Chapter XXII: History of Poetry From 1600 to 1650 (2)

27. It has been the misfortune of the Dutch, a great people, a people fertile of men of various ability and erudition, a people of scholars, of theologians and philosophers, of mathematicians, of historians, of painters, and, we may add, of poets, that these last have been the mere violets of the shade, and have peculiarly suffered by the narrow limits within which their language has been spoken or known. The Flemish dialect of the southern Netherlands might have contributed to make up something like a national literature, extensive enough to be respected in Europe, if those provinces, which now affect the somewhat ridiculous name of Belgium, had been equally fertile of talents with their neighbours.

|Spiegel.|

28. The golden age of Dutch literature is this first part of the seventeenth century. Their chief poets are Spiegel, Hooft, Cats, and Vondel. The first, who has been styled the Dutch Ennius, died in 1612: his principal poem, of an ethical kind, is posthumous, but may probably have been written towards the close of the preceding century. “The style is vigorous and concise; it is rich in imagery and powerfully expressed, but is deficient in elegance and perspicuity.”[486] Spiegel had rendered much service to his native tongue, and was a member of a literary academy which published a Dutch grammar in 1584. Coornhert and Dousa, with others known to fame, were his colleagues; and be it remembered, to the honour of Holland, that in Germany or England, or even in France, there was as yet no institution of this kind. But as Holland at the end of the sixteenth century, and for many years afterwards, was pre-eminently the literary country of Europe, it is not surprising that some endeavours were made, though unsuccessfully as to European renown, to cultivate the native language. This language is also more soft, though less sonorous than the German.

[486] Biogr. Univ.

|Hooft. Cats. Vondel.|

29. Spiegel was followed by a more celebrated poet, Peter Hooft, who gave sweetness and harmony to Dutch verse. “The great creative power of poetry,” it has been said, “he did not possess; but his language is correct, his style agreeable, and he did much to introduce a better epoch.”[487] His amatory and Anacreontic lines have never been excelled in the language; and Hooft is also distinguished both as a dramatist and an historian. He has been called the Tacitus of Holland. But here again his praises must by the generality be taken upon trust. Cats is a poet of a different class; ease, abundance, simplicity, clearness, and purity are the qualities of his style: his imagination is gay, his morality popular and useful. No one was more read than Father Cats, as the people call him; but he is often trifling and monotonous. Cats, though he wrote for the multitude, whose descendants still almost know his poems by heart, was a man whom the republic held in high esteem; twice ambassador in England, he died great pensionary of Holland, in 1651. Vondel, a native of Cologne, but the glory, as he is deemed, of Dutch poetry, was best known as a tragedian. In his tragedies, the lyric part, the choruses which he retained after the ancient model, have been called the sublimest of odes. But some have spoken less highly of Vondel.[488]

[487] Biogr. Univ.

[488] Foreign Quart. Rev., vol. iv., p. 49. For this short
account of the Dutch poets I am indebted to Eichhorn, vol. iv.,
part 1, and to the Biographie Universelle.

|Danish poetry.|

30. Denmark had no literature in the native language, except a collection of old ballads, full of Scandinavian legends, till the present period; and in this it does not appear that she had more than one poet, a Norwegian bishop, named Arrebo. Nothing, I believe, was written in Swedish. Sclavonian writers there were; but we know so little of those languages, that they cannot enter, at least during so distant a period, into the history of European literature.

SECT. V.

ON ENGLISH POETRY.

_Imitators of Spenser--The Fletchers--Philosophical Poets--Denham-- Donne--Cowley--Historical and Narrative Poets--Shakspeare’s Sonnets--Lyric Poets--Milton’s Lycidas, and other Poems._

|English poets numerous in this age.|

31. The English poets of these fifty years are very numerous, and though the greater part are not familiar to the general reader, they form a favourite study of those who cultivate our poetry, and are sought by all collectors of scarce and interesting literature. Many of them have within half a century been reprinted separately, and many more in the useful and copious collections of Anderson, Chalmers, and other editors. Extracts have also been made by Headley, Ellis, Campbell, and Southey. It will be convenient to arrange them rather according to the schools to which they belonged, than in mere order of chronology.

|Phineas Fletcher.|

32. Whatever were the misfortunes of Spenser’s life, whatever neglect he might have experienced at the hands of a statesman grown old in cares, which render a man insensible to song, his spirit might be consoled by the prodigious reputation of the Faëry Queen. He was placed at once by his country above all the great Italian names, and next to Virgil among the ancients; it was a natural consequence that some should imitate what they so deeply reverenced. An ardent admiration for Spenser inspired the genius of two young brothers, Phineas and Giles Fletcher. The first, very soon after the Queen’s death, as some allusions to Lord Essex seem to denote, composed, though he did not so soon publish, a poem, entitled The Purple Island. By this strange name he expressed a subject more strange; it is a minute and elaborate account of the body and mind of man. Through five cantos the reader is regaled with nothing but allegorical anatomy, in the details of which Phineas seems tolerably skilled, evincing a great deal of ingenuity in diversifying his metaphors, and in presenting the delineation of his imaginary island with as much justice as possible to the allegory, without obtruding it on the reader’s view. In the sixth canto he rises to the intellectual and moral faculties of the soul, which occupy the rest of the poem. From its nature it is insuperably wearisome; yet his language is often very poetical, his versification harmonious, his invention fertile. But that perpetual monotony of allegorical persons, which sometimes displeases us even in Spenser, is seldom relieved in Fletcher; the understanding revolts at the confused crowd of inconceivable beings in a philosophical poem; and the justness of analogy, which had given us some pleasure in the anatomical cantos, is lost in tedious descriptions of all possible moral qualities, each of them personified, which can never coexist in the Purple Island of one individual.

