Front matter (continued 11)

These manuscripts were now delivered up to the archbishop, who placed them in the hands of the learned Dr. Spenser to put into order; he was an intimate friend of Hooker, and long conversant with his arguments. However, as this scholar was deeply occupied in the translation of the Bible, he entrusted the papers to a student at Oxford, Henry Jackson, a votary of the departed genius.

On the decease of Dr. Spenser, the manuscripts of Hooker were left as “a precious legacy” to Dr. King, bishop of London, in 1611. They were resigned with the most painful reluctance by the speculative and ingenious student to whom they had been so long entrusted, that he looked on them with a parental eye, having transcribed them and put many things together according to his idea of the system of Hooker.3 During the time the manuscripts reposed in the care of the bishop of London, an edition of the five books of the “Ecclesiastical Polity,” with some tractates and sermons, was published in 1617;4 had Dr. King thought that these manuscripts were in a state fitted for publication, he would have doubtless completed that edition. He died in 1621, and the manuscripts were claimed by Archbishop Abbot for the Lambeth library.

Again, in 1632, the five undoubted genuine books were reprinted. Laud, then archbishop of Canterbury, attracted probably by this edition, examined the papers—he was startled by some antagonist principles, and left the phantom to sleep in its darkness; whether some doctrines which broadly inculcate jure divino were touches from the Lambeth quarter, or whether the interpolating hand of some presbyter had insidiously turned aside the weapon, the conflicting opinions could not be those of the judicious Hooker.

But their fate and their perils had not yet terminated; the episcopalian walls of Lambeth were no longer an asylum, when the manuscripts of Hooker were to be grasped by the searching hands and heads of Prynne and Hugh Peters, by a vote of the Commons! At this critical period the sixth and eighth books were given to the world, announced as “a work long expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies.” We are told of six transcripts with which this edition was collated. It is perplexing to understand when these copies got forth, and how they were all alike deficient in the seventh book, which the setter forth of this edition declares to be irrecoverable. After the Restoration, Dr. Gauden made an edition of Hooker; in the dedication to the king he offers the work as “now augmented and I hope completed, with the three last books, so much desired and so long concealed.” This remarkable expression indicates some doubt whether he possessed the perfect copies, nor does he inform us of the manner in which he had recovered the lost seventh book. The recent able editor of the works of Hooker favours its genuineness by internal evidence, notwithstanding it bears marks of hasty writing; but he irresistibly proves that the sixth book is wholly lost, that which is named the sixth being never designed as a part of the “Ecclesiastical Polity.”

Both the great parties are justly entitled to suspect one another; a helping hand was prompt to twist the nose of wax to their favourite shape; and the transcripts had always omissions, and we may add, commissions. Some copies of the concluding book asserted that “Princes on earth are only accountable to Heaven,” while others read “to the people.” We perceive the facility of such slight emendations, and may be astonished at their consequences; but we need not question the hands which furnished the various readings. When we recollect the magnificent entrance into the work, we must smile at the inconclusive conclusion, the small issue from so vast an edifice. “Too rigorous it were that the breach of human law should be held a deadly sin. A mean there is between extremities, if so be that we can find it out.” Never was the juste milieu suggested with such hopeless diffidence. Such was not the tone, nor could be the words, of our eloquent and impressive Hooker. From the first conception of his system, his comprehensive intellect had surveyed all its parts, and the intellectual architecture was completed before the edifice was constructed. This admirable secret in the labour of a single work, on which many years were to be consumed, our author has himself revealed to us; a secret which may be a lesson. “I have endeavoured that every former part might give strength unto all that follow, and every latter bring some light unto all before; so that if the judgments of men do but hold themselves in suspense, as touching the first more general meditations, till in order they have perused the rest that ensue, what may seem dark at the first will afterwards be found more plain, even as the latter particular decisions will appear, I doubt not, more strong, when the other have been read before.”5 Here we have an allusion to a noble termination of his system.

This great work of Hooker strictly is theological, but here it is considered simply as a work of literature and philosophy. The first book lays open the foundations of law and order, to escape from “the mother of confusion which breedeth destruction. The lowest must be knit to the highest.” We may read this first book as we read the reflections of Burke on the French revolution; where what is peculiar, or partial, or erroneous in the writer does not interfere with the general principles of the more profound views of human policy. And it is remarkable that during the anarchical misrule of France, when all governments seemed alike unstable, some one who had not wholly lost his senses among those raving politicians, published separately this first book of Ecclesiastical Polity; a timely admonition, however, alas! timeless! I was not surprised to find classed among “Legal Bibliography” the works of Hooker.

The fate of those controversies which in reality admit of no argument, is singularly exemplified in the history of this great work. These are the controversies where the parties apparently going the same course, and intent on the same object, but impelled by opposite principles, can never unite; like two parallel lines, they may run on together, but remain at the same distance, though they should extend themselves to infinity. Opposite propositions are assigned by each party, or from the same premises are educed opposite inferences. In the present case both parties inquired after a model for church-government; there was none! Apostolical Christianity had hardly left the old synagogue. Hooker therefore asserted that the form of church-government was merely a human institution regulated by laws; and that laws were not made for private men to dispute, but to obey. The nonconformist urged the Protestant right of private judgment and a satisfied conscience. Hooker, alarmed at this irruption of schisms, to maintain established authority, or rather supremacy, was driven to take refuge in the very argument which the Romanist used with the Protestant.

The elaborate preface of Hooker is a tract of itself; it is the secret history of nonconformity, and of the fiery Calvin. Yet was it from positions here laid down that James the Second declared that it was one of the two books which sent him back to the fold of Rome. It is not therefore surprising that when a part was eagerly translated by an English Romanist to his Holiness, who had declared that “he had never met with an English book whose writer deserved the name of an author!”—so low then stood our literature in the eyes of the foreigner,—that the Pope perceived nothing anti-papal in the eloquent advocate of established authority, while he was deeply struck at the profundity of the genius of “a poor obscure English priest;” and the bishop of Rome exclaimed, “There is no learning that this man has not searched into; nothing too hard for his understanding, and his books will get reverence by age.” Our James the First, who it must be allowed was no ordinary judge of polemics, on his arrival in England inquired after Hooker, and was informed that his recent death had been deeply lamented by the queen. “And I receive it with no less sorrow,” observed the new English monarch, “for I have received more satisfaction in reading a leaf in Mr. Hooker than I have had in large treatises by many of the learned: many others write well, but yet in the next age they will be forgotten.”

The attestations of his Holiness and our James the First, to some of my readers, may appear very suspicious. They are, however, prophetic; and this is an evidence that the “Ecclesiastical Polity” must contain principles more deeply important than those which might more particularly have been grateful to these regal critics. Our sage, it is true, has not escaped from a severer scrutiny, and has been taxed as “too apt to acquiesce in all ancient tenets.” What was transitory, or what was partial, in this great work, may be subtracted without injury to its excellence or its value. Hooker has written what posterity reads. The spirit of a later age, progressive in ameliorating the imperfect condition of all human institutions, must often return to pause over the first book of “Ecclesiastical Polity,” where the master-genius has laid the foundations and searched into the nature of all laws whatever. Hooker is the first vernacular writer whose classical pen harmonised a numerous prose. While his earnest eloquence, freed from all scholastic pedantry, assumed a style stately in its structure, his gentle spirit sometimes flows into natural humour, lovely in the freshness of its simplicity.

1 When our literary history was only partially cultivated, the readers of Hooker were often disturbed amidst the profound reasonings of “The Ecclesiastical Polity,” by frequent references to volumes and pages of T. C. The editors of Hooker had thrown no light on these mysterious initials. Contemporaries are not apt to mortify themselves by recollecting that what is familiar to them may be forgotten by the succeeding age. Sir John Hawkins, a literary antiquary, drew up a memoir which explains these initials as those of Thomas Cartwright, and has correctly arranged the numerous tracts of the whole controversy. But Hawkins having consigned this accurate catalogue to “The Antiquarian Repertory,” it could be little known; and Beloe, in his “Anecdotes of Literature,” vol. i., transcribing the entire memoir of Hawkins, verbatim, without the slightest acknowledgment, obtains a credit for original research. Beloe is referred to for this authentic information by Burnet, in his “Specimens of English Prose-Writers.”

2 Both these papers of Travers and Hooker are preserved in Hooker’s Works. Many curious points are discussed by Hooker with admirable reasoning. The divinity of Hooker, who is the firm advocate of legal authority, is enlightened and tolerant; while Travers, who advocated unrestrained personal freedom, is in his divinity narrow and merciless. He sees only “the Elect,” and he casts human nature into the flames of eternity.

3 “A studious and cynical person, who never expected or desired more than his small preferment. He was a great admirer of Richard Hooker, and collected some of his small treatises.”—Athenæ Oxonienses.

4 Anthony Wood has said it contained all the eight books, (followed by General Dictionary and Biographia Britannica,) and accused Gauden of pretending to publish three books for the first time in 1662.

5 “Ecclesiastical Polity,” book First.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

Were I another Baillet, solely occupied in collecting the “jugemens des sçavans”—the decisions of the learned—the name of Sir Philip Sidney would bring forth an awful crash of criticism, rarely equalled in dissonance and confusion.

