CHAPTER XII

MINOR CAROLINE PROSE

The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period

in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is

never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of

his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a

masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more

leisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work.

The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified

if it had produced nothing but _The Anatomy of Melancholy_; though there is

something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a

studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed

clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a

college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly

have grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it.

The author of the _Anatomy_ was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in

Leicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He was

educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College,

Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch--the equivalent of a fellow--in

1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there,

though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of

St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and the

rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places he

seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the

character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing

inconsistent with that character in the _Anatomy_. The picture of him which

Anthony a Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the

attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very

merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous

misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more

serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his

epitaph (_Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia_), that having cast his

nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed

suicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death)

at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of

charity.

The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of

men and books is _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, first printed in 1621, and

enlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the _Anatomy_,

giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very much

wanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, old

and new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history is

rather curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from the

date of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped out

of notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it was

revived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or five

editions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thus

circulated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have been

followed without much alteration in some later issues.

The book itself has been very variously judged. Fuller, in one of his least

worthy moments, called it "a book of philology." Anthony Wood, hitting on a

notion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenient

commonplace book of classical quotations, which, with all respect to

Anthony's memory (whom I am more especially bound to honour as a Merton

man), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected,

appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his _Illustrations of Sterne_ pointed

out the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior.

Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man," exhibited

perhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which,

after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton's

contemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled.

Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of a

quarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers of

English literature have loved him.

The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps no

great wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by the

bristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with full

and careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaborate

but apparently futile marshalling in "partitions" and "members," in

"sections" and "subsections," and by the measureless license of digression

which the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling some

hundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the author

calls himself, to the reader--an epistle which gives a true foretaste of

the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not

scholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and even

the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" a

curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more

methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed

even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are

exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature,

effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of

madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also

less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole

that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw

out a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very

different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep

to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass of

the scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowest

terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of

digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his

notebook, but in developing his own thoughts,--a mine hardly less rich if

less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to

have been put at his disposal.

The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe in

brief space. The melancholy of which the author treats, and of which, no

doubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mere

Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years

ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very

healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that

transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have

been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it

approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of

Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole round

of human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found all

to be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some _amari aliquid_. It

is at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whose

bodily health was not quite so robust as his mental constitution. It is the

satiety of learning of a man who, nevertheless, knows that learning, or at

least literature, is the only cure for his disease.

In mere style there is perhaps nothing very strongly characteristic in

Burton, though there is much that is noteworthy in the way in which he

adapts his style to the peculiar character of his book. Like Rabelais, he

has but rarely occasion to break through his fantastic habit of stringing

others' pearls on a mere string of his own, and to set seriously to the

composition of a paragraph of wholly original prose. But when he does, the

effect is remarkable, and shows that it was owing to no poverty or

awkwardness that he chose to be so much of a borrower. In his usual style,

where a mere framework of original may enclose a score or more quotations,

translated or not (the modern habit of translating Burton's quotations

spoils, among other things, the zest of his own quaint habit of adding, as

it were, in the same breath, a kind of summary or paraphrase in English of

what he has said in Latin or Greek), he was not superior to his time in the

loose construction of sentences; but the wonder is that his fashion of

writing did not make him even inferior to it. One of his peculiar

tricks--the only one, perhaps, which he uses to the extent of a

mannerism--is the suppression of the conjunctions "or" and "and," which

gives a very quaint air to his strings of synonyms. But an example will do

more here than much analysis:--

"And why then should baseness of birth be objected to any man?

Who thinks worse of Tully for being _Arpinas_, an upstart? or

Agathocles, that Sicilian King, for being a potter's son?

Iphicrates and Marius were meanly born. What wise man thinks

better of any person for his nobility? as he[64] said in

Machiavel, _omnes codem patre nati_, Adam's sons, conceived all

and born in sin, etc. _We are by nature all as one, all alike, if

you see us naked; let us wear theirs, and they our clothes, and

what's the difference?_ To speak truth, as Bale did of P.

Schalichius, _I more esteem thy worth, learning, honesty, than

the nobility; honour thee more that thou art a writer, a doctor

of divinity, than earl of the Hunnes, baron of Skradine, or hast

title to such and such provinces, etc. Thou art more fortunate

and great_ (so Jovius writes to Cosmus Medices, then Duke of

Florence) _for thy virtues than for thy lovely wife and happy

children, friends, fortunes, or great Duchy of Tuscany_. So I

account thee, and who doth not so indeed? Abdalonymus was a

gardener, and yet by Alexander for his virtues made King of

Syria. How much better is it to be born of mean parentage and to

excel in worth, to be morally noble, which is preferred before

that natural nobility by divines, philosophers, and politicians,

to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any

manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace,

than to be _degeneres Neoptolemi_ as so many brave nobles are,

only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate, unfit for

any manner of service? Udalricus, Earl of Cilia, upbraided John

Huniades with the baseness of his birth; but he replied, _In te

Ciliensis comitatus turpiter exstinguitur, in me gloriose

Bistricensis exoritur_; thine earldom is consumed with riot; mine

begins with honour and renown. Thou hast had so many noble

ancestors; what is that to thee? _Vix ea nostra voco_; when thou

art a disard[65] thyself, _quid prodest Pontice longo stemmate

censeri_? etc. I conclude, hast thou a sound body and a good

soul, good bringing up? Art thou virtuous, honest, learned, well

qualified, religious? Are thy conditions good? Thou art a true

nobleman, perfectly noble though born of Thersites, _dummodo tu

sis Aeacidae similis non natus sed factus_, noble kat' exochen,

_for neither sword, nor fire, nor water, nor sickness, nor

outward violence, nor the devil himself can take thy good parts

from thee_. Be not ashamed of thy birth then; thou art a

gentleman all the world over, and shalt be honoured, whenas he,

strip him of his fine clothes, dispossess him of his wealth, is a

funge[66] (which Polynices in his banishment found true by

experience, gentry was not esteemed), like a piece of coin in

another country, that no man will take, and shall be contemned.

Once more, though thou be a barbarian born at Tontonteac, a

villain, a slave, a Saldanian negro, or a rude Virginian in

Dasamonquepeuc,[67] he a French monsieur, a Spanish don, a

seignior of Italy, I care not how descended, of what family, of

what order--baron, count, prince--if thou be well qualified and

he not but a degenerate Neoptolemus, I tell thee in a word thou

art a man and he is a beast."

[64] Burton, with others of the time, constantly wrote "he" as the

equivalent of the classical demonstratives. Modern, but not better, use

prefers "the man," or something similar.

[65] A "dizzard" = a blockhead. Said to be connected with "dizzy."

[66] Fungus, mushroom.

[67] Saldania is Saldanha Bay. As for Tontonteac and Dasamonquepeuc, I

shall imitate the manly frankness of the boy in _Henry V._, and say, "I do

not know what is the French for fer, and ferret, and firk."

Such, in his outward aspects, is Burton; but of him, even more than of most

writers, it may be said that a brick of the house is no sample. Only by

reading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his great

learning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and of

things belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole his

learning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For reading

either continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of life

and in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test of

practice so well as the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_.

Probably, however, among those who can taste old authors, there will always

be a friendly but irreconcilable difference as to the merits of Fuller and

Burton, when compared together. There never can be any among such as to the

merits of Fuller, considered in himself. Like Burton, he was a clerk in

orders; but his literary practice, though more copious than that of the

author of _The Anatomy_, divorced him less from the discharge of his

professional duties. He was born, like Dryden, but twenty-two years

earlier, in 1608, at Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire, and in a parsonage

there, but of the other parish (for there are two close together). He was

educated at Cambridge, and, being made prebendary of Salisbury, and vicar

of Broadwindsor, almost as soon as he could take orders, seemed to be in a

fair way of preferment. He worked as a parish priest up to 1640, the year

of the beginning of troubles, and the year of his first important book,

_The Holy War_. But he was a staunch Royalist, though by no means a bigot,

and he did not, like other men of his time, see his way to play Mr.

Facing-both-ways. For a time he was a preacher in London, then he followed

the camp as chaplain to the victorious army of Hopton, in the west, then

for a time again he was stationary at Exeter, and after the ruin of the

Royal cause he returned to London, where, though he did not recover his

benefices, he was leniently treated, and even, in 1655, obtained license to

preach. Nevertheless, the Restoration would probably have brought him

promotion, but he lived not long enough to receive it, dying on the 15th of

August 1661. He was an extremely industrious writer, publishing, besides

the work already mentioned, and not a few minor pieces (_The Holy and

Profane State_, _Thoughts and Contemplations in Good, Worse, and Better

Times_, _A Pisgah-sight of Palestine_), an extensive _Church History of

Britain_, and, after his death, what is perhaps his masterpiece, _The

Worthies of England_, an extraordinary miscellany, quartering the ground by

counties, filling, in the compactest edition, two mighty quartos, and

containing perhaps the greatest account of miscellaneous fact to be found

anywhere out of an encyclopedia, conveyed in a style the quaintest and most

lively to be found anywhere out of the choicest essayists of the language.

A man of genius who adored Fuller, and who owes to him more than to any one

else except Sir Thomas Browne, has done, in small compass, a service to his

memory which is not easily to be paralleled. Lamb's specimens from Fuller,

most of which are only two or three lines long, and none a pageful, for

once contradict the axiom quoted above as to a brick and a house. So

perfectly has the genius of selector and author coincided, that not having

myself gone through the verification of them, I should hardly be surprised

to find that Lamb had used his faculty of invention. Yet this would not

matter, for they are perfectly Fullerian. Although Fuller has justly been

praised for his method, and although he never seems to have suffered his

fancy to run away with him to the extent of forgetting or wilfully

misrepresenting a fact, the conceits, which are the chief characteristic of

his style, are comparatively independent of the subject. Coleridge has

asserted that "Wit was the stuff and substance of his intellect," an

assertion which (with all the respect due to Coleridge) would have been

better phrased in some such way as this,--that nearly the whole force of

his intellect concentrated itself upon the witty presentation of things. He

is illimitably figurative, and though his figures seldom or never fail to

carry illumination of the subject with them, their peculiar character is

sufficiently indicated by the fact that they can almost always be separated

from the subject and from the context in which they occur without any

damage to their own felicity. To a thoroughly serious person, to a person

like Lord Chesterfield (who was indeed very serious in his own way, and

abhorred proverbial philosophy), or to one who cannot away with the

introduction of a quip in connection with a solemn subject, and who thinks

that indulgence in a gibe is a clear proof that the writer has no solid

argument to produce, Fuller must be nothing but a puzzle or a disgust. That

a pious and earnest divine should, even in that day of quaintness, compare

the gradual familiarisation of Christians with the sacraments of the Church

to the habit of children first taking care of, and then neglecting a pair

of new boots, or should describe a brother clerk as "pronouncing the word

_damn_ with such an emphasis as left a dismal echo in his auditors' ears a

good while longer," seems, no doubt, to some excellent people,

unpardonable, and almost incomprehensible. Yet no one has ever impeached

the sincerity of Fuller's convictions, and the blamelessness of his life.

