A History of Elizabethan Literature

Pish! 'tis mere fondness in our nature.
A certain clownish cowardice that still
Would stay at home and dares not venture
Into foreign countries, though better than
Its own. Ha! what countries? for we receive
Descriptions of th' other world from our divines
As blind men take relations of this from us:
My thoughts lead me into the dark, and there
They'll leave me. I'll no more on it. Within!"

Such were the last notes of the concert which opened with the music, if not at once of Hamlet and Othello, at any rate of Tamburlaine and Faustus.

To complete this sketch of the more famous and fortunate dramatists who have attained to separate presentation, we must give some account of lesser men and of those wholly anonymous works which are still to be found only in collections such as Dodsley's, or in single publications. As the years pass, the list of independently published authors increases. Mr. Bullen, who issued the works of Thomas Nabbes and of Davenport, has promised those of W. Rowley. Nabbes, a member of the Tribe of Ben, and a man of easy talent, was successful in comedy only, though he also attempted tragedy. Microcosmus (1637), his best-known work, is half-masque, half-morality, and has considerable merit in a difficult kind. The Bride, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court, range with the already characterised work of Brome, but somewhat lower. Davenport's range was wider, and the interesting history of King John and Matilda, as well as the lively comedy of The City Nightcap, together with other work, deserved, and have now received, collection. William Rowley was of a higher stamp. His best work is probably to be found in the plays wherein, as mentioned more than once, he collaborated with Middleton, with Massinger, with Webster, with Fletcher, with Dekker, and in short with most of the best men of his time. It would appear that he was chiefly resorted to for comic underplots, in which he brought in a good deal of horseplay, and a power of reporting the low-life humours of the London of his day more accurate than refined, together with not a little stock-stage wit, such as raillery of Welsh and Irish dialect. But in the plays which are attributed to him alone, such as A New Wonder, a Woman Never Vexed, and A Match at Midnight, he shows not merely this same vis comica and rough and ready faculty of hitting off dramatic situations, but an occasional touch of true pathos, and a faculty of knitting the whole action well together. He has often been confused with a half namesake, Samuel Rowley, of whom very little is known, but who in his chronicle play When you see Me you know Me, and his romantic drama of The Noble Spanish Soldier, has distinctly outstripped the ordinary dramatists of the time. Yet another collected dramatist, who has long had a home in Dodsley, and who figures rather curiously in a later collection of "Dramatists of the Restoration," though his dramatic fame was obtained many years before, was Shakerley Marmion, author of the pretty poem of Cupid and Psyche, and a "son" of Ben Jonson. Marmion's three plays, of which the best known is The Antiquary, are fair but not excessively favourable samples of the favourite play of the time, a rather broad humour-comedy, which sometimes conjoined itself with, and sometimes stood aloof from, either a romantic and tragi-comical story or a downright tragedy.

Among the single plays comparatively few are of the latter kind. The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, a domestic tragi-comedy, connects itself with the wholly tragical Yorkshire Tragedy, and is a kind of introduction to it. These domestic tragedies (of which another is A Warning to Fair Women) were very popular at the time, and large numbers now lost seem to have been produced by the dramatisation of notable crimes, past and present. Their class is very curiously mixed up with the remarkable and, in one sense or another, very interesting class of the dramas attributed, and in general estimation falsely attributed, to Shakespere. According to the fullest list these pseudo-Shakesperian plays number seventeen. They are Fair Em, The Merry Devil ofEdmonton, Edward III., The Birth of Merlin, The Troublesome Reign of King John, A Warning to Fair Women, The Arraignment of Paris, Arden of Feversham, Mucedorus, George a Green the Pinner of Wakefield, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The London Prodigal, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan or the Widow of Watling Street, The Yorkshire Tragedy, and Locrine. Four of these, Edward III., The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Arden of Feversham, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, are in whole or parts very far superior to the rest. Of that rest The Yorkshire Tragedy, a violent and bloodthirsty little piece showing the frantic cruelty of the ruined gambler, Calverley, to his wife and children, is perhaps the most powerful, though it is not in the least Shakesperian. But the four have claims, not indeed of a strong, but of a puzzling kind. In Edward III. and The Two Noble Kinsmen there are no signs of Shakespere either in plot, character-drawing, or general tone. But, on the contrary, there are in both certain scenes where the versification and dialogue are so astonishingly Shakesperian that it is almost impossible to account for the writing of them by any one else than Shakespere. By far the larger majority of critics declare for the part authorship of Shakespere in The Two Noble Kinsmen; I avow myself simply puzzled. On the other hand, I am nearly sure that he did not write any part of Edward III., and I should take it to be a case of a kind not unknown in literature, where some writer of great but not very original faculty was strongly affected by the Shakesperian influence, and wrote this play while under it, but afterwards, either by death or diversion to non-literary employments, left no other monument of himself that can be traced or compared with it. The difficulty with Arden of Feversham and The Merry Devil is different. We shall presently speak of the latter, which, good as it is, has nothing specially Shakesperian about it, except a great superiority in sanity, compactness, pleasant human sentiment, and graceful verse, to the ordinary anonymous or named work of the time. But Arden of Feversham is a very different piece of work. It is a domestic tragedy of a peculiarly atrocious kind, Alice Arden, the wife, being led by her passion for a base paramour, Mosbie, to plot, and at last carry out, the murder of her husband. Here it is not that the versification has much resemblance to Shakespere's, or that single speeches smack of him, but that the dramatic grasp of character both in principals and in secondary characters has a distinct touch of his almost unmistakable hand. Yet both in the selection and in the treatment of the subject the play definitely transgresses those principles which have been said to exhibit themselves so uniformly and so strongly in the whole great body of his undoubted plays. There is a perversity and a dash of sordidness which are both wholly un-Shakesperian. The only possible hypothesis on which it could be admitted as Shakespere's would be that of an early experiment thrown off while he was seeking his way in a direction where he found no thoroughfare. But the play is a remarkable one, and deserves the handsome and exact reproduction which Mr. Bullen has given it. The Second Maiden's Tragedy, licensed 1611, but earlier in type, is one of the gloomy pity-and-terror pieces which were so much affected in the earlier part of the period, but which seem to have given way later in the public taste to comedy. It is black enough to have been attributed to Tourneur. The Queen of Aragon, by Habington, though in a different key, has something of the starchness rather than strength which characterises Castara. A much higher level is reached in the fine anonymous tragedy of Nero, where at least one character, that of Petronius, is of great excellence, and where the verse, if a little declamatory, is of a very high order of declamation. The strange piece, first published by Mr. Bullen, and called by him The Distracted Emperor, a tragedy based partly on the legend of Charlemagne and Fastrada, again gives us a specimen of horror-mongering. The Return from Parnassus (see note, p. 81), famous for its personal touches and its contribution to Shakespere literature, is interesting first for the judgments of contemporary writers, of which the Shakespere passages are only the chief; secondly, for its evidence of the jealousy between the universities and the players, who after, in earlier times, coming chiefly on the university wits for their supplies, had latterly taken to provide for themselves; and thirdly, for its flashes of light on university and especially undergraduate life. The comedy of Wily Beguiled has also a strong university touch, the scholar being made triumphant in it; and Lingua, sometimes attributed to Anthony Brewer, is a return, though a lively one, to the system of personification and allegory. The Dumb Knight, of or partly by Lewis Machin, belongs to the half-romantic, half-farcical class; but in The Merry Devil of Edmonton, the authorship of which is quite unknown, though Shakespere, Drayton, and other great names have been put forward, a really delightful example of romantic comedy, strictly English in subject, and combining pathos with wit, appears. The Merry Devil probably stands highest among all the anonymous plays of the period on the lighter side, as Arden of Feversham does on the darker. Second to it as a comedy comes Porter's Two Angry Women of Abingdon (1599), with less grace and fancy but almost equal lightness, and a singularly exact picture of manners. With Ram Alley, attributed to the Irishman Lodowick Barry, we come back to a much lower level, that of the bustling comedy, of which something has been said generally in connection with Middleton. To the same class belong Haughton's pleasant Englishmen for my Money, a good patriot play, where certain foreigners, despite the father's favour, are ousted from the courtship of three fair sisters; Woman is a Weathercock, and Amends for Ladies (invective and palinode), by Nathaniel Field (first one of the little eyasses who competed with regular actors, and then himself an actor and playwright); Green's "Tu Quoque" or The City Gallant, attributed to the actor Cook, and deriving its odd first title from a well-known comedian of the time, and the catchword which he had to utter in the play itself; The Hog hath Lost his Pearl, a play on the name of a usurer whose daughter is married against his will, by Taylor; The Heir and The Old Couple, by Thomas May, more famous still for his Latin versification; the rather overpraised Ordinary of Cartwright, Ben Jonson's most praised son; The City Match by Dr. Jasper Mayne. All these figure in the last, and most of them have figured in the earlier editions of Dodsley, with a few others hardly worth separate notice. Mr. Bullen's delightful volumes of Old Plays add the capital play of Dick of Devonshire (see ante), the strange Two Tragedies in One of Robert Yarington, three lively comedies deriving their names from originals of one kind or another, Captain Underwit, Sir Giles Goosecap, and Dr. Dodipoll, with one or two more. One single play remains to be mentioned, both because of its intrinsic merit, and because of the controversy which has arisen respecting the question of priority between it and Ben Jonson's Alchemist. This is Albumazar, attributed to one Thomas Tomkis, and in all probability a university play of about the middle of James's reign. There is nothing in it equal to the splendid bursts of Sir Epicure Mammon, or the all but first-rate comedy of Face, Dol, and Subtle, and of Abel Drugger; but Gifford, in particular, does injustice to it, and it is on the whole a very fair specimen of the work of the time. Nothing indeed is more astonishing than the average goodness of that work, even when all allowances are made; and unjust as such a mere enumeration as these last paragraphs have given must be, it would be still more unjust to pass over in silence work so varied and so full of talent.[62 - A note may best serve for the plays of Thomas Goff (1591-1629), acted at his own college, Christ Church, but not published till after his death. The three most noteworthy, The Raging Turk, The Courageous Turk, and the Tragedy of Orestes, were republished together in 1656, and a comedy, The Careless Shepherdess, appeared in the same year. The tragedies, and especially The Raging Turk, have been a byword for extravagant frigidity, though, as they have never been printed in modern times, and as the originals are rare, they have not been widely known at first hand. A perusal justifies the worst that has been said of them: though Goff wrote early enough to escape the Caroline dry-rot in dramatic versification. His lines are stiff, but they usually scan.]

