A History of Elizabethan Literature

Making worthless men despair
To be loved of one so fair.
Yea the Destinies agree
Some good judgments blind should be:
And not gain the power of knowing
Those rare beauties, in her growing.
Reason doth as much imply,
For, if every judging eye
Which beholdeth her should there
Find what excellences are;
All, o'ercome by those perfections
Would be captive to affections.
So (in happiness unblest)
She for lovers should not rest."

Nor had he at times a less original and happy command of the rhymed decasyllabic couplet, which he sometimes handles after a fashion which makes one almost think of Dryden, and sometimes after a fashion (as in the lovely description of Alresford Pool at the opening of Philarete) which makes one think of more modern poets still. Besides this metrical proficiency and gift, Wither at this time (he thought fit to apologise for it later) had a very happy knack of blending the warm amatory enthusiasm of his time with sentiments of virtue and decency. There is in him absolutely nothing loose or obscene, and yet he is entirely free from the milk-and-water propriety which sometimes irritates the reader in such books as Habington's Castara. Wither is never mawkish, though he is never loose, and the swing of his verse at its best is only equalled by the rush of thought and feeling which animates it. As it is perhaps necessary to justify this high opinion, we may as well give the "Alresford Pool" above noted. It is like Browne, but it is better than anything Browne ever did; being like Browne, it is not unlike Keats; it is also singularly like Mr. William Morris.

"For pleasant was that Pool; and near it, then,
Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen.
It was not overgrown with boisterous sedge,
Nor grew there rudely, then, along the edge
A bending willow, nor a prickly bush,
Nor broad-leafed flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush:
But here, well ordered, was a grove with bowers;
There, grassy plots, set round about with flowers.
Here, you might, through the water, see the land
Appear, strewed o'er with white or yellow sand.
Yon, deeper was it; and the wind, by whiffs,
Would make it rise, and wash the little cliffs;
On which, oft pluming, sate, unfrighted then
The gagling wild goose, and the snow-white swan,
With all those flocks of fowl, which, to this day
Upon those quiet waters breed and play."

When to this gift of description is added a frequent inspiration of pure fancy, it is scarcely surprising that —

"Such a strain as might befit
Some brave Tuscan poet's wit,"

to borrow a couplet of his own, often adorns Wither's verse.

Two other poets of considerable interest and merit belong to this period, who are rather Scotch than English, but who have usually been included in histories of English literature – Drummond of Hawthornden, and Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Both, but especially Drummond, exhibit equally with their English contemporaries the influences which produced the Elizabethan Jacobean poetry; and though I am not myself disposed to go quite so far, the sonnets of Drummond have sometimes been ranked before all others of the time except Shakespere's.

William Drummond was probably born at the beautiful seat whence he derived his designation, on 13th December 1585. His father was Sir John Drummond, and he was educated in Edinburgh and in France, betaking himself, like almost all young Scotchmen of family, to the study of the law. He came back to Scotland from France in 1610, and resided there for the greater part of his life, though he left it on at least two occasions for long periods, once travelling on the continent for eight years to recover from the grief of losing a lady to whom he was betrothed, and once retiring to avoid the inconveniences of the Civil War. Though a Royalist, Drummond submitted to be requisitioned against the Crown, but as an atonement he is said to have died of grief at Charles I.'s execution in 1649. The most famous incidents of his life are the visit that Ben Jonson paid to him, and the much discussed notes of that visit which Drummond left in manuscript. It would appear, on the whole, that Drummond was an example of a well-known type of cultivated dilettante, rather effeminate, equally unable to appreciate Jonson's boisterous ways and to show open offence at them, and in the same way equally disinclined to take the popular side and to endure risk and loss in defending his principles. He shows better in his verse. His sonnets are of the true Elizabethan mould, exhibiting the Petrarchian grace and romance, informed with a fire and aspiring towards a romantic ideal beyond the Italian. Like the older writers of the sonnet collections generally, Drummond intersperses his quatorzains with madrigals, lyrical pieces of various lengths, and even with what he calls "songs," – that is to say, long poems in the heroic couplet. He was also a skilled writer of elegies, and two of his on Gustavus Adolphus and on Prince Henry have much merit. Besides the madrigals included in his sonnets he has left another collection entitled "Madrigals and Epigrams," including pieces both sentimental and satirical. As might be expected the former are much better than the latter, which have the coarseness and the lack of point noticeable in most of the similar work of this time from Jonson to Herrick. We have also of his a sacred collection (again very much in accordance with the practice of his models of the preceding generation), entitled Flowers of Sion, and consisting, like the sonnets, of poems of various metres. One of these is noticeable as suggesting the metre of Milton's "Nativity," but with an alteration of line number and rhyme order which spoils it. Yet a fourth collection of miscellanies differs not much in constitution from the others, and Drummond's poetical work is completed by some local pieces, such as Forth Feasting, some hymns and divine poems, and an attempt in Macaronic called Polemo-Middinia, which is perhaps not his. He was also a prose writer, and a tract, entitled The Cypress Grove, has been not unjustly ranked as a kind of anticipation of Sir Thomas Browne, both in style and substance. Of his verse a sonnet and a madrigal may suffice, the first of which can be compared with the Sleep sonnet given earlier: —

