Chapter XIV: History of Poetry From 1550 to 1600 (3)

|Relaxation of moral austerity.|

64. We may easily perceive in the literature of the later period of the queen, what our biographical knowledge confirms, that much of the austerity characteristic of her earlier years had vanished away. The course of time, the progress of vanity, the prevalent dislike, above all, of the Puritans, avowed enemies of gaiety, concurred to this change. The most distinguished courtiers, Raleigh, Essex, Blount, and we must add Sydney, were men of brilliant virtues, but not without license of morals; while many of the wits and poets, such as Nash, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, were notoriously of very dissolute lives.

|Serious poetry.|

65. The graver strains, however, of religion and philosophy were still heard in verse. The Soul’s Errand, printed anonymously in Davison’s Rhapsody, and ascribed by Ellis, probably without reason, to Silvester, is characterised by strength, condensation, and simplicity.[1212] And we might rank in a respectable place among these English poets, though I think he has been lately overrated, one whom the jealous law too prematurely deprived of life, Robert Southwell, executed as a seminary priest in 1591, under one of those persecuting statutes which even the traitorous restlessness of the English Jesuits cannot excuse. Southwell’s poetry wears a deep tinge of gloom, which seems to presage a catastrophe too usual to have been unexpected. It is, as may be supposed, almost wholly religious; the shorter pieces are the best.[1213]

[1212] Campbell reckons this, and I think justly, among the best pieces
of the Elizabethan age. Brydges gives it to Raleigh without
evidence, and we may add, without probability. It is found in
manuscripts, according to Mr. Campbell, of the date of 1593. Such
poems as this could only be written by a man who had seen and
thought much; while the ordinary Latin and Italian verses of this
age might be written by any one who had a knack of imitation and a
good ear.

[1213] I am not aware that Southwell has gained anything by a
republication of his entire poems in 1817. Headley and Ellis
had culled the best specimens. St. Peter’s Complaint, the longest
of his poems, is wordy and tedious; and in reading the volume I
found scarce anything of merit which I had not seen before.

|Poetry of Sydney.|

66. Astrophel and Stella, a series of amatory poems by Sir Philip Sydney, though written nearly ten years before, was published in 1591. These songs and sonnets recount the loves of Sydney and Lady Rich, sister of Lord Essex; and it is rather a singular circumstance that, in her own and her husband’s lifetime, this ardent courtship of a married woman should have been deemed fit for publication. Sydney’s passion seems indeed to have been unsuccessful, but far enough from being platonic.[1214] Astrophel and Stella is too much disfigured by conceits, but is in some places very beautiful; and it is strange that Chalmers, who reprinted Turberville and Warner, should have left Sydney out of his collection of British poets. A poem by the writer just mentioned, Warner, with the quaint title, Albion’s England, 1586, has at least the equivocal merit of great length. It is rather legendary than historical; some passages are pleasing, but it is not a work of genius, and the style, though natural, seldom rises above that of prose.

[1214] Godwin having several years since made some observations on
Sydney’s amour with Lady Rich, a circumstance which such
biographers as Dr. Zouch take good care to suppress, a gentleman
who published an edition of Sydney’s Defence of Poetry thought fit
to indulge in recriminating attacks on Godwin himself. It is
singular that men of sense and education should persist in fancying
that such arguments are likely to convince any dispassionate reader.

|Epithalamium of Spenser.|

67. Spenser’s Epithalamium on his own marriage, written perhaps in 1594, is of a far higher mood than anything we have named. It is a strain redolent of a bridegroom’s joy, and of a poet’s fancy. The English language seems to expand itself with a copiousness unknown before, while he pours forth the varied imagery of this splendid little poem. I do not know any other nuptial song, ancient or modern, of equal beauty. It is an intoxication of ecstacy, ardent, noble, and pure. But it pleased not heaven that these day dreams of genius and virtue should be undisturbed.

|Poems of Shakspeare.|

68. Shakspeare’s Venus and Adonis appears to have been published in 1593, and his Rape of Lucrece the following year. The redundance of blossoms in these juvenile effusions of his unbounded fertility obstructs the reader’s attention, and sometimes almost leads us to give him credit for less reflection and sentiment than he will be found to display. The style is flowing, and, in general, more perspicuous than the Elizabethan poets are wont to be. But I am not sure that they would betray themselves for the works of Shakspeare, had they been anonymously published.

|Daniel and Drayton.|

69. In the last decade of this century several new poets came forward. Samuel Daniel is one of these. His Complaint of Rosamond, and probably many of his minor poems, belong to this period; and it was also that of his greatest popularity. On the death of Spenser in 1598, he was thought worthy to succeed him as poet laureate; and some of his contemporaries ranked him in the second place; an eminence due rather to the purity of his language than to its vigour.[1215] Michael Drayton, who first tried his shepherd’s pipe with some success in the usual style, published his Baron’s Wars in 1598. They relate to the last years of Edward II., and conclude with the execution of Mortimer under his son. This poem, therefore, seems to possess a sufficient unity, and, tried by rules of criticism might be thought not far removed from the class of epic--a dignity, however, to which it has never pretended. But in its conduct Drayton follows history very closely, and we are kept too much in mind of a common chronicle. Though not very pleasing, however, in its general effect, this poem, The Barons’ Wars, contains several passages of considerable beauty, which men of greater renown, especially Milton, who availed himself largely of all the poetry of the preceding age, have been willing to imitate.

