Chapter XXII

HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1600 TO 1650.

Sect. I.

ON ITALIAN POETRY.

Characters of the Poets of the Seventeenth Century—Sometimes too much depreciated—Marini—Tassoni—Chiabrera.

Low estimation of the Seicentisti. 1. At the close of the sixteenth century, few remained in Italy to whom posterity has assigned a considerable reputation for their poetry. But the ensuing period has stood lower, for the most part, in the opinion of later ages than any other since the revival of letters. The seicentisti, the writers of the seventeenth century, were stigmatised in modern criticism, till the word has been associated with nothing but false taste and everything that should be shunned and despised. Those who had most influence in leading the literary judgment of Italy went back, some almost exclusively, to the admiration of Petrarch and his contemporaries, some to the various writers who cultivated their native poetry in the sixteenth century. Salvini is of the former class, Muratori of the latter.[443]

Not quite so great as formerly. 2. The last age, that is, the concluding twenty years of the eighteenth century, brought with it, in many respects, a change of public sentiment in Italy. A masculine turn of thought, an expanded grasp of philosophy, a thirst, ardent to excess, for great exploits and noble praise, has distinguished the Italian people of the last fifty years from their progenitors of several preceding generations. It is possible that the enhanced relative importance of the Lombards in their national literature, may have not been without its influence in rendering the public taste less fastidious as to purity of language, less fine in that part of æsthetic discernment which relates to the grace and felicity of expression, while it became also more apt to demand originality, nervousness, and the power of exciting emotion. The writers of the seventeenth century may, in some cases, have gained by this revolution; but those of the preceding ages, especially the Petrarchists whom Bembo had led, have certainly lost ground in national admiration.

Praise of them by Rubbi. 3. Rubbi, editor of the voluminous collection, called Parnaso Italiano, had the courage to extol the “seicentisti” for their genius and fancy, and even to place them, in all but style, above their predecessors. “Give them,” he says, “but grace and purity, take from them their capricious exaggerations, their perpetual and forced metaphors, you will think Marini the first poet of Italy, and his followers, with their fulness of imagery and personification, will make you forget their monotonous predecessors. I do not advise you to make a study of the seicentisti; it would spoil your style, perhaps your imagination; I only tell you that they were the true Italian poets; they wanted a good style, it is admitted, but they were so far from wanting genius and imagination, that these perhaps tended to impair their style.”[444]

Also by Salfi. 4. It is probable that every native critic would think some parts of this panegyric, and especially the strongly hyperbolical praise of Marini, carried too far. But I am not sure that we should be wrong in agreeing with Rubbi, that there is as much Catholic poetry, by which I mean that which is good in all ages and countries, in some of the minor productions of the seventeenth as in those of the sixteenth age. The sonnets, especially, have more individuality and more meaning. In this, however, I should wish to include the latter portion of the seventeenth century. Salfi, a writer of more taste and judgment than Rubbi, has recently taken the same side, and remarked the superior originality, the more determined individuality, the greater variety of subjects, above all, what the Italians now most value, the more earnest patriotism of the later poets.[445] Those immediately before us, belonging to the first half of the century, are less numerous than in the former age; the sonnetteers, especially, have produced much less; and in the collections of poetry, even in that of Rubbi, notwithstanding his eulogy, they take up very little room. Some, however, have obtained a durable renown, and are better known in Europe than any, except the Tassos, that flourished in the last fifty years of the golden age.

Adone of Marini. 5. It must be confessed that the praise of a masculine genius, either in thought or language, cannot be bestowed on the poet of the seventeenth century whom his contemporaries most admired, Giovanni Battista Marini. He is, on the contrary, more deficient than all the rest in such qualities, and is indebted to the very opposite characteristics for the sinister influence he exerted on the public taste. He was a Neapolitan by birth, and gave to the world his famous Adone, in 1623. As he was then fifty-four years old, it may be presumed, from the character of the poem, that it was in great part written long before; and he had already acquired a considerable reputation by his other works. The Adone was received with an unbounded and ill-judging approbation; ill-judging in a critical sense, because the faults of this poem are incapable of defence, but not unnatural, as many parallel instances of the world’s enthusiasm have shown. No one had before carried the corruption of taste so far; extravagant metaphors, false thoughts and conceits on equivocal words are very frequent in the Adone; and its author stands accountable in some measure for his imitators, who during more than half a century looked up to Marini with emulous folly, and frequently succeeded in greater deviations from pure taste, without his imagination and elegance.

