A Brief History of English and American Literature ~ Henry A. Beers (Audiobook) PART 1

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“A Brief History of English and American Literature – Henry A. Beers” (Audiobook)

Genre: History book, Literature book, Non-fiction

Henry Augustin Beers (1847-?), native of Buffalo, NY and professor of English at Yale, with the help of John Fletcher Hurst (1834-1903), Methodist bishop and first Chancellor of American University, has written a sweeping thousand 900 year history of English literature, up to the end of the 19th century. Although at times biased and sometimes misguided (as when he dismisses Mark Twain as a humorist noteworthy in his time but not for the ages), his research is sound and his criticism is interesting and quite often very balanced. In addition, the last chapter of each part is Hurst’s synopsis of religious and theological literature in the language. This book is interesting for its point of view, but also useful as a jumping-off point for those interested in reading the classics.

[00:00:00] – 00 – Introduction, Preface
[00:07:59] – 01 – Part 1, Chapter I – From the Conquest to Chaucer, 1066-1400
[00:55:03] – 02 – Part 1, Chapter II – From Chaucer to Spenser, 1400-1599
[01:42:42] – 03 – Part 1, Chapter III – The Age of Shakspere, 1564-1616
[02:51:42] – 04 – Part 1, Chapter IV – The Age of Milton, 1608-1674
[03:44:54] – 05 – Part 1, Chapter V – From the Restoration to the Death of Pope, 1660-1744
[04:29:56] – 06 – Part 1, Chapter VI – From the Death of Pope to the French Revolution, 1744-1789
[05:13:13] – 07 – Part 1, Chapter VII – From the French Revolution to the Death of Scott, 1789-1832

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Introduction and preface of a brief history of English and American literature this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org recording by Kalinda A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers with introduction and supplementary

Chapters on the religious and theological literature of Great Britain in the United States by John Fletcher Hurst introduction at the request of the Publishers the undersigned has prepared this introduction in two supplementary chapters on the religious and Theological literature of Great Britain in the United States to the preacher in

His preparation for the pulpit and also to the general reader and student of religious history the pursuit of the study of literature is a necessity the sermon itself is a part of literature must have its literary finish and proportions and should give ample proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English

Tongue the world of letters presents to even the Casual reader a rich and varied profusion of fascinating and Luscious fruit but to the earnest student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the intellectual products of countries and times other than his own the infinite variety so strikingly apparent to The Superficial

Observer resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious Unity literature is the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless Universe of thought as in physics the correlation and conservation of force bind all the Material Sciences together into one so in the world of the intellect all the diverse Departments of

Mental life and action find their common bond in literature even the signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing the stenography of those exact science the simple Chronicles of the analyst the flowing verses of the poet clothing his thought with winged words

The abstruse propositions of the philosopher the smiting protests of the Bold reformer either in church or state the impassioned appeal of The Advocate at the bar of Justice the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures the very Cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression of

Cruelty all have their literature the minister of the Gospel whose mission is to Man In His Highest and holiest relations must know the best that human thought has produced if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and inquiring perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method of pursuing

A course of study in literature both English and American the following work of Professor beers touches but lightly and scarcely more than opens these Broad and inviting fields which are ever growing richer and more fascinating while man continues to think he will weave the fabric of the mental Loom into infinitely varied and

Beautiful designs in the general outlines of a plan of literary study which is to cover the entire history of English and American literature the following directions it is hoped will be of value one fix the great landmarks the general periods each marked by some towering leader around whom other contemporary writers may be

Grouped in Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Jeffrey choser or John W Cliffe Thomas Moore or Henry Howard Edmund Spencer or Sir Walter Raleigh William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon John Milton or Jeremy Taylor John John Dryden or John Lock

Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith William cper or John Wesley Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor CID William woodsworth or Thomas Chalmers Alfred Tennyson Thomas Carlile or William makepiece ther a similar list for American literature would place as leaders in letters Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shephard cotton Ma Jonathan Edwards

Benjamin Franklin Philip freno Noah Webster or James Kent James fenmore Cooper or Washington Irving Ralph Waldo Emerson or Edward Everett Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow James Russell LEL or Nathaniel Hawthorne the prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of

Several ways according either to the purpose in view or the tastes of the student attention might profitably be concentrated on the literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up individual authors or by classifying all the writers of the period on the basis of the character of

Their writings such as poetry history beleta theology essays and the like again the literature of a period might be studied with reference to its influence on the religious commercial political or social life of the people among whom it is circulated or as the result of certain forces which have preceded its

Production it is well worth the time and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many others who while maintaining their individuality have been either in style or method of production unconsciously molded by their confes of the pen the divisions of writers May again

Be made with reference to their opinions and associations in the different Departments of life where they have rought their active labors such as in politics religion moral reform or or educational questions the influence of the great writers in the languages of the continent upon the literature of England

And America affords another theme of absorbing interest and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close Brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land in fact the possible applications of the study of literature are so many and varied that the Ingenuity of any

Earnest student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require John F Hurst Washington preface in so brief a history of so rich a literature the problem is how to get room enough to give not an adequate impression that is impossible but any

Impression at all of the subject to do this I have crowded out everything but belra books in philosophy History Science Etc however important in the history of English thought received the mest incidental mention or even no mention at all again I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period

Which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is or Dutch cadon and sin wolf are no more a part of English literature than Virgil and Horus are of Italian I have also left out the vernacular literature of the scotch

Before the time of burns up to the date of the Union Scotland was a separate Kingdom and its literature had a development independent of the English though parallel with it in dividing the history into periods I have followed with some modifications the divisions made by Mr stopford Brook

In his excellent little primer of English literature a short reading course is appended to each chapter Henry a beers end of introduction and preface part one chapter 1 of A Brief History of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Kalinda A Brief History of English and

American literature by Henry a beers part one chapter 1 from the conquest to Cher 1066 to 1400 the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature the old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic

Speech with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections for 300 years following the Battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king’s court and the courts of law from Parliament school and University during all this time there were two languages spoken in England

Norman French was the birth tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower when the latter finally got the better in the struggle and became about the middle of the 14th century the national speech of all of England it was no longer the English of King Alfred it

Was a new language a grammar tongue almost wholly stripped of its inflections it had lost a half of its old words and had filled their places with French equivalents the Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms the ladies and cers words of dress and courtesy the Knight had imported the vocabulary of

War and of the chase the Master Builders of the Norman castles and Cathedrals contributed technical Expressions proper to the architect and the Mason the art of cooking was French the naming of the living animals Ox swine sheep deer was left to the Saxon churl who had the

Hering of them while the dressed Meats Beef Pork mutton venison received their baptism from the table talk of his Norman master the four orders of begging friars and especially the franciscans or gray Friar introduced into England in 1224 became intermediaries between the high and the low they went about

Preaching to the poor and in their sermons they intermingled French with English in their hands too was almost all the science of the day their medicine botany and astronomy displayed the old nomenclature of leech them wart cunning and Starcraft and finally the translators of French poems often found it easier to

Transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme but the Innovation reached even to the commonest words in everyday use so that voice drove out stefen poor drove out arm and color use and place made

Good their footing beside Hugh want and stead a great part of the English word words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new choser stands in date midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson but his English differs vastly more from the forers than from the

Latters to choser Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us the classical Anglo-Saxon moreover had been the Wessex dialect spoken and written at Alfred’s Capital Winchester when the French had displaced this as the language of culture there was no longer a King’s English or any

Literary standard the sources of Modern Standard English are to be found in the East Midland spoken in Lincoln norfol suffk Cambridge and the neighboring shes here the old anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a

Written language after the conquest the West Saxon clinging more to iously to ancient forms sunk into the position of a local dialect while the East Midland spreading to London Oxford and Cambridge became the literary English in which choser wrote the Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of

Literature they were a Cosmopolitan people and they connected England with the continent Lan Frank and anom the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury were learnning and Splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons they introduced the Scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris and the reformed discipline of the Norman

Abies they bound the English church more closely to Rome and officered it with Normans English Bishops were deprived of their Seas for illiteracy and French abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks down to the middle of the 14th century the Learned literature of England was mostly in Latin and the

Polite literature in French English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and with one exception unimportant after 1200 English came more and more into written use but mainly in translations paraphrases and imitations

Of French works the native genius was at school and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master the anglo-saxon poetry for example had been rhythmical and alliterative it was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating rest and gu in a

Sff rested him then the great-hearted the hall towered roomy and gold bright the guests slept within this rude energetic verse the Saxon shop had sung to his harp or his Glee beam dwelling on the emphatic syllables passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number

And position in the line it was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings which the French introduced and which our modern poets use a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung the old English alliterative verse continued indeed in occasional use to

The 16th century but it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect and was doomed to give way Cher lent his great authority to the more modern verse system and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign French or Italian literature in England began to

Be once more English and truly National in the hands of choser and his contemporaries but it was the literature of a Nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule the most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle copies of these annals differing somewhat among themselves have been kept at the monasteries in Winchester Abington Worcester and elsewhere the yearly entries were mostly brief dry records of passing events though occasionally they became full and animated the f country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries

Here were the Great abies of Peterboro and cyland and Ellie Miner one of the earliest English songs tells how the Savage heart of the Danish King knot was softened by the singing of the monks In Ro no the land and it was among the dkes and marches of this Fen country that the Bold Outlaw herad the last of the English held out for some years against the Conqueror and it was here in the rich Abbey of Burke or Peterboro the ancient medis Hamstead

Meadow Homestead that the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the conquest breaking off abruptly in 1154 the date of King Steven’s death petero had received a new Norman Abbot tural a very Stern man and the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how herard and his gang with his Danish backers

Thereupon plundered the Abby of its Treasures which were first removed to Ellie and then carried off by the Danish Fleet and sunk lost or squandered the English in the later portions of this Peterborough Chronicle becomes gradually more modern and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classic

Anglo-Saxon it is a most valuable historical document and some passages of it are written with great vividness notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death 1086 by one who had looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his

Court he who was before a rich King and Lord of many a land he had not then of all his land but a piece of sevenet likewise he was a very Stark man and a terrible so that one Durst do nothing against his will among other

Things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in his land so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhe hurt he set up a great deer preserve and he laid laws therewith that who so should slay heart or H he should be

Blinded as greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father with the discontinuance of the Peterboro annals English History written in English Pros ceased for 300 years the thread of the nation’s story was kept up in Latin Chronicles compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman

Descent the earliest of these such as ordus vitales Simeon of Durham Henry of Huntington and William of malmsbury were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon Chronicle the last of them Matthew of Westminster finished his work in 1273 about 1300 a monk of Gloucester composed a Chronicle in English verse

Following in the main the authority of the Latin Chronicles and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century in the hands of these the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever increasing mass of fable and Legend all real knowledge of the period

Dwindled away until in cap Graves Chronicle of england written in Pros in 1463 to 64 hardly anything of it is left in history as in literature the English had forgotten their past and had turned to foreign sources it is noteworthy that Shakespeare who borrowed his subjects and his Heroes sometimes from the

Authentic English History sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain Denmark and Scotland as in leer Hamlet and McBeth ignores the sax period alt together and Spencer who gives in his second book of the fairy queen a resume of The reigns of fabulous British Kings the supposed ancestors of Queen

Elizabeth his Royal Patron has nothing to say of the real Kings of early England so completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets the Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur and the conquered Welsh had imposed their

Fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors in the romand de a verse Chronicle of the dukes of Normandy written by the Norman was it is related that at the Battle of Hastings the French jongler tyer spurred out before the van of Williams Army tossing his Lance in the air and

Chanting of shalaman and of Rolan of Oliver and the peers who died atal this incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman song no less than Norman arms was to win over England the lines which tyer sang were from the chanon de Ron the oldest and best of the French hero sagas the

Heathen northmen who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th Century had become in the course of 150 years completely identified with the French they had accepted Christianity intermarried with the native women and forgotten their own Norse tongue the race thus formed was the most brilliant in in Europe the warlike adventurous

Spirit of the Vikings mingled in its blood with the French nibblenet with a passion for prowess and for Courtesy their architecture was at once strong and graceful their women were skilled in embroidery a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayo tapestry in which the conqueror’s wife

Matilda and the ladies of her Court wrought the history of the conquest this National taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and Chase and turny but likewise in literature the most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or

Chivalry Tales these were sung or recited by The minstrels Who were among the retainers of every great feudal Baron or by The junglers Who wandered from court to Castle there is a whole literature of these Roman dentur in the anglo-norman dialect of French many of

Them are very long often 30 40 or 50,000 lines written sometimes in a stopic form sometimes in long alexandrin but commonly in the short eight- syllabled rhyming couplet numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th 14th and 15th centuries the translations were usually inferior to The Originals the French TR

Finder or poet told it his story in a straightforward prosaic fashion omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses trappings Gardens Etc he invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which later poets have profited but his own handling of them was feeble and

Prolix yet there was a Simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the TR which the rude unformed English failed to catch the heroes of these romances were of various climes guy of Warwick and Richard the lionard of England havalo the DNE sir

Trus of Troy Charlamagne and Alexander but strangely enough the favorite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain whom Welsh Legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the sassinak Invaders and their Victor in 12 great battles the language and literature of

The an ient Sim or Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors there were a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech such as Bard and Druid but in the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the

Ocean instead of being borderers for over 600 years but the Welsh had their own National traditions and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and in an indirect form entered into the general literature of Europe the French came into contact with

The old British literature in two places in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Britany in France where the population is of simri race and spoke and still to some extent speaks a simich dialect akin to the Welsh about 1140 Jeffrey of Monmouth a Benedict and monk seemingly of Welsh

Descent who lived at the the court of Henry the and became afterward Bishop of St ASF produced in Latin a so-called Historia brittonum in which it was told how Brutus the great grandson of anas came to Britain and founded there his kingdom called after him and his city of

New Troy Troy Novant on the site of the later London an air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh Legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British Kings and the author referred as his authority to an imaginary Welsh book given him as he

Said by a certain Walter archdeacon of Oxford here appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to Modern readers in the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Tennyson Lear and his three daughters simine gbuk the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy composed by Sackville and acted in

1562 line and his Queen and his daughter Sabrina who gave her name to the river sever was made Immortal by an Exquisite song in Milton’s komos and became the heroine of the tragedy of line once attributed to Shakespeare and above all Arthur the son of Uther Pendragon and the founder of

The table round in 1155 Wes the author of the Roman deu turns jeffy’s work into a French poem entitled brute danger brute being a Welsh word meaning Chronicle about the year 1200 W’s poem was englished by lamon a priest of Arley Reus on the border stream of

Severn lon’s brute is in 30,000 lines partly alliterative and partly rhymed but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words the style is rude but vigorous and at times highly imaginative was had Amplified Jeffrey’s Chronicle somewhat but lamon made much larger additions derived no doubt from Legends current on the Welsh

Border in particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness he tells of the enchantments of Merlin the Wizard of the unfaithfulness of Arthur’s queen guir and the treachery of his nephew modred his narration of the last great battle between Arthur and modred of the

Wounding of the king 15 fly wounds he had one might in the least three gloves thrust and of the little boat with two women therein wonderly D which came to bear him away to Avalon and the queen argant Sheen of all elves whence he shall come again according to Merlin’s prophecy to

Rule the Britains all this left little in Essentials for Tennyson to add in his death of Arthur this new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers the story of Arthur Drew to itself other stories which were afloat Walter map a gentleman of the court of

Henry II in two French Pros romances connected with it the church legend of the sangreal or holy cup from which Christ had drunk at his last supper and which Joseph of arthea had afterward brought to England then it miraculously disappeared and became then forth the occasion of

Nightly Quest the Mystic symbol of the object of the Soul’s desire an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden Knight Galahad the son of the great Lancelot who in the romances had taken the place of modred in jeffy’s history as the Paramore of Queen Gwen in like manner the love story of

Tristan and eold was joined by other romancers to the Arthur Saga this came probably from Britany or Cornwall thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and

Rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such Modern English poets as Tennison in his idols of the King by Matthew Arnold swinburn and many others there were innumerable Arthur romances in pros and verse in angl Norman and Continental French dialects

In English in German and in other tongues but the final form which The Saga took in medieval England was the pros Mort darur of Sir Thomas mallerie composed at the close of the 15th century this was a digest of the earlier romances and is Tennyson’s main Authority beside the literature of the

Night was the literature of the cloer there is a considerable body of religious writing in early English consisting of homilies and pros and verse books of devotion like the anran riv rule of anchoresses 1225 the a inbit of inwit remorse of conscience 1340 both in Pros the hand 13 183 the corser Mundi

1320 and the prick of conscience 1340 in verse metrical renderings of the Salter the padros the Creed and the Ten Commandments the gospels for the day such as the ormulum or book of or 1205 Legends and miracles of saints poems and praise of virginity on the contempt of

The world on the five joys of the Virgin the Five Wounds of Christ the 11 Pains of Hell the seven deadly sins the 15 tokens of the coming judgment and D dialogues between the soul and the body these were the work not only of the monks but also of the begging friars and

In smaller part of the secular or Parish clergy they are full of the aesthetic piety and Superstition of the middle age the childish belief in The Marvelous the allegorical interpretation of the scripture texts the grotesque material horrors of hell with its Grizzly fiends the vness of the human body and the

Loathsome details of its corruption after death now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this Monkish literature either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet or from an occasional Grace or beauty in his verse a poem so distinguished for

Example a Lon a Love counsil by the minorite frier Thomas de Hales one stanza of which recalls the French poet vion’s Ballad of dead ladies with its refrain May dant where are the Snows of yester year where is Paris and elen that were in so bright and fair of ble amadas

Tristan and Adan EOD and Al Hector with his sharper man and Caesar rich in world’s F they Bethy gliden out of the rain as the shaft is of the day a few early English poems on secular subjects are also Al worthy of mention among others The Owl and the night

Andale generally assigned to the reign of Henry II 1216 to 1272 an estri or dispute in which the owl represents the aesthetic and the Nightingale the aesthetic view of Life the debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom the land of coia is an amusing

Little poem of some 200 lines belonging to the class of fablo short humorous Tales or satirical pieces in verse it describes a lber land or Fool’s Paradise where the geese fly down all roasted on the spit bringing garlic in the bills for the dressing and where there is a

Nunnery upon a river of sweet milk and an Abbey of white monks and gray whose walls like the Hall of little King pepen are of pie crust and pastry crust with floring cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins there are a few songs dating from about 1300

And mostly found in a single collection harl manuscript 2253 which are almost the only English verse before choser that has any sweetness to a modern ear they are written in French stopic forms in the southern dialect and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines they are musical fresh

Simple and many of them are very pretty they celebrate the gladness of spring with its cucko and throtle coocks its daisies and Woodruff when the night Andale sings the wood swacks and green leaf and grass and Blossom spring in ail I wean and love is to be my heart gone

With a spear so Keen night and day my blood drinks my heart doth me Teen others are love plaints to Allison or some other lady whose name is in a note of the night Andale whose eyes are as gray as glass and her skin as red as rose on

Wrists some employ a burden or refrain blow Northern wind blow thou me my sweding blow Northern wind blow blow blow others are touched with a light Melancholy at the coming of winter winter wakeneth all my care now these leav is waxes bare of I sigh in

Mourn as air when it cometh in my thought of this world’s Joy how it goeth all to not some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the virgin composed in the warm language of Earthly passion the sentiment of chivalry United with the ecstatic reies of the CL had produced

Mariolatry and the imagery of the Song of Solomon in which Christ wooed the soul and made this feeling of divine love familiar toward the end of the 13th century a collection of lives of saints a sort of English golden legend was prepared at the great Abbey of

Gloucester for use on Saints days the Legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic as the Lives of Margaret Christopher and Michael partly from the calendar of the English church as the lives of St Thomas of Canterbury of the Anglo-Saxons Dunston swin who was mentioned by

Shakespeare and kenel whose life is quoted by choser in the NoNo Tale the verse was clumsy and the style monotonous but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets thus the legend of St Brandon’s search for the Earthly Paradise has been treated by by Matthew Arnold and William

Morris about the middle of the 14th century there was a Revival of the Old English alliterative verse in romances like William and the werewolf and ser GNE and in religious pieces such as cless Purity patience and the Pearl the last named a mystical poem of much

Beauty in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the glorified some of these employed rhyme as well as literation they are in the West Midland dialect although choser implies that alliteration was most common in the north I am a southern man says the Parson in the Canterbury Tales

I cannot just Rome Ram roof by my letter but the most important of the alliterative poems was the vision of William conquering pierce the plow man in the second half of the 14th century French had ceased to be the mother tongue of any considerable part of the population of

England by a statute of Edward II in 1362 it was displaced from the Law Courts by 1386 English had taken its place in the schools the anglo-norman dialect had grown corrupt and choser contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioress after the skull of Stratford at

BO the native English genius was also beginning to assert itself roused in part perhaps by the English victories in the wars of Edward III against the French it was the bows of the English yry that won the fight at chy fully as much as the prowess of the Norman Baron

Edge but at home the times were bad heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence or Black Death pressed upon the poor and wasted the land the church was corrupt the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars pardoners and

Operators the social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry under watt Tyler and Jack straw this state of things is reflected in the vision of Pierce Plowman written as early as 1362 by William langland a tuned Clerk of the West

Country it is in form of an allegory and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the Pilgrim’s Progress the poet falls asleep on the Malin Hills in werer and has a vision of a fair field full of folk representing the world with its various conditions of

Men there were pilgrims and Palmers Hermits with hooked staves who went to Walsingham and their wenches after them great lbers and long that were LOF to work Friars glossing the gospel for their own profit pardoners cheating the people with relics and indulgences Parish priests who forsook their

Parishes that had been poor since the pestilence time and went to London to sing there for simony Bishops archbishops and deacons who got themselves fat clerk ships in the ex cheer or King’s bench in short all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics a lady who represents holy church then appears to the dreamer

Explaining to him the meaning of his vision and reads to him a sermon the text of which is when all treasure is tried truth is the best a number of other allegorical figures are next introduced conscience reason me simony falsehood ET Etc and after a series of speeches and Adventures a second Vision

Begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of St truth finding no guide to direct them save pierce the plowman who stands for the simple Pious laboring man

The sound heart of the English common folk the poem was originally in eight divisions or passes to which was added a continuation in three parts V do doet and do best about 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author Pierce Plowman was the first extended literary work after the

Conquest which was purely English in character it owed nothing to France but the allegorical cast which the romand De Rose had made fashionable in both countries but even here such personified abstractions as langland’s fair speech and work when time is remind us less of the fris bellamore and Falon of the

French courtly allegories than of bunions Mr worldly wisem men and even of such Puritan names as praise God barebones and Zeal of the land busy the poem is full of English moral seriousness of shrewd humor the hatred of a lie the homely English love for reality it has little Unity of plan but

Is rather a series of episodes discourses Parables and scenes it is all a stir with the actual life of the time we see the gossips gathered in the Ale House of bettin the Brewster and the pastry Cooks in the London streets crying hot pies hot good geese and grease go We Dine go

We had langin not linked his literary fortunes with an UNC and obsolescent verse and had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination his book might have been like choser among the lasting glories of our tongue as it is it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and

History its popularity in its own day is shown by the number number of manuscripts which are extant and imitations such as pierce the plowman’s Creed 1394 and the plowman’s tale for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales Pierce became a kind of typical figure like the French peasant Jac bonom

And was appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century the attack upon the growing Corruptions of the church was made more systematically and from the standpoint of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist by John W Cliffe the Rector of leworth and professor of

Divinity in balol College Oxford in a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences pilgrimages images oblations the Friars the pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation but his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible the first complete version in the mother

Tongue this he made about 1380 with the help of Nicholas Harford and a revision of it was made by another disciple pervy some 10 years later there was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time and the wliite versions were made not from the original tongues but from the Latin

Vulgate in his anxiety to make his rendering close and mindful perhaps of the warning in the apocalypse if any any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of The Book of Life Whitecliff followed the Latin order of

Construction so literally as to make rather awkward English translating for example quid Vol homni by what to itself W the ven pv’s version was somewhat freier and more idiomatic in the Reigns of Henry ivth and 5th it was forbidden to read or to have any of wff’s writings such of them

As could be seized were publicly burned in spite of this copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers forall and Madden in their great Edition 1850 enumerate 150 manuscripts which had been consulted by them later translators like Tiel and the makers of the authorized version or King James Bible

1611 followed wff’s language in many instances so that he was in truth the first author of our Biblical dialect and the founder of that great Monument of noble English which has been the main conservative influence in the mother tongue holding it fast to many strong piffy words and idioms that would else

Have been lost in 1415 some 30 years after wff’s death by decree of the Council of constant his bones were dug up from the soil of leworth chancel and burned and the ashes cast into the Swift the brook says Thomas Fuller in his church history did convey his ashes into Avon Avon into

Severn Severn into the narrow Seas they into the main ocean and thus the ashes of Whitecliff are the emblem of his Doctrine which now is dispersed all the world over although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language and

The historian of English manners and culture they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature but in Jeffrey Cher died 1400 we meet with a poet of the the first rank whose works are increasingly read and will always continue to be a source of delight and refreshment to the

General reader as well as a well of English undefiled to the professional man of letters with the exception of Dante choser was the greatest of The Poets of medieval Europe and he remains one of the greatest of English poets and certainly the foremost of English storytellers in verse he was the son of

A London ventner and was in his youth in the service of Lionel Duke of Clarence one of the sons of Edward the 3D he made a campaign in France 1359 to 60 when he was taken prisoner afterward he was attached to the court and received numerous favors and

Appointments he was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king three of them to Italy where in all probability he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature the writings of Dante petrarch and Picacho he was appointed at different times com controller of the wool Customs com controller of petty customs and

Clerk of the works he sat for Kent in Parliament and he received pensions from three successive Kings he was a man of business as well as books and he loved men and nature no less than study he knew his world he saw life steadily and saw it whole living at the center of

English social and political life and resorting to the court of Edward III then the most brilliant in Europe choser was an eyewitness of those feudal pomps which filled the high-colored pages of his contemporary the French chronicler fasar his description of a tournament in the nights tale is unexcelled for spirit

And detail he was familiar with dances feasts and state ceremonies and all the life of the baronial castle in Bower and Hall the trumps with the loud Minal SE the Heralds the ladies and the squires what hawks sitting on the perch above what hounds liing on the floor

Down but his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly the poor Widow in her her narrow Cottage and the true spher and a good the plowman whom langin had made the hero of his vision he is more than all English poets the poet of the Lusty spring of April

With her showers sweet and of the foua song of May with all her flowers and her green of the new leaves in the wood and The Meadows New powdered with the Daisy the Mystic margarite of his Legend of good women a fresh Vernal air blows through all his pages

In Cher’s earlier work such as the translation of the romant of the Rose if that be his the book of The Duchess the parliament of fowls the house of Fame as well as in the legend of good women which was later the inspiration of the French Court poetry of the 13th and 14th

Centuries is Manifest he retains in them the medieval Machinery of allegories and dreams the elaborate descriptions of palaces temples portraitures Etc which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as gam dolores’s Roman de ro and Je lafontan am in some of these the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible there

Are suggestions from Dante for example in the parliament of fows and the house of Fame and trus and cresa is a free handling rather than a translation of picachio filostrato in all of these there are passages of great Beauty and force had Cher written nothing else he would still have been

Remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies as one of the greatest English Poets of all time this position he owes to his Masterpiece the Canterbury Tales here he abandoned the imitation of foreign models and the artificial

Literary Fashions of his age and wrote of real life from his own ripe knowledge of men and things the Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories written at different times but put together together probably toward the close of his life the framework into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever

Devised a number of pilgrims who are going on Horseback to the shrine of St Thomas eckett at Canterbury meet at the tabard Inn in southwark a suburb of London the Jolly host of the tabern Harry Bailey proposes that on their way to Canterbury each of the company shall

Tell Two Tales and two more on their way back and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return into the Inn he himself accompanies them as judge and reporter in the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of

Movement and the air of all Outdoors the little head links and end links which bind them together give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims sometimes amounting as in the prologue of the wife of bath to full and almost dramatic character sketches the stories too are

Dramatically suited to the narrators The General prologue is a series of such character sketches the most perfect in English poetry the portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving Fidelity of the Miniatures in the old missiles and with the same quaint

Precision in traits of expression and in costume the pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English Inn the presence of a knight a squire a yman Archer and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics a naun a frier a monk a pardoner and a snor or a parator

Reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England as we know it than like the Italy of some 30 years ago but however the outward face of society may have changed the Canterbury pilgrims remain in chau’s description living and Universal types of human

Nature the Canterbury Tales are 24 in number there were 32 pilgrims so that if finished as designed the whole collection would have numbered 128 stories choser is the bright consumate flower of the English middle age like many another great poet he put the final touch to the

Various literary forms that he found in cultivation thus his night’s tale based on bachio T is the best of English medieval romances and yet the rhyme of Copus who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate and is encountered by the giant sir olant burlesks these same romances with their impossible Adventures and

Their tedious rambling descriptions the tales of the prioress and the second nun are Saints Legends the Monk’s tale is a set of dry moral apologues in the manner of his contemporary the moral Gower the story is told by the reev Miller frier snor Shipman and Merchant belong to the class

Of fablo a few of which existed in English such as Dame Ser the lay of the Ash and the land of CIA already mentioned the nun priest’s tale likewise which dried in mod with admirable humor was of the class of fablo and was suggested by a little poem in 40 Lines

Duil by Marie def France a Norman poetess of the 13th century it belonged like the early English poem of the fox and the Wolf to the popular animal Saga of rear the fox the Franklin’s tale whose scene is Britney and The Wife of Bath’s Tale which is laid in the time of

The British Arthur belonged to the class of French Le serious metrical Tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin the best representatives of which are the elegant and graceful lays of Marie def France choser was our first great master of laughter and of tears his serious

Poetry is full of the tenderest pathos his loosest tales are delightfully humorous and lifelike he is the kindliest of sists the Navy greed and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are are exposed by him as pitilessly as by langland and W Cliffe though his mood is not like

Theirs one of stern moral indignation but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world his charity is Broad enough to cover even the corrupt snor of whom he says and yet in sooth he was a good fellow whether he shared W Cliff’s opinions is unknown but John of gaun the

Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry ivth who was Cher’s lifelong Patron was likewise W Cliff’s great upholder against the persecution of the Bishops it is perhaps not without significance that the poor Parson in the Canterbury Tales the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom choser treats with respect

Is suspected by the host of the tabern to be a Lawler that is a lard or disciple of w Cliffe and that because he objects to the jovial inkeeper swearing by God’s bones Cher’s English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakespeare’s and few of his words have become obsolete

His verse when rightly read is correct and melodious the early English was in some respects more sweet upon the tongue than the modern language the vowels had their broad Italian sounds and the speech was full of soft gutturals and vocalic syllables like the endings in in is and