|Giles Fletcher.|

33. Giles Fletcher, brother of Phineas, in Christ’s Victory and Triumph, though his subject has not all the unity that might be desired, had a manifest superiority in its choice. Each uses a stanza of his own; Phineas one of seven lines, Giles one of eight. This poem was published in 1610. Each brother alludes to the work of the other, which must be owing to the alterations made by Phineas in his Purple Island, written probably the first, but not published, I believe, till 1633. Giles seems to have more vigour than his elder brother; but less sweetness, less smoothness, and more affectation in his style. This, indeed, is deformed by words neither English nor Latin, but simply barbarous; such as _elamping_, _eblazon_, _deprostrate_, _purpured_, _glitterand_, and many others. They both bear much resemblance to Spenser: Giles sometimes ventures to cope with him, even in celebrated passages, such as the description of the Cave of Despair.[489] And he has had the honour, in turn, of being followed by Milton, especially in the first meeting of our Saviour with Satan in the Paradise Regained. Both of these brothers are deserving of much praise; they were endowed with minds eminently poetical, and not inferior in imagination to any of their contemporaries. But an injudicious taste, and an excessive fondness for a style which the public was rapidly abandoning, that of allegorical personification, prevented their powers from being effectively displayed.

[489] Christ’s Vict. and Triumph, ii. 23.

|Philosophical poetry.|

34. Notwithstanding the popularity of Spenser, and the general pride in his name, that allegorical and imaginative school of poetry, of which he was the greatest ornament, did not by any means exclude a very different kind. The English, or such as by their education gave the tone in literature, had become, in the latter years of the Queen, and still more under her successor, a deeply thinking, a learned, a philosophical people. A sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed, or the novel and remote analogies of wit, gained praise from many whom the creations of an excursive fancy could not attract. Hence, much of the poetry of James’s reign is distinguished from that of Elizabeth, except, perhaps, her last years, by partaking of the general character of the age; deficient in simplicity, grace, and feeling, often obscure and pedantic, but impressing us with a respect for the man, where we do not recognise the poet. From this condition of public taste arose two schools of poetry, different in character, if not unequal in merit, but both appealing to the reasoning more than to the imaginative faculty as their judge.

|Lord Brooke.|

35. The first of these may own as its founder, Sir John Davis, whose poem on the Immortality of the Soul, published in 1600, has had its due honour in our last volume. Davies is eminent for perspicuity; but this cannot be said for another philosophical poet, Sir Fulk Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, the bosom friend of Sir Philip Sydney, and once the patron of Jordano Bruno. The titles of Lord Brooke’s poems, A Treatise of Human Learning, A Treatise of Monarchy, A Treatise of Religion, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, lead us to anticipate more of sense than fancy. In this we are not deceived; his mind was pregnant with deep reflection upon multifarious learning, but he struggles to give utterance to thoughts which he had not fully endowed with words, and amidst the shackles of rhyme and metre which he had not learned to manage. Hence, of all our poets he may be reckoned the most obscure; in aiming at condensation, he becomes elliptical beyond the bounds of the language, and his rhymes, being forced for the sake of sound, leave all meaning behind. Lord Brooke’s poetry is chiefly worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit upon political science, which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes, and Harrington, and Locke.

|Denham’s Cooper’s Hill.|

36. This argumentative school of verse was so much in unison with the character of that generation, that Daniel, a poet of a very different temper, adopted it in his panegyric addressed to James soon after his accession, and in some other poems. It had an influence upon others who trod generally in a different track, as is especially perceived in Giles Fletcher. The Cooper’s Hill of Sir John Denham, published in 1643, belongs in a considerable degree to this reasoning class of poems. It is also descriptive, but the description is made to slide into philosophy. The plan is original, as far as our poetry is concerned, and I do not recollect any exception in other languages. Placing himself upon an eminence not distant from Windsor, he takes a survey of the scene; he finds the tower of St. Paul’s on his farthest horizon, the Castle much nearer, and the Thames at his feet. These, with the ruins of an abbey, supply in turn materials for a reflecting rather than imaginative mind, and, with a stag hunt which he has very well described, fill up the canvas of a poem of no great length, but once of no trifling reputation.

