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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Amenities of Literature, by Isaac Disraeli
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
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+
+Title: Amenities of Literature
+       Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature
+
+
+Author: Isaac Disraeli
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 1, 2011  [eBook #36298]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMENITIES OF LITERATURE***
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+
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+Transcriber's note:
+
+      (1) Characters following a carat (^) were printed
+          in superscript.
+
+      (2) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below
+          letters are not identified in this text file.
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+[Illustration: Bodleian Library, Oxford.
+
+London, Frederick Warne & C^o.]
+
+
+AMENITIES OF LITERATURE,
+
+Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature.
+
+by
+
+ISAAC DISRAELI.
+
+A New Edition,
+
+Edited by His Son,
+
+THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+London:
+Frederick Warne and Co.,
+Bedford Street, Strand.
+
+London:
+Bradbury, Agnew, & Co., Printers, Whitefriars.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+A history of our vernacular literature has occupied my studies for many
+years. It was my design not to furnish an arid narrative of books or of
+authors, but following the steps of the human mind through the wide
+track of Time, to trace from their beginnings the rise, the progress,
+and the decline of public opinions, and to illustrate, as the objects
+presented themselves, the great incidents in our national annals.
+
+In the progress of these researches many topics presented themselves,
+some of which, from their novelty and curiosity, courted investigation.
+Literary history, in this enlarged circuit, becomes not merely a
+philological history of critical erudition, but ascends into a
+philosophy of books where their subjects, their tendency, and their
+immediate or gradual influence over the people discover their actual
+condition.
+
+Authors are the creators or the creatures of opinion; the great form an
+epoch, the many reflect their age. With them the transient becomes
+permanent, the suppressed lies open, and they are the truest
+representatives of their nation for those very passions with which they
+are themselves infected. The pen of the ready-writer transmits to us the
+public and the domestic story, and thus books become the intellectual
+history of a people. As authors are scattered through all the ranks of
+society, among the governors and the governed, and the objects of their
+pursuits are usually carried on by their own peculiar idiosyncrasy, we
+are deeply interested in the secret connexion of the incidents of their
+lives with their intellectual habits. In the development of that
+predisposition which is ever working in characters of native force, all
+their felicities and their failures, and the fortunes which such men
+have shaped for themselves, and often for the world, we discover what is
+not found in biographical dictionaries, the history of the mind of the
+individual--and this constitutes the psychology of genius.
+
+In the midst of my studies I was arrested by the loss of sight; the
+papers in this collection are a portion of my projected history.
+
+The title prefixed to this work has been adopted to connect it with its
+brothers, the "Curiosities of Literature," and "Miscellanies of
+Literature;" but though the form and manner bear a family resemblance,
+the subject has more unity of design.
+
+The author of the present work is denied the satisfaction of reading a
+single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespass on
+the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been
+confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can
+no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in
+the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate
+patience of filial devotion.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+  THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION                                    1
+
+  BRITAIN AND THE BRITONS                                     12
+
+  THE NAME OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ENGLISH                      24
+
+  THE ANGLO-SAXONS                                            28
+
+  CÆDMON AND MILTON                                           37
+
+  BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE                                      51
+
+  THE ANGLO-NORMANS                                           59
+
+  THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL                       70
+
+  GOTHIC ROMANCES                                             81
+
+  ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE                96
+
+  ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE                             111
+
+  VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE                       128
+
+  DIALECTS                                                   142
+
+  MANDEVILLE; OUR FIRST TRAVELLER                            151
+
+  CHAUCER                                                    158
+
+  GOWER                                                      177
+
+  PIERS PLOUGHMAN                                            183
+
+  OCCLEVE; THE SCHOLAR OF CHAUCER                            191
+
+  LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY                                  196
+
+  THE INVENTION OF PRINTING                                  203
+
+  THE FIRST ENGLISH PRINTER                                  214
+
+  EARLY LIBRARIES                                            221
+
+  HENRY THE SEVENTH                                          228
+
+  FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY                            234
+
+  ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE                                        240
+
+  THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE                                243
+
+  HENRY THE EIGHTH; HIS LITERARY CHARACTER                   250
+
+  BOOKS OF THE PEOPLE                                        256
+
+  THE DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY A PRIMITIVE AUTHOR         268
+
+  SKELTON                                                    276
+
+  THE SHIP OF FOOLS                                          285
+
+  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF SIR THOMAS MORE             289
+
+  THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT                    303
+
+  THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES                          316
+
+  A CRISIS AND A REACTION; ROBERT CROWLEY                    322
+
+  PRIMITIVE DRAMAS                                           339
+
+  THE REFORMER BISHOP BALE; AND THE ROMANIST JOHN HEYWOOD,
+  THE COURT JESTER                                           353
+
+  ROGER ASCHAM                                               359
+
+  PUBLIC OPINION                                             368
+
+  ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY                                   381
+
+  THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE                         393
+
+  ORIGIN OF RHYME                                            399
+
+  RHYMING DICTIONARIES                                       403
+
+  THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE                                 405
+
+  THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT                               413
+
+  THE FIRST JESUITS IN ENGLAND                               423
+
+  HOOKER                                                     439
+
+  SIR PHILIP SIDNEY                                          451
+
+  SPENSER                                                    460
+
+  THE FAERY QUEEN                                            475
+
+  ALLEGORY                                                   487
+
+  THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY                     502
+
+  THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE         514
+
+  SHAKESPEARE                                                529
+
+  THE "HUMOURS" OF JONSON                                    578
+
+  DRAYTON                                                    584
+
+  THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH                      590
+
+  THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHER, DR. DEE                            617
+
+  THE ROSACRUSIAN FLUDD                                      642
+
+  BACON                                                      650
+
+  THE FIRST FOUNDER OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY                      661
+
+  EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS,--THE TRANSITION
+  TO AUTHORS BY PROFESSION                                   670
+
+  THE AGE OF DOCTRINES                                       681
+
+  PAMPHLETS                                                  685
+
+  THE OCEANA OF HARRINGTON                                   692
+
+  THE AUTHOR OF "THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY"        709
+
+  COMMONWEALTH                                               712
+
+  THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE               714
+
+  DIFFICULTIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS     724
+
+  THE WAR AGAINST BOOKS                                      738
+
+
+
+
+AMENITIES OF LITERATURE.
+
+THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION.
+
+
+England, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly
+productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so
+late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a
+national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving
+ages of time is but of yesterday.
+
+How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or
+preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome,"[1] becomes a tale
+in the history of the human mind.
+
+In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own,
+a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek
+for our ABORIGINES? A Welsh triad, and a Welsh is presumed to be a
+British, has commemorated an epoch when these mighty realms were a
+region of impenetrable forests and impassable morasses, and their sole
+tenants were wolves, bears, and beavers, and wild cattle. Who were the
+first human beings in this lone world?
+
+Every people have had a fabulous age. Priests and poets invented, and
+traditionists expatiated; we discover gods who seem to have been men, or
+men who resemble gods; we read in the form of prose what had once been a
+poem; imaginations so wildly constructed, and afterwards as strangely
+allegorised, served as the milky food of the children of society,
+quieting their vague curiosity, and circumscribing the illimitable
+unknown. The earliest epoch of society is unapproachable to human
+inquiry. Greece, with all her ambiguous poetry, was called "the
+mendacious;" credulous Rome rested its faith on five centuries of
+legends; and our Albion dates from that unhistorical period when, as our
+earliest historian, the Monk of Monmouth, aiming at probability,
+affirms, "there were but a few giants in the land,"[2] and these the
+more melancholy Gildas, to familiarise us with hell itself, accompanied
+by "a few devils." Every people however long acknowledged, with national
+pride, beings as fabulous, in those tutelary heroes who bore their own
+names.
+
+The landing of Brutus with his fugitive Trojans on "the White Island,"
+and here founding a "Troynovant," was one of the results of the
+immortality of Homer, though it came reflected through his imitator
+Virgil, whose Latin in the mediæval ages was read when Greek was
+unknown. The landing of Æneas on the shores of Italy, and the pride of
+the Romans in their Trojan ancestry, as their flattering Epic
+sanctioned, every modern people, in their jealousy of antiquity, eagerly
+adopted, and claimed a lineal descent from some of this spurious progeny
+of Priam. The idle humour of the learned flattered the imaginations of
+their countrymen; and each, in his own land, raised up a fictitious
+personage who was declared to have left his name to the people. The
+excess of their patriotism exposed their forgeries, while every
+pretended Trojan betrayed a Gothic name. France had its Francion,
+Ireland its Iberus, the Danes their Danus, and the Saxons their Saxo.