CHAPTER XII

MINOR CAROLINE PROSE

The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is never, as Fuller sometimes is, puerile, and the greater concentration of his thoughts and studies has produced what Fuller never quite produced, a masterpiece. At the same time it must be confessed that Burton's more leisurely life assisted to a great extent in the production of his work. The English collegiate system would have been almost sufficiently justified if it had produced nothing but The Anatomy of Melancholy; though there is something ironical, no doubt, in the fact that this ideal fruit of a studious and endowed leisure was the work of one who, being a beneficed clergyman, ought not in strictness to have been a resident member of a college. Yet, elsewhere than in Oxford or Cambridge the book could hardly have grown, and it is as unique as the institutions which produced it.

The author of the Anatomy was the son of Ralph Burton of Lindley in Leicestershire, where he was born on the 8th of February 1577. He was educated at Sutton Coldfield School, and thence went to Brasenose College, Oxford. He became a student of Christchurch – the equivalent of a fellow – in 1599, and seems to have passed the whole of the rest of his life there, though he took orders and enjoyed together or successively the living of St. Thomas in Oxford, the vicarage of Walsby in Lincolnshire, and the rectory of Segrave in Leicestershire, at both of which latter places he seems to have kept the minimum of residence, though tradition gives him the character of a good churchman, and though there is certainly nothing inconsistent with that character in the Anatomy. The picture of him which Anthony à Wood gives at a short second hand is very favourable; and the attempts to harmonise his "horrid disorder of melancholy" with his "very merry, facete, and juvenile company," arise evidently from almost ludicrous misunderstanding of what melancholy means and is. As absurd, though more serious, is the traditionary libel obviously founded on the words in his epitaph (Cui vitam et mortem dedit melancholia), that having cast his nativity, he, in order not to be out as to the time of his death, committed suicide. As he was sixty-three (one of the very commonest periods of death) at the time, the want of reason of the suggestion equals its want of charity.

The offspring in English of Burton's sixty-three years of humorous study of men and books is The Anatomy of Melancholy, first printed in 1621, and enlarged afterwards by the author. A critical edition of the Anatomy, giving these enlargements exactly with other editorial matter, is very much wanted; but even in the rather inedited condition in which the book, old and new, is usually found, it is wholly acceptable. Its literary history is rather curious. Eight editions of it appeared in half a century from the date of the first, and then, with other books of its time, it dropped out of notice except by the learned. Early in the present century it was revived and reprinted with certain modernisations, and four or five editions succeeded each other at no long interval. The copies thus circulated seem to have satisfied the demand for many years, and have been followed without much alteration in some later issues.

The book itself has been very variously judged. Fuller, in one of his least worthy moments, called it "a book of philology." Anthony Wood, hitting on a notion which has often been borrowed since, held that it is a convenient commonplace book of classical quotations, which, with all respect to Anthony's memory (whom I am more especially bound to honour as a Merton man), is a gross and Philistine error. Johnson, as was to be expected, appreciated it thoroughly. Ferriar in his Illustrations of Sterne pointed out the enormous indebtedness of Tristram Shandy to Democritus Junior. Charles Lamb, eloquently praising the "fantastic great old man," exhibited perhaps more perversity than sense in denouncing the modern reprints which, after all, are not like some modern reprints (notably one of Burton's contemporary, Felltham, to be noticed shortly), in any real sense garbled. Since that time Burton has to some extent fallen back to the base uses of a quarry for half-educated journalists; nevertheless, all fit readers of English literature have loved him.

The book is a sufficiently strange one at first sight; and it is perhaps no great wonder that uncritical readers should have been bewildered by the bristling quotations from utterly forgotten authorities which, with full and careful reference for the most part, stud its pages, by its elaborate but apparently futile marshalling in "partitions" and "members," in "sections" and "subsections," and by the measureless license of digression which the author allows himself. It opens with a long epistle, filling some hundred pages in the modern editions, from Democritus Junior, as the author calls himself, to the reader – an epistle which gives a true foretaste of the character and style of the text, though, unlike that text, it is not scholastically divided. The division begins with the text itself, and even the laziest reader will find the synopses of Burton's "partitions" a curious study. It is impossible to be, at least in appearance, more methodical, and all the typographical resources of brackets (sub-bracketed even to the seventh or eighth involution) and of reference letters are exhausted in order to draw up a conspectus of the causes, symptoms, nature, effects, and cure of melancholy. This method is not exactly the method of madness, though it is quite possible for a reader to attach more (as also less) importance to it than it deserves. It seems probable on the whole that the author, with the scholastic habits of his time, did actually draw out a programme for the treatment of his subject in some form not very different from these wonderful synopses, and did actually endeavour to keep to it, or at any rate to work on its lines within the general compass of the scheme. But on each several head (and reducing them to their lowest terms the heads are legion) he allowed himself the very widest freedom of digression, not merely in extracting and applying the fruits of his notebook, but in developing his own thoughts, – a mine hardly less rich if less extensive than the treasures of the Bodleian Library which are said to have been put at his disposal.

The consequence is, that the book is one quite impossible to describe in brief space. The melancholy of which the author treats, and of which, no doubt, he was in some sort the victim, is very far from being the mere Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought at least, over the whole round of human pleasures and interests, and who, if he has not exactly found all to be vanity, has found each to be accompanied by some amari aliquid. It is at the same time the frankly expressed hypochondria of a man whose bodily health was not quite so robust as his mental constitution. It is the satiety of learning of a man who, nevertheless, knows that learning, or at least literature, is the only cure for his disease.