Its character. 6. The Adone is one of the longest poems in the world, containing more than 45,000 lines. He has shown some ingenuity in filling up the canvas of so slight a story by additional incidents from his own invention, and by long episodes allusive to the times in which he lived. But the subject, expanded so interminably, is essentially destitute of any superior interest, and fit only for an enervated people, barren of high thoughts and high actions, the Italy, notwithstanding some bright exceptions, of the seventeenth century. If we could overcome this essential source of weariness, the Adone has much to delight our fancy and our ear. Marini is, more than any other poet, the counterpart of Ovid; his fertility of imagination, his ready accumulation of circumstances and expressions, his easy flow of language, his harmonious versification, are in no degree inferior; his faults are also the same; for in Ovid we have all the overstrained figures and the false conceits of Marini. But the Italian poet was incapable of imitating the truth to nature and depth of feeling which appear in many parts of his ancient prototype, nor has he as vigorous an expression. Never does Marini rise to any high pitch; few stanzas, perhaps, are remembered by natives for their beauty, but many are graceful and pleasing, all are easy and musical.[446] “Perhaps,” says Salfi, “with the exception of Ariosto, no one has been more a poet by nature than he;”[447] a praise, however, which may justly seem hyperbolical to those who recall their attention to the highest attributes of poetry.

Though this metrical skill may not be of the highest merit in poetry, it is no more to be slighted than facility of touch in a painter.

And popularity. 7. Marini belongs to that very numerous body of poets who, delighted with the spontaneity of their ideas, never reject any that arise; their parental love forbids all preference, and an impartial law of gavelkind shares their page among all the offspring of their brain. Such were Ovid and Lucan, and such have been some of our own poets of great genius and equal fame. Their fertility astonishes the reader, and he enjoys for a time the abundant banquet; but satiety is too sure a consequence, and he returns with less pleasure to a second perusal. The censure of criticism falls invariably, and sometimes too harshly, on this sort of poetry; it is one of those cases where the critic and the world are most at variance; but the world is apt, in this instance, to reverse its own judgment, and yield to the tribunal it had rejected. “To Marini,” says an eminent Italian writer, “we owe the lawlessness of composition: the ebullition of his genius, incapable of restraint, burst through every bulwark, enduring no rule but that of his own humour, which was all for sonorous verse, bold and ingenious thoughts, fantastical subjects, a phraseology rather Latin than Italian, and in short aimed at pleasing by a false appearance of beauty. It would almost pass belief how much this style was admired, were it not so near our own time that we hear as it were the echo of its praise; nor did Dante, or Petrarch, or Tasso, or perhaps any of the ancient poets, obtain in their lives so much applause.”[448] But Marini, who died in 1625, had not time to enjoy much of this glory. The length of this poem, and the diffuseness which produces its length, render it nearly impossible to read through the Adone; and it wants that inequality which might secure preference to detached portions. The story of Psyche in the fourth canto may perhaps be as fair a specimen of Marini as could be taken: it is not easy to destroy the beauty of that fable, nor was he unfitted to relate it with grace and interest; but he has displayed all the blemishes of his own style.[449]

Secchia Rapita of Tassoni. 8. The Secchia Rapita of Alessandro Tassoni, published at Paris in 1622, is better known in Europe than might have been expected from its local subject, idiomatic style, and unintelligible personalities. It turns, as the title imports, on one of the petty wars frequent among the Italian cities as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century, wherein the Bolognese endeavoured to recover the bucket of a well, which the citizens of Modena, in a prior incursion, had carried off. Tassoni, by a poetical anachronism, mixed this with an earlier contest of rather more dignity between the little republics, wherein Enzio, king of Sardinia, a son of Frederic II., had been made prisoner. He has been reckoned by many the inventor, or at least the reproducer in modern times, of the mock heroic style.[450] Pulci, however, had led the way; and when Tassoni claims originality, it must be in a very limited view of the execution of his poem. He has certainly more of parody than Pulci could have attempted; the great poems of Ariosto and Tasso, especially the latter, supply him with abundant opportunities for this ingenious and lively, but not spiteful, exercise of wit, and he has adroitly seized the ridiculous side of his contemporary Marini. The combat of the cities, it may be observed, is serious enough, however trifling the cause, and has its due proportion of slaughter; but Tassoni, very much in the manner of the Morgante Maggiore, throws an air of ridicule over the whole. The episodes are generally in a still more comic style. A graceful facility and a light humour, which must have been incomparably better understood by his countrymen and contemporaries, make this a very amusing poem. It is exempt from the bad taste of the age; and the few portions where the burlesque tone disappears are versified with much elegance. Perhaps it has not been observed that the Count de Culange, one of his most ludicrous characters, bears a certain resemblance to Hudibras, both by his awkward and dastardly appearance as a knight, and by his ridiculous addresses to the lady whom he woos.[451] None, however, will question the originality of Butler.