I which made feminine Rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together great poet as choser was was he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time he relapses sometimes into the Babbling style of the old chroniclers and Legend writers cites Octor and gives long cataloges of names

And objects with a naive display of learning and introduces vulgar details in his most Exquisite passages there is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages at least outside of Italy where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold but Cher’s artless is half

The secret of his wonderful ease in storytelling and is so engaging that like a child’s sweet unconsciousness one would not wish it otherwise the canabury tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued French was spoken in the proceedings of

Parliament as late as the reign of Henry V 6 1422 to 1471 ‘s contemporary John go wrote his Vox clanes in Latin his speculum medanis a Lost poem and a number of bads in Parisian French and his confessio amantis 1393 in English the last named is a dreary pedantic work in some 15,000

Smooth monotonous eight syllabled couplets in which Grand Amur instructs the lover how to get the love of Bel pel end of part one chapter 1 part one chapter 2 of a brief history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by

Kalinda A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers part one chapter 2 from choser to Spencer 1400 to 1599 the 15th century was a Barren period in English literary history it was nearly 200 years after Cher’s death before any poet came whose name can be

Written in the same line with his he was followed At Once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language in verse but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them the manner of a true poet may be learned but his

Style in the high sense of the word remains his own secret some of the poems which have been attributed to choser and printed in additions of his works as the court of love the flower and the leaf the cuckoo and the Nightingale are now regarded by many scholars as the work of

Later writers if not chers they are of Cher’s school and the first two at least are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces such as the book of The Duchess and the Parliament of fowls among his professed disciples was Thomas Oley a dull Rhymer who in his

Governale of princes a dactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413 Drew or caused to be drawn on the margin of his manuscript a colored portrait of his master dear and father Reverend this Lis very treasure and ress death by thy death hath harm irreparable unto us done her Venable duress

Despoiled hath this land of the sweetness of rhetoric another versified of this same generation was John lidgate A benedic and monk of the Abbey of Buy St Edmonds in suffk a very PRX writer who composed among other things the story of Thieves as an addition to the Canterbury Tales

His Ballad of London lick Penney recounting The Adventures of a countryman who goes to the Law Courts at Westminster in search of justice but for lack of money I could not speed is of interest for the Glimpse that it gives us of London Street Life Cher’s influence rought more

Fruitfully in Scotland with it was carried by James I who had been captured by the English when a boy of 11 and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of State there he wrote during the reign of Henry V 1413 to 1422 a poem in six kantos entitled The King’s Kare King’s

Book in Cher’s seven line stanza which had been employed by lidgate in his Falls of princes from bachio and which was afterward called the re Royale for its use by King James the king’s Kar tells how the poet on a May morning looks from the window of his prison

Chamber into the castle Garden full of alleys Hawthorne Hedges and fair Arbor set with the sharp green sweet Juniper he was listening to the little sweet Nightingale when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a lady walking in the garden and at once his heart became her thrall the incident is precisely like

Palamon first sighting of Emily in Cher’s nights tale and almost in the very words of palamon the poet addresses his lady ah sweet are you a worldly creature or Heavenly thing in likeness of nature or are ye very nature the Goddess that have to painted with your heavenly hand this

Garden full of flowers as they stand then after a vision in the taste of the age in which the Royal prisoners transported and turn to the courts of Venus manura and Fortune and receives their instructions in the duties belonging to love service he wakes from sleep and a white turtle dove brings to

His window a spray of red ghilly flowers whose leaves are inscribed in Golden letters with a message of encouragement James I may be reckoned among the English poets he mentions choser Gower and lidgate as his Masters his education was English and so was the dialect of his poem although the unique

Manuscript of it is in the scotch spelling the king’s cair is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices but it is upon the whole a rich and Tender Love Song the best specimen of court poetry between the time of choser and the time

Of Spencer the lady who walked in the garden on that may morning was Jane bort niece to Henry IV she was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424 12 years later James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders

And his wife who strove to defend him was wounded by the Assassins the story of the murder has been told of Late by DG retti in his Ballad The King’s tragedy the whole life of this princely singer was like his poem in the very Spirit of Romance the effect of all this imitation

Of chasser was to fix a standard of literary style and to confirm the authority of the East Midland English in which he had written though The Poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius they had at least a definite model to follow as in the 14th century

Metrical romances continued to be translated from the French homes and Saints Legends and rhyming Chronicles were still manufactured but the poems of aave and lidgate and James I had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong the Cherian tradition the literary English never again slipped back into the chaos of

Dialects which had prevailed before choser in the history of every literature the development of Pros is later than that of verse the latter being by its very form artificial is cultivated as a fine art and its records preserved in an early early stage of society when Pros is simply the talk of

Men and not thought worthy of being written and kept English Pros labored under the added disadvantage of competing with Latin which was the Cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of communication between Scholars of all countries Latin was the language of the church and in the Middle Ages churchmen and Scholar were

Convertible terms the word clerk meant either priest or scholar two of the Canterbury Tales are in Pros as is also the Testament of love formerly ascribed to choser and the style of all of these is so feeble wandering and unformed that it is hard to believe that they were

Written by the same man who wrote the Knight’s Tale and the story of gisala the voyage and travail of Sir John miville the Forerunner of that great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern literature was written according to its author first in Latin then in French and lastly in the

Year 1356 translated into English for the behoof of Lords and knights and other Noble and worthy men that cannot Latin but little the author professed to have spent over 30 years in eastern travel to have penetrated as far as farther India and the Isles that been about in India

To have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his Wars against the bedwin and at another time in the employ of the great KH of Tarter but there is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant the French seems to be much later than 1356 and the

English manuscript to belong to the early years of the 15th century and to have been made by another hand recent investigations make it probable that miville borrowed his descriptions of the remoter East from many sources and particularly from The Narrative of odor a minorite frier of Lombardy who wrote about

1330 some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such person as miville whoever wrote the book that passes under his name however would seem to have visited the holy land and the part of the voyage that describes tries Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to the

Truth the rest of the work so far as it is not taken from the tales of other Travelers is a diverting tissue of fables about Griffins that fly away with yolks of oxen tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the Sun by using their monstrous feet as umbrellas

Etc during the 15th century English Pros was gradually being brought into a shape fitting it for more serious uses in the controversy between the church and the law lards Latin was still mainly employed but W Cliffe had written some of his tracks in English and in 1449 Reginald peacock Bishop of St ASF

Contributed in English to the same controversy the repressor of over much blaming of the clergy Sir John fiscu who was Chief Justice of the king’s bench from 1442 to 1460 wrote during the reign of Edward IV a book on the difference between absolute and limited monarchy which may

Be regarded as the first Treatise on political philosophy and constitutional law in that language but these Works hardly belong to Pure literature and are remarkable only as early though not very good examples of English Pros in a Barren time the 15th century was an era of Decay and change the middle age was

Dying church and state were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences that were working secretly underground in England The Civil Wars of the red and white roses were breaking up the old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the baronage thus preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the tutors toward the close

Of that century and early in the next happened the four Great events or series of events which freed and widened men’s minds and in a succession of shocks overthrew the medieval system of life and thought these were the invention of printing the renissance or Revival of classical learning the discovery of

America and the Protestant Reformation William kton the first English printer learned the art in Cologne in 1476 he set up his press and sign a red pole in the alry at Westminster just before the introduction of printing the demand for manuscript copies had grown very active stimulated

Perhaps by the coming into General use of linen paper instead of the more costly parchment the scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and Illuminating of manuscripts went on professional copyists resorting to Westminster Abbey for example to make their copies of books belonging to the monastic

Library caxton’s choice of a spot was therefore significant his new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the old method of transcription at the very headquarters of the manuscript makers the first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the dictus and sayings of the philosophers translated from the French by Anthony Woodville

Lord Rivers a brother-in-law of Edward IV the list of books printed by kton is interesting as showing the taste of the time as he naturally selected what was most in demand the list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in Chief request books like the

Order of chivalry fates of arms and the golden legend which last kton translated himself as well as reard the fox and a French version of the anid he also printed with continuations of his own revisions of several early Chronicles and additions of choser Gower and lgate a translation of Cicero on

Friendship made directly from the Latin by Thomas tiptoft Earl of Worcester was printed by kton but no addition of a classical author in the original the new learning of the Renaissance had not as yet taken much hold in England upon the whole the Productions of caxton’s press were

Mostly of a kind that may be described as medieval and the most important of them if we accept his edition of choser was that Noble and joyous book as kton called it lamort dour written by Sir Thomas mallerie in 1469 and printed by caxton in 1485 this was a compilation from French

Arthur romances and was by far the best English Pros that had yet been written it may be doubted indeed whether for purposes of simple storytelling the picturesque charm of mallerie’s style has been improved upon the episode which lends its name to the whole Romance the death of Arthur is

Most impressively told and Tennyson has followed mallerie’s narrative closely even to such details of the scene as The Little Chapel By the Sea The Moonlight and the answer which sir bedwear made the wounded King when bidden to throw Excalibur into the water what saw thou

There said the King sir he said I saw nothing but the waters and the waves won I heard the Ripple washing in the Reeds and the Wild Water lapping on the Crag and very touching and beautiful is the oft qued lament of Sir ector over Lancelot in mallerie’s Final

Chapter ah Lancelot he said thou were head of all Christian Knights and now I dare say said sir ector thou sir Lancelot there thou liest that thou were never matched of Earthly Knights hand and thou were the courtious Knight that ever bear a shield and thou were the

Truest friend to thy lover that ever bested horse and thou were the truest lover of sinful man that ever loved woman and thou were the kindest man that ever strike with sword and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights and thou were the meekest man

And the gentlest that ever ate in Hall among ladies and thou were the sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest equally good as an example of English Pros narrative was the translation made by John bourier Lord burners of that most brilliant of the French chroniclers Cher’s contemporary

Sir John fasar Lord burners was the English governor of CA and his version of faar’s Chronicles was made in 1523 to2 at the request of Henry VII in these two books English chivalry spoke its last genuine word in sir Philip Sydney the character of the Knight was merged into that of the

Modern gentleman and although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth and Spencer cast his fairy queen into the form of a chivalry romance these were but a ceremonial surviv Ral and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away how antagonistic the new classical

Culture was to the vanished ideal of the middle age may be read in toxophilus A Treatise on archery published in 1545 by Roger asham a Greek lecturer in Cambridge and the tutor of the princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane gray in our forefather’s time when pestry as a standing pool covered and

Overflowed all England few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of of chivalry as they said for Pastime and pleasure which as some say were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanting cannons as one for example Mort Ur the whole pleasure of which book standeth in

Two special points in open manslaughter and bold B this is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at yet I know when God’s Bible was banished the court and mor Artur received into the prince’s chamber the fashionable School of courtly allegory first introduced into

England by the translation of the Roman of the Rose reached its extremity in Steven ha’s pastime of pleasure printed by kon’s successor winin de word in 1517 this was a Dre and pedantic poem in which it is told how Grand Amur after a long series of Adventures and instructions among such shadowy

Personages as verite observance falsehood and good operation finally won the love of Bel pel Haw was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively medieval his contemporary John Skelton mingled the old Fashions with the new classical learning in his bouge of court court entertainment or Dole and in

Others of his earlier pieces he used like ha’s choser seven line stanza but his later poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention called after him skeltonic this was a sort of glorified dogal in short Swift ragged lines with occasional intermixture of French and

Latin her beauty to augment Dame nature hath her lent a wart upon her cheek who so list to seek in her visous scar that seeth from afar like to the Radiant Star all with favor fret so properly it is set she is the Violet the daisy delectable the Coline commendable the

Jeler amable for this most goodly flower this Blossom of fresh color so Jupiter me sucker she flourisheth new and new in Beauty and virtue H clarate Gina o gloriaa femina Etc Skelton was a rude railing rhyme and a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon coarse as

Rabet Whimsical obscure but always vivacious he was the Rector of D in norfol but his profane and scarless wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character his tunning of Eleanor rumming is a study of very low life reminding one slightly of Burns’s Jolly Beggars his Philip Sparrow is a sportive pretty

Fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to mistress Joanna scoup of caro and has been compared to the Latin poet catullus’s elegy on lesbia’s Sparrow in speak parrot and why Come Ye not to court he assailed the powerful Cardinal waly with the most ferocious

Satire and was in consequence obliged to take Sanctuary at Westminster where he died in 1529 Skelton was a classical scholar and at one time tutor to Henry VII the great humanist arasmus spoke of him as the one light and ornament of British letters kton asserts that he had read Virgil

Avid and Tully and quaintly adds I suppose he hath drunken of elison’s well in refreshing contrast with the artificial Court poetry of the 15th and the first three quarters of the 16th century was the fol poetry the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition the English and Scotch ballads

Were narrative songs written in a variety of meters but chiefly in what is known as The Ballad stanza in summer when the Shaws be Shane and leaves be large and long it is full merry in Fair Forest to hear the fowlest song to see the deer draw to the Dale

And leave The Hil he and Shadow them in the leaves green under the Greenwood tree it is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads they lived on the lips of the people and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and

Sung meanwhile they underwent repeated changes so that we have numerous versions of the same story they belong to no particular author but like all folklore were handed freely by the unknown poets minstrels and ballad reciters who modernized their language added to them or corrupted them and passed them along coming out of an

Uncertain past based on on some dark Legend of heartbreak or Bloodshed they bear no poet’s name but are F Nur and have the flavor of wild game in the forms in which they are preserved few of them are older than the 17th century or the latter part of the

16th century though many in their original shape are doubtless much older a very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 15th century and to the same period is assigned the Charming Ballad of the nut brown maid and the famous border Ballad of chvy Chase which describes a battle between

The retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy it was this song of which sir Philip Sydney wrote I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet and yet it is sung but by some

Blind Crowder with no rougher voice than rude style but the style of the ballads was not always rude in their compressed energy of expression in the impassioned abrupt yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror there reside often a tragic power and

Art Superior to any English poetry that had been written since choser Superior even to choser in the quality of intensity the true home of the ballad literature was the North country and especially the scotch border where the constant foray of moss Troopers and the raids and private Warfare of the Lords

Of the marches supplied many traditions of heroism like those celebrated in the old poem The Battle of otterbourne and in the hunting of the chevat or Chevy Chas already mentioned some of these are scotch and others English the dialect of Loland Scotland did not in effect differ much

From that of North umberland and Yorkshire both descended alike from the old north uman of anglo-saxon times other ballads were shortened popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing out of fashion among educated readers in the 16th century and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers others preserved

The memory of local Countryside Tales Family Feud moods and tragic incidents partly historical and partly legendary Associated often with particular spots such are for example the dowy dens of Yaro Fair Helen of Kirk Connell The Forsaken bride and the twah corbes others again have a coloring of popular Superstition like the beautiful

Ballad concerning Thomas of Eldon who goes in at Elden Hill with an elf queen and spends seven years in Fairyland but the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about the name of that good Outlaw Robin Hood who with his merry men hunted the

Forest of Mary Sherwood where he killed the king’s deer and whay Rich Travelers but was kind to poor Knights and honest workmen Robin Hood is the true ballad hero the darling of the common people as Arthur was of the Nobles the names of his Confessor Fri tuck his mistress made

Maran his companions Little John scathelock and much The Miller’s son were as familiar as household words langland in the 14th century mentions rhymes of Robin Hood and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage as with one of the dispossessed Barons who had been

Adherence of Simon deont fort in his war against Henry III but there seems to be nothing historical about Robin Hood he was a creation of the popular fancy the game laws under the Norman Kings were very oppressive and there were doubtless dim memories still cherished among the Saxon masses of

Herward and edric the wild who had defied the power of the Conqueror as well as of later free booters who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder Robin Hood was a thoroughly National character he had the English love of fair play the English Readiness

To shake hands and make up and keep No Malice when worsted in a square fight he beat and plundered the rich Bishops and Abbotts who had more than their fair share of wealth but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed and lived a free and careless life in the good green

Wood he was a mighty Archer with those National weapons the Longbow and the cloth yard shaft he tricked and baffled legal Authority in the person of The Proud Sheriff of Nottingham thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness and Adventure which marked the Freeborn vigorous yry of England and finally the

Scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of the old Robin Hood of England and his merry men the ballads came in time to have a certain tricks of style such as are apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk

Poetry such as their use of conventional epithets the red red gold the good green wood The Gray Goose wi such are certain recurring terms of phrase like but out and spake their stepmother such is finally a kind of sing song repetition which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his

Stock as for example she hadn’t have put a double rose a rose but only TW or again and many one sings O grass o grass and many one sings a corn and many one sings A Robin Hood Ken’s little where he was born it was not in the ha the ha nor

In the painted Bower but it was in the good green wood among the lily flower copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century printed in Black letter broadsides or single sheets winin the word printed in 1489 a little Gest of

Robin Hood which is a sort of Digest of earlier ballads on the subject in the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies called garlands early in the 18th century the scotch poet Alan Ramsey published a number of scotch ballads in the Evergreen and the tea table

Miscellany but no large and important collection was put forth until Percy’s relics 1765 a book which had a powerful influence upon woodsworth and Walter Scott in Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were were written in the 18th century such as Jane Elliot’s lament for floden and the fine

Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence Walter Scott’s proud Maisy is in the woods is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant indirect method of old ballad makers in 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks and many Greek Scholars with their manuscripts fled into Italy where they began teaching their language and

Literature and especially the philosophy of Plato there had been little or no knowledge of Greek in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin Classics Avid and staus were widely read and so was the late Latin poet boethus whose de consola philosoph had been

Translated into English by King Alfred and by choser little was known of Virgil at firsthand and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard who made sundry works of Enchantment at Rome such as a magic mirror and statue caxton’s so-called trans ation of the anid was in reality nothing but a

Version of a French romance based on Virgil’s epic of the Roman historians orators and moralists such as Livy tacitus Caesar Cicero and senica there was an almost entire ignorance as also of poets like Horus lucretius Juvenile and catellis the gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature

Which took place in the 15th century and largely in Italy worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe man manuscripts were brought out of their hiding places edited by Scholars and spread abroad by means of the printing press statues were dug up and placed in museums and Men became acquainted with a

Civilization far more mature than that of the middle age and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the Fine Arts in the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England William Gren and Thomas

Linaker who had studied at Florence under the refugee de chal candilis began teaching Greek at Oxford the former as early as 1491 a little later John Colette dean of St Paul’s and the founder of St Paul’s School and his friend William Lily the Garian and first master of St Paul’s

1500 also studied Greek abroad Colette in Italy and Lily at rhs and in the city of Rome Thomas Moore afterward the famous Chancellor of Henry VII was among the pupils of Gren and liner at Oxford thither also in 1497 came in search of the new knowledge the Dutchman arasmus

Who became the foremost scholar of his time from Oxford the study spread to the sister University where the first English Grecian of his day sir Jonathan Chek who taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540 among his pupes were Roger asham

Already mentioned in whose time St John’s College Cambridge was the chief seat of the new learning of which Thomas Nash testifies that it was a university within itself having more candles light in it every winter morning before four of the clock then the four ofth clock Bell gave

Strokes Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent opposition from the conservative element who were nicknamed Trojans the opposition came in part from the priests who feared that the new study would SE seeds of heresy yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture among

Them Thomas Moore whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the block for his religion Cardinal woy whom Moore succeeded as Chancellor was also a munificent patron of learning and founded Christ Church College at Oxford popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies and over 20 endowed grammar schools were

Established in England in the first 20 years of the 16th century Greek became a passion even with the English ladies asham in his school master A Treatise on education published in 1570 says that Queen Elizabeth readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prender of this church doth read Latin

In a whole week and in the same book he tells how calling Once Upon Lady Jane gray at broadgate in Lasher he found her in her chamber reading fedon platonis in Greek and that with as much delight as some gentleman would read a Mery Tale in

Bouas and when he asked her why she had not gone hunting with the rest she answered I wish all their little sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato asham School Master as well as his earlier book toxophilus a platonic Dialogue on archery bristles with

Quotations from the Greek and Latin Classics and with that Perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches which remained the fashion in all serious Pros down to the time of dren one Speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the scriptures into English out of the

Original tongues in 1525 William Tindall printed at cologne and worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek 10 years later miles Coverdale made at Zurich a translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin these were the basis of numerous later translations and the strong beautiful English of

Tindall’s Testament is preserved for the most part in our authorized version at first it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England numbers of copies were brought into the country however and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation after Henry VII had broken

With the Pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people Tindall and Sir Thomas Moore carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions that issue between the church and the Protestants other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homy sermons preached at Westminster and

At Paul’s Cross by Bishop Hugh ladimer who was burned at Oxford in the reign of BL Mary the English book of common prayer was compiled in 1549 to 52 Moore was perhaps the best representative of a group of Scholars who wished to Enlighten and reform the Church from

Inside but who refused to follow Henry VII in his breach with Rome Dean collet and John fiser Bishop of Rochester belonged to the same company and fiser was beheaded in the same year with more and for the same offense namely refusing to take the oath to maintain the ACT confirming the

King’s divorce from from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage with Anne Bolin Moore’s philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia the description of an ideal Commonwealth modeled on Plato’s Republic and printed in 1516 the name signifies no place AOS and has furnished an adjective to the language the Utopia was in Latin but

Moore’s history of Edward V and Richard II written in 1513 though not printed till 1557 was in English it is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a Chronicle that is it is a reason and artistic presentation of an historic period and not a mere chronological narrative of

Events the first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original work of literature in England it was a season of preparation of Education the storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary Renaissance through the Reigns of Henry VII Edward II and Queen Mary when Elizabeth came to

The throne in 1558 a more settled Order of Things began and a period of great National prosperity and Glory meanwhile the English mine had slowly been assimilating the new classical culture which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors

A fresh poetic impulse Came From Italy in 1557 appeared toddles miscellane containing songs and sonnets by a new company of courtly makers most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before by gentlemen of Henry VII’s court and circulated in manuscript the Two Chief contributors were Sir Thomas

Wyatt at one time English ambassador to Spain and that brilliant Noble Henry Howard the Earl of Sur who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the King’s Arms with his own both of them were dead long before their work was printed the pieces in toddles miscellane show very clearly

The influence of Italian poetry we have seen that choser took subjects and something more from bachio and petrarch but the sonnet which petrarch had brought to Great Perfection was first introduced into England by Wyatt there was a great Revival of saering in Italy in the 16th century and a number of

Wyatt’s poems were adaptations of the sonnets and Canon of petrarch and later poets others were imitations of horus’s satires and Epistles Siri introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the anad the love poetry of toddle miscellane is polished and artificial like the models

Which it followed Dante’s beatric was a child and so was petrarch’s Laura following their example Su addressed his love complaints by way of compliment to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine the amorist or love sers dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious

Minuteness and the conventional nature of their size and complaints May often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems description of the Restless state of a lover with suit to his lady to Ru on his dying heart hell torment not the Damned ghost so sore as unkindness the

Lover the lover prayeth not to be disdained refused mistrusted nor forsaken Etc the most genuine utterance of Sur was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor a cage where so many a song bird has grown vocal and Wyatt’s little piece of eight lines of his return from Spain

Is worth dreams of his amatory affections nevertheless the writers in toddles miscellane were real reformers of English poetry they introduced new models of style and new metrical forms and they broke away from the medieval Traditions which had hither to obtained the language had undergone some changes since Cher’s time which made his

Scansion obsolete the accent of many words of French origin like Nur kurage virtu mat had shifted to the first syllable and the E of the final syllables s n Ed and E had largely disappeared but the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind

And in Steven Haw who wrote A Century after choser we still find such lines as these but he my strokus might write well endure he was so great and huge of pans ha’s practice is variable in this respect and so is his contemporary skeletons but in Wyatt and sui who wrote

Only a few years later the reader first feels that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion but Cher’s example still continued potent Spencer revived many of his obsolete words both in pastorals and in his fairy queen thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction but

Incurring Ben Johnson’s censure that he writ no language a poem that stands midway between Spencer and late medieval work of Cher’s School such as ha’s pastime of pleasure was the induction contributed by Thomas sack Lord Buckhurst in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called the mirror for

Magistrates the whole series was the work of many hands modeled upon lidgate’s Falls of princes taken from picachio and was designed as a warning to Great Men of the fickleness of Fortune the induction is the only noteworthy part of it it was an allegory written in choser seven-line stanza and

Described with a somber imaginative power the figure of Sorrow her Abode in the gasly of aess and her attendance remorse dread old age Etc Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy gorbad and it was at his request that asham wrote the school Master Italian poetry also fed the

Genius of Edmund Spencer 1552 to 99 while a student at pemro Hall Cambridge he had translated some of the visions of petrarch and the visions of ble of French poet but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his Shepherd’s calendar announced the coming of a great original poet the first since

Choser the shepherd’s calendar was a pastoral in 12 eogs one for each month of the year there had been a great Revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France but with one or two insignificant exceptions Spencers were the first bucolics in English two of his eogs were paraphrases from Clement Maro a French

Protestant poet whose Psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of Francis I the Pastoral Machinery had been used by Virgil and by his modern imitators not merely to betray the loves of Stan and Khloe or the idyllic charms of rustic life but also as a vehicle of compliment elegy satire and personal

Illusion of many kinds Spencer accordingly alluded to his friends Sydney and harvy as the Shepherds asrael and habol paid Court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia and introduced produced in the form of anagrams names of the high Church Bishop of London Elmer and the low Church Archbishop grindle the conventional pastoral is a

Somewhat delicate exotic in English poetry and represents a very unreal Arcadia before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become a burden and the only piece of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton’s wonderful ldus the shepherd’s calendar however

Though it belonged to an artificial order of literature had the unmistakable stamp of Genius in its style there was a broad easy Mastery of the resources of language a Grace fluency and music which were new to English poetry It Was Written while Spencer was in service

With the Earl of ler and enjoying the Friendship of his nephew the all accomplished Sydney and was perhaps composed at the latter’s country seat of penshurst in the following year Spencer went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord gray of Wilton who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that Kingdom

After filling several clerk ships in the Irish government Spencer received a grant of the castle and estate of kilman a part of the forfeited lands of the Rebel Earl of Desmond here among Landscapes richly wooded like the scenery of his own fairy land under the cooly shades of the green

Alders by the mulles shore Sir Walter Raleigh found him in 1589 busy upon his fairy queen in his poem Colin Clouts come home again Spencer tells in pastoral language how The Shepherd of the ocean persuaded him to go to London where he presented him to the queen under whose patronage

The first three books of his great poem were printed in 1590 a volume of minor poems entitled complaints followed in 1591 and the three remaining books of the fairy queen in 1596 in 1595 to 96 he published also his DH naida pralon and the four hymns on

Love and beauty and on Heavenly love and Heavenly Beauty in 1598 in Tyrone’s Rebellion Kil Colman Castle was sacked and burned and Spencer with his family fled to London where he died in January 1599 the fairy queen reflects perhaps more fully than any other English work the many-sided literary influences of the

Renaissance it was the blossom of a richly composite culture its immediate models were ariosto’s Orlando Furioso the first 40 kantos of which were published in 1515 and tassos gusal liberata printed in 1581 both of these were in subject romances of chivalry the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos Orlando

Being identical with the hero of the French Shon Deon the second upon the history of the First Crusade and the recovery of the holy city from the sarason but in both of them there was a splendor of addiction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude

Medieval romances arosto and tasso wrote with the great epics of Homer and Virgil constantly in mind and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art in its early freshness and power the fairy queen too was a tale of night errantry its hero was King Arthur and

Its Pages swarm with the familiar adventures and figures of Gothic romance distressed ladies and their Champions combats with dragons and Giants Enchanted castles magic rings Charmed Wells Forest hermitages Etc but side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory Knights Squires Wizards

Hamadryads saders and River Gods idleness gluttony and Superstition jostle each other in Spencer’s Fairyland descents to The Infernal Shades in the manner of Homer and Virgil alternate with descriptions of the Palace of pride in the manner of the romant of the Rose but Spencer’s imagination was a powerful spirit and held all these

Diverse elements in solution he removed them to an ideal sphere apart from Place withholding time where they seem all alike equally real the dateless conceptions of the poet’s dream the poem was to have been a continued allegory or dark conceit in 12 books the hero of each book representing

One of the 12 moral virtues only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written by way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest Spencer undertook to make his allegory a double one personal and historical as well as moral or abstract thus Gloriana the queen of fairies

Stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth to whom the poem was dedicated Prince Arthur is Lister as well as magnificence Dessa is falsehood but also Mary Queen of Scots Gran torto is Philip II of Spain sir Aral is justice but likewise he is Sir Arthur gr de

Wilton other characters Shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh sir Philip Sydney Henry IV of France Etc and such public events as the Revolt of the Spanish Netherlands the Irish Rebellion the execution of Mary Stewart and the rising of the northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in Parable in this

Way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time the Warfare of young England against popery and Spain the allegory is not always easy to follow it is kept up most carefully in the first two books but it sat rather lightly on Spencer’s conscience and is

Not of the essence of the poem it is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable AT Pleasure the spencerian stanza in which the fairy queen was written was adapted from the a OFA Rema of arosto Spencer changed somewhat the order of the Rhymes in the first eight

Lines and added a ninth line of 12 syllables thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse it was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost and his similes especially Each of which usually fills a whole stanza have the pictorial

Amplitude of homers Spencer was in fact a great painter his poetry is almost purely sensuous the personages in the fairy queen are not characters but richly colored figures moving to the accompaniment of delicious music in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth Charles Lamb said that he was the

Poet’s poet that is he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shape of beauty so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses Spencer was in some

Respects more an Italian than an English poet it is said the Venetian gonders still sing that stands as of tassos gusal liberata it is not easy to imagine the TS barges chanting passages from the fairy queen those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound

Interpretation of our common life but Spencer escaped altogether from reality into a region of Pure Imagination his aerial Creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids which have no root in the soil but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air their birth was of the womb of

Morning Dew and their conception of the Glorious Prime among the minor poems of Spencer the most delightful were his prothalamion and epithalamion the first was a spousal verse made for the double wedding of the ladies Katherine and Elizabeth Somerset whom the poet figures as two white swans

That come swimming down the temps whose surface the nymphs strew with lies till it appears like a bride’s chamber floor sweet temps run softly till I end my song is the burden of each stanza the epithalamion was Spencer’s own marriage song written to Crown his series of amoretti or love sonnets and

Is the most Splendid Hymn of triumphant love in the language hardly less beautiful than these was mui poos or the fate of the butterfly in addition to the classical myth of Arachne the spider the four hymns In Praise of love and beauty Heavenly love and Heavenly Beauty are

Also stately and Noble poems but by reason of their abstractness and the platonic mysticism which they express are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spencer’s genius he was a seer of visions of images full brilliant and distinct and not like bunan Dante or

Hawthorne a projector into bodily shapes of ideas typical and emblematic the Shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind end of part one chapter 2 recording by Kalinda in lunberg Germany on March 21st 2009 part one chapter 3 of a brief history history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in

