Chapter XVII: Part 17

The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks called _rhythmus_, the Latins _numerus_, and we _melody_ or _measure_. But in our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on the poet's ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music, slow or quick, long or short, which form the quantities or the time of the measured feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble languages of Greece and Rome. The artificial movements in the hexameter were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and, denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the genius of the native idiom.

Several of our scholars, invested by classical authority, and carrying their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by the melody of emotion, as to a mechanical and severe scansion. To this Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician--

Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just _note_ and _accent_, not to scan
_With Midas' ears, committing short and long_.

The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from "dark forgetfulness" when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his "Fairy Queen" took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. STANYHURST has left a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic GABRIEL HARVEY had espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical TOM NASH, who scourged with searching humour. "The Hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins."

A treatise on "the New Poetry," or "the Reformed Verse," for it assumed this distinction, was expressly composed by WILLIAM WEBBE, recommendatory of this "Reformation of our English verse."[4] Some years after Dr. THOMAS CAMPION, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his rhymes, seating himself in the critic's chair, renewed the exotic system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of English verse, he denounces "the vulgar and inartificial custom of RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise of English poetry."[5] He calls it "the childish titillation of rime."

We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however, he was known in his days as "SWEET MASTER CAMPION," and his title would not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical "Observations," he has prefixed a poem in what he calls "Licentiate Iambicks," which is our blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book, consisting only of nearly five leaves:--

Alas, poor book, I rue
Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings;
Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.

The poet DANIEL replied by his "Defence of Rime," an elaborate and elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the anti-rhymers.

It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the contest solely turned on their genius.

A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own spontaneous emotions.

Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere "Gothic barbarisms." Had the practice of the classical writers become a custom, we should now be "committing long and short," and we should have missed the discovery of the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins could never have imagined the existence.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical
superstition, see _Quarterly Review_, August, 1834.

The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The
people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their
rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial
construction of verses regulated by _quantity_, and not by the latent
delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible.

[2] Quadrio, "Storia e raggione d'ogni Poesia," i. 606.

[3] Pasquier, "Les Recherches de la France," p. 624, fo. 1533.

[4] "A Discourse of English Poetrie; together with the Author's
Judgment touching the Reformation of our English Verse," by WILLIAM
WEBBE, graduate, 1586, 4to.

[5] "Observations on the Art of English Poesie, by THOMAS CAMPION,
wherein is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the
English tongue will receive eight several kinds of numbers proper to
itself, which are all in this Book set forth, and were never before
this time by any man attempted," 1602.

ORIGIN OF RHYME.

Contending theories long divided the learned world. One party asserted that the use of Rhyme was introduced by the Saracenic conquerors of Spain and of Sicily, for they had ascertained that the Arabian poets rhymed; the other, who had traced Rhyme to a northern source among the Scandinavian bards, insisted that Rhyme had a Gothic origin; and as Rhyme was generally used among the monks in the eighth century, they imagined that in the decline of ancient literature the dexterous monks had borrowed the jingle for their church hymns, to win the ear of their Gothic lords; both parties alike concurred in condemning Rhyme as a puerile invention and a barbarous ornament, and of a comparatively modern invention.

The opinions of the learned are transmitted, till by length of time they are accepted as facts; and in this state was Rhyme considered till our own days. Warton, in the course of his researches in the history of our poetry, was struck at the inaccuracy of one of these statements; for he had found that rhymed verse, both Latin and vernacular, had been practised much earlier than the period usually assigned. But Warton, though he thus far corrected the misstatements of his predecessors, advanced no further. No one, indeed, as yet had pursued this intricate subject on the most direct principle of investigation; conjecture had freely supplied what prevalent opinion had already sanctioned; and we were long familiarised to the opprobrious epithet of "Monkish Rhymes." The subject was not only obscure, but apparently trivial; for Warton dismisses an incidental allusion to the origin of Rhyme by an apology for touching on it. "Enough," he exclaims, in his impatience, "has been said on a subject of so little importance;"[1] and it is curious to observe, that the same vexatious exclamation occurred to a French literary antiquary. "We must not believe," said Lenglet du Fresnoy, "that we began to rhyme in France about 1250, as Petrarch pretends. The romance of Alexander existed before, and it is not probable that the first essay of our versification was a great poem. Abelard composed love-songs in the preceding century. I believe Rhyme was still more ancient; and it is useless to torment ourselves to discover from whom we learned to rhyme. As we always had poets in our nation, so we have also had Rhyme."[2] Thus two great poetical antiquaries in England and France had been baffled in their researches, and came to the same mortifying conclusion. They were little aware how an inquiry after the origin of Rhyme could not be decided by chronology.

