turgid or harsh; and though more figurative than that of Ariosto, it is
so much less than that of most of our own or the ancient poets, that it
appears simple in our eyes. Virgil to whom we most readily compare him,
is far superior in energy, but not in grace. Yet his grace is often too
artificial, and the marks of the file are too evident in the
exquisiteness of his language. Lines of superior beauty occur in almost
every stanza; pages after pages may be found, in which, not pretending
to weigh the style in the scales of the Florentine academy, I do not
perceive one feeble verse or improper expression.
|Some faults in it.|
25. The conceits so often censured in Tasso, though they bespeak the
false taste that had begun to prevail, do not seem quite so numerous as
his critics have been apt to insinuate; but we find sometimes a trivial
or affected phrase, or, according to the usage of the times, an idle
allusion to mythology, when the verse or stanza requires to be filled
up. A striking instance may be given from the admirable passage
where Tancred discovers Clorinda in the warrior on whom he has just
inflicted a mortal blow--
La vide, e la conobbe; e restò senza
E moto e senso----
The effect is here complete, and here he would have desired to stop. But
the necessity of the verse induced him to finish it with feebleness and
affectation. _Ahi vista! Ahi conoscenza!_ Such difficult metres as
the ottava rima demand these sacrifices too frequently. Ariosto has
innumerable lines of necessity.
|Defects of the poem.|
26. It is easy to censure the faults of this admirable poem. The
supernatural machinery is perhaps somewhat in excess; yet this had been
characteristic of the romantic school of poetry, which had moulded the
taste of Europe, and is seldom displeasing to the reader. A still more
unequivocal blemish is the disproportionate influence of love upon the
heroic crusaders, giving a tinge of effeminacy to the whole poem, and
exciting something like contempt in the austere critics, who have no
standard of excellence in epic song but what the ancients have erected
for us. But while we must acknowledge that Tasso has indulged too far
the inspirations of his own temperament, it may be candid to ask
ourselves, whether a subject so grave, and by necessity so full of
carnage, did not require many of the softer touches which he has given
it. His battles are as spirited and picturesque as those of Ariosto, and
perhaps more so than those of Virgil; but to the taste of our times he
has a little too much of promiscuous slaughter. The Iliad had here set
an unfortunate precedent, which epic poets thought themselves bound to
copy. If Erminia and Armida had not been introduced, the classical
critic might have censured less in the Jerusalem; but it would have been
far less also the delight of mankind.
|It indicates the peculiar genius of Tasso.|
27. Whatever may be the laws of criticism, every poet will best obey the
dictates of his own genius. The skill and imagination of Tasso made him
equal to descriptions of war; but his heart was formed for that sort of
pensive voluptuousness which most distinguishes his poetry, and which is
very unlike the coarser sensuality of Ariosto. He lingers around the
gardens of Armida, as though he had been himself her thrall. The
Florentine critics vehemently attacked her final reconciliation with
Rinaldo in the twentieth canto, and the renewal of their loves; for the
reader is left with no other expectation. Nor was their censure unjust;
since it is a sacrifice of what should be the predominant sentiment in
the conclusion of the poem. But Tasso seems to have become fond of
Armida, and could not endure to leave in sorrow and despair the creature
of his ethereal fancy, whom he had made so fair and so winning. It is
probable that the majority of readers are pleased with this passage, but
it can never escape the condemnation of severe judges.
|Tasso compared to Virgil;|
28. Tasso, doubtless, bears a considerable resemblance to Virgil. But,
independently of the vast advantages which the Latin language possesses
in majesty and vigour, and which render exact comparison difficult as
well as unfair, it may be said that Virgil displays more justness of
taste, a more extensive observation, and, if we may speak thus in the
absence of so much poetry which he might have imitated, a more genuine
originality. Tasso did not possess much of the self-springing invention
which we find in a few great poets, and which, in this higher sense, I
cannot concede to Ariosto; he not only borrows freely, and perhaps
studiously, from the ancients, but introduces frequent lines from
earlier Italian poets, and especially from Petrarch. He has also some
favourite turns of phrase, which serve to give a certain mannerism to
his stanzas.
|to Ariosto;|
29. The Jerusalem was no sooner published, than it was weighed against
the Orlando Furioso, and neither Italy nor Europe have yet agreed which
scale inclines. It is indeed one of those critical problems, that admit
of no certain solution, whether we look to the suffrage of those who
feel acutely and justly, or to the general sense of mankind. We cannot
determine one poet to be superior to the other, without assuming
premises which no one is bound to grant. Those who read for a
stimulating variety of circumstances, and the enlivening of a leisure
hour, must prefer Ariosto; and he is probably, on this account, a poet
of more universal popularity. It might be said perhaps by some, that he
is more a favourite of men, and Tasso of women. And yet, in Italy, the
sympathy with tender and graceful poetry is so general, that the
Jerusalem has hardly been less in favour with the people than its
livelier rival; and its fine stanzas may still be heard by moonlight
from the lips of a gondolier, floating along the calm bosom of
the Giudecca.[1164]
[1164] The following passages may perhaps be naturally compared, both
as being celebrated, and as descriptive of sound. Ariosto has
however much the advantage, and I do not think the lines in the
Jerusalem, though very famous, are altogether what I should select
as a specimen of Tasso.
Aspri concenti, orribile armonia
d’Alte querele, d’ululi, e di strida
Della misera gente, che peria
Nel fondo per cagion della sua guida,
Istranamente concordat s’udia
Col fiero suon della flamma omicida.
Orland. Fur. c. 14.
Chiama gli abitator dell’ombre eterne
Il rauco suon della tartarea tromba;
Treman le spaziose atre caverne,
E l’aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba.
Nè si stridendo mai dalle superne
Regioni del cielo il folgor piomba;
Nè si scossa giammai trema la terra
Quando i vapori in sen gravida serra.
Gierus. Lib. c. 4.
In the latter of these stanzas there is rather too studied an
effort at imitative sound; the lines are grand and nobly expressed,
but they do not hurry along the reader like those of Ariosto. In
his there is little attempt at vocal imitation, yet we seem to hear
the cries of the suffering, and the crackling of the flames.
30. Ariosto must be placed much more below Homer, than Tasso falls short
of Virgil. The Orlando has not the impetuosity of the Iliad; each is
prodigiously rapid, but Homer has more momentum by his weight; the one
is a hunter, the other a war-horse. The finest stanzas in Ariosto are
fully equal to any in Tasso, but the latter has by no means so many
feeble lines. Yet his language, though never affectedly obscure, is not
so pellucid, and has a certain refinement which makes us sometimes pause
to perceive the meaning. Whoever reads Ariosto slowly, will probably be
offended by his negligence; whoever reads Tasso quickly, will lose
something of the elaborate finish of his style.
|to the Bolognese painters.|
31. It is not easy to find a counterpart among painters for Ariosto. His
brilliancy and fertile invention might remind us of Tintoret; but he is
more natural, and less solicitous of effect. If indeed poetical diction
be the correlative of colouring in our comparison of the arts, none of
the Venetian school can represent the simplicity and averseness to
ornament of language which belong to the Orlando Furioso; and it would
be impossible, for other reasons, to look for a parallel in a Roman or
Tuscan pencil. But with Tasso the case is different: and though it would
be an affected expression to call him the founder of the Bolognese
school, it is evident that he had a great influence on its chief
painters, who came but a little after him. They imbued themselves with
the spirit of a poem so congenial to their age, and so much admired in
it. No one, I think, can consider their works without perceiving both
the analogy of the place each hold in their respective arts, and the
traces of a feeling, caught directly from Tasso as their prototype and
model. We recognise his spirit in the sylvan shades and voluptuous forms
of Albano and Domenichino, in the pure beauty that radiates from the
ideal heads of Guido, in the skilful composition, exact design, and
noble expression of the Caracci. Yet the school of Bologna seems to
furnish no parallel to the enchanting grace and diffused harmony of
Tasso; and we must, in this respect, look back to Correggio as his
representative.
SECT. II.--ON SPANISH POETRY.
_Luis de Leon--Herrera--Ercilla--Camoens--Spanish Ballads._
|Poetry cultivated under Charles and Philip.|
32. The reigns of Charles and his son have long been reckoned the golden
age of Spanish poetry; and if the art of verse was not cultivated in the
latter period by any quite so successful as Garcilasso and Mendoza, who
belonged to the earlier part of the century, the vast number of names
that have been collected by diligent inquiry show, at least, a national
taste which deserves some attention. The means of exhibiting a full
account of even the most select names in this crowd are not readily at
hand. In Spain itself, the poets of the age of Philip II., like those
who lived under his great enemy in England, were, with very few
exceptions, little regarded till after the middle of the eighteenth
century. The Parnaso Español of Sedano, the first volumes of which were
published in 1768, made them better known; but Bouterwek observes, that
it would have been easy to make a better collection, as we do not find
several poems of the chief writers, with which the editor seems to have
fancied the public to be sufficiently acquainted. An imperfect knowledge
of the language, and a cursory view of these volumes, must disable me
from speaking confidently of Castilian poetry; so far as I feel myself
competent to judge, the specimens chosen by Bouterwek do no injustice to
the compilation.[1165]
[1165] “The merit of Spanish poems,” says a critic equally candid and
well-informed, “independently of those intended for representation,
consists chiefly in smoothness of versification and purity of
language, and in facility rather than strength of imagination.”
Lord Holland’s Lope de Vega, vol. i. p. 107. He had previously
observed that these poets were generally voluminous: “it was not
uncommon even for the nobility of Philip IV.’s time (later of
course than the period we are considering) to converse for some
minutes in extemporaneous poetry; and in carelessness of metre, as
well as in commonplace images, the verses of that time often remind
us of the _improvisatori_ of Italy,” p. 106.
|Luis de Leon.|
33. The best lyric poet of Spain in the opinion of many, with whom I
venture to concur, was Fra Luis Ponce de Leon, born in 1527, and whose
poems were probably written not very long after the middle of the
century. The greater part are translations, but his original productions
are chiefly religious, and full of that soft mysticism which allies
itself so well to the emotions of a poetical mind. One of his odes, De
la Vida del Cielo, which will be found entire in Bouterwek, is an
exquisite pieces of lyric poetry, which, in its peculiar line of devout
aspiration, has perhaps never been excelled.[1166] But the warmth of his
piety was tempered by a classical taste, which he had matured by the
habitual imitation of Horace. “At an early age,” says Bouterwek, “he
became intimately acquainted with the odes of Horace, and the elegance
and purity of style which distinguish those compositions made a deep
impression on his imagination. Classical simplicity and dignity were the
models constantly present to his creative fancy. He, however,
appropriated to himself the character of Horace’s poetry too naturally
ever to incur the danger of servile imitation. He discarded the prolix
style of the canzone, and imitated the brevity of the strophes of Horace
in romantic measures of syllables and rhymes; more just feeling for the
imitation of the ancients was never evinced by any modern poet. His odes
have, however, a character totally different from those of Horace,
though the sententious air which marks the style of both authors imparts
to them a deceptive resemblance. The religious austerity of Luis de
Leon’s life was not to be reconciled with the epicurism of the Latin
poet; but notwithstanding this very different disposition of the mind,
it is not surprising that they should have adopted the same form of
poetic expression, for each possessed a fine imagination, subordinate to
the control of a sound understanding. Which of the two is the superior
poet, in the most extended sense of the word, it would be difficult to
determine, as each formed his style by free imitation, and neither
overstepped the boundaries of a certain sphere of practical observation.
Horace’s odes exhibit a superior style of art; and from the relationship
between the thoughts and images, possess a degree of attraction which is
wanting in those of Luis de Leon; but, on the other hand, the latter are
the more rich in that natural kind of poetry, which may be regarded as
the overflowing of a pure soul, elevated to the loftiest regions of
moral and religious idealism.”[1167] Among the fruits of these Horatian
studies of Luis de Leon, we must place an admirable ode suggested by the
prophecy of Nereus, wherein the genius of the Tagus, rising from its
waters to Rodrigo, the last of the Goths, as he lay encircled in the
arms of Cava, denounces the ruin which their guilty loves were to entail
upon Spain.[1168]
[1166] P. 248.
[1167] P. 243.