The public domain A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers part 1 chapter 3 the age of Shakespeare 1564 to 1616 the great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spencer Shepherd’s calendar in 1579 and closed with the printing of Milton Samson Agonist in 167

1 within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature Milton who acknowledged Spencer as his master and who was a boy of eight years at Shakespeare’s death lived long enough to witness the

Establishment of the entirely new school of poets in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries but roughly speaking the dates above given Mark the limits of one literary aoch which which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan in strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the Queen’s death in

1603 but the Poets of the succeeding Reigns inherited much of the glow and Splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners and the spacious times of great Elizabeth have been by courtesy prolonged to the year of restoration 1660 there is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole

Period a largess of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamped them all alikee with the Queen’s seal nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the Monarch has attached itself to the literature of her Reign and of the Reign

Succeeding hers the expression Victorian poetry has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time but in Elizabethan poetry the maiden Queen is really the central figure she is Cynthia she is thetus great queen of shepherds on the sea

She is Spencer’s Gloriana and even Shakespeare the most impersonal of poets paid tribute to her in Henry VII and in a more delicate and indirect way in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night’s Dream that very time I marked but thou couldst not flying between the cold Moon

And the Earth Cupid all armed a certain aim he took at a fair vestle thrown by the west and Loos his love shaft smartly from his bow as he would Pierce a 100,000 Hearts but I might see young fiery Dart quenched in the chased beams of the watery moon and the Imperial voes

Passed on in Maiden meditation fancy-free an illusion to Lys sister’s unsuccessful suit for Elizabeth’s hand the Praises of the queen which sound through all the Poetry of her time seemed somewhat overdone to a modern reader but they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment England had never before had a female

Sovereign except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary when she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter’s feet the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the Crown The Poets idealized Elizabeth

She was to Spencer to Sydney and to Rally not merely a woman and Virgin Queen but the champion of protestantism the lady of young England the heroine of conflict against popery and Spain moreover Elizabeth was a great woman in spite of the vanity Capri and ingratitude which disfigured her

Character and the vacillating torturous policy which often distinguished her government she was at bottom a sovereign of large views strong will and dauntless courage like her father she loved a man and she had the Magnificent tastes of the tutors she was a patron of the Arts passionately fond of shows and

Spectacles and sensible to Poetic flattery in her royal progresses through the kingdom the universities and the Nobles and the cities VI with one another in receiving her with plays Rebels masks and triumphs in the mythological Taste of the day when the queen paraded through a country Town says Wharton the historian

Of English poetry almost every pageant was a Pantheon when she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility at entering the hall she was saluted by the penates in the afternoon when she condescended to walk in the garden the lake was covered with tritons and nads

The pages of the family were converted into wood nymphs who peep from every Bower and the footmen gambled Over The Lawns and the figures of SATs when her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who pronouncing our Royal prud to be the biggest Paragon of

Unspotted Chastity invited her to the Groves free from the intrusions of action the most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice were perhaps The Games celebrated in her Honor by the Earl of Lister when she visited him at kennworth in 1575 an account of these was published

By a contemp temporary poet George gascoin the princely pleasures at the court of Kennelworth and Walter Scott has made them familiar to Modern readers in his novel of kennworth Sydney was present on this occasion and perhaps Shakespeare then a boy of 11 and living at Stratford not

Far off may have been taken to see the spectacle may have seen Neptune riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle Lake speak the copy of verses in which he offered his Trident to the Empress of the sea and may have heard a mermaid on a

Dolphin’s back utter such dulet and harmonious breath that the rude sea grew civil at the sound but in considering the literature of Elizabeth’s Reign it will be convenient to speak first of the pros while following up Spencer’s career to its close 1599 we have for the sake of unity of

Treatment anticipated somewhat the literary history of the 20 years preceding in 1579 appeared a book which had a remarkable influence on English pros this was John L’s iuis the anatomy of wit it was in form of Romance the history of a young Athenian who went to

Naples to see the world and get an education but it is in substance nothing but a series of dialogues on love friendship religion Etc written in language which from the title of the book has received the name of euphuism this new English became very fashionable among the ladies and that

Beauty in court which could not parlay uuism says a writer of 1632 was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French Walter Scott introduced the eist into his novel The monaster but the peculiar jargon which sir Percy shafton is made to talk is not at all like the real

Euphuism that consisted of antithesis alliteration and the profuse illustration of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a kind of fabulous Natural History descend into thine own conscience and consider with thyself the great difference between staring and Stark blind wit and wisdom love and lust be merry but with modesty

Be sober but not too Sullen be Valiant but not too venturous I see now that as the fish scalopus in the flood araxis at the waxing of the moon is as white as the driven snow and at the waning as black as the burnt coal so euu which at the

First increasing of our familiarity was very zealous is now at the last cast become most faithless besides the fish scalopus the favorite animals of Lily’s managerie are such as the chameleon which though he have most guts draweth least breath the bird paralus which sitting upon white

Cloth is white upon green green and the serpent peruas which though he be full of poison yet having no teeth hurteth none but himself Lily’s style was piy and sententious and his sentences have the air of Proverbs or epigrams the vice of euphuism was its monotony on every page

Of the book there was something pungent something quotable but many pages of such writing became tiresome yet it did much to form the hitherto loose structure of English Pros by lending it point and polish his carefully balanced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric and his book became a manual of polite conversation and

Introduced that fashion of witty reparte which is evident enough in Shakespeare’s comic dialogue in 1580 appeared the second part eupo and his England and six editions of the whole work were printed before 1598 Lily had many imitators in Steven goss’s School of abuse a tract directed against the stage and published about 4

Months later than the first part of euu the language is distinctly euphuistic the dramatist Robert Green published in 1587 his Menon Camila’s alarm to slumbering eois and his yuu centure to Fus his brother dramatist Thomas Lodge published in 1590 rosaland eo’s golden Legacy from which Shakespeare took the

Plot of As You Like It Shakespeare and Ben Johnson both quote from euu in their plays and Shakespeare was really writing euphuism when he wrote Such a sentence as T true T pity pity t t true that nightly gentleman Philip Sydney was a true type of the lofty aspiration and manifold activity of

Elizab in England he was scholar poet courtier diplomatist Statesman Soldier Allin one educated at Oxford and then introduced at court by his uncle the Earl of Lister he had been sent to France when a lad of 18 with the embassy which went to treat of the Queen’s

Proposed marriage to the Duke of alanson and was in Paris at the time of the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572 afterward he had traveled through Germany Italy and the Netherlands had gone as as ambassador to the emperor’s court and everywhere won golden opinions in 1580 while visiting his sister Mary

Countess of pmro at Wilton he wrote for her pleasure the Countess of pmr’s Arcadia which remained in manuscript until 1590 this was a pastoral romance after the manner of the Italian Arcadia of sanazaro and the Diana anamara of montoo a Portuguese author it was in Pros but intermixed with songs and sonnets and

Sydney finished only two books and a portion of a third it describes the adventures of two cousins madoris and Pericles who are wrecked on the coast of Sparta the plot is very involved and is full of the stock episodes of romance disguises surprises love intrigues battles jousts and single

Combats although the Insurrection of the helots against the Spartans forms a part of the story The Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the helenic ppines but the fanciful country of pastoral romance an unreal climb like the Fairyland of Spencer Sydney was our first writer of poetic Pros the poet Drayton says that

He did first reduce our tongue from Lily’s writings then in use talking of stones Stars plants of fishes flies playing with words and Idol similes Sydney was certainly no eupo but his style was as Italian as lies though in a different way his English was too

Pretty for pros his Sydney in showers of sweet discourse sewed every page of the Arcadia with those flowers of conceit those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved but which the taste of a sever age finds insipid this Splendid Vice of the Elizabethan writers appears in Sydney chiefly in the form of an excessive

Personification if he describes a field full of roses he makes the Roses add such a ruddy show onto it as though the field were bashful at its own Beauty if he describes lady is bathing in a stream he makes the water break into 20 Bubbles as not content to have

The picture of their face enlarge upon him but he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them and even a passage which should be tragic such as the death of its heroine perania he embroiders with conceits like these for her exceeding Fair eyes having

With continued weeping got a little redness about them her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling as though they kissed their neighbor death in her cheek cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them her neck a neck indeed of alabaster displaying the

Wound which with most dainty blood labored to drown his own Beauties so as here was a river of purest red there an island of perfectest white Etc the Arcadia like euu was a lady’s book it was the favorite Court Romance of its day but it surfs a modern reader

With its sweetness and confuses him with its tangle of Adventures the the lady For Whom It Was Written was the mother of that William Herbert Earl of Pembroke to whom Shakespeare sonnets are thought to have been dedicated and she was the subject of Ben Johnson’s famous Epitaph underneath this Sable hearse

Lies the subject of all verse Sydney’s sister pmr’s mother death a thou Hast slain another learned and fair and good as she time shall throw a dart at thee Sydney’s defense of poesy composed in 1581 but not printed until 1595 was written in manlier English than the

Arcadia and is one of the very few books of criticism belonging to a creative and uncritical time he was also the author of a series of love sonnets astell and Stella in which he paid platonic Court to the Lady Penelope rich with whom he was not at all in love according to the

Conventional usage of the amorist Sydney died in 1586 from a wound received in a cavalry charge at zfen where he was an officer in the English contingent sent to help the Dutch against Spain the story has often been told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded

Soldier with the words thy necessity is yet greater than mine Sydney was England’s darling and there was hardly a poet in the land from whom his death did not obtain the need of some melodious tear Spencer’s ruins of time were among the number of these funeral songs but

The best of them all was one by Matthew reyen concerning whom little is known another typical Englishman of Elizabeth’s Reign was Walter Raleigh who was even more versatile than Sydney and more representative of the Restless Spirit of romantic adventure mixed with the cool practical Enterprise that marked the times he fought against the

Queen’s Enemy by land and sea in many quarters of the globe in the Netherlands and in Ireland against Spain with the hugenot Army against the league in France rally was from devenshire the great Nursery of English seamen he was a half brother to the famous Navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert

And cousin to another great Captain Sir Richard Grenville he sailed with Gilbert on one of his voyages against the Spanish treasure Fleet and in 1591 he published a report of the fight near the azors between grenville’s ship the revenue and 15 great ships of Spain an action said Francis Bacon memorable even

Beyond credit and to the height of some heroical Fable rale was active in raising a fleet against the Spanish Armada of 1588 he was present in 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of Essex singed the Spanish King’s beard in the harbor of Cadiz the year before he had sailed

To Guana in search of the fabled El Dorado destroying on the way the Spanish Town of San Jose in the West Indies and on his return he published his discovery of the empire of Guana in 1597 he captured the town of fial in the Azores he took a prominent part in

Colonizing Virginia and he introduced tobacco and the potato plant into Europe America was still a land of Wonder and romance full of rumors nightmares and enchantments in 1580 when Francis Drake the devire skipper had dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor after his voyage around the world the enthusiasm of England had been mightily

Stirred these narratives of rally and the similar accounts of the exploits of the Bold sailers Davis Hawkins frobisher Gilbert and Drake but especially the great enyclopedia of nautical travel published by Richard haut in 1589 9 the principal navigations voyages and discoveries made by the English Nation worked powerfully on the imaginations of

The Poets we see the influence of this literature of travel in the Tempest written undoubtedly after Shakespeare had been reading The Narrative of Sir George Summers shipwreck on the Bermudas or Isles of devils rally was not in favor with Elizabeth’s successor James I he was sentenced to death on a trumped up

Charge of high treason the sentence hung over him until 1618 when it was revived against him and he was beheaded meanwhile during his 12 years imprisonment in the tower he had written his magnum opus the history of the world this is not a history in the modern sense but a series of learned

Dissertations on law government theology magic War Etc a chapter with such a caption as the following would hardly be found in a universal history nowadays of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the Moon and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the

Air the preface and conclusion are noble examples of Elizabeth in pros and the book ends with an oft qued apostrophe to death oh eloquent just and mighty death whom none could advise thou has persuaded what none hath dared thou has done and whom all the world hath

Flattered thou only Hast cast out of the world and despised thou has drawn together all the far-fetched greatness all the pride cruelty and amb I of man and covered it all with these two narrow words hick yasid although so busy a man Raleigh found time to be a poet Spencer calls

Him the Summer’s night Andale and George putam in his art of English poey 1589 finds his vein most lofty insolent and passionate puam used insolent in its old sense uncommon but this description is hardly less true if we accept the word in its modern meaning R’s most notable

Verses the LIE are a challenge to the world inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of Life the SAA indag naio of Swift the same grave and costic Melancholy the same disillusion marks his quaint poem The Pilgrimage it is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical

Remains are asserted in the manuscripts or by tradition to have been made by Sir Walter righ the night before he was beheaded of one such poem The assertion is probably true namely the lines found in his Bible in the Gat house at Westminster even such is time that takes

In trust our youth our Joys our all we have and pays as but with Earth and dust who in the dark and Silent grave when we’ve wandered all our ways shuts up the story of our days but from this Earth this grave this dust my God shall Raise Me Up I

Trust the strictly literary pros of the Elizabethan period bore a small proportion to the verse many entire Departments of PR literature were as yet undeveloped fiction was represented outside of Arcadia and euo already mentioned chiefly by Tales translated or imitated from Italian no George tuberville’s tragical Tales

1566 was a collection of such stories and William painter’s Palace of pleasure 1576 to 77 a similar collection from picachio De camaron and the novels of bandello these translations are mainly of Interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists lodes rosaland and Robert Green pendo the sources respectively of Shakespeare’s as you

Like it and Winter’s Tale are short pastoral romances not without prettiness in their artificial way the satirical pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows against Martin meate an anonymous writer or company of writers who attacked the Bishops are not wanting in wit but are so cumbered with

Fantastic whimsic alties and so bound up with personal quarrels that Oblivion has covered them the most noteworthy of them were Nash’s peer Penn’s supplication to the devil Lily Pap with a hatchet and greens GRS worth of wit of books which were not so much literature as the material of literature

Mention may be made of the chronicle of England compiled by Ralph hollinshed in 1577 this was Shakespeare’s English History and its strong lancastrian bias influenced Shakespeare in his representation of Richard iiii and other characters in his historical plays in his Roman tragedies Shakespeare followed closely Sir Thomas North’s translations

Of plutarch’s lives made in 1579 from the French version of jacqu AMU of books belonging to other departments than pure literature the most important was Richard hooker’s ecclesiastical polity the first four books of which appeared in 1594 this was a work on the philosophy of law and a defense as against the

Presbyterians of the government of the English church by Bishops no work of equal dignity and scope had yet been published in English Pros It Was Written in sonorous stately and somewhat involved periods and a Latin rather than an English idiom and it influenced strongly the diction of

Later writers such as Milton and Sir Thomas Brown had the ecclesiastical polity been written 100 or perhaps even 50 years later it would doubtless have been written in Latin the life of Sir Francis Bacon the father of inductive philosophy as he has been called better the founder of inductive

Logic belongs to English History and the bulk of his writings in Latin and English to the history of English philosophy but his volume of essays was a contribution to General literature in their completed form they belonged to the year 1625 but the first edition was printed in 1597 and contained only 10

Short essays each of them rather a string of pregnant maxims the textt for an essay then that developed treatment of a subject which we Now understand by the word essay they were said their author as grains of salt that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with

Satiety they were the first essays soall in the language the word said bacon is late but the thing is ancient the word he took from the French essay of montna the first two books of which had been published in 1592 bacon testified that his essays were the most popular of his writings

Because they came home to men’s business and bosoms their alternate title explains their character counsel civil and moral that is pieces of advice touching the conduct of life of a nature whereof men shall find much in experience little in books the essays contain the quintessence of Bacon’s practical wisdom

His wide knowledge of the world of men the truth and depth of his sayings and the extent of ground which they cover as well as the weighty compactness of his style have given many of them the currency of Proverbs revenge is a kind of wild Justice he that hath wife and children

Hath given hostages to Fortune there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion Bacon’s reason was illuminated by a powerful imagination and his Noble English Rises now and then as in his essay on death into eloquence the eloquence of pure thought touched Gravely and a far off by

Emotion in general the atmosphere of his intellect is that of lumun seum which he loved to commend not drenched or bloodied by the affections Dr Johnson said that the wine of Bacon’s writings was a dry wine a popular class of books in the 17th century were characters or witty

Descriptions of the properties of Sury persons such as the good school Master the Clown the country magistrate much as in some Modern heads of the people where Douglas Gerald or Lee Hunt sketches the medical student the monthly nurse Etc a still more modern instance of the kind is George Elliot’s impressions of

Theophrastus such which derives its title from the Greek philosopher theophrastus whose character sketches were the original models of this kind of literature the most popular character book in Europe in the 17th century was laer character but this was not published until 1588 in England the fashion had been set in

1614 by the characters of Sir Thomas overbury who died by Poison the year before his book was printed one of overbury’s sketches the fair and happy milkmaid is justly celebrated for its oldw World sweetness and quaintness her breath is her own which sense all the year long of June like a

New made hcock she makes her hand hard with labor and her heart soft with pity and when winter even fall early sitting at her Merry wheel she sings Defiance to the giddy Wheel of Fortune she bestows her Year’s wages at next fair and in choosing her garments counts no bravery

In the world like decency the garden and beehive are all her physic and surgery and she lives the longer for it she dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night and fears no manner of ill because she means none yet to say truth she is never alone but is still accompanied

With old songs honest thoughts and prayers but short ones thus lives she and all her care is she may die in the springtime to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding sheet England was still merry England in the times of good Queen beess and rang with old songs such as kept this

Milkmaid company songs said Bishop Joseph Hall which were sung to the wheel and sung unto the pale Shakespeare loved their simple minstral he put some of them into the mouth of ailia and Scattered snatches of them through his plays and wrote others like them himself now good Cesario but that piece

Of song that old and antique song we heard last night me thinks it did relieve my passion much and more than light airs and recollected terms of these most brisk and giddy paced times mark it Cesario it is old and plain the knits and the Spinners in the sun and

The free Maids that weave their threads with bones do use to chant it it is silly sooth and delies with the innocence of love like the old age many of these songs so natural fresh and spontaneous together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse were printed in

Miscellaneous such as the passionate Pilgrim England’s Helicon and Davidson’s poetical rapity some were Anonymous or were by Poets of whom little more is known than their names others were by well-known writers and others again were strewn through the plays of Lily Shakespeare Johnson Bowmont Fletcher and other dramatists series of love sonnets like

Spencer amoretti and Sydney’s astell and Stella were written by Shakespeare Daniel Drayton Drummond Constable Watson and others all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary pastorals too were written in great number such as William Brown’s bratan pastorals and shaper’s pipe 1613 to 1616 and Marlo’s charmingly Roco little Idol the passionate Shepherd to

His love which Shakespeare quoted in the merry wives of Windsor and to which Sir Walter Ry wrot to reply there were love stories in verse like Arthur Brooks Romeo and Juliet the source of Shakespeare’s tragedy Marlo’s fragment hero and Leander and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and the

Rape of lucrecia the first of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects though handled in anything but a classical manner Wordsworth said finely of Shakespeare that he could not have written an epic he would have died of a plethora of thought Shakespeare’s two narrative poems indeed

Are by no means models of their kind the current of the story is choked at every turn though it be with golden sand it is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and Soliloquy usurp the place of narration and that in the rape of lucrecia especially the poet

Lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings instead of hastening on to the action as choser or any born Storyteller would have done in Marlo’s poem there is the same Spen Thrift fancy although not the same subtlety in the first two divisions of the poem The Story does in some sort get

Forward but in the continuation by George Chapman who wrote the last four cads the path is utterly lost with Woodbine and the gatting vine or grown one is reminded that modern poetry if it has lost in richness has gained in directness when One Compares any passage in Marlo and Chapman’s hero and Leander

With Byron’s ringing lines the wind is high on Hell’s wav as on that night of Stormy water when love who sent forgot to save the young the Beautiful the Brave the lonely hope of Zesto’s daughter Marlo’s continuator Chapman wrote a number of plays but he is best remembered by his Royal translation of

Homer issued in parts from 1598 to 1615 this was not so much a literal translation of the Greek as a great Elizabethan poem inspired by Homer it was Homer’s fire but not his Simplicity the energy of Chapman’s fancy kindling him to run Beyond his text into all manner of figures and

Conceits it was written as has been said as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman’s time certainly all later versions popes and cers and Lord Derby’s and Bryant’s seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman’s English his verse was not the heroic line of 10 syllables chosen by

Most of the standard translators but the long 14 syllable measure which degenerates easily into sing song in the hands of a feeble metrist in Chapman it is often harsh but seldom tame and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer’s hexameters from his bright Helm and

Shield did burn a most unwearied fire like Rich ais’s golden lamp whose brightness men admire past all the other host of stars when with his cheerful face fresh washed in lofty ocean waves he do the sky in Chase keats’s fine o on first looking into Chapman’s Homer is

Well known fairfax’s version of tassos Jerusalem delivered 1600 is one of the best metrical translations in the language the national pride in the achievements of Englishmen by land and sea found expression not only in Pros Chronicles and in books like stow’s survey of London and Harrison’s description of England prefix to

Holland’s Chronicle but in Long historical and descriptive poems like William Warner’s albon’s England 1586 Samuel Daniels history of the Civil Wars 1595 to 162 Michael drayton’s Barons Wars 1596 England’s heroic Epistles 1598 and poly Alon 1613 the very plan of these Works was fatal to their success it is not easy to

Digest history and geography into poetry dayon was the most considerable poet of the three but his poly Alon was nothing more than a gazeteer in rhyme a topographical survey of England and Wales with tedious personifications of rivers mountains and valleys in 30 books and nearly 100,000

Lines it was Drayton who said of Marlo that he had in him those Brave translunar things that the first poets had and there are brave things in Drayton but there are only occasional passages oases among Dre wastes of sand his aenor is a spirited War song

And his NY or Court of fery is not Unworthy of comparison with Drake’s culprit Fay and is interesting as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow and the popular fairy lore of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night Dream the well- languaged Daniel of whom Ben Johnson said that he was a good

Honest man but no poet wrote however one fine meditative piece his epistle to the Countess of Cumberland a sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet lucius’s famous passage in Praise of philosop phos ophy Suave Mari Magno tanus eora venes Etc but the Elizabethan genius found its

Fullest and truest expression in the drama it is a common phenomenon in the history of literature that some old literary form or mold will run along for centuries without having anything poured into it worth keeping until the moment comes when the genius of the time seizes

It and makes it the vehicle of immortal thought and pass fion such was in England the fortune of the stage play at a time when Cher was writing character sketches that were really dramatic the formal drama consisted of rude Miracle plays that had no literary quality whatever these were taken from the Bible

And acted at first by the priests as illustrations of scripture history and additions to the church service on feasts and Saints days afterward the town guilds or Incorporated trades took hold of them and produced them annually on scaffolds in the open air in some English cities as Coventry and

Chester they continued to be performed almost to the close of the 16th century and in the celebrated Passion Play at obber amaga in Bavaria we have an instance of a miracle play that has survived to our own day these were followed by the moral plays in which allegorical characters such as clergy

Lusty Juventus riches Folly and good demant were the persons of the drama the comic character in The Miracle plays had been the devil and he was retained in some of the moralities side by side with the abstract Vice who became the clown or fool of Shakespearean comedy the formal Vice iniquity as

Shakespeare calls him had it for his business to belabor the Roaring Devil with his wooden sword with his Dagger of laugh and his rage and his wrath cries aha to the devil pair your nails good men evil he survives also in the Harlequin of the pantomimes and in Mr punch of the

Puppet shows who kills the devil and Carries him off on his back when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell for his crimes masks and interludes the latter a species of short farce were popular at the court of Henry VII Elizabeth was often entertained at

The universities or at the ends of the court with Latin plays or with translations from senica Ides and arosto original comedies and tragedies began to be written modeled upon Terren and senica and chronical history founded on the annals of English kings there was a master of the rebels at court whose

Duty it was to select plays to be performed before the queen and these were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel or by the choir boys of St Paul’s Cathedral these early plays are of interest to the students of the history of the drama and throw much light upon

The construction of later plays like Shakespeare’s but they are rude and inartistic and without any literary quality there were also private companies of actors maintained by wealthy noblemen like the Earl of Lister and bands of strolling players who acted in in yards and bear Gardens it was not

Until stationary theaters were built and stock companies of actors regularly licensed and established that any plays were produced which deserve the name of literature in 1576 the first Playhouse was built in London this was the black Friars which was located within the Liberties of the dissolved Monastery of

The black Friars in order to be outside of the jurisdiction of the mayor and Corporation who were Puritan and determined in their opposition to the stage for the same reason the theater and the curtain were built in the same year outside the city walls in shortage later the rose the globe and

The swan were erected on the bank side across the temps and playgoers resorting to them were accustomed to take boat these early theaters were of the rudest construction the six pin many Spectators or Groundlings stood in the yard or pit which had neither floor nor roof the Shilling Spectators sat on the

Stage where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes and whence they chaffed the actors or the opposed rascality in the yard there was no scenery and the female parts were taken by Boys plays were acted in the afternoon a placard with the letters Venice or Rome or whatever

Indicated the place of the action with such rude appliances must Shakespeare bring before his audience the midnight battlements of Elenor and the moonlit Garden of the capulets the dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their public and it says much for the imaginative temper of the

Public of that day that it responded to the appeal it suffered the poet to transport it over wide intervals of space and time and with the aid of some few foot and half foot words fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars pedantry undertook even at the very beginnings of the Elizabethan drama to

Shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle or classical unities of time and place to make it keep violent action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy but the playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the audience and they decided for freedom in action rather than restraint and

Recitation hence our national drama is of Shakespeare and not of rasine by 16003 there were 12 playhouses in London in full blast although the city then numbered only 150,000 inhabitants Fresh Plays were produced every year the theater was more to the Englishman of that time than it has ever

Been before or since it was his Club his novel his newspaper Allin one no great drama has ever flourished apart from a living stage and it was fortunate that the Elizabethan dramatists were almost all of them actors and familiar with Stage effect even the few exceptions like

Bowmont and Fletcher who were young men of good birth and Fortune and not dependent on their pens were probably intimate with the actors lived in a theatrical atmosphere and knew practically how play should be put on it had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and playwright

Richard Burbage and Edward Allen the leading actors of their generation made large fortunes Shakespeare himself made enough from his share in the profits of the globe to retire with a competence some seven years before his death and purchase a handsome property and his native Stratford accordingly shortly after 1580

A number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a career these were young graduates of the universities Marlo green Peele kid Lily Lodge and others who came up to town and led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights most of them were wild and

Dissipated and ended in wretchedness Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil discourses Green in extreme destitution from a surfit of renish wine and pickled herring and Marlo was stabbed in a Tavern brawl the eist Lily produced eight plays from 1584 to 16001 they were written for

Court entertainments in pros and mostly on mythological subjects they have little dramatic power but the dialogue is brisk and vivacious and there are several pretty songs in them all the characters talk euphuism the best of these was Alexander and C paspi the plot of which is briefly as follows

Alexander has fallen in love with his beautiful captive K pasp and employs the artist aelis to paint her portrait during the sittings aelis becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion which is returned Alexander discovers their secret but magnanimously forgives the treason and joins The Lover’s

Hands the situation is a good one and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist but Lily slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and in place of passionate scenes gives us clever discourses and soliloquies or at best a light interchange of question

And answer full of conceits repes and double meanings for example appelles whom do you love best in the world campaspe he that made me last in the world aelis that was a God campaspe I had thought it had been a man Etc Lily’s service to the drama

Consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling Pros as the language of high comedy and Shakespeare’s indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit combats between Benedict and beatric in much ad do about nothing greatly Superior as they are to anything of the kind in

Lily the most important of the dramatists who were Shakespeare’s forerunners or early contemporaries was Christopher or as he was familiarly called kit Marlo born in the same year with Shakespeare 1564 he died in 1593 at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original

Plays except the comedy of errors and Love’s labors lost Marlo first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his tamberlane written before 1587 and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakespeare to do but to take it as he

Found it tamberlane was a crude violent piece full of exaggeration and bombast but with passages here and there of splend declamation justifying Ben Johnson’s phrase Marlo’s Mighty Line Johnson however ridiculed in his discoveries the scenical strutting and Furious vociferation of Marlo’s hero and Shakespeare put a quotation

From tamberlane into the mouth of his ranting pistol Marlos Edward II was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays it was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakespeare and not undeserving of the comparison which had provoked with the latters Richard II but the most interesting of Marlo’s

Plays to a modern reader is the tragical history of Dr Fus the subject is the same as in GTA’s fa and Gerta who knew the English play spoke of it as greatly planned the opening of Marlos Fus is very similar to GTA his hero wearied with unprofitable

Studies and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of Life sells his soul to the devil in return for a few years of Supernatural power the tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Fus makes of his dearly bought power wasting

It in practical jokes and Feats of Legend but of this Marlo was probably unconscious the love story of Margaret which is the central point of G’s drama is entirely wanting in Marlo’s and so is the subtle conception of G’s mephistophiles Marlo’s handling of the Supernatural is materialistic and

Downright as befitted an age which believed in witchcraft the greatest part of the English Fus is the last scene in which the agony and Terror of suspense with which the magician awaits The Stroke of the clock that signals his Doom are powerfully drawn oh lente lente cor nocus the stars

Move still time runs the clock will strike oh Soul be changed into little water drops and fall into the ocean n be found Marlo’s genius was passionate and irregular he had no humor and the comic portions of F’s are scenes of low buffoonery George peele’s Masterpiece

David and bet Sheba was also in many respects a fine play though its Beauties were poetic rather than dramatic consisting not in the characterization which is feeble but in the Eastern luxuriance of the imagery there is one Noble chorus oh proud Revolt of a presumptuous man Etc which reminds one

Of passages in Milton’s Samson Agonist and occasionally Peele Rises to such high escan audacities as these at him the Thunder shall discharge his bolt and his fair spouse with bright and fiery Wings sit ever burning on his hateful bones Robert Green was a very unequal writer his plays are slovenly and

Careless in construction and he puts classical Illusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage he has notwithstanding in his comedy parts more natural lightness and Grace than either Marlo or Peele in

His frier bacon and frier bungay and his Pinner of Wakefield there is a fresh breath as of the green English country in such passages as the description of Oxford the scene at hariston fair and the picture of the dairy in the Keeper’s Lodge at Mary fressingfield in all these anti- Shakespearean dramas

There was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a new literary departure as compared not only with Shakespeare but with later writ ERS who had the inestimable advantage of his example their work was full of imperfection hesitation experiment Marlo was probably a native

Genius the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster but his plays as a whole are certainly not equal to theirs they wrote in a more developed state of the art but the work of this early School settled the shape which the English drama was to take it fixed the practice and