The origin of Rhyme was an inquiry which, however unimportant Warton in his despair might consider it, had, though inconclusively treated, often engaged the earnest inquiries of the learned in Italy and in Spain, in Germany and in France. It is remarkable that all the parties were equally perplexed in their researches, and baffled in their conclusions. Each inquirer seemed to trace the use of Rhyme by his own people to a foreign source, for with no one it appeared of native growth. The Spaniard Juan de la Enzina, one of the fathers of the Spanish drama, and who composed an "Art of Poetry," (_Arte de Trovar_, as they expressively term the art of invention,) fancied that Rhyme had passed over into Spain from Italy, though in the land of Redondillas the guitar seemed attuned to the chant of their Moorish masters; but in Italy Petrarch, at the opening of his epistles, declares that they had drawn their use of Rhyme from Sicily; and the Sicilians had settled that they had received it from the Provencals; while those roving children of fancy were confident that they had been taught their artless chimes by their former masters, the Arabians! Among the Germans it was strenuously maintained that this modern adjunct to poetry derived its origin and use from the Northern Scalds. Fauchet, the old Gaulish antiquary, was startled to find that Rhyme had been practised by the primitive Hebrews!

Fauchet, struck by discovering the use of Rhyme among this ancient people, and finding it practised by the monks in their masses in the eighth century, suggested for its modern prevalence two very dissimilar causes. With an equal devotional respect for "the people of God," and for the monks, whom he considered as sacred, he concluded that "possibly some pious Christian by the use of Rhyme designed to imitate the holy people;" but at the same time holding, with the learned, Rhyme to be a degenerate deviation from the classical metres of antiquity, he insinuates, "or perchance some vile poetaster, to eke out his deficient genius, amused the ear by terminating his lines with these ending unisons." He had further discovered that the Greek critics had, among the figures of their rhetoric, mentioned the _homoioteleuton_, or consonance. The abundance of his knowledge contradicted every system which the perplexed literary antiquary could propose; and impatiently he concludes,--"Rhyme has come to us from some part of the world, or nation, whoever it may be; for I confess I know not where to seek, nor what to conclude. It was current among the people and the languages which have arisen since the ruin of the Roman empire."[3]

Since the days of ancient Fauchet, no subsequent investigators, even such great recent literary historians as Warton, Quadrio, Crescembini and Gray, Tiraboschi, Sismondi and Ginguene, have extricated us by their opposite theories from these uncertain opinions. It was reserved for the happy diligence of the learned Sharon Turner to explore into this abyss of darkness.[4] To defend the antiquity of the Rhyming Welsh bards, he pursued his researches through all languages, and demonstrated its early existence in all. His researches enable us to advance one more step, and to effect an important result, which has always baffled the investigators of these curious topics.

Rhyming poems are found not only in the Hebrew but in the Sanscrit, in the Bedas, and in the Chinese poetry,[5] as among the nations of Europe. It was not unknown to the Greeks, since they have named it as a rhetorical ornament; and it appears to have been practised by the Romans, not always from an accidental occurrence, but of deliberate choice.

To deduce the origin of rhyme from any particular people, or to fix it at any stated period, is a theory no longer tenable. The custom of rhyming has predominated in China, in Hindustan, in Ethiopia; it chimes in the Malay and Javanese poetry, as it did in ancient Judea: this consonance trills in the simple carol of the African women; its echoes resounded in the halls of the frozen North, in the kiosque of the Persian, and in the tent of the Arab, from time immemorial. RHYME must therefore be considered _as universal as poetry itself_.

Yet rhyme has been contemned as a "monkish jingle," or a "Gothic barbarism;" but we see it was not peculiar to the monks nor the Goths, since it was prevalent in the vernacular poetry of all other nations save the two ancient ones of Greece and Rome. Delighting the ear of the man as it did that of the child, and equally attractive in the most polished as in the rudest state of society, rhyme could not have obtained this universality had not this concord of returning sounds a foundation in the human organization influencing the mind. We might as well inquire the origin of dancing as that of rhyming; the rudest society as well as the most polished practised these arts at every era. And thus it has happened, as we have seen, that the origin of rhyme was everywhere sought for and everywhere found.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Warton's "Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning
into England."

