 
 from a fantastic natural history. It served PalstaflE 
 as stuff for parody, Drayton attacked it, and Sidney 
 rejected some of its extravagances in his more human 
 and graceful pastoral romance Arcadia; still, its man- 
 nered, disciplined style played a part in providing a 
 technique of prose. Before the fashion was spent, 
 Greene wrote Pandosto in the same medium and 
 Lodge Rosalynde. Greene then turned to his series 
 of "coney-catching" exposures, in the wake of Har- 
 man's Caveat for Vagabonds, and Dekker followed 
 suit with his Gull's Horn Book, 1609. Nashe, the 
 typical Elizabethan journalist, broke in with his 
 vivid, picaresque tale. Jack Wilton. Deloney wrote 
 novels of craftsmen and apprentices. These roman- 
 tic and realistic stories correspond in a rough way 
 to the romances and fabliaux of the Middle Ages. 
 Here must be named the species of writing known 
 as Characters, derived ultimately from Theophrastus. 
 Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters are surpassed in 
 
70 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 their witty observation and analytic delineation of 
 types by Earle's Microcosmographie, 1628; the vein is 
 exhausted in the prose characters of Butler, author 
 of Hudibras. It may faintly have influenced the 
 course of the novel. 
 
 Pamphleteering became an enormous industry. 
 The Martin Marprelate controversy stands out by 
 reason of the vigour of the assailants, the 
 ohleteerine romantic history of its perambulating 
 press, the fact that bishops were obliged 
 to call in professional aid and that puritanism here 
 gave its solitary evidence of a capacity for humovir: 
 the prelates undoubtedly had the worst of it. 
 
 Sidney always carried abroad with him Hoby's 
 translation, 1561, of Castiglione's Courtier, the first 
 of many " courtier books " ; the scholarly 
 lators " ^^^ industrious Philemon Holland trans- 
 
 lated, about 1600, among other things, 
 Livy and Plutarch's Morals. In four notable cases, 
 translators proved themselves competent to distil into 
 English, taking no thought for slavish accuracy, the 
 full flavour of great originals; these are North's 
 Plutarch's Lives, 1579, from the French of Amyot, 
 Florio's Montaigne, 1603, Shelton's Z>ow Quixote, 1612, 
 and, much later, Urquhart's Rabelais, 1653. 
 
 Of all this multifarious prose, rhetorical, cere- 
 monious, exotic, compact, colloquial, over-Latinised, 
 or eccentric, we may remark three things. First, 
 that no one has yet appeared to serve as a model in 
 syntax and diction, though Ben Jonson came near 
 to it. Secondly, that it brought much grist to Shake- 
 speare's mill: Holinshed, North's Plutarch, the collec- 
 tions of novels, Greene's Pandosto (the source of The 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 71 
 
 Winter's Tale), Lodge's Rosalynde (the source oi As 
 You Like It), and Montaigne are all contributors to 
 him in different measures. Thirdly, of this type of 
 mannered prose, when encumbrances have been 
 brushed away, thought clarified, and imagination in- 
 fused, Shakespeare himself is the real master in the 
 dialogue of his plays between 1594 and 1604. 
 
 4. The Drama 
 
 The origins of Elizabethan drama lie far back 
 in the liturgy of the Church; there are hardly any 
 traces of classical drama in the Middle . 
 
 Ages, though there are spectacular and 
 faintly dramatic elements in popular carnivals, sword- 
 dances, and may-dances. But the Church, by convert- 
 ing the services for Easter and Christmas into visual 
 representations, with, at first, antiphonal song, and, 
 later, vernacular dialogue, gave birth to the drama 
 destined to maturity in Shakespeare's plays. These 
 liturgical plays date from the eleventh century; they 
 centred about the sepulchre and the manger, and 
 were acted by priests in the church or with its walls 
 for a background. By steps which we cannot pre- 
 cisely date, (i) the subjects were extended till they 
 came to include all the Bible story (strictly called 
 mystery plays) and saints' legends 
 (strictly miracle plays, though this word 
 ■ is applied to both kinds in England) . (ii) They passed 
 out of the hands of the Church into those of the cor- 
 porations, who were in the habit of presenting them 
 by the aid of the craft-guilds long before 1378; 
 occasionally, though not regularly, a guild took an 
 
72 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 incident appropriate to its trade, as Cana, in the case 
 of the Vintners, (iii) These plays, on many incidents 
 of Scripture story, legend, and even devotional litera- 
 ture, were gathered into cycles and played on Corpus 
 Christi Day, and often on succeeding days, replacing, 
 or going on concurrently with, the processions which 
 celebrated the feast. Most towns had cycles, and 
 they were often represented on a number of two- 
 storied wheeled stages or "pagonds" which passed 
 in succession round the town to different groups 
 of spectators. Many details of cost and policing 
 remain in municipal records, but only five main 
 cycles are preserved in MSS., generally of the fif- 
 teenth century. Those of York number forty-eight, 
 of Wakefield (the Towneley mysteries) thirty-two, of 
 Chester twenty-five; there are, besides, the Cornish 
 cycle in dialect, and a less dramatic group, wrongly 
 called of Coventry. They are in all kinds of measures, 
 chiefly lyrical stanzas: all are anonymous, but very 
 memorable are those written by one of the Towneley 
 authors, who uses a singular stanza and who, in 
 the episodes of Cain, of Noah, and of Mak the sheep- 
 stealer, has telling realism and rich humour; these 
 show the secularising and popularising of religious 
 drama proceeding apace. There are, in addition, 
 single plays and fragmentary evidences of non-clerical 
 material, such as plays on Robin Hood. 
 
 On the heels of the miracle cycles follow, iii the 
 fifteenth century, the moral, or, using the French 
 
 word, morality, plays, manifesting the 
 J taste of the time for allegory. The 
 
 Castle of Perseverance, the first of them 
 extant, dates about 1430, and they continue their 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 73 
 
 course for a century and a half alongside the miracle 
 play, being enacted, however, on a stationary stage. 
 Later examples are Skelton's Magnificence, I5i6(?) 
 and the impressive Everyman, in which man, sum- 
 moned by Death to judgment, is deserted by Fellow- 
 ship, Jollity, Strength, Pleasure, and Beauty, and 
 accompanied only by the meagre phantom of his Good 
 Deeds. Moralities are all variations of a common 
 theme, the struggle for man's soul by personified vices 
 and virtues. Whereas the miracle play told the long 
 history from creation to judgment in prescribed 
 scriptural sequence, the moral play introduced the 
 idea of conflict, invented its stories, and designed 
 emblematic characters, counterbalancing these ad- 
 vances by falling back for a while upon lifeless per- 
 sonifications. Some show of comedy was made out 
 of the vice, said to be the progenitor of the Shake- 
 spearean fool. 
 
 Next came the stage of the interlude, a dialogue 
 between characters, in which the morality is shortened 
 for entertainments in banqueting halls, 
 another instance of the influence of the 
 audience in shaping drama; these were played by 
 professional players. Several types of interlude exist : 
 the moral and didactic, such as Hickscorner, c. 1509; 
 the humanist, such as Rastell's Four Elements, c. 1515, 
 and the later Wit and Science; the controversial, 
 such as those of the "bilious" Protestant John Bale, 
 whose King John shows the morality being trans- 
 formed, very slowly, into the history play; and, 
 fourthly, the farces, much nearer akin to the French 
 soties, of John Heywood. His interludes, The Weather, 
 Love, Johan Johan, and the Four PP, c. 1544, are 
 
74 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 witty fabliau-like tales, portraying genuine social 
 types and carrying comedy to within reach of classical 
 example. 
 
 Classical influence fastens upon comedy and tragedy 
 about the middle of the sixteenth century. In 
 comedy, Terence and Plautus are studied 
 . f. and pillaged; first come schoolmaster 
 
 dramas (the renascence schools were 
 much given to dramatic production), Udall's Ralph 
 Roister Doisier, I553(?), and Stevenson's Gammer Gur- 
 ton's Needle, c. 1550, in which native stuff with some 
 classical character types is roughly divided into acts 
 and scenes. Next follow experimenters such as Gas- 
 coigne, Whetstone, and Edwards, whose Damon and 
 Pythias, 1564, fuses comedy and tragedy and some 
 degree of characterisation. The kinds welter to- 
 gether; those in popular tradition acted in the open 
 or in inn-yards, and those in classical tradition acted 
 in the inns of court and in the universities ; these lead 
 us to the university wits. 
 
 In tragedy, humanist influence set the Senecan 
 form as model, as may be seen in Sackville and 
 Norton's Gorboduc, 1562, and in Hughes's Misfortunes 
 of Arthur, 1587, both presenting matter of British 
 history in classical shape with Senecan accompani- 
 ments, ghost, chorus, sententious maxims, and messen- 
 ger reporting sensational bloodshed; the dumb-shows 
 in Gorboduc are not Senecan but Italian. 
 
 The plays of the university wits cover the years 
 1580-92; the first of the wits is John Lyly the Eu- 
 phuist, among whose eight plays are Alexander and 
 Campaspe, in which Alexander the Great gives up 
 Campaspe to the painter Apelles; Mother Bombie, in 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 75 
 
 which native stuff is set in a Terentian frame; En- 
 dymion, probably a court-allegory of 
 Leicester, as Midas is of Philip of '^J'® 
 
 Spain; Gallathea and some other pas- ^j^g 
 
 toral masques . His comedies are mostly 
 of persons of quality, whose artificial codes are the 
 material of high comedy; at times, he mixes there- 
 with provincial buffooneries. His witty style and 
 pleasing talk studded with puns and quips often 
 sparkle with sprightly, polished repartee. The in- 
 fluence of these things extends demonstrably to A 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, and, by inference, beyond. 
 It is now thought doubtful whether the lyrics, which 
 do not appear before 1632, can be by Lyly's own hand. 
 His success established prose as the meditun for 
 comedy and ensured its discarding the boisterous 
 humour of English tradition in favour of lighter, 
 more graceful , and more intellectual substance . George 
 Peele's Arraignment of Paris amends the legend of the 
 three goddesses, and Diana presents the ball of gold to 
 Queen Elizabeth. His scriptural drama of David and 
 Bethsabe has much graceful blank verse and a shapely 
 plot; this praise cannot be given to The Old Wives' 
 Tale, a farrago of folk-lore and literary satire, which 
 gave Milton hints and figures for his masque of Comus. 
 Robert Greene had more original gift; his Alphonsus 
 is an imitation of Tamburlaine; James IV, in spite 
 of its title, is from a novel of Cinthio; Friar Bacon 
 and Friar Bungay compounds the love affairs of 
 Edward I (as Prince of Wales) and the magic skill 
 of Roger Bacon. Greene has some real passion in 
 the love stories which he exalts to a high place in 
 the dramas, and some simple human feeling, espe- 
 
76 The Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 dally in his portrayals of long-suffering women, for 
 whom his own wife may well have sat as a model. 
 Thomas Lodge's Roman play The Wounds of Civil 
 War is very tedious; and the brilliant and varied 
 talent of Nashe did not give anything of importance 
 to the stage. Thomas Kyd was not a university 
 man, but, in his Spanish Tragedy, a very popular 
 play, he derived material from Seneca; it is an orgy 
 of revenge and bloodshed; but its deeper interest 
 is its resemblance to the plot of Hamlet. On the 
 basis of this, and some references of Nashe, has been 
 built the theory that Kyd was the author of the 
 original Hamlet which Shakespeare worked over in 
 the quarto of 1603. Kyd may also be credited with 
 some advance in the involution of character and 
 „ . plot. Christopher Marlowe was the 
 
 JVLSTIOWC 
 
 only member of the group whose accom- 
 plishment passed beyond the tentative; he is the 
 aggressor against "jigging veins," "mother- wits," 
 rime in tragedy, and the "conceits" of "clownage." 
 His brief dramatic career, if it did not found, at 
 any rate confirmed, the obligation to seek the sub- 
 jects of high tragedy among people of high rank, 
 and amid the "stately tents of war. " The ambitious 
 imagination of his irregular genius at first over- 
 reached itself; his first play, Tamburlaine, 1587, and 
 his Jew of Malta (Lamb says of Barabas, in this 
 play, "He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, 
 invents infernal machines"), are beyond the confines 
 of likelihood; they portray illimitable lusts, in the 
 one case for conquest, in the other for wealth. The 
 vast outlines of these characters are amazing, but 
 unconvincing: bloodshed and violence usurp the place 
 
The Renascence. 1500-1660 77 
 
 of natural motive and action. But, in Edward II, 
 which, by its reaUstic historical basis, compels the 
 poet to concentrate instead of dispersing his forces, 
 and in Dr. Faustus, where the overwhelming desire to 
 rifle the hidden treasures of knowledge is a more 
 credible motive, tragedy becomes human; in the case 
 of Faustus, the tragedy is intensified (if we accept the 
 system of belief) , by the final forfeiture of his immor- 
 tal soul. If we regard Marlowe's accepted triumphs, 
 we may see that his intrinsic worth is chiefly asso- 
 ciated with two things: first, his mastery of tragic 
 terror, whether "the reluctant pangs of abdicating 
 royalty " in Edward II or the agony of the " exactment 
 of his (Faustus's) dire compact"; second, his poetical 
 splendour, those "brave translunary things" which 
 Drayton celebrated; he ranks with Chaucer and 
 Spenser among the great metrical innovators. 
 Through the instrument of blank verse, he uttered 
 strains latent but, as yet, undetected in it by any 
 ear; its various music, its supple submission to all 
 the demands of thought and beauty, provided the 
 means to attempt and accomplish the severest tasks, 
 to chant the loveliness of Helen, to echo the terror 
 of Faustus's last hour, or to ring exultantly with 
 stately names, Usumcasane, Theridamas, Persepolis. 
 This skill made Milton his pupil in verse, as Shake- 
 speare was for the lessons of his early tragedy in 
 Henry VI, in Titus Andronicus (it is to be feared 
 that Shakespeare wrote it) , in Richard III, in Richard 
 II, and in the character of Shylock. In the light 
 of these things, we may set down at their justly 
 insignificant value the charges of "lack of humour" 
 and propensity to rant. 
 
78 TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 William Shakespeare was born in 1564 and edu- 
 cated at the Grammar School of his native town, 
 Stratford-on-Avon. He escaped the 
 tmiversities. Probably, the waning for- 
 tunes and diminished status of his family rankled 
 in his ihind; his later dealings in Stratford after his 
 fortune was made, his litigation and purchases of 
 property and of a coat-of-arms, indicate a resolution 
 to enforce his rights and to clear a stigma from his 
 name. After a youth spirited enough to involve 
 him in a poaching aflEray and an early marriage, he 
 turned to London, possibly just before the year of 
 the Armada, and patched old plays; he soon awoke 
 the lightly sleeping jealousies of the Bohemian play- 
 wrights, especially of Robert Greene. But he won 
 his standing in London, in a quarrelsome age and 
 set, by his genius, his engaging temper, and his fer- 
 tility; he wrote on the average two plays a year 
 for nearly twenty years, besides narrative poems and 
 sonnets at the beginning of his career. For all this 
 Ben Jonson is an unimpeachable witness. So far as 
 we know, his life was uneventful, though the sonnets 
 may reflect some desperate passion; we have no 
 clue to the causes of the changed temper which we 
 detect in some of his plays between 1601 and 1605. 
 The cause may have been the fates of Essex, 
 Southampton, and Pembroke, or it may have 
 been some compelling importunity within his own 
 mind. After 1608, it is as though he nad passed 
 through this tempestuous ocean strewn with noble 
 wreckage into a serene sim-bathed haven. He re- 
 turned to Stratford about 161 1 and died there on 
 23d April, 1616. 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 79 
 
 The Plays 
 
 A rough chronological division of the plays may be 
 made as follows: 
 
 I. Period of Apprenticeship. 1590-6. 
 
 History Comedy Tragedy 
 
 Henry VI, parts i, Love's Labour's Lost Titus Andro- 
 
 ii, and iii nicus 
 
 King John The Comedy of Errors Romeo and 
 
 Juliet 
 The Two Gentlemen of 
 Verona 
 Richard II The Merchant of Venice 
 
 Richard III A Midsummer Night's 
 
 Dream 
 
 II. Middle History and Comedy. 1596-1601. 
 
 The Taming of the Shrew 
 The Merry Wives of 
 Windsor 
 Henry IV, parts i Much Ado about Nothing 
 
 and ii 
 Henry V As You Like It 
 
 Twelfth Night 
 
 III. 1601-8. i. Plays of Disillusion. 
 
 All's Well that Ends Well Troilus and 
 (? revision of Love's La- Cressida 
 hour's Won) 
 
 Measure for 
 
 Measure 
 Timon of 
 
 Athens (in 
 part) 
 
80 TKe Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 ii. Tragedy. 
 
 History Comedy Tragedy 
 
 Julius Cassar 
 Hamlet 
 Othello 
 King Lear 
 Macbeth 
 Antony and 
 
 Cleopatra 
 Coriolanus 
 
 IV. Period of Romances, 1608-12. 
 
 Henry VIII Pericles (in part) 
 
 (in part) 
 
 Cymbeline 
 
 The Winter's Tale 
 
 The Tempest 
 
 We may consider Shakespeare's work under the 
 headings of comedy, history, and tragedy, this being 
 the division adopted in the first folio of 1623. 
 
 Comedy is integral and organic in Shakespeare's 
 histories and tragedies as well as a separate species. 
 With this warning, we may outline the 
 varying forms of his comic writing 
 broadly in three sections. In the first, he works 
 through absurdity and creates farce; in the second, 
 he works through grace and youth and creates ro- 
 mance; in the third, through thought and offers 
 "criticism of life." 
 
 The farce may be that of situation as in The Taming 
 of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor, in 
 which we are pledged to laugh though the central 
 situations will not bear thinking on; or of mistaken 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 8i 
 
 identity as in The Comedy of Errors and A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream, which depend on ingenuity 
 of construction. It may be absurdities and oddities 
 of character that he presents; these make up a lengthy 
 and heterogeneous procession; figures of ungainly 
 animal vigour, busy with intoxication, lying, thieving, 
 jesting, and singing like Falstaff and Sir Toby, the 
 consummate spokesman for the creed of cakes and 
 ale; or Bottom, who, by sheer reiteration of himself, 
 has become a person of importance. Next follow the 
 cloudy-witted, like the artisans of Athens, and Dog- 
 berry and Verges, whose brains are fuddled as soon 
 as they are called upon to act; next, the echoes and 
 parrots, anaemic and subnormal. Sir Andrew Ague- 
 cheek, Slender, and Shallow, born to be spoiled like 
 the Egyptians ; next, those with a large endowment of 
 high spirits and mother-wit, Maria, Gobbo, and Au- 
 tolycus; and here, too, we may put the disconcerted 
 boasters and self-deceivers Parolles, Bardolph, and 
 Pistol. A curious sympathy is extended to them all 
 singly, whether stupid or alert, which Shakespeare 
 could never feel for the collective mob. 
 
 His romantic comedy goes on under brilliant 
 skies, in palaces and bowers, or in forests or by the 
 seashore, not in Eastcheap taverns or by Gadshill. 
 In the world of feudal observances, the primitive 
 impulses of men must be masked. Rank, culture, 
 leisure, convention, courtesy, disguisings, and, above 
 all, the dominance of the radiantly triumphant crea- 
 tions Portia, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola; all these 
 things together weave a web of artificiality in which 
 men and women are for ever becoming entangled in 
 comically false positions. Malvolio, who is hopelessly 
 
82 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 inflexible and intolerant, suffers most, attempting to 
 enter two worlds, of romance and comedy, which he 
 does not understand. He is an older figure, but, in 
 general, youth is on the prow and Shakespeare culti- 
 vates the belief that youth cannot make irreparable 
 mistakes. Critics like Malvolio and the moody lib- 
 ertine Jaques are outfaced by the impulsive opti- 
 mists, whose laughter is clear, musical, and free. 
 The intrusions of a not very deeply laid villainy in 
 Much Ado and .45 You Like It only cloud for a mo- 
 ment the sunshine of love and gaiety. In the last 
 plays, often called specifically "romances," the men- 
 ace of tragedy is not so easily shaken off; they turn 
 chiefly on the theme of sundered families; age has 
 its place and its serener outlook is the result of 
 digested experience, rather than, as in the middle 
 comedies, of heedless fortunate imptilse. 
 
 Lastly, we may find comedy allied with thought; 
 along this line, Shakespeare developed the fool, from 
 the feudal jester and juggler, with words to the 
 observant commentator with a dramatic purpose to 
 serve; Touchstone and his tragic counterpart the fool 
 in King Lear are instances. Both reason logically 
 and have the instinct for facts, though they deliver 
 themselves in motley; and they exemplify a generous 
 fidelity contrasted with monstrous impiety. Much 
 the same office is filled by the grave-diggers in Ham- 
 let, and the porter in Macbeth, auxiliary figures 
 who intensify emotional crises in tragedy. There is 
 wider import in the macabre expression of the dis- 
 illusions of Hamlet, the only humourist among the 
 tragic characters; thought takes a gayer hue in 
 Falstaff, greatest of all comic creations. He is a 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 83 
 
 rake, spendthrift, glutton, liar, and coward for pure 
 fun; but these things are not the essence of him, 
 for he is of gentlemanly rank and is a master mind. 
 He is a rebel against strait-laced authority and the 
 unthinking man's standards; he will not admit for 
 himself any moral standards; he ignores uncomfort- 
 able facts and evades their consequences by a wit as 
 nimble and ubiquitous as his body is corpulent and 
 stationary. With colossal impudence, he betakes 
 himself to an imaginary world (though it is not 
 devoid of logic) in which such conceptions as honour 
 and truth appear the veriest delusions. Just when 
 he seems to have fortified himself against facts and 
 laws and to have absolved himself from all punish- 
 ment, a twinge of the great toe finds him out and his 
 world breaks down; its foundations were insecure, 
 for wit cannot defy the gout, and, moreover, the 
 callous Henry V, who was counted upon as a buttress 
 against justice, was no true Falstaffian. It appears 
 from this comedy that truth will out and deride the 
 perverters of it ; but never was sound moralising so 
 engagingly embroidered. 
 
 The chronicle-plays on some of the kings from 
 John to Henry VIII show a large historical grasp 
 of this section of the feudal period and 
 a gift of imagining the background of 
 battlefield, council-chamber, embarkation, the pomp 
 and retinue of rank as well as the taverns and haunts 
 of the common soldier. The plays are, in the main, 
 as historically accurate as their source, which is 
 Holinshed's Chronicles, though there are dramatic 
 perversions such as making Hotspur of the same 
 age as Prince Hal. Henry VI, Richard III, and 
 
84 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 Richard II are indebted in various ways to Mar- 
 lowe. The earlier plays on the later period, the 
 wars of the Roses, are more uniformly tragic, while 
 the later ones, Henry IV, parts i and ii, and Henry V, 
 are lightened by comedy, the witty insolence of 
 Falstaff and his satellites. This was Shakespeare's 
 school of training in portraiture, for characters and 
 events interest him more than constitutions and 
 creeds; King John does not mention Magna Carta, 
 Richard II ignores the Peasant Revolt and Henry 
 VIII the Reformation. Yet creed, as an element of 
 character, is not neglected, as may be seen in the 
 prayers of Henry V. These regal people are all 
 brought face to face with harassing circumstance, 
 "malice domestic, foreign levy"; not many of them 
 emerge triumphantly. We are never allowed to 
 forget the toilsomeness of kingly duties; the tinge 
 of Shakespearean melancholy colours what both 
 Richard II and Henry V have to say about cere- 
 mony. The variety and actuality of character is 
 astonishing; fighting types, statesmen, churchmen, 
 courtiers, archers, men-at-arms, traitors, parasites, 
 dreamers, men with deep-grained national traits, all 
 speak with the accent of life. Women are naturally 
 less prominent than in the comedies, yet there are 
 the distinctive figures of Richard II's Queen, the 
 Lady Anne, Lady Percy, and Mistress Quickly. More- 
 over, these plays are the poet's utterance on the 
 test question of patriotism. He is a little singular 
 here, for he adds but few notes to the chorus in 
 praise of Elizabeth; he drew his inspiration from his 
 profound aflEection for the soil and heroes of England 
 when he wrote the speeches of Faulconbridge, Talbot, 
 
The Renascence. 1500-1660 85 
 
 Richard II, John of Gaunt, and Henry V. He is 
 for the Tudor settlement, and is a firm believer 
 in the security afforded to the state by rank, though 
 the democratic affability of Henry V was one of the 
 traits which attracted him; the thought of the mob 
 roused his bitterest animosity. Finally, we should 
 note the gift of royal eloquence with which Shake- 
 speare endows all the company of kings. 
 
 Shakespeare had already written tragedy before 
 1601 in the history plays and in Romeo and Juliet. 
 But his later conception of tragedy was 
 not hke his romantic idyll, suffused 
 with the warmth and passion and mirth of an Italian 
 summer-night, turned to fatality. These lovers are 
 "star-crossed"; fate casts a mortal shadow upon 
 their perfect lyrical passion. The tragedies from 
 Julius CcBsar, 1601, to Coriolanus, 1608, apart from 
 their wider speculative range (perhaps due to Mon- 
 taigne), present characters at war not so much with 
 fate as with themselves. They are flawed by some 
 frailty or consumed by some overmastering passion, 
 and, by a malign conjunction, upon this weakness 
 the whole weight of adverse circumstance bears too 
 hard for faults to be retrieved, as they might in 
 comedy. It is not the tragedy of weakness, but of 
 weakness betraying strength; character, action, and 
 suffering are in a necessary concatenation. We cannot, 
 however, isolate the tragic character ; there are nerves 
 and fibres and arteries connecting him with the sur- 
 rounding world. The poison gathers in these outer 
 places, in Hamlet's uncle-stepfather, in Goneril and 
 Regan, in lago, in (on one interpretation of them at 
 least) the witches in Macbeth, in the demagogues of 
 
86 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 Coriolanus. The toxin works its way disastrously to 
 the heart of these heroic figures and convulses the 
 whole system, noble and ignoble alike; as in Hamlet, 
 where the King and Queen, Polonius, Laertes and 
 Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are all de- 
 stroyed before the system is purged — the rotten thing 
 in the state of Denmark cleansed. The plays compel 
 us to take a wider perspective, else the ransom that 
 evil extortsjs too great a price. The dignity of the 
 protagonists is sustained by that of the setting; em- 
 pires, kingdoms, armies are at stake as well as immor- 
 tal souls. The interplay of statecraft, warfare, and 
 these passions that "o'er leap" themselves multiplies 
 the imaginative interest, though it is never allowed 
 to force the tragic character out of focus. Again, 
 there are types of womanhood — Lady Macbeth and 
 Volumnia, who, in splendour and power, rival even 
 Macbeth and Coriolanus; whilst Cleopatra — one of 
 the summits of Shakespeare's creative genius — alto- 
 gether overshadows Antony. As a foil to these we 
 have the fated yielding gracefulness of Ophelia and 
 the impulsive self-effacing surrender of Desdemona. 
 It is to be noted how the diction of the comedies and 
 histories, clear in meaning and music and yet finely 
 adorned, becomes tormented and often violent in the 
 tragedies, suggesting troublous, overwrought think- 
 ing and emotion, which words cannot adequately 
 convey; there are parallel variations in the blank 
 verse which can only be hinted at here, but are 
 fascinating literary studies. 
 
 The significant thing about the sources of Shake- 
 speare is what he made of them; here, as everywhere, 
 he had the art of distilling the finer essence from 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 87 
 
 every herb. From the thin stock of Italian novels 
 and translations he drew the entrancing perfume 
 of romance; from Holinshed, the strong savour of 
 patriotism; from Plutarch's Lives, the sharp flavour 
 of stoic morals. 
 
 It is needless to deny that there are blemishes, 
 spots on the sun of Shakespeare, though there are 
 foolish worshippers who seek to deny it; his great- 
 ness is firmly enough established by a fourfold test. 
 First, by his creation of character; no other writer 
 has peopled the earth with so large and diverse a 
 company, who haunt the memory and appeal to the 
 affections. Secondly, by the loftiness and delicacy 
 of his morality, stoic, in the main, but inspired by 
 sympathy, widely tolerant of frailty and exuberance, 
 never of calculated evil, calling in very little of 
 transcendental support or "metaphysical aid" at any 
 great crisis. Thirdly, by his dramatic power in 
 situation and emotion, whether comedy or tragedy. 
 Fourthly, by his poetic gift, his command of rhythm, 
 of imagery and the sense of the inner charm of words. 
 Many dithyrambs have been written on Shakespeare ; 
 these four things are set down simply ; the student can 
 for himself try them, vary them, expand them with 
 increasing knowledge of the text. 
 
 For a hundred years, Ben Jonson, 1573-1637, chal- 
 lenged Shakespeare in public favour; in almost all 
 respects, save intellectual vigour, they ^^^ jonson 
 were opposites. Jonson's learning was 
 prodigious, as may be seen in the pedantic accu- 
 racy of his noble Roman tragedies, Sejanus, 1603, 
 and Catiline, 161 1, and in the erudite notes to his 
 masques. His temperament was harsh, dogmatic, 
 
88 The Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 and assertive, as revealed in his conversations with 
 Drummond, and in his stage war (in The Poetaster 
 and other plays) with Dekker and Marston; yet he 
 was capable of sincere admirations. Again, though 
 there are evidences of romanticism in him, he sup- 
 pressed them and pronounced himself for rigidly 
 classical formulas in comedy. He introduced de- 
 finitely to the Elizabethan stage the comedy of 
 manners; realistic social types, at first, as in Every 
 Man in his Humour, 1598 (not unlike The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor), but tending rapidly to become 
 the comedy of "humours" or of single idiosyncrasies 
 as of Morose in The Silent Woman, 1609. In Jonson, 
 these "humours" are neither artificial (as they be- 
 come in Shadwell, for instance) nor merely photo- 
 graphic, for he penetrates deep into the natures of his 
 creations, as Face, the brilliant scoundrel of The 
 Alchemist, 1610; there is still more psychological in- 
 sight in Volpone, 1605, which also illustrates Jonson's 
 didactic and moral view of his art; comedy, in this 
 play, barely survives in the poisonous atmosphere of 
 loathsome vice. In all these plays, his intellect shapes 
 and fits its material with a fine structural sense. His 
 untiring curiosity is evident in his knowledge of the 
 rogues' dialects of London, and of such lying and 
 blackmailing industries as are pictured in The Staple 
 of News, and in the showman's pandemonium, Barthol- 
 omew Fair, 1614, in which appears another colossal 
 Elizabethan conception, Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land- 
 Busy, to stand beside Sir Epicure Mammon and Vol- 
 pone. There is a vein of fanciful imaginativeness and 
 lyric beauty in Jonson. His pastoral play. The Sad 
 Shepherd, is comparable with Fletcher's Faithful Shep- 
 
TKe Renascence. 1500-1660 89 
 
 herdess in music, grace, and pathos ; and the verses in 
 
 Underwoods and The Forest, 161 6, putting aside some 
 
 unpleasant epigrams, form one of the richest hoards of 
 
 song and witty compliment the age provides. His 
 
 writing, however censorious, is strong, vivid, the fruit 
 
 of mental labour and drastic self-criticism; of all the 
 
 Elizabethans, he held the most exalted opinion of 
 
 poesy, and fought and hated for its maintenance. 
 
 He wins sympathy a little slowly, but he compels 
 
 admiration. 
 
 The masque originated in English pageantry and 
 
 procession, in the forms of disguisings and mummings, 
 
 in which disguisers went through a _. 
 
 • -r- •-, r T^ , The masque 
 
 Significant silent performance. But the 
 
 name, and some elements which Henry VIII's patron- 
 age caused to be incorporated, came from Italy; in its 
 later developments, it was a salade russe of scenery, 
 music, poetry, allegory, emblem, and dancing. The 
 dancing, at first, was confined to people of rank and 
 quality; Jonson provided for the professional dancers 
 the grotesque anti-masque or antic-masque. Many 
 poets tried their hands at the form, Shakespeare as in 
 The Tempest, Chapman, Daniel, Campion, and Shirley, 
 but the perfecter of it was Jonson; probably his best 
 is The Masque of Queens, 1609. The masque became 
 a costly affair, subject to the stage engineer Inigo 
 Jones, whose carpentering was sometimes at enmity 
 with poetry. Nevertheless, some of Jonson's most 
 exquisite lines and concerted music are in these 
 little read poems. The masque had a sunset blazing 
 with glory in Milton's Comus, 1634. 
 
 The remaining Elizabethan drama must be enumer- 
 ated summarily. Chapman's best comedy is All 
 
90 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 Fools, 1605, and he wrote sensational tragedies such 
 as Bussy d'Ambois, 1607, in which there 
 bethan drama ^^^' ^^^vertheless, many flights of fine 
 reflective poetry. A group of writers 
 deal with domestic subjects and London life ; among 
 them is Dekker, best known by Lamb's sentence, 
 "He has poetry enough for anything." He reveals 
 a deep vein of humanity, skill in the portrayal of 
 women, and poetic fantasy, for instance, in Old For- 
 tunatus, 1600, and The Honest Whore, 1604. Other 
 members of the group are Munday, Chettle, Drayton, 
 Rowley, Day, and He3rwood, whose enormous output 
 includes one masterpiece, A Woman killed with kind- 
 ness, 1603. Middleton has bustling and realistic 
 comedies of a low world, A Trick to catch the old one, 
 1608, The Roaring Girl, 161 1; and one great scene in 
 his tragedy The Changeling; here, as elsewhere, Row- 
 ley appears to have braced Middleton to his nobler 
 efforts; The Witch has affinities with Macbeth. In 
 prose and in verse Middleton has rapidity and ease. 
 Tourneur has poetry in the midst of the gloomy 
 horrors of The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's 
 Tragedy, 161 1 . Marston hovers between'the bombastic 
 and the caustic in his tragic Antonio and Mellida, 
 1602. He had a share in the excellent citizen comedy 
 Eastward Ho! Beaumont and Fletcher (the latter 
 collaborated with Shakespeare in Henry VIII and in 
 The Two Noble Kinsmen) are generally thought to 
 have come nearest to Shakespeare. The fifty-two 
 plays published under their names in 1647 are many 
 men's work, but chiefly Fletcher's. They wrote to- 
 gether the tragi-comedyPHZas/er, i6io,and TheMaid's 
 Tragedy, 161 1, where may be seen creeping in not 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 91 
 
 only excessively romantic event (common enough in 
 Shakespeare) , but unreality of motive and unaccount- 
 able transitions of character. The Knight of the 
 Burning Pestle, 1609, is a lively bourgeois farce and 
 parody. Beaumont is generally credited with balance 
 and judgment, Fletcher with invention, grace, gaiety, 
 deft construction, a liberal infusion of licence, and a 
 talent for lyrical verse only inferior to that of Shake- 
 speare. The blank verse of Fletcher plays fast and 
 loose with even the bare minimum of restriction 
 retained by Shakespeare in his later plays: Fletcher 
 has redundant syllables in all parts of the line; 
 henceforth, until Milton, blank verse degenerates. 
 Webster, in The Duchess of Malfi, 1614, paints a con- 
 summate picture of nobility in woman ; no accumula- 
 tion of horror or suffering can break her heroic spirit; 
 in this play and in The White Devil he employs sinister 
 Italian themes and characters with immense tragic 
 effect. Webster has imaginative genius, pictorial 
 power, and Shakespearean penetration into passionate 
 emotion, but he exercised his gifts too uniformly 
 among images of mortality and scenes of intolerable 
 cruelty. 
 
 Massinger was one of the busiest of collabora- 
 tors; he is remembered best by The Roman Actor, 
 1626, skilfully involving political motive, and The 
 Virgin Martyr, tragedies, and by his comedies, The 
 City Madam and A New Way to pay old Debts, i626(?). 
 He has some command of tragic terror and writes 
 fluent verse attaining often to dignity and rhetoric; 
 he constructs with remarkable craftsmanship and 
 economy and these gifts win for him high rank. 
 John Ford never deviates from the events and emo- 
 
92 The Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 tions which drive on to the tragic outcome; this 
 incisive, relentless force leads up to the scene of 
 Calantha's dancing in The Broken Heart, 1629, one 
 of the most powerful, though not the most natural, 
 out of Shakespeare. The charge against Ford — that 
 he signalises the decay of Elizabethan drama — rests 
 less on the unsoundness of his subjects than on his 
 apparent sympathy with moral anarchy. Shirley's 
 tragedies, such as The Traitor, 1631, and The Cardinal, 
 1641, his comedies, such as Hyde Park, 1632, and The' 
 Lady of Pleasure, 1635, prove him to be last but not 
 least of the great dramatists. His famous song, "The 
 glories of our blood and state," is in the short drama 
 (not a masque) Ajax and Ulysses. Other dramatists 
 are Randolph, Field, and Brome, whose Merry Beggars 
 was the last play staged before the closing of the 
 theatres from 1642 to 1660, for Davenant's Siege 
 of Rhodes, 1656, is more important to opera than 
 drama. Shirley and Sir William Davenant seem 
 to bridge the interval of silence; but, though Davenant 
 wrote both before and after the Restoration, the altera- 
 tions he made in theatrical conditions, the introduc- 
 tion of scenery and of women actors, were soon to be 
 paralleled by a change in the type of drama; the 
 heroic play of the Restoration has but faint spiritual 
 aflHnities with the tragedy of the Jacobeans. 
 
 We speak of this vast bulk of drama as romantic; 
 the word has to cover a wide area of meaning. Putting 
 Jonson aside, we may take it to mean that play- 
 wrights were careless of the unities, preferring a wider 
 canvas of region and time. They eschewed restraint, 
 for they worked from the model of the complexity of 
 actual life, ignoring the classical method, selection 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 93 
 
 and emphasis of single aspects; they disdained re- 
 straint in diction, and, in the later period, in subject — 
 for the age could stomach the strongest stimulants 
 — using inadmissible themes and muffling the shock 
 of moral condemnation. The traditional English ad- 
 mixture of comedy and tragedy is likewise romantic; 
 the same title is used for the many plays in which 
 humanity is transported to some remote or imagina- 
 tive scene where a lyrical or rhetorical splendour 
 pervades its speech ; finally, stress is laid upon passion 
 and feeling. The crowning gift of the English re- 
 nascence drama, taken as a whole, is its almost infalli- 
 ble power of finding fit and moving utterance for every 
 shade of emotion. 
 
 5. Poetry from 1625 to the Restoration 
 
 The history of poetry from Donne to Milton 
 presents three main episodes: (i) lyric, which has an 
 almost continuous record from Wyatt . 
 
 to Dryden; (ii) the development of 
 the new heroic couplet and the rise of satire; (iii) 
 endeavours after the heroic poem. i. Lyric writers 
 were under the influence of Ben Jonson or Donne or 
 both. Jonson banished the Petrarchan tradition, 
 but rarely sings with the "wood-notes wild" of 
 Shakespeare, and is never tempted to extravagance 
 of imagery; a pupil of Horace, Catullus, Martial, he 
 imported the ideals of elegance, proportion, and 
 restraint. For the most part, cavalier lyrists are 
 of the "tribe of Ben." Carew often achieves musical 
 perfection and has a graver note in his Elegy on 
 Donne; Suckling owes his mockery of gallant usages 
 
94 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 to the lighter side of Donne's contempt for women; 
 his impetuous gaiety is his own. Her- 
 rick's range and accomplishment are 
 the widest, including, in Hesperides, 1648, CatuUan 
 and Anacreontic song, Horatian idyll, the stuff of 
 folk-lore and country festival, gallant compliment 
 and love tribute to many seductive deities, flowers 
 and their suggestions of transient beauty, verse 
 epistles, and some weightier lines on the evil fortunes 
 of his king and country. There is more sincerity of 
 feeling in these than in the distinctly pagan piety of 
 his religious poems, Noble Numbers. His pure clear 
 feeling and his mastery of metre are the warp and 
 woof of an exquisite fabric, and he has, besides, a 
 flute-Uke melody and rhythmic subtlety and delicacy 
 which almost conceal the infinite pains he took with 
 his art. Wither, in his early poems, such as "Shall 
 I wasting in despair?" Waller, in songs like "Go, 
 Lovely Rose," and Lovelace, with his fine chivalric 
 note, are much less given to Donne's "metaphysical" 
 ingenuities than Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Cow- 
 ley, in Dr. Johnson's Life of whom is found a de- 
 structive criticism of the whole school ; neither Milton 
 nor Dryden escaped the contagion, and the religious 
 poets were especially prone to take it. George 
 Herbert's quiet but deeply stirred piety is expressed 
 through images and an order of thought much in- 
 fluenced by Donne, as in poems like The Pulley and 
 Man. Crashaw has a more passionate note. His 
 Wishes and his translation Music's Duel are graceful 
 secular poems, but the religious ecstasy and imagina- 
 tive opulence of The Flaming Heart and The Hymn to 
 St. Teresa are his real claims to remembrance. 
 