In mere style there is perhaps nothing very strongly characteristic in Burton, though there is much that is noteworthy in the way in which he adapts his style to the peculiar character of his book. Like Rabelais, he has but rarely occasion to break through his fantastic habit of stringing others' pearls on a mere string of his own, and to set seriously to the composition of a paragraph of wholly original prose. But when he does, the effect is remarkable, and shows that it was owing to no poverty or awkwardness that he chose to be so much of a borrower. In his usual style, where a mere framework of original may enclose a score or more quotations, translated or not (the modern habit of translating Burton's quotations spoils, among other things, the zest of his own quaint habit of adding, as it were, in the same breath, a kind of summary or paraphrase in English of what he has said in Latin or Greek), he was not superior to his time in the loose construction of sentences; but the wonder is that his fashion of writing did not make him even inferior to it. One of his peculiar tricks – the only one, perhaps, which he uses to the extent of a mannerism – is the suppression of the conjunctions "or" and "and," which gives a very quaint air to his strings of synonyms. But an example will do more here than much analysis: —

"And why then should baseness of birth be objected to any man? Who thinks worse of Tully for being Arpinas, an upstart? or Agathocles, that Sicilian King, for being a potter's son? Iphicrates and Marius were meanly born. What wise man thinks better of any person for his nobility? as he[63 - Burton, with others of the time, constantly wrote "he" as the equivalent of the classical demonstratives. Modern, but not better, use prefers "the man," or something similar.] said in Machiavel, omnes codem patre nati, Adam's sons, conceived all and born in sin, etc. We are by nature all as one, all alike, if you see us naked; let us wear theirs, and they our clothes, and what's the difference? To speak truth, as Bale did of P. Schalichius, I more esteem thy worth, learning, honesty, than the nobility; honour thee more that thou art a writer, a doctor of divinity, than earl of the Hunnes, baron of Skradine, or hast title to such and such provinces, etc. Thou art more fortunate and great (so Jovius writes to Cosmus Medices, then Duke of Florence) for thy virtues than for thy lovely wife and happy children, friends, fortunes, or great Duchy of Tuscany. So I account thee, and who doth not so indeed? Abdalonymus was a gardener, and yet by Alexander for his virtues made King of Syria. How much better is it to be born of mean parentage and to excel in worth, to be morally noble, which is preferred before that natural nobility by divines, philosophers, and politicians, to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace, than to be degeneres Neoptolemi as so many brave nobles are, only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate, unfit for any manner of service? Udalricus, Earl of Cilia, upbraided John Huniades with the baseness of his birth; but he replied, In te Ciliensis comitatus turpiter exstinguitur, in me gloriose Bistricensis exoritur; thine earldom is consumed with riot; mine begins with honour and renown. Thou hast had so many noble ancestors; what is that to thee? Vix ea nostra voco; when thou art a disard[64 - A "dizzard" = a blockhead. Said to be connected with "dizzy."] thyself, quid prodest Pontice longo stemmate censeri? etc. I conclude, hast thou a sound body and a good soul, good bringing up? Art thou virtuous, honest, learned, well qualified, religious? Are thy conditions good? Thou art a true nobleman, perfectly noble though born of Thersites, dummodo tu sis Aeacidæ similis non natus sed factus, noble κατ' εξοχην, for neither sword, nor fire, nor water, nor sickness, nor outward violence, nor the devil himself can take thy good parts from thee. Be not ashamed of thy birth then; thou art a gentleman all the world over, and shalt be honoured, whenas he, strip him of his fine clothes, dispossess him of his wealth, is a funge[65 - Fungus, mushroom.] (which Polynices in his banishment found true by experience, gentry was not esteemed), like a piece of coin in another country, that no man will take, and shall be contemned. Once more, though thou be a barbarian born at Tontonteac, a villain, a slave, a Saldanian negro, or a rude Virginian in Dasamonquepeuc,[66 - Saldania is Saldanha Bay. As for Tontonteac and Dasamonquepeuc, I shall imitate the manly frankness of the boy in Henry V., and say, "I do not know what is the French for fer, and ferret, and firk."] he a French monsieur, a Spanish don, a seignior of Italy, I care not how descended, of what family, of what order – baron, count, prince – if thou be well qualified and he not but a degenerate Neoptolemus, I tell thee in a word thou art a man and he is a beast."

Such, in his outward aspects, is Burton; but of him, even more than of most writers, it may be said that a brick of the house is no sample. Only by reading him in the proper sense, and that with diligence, can his great learning, his singular wit and fancy, and the general view of life and of things belonging to life, which informs and converts to a whole his learning, his wit, and his fancy alike, be properly conceived. For reading either continuous or desultory, either grave or gay, at all times of life and in all moods of temper, there are few authors who stand the test of practice so well as the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Probably, however, among those who can taste old authors, there will always be a friendly but irreconcilable difference as to the merits of Fuller and Burton, when compared together. There never can be any among such as to the merits of Fuller, considered in himself. Like Burton, he was a clerk in orders; but his literary practice, though more copious than that of the author of The Anatomy, divorced him less from the discharge of his professional duties. He was born, like Dryden, but twenty-two years earlier, in 1608, at Aldwinkle in Northamptonshire, and in a parsonage there, but of the other parish (for there are two close together). He was educated at Cambridge, and, being made prebendary of Salisbury, and vicar of Broadwindsor, almost as soon as he could take orders, seemed to be in a fair way of preferment. He worked as a parish priest up to 1640, the year of the beginning of troubles, and the year of his first important book, The Holy War. But he was a staunch Royalist, though by no means a bigot, and he did not, like other men of his time, see his way to play Mr. Facing-both-ways. For a time he was a preacher in London, then he followed the camp as chaplain to the victorious army of Hopton, in the west, then for a time again he was stationary at Exeter, and after the ruin of the Royal cause he returned to London, where, though he did not recover his benefices, he was leniently treated, and even, in 1655, obtained license to preach. Nevertheless, the Restoration would probably have brought him promotion, but he lived not long enough to receive it, dying on the 15th of August 1661. He was an extremely industrious writer, publishing, besides the work already mentioned, and not a few minor pieces (The Holy and Profane State, Thoughts and Contemplations in Good, Worse, and Better Times, A Pisgah-sight of Palestine), an extensive Church History of Britain, and, after his death, what is perhaps his masterpiece, The Worthies of England, an extraordinary miscellany, quartering the ground by counties, filling, in the compactest edition, two mighty quartos, and containing perhaps the greatest account of miscellaneous fact to be found anywhere out of an encyclopedia, conveyed in a style the quaintest and most lively to be found anywhere out of the choicest essayists of the language.