[2] Lenglet du Fresnoy--Preface to his edition of the "Roman de la
Rose."

[3] Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet
"Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poesie Francoise Ryme et Romans
plus les Noms et Summaire des Oeuvres, de cxxvii. Poetes Francois,
vivant avant l'an MCCC.;" liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to.

[4] See "Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme," by Sharon
Turner, Esq.--_Archaeologia,_ vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged,
"On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle Ages."--_Hist. of
England_, iv. 386.

[5] The second book the Chinese children read is a collection
conveyed in _rhyming lines_.--_Davis on the Chinese._

RHYMING DICTIONARIES.

If our poets in rhyme dared to disclose one of the grand mysteries of their art, they would confess that, to find rhymes for their lines is a difficulty which, however overcome, after all has botched many a fine verse; the second line has often altered the original conception of the preceding one. The finest poems in the language, if critically examined, would show abundant evidence of this difficulty _not overcome_. This difficulty seems to have occurred to our earliest critics, for GASCOIGNE, in his "Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making Verse or Rhyme in English"--and WEBBE, in his "Discourse," repeats the precept--would initiate the young poet in the art of rhyme-finding: the simplicity of the critic equals the depth of his artifice.

"When you have one verse _well settled_ and _decently ordered_, which you may dispose at your pleasure to end it with _what word you will_; then whatsoever the word is, you may speedily run over the other words which are answerable thereunto (for more readiness through all the letters alphabetically),[1] whereof you may choose that which will _best fit the sense_ of your matter in that place; as, for example, if your last word end in book, you may straightway in your mind run them over thus--book, cook, crook, hook, look, nook, pook, &c. &c. Now it is _twenty to one but always one of these shall jump with your former word and matter in good sense_."

The poet in _rhyme_ has therefore in his favour "twenty to one" of a chance that his second line may "jump" with his former one. We were not aware that the odds were so favourable, even when we look over the finished poetry of Pope, who has written so much, or of Gray, who has written so little. Boileau tells us he always chose a rhyme for his second line before he wrote out his first, that by this means he might secure the integrity of the sense; and this he called "the difficult art of rhyming." These are mysteries which only confirm the hazard which rhymers incur; and, on the whole, though we do marvellously escape, the poet at every rhyming line still stands in peril.

This torture of rhyme-finding seems to have occasioned a general affliction among modern poets; and an unhappy substitute was early found in arranging collections of rhymes, and which subsequently led to a monstrous device. In Goujet's "Bibliotheque Francaise," vol. iii., will be found a catalogue of these rhyming dictionaries: the earliest of the French was published in 1572. Indeed, some of these French critics looked upon these rhyming dictionaries as part of the art of poetry, recommending pocket editions for those who in their walks were apt to poetise, as if finding a rhyme would prompt a thought.

Among these early attempts is an extravagant one by Paul Boyer. It is a kind of encyclopaedia, in which all the names are arranged by their terminations, so that it furnishes a dictionary of rhymes.

The demand for rhymes seems to have continued; for in 1660, D'Ablancourt Fremont published a _Dictionnaire_, which was enlarged by Richelet in 1667. It seems we were not idle in threading rhymes in our own country, for Poole, in 1657, in his "Parnassus," furnishes a collection of rhymes; and he has had his followers. But the perfect absurdity or curiosity of a rhyming lexicographer appears in one of Walker's Dictionaries of the English Language. As he was a skilful philologist, he has contrived to make it useful for orthography and pronunciation. He advances it as on a plan "not hitherto attempted;" and his volume on the whole, as Moreri observes of Boyer's, is a thing "_plaisant a considerer_."

A dictionary of rhymes is as miserable a contrivance to assist a verse as counting the syllables by the finger is to regulate the measure; in the case of rhyme it is sense which should regulate the verse, and in that of metre it is the ear alone which can give it melody.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Here is the first idea of "A Dictionary of Rhymes," which has
inspired so many unhappy bards.

THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE.

Among the arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an anonymous work.[1] The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first printed in 1589, we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic has often adroitly addressed "the most beautiful, or rather the beauty, of queens;" and to illustrate that figure which he terms "the gorgeous," has preserved for us some of her regal verses.

Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that "this book came into my hands with _its bare title without any author's name_." The author himself could not have been at all concerned in delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.