Chiabrera. 9. But the poet of whom Italy has, in later times, been far more proud than of Marini or Tassoni was Chiabrera. Of his long life the greater part fell within the sixteenth century; and some of his poems were published before its close; but he has generally been considered as belonging to the present period. Chiabrera is the founder of a school in the lyric poetry of Italy, rendered afterwards more famous by Guidi, which affected the name of Pindaric. It is the Theban lyre which they boast to strike: it is from the fountain of Dirce that they draw their inspiration; and these allusions are as frequent in their verse, as those to Valclusa and the Sorga in the followers of Petrarch. Chiabrera borrowed from Pindar that grandeur of sound, that pomp of epithets, that rich swell of imagery, that unvarying majesty of conception, which distinguish the odes of both poets. He is less frequently harsh or turgid, though the latter blemish has been sometimes observed in him, but wants also the masculine condensation of his prototype; nor does he deviate so frequently, or with so much power of imagination, into such digressions as those which generally shade from our eyes, in a skilful profusion of ornament, the victors of the Grecian games whom Pindar professes to celebrate. The poet of the house of Medici and of other princes of Italy, great at least in their own time, was not so much compelled to desert his immediate subject, as he who was paid for an ode by some wrestler or boxer, who could only become worthy of heroic song by attaching his name to the ancient glories of his native city. The profuse employment of mythological allusions, frigid as it appears at present, was so customary, that we can hardly impute to it much blame; and it seemed peculiarly appropriate to a style which was studiously formed on the Pindaric model.[452] The odes of Chiabrera are often panegyrical, and his manner was well fitted for that style, though sometimes we have ceased to admire those whom he extols. But he is not eminent for purity of taste, nor, I believe, of Tuscan language: he endeavoured to force the idiom, more than it would bear, by constructions and inventions borrowed from the ancient tongues; and these odes, splendid and noble as they are, bear in the estimation of critics some marks of the seventeenth century.[453] The satirical epistles of Chiabrera are praised by Salfi as written in a moral Horatian tone, abounding with his own experience and allusions to his time.[454] But in no other kind of poetry has he been so highly successful as in the lyric; and, though the Grecian robe is never cast away, he imitated Anacreon with as much skill as Pindar. “His lighter odes,” says Crescimbeni, “are most beautiful and elegant, full of grace, vivacity, spirit, and delicacy, adorned with pleasing inventions, and differing in nothing but language from those of Anacreon. His dithyrambics I hold incapable of being excelled, all the qualities required in such compositions being united with a certain nobleness of expression which elevates all it touches upon.”[455]

10. The greatest lyric poet of Greece was not more the model of Chiabrera than his Roman competitor was of Testi. “Had he been more attentive to the choice of his expression,” says Crescimbeni, “he might have earned the name of the Tuscan Horace.” The faults of his age are said to be frequently discernible in Testi; but there is, to an ordinary reader, an Horatian elegance, a certain charm of grace and ease in his canzoni, which render them pleasing. One of these, beginning, Ruscelletto orgoglioso, is highly admired by Muratori, the best, perhaps, of the Italian critics, and one not slow to censure any defects of taste. It apparently alludes to some enemy in the court of Modena.[456] The character of Testi was ambitious and restless, his life spent in seeking and partly in enjoying public offices, but terminated in prison. He had taken, says a later writer, Horace for his model; and perhaps like him he wished to appear sometimes a stoic, sometimes an epicurean; but he knew not like him how to profit by the lessons either of Zeno or Epicurus, so as to lead a tranquil and independent life.[457]

His followers. 11. The imitators of Chiabrera were generally unsuccessful; they became hyperbolical and exaggerated. The translation of Pindar by Alessandro Adimari, though not very much resembling the original, has been praised for its own beauty. But these poets are not to be confounded with the Marinists, to whom they are much superior. Ciampoli, whose Rime were published in 1628, may perhaps be the best after Chiabrera.[458] Several obscure epic poems, some of which are rather to be deemed romances, are commemorated by the last historian of Italian literature. Among these is the Conquest of Granada by Graziani, published in 1650. Salfi justly observes that the subject is truly epic; but the poem itself seems to be nothing but a series of episodical intrigues without unity. The style, according to the same writer, is redundant, the similes too frequent and monotonous; yet he prefers it to all the heroic poems which had intervened since that of Tasso.[459]

Sect. II.

ON SPANISH POETRY.

Romances—The Argensolas—Villegas—Gongora, and his School.

The styles of Spanish poetry. 12. The Spanish poetry of the sixteenth century might be arranged in three classes. In the first we might place that which was formed in the ancient school, though not always preserving its characteristics; the short trochaic metres, employed in the song or the ballad, altogether national, or aspiring to be such, either in its subjects or in its style. In the second would stand that to which the imitation of the Italians had given rise, the school of Boscan and Garcilasso; and with these we might place also the epic poems which do not seem to be essentially different from similar productions of Italy. A third and not inconsiderable division, though less extensive than the others, is composed of the poetry of good sense; the didactic, semi-satirical, Horatian style, of which Mendoza was the founder, and several specimens of which occur in the Parnaso Español of Sedano.

