OF ENGLISH POETRY. XXV more lovely manifestation; Virgil is the incarnation of the power, grandeur, and development of the nationality of empire; Dante was no less the literary embodiment of Mediæval Christianity— that wild and wondrous phase of humanity which is found petrified, as it were, and presented to us in a tangible form, in the great triumphs of Gothic art; and our great countryman will seem no inapt or imperfect type of the Christianity of the Reformation, that is, of Christianity combined with freedom of opinion and the right of private judgment carried to its extremest consequences." In like manner we might conceive Shakespeare in the sixteenth century as embodying the inquiring spirit which was then abroad in the English mind. He is the "abstract and brier chronicle of the time," which was gauging the depth of every principle in politics, religion, and morals, even under the sternness of a Tudor despotism. It was the age when Bacon's vast intellect (and he also may be called a poet in the wealth and pregnancy of his imagery) was beginning to map out the geography of all science; when Jonson was anatomizing the surface "humours" of society, and reconstructing on a Gothic stage the principles of the ancient drama; when Spenser was weaving faith, and morals, and history, and intrigue, into his endless web of romance; when Sidney was impersonating in a nobler shape the departed spirit of chivalry; and when language itself was running riot in novelty in the Euphuism of Lilly. The "myriad-minded" poet is a fit type of this variegated age; his apothegms would construct a moral philosophy; his maxims, a system of enlightened policy; his observations, a treatise on natural history; his characters, a psychological discourse on human nature. And what he dreamt or imagined is not less wonderful. The world of "faery" was not the only land over which the fine frenzy of his imagination rolled; not only could he give flesh and blood to the shadowy images of chronicle history, or the filamental outlines of Italian romances, but art, in a style which his visual eye never witnessed, and his hand was utterly incapable of tracing, lived in his imagination in the perfection. of exquisite forms. The pure Italian character of Shakespeare's artistic taste is visible in his thousand references to statuary, whose exalted beauty he could only have conceived. "Niobe all tears;" "A feathered Mercury new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;" "Patience on a monument smiling at grief;" "O'erpicturing that Venus where we see the fancy outwork nature;"-these are but a few instances of his perfectness of conception as regards sculpture. In like manner his delineations of female character were original. No prototypes existed in the earlier dramas, and such creations as Desdemona, Imogen, Miranda, and Viola, attest the purity and refinement of his taste no less than the variety and power of his genius. In this respect he is as unlike all his contemporaries as he is in respect of poetic diction and versification. The conclusion of the sixteenth century was a period of the marshalling of all ideas and all literatures on the field of England; and, although the Elizabethan literature was tinged by an infusion of French taste and mannerism, yet its principles and the freshness of its nature have germinated again after a lapse of two hundred years. Of course there mingled in the product an abundant crop of weeds, more perhaps than a legitimate growth. The effects of the semi-barbarous preceding age still were visible in the pollution which mingled deeply in the stream, and which renders a great portion of the literature of that age unfitted for general perusal or quotation. But it is singular that coarseness of thought affected even our Protestant ancestors, apparently with little notion of a moral stain; Lyndsay, an apostle of the Reformation in Scotland, full of serious and devout thinking, is yet one of the coarsest of the writers of the century, and his most licentious wit amused the ears of an elegant court, and delighted the fancies of high-born dames and "gentle knights." The most distinguished feature of the poetic character of Elizabeth's reign is the development of the dramatic art. The rudeness of preceding centuries had been amused by the Miracle Plays, which ripened into the improved shape of Mysteries or Moralities; and by the pantomimic exhibition of the Masque, on which was ultimately engrafted a poetic literature, which raised it in the sixteenth century to a respectable literary rank. The Miracles and Mysteries were adaptations of Scripture stories, such as the Creation, the Deluge, etc., in which Satan in a ridiculous guise was the hero of the piece; the Divine Persons also form characters in these dramas; and, in their improved form, personifications of virtues, vices, and other abstract ideas, are introduced. Very strangely, this literature, if it may be so termed, was the invention of the Church, and was used as a 1 The coincidence of circumstances in the origin of the Greek drama, and that of the medieval times, has been frequently noticed. "Both," says Mr. Shaw (Outlines of English Literature), "were performed in a sacred spot; the subjects of both were drawn from what was considered most holy and venerable; both were placed before OF ENGLISH POETRY. xxvii means of popular instruction in an age when reading was a scarce accomplishment. Plays were acted on stated occasions often by churchmen. The first English comedy that may properly deserve the appellation is "Ralph Royster Doyster" (1551?) by Nicholas Udal, Master of Westminster School. The earliest tragedy is the "Gorboduc," or, as it was afterwards named, Ferrex and Porrex," of Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, founded on a British legend similar to that of Eteocles and Polynices, and which was acted before the court in 1562. 66 A crowd of writers followed Sackville: dramatic entertainments became extravagantly popular, and theatrical property highly valuable. The subjects were drawn from classical and mythological sources, and from Greek, Roman, and English history. The taste for poetized history was long prevalent, and examples are found in the series of Shakspeare's historical plays, and, in general poetry, in Daniel's Civil Wars. The accession of James did not check the impulse which literature had received. Many of the great writers of Elizabeth's era were still living. The king, though with little true taste, was himself an author, and the partiality of his queen, Anne of Denmark, for elegant amusement, nursed among the nobility the passion for masques. This entertainment, originally a mere mumming show, had gradually, as above noticed, a literature engrafted on it, which Ben Jonson may be said to have raised to perfection; there were few masques after his death. It is singular how, in those days, without the pomp of modern theatres,' without the dazzle of artificial light, with rude scenery, the spectator with the greatest magnificence attainable; and the spirit of mingled patriotism and religion, which it was the object of the Greek theatre to excite, was certainly little inferior in intensity to the credulous and simple awe with which the rude audiences of Catholic times must have witnessed the great mysteries of their religion represented before the altar of a cathedral." The hymns of the Dionysia, the Bacchic festival of Greece, originated the Choruses which form so conspicuous a feature of the Greek drama.