This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as "the unknown _Godfather_, that, this last year save one (1589), set forth a book called 'The Arte of English Poesie.'" About twelve years afterwards, Carew, in his "Survey of Cornwall," appears to have been the first who disclosed the writer's name as "Master Puttenham;" but this was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605, Camden only alludes to the writer as "the _gentleman_ who proves that poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first historiographers." Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his "Hypercritica," notices "this work (_as the fame is_) of one of Queen Elizabeth's pensioners, Puttenham." The qualifying parenthesis "as the fame is," leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.

Who was Puttenham? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by any contemporary. Even the baptismal name of this writer has been subject to contradiction.[2]

In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,[3] which our mature critic still deemed "pretty;" but, according to one of his rhetorical technical terms, "it holds too much of the _cachemphaton_ or _foule speech_, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense." Our author was a travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to have been connected with the _corps diplomatique_, for he had been present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we discover by coeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes:--"These and many such like disgustings we find in men's behaviour, and specially in the courtiers of foreign countries, _where in my youth I was brought up_, and very well observed their manner of life and conversation; for of _mine own country I have not made so great experience_."

This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author's history, for at eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by "Our Eclogue of Elpine." When he tells us that "he had not had so great experience of his own country as of others," we may be surprised, for no contemporary writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England, which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all betray a stranger's absence from home. But, what seems more extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions, critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own--to "our comedy" and to "our enterlude," and has frequent illustrations drawn from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous, and that no contemporary has ever mentioned the name of Puttenham. How are we to reconcile these discrepancies, and how account for these numberless vernacular compositions, with the condition of one who was "brought up abroad," and who had such "little experience of his own country?" We appear to read a work composed by different persons.

The same anomalous character is attached to the work as we have discovered concerning the writer.

This "Arte of English Poesie," which Warton observes "remained long as a rule of criticism," and still may be consulted for its comprehensive system, its variety of poetic topics, and its contemporary historical anecdotes, is the work of a scholar, and evidently of a courtier. His scholastic learning furnished the terms of his numerous figures of rhetoric, each of which is illustrated by examples drawn from English literature; but aware that this uncouth nomenclature might deter, as he says, "the sort of readers to whom I write, too scholastical for our MAKERS," as he classically calls our poets, "and more fit for clerks than for courtiers, for whose instruction this travail is taken," our logician was cast into the dilemma of inventing English descriptions for these Greek rhetorical figures. We had no English name--"the rule might be set down, but there was no convenient name to hold it in memory."

To familiarise the technical terms of rhetoric by substituting English descriptive ones, led to a ludicrous result. The Greek term of _histeron proteron_ was baptised the _preposterous_; these are words misplaced, or, as our writer calls it, "in English proverb, the cart before the horse," as one describing his landing on a strange coast said thus _preposterously_, that is, placing before what should follow--

When we had climb'd the cliff, and were ashore.

instead of

When we had come ashore, and climb'd the cliff.

The _hipallage_ he calls _the changeling_, when changing the place of words changes the sense; as in the phrase "come dine with me, and stay not," turned into "come stay with me, and dine not." This change of sense into nonsense he called "the changeling," in allusion to the nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and substitute an ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense! I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the wits of that day. _Ironia_, he calls the _dry-mock_; _sarcasmus_, the _bitter taunt_; the Greek term _asteismus_ he calls _the merry scoff_--it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock scornfully comes the _micterismus_, the _fleering frumpe_, as he who said to one to whom he gave no credit, "_No doubt, sir, of that!_" The _antiphrasis_, or the _broad flout_, when we deride by flat contradiction, antithetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a black woman, "In sooth ye are a fair one!" The _charientismus_ is _the privy nippe_, when you mock a man in a _sotto voce_; and the _hyperbole_, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latins _dementiens_, our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as "the over-reacher, or the loud liar." The rhetorical figures of our critic exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly, all which are ingeniously illustrated by fragments of our own literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity, though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however naturally, we are in fact violating, or illustrating, this heap of rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously our _fleering frumpes_, our _merry scoffs_, and our _privy nippes_, have been intelligible all our days.

In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining the poet, after the Greek, to be "a maker" or creator, drawing the verse and the matter from his native invention,--unlike the _translator_, who therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism. It happened, however, that in the year following that in which "The Art of Poetry" was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet, he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive "versifier" invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his "Art," by very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of "The Art" itself was a nullity! "All the receipts of poetry prescribed," proceeds the enraged translator of Ariosto, "I learn out of this very book, never breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is a _gift_ and not an _art_, because making himself and many others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it."

Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric? We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values "the courtly trifles," which he calls "pretty devices," among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of "geometrical figures in verse," his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in "parcels of his own poetry," obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable "triumphals," poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls "partheniades, or new year's gifts,"--bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court.

When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as "going like a minstrel's music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both, I wot not." And he exemplifies this lack of "good rime and good reason, or both," by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her infant:

Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother's own joy,
Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy;
For beauty, surpassing the azured sky,
I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.

Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are left without any more.

In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate poetical erudition, combined with such ineptitude of poetic taste, that I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious Art of English Poetry was ascribed to SIDNEY; and Wanley, in his catalogue of the Harley Library, assigns this volume to Spenser.[4] I lay no stress on the singular expression of Sir John Harrington, applied to the present writer, as "the unknown _godfather_," which seems to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at all have been connected with that treatise of "the English poets," which Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever claimed this work. Manuscripts, however, we may observe, strangely wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had long passed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of publication, and so partial was all literary communication.

One more mystery is involved in the authorship of this remarkable work: first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has furnished for us so many "parcels of his poetry," to exemplify "the art."

If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed and unowned.

I find it less difficult to imagine that some stray manuscript, possibly from the relics of SIDNEY, or perhaps the lost one of SPENSER, might have fallen into the hands of some courtly critic, or "the Gentleman Pensioner," who inlaid it with many of his own trivialities: the discrepancy in the ingenuity of the writing with the genius of the writer in this combination of learning and ineptitude would thus be accounted for; at present it may well provoke our scepticism.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes--the first
of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of
Ornament," 1589, 4to.

[2] Ames appears first to have called him _Webster_ Puttenham.
Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master
Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was
transformed into the remarkable Christian name of _Webster_. I cannot
otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct
reference to a manuscript, revealed it to be _George_; and probably
was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a manuscript work in the
Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of
Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic
antiquary, has distinguished our author as "Webster, _alias_ George."
All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course
of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated
1590, of a _George_ Puttenham; already persuaded that such a name
appertained to the author of the "Art of English Poetry," he ventured
to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could
draw from the nuncupative will of this _George_ Puttenham is, that he
"left all his goods, movable and immovable, moneys, and bonds," to
Mary Symes, a favourite female servant; but he infers that "he
probably was our author." Yet, at the same time, there turned up
another will of one _Richard_ Puttenham, "a prisoner in her Majesty's
Bench." _Richard_, therefore, may have as valid pretensions to "The
Arte of English Poesie," as _George_, and neither may be the author.
This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.

Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of
an elegant reprint of this "Arte of English Poesie." A modern reader
may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been
long locked up in the antiquary's closet.

[3] See page 157 of "The Arte of English Poesie."

[4] The following letter is an evidence of the uncertain accounts
respecting this author among the most knowing literary historians.
Here, too, we find that Webster, or George, or Richard, is changed
into Jo!--

"What authority Mr. Wood has for Jo. Puttenham's being the author of
the 'Art of English Poetry' I do not know. Mr. Wanley, in his
'Catalogue of the Harley Library,' says that _he had been told that
Edmund Spenser was the author of that book, which came out
anonymous_. But Sir John Harrington, in his preface to 'Orlando
Furioso,' gives so hard a censure of that book, that Spenser could
not possibly be the author."--"Letter from THOMAS BAKER to the Hon.
James West," printed in the "European Magazine," April, 1788.

THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT.

A single volume sent forth from the privacy of a retired student, by its silent influence may mark an epoch in the history of the human mind among a people.

Such a volume was "The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot," a singular work which may justly claim the honour in this country of opening that glorious career which is dear to humanity and fatal to imposture.

Witchcraft and magic, and some similar subjects, through a countless succession of ages, consigned the human intellect to darkness and to chains. In this country these conspiracies against mankind were made venerable by our laws and consecrated by erring piety. They were long the artifices of malignant factions, who found it mutually convenient to destroy each other by the condemnation of crimes which could never be either proved or disproved. The sorcerers and witches under the Church of Rome were usually the heretics; and our Henry the Eighth, who was a Protestant pope, transferred the grasp of power to the civil law, and an Act of Parliament of the Reformation made witchcraft felony. Dr. Bulleyn, a celebrated physician and a reformer, who lived through the gloomy reign of Philip and Mary, bitterly laments "that while so many blessed men are burned, witches should walk at large." When the Act fell into disuse, Elizabeth was reminded, by petitions from the laity and by preaching from the clergy, that "witches and sorcerers were wonderfully increasing, and that her Majesty's subjects pined away until death." Witchcraft was again confirmed to be felony.