[1215] British Bibliographer, vol. ii. Headley remarks that Daniel was
spoken of by contemporary critics as the polisher and purifier of
the English language.

|Nosce Teipsum, of Davies.|

70. A more remarkable poem is that of Sir John Davies, afterwards chief-justice of Ireland, entitled Nosce Teipsum, published in 1600, usually though rather inaccurately, called, his poem on the Immortality of the Soul. Perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found. Yet, according to some definitions, the Nosce Teipsum is wholly unpoetical, inasmuch as it shows no passion and little fancy. If it reaches the heart at all, it is through the reason. But since strong argument in terse and correct style fails not to give us pleasure in prose, it seems strange that it should lose its effect when it gains the aid of regular metre to gratify the ear and assist the memory. Lines there are in Davies which far outweigh much of the descriptive and imaginative poetry of the last two centuries, whether we estimate them by the pleasure they impart to us, or by the intellectual vigour they display. Experience has shown that the faculties peculiarly deemed poetical are frequently exhibited in a considerable degree, but very few have been able to preserve a perspicuous brevity without stiffness or pedantry (allowance made for the subject and the times), in metaphysical reasoning, so successfully as Sir John Davies.

|Satires of Hall, Marston, and Donne.|

71. Hall’s Satires are tolerably known, partly on account of the subsequent celebrity of the author in a very different province, and partly from a notion, to which he gave birth by announcing the claim, that he was the first English satirist. In a general sense of satire, we have seen that he had been anticipated by Gascoyne; but Hall has more of the direct Juvenalian invective, which he may have reckoned essential to that species of poetry. They are deserving of regard in themselves. Warton has made many extracts from Hall’s Satires; he praises in them “a classical precision, to which English poetry had yet rarely attained;” and calls the versification “equally energetic and elegant.”[1216]

The former epithet may be admitted; but elegance is hardly compatible with what Warton owns to be the chief fault of Hall, “his obscurity, arising from a remote phraseology, constrained combinations, unfamiliar allusions, elliptical apostrophes, and abruptness of expression.” Hall is in fact not only so harsh and rugged, that he cannot be read with much pleasure, but so obscure in very many places that he cannot be understood at all, his lines frequently bearing no visible connection in sense or grammar with their neighbours. The stream is powerful, but turbid and often choked.[1217] Marston and Donne may be added to Hall in this style of poetry, as belonging to the sixteenth century, though the satires of the latter were not published till long afterwards. With as much obscurity as Hall, he has a still more inharmonious versification, and not nearly equal vigour.

[1216] Hist, of English Poetry, iv. 338.

[1217] Hall’s Satires are praised by Campbell, as well as Warton, full
as much, in my opinion, as they deserve. Warton has compared
Marston with Hall, and concludes that the latter is more “elegant,
exact, and elaborate.” More so than his rival he may by possibility
be esteemed; but these three epithets cannot be predicated of his
satires in any but a relative sense.

|Modulation of English verse.|

72. The roughness of these satirical poets was perhaps studiously affected; for it was not much in unison with the general tone of the age. It requires a good deal of care to avoid entirely the combinations of consonants that clog our language; nor have Drayton or Spenser always escaped this embarrassment. But in the lighter poetry of the queen’s last years, a remarkable sweetness of modulation has always been recognised. This has sometimes been attributed to the general fondness for music. It is at least certain, that some of our old madrigals are as beautiful in language as they are in melody. Several collections were published in the reign of Elizabeth.[1218] And it is evident that the regard to the capacity of his verse for marriage with music, that was before the poet’s mind, would not only polish his metre, but give it grace and sentiment, while it banished also the pedantry, the antithesis, the prolixity, which had disfigured the earlier lyric poems. Their measures became more various: though the quatrain, alternating by eight and six syllables, was still very popular, we find the trochaic verse of seven, sometimes ending with a double rhyme, usual towards the end of the queen’s reign. Many of these occur in England’s Helicon, and in the poems of Sydney.

[1218] Morley’s Musical Airs, 1594, and another collection in 1597,
contain some pretty songs. British Bibliographer, i. 342. A few of
these madrigals will also be found in Mr. Campbell’s Specimens.

|Translation of Homer by Chapman.|

73. The translations of ancient poets by Phaier, Golding, Stanyhurst, and several more, do not challenge our attention; most of them, in fact, being very wretched performances.[1219] Marlowe, a more celebrated name, did not, as has commonly been said, translate the poem of Hero and Leander ascribed to Musæus, but expanded it into what he calls six Sestiads on the same subject; a paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most licentious kind. This he left incomplete, and it was finished by Chapman.[1220] But the most remarkable productions of this kind are the Iliad of Chapman, and the Jerusalem of Fairfax, both printed in 1600; the former, however, containing in that edition but fifteen books, to which the rest was subsequently added. Pope, after censuring the haste, negligence, and fustian language of Chapman, observes “that which is to be allowed him, and which very much contributed to cover his defects, is a free daring spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have written before he arrived at years of discretion.” He might have added, that Chapman’s translation, with all its defects, is often exceedingly Homeric; a praise which Pope himself seldom attained. Chapman deals abundantly in compound epithets, some of which have retained their place; his verse is rhymed, of fourteen syllables, which corresponds to the hexameter better than the decasyllabic couplet; he is often uncouth, often unmusical, and often low; but the spirited and rapid flow of his metre makes him respectable to lovers of poetry. Waller, it is said, could not read him without transport. It must be added, that he is an unfaithful translator, and interpolated much, besides the general redundancy of his style.[1221]

[1219] Warton, chap. liv., has gone very laboriously into this subject.

