ascribes it to Sir Walter Raleigh being insufficient to prove him the
author of it. It first appeared in _England’s Helicon_, 1600. In all
known copies of this edition ‘Ignoto’ has been pasted over W. R., the
original signature which the poem bore. This may have arisen from a
discovery on the part of the editor that the poem was not Raleigh’s; but
also may be explained by his unwillingness to have his authorship of it
declared; so that there is here nothing decisive one way or the other.
Other external evidence bearing on the question I believe there is none,
except Izaak Walton’s assertion fifty-three years later (_Complete
Angler_, 1653, p. 64) that it ‘was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his
younger days.’ No doubt then there was a tradition to this effect;
though ‘younger’ must not be pushed too far, as Raleigh was ten years
older than Marlowe, to whose poem this is a reply. All that we can say
is that there is no name in English literature so great, but that the
authorship of these lines, if this could be ascertained, would be an
additional honour to it.--l. 21-24: In the _second_ edition of Walton’s
_Complete Angler_, 1655, this stanza appears--I should say, for the
first time, were not this fact brought into question by its nearly
contemporaneous appearance in a broad-sheet (see _Roxburgh Ballads_,
vol. i. p. 205) which seems by its type to belong, as those expert in
such matters affirm, to the date 1650-55. The stanza there runs,
‘What should you talk of dainties then!
Of better meat than serveth men?
All that is vain; this only good,
Which God doth bless and send for food.’
While Walton may have made, it is also possible that he may have found
ready made to his hand, this beautiful addition to the poem.
P. 24, No. xxii.--Of this poem Dr. Guest (_History of English Rhythms_,
vol. ii. p. 273) has said, ‘It appears to me extremely beautiful,’ a
judgment from which none who are capable of recognizing poetry when they
see it will dissent. It is found in Campion’s _Observations on the Art
of English Poesy_, London, 1602. The purpose of the book is mainly to
prove that rhyme is altogether an unnecessary appendage to English
verse; that this does not require, and indeed is better without it. Had
he offered to his readers many lyrics like this, he might have done much
more than by all his arguments he has done to bring them to his opinion.
As it is, the main value which the _Observations_ possess consists in
this exquisite lyric, and, mediately, in the admirable _Apology for
Rhyme_ on Daniel’s part which they called out.
Pp. 27, 28, No. xxv. xxvi.--Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets may be ‘vain and
amatorious,’ as Milton has called his prose romance of _The Arcadia_;
but they possess grace, fancy, and a passion which makes itself felt
even under the artificial forms of a Platonic philosophy. They are
addressed to one, who, if the course of true love had run smooth, should
have been his wife. When, however, through the misunderstanding of
parents, or through some other cause, she had become the wife of
another, Platonic as they are, they would far better have remained
unwritten.
P. 35, No. xli.--Pope somewhere speaks of ‘a very mediocre poet, one
Drayton,’ and it will be remembered that when Goldsmith visited Poets’
Corner, seeing his monument he exclaimed, ‘Drayton, I never heard of him
before.’ It must be confessed that Drayton, who wrote far too much,
wrote often below himself, and has left not a little to justify the
censure of the one, and to excuse the ignorance of the other. At the
same time only a poet could describe the sun at his rising,
‘With rosy robes and crown of flaming gold;’
and this heroic ballad has a very genuine and martial tone about it. It
is true that every celebration of Agincourt must show pale and faint
beside Shakespeare’s epic drama, _Henry the Fifth_, and this will as
little endure as any other to be brought even into remote comparison
with that; but for all this it ought not to be forgotten.
P. 39, No. xlii. l. 9: ‘Clarius,’ a surname of Apollo, derived from his
famous temple at Claros, in Asia Minor.--l. 27-30: Prometheus was
‘Japhet’s line,’ being the son of Iapetus, whom Jonson has not resisted
the temptation of identifying, as others have done, with Japhet the son
of Noah, and calling by his name. According to one legend it was by the
assistance of Minerva, ‘the issue of Jove’s brain,’ that Prometheus
ascended to heaven, and there stole from the chariot of the Sun the fire
which he brought down to earth; to all which there is reference here.
P. 40, No. xliii.--It would be difficult not to think that we had here
the undeveloped germ of _Il Penseroso_ of Milton, if this were not shown
to be impossible by the fact that Milton’s poem was published two years
previously to this.