Traditions to the National Theater it decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of Life the real and the ideal tragedy and comedy pros and verse in the same play without limitations of time place and action it decided that the English play was to be an action and not

A dialogue bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts dances processions hangings riots plays within plays drunken Rebels beatings battle murder and sudden death it established blank verse with occasional rhyming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech as the language of the tragedy

And high comedy parts and Pros as the language of the low comedy and business parts and it introduced songs a feature of which Shakespeare made Exquisite use Shakespeare indeed like all great poets invented no new form of literature but touched old forms to finer purposes refining everything discarding

Nothing even the old chorus and dumb show he employed though sparingly as also the old jig or comic song which the clown used to give between the acts of the life of William Shakespeare the greatest dramatic poet of the world so little is known that it has been possible for ingenious persons to

Construct a theory and support it with some show of reason that the plays which pass under his name were really written by bacon or someone else there is no danger of this Paradox ever making serious Headway for the historical evidence that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays though not overwhelming is sufficient but it is

Startling to think that the greatest creative genius of his day or perhaps of all time was suffered to slip out of life so quietly that his title to his own works could even be questioned only 250 years after the event that the single authorship of the

Homeric poem should be doubted as not so strange for Homer is almost prehistoric but Shakespeare was a modern Englishman and at the time of his death the first English colony in America was already 9 years old the important known facts of his life can be told almost in

A sentence he was born at Stratford on Avon in 1564 married when he was 18 went to London probably in 1587 and became an actor playwriter and stockholder in the company which owned the black friers and the globe theaters he seemingly prospered in his calling and retired about 1609 to

Stratford where he lived in his house that he had bought some years before and where he died in 1616 his Venus and Adonis was printed in 1593 the rape of lucrea in 1594 and his sonnets in 16009 so far as it is known only 18 of the 37 plays are generally attributed to

Shakespeare were printed during his lifetime these were printed singly in quto shape and were little more than stage books or librettos the first collected edition of his Works was the so-called first folio of 1623 published by his fellow actors Heming and Condell no contemporary of Shakespeare

Thought it worthwhile to write a life of the stage player there are a number of references to him in the literature of the time some generous as in Ben Johnson’s well-known verses others singularly unappreciative like Webster’s mention of the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare but all these together do

Not begin to amount to the sum of what was said about Spencer or Sydney or Raleigh or Ben Johnson there is indeed nothing to show that his contemporaries understood what a man they had among them in the person of our English teren Mr will Shakespeare the age for the rest was not

A self-conscious one nor greatly given to review writing and literary biography nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shakespeare’s plays to Aid the reader in forming a notion of the man he lost his identity completely in the characters of his plays as it is the duty of a dramatic writer to do his

Sonnets have been examined carefully in search of internal evidence as to his character in life but the speculations founded upon them have been more ingenious than convincing Shakespeare probably began by touching up old plays Henry V 6 and the Bloody tragedy of Titus andronicus if Shakespeare’s at all are doubtless only

His revision of pieces already on the stage The Taming of the Shrew seems to be an old play worked over by shakespare and some other dramatist and traces of another hand are thought to be visible in parts of Henry VII Pericles and teon of Athens such Partnerships were common

Among the Elizabethan dramatists the most illustrious example being the long Association of Bowmont and Fletcher the plays in the first folio were divided into histories comedies and tragedies and it will be convenient to not noticed them briefly in that order it was a stirring time when the

Young Adventurer came to London to try his fortune Elizabeth had finally thrown down the gauge of battle to Catholic Europe by the execution of Mary Stewart in 1587 the following year saw the destruction of the Colossal Armada which Spain had sent to Revenge Mary’s death and hard upon these events followed the

Gallant exploits of Grenville Essex and rally that Shakespeare shared the exultant patriotism of the times and the sense of their from the continent of Europe which was now born in the breasts of Englishmen is evident from many a passage in his plays this happy breed of men this

Little world this precious stone set in a silver sea this blessed plot this Earth this realm this England this land of such dear Souls this dear dear land England Bound in with the triumphant sea his English histories are 10 in number of these King John and Henry VII

Are isolated plays the others form a consecutive Series in the following order Richard III the two parts of Henry IV Henry V the three parts of Henry V 6 and Richard III this series may be divided into two each forming a tetrology or group of four

Plays in the first the subject is the rise of the House of Lancaster but the power of the red rose was founded in usurpation in the second group accordingly comes the nemesis in The Civil Wars of the Roses reaching their catastrophe in the downfall of both Lancaster and York and the tyranny of

Gloucester the happy conclusion is finally reached in the last play of the series when this new usurper is overthrown in turn and Henry iith the first tutor Sovereign ascends the throne and restores The lancastrian Inheritance purified by Bloody atonement from the stain of Richard II’s murder these eight plays are as it were

The eight acts of one great drama and if such a thing were possible they should be represented Ed on successive nights like the parts of a Greek Trilogy in order of composition the second group came first Henry V 6 is strikingly inferior to the others Richard III is a

Good acting play and its popularity has been sustained by a series of great tragedians who have taken the part of the king but in a literary sense it is unequal to Richard II or the two parts of Henry IV the latter is unquestionably Shakespeare’s greatest historical tragedy and it contains his master

Creation in the region of low comedy the immortal fall staff the constructive art with which Shakespeare shaped history into drama is well seen in comparing his King John with the two plays on that subject which were already on this stage these like all the other old Chronicle histories such as Thomas Lord

Cromwell and the famous victories of Henry V follow a merely chronological or biographical order giving events Loosely as they occurred without any Unity of effect or any reference to their bearing on the catastrophe Shakespeare’s order was logical he impressed and selected disregarding the fact of history often

Times in favor of the higher truth of fiction bringing together a crime and its punishment as cause and effect even though they had no such relation in the chronicle and were separated perhaps by many years Shakespeare’s first two comedies were experiments Love’s labors lost was a play of manners with hardly any plot

It brought together a number of humors that is Oddities and affectations of various sorts and played them off one another as Ben Johnson afterward did in his comedies of humor Shakespeare never returned to this type of play unless perhaps in The Taming of the Shrew there the story turned on a

Single humor Catherine’s bad temper just as the story in Johnson’s silent woman turned on Mosa’s hatred of noise The Taming of the Shrew is therefore one of the least Shakespearean of the Shakespeare’s plays a Bourgeois domestic comedy with a very narrow interest it belongs to the school of French comedy

Like M’s Malad maire not to the r romantic comedy of Shakespeare and Fletcher The Comedy of Errors was an experiment of an exactly opposite kind it was a play purely of incident a farce in which the main improbability being granted namely that the twin antii and twin dromos are so alike that they

Cannot be distinguished all the amusing complications follow naturally enough there is little character drawing in the play any two pairs of twins in the same predicament would be equally droll the fun lies in the situation this was a comedy of the Latin School and resembled the Mani of ploutus Shakespeare never returned to

This type of play though there is an element of errors in Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Two Gentlemen of Verona he finally hit upon that species of romantic comedy which he may be said to have invented or created out of the scattered materials at hand in the works

Of his predecessors in this play as in The Merchant of Venice Midsummer Night Dream much ad do about nothing as you like it 12th night Winter’s Tale all’s well the well measure for measure and the Tempest the plan of construction is as follows there is one main Intrigue

Carried out by the high comedy characters and a secondary Intrigue or underplot by the low comedy characters the former is by no means purely comic but admits the presentation of the noblest motives the strongest passions and the most delicate Graces of romantic poetry in some of the plays it has a

Prevailing lightness and gayety as in as you like it and 12th night in others like measure for measure it is barely saved from becoming Tragedy by the happy clothes certainly remains a tragic figure even to the end and a play likee Winter’s Tale in which the painful

Situation is prolonged for years is only technically a comedy such dramas indeed were called on many of the title pages of the time tragic comedies the low comedy interlude on the other hand was broadly comic it was cunningly interwoven with the texture of the play sometimes Loosely and by way of

Variety or relief as in theep suit of Touchstone and Audrey in as you like it sometimes closely as in the case of dogberry and Vargus in much ad do about nothing where the blundering of the watch is made to bring about the Dan Numan of the main

Action the merry wives of Windsor is an exception to this plan of construction it is Shakespeare’s only play of contemporary middleclass English life and is written almost throughout in Pros it is his only pure comedy except The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare did not abandon comedy when writing tragedy

Though he turned it to a new account the two species graded into one another thus symboling is in its unfortunate ending really as much of a comedy as a Winter’s Tale to which its plot Bears a resemblance and is only technically a tragedy because it contains a violent

Death in some of the tragedies as McBeth and Julius Caesar the comedy element is reduced to a minimum but in others as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet it heightens the tragic Feeling by the irony of contrast akin to this is the use to which Shakespeare put the old Vice or

Clown of the moralities the fool in Lear Touchstone and as you like it and thides and trilus andesa are a sort of parody of the function of the Greek chorus commenting the action of the drama with scraps of bitter or half crazy philosophy and wonderful gleams of insight into the depths of man’s

Nature the earliest of Shakespeare’s tragedies unless Titus andronicus be his was doubtless Romeo and Juliet which is full of the passion and poetry of Youth and of first love it contains a large proportion of rhyming lines which is usually a sign in Shakespeare of early work he dropped rhyme more and more in

His later plays and his blank verse grew Freer and more varied in its pauses and the number of its feet Romeo and Juliet is also unique among his tragedies in this respect that the catastrophe is brought about by a fatality as in the Greek drama it was Shakespeare’s Habit to work

Out this tragic conclusion from within through character rather than through external chances this is true of all the great tragedies of his middle life Hamlet aell Lear McBeth in every one of which the catastrophe is involved in the character and actions of the hero this

Is so in a special sense in Hamlet the subtlest of all Shakespeare’s plays and if not his Masterpiece at any rate the one which has most attracted and puzzled the greatest Minds it is observable that in Shakespeare’s comedies there is no one central figure but that in passing into tragedy he intensified and

Concentrated the Upon A Single Character this difference is seen even in the naming of the plays the tragedies always take their titles from their Heroes the comedies never somewhat later probably than the tragedies already mentioned were the three Roman plays Julius Caesar cor lanus and Anthony and Cleopatra it is characteristic of

Shakespeare that he invented the plot of none of his plays but took material that he found at hand in these Roman tragedies he followed plutar closely and yet even in doing so gave if possible a greater evidence of real creative power than when he borrowed a mere outline of

A story from some Italian novelist it is most instructive to compare Julius Caesar with Ben Johnson’s cadalene and sanis Johnson was careful not to go beyond his text in Cataline he translates almost literally the whole of Cicero’s first oration against Catalin sanis is a mosaic of passages from tacitus and

Suetonius there is none of this dead learning in Shakespeare’s play having grasped the conception of the characters of Brutus cassus and Mark Anthony as plutar gave them he pushed them out into their consequences in every word and act so independently of his original and yet so harmoniously with it that the reader

Knows that he is reading history and needs no further warrant for it than Shakespeare’s own timman of Athens is the least agreeable and most monotonous of Shakespeare’s undoubted tragedies and trus and cresus says colid is the hardest to characterize the figures of the old homic world far

But hardly under the glaring light of modern standards of morality which Shakespeare turns upon them Ajax becomes a stupid bully ulyses a crafty politician and swift-footed achilles a Vain and sulky chief of faction in losing their ideal remoteness the heroes of The Iliad lose their poetic quality

And the lover of Homer experiences an unpleasant disenchantment it was customary in the 18th century to speak of Shakespeare as a rude though PR genius even Milton could describe him as warbling his native woodnotes wild but a truer criticism beginning in England with colid has shown that he was also a

Profound artist it is true that he wrote for his audiences and that his art is not everywhere and at all points perfect but a great artist will contrive as Shakespeare did to reconcile practical exigencies like those of the public stage with the finer requirements of his art strain interpretations have been put

Upon this or that item in Shakespeare’s plays and yet it is generally true that some deeper reason can be assigned for his method in a given case than that the audience liked puns or the audience liked ghosts compare for example his delicate management of the supernatural with Marlo’s procedure in Fus Shakespeare’s

Age believed in witches elves and apparitions and yet there is always something shadowy or allegorical in his use of such Machinery the ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspicion banquo’s wraith which is invisible to all but Beth is the haunting of an evil conscience the witches in the same play

Are but the promptings of ambition thrown into a human shape so as to become actors in the drama in the same way the fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream are the personified Caprices of the lovers and they are unseen by the human characters whose likes and dislikes they control save in the

Instance where bottom is translated that is becomes mad and has sight of the invisible world so in the Tempest Ariel is the spirit of the air and caliban of the Earth ministering with more or less of unwillingness to man’s Necessities Shakespeare is the most universal of writers he touches more men

At more points than Homer or Dante or G the deepest wisdom the sweetest poetry the widest range of character are combined in his plays he made the English language an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of literature yet he is not an English poet simply but a world poet

Germany has made him her own and the Latin races though at first hindered in a true appreciation of him by the Cannons of classical taste have at length learned to know him an Ever growing mass of Shakespearean literature in the way of comment and interpretation critical textual historical or

Illustrative testifies to the durability and growth of his Fame above all his plays still keep and probably always will keep the stage it is common to speak of Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists as if they stood in some sense on a level but in truth there is an almost measureless distance

Between him and all of his contemporaries the rest shared with him in the mighty influences of the age their plays were touched here and there with the power and Splendor of which they were all jointed heirs but as a whole they are obsolete they live in

Books but not in the hearts and on the tongues of men the most remarkable of the dramatists Contemporary with Shakespeare was Ben Johnson whose robust figure is in Striking contrast with the other gracious in personality Johnson was 9 years younger than Shakespeare he was educated at Westminster School served as a soldier

In the low countries became an actor in henslow’s company and was twice imprisoned once for killing a fellow actor in a duel and once for his part in The Comedy of Eastward hoe which gave offense to King James he lived down to the times of Charles I 1635 and became the acknowledged Arbiter

Of English letters and the center of convivial wit combats at the mermaid the devil and and other famous London taverns what things have we seen done at the mermaid heard words that have been so Nimble and so full of subtle flame as if that everyone from whom they came had

Meant to put his whole wit in a Gest and had resolved to live a fool the rest of his dull life the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey is simply oh rare Ben Johnson Johnson’s comedies were modeled upon the vetus Comedia of Aristophanes which was satirical in purpose and they

Belonged to an entirely different school from Shakespeare’s they were classical and not romantic and were pure comedies admitting no ad mixture of tragic motives there is hardly one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range of his dramatic Creations they were comedies not of character in the high

Sense of the word but of manners or humors his design was to lash the Foles and vices of the day and his dramus Persona consisted for the most part of gulls imposters fops cowards swaggering Braggs and Paul’s men in his first play every man in his humor

Acted in 1598 in every man out of his humor Bartholomew fair and indeed in all of his comedies his subject was the spongy humors of the time that is the fashionable affectations the whims Oddities and eccentric developments of London life his procedure was to bring together a number of these fantastic

Humorists to play them off upon each other involve them in all manner of comical Misadventures and render them utterly ridiculous and cont able there was thus a perishable element in his art for manner’s Change and however effective this exposure of contemporary affectations may have been before an

Audience of Johnson’s day it is as hard for a modern reader to detect his points as it will be for a reader 200 years hence to understand the satire upon the aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day as patience or the konel nevertheless a patient reader with

The help of copious footnotes can gradually put together for himself an image of that world of obsolete humors in which Johnson’s comedy dwells and can admire the dramatist solid Good Sense his great learning his skill in construction and the astonishing fertility of his invention his characters are not revealed from within like Shakespeare’s

But built up painfully from outside by a succession of minute laborious particulars the difference will be plainly manifest if such a character as Slender in the merry wives of Windsor be compared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of idiots in Johnson’s plays with Master Steven for

Example in every in his humor or if fall staff be put side by side with Captain bobadil in the same comedy perhaps Johnson’s Masterpiece in the way of comic charat Cynthia’s Rebels was a satire on the corders and the poetaster on Johnson’s literary enemies The Alchemist was an exposure of quackery

And is one of his best comedies but somewhat overweighted with learning volpone is the most powerful of all his dramas but is a harsh and disagreeable piece and the state of society which it depicts is too revolting for comedy the silent woman is perhaps the easiest of

All Johnson’s plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate there is a distinct plot to it the situation is extremely ludicrous and the emphasis is laid upon single humor or eccentricity as in some of Muller’s lighter comedies like Le Malad imager or Lea Mali in spite of his heaviness in drama

Johnson had a light enough touch in lyric poetry his songs have not the careless sweetness of Shakespeare’s but they have a Grace of the such pieces as his Love’s Triumph him to Diana the noble mind and the adaptation from fil estratus Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes and many others entitled

Their author to rank among the first English lists some of these occur in his two collections of miscellaneous verse the forest and Underwoods others in the numerous masks which he composed these were a species of entertainment very popular at the court of James I combining dialogue with music intricate dances and costly

Scenery Johnson left an unfinished pastoral drama the sad Shepherd which though not equal to Fletcher’s faithful shepherdess contains passages of great Beauty one especially descriptive of the shepherdess aarene who had her very being and her name with the first buds and breathings of the spring born with

The Primrose and the Violet and earliest roses Blown end of part 1 chapter 3 chapter 4 of a brief history of English and American literature this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers chapter 4

The age of Milton 1608 to 1674 the Elizabeth and age proper closed with the death of the queen and the accession of James I in 16003 but the literature of the 50 years following was quite as rich as that of the half century that had passed since

She came to the throne in 1557 the same qualities of thought and style which had marked the writers of her Reign prolonged themselves in their successors through the Reigns of the first two steart kings and the Commonwealth yet there was a change in spirit literature is only one of the

Many forms in which the national mind expresses itself in periods of political revolution literature leaving the Serene era of Fine Art partakes the violent agitation of the times there were seeds of civil and religious Discord in Elizabeth in England as between the two parties in the church there was a compromise and a

Truce rather than a final settlement the Anglican Doctrine was partly calvinistic and partly arminian the form of government was Episcopal but there was a large body of Presbyterians in the church who desired a change in the ritual and ceremonies many Rags of popery had been retained which the extreme reformers wished to tear

Away but Elizabeth was a worldly-minded woman impatient of theological disputes those circumstances had made her the champion of protestantism in Europe she kept many Catholic Notions disapproved for example of the marriage of priests and hated sermans she was jealous of her prerogative in the state and in the church she enforced

Uniformity the authors of the Martin marpet pamphlets against the Bishops were punished by death or imprisonment while the queen lived things were kept well together and England was at one in face of the common foe Admiral Howard who commanded the English Naval forces against against the Armada was a

Catholic but during the Reigns of James i63 to 1625 and Charles I 1625 to 1649 puritanism grew stronger through repression England says the historian green became the people of a book and that book The Bible the power of the King was used to impose the power of the

Bishops upon the English and Scotch churches until religious discontent became also political discontent and finally over through the throne the writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile camps on the side of church and King was the bulk of the learning and Genius of

The time but on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern conviction the fiery Zeal the excited imagination of English puritanism the spokesman of this movement was Milton whose great figure dominates the literary history of his generation as Shakespeare’s does of the generation preceding the drama went on in the

Course marked out for it by Shakespeare’s example until the theaters were closed by parliament in 1642 of the steuart dramatists the most important were Bowmont and Fletcher all of whose plays were produced during the reign of James I these were 53 in number but only 13 of them were joint

Productions Francis Bowmont was 20 years younger than Shakespeare and died a few years before him he was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas his collaborator John Fletcher a son of the bishop of London was 5 years older than bont and survived him 9 years he was

Much the more prolific of the two and wrote alone some 40 plays although the life of one of these Partners was conterminous with Shakespeare’s their Works exhibit a later phase of dramatic art the steart dramatists followed the lead of Shakespeare rather than of Ben Johnson their plays like the forers belonged to

The romantic drama they present a poetic and idealized version of Life deal with the highest Passions and the wildest buffoonery and introduce a great variety of those daring situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic but while Shakespeare seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature his successors ran into every license

They sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of Their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character unnatural lusts subtleties of crime virtues and vices both in excess Bowmont and Fletcher’s plays are much easier and more agreeable reading than Ben Johnson’s though often loose in their plots and without that consistency

In the development of their characters which distinguished Johnson’s more conscientious workmanship they are full of graceful dialogue and beautiful poetry Dryden said that after the restoration two of their plays were acted for one of Shakespeare’s or Johnson’s throughout the year and he added that they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much

Better whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repes no poet can ever paint as they have done wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakespeare nor was it altogether so in Bowmont and Fletcher their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers gay Cavaliers generous courageous courteous according to the

Fashion of their times and sensitive on the point of Honor they are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of dren and the restoration comedy still the manners and language in Bowmont and Fletcher’s plays are extremely lenti and it is not hard to sympathize with the objections to the

Theater expressed by the Puritan writer William prin who after denouncing the long hair of the Cavaliers in his tra the UN loveliness of Love loocks attacked the stage in 1633 with hyom mastics the player Scourge an offense for which he was fined imprisoned pillared and had his ears

Cropped colid said that Shakespeare was coarse but never gross he had the healthy coarseness of nature herself but Bowmont and Fletcher’s pages are corrupt even their chased women are immodest in language and thought they use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times but a profusion of

Obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind Chastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart says colid among the best of their like comedies are the chances the scornful lady the Spanish curate and Rule a wife and have a wife but far superior to

These are their tragedies and comedies the Maya’s tragedy faster a king and no King all written jointly and valentinian and TI and teodore written by Fletcher alone but perhaps in part sketched out by bont the tragic Masterpiece of Bowmont and Fletcher is the maids tragedy a powerful but repulsive play which sheds

A singular light not only upon its author’s dramatic methods but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by the doctrine of the divine right of kings which grew up under under the stewards the heroine Evy has been in secret a mistress of the king who marries her to amtor a gentleman of his

Court because as he explains to her bridegroom on the wedding night I must have one to father children and to Bear the name of husband to me that my sin may be more honorable this scene is perhaps the most affecting and impressive in the whole range of Bowmont and Fletcher’s drama

Yet when nne names the king as her Paramore amtor exclaims oh thou Hast named a word that wipes away all thoughts revengeful in that sacred name the king there lies a terror what frail man dares lift his hand against it let the gods speak to him when they please

Till when let us suffer and wait and the play ends with the words oh lustful Kings unlooked for sudden deaths from Heaven are sent but cursed is he that is their instrument asaa in this tragedy is a good instance of Bowmont and Fletcher’s pathetic characters she is trough plight

Wife to amtor and after he by the King’s Command has forsaken her for evadne she disguises herself as a man provokes her Unfaithful lover to a duel and dies under his sword blessing the hand that killed her this is a common type in Bow Mountain Fletcher and was drawn originally from Shakespeare’s

Ofilia all their good women have the instinctive Fidelity of a dog and the Superhuman patience and devotion a gentle forlornness under wrongs which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness in faster or Love Lies bleeding euphrasia conceiving a hopeless passion for faster who is in love with

Aithusa puts on the dress of a page and enters his service he employs her to carry messages to his lady love just as Viola in 12th night is sent by the Duke to Olivia faster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady have been unfaithful to him and in his

Jealous Fury he wounds euphrasia with his sword afterward convinced of the boy’s Fidelity he asks forgiveness wereto euphrasia replies alas my Lord my life is not a thing worthy your Noble thoughts is not a life is but a piece of childhood thrown away Bowmont and Fletcher’s love Lorn

Maids wear the willow very sweetly but in all their Pious passages there is nothing equal to the Natural pathos the pathos which arises from the Deep Springs of character of that one brief question and answer in King Lear Lear so young and so untendered so young my Lord and

True the disguise of a woman in man’s apparel is a common incident in the romantic drama and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female parts were taken by boys made the deception easier via’s situation in 12th night is precisely similar to euphrasia but there

Is a difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a distinction between Shakespeare’s art and that of his contemporaries the audience in 12th night is taken into confidence and made aware of via’s real nature from the start start while euphrasia Incognito is preserved till the Fifth Act and then

Disclosed by an accident this kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakespeare in this instance moreover it involved a departure from dramatic probability euphrasia could at any moment by revealing her identity have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from faster aithusa and herself and the only

Motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly Shame at her position such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Bowmont and Fletcher’s tragic comedies their characters have not the depth and truth of Shakespeare’s nor are they drawn so

Sharply one reads their plays with pleasure and remembers here and there a passage of fine poetry or a noble or lovely trait but their characters as holes leave a fading impression who even after a single reading or representation ever forgets fallstaff or or King Le the moral inferiority of Bowmont and

Fletcher is well seen in such a play as a king and no King here arbes falls in love with his sister and after a furious conflict in his own mind finally succumbs to his guilty passion he is rescued from the consequences of his weakness by the

Discovery that pentha is not in fact his sister but this is to cut the knot and not to untie it it leaves the de numont a chance and not to those moral forces through which Shakespeare always rought his conclusions our basses has failed and the piece of luck which keeps

Failure innocent is rejected by every right feeling spectator in one of John Ford’s tragedies the situation which in a king and no king is only apparent becomes real and incest is boldly made the subject of the play Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character and passion into even Wilder extremes than

Bowmont and Fletcher his best play the broken heart is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of the feelings Fletcher’s Faithful shepherdess is the best English pastoral drama it’s Coral songs are richly and sweetly modulated and the influence of the whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his

Komus the night of the burning pessel written by bont and Fletcher jointly was the first burlesque comedy in the language and is excellent fooling bont and Fletcher’s blank verse is musical but less masculine than Marlo’s or Shakespeare’s by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and feminine

Endings in John Webster the fondness of the abnormal and Sensational themes which beset the steuart stage showed itself in the exaggeration of the terrible into the horrible fear in Shakespeare as in the great murder scene in McBeth is a pure passion but in Webster it is mingled with something physically

Repulsive thus his Duchess of malfie is presented in the dark with a dead man’s head and is told that it is the hand of her murdered husband she has shown a dance of Mad Men and behind a Traverse the artificial figures of her children appearing as if dead treated in this

Elaborate fashion that ter Terror which Aristotle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move loses half its dignity Webster’s images have the smell of the charal house about them she would not after the report keep fresh as long as flowers on graves we are only like dead walls or

Vaulted Graves that ruined yield no Echo oh this Gloomy World in what a shadow or deep pit of Darkness doth womanish and fearful mankind live Webster had an intense and somber genius in diction he was the most Shakespearean of the Elizabethan dramatists and there are sudden gleams

Of beauty among his dark Horrors which light up a whole scene with some abrupt Touch of Feeling cover her face mine eyes Dazzle she died young says the brother of The Duchess when he has procured her murder and stands before the corpse Victoria Corona is described in the old editions

As a night piece and it should indeed be acted by the shuttering light of torches and with the Cry of the screech owl to punctuate the speeches the scene of Webster’s two best tragedies was laid like many of Fords seral torers and Bowmont and Fletchers in Italy the wicked and Splendid Italy

Of the Renaissance which had such a Fascination for the Elizabethan imagination it was to them the land of the bourges and the sensey of families of proud Nobles luxurious cultivated but full of revenges and ferocious cunning subtle poisoners who killed with a perfumed glove or fan pardes atheists committers of unnamable crimes and

Inventors of strange and delicate varieties of sin but a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists Who kept theaters busy through the Reigns of Elizabeth James I and Charles I the last of the race was James shley who died in 1666 and whose

38 plays were written during the reign of Charles I and the Commonwealth in the miscellaneous pros and poetry of this period there is lacking the free exalting creative impulse of the Elder generation but there is a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend themselves to readers of bookish tastes

Even that quaintness of thought which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its attraction for a nice literary pallet Pros became now of Greater relative importance than ever before almost every distinguished writer of the time lend his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and

Political controversy of the time there were famous theologians like hailes Chillingworth and Baxter historians and antiquaries like Seldon NES and cotton philosophers such as Hobbs Lord Herbert of cherbury and more the platonist and writers in rural science which now entered upon its modern experimental phase under the stimulus of Bacon’s

Writings among whom may be mentioned Wallace the mathematician Bole the chemist and Harvey the discoverer of the circulation of the blood these are outside of our subject but in the strictly literary Pro of the time The Same Spirit of roused inquiry is Manifest and the same disposition to a

Thorough and exhaustive treatment of a subject which is proper to the scientific attitude of mind the line between true and false science however had not yet been drawn the age was pedantic and appeal too much to the authority of antiquity hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious

Audition as Robert Burton’s anatomy of melancholy 1621 and Sir Thomas Brown’s pseudodoxia epidemica or inquiries into vulgar and common errors 1646 the former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar an astrologer who cast his own horoscope and a victim himself of the asra bilious humor from which he

Sought relief in listening to the rialy of barg men and in compiling this anatomy in which the causes symptoms prognostics and cures of melancholy are considered in numerous partitions sections members and subsections the work is a mosaic of quotations all lit lature is ransacked for anecdotes and instances and the book

Has thus become a mine of outof theeway learning in which later writers have dug Lawrence Stern helped himself freely to Burton’s treasures and Dr Johnson said that the anatomy was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise the vulgar and common errors which

Sir Thomas Brown set himself to refute were such as these that dolphins are crooked that Jews stink that a man hath one rib less than a woman that xerx Army drank up rivers that cicas are bred out of cuckoo spittle that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar together with many

Similar fallacies touching Pope Joan the wandering jew the decum or 10th wave the Blackness of negroes frier Bacon’s Brazen Head Etc another book in which great learning and Ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same author’s Garden of Cyrus or the quinal lozen or network plantations of the ancients

In which a mystical meaning is sought in the occurrence through nature and art of the figure of the Quin or lozen brown was a physician of Norwich where his Library Museum Avary and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special visit by the Royal Society he was an antiquary and a naturalist and

Deeply read in the schoolmen and the Christian fathers he was a Mystic and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many Kindred Minds like karid d Quincy and two of his books belong to literature religio medit published in 1642 and hydriotaphia or ear burial 1658

A discourse upon rights of burial and increation suggested by some Roman funeral earns dug up in norfol Brown’s style though too highly latinized is a good example of Commonwealth Pros that stately cumbrous brocaded PR which had something of the flow and measure of verse rather than the quicker colloquial movement of modern

Writing Brown stood aloof from the disputes of his time and in his very subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily interests of men his religio medit is full of a wise tolerance and a singular elevation of feeling at the sight of a cross or

Crucifix I can dispense with my hat but scarce with the thought or memory of my savior they had only the advantage of a bold and Noble Faith who lived before his coming they go the fair way to heaven that would serve god without a hell all things are artificial for

Nature is the art of God the last chapter of the ear burial is an almost rhythmical descant on mortality and Oblivion the style Kindles slowly into a somber eloquence it is the most impressive and extraordinary passage in the pros literature of the time Brown like Hamlet loved to consider too

Curiously his subtlety led him to pose his apprehension with those involved in nigas and riddles of the Trinity with Incarnation and resurrection and to start OD inquiries what song the sirens sang or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women or whether after Lazarus was raised from the dead

