LECTURES ON THE DRAMATIC LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (continued 4)

‘Gervase. They say Green’s a good clown.

Bubble. (Played by Green, says) Green! Green’s an ass.

Scattergood. Wherefore do you say so?

Bub. Indeed, I ha’ no reason; for they say he’s as like me as ever he can look.’

The following description of the dissipation of a fortune in the hands of a spendthrift is ingenious and beautiful.

‘Know that which made him gracious in your eyes,

And gilded o’er his imperfections,

Is wasted and consumed even like ice,

Which by the vehemence of heat dissolves,

And glides to many rivers: so his wealth,

That felt a prodigal hand, hot in expence,

Melted within his gripe, and from his coffers

Ran like a violent stream to other men’s.’

Microcosmus, by Thomas Nabbes, is a dramatic mask or allegory, in which the Senses, the Soul, a Good and a Bad Genius, 291Conscience, &c. contend for the dominion of a man; and notwithstanding the awkwardness of the machinery, is not without poetry, elegance, and originality. Take the description of morning as a proof.

‘What do I see? Blush, grey-eyed morn and spread

Thy purple shame upon the mountain tops:

Or pale thyself with envy, since here comes

A brighter Venus than the dull-eyed star

That lights thee up.’

But what are we to think of a play, of which the following is a literal list of the dramatis personæ?

‘Nature, a fair woman, in a white robe, wrought with birds, beasts, fruits, flowers, clouds, stars, &c.; on her head a wreath of flowers interwoven with stars.

Janus, a man with two faces, signifying Providence, in a yellow robe, wrought with snakes, as he is deus anni: on his head a crown. He is Nature’s husband.

Fire, a fierce-countenanced young man, in a flame-coloured robe, wrought with gleams of fire; his hair red, and on his head a crown of flames. His creature a Vulcan.

Air, a young man of a variable countenance, in a blue robe; wrought with divers-coloured clouds; his hair blue; and on his head a wreath of clouds. His creature a giant or silvan.

Water, a young woman in a sea-green robe, wrought with waves; her hair a sea-green, and on her head a wreath of sedge bound about with waves. Her creature a syren.

Earth, a young woman of a sad countenance, in a grass-green robe, wrought with sundry fruits and flowers; her hair black, and on her head a chaplet of flowers. Her creature a pigmy.

Love, a Cupid in a flame-coloured habit; bow and quiver, a crown of flaming hearts &c.

Physander, a perfect grown man, in a long white robe, and on his head a garland of white lilies and roses mixed. His name ἀπο τῆς φύσεος καὶ τῶ ἀνδρος.

Choler, a fencer; his clothes red.

Blood, a dancer, in a watchet-coloured suit.

Phlegm, a physician, an old man; his doublet white and black; trunk hose.

Melancholy, a musician: his complexion, hair, and clothes, black; a lute in his hand. He is likewise an amorist.

Bellanima, a lovely woman, in a long white robe; on her head a wreath of white flowers. She signifies the soul.

Bonus Genius, an angel, in a like white robe; wings and wreath white.

Malus Genius, a devil, in a black robe; hair, wreath, and wings, black.

The Five Senses—Seeing, a chambermaid; Hearing, the usher of the hall; Smelling, a huntsman or gardener; Tasting, a cook; Touching, a gentleman usher.

Sensuality, a wanton woman, richly habited, but lasciviously dressed, &c.

292Temperance, a lovely woman, of a modest countenance; her garments plain, but decent, &c.

A Philosopher, all properly habited.

An Eremite,

A Ploughman,

A Shepherd,

Three Furies as they are commonly fancied.

Fear, the Crier of the Court, with a tipstaff.

Conscience, the Judge of the Court.

Hope and Despair, an advocate and a lawyer.

The other three Virtues, as they are frequently expressed by painters.

The Heroes, in bright antique habits, &c.

The front of a workmanship, proper to the fancy of the rest, adorned with brass figures of angels and devils, with several inscriptions; the title is an escutcheon, supported by an Angel and a Devil. Within the arch a continuing perspective of ruins, which is drawn still before the other scenes, whilst they are varied.

THE INSCRIPTIONS.

Hinc gloria. Hinc pœna.

Appetitus boni. Appetitus Mali.’

Antony Brewer’s Lingua (1607) is of the same cast. It is much longer as well as older than Microcosmus. It is also an allegory celebrating the contention of the Five Senses for the crown of superiority, and the pretensions of Lingua or the Tongue to be admitted as a sixth sense. It is full of child’s play, and old wives’ tales; but is not unadorned with passages displaying strong good sense, and powers of fantastic description.

Mr. Lamb has quoted two passages from it—the admirable enumeration of the characteristics of different languages, ‘The Chaldee wise, the Arabian physical,’ &c.; and the striking description of the ornaments and uses of tragedy and comedy. The dialogue between Memory, Common Sense, and Phantastes, is curious and worth considering.

‘Common Sense. Why, good father, why are you so late now-a-days?

Memory. Thus ’tis; the most customers I remember myself to have, are, as your lordship knows, scholars, and now-a-days the most of them are become critics, bringing me home such paltry things to lay up for them, that I can hardly find them again.

Phantastes. Jupiter, Jupiter, I had thought these flies had bit none but myself: do critics tickle you, i’faith?

Mem. Very familiarly: for they must know of me, forsooth, how every idle word is written in all the musty moth-eaten manuscripts, kept in all the old libraries in every city, betwixt England and Peru.

Common Sense. Indeed I have noted these times to affect antiquities more than is requisite.

293Mem. I remember in the age of Assaracus and Ninus, and about the wars of Thebes, and the siege of Troy, there were few things committed to my charge, but those that were well worthy the preserving; but now every trifle must be wrapp’d up in the volume of eternity. A rich pudding-wife, or a cobbler, cannot die but I must immortalize his name with an epitaph; a dog cannot water in a nobleman’s shoe, but it must be sprinkled into the chronicles; so that I never could remember my treasure more full, and never emptier of honourable and true heroical actions.’

And again Mendacio puts in his claim with great success to many works of uncommon merit.

‘Appe. Thou, boy! how is this possible? Thou art but a child, and there were sects of philosophy before thou wert born.

Men. Appetitus, thou mistakest me; I tell thee three thousand years ago was Mendacio born in Greece, nursed in Crete, and ever since honoured every where: I’ll be sworn I held old Homer’s pen when he writ his Iliads and his Odysseys.

Appe. Thou hadst need, for I hear say he was blind.

Men. I helped Herodotus to pen some part of his Muses; lent Pliny ink to write his history; rounded Rabelais in the ear when he historified Pantagruel; as for Lucian, I was his genius; O, those two books de Vera Historia, however they go under his name, I’ll be sworn I writ them every tittle.

Appe. Sure as I am hungry, thou’lt have it for lying. But hast thou rusted this latter time for want of exercise?

Men. Nothing less. I must confess I would fain have jogged Stow and great Hollingshed on their elbows, when they were about their chronicles; and, as I remember, Sir John Mandevill’s travels, and a great part of the Decad’s, were of my doing: but for the Mirror of Knighthood, Bevis of Southampton, Palmerin of England, Amadis of Gaul, Huon de Bourdeaux, Sir Guy of Warwick, Martin Marprelate, Robin Hood, Garagantua, Gerilion, and a thousand such exquisite monuments as these, no doubt but they breathe in my breath up and down.’

The Merry Devil of Edmonton which has been sometimes attributed to Shakespear, is assuredly not unworthy of him. It is more likely, however, both from the style and subject-matter to have been Heywood’s than any other person’s. It is perhaps the first example of sentimental comedy we have—romantic, sweet, tender, it expresses the feelings of honour, of love, and friendship in their utmost delicacy, enthusiasm, and purity. The names alone, Raymond Mounchersey, Frank Jerningham, Clare, Millisent, ‘sound silver sweet like lovers’ tongues by night.’ It sets out with a sort of story of Doctor Faustus, but this is dropt as jarring on the tender chords of the rest of the piece. The wit of the Merry Devil of Edmonton is as genuine as the poetry. Mine Host of the George is as good a fellow as Boniface, and the deer-stealing scenes in the forest between 294him, Sir John the curate, Smug the smith, and Banks the miller, are ‘very honest knaveries,’ as Sir Hugh Evans has it. The air is delicate, and the deer, shot by their cross-bows, fall without a groan! Frank Jerningham says to Clare,

‘The way lies right: hark, the clock strikes at Enfield: what’s the hour?

Young Clare. Ten, the bell says.

Jern. It was but eight when we set out from Cheston: Sir John and his sexton are at their ale to-night, the clock runs at random.

Y. Clare. Nay, as sure as thou livest, the villainous vicar is abroad in the chase. The priest steals more venison than half the country.

Jern. Millisent, how dost thou?

Mil. Sir, very well.

I would to God we were at Brian’s lodge.’

A volume might be written to prove this last answer Shakespear’s, in which the tongue says one thing in one line, and the heart contradicts it in the next; but there were other writers living in the time of Shakespear, who knew these subtle windings of the passions besides him,—though none so well as he!