[1168] This ode I first knew many years since by a translation in the
poems of Russell, which are too little remembered, except by a few
good judges. It has been surmised by some Spanish critics to have
suggested the famous vision of the Spirit of the Cape to Camoens;
but the resemblance is not sufficient, and the dates rather
incompatible.
|Herrera.|
34. Next to Luis de Leon in merit, and perhaps above him in European
renown, we find Herrera surnamed the divine. He died in 1578; and his
poems seem to have been first collectively published in 1582. He was an
innovator in poetical language, whose boldness was sustained by
popularity, though it may have diminished his fame. “Herrera was a
poet,” says Bouterwek, “of powerful talent, and one who evinced
undaunted resolution in pursuing the new path which he had struck out
for himself. The noble style, however, which he wished to introduce into
Spanish poetry, was not the result of a spontaneous essay, flowing from
immediate inspiration, but was theoretically constructed on artificial
principles. Thus, amidst traits of real beauty, his poetry everywhere
presents marks of affectation. The great fault of his language is too
much singularity; and his expression, where it ought to be elevated, is
merely far fetched.”[1169] Velasquez observes that, notwithstanding the
genius and spirit of Herrera, his extreme care to polish his
versification has rendered it sometimes unpleasing to those who require
harmony and ease.[1170]
[1169] P. 229.
[1170] Geschichte der Spanischen Dichtkunst, p. 207.
35. Of these defects in the style of Herrera I cannot judge; his odes
appear to possess a lyric elevation and richness of phrase, derived in
some measure from the study of Pindar, or still more, perhaps, of the
Old Testament, and worthy of comparison with Chiabrera. Those on the
battle of Lepanto are most celebrated; they pour forth a torrent of
resounding song, in those rich tones which the Castilian language so
abundantly supplies. I cannot so thoroughly admire the ode addressed to
sleep, which Bouterwek as well as Sedano extol. The images are in
themselves pleasing and appropriate, the lines steal with a graceful
flow on the ear; but we should desire to find something more raised
above the commonplaces of poetry.
|General tone of Castilian poetry.|
36. The poets of this age belong generally, more or less, to the Italian
school. Many of them were also translators from Latin. In their odes,
epistles, and sonnets, the resemblance of style, as well as that of the
languages, make us sometimes almost believe that we are reading the
Italian instead of the Spanish Parnaso. There seem however to be some
shades of difference even in those who trod the same path. The Castilian
amatory verse is more hyperbolical, more full of extravagant metaphors,
but less subtle, less prone to ingenious trifling, less blemished by
verbal conceits than the Italian. Such at least is what has struck me in
the slight acquaintance I have with the former. The Spanish poets are
also more redundant in descriptions of nature, and more sensible to her
beauties. I dare not assert that they have less grace and less power of
exciting emotion; it may be my misfortune to have fallen rarely on such
passages.
|Castillejo.|
37. It is at least evident that the imitation of Italy, propagated by
Boscan and his followers, was not the indigenous style of Castile. And
of this some of her most distinguished poets were always sensible. In
the Diana of Montemayor, a romance which, as such, we shall have to
mention hereafter, the poetry, largely interspersed, bears partly the
character of the new, partly that of the old or native school. The
latter is esteemed superior. Castillejo endeavoured to restore the gay
rhythm of the redondilla, and turned into ridicule the imitators of
Petrarch. Bouterwek speaks rather slightingly of his generally poetic
powers; though some of his canciones have a considerable share of
elegance. His genius, playful and witty, rather than elegant, seemed not
ill-fitted to revive the popular poetry.[1171] But those who claimed the
praise of superior talents did not cease to cultivate the polished style
of Italy. The most conspicuous, perhaps, before the end of the century
were Gil Polo, Espinel, Lope de Vega, Barahona de Soto, and
Figueroa.[1172] Several other names, not without extracts, will be found
in Bouterwek.
[1171] P. 267.
[1172] Lord Holland has given a fuller account of the poetry of Lope
de Vega than either Bouterwek or Velasquez and Dieze; and the
extracts in his “Lives of Lope de Vega and Guillen de Castro,” will
not, I believe, be found in the Parnaso Español, which is contrived
on a happy plan of excluding what is best. Las Lagrimas de
Angelica, by Barahona de Soto, Lord H. says, “has always been
esteemed one of the best poems in the Spanish language,” vol. i. p.
33. Bouterwek says he has never met with the book. It is praised by
Cervantes in Don Quixote.
The translation of Tasso’s Aminta, by Jauregui, has been preferred
by Menage as well as Cervantes to the original. But there is no
extraordinary merit in turning Italian into Spanish, even with some
improvement of the diction.
|Araucana of Ercilla.|
38. Voltaire, in his early and very defective essay on epic poetry, made
known to Europe the Araucana of Ercilla, which has ever since enjoyed a
certain share of reputation, though condemned by many critics as tedious
and prosaic. Bouterwek depreciates it in rather more sweeping a manner
than seems consistent with the admissions he afterwards makes.[1173] A
talent for lively description and for painting situations, a natural and
correct diction, which he ascribes to Ercilla, if they do not constitute
a claim to a high rank among poets, are at least as much as many have
possessed. An English writer of good taste has placed him in a
triumvirate with Homer and Ariosto for power of narration.[1174]
Raynouard observes, that Ercilla has taken Ariosto as his model,
especially in the opening of his cantos. But the long digressions and
episodes of the Araucana, which the poet has not had the art to connect
with his subject, render it fatiguing. The first edition, in 1569,
contains but fifteen books; the second part was published in 1578, the
whole together in 1590.[1175]
[1173] P. 407.
[1174] Pursuits of Literature.
[1175] Journal des Savans, Sept. 1824.
|Many epic poems in Spain.|
39. The Araucana is so far from standing alone in this class of poetry,
that not less than twenty-five epic poems appeared in Spain within
little more than half a century. These will be found enumerated,
and, as far as possible, described and characterised, in Velasquez’s
History of Spanish Poetry, which I always quote in the German
translation with the valuable notes of Dieze.[1176] Bouterwek mentions
but a part of the number, and a few of them may be conjectured by the
titles not to be properly epic. It is denied by these writers, that
Ercilla excelled all his contemporaries in heroic song. I find, however,
a different sentence in a Spanish poet of that age, who names him as
superior to the rest.[1177]
[1176] P. 376-407. Bouterwek, p. 413.
[1177]
Oyle el estilo grave, el blando acento,
Y altos concentos del varon famoso
Que en el heroyco verso fue el primero
Que honro a su patria, y aun quiza el postrero.
Del fuerte Arauco el pecho altivo espanta
_Don Alonso de Ercilla_ con el mano,
Con ella lo derriba y lo levanta,
Vence y honra venciendo al Araucano;
Calla sus hechos, los agenos canta,
Con tal estilo que eclipsó al Toscano:
Virtud que el cielo para sí reserva
Que en el furor de Marte esté Minerva.
La Casa de la Memoria, por Vicente Espinel, in Parnaso Espanol,
viii. 352.
Antonio, near the end of the seventeenth century, extols Ercilla
very highly, but intimates that some did not relish his simple
perspicuity. Ad hunc usque diem ob iis omnibus avidissime legitur,
qui facile dicendi genus atque perspicuum admittere vim suam et
nervos, nativaque sublimitate quadam attolli posse, cothurnatumque
ire non ignorant.
|Camoens.|
|Defects of the Lusiad.|
40. But in Portugal there had arisen a poet, in comparison of whose
glory that of Ercilla is as nothing. The name of Camoens has truly an
European reputation, but the Lusiad is written in a language not
generally familiar. From Portuguese critics it would be unreasonable to
demand want of prejudice in favour of a poet so illustrious, and of a
poem so peculiarly national. The Æneid reflects the glory of Rome as
from a mirror; the Lusiad is directly and exclusively what its name “The
Portuguese” (Os Lusiadas) denotes, the praise of the Lusitanian people.
Their past history chimes in, by means of episodes, with the great event
of Gama’s voyage to India. The faults of Camoens, in the management of
his fable and the choice of machinery, are sufficiently obvious; it is,
nevertheless, the first successful attempt in modern Europe to construct
an epic poem on the ancient model; for the Gierusalemme Liberata, though
incomparably superior, was not written or published so soon. In
consequence, perhaps, of this epic form, which, even when imperfectly
delineated, long obtained, from the general veneration for antiquity, a
greater respect at the hands of critics than perhaps it deserved, the
celebrity of Camoens has always been considerable. In point of fame he
ranks among the poets of the south, immediately after the first names of
Italy; nor is the distinctive character that belongs to the poetry of
the southern languages anywhere more fully perceived than in the Lusiad.
In a general estimate of its merits it must appear rather feeble and
prosaic; the geographical and historical details are insipid and
tedious; a skilful use of poetical artifice is never exhibited; we are
little detained to admire an ornamented diction, or glowing thoughts, or
brilliant imagery; a certain negligence disappoints us in the most
beautiful passages; and it is not till a second perusal, that their
sweetness has time to glide into the heart. The celebrated stanzas on
Inez De Castro are a proof of this.
|Its excellencies.|
41. These deficiencies, as a taste formed in the English school, or in
that of classical antiquity, is apt to account them, are greatly
compensated, and doubtless far more to a native than they can be to us,
by a freedom from all that offends, for he is never turgid, nor
affected, nor obscure, by a perfect ease and transparency of narration,
by scenes and descriptions, possessing a certain charm of colouring, and
perhaps not less pleasing from the apparent negligence of the pencil, by
a style kept up at a level just above common language, by a mellifluous
versification, and, above all, by a kind of soft languor which tones, as
it were, the whole poem, and brings perpetually home to our minds the
poetical character and interesting fortunes of its author. As the mirror
of a heart so full of love, courage, generosity, and patriotism, as that
of Camoens, the Lusiad can never fail to please us, whatever place we
may assign to it in the records of poetical genius.[1178]
[1178] “In every language,” says Mr. Southey, probably, in the
Quarterly Review, xxvii. 38, “there is a magic of words as
untranslatable as the Sesame in the Arabian tale,--you may retain
the meaning, but if the words be changed the spell is lost. The
magic has its effect only upon those to whom the language is as
familiar as their mother tongue, hardly indeed upon any but those
to whom it is really such. Camoens possesses it in perfection, it
is his peculiar excellence.”
|Mickle’s translation.|
42. The Lusiad is best known in England by the translation of Mickle,
who has been thought to have done something more than justice to his
author, both by the unmeasured eulogies he bestows upon him, and by the
more substantial service of excelling the original in his unfaithful
delineation.[1179] The style of Mickle is certainly more poetical,
according to our standard, than that of Camoens, that is, more
figurative and emphatic; but it seems to me replenished with commonplace
phrases, and wanting in the facility and sweetness of the original; in
which it is well known that he has interpolated a great deal without a
pretence.
[1179] Several specimens of Mickle’s infidelity in translation, which
exceed all liberties ever taken in this way, are mentioned in the
Quarterly Review.
|Celebrated passage in the Lusiad.|
43. The most celebrated passage in the Lusiad is that wherein the Spirit
of the Cape, rising in the midst of his stormy seas, threatens the
daring adventurer that violates their unploughed waters. In order to
judge fairly of this conception, we should endeavour to forget all that
has been written in imitation of it. Nothing has become more commonplace
in poetry than one of its highest flights, supernatural personification;
and, as children draw notable monsters when they cannot come near the
human form, so every poetaster, who knows not how to describe one object
in nature, is quite at home with a goblin. Considered by itself, the
idea is impressive and even sublime. Nor am I aware of any evidence to
impeach its originality, in the only sense which originality of poetical
invention can bear; it is a combination which strikes us with the force
of novelty, and which we cannot instantly resolve into any constituent
elements. The prophecy of Nereus, to which we have lately alluded, is
much removed in grandeur and appropriateness of circumstance from this
passage of Camoens, though it may contain the germ of his conception. It
is, however, one that seems much above the genius of its author. Mild,
graceful, melancholy, he has never given in any other place signs of
such vigorous imagination. And when we read these lines on the Spirit of
the Cape, it is impossible not to perceive that, like Frankenstein, he
is unable to deal with the monster he has created. The formidable
Adamastor is rendered mean by particularity of description, descending
even to yellow teeth. The speech put into his mouth is feeble and
prolix; and it is a serious objection to the whole, that the awful
vision answers no purpose but that of ornament, and is impotent against
the success and glory of the navigators. A spirit of whatever
dimensions, that can neither overwhelm a ship, nor even raise a tempest,
is incomparably less terrible than a real hurricane.
|Minor poems of Camoens.|
44. Camoens is still, in his shorter poems, esteemed the chief of
Portuguese poets in this age, and possibly in every other; his
countrymen deem him their model, and judge of later verse by comparison
with his. In every kind of composition then used in Portugal, he has
left proofs of excellence. “Most of his sonnets,” says Bouterwek, “have
love for their theme, and they are of very unequal merit; some are full
of Petrarchic tenderness and grace, and moulded with classic
correctness, others are impetuous and romantic, or disfigured by false
learning, or full of tedious pictures of the conflicts of passion with
reason. Upon the whole, however, no Portuguese poet has so correctly
seized the character of the sonnet as Camoens. Without apparent effort,
merely by the ingenious contrast of the first eight with the last six
lines, he knew how to make these little effusions convey a poetic unity
of ideas and impressions, after the model of the best Italian sonnets,
in so natural a manner, that the first lines or quartets of the sonnet
excite a soft expectation, which is harmoniously fulfilled by the
tercets or last six lines.”[1180] The same writer praises several other
of the miscellaneous compositions of Camoens.