37. The epithet, _majestic_ Denham, conferred by Pope, conveys rather too much; but Cooper’s Hill is no ordinary poem. It is nearly the first instance of vigorous and rhythmical couplets, for Denham is incomparably less feeble than Browne, and less prosaic than Beaumont. Close in thought, and nervous in language like Davies, he is less hard and less monotonous; his cadences are animated and various, perhaps a little beyond the regularity that metre demands; they have been the guide to the finer ear of Dryden. Those who cannot endure the philosophic poetry, must ever be dissatisfied with Cooper’s Hill; no personification, no ardent words, few metaphors beyond the common use of speech, nothing that warms, or melts, or fascinates the heart. It is rare to find lines of eminent beauty in Denham; and equally so to be struck by anyone as feeble or low. His language is always well chosen and perspicuous, free from those strange turns of expression, frequent in our older poets, where the reader is apt to suspect some error of the press, so irreconcilable do they seem with grammar or meaning. The expletive _do_, which the best of his predecessors use freely, seldom occurs in Denham; and he has in other respects brushed away the rust of languid and ineffective redundancies which have obstructed the popularity of men with more native genius than himself.[490]

[490] The comparison by Denham between the Thames and
his own poetry was one celebrated:--

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My bright example, as it is my theme:
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

Johnson, while he highly extols these lines, truly observes, that
“most of the words thus artfully opposed, are to be understood
simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the
other; and if there be any language which does not express
intellectual operations by material images, into that language
they cannot be translated.” Perhaps these metaphors are so
naturally applied to style, that no language of a cultivated
people is without them. But the ground of objection is, in fact,
that the lines contain nothing but wit, and that wit which turns
on a play of words. They are rather ingenious in this respect,
and remarkably harmonious, which is probably the secret of their
popularity; but, as poetry, they deserve no great praise.

|Poets called metaphysical.|

38. Another class of poets in the reigns of James and his son were those whom Johnson has called the metaphysical; a name rather more applicable, in the ordinary use of the word, to Davies and Brooke. These were such as laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought, usually false, and resting upon some equivocation of language, or exceedingly remote analogy. This style Johnson supposes to have been derived from Marini. But Donne, its founder, as Johnson imagines, in England, wrote before Marini. It is in fact, as we have lately observed, the style which, though Marini has earned the discreditable reputation of perverting the taste of his country by it, had been gaining ground through the latter half of the sixteenth century. It was, in a more comprehensive view, one modification of that vitiated taste which sacrificed all ease and naturalness of writing and speaking for the sake of display. The mythological erudition and Grecisms of Ronsard’s school, the Euphuism of that of Lilly, the “estilo culto” of Gongora, even the pedantic quotations of Burton and many similar writers, both in England and on the continent, sprang like the concetti of the Italians, and of their English imitators, from the same source, a dread of being overlooked if they paced on like their neighbours. And when a few writers had set the example of successful faults, a bad style, where no sound principles of criticism had been established, readily gaining ground, it became necessary that those who had not vigour enough to rise above the fashion, should seek to fall in with it. Nothing is more injurious to the cultivation of verse, than the trick of desiring, for praise or profit, to attract those by poetry whom nature has left destitute of every quality which genuine poetry can attract. The best, and perhaps the only secure basis for _public_ taste, for an æsthetic appreciation of beauty, in a court, a college, a city, is so general a diffusion of classical knowledge, as by rendering the finest models familiar, and by giving them a sort of authority, will discountenance and check at the outset the vicious novelties which always exert some influence over uneducated minds. But this was not yet the case in England. Milton was perhaps the first writer who eminently possessed a genuine discernment and feeling of antiquity; though it may be perceived in Spenser, and also in a very few who wrote in prose.

|Donne.|

39. Donne is generally esteemed the earliest, as Cowley was afterwards the most conspicuous model of this manner. Many instances of it, however, occur in the lighter poetry of the Queen’s reign. Donne is the most inharmonious of our versifiers, if he can be said to have deserved such a name by lines too rugged to seem metre. Of his earlier poems many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much; the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible; it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages that we should care to read again.

|Crashaw.|

40. The second of these poets was Crashaw, a man of some imagination and great piety, but whose softness of heart, united with feeble judgment, led him to admire and imitate whatever was most extravagant in the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. He was more than Donne a follower of Marini, one of whose poems, The Massacre of the Innocents, he translated with success. It is difficult, in general, to find anything in Crashaw that bad taste has not deformed. His poems were first published in 1646.

