THE STARTING-POINT--ITALIAN INFLUENCE--THE OPPOSITION TO
RHYME--EXCUSES FOR THIS--ITS LITTLE EFFECT--POETRY OF FIRST
HALF OF ELIZABETH’S REIGN--SPENSER--ORDER OF HIS WORK--HIS
METRE--CHARACTER OF HIS POETRY--SIR P. SIDNEY--THE ‘APOLOGIE FOR
POETRIE’--HIS SONNETS AND LYRICS--WATSON--THE SONNETEERS--OTHER
LYRIC POETRY--THE COLLECTIONS AND SONG-BOOKS--THE HISTORICAL
POEMS--FITZ-GEOFFREY AND MARKHAM--WARNER--DANIEL DRAYTON--THE SATIRIC
POETS--LODGE--HALL--MARSTON--DONNE.
[SN: _The starting-point._]
A long silence and two generations of effort preceded the renaissance
of English poetry, which may conveniently, though perhaps somewhat
arbitrarily, be said to date from the publication of the _Shepherd’s
Calendar_ in 1579. The choice of this year as the actual starting-point
is arbitrary, because Spenser was already recognised by his friends as
the “new poet,” and his work was known among them in manuscript. It had
therefore begun to live, and to exercise an influence, before it was
given to the world. But the convention which treats the ascertainable
date of printing, and not the first moment when the poet’s mind
began to create, as the starting-point, is useful, and we may (always
remembering that it is a convention) put 1579 at the head of the
history of the great Elizabethan poetry.
[SN: _Italian influence._]
With us, as with the Spaniard, the spark, which was to grow into so
great a flame, was brought from Italy. Before Spenser there had been
Surrey and Wyatt, who had worked in the Italian metres in the reign
of Henry VIII., and their example had been set up for all to follow
by the publication of _Tottel’s Miscellany_ in 1557. There had also
been the leaders of the New Learning, and the classic models. But the
resemblance between the history of poetry in the two countries goes
no further. Italy could affect only individual Englishmen. No such
similarity of language, beliefs, and character existed between the
two countries as would have enabled Italy to press on us as it did on
Spain, all along the line. There was not the same proximity, nor had
there been an equally close previous relationship of pupil to master
stretching far back into the Middle Ages. The Italian influence in
England was rather an incitement to independent effort than a mere
pattern to be copied, as it was to the Spaniard. [SN: _The opposition
to rhyme._] Nor were the Greek and Latin models more, though in
this case a deliberate effort was made to bring English verse into
subjection to ancient prosody. Much ridicule was shed then, and has
been poured since, on those who endeavoured to write English verse by
quantity only. The quaint pragmatic figure of Spenser’s friend Gabriel
Harvey, who was the most conspicuous, though not the first of the
school, was of itself enough to confer a certain absurdity on the
effort. And the verse produced in this struggle to do the impossible
was altogether worthy of Harvey’s oddities. Putting aside Stanyhurst’s
_Æneid_, published in 1582, which is the most bulky example of
misapplied labour, it ought, one would think, to have been warning
enough to those who thought to force English into an alien mould when
they found a writer of the real intelligence and natural good taste
of Webbe, author of _The Discourse of English Poetrie_, contentedly
pronouncing such a line as this:--
“Hedgerows hott doo resound with grasshops mournfully squeeking.”
Webbe did worse, for he seems really to have believed that he improved
Spenser, whom he admired and recognised as the new poet, when he turned
the song in _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ beginning--
“Ye dainty Nymphes that in this blessed brooke doo bathe your brest,”
into this:--
“O ye Nymphes most fine who resort to this brooke
For to bathe your pretty breasts at all times,
Leave the watrish bowers hyther and to me come
At my request now.”
Yet the mistake of Webbe was one which Spenser himself, and Sidney, had
so far shared that they played with the classic metres. [SN: _Excuses
for this._] Nor was it altogether absurd, but, on the contrary,
natural, and even inevitable. When there were no native models newer
than Chaucer to follow, and when the splendour of classic literature
was just being fully recognised, it was not wonderful that men who were
in search of a poetic form should have been deluded into thinking that
they could reproduce what they admired, or should have agreed with
Ascham that “to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks in
true versifying, were even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely
eat bread among men.”
[SN: _Its little effect._]
Then this mania, pedantry, or whatever other evil name may be given it,
never attained to the dignity of doing harm. No Englishman who could
write good rhyme was ever deterred from doing so by the fear that he
would become a Goth, and eat acorns with swine. The real belief of
the Elizabethan poets was expressed in _The Arte of English Poesie_,
which tradition has assigned to George Puttenham. If we have not the
feet of the Greeks and Latins, which we “as yet never went about to
frame (the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it), we
have instead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more
than they ever had, by reason of our rime, and tunable concords, or
simphonie, which they never observed. Poesie therefore may be an arte
in our vulgar, and that very methodicall and commendable.” _The Arte of
English Poesie_ was published in 1589. Webbe’s discourse had appeared
three years before. The conflict, such as it was, was really over,
though the superiority of “versifying” to rhyming might continue to be
discussed as an academic question. Thomas Campion, who, as if to show
the hollowness of his own cause, was a writer of rhymed songs of great
beauty, might talk “of the childish titilation of riming” in his _Art
of English Poetry_ in 1602, and be answered by Daniel in his _Defence
of Ryme_, but they were discussing “a question of the schools.” The
attempt to turn English poetry from its natural course belongs to the
curiosities of literary history.