The Pinner of Wakefield, or George a Greene, is a pleasant interlude, of an early date, and the author unknown, in which kings and coblers, outlaws and maid Marians are ‘hail-fellow well met,’ and in which the features of the antique world are made smiling and amiable enough. Jenkin, George a Greene’s servant, is a notorious wag. Here is one of his pretended pranks.

Jenkin. This fellow comes to me,

And takes me by the bosom: you slave,

Said he, hold my horse, and look

He takes no cold in his feet.

No, marry shall he, Sir, quoth I,

I’ll lay my cloak underneath him.

I took my cloak, spread it all along,

And his horse on the midst of it.

George. Thou clown, did’st thou set his horse upon thy cloak?

Jenk. Aye, but mark how I served him.

Madge and he was no sooner gone down into the ditch

But I plucked out my knife, cut four holes in my cloak, and made his horse stand on the bare ground.’

The first part of Jeronymo is an indifferent piece of work, and the second, or the Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, is like unto it, except the interpolations idly said to have been added by Ben Jonson, relating to Jeronymo’s phrensy ‘which have all the melancholy madness of poetry, if not the inspiration.’

295

LECTURE VI ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, F. BEAUMONT, P. FLETCHER, DRAYTON, DANIEL, &C. SIR P. SIDNEY’S ARCADIA, AND OTHER WORKS.

I shall, in the present Lecture, attempt to give some idea of the lighter productions of the Muse in the period before us, in order to shew that grace and elegance are not confined entirely to later times, and shall conclude with some remarks on Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.

I have already made mention of the lyrical pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher. It appears from his poems, that many of these were composed by Francis Beaumont, particularly the very beautiful ones in the tragedy of the False One, the Praise of Love in that of Valentinian, and another in the Nice Valour or Passionate Madman, an Address to Melancholy, which is the perfection of this kind of writing.

‘Hence, all you vain delights;

As short as are the nights

Wherein you spend your folly:

There’s nought in this life sweet,

If man were wise to see ‘t,

But only melancholy,

Oh, sweetest melancholy.

Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes,

A sight that piercing mortifies;

A look that’s fasten’d to the ground,

A tongue chain’d up without a sound;

Fountain heads, and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves:

Moon-light walks, when all the fowls

Are warmly hous’d, save bats and owls;

A midnight bell, a passing groan,

These are the sounds we feed upon:

Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley;

Nothing so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.’

It has been supposed (and not without every appearance of good reason) that this pensive strain, ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ gave the first suggestion of the spirited introduction to Milton’s Il Penseroso.

‘Hence, vain deluding joys,

The brood of folly without father bred!...

296But hail, thou Goddess, sage and holy,

Hail, divinest melancholy,

Whose saintly visage is too bright

To hit the sense of human sight, &c.’

The same writer thus moralises on the life of man, in a set of similes, as apposite as they are light and elegant.

‘Like to the falling of a star,

Or as the flights of eagles are,

Or like the fresh spring’s gaudy hue,

Or silver drops of morning dew,

Or like a wind that chafes the flood,

Or bubbles which on water stood:

Even such is man, whose borrow’d light

Is straight call’d in and paid to night:—

The wind blows out, the bubble dies;

The spring intomb’d in autumn lies;

The dew’s dried up, the star is shot,

The flight is past, and man forgot.’

‘The silver foam which the wind severs from the parted wave’ is not more light or sparkling than this: the dove’s downy pinion is not softer and smoother than the verse. We are too ready to conceive of the poetry of that day, as altogether old-fashioned, meagre, squalid, deformed, withered and wild in its attire, or as a sort of uncouth monster, like ‘grim-visaged comfortless despair,’ mounted on a lumbering, unmanageable Pegasus, dragon-winged, and leaden-hoofed; but it as often wore a sylph-like form with Attic vest, with faery feet, and the butterfly’s gaudy wings. The bees were said to have come, and built their hive in the mouth of Plato when a child; and the fable might be transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of five and twenty. One of these writers makes Bellario the Page say to Philaster, who threatens to take his life—

——‘’Tis not a life;

’Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.’

But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, growing reputation, cut off like a flower in its summer-pride, or like ‘the lily on its stalk green,’ which makes us repine at fortune and almost at nature, that seem to set so little store by their greatest favourites. The life of poets is or ought to be (judging of it from the light it lends to ours) a golden dream, full of brightness and sweetness, ‘lapt in Elysium;’ and it gives one a reluctant pang to see the splendid vision, by which they are attended in their path of glory, fade like 297a vapour, and their sacred heads laid low in ashes, before the sand of common mortals has run out. Fletcher too was prematurely cut off by the plague. Raphael died at four and thirty, and Correggio at forty. Who can help wishing that they had lived to the age of Michael Angelo and Titian? Shakespear might have lived another half-century, enjoying fame and repose, ‘now that his task was smoothly done,’ listening to the music of his name, and better still, of his own thoughts, without minding Rymer’s abuse of ‘the tragedies of the last age.’ His native stream of Avon would then have flowed with softer murmurs to the ear, and his pleasant birthplace, Stratford, would in that case have worn even a more gladsome smile than it does, to the eye of fancy!—Poets however have a sort of privileged after-life, which does not fall to the common lot: the rich and mighty are nothing but while they are living: their power ceases with them; but ‘the sons of memory, the great heirs of fame’ leave the best part of what was theirs, their thoughts, their verse, what they most delighted and prided themselves in, behind them—imperishable, incorruptible, immortal!—Sir John Beaumont (the brother of our dramatist) whose loyal and religious effusions are not worth much, very feelingly laments his brother’s untimely death in an epitaph upon him.

‘Thou should’st have followed me, but death to blame

Miscounted years, and measured age by fame:

So dearly hast thou bought thy precious lines,

Their praise grew swiftly; so thy life declines.

Thy Muse, the hearer’s Queen, the reader’s Love,

All ears, all hearts (but Death’s) could please and move.’

Beaumont’s verses addressed to Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, are a pleasing record of their friendship, and of the way in which they ‘fleeted the time carelessly’ as well as studiously ‘in the golden age’ of our poetry.

[Lines sent from the Country with two unfinished Comedies, which deferred their merry meetings at the Mermaid.]

‘The sun which doth the greatest comfort bring

To absent friends, because the self-same thing

They know they see, however absent is,

(Here our best hay-maker, forgive me this,

It is our country style) in this warm shine

I lie and dream of your full Mermaid wine:

Oh, we have water mixt with claret lees,

Drink apt to bring in drier heresies

Than here, good only for the sonnet’s strain,

With fustian metaphors to stuff the brain:—

298Think with one draught a man’s invention fades,

Two cups had quite spoil’d Homer’s Iliads.

’Tis liquor that will find out Sutclift’s wit,

Like where he will, and make him write worse yet:

Fill’d with such moisture, in most grievous qualms^[30]

Did Robert Wisdom write his singing psalms:

And so must I do this: and yet I think

It is a potion sent us down to drink

By special providence, keep us from fights,

Make us not laugh when we make legs to knights;

’Tis this that keeps our minds fit for our states,

A medicine to obey our magistrates.

· · · · ·

Methinks the little wit I had is lost

Since I saw you, for wit is like a rest

Held up at tennis, which men do the best

With the best gamesters. What things have we seen

Done at the Mermaid! Hard words that have been

So nimble, and so full of subtile flame,

As if that every one from whence they came

Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,

And had resolv’d to live a fool the rest

Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown

Wit able enough to justify the town

For three days past, wit that might warrant be

For the whole city to talk foolishly,

Till that were cancell’d; and when that was gone,

We left an air behind us, which alone

Was able to make the two next companies

Right witty, though but downright fools more wise.’

I shall not, in this place repeat Marlowe’s celebrated song, ‘Come live with me and be my love,’ nor Sir Walter Raleigh’s no less celebrated answer to it (they may both be found in Walton’s Complete Angler, accompanied with scenery and remarks worthy of them); but I may quote as a specimen of the high and romantic tone in which the poets of this age thought and spoke of each other the ‘Vision upon the conceipt of the Fairy Queen,’ understood to be by Sir Walter Raleigh.

‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,

Within that temple, where the vestal flame

Was wont to burn, and passing by that way

To see that buried dust of living fame,

299Whose tomb fair Love, and fairer Virtue kept.

All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen:

At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;

And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen,

For they this queen attended, in whose stead

Oblivion laid him down on Laura’s hearse.

Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,

And groans of buried ghosts the Heav’ns did pierce,

Where Homer’s spright did tremble all for grief,

And curst th’ access of that celestial thief.’

A higher strain of compliment cannot well be conceived than this, which raises your idea even of that which it disparages in the comparison, and makes you feel that nothing could have torn the writer from his idolatrous enthusiasm for Petrarch and his Laura’s tomb, but Spenser’s magic verses and diviner Faery Queen—the one lifted above mortality, the other brought from the skies!