|Cowley.|

41. In the next year, 1647, Cowley’s Mistress appeared; the most celebrated performance of the miscalled metaphysical poets. It is a series of short amatory poems, in the Italian style of the age, full of analogies that have no semblance of truth, except from the double sense of words, and thoughts that unite the coldness of subtlety with the hyperbolical extravagance of counterfeited passion. The Anacreontic lines, and some other light pieces of Cowley, have a spirit and raciness very unlike these frigid conceits; and in the ode on the death of his friend Mr. Harvey, he gave some proofs of real sensibility and poetic grace. The Pindaric odes of Cowley were not published within this period. But it is not worth while to defer mention of them. They contain, like all his poetry, from time to time, very beautiful lines, but the faults are still of the same kind; his sensibility and good sense, nor has any poet more, are choked by false taste; and it would be difficult to fix on any one poem in which the beauties are more frequent than the blemishes. Johnson has selected the elegy on Crashaw as the finest of Cowley’s works. It begins with a very beautiful couplet, but I confess that little else seems, to my taste, of much value. The Complaint, probably better known than any other poem, appears to me the best in itself. His disappointed hopes give a not unpleasing melancholy to several passages. But his Latin ode in a similar strain is much more perfect. Cowley, perhaps, upon the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English poet; yet it is very easy to perceive that some who wrote better than he, did not possess so fine a genius. Johnson has written the life of Cowley with peculiar care; and as his summary of the poet’s character is more favourable than my own, it may be candid to insert it in this place, as at least very discriminating, elaborate, and well expressed.

|Johnson’s character of him.|

42. “It may be affirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he brought to his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that his pages are embellished with all the ornaments which books could supply; that he was the first who imparted to English numbers the enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less;[491] that he was equally qualified for sprightly sallies and for lofty flights; that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side; and that, if he left versification yet improvable, he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.”

[491] Was not Milton’s Ode on the Nativity written as early as
any of Cowley’s? And would Johnson have thought Cowley superior
in gaiety to Sir John Suckling?

|Narrative poets. Daniel.|

43. The poets of historical or fabulous narrative belong to another class. Of these the earliest is Daniel, whose minor poems fall partly within the sixteenth century. His History of the Civil Wars between York and Lancaster, a poem in eight books, was published in 1604. Faithfully adhering to truth, which he does not suffer so much as an ornamental episode to interrupt, and equally studious to avoid the bolder figures of poetry, it is not surprising that Daniel should be little read. It is indeed certain that much Italian and Spanish poetry, even by those whose name has once stood rather high, depends chiefly upon merits which he abundantly possesses, a smoothness of rhythm, and a lucid narration in simple language. But that which from the natural delight in sweet sound is enough to content the ear in the southern tongues, will always seem bald and tame in our less harmonious verse. It is the chief praise of Daniel, and must have contributed to what popularity he enjoyed in his own age, that his English is eminently pure, free from affectation of archaism and from pedantic innovation, with very little that is now obsolete. Both in prose and in poetry, he is, as to language, among the best writers of his time, and wanted but a greater confidence in his own power, or, to speak less indulgently, a greater share of it, to sustain his correct taste, calm sense, and moral feeling.

|Drayton’s Polyolbion.|

44. Next to Daniel in time, and much above him in reach of mind, we place Michael Drayton, whose Baron’s Wars have been mentioned under the preceding period, but whose more famous work was published partly in 1613 and partly in 1622. Drayton’s Polyolbion is a poem of about 30,000 lines in length, written in Alexandrine couplets, a measure, from its monotony, and perhaps from its frequency in doggerel ballads, not at all pleasing to the ear. It contains a topographical description of England, illustrated with a prodigality of historical and legendary erudition. Such a poem is essentially designed to instruct, and speaks to the understanding more than to the fancy. The powers displayed in it are, however, of a high cast. It has generally been a difficulty with poets to deal with a necessary enumeration of proper names. The catalogue of ships is not the most delightful part of the Iliad, and Ariosto never encounters such a roll of persons or places without sinking into the tamest insipidity. Virgil is splendidly beautiful upon similar occasions; but his decorative elegance could not be preserved, nor would continue to please in a poem that kept up through a great length the effort to furnish instruction. The style of Drayton is sustained, with extraordinary ability, on an equable line, from which he seldom much deviates, neither brilliant nor prosaic; few or no passages could be marked as impressive, but few are languid or mean. The language is clear, strong, various, and sufficiently figurative; the stories and fictions interspersed, as well as the general spirit and liveliness, relieve the heaviness incident to topographical description. There is probably no poem of this kind in any other language, comparable together in extent and excellence to the Polyolbion; nor can any one read a portion of it without admiration for its learned and highly gifted author. Yet, perhaps, no English poem, known as well by name, is so little known beyond its name; for while its immense length deters the common reader, it affords, as has just been hinted, no great harvest for selection, and would be judged very unfairly by partial extracts. It must be owned also that geography and antiquities may, in modern times, be taught better in prose than in verse; yet, whoever consults the Polyolbion for such objects, will probably be repaid by petty knowledge which he may not have found anywhere else.

|Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals.|

45. Among these historical poets I should incline to class William Browne, author of a poem with the quaint title of Britannia’s Pastorals, though his story, one of little interest, seems to have been invented by himself. Browne indeed is of no distinct school among the writers of that age; he seems to recognise Spenser as his master, but his own manner is more to be traced among later than earlier poets. He was a native of Devonshire; and his principal poem, above-mentioned, relating partly to the local scenery of that county, was printed in 1613. Browne is truly a poet full of imagination, grace, and sweetness, though not very nervous or rapid. I know not why Headley, favourable enough for the most part to this generation of the sons of song, has spoken of Browne with unfair contempt. Justice, however, has been done to him by later critics.[492] But I have not observed that they take notice of what is remarkable in the history of our poetical literature, that Browne is an early model of ease and variety in the regular couplet. Many passages in his unequal poem are hardly excelled by the fables of Dryden. It is manifest that Milton was well acquainted with the writings of Browne.

