romantics, and which will lead by degrees, through Sandys and Denham, to the rimed couplet without run-on lines of Waller, Dryden and Pope,1 are not that for which these authors mostly count. What is most noticeable in them is, as we have said, their number. Although they claim Spenser as their master, they show, by their abundant adaptations of his style to pious subjects, that the time was no longer favourable to new "Faerie Queenes," and that the nation was ready for a far more serious epic, far grander and deeper: what it wanted was a "Paradise Lost." It expected it, and longed for it; and while twenty writers of but modest parts were trying to realise its wish, the great man who was to do so, very nearly went astray, and, full of admiration as he was for the famous artists of the foregoing age, ardent admirer of Spenser, as most of his immediate predecessors had been, he all but gave his country one more Arthurian poem instead of the biblical epic so earnestly desired. The voice of the nation luckily, those unspoken suggestions which, at certain periods, are, so to say, in the air, and which had been heard by many an artist deprived of genius, turned the scale, and Milton fulfilled his destiny. By the side of his work, those of his predecessors, all of which he knew and from most of which he borrowed, seem dead. Let us note, however, that they did exist; if the majority have died, their corpses serve at least to show the direction: they line the road, as skeletons do along the path followed by caravans on their way to the holy sanctuaries.

This couplet, destined to prevail again later, was recovering the favour it had lost during Elizabeth's reign. Examples can be found in a number of poets of James and Charles I.'s time, in Wither, for instance, in his "Fidelia," 1615, in Drummond, "Poems," vol. i. pp. 32, 124 ("Songs," i and ii), 1616, etc.

II.

Their eyes raised towards distant horizons, gazing at an unreachable sky, or else turned toward fathomless abysses, Elizabethan poets and thinkers had, many of them, lived much in the land of dreams, beyond the limits of realities. But now the earth was quaking, and it was impossible not to think of earth. Eyes look down towards it; men do not try so persistently to reach the stars; hands wander among the leaves and branches to cull the fruits of the orchard, The period is eminently a period of observers; the sciences and the arts of observation progress; in the case even of certain kinds which will bloom only later, such as the novel, the elements of their future grandeur are being assembled now with more care and better effect than ever before.

The essay, the portraits, the "characters," the psychological analysis of one's neighbour and of one's self, the works of moralists closely studying the human mind and the means of forming it, get a wider and readier public. Even a poem like Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island" is connected, in a friendly preface by Daniel Featley, with that more and more popular class of writings: "He that would learn Theologie, must first studie Autologie" (1633). Ascham and Sir Thomas Elyot now have numerous continuators, like Peacham, who excuses himself for writing after them, and who, desirous in his turn that his "Compleat Gentleman" be worthy of the name, gives a considerable place in his work to literature and art, supplying a summary of English literary history, praising Giotto, especially for his frescoes at Assisi, Raphael whose "stately hangings of arras, containing the story of St. Paul out of the Acts," used to adorn "the banquetting house at White-hall," and the French

as being "the best architects in the world." Wotton, the ambassador, now provost of Eton, sums up likewise his personal observations on the forming of the human mind, in his "Philosophical Survey of Education"; 2 Brathwaite publishes in 1630 his "English Gentleman," and in 1631, his "English Gentlewoman" (both of little value); after King James, who had printed in 1599 his "Basilicon Doron," or "Instructions to his dearest sonne," 3 Raleigh drafts his "Instructions to his Son and to Posterity," giving as plain and practical advice as he can, this one for example: "Have therefore ever more care that thou be beloved of thy wife, rather than thyself besotted on her."4

People like to control and verify; they note the movements of their heart and mind; they describe their neighbours' manners. The great quarrel on the usefulness of travels is still going on; Hall declares

"The Compleat Gentleman, fashioning him absolute in the most necessary and commendable qualities concerning minde and bodie," London, 1622, 4to, 2nd ed. enlarged 1634; modern ed. by G. S. Gordon, Oxford, 1906; great use made of C. Mander for all that concerns art. Henry Peacham (1576-1643?) left several other works, e.g. "The Worth of a Penny," 164[1], in Arber, "English Garner," vi. 245, of less interest.

"Or Moral Architecture," in "Reliquiæ Wottonianæ," London, 1651, much being made of experimental observation, and the popularity of the word "characters" being adverted to: first of all, says Wotton, a study must be made of "certain signatures of hopefulness or characters (as I will rather call them, because that word hath gotten already some entertainment among us), whereby may be timely described what the child will prove in probability." The least detail should be observed: "not only their articulate answers, but likewise certain smiles and frowns upon incident occasions." Concerning Wotton (1568–1639), one of the men of that period who knew Europe best, who spent some twenty years in Venice and died provost of Eton, see Izaac Walton's famous biography, and " Life and Letters of Sir H. Wotton," by L. Pearsall Smith, Oxford, 1907, 2 vols. 8vo.