TKe Renascence. 1500-1660 95 
 
 Vaughan the Silurist, in Silex Scintillans, 1650, was 
 influenced by Herbert, but he has a deeper vein of 
 mystical thought; he speaks of childhood, nature, 
 light, and eternity, with subtle insight and with a rare 
 kind of imagery, and he left some impress on Words- 
 worth. The newly discovered poet Traherne, also a 
 Kelt, has high moments, as in The Choice and The 
 Estate, but his prose Centuries of Meditation show 
 richer emotion and a greater command over style. 
 Habington's Castara, 1634, contains amorous and re- 
 ligious poems of the metaphysical school; Quarles's 
 Emblems are only half literature and that half home- 
 spun. We may complete this long chapter in the 
 history of the lyric by the mention of Rochester, 
 Sedley, Dorset, Mrs. Aphra Behn, and Dryden him- 
 self in his plays, each of whom wrote more than one 
 unforgettable song of the cavalier type, often, espe- 
 cially in the case of Rochester, with a note of real 
 passion. 
 
 ii. The heroic couplet, even in the isolated form, 
 is used by EHzabethans such as Spenser, Drayton, and 
 
 Sandys; but it becomes more pointed ^, 
 
 The new 
 and antithetical, more epigrammatic couplet 
 
 and rhetorical, and less imaginative in 
 
 the poems of Edmund Waller about 1623 ; he introduces 
 
 the balanced epithet, places the cassura with more 
 
 regularity, has stronger riming words, and confines 
 
 the sense to the distich. For these things he was 
 
 too generously credited by Dryden with "the reform 
 
 of our numbers." These qualities become more 
 
 manifest in Denham's Cooper's Hill, 1642, and in the 
 
 Davideis of Cowley, thought a genius in his day, 
 
 whose voluminous output also included so-called 
 
96 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 Pindaric odes, imitated later by Dryden, and, with 
 marked differences, by Gray and by many nine- 
 teenth century poets. Marvell, the friend and 
 assistant of Milton, was, like Cowley, a scholar; his 
 satires, Instructions to a Painter and others, are 
 inferior to his Horatian Ode, 1650, and to The Ber- 
 mudas, and to his amorous and pastoral verse, such 
 as The Garden; these are in octosyllabics of a 
 "witty delicacy" in diction and rhythm, and have 
 fine observation and feeling for the intense hidden 
 life about him. The drift towards satire, for which 
 the heroic couplet was the foreordained instrument, 
 is again illustrated in the violent tirades of Oldham, 
 Satires upon the Jesuits, 1679. This carries us well 
 past the Restoration and almost to the Revolution, 
 iii. The heroic poem or epic was the goal of seven- 
 teenth century effort, a perennial ideal of the renas- 
 „ . cence. It was discussed by all critics, 
 
 Enic 
 
 and attempted by Cowley in his Davideis, 
 
 1656, in couplets, by Davenant in his Gondibert, 1651, 
 
 in quatrains, and, in a more romantic fashion, by 
 
 Chamberlayne in Pharonnida, 1659, in couplets. It 
 
 would have been essayed by Dryden on the subject 
 
 of King Arthur, had his pension been paid more 
 
 regularly. It was finally written in blank verse by 
 
 Milton in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and 
 
 the mould thereafter was broken. 
 
 Milton's early upbringing and the bent of his 
 
 disposition made him first of all a puritan in spirit, 
 
 though certainly not in the letter; a 
 Milton ,^^ , V J 1 f 
 
 cultured puritan and a lover of music. 
 
 His classical education at St. Paul's and at Christ's 
 
 College, Cambridge, 1625-32, developed the instinct 
 
The Renascence. 1500-1660 97 
 
 for form, beauty, and craftsmanship which was never 
 to be reconciled with his rehgious tenets ; the Hebraic 
 and the Hellenic in him were both too native and 
 too formidable to yield to any compromise, though 
 his mastery of style may disguise their deep-laid 
 enmity. His models were generally classic, his 
 materials generally scriptural. His residence at 
 Horton in Buckinghamshire touched in him some 
 chords of interest in natural scenes, but not enough 
 to seduce him from books. His journey to France 
 and Italy, 1638-9, brought him into relations with 
 scholarship in these countries, and laid the founda- 
 tions of a continental reputation, which his contro- 
 versies with Salmasius and Morus and his letters 
 of state, written as Cromwell's Latin secretary, were 
 afterwards to extend. These years of poHtical 
 service, 1649-58, undertaken through his keen sense 
 of obligation to the Commonwealth, were almost 
 destitute of poetry. At the Restoration, his life 
 being surprisingly spared, he resumed the poetical 
 ambitions rudely broken in upon by civil strife; his 
 epic and dramatic poetry appeared between 1660 
 and 1671. 
 
 The Ode on the Nativity, 1629, contains some trace 
 of metaphysical extravagance, but more remarkable 
 
 are the Miltonic blending of pagan and _, , 
 
 Early poems 
 scriptural themes, the stately move- 
 ment, and the imaginative insight, rising to its 
 height in the flight of the deities of antiquity from 
 their haunts and oracles. // Penseroso and L' Allegro, 
 c. 1632, are richly decorative presentations of two 
 imagined moods, companion pictures of studious 
 retreat and festival mirth, wherein is evident the 
 
98 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 poet's ear, exact and musical, for all the rhythmic 
 possibilities of pace and sound inherent in the oc- 
 tosyllabic couplet. Arcades is a fragmentary, but 
 worthy, predecessor of the masque Comus, 1634; here, 
 the poet uses a larger canvas; its theme is nearer to 
 morals and the strict conduct of life; temptation 
 and chastity are emblematically figured in Comus, 
 who eloquently presents the snare of vice as an 
 enrichment of life; and in the Lady, who counters 
 this with the high and- arduous doctrine of restraint. 
 Platonic, rather than puritanic, idealism underlies 
 the debate. The art, conscious, varied, and perfect, 
 of the blank verse and the "Doric delicacy" of the 
 songs are the highest reach of non-dramatic poetry 
 to this date. Dr. Johnson's criticism that, as a tale, 
 it moves slowly is much more justifiable than his 
 strictures on Lycidas, 1637, which establishes the 
 model of pastoral elegy drawn from the Sicilians, 
 and serves as exemplar to Shelley's Adonais and 
 Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis. Lycidas should be 
 compared with Milton's earlier Epitaphium Damonis. 
 The death of Edward King is not much more than 
 a pretext, though the idea of loss allows of the 
 invocation of nature, English and Sicilian, the pro- 
 cession of mythical and scriptural mourners, and 
 the Christian consolation; "eloquent distress" is the 
 happy description of the poem by Keats. The 
 passionate note of Milton rings clear for the first 
 time in two digressions; one, on the true nature of 
 fame, condemning poetical triviality; and one, a 
 wrathful puritanic denunciation of hireling clergy. 
 Lycidas is in iambic Unes of different length and 
 rime arrangement, with some few unrimed lines, 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 99 
 
 slight discords skilfully resolved into the general 
 harmony. Milton's sonnets are the occasional out- 
 bursts of smouldering poetic fire kindled during 
 twenty years of politics; some embody sentiments 
 stirred by historical events, as those on the Pied- 
 montese and on the Assault; some are domestic and 
 personal, as those on his Wife and on his Blindness; 
 some perpetuate the mood of L' Allegro — it never 
 died completely out — as that To Cyriack Skinner. 
 Save that he makes free with the volta or turn, he 
 adheres to the stricter Italian scheme of the sonnet. 
 He is also a writer of Latin verse, the most accom- 
 plished, save perhaps Landor, of all English poets 
 who attempted it. 
 
 In 1658 he resumed his intended life-work, which 
 "posterity should not willingly let die." The 
 Elizabethan lyric notes are but faintly p j' L t 
 blown in his great orchestral sym- 
 phony. It tells, like the miracle-cycles, the story of 
 the fall of man, with the prophecy of his redemption. 
 But the fall of man is preceded by the fall of 
 Lucifer and it is here that the dramatic force of 
 the story is developed; it is not profitable to discuss 
 who is the hero, but it is certain that the attitude 
 of irreconcilable rebellion against tyranny which 
 Satan takes up in Books I and II is in sympathy 
 with Milton's temperament and that the official 
 characterisation of Satan, as the impious rebel and 
 source of all evil, is crossed and blurred by the 
 element of Promethean heroism in his nature. We 
 may get the justest view of Satan if we think of 
 him as a defeated general, reassembling and inspiring 
 his forces, by the splendour and irony of his oratory. 
 
100 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 and by Machiavellian suggestions, to a renewal of a 
 forlorn conflict. The latent qualities of pride, envy, 
 and ambition are developed in succeeding books, 
 where his angelic form loses all its original bright- 
 ness, and he is degraded. The whole story is slowly 
 unfolded in the epic manner with large inset episodes, 
 its scenes placed in the empyrean or in the circum- 
 ambient chaos, in paradise or in hell; only once or 
 twice does it falter in dignity of conception, never in 
 the solemn grandeur of its speech. Milton sought 
 "to justify the ways of God to man." Inasmuch as 
 he did this by making use of a temporary theological 
 system, his poem is for an age; but it is for all time in 
 its intellectual comprehensiveness, its vast imagina- 
 tive scale, its moral sublimity, its descriptive power, 
 whether shown in clear-cut outlines against vague 
 backgrounds, or in pictures of armies moving "in per- 
 fect phalanx to the Dorian mood," or in classic 
 similes. Whether in its triumphs of oratory, its argu- 
 ments on divine things, or its occasional idyllic ten- 
 derness, the sense of dedication is over all. And still 
 there remain its style, the massive verse paragraphs 
 Milton designed with "the sense variously drawn 
 out, " and its diction of a rich and permanent texture. 
 Words came to him with a long-hoarded wealth of 
 association and with subtle musical values like organ 
 notes with their overtones; and out of these things 
 he wove the true poetic fabric of cadence, imagery, 
 and memories. 
 
 Paradise is regained, not as a result of the sacri- 
 ficial offering of the Messiah, but by his resistance 
 to Satan — a meaner, more calculating Satan — at the 
 beginning of the ministry in the desert. The poem 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 loi 
 
 wants dramatic interest, for we cannot form an 
 anticipation of the fall of Christ. But, 
 as in Comus, the offerings of the tempter P^r^dise Re^ 
 are set out with no attenuation of c*"" /^ , 
 their charms; the pictures of the ban- oaistes, 1671 
 quet, of the kingdoms and powers of 
 this world, and of Athens, mother of arts, have no 
 superiors in Milton. Here, the prevalent austerity is 
 relieved by imaginative colour; the close, like all 
 Milton's endings, is perfect. His original intention of 
 emplojdng dramatic form for Paradise Lost was 
 abandoned, to be revived in Samson Agonistes, a sub- 
 ject considered very early, as the famous Trinity 
 manuscript shows. Again, he treats scriptural matter 
 in classic form, choosing the Sophoclean drama. 
 Samson is the outcry of a "gray spirit yearning in 
 desire" for the restoration of the fallen ideals of 
 Puritanism; the likeness of the cases of Samson and 
 Milton is evident; the poet contemns the licence and 
 triviality of the court, and expresses his steadfast 
 conviction of the purpose of the Deity, in good time, to 
 crush his foes. The verse, here, is harsher, per- 
 haps more powerful, but with fewer elements of 
 geniality, and the rhythmic norm is, in the choruses 
 hard to detect. 
 
 At heart, Milton was a puritan; to the puritanic 
 spirit he clung more tenaciously than he did even to 
 the humanities. But he was a puritan of a different 
 stamp from Bunyan; the untutored emotion — "en- 
 thusiasm" the next century would have called it — 
 of Bunyan has no place in the more disciplined 
 utterance of Milton. He accepted the large outlines 
 of Calvinistic doctrine, though he held the Arian 
 
102 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 heresy that the Messiah was later born in heaven 
 and not co-eternal with the Father and the Spirit. 
 Satan's right to rebel hangs upon this doctrine, for 
 the exaltation of the Messiah to the right hand of 
 the Almighty — the act of a political tyrant — ^is 
 Satan's grievance, the fons et origo, according to 
 Paradise Lost, of all human history. This definitely 
 mapped out scheme of the relations between man 
 and God left little room for mystery, for the feeling 
 of religious awe in face of the unknown; there is 
 no mystery of that kind in Paradise Lost. 
 
 On the other hand, it is an immense conception, 
 whether we accept it or not, and whether we think 
 it too doctrinaire for epic poetry or not; sublime in 
 its outline and imposing the loftiest standards of 
 action. This moral austerity, and the sense of the 
 duty of holiness, obedience, and service, were the 
 elements of Milton's character which appealed to 
 Wordsworth, when he sought in some of his sonnets 
 to intensify the spiritual factors in national life at a 
 later crisis. 
 
 6. Prose from 1625 to 1660 
 
 The prose of the middle of the seventeenth century 
 reflects the disintegration of national interests. Eliza- 
 beth's religious compromise and the 
 controversv monarchical security of the Tudors 
 collapse; Anglican and dissenter, royalist 
 and common wealthsman are at wordy warfare, a 
 struggle soon to become a strife of arms. Religious 
 controversy centres about the question of toleration, 
 and the outlines of the argument can be studied in 
 
The Renascence, 1500-1660 103 
 
 Hales, Chillingworth {The Religion of Protestants), 
 Lord Falkland, Taylor [The Liberty of Prophesying, 
 1646), all tending to find the essentials of agreement 
 in the Apostles' Creed; the discussion grows wider 
 and more fantastic in Cudworth's Intellectual System of 
 the Universe, 1678, and closes in Locke's letters On 
 Toleration, 1689, establishing the validity of the 
 appeal to reason. The hottest of the anti-prelatists 
 was Milton; among his pamphlets on 
 this topic is The Reason of Church 
 Government Urged against Prelacy, 1641, which tells us 
 much about himself. He became an independent on 
 perceiving that "new Presbyter is but old Priest writ 
 large." He was deep, also, in political controversy 
 (it cost him his eyesight), as in Eikonoklastes, 1649, a 
 defence of the execution of Charles I, and in his 
 Second Defence of the English People, in Latin and 
 autobiographical ; but his greatest piece of polemics is 
 his Areopagitica, 1644, a speech on behalf of unlicensed 
 printing. It failed to persuade the Presbyterians to 
 remove the censorship, but it is an imperishable 
 vindication of the rights of thought against tyranny 
 and prescription. Round the central tenet of liberty 
 Milton grouped, though by an afterthought, all his 
 prose, on divorce, on church, and on state, except his 
 idealised picture of Miltonic schooling. The Tractate 
 on Education, 1644. More philosophic minds than 
 Milton's set themselves to solve these urgent pro- 
 blems; Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan, 1651, traces 
 the history of society from its aboriginal state of inter- 
 necine war through the "social contract" to its logical 
 outcome in absolute monarchy, which is established 
 on grounds of universal self-interest, not, as hereto- 
 
104 The Renascence. 1500-1660 
 
 fore, by divine right. The prose of Hobbes has a 
 grim tenacious power which irritated into activity 
 a widespread opposition. Harrington's Oceana, 1656, 
 and Filmer's Pairiarcha, 1680, and Algernon Sidney's 
 Discourses treat of these topics, while Locke's Civil 
 Government, 1690, reflects the Whig settlement of the 
 Revolution. His Essay concerning the Human Under- 
 standing, 1690, lays a broad foundation for the meta- 
 physical theory of the eighteenth century. Another 
 great writer fashioned by these troublous times was 
 Clarendon, whose History of the Great Rebellion, begun 
 in 1641, published 1702-4, proves him a maker of his- 
 ■ tory and a great statesman in a time of intrigue and 
 cabals. It is not impartial or critical history, for the 
 dice are heavily weighted against the parliamentari- 
 ans, nor does it pierce to the currents and movements 
 of which events are merely the surface ripples; but 
 it has high literary power, its record is unfolded with 
 sustained dignity of speech ; in description of warfare 
 and political narrative it is masterly, and it is un- 
 matched in its gallery of historical portraits. 
 
 Other recorders are May in his History of the 
 Long Parliament, 1647, and Fuller in his series begin- 
 ning with Good Thoughts in Bad Times and closing 
 with The Worthies of England, 1662. Nearer still 
 to the type of memoir, are the diaries of Evelyn and 
 Pepys, 1660-9, the latter a historical document of 
 importance and a piquant example of self -revelation. 
 Of letter-writers must be mentioned Howell for his 
 witty and entertaining Familiar Letters, Domestic 
 and Foreign, 1655, and Dorothy Osborne, for the 
 letters to her fianc^. Sir William Temple. 
 
 There are other minds who appear detached 
 
TKe Renascence, 1500-1660 105 
 
 from current strife; a group of divines and a group 
 akin to the essayists. The eloquence 
 of the pulpit begins in Elizabeth's ^^J^^^^^J^ 
 reign with Lancelot Andrewes and j xhe Divines 
 with Donne, splendid in strange har- 
 monies of prose, expressing spiritual intimacy and 
 wonder; it continues parallel with the great French 
 preachers Bourdaloue and Bossuet, through Fuller the 
 incessant humorist and Jeremy Taylor, South of cogent 
 wit, and Barrow, a man of science and pulpiteer. 
 Taylor is among the three or four great Anglican 
 orators; his sermons are deeply versed in the classics 
 and the Fathers, full of human sympathy, multi- 
 divisional in method, rich in imaginative decoration 
 and simile, and complete in knowledge of oratorical 
 art. On the Puritan side, there is much less learning 
 and much less elaboration, with a correspondingly 
 intense concentration on the affairs of the individual 
 soul. Richard Baxter wrote many volumes — "a 
 cartload," the infamous Jeffreys said — besides The 
 Saints' Everlasting Rest, 1650. But the greatest of 
 Puritan preachers was John Bunyan, 
 who, better than Byron, deserves the 
 title "the Pilgrim of Eternity." The central experi- 
 ence of Bunyan's life is recorded in Grace Abounding 
 to the Chief of Sinners, 1666. During his imprison- 
 ment he discovered his power of giving concrete 
 expression to inner experience. The Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress, 1678-84, took shape as a dream-allegory; its 
 materials were drawn from his own spiritual history ; 
 from the Scriptures and commentaries upon them; 
 from chap-books, emblem-books, and popular roman- 
 ces; from the actual persecutions of dissenters; and 
 
io6 The Renascence, 1500-1660 
 
 from the roadside life of his day. His power lies, 
 first, in his intimate portrayal of a widespread order of 
 religious experience; next, in narrative skill and in 
 a sense of character so vivid that we forget he is 
 writing an allegory; thirdly, in the vital zest and 
 energy of his style, familiar, racy, shrewd, a perfect 
 dialect for the unlearned. The abstractions do not 
 live so concretely in The Holy War, 1682, as in this 
 "similitude of a dream"; The Life and Death of 
 Mr. Badtnan, 1680, is often praised, but the realistic 
 narrative of tradesmen's thievery is too thickly 
 strewn with Biblical phrase and discussion. The 
 .. . fine spirit of Sir Thomas Browne, 
 
 Browne ' ^^^^^^t our first egoist, is compounded 
 of curiosity, mysticism, charity, and 
 strange learning. His purpose in Religio Medici, 1 643 , 
 is to define his faith; in reality he draws the cloak of 
 Christianity over an engaging collection of heresies. 
 "There is all Africa and her prodigies in us, " he says; 
 he compels his religion to be reconciled with these 
 marvels; the result is the revelation of a kingdom 
 of the mind whose new beauty and wonder stir him 
 to an ecstasy of thought and language. His Pseudo- 
 doxia or Vulgar Errors, 1646, is a storehouse of older 
 credulous knowledge veined with scepticism, and of 
 learned divagation. The Garden of Cyrus ransacks 
 nature in pursuit of the ubiquitous quincunx, while 
 Christian Morals and A Letter to a Friend give some 
 sense of his high stoical ethics. His noblest gifts are 
 exercised in the fifth chapter of his Hydriotaphia or 
 Urn Burial, 1658, a gorgeous prose elegy on fame, 
 antiquity, and death, viewing man as he stands in the 
 perspctive of the present, the past, and eternity, and 
 
THe Renascence, 1500-1660 107 
 
 moved thereby to the various emotions of melancholy, 
 compassion, and exaltation. The prose in which these 
 things are expressed has vast imaginative range, pro- 
 found reflection, a quite individual and fascinating 
 humour, whimsical and arresting thought, where 
 what the age called "wit" is blended with sumptuous 
 phrasing and poetic rhythm; and, over all, there is a 
 solemn sublimity in the strangely harmonious periods. 
 There is a great school of prose eloquence concerning 
 mortality, which includes Ralegh's History, the essay 
 on Death wrongly attributed to Bacon, Drummond's 
 Cypress Grove, and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying. 
 
 Cowley's Essays, 1667, on such subjects as Li6e?-/y, 
 Solitude, The Garden, have the intimacy of personal 
 revelation, picturing, in the main, a man disillusioned 
 but not discontented, seeking retirement and its grave 
 pleasures. He perceived the right function of the 
 essay form, and hit happily upon the ideal essay style. 
 He may weU illustrate the transition from the older 
 to the newer school of prose. Izaak Walton says in his 
 preface to The Compleat Angler, 1653, "I have made 
 myself a recreation of a recreation " and mixed thereto 
 ' ' some innocent mirth. ' ' The book has for its literary 
 ancestry, pastoral and piscatorial eclogues, "old- 
 fashioned poetry but choicely good"; and it records 
 with a like felicitous simplicity the complacent joys 
 and callousness, the varied fishing-lore and some of 
 the rather irrelevant classical learning of Piscator. 
 The opening is a triumph of prose descriptive of 
 sport and nature; and the final benediction "upon 
 all that are lovers of virtue; and dare trust in His 
 providence; and be quiet; and go a Angling," harmon- 
 ises with Walton's undisturbed remoteness from the 
 
io8 The Renascence. 1300-1660 
 
 restless age. His Lives of five notable divines are 
 masterpieces of biography, redolent of the person- 
 alities of his subjects, as old gardens are of perfumes. 
 As to the matter of all this prose we note the wide- 
 spread polemical activity, the louder bayings of 
 Puritanism, the gentler accents of toleration, a general 
 anxiety of thought, becoming, at times, a deep-toned 
 melancholy, and a new tendency towards realism. 
 As to style, there is a welter of forms ; some few writers, 
 Hobbes, Walton, and Bunyan among them, cultivate a 
 direct, incisive manner; but men of learning are in the 
 main over- Latinised in diction, or over- decorative for 
 the plain man's affairs ; Milton, Taylor, and Browne are 
 instances. Some again are parenthetical and structur- 
 ally helpless; Milton and Clarendon both suffer 
 in this way, though both are masters of the grand 
 style. Some writers are excessively oratorical and 
 periodic; this charge lies against Milton — as great a 
 sinner as he is a master — and Taylor. Milton, 
 Taylor, Browne, and Clarendon are monuments, not 
 models; the making of modern prose style was the 
 business of the next generation. 
 
BOOK IV 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE 
 CLASSES, 1660-1800 
 
 I. Prose from Dryden to Swift, i 660-1 720 
 
 The renascence as it comes to us from Italy blazes 
 into a splendid consummation in Milton. Hence- 
 forth, so far as writing is touched by literary in- 
 fluences, these come to us from the renascence as 
 coloured by its passage through France. The exiled 
 Court returned from its long vacation with the habits, 
 manners, ideas, and literary interests of France. But 
 these affect mainly the literature of the Court. There 
 is a competing influence, that of the citizen class, 
 the humanised descendants of the triumphant but 
 intolerant commonwealthsmen ; this and other de- 
 velopments, such as the liberation of the press, the 
 party cleavage into Whig and Tory, the patronage of 
 literature by the politicians, are reflected in the 
 writings of Dryden, Congreve, Addison, Steele, Pope, 
 Swift, and Defoe. 
 
 Prose undergoes a disciplinary process; it was 
 exercised in the pulpit, by Tillotson, to whose 
 "clear, plain, and short sentences" Dryden over- 
 stated his debt; in the essay, by the learned ama- 
 
 109 
 
no THe Literature of tHe 
 
 teur Sir William Temple; in political debate, by 
 
 Halifax, whose defensive Character oj 
 
 The making ^ Trimmer and Advice to a Dissenter, 
 
 nrose ^ ^^7' ^^^ ^^'^ ^ rank only below Dryden ; 
 
 in pamphleteering; in journalism, by 
 
 L'Estrange; and by writers on science. Bishop Sprat, 
 
 secretary of the Royal Society (in which Dryden, 
 
 Pepys, and Charles II were enrolled) , told in a famous 
 
 sentence how they exacted from their members "a 
 
 close, naked, natural way of speaking," the reverse 
 
 of the imaginative splendour of the school of Browne. 
 
 The final outcome was modern prose, fit for "the 
 
 average purpose"; its diction and metaphors no 
 
 longer at the mercy of the Latinising rhetorician; 
 
 its short harmonious sentences not modelled on 
 
 the wheeling periods of Cicero, but having their 
 
 emphasis, pause, and rhythm determined by the 
 
 sentence of conversation. The conversational ideal 
 
 also prescribed for modern prose its tone of equality 
 
 with the reader, and its vivid happy pictorial manner 
 
 in the quick suggestive way of the good talker; 
 
 wit, elegance, clearness, point, animation, these are 
 
 the qualities of Congreve's comedies and Dryden's 
 
 criticism. 
 
 John Dryden, 1631-1700, was the literary dictator 
 
 of his day, eminent in prose, verse, and drama. His 
 
 _ , main concern in prose was with critic- 
 
 Dryden . , . , . ^ , ,, 
 
 ism, which judges confusedly at first, 
 
 having for its accepted models French interpretations 
 of Horace and Aristotle and finding no consonance be- 
 tween these and the work of the Elizabethan giants 
 before the flood. Dryden with his genuine love of the 
 best in letters came nearest to reconciling the two 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 in 
 
 interests; all his prefaces and essays turn on these 
 matters ; An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 1668, is rather 
 academic, though splendid in praise; the Preface to 
 the Fables, 1700, is more independent, for here he 
 sees Chaucer clear through many mists. Keen per- 
 ception, generosity, freshness, and zest distinguish him 
 throughout. Dennis and Rymer, rather pedantic 
 critics, and the Frenchman Saint-Evremond, long 
 resident in England, can only be named. 
 
 Jonathan Swift, 1 667-1 745, dean of St Patrick's, 
 Dubhn, the supreme genius of unpoetic prose, pro- 
 duced, in 1704, The Battle of the Books 
 and A Tale of a Tub, treatises dealing 
 in trenchant satirical fashion with literary squabbles 
 concerning ancients and moderns, and with the 
 dissensions of Christian sects. He had a period of 
 almost regal power as a Tory politician, 1710-13, won 
 by such brilliant political pamphlets as The Conduct 
 of the Allies, 1711; the intimate side of this part of 
 his life is recorded in the delightful Journal to Stella 
 with its "little language" and its traces of genial 
 humour, only paralleled in his chaffing of the 
 astrologer Partridge. Afterwards, he suffered the 
 bitterness of a proud and masterful mind possessing 
 immense nervous energy yet condemned to engage 
 in the pettiest occupations; physically, he was a 
 sufferer; his mysterious love-affairs fell into con- 
 fusion; furious emotions fermented within him, 
 generating a morbid misanthropy, which coloured 
 too darkly his passion for reason and justice. Irony 
 is his distinguishing mark, as may be seen in The 
 Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 1708, and 
 in the hideously tragical mirth of A Modest Proposal, 
 
112 THe Literature of tKe 
 
 1729, which suggested that the superfluous children of 
 the Irish poor should be disposed of by being served up 
 as food. Irony is accompanied by invective and some 
 malice in his Drapier's Letters, 1724, against the 
 monopoly of Wood's halfpence in Ireland. All his 
 resources are brought into play in Gulliver's Travels, 
 1726. Its narrative skill, whimsical invention, and 
 meticulous detail have made it, by a strange destiny, 
 a child's classic; the concurrent irony becomes more 
 searching and more repulsive in successive degrada- 
 tions of humanity, till, in the fourth book, man is 
 stripped of every shred of honour, decency, morality, 
 and reasonableness, and becomes a cowering and nau- 
 seous Yahoo. The method of his irony is either to 
 conduct some assumption of unreason with all gravity 
 to its disconcerting conclusions, or to set truth blazing 
 in the very lines of the pictures which the complacent 
 and the hypocritical draw of themselves. Swift's is 
 the model of all plain unadorned styles; in lucidity, 
 directness, force, and in the perfect conveyance of 
 thought into the fewest and most effective words 
 he has no equal. No genius at once so universal 
 in range and so penetrating in criticism of society 
 appeared again till Burke. 
 
 With Swift should be named his friend Dr. John 
 Arbuthnot, a man of fine character, whose gifts were 
 like the more genial half of Swift's. He was the 
 inspiring spirit of the Scriblerus Club in which 
 Pope, Gay, and Congreve were also concerned, and 
 was the author of the Tory History of John Bull, 
 1712. 
 
 Addison and Steele were the first to find articulate 
 and polite utterance for -the prevailing part of the 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 113 
 
 new nation, the puritan middle classes. The ex- 
 travagance, insolence and licence of the 
 Restoration era had provoked a reaction * ^ 
 in the direction of morality and order; and the increase 
 in wealth and the very influential institution of the 
 coffee-house brought something of amenity into the 
 outlook of the middle classes. Addison and Steele 
 made their fellow-citizens — sound in heart and under- 
 standing but without established traditions — con- 
 scious of themselves; it was an office of national 
 importance, and it is difficult to imagine a more 
 propitious conjunction of the hour and the men. 
 With extraordinary tact, they varied preaching with 
 ridictde, pictorial example with appeals to sentiment, 
 all with an engaging air of enjoyment. They gave a 
 decisive turn to the national mind, becoming its 
 accepted censors in morals, manners, dress, literary 
 taste, and conversation. In nothing was their in- 
 fluence more necessary or more powerful than in 
 restoring the status and dignity of women by awaken- 
 ing their self-respect and enlarging their horizons ; in 
 this, Steele's chivalry is more attractive than Addison's 
 condescension. In fact, we may say generally that, 
 while Addison has a more urbane culture, a more 
 retired observation, a quicker eye for eccentricity, a 
 defter irony, Steele, who is less aloof, has a greater 
 warmth of feeling and more generous impulses. It 
 was Steele who initiated the whole enterprise by means 
 of The Tatler (appearing three days a week, 1709-11), 
 a miscellaneous sheet containing news, stories, do- 
 mestic sketches, admonition, poetry, and learning. 
 Addison was drawn into the undertaking, and, when 
 The Spectator began on the cessation of The Tatler, he 
 
114 TKe Literature of tHe 
 
 wrote more than half of its 555 issues between March, 
 1 71 1, and December, 17 12. The Spectator appeared 
 daily and, discarding news, confined itself to a single 
 essay. Mr. Spectator is Addison's creation, the 
 Spectator Club is Steele's; both have an honourable 
 part in the characterisation of the perennially charm- 
 ing feudal aristocrat Sir Roger de Coverly. Besides 
 these papers, there were lay sermons, tales, allegories, 
 correspondence, accounts of functions, of visits to the 
 theatre, and criticism such as Addison's papers on 
 ballads and on Paradise Lost. The two banish politi- 
 cal rancour from their journal (though Steele's pro- 
 nounced whiggism found an outlet in some later 
 ventures), and avoided personal scandal; they endeav- 
 oured, in Addison's words, to "enliven morality with 
 wit and temper wit with morality"; so that, while 
 the Restoration poured ridicule upon virtue, these 
 writers poured ridicule upon vice, and they found the 
 whole nation with them. Addison achieved a per- 
 fect style for these essays, easy, effortless, colloquial, 
 but correct and never without dignity; Steele is more 
 negligent in choice of word and in syntax, but in 
 pathetic and domestic scenes he strikes a chord beyond 
 Addison's range. 
 
 Daniel Defoe or Foe, i66o(?)-i73i, belonged to the 
 obscurer side of the journalism which sprang up 
 when the censorship was withdrawn 
 in 1695. Numerous ephemeral sheets 
 preceded him, but his Review, written in Newgate 
 prison, afforded some hints for the first numbers of 
 The Tatler. He was a busy and effective pamphleteer 
 for twenty years before turning to fiction. He had 
 an amazingly ready pen, a prosaic but racy and 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 115 
 
 copious style, a journalist's eye for those details which 
 take the public taste, an extraordinary knowledge 
 of what everybody was doing and what they were 
 paid for it, and an unmatched faculty for colouring 
 fiction with the hue of truth; the gift is at its height 
 in his Journal of the Plague Year, 1722. All this 
 realistic writing and describing served him in the 
 best stead when he wrote at the age of sixty his 
 first novel, Robinson Crusoe, the epic of the plain 
 devout man overcoming adverse nature. His nar- 
 rative power was exhibited also in other fiction, 
 such as Captain Singleton, 1720, Moll Flanders, 1721, 
 and other stories generally nearer to the manner of 
 Nashe than to the modern novel. 
 
 2. Poetry from Dryden to Pope 
 
 The emergence of the heroic couplet as the main 
 vehicle of poetry has been traced. Dryden is the 
 
 first master of the measure in which t% j 
 
 . 1 , Dryden 
 
 satire, elegy, panegyric, debate, epis- 
 tolary matter, criticism, and miscellaneous learning 
 were to find expression for a century. After some 
 early metaphysical attempts, Dryden produced his 
 Annus Mirabilis, 1666, in quatrains, on the fire, 
 plague, and war of that year. For fourteen years, 
 his attention was given to drama in heroic couplets, 
 and, with this practice behind him, he produced 
 Absalom and Achitophel, 1681, a sketch of the political 
 situation in which Charles II, Shaftesbury, and 
 Monmouth were the principal figures. The poem 
 has supreme skill in political argumentation and 
 presents a gallery of portraits including Zimri, 
 
Ii6 The Literature of tKe 
 
 Achitophel, and Shimei, masterpieces which show 
 forth the individual and the type in one figure; their 
 clear outlines and ingenious choice of detail make 
 them unanswerable, because the statements are either 
 next door to the truth, or cannot be refuted without 
 uncomfortable disclosures. In the warfare of satires 
 which followed, Dryden was irritated, into attacking 
 Shadwell and Settle, in the second part of Absalom 
 and in Macflecknoe, 1682; he gives decisive proof, 
 apparently, of their claim to all the titles of infamy; 
 then, after an interlude on their poetical incapacity, 
 he sends them hurtling into the realms of dulness. 
 There is no other personal invective so explicit yet so 
 tempered by artistic execution. His later exercisee in 
 the couplet include Religio Laid, 1682, a rational 
 Anglican's case, while The Hind and the Panther, 1687, 
 is his apologia on the occasion of his conversion to the 
 Roman Church; The Fables, 1700, are adaptations 
 in the same measure chiefly from Boccaccio and 
 Chaucer. The most notable of many translations 
 was his Vergil; and he wrote, besides, lyric verse in 
 his plays, and pindarics such as Alexander's Feast and 
 An Ode to Mistress Anne Killigrew. He left the coup- 
 let varied in accent and pause, a vehicle for prosaic 
 thought and diction, effectively rimed, with the sense 
 contained, for the most part, within the limits of the 
 riming lines. There are other couplet writers between 
 Dryden and Pope, such as Granville and the Earl of 
 Dorset, Garth {The Dispensary, 1699), and Blackmore. 
 HudOs ^^ more importance is Samuel Butler's 
 
 Hudibras, 1663-8, a parody in octosylla- 
 bic couplets of Don Quixote, victimising the Presby- 
 terians in the figure of the knight Hudibras, and the 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1500 117 
 
 Independents in that of his squire Ralpho. It is hard 
 and bitter in sentiment, and weak in construction, but 
 amazingly clever in idea, compression, imagery, and 
 rime; the mind becomes restive under its incessant 
 explosions of wit. In some other writings, Butler 
 shares with Swift a hatred of the new science. This 
 octosyllabic form began early to challenge the sway 
 of the decasyllabic ; most of Swift's verse {On the 
 Death of Dr. Swift, Cadenus and Vanessa), Prior's 
 Alma, Gay's Fables, Dyer's Grongar Hill, Parnell's 
 Night-Piece, Matthew Green's The Spleen, show for 
 what various moods it could be used. 
 
 Alexander Pope, 1 688-1 744, is the typical poet of 
 the generation after Dryden; a town-dweller, sus- 
 picious of enthusiasm, a satirist, a critic, 
 devoid of lyric gift, accepting authority 
 from France, a skilled and conscientious artist in 
 form, much beholden to a shibboleth called "nature, " 
 compounded of scraps from Boileau, Horace, and 
 Aristotle with a strong infusion of eighteenth century 
 common sense — a thing as remote as possible from 
 "nature" as Wordsworth thought of it. Pope's po- 
 etry, practically all in the heroic couplet, included 
 criticism, satire, translation, and ethics ; in his Essay 
 on Criticism, 171 1, he had attained perfect ease and 
 polish. His satires are of three classes: (i) the bril- 
 liant mock-heroic i?a^e of the Lock, I7i2-I4,agaysatire 
 of the cavalier world; (ii) The Dunciad, 1728, of which 
 the part attacking dulness is excellent and necessary, 
 but the personal abuse of Grub Street hacks and of 
 Theobald (who exposed the textual failings in Pope's 
 edition of Shakespeare, 1725) does Pope himself a dis- 
 service; (iii) his most mature and most accomplished 
 
Ii8 The Literature of tHe 
 
 Epistles (including the masterly one to Arbuthnot, 
 1735) and the Imitations of Horace, 1733-9. These are 
 a mingled yarn of the best and worst in Pope; there is 
 sane judgment, fine irony, concern for letters, loyal 
 friendship to Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and the rest of 
 the Scriblerus circle; but accompanying these things 
 are personalities such as the malicious and plausible 
 distortion of Addison and the venomous portrait of 
 Hervey. His translations of the Iliad, 1715-20, and 
 Odyssey (with coadjutors) are masterly, though 
 far from literal, re-interpretations, in pointed anti- 
 thetical couplets, after the taste of the time; but 
 they undoubtedly retain something of the Homeric 
 lightness and energy. An Essay on Man, 1733, 
 elaborates a philosophy based on the inconsequent 
 optimism of the brilliant but superficial Bolingbroke. 
 It is worth notice that, in his early pastorals and 
 in his emotional poems Eloisa to Abelard and his 
 Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, he gives evidence 
 of a vein of romantic feeling afterwards un worked. 
 Pope is a master of the secondary rhetorical kinds 
 of poetry, or, to put the matter in other words, 
 the inner urgency which drove him to composition 
 does not appear to have been delight in beauty or 
 imaginative vision. He is a craftsman of infinite 
 patience, aiming at polished perfection of speech. 
 To achieve this he employs the arts of elegance, 
 lucidity, antithesis, and "wit," which by Pope's time 
 had come to mean the incisive and memorable ex- 
 pression of familiar ideas. His tendency to compress 
 his meaning into single lines or, at most, into the 
 distich, together with his extraordinary power of 
 crystallising thought into words, produces the effect 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1500 119 
 
 of a shower of metrical epigrams; it reveals, too, 
 the lack of such wide-sweeping imaginative con- 
 ception as would require the space of the paragraph 
 for its statement. Within the line the break comes 
 generally after the second or third foot; at first, 
 the effect is apt to be monotonous; after a time 
 we realise with what delicate and subtle skill the 
 variations of stress are proportioned to their pur- 
 pose, whether of oracular statement, pathos, satire, 
 or eulogy. These effects are what Pope offers in 
 compensation for his abandonment of the bolder 
 freedoms of Dryden, whose couplet had a constant 
 tendency to enjambement, that is to overflow, to 
 triple riming lines, and to alexandrines. Criticism, 
 since Wordsworth, has been prone to belittle Pope; 
 and it cannot be denied that there were uncomfort- 
 able traits in his character. Nevertheless, the last 
 word on him ought rather to be an acknowledg- 
 ment of his conscientious and unceasing devotion 
 to his craft of letters. 
 