The romances. 13. The romances of the Cid and many others are referred by the most competent judges to the reign of Philip III.[460] These are by no means among the best of Spanish romances, and we should naturally expect that so artificial a style as the imitation of ancient manners and sentiments by poets in wholly a different state of society, though some men of talent might succeed in it, would soon degenerate into an affected mannerism. The Italian style continued to be cultivated: under Philip III., the decline of Spain in poetry, as in arms and national power, was not so striking as afterwards. Several poets belong to the age of that prince, and even that of Philip IV. was not destitute of men of merited reputation.[461] |The brothers Argensola.| Among the best were two brothers, Lupercio and Bartholomew Argensola. These were chiefly distinguished in what I have called the third or Horatian manner of Spanish poetry, though they by no means confined themselves to any peculiar style. “Lupercio,” says Bouterwek, “formed his style after Horace with no less assiduity than Luis de Leon; but he did not possess the soft enthusiasm of that pious poet, who in the religious spirit of his poetry is so totally unlike Horace. An understanding at once solid and ingenious, subject to no extravagant illusion, yet full of true poetic feeling, and an imagination more plastic than creative, impart a more perfect Horatian colouring to the odes, as well as to the canciones and sonnets of Lupercio. He closely imitated Horace in his didactic satires, a style of composition in which no Spanish poet had preceded him. But he never succeeded in attaining the bold combination of ideas which characterizes the ode style of Horace; and his conceptions have therefore seldom anything like the Horatian energy. On the other hand, all his poems express no less precision of language than the models after which he formed his style. His odes, in particular, are characterized by a picturesque tone of expression which he seems to have imbibed from Virgil rather than from Horace. The extravagant metaphors by which some of Herrera’s odes are deformed were uniformly avoided by Lupercio.”[462] The genius of Bartholomew Argensola was very like that of his brother, nor are their writings easily distinguishable; but Bouterwek assigns on the whole a higher place to Bartholomew. Dieze inclines to the same judgment, and thinks the eulogy of Nicolas Antonio on these brothers, extravagant as it seems, not beyond their merits.

Villegas. 14. But another poet, Manuel Estevan de Villegas, whose poems, written in very early youth, entitled Amatorias or Eroticas, were published in 1620, has attained a still higher reputation, especially in other parts of Europe. Dieze calls him “one of the best lyric poets of Spain, excellent in the various styles he has employed, but above all in his odes and songs. His original poems are full of genius; his translations of Horace and Anacreon might often pass for original. Few surpass him in harmony of verse; he is the Spanish Anacreon, the poet of the Graces.”[463] Bouterwek, a more discriminating judge than Dieze, who is perhaps rather valuable for research than for taste, has observed that “the graceful luxuriance of the poetry of Villegas has no parallel in modern literature; and, generally speaking, no modern writer has so well succeeded in blending the spirit of ancient poetry with the modern. But constantly to observe that correctness of ideas, which distinguished the classical compositions of antiquity, was by Villegas, as by most Spanish poets, considered too rigid a requisition, and an unnecessary restraint on genius. He accordingly sometimes degenerates into conceits and images, the monstrous absurdity of which are characteristic of the author’s nation and age. For instance, in one of his odes in which he entreats Lyda to suffer her tresses to flow, he says that ‘agitated by Zephyr, her locks would occasion a thousand deaths, and subdue a thousand lives;’ and then he adds, in a strain of extravagance, surpassing that of the Marinists, ‘that the sun himself would cease to give light, if he did not snatch beams from her radiant countenance to illumine the east.’ But faults of this glaring kind are by no means frequent in the poetry of Villegas, and the fascinating grace with which he emulates his models, operates with so powerful a charm, that the occasional occurrence of some little affectations, from which he could scarcely be expected entirely to abstain, is easily overlooked by the reader.”[464]

Quevedo. 15. Quevedo, who, having borne the surname of Villegas, has sometimes been confounded with the poet we have just named, is better known in Europe for his prose than his verse; but he is the author of numerous poems both serious and comic or satirical. The latter are by much the more esteemed of the two. He wrote burlesque poetry with success, but it is frequently unintelligible except to natives. In satire he adopted the Juvenalian style.[465] A few more might be added, perhaps, especially Espinel, a poet of the classic school, Borja of Esquillace, once viceroy of Peru, who is called by Bouterwek the last representative of that style in Spain, but more worthy of praise for withstanding the bad taste of his contemporaries than for any vigour of genius, and Christopher de la Mena.[466] No Portuguese poetry about this time seems to be worthy of notice in European literature, though Manuel Faria y Sousa and a few more might attain a local reputation by sonnets and other amatory verse.