[1220] Marlowe’s poem is republished in the Restituta of Sir Egerton
Brydges. It is singular that Warton should have taken it for a
translation of Musæus.

[1221] Warton, iv. 269. Retrospective Review, vol. iii. See also a very
good comparison of the different translations of Homer, in
Blackwood’s Magazine for 1831 and 1832, where Chapman comes in for
his due.

|Tasso, Fairfax.|

74. Fairfax’s Tasso has been more praised, and is better known. Campbell has called it, in rather strong terms, “one of the glories of Elizabeth’s reign.” It is not the first version of the Jerusalem, one very literal and prosaic having been made by Carew, in 1594.[1222] That of Fairfax, if it does not represent the grace of its original, and deviates also too much from its sense, is by no means deficient in spirit and vigour. It has been considered as one of the earliest works, in which the obsolete English, which had not been laid aside in the days of Sackville, and which Spenser affected to preserve, gave way to a style not much differing, at least in point of single words and phrases, from that of the present age. But this praise is equally due to Daniel, to Drayton, and to others of the later Elizabethan poets. The translation of Ariosto by Sir John Harrington, in 1591, is much inferior.

[1222] In the third volume of the Retrospective Review, these
translations are compared, and it is shown that Carew is far
more literal than Fairfax, who has taken great liberties with his
original. Extracts from Carew will also be found in the British
Bibliographer, i. 30. They are miserably bad.

|Employment of ancient measures.|

75. An injudicious endeavour to substitute the Latin metres for those congenial to our language, met with no more success than it deserved; unless it may be called success, that Sydney, and even Spenser, were for a moment seduced into approbation of it. Gabriel Harvey, best now remembered as the latter’s friend, recommended the adoption of hexameters in some letters which passed between them, and Spenser appears to have concurred. Webbe, a few years afterwards, a writer of little taste or ear for poetry, supported the same scheme, but may be said to have avenged the wrong of English verse upon our great poet, by travestying the Shepherd’s Kalendar into Sapphics.[1223] Campion, in 1602, still harps upon this foolish pedantry; many instances of which may be found during the Elizabethan period. It is well known that in German the practice has been in some measure successful, through the example of a distinguished poet, and through translations from the ancients in measures closely corresponding with their own. In this there is doubtless the advantage of presenting a truer mirror of the original. But as most imitations of Latin measures, in German or English, begin by violating their first principle, which assigns an invariable value in time to the syllables of every word, and produce a chaos of false quantities, it seems as if they could only disgust any one acquainted with classical versification. In the early English hexameters of the period before us, we sometimes perceive an intention to arrange long and short syllables according to the analogies of the Latin tongue. But this would soon be found impracticable in our own, which, abounding in harsh terminations, cannot long observe the law of position.

[1223] Webbe’s success was not inviting to the Latinists. Thus in the
second Eclogue of Virgil, for the beautiful lines--

At mecum raucis, tua dum vestigia lustro,
Sole sub ardenti resonant arbusta cicadis,

we have this delectable hexametric version:--

But by the scorched bank-sides i’ thy footsteps still I go
plodding:
Hedge-rows hot do resound with grasshops mournfully squeaking.

|Number of poets in this age.|

76. It was said by Ellis, that nearly one hundred names of poets belonging to the reign of Elizabeth might be enumerated, besides many that have left no memorial except their songs. This however was but a moderate computation. Drake has made a list of more than two hundred, some few of whom, perhaps, do not strictly belong to the Elizabethan period.[1224] But many of these are only known by short pieces in such miscellaneous collections as have been mentioned. Yet in the entire bulk of poetry, England could not, perhaps, bear comparison with Spain or France, to say nothing of Italy. She had come in fact much later to cultivate poetry as a general accomplishment. And, consequently, we find much less of the mechanism of style, than in the contemporaneous verse of other languages. The English sonnetteers deal less in customary epithets and conventional modes of expression. Every thought was to be worked out in new terms, since the scanty precedents of earlier versifiers did not supply them. This was evidently the cause of many blemishes in the Elizabethan poetry; of much that was false in taste, much that was either too harsh and extravagant, or too humble, and of more that was so obscure as to defy all interpretation. But it saved also that monotonous equability that often wearies us in more polished poetry. There is more pleasure, more sense of sympathy with another mind, in the perusal even of Gascoyne or Edwards, than in that of many French and Italian versifiers whom their contemporaries extolled. This is all that we can justly say in their favour; for any comparison of the Elizabethan poetry, save Spenser’s alone, with that of the nineteenth century would show an extravagant predilection for the mere name or dress of antiquity.

[1224] Shakspeare and his Times, i. 674. Even this catalogue is
probably incomplete; it includes, of course, translators.

|Scots and English ballads.|

77. It would be a great omission to neglect in any review of the Elizabethan poetry, that extensive, though anonymous class, the Scots and English ballads. The very earliest of these have been adverted to in our account of the fifteenth century. They became much more numerous in the present. The age of many may be determined by historical or other allusions; and from these, availing ourselves of similarity of style, we may fix, with some probability, the date of such as furnish no distinct evidence. This however is precarious, because the language has often been modernised, and passing for some time by oral tradition, they are frequently not exempt from marks of interpolation. But, upon the whole, the reigns of Mary and James VI., from the middle to the close of the sixteenth century, must be reckoned the golden age of the Scottish ballad; and there are many of the corresponding period in England.