 3. Prose of the Later Eighteenth Century 
 1720 TO 1800 
 
 The prose of theology centred about the deistic 
 
 or rationalist controversy; the opponents of revealed 
 
 religion were writers such as Boling- 
 
 ProsG of 
 broke, Shaftesbury, author of Character- doctrine 
 
 istics, 171 1, Tindal, Conyers Middleton, 
 
 and Toland, while on the orthodox side were Butler, 
 
 author of The Analogy, 1736, close-knit, and exhaustive 
 
 in its argument, and William Law, famous for his 
 
 mystical and evangelical Serious Call, 1728. In 
 
120 THe Literature of tHe 
 
 philosophy, Locke's empiricism was varied by Berke- 
 ley's idealist doctrine that matter only exists for mind, 
 and by Hume's development of it, that the mind itself 
 is but a succession of ideas. Hume wrote with great 
 literary charm, but Berkeley, as in his Dialogues 
 between Hylas and Philonous, 1713, developed a style 
 of grace, lucidity, and power hardly to be paralleled 
 in any other philosophical writing. With these 
 should be associated Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, 
 which opens in verse, a vigorous, penetrating, and 
 misanthropical survey of society, to which the mystic, 
 William Law, made an effective reply. 
 
 Steele's Guardian, one of many ventures which 
 flourished for a little time when The Spectator came 
 to an end, was without a really notable 
 successor until Johnson in the Rambler, 
 1750, and in his later Idler and Rasselas, 1759 (which 
 is not much more than a bound volume of Ramblers), 
 proved that a man might have many gifts of heart and 
 brain, learning, shrewdness, sympathy, humour, reli- 
 gion, wisdom, and yet not be able to dissipate melan- 
 choly or to achieve the lightness of the perfect essay 
 style. Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses brought art 
 criticism within the range of the essay; Ruskin 
 and Pater are the chief of many later disciples. Gold- 
 smith, in The Citizen of the World, adopts the pretence 
 of being a Chinaman surveying naively the follies 
 and oddities of Englishmen. But the Addisonian 
 tradition of the essay was worked out, and when the 
 essay was revived by Lamb and Hazlitt, it was funda- 
 mentally changed in manner and matter. Meanwhile 
 must be noted the foundation of the modern news- 
 paper press (for instance. The Times and The Morning 
 
Middle Classes. 1660-1500 121 
 
 Posi), the relations of which to literature at large are 
 
 not yet fully determined. 
 
 Of memoirs and letters this is our golden age, 
 
 almost challenging the supremacy of France. Swift's 
 
 Journal to Stella, 1710-13, portrays in- 
 
 , • . 1 , , £ , £ . . Memoirs and 
 
 timately the foremost figures m soci- Letters 
 
 ety, literature, and politics, at the end 
 of Anne's reign. Swift moves in these circles on a 
 footing of perfect equality. Pope's polished letters 
 were put forth and advertised in characteristic sub- 
 terranean fashion; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 
 show her a bluestocking possessed of a keen, sar- 
 donic wit; Gray's are the locus classicus for the 
 change of attitude towards what had hitherto been 
 thought forbidding and monstrous in natural scenes; 
 Chesterfield's are brilliant, courtly, and wise, in- 
 tending "to fashion a gentleman in noble discipline" 
 after French and English models; the other aspect 
 of them is commented on by Wesley in his Journal 
 thus: "He was a man of much wit, middling sense, 
 and some learning; but as absolutely void of virtue, 
 as any Jew, Turk, or Heathen, that ever lived." 
 Walpole's vivid epistolary style records the gossip, 
 personal tastes, antipathies, reflections of a busy 
 leisure and wide-ranging mind, with an air of inti- 
 macy, a quick sense of the comic, and some measure 
 of malice, a mixture which makes his letters an in- 
 cessant source of amusement. But none of these 
 letter-writers has a sense of style so inborn, so deli- 
 cate as Cowper's; his material is simply that which 
 passes before our own observation, but he charms 
 attention by subtle grace and simplicity of descrip- 
 tion; the elements are mixed in infallible proportions. 
 
122 THe Literature of tHe 
 
 Madame D'Arblay's Journal, beginning 1786, gives 
 a vivid and personal account of her uncomfortable 
 office at the court of Queen Charlotte. The Letters 
 of Junius, 1769-72, which contain virulent invective 
 against the Duke of Bedford and others of the King's 
 party, have the fortune to embody a mystery of 
 authorship; opinion leans, though hesitatingly, to- 
 wards Sir Philip Francis as the writer. 
 
 In biography, the age has such masterpieces as 
 Gibbon's Autobiography, Boswell's Life of Johnson, 
 
 1791, and Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 
 Biography \ i,, j u^ 1 
 
 1779-81. There was, no doubt, a large 
 
 vein of folly in Boswell, but he had uncommon skill 
 in providing opportunities for the play of Johnson's 
 personality, an artist's sense for the salient aspects 
 of an incident, a rare measure of hero-worship, a 
 retentive memory, and an engaging narrative style, 
 with the result that of no other man have we a pre- 
 sentation so intimate, so detailed, and so unforgettable 
 as to manner, habits, garb, and speech. It is from 
 Boswell's Life more than from his own writings 
 that we derive our picture of Johnson, 
 marked by disease, awkward in gait, 
 emphatic in assertion, a lover of talk and of clubs, as 
 well as our impression of his courage, independence, 
 British intellect, with its largeness of grasp in some 
 things and insular speculative narrowness in others, 
 his readiness to argue all causes, his melancholy, his 
 piety, his benevolence, his immovable prejudices 
 against the Whig dogs and the Scots. Except for the 
 three months* tour in the Hebrides, Boswell cannot 
 have met Johnson on an average more than ten days a 
 year in the twenty years of their acquaintance. In 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 123 
 
 view of all this, it is clear that Macaulay's first sketch 
 of Boswell (Macaulay made some amends in a later 
 essay) as the fortunate fool of literature is an injustice. 
 Johnson's other writings are numerous, including the 
 great Dictionary, 1755, the edition of Shakespeare, 
 1765, with its splendid preface, and his Journey to 
 the Western Isles, 1775; but the crown of his writing 
 is the Lives of the Poets, 1779-81, combining bio- 
 graphy and criticism. Literary anecdote keeps its 
 savour in these pages, but the Lives also aflford a 
 body of criticism in which the canons of the pseudo- 
 classical school reveal both their strength and their 
 weakness. His understanding and sagacity make 
 such lives as those of Dryden and Pope almost final 
 pronouncements, but his lack of sensitiveness for im- 
 aginative expression and for a freer music than Pope 
 could charm from the heroic couplet, to say nothing 
 of his church and state prejudices, render the account 
 of Gray nugatory and that of Milton only partially 
 valid. His earlier involved sentence structure and 
 polysyllabic diction are tempered by this time to a 
 finer strength and a mature ease. The Letter to Lord 
 Chesterfield gave a death-blow to the system of patron- 
 age under which writers had successively profited and 
 starved since the Restoration ; henceforth, the author 
 was to appeal direct to the public. 
 
 History in the modern sense, like the essay, letter- 
 writing, and the novel, is a creation of the age of 
 prose and reason. Hume's History of 
 England, 1762, is a different thing from 
 the garrulous though generally accurate contemporary 
 records of Burnet's History of my own Times, 1723. 
 Hume's writing is clear and spirited, he has narrative 
 
124 TKe Literature of the 
 
 skill, sense of character, and philosophic reflection; 
 Smollett's continuation is simply vigorous hack-work. 
 Robertson's Histories of Scotland and of Charles V are 
 in the rotund Latinised style which took a new lease of 
 life in Dr. Johnson's time. He examined with some 
 care such material as the age provided, and is accurate 
 in the main. No such qualification need be put upon 
 The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire, 1776-88, of Gibbon, one of the 
 masterpieces of historical writing. First, he brought 
 together by tireless and minute research an unimagin- 
 able mass of detail which his historical sagacity inter- 
 preted with rare judgment ; next, he chose his vantage 
 ground so as to present in panoramic succession the 
 major events of thirteen hundred years — the spread 
 of Christianity, the barbarian irruptions, the rise of 
 Mohammedanism, the record of the Persian Empire, 
 Arabic civilisation, the Crusades, closing his survey 
 with the brilliant relation of the fall of Constantinople. 
 How masterly is his control of his multifarious mate- 
 rial may be seen in the fact that, for the years 476-1 453 
 he changes the scale of the work and yet maintains 
 unfalteringly his sense of proportion. Gibbon's 
 attitude, to which his Autobiography gives con- 
 summate expression, is in the main that of impartial 
 detachment, except towards religion and zeal; these 
 things (he was much influenced by Voltaire) provoked 
 his ironic scepticism, as in his famous account of the 
 spread of Christianity. His style has a long resound- 
 ing march and energy in sentence, paragraph, and 
 chapter; its system of balanced rhetorical clauses is 
 well suited to express the pros and cons of his well- 
 considered statements. The monumental quality of 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 125 
 
 his achievement may be judged from the fact that 
 modern scholars, though they revise details, make no 
 proposals to supersede his work as a whole. 
 
 Edmund Burke is the greatest of all political 
 orators by virtue of his minute knowledge of events, 
 piercing insight, imaginative grasp, and 
 magnificent rhetorical endowment. In 
 his earlier speeches on English affairs, such as Thoughts 
 on the Present Discontents, 1770, and on colonial politics, 
 such as his American Speeches, 1774-5, ^^ investigates 
 problems as they are illuminated by past experience, 
 is generous towards progressive hopes, condemns 
 meticulous legality, and aims at "reason, justice, and 
 humanity" by means of a practical and high-minded 
 expediency. Yet all his eloquence failed to avert the 
 War of Independence. The French Revolution set him 
 face to face with a more profound social upheaval and 
 forced him back to a conservative upholding of inher- 
 ited institutions, for which he has been accused of 
 inconsistency. In The French Revolution, 1790, and 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1795-7, he formulated 
 his creed of the state as an organism of slow benefi- 
 cent growth enshrining the "permanent reason" of 
 the race as against popular illusions — which he ab- 
 horred as much as he did abstract politics — while, 
 at the same time, embodying the conception of moral 
 duty and forbidding revolution. He lifted political 
 discussion out of the sphere of mere argument by 
 his analogy between the state and the world; and 
 he called in imagination, sentiment, the whole nature 
 of man in fact, to assist the reason in the exercise 
 of judgment; in this respect, he may be counted 
 something of a romantic. His oratory shares in 
 
126 The Literature of tHe 
 
 the revival of the long swelling sentence, though, 
 within it, he manages admirably his antithetical 
 clauses and enlightening illustration; he has an un- 
 equalled gift for the accumulative method and for 
 interfusing poetic phrase and imagery of oriental 
 richness so that it seems one with his thought. All 
 subsequent political speculation is deeply in debt 
 to Burke. 
 
 4. The Novel 
 
 The backward record of the novel might stretch 
 to the Greek romances; but its more significant 
 features were not compounded till the eighteenth 
 century. Long and detailed realistic narrative is 
 seen in Bunyan, Defoe, and Swift; character sketch- 
 ing in Addison, and, on the domestic side, in Steele; 
 the association of naturally related characters in 
 real circumstances, plot, and situation are found 
 in Fielding; while sentiment, erotic emotion, and 
 the sense of tragedy are added by Richardson. 
 Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Re- 
 warded, 1740, and Sir Charles Grandison 
 (portraying an insufferable masculine ideal) are 
 inferior to his Clarissa Harlowe, 1748. When fairly 
 entered upon, this novel enchains the reader; it has 
 a Ford-like tenacity in respect of its tragic theme, 
 the undoing of Clarissa by Lovelace, fecklessly 
 seconded by her rigid and unimaginative family. 
 Its insistence on feeling to the exclusion of almost 
 all else, and its stuffy conception of virtue may seem 
 unhealthy; its interminable length, its epistolary 
 form, its diffuse and endlessly analytic style make 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 127 
 
 a great dead weight to lift; but the book rises to 
 the rank of a classic; it was accepted as such in 
 France and Germany, where its influence was enor- 
 mous. Henry Fielding, after dabbling in the drama, 
 turned novelist to ridicule Pamela in p,. j .. 
 
 Joseph Andrews, 1742; this revealed to 
 him his vocation and in Tom Jones, 1749, he proved 
 himself the possessor of the strongest and most 
 comprehensive understanding among the English 
 novelists. The tale is plotted on epic scale, the 
 conventions of which are wittily utilised in the 
 initial chapters of each book. Its range of incident is 
 wide, the events set in country houses, inns, and by the 
 roadside; the London part of the tale is the least 
 attractive. The book is full of living men and women, 
 of broad humorous comedy of situation and char- 
 acter, and of a widely tolerant spirit exacting a 
 standard remorseless in its castigation of hypocrisy, 
 treachery, and calculating propriety. Fielding is not 
 invaded by the hot-house sensibility, the conscious 
 glow of feeling of Richardson and Sterne; his whole 
 world is manlier in its acceptance of things as they 
 come. Neither the Swift-like irony on the subject 
 of "greatness" in Jonathan Wild, 1743, nor his later 
 novel Amelia, 1751, attains the proportions of Tom 
 Jones. A Journey from this World to the Next has 
 brilliant satire in the chapters describing Elysium. 
 Fielding writes the masculine flexible English of the 
 scholar and the man of the world, the best of all 
 middle styles. Laurence Sterne's Tris- Sterne 
 
 tram Shandy, 1 760-7 , defies all the canons 
 of order and development; it is an eccentric fantasy 
 having for its ancestry Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton, 
 
128 The Literature of tHe 
 
 and Arbuthnot. No thread of story runs through 
 the work, no possible world is reflected therein, but 
 rare turns of humour and pathos, and, above all, 
 character, appear; Uncle Toby, and Corporal Trim 
 especially, are figures constantly being elaborated 
 by subtle touches delineating gesture, speech, the 
 absorbing pursuit of their wajrward hobbies, and 
 their generous human feeling. The style is shot 
 with iridescent colour, full of Rabelaisian pedantry 
 and allusive innuendo, yet answering, on occasion, 
 to every call of emotion or description. Sterne's 
 Sentimental Journey, 1768, is a document showing 
 forth the "sensibility" of the time, the high-wrought 
 feeling perpetually threatening tears, which actually 
 flood the page in Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, 1771. 
 Goldsmith's charming idyll, The Vicar 
 of Wakefield, 1766, is feeble in struc- 
 ture, being but a series of incidents in a chequered 
 family history loosely bound together; but its 
 humanity and sympathy, its delicate touch on 
 humour, pathos, satire, and tragedy, and its limpid 
 musical prose ensure for it a place among the 
 great prose writings of the eighteenth century. 
 Smollett's picaresque novels, Roderick 
 Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, 
 and Humphrey Clinker (in letter form), 1771, often 
 reflect his rather harsh and irritable temper, but 
 they have extraordinary wealth of comic adventure 
 drifting easily to blows, variety of character, includ- 
 ing national types, doctors, and sailors — the shadier 
 and more insolent predominating — and a coarse, racy 
 speech, all of which were doubtless enriched in his 
 own travels by land and sea. 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 129 
 
 We may briefly indicate several lines of develop- 
 ment which the novel followed; first, that of romance, 
 of such varjdng shades as we see in 
 Walpole's Castle of Otranto, 1764, Beck- no^lkts 
 
 ford's Vathek (in English), 1786, Mrs. 
 Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolhpo, 1794, and the novels 
 of other terror-mongers such as "Monk" Lewis, who 
 were parodied in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. 
 Next, novels of edification such as Godwin's Caleb 
 Williams, 1794., turning on the pathology of crime; 
 and the Rousseau-like educational story Sandford 
 and Merton, and those of Hannah More and Miss 
 Edgeworth. Thirdly, we may note the beginnings 
 of the novel of local colour, Irish in Miss Edgeworth's 
 Castle Rackrent, 1800, Scottish in Gait's Annals of 
 the Parish, 1821, and Miss Ferrier's Inheritance, 1824, 
 these last two in the wake of Sir Walter. Lastly, 
 most important in its immediate results, the novel 
 of manners or domestic satire; in this, Fanny Bumey's 
 Evelina, 1778, rich in character sketches, precedes the 
 masterpieces of Jane Austen. 
 
 Jane Austen, 1775-1817, in her Sense and Sensibility, 
 1 81 1, Pride and Prejtidice, Mansfield Park, Emma, 
 Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, 1816, 
 adapts the comedy of manners to the 
 novel. Her circle is small, and no doubt she was con- 
 firmed in her tendency to realism by a reaction from 
 the novels of mystery, which she ridiculed in North- 
 anger Abbey. She delineates the upper middle class 
 family of the southern counties, its relatives, its 
 emigrations to Bath, and, more rarely, to town, and its 
 absorbing interest in marriages and dowries; these 
 constitute the two inches of ivory on which, as she 
 
130 The Literature of tKe 
 
 herself said, she worked with a fine brush. Grant 
 this miniature circle and the absence, for the most 
 part, of tragic and vehement matter, and she must be 
 allowed to attain perfection in her art; not only by 
 reason of her remarkable restraint, her sure instinct 
 for proportion and for selection of salient detail, her 
 unfaltering consistency in character-drawing, but, 
 also, by her style; for, whether in the dialogue, or in 
 the finely ironic phrasing of her comment, she never 
 fails in aptness and a kind of fastidiously used force. 
 She lives and moves in the company of her characters, 
 like Dickens, but, whilst he is in a continual state of 
 exuberant excitement about them, Jane Austen is 
 always alert, sane, unsentimental, witty, rather like 
 Meredith's comic spirit abroad. She imparts to the 
 atmosphere in which we view her characters some 
 quality of sharpness and clearness, so that they make 
 an ineffaceable impression upon us and we know them 
 through and through. 
 
 5. The Eighteenth Century Tradition and 
 THE Rise of Romance in Poetry 
 
 The tradition of Pope continues in writings in 
 couplet which stretch in a thinning line down to 
 
 Byron. Addison's Campaign, 1704, 
 of Pope Tickell's fine Elegy on Addison, Par- 
 
 nell's Hermit, Young's satires. The 
 Universal Passion, 1725-8, Johnson's io«<ioM, 1738, and 
 The Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749, Churchill's 
 lampoons, The Rosciad, 1761, and others, Goldsmith's 
 Traveller, 1764, Darwin's Loves of the Plants, 1789 
 (richly burlesqued in The Anti- Jacobin), Rogers's 
 
Middle Classes. 1660-1800 131 
 
 Pleasures of Memory, 1792, Campbell's Pleasures of 
 Hope, 1799, Crabbe's narratives, from The Library, 
 1781, to Tales of the Hall, 1819, Byron's English Bards 
 and Scotch Reviewers, 1809 ; these make up a catalogue, 
 which could easily be extended, of poems of which the 
 themes are satire, panegyric, elegy (death and the 
 churchyard were much in the mind of the eighteenth 
 century), learning, and didacticism; much more 
 rarely do we find poets treating of passion, nature, 
 or large historic event. Some of the titles indicate 
 what proved to be the besetting sin of this age of 
 intellectual analysis, namely abstraction and per- 
 sonification. Some poets use the typical measure, 
 the couplet, but are less didactic, as Gay in Trivia, 
 or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, 1716, and 
 Prior, though his light and sparkling "society verses" 
 such as The Female Phaeton, To a Child of Quality, 
 and Jinny the Just are far superior. Other writers 
 are of the didactic tradition in subject but not in 
 form, using, for instance, blank verse, as Akenside's 
 Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, and Young's Night 
 Thoughts, 1742-4; they and many others followed 
 Milton, but, not having access to his springs of 
 inspiration, were prone to write a diction "glossy and 
 unfeeling" or large, circumlocutory, and ineffective; 
 much more understanding of blank verse was shown in 
 the Miltonic burlesque (not in the least malicious), 
 The Splendid Shilling by John Philips. Other poets 
 of the age are partly in the pseudo-classic tradition; 
 but the fortunes of Pope's school are falling and we 
 seek out more curiously the forerunners of the rising 
 dynasty. They are heard even in the moment of 
 Pope's supremacy; they besiege the classical citadel 
 
132 THe Literature of tHe 
 
 on many sides. First, we see men turning from the 
 
 town to the fields in Thomson's Seasons, 
 
 _ 1726-30, accurate and sensitive descrip- 
 
 romaace . 
 
 tions of quiet aspects of nature, though, 
 
 in diction, too imitative of Milton; in Parnell's 
 Night-Piece, in Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1727, in Allan 
 Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, 1725, in Gray's Elegy, 1751, 
 and in his Letters, in Collins's exquisite Ode to Evening, 
 1 747 , in Goldsmith's Deserted Village, 1 770, in Cowper's 
 Task, 1785, and in the Songs and Poems of Burns. 
 Next, we may note the use of the Spenserian stanza 
 in Shenstone's Schoolmistress, 1742, and in Thomson's 
 Castle of Indolence, 1748, in some part a real re-ani- 
 mation of the spirit of Spenser; Milton's early poems 
 count for something, too, with Gray and Collins. 
 When we remember that the earliest name in John- 
 son's Lives is that of Cowley, 1618-67, it becomes sig- 
 nificant that Spenser was edited by Thomas Warton, 
 1754, Chaucer by Tyrwhitt, 1775, and Shakespeare 
 by Pope, 1725, by Theobald, 1734, by Warburton, 
 1749, and by Johnson, 1765. A number of works 
 which, earlier, would have been called contemptuously 
 "Gothic" came to light in the second half of the 
 century. Thomas Warton's learned History of Poetry, 
 1774-81, reopened the closed book of medieval ro- 
 mance ; ballads were brought fully to light in Percy's 
 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. Gray's 
 Triumphs of Owen and Fatal Sisters are from the 
 Welsh and Norse. The Highlands are the scene of 
 the cloudy and gloomy heroics of Macpherson's 
 pseudo-Gaelic Ossian, 1762. Chatterton's Rowley 
 Poems, purporting to be of the fifteenth century, show 
 an interest in the past which takes a scholarly turn in 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 I33 
 
 Gray's more erudite odes, The Bard and the nobly- 
 conceived Progress of Poesy. Something must be set 
 down also to the religious revival led by John Wesley; 
 it does much more than produce the hymns of Cowper 
 and the rich, vigorous, and triumphant Song to 
 David, 1763, of Christopher Smart. 
 
 Of the great mass of writing thus summarily dis- 
 missed we may dwell for a moment on one or two 
 outstanding things. It is evident that the splendid 
 rhetoric tinged with melancholy of Johnson's Vanity 
 of Human Wishes, and the happy delineations of 
 characters in the circle of Dr. Johnson's club in 
 Goldsmith's Retaliation, 1774, are of an earlier date 
 in spirit than Gray's Elegy, 1 75 1 . There q^^^,^ ^j^^ 
 is a magic appeal in the solitary figure 
 of the Elegy, even though we cannot form any human 
 picture of him, reflecting in a mood of resignation in 
 the hushed twilight landscape upon the lot of the 
 rustic poor, who are foiled of fame, yet doomed, like all 
 their fellows, to the inevitable grave. The appeal 
 partly lies in the finely phrased truisms, about feelings 
 the occasions of which are common to all; partly in 
 the implicit human cry for sympathy. The polished 
 diction and the rhythm have a rare quality which 
 transcends the formal balanced epithets and the ex- 
 cessive use of inversion, things which, in themselves, 
 would stamp Gray's genius as of his age. He is far 
 from being clear from the vices of his school — witness 
 his personification and abstraction and want of the 
 free lyrical note in the Eton College ode; yet, by 
 his feeling for the wilder aspects of nature in his 
 Letters, and for humbler human beings as in the 
 Elegy, and by his sensitiveness to the imaginative 
 
134 THe Literature of the 
 
 worth of other literatures, Welsh, Norse, and the 
 poetry of Dante, he is on the side of romance. He 
 was the widest read man of his day, a critic of fine 
 insight and historical sense, and he was not ignorant 
 of science. William Collins, like Gray, wrote in 
 the form of the elaborate academic ode; it would be 
 an instructive exercise to trace the form of the ode, 
 whether Pindaric, pseudo-Pindaric, or of regular, 
 successive stanzas, through Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Shelley, Keats, down to Swinburne, who pronounced 
 the ode the supreme form of lyric poetry. The Ode 
 to Evening is the masterpiece of Collins; there is 
 fastidious art and classic self-possession in his Ode 
 to Simplicity; and, in the Dirge in Cymbeline and 
 "How sleep the brave," he proved himself the most 
 exquisite lyrist between the Elizabethans and Blake. 
 Chatterton's fine Ballad of Charity ought also to be 
 singled out both for its intrinsic quality and for its 
 later influence on Coleridge, Keats, and the pre- 
 Raphaelites. 
 
 All this means a wider range of poetic subject; 
 it points to a liberating of emotion and to a revival 
 
 of imaginative faculties, which had 
 transition ^&^T^ gradually but finally dulled during 
 
 the puritan ascendency, the cavalier 
 reaction, and the age of prose and reason. Again, 
 when Pope counselled poets to follow "nature," his 
 meaning was that they should portray man as he 
 appears in his social environment; as this conception 
 of the function of poetry loses sway, the embittered 
 partisan attitude of the urban poets yields to more 
 frank and unsuspicious feeling and to enthusiasm; 
 the rigid rationalistic temper gives way before the 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 135 
 
 invasions of mystical and religious thought in Blake 
 and Cowper; abuse, debate, preaching, and generalities 
 are replaced by solitary introspection and reverie, or 
 by communings with nature, or with things of sen- 
 suous beauty; individualism, tentative in Cowper, 
 pronounced in Blake and Burns, takes the place of an 
 attempt to write to an artificial pattern in the school 
 of Pope; feelings which give colour to unexciting but 
 intimate events are expressed poetically in Cowper, 
 and the child-mind finds its first understanding spokes- 
 man in Blake. These changes are accompanied by a 
 less frequent use of the long-established couplet, the 
 flat blank verse line, or the octosyllabic couplet, which 
 was to have, however, a new lease of life in the Christa- 
 bel form established by Coleridge; and this was only 
 one example of a fresh metrical inventiveness which 
 set in with the revival of lyric, and of which the latest 
 master was Swinburne. As a result of all this we 
 get, at the end of the century, writers of the classical 
 tradition side by side with romantic innovators. 
 George Crabbe, 1754- 1832, in his verse _ . . 
 
 form and in his satirical temper, is old- 
 fashioned ; the realism of his description of country folk 
 in a way anticipates Wordsworth, but is without 
 Wordsworth's sympathy; he began describing the 
 villages he knew in a fit of revulsion from Goldsmith's 
 sentimentalism. His pictures of nature and the sea 
 are most intimately observed, and though he is apt to 
 see the harsher aspects, he paints what he sees vividly 
 and arrestingly. The Borough, 1810, Tales in Verse, 
 1812, and Tales of the Hall, 1819, make up a series of 
 narratives, including character sketches and tragic 
 biographies, for the most part of people of higher rank 
 
156 The Literature of the 
 
 than those in The Village, 1783. His tales are not 
 altogether sombre; some are touched with humorous 
 observation, and there are unexpected flashes of ro- 
 mantic feeling; most of the tales have unmistakable 
 force and grip and strong satirical power. 
 
 William Cowper, 1 731-1800, is another figure of 
 the transition. His Table Talk, Expostulation, and 
 
 the like are in the tradition of Pope; 
 
 but he came to protest against its 
 artifice; he sought to translate Homer more simply 
 than Pope and he deserted the couplet for blank 
 verse. Above all, he revolted against the town. 
 "Chartered boroughs, " he says, " are public plagues. " 
 The Winter Evening in The Task argues that man 
 has an innate love of natural objects, which not all the 
 seductions and vices of cities can obliterate. The 
 Task, 1785, which heralds the return of poetic style, 
 has a curious diversity of theme; the most persistent 
 interest in it is the recounting of all the simple delights 
 and observations of country life, the coming of spring, 
 the sound of distant bells, the light occupations of the 
 gardener, the gamboUings of pets and animals, much 
 in the manner of Vergil's Georgics. With this, there 
 is a large admixture of exhortation, of evangelical 
 doctrine, of challenges to deists, and of the opinions of 
 a scholarly recluse possessing a religious temper. He 
 has many sallies of humour, boisterous, as in John 
 Gilpin, Prior-like in other verses, quite individual, as in 
 The Colubriad. His music has a larger volume in the 
 unfinished Yardley Oak, 1791; and there is intense 
 feeling in the pathetic poems to Mary Unwin and 
 the lines On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture; the 
 terror of his own mental experience gives the power 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 137 
 
 of profound gloom to The Castaway. The lines On 
 the Loss oj the Royal George may take a place among 
 patriotic lyrics such as Thomson's Rule Britannia, 
 Garrick's Hearts oj Oak, and the war lyrics of Camp- 
 bell, in which rhythmic effects are generally much 
 surer than the diction and imagery. 
 
 William Blake, 1757-1827, mystic, poet, and 
 engraver, is an isolated, not to say miraculous, 
 phenomenon in his day. He is not 
 inspired in any way by his age; he 
 remained almost unknown during his life and he did 
 not found any school. His Prophetic Books are not 
 yet fully elucidated, though it is clear enough that 
 they anticipate the liberal doctrines of the next 
 generation; as in Shelley, reason and custom are 
 accused of fettering imagination and goodness, 
 priestcraft and kingcraft are condemned, and "great 
 things are done when men and mountains meet." 
 The last books, Jerusalem and Milton, are overcharged 
 with the vast spectral images and symbols which 
 haunted him habitually. His genius is more un- 
 mistakably at play in his shorter poems in Poetical 
 Sketches, as early as 1783, and Songs of Innocence, 
 1789. In some of these he recaptures perfectly the 
 lyric note of the Elizabethans; in others, the very 
 spirit of childhood speaks out its impulses and delights 
 in its own voice of simple magic; in this identification 
 of himself with the child-mind, Blake has no peer. 
 Songs of Experience, 1794, have some sinister discords 
 breaking in upon the melody of innocence. Some- 
 thing of the range of Blake's lyrical genius — its 
 strength and its sensitiveness — may be realised from 
 a comparison of "the fervent beauty and vigour of 
 
138 TKc Literature of tHe 
 
 music" of The Tiger, with "the fierce floral life and 
 radiant riot of childish power and pleasure" in Songs 
 of Innocence. 
 
 We must think of Robert Bums, 1759-96, as coming 
 late in a line of great tradition rather than as a con- 
 scious herald of romantic revolt ; he was, 
 in fact, an admirer of English eighteenth 
 century literature. He continues the tradition of 
 Scots poetry, which in a diminished way had been 
 upheld by Allan Ramsay {Poems, 1721) and Fergusson 
 {Poems, 1773) and by many unknown local poets of the 
 type of Davie Sillar, Lapraik, and Simson, recipients 
 of some of the most human verses of Burns. It is true 
 that some elements in the tradition and in Burns 
 coincided with the movement towards romance in 
 England — the love of the soil and animals; the 
 feeling for natural scenes; the revival of the lyric 
 note; the democratic doctrine, which hit well with 
 his pugnacious independence; the assertion of the 
 worth of humble folk; the piety of the hearth-side; 
 the unashamed utterance of strong instinctive pas- 
 sions; the return to past heroism and history, some- 
 times with a Jacobite tinge; the sensitiveness to the 
 imaginative and supernatural in folk-lore. On the 
 other hand, his unsparing and irreverent satire 
 of religious hypocrisy, as in Holy Willie's Prayer, 
 and of all hereditary pretensions; his love of strong 
 rustic liquors and gaieties, as in The Jolly Beggars, 
 and the mirthful narratives, such as The Twa Dogs 
 and Tarn O'Shanter, which swing along with reckless 
 speed, yet have full and exact detail, and incisive 
 vividness of expression — these things are like enough 
 to some aspects of Dunbar, but they are not much 
 
Middle Classes. 1660-1&00 139 
 
 in consonance with the aims of Wordsworth or of 
 Keats. Burns's Songs, perhaps even more than his 
 Poems, are rooted fast in a rich native soil; the Songs 
 are, for the most part, words invented or elaborated 
 from some suggestive or musical existing phrase, to fit 
 the melodies of old Scots folk-songs. In these, per- 
 haps his highest genius is shown, in their exquisite 
 sensitiveness, their absolute fidelity to experience 
 (compare them, for instance, with the generalised 
 emotions of his verses in English), the beauty and 
 simpUcity and power of his diction and rhythm, 
 especially when he utters passionate feelings of tragic 
 or pathetic intensity. 
 
 6. The Drama from 1660 
 
 The story of the drama from the re-opening of 
 the theatres at the Restoration to modern days is 
 a tale of mediocrity relieved by occasional flashes of 
 comic splendour. The first episode is that of the 
 heroic play, a grotesque form of tragedy, drawn, as 
 Dryden says in his preface to the most famous of 
 them. The Conquest of Granada, 1670, "far above the 
 ordinary proportion of the stage"; heroic romance 
 and French tragedy share the responsibility for the 
 matter and form of these plays, which were generally 
 in heroic couplets. Next came the series of Shake- 
 spearean imitations and revisions; there was much 
 incompetent botching, but Dryden's All for Love, 
 1677, a remaking of Antony and Cleopatra, is worthy 
 of its theme. Nathaniel Lee's Rival Queens, iS'JT, 
 is fitfully poetical; and Otway in Venice Preserved, 
 1682, evolves a most moving tragic conclusion out of 
 
140 TKe Literatvire of tHe 
 
 a conflict between loyalty and passion, in spite of 
 the comparative bareness of his diction. Garrick 
 took some liberties with the text of Shakespeare, 
 but at least he restored dignity to his profession. 
 Shelley's Cenci is the only other tragedy in the Eliza- 
 bethan tradition that our drama can boast. A 
 succession of rhetorical tragedies may be traced in the 
 eighteenth century, Addison's Cato, 1713, Young's 
 Revenge, 1721, Thomson's Sophonisba, 1730, Dr. 
 Johnson's Irene, 1749; but a brilliant series of bur- 
 lesques, The Rehearsal, 1671, Fielding's Tom Thumb, 
 1730, and Sheridan's Critic, 1779, hounded the type to 
 death. Citizen tragedy made a momentary appear- 
 ance in Lillo's George Barnwell, 1731. Gay's Beggar's 
 Opera, 1728, a travesty of fashionable Italian opera, 
 took the town by storm, but is not in itself any great 
 thing. Comedy has much more to show. The realistic 
 comedies of Shadwell, a fruitful creator of Jonsonian 
 humours, picture the Alsatian aspects of London 
 life; Dryden's comedies, such as Sir Martin Mar-All 
 and The Spanish Friar, 1681, are mostly tours de 
 force; he joined in the foray which pillaged Moli^re 
 for characters and situations and cheapened them 
 on their way across the Channel. A finer product 
 is the comedy of manners, such as Etherege's The 
 Man of Mode, 1676, the comedy of Wycherley (The 
 . Plain Dealer, 1677) and of the brilliant 
 
 comedv ^^°' Congreve (The Way of the World, 
 
 1 700) , Vanbrugh ( The Relapse, 1 697) , and 
 Farquhar {The Beaux' Stratagem, 1 707) . It is the wit- 
 tiest comedy of an actual society that we have; it 
 portrays a world of heartless infidelity, of reckless ad- 
 venture in pursuit of lawless pleasure, of the droll 
 
Middle Classes, 1660-1800 141 
 
 contretemps which arise out of plentiful intrigue; but 
 the infinite grace of speech of the culprits redeems 
 them for literature. Into this orgy of licence Jeremy 
 ColUer, a non-juring divine, hurled his View of the 
 Immorality of the Stage, 1698; but its immediate result 
 was a decline in art; comedy was brought back to a 
 clean way of writing only to become the tearful, senti- 
 mental thing it is in Steele's Conscious Lovers, 1722, 
 and in the figure of Faulkland in Sheridan's The 
 Rivals, 1775. In the reaction from this school, the 
 last writers of comedy till our own day, the Irishmen 
 Goldsmith and Sheridan, produced their masterpieces. 
 Goldsmith in The Good-Natured Man and in She 
 Stoops to Conquer, 1773, has a real sense of character, 
 especially of the pleasantly grotesque 
 (for which he might have taken himself . „. . . 
 as, in some measure, a model), comic 
 invention, natural sentiment, and amusing dialogue. 
 Sheridan chooses his material for plot and character in 
 The School for Scandal, 1777, from earlier plays, from 
 Vanbrugh and Moliere; it is a richer, more urbane 
 world than Goldsmith's, with entangling social con- 
 ventions, concerns with legacies, marriages of con- 
 venience, idle coquetry, and scandal-mongering; the 
 usual world of high artificial comedy. But the dia- 
 logue, though also in that tradition, is his own, the 
 quintessence of verbal wit. The earlier Rivals is, 
 for the most part, farce enriched by the figures of Bob 
 Acres and Mrs. Malaprop. The Critic, with its play 
 inset, is unsurpassed in the brilliance of its literary par- 
 ody. Though his comedy is still artificial, and though 
 most of his characters are old types, yet the effective- 
 ness of his situations and surprises, his pointed critic- 
 
142 Literature of tKe Middle Classes 
 
 isms of manners, and, above all, his wit of idea and 
 speech, compel laughter, and his style makes him 
 enduringly readable. From this time forward there is 
 a long intermission ; no plays which are at once litera- 
 ture and suited for the stage are to be found until we 
 come to two Irishmen of our own day, Wilde and 
 Synge. 
 
BOOK V 
 
 THE REVIVAL OF ROMANCE, 1 798-1 832 
 
 I . New Conditions and Interests in 
 Literature 
 
 We have seen that many new forces are stirring 
 by the end of the century; the twin processes of 
 evolution and revolution are at work. But the con- 
 scious revolution, the sense that old fetters must be 
 snapped and a new way of life entered upon, waits 
 for the declaration of Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 in Lyrical Ballads, 1798. For what they accom- 
 plished and what they adumbrated in the nineteenth 
 century, many names have been proposed — "the 
 return to nature," "the romantic revival," "the 
 renascence of wonder," "the awakening of imagina- 
 tive sensibility, " "the convalescence of the feeling for 
 beauty. " But no single name can define the diverse 
 gifts exemplified, let us say, in Michael, Kubla Khan, 
 Marmion, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Prometheus Un- 
 bound, though it is easy to see that all of them difEer 
 from The Rape of the Lock and The Vanity of Human 
 Wishes. The enquiry into causes and evidences 
 might take us far afield; we may concentrate attention 
 upon two or three points. 
 
 143 
 
144 The Revival of 
 
 i. Economic and political changes lie behind. 
 The most powerful influence is that of Rousseau 
 jj (himself indebted to Thomson's Seasons) 
 
 working through the French Revolu- 
 tion. Rousseau's comprehensive return to nature 
 involved, in the main, three things, all of which were 
 to germinate in English Hterature; first, a return to 
 the country, next, the unchecked expression of the 
 emotions, thirdly the levelling of all social distinc- 
 tions; these things all contribute to the ideal of 
 the primitive unsophisticated man wandering in the 
 forests, the natural habitat of virtuous unrestrained 
 simplicity. The fundamental doctrine of liberty was 
 worked out in prison reform, or slave liberation, in 
 the benevolent idealism of Shelley or the individual- 
 ism of Byron; in Germany, in defiance of oppression, 
 it gave birth to a nation. Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 and Southey all proclaimed an ardent youthful 
 sympathy with the French Revolution; all of them 
 recoiled from its implications and methods, and 
 younger generations, represented by Shelley and 
 Browning, looked on them askance, as "lost leaders" 
 in the great cause of freedom. 
 
 ii. The same insurgent spirit is at work, also, in 
 
 criticism. To this chapter belong Wordsworth's 
 
 theorising contentions (afterwards tem- 
 
 critic^^mrthod P^^®^ ^y Coleridge) as to the material 
 best suited for poetic treatment, as to an 
 appropriate diction, and as to the function of metre. 
 The same rebellion against rule, reason, and uniformity 
 underlies changes in the type of the critical magazine ; 
 the earlier Edinburgh, 1802, Quarterly, 1809, and 
 Blackwood, 1817, adhered substantially to the older 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 145 
 
 canons. They were powerful enough to delay the 
 acceptance of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, though 
 Jeffrey of The Edinburgh in the end softened some 
 of his strictures upon Wordsworth, and spoke gener- 
 ously of Keats. But, meanwhile, the truer critical 
 method of imaginative insight and sympathy had 
 been born in the writings of Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, 
 and De Quincey. 
 
 iii. We have already noted the evolution of a 
 deep-felt sympathy between man and nature, and 
 a recognition of beauty in the simple 
 emotions, in eighteenth century poetry; " J^ctso e 
 these were to be the texts of all Words- 
 worth's prophesyings. But, in other ways also, the 
 new poetic genius is irresistible. Wherever at any 
 earlier time poets had seen the vision of beauty 
 or caught the strains of a true music the romantic 
 genius claimed the inheritance. The art and mytho- 
 logy of Greece, the historic scenes of Italy and the 
 Mediterranean shores, the exotic customs of the East, 
 the chivalry, superstition, and faith of the Middle 
 Ages, the life of the Border with its insatiable feuds 
 and its singular heroism — the new poets essayed 
 all these themes; sometimes attempting to gild 
 refined gold, as in Keats's Endymion, but more 
 often loading every rift with richer ore as in La 
 Belle Dame sans Merci and in The Eve of St. Agnes. 
 Subjects were found, moreover, beyond the horizon 
 of these remote and historic matters. A crude and 
 unimpressive treatment of the supernatural had 
 pervaded the novels of the school of Walpole; Keats 
 and his contemporaries strike chords that ordinarily 
 lie silent far within the threshold of rational con- 
 
146 THe Revival of 
 
 sciousness, yielding echoes Only when unknown 
 terrors, longings, dreams, and ecstasies are stirred, 
 such as find utterance, for instance, in Tintern Abbey, 
 The Ancient Mariner, and Suspiria; furthermore, they 
 may be seen learning to divine between what is 
 merely neurotic and disordered and the finer issues of 
 mystery and terror, in the successive versions of 
 The Ancient Mariner and in Keats' s omissions from 
 the Ode on Melancholy. 
 