The learned and others were fostering the traditions of the people about spirits, the incubus, and the succubus, the assemblies of witches, and the sabbaths of Satan. Some constructed their theories to explain the inexplicable; and too many, by torture, extorted their presumed facts and delusive confessions. The sage doated--the legal functionaries were only sanguinary executioners; and the merciful, with the kindest intentions, were practising every sort of cruelty, by what was termed trials to save the accused. The history of these dismal follies belongs even to a late period of the civilization of Christian Europe! An enlightened physician of Germany had raised his voice in defence of the victims who were suffering under the imputation of Sorcery;[1] not denying the Satanic potency, he maintained that the devil was very well able to execute his own malignant purposes without the aid of such miserable agents. It required a protracted century ere Balthaser Bekker's "World Bewitched" could deprive Satan himself of his personality, indeed of his very existence. But it was a subject to be tenderly touched; superstition was a sacred thing, and too often riveted with theology; and though the learned Wierus had thus guarded his system, to a distant day he encountered the polemical divines. One of his fiercest assailants was a layman, the learned Bodin, he who has composed so admirable a treatise on Government, now deeply plunged into the "Demonomanie des Sorciers." The volume of Wierus, he tells us, "made his hair stand on end." "Shall we," he cries, "credit a little physician" before all the philosophers of the world, and the laws of God which condemn sorcerers?

While Wierus and Bodin had been thus employed, an Englishman, Reginald Scot, in the serene retreat of a studious life, was silently labouring on the development of this great moral conquest over the prejudices of Europe. Reginald Scot, who passed his life in the occupation of his studies, seems to have concentrated them on this great subject, for he has left no other work, except an esteemed tract on the cultivation of the hop--the vine of his Kentish county. Although he took no degree at college, his erudition was not the less extensive, as appears by his critical knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek. But it was chiefly by his miscellaneous reading, where nothing seems to have escaped his insatiable curiosity on the extraordinary subjects which he ventured to scrutinise with such minute attention, that he was enabled to complete one of the most curious investigations of the age. Anthony Wood, in his peculiar style, tells us that "Scot gave himself up solely to _solid reading_, and to the perusal of _obscure authors_ that had by the generality of the learned been neglected." This is a curious description of the early state of our vernacular literature, and of those students who, watchful over the spirit of the times, sought a familiar acquaintance with the opinions of their contemporaries. All writers were condemned as "obscure" who stood out of the pale of classical antiquity; and plain Anthony, who rarely dipped into the writings of Greece and Rome, but was an incessant lover of the miscellaneous writers of modern date, distinguishes his favourites as "solid reading." In the days of Reginald Scot our scholars never ventured to quote other authority than some ancient; but the poets from Homer to Ovid, the historians from Tacitus to Valerius Maximus, and the essayists from Plutarch to Aulus Gellius, could not always supply arguments and knowledge for an age and on topics which had nothing in common with their own.

With more elevated views than Wierus, Scot denied the power of sorcerers, because it attributed to them an omnipotence which can only be the attribute of divine power. Our philosopher could publish only half the truth. "My question is not, as many fondly suppose, whether there be witches or not, but whether they can do such miraculous works as are imputed unto them." He thus adroitly eludes an argument which the public mind was not yet capable of comprehending. The "Discoverer" had to encounter a fierce host in shaking the predominant creed. The passions of mankind were enlisted against the zealous antagonist of an ancient European prejudice; the vital interests of priestly exorcists were at stake. To doubt of a supernatural agency seemed to some to be casting a suspicion over miracles and mysteries. The most ticklish point was the difficulty of explaining Scriptural phrases, which Reginald Scot denied related to witches, in the ordinary sense attached to these miserable women; the Hebrew term merely designating a female who practised the arts of "a poisoner," or "a cozener or cheat." The whole scene of the witch of Endor seems to have racked the "Discoverer's" invention through several chapters, to unveil the preparatory management of such incantations, by the ventriloquising Pythonissa, and her confederate, some lusty priest. All these Scot presumes to trace in the obscure and interrupted narrative of the Israelitish Macbeth, who, in his despair, hastened by night to listen to his approaching fate, which hardly required the gift of prophecy to predict.