He who first ventured to pronounce a final condemnation on “The Arcadia” of Sir Philip Sidney as a “tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance,” was Horace Walpole;—a decision suited to the heartlessness which wounded the personal qualities of an heroic man, the pride of a proud age. Have modern critics too often caught the watchword when given out by an imposing character? The irregular Hazlitt honestly confides to us, in an agony of despair, that “Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste,” tormented by a conviction that a taste should be acquired. The peculiar style of this critic is at once sparkling and vehement, antithetical and metaphysical. The volcano of his criticism heaves; the short, irruptive periods clash with quick repercussion; the lava flows over his pages, till it leaves us in the sudden darkness of an hypercriticism on “the celebrated description of the ‘Arcadia.’”

Gifford, once the Coryphæus of modern criticism, whose native shrewdness admirably fitted him for a partisan, both in politics and in literature, did not deem Walpole’s depreciation of Sidney “to be without a certain degree of justice; the plan is poor, the incidents trite, the style pedantic.” But our prudential critic harbours himself in some security by confessing to “some nervous and elegant passages.”

At our northern Athens, the native coldness has touched the leaves of “The Arcadia” like a frost in spring. The agreeable researcher into the history of fiction confesses the graceful beauty of the language, but considers the whole as “extremely tiresome.” Another critic states a more alarming paroxysm of criticism, that of being “lulled to sleep over the interminable ‘Arcadia.’”

What innocent lover of books does not imagine that “The Arcadia” of Sidney is a volume deserted by every reader, and only to be classed among the folio romances of the Scuderies, or the unmeaning pastorals whose scenes are placed in the golden age? But such is not the fact. “Nobody, it is said, reads ‘The Arcadia;’ we have known very many persons who read it, men, women, and children, and never knew one read it without deep interest and admiration,” exclaims an animated critic, probably the poet Southey.1 More recent votaries have approached the altar of this creation of romance.

It may be well to remind the reader that, although this volume, in the revolutions of times and tastes, has had the fate to be depreciated by modern critics, it has passed through fourteen editions, suffered translations in every European language, and is not yet sunk among the refuse of the bibliopolists. “The Arcadia” was long, and it may still remain, the haunt of the poetical tribe. Sidney was one of those writers whom Shakespeare not only studied but imitated in his scenes, copied his language, and transferred his ideas.2 Shirley, Beaumont and Fletcher, and our early dramatists turned to “The Arcadia” as their text-book. Sidney enchanted two later brothers in Waller and Cowley; and the dispassionate Sir William Temple was so struck by “The Arcadia,” that he found “the true spirit of the vein of ancient poetry in Sidney.” The world of fashion in Sidney’s age culled their phrases out of “The Arcadia,” which served them as a complete “Academy of Compliments.”

The reader who concludes that “The Arcadia” of Sidney is a pedantic pastoral, has received a very erroneous conception of the work. It was unfortunate for Sidney that he borrowed the title of “The Arcadia” from Sannazaro, which has caused his work to be classed among pastoral romances, which it nowise resembles; the pastoral part stands wholly separated from the romance itself, and is only found in an interlude of shepherds at the close of each book; dancing brawls, or reciting verses, they are not agents in the fiction. The censure of pedantry ought to have been restricted to the attempt of applying the Roman prosody to English versification, the momentary folly of the day, and to some other fancies of putting verse to the torture.

“The Arcadia” was not one of those spurious fictions invented at random, where an author has little personal concern in the narrative he forms.

When we forget the singularity of the fable, and the masquerade dresses of the actors, we pronounce them to be real personages, and that the dramatic style distinctly conveys to us incidents which, however veiled, had occurred to the poet’s own observation, as we perceive that the scenes which he has painted with such precision must have been localities. The characters are minutely analyzed, and so correctly preserved, that their interior emotions are painted forth in their gestures as well as revealed in their language. The author was himself the tender lover whose amorous griefs he touched with such delicacy, and the undoubted child of chivalry he drew; and in these finer passions he seems only to have multiplied himself.

The manners of the court of Elizabeth were still chivalric; and Sidney was trained in the discipline of those generous spirits whom he has nobly described as men of “high-erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy.” Hume has censured these “affectations, conceits, and fopperies,” as well became the philosopher of the Canongate; but there was a reality in this shadow of chivalry. Amadis de Gaul himself never surpassed the chivalrous achievements of the Earl of Essex; his life, indeed, would form the finest of romances, could it be written. He challenged the governor of Corunna to single combat for the honour of the nation, and proposed to encounter Villars, governor of Rouen, on foot or on horseback. And thus run his challenge:—“I will maintain the justice of the cause of Henry the Fourth of France, against the league; and that I am a better man than thou, and that my mistress is more beautiful than thine.” This was the very language and the deed of one of the Paladins. It was this spirit, fantastic as it may appear to us, which stirred Sidney, when Parsons the Jesuit, or some one who lay concealed in a dark corner of the court, sent forth anonymously the famous state-libel of “Leicester’s Commonwealth.” To the unknown libeller who had reflected on the origin of the Dudleys, that “the Duke of Northumberland was not born a gentleman,” Sir Philip Sidney, in the loftiest tone of chivalry, designed to send a cartel of defiance. Touched to the quick in any blur in the Stemmata Dudleiana, which, it is said, occupied the poet Spenser when under the princely roof of Leicester, Sidney exclaims, “I am a Dudley in blood, that Duke’s daughter’s son; my chief honour is to be a Dudley, and truly am I glad to have cause to set forth the nobility of that blood; none but this fellow of invincible shamelessness could ever have called so palpable a matter in question.” He closed with the intention of printing at London a challenge which he designed all Europe to witness. “Because that thou the writer hereof doth most falsely lay want of gentry to my dead ancestors, I say that thou therein liest in thy throat, which I will be ready to justify upon thee in any place of Europe where thou wilt assign me a free place of coming, as within three months after the publishing thereof I may understand thy mind. And this which I write, I would send to thine own hands if I knew thee; but I trust it cannot be intended that he should be ignorant of this printed in London, who knows the very whisperings of the Privy-chamber.”3

We, who are otherwise accustomed to anonymous libels, may be apt to conclude that there was something fantastical in sending forth a challenge through all Europe:—we, who are content with the obscure rencontre of a morning, and with the lucky chance of an exchange of shots.

The narrative of “The Arcadia” is peculiar; but if the reader’s fortitude can yield up his own fancy to the feudal poet, he will find the tales diversified. Sidney had traced the vestiges of feudal warfare in Germany, in Italy, and in France; those wars of petty states where the walled city was oftener carried by stratagem than by storm, and where the chivalrous heroes, like champions, stepped forth to challenge each other in single combat, almost as often as they were viewed as generals at the head of their armies. Our poet’s battles have all the fierceness and the hurry of action, as if told by one who had stood in the midst of the battle-field; and in his “shipwreck,” men fight with the waves, ere they are flung on the shore, as if the observer had sat on the summit of a cliff watching them.

He describes objects on which he loves to dwell with a peculiar richness of fancy; he had shivered his lance in the tilt, and had managed the fiery courser in his career; that noble animal was a frequent object of his favourite descriptions; he looks even on the curious and fanciful ornaments of its caparisons; and in the vivid picture of the shock between two knights, we see distinctly every motion of the horse and the horseman.4 But sweet is his loitering hour in the sunshine of luxuriant gardens, or as we lose ourselves in the green solitudes of the forests which most he loves. His poetic eye was pictorial; and the delineations of objects, both in art and nature, might be transferred to the canvas.

There is a feminine delicacy in whatever alludes to the female character, not merely courtly, but imbued with that sensibility which St. Palaye has remarkably described as “full of refinement and fanaticism.” And this may suggest an idea not improbable, that Shakespeare drew his fine conceptions of the female character from Sidney. Shakespeare solely, of all our elder dramatists, has given true beauty to woman; and Shakespeare was an attentive reader of “The Arcadia.” There is something, indeed, in the language and the conduct of Musidorus and Pyrocles, two knights, which may startle the reader, and may be condemned as very unnatural and most affected. Their friendship resembles the love which is felt for the beautiful sex, if we were to decide by their impassioned conduct and the tenderness of their language. Coleridge observed that the language of these two friends in “The Arcadia” is such as we would not now use, except to women; and he has thrown out some very remarkable observations.5 Warton, too, has observed, that the style of friendship between males in the reign of Elizabeth would not be tolerated in the present day; sets of sonnets, in a vein of tenderness which now could only express the most ardent affection for a mistress, were then prevalent.6 They have not accounted for this anomaly in manners by merely discovering them in the reigns of Elizabeth and James. It is unquestionably a remains of the ancient chivalry, when men, embarking in the same perilous enterprise together, vowed their mutual aid and their personal devotion. The dangers of one knight were to be participated, and his honour to be maintained, by his brother-in-arms. Such exalted friendships, and such interminable affections, often broke out both in deeds and words which, to the tempered intercourse of our day, offend by their intensity. A male friend, whose life and fortune were consecrated to another male, who looks on him with adoration, and who talks of him with excessive tenderness, appears to us nothing less than a chimerical and monstrous lover! It is certain, however, that in the age of chivalry, a Damon and Pythias were no uncommon characters in that brotherhood.

It is the imperishable diction, the language of Shakespeare, before Shakespeare wrote, which diffuses its enchantment over “The Arcadia;” and it is for this that it should be studied; and the true critic of Sidney, because the critic was a true poet, offers his unquestioned testimony in Cowper—

Sidney, warbler of poetic prose!

Even those playful turns of words, caught from Italian models, which are usually condemned, conceal some subtility of feeling, or rise in a pregnant thought.7 The intellectual character of Sidney is more serious than volatile; the habits of his mind were too elegant and thoughtful to sport with the low comic; and one of the defects of “The Arcadia” is the attempt at burlesque humour in a clownish family. Whoever is not susceptible of great delight in the freshness of the scenery, the luxuriant imagery, the graceful fancies, and the stately periods of “The Arcadia,” must look to a higher source than criticism, to acquire a sense which nature and study seem to deny him.