 We may remark, also, a tendency towards picture 
 and tale in place of analysis and disquisition (though 
 there is didactic and reforming poetry of supreme 
 quality in Wordsworth and Shelley). In Coleridge 
 and Keats, colour and imagery are so vibrant and 
 profuse that they appear like enchantments seen 
 through the magic casements of the Ode to the Night- 
 ingale. Some of the writers of this school cause that 
 thrill of the perfectly chosen word which gratifies at 
 once the expectation of ear, imagination, and under- 
 standing more often than has any one since Shake- 
 speare. The disciples of Keats, the pre-Raphaelites, 
 cultivated a studied exactness of imagery, and the 
 method degenerates, no doubt, into the modem vice 
 of word-painting. Indeed, the pathology of romantic- 
 ism is a revelation of the manner in which good 
 customs corrupt the world. 
 
 There are resemblances between the earlier nine- 
 teenth century and the earlier creative period, the 
 Elizabethan. Here, again, we find widened horizons, 
 the flood-tide of poetic energy, and the worship of 
 beauty; but, while the earlier group dealt mainly 
 with the world of action and afEairs, the later, with 
 exceptions, as in Byron and Scott, has a less ad- 
 
Romance, 1798-1832 147 
 
 venturous, more introspective cast. Except Scott, 
 
 there are few creators of characters, and no very 
 
 notable contribution to comedy; and the later age 
 
 has no drama. 
 
 A moment may be given here to a distinction 
 
 which is constantly confronting us in the nineteenth 
 
 centurv; that between romantic and 
 
 , . " Ti • J. M J- i- Romantic and 
 
 classic. It IS not necessarily a distmc- classic 
 
 tion of subject, for some of the triumphs 
 of romance are, in Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne, 
 on classic themes; nor is it a case of the presence or 
 absence of imagination, though this might serve to 
 differentiate broadly the pseudo-classic eighteenth 
 century. There is imagination in both the true 
 romantic and the true classic; but the latter, with 
 firm self-possession, restrains it in obedience to an 
 instinct for perfect form, while the romantic, in a 
 mood of excitement, gives it free rein; the instinct 
 for form is by no means conspicuous in The Excursion, 
 or Prometheus Unbound. The classic designs with 
 clarity of outline; the romantic is purposefully vague, 
 and is prone to run riot in decoration and colour; the 
 classic presents emotion pure and intense, the roman- 
 tic seeks out shades of feeling and powers in nature 
 which can only be half distilled into words; the classic 
 tends, on the whole, towards a statuesque type, the 
 romantic prefers to suggest veiled immensities and 
 indefinable ecstasies. These are general statements, 
 but, if there is any truth in them, the early nineteenth 
 century, though it is called romantic, produces master- 
 pieces in both kinds; the "bare sheer penetrating 
 power" which Matthew Arnold emphasises in Words- 
 worth is, for instance, classic; but, in the main, the 
 
148 TKe Revival of 
 
 works we are to discuss would fall under the other 
 category. 
 
 2. Poetry from 1798 to 1832 
 
 William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, in Descriptive 
 
 Sketches, and Coleridge, in Religious Musings, had 
 
 both written verse not distinguishable 
 
 Wordsworth ^^.^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^j^^ eighteenth 
 
 century before their intiinacy at Stowey led to the 
 staking out of the complementary claims of the 
 natural and the imaginative in poetry. The signifi- 
 cant portions of Wordsworth's development are told 
 in his Prelude, 1805 (not published till 1850), a con- 
 fessional monologue, which proves him, like Milton, 
 an egoist with an unshakable conviction of his mission 
 to teach, and shows, too, how much of his poetry 
 was of the stuff of his own emotions and reflections. 
 His mind — deep, slow-moving, but not speculatively 
 comprehensive — took profound impressions in his 
 youth ; after the moral crisis at about the age of thirty 
 he was not often open to fresh imaginative stimulus. 
 The consequences are, first, that much of his volumin- 
 ous later work is repetition in a muffled voice of what 
 had already been faultlessly uttered, and, secondly, 
 that many large tracts of experience were closed to 
 him; for instance, comedy, the tumultuous side of sex, 
 indi\'idual enmities and many aspects of beauty outside 
 nature. The Prelude modifies the usual picture of 
 Wordsworth as a staid, austere, ruminative person; 
 his youth at least was adventurous and impetuous, 
 while his first experiences of nature were of its for- 
 midable conscience-haunting aspects. An impulsive 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 149 
 
 idealism led him to take his third Cambridge vacation 
 in France, where he participated in the high hopes of 
 the Girondists. The turn given to these hopes by 
 Robespierre left him without faith, and the ra- 
 tional doctrines of Godwin's Political Justice availed 
 nothing against his spiritual unrest 
 and despair. His sister, Dorothy, dia- ahire 
 
 gnosed the malady and prescribed a life 
 amid the temperate stillness and calm power of nature. 
 The intensity of the crisis imprinted the cause of 
 recovery deeply in his mind, and he became the 
 high priest of a new gospel. Moreover, in the simple 
 folk who dwelt closest to the soil he realised the 
 value of the feeling and charity condemned by God- 
 win, and the poignancy of the primeval events which 
 "having been must ever be." At this propitious mo- 
 ment, he made the acquaintance of Coleridge, who 
 helped to kindle his imaginative and expressive 
 power; together, they projected Lyrical Ballads, 
 1798; between this date and 1807, most of Words- 
 worth's enduring work was written, though he Uved, 
 winning slow but sure recognition, till 1850. Like 
 all nature poets, he had great descriptive skill, 
 whether of minute or larger aspects; but nature was, 
 for him, much more than a gallery of magnificent 
 landscapes, or a background for action, or even a 
 scene whose physical elements might seem to sort 
 with varying human moods ; for him, man and nature 
 have spiritual identity, and his endeavour was to 
 pierce to the spirit that "impels all thinking things, 
 all objects of all thought and rolls through all things. " 
 The heart of his creed, as affirmed in Tintern Aibey, 
 1798, is that the refreshing of worn spirits, the inspira- 
 
150 TKe Revival of 
 
 tion to kindliness and goodwill, the perception of 
 truth, the power to see into the life of things, come 
 through continued intercourse with nature and the 
 contemplative rapture which it induces in those who 
 are properly attuned and wisely passive. In the noble 
 Fragment from the Recluse, however, this passivity is 
 replaced, in part, by a vital creative effort of imagina- 
 tion working upon the world, an idea akin to Cole- 
 ridge's "In our life alone does nature live." There 
 are many corollaries to such a doctrine, and they form 
 the basis of many of Wordsworth's lyrics — that the 
 beauty of nature could be transmuted into human 
 frame and feature, as in "Three years she grew"; 
 that the woods, the starry sky, and the lonely hills 
 could inform the soul with the noblest learning, as in 
 Brougham Castle, The Tables Turned, and Expostula- 
 tion and Reply; that memories are ineffaceable and bring 
 in their train a wealth of consolation and delight, as in 
 Daffodils, and Stepping Westward; and that obedience 
 to duty is the condition of stability, repose, and joy, as 
 in the Ode to Duty. The sum of his beliefs on much of 
 this matter may be found in the discussions of the 
 Wanderer and the Solitary in Books I and II of The 
 Excursion, 1814, while, in later books the Pastor illus- 
 trates them in the lives of his parishioners. 
 
 Much of Wordsworth's poetry of man is involved, 
 therefore, in his poetry of nature; in the Fragment 
 from the Recluse he announced the 
 novelty of his theme, the exquisite 
 mutual fitness of the mind of man and the external 
 world. We may regard this aspect of his work 
 under three main headings, of childhood, of rustic 
 life, and of liberty and patriotism. 
 
Romance. 179&-1&32 151 
 
 i. His poetry of childhood is tinged by the re- 
 membrance of his own infancy, when the world had 
 been lighted by some bright gleam ChUdhood 
 which he interpreted to be the result of 
 a spiritual vision freshly come from a celestial home. 
 He thinks of his mature imaginings as efforts to 
 recapture the truths which infancy possesses without 
 effort; this is the meaning of the line, "The child is 
 father of the man," which prefaces the great Ode 
 on the Intimations of Immortality, 1803-6. The ode 
 records the passing of this vision with the years; 
 yet the bonds of the two worlds are not altogether 
 severed; sometimes, still, a sound, a recollection is 
 wafted from those mightier waters to this smaller 
 earth; and, in compensation for the loss, there is 
 gained the deep human experience which modulates 
 its grief into sympathy; on this part of the ode, the 
 best comment is contained in Tintern Abbey and in 
 the Peele Castle lines. His other poems of childhood 
 have some touches of insight, but in the main, child- 
 hood remained an abstraction to him. 
 
 ii. The poems of rustic life are based on his 
 belief that there "the essential passions of the heart 
 speak a plainer and more emphatic Rustic life 
 language"; if with this we link his 
 principle that "the feeling developed gives importance 
 to the action and situation, and not the action and 
 situation to the feeling," we fathom his intention 
 in The Affliction of Margaret, Michael, Ruth, The 
 Brothers, Resolution and Independence, the Matthew 
 poems, and those of the Lucy who dwelt near his 
 Cumberland home. The narratives are bare, almost 
 trivial, but they have the suffusion of intense pure 
 
152 The Revival of 
 
 feeling, pathetic or tragic, and need no other appeal. 
 These poems of children, peasants, and half-witted 
 creatures at first stirred repugnance; they are now 
 thought by some to be among the most characteristic 
 of his writings. He is not quite a realist, his rustics 
 are not always real rustics, but the feelings are real 
 feelings, the deepest, simplest, and most widespread 
 that we know. 
 
 iii. Liberty, the first high aim of the French 
 
 Revolution, was a rallying cry for all these romantic 
 
 poets, but the interpretations of it varied 
 
 triotism widely. For Wordsworth, liberty had 
 always a close relation with discipline in 
 the individual. In another sense, as in the sonnet " The 
 world is too much with us," it meant freedom from ma- 
 terial fetters. Again, in sonnets such as The Venetian 
 Republic, and "It is not to be thought of," it lifted 
 him to a larger historic utterance than did any other 
 subject. His patriotism was a call to England to 
 wake from moral slumber, as in the sonnets which 
 invoke Milton's name. Although his ideal of The 
 Happy Warrior is pacific — a stoic self-control, a calm 
 contempt of circumstance, an immovable faith in 
 good and honour — yet he had a spark of pugnacity in 
 him which is fanned to a flame in his martial summons 
 To the Men of Kent. 
 
 Other influences touched him from time to time; 
 Milton was his model in his numerous sonnets — he 
 was a great practiser and experimenter of metrical 
 forms; the reading of Vergil suggested to him his 
 Laodamia, 1814; Scott, his faintly romantic 5roMg/!COT 
 Castle, and The White Doe, 1807. Finally, one should 
 note in him much of that kind of poetry whose main 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 153 
 
 appeals are through vague suggestion, subtle rhythm, 
 and magical halo, such, for instance, as Yew-Trees, 
 the sonnet on King's College Chapel and The Solitary 
 Reaper. 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, philosopher, 
 psychologist, critic, talker, and journalist, as well as 
 poet, took for his sphere, when he and Coleridee 
 
 Wordsworth projected Lyrical Ballads, 
 "persons and characters supernatural, or at least 
 romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward 
 nature a human interest and a semblance of truth 
 sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination 
 that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment 
 which constitutes poetic faith." 
 
 His output was large and varied, as we shall see, 
 but his genius was supremely exercised by the kind 
 of theme thus defined; The Ancient Mariner, Christ- 
 abel, and Kubla Khan all belong to his annus memora- 
 bilis, 1797-8. An opitim dream gave birth to Kubla 
 Khan with its voluptuous pictorial splendour, its 
 sounds echoing from wild mysterious haunts, its work- 
 ings of occult powers, and its weird and fascinating 
 harmonies of rhythm. The Ancient Mariner is a 
 model in Uttle of the whole of one aspect of romantic- 
 ism. Its appeal is to the imagination, it is impreg- 
 nated with the supernatural; in remote, untrodden 
 regions, the poet describes scenes of arctic cold or 
 sultry tropical heat, the dwelling-places of the un- 
 canny omens and superstitions of sailors; to each 
 scene he gives a vigour of outline, a brilliance of 
 colour, and curiously real sounds, that bewitch us 
 into granting the "willing suspension of disbelief 
 which constitutes poetic faith." With the same au- 
 
154 TKe Revival of 
 
 dacity, he enchains our interest in a series of out- 
 landish events and figures breaking abruptly upon the 
 vision, the Ancient Mariner, the albatross, the 
 phantom ship, the dead men rising, the crimson 
 lights, and the angels' songs; there are, too, homely 
 things such as the harbour, the wedding feast, and 
 the prajdng hermit; enough to remind us faintly 
 that we are in a dream. Nature plays a significant 
 part in the whole effect; the vaster elements, the 
 sun, the sea, the stars, and, above all, the moon are 
 drawn with a few bold impressive strokes; in contrast, 
 there is the fresh murmuring beauty of the month of 
 June; there are, too, the albatross and the watersnakes, 
 the imaginative counterparts of the animals in Cowper 
 and Bums ; nature, moreover, has a strange sympathy 
 with the events of the story, for some upheaval or 
 portent precedes each supernatural happening; the 
 most impressive imagery is from the same source, 
 "At one stride came the dark," "I pass like night 
 from land to land." The simplicity of wording 
 throughout is matched by the choice of metre, the 
 simple ballad form, rich in traditions to which Cole- 
 ridge and Keats above all were most delicately sensi- 
 tive. All this abundant stuff of romance is steadied 
 by a sure art, ennobled by seriousness and beauty, 
 and its unity is secured in the action and suffering of 
 the Mariner, in his moods of remorse, loneliness, gloom, 
 fear, penitence, and calm, portrayed with a psychology 
 as true as it is subtle. Christabel chooses a medieval 
 background and makes brilliant use of its chivalric 
 trappings; its second part, indeed, is Scott-like and 
 definite, though the famous lines on severed friendship 
 are beyond the scope of Scott. But the first part is 
 
Romance, 1798-1832 155 
 
 Coleridge's masterpiece; it pictures a world full of 
 foreboding, every movement and sound is a whisper 
 of doom, and the simple words seem to tremble with 
 a secret menace; inexplicable, overmastering terror 
 pervades the scene, "A thing to dream of, not to tell, " 
 which spreads its maleficent tyranny out through 
 the air, "The night-birds all that hour were still." 
 The invisible deformity of Geraldine, like the more 
 gracious influences which Wordsworth knew, is "felt 
 in the blood, and felt along the heart." The four- 
 beat measure of the poem, though not as original as 
 Coleridge thought it, gave, potent aid to the music 
 of poetry, and Scott, though with a less fine ear, 
 tried it in the Lay, and Byron in The Siege of Corinth. 
 The promise of this sudden fertile spring in 1798 
 was unfulfilled : the rest of his life was given to philoso- 
 phy, eloquence, and criticism, and everywhere he was 
 dogged by his malady of irresolution and his besetting 
 sin of drug-taking. Most of what is memorable, 
 therefore, in his voluminous production, is to be sought 
 among the writings of his youth ; there are poems of 
 the romantic kind, Alice du Clos, The Dark Ladye, 
 Lewti, and Love; Wordsworthian poems such as The 
 Nightingale and Fears in Solitude and other descriptive 
 pieces ; poems inspired by childhood, especially by his 
 own son, Hartley, such as Frost at Midnight; poems, 
 also, which give us the inward experience from which 
 he wove his spectral dreams, such as The Pains of 
 Sleep, and Dejection, which records the loss of his 
 shaping power of imagination and the failure for him 
 of the doctrine of the healing of nature. Still, there 
 remain his vigorous translation of Schiller's Wallen- 
 stein, and his political odes, To the Departing Year, 
 
156 The Revival of 
 
 1796, and France, 1798, which last utters a revulsion, 
 parallel to that of Wordsworth, from the hopes 
 earlier inspired by the Revolution. 
 
 Robert Southey, 1774-1843, was a relative by 
 marriage of Coleridge and the friend of Wordsworth, 
 g ^ the "Lepidus of the triumvirate" once 
 
 called the Lake school. He formed a 
 colossal project of writing epics on the mythologies 
 with which his omnivorous reading had made him 
 acquainted; the fruits of this project were his narra- 
 tives Thalaba, 1801 (a favourite of Shelley), Modoc, 
 1805, The Curse of Kehama, 1810, and Roderick, the 
 last of the Goths, 1814, perhaps the best of these 
 epics, because, from early years, Southey had had a 
 keen affection for the poetry of Spain and Portugal. 
 The romantic instinct for adventurous story, un- 
 familiar scenery, and pageantry is evident; but 
 neither in Wordsworth's nor in Coleridge's way 
 could he produce the illusion of reality; the poems 
 have a bookish inflexibility of imagination for all 
 their purity of diction and careful versification. 
 Some of his ballads and lyrics, tragic and humorous, 
 have won more favour than is accorded to his am- 
 bitious epic narratives. 
 
 To Sir Walter Scott, 1771-1832, fell the task of 
 commending romance to the public taste, and 
 this he did by the verse-tales written 
 between the years of Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo, among them The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 
 1805, Marmion, 1808, The Lady of the Lake, 1810, and 
 The Lord of the Isles, 1815. He was nearer to the 
 still widespread tradition of the past centtury, that 
 part of it, at least, which derives from Fielding, 
 
Romance, I798-1&32 157 
 
 than the other romantic poets, and so gained a 
 hearing more quickly. After a hundred years of sed- 
 entary poetry, of argument, satire, and melancholy, 
 he restored one of the Homeric functions, the repre- 
 sentation of physical action; the tale came to its 
 own again in the wake of the ballad. Scott, like 
 some other poets, began writing ballads in emulation 
 of the German poet Burger's Lenore; he published 
 The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802-3, but 
 he soon turned to the tale, enhancing its appeal by 
 his directness and simplicity, by his unerring instinct 
 for the salient features of scenery and place, and by 
 his pictures of border life, with its feuds and chival- 
 ries; he was nourished on its history and ballads 
 and folk-memories. He makes, in addition, a high 
 appeal to national consciousness, as may be seen in 
 his tributes to Nelson, Fox, and Pitt. His rhythm, 
 like a moss-trooping gallop, is not always free from 
 commonplace (though he has a keen sense of the 
 music of names); he draws character in broad out- 
 line; but whatever he lacks in subtlety he makes 
 up in a singularly healthy manliness of temper. 
 Yet his finest art is not in his tales, but in his lyrics; 
 in The Pibroch, Coronach, Brignall Banks, County Guy, 
 Proud Maisie, and in a dozen others, he is perfect. 
 The personahty of George Gordon, Lord Byron, 
 1788-1824, has, for later ages, unduly obscured his 
 poetic work; the tempestuous egoism, Byron 
 
 volume of passion, irrepressible con- 
 fessions of the poet, and the romantic variety of 
 his adventures attract and repel. Like Shelley, he 
 was a votary of freedom; though, at first, it meant for 
 him the freedom of the individual will, the conception 
 
158 The Revival of 
 
 becomes loftier in The Prisoner of Chillon, and, in 
 the glorious end of his career, he became the advocate 
 of the awakening nationality of Greece. Hours of 
 Idleness, 1807, did not foretell the real lyrical talent 
 which he afterwards developed, whether of the 
 resounding martial type of Sennacherib, or the curi- 
 ously explanatory passion of "When we two parted" 
 and "There's not a joy the world can give," or the 
 pure magic of "There be none of Beauty's daughters " ; 
 personal passions and recollections seem to inspire the 
 longer-breathed Dream and Darkness. English Bards 
 and Scotch Reviewers, 1809, is a piece of youthful blus- 
 ter, but with the promise of power. It indicates his 
 satirical temper and his sympathy with the school 
 of Pope. Fame came to him with his descriptive 
 itinerary Childe Harold, i and ii, 1812, where partly 
 the imagined character, and partly the historic and 
 heroic memories of southern Europe won the instant 
 ear of the public. Before parts iii and iv, 1816-17, 
 were written, Byron had become an exile in Italy 
 and an intimate of Shelley. The infinitely wider 
 power of these later cantos is due to these causes, as 
 is likewise the stronger feeling for mountain and 
 ocean which recurs in Manfred and Don Juan, where, 
 as in Shelley, it is interwoven with passion. Italy, 
 at the same time, inspired his poems to Venice, Tasso, 
 and Dante, 1819. By his series of verse tales from 
 The Giaour, 1813, to The Island, 1823, he drove Scott 
 from Scott's own field; in the earlier half-dozen 
 tales, with their pictures of oriental and southern 
 crime, headlong passion, exotic scenery, and savage 
 realism, he delineates "the Byronic hero." Conrad, 
 Lara, and the rest of them pass through the stages 
 
Romance, 1798-1832 159 
 
 of unnatural crime, guilt-stricken conscience, fevered 
 energy, and cynical contempt, to a final angry isola- 
 tion; the type is pictured for the last time in By- 
 ron's greatest non-satirical work, Manfred. Another 
 drama, Cain, depicts a different kind of guilty rebel. 
 His dramas of political intrigue, Marino Faliero, 1820, 
 and The Two Foscari, are totirs de force; they have 
 now no advocates. But, whilst writing them, Byron 
 was discovering that the heroic and romantic were 
 not his spheres; satire, realism, the normal levels of 
 life, these are the materials of his abiding work in 
 Don Juan, 1818-22, the fully accomplished successor 
 to his experimental Beppo. The loosely strung 
 episodes of Don Jtian, the rapid changes of emotional 
 key, the swift revulsions from sentiment to mockery, 
 the uncensored report of everything seen or experi- 
 enced, the total disregard of decorum, exactly fitted 
 Byron's matured genius, as did the ottava rima 
 measure, to which, at his best, he gave a new perfec- 
 tion. His expression here attains the rightness and 
 precision of his Letters; the torrent of vivid diction, 
 colloquial and unsought, sweeps rhythm, rime, wit, 
 dialogue, and rhetoric along with it in its abounding 
 power. The Vision of Judgment, 1822, a parody of 
 Southey's poem to George III of the same title, is the 
 most sustained piece of satirical invective in English. 
 When Byron has passed the stage of Titanic posing, 
 power is his supreme quality, and his power is not 
 only a mental tonic, but it carries us past his careless 
 craftsmanship and all the faults which are set in high 
 relief by his nearness to Shelley and Keats. 
 
 The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, 
 reflects the complexity of his character. Some of 
 
i6o THe Revival of 
 
 his actions, his ill-starred marriage, his visions and 
 Shellev propaganda leave the impression not so 
 
 much of a child as of a spirit from 
 another sphere, not moving in the orbit of common 
 men — thinking this life but the interlude of a night- 
 mare. Yet there were many ways in which he 
 stood in quite normal relations with his fellows; a 
 fascinating and companionable figure is revealed, 
 for instance, in his Letter to Maria Gisborne and in 
 Julian and Maddalo. But there were in him almost 
 irreconcilable traits of dejection and of idealism; his 
 Euganean Hills embodies both moods. His pessi- 
 mism becomes morbid in some of his self-portrayals 
 in Adonais, and in Stanzas written in Dejection near 
 Naples. It takes the form, at other times, of an acute 
 sense of isolation, as inAlastor, though this mood gives 
 rise to some of his supreme work, expressing the desire 
 for ideal companionship in The Sensitive Plant and 
 the fulfilment of this desire in the fervid passion and 
 symbolic backgrounds of Epipsychidion, the poem 
 which best illustrates his debt to Plato's Symposium. 
 Perhaps, also, out of the same root of dejection sprang 
 the complete abandonment of himself to the immense 
 elemental forces of nature, which is illustrated in the 
 Ode to the West Wind, and in the close of Adonais. 
 
 His all-pervading idealism inspires, first of all, his 
 lifelong battle with oppression. In his generation, 
 the watchword of liberty won back some of the 
 glamour it had had for Wordsworth; tyrannies and 
 monarchies had been restored in Greece, Italy, Prance, 
 and Spain. The early Revolt of Islam, 1818, the Ode 
 to Liberty, ennobled by historic imagination, the 
 Ode to Naples, and Hellas, 1822, invoke freedom and, 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 i6i 
 
 at the same time, arraign priest and king and tyrant, 
 as, with an intenser hate, do his pohtical satires, 
 chief among them The Masque of Anarchy, 1819. 
 In Prometheus Unbound, 1820, the object of his scorn 
 is the traditional and dogmatic conception of God. 
 Prometheus stands for the saviours of mankind, 
 Jupiter for the tyrant God, created by custom and 
 ruling by fear, who is dethroned by the rising of 
 Demogorgon, the spirit of justice, dwelling in eternity. 
 There follows in Act I-V the lyric rapture, a great 
 chorus of spirit voices, which celebrates the rejuve- 
 nation of the earth. None of the poets prophesies 
 larger hopes for man than Shelley, who owes some- 
 thing in this respect to the better part of Godwin. 
 The poet pictures an earth overflowing with love and 
 joy, its inhabitants sceptreless, equal, just, gentle, 
 wise. But, with his generous vehement mind, he 
 effects the transition to the golden age at one prodi- 
 gious stroke. He had little faculty for enquiry, for 
 the slow accumulation of experience, for the testing 
 of hypothesis, for the dreary journey between the 
 intractable real and the visionary ideal. This failing 
 has laid him open to the charge that he lacks human- 
 ity, that, in Matthew Arnold's words, he is no more 
 than "a beautiful ineffectual angel." Nevertheless 
 he is intensely in earnest in his religion of universal 
 love and freedom. The assertion of the supremacy 
 of love and freedom would no doubt have been the 
 solution of his last enigmatic fragment. The Triumph 
 of Life. His theory of the One, the encircling crea- 
 tive mind, is not clearly elaborated, but is partially 
 expressed in the triumphant close of Adonais (his 
 splendid elegy on Keats), in Moni Blanc, and in his 
 
l62 TKe Revival of 
 
 prose Defence of Poetry. Shelley is one of the poets' 
 poets; everything that passes through his mind 
 becomes saturated in poetry; but the singularity of 
 his gift is that he obliterates the defining line between 
 matter and spirit, between the solid earth and man's 
 thought, between the real and the imagined; the two 
 are involved together in his "translucent" pictures of 
 nature, especially regarding the more lawless things, 
 wind, sea, and light ; but all his imagery, perpetually 
 recurring yet always fresh, has this quality of mingling 
 the spiritual and the material. He has the Turner- 
 esque vision which sees and retains the splendid 
 moments, the ethereal hues, the spiritual beauty and 
 power of a scene; any of his numerous voyages by 
 rivers, caverns, oceans, and mountain sides, in Alastor, 
 The Witch of Atlas, and other poems, will serve as 
 illustration. He is no great creator of characters; his 
 analytic mind reduced them, in Adonais, for instance, 
 to abstractions, which move in the middle region 
 between earth and spirit. There is, however, one 
 striking and masterly exception. The Cenci, 1819, a 
 drama of Italian lust and revenge, which, in its power 
 and objectivity, and in its picture of the wronged 
 Beatrice Cenci, rivals the later Elizabethans; here, 
 the poet purposely eschewed what he called "mere 
 poetry." But "mere poetry" was his native element, 
 as one may see in his wealth of lyric verse. Shake- 
 speare, Burns, and Shelley are the monarchs of English 
 lyric ; in swift energy of thought, in miraculous melody, 
 in emotional ecstasy, in profuse imagery, and, at times, 
 in a rare faculty of myth-making, we shall search in 
 vain for the peers of songs such as "Worlds on worlds 
 are rolling ever," "My soul is like a boat," "The 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 163 
 
 world's great age begins anew," The Cloud, Arethusa, 
 To a Skylark, " I arise from dreams of thee, " " Swiftly 
 walk over the western wave, " "Rarely, rarely, comest 
 thou," and many others. Finally, mention must be 
 made of a number of excellent translations, the best 
 of them from Greek. 
 
 John Keats, 1 795-1 821, was but faintly touched 
 by the political revolution, but his early Sleep and 
 Poetry, 1817, proves him conscious of „ . 
 
 the revolution in literature. The first 
 awakening of his art came through his introduction 
 by Leigh Hunt to Spenser, Sandys, and other Jacobean 
 poets, from whose influence he never entirely escaped. 
 It was from them, as much as from Lempri^re's Dic- 
 tionary, that he gathered his knowledge of classical 
 story. Chapman's Homer, he celebrated in one of his 
 most perfect sonnets, a form in which he rivals the 
 greatest masters. Beauty was the magnet to his 
 imagination ; it drew him to Grecian art and mytho- 
 logy, to the Middle Ages and to nature. Endymion, 
 181 8, is a mingled yarn of luscious scenes and veiled 
 allegory, with many faults (which the poet himself 
 acknowledged in his manly preface) of diction, verse, 
 and feeling. It is "prentice work" and yet contains 
 such things as the ode to Pan, the song to sorrow, and 
 the Bacchic chorus. But his conception of Hellen- 
 ism was to be clarified and exalted by his growing 
 imaginative powers and, perhaps, by the influence of 
 the Elgin marbles. In expression, he was never quite 
 what Shelley called him, a Greek; the Elizabethan 
 habit of beautiful interpolation remained to the end in 
 different degrees in Hyperion, and in the odes, To a 
 Grecian Urn, To Psyche, and To Maia. The ode To a 
 
164 THe Revival of 
 
 Grecian Urn contrasts the disappointing satisfactions 
 of life with the arrested but expectant joyousness of 
 art, and closes with a tenet of which all his work is an 
 expansion, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty." 
 Hyperion remains a fragment, though the poet 
 attempted to complete it, while removing its excessive 
 Miltonic inversions. The Miltonic theme, the defeat 
 of the Saturnian gods, and something of Milton's 
 epic scale and verse structure persist; the poem is 
 Keats's highest intellectual reach, and, in the words of 
 Oceanus and Mnemosyne, it embodies his final con- 
 ception of beauty, as it is enriched by the elements of 
 memory, power, and sorrow. 
 
 His imagination pierced just as unerringly into 
 the poetic aspects of the Middle Ages. In his tales 
 Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, The Eve of Si. Mark, 
 the scenes pass like the slow unfolding of rich tapes- 
 tries; the mind is constantly being engaged by new 
 beauties of cunning decoration, of surprising contrast 
 in colour, shape, and sound. Lamia, the story of 
 the serpent-woman, is in the kind of heroic couplet 
 which Keats learned, curiously enough, from Dryden. 
 The brief unearthly masterpiece La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci is supreme in its class; it is compounded of 
 bitter personal sorrow, of nature, of chivalry, faery, 
 enchantment, magic, dream, and mortal horror; it is 
 told in ballad form with a consummate reticence 
 befitting its ghostly theme, the undoing of men by 
 evil powers, which use beauty as their lure. 
 
 Keats's conception of nature was sensuous: colour, 
 shape, sound, perfume, and touch make their simul- 
 taneous siege on the senses in, for instance. Psyche, 
 and in the flawless Autumn. There is the same 
 
Romance, 1798-1832 165 
 
 concreteness when he pictures the haunt of the night- 
 ingale, the verdurous glooms, moss-carpeted, flower- 
 scented, thrilled with sound, which entrance him to 
 wish, Hke Shelley, for death. The Nightingale ode, 
 however, is a revelation of mood, like the odes on 
 Indolence and Melancholy, whose long-hidden shrine 
 the poet discovers, by a finely imagined paradox, 
 in the very temple of deUght. The magical perfection 
 of the phrasing in these odes is the gift which entitles 
 Keats, in Matthew Arnold's words, to rank "with 
 Shakespeare." Of his other poems, the Mermaid 
 tavern lines, Fancy, Robin Hood, and "Bards of 
 Passion" are delightful, as is the song "In a drear- 
 nighted December"; the dramas Otho and King 
 Stephen and the comic poem The Cap and Bells are 
 almost negligible. 
 
 Of Landor's voluminous poetry, some of the best, 
 as in the mythic and idyUic Hellenics, 1846, is marked 
 by definite form, classic purity of Ian- other 00 ts 
 guage, and appropriateness of imagery; 
 of many exquisite short verses. Rose Aylmer is the 
 most famous. With one aspect of Wordsworth we 
 may associate The Farmer's Boy, 1800, of Robert 
 Bloomfield and the Descriptive Poems, 1820, of John 
 Clare. The nearest akin to Scott is James Hogg, 
 the Ettrick shepherd, whose Queen's Wake, 1813, shows 
 an intimate understanding of the ballad, while, in 
 The Poetic Mirror, 18 16, he skilfully parodied Scott, 
 Southey, Wordsworth, and himself; his Kilmeny is a 
 graceful fairy tale. With Byron, we should most 
 naturally associate his biographer, Thomas Moore, 
 whose largest work, Lalla Rookh, 181 7, is a collection of 
 gorgeous Eastern tales, embroidered on a prose ground, 
 
I66 The Revival of 
 
 brilliant in a kind of facile melody and narrative. 
 He is somewhat stronger in his lyric poetry, which was 
 inspired to patriotism by Emmet, asin Irish Melodies, 
 1807-34. He has also a gift of stinging banter in his 
 satirical squibs The Twopenny Fost-Bag and The 
 Fudge Family in Paris, 1818, exercising a pungent and 
 ingenious wit upon the regent and Castlereagh. The 
 mantle of Shelley fell, if anywhere, upon Thomas 
 Lovell Beddoes, though Beddoes is equally of the 
 tribe of the Elizabethan dramatists of mortality in his 
 Death's Jest Book, 1850; perhaps his rarest power is 
 shown in some of his lyrics, such as the enchanting 
 Dream Pedlary. Nearer to Keats stand his friends 
 Leigh Hunt {The Story of Rimini, 1816), Thomas 
 Hood {The Midsummer Fairies, 1827, and Eugene 
 Aram), and John Hamilton Reynolds {The Garden of 
 Florence and The Fancy). Hood is better remem- 
 bered for many comic poems, though his constitu- 
 tional bent was towards tragedy; his humanitarian 
 verses, such as The Song of the Shirt, ring true. A 
 fiercer writer is Ebenezer Elliott, whose Corn Law 
 Rhymes belong to 1831. Lamb, Hartley Coleridge 
 in his sonnets, and Wolfe win their places in 
 anthologies by one or two triumphs. Parody, 
 whether of poetical or political absurdities, produces 
 some of its classic triumphs in The Anti- Jacobin, 
 1797-8, by Ellis, Hookham Frere, and Canning; The 
 Needy Knife-Grinder, for instance, victimises the 
 sentimental revolutionism and hapless metrical 
 inventions of Southey, and The Loves of the Tri- 
 angles ridicules the misdirected poetic energies of 
 Erasmus Darwin. The Rejected Addresses, 1812, of 
 James and Horace Smith pink some of the foibles 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 167 
 
 of Crabbe, Scott, Moore, and other poets of the 
 time. 
 
 3. Prose from 1800 to 1832 
 
 The prose of the period is almost equally swayed 
 by the revolutionary and romantic interests, but, 
 until we come to Carlyle, there is nothing of the 
 sweep of Burke and Gibbon; the memorable writing 
 of 1 790-1 832 is in the novel or in essay and criticism. 
 
 We have already traced the history of the novel 
 down to Jane Austen. As in her case, Scott had 
 much of the eighteenth century in 
 him; he is in the succession of Fielding ' ^"g'^tt 
 and Smollett. But he vastly extended 
 its province, inventing the historical novel and adding 
 other elements of the largest promise. He turned 
 from the verse tale in 1815 and wrote, in all, thirty-one 
 novels. He began with Scottish history, dealing with 
 the events of 1745 in Waverley, the covenanters in 
 Old Mortality, and Mary Queen of Scots in The Abbot. 
 With Ivanhoe, 1820, began his tales of English history 
 and the Middle Ages; to this group belong, also. The 
 Fortunes of Nigel, Woodstock, and Kenilworih. Foreign 
 scenes are the background of The Talisman and Quen- 
 tin Durward; of the more domestic kind, Guy Manner- 
 ing, St. Ronan's Well, and The Heart of Midlothian are 
 all masterpieces. Scott established the European 
 canons of the historical novel, in regard to the pro- 
 portions of history and invention, the general fidelity 
 of portraiture of known persons and their exclusion, 
 in the main, from the central places in the tale, the 
 broadly accurate realisation of past national life in 
 
I68 The Revival of 
 
 profuse and picturesque detail, the credible play of 
 public events upon private fortunes, and the adoption 
 of a slightly archaic speech. To these things, he 
 added a romantic care for local scenery, steeped in 
 the atmosphere of memory and affection. He comes 
 nearest to Shakespeare in the fecundity and diversity 
 of his creations. Just exception may be taken to 
 some of his inanimate heroes and heroines and their 
 rhetorical dialogue; but, in the representation of 
 national types, especially of all ranks of Scots, from 
 monarch to crofter, speaking their native dialect, 
 and, in particular, when pitted against the Sassenach, 
 he has amazing truth and vitality; in his command of 
 the supernatural, his Wandering Willie's Tale is not 
 to be surpassed. Some of his most effective character- 
 isation is achieved in his prefatory figures, such as 
 Cleishbotham and Old Mortality. We may always 
 rely on him for fine chivalry, courageous loyalty, 
 shrewd humour, and true pathos. His large, sane, 
 and vigorous personality, and its struggle with dis- 
 aster at the close, afforded material for a classic 
 biography, the Life, by his son-in-law Lockhart. 
 Neglecting minor novelists, two others must be 
 mentioned before we come to the great Victorians; 
 J. J. Morier, whose Hajji Baba, 1824, is an enter- 
 taining and veracious chronicle of the East; and 
 Thomas Love Peacock, who satirised, in conversation- 
 novels like Crotchet Castle, 1831, the manias and 
 singularities of poets and philosophers; whilst, in 
 Maid Marian, 1822, he gave, with a tonic admixture 
 of satire, an entrancing picture of the times which 
 inspired Scott's Ivanhoe. Peacock sprinkles his 
 novels with lyrics like an Elizabethan romancer; 
 
Romance, 1798-1832 169 
 
 his Attic purity of style and fineness of wit have 
 been unduly neglected. 
 