Defects of taste in Spanish verse. 16. The original blemish of Spanish writing, both in prose and verse, had been an excess of effort to say everything in an unusual manner, a deviation from the beaten paths of sentiment and language in a wider curve than good taste permits. Taste is the presiding faculty which regulates, in all works within her jurisdiction, the struggling powers of imagination, emotion, and reason. Each has its claim to mingle in the composition; each may sometimes be allowed in a great measure to predominate; and a phlegmatic application of what men call common sense in æsthetic criticism is almost as repugnant to its principles as a dereliction of all reason for the sake of fantastic absurdity. Taste also must determine, by an intuitive sense of right somewhat analogous to that which regulates the manners of polished life, to what extent the most simple, the most obvious, the most natural, and, therefore, in a popular meaning, the most true, is to be modified by a studious introduction of the new, the striking, and the beautiful, so that neither what is insipid and trivial, nor yet what is forced and affected, may displease us. In Spain, as we have observed, the latter was always the prevailing fault. The public taste had been formed on bad models, on the Oriental poetry, metaphorical beyond all perceptible analogy, and on that of the Provençals, false in sentiment, false in conception, false in image and figure. The national character, proud, swelling, and ceremonious, conspired to give an inflated tone; it was also grave and sententious, rather than lively or delicate, and therefore fond of a strained and ambitious style. These vices of writing are carried to excess in romances of chivalry, which became ridiculous in the eyes of sensible men, but were certainly very popular: they affect also, though in a different manner, much of the Spanish prose of the sixteenth century, and they belong to a great deal of the poetry of that age, though it must be owned that much appears wholly exempt from them, and written in a very pure and classical spirit. Cervantes strove by example and by precept to maintain good taste; and some of his contemporaries took the same line.[467] But they had to fight against the predominant turn of their nation, which soon gave the victory to one of the worst manners of writing that ever disgraced public favour.

Pedantry and far-fetched allusions. 17. Nothing can be more opposite to what is strictly called a classical style, or one formed upon the best models of Greece and Rome, than pedantry. This was, nevertheless, the weed that overspread the face of literature in those ages when Greece and Rome were the chief objects of veneration. Without an intimate discernment of their beauty, it was easy to copy allusions that were no longer intelligible, to counterfeit trains of thought that belonged to past times, to force reluctant idioms into modern form, as some are said to dress after a lady for whom nature has done more than for themselves. From the revival of letters downwards, this had been more or less observable in the learned men of Europe, and after that class grew more extensive, in the current literature of modern languages. Pedantry, which consisted in unnecessary, and perhaps unintelligible, references to ancient learning, was afterwards combined with other artifices to obtain the same end, far-fetched metaphors and extravagant conceits. The French versifiers of the latter end of the sixteenth century were eminent in both, as the works of Ronsard and Du Bartas attest. We might, indeed, take the Creation of Du Bartas more properly than the Euphues of our English Lilly, which, though very affected and unpleasing, does hardly such violence to common speech and common sense, for the prototype of the style which, in the early part of the seventeenth century, became popular in several countries, but especially in Spain, through the misplaced labours of Gongora.

Gongora. 18. Luis de Gongora, a man of very considerable talents, and capable of writing well, as he has shown, in different styles of poetry, was unfortunately led by an ambitious desire of popularity to introduce one which should render his name immortal, as it has done in a mode which he did not design. This was his estilo culto, as it was usually called, or highly polished phraseology, wherein every word seems to have been out of its natural place. “In fulfilment of this object,” says Bouterwek, “he formed for himself with the most laborious assiduity, a style as uncommon as affected, and opposed to all the ordinary rules of the Spanish language, either in prose or verse. He particularly endeavoured to introduce into his native tongue the intricate constructions of the Greek and Latin, though such an arrangement of words had never been attempted in Spanish composition. He consequently found it necessary to invent a particular system of punctuation, in order to render the sense of his verses intelligible. Not satisfied with this patch-work kind of phraseology, he affected to attach an extraordinary depth of meaning to each word, and to diffuse an air of superior dignity over his whole style. In Gongora’s poetry the most common words received a totally new signification; and in order to impart perfection to his estilo culto, he summoned all his mythological learning to his aid.”[468] “Gongora,” says an English writer, “was the founder of a sect in literature. The style called in Castilian cultismo owes its origin to him. This affectation consists in using language so pedantic, metaphors so strained, and constructions so involved, that few readers have the knowledge requisite to understand the words, and still fewer ingenuity to discover the allusion, or patience to unravel the sentences. These authors do not avail themselves of the invention of letters for the purpose of conveying, but of concealing their ideas.”[469]