The name of Drummond of Hawthornden is in a manner entwined in cypher with that of Ben Jonson. He has not done himself or Jonson any credit by his account of their conversation; but his Sonnets are in the highest degree elegant, harmonious, and striking. It appears to me that they are more in the manner of Petrarch than any others that we have, with a certain intenseness in the sentiment, an occasional glitter of thought, and uniform terseness of expression. The reader may judge for himself from a few examples.

‘I know that all beneath the moon decays,

And what by mortals in this world is wrought

In time’s great periods shall return to nought;

That fairest states have fatal nights and days.

I know that all the Muse’s heavenly lays,

With toil of spright which are so dearly bought,

As idle sounds, of few or none are sought;

That there is nothing lighter than vain praise.

I know frail beauty’s like the purple flow’r,

To which one morn oft birth and death affords:

That love a jarring is of minds’ accords,

Where sense and will bring under reason’s pow’r.

Know what I list, this all cannot me move,

But that, alas! I both must write and love.’

Another—

‘Fair moon, who with thy cold and silver shine

Mak’st sweet the horror of the dreadful night,

Delighting the weak eye with smiles divine,

Which Phœbus dazzles with his too much light;

300Bright queen of the first Heav’n, if in thy shrine

By turning oft, and Heav’n’s eternal might,

Thou hast not yet that once sweet fire of thine,

Endymion, forgot, and lovers’ plight:

If cause like thine may pity breed in thee,

And pity somewhat else to it obtain,

Since thou hast power of dreams as well as he

That holds the golden rod and mortal chain;

Now while she sleeps,^[31] in doleful guise her show,

These tears, and the black map of all my woe.’

This is the eleventh sonnet: the twelfth is full of vile and forced conceits, without any sentiment at all; such as calling the Sun ‘the Goldsmith of the stars,’ ‘the enameller of the moon,’ and ‘the Apelles of the flowers.’ This is as bad as Cowley or Sir Philip Sidney. Here is one that is worth a million of such quaint devices.

‘To the Nightingale.

Dear chorister, who from these shadows sends,^[32]

Ere that the blushing morn dare show her light,

Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends

(Become all ear^[33]) stars stay to hear thy plight.

If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends,

Who ne’er (not in a dream) did taste delight,

May thee importune who like case pretends,

And seem’st to joy in woe, in woe’s despite:

Tell me (so may thou milder fortune try,

And long, long sing!) for what thou thus complains,^[32]

Since winter’s gone, and sun in dappled sky

Enamour’d smiles on woods and flow’ry plains?

The bird, as if my questions did her move,

With trembling wings sigh’d forth, ‘I love, I love.’

Or if a mixture of the Della Cruscan style be allowed to enshrine the true spirit of love and poetry, we have it in the following address to the river Forth, on which his mistress had embarked.

‘Slide soft, fair Forth, and make a chrystal plain,

Cut your white locks, and on your foamy face

Let not a wrinkle be, when you embrace

The boat that earth’s perfections doth contain.

Winds wonder, and through wondering hold your peace,

Or if that you your hearts cannot restrain

From sending sighs, feeling a lover’s case,

Sigh, and in her fair hair yourselves enchain.

301Or take these sighs, which absence makes arise

From my oppressed breast, and fill the sails,

Or some sweet breath new brought from Paradise.

The floods do smile, love o’er the winds prevails,

And yet huge waves arise; the cause is this,

The ocean strives with Forth the boat to kiss.’

This to the English reader will express the very soul of Petrarch, the molten breath of sentiment converted into the glassy essence of a set of glittering but still graceful conceits.

‘The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets,’ and the critic that tastes poetry, ‘his ruin meets.’ His feet are clogged with its honey, and his eyes blinded with its beauties; and he forgets his proper vocation, which is to buz and sting. I am afraid of losing my way in Drummond’s ‘sugar’d sonnetting;’ and have determined more than once to break off abruptly; but another and another tempts the rash hand and curious eye, which I am loth not to give, and I give it accordingly: for if I did not write these Lectures to please myself, I am at least sure I should please nobody else. In fact, I conceive that what I have undertaken to do in this and former cases, is merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatical formulas of criticism that can do no good to any body. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or a ruler in my pocket, to see whether a poem is round or square, or to measure its mechanical dimensions, like a meter and alnager of poetry: it is not in my bond to look after excisable articles or contraband wares, or to exact severe penalties and forfeitures for trifling oversights, or to give formal notice of violent breaches of the three unities, of geography and chronology; or to distribute printed stamps and poetical licences (with blanks to be filled up) on Mount Parnassus. I do not come armed from top to toe with colons and semicolons, with glossaries and indexes, to adjust the spelling or reform the metre, or to prove by everlasting contradiction and querulous impatience, that former commentators did not know the meaning of their author, any more than I do, who am angry at them, only because I am out of humour with myself—as if the genius of poetry lay buried under the rubbish of the press; and the critic was the dwarf-enchanter who was to release its airy form from being stuck through with blundering points and misplaced commas; or to prevent its vital powers from being worm-eaten and consumed, letter by letter, in musty manuscripts and black-letter 302print. I do not think that is the way to learn ‘the gentle craft’ of poesy or to teach it to others:—to imbibe or to communicate its spirit; which if it does not disentangle itself and soar above the obscure and trivial researches of antiquarianism is no longer itself, ‘a Phœnix gazed by all.’ At least, so it appeared to me (it is for others to judge whether I was right or wrong). In a word, I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to ‘give a reason for the faith that was in me’ when necessary, and when in my power. This is what I have done, and what I must continue to do.

To return to Drummond.—I cannot but think that his Sonnets come as near as almost any others to the perfection of this kind of writing, which should embody a sentiment and every shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and place and humour, with the extravagance or lightness of a momentary impression, and should, when lengthened out into a series, form a history of the wayward moods of the poet’s mind, the turns of his fate; and imprint the smile or frown of his mistress in indelible characters on the scattered leaves. I will give the two following, and have done with this author.

‘In vain I haunt the cold and silver springs,

To quench the fever burning in my veins:

In vain (love’s pilgrim) mountains, dales, and plains

I over-run; vain help long absence brings.

In vain, my friends, your counsel me constrains

To fly, and place my thoughts on other things.

Ah, like the bird that fired hath her wings,

The more I move the greater are my pains.

Desire, alas! desire a Zeuxis new,

From the orient borrowing gold, from western skies

Heavenly cinnabar, sets before my eyes

In every place her hair, sweet look and hue;

That fly, run, rest I, all doth prove but vain;

My life lies in those eyes which have me slain.’

The other is a direct imitation of Petrarch’s description of the bower where he first saw Laura.

‘Alexis, here she stay’d, among these pines,

Sweet hermitress, she did alone repair:

Here did she spread the treasure of her hair,

More rich than that brought from the Colchian mines;

Here sat she by these musked eglantines;

The happy flowers seem yet the print to bear:

Her voice did sweeten here thy sugar’d lines,

To which winds, trees, beasts, birds, did lend an ear.

303She here me first perceiv’d, and here a morn

Of bright carnations did o’erspread her face:

Here did she sigh, here first my hopes were born,

Here first I got a pledge of promised grace;

But ah! what serves to have been made happy so,

Sith passed pleasures double but new woe!’

I should, on the whole, prefer Drummond’s Sonnets to Spenser’s; and they leave Sidney’s, picking their way through verbal intricacies and ‘thorny queaches,’^[34] at an immeasurable distance behind. Drummond’s other poems have great, though not equal merit; and he may be fairly set down as one of our old English classics.

Ben Jonson’s detached poetry I like much, as indeed I do all about him, except when he degraded himself by ‘the laborious foolery’ of some of his farcical characters, which he could not deal with sportively, and only made stupid and pedantic. I have been blamed for what I have said, more than once, in disparagement of Ben Jonson’s comic humour; but I think he was himself aware of his infirmity, and has (not improbably) alluded to it in the following speech of Crites in Cynthia’s Revels.

‘Oh, how despised and base a thing is man,

If he not strive to erect his groveling thoughts

Above the strain of flesh! But how more cheap,

When even his best and understanding part

(The crown and strength of all his faculties)

Floats like a dead-drown’d body, on the stream

Of vulgar humour, mix’d with common’st dregs:

I suffer for their guilt now; and my soul

(Like one that looks on ill-affected eyes)

Is hurt with mere intention on their follies.

Why will I view them then? my sense might ask me:

Or is’t a rarity or some new object

That strains my strict observance to this point:

But such is the perverseness of our nature,

That if we once but fancy levity,

(How antic and ridiculous soever

It suit with us) yet will our muffled thought

Chuse rather not to see it than avoid it, &c.’

Ben Jonson had self-knowledge and self-reflection enough to apply this to himself. His tenaciousness on the score of critical objections does not prove that he was not conscious of them himself, but the contrary. The greatest egotists are those whom it is impossible to offend, because they are wholly and incurably blind to their own 304defects; or if they could be made to see them, would instantly convert them into so many beauty-spots and ornamental graces. Ben Jonson’s fugitive and lighter pieces are not devoid of the characteristic merits of that class of composition; but still often in the happiest of them, there is a specific gravity in the author’s pen, that sinks him to the bottom of his subject, though buoyed up for a time with art and painted plumes, and produces a strange mixture of the mechanical and fanciful, of poetry and prose, in his songs and odes. For instance, one of his most airy effusions is the Triumph of his Mistress: yet there are some lines in it that seem inserted almost by way of burlesque. It is however well worth repeating.