78. There can be, I conceive, no question as to the superiority of Scotland in her ballads. Those of an historic or legendary character, especially the former, are ardently poetical; the nameless minstrel is often inspired with an Homeric power of rapid narration, bold description, lively or pathetic touches of sentiment. They are familiar to us through several publications, and chiefly through the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, by one whose genius these indigenous lays had first excited, and whose own writings, when the whole civilised world did homage to his name, never ceased to bear the indelible impress of the associations that had thus been generated. The English ballads of the northern border, or perhaps, of the northern counties, come near in their general character and cast of manners to the Scottish, but, as far as I have seen, with a manifest inferiority. Those again which belong to the south, and bear no trace either of the rude manners, or of the wild superstitions which the bards of Ettrick and Cheviot display, fall generally into a creeping style, which has exposed the common ballad to contempt. They are sometimes, nevertheless, not devoid of elegance, and often pathetic. The best are known through Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry; a collection singularly heterogeneous, and very unequal in merit, but from the publication of which in 1774, some of high name have dated the revival of a genuine feeling for true poetry in the public mind.

|The Faery Queen.|

79. We have reserved to the last the chief boast of this period, the Faery Queen. Spenser, as is well known, composed the greater part of his poem in Ireland, on the banks of his favourite Mulla. The first three books were published in 1590; the last three did not appear till 1596. It is a perfectly improbable supposition, that the remaining part, or six books required for the completion of his design, have been lost. The short interval before the death of this great poet was filled up by calamities sufficient to wither the fertility of any mind.

|Superiority of the first book.|

80. The first book of the Faery Queen is a complete poem, and far from requiring any continuation, is rather injured by the useless reappearance of its hero in the second. It is generally admitted to be the finest of the six. In no other is the allegory so clearly conceived by the poet, or so steadily preserved, yet with a disguise so delicate, that no one is offended by that servile setting forth of a moral meaning we frequently meet with in allegorical poems; and the reader has the gratification that good writing in works of fiction always produces, that of exercising his own ingenuity without perplexing it. That the red cross knight designates the militant Christian, whom Una, the true church, loves, whom Duessa, the type of popery, seduces, who is reduced almost to despair, but rescued by the intervention of Una, and the assistance of Faith, Hope, and Charity, is what no one feels any difficulty in acknowledging, but what every one may easily read the poem without perceiving or remembering. In an allegory conducted with such propriety, and concealed or revealed with so much art, there can surely be nothing to repel our taste; and those who read the first book of the Faery Queen without pleasure, must seek (what others perhaps will be at no loss to discover for them), a different cause for their indifference, than the tediousness or insipidity of allegorical poetry. Every canto of this book teems with the choicest beauties of imagination; he came to it in the freshness of his genius, which shines throughout with an uniformity it does not always afterwards maintain, unsullied by flattery, unobstructed by pedantry, and unquenched by languor.

|The succeeding books.|

81. In the following books, we have much less allegory; for the personification of abstract qualities, though often confounded with it, does not properly belong to that class of composition: it requires a covert sense beneath an apparent fable, such as the first book contains. But of this I do not discover many proofs in the second or third, the legends of Temperance and Chastity; they are contrived to exhibit these virtues and their opposite vices, but with little that is not obvious upon the surface. In the fourth and sixth books, there is still less; but a different species of allegory, the historical, which the commentators have, with more or less success, endeavoured to trace in other portions of the poem, breaks out unequivocally in the legend of Justice, which occupies the fifth. The friend and patron of Spenser, Sir Arthur Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland, is evidently portrayed in Arthegal; and the latter cantos of this book represent, not always with great felicity, much of the foreign and domestic history of the times. It is sufficiently intimated by the poet himself, that his Gloriana, or Faery Queen, is the type of Elizabeth; and he has given her another representative in the fair huntress Belphœbe. Spenser’s adulation of her beauty (at some fifty or sixty years of age), may be extenuated, we can say no more, by the practice of wise and great men, and by his natural tendency to clothe the objects of his admiration in the hues of fancy; but its exaggeration leaves the servility of the Italians far behind.

|Spenser’s sense of beauty.|

82. It has been justly observed by a living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters, and has left it for others almost as invidious to praise in terms of less rapture, as to censure what he has borne along in the stream of unhesitating eulogy, that “no poet has ever had a more exquisite sense of the beautiful than Spenser.”[1225] In Virgil and Tasso this was not less powerful; but even they, even the latter himself, do not hang with such a tenderness of delight, with such a forgetful delay, over the fair creations of their fancy. Spenser is not averse to images that jar on the mind by exciting horror or disgust, and sometimes his touches are rather too strong; but it is on love and beauty, on holiness and virtue, that he reposes with all the sympathy of his soul. The slowly sliding motion of his stanza, “with many a bout of linked sweetness long drawn out,” beautifully corresponds to the dreamy enchantment of his description, when Una, or Belphœbe, or Florimel, or Amoret, are present to his mind. In this varied delineation of female perfectness, no earlier poet had equalled him; nor, excepting Shakspeare, has he had, perhaps, any later rival.