+The descent of Brutus into Britain is even tenderly touched by so late a
+writer as our CAMDEN; for while he abstains from affording us either
+denial or assent, he expends his costly erudition in furnishing every
+refutation which had been urged against the preposterous existence of
+these fabulous founders of every European people.
+
+Such is the corruption of the earliest history, either to gratify the
+idle pride of a people, or to give completeness to inquiries extending
+beyond human knowledge. Even BUCHANAN, to gratify the ancestral vanity
+of his countrymen, has recorded the names of three hundred fabulous
+monarchs, and presents a nomenclature without an event; and in his
+classical latinity we must silently drop a thousand unhistorical years.
+Even HENRY and WHITAKER, in the gravity of English history, sketched the
+manners and the characteristics of an unchronicled generation from the
+fragmentary romances of Ossian.
+
+Cæsar imagined that the inhabitants of the interior of Britain, a
+fiercer people than the dwellers on the coasts, were an indigenous race.
+But the philosophy of Cæsar did not exceed that of Horace and Ovid, who
+conceived no other origin of man than _Mater Terra_. Man indeed was
+formed out of "the dust of the ground," but the Divine Spirit alone
+could have dictated the history of primeval man in the solitude of Eden.
+To Cæsar was not revealed that man was an oriental creature; that a
+single locality served as the cradle of the human race; and that the
+generations of man were the offspring of a single pair, when once "the
+whole earth was of one language and of one speech." "And there is no
+antiquity but this that can tell _any other beginning_," exclaims our
+honest VERSTEGAN, exulting in his Teutonic blood, while furnishing an
+extraordinary evidence of the retreat of Tuisco and his Teutons from the
+conspiracy against the skies.[3]
+
+The dispersion of Babel, and, consequently, the diversity of languages,
+is the mysterious link which connects sacred and profane history. There
+is but a single point whence human nature begins--the universe has been
+populated by migrations. Wherever the human being is found, he has been
+transplanted; however varied in structure and dissimilar in dialect, the
+first inhabitants of every land were not born there: unlike plants and
+animals, which seem coeval with the region in which they are found,
+never removing from the soil they occupy. Thus the miracle of Holy Writ
+solves the enigmas of philosophical theories; of more than one Adam, of
+distinct stocks of mankind, and of the mechanism of language--vague
+conjectures, and contested opinions! which have left us without even a
+conception how the human being is white, or tawny, or sable; or how the
+first letters of the alphabet are Aleph and Bêt, or Alpha and Beta, or A
+and B!
+
+In tracing the origin of nations later speculators have therefore more
+discreetly, though not wanting in hardy conjectures or fanciful
+affinities, conducted people after people, from the mysterious fount of
+human existence in the Asian region. Through countless centuries they
+have followed the myriads who, propelling each other, took the right or
+the left, as chance led them: vanished nations may have received names
+which they themselves might not have recognised. Kelt or Kimmerian,
+Scandinavian or Goth, Phoenician or Iberian, have been hurried to the
+Isles of Britain. Their tale is older, though less "divine," than the
+tale of Troy; and the difficulty remains to unravel the reality of the
+fabulous. The learned have rarely satisfied their consciences in
+arranging their dates in the confusion of unnoted time; nor in that
+other confusion of races, often mingling together under one common
+appellative, have they always agreed in assigning that ancient people
+who were the progenitors of the modern nation; and the aborigines have
+been more than once described as "an ancient people whose name is
+unknown." In the pride of erudition, and the irascibility of
+confutation, they have involved themselves in interminable discussions,
+yet one might be seduced to adopt any hypothesis, for more or less each
+bears some ambiguous evidence, or some startling circumstance sufficient
+to rock the dreaming antiquary, and to kindle the bitter blood of
+pedantic patriots. The origin of the population of Europe and the first
+inhabitants of our British Isles has produced some antiquarian romances,
+often ingenious and amusing, till the romances turn out to be mere
+polemics, and give us angry words amid the most quaint fancies. This
+theme, still continued, becomes a cavern of antiquity, where many waving
+their torches, the light has sometimes fallen on an unperceived angle;
+but the scattered light has shown the depth and the darkness.
+
+Among those shadows of time we grasp at one certainty. Whoever might be
+the first-comers to this solitary island, when we obtain any knowledge
+of the inhabitants, we are struck by their close resemblance to those
+tribes of savage life whom our navigators have discovered, and who are
+now found in almost a primitive state among that innumerable cluster of
+what has recently been designated the Polynesian Isles. The aborigines
+of Britain took the same modes of existence, and fell into similar
+customs. We discover their rude population divided into jealous tribes,
+in perpetual battle with one another; they lived in what Hobbes has
+called the _status belli_, with no notion of the _meum_ and _tuum_; in
+the same community of their women as was found in Otaheite;[4] and with
+the same ignorance of property, when its representative in some form was
+not yet invented. Our aborigines resembled these races even in their
+personal appearance; a Polynesian chief has been drawn and coloured
+after the life, and the figure exhibits the perfect picture of an
+ancient Briton, almost naked, the body painted red; the British savage
+chose blue, and made deep incisions in the flesh to insert his indelible
+woad.[5] The fierce eye, and the bearded lip, with the long hair
+scattered to the waist, exhibit the Briton as he was seen by Cæsar, and,
+a century afterwards, as the British monarch Caractacus appeared before
+the Emperor Claudius at Rome: his sole ornaments consisted of an iron
+collar, and an iron girdle; but as his naked majesty had his skin
+painted with figures of animals, however rudely, this was probably a
+distinctive dress of British royalty. These Britons lived in thick
+woods, herding among circular huts of reed, as we find other tribes in
+this early state of society; and submissive to the absolute dominion of
+a priesthood of magicians, as we find even among the Esquimaux; and
+performing sanguinary rites, similar to those of the ancient Mexicans:
+we are struck with the conviction that men in a parallel condition
+remain but uniform beings.
+
+It seems a solecism in the intellectual history of man to discover among
+such a semi-barbarous people a government of sages, who, we are assured,
+"invented and taught such philosophy and other learning as were never
+read of nor heard of by any men before."[6] This paradoxical incident
+deepens in mystery when we are to be taught that the druidical
+institution of Britain was Pythagorean, or patriarchal, or Brahminical.
+The presumed encyclopedic knowledge which this order possessed, and the
+singular customs which they practised, have afforded sufficient
+analogies and affinities to maintain the occult and remote origin of
+Druidism. Nor has this notion been the mere phantom of modern
+system-makers. It was a subject of inquiry among the ancients whether
+the Druids had received their singular art of teaching by secret
+initiation, and the prohibition of all writing, with their doctrine of
+the pre-existence and transmigration of souls, from Pythagoras; or,
+whether this philosopher in his universal travels had not alighted among
+the Druids, and had passed through their initiation?[7] This discussion
+is not yet obsolete, and it may still offer all the gust of novelty. A
+Welsh antiquary, according to the spirit of Welsh antiquity, insists
+that the Druidical system of the Metempsychosis was conveyed to the
+Brahmins of India by a former emigration from Wales; but the reverse may
+have occurred, if we trust the elaborate researches which copiously
+would demonstrate that the Druids were a scion of the oriental
+family.[8] Every point of the Druidical history, from its mysterious
+antiquity, may terminate with reversing the proposition. A recent writer
+confidently intimated that the knowledge of Druidism must be searched
+for in the Talmudical writings; but another, in return, asserts that the
+Druids were older than the Jews.
+
+Whence and when the British Druids transplanted themselves to this lone
+world amid the ocean, bringing with them all the wisdom of far
+antiquity, to an uncivilized race, is one of those events in the history
+of man which no historian can write. It is evident that they long
+preserved what they had brought; since the Druids of Gaul were fain to
+resort to the Druids of Britain to renovate their instruction.
+
+The Druids have left no record of themselves; they seem to have
+disdained an immortality separate from the existence of their order; but
+the shadow of their glory is reflected for ever in the verse of Lucan,
+and the prose of Cæsar. The poet imagined that if the knowledge of the
+gods was known to man, it had been alone revealed to these priests of
+Britain. The narrative of the historian is comprehensive, but, with all
+the philosophical cast of his mind and the intensity of his curiosity,
+Cæsar was not a Druid;[9] and only a Druid could have written--had he
+dared!--on DRUIDHEACHT--a sacred, unspeakable word at which the people
+trembled in their veneration.