-See Brumoy's Greek Theatre. In both cases the earliest development of the drama took the direction of comedy. The word Tragedy is derived from tragos, a goat, the animal sacred to Bacchus ; another etymology is tryx, new wine; Comedy, from kome, a village, and ode, a song, denotes the scenes of the earliest dramatic representations. 1 "The stage (of the miracle plays) was divided into three platforms; the upper being reserved for God, angels, and glorified spirits; the next below it for the human personages of the Drama; and the lowest was devoted to the devils, being a representation of the yawning mouth of hell."--"The much agitated question, of the meaning of the singular title given by Dante to his great work, could hardly have been raised, had the critics remembered that the Comedia of the 'Gran Padre Alighier' is nothing else but a mystery in a narrative form, and that the three divisions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise correspond exactly with the three stages of the religious drama."-Shaw, whose locality was indicated by a placard, the dramatic literature could have produced the powerful effect on the feelings of the audience which we know it to have exercised. The dramatic art seems to have declined with the progressive improvement of the facilities for giving it effective scope in representation. The line of dramatic writers of the period of Elizabeth, James, and Charles, is considered to have expired with Shirley, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century. After the overthrow of the monarchy in the civil wars, the stern puritanism of the Commonwealth extinguished the drama, and almost silenced the Muses. Milton had unstrung his harp at the commencement of the struggle, and, when its note again rung, it was in the midst of a new form of literature. It has been remarked that great eras in our poetry have corresponded with great religious movements. Chaucer was contemporary with Wycliffe; Shakespeare and the Elizabethan literature with the completion of the Reformation; and Milton with the Puritan revolution. A revival of the religious spirit both in England and Scotland accompanied the revivification of poetry in the beginning of the present century. The influence of Milton on his age is not historically distinct and palpable, but the sale of three thousand copies of Paradise Lost in eleven years, at a period when England had comparatively a small body of readers, is a memorable fact. The poetical literature of the Restoration unhappily took too much of its tone in morals from the Court, and its fashion from France. The Puritanical austerity of the Commonwealth naturally produced a reaction when monarchy was restored, and licentiousness was enthroned at Whitehall. Waller and Denham gave examples of correct and elegant verse, but in general the poetry of the latter half of the seventeenth century is artificial, limited in aim, and overspread with the conceits of the followers of Donne. It was fortunate that this school found an artist in Dryden, who, like Raphael in painting, bursting its feeble, absurd, or noxious mannerism, dignified it with Roman nobility of subject and expression, and placed the language on a rock whence it has never been shaken. The metaphysical school may be said to close with Cowley. Sir William D'Avenant revived the drama after the Restoration, but the rant of the Frenchified "rhyming plays" exhibits a sad contrast with the earnest passion of the earlier dramatic period. Dryden, the father of literary criticism, felt the difference, but his genius lacked the internal spirit which he strove to evoke in OF ENGLISH POETRY. xxix his later dramatic efforts. The French aspect which the Restoration had communicated to poetical literature continued in the age of Anne and the Georges, and after the English Revolution, it mellowed into more regular verse. Pope's "velvet lawn, shaven with the scythe, and levelled with the roller," succeeded Dryden's "natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation." But this poetry of learning and artificial life, having no root in the deeper sympathies of humanity, withered in the reigns of the first two Georges, until the poetical literature of England became a mere hortus siccus of mummified flowers, retaining the elegant outline of their forms, but without blood in their dead veins, or odour in their sapless leaves. In the voices of Thomson, Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith; and, in Scotland, in those of Allan Ramsay and a few other lyrists-humble yet sweet singers-the life of true poetry was heard: but the latter part of the century sleepily dosed over what had become the mere sing-song of the age of Anne, till the artificial school expired in the transient flutter of enthusiasm that hailed the metallic melody of Darwin. This age, then, though remarkable for the progress of science and philosophy in many departments, was almost dead in poetry, when the advent of Cowper and Burns began to change the scene. The elder poetical literature had been in some measure revived by the researches of critics (often of an unpoetical antiquarian cast), by the great editions of Shakespeare, by the publication of Percy's "Reliques," and other Florilegia, and, above all, by Warton's "History of Poetry." The Gothic legends of Germany also nursed the rising genius of more than one great author; and perhaps that country has done, in a proportional degree, as much for the modern poetic literature of England, as her scholarship and philosophy have achieved for the progress of the human race. A popular writer remarks that, in "the three last great sunbursts of our literature, viz., those of Elizabeth, Anne, and George III., the inspiration in each case came from a foreign source; in the first from Italy, in the second from France, in the third from Germany." And, if there be any logical sequence between great political events and the progress or decline of poetry and other arts, the impulse of improvement was increased by the results of the incidents of the first French revolution. A convulsion which overturned or shook the theories of society, government, religion, and morality, could not be without its influence on a literary art so intimately connected |