 Most of the poets exercised themselves also in 
 criticism; Wordsworth in his prefaces, Coleridge in 
 Biographia Literaria, 1817, Scott in . 
 
 the introductory parts of his novels, 
 Southey in many reviews and biographies (out of 
 which grew his classic lives of Nelson and of Wesley), 
 Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, a subtle and eloquent 
 study of the working of creative imagination, Keats 
 and Byron in their brilliant Letters; all reflected 
 upon and discussed their individual relations to 
 poetry. Of these, Coleridge ranged „ 
 
 farthest; he was probably influenced 
 by Schlegel in his formulation of an cesthetic philo- 
 sophy based on a distinction between imagination 
 and fancy, to which Wordsworth also gave his assent. 
 There was another equally important mission for 
 criticism, to recover the buried riches of English 
 renascence literature. In this quest, Coleridge, 
 Lamb, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Scott (as 
 in his lives of Dryden and of Swift) , were all engaged. 
 Coleridge, though his work is preserved only in 
 fragments in Biographia Literaria, and in notes on 
 Elizabethan drama, is the most original; for, with a 
 poet's sensitiveness and a philosopher's analytic 
 insight, he imagines afresh the conditions of creation 
 in another mind and traces the steps in the evolution 
 of a masterpiece; on all estimates of Shakespeare and 
 Wordsworth since his day he has left an abiding 
 impress. Lamb's different way may be seen in the 
 fact that some of his best criticism of Shakespeare is 
 in essays on actors ; the human aspect of literature was 
 
17° The Revival of 
 
 more to him than the critical. His brief inspired 
 notes to his perfect anthology, Specimens of the Dra- 
 matic Poets, 1808, are the high- water mark of impres- 
 sionist criticism. His fine insight enables him, in his 
 Tales from Shakespear, 1807 (the comedies were done 
 by his sister Mary), to retain the "exact emphasis of 
 the original." 
 
 WilUam Hazlitt, 1778-1830, in works written 
 between 181 7 and 1820, The Characters of Shake- 
 speare's Plays, The English Poets, The English Comic 
 Writers, has left a body of sane, spirited, human 
 judgment in a manner which infects the reader 
 with the critic's own enjoyment; his standards, like 
 Lamb's, are personal, but he takes a wider range, 
 seeing character not in isolation, but in contact with 
 other men and manners ; he has even more of the pure 
 zest — "gusto" he calls it — of letters than Dryden. 
 De Quincey, also, must have a niche here, both for 
 his share in the elucidation of Macbeth, and for his 
 essays on rhetoric and style, where he formulates 
 the illuminating distinction between the literature of 
 knowledge and that of power. 
 
 The essay cannot be sharply divided from critic- 
 ism. The magazines. The Edinburgh, The Quarterly, 
 
 Blackwood's, The London, and Eraser's, 
 in. The essay .j , , . , 
 
 provided a means of expression and some- 
 times a means of liveUhood to writers such as Gifford, 
 . Southey, Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, Leigh 
 
 Hunt, De Quincey, and, later, Carlyle. 
 Hazlitt's forceful, though not always just, review of 
 notabiHties in 1825, The Spirit of the Age, is only the 
 last of a series in which brain-stuff, wit, sharp chal- 
 lenge, skilful overture, raciness, and exactness of 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 171 
 
 writing are extraordinarily abundant. The lively and 
 copio us Nodes A mbrosianm of John Wilson (Christopher 
 North) appeared in Blackwood. Walter Savage Landor, 
 1 775-1 864, is best remembered for his 
 Imaginary Conversations, 1824-9, and 
 for the extensions of them in Pentameron and Pericles 
 and Aspasia. The speakers are men and women 
 chosen from history, Hannibal, Marius, Godiva, Anne 
 Boleyn, Spenser — there are hundreds of them; their 
 speech is veined with lively human touches and with 
 memories of idyllic scenes, but there is hardly any 
 narrative fibre. His own independent and, in some 
 ways, unadaptable principles are reflected; he is like 
 Swinburne, a republican but no democrat. He is as 
 cunning in another order of prose-writing as De 
 Quincey, in contrast with whom he stands in the 
 classic lucidity, lightness, and plastic jj^ Ouincey 
 beauty of his expression. Thomas De 
 Quincey, 1 785-1 859, wrote work prodigious in bulk; 
 besides criticism, he produced long essays such as 
 those on the Caesars and the Essenes; confessional 
 prose, like the Opium-Eater and the Autobiographical 
 Sketches; reviews of the works of his contempora- 
 ries, and stories and fantasias. In these last, he is 
 greatest; his richly wrought prose, poetry in all but 
 regularly recurrent rhythm, is perfect in narratives 
 such as The English Mail-Coach, The Spanish Mili- 
 tary Nun, and The Revolt of the Tartars, where his 
 harmonious periods suggest, with immense power, 
 the movement of multitudes over vast steppes and 
 deserts, through unspeakable sufferings. The "prose 
 of impassioned reverie " is seen in his Dream Fugue and 
 in Suspiria. The shifting cloud-matter of dreams 
 
172 THe Revival of 
 
 is marshalled as logic orders it in the one; the pro- 
 ioundest tortures and despondencies of the mind are 
 symbolised in the other. He perceived a psycho- 
 logical correspondence between vision and "rhyth- 
 mus, " and his ample cumulative periods cohere in 
 ceremonious patterns, falling, at the same time, 
 with infallible music upon the ear. 
 
 Charles Lamb, 1775-1834, with his delicacy and 
 strong understanding and waywardness, remains 
 Lamb unique. The Essays and Last Essays of 
 
 Elia, 1820-5, are intimate revelations 
 of his tastes, antipathies, and moods. Three or four 
 subjects engage him chiefly: old-fashioned London 
 scenes, such as the Temple and India House; char- 
 acters who inhabit them, possessing odd twists 
 of habit and disposition; his near relations, painted 
 with fine penetration and forbearance; matters, too, 
 of comic extravagance, or of imaginative fantasy, or 
 of pathetic wistful regret. All this is told by one 
 who was rich in humanity, in love with life, who 
 bore disastrous blows with fortitude. His most 
 engaging quality, even more evident in his letters, 
 is his humour; pun, repartee, grave exaggeration, 
 grotesque narrative, whimsical turns of thought, 
 reminiscent anecdote, kindly ridicule, delicate irony 
 — he runs through the whole gamut of humour with 
 the finest taste, and is equally sure in his pathos. 
 His style, though intimately personal, extracts 
 essences from many rare herbs, Jacobean prose 
 writers, seventeenth century lyrists and dramatists; 
 he is a connoisseur in words and prose rhythms; 
 whether simple or elaborate, he makes them deli- 
 cately flexible and adaptable to his moods. The im- 
 
Romance. 1798-1832 173 
 
 mensely voluminous democrat William Cobbett is a 
 more pugnacious egoist; his political Cobbett 
 
 thought and utterance, in his Weekly 
 Political Register, 1802-35, were not always strictly 
 under control or strictly consistent, but he is saved 
 for literature by his style, which is strong, simple, 
 and direct. In his Rural Rides and in his Advice to 
 Young Men and Young Women, 1830, where, some- 
 times, the softening light of memory falls upon the 
 page, he is a classic writer, one whose sense of the 
 purport of words is matched by economy in their use. 
 
BOOK VI 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 I. Currents of Thought 
 
 In 1832, the energies of the romantic revival were 
 dispersed; thought, political and religious, comes 
 more insistently into literature, and, in spite of the 
 poetry of Tennyson, Browning, the pre-Raphaelites, 
 and the Oxford poets, we are in an age of prose. Two 
 main currents — with many tributaries — may be 
 detected: the rationalist, an English tradition from 
 Locke and Hume, confirmed in Benthamism and 
 utilitarianism; and, on the other hand, the religious, 
 culminating once in the Catholic reaction of the 
 Oxford Movement, and, again, in the Broad Church 
 party, with Maurice at its head. The rationalists 
 are reinforced, first, by the widespread speculative 
 doubt which Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning 
 sought to dispel in Sartor Resartus, In Memoriam, and 
 La Saisiaz; secondly, by the vast evolutionary hypo- 
 thesis of science, interpreted very largely in material- 
 istic ways. Religious feeling was fostered by the 
 transcendental philosophy which Coleridge unsyste- 
 matically poured into the ears of clever young men 
 at Highgate; Carlyle's ironic picture of him in the 
 
 174 
 
The Victorian A^e 175 
 
 Life of Sterling, is well known. Carlyle, however, 
 was the most potent apostle of the new idealism, 
 which was our largest debt to Germany; though it 
 did not provide him with a working faith. The 
 Oxford Movement turned back to medieval tradi- 
 tion by the assertion of authority in the church, by the 
 appeal to feeUng, and by the use of ritual ; in this last, 
 it showed an interesting approach to the pre-Raphael- 
 ites; Morris found much of his inspiration in the 
 Middle Ages, and the same aspect in Scott powerfully 
 attracted Newman. In politics, we become aware of 
 the incarnation of some of the ideas of Rousseau in 
 governmental forms when the Reform bill was passed 
 in 1832. In many ways, democracy was foiled of its 
 expression; but its demands and its hopes enter 
 largely into the works of men so diverse in outlook as 
 Dickens, Ruskin, and William Morris; the newspaper 
 and the modern novel are the mouthpieces of the 
 democratic state. Democracy and science join hands 
 in trade, invention, and communication; for literature, 
 their conjunction is more significant in the fiction 
 of Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, and Thomas 
 Hardy. Science produced its own masters of writing, 
 the greatest of whom was Huxley. 
 
 2. Victorian Poetry, 1832-1900 
 
 As an artist, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809-92, 
 worked most securely in lyric and idyllic material; 
 he was impelled, however, by the spirit Tennyson 
 
 of the age, to weave contemporary 
 thought into his art. He sought to cope with his 
 own profound grief at the death of Arthur HaUam 
 
176 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 and to bring to terms his crumbling beliefs and the 
 new doctrines of science in In Memoriam, 1850. He 
 attained, finally, an optimism based on feeling, an 
 instinctive conviction of immortality, and a sense of 
 all-pervading Divine law, which were balm to the 
 troubled spirits of his day. This closeness to his 
 time gives his thought a bygone air, though the 
 craftsmanship retains its primal beauty and skill. 
 Under the same impulse, he wrote Idylls of the King, 
 1859-85, "shadowing Sense at war with Soul." Here 
 are recorded the ideals and prowess of the knights 
 of the Round Table, the organised powers of right- 
 eousness, and its disintegration, first by the guilty 
 passion of Lancelot, next by the pursuit of the wander- 
 ing fires of enthusiasm, as of the Grail, by men unfitted 
 for the quest. The final note is, again, optimistic, 
 as may be seen in the passage at the close on the 
 changing of "the old order," and in the later poem 
 Merlin and the Gleam. However lofty the ideal 
 unfolded in them, the Idylls are now, in a manner, 
 faded. If we bear in mind the art of Tennyson's 
 predecessor Malory, it is easily seen that the fault 
 lies in the treatment of the material ; it cannot serve — 
 Keats and Scott never tried to make it — as a vehicle 
 for overt preaching. This judgment is confirmed 
 when we see that the earlier-written idylls, such as 
 Morte d' Arthur, with no allegorical interpolation, are 
 of higher poetic worth. Tennyson could never quite 
 command the large metaphysical utterance of Words- 
 worth and Shelley; we may note, too, that, in long 
 poems, he is generally wanting in structural gift, 
 though Maud is an exception. The conclusion is 
 that these more ambitious works are not likely 
 
The Victorian A^e 177 
 
 to be the most prized; and the same sentence would 
 apply — were it not for the sprinkling of magical 
 Ijnics — to The Princess, 1847, and to the historical 
 dramas, with some reservation in the case of Becket, 
 1884. FitzGerald thought that Tennyson never 
 advanced upon the two volumes of 1842. Ulysses 
 represents his classically inspired verse (including 
 his most powerful single poem Lucretius) in which he 
 was uniformly triumphant ; Sir Galahad and the Lady 
 of Shalott show him gleaning in the Middle Ages, 
 though he never proved himself a true medievalist; 
 Locksley Hall prophesies later poems of social concern ; 
 The Gardener's Daughter is of the form of village 
 idyll to which Enoch Arden, 1864, belongs. The 
 Dream of Fair Women is the most exquisite of his 
 too rare dream-galleries; "Break, break, break" 
 illustrates, as does his swan-song. Crossing the Bar, 
 the Tennysonian lyric, which crystallises deep-felt 
 emotion round some fitting image in nature. His 
 many volumes, down to the last. The Death of Mnone, 
 1892, comprise, besides these things, the lyrical mono- 
 drama Maud, 1855, which, along with overstrained 
 melodramatic and morbid elements, embodies some 
 of his most passionate and subtle writing; patriotic 
 poems, finely tempered and stirring when celebrating 
 heroic action, as in The Revenge and The Heavy Bri- 
 gade, though, at times, sinking to insularity; and 
 poems of character, to which belong his humorous 
 dialect poems. The Northern Farmer, and others. 
 He is a nature poet, of the order, though not with the 
 fulness, of Keats; he broods expectantly before his 
 object until vision and reflection generate the inevi- 
 table phrase ; either in minute observation or broad 
 
178 The Victorian A^e 
 
 atmospheric effect, nature is an element in all his verse, 
 though it has never the overmastering importance 
 that it has in Wordsworth and Keats. He is a great 
 "inventor of harmonies"; the Hnes to Vergil, to 
 Milton, the blank verse of Morte d' Arthur, Ulysses, 
 Tithonus, the stanzas of The Palace of Art, and lyrics 
 such as "Tears, idle tears," come instantly to mind. 
 His vision of beauty is expressed with mastery of 
 rhythm, phrasing, whether simple or gorgeous, 
 sound-values, alliteration, haunting suggestion, and 
 is adorned with innumerable allusions, the spoils of 
 his wide and scholarly culture; and all is polished 
 and perfected with an art only equalled by that of 
 Pope among English poets. 
 
 Robert Browning, 1812-89, shares with Tennyson 
 the supremacy of Victorian poetry, though his fame 
 Brownine ^^^ slower of confirmation. He was 
 
 remote from traditional schools of 
 poetry and he had not Tennyson's flawless technique 
 with which to win the public ear. Browning was 
 a detached spectator, Tennyson a fellow-sufferer 
 with his age; Browning, in a sense, was cosmopohtan; 
 Tennyson, Hke Dickens, English to the core. Both 
 were addicted to the contemporary habit — Brown- 
 ing more than Tennyson — of thinking rehgious things 
 out in poetry; it is evident in Christmas Eve and 
 Easter Day, 1850; and La Saisiaz, 1878, is Brown- 
 ing's In Memoriam. Browning proved himself the 
 subtler intellect, and, by temperament, the more 
 convinced optimist. His poetry reflects politics 
 little enough, and he takes from science chiefly what 
 can be spiritually interpreted, as in Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 Of his earlier poems, Paracelsus, 1835, remains one of 
 
THe Victorian A^e 179 
 
 his most stimulating achievements; Sordello, 1840, 
 completely discouraged his public. Something was 
 retrieved, however, by the grace and power of Pippa 
 Passes, 1 84 1, the first of the series named Bells and 
 Pomegranates. After many dramatic lyrics and ro- 
 mances in this series, and after a number of plays, the 
 best of them A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, 1843, he came 
 to his preordained form, the dramatic monologue, a 
 comprehensive soliloquy absorbing into itself sur- 
 rounding scenery and persons, and bringing all that is 
 pertinent to the chosen moment by the charmels of 
 memory, association, and reflection. He employed 
 this form in Men and Women, 1855, in Dramatis 
 Persona, 1864, and in Dramatic Idyls, 1879-80, in 
 which last, action divides the interest with analysis. 
 His agile curiosity, odd garnerings of knowledge, 
 peculiar vigilant humour, and power of synthesising 
 all into a consistent picture are illustrated in types 
 of many lands and ages, as, for example, Karshish, 
 Fra Lippo Lippi, the Bishop of St. Praxed's, Mr. 
 Sludge, Bishop Blougram, Caliban, and Cleon. Clean 
 and A rtemis Prologises remind us of Browning's high 
 devotion to Greece, the best fruit of which was his 
 Balaustion's Adventure, 1871 ; but his imagination 
 moved more freely and surely in the Italy of the 
 renascence. Though not quite a trustworthy critic, 
 he was keenly interested in music and art, still more 
 in the souls of musicians and artists; in the same 
 way he regarded his lovers, most of whom, signific- 
 antly, fail in their quest. All these poems give 
 evidence of a subtle sense of character, as indicated 
 by thoughts and longings before these crystallise 
 into action; he lays bare the soul by the application 
 
i8o The Victorian Age 
 
 of a sudden test; nothing could be more unlike the 
 long slow gradient of interest in Wordsworth's poems. 
 Browning is sharply conscious of detail, of edges, of 
 salient divisions in nature, humanity, and thought, 
 especially if they border on the grotesque or evil. 
 In a later series of poems, The Ring and the Book, 
 1868-9, Fifine at the Fair, 1872, Red Cotton Night-Cap 
 Country, 1873, and The Inn Album, 1875, he seems to 
 aim specifically at crushing truth out of pestiferous 
 accumulations of falsehood. Of these, The Ring and 
 the Book is his masterpiece, in respect of constructive 
 power, cunning detail, vivid exposure of complex 
 motive, unfaltering appropriateness of speech and 
 outlook to each character in the ten-times repeated 
 story, notably when he portrays the four most pro- 
 minent characters, Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, 
 and the Pope. His last volume, Asolando, 1889, 
 recalls his early freshness and wealth of lyric, and 
 echoes again his lifelong creed that failure, evil, and 
 misery are but opportunities for victory afforded by 
 a far-seeing Divine Love to the immortal soul of man. 
 "No weakness, no contempt" is true of Browning as 
 of Milton. This robust energy and manliness, this 
 grappling with the actual, in order to wring from it a 
 heightened sense of the worth of life, this scorn of 
 lethargy, though it may wear the mask of morality, are 
 likely for long to make the poet a rare remedial and 
 tonic companion. As to style, though it would be a 
 grave error to suppose that he entirely eschewed 
 grace, sweetness, and melodic variety to challenge 
 attention by oddities and novelties, it is clear that 
 his diction and rhythm have the quality of aggres- 
 sive ptmgent singularity oftener than that of exquisite 
 
The Victorian Age i8i 
 
 beauty; he has a special fondness for the shock of the 
 actual, in the midst of the imaginative picture, and 
 for prosaic rhythms among those of poetry. It is 
 unfortunate that he often lays himself open to a just 
 charge of obscurity; it comes of over-swiftness of 
 thought, of excess of detail, and of too great compres- 
 sion; but, perhaps, it is, in truth, a more serious charge 
 that he too often falls back into the mood of prose. 
 
 With him may be named his wife, Elizabeth Bar- 
 rett Browning, whose exquisite Sonnets from the Portu- 
 guese, 1850, are inspired by a rare passion ^^^ Browning 
 and devotion. Her touch is surest in 
 lyric, especially in the lyric of sjmipathy, as in 
 Cowper's Grave and The Cry of the Children; but she 
 also wrote romance like The Romaunt of Margaret 
 and The Rhyme of the Duchess May, and celebrated 
 the Italian struggle for Hberty in Casa Guidi Windows, 
 1 85 1, whilst her long verse novel, Aurora Leigh, 1857, 
 has passages of insight, exaltation, and beauty, 
 strongly phrased, though it exhibits many defects 
 of style and construction. Most of her poems expose 
 her extraordinary carelessness in rime. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, 1822-88, seems, in his Poems, 
 1853, and New Poems, 1867, to retreat from life, 
 baffled by its outward complexity; a „ . 
 
 tone of melancholy and loneliness per- Arnold 
 
 vades Dover Beach, a wistful conscious- 
 ness that he could not attain the faith which he 
 envied in others. This, with a deep reverence for 
 truth and noble character, inspires Rugby Chapel, 
 and some other poems, where a quiet beauty and 
 rare distinction give way, at times, to a more poignant 
 cry; the stoic resolution upon which he falls back is 
 
l82 The Victorian A^e 
 
 the basis of poems of the type of The Last Word. A 
 curious beauty haunts The Forsaken Merman; and 
 fine natural descriptive powers are exercised in The 
 Scholar Gypsy and in Stanzas from the Grande Char- 
 treuse. He shows that he is finely sensitive to the 
 spiritual thought of other poets — Goethe, Words- 
 worth, Heine, Byron, and Shakespeare — in Memorial 
 Verses, the Obermann poems, Heine's Grave, and the 
 sonnet on Shakespeare. Merope and his other classi- 
 cal poems are less marked by "excellent action," 
 restraint, proportion, and keeping than are his admir- 
 able narratives Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead, 
 with their limpid unencumbered speech, and his 
 elegiac poems, above all, Thyrsis. This last is an 
 
 elegy on Arnold's friend and fellow- 
 °"^ student at Oxford, Arthur Hugh Clough, 
 
 a mind of the same order, whose "piping took a 
 troubled sound," like Arnold's. Clough's Bothie 
 of Tober-na-Vuolich, 1848, has more elasticity of spirit 
 and more humour than have any of Arnold's poems, 
 and his lyrics, especially the memorable "Say not 
 the struggle naught availeth, " are inspired by stronger 
 hopefulness of conviction. 
 
 The phrase pre-Raphaelite has reference to the 
 colouring, the minute elaboration, and the religious 
 
 mysticism of the early Italian painters. 
 Ranhaelites ^^ poetry, it is a convenient title for 
 
 anti-classical poets, such as the Rossettis, 
 Morris, and, in part, Swinburne. Dante Gabriel Ros- 
 setti's translations, Dante and his Circle, 1861, remind 
 D G Rossetti ^^ °^ ^^ Italian blood; his Poems, 1870, 
 
 and Ballads and Sonnets, 1881, give us 
 The Blessed Damozel, the sonnet-sequence The House 
 
TKe Victorian A^e 183 
 
 0/ Life, and his London street poem Jenny. His 
 ballads — ^historical, as in The White Ship and The 
 King's Tragedy, menacing and unearthly in Sister 
 Helen, and others which make use of the essentially 
 romantic motive "the evil powers of nature assailing 
 man through his sense of beauty" — are among his 
 most notable work. The House of Life is a record 
 of the passion and mystery of love; sensuous as its 
 imagery often is, its intense emotion sets it spirit- 
 ually aglow. There is no swift torrent of words, 
 but the molten passion is moulded into exquisite 
 pictorial shapes by the painter's regard for form 
 and composition. All Rossetti's writing has slow 
 fastidious distinctness, sumptuous phrasing, and 
 close-packed imagery and subtle and varied musical 
 
 appeal. His sister, Christina Rossetti, 
 
 , , Chnstina 
 
 was much more spontaneous, as we Rossetti 
 
 may see in the dehcate lyrical abandon 
 
 and quick repetitions of songs such as A Birthday; her 
 
 poems, mostly lyrical, are unique in their blending of 
 
 opposite qualities, the power of miniature wizardry 
 
 (in Goblin Market), the religious ecstasy of a finely 
 
 devout spirit, the keen sense of physical beauty and 
 
 colour, and subtle simplicity in rhythm and phrasing ; 
 
 she divides with Keble {The Christian Year) and 
 
 Newman {The Dream of Gerontius) the title of the 
 
 chief religious poet since Vaughan. 
 
 William Morris, 1834-96, was the most voluminous 
 
 of Victorian poets, and by far (though Rossetti was 
 
 painter as well as poet) the most ac- 
 
 tive in other decorative arts, for which Morris 
 
 he chose the general title "designing." 
 
 He imitated the pictorial aspects of many other 
 
1 84 The Victorian Age 
 
 poets' work; Rossetti, Chaucer, Tennyson, Browning, 
 and the sagas all left some impress on him. His 
 prevailing inclinations were towards medieval forms, 
 even when he tells the classical tale, The Life and 
 Death of Jason, 1867, and the twelve classical stories 
 which alternate with the twelve medieval and Oriental 
 legends in The Earthly Paradise, 1868-70. This 
 collection is after the fashion of The Canterbury Tales, 
 though the tellers meet in a remote imaginary island. 
 His earlier Z>e/ewce of Guenevere, 1858, had a poignancy, 
 a sense of bitter strife in the conscience, symbolised 
 in colours and figures of a feverish brightness and 
 sharpness, which disappeared from the "tapestry- 
 work and low music" of The Earthly Paradise. For, 
 here, we have, instead, brilliantly coloured shadows 
 in a brilliantly coloured shadow land; a large equable 
 movement, whether in stanza or couplet, a pervading 
 note of melancholy, and no humour. Yet these are 
 memorable retellings of famous tales, without the 
 Tennysonian intrusions of sermon and counsel. 
 Greater than these, however, are the poems, of epic 
 rather than of romantic temper, inspired by the north- 
 ern sagas, some of which Morris translated in prose as 
 well as in verse. Sigurd the Volsung, 1876, has some 
 of the berserk force, the immense passion, the heroic 
 battUng, the relentless spirit of the Scandinavian 
 originals. He undertook other translations such as 
 the Odyssey, the Mneid, and Beowulf. Of his prose 
 romances, some picture medieval Utopias, as The 
 Dream of John Ball, others primitive Teutonic life, 
 such as The House of the Wolfings, 1889; all are in 
 a simple coloured prose which has the effect of 
 poetry. 
 
The Victorian Age 185 
 
 Other poets must be more briefly named: Dobell, 
 author of the fine ballad Keith of Ravelston; Aytoun, 
 
 now remembered for the Bon GauUier _^. „ ^ 
 D 77 J 1-1 , . . Other Poets 
 
 HaUads, which are humorous m inten- 
 tion, like The Ingoldshy Legends of R. H. Barham; 
 W. M. Praed, whose "society" verse almost equals 
 Prior's, and C. S. Calverley, a master of parody. 
 Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Lord de Tabley wrote 
 lyrics of fine musical power; P. J. Bailey, in the extra- 
 ordinarily unequal Festus, 1839, and R. H. Home, in 
 Orion, 1843, are writers of epic verse. Coventry 
 Patmore's Odes prove him a master of the theory and 
 practice of rhjrthm. High thought and feeling, bold- 
 ness of imagination, and mastery of poetic diction win 
 for Francis Thompson his place among the major 
 poets. 
 
 Three others remain to be spoken of, one at some 
 length — Edward FitzGerald, George Meredith, and 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne. Among ,, .... 
 
 , . _ ^ ,. , , „ ° Meredith 
 
 the poems of Meredith, the so-called 
 
 sonnets Modern Love, give us one of his subtlest 
 
 tragical studies of temperaments at war with one 
 
 another. The song entitled The Lark Ascending, 
 
 has a pure and marvellously sustained melody, as has 
 
 also The Woods of Westermain, where the music is 
 
 interwoven with the doctrine set out in Earth and 
 
 Man: that earth, which has patiently fostered many 
 
 generations, is the surest source of wisdom and 
 
 health, however austere the discipline. FitzGerald, in 
 
 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, 1859, pro- wtzGerald 
 
 fessed to translate the quatrains of 
 
 a Persian poet; his version is, in fact, a poem of the 
 
 nineteenth century, in an Eastern setting, the finest 
 
1 86 TKe Victorian Age 
 
 imaginative expression of the creed of hedonism. 
 FitzGerald seeks to drown the age-long questionings 
 as to man's fate in the cup of voluptuous content. 
 The questions, however, still echo through the verse 
 and receive sardonic rejoinders. The wistful and 
 ironic tone of the poem, its opulence of colour, bold 
 and novel imagery, and the haunting music of the 
 rhythm and stanza give it enduring charm. 
 
 With an intensely individual temper, Algernon 
 Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909, unites a keen sus- 
 Swinbume ceptibility to the influence of other 
 poets. His deepest affinity is with 
 Shelley, an earlier intellectual revolutionary, though 
 Swinburne's creed insists more on Uberty than on 
 equality or fraternity; he has Shelley's antagonism 
 to priests and kings, and Lander's paganism. The 
 cause of liberty and the leaders in the cause, Mazzini 
 and Hugo, inspire the great poems of his middle 
 period, A Song of Italy, 1867, and Songs before Sun- 
 rise, 1 87 1. Like Shelley, he has native kinship with 
 the Greek poets; it is evident in Atalanta in Calydon, 
 1865, with its exquisitely musical choruses, and in 
 the more austere Erechtheus, 1876. Like Shelley's, 
 too, is his power of penetration into nature; his 
 landscapes have the same expressiveness of mood. 
 No English poet is to be compared with him, how- 
 ever, in the sense of the power and beauty and mys- 
 tery of the sea, as shown in A Forsaken Garden, By 
 the North Sea, A Swimmer's Dream, and many another 
 poem. The spirit of rebellion, of insurgent youth, 
 inspires his Poems and Ballads, 1866; while Laus 
 Veneris and Dolores, show his keen sense of feminine 
 beauty. Nothing is hidden of the animal stirrings, 
 
The Victorian A^e 187 
 
 the languor and revulsions of love, of passion, with 
 its train of exaltation and bitterness, and of death, 
 whose wide empire of quiet promises relief from the 
 ache of intolerable desire. This exotic material, 
 recorded in marvellously musical verse, is less pro- 
 minent in the Poems and Ballads of 1878 and of 1889, 
 and other volumes of lyric verse. Other themes — 
 patriotism; ballads of the sea; a series of memorial 
 poems, including those to Landor, Kossuth, Baude- 
 laire (the beautiful and disturbing Ave atgue Vale), 
 Marlowe {In the Bay) ; sonnets on Elizabethan drama- 
 tists; — mingle with his poems of liberation. Other 
 volumes included splendid medieval romances, Tris- 
 tram of Lyonesse, 1882, and The Tale of Balen, 1896; 
 and also his dramatic trilogy, Chastelard, 1865, Both- 
 well, 1874, and Mary Stuart, 1881, each of which shows 
 how lasting upon him was the influence of the Eliza- 
 bethans. We may sometimes feel that he conjures 
 too readily with the poet's symbols — stars, wind, 
 storm, light, spray, sleep, pair, sorrow, death — and 
 that the facile silver tones and the easy emphasis of 
 alliteration can hardly be consonant with deeply felt 
 passion. Yet he is a pioneer, and remains the sover- 
 eign of a new kingdom of rhythm and metrical form. 
 In intricate and dainty forms such as the triolet and 
 ballade, in billowy roller-like measures as in the 
 Hymn to Proserpine, in the stanzas of The Garden of 
 Proserpine, Itylus, and other poems, with brief, 
 strong closing lines, and in the transformed couplet 
 of Tristram (to name only a few cases), he brought 
 to light inexhaustible springs of new metrical art. 
 
l88 The Victorian Age 
 
 3. The Victorian Novel 
 
 Charles Dickens, 1812-70, wrote best when his 
 subjects were those of memory and observation; 
 jj. . poverty oppressed his childhood and 
 
 youth, and in those days he acquired 
 intimate knowledge of the lower classes and of London 
 street life; the imprisonment of his father, the original 
 of Micawber, accounts for a number of pictures 
 of debtors' prisons; his experience as a reporter 
 took him to provincial towns, travelling by coach 
 and sojourning in inns, and his descriptions of these 
 mark him a successor of Fielding. His two years' 
 stay in a solicitor's office is the source of his brilliant 
 gallery of lawyer portraits. The everyday life of 
 humble people, their toil, distresses, enmities, volu- 
 bilities, and diet, the background and atmosphere of 
 their dwellings, are set forth with amazing vividness. 
 He suffuses the grey and desolate realism of Crabbe 
 with the warm colours of humour and pathos. He is 
 always prone to force the note ; none of his characters 
 deliver themselves quite like men of this world; but 
 whereas characters like Mrs. Gamp, Micawber, Peck- 
 sniff, Gradgrind, Peggotty, Gargery, and the Wellers 
 are over-emphasised in the manner of Ben Jonson's 
 "humours," they are at least a sublimation of truth; 
 while figures such as Monk in Oliver Twist, and 
 Steerforth are drawn from the outside and we have 
 no interest in them; like his plots, with their lost 
 wills, murders, and kidnappings, and some of his 
 descriptions of the pathos of unmerited suffering, 
 they are theatrical, a strain in Dickens which played 
 him false in many. ways. He was too ready to sacri- 
 
THe Victorian A^e 189 
 
 fice probability to a situation; hence, a too persistent 
 use of coincidence. His casual and hurried method 
 of printing monthly parts no doubt affected the 
 construction of his stories, as it did Thackeray's, 
 for the worse; for, though they are crowded with 
 incident, only rarely do they unfold themselves by 
 an inner necessity; in this matter, his historical 
 novels Barnaby Rudge, 1841, and A Tale of Two Cities, 
 1859, stand a little apart. He sometimes al- 
 lowed his artistic conscience to be overborne by 
 concurrence with the standards of his audience; and 
 he did not always succeed in raising his splendidly 
 generous hatreds of child drudgery, religious hy- 
 pocrisy, legal fraud, tyrannical schools, and debtors' 
 prisons from the rank of propaganda to that of art. 
 But, whatever his defects, there remain his abounding 
 vitality, human sympathy, irresistible farcical fun, 
 immense widening of the boundaries of fiction and 
 humour, represented in five or six of his best stories, 
 say The Pickwick Papers, 1837-9, l'^^ Old Curiosity 
 Shop, 1840, Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843, David Copper- 
 field, 1849-50, Great Expectations, 1860-1, and the 
 Christmas books. 
 
 In William Makepeace Thackeray, 181 1-63, the 
 world portrayed, the art of portrajring, and the 
 temper of the novelist are widely Thackeray 
 different from those of Dickens. Thack 
 eray's is the world of the upper classes, of clubs, 
 professions, London society with its more sophis- 
 ticated, less open expression. His sense of character 
 in his greater works. Vanity Fair, 1847-8, Pendennis, 
 1849-50, Henry Esmond, 1852, The Newcomes, 
 1854-5, is marvellously sure; Becky Sharp, Arthur 
 
I go THe Victorian Age 
 
 Pendennis, the Major, Harry Foker, Esmond, 
 Beatrix, Lady Castlewood, Colonel Newcome, all are 
 creations original, perfectly sustained and finished; 
 his apprehension of social atmosphere and relations 
 and his management of episodes are equally unerring. 
 It is a world not of heroes — most of his attractive 
 characters have a strain of pathetic feebleness in 
 them — but of widespread generous qualities. There 
 is, no doubt, an interpolation of unimpressive moral- 
 ising which obtrudes itself irritatingly upon his 
 art, and a running comment of potent ridicule or 
 sharp irony; but this does not affect the truth of 
 his vision, tho,ugh it may, for a time, conceal the 
 balance, sanity, and true gentleness of the writer's 
 character. The cynical tone of Vanity Fair softens 
 in successive books until, in The Newcomes, it becomes 
 a tender melancholy which, in the death of the colonel, 
 expresses, with fine imaginative restraint, intense 
 emotion on the most common of human occasions. 
 His stories are not well composed, having rather the 
 uncalculated episodic succession of life, just as they 
 have its curiously fascinating blend of bitter and 
 sweet. Some hold Esmond to be his masterpiece; 
 it is an astonishing, sympathetic re-creation of the 
 life of Queen Anne's day, taking full advantage of a 
 magnificent opportunity; perhaps the delicacy and 
 strength of Thackeray's disposition are best shown 
 in the solution of the difficult aesthetic and moral 
 problems inherent in the tale. Besides these major 
 works, he wrote much in the nature of journalism, 
 burlesque, and extravaganza. The Yellow-plush 
 Papers, Barry Lyndon, with its fine incisive touch, 
 Codlingsby, a parody of Disraeli, The English Humour- 
 
TKe "Victorian A.^e 191 
 
 ists (who are chosen from his favourite eighteenth 
 century), and the delightful Roundabout Papers. 
 Throughout, he expresses himself in an easy, limpid, 
 unmannered, accomplished style. 
 
 In the case of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), 
 1819-80, as in many others of her time, ancestral 
 faith failed and she fell back upon a „ _.. 
 "religion of humanity"; she is almost 
 the only philosophically trained mind among the 
 English novelists. Her philosophy is at once her 
 strength and her weakness; for, on the one hand, 
 it enabled her, along with her sympathy, her 
 fine "intelligence of the heart," to pierce through the 
 single action and indicate its universal significance 
 and its attachments for common humanity. On the 
 other hand, the tendency to abstraction grew upon 
 her in her later, drier novels, Felix Holt, 1866, and 
 Daniel Deronda, 1876. Her recollections of people 
 closely attached to the farms, inns, and towns of the 
 midlands by birth, breeding, and religious tradition, 
 with their narrow outlook, shrewd homely humour, 
 domestic pride, views of duty, marriage, and the like, 
 formed the staple of her surest art, and found their 
 liveliest expression in Adam Bede, 1859, The Mill on 
 the Floss, i860, the classically constructed Silas Mar- 
 ner, 1861, and Middlemarch, 1871-2. Her own intense 
 emotional experience made her portray life as, on the 
 whole, a grim affair, especially for her women charac- 
 ters; but these earlier novels have the relief of penetrat- 
 ing humour and observation, as we may see in the cases 
 of the Tulliver aunts and Mrs. Poyser. Like Dickens 
 and Thackeray, she also essayed the historical novel 
 in Romola, 1863, a tale of Savonarola and Florence. 
 
192 TKe Victorian Age 
 
 The novel was also the form of expression chosen 
 by the Brontes, Charlotte and Emily, untamed 
 Emil B f • sp^i^ts cribbed and confined on the edge 
 
 of the Yorkshire moors. Wuthering 
 Heights, 1848, Emily's single novel (she also wrote 
 some piercing verse), gives a picture of undisciplined 
 characters, of passion sometimes exalted, sometimes 
 ferocious, which are well sorted with "the shrewd 
 bleak soil" and the wild moods of nature, portrayed 
 often with an eerie suggestion of the supernatural. 
 
 Charlotte's stories, Jane Eyre, 1847, and 
 g ... Villette, 1852, based on her own history, 
 
 and Shirley, 1849, based on her sister 
 Emily's, are less forbidding, though mostly devoid of 
 humour and marred by overstrained elements as in 
 the case of the maniac's wife in Jane Eyre, But she 
 had a subtle sense of the working of women's passions ; 
 the sufferings and rewards of love in women of com- 
 monplace appearance are her central concern; by the 
 light of her own experience and intuitions, she makes 
 an open and outspoken revelation of the heart with 
 what Swinburne calls the "occult inexplicable force 
 of nature." She has, too, in Villette, some power- 
 ful strokes of satire. With her may be named Mrs. 
 Gaskell, whose biography of Charlotte is a master- 
 piece, as is also Cranford, 1853, a finely detailed pic- 
 ture of a quiet rural society whose surface is rufHed 
 by small and charming adventures; like Miss Mit- 
 ford's Our Village, 1824-32, Cranford has a delicate 
 feminine grace and light humorous observation. The 
 unfinished Wives and Daughters is the best of Mrs. 
 Gaskell's other novels {Mary Barton, Sylvia's Lovers), 
 but, though they have more modem and more tragic 
 
TKe Victorian A^e 193 
 
 substance, they never recover the perfect art of 
 Cranford. 
 
 These are the major names; there remain to be 
 merely catalogued before we close this record of 
 the novel with Stevenson and Meredith, 
 Disraeli's brilliant political stories Con- No li t 
 
 ingshy, 1844, Sybil, 1845, and Tancred, 
 1847; historical novels, such as The Last Days of 
 Pompeii, of Bulwer-Lytton; the propaganda stories 
 of Charles Reade, such as Hard Cash, 1863, and his 
 one masterpiece, the full and vivid medieval story, 
 The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861 ; fluent and pleasing 
 sketches of cathedral-city character and humour in 
 Trollope's Barchester series; the breezy Smollett-like 
 yams of Marryat; pictures of the stage Irishman 
 as in Lover's Handy Andy, and Lever's Charles 
 O'Malley; Kingsley's novel of Elizabethan seamen 
 and Spanish new-world treachery in Westward Ho! 
 1855, and his delineations of social distress in Yeast, and 
 Alton Locke; we must also chronicle Lorna Doone, 
 Blackmore's great romance of Exmoor; and almost 
 the chief of travel-books, unless Kinglake's Eothen, 
 1844, should challenge the title, Borrow's Bible in 
 Spain, 1843, together with his novels Lavengro, 1851, 
 and The Romany Rye, 1857. In these works, auto- 
 biography, a vivid sense of open-air life and adventure, 
 and intimate gypsy lore blend with an arresting 
 brilliance and tang of style. The open air is the native 
 habitat, also, of Richard Jefferies, as in his Wild Life 
 in a Southern County, 1879, a successor to Gilbert 
 White's Natural History of Selborne, 1789, and a 
 forerunner of a large and attractive modem literature 
 in which a writer deals with such aspects of bird-, ani- 
 
194 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 mal-, insect-, or plant-life, as may fall within the range 
 of his own close observation. 
 