[1180] Hist. of Portuguese Literature, p. 187.
|Ferreira.|
45. But, though no Portuguese of the sixteenth century has come near to
this illustrious poet, Ferreira endeavoured with much good sense, if not
with great elevation, to emulate the didactic tone of Horace, both in
lyric poems and epistles, of which the latter have been most
esteemed.[1181] The classical school formed by Ferreira produced other
poets in the sixteenth century; but it seems to have been little in
unison with the national character. The reader will find as full an
account of these as, if he is unacquainted with the Portuguese language,
he is likely to desire, in the author on whom I have chiefly relied.
[1181] Id. p. 111.
|Spanish ballads.|
46. The Spanish ballads or romances are of very different ages. Some of
them, as has been observed in another place, belong to the fifteenth
century; and there seems sufficient ground for referring a small number
to even an earlier date. But by far the greater portion is of
the reign of Philip II., or even that of his successor. The Moorish
romances, in general, and all those on the Cid, are reckoned by Spanish
critics among the most modern. Those published by Depping and Duran have
rarely an air of the raciness and simplicity which usually distinguish
the poetry of the people, and seem to have been written by poets of
Valladolid or Madrid, the contemporaries of Cervantes, with a good deal
of elegance, though not much vigour. The Moors of romance, the
chivalrous gentlemen of Granada, were displayed by these Castilian poets
in attractive colours;[1182] and much more did the traditions of their
own heroes, especially of the Cid, the bravest and most noble-minded of
them all, furnish materials for their popular songs. Their character, it
is observed by the latest editor, is unlike that of the older romances
of chivalry, which had been preserved orally, as he conceives, down to
the middle of the sixteenth century, when they were inserted in the
Cancionero de Romances at Antwerp, 1555.[1183] I have been informed that
an earlier edition printed in Spain has lately been discovered. In these
there is a certain prolixity and hardness of style, a want of
connection, a habit of repeating verses or entire passages from others.
They have nothing of the marvellous, nor borrow anything from Arabian
sources. In some others of the more ancient poetry there are traces of
the oriental manner, and a peculiar tone of wild melancholy. The little
poems scattered through the prose romance, entitled, Las Guerras de
Granada, are rarely, as I should conceive, older than the reign of
Philip II. These Spanish ballads are known to our public, but generally
with inconceivable advantage, by the very fine and animated translations
of Mr. Lockhart.[1184]
[1182] Bouterwek, Sismondi, and others, have quoted a romance,
beginning Tanta Zayda y Adalifa, as the effusion of an orthodox
zeal, which had taken offence at these encomiums on infidels.
Whoever reads this little poem, which may be found in Depping’s
collection, will see that it is written more as a humorous ridicule
on contemporary poets, than a serious reproof. It is much more
lively than the answer, which these modern critics also quote. Both
these poems are of the end of the sixteenth century. Neither
Bouterwek nor Sismondi have kept in mind the recent date of the
Moorish ballads.
[1183] Duran in preface to his Romancero of 1832. These Spanish
collections of songs and ballads, called Cancioneros and
Romanceros, are very scarce, and there is some uncertainty among
bibliographers as to their editions. According to Duran, this of
Antwerp contains many romances unpublished before and far older
than those of the fifteenth century, collected in the Cancionero
General of 1516. It does not appear, perhaps, that the number which
can be referred with probability to a period anterior to 1400 is
considerable, but they are very interesting. Among these are Los
Fronterizos, or songs which the Castilians used in their incursions
on the Moorish frontier. These were preserved orally, like other
popular poetry. We find in these early pieces, he says, some traces
of the Arabian style, rather in the melancholy of its tone than in
any splendour of imagery, giving as an instance some lines quoted
by Sismondi, beginning, “Fonte frida, fonte frida, Fonte frida y
con amor,” which are evidently very ancient. Sismondi says
(Littérature du Midi, iii. 240) that it is difficult to explain the
charm of this little poem, but “by the tone of truth and the
absence of all object;” and Bouterwek calls it very nonsensical. It
seems to me that some real story is shadowed in it under images in
themselves of very little meaning, which may account for the tone
of truth and pathos it breathes.
The older romances are usually in alternate verses of eight and
seven syllables, and the rhymes are _consonant_, or real
rhymes. The _assonance_ is however older than Lord Holland
supposes, who says (Life of Lope de Vega, vol. ii. p. 12), that it
was not introduced till the end of the sixteenth century. It occurs
in several that Duran reckons ancient.
The romance of the Conde Alarcos is probably of the fifteenth
century. This is written in octosyllable consonant rhymes, without
division of strophes. The Moorish ballads, with a very few
exceptions, belong to the reigns of Philip II. and Philip III., and
those of the Cid, about which so much interest has been taken, are
the latest, and among the least valuable of all. All these are, I
believe, written on the principle of assonances.
[1184] An admirable romance on a bull-fight, in Mr. Lockhart’s volume,
is faintly to be traced in one introduced in Las Guerras de
Granada; but I have since found it much more at length in another
collection. It is still, however, far less poetical than the
English imitation.
SECT. III.--ON FRENCH AND GERMAN POETRY.
_French Poetry--Ronsard--His Followers--German Poets._
|French poets numerous.|
47. This was an age of verse in France; and perhaps in no subsequent
period do we find so long a catalogue of her poets. Goujet has recorded
not merely the names, but the lives, in some measure, of nearly two
hundred, whose works were published in this half century. Of this number
scarcely more than five or six are much remembered in their own country.
It is possible indeed that the fastidiousness of French criticism, or
their idolatry of the age of Louis XIV., and of that of Voltaire, may
have led to a little injustice in their estimate of these early
versifiers. Our own prejudices are apt of late to take an opposite
direction.
|Change in the tone of French poetry.|
48. A change in the character of French poetry, about the commencement
of this period, is referrible to the general revolution of literature.
The allegorical personifications which, from the æra of the Roman de la
Rose, had been the common field of verse, became far less usual, and
gave place to an inundation of mythology and classical allusion. The
_Désir_ and _Reine d’Amour_ of the older school became Cupid with his
arrows and Venus with her doves; the theological and cardinal virtues,
which had gained so many victories over _Sensualité_ and _Faux
Semblant_, vanished themselves from a poetry which had generally
enlisted itself under the enemy’s banner. This cutting off of an old
resource rendered it necessary to explore other mines. All antiquity was
ransacked for analogies; and, where the images were not wearisomely
commonplace, they were absurdly far-fetched. This revolution was
certainly not instantaneous; but it followed the rapid steps of
philological learning, which had been nothing at the accession of
Francis I., and was everything at his death. In his court, and in that
of his son, if business or gallantry rendered learning impracticable, it
was at least the mode to affect an esteem for it. Many names in the list
of French poets are conspicuous for high rank, and a greater number are
among the famous scholars of the age. These, accustomed to writing in
Latin, sometimes in verse, and yielding a superstitious homage to the
mighty dead of antiquity, thought they ennobled their native language by
destroying her idiomatic purity.
|Ronsard.|
49. The prevalence however of this pedantry, was chiefly owing to one
poet, of great though short-lived renown, Pierre Ronsard. He was the
first of seven contemporaries in song under Henry II., then denominated
the French Pleiad; the others were Jodelle, Bellay, Baif, Thyard, Dorat,
and Belleau. Ronsard, well acquainted with the ancient languages, and
full of the most presumptuous vanity, fancied that he was born to mould
the speech of his fathers into new forms more adequate to his genius.
Je fis des nouveaux mots,
J’en condamnai les vieux.[1185]
His style, therefore, is as barbarous, if the continual adoption of
Latin and Greek derivatives renders a modern language barbarous, as his
allusions are pedantic. They are more ridiculously such in his amatory
sonnets; in his odes these faults are rather less intolerable, and there
is a spirit and grandeur which show him to have possessed a poetical
mind.[1186] The popularity of Ronsard was extensive; and, though he
sometimes complained of the neglect of the great, he wanted not the
approbation of those whom poets are most ambitious to please. Charles
IX. addressed some lines to Ronsard, which are really elegant, and at
least do more honour to that prince than anything else recorded of him;
and the verses of this poet are said to have enlightened the weary hours
of Mary Stuart’s imprisonment. On his death in 1586 a funeral service
was performed in Paris with the best music that the king could command;
it was attended by the Cardinal de Bourbon and an immense concourse;
eulogies in prose and verse were recited in the university; and in those
anxious moments, when the crown of France was almost in its agony, there
was leisure to lament that Ronsard had been withdrawn. How differently
attended was the grave of Spenser![1187]
[1185] Goujet, Bibliothéque Française xii. 199.
[1186] Id. 216.
[1187] Id. 207.
50. Ronsard was capable of conceiving strongly, and bringing his
conceptions in clear and forcible, though seldom in pure or well-chosen
language before the mind. The poem, entitled Promesse, which will be
found in Auguis’s Recueil des Anciens Poëtes, is a proof of this, and
excels what little besides I have read of this poet.[1188] Bouterwek,
whose criticism on Ronsard appears fair and just, and who gives him, and
those who belonged to his school, credit for perceiving the necessity of
elevating the tone of French verse above the creeping manner of the
allegorical rhymers, observes that, even in his errors, we discover a
spirit striving upwards, disdaining what is trivial, and restless in the
pursuit of excellence.[1189] But such a spirit may produce very bad and
tasteless poetry. La Harpe, who admits Ronsard’s occasional beauties and
his poetic fire, is repelled by his scheme of versification, full of
_enjambemens_, as disgusting to a correct French ear as they are, in a
moderate use, pleasing to our own. After the appearance of Malherbe, the
poetry of Ronsard fell into contempt, and the pure correctness of Louis
XIV.’s age was not likely to endure his barbarous innovations and false
taste.[1190] Balzac not long afterwards turns his pedantry into
ridicule, and admitting the abundance of the stream, adds that it was
turbid.[1191] In later times more justice has been done to the spirit
and imagination of this poet, without repealing the sentence against his
style.[1192]
[1188] Vol. iv. p. 135.
[1189] Geschichte der Poësie, v. 214.
[1190] Goujet, 245. Malherbe scratched out about half from his copy of
Ronsard giving his reasons in the margin. Racan, one day looking
over this, asked whether he approved what he had not effaced. Not a
bit more, replied Malherbe, than the rest.
[1191] Encore aujourd’hui il est admiré par les trois quarts du
parlement de Paris, et géneralement par les autres parlemens de
France. L’université et les Jesuites tiennent encore son part
contre la cour, et contre l’académie.... Ce n’est pas un poëte bien
entier, c’est le commencement et la matière d’un poëte. On voit,
dans ses œuvres, des parties naissantes, et a demi animées, d’un
corps qui se forme, et qui se fait, mais qui n’a garde d’estre
achevé. C’est une grande source, il faut l’avouer; mais c’est une
source troublée et boueuse; une source, où non seulement il y a
moins d’eau que de limon, mais où l’ordure empêche de couler l’eau.
Œuvres de Balzac, i. 670, and Goujet ubi supra.
[1192] La Harpe, Biogr. Univ.
|Other French poets.|
51. The remaining stars of the Pleiad, except perhaps Bellay, sometimes
called the French Ovid, and whose “Regrets,” or lamentations for his
absence from France during a residence at Rome, are almost as querulous,
if not quite so reasonable, as those of his prototype on the
Ister,[1193] seem scarce worthy of particular notice; for Jodelle, the
founder of the stage in France, has deserved much less credit as a poet,
and fell into the fashionable absurdity of making French out of Greek.
Raynouard bestows some eulogy on Baif.[1194] Those who came afterwards
were sometimes imitators of Ronsard, and, like most imitators of a
faulty manner, far more pedantic and far-fetched than himself. An
unintelligible refinement, that every nation in Europe seems in
succession to have admitted into its poetry, has consigned much then
written in France to oblivion. As large a proportion of the French verse
in this period seems to be amatory as of the Italian; and the Italian
style is sometimes followed. But a simpler and more lively turn of
language, though without the naïveté of Marot, often distinguishes these
compositions. These pass the bounds of decency not seldom; a privilege
which seems in Italy to have been reserved for certain Fescennine
metres, and is not indulged to the solemnity of the sonnet or canzone.