The schools formed by him. 19. The Gongorists formed a strong party in literature, and carried with them the public voice. If we were to believe some writers of the seventeenth century, he was the greatest poet of Spain.[470] The age of Cervantes was over, nor was there vitality enough in the criticism of the reign of Philip IV. to resist the contagion. Two sects soon appeared among these cultoristos; one who retained that name, and, like their master, affected a certain precision of style; another, called conceptistos, which went still greater lengths in extravagance, desirous only of expressing absurd ideas in unnatural language.[471] The prevalence of such a disease, for no other analogy can so fitly be used, would seem to have been a bad presage for Spain; but in fact, like other diseases, it did but make the tour of Europe, and rage worse in some countries than in others. It had spent itself in France, when it was at its height in Italy and England. I do not perceive the close connection of the estilo culto of Gongora with that of Marini, whom both Bouterwek and Lord Holland suppose to have formed his own taste on the Spanish school. It seems rather too severe an imputation on that most ingenious and fertile poet, who, as has already been observed, has no fitter parallel than Ovid. The strained metaphors of the Adone are easily collected by critics, and seem extravagant in juxtaposition, but they recur only at intervals; while those of Gongora are studiously forced into every line, and are besides incomparably more refined and obscure. His style, indeed, seems to be like that of Lycophron, without the excuse of that prophetical mystery, which breathes a certain awfulness over the symbolic language of the Cassandra. Nor am I convinced that our own metaphysical poetry in the reigns of James and Charles, had much to do with either Marini or Gongora, except as it bore marks of the same vice, a restless ambition to excite wonder by overstepping the boundaries of nature.

Sect. III.

Malherbe—Regnier—Other French Poets.

Malherbe. 20. Malherbe, a very few of whose poems belong to the last century, but the greater part to the first twenty years of the present, gave a polish and a grace to the lyric poetry of France which has rendered his name celebrated in her criticism. The public taste of that country is (or I should rather say, used to be) more intolerant of defects in poetry than rigorous in its demands of excellence. Malherbe, therefore, who substituted a regular and accurate versification, a style pure and generally free from pedantic or colloquial phrases, and a sustained tone of what were reckoned elevated thoughts, for the more unequal strains of the sixteenth century, acquired a reputation which may lead some of his readers to disappointment. And this is likely to be increased by a very few lines of great beauty which are known by heart. These stand too much alone in his poems. In general, we find in them neither imagery nor sentiment that yield us delight. He is less mythological, less affected, less given to frigid hyperboles than his predecessors, but far too much so for anyone accustomed to real poetry. In the panegyrical odes Malherbe displays some felicity and skill; the poet of kings and courtiers, he wisely perhaps wrote, even when he could have written better, what kings and courtiers would understand and reward. Polished and elegant, his lines seldom pass the conventional tone of poetry; and while he is never original, he is rarely impressive. Malherbe may stand in relation to Horace as Chiabrera does to Pindar: the analogy is not very close; but he is far from deficient in that calm philosophy which forms the charm of the Roman poet, and we are willing to believe that he sacrificed his time reluctantly to the praises of the great. It may be suspected that he wrote verses for others; a practice not unusual, I believe, among these courtly rhymers; at least, his Alcandre seems to be Henry IV., Chrysanthe or Oranthe, the Princess of Condé. He seems himself, in some passages, to have affected gallantry towards Mary of Medicis, which at that time was not reckoned an impertinence. It is hardly perhaps worth mentioning that Malherbe uses lines of an uneven number of syllables; an innovation, as I believe it was, that has had no success.

Criticisms upon his poetry. 21. Bouterwek has criticised Malherbe with some justice, but with greater severity.[472] He deems him no poet, which in a certain sense is surely true. But we narrow our definition of poetry too much, when we exclude from it the versification of good sense and select diction. This may probably be ascribed to Malherbe; though Bouhours, an acute and somewhat rigid critic, has pointed out some passages which he deems nonsensical. Another writer of the same age, Rapin, whose own taste was not very glowing, observes that there is much prose in Malherbe; and that, well as he merits to be called correct, he is a little too desirous of appearing so, and often becomes frigid.[473] Boileau has extolled him, perhaps, somewhat too highly, and La Harpe is inclined to the same side; but in the modern state of French criticism, the danger is that the Malherbes will be too much depreciated.

Satires of Regnier. 22. The satires of Regnier have been highly praised by Boileau, a competent judge, no doubt, in such matters. Some have preferred Regnier even to himself, and found in this old Juvenal of France a certain stamp of satirical genius which the more polished critic wanted.[474] These satires are unlike all other French poetry of the age of Henry IV.; the tone is vehement, somewhat rugged and coarse, and reminds us a little of his contemporaries Hall and Donne, whom, however, he will generally and justly be thought much to excel. Some of his satires are borrowed from Ovid or from the Italians.[475] They have been called gross and licentious; but this only applies to one, the rest are unexceptionable. Regnier, who had probably some quarrel with Malherbe, speaks with contempt of his elaborate polish. But the taste of France, and especially of that highly cultivated nobility who formed the court of Louis XIII. and his son, no longer endured the rude though sometimes animated versification of the older poets. |Racan—Maynard.| Next to Malherbe in reputation stood Racan and Maynard, both more or less of his school. Of these it was said by their master that Racan wanted the diligence of Maynard, as Maynard did the spirit of Racan, and that a good poet might be made out of the two.[476] A foreigner will in general prefer the former, who seems to have possessed more imagination and sensibility, and a keener relish for rural beauty. Maynard’s verses, according to Pelisson, have an ease and elegance that few can imitate, which proceeds from his natural and simple construction.[477] He had more success in epigram than in his sonnets, which Boileau has treated with little respect. Nor does he speak better of Malleville, who chose no other species of verse, but seldom produced a finished piece, though not deficient in spirit and delicacy. Viaud, more frequently known by the name of Theophile, a writer of no great elevation of style, is not destitute of imagination. Such at least is the opinion of Rapin and Bouterwek.[478]