A man of genius who adored Fuller, and who owes to him more than to any one else except Sir Thomas Browne, has done, in small compass, a service to his memory which is not easily to be paralleled. Lamb's specimens from Fuller, most of which are only two or three lines long, and none a pageful, for once contradict the axiom quoted above as to a brick and a house. So perfectly has the genius of selector and author coincided, that not having myself gone through the verification of them, I should hardly be surprised to find that Lamb had used his faculty of invention. Yet this would not matter, for they are perfectly Fullerian. Although Fuller has justly been praised for his method, and although he never seems to have suffered his fancy to run away with him to the extent of forgetting or wilfully misrepresenting a fact, the conceits, which are the chief characteristic of his style, are comparatively independent of the subject. Coleridge has asserted that "Wit was the stuff and substance of his intellect," an assertion which (with all the respect due to Coleridge) would have been better phrased in some such way as this, – that nearly the whole force of his intellect concentrated itself upon the witty presentation of things. He is illimitably figurative, and though his figures seldom or never fail to carry illumination of the subject with them, their peculiar character is sufficiently indicated by the fact that they can almost always be separated from the subject and from the context in which they occur without any damage to their own felicity. To a thoroughly serious person, to a person like Lord Chesterfield (who was indeed very serious in his own way, and abhorred proverbial philosophy), or to one who cannot away with the introduction of a quip in connection with a solemn subject, and who thinks that indulgence in a gibe is a clear proof that the writer has no solid argument to produce, Fuller must be nothing but a puzzle or a disgust. That a pious and earnest divine should, even in that day of quaintness, compare the gradual familiarisation of Christians with the sacraments of the Church to the habit of children first taking care of, and then neglecting a pair of new boots, or should describe a brother clerk as "pronouncing the word damn with such an emphasis as left a dismal echo in his auditors' ears a good while longer," seems, no doubt, to some excellent people, unpardonable, and almost incomprehensible. Yet no one has ever impeached the sincerity of Fuller's convictions, and the blamelessness of his life. That a grave historian should intersperse the innumerable trivialities of the Worthies may be only less shocking. But he was an eminent proof of his own axiom, "That an ounce of mirth, with the same degree of grace, will serve God farther than a pound of sadness." Fuller is perhaps the only writer who, voluminous as he is, will not disappoint the most superficial inquirer for proofs of the accuracy of the character usually given to him. Nobody perhaps but himself, in trying to make the best of the Egyptian bondage of the Commonwealth, would have discovered that the Church, being unrepresented by any of the four hundred and odd members of Cromwell's Parliament, was better off than when she had Archbishops, Bishops, and a convocation all to herself, urging, "what civil Christian would not plead for a dumb man," and so enlisting all the four hundred and odd enemies as friends and representatives. But it is impossible to enter fully on the subject of Fuller's quips. What may fairly be said of them is, that while constantly fantastic, and sometimes almost childish, they are never really silly; that they are never, or hardly ever in bad taste; and that, quaint and far fetched as they are, there is almost always some application or suggestion which saves them from being mere intellectual somersaults. The famous one of the "Images of God cut in ebony," is sufficient of itself to serve as a text. There is in it all the good side of the emancipation propaganda with an entire freedom from the extravagance, the vulgarity, the injustice, the bad taste which marked that propaganda a century and more afterwards, when taken up by persons very different from Fuller. Perhaps it may be well to give an extract of some length from him: —

"A lady big with child was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and in the dungeon was delivered of a son, who continued with her till a boy of some bigness. It happened at one time he heard his mother (for see neither of them could, as to decern in so dark a place) bemoan her condition.

"Why, mother (said the child) do you complain, seeing you want nothing you can wish, having clothes, meat, and drink sufficient? Alas! child (returned the mother), I lack liberty, converse with Christians, the light of the sun, and many things more, which thou, being prison-born, neither art nor can be sensible of in thy condition.

"The post-nati, understand thereby such striplings born in England since the death of monarchy therein, conceive this land, their mother, to be in a good estate. For one fruitful harvest followeth another, commodities are sold at reasonable rates, abundance of brave clothes are worn in the city, though not by such persons whose birth doth best become, but whose purses can best bestow them.

"But their mother, England, doth justly bemoan the sad difference betwixt her present and former condition; when she enjoyed full and free trade without payment of taxes, save so small they seemed rather an acknowledgment of their allegiance than a burden to their estate; when she had the court of a king, the House of Lords, yea, and the Lord's house, decently kept, constantly frequented, without falsehood in doctrine, or faction in discipline. God of His goodness restore unto us so much of these things as may consist with His glory and our good."

"I saw a servant maid, at the command of her mistress, make, kindle, and blow a fire. Which done, she was posted away about other business, whilst her mistress enjoyed the benefit of the fire. Yet I observed that this servant, whilst industriously employed in the kindling thereof, got a more general, kindly, and continuing heat than her mistress herself. Her heat was only by her, and not in her, staying with her no longer than she stayed by the chimney; whilst the warmth of the maid was inlaid, and equally diffused through the whole body.

"An estate suddenly gotten is not so lasting to the owner thereof as what is duly got by industry. The substance of the diligent, saith Solomon, Prov. xii. 27, is precious. He cannot be counted poor that hath so many pearls, precious brown bread, precious small beer, precious plain clothes, etc. A comfortable consideration in this our age, wherein many hands have learned their lesson of labour, who were neither born nor bred with it."

The best judges have admitted that, in contradistinction to this perpetual quipping, which is, as far as it goes, of his time, the general style of Fuller is on the whole rather more modern than the styles of his contemporaries. It does not seem that this is due to deliberate intention of shortening and proportioning his prose; for he is as careless as any one of the whole century about exact grammatical sequence, and seems to have had no objection on any critical grounds to the long disjointed sentence which was the curse of the time. But his own ruling passion insensibly disposed him to a certain brevity. He liked to express his figurative conceits pointedly and antithetically; and point and antithesis are the two things most incompatible with clauses jointed ad infinitum in Clarendon's manner, with labyrinths of "whos" and "whiches" such as too frequently content Milton and Taylor. Poles asunder from Hobbes, not merely in his ultimate conclusions but in the general quality of his mind, he perhaps comes nearest to the author of the treatise on Human Nature in clear, sensible, unambiguous presentation of the thing that he means to say; and this, joined to his fecundity in illustration of every kind, greatly helps the readableness of his books. No work of his as a working out of an original conception can compete with The Anatomy of Melancholy; but he is as superior in minor method to Burton as he is inferior in general grasp.

The remainder of the minor Carolines must be dismissed rapidly. A not unimportant position among the prose writers of this time is occupied by Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the elder brother of George Herbert the poet. He was born in 1583, and finished his life ingloriously, and indeed discreditably, during the troubles of the civil war, on the 20th of August 1648. His earlier career is elaborately if not exactly truthfully recorded in his Autobiography, and its details have been carefully supplemented by his latest editor, Mr. Lee. His literary activity was various and considerable. His greatest work – a treatise which has been rashly called the foundation of English deism, but which rather expresses the vague and not wholly unorthodox doubt expressed earlier by Montaigne, and by contemporaries of Herbert's own, such as La Mothe le Vayer – was written in Latin, and has never been translated into English. He was an English verse writer of some merit, though inferior to his brother. His ambitious and academic History of Henry VIII. is a regular and not unsuccessful effort in English prose, prompted no doubt by the thoroughgoing courtiership which ranks with his vanity and want of stability on the most unfavourable aspect of Herbert's character. But posterity has agreed to take him as an English writer chiefly on the strength of the Autobiography, which remained in manuscript for a century and more, and was published by Horace Walpole, rather against the will of Lord Powis, its possessor and its author's representative. It is difficult to say that Lord Powis was wrong, especially considering that Herbert never published these memoirs, and seems to have written them as much as anything else for his own private satisfaction. It may be doubted whether there is any more astounding monument of coxcombry in literature. Herbert is sometimes cited as a model of a modern knight-errant, of an Amadis born too late. Certainly, according to his own account, all women loved and all men feared him; but for the former fact we have nothing but his own authority, and in regard to the latter we have counter evidence which renders it exceedingly doubtful. He was, according to his own account, a desperate duellist. But even by this account his duels had a curious habit of being interrupted, in the immortal phrase of Mr. Winkle, by "several police constables;" while in regard to actual war the exploits of his youth seem not to have been great, and those of his age were wholly discreditable, inasmuch as being by profession an ardent Royalist, he took the first opportunity to make, without striking a blow, a profitable composition with the Parliament. Nevertheless, despite the drawbacks of subject-matter, the autobiography is a very interesting piece of English prose. The narrative style, for all its coxcombry and its insistence on petty details, has a singular vivacity; the constructions, though sometimes incorrect ("the edict was so severe as they who transgressed were to lose their heads"), are never merely slovenly; and the writer displays an art, very uncommon in his time, in the alternation of short and long sentences and the general adjustment of the paragraph. Here and there, too, there are passages of more elevated style which give reason for regretting that the De Veritate was not written in English. It is very much to be feared that the chief reason for its being written in Latin was a desire on the author's part to escape awkward consequences by an appearance of catering for philosophers and the learned only. It must be admitted that neither of the two great free-thinking Royalists, Hobbes and Herbert, is a wholly pleasant character; but it may be at least said for the commoner (it cannot be said for the peer) that he was constant to his principles, and that if somewhat careful of his skin, he never seems to have been tempted to barter his conscience for it as Herbert did.