P. 41, No. xliv.--Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised
at least as much as he deserves. This may be so, yet taking into account
the finished beauty of such poems as this and No. 1. of this collection,
poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has
scarcely been praised _more_ than he deserves. How in earlier times he
was rated the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems
will sufficiently testify; though possibly the creed which he professed,
and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this.
Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the
persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of
the Sovereign and the life of the State must altogether fail to justify
or excuse.
P. 44, No. xlvi.--The judgment of one great poet on another his
contemporary, must always have a true interest for us, and it was with
serious regret that I omitted Ben Jonson’s ever-memorable lines on
Shakespeare. Many things a contemporary sees, as none who belong to a
later time can see them; knows, as none other can know; and even where
he does not tell us much which we greatly care to learn about the other,
he is sure to tell us something, whether he means it or not, about
himself and about his age. English literature possesses many judgments
of this kind. What Ben Jonson did for Shakespeare, Cartwright, a
strong-thoughted writer if not an eminent poet, and more briefly
Cleveland here, have done in turn for Jonson; Denham for Cowley; Cowley
for Crashaw; Carew for Donne; Marvell for Milton; Dryden for Oldham.
There is not one of these which may not be read with profit by the
careful student of English literature; and certainly Cleveland must be
allowed very happily to have seized here some of the main excellences of
Jonson.
P. 45, No. xlvii.--Another poem on the same subject, in Byrd’s _Psalms,
Sonnets, and Songs_, is as a whole inferior to this, but yields one
stanza which is equal in merit to any here:
‘I wish but what I have at will;
I wander not to seek for more;
I like the plain; I climb no hill;
In greatest storms I sit on shore;
And laugh at them that toil in vain
To get what must be lost again.’
P. 46, No. xlix.--Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so heavily laden with
meaning, so double-shotted, if one may so speak, with thought, so
penetrated and pervaded with a repressed passion, that, packed as all
this is into narrowest limits, it sometimes imparts no little obscurity
to them; and they often require to be heard or read not once but many
times, in fact to be studied, before they reveal to us all the treasures
of thought and feeling which they contain. It is eminently so with this
one. The subject, the bitter delusion of all sinful pleasures, the
reaction of a swift remorse which inevitably dogs them, Shakespeare must
have most deeply felt, as he has expressed himself upon it most
profoundly. I know no picture of this at all so terrible in its truth as
in _The Rape of Lucrece_ the description of Tarquin after he has
successfully wrought his deed of shame. But this sonnet on the same
theme is worthy to stand by its side.
P. 48, No. lii.--These lines are appended to the second edition of
Wastell’s _Microbiblion_, 1629; they are not found in the first,
published under another title in 1623. I have not disturbed the
ascription of them to him, although, considering the general
worthlessness of the book, it must be considered very doubtful indeed.
On the question of the authorship of these lines see Hannah, _Poems and
Psalms of Henry King_, 1843, p. cxviii.
P. 57, No. lxii.--There are at least half-a-dozen texts of this poem
with an infinite variety of readings, these being particularly numerous
in the third stanza, which I must needs think corrupt as it now stands.
The _Reliquiæ Wottonianæ_, in which it was first published, appeared in
1651, some twelve years after Wotton’s death; but much earlier MS.
copies are in existence; thus one in the handwriting of Edward Alleyn,
apparently of date 1616. Ben Jonson visited Drummond of Hawthornden two
or three years later, and is reported by him to have had these lines by
heart.
P. 58, No. lxiii.--This poem Bishop Percy believes to have been first
printed in a volume of _Miscellaneous Poems by different hands_,
published by David Lewis, 1726. The date and authorship is discussed on
several occasions in _Notes and Queries_, vol. iii. (1st Series) pp. 27,
108, 155, but without much light being thrown upon either.
P. 60, No. lxv.--Carew is commonly grouped with Waller, and subordinated
to him. He is indeed immensely his superior. Waller never wrote a
love-song in grace and fancy to compare with this; while in many of
Carew’s lighter pieces there is an underlying vein of earnestness, which
is wholly wanting in the other.