I have dwelt on the finer qualities of “The Arcadia;” whenever the volume proves tedious, the remedy is in the reader’s own hands, provided he has the judgment often to return to a treasure he ought never to lose.

It is indeed hardly to be hoped that the volatile loungers over our duodecimos of fiction can sympathise with manners, incidents, and personages which for them are purely ideal—the truth of nature which lies under the veil must escape from their eyes; for how are they to grow patient over the interminable pages of a folio, unbroken by chapters, without a single resting-place?8 And I fear they will not allow for that formal complimentary style, borrowed from the Italians and the Spaniards, which is sufficiently ludicrous.

The narrative too is obstructed by verses, in which Sidney never obtained facility or grace. Nor will the defects of the author be always compensated by his beauties, for “The Arcadia” was indeed a fervent effusion, but an uncorrected work. The author declared that it was not to be submitted to severer eyes than those of his beloved sister, “being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in her presence, the rest by sheets sent as fast as they were done.” The writer, too, confesses, to “a young head having many fancies begotten in it, which, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in, than they gat out.” So truly has Sidney expressed the fever of genius, when working on itself in darkness and in doubt—absorbing reveries, tumultuous thoughts, the ceaseless inquietudes of a soul which has not yet found a voice. Even on his death-bed, the author of “The Arcadia” desired its suppression; but the fame her noble brother could contemn was dear to his sister, who published these loose papers without involving the responsibility of the writer, affectionately calling the work, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia;” and this volume of melodious prose, of visionary heroism, and the pensive sweetness of loves and friendships, became the delight of poets.

There is one more work of Sidney, perhaps more generally known than “The Arcadia”—his “Defence of Poetry.” Lord Orford sarcastically apologised, in the second edition of his “Royal and Noble Authors,” for his omission of any notice of this production. “I had forgotten it,” he says; and he adds, “a proof that I at least did not think it sufficient foundation for so high a character as he acquired.” It was a more daring offence to depreciate this work of love, than the romance which at least lay farther removed from the public eye. The “Defence of Poetry” has had, since the days of Walpole, several editions by eminent critics. Sidney, in this luminous criticism, and effusion of poetic feeling, has introduced the principal precepts of Aristotle, touched by the fire and sentiment of Longinus; and, for the first time in English literature, has exhibited the beatitude of criticism in a poet-critic.

Sir Philip Sidney assuredly was one of the most admirable of mankind, largely conspicuous in his life, and unparalleled in his death. But was this singular man exempt from the frailties of our common nature? If we rely on his biographer Zouch, we shall not discover any; if we trust to Lord Orford, we shall perceive little else. The truth is, that had Sidney lived, he might have grown up to that ideal greatness which the world adored in him; but he perished early, not without some of those errors of youth, which even in their rankness betrayed the generous soil whence they sprung. His fame was more mature than his life, which indeed was but the preparation for a splendid one. We are not surprised, that to such an accomplished knight the crown of Poland was offered, and that all England went into mourning for their hero. We discover his future greatness, if we may use the expression, in the noble termination of his early career, rather than in the race of glory which he actually ran. The life of Sidney would have been a finer subject for the panegyric of a Pliny, than for the biography of a Plutarch; his fame was sufficient for the one, while his actions were too few for the other.9

1 “Annual Review,” iv. 547.

2 Who does not recognise a well-known passage in Shakespeare, copied too by Coleridge and Byron, in these words of Sidney—“More sweet than a gentle south-west wind which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer.” Such delightful diction, which can only spring out of deep poetic emotion, may be found in the poetic prose of Sidney.

“Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour.”— Shaks. Twelfth Night, act 1, sc. i. “And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind, O’er willowy meads and shadow’d waters creeping, And Ceres’ golden fields.”— Coleridge’s First Advent of Love. “Breathing all gently o’er his cheek and mouth, As o’er a bed of violets the sweet south.”— Don Juan, canto 2, verse 168.

3 Sidney alludes to all that secret history of Leicester which Parsons the Jesuit pretends to disclose in his “Leicester’s Commonwealth.” This challenge was found among the Sidney papers, but probably was not issued.

4 See “The Arcadia,” p. 267; eighth edition, 1633.

5 See Coleridge’s “Table-Talk,” ii. 178.

6 Richard Barnfielde’s “Affectionate Shepherd” forms such a collection of sonnets which were popular. The poet bewails his unsuccessful love for a beautiful youth, yet professing the chastest affection. Poets, like mocking-birds, repeat the notes of others, till the cant becomes idle, and the fashion of style obsolete.

7 A lady who has become enamoured of the friend who is pleading for her lover, and suddenly makes the fatal avowal to that friend, thus expresses her emotion—“Grown bolder or madder, or bold with madness, I discovered my affection to him.” “He left nothing unassayed to disgrace himself, to grace his friend.”—p. 39.

8 In the late Mr. Heber’s treasures of our vernacular literature there was a copy of “The Arcadia,” with manuscript notes by Gabriel Harvey. He had also divided the work into chapters, enumerating the general contents of each.—“Bib. Heberiana,” part the first. A republication of this copy—omitting the continuations of the Romance by a strange hand, and all the eclogues, and most of the verses—would form a desirable volume, not too voluminous.

9 This summary of the character of Sidney I wrote nearly thirty years ago, in the “Quarterly Review.”

SPENSER.

Though little is circumstantially related, yet frequent outbreakings, scattered throughout the writings of Spenser, commemorate the main incidents of his existence. His emotions become dates, and no poet has more fully confided to us his “secret sorrows.”

Spenser in the far north was a love-lorn youth when he composed “The Shepherd’s Calendar.” This rustic poem, rustic from an affectation of the Chaucerian style, though it bears the divisions of the twelve months, displays not the course of the seasons so much as the course of the poet’s thoughts; the themes are plaintive or recreative, amatorial or satirical, and even theological, in dialogues between certain interlocutors. To some are prefixed Italian mottoes; for that language then stamped a classical grace on our poetry. In the eclogue of January we perceive that it was still the season of hope and favour with the amatory poet, for the motto is, Anchora Speme (“yet I hope”); but in the eclogue of June we discover Gia Speme Spenta (“already hope is extinguished”). A positive rejection by Rosalind herself had for ever mingled gall with his honey, and he ungenerously inveighs against the more successful arts of a hated rival. Rosalind was indeed not the Cynthia of a poetic hour: deep was the poet’s first love; and that obdurate mistress had called him “her Pegasus,” and laughed at his sighs.

It was when the forlorn poet had thus lost himself in the labyrinth of love, and “The Shepherd’s Calendar” had not yet closed, that his learned friend Harvey, or, in his poetical appellative, Hobbinol, to steal him away from the languor of a country retirement, invited him to southern vales, and with generous warmth introduced “the unknown” to Sir Philip Sidney. This important incident in the destiny of Spenser has been carefully noted by a person who conceals himself under the initials E. K., and who is usually designated as “the old commentator on ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar.’” This E. K. is a mysterious personage, and will remain undiscovered to this day, unless the reader shall participate in my own conviction.

“The Shepherd’s Calendar” was accompanied by a commentary on every separate month; and this singularity of an elaborate commentary in the first edition of the work of a living author was still more remarkable by the intimate acquaintance of the commentator with the author himself. E. K. assures us, and indeed affords ample evidence, that “he was privy to all his (the poet’s) designs.” He furnishes some domestic details which no one could have told so accurately, except he to whom they relate; and we find our commentator also critically conversant with many of the author’s manuscripts which the world has never seen. Rarely has one man known so much of another. The poet and the commentator move together as parts of each other. In the despair of conjecture some ventured to surmise that the poet himself had been his own commentator. But the last editor of Spenser is indignant at a suggestion which would taint with strange egotism the modest nature of our bard. Yet E. K. was no ordinary writer; an excellent scholar he was, whose gloss has preserved much curious knowledge of ancient English terms and phrases. We may be sure that a pen so abundant and so skilfully exercised was not one to have restricted itself to this solitary lucubration of his life and studies. The commentary, moreover, is accompanied by a copious and erudite preface, addressed to Gabriel Harvey, and the style of these pages is too remarkable not to be recognised. At length let me lift the mask from this mysterious personage, by declaring that E. K. is Spenser’s dear and generous friend Gabriel Harvey himself. I have judged by the strong peculiarity of Harvey’s style; one cannot long doubt of a portrait marked by such prominent features. Pedantic but energetic, thought pressed on thought, sparkling with imagery, mottled with learned allusions, and didactic with subtle criticism—this is our Gabriel! The prefacer describes the state of our bardling as that of “young birds that be nearly crept out of their nest, who, by little, first prove their tender wings before they make a greater flight. And yet our new poet flieth as a bird that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best.”

From this detection, we may infer that the Commentary was an innocent ruse of the zealous friend to overcome the resolute timidity of our poet.1 His youthful muse, teeming with her future progeny, was, however, morbidly sensible in the hour of parturition. Conscious of her powers, thus closes the address “To his Booke:”—

And when thou art past jeopardie, Come tell me what was said of me, And I will send more after thee.

After several editions, the work still remained anonymous, and the unnamed poet was long referred to by critics of the day only as “the late unknown poet,” or “the gentleman who wrote ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar.’”