The Italian language is ill-adapted to the epigram, in which the French
succeed so well.[1195]
[1193] Goujet, xii. 128. Augis.
[1194] “Baif is one of the poets who, in my opinion, have happily
contributed by their example to fix the rules of our
versification.” Journal des Savans, Feb. 1825.
[1195] Goujet devotes three volumes, the twelfth, thirteenth, and
fourteenth, of his Bibliothèque Française, to the poets of these
fifty years. Bouterwek and La Harpe have touched only on a very few
names. In the Recueil des Anciens Poëtes, the extracts from them
occupy about a volume and a half.
|Du Bartas.|
52. A few may be selected from the numerous versifiers under the sons of
Henry II. Amadis Jamyn, the pupil of Ronsard, was reckoned by his
contemporaries almost a rival, and is more natural, less inflated and
emphatic than his master.[1196] This praise is by no means due to a more
celebrated poet, Du Bartas. His productions, which are numerous, unlike
those of his contemporaries, turn mostly upon sacred history; but his
poem on the Creation, called La Semaine, is that which obtained most
reputation, and by which alone he is now known. The translation by
Silvester has rendered it in some measure familiar to the readers of our
old poetry; and attempts have been made, not without success, to show
that Milton had been diligent in picking jewels from this mass of bad
taste and bad writing. Du Bartas, in his style, was a disciple of
Ronsard; he affects words derived from the ancient languages, or, if
founded on analogy, yet without precedent, and has as little naturalness
or dignity in his images as purity in his idiom. But his imagination,
though extravagant, is vigorous and original.[1197]
[1196] Goujet, xiii. 229. Biogr. Univ.
[1197] Goujet, xiii. 304. The Semaine of Du Bartas was printed thirty
times within six years, and translated into Latin, Italian, German,
and Spanish, as well as English. Id. 312, on the authority of La
Croix du Maine.
Du Bartas, according to a French writer of the next century, used
methods of exciting his imagination which I recommend to the
attention of young poets. L’on dit en France, que Du Bartas
auparavant que de faire cette belle description de cheval ou il a
si bien rencontré, s’enfermoit quelquefois dans une chambre, et se
mettant à quatre pattes, souffloit, hennissoit, gambadoit, tirait
des ruades, alloit l’amble, le trot, le galop, â courbette, et
tachoit par toutes sortes de moyens à bien contrefaire le cheval.
Naudé’s Considérations sur les Coups d’Estat. p. 47.
|Pibrac; Desportes.|
53. Pibrac, a magistrate of great integrity, obtained an extraordinary
reputation by his quatrains; a series of moral tetrastichs in the style
of Theognis. These first appeared in 1574, fifty in number, and were
augmented to 126 in later editions. They were continually republished in
the seventeenth century, and translated into many European and even
oriental languages. It cannot be wonderful that, in the change of taste
and manners, they have ceased to be read.[1198] An imitation of the
sixth satire of Horace, by Nicolas Rapin, printed in the collection of
Auguis is good and in very pure style.[1199] Philippe Desportes somewhat
later chose a better school than that of Ronsard; he rejected its
pedantry and affectation, and by the study of Tibullus, as well as by
his natural genius, gave a tenderness and grace to the poetry of love
which those pompous versifiers had never sought. He has been esteemed
the precursor of a better æra; and his versification is rather less
lawless,[1200] according to La Harpe, than that of his predecessors.
[1198] Goujet, xii. 266. Biogr. Univ.
[1199] Recueil des Poëtes, v. 361.
[1200] Goujet, xiv. 63. La Harpe. Auguis, v. 343-377.
|French metre and versification.|
54. The rules of metre became gradually established. Few writers of this
period neglect the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes;[1201]
but the open vowel will be found in several of the earlier. Du Bartas
almost affects the _enjambement_, or continuation of the sense beyond
the couplet; and even Desportes does not avoid it. Their metres are
various; the Alexandrine, if so we may call it, or verse of twelve
syllables, was occasionally adopted by Ronsard, and in time displaced
the old verse of ten syllables, which became appropriated to the lighter
style. The sonnets, as far as I have observed, are regular; and this
form, which had been very little known in France, after being introduced
by Jodelle and Ronsard, became one of the most popular modes of
composition.[1202] Several attempts were made to naturalise the Latin
metres; but this pedantic innovation could not long have success.
Specimens of it may be found in Pasquier.[1203]
[1201] Grevin, about 1558, is an exception. Goujet, xii. 159.
[1202] Bouterwek, v. 212.
[1203] Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 11. Baif has passed for the
inventor of this foolish art in France, which was more common there
than in England. But Prosper Marchand ascribes a translation of the
Iliad and Odyssey into regular French hexameters to one Moysset, of
whom nothing is known; on no better authority, however, than a
vague passage of d’Aubigné, who “remembered to have seen such a
book sixty years ago.” Though Mousset may be imaginary, he
furnishes an article to Marchand, who brings together a good deal
of learning as to the Latinized French metres of the sixteenth
century. Dictionnaire Historique.
Passerat, Ronsard, Nicolas Rapin, and Pasquier, tried their hands
in this style. Rapin improved upon it by rhyming in Sapphics. The
following stanzas are from his ode on the death of Ronsard:--
Vous que les ruisseaux d’Helicon frequentez,
Vous que les jardins solitaires hantez,
Et le fonds des bois, curieux de choisir
L’ombre et le loisir.
Qui vivant bien loin de la fange et du bruit,
Et de ces grandeurs que le peuple poursuit,
Estimez les vers que la muse apres vous
Trempe de miel doux.
Notre grand Ronsard, de ce monde sorti,
Les efforts derniers de la Parque a senti;
Ses faveurs n’ont pu le garantir enfin
Contre le destin, &c. &c.
Pasquier, ubi supra.
|General character of French poetry.|
55. It may be said, perhaps, of French poetry in general, but at least
in this period, that it deviates less from a certain standard than any
other. It is not often low, as may be imputed to the earlier writers,
because a peculiar style, removed from common speech, and supposed to be
classical, was a condition of satisfying the critics; it is not often
obscure, at least in syntax, as the Italian sonnet is apt to be, because
the genius of the language and the habits of society demanded
perspicuity. But it seldom delights us by a natural sentiment or
unaffected grace of diction, because both one and the other were
fettered by conventional rules. The monotony of amorous song is more
wearisome, if that be possible, than among the Italians.
|German poetry.|
56. The characteristics of German verse impressed upon it by the
meister-singers still remained, though the songs of those fraternities
seem to have ceased. It was chiefly didactic or religious, often
satirical, and employing the veil of apologue. Luther, Hans Sachs, and
other more obscure names are counted among the fabulists; but the most
successful was Burcard Waldis, whose fables, partly from Æsop, partly
original, were first published in 1548. The Froschmauseler of
Rollenhagen, in 1545, is in a similar style of political and moral
apologue with some liveliness of description. Fischart is another of the
moral satirists, but extravagant in style and humour, resembling
Rabelais, of whose romance he gave a free translation. One of his poems,
Die Gluckhafte Schiff, is praised by Bouterwek for beautiful
descriptions and happy inventions; but in general he seems to be the
Skelton of Germany. Many German ballads belong to this period, partly
taken from the old tales of chivalry: in these the style is humble, with
no poetry except that of invention, which is not their own; yet they are
true-hearted and unaffected, and better than what the next age
produced.[1204]
[1204] Bouterwek, vol. ix. Heinsius, vol. iv.
SECT. IV.--ON ENGLISH POETRY.
_Paradise of Dainty Devices--Sackville--Gascoyne--Spenser’s Shepherd’s
Kalendar--Improvement in Poetry--England’s Helicon--Sydney--Shakspeare’s
Poems--Poets near the Close of the Century--Translations--Scots and
English Ballads--Spenser’s Faery Queen._
|Paradise of Dainty Devices.|
57. The poems of Wyatt and Surrey with several more first appeared in
1557, and were published in a little book, entitled Tottel’s
Miscellanies. But as both of these belonged to the reign of Henry VIII.
their poetry has come already under our review. It is probable that Lord
Vaux’s short pieces, which are next to those of Surrey and Wyatt in
merit, were written before the middle of the century. Some of these are
published in Tottel, and others in a scarce collection, the first
edition of which was in 1576, quaintly named, The Paradise of Dainty
Devices. The poems in this volume, as in that of Tottel, are not coeval
with its publication; it has been supposed to represent the age of Mary,
full as much as that of Elizabeth, and one of the chief contributors, if
not framers of the collection, Richard Edwards, died in 1566. Thirteen
poems are by Lord Vaux, who certainly did not survive the reign of Mary.
|Character of this collection.|
58. We are indebted to Sir Egerton Brydges for the republication, in his
British Bibliographer, of the Paradise of Dainty Devices, of which,
though there had been eight editions, it is said that not above six
copies existed.[1205] The poems are almost all short, and by more nearly
thirty than twenty different authors. “They do not, it must be
admitted,” says their editor, “belong to the higher classes; they are of
the moral and didactic kind. In their subject there is too little
variety, as they deal very generally in the commonplaces of ethics, such
as the fickleness and caprices of love, the falsehood and instability of
friendship, and the vanity of all human pleasures. But many of these are
often expressed with a vigour which would do credit to any æra.... If my
partiality does not mislead me, there is in most of these short pieces
some of that indescribable attraction which springs from the colouring
of the heart. The charm of imagery is wanting, but the precepts
inculcated seem to flow from the feelings of an overloaded bosom.”
Edwards, he considers, probably with justice, as the best of the
contributors, and Lord Vaux the next. We should be inclined to give as
high a place to William Hunnis, were his productions all equal to one
little poem;[1206] but too often he falls into trivial morality and a
ridiculous excess of alliteration. The amorous poetry is the best in
this Paradise; it is not imaginative or very graceful, or exempt from
the false taste of antithetical conceits, but sometimes natural and
pleasing; the serious pieces are in general very heavy, yet there is a
dignity and strength in some of the devotional strains. They display the
religious earnestness of that age with a kind of austere philosophy in
their views of life. Whatever indeed be the subject, a tone of sadness
reigns through this misnamed Paradise of Daintiness, as it does through
all the English poetry of this particular age. It seems as if the
confluence of the poetic melancholy of the Petrarchists with the
reflective seriousness of the Reformation overpowered the lighter
sentiments of the soul; and some have imagined, I know not how justly,
that the persecutions of Mary’s reign contributed to this effect.
[1205] Beloe’s Anecdotes of Literature, vol. v.
[1206] This song is printed in Campbell’s Specimens of English Poets,
vol. i. p. 117. It begins,
“When first mine eyes did view and mark.”
The little poem of Edwards, called Amantium Iræ, has often been
reprinted in modern collections, and is reckoned by Brydges one of
the most beautiful in the language. But hardly any light poem of
this early period is superior to some lines addressed to Isabella
Markham by Sir John Harrington, of the date of 1564. If these are
genuine, and I know not how to dispute it, they are as polished as
any written at the close of the Queen’s reign. These are not in the
Paradise of Dainty Devices.
|Sackville’s induction.|
59. But at the close of that dark period, while bigotry might be
expected to render the human heart torpid, and the English nation seemed
too fully absorbed in religious and political discontent, to take much
relish in literary amusements, one man shone out for an instant in the
higher walks of poetry. This was Thomas Sackville, many years
afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and High Treasurer of England, thus withdrawn
from the haunts of the muses to a long and honourable career of active
life. The Mirrour of Magistrates, published in 1559, is a collection of
stories by different authors, on the plan of Boccaccio’s prose work, De
Casibus virorum illustrium, recounting the misfortunes and reverses of
men eminent in English history. It was designed to form a series of
dramatic soliloquies united in one interlude.[1207] Sackville, who seems
to have planned the scheme, wrote an Induction, or prologue, and also
one of the stories, that of the first Duke of Buckingham. The Induction
displays best his poetical genius; it is, like much earlier poetry, a
representation of allegorical personages, but with a fertility of
imagination, vividness of description, and strength of language, which
not only leave his predecessors far behind, but may fairly be compared
with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser. Sackville’s
Induction forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to
the Faery Queen. It would certainly be vain to look in Chaucer, wherever
Chaucer is original, for the grand creations of Sackville’s fancy, yet
we should never find any one who would rate Sackville above Chaucer. The
strength of an eagle is not to be measured only by the height of his
place, but by the time that he continues on the wing. Sackville’s
Induction consists of a few hundred lines; and even in these there is a
monotony of gloom and sorrow, which prevents us from wishing it to be
longer. It is truly styled by Campbell a landscape on which the sun
never shines. Chaucer is various, flexible, and observant of all things
in outward nature, or in the heart of man. But Sackville is far above
the frigid elegance of Surrey; and, in the first days of the virgin
reign, is the herald of that splendour in which it was to close.