P. 62, No. lxviii.--Waller’s fame has sadly, but not undeservedly,
declined since the time when it used to be taken for granted that he had
virtually invented English poetry, or one might almost say, the English
language; since an editor of his poems (1690) could write that his was
‘a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful
in poetry. He was indeed the parent of English verse, and the first that
showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. The tongue came into
his hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first, and to that degree
that all artists since him have admired the workmanship without
pretending to mend it.’ Compare the twenty-two lines devoted to him in
Addison’s _Account of the greatest English Poets_, which includes
Congreve, but not Shakespeare! For myself, I confess that I did not find
it very easy to select from the whole range of his poems one which I
much cared to quote. He appears in this to have had in his eye the
graceful epigram of Rufinus beginning,
Πἑμπω σοι, Ρυδὁκλεια, τὁδε στἑφος,
and ending with these lines,
ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα,
ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος.
P. 63, No. lxx.--Castara, to whom these beautiful lines are addressed,
was a daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Percy, and either was
already, or afterwards became, the wife of the poet. There are no purer
and few more graceful records of a noble attachment than that which is
contained in the poems to which Habington has given the name of the lady
of his happy love. Phillips, writing in 1675, says, ‘His poems are now
almost forgotten.’ How little they deserved this, how finished at times
his versification was, lines such as the following--they are the first
stanza of a poem for which I could not find room--will abundantly prove.
It is headed, _Against them who lay Unchastity to the sex of Women_.
‘They meet with but unwholesome springs,
And summers which infectious are,
They hear but when the mermaid sings,
And only see the falling star,
Who ever dare
Affirm no woman chaste and fair.’
P. 76, No. lxxviii.--Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all:
‘Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.’
They are so far beyond all doubt the greatest in the language that it is
a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to
recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow
is that ‘three of them are not bad;’ and he and Hannah More once set
themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness
itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains
an illustration lively enough to be worth quoting: ‘Why, Madam,’ he
said, ‘Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock,
but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.’
P. 76, No. lxxix.--I have obtained room for these lines by excluding
another very beautiful poem by the same author, his _Song of the
Emigrants in Bermuda_. To this I was moved in part by the fact that the
_Song_ has found its way into many modern collections; these lines, so
far as I know, into none; in part by my conviction that we have here a
poem which, though less popular than the _Song_, is of a still higher
mood. If after this praise, these lines should, at the first perusal,
disappoint a thoughtful reader, I would ask him to read them a second
time, and, if needful, a third. Sooner or later they will reveal the
depth and riches of meaning which under their unpretending forms lie
concealed.
P. 78, No. lxxx.--This poem will acquire a profound interest, for those
at least who count there is something better in the world than Art, when
we read it in the light of the fact mentioned by Lord Clarendon in his
_History of the Rebellion_ about its author, namely, that ‘after fifty
years spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been,
he died with the greatest remorse for that license, and the greatest
manifestations of Christianity that his best friends could desire;’ so
that in the end the hope which he ventures here timidly to utter was
fulfilled, and one thorn ‘from the dry leafless trunk on Golgotha’ did
prove to him more precious ‘than all the flourishing wreaths by
laureates worn.’
P. 82, No. lxxxiv., l. 8: Campbell has transferred ‘the world’s gray
fathers’ into his poem on the Rainbow; but has no more to say for the
author of these exquisite lines and of three other poems as perfect in
form as in spirit which enrich this volume than this, ‘He is one of the
harshest even of the inferior order of the school of conceit, but he has
some few scattered thoughts that meet our eye amid his harsh pages, like
wild flowers on a barren heath.’
P. 83, No. lxxxv. l. 133, 134: These lines are very perplexing. Milton’s
lines on Shakespeare abundantly attest that the true character of the
greatness of England’s greatest poet rose distinct and clear before the
mind of him who in greatness approached him the nearest. But in this
couplet can we trace any sense of the same discernment? ‘Fancy’s child’
may pass, seeing that ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ were not effectually
desynonymized when Milton wrote; nay, ‘fancy’ was for him the greater
name (see _Paradise Lost_, v. 100-113). ‘Sweetest’ Shakespeare
undoubtedly was, but then the sweetness is so drawn up into the power,
that this is about the last epithet one would be disposed to use about
him. And then what could Milton possibly have intended by ‘his native
woodnotes wild’--the sort of praise which might be bestowed, though with
no eminent fulness, upon Clare, or a poet of his rank. The _Midsummer
Night’s Dream_ and _As You Like It_ are perhaps the most idyllic of his
plays; but the perfect art controlling at every step the prodigality of
nature, in these as in all his works, takes away all fitness from
language such as this, and I can only wonder that of all the
commentators on Milton not one has cared to explain to us what the poet
here meant.