[SN: _Poetry of first half of Elizabeth’s reign._]
Poetry so completely dominated the literature of Elizabeth’s reign that
we can leave not only the prose, which was entirely subordinate, but
the drama, poetic as it was, aside for the time. There was no great
drama till the poets had suppled and moulded the language. The example
set by Surrey and Wyatt had no such immediate influence as had been
exercised by Boscan and Garcilaso in Spain. Part even of their own work
hardly rose above the level of the doggerel to which English verse
had fallen. Those who look for an explanation of the flowering or the
barrenness of literature elsewhere than in the presence or absence of
genius in a people, may account for this by the troubled times which
followed the death of Henry VIII. But the return of peace and security
with the accession of Elizabeth brought no change. The first twenty
years of her reign were as barren as the disturbed years of Edward or
Mary. Indeed they were even poorer, for Sackville’s Induction to _The
Mirror of Magistrates_ and his _Complaint of Buckingham_, which have
been recognised as the best verse written in England between Chaucer
and Spenser, though not published till Elizabeth was on the throne, had
been written before 1559--in the reign of Mary. Between this year and
the publication of _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ (1579) the voice of poetry
was not mute in England--at least not the voice of those who were
endeavouring to write poetry. When Webbe spoke, with more emphasis than
respect, of the “infinite fardles of printed pamphlets,” mostly “either
meere poeticall or which tend in some respects (as either in matter
or forme) to poetry,” by which “this country is pestered, all shoppes
stuffed, and every study furnished,” he was not wholly exaggerating.
Translators were very busy, and not a few published original work.
There were certainly many others who wrote but did not publish. But
these forerunners could in no case have deserved more than the praise
which Sir John Harington gave to one of them, George Turberville:--
“When times were yet but rude thy pen endeavoured
To polish barbarism with purer style.”
Their inferiority to Surrey, Wyatt, and Sackville diminishes their
claim even to so much as this.
They were enslaved to the old fourteen-syllabled metre, which might or
might not be printed in lines of eight and six, but which, in whatever
way it was arranged, had a fatal tendency to fall into a rocking-horse
movement. We constantly meet with rhymes like these:--
“The hawtye verse that Maro wrote
made Rome to wonder muche,
And mervayle none for why the style
and weightynes was such,
That all men judged Parnassus Mownt
had clefte herselfe in twayne,
And brought forth one that seemed to drop
from out Minervaes brayne.”
These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe’s _Epitaph_ on Thomas
Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind of metre which seems to come
naturally to Englishmen, but their capacity for turning to doggerel
is patent. They, with here and there a note which shows that if the
writer had had the good fortune to be young after, and not before,
_The Shepherd’s Calendar_, he might have contributed to the great
body of exquisite Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse
of the first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their own
honour. They rough-harrowed the ground. George Turberville, who was
born about 1530 and died about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates
are 1535 or thereabouts to 1577; and Barnabe Googe, born in 1540, who
died in 1594, tried many things; and if they did nothing else, they
helped to extend the knowledge of the average Englishman, and to give
practice to the language by their translations. The strongest of the
three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to write a verse
satire--_The Steel Glass_--was the author of some pretty occasional
poetry, of a translation of Ariosto’s _Gli Suppositi_, stories from
Bandello, and a tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have
begun the writing of critical essays in English by his brief note
of Instruction for the construction of English verse, published as a
preface to _The Steel Glass_.[61]
[SN: _Spenser._]
The sincerity with which the best intellects in England were studying
poetry, and looking for a poet, helps to explain the instant
recognition of Spenser. At this moment the times called for the man,
and he came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably in 1552, of a
Lancashire branch of a very ancient and famous house. His family was
poor, and he received his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a
sizar. He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it is believed
that he then spent some time in the north of England with his family
before coming to London to seek his fortune. It could be obtained in
one way only--by the favour of friends who could secure him a place.
That Spenser was resolved to make poetry the chief aim of his life
is certain; but he could not live by it at a time when no form of
literature, with the exception of the drama, brought certain payment,
and even the drama gave but starvation wages. He had to rely on the
willingness of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he was
a poet. Spenser was not without friends who might have been useful.
At Cambridge he had become known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older
man, a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of pragmatical
self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity, exercised a certain
limited influence over him. Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester
and Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritanism
was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally undoubted though very
different Puritanism of the queen’s favourite. But Leicester did, and
it may be could do, little for his client. _The Shepherd’s Calendar_
was published in 1579, a year or two after Spenser came to London, but
he had no share in “the rich fee which poets won’t divide.” There is
no need to look far for the causes of his disappointment. Elizabeth
had little money, and much to do with it, while her Lord Treasurer,
Burghley, who had no love for Leicester, was the man to meet any
pensioned poet with the ungracious attitude of Sully to Casaubon:
“You are no use, sir, and you cost the king as much as two captains.”
In 1580 Spenser accompanied Lord Grey to Ireland, where estates of
confiscated land were to be won. From that time he was plunged into
the horrible strife between the anarchy of Celtic Ireland and the
repression of the queen’s officers, who fought for order with ferocious
means. He obtained a grant of land in County Cork, married in 1594, and
reached some measure of prosperity. A small but apparently ill-paid
pension was granted him. The rebellion of 1598 shattered his fortunes
altogether. His house at Kilcolman was burnt in the usual fashion
of the brutal Irish wars, and it was said that one of his children
perished with it. Spenser fled to England, and died on the 16th January
1599--“for lack of bread,” according to Ben Jonson, and undoubtedly in
great poverty.
[SN: _Order of his work._]
It seems certain that he began writing very young, for some
translations from Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay, which were afterwards
reprinted unchanged, or changed only by rhyme, in his acknowledged
works, appeared in _The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings_ of John Van
Noodt in 1569. Ten years, however, passed before he published _The
Shepherd’s Calendar_, and then an equal period before he prepared
to bring out the first three books of _The Faërie Queen_, which was
registered at Stationers’ Hall on the last day of 1589, and appeared
in the following spring. Next year--1591--appeared the minor poems,
under the name of _The Complaints_ (_The Ruins of Time_, _The Tears
of the Muses_, _Virgil’s Gnat_, _Mother Hubberds Tale_, _The Ruins of
Rome_, _Muiopotmos_, and _The Visions_). The address to the reader
gives a promise of other poems, which have been lost; and it may be
noted that the same thing had happened with _The Shepherd’s Calendar_.
The _Daphnaida_ followed. In 1596 the _Amoretti_, the _Epithalamium_,
_Colin Clout’s Come Home Again_, the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of
_The Faërie Queen_, the Hymns, and the _Prothalamium_ were published
within a short time of one another. Nothing more was to appear in
his life. Part of a seventh book of _The Faërie Queen_, and a prose
treatise giving a very vivid, very true, and very terrible “View of the
Present State of Ireland,” were printed after his death. The treatise
did not come out for thirty years, when it was published by Sir J.