Hardly any other writer among the minor Caroline prosaists is important enough to justify a substantive notice in a work which has already reached and almost exceeded the limits accorded to it. The excellent style of Cowley's Essays, which is almost more modern than the work of Dryden and Tillotson, falls in great part actually beyond the limits of our time; and by character, if not by date, Cowley is left for special treatment in the following volume. He sometimes relapses into what may be called the general qualities with their accompanying defects of Elizabethan prose – a contempt of proportion, clearness, and order; a reckless readiness to say everything that is in the writer's mind, without considering whether it is appropriate or not; a confusion of English and classical grammar, and occasionally a very scant attention even to rules which the classical grammars indicate yet more sternly than the vernacular. But as a rule he is distinguished for exactly the opposite of all these things. Much less modern than Cowley, but still of a chaster and less fanciful style than most of his contemporaries, is the famous Protestant apologist, Chillingworth – a man whose orderly mind and freedom from anything like enthusiasm reflected themselves in the easy balance of his style. Sanderson, Pearson, Baxter, the two former luminaries of the Church, the latter one of the chief literary lights of Nonconformity, belong more or less to the period, as does Bishop Hall. Baxter is the most colloquial, the most fanciful, and the latest, of the three grouped together; the other two are nearer to the plainness of Chillingworth than to the ornateness of Jeremy Taylor. Few English prose writers again are better known than Izaak Walton, though it might be difficult to prove that in matter of pure literature he stands very high. The engaging character of his subjects, and the still more engaging display of his own temper and mode of thought which he makes in almost every sentence, both of his Complete Angler and of his hardly less known Lives, account for the survival and constant popularity of books which are neither above nor below the better work of their time in literary form. Walton was born in 1593 and died ninety years later. His early manhood was spent in London as a "linen-draper," but in friendly conversation with the best clerical and literary society. In 1643 he retired from London to avoid the bustle of the Civil War, and the Complete Angler appeared in 1653. Another writer contemporary with Walton, though less long-lived, James Howell, has been the subject of very varying judgments; his appeal being very much of the same kind as Walton's, but addressed to a different and narrower class of persons. He was born in 1594(?) of a fair Welsh family, was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, was employed more than once on confidential business errands on the Continent, entered Parliament, was made Clerk of the Council, was imprisoned for years in the Fleet during the Civil War, received at the Restoration the post of Historiographer, and died in 1666. He wrote all manner of things, but has chiefly survived as the author of a large collection of Familiar Letters, which have been great favourites with some excellent judges. They have something of the agreeable garrulousness of Walton. But Howell was not only much more of a gossip than Izaak; he was also a good deal of a coxcomb, while Walton was destitute of even a trace of coxcombry. In one, however, as in the other, the attraction of matter completely outdoes the purely literary attraction. The reader is glad to hear at first hand what men thought of Raleigh's execution; how Ben Jonson behaved in his cups; how foreign parts looked to a genuine English traveller early in the seventeenth century, and so forth. Moreover, the book was long a very popular one, and an unusual number of anecdotes and scraps passed from it into the general literary stock of English writers. But Howell's manner of telling his stories is not extraordinarily attractive, and has something self-conscious and artificial about it which detracts from its interest. The Characters of Overbury were followed and, no doubt, imitated by John Earle, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, and a man of some importance. Earle, who was a fellow of Merton, called his sketches Microcosmography. Nothing in them approaches the celebrated if perhaps not quite genuine milkmaid of Overbury; but they give evidence of a good deal of direct observation often expressed in a style that is pointed, such as the description of a bowling green as a place fitted for "the expense of time, money, and oaths." The church historian and miscellanist Heylin belongs also to the now fast multiplying class of professional writers who dealt with almost any subject as it might seem likely to hit the taste of the public. The bold and fantastic speculations of Bishop Wilkins and Sir Kenelm Digby, and the Oceana or Ideal Republic (last of a long line) of James Harrington (not to be confounded with the earlier Sir John Harington, translator of Ariosto), deserve some notice. The famous Eikon Basilike (the authorship of which has perhaps of late years been too confidently ascribed to Dr. Gauden independently, rather than to the king, edited by Gauden) has considerable literary merit. Last of all has to be mentioned a curious book, which made some noise at its appearance, and which, though not much read now, has had two seasons of genuine popularity, and is still highly thought of by a few good judges. This is the Resolves of Owen Feltham or Felltham. Not much is known of the author except that he was of a respectable family in East Anglia, a family which seems to have been especially seated in the neighbourhood of Lowestoft. Besides the Resolves he wrote some verse, of which the most notable piece is a reply to Ben Jonson's famous ode to himself ("Come Leave the Loathed Stage") – a reply which even such a sworn partisan as Gifford admits to be at least just if not very kind. Felltham seems also to have engaged in controversy with another Johnson, a Jesuit, on theological subjects. But save for the Resolves he would be totally forgotten. The estimate of their value will differ very much, as the liking for not very original discussion of ethical subjects and sound if not very subtle judgment on them overpowers or not in the reader a distaste for style that has no particular distinction, and ideas which, though often wholesome, are seldom other than obvious. Wordsworth's well-known description of one of his own poems, as being "a chain of extremely valuable thoughts," applies no doubt to the Resolves, which, except in elegance, rather resemble the better-known of Cicero's philosophical works. Moreover, though possessing no great elegance, they are not inelegant; though it is difficult to forget how differently Bacon and Browne treated not dissimilar subjects at much the same time. So popular were they that besides the first edition (which is undated, but must have appeared in or before 1628, the date of the second), eleven others were called for up to 1709. But it was not for a hundred years that they were again printed, and then the well-meaning but misguided zeal of their resuscitator led him not merely to modernise their spelling, etc. (a venial sin, if, which I am not inclined very positively to lay down, it is a sin at all), but to "improve" their style, sense, and sentiment by omission, alteration, and other tamperings with the text, so as to give the reader not what Mr. Felltham wrote early in the seventeenth century, but what Mr. Cummings thought he ought to have written early in the nineteenth.

This chapter might easily be enlarged, and indeed, as Dryden says, shame must invade the breast of every writer of literary history on a small scale who is fairly acquainted with his subject, when he thinks how many worthy men – men much worthier than he can himself ever pretend to be – he has perforce omitted. Any critic inclined to find fault may ask me where is the ever-memorable John Hales? Where is Tom Coryat, that most egregious Odcombian? and Barnabee of the unforgotten, though scandalous, Itinerary? Where is Sir Thomas Urquhart, quaintest of cavaliers, and not least admirable of translators, who not only rendered Rabelais in a style worthy of him, who not only wrote in sober seriousness pamphlets with titles, which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed a pedigree of the Urquhart family nominatim up to Noah and Adam, and then improvised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating the prehistoric ancestors whom he had excogitated? Where are the great Bishops from Andrewes and Cosin onwards, and the lesser Theologians who wrangled, and the Latitudinarians who meditated, and the historians with Whitelocke at their head, and the countless writers of countless classes of books who multiplied steadily as time went on? It can only be answered that they are not, and that almost in the nature of things they cannot be here. It is not that they are not intrinsically interesting; it is not merely that, being less intrinsically interesting than some of their forerunners or contemporaries, they must give way when room is limited. It is that even if their individual performance were better than that of earlier men, even if there were room and verge enough for them, they would less concern the literary historian. For to him in all cases the later examples of a style are less important than the earlier, merely because they are late, because they have had forerunners whom, consciously or unconsciously, they have (except in the case of a great genius here and there) imitated, and because as a necessary consequence they fall into the numerus– into the gross as they would themselves have said – who must be represented only by choice examples and not enumerated or criticised in detail.

CONCLUSION

A conclusion, like a preface, is perhaps to some extent an old-fashioned thing; and it is sometimes held that a writer does better not to sum up at all, but to leave the facts which he has accumulated to make their own way into the intelligence of his readers. I am not able to accept this view of the matter. In dealing with such a subject as that which has been handled in the foregoing pages, it is at least as necessary that the writer should have something of ensemble in his mind as that he should look carefully into facts and dates and names. And he can give no such satisfactory evidence of his having possessed this ensemble, as a short summary of what, in his idea, the whole period looks like when taken at a bird's-eye view. For he has (or ought to have) given the details already; and his summary, without in the least compelling readers to accept it, must give them at least some means of judging whether he has been wandering over a plain trackless to him, or has been pursuing with confidence a well-planned and well-laid road.