+
+The British Druids constituted a sacred and a secret society, religious,
+political, and literary. In the rude mechanism of society in a state of
+pupilage, the first elements of government, however gross, or even
+puerile, were the levers to lift and to sustain the unhewn masses of the
+barbaric mind. Invested with all privileges and immunities, amid that
+transient omnipotence which man in his first feeble condition can
+confer, the wild children of society crouched together before those
+illusions which superstition so easily forges; but the supernatural
+dominion lay in the secret thoughts of the people; the marauder had not
+the daring to touch the open treasure as it lay in the consecrated
+grove; and a single word from a Druid for ever withered a human being,
+"cut down like grass." The loyalty of the land was a religion of wonder
+and fear, and to dispute with a Druid was a state crime.
+
+They were a secret society, for whatever was taught was forbidden to be
+written; and not only their doctrines and their sciences were veiled in
+this sacred obscurity, but the laws which governed the community were
+also oral. For the people, the laws, probably, were impartially
+administered; for the Druids were not the people, and without their
+sympathies, these judges at least sided with no party. But if these
+sages, amid the conflicting interests of the multitude, seemed placed
+above the vicissitudes of humanity, their own more solitary passions
+were the stronger, violently compressed within a higher sphere:
+ambition, envy, and revenge, those curses of nobler minds, often broke
+their dreams. The election of an Arch-Druid was sometimes to be decided
+by a battle. Some have been chronicled by a surname which indicates a
+criminal. No king could act without a Druid by his side, for peace or
+war were on his lips; and whenever the order made common cause, woe to
+the kingdom![10] It was a terrible hierarchy. The golden knife which
+pruned the mistletoe beneath the mystic oak, immolated the human victim.
+
+The Druids were the common fathers of the British youth, for they were
+the sole educators; but the genius of the order admitted of no inept
+member. For the acolyte unendowed with the faculty of study all
+initiation ceased; nature herself had refused this youth the glory of
+Druidism; but he was taught the love of his country. The Druidical lyre
+kindled patriotism through the land, and the land was saved--for the
+Druids!
+
+The Druidical custom of unwritten instruction was ingeniously suggested
+by Cicero, as designed to prevent their secret doctrines from being
+divulged to those unworthy or ill fitted to receive them, and to
+strengthen the memory of their votaries by its continued exercise; but
+we may suspect, that this barbarous custom of this most ancient sodality
+began at a period when they themselves neither read nor wrote, destitute
+of an alphabet of their own; for when the Druids had learned from the
+Greeks their characters, they adopted them in all their public and
+private affairs. We learn that the Druidical sciences were contained in
+twenty thousand verses, which were to prompt their perpetual memory.
+Such traditional science could not be very progressive; what was to be
+got by rote no disciple would care to consider obsolete, and a century
+might elapse without furnishing an additional couplet. The Druids, like
+some other institutions of antiquity, by not perpetuating their
+doctrines, or their secrets, in this primeval state of theology and
+philosophy, by writing, have effectually concealed their own puerile
+simplicity. But the monuments of a people remain to perpetuate their
+character. We may judge of the genius or state of the Druidical arts and
+sciences by such objects. We are told that the Druids were so wholly
+devoted to nature, that they prohibited the use of any tool in the
+construction of their rude works; all are unhewn masses, or heaps of
+stones; such are their cairns and cromleches and corneddes, and that
+wild architecture whose stones hang on one another, still frowning on
+the plains of Salisbury.[11] A circle of stones marked the consecrated
+limits of the Druidical tribunal; and in the midst a hillock heaped up
+for the occasion was the judgment-seat. Here, in the open air, in "the
+eye of light and the face of the sun," to use the bardic style, the
+decrees were pronounced, and the Druids harangued the people. Such a
+scene was exhibited by the Hebrew patriarchs, from whom some imagined
+these Druids descended; but whether or not the Celtic be of this origin
+we must not decide by any analogous manners or customs, because these
+are nearly similar, wherever we trace a primitive race--so uniform is
+nature, till art, infinitely various, conceals nature herself.
+
+In the depth of antiquity, misty superstition and pristine tradition
+gave a false magnitude to the founders of human knowledge; and our own
+literary historians who have been over-curious about "the Genesis" of
+their antiquities, have inveigled us into the mystic groves of Druidism
+in all their cloudy obscurity. The "Antiquities of the University of
+Oxford" open with "the Originals of Learning in this Nation;" and our
+antiquary discerns the first shadowings of the University of Oxford in
+"the universal knowledge" of the Druidical institution in "ethics,
+politics, civil law, divinity, and poetry." Such are the reveries of an
+antiquary.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Ben Jonson.
+
+  [2] The existence of these _giants_ was long historical, and their
+    real origin was in the fourth verse of the fifth chapter of Genesis,
+    which no commentator shall ever explain. AYLET SAMMES in his
+    "Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, or the Antiquities of Ancient Britain
+    derived from the Phoenicians," has particularly noticed "two teeth of
+    a certain giant, of such a huge bigness, that two hundred such teeth
+    as men now-a-days have might be cut out of them." Becanus and Camden
+    had however observed, that "_the bones of sea-fish_ had been taken
+    for _giants' bones_;--but can it be rationally supposed that men ever
+    entombed fishes?" triumphant in his arguments, exclaims Aylet Sammes.
+    The revelations of geology had not yet been surmised, even by those
+    who had discovered that giants were but sea-fish. So progressive is
+    all human knowledge.
+
+  [3] The miraculous event was perpetuated by the whole Teutonic
+    people, "while it was fresh in their memories," as our honest Saxon
+    asserts; hence to this day we in our Saxon _English_, and our
+    Teutonic kinsmen and neighbours in their idiom, describe a confusion
+    of idle talk by the term of _Babel_, now written from our harsh love
+    of supernumerary consonants _Babble_; and any such workmen of Babel
+    are still indicated as _Babblers_.--"A Restitution of Decayed
+    Intelligence," 138, 4to. Antwerp, 1605.
+
+    The erudite Menage offers a memorable evidence of the precarious
+    condition of etymology when it connects things which have no other
+    affinity than that which depends on _sounds_. See his "Dictionnaire
+    Etymologique, ou Origines de la Langue Françoise," ad verbum BABIL.
+    Not satisfied with the usual authorities deduced from _Babel_, this
+    verbal sage appeals to us English to demonstrate the natural
+    connexion between _Babbling and Childishness_; for thus he has
+    shrewdly opined "The English in this manner have _Babble_ and
+    _Baby_!"
+
+    After all the convulsion of lips at Babel, and confusion among the
+    etymologists, the word is Hebrew, which with a few more such are
+    found in many languages.
+
+  [4] Julia, the empress of Severus, once in raillery remonstrated with
+    a British female against this singular custom, which annulled every
+    connubial tie. The British woman, whose observation had evidently
+    been enlarged during her visit to Rome, retorted by her disdain of
+    the more polished corruption of the greater nation. "We British women
+    greatly differ from the Roman ladies, for we follow in public the men
+    whom we esteem the most worthy, while the Roman women yield
+    themselves secretly to the vilest of men."
+
+    Such was the noble sentiment which broke forth from a lady of savage
+    education--it was, however, but a savage's view of social life. This
+    female Briton had not felt how much remained of life which she had
+    not taken into her view; when the attractions of her sex had ceased,
+    and the season of flowers had passed, she was left without her
+    connubial lord amid a progeny who had no father.
+
+  [5] This practice of savage races may have originated in a natural
+    circumstance. The naked body by this slight covering is protected
+    from the atmosphere, from insects, and other inconveniences to which
+    the unclothed are exposed. But though it may not have been considered
+    merely as personal finery, which seems sometimes to have been the
+    case, it became a refinement of barbarism when they painted their
+    bodies frightfully to look terrible to the enemy.
+
+  [6] See Mr. Tate's twelve questions about the Druids, with Mr.
+    Jones's answers; a learned Welsh scholar who commented on the ancient
+    laws of his nation.--Toland's "History of the Druids."
+
+    A later Welsh scholar affirms, "beyond all doubt there has been an
+    era when science diffused a light among the Cymry--in a very early
+    period of the world."--Owen's "Heroic Elegies of Llywarç Hen."
+    Preface, xxi.
+
+    This style is traditional and still kept up among Welsh and Irish
+    scholars, who seem familiar with an antiquity beyond record.
+
+  [7] Toland's "History of the Druids" in his Miscellaneous Works, ii.
+    163.
+
+  [8] "The Celtic Druids, or an Attempt to show that the Druids were
+    the Priests of Oriental Colonies, who emigrated from India." By
+    Godfrey Higgins, Esq. London, 1829.