Ware. The Fragments were included in the new edition of _The Faërie
Queen_ in 1611.
Few great poets were ever so little beholden to predecessors as
Spenser. He had before him Chaucer, and near his own time Sackville,
who had written with original force in Chaucer’s stanza. There were
also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few English followers,
and the French poets of the Pléiade. In his _Shepherd’s Calendar_
Spenser imitated the Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and
he translated from the French. Neither he nor any man could live
uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the Renaissance are abundantly
audible in his work--its love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the
melancholy which was natural in men whose ideals were unattainable in
a very harsh world, which was never harder than amid the disruption
of faith, the violent clash of contending forces, and the unchaining
of violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there might have
been all this, and no Spenser. [SN: _His metre._] He is great by what
was wholly his own, both in form and spirit. _The Shepherd’s Calendar_
may be called the work of his prentice hand, done when he had not
attained complete control of his own vast powers. Yet it is not so
far below the impeccable verse of his later years as it is above the
level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth’s reign. The part of
imitation which there is in it is the weakest. What he inherited from
nobody was the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It is out of
his own genius that he perfected the form in which that melody found
its full expression. The Spenserian stanza does not appear in _The
Shepherd’s Calendar_; but it had been constructed, and was being used
in the earlier cantos of _The Faërie Queen_ at least immediately after
the earlier work was finished. It is surely no longer necessary to
argue that this form was not imitated from the Italians. The _ottava
rima_ and the sonnet may have--indeed must have--helped Spenser with
indications, but they did no more. Had he been an imitator he would
have done as the Spaniards did,--he would have taken an already
finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly. But he did a
very different thing. He constructed a stanza which is to English what
the _ottava rima_ is to the Italian. It is just the difference between
a successor and a mere follower, that whereas the second toils to
reproduce the letter, the first gives a new form to the spirit. The
relation in which Spenser stands to the Italians is that he carried on
the torch of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and bore it
to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly less independent than his
stanza, and all talk of obligation to any model becomes idle indeed
when we think of the melody of the Hymns, the _Epithalamium_, and the
_Prothalamium_.
[SN: _The character of his poetry._]
The matter which this form bodied forth to the world is not to be
expressed in our meagre prose. It could be uttered only in his own
perfect verse. The mere doctrine may be defined with no overwhelming
amount of difficulty, for there is a strong and, not only unconcealed
but, firmly avowed didactic aim in Spenser. It was no purpose of his
to be “the idle singer of an empty day.” He held with his friend Sir
Philip Sidney that the poet “doth intend the winning of the mind from
wickedness to virtue.” The poet in their creed was the seer, and
Spenser strove to fulfil his lofty function by teaching the Platonism
which endeavours to trace back the love of virtue and the love of
beauty to that divine origin where they are one, and by singing a
Puritanism which is the poetic expression of the Englishman’s innate
conviction that the religion which is not interpreted into conduct
is an empty hypocrisy. But all this didactic side of Spenser is the
side which was not necessarily poetic. In so far as the Hymns merely
teach a Platonist doctrine, they do not surpass the final pages of
Castiglione’s _Courtier_. In so far as _The Faërie Queen_ is an
allegory, it is no more consistent, ingenious, or perfectly adapted
to its purpose than _The Pilgrim’s Progress_. But over all that could
be adequately expressed in prose Spenser cast a spell which carried
it into the realm of fancy--that golden world of the poet which Sir
Philip Sidney contrasted with nature’s “brazen” earth. A very trifling
change in the wording of one passage of _The Apologie for Poetrie_ is
all that is needed to make it applicable to _The Faërie Queen_: “Nature
never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as ‘this poet hath’ done,
neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers;
nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.” It
is to this word that the attempt to estimate Spenser finally leads. By
the magic of his melody, and the force of that imagination which could
transmute all from prose to poetry, he made a lovely world of poetry
out of the real earth. When he used ugliness, as he could, it was for
the purpose of heightening beauty by contrast.
As the poet of _The Faërie Queen_, Spenser stands apart in his time.
He is connected with his contemporaries by the sonnet. This form,
introduced into English literature by Surrey and Wyatt, had been
little, and ill, cultivated in the duller generation which followed
them. But with the revival of the poetic genius of England towards
the middle of the queen’s reign, it naturally attracted men who were
in search of richer and more artful forms of verse. Moreover, it lent
itself to the expression of feeling, and that was of itself enough
to make it popular with a lyrical generation. For this reason the
sonnet work of the Elizabethans has been made subject to a great
deal of comment which is not of the nature of literary criticism. It
has been treated as a form of confession and veiled autobiography.
Various considerations--the limits of space being not the least
important among them--make it impossible to discuss the question at
length here. Moreover, where the external evidence is naught, and
the internal evidence is subject to various interpretations, which
is always the case, comment on the inner meaning of the sonnets must
always be more or less guesswork. To start from arbitrary premisses,
with the certainty of arriving at no definite conclusion, ought to
be considered a waste of time. Sidney may have decided to leave it
on record that he found out his love for Penelope Devereux too late,
and that he then hovered round the thought of adultery. Shakespeare
may have made poetry out of his friendship and his love. If so, the
passions which left them so much masters of themselves as to be able to
produce these artistic forms of verse cannot have been very absorbing.
Finished sonnets do not come to men either in their sleep or in
anguish. What we know for certain of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and
others is, that they lived active lives in the world, and that they
were artists. The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give
form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in the terms of
his art, whether he be poet, painter, or actor. It is because he has
the constructive imagination and the power of expression that he gives
truth to his work. The genius which could give reality to the sorrow of
Constance, to the manhood of the Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello,
to more men, women, and passions than could be named on this page, was
quite adequate to giving the same reality to the scheme of the Sonnets.
As much may be said of the other Elizabethans, each in his place in the
scale. From the literary point of view, too, it is of no importance
how the debate be settled. Poetry is not valuable because it tells us
that this or the other dead poet felt as a man the common hopes and
disappointments of humanity, but because it fixes what all men can feel
in forms of immortal beauty.