His Heir might lawfully detain his inheritance the quaintness of his phrase appears at every turn Charles I can never hope to live within two Methuselah of Hector generation pass while some trees stand and old families survive not Three Oaks mummy has become merchandise misraim cures wounds and Pharaoh is sold for

Balsams one of the pleasantest of Old English humorists is Thomas Fuller who was a chaplain in the Royal army during the Civil War and wrote among other things a church history of Britain a book of religious Med meditations good thoughts in bad times and a character book the holy and profane M

State his most important work the worthies of England was published in 1662 the year after his death this was a description of every English County its natural Commodities manufactures wonders Proverbs Etc with brief biographies of its memorable persons Fuller had a well stored memory sound piety and excellent

Common Sense wit was his leading intellectual trait and the quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his writings in a fondness for puns droll turns of expressions and bits of eccentric suggestion his Pros unlike Browns Milton’s and Jeremy Taylor’s is brief simple and pithy his dry vein of humor

Was imitated by the American Cotton Mather in his magnalia and by many of the English and New England divines of the 17th century Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king’s Army was several times imprisoned for his opinions and was afterward made by Charles II Bishop of down and

Connor he is a devotional rather than a theological writer and His holy living and holy dying are religious Classics Taylor like Sydney was a warbler of poetic Pros he has been called the pros Spencer and his English has the opulence the gentle elaboration the link sweetness long drawn out of the

Poet of the fairy queen in fullness and resonance Taylor’s diction resembles that of the great orators though it lacks their n energy his pathos is exquisitely tender and his numerous similes have Spencer’s pictorial amplitude some of them have become common places for admiration notably his description of the Flight of the Skylark

And the sentence in which he compares the gradual Awakening of the human faculties to the sunrise which first opens a little eye of heaven and sends away the spirits of darkness and gives light to a and calls up the Lark to meta and by and by gilds the fringes of

A cloud and peeps over the Eastern Hills perhaps the most impressive single passage of Taylor’s is the concluding chapter in holy dying from the midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates Rises that delicate image of the fading Rose one of the most perfect things in its wording

In all our Pros literature but so have I seen a rose newly springing from The Cliffs of its hood and at first it was as Fair as the morning and full with the Dew of Heaven as a lamb’s fleece but when a Rudder breath had forced to open its virgin

Modesty and dismantled its to youthful and unripe retirements it began to put on darkness and to decline in softness and the symptoms of a sickly age it bowed the head and broke its stock and at night having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty it fell into the

Portion of weeds and outworn faces with the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of Pros literature which were not absolutely new now began to receive wider extension of this sort are the letters from Italy and other miscellanies included in the requ Waton or remains of Sir Henry Waton

English Ambassador at Venice in the reign of James I and subsequently Provost of eaten College Also the table talk full of incisive remarks left by John Seldon whom Milton pronounced the first scholar of his age and who was a distin Authority in legal Antiquities and international law furnished notes to drayton’s

Polyon and wrote upon Eastern religions and upon the Arundle marbles literary biography was represented by the Charming Little Lives of good old Isaac Walton the first edition of whose complete angler was printed in 1653 the lives were five in number of hooker Watton dun Herbert and Sanderson several of these were personal Friends

Of the author and Sir Henry Waton was a brother of the angle the complete angler though not the first piece of sporting literature in English is unquestionably the most popular and Still Remains a favorite with all that are lovers of virtue and dare trust in Providence and be quiet and go a Angling as in asham’s talk of Phyllis the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form but the technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions piscator and his pupil venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle head Ed or a sycamore tree during a passing shower they repair

After the day’s fishing to some honest Ale House with lavender in the window and a score of ballads stuck about the wall where they sing catches old-fashioned poetry but choicely good composed by the author or his friends drink barley wine and eat their trout or chub they encounter milkmaids who sing

To them and give them a draft of the red cow’s milk and they never cease their praises of the anger’s life of rural contentment among the cow slip Meadows and theet quiet streams of TS or Lee or shafford Brook the decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the

Exaggeration of its characteristic traits the manner of the Elizabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors that manner at its best was hardly a simple one but in the steward and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance thus Phineas Fletcher a cousin of the dramatist composed a long spencerian allegory the purple Island

Descriptive of the human body George Herbert and others made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar a cross or a pair of Easter Wings this group of poets was named by Dr Johnson in his life of cowy the metaphysical School other critics have preferred to call them the Fantastic or conceited School

The later yist or the English marins and gorist after the poets Marino and gangora who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain the English contia were mainly clergymen of the established church Dunn Herbert vau quars and herck but crha was a Roman Catholic and cly the latest of

Them a Layman the one who set the fashion was Dr John Dunn dean of St Pauls whom Dryden pronounced a great wit but not a great poet and whom Ben Johnson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things but likely to be forgotten for want of being

Understood besides satires and Epistles in verse he composed am poems in his Youth and divine poems in his age both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity and far-fetched ingenuities that they read like a series of puzzles when this poet has occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going

Into France he Compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses such wilt thou be to me who must like the other foot obliquely run thy firmness makes my circle just and makes me end where I begun if he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a

Flea me it sucked first and Now sucks thee and in this flee are two bloods mingled be he says that the flea is their marriage Temple and bids her forbear to kill it lest she thereby commit murder suicide and sacrilege Allin one dun’s figures are Scholastic and smell of the lamp he ransacked

Cosmography astrology Alchemy Optics the canon law and the Divinity of the schoolmen for inkhorn terms and similes he was in verse what brown was in Pros he loved to play with distinctions hyperboles paradoxes the very cestry and dialectics of Love or devotion thou can not every day give me

Thy heart if thou can give it then thou never gavest it Love’s riddles are that though thy heart depart it stays at home and thou with losing savest it dun’s verse is usually as uncouth as his thought but there is a real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of

Conceit and occasionally a pure Flame darts up as in the justly admired lines her pure and elegant blood spoke in her cheek and so divinely rought that one might almost say her body thought this description of dun is true with modifications of all the metaphysical poets they had the same

Forced and unnatural style the ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them it was not the nearest but the remotest association that was called up their attempts said Johnson were always analytic they broke every image into fragments the finest Spirit among them was holy George Herbert whose Temple was

Published in 1631 the titles in this volume were such as the following Christmas Easter Good Friday holy baptism the cross the church porch church music The Holy scriptures Redemption Faith doomsday never since except perhaps in keble’s Christian year have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican Church the beauty of holiness found such

Sweet expression in poetry the verse is entitled virtue sweet day so cool so calm so bright Etc are known to most readers as well as the line who sweeps a as for thy laws makes that and the action fine the quaintly named pieces The Elixir the collar the pulley are full of

Deep thought and spiritual feeling but Herbert’s poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste take this passage from witsend day listen sweet Dove unto my song and spread thy Golden Wings on me hatching my tender heart so long till it get wing and fly away with thee which is almost

As ludicrous as the Epitaph written by his contemporary carou on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth whose Soul grew so fast within it broke the outward shell of sin and so was hatched a Cherubin another of these Church poets was Henry vaugh the cerist or Welshman whose fine piece the retreat has often been compared with Wordsworth Ed on the intimations of immortality Francis corel’s Divine emblems long remained a favorite book with religious readers both in Old and New England emblem books in which

Engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letter press in verse were a popular class of literature in the 17th century one of the most delightful of English lyric poets is Robert herck whose Hesperides 1648 has lately received such sympathetic illustration from the pencil of an American Artist Mr EA

Abby herck was a clergyman of the English church and was expelled by the Puritans from his living the vicarage of Dean prior in devenshire the most quoted of his religious poems is how to keep a true lent but it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical his

Poetry certainly was not he was a disciple of Ben Johnson and his Boon companion at those lyric feasts made at the Sun the dog the triple T where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad and yet each verse of thine outdid the meat outdid the Frolic

Wine her’s Noble number seldom rises above the expression of cheerful gratitude and contentment he had not the subtlety and elevation of Herbert but he surpassed him in the grace Melody sensous Beauty and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse the conceits of the metaphysical School appear in herck only

In the form of an occasional pretty quaintness he is the poet of English Parish festivals and of English flowers the Primrose the white Thorn the daffodil he sang the Praises of the country life love songs to Julia and hymns of Thanksgiving for simple blessings he has been called the English

Catalis but he strikes rather the horatian note of carp adum and regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best known poems such as Gather ye rose buds while ye may and to kenad to go aing Abraham c is now less remembered for his poetry than for his Pleasant

Volume of essays published after the restoration but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton his collection of love songs the mistress is a mass of cold conceits in the metaphysical manner but his elegies on crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural feeling he introduced the

Pendic ode into English and wrote an epic poem on a Biblical subject the davidas now quite unreadable C was a royalist and followed the exiled Court to France side by side with the church poets were the Cavaliers CaRu Waller Loveless suckling lrange and others Gallant couriers and officers in

The Royal Army who mingled love and loyalty in their strains Colonel Richard Lovelace who lost everything in the King’s Service and was several times imprisoned wrote two famous songs to lacasta on going to the wars in which occur the lines I could not love thee dear so much loved I not honor

More and to Al from prison in which he sings the sweetness Mercy majesty and glories of his King and declares that stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage another of the Cavaliers was Sir John suckling who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Stratford raised a

Troop of horse for Charles I was impeached by the Parliament and fled to France he was a man of wit and pleasure who penned a number of gay Trifles but has been saved from Oblivion chiefly by his Exquisite ballot upon a wedding Thomas CaRu and Edmund Waller were Poets

Of the same stamp graceful and easy but shallow in feeling Waller who followed the court to Paris was the author of two songs which are still favorites go lovely rose and on a girdle and he first introduced the smooth correct manner of writing in couplets which dren and Pope carried to

Perfection gallantry rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers in such verses as car’s encouragements to a lover and George Withers the manly heart if she be not so to me what care I how fair she be we see the revolt against the high passionate

Sydney and love of Elizabeth and sers and the note of persiflage that was to Mark the lyrical verse of the restoration but the Poetry of the Cavaliers reached its high watermark in one fiery Hearted song by the noble and unfortunate James Graham Marquee of Montrose who invaded Scotland in the

Interest of Charles II and was taken prisoner and put to death at Edinburgh in 1650 my dear and Only Love I pray that little world of thee be governed by no other sway than purist monarchy in language borrowed from the politics of the time he cautions his mistress against sinid or committees in

Her heart swears to make her glorious by his pen and Famous by his sword and with that fine recklessness which distinguished The Dashing Troopers of Prince Rupert he adds in words that have been often quoted he either fears his fate too much or his deserts are too small

That dares not put it to the touch to gain or lose it all John Milton the greatest English poet except Shakespeare was born in London in 1608 his father was a scrier an educated man and a musical composer of some Merit at his home Milton was surrounded

With all the influences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of the better class he inherited his father’s musical tastes and during the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in playing the organ no poet has written more beautifully of music than

Milton one of his sonets was addressed to Henry laws the composer who wrote The Heirs to the songs in Kus Milton’s education was most careful and thorough he spent seven years at Cambridge where from his personal Beauty and fastidious habits he was called the lady of christs at Horton in

Buckinghamshire where his father had a country seat he passed 5 years more perfecting himself self in his studies and then traveled for 15 months mainly in Italy visiting Naples and Rome but residing at Florence here he saw Galileo a prisoner of the Inquisition for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his

Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought Milton is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets his Latin verse for elegance and correctness ranks with Addison and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan Scholars but his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine

And chastened result and not in laborious illusion and pedantic citation as too often in Ben Johnson for instance my father he wrote destined me while yet a little child for the study of human letters he was also destined for the ministry but coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had

Invaded the church I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking bought and begun with servitude and forswearing other hands than a bishop were laid upon his head he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well Hereafter he says ought himself to be a

True poem and he adds that his natural hotess saved him from all impurity of living Milton had a Sublime self-respect the dignity and earnestness of the Puritan gentleman Blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance born into an age of spiritual conflict he dedicated his gift

To the service of heaven and he became like haa a valiant soldier in the war for Liberation he was the poet of a cause and his song was keyed to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders such as raised to height the of noblest temper Heroes old arming to

Battle on comparing Milton with Shakespeare with his Universal sympathies and receptive imagination one perceives a loss in breadth but a gain in intense personal conviction he introduced a new note into English poetry the passion for truth and the feeling of religious Sublimity Milton’s was an heroic age and its song Must Be

Lyric rather than dramatic its singer must be in the fight and of it of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his Splendid ode on the morning of Christ’s Nativity at Horton he wrote among other things the companion pieces lro and IL

Penseroso of a Kind quite new in English giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with two contrasted moods KOMU which belongs to the same period was the Perfection of the Elizabethan Court mask and was presented at lllo Castle in 1634 on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of

Bridgewater as Lord president of Wales under the guise of a skillful addition to the homeric allegory of Cersei with her cup of Enchantment it was a Puritan song In Praise of Chastity and Temperance ldus in like manner was the Perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy it was contributed to a volume of

Memorial verses on the death of Edward King a Cambridge friend of Milton who was drowned in the Irish channel in 1637 in one Stern strain which is put into the mouth of St Peter the author foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then at their height but that two-handed engine at the

Door stands ready to Smite once and smite no more this was Milton’s last utterance in English verse before the outbreak of the Civil War and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle in technical quality ldus is the most wonderful of all Milton’s poems the cunningly intricate Harmony of the verse

The pressed and packed language with its fullness of meaning and illusion make it worthy of the minutest study in these early poems Milton merely as a poet is at his best something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them but their grave sweetness their choice wording their originality in

Epithet name and phrase were Novelties of Milton’s own his English English Masters were Spencer Fletcher and Sylvester the translator of dup paris’s lepman but nothing of Spencer’s prolixity or Fletcher’s effeminacy or Sylvester’s quaintness is found in Milton’s pure energetic diction he inherited their Beauties but his taste

Had been tempered to a finer Edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry he was the last of the elizabethans and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new in mask elegy and sonnet he set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry said the

Last word and closed one great literary era in 1639 the breach between Charles the first and his Parliament brought Milton back from Italy I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for amusement while my fellow countrymen at home were fighting for liberty for the next 20 years he threw

Himself into the contest and poured forth a succession of tracks in English and Latin upon the various public questions it issue as a political thinker Milton had what bacon calls the humor of a scholar in a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a medieval

Discipline and curriculum he wanted to set up a Greek gymnasia and philosophical schools after the fashion of the porch and the academy he would have imposed an Athenian democracy Upon A people trained in the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy at the very moment when England had grown tired of the

Protectorate and Was preparing to welcome back the stewards he was writing an easy and ready way to establish a free Commonwealth Milton acknowledged that in Pros he had the use of his left hand only there are passages of fervent eloquence where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant with a rhythmical

Rise and fall to it as in parts of the English book of common prayer but in general his sentences are long and involved full of inventions and latinized constructions controversy at that day was conducted on Scholastic lines each disputant instead of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency in common

Sense began with a formidable display of learning ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the fathers of the church for opinions in support of his own position these authorities he deployed at tedious length and followed them up with heavy scur lities and excus by way of attack and defense the dispute between Milton and

Sasus over the execution of Charles I was like a duel between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces the very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off modern reader a confutation of the enate versions upon a defense of a humble remonstrance against a treaties entitled of

Reformation the most interesting of Milton’s Pros tracks is his arop paga a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing 1644 the arguments in this are of permanent Force but if the reader will compare it or Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of prophesying with locks letters on Toleration he will see how much clearer

And more convincing is the modern method of discussion introduced by writers like Hobs and loock and Dryden under the protectorate Milton was appointed Latin secretary to the Council of State in the Diplomatic correspondence which was his official Duty and in the composition of his tract defensio propo anglicano he overtasked

His eyes and in 1654 became totally blind the only poetry of Milton belonging to the years 1640 to 1660 are a few songs of the pure Italian form mainly called forth by public occasions by the elizabethans the sonnet had been used mainly in love poetry in Milton’s hands said Wordsworth the thing

Became a trumpet some of his were addressed to political leaders like Fairfax Cromwell and Sir Henry Vain and of these the best is perhaps the sonnet written on the massacre of the vodis Protestants a collect in verse it has been called which has the fire of a Hebrew Prophet

Invoking The Divine wrath upon on the oppressors of Israel two were on his own blindness and in these there is not one selfish repining but only a regret that the value of his service is impaired will God exact day labor light denied after the restoration of the

Stewarts in 1660 Milton was for a while in Peril by reason of the part that he had taken against the king but on evil days through fallen and evil tongues in darkness and with dangers Compass round and solid ude he baited no jot of heart or hope henceforth he becomes the most

Heroic and affecting figure in English literary history years before he had planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur and again a sacred tragedy on man’s fall and Redemption these experiments finally took shape in Paradise Lost which was given to the world in 1667 this is the Epic of English

Puritanism and of protestant Christianity it was Milton’s purpose to assert eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men or in other words to embody his theological system in verse this gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost which enure its effects as a

Poem his God the Father turns a school Divine his Christ as had been wittily said is God’s good boy the discourses of Raphael to Adam Are Scholastic lectures Adam himself is too sophisticated for the state of Innocence and Eve is somewhat insipid the real protagonist of the poem is Satan upon whose Mighty

Figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some Republican leader when the good old cause went down what though the field be lost all is not lost the unconquerable will and study of Revenge Immortal hate and courage never to submit or

Yield but when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or qualification Paradise Lost Remains the foremost of English poems and the sublimest of all epics even in those parts where theology encroaches most upon poetry the diction though often heavy is never languid Milton’s blank verse in itself is enough

To Bear up the most praic theme and so is his epic English a style more massive and Splendid than Shakespeare’s and comparable like tertullian’s Latin to a river of molten gold of the countless single beauties that sew his page thick as ainal leaves that strew the Brooks in val Osa there

Is no room to speak nor of the astonishing fullness of substance and multitude of thoughts which have caused the paradise loss to be called The Book of universal knowledge the heat of Milton’s mind said Dr Johnson might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off into his work the spirit of science

Unmingled with its grosser parts the truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton’s description of the creation for example with corresponding passages in Sylvester’s Divine weeks and works translated from the Hugo poem dub bartas which was in some sense his original but the most heroic thing in

Milton’s heroic poem is Milton there are no strains in Paradise Lost so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself as in the Majestic lament over his own blindness and in the invocation to urania which opens the third and seventh books everywhere

One reads between the lines we think of the dissolute Cavaliers as Milton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them when we read of the sons of bellal flown with insolence and wine or when the Puritan turns among the sweet Landscapes of Eden to denounce Court am Moors mixed

Dance or wanton mask or midnight ball or serenade which the starved lover sings to his proud Fair best quitted with disdain and we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of the sarif Abal faithful found among the faithless nor number nor example with him wrought to Swerve from truth or

Change his constant mind though single from amidst them forth he passed long way through hostile scorn which he sustained Superior nor of violence feared ought and with retorted scorn his back he turned on those proud Towers to Swift destruction doomed Paradise regained and Samson agonists were lished in

1671 the first of these treated in four books Christ’s Temptation in the wilderness a subject that had already been handled in the sperian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher a brother of the purple Islander in his Christ’s Victory and Triumph 1610 the superiority of Paradise Lost to his sequel is not without significance

The Puritans were Old Testament men their God was the Hebrew Jehovah whose single Divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with figures of the son the Virgin Mary and the Saints they identified themselves in thought with his chosen people with the militant theocracy of the Jews their sword was

The sword of the Lord and of Gideon to your tense o Israel was the Cry of the London mob when the Bishops were committed to the Tower and when the fog lifted on the morning of the battle of Dunbar Cromwell exclaimed let God arise and let his

Enemies be scattered like as the Sun riseth so shalt thou drive them away Samson agonists though Hebrew in theme and in spirit was in form a Greek tragedy it had chorus and semi chorus and preserved the so-called dramatic unities that is the scene was unchanged and there were no intervals of time

Between the acts in accordance with the rules of the Greek Theater but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once and there was no violent action the death of Samson is related by a messenger Milton’s reason for the choice of this subject is obvious he himself was Samson shorn of his strength blind

And alone among enemies given over to the unjust tribunals under change of times and condemnation of The Ungrateful multitude as Milton Grew Older he discarded more and more The Graces of poetry and relied purely upon the structure and the thought in Paradise Lost although there is little resemblance to Elizabethan work such as

One notices in komus and the Christmas hymn yet the style is Rich especially in the earlier books but in Paradise regained it is severe to bear and in Samson even to ruggedness like Michelangelo with whose genius he had much in common Milton became impatient of finish or of mere

Beauty he blocked out his work in masses left rough places and surfaces not filled in and inclined to express his meaning by a symbol rather than work it out in detail it was a part of his austerity his increasing preference for structural over decorative methods to

Give up his rhyme for blank verse his latest poem Samson agonists a metrical study of the highest interest Milton was not quite alone among the Poets of his time in espousing the popular cause Andrew Marvel who was his assistant in the Latin secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hall after the

Restoration was a good Republican and wrote a fine horatian ode upon cromwell’s return from Ireland there is also a rare imaginative quality in his song of the Exiles in Bermuda thoughts in a garden and the girl describes her fawn George wither who was imprisoned for his satires also took the side of the

Parliament but there is little that is distinctively Puritan in his poetry end of chapter 4 recording by colinda in lunor Germany on February 15th 2009 part one chapter 5 of a brief history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by

Kalinda A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers part one chapter 5 from the restoration to the death of Pope 1660 to 1744 the steart restoration was a period of descent from poetry to pros from Passion and Imagination to wit and understanding the serious exalted mood of the Civil

War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and issued in disillusion there followed a generation of wits logical skeptical and prosaic without earnestness as without principle the characteristic literature of such a time is criticism satire and burlesque and such indeed continued to be the course of English literary

History for a century after the return of the Stewarts the age was not a stupid one but one of active inquiry the Royal Society for the cultivation of the Natural Sciences was founded in 1662 there were able divines in the pulpit and at the University Barrow tilletson stilling Fleet South and

Others Scholars like Bentley historians like Clarendon and beray scientists like Bole and Newton philosophers like Hobs and lock but of poetry in any high sense of the word there was little between the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and gray the English writers of this period were strongly influenced by the

Contemporary literature of France by the comedies of mulier and the tragedies of cor and Rin and the satires Epistles and versified essays of guo many of the restoration writers Waller cowy davenant witchly vilers and other other s had been in France during the Exile and brought back with them

French tastes John Dryden 1631 to 1700 who is the great literary figure of his generation has been called the first of the moderns from the reign of Charles II indeed we may date the beginnings of Modern English life what we call Society was forming the town the London

World coffee which makes the politician wise had just been introduced and the ordinaries of Ben Johnson’s time gave way to coffee houses like wheels and buttons which became the headquarters of literary and political gossip the two great English parties as we know them today were organized the words wig and

Tor date from this Reign French etiquette and Fashions came in and French phrases of convenience such as cig grass bellisi Etc began to appear in English Pros literature became intensely Urban and partisan it reflected City Life the disputes of faction and the personal quarrels of authors the politics of the

Great Rebellion had been of heroic proportions and found fitting expression in song but in the revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by the arguments of lawyers measures were in question rather than principles and there was little inspiration to the poet in exclusion bills and acts of

Settlement court and Society in the reign of Charles II and James II were shockingly dissolute and in literature as in life the reaction against puritanism went to Great extremes the social life of the time is Faithfully reflected in the Diary of Samuel pepus he was a simple-minded man

The son of a London tailor and became himself secretary to the admiralty his diary was kept in Cipher and published only in 1825 being written for his own eye it is singularly outspoken and its naive gossipy confidential tone makes it a most diverting book as it is historically a most valuable

One perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler’s hudibras 1663 to 64 a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans the king carried a copy of it in his pocket and pepus testifies that it was quoted and praised on all sides ridicule of the Puritans was nothing new

Zeal of the land busy in Ben Johnson’s Bartholomew fair is an early instance of the kind there was nothing aable about the earnestness of men like Cromwell Milton alganon Sydney and Sir Henry vain but even the French Revolution had its humors and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the

Extremer sectaries pressed to the front Quakers new lights fifth monarchy men ranters Etc its grotesque sides came uppermost Butler’s hero is a presbyterian Justice of the Peace who SES forth with his secretary ralo an independent and anabaptist like Don kote with Sancho pan to suppress May games and be baitings

Mcau it will be remembered said that the Puritans disapproved of be baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to The Spectators the humor of hudibras is not of the finest the Knight and Squire are discomforted in broadly comic Adventures hardly removed from the rough physical

Drolleries of a pantomime or a circus the Deep heart laughter of Cervantes the pathos on which his humor rests is of course not to be looked for in Butler but he had a wit of a Sharp logical kind and his style Surprises with all manner of verbal Antics he is

Almost as great a phras maker as Pope though in a coarser kind his verse is a smart dogal and his poem has furnished many stock sayings as for example is strange what difference there can be Twi Tweedle Dum and Tweedle D hudas had many imitators not the least

Successful of whom was the American John Trumble in his revolutionary satire mingal some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butlers as for example no man felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law the rebound against puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of the

Restoration and the stage now took Vengeance for its enforced silence under the protectorate two theaters were opened under the patronage respectively of the king and of his brother the Duke of York the manager of the latter Sir William davenant who had fought on the king’s side been knighted for his Services

Escaped to France and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for 2 years had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as 1656 by presenting his Siege of Roads as an opera with instrumental music and dialogue in recitative after a fashion newly sprung up in

Italy this he brought out again in 1661 with the dialogue recast into rhyming couplets in the French fashion movable painted scenery was now introduced from France and and actresses took the female parts formerly played by boys this last Innovation was said to be at the request

Of the king one of whose Mistresses the famous Nell Gwyn was the favorite actress at the king’s theater upon the stage thus reconstructed the so-called classical rules of the French theater were followed at least in theory the Louis the 14th writers were not purely creative like Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England but

Critical and self-conscious the academy had formed in 1636 for the preservation of the purity of the French language and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of literary art cor not only wrote tragedies but essays on tragedy and one in particular on the three unities dren followed his example in his

Essay of dramatic poesy in which he treated of the unities and argued for the use of rhyme and tragedy in preference to blank verse his own practice varied most of his tragedies were written in rhyme but in the best of them all for love 1678 founded on Shakespeare’s Anthony and

Cleopatra he returned to blank verse one of the principles of the classical school was to keep comedy and tragedy distinct the tragic dramatists of the restoration dden Howard settle Crown Lee and others composed what they called heroic plays such as the Indian Emperor the conquest of Granada the Duke

Of LMA the Empress of Morocco the destruction of Jerusalem Nero and the Rival Queens the titles of these pieces indicate their character their Heroes were great historic personages subject and treatment were alike remote from nature and real life the diction was stilted and artificial and pompous declamation took the place

Of action and genuine passion the tragedies of R scen seemed chill to an Englishman brought up on Shakespeare but to see how great an artist rasine was in his own somewhat narrow way one has but to compare his fedra or eien with dren’s ranting tragedy of tyrannic love these bombastic heroic plays were

Made the subject of a capital burlesque the rehearsal by George Villers Duke of Buckingham acted in 1671 at the king’s theater the indebtedness of the English stage to the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic methods but extended to direct imitation and translation dryden’s comedy and

Evening’s love was adapted from tomak Le and his sir Martin maral from molier Lei Shadwell borrowed his Miser for molier andwe made versions of rin’s Bin and molier forap Witcher Le’s country wife and Plain Dealer although not translations were based in a sense upon M’s eam and

Lantop the only one of the tragic dramatists of the restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elizabethan stage was Atway whose Venice preserved written in blank verse still keeps the boards there are fine passages in dren’s heroic plays passages weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language there is one great scene

Between Anthony and ventidius in his All for Love and one at least of his comedies the Spanish frier is skillfully constructed but his nature was not pliable enough for the drama and he acknowledged that in writing for the stage he forced his genius in sharp contrast with these heroic

Plays was the comic drama of the restoration the plays of witchery kigu ethd farar van brug conri and others plays like the country wife the Parson’s wedding she would if she could the Bose stratagem the relapse and The Way of the World these were in pros and represented

The gay world and the surface of fashionable life Amorous Intrigue was their constantly recurring theme some of them were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans such was the committee of dren’s brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard the hero of which is a distressed gentleman and the villain a London sit

And president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the sequestration of the Estates of royalists such were also The Roundheads and the banished Cavaliers of Mrs Afra Ben who was a female spy in the service of Charles II at ANP and one of the coarsest of the restoration comedians

The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a Shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman the ideal hero of witchery or eage was the witty young proplate who had seen life and learned to disbelieve in virtue His Highest qualities were a contempt for C physical courage a sort

Of spendthrift generosity and a good-natured Readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel or an A Moore virtue was Bourgeois reserved for Lon trades people a man must be either a rake or a hypocrite the gentlemen were Rees the city people were Hypocrites their wives however were all in love with the

Gentleman and it was the proper thing to seduce them and to borrow their husband’s money for the first and last time perhaps in the history of the English drama the sympathy of the audience was deliberately sought for the Seducer and the Rogue and the laugh turned against the Dishonored husband

And the honest man contrast this with Shakespeare’s Mary wife of Windsor the women were represented as worse than the men scheming ignorant and corrupt the dialogue in the best of these plays was easy Lively and witty the situations in some of them audacious almost beyond belief under a thin

Varnish of good breeding the sentiments and manners were really brutal the loosest Gallants of Bowmont and Fletcher’s theater retain a finess of feeling and that polyest which marks the gentleman they are poetic creatures and own a capacity for romantic passion but the manli and homers of the restoration

Comedy have a praic cold-blooded pracy that disgusts Charles Lamb in his ingenious essay on the artificial comedy of the last century apologized for the restoration stage on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no application but mcau answered truly that

At no time has the stage been closer in its imitation of real life the theater of Witcher Le and E was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in Pepe’s diary and in the Memoirs of the chal de this Pros comedy of manners was not

Indeed artificial at all in the sense in which the Contemporary tragedy the heroic play was artificial it was on the contrary far more natural and intellectually of much higher value in 1698 Jeremy Collier a nonjuring Jacoby clergyman published his short view of the immorality and profaneness of the English stage which did much

Toward reforming the practice of the dramatists the formal characteristics without the immorality of the restoration comedy reappeared briefly in Goldsmith’s she Stoops to conquer 1772 and Sheridan’s rival school for Scandal and critic 1775 to 79 our last strictly classical comedies none of this school of English comedian approached their model molier

He excelled his imitators not only in his French urbanity the polished wit and delicate Grace of his style but in the dextrous unfolding of his plot and in the wisdom and truth of his criticism of life and his insight into character it is a symptom of the false

Taste of the age that Shakespeare’s plays were Rewritten for the restoration stage davenant made new versions of MC Beth and Julius Caesar substituting rhyme for blank verse in conjunction with dren he altered The Tempest complicating the Intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda a youth who had never seen a

Woman Shadwell improved Timon of Athens and Nahum Tate furnished a new Fifth Act to King Lear which turned the play into a comedy in the prologue to his doctored version of trus and cresa dren made the ghost of Shakespeare speak of himself as untaught unpracticed in a barbarous