[1225] I allude here to a very brilliant series of papers on the Faery
Queen, published in Blackwood’s Magazine during the years 1834 and
1835.

|Compared to Ariosto.|

83. Spenser is naturally compared with Ariosto. “Fierce wars and faithful loves did moralize the song” of both poets. But in the constitution of their minds, in the character of their poetry, they were almost the reverse of each other. The Italian is gay, rapid, ardent; his pictures shift like the hues of heaven; even while diffuse, he seems to leave in an instant what he touches, and is prolix by the number, not the duration, of his images. Spenser is habitually serious; his slow stanza seems to suit the temper of his genius; he loves to dwell on the sweetness and beauty which his fancy portrays. The ideal of chivalry, rather derived from its didactic theory, than from the precedents of romance, is always before him; his morality is pure and even stern, with nothing of the libertine tone of Ariosto. He worked with far worse tools than the bard of Ferrara, with a language not quite formed, and into which he rather injudiciously poured an unnecessary archaism, while the style of his contemporaries was undergoing a rapid change in the opposite direction. His stanza of nine lines is particularly inconvenient and languid in narration, where the Italian octave is sprightly and vigorous; though even this becomes ultimately monotonous by its regularity, a fault from which only the ancient hexameter and our blank verse are exempt.

84. Spenser may be justly said to excel Ariosto in originality of invention, in force and variety of character, in strength and vividness of conception, in depth of reflection, in fertility of imagination, and above all, in that exclusively poetical cast of feeling, which discerns in everything what common minds do not perceive. In the construction and arrangement of their fable neither deserve much praise; but the siege of Paris gives the Orlando Furioso, spite of its perpetual shiftings of the scene, rather more unity in the reader’s apprehension than belongs to the Faery Queen. Spenser is, no doubt, decidedly inferior in ease and liveliness of narration, as well as clearness and felicity of language. But, upon thus comparing the two poets, we have little reason to blush for our countryman. Yet the fame of Ariosto is spread through Europe, while Spenser is almost unknown out of England; and even in this age, when much of our literature is so widely diffused, I have not observed proofs of much acquaintance with him on the continent.

|Style of Spenser.|

85. The language of Spenser, like that of Shakspeare, is an instrument manufactured for the sake of the work it was to perform. No other poet had written like either, though both have had their imitators. It is rather apparently obsolete by his partiality to certain disused forms, such as the _y_ before the participle, than from any close resemblance to the diction of Chaucer or Lydgate.[1226] The enfeebling expletives, _do_ and _did_, though certainly very common in our early writers, had never been employed with such an unfortunate predilection as by Spenser. Their everlasting recurrence is among the great blemishes of his style. His versification is in many passages beautifully harmonious; but he has frequently permitted himself, whether for the sake of variety, or from some other cause, to baulk the ear in the conclusion of a stanza.[1227]

[1226] “Spenser,” says Ben Jonson, “in affecting the ancients writ no
language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil
read Ennius.” This is rather in the sarcastic tone attributed to
Jonson.

[1227] Coleridge, who had a very strong perception of the beauty of
Spenser’s poetry, has observed his alternate alliteration, “which
when well used is a great secret in melody; as _‘sad_ to _see_ her
_sorrowful_ constraint’;--‘on the grass her _dainty_ limbs _did_
lay.’” But I can hardly agree with him when he proceeds to say “it
never strikes any unwarned ear as artificial, or other than the
result of the necessary movement of the verse.” The artifice seems
often very obvious. I do not also quite understand, or, if I do,
cannot acquiesce in what follows, that “Spenser’s descriptions are
not in the true sense of the word picturesque, but are _composed of
a wondrous series of images, as in our dreams_.” Coleridge’s
Remains, vol. i. p. 93.

|Inferiority of the latter books.|

86. The inferiority of the last three books to the former is surely very manifest. His muse gives gradual signs of weariness; the imagery becomes less vivid, the vein of poetical description less rich, the digressions more frequent and verbose. It is true that the fourth book is full of beautiful inventions, and contains much admirable poetry; yet even here we perceive a comparative deficiency in the quantity of excelling passages, which becomes far more apparent as we proceed, and the last book falls very short of the interest which the earlier part of the Faery Queen had excited. There is perhaps less reason than some have imagined, to regret that Spenser did not complete his original design. The Faery Queen is already in the class of longest poems. A double length, especially if, as we may well suspect, the succeeding parts would have been inferior, might have deterred many readers from the perusal of what we now possess. It is felt already in Spenser, as it is perhaps even in Ariosto, when we read much of either, that tales of knights and ladies, giants and savage men, end in a satiety which no poetical excellence can overcome. Ariosto, sensible of this intrinsic defect in the epic romance, has enlivened it by great variety of incidents, and by much that carries us away from the peculiar tone of chivalrous manners. The world he lives in is before his eyes, and to please it is his aim. He plays with his characters as with puppets that amuse the spectator and himself. In Spenser, nothing is more remarkable than the steadiness of his apparent faith in the deeds of knighthood. He had little turn for sportiveness; and in attempting it, as in the unfortunate instance of Malbecco, and a few shorter passages, we find him dull as well as coarse. It is in the ideal world of pure and noble virtues, that his spirit, wounded by neglect, and weary of trouble, loved to refresh itself without reasoning or mockery; he forgets the reader, and cares little for his taste, while he can indulge the dream of his own delighted fancy. It may be here also observed, that the elevated and religious morality of Spenser’s poem would secure it, in the eyes of every man of just taste, from the ridicule which the mere romances of knight-errantry must incur, and against which Ariosto evidently guarded himself by the gay tone of his narration. The Orlando Furioso and the Faery Queen are each in the spirit of its age; but the one was for Italy in the days of Leo, the other for England under Elizabeth, before, though but just before, the severity of the Reformation had been softened away. The lay of Britomart, in twelve cantos, in praise of Chastity, would have been received with a smile at the court of Ferrara, which would have had almost as little sympathy with the justice of Arthegal.