[SN: _Sir P. Sidney._]
The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary society gathered
around Sir Philip Sidney in and about 1580. His high birth,--he was
son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in
Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth’s sinister favourite, the Earl of
Leicester,--the fact that he stood in the relation of patron to many
of the men of letters of his time, his amiable personal character, and
the heroic circumstances of his death in a skirmish fought to prevent
a Spanish convoy from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586,
have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very shining figure. It is
possible that he is more conspicuous than his intrinsic power would
have made him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must have been a
great personal fascination in the man who could inspire the reverential
love which was felt for Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Greville, while his
_Apologie for Poetrie_, his _Arcadia_, the sonnets collected under the
title of _Astrophel and Stella_, with his other poems, remain to prove
that wherever he had been born he would have left his mark on the time.
[SN: The Apologie for Poetrie.]
_The Arcadia_ may be left aside for the present, but _The Apologie for
Poetrie_, though written in prose, cannot, without violently separating
things akin to one another, be taken apart from his poetry. It is to
some extent our English equivalent for the _Deffense et Illustration
de la Langue française_ of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new
school of poets. The circumstances in which the two were written
differ widely. The Pléiade, with the Frenchman’s usual love of a
large and minute _ordonnance_, drew up a scheme for the conquest and
orderly division of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was provoked
into writing his little treatise by a very foolish tract printed in
1579, and named _The School of Abuse_, the work of one Stephen Gosson
(1535-1624), an unsuccessful playwright who took orders, and lived to
a great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. _The School of
Abuse_, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney without his
consent, and perhaps because he was the nephew of the chief protector
of the Puritans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as it
contains a statement of the narrow puritan view that all modern poetry
was wicked, and that the theatre was the home of every corruption. It
is chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the signal honour
to give it an answer. _The Apologie for Poetrie_ is in no sense an
_Ars Poetica_. Sidney does not deal with the formal part of poetry. He
replies to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion that it is
the noblest of all things. The view and the spirit of the Elizabethan
time are nowhere more clearly shown than in the _Apologie_. That Sidney
fell into one gross heresy is true. He said that poetry was independent
of metre. But that was not an error likely to mislead either himself or
others. Against it has to be set his conception of poetry as the noble
expression of that which in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose.
There may not be much guidance in this; but it is not as a guide that
the _Apologie_ is to be considered, but as the challenge of the coming
English poetry, lyrical, epic, and dramatic--a declaration that it
was to be something more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it
was to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and thought, of
fancy and imagination. If English poets of that generation looked up
to Sidney, it was not only for the reasons given above, but because he
spoke early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The style of the
_Apologie_ is full of the animation and sincerity of the writer. It
has a colour and melody unknown to the downright sober English of his
predecessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and is free from the
conceits of his own _Arcadia_.
Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the high note of the great
Elizabethan poetry.
No part of his work was printed in his life. The _Arcadia_ was prepared
for publication immediately after his death in 1586, but it did not
appear till 1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more accurate
version followed in 1593. [SN: _His Sonnets and Lyrics._] The sonnets
and other lyric pieces, collected under the title of _Astrophel and
Stella_, were printed in 1591, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ in 1595.
His metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript till 1823,
while some fragments of his verse have only been recovered recently by
Dr Grosart.[62] But the date of printing was comparatively unimportant
at a time when a poet’s work not only could be, but generally was,
known in manuscript to the reading world long before it was published.
Sidney was renowned as a poet and prose-writer in his lifetime,
and his case is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count his
influence as having been exercised from the day when his sonnets were
handed about among his friends, which must have been as early as, if
not earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must have learnt at
once that the day when Gascoigne, Turberville, Googe, or an industrious
decent verse-writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented English
poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the same high level.
The epithet of “jejune” which Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be
justly used of any of them; but the sonnet beginning, “Phœbus was
judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love,” or the other which has for first
line, “I on my horse and love on me, doth try,” or the third, “O
grammar-rules, O now your virtues show,” are not equally safe against
the other epithet “frigid.” They are at least more marked by laboured
and cold-blooded conceit than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have
an accomplishment of form which was new, and in the others the greater
qualities are by no means rarely shown. The first in the accepted
order--“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show,”--with its
ringing last line, “‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart
and write,’” and the last, “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to
dust,” are abundantly lofty and passionate; and were, in the sense
in which the word was used, “insolent”--that is, unprecedented--in
the English poetry of that generation. To these it would be easy to
add many others. “With how slow steps, O Moon”; “Having this day my
horse, my hand, my lance,” are but two of them; while the sonnet “Good
brother Philip” is a gem of gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not
confine himself to the so-called legitimate form of two quatrains and
two tercets, but tried experiments. He stretched the term sonnet as far
as it will go when he applied it to twelve Alexandrines and a heroic
couplet. Nor was it in the sonnet only that Sidney set an example. The
songs of _Astrophel and Stella_ usher in the great Elizabethan lyric,
in which there is nothing to surpass the “Doubt you to whom my Muse
these notes entendeth” in soaring melody. The verse which abounds in
the _Arcadia_ and the metrical version of the Psalms does not reach
the level of the _Astrophel and Stella_. Yet it appears inferior only
when judged by his own best work, and the best that was to follow. We
may doubt whether Sidney has a claim to the place in the active life of
Elizabeth’s time assigned him by the affection of Fulke Greville and by
tradition, but there can be no question that he stands beside Spenser
as one of the beginners of the unsurpassed poetic literature of her
reign.
[SN: _Watson._]
It is mainly on historical grounds that mention must be made of his
contemporary Thomas Watson (1557-1592). Watson was a busy writer
of verse and translator, whose claim to be remembered now rests on
this, that he was working at the sonnet beside Sir Philip Sidney,
and independently of him. What he called a sonnet was a set of
three stanzas of six lines, each complete in itself.[63] There the
independence of Watson ends. His sonnets are avowedly imitations of
Italian or French originals when they are not translations. But his
chief work, the _Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love_, has an
undoubted value as a piece of evidence. It supplies a link in the chain
of literary history, and then it gives what may be called a glimpse
into the workshop of a sonnet-cycle maker. Watson candidly confesses,
in a “Letter to the Friendly Reader,” that his pains in suffering the
pangs of love which his sonnets record are “but supposed.” His less
ingenuous followers leave us to guess as much concerning them. But in
addition to this there is an _apparatus criticus_ which in everything
except bulk bears a very close resemblance to the pedantic commentaries
added by his admirers to the early editions of the Spaniard Góngora.