At the time at which our period begins (and which, though psychological epochs rarely coincide exactly with chronological, is sufficiently coincident with the accession of Elizabeth), it cannot be said with any precision that there was an English literature at all. There were eminent English writers, though perhaps one only to whom the first rank could even by the utmost complaisance be opened or allowed. But there was no literature, in the sense of a system of treating all subjects in the vernacular, according to methods more or less decidedly arranged and accepted by a considerable tradition of skilled craftsmen. Something of the kind had partially existed in the case of the Chaucerian poetic; but it was an altogether isolated something. Efforts, though hardly conscious ones, had been made in the domain of prose by romancers, such as the practically unknown Thomas Mallory, by sacred orators like Latimer, by historians like More, by a few struggling miscellaneous writers. Men like Ascham, Cheke, Wilson, and others had, perhaps with a little touch of patronage, recommended the regular cultivation of the English tongue; and immediately before the actual accession of Elizabeth the publication of Tottel's Miscellany had shown by its collection of the best poetical work of the preceding half century the extraordinary effect which a judicious xenomania (if I may, without scaring the purists of language, borrow that useful word from the late Karl Hillebrand) may produce on English. It is to the exceptional fertilising power of such influences on our stock that we owe all the marvellous accomplishments of the English tongue, which in this respect – itself at the head of the Teutonic tongues by an almost unapproachable distance – stands distinguished with its Teutonic sisters generally from the groups of languages with which it is most likely to be contrasted. Its literary power is originally less conspicuous than that of the Celtic and of the Latin stocks; the lack, notorious to this day, of one single original English folk-song of really great beauty is a rough and general fact which is perfectly borne out by all other facts. But the exquisite folk-literature of the Celts is absolutely unable either by itself or with the help of foreign admixture to arrive at complete literary perfection. And the profound sense of form which characterises the Latins is apparently accompanied by such a deficiency of originality, that when any foreign model is accepted it receives hardly any colour from the native genius, and remains a cultivated exotic. The less promising soil of Anglo-Saxon idiom waited for the foreign influences, ancient and modern, of the Renaissance to act upon it, and then it produced a crop which has dwarfed all the produce of the modern world, and has nearly, if not quite, equalled in perfection, while it has much exceeded in bulk and length of flowering time, the produce of Greece.

The rush of foreign influences on the England of Elizabeth's time, stimulated alike by the printing press, by religious movements, by the revival of ancient learning, and by the habits of travel and commerce, has not been equalled in force and volume by anything else in history. But the different influences of different languages and countries worked with very different force. To the easier and more generally known of the classical tongues must be assigned by far the largest place. This was only natural at a time when to the inherited and not yet decayed use of colloquial and familiar Latin as the vehicle of business, of literature, and of almost everything that required the committal of written words to paper, was added the scholarly study of its classical period from the strictly humanist point of view. If we could assign marks in the competition, Latin would have to receive nearly as many as all its rivals put together; but Greek would certainly not be second, though it affected, especially in the channel of the Platonic dialogues, many of the highest and most gifted souls. In the latter part of the present period there were probably scholars in England who, whether their merely philological attainments might or might not pass muster now, were far better read in the actual literature of the Greek classics than the very philologists who now disdain them. Not a few of the chief matters in Greek literature – the epical grandeur of Homer, the tragic principles of the three poets, and so forth – made themselves, at first or second hand, deeply felt. But on the whole Greek did not occupy the second place. That place was occupied by Italian. It was Italy which had touched the spring that let loose the poetry of Surrey and Wyatt; Italy was the chief resort of travelled Englishmen in the susceptible time of youth; Italy provided in Petrarch (Dante was much less read) and Boccaccio, in Ariosto and Tasso, an inexhaustible supply of models, both in prose and verse. Spain was only less influential because Spanish literature was in a much less finished condition than Italian, and perhaps also because political causes made the following of Spaniards seem almost unpatriotic. Yet the very same causes made the Spanish language itself familiar to far more Englishmen than are familiar with it now, though the direct filiation of euphuism on Spanish originals is no doubt erroneous, and though the English and Spanish dramas evolved themselves in lines rather parallel than connected.

France and Germany were much (indeed infinitely) less influential, and the fact is from some points of view rather curious. Both were much nearer to England than Spain or Italy; there was much more frequent communication with both; there was at no time really serious hostility with either; and the genius of both languages was, the one from one side, the other from the other, closely connected with that of English. Yet in the great productions of our great period, the influence of Germany is only perceptible in some burlesque matter, such as Eulenspiegel and Grobianus, in the furnishing of a certain amount of supernatural subject-matter like the Faust legend, and in details less important still. French influence is little greater; a few allusions of "E. K." to Marot and Ronsard; a few translations and imitations by Spenser, Watson, and others; the curious sonnets of Zepheria; a slight echo of Rabelais here and there; some adapted songs to music; and a translated play or two on the Senecan model.[67 - Some, like my friend Mr. Lee, would demur to this, especially as regards the sonnet. But Desportes, the chief creditor alleged, was himself an infinite borrower from the Italians. Soothern, an early but worthless sonneteer, c. 1584, did certainly imitate the French.]

But France had already exercised a mighty influence upon England; and Germany had very little influence to exercise for centuries. Putting aside all pre-Chaucerian influence which may be detected, the outside guiding force of literary English literature (which was almost exclusively poetry) had been French from the end of the fourteenth century to the last survivals of the Scoto-Chaucerian school in Hawes, Skelton, and Lindsay. True, France had now something else to give; though it must be remembered that her great school coincided with rather than preceded the great school of England, that the Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française was but a few years anterior to Tottel's Miscellany, and that, except Marot and Rabelais (neither of whom was neglected, though neither exercised much formal influence), the earlier French writers of the sixteenth century had nothing to teach England. On the other hand, Germany was utterly unable to supply anything in the way of instruction in literary form; and it was instruction in literary form which was needed to set the beanstalk of English literature growing even unto the heavens. Despite the immense advantage which the English adoption of German innovations in religion gave the country of Luther, that country's backwardness made imitation impossible. Luther himself had not elaborated anything like a German style; he had simply cleared the vernacular of some of its grossest stumbling-blocks and started a good plain fashion of sentence. That was not what England wanted or was likely to want, but a far higher literary instruction, which Germany could not give her and (for the matter of that) has never been in a position to give her. The models which she sought had to be sought elsewhere, in Athens, in old Rome, in modern Tuscany.

But it would probably be unwise not to make allowance for a less commonplace and more "metaphysical" explanation. It was precisely because French and German had certain affinities with English, while Italian and Spanish, not to mention the classical tongues, were strange and exotic, that the influence of the latter group was preferred. The craving for something not familiar, for something new and strange, is well known enough in the individual; and nations are, after all, only aggregates of individuals. It was exactly because the models of the south were so utterly divided from the isolated Briton in style and character that he took so kindly to them, and that their study inspired him so well. There were not, indeed, wanting signs of what mischief might have been done if English sense had been less robust and the English genius of a less stubborn idiosyncrasy. Euphuism, the occasional practice of the Senecan drama, the preposterous and almost incredible experiments in classical metre of men not merely like Drant and Harvey, but like Sidney and Spenser, were sufficiently striking symptoms of the ferment which was going on in the literary constitution of the country. But they were only harmless heat-rashes, not malignant distempers, and the spirit of England won through them, with no loss of general health, probably with the result of the healthy excretion of many peccant humours which might have been mischievous if driven in. Even the strongest of all the foreign forces, the just admiration of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, was not in any way hurtful; and it is curious enough that it is only in what may be called the autumn and, comparatively speaking, the decadence of the period that anything that can be called pedantry is observed. It is in Milton and Browne, not in Shakespere and Hooker, that there is an appearance of undue domination and "obsession" by the classics.