+
+    This is a quarto volume abounding with recondite researches and many
+    fancies. It is more repulsive, by the absurd abuse of "the Christian
+    priests who destroyed their (the Druids') influence, and unnerved the
+    arms of their gallant followers." There are philosophical fanatics!
+
+  [9] Cæsar was a keen observer of the Britons. He characterizes the
+    Kentish men, _Ex his omnibus longè sunt humanissimi_,--"Of all this
+    people the Kentish are far the most humane." Cæsar describes the
+    British boats to have the keel and masts of the lightest wood, and
+    their bodies of wicker covered with leather; and the hero and sage
+    was taught a lesson by the barbarians, for Cæsar made use of these in
+    Spain to transport his soldiers,--a circumstance which Lucan has
+    recorded. In the size and magnitude of Britain, confiding to the
+    exaggerated accounts of the captives, he was mistaken; but he
+    acknowledges, that many things he heard of, he had not himself
+    observed.
+
+  [10] Toland's "Hist. of the Druids," 56.
+
+  [11] The origin of Stonehenge is as unknown as that of the Pyramids.
+    As it is evident that those huge masses could not have been raised
+    and fixed without the machinery of art, Mr. Owen, the Welsh
+    antiquary, infers, that this building, if such it may be called,
+    could not have been erected till that later period when the Druidical
+    genius declined and submitted to Christianity, and the Druids were
+    taught more skilful masonry in stone, though without mortar. It has
+    been, however, considered, that those masses which have been ascribed
+    to the necromancer Merlin, or the more ancient giants, might have
+    been the work of the Britons themselves, who, without our knowledge
+    of the mechanical powers in transporting or raising ponderous bodies,
+    it is alleged, were men of mighty force and stature, whose
+    co-operation might have done what would be difficult even to our
+    mechanical science. The lances, helmets, and swords of these Britons
+    show the vast size and strength of those who wore them. The native
+    Americans, as those in Peru, unaided by the engines we apply to those
+    purposes, have raised up such vast stones in building their temples
+    as the architect of the present time would not perhaps hazard the
+    attempt to remove. "Essays by a Society at Exeter," 114.
+
+
+
+
+BRITAIN AND THE BRITONS.
+
+
+Britain stood as the boundary of the universe, beyond Which all was air
+and water--and long it was ere the trembling coasters were certain
+whether Britain was an island or a continent, a secret probably to the
+dispersed natives themselves. It was the triumphant fleet of Agricola,
+nearly a century after the descent of Cæsar, which, encircling it,
+proclaimed to the universe that Britain was an island. From that day
+Albion has lifted its white head embraced by the restless ocean, but
+often betrayed by that treacherous guardian, she became the possession
+of successive races.
+
+Nations have derived their names from some accidental circumstance; some
+peculiarity marking their national character, or descriptive of the site
+of their country. The names of our island and of our islanders have
+exercised the inquiries, and too often the ingenuity, of our antiquarian
+etymologists. There are about half a hundred origins of the name of
+Britain; some absurd, many fanciful, all uncertain.[1] Our primitive
+ancestors distinguished themselves, in pride or simplicity, as _Brith_
+and _Brithon_; _Brith_ signified stained, and _Brithon_, a stained man,
+according to Camden.[2] The predilection for colouring their bodies
+induced the civilized Romans to designate the people who were driven to
+the Caledonian forests as _Picts_, or a painted people.
+
+That the native term of _Brith_ or _Brithon_, by its curt harshness,
+would clash on the modulating ear of the Greek voyager, or the Latin
+poet, seems probable, for by them it was amplified. And thus we owe to
+sonorous antiquity the name now famous as their own, for BRITANNIA first
+appeared in their writings, bequeathed to us by the masters of the world
+as their legacy of glory.
+
+To the knowledge of the Romans the island exceeded in magnitude all
+other islands; and they looked on this land with pride and anxiety,
+while they dignified Britain as the "Roman island." The Romans even
+personified the insular Genius with poetic conceptions. Britannia is
+represented as a female seated on a rock, armed with a spear, or leaning
+on a prow, while the ship beside her attests her naval power. We may yet
+be susceptible of the prophetic flattery, when we observe the Roman has
+also seated her on a globe, with the symbol of military power, and the
+ocean rolling under her feet.[3]
+
+The tale of these ancient Britons who should have been our ancestors is
+told by the philosophical historian of antiquity. Under successive Roman
+governors they still remained divided by native factions: "A
+circumstance," observes Tacitus, "most useful for us, among such a
+powerful people, where each combating singly, all are subdued." A
+century, as we have said, had not elapsed from the landing of Cæsar to
+the administration of Agricola. That enlightened general changed the
+policy of former governors; he allured the Britons from their forest
+retreats and reedy roofs to partake of the pleasures of a Roman city--to
+dwell in houses, to erect lofty temples, and to indulge in dissolving
+baths. The barbarian who had scorned the Roman tongue now felt the
+ambition of Roman eloquence; and the painted Briton of Cæsar was
+enveloped in the Roman toga. Severus, in another century after Agricola,
+as an extraordinary evidence of his successful government, appealed to
+Britain--"Even the Britons are quiet!" exclaimed the emperor. The
+tutelary genius of Rome through four centuries preserved Britain--even
+from the Britons themselves; but the Roman policy was fatal to the
+national character, and when the day arrived that their protector
+forsook them, the Britons were left among their ancient discords: for
+provincial jealousies, however concealed by circumstances, are never
+suppressed; the fire lives in its embers ready to be kindled.
+
+The island of Britain, itself not extensive, was broken into petty
+principalities: we are told that there were nearly two hundred
+kinglings, the greater part of whom did not presume to wear crowns.
+Sometimes they united in their jealousies of some paramount tyrant, but
+they raged among themselves; and the passion of Gildas has figured them
+as "the Lioness of Devonshire" encountering a "Lion's Whelp" in
+Dorsetshire, and "the Bear-baiter," trembling before his regal brother,
+"the Great Bull-dog." "These kings were not appointed by God," exclaims
+the British Jeremiah; he who wrote under the name of Gildas. Thus the
+Britons formed a powerless aggregate, and never a nation. The naked
+Irish haunted their shores, covering their sea with piracy; and the
+Picts rushed from their forests--giants of the North who, if Gildas does
+not exaggerate, even dragged down from their walls the amazed Britons.
+Such a people in their terrified councils were to be suppliants to the
+valour of foreigners; from that hour they were doomed to be chased from
+their natal soil. They invited, or they encouraged, another race to
+become their mercenaries or their allies. The small and the great from
+other shores hastened to a new dominion. Britain then became "a field of
+fortune to every adventurer when nothing less than kingdoms were the
+prize of every fortunate commander."[4]
+
+We have now the history of a people whose enemies inhabited their
+ancient land: the flame and the sword ceaselessly devouring the soil;
+their dominion shrinking in space, and the people diminishing in number;
+victory for them was fatal as defeat. The disasters of the Britons
+pursued them through the despair of almost two centuries; it would have
+been the history of a whole people ever retreating, yet hardly in
+flight, had it been written. Shall we refuse, on the score of their
+disputed antiquity the evidence of the Welsh bards? The wild grandeur of
+the melancholy poetry of those ancient Britons attests the reality of
+their story and the depth of their emotions.[5]
+
+We have spun the last thread of our cobweb, and we know not on what
+points it hangs, such irreconcileable hypotheses are offered to us by
+our learned antiquaries, whenever they would account for the origin or
+the disappearance of a whole people. The mystery deepens, and the
+confusion darkens amid contradictions and incredibilities, when the
+British historian contemplates in the perspective the Fata Morgana of
+another Britain on the opposite shores of the ancient Armorica, another
+Britain in La Brétagne.
+
+The ancient Armorica was a district extending from the Loire to the
+Seine, about sixty leagues, and except on the land side, which joined
+Poictou, is encircled by the ocean. Composed of several small states, in
+the decline of the Roman empire they shook off the Roman yoke, and their
+independence was secured by the obscurity of their sequestered locality.