In Sir Philip Sidney the youthful poet found a youthful patron. The shades of Penshurst opened to leisure and the muse. “The Shepherd’s Calendar” at length concluded, “The Poet’s Year” was dedicated to “Maister Philip Sidney, worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry.” Leicester, the uncle of Sidney, was gained, and from that moment Spenser entered into a golden servitude.

The destiny of Spenser was to be thrown among courtiers, and to wear the silken trammels of noble patrons—a life of honourable dependence among eminent personages. Here a seductive path was opened, not easily scorned by the gentle mind of him whose days were to be counted by its reveries, and the main business of whose life was to be the cantos of his “Faery Queen.”

Of the favours and mortifications during his career of patronage, and of his intercourse with the court, too little is known; though sufficient we shall discover to authenticate the reality of his complaints, the verity of his strictures, and all the flutterings of the sickening heart of him who moves round and round the interminable circle of “hope deferred.”

Our poet was now ascending the steps of favouritism; and the business of his life was with the fair and the great. He looked up to the smiles of distinguished ladies, for to such is the greater portion of his poems dedicated. If her Majesty gloried in “The Faery Queen,” we are surprised to find that the most exquisite of political satires, “Mother Hubbard’s Tale,” should be addressed to the Lady Compton and Monteagle; that “The Tears of the Muses” were inscribed to Lady Strange; and that “The Ruins of Time” are dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke. For others, their nuptials were graced by the music of his verse, or their sorrows were soothed by its elegiac tenderness.2 In the Epithalamion on his own marriage, the poet reminds

The sacred sisters who have often times Been to the aiding others to adorn, Whom ye thought worthy of your graceful rymes, That even the greatest did not greatly scorn To hear their names sung in your simple lays, But joyed at their praise.

“The Tears of the Muses,” as one of his plaintive poems is called, had possibly been spared had the poet only moved among that bevy of ladies whose names are enshrined in his volumes, around the Queen, whose royalty so frequently rises with splendour in his verse. Unawares, perhaps, the gentle bard discovered that personal attachments by cruel circumstances were converted into political connexions; that a favourite must pay the penalty of favouritism; and that in binding himself more closely to his patrons, he was wounded the more deeply by their great adversary; and in gaining Sidney, Leicester, and Essex, Spenser was doomed to feel the potent arm of the scornful and unpoetic Burleigh.

The Queen was the earliest and the latest object of our poet’s musings. “The Maiden Queen” enters into almost every poem. Shortly after the publication of “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” wherein her Majesty occupies the month of April, Spenser, in writing to Harvey, has this remarkable passage:—“Your desire to hear of my late being with her Majesty must die in itself.” By this ambiguous reply, it is, however, evident that Harvey, and probably Spenser himself, had looked forwards, by the intervention of his great patrons, that “the unknown poet,” as he is called by “the old commentator,” would have been honoured by an interview with the royal poetess. Elizabeth, among her princely infirmities, had the ambition of verse. She was afterwards saluted as

A peerless prince and peerless poetess,

by Spenser, who must, however, have closed his ear at her harsher numbers.3 We may regret that we know so little of our Spenser’s intercourse with the Queen. If Sidney made him known to her Majesty, as Philips has told, the poet might have read to the Queen the earlier cantos of his romantic epic. The poet himself has only recorded that “The Shepherd of the Ocean,” Sir Walter Raleigh, brought him into the presence of Cynthia, “The Queen of the Ocean,” who

To his oaten pipe inclined her ear, And it desired, at timely hours, to hear.

The Lord Treasurer Burleigh seems to have marred those “timely hours.” Spenser had lingered before the fountain of court favour; and how often the dark shadow of the political minister intervened between the poet and the throne we are reminded by the deep sensitiveness of the victim, the murmurs, and even the scorn of the indignant bard.

Under the patronage of Leicester, the poet’s services were transferred to Lord Arthur Grey, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who appointed Spenser his secretary. He has vindicated this viceroy’s administration in the “Faery Queen,” by shadowing forth his severe justice in Arthegal, accompanied by his “Iron Man,” whose iron flail “threshed out falsehood” in their quest of Ierne, in that “Land of Ire” where justice and the executioner were ever erratic.

Of the brief life of the poet, his better years were consumed in Ireland, where he filled several appointments more honourable than lucrative. His slender revenue seems not to have flourished under a grant of land from the crown, on the conditions attached to it in 1585.4 Cast into active service, the musings of the “Faery Queen” were assuredly often thrown aside; its fate was still dubious, for Ireland was not a land of the muses, as he himself declared, when a chance occurrence, the visit of Rawleigh to that country, gave Spenser another Sidney. The “Faery Queen” once more opened its mystical leaves on the banks of the Mulla, before a judge, whose voice was fame.

And when he heard the music that I made, He found himself full greatly pleased at it; He gan to cast great liking to my lore, And great disliking to my luckless lot, That banish’d had myself, like wight forlore, Into that waste where I was quite forgot.

Spenser has here disclosed involuntarily “the secret sorrow.”

The acres of Kilcolman offered no delights to “the wight forlore, forgotten in that waste.” Our tender and melancholy poet was not blessed with that fortitude which, even in a barren solitude, can muse on its own glory, as Petrarch and Rousseau were wont, and which knows also to value a repose freed from spiteful rivalries and mordacious malignity. And now opened his tedious suings at court, for what, but to obtain some situation in his native home, which offered repose of mind, and carelessness of the future? We know of his restless wanderings to England, and his constant returns to Ireland. We find the poet, in 1590, wearied by solicitations, throwing out the immortal lines so painfully descriptive of

What hell it is in suing long to bide.

It was in this year that the first three books of the romantic epic were published, which was followed by the grant of a pension in February, 1591. But five years afterwards the poet still remains the same querulous court-suitor; the miserable man wasting his days and his nights; for then he tells us in his “Prothalamion,” how on a summer’s day he

Walk’d forth to ease his pain, Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames. ————————I whose sullen care, Through discontent of my long fruitless stay In princes’ court, and expectation vain Of idle hopes which still do fly away, Like empty shadows, to afflict my brain.

When this was written Spenser had possessed the lands of Kilcolman more than ten years, and held his pension. Were the lands profitless, and the pension still to be solicited? The poet has only perpetuated his “secret sorrows;” his pride or his delicacy has thrown a veil over them. He has sent down to posterity his disappointments, without alluding to the nature of his claims.

It was in 1597 that Spenser laid before the Queen his memorable “View of the State of Ireland.” This state-memorial still makes us regret that our poet only wrote verse; there is a charm in his sweet and voluble prose, a virgin grace which we have long lost in the artificial splendour of English diction. Here is no affectation of Chaucerian words; the gold is not spotted with rust. The vivid pictures of the poet; the curiosity of the antiquary; and above all, a new model of policy of the practical politician, combine in this inestimable tract. Spenser suggested that the popular hero of that day, his noble friend the Earl of Essex, would be more able to conciliate popular favour in Ireland. By an alternate policy, from that day to the present, has our government tried to rule that fair “Land of Ire,” either by a Lord Grey’s severity of justice—the Arthegal, accompanied by his “iron man,” with his “iron flail;” or by the generous graciousness of an Earl of Essex, courting popularity: but neither would serve; the more quiet wisdom lay in colonization, happily begun, and so fatally neglected. The powerful eloquence of the poet and the secretary attracted the Queen’s attention. She recommended Spenser to the Irish Council to be Sheriff of Cork; again was “the wight forlore” sent back to his undesired locality; yet now, perhaps, honours and promotion were awaiting the “miserable man.” The royal letter was dated in September, and in the following month, suddenly, the Irish insurrection broke out. The flight of Spenser and his family from the Castle of Kilcolman was momentous—perhaps they witnessed the flames annihilating their small wealth. Spenser himself lost more than wealth; for the father beheld the sacrifice of his child, and the author was bereaved of all his manuscripts, now lost or scattered—his hopes, his pride, and his fame! He flew to England, not to live, but to experience how this last stroke of fortune went beyond the force of his own passionate descriptions, or of his nature to endure. In an obscure lodging, and within three short months, the most sensitive of men, broken-hearted, closed his eyes in mute grief, and in a premature death; Spenser perished at the zenith of human life.

Curiosity has been excited to learn the occasion of the inveterate prejudice of an insensible Lord Treasurer against a tender poet, who had courted his favour. This hostility of “the mighty peer” seems not to have broken forth openly till the publication of the first three books of the “Faery Queen;” for all the poet’s personal allusions to Burleigh were written shortly after that event.

Can so small a creature as a poet when it creeps into the sphere of a jealous statesman’s policy draw on itself his hateful attention? Are crafty politicians in office like richly-laden travellers who start at a crossing shadow? Burleigh possessed the full confidence of his sovereign from her youth; but she was a woman subject to caprices, and would call her ancient friend and servant “an old fool.” Burleigh was fearfully jealous of two potent rivals—the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex; these “men of arms,” the patrons of Spenser, were each subsequently the head of the opposition to the pacific administration of the Lord Treasurer.

“The sage old sire,” moreover, well knew the romantic self-idolatry of his royal mistress; her infirmity of poetical susceptibility; her avidity of poignant flatteries on her beauty, her chastity, and even on her verse. Her Majesty was now in the ascension of that glorified beatitude, the “Faery Queen;” and this transfiguration was the work of him whom he held to be a creature of his great rivals!

We are interested to detect the vacillating conduct of the poet to the implacable statesman. Spenser accompanied his presentation copy of the “Faery Queen” to the Lord-Treasurer with a sonnet, in which he humiliated the muse before his great court-enemy—

On whose mighty shoulders most doth rest The burden of this kingdom’s government, Unfitly I these idle rimes present, The labour of lost time and wit unstay’d.