 The kinds of novel are numerous, and the boun- 
 daries between them are easily ob- 
 fth 1 soured; but the general currents are 
 clear. The eighteenth century novel 
 began, in Fielding and Richardson, in the fashion of 
 realism. The novelists of terror and Sir Walter 
 Scott widened the range of the novel by the intro- 
 duction of romance and history ; in Scott's wake fol- 
 low all the historical novelists and the romancers of 
 the "sword and cloak" school; the one genius in this 
 company is R. L. Stevenson. Jane Austen upholds 
 the realistic tradition; but while, in Fielding and 
 Smollett, the typical background is that of travel, 
 Jane Austen keeps within the domestic circle that she 
 knew from her own experience. Dickens and Thack- 
 eray also maintain the realistic tradition, though the 
 worlds they portray are widely different, and though 
 both attempted the historical novel as well. To the 
 women novelists, George Eliot and the Brontes, we 
 owe, in all probability, a deeper strain of introspec- 
 tion in character, a closer psychological enquiry, 
 and a more open expression of passionate moods. 
 Novels of propaganda have rarely attained the highest 
 rank, though both Dickens and Charles Reade made 
 trial of them. The work of Samuel Butler, Thomas 
 Hardy, and George Meredith has two interests ; firstly, 
 it illustrates the resolute and exact temper of science 
 at work in fiction ; secondly, it puts upon the novelist 
 of our day the obligation to approach life with an 
 implicit "metaphysic," that is to say, with a compre- 
 hensive judgment of the worth of life. Meredith 
 
TKe Victorian A^e 195 
 
 speaks reassuringly and optimistically on this subject ; 
 Hardy sees man in the grip of an ironic destiny. 
 Hardy is also the novelist who has most powerfully 
 used the motive of the hereditary claims of the soil 
 and atmosphere of a man's birthplace. 
 
 We may take Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-94, 
 as the representative of the romantic novelists; he 
 is a chronicler of adventure, mystery, and surprise; 
 sometimes he sets his tale in remote 
 ages and places, as in The Black Arrow, 
 1888; but, for the most part, he is in- 
 spired by the memory and spell of Scottish scenes, "the 
 cold old huddle of grey hills" of his native country; 
 the eighteenth century is the period of the Scottish 
 tales. Kidnapped, Catriona, and Weir of Hermiston. 
 This last unfinished book, a torso in granite, leaves 
 the impression of irresistible power in its chief char- 
 acter, going blindly to work and driving towards 
 inevitable tragedy. Things gruesome and malignant 
 are the themes of some of his short stories, as in his 
 brilliant psychological fantasy Dr. Jekyll and Mr. 
 Hyde. His essays Virginibus Puerisque, Memories and 
 Portraits, and Across the Plains, are in the wake of 
 Hazlitt ; they have not the earlier writer's pungency 
 and force, but they are wider-travelled and have a 
 more engaging temper and humour; the delightful 
 Letters are of the same order. He first won his spurs 
 in Treasure Island, 1882, which gives amazing definite- 
 ness to boyish imaginings of piracy and is the classic 
 of its kind; something of the same imaginative insight 
 into the child-mind marks his Child's Garden of Verse. 
 It used to be the fashion to call Stevenson's style 
 artificial or precious ; it was the fruit of constant and 
 
196 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 assiduous labour, and is a little mannered; it has, 
 nevertheless, lucidity, buoyancy, and humour in a 
 remarkable degree. 
 
 George Meredith, 1 828-1 909, takes his figures 
 from the surviving feudalism of England and from 
 
 the world between the commons and 
 M**"^th ^^^ peers. He found in the classes of 
 
 high rank and deep-rooted tradition, in 
 which the best of the men are natural ralers, though 
 they may not be great thinkers, and the best of the 
 women are leisured, cultured, vital, and witty, the 
 scene and matter of his art. The appendages of such 
 a world — scholars, tutors, solicitors, yeomen, cricket- 
 ers, prize-fighters, and the rather luridly portrayed 
 demi-monde — vary and enrich the scene; while the 
 incalculable shifts of those who hover hankeringly 
 at the boundaries of the set provide the theme of 
 exquisite high comedy, as in Evan Harrington, 1861. 
 The characters are often brought together in spacious 
 country houses; such a company as the brothers of 
 Sir Austin Feverel may remind us of Peacock's as- 
 semblies of intellectual humourists; Peacockian, too, 
 are the lavish praises of wine and scholarship; but 
 there is nothing in Peacock to compare with the 
 strong-shouldered, competent, game-winning Red- 
 worth, in Diana of the Crossways. Meredith has an 
 acute sense of the conventions of caste and his trage- 
 dies are connected, though not always directly, with 
 defiances of them by characters in the earlier novels, 
 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859, and Rhoda Flem- 
 ing, 1865. The later books, One of Our Conquerors, 
 1 89 1, Lord Ormont and his Aminta, and The Amazing 
 Marriage, 1895, are less concerned with caste than 
 
The Victorian A^e 197 
 
 with rebellions against the tyranny of the marriage 
 bond. Meredith is more than a mere showman of his 
 world in action; with penetrating and ramifying 
 insight, he tracks the dubious courses of emotion, 
 desire, conflicts of will with reason or convention or 
 authority. He portrays, with Shakespearean deli- 
 cacy, the quick pulse and unflawed beauty of a first 
 passion in Richard Feverel; love but the ghost of a 
 passion in Dacier in Diana; egoism masquerading 
 as love in Sir Willoughby Patterne ; and he is equally 
 authoritative on friendship and patriotism. We do 
 not go to him for narrative — though there are sketches 
 of swift and exciting incident, such as that of Carin- 
 thia and the mad dog in The Amazing Marriage — but 
 for analysis; he is the surgeon of the social body, whose 
 diagnosis, made with sure intuition and consummate 
 craft, commands our acquiescence. Complexity is 
 necessary to the full display of his skill; the minute 
 exhibition of this complexity may account, in part, 
 for the excesses in diction which may be justly charged 
 against him. These are not quite the same as faults 
 of over-compression of thought; the brilliance and 
 sparkle of epigram, the deft counterstrokes of wit, 
 the criticial reflections, which make the reading of 
 Diana a pleasing mental excitement, become too 
 oracular and descend in too bewildering a shower in 
 the later books. He is more than psychologist and 
 analyst; he is an ironist, choosing his point of view 
 and uttering his comment as the instrument of the 
 comic spirit. His keenest shafts are reserved not 
 for humanity at large, for he is an optimist; but for 
 vanity, egoism, sentimentalism, and rigid formu- 
 larism; his surest aim is taken in The Egoist, 1879; 
 
198 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 but all his prose is shot through with irony, the 
 method of which, and its great literary prototypes, 
 are set out in the incomparable Essay on the Comic 
 Spirit. Beauchamp's Career, 1875, is the only novel 
 he wrote whose development is determined by English 
 political ideas. Meredith seems to rise into an ampler 
 air on broader pinions, to view a larger panorama, 
 in Emilia in England, 1864, and Vittoria, 1866, where 
 the almost epical matter is the strife between Austria 
 and Italy, and where he creates his supreme woman 
 figure, the artist and patriot Emilia. To the novels, 
 there has recently, 1912, been added the rich treasury 
 of cotmsel, wit, and criticism contained in his Letters. 
 
 4. History, Criticism, and Science, 1830-1900 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, unites the functions 
 of man of letters, historian, and prophet. His earlier 
 essays are divided between the interests 
 " ^ ^ of German romance and such biographi- 
 
 cal subjects as Burns, Samuel Johnson, and Voltaire. 
 With Sartor Resartus, 1834, a faintly veiled autobio- 
 graphy centring about the spiritual new birth which 
 he owed largely to Goethe, come into play his "philo- 
 sophico-poetical " thought and his teeming psalmodic 
 style. His first large historical work was The French 
 Revolution, 1837, the most brilliant of all, pictorially, 
 whether in characters like Mirabeau and Danton, 
 or in vivid scenes such as the fall of the Bastille, the 
 flight to Varennes, or the death of Louis XVI. His 
 doctrine that history is the biography of great men 
 (the basis, also, of his lectures, Heroes and Hero-Wor- 
 ship, 1840) is more fully developed in Cromwell's 
 
THe Victorian A^e 199 
 
 Letters and Speeches, 1845, which swiftly reversed the 
 national verdict of generations; and in Frederick the 
 Great, 1858-65, the work which made the largest tax 
 on his mental energies and nervous resources. These 
 compositions precede the modern school in their 
 methods of research, though they exemplify Carlyle's 
 untiring industry. He was no single-minded histo- 
 rian, for he sought to show how the age might best 
 manage its affairs, to be prophet and poet as well as 
 recorder. The prophetic and sometimes dyspeptic 
 strain becomes more rife in Chartism, 1839, Past and 
 Present, 1843, Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850, and 
 Shooting Niagara, 1867; this last is his only writing of 
 any length after the death of his brilliant but unhappy 
 wife in 1866. Shorn of their volcanic eloquence and 
 graphic splendours, his precepts are two, a mystic 
 philosophy and hard work . His mysticism, like the 
 Earth Spirit in Goethe's Faust, resolves the visible 
 universe into the mere vesture of eternal mind; 
 urged by this thought, Carlyle assails the materialism 
 and luxury of his " sceptico-epicurean " generation. 
 On the other hand, he conceived of action and toil 
 as the only sources of bodily and spiritual health, 
 the only solvents of doubt and misery; he had nothing 
 but withering scorn for the expedients of ballot-boxes. 
 Reform Bills, the dismal sciences of economics and 
 evolution, and the "Hebrew old clothes" of orthodox 
 religious belief (on this, see the Life of Sterling). 
 He came to worship force, which he too easily assumed 
 to be identical with righteousness. His prejudices 
 and antagonisms and a certain ferocity of expression 
 render him an untrustworthy critic of his time, and he 
 oftener saw the truth in some lightning flash of intui- 
 
200 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 tion, than in the processes of philosophising; yet, 
 something of the incalculable moral influence which 
 Goethe forecast that he would wield may be seen in 
 Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Browning. His 
 style, whether ruggedly colloquial or majestically 
 eloquent, has a teeming wealth of idiom, graphic 
 force, saturnine humour ("grisly laughter," Meredith 
 called it), above all, unparalleled inventiveness of 
 phrase and imagery. Carlyle defines it himself in the 
 chapter "Characteristics" in Sartor Resartus. 
 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800-59, and James 
 Anthony Froude, 1818-94, ^^^ ^'^so of the school of 
 pictorial historians; both are modem 
 _. . in the wide range of research, though 
 
 both are justly charged with faults, 
 Macaulay with partisanship and advocacy, Froude 
 with inaccuracies. Both were probably men of too 
 strong prejudices to write impartially, if, indeed, that 
 is ever possible. Both have added imperishable 
 pictures to the gallery of history; Froude (who makes 
 Henry VIII into a Carlylean hero) describes the 
 Protestant struggle with the Papacy in Tudor times, 
 with much illumination from Spanish sources; Ma- 
 caulay describes the beginning of the Whig supremacy 
 in 1688. Macaulay's extraordinarily voluminous 
 reading and tenacious memory enabled him to sum- 
 mon illustrative material for every contingency, to 
 fiU his scenes with picturesque and convincing detail, 
 set in relief by his brilliant, though rather metallic, 
 expression, with short arresting sentences and anti- 
 thetic clauses deftly wrought into the large fabric 
 of the paragraph. He writes in his History of England, 
 1848-55, like an orator, with strong, sometimes vio- 
 
TKe Victorian Age 201 
 
 lent effects, splendid narrative power, and fine emo- 
 tional response to heroic deeds and names, just the 
 things which, in fact, inspire his Armada, and The 
 Lays of Ancient Rome. He is rather typical of Victo- 
 rian "respectability" and contentment; he has not 
 much subtlety or speculative gift, but he has all the sa- 
 gacity and judgment which come of acquaintance with 
 affairs. Much the same may be said of his Essays, 
 which excel in the illustrative and historical aspects, 
 though there is penetrating criticism in such an essay 
 as that on Addison. 
 
 Mention should be made of Grote and Thirlwall, 
 historians of Greece; of Thomas Arnold, historian 
 of Rome; of Hallam, historian of the Middle Ages; 
 they furthered in various ways the science of history ; 
 but we may think of Stubbs as the first representative 
 of the modern school of history intent on minutely 
 examining and elucidating documents before slowly 
 and surely re-erecting — on the immovable basis of 
 knowledge, without the loose mortar of conjecture, 
 the false perspective of partisanship and the needless 
 decoration of rhetoric — the edifice of man's past. 
 
 Matthew Arnold, 1822-88, like Ruskin and Carlyle, 
 
 is a critic of contemporary life, but his most effective 
 
 range is in the criticism of literature. 
 
 Matthew 
 He stood firmly as an opponent of ' ' stock Arnold 
 
 romanticism" on the ground of its self- 
 will, eccentricity, violation of restraint, and propor- 
 tion, want of the unity which comes of a clearly 
 grasped central subject, its general lack of what Greece 
 might teach us. He sought to formulate new stand- 
 ards; he had a keener sense of the varied beauties of 
 literature than the a priori critics of the eighteenth 
 
202 THe Victorian A^e 
 
 century, but his bent is still towards ethical aspects, 
 "the criticism of life," and his method is the applica- 
 tion of preconceived tests. He is apt to make use of 
 catchwords : '' sweetness and light," "higher truth and 
 seriousness," "the grand style," though he is not vague 
 about them, never shrinking from definition. From 
 the critic he demands disinterestedness, knowledge, 
 and justness of spirit. These sane and lofty canons 
 are applied to many topics in his Essays in Criticism, 
 1865, Mixed Essays, 1879, On Translating Homer, 
 1861, and in other books. Yet, perhaps his largest 
 service was the suggestion of the comparative method, 
 which should bring an enlightened knowledge of 
 European literature to bear in judging any great 
 work; he left it to later critics to enforce the historical 
 point of view as well. His criticisms of the English 
 social order were directed against its deficiencies in 
 large ideas, and in the power (which he believed the 
 French possessed) of applying them freshly and freely ; 
 and against philistinism and routine thinking. The 
 wittiest of these writings is his Friendship's Garland, 
 1871 ; his excursions in theology were less authori- 
 tative. His style has lucidity, urbanity, piquancy, 
 and, though rather full of reiteration, shows a sense 
 of buoyancy denied to his graver verse. 
 
 John Ruskin, 1819-1900, began, in his Modern 
 Painters, 1843-60, as critic and expositor of art. 
 He was an apostle of beauty, and shared 
 the predilection of the pre-Raphaelites 
 for the sensitive colouring of early renascence art. 
 He had other enthusiasms — for Turner's landscapes, 
 for medieval architecture (the chapter in The Stones 
 of Venice, on "The Nature of Gothic" sets forth his 
 
THe Victorian A^e 203 
 
 doctrine that the inspiration to work should be 
 found in the soul of man) , and for all the pageantry 
 of sky, sea, Alps, plains, rocks, and trees with their 
 colours, surfaces, and textures. He went volumin- 
 ously into the abstract problems of art, and his 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849 (which are Sacri- 
 fice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, Obedience), 
 indicates his ethical bent. About 1850, he came 
 definitely under the influence of Carlyle, whom he 
 revered as "master." Henceforth, though he never 
 abandoned art, his criticism and thought were directed 
 towards economics and sociology, which he sought to 
 humanise as he sought also to stir the utilitarian and 
 commercial age to some protest against its own ugli- 
 ness and cruelty. In volumes such as Unto this Last, 
 1862, Sesame and Lilies, 1865, and the autobiographi- 
 cal Fors Clavigera and Prceterita, though some of his 
 theories may be whimsical and some of his enthusi- 
 asms unbalanced, it is clear that Carlyle's prophetic 
 mantle descended to a spirit kindred in sincerity of 
 conviction, moral urgency, belief in the natural order 
 as the expression of the Divine Mind — as well as in 
 a certain imperious dogmatism of statement. His 
 style is masterly, lucid, and delightful; his long periods 
 are marvellously harmonious and rhythmical, his 
 diction opulent to a degree; his achievement in style 
 is the more remarkable since he writes a modern prose; 
 the Ciceronian tradition, in which De Quincey is still 
 steeped, has passed away. Wherever his judgment 
 and thought and feeling are of the quality of his craft 
 of expression, we may hail Ruskin as the grand master 
 of English prose of the ornate kind. 
 
 Of many critics since Ruskin we may name as a 
 
204 TKe Victorian A^e 
 
 representative of scholarship Mark Pattison; and of 
 aesthetics J. A. Symonds. Oscar Wilde illustrates 
 the decline from sestheticism to decadence, but his 
 Intentions is of worth in respect of its rare insight, 
 witty paradox, and beautifully finished prose. Walter 
 Pater, 1839-94, ^^^Y stand as representative of those 
 literary descendants of Ruskin, who 
 are quite untouched by the ethics of 
 Ruskin ; he is a lover of strange beauty. Leonardo's 
 Mona Lisa, with its baffling union of diverse qualities 
 and remote suggestions, is the subject of a famous 
 passage in Pater's Studies in the History of the Renais- 
 sance; at the close of the same book, he unfolded the 
 ideal of being "present always at the focus where the 
 greatest number of vital forces unite in the purest 
 energies," and of "art for its own sake." "For art 
 comes to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but 
 the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and 
 simply for those moments' sake." This sophisticated 
 and over-subtle sense of beauty found its ideals less 
 in Greece than in Rome, as we may judge from Marius 
 the Epicurean, 1885, and in the renascence period of 
 Montaigne as we may judge from Gaston de Latour, 
 1896. Appreciations, 1889, is his fullest body of 
 critical pronouncements, and its opening essay on 
 " Style " proves him a pupil of Flaubert and a devotee 
 of the mot propre. In this spirit, he aims at writing 
 an artist's prose, the words pregnant by their choice 
 and association, delicately inlaid, suggestive by their 
 juxtaposition of light and shade, surprising and 
 exciting the reader by unexpected felicities of rhythm. 
 In this studied art, he has no equal. This brief survey 
 of the progress of criticism must close with the 
 
TKe Victorian A^e 205 
 
 reminder that criticism is constantly becoming more 
 
 comprehensive and more complex. Sainte-Beuve 
 
 introduced the method of psychological estimate and 
 
 minute study of environment; other lines of its 
 
 advance are the historical method, in one direction, 
 
 and, in another, the comparative ; in this last direction, 
 
 French scholars have, up to the present, led the way. 
 
 We have not much concern with these matters 
 
 except so far as they become the subjects of high and 
 
 noble expression; we cannot do more 
 
 than note the succession of books which Economics, 
 
 established and developed the utili- eoogy, 
 
 science 
 tarian philosophy (which stirred Car- 
 
 lyle's wrath), from the great codifier Bentham's 
 
 Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1780, to John 
 
 Stuart Mill's more human and sympathetic Liberty, 
 
 1859, and Utilitarianism, 1863. His System of Logic, 
 
 1843, touches the science of thought and is in the 
 
 empirical tradition of Locke and Hume. Economics 
 
 is the theme of a vast literature, from Adam Smith's 
 
 Wealth of Nations, 1776 (providing a theory for 
 
 industrialism, out of which grew the laissez-faire 
 
 school of free competition), through Ricardo and 
 
 Malthus to Ruskin and the later scientific economists. 
 
 Nearly allied is Buckle's History of Civilisation, 1857, 
 
 a large, stimulating, though not always convincing, 
 
 study of the general laws of development of the 
 
 English state. 
 
 The tractarians troubled thought much, but 
 
 literature little, except in the case of John Henry 
 
 Newman, 1801-90; with the precise Newman 
 
 cast of his dogma and his grounds for 
 
 passing over to the Roman church we are uncon- 
 
2o6 The Victorian A^e 
 
 cerned. In his Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864, his 
 intense personality sets his graceful scholarly periods 
 aglow with an impassioned defence of principles, the 
 fruit of long-sifted thought and acute spiritual need. 
 Some of the finest ideals of knowledge and culture 
 find consummate expression in his Idea of a Univer- 
 sity, 1854, where his style, as in the best of his Plain 
 and Parochial Sermons, blends precision, charm, and 
 eloquence in a fashion unparalleled in the nineteenth 
 century. 
 
 It is inevitable that the last words of this book 
 should deal, however briefly, with science; though 
 science, in the main, still awaits its 
 transmutation in the alembic of style. 
 We can only name the direct, unpretending prose 
 of Darwin's Origin of Species, 1859; the solid industry 
 and ambitious synthesis of Spencer's First Principles, 
 1862, and Principles of Biology, 1864-7 ; the controver- 
 sial eagerness and vivid epigrammatic speech of 
 Huxley's Essays. But these are enough to show that 
 the advent of science — like the renascence three 
 hundred years before — has shaken the whole universe 
 of thought ; it admits no compromise in its pursuit of 
 truth, and its sway is widening in all the provinces of 
 man's endeavour. Since literature must remain 
 firmly planted in one or another kind of experience, it 
 is bound to take up into itself more and more of the 
 forms and principles and ideals with which science is 
 impregnating the soil of all human activities. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The following table presents the plays of Shake- 
 speare in approximately chronological order. Many of 
 the dates depend upon inference and conjecture and the 
 whole arrangement must be regarded as provisional. 
 
 The letter M following twelve of the plays signi- 
 fies that those plays are mentioned in Francis Meres's 
 Palladis Tamia, 1598. 
 
 The third column gives the dates of all the known 
 quarto editions before 1623. All the plays mentioned 
 were printed in the first folio (1623), with the excep- 
 tion of Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The 
 date 1623 in the fourth column simply indicates that 
 in those cases the earliest extant version of the play 
 is in the first folio (1623). 
 
 The later folios are the second (1632), with Mil- 
 ton's verses; the third (1663) reissued in 1664 with 
 Pericles; and the fourth (1685). 
 
 Date 
 
 Play 
 
 Quartos 
 
 Folio 
 
 c. 1591-3? (re- 
 
 Love's Labour's 
 
 Q1598 
 
 
 vised 1597) 
 
 Lost M 
 
 
 
 c. 1591-3? 
 
 The Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona M 
 
 
 1623 
 
 c- 1591-3? also 
 
 The Comedy of Er- 
 
 
 1623 
 
 played Gray's 
 
 rors M 
 
 
 
 Inn, 1594 
 
 
 
 
 c. 1 59 1? revised 
 
 Romeo and Juliet 
 
 Qq surreptitious 
 
 
 later, 1595? 
 
 M 
 
 1597, authentic 
 1599 and 1609 
 
 
 207 
 
I308 
 
 Appendix 
 
 Date 
 
 Play 
 
 Quartos 
 
 Folio 
 
 c. 1592? 
 
 Henry VI, part i 
 
 
 1623 
 
 >c. 1592? 
 
 Henry VI, part ii 
 
 
 1623 
 
 'c. 1592? 
 
 Henry VI, part in 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1593-4? 
 
 Richard III M 
 
 Qq 1597.1598,1602, 
 
 1605, 1612, 1622 
 
 
 1594? 
 
 Richard II M 
 
 Qq 1597.1598,1608, 
 
 and 1615 
 
 
 3 1593-4 
 
 Titus A ndronicus M 
 
 Qq 1594, 1600, and 
 161 1 
 
 
 1594? 
 
 The Merchant of 
 Venice M 
 
 2 quartos in 1600 
 
 
 1594? 
 
 King John M 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1595? 
 
 A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream M 
 
 2 quartos in 1600 
 
 
 ♦ 1595-6? 
 
 The Taming of the 
 
 Shrew 
 All's Well that Ends 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1596? 
 
 
 1623 
 
 
 Well (if identical 
 
 
 
 
 with Meres's 
 
 
 
 
 Love's Labour's 
 
 
 
 
 Won; but pos- 
 
 
 
 
 sibly later) 
 
 
 
 1597 
 
 Henry IV, parti M 
 
 Qqi598,i599,l604, 
 1608, 1613, 1622 
 
 
 1597 
 
 Henry IV, partii 
 
 Q 1600 
 
 
 1598? 
 
 The Merry Wives 
 
 Qq 1602 imperfect. 
 
 
 
 of Windsor 
 
 and 1619 
 
 
 1599 
 
 Henry V 
 
 Qq 1600 imperfect, 
 1602, 1608 
 
 
 1599? 
 
 Much Ado about 
 Nothing 
 
 Q 1600 
 
 
 1600? 
 
 As You Like It 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1600-1 also 
 
 Twelfth Night 
 
 
 1623 
 
 acted 1602 
 
 
 
 
 ' In 1594 was printed The first part of the Contention betwixt 
 the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster. This is not Shake- 
 spearean; but it is the basis of the play which is printed in F. 1623 
 as Henry VI, part ii. 
 
 " In 1595 was printed The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of 
 York and the death of Good King Henry Sixt. This is not Shake- 
 spearean; but is the basis of F. 1623, Henry VI, part iii. 
 
 i Authorship disputed. 
 
 4 Adapted from The Taming of a Shrew printed in 1594. 
 
Appendix 
 
 209 
 
 DaU 
 
 Play 
 
 Quartos 
 
 Folio 
 
 1601? 
 
 Julius Ceesar 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1602 
 
 Hamlet 
 
 Qq 1603 imperfect; 
 also 1604 and 
 161 1 
 
 
 1603? 
 
 Troilus and Cres- 
 sida 
 
 Q1609 
 
 
 1604 
 
 Othello 
 
 Q 1622 
 
 
 1604 
 
 Measure for 
 Measure 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1605-6 
 
 King Lear 
 
 2 quartos 1608 
 
 
 1606 
 
 Macbeth 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1607 
 
 Timon of Athens 
 (in part) 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1607 
 
 Pericles (in part) 
 
 Qq mangled form 
 1609; 161 I and 
 1619. In folio 
 1664, not in folio 
 1623 
 
 
 1608 
 
 Antony and Cleo- 
 
 1623 
 
 
 patra 
 
 
 
 1608-9 
 
 Coriolanus 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1610-11 
 
 Cymbeline 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1610-11 
 
 The Winter's Tale 
 
 
 1623 
 
 l6ll 
 
 The Tempest 
 
 
 1623 
 
 1612 
 
 The Two Noble 
 
 Q 1634, not in 
 
 
 
 Kinsmen (in 
 part) 
 Henry VIII (in 
 
 folio 1623 
 
 
 1613? 
 
 
 1623 
 
 
 part) 
 
 
 
 Recent researches seem to indicate that the following quartos 
 in the above lists bear fictitious dates, and were actually printed 
 in 1619. In each case the quarto affected is the one without 
 the printer's address. 
 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream Q 1600 
 
 The Merchant of Venice Q 1600 
 
 Henry V Q 1608 
 
 King Lear Q 1608 
 
 Vide Pollard, Shakespeare Folios and Quartos. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Note. Italic figures indicate the principal references, 
 of the plays of Shakespeare are given in the Appendix. 
 
 Dates 
 
 Abbot, The (1820), 167 
 
 A. B.C. (Chaucer) (c. 1370), 26 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel (1681), 
 
 115 
 
 Across the Plains (1892), 195 
 
 Adam Bede (1859), 191 
 
 Adam Smith (1723-90), Wealth 
 of Nations (1776), 205 
 
 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 
 109; Essays, 113, 114, 118, 
 120, 126, 130, 140, 201 
 
 Adonais (1821), 98, 160, 161 
 
 Advancement of Learning, The 
 (1605), 65 
 
 Advice to a Dissenter (1687), 
 no 
 
 Advice to Young Men and 
 Young Women (1830), 173 
 
 iElfric (fl. 1006), 12, 13 
 
 jEneid, The, 20, 50, 184 
 
 Affliction of Margaret, The 
 (1804?; ptd. 1807), 151 
 
 Ajax and Ulysses, The Con- 
 tention of (1640), 92 
 
 Akenside, Mark (1721-70), 
 The Pleasures of Imagina- 
 tion (1744), 131 
 
 Alastor (1815; ptd. 1816), 160, 
 162 
 
 Albion's England (1586-1602), 
 61 
 
 Alchemist, The (16 10; ptd. 
 1612), 88 
 
 Alcuin (735-804), 7, 10 
 
 21 
 
 Aldhelm (640?-709), 10 
 Alexander and Campaspe (1580; 
 
 ptd. 1584), 74 
 Alexander's Feast (1697), 116 
 Alexander, Sir William (1567?- 
 
 1640), 52 
 Alfred, King (849-901), 2, 6, 
 
 10, II 
 Alice du Clos (1825?), 155 
 All Fools (1599; ptd. 1605), 90 
 All for Love (1677; ptd. 1678), 
 
 139 
 
 Alliterative poems of the 14th 
 
 century, 23 
 Alma (1718), 117 
 Alphonsus (1589; ptd. 1599), 
 
 75 
 Alton Locke (1850), 193 
 Alysoun (c. 1310), 23 
 Amazing Marriage, The (1895), 
 
 197 
 Amelia (1751), 127 
 American Speeches (1774-5), 
 
 125 
 Amis and Amiloun (1275- 
 
 1300), 20 
 Amoretli (1595), 51 
 Amyot (trans. Plutarch, 1579), 
 
 70 
 Anacreon, 94 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, The 
 
 (1621), 67 
 Anatomy of the World, An 
 
 (i6ii),6i 
 
212 
 
 Index 
 
 Ancient Mariner, The (1798- 
 
 1817), 146, 153, 154 
 Ancren Riwle (c. 1210), 33 
 Andreas, 8, 22 
 Andrewes, Lancelot (1555- 
 
 1626), 105 
 Andrew of Wyntoun's Cronykyl 
 
 (c. 1406), 38 
 Anelida and Arcite (c. 1380), 27 
 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The, 
 
 closes 1154, 9, II, 13, 20, 32 
 Annals oftheParish (1821), 129 
 Annus Mirabilis (1666-7), 115 
 Anselm (1033-1109), 15 
 Anti-Jacobin, The (1797-8), 
 
 130, 166 
 Antonio and Mellida (1599; ptd. 
 
 1602), 90 
 Antony and Cleopatra, 139 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), 
 
 206 
 Apology for Poetry (1581?; pub. 
 
 1595), 68 
 Appreciations (1889), 204 
 Arbuthnot, Dr. John (1667- 
 
 1735). 112, 118, 128 
 Arcades (1633; ptd. 1645), 98 
 Arcadia (pub. 1590), 69 
 Areopagitica (1644), 103 
 Arethusa (1820), 163 
 Argument against abolishing 
 
 Christianity, An (1708), 11 1 
 Ariosto (1474-1533), Orlando 
 
 Furioso (1591). 51. 55, 59 
 Aristotle, no, 117 
 Armada, The (1848), 201 
 Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 
 
 31, 98, 147, 161, 165; Poems, 
 
 181, 182; Prose, 201, 202 
 Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 
 
 201 
 Arraignment of Paris, The 
 
 (c. I58i;ptd. 1584), 75 
 Art of English Poesie, The 
 
 (1589), 68 
 Artemis Prologuizes (1842), 179 
 Arthur, King, 17, 20, 21 
 Ascham, Roger (1515-68), 43, 
 
 46,65 
 
 Asser's Life of Alfred (c. 900), 10 
 Asolando (1889), 180 
 Astrolabe, The (1391), 35 
 Astrophel and Stella (1580-4; 
 
 ptd. 1591), 51 
 As You Like It, 71, 82 
 Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 186 
 Atheist's Tragedy, The (1603; 
 
 ptd. 161 1), 90 
 Auchinleck MS. (c. 1320), 21 
 Aurora Leigh (1857), 181 
 Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 129, 
 
 130, 167, 194 
 Autobiographic Sketches (1834 
 
 ff.), 171 
 Autobiography (Gibbon) (pub. 
 
 1796), 122, 124 
 Ave atgue Vale (1867), 187 
 Awyntyrs of Arthur (1350-1400), 
 
 19.23 
 Ayenbite oflnwit, The (c. 1340), 
 
 33 
 Aytoun, William Edmond- 
 stoune (1813-65), Bon 
 Gaultier Ballads (1845), 185 
 
 Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam 
 (1561-1626), 45, 46, 65, 66, 
 67, 68, 107 
 
 Bacon, Roger (i2i4?-94), 15, 
 
 75 
 Bailey's Festus (1839), 185 
 Balaustion's Adventure (1871), 
 
 179 
 Balder Dead (1855), 182 
 Bale, John (1495-1563), 73 
 Ballad of Agincourt (1605), 62 
 Ballad of Charity (1770), 134 
 Ballads and Sonnets (Rbssetti) 
 
 (1881), 182 
 Ballads, The, 40, 1 14, 132 
 Barbour, John (l3i6?-95), 
 
 Brus (c. 1376), 38 
 Barclay, Alexander (1475?- 
 
 ii22),ShipofFools{,i50ci),7,i 
 Bard, The (1757), 133 
 Barham, Richard Harris 
 
 (1788-1845), Ingoldsby Leg- 
 ends (1840), 185 
 
Index 
 
 213 
 
 Barnahy Rudge (1841), 189 
 Barnes, Barnabe (i569?-i6o9), 
 
 51 
 Barons' Wars, The (1603), 62 
 Barrow, Isaac (1630-77), 105 
 Barry Lyndon (1846), 190 
 Bartholomew Fair (1614; ptd. 
 
 1631), 88 
 Bartolomaeus Anglicus {fl. 
 
 1230-50), 35 
 Battle of Brunanbnrh, The (937), 
 
 II 
 Battle of Lewes, The (1264), 22 
 Battle of Maldon, The (991), 11 
 Battle of the Books, The (ptd. 
 
 1704), MI 
 Baxter, Richard (1615-91), 
 
 Saints' Everlasting Rest 
 
 (1650), 105 
 Beauchamp's Career (1875), 
 
 198 
 Beaiimont, Francis (1584- 
 
 1616), 58, 90, 91 
 Beaumont, Joseph (1616-99), 
 
 Psyche (1648), 64 
 Beaux' Stratagem, The (1707), 
 
 140 
 Becket (1884), 177 
 Beckford, William (1759-1844), 
 
 Vathek (1786), 129 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803- 
 
 49), 166 
 Bede (673-735), Ecdestastical 
 
 History of the English Race 
 
 (731). 7. 10, II, 20 
 Beggar's Opera, The (1728), 140 
 Behn, Mrs. Aphra (1640-89), 
 
 95 
 Bells and Pomegranates (1841- 
 
 6), 179 
 Benott de Ste. More (fl. 1165), 
 
 28 
 Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 
 
 205 
 Beowulf, I, 2, 3, 4. 9. 12, 18, 
 
 184 
 Beppo (18 1 8), 159 
 Berkeley, George (1685-1753), 
 
 Bermudas, The (1650-2; ptd. 
 
 l68i),96 
 Berners, Lord Qohn Bour- 
 
 chier) (1467-1533). 36, 43. 
 
 69 
 Bestiary, (c. 1130), 15 
 Bevis of Hampton (1300-25), 
 
 19 
 
 Bible in Spain, The (1843), 193 
 Bible, The, 34, 44 
 Biographia Literaria (1817), 
 
 169 
 Birthday, A (1857), 183 
 Black Arrow, The (1888), 195 
 Blackmore, Sir Richard (d. 
 
 1729), 116 
 Blackmore, Richard Dodd- 
 ridge (1825-1900), Lorna 
 
 Doone (1869), 193 
 Blackwood's Magazine (founded 
 
 1817), 144, 170, 171 
 Blake, William (1757-1827), 
 
 134; Poems, JJ7, 138 
 Blessed Damozel, The (c. 1847; 
 
 ptd. 1856 and 1870), 182 
 Blickling Homilies (c. 975), 12 
 Blind Harry's Wallace (1470- 
 
 80), 38 
 Bloomfield, Robert (1766- 
 
 1823), Farmer's Boy (1800), 
 
 165 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A (1843), 
 
 179 
 Boccaccio (1313-75). 28, 29, 
 
 n6 
 Bodel, Jean {fl. 1200), 19 
 Boece (1377-81), 33 
 Boethius (c. 470-525), De 
 
 Consolatione Philosophim, 11, 
 
 33 
 Boileau (1636-1711), L'Art 
 
 Poetigue, (1674), 117 
 Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry 
 
 St. John) (1678-1751), 118, 
 
 119 
 Bon GauUier Ballads (1845), 
 
 Book of the Duchess, The (1369), 
 26 
 
214 
 
 Index 
 
 Book of Common Prayer, The, 
 
 44 
 Book of Philip Sparrow, The 
 
 (before 1508), 38 
 Borrow, George (1803-81), 
 
 193 
 Bossuet (162 7- 1 704), 105 
 Boswell, James (1740-95), 
 
 122, 123 
 
 Bothwell (1874), 187 
 Borough, The (18 10), 135 
 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, 
 
 The (1848-9), 182 
 Bourdaloue (1632- 1 704), 105 
 Breton, Nicholas (1545?- 
 
 1629?), 53 
 Bright, John (181 1-89), 42 
 Brignall Banks, 157 
 Britain's Ida (attributed to 
 
 Phineas Fletcher) (1628), 58 
 Britannia (1586-1607), 67 
 Britannia's Pastorals (1613- 
 
 15). 63 
 Broken Heart, The (1629; ptd. 
 
 1633), 92 
 Brome, Richard (d. 1652?), 92 
 Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 
 
 192, 194 
 Bronte, Emily Jane (1818-48), 
 
 192, 194 
 Brothers, The (Wordsworth) 
 
 (1800), 151 
 Brougham Castle (1807), 150, 
 
 152 
 Browne of Tavistock, William 
 
 (I59i-i643?),63 
 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605- 
 
 82), 106, 107, 108, no 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 
 
 (1806-61), 181 
 Browning, Robert (1812-89), 
 
 144, 174; Poems, 178, 179, 
 
 180, 181, 184, 200 
 Bruno, Giordano (l550?-i6oo), 
 
 46 
 Brut (c. 1200 and c. 1250), 17 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas (182 1- 
 
 62), History of Civilisation 
 
 (1857), 205 
 
 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (1803- 
 
 73). 193 
 Bunyan, John (1628-88), 42, 
 
 56, 63, loi, 105, 108, 126 
 Btirger's Lenore (1774), 157 
 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 
 
 112, I2S, 126, 167 
 Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715), 
 
 History of my own Times 
 
 (pub. 1723-34), 123 
 Bumey, Frances (Madame D - 
 
 Arblay) (1752-1840), Jour- 
 nal, 122; Evelina, 129 
 Burns, Robert (1759-96), 39, 
 
 60, 132, 135; Poems, 138, 
 
 139, 154, 162, 198 
 Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 
 
 Anatomy of Melancholy 
 
 (1621), 67, 127 
 Bussy d'Ambois (1598?; ptd. 
 
 1607), 90 
 Butler, Joseph (1692-1752), 
 
 Analogy {1726), 119 
 Butler, Samuel (1612-80), 70, 
 
 iz6, 117 
 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902), 
 
 194 
 Byrd, William (i538?-l623), 
 
 53 
 
 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 
 (1788-1824), 57, 130, 131, 
 144, 146, 155; Poems, JS7, 
 158, 159. 165. 169, 182 
 
 By the North Sea (1880), 186 
 
 Cadenus and Vanessa (1713), 
 
 117 
 Csedmon (fl. 670), 7 
 Cain (1821), 159 
 Caleb Williams (1794), 129 
 Calverley, Charles Stuart 
 
 (1831-84), 185 
 Calvin's Institutes (1536; trans. 
 
 1559). 47 
 
 Camden, WiUiam (1551-1623), 
 Britannia (1586-1607) 
 (trans, by Holland, 1610), 67 
 
 Campaign, The (1704), 130 
 
Index 
 
 215 
 
 Campbell, Thomas (1777- 
 
 1844), 131, 137 
 Campion, Thomas (1567?- 
 
 1620), Poems, 53; Criticism, 
 
 68 
 Canning, George (1770-1827), 
 
 166 
 Canterbury Tales, The (begun 
 
 c. 1387), 27, 28, 29, 36 
 Cap and Bells, The (1819), 
 
 165 
 Capgrave, John (1393-1464), 
 
 Chronicle (1450), 41 
 Captain Singleton (1720), 115 
 Cardinal, The (lie. 1641; ptd. 
 
 1652), 92 
 Carew, Thomas (1595-1639?), 
 
 Poems (1640), 60, 93 
 Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 
 
 167, 170, 174, 175, ig8, 199, 
 
 200, 203, 205 
 Casa Gutdi Windows (1851), 
 
 181 
 Castara (1634), 95 
 Castaway, The (1798), 137 
 Castiglione II Cortegiano, 
 ^ (1528), 70 
 Castle of Indolence, The (1748), 
 
 132 
 Castle of Otranto, The (1764), 
 
 129 
 Castle of Perseverance, The 
 
 (c. 1430), 72 
 Castle Rackrent (1800), 129 
 Catiline (1611), 87 
 Cato (1713). 140 
 Catriona (1893), 195 
 Catullus, 93 
 Cavendish, George (1500-61?), 
 
 42 
 Caxton, William (i42i?-i49i), 
 
 43 
 Cenci, The (1819; ptd. 1820), 
 
 140, 162 
 Centuries of Meditations (c. 
 