Age Thomas Rhymer whom Pope pronounced a good critic was very severe upon Shakespeare in his remarks on the tragedies of the last age and in his short view of tragedy 1693 he said in the nighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff there is more

Humanity than many times in the tragical flights of Shakespeare to depford by water writes pepis in his diary for August 20 1666 reading a fellow more of Venice which I ever here to esteemed a mighty good play but having so lately read The Adventures of 5 hours it seems a mean

Thing in undramatic poetry the new school both in England and in France took its Point of Departure in a reform against the extravagances of the marins or conceited poets especially represented in England by Dunn and Cy the new poets both in their theory and practice insisted upon correctness clearness polish moderation and good

Sense Boo’s lar poetique 1673 inspired by horus’s ARS poetica Was A Treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition and it gave the law in criticism for over a century not only in France but in Germany and England it gave English poetry a dactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical

Essays in rhyming couplets the Earl of mulgrave published two poems of this kind an essay on satire and an essay on poetry the Earl of Ros common who said Addison makes even rulle a noble poetry made a metrical version of horus’s arts poetica and wrote an original essay on translated

Verse of the same kind were Addison’s epistle to saarel entitled an account of the greatest English poets and Pope’s essay on criticism 1711 which was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric put with Pope’s usual point and brilliancy the classicism of the 18th century it has been said was a

Classicism in red heels and a perg it was Latin rather than Greek it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and found its models not in Virgil catellus and lucretius but in the satires Epistles and dactic pieces of juvenile Horus and Perseus The Chosen medium of the new

Poetry was the heroic couet this had of course been used before by English poets as far back as Cher the greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplets but now a new strength and prec PR ision were given to the familiar measure by imprisoning the scense within

The limit of the couplet and by treating each line as also a unit in itself Edmund Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles I he said Dryden first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distic which in the verse of those

Before him runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it Sir John denim also in his Cooper’s Hill 1643 had written such vers is this oh could I flow like thee and make thy stream my great example as it is my

Theme though deep yet clear though gentle yet not Dull strong without rage without or flowing full here we have the regular flow and the nice balance between the first and second member of each couplet and the first and second part of each line which characterized the verse of dren and

Pope Waller was smooth but dren taught us to join the varying verse the full resounding line the long resounding March and energy Divine thus wrote Pope using for the kns the triplet and alexandrin by which Dryden frequently varied the couplet Pope himself added a greater neatness and polish to dren’s verse and

Brought the system to such monotonous Perfection that he made poetry a mere mechanic art the lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless the dissolute Wits of Charles II’s Court sly Rochester Sackville and the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease threw off a few amatory Trifles but the

Age was not spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song Cy introduced the pendic ode a highly artificial form of the lyric in which the language was tortured into a kind of spous grandeur and the meter teased into a sound in Fury signifying nothing C’s pindarics were filled with

Something which passed for fire but has now utterly gone out nevertheless the fashion spread and he who could do nothing else said Dr Johnson could write like pindar the best of these ODS was dren’s famous Alexander’s Feast written for a celebration of St Cecilia’s Day by a

Musical Club to this same fashion also we owe Gray’s Two Fine Odes the progress of poesy and The Bard written a half century later Dryden was not so much a great poet as a solid thinker with a splend Mastery of expression who used his energetic verse as a vehicle for

Political argument and satire his first noteworthy poem anus marabis 1667 was a narrative of the public events of the year 1666 namely the Dutch War and the Great Fire of London the subject of Absalom and ahal the first part of which appeared in 1681 was the alleged plot of

The wig leader the Earl of Shaftsbury to defeat the succession of the Duke of York afterward James II by securing the throne to Monmouth a natural son of Charles II The Parallel afforded by the story of absalom’s revolt against David was wrot out by dren with admirable Ingenuity and

Keeping he was at his best in satirical character sketches such as the brilliant portraits in his poem of Shaftsbury as the false counselor aul and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zim the latter was dren’s reply to the rehearsal Absalom and nofal was followed by the medal a continuation of the same

Subject and Mac flecho a personal Onslaught on the true blue Protestant poet Thomas Shadwell a political and literary foe of dren flecho an obscure Irish poeter being about to retire from the Throne of dunam resolved to settle the succession upon his son Shadwell whose claims to The Inheritance are vigorously

Asserted the rest to some faint meaning make pretense but Shadwell never deviates into sense the Midwife laid her hand on his thick skull with this prophetic blessing be thou dull Dryden is our first great satirist the formal satire had been written in the reign of Elizabeth by Dunn and by

Joseph Hall Bishop of exer and subsequently by marsten the dramatist by wither Marvel and others but all of these failed through an over violence of language and a purpose to pronouncedly moral they had no lightness of touch no irony and Mischief they bore down too hard imitated Juvenile and lashed

English society in terms befitting the corruption of Imperial Rome they denounced instructed preached did everything but saiz the sauris must raise a laugh dun and Hall abused men in classes priests were worldly lawyers greedy couriers obsequious Etc but the easy scorn of dren and the delightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal

Interest to their sarcasm infinitely more effective than these common places of sat attire dren was as happy in controversy as in satire and is unexcelled in the power to reason in verse his religio litti 1682 was a poem in defense of the English church but when James II came to the throne dren

Turned Catholic and wrote the Hind and panther 1687 to vindicate his new belief dren had The Misfortune to be dependent upon Royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage he sold his pen to the court and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewed a sin which he afterward acknowledged and regretted

Milton’s Soul was like a star and dwelt apart but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude he had a coarseness of moral fiber but was not malignant in his satire being of a large careless and forgetting nature he had that masculine enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from motion and grows

Better with age his fables modernizations from choser and translations from Picacho written the year before he died are among his best works dren is also our first critic of any importance his critical essays were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays but his essay on dramatic poesy which Dr

Johnson called our first regular and valuable treaties on the art of writing was in the shape of a platonic dialogue when not misled by the French classicism of his day Dryden was an admirable critic full of pen ation and sound sense he was the earliest writer too of modern literary Pros if the

Imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit to Pros the best modern Pros is French and it was the essayists of the gallicized restoration age cowy Sir William Temple and above all Dryden who gave Modern English Pros that Simplicity directness and colloquial air which marks it off

From the more artificial diction of Milton Taylor and brown a few books whose shaping influences lay in the past Belong by their date to this period John bunan a poor Tinker whose reading was almost wholly in the Bible and Fox’s book of Martyrs imprisoned for 12 years in Bedford jail for preaching at

Conventicles wrote and in 1678 published his Pilgrim’s Progress the greatest of religious allegories Bun’s spiritual experiences were so real to him that they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men women cities Landscapes it is the simplest the most transparent of allegories unlike the fairy queen the

Story of Pilgrim’s Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the sloth of despond and doubting castle and the Valley of the shadow of death with the same belief with which they

Read of kuso’s cave or Aladdin’s Palace it is a long step from the Bedford Tinker to the cultivated poet of paradise lost they represent the poles of the Puritan party yet it may admit of a doubt whether the Puritan epic is in Essentials as vital and original a work as the Puritan

Allegory they both came out quietly and made little noise at first but the Pilgrim’s Progress got at once into circulation and not even a single copy of the first edition remains Milton too who received 10s for the copyright of Paradise Lost seemingly found that fit audience though few for which he prayed

As his poem reached its second impression in five years Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked leave to turn it into rhyme and put it on the stage as an opera I said Milton goodh humoredly you may tag my verses and accordingly they appeared duly tagged in dren’s operatic mask the

State of innocence in this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a nutshell the Commonwealth was an epic the restoration an opera the literary period covered by the life of Pope 1688 to 1744 is marked off by no distinct line from the generation before it taste continued to be governed by the

Precepts of buo and the French classical school poetry remained chiefly dactic and satirical and satire in Pope’s hands was more personal even than in dren’s and addressed itself less to public issues the literature of the Augustine age of Queen an 170 2 to 1714 was still more a literature of the

Town and fashionable Society than that of the restoration had been it was also closely involved with party struggles of wig and Tori and the ablest pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers Oxford and Bowling Brook and his pamphlets the

Public Spirit of the wigs and the conduct of the Allies were rewarded with the Deery of St Patrick’s Dublin Addison became Secretary of State under a wig government prior was in the Diplomatic service Daniel Defoe the author of Robinson cruso 1719 was a prolific political writer conducted his

Review in the interest of the wigs and was imprisoned and pillared for his ironical pamphlet the shortest way with the denters steel who was a violent writer on the wig side held various public offices such as commissioner of stamps and commissioner for forfeited Estates and sat in

Parliament After the revolution of 168 8 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the menend the court of William and Mary and of their successor Queen Anne set no such example of open pracy as that of Charles II but there was much hard drinking gambling

Dueling and Intrigue in London and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down in The Spectator the women were mostly frivolous and uneducated and not unfrequently fast they are spoken of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time except steel Every Woman wrote Pope is at heart

A rake the reading public had now become large enough to make letters a profession Dr Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose case the book seller took the place of the patron his translation of Homer published by subscription brought him between 8 and 9,000 and made him independent but the

Activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly paid hack riters penny aligners who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order many of these inhabited grub Street and their Lampoons against Pope and others of their more successful Rivals called out Pope’s dunad or epic

Of the Dunces by way of retaliation the politics of the time were sorted and consisted mainly of an ignoble Scramble for office the wigs were fighting to maintain the act of succession in favor of the House of Hanover and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the exiled stewards many

Of the leaders such as the great wig champion John Churchill Duke of Marlboro were without political principle or even personal honesty the church too was in a condition of spiritual deadness Bishop Ricks and livings were sold and given to political favorites clergymen like Swift and Lawrence Stern were worldly in their

Lives and immoral in their writings and were practically unbelievers the growing religious skepticism appeared in the deest controversy numbers of men in high position were deists the Earl of shafts B for example and Pope’s brilliant friend Henry St John Lord Bowling Brook the head of the Tory Ministry whose

Political writings had much influence upon his young French acquaintance voler Pope was a Roman Catholic though there is little to show it in his writings and the underlying thought of his famous essay on man was furnished him by Bowling Brook the letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son

Were accepted as a manual of conduct and L Roa fold’s cynical maxims were quoted as Authority on on life and human nature said Swift as Rosa fold his maxims Drew from nature I believe them true they argue no corrupted mind in him the fault is in mankind the succession which Dryden had

Willed to congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope he was a man quite unlike dren sickly deformed morbidly precocious and spiteful nevertheless he joined onto and continued Dryden he was more careful in his literary workmanship than his great Forerunner and in his moral essays and satires he brought the horatian eple

In verse the formal satire and that species of dactic poem of which buo had given the first example to an Exquisite Perfection of Finnish and verbal art Dryden had translated Virgil and so Pope translated Homer the Throne of the Dunces which dren had conferred upon Shadwell Pope in his dunciad passed on

To two of his own own literary foes Theobald and colie cber there is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib and most of the petty writers whose names it has preserved as has been said like flies and Amber are now quite unknown but although we have to read it

With notes to get the point of its Illusions it is easy to see what execution it must have done at the time and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit the wickedness the triumphant Mischief of the thing the sketch of Addison who had offended Pope by praising a rival

Translation of Homer as attacus is as brilliant as anything of the kind in dren Pope’s very malignity made his sting sharper than dren’s he secreted Venom and worked out his revenges deliberately bringing all the resources of his art to Bear upon the question of how to give the most pain most

Cleverly Pope’s Masterpiece is perhaps the rape of the lock a mock heroic poem a dwarf Iliad recounting in five kantos a society quarrel which arose from Lord Peters cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs Arabella fermer boo in his lutan had treated with the same epic

Dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a Paris Church Pope was the Homer of the drawing room the budoir the tea Ear The omber Party The sedan chair the parrot cage and the lap dogs this poem in its Sparkle and Airy Grace is the topmost blossom of a highly

Artificial Society the quintessence of whatever poetry was possible in those teacup times of hood and hoop and when the patch was worn with whose decorative features at least the recent Queen an Revival has made this generation familiar it may be said of it as th said

Of Gay’s pastorals it is to poetry what Charming little Dresden China figures are to sculpture graceful minican fantastic with a certain Beauty always accompanying them them the rape of the lock perhaps stops short of beauty but it attains elegance and prettiness in a supreme degree in Imitation of the gods and

Goddesses in The Iliad who interm medal for or against the human characters Pope introduces the sils of the rosicrucian philosophy we may measure the distance between imagination and fancy if we will compare these little filigree creatures with Shakespeare’s elves whose occupation it was to tread the Ooze of

The salt deep or run upon the sharp wind of the North or on The Beached margin of the sea to dance their ringlets of the Whispering Wind very different were the offices of Pope’s phase our humble province is to tend the fair not a less pleasing though less

Glorious care to save the powder from too rude a gale nor let the imprisoned Essences exhale nay of in dreams invention we bestow to change a flounce or add a furbelow Pope was not a great poet it has been doubted whether he was a poet

At all he does not touch the heart or stimulate the imagination as the true poet always does in the Poetry of Nature and the Poetry of passion he was altogether impotent his Windsor Forest and his pastorals are artificial and false not written with the eye upon the

Object his Epistle of eloisa to abelard is declamatory and academic and leaves the reader cold the only one of his poems which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady but he was a great literary artist within the cramped and starched

Regularity of the heroic couplet which the fashion of the time and his own habit of Mind imposed upon him he secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was capable he used antithesis paraphrasis and climax with great skill his example dominated English poetry for

Nearly a century and even now when a poet like Dr Holmes for example would write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind he turns instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope he was not a consecutive thinker like dren and cared less about the truth of his

Thought than about the pointedness of its expression his language was closer grained than dren’s his great art was the art of putting things he is more quoted than any other English poet but Shakespeare he struck the average intelligence the Comm sense of English readers and furnished it with neat

Portable formulas so that it could no longer need to vent its observation in mangled terms but could pour itself out compactly artistically in little ready-made molds but his high rot brilliancy this unceasing point soon fatigue his poems read like a series of epigrams and every line has a hit or an

Effect from the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical essay news papers had been published since the time of the Civil War at first irregularly and then regularly but no literature of permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard steel started the Tattler in

1709 in this he was soon joined by his friend Joseph Addison and in its successor The Spectator the first number of which was issued March 1st 1711 Addison’s contributions outnumbered steals the Tattler was published on three The Spectator on six days of the week the Tattler gave political news but each

Number of The Spectator consisted of a single essay the object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of the time and to sattie the folies and minor immoralities of the town I shall Endeavor wrote Addison in the 10th paper of The Spectator to enliven morality with wit and to temper

Wit with morality it was said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inabit among men and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought brought philosophy out of the closets and libraries schools and colleges to dwell in clubs and

Assemblies at tea tables and in coffee houses Addison satire was never personal he was a moderate man and did what he could to restrain Steel’s intemperate party Zeal his character was dignified and pure and his strongest emotion seems to have been his religious feeling one of his contemporaries called him a

Parson and a Thai wig and he wrote several excellent hymns his mission was that of sensor of the public taste sometimes he lectures and sometimes he preaches and in his Saturday papers he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into service for the instruction of his

Readers such was the series of essays in which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise Lost such also was his famous paper the vision of Mera an oriental allegory of human life the adoption of this slight pedagogic tone was justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity

Of the age but the lighter portions of The Spectator are those which have worn the best their style is at once correct and easy and it is as a humorist A sly Observer of manners and above all a delightful talker that Addison is best known to posterity in the personal sketches of

The members of The Spectator Club of will honeycomb Captain Sentry sir Andrew Freeport and above all sir Roger de coverly the quaint and honest Country Gentleman may be found the nucleus of the modern Pros fiction of character Addison’s humor is always a trifle grave

There is no Whimsy no Frolic in it as in Stern or lamb he thinks justly said Dr Johnson but he thinks faintly the spectator had a host of followers from the somewhat heavy Rambler and idler of Johnson down to the salmagundi papers of our own Irving who was perhaps Addison’s latest and best

Literary descendant in his own age Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist his campaign celebr celebrating the victory of Blenheim had one much admired couplet in which marlb was likened to the angel of the Tempest who pleased the almighty’s orders to perform rids in the Whirlwind and directs the

Storm his stately classical tragedy KO which was acted at Drury Lane theater in 1712 with immense applause was pronounced by Dr Johnson unquestionably the noblest production of Addison’s genius it is not withstanding cold and tedious as a whole though it has some fine declamatory passages in particular

The Soliloquy of ko in the Fifth Act it must be so Plato thou reason well Etc the greatest of the Queen Anne wits and one of the most Savage and Powerful sists that ever lived was Jonathan Swift as secretary in the family of Sir William Temple and domestic chaplain to

The Earl of Berkeley he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and dependence afterward he rode himself into influence with the Tory Ministry and was and was promised a bishop rck but was put off with the Deery of St Patrick’s and retired to Ireland to die like a poison rat in a

Hole his life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him the stage darkened said Scott a the curtain fell Insanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence and for 3 years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word he had Direct Ed that his Tombstone

Should bear the inscription UB Indio corus l neid so great a man he seems to me wrote zare that thinking of him is like thinking of an Empire falling Swift’s first noteworthy publication was his tale of a tub 1704 a satire on religious differences but his great work was Gulliver’s Travels

1726 the book in which his hate and Scorn of mankind and the long long Rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression children read the Voyages to liliput and bring nag to the Flying island of leuda and the country of the winoms as they read Robinson cruso as

Stories of wonderful Adventure Swift had all of defoe’s realism his power of giving Vera similitude to his narrative by the invention of a vast number of small exact consistent details but underneath its fairy tales Gulliver’s Travels is a satire far more radical than any of drens or popes because directed not

Against particular parties or persons but against human nature in his account of liliput and brag Swift tries to show looking first through one end of the telescope and then through the other that human greatness goodness Beauty disappear if the scale be altered a little if men

Were 6 in high instead of 6 feet such is the logic of his tale their Wars governments science religion all their institutions in fine and all the courage wisdom and virtue by which these have been built up would appear laughable on the other hand if they were 60 ft High

Instead of six they would become disgusting the complexion of the finest ladies would show blotches hairs excrescences and an overpowering effluvium would Breathe from the pores of the skin finally in his loathsome caricature of man kind as yahoos he contrasts them to their shame with the beasts and sets Instinct above reason

The method of Swift’s satire was grave irony among his minor writings in this kind are his argument against abolishing Christianity his modest proposal for utilizing the Surplus population of Ireland by eating the babies of the poor and his predictions of Isaac biera in the last he predicted the death

Of one Partridge an almanac maker at a certain day and hour when the time set was passed he published a minute account of partridge’s last moments and when the subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own death Swift answered very temperately proving that he was dead and

Remonstrating him on the violence of his language to call a man a fool and villain an impudent fellow only for differing from him in a point merely speculative is in my humble opinion a very improper style for a person of his education Swift wrote verses as well as

Pros but their motive was the reverse of poetical his gross and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched he leaves us no Illusions and not only strips his subject but flays it and shows the raw muscles beneath the skin he delighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions

Of human nature he saw bloodshot said th end of part one chapter 5 recording by colinda in lunor Germany on February 17th 2009 part one chapter 6 of a brief history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Kalinda A Brief History of English and

American literature by Henry a beers part one chapter 6 from the death of Pope to the French Revolution 1744 to 1789 Pope’s example continued potent for 50 years after his death especially was this so in satiric and dactic poetry not only Dr Johnson’s adaptations from juvenile London 1738 and the vanity

Of human wishes 1749 but gford B avad 1791 and mavad 1795 and Byron’s English BS and Scotch reviewers 1809 were in the verse and manner of Pope in Johnson’s lives of The Poets 1781 Dryden and Pope are treated as the two greatest English poets but long before this a revolution in literary

Taste had begun a movement which is variously described as The Return To Nature or the rise of the new romantic School for nearly a 100 years poetry had dealt with manners and the life of towns the gay prosaic life of congri or of Pope the sole concession to the life of

Nature was the old pastoral which in the hands of coochy like Pope and Ambrose Phillips who merely repeated stock descriptions at second or third hand became even more artificial than a Beggar’s opera or a rape of the lock these at least were true to their environment and were natural just

Because they were artificial but the seasons of James Thompson published in installments from 1726 to 30 had opened a new field their theme was the English landscape as varied by the changes of the year and they were written by a true lover and observer of nature Mark aide’s pleasures of

Imagination 1744 published the year of Pope’s death was written like the seasons in blank verse and although its language had much of the formal dactic cast of The Queen Anne poets it pointed unmistakably in the New Direction Thompson had painted the soft beauties of a highly cultivated land Lawns Gardens forest preserves Orchards

And sheep walks but now a fresh note was struck in the literature not of England alone but of Germany and France Romanticism the chief element in which was a love of the wild poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to Savage nature and the heroic Simplicity of life among primitive

Tribes in France br so introduced the idea of the natural man following his instincts in disregard of social conventions in Germany bodmer published in 1753 the first edition of the old German epic the nongin lead works of a similar tendency in England were the ODS of William Collins

And Thomas Gray published between 1747 and 57 especially Collins’s ode on the superstitions of the Highlands and gr’s Bard a Pender in which the last survivor of the Welsh bards invokes Vengeance on Edward I the destroyer of his Guild gray and Mason his friend and editor made translations from the

Ancient Welsh and Norse poetry Thomas Percy’s relics of ancient English poetry 1765 aroused a taste for old ballads Richard herd’s letters on chivalry and romance Thomas Wharton’s history of English poetry 1774 to 78 tier wit’s critical edition of choser and Horus walpole’s Gothic Romance the castle of Otranto 1765 stimulated this awakened interest

In the picturesque aspects of feudal life and contributed to the fondness for Supernatural and medieval subjects James bey’s Minstrel 1771 described the educating influence of Scottish Mountain scenery upon the genius of a young poet but the most remarkable instances of this passion for wild nature and the Romantic past were

The poems of Ashen and Thomas Chatter’s literary forgeries in 1762 James mcferson published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ashen a gelic Bard whom tradition placed in the 3 Century mcferson said that he had made his version including two complete epics

Fingle and Tamora from gaac manuscripts which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands a fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuine of these remains mcferson was challenged to produce his originals and when many years after he published the Gaelic text it was asserted that this was nothing

But a translation of his own English into modern Gaelic of the manuscripts which he have professed to have found not a scrap remained the gelic text was printed from transcriptions in McPherson’s handwriting or in that of his secretaries but whether these poems were the work of Asen or of mcferson they

Made a deep impression upon the time Napoleon admired them greatly and Gerta inserted passages from the songs of Selma in his Sorrows of ver mcferson composed or translated them in an Abrupt rapal PR resembling the English version of job or of the Prophecies of Isaiah they filled the

Minds of their readers with images of vague Sublimity and desolation the mountain torrent The Mist on the Hills the ghosts of Heroes half seen by the setting Moon the thistle in the ruined courts of Chieftain the grass whistling on the windy Heath the gray rock by the

Blue stream of lutha and the cliffs of sea surrounded gormel a tale of the times of old why thou Wanderer unseen thou Bender of the thistle of Laura why thou Breeze of the valley hast thou left mine ear I hear no distant Roar of streams no sound

Of the harp from The Rock Come Thou Huntress of lutha Malvina call back his soul to The Bard I look forward to lachin of lakes to the dark billowy Bay of uo where fingle descends from Ocean from the Roar of winds few are the Heroes of morvin in a Land

Unknown Thomas Chatterton who died by his own hand in 1770 at the age of 17 is one of the most wonderful examples of precocity in the history of literature his father had been sexed in of the ancient Church of St Mary redcliffe in Bristol and the boy’s sensitive imagination took the stamp of

Its surroundings he taught himself to read from a blackletter Bible he drew charcoal sketches of churches castles nightly tombs and heraldic blazonry when only 11 years old he began the fabrication of documents in pros and verse which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley a secular priest at

Bristol in the 15th century Chatterton pretended to have found these among the contents of an old chest in the muniment room of St Mary redcliffs the rowy poems included two tragedies aella and Godwin two kantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings and a number of ballads and minor pieces

Chatterton had no precise knowledge of early English or even of choser his method of working was as follows he made himself a manuscript glossery of the words marked as archaic in Bailey’s and kiry’s English dictionaries composed his poems first in modern language and then turned them into ancient spelling and substituted

Here and there the old words in his glossery for their modern equivalents naturally he made many mistakes and the Horus Walpole to whom he sent some of his pieces was an unable to to detect the forgery his friends gray and Mason to whom he submitted them at once pronounced them

Spurious nevertheless there was a controversy over Rowley hardly less obstinate than that over ocean a controversy made possible only by the then almost Universal ignorance of the forms scansion and vocabulary of early English poetry chatterton’s poems are of little value in themselves but they are the record of an industry and imitative

Quickness marvelous in a mere child and they show how with the Instinct of Genius he threw himself into the main literary current of his time discarding the couplet of Pope The Poets now went back for models to the Elizabethan writers Thomas Wharton published in 1753 his observations on the fairy queen

Bat’s Minstrel Thompson’s castle of indolence William shenstone School mistress and John Dyer’s fleece were all written in the spencerian stanza shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by IM imitating Spencer’s archaisms and Thompson reproduced in many passages the copious Harmony and luxuriant imagery of the

Fairy queen the fleece was a poem on English wool growing after the fashion of Virgil’s georgic the subject was unfortunate for as Dr Johnson said it is impossible to make poetry out of surges and drugs Dy grer Hill which mingles reflection with natural description in the manner of Gray’s elgy written in a

Country churchyard was composed in the octos cabic verse of Milton’s lro and IL penseroso Milton’s minor poems which had hitherto been neglected exercised a great influence on Collins and gray Collins’s Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of Milton’s Nativity and his Exquisite un rmed OD to evening was

A study in versification after Milton’s translation of horus’s Ode to purira in the original meters Shakespeare began to be studied more reverently numerous critical editions of his plays were issued and Garrick restored his pure text to the stage Collins was an enthusiastic student of Shakespeare and one of his

Sweetest poems the dur and simine was inspired by the tragedy of simine the verse of gray Collins and the Wharton Brothers abounds in verbal reminiscences of Shakespeare but their genius was not Allied to his being exclusively lyrical and not at all dramatic The Muse of this romantic

School was fancy rather than passion a thoughtful mly a gentle scholarly pensiveness the spirit of Milton’s IL penseroso pervades their poetry gray was a fastidious scholar who produced very little but that little of the finest quality his famous elegy expressing a meditative mood in language of the choicest Perfection is the

Representative poem of the second half of the 18th century as the rape of the lock is of the first the romanticists were quietists and their scenery is characteristic they loved Solitude and evening the Twilight Veil the mossy Hermitage ruins Glens and caves their style was elegant and academic retaining

A little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical forerunners personification and paraphrasis were their favorite mannerisms Collins’s ODS were largely addressed to abstractions such as fear pity Liberty mercy and simplicity a poet in their dialect was always a Bard a countryman was the untutored Swain and a woman was a nymph

Or the air just as in dren and Pope Thompson is perpetually mindful of Virgil and afraid to speak simply he uses too many Latin epithets like amusive and precipitant and calls a fish line the floating line snatched from the Hy Steed they left much for cper and

Wardsworth to do in the way of infusing the new blood of a strong racy English into our exhausted poetic diction their poetry is impersonal bookish literary it Black’s emotional Force except now and then in Gray’s Immortal elegy in his ode on a distant Prospect of eaten College in Collins’s

Lines on the death of Thompson and his little ode beginning how sleep the Brave the new school did not lack critical expounders of its principles and practice Joseph Wharton published in 1756 the first volume of his essay on the genius and writings of Pope an elaborate review of Pope’s writings

Seriatim doing him certainly full justice but ranking him below Shakespeare Spencer and Milton wit and satire wrote Wharton are transitory and perishable but nature and passion are Eternal he stuck to describing modern manners but those manners because they are familiar artificial and Polished are in their very nature unfit for any lofty

Effort of the Muse whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed he withheld and stifled surely it is no narrow and nerly encomium to say he is the great poet of reason the first of ethical authors in verse Wharton Illustrated his critical positions by quoting freely not only from Spencer and Milton but from recent

Poets like Thompson gray Collins and Dyer he testified that the seasons had been very instrumental in diffusing a general taste for the beauties of Nature and Landscape it was symptomatic of the change in literary taste that the natural or English school of landscape gardening now began to displace the

French and Dutch fashion of C Hedges regular partar Etc and the Gothic architecture came into repute Horus Walpole was a virtuoso in gothic art and in his castle at Strawberry Hill he made a collection of ancient armor illuminated manuscripts and bricka of all kinds gray had been walpole’s traveling

Companion in France and Italy and the two had quarreled and separated but were afterward reconciled from walpole’s private printing press at Strawberry Hill Graz to Sister ODS The Bard and the progress of poesy were first printed in 1757 both gray and Walpole were good correspondents and their printed letters

Are among the most delightful literature of the kind the central figure among the English men of letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson 1709 to 84 whose memory has been preserved less by his own writings than by James Boswell’s famous life of Johnson published in 1791 Boswell was a scotch L and Advocate

Who first met Johnson in London when the latter was 54 years old Boswell was not a very wise or witty person but he reverenced the worth and intellect which sha through his subject’s uncouth exterior he followed him about notebook in hand bore all his snubbing patiently and made the best biography ever written

It is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant to write his life he should prevent it by taking Boswell’s and yet Johnson’s own own writings and this biography of him have changed places in relative importance so completely that Carlile predicted that the former would soon be reduced to

Notes on the latter and mcau said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion Johnson was one of those rugged eccentric self-developed characters so common among the English he was the son of a Lichfield book

Seller and after a course at Oxford which was cut short by poverty and an unsuccessful career as a school Master he had come up to London in 1737 where he supported himself for many years as a book sell’s hack gradually his great learning and abilities his ready social wit and

Powers as a talker caused his company to be sought at the tables of Those whom he called the great he was a clubbable man and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of the time Edmund Burke the orator and Statesman Oliver Goldsmith

Sir Joshua Reynolds the Portrait Painter and David Garrick the great actor who had been a pupil in Johnson’s school near Lichfield Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last century his Oddities virtues and prejudices were thoroughly English he hated Frenchmen Scotchman and Americans and had a coish attachment to

London he was a high Tory and an orthodox Churchman he loved a lord in the abstract and yet he asserted sturdy Independence against any Lord in particular he was deeply religious but had an fiding fear of death he was burly in person and slovenly in dress his shirt frill was always covered with

Snuff he was a great Diner out an inordinate tea drinker and a voracious and untidy feeder an inherited scrofula which often took the form of hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain deprived him of control over the muscles of his face Boswell describes how his features worked how he

Snorted grunted whistled and rolled about in his chair when getting ready to speak he records his minutest traits such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club and his superstitious way of touching all the posts between his house in the miter tavn going back to do it if he skipped