[1207] Warton, iv. 40. A copious account of the Mirrour for Magistrates
occupies the forty-eighth and three following sections of the
History of Poetry, p. 33-105. In this Warton has introduced rather
a long analysis of the Inferno of Dante, which he seems to have
thought little known to the English public, as in that age, I
believe, was the case.
|Inferiority of poets in early years of Elizabeth.|
|Gascoyne.|
60. English poetry was not speedily animated by the example of
Sackville. His genius stands absolutely alone in the age to which as a
poet he belongs. Not that there was any deficiency in the number of
versifiers; the muses were honoured by the frequency, if not by the
dignity, of their worshippers. A different sentence will be found in
some books; and it has become common to elevate the Elizabethan age in
one undiscriminating panegyric. For wise counsellors, indeed, and acute
politicians, we could not perhaps extol one part of that famous reign at
the expense of another. Cecil and Bacon, Walsingham, Smith, and Sadler,
belong to the earlier days of the queen. But in a literary point of
view, the contrast is great between the first and second moiety of her
four and forty years. We have seen this already in other subjects than
poetry; and in that we may appeal to such parts of the Mirrour of
Magistrates as are not written by Sackville, to the writings of
Churchyard, or to those of Gouge and Turberville. These writers scarcely
venture to leave the ground, or wander in the fields of fancy. They even
abstain from the ordinary commonplaces of verse, as if afraid that the
reader should distrust or misinterpret their images. The first who
deserves to be mentioned as an exception is George Gascoyne, whose Steel
Glass, published in 1576, is the earliest instance of English satire,
and has strength and sense enough to deserve respect. Chalmers has
praised it highly. “There is a vein of sly sarcasm in this piece which
appears to me to be original; and his intimate knowledge of mankind
enabled him to give a more curious picture of the dress, manners,
amusements, and follies of the times, than we meet with in almost any
other author. His Steel Glass is among the first specimens of blank
verse in our language.” This blank verse, however, is but indifferently
constructed. Gascoyne’s long poem, called The Fruits of War, is in the
doggrel style of his age; and the general commendations of Chalmers on
this poet seem rather hyperbolical. But his minor poems, especially one
called The Arraignment of a Lover, have much spirit and gaiety;[1208]
and we may leave him a respectable place among the Elizabethan
versifiers.
[1208] Ellis’s Specimens. Campbell’s Specimens, ii. 146.
|Spenser’s Shepherd’s Kalendar.|
61. An epoch was made, if we may draw an inference from the language of
contemporaries, by the publication of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Kalendar in
1579.[1209] His primary idea, that of adapting a pastoral to every month
of the year, was pleasing and original, though he has frequently
neglected to observe the season, even when it was most abundant in
appropriate imagery. But his Kalendar is, in another respect, original,
at least when compared with the pastoral writings of that age. This
species of composition had become so much the favourite of courts, that
no language was thought to suit it but that of courtiers, which, with
all its false beauties of thought and expression, was transferred to the
mouths of shepherds. A striking instance of this had lately been shown
in the Aminta; and it was a proof of Spenser’s judgment, as well as
genius, that he struck out a new line of pastoral, far more natural, and
therefore more pleasing, so far as imitation of nature is the source of
poetical pleasure, instead of vieing, in our more harsh and uncultivated
language, with the consummate elegance of Tasso. It must be admitted,
however, that he fell too much into the opposite extreme, and gave a
Doric rudeness to his dialogue, which is a little repulsive to our
taste. The dialect of Theocritus is musical to our ears, and free from
vulgarity; praises which we cannot bestow on the uncouth provincial
rusticity of Spenser. He has been less justly censured on another
account, for intermingling allusions to the political history and
religious differences of his own times; and an ingenious critic has
asserted that the description of the grand and beautiful objects of
nature, with well-selected scenes of rural life, real but not coarse,
constitute the only proper materials of pastoral poetry. These
limitations, however, seem little conformable to the practice of poets
or the taste of mankind; and if Spenser has erred in the allegorical
part of his pastorals, he has done so in company with most of those who
have tuned the shepherd’s pipe. Several of Virgil’s Eclogues, and
certainly the best, have a meaning beyond the simple songs of the
hamlet; and it was notorious that the Portuguese and Spanish pastoral
romances, so popular in Spenser’s age, teemed with delineations of real
character, and sometimes were the mirrors of real story. In fact, mere
pastoral must soon become insipid, unless it borrows something from
active life or elevated philosophy. The most interesting parts of the
Shepherd’s Kalendar are of this description; for Spenser has not
displayed the powers of his own imagination so strongly as we might
expect in pictures of natural scenery. This poem has spirit and beauty
in many passages; but is not much read in the present day, nor does it
seem to be approved by modern critics. It was otherwise formerly. Webbe,
in his Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, calls Spenser “the rightest
English poet he ever read,” and thinks he would have surpassed
Theocritus and Virgil, “if the coarseness of our speech had been no
greater impediment to him, than their pure native tongues were to them.”
And Drayton says, “Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the
immortality of his name, had he only given us his Shepherd’s Kalendar, a
masterpiece, if any.”[1210]
[1209] The Shepherd’s Kalendar was printed anonymously. It is ascribed
to Sydney by Whetstone in a monody on his death in 1586. But Webbe,
in his Discourse on English Poesie, published the same year,
mentions Spenser by name.
[1210] Preface to Drayton’s Pastorals.
|Sydney’s character of contemporary poets.|
62. Sir Philip Sydney, in his Defence of Poesie, which may have been
written at any time between 1581 and his death in 1586, laments that
“poesy thus embraced in all other places, should only find in our time a
bad welcome in England;” and, after praising Sackville, Surrey, and
Spenser for the Shepherd’s Kalendar, does not “remember to have seen
many more that have poetical sinews in them. For proof whereof, let but
most of the verses be put into prose, and then ask the meaning, and it
will be found that one verse did but beget another, without ordering at
the first what should be at the last; which becomes a confused mass of
words, with a tinkling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with
reason.... Truly many of such writings as come under the banner of
irresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they
were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches as men that had rather
read lovers’ writings, and so caught up certain swelling phrases, than
that in truth they feel those passions.”
|Improvement soon after this time.|
63. It cannot be denied that some of these blemishes are by no means
unusual in the writers of the Elizabethan age, as in truth they are
found also in much other poetry of many countries. But a change seems to
have come over the spirit of English poetry soon after 1580. Sydney,
Raleigh, Lodge, Breton, Marlowe, Greene, Watson, are the chief
contributors to a collection called England’s Helicon, published in
1600, and comprising many of the fugitive pieces of the last twenty
years. Davidson’s Poetical Rhapsody, in 1602, is a miscellany of the
same class. A few other collections are known to have existed,
but are still more scarce than these. England’s Helicon, by far the most
important, has been reprinted in the same volume of the British
Bibliographer as the Paradise of Dainty Devices. In this juxtaposition
the difference of their tone is very perceptible. Love occupies by far
the chief portion of the later miscellany; and love no longer pining and
melancholy, but sportive and boastful. Every one is familiar with the
beautiful song of Marlowe, “Come live with me and be my love;” and with
the hardly less beautiful answer ascribed to Raleigh. Lodge has ten
pieces in this collection, and Breton eight. These are generally full of
beauty, grace, and simplicity; and, while in reading the productions of
Edwards and his coadjutors every sort of allowance is to be made, and we
can only praise a little at intervals, these lyrics, twenty or thirty
years later, are among the best in our language. The conventional tone
is that of pastoral; and thus, if they have less of the depth sometimes
shown in serious poetry, they have less also of obscurity and false
refinement.[1211]
[1211] Ellis, in the second volume of his Specimens of English Poets,
has taken largely from this collection. It must be owned that his
good taste in selection gives a higher notion of the poetry of this
age than, on the whole, it would be found to deserve; yet there is
so much of excellence in England’s Helicon, that he has been
compelled to omit many pieces of great merit.
|Relaxation of moral austerity.|
64. We may easily perceive in the literature of the later period of the
queen, what our biographical knowledge confirms, that much of the
austerity characteristic of her earlier years had vanished away. The
course of time, the progress of vanity, the prevalent dislike, above
all, of the Puritans, avowed enemies of gaiety, concurred to this
change. The most distinguished courtiers, Raleigh, Essex, Blount, and we
must add Sydney, were men of brilliant virtues, but not without license
of morals; while many of the wits and poets, such as Nash, Greene,
Peele, Marlowe, were notoriously of very dissolute lives.
|Serious poetry.|
65. The graver strains, however, of religion and philosophy were still
heard in verse. The Soul’s Errand, printed anonymously in Davison’s
Rhapsody, and ascribed by Ellis, probably without reason, to Silvester,
is characterised by strength, condensation, and simplicity.[1212] And we
might rank in a respectable place among these English poets, though I
think he has been lately overrated, one whom the jealous law too
prematurely deprived of life, Robert Southwell, executed as a seminary
priest in 1591, under one of those persecuting statutes which even the
traitorous restlessness of the English Jesuits cannot excuse.
Southwell’s poetry wears a deep tinge of gloom, which seems to presage a
catastrophe too usual to have been unexpected. It is, as may be
supposed, almost wholly religious; the shorter pieces are the
best.[1213]
[1212] Campbell reckons this, and I think justly, among the best pieces
of the Elizabethan age. Brydges gives it to Raleigh without
evidence, and we may add, without probability. It is found in
manuscripts, according to Mr. Campbell, of the date of 1593. Such
poems as this could only be written by a man who had seen and
thought much; while the ordinary Latin and Italian verses of this
age might be written by any one who had a knack of imitation and a
good ear.
[1213] I am not aware that Southwell has gained anything by a
republication of his entire poems in 1817. Headley and Ellis
had culled the best specimens. St. Peter’s Complaint, the longest
of his poems, is wordy and tedious; and in reading the volume I
found scarce anything of merit which I had not seen before.
|Poetry of Sydney.|
66. Astrophel and Stella, a series of amatory poems by Sir Philip
Sydney, though written nearly ten years before, was published in 1591.
These songs and sonnets recount the loves of Sydney and Lady Rich,
sister of Lord Essex; and it is rather a singular circumstance that, in
her own and her husband’s lifetime, this ardent courtship of a married
woman should have been deemed fit for publication. Sydney’s passion
seems indeed to have been unsuccessful, but far enough from being
platonic.[1214] Astrophel and Stella is too much disfigured by conceits,
but is in some places very beautiful; and it is strange that Chalmers,
who reprinted Turberville and Warner, should have left Sydney out of his
collection of British poets. A poem by the writer just mentioned,
Warner, with the quaint title, Albion’s England, 1586, has at least the
equivocal merit of great length. It is rather legendary than historical;
some passages are pleasing, but it is not a work of genius, and
the style, though natural, seldom rises above that of prose.
[1214] Godwin having several years since made some observations on
Sydney’s amour with Lady Rich, a circumstance which such
biographers as Dr. Zouch take good care to suppress, a gentleman
who published an edition of Sydney’s Defence of Poetry thought fit
to indulge in recriminating attacks on Godwin himself. It is
singular that men of sense and education should persist in fancying
that such arguments are likely to convince any dispassionate reader.
|Epithalamium of Spenser.|
67. Spenser’s Epithalamium on his own marriage, written perhaps in 1594,
is of a far higher mood than anything we have named. It is a strain
redolent of a bridegroom’s joy, and of a poet’s fancy. The English
language seems to expand itself with a copiousness unknown before, while
he pours forth the varied imagery of this splendid little poem. I do not
know any other nuptial song, ancient or modern, of equal beauty. It is
an intoxication of ecstacy, ardent, noble, and pure. But it pleased not
heaven that these day dreams of genius and virtue should be undisturbed.
|Poems of Shakspeare.|
68. Shakspeare’s Venus and Adonis appears to have been published in
1593, and his Rape of Lucrece the following year. The redundance of
blossoms in these juvenile effusions of his unbounded fertility
obstructs the reader’s attention, and sometimes almost leads us to give
him credit for less reflection and sentiment than he will be found to
display. The style is flowing, and, in general, more perspicuous than
the Elizabethan poets are wont to be. But I am not sure that they would
betray themselves for the works of Shakspeare, had they been anonymously
published.
|Daniel and Drayton.|
69. In the last decade of this century several new poets came forward.
Samuel Daniel is one of these. His Complaint of Rosamond, and probably
many of his minor poems, belong to this period; and it was also that of
his greatest popularity. On the death of Spenser in 1598, he was thought
worthy to succeed him as poet laureate; and some of his contemporaries
ranked him in the second place; an eminence due rather to the purity of
his language than to its vigour.[1215] Michael Drayton, who first tried
his shepherd’s pipe with some success in the usual style, published his
Baron’s Wars in 1598. They relate to the last years of Edward II., and
conclude with the execution of Mortimer under his son. This poem,
therefore, seems to possess a sufficient unity, and, tried by rules of
criticism might be thought not far removed from the class of epic--a
dignity, however, to which it has never pretended. But in its conduct
Drayton follows history very closely, and we are kept too much in mind
of a common chronicle. Though not very pleasing, however, in its general
effect, this poem, The Barons’ Wars, contains several passages of
considerable beauty, which men of greater renown, especially Milton, who
availed himself largely of all the poetry of the preceding age, have
been willing to imitate.