The subdivisions of the period in which these purely literary influences worked in combination with those of the domestic and foreign policy of England (on which it is unnecessary here to dilate), can be drawn with tolerable precision. They are both better marked and more important in verse than in prose. For it cannot be too often asserted that the age, in the wide sense, was, despite many notable achievements in the sermo pedestris, not an age of prose but an age of poetry. The first period extends (taking literary dates) from the publication of Tottel's Miscellany to that of The Shepherd's Calendar. It is not distinguished by much production of positive value. In poetry proper the writers pursue and exercise themselves upon the track of Surrey, Wyatt, and the other authors whom Grimoald, or some other, collected; acquiring, no doubt, a certain facility in the adjustment to iambic and other measures of the altered pronunciation since Chaucer's time; practising new combinations in stanza, but inclining too much to the doggerel Alexandrines and fourteeners (more doggerel still when chance or design divided them into eights and sixes); repeating, without much variation, images and phrases directly borrowed from foreign models; and displaying, on the whole, a singular lack of inspiration which half excuses the mistaken attempt of the younger of them, and of their immediate successors, to arrive at the desired poetical medium by the use of classical metres. Among men actually living and writing at this time Lord Buckhurst alone displays a real poetical faculty. Nor is the case much better in respect of drama, though here the restless variety of tentative displays even more clearly the vigorous life which underlay incomplete performance, and which promised better things shortly. The attempt of Gorboduc and a few other plays to naturalise the artificial tragedy, though a failure, was one of those failures which, in the great literary "rule of false," help the way to success; the example of Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton's Needle could not fail to stimulate the production of genuine native farce which might any day become la bonne comédie. And even the continued composition of Moralities showed signs of the growing desire for life and individuality of character. Moreover, the intense and increasing liking for the theatre in all classes of society, despite the discouragement of the authorities, the miserable reward offered to actors and playwrights, and the discredit which rested on the vocations of both, was certain in the ordinary course of things to improve the supply. The third division of literature made slower progress under less powerful stimulants. No emulation, like that which tempted the individual graduate or templar to rival Surrey in addressing his mistress's eyebrow, or Sackville in stately rhyming on English history, acted on the writers of prose. No public demand, like that which produced the few known and the hundred forgotten playwrights of the first half of Elizabeth's reign, served as a hotbed. But it is the great secret of prose that it can dispense with such stimulants. Everybody who wished to make his thoughts known began, with the help of the printing press, to make them known; and the informal use of the vernacular, by dint of this unconscious practice and of the growing scholarship both of writers and readers, tended insensibly to make itself less of a mere written conversation and more of a finished prose style. Preaching in English, the prose pamphlet, and translations into the vernacular were, no doubt, the three great schoolmasters in the disciplining of English prose. But by degrees all classes of subjects were treated in the natural manner, and so the various subdivisions of prose style – oratorical, narrative, expository, and the rest – slowly evolved and separated themselves, though hardly, even at the close of the time, had they attained the condition of finish.

The year 1580 may be fixed on with almost mathematical accuracy as the date at which the great generation of Elizabethan writers first showed its hand with Lyly's Euphues in prose and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in verse. Drama was a little, but not more than a little, later in showing the same signs of rejuvenescence; and from that time forward till the end of the century not a year passed without the appearance of some memorable work or writer; while the total production of the twenty years exceeds in originality and force, if not always in artistic perfection of form, the production of any similar period in the world's history. The group of University Wits, following the example of Lyly (who, however, in drama hardly belongs to the most original school), started the dramas of history, of romance, of domestic life; and, by fashioning through their leader Marlowe the tragic decasyllable, put into the hands of the still greater group who succeeded them an instrument, the power of which it is impossible to exaggerate. Before the close of the century they had themselves all ceased their stormy careers; but Shakespere was in the full swing of his activity; Ben Jonson had achieved the freshest and perhaps capital fruit of his study of humours; Dekker, Webster, Middleton, Chapman, and a crowd of lesser writers had followed in his steps. In poetry proper the magnificent success of The Faërie Queen had in one sense no second; but it was surrounded with a crowd of productions hardly inferior in their own way, the chief being the result of the great and remarkable sonnet outburst of the last decade of the century. The doggerel of the earlier years had almost entirely disappeared, and in its place appeared the perfect concerted music of the stanzas (from the sonnet and the Spenserian downwards), the infinite variety of the decasyllable, and the exquisite lyric snatches of song in the dramatists, pamphleteers, and music-book writers. Following the general law already indicated, the formal advance in prose was less, but an enormous stride was made in the direction of applying it to its various uses. The theologians, with Hooker at their head, produced almost the first examples of the measured and dignified treatment of argument and exposition. Bacon (towards the latter end it is true) produced the earliest specimens of his singular mixture of gravity and fancy, pregnant thought and quaint expression. History in the proper sense was hardly written, but a score of chroniclers, some not deficient in narrative power, paved the way for future historians. In imaginative and miscellaneous literature the fantastic extravagances of Lyly seemed as though they might have an evil effect. In reality they only spurred ingenious souls on to effort in refining prose, and in one particular direction they had a most unlooked for result. The imitation in little by Greene, Lodge, and others, of their long-winded graces, helped to popularise the pamphlet, and the popularisation of the pamphlet led the way to periodical writing – an introduction perhaps of doubtful value in itself, but certainly a matter of no small importance in the history of literature. And so by degrees professional men of letters arose – men of letters, professional in a sense, which had not existed since the days of the travelling Jongleurs of the early Middle Ages. These men, by working for the actors in drama, or by working for the publishers in the prose and verse pamphlet (for the latter form still held its ground), earned a subsistence which would seem sometimes to have been not a mere pittance, and which at any rate, when folly and vice did not dissipate it, kept them alive. Much nonsense no doubt has been talked about the Fourth Estate; but such as it is, for good or for bad, it practically came into existence in these prolific years.

The third period, that of vigorous manhood, may be said to coincide roughly with the reign of James I., though if literary rather than political dates be preferred, it might be made to begin with the death of Spenser in 1599, and to end with the damnation of Ben Jonson's New Inn just thirty years later. In the whole of this period till the very last there is no other sign of decadence than the gradual dropping off in the course of nature of the great men of the preceding stage, not a few of whom, however, survived into the next, while the places of those who fell were taken in some cases by others hardly below the greatest, such as Beaumont and Fletcher. Many of the very greatest works of what is generally known as the Elizabethan era – the later dramas of Shakespere, almost the whole work of Ben Jonson, the later poems of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, the plays of Webster and Middleton, and the prose of Raleigh, the best work of Bacon, the poetry of Browne and Wither – date from this time, while the astonishingly various and excellent work of the two great dramatists above mentioned is wholly comprised within it. And not only is there no sign of weakening, but there is hardly a sign of change. A slight, though only a slight, depression of the imaginative and moral tone may be noticed or fancied in those who, like Fletcher, are wholly of the period, and a certain improvement in general technical execution testifies to longer practice. But Webster might as well have written years earlier (hardly so well years later) than he actually did; and especially in the case of numerous anonymous or single works, the date of which, or at least of their composition, is obscure, it is very difficult from internal evidence of style and sentiment to assign them to one date rather than to another, to the last part of the strictly Elizabethan or the first part of the strictly Jacobean period. Were it not for the occasional imitation of models, the occasional reference to dated facts, it would be not so much difficult as impossible. If there seems to be less audacity of experiment, less of the fire of youth, less of the unrestrainable restlessness of genius eager to burst its way, that, as has been already remarked of another difference, may not improbably be mainly due to fancy, and to the knowledge that the later efforts actually were later as to anything else. In prose more particularly there is no change whatever. Few new experiments in style were tried, unless the Characters of Overbury and Earle may be called such. The miscellaneous pamphlets of the time were written in much the same fashion, and in some cases by the same men, as when, forty years before Jonson summoned himself to "quit the loathed stage," Nash had alternately laughed at Gabriel Harvey, and savagely lashed the Martinists. The graver writers certainly had not improved upon, and had not greatly changed the style in which Hooker broke his lance with Travers, or descanted on the sanctity of law. The humour-comedy of Jonson, the romantic drame of Fletcher, with the marmoreally-finished minor poems of Ben, were the nearest approaches of any product of the time to novelty of general style, and all three were destined to be constantly imitated, though only in the last case with much real success, during the rest of our present period. Yet the post-Restoration comedy is almost as much due to Jonson and Fletcher as to foreign models, and the influence of both, after long failing to produce anything of merit, was not imperceptible even in Congreve and Vanbrugh.