If Spenser had complained of former cold neglect, now he had to endure, what a poet can never forgive, bitter disdain.

Wounded in spirit, the poet composed, immediately after the first appearance of the “Faery Queen,” “The Ruins of Time;” there, eulogising the departed Sir Francis Walsingham for his love of learning and care of “men of arms,” he launches forth a thunderbolt against the wary and frigid Burleigh—

For he that now wields all things at his will, Scorns one and th’ other, in his deeper skill.

And he repeats the accusation in “Mother Hubbard’s Tale”—

Oh, grief of griefs! Oh, gall of all good hearts! To see that virtue should despised be Of him, that first was raised for vertuous parts; And now, broad spreading like an aged tree, Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be. Oh, let the man by whom the Muse is scorn’d, Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorn’d.

We have, too, a more finished portrait of an evil minister who “lifted up his lofty towers,”

That they begin to threat the neighbour sky;

in which unquestionably we find some of the deformities of Burleigh’s political physiognomy.

He no count made of nobility; The realm’s chief strength and girlond of the crown— He made them dwell in darkness of disgrace, For none but whom he list might come in place. Of men of armes he had but small regard, But kept them low, and strained very hard; For men of learning little he esteem’d, His wisdome he above their learning deem’d. As for the rascal commons least he cared, For not so common was his bounty shared. Let God, said he, if please care for the manie, I for myself most care before else anie. Yet none durst speak, ne none durst of him plaine, So great he was in grace, and rich through gaine.

The gentle bard of the “Faery Queen” now sate down to continue his great work; but haunted by this spectral and iron-eyed monster of an unpatronising minister, he actually violates the solemnity of his theme by opening with another recollection, so fatal to his own repose:—

The rugged forehead that, with grave foresight, Welds kingdoms, causes, and affairs of state, My looser rimes I wote doth sharply wite, For praising love as I have done of late. Such ones ill judge of love, that cannot love, Ne in their frozen heart feel kindly flame.

But the minister could not banish him from the sovereign:—

To such therefore I do not sing at all, But to that Sacred Saint, my sovereign Queen; To her I sing of love that loveth best, And best is loved.

About the same time Spenser had written “The Tears of the Muses,” where, expressing a poet’s wish that the royal palaces of Eliza should be filled with

————Praises of divinest wits, Who her eternize with their heavenly writs,

I suspect that Burleigh figures again among

——————The salvage brood, Who, having been with acorns always fed, Can no whit cherish this celestial food; But, with base thoughts, are unto blindness led, And kept from looking on the lightsome day.

After these indignant effusions, Spenser in proceeding with the “Faery Queen” tergiversated in his feelings. The poet had shadowed with some tenderness the calamities of the Scottish Mary, in the gentle characters of Amoret and Florizel. Yielding to political changes, the Queen of Scots is suddenly horribly transformed into the false Duessa. For the honour of the poet we may concede that he partook of those party-passions which great statesmen know to raise up at will, and which never fail to influence contemporaries. Burleigh never paused till he laid the head of Mary on the block.5 In the fifth book of the “Faery Queen” the poet has exhibited the trial of this state victim, and has made her sister-sovereign gracefully conceal tears which possibly were never shed; but who could expect that “the rugged forehead”—him whom he had denounced that “alive or dead” should by “the muse be ever scorned”—should appear with all the dignity of wisdom!

The sage old Sire, that had to name The kingdom’s care, with a white silver head, That many high regards and reasons ’gainst her read.

The poet did worse as he advanced in his work, for in the sixth book he absolutely denies that it was his intention in any of his “former writs” to reflect on “this mighty peer.” To what “former writs” Spenser alludes is not clear. The matchless picture of the fruitless days of a court-expectant in “Mother Hubbard’s Tale,” which many of my readers may have by heart, is supposed to have been represented to Lord Burleigh by “backbiters” as a censure on him; it was an immortal one! and the application was easy.

It was after the appearance of the “Faery Queen” that Elizabeth, economical as were her bounties, sealed her delight by a permanent pension. Was it on this occasion that the remonstrance of the prudential Lord Treasurer diminished by half its amount? “All this for a song!” exclaimed Burleigh. “Then give him what is reason,” rejoined the Queen. The words were remembered by the bard, but the royal command lay neglected at the exchequer. On a progress Spenser reminded her Majesty, by a petition, in the smallest space that ever suitor presented one, and in a style of which it was not easy to forget a word.6 The Lord Treasurer got reprimanded, and the poet present payment. We cannot avoid associating the anecdote with these lines—

To have thy Prince’s grace, yet want her Peer’s; To have thy asking, yet wait many years.

We may now close with Burleigh; but much remains to be developed in the fortunes of a court-suitor, as we trace them in the history of our Spenser. The coldness of the Lord Treasurer may not have been the only cause of the poet’s deep and constant laments. The sojourner in the circle of a court may be mortified not only by its repulse or its neglect, but also by the capricious favour of his patron. A devotion of service may provoke offence, whether it be from zeal too improvident, from officiousness too busy, or from an ingenuousness too open. He is thrown into a position in which he must preserve silence, and cannot always hope for pardon.

One incident of this nature deeply affected our poet in his intercourse with Lord Leicester. We only discover it by a remarkable dedicatory sonnet to his translation of Virgil’s “Gnat.” Had the poet not decided that the mysterious tale should reach posterity, he would not have published the sonnet several years after it was composed, for it is dedicated “to the deceased lord!” The poet has energetically described the delicacy and difficulty of the position into which he had been cast.

Wrong’d, yet not daring to express my pain To you, good lord! the causer of my care, In cloudy tears my case I thus complain Unto yourself, that only privy are. But if that any Œdipus, unware, Shall chance, through power of some divining spright, To read the secret of this riddle rare, And know the purport of my evil plight; Let him rest pleased with his own insight, Ne further seek to gloze upon the text; But grief enough it is to grieved wight, To feel hit fault, and not be further vext. But what so by myself may not be shown, May by this Gnat’s complaint be easily known.

The Gnat of Virgil, observing a serpent in the act of darting on a sleeping swain, stings the eye of the sleeper; starting at the pain, the disturbed man crushes the gnat, but, thus awakened, he saves himself from the crested serpent. The poem turns on the remonstrance of the ghost of the gnat, which had no other means than by inflicting its friendly sting to warn him of his peril who had thus hastily deprived it of its own innocent existence. What was “the serpent,” and why the poet was hardly used as “the gnat,” and why he was

Wrong’d, yet not daring to express his pain,

and yet “grieved to feel his fault,” is “a riddle rare,” supposed to require some Œdipus of secret history to solve. The moral is obvious. The character of the royal favourite may give rise to many suggestions; but if I may venture a conjecture on what the parties themselves “were only privy to,” Spenser had touched on some high matter, where his affectionate zeal, however sagacious, on this occasion hurt the pride of Leicester—too haughty or too mortified to be lessoned by his familiar dependant, who, like the gnat, found that his timely warning was “his fault.”

A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma of Spenser’s sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries, the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium attached to Burleigh’s prepossessions against the poet, he assumes that without the Lord Treasurer’s consent Spenser could not have received his lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands was obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh. George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are “too highly coloured, if they really were complaints respecting himself!” and concludes that all the poet’s querulousness must be ascribed, not to Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet—only his death! for we have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed between his flight from Ireland and his decease in London.

It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the “secret sorrows” of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares, like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others, dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps more than we possess of his writings. The author of “The Faery Queen” required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first cantos of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our poet a mourner all his days. There was no substitute for a congenial patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage, cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion of the poet’s thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes.

In his last days Spenser has not dropped even one “melodious tear;” but he was wept by his brothers the poets, who held his pall and bestrewed his hearse with their elegies, and beheld in the fate of their great master their own. And thus truly, though ambiguously, Phineas Fletcher described his destiny—

Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died.

So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source of his “secret sorrows”—his unceasing and vain solicitation at court, the suitor of so many patrons; the res angusta domi perpetually pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man.

I know of no satire aimed at Spenser; a singular fate for a great poet: even “satyric Nash” revered the character of the author of “The Faery Queen.” I have often thought that among the numerous critics of Spenser, the truest was his keen and witty contemporary; for this town-wit has stamped all our poet’s excellences by one felicitous word—“Heavenly Spenser.”

1 A strange personage has been fixed on as the commentator. Spenser lodged with a Mrs. Kerke, where his parcels were directed. E. K. has been conjectured to be Mr. Kerke, her husband!

It is a proof of the deficient skill of the modern editors of Spenser, Hughes and Aikin, that they have omitted the curious and valuable Commentary of E. K. It has been judiciously restored to the last and best edition, by Mr. Todd. The woodcuts might also have been preserved.

2 These complimentary sonnets, evidently composed “for the nonce,” are not the happiest specimens in our language of these minor poems, no more than they are of the real genius of Spenser. I have seen a German reprint, consisting only of Spenser’s Sonnets, by the learned Von Hammer. Foreign critics often startle one by their fancies on English poetry.

3 We have several printed specimens of her Majesty’s poetry, which does not want for elevation of thought; but to compose poetry with the energy of her prose, deprived her Majesty of all the grace and melody of verse. I have been informed, on the best authority, that Elizabeth exercised her poetical pen more voluminously than we have hitherto known, for that there exists a manuscript volume of her Majesty’s poems in that rich repository of State-papers—the Hatfield Collection.