+
+The tale runs that Maximus, having engaged his provincial Britons in his
+ambitious schemes, rewarded their military aid by planting them in one
+of these Armorican communities. To give colour to this tradition, the
+story adds that this Roman general had a considerable interest in Wales,
+"having married the daughter of a powerful chieftain, whose chapel at
+Carnarvon is still shown."[6] The marriage of this future Roman emperor
+with a Welsh princess would serve as an embellishment to a Welsh
+genealogy. This event must have occurred about the year 384. When the
+Britons were driven out of their country by faithless allies, Armorica
+would offer an easy refuge for fugitives; there they found brothers
+already settled, or friends willing to receive them.[7]
+
+In this uncertainty of history, amid the dreams of theoretical
+antiquaries, we cannot doubt that at some time there was a powerful
+colony of Britons in Armorica; they acquired dominion as well as
+territory. They changed that masterless Armorican state to which they
+were transplanted from an aristocracy into a monarchy--that government
+to which they had been accustomed; they consecrated the strange land by
+the baptism of their own national name, and to this day it is called
+Brétagne, or Britain; and surely the Britons carried with them all their
+home-affections, for they made the new country an image of the old: not
+only had they stamped on it the British name, but the Britons of
+Cornwall called a considerable district by their own provincial name,
+known in France as "Le Pays de Cornouaille;" and their speech
+perpetuated their vernacular Celtic. At the siege of Belleisle in 1756,
+the honest Britons of the principality among our soldiers were amazed to
+find that they and the peasants of Brittany were capable of conversing
+together. This expatriation reminds us of the emotions of the first
+settlers in the New World. Ancient Spain reflected herself in her New
+Spain; and our first emigrants called their "plantations" "New England;"
+distributing local names borrowed from the land of their birth--undying
+memorials of their parent source!
+
+This singular event in the civil annals of the ancient Britons has given
+rise to a circumstance unparalleled in the literary history of every
+people, for it has often involved in a mysterious confusion a part of
+our literary and historical antiquities. The Britain in France is not
+always discriminated from our own; and this double Britain at times
+becomes provokingly mystifying. Two eminent antiquaries, Douce and
+Ritson, sometimes conceived that Bretagne meant England; a circumstance
+which might upset a whole hypothesis.
+
+In the fastnesses of Wales, on the heights of Caledonia, and on the
+friendly land of Armorica, are yet tracked the fugitive and ruined
+Britons. It is most generally conceded that they retreated to the
+western coasts of England, and that, often discomfited, they took their
+last refuge in those "mountain heights" of Cambria.
+
+Their shadowy Arthur has left an undying name in romance, and is a
+nonentity in history. Whether Arthur was a mortal commander heading some
+kings of Britain, or whether religion and policy were driven to the
+desperate effort for rallying their fugitives by a national name, and "a
+hope deferred," like the Sebastian of Portugal, this far-famed chieftain
+could never have been a fortunate general; he displayed his
+invincibility but in some obscure and remote locality; he struck no
+terror among his enemies, for they have left his name unchronicled: nor
+living, have the bards distinguished his pre-eminence. "The grave of
+Arthur is a mystery of the world," exclaimed Taliessin, the great bard
+of the Britons. But the mortal who vanished in the cloud of conflict had
+never seen death; and to the last the Britons awaited for the day of
+their Redeemer when Arthur should return in his immortality, accompanied
+by "the Flood-King of the Deluge," from the Inys Avallon, the Isle of
+the Mystic Apple-tree, their Eden or their Elysium. Arthur was a myth,
+half Christian and half Druidical. In Armorica, as in Wales, his coming
+was long expected, till "Espérance brétonne" became proverbial for all
+chimerical hopes.
+
+Thus the aborigines of this island vanished, but their name is still
+attached to us. The Anglo-Saxons became our progenitors, and the Saxon
+our mother-tongue. Yet so complex and incongruous is the course of time,
+that we still call ourselves Britons, and "true Britons;" and the land
+we dwell in Great Britain. Nor is it less remarkable, that the days of
+the Christian week commemorate the names of seven Saxon idols.[8] There
+are improbabilities and incongruities in authentic history as hard to
+reconcile as any we meet with in wild romance.
+
+During six centuries the Saxons and the Normans combined to banish from
+the public mind the history of the Britons: it was lost; it did not
+exist even among the Britons in Wales. In the reign of Henry the First,
+an Archdeacon of Oxford, who was that king's justiciary, being curious
+in ancient histories, opportunely brought out of "Britain in France," "a
+very ancient book in the British tongue." This book, which still forms
+the gordian knot of the antiquary, he confided to the safe custody and
+fertile genius of Geoffry, the Monk of Monmouth. It contained a regular
+story of the British kings, opening with Brute, the great grandson of
+Priam in this airy generation; kings who, Geoffry "had often wondered,
+were wholly unnoticed by Gildas and Bede." "Yet," adds our historian,
+"their deeds were celebrated by many people in a _pleasant manner_, and
+_by heart, as if they had been written_." This remarkable sentence aptly
+describes that species of national songs which the early poets have
+always provided for the people, traditions which float before history is
+written. Whether this very ancient British book, almost five centuries
+old, was a volume of these poetical legends, which our historian might
+have arranged into that "regular history" which is furnished by his
+Latin prose version, we are left without the means of ascertaining,
+since it proved to be the only copy ever found, and was never seen after
+the day of the translation. The Monk of Monmouth does not arrogate to
+himself any other merit than that of a faithful translator, and with
+honest simplicity warns of certain additions, which, even in a history
+of two thousand years contained in a small volume, were found necessary.
+
+We are told that the Britons who passed over into France carried with
+them "their archives." But there were other Britons who did not fly to
+the sixty leagues of Armorica; and of these the only "archives" we hear
+of are those which the romancers so perpetually assure us may be
+consulted at Caerleon, or some other magical residence of the visionary
+Arthur. The Armorican colony must have formed but a portion of the
+Britons; and it would be unreasonable to suppose, that these fugitives
+could by any human means sequestrate and appropriate for themselves the
+whole history of the nation, without leaving a fragment behind. Yet
+nothing resembling the Armorican originals has been traced among the
+Welsh. Our Geoffry modestly congratulates his contemporary annalists,
+while he warns them off the preserve where lies his own well-stocked
+game. And thus he speaks:--"The history of the kings who were the
+successors in Wales of those here recorded, I leave to Karadoc of
+Lancarven, as I do also the kings of the Saxons to William of Malmesbury
+and Henry of Huntingdon; but I advise them to be silent concerning the
+British kings, since they have not that book written in the British
+tongue which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Britain." Well
+might Geoffry exult. He possessed the sole copy ever found in both the
+Britains.
+
+The British history is left to speak for itself in a great simplicity of
+narrative, where even the supernatural offers no obstacle to the faith
+of the historian--a history which might fascinate a child as well as an
+antiquary. These remote occurrences are substantiated by the careful
+dates of a romantic chronology. Events are recorded which happened when
+David reigned in Judea, and Sylvius Latinus in Italy, and Gad, Nathan,
+and Asaph prophesied in Israel. And the incidents of Lear's pathetic
+story occurred when Isaiah and Hosea flourished, and Rome was built by
+the two brothers. It tells of one of the British monarchs, how the lady
+of his love was concealed during seven years in a subterraneous palace.
+On his death, his avengeful queen cast the mother and her daughter into
+the river which still bears that daughter's name, Sabrina, or the
+Severn, and was not forgotten by Drayton. Another incident adorns a
+canto of Spenser; the Lear came down to Shakspeare, as the fraternal
+feuds of Ferrex and Porrex created our first tragedy by Sackville. There
+are other tales which by their complexion betray their legendary origin.
+
+Whatever assumed the form of history was long deemed authentic; and such
+was the authority of this romance of Geoffry, that when Edward the First
+claimed the crown of Scotland in his letter to the pope, he founded his
+right on a passage in Geoffry's book; doubtless this very passage was
+held to be as veracious by the Scots themselves, only that on this
+occasion they decided to fight against the text. Four centuries after
+Geoffry had written, when Henry the Seventh appointed a commission to
+draw up his pedigree, they traced the royal descent from the imaginary
+Brutus, and reckoning all Geoffry's British kings in the line--the
+fairies of history--made the English monarch a descendant in the
+hundredth degree. We now often hear of "the fabulous" History of Geoffry
+of Monmouth; but neither his learned translator in 1718, nor the most
+eminent Welsh antiquaries, attach any such notion to a history crowded
+with domestic events, and with names famous yet unknown.
+
+After the lapse of so many centuries, the scrutinising investigation of
+a thoughtful explorer in British antiquities has demonstrated, through a
+chain of recondite circumstances, that this History of Geoffry of
+Monmouth, and its immediate predecessor, the celebrated Chronicle of the
+pseudo-Archbishop Turpin, were sent forth on the same principle on which
+to this day we publish party pamphlets, to influence the spirit of two
+great nations opposed in interest and glory to each other; in a word,
+that they were two Tales of a Tub thrown out to busy those mighty
+whales, France and England.[9]
+
+One great result of their successful grasp of the popular feelings could
+never have been contemplated by these grave forgers of fabulous history.