Each sonnet is introduced, explained, annotated, and the passion it is
to express described, and we are shown the machinery at every stage.
One of these introductions contains what is, in fact, a by no means bad
criticism on the whole body of the sonnets. “This Passion,” No. xli.,
“is framed upon a somewhat tedious, or too much affected, continuation
of that figure of Rhetorique whiche of the Greeks is called παλιλλογἱα
or ἀναδἰπλωσις, of the Latins Reduplicatio.” Somewhat tedious, too
much affected, and full of repetitions are these sonnets; but they
show the increased mechanical skill of our writers of verse, and they
are historically interesting. When tempted to make autobiography out
of the cycles of other sonneteers, it is well to remember Watson’s
confession, and also this, that to have a lady for the saint of
your literary devotions had been “common form” as far back as the
troubadours. His later work, _The Tears of Fancy_, is in regular
quatorzains.
[SN: _The sonneteers._]
The popularity of the _Astrophel and Stella_ (there were three
editions in the first year in which it was printed--1591), as well
as the example it set, help to account for the profuse production of
sonnet cycles in the next few years. The following list, which does
not profess to be exhaustive, of the collections published before
1595, will show the wealth of Elizabethan literature in this form:
The _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ of Barnabe Barnes (which owes
its survival to the accident which has preserved a single copy at
Chatsworth, reprinted by Dr Grosart), the _Licia_ of Giles Fletcher,
and the _Phillis_ of Thomas Lodge, were published before the end of
1593. In 1594 appeared the _Cœlia_ of William Percy, Constable’s
_Diana_, Daniel’s _Delia_, and Drayton’s _Idea_. To these may be added
the names of Willoughby’s _Avisa_, which, however, does not consist
of sonnets, and the anonymous _Zepheria_. Spenser’s _Amoretti_, or
love sonnets, belong in date of publication to 1595. Three other
collections--the _Fidessa_ of Griffin, Lynch’s _Diella_ (thirty-eight
sonnets, prefixed to the amorous poem of _Diego and Genevra_), and the
_Chloris_ of W. Smith, belong to 1596. The sonnet, too, was written by
others who did not construct cycles. Every reader of _The Faërie Queen_
knows the splendid “Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,” by
Sir W. Raleigh, and its less legitimately built successor, “The praise
of meaner wits,” which was addressed less to Spenser’s masterpiece than
to the vanity of Queen Elizabeth. During many long fallow years of
silence the poetic genius of the English race had been accumulating,
and it wanted but a touch to set it free. Even among the poets named
here who are not otherwise famous, there was some measure of original
power. Putting aside Spenser, who towers over all, the finest lyric
force was in Lodge, and the most uniform accomplishment in Daniel. It
was left to Shakespeare to give the greatest of English sonnets, but
the form he preferred--the three rhymed quatrains and the couplet--had
been polished and established as the prevalent English type by
Daniel.[64]
[SN: _Other lyric poetry._]
Although the Elizabethan age was great in all forms of pure literature,
except the prose romance and the satire, and was not wholly barren even
of these, yet it was more copious, more uniformly excellent in the
lyric, than in any other. Sir Walter Scott has spoken of the wind of
poetry which blew throughout that wonderful generation. He was thinking
of the drama; but this general inspiration which gives its grandeur to
the activity of the time is to be traced more widely, and with less
admixture of weakness in its songs, than in any other of its manifold
activities. But this very extension of the lyric faculty, and the
number of the singers, makes it not merely difficult but impossible
to deal fully with the subject within the limits of our space. Of the
sonnet writers we can speak with some approach to completeness, for
there the field, though large, is not boundless. But the freer forms of
lyric spread over all the life and literature of England. Raleigh, who
was a soldier, politician, discoverer, colonist, historian, political
writer, and amateur chemist, was also a lyric poet of more than note.
So were the Jesuit missionary Southwell and the courtier Earl of
Oxford. Some of the most beautiful lyrics in the language were written
by pamphleteers, prose story-writers, and dramatists. The composer
wrote his own songs, and some of them are among the best, while many
are only just below that level. So much was the time penetrated by
poetic fire, that gems of verse are to be found in its song-books for
which no known author can be traced.
[SN: _The Collections and Song-books._]
The general wealth of the time in lyric poetry can be better
appreciated by taking its miscellaneous collections, whether of pure
poetry or of verse written to accompany music, than by a list of
the names of writers who may be held to deserve particular mention.
Putting aside _Tottel’s Miscellany_ as belonging to an earlier time,
though it was repeatedly reprinted under Elizabeth, and _The Mirror
of Magistrates_, which stands apart, there were numerous collections
of minor pieces made in the queen’s reign. _The Paradise of Dainty
Devises_, 1576; _A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions_, 1578;
_A Handful of Pleasant Delights_, 1584; _The Phœnix Nest_, 1593;
_England’s Helicon_, 1600; _A Poetical Rhapsody_, 1602; _England’s
Parnassus_, 1600; and _Belvedere, or the Garden of the Muses_, in the
same year, are the names of some of them. To these are to be added
the list of song-books collected or written by Byrd, Yonge, Campion,
Dowland, Morley, Alison, Wilbye, and others.[65] Some of the poems
in these collections have always been known, but they contain many
which had fallen entirely into obscurity. There can have been very
few readers to whom Mr Bullen’s collection, made from a class of
books which in most ages are full of mere insipidities, was not a
revelation. The point is that it represents not the exceptional work
of the time, but the average production, which we may almost call
commercial, or the poets’ corner, and that being this, it maintains
such an extraordinarily high level of inspiration and melody. It is
not a mere question of that workmanlike dexterity which a great poet,
as Scott said half humorously, but not without truth, to Moore, can
teach a receptive generation. Spenser himself could never have taught
anybody to produce such a piece of genuine lyric poetry as the “Fain
would I change that note,” which Mr Bullen quotes from Captain Hume’s
_First Part of Airs_. It, and much else only less good, would not have
been written without Spenser and Sidney; but it is one thing to be
influenced by great models, and another merely to echo them.