[1215] British Bibliographer, vol. ii. Headley remarks that Daniel was
spoken of by contemporary critics as the polisher and purifier of
the English language.
|Nosce Teipsum, of Davies.|
70. A more remarkable poem is that of Sir John Davies, afterwards
chief-justice of Ireland, entitled Nosce Teipsum, published in 1600,
usually though rather inaccurately, called, his poem on the Immortality
of the Soul. Perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so
great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer
languid verses will be found. Yet, according to some definitions, the
Nosce Teipsum is wholly unpoetical, inasmuch as it shows no passion and
little fancy. If it reaches the heart at all, it is through the reason.
But since strong argument in terse and correct style fails not to give
us pleasure in prose, it seems strange that it should lose its effect
when it gains the aid of regular metre to gratify the ear and assist the
memory. Lines there are in Davies which far outweigh much of the
descriptive and imaginative poetry of the last two centuries, whether we
estimate them by the pleasure they impart to us, or by the intellectual
vigour they display. Experience has shown that the faculties peculiarly
deemed poetical are frequently exhibited in a considerable degree, but
very few have been able to preserve a perspicuous brevity without
stiffness or pedantry (allowance made for the subject and the times), in
metaphysical reasoning, so successfully as Sir John Davies.
|Satires of Hall, Marston, and Donne.|
71. Hall’s Satires are tolerably known, partly on account of the
subsequent celebrity of the author in a very different province, and
partly from a notion, to which he gave birth by announcing the claim,
that he was the first English satirist. In a general sense of satire, we
have seen that he had been anticipated by Gascoyne; but Hall has more of
the direct Juvenalian invective, which he may have reckoned essential to
that species of poetry. They are deserving of regard in themselves.
Warton has made many extracts from Hall’s Satires; he praises in them “a
classical precision, to which English poetry had yet rarely attained;”
and calls the versification “equally energetic and elegant.”[1216]
The former epithet may be admitted; but elegance is hardly compatible
with what Warton owns to be the chief fault of Hall, “his obscurity,
arising from a remote phraseology, constrained combinations, unfamiliar
allusions, elliptical apostrophes, and abruptness of expression.” Hall
is in fact not only so harsh and rugged, that he cannot be read with
much pleasure, but so obscure in very many places that he cannot be
understood at all, his lines frequently bearing no visible connection in
sense or grammar with their neighbours. The stream is powerful, but
turbid and often choked.[1217] Marston and Donne may be added to Hall in
this style of poetry, as belonging to the sixteenth century, though the
satires of the latter were not published till long afterwards. With as
much obscurity as Hall, he has a still more inharmonious versification,
and not nearly equal vigour.
[1216] Hist, of English Poetry, iv. 338.
[1217] Hall’s Satires are praised by Campbell, as well as Warton, full
as much, in my opinion, as they deserve. Warton has compared
Marston with Hall, and concludes that the latter is more “elegant,
exact, and elaborate.” More so than his rival he may by possibility
be esteemed; but these three epithets cannot be predicated of his
satires in any but a relative sense.
|Modulation of English verse.|
72. The roughness of these satirical poets was perhaps studiously
affected; for it was not much in unison with the general tone of the
age. It requires a good deal of care to avoid entirely the combinations
of consonants that clog our language; nor have Drayton or Spenser always
escaped this embarrassment. But in the lighter poetry of the queen’s
last years, a remarkable sweetness of modulation has always been
recognised. This has sometimes been attributed to the general fondness
for music. It is at least certain, that some of our old madrigals are as
beautiful in language as they are in melody. Several collections were
published in the reign of Elizabeth.[1218] And it is evident that the
regard to the capacity of his verse for marriage with music, that was
before the poet’s mind, would not only polish his metre, but give it
grace and sentiment, while it banished also the pedantry, the
antithesis, the prolixity, which had disfigured the earlier lyric poems.
Their measures became more various: though the quatrain, alternating by
eight and six syllables, was still very popular, we find the trochaic
verse of seven, sometimes ending with a double rhyme, usual towards the
end of the queen’s reign. Many of these occur in England’s Helicon, and
in the poems of Sydney.
[1218] Morley’s Musical Airs, 1594, and another collection in 1597,
contain some pretty songs. British Bibliographer, i. 342. A few of
these madrigals will also be found in Mr. Campbell’s Specimens.
|Translation of Homer by Chapman.|
73. The translations of ancient poets by Phaier, Golding, Stanyhurst,
and several more, do not challenge our attention; most of them, in fact,
being very wretched performances.[1219] Marlowe, a more celebrated name,
did not, as has commonly been said, translate the poem of Hero and
Leander ascribed to Musæus, but expanded it into what he calls six
Sestiads on the same subject; a paraphrase, in every sense of the
epithet, of the most licentious kind. This he left incomplete, and it
was finished by Chapman.[1220] But the most remarkable productions of
this kind are the Iliad of Chapman, and the Jerusalem of Fairfax, both
printed in 1600; the former, however, containing in that edition but
fifteen books, to which the rest was subsequently added. Pope, after
censuring the haste, negligence, and fustian language of Chapman,
observes “that which is to be allowed him, and which very much
contributed to cover his defects, is a free daring spirit that animates
his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer
himself would have written before he arrived at years of discretion.” He
might have added, that Chapman’s translation, with all its defects, is
often exceedingly Homeric; a praise which Pope himself seldom attained.
Chapman deals abundantly in compound epithets, some of which have
retained their place; his verse is rhymed, of fourteen syllables, which
corresponds to the hexameter better than the decasyllabic couplet; he is
often uncouth, often unmusical, and often low; but the spirited and
rapid flow of his metre makes him respectable to lovers of poetry.
Waller, it is said, could not read him without transport. It must be
added, that he is an unfaithful translator, and interpolated much,
besides the general redundancy of his style.[1221]
[1219] Warton, chap. liv., has gone very laboriously into this subject.
[1220] Marlowe’s poem is republished in the Restituta of Sir Egerton
Brydges. It is singular that Warton should have taken it for a
translation of Musæus.
[1221] Warton, iv. 269. Retrospective Review, vol. iii. See also a very
good comparison of the different translations of Homer, in
Blackwood’s Magazine for 1831 and 1832, where Chapman comes in for
his due.
|Tasso, Fairfax.|
74. Fairfax’s Tasso has been more praised, and is better known.
Campbell has called it, in rather strong terms, “one of the glories of
Elizabeth’s reign.” It is not the first version of the Jerusalem, one
very literal and prosaic having been made by Carew, in 1594.[1222] That
of Fairfax, if it does not represent the grace of its original, and
deviates also too much from its sense, is by no means deficient in
spirit and vigour. It has been considered as one of the earliest works,
in which the obsolete English, which had not been laid aside in the days
of Sackville, and which Spenser affected to preserve, gave way to a
style not much differing, at least in point of single words and phrases,
from that of the present age. But this praise is equally due to Daniel,
to Drayton, and to others of the later Elizabethan poets. The
translation of Ariosto by Sir John Harrington, in 1591, is much
inferior.
[1222] In the third volume of the Retrospective Review, these
translations are compared, and it is shown that Carew is far
more literal than Fairfax, who has taken great liberties with his
original. Extracts from Carew will also be found in the British
Bibliographer, i. 30. They are miserably bad.
|Employment of ancient measures.|
75. An injudicious endeavour to substitute the Latin metres for those
congenial to our language, met with no more success than it deserved;
unless it may be called success, that Sydney, and even Spenser, were for
a moment seduced into approbation of it. Gabriel Harvey, best now
remembered as the latter’s friend, recommended the adoption of
hexameters in some letters which passed between them, and Spenser
appears to have concurred. Webbe, a few years afterwards, a writer of
little taste or ear for poetry, supported the same scheme, but may be
said to have avenged the wrong of English verse upon our great poet, by
travestying the Shepherd’s Kalendar into Sapphics.[1223] Campion, in
1602, still harps upon this foolish pedantry; many instances of which
may be found during the Elizabethan period. It is well known that in
German the practice has been in some measure successful, through the
example of a distinguished poet, and through translations from the
ancients in measures closely corresponding with their own. In this there
is doubtless the advantage of presenting a truer mirror of the original.
But as most imitations of Latin measures, in German or English, begin by
violating their first principle, which assigns an invariable value in
time to the syllables of every word, and produce a chaos of false
quantities, it seems as if they could only disgust any one acquainted
with classical versification. In the early English hexameters of the
period before us, we sometimes perceive an intention to arrange long and
short syllables according to the analogies of the Latin tongue. But this
would soon be found impracticable in our own, which, abounding in harsh
terminations, cannot long observe the law of position.
[1223] Webbe’s success was not inviting to the Latinists. Thus in the
second Eclogue of Virgil, for the beautiful lines--
At mecum raucis, tua dum vestigia lustro,
Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis,
we have this delectable hexametric version:--
But by the scorched bank-sides i’ thy footsteps still I go
plodding:
Hedge-rows hot do resound with grasshops mournfully squeaking.
|Number of poets in this age.|
76. It was said by Ellis, that nearly one hundred names of poets
belonging to the reign of Elizabeth might be enumerated, besides many
that have left no memorial except their songs. This however was but a
moderate computation. Drake has made a list of more than two hundred,
some few of whom, perhaps, do not strictly belong to the Elizabethan
period.[1224] But many of these are only known by short pieces in such
miscellaneous collections as have been mentioned. Yet in the entire bulk
of poetry, England could not, perhaps, bear comparison with Spain or
France, to say nothing of Italy. She had come in fact much later to
cultivate poetry as a general accomplishment. And, consequently, we find
much less of the mechanism of style, than in the contemporaneous verse
of other languages. The English sonnetteers deal less in customary
epithets and conventional modes of expression. Every thought was to be
worked out in new terms, since the scanty precedents of earlier
versifiers did not supply them. This was evidently the cause of many
blemishes in the Elizabethan poetry; of much that was false in taste,
much that was either too harsh and extravagant, or too humble, and of
more that was so obscure as to defy all interpretation. But it saved
also that monotonous equability that often wearies us in more polished
poetry. There is more pleasure, more sense of sympathy with another
mind, in the perusal even of Gascoyne or Edwards, than in that of many
French and Italian versifiers whom their contemporaries extolled. This
is all that we can justly say in their favour; for any comparison of the
Elizabethan poetry, save Spenser’s alone, with that of the nineteenth
century would show an extravagant predilection for the mere name or
dress of antiquity.
[1224] Shakspeare and his Times, i. 674. Even this catalogue is
probably incomplete; it includes, of course, translators.
|Scots and English ballads.|
77. It would be a great omission to neglect in any review of the
Elizabethan poetry, that extensive, though anonymous class, the Scots
and English ballads. The very earliest of these have been adverted to in
our account of the fifteenth century. They became much more numerous in
the present. The age of many may be determined by historical or other
allusions; and from these, availing ourselves of similarity of style, we
may fix, with some probability, the date of such as furnish no distinct
evidence. This however is precarious, because the language has often
been modernised, and passing for some time by oral tradition, they are
frequently not exempt from marks of interpolation. But, upon the whole,
the reigns of Mary and James VI., from the middle to the close of the
sixteenth century, must be reckoned the golden age of the Scottish
ballad; and there are many of the corresponding period in England.