+The Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin and the British History of Geoffry of
+Monmouth became the parents of those two rival families of romances
+which commemorate the deeds of the Paladins of Charlemagne, and the
+Knights of Arthur, the delight of three centuries.
+
+The Welsh of this day possess very ancient manuscripts, which they
+cherish as the remains of the ancient Britons. These preserve the deep
+strains of poets composed in triumph or in defeat, the poetry of a
+melancholy race. Gray first attuned the Cymry harp to British notes,
+more poetical than the poems themselves, while others have devoted their
+pens to translation, unhappily not always master of the language of
+their version. These manuscripts contain also a remarkable body of
+fiction in the MABINOGION, or juvenile amusements, a collection of prose
+tales combining the marvellous and the imaginative. Some are chivalric
+and amatory, stamped with the manners and customs of the middle ages;
+others apparently of a much higher antiquity, like all such national
+remains, are considered mythological; some there are not well adapted,
+perhaps, to the initiation of youth. Obviously they are nothing more
+than short romances; but we are solemnly assured that the Mabinogion
+abound with occult mysteries, and that simple fiction only served to
+allure the British neophyte to bardic mysticism. A learned writer, who
+is apt to view old things in a new light, and whose boldness invigorates
+the creeping toil of the antiquary, reveals the esoteric
+doctrine----"the childhood alluded to in their title is an early and
+preparatory stage of initiation; they were calculated to inflame
+curiosity, to exercise ingenuity, and lead the aspirant gradually into a
+state of preparation for things which ears not long and carefully
+disciplined were unfit to hear."[10]
+
+Every people have tales which do not require to be written to be
+remembered, whose shortness is the salt which preserves them through
+generations. Our ancestors long had heard of "Breton lays" and "British
+tales," from the days of Chaucer to those of Milton; but it was reserved
+for our own day to ascertain the species, and to possess those forgotten
+yet imaginative effusions of the ancient Celtic genius. Our literary
+antiquaries have discovered reposing among the Harleian manuscripts the
+writings of Marie de France,[11] an Anglo-Norman poetess, who in the
+thirteenth century versified many old Breton lais, which, she says, "she
+had heard and well remembered." Who can assure us whether this
+Anglo-Norman poetess gathered her old tales, for such she calls them, in
+the French Britain or the English Britain, where she always resided?
+
+It is among the Welsh we find a singular form of artificial memory which
+can be traced among no other people. These are their TRIADS. Though
+unauthorized by the learned in Celtic antiquities, I have sometimes
+fancied that in the form we may possess a relic of druidical genius. A
+triad is formed by classing together three things, neither more nor
+less, but supposed to bear some affinity, though a fourth or fifth might
+occur with equal claim to be admitted into the category.[12] To connect
+three things together apparently analogous, though in reality not so,
+sufficed for the stores of knowledge of a Triadist; but to fix on any
+three incidents for an historical triad discovered a very narrow range
+of research; and if designed as an artificial memory, three insulated
+facts, deprived of dates or descriptions or connexion, neither settled
+the chronology, nor enlarged the understanding. It is, however, worthy
+of remark, that when the Triad is of an ethical cast, the number _three_
+may compose an excellent aphorism; for three things may be predicated
+with poignant concision, when they relate to our moral qualities, or to
+the intellectual faculties: in this capricious form the Triad has often
+afforded an enduring principle of human conduct, or of critical
+discrimination; for our feelings are less problematical than historical
+events, and more permanent than the recollection of three names.[13]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See the opening of Speed's "Chronicle."
+
+  [2] The historian of our land in the solemnity of his high office,
+    unwilling that an obscure Welsh prince named _Prydain_ should have
+    left his immemorable name to this glorious realm, as a Welsh triad
+    professes, was delighted to draw the national name out of the native
+    tongue, appositely descriptive of the prevalent custom. But when,
+    seduced by this syren of etymology, our grave Camden, to display the
+    passion of a painted people for colours, collects a long list of
+    ancient British names of polysyllabic elongation, and culls from each
+    a single syllable which by its sound he conceives alludes to blue, or
+    red, or yellow, our sage, in proving more than was requisite, has
+    encumbered his cause, and has thrown suspicion over the whole. The
+    doom of the etymologist, so often duped by affinity of _sounds_,
+    seems to have been that of our judicious Camden.
+
+  [3] Evelyn's "Numismata." Pinkerton has engraven ten of these
+    Britannias struck by the Romans in his "Essay on Medals."
+
+  [4] Milton.
+
+  [5] See Mr. Turner's able "Vindication of the Genuineness of the
+    Ancient British Bards."
+
+  [6] Warton draws his knowledge from Rowland's "Mona Antiqua;" Geoffry
+    of Monmouth would have extended his inquiry. Camden, judicious as he
+    was, has actually bestowed the kingdom, as well as the princess, on
+    this Roman general; and Gibbon has sarcastically noticed that Camden
+    has been authority for all "his blind followers." The source of this
+    sort of history lies in the volume of the "Monk of Monmouth," where
+    Gibbon might have found the number of the numerous army of Maximus.
+    Rowland's "Mona Antiqua Restaurata" is one of the most extraordinary
+    pieces of our British Antiquities. It is written with the embrowned
+    rust of our old English Antiquaries, where nothing on a subject seems
+    to be omitted; but our author, unlike his contemporary antiquaries,
+    is sceptical even on his own acquisitions; he asserts little and
+    assumes nothing. One may conceive the native simplicity of an author,
+    who having to describe the Isle of Anglesey, opens his work with the
+    history of Chaos itself, to explain by the division of land and water
+    the origin of islands. I have heard that this learned antiquary never
+    travelled from his native island.
+
+  [7] "L'Art de vérifier les Dates," article _Brétagne_, is thrown into
+    utter confusion. It seems, however, to indicate that there were many
+    migrations; but all is indistinct or uncertain.
+
+  [8] Verstegan has finely engraved these idols in his "Restitution,"
+    so delighted was this Teutonic Christian with these hideous
+    absurdities of his pagan ancestors, and so proud of his Saxon
+    descent.
+
+  [9] Turner's "History of England during the Middle Ages," iv. 326.
+
+  [10] "Britannia after the Romans." The literary patriotism of Wales
+    has been more remarkable among humble individuals than among the
+    squirearchy, if we except the ardent Pennant. Mr. Owen Jones, an
+    honest furrier in Thames-street, kindled by the love of father-land,
+    offered the Welsh public a costly present of the "Archæology of
+    Wales," containing the bardic poetry, genealogies, triads,
+    chronicles, &c. in their originals: the haughty descendant of the
+    Cymry disdained to translate for the Anglo-Saxon. To Mr. William Owen
+    the lore of Cambria stands deeply indebted for his persevering
+    efforts. Under the name of Meirion he long continued his literal
+    versions of the Welsh bards in the early volumes of the "Monthly
+    Magazine;" he has furnished a Cambrian biography and a dictionary.
+
+    Some years ago, a learned Welsh scholar, Dr. Owen Pughe, issued
+    proposals to publish the "Mabinogion," accompanied by translations,
+    on the completion of a subscription list sufficient to indemnify the
+    costs of printing.--See Mr. Crofton Croker's interesting work on
+    "Fairy Legends," vol. iii. He appealed in vain to the public, but the
+    whole loss remains with them. Recently a munificent lady [Lady
+    Charlotte Guest] has resumed the task, and has presented us in the
+    most elegant form with two tales such as ladies read. Since this note
+    was written several cheering announcements of some important works
+    have been put forth. [Many have since been published.]
+
+  [11] See Warton and Ellis. "Poésies de Marie de France" have been
+    published by M. de Roquefort, Paris, 1820.
+
+  [12] "The translators do the triadist an injustice in rendering _Tri_
+    by '_The Three_' when he has put no _The_ at all. The number was
+    accounted fortunate, and they took a pleasure in binding up all their
+    ideas into little sheaves or fasciculi of three; but in so doing they
+    did not mean to imply that there were no more such."--"Britannia
+    after the Romans."
+
+  [13] As these artificial associations, like the topics invented by
+    the Roman rhetoricians, have been ridiculed by those who have
+    probably formed their notions from unskilful versions, I select a few
+    which might enter into the philosophy of the human mind. They denote
+    a literature far advanced in critical refinement, and appear to have
+    been composed from the sixth to the twelfth century.