[SN: _The historical poems._]
The love of verse led in England, as in Spain, to the production of not
a little in what is almost inevitably a bastard kind--the historical
poem. By attempting to do in poetry what could be adequately done in
prose, the authors of _The History of the Civil War_ or of _The Barons’
Wars_, condemned themselves to be often dull, or to endeavour to escape
dulness by mixing purely romantic episodes with what professes to be
record of matter of fact. The romance is superfluous to those who read
for the history, and the history is tiresome to those who read for
the romance. Our own historical poems are commonly the more subject
to the danger of dulness, because the authors, unlike the Spaniards,
did not, as a rule, choose the great events of their own time, or of
the previous generation, of which the memory was still fresh. They
went back to the past, which they could only know through books. This
would have done no harm if they had used their authorities only to
find “local colour” for their romance. But they did not. They aimed at
even a minute historical accuracy, and thereby condemned themselves to
produce works of learning in an inappropriate shape. It is no doubt bad
criticism to condemn any form of literature for being itself and not
another. Yet we could spare even the _Polyolbion_ for an Elizabethan
Mariana, which Drayton, whose prose was excellent and whose learning
was great, might well have been, and still have left himself free to
write his sonnets, his _Nymphidia_, and his _Ballad of Agincourt_.
[SN: _Fitz-Geoffrey and Markham._]
The curious literary bad fortune which has pursued the achievements of
Englishmen at sea is well illustrated by the vehement, but also frothy
and flamboyant, poem of Charles Fitz-Geoffrey, called _Sir Francis
Drake, his Honourable Life’s Commendation and his Tragical Death’s
Lamentation_. It is in the seven-line stanza which Drayton, after first
trying it, renounced as too soft for the subject of his _Barons’ War_.
Fitz-Geoffrey wraps up the substantial figure of Sir Francis in clouds
of hyperbole, and makes a terrible abuse of the figure called “by
the Latines Reduplicatio.” We see the great corsair only in glimpses
through the very smoky flames of Fitz-Geoffrey’s melodious rhetoric.
_The most honourable Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvill_, by Gervase
Markham, in an eight-lined stanza, very flowing and mythological, has
much the same defect. The author, who founded his poem on Raleigh’s
pamphlet describing the last fight of the Revenge, endeavours to
“outcracke the scarcrow thunderbolt.”
[SN: _Warner._]
Three names stand out among the writers of historical poems--William
Warner, because he was at once a forerunner to the others and a link
between the poetry of the earlier and the later Elizabethans; Daniel,
for a certain mild, yet grave, wisdom; Drayton, for his manly force
and intrinsic poetic power. Warner, who was born about 1567, and who
certainly died in March 1609 (the year in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets
were published), was attached in some uncertain relationship as client
or servant to the Careys, Lords Hunsdon. His historical poem, _Albion’s
England_, was in part written before 1586, when it was suppressed
for some unknown reason by an order of the Star Chamber.[66] If this
date is correct, the decidedly jejune account of the defeat of the
Armada, and the most unfriendly passage on the execution of Queen
Mary, must have been added later. Warner had written a collection of
prose stories called _Syrinx_, as he says, “with acceptance.” But his
claim to be remembered rests on his _Albion’s England_, a long poem
in the old seven-foot or fourteen-syllable metre, on the history,
and more particularly on the legends of the history, of England. His
well-established reputation as “a good, honest, plain writer” is
fully deserved. Warner, indeed, carries plainness so far that in the
most poetic passage of his book--the episode of Curan and Argentill,
in which there is a genuine simple poetry--he tells us that the hero
“wiped the drivel from his beard.” Beginning at the creation of the
world, he comes down to his own time, with constant digressions into
romantic episodes of his own growing, and classical or Biblical tales.
He does not always escape the tendency of his metre to drop into a
jog-trot, yet in the main he canters briskly along with a very fair
proportion of spirited lines. His farewell to Queen Mary is worth
quoting, both as an example of his verse and as a rather engaging
mixture of charity and implacability:--
“Then to her wofull servants did she pass a kind a-dew,
And kissing oft her crucifix, unto the block she drew,
And fearless, as if glad to dye, did dye to papisme trew.
Which and her other errors (who in all did ever erre)
Unto the judge of mercie and of justice we referre.
If ever such conspirator of it impenitent,
If ever soule pope-scooled so, that sea to Heaven sent,
If ever one ill lived did dye a papist Godwards bent,
Then happie she. But so or not, it happie is for us,
That of so dangerous a foe we are delivered thus.”
His moderate length (a fairly girt reader can begin and end him in a
longish evening), his disregard for mere historical fact, and a certain
childish downrightness, make Warner easier reading than much better
poets. Although Warner adhered to the fourteener in the face of Spenser
and Sidney, he was so far affected by their example that he generally
raised his verse above the mere rocking-horse motion, which is its
special bane.
[SN: _Daniel._]
Samuel Daniel, the son of a music-master, was born near Taunton
in 1562, and was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He began by
translating the _Imprese_ of Paulus Jovius, and his first independent
works were his sonnets to _Delia_, already mentioned. It is possible
that he went abroad as servant to Elizabeth’s ambassador in France,
Lord Stafford, and that he visited Italy before 1590. Although Daniel
wrote two tragedies--_Cleopatra_ and _Philotas_--they were on the
classical model, which our stage has never tolerated, and he therefore
could not live by literature, since it was then only the theatre which
paid. It was necessary for him to seek support in the service of rich
people. He found it in the patronage of the Pembroke family, and was
afterwards tutor to the daughter of the famous seafaring Earl of
Cumberland. In his later years he was in the service of Queen Anne, the
wife of James I., as “inspector of the children of the Queen’s revels,”
and as groom or “gentleman extraordinary of her majesty’s private
chamber.” At the end he appears to have achieved independence, for he
died on a farm of his own near Beckington in 1619.