3 One of the earliest works translated from English into French: "Basilicon Doron ou présent royal de Jacques premier, roy d'Angleterre... au Prince Henry son fils . . . traduit de l'Anglois ” by de Villiers Hotman, Paris, 1603 "Avec Permission."

4 "Works," vol. viii. pp. 557 ff.

against them, Howell for them; the accounts of journeys compiled after the return home, with the help of notes and sometimes drawings from nature,2 collected on the spot, multiply from year to year.

The good sense and veracity of Sandys, the minute observation of picturesque details and the realism of Coryat, are, as we have seen, the main merits of their relations of travels, written under James. The psychological and moral essay is, quite naturally, combined with this kind of work: Fynes Moryson, who had travelled under Elizabeth, publishes during the next reign his "Itinerary . . . containing his ten yeeres travell"; besides the Itinerary proper, full of statistical data and studded with useful and quaint information, he prints noteworthy considerations on the character of European peoples and gives sound advice to the 'prentice traveller, this for example: "Let him lay his purse under his pillow, but alwayes foulded with his

...

"Quo Vadis, a Just Censure of Travel," 1617, by Joseph Hall, whose reasonings are those of a "laudator Patria": since his compatriots are better than any other sort of men, they cannot but lose by travelling.-" Instructions for Forreine Travell," 1642 (reprinted by Arber, 1895), by James Howell, 1594 ?-1666, a traveller and diplomat, who began his journeys in 1618 and left letters, various treatises, a revised edition of the great "French-English Dictionary" of Cotgrave, London, 1650, fol. (originally published in 1611, and having first figured in the Stationers' Registers as "A Dictionarie in Ffrenche and Englishe collected by C. Holyband and sythene augmented or altered by Randall Cotgrave," June 7, 1608), much in his preface being borrowed from Pasquier's "Recherches de la France"; a prose allegory, of a kind greatly in fashion then: "Dodona's Grove," 1640, fol. (French version, 1641), etc. A number of his letters are in reality essays and treatises and not real letters; several describe, from personal observation, foreign countries, as does the long one, given as sent from Antwerp, May 1, 1622, and entitled "A Survey of the Seventeen Provinces." "The Familiar Letters of James Howell," ed. J. Jacobs, London, 1892, 2 vols. 8vo, vol. i. p. 115.

2 For example, in Sandys: "A Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610," London, 1615, fol.; plates visibly engraved from an amateur's sketches and to which the author refers in his text: ". . . As appeareth by the following picture" (alluding to the entrance to the Pyramids).

garters or something hee first useth in the morning, lest hee forget to put it up before hee goe out of his chamber." Travels, Moryson thinks, improve the mind; the impossible, however, should not be expected from them: "Chi asino va a Roma, asino se ne torna." French commerce suffers from the lack of coal; this commodity is imported from England, as France has "no pit coales or sea coales." But she has all the rest, so much so that, wanting nothing, and her people being contented within their borders, her colonies are insufficiently cared for and do not prosper.1

His "Itinerary" is scarcely finished than he sets to work again and tries to depict, on a larger scale, the character of the various nations he has visited, including

his own. He describes England as the merry country which he had known in his youth and which had not yet been modified by the approach of the great upheaval; no land more joyous, none fuller of plays, players and jollity. "All cittyes, towns and villages swarme with companyes of players with their peculiar theaters capable of many thousands, wherein they all play every day in the weeke but Sunday, with the most strang concourse of people. . . . As there be in my opinion more playes in London then in alle the partes of the worlde I have seene, so doe these players or comedians excell all other in the worlde. . . . What shall I say of daunsing with curious and rurall musicke, frequently used by the better sort, and upon all hollydayes by country people daunsing about the maypoles with bagpipes or other fidlers, besydes the jollityes of certain seasons of the yeare?" Especially attentive to

In Moryson's "Itinerary" (London, 1617, fol., some very bad maps of towns; repr. Glasgow, 1907, 4 vols.), the third part consists in essays inspired by his travels, his observations, and his experience. Born in 1566, and belonging to a well-to-do family, he began his journeys in May, 1591, visited most countries in Europe, became secretary to the Lord Deputy in Ireland, and died in February, 1630.