Voiture. 23. The poems of Gombauld were, in general, published before the middle of the century; his epigrams, which are most esteemed, in 1657. These are often lively and neat. But a style of playfulness and gaiety had been introduced by Voiture. French poetry under Ronsard and his school, and even that of Malherbe, had lost the lively tone of Marot, and became serious almost to severity. Voiture, with an apparent ease and grace, though without the natural air of the old writers, made it once more amusing. In reality, the style of Voiture is artificial and elaborate, but, like his imitator Prior among us, he has the skill to disguise this from the reader. He must be admitted to have had, in verse as well as prose, a considerable influence over the taste of France. He wrote to please women, and women are grateful when they are pleased. |Sarrazin.| Sarrazin, says his biographer, though less celebrated than Voiture, deserves perhaps to be rated above him; with equal ingenuity, he is far more natural.[479] The German historian of French literature has spoken less respectfully of Sarrazin, whose verses are the most insipid rhymed prose, such as he not unhappily calls toilet-poetry.[480] This is a style which finds little mercy on the right bank of the Rhine; but the French are better judges of the merit of Sarrazin.

Sect. IV.

Rise of Poetry in Germany—Opitz and his followers—Dutch Poets.

Low state of German literature. 24. The German language had never been more despised by the learned and the noble than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which seems to be the lowest point in its native literature. The capacity was not wanting; many wrote Latin verse with success; the collection made by Gruter is abundant in these cultivators of a foreign tongue, several of whom belong to the close of the preceding age. But among these it is said that whoever essayed to write their own language did but fail, and the instances adduced are very few. The upper ranks began about this time to speak French in common society; the burghers, as usual, strove to imitate them, and what was far worse, it became the mode to intermingle French words with German, not singly and sparingly, as has happened in other times and countries, but in a jargon affectedly pie-bald and macaronic. |Literary Societies.| Some hope might have been founded on the literary academies, which, in emulation of Italy, sprung up in this period. The oldest is The Fruitful Society, (die fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) known also as the order of Palms, established at Weimar in 1617.[481] Five princes enrolled their names at the beginning. It held forth the laudable purpose of purifying and correcting the mother tongue and of promoting its literature, after the manner of the Italian academies. But it is not unusual for literary associations to promise much and fail of performance; one man is more easily found to lay down a good plan, than many to co-operate in its execution. Probably this was merely the scheme of some more gifted individual, perhaps Werder, who translated Ariosto and Tasso;[482] for little good was affected by the institution. Nor did several others which at different times in the seventeenth century arose over Germany, deserve more praise. They copied the academies of Italy in their quaint names and titles, in their bye-laws, their petty ceremonials and symbolic distinctions, to which, as we always find in these self-elected societies, they attached vast importance, and thought themselves superior to the world by doing nothing for it. “They are gone,” exclaims Bouterwek, “and have left no clear vestige of their existence.” Such had been the meister-singers before them, and little else in effect were the Academies, in a more genial soil, of their own age. Notwithstanding this, though I am compelled to follow the historian of German literature, it must strike us that these societies seem to manifest a public esteem for something intellectual, which they knew not precisely how to attain; and it is to be observed that several of the best poets in the seventeenth century belonged to them.

Opitz. 25. A very small number of poets, such as Meckerlin and Spee, in the early part of the seventeenth century, though with many faults in point of taste, have been commemorated by the modern historians of literature. But they were wholly eclipsed by one whom Germany regards as the founder of her poetic literature, Martin Opitz, a native of Silesia, honoured with a laurel crown by the emperor in 1628, and raised to offices of distinction and trust in several courts. The national admiration of Opitz seems to have been almost enthusiastic; yet Opitz was far from being the poet of enthusiasm. Had he been such his age might not have understood him. His taste was French and Dutch; two countries of which the poetry was pure and correct but not imaginative. No great elevation, no energy of genius will be found in this German Heinsius and Malherbe. Opitz displayed, however, another kind of excellence. He wrote the language with a purity of idiom, in which Luther alone, whom he chose as his model, was superior; he gave more strength to the versification, and paid a regard to the collocation of syllables according to their quantity, or length of time required for articulation, which the earlier poets had neglected. He is therefore reckoned the inventor of a rich and harmonious rhythm; and he also rendered the Alexandrine verse much more common than before.[483] His verse is good; he writes as one conversant with the ancients, and with mankind; if he is too didactic and learned for a poet in the higher sense of the word, if his taste appears fettered by the models he took for imitation, if he even retarded, of which we can hardly be sure, the development of a more genuine nationality in German literature, he must still be allowed, in a favourable sense, to have made an epoch in its history.[484]