Of the fourth period, which practically covers the reign of Charles I. and the interregnum of the Commonwealth, no one can say that it shows no signs of decadence, when the meaning of that word is calculated according to the cautions given above in noticing its poets. Yet the decadence is not at all of the kind which announces a long literary dead season, but only of that which shows that the old order is changing to a new. Nor if regard be merely had to the great names which adorn the time, may it seem proper to use the word decadence at all. To this period belong not only Milton, but Taylor, Browne, Clarendon, Hobbes (four of the greatest names in English prose), the strange union of learning in matter and quaintness in form which characterises Fuller and Burton, the great dramatic work of Massinger and Ford. To it also belongs the exquisite if sometimes artificial school of poetry which grew up under the joint inspiration of the great personal influence and important printed work of Ben Jonson on the one hand, and the subtler but even more penetrating stimulant of the unpublished poetry of Donne on the other – a school which has produced lyrical work not surpassed by that of any other school or time, and which, in some specially poetical characteristics, may claim to stand alone.

If then, we speak of decadence, it is necessary to describe with some precision what is meant, and to do so is not difficult, for the signs of it are evident, not merely in the rank and file of writers (though they are naturally most prominent here), but to some extent in the great illustrations of the period themselves. In even the very best work of the time there is a want of the peculiar freshness and spontaneity, as of spring water from the rock, which characterises earlier work. The art is constantly admirable, but it is almost obtrusively art – a proposition which is universally true even of the greatest name of the time, of Milton, and which applies equally to Taylor and to Browne, to Massinger and to Ford, sometimes even to Herrick (extraordinary as is the grace which he manages to impart), and almost always to Carew. The lamp is seldom far off, though its odour may be the reverse of disagreeable. But in the work which is not quite so excellent, other symptoms appear which are as decisive and less tolerable. In the poetry of the time there appear, side by side with much exquisite melody and much priceless thought, the strangest blotches, already more than once noticed, of doggerel, of conceits pushed to the verge of nonsense and over the verge of grotesque, of bad rhyme and bad rhythm which are evidently not the result of mere haste and creative enthusiasm but of absolutely defective ear, of a waning sense of harmony. In the drama things are much worse. Only the two dramatists already mentioned, with the doubtful addition of Shirley, display anything like great or original talent. A few clever playwrights do their journey-work with creditable craftsmanship. But even this characteristic is wanting in the majority. The plots relapse into a chaos almost as great as that of the drama of fifty years earlier, but with none of its excuse of inexperience and of redeeming purple patches. The characters are at once uninteresting and unpleasant; the measure hobbles and staggers; the dialogue varies between passages of dull declamation and passages of almost duller repartee. Perhaps, though the prose names of the time are greater than those of its dramatists, or, excluding Milton's, of its poets, the signs of something wrong are clearest in prose. It would be difficult to find in any good prose writer between 1580 and 1625 shameless anomalies of arrangement, the clumsy distortions of grammar, which the very greatest Caroline writers permit themselves in the intervals, and sometimes in the very course of their splendid eloquence; while, as for lesser men, the famous incoherences of Cromwell's speeches are hardly more than a caricature of the custom of the day.

Something has yet to be said as to the general characteristics of this time – characteristics which, scarcely discernible in the first period, yet even there to be traced in such work as that of Surrey and Sackville, emerge into full prominence in the next, continue with hardly any loss in the third, and are discernible even in the "decadence" of the fourth. Even yet they are not universally recognised, and it appears to be sometimes thought that because critics speak with enthusiasm of periods in which, save at rare intervals, and as it were by accident, they are not discernible at all, such critics are insensible to them where they occur. Never was there a grosser mistake. It is said that M. Taine, in private conversation, once said to a literary novice who rashly asked him whether he liked this or that, "Monsieur, en littérature j'aime tout." It was a noble and correct sentiment, though it might be a little difficult for the particular critic who formulated it to make good his claim to it as a motto. The ideal critic undoubtedly does like everything in literature, provided that it is good of its kind. He likes the unsophisticated tentatives of the earliest minstrel poetry, and the cultivated perfection of form of Racine and Pope; he likes the massive vigour of the French and English sixteenth centuries, and the alembicated exquisiteness of Catullus and Carew; he does not dislike Webster because he is not Dryden, or Young because he is not Spenser; he does not quarrel with Sophocles because he is not Æschylus, or with Hugo because he is not Heine. But at the same time it is impossible for him not to recognise that there are certain periods where inspiration and accomplishment meet in a fashion which may be sought for in vain at others. These are the great periods of literature, and there are perhaps only five of them, with five others which may be said to be almost level. The five first are the great age of Greek literature from Æschylus to Plato, the great ages of English and French literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole range of Italian literature from Dante to Ariosto, and the second great age of English from the Lyrical Ballads to the death of Coleridge. It is the super-eminent glory of English that it counts twice in the reckoning. The five seconds are the Augustan age of Latin, the short but brilliant period of Spanish literary development, the Romantic era in France, the age of Goethe in Germany, including Heine's earlier and best work, and (with difficulty, and by allowance chiefly of Swift and Dryden) the half century from the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel to the appearance of Gulliver and The Dunciad in England. Out of these there are great men but no great periods, and the first class is distinguished from the second, not so much by the fact that almost all the greatest literary names of the world are found in it, as because it is evident to a careful reader that there was more of the general spirit of poetry and of literature diffused in human brains at these times than at any other. It has been said more than once that English Elizabethan literature may, and not merely in virtue of Shakespere, claim the first place even among the first class. The full justification of this assertion could only be given by actually going through the whole range of the literature, book in hand. The foregoing pages have given it as it were in précis, rather than in any fuller fashion. And it has been thought better to devote some of the space permitted to extract as the only possible substitute for this continual book-in-hand exemplification. Many subjects which might properly form the subject of excursus in a larger history have been perforce omitted, the object being to give, not a series of interesting essays on detached points, but a conspectus of the actual literary progress and accomplishment of the century, from 1557 to 1660. Such essays exist already in great numbers, though some no doubt are yet to write. The extraordinary influence of Plato, or at least of a more or less indistinctly understood Platonism, on many of the finer minds of the earlier and middle period, is a very interesting point, and it has been plausibly connected with the fact that Giordano Bruno was for some years a resident in England, and was acquainted with the Greville-Sidney circle at the very time that that circle was almost the cradle of the new English literature. The stimulus given not merely by the popular fancy for rough dramatic entertainments, but by the taste of courts and rich nobles for masques – a taste which favoured the composition of such exquisite literature as Ben Jonson's and Milton's masterpieces – is another side subject of the same kind. I do not know that, much as has been written on the Reformation, the direct influence of the form which the Reformation took in England on the growth of English literature has ever been estimated and summarised fully and yet briefly, so as to show the contrast between the distinctly anti-literary character of most of the foreign Protestant and the English Puritan movement on the one side, and the literary tendencies of Anglicanism on the other. The origins of Euphuism and of that later form of preciousness which is sometimes called Gongorism and sometimes Marinism have been much discussed, but the last word has certainly not been said on them. For these things, however (which are merely quoted as examples of a very numerous class), there could be found no place here without excluding other things more centrally necessary to the unfolding of the history. And therefore I may leave what I have written with a short final indication of what seems to me the distinguishing mark of Elizabethan literature. That mark is not merely the presence of individual works of the greatest excellence, but the diffusion throughout the whole work of the time of a vivida vis, of flashes of beauty in prose and verse, which hardly any other period can show. Let us open one of the songbooks of the time, Dowland's Second Book of Airs, published in the central year of our period, 1600, and reprinted by Mr Arber. Here almost at random we hit upon this snatch —

"Come ye heavy states of night,
Do my father's spirit right;
Soundings baleful let me borrow,
Burthening my song with sorrow:
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turnèd into springs.
"Come you Virgins of the night
That in dirges sad delight,
Quire my anthems; I do borrow
Gold nor pearl, but sounds of sorrow.
Come sorrow, come! Her eyes that sings
By thee, are turnèd into springs."