|Allegories of the Faery Queen.|

87. The allegories of Spenser have been frequently censured. One of their greatest offences, perhaps, is that they gave birth to some tedious and uninteresting poetry of the same kind. There is usually something repulsive in the application of an abstract or general name to a person, in which, though with some want of regard, as I have intimated above, to the proper meaning of the word, we are apt to think that allegorical fiction consists. The French and English poets of the Middle Ages had far too much of this; and it is to be regretted, that Spenser did not give other appellations to his Care and Despair, as he has done to Duessa and Talus. In fact, Orgoglio is but a giant, Humiltà a porter, Obedience a servant. The names, when English, suggest something that perplexes us; but the beings exhibited are mere persons of the drama, men and women, whose office or character is designated by their appellation.

|Blemishes in the diction.|

88. The general style of the Faery Queen is not exempt from several defects, besides those of obsoleteness and redundancy. Spenser seems to have been sometimes deficient in one attribute of a great poet, the continual reference to the truth of nature, so that his fictions should be always such as might exist on the given conditions. This arises in great measure from copying his predecessors too much in description, not suffering his own good sense to correct their deviations from truth. Thus, in the beautiful description of Una, where she first is introduced to us, riding

Upon a lowly ass more white than snow;
_Herself much whiter_.

This absurdity may have been suggested by Ovid’s Brachia Sithonia candidiora nive; but the image in this line is not brought so distinctly before the mind as to be hideous as well as untrue; it is merely a hyperbolical parallel.[1228] A similar objection lies to the stanza enumerating as many kinds of trees as the poet could call to mind, in the description of a forest,--

The sailing pine, the cedar proud and tall,
The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry,
The builder oak, sole king of forests all,
The aspine good for staves, the cypress funeral,

with thirteen more in the next stanza. Every one knows that a natural forest never contains such a variety of species; nor indeed could such a medley as Spenser, treading in the steps of Ovid, has brought together from all soils and climates, exist long if planted by the hands of man. Thus, also, in the last canto of the second book, we have a celebrated stanza, and certainly a very beautiful one, if this defect did not attach to it; where winds, waves, birds, voices, and musical instruments are supposed to conspire in one harmony. A good writer has observed upon this, that “to a person listening to a concert of voices and instruments, the interruption of singing birds, winds, and waterfalls, would be little better than the torment of Hogarth’s enraged musician.”[1229] But perhaps the enchantment of the Bower of Bliss, where this is feigned to have occurred, may in some degree justify Spenser in this instance, by taking it out of the common course of nature. The stanza is translated from Tasso, whom our own poet has followed with close footsteps in these cantos of the second book of the Faery Queen--cantos often in themselves beautiful, but which are rendered stiff by a literal adherence to the original, and fall very short of its ethereal grace and sweetness. It would be unjust not to relieve these strictures, by observing that very numerous passages might be brought from the Faery Queen of admirable truth in painting, and of indisputable originality. The cave of Despair, the hovel of Corceca, the incantation of Amoret, are but a few among those that will occur to the reader of Spenser.

[1228] Vincent Bourne, in his translation of William and Margaret, has
one of the most elegant lines he ever wrote:--

Candidior nivibus, frigidiorque manus.

But this is said of a ghost.

[1229] Twining’s Translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, p. 14.

|Admiration of the Faery Queen.|

89. The admiration of this great poem was unanimous and enthusiastic. No academy had been trained to carp at his genius with minute cavilling; no recent popularity, no traditional fame (for Chaucer was rather venerated than much in the hands of the reader) interfered with the immediate recognition of his supremacy. The Faery Queen became at once the delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every scholar. In the course of the next century, by the extinction of habits derived from chivalry, and the change both of taste and language, which came on with the civil wars and the restoration, Spenser lost something of his attraction, and much more of his influence over literature; yet, in the most phlegmatic temper of the general reader, he seems to have been one of our most popular writers. Time, however, has gradually wrought its work; and, notwithstanding the more imaginative cast of poetry in the present century, it may be well doubted whether the Faery Queen is as much read or as highly esteemed as in the days of Anne. It is not perhaps very difficult to account for this: those who seek the delight that mere fiction presents to the mind (and they are the great majority of readers), have been supplied to the utmost limit of their craving, by stores accommodated to every temper, and far more stimulant than the legends of Faeryland. But we must not fear to assert, with the best judges of this and of former ages, that Spenser is still the third name in the poetical literature of our country, and that he has not been surpassed, except by Dante, in any other.[1230]

[1230] Mr. Campbell has given a character of Spenser, not so
enthusiastic as that to which I have alluded, but so
discriminating, and, in general sound, that I shall take the
liberty of extracting it from his Specimens of the British Poets,
i. 125. “His command of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He
threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly,
tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before,
or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. It must
certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the
brief strokes and robust power, which characterise the very
greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find more airy and expansive
images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer
flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English
poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of circumstance,
like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure through the utmost
extremities of the foliage which it nourishes. On a comprehensive
view of the whole work, we certainly miss the charm of strength,
symmetry, and rapid, or interesting progress; for though the plan
which the poet designed is not completed, it is easy to see that no
additional cantos could have rendered it less perplexed.”

|General parallel of Italian and English poetry.|

90. If we place Tasso and Spenser apart, the English poetry of Elizabeth’s reign will certainly not enter into competition with that of the corresponding period in Italy. It would require not only much national prejudice, but a want of genuine _æsthetic_ discernment to put them on a level. But it may still be said that our own muses had their charms; and even that, at the end of the century, there was a better promise for the future than beyond the Alps. We might compare the poetry of one nation to a beauty of the court, with noble and regular features, a slender form, and grace in all her steps, but wanting a genuine simplicity of countenance, and with somewhat of sickliness in the delicacy of her complexion, that seems to indicate the passing away of the first season of youth; while that of the other would rather suggest a country maiden, newly mingling with polished society, not of perfect lineaments, but attracting beholders by the spirit, variety, and intelligence of her expression, and rapidly wearing off the traces of rusticity, which are still sometimes visible in her demeanour.