That a grave historian should intersperse the innumerable trivialities of

the _Worthies_ may be only less shocking. But he was an eminent proof of

his own axiom, "That an ounce of mirth, with the same degree of grace, will

serve God farther than a pound of sadness." Fuller is perhaps the only

writer who, voluminous as he is, will not disappoint the most superficial

inquirer for proofs of the accuracy of the character usually given to him.

Nobody perhaps but himself, in trying to make the best of the Egyptian

bondage of the Commonwealth, would have discovered that the Church, being

unrepresented by any of the four hundred and odd members of Cromwell's

Parliament, was better off than when she had Archbishops, Bishops, and a

convocation all to herself, urging, "what civil Christian would not plead

for a dumb man," and so enlisting all the four hundred and odd enemies as

friends and representatives. But it is impossible to enter fully on the

subject of Fuller's quips. What may fairly be said of them is, that while

constantly fantastic, and sometimes almost childish, they are never really

silly; that they are never, or hardly ever in bad taste; and that, quaint

and far fetched as they are, there is almost always some application or

suggestion which saves them from being mere intellectual somersaults. The

famous one of the "Images of God cut in ebony," is sufficient of itself to

serve as a text. There is in it all the good side of the emancipation

propaganda with an entire freedom from the extravagance, the vulgarity, the

injustice, the bad taste which marked that propaganda a century and more

afterwards, when taken up by persons very different from Fuller. Perhaps it

may be well to give an extract of some length from him:--

"A lady big with child was condemned to perpetual imprisonment,

and in the dungeon was delivered of a son, who continued with her

till a boy of some bigness. It happened at one time he heard his

mother (for see neither of them could, as to decern in so dark a

place) bemoan her condition.

"Why, mother (said the child) do you complain, seeing you want

nothing you can wish, having clothes, meat, and drink sufficient?

Alas! child (returned the mother), I lack liberty, converse with

Christians, the light of the sun, and many things more, which

thou, being prison-born, neither art nor can be sensible of in

thy condition.

"The _post-nati_, understand thereby such striplings born in

England since the death of monarchy therein, conceive this land,

their mother, to be in a good estate. For one fruitful harvest

followeth another, commodities are sold at reasonable rates,

abundance of brave clothes are worn in the city, though not by

such persons whose birth doth best become, but whose purses can

best bestow them.

"But their mother, England, doth justly bemoan the sad difference

betwixt her present and former condition; when she enjoyed full

and free trade without payment of taxes, save so small they

seemed rather an acknowledgment of their allegiance than a burden

to their estate; when she had the court of a king, the House of

Lords, yea, and the Lord's house, decently kept, constantly

frequented, without falsehood in doctrine, or faction in

discipline. God of His goodness restore unto us so much of these

things as may consist with His glory and our good."

* * * * *

"I saw a servant maid, at the command of her mistress, make,

kindle, and blow a fire. Which done, she was posted away about

other business, whilst her mistress enjoyed the benefit of the

fire. Yet I observed that this servant, whilst industriously

employed in the kindling thereof, got a more general, kindly, and

continuing heat than her mistress herself. Her heat was only by

her, and not in her, staying with her no longer than she stayed

by the chimney; whilst the warmth of the maid was inlaid, and

equally diffused through the whole body.

"An estate suddenly gotten is not so lasting to the owner thereof

as what is duly got by industry. The substance of the diligent,

saith Solomon, Prov. xii. 27, is precious. He cannot be counted

poor that hath so many pearls, precious brown bread, precious

small beer, precious plain clothes, etc. A comfortable

consideration in this our age, wherein many hands have learned

their lesson of labour, who were neither born nor bred with it."

The best judges have admitted that, in contradistinction to this perpetual

quipping, which is, as far as it goes, of his time, the general style of

Fuller is on the whole rather more modern than the styles of his

contemporaries. It does not seem that this is due to deliberate intention

of shortening and proportioning his prose; for he is as careless as any

one of the whole century about exact grammatical sequence, and seems to

have had no objection on any critical grounds to the long disjointed

sentence which was the curse of the time. But his own ruling passion

insensibly disposed him to a certain brevity. He liked to express his

figurative conceits pointedly and antithetically; and point and antithesis

are the two things most incompatible with clauses jointed _ad infinitum_ in

Clarendon's manner, with labyrinths of "whos" and "whiches" such as too

frequently content Milton and Taylor. Poles asunder from Hobbes, not merely

in his ultimate conclusions but in the general quality of his mind, he

perhaps comes nearest to the author of the treatise on _Human Nature_ in

clear, sensible, unambiguous presentation of the thing that he means to

say; and this, joined to his fecundity in illustration of every kind,

greatly helps the readableness of his books. No work of his as a working

out of an original conception can compete with _The Anatomy of Melancholy_;

but he is as superior in minor method to Burton as he is inferior in

general grasp.

The remainder of the minor Carolines must be dismissed rapidly. A not

unimportant position among the prose writers of this time is occupied by

Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the elder brother of George

Herbert the poet. He was born in 1583, and finished his life ingloriously,

and indeed discreditably, during the troubles of the civil war, on the 20th

of August 1648. His earlier career is elaborately if not exactly truthfully

recorded in his _Autobiography_, and its details have been carefully

supplemented by his latest editor, Mr. Lee. His literary activity was

various and considerable. His greatest work--a treatise which has been

rashly called the foundation of English deism, but which rather expresses

the vague and not wholly unorthodox doubt expressed earlier by Montaigne,

and by contemporaries of Herbert's own, such as La Mothe le Vayer--was

written in Latin, and has never been translated into English. He was an

English verse writer of some merit, though inferior to his brother. His

ambitious and academic _History of Henry VIII._ is a regular and not

unsuccessful effort in English prose, prompted no doubt by the

thoroughgoing courtiership which ranks with his vanity and want of

stability on the most unfavourable aspect of Herbert's character. But

posterity has agreed to take him as an English writer chiefly on the

strength of the Autobiography, which remained in manuscript for a century

and more, and was published by Horace Walpole, rather against the will of

Lord Powis, its possessor and its author's representative. It is difficult

to say that Lord Powis was wrong, especially considering that Herbert never

published these memoirs, and seems to have written them as much as anything

else for his own private satisfaction. It may be doubted whether there is

any more astounding monument of coxcombry in literature. Herbert is

sometimes cited as a model of a modern knight-errant, of an Amadis born too

late. Certainly, according to his own account, all women loved and all men

feared him; but for the former fact we have nothing but his own authority,

and in regard to the latter we have counter evidence which renders it

exceedingly doubtful. He was, according to his own account, a desperate

duellist. But even by this account his duels had a curious habit of being

interrupted, in the immortal phrase of Mr. Winkle, by "several police

constables;" while in regard to actual war the exploits of his youth seem

not to have been great, and those of his age were wholly discreditable,

inasmuch as being by profession an ardent Royalist, he took the first

opportunity to make, without striking a blow, a profitable composition with

the Parliament. Nevertheless, despite the drawbacks of subject-matter, the

autobiography is a very interesting piece of English prose. The narrative

style, for all its coxcombry and its insistence on petty details, has a

singular vivacity; the constructions, though sometimes incorrect ("the

edict was so severe as they who transgressed were to lose their heads"),

are never merely slovenly; and the writer displays an art, very uncommon in

his time, in the alternation of short and long sentences and the general

adjustment of the paragraph. Here and there, too, there are passages of

more elevated style which give reason for regretting that the _De Veritate_

was not written in English. It is very much to be feared that the chief

reason for its being written in Latin was a desire on the author's part to

escape awkward consequences by an appearance of catering for philosophers

and the learned only. It must be admitted that neither of the two great

free-thinking Royalists, Hobbes and Herbert, is a wholly pleasant

character; but it may be at least said for the commoner (it cannot be said

for the peer) that he was constant to his principles, and that if somewhat

careful of his skin, he never seems to have been tempted to barter his

conscience for it as Herbert did.

Hardly any other writer among the minor Caroline prosaists is important

enough to justify a substantive notice in a work which has already reached

and almost exceeded the limits accorded to it. The excellent style of

Cowley's _Essays_, which is almost more modern than the work of Dryden and

Tillotson, falls in great part actually beyond the limits of our time; and

by character, if not by date, Cowley is left for special treatment in the

following volume. He sometimes relapses into what may be called the general

qualities with their accompanying defects of Elizabethan prose--a contempt

of proportion, clearness, and order; a reckless readiness to say everything

that is in the writer's mind, without considering whether it is appropriate

or not; a confusion of English and classical grammar, and occasionally a

very scant attention even to rules which the classical grammars indicate

yet more sternly than the vernacular. But as a rule he is distinguished for

exactly the opposite of all these things. Much less modern than Cowley, but

still of a chaster and less fanciful style than most of his contemporaries,

is the famous Protestant apologist, Chillingworth--a man whose orderly mind

and freedom from anything like enthusiasm reflected themselves in the easy

balance of his style. Sanderson, Pearson, Baxter, the two former luminaries

of the Church, the latter one of the chief literary lights of

Nonconformity, belong more or less to the period, as does Bishop Hall.

Baxter is the most colloquial, the most fanciful, and the latest, of the

three grouped together; the other two are nearer to the plainness of

Chillingworth than to the ornateness of Jeremy Taylor. Few English prose

writers again are better known than Izaak Walton, though it might be

difficult to prove that in matter of pure literature he stands very high.

The engaging character of his subjects, and the still more engaging display

of his own temper and mode of thought which he makes in almost every

sentence, both of his _Complete Angler_ and of his hardly less known

_Lives_, account for the survival and constant popularity of books which

are neither above nor below the better work of their time in literary form.