Our "Discoverer" prepared his readers for a revolution in their opinions. It appears that in his day, notwithstanding some fairies still lurking in the bye-corners of our poets, the whole fairy creed had in fact passed away. He appeals to this native mythology, now utterly exploded, as an evidence of popular infatuation; and our philosopher observes that he cannot hope that the partial reader should look with impartial eyes on this book; it were labour lost to ask for this, for, he adds, "I should no more prevail therein than if _a hundred years since I should have entreated your predecessors_ to believe that Robin Goodfellow, that great but antient bull-beggar, had been but a cousening merchant, and no devil indeed." This was a philosophical parallelism; and the corollary pinched the present generation concerning their witches, they who were now holding their fathers dotards for their belief in fairies.

The volume abounds with many strange incidents, which its singular subject involved. The solitary witch of the homestead was not the poetic witch uttering her incantations at her mystic cauldron. Her homely feats are familiar, but the revelations of the impostures are not. "The devils and spirits," the powers of the kingdom of darkness, are more fantastic. These raw materials have been woven in the rich looms of Shakspeare and Goethe. Our author included in his volume a complete treatise of legerdemain, or the conjuring art. To convince the people that many acts may appear miraculous without the intervention of a miracle, he ingeniously initiated himself into the deceptious practices of the juggler; but he dreaded lest the spectators of his dexterity should depose against his own witchcraft, and "the Familiar," his confederate. Our seer, to save himself from fire or water, has not only minutely explained these "deceitful arts," but cautiously accompanied them by woodcuts of the magical instruments used on these occasions. At the time, these were surprising revelations. The sagacity of our author anticipated the fate of his work. It appears to have shaken the credulity of a very few reflecting magistrates; yet such scholars as Sir Thomas Smith, the great political writer, when he retired from public life, as a justice of peace, was active in punishing witches. But the book was denounced by the divines.

When Reginald Scot's work was translated into Dutch, we learn from an arch-enemy of philosophy, the intolerant Calvinistical polemic, Voetius, that "this book was an inexhaustible source, whence not a few learned and unlearned persons in the Netherlands have begun to doubt, and grow sceptics and libertines with regard to witchcraft. Our country is infected with libertines and half libertines, and they have proceeded to such a pitch of ignorance, that this set of new Sadducees laugh at all the operations and apparitions of the devils as phantoms and fables of old women, and timorous superstition." The work was more successful abroad than at home; and, indeed, how often have the benefactors of mankind experienced that the voice of foreigners is the voice of posterity! They decide without prepossessions.

The FIRST edition of the "Discoverie of Witchcraft," 1584, is of extreme rarity, the copies having been burned by the order of James, on his accession to the English throne, in compliance with the act of parliament of 1603, which ratified a belief in witchcraft throughout the three kingdoms; but the author had not survived to see that day. This awful prejudice broke out afresh under the fanatical government, and gave rise to an infamous class of men who were called "witch-finders." When a reward was publicly offered, there seemed to be no end in finding witches. It was probably this great evil which reminded the people of Scot, whose work was reprinted in 1651, but the public so eagerly required another edition, that it was again republished in 1665. The fact was, that justices, judges, and juries, had so little improved by the _second_ edition, that many had kept with great care their note-books of "Examinations of Witches," and were discovering "hellish knots of them." It was only in the preceding year that Sir Matthew Hale had left for execution two female victims, without even summing up the evidence, solely resting on the fact that "there were witches," for which assumption he appealed "to the Scriptures," and he added, to "the wisdom of all nations!" What is not less remarkable in this trial, the illustrious corrector of "vulgar errors," Sir Thomas Browne, in his medical character examining the accused person, who was liable to fainting fits, acknowledged that the fits were natural and common; but the philosopher was so prepossessed that the woman was a witch, that he pronounced against her, alleging this mystical explanation of "the subtleties of the devil," who had taken this opportunity of her natural fits to be "co-operating with her malice!" What a demonstration that superstition holds its mastery even over the philosophic intellect!

The popular prejudice was confirmed by narratives of witchcraft, by Joseph Glanvil, one of the early founders of the Royal Society; by the visionary learning of the platonic Dr. More; and by the theological dogmatism of Meric Casaubon. Dr. More was desirous that every parish should keep a register of all authentic histories of apparitions and witchcraft: and Glanvil was so staunch a believer, that he considered that the strong unbelief in some persons was an evidence of what they denied; for that so confident an opinion could not be held but by some kind of witchcraft and fascination in the senses. All these, and such as these, treat with extreme contempt and cover with obloquy "the Father of the modern Witch-advocates," "the Gallant of the Old Hags!" This was our Reginald Scot.