4 Three thousand acres of dilapidated estates of the Earl of Desmond. The receivers of these grants were called “The Undertakers,” as they were bound to bring the lands into cultivation, which, after the ravages of fire and sword, consisted of tenantless farms and a wasted soil. Sir Walter Rawleigh had a grant of twelve thousand acres, which he probably found profitless, for he made them over at a low rate to the Boyle family.

5 I have been favoured with the sight of several manuscript letters of Burleigh, in the possession of a gentleman in the neighbourhood of Taunton, which relate to this critical period. They remarkably display the eager and remorseless decision of Burleigh. Messengers were sent off three or four times in a day, countermanding the former command, as the mind of Elizabeth vacillated, disconcerting the plans of the minister. The order “to cut off her head” is given with the most revolting minuteness.

6 This petition in rhyme is well known—

“I was promised on a time, To have reason for my rhime; From that time unto this season, I received nor rhime nor reason.”

Mr. Todd deems the anecdote apocryphal, because he can only retrace it to Fuller, who published it seventy years after the incident recorded, assigning no authority. Honest Fuller has, however, given a tolerable authority for such a sort of thing, namely, that it was “a story commonly told and believed.” There could be no motive for any one to invent the circumstance and the pleasantry, gratuitously to ascribe it to the poet. Mr. Todd is pleased to call “the numbers magical,” and decides on this “ridiculous memorial”—a criticism fatal to all the playfulness of genius. Were the “Rhimes” not good enough for the nonce, and “the Reason” amusingly convenient to be remembered?

The anecdote is only deficient in its date, and possibly may relate to some former donation before the pension was fixed. Edward Phillips gives the large sum of five hundred pounds—another version of the same story; and he wrote about the same time. What remains inexplicable is, that this pension to Spenser seems to have been wholly unknown to his contemporaries—to Camden and to others—who wrote subsequently. The grant of this pension was only discovered a few years ago in the Chapel of the Rolls. The pension was only for fifty pounds; but the value of money makes the royal gift more decent than at first it would seem.

THE FAERY QUEEN.

Spenser, the courtly spectator of the tilt, the pageant, and the masque—musing over the tome of old Gothic romances, and striking into the vein of fabling of Italian poesy, whose novelty had nearly supplanted the ancient classics—was at once Ariosto and Tasso and Ovid.

Spenser composed with great facility; incessant production seems to have been his true existence. His was one of those minds whose labour diffuses their delight, and whose delight provokes to labour. He seems always to be in earnest, and sometimes in haste, for he had much to work. While composing the “Faery Queen,” he had that concurrent poem of the regal Arthur, of no inferior calibre, ever in his mind. The “Faery Queen” would have contained, had it been completed, not much under a hundred thousand verses. The “Iliad” does not exceed fifteen. He seems to have been satisfied with his first unblotted thoughts. He has defects which might have proved fatal to an ordinary versifier; but his voluminous vein lies protected by his genius.

The artificial complexity of his nine-lined stanza put him to many shifts; he exercised arbitrary power in shortening words or lengthening syllables, and hardily invented novel terminations to common words, to provide his multiplicity of rhymes; he falsified accentuation, to adapt it to his metre, and violated the orthography, to adjust the rhyme. He dilated his thoughts to fill up the measure of his stanza; and we are too often reminded of the hammering of the chain. The first book of the “Faery Queen,” when the difficulties of this novel stanza must have been most arduous, is necessarily composed with most care, and, both for subject and execution, is of itself a complete poem. As Spenser acquired facility and dexterity, his pen winged its flight through the prescribed labyrinth of sweet sounds.

His exquisite ear had felt the melody of the vowelly and voluble stanza of Italy, and to which he even added a grace of his own by a new measure, in the Alexandrine close. This verse had been introduced by Sir Thomas Wyatt with no great effect; it was adroitly adopted by Spenser to give a full cadence to his stanza. Dryden, in its occasional use, professedly derived it from Spenser, and seems to have carried away the honour, when Pope in exemplifying its solemn effect ascribes it to the latter poet, who he tells us had taught—

——————The full-resounding line, The long majestic march and energy divine.

The inanity of that race—

Of gentlemen who wrote with ease,

and made such free use of “the full-resounding line,” void of all thought, only betrayed their barrenness by this additional extension of their weakness. Hence it incurred the partial censure of our great poetical critic, as “a needless Alexandrine,”

That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.

But the soul of melody lies hidden in the musician’s instrument; and the Spenserian stanza, to be felt, must find its echo in the ear of the reader. A master in the art of versification was struck by our poet’s modulation, so musical was his ear in the rhythm of his verse. He remarked this in those two delicious pieces, “The Prothalamion,” a spousal hymn on the double marriage of two ladies, personated as two swans in these harmonious lines—

——————Two swans of goodly hue, Came softly swimming down along the Lee;1—

and “The Epithalamium” on the poet’s own nuptials, or, as the poet notes—

Song made in lieu of many ornaments, With which my Love should duely have been deck’d.

One feature in Spenser’s versification seems to have escaped notice, although Warton has expressly written a dissertation on that subject. It is Spenser’s discreet use of alliteration; never obtrusive, but falling naturally into the verse, it may escape our perception while it is acting on our feeling. Unconsciously or by habit, his ear became the echo of his imagination; sound was the response of thought, and, as much as his epithets, scattered the “orient hues” of his fancy. Alliteration and epithets, which with mechanical versificators are a mere artifice, because only an artifice, and glare and glitter, charm by their consonance when they rise out of the emotions of the true poet.2

Some persons have been deterred from venturing on the “Faery Queen” from a notion that the style had rusted with time, and is as obsolete as chivalry itself. This popular prejudice has been fostered by an opinion of Ben Jonson, which probably referred chiefly to “The Shepherd’s Calendar,” where Spenser had adopted a system of Chaucerian words, which to us is more curious than fortunate, and which on the first publication required a glossary. This system he abandoned in his romantic epic; but he loved to sprinkle some remaining graces of antiquity, some naïve expressions, or some picturesque words; and his modern imitators, amid their elaborate pomp, have felt the secret charm, and have mottled their Spenserian stanza with these archaisms.

Of all poets Spenser excelled in the pictorial faculty. His circumstantial descriptions are minute yet vivid. They are, indeed, exuberant, for he loved not to quit his work while he could bring the object closer to the eye. This diffusion, flowing with the melody of his verse, often raises the illusion of reverie till we seem startled by reality, and we appear to have beheld what only we have been told.3 Poet of poets! Spenser made a poet at once of Cowley, and once lent an elegant simplicity to Thomson. Gray was accustomed to open Spenser when he would frame

Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn;

and Milton, who owned Spenser to have been his master as well as his predecessor, lingered amid his musings, and with many a Spenserian image touched into perfection his own sublimity.

In associating the name of Spenser with Milton and Gray, we are reminded of the distinctness of his poetic faculty, and the difference of his personal character. Spenser, tender, elegant, and fanciful, rarely participated in their condensed energies or the severity of their greatness; the personal character of our courtly poet was moulded by his position in society.

When we float along the stream of his melodious song, conscious only of its beauty, we do not often pause at elevations which raise the feeling of the sublime. Such daring visions, when they do rise on us, rather indicate the power of his genius than the habit of his mind. Our gentle Spenser was often satisfied with rivalling without surpassing his originals, which Milton and Gray ever did when they copied. It seems, therefore, unreasonable to assert that Spenser has combined the daring sternness of Dante with the wild fantasy of Goethe. Yet their lofty creations have not gone beyond those of Spenser’s personifications of Despair—of Fear—of Confusion—of Astonishment—of laborious Care, that workman in his smithy, living amid the unceasing strokes of his perpetual hammers—or of Jealousy, from a mortal man metamorphosed with Ovidean fancy: his single eye, for he had long worn out the other, never could be closed; no slumber could press down those restless lids; tenant of a cavern, listening day and night to the roaring billows incessantly beating his abode, threatening with its huge ruins to fall on the wretch wasting in self-torments, till, nothing left of him, he vanished into a flitting aëry sprite—

Forgot he was a Man, and Jealousy is hight.4

There are two sublime descriptions of Night which may be read together. In the one she is the

Sister of heavie Death, and nurse of Woes!

and elsewhere she appears as

That most ancient Grandmother of all, Older than Jove——

Night befriending Deceit and Shame, takes one of their daughters, the witch Duessa, in her “pitchy mantle;” yoking her coal-black steeds to her iron waggon, they penetrate to the inferior regions, bearing a mortal caitiff to be restored to this wicked life—“the messenger of death” passing over the earth, the screeching owl, the baying dogs, the howling wolf, warn of the witch’s presence; and in hell the trembling ghosts stand

Chattering with iron teeth, and staring wide With stonie eyes—and flock’d on every side To gaze on Earthly Wight that with the Night durst ride.5

The sublime fragment on “Mutability,” where Nature is viewed seated mysteriously amid the creation, has not been excelled by the most philosophical poets.

Great Nature ever young, yet full of eld, Still moving, yet immoved from her sted; Unseen of any, yet of all beheld, Thus sitting on her throne——

If such noble inventions appear rare, it perhaps is owing to the wide extent of the “faery land,” as well as to the poet’s proneness to luxuriance of diction. If from that voluminous inspiration the poet has sometimes trespassed on the critic’s bourn, or the romantic eulogist of chastity itself has sometimes violated his own virgin page, for Spenser, always imitative, caught a slight infection from his old romancers and his Italian favourites, all this exuberance bears fruit; freedom and force will ever interest the artists of poetry.