P. 87, No. lxxxvi. l. 18: Memnon, king of Ethiopia (nigri Memnonis arma,
Virgil), who according to the cyclic poets was slain before the walls of
Troy by Achilles, is described in the _Odyssey_, xi. 522, as the most
beautiful of the warriors there. A sister of his might therefore be
presumed to be beautiful no less. Milton did not, as some say, invent
the sister. Mention is made of her, her name is Hemera (Ήμἑρα), in
Dictys Cretensis. It is she who pays the last honours to the ashes of
her brother.--l. 19: Cassiopeia, ‘starred’ as having been translated
into the heaven, and become a constellation there. She offended the
Nereids by contesting the prize of beauty with them. Milton concludes
that as an Ethiopian she was black, but this is nowhere said.--l.
108-115: Milton does not introduce Chaucer in his _Allegro_, but in his
_Penseroso_; seeing in him something beside ‘the merry bard,’ which is
all that Addison can see in the most pathetic poet in the English
language.--l. 116-120: Spenser is here alluded to, of course--‘our sage
and serious poet, Spenser,’ as Milton loved to call him. Contrast his
judgment of Spenser’s allegory, as being something
‘Where more is meant than meets the ear;’
with Addison’s,
‘The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.’
P. 92, No. lxxvii.--Wordsworth in the Preface to an early edition of his
works calls attention to Cotton’s well-nigh forgotten poetry, some of it
abundantly deserving the oblivion into which it has fallen, but some of
a very rare excellence in its kind. This he does, quoting largely from
his _Ode to Winter_, mainly with the purpose of illustrating the
distinction between fancy, of which these poems, in his judgment, have
much, and imagination, of which they have little or none. They have a
merit which certainly strikes me more than any singular wealth of fancy
which I can find in them; and which to Wordsworth also must have
constituted their chief attraction, namely, the admirable English in
which they are written. They are sometimes prosaic, sometimes blemished
by more serious faults; but for homely vigour and purity of language,
for the total absence of any attempt to conceal the deficiency of strong
and high imagination by a false poetic diction--purple rags torn from
other men’s garments, and sewn upon his own--he may take his place among
the foremost masters of the tongue. Coleridge has said as much
(_Biographia Literaria_, vol. ii. p. 96): ‘There are not a few poems in
that volume [the works of Cotton] replete with every excellence of
thought, image, and passion which we expect or desire in the poetry of
the milder Muse, and yet so worded that the reader sees no reason either
in the selection or the order of the words why he may not have said the
very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how indeed
he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise, without loss or injury
to his meaning.’ I will add that this poem is drawn out to too great a
length for its own interests, or for my limited space; and several
stanzas toward the close have been omitted.
P. 95, No. lxxxviii.--Johnson has justly praised the ‘unequalled
fertility of invention’ displayed in this poem, and in its pendant,
_Against Hope_. To estimate _all_ the wonder of them, they should be
read each in the light of the other. In some lines of wretched
criticism, which Addison has called _An Account of the greatest English
Poets_, there is one exception to the shallowness or falseness of most
of his judgments about them, namely in his estimate of Cowley, which is
much higher than that of the present day, though not too high; wherein
too he has well seized his merits and defects, both of which this poem
exemplifies. These are the first six lines:
‘Great Cowley then (a mighty genius) wrote,
O’errun with wit, and lavish of his thought;
His turns too closely on the reader press,
He more had pleased us, had he pleased us less;
One glittering thought no sooner strikes our eyes
With silent wonder but new wonders rise.’
P. 96, No. lxxxix.--It is evident that in this Prologue and in that
which follows Dryden is on his good behaviour; he has indeed so much
respect for his audience that in all the eighty-five lines which compose
them he has not one profane, and, still more remarkable, not one
indecent allusion. Neither are the compliments which he pays his
hearers, as is too often the case, fulsome and from their exaggeration
offensive, but such as became him to pay and them to receive, and there
is an eminent appropriateness to the time and place in them all. Though
no very accurate scholar, he is yet quite scholar enough to talk with
scholars on no very unequal footing; while the most eminent of those who
heard him must have felt that in strength and opulence of thought, and
in power of clothing this thought in appropriate forms, he immeasurably
surpassed them all.