One by chance though bearish in his manners and arrogant in dispute especially when talking for victory Johnson had a large and tender heart he loved his ugly old wife 21 years his senior and he had his house full of unfortunates a blind woman an invalid surgeon a destitute Widow a

Negro servant whom he supported for many years and bore with all their ill humors patiently among Johnson’s numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are perhaps his dictionary of the English language 1755 his moral tale rasalas 1759 the introduction to his edition of Shakespeare 1765 and his lives of The Poets

1781 Johnson wrote a sonorous cadenced PR full of big Latin words words and balanced Clauses here is a sentence for example from his visit to the herdes we were now treading that illustrious Island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions when Savage Clans and roving barbarians derived the

Benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion to abstract the Mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored and would be foolish if it were possible the difference between his colloquial style and his book style is well Illustrated in the cited by maau speaking of vill’s rehearsal Johnson

Said it has not wit enough to keep it sweet then paused and added translating English into Johnson it has not Vitality sufficient to preserve it from putria there is more of this in Johnson’s Rambler and idler papers than in his latest work the lives of The

Poets in this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic though with decided limitations his understanding was was solid but he was a thorough classicist and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope he was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries gray Collins shenston and

Dyer he had no sense of the higher and subtler Graces of romantic poetry and he had a comical indifference to the beauties of nature when Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had at least some Noble wild prospects the doctor replied that the noblest Prospect a

Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to life Lon the English novel of real life had its origin at this time books like defo Robinson cruso Captain Singleton Journal of the plague Etc were Tales of incident and Adventure rather than novels the novel deals primarily with character and

With the interaction of characters upon one another as developed by a regular plot the first English novelist in the modern sense of the word was Samuel Richardson a printer who began authorship in his 50th year year with his Pamela the story of a young servant girl who resisted the seductions of her

Master and finally as the reward of her virtue became his wife Clarissa harlo 1748 was the tragical history of a high-spirited young lady who being driven from home by her family because she refused to Marry The Suitor selected for her fell into the toils of LEL and accomplished rake after struggling heroically against

Every form of artifice and violence she was at last drugged and ruined she died of a broken heart and Loveless born down by remorse was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa Sir Charles grandis in 1753 was Richardson’s portrait of an ideal fine gentleman whose stately doings fill

Eight volumes but who seems to the modern reader a boore and a prig all of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters a method which fitted Richardson’s subjective cast of mind he knew little of life but he identified himself in intensely with his principal

Character and produced a strong effect by minute accumulated touches Clarissa harlo is his Masterpiece though even in that the situation is painfully prolonged The heroin’s Virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical and there is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the copiousness with which she pours herself out in gushing Epistles to her female

Correspondent at the very moment when she is beset with dangers persecuted agonized and driven nearly mad in Richardson’s novels appears for the first time that sentimentalism which now began to infect European literature Pamela was translated into French and German and fell in with that current of popular feeling which found

Fullest expression in Russo’s nuel Eloise 1759 and gerta’s liend Yong inverto which set all the world a weeping in 1774 kerid said that to pass from Richardson’s books to those of Henry Fielding was like going into the fresh air from a close room heated by stoves Richardson it has been affirmed new man

But Fielding new men the latter’s first novel Joseph Andrews 1742 was begun as a travesty of Pamela the hero a brother of Pamela was a young footman in the employ of Lady booby from whom his virtue suffered a like assault to that made upon pamelas by her master this reversal

Of the natural situation was in itself full of laughable possib abilities had the book Gone on simply as a burlesque but the exuberance of fielding’s Genius led him Beyond his original design this hero leaving lady booby’s service goes traveling with good Parson Adams and is soon engaged in a series of comical and

Rather boisterous Adventures Fielding had seen life and his characters were painted from the life with a bold free hand he was a gentleman by birth and had made acquaintance with Society in the town in 1727 when he was a handsome stalwart young fellow with high animal spirits

And a great Appetite For Pleasure he soon ran himself into debt and began writing for the stage married and spent his wife’s Fortune living for a while in much Splendor as a Country Gentleman and afterward in a reduced condition as a rural Justice with a salary of 500 of the dirtiest money on

Earth fielding’s Masterpiece was Tom Jones 1749 and it remains one of the best of English novels its hero is very much after fielding’s own heart wild Spen Thrift warm-hearted forgiving and greatly in need of forgiveness the same type of character with the lines deepened reappears in Captain booth in Amelia

1751 the heroine of which is a portrait of fielding’s wife with Tom Jones is contrasted BFFL the embodiment of meanness hypocrisy and cowardice Sophia Western the heroine is one of the fielding’s most admirable Creations for the regulated morality of Richardson with its somewhat old Grand ified air Fielding substituted Instinct

His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse only and his ideal of character is manliness in Jonathan wild the hero is a Highwayman this novel is ironical a sort of Pros mock heroic and is one of the strongest though certainly the least pleasing of fielding’s writings Tobias Smet was an inferior

Fielding with a difference he was a scotch ship surgeon and had spent some time in the West Indies he introduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the British tar in the persons of Tom bowling and commodore Tran as Fielding had introduced in Squire Western the equally National type

Of hard swearing deep drinking fox hunting Tory Squire both fielding and Smet were of the Hardy British beef and beer School their novels are downright energetic coarse and high blooded low life physical life runs Riot through their Pages Tavern braws the breaking of Pates and the off-hand courtship of country

Wenches smallet books such as rodick random 1748 paragen pickle 1751 and Ferdinand count fathom 1752 were more purely stories of broadly comic Adventure than fieldings the latter’s view of life was by no means idyllic but with smallet this English realism ran into vulgarity and a hard scotch literalness and

Character was pushed to car the generous wine of Fielding says T in smallet hands becomes Brandy of the dram shop a partial exception to this is to be found in his last and best novel Humphrey clinker 1770 the influence of cantes and of the French novelist Las who finished his

Adventures of jilah in 1735 are very perceptible in smallet a genius of much finer mold was Lawrence Stern the author of Tristram Shandy 1759 to 67 and the Sentimental Journey 1768 Tristram Shandy is hardly a novel The Story merely serves to hold together a number of characters such as Uncle

Toby and Corporal trim conceived with rare subtlety and originality Stern’s chosen Province was the Whimsical and his great model was rabal his books are full of digressions breaks surprises innuendos double meanings mystifications and all all manner of odd turns karid and carile unite in pronouncing him a great humorist fer

Says that he was only a great Jester humor is the laughter of the heart and Stern’s pathos is closely interwoven with his humor he was the foremost of English sentimentalists and he had that taint of insincerity which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine sentiment like goldsmiths for example Stern in life was selfish

Heartless and untrue a clergyman his world worldliness and vanity and the indecency of his writings were a scandal to the church though his sermons were both witty and affecting he enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that

Lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor patient animals that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded post Chez a dead donkey a starling in a cage or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window and saying there is room

Enough in the world for thee and me it is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds in raising the desired feelings in his reader even from Such trivial occasions he was a minute philosopher his philosophy was kindly and he taught the delicate art of making much out of

Little less coarse than Fielding he is far more corrupt Fielding goes bluntly to the point Stern lingers Among The Temptations and suspends the expectation to tease and excite it forbidden fruit had a relish for him and his Pages seduce he is full of good sayings both tender and witty it was Stern for

Example who wrote God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb a very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith who vicer of Wakefield 1766 was the earliest and is still one of the best novels of domestic and Rural Life the book like its author was thoroughly Irish full of bulls and inconsistencies very improvable things

Happen in it with a cheerful Defiance of logic but its characters are true to Nature drawn with an idilic sweetness and Purity and with touches of a most loving humor its hero Dr Primrose was painted after Goldsmith’s father a poor clergyman of the English church in Ireland and the original likewise of the

Country Parson in Goldsmith’s deserted village 1770 who was passing rich on 40 pounds a year this poem though written in the fashionable couplet of Pope and even containing a few verses contributed by Dr Johnson so that it was not at all in line with the work of the romanticists

Did perhaps as much as anything of gray or of Collins to recall English poetry to the Simplicity and freshness of country life except for the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith and perhaps a few other plays the stage had now utterly declined the novel which is dramatic in

Essence though not in form began to take its place and to represent life though less intens yet more minutely than the theater could do in the novelists of the 18th century the life of the people as distinguished from society or the upper classes began to invade literature Richardson was distinctly a

Bourgeois writer and his contemporaries Fielding Smet Stern and Goldsmith ranged over a wide variety of ranks and conditions this is one thing which distinguishes the literature of the second half of the 18th century from that of the first as well as in some degree from that of all previous

Centuries among the authors of this generation whose writings belong to other Departments of thought than pure literature may be mentioned in passing the great historian Edward Gibbon whose Decline and fall of the Roman Empire was published from 1776 to 88 and Edmund Burke whose political speeches and pamphlets possess a true literary

Quality the Romantic Poets had addressed the imagination rather than the heart it was reserved for two men a contrast to one another in almost every respect to bring once more into British song a strong individual feeling and with it a new warmth and directness of speech these were William cper 1731 to

1800 and Robert Burns 1759 to 96 calper spoke out of his own life experience his Agony his love his worship and despair and straight away the varnish that had glittered all over our poetry since the time of DED and melted away calper had scribbled verses

When he was a young law student at the middle temple in London and he had contributed to the only hymns published in 1779 by his friend and Pastor the Reverend John Newton but he only began to write poetry in Earnest when he was nearly 50 years

Old in 1782 the date of his first volume he said in a letter to a friend that he had read but one English poet during the past 20 years perhaps therefore of all English poets of equal culture cper owed the least impulse to books and the most

To need of uttering his inmost thoughts and feelings cper had a most unhappy life as a child he was shy sensitive and sickly and suffered much from bullying and fagging at a school whether he was sent after his mother’s death this happened when he was 6 years old and in

His affecting lines written on receipt of my mother’s picture he speaks of himself as a wretch even then life’s journey just begun in 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asylum where he spent a year judicious treatment restored him to sanity but he came out a Broken Man and

Remained for the rest of his life an invalid unfitted for any active occupation his disease took the form of religious Melancholy he had two recurrences of Madness and both times made attempts on his life at Huntington and afterward at only in buckinghamshire he found a home with the Unwin family

Whose kindness did all which the most soothing and delicate care could do to heal his wounded Spirit his two poems to Mary unan together with the lines on his mother’s picture were almost the first examples of deep and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the last

Century cper found relief from the black thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round of quiet household occupations he corresponded indefatigably took long walks through the neighborhood read sang and conversed with Mrs Unwin and his friend lady Austin and amused himself with carpentry gardening and raising pets especially

Hairs of which gentle animals he grew very fond all these simple tastes in which he found for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness are reflected in his best poem the task 1785 cper is the poet of the family affections of domestic life and Royal retirement the laurate of the Fireside

The tea table the evening lamp the garden the greenhous house and the rabbit Coupe he draws with elegance and precision a chair a clock a harpsicord a barometer a piece of needle work but cper was an outdoor as well as an indoor man the only landscape was tame a fat

Agricultural region where the sluggish ow wound between plowed fields and the Horizon was bounded by low Hills nevertheless Cowper’s natural descriptions are at once more distinct and more imaginative than Thompson’s the task reflects also the new philanthropic Spirit the enthusiasm of humanity the feeling of the Brotherhood of men to

Which rouso had given expression in France and which issued in the French Revolution in England this was the time of wilburforce the anti-slavery agitator of Whitefield the eloquent Revival preacher of John and Charles Wesley and of the Evangelical and Methodist movements which gave new life to the English

Church John Newton the curate of only and the keeper of Cowper’s conscience was one of the leaders of the evangelicals and Cowper’s first volume of table talk and other poems 1782 written under Newton’s inspiration was a series of sermons and verse somewhat intolerant of all worldly enjoyments such as hunting dancing and

Theaters God made the country and manmade the town he wrote he was a moralizing poet and his morality was sometimes that of the invalid and the recluse Byron called him a coddled poet and indeed there is a suspicion of GRL and dressing gowns about him he lived

Much among women and his sufferings had refined him to a feminine delicacy but there is no sickliness in his poetry and he retained a Charming playful humor displayed in his excellent comic ballad John Gilpin and Mrs Browning has sung of him how when one by one sweet sounds and

Wandering lights departed he bore no less a loving face because so brokenhearted at the close of the Year 1786 a young Scotchman named Samuel Rose called upon cper at only and left with him a small volume which had appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer entitled poems chiefly in the Scottish

Dialect by Robert Burns calber read the book through twice and though somewhat bothered by the dialect pronounced it a very extraordinary production this momentary flash as of an electric spark marks the contact not only of the Two Chief British Poets of their generation but of two lit lures Scotch poets like Thompson and

Batty had written in southern English and as carile said in vacuo that is with nothing specially National in their work Burns’s sweet though rugged Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his country a hearing Beyond The Border he had to be sure a whole literature of popular songs and ballads behind him and

His immediate models were Alan Ramsey and Robert Ferguson but these remained provincial while Burns became Universal he was bornn in AER on the banks of Bonnie dun in a clay biggan not far from ala’s old haunted Kirk the scene of the witch dance in Tander his father was a hard-headed

God-fearing tenant farmer whose life and that of his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty the crops failed the landlord pressed for his rent for weeks at a time the family tasted no meat yet this life of toil was lightened by love and homely Pleasures in the Cotter

Saturday night Burns has drawn a beautiful picture of his parents’ household the rest that came at the week’s end and the family worship about the wee bit Engle blink and bonnelly Robert was handsome wild and witty he was universally susceptible and his first songs like his last were of the

Lasses his head had been stuffed in Boyhood with tales and songs concerning Devils ghosts fairies brownies witches warlocks spunky Kelpies elf candles deadlights Etc told him by one Jenny Wilson an old woman who lived in the family his ear was full of ancient Scottish tunes and as soon as he fell in

Love he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird sings He composed his verses while following the plow or working in the stackyard OR at evening balancing on two legs of his chair and watching the light of a Peete Fire play over the raky walls of the

Cottage Burn’s love songs are in many keys ranging from strains of the most pure and exalted passions like a fond kiss and to marry in heaven to such loose tities as when January winds and green grow the rushes o Burns liked a glass almost as well as

A lass and at mline where he carried on a farm with his brother Gilbert after their father’s death he began to seek a questionable relief from the pressure of daily Toil and unkind Fates in the convivialities of the tavern there among the Wits of the mline club Farmers Sons Shepherds from the

Uplands and the Smugglers who swarmed over the West Coast host he would discuss politics and farming recite his verses and join in the singing and ranting while banor the nappy and getting fou and UNOH happppy to these experiences we owe not only those excellent drinking songs John

Barley corn and Willie bruda M but the headlong fun of tamama Shanter and the Visions grotesquely terrible of death in Dr hornbrook and the dramatic humor of the Jolly Beggars Cowper had celebrated the cup which cheers but not inebriates Burns sang the Praises of the scotch

Drink cper was a stranger to Burn’s High animal spirits and his robust enjoyment of life he had affections but no passions at mckline Burns whose irregularities did not escape the centure of the Kirk became involved through his friendship with Gavin Hamilton in the controversy between the old light and new light

Clergy his holy Fair holy tulsy two herds holy Wily’s prayer and address to the uncle good are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy but in spite of the rolicking profanity of his language and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by

Religious ideas as may be seen from his prayer under the pressure of violent anguish and prayer in Prospect of death his farm turned out a failure and he was on the eve of sailing for Jamaica when the favor with which his volume of poems was received stayed his departure

And turned his steps to Edinburgh there The Peasant poet was lionized for a winter season by the learned and polite Society of the scotch Capital with results in the end not altogether favorable to Burn’s best interests for when Society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had

To go back to farming again carrying with him a bitter sense of Injustice and neglect he leased a farm in ellisland in 178 and some friends procured his appointment as excisemen for the district but poverty disappointment irregular habits and broken Health clouded his last years and brought him

An untimely death at the age of 37 he continued however to pour Forth songs of unequal sweetness and force the man sank said kerid but the poet was bright to the last Burns is the best of British songwriters his songs are singable they are not merely lyrical po poems They

Were Meant To Be Sung and they are sung they were mostly set to Old Scottish heirs and sometimes they were built up from ancient fragments of anonymous popular poetry A Chorus or stanza or even a single line such are for example Old Lang Zine my hearts in

The highlands and land lady count the laen burns had a great warm heart his sins were sins of passion and sprang from the same generous soil that nourished his impulsive virtues his ele M qualities of a poet were sincerity a healthy openness to all impressions of the beautiful and a sympathy which

Embraced men animals and the dumb objects of nature his tenderness toward flowers and the brute creation may be read in his lines to a mountain Daisy To a Mouse and The Old Farmer’s New Year’s morning salutation to his old mayor Maggie next after love and good Fellowship patriotism is the most

Frequent motive of his song of his national anthem Scots what how you Wallace bled Carlile said so long as there is warm blood in the heart of a Scotchman or man it will move in Fierce Thrills under this war ode Burns’s politics were a singular mixture of sentimental tourism with practical

Democracy a romantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of the exiled stewards and to have been out in 45 with the young Pretender was a popular thing in parts of Scotland to this purely poetic loyalty may be attributed such jackaby Ballads of burns as over the water to

Charlie but his sober convictions were on the side of Liberty and human Brotherhood and are expressed in the TW dogs the first epistle to Davy and a man’s a man for a that his sympathy with the revolution led him to send four pieces of ordinance taken from a captured Smuggler as a

Present to the French convention a piece of bravado which got him into difficulties with his superiors in the excise The Poetry which burns wrote not in dialect but in the classical English is in the stilted manner of his century and his Pros correspondence betrays his lack of culture by his constant lapse into

Rhetorical affectation and fine writing end of part one chapter 6 part one chapter 7 of a brief history of English and American literature this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Kalinda A Brief History of English and American literature by Henry a beers part one chapter 7 from the French

Revolution to the death of Scott 1789 to 1832 the burst of creative activity at the opening of the 19th century has but one parallel in English literary history namely the somewhat similar flowering out of the national genius in the time of Elizabeth and the first two Stuart

Kings the later age gave birth to no Supreme poets like Shakespeare and Milton It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise Lost but it offers a greater number of important writers a higher average of excellence and a wider range and variety of literary work than any preceding era woodsworth colid Scott

Byron Shelly and Keats are all great names while suy landoor Moore lamb and D Quincy would be noteworthy figures at any period and deserve a fuller mention than can be here accorded them but in so crowded a generation selection becomes increasingly needful and in the present chapter accordingly the emphasis will be

Laid upon the first named group as not only the most important but the most representative of the various Tendencies of their time the conditions of literary work in this Century have been almost unduly stimulating the rapid advance in population wealth education and the means of communication has vastly

Increased the number of readers everyone who has anything to say can say it in print and is sure of some sort of a hearing a special feature of the time is the multiplication of periodicals the great London dailies like the times and the morning post which were started during the last

Quarter of the 18 century were something quite new in journalism the first of the modern reviews the Edinburgh was established in 1802 as the organ of the wig party in Scotland this was followed by the London quarterly in 1808 and by blackwoods magazine in 1817 both in the Tory

Interest the first editor of the Edinburgh was Francis Jeffrey who assembled about him a distinguished core of contributors including the versatile Henry broam afterward a great parliamentary or orator and Lord Chancellor of England and the Reverend Sydney Smith whose witty sayings are still current the first editor of the

Quarterly was William gford a satirist who wrote The Bad and The mavad in ridicule of literary affectations he was succeeded in 1824 by James Gibson lockheart the son-in-law of Walter Scott and the author of an excellent life of Scott blackwoods was edited by John Wilson professor of moral philosophy in

The University of Edinburgh who under the name of Christopher North contributed to his magazine a series of brilliant imaginary dialogues between famous characters of the day entitled noctes ambrosian because they were supposed to take place at Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh these papers were full of a profuse headlong eloquence of humor

Literary criticism and personalities interspersed with songs expressive of a roystering and convivial tourism and an uous contempt for wigs and coochy these reviews and magazines and others which sprang up beside them became the nuclei about which the wit and scholarship of both parties gathered political controversy under the Regency

And the reign of George IV was thus carried on more regularly by permanent organs and no longer so largely by privateering in the shape of pamphlets like Swift’s public Spirit of the wigs Johnson’s taxation no tyranny and Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France nor did politics by any means

Usurp The Columns of the review literature art science the whole circle of human effort and achievement passed under review blackwoods phasers and other monthlies published stories poetry criticism and correspondence everything in short which enters into the makeup of our magazines today except illustrations two main influences of

Foreign origin have left their Trace in the English writers of the first 30 years of the 19th century the one communicated by contact with the new German literature of the latter half of the 18th century and in particular with with the writings of Gerta Schiller and Kant the other springing from the events

Of the French Revolution the influence of German upon English literature in the 19th century was more intellectual and less formal than that of the Italian in the 16th and of the French in the 18th in other words the German writers furnish the English with ideas and ways

Of feeling rather than with models of style GTA and Schiller did not become subjects for literary imitation as molier Rasin and buo had become in Pope’s time it was reserved for a later generation and for Thomas Carlile to domesticate the diction of German Pros but the nature and extent of this

Influence can perhaps best be noted when we come to take up the authors of the time one by one the excitement caused by the French Revolution was something more obvious and immediate when the bastile fell in 1789 the enthusiasm among the friends of Liberty and human progress in England

Was hardly less intense than in France it was was the dawn of a new day the shackles were stricken from the slave all men were free and all men were brothers and radical young englands sent up a shout that echoed the Roar of the Paris mob wordsworth’s lines on the fall

Of the bastile kid’s fall of robes Pierre and ODed to France and s’s revolutionary drama watt Tyler gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the English democracy in afterlife woodsworth looking back regretfully to those years of Promise wrote his poem on the French Revolution as it appeared to enthusiasts at its

Commencement Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive but to be young was very Heaven oh times in which the meager stale forbidding ways of custom law and statute took at once the attraction of a country in Romance those were the days in which woodsworth then and undergraduate at

Cambridge spent a college vacation in tramping through France landing at Cala on the eve of the very Day July 14 14 1790 on which Louis the 16th signalized the anniversary of the fall of the bastile by taking the oath of fidelity to the new constitution in the following year

Wardsworth Revisited France where he spent 13 months forming an intimacy with the Republican general b at oron and reaching Paris not long after the September massacres of 1792 those were the days too in which young Sai and young colage having married sisters at Bristol were planning a pantisocracy or ideal community on the

Banks of the sasquan and denouncing the British government for going to war with the French Republic this group of poets who had met one another first in the south of England came afterward to be called the lake poets from their residence in the mountainous Lake Country of West Morland and Cumberland

With which their names and that of woodsworth especially are forever Associated the so-called Lakers did not properly speaking constitute a school of poetry they differed greatly from one another in mind and art but they they were connected by social ties and by religious and political sympathies the excesses of the French Revolution and

The usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them as it did many other English liberals and drove them into the ranks of the reactionaries advancing years brought conservatism and they became in time loyal Tories and Orthodox churchmen William wardsworth 1770 to 1850 the chief of the three and perhaps on the whole the greatest English poet

Since Milton published his lyrical ballads in 1798 the volume contained a few pieces by his friend karid among them the Ancient Mariner and its appearance May fairly be said to mark an epic in the history of English poetry woodsworth regarded himself as a reformer of poetry and in the preface to

The second volume of lyrical ballads he defended the theory on which they were composed his Innovations were twofold in subject matter and in diction the principal object which I proposed to myself in these poems he said was to choose incidents and situations from common life low and rustic life was generally chosen because

In that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity and are Incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature Wordsworth discarded in theory the poetic diction of his predecessors and professed to use a selection of the

Real language of men in a state of vivid sensation he adopted he said the language of men in rustic life because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived in the matter of poetic fiction woodsworth did not in his practice

Adhere to the doctrine of this preface many of his most admired poems such as the lines written near tinter Abbey the great ode on the intimations of immortality the sonnets and many parts of his longest poems the Excursion and the Prelude deal with philosophic thought and highly intellectualized emotions

In all of these and in many others the language is Rich stately involved and as remote from the real language of West Morland Shepherds as is the Epic blank verse of Milton on the other hand in those of his poems which were consciously written in illustration of his theory the

Affectation of Simplicity coupled with a defective sense of humor sometimes led him to the selection of vulgar and trivial themes and the use of language which is bald childish or even ludicrous his Simplicity is too often the Simplicity of Mother Goose rather than of choser instances of this occur in such

Poems as Peter Bell The Idiot Boy goody Blake and Harry Gil Simon Lee and the Wagoner but there are multitudes of wordsworth’s ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly and which in their homeliness and clear profundity in their production of the strongest Effects by the fewest Strokes are among

The choicest modern examples of pure as distinguished from decorated art such are out of many Ruth Lucy a portrait to a Highland girl the Ry of poor Susan to the cuckoo the reaper we are seven the pet lamb The Fountain the two April mornings the leech gatherer The Thorn and Yaro

Revisited woodsworth was something of a Quaker in poetry and loved the sober drabs and Grays of life quietism was his literary religion and The Sensational was to him not merely vulgar but almost Wicked the human mind he wrote is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent

Stimulants he disliked the far-fetched themes and high colored style of Scott and Byron he once told Lor that all of Scott’s poetry together was not worth six from action and passion he turned away to sing the inward life of the soul and the outward life of nature he said

To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears and again long have I loved what I behold the night that calms the day that cheers the common growth of Mother Earth suffices me her tears her mirth her humblest mirth and

Tears wordsworth’s life was outwardly uneventful the companionship of the mountains and of his own thoughts the sympathy of his household the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about him furnished him with all the stim that he required love had he found in Huts where poor men lie his only teachers had been

Woods and reals the silence that is in the Starry Sky the sleep that is among the lonely Hills he read little but reflected much and made poetry daily composing by preference out of Dooors and dictating his verses to some member of his family his favorite amenis was his sister

Dorothy a woman of fine gifts to whom wardsworth was indebted for some of his happiest inspirations she was the subject of the poem beginning her eyes are wild and her Charming Memorials of a tour in the Scottish Highlands records the origin of many of her brother’s best poems throughout life woodsworth was

Remarkably self-centered the ridicule of the reviewers against which he gradually made his way to public recognition never Disturbed his Serene belief in himself or in the Divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver he was a slow and serious person a preacher as well as a poet with a certain rigidity

Not to say narrowness of character that plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess or it hardened early whole sides of Life were beyond the range of his sympathies he touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott but touched it more

Profoundly it is to him that we owe the phrase plain living and high thinking as also a most noble illustration of it in his own practice his was the wisest and deepest Spirit among the English Poets of his generation though hardly the most poetic he wrote too much and attempting

To make every Petty incident or reflection the occasion of a poem he finally reached the point of composing verses on seeing a harp in the shape of a needle case and on other themes more worthy of Mrs Sigourney in parts of his long blank verse poems the Excursion 1814 and the

Prelude which was printed after his death in 1850 though finished as early as 1806 The Poetry wears very thin and its place is taken by prosaic tedious didacticism these two poems were designed as portions of a still more extended work the recluse which was never completed the Excursion consists mainly

Of philosophical discussions on nature and human life between a school Master a solitary and an itinerant peder the Prelude describes the development of wordsworth’s own genius in parts of the Excursion the diction is fairly Shakespearean the Good Die first and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust burn to the

Socket a passage not only beautiful in itself but dramatically true in the mouth of the bereaved mother who utters it to that human instinct which generalizes a private sorrow into a universal law much of the Prelude can hardly be called poetry at all yet some of wordsworth’s loftiest poetry is

Buried among its dreary wastes and now and then in the midst of common places comes a flash of miltonic Splendor like golden cities 10-months Journey deep among tartarian Wilds Wordsworth is above all things the poet of nature in this province he was not without forerunners to say nothing

Of Burns and cper there was George Krab who had published his village in 1783 15 years before the lyrical ballads and whose last poem tales of the hall came out in 1819 5 years after the Excursion Byron called crab Nature’s sternest painter and her best he was a minutely accurate delineator of the

Harsher aspects of Rural Life he photographs a gypsy Camp a common with its geese and Donkey a salt marsh a Shabby Village Street or Tumbl down mans but neither crab nor cper has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth the light that never was on sea or land the Consecration and the poet’s

Dream in a note on a couplet in one of his earliest poems descriptive of an oak tree standing dark against the sunset Wordsworth says I recollect distinctly the very spot where this struck me the moment was important in my poetical history for I dated from my consciousness of the infinite variety of

Natural appearances which had been unnoticed by Poets of any age or country and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency in later life he is said to have been impatient of anything spoken or written by another about mountains conceiving himself to have a monopoly of

The power of Hills but Wordsworth did not stop stop with natural description Matthew Arnold has said that the office of modern poetry is the moral interpretation of nature such at any rate was wordsworth’s office to him nature was alive and divine he felt under the veil of phenomena a presence

That disturbs me with joy of elevated thought a sense Sublime of something far more deeply interfused he approached if he did not actually reach the view of pantheism which identifies god with nature and the mysticism of the idealists who identify nature with the soul of man this tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth

By German philosophy he was no metaphysician in his rambles with colid about nether stoy and Al Foxton when both were young they had indeed discussed Spinosa and in the Autumn of 1798 after the publication of the lyrical ballads the two friends went together to Germany where woodsworth spent half a year but

The literature and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth he disliked Gera and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet ktoo whom he met at Hamburg that he placed the romanticist burger above both Gerta and Schiller it was through Samuel Taylor colorid 1772 to 1834 who was

Preeminently The Thinker among the literary men of his generation that the new German thought found its way into England during the 14 months which he spent in Germany chiefly at ratzburg and gangan he had familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Emanuel Kant and of his continuators FTA and

Shelling as well as with the general literature of Germany on his return to England he published in 1800 a free translation of schillers Valenstein and through his writings and more especially through his conversations he became the conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary class keridge described himself as being

From Boyhood a book worm and a Daydreamer he remained through life an omnivorous though unsystematic reader he was helpless in Practical Affairs and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his Indulgence in the Opium habit on his return to England in 1800 he went to reside at Keswick in the

Lake country with his brother-in-law Sai whose industry supported both families during his last 19 years colid found an asylum under the roof of Mr James Gilman of Highgate near London with many of the best best young men in England were accustomed to resort to Listen to col’s Wonderful talk talk

Indeed was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation it cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper his table talk crowded with pregnant paragraphs was taken down from his lips by his nephew Henry kid his criticisms of Shakespeare are nothing but notes made here and there

From a course of lectures delivered before the Royal Institute and never fully written out though only hints since suggestions they are perhaps the most penetrative and helpful Shakespearean criticism in English he was always forming projects and abandoning them he projected a great work on Christian philosophy which was

To have been his magnum opus but he never wrote it he projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem I schemed it at 25 he said but alas ventorum expectat what bad fair to be his best poem cristel is a fragment another strangely beautiful

Poem kublan which came to him he said in sleep is even more fragmentary and the most important of his Pros remains his biographia of literaria 1817 a history of his own opinions breaks off abruptly it was in his suggestiveness that kid’s great service to posterity resided he was what JS Mill called a