‘See the chariot at hand here of love,

Wherein my lady rideth!

Each that draws it is a swan or a dove;

And well the car love guideth!

As she goes all hearts do duty

Unto her beauty:

And enamour’d, do wish so they might

But enjoy such a sight,

That they still were to run by her side,

Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.

Do but look on her eyes, they do light

All that love’s world compriseth!

Do but look on her hair, it is bright

As love’s star when it riseth!

Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother

Than words that soothe her:

And from her arch’d brows, such a grace

Sheds itself through the face,

As alone there triumphs to the life

All the gain, all the good of the elements’ strife.

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

Before rude hands have touch’d it?

Ha’ you mark’d but the fall of the snow

Before the soil hath smutch’d it?

Ha’ you felt the wool of beaver?

Or swan’s down ever?

Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar?

Or the nard in the fire?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee?

Oh, so white! Oh so soft! Oh so sweet is she!’

His Discourse with Cupid, which follows, is infinitely delicate and piquant, and without one single blemish. It is a perfect ‘nest of spicery.’

305‘Noblest Charis, you that are

Both my fortune and my star!

And do govern more my blood,

Than the various moon the flood!

Hear, what late discourse of you,

Love and I have had; and true.

‘Mongst my Muses finding me,

Where he chanc’t your name to see

Set, and to this softer strain;

‘Sure,’ said he, ‘if I have brain,

This here sung can be no other,

By description, but my mother!

So hath Homer prais’d her hair;

So Anacreon drawn the air

Of her face, and made to rise,

Just about her sparkling eyes,

Both her brows, bent like my bow.

By her looks I do her know,

Which you call my shafts. And see!

Such my mother’s blushes be,

As the bath your verse discloses

In her cheeks, of milk and roses;

Such as oft I wanton in.

And, above her even chin,

Have you plac’d the bank of kisses,

Where you say, men gather blisses,

Rip’ned with a breath more sweet,

Than when flowers and west-winds meet.

Nay, her white and polish’d neck,

With the lace that doth it deck,

Is my mother’s! hearts of slain

Lovers, made into a chain!

And between each rising breast

Lies the valley, call’d my nest,

Where I sit and proyne my wings

After flight; and put new stings

To my shafts! Her very name

With my mother’s is the same.’—

‘I confess all,’ I replied,

‘And the glass hangs by her side,

And the girdle ‘bout her waste,

All is Venus: save unchaste.

But, alas! thou seest the least

Of her good, who is the best

Of her sex; but could’st thou, Love,

Call to mind the forms, that strove

For the apple, and those three

Make in one, the same were she.

For this beauty yet doth hide

306Something more than thou hast spied.

Outward grace weak love beguiles:

She is Venus when she smiles,

But she’s Juno when she walks,

And Minerva when she talks.’

In one of the songs in Cynthia’s Revels, we find, amidst some very pleasing imagery, the origin of a celebrated line in modern poetry—

‘Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, &c.’

This has not even the merit of originality, which is hard upon it. Ben Jonson had said two hundred years before,

‘Oh, I could still

(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill)

Drop, drop, drop, drop,

Since nature’s pride is now a wither’d daffodil.’

His Ode to the Memory of Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morrison, has been much admired, but I cannot but think it one of his most fantastical and perverse performances.

I cannot, for instance, reconcile myself to such stanzas as these.

—‘Of which we priests and poets say

Such truths as we expect for happy men,

And there he lives with memory; and Ben

THE STAND

Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went

Himself to rest,

Or taste a part of that full joy he meant

To have exprest,

In this bright asterism;

Where it were friendship’s schism

(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry)

To separate these twi—

Lights, the Dioscori;

And keep the one half from his Harry.

But fate doth so alternate the design,

While that in Heaven, this light on earth doth shine.’

This seems as if because he cannot without difficulty write smoothly, he becomes rough and crabbed in a spirit of defiance, like those persons who cannot behave well in company, and affect rudeness to show their contempt for the opinions of others.

His Epistles are particularly good, equally full of strong sense and sound feeling. They shew that he was not without friends, whom he 307esteemed, and by whom he was deservedly esteemed in return. The controversy started about his character is an idle one, carried on in the mere spirit of contradiction, as if he were either made up entirely of gall, or dipped in ‘the milk of human kindness.’ There is no necessity or ground to suppose either. He was no doubt a sturdy, plain-spoken, honest, well-disposed man, inclining more to the severe than the amiable side of things; but his good qualities, learning, talents, and convivial habits preponderated over his defects of temper or manners; and in a course of friendship some difference of character, even a little roughness or acidity, may relish to the palate; and olives may be served up with effect as well as sweetmeats. Ben Jonson, even by his quarrels and jealousies, does not seem to have been curst with the last and damning disqualification for friendship, heartless indifference. He was also what is understood by a good fellow, fond of good cheer and good company: and the first step for others to enjoy your society, is for you to enjoy theirs. If any one can do without the world, it is certain that the world can do quite as well without him. His ‘verses inviting a friend to supper,’ give us as familiar an idea of his private habits and character as his Epistle to Michael Drayton, that to Selden, &c., his lines to the memory of Shakespear, and his noble prose eulogy on Lord Bacon, in his disgrace, do a favourable one.

Among the best of these (perhaps the very best) is the address to Sir Robert Wroth, which besides its manly moral sentiments, conveys a strikingly picturesque description of rural sports and manners at this interesting period.

‘How blest art thou, canst love the country, Wroth,

Whether by choice, or fate, or both!

And though so near the city and the court,

Art ta’en with neither’s vice nor sport:

That at great times, art no ambitious guest

Of sheriff’s dinner, or of mayor’s feast.

Nor com’st to view the better cloth of state;

The richer hangings, or the crown-plate;

Nor throng’st (when masquing is) to have a sight

Of the short bravery of the night;

To view the jewels, stuffs, the pains, the wit

There wasted, some not paid for yet!

But canst at home in thy securer rest,

Live with un-bought provision blest;

Free from proud porches or their guilded roofs,

‘Mongst lowing herds and solid hoofs:

Along the curled woods and painted meads,

Through which a serpent river leads

308To some cool courteous shade, which he calls his,

And makes sleep softer than it is!

Or if thou list the night in watch to break,

A-bed canst hear the loud stag speak,

In spring oft roused for their master’s sport,

Who for it makes thy house his court;

Or with thy friends, the heart of all the year,

Divid’st upon the lesser deer;

In autumn, at the partrich mak’st a flight,

And giv’st thy gladder guests the sight;

And in the winter hunt’st the flying hare,

More for thy exercise than fare;

While all that follows, their glad ears apply

To the full greatness of the cry:

Or hawking at the river or the bush,

Or shooting at the greedy thrush,

Thou dost with some delight the day out-wear,

Although the coldest of the year!

The whil’st the several seasons thou hast seen

Of flow’ry fields, of copses green,

The mowed meadows, with the fleeced sheep,

And feasts that either shearers keep;

The ripened ears yet humble in their height,

And furrows laden with their weight;

The apple-harvest that doth longer last;

The hogs return’d home fat from mast;

The trees cut out in log; and those boughs made

A fire now, that lent a shade!

Thus Pan and Sylvan having had their rites,

Comus puts in for new delights;

And fills thy open hall with mirth and cheer,

As if in Saturn’s reign it were;

Apollo’s harp and Hermes’ lyre resound,

Nor are the Muses strangers found:

The rout of rural folk come thronging in,

(Their rudeness then is thought no sin)

Thy noblest spouse affords them welcome grace;

And the great heroes of her race

Sit mixt with loss of state or reverence.

Freedom doth with degree dispense.

The jolly wassail walks the often round,

And in their cups their cares are drown’d:

They think not then which side the cause shall leese,

Nor how to get the lawyer fees.

Such, and no other was that age of old,

Which boasts t’ have had the head of gold.

And such since thou canst make thine own content,

Strive, Wroth, to live long innocent.

Let others watch in guilty arms, and stand

309The fury of a rash command,

Go enter breaches, meet the cannon’s rage,

That they may sleep with scars in age.

And show their feathers shot and colours torn,

And brag that they were therefore born.

Let this man sweat, and wrangle at the bar

For every price in every jar

And change possessions oftener with his breath,

Than either money, war or death:

Let him, than hardest sires, more disinherit,

And each where boast it as his merit,

To blow up orphans, widows, and their states;

And think his power doth equal Fate’s.

Let that go heap a mass of wretched wealth,

Purchas’d by rapine, worse than stealth,

And brooding o’er it sit, with broadest eyes,

Not doing good, scarce when he dies.

Let thousands more go flatter vice, and win,

By being organs to great sin,

Get place and honour, and be glad to keep

The secrets, that shall breake their sleep:

And, so they ride in purple, eat in plate,

Though poyson, think it a great fate.