[492] “Browne,” Mr. Southey says, “is a poet who produced no
slight effect upon his contemporaries. George Wither in his
happiest pieces has learned the manner of his friend, and Milton
may be traced to him. And in our days his peculiarities have been
caught, and his beauties imitated, by men who will themselves
find admirers and imitators hereafter.” “His poetry,” Mr.
Campbell, a far less indulgent judge of the older bards,
observes, “is not without beauty; but it is the beauty of mere
landscape and allegory, without the manners and passions that
constitute human interest.” Specimens of English Poetry, iv. 323.

|Sir John Beaumont.|

46. The commendation of improving the rhythm of the couplet is due also to Sir John Beaumont, author of a short poem on the battle of Bosworth Field. It was not written, however, so early as the Britannia’s Pastorals of Browne. In other respects it has no pretensions to a high rank. But it may be added that a poem of Drummond on the visit of James I. to Scotland, in 1617, is perfectly harmonious; and what is very remarkable in that age, he concludes the verse at every couplet with the regularity of Pope.

|Davenant’s Gondibert.|

47. Far unlike the poem of Browne was Gondibert, published by Sir William Davenant in 1650. It may probably have been reckoned by himself an epic: but in that age the practice of Spain and Italy had effaced the distinction between the regular epic and the heroic romance. Gondibert belongs rather to the latter class by the entire want of truth in the story, though the scene is laid at the court of the Lombard kings, by the deficiency of unity in the action, by the intricacy of the events, and by the resources of the fable, which are sometimes too much in the style of comic fiction. It is so imperfect, only two books and part of the third being completed, that we can hardly judge of the termination it was to receive. Each book, however, after the manner of Spenser, is divided into several cantos. It contains about 6,000 lines. The metre is the four-lined stanza of alternate rhymes; one capable of great vigour, but not perhaps well adapted to poetry of imagination or of passion. These, however, Davenant exhibits but sparingly in Gondibert; they are replaced by a philosophical spirit, in the tone of Sir John Davies, who had adopted the same metre, and, as some have thought, nourished by the author’s friendly intercourse with Hobbes. Gondibert is written in a clear, nervous, English style; its condensation produces some obscurity, but pedantry, at least that of language, will rarely be found in it, and Davenant is less infected by the love of conceit and of extravagance than his contemporaries, though I would not assert that he is wholly exempt from the former blemish. But the chief praise of Gondibert is for masculine verse in a good metrical cadence; for the sake of which we may forgive the absence of interest in the story, and even of those glowing words and breathing thoughts which are the soul of genuine poetry. Gondibert is very little read; yet it is better worth reading than the Purple Island, though it may have less of that which distinguishes a poet from another man.

|Sonnets of Shakspeare.|

48. The sonnets of Shakspeare, for we now come to the minor, that is, the shorter and more lyric, poetry of the age, were published in 1609, in a manner as mysterious as their subject and contents. They are dedicated by an editor (Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller) “to Mr. W. H., the only begetter of these sonnets.”[493] No one, as far as I remember, has ever doubted their genuineness; no one can doubt that they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart; but when they were written, who was the W. H., quaintly called their begetter, by which we can only understand the cause of their being written, and to what persons or circumstances they allude, has of late years been the subject of much curiosity. These sonnets were long overlooked; Steevens spoke of them with the utmost scorn, as productions which no one could read; but a very different suffrage is generally given by the lovers of poetry, and perhaps there is now a tendency, especially among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of these remarkable productions. They rise, indeed, in estimation as we attentively read and reflect upon them; for I do not think that at first they give us much pleasure. No one ever entered more fully than Shakspeare into the character of this species of poetry, which admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line. But though each sonnet has generally its proper unity, the sense, I do not mean the grammatical construction, will sometimes be found to spread from one to another, independently of that repetition of the leading idea, like variations of an air, which a series of them frequently exhibits, and on account of which they have latterly been reckoned by some rather an integral poem than a collection of sonnets. But this is not uncommon among the Italians, and belongs in fact to those of Petrarch himself. They may easily be resolved into several series according to their subjects;[494] but when read attentively, we find them relate to one definite, though obscure, period of the poet’s life; in which an attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic character, and so extravagant in the phrases that the author uses, as to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work. It is true that in the poetry as well as in the fictions of early ages, we find a more ardent tone of affection in the language of friendship than has since been usual; and yet no instance has been adduced of such rapturous devotedness, such an idolatry of admiring love, as the greatest being whom nature ever produced in the human form, pours forth to some unknown youth in the majority of these sonnets.

[493] The precise words of the dedication are the following:

To the only Begetter
Of these ensuing sonnets
Mr. W. H.
All Happiness
And that eternity promised
By our ever living poet
Wisheth the
Well-wishing Adventurer
In setting forth
T. T.