P. 99, No. xci.--Barten Holyday, Archdeacon of Oxford, and translator of
Juvenal, published in 1661 his _Survey of the World_, which contains a
thousand independent distiches, of which these are a favourable sample.
Nearly all which I have quoted have more or less point--to my mind the
distinction between the two chief historians of Greece has never been
more happily drawn--and some of them have poetry as well. Yet for all
this the devout prayer of the author in his concluding distich,
‘Father of gifts, who to the dust didst give
Life, say to these my meditations, Live,’
has not been, and will scarcely now, be fulfilled.
P. 103, No. xcv.--This is nothing more than a broad-sheet ballad
published in 1641, the year of Strafford’s execution, with the title
_Verses lately written by Thomas Earl of Strafford_. Two copies, of
different issues, but of the same date, and identical in text, exist in
the British Museum, while in _The Topographer_, vol. ii. p. 234, there
is printed another, and in some respects an improved text. The fall of
the great statesman from his pride of place has here kindled one with
perhaps but ordinary gifts for ordinary occasions to a truly poetical
treatment of his theme; as to a certain extent it has roused another,
whose less original ballad in the same year and on the same theme,
bearing the title, _The Ultimum Vale or Last Farewell of Thomas Earl of
Strafford_, yields as its second stanza these nervous lines:
‘Farewell, you fading honours which do blind
By your false mists the sharpest-sighted mind;
And having raised him to his height of cares,
Tumble him headlong down the slippery stairs;
How shall I praise or prize your glorious ills,
Which are but poison hid in golden pills?’
P. 108, No. xcix.--These spirited lines were found written in an old
hand in a copy of Lovelace’s _Lucasta_, 1679. We have in them no doubt a
Cavalier Song of our Civil Wars.
P. 108, No. c.--Davenant is scarcely known except by his
strong-thoughted but heavy poem of _Gondibert_; and very little known, I
should suppose, by this. But three of his poems, this and Nos. cvii. and
clii., show that in another vein, that of graceful half play, half
earnest, few have surpassed him. I know nothing in its kind happier than
clii., which by an oversight has been placed somewhat too late in this
volume.
P. 111, No. ci. l. 43-48: Cicero (_De Nat. Deor._ 3, 28, and elsewhere)
refers to the remarkable story of Jason, tyrant of Pheræe, whom one
would have stabbed, but did in fact only open a dangerous ulcer in his
body.--l. 59: ‘Adamant’ is here used in the sense of loadstone; as in
Shakespeare’s _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, 2, i.
‘You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
And yet you draw not iron.’
P. 112, No. cii.--I have dealt somewhat boldly with this poem, of its
twenty-four triplets omitting all but ten, these ten seeming to me to
constitute a fine poem, which the entire twenty-four altogether fail to
do. Few, I think, will agree with Horace Walpole that ‘the poetry is
most uncouth and inharmonious;’ so far from this, it has a very solemn
and majestic flow. Nor do I doubt that these lines are what they profess
to be, the composition of King Charles; their authenticity is stamped on
every line. We are indebted to Burnet for their preservation. He gives
them in his _Memoirs of the Dukes of Hamilton_, saying, ‘A very worthy
gentleman who had the honour of waiting on him then [at Carisbrook
Castle], and was much trusted by him, copied them out from the original,
who avoucheth them to be a true copy.’--l. 2: A word has evidently
dropped out here, which is manifestly wanted by the metre, and, as it
seems to me, also by the sense. I have enclosed within brackets the
‘earthly’ with which I have ventured to supply the want.
P. 113, No. ciii.--Marvell showed how well he understood what he was
giving to the world in this ode, one of the least known but among the
grandest which the English language possesses, when he called it
‘Horatian.’ In its whole treatment it reminds us of the highest to which
the greatest Latin Artist in lyrical poetry did, when at his best,
attain. To one unacquainted with Horace, this ode, not perhaps so
perfect as his are in form, and with occasional obscurities of
expression which Horace would not have left, will give a truer notion of
the kind of greatness which he achieved than, so far as I know, could
from any other poem in the language be obtained.