But thou, my Wroth, if I can truth apply,

Shalt neither that, nor this envy:

Thy peace is made; and, when man’s state is well,

’Tis better, if he there can dwell.

God wisheth none should wrack on a strange shelf;

To him man’s dearer than t’ himself.

And, howsoever we may think things sweet,

He alwayes gives what he knows meet;

Which who can use is happy: such be thou.

Thy morning’s and thy evening’s vow

Be thanks to him, and earnest prayer, to find

A body sound, with sounder mind;

To do thy country service, thy self right;

That neither want do thee affright,

Nor death; but when thy latest sand is spent,

Thou mayst think life a thing but lent.’

Of all the poetical Epistles of this period, however, that of Daniel to the Countess of Cumberland, for weight of thought and depth of feeling, bears the palm. The reader will not peruse this effusion with less interest or pleasure, from knowing that it is a favourite with Mr. Wordsworth.

‘He that of such a height hath built his mind,

And rear’d the dwelling of his thoughts so strong,

310As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame

Of his resolved pow’rs; nor all the wind

Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong

His settled peace, or to disturb the same:

What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may

The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey!

And with how free an eye doth he look down

Upon these lower regions of turmoil,

Where all the storms of passions mainly beat

On flesh and blood: where honour, pow’r, renown,

Are only gay afflictions, golden toil;

Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet,

As frailty doth; and only great doth seem

To little minds, who do it so esteem.

He looks upon the mightiest monarch’s wars

But only as on stately robberies;

Where evermore the fortune that prevails

Must be the right: the ill-succeeding mars

The fairest and the best-fac’d enterprize.

Great pirate Pompey lesser pirates quails:

Justice, he sees (as if seduced) still

Conspires with pow’r, whose cause must not be ill.

He sees the face of right t’ appear as manifold

As are the passions of uncertain man.

Who puts it in all colours, all attires,

To serve his ends, and make his courses hold.

He sees, that let deceit work what it can,

Plot and contrive base ways to high desires;

That the all-guiding Providence doth yet

All disappoint, and mocks this smoke of wit.

Nor is he mov’d with all the thunder-cracks

Of tyrants’ threats, or with the surly brow

Of pow’r, that proudly sits on others’ crimes:

Charg’d with more crying sins than those he checks.

The storms of sad confusion, that may grow

Up in the present for the coming times,

Appal not him; that hath no side at all,

But of himself, and knows the worst can fall.

Although his heart (so near ally’d to earth)

Cannot but pity the perplexed state

Of troublous and distress’d mortality,

That thus make way unto the ugly birth

Of their own sorrows, and do still beget

Affliction upon imbecility:

Yet seeing thus the course of things must run,

He looks thereon not strange, but as fore-done.

And whilst distraught ambition compasses,

And is encompass’d; whilst as craft deceives,

And is deceived; whilst man doth ransack man,

311And builds on blood, and rises by distress;

And th’ inheritance of desolation leaves

To great expecting hopes: he looks thereon,

As from the shore of peace, with unwet eye,

And bears no venture in impiety.’

Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion is a work of great length and of unabated freshness and vigour in itself, though the monotony of the subject tires the reader. He describes each place with the accuracy of a topographer, and the enthusiasm of a poet, as if his Muse were the very genius loci. His Heroical Epistles are also excellent. He has a few lighter pieces, but none of exquisite beauty or grace. His mind is a rich marly soil that produces an abundant harvest, and repays the husbandman’s toil, but few flaunting flowers, the garden’s pride, grow in it, nor any poisonous weeds.

P. Fletcher’s Purple Island is nothing but a long enigma, describing the body of a man, with the heart and veins, and the blood circulating in them, under the fantastic designation of the Purple Island.

The other Poets whom I shall mention, and who properly belong to the age immediately following, were William Brown, Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, and Marvell. Brown was a pastoral poet, with much natural tenderness and sweetness, and a good deal of allegorical quaintness and prolixity. Carew was an elegant court-trifler. Herrick was an amorist, with perhaps more fancy than feeling, though he has been called by some the English Anacreon. Crashaw was a hectic enthusiast in religion and in poetry, and erroneous in both. Marvell deserves to be remembered as a true poet as well as patriot, not in the best of times.—I will, however, give short specimens from each of these writers, that the reader may judge for himself; and be led by his own curiosity, rather than my recommendation, to consult the originals. Here is one by T. Carew.

‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows,

When June is past, the fading rose:

For in your beauties, orient deep

These flow’rs, as in their causes, sleep.

Ask me no more, whither do stray

The golden atoms of the day;

For in pure love, Heaven did prepare

Those powders to enrich your hair.

Ask me no more, whither doth haste

The nightingale, when May is past;

For in your sweet dividing throat

She winters, and keeps warm her note.

312Ask me no more, where those stars light,

That downwards fall in dead of night;

For in your eyes they sit, and there

Fixed become, as in their sphere.

Ask me no more, if east or west

The phœnix builds her spicy nest;

For unto you at last she flies,

And in your fragrant bosom dies.’

The Hue and Cry of Love, the Epitaphs on Lady Mary Villiers, and the Friendly Reproof to Ben Jonson for his angry Farewell to the stage, are in the author’s best manner. We may perceive, however, a frequent mixture of the superficial and common-place, with far-fetched and improbable conceits.

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite and threadbare. But neither is he likely to become so. He is a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. From his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary instead of a poet. One of his pieces is entitled

‘The Rock of Rubies, and the Quarry of Pearls.

Some ask’d me where the rubies grew;

And nothing I did say;

But with my finger pointed to

The lips of Julia.

Some ask’d how pearls did grow, and where;

Then spoke I to my girl

To part her lips, and shew them there

The quarrelets of pearl.’

Now this is making a petrefaction both of love and poetry.

His poems, from their number and size, are ‘like the motes that play in the sun’s beams;’ that glitter to the eye of fancy, but leave no distinct impression on the memory. The two best are a translation of Anacreon, and a successful and spirited imitation of him.

‘The Wounded Cupid.

Cupid, as he lay among

Roses, by a bee was stung.

Whereupon, in anger flying

To his mother said thus, crying,

313Help, oh help, your boy’s a dying!

And why, my pretty lad? said she.

Then, blubbering, replied he,

A winged snake has bitten me,

Which country-people call a bee.

At which she smiled; then with her hairs

And kisses drying up his tears,

Alas, said she, my wag! if this

Such a pernicious torment is;

Come, tell me then, how great’s the smart

Of those thou woundest with thy dart?’

The Captive Bee, or the Little Filcher, is his own.

‘As Julia once a slumbering lay,

It chanced a bee did fly that way,

After a dew or dew-like show’r,

To tipple freely in a flow’r.

For some rich flow’r he took the lip

Of Julia, and began to sip:

But when he felt he suck’d from thence

Honey, and in the quintessence;

He drank so much he scarce could stir;

So Julia took the pilferer.

And thus surpris’d, as filchers use,

He thus began himself to excuse:

Sweet lady-flow’r! I never brought

Hither the least one thieving thought;

But taking those rare lips of yours

For some fresh, fragrant, luscious flow’rs,

I thought I might there take a taste,

Where so much syrup ran at waste:

Besides, know this, I never sting

The flow’r that gives me nourishing;

But with a kiss or thanks, do pay

For honey that I bear away.

This said, he laid his little scrip

Of honey ‘fore her ladyship:

And told her, as some tears did fall,

That that he took, and that was all.

At which she smil’d, and bid him go,

And take his bag, but thus much know,

When next he came a pilfering so,

He should from her full lips derive

Honey enough to fill his hive.’

Of Marvell I have spoken with such praise, as appears to me his due, on another occasion: but the public are deaf, except to proof or to their own prejudices, and I will therefore give an example of the sweetness and power of his verse.

314‘To his Coy Mistress.

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Should’st rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood;

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest.

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should shew your heart.

For, Lady, you deserve this state;

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near:

And yonder all before us lye

Desarts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor in thy marble vault shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity:

And your quaint honour turn to dust;

And into ashes all my lust.

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now, therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapp’d pow’r.

Let us roll all our strength, and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball;

And tear our pleasures with rough strife,

Thorough the iron gates of life.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.’

315In Brown’s Pastorals, notwithstanding the weakness and prolixity of his general plan, there are repeated examples of single lines and passages of extreme beauty and delicacy, both of sentiment and description, such as the following Picture of Night.

‘Clamour grew dumb, unheard was shepherd’s song,

And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongue

Talk’d to the echo; Satyrs broke their dance,

And all the upper world lay in a trance,

Only the curled streams soft chidings kept;

And little gales that from the green leaf swept

Dry summer’s dust, in fearful whisp’rings stirr’d,

As loth to waken any singing bird.’

Poetical beauties of this sort are scattered, not sparingly, over the green lap of nature through almost every page of our author’s writings. His description of the squirrel hunted by mischievous boys, of the flowers stuck in the windows like the hues of the rainbow, and innumerable others might be quoted.