+
+    "The three foundations of genius; the gift of God, human exertion,
+    and the events of life."
+
+    "The three first requisites of genius; an eye to see nature, a heart
+    to feel it, and a resolution that dares follow it."
+
+    "The three things indispensable to genius; understanding, meditation,
+    and perseverance."
+
+    "The three things that improve genius; proper exertion, frequent
+    exertion, and successful exertion."
+
+    "The three qualifications of poetry; endowment of genius, judgment
+    from experience, and felicity of thought."
+
+    "The three pillars of judgment; bold design, frequent practice, and
+    frequent mistakes."
+
+    "The three pillars of learning; seeing much, suffering much, and
+    studying much." See Turner's "Vindication of the Ancient British
+    Bards."--Owen's "Dissertation on Bardism, prefixed to the Heroic
+    Elegies of Llywarç Hen."
+
+
+
+
+THE NAME OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ENGLISH.
+
+
+Two brothers and adventurers of an obscure Saxon tribe raised their
+ensign of the White Horse on British land: the visit was opportune, or
+it was expected--this remains a state secret. Welcomed by the British
+monarch and his perplexed council amid their intestine dissensions, as
+friendly allies, they were renowned for their short and crooked swords
+called _Seax_, which had given the generic name of Saxons to their
+tribe.
+
+These descendants of Woden, for such even the petty chieftains deemed
+themselves, whose trade was battle and whose glory was pillage, showed
+the spiritless what men do who know to conquer, the few against the
+many. They baffled the strong and they annihilated the weak. The Britons
+were grateful. The Saxons lodged in the land till they took possession
+of it. The first Saxon founded the kingdom of Kent; twenty years after,
+a second in Sussex raised the kingdom of the South-Saxons; in another
+twenty years appeared the kingdom of the West-Saxons. It was a century
+after the earliest arrival that the great emigration took place. The
+tribe of the Angles depopulated their native province and flocked to the
+fertile island, under that foeman of the Britons whom the bards describe
+as "The Flame Bearer," and "The Destroyer." Every quality peculiar to
+the Saxons was hateful to the Britons; even their fairness of
+complexion. Taliessin terms Hengist "a white-bellied hackney," and his
+followers are described as of "hateful hue and hateful form." The
+British poet delights to paint "a Saxon shivering and quaking, his
+_white hair_ washed in blood;" and another sings how "close upon the
+backs of the _pale-faced_ ones were the spear-points."[1]
+
+Already the name itself of _Britain_ had disappeared among the invaders.
+Our island was now called "Saxony beyond the Sea," or "West Saxon land;"
+and when the expatriated Saxons had alienated themselves from the land
+of their fathers, those who remained faithful to their native hearths
+perhaps proudly distinguished themselves as "the old Saxons," for by
+this name they were known by the Saxons in Britain.
+
+Eight separate but uncertain kingdoms were raised on the soil of
+Britain, and present a moveable surface of fraternal wars and baffled
+rivals. There was one kingdom long left kingless, for "No man dared,
+though never so ambitious, to take up the sceptre which many had found
+so hot; the only effectual cure of ambition that I have read"--these are
+the Words of Milton. Finally, to use the quaint phrase of the Chancellor
+Whitelock, "the Octarchy was brought into one." At the end of five
+centuries the Saxons fell prostrate before a stronger race.
+
+But of all the accidents and the fortunes of the Saxon dynasty, not the
+least surprising is that an obscure town in the duchy of Sleswick,
+_Anglen_, is commemorated by the transference of its name to one of the
+great European nations. The _Angles_, or _Engles_, have given their
+denomination to the land of Britain--_Engle-land_ is _England_, and the
+_Engles_ are the _English_.[2]
+
+How it happened that the very name of _Britain_ was abolished, and why
+the Anglian was selected in preference to the more eminent race, may
+offer a philosophical illustration of the accidental nature of LOCAL
+NAMES.
+
+There is a tale familiar to us from youth, that Egbert, the more
+powerful king of the West Saxons, was crowned the first monarch of
+England, and issued a decree that this kingdom of Britain should be
+called England; yet an event so strange as to have occasioned the change
+of the name of the whole country remains unauthenticated by any of the
+original writers of our annals.[3] No record attests that Egbert in a
+solemn coronation assumed the title of "King of England." His son and
+successor never claimed such a legitimate title; and even our
+illustrious Alfred, subsequently, only styled himself "King of the West
+Saxons."
+
+The story, however, is of ancient standing; for Matthew of Westminster
+alludes to a similar if not the same incident, namely, that by "a common
+decree of all the Saxon kings, it was ordained that the title of the
+island should no longer be Britain, from Brute, but henceforward be
+called from the English, England." Stowe furnishes a positive
+circumstance in this obscure transaction--"Egbert caused the brazen
+image of Cadwaline, King of the Britons, to be thrown down." The decree
+noticed by Matthew of Westminster, combined with the fact of pulling
+down the statue of a popular British monarch, betrays the real motive of
+this singular national change: whether it were the suggestion of Egbert,
+or the unanimous agreement of the assembled monarchs who were his
+tributary kings, it was a stroke of deep political wisdom; it knitted
+the members into one common body, under one name, abolishing, by
+legislative measures, the very memory of Britain from the land.
+Although, therefore, no positive evidence has been produced, the state
+policy carries an internal evidence which yields some sanction to the
+obscure tradition.
+
+It is a nicer difficulty to account for the choice of the Anglian name.
+It might have been preferred to distinguish the Saxons of Britain from
+the Saxons of the Continent; or the name was adopted, being that of the
+far more numerous race among these people. Four kingdoms of the octarchy
+were possessed by the Angles. Thus doubtful and obscure remains the real
+origin of our national name, which hitherto has hinged on a suspicious
+fact.
+
+The casual occurrence of the ENGLES leaving their name to this land has
+bestowed on our country a foreign designation; and--for the contingency
+was nearly occurring--had the kingdom of Northumbria preserved its
+ascendancy in the octarchy, the seat of dominion had been altered. In
+that case, the Lowlands of Scotland would have formed a portion of
+England; York would have stood forth as the metropolis of Britain, and
+London had been but a remote mart for her port and her commerce. Another
+idiom, perhaps, too, other manners, had changed the whole face of the
+country. We had been Northmen, not Southerns; our neighbourhood had not
+proved so troublesome to France. But the kingdom of Wessex prevailed,
+and became the sole monarchy of England, Such local contingencies have
+decided the character of a whole people.[4]
+
+The history of LOCAL NAMES is one of the most capricious and fortuitous
+in the history of man; the etymologist must not be implicitly trusted,
+for it is necessary to be acquainted with the history of a people as
+much as the history of languages, to be certain of local derivations. We
+have recently been cautioned by a sojourner in the most ancient of
+kingdoms,[5] not too confidently to rely on etymology, or to assign too
+positively any reason for the origin of LOCAL NAMES. No etymologist
+could have accounted for the name of our nation had he not had recourse
+to our annals. Sir WALTER RALEIGH, from his observations in the New
+World, has confirmed this observation by circumstances which probably
+remain unknown to the present inhabitants. The actual names given to
+those places in America which they still retain, are nothing more than
+the blunders of the first Europeans, demanding by signs and catching at
+words by which neither party were intelligible to one another.[6]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Britannia after the Romans," 62, 4to.
+
+  [2] It is a singular circumstance that our neighbours have preserved
+    the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our
+    mutilated term of _England_, for they write it with antiquarian
+    precision, _Angle-terre_--the land of the Angles. Our counties bear
+    the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native
+    Britons, as our pious Camden ejaculates, "by God's wonderful
+    providence."
+
+  [3] The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons
+    concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the
+    decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.
+
+    Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the
+    name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected
+    it to 800. Holinshed says _about_ 800. Speed gives a much later date,
+    819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded
+    conjectures.
+
+  [4] Mitford's "Harmony of Language," 429. I might have placed this
+    possible circumstance in the article "A History of Events which have
+    not happened," in "Curiosities of Literature."
+
+  [5] Sir GARDNER WILKINSON, in the curious volume of his recondite
+    discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.
+
+  [6] "History of the World," 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious
+    account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our
+    own nation in venerable Lambarde's "Perambulations of Kent," 349,
+    453.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGLO-SAXONS.
+
+
+The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions
+of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their
+fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political
+freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of
+Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there
+a people first assumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and
+our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among
+them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national
+establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our
+theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines
+and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the
+moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and
+literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people
+everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.