Whoever has passed into the house of Pride,

Whose walls were high, but nothing strong nor thick,

and marked her on her progress, “drawn by six unequal beasts,” with her vile counsellors in their wicked gradation; or has entered “the ancient house of Holiness;” or counted in the den of Riches,

The huge great iron chests, and coffers strong,

amid the dead men’s bones scattered around those chests and coffers, has realized the marvellous architecture of Fancy; or, whoever roving with the muse of Spenser through all her localities, meets the sylvan men whom the chaste Una governed, or the satyrs whom the frail Hellenore would not quit; or when that muse unveils her voluptuous charms, listens to her song in the enchanted gardens of Armida; or in the approach to Acrasia in the bower of Bliss, starts at the nymphs wantonly wrestling in the glassy waters, laughing and blushing; or more innocently gazes on the gorgeous Masque of Cupid, or the dance of the poet and mistress among the Graces,—finds all endowed with poetic existences, unchangeable in their nature amid the changes of taste so long as imagination shall seek for its delights, and genius for the language of its emotions.

“The Faery Queen” was designed by its author to consist of twelve books; six of which we only possess, published at two several times, and a fragment of another. The subject of each book is a moral attribute; Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. Each attribute is personified by a knight-errant, with all the passions of bodily mortality.

The plan of the poem is so inartificial, that the twelve books, had it been completed, could only have formed twelve separate poems; our poet followed the free and fertile way of Ariosto. The introduction of Prince Arthur may have been designed to give a sort of unity to the incoherent twelve knights, who would have been finally led under his auspices to the court of the Faery Queen; but as the prince, however respectable in romance, comes and vanishes, does nothing, and says little, we incline to the humour of the editor, Hughes, that “the prince is here seen only in his minority, performing his exercises in Fairy-land as a private gentleman.” The versatile plan was adapted to the genius of the poet; the ductility of his invention, the luxuriance of his imagination, and the never-ceasing flow of his mellifluous stanza, would have suffered constraint and mutilation, bound by prescribed forms, and modelled by the classical epic. At the period that the poet Hughes published his edition6 of Spenser, our editors and critics were little conversant with the Elizabethan literature, nor had the taste of the learned emancipated itself from the established form of the epic of antiquity. But Hughes was alive to the vital poetry before him, though evidently perplexed to fix on a criterion, or to specify the class of poetry, for “The Faery Queen.” His excellent judgment struck into a new and right path. He describes it as “a poem of a particular kind;” and in his “Remarks on The Faery Queen,” he had the merit of distinguishing poetry, like architecture, into its Gothic origin, as well as its classical. This was a discovery at that period; and subsequent critics, such as Bishop Hurd, and more recently Schlegel, have run away with the honour, by their more ample development of the romantic school. Hughes was hardly aware of the importance of this division; for his discovery amounts to little more than one of those first thoughts, which have not ripened into a principle.

“The Faery Queen” was the last great work modelled on Chivalry. Awakening from the gloom of the theological contests of Edward and Mary, the court of the Maiden Queen, from state-policy and her own disposition, had been transformed into a court of romance. Glory was the cheap but inappreciable meed bestowed by the economical sovereign; and love was the language to which the female from the throne could bend to listen to her subject.

Elizabeth, stately and tender, was herself “the Faery Queen,” without even the poet’s flattery, when seated under the dais, amid long galleries hung with cloth of gold or silver, and all the moving tilt-yard glittering in its shine; “the noise of music,” and the sound of shields; the solemn procession, and gay crowd of the many-coloured liveries; the tasselled caparisons of the horses, and the nodding plumes of the knights. There our poet fed his eyes on the pageant, enchanting by its scenical allegory—as when four noble challengers approached—the children of Desire—attempting to win the Fortress of Beauty,—that is, Whitehall and her Majesty!7 They stand in a car, “shadowed with white and carnation silk, being the colours of Desire.” But the challengers must yield to Beauty, whose princely voice is their ample guerdon; and on the following day were the tourney and the barriers “courageously tried.” Thus were the days of chivalry, in its forms or its “fopperies,” restored by the Faery Queen; and with such festivals Spenser nursed his gorgeous fancy, and the Queen was the true inspirer of his romantic Epic.

Warton and Hurd observe that Spenser copied real manners of his time as much as Homer. We must here distinguish an essential difference, if Homer really represented the manners of the heroic age. It is true, that much of the manners and forms of chivalry prevailed among the courtiers of Elizabeth; but such adventures of chivalry as Spenser has described in his singular poem were transplanted from the ancient romances. The incidents are therefore not of the poet’s age; and we can only read his narrative as the last of the romances.

The old romance of “La Morte d’Arthur” was still the fashionable reading of the court; nor had the gorgeous enchantments of Stephen Hawes yet vanished, for a new edition had issued in 1555. Spenser had read Hawes; and however entranced by the pageantry of the fiction, from the uncouth stanza of “The Pastime of Pleasure” he may have been led to the construction of the Spenserian; for it is one of the aptitudes of true genius to carry to perfection what it finds imperfect.

“The Faery Queen” was produced at a crisis of transition when the old romantic way was departing, notwithstanding the temporary influence of a courtly revival, and the new had not yet arrived. The whole machinery of Gothic invention could hardly be worked; its marvels had ceased to be wondrous, and began to be ridiculed. The fantastic extravagance of the ordinary writers of fiction—that crowd of poet-apes which always rise after a great work has appeared—has been censured by the two great literary satirists of that day, Marston and Hall; Hall, indeed, suddenly checks his censorial temerity in blaming themes made sacred by the Faery Muse.

Let no rebel satire dare traduce Th’ eternal legends of thy fairy Muse, Renowned Spenser, whom no earthly wight Dares once to emulate——

The compliment to Spenser does not diminish the satire levelled at the class.

Contemporary satirists furnish a precise date when ancient things are on the turn and getting out of fashion; they are the first who, like hawks, descend on their quarry.

If Spenser attempted to infuse a rejuvenescence into the dry veins of the old age of romance, by the vitality of Allegory, he has fallen into a great error; for his twelve knight-errants do not interest our sympathies the more for being twelve wandering virtues. Allegorical poetry not long after his day also declined; and when it was resumed by Phineas Fletcher, in what he has fantastically named and described as “The Purple Island,” or “the little Isle of Man,” the poetry can hardly preserve itself amid the ludicrous analogies which, with such ingenious perversity of taste, are struck out between anatomy and poesy, too many not very agreeable to recollect.

Chivalry and Allegory, two columns of our poet’s renown, thus soon gave way; and Spenser has often suffered the heaviest penalty to which a great poet was ever condemned—neglect!

But these infelicitous forms, which disguised the most tender and imaginative genius, could not deprive it of its “better parts.” Spenser still remained the poet among poets themselves; though for the world at large, indeed, Spenser seemed to be recognised only as a poet in the chronology of poetry. A critic of great delicacy, and a votary of “the Gothic school,” despaired for the destiny of our poet. “The Faery Queen,” exclaimed Hurd, in the agony of his taste, “one of the noblest productions of modern poetry, is fallen into so general a neglect, that all the zeal of the commentators is esteemed officious and impertinent, and will never restore it to those honours which it has, once for all, irrecoverably lost.”

This sharp lament broke out in 1760, when, only two years before, the two rival editions of Church and Upton had simultaneously appeared; and the latter could at least boast both of the novelty and the curiosity of its commentary. But literary commentators held forth few attractions to the incurious readers of that day. More than thirty years have now elapsed since the last classical edition of Spenser’s works. But at no period was Spenser ever forgotten by poetical recluses; and professed imitations of our poet in modern times, though they may not always be Spenserian, have never ceased, from Shenstone to Mickle, and from Beattie to Byron.

1 The Lee is the stream.

2 I offer some instances of alliteration; but the beauty of such lines can only be rightly judged by the context.—

“In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell And will be found with peril and with pain.” “Such as a lamp whose life does fade away, Or as the moon cloathed with cloudy night.” “A world of waters, Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse cry.” “They cherelie chaunt, and rymes at random flung, The fruitful spawn of their rank fantasies; They feed the ears of fools with flattery.” “All the day before the sunny rays, He used to slug or sleep, in slothful shade.” “Unpitied, unplagued, of foe or friend.” “And with sharp shrilling shriek do bootless cry.” “Did stand astonish’d at his curious skill, With hungry ears to hear his harmony.”

3 Spenser has suffered a criticism from Mr. Campbell, who, a great poet himself, has otherwise done ample justice to his ancient master. “It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which characterize the very greatest poets.” Certain it is Spenser is rarely “brief and robust;” but contrary natures cannot operate in the same genius. If Spenser rarely shows the strength and brevity of “the very greatest poets,” so may it be said that “the very greatest poets” rarely rival the charm of his diffusion; or, as Mr. Campbell himself attests, in “verse more magnificently descriptive.” But the voice of Poetry is more potent than its criticism, and truly says Mr. Campbell—“We shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colour of language, than in this Rubens of English Poetry.”