His Philarete (the fourth song of the Shepherd’s Pipe) has been said to be the origin of Lycidas: but there is no resemblance, except that both are pastoral elegies for the loss of a friend. The Inner Temple Mask has also been made the foundation of Comus, with as little reason. But so it is: if an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after: and every writer that finds an ingenious or partial editor, will be made to set up his claim of originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged against the principal character in Paradise Lost (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this, we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw’s translation of Marino’s Sospetto d’Herode. The description of Satan alluded to, is given in the following stanzas:

‘Below the bottom of the great abyss,

There where one centre reconciles all things,

The world’s profound heart pants; there placed is

Mischief’s old master; close about him clings

A curl’d knot of embracing snakes, that kiss

His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings

Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties

Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies.

The judge of torments, and the king of tears,

He fills a burnish’d throne of quenchless fire;

And for his old fair robes of light, he wears

A gloomy mantle of dark flames; the tire

316That crowns his hated head, on high appears;

Where seven tall horns (his empire’s pride) aspire;

And to make up hell’s majesty, each horn

Seven crested hydras horribly adorn.

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night,

Startle the dull air with a dismal red;

Such his fell glances as the fatal light

Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead.

From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite

Of hell’s own stink, a worser stench is spread.

His breath hell’s lightning is; and each deep groan

Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone.

His flaming eyes’ dire exhalation

Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath;

Whose unconsum’d consumption preys upon

The never-dying life of a long death.

In this sad house of slow destruction

(His shop of flames) he fries himself, beneath

A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash,

While his steel sides sound with his tail’s strong lash.’

This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton’s description.

——‘His form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appear’d

Less than archangel ruin’d and the excess

Of glory obscured.’

Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainly Milton’s mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton’s boldest imagery, though its effect is injured by the incongruous mixture above stated.

‘Struck with these great concurrences of things,^[35]

Symptoms so deadly unto death and him;

Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings

Eternally bind each rebellious limb.

317He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings,

Which like two bosom’d sails^[36] embrace the dim

Air, with a dismal shade, but all in vain;

Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain.

While thus heav’n’s highest counsels, by the low

Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well,

He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow

Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell.

With his foul claws he fenced his furrow’d brow,

And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell

Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night.’

The poet adds—

‘The while his twisted tail he knaw’d for spite.’

There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan’s soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time.

‘Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves

Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given?

The nimblest of the lightning-winged loves?

The fairest and the first-born smile of Heav’n?

Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves,

Reverently circled by the lesser seven:

Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes

Opprest the common people of the skies?

Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine eyes

Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shews?’ &c.

This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue: but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot reascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot, without a violent effort, picture to itself.

In our author’s account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton’s description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates.

‘Thrice howl’d the caves of night, and thrice the sound,

Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes,

318Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound:

At last her listening ears the noise o’ertakes,

She lifts her sooty lamps, and looking round,

A general hiss,^[37] from the whole tire of snakes

Rebounding through hell’s inmost caverns came,

In answer to her formidable name.

‘Mongst all the palaces in hell’s command,

No one so merciless as this of hers,

The adamantine doors forever stand

Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears.

The wall’s inexorable steel, no hand

Of time, or teeth of hungry ruin fears.’

On the whole, this poem, though Milton has undoubtedly availed himself of many ideas and passages in it, raises instead of lowering our conception of him, by shewing how much more he added to it than he has taken from it.

Crashaw’s translation of Strada’s description of the Contention between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not equal to Ford’s version of the same story in his Lover’s Melancholy. One line may serve as a specimen of delicate quaintness, and of Crashaw’s style in general.

‘And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings.’

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said, ‘he could not love the French Republic’—so I may say, that I cannot love the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, with all my good-will to it. It will not do for me, however, to imitate the summary petulance of the epigrammatist.

‘The reason why I cannot tell,

But I don’t like you, Dr. Fell.’

I must give my reasons, ‘on compulsion,’ for not speaking well of a person like Sir Philip Sidney—

‘The soldier’s, scholar’s, courtier’s eye, tongue, sword,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;’

the splendour of whose personal accomplishments, and of whose wide-spread fame was, in his life time,

——‘Like a gate of steel,

Fronting the sun, that renders back

His figure and his heat’—

319a writer too who was universally read and enthusiastically admired for a century after his death, and who has been admired with scarce less enthusiastic, but with a more distant homage, for another century, after ceasing to be read.

We have lost the art of reading, or the privilege of writing, voluminously, since the days of Addison. Learning no longer weaves the interminable page with patient drudgery, nor ignorance pores over it with implicit faith. As authors multiply in number, books diminish in size; we cannot now, as formerly, swallow libraries whole in a single folio: solid quarto has given place to slender duodecimo, and the dingy letter-press contracts its dimensions, and retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless margin. Modern authorship is become a species of stenography: we contrive even to read by proxy. We skim the cream of prose without any trouble; we get at the quintessence of poetry without loss of time. The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy bullion of books is driven out of the market of learning, and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating medium of magazines and reviews. Those who are chiefly concerned in catering for the taste of others, and serving up critical opinions in a compendious, elegant, and portable form, are not forgetful of themselves: they are not scrupulously solicitous, idly inquisitive about the real merits, the bona fide contents of the works they are deputed to appraise and value, any more than the reading public who employ them. They look no farther for the contents of the work than the title page, and pronounce a peremptory decision on its merits or defects by a glance at the name and party of the writer. This state of polite letters seems to admit of improvement in only one respect, which is to go a step further, and write for the amusement and edification of the world, accounts of works that were never either written or read at all, and to cry up or abuse the authors by name, although they have no existence but in the critic’s invention. This would save a great deal of labour in vain: anonymous critics might pounce upon the defenceless heads of fictitious candidates for fame and bread; reviews, from being novels founded upon facts, would aspire to be pure romances; and we should arrive at the beau ideal of a commonwealth of letters, at the euthanasia of thought, and Millennium of criticism!

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia was written, those middle men, the critics, were not known. The author and reader came into immediate contact, and seemed never tired of each other’s company. We are more fastidious and dissipated: the effeminacy of modern taste would, I am afraid, shrink back affrighted at the 320formidable sight of this once popular work, which is about as long (horresco referens!) as all Walter Scott’s novels put together; but besides its size and appearance, it has, I think, other defects of a more intrinsic and insuperable nature. It is to me one of the greatest monuments of the abuse of intellectual power upon record. It puts one in mind of the court dresses and preposterous fashions of the time which are grown obsolete and disgusting. It is not romantic, but scholastic; not poetry, but casuistry; not nature, but art, and the worst sort of art, which thinks it can do better than nature. Of the number of fine things that are constantly passing through the author’s mind, there is hardly one that he has not contrived to spoil, and to spoil purposely and maliciously, in order to aggrandize our idea of himself. Out of five hundred folio pages, there are hardly, I conceive, half a dozen sentences expressed simply and directly, with the sincere desire to convey the image implied, and without a systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom and everlasting impertinence of the writer, so as to disguise the object, instead of displaying it in its true colours and real proportions. Every page is ‘with centric and eccentric scribbled o’er;’ his Muse is tattooed and tricked out like an Indian goddess. He writes a court-hand, with flourishes like a schoolmaster; his figures are wrought in chain-stitch. All his thoughts are forced and painful births, and may be said to be delivered by the Cæsarean operation. At last, they become distorted and ricketty in themselves; and before they have been cramped and twisted and swaddled into lifelessness and deformity. Imagine a writer to have great natural talents, great powers of memory and invention, an eye for nature, a knowledge of the passions, much learning and equal industry; but that he is so full of a consciousness of all this, and so determined to make the reader conscious of it at every step, that he becomes a complete intellectual coxcomb or nearly so;—that he never lets a casual observation pass without perplexing it with an endless, running commentary, that he never states a feeling without so many circumambages, without so many interlineations and parenthetical remarks on all that can be said for it, and anticipations of all that can be said against it, and that he never mentions a fact without giving so many circumstances and conjuring up so many things that it is like or not like, that you lose the main clue of the story in its infinite ramifications and intersections; and we may form some faint idea of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which is spun with great labour out of the author’s brains, and hangs like a huge cobweb over the face of nature! This is not, as far as I can judge, an exaggerated description: but as near the truth as I can make it. The proofs are not far to seek. Take the first sentence, or open the 321volume any where and read. I will, however, take one of the most beautiful passages near the beginning, to shew how the subject-matter, of which the noblest use might have been made, is disfigured by the affectation of the style, and the importunate and vain activity of the writer’s mind. The passage I allude to, is the celebrated description of Arcadia.

‘So that the third day after, in the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which that night had been their pavilion) they went on their journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus’ eyes (wearied with the wasted soil of Laconia) with welcome prospects. There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees: humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets, which being lined with most pleasant shade were witnessed so to, by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dam’s comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old: there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work, and her hands kept time to her voice-music. As for the houses of the country (for many houses came under their eye) they were scattered, no two being one by the other, and yet not so far off, as that it barred mutual succour; a shew, as it were, of an accompaniable solitariness, and of a civil wildness. I pray you, said Musidorus, (then first unsealing his long-silent lips) what countries be these we pass through, which are so divers in shew, the one wanting no store, the other having no store but of want. The country, answered Claius, where you were cast ashore, and now are past through is Laconia: but this country (where you now set your foot) is Arcadia.’