His followers. 26. Opitz is reckoned the founder of what was called the first Silesian school, rather so denominated from him than as determining the birthplace of its poets. They were chiefly lyric, but more in the line of songs and short effusions in trochaic metre than of the regular ode, and sometimes display much spirit and feeling. The German song always seems to bear a resemblance to the English; the identity of metre and rhythm conspires with what is more essential, a certain analogy of sentiment. Many, however, of Opitz’s followers, like himself, took Holland for their Parnassus, and translated their songs from Dutch. Fleming was distinguished by a genuine feeling for lyric poetry; he made Opitz his model, but had he not died young, would probably have gone beyond him, being endowed by nature with a more poetical genius. Gryph, or Gryphius, who belonged to the Fruitful Society, and bore in that the surname of the immortal, with faults that strike the reader in every page, is also superior in fancy and warmth to Opitz. But Gryph is better known in German literature by his tragedies. The hymns of the Lutheran church are by no means the lowest form of German poetry. They have been the work of every age since the reformation; but Dach and Gerhard, who, especially the latter, excelled in these devotional songs, lived about the middle of the seventeenth century. The shade of Luther seemed to protect the church from the profanation of bad taste; or, as we should rather say, it was the intense theopathy of the German nation, and the simple majesty of their ecclesiastical music.[485]

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

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

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

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

Sect. V.

ON ENGLISH POETRY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herrick has it thus:—

A most singular parallel for an elegant dancer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lycidas. 60. It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or perhaps we might say most readers do not taste its excellence; nor does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or even Virgil and Homer. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that Johnson, who has committed his critical reputation by the most contemptuous depreciation of this poem, had in an earlier part of his life selected the tenth eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise;[505] the tenth eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same class of pastoral and personal allegory, and requires the same sacrifice of reasoning criticism as the Lycidas itself. In the age of Milton, the poetical world had been accustomed by the Italian and Spanish writers to a more abundant use of allegory than has been pleasing to their posterity; but Lycidas is not so much in the nature of an allegory as of a masque; the characters passed before our eyes in imagination, as on the stage; they are chiefly mythological, but not creations of the poet. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress; but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination that produce no emotion in the heart; nor none at least, except through associations independent of the subject.

61. The introduction of St. Peter after the fabulous deities of the sea has appeared an incongruity deserving of censure to some admirers of this poem. It would be very reluctantly that we could abandon to this criticism the most splendid passage it presents. But the censure rests, as I think, on too narrow a principle. In narrative or dramatic poetry, where something like illusion or momentary belief is to be produced, the mind requires an objective possibility, a capacity of real existence, not only in all the separate portions of the imagined story, but in their coherency and relation to a common whole. Whatever is obviously incongruous, whatever shocks our previous knowledge of possibility, destroys to a certain extent that acquiescence in the fiction, which it is the true business of the fiction to produce. But the case is not the same in such poems as Lycidas. They pretend to no credibility, they aim at no illusion; they are read with the willing abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only that general possibility, that combination of images which common experience does not reject as incompatible, without which the fancy of the poet would be only like that of the lunatic. And it had been so usual to blend sacred with mythological personages in allegory, that no one probably in Milton’s age would have been struck by the objection.

Allegro and Penseroso. 62. The Allegro and Penseroso are perhaps more familiar to us than any part of the writings of Milton. They satisfy the critics and they delight mankind. The choice of images is so judicious, their succession so rapid, the allusions are so various and pleasing, the leading distinction of the poems is so felicitously maintained, the versification is so animated, that we may place them at the head of that long series of descriptive poems which our language has to boast. It may be added, as in the greater part of Milton’s writings, that they are sustained at an uniform pitch, with few blemishes of expression and scarce any feebleness; a striking contrast, in this respect, to all the contemporaneous poetry, except perhaps that of Waller. Johnson has thought, that while there is no mirth in his melancholy, he can detect some melancholy in his mirth. This seems to be too strongly put; but it may be said that his Allegro is rather cheerful than gay, and that even his cheerfulness is not always without effort. In these poems he is indebted to Fletcher, to Burton, to Browne, to Withers, and probably to more of our early versifiers; for he was a great collector of sweets from those wild flowers.

Ode on the Nativity. 63. The Ode on the Nativity, far less popular than most of the poetry of Milton, is perhaps the finest in the English language. A grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the Scriptures. Of the other short poems, that on the death of the Marchioness of Winchester deserves particular mention. It is pity that the first lines are bad, and the last much worse; for rarely can we find more feeling or beauty than in some other passages.