Walton was born in 1593 and died ninety years later. His early manhood was

spent in London as a "linen-draper," but in friendly conversation with the

best clerical and literary society. In 1643 he retired from London to avoid

the bustle of the Civil War, and the _Complete Angler_ appeared in 1653.

Another writer contemporary with Walton, though less long-lived, James

Howell, has been the subject of very varying judgments; his appeal being

very much of the same kind as Walton's, but addressed to a different and

narrower class of persons. He was born in 1594(?) of a fair Welsh family,

was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, was employed more than once on

confidential business errands on the Continent, entered Parliament, was

made Clerk of the Council, was imprisoned for years in the Fleet during the

Civil War, received at the Restoration the post of Historiographer, and

died in 1666. He wrote all manner of things, but has chiefly survived as

the author of a large collection of Familiar Letters, which have been great

favourites with some excellent judges. They have something of the agreeable

garrulousness of Walton. But Howell was not only much more of a gossip than

Izaak; he was also a good deal of a coxcomb, while Walton was destitute of

even a trace of coxcombry. In one, however, as in the other, the attraction

of matter completely outdoes the purely literary attraction. The reader is

glad to hear at first hand what men thought of Raleigh's execution; how

Ben Jonson behaved in his cups; how foreign parts looked to a genuine

English traveller early in the seventeenth century, and so forth. Moreover,

the book was long a very popular one, and an unusual number of anecdotes

and scraps passed from it into the general literary stock of English

writers. But Howell's manner of telling his stories is not extraordinarily

attractive, and has something self-conscious and artificial about it which

detracts from its interest. The _Characters_ of Overbury were followed and,

no doubt, imitated by John Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and a man

of some importance. Earle, who was a fellow of Merton, called his sketches

_Microcosmography_. Nothing in them approaches the celebrated if perhaps

not quite genuine milkmaid of Overbury; but they give evidence of a good

deal of direct observation often expressed in a style that is pointed, such

as the description of a bowling green as a place fitted for "the expense of

time, money, and oaths." The church historian and miscellanist Heylin

belongs also to the now fast multiplying class of professional writers who

dealt with almost any subject as it might seem likely to hit the taste of

the public. The bold and fantastic speculations of Bishop Wilkins and Sir

Kenelm Digby, and the _Oceana_ or Ideal Republic (last of a long line) of

James Harrington (not to be confounded with the earlier Sir John Harington,

translator of Ariosto), deserve some notice. The famous _Eikon Basilike_

(the authorship of which has perhaps of late years been too confidently

ascribed to Dr. Gauden independently, rather than to the king, edited by

Gauden) has considerable literary merit. Last of all has to be mentioned a

curious book, which made some noise at its appearance, and which, though

not much read now, has had two seasons of genuine popularity, and is still

highly thought of by a few good judges. This is the _Resolves_ of Owen

Feltham or Felltham. Not much is known of the author except that he was of

a respectable family in East Anglia, a family which seems to have been

especially seated in the neighbourhood of Lowestoft. Besides the _Resolves_

he wrote some verse, of which the most notable piece is a reply to Ben

Jonson's famous ode to himself ("Come Leave the Loathed Stage")--a reply

which even such a sworn partisan as Gifford admits to be at least just if

not very kind. Felltham seems also to have engaged in controversy with

another Johnson, a Jesuit, on theological subjects. But save for the

_Resolves_ he would be totally forgotten. The estimate of their value will

differ very much, as the liking for not very original discussion of ethical

subjects and sound if not very subtle judgment on them overpowers or not in

the reader a distaste for style that has no particular distinction, and

ideas which, though often wholesome, are seldom other than obvious.

Wordsworth's well-known description of one of his own poems, as being "a

chain of extremely valuable thoughts," applies no doubt to the _Resolves_,

which, except in elegance, rather resemble the better-known of Cicero's

philosophical works. Moreover, though possessing no great elegance, they

are not inelegant; though it is difficult to forget how differently Bacon

and Browne treated not dissimilar subjects at much the same time. So

popular were they that besides the first edition (which is undated, but

must have appeared in or before 1628, the date of the second), eleven

others were called for up to 1709. But it was not for a hundred years that

they were again printed, and then the well-meaning but misguided zeal of

their resuscitator led him not merely to modernise their spelling, etc. (a

venial sin, if, which I am not inclined very positively to lay down, it is

a sin at all), but to "improve" their style, sense, and sentiment by

omission, alteration, and other tamperings with the text, so as to give the

reader not what Mr. Felltham wrote early in the seventeenth century, but

what Mr. Cummings thought he ought to have written early in the nineteenth.

This chapter might easily be enlarged, and indeed, as Dryden says, shame

must invade the breast of every writer of literary history on a small scale

who is fairly acquainted with his subject, when he thinks how many worthy

men--men much worthier than he can himself ever pretend to be--he has

perforce omitted. Any critic inclined to find fault may ask me where is the

ever-memorable John Hales? Where is Tom Coryat, that most egregious

Odcombian? and Barnabee of the unforgotten, though scandalous, Itinerary?

Where is Sir Thomas Urquhart, quaintest of cavaliers, and not least

admirable of translators, who not only rendered Rabelais in a style worthy

of him, who not only wrote in sober seriousness pamphlets with titles,

which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed a

pedigree of the Urquhart family _nominatim_ up to Noah and Adam, and then

improvised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating the prehistoric

ancestors whom he had excogitated? Where are the great Bishops from

Andrewes and Cosin onwards, and the lesser Theologians who wrangled, and

the Latitudinarians who meditated, and the historians with Whitelocke at

their head, and the countless writers of countless classes of books who

multiplied steadily as time went on? It can only be answered that they are

not, and that almost in the nature of things they cannot be here. It is not

that they are not intrinsically interesting; it is not merely that, being

less intrinsically interesting than some of their forerunners or

contemporaries, they must give way when room is limited. It is that even if

their individual performance were better than that of earlier men, even if

there were room and verge enough for them, they would less concern the

literary historian. For to him in all cases the later examples of a style

are less important than the earlier, merely because they are late, because

they have had forerunners whom, consciously or unconsciously, they have

(except in the case of a great genius here and there) imitated, and because

as a necessary consequence they fall into the _numerus_--into the gross as

they would themselves have said--who must be represented only by choice

examples and not enumerated or criticised in detail.

CONCLUSION

A conclusion, like a preface, is perhaps to some extent an old-fashioned

thing; and it is sometimes held that a writer does better not to sum up at

all, but to leave the facts which he has accumulated to make their own way

into the intelligence of his readers. I am not able to accept this view of

the matter. In dealing with such a subject as that which has been handled

in the foregoing pages, it is at least as necessary that the writer should

have something of _ensemble_ in his mind as that he should look carefully

into facts and dates and names. And he can give no such satisfactory

evidence of his having possessed this _ensemble_, as a short summary of

what, in his idea, the whole period looks like when taken at a bird's-eye

view. For he has (or ought to have) given the details already; and his

summary, without in the least compelling readers to accept it, must give

them at least some means of judging whether he has been wandering over a

plain trackless to him, or has been pursuing with confidence a well-planned

and well-laid road.

At the time at which our period begins (and which, though psychological

epochs rarely coincide exactly with chronological, is sufficiently

coincident with the accession of Elizabeth), it cannot be said with any

precision that there was an English _literature_ at all. There were eminent

English writers, though perhaps one only to whom the first rank could even

by the utmost complaisance be opened or allowed. But there was no

literature, in the sense of a system of treating all subjects in the

vernacular, according to methods more or less decidedly arranged and

accepted by a considerable tradition of skilled craftsmen. Something of the

kind had partially existed in the case of the Chaucerian poetic; but it was

an altogether isolated something. Efforts, though hardly conscious ones,

had been made in the domain of prose by romancers, such as the practically

unknown Thomas Mallory, by sacred orators like Latimer, by historians like

More, by a few struggling miscellaneous writers. Men like Ascham, Cheke,

Wilson, and others had, perhaps with a little touch of patronage,

recommended the regular cultivation of the English tongue; and immediately

before the actual accession of Elizabeth the publication of Tottel's

_Miscellany_ had shown by its collection of the best poetical work of the

preceding half century the extraordinary effect which a judicious xenomania

(if I may, without scaring the purists of language, borrow that useful word

from the late Karl Hillebrand) may produce on English. It is to the

exceptional fertilising power of such influences on our stock that we owe

all the marvellous accomplishments of the English tongue, which in this

respect--itself at the head of the Teutonic tongues by an almost

unapproachable distance--stands distinguished with its Teutonic sisters

generally from the groups of languages with which it is most likely to be

contrasted. Its literary power is originally less conspicuous than that of

the Celtic and of the Latin stocks; the lack, notorious to this day, of one

single original English folk-song of really great beauty is a rough and

general fact which is perfectly borne out by all other facts. But the

exquisite folk-literature of the Celts is absolutely unable either by

itself or with the help of foreign admixture to arrive at complete literary

perfection. And the profound sense of form which characterises the Latins

is apparently accompanied by such a deficiency of originality, that when

any foreign model is accepted it receives hardly any colour from the native

genius, and remains a cultivated exotic. The less promising soil of

Anglo-Saxon idiom waited for the foreign influences, ancient and modern, of

the Renaissance to act upon it, and then it produced a crop which has

dwarfed all the produce of the modern world, and has nearly, if not quite,

equalled in perfection, while it has much exceeded in bulk and length of

flowering time, the produce of Greece.

The rush of foreign influences on the England of Elizabeth's time,

stimulated alike by the printing press, by religious movements, by the

revival of ancient learning, and by the habits of travel and commerce, has

not been equalled in force and volume by anything else in history. But the

different influences of different languages and countries worked with very

different force. To the easier and more generally known of the classical

tongues must be assigned by far the largest place. This was only natural at

a time when to the inherited and not yet decayed use of colloquial and

familiar Latin as the vehicle of business, of literature, and of almost

everything that required the committal of written words to paper, was added

the scholarly study of its classical period from the strictly humanist

point of view. If we could assign marks in the competition, Latin would

have to receive nearly as many as all its rivals put together; but Greek

would certainly not be second, though it affected, especially in the

channel of the Platonic dialogues, many of the highest and most gifted

souls. In the latter part of the present period there were probably

scholars in England who, whether their merely philological attainments

might or might not pass muster now, were far better read in the actual

literature of the Greek classics than the very philologists who now disdain

them. Not a few of the chief matters in Greek literature--the epical

grandeur of Homer, the tragic principles of the three poets, and so

forth--made themselves, at first or second hand, deeply felt. But on the

whole Greek did not occupy the second place. That place was occupied by

Italian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose the

poetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelled

Englishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch

(Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, an

inexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was only

less influential because Spanish literature was in a much less finished

condition than Italian, and perhaps also because political causes made the

following of Spaniards seem almost unpatriotic. Yet the very same causes

made the Spanish language itself familiar to far more Englishmen than are

familiar with it now, though the direct filiation of euphuism on Spanish

originals is no doubt erroneous, and though the English and Spanish dramas

evolved themselves in lines rather parallel than connected.