The most elaborate treatise on the subject was now sent forth by John Webster; "The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft," 1677, fo. He defends Scot and Wierus against Glanvil and Casaubon. He was a clergyman, and dares not agitate the question, _an sint_, whether there be witches or not; but _quomodo sint_, in what manner they act, and what the things are they do, or can perform. The state of the question is not simply the being of witches, or _de existencia_, but only _de modo existendi_. The dispute of their manner of existing necessarily supposes their existence. He has, however, detected many singular impostures, and the volume is full and curious.[2]

Glanvil and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus, or full evidence concerning Witches," 1668, a book so popular that I have never met with a very fair copy, introduced with plenary evidence a minute narrative of "the Demon of Tedworth," whose invisible drum beat every night for above a year, in the house of some reverend magistrate, who had evidently raised a spirit which he could not lay, and whose Puck-like pranks wofully deranged the whole unsuspicious family. This tale, confirmed by affidavits, but shaken by demurrers, was long an article of faith, but finished by furnishing the comedy of Addison's "Drummer." The controversy about witches, including that of ghosts, which were equally the incessant but volatile phantoms of their chase, now assumed a more serious aspect than ever. The illustrious Boyle, who had observed the unguarded heat with which it was pursued, vainly cautioned the parties, that even religion might suffer by weak arguments drawn from uncertain statements. Boyle had more reason to say this than one might suppose; for Dr. More, ever too vehement and too fanciful, had exclaimed in his unhappy conviction, "No bishop, no king! no spirit, no God!"[3]

Shadwell in his "Lancashire Witches," resolved to advance nothing without authority, accompanies that comedy with ample notes, drawn from the writings of witch-believers. His witches, therefore, are far beneath those of Shakspeare, for they do nothing but what we are told witches do; the whole system of witchery is here exhibited. In his remarkable preface, Shadwell tells us, that if he had not represented them as _real_ witches, "it would have been called atheistical by a prevailing party."

The belief in witchcraft was maintained chiefly by that fatal error which had connected the rejection of any supernatural agency in old women with religious scepticism; and it was fostered by the statutes, which with the lawyer admitted of no doubt. "We cannot doubt of the existence of witchcraft, seeing that our law ordains it to be punished by death," was the argument of Sir George Mackenzie, the great Scottish advocate; nor is it less sad to see such minds as that of the great Dr. Clarke, celebrated for his logical demonstrations, thus reasoning on witchcraft, astrology, and fortune-telling; "All things of this sort, whenever they have any reality in them, are evidently diabolical; and when they have no reality, they are cheats and lying impostures."[4] The great demonstrator thus confesses "the reality" of these chimeras! Another not less celebrated divine, Dr. Bentley, infers that "no English priest need affirm the existence of sorcery or witchcraft, since they now have a public law which they neither enacted nor procured, declaring these practices to be felony!"[5] Did the doctor know that churchmen have had no influence in creating that belief, or in enacting this statute?

The gravity of Blackstone seems strangely disturbed when as a lawyer he was compelled to acknowledge its existence. "It is a crime of which one knows not well what account to give." The commentator on the laws of England found no other resource than to turn to Addison, whose gentle sagacity could only discover that "_in general_, there has been such a thing as witchcraft, though one cannot give credit to any _particular_ modern instance of it." Not one of these writers had yet ventured to detect the hallucinations of self-credulity in the victims, and the crimes of remorseless men in their persecutors. The name and the volume of their own countryman had never reached them, who two centuries before had elucidated these chimeras.

After the statute against witchcraft had been repealed in England, we must not forget that an act of the Assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland confesses "as a great national sin, the act of the British Parliament abolishing the burning and hanging of witches."

The name of Reginald Scot does not appear in the "Biographia Britannica;" and it was only from a short notice by Bayle, that Dr. Birch, in his translation of the General Dictionary, was induced to draw up a life of our earliest philosopher. Such was the fate of this "English gentleman," as Bayle has described him; and the philosophical reader, in what is now before him, may detect the shifting shades of truth, till it settles in its real and enduring colour; the philosopher had demonstrated a truth which it required a century and a half for the world to comprehend.

That such courageous and generous tempers as that of REGINALD SCOT should fail themselves of being the spectators of that noble revolution in public opinion which was the ripening of their own solitary studies, is the mortifying tale of the benefactors of mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "De Prestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis," 1564.