The title page runs: Shakspeare’s Sonnets, never before
imprinted, 4to, 1609. G. Eld for T. T.

[494] This has been done in a late publication, “Shakspeare’s
Autobiographical poems, by George Armitage Brown” (1838). It
might have occurred to any attentive reader, but I do not know
that the analysis was ever so completely made before, though
almost every one has been aware that different persons are
addressed in the former and latter part of the sonnets. Mr.
Brown’s work did not fall into my hands till nearly the time that
these sheets passed through the press, which I mention on account
of some coincidences of opinion, especially as to Shakspeare’s
knowledge of Latin.

|The person whom they address.|

49. The notion that a woman was their general object is totally untenable, and it is strange that Coleridge should have entertained it.[495] Those that were evidently addressed to a woman, the person above hinted, are by much the smaller part of the whole, but twenty-eight out of one hundred and fifty-four. And this mysterious Mr. W. H. must be presumed to be the idolised friend of Shakspeare. But who could he be? No one recorded in literary history or anecdote answers the description. But if we seize a clue which innumerable passages give us, and suppose that they allude to a youth of high rank as well as personal beauty and accomplishment, in whose favour and intimacy, according to the base prejudices of the world, a player and a poet, though he were the author of Macbeth, might be thought honoured, something of the strangeness, as it appears to us, of Shakspeare’s humiliation in addressing him as a being before whose feet he crouched, whose frown he feared, whose injuries, and those of the most insulting kind, the seduction of the mistress to whom we have alluded, he felt and bewailed without resenting; something, I say, of the strangeness of this humiliation, and at best it is but little, may be lightened and in a certain sense rendered intelligible. And it has been ingeniously conjectured within a few years by inquirers independent of each other, that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, born in 1580, and afterwards a man of noble and gallant character, though always of a licentious life, was shadowed under the initials of Mr. W. H. This hypothesis is not strictly proved, but sufficiently so, in my opinion, to demand our assent.[496]

[495] “It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from
a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one
sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed
blind.” Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 180. This sonnet the editor
supposes to be the twentieth, which certainly could not have been
addressed to a woman; but the proof is equally strong as to most
of the rest. Coleridge’s opinion is absolutely untenable; nor do
I conceive that any one else is likely to maintain it after
reading the sonnets of Shakspeare; but to those who have not done
this the authority may justly seem imposing.

[496] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1832, p. 217, et post, it
will be seen that this occurred both to Mr. Boaden and Mr.
Heywood Bright. And it does not appear that Mr. Brown, author of
the work above-quoted, had any knowledge of their priority.

Drake has fixed on Lord Southampton as the object of these
sonnets, induced probably by the tradition of his friendship with
Shakspeare, and by the latter’s having dedicated to him his Venus
and Adonis, as well as by what is remarkable on the face of the
series of sonnets, that Shakspeare looked up to his friend “with
reverence and homage.” But, unfortunately, this was only the
reverence and homage of an inferior to one of high rank, and not
such as the virtues of Southampton might have challenged. Proofs
of the low moral character of “Mr. W. H.” are continual. It was
also impossible that Lord Southampton could be called “beauteous
and lovely youth,” or “sweet boy.” Mrs. Jameson, in her “Loves of
the Poets,” has adopted the same hypothesis, but is forced in
consequence to suppose some of the earlier sonnets to be
addressed to a woman.

Pembroke succeeded to his father in 1601: I incline to think that
the sonnets were written about that time, some probably earlier,
some later. That they were the same as Meres, in 1598, has
mentioned among the compositions of Shakspeare, his “sugred
sonnets among his private friends,” I do not believe, both on
account of the date, and from the peculiarly personal allusions
they contain.

50. Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets, the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host of other passages attest the contrary.

|Sonnets of Drummond and others.|

51. The sonnets of Drummond, of Hawthornden, the most celebrated in that class of poets, have obtained, probably, as much praise as they deserve.[497] But they are polished and elegant, free from conceit and bad taste, in pure, unblemished English; some are pathetic or tender in sentiment, and if they do not show much originality, at least would have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the sixteenth century. Those of Daniel, of Drayton, and of Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, are perhaps hardly inferior. Some may doubt, however, whether the last poet should be placed on such a level.[498] But the difficulty of finding the necessary rhymes in our language has caused most who have attempted the sonnet to swerve from laws which cannot be transgressed, at least to the degree they have often dared, without losing the unity for which that complex mechanism was contrived. Certainly, three quatrains of alternate rhymes, succeeded by a couplet, which Drummond, like many other English poets, has sometimes given us, is the very worst form of the sonnet, even if, in deference to a scanty number of Italian precedents, we allow it to pass as a sonnet at all.[499] We possess, indeed, noble poetry in the form of sonnet; yet with us it seems more fitted for grave than amatory composition; in the latter we miss the facility and grace of our native English measures, the song, the madrigal, or the ballad.