SECT. V.--ON LATIN POETRY.

_In Italy--Germany--France--Great Britain._

|Decline of Latin poetry in Italy.|

91. The cultivation of poetry in modern languages did not as yet thin the ranks of Latin versifiers. They are, on the contrary, more numerous in this period than before. Italy, indeed, ceased to produce men equal to those who had flourished in the age of Leo and Clement. Some of considerable merit will be found in the great collection, “Carmina Illustrium Poetarum” (Florentiæ, 1719); one too, which rigorously excluding all voluptuous poetry, makes some sacrifice of genius to scrupulous morality. The brothers Amaltei are perhaps the best of the later period. It is not always easy, at least without more pains than I have taken, to determine the chronology of these poems, which are printed in the alphabetical order of the authors’ names. But a considerable number must be later than the middle of the century. It must be owned that most of these poets employ trivial images, and do not much vary their forms of expression. They often please, but rarely make an impression on the memory. They are generally, I think, harmonious; and perhaps metrical faults, though not uncommon, are less so than among the Cisalpine Latinists. There appears, on the whole, an evident decline since the preceding age.

|Compensated in other countries. Lotichius.|

92. This was tolerably well compensated in other parts of Europe. One of the most celebrated authors is a native of Germany, Lotichius, whose poems were first published in 1551, and with much amendment in 1561. They are written in a strain of luscious elegance, not rising far above the customary level of Ovidian poetry, and certainly not often falling below it. The versification is remarkably harmonious and flowing, but with a mannerism not sufficiently diversified; the first foot of each verse is generally a dactyle, which adds to the grace, but somewhat impairs the strength. Lotichius is, however, a very elegant and classical versifier; and perhaps equal in elegy to Joannes Secundus, or any Cisalpine writer of the sixteenth century.[1231] One of his elegies, on the siege of Magdeburg, gave rise to a strange notion--that he predicted, by a sort of divine enthusiasm, the calamities of that city in 1631. Bayle has spun a long note out of this fancy of some Germans.[1232] But those who take the trouble, which these critics seem to have spared themselves, of attending to the poem itself, will perceive that the author concludes it with prognostics of peace instead of capture. It was evidently written on the siege of Magdeburg by Maurice in 1550. George Sabinus, son-in-law of Melanchthon, ranks second in reputation to Lotichius among the Latin poets of Germany during this period.

[1231] Baillet calls him the best poet of Germany after Eobanus Hessus.

[1232] Morhof, l. i. c. 19. Bayle, art. Lotichius, note G. This seems
to have been agitated after the publication of Bayle; for I find in
the catalogue of the British Museum a disquisition, by one Krusike,
Utrum Petrus Lotichius secundam obsidionem urbis Magdeburgensis
prædixerit; published as late as 1703.

|Collections of Latin poetry by Gruter.|

93. But France and Holland, especially the former, became the more favoured haunts of the Latin muse. A collection in three volumes by Gruter, under the fictitious name of Ranusius Gherus, Deliciæ Poetarum Gallorum, published in 1609, contains the principal writers of the former country, some entire, some in selection. In these volumes there are about 100,000 lines; in the Deliciæ Poetarum Belgarum, a similar publication by Gruter, I find about as many; his third collection, Deliciæ Poetarum Italorum, seems not so long, but I have not seen more than one volume. These poets are disposed alphabetically; few, comparatively speaking, of the Italians seem to belong to the latter half of the century, but very much the larger proportion of the French and Dutch. A fourth collection, Deliciæ Poetarum Germanorum, I have never seen. All these bear the fictitious name of Gherus. According to a list in Baillet, the number of Italian poets selected by Gruter is 203; of French, 108; of Dutch or Belgic, 129; of German, 211.

|Characters of some Gallo-Latin poets.|

94. Among the French poets, Beza, who bears in Gruter’s collection the name of Adeodatus Seba, deserves high praise, though some of his early pieces are rather licentious.[1233] Bellay is also an amatory poet; in the opinion of Baillet he has not succeeded so well in Latin as in French. The poems of Muretus are perhaps superior. Joseph Scaliger seemed to me to write Latin verse tolerably well, but he is not rated highly by Baillet and the authors whom he quotes.[1234] The epigrams of Henry Stephens are remarkably prosaic and heavy. Passerat is very elegant; his lines breathe a classical spirit, and are full of those fragments of antiquity with which Latin poetry ought always to be inlaid, but in sense they are rather feeble.[1235] The epistles, on the contrary, of the Chancellor de l’Hospital, in an easy Horatian versification, are more interesting than such insipid effusions, whether of flattery or feigned passion, as the majority of modern Latinists present. They are unequal, and fall too often into a creeping style; but sometimes we find a spirit and nervousness of strength and sentiment worthy of his name; and though keeping in general to the level of Horatian satire, he rises at intervals to a higher pitch, and wants not the skill of descriptive poetry.