One would think the very name might have lulled his senses to delightful repose in some still, lonely valley, and have laid the restless spirit of Gothic quaintness, witticism, and conceit in the lap of classic elegance and pastoral simplicity. Here are images too of touching beauty and everlasting truth that needed nothing but to be simply and nakedly expressed to have made a picture equal (nay superior) to the allegorical representation of the Four Seasons of Life by Georgioni. But no! He cannot let his imagination or that of the reader dwell for a moment on the beauty or power of the real object. He thinks nothing is done, unless it is his doing. He must officiously and gratuitously interpose between you and the subject as the Cicerone of Nature, distracting the eye and the mind by continual uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering every thing, 322and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature. The moving spring of his mind is not sensibility or imagination, but dry, literal, unceasing craving after intellectual excitement, which is indifferent to pleasure or pain, to beauty or deformity, and likes to owe everything to its own perverse efforts rather than the sense of power in other things. It constantly interferes to perplex and neutralise. It never leaves the mind in a wise passiveness. In the infancy of taste, the froward pupils of art took nature to pieces, as spoiled children do a watch, to see what was in it. After taking it to pieces they could not, with all their cunning, put it together again, so as to restore circulation to the heart, or its living hue to the face! The quaint and pedantic style here objected to was not however the natural growth of untutored fancy, but an artificial excrescence transferred from logic and rhetoric to poetry. It was not owing to the excess of imagination, but of the want of it, that is, to the predominance of the mere understanding or dialectic faculty over the imaginative and the sensitive. It is in fact poetry degenerating at every step into prose, sentiment entangling itself in a controversy, from the habitual leaven of polemics and casuistry in the writer’s mind. The poet insists upon matters of fact from the beauty or grandeur that accompanies them; our prose-poet insists upon them because they are matters of fact, and buries the beauty and grandeur in a heap of common rubbish, ‘like two grains of wheat in a bushel of chaff.’ The true poet illustrates for ornament or use: the fantastic pretender, only because he is not easy till he can translate every thing out of itself into something else. Imagination consists in enriching one idea by another, which has the same feeling or set of associations belonging to it in a higher or more striking degree; the quaint or scholastic style consists in comparing one thing to another by the mere process of abstraction, and the more forced and naked the comparison, the less of harmony or congruity there is in it, the more wire-drawn and ambiguous the link of generalisation by which objects are brought together, the greater is the triumph of the false and fanciful style. There was a marked instance of the difference in some lines from Ben Jonson which I have above quoted, and which, as they are alternate examples of the extremes of both in the same author and in the same short poem, there can be nothing invidious in giving. In conveying an idea of female softness and sweetness, he asks—

‘Have you felt the wool of the beaver,

Or swan’s down ever?

Or smelt of the bud of the briar,

Or the nard in the fire?’

323Now ‘the swan’s down’ is a striking and beautiful image of the most delicate and yielding softness; but we have no associations of a pleasing sort with the wool of the beaver. The comparison is dry, hard, and barren of effect. It may establish the matter of fact, but detracts from and impairs the sentiment. The smell of ‘the bud of the briar’ is a double-distilled essence of sweetness: besides, there are all the other concomitant ideas of youth, beauty, and blushing modesty, which blend with and heighten the immediate feeling: but the poetical reader was not bound to know even what nard is (it is merely a learned substance, a non-entity to the imagination) nor whether it has a fragrant or disagreeable scent when thrown into the fire, till Ben Jonson went out of his way to give him this pedantic piece of information. It is a mere matter of fact or of experiment; and while the experiment is making in reality or fancy, the sentiment stands still; or even taking it for granted in the literal and scientific sense, we are where we were; it does not enhance the passion to be expressed: we have no love for the smell of nard in the fire, but we have an old, a long-cherished one, from infancy, for the bud of the briar. Sentiment, as Mr. Burke said of nobility, is a thing of inveterate prejudice, and cannot be created, as some people (learned and unlearned) are inclined to suppose, out of fancy or out of any thing by the wit of man. The artificial and natural style do not alternate in this way in the Arcadia: the one is but the Helot, the eyeless drudge of the other. Thus even in the above passage, which is comparatively beautiful and simple in its general structure, we have ‘the bleating oratory’ of lambs, as if anything could be more unlike oratory than the bleating of lambs; we have a young shepherdess knitting, whose hands keep time not to her voice, but to her ‘voice-music,’ which introduces a foreign and questionable distinction, merely to perplex the subject; we have meadows enamelled with all sorts of ‘eye-pleasing flowers,’ as if it were necessary to inform the reader that flowers pleased the eye, or as if they did not please any other sense: we have valleys refreshed ‘with silver streams,’ an epithet that has nothing to do with the refreshment here spoken of: we have ‘an accompaniable solitariness and a civil wildness,’ which are a pair of very laboured antitheses; in fine, we have ‘want of store, and store of want.’

Again, the passage describing the shipwreck of Pyrochles, has been much and deservedly admired: yet it is not free from the same inherent faults.

‘But a little way off they saw the mast (of the vessel) whose proud height now lay along, like a widow having lost her mate, of whom she held her honour;’ [This needed explanation] ‘but upon the mast they saw 324a young man (at least if it were a man) bearing show of about eighteen years of age, who sat (as on horseback) having nothing upon him but his shirt, which being wrought with blue silk and gold, had a kind of resemblance to the sea’ [This is a sort of alliteration in natural history] ‘on which the sun (then near his western home) did shoot some of his beams. His hair, (which the young men of Greece used to wear very long) was stirred up and down with the wind, which seemed to have a sport to play with it, as the sea had to kiss his feet; himself full of admirable beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of his seat and gesture; for holding his head up full of unmoved majesty, he held a sword aloft with his fair arm, which often he waved about his crown, as though he would threaten the world in that extremity.’

If the original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit could be weeded out of this passage, there is hardly a more heroic one to be found in prose or poetry.

Here is one more passage marred in the making. A shepherd is supposed to say of his mistress,

‘Certainly, as her eyelids are more pleasant to behold, than two white kids climbing up a fair tree and browsing on his tenderest branches, and yet are nothing, compared to the day-shining stars contained in them; and as her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer; and yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry; no more all that our eyes can see of her (though when they have seen her, what else they shall ever see is but dry stubble after clover grass) is to be matched with the flock of unspeakable virtues, laid up delightfully in that best-builded fold.’

Now here are images of singular beauty and of Eastern originality and daring, followed up with enigmatical or unmeaning common-places, because he never knows when to leave off, and thinks he can never be too wise or too dull for his reader. He loads his prose Pegasus, like a pack-horse, with all that comes and with a number of little trifling circumstances, that fall off, and you are obliged to stop to pick them up by the way. He cannot give his imagination a moment’s pause, thinks nothing done, while any thing remains to do, and exhausts nearly all that can be said upon a subject, whether good, bad, or indifferent. The above passages are taken from the beginning of the Arcadia, when the author’s style was hardly yet formed. The following is a less favourable, but fairer specimen of the work. It is the model of a love-letter, and is only longer than that of Adriano de Armada, in Love’s Labour Lost.

‘Most blessed paper, which shalt kiss that hand, whereto all blessedness is in nature a servant, do not yet disdain to carry with thee the woeful 325words of a miser now despairing: neither be afraid to appear before her, bearing the base title of the sender. For no sooner shall that divine hand touch thee, but that thy baseness shall be turned to most high preferment. Therefore mourn boldly my ink: for while she looks upon you, your blackness will shine: cry out boldly my lamentation, for while she reads you, your cries will be music. Say then (O happy messenger of a most unhappy message) that the too soon born and too late dying creature, which dares not speak, no, not look, no, not scarcely think (as from his miserable self unto her heavenly highness), only presumes to desire thee (in the time that her eyes and voice do exalt thee) to say, and in this manner to say, not from him, oh no, that were not fit, but of him, thus much unto her sacred judgment. O you, the only honour to women, to men the only admiration, you that being armed by love, defy him that armed you, in this high estate wherein you have placed me’ [i.e. the letter] ‘yet let me remember him to whom I am bound for bringing me to your presence: and let me remember him, who (since he is yours, how mean soever he be) it is reason you have an account of him. The wretch (yet your wretch) though with languishing steps runs fast to his grave; and will you suffer a temple (how poorly built soever, but yet a temple of your deity) to be rased? But he dyeth: it is most true, he dyeth: and he in whom you live, to obey you, dyeth. Whereof though he plain, he doth not complain, for it is a harm, but no wrong, which he hath received. He dies, because in woeful language all his senses tell him, that such is your pleasure: for if you will not that he live, alas, alas, what followeth, what followeth of the most ruined Dorus, but his end? End, then, evil-destined Dorus, end; and end thou woeful letter, end: for it sufficeth her wisdom to know, that her heavenly will shall be accomplished.’