[497] I concur in this with Mr. Campbell, iv., 343. Mr. Southey
thinks Drummond “has deserved the high reputation he has
obtained;” which seems to say the same thing, but is, in fact,
different. He observes that Drummond “frequently borrows and
sometimes translates from the Italian and Spanish poets.”
Southey’s British Poets, p. 798. The furious invective of Gifford
against Drummond, for having written private memoranda of his
conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did not publish, and
which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is absurd.
Anyone else would have been thankful for so much literary
anecdote.

[498] Lord Stirling is rather monotonous, as sonnetteers usually
are, and he addresses his mistress by the appellation, “Fair
tygress.” Campbell observes that there is elegance of expression
in a few of Stirling’s shorter pieces. Vol. iv., p. 206. The
longest poem of Stirling is entitled Domesday, in twelve books,
or, as he calls them, hours. It is written in the Italian octave
stanza, and has somewhat of the condensed style of the
philosophical school, which he seems to have imitated, but his
numbers are harsh.

[499] The legitimate sonnet consists of two quatrains and two
tercets; as much skill, to say the least, is required for the
management of the latter as of the former. The rhymes of the last
six lines are capable of many arrangements; but by far the worst,
and also the least common in Italy, is that we usually adopt, the
fifth and sixth rhyming together, frequently after a full pause,
so that the sonnet ends with the point of an epigram. The best
form, as the Italians hold, is the rhyming together of the three
uneven, and the three even lines; but as our language is less
rich in consonant terminations, there can be no objection to what
has abundant precedents even in theirs, the rhyming of the first
and fourth, second and fifth, third and sixth lines. This, with a
break in the sense at the third line, will make a real sonnet,
which Shakspeare, Milton, Bowles, and Wordsworth have often
failed to give us, even where they have given us something good
instead.

|Carew.|

52. Carew is the most celebrated among the lighter poets, though no collection has hitherto embraced his entire writings. Headley has said, and Ellis echoes the praise, that “Carew has the ease without the pedantry of Waller, and perhaps less conceit. Waller is too exclusively considered as the first man who brought versification to anything like its present standard. Carew’s pretensions to the same merit are seldom sufficiently either considered or allowed.” Yet, in point of versification, others of the same age seem to have surpassed Carew, whose lines are often very harmonious, but not so artfully constructed or so uniformly pleasing as those of Waller. He is remarkably unequal; the best of his little poems (none of more than thirty lines are good), excel all of his time; but, after a few lines of great beauty, we often come to some ill-expressed or obscure, or weak, or inharmonious passage. Few will hesitate to acknowledge that he has more fancy and more tenderness than Waller, but less choice, less judgment and knowledge where to stop, less of the equability which never offends, less attention to the unity and thread of his little pieces. I should hesitate to give him, on the whole, the preference as a poet, taking collectively the attributes of that character; for we must not, in such a comparison, overlook a good deal of very inferior merit which may be found in the short volume of Carew’s poems. The best has great beauty, but he has had, in late criticism, his full share of applause. Two of his most pleasing little poems appear also among those of Herrick; and as Carew’s were, I believe, published posthumously, I am rather inclined to prefer the claim of the other poet, independently of some internal evidence as to one of them. In all ages, these very short compositions circulate, for a time, in polished society, while mistakes as to the real author are natural.[500]

[500] One of these poems begins, “Amongst the myrtles as I
walked, Love and my sighs thus intertalked.” Herrick wants four
good lines which are in Carew; and as they are rather more likely
to have been interpolated than left out, this leads to a sort of
inference that he was the original; there are also some other
petty improvements. The second poem is that beginning, “Ask me
why I send you here, This firstling of the infant year.” Herrick
gives the second line strangely, “This sweet infanta of the
year,” which is little else than nonsense; and all the other
variances are for the worse. I must leave it in doubt, whether he
borrowed, and disfigured a little, or was himself improved upon.
I must own that he has a trick of spoiling what he takes.
Suckling has an incomparable image, on a lady dancing.

Her feet beneath the petticoat,
_Like little mice_, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light--.

Herrick has it thus:--

Her pretty feet, _like snails_, did creep
A little out.

A most singular parallel for an elegant dancer.

|Ben Jonson.|

53. The minor poetry of Ben Jonson is extremely beautiful. This is partly mixed with his masques and interludes, poetical and musical rather than dramatic pieces, and intended to gratify the imagination by the charms of song, as well as by the varied scenes that were brought before the eye; partly in very short effusions of a single sentiment, among which two epitaphs are known by heart. Jonson possessed an admirable taste and feeling in poetry, which his dramas, except the Sad Shepherd, do not entirely lead us to value highly enough; and when we consider how many other intellectual excellencies distinguished him, wit, observation, judgment, memory, learning, we must acknowledge that the inscription on his tomb, O rare Ben Jonson! is not more pithy than it is true.

|Wither.|

54. George Wither, by siding with the less poetical, though more prosperous party in the civil war, and by a profusion of temporary writings to serve the ends of faction and folly, has left a name which we were accustomed to despise, till Ellis did justice to “that playful fancy, pure taste, and artless delicacy of sentiment which distinguish the poetry of his early youth.” His best poems were published in 1622 with the title “Mistress of Philarete.” Some of them are highly beautiful, and bespeak a mind above the grovelling puritanism into which he afterwards fell. I think there is hardly anything in our lyric poetry of this period equal to Wither’s lines on his Muse, published by Ellis.[501]