[1233] Baillet, n. 1366, thinks Beza an excellent Latin poet. The
Juvenilia first appeared in 1548. The later editions omitted
several poems.

[1234] Jugemens des Savans, n. 1295. One of Scaliger’s poems celebrates
that immortal flea, which, on a great festival at Poitiers, having
appeared on the bosom of a learned, and doubtless beautiful young
lady, Mademoiselle des Roches, was the theme of all the wits and
scholars of the age. Some of their lines and those of Joe Scaliger
among the number, seem designed, by the freedom they take with the
fair Pucelle, to beat the intruder himself in impudence. See Œuvres
de Pasquier, ii. 950.

[1235] Among the epigrams of Passerat I have found one which Amaltheus
seems to have shortened and improved, retaining the idea, in his
famous lines on Acon and Leonilla. I do not know whether this has
been observed.

Cætera formosi, dextro est orbatus ocello
Frater, et est lævo lumine capta soror.
Frontibus adversis ambo si jungitis ora,
Bina quidem facies, vultus at unus erit.
Sed tu, Carle, tuum lumen transmitte sorori,
Continuo ut vestrûm fiat uterque Deus.
Plena hæc fulgebit fraterna luce Diana,
Hujus frater eris tu quoque, cæcus amor.

This is very good, and Passerat ought to have credit for the
invention; but the other is better. Though most know the lines by
heart, I will insert them here:--

Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro,
Et Potis est forma vincere uterque Deos.
Blande puer, lumen quod habes, concede sorori,
Sic tu cæcus amor, sic erit illa Venus.

I have no ground for saying that this was written last, except that
no one would have dreamed of improving it.

|Sammarthanus.|

95. The best of Latin poets whom France could boast was Sammarthanus (Sainte Marthe), known also, but less favourably, in his own language. They are more classically elegant than any others which met my eye in Gruter’s collection; and this, I believe, is the general suffrage of critics.[1236] Few didactic poems, probably, are superior to his Pædotrophia, on the nurture of children; it is not a little better, which indeed is no high praise, than the Balia of Tansillo on the same subject.[1237] We may place Sammarthanus, therefore, at the head of the list; and not far from the bottom of it I should class Bonnefons, or Bonifonius, a French writer of Latin verse in the very worst taste, whom it would not be worth while to mention, but for a certain degree of reputation he has acquired. He might also be suspected of designing to turn into ridicule the effeminacy which some Italians had introduced into amorous poetry. Bonifonius has closely imitated Secundus, but is much inferior to him in everything but his faults. The Latinity is full of gross and obvious errors.[1238]

[1236] Baillet, n. 1401. Some did not scruple to set him above the
best Italians, and one went so far as to say that Virgil would have
been envious of the Pædotrophia.

[1237] The following lines are a specimen of the Pædotrophia, taken
much at random.

Ipsæ etiam Alpinis villosæ in cautibus ursæ,
Ipsæ etiam tigres, et quicquid ubique ferarum est,
Debita servandis concedunt ubera natis.
Tu, quam miti animo natura benigna creavit,
Exuperes feritate feras? nec te tua tangant
Pignora, nec querulos puerili e gutture planctus,
Nec lacrymas miserêris, opemque injusta recuses,
Quam præstare tuum est, et quæ te pendet ab unâ.
Cujus onus teneris hærebit dulce lacertis
Infelix puer, et molli se pectore sternet?
Dulcia quis primi captabit gaudia risûs,
Et primas voces et blæsæ murmura linguæ?
Tune fruenda alii potes illa relinquere demens,
Tantique esse putas teretis servare papillæ
Integrum decus, et juvenilem in pectore florem?
Lib. i. (Gruter. iii. 266.)

It is singular that Sammarthanus (Sainte Marthe), though a French
poet (with less success than in Latin), and one of the most
accomplished men of his time, and also one of the best known in
literary history, is omitted in the Biographie Universelle. Such
negligences must occur in a long work; but the editors are rather
too severe on a preceding collection of biography, the Dictionnaire
Historique of Chaudon and Delandine, for similar faults. Lives will
be found in this much shorter publication which have been
overlooked in their own.

[1238] The following lines are not an unfair specimen of Bonifonius:--

Nympha bellula, nympha mollicella,
Cujus in roseis latent labellis
Meæ deliciæ, meæ salutes, &c.

* * * * *

Salvete aureolæ meæ puellæ
Crines aureolique crispulique,
Salvete et mihi vos puellæ ocelli,
Ocelli improbuli protervulique;
Salvete et veneris pares papillis
Papillæ teretesque turgidæque;
Salvete æmula purpuræ labella;
Tota denique Pancharilla salve.

* * * * *

Nunc te possideo, alma Pancharilla,
Turturilla mea et columbililla.

Bonifonius has been thought worthy of several editions, and has met
with more favourable judges than myself.

|Belgic Poets.|

96. The Deliciæ Poetarum Belgarum appeared to me, on rather a cursory inspection, inferior to the French. Secundus outshines his successors. Those of the younger Dousa, whose premature death was lamented by all the learned, struck me as next in merit. Dominic Baudius is harmonious and elegant, but with little originality or vigour. These poets are loose and negligent in versification, ending too often a pentameter with a polysyllable, and with feeble effect; they have also little idea of several other common rules of Latin composition.

|Scots poets; Buchanan.|