In spite of the interruptions caused by his tutoring, at which he
repined not a little, Daniel was a voluminous writer. He was the author
in prose of a history of England down to the reign of Edward III.,
popular in its day, and of the excellent _Defence of Rime_ in answer to
Campion’s belated plea for “pure versifying.” But it is as a poet that
Daniel ranks in English literature, though with a limitation, somewhat
roughly worded by his stronger contemporary Drayton, who said that “his
manner better fitted prose.” This would be a very unfair judgment if
it were applied to all his work without qualification. _The Complaint
of Rosamonde_, his first considerable poem, published in 1592, is
neither in manner nor matter better fitted for prose. It is a very
poetic retelling of the legend of Henry II.’s mistress in the favourite
seven-line stanza. His moral epistles in verse escape the vice of mere
moralising by virtue of a loftiness of sentiment which is fitly enough
wedded to poetic form. Yet there is none of the “lofty, insolent, and
passionate” note of the Elizabethans in Daniel, and Drayton’s harsh
sentence may be applied with little or no restriction to the _Civil
Wars_. Daniel’s claim to honour was as well stated by himself in some
prefatory verses to an edition of his poems in 1607 as by any of the
many good judges of literature who have praised him:--
“I know I shall be read among the rest
So long as men speak English, and so long
As verse and virtue shall be in request,
Or grace to honest industry belong.”
Grace to honest industry seems but a humble plea for the poet. We may
paraphrase it with more dignity and not less truth by saying that
Daniel was a most accomplished and conscientious artist in verse, who
had a genuine, but mild, poetic nature. The care he took to revise his
work is evidence of his conscience as a workman, and the fact that his
changes were commonly for the better is proof of his judgment. It is
mainly the beauty of his English which will cause him to be read for
ever among the rest. If it never has the splendour of the greatest
Elizabethan poetry, neither does it fall into “King Cambyses’ vein,”
into the roaring fury which gave an outlet to the exuberant energy of
that time. Southey gave Daniel as the nearest English equivalent to
Camoens, on the ground that the main charm of both is the even purity
of their language. This of itself is hardly compensation enough for the
undoubted tediousness of his _Civil Wars_, which tell the essentially
dreary history of the Wars of the Roses down to the marriage of Edward
IV.[67]
It was perhaps partly his dislike of the Bohemian habits of his brother
men of letters which has left the life of Michael Drayton so obscure.
He was a Warwickshire man of respectable parentage, but so poor that he
owed his education to the kindness of patrons. The date of his birth
was 1563, and he died in 1631, well into the reign of Charles I. If
confidence can be placed in the jottings of Drummond of Hawthornden,
there was at one time an armed neutrality between Jonson and Drayton;
but Jonson wrote some highly laudatory verses on the _Polyolbion_, and
we need not place too much reliance on casual remarks he threw out in
conversation when he had no knowledge that his words were to be written
down. It is known, too, that Drayton was patronised by Prince Henry,
who in his short life was the friend of many men of pith and substance,
from Raleigh to Phineas Pett the shipbuilder. Ill-founded legend
asserts that he was of the party in the carouse which is said to have
been the death of Shakespeare.
[SN: _Drayton._]
Drayton[68] was a stronger man than Daniel, and there came forth more
sweetness from him. No writer of the time was more voluminous. The
sonnets, to which he seems to have been somewhat indifferent, form a
very small portion of his work. Whenever he began to write (it is said
that his love of literature was shown when he was a boy), he did not
publish early. His first poem--_A Harmonie of the Church_--appeared in
1591. It was suppressed by the censorship, then directed by Archbishop
Whitgift, but republished under another title, _The Heavenly Harmonie
of Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns_, in 1610. In 1593 he published nine
eclogues with the title of _Idea_, a name also given to the sonnets
printed in 1594. It is to be noted that the famous sonnet beginning,
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” which is so
superior to the others, and so like Shakespeare’s, was first included
in the edition of 1619. Drayton, like Daniel, was much in the habit of
revising his work. He not uncommonly incorporated his earlier poems
in his later with great changes. In 1596 appeared the awkwardly named
_Mortimeriados_, in the seven-line stanza, recast and republished in
_ottava rima_ in 1603 under the title of _The Barons’ Wars_. Between
these two came the _Heroical Epistles_ in 1597. In 1604 Drayton made
a most unfortunate attempt to win the favour of James I. by flattery,
and he also published a satirical poem, _The Owl_, and his _Moses in
a Map of his Miracles_. To 1605 belongs a collection of short poems,
including the most famous of his minor poems, except the universally
known sonnet, the magnificent _Ballad of Agincourt_. The years which
follow were employed in the composition of his vast _Polyolbion_, of
which nineteen books appeared in 1613, and which was completed in 1622.
Between these dates he brought out an edition of his poems in 1619. In
1627 he went back on the battle of Agincourt, and produced the poem
of that name, together with _Nymphidia_ and _The Miseries of Queen
Margaret_. At the very close of his life, in 1630, he published the gay
and graceful _Muses’ Elysium_. He wrote also for the stage, to which
he had no natural inclination, in an occasional and subordinate way.
This list, which is not exhaustive, will show that the forty years of
Drayton’s known activity were remarkably well filled. And the quality
of this great bulk of work was not less remarkable than the quantity.
It may be allowed at once, and without conceding too much to the
eighteenth-century criticism, which talked of his “creeping narrative,”
that much of his poetry is dull to other readers than those who find
all dull except the last smart short story or newspaper scandal. The
reader who can master _The Battle of Agincourt_ (not the Ballad),
_The Miseries of Queen Margaret_, and _The Barons’ Wars_ without an
effort may hold himself armed against the more laborious forms of
study. Drayton indeed tempted dulness when he chose for subject the
Barons’ War of Edward II.’s reign, and did not also decide to make
the “she-wolf of France” his heroine and to throw history to the
winds. Yet even in these the strong poetical faculty of the writer can
never be forgotten. The longest of all his poems--the _Polyolbion_,
or “Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains,
Forests, and other parts of Great Britain,” which may be described as
a poetical guide-book to his native country--is not dull, though it
cannot be praised as exciting. Drayton may have made an error when he
decided to write it in the long twelve-syllable line, and not in his
favourite eight-line stanza, which, in the words of his preface to _The
Barons’ Wars_, “both holds the time clean through to the base of the
column, which is the couplet at the foot or bottom, and closeth not but
with a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention.” Yet he has
mastered his unwieldy verse, and after a time, when the reader’s ear
has become attuned to the melody, his at first rather strange mixture
of topography, legend, and vigorous romantic flashes rolls on in a
majestic course. It is a proof of the essential strength of Drayton
that his most delicate work--the fairy poetry of the _Nymphidia_ and
the _Nymphalls_ or _Muses’ Elysium_--belongs to his later years. He
grew sweet as he mellowed.