Seminal mind and his thought had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius many a man has owed to to some sentence of colorages if not the Awakening in himself of a new intellectual life at least the starting of fruitful trains of reflection which

Have modified his whole view of certain great subjects on everything that he left is set the stamp of high mental Authority he was not perhaps primarily he certainly was not exclusively a poet in theology in philosophy in political thought and literary criticism he set currents flowing which are

Flowing yet the ter terminology of criticism for example is in his debt for many of those convenient distinctions such as that between genius and talent between wit and humor between fancy and Imagination which are familiar enough now but which he first introduced or enforced his definitions and

EMS we meet everywhere such are for example the sayings every man is born an Aristotelian or a platonist Pros is words in their best order poetry the best words in the best order and among the bits of subtle interpretation that abound in his writings may be mentioned his estimate

Of Wordsworth in the biographia literaria and his sketch of Hamlet’s character one with which he was personally in strong sympathy in the lectures on Shakespeare the broad Church party in the English church among whose most eminent exponents have been Frederick Robertson Arnold of rugby FD morce Charles Kingsley and the late Dean

Stanley traces its intellectual Origins to coler’s AIDS to reflection to his writings and conversations in general and particularly to his ideal of a national claricy as set forth in his essay on church and state in politics as in religion kid’s conservatism represents the reaction against the destructive Spirit of the 18th century

And the French Revolution to this root and Branch democracy he opposed the view that every old belief or institution such as the throne or the church had served some need and and had a rational idea at the bottom of it to which it might be again

Recalled and made once more a benefit to society instead of a curse and an anachronism as a poet colid has a sure though slender hold upon Immortal Fame no English poet has sung so wildly well as the singer of cristabel and the Ancient Mariner the former of these in

Form a romance in a variety of meters and in substance a tale of Supernatural possession by which a lovely and innocent Maiden is brought under the control of a witch though unfinished and obscure in intention it haunts the imagination with a Mystic power Byron had seen cristel in

Manuscript and urged kid to publish it he hated all the Lakers but when on parting from Lady Byron he wrote his song Fair the well and if forever still forever Fair Thee Well he prefixed it to the noble lines from kid’s poem beginning alas they had been friends in

Youth in that weird ballad the Ancient Mariner the super natural is handled with even greater subtlety than in cristel the reader is led to feel that amid the loneliness of the Tropic sea the line between the Earthly and unearthly vanishes and the poet leaves him to discover for himself whether the

Spectral shapes that the Mariner saw were merely the visions of the calenture or a glimpse of the world of spirits karid is one of our most perfect metrist the poet swinburn than whom there can be no higher authority on this point though he is rather given to exaggeration

Pronounces Lan for absolute Melody and Splendor the first poem in the language Robert SDI the third member of this group was a diligent worker and one of the most voluminous of English writers as a poet he was lacking in inspiration and his big Oriental epics thalaba 1801 and the curse of kahama

1810 are little better than waxwork of his numerous Works in Pros the life of Nelson is perhaps the best and is an excellent biography several other authors were more or less closely associated with the lake poets by residence or social affiliation John Wilson the editor of blackwoods lived for some time when a

Young man at El on the banks of the windir he was an athletic man of outdoor habits an enthusiastic Sportsman and a lover of natural scenery his admiration of woodsworth was thought to have led him to the imitation of the latter in his aisle of Palms 1812 and his other

Poetry one of Wilson’s companions in his Mountain walk was Thomas D Quincy who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and colid to take up his residence in 1808 at Grassmere where he occupied for many years the cottage from which woodsworth had removed to Alan Bank DeQuincy was a shy bookish little

Man of erratic nocturnal habits who impresses one personally as a child of genius with a child’s helplessness and a child’s sharp observation he was above all things a magazin all his writings with one exception appeared first in the shape of contribution to periodical and his essays literary criticisms and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly

Rich and varied the most famous of them was his confessions of an English opium eater published as a serial in the London magazine in 1821 he had begun to take opium as a cure for the toothache when a student at Oxford where he resided from 1803 to

1808 by 1816 he had risen to 8,000 drops of lanam a day for several years after this he experienced the acutest misery and his will suffered an entire paralysis in 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance and in shaking off his torper so as to become capable of

Literary work the most impressive effect of the Opium habit was seen in his dreams in the unnatural expansion of space and time and the infinite repetition of the same objects his sleep was filled with dim vast images measureless cavalcades deploying to the sound of orchestal music an endless succession of vaulted

Halls with staircases climbing to Heaven up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure then came sudden alarms hurrying to and fro trepidations of innumerable fugitives Darkness and Light Tempest and human faces many of D Quincy’s papers were autobiographical but there was always something baffling in these reminiscences in the interminable

Wanderings of his pen for which perhaps opium was responsible he appears to lose saw trace of fact or of any continuous story every actual experience of his life seems to have been taken up into a realm of dream and there distorted till the reader sees not the real figures but

The enormous grotesque Shadows of them executing wild dances on a screen an instance of this process is described by himself in his vision of sudden death but his unworldliness and faculty of vision seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception displayed in his biogra

Graphical sketches of woodsworth kerid and other contemporaries in his critical papers on Pope Milton lesing Homer and the Homer his essay on style and his brief appraisal of the Greek literature his curious scholarship is seen in his articles on the toilet of a Hebrew lady and the casuistry of Roman

Meals his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay on murder considered as one of the Fine Arts of his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his Revolt of the tartar describing the flight of a calmic tribe of 600,000 Souls from Russia to the Chinese Frontier a great Hegira or

Anabasis which extended for 4,000 miles over desert steps infested with foes occupied 6 month’s time and left nearly half the tribe dead upon the way the subject was suited to D Quincy’s imagination it was like one of his own opium visions and he handled it with a dignity and force which makes the

History not altogether Unworthy of comparison with th’s great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition an intimate friend of Sai was Walter Savage Lor a man of kingly nature of a leonine presence with a most stormy and unreasonable temper and yet with The courtest Graces of manner and with said Emerson a wonderful brain despotic

Violent and inexhaustible he inherited wealth and lived a great part of his life at Florence where he died in 1864 in his 90th year Dickens who knew him at bath in the latter part of his life made a kindly caricature of him as Lawrence boyam in Bleek house whose combination of

Superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness testifies Henry Krab Robinson in his diary was true to the life Lor is the most purely classical of English writers not merely his themes but his whole way of thinking was Pagan and antique he composed indifferently in English or Latin preferring the latter

If anything in obedience to his Instinct for compression and exclusiveness thus portions of his narrative poem gabir 1798 were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin version gius to the English edition in like manner his helenic 1847 were mainly translations from his Latin idilia Heroica written years

Before the helenic clearness and Repose which were absent from his life Landor sought in his art his poems in their restraint their objectivity their aloofness from Modern feeling have something chill and artificial the verse of poets like Byron and woodsworth is alive the blood runs in it but Lor’s

Polished clean cut intaglios have been well described as written in Marble he was a master of fine and solid Pros his Pericles and aspasia consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian demagogue the hatira aspasia her friend Cleon of midus anaxagoras the philos philosopher and pericles’s nephew

Alates in this masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens at its period of highest refinement is brought before the reader with singular vividness and he is made to breathe an atmosphere of high bred Grace delicate wit and thoughtful sentiment expressed in English of attic Choice the imaginary conversations 1824

To 1846 were platonic dialogues between a great variety of historical characters but between for example Dante and Beatrice Washington and Franklin Queen Elizabeth and Cil xenophon and Cyrus the younger bonapart and the president of the Senate landor’s writings have never been popular they address an aristocracy of Scholars and Byron whom Lander

Disliked and considered vulgar sneered at the latter as a writer who cultivated much private Renown in the shape of Latin verses he said of himself that he never contended with a contemporary but walked alone on the Far Eastern Uplands meditating and remembering a schoolmate of colid at Christ’s hospital and his friend and

Correspondent through life was Charles Lamb one of the most Charming of English essayists he was an old Bachelor who lived alone with his sister Mary a lovable and intellectual woman but subject to recurring attacks of Madness lamb was a notched and cropped scrier a

Voter of the desk a clerk that is in the employ of the East India Company he was of antiquarian tastes an Ardent playgoer a lover of wi and of the London streets and these tastes are reflected in his essays of Ilia contributed to the London magazine and reprinted in book form in

1823 from his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old humorists as Burton and Fuller his own style emed A peculiar quaintness and pungency his specimens of English dramatic poets 1808 is admirable for its critical Insight in 1802 he paid a visit to karid at Keswick in the Lake Country but he

Felt or affected a Whimsical horror of the mountains and said Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in among the best of his essays are dream children poor relations the artificial comedy of the last century old China roast Pig a defense of Chimney Sweeps a

Complaint of the decay of beggars in the metropolis and the old ventures of the inner Temple the Romantic Movement preluded by gray Collins Chatterton mcferson and others culminated in Walter Scott 1771 to 1832 his passion for the medieval was first excited by reading Percy’s relics

When he was a boy and in one of his school themes he maintained that arosto was a greater poet than Homer he began early to collect manuscript ballads suits of armor pieces of old plate border horns and similar relics he learned Italian in order to read the romancers arosto tasso Puli and

Bardo preferring them to Dante he studied Gothic architecture heraldry and the Art of fortification and made drawings of famous ruins and battlefields in particular he read eagerly everything that he could lay hands on relating to the history Legends and Antiquities of the Scottish border the veil of Tweed tevet Dale rric Forest

And the Yaro of all which land he became the laurate as Burns had been of Aire in the west country Scott like woodsworth was an outdoor poet he spent much time in the saddle and was fond of horses dogs hunting and salmon fishing he had a Keen

Eye for the beauties of natural scenery though more especially he admits when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers piety or Splendor he had the historic imagination and in creating the historical novel he was the first to throw a poetic glamour over European annals in 1803 woodsworth visited Scott

At lasswade near Edinburgh and Scott afterward returned the visit at Grassmere where birdsworth noted that his guest was full of anecdote and a verse from disquisition the Englishman was a moralist and much given to disquisition while the Scotchman was above all things a Rec contur and perhaps on the whole

The foremost of British storytellers Scott’s tourism too was of a different Stripe from wordsworth’s being rather the result of sentiment and Imagination than of philosophy and reflection his mind struck deep root in the past his local attachments and family Pride were intense Abbotts was his darling and the expenses of this

Domain and of the baronial hospitality which he there extended to all comers were among the causes of his bankruptsy the enormous toll which he exacted of himself to pay off the debt of £17,000 contracted by the failure of his Publishers cost him his life it is said

That he was more gratified when the prince Regent created him a baronet in 1820 than by all the public recognition that he acquired as the author of the Waverly novels Scott was attracted by the Romantic side of German literature his first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Berger’s wild ballad

Leonora he followed this up with versions of the same poets V deod of Good’s violent drama of feudal life gz van bikin and with other translations from the German of a similar class on his horseback trips through the Border where he studied the Primitive manners of the Liddell people and took

Down old ballad from the recitation of ancient Dames and cottagers he amassed the materials for his minstral of the Scottish border 1802 but the first of his original poems was the lay of the last Minstrel published in 1805 and followed in quick succession by marmian the Lady of the

Lake rby the lord of the Isles and a volume of ballads and lyrical pieces all issued during the years 1806 to 1814 the popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and widespread nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries the reader was hurried

Along through scenes of Rapid action whose effect was heightened by wild Landscapes and picturesque manners the pleasure was a passive one there was no deep thinking to perplex no subtler Beauties to pause on the feelings were stirred pleasantly but not deeply the effect was on the surface the spell

Employed was novelty or at most wonder and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story carile said that Scott’s genius was in extenso rather than in intenso and that its great praise was its healthiness this is true of his verse but not altogether so of his Pros which

Exhibits deeper qualities some of Scott’s most perfect poems too are his shorter ballads like jock a hazeldine and proud Maisy is in the woods which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical Tales From 1814 to 183 1 Scott wrote and published the Waverly novels some 30 in

Number if we consider the amount of work done the speed with which it was done and the general average of Excellence maintained perhaps the most marvelous literary feed on record the series was issued anonymously and takes its name from the first number Waverly or t 60 years since this was founded upon the

Rising of Clans in 1745 in support of the young Pretender Charles Edward Stewart and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which lay just across their threshold the Scottish Highlands the Waverly novels remain as a whole unequaled as historical fiction although here and there a single novel

Like George Elliot’s ramola or thar’s Henry Esmond or kingsley’s HIPAA may have attained a place beside the best of them they were a novelty when they appeared English Pros fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding in Goldsmith there were truthful though rather tamed delineations of provincial life like

Jane Austin’s sense insensibility 1811 and Pride and Prejudice 1813 or Maria edgeworth’s popular Tales 1804 on the other hand there were Gothic romances like the monk of Matthew Gregory Lewis to whose Tales of Wonder some of Scott’s translations from the German had been contributed or like Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of

Udalo the great original of this school of fiction was Horus walpole’s castle of Otranto 1765 an absurd tale of secret trap doors Subterranean vaults apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets pictures that descended from their frames and Hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families Scott used the Machinery of

Romance but he was not merely a romancer or a historical novelist even and it is not as carile implies the buff belts and jerkens which principally interest Us in his Heroes ivanho and Kennelworth and the Talisman are indeed romances pure and simple and very good romances at that

But in novels such as Rob Roy the antiquary the heart of Midlothian and the Bride of lam more Scott drew from contemporary life and from his intimate knowledge of scotch character the story is there with its entanglement of plot and its exciting Adventures but there are also as truly as in Shakespeare

Though not to the same degree the observation of Life the knowledge of men the power of dramatic creation no writer awakens in his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott the brave honest kindly gentleman the noblest figure among the literary men of his generation another Scotch poet was Thomas Campell

Whose pleasures of Hope 1799 was written in Pope’s couplet and in the stilt addiction of the 18th century Gertrude of Wyoming 1809 a long narrative poem in spencerian stanza is untrue to the scenery and life in Pennsylvania where the scene is laid but Campell turned his rhetorical Manner and his clanking

Marshal verse to fine advantage in such pieces as hoen Lindon ye Mariners of England and the battle of the Baltic these have the true lyric fire and rank among the best English war songs when Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry he answered Byron bet

Me George Gordon Byron 1788 to 1824 was a young man of 24 when on his return from a two-ear sauntering through Portugal Spain Albania Greece and the Levant he published in the first two kantos of child Herald 1812 a sort of poetic itinerary of his experiences and

Impressions the poem took rather to its author’s surprise who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous child Herald opened a new field to poetry the romance of travel the picturesque aspects of foreign scenery manners and costumes it is instructive of the difference between the two ages in

Poetic sensibility to such things to compare Byron’s glowing imagery with Addison’s tame letter from Italy written a century before child Herald was followed by a series of metrical Tales the J the Bride of abidos the Corsair Lara the siege of Corinth parisina and prisoner of Shion all written in the Years 1813 to

1816 these poems at once took the place of Scots in popular interest dazzling a public that had begun to weary of chivalry romances with pictures of Eastern life with incidents as exciting as Scots descriptions as highly colored and a much greater intensity of passion so far as they depended for

Their interest upon the novelty of their accessories the effect was a temporary one sagos devans bulls gulistan zikas and other Oriental properties deluged English poetry for a time and then subsided even as the tide of moss Troopers Sorcerers Hermits and feudal castles had already had its rise and

Fall but there was a deeper reason for the impression made by Byron’s poetry upon his contemporaries he laid his finger right on the sore spot in Modern Life he had the disease with which the time was sick the world weariness the desperation which proceeded from Passion incapable of being converted into action

We find this tone in much of the literature which followed the failure of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars from the irritations of that period the disappointment of High Hopes from the future of the race the growing religious disbelief and the Revolt of democracy and free thought against

Conservative reaction sprang what SOI called The Satanic school which spoke its loudest word in Byron Titanic is the better word for the rebellon was not against God but Jupiter that is against the state church and Society of Byron’s day against George iiii the Tory cabinet of Lord Castle Ray

The Duke of Wellington the bench of Bishops London gossip the British constitution and British C in these poems of Byron and in his dramatic experiments Manfred and Cain there is a single figure the figure of Byron under various masks and one pervading mood a restless and sardonic

Gloom a weariness of life a love of solitude a Melancholy exaltation in the presence of the Wilderness and the Sea Byron’s hero is always represented as a man originally Noble whom some great Wrong by others or some mysterious crime of his own has blasted and embittered

And who carries about the world a seared heart and a somber brow Herold who may stand as a type of all his Heroes has run through sin’s Labyrinth and feeling the fullness of satiety is drawn abroad to roam the wandering Exile of his own dark mind

The loss of a capacity for Pure unjaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron’s lament no more no more oh never more on me the freshness of the heart shall fall like Dew and again oh could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been or weep as I could

Once have wept or many a vanished seen as Springs in deserts found seem sweet all brackish though they be so midst the withered waste of life those tears would flow to me this mood was sincere in Byron but by cultivating it and posing too long in one attitude he became self-conscious

And Theatrical and much of his serious poetry had a false ring his example infected the minor poetry of the time and it was quite natural that th who represented a generation that had a very different ideal of the heroic should be provoked into describing Byron as a big sulky

Dandy Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament to be the spokesman of this Fierce discontent he inherited from his mother a hoty and violent temper and propagate Tendencies from his father he was through life a spoiled child whose main characteristic was willfulness he liked to shock people by exaggerating

His wickedness or by perversely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute but he had traits of bravery and generosity women loved him and he made strong friends there was a careless charm about him which fascinated Natures as unlike each other as Shelly and Scott by the death of the fifth Lord Byron

Without issue Byron came into a title and Estates at the age of 10 th a liberal in politics he had aristocratic feelings and was vain of his rank as he was of his Beauty he was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College Cambridge where he was idle and dissipated but did

A great deal of miscellaneous reading he took some of his Cambridge set hobhouse Matthews and others to newad Abbey his ancestral seat where they filled the ancient Cloisters with eccentric orgies Byron was strikingly handsome his face had a spiritual paleness and a classic regularity and his dark hair curled closely to his

Head a deformity in one of his feet was a mortification to him though it did not greatly impair his activity and he prided himself on his powers as a swimmer in 1815 when at the height of his literary and social EA in London he married in February of the following

Year he was separated from Lady Byron and left England forever pursued by the execrations of outraged respectability in this chorus of abuse there was mingled a share of K but Byron got on the whole what he deserved from Switzerland where he spent a summer by llama with the shellies from

Venice Rena Pisa and Rome scandalous reports of his intrigues and his wild debaucheries were wafted back to England and with these came poem after poem full of burning genius Pride scorn and anguish and all Hing Defiance at English public opinion the third and fourth kantos of child Herald 1816 to 1818 were

A great Advance upon the first two and contain the best of Byron’s serious poetry he has written his name all over the continent of Europe and on a 100 memorable spots has made the scenery his own on the field of waterl on the castle CAG of drachenfels by the blue rushing

Of the arrowy rone in Venice on the bridge of size in the Coliseum at Rome Rome and among the Isles of Greece the tourist is compelled to see with Byron’s eyes and under the associations of his pilgrimage in his later poems such as beo 1818 and Don Juan 1819 to 1823 he

Passed into his second manner a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon the somewhat stagy Gloom of his early poetry mephistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan Don Juan though morally the worst is intellectually the most vital and represent of Byron’s poems it takes up into itself most fully the life of the

Time exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic alterations of Byron’s mood and the prodigal resources of wit passion and understanding which rather than imagination were his prominent qualities as a poet the hero a graceless Amorous Stripling goes wandering from Spain to the Greek Islands in Constantinople then to St Petersburg and finally to England

Everywhere his seductions are successful and by Byron uses him as a means of exposing the weakness of the human heart and the rottenness of society in all countries in 1823 breaking away from his life of self-indulgence in Italy Byron threw himself into the cause of Grecian Liberty which he had sung so gloriously

In the Isles of Greece he died at mongi in the following year of a fever contracted by exposure and overwork Byron was a great poet but not a great literary artist he wrote negligently and with the ease of assured strength his mind Gathering heat as it moved and pouring itself forth in

Reckless profusion his work is diffuse and imperfect much of it is melodrama or speechmaking rather than true poetry but on the other hand much very much of it is unexcelled as the direct strong sincere utterance of personal feeling such is the quality of his best lyrics like when we two parted the elegy

On theza stanas to Augusta she walks in Beauty and of innumerable passages lyrical and descriptive in his longer poems he had not the wisdom of woodsworth nor the rich and subtle imagination of kerid Shelly and Keats when they were at their best but he had greater body and motive Force than any

Of them he is the strongest personality among the English poets since Milton though his strength was wasted by want of restraint and self-culture in Milton the passion was there but it was held in check by the will and the artistic conscience made subordinate a good good ends ripened by long reflection and

Finally uttered in forms of perfect and harmonious Beauty Byron’s love of nature was quite different in kind from wordsworth’s of all English poets he has sung most lyrically of that National theme the sea as witness among many other passages the famous apostrophe to the ocean which closes child Herald and the opening of

The third Kanto in the same poem once more upon the waters Etc he had a passion for night and storm because they made him forget himself most glorious Knight thou W not sent for slumber let me be a sharer in thy Fierce and far Delight a portion of the Tempest and of

Thee Byron’s literary executive and biographer was the Irish poet Thomas Moore a born songwriter whose Irish Melodies set to Old native Hees are like Burns’s genuine spontaneous singing and run naturally to music songs such as the meeting of the waters the harp of Tara those evening Bells the light of other

Days Arab’s daughters and the last Rose of Summer were and still are popular favorites Moore’s Oriental romance la la ruk 1817 is overladen with ornament and with a sugary sentiment that clogs the pallet he had the quick Irish wit sensibility rather than passion and fancy rather than imagination Byron’s friend Percy Bish

Shelli 1792 to 1822 was also in fiery revolt against all conventions and institutions though his Revolt proceeded not as in Byron’s case from the turbulence of passions which bro no restraint but rather from an intellectual impatience of any kind of control he was not like Byron a sensual

Man but temperate and chaste he was indeed in his life and in his poetry as nearly a disembodied Spirit as a human creature can be the German poet H said that Liberty was the religion of this century and of this religion shell was a worshipper his Rebellion against

Authority began early he refused to at eaten and was expelled from Oxford for publishing a tract on the necessity of atheism at 19 he ran away with Harriet Westbrook and was married to her in Scotland 3 years later he deserted her for Mary Godwin with whom he eloped to

Switzerland two years after this his first wife drowned herself in the serpentine and Shelly was then formerly wedded to marry Godwin all this is rather startling in the bare statement of it yet it is not inconsistent with the many testimonies that exist to shelle’s singular Purity and beauty of

Character testimonies borne out by the evidence of his own writings impulse with him took the place of conscience moral law accompanied by the sanction of power and imposed by outside Authority he rejected as a form of tyranny his nature lacked robustness and ballast Byron who was at bottom intensely practical said that Shell’s

Philosophy was too spiritual and romantic Haslet himself a radical wrote of shell he has a fire in his eye a fever in his blood a maggot in his brain a hectic flutter in his speech which Mark out the philosophic fanatic he his sanguin complexioned and shrill vo it

Was perhaps with some recollection of this last mentioned trait of shell the man that Carlile wrote of shell the poet that the sound of him was shrieky and that he had filled the Earth with an inarticulate wailing his career as a poet began characteristically enough with the

Publication while at Oxford of a volume of political iCal Rhymes entitled Margaret Nicholson’s remains Margaret Nicholson being the crazy woman who tried to stab George III his boyish poem Queen mahab was published in 1813 alaster in 1816 and the Revolt of Islam his longest in 1818 all before he was

21 these were filled with Splendid though unsubstantial imagery but they were abstract and subject and had the faults of incoherence and formlessness which make Shell’s longer poems wearisome and confusing they sought to embody his social Creed of perfectionism as well as a certain vague pantheistic system of belief in a

Spirit of love in nature and man whose presence is a constant source of obscurity in shelle’s verse in 1818 he went to Italy where the last four years of his life were passed and where under the influences of Italian art and poetry his writing became deeper and

Stronger he was fond of yachting and spent much of his time upon the Mediterranean in the summer of of 1822 his boat was swamped in a Squall off the Gulf of spia and shelle’s drowned body was washed ashore and burned in the presence of Byron and Lee Hunt the ashes

Were inomed in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome with the Epitaph core cordium shelle’s best and maturest work nearly all of which was done in Italy includes his tragedy the sensey 1819 and his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound 1821 the first of these has a unity and a definit of Contour unusual with shell

And is with the exception of some of Robert Browning’s the best English tragedy since utway Prometheus represented to shelle’s mind the human Spirit fighting against Divine oppression and in his portrayal of this figure he kept in mind not only the Prometheus of escalus but the Satan of Paradise Lost indeed in this poem

Shel came nearer to the sublime than any English poet since Milton yet it is in lyrical rather than in dramatic quality that Prometheus Unbound is great if Shelly be not as his latest editor Mr Foreman claims him to be the foremost of English lyrical poets he is at least the

Most lyrical of them he had in a supreme degree the lyric cry his vibrant nature trembled to Every Breath of emotion and his nerves craved ever newer shocks to pant to quiver to Thrill to grow faint in the spasm of intense sensation the feminine cast observable

In shelle’s portrait is born out by this tremulous sensibility in his verse it is curious how often he uses the metaphor of wings of the winged Spirit soaring like his Skylark till lost in music Rapture light and then falling back to Earth three successive moods longing ecstasy and the revulsion of Despair are

Expressed in many of his lyrics As in the hymn to the spirit of nature in pereus in the Ode to a Skylark and in the lines to an Indian Heir Edgar Po’s favorite his passionate desire to lose himself in nature to become one with that Spirit of

Love and beauty in the universe which was to him in place of God is expressed in the Ode to the West Wind his most perfect poem make me thy liar even as the forest is what if my leaves are falling like its own the tumult of thy Mighty

Harmonies will take from both a deep autumnal tone sweet though in sadness be thou Spirit Fierce my spirit be thou me impetuous one in the lyrical pieces already mentioned together with adonias the lines written in the ugan Hills epicyon stands as written in dejection near Naples a dream of the unknown and many

Others shelle’s lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and more faultless art than Byron’s ever attained though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron in Shell’s longer poems intoxicated with the music of his own singing he abandons himself wholly to the guidance of his imagination and the

Verse seems to go on of itself like the enchanted boat in alastor with no one at the helm Vision succeeds Vision in glorious but bewildering profusion ideal Landscapes and cities of cloud pinnacled dim in the intense inan these poems are like the waterfalls in the yede which tumbling from a height of several

Thousand feet are shattered into foam by the air and waved about over the valley very beautiful is this descending spray and the rainbow dwells in its bosom but there is no longer any stream nothing but an iridescent Mist the word ethereal best expresses the quality of Shell’s

Genius his poetry is full of atmospheric effects of the tricks which light plays with the fluid elements of water and air of stars clouds rain Dew Mist Frost wind the Foams of the sea the phases of the moon the green Shadows of waves the shapes of flames the Golden Light in of

The Setting Sun nature in Shell wants homeliness and relief while poets like woodsworth and burns l in an ideal light upon the rough fields of Earth shell escapes into a Moonlight colored Realm Of Shadows and dreams among whose abstractions the heart turns cold one bit of woodsworth mountain Turf is worth them

All by the death of John Keat 1796 to 1821 whose elegy shell sang in adanas English poetry suffered an irreparable loss his emion 1818 though disfigured by mckishen promise its fault were those of Youth The Faults of exuberance and of a tremulous sensibility which time corrects Hyperion 1820 promised to be

His Masterpiece but he left it unfinished a Titanic torso because as he said there were too many miltonic inversions in it the subject was the displacement by febus Apollo of the ancient sun god Hyperion the last of the Titans who retained his Dominion it was a theme of

Great capabilities and the poem was begun by Keats with a strength of conception which leads to the belief that here was once more a really epic genius had fate suffered it to mature the fragment as it stands that Inlet to severe magnificence proves how rapidly kei’s diction was clarifying he

Had learned to string up his looser cords there is nothing modlin in Hyperion all there is in whole tones and in the grand manner as Sublime as escalus said Byron with the grave antique Simplicity and something of modern sweetness interfused Keith’s father was a groom in a London Livery stable the poet was

Apprenticed at 15 to a surgeon at school he had studied Latin but not Greek he who of all English poets had the most purely helenic Spirit made acquaintance with Greek literature and art only through the medium of classical dictionaries translations and popular mythologies and later through the marbles and casts in the British

Museum his friend the artist Hayden lent him a copy of Chapman’s Homer and the impression that it made upon him he recorded in his sonnet on first looking into Chapman’s Homer other poems of the same inspiration are his three sonnets to Homer on seeing the Elgen marbles on a

Picture of Leander lamia and the Beautiful owed on a Grecian ear but kei’s art was retrospective and eclectic the blossom of a double root and golden tonged romance with Serene loot had her part in him as well as the classics in his 17th year he had read

The fairy queen and from Spencer he went on to a study of choser Shakespeare and Milton then he took a Italian and read arosto the influence of these studies is seen in his poem Isabella or the pot of Basil taken from a story of picachio in his wild ballad La belam Sam

Meri and in his love Tale the eve of St Agnes with its wealth of medieval adornment in the Ode to Autumn and Ode to a Nightingale the helenic choiceness is found touched with the warmer Hughes of romance there is something deeply tragic in the short story of Kat’s life the

Seeds of consumption were in him he felt the stirrings of a potent genius but knew that he could not wait for it to unfold but Must Die before high piled books in carry hold like Rich Garners the full ripened grain his disease was aggravated possibly by the stupid brutality with

Which the reviewers had treated and demion and certainly by the Hopeless love which devoured him the very thing which I want to live most for he wrote will be a great occasion of my death if I had any chance of recovery this passion would kill me in the Autumn of 1820 his disease

Gaining a pace he went on a sailing vessel to it accompanied by a single friend a young artist named sever the change was of no avail and he died at Rome a few weeks after in his 26th year Keats was above all things the artist with that love of the beautiful

And that instinct for its reproduction which are the artists divest gifts he cared little about the politics and philosophy of his day and he did not make his poetry the vehicle of ideas it was sensuous poetry The Poetry of Youth and gladness but if he had lived and if

With wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of life he had attained to wordsworth’s spiritual insight and to Byron’s power of passion and understanding he would have become a greater poet than either for he had a style a natural magic which only needed the chastening touch of a finer culture

To make it Superior to anything in Modern English poetry and to force us back to Milton or Shakespeare for a comparison his Tombstone not far from Shell’s Bears the inscription of his own own choosing here lies one whose name was writ in water but it would be within the limits

Of Truth to say that it is written in large characters on most of our contemporary poetry Wordsworth says LEL has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets Keats their forms and he has influenced these out of all proportion to the amount which he left or to his intellectual range by

Virtue of the Exquisite quality of his technique end of part one chapter 7