[501] Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Poets, iii. 96.

|Habington.|

|Earl of Pembroke.|

55. The poetry of Habington is that of a pure and amiable mind, turned to versification by the custom of the age, during a real passion for a lady of birth and virtue, the Castara whom he afterwards married; but it displays no great original power, nor is it by any means exempt from the ordinary blemishes of hyperbolical compliment and far-fetched imagery. The poems of William Earl of Pembroke, long known by the character drawn for him by Clarendon, and now as the object of Shakspeare’s doting friendship, were ushered into the world after his death, with a letter of extravagant flattery addressed by Donne to Christiana Countess of Devonshire.[502] But there is little reliance to be placed on the freedom from interpolation of these posthumous editions. Among these poems attributed to Lord Pembroke, we find one of the best known of Carew’s,[503] and even the famous lines addressed to the Soul, which some have given to Silvester. The poems, in general, are of little merit; some are grossly indecent; nor would they be mentioned here except for the interest recently attached to the author’s name. But they throw no light whatever on the sonnets of Shakspeare.

[502] The only edition that I have seen, or that I find
mentioned, of Lord Pembroke’s poems is in 1660. But as Donne died
in 1631, I conceive that there must be one of earlier date. The
Countess of Devonshire is not called dowager; her husband died in
1643.

[503]
Ask me no more whither do stray
The golden atoms of the day.

|Suckling.|

|Lovelace.|

56. Sir John Suckling is acknowledged to have left far behind him all former writers of song in gaiety and ease; it is not equally clear that he has ever since been surpassed. His poetry aims at no higher praise; he shows no sentiment or imagination, either because he had them not, or because he did not require either in the style he chose. Perhaps the Italians may have poetry in that style equal to Suckling’s; I do not know that they have, nor do I believe that there is any in French; that there is none in Latin I know.[504] Lovelace is chiefly known by a single song; his other poetry is much inferior; and indeed it may be generally remarked that the flowers of our early verse, both in the Elizabethan and the subsequent age, have been well culled by good taste and a friendly spirit of selection. We must not judge of them, or shall judge of them very favourably, by the extracts of Headley or Ellis.

[504] Suckling’s Epithalamium, though not written for those “Qui
Musas colitis severiores,” has been read by almost all the world,
and is a matchless piece of liveliness and facility.

|Herrick.|

57. The most amorous, and among the best of our amorous poets was Robert Herrick, a clergyman ejected from his living in Devonshire by the long parliament, whose “Hesperides, or Poems Human and Divine,” were published in 1648. Herrick’s divine poems are of course such as might be presumed by their title and by his calling; of his human, which are poetically much superior, and probably written in early life, the greater portion is light and voluptuous, while some border on the licentious and indecent. A selection was published in 1815, by which, as commonly happens, the poetical fame of Herrick does not suffer; a number of dull epigrams are omitted, and the editor has a manifest preference for what must be owned to be the most elegant and attractive part of his author’s rhymes. He has much of the lively grace that distinguishes Anacreon and Catullus, and approaches also, with a less cloying monotony, to the Basia of Joannes Secundus. Herrick has as much variety as the poetry of kisses can well have; but his love is in a very slight degree that of sentiment, or even any intense passion; his mistresses have little to recommend them, even in his own eyes, save their beauties, and none of these are omitted in his catalogues. Yet he is abundant in the resources of verse; without the exuberant gaiety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults of his age are sometimes apparent; though he is not often obscure, he runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into occasional pedantry; he has his conceits and false thoughts, but these are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams) which may be praised without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry.

|Milton.|

58. John Milton was born in 1609. Few are ignorant of his life, in recovering and recording every circumstance of which no diligence has been spared, nor has it often been unsuccessful. Of his Latin poetry some was written at the age of seventeen; in English we have nothing, I believe, the date of which is known to be earlier than the sonnet on entering his twenty-third year. In 1634, he wrote Comus, which was published in 1637. Lycidas was written in the latter year, and most of his shorter pieces soon afterwards, except the sonnets, some of which do not come within the first half of the century.

|His Comus.|

59. Comus was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a different school from his contemporaries. Many of them had produced highly beautiful and imaginative passages; but none had evinced so classical a judgment, none had aspired to so regular a perfection Jonson had learned much from the ancients; but there was a grace in their best models which he did not quite attain. Neither his Sad Shepherd nor the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher have the elegance or dignity of Comus. A noble virgin and her young brothers, by whom this masque was originally represented, required an elevation, a purity, a sort of severity of sentiment which no one in that age could have given but Milton. He avoided, and nothing loth, the more festive notes which dramatic poetry was wont to mingle with its serious strain. But for this he compensated by the brightest hues of fancy and the sweetest melody of song. In Comus we find nothing prosaic or feeble, no false taste in the incidents and not much in the language, nothing over which we should desire to pass on a second perusal. The want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to the imagination.

|Lycidas.|