 1676; ptd. 1908), 95 
 Cervantes (1547-1616), 127 
 Chamberlayne, William (1619- 
 
 89), Pharonnida (1659), 96 
 
 Changeling, The (c. 1623; ptd. 
 
 1653), 90 
 Chanson de Roland, Le (1000- 
 
 iioo), 18 
 Chapman, George (1559?- 
 
 1634), 46, 48, 55, 59, 89, 90, 
 
 163 
 Chapman's Iliad (1598-1611), 
 
 58, 163 
 Chapman's Odyssey (1616), 58 
 Character of a Trimmer (1685; 
 
 ptd. 1688), no 
 Characters, 69 
 Characters of Shakespeare's 
 
 Plays, The (1817), 170 
 Oharles O'Malley (1841), 193 
 Chartism (1839), 199 
 Chastelard (1865), 187 
 Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 
 
 132, 134 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?- 
 
 1400), 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22; 
 
 Poems, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 
 
 31,33; Prose, jj, 35, 36, 37, 
 
 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 48, 77, 
 
 III, 116, 132, 184 
 Cheke, Sir John (1514-57), 46 
 Chesterfield, Earl of (Philip 
 
 Dormer Stanhope, 1694- 
 
 1773), Letters (1737 flf.), 121 
 Chester plays (1390-1420), 
 
 MSS. (1 591-1607), 72 
 Chettle, Henry (?-i6o7?), 90 
 Chevy Chase, 68 
 Childe Harold (1812-17), 158 
 Childe Maurice, 41 
 Child's Garden of Verses, A 
 
 (1885), 195 
 Chillingworth, William (1602- 
 
 44), Religion of Protestants 
 
 (1638), 103 
 Choice, The (c. 1665), 95 
 Chrestien de Troyes (j?. 1160- 
 
 80), 21 
 Christabel (1797 and 1800; 
 
 ptd. 1816), 16, 135. i53>J54> 
 
 iSS 
 Christian Morals (ptd. 1 716), 
 
 106 
 
2l6 
 
 Index 
 
 Christmas Eve and Easter Day 
 
 (1850), 178 
 "Chnstopher North" Qohn 
 
 Wilson, 1785-1854), 171 
 Christ's Victory and Triumph 
 
 (i6io),63 
 Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 
 
 Rosciad (1761), 130 
 Churchyard, Thomas (1520?- 
 
 1604), 51 
 Cicero, no, 203 
 Cinthio (1504-73), (Hecatom- 
 
 mithi, 1565), 75 
 Citizen of the World, The (1760- 
 
 2), 120 
 City Madam, The (1619; ptd. 
 
 1658), 91 
 Civil Government (1690), 104 
 CivU Wars, The (1595-1623), 
 
 61 
 Clare, John (i 793-1 864), De- 
 scriptive Poems (1820), 165 
 Clarissa Harlowe (1748), 126 
 Cleanness (c. 1350), 23 
 Cleon (1855), 179 
 Clerk Saunders, 41 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The 
 
 (l86i), 193 
 Cloud, The (1820), 163 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819- 
 
 61), 182 
 Cobbett, William (1762-1835), 
 
 42, 173 
 Codlingsby (in Punch) (1847), 
 
 190 
 CiBur de Lion (1275-1300), 20 
 Coleridge, Hartley (1796- 
 
 1849). 155, 166 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 
 
 (1772-1834), 134, 135, 143, 
 
 144. 145. 146. 148. 149. 150; 
 
 Poems, IS3, I54. 155, 156; 
 
 Cntiasm, 169, 174 
 Colin Clout (c. 1519), 38 
 Colin Clout's Come Home Again 
 
 (1591), 57, 64 
 Comer, Jeremy (1650-1726), 
 Immorality of the Stage 
 (1698), 141 
 
 Collins, William (1721-59), 
 
 132, 134 
 Colubriad, The (1782; pub. 
 
 1806), 136 
 Comedy of Errors, The, 79 
 Complaint of Buckingham 
 
 (1563), 48 
 Complaint of Rosamond (1592- 
 
 1623), 61 
 Complaint of the Black Knight, 
 
 The, 37 
 Complaint to his Empty Purse, 
 
 The (1399?), 30 
 Complaint unto Pity (c. 1372), 
 
 26 
 Complaints (1591), 56 
 Compleat Angler, The (1653), 
 
 107 
 Comus (1634; ptd. 1637), 75, 
 
 89, g8, 101 
 Conduct of the Allies, The 
 
 (1711), III 
 Confessio Amantis (1390), 32 
 Confessions of an English 
 
 Opium-Eater (1821), 171 
 Congreve, William (1670- 
 
 1729), X09, no, 112, 140 
 Coningsby (1844), 193 
 Conquest of Granada, The 
 
 (1669-70), 139 
 Conscious Lovers, The (1722), 
 
 141 
 Constable, Henry (1562-1613), 
 
 51 
 Cooper's Hill (1642), 95 
 Coriolanus, 85, 86 
 Cornish dialect plays (before 
 
 1300; MS. 15th cent.), 72 
 Corn-Law Rhymes (1831), 166 
 Coronach, 157 
 Coryat, Thomas (i577?-i6i7), 
 
 Cory at' s Crudities (1611), 68 
 County Guy, 157 
 Court of Love, The (before 1500), 
 
 37,39 
 Coventry plays (1416; MS. 
 
 1468), 72 
 Coverdale, Miles (1488-1568), 
 
 44 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 217 
 
 Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 
 Poems, 94, 95, 96; Essays 
 (1667), 107 
 Cowper's Grave (1838), 181 
 Cowper, William (1731-1800), 
 58; Letters, 121, 132, 133, 
 13s; Poems, 136, 154 
 Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 
 
 131. 135, 167. 188 
 Cranford (1853), 192, 193 
 Cranmer, Archbidiop (1489- 
 
 1556). 44 
 Crashaw, Richard (i6i3?-49), 
 
 94 
 Crist, 8 
 
 Crist and Satan, 7 
 Critic, The (1779), 140, 141 
 Cromwell's Letters and Speeches 
 
 (1845), 198, 199 
 Cronica Tripartita (1400), 32 
 Crossing the Bar (1889), 177 
 Crotchet Castle (1831), 168 
 Cry of the Children, The (1843), 
 
 181 
 Cuckoo and the Nightingale, 
 
 The (1403-10), 37 
 Cudworth, Ralph (1617-88), 
 
 True Intellectual System of 
 
 the Universe (1678), 103 
 Curse of Kehama, The (18 10), 
 
 156 
 Cursor Mundi (1300), 22 
 Cynewulf (/. 750), 7, 8, 9 
 Cypress Grove, A (1623), 107. 
 
 Daffodils (1804; pub. 1807), 150 
 Dame Siriz (c. 1260), 22 
 Damon and Pythias (1564; ptd. 
 
 1571). 74 
 Daniel, 7 
 
 Daniel Deronda (1877), 191 
 Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), 
 
 Poems, 52, 53, 61, 62; 
 
 Criticism, 68, 89 
 Dante (1265-1321), 49, 134 
 Dante and his Circle (1861), 
 
 182 
 Dares the Phrygian, 28 
 
 Dark Ladye, The (1798; ptd. 
 
 1834), 155 
 Darkness (1816), 158 
 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809- 
 
 82), Origin of Species (1859), 
 
 206 
 Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 
 
 Loves of the Plants (1789), 
 
 130 
 Davenant, Sir William (1606- 
 
 68), 92, 96 
 David and Bethsabe (1589; ptd. 
 
 1599), 75 
 David Copperfield (1849-50), 
 
 189 
 Davideis (1656), 96 
 Davies, Sir John (1569-1626), 
 
 59 
 Davison's Poetical Rhapsody 
 
 (1602), 53 
 Day, John (Jl. 1606), 90 
 Death of Dr. Swift, The (1731; 
 
 ptd. 1739), 117 
 Death of CEnone, The (1892), 
 
 177 
 Death's Jest Book (1825-49; 
 
 ptd. 1850 and 1851), 166 
 De Augmentiis Scientiarum 
 
 (1623), 65, 68 
 Decameron (1350), 29 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 
 Empire, The (1766-88), 124 
 De Consolatione Philosophies, 
 
 11.33 
 Defence of Guenevere, The 
 
 (1858), 184 
 Defence of Poetry (1821 ; ptd. 
 
 1840), 162, 169 
 Defoe, Daniel (i66o?-i73i), 
 
 109, 114, 115, 126 
 Deistic controversy. The, 119 
 Dejection (1802-17), 155 
 Dekker, Thomas (1570?- 
 
 1641?), Songs, 53; Prose, 69, 
 
 88; Plays, 90 
 Delia (1591, and 1592-1623), 
 
 52 
 Deloney, Thomas (iS43?- 
 
 1607?) 69 
 
2l8 
 
 Index 
 
 Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 
 
 95 
 Dennis, John (1657-1734), in 
 Dear's Lament, i 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum (c. 
 
 1231; trans. 1398), 35 
 De Quincey, Thomas (1785- 
 
 1859). 145. 169. 171, 172; 
 Essays, 171, 203 
 De Regimine Principum (1413), 
 
 37 
 Descriptive Sketches (1793), 148 
 Deserted Village, The (1770), 
 
 132 
 Desportes (i 546-1 606), 51 
 Destruction of Britain, The 
 
 (c. 560), ID 
 de Tabley, Lord (1835-95), 
 
 185 
 Diana of the Crossways (1885), 
 
 196, 197 
 Dialogues between Hylas end 
 
 Philonous (1713), 120 
 Dialogues of Gregory the Great, 
 
 ID 
 
 Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 
 130. 175. 178; Novels, j88, 
 189, 191, 194, 200 
 
 Dictionary (1755) Qohnson), 
 123 
 
 Dictys the Cretan, 28 
 
 Dirge in Cymbeline (1749), 
 
 134 
 Discourse of English Poetry 
 
 (1586), 68 
 Discoveries (1641), 68 
 Dispensary, The (1699), 116 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, Lord 
 
 Beaconsfield (1804-81), 190, 
 
 193 
 Divine Poems (Donne) (ptd. 
 
 1633), 61 
 Dobell, Sydney (1824-74), 185 
 Dolores (1864), 186 
 Don Juan (1818-22), 158, 159 
 Donne, John (1573-1631), 
 
 Poems, sg, 60; Satires, 64; 
 
 Influence, '93, 94; Sermons, 
 
 105 
 
 Don Quixote (1605-15), 70, 116 
 Dorset, Earl of (Charles Sack- 
 
 ville) (1638-1706), 95, 116 
 Douglas, Gavin (i474?-i522), 
 
 39.40 
 Dover Beach (1867), 181 
 Dowland, John (i563?-i626), 
 
 53 
 Dowsabel (1593-1619), 62 
 Dr. Faustus (1588; ptd. 1604), 
 
 77 
 Dramatic Idyls (1879-80), 179 
 Dramatis Personce (1864), 179 
 Drapier's Letters (1724), 112 
 Drayton, Michael (1563-1631), 
 
 47. 52. 53. 58; Poems, 62, 
 
 63, 69. 77. 90, 95 
 Dream, The (1816), 158 
 Dream Fugue (1849), 171 
 Dream of Fair Women, A 
 
 (1833-42), 177 
 Dream of John Ball, A (1888), 
 
 184 
 Dream of the Rood, The, 8 
 Dream Pedlary (ptd. 1851), 166 
 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), 
 
 195 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, 
 
 William (1585-1649), 52, 
 
 59.88 
 Dryden, John (i 631-1700), 
 
 37. 64, 93, 94, 95, 96, 109; 
 
 Prose, no; Poems, lis, n^, 
 
 H7, 119, 123, 139, 140, 164, 
 
 169 
 Du Bartas (1544-90), 59 
 Du Bellay (1525-60), 51 
 Duchess of Malfi, The (1614? 
 
 ptd. 1623), 91 
 Dunbar, William (1465?- 
 
 1530?), 33. 39, 40, 138 
 Dunciad, The (1728-42), 117 
 Duns Scotus (i265?-l308?), 
 
 15 
 
 Dunstan (924-988), 12 
 
 Dyer, John (l700?-58), Gron- 
 
 garHill (1727), n?. 132 
 Dyer, Sir Edward (d. 1607), 
 
 54 
 
Index 
 
 219 
 
 Earle, John (i6oi?-65), Micro- 
 cosmographie (1628), 70 
 
 Earth and Man- (1883), 185 
 
 Earthly Paradise, The (1868- 
 70), 184 
 
 Eastward Hoi (1605), 90 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849), 
 129 
 
 Edinburgh, The (founded 1802), 
 144, 170 
 
 Edward II (1592; ptd. 1594 
 and 1598), 77 
 
 Edwards, Richard (1523?- 
 66), 74 
 
 Egoist, The (1879), 197 
 
 Eikonoklastes (1649), 103 
 
 Elegy in a Country Churchyard 
 (1751), 132, 133 
 
 Elegy to the Memory of an Un- 
 fortunate Lady (1717), 118 
 
 Elegy on Donne (1633), 93 
 
 Elene, 8 
 
 Eliot, George 'Mary Ann 
 Evans) (1819-80), 175; 
 Novels, igi, 194 
 
 Elizabethan classical transla- 
 tions, 58, 70 
 
 Elizabethan lyric poetry, 53 
 
 Elizabethan patriotic poetry, 
 61 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer (1781-1849), 
 166 
 
 Ellis, George (i753-i8is), 166 
 
 Eloisa to Ahelard (17 17). nS 
 
 Elyot, Sir Thomas (1499- 
 1546), 42 
 
 Emblems (1635), 95 
 
 Emilia in England (1864), 198 
 
 Emma (1816), 129 
 
 Endymion and Phcebe (1594), 
 
 58 
 Endymion (Keats) (1818), 145, 
 
 163 
 Endymion (Lyly) (1585; ptd. 
 
 I59i),75 , 
 Eneydos (1490), 40 
 England's Helicon (1600), 53 
 England's Heroical Epistles 
 
 (1597-1605), 62 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Re- 
 viewers (1809), 131, 158 
 
 English Comic Writers, The 
 (1819), 170 
 
 English Humourists, The (1851; 
 ptd. 1853), 190, 191 
 
 English Mail-Coach, The (1849) , 
 
 171 
 English Poets, The (1818), 170 
 Enoch Arden (1864), 177 
 Eothen (1844), 193 
 Epipsychidion (1821), 160 
 Epistle to the Lady Margaret 
 
 (1603), 62 
 Epistles and Satires (Pope) 
 
 1733-39), 118 
 Epitaphium Damonis (1639- 
 
 40), 98 
 Epithalamium (1595), 51, 57 
 Erasmus (1466-1536), 44, 46 
 Erechtheus (1876), 186 
 Essay Concerning Human Un- 
 derstanding, An (1690), 104 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, An 
 
 (1668), III 
 Essay on Criticism, An (171 1), 
 
 117 
 Essay on Man, An (1733), 118 
 Essay on the Comic Spirit, An 
 
 (1877; pub. 1897), 198 
 Essays in Criticism (1865), 
 
 202 
 Essays (1597-1625) (Bacon), 
 
 66, 67 
 Essays (Macaulay) (1825 ff.), 
 
 201 
 Essays of Elia (1820-5), 172 
 Estate, The (c. 1665), 95 
 Etherege, Sir George (1635?- 
 
 91), Man of Mode (1676), 140 
 Euganean Hills, The (18 18), 
 
 160 
 Eugene Aram (1829), 166 
 Euphues (1579), 68 
 Euphues and his England 
 
 (1580), 69 
 Euphuism, 44, 69 
 Evan Harrington (1861), 196 
 Evelina (1778), 129 
 
220 
 
 Index 
 
 Evelyn , John (1620-1706), 
 Diary (1641-1705), 104 
 
 Eve of St. Agnes, The (1819; 
 pub. 1820), 143, 145, 164 
 
 Eve of St. Mark, The (1819; 
 pub. 1848), 164 
 
 Everyman (before 1490; ptd. 
 
 1509-30). 73 
 Every Man in his Humour 
 
 (1598; ptd. 1601), 88 
 Excursion, The (1814), 147, 
 
 150 
 Exodus, 7, 8 
 Expostulation (Cowper) (1782), 
 
 136 
 Expostulation and Reply (1798), 
 
 150 
 
 Fables (Gay) (1727; vol. ii., 
 
 1738), 117 
 Fables of Msop (c. 1476-86), 
 
 39 
 Fables, Ancient and Modern 
 
 (Dryden) (1700), 37, 116 
 Fabyan's Chronicle (c. 1510; 
 
 ptd. I5l6),4i 
 Faerie Queene, The (1590-96), 
 
 52, S4, 55. 56 
 Fair Annie, 41 
 Fairfax, Edward (d. 1635), 
 
 trans, of Gerusalemme Liber- 
 
 ata (1600), 59 
 Faithful Shepherdess, The (1608 ; 
 
 ptd. c. 1610), 89 
 Falkland, Lord (Lucius Gary) 
 
 (i6io?-43), 103 
 Falls of Princes, The (c. 1435; 
 
 pub. 1494), 36, 49 
 Fancy (1819; pub. 1820), 165 
 Fancy, The (1820), 166 
 Farewell to Norris and Drake 
 
 (1589). 61 
 Farquhar, George (1678-1707), 
 
 140 
 Fatal Sisters, The (1768), 132 
 Fates of the Apostles, 8 
 Fears m Solitude (1798), 155 
 Felix Holt (1866), 191 
 
 Feltham, Owen (i6o2?-68), 
 
 Resolves 1620?), 67 
 Female Phaeton, The (ptd. 
 
 1722), 131 
 Fergusson, Robert (1750-74), 
 
 Poems (1773), 138 
 Ficino (1433-99). 54 
 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 
 
 126, 127, 140, 156, 167, 188, 
 
 194 
 Field, Nathaniel (1587-1633), 
 
 92 
 Fifine at the Fair (1872), 180 
 Fig for Momus, A (1589), 64 
 Fight at Finnsburh, The, 4, 12 
 Filmer, Sir Robert (d. 1653), 
 
 Patriarcha (pub. 1680), 104 
 Filostrato (c. 1338), 28 
 First Principles (1862), 206 
 Fisher, Bishop (1459-1535). 
 
 Sermons (c. 1509), 42 
 Fitzgefifrey, Charles (1575?- 
 
 1638), 61 
 FitzGerald, Edward (1809- 
 
 83). 177. 185. 186 
 Flaming Heart, The (1652), 94 
 Flaubert (1821-80), 204 
 Fletcher, Giles (i588?-i623),(5j 
 Fletcher, John (1579-1625), 
 
 63, 90, 91 
 Fletcher, Phineas (1582-1650), 
 
 63 
 Florio, John (i553?-i625), 
 
 Montaigne (1603), 70 
 Floris and Blancheflour (1275- 
 
 1300), 20 
 Flower and the Leaf, The (c. 
 
 1450). 37 
 Flowers of Sion (1623), 59 
 Ford, John (1586-1640?), 91, 
 
 92, 126 
 Forest, The (i6i6), 89 
 Forsaken Garden, A (1878), 
 
 186 
 Forsaken Merman, The (1849), 
 
 182 
 Fors Clavigera (1871 ff.), 203 
 Fortescue, Sir John (1394?- 
 
 1476?), 42 
 
Index 
 
 221 
 
 Fortunes of Nigel, The (1822), 
 
 167 
 Four Books of Airs (Campion) 
 
 (1601-17), 53 
 Four Elements, The (c. 1515; 
 
 ptd. 1519), 73 
 Four Hymns (Spenser) (1596), 
 
 54 
 Four P. P., The (c. 1544), 73 
 Fox and the Wolf, The (c. 1260), 
 
 22 
 Foxe, John (1516-87), Book of 
 
 Martyrs (1563), 47 
 Fragment from the Recluse 
 
 (1814), 150 
 France (ijgS), 156 
 Francis, Sir Philip (1740- 
 
 1818), 122 
 Fraser's Magazine (founded 
 
 1830), 170 
 Fraunce, Abraham, {fl. 1587- 
 
 1633). 53 
 Frederick the Great (1858-65), 
 
 199 
 French Revolution, The (1790) 
 
 (Burke), 125 
 French Revolution, The (1837) 
 
 (Carlyle), 198 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 
 
 (1589; ptd. 1594). 75 
 Friendship's Garland (1871), 
 
 202 
 Froissart's Chronicles, Ber- 
 
 ners's trans, (c. 1523), 36, 43 
 Frost at Midnight (1798), I55 
 Froude, James Anthony (1818- 
 
 94), 200 
 Fudge Family in Paris, The 
 
 (1818), 166 
 Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke 
 
 (1554-1628), 59 
 Fuller, Thomas (1608-61), 104 
 
 Gaimar, Geoffrey (fl. 1140), 15 
 Gallathea (1584; ptd. 1592), 75 
 Gait, John (1779-1839), An- 
 nals of the Parish ( 1 821), 129 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle (c. 
 1550; ptd. 1575), 74 
 
 Gardener's Daughter, The 
 
 (1842), 177 
 Garden of Cyrus, The (1658), 
 
 106 
 Garden of Florence, The (1821), 
 
 166 
 Garden of Prosperpine, The 
 
 (1866), 187 
 Garden, The (Marvell) (c. 
 
 1651; ptd. 1681), 96 
 Garrick, David (1716-79), 137, 
 
 140 
 Garth, Sir Samuel (1661-1719), 
 
 Dispensary (1699), 116 
 Gascoigne, George (l525?-77), 
 
 51, 74 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth Cleg- 
 horn (1810-65), 192, 193 
 
 Gaston de Latour (1896), 204 
 
 Gaudeamus igitur, 41 
 
 Gawayne and the Grene Knight 
 
 (c. 1350). 23. 24 
 Gay, John (1685-1732), 112, 
 
 117, 118, 131, 140 
 Genesis, 7, 8 
 Genesis and Exodus (c. 1250), 
 
 16 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
 
 History (c. 1136), 15, 20 
 Gesta Romanorum in English 
 
 (1425-50; ptd. c. 1472-5). 
 
 32 
 Geste Historyale of Troy (c. 
 
 1360), 28 
 Giaour, The (1813), 158 
 Gibbon, Edward (1737-94). 
 
 122, 124, 125. 167 
 Gifford, William (1756-1826), 
 
 170 
 Gildas (5l6?-570?), 10, 13, 20 
 Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?- 
 
 1220?), 15 
 Glaucus and Scylla (1589), 58 
 Goblin Market (1859; ptd. 
 
 1862), 183 
 Godwin, William (1756-1836), 
 
 Caleb Williams (1794), 129; 
 
 Political Justice (1793), 149. 
 
 161 
 
222 
 
 Index 
 
 Goethe (1749-1832), 182, 198, 
 
 199, 200 
 Golding, Arthur (i536?-i6o5?), 
 
 Metamorphoses (1567), 58 
 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 
 
 Essays, 120; Novel, 128, 130, 
 
 132; Poems, 133, 135; Plays, 
 
 141 
 Gondibert (1651)196 
 Good-Natured Man, The (1768), 
 
 141 
 Good Thoughts in Bad Ttmes 
 
 (1645 and 1646), 104 
 Googe, Barnabe (1540-94), 51 
 Gorboduc (1562; ptd. 1565 and 
 
 1570), 74 
 Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624), 
 
 School of Abuse (1579), 68 
 Governor, The (i 531), 42 
 Gower, Sir John (1325?- 
 
 1408), J7, 32 
 Grace Abounding (1666), 105 
 Granville, George, Lord Lans- 
 
 downe (1667-1735), 116 
 Gray, Thomas (1716-71), 96; 
 
 Letters, 121, 123, 132; Elegy 
 
 (1751). 133. 134 
 Great Expectations (1860-61), 
 
 189 
 Greene, Robert (i56o?-92). 
 
 Songs, 53; Novels, 69; Plays, 
 
 75.78 
 Green, Matthew (1696-1737), 
 
 The Spleen (1737), 117 
 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke 
 
 (1554-1628), 59 
 Griselda (Chaucer) (after 1373), 
 
 41 
 Grocyn, William (1446?- 
 
 I5I9),46 
 Grongar Hill (1727), 117, 132 
 Grosseteste, Robert (d. 1253), 
 
 15 
 Grote, George (1794-1871), 
 
 201 
 Guardian, The (1713), 120 
 Guevara's Dial of Princes 
 
 (1529), Berners's trans. 
 
 (1534), 69 
 
 Guido delle Colonne {fl, 1270- 
 
 87), 28 
 Guillaume de Lorris ()?. 1237), 
 
 26 
 Guillaume de Machault (c. 
 
 1300-77), 31 
 Guilpin's Skialethia (1598), 64 
 Gulliver's Travels (1726), II2 
 Gull's Horn Book, The (1609), 
 
 69 
 
 Guthlac, 8 
 
 Guy Mannering (1815), 167 
 
 Guy of Warwick (1300-25), 19 
 
 Habington, William (1605-54), 
 
 95 
 
 Hajjt Baba (1824), 168 
 Hakluyt, Richard (1552?- 
 
 1616), Principal Navigations 
 
 (1589-1600), 48, 67 
 Hales, John (1584-1656), 103 
 Halifax, Earl of (George 
 
 Savile) (1633-95), no 
 Hallam, Arthur Henry (181 1- 
 
 33) 175 
 HaUam's Middle Ages (1818), 
 
 201 
 Hall, Joseph (1574-1656), 
 
 Virgidemiarum (1597), 64 
 Hall's Chronicle (c. 1530), 41 
 Hamlet, 49, 76, 82, 86 
 Handlynge Sinne (1303), 22 
 Handy Andy (1842), 193 
 Happy Warrior, The (1807), 
 
 152 
 Hard Cash (1863), 193 
 Hardy, Thomas (b. 1840), 175, 
 
 194. 195 
 Harman's Caveat for Common 
 
 Corsetors (1567), 69 
 Harrington, James (161 1-77), 
 
 Oceana (1656), 104 
 Harrington, Sir John (1561- 
 
 161^, Orlando Furioso (1591) , 
 
 59 
 Harrison, William (1534-93), 
 Description of England 
 (1577), 67 
 
Index 
 
 223 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel (1545-1630), 
 
 46,53 
 Havelok (c. 1302), 19 
 Hawes, Stephen (1475?- 
 
 1530?), 37 
 Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 
 
 120, 145; Criticism, 170; 
 
 Essays, 170, 195 
 Heart of Midlothian, The 
 
 (1818), 167 
 Heart of Oak, 137 
 Heavy Brigade, The (1882 and 
 
 1885), 177 
 Heine's Grave (1867), 182 
 Hekatompathia (1582), 51 
 Hellas (1822), 160 
 Hellenics (1846), 165 
 Henry IV (parts i and ii), 84 
 Henry V, 62, 84 
 Henry VI, 77, 83 
 Henry VII (Bacon) (1622), 67 
 Henry VIII, 84, 90 
 Henry Esmond (1852), 189, 190 
 Henryson, Robert (1430?- 
 
 1506?), 39 
 Herbert, George (1593-1633), 
 
 22, P4, 95 
 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord 
 
 (i583-i648),94 
 Hero and Leander (1593; pub. 
 
 1598), 46, 58 
 Heroes and Hero- Worship 
 
 (1840; pub. 1841), 198 
 Heroic play. The, 139 
 Heroic poem. The, 96 
 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 
 
 62, Q4 
 Hesperides (1648), 94 
 Haywood, John (1497-c. 1580), 
 
 Interltides, 73 
 Heywood, Thomas (?-i650?), 
 
 90 
 Hickscorner (c. 1509), 73 
 Hind and the Panther, The 
 
 (1687), 116 
 History of Charles V (1769), 
 
 124 
 History of England (Macaulay) 
 
 (1848-55), 200 
 
 History of John Bull (1712), 112 
 History of Scotland (Robertson) 
 
 (1759), 124 
 Htstory of the Great Rebellion 
 
 (pub. 1702-4), 104 
 History of the World (Ralegh) 
 
 (1614), 67, 107 
 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 
 
 103, 108 
 Hoby, Sir Thomas (1530-66), 
 
 Courtier (1561) (from Casti- 
 
 glione), 70 
 Hogg, James (1770-1835), 165 
 Holinshed, Raphael (d. 1580), 
 
 Chronicles (1577 and 1586- 
 
 7), 41. 67, 70, 83, 87 
 Holland, Philemon (1552- 
 
 1637), translations (c. 1600), 
 
 70 
 Holy Dying (1651), 107 
 Holy Maidenhood (c. 1210), 33 
 Holy War, The (1682), 106 
 Holy Willie's Prayer (1785), 
 
 138 
 Homilies of jElfric (990-5), 12 
 Homilies of Wulfstan (c. loio), 
 
 13 
 
 Honest Whore, The (1604), 90 
 Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 
 
 166 
 Hooker, Richard (i554?-l6oo), 
 
 47-65 
 Horace, 93, 94, 110, 117 
 Horatian Ode (1650), 96 
 Home, Richard Henry (1803- 
 
 84), 185 
 Hours of Idleness (1807), 158 
 House of Fame, The (1383-4), 
 
 27 
 House of Life, The (1847 ff., 
 
 1870; complete 1881), 183 
 House of the Wolfings, The 
 
 (1889), 184 
 Howell, James (1594-1666), 
 
 Familiar Letters (1645-55), 
 
 104 
 Huchowne (Jl. 14th c), 24 
 Hudibras (1663, 1664, and 
 
 1678), 70, 116, 117 
 
224 
 
 Index 
 
 Hughes, Thomas {fl. 1587), 74 
 Humane Knowledge, Of (1633), 
 
 59 
 
 Hume, David (171 1-76), Em- 
 piricism, 120, 174, 205; His- 
 tory of England (1762), 123 
 
 Humphrey Clinker (1771), 128 
 
 Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 163, 
 166, 169, 170 
 
 Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 
 
 41 
 Huon of Bordeaux (ptd. 1534?), 
 
 44 
 
 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825- 
 95), Essays collected (1893- 
 4), 175,206 
 
 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Claren- 
 don (1609-74), J04, 108 
 
 Hyde Park (lie. 1632; ptd. 
 1637), 92 
 
 Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial 
 (1658), 106 
 
 Hymn to Proserpine (1866), 187 
 
 Hymn to St. Teresa, The (1652), 
 
 94 
 Hyperion (1818-20; ptd. 1820), 
 
 163 
 
 Idea (1594-1619), 52, 62 
 Idea of a University (1854), 
 
 206 
 Idler, The (1758-60), 120 
 Idylls of the King (1859-85), 
 
 176 
 Iliad (Pope) (1715-20), 118 
 II Penseroso (c. 1632; ptd. 
 
 1645), 97 
 Imaginary Conversations (1824- 
 
 29), 171 
 Imitations of Horace (1733- 
 
 9), 118 
 Induction to The Mirror for 
 
 Magistrates (1563), 48-49 
 Inn Album, The (1875), 180 
 Inheritance (1824), 129 
 In Memoriam (1850), 174, 
 
 176, 178 
 Instauratio Magna (1620), 66 
 Intentions (1891), 204 
 
 Interludes, 73 
 
 In the Bay (,187s), 187 
 
 Ipomedon (c. 1400), 20 
 
 Irene (1749), 140 
 
 Irish Melodies (1807-34), 1^6 
 
 Isabella (1818; ptd. 1820), 164 
 
 Island, The (1823), 158 
 
 Itylus (1866), 187 
 
 Ivanhoe (1820), 167, 168 
 
 Jack Wilton (1594), 69 
 James I of Scotland (1394- 
 
 1437). 38-39 
 James IV (1590; ptd. 1598), 75 
 Jane Eyre (1847), 192 
 Jean de Meung (d. 1305), 26 
 Jefferies, Richard (1848-87), 
 
 193 
 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord (1773- 
 
 1850), 145 
 Jenny (ptd. 1870), 183 
 Jerusalem (1804), 137 
 Jew of Malta, The Rich (1589; 
 
 ptd. 1633), 76 
 Jinny the Just (in Longleat 
 
 MSS.) (c. 1716?), 131 
 Jocasta (1566), 51 
 Johan Johan (1533-4), 73 
 John Gilpin (1782), 136 
 John of Salisbury (d. 1180), 15 
 John of Trevisa (1326-1412), 
 
 35 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel (1709- 
 84), 61, 94, 98; Essays, 120, 
 122; Lives, 123; Poems, 130, 
 132, 133, 140. 198 
 Jolly Beggars, The (1785), 138 
 Jonathan Wild (1743), 127 
 Jonson, Ben (i573?-l637), 
 47. 53. 54. 64; Prose, 68, 70, 
 78; Plays, 87, 88, 89; Poems, 
 93, 140, 188 
 Joseph Andrews (1742), 127 
 Journal of the Plague Year 
 
 (1722), 115 
 Journal to Stella (1710-13), 
 
 III, 121 
 Journey from this World to 
 the Next, A (1743), 127 
 
Index 
 
 225 
 
 Journey to the Western Isles 
 
 (177s). 123 
 Judith, 12 
 Juliana, 8 
 Julian and Maddalo (18 18), 
 
 160 
 Julius CiBsar, 85 
 Juvenal, 64 
 
 Keats, John (1795-1 821), 57, 
 63, 98, 134, 139. 145, 146- 
 147, 154. 159; Poems, 163, 
 164, 165, 166; Letters, 169, 
 176, 177, 178 
 
 Keble, John (i 792-1 866) , 
 Christian Year (1827), 183 
 
 Keith of Ravelston (1856), 185 
 
 Kenilworth (i 821), 167 
 
 Kidnapped (1886), 195 
 
 Kilmeny (1813), 165 
 
 King Alfred (849-901), 2, 6, 
 10, II 
 
 King Alisaunder (1275-1300), 
 
 19 
 King Arthur, 20 
 King Horn (c. 1250), 19 
 Kingis Quair, The (c. 1423), 38 
 King John (Bale) (c. 1548), 73 
 King John (Shakespeare), 84 
 Kinglake, Alexander William 
 
 (1809-91), 193 
 King Lear, 82 
 King's College Chapel (1820?), 
 
 153 
 Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 
 
 193 
 
 KingStephen (1819; ptd. 1848), 
 
 165 
 King's Tragedy, The (1880; ptd. 
 
 1881), 183 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, 
 
 The (1609?; ptd. 1613), 91 
 Knight's Tale, The, 18, 20, 29 
 Kubla Khan (1797; ptd. 1816), 
 
 143.153 , , ,, , 
 Kyd, Thomas (i557?-95?). 7^ 
 
 La Belle Dame sans Merci 
 (1819; pub. 1820), 145, 164 
 
 Lady of Pleasure, A (1635; ptd. 
 
 1637). 92 
 Lady of Shalott, The (1833-42), 
 
 177 
 Lady of the Lake, The (1810), 
 
 156 
 Lalla Rookh (1817), 165 
 L' Allegro (c. 1632; ptd. 1645), 
 
 97,99 
 
 Lamb, Charles (i 775-1 834), 
 76, 90, 120, 145, 166; Criti- 
 cism, 169; Essays, 172 
 
 Lamb, Mary Ann (1764-1847), 
 170 
 
 Lament for the Makaris, The 
 (c. 1508), 39 
 
 Lament of Tasso, The (1817), 158 
 
 Lamia (1819; ptd. 1820), 164 
 
 Land of Cockaigne, The (c. 
 1258), 22 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage (1775- 
 1864), 99; Poems, 165; Prose, 
 171, 186, 187 
 
 Langland, William (1332?- 
 99?). 22, 23, 24, 25, 33 
 
 Laodamia (1814; pub. 1815), 
 
 152 
 Lark Ascending, The (1881 
 
 and 1883), 185 
 La Saisiaz (1878), 174, 178 
 Last Days of Pompeii, The 
 
 (1834), 193 
 Last Instructions to a Painter 
 
 (1667), 96 
 Last Word, The (1867), 182 
 Latimer, Hugh (l485?-i555). 
 
 42 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), 
 
 199 
 Laura (1327 ff.), 51 
 Laus Veneris (1862; ptd. 1866), 
 
 186 
 Lavengro (1851), 193 
 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 
 
 (bks l-iv, 1594), 65 
 Law, William (1686-1761), 
 
 Serious Call (1728), 119 
 Layamon's Brut (c. 1200 and 
 
 c. 1250), 17, 18 
 
 i5 
 
226 
 
 Index 
 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The 
 
 (1805), 155, 156 
 Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), 
 
 201 
 Lee, Nathaniel (i653?-92), 
 
 Rival Queens (1677), 139 
 Legend of Good Women, The 
 
 (1385-6?), 27, 28 
 Leland, John (i5o6?-52). Itin- 
 erary (c. 1540), 41 
 Le Morte Arthur (finished 
 
 1469; pub. 1485), 21, 42 
 Lemprifere, John (1765?- 
 
 1824), Dictionary (1788), 
 
 163 
 
 "Lenten is come with love to 
 
 toune" (c. 1 3 10), 23 
 L 'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616- 
 
 1704), no 
 Letters of Junius (1769-72), 
 
 122 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace 
 
 (1795-7), 125 
 Letter to a Friend, A (pub. 
 
 1690), 106 
 Letter to Lord Chesterfield 
 
 (1755). 123 
 Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), 
 
 160 
 Lewis, Matthew Gregory 
 , (1775-1818), The Monk 
 
 (1795), 129 
 Lewti (1798), 155 
 Lever, Charles James (1806- 
 
 72), 193 
 Leviathan (1651), 103 
 Liberty, On (1859), 205 
 Liberty of Prophesying, The 
 
 (1646), 103 
 Library, The (1781), 131 
 Life and Death of Jason, The 
 
 (1867), 184 
 Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 
 
 The (1680), 106 
 Life of Alfred (c. 900), 10 
 Life of Cowley (1779), 61, 94, 
 
 132 
 Life of Johnson (Boswell) 
 
 (1791), 122 
 
 Life of Nelson (1813), 169 
 Ltfe of Sir Walter Scott (1836- 
 
 8), 168 
 Life of Sterling (1851), 175, 199 
 Life of Wesley (1820), 169 
 Lillo, George (1693-1739), 
 
 George Barnwell (1731), 140 
 Linacre, Thomas (i46o?-i524), 
 
 46 
 Lindsay, Sir David (1490- 
 
 1555), 38. 40 
 Little Geste of Robin Hood, 
 
 The (i400-i50o),40 
 Lives of divines (Walton), 
 
 (1640-78), 108 
 Lives of the Poets (1779-81), 
 
 122, 123, 132 
 Livy, 70 
 Locke, John (1632-1704), 103, 
 
 104, 120, 174, 205 
 Lockhart, John Gibson (1794- 
 
 1854), 168 
 Locksley Hall (1842), 177 
 Lodge, Thomas (i558?-i625). 
 
 Sonnets, 52; Songs, 53, 58, 
 
 64; Novels, 69, 76 
 London (1738), 130 
 London Magazine, The (founded 
 
 1820), 170 
 London Lickpenny, 36 
 Lord of the Isles, The (1815), 
 
 156 
 Lord Ormont and his Aminta 
 
 (1894), 196 
 Lorna Doone (1869), 193 
 Love (Coleridge) (1799; ptd. 
 