78. There can be, I conceive, no question as to the superiority of
Scotland in her ballads. Those of an historic or legendary character,
especially the former, are ardently poetical; the nameless minstrel is
often inspired with an Homeric power of rapid narration, bold
description, lively or pathetic touches of sentiment. They are familiar
to us through several publications, and chiefly through the Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border, by one whose genius these indigenous lays had
first excited, and whose own writings, when the whole civilised world
did homage to his name, never ceased to bear the indelible impress of
the associations that had thus been generated. The English ballads of
the northern border, or perhaps, of the northern counties, come near in
their general character and cast of manners to the Scottish, but, as far
as I have seen, with a manifest inferiority. Those again which belong to
the south, and bear no trace either of the rude manners, or of the wild
superstitions which the bards of Ettrick and Cheviot display, fall
generally into a creeping style, which has exposed the common ballad to
contempt. They are sometimes, nevertheless, not devoid of elegance, and
often pathetic. The best are known through Percy’s Reliques of Ancient
Poetry; a collection singularly heterogeneous, and very unequal in
merit, but from the publication of which in 1774, some of high name have
dated the revival of a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public
mind.
|The Faery Queen.|
79. We have reserved to the last the chief boast of this period, the
Faery Queen. Spenser, as is well known, composed the greater part of his
poem in Ireland, on the banks of his favourite Mulla. The first three
books were published in 1590; the last three did not appear till 1596.
It is a perfectly improbable supposition, that the remaining part, or
six books required for the completion of his design, have been lost. The
short interval before the death of this great poet was filled up by
calamities sufficient to wither the fertility of any mind.
|Superiority of the first book.|
80. The first book of the Faery Queen is a complete poem, and far from
requiring any continuation, is rather injured by the useless
reappearance of its hero in the second. It is generally admitted to be
the finest of the six. In no other is the allegory so clearly conceived
by the poet, or so steadily preserved, yet with a disguise so delicate,
that no one is offended by that servile setting forth of a moral meaning
we frequently meet with in allegorical poems; and the reader has the
gratification that good writing in works of fiction always produces,
that of exercising his own ingenuity without perplexing it. That the red
cross knight designates the militant Christian, whom Una, the true
church, loves, whom Duessa, the type of popery, seduces, who is reduced
almost to despair, but rescued by the intervention of Una, and the
assistance of Faith, Hope, and Charity, is what no one feels any
difficulty in acknowledging, but what every one may easily read the poem
without perceiving or remembering. In an allegory conducted with such
propriety, and concealed or revealed with so much art, there can surely
be nothing to repel our taste; and those who read the first book of the
Faery Queen without pleasure, must seek (what others perhaps will be at
no loss to discover for them), a different cause for their indifference,
than the tediousness or insipidity of allegorical poetry. Every canto of
this book teems with the choicest beauties of imagination; he came to it
in the freshness of his genius, which shines throughout with an
uniformity it does not always afterwards maintain, unsullied by
flattery, unobstructed by pedantry, and unquenched by languor.
|The succeeding books.|
81. In the following books, we have much less allegory; for the
personification of abstract qualities, though often confounded with it,
does not properly belong to that class of composition: it requires a
covert sense beneath an apparent fable, such as the first book contains.
But of this I do not discover many proofs in the second or third, the
legends of Temperance and Chastity; they are contrived to exhibit these
virtues and their opposite vices, but with little that is not obvious
upon the surface. In the fourth and sixth books, there is still less;
but a different species of allegory, the historical, which the
commentators have, with more or less success, endeavoured to trace in
other portions of the poem, breaks out unequivocally in the legend of
Justice, which occupies the fifth. The friend and patron of Spenser, Sir
Arthur Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, is evidently portrayed in Arthegal;
and the latter cantos of this book represent, not always with great
felicity, much of the foreign and domestic history of the times. It is
sufficiently intimated by the poet himself, that his Gloriana, or Faery
Queen, is the type of Elizabeth; and he has given her another
representative in the fair huntress Belphœbe. Spenser’s adulation of
her beauty (at some fifty or sixty years of age), may be extenuated, we
can say no more, by the practice of wise and great men, and by his
natural tendency to clothe the objects of his admiration in the hues of
fancy; but its exaggeration leaves the servility of the Italians far
behind.
|Spenser’s sense of beauty.|
82. It has been justly observed by a living writer of the most ardent
and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty
waters, and has left it for others almost as invidious to praise in
terms of less rapture, as to censure what he has borne along in the
stream of unhesitating eulogy, that “no poet has ever had a more
exquisite sense of the beautiful than Spenser.”[1225] In Virgil and
Tasso this was not less powerful; but even they, even the latter
himself, do not hang with such a tenderness of delight, with such a
forgetful delay, over the fair creations of their fancy. Spenser is not
averse to images that jar on the mind by exciting horror or disgust, and
sometimes his touches are rather too strong; but it is on love and
beauty, on holiness and virtue, that he reposes with all the sympathy of
his soul. The slowly sliding motion of his stanza, “with many a bout of
linked sweetness long drawn out,” beautifully corresponds to the dreamy
enchantment of his description, when Una, or Belphœbe, or Florimel,
or Amoret, are present to his mind. In this varied delineation of female
perfectness, no earlier poet had equalled him; nor, excepting
Shakspeare, has he had, perhaps, any later rival.
[1225] I allude here to a very brilliant series of papers on the Faery
Queen, published in Blackwood’s Magazine during the years 1834 and
1835.
|Compared to Ariosto.|
83. Spenser is naturally compared with Ariosto. “Fierce wars and
faithful loves did moralize the song” of both poets. But in the
constitution of their minds, in the character of their poetry, they were
almost the reverse of each other. The Italian is gay, rapid, ardent; his
pictures shift like the hues of heaven; even while diffuse, he seems to
leave in an instant what he touches, and is prolix by the number, not
the duration, of his images. Spenser is habitually serious; his slow
stanza seems to suit the temper of his genius; he loves to dwell on the
sweetness and beauty which his fancy portrays. The ideal of chivalry,
rather derived from its didactic theory, than from the precedents of
romance, is always before him; his morality is pure and even stern, with
nothing of the libertine tone of Ariosto. He worked with far worse tools
than the bard of Ferrara, with a language not quite formed, and into
which he rather injudiciously poured an unnecessary archaism, while the
style of his contemporaries was undergoing a rapid change in the
opposite direction. His stanza of nine lines is particularly
inconvenient and languid in narration, where the Italian octave is
sprightly and vigorous; though even this becomes ultimately monotonous
by its regularity, a fault from which only the ancient hexameter and our
blank verse are exempt.
84. Spenser may be justly said to excel Ariosto in originality of
invention, in force and variety of character, in strength and vividness
of conception, in depth of reflection, in fertility of imagination, and
above all, in that exclusively poetical cast of feeling, which discerns
in everything what common minds do not perceive. In the construction and
arrangement of their fable neither deserve much praise; but the siege of
Paris gives the Orlando Furioso, spite of its perpetual shiftings of the
scene, rather more unity in the reader’s apprehension than belongs to
the Faery Queen. Spenser is, no doubt, decidedly inferior in ease and
liveliness of narration, as well as clearness and felicity of language.
But, upon thus comparing the two poets, we have little reason to blush
for our countryman. Yet the fame of Ariosto is spread through Europe,
while Spenser is almost unknown out of England; and even in this age,
when much of our literature is so widely diffused, I have not observed
proofs of much acquaintance with him on the continent.
|Style of Spenser.|
85. The language of Spenser, like that of Shakspeare, is an instrument
manufactured for the sake of the work it was to perform. No other poet
had written like either, though both have had their imitators. It is
rather apparently obsolete by his partiality to certain disused forms,
such as the _y_ before the participle, than from any close resemblance
to the diction of Chaucer or Lydgate.[1226] The enfeebling expletives,
_do_ and _did_, though certainly very common in our early writers, had
never been employed with such an unfortunate predilection as by Spenser.
Their everlasting recurrence is among the great blemishes of his style.
His versification is in many passages beautifully harmonious; but he has
frequently permitted himself, whether for the sake of variety, or from
some other cause, to baulk the ear in the conclusion of a stanza.[1227]
[1226] “Spenser,” says Ben Jonson, “in affecting the ancients writ no
language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil
read Ennius.” This is rather in the sarcastic tone attributed to
Jonson.
[1227] Coleridge, who had a very strong perception of the beauty of
Spenser’s poetry, has observed his alternate alliteration, “which
when well used is a great secret in melody; as _‘sad_ to _see_ her
_sorrowful_ constraint’;--‘on the grass her _dainty_ limbs _did_
lay.’” But I can hardly agree with him when he proceeds to say “it
never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the
result of the necessary movement of the verse.” The artifice seems
often very obvious. I do not also quite understand, or, if I do,
cannot acquiesce in what follows, that “Spenser’s descriptions are
not in the true sense of the word picturesque, but are _composed of
a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams_.” Coleridge’s
Remains, vol. i. p. 93.
|Inferiority of the latter books.|
86. The inferiority of the last three books to the former is surely very
manifest. His muse gives gradual signs of weariness; the imagery becomes
less vivid, the vein of poetical description less rich, the digressions
more frequent and verbose. It is true that the fourth book is full of
beautiful inventions, and contains much admirable poetry; yet even here
we perceive a comparative deficiency in the quantity of excelling
passages, which becomes far more apparent as we proceed, and the last
book falls very short of the interest which the earlier part of the
Faery Queen had excited. There is perhaps less reason than some have
imagined, to regret that Spenser did not complete his original design.
The Faery Queen is already in the class of longest poems. A double
length, especially if, as we may well suspect, the succeeding parts
would have been inferior, might have deterred many readers from the
perusal of what we now possess. It is felt already in Spenser, as it is
perhaps even in Ariosto, when we read much of either, that tales of
knights and ladies, giants and savage men, end in a satiety which no
poetical excellence can overcome. Ariosto, sensible of this intrinsic
defect in the epic romance, has enlivened it by great variety of
incidents, and by much that carries us away from the peculiar tone of
chivalrous manners. The world he lives in is before his eyes, and to
please it is his aim. He plays with his characters as with puppets that
amuse the spectator and himself. In Spenser, nothing is more remarkable
than the steadiness of his apparent faith in the deeds of knighthood. He
had little turn for sportiveness; and in attempting it, as in the
unfortunate instance of Malbecco, and a few shorter passages, we find
him dull as well as coarse. It is in the ideal world of pure and noble
virtues, that his spirit, wounded by neglect, and weary of trouble,
loved to refresh itself without reasoning or mockery; he forgets the
reader, and cares little for his taste, while he can indulge the dream
of his own delighted fancy. It may be here also observed, that the
elevated and religious morality of Spenser’s poem would secure it, in
the eyes of every man of just taste, from the ridicule which the mere
romances of knight-errantry must incur, and against which Ariosto
evidently guarded himself by the gay tone of his narration. The Orlando
Furioso and the Faery Queen are each in the spirit of its age; but the
one was for Italy in the days of Leo, the other for England under
Elizabeth, before, though but just before, the severity of the
Reformation had been softened away. The lay of Britomart, in twelve
cantos, in praise of Chastity, would have been received with a smile at
the court of Ferrara, which would have had almost as little sympathy
with the justice of Arthegal.
|Allegories of the Faery Queen.|
87. The allegories of Spenser have been frequently censured. One
of their greatest offences, perhaps, is that they gave birth to some
tedious and uninteresting poetry of the same kind. There is usually
something repulsive in the application of an abstract or general name to
a person, in which, though with some want of regard, as I have intimated
above, to the proper meaning of the word, we are apt to think that
allegorical fiction consists. The French and English poets of the Middle
Ages had far too much of this; and it is to be regretted, that Spenser
did not give other appellations to his Care and Despair, as he has done
to Duessa and Talus. In fact, Orgoglio is but a giant, Humiltà a porter,
Obedience a servant. The names, when English, suggest something that
perplexes us; but the beings exhibited are mere persons of the drama,
men and women, whose office or character is designated by their
appellation.
|Blemishes in the diction.|
88. The general style of the Faery Queen is not exempt from several
defects, besides those of obsoleteness and redundancy. Spenser seems to
have been sometimes deficient in one attribute of a great poet, the
continual reference to the truth of nature, so that his fictions should
be always such as might exist on the given conditions. This arises in
great measure from copying his predecessors too much in description, not
suffering his own good sense to correct their deviations from truth.
Thus, in the beautiful description of Una, where she first is introduced
to us, riding
Upon a lowly ass more white than snow;
_Herself much whiter_.
This absurdity may have been suggested by Ovid’s Brachia Sithonia
candidiora nive; but the image in this line is not brought so distinctly
before the mind as to be hideous as well as untrue; it is merely a
hyperbolical parallel.[1228] A similar objection lies to the stanza
enumerating as many kinds of trees as the poet could call to mind, in
the description of a forest,--
The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspine good for staves, the cypress funeral,
with thirteen more in the next stanza. Every one knows that a natural
forest never contains such a variety of species; nor indeed could such a
medley as Spenser, treading in the steps of Ovid, has brought together
from all soils and climates, exist long if planted by the hands of man.