France and Germany were much (indeed infinitely) less influential, and the

fact is from some points of view rather curious. Both were much nearer to

England than Spain or Italy; there was much more frequent communication

with both; there was at no time really serious hostility with either; and

the genius of both languages was, the one from one side, the other from the

other, closely connected with that of English. Yet in the great productions

of our great period, the influence of Germany is only perceptible in some

burlesque matter, such as _Eulenspiegel_ and _Grobianus_, in the furnishing

of a certain amount of supernatural subject-matter like the Faust legend,

and in details less important still. French influence is little greater; a

few allusions of "E. K." to Marot and Ronsard; a few translations and

imitations by Spenser, Watson, and others; the curious sonnets of

_Zepheria_; a slight echo of Rabelais here and there; some adapted songs to

music; and a translated play or two on the Senecan model.[68]

[68] Some, like my friend Mr. Lee, would demur to this, especially as

regards the sonnet. But Desportes, the chief creditor alleged, was himself

an infinite borrower from the Italians. Soothern, an early but worthless

sonneteer, _c._ 1584, did certainly imitate the French.

But France had already exercised a mighty influence upon England; and

Germany had very little influence to exercise for centuries. Putting aside

all pre-Chaucerian influence which may be detected, the outside guiding

force of literary English literature (which was almost exclusively poetry)

had been French from the end of the fourteenth century to the last

survivals of the Scoto-Chaucerian school in Hawes, Skelton, and Lindsay.

True, France had now something else to give; though it must be remembered

that her great school coincided with rather than preceded the great school

of England, that the _Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francaise_ was

but a few years anterior to Tottel's _Miscellany_, and that, except Marot

and Rabelais (neither of whom was neglected, though neither exercised much

formal influence), the earlier French writers of the sixteenth century had

nothing to teach England. On the other hand, Germany was utterly unable to

supply anything in the way of instruction in literary form; and it was

instruction in literary form which was needed to set the beanstalk of

English literature growing even unto the heavens. Despite the immense

advantage which the English adoption of German innovations in religion gave

the country of Luther, that country's backwardness made imitation

impossible. Luther himself had not elaborated anything like a German style;

he had simply cleared the vernacular of some of its grossest

stumbling-blocks and started a good plain fashion of sentence. That was not

what England wanted or was likely to want, but a far higher literary

instruction, which Germany could not give her and (for the matter of that)

has never been in a position to give her. The models which she sought had

to be sought elsewhere, in Athens, in old Rome, in modern Tuscany.

But it would probably be unwise not to make allowance for a less

commonplace and more "metaphysical" explanation. It was precisely because

French and German had certain affinities with English, while Italian and

Spanish, not to mention the classical tongues, were strange and exotic,

that the influence of the latter group was preferred. The craving for

something not familiar, for something new and strange, is well known enough

in the individual; and nations are, after all, only aggregates of

individuals. It was exactly because the models of the south were so utterly

divided from the isolated Briton in style and character that he took so

kindly to them, and that their study inspired him so well. There were not,

indeed, wanting signs of what mischief might have been done if English

sense had been less robust and the English genius of a less stubborn

idiosyncrasy. Euphuism, the occasional practice of the Senecan drama, the

preposterous and almost incredible experiments in classical metre of men

not merely like Drant and Harvey, but like Sidney and Spenser, were

sufficiently striking symptoms of the ferment which was going on in the

literary constitution of the country. But they were only harmless

heat-rashes, not malignant distempers, and the spirit of England won

through them, with no loss of general health, probably with the result of

the healthy excretion of many peccant humours which might have been

mischievous if driven in. Even the strongest of all the foreign forces, the

just admiration of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, was not in any

way hurtful; and it is curious enough that it is only in what may be called

the autumn and, comparatively speaking, the decadence of the period that

anything that can be called pedantry is observed. It is in Milton and

Browne, not in Shakespere and Hooker, that there is an appearance of undue

domination and "obsession" by the classics.

The subdivisions of the period in which these purely literary influences

worked in combination with those of the domestic and foreign policy of

England (on which it is unnecessary here to dilate), can be drawn with

tolerable precision. They are both better marked and more important in

verse than in prose. For it cannot be too often asserted that the age, in

the wide sense, was, despite many notable achievements in the _sermo

pedestris_, not an age of prose but an age of poetry. The first period

extends (taking literary dates) from the publication of Tottel's

_Miscellany_ to that of _The Shepherd's Calendar_. It is not distinguished

by much production of positive value. In poetry proper the writers pursue

and exercise themselves upon the track of Surrey, Wyatt, and the other

authors whom Grimoald, or some other, collected; acquiring, no doubt, a

certain facility in the adjustment to iambic and other measures of the

altered pronunciation since Chaucer's time; practising new combinations in

stanza, but inclining too much to the doggerel Alexandrines and

fourteeners (more doggerel still when chance or design divided them into

eights and sixes); repeating, without much variation, images and phrases

directly borrowed from foreign models; and displaying, on the whole, a

singular lack of inspiration which half excuses the mistaken attempt of the

younger of them, and of their immediate successors, to arrive at the

desired poetical medium by the use of classical metres. Among men actually

living and writing at this time Lord Buckhurst alone displays a real

poetical faculty. Nor is the case much better in respect of drama, though

here the restless variety of tentative displays even more clearly the

vigorous life which underlay incomplete performance, and which promised

better things shortly. The attempt of _Gorboduc_ and a few other plays to

naturalise the artificial tragedy, though a failure, was one of those

failures which, in the great literary "rule of false," help the way to

success; the example of _Ralph Roister Doister_ and _Gammer Gurton's

Needle_ could not fail to stimulate the production of genuine native farce

which might any day become _la bonne comedie_. And even the continued

composition of Moralities showed signs of the growing desire for life and

individuality of character. Moreover, the intense and increasing liking for

the theatre in all classes of society, despite the discouragement of the

authorities, the miserable reward offered to actors and playwrights, and

the discredit which rested on the vocations of both, was certain in the

ordinary course of things to improve the supply. The third division of

literature made slower progress under less powerful stimulants. No

emulation, like that which tempted the individual graduate or templar to

rival Surrey in addressing his mistress's eyebrow, or Sackville in stately

rhyming on English history, acted on the writers of prose. No public

demand, like that which produced the few known and the hundred forgotten

playwrights of the first half of Elizabeth's reign, served as a hotbed. But

it is the great secret of prose that it can dispense with such stimulants.

Everybody who wished to make his thoughts known began, with the help of

the printing press, to make them known; and the informal use of the

vernacular, by dint of this unconscious practice and of the growing

scholarship both of writers and readers, tended insensibly to make itself

less of a mere written conversation and more of a finished prose style.

Preaching in English, the prose pamphlet, and translations into the

vernacular were, no doubt, the three great schoolmasters in the

disciplining of English prose. But by degrees all classes of subjects were

treated in the natural manner, and so the various subdivisions of prose

style--oratorical, narrative, expository, and the rest--slowly evolved and

separated themselves, though hardly, even at the close of the time, had

they attained the condition of finish.

The year 1580 may be fixed on with almost mathematical accuracy as the date

at which the great generation of Elizabethan writers first showed its hand

with Lyly's _Euphues_ in prose and Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_ in

verse. Drama was a little, but not more than a little, later in showing the

same signs of rejuvenescence; and from that time forward till the end of

the century not a year passed without the appearance of some memorable work

or writer; while the total production of the twenty years exceeds in

originality and force, if not always in artistic perfection of form, the

production of any similar period in the world's history. The group of

University Wits, following the example of Lyly (who, however, in drama

hardly belongs to the most original school), started the dramas of history,

of romance, of domestic life; and, by fashioning through their leader

Marlowe the tragic decasyllable, put into the hands of the still greater

group who succeeded them an instrument, the power of which it is impossible

to exaggerate. Before the close of the century they had themselves all

ceased their stormy careers; but Shakespere was in the full swing of his

activity; Ben Jonson had achieved the freshest and perhaps capital fruit of

his study of humours; Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, and a crowd of

lesser writers had followed in his steps. In poetry proper the magnificent

success of _The Faerie Queen_ had in one sense no second; but it was

surrounded with a crowd of productions hardly inferior in their own way,

the chief being the result of the great and remarkable sonnet outburst of

the last decade of the century. The doggerel of the earlier years had

almost entirely disappeared, and in its place appeared the perfect

concerted music of the stanzas (from the sonnet and the Spenserian

downwards), the infinite variety of the decasyllable, and the exquisite

lyric snatches of song in the dramatists, pamphleteers, and music-book

writers. Following the general law already indicated, the formal advance in

prose was less, but an enormous stride was made in the direction of

applying it to its various uses. The theologians, with Hooker at their

head, produced almost the first examples of the measured and dignified

treatment of argument and exposition. Bacon (towards the latter end it is

true) produced the earliest specimens of his singular mixture of gravity

and fancy, pregnant thought and quaint expression. History in the proper

sense was hardly written, but a score of chroniclers, some not deficient in

narrative power, paved the way for future historians. In imaginative and

miscellaneous literature the fantastic extravagances of Lyly seemed as

though they might have an evil effect. In reality they only spurred

ingenious souls on to effort in refining prose, and in one particular

direction they had a most unlooked for result. The imitation in little by

Greene, Lodge, and others, of their long-winded graces, helped to

popularise the pamphlet, and the popularisation of the pamphlet led the way

to periodical writing--an introduction perhaps of doubtful value in itself,

but certainly a matter of no small importance in the history of literature.