 1800), 155 
 Lovelace, Richard (1618-58), 
 
 Lucasta (1649), 94 
 Love Song (c. 1240), 23 
 Lover, Samuel (1797- 1868), 193 
 Loves of the Plants, The (1789), 
 
 130 
 Lover's Message, The, 6 
 Lucrece (1594), 58 
 Lucretius (1869), 177 
 Lycidas (1637; pub. 1638), 98 
 Lydgate, John (i37o?-i45i?), 
 
 20, 36, 37, 49 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 227 
 
 Lyly, John (i554?-i6o6), 
 Novels, 68-69; Plays, 74, 75 
 
 Lyrical Ballads (1798), 2nd 
 edition (1800), 143, 149, 153 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
 
 Lord (1800-59), 123, 200, 201 
 Macbeth, 49, 82, 85, 90, 170 
 Macflecknoe (1682), 116 
 Madiiavelli (1469-1527), The 
 
 Prince (1532), 66 
 Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831), 
 
 Man of Feeling (1771), 128 
 Macpherson, James (1736-96), 
 
 Ossian (1762), 132 
 Madoc (1805), 156 
 Magnificence (15 16?), 73 
 Maid Marian (1822), 168 
 Maid's Tragedy, The (1611?; 
 
 ptd. 1619), 90 
 Male Rigle, La (c. 1406), 37 
 Malory, Sir Thomas (fl. 1470), 
 
 21, 42, 43, 55, 176 
 Malthus, Thomas Robert 
 
 (1766-1834), 205 
 Man (1633), 94 
 Mandeville, Bernard (1670?- 
 
 1733), Fable of the Bees 
 
 (1714-23), 120 
 Mandeville's Travels (French 
 
 MS.) (1371), 35 
 Manfred (1817), 158, 159 
 Mannynge, Robert, of Brunne 
 
 (fl. 1288-1338), 22 
 Man of Feeling, The (1771), 128 
 Man of Mode, The (1676), 140 
 Mansfield Park (1814), 129 
 Mantuanus (d. 15 16), 53 
 Map, Walter (fl. 1200), 15 
 Marie de Prance (fl. 1180), 15 
 Marino Faliero (1820), 159 
 Marius the Epicurean (1885), 
 
 204 
 Marlowe, Christopher (1564- 
 
 93), 33, 46, 47, 49, 53 1 Poems, 
 
 58; Plays, 76, 77, 84 
 Marmion (1808), 143, 156 
 Marot, Clement (1496-1544), 
 
 53 
 
 Marryat, Frederic (1792- 
 
 1848), 193 
 Marston, John (1575 ?-i 634), 
 
 Satires, 64, 88; Plays, 90 
 Martial, 93 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), 189 
 Martin Marprelate (1588-go), 
 
 47,70 
 Mary Barton (1848), 192 
 Mary Stuart (1881), 187 
 Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 96 
 Masque, The, 8q 
 Masque of Anarchy, The (1819), 
 
 161 
 Masque of Queens, The (1609), 
 
 89 
 Massinger, Philip (1583-1640), 
 
 91 
 Maud (1855), 176, 177 
 May, Thomas (1595-1650), 
 History of the Long Parlia- 
 ment (1647), 104 
 Medieval survivals, 48 
 Melibeus and Prudence, 33 
 Memorial Verses (1850; ptd. 
 
 1852 and 1855), 182 
 Memories and Portraits (1887), 
 
 195 
 Men and Women (1855), 179 
 Meredith, George (1828-1909), 
 
 130; Poems, 185; Novels, 
 
 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 
 
 200 
 Merlin and the Gleam (1889), 
 
 176 
 Merope (1858), 182 
 Merry Beggars, The (1641 ; ptd. 
 
 1659), 92 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 
 
 80,88 
 "Metaphysical" poets, 59-60, 
 
 94 
 
 Michael (1800), 143, 151 
 Midas (1589; ptd. 1592), 75 
 Middlemarch (1871-2), 191 
 Middleton, Conyers (1683- 
 
 1750), 119 
 Middleton, Thomas (1570?- 
 1627), 90 
 
228 
 
 Index 
 
 Midsummer Fairies, The 
 (:827), i66 
 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 
 75, 8i 
 
 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 
 205 
 
 Mill on the Floss, The (i860), 
 191 
 
 Milton (Blake) (1804), 137 
 
 Milton, John (1608-74), 21, 
 49. 59, 63, 75, 77, 91, 93, 
 94, 96; Poems, q6, 97, 98, 99, 
 100, loi, 102; Prose, J05, 108, 
 109, 123, 131, 132, 148, 152, 
 164, 178, 180 
 
 Minot, Laurence (i300?-52), 
 
 23 
 
 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor- 
 der, The (1802-3), 157 
 
 Miracle plays (12th centtuy ff.), 
 71, 72, 99 
 
 Mirror for Magistrates, The 
 (1559-63), 36, 48 
 
 Mirrour de I'Omme (c. 1376), 
 
 31 
 
 Misfortunes of Arthur, The 
 
 (1587), 74 
 Miss Ferrier (1782-1854), 
 
 Inheritance (1824), 129 
 Mitford, Mary Russell (1787- 
 
 1855), 192 
 Mixed Essays (1879), 202 
 Modern Love (1862), 185 
 Modern Painters (1843-60), 
 
 202 
 Modest Proposal, A (1729), 112 
 Molifere (1622-73), 14°, 141 
 Moll Flanders (1721; ptd. 
 
 1722), 115 
 Monarchy, Of (1633), 59 
 Monk's Tale, The, 28, 36 
 Montaigne (1533-92), Essays 
 
 (1580-3), 66, 70, 8s, 204 
 Mont Blanc (1816; ptd. 1817), 
 
 161 
 Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 
 
 165, 167 
 Morality plays, 72, 73 
 Moral Ode, The (c. 1 170), 16 
 
 More, Hannah (1745-1833), 
 
 129 
 More, Henry (1614-87), Philo- 
 sophical Poems (1647), 64 
 More's History of Richard III 
 
 (ptd. 1543-57), 67 
 More, Sir Thomas (1478- 
 
 1535), 64, 67 
 Morning Post, The (founded 
 
 1772), 123-124 
 Morris, William (1834-96), 
 
 31, 175, 182; Poems, J83 
 Mort Arthur, 19 
 Morte Arthur, Le (1469; ptd. 
 
 1485), 21, 42 
 Morte d'Arthure (c. 1400), 23 
 Morte D' Arthur (Tennyson), 
 
 (1835; ptd. 1842), 176, 178 
 Much Ado about Nothing, 82 
 Mother Bombie (1590; ptd. 
 
 1594 and 1598), 74 
 Munday, Anthony (1553- 
 
 1633), 90 
 Muses' Elizium, The (1630), 62 
 Music's Duel (1648), 94 
 Musophilus (1599), 62 
 Mysteries of Udolpho, The 
 
 (1794), 129 
 
 Narrenschiff (Brant) (ptd. 
 
 1494), 38 
 Nashe, Thomas (1567-1601), 
 
 69.76,115 
 
 Natural History of Selborne 
 
 (1789), 193 
 Nennius (J?. 796), 10 
 New Atlantis, The (pub. 1627), 
 
 67 
 
 Newcomes, The (1854-5), 189, 
 190 
 
 Newman, John Henry, Cardi- 
 nal (1801-90), 175; Dream of 
 Gerontius (pub. 1865), 183; 
 Prose, 205, 206 
 
 New Way to pay old Debts, A 
 (1626?; ptd. 1633), 91 
 
 Nibelungenlied (c. 1150), 4 
 
 Nicholas of Hereford (c. 1250), 
 34 
 
Index 
 
 229 
 
 Nightingale, The (1798) (Cole- 
 ridge), 155 
 Night Thoughts (1742-4), 131 
 Nimphidia (1627), 62 
 Noble Numbers (1647-8), 94 
 Noctes AmbrosiancB (1822-35), 
 
 171 
 
 Northanger Abbey (ptd. 181 8), 
 
 129, 130 
 
 Northern Farmer: Old Style 
 
 (1864), 177 
 North, Sir Thomas (1535?- 
 
 1601?), Plutarch (1579), 70 
 Norton, Thomas (1532-84), 74 
 Nosce Teipsum (1598; ptd. 
 
 1599). 59 
 Notes of Instruction (1575), 51 
 Novel, The, 68, 69, 70, 126- 
 
 130, 167, 188-198 
 
 Novum Organum (1620), 66 
 Nun's Priest's Tale, The, 22, 30 
 Nut-Browne Maid, The (ptd. 
 1503), 39. 41 
 
 Ocdeve, Thomas (1368?- 
 1450?), 36 
 
 Ode on a distant prospect of 
 Eton College (1742-8), 133 
 
 Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819; 
 pub. 1820), 163 
 
 Ode on Melancholy (18 19; ptd. 
 1820), 146, 165 
 
 Ode on the Intimations of Im- 
 mortality (1803-6; ptd. 1807), 
 
 Ode on the Nativity (1629; ptd. 
 
 1645). 97 , , 
 Odes (Drayton), (1606-19), 62 
 Ode to Duty (1805; ptd. 1807), 
 
 Ode to Evening (1747). 132, I34 
 Ode to Liberty (Shelley) (1820), 
 
 160 
 Ode to Mistress Anne KilUgrew 
 
 (1686), 116 
 Ode to Naples (1820), 160 
 Ode to Simplicity (i747). 134 
 Ode to the Nightingale (18 19), 
 
 146, 165 
 
 Ode to the West Wind (1820), 
 
 160 
 Odyssey (Morris) (1887), 184 
 Old Curiosity Shop, The (1840), 
 
 189 
 Old Fortunatus (1596; ptd. 
 
 1600), 90 
 Oldham, John (1653-83), 96 
 Old Mortality (1816-7), 167 
 Old Wives' Tale, The (1590; ptd. 
 
 1595). 75 
 Oliver Twist (1837-9), 188 
 One of Our Conquerors (1891), 
 
 196 
 On Indolence (1819; pub. 1848), 
 
 165 
 On the Loss of the Royal George 
 
 (1782; pub. 1803), 137 
 On the Receipt of my Mother's 
 
 Picture (1790; pub. 1798), 
 
 136 
 On Translating Homer (1861), 
 
 202 
 Orchestra (1596), 59 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The 
 
 (1859), 196 
 Origins of drama, 71 
 Orion (1843), 185 
 Orison of Our Lady, The (c. 
 
 1210), 16 
 Ormulum (c. 1200), 16 
 Orosius (fl. 416), II 
 Osborne, Dorothy (1627-95), 
 
 Letters (1652-4), 104 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur (1844- 
 
 81), 185 
 Ossian (1762), 132 
 Otho the Great (1819; pub. 
 
 1848), 165 
 Otway, Thomas (1652-85), 
 
 Venice Preserved (1682), 139 
 Our Village (1824-32), 192 
 Overbury's? Characters (1614), 
 
 69 
 Ovid, 19, 27, 58, 62 
 Owl and the Nightingale, The 
 
 (c. 1220), 17 
 Oxford movement. The, 174, 
 
 175 
 
230 
 
 Index 
 
 Pains of Sleep, The (1803; ptd. 
 
 1817). 155 
 
 Palace of Art, The (1832; and 
 1842), 178 
 
 Pamela (1740), 127 
 
 Pandosto (1588), 69, 70 
 
 Paracelsus (1835), 178 
 
 Paradise Lost (1650-63; ptd. 
 1667 in ten books; 2nd 
 edn., 1674, in twelve books), 
 7. 96, (?p, 100, loi, 102, 114 
 
 Paradise Regained (1671), 63, 
 96, lOI 
 
 Parcy Reed, 41 
 
 Pardoner's Tale, The, 29 
 
 Paris, Matthew (d. 1259), 15 
 
 Parker, Archbishop (1504-75), 
 
 44 
 Parliament of Fowls, The 
 
 (1382), 27 
 Parnell, Thomas (1679-17 18), 
 
 Night-Piece (pub. 1721), 117, 
 
 132 
 Parochial Sermons (1836-42), 
 
 Parochial and Plain Sermons 
 
 (1868), 206 
 Parson's Tale, The, 33 
 Past and Present (1843), 199 
 Pastime of Pleasure, The (1505- 
 
 6), 37 
 Paston Letters (1424-1506), 42 
 Pastoral Care, 10, 11 
 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839- 
 
 94), 120, 204 
 Patience (c. 1350), 23, 24 
 Patmore, Coventry (1823-96), 
 
 Odes (1877), 185 
 Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 204 
 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785- 
 
 1866), 168, 196 
 Pearl (c. 1350), 23, 24 
 Pecock, Reginald (1395?- 
 
 1460?), 42 
 Peele Castle (1805; pub. 1807), 
 
 151 
 Peele, George (i558?-97?), 
 
 Poems, 53, 61 ; Plays, 75 
 Pendennis (1849-50), 189 
 Pentameron, The (1837), 171 
 
 Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 
 
 Diary (1660-9), 104, no 
 Percy folio MS. (c. 1650), 40 
 Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 
 
 Reliques (1765), 132 
 Peregrine Pickle (1751), 128 
 Pericles and Aspasia (1836), 
 
 171 
 Persius, 64 
 
 Persuasion (1816), 129 
 Petrarch (1304-74), 48, 50, 
 
 51,60 
 Pettie's Petite Palace of 
 
 Pleasure (lie. 1576), 69 
 Phaer, Thomas (i5io?-6o) 
 
 Vergil (1560), 58 
 Pharonnida (1659), 96 
 Philarete (1622), 63 
 Philaster (1610?; ptd. 1620), 90 
 Philips, John (1676-1709), 
 
 Splendid Shilling (1701), 131 
 Philobiblon (1345), 15 
 Phcenix, The, 8 
 Physiologus, 9 
 Pibroch, The, 157 
 Pickwick Papers, The (1837- 
 
 9), 189 
 Piers of the Plowman's Creed 
 
 (c. 1393), 26 
 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 
 
 The (1426), 36 
 Pilgrim's Progress, The (1678- 
 
 84), 105 
 Pindaric ode, The, 96, 116, 134 
 Pippa Passes (1841), 179 
 Piscatory Eclogues (ptd. 1633), 
 
 63 
 Ptstil of Susan, The (in Vernon 
 
 MS. (c. 1380), 23 
 Plain Dealer, The (1674; ptd. 
 
 1677), 140 
 Plautus, 74 
 Pleasures of Hope, The (1799), 
 
 131 
 Pleasures of Imagination, The 
 
 (1744), 131 
 Pleasures of Memory, The 
 
 (1792), 131 
 PlHade, The (1549), 51 
 
Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 231 
 
 Plutarch's Lives, 70, 87 
 Plutarch's Morals, 70 
 Poems and Ballads (1866), 186 
 Poems and Ballads (1878, 2d 
 
 series), 187 
 Poems and Ballads (1889, 3d 
 
 series), 187 
 Poetaster, The (1601; ptd. 
 
 1602), 88 
 Poetical Sketches (1783), 137 
 Poetic Mirror, The (1816), 165 
 Political Justice (1793), 149 
 Polychronicon (c. 1350; trans. 
 
 1387), 35 
 Poly-Olbion (1613-22), 47, 62 
 Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 
 
 58, 64, 109, 112, 116; Poems, 
 
 117, 118, 119; Letters,. 121, 
 
 123, 131. 132- 135, 136, 158, 
 
 178 
 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth 
 
 (1802-39), 185 
 Prmterita (1885-89), 203 
 Preface to The Fables (1700), 
 
 III 
 Prelude, The (1799-1805; pub. 
 
 1850), 148 
 Pre-Raphaelites, The, 134, 
 
 146, 174, 175, 182, 202 
 Pricke of Conscience (1349?), 22 
 Pride and Prejudice (1813), 129 
 Princess, The (1847), 177 
 Principles of Biology (1864-7), 
 
 206 
 Principles of Morals and Legis- 
 lation (1780), 205 
 Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 
 
 117, 131, 136, 185 
 Prisoner of Chilian, The (18 16), 
 
 158 
 Progress of Poesy, The (1757), 
 
 133 
 
 Progress of the Soul, The {Me- 
 tempsychosis), (1601; ptd. 
 1633), 60 
 
 Prologue to the Canterbury 
 Tales, The (c. 1387), 29 
 
 Prometheus Unbound (1820), 
 143, 147, 161 
 
 Prophecy of Dante, The (1821), 
 
 158 
 Prophetic Books (1793-1804), 
 
 137 
 Prosopopoia or Mother Hub- 
 
 berd's Tale (1591), 56, 57, 64 
 Prothalamium (1596), 57 
 Proud Maisie, 157 
 Proverbs of Alfred (c. 1250), 16 
 Proverbs of Hendyng (c. 1270), 
 
 16 
 Pseudodoxia or Vulgar Errors 
 
 (1646), 106 
 Pulley, The (1633), 94 
 Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), 
 
 68 
 Purple Island, The (1610; pub. 
 
 1633). 63 
 Purvey, John (i353?-i428?), 34 
 Puttenham's Art of English 
 
 Poesie (1589), 68 
 
 Quarles, Francis (1592-1644), 
 
 95 
 Quarterly, The (founded 1809), 
 
 144, 170 
 Queen's Wake, The (1813), 165 
 Quentin Durward (1823), 167 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864), 178 
 Rabelais (c. 1500-53), 39, 70, 
 
 127 
 Ralegh, Sir Walter (1552?- 
 
 1618), 46, 52; Poems, 53, 54; 
 
 Prose, 67, 107 
 Ralph Roister Doister (1553?; 
 
 ptd. 1566), 74 
 Rambler, The (1750-2), 120 
 Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), 
 
 Gentle Shepherd (1725), 132; 
 
 Poems (1721), 138 
 Randolph, Thomas (1605-35), 
 
 92 
 Rape of the Lock, The (1712-4), 
 
 117. 143 
 Rasselas (1759), 120 
 Rastell, John (d. 1536), 73 
 Reade, Charles (1814-84), 193, 
 
 194 
 
232 
 
 Index 
 
 Reason of Church Government, 
 
 The (1641), 103 
 Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, 
 
 (1873), 180 
 Reformation, The, 47 
 Rehearsal, The (1671), 140 
 Rejected Addresses (1812), 166 
 Relapse, The (1697)^ 140 
 Religio Laid (1682), 116 
 Religio Medici (1642 and 1643), 
 
 106 
 Religious Musings (1794; pub. 
 
 1796), 148 
 Renascence, The, 45 
 Resolution and Independence 
 
 (1802; pub. 1807), 151 \ 
 
 Resolves (1620?), 67 
 Retaliaiionliijy^), 133 
 Revenger's Tragedy, The (1606- 
 
 7; ptd. 1607), 90 
 Revenge, The (1880), 177 
 Review, The (Defoe) (1704- 
 
 13). "4 
 Revolt of Islam, The (181 7; ptd. 
 
 1818), 160 
 Revolt of the Tartars, The 
 
 (1837), 171 
 Reynard the Fox (ptd. Caxton, 
 
 1481), 22 
 Reynolds, John Hamilton 
 
 (1796-1852), 166 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua {1723- 
 
 92), 120 
 Rhoda Fleming (1865), 196 
 Rhyme of the Duchess May, 
 
 The (1844), 181 
 Ricardo, David (1772-1823), 
 
 205 
 Richard II, 77, 84 
 Richard III, 77, 83 
 Richard Cceur de Lion (1275- 
 
 1300), 14 
 Richard of Bury's Philobiblon 
 
 (1345), 15 
 Richardson, Samuel (1689- 
 
 1761), is6, 127, 194 
 Richard the Redeless (c. 1400), 
 
 26 
 Riddles, Old English, 9 
 
 Ring and the Book, The (1868- 
 
 9), 180 
 Rivals, The (1775), 141 
 Roaring Girl, The (1610; ptd. 
 
 161 1), 90 
 Robene and Makyne, 39 
 Robert de Borron (c. 1215), 21 
 Robert of Gloucester (c. 1300), 
 
 22 
 Robertson, William, History of 
 
 Scotland (1759), 124 
 Robin Hood (1400-1500), 41 
 Robin Hood plays 72 
 Robinson Crusoe (1719), 115 
 Rochester, Earl of (John Wil- 
 
 mot) (1647-80), 95 
 Roderick Random (1748), 128 
 Roderick, the last of the Goths 
 ,- (i8i4),i56 
 [Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 
 
 Pleasures of Memory (1792), 
 
 M30-131 
 Rol^e, Richard, of Hampole 
 
 (c. 1300-49?), 22, 33 
 RomaH^ Actor, The (1626; ptd. 
 
 1629), 91 
 Romances \of chivalry, j8 
 Roman de la Rose, Le (c. 1237 
 
 and c. 1278) (Chaucer's? 
 
 translation c. 1360-5), 26, 
 
 27, 32, 37 
 Romantic and classic, 147 
 Romantic drama, 93 
 Romantic revival. The, 14s 
 Romany Rye, The (1857), 193 
 Romaunt of Margaret, The 
 
 (1835), 181 
 Romeo and Juliet, 85 
 Romola (1863), 191 
 Ronsard (1524-85), 51 
 Rosalynde (1590), 69, 71 
 Rose Aylmer (1806-31), 165 
 Rosciad, The (1761), 130 
 Rossetti, Christina Georgina 
 
 (1830-94), 183 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828- 
 
 82), 182, 183, 184 
 Roundabout Papers (1860-3), 
 
 191 
 
Index 
 
 ^33 
 
 Rousseau (1712-78), 129, 144, 
 
 175 
 Rowley poems, The (1765 ff.; 
 
 pub. 1777)- 132 
 Rowley, William, (1585?- 
 
 1642?), 90 
 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam 
 
 (1859). 185 
 Rugby Chapel (1857; ptd. 1869), 
 
 181 
 Ruins of Tim^, The (1591), 56 
 'Ruin, The, 6 
 
 Rule Britannia (1740), 137 
 Rural Rides (collected and pub. 
 
 1830), 173 
 Ruskin, John (1819-1900), 120, 
 
 175, 200, 201, 202, 203 
 Ruth (1799; pub. 1800), 151 
 Rymer, Thomas (1641-1713), 
 
 III 
 
 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buck- 
 hurst (i 536-1 608), 48, 74 
 
 Sad Shepherd, The (1614; ptd. 
 1641), 88 
 
 Sainte-Beuve (1804-69), 205 
 
 Saint-Evremond (16 13?-! 703), 
 III 
 
 Saint Peter's Complaint (1615), 
 
 59 
 Sdmacis and Hermaphroditus 
 
 (1602), 58 
 Salomon and Saturn, 9 
 Samson Agonistes (1671), loi 
 Sandford and Merlon (1783-9), 
 
 129 
 Sandys, George (1578-1644), 
 
 Metamorphoses (1621-26) , 58, 
 
 95,163 ,, ,. 
 Sannazaro {Arcadia, 1490), 53 
 Sartor Resartus (1834), 174, 
 
 198, 200 
 Satire of the Three Estates 
 
 (1535; ptd. 1602), 38 
 Satires upon the Jesuits (1679), 
 
 96 
 Schlegel, A. W. von (1767- 
 
 1845), 169 
 
 Scholar Gypsy, The (1853), 
 
 182 
 School for Scandal, The (1777), 
 
 141 
 Schoolmaster, The (pub. 1570), 
 
 65 
 
 Schoolmistress, The (1742), 132 
 School of Abuse, The (1579), 68 
 Scots poets, 38, 138 
 Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 
 
 129, 146, 147, 154, 155; 
 
 Poems, 156, 157, 165 ; Novels, 
 
 167, 168, 169, 175, 176, 194 
 Sea-farer, The, 6 
 Seasons, The (1726-30), IJ52 
 Second Defence of the English 
 
 People (in Latin) (1654), 103 
 Sedley, Sir Charles (1639?- 
 
 I70i),95 
 Sejanus (1603; ptd. 1605), 87 
 Selden, John (1584-1654), 62 
 Senecan drama, 58, 74, 76 
 Sennacherib (1815), 158 
 Sense and Sensibility (1811), 
 
 129 
 Sensitive Plant, The (1820), 160 
 Sentimental Journey, A (1768), 
 
 128 
 Sesame and Lilies (1865), 203 
 Settle, Elkanah (1648-1724), 
 
 116 
 Seven Deadly Sins, The (c. 
 
 1512), 39 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture, 
 
 The (1849), 203 
 Seven Sages of Rome, The, 20 
 Shadwell, Thomas (i642?-92), 
 
 88, 116, 140 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Antony 
 Ashley Cooper, 1671-1713), 
 Characteristics (1711), 119 
 Shakespeare, William (1564- 
 161 6) (j)ide list of plays pp. 
 79, 80; and Appendix), 45, 
 49; Sonnets, 52; Poems, S3- 
 S8, 68; Prose, 70, 71, 73, 
 76; Plays, 77-S7, 89. 91. 92, 
 93. 117, 123, 132, 140, 146, 
 162, 168, 169, 182, 197 
 
234 
 
 Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792- 
 1822), 58, 98, 134, 137, 
 140, 144, 145, 146, 147, 156, 
 157. 158; Poems, 160, 161, 
 162, 163, 165, 166; Criticism, 
 169, 176, 186 
 
 Shelton's Don Quixote (1612 
 and 1620?), 70 
 
 Shenstone, William (i 7 i 4 - 
 63), Schoolmistress (1742), 
 132 
 
 Shepherd's Calendar, The 
 (1579), 53, 68 
 
 Shepherd's Hunting, The(i6i5), 
 
 63 
 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 
 
 (1751-1816), 140, 141 
 She Stoops to Conquer (1773), 
 
 141 
 Ship of Fools, The (1509), 38 
 Shirley (1849), 192 
 Shirley, James (1596-1666), 
 
 89,92 
 Shooting Niagara (1867), 199 
 Sidney, Algernon (1622-83), 
 
 104 
 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 
 
 46, 49, 51, 55, 57, 68, 69, 70 
 Siege of Corinth, The (1816), 155 
 Siege of Rhodes, The (1656), 92 
 Sigurd the Volsung (1876), 184 
 Silas Marner (1861), 191 
 Silent Woman, The (1609; ptd. 
 
 i6i6),88 
 Silex Scintillans (1650), 95 
 Sir Charles Grandison (1753), 
 
 126 
 Sir Ferumbras (c. 1400), 19 
 Sir Galahad (1842), 177 
 Sir Gowther (c. 1400), 19 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds' Dis- 
 courses (1759-90), 120 
 Sir Martin Mar-All (1667; ptd. 
 
 1668), 140 
 Sir Orfeo (1330-40), 19 
 Sir Thopas (c. 1390?), 20, 21 
 Sir Tristrem (1275-1300), 19 
 Sister Helen (1853, 1870, and 
 
 1881), 183 
 
 Skelton, John (1460-1529), 
 
 37, 38, 73 
 Sleep and Poetry (1817), 163 
 Smart, Christopher (1722-71), 
 
 Song to David (1763), 133 
 Smith, Horace (1779-1849), 
 
 166 
 Smith, James (1775-1839), 166 
 Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 
 
 170 
 Smollett, Tobias George (1721- 
 
 71), 124, 128, 167, 193, 194 
 Sohrah and Rustum (1853), 182 
 Solitary Reaper, The (1803-5; 
 
 pub. 1807), 153 
 Somnour's Tale, The, 29 
 Song of Italy, A (1867), 186 
 Songof the Shirt, The (1843), 166 
 Songs before Sunrise (1871), 
 
 186 
 Songs of Innocence (1789), 137 
 Songs of Experience (1794), 
 
 137 
 Sonneteers, Elizabethan, ^i 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese 
 
 (1850), 181 
 Sonnets of Milton, 99 
 Sophonisba (1730), 140 
 Sordello (1840), 179 
 Soul's Ward (c. 12 10), 33 
 South, Robert (1634-1716), 
 
 105 
 Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 
 
 144; Poems, 156, 159, 165; 
 
 Prose, 169, 170 
 Southwell, Robert (i 5 6 i ?- 
 
 95 J, 59 
 Spanish Friar, The (1681), 140 
 Spanish Military Nun, The 
 
 (1847), 171 
 Spanish Tragedy, The (1586; 
 
 ptd. 1594), 76 
 Specimens of the Dramatic 
 
 Poets (1808), 170 
 Spectator, The (1711-12), 113, 
 
 114, 120 
 Speed, John (1552?-! 629), His- 
 tory of Great Britain (161 1), 
 
 67 
 
Index 
 
 235 
 
 Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903), 
 
 205 
 
 Spenser, Edmund (1552-99), 
 37. 45, 47, 49, 5°; Sonnets, 
 si; Poems, 5j, 54, 55, 56, 61, 
 63,64,77, 95, 132, 163, 171, 
 174 
 
 Spirit of the Age, The (1825), 
 170 
 
 Splendid Shilling, The (1701), 
 
 131 
 Sprat, Bishop (1635-1713), 
 
 no 
 Squire of Low Degree, The, 20, 
 Squire's Tale, The, 20, 29 
 Stanyhurst, Richard (1547- 
 
 1618), Vergil (1582), 58 
 Stanzas from the Grande 
 
 Chartreuse (1855-67), 182 
 Stanzas written in Dejection 
 
 near Naples (1818), 160 
 Staple of News, The (1625; ptd. 
 
 1631), 88 
 Steele, Sir Richard (1672- 
 
 1729), 109; Essays, 112, 113, 
 
 114, 120, 126; Plays, 141 
 Steel Glass, The (1576), 51 
 Stepping Westward (1803-5; 
 
 pub. 1807), 150 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850- 
 
 94). 193, 194, 195, 196 
 Stevenson, William (d. 1575), 
 
 74 
 Stones of Venice, The (1851- 
 
 3), 202 
 Story of Rimini, The (18 16), 
 
 166 
 Story of Thebes, The (c. 1420), 
 
 20,36 
 Stow, John (1525?- 1605), 
 
 Survey of London (1598 and 
 
 1603), 41, 67 
 St. Ronan's Well (1824) 167, 
 Stubbs, Bishop (1825-1901), 
 
 201 
 Studies in the History of the 
 
 Renaissance (1873), 204 
 Suckling, Sir John (1609-42), 
 
 62,93 
 
 "Sumer is i-cumen in" (c. 
 i3io),23 
 
 Supposes, The (1566), 51 
 
 Surrey, Earl of (Henry How- 
 ard) (i5i7?-47), so 
 
 Suspiria de Profundis (1845), 
 146, 171 
 
 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 
 109; Prose, III; Poems, 117, 
 118, 121, 126, 127, 169 
 
 Swimmer's Dream, A (1894), 
 186 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 
 (1837-1909), 134, 135, 147, 
 171, 182, 185; Poems, 186, 
 187, 192 
 
 Sybil (1845), 193 
 
 Sylvester, Joshua (1563-1618), 
 Divine Weeks and Days 
 (1590-2), 59 
 
 Syvlia's Lovers (1863), 192 
 
 Symonds, John Addington 
 (1840-93), 204 
 
 Symposium of Plato, 160 
 
 Synge, J. M. (1871-1909), 142 
 
 System of Logic (1843), 205 
 
 Tables Turned, The (1798), 150 
 Table Talk (Cowper) (1782), 
 
 136 
 Tacitus, 4 
 
 Tale of a Tab, A (1704), in 
 Tale of Balen, The (1896), 187 
 Tale of Two Cities, A (1859), 
 
 189 
 Tales from Shakespear (1807), 
 
 170 
 Tales in Verse (1812), 135 
 Tales of the Hall (1819), 131, 
 
 135 
 
 Talisman, The (1825), 167 
 Tamburlaine (1587?; ptd. 
 
 1590), 75, 76 
 Taming of the Shrew, The, 80 
 Tam 0' Shanter (1785), 138 
 Tancred (1847), 193 
 Task, The (1785), 132, 136 
 Tasso (1544-95), Gerusalemme 
 
 Liberata (1581), 55, 59 
 
236 
 
 Index 
 
 Taller, The (1709-11), 113, 
 
 114 
 Taylor, Jeremy (1613-67), 
 
 103. lOS, 108 
 Tears of Peace (1609), 59 
 Tempest, The, 48, 89 
 Temple, Sir William (1628- 
 
 99), 104, no 
 Temple, The (Herbert) (1633), 
 
 94 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809- 
 92), II, 21, 174; Poems, 175, 
 176, 177, 178, 184, 200 
 
 Terence, 74 
 
 Testament of Cressid, The, 39 
 
 Tethys' Festival (1610), 61 
 
 Thackeray, William Make- 
 peace (1811-63), 175; Novels, 
 iSp, 190, 191, 194 
 
 Thalaba (1801), 156 
 
 Theobald, Lewis (1688-1744), 
 Shakespeare (1734), 117, 132 
 
 Theocritus, 53 
 
 Theophrastus, 69 
 
 Thirlwall, Con nop (1797- 
 1875), 201 
 
 Thistle and the Rose, The (1503), 
 
 39 
 
 Thomas de Hales (Jl. 1250), 23 
 Thomas of Ercildoune, 41 
 Thompson, Francis (1859- 
 
 1907), 185 
 Thomson, James (1700-48), 
 
 132, 137, 144; Sophonisba, 
 
 140 
 Thoughts on the Present Discon- 
 tents (1770), 125 
 Thyrsis (1861), 98, 182 
 Tickell, Thomas (1686-1740), 
 
 Elegy on Addison (172 1), 
 
 130 
 Tiger, The (1794), 138 
 Tillotson, Archbishop (1630- 
 
 94), 109 
 Times, The (fotmded 1788), 120 
 Tindal, Matthew (1657-1733), 
 
 1X9 
 Tintern Abbey (1798), 146, 
 
 149. 151 
 
 Tithonus (ptd. i860), 178 
 
 Titus Andronicus, 77 
 
 To a Child of Quality, 131 
 
 To a Skylark (Shelley) (1820), 
 
 163 
 To Autumn (1819; pub. 1820), 
 
 164 
 Toland, John (1670-1722), 119 
 Toleration, On (1689 ff.), 103 
 To Maia (1818; pub. 1848), 
 
 163 
 To Mary Unvnn (1793; pub. 
 
 1803), 136 
 Tom Jones (1749), 127 
 Tom Thumb (1730), 140 
 To Psyche (1819; ptd. 1820), 
 
 163, 168 
 To the Departing Year (1796), 
 
 156 
 To the Men of Kent, 152 
 Tottel's Miscellany (1557), 50 
 Tourneur, Cyril (iS75?-l626), 
 
 90 
 To Venice (1818), 158 
 Towneley mysteries (c. 1350; 
 
 MS. 15th century), 72 
 Toxophilus (1545), 65 
 Tractate on Education (1644), 
 
 103 
 Traherne, Thomas (i634?-74), 
 
 95 
 Traitor, The (lie. 163 1 ; ptd. 
 
 1635), 92 
 Traveller, The (1764), 130 
 Treasure Island (1882), 195 
 Trick to catch the old one, A 
 
 (1606; ptd. 1608), 90 
 Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), 
 
 187 
 Tristram Shandy (1760-7), 127 
 Triumph of Life, The (1822), 
 
 161 
 Triumphs of Owen, The (1768), 
 
 132 
 Trivia (1716), 132 
 Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1383), 
 
 19. 28, 39, 68 
 Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 
 
 193 
 
Index 
 
 237 
 
 Troy Book (1412-20; ptd. 
 
 I5I3).36 
 Turbervile, George (1540?- 
 
 1610?), 50,51 
 Tusser, Thomas (1524-80), 51 
 Twa Dogs, The (1786), 138 
 Two Foscari, The (1821), 159 
 Two Married Women, The 
 
 (c. 1512), 39 
 The Noble Kinsmen, The (1612; 
 
 ptd. 1634), 90 
 Twopenny Post-Bag, The 
 
 (1812), 166 
 Tyndale, William (d. 1536), 44 
 Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1730-86), 
 
 Chaucer (1775), 132 
 
 Udall, Nicholas (1505-56), 74 
 Ulysses (1842), 177, 178 
 Ulysses and the Siren (1605), 62 
 Underwoods (1616), 89 
 Universal History (Orosius) 
 
 (416), King Alfred's trans. 
 
 (c. 890), II 
 Universal Passion, The (1725- 
 
 8), 130 
 University wits. The, 74 
 Unto this Last (1862), 203 
 Urquhart, Sir Thomas (1611- 
 
 60), Rabelais (1653), 70 
 Utilitarianism (1863), 205 
 Utopia (1515 and 1516, in 
 
 English, 1551), 64, 65 
 
 Vanbnigh, Sir John (1664- 
 
 1726), 140, 141 
 Vanity Fair (1847-8), 189, 
 
 190 
 Vanity of Human Wishes, The 
 
 (1749), 130, 133. 143 
 Vathek (1786), 129 
 Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 
 
 95. 183 
 Venetian Republic, The (1802), 
 
 152 
 Venus and Adonis (1593), 58 
 Vicar of WakefUld, The (1766), 
 
 128 
 Victorian Age, The, 174 
 
 View of Ireland (Spenser) 
 
 (1596), 56 
 Village, The (1783), 136 
 Villette (1852), 192 
 Virginibus Pu^risgue (1881), 
 
 195 
 
 Virgin Martyr, The (lie. 1620, 
 
 ptd. 1622), 91 
 Vision of Judgment, The (1822), 
 
 159 
 Vision of William concerning 
 
 Piers the Plowman (1362, 
 
 1377, and 1398?), 25 
 Vitloria (1866), 198 
 Volpone (1605-6; ptd. 1607), 
 
 88 
 Voltaire (1694-1778), 124, 198 
 Vox Clamantis (1382), 31 
 Voyage and Travel of Sir John 
 
 Mandeville, (French MS. 
 
 I37i)> 35 
 
 Wace ifl. 1 170), Brut (c. 1155), 
 
 15. 17.21 
 Wallace (1470-80), 38 
 Wallenstein (1800), 155 
 Waller, Edmund (1606-87), 
 
 94.95 
 Walpole, Horace (1717-97), 
 Letters, 121; Novels, 129, 
 
 145 
 Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 
 
 107, 108 
 Wanderer, The, 5 
 Wandering WUUe's Tale in 
 
 Redgauntlet (1824), 168 
 Warburton, William (1698- 
 
 1779), Shakespeare (1749), 
 
 132 
 Warner, William (1558?- 
 
 1609), Albion's England, 61 
 Warton, Thomas (1728-90), 
 
 History of Poetry (1774-81), 
 
 132 
 Watson, Thomas (l557?-92), 
 
 Hekatompathia (1582), 51 
 Waverley (1814), 167 
 Way of the World, The (1700), 
 
 140 
 
238 
 
 Index 
 
 Weather, The (c. 1533), 73 
 Webbe's Discourse of English 
 
 Poetry (,1586), 6S 
 Webster, John (i58o?-i625?), 
 
 Weekly Political Register (1802- 
 
 35)- 173 
 Weir of Hermiston (1896), 195 
 Werferth, Bishop (d. 915), 10 
 Wesley, John (1703-91), 121, 
 
 133 
 Westward, Ho I (1855), 193 
 Whetstone, George (1544-87), 
 
 51.74 
 White Devil, The (161 1; ptd. 
 
 1612), 91 
 White Doe, The (1807; ptd. 
 
 I8i5),i52 
 White Ship, The (1880; ptd. 
 
 1881), 183 
 Widsith, I 
 
 Wife of Usher's Well, The, 41 
 Wife's Complaint, The, 6 
 Wilbye, John (jl. 1600), 53 
 WMe, Oscar (1856-1900), 142, 
 
 204 
 Wild Life in a Southern County 
 
 (1879), 193 
 William of Malmesbury (d. 
 
 1 143?). 15 
 WiUiam of Ockham (d. 1349), 
 
 15 
 
 William of Palerne (c. 1350), 
 
 23 
 
 William of Shoreham {f,. 1320), 
 22 
 
 Wilson, John ("Christopher 
 North") (1785-1854), 171 
 
 Winter Evening, The (1785), 136 
 
 Winter's Tale, The, 71 
 
 Wishes to his {supposed) Mis- 
 tress (1648), 94 
 
 Wit and Science (end of Henry 
 VIII's reign) , 73 
 
 WiUh of Atlas, The (1820), 162 
 
 Witch, The (1610?; pub. 1778), 
 90 
 
 Wither, George (1588-1667), 
 Poems, 63; Songs, 94 
 
 Wives and Daughters (1865), 
 
 192 
 Wolfe, Charles (1791-1823), 
 
 166 
 Woman Killed with Kindness, 
 
 A (1603; ptd. 1607), 90 
 Woods of Westermain, The 
 
 (l883),'i85 
 Woodstock (1826), 167 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771- 
 
 1855), 149 
 Wordsworth, William (1770- 
 
 1850), 95. 102, 119, 134. 
 
 135. 139. 143; Criticism, 
 
 144, 145, 146; Poems, 7^1?- 
 
 153. 155. 156, 160, 165, 169, 
 
 178, 180, 182 
 Worthies of England, The 
 
 (1662), 104 
 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 
 
 (1687-1762), Letters (1763), 
 
 121 
 Wotton, SirHenry(l568-i639), 
 
 53 
 Wounds of Civil War, The 
 
 (1587; ptd. 1594), 76 
 Wulfstan's Address to the 
 
 English (c. loio), 13 
 WutJwring Heights (1848), 192 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503?- 
 
 1542). 23. 49. SO, 64, 93 
 Wycherley, William (1640?- 
 
 1716), 140 
 Wyclif, John (i320?-84), 33- 
 
 34.47 
 
 Yardley Oak (1791), 136 
 Yeast (1848), 193 
 Yellow-Plush Papers, The 
 
 (1838-40), 190 
 Yew-Trees (1803; pub. 1815), 
 
 153 
 York mysteries (c. 1340-50; 
 
 MS. 15th century), 72 
 Young, Edward (1 683-1 765), 
 
 Night Thoughts (1742-44), 
 
 131 ; Satires, 130; Revenge, 140 
 Ywain and Gawain (1330-40), 
 
 19 
 
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