[SN: _The Satiric Poets._]
A time so rich as the Elizabethan in new forms of literature could
hardly fail to produce the satirist. In this case also there were
Italian and, it need hardly be added, Classic models to follow, and
they were followed. Satiric writing there had always been, and that
inevitably, since so soon as men began to record observation at all
they would see that there was much vice and folly in the world, and
from this experience all satire springs. The satiric spirit abounded
in the prose pamphlet literature of the time. Between this and the
help afforded by the Latin models, who supplied the ready-made mould,
the poetic satirists were led forward by the hand. As a class, and in
so far as they were satirists, they were the least interesting body
of writers of their time. It is very necessary to limit this estimate
to their satires; for the four who may be mentioned here are all, for
one reason or another, notable men, or even more. Lodge, without ever
attaining to originality or power of the first order, was a successful
writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly high place in our
dramatic literature. Hall, though that part of his life lies outside
the scope of this book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in
his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the main to a later
time, is one of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of
the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature.
If Hall’s boast in the Prologue to his Satires--
“I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English Satirist,”
is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have claimed the
honour of leading. If so, he must also be presumed not to have known
_The Steel Glass_ of Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and
ineffective satire, belonging to the first half of the queen’s reign.
[SN: _Lodge._] He certainly ignored the earlier claim of Lodge, whose
_Fig for Momus_ appeared in 1595, two years before the first six books
of Hall’s _Virgidemiarum_. But it may be that he wrote long before he
printed, and in any case the originality is not great enough to be
worth fighting over, since both were followers of Latin originals;
while it appears more than probable that Marston and Donne were turning
their thoughts in the same direction about the same time. In fact, the
Poetic Satire was so certain to arise that many men may well have begun
it together in complete independence one of another. The satire of
Lodge is confessedly a mere echo of Horace.
[SN: _Hall._]
This cannot be said of the Satires of Joseph Hall. Hall, who in his
very interesting brief autobiography says that he was born on the 1st
January, 1574 (which, if he went by the old official calendar, means
1575), and was educated at the Puritan College of Emmanuel, Cambridge,
lived to attain the bishopric of Exeter, to play a conspicuous part
in the early days of the Long Parliament, to be translated to Norwich
in the eclipse of King Charles’s fortunes, and to be rabbled out of
his palace by the Puritans. He died at Heigham in 1656. His Satires,
therefore, appeared when he was at the utmost only twenty-three.
Although marked by a certain youthful loftiness of moral pose and
some impudence, they show an undoubted maturity of form much more
meritorious then than it would be now, when there is so much more
in English to copy. In “A Postscript to the Reader,” printed with
the first issue of the _Virgidemiarum_ (a pedantic title taken from
_Virgidemia_, a gathering of rods), he states what undoubtedly was the
literary faith of the satirists of the time: “It is not for every one
to relish a true natural satire, being of itself, besides the nature
and inbred bitterness and tartness of particulars, both hard of conceit
and harsh of style, and therefore cannot but be unpleasing both to the
unskilful and over-musical ear.” In other words, a rough form and a
deliberate violation of melody were proper to satire. Marston and Donne
acted on that rule. But Hall in his own verses is not markedly hard of
conceit or harsh of style. His couplets flow easily enough, carrying
with them shrewd but not very important remarks on the contradictions
of sinners. We can well believe that when Pope was shown them late
in life he wished he had seen them sooner, and that he thought the
first satire of the sixth book “optima satira.” Hall’s attitude of
superiority to a sinful world is rather comic in a young gentleman who
knew no more of it than lay inside the walls of “pure Emmanuel.” His
worst fault was a habit of sniffing at contemporary poets, whose poetic
shoe-latchet he was not worthy to undo. He falls upon the sonneteers
and their “Blowesses” (_i.e._, Blowsibellas) after a fashion afterwards
bettered by Swift with his incomparable brutality.[69]
[SN: _Marston._]
Marston’s first set of Satires were printed under the assumed name
of W. Kinsayder in 1598, together with a poem called _Pygmalion’s
Image_. A second instalment of the Satires followed next year, and both
bear the same title--_The Scourge of Villainy_. There was not much
villainy to which Marston had better call to apply the scourge than the
greasy lubricity of _Pygmalion’s Image_. He preferred to scold at his
contemporaries in verse which is as pleasant to read as charcoal would
be to eat, and to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which he
took at second hand from Latin books, in a style which raises the image
of ancient Pistol unpacking his heart with curses.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] _Tottel’s Miscellany_ has been reprinted by Mr Arber, who has also
republished Gascoigne’s _Steel Glass_, and the _Eclogues_, _Epitaphs_,
and _Sonnets_ of Barnabe Googe in his English reprints. Turberville is
in vol. ii. of Chalmers’s _British Poets_. Works of Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, 1859.
[62] _The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney_, edited by the Rev. A.
B. Grosart, 2 vols., 1873, in “The Fuller’s Worthies Library.”
[63] _Poems of Thomas Watson_, in Arber’s English reprints.
[64] For Barnes, Percy, Constable, Lynch, _Zepheria_, and Smith, see Mr
Arber’s _English Garner_; for Daniel and Drayton, vols. iii. and iv. of
Chalmers’s _British Poets_.
[65] Mr Arber in his _English Garner_, and Mr Bullen in his _Lyrics
from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age_, 1887, have made selections
from these sources.
[66] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iv.
[67] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iii. Complete works, edited by Dr
Grosart. 5 vols., 1885-1896.
[68] Chalmers’s _British Poets_, vol. iv. A very thorough monograph on
Drayton by Mr O. Elton has been published by the Spenser Society, 1895.
[69] _Satires by Joseph Hall._ Chiswick Press, 1824.