Lib. ii. p. 117.

This style relishes neither of the lover nor the poet. Nine-tenths of the work are written in this manner. It is in the very manner of those books of gallantry and chivalry, which, with the labyrinths of their style, and ‘the reason of their unreasonableness,’ turned the fine intellects of the Knight of La Mancha. In a word (and not to speak it profanely), the Arcadia is a riddle, a rebus, an acrostic in folio: it contains about 4000 far-fetched similes, and 6000 impracticable dilemmas, about 10,000 reasons for doing nothing at all, and as many more against it; numberless alliterations, puns, questions and commands, and other figures of rhetoric; about a score good passages, that one may turn to with pleasure, and the most involved, irksome, improgressive, and heteroclite subject that ever was chosen to exercise the pen or patience of man. It no longer adorns the toilette or lies upon the pillow of Maids of Honour and Peeresses in their own right (the Pamelas and Philocleas of a later age), but remains upon the shelves of the libraries of the curious in long works and great names, a monument to shew that the author was one of the ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth.

326His Sonnets, inlaid in the Arcadia, are jejune, far-fetched and frigid. I shall select only one that has been much commended. It is to the High Way where his mistress had passed, a strange subject, but not unsuitable to the author’s genius.

‘High-way, since you my chief Parnassus be,

And that my Muse (to some ears not unsweet)

Tempers her words to trampling horses’ feet

More oft than to a chamber melody;

Now blessed you bear onward blessed me

To her, where I my heart safe left shall meet;

My Muse, and I must you of duty greet

With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully.

Be you still fair, honour’d by public heed,

By no encroachment wrong’d, nor time forgot;

Nor blamed for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed;

And that you know, I envy you no lot

Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss,

Hundreds of years you Stella’s feet may kiss.’

The answer of the High-way has not been preserved, but the sincerity of this appeal must no doubt have moved the stocks and stones to rise and sympathise. His Defence of Poetry is his most readable performance; there he is quite at home, in a sort of special pleader’s office, where his ingenuity, scholastic subtlety, and tenaciousness in argument stand him in good stead; and he brings off poetry with flying colours; for he was a man of wit, of sense, and learning, though not a poet of true taste or unsophisticated genius.

LECTURE VII CHARACTER OF LORD BACON’S WORKS—COMPARED AS TO STYLE WITH SIR THOMAS BROWN AND JEREMY TAYLOR.

Lord Bacon has been called (and justly) one of the wisest of mankind. The word wisdom characterises him more than any other. It was not that he did so much himself to advance the knowledge of man or nature, as that he saw what others had done to advance it, and what was still wanting to its full accomplishment. He stood upon the high ‘vantage ground of genius and learning; and traced, ‘as in a map the voyager his course,’ the long devious march of human intellect, its elevations and depressions, its windings and its 327errors. He had a ‘large discourse of reason, looking before and after.’ He had made an exact and extensive survey of human acquirements: he took the gauge and meter, the depths and soundings of the human capacity. He was master of the comparative anatomy of the mind of man, of the balance of power among the different faculties. He had thoroughly investigated and carefully registered the steps and processes of his own thoughts, with their irregularities and failures, their liabilities to wrong conclusions, either from the difficulties of the subject, or from moral causes, from prejudice, indolence, vanity, from conscious strength or weakness; and he applied this self-knowledge on a mighty scale to the general advances or retrograde movements of the aggregate intellect of the world. He knew well what the goal and crown of moral and intellectual power was, how far men had fallen short of it, and how they came to miss it. He had an instantaneous perception of the quantity of truth or good in any given system; and of the analogy of any given result or principle to others of the same kind scattered through nature or history. His observations take in a larger range, have more profundity from the fineness of his tact, and more comprehension from the extent of his knowledge, along the line of which his imagination ran with equal celerity and certainty, than any other person’s, whose writings I know. He however seized upon these results, rather by intuition than by inference: he knew them in their mixed modes, and combined effects rather than by abstraction or analysis, as he explains them to others, not by resolving them into their component parts and elementary principles, so much as by illustrations drawn from other things operating in like manner, and producing similar results; or as he himself has finely expressed it, ‘by the same footsteps of nature treading or printing upon several subjects or matters.’ He had great sagacity of observation, solidity of judgment and scope of fancy; in this resembling Plato and Burke, that he was a popular philosopher and a philosophical declaimer. His writings have the gravity of prose with the fervour and vividness of poetry. His sayings have the effect of axioms, are at once striking and self-evident. He views objects from the greatest height, and his reflections acquire a sublimity in proportion to their profundity, as in deep wells of water we see the sparkling of the highest fixed stars. The chain of thought reaches to the centre, and ascends the brightest heaven of invention. Reason in him works like an instinct: and his slightest suggestions carry the force of conviction. His opinions are judicial. His induction of particulars is alike wonderful for learning and vivacity, for curiosity and dignity, and an all-pervading intellect binds the whole together in a graceful and pleasing form. His style is equally sharp and sweet, 328flowing and pithy, condensed and expansive, expressing volumes in a sentence, or amplifying a single thought into pages of rich, glowing, and delightful eloquence. He had great liberality from seeing the various aspects of things (there was nothing bigotted or intolerant or exclusive about him) and yet he had firmness and decision from feeling their weight and consequences. His character was then an amazing insight into the limits of human knowledge and acquaintance with the landmarks of human intellect, so as to trace its past history or point out the path to future enquirers, but when he quits the ground of contemplation of what others have done or left undone to project himself into future discoveries, he becomes quaint and fantastic, instead of original. His strength was in reflection, not in production: he was the surveyor, not the builder of the fabric of science. He had not strictly the constructive faculty. He was the principal pioneer in the march of modern philosophy, and has completed the education and discipline of the mind for the acquisition of truth, by explaining all the impediments or furtherances that can be applied to it or cleared out of its way. In a word, he was one of the greatest men this country has to boast, and his name deserves to stand, where it is generally placed, by the side of those of our greatest writers, whether we consider the variety, the strength or splendour of his faculties, for ornament or use.

His Advancement of Learning is his greatest work; and next to that, I like the Essays; for the Novum Organum is more laboured and less effectual than it might be. I shall give a few instances from the first of these chiefly, to explain the scope of the above remarks.

The Advancement of Learning is dedicated to James I. and he there observes, with a mixture of truth and flattery, which looks very much like a bold irony,

‘I am well assured that this which I shall say is no amplification at all, but a positive and measured truth; which is, that there hath not been, since Christ’s time, any king or temporal monarch, which hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and human (as your majesty). For let a man seriously and diligently revolve and peruse the succession of the Emperours of Rome, of which Cæsar the Dictator, who lived some years before Christ, and Marcus Antoninus were the best-learned; and so descend to the Emperours of Grecia, or of the West, and then to the lines of France, Spain, England, Scotland, and the rest, and he shall find his judgment is truly made. For it seemeth much in a king, if by the compendious extractions of other men’s wits and labour, he can take hold of any superficial ornaments and shews of learning, or if he countenance and prefer learning and learned men: but to drink indeed of the true fountain of learning, nay, to have such a fountain of learning in himself, in a king, and in a king born, is almost a miracle.’

329To any one less wrapped up in self-sufficiency than James, the rule would have been more staggering than the exception could have been gratifying. But Bacon was a sort of prose-laureat to the reigning prince, and his loyalty had never been suspected.

In recommending learned men as fit counsellors in a state, he thus points out the deficiencies of the mere empiric or man of business in not being provided against uncommon emergencies.—‘Neither,’ he says, ‘can the experience of one man’s life furnish examples and precedents for the events of one man’s life. For as it happeneth sometimes, that the grand-child, or other descendant, resembleth the ancestor more than the son: so many times occurrences of present times may sort better with ancient examples, than with those of the latter or immediate times; and lastly, the wit of one man can no more countervail learning, than one man’s means can hold way with a common purse.’—This is finely put. It might be added, on the other hand, by way of caution, that neither can the wit or opinion of one learned man set itself up, as it sometimes does, in opposition to the common sense or experience of mankind.

When he goes on to vindicate the superiority of the scholar over the mere politician in disinterestedness and inflexibility of principle, by arguing ingeniously enough—‘The corrupter sort of mere politiques, that have not their thoughts established by learning in the love and apprehension of duty, nor never look abroad into universality, do refer all things to themselves, and thrust themselves into the centre of the world, as if all times should meet in them and their fortunes, never caring in all tempests what becomes of the ship of estates, so they may save themselves in the cock-boat of their own fortune, whereas men that feel the weight of duty, and know the limits of self-love, use to make good their places and duties, though with peril’—I can only wish that the practice were as constant as the theory is plausible, or that the time gave evidence of as much stability and sincerity of principle in well-educated minds as it does of versatility and gross egotism in self-taught men. I need not give the instances, ‘they will receive’ (in our author’s phrase) ‘an open allowance:’ but I am afraid that neither habits of abstraction nor the want of them will entirely exempt men from a bias to their own interest; that it is neither learning nor ignorance that thrusts us into the centre of our own little world, but that it is nature that has put a man there!