"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest,
Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings,
Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings,
Sole comforter of minds which are oppressed;
Lo, by thy charming rod, all breathing things
Lie slumb'ring, with forgetfulness possess'd,
And yet o'er me to spread thy drowsy wings
Thou spar'st, alas! who cannot be thy guest.
Since I am thine, O come, but with that face
To inward light, which thou art wont to show,
With feignèd solace ease a true felt woe;
Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace,
Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath:
I long to kiss the image of my death."

"To the delightful green
Of you, fair radiant een,
Let each black yield, beneath the starry arch.
Eyes, burnish'd Heavens of love,
Sinople[57 - In heraldry (but not English heraldry) = "green."] lamps of Jove,
Save all those hearts which with your flames you parch
Two burning suns you prove;
All other eyes, compared with you, dear lights
Are Hells, or if not Hells, yet dumpish nights.
The heavens (if we their glass
The sea believe) are green, not perfect blue;
They all make fair, whatever fair yet was,
And they are fair because they look like you."

Sir William Alexander, a friend and countryman of Drummond (who bewailed him in more than one mournful rhyme of great beauty), was born in 1580 of a family which, though it had for some generations borne the quasi-surname Alexander, is said to have been a branch of the Clan Macdonald. Alexander early took to a court life, was much concerned in the proposed planting of Nova Scotia, now chiefly remembered from its connection with the Order of Baronets, was Secretary of State for Scotland, and was raised to the peerage. He died in 1640. Professor Masson has called him "the second-rate Scottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism." He might as well be called "the faithful servant of monarchy in its struggle with the encroachments of Republicanism," and one description would be as much question-begging as the other. But we are here concerned only with his literary work, which was considerable in bulk and quality. It consists chiefly of a collection of sonnets (varied as usual with madrigals, etc.), entitled Aurora; of a long poem on Doomsday in an eight-lined stanza; of a Paraenesis to Prince Henry; and of four "monarchic tragedies" on Darius, Crœsus, Alexander, and Cæsar, equipped with choruses and other appliances of the literary rather than the theatrical tragedy. It is perhaps in these choruses that Alexander appears at his best; for his special forte was grave and stately declamation, as the second of the following extracts will prove. The first is a sonnet from Aurora: —

"Let some bewitched with a deceitful show,
Love earthly things unworthily esteem'd,
And losing that which cannot be redeemed
Pay back with pain according as they owe:
But I disdain to cast my eyes so low,
That for my thoughts o'er base a subject seem'd,
Which still the vulgar course too beaten deem'd;
And loftier things delighted for to know.
Though presently this plague me but with pain,
And vex the world with wondering at my woes:
Yet having gained that long desired repose
My mirth may more miraculous remain.
That for the which long languishing I pine,
It is a show, but yet a show divine."

"Those who command above,
High presidents of Heaven,
By whom all things do move,
As they have order given,
What worldling can arise
Against them to repine?
Whilst castled in the skies
With providence divine;
They force this peopled round,