Twining was a scholar, deeply versed in classical lore, which he has shown to great advantage in his “Version of and Commentary on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry.” In his Dissertations “On Poetical and Musical Imitation” prefixed to this work, our critic is quite at home with Pope and Goldsmith, but he seems wholly shut out from Spenser! In a note to his first Dissertation he tells us “the following stanza of Spenser has been much admired:”—

The joyous birds shrouded in cheareful shade, Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet; Th’ angelical soft trembling voices made To th’ instruments divine respondence meet; The silver-sounding instruments did meet With the base murmurs of the waters-fall; The waters-fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call; The gentle-warbling wind low answered to all.*

Our critic observes that Dr. Warton says of these lines, that “they are of themselves a complete concert of the most delicious music.” Indeed, this very stanza in Spenser has been celebrated long before Joseph Warton wrote, and often since; now listen to our learned Twining:—

“It is unwillingly that I differ from a person of so much taste. I cannot consider as music, much less as ‘delicious music,’ a mixture of incompatible sounds—of sounds musical with sounds unmusical. The singing of birds cannot possibly be ‘attempered’ to the notes of a human voice. The mixture is, and must be, disagreeable. To a person listening to a concert of voices and instruments, the interruption of singing-birds, wind, and water-falls, would be little better than the torment of Hogarth’s enraged musician. Further, the description itself is, like too many of Spenser’s, coldly elaborate, and indiscriminately minute. Of the expressions, some are feeble and without effect, as ‘joyous birds’—some evidently improper, as ‘trembling voices’ and ‘cheerful shades;’ for there cannot be a greater fault in a voice than to be tremulous, and cheerful is surely an unhappy epithet applied to shade—some cold and laboured, and such as betray too plainly the necessities of rhyme; such is—

“‘The waters-fall with difference discreet.’”

Such is the anti-poetical and technical criticism! Imagine a music-master, who had never read a line of poetry, attempting to perform the “delicious music” of our poet—or a singing-master, who had never heard a “joyous bird,” tuning up some fair pupil’s “trembling voice,” and we might have expected this criticism from such “enraged musicians!” Would our critic insist on having a philharmonic concert, or a simple sonata? He who will not suffer birds to be “joyous,” nor “the shade cheerful,” which their notes make so.

“Th’ angelical soft trembling voices made To th’ instruments divine respondence meet,”

the “softness trembling” with the verse; had our critic forgotten Strada’s famed contest of the Nightingale with the Lyre of the poet, when, her “trembling voice” overcome in the rivalry, she fell on the strings to die? And what shall we think of the classical critic who has pronounced that “the descriptions of Spenser are coldly elaborate”—the most vivid and splendid of our poetry?

But the most curious part remains to be told. This fine stanza of Spenser is one of his free borrowings, being a translation of a stanza in Tasso,** excepting the introduction of “the silver-sounding instruments.” The Æolian harp played on by the musical winds was a happiness reserved for Thomson. The felicitous copy of Spenser attracted Fairfax, who, when he came to the passage in Tasso, kept his eye on Spenser, and has carefully retained “the joyous birds” for the “vezzosi augelli” of the original.

It is certain that, without poetic sensibility, the most learned critic will ever find that the utmost force of his logic in these matters will not lead to reason, but to unreason. Imagination only can decide on imagination.

* “The Faery Queen,” book II. canto xii. st. 71.

** “Gerusalemme Liberata,” canto xvi. st. 12.

4 “The Faery Queen,” book III. canto x.

5 “The Faery Queen,” B. III. canto iv, st. 65, and B. I. canto v. st. 20.

6 This edition of 1715, from its modernized orthography, and from greater freedoms taken with the text, is valueless.

7 Thia famous tourney may be viewed in Hollinshed—“England,” 1317, fo. The four illustrious challengers were, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Windsor, Sir Fulke Greville, and Sir Philip Sidney.

ALLEGORY.

Allegory and its exposition of what is termed the double or secret sense, is a topic on more than one account important. The mystical art of types and symbols has given rise to some extraordinary abuses, and even to artifices, which may be considered as an imposture practised on the human understanding. An extended fictitious narrative, constructed on the principle of one continued allegory, is a topic which critical learning has not expressly treated on. An allegorical epic never occurred to the ancient legislator of poetry; and modern critics have consented to define Allegory as “that art in which one thing is related, and another understood.”

But it has been subsequently discovered that this definition was too narrow to comprehend the multiform shapes which allegory assumes, either in the subtility or the grossness of its nature.

Licentious commentators have rioted in their presumed discoveries by extorting from the apparent meaning a hidden sense; or by typical adumbrations wresting allusions to persons or circumstances. The genius of allegory has triumphed from an extended metaphor to a whole poem itself; and its chimerical results have often resembled the metamorphoses of Ovid, turning every object into an altered shape, and making two objects, wholly unconnected, appear to rise out of each other. We may show from the success of many of these pretended revelations that the difficulty has not always been so great as the absurdity.

A prevalent folly has usually some parent-origin; and the present one of Allegory may have been an ancient one. The learned have sought for the source of Allegory in the night of Egyptian darkness, among their hieroglyphics. That curious tale of antiquity which Herodotus has preserved shows us all the obscurity and the inconvenience of allegorical communication in its ambidextrous nature. The four symbols—of the arrows, the bird, the mouse, and the frog, which the Scythian ambassadors silently presented to Darius on his invasion of their deserts, were an allegory; and like many allegories, this emblematical embassy admitted of contrary interpretations. This enigmatic humour of the Egyptian learning seems to have been caught by the emblematical Greeks. The priesthood, eager to save the divinity of their whole theogony from the popular traditions and poetical impieties of that bible of the Polytheists, the Iliad, opened the secret or double sense of Homer. They maintained that the Homeric fables were nothing less than an allegory, shadowing forth the mysteries of nature, and veiling an arcanum of the sciences physical and moral. And these elucidators of speculative obscurities formed a sect under the lower Platonists.1 The fathers were perfect children in their ridiculous allegories, and they allegorised the Old Testament throughout; and assuredly the Rabbins did not yield in puerility to the fathers. But all these were on topics too solemn to enter into our present inquiry.

We may, however, smile when we discover this race of Œdipuses among the romanzatori, or the publishers of the ancient romances. With solemn effrontery these proceeded on the principle of allegory to dignify their light and lying volumes, either to renovate the satiated curiosity of their readers, to cover the freedom of their prurient incidents, or to tolerate their marvellous fantasies. The editor of “Amadis of Gaul” revealed a secret yet untold. The common reader hitherto had never strayed beyond the literal sense; but he was now informed that he had only culled the most perishable flowers; for the more elevated mind were reserved the perennial fruits of a mystical interpretation of the occult sense. It was in this way that the famous “Romaunt of the Rose,” from a mere love-story and a general satire on society, was converted into a volume of theology, of politics, of ethics, and even of the grand œuvre of the alchemists. Such inchoate mysteries were told under “the rose!” The most ludicrous display of their literary imposture may be seen in that collection of popular tales called the Gesta Romanorum. Every tale is accompanied by the gloss of a pious allegorist. An “Emperor,” or “Pompey the Great,” is a frequent personage in these tales, and is always the type of “our Heavenly Father,” or “the soul,” or “the Saviour;” while Contes à la Fontaine, however licentious, pass through a moralization by the puritanical cant of hypocritical monkery.

Conforming to the spurious piety of this monkish taste, a voluminous commentary expounded the morality of the ravishing versatilities of Ariosto. Berni gravely assured us that all the marvels of enchanted gardens, voluminous dragons, sylvan savages, and monsters with human faces, were only thrown out for the amusement of the ignorant; and concludes with these memorable lines, which he freely borrowed from the father of Italian poesy—

Ma voi ch’avete gl’intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde, Sotto queste coperte alte e profonde!2

“But ye of sounder intellect admire the wisdom hidden under these coverings, high and profound!” A strain so solemn and melodious was not the least exquisite pleasantry from a burlesque satirist!

Camoens having adopted the Grecian mythology in his Christian epic, recourse was had to a mystic allegory to defend the incongruity; when Vasco de Gama and his companions sport with Thetis and her nymphs, allegorically, though in good earnest, some Portuguese commentator has explained how “these phantastic amours signify the wild sects of different enthusiasts in the most rational institutions, which, however contrary to each other, all agree in deriving their authority from the same source.” To such ineptitudes are the allegorists sometimes driven, from the sickly taste of gratifying the infirmity of readers by cloaking their freest inventions in the garb of piety and morality. Thus the popular literature of Europe was overrun by these adumbrations. Even Milton echoed the occult doctrine which he had caught from the seers of the old Romanzatori—those Gothic Homers in whose spells he had been bound:—

Forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear.

While this mania of allegorising fictitious narratives was in vogue, a remarkable occurrence, had it been publicly known, might have let the initiated into a secret more “high and profound” than any of their esoteric revelations, and might have exposed the imposture which had been so long practised on their simplicity. The hapless Tasso was harassed by a most “stiff-necked” generation of “the learned Romans,” as he calls the Classicists—a mob of signori, of mechanical critics, protesting against his potent inventions.

Magnanima Mensogna, hor quando è il vero Si bello che si posse à te preporre.

The forest incantations of Ismen, and the enchantments of Armida, those true creations of Gothic romance, were on the point of utter perdition. In this extremity the poet decided to have recourse to the prevalent folly of fitting an allegory to his epic. He acknowledges to his confidential friend that the whole was only designed to humour the times, and begs that he may not be laughed at. “I will act the profound, and show that I have a deep political purpose;” and he might have added a whole system of ethics which has been extorted from the presumed allegory. “Under this shield,” he proceeds, “I shall endeavour to protect the loves and the enchantments”—those golden leaves which the furious classicists would have torn out of his romantic epic. By this singular fact we are led to this important discovery, that to allegorise is no difficult affair, for the present allegory was “the work of a single morning!”3

Tasso’s confession is a perpetual demonstration of the fallacies of allegory. We must wholly rid ourselves of “gl’ intelletti sani,” if we doubt that the original writers who have been so largely allegorised ever composed an extended fictitious narrative but in all the freedom of invention, in open daylight, and never seeking to hide nature in secret coverts.