Thus, also, in the last canto of the second book, we have a celebrated
stanza, and certainly a very beautiful one, if this defect did not
attach to it; where winds, waves, birds, voices, and musical instruments
are supposed to conspire in one harmony. A good writer has observed upon
this, that “to a person listening to a concert of voices and
instruments, the interruption of singing birds, winds, and waterfalls,
would be little better than the torment of Hogarth’s enraged
musician.”[1229] But perhaps the enchantment of the Bower of Bliss,
where this is feigned to have occurred, may in some degree justify
Spenser in this instance, by taking it out of the common course of
nature. The stanza is translated from Tasso, whom our own poet has
followed with close footsteps in these cantos of the second book of the
Faery Queen--cantos often in themselves beautiful, but which are
rendered stiff by a literal adherence to the original, and fall very
short of its ethereal grace and sweetness. It would be unjust not to
relieve these strictures, by observing that very numerous passages might
be brought from the Faery Queen of admirable truth in painting, and of
indisputable originality. The cave of Despair, the hovel of Corceca, the
incantation of Amoret, are but a few among those that will occur to the
reader of Spenser.
[1228] Vincent Bourne, in his translation of William and Margaret, has
one of the most elegant lines he ever wrote:--
Candidior nivibus, frigidiorque manus.
But this is said of a ghost.
[1229] Twining’s Translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 14.
|Admiration of the Faery Queen.|
89. The admiration of this great poem was unanimous and enthusiastic. No
academy had been trained to carp at his genius with minute cavilling; no
recent popularity, no traditional fame (for Chaucer was rather venerated
than much in the hands of the reader) interfered with the immediate
recognition of his supremacy. The Faery Queen became at once the delight
of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of
every scholar. In the course of the next century, by the extinction of
habits derived from chivalry, and the change both of taste and language,
which came on with the civil wars and the restoration, Spenser lost
something of his attraction, and much more of his influence over
literature; yet, in the most phlegmatic temper of the general reader, he
seems to have been one of our most popular writers. Time, however, has
gradually wrought its work; and, notwithstanding the more imaginative
cast of poetry in the present century, it may be well doubted whether
the Faery Queen is as much read or as highly esteemed as in the days of
Anne. It is not perhaps very difficult to account for this: those who
seek the delight that mere fiction presents to the mind (and they are
the great majority of readers), have been supplied to the utmost limit
of their craving, by stores accommodated to every temper, and far more
stimulant than the legends of Faeryland. But we must not fear to assert,
with the best judges of this and of former ages, that Spenser is still
the third name in the poetical literature of our country, and that he
has not been surpassed, except by Dante, in any other.[1230]
[1230] Mr. Campbell has given a character of Spenser, not so
enthusiastic as that to which I have alluded, but so
discriminating, and, in general sound, that I shall take the
liberty of extracting it from his Specimens of the British Poets,
i. 125. “His command of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He
threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly,
tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before,
or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. It must
certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the
brief strokes and robust power, which characterise the very
greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find more airy and expansive
images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer
flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English
poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of circumstance,
like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure through the utmost
extremities of the foliage which it nourishes. On a comprehensive
view of the whole work, we certainly miss the charm of strength,
symmetry, and rapid, or interesting progress; for though the plan
which the poet designed is not completed, it is easy to see that no
additional cantos could have rendered it less perplexed.”
|General parallel of Italian and English poetry.|
90. If we place Tasso and Spenser apart, the English poetry of
Elizabeth’s reign will certainly not enter into competition with that of
the corresponding period in Italy. It would require not only much
national prejudice, but a want of genuine _æsthetic_ discernment to
put them on a level. But it may still be said that our own muses had
their charms; and even that, at the end of the century, there was a
better promise for the future than beyond the Alps. We might compare the
poetry of one nation to a beauty of the court, with noble and regular
features, a slender form, and grace in all her steps, but wanting a
genuine simplicity of countenance, and with somewhat of sickliness in
the delicacy of her complexion, that seems to indicate the passing away
of the first season of youth; while that of the other would rather
suggest a country maiden, newly mingling with polished society, not of
perfect lineaments, but attracting beholders by the spirit, variety, and
intelligence of her expression, and rapidly wearing off the traces of
rusticity, which are still sometimes visible in her demeanour.
SECT. V.--ON LATIN POETRY.
_In Italy--Germany--France--Great Britain._
|Decline of Latin poetry in Italy.|
91. The cultivation of poetry in modern languages did not as yet thin
the ranks of Latin versifiers. They are, on the contrary, more numerous
in this period than before. Italy, indeed, ceased to produce men equal
to those who had flourished in the age of Leo and Clement. Some of
considerable merit will be found in the great collection, “Carmina
Illustrium Poetarum” (Florentiæ, 1719); one too, which rigorously
excluding all voluptuous poetry, makes some sacrifice of genius to
scrupulous morality. The brothers Amaltei are perhaps the best of the
later period. It is not always easy, at least without more pains than I
have taken, to determine the chronology of these poems, which are
printed in the alphabetical order of the authors’ names. But a
considerable number must be later than the middle of the century. It
must be owned that most of these poets employ trivial images, and do not
much vary their forms of expression. They often please, but rarely make
an impression on the memory. They are generally, I think, harmonious;
and perhaps metrical faults, though not uncommon, are less so than among
the Cisalpine Latinists. There appears, on the whole, an evident decline
since the preceding age.
|Compensated in other countries. Lotichius.|
92. This was tolerably well compensated in other parts of Europe. One of
the most celebrated authors is a native of Germany, Lotichius, whose
poems were first published in 1551, and with much amendment in 1561.
They are written in a strain of luscious elegance, not rising far above
the customary level of Ovidian poetry, and certainly not often falling
below it. The versification is remarkably harmonious and flowing, but
with a mannerism not sufficiently diversified; the first foot of each
verse is generally a dactyle, which adds to the grace, but somewhat
impairs the strength. Lotichius is, however, a very elegant and
classical versifier; and perhaps equal in elegy to Joannes Secundus, or
any Cisalpine writer of the sixteenth century.[1231] One of his elegies,
on the siege of Magdeburg, gave rise to a strange notion--that he
predicted, by a sort of divine enthusiasm, the calamities of that city
in 1631. Bayle has spun a long note out of this fancy of some
Germans.[1232] But those who take the trouble, which these critics seem
to have spared themselves, of attending to the poem itself, will
perceive that the author concludes it with prognostics of peace instead
of capture. It was evidently written on the siege of Magdeburg by
Maurice in 1550. George Sabinus, son-in-law of Melanchthon, ranks second
in reputation to Lotichius among the Latin poets of Germany during this
period.
[1231] Baillet calls him the best poet of Germany after Eobanus Hessus.
[1232] Morhof, l. i. c. 19. Bayle, art. Lotichius, note G. This seems
to have been agitated after the publication of Bayle; for I find in
the catalogue of the British Museum a disquisition, by one Krusike,
Utrum Petrus Lotichius secundam obsidionem urbis Magdeburgensis
prædixerit; published as late as 1703.
|Collections of Latin poetry by Gruter.|
93. But France and Holland, especially the former, became the more
favoured haunts of the Latin muse. A collection in three volumes by
Gruter, under the fictitious name of Ranusius Gherus, Deliciæ Poetarum
Gallorum, published in 1609, contains the principal writers of the
former country, some entire, some in selection. In these volumes there
are about 100,000 lines; in the Deliciæ Poetarum Belgarum, a similar
publication by Gruter, I find about as many; his third collection,
Deliciæ Poetarum Italorum, seems not so long, but I have not seen more
than one volume. These poets are disposed alphabetically; few,
comparatively speaking, of the Italians seem to belong to the latter
half of the century, but very much the larger proportion of the French
and Dutch. A fourth collection, Deliciæ Poetarum Germanorum, I have
never seen. All these bear the fictitious name of Gherus. According to a
list in Baillet, the number of Italian poets selected by Gruter is 203;
of French, 108; of Dutch or Belgic, 129; of German, 211.
|Characters of some Gallo-Latin poets.|
94. Among the French poets, Beza, who bears in Gruter’s collection the
name of Adeodatus Seba, deserves high praise, though some of his early
pieces are rather licentious.[1233] Bellay is also an amatory poet; in
the opinion of Baillet he has not succeeded so well in Latin as in
French. The poems of Muretus are perhaps superior. Joseph Scaliger
seemed to me to write Latin verse tolerably well, but he is not rated
highly by Baillet and the authors whom he quotes.[1234] The epigrams of
Henry Stephens are remarkably prosaic and heavy. Passerat is very
elegant; his lines breathe a classical spirit, and are full of those
fragments of antiquity with which Latin poetry ought always to be
inlaid, but in sense they are rather feeble.[1235] The epistles, on the
contrary, of the Chancellor de l’Hospital, in an easy Horatian
versification, are more interesting than such insipid effusions, whether
of flattery or feigned passion, as the majority of modern Latinists
present. They are unequal, and fall too often into a creeping style; but
sometimes we find a spirit and nervousness of strength and sentiment
worthy of his name; and though keeping in general to the level of
Horatian satire, he rises at intervals to a higher pitch, and wants not
the skill of descriptive poetry.
[1233] Baillet, n. 1366, thinks Beza an excellent Latin poet. The
Juvenilia first appeared in 1548. The later editions omitted
several poems.
[1234] Jugemens des Savans, n. 1295. One of Scaliger’s poems celebrates
that immortal flea, which, on a great festival at Poitiers, having
appeared on the bosom of a learned, and doubtless beautiful young
lady, Mademoiselle des Roches, was the theme of all the wits and
scholars of the age. Some of their lines and those of Joe Scaliger
among the number, seem designed, by the freedom they take with the
fair Pucelle, to beat the intruder himself in impudence. See Œuvres
de Pasquier, ii. 950.
[1235] Among the epigrams of Passerat I have found one which Amaltheus
seems to have shortened and improved, retaining the idea, in his
famous lines on Acon and Leonilla. I do not know whether this has
been observed.
Cætera formosi, dextro est orbatus ocello
Frater, et est lævo lumine capta soror.
Frontibus adversis ambo si jungitis ora,
Bina quidem facies, vultus at unus erit.
Sed tu, Carle, tuum lumen transmitte sorori,
Continuo ut vestrûm fiat uterque Deus.
Plena hæc fulgebit fraterna luce Diana,
Hujus frater eris tu quoque, cæcus amor.
This is very good, and Passerat ought to have credit for the
invention; but the other is better. Though most know the lines by
heart, I will insert them here:--
Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro,
Et Potis est forma vincere uterque Deos.
Blande puer, lumen quod habes, concede sorori,
Sic tu cæcus amor, sic erit illa Venus.
I have no ground for saying that this was written last, except that
no one would have dreamed of improving it.
|Sammarthanus.|
95. The best of Latin poets whom France could boast was Sammarthanus
(Sainte Marthe), known also, but less favourably, in his own language.
They are more classically elegant than any others which met my eye in
Gruter’s collection; and this, I believe, is the general suffrage of
critics.[1236] Few didactic poems, probably, are superior to his
Pædotrophia, on the nurture of children; it is not a little better,
which indeed is no high praise, than the Balia of Tansillo on the same
subject.[1237] We may place Sammarthanus, therefore, at the head of the
list; and not far from the bottom of it I should class Bonnefons, or
Bonifonius, a French writer of Latin verse in the very worst taste, whom
it would not be worth while to mention, but for a certain degree of
reputation he has acquired. He might also be suspected of designing to
turn into ridicule the effeminacy which some Italians had introduced
into amorous poetry. Bonifonius has closely imitated Secundus, but is
much inferior to him in everything but his faults. The Latinity is full
of gross and obvious errors.[1238]
[1236] Baillet, n. 1401. Some did not scruple to set him above the
best Italians, and one went so far as to say that Virgil would have
been envious of the Pædotrophia.
[1237] The following lines are a specimen of the Pædotrophia, taken
much at random.
Ipsæ etiam Alpinis villosæ in cautibus ursæ,
Ipsæ etiam tigres, et quicquid ubique ferarum est,
Debita servandis concedunt ubera natis.
Tu, quam miti animo natura benigna creavit,
Exuperes feritate feras? nec te tua tangant
Pignora, nec querulos puerili e gutture planctus,
Nec lacrymas miserêris, opemque injusta recuses,
Quam præstare tuum est, et quæ te pendet ab unâ.
Cujus onus teneris hærebit dulce lacertis
Infelix puer, et molli se pectore sternet?
Dulcia quis primi captabit gaudia risûs,
Et primas voces et blæsæ murmura linguæ?
Tune fruenda alii potes illa relinquere demens,
Tantique esse putas teretis servare papillæ
Integrum decus, et juvenilem in pectore florem?
Lib. i. (Gruter. iii. 266.)