And so by degrees professional men of letters arose--men of letters,

professional in a sense, which had not existed since the days of the

travelling Jongleurs of the early Middle Ages. These men, by working for

the actors in drama, or by working for the publishers in the prose and

verse pamphlet (for the latter form still held its ground), earned a

subsistence which would seem sometimes to have been not a mere pittance,

and which at any rate, when folly and vice did not dissipate it, kept them

alive. Much nonsense no doubt has been talked about the Fourth Estate; but

such as it is, for good or for bad, it practically came into existence in

these prolific years.

The third period, that of vigorous manhood, may be said to coincide roughly

with the reign of James I., though if literary rather than political dates

be preferred, it might be made to begin with the death of Spenser in 1599,

and to end with the damnation of Ben Jonson's _New Inn_ just thirty years

later. In the whole of this period till the very last there is no other

sign of decadence than the gradual dropping off in the course of nature of

the great men of the preceding stage, not a few of whom, however, survived

into the next, while the places of those who fell were taken in some cases

by others hardly below the greatest, such as Beaumont and Fletcher. Many of

the very greatest works of what is generally known as the Elizabethan

era--the later dramas of Shakespere, almost the whole work of Ben Jonson,

the later poems of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, the plays of Webster and

Middleton, and the prose of Raleigh, the best work of Bacon, the poetry of

Browne and Wither--date from this time, while the astonishingly various and

excellent work of the two great dramatists above mentioned is wholly

comprised within it. And not only is there no sign of weakening, but there

is hardly a sign of change. A slight, though only a slight, depression of

the imaginative and moral tone may be noticed or fancied in those who, like

Fletcher, are wholly of the period, and a certain improvement in general

technical execution testifies to longer practice. But Webster might as well

have written years earlier (hardly so well years later) than he actually

did; and especially in the case of numerous anonymous or single works, the

date of which, or at least of their composition, is obscure, it is very

difficult from internal evidence of style and sentiment to assign them to

one date rather than to another, to the last part of the strictly

Elizabethan or the first part of the strictly Jacobean period. Were it not

for the occasional imitation of models, the occasional reference to dated

facts, it would be not so much difficult as impossible. If there seems to

be less audacity of experiment, less of the fire of youth, less of the

unrestrainable restlessness of genius eager to burst its way, that, as has

been already remarked of another difference, may not improbably be mainly

due to fancy, and to the knowledge that the later efforts actually were

later as to anything else. In prose more particularly there is no change

whatever. Few new experiments in style were tried, unless the _Characters_

of Overbury and Earle may be called such. The miscellaneous pamphlets of

the time were written in much the same fashion, and in some cases by the

same men, as when, forty years before Jonson summoned himself to "quit the

loathed stage," Nash had alternately laughed at Gabriel Harvey, and

savagely lashed the Martinists. The graver writers certainly had not

improved upon, and had not greatly changed the style in which Hooker broke

his lance with Travers, or descanted on the sanctity of law. The

humour-comedy of Jonson, the romantic _drame_ of Fletcher, with the

marmoreally-finished minor poems of Ben, were the nearest approaches of any

product of the time to novelty of general style, and all three were

destined to be constantly imitated, though only in the last case with much

real success, during the rest of our present period. Yet the

post-Restoration comedy is almost as much due to Jonson and Fletcher as to

foreign models, and the influence of both, after long failing to produce

anything of merit, was not imperceptible even in Congreve and Vanbrugh.

Of the fourth period, which practically covers the reign of Charles I. and

the interregnum of the Commonwealth, no one can say that it shows no signs

of decadence, when the meaning of that word is calculated according to the

cautions given above in noticing its poets. Yet the decadence is not at all

of the kind which announces a long literary dead season, but only of that

which shows that the old order is changing to a new. Nor if regard be

merely had to the great names which adorn the time, may it seem proper to

use the word decadence at all. To this period belong not only Milton, but

Taylor, Browne, Clarendon, Hobbes (four of the greatest names in English

prose), the strange union of learning in matter and quaintness in form

which characterises Fuller and Burton, the great dramatic work of Massinger

and Ford. To it also belongs the exquisite if sometimes artificial school

of poetry which grew up under the joint inspiration of the great personal

influence and important printed work of Ben Jonson on the one hand, and the

subtler but even more penetrating stimulant of the unpublished poetry of

Donne on the other--a school which has produced lyrical work not surpassed

by that of any other school or time, and which, in some specially poetical

characteristics, may claim to stand alone.

If then, we speak of decadence, it is necessary to describe with some

precision what is meant, and to do so is not difficult, for the signs of it

are evident, not merely in the rank and file of writers (though they are

naturally most prominent here), but to some extent in the great

illustrations of the period themselves. In even the very best work of the

time there is a want of the peculiar freshness and spontaneity, as of

spring water from the rock, which characterises earlier work. The art is

constantly admirable, but it is almost obtrusively art--a proposition which

is universally true even of the greatest name of the time, of Milton, and

which applies equally to Taylor and to Browne, to Massinger and to Ford,

sometimes even to Herrick (extraordinary as is the grace which he manages

to impart), and almost always to Carew. The lamp is seldom far off, though

its odour may be the reverse of disagreeable. But in the work which is not

quite so excellent, other symptoms appear which are as decisive and less

tolerable. In the poetry of the time there appear, side by side with much

exquisite melody and much priceless thought, the strangest blotches,

already more than once noticed, of doggerel, of conceits pushed to the

verge of nonsense and over the verge of grotesque, of bad rhyme and bad

rhythm which are evidently not the result of mere haste and creative

enthusiasm but of absolutely defective ear, of a waning sense of harmony.

In the drama things are much worse. Only the two dramatists already

mentioned, with the doubtful addition of Shirley, display anything like

great or original talent. A few clever playwrights do their journey-work

with creditable craftsmanship. But even this characteristic is wanting in

the majority. The plots relapse into a chaos almost as great as that of the

drama of fifty years earlier, but with none of its excuse of inexperience

and of redeeming purple patches. The characters are at once uninteresting

and unpleasant; the measure hobbles and staggers; the dialogue varies

between passages of dull declamation and passages of almost duller

repartee. Perhaps, though the prose names of the time are greater than

those of its dramatists, or, excluding Milton's, of its poets, the signs of

something wrong are clearest in prose. It would be difficult to find in any

good prose writer between 1580 and 1625 shameless anomalies of arrangement,

the clumsy distortions of grammar, which the very greatest Caroline writers

permit themselves in the intervals, and sometimes in the very course of

their splendid eloquence; while, as for lesser men, the famous incoherences

of Cromwell's speeches are hardly more than a caricature of the custom of

the day.

Something has yet to be said as to the general characteristics of this

time--characteristics which, scarcely discernible in the first period, yet

even there to be traced in such work as that of Surrey and Sackville,

emerge into full prominence in the next, continue with hardly any loss in

the third, and are discernible even in the "decadence" of the fourth. Even

yet they are not universally recognised, and it appears to be sometimes

thought that because critics speak with enthusiasm of periods in which,

save at rare intervals, and as it were by accident, they are not

discernible at all, such critics are insensible to them where they occur.

Never was there a grosser mistake. It is said that M. Taine, in private

conversation, once said to a literary novice who rashly asked him whether

he liked this or that, "Monsieur, en litterature j'aime tout." It was a

noble and correct sentiment, though it might be a little difficult for the

particular critic who formulated it to make good his claim to it as a

motto. The ideal critic undoubtedly does like everything in literature,

provided that it is good of its kind. He likes the unsophisticated

tentatives of the earliest minstrel poetry, and the cultivated perfection

of form of Racine and Pope; he likes the massive vigour of the French and

English sixteenth centuries, and the alembicated exquisiteness of Catullus

and Carew; he does not dislike Webster because he is not Dryden, or Young

because he is not Spenser; he does not quarrel with Sophocles because he is

not AEschylus, or with Hugo because he is not Heine. But at the same time it

is impossible for him not to recognise that there are certain periods where

inspiration and accomplishment meet in a fashion which may be sought for in

vain at others. These are the great periods of literature, and there are

perhaps only five of them, with five others which may be said to be almost

level. The five first are the great age of Greek literature from AEschylus

to Plato, the great ages of English and French literature in the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries, the whole range of Italian literature from Dante

to Ariosto, and the second great age of English from the _Lyrical Ballads_

to the death of Coleridge. It is the super-eminent glory of English that it

counts twice in the reckoning. The five seconds are the Augustan age of

Latin, the short but brilliant period of Spanish literary development, the

Romantic era in France, the age of Goethe in Germany, including Heine's

earlier and best work, and (with difficulty, and by allowance chiefly of

Swift and Dryden) the half century from the appearance of _Absalom and

Achitophel_ to the appearance of _Gulliver_ and _The Dunciad_ in England.

Out of these there are great men but no great periods, and the first class

is distinguished from the second, not so much by the fact that almost all

the greatest literary names of the world are found in it, as because it is

evident to a careful reader that there was more of the general spirit of

poetry and of literature diffused in human brains at these times than at

any other. It has been said more than once that English Elizabethan

literature may, and not merely in virtue of Shakespere, claim the first

place even among the first class. The full justification of this assertion

could only be given by actually going through the whole range of the

literature, book in hand. The foregoing pages have given it as it were in

_precis_, rather than in any fuller fashion. And it has been thought better

to devote some of the space permitted to extract as the only possible

substitute for this continual book-in-hand exemplification. Many subjects

which might properly form the subject of excursus in a larger history have

been perforce omitted, the object being to give, not a series of

interesting essays on detached points, but a conspectus of the actual

literary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660.

Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet to

write. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or less

indistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of the

earlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has been

plausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years a

resident in England, and was acquainted with the Greville-Sidney circle at

the very time that that circle was almost the cradle of the new English

literature. The stimulus given not merely by the popular fancy for rough

dramatic entertainments, but by the taste of courts and rich nobles for

masques--a taste which favoured the composition of such exquisite

literature as Ben Jonson's and Milton's masterpieces--is another side

subject of the same kind. I do not know that, much as has been written on

the Reformation, the direct influence of the form which the Reformation

took in England on the growth of English literature has ever been estimated

and summarised fully and yet briefly, so as to show the contrast between

the distinctly anti-literary character of most of the foreign Protestant

and the English Puritan movement on the one side, and the literary

tendencies of Anglicanism on the other. The origins of Euphuism and of that

later form of preciousness which is sometimes called Gongorism and

sometimes Marinism have been much discussed, but the last word has

certainly not been said on them. For these things, however (which are

merely quoted as examples of a very numerous class), there could be found

no place here without excluding other things more centrally necessary to

the unfolding of the history. And therefore I may leave what I have written

with a short final indication of what seems to me the distinguishing mark

of Elizabethan literature. That mark is not merely the presence of

individual works of the greatest excellence, but the diffusion throughout

the whole work of the time of a _vivida vis_, of flashes of beauty in prose

and verse, which hardly any other period can show. Let us open one of the

songbooks of the time, Dowland's _Second Book of Airs_, published in the

central year of our period, 1600, and reprinted by Mr Arber. Here almost at

random we hit upon this snatch--

"Come ye heavy states of night,

Do my father's spirit right;

Soundings baleful let me borrow,

Burthening my song with sorrow:

Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings

By thee, are turned into springs.

"Come you Virgins of the night

That in dirges sad delight,

Quire my anthems; I do borrow

Gold nor pearl, but sounds of sorrow.

Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings

By thee, are turned into springs."

It does not matter who wrote that--the point is its occurrence in an

ordinary collection of songs to music neither better nor worse than many

others. When we read such verses as this, or as the still more charming

Address to Love given on page 122, there is evident at once the _non so

che_ which distinguishes this period. There is a famous story of a

good-natured conversation between Scott and Moore in the latter days of Sir

Walter, in which the two poets agreed that verse which would have made a

fortune in their young days appeared constantly in magazines without being

much regarded in their age. No sensible person will mistake the meaning of

the apparent praise. It meant that thirty years of remarkable original

production and of much study of models had made possible and common a

standard of formal merit which was very rare at an earlier time. Now this

standard of formal merit undoubtedly did not generally exist in the days of

Elizabeth. But what did generally exist was the "wind blowing where it

listeth," the presence and the influence of which are least likely to be

mistaken or denied by those who are most strenuous in insisting on the

importance and the necessity of formal excellence itself. I once undertook

for several years the criticism of minor poetry for a literary journal,

which gave more room than most to such things, and during the time I think

I must have read through or looked over probably not much less than a

thousand, certainly not less than five or six hundred volumes. I am

speaking with seriousness when I say that nothing like the note of the

merely casual pieces quoted or referred to above was to be detected in more

than at the outside two or three of these volumes, and that where it seemed

to sound faintly some second volume of the same author's almost always came

to smother it soon after. There was plenty of quite respectable poetic

learning: next to nothing of the poetic spirit. Now in the period dealt

with in this volume that spirit is everywhere, and so are its sisters, the

spirits of drama and of prose. They may appear in full concentration and

lustre, as in _Hamlet_ or _The Faerie Queene_; or in fitful and

intermittent flashes, as in scores and hundreds of sonneteers,

pamphleteers, playwrights, madrigalists, preachers. But they are always not

far off. In reading other literatures a man may lose little by obeying the

advice of those who tell him only to read the best things: in reading

Elizabethan literature by obeying he can only disobey that advice, for the

best things are everywhere.[69]

[69] In the twenty years which have passed since this book was first

published, monographs on most of the points indicated on p. 459 have

appeared, both in England and America.

INDEX

I.--BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Single plays, poems, etc., not mentioned in this Index will be found in the

collections referred to under the headings Arber, Bullen, Farmer, Grosart,

Hazlitt, Park, Simpson.

Alexander, Sir William. _See_ Stirling.

Arber, E., English Garner, vols. i.-viii., Birmingham and London,

1877-96.

_Also_ new editions in redistributed volumes by Lee, Collins,

and others.

Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus. Ed. Arber, London, 1868.

The Schoolmaster. Ed. Arber, London, 1870.

Works. Ed. Giles, 4 vols., London, 1865.

Bacon, Francis, Works of. 3 vols. folio, London, 1753.

Barnabee's Journal. By R. Braithwaite. Ed. Haslewood and Hazlitt, London,

1876.

Barnes, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe. In Grosart's Occasional

Issues, vol. i.

The Devil's Charter. Ed. M'Kerrow, Louvain.

Barnfield, Richard, Poems. Ed. Arber, Birmingham, 1882.

Basse, William, Poems of. Ed. Bond, London, 1893.

Beaumont, Francis, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vi.

Beaumont, Sir John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vi.

Beaumont, Joseph, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1880.

Beaumont and Fletcher, Dramatic Works of. 10 vols., London, 1750.

2 vols., Ed. Darley, London, 1859.

11 vols., Ed. Dyce, London, 1843.

Two new editions in progress now (1907)--one Ed. Bullen, London,

the other Ed. Waller, Cambridge.

Benlowes, Edward, Theophila. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. i., Oxford,

1905.

Bible. The Holy Bible, Authorised Version, Oxford, 1851.

Revised Version, Oxford, 1885.

Breton, Nicholas, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1879.

Brome, Alexander, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. vi.

Brome, Richard, Plays of. 3 vols., London, 1873.

Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 4 vols. Privately

printed, 1870.

Browne, Sir Thomas, Works of. Ed. Wilkin, 3 vols., London, 1880.

Religio Medici. Ed. Greenhill, London, 1881.

Browne, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vi.

_Also_ 2 vols. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868.

_Also_ Ed. Goodwin, 2 vols., London, 1894.

Bullen, A. H., Old Plays, 4 vols., London, 1882-85.

Ditto, New Series, Vols, i. ii. iii., London, 1887-90.

Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-books, 2 vols., 1887-88. Ditto, Romances,

1890. Ditto, Dramatists, 1890.

_Speculum Amantis_, 1891.

Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 2 vols., 1891.

England's Helicon. London, 1887.

Arden of Feversham. London, 1887.

Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy. 2 vols., London, 1821.

Carey, Patrick. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. ii., Oxford, 1906.

Carew, Thomas, Poems of. Edinburgh, 1824.

_Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. v.

_Also_ Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868.

Cartwright, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. vi.

Chalkhill, John, Thealma and Clearchus. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. ii.

Chalmers, A., British Poets, 21 vols., London, 1810.

Chamberlayne, William, Pharonnida. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. i.

Chapman, George, Works of. 3 vols., London, 1875.

Churchyard, T. No complete edition. Some things reprinted by Collier and

in Heliconia.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. Works, 1 vol., Oxford, 1843.

Cleveland, John. Contemporary edd. numerous but puzzling and

untrustworthy.

A recent one by J. M. Berdan, New York, n.d.

Cokain, Sir Aston, Plays of. Edinburgh, 1874.

Constable, Henry, Diana. In Arber's English Garner, vol. ii.

Corbet, Bishop, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. v.

Cotton, Charles, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. vi.

Crashaw, Richard, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1872.

_Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vi.

_Also_ Ed. Waller, Cambridge, 1904.

Daniel, Samuel, Delia. In Arber's English Garner, vol. iii.

_Also_ Works of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iii.

_Also_ Works of. Ed. Grosart, 5 vols. Privately printed, 1885-96.

Davenant, Sir William, Dramatic Works of. 5 vols., Edinburgh, 1872-73.

Poems of. Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv.

Davies, Sir John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. v.

Davies, John, of Hereford, Works. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed,

1878.

Day, John, Works of. Ed. Bullen. Privately printed, 1881.

Dekker, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. 4 vols., London, 1873.

Prose Works of. 5 vols. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed, 1884-86.

Donne, John, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed, 1872.

_Also_ Ed. Chambers, 2 vols., London, 1896.

Drayton, Michael, Idea. In Arber's English Garner, vol. vi.

Works of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv.

Drummond, William, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. v.

_Also_ Published for the Maitland Club. Edinburgh, 1832.

Dyer, Sir Edward, Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets.

Early English Dramatists. Ed. Farmer, vols. i.-ix., London, 1905-6.

Eden, Richard, The First Three English Books on America. Ed. Arber,

Birmingham, 1885.

Elizabethan Critical Essays. Ed. G. Smith, 2 vols., Oxford, 1904.

Elizabethan Sonnets. Ed. Lee, 2 vols., London, 1904.

Felltham, Owen, Resolves. London, 1820 (but _see_ p. 443).

Fletcher, Giles, Licia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol, ii.

Fletcher, Giles, the younger, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets,

vol. vi.

Fletcher, Phineas, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vi.

Ford, John, Works of. Ed. Hartley Coleridge, London, 1859.

Fuller, Thomas, Worthies of England. Ed. Nichols, 2 vols. 4to, London,

1811.

Thoughts in Good Times. London, 1885.

Holy and Profane State. London, 1642.

Church History. London, 1655.

Gascoigne, George, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868.

_Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. ii.

Gifford, Humphrey, A Posy of Gillyflowers. In Grosart's Occasional

Issues, vol. i.

Glapthorne, Henry, Works of. 2 vols., London, 1874.

Godolphin, Sidney, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. ii.

Goff, Thomas, Plays. London, 1656.

Googe, Barnabe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets. Ed. Arber, London, 1871.

Greene, Robert, Dramatic Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1883.

_Also_ Ed. Collins, 2 vols., Oxford, 1905.

_Also_ Complete Works of. Ed. Grosart, 13 vols. Privately printed,

1881-86.

Griffin, Bartholomew, Fidessa. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. ii.

Grosart, A. B., Fuller Worthies Library. Chertsey Worthies Library.

Occasional Issues. Privately printed, v.d.

Guilpin, Edward, Skialetheia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. vi.

Habington, William, Castara. Ed. Arber, London, 1870.

_Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. vi.

Hakluyt, Richard, The Voyages, etc., of the English Nation: Edinburgh.

_Also_ a later edition, Glasgow.

Hales, John, Works of. 3 vols., Glasgow, 1765.

Hall, John, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. ii.

Hall, Joseph, Virgidemiarum, etc. In Grosart's Occasional Issues,

vol. ix.

_Also_ in Chalmers's Poets, vol. v.

Hannah, Dr., Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, and other Courtly Poets. Aldine

Series, London, 1885.

Harvey, Gabriel, Works. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols. Privately printed, 1884-85.

Hazlitt, W. C., Dodsley's Old Plays, 15 vols., London, 1874-76.

Shakespere's Library. 6 vols., London, 1875.

Herbert, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Autobiography. Ed. Lee,

London, 1886.

Herbert, George, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, London, 1876.

Herrick, Robert, Poems of. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols., London, 1876.

_Also_ Ed. Pollard, 2 vols., London, 1891; and Ed. Saintsbury,

2 vols., London, 1893.

Heywood, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. 6 vols., London, 1874.

Pleasant Dialogues, etc. Ed. Bang, Louvain, 1903.

Hobbes, Thomas, Works. Ed. Molesworth, 16 vols., London, 1839-45.

Hooker, Richard, Ecclesiastical Polity. 3 vols., Oxford, 1820.

Howell, James, Familiar Letters. The Eleventh Edition, London, 1754.

Howell, Thomas, The Arbour of Amity. In Grosart's Occasional Issues,

vol. viii.

J. C., Alcilia. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. viii.

_Also_ in Arber's English Garner, vol. iv.

Jonson, Ben, Works of. Ed. Cunningham, 3 vols., London, n.d.

Knolles, Richard, History of the Turks. Third Edition, London, 1621.

Kyd, Thomas, Cornelia. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. v.

Jeronimo, (?) in do. vol. iv.

The Spanish Tragedy, in do. vol. v.

Works. Ed. Boas, Oxford, 1900.

Kynaston, Sir Francis, Poems of. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol, ii.

Lodge, Thomas, Euphues' Golden Legacy in Shakespere's Library, vol. ii.,

London, 1875.

Lovelace, Richard, Poems of. Ed. Hazlitt, London, 1864.

Lyly, John, Euphues. Ed. Arber, London, 1868.

Dramatic Works. Ed. Fairholt, 2 vols., London, 1858.

Complete Works. Ed. Bond, 3 vols., Oxford, 1902.

Lynch, Diella. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. iv.

Marlowe, Christopher, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1859.

_Also_ Ed. Bullen, 3 vols., London, 1887.

Marmion, Shakerley, Plays of. Edinburgh, 1874.

Cupid and Psyche. In Minor Caroline Poets, vol. ii.

Marprelate, Martin, Tracts by and against. _See_ text.

The Epistle. Ed. Petheram.

_Also_ Ed. Arber, The English Scholars' Library.

Diotrephes, by N. Udall. Ed. Arber.

Demonstration of Discipline, by N. Udall. Ed. Arber.

An Admonition to the People of England, by T. C. Ed. Petheram.

_Also_ Ed. Arber.

Hay any Work for Cooper. Ed. Petheram.

Pap with a Hatchet. Ed. Petheram.

An Almond for a Parrot. Ed. Petheram.

A Counter-Cuff to Martin Junior, etc., in Works of Nash. Ed. Grosart.

Plain Percival, the Peacemaker of England. Ed. Petheram.

Marston, John, Works of. Ed. Halliwell, 3 vols., London, 1856.

_Also_ Ed. Bullen, 3 vols., London, 1885.

Poems of. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. xi.

Massinger, Philip. Ed. Hartley Coleridge, London, 1859.

Middleton, Thomas, Dramatic Works of. Ed. Bullen, 8 vols., London, 1886.

Milton, John, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. vii.

Prose Works of. 2 vols., Philadelphia, 1847.

Ed. Masson, 3 vols., London, 1890.

Minor Caroline Poets, vols. i. and ii., Oxford, 1905-6.

Mirror for Magistrates, The. Ed. Hazlewood, 3 vols., London, 1815.

Miscellanies, Seven Poetical. Ed. Collier, London, 1867.

Some in Heliconia.

More, Henry, Poems of. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed, 1878.

Mulcaster, Richard, Positions. Ed. Quick, London, 1888.

Nabbes, Thomas, Works of. In Bullen's Old Plays, New Series, vols. i.

and ii.

Nash, Thomas, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 6 vols. Privately printed, 1883-85.

Ed. M'Kerrow, 4 vols., London, 1904.

Park, T., Heliconia. 3 vols., London, 1814.

Peele, George, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1883.

Percy, W., Coelia, In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. iv.

Puttenham, George, The Art of English Poesy. Ed. Arber, London, 1869.

_Also_ in G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays.

Quarles, Francis. Ed. Grosart, 3 vols. Privately printed, 1880-81.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, History of the World. 6 vols., London, 1820.

Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets.

Randolph, Thomas, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt. 2 vols., London, 1875.

Return from Parnassus, The. Edited by W. Macray, Oxford, 1886.

Rowlands, Samuel, Works of. Ed. Gosse, 3 vols., Glasgow, 1880

(Hunterian Club).

Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, Works of. Ed. Sackville-West, London,

1859.

Sandys, George, [Sacred] Poetical Works of. Ed. Hooper, 2 vols., London,

1872.

Shakespere, William, Works of. Globe edition, London, 1866.

Doubtful plays. Ed. Warnke and Proescholdt, Halle.

_Also_ Ed. Hazlitt, London, n.d.

Sherburne, Sir Edward, Poems of. In Chalmers's Poets, vol. vi.

Shirley, James, Plays of. Ed. Gifford and Dyce, 6 vols., London, 1833.

Sidney, Philip, Poetical Works. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols., London, 1873.

An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Arber, London, 1868.

Arcadia. Ed. Sommer, London, 1891.

Simpson. R., The School of Shakespere, 2 vols., London, 1878.

Smith, T., Chloris. In Grosart's Occasional Issues, vol. iv.

Southwell, Robert, Poems. Ed. Grosart. Printed for private circulation.

Spenser, Edmund. Ed. Todd, London, 1853.

_Also_ Ed. Morris and Hales, London, 1873.

_Also_ Ed. Grosart, vols. i.-ix. Privately printed, 1882-87.

Stanley, T., Poems. Partly reprinted, London, 1814.

Stanyhurst, Richard, The First Four Books of the AEneid. Ed. Arber,

London, 1880.

Still, John, Gammer Gurton's Needle. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. iii.

Stirling, William Alexander, Earl of, Poems of. In Chalmers's British

Poets, vol. v.

Suckling, Sir John, Works of. Ed. Hazlitt, 2 vols., London, 1874.

Surrey, Earl of. _See_ Tottel's Miscellany.

_Also_ in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. ii.

Sylvester, Joshua, Works of. Ed. Grosart, 2 vols. Privately printed,

1880.

Taylor, Jeremy, Works of. 3 vols., London, 1844.

Tottel's Miscellany. Ed. Arber, London, 1870.

Tourneur, Cyril, Works of. Ed. Collins, 2 vols., London, 1878.

Traherne, Thomas, Poems. Ed. Dobell, London, 1903.

Turberville, George, Poems of. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. ii.

Tusser, Thomas. Ed. Mavor, London, 1812.

_Also_ by English Dialect Society, 1878.

Udall, N., Ralph Roister Doister. In Hazlitt's Dodsley, vol. iii.

Vaughan, Henry. Ed. Grosart. Privately printed. 4 vols., 1868-71.

_Also_ Silex Scintillans. Facsimile of 1st edition. Ed. Clare,

London, 1885.

_Also_ 2 vols., Ed. Chambers, London, 1896.

Walton, Izaak, The Complete Angler. London, 1825.

Lives. London, 1842.

Warner, William, Albion's England. In Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iv.

Watson, Thomas, Poems. Ed. Arber, London, 1870.

Webbe, William, A Discourse of English Poetry. Ed. Arber, London, 1870.

_Also_ in G. Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays.

Webster, John, Works of. Ed. Dyce, London, 1859.

Wither, George, Hymns and Songs of the Church. Ed. Farr, London, 1856.

Hallelujah. Ed. Farr, London, 1857.

Philarete, in Arber's English Garner, vol. iv.

Fidelia, in Arber's English Garner, vol. vi.

Poems generally in Spenser Society's issues.

Wotton, Sir Henry, Poems of. In Hannah's Courtly Poets.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas. _See_ Tottel's Miscellany.

II.--GENERAL

_Albumazar_, 427.

Alexander, Sir William. See Stirling.

Andrewes, Bishop Lancelot (1555-1626), 444.

_Arden of Feversham_, 425.

Ascham, Roger (1515-1568), 30-33.

Bacon, Francis, Lord (1561-1626), 207-212.

_Barnabee's Journal_, 444.

Barnes, Barnabe (1569?-1609), 108, 109.

Barnfield, Richard (1584-1627), his Poems, 117, 118.

Basse, William (d. 1653?), 301.

Baxter, Richard (1615-1691), 440.

Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), his Poems, 312.

_See_ also Beaumont and Fletcher.

Beaumont, Sir John (1583-1627), his Poems, 312.

Beaumont, Joseph (1616-1699), 378.

Beaumont and Fletcher, 255-266.

Benlowes, Edward (1603?-1676), 381.

Bible, The English, Authorised and Revised versions, 215-218.

Breton, Nicholas (1545?-1626?), his verse, 128;

his prose pamphlets, 238-240.

Brome, Richard ( ?-1652?), 415, 416.

Brooke, Fulke Greville, Lord (1554-1628), 98-100.

Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-1682), 336-343;

his Life, 336, 337;

his Works and Style, 338-343.

Browne, William (1591-1643?), his Life and Poems, 299-302.

Bruno, Giordano, his influence, 102, 459.

Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 428-433.

_Cambyses_, 62, 249, _note_.

Campion, Thomas ( ?-1619), 34, 120 _sq._, 156, _note_.

Carew, Thomas (1598?-1639), 359-364.

Carey, Patrick ( ?- ?), 384.

Caroline Poetry, A Discussion of the Merits and Defects of, 386-393.

Cartwright, William (1611-1643), his Poems, 383;

his Plays, 427.

Chalkhill, John ( ?- ?), 380.

Chamberlayne, William (1619-1689), 381.

Chapman, George (1559?-1634), his Life, Poems, and Translations, 184-195.

Chillingworth, William (1602-1644), 440.

Churchyard, Thomas (1520?-1604), 17-18, 27, _note_.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of (1609-1674), his Life, Works, and Style,

343-348.

Cleveland, John (1613-1658), 385.

Cokain, Sir Aston (1608-1684), 416, 417.

Constable, Henry (1562-1613), 113.

Corbet, Bishop (1582-1635), his Poems, 382-384.

Coryat, Thomas (1577?-1617), 444.

Cosin, Bishop (1594-1672), 444.

Cotton, Charles (1630-1687), his Poems, 383, 384.

Cowley's Prose, 440.

Crashaw, Richard (1613?-1649), his Life and Poems, 364-370.

Critics, Elizabethan, 33-35.

Daniel, Samuel (1562-1619), his Sonnets, 113, 114;

his other Poems, 135-139;

his Prose, 220-222.

Davenant, Sir William (1606-1668), 419, 420.

Davenport, Robert ( ?-1655?), 422.

Davies, John, of Hereford (1565?-1618), 291-293.

Davies, Sir John (1569-1626), his Life and Poems, 293-295.

Day, John ( ?- ?), his Plays, 286-288.

"Decadence," 391, 394, 455-457.

Dekker, Thomas (1570?-1641?), his Plays and Songs, 201-206;

his Pamphlets, 235-238.

_Distracted Emperor, The_, 425.

Donne, John (1573-1631), his Satires and other Poems, 144-150.

Drama, Elizabethan, general characteristics, 50-53.

Dramatic Periods, Division of, 50, 51.

Drayton, Michael (1563-1631), his Sonnets, 114, 115;

his other Poems, 139-144.

Drummond, William, of Hawthornden (1585-1649), 306-308.

Earle, Bishop (1601?-1665), 442.

_Ecclesiastical Polity_, the, 46 _sq._

Eden, Richard (1521?-1576), his geographical work, 33.

_Edward III._, 424.

Edwards, Richard (1523?-1566), dramatist and miscellanist, 25, 26, 62.

_Eikon Basilike_, 442.

_Euphues_ and Euphuism, 37-40.

_Fair Em_, 73, 424.

Felltham, Owen (1602?-1668?), 442, 443.

Field, Nathaniel (1587-1633), his Plays, 426.

Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles (1575-1638), his Poem on Drake, 131.

Fletcher, Giles, the elder (1549-1611), 109.

Fletcher, Giles and Phineas, Poems of, 295-298.

Fletcher, John (1579-1625). _See_ Beaumont and Fletcher.

Ford, John (1586?- ?), his Plays, 401-409.

Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), 433-438.

_Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 55-57.

Gascoigne, George (1525?-1577), 16-18.

Gifford, Humphrey ( ?- ?), his _Posy of Gillyflowers_, 129.

Gilpin or Guilpin, Edward ( ?- ?), his _Skialetheia_, 155.

Glapthorne, Henry ( ?- ?), 417, 418.

Godolphin, Sidney (1610-1643), 384.

Goff, Thomas (1591-1629), 427, _note_.

Googe, Barnabe (1540?-1594), 18-20.

Gosson, Stephen (1554-1624), 34.

Greene, Robert (1560-1592), Life and Plays, 72-74;

Prose, 224-228.

Griffin, Bartholomew ( ?-1602?), his _Fidessa_, 116.

Grimald or Grimoald, Nicholas (1519?-1562?), 3-8.

Grove, Matthew ( ?- ?), his Poems, 130.

Habington, William (1605-1654), his _Castara_, 378-380;

his _Queen of Aragon_, 425.

Hakluyt, Richard (1552?-1616), his Voyages, 220-222.

Hales, John (1584-1656), 444.

Hall, John (1627-1656), 384.

Hall, Joseph (1574?-1650), his Satires, 151-153.

Herbert, George (1593-1633), 371-373.

Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury (1583-1648), 438-440.

Heroic Poem, the, 380.

Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), his Life and Poems, 354-359.

Heywood, Thomas ( ?-1650?), his Life and Works, 270-284.

Historical Poems, 131.

Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), his Life, Works, and Style, 348-353.

Hooker. Richard (1554?-1600), 44-49;

his Life, 44;

his Prose Style, 46-48.

Howell, James (1594?-1666), 441, 442.

Howell, Thomas ( ?- ?), his Poems, 130.

J. C., his _Alcilia_, 115.

_Jeronimo_, and _The Spanish Tragedy_, 74, 75.

Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), his Life, Poems, and Plays, 174-184;

his Prose, 216.

Kyd, Thomas (1557?-1595?), 74, 75, 81, _note_.

Kynaston, Sir Francis (1587-1642), 380, 381.

Lodge, Thomas (1558?-1625), his Plays, 70;

his Poems, 109-111;

his Satires, 145;

his Prose Pamphlets, 228-230.

Lovelace, Richard (1618-1658), his Poems, 374-376.

Lyly, John (1554?-1606?), 36-40, 65-68;

his Life, 36;

_Euphues_ and Euphuism, 37-40;

his Plays, 65-68.

Lynch, Richard ( ?- ?), his _Diella_, 116.

Manuscript, habit of keeping Poems in, 2.

Markham, Gervase (1568?-1637), his Poem on _The Revenge_, 131.

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593), his Life and Plays, 76-79.

Marmion, Shakerley (1603-1639), his Poems and Plays, 380, 423.

Marston, John (1575?-1634), his Life and Satires, 153-155;

his Plays, 195-199.

Martin Marprelate, sketch of the Controversy and account of the principal

tracts, 241-252.

Massinger, Philip (1583-1640), his Plays, 395-401.

_Merry Devil of Edmonton, The_, 426.

Metre, Classical, the fancy for, and its reasons, 22, 25.

Metre, English, must be scanned by Classical Rules, 14.

Middleton, Thomas (1570?-1627), his Life and Works, 266-273.

Milton, John (1608-1674), 316-330;

his Life and Character, 316, 317;

Divisions of his Work, 318;

his early Poems, 318-322;

his Prose, 322-326;

his later Poems, 326-329.

_Mirror for Magistrates, The_, 11-15.

_Miscellany_, Tottel's, 1-10;

a starting-point, 2;

its Authorship and Composition, 3;

Wyatt's and Surrey's Contributions to it, 4-8;

Grimald and minor authors, 8-9;

Metrical and Material Characteristics, 9, 10.

Miscellanies, the early Elizabethan, subsequent to Tottel's, 25-27.

Miscellanies, Caroline and later, 370.

_Miseries of Enforced Marriage, The_, 423.

More, Henry (1614-1687), his _Song of the Soul_, 377, 378.

Nabbes, Thomas ( ?- ?), his Plays, 422.

Nash, Thomas (1567-1601), his Plays, 70;

his Prose Works, 232-235.

_Nero_, 425.

North's Plutarch, 33.

Oxford, Edward, Earl of (1550-1604), his Poems, 127-128.

Pearson, Bishop (1613-1686), 440.

Peele, George (1558?-1597), his Life and Plays, 70-72.

Percy, William (1575-1648), his _Coelia_, 111.

_Pharonnida_, 381.

Plays, early nondescript, 62.

Poetry, 95-96.

Prose, the Beginnings of Modern English, 28-30.

Prosody, Weakness of the Early Elizabethans in, 9.

Pseudo-Shakesperian Plays, 424, 425.

Puttenham, George (1532?-1590), 34.

Quarles, Francis (1592-1644), 376, 377.

Raleigh, Sir Walter (1552?-1618), his Verse, 125-127;

his Prose, 212-215.

_Ralph Roister Doister_, 54, 55.

Randolph, Thomas (1605-1635), his Poems, 382;

his Plays, 413-415.

_Return from Parnassus, The_, 81, 426.

Rowlands, Samuel (1570?-1630?), 238, 240.

Rowley, Samuel ( ?- ?), 423.

Rowley, William (1585?-1642?), his Plays, 422.

Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst (1536-1608), his Life and Works, 11-15;

the _Induction_ and _Complaint of Buckingham_, 12-15;

_Gorboduc_, 57-60.

Sanderson, Bishop (1587-1663), 440.

Sandys, George (1578-1644), 373.

Satirists, the Elizabethan, 144-156.

_Second Maiden's Tragedy, The_, 425.

Senecan Drama, the, 58-61.

Shakespere, William (1564-1616), 157-173;

his Life, 158;

his Works and their Reputation, 159, 160;

their divisions, 160, 161 (1573-1636);

the Early Poems, 161;

the Sonnets, 161-164;

the Plays, 164-173;

the "Doubtful" Plays, 424-425.

Sherburne, Sir Edward (1618-1702), his Poems, 383.

Shirley, Henry ( ?-1627), 409, _note_.

Shirley, James (1596-1666), his Plays, 449-413.

Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586), his Prose, 40-43;

his Prose style, 42;

his Verse, 100-105.

Smith, William (1546?-1618?), his _Chloris_, 116.

Songs, Miscellaneous, from the Dramatists and Madrigal Writers, 121-125,

312-314.

Sonneteers, the Elizabethan, 97.

Southwell, Robert (1561 ?-1595), his Poems, 119.

Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599), 82-96;

his Life, 83-85;

_The Shepherd's Calendar_, 86;

the Minor Poems, 87;

_The Faerie Queene_, 88-93;

the Spenserian Stanza, 90;

Spenser's Language, 91;

his Comparative Rank in English Poetry, 93-96.

Stanley, Thomas (1625-1678), 383, 384.

Stanyhurst, Richard (1547-1618), 23-25.

Still, John (1543-1608), his _Gammer Gurton's Needle_, 55-57.

Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of (1567?-1640), 308-311.

Suckling, Sir John (1609-1642), his Poems, 374-376;

his Plays, 420-422.

Surrey, Lord Henry Howard, Earl of (1517?-1547), 6-8.

Sylvester, Joshua (1563-1618), his Du Bartas, etc., 289-291.

Taylor, Jeremy (1613-1667), 330-336;

his Life, 330, 331;

his Works and Style, 331-336.

_Theophila_, 381.

_Tottel's Miscellany_. See _Miscellany_.

Tourneur, Cyril (1575?-1626?), his Poems, 155-156;

his Plays, 284, 285.

Traherne, Thomas (1636?-1674), 381, _note_.

Translators, the Early Elizabethan, 21, 33.

Turberville, George (1540?-1610), 18-19.

_Two Angry Women, The_, 426.

_Two Noble Kinsmen, The_, 424.

Udall, Nicholas (1505-1556), his _Ralph Roister Doister_, 54, 55.

University Wits, the, 60-81.

Urquhart, Sir Thomas (1611-1660), 444.

Vaughan, Henry (1622-1695), 374-375, 393, _note_.

Version, the Authorised, 215-218.

Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 441.

Warner, William (1558-1649), 122-134.

Watson, Thomas (1557?-1592), 105-107.

Webbe, William ( ?- ?), 34.

Webster, John (1580?-1625?), his Life and Works, 273-279.

Willoughby's _Avisa_, 110, 111.

Wither, George (1588-1667), Life and Poems, 302-306.

_Wit's Recreations_, 370.

Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503?-1542), 4-6.

_Yorkshire Tragedy, The_, 424.

_Zepheria_, 112.

THE END

_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.