+
+The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the
+annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in
+this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen;
+the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs
+and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their
+literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in
+their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long
+neglected--in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had
+not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems
+often to have been to them "the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon
+manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation,
+were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by
+strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The
+language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into
+desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so
+utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.
+
+But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and
+religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned
+Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, who was the first to attempt their
+restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas
+Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this
+king's secretary, Asser, _printed in the Saxon character_; we are told,
+as "an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an
+acquaintance with the _handwriting of their ancestors_."[1] "The
+invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or
+dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archæologist,
+was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon
+duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the
+writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names
+and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to
+the study; and his "Glossary" is too humble a title for that treasure of
+law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the
+learned world at home and abroad--while the unsold copies during the
+life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of
+students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was
+not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon
+professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the
+inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned
+SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not
+antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted
+lore. HICKES, in his elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which
+had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read.
+These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to
+their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded
+in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer
+could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary
+Rowe Mores expresses it, "unsightly to politer eyes." A lady--and she
+is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient
+language of our country--Mrs. ELSTOB, the niece of Hickes, patronised by
+a celebrated Duchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the
+Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were
+suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our
+National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly
+to disappear from our literature.
+
+None of our historians from MILTON to HUME ever referred to an original
+Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of
+the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in
+Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in
+which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race
+dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record
+the polity which had once constituted their lost independence. The
+annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in
+other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of
+feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England.
+MILTON, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the
+Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, or Octarchy, would be as worthless "to chronicle
+as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air." Thus a
+poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that
+knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired--this was less
+pardonable in a philosopher; and when HUME observed, perhaps with the
+eyes of Milton, that "he would hasten through the obscure and
+uninteresting period of Saxon Annals," however cheering to his reader
+was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly
+unconscious that these "obscure and uninteresting annals of the
+Anglo-Saxons" formed of themselves a complete history, offering new
+results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political
+state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we
+track BURKE in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our
+elegant antiquary, Bishop PERCY, lamenting the scanty and defective
+annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest
+indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our
+land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy
+of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and
+conjecture.
+
+We find ELLIS and RITSON still erring in the trackless paths. All this
+national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous
+investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the
+Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to
+the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for
+the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was
+given to the country. It was our studious explorer, SHARON TURNER, who
+first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.[2]
+
+Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected
+difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been
+regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose
+orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when
+confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be
+too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous.
+Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.[3]
+
+It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a
+most corrupt state.[4] This fatality was occasioned by the inattention
+or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a
+learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of
+alliteration,[5] and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the
+strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or
+misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are
+disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been
+mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns."
+
+These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely
+increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The
+tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense:
+their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous
+inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous
+metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by
+twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by
+the most remote and dark analogies[6]--all these have perplexed the most
+skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted passages, but have
+even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last
+circumstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of
+BEOWULF. When it first fell to the hard lot of WANLEY, the librarian of
+the Earl of Oxford, to describe "The Exploits of Beowulf," he imagined,
+or conjectured, that it contained "the wars which this Dane waged
+against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden." He probably decided on
+the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero
+descends from his ship--but for a very different purpose from a military
+expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the manuscript as a "tractatus
+nobilissimus," and an "egregium exemplum" of the Anglo-Saxon poetry.
+Probably this manuscript remained unopened during a century, when SHARON
+TURNER detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the
+design of these romantic "Exploits." Yet this diligent historian
+carefully read and analysed this heroic tale. CONYBEARE, who had fallen
+into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this
+labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though
+possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr.
+KEMBLE.
+
+Even the learned in Saxon have not always been able to distinguish this
+verse from prose; the verse unmarked by rhyme being written continuously
+as prose.[7] A diction turgid and obscure was apparent; but in what
+consisted the art of the poet, or the metrical system, long baffled the
+most ingenious conjectures. RITSON, in his perplexity, described this
+poetry or metre as a "rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or
+insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished."
+TYRWHIT and ELLIS remained wholly at a loss to comprehend the fabric of
+Anglo-Saxon poesy. HICKES, in the fascination of scholarship, had
+decided that it proceeded on a metrical system of syllabic quantities,
+and surmounted all difficulties by submitting the rhythmical cadences of
+Gothic poesy to the prosody of classical antiquity. This was a literary
+hallucination, and a remarkable evidence of a favourite position
+maintained merely by the force of prepossession.
+
+To what cause are we to ascribe the complex construction of the diction,
+and the multiplied intricacies of the metres of the poetry of the
+Northmen? Bishop Percy noticed, that the historian of the Runic poetry
+has counted up among the ancient Icelandic poets one hundred and
+thirty-six different metres. The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon are
+cognate languages, being both dialects of the ancient Gothic or
+Teutonic. The genius of the Danish Scalds often displays in their
+Eddas[8] a sublime creative power far out of the reach of the creeping
+and narrow faculty of the Saxon, yet the same mechanism regulated both;
+the fixed recurrence of certain letters or syllables which constitutes
+that perpetual alliteration, which oftener than rhyme gratified the ear
+of barbaric poesy, and a metaphorical phraseology or poetical vocabulary
+appropriated by the bards, furnishing the adept with phrases when he had
+not always ready any novel conceptions. Shall we deem such arbitrary
+forms and such artificial contrivances, the mere childishness of tastes,
+to have been invented in the wintry years of these climates, to amuse
+themselves in their stern solitudes; or rather, may we not consider them
+as a mystery of the Craft, the initiation of the Order? for by this
+scholarlike discipline in multiplying difficulties the later bards
+separated themselves from those humbler minstrels who were left to their
+own inartificial emotions.
+
+Such prescribed formulæ, and such a mechanism of verse, must have
+tethered the imagination in a perpetual circle; it was art which
+violated the free course of nature. In this condition we often find even
+the poetry of the Scandinavians. The famous death-song of Regner Lodbrog
+seems little more than an iteration of the same ideas. An Anglo-Saxon
+poem has the appearance of a collection of short hints rather than
+poetical conceptions, curt and ejaculative: a paucity of objects yields
+but a paucity of emotions, too vague for detail, too abrupt for deep
+passion, too poor in fancy to scatter the imagery of poesy. The
+Anglo-Saxon betrays its confined and monotonous genius: we are in the
+first age of art, when pictures are but monochromes of a single colour.
+Hence, in the whole map of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is difficult to
+discriminate one writer from another.[9]
+
+Their prose has taken a more natural character than their verse. The
+writings of Alfred are a model of the Anglo-Saxon style in its purest
+state; they have never been collected, but it is said they would form
+three octavo volumes; they consist chiefly of translations.
+
+The recent versions in literal prose by two erudite Saxonists of two of
+the most remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems, will enable an English reader to
+form a tolerable notion of the genius of this literature. CONYBEARE'S
+poetical versions remained unrivalled. But if a literal version of a
+primitive poetry soon ceases to be poetry, so likewise, if the rude
+outlines are to be retouched, and a brilliant colouring is to be
+borrowed, we are receiving Anglo-Saxon poetry in the cadences of Milton
+and "the orient hues" of Gray.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Bp. Nicholson's Eng. Lib.
+
+  [2] It is pleasing to record a noble instance of the enthusiasm of
+    learned research. "The leisure hours of sixteen years" furnished a
+    comprehensive history of which "two-thirds had not yet
+    appeared."--_Mr. Turner's Preface._
+
+  [3] A sufferer, moreover, fully assures us that some remain, which
+    "must baffle all conjecture;" and another critic has judicially
+    decreed that, in every translation from the Anglo-Saxon that has
+    fallen under his notice, "there are blunders enough to satisfy the
+    most unfriendly critic." "The Song of the Traveller," in "The Exeter
+    Book," was translated by CONYBEARE; a more accurate transcript was
+    given by Mr. KEMBLE in his edition of Beowulf; and now Mr. GUEST has
+    furnished a third, varying from both. We cannot be certain that a
+    fourth may not correct the three.
+
+  [4] "Without exception!" is the energetic cry of the translator of
+    Beowulf.
+
+  [5] The first line contains two words commencing with the same
+    letter, and the second line has its first word also beginning with
+    that letter. This difficulty seems insurmountable to a modern reader,
+    for our authority confesses that, "In the Saxon poetry; as it is
+    preserved in manuscripts, the first line often contains but one
+    alliterating word, and, from the negligence of the scribes, the
+    alliteration is in many instances entirely lost."--_Dissertation on
+    Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Fraser's Magazine_, xii. 81.
+
+  [6] A striking instance how long a universal error can last, arising
+    from one of these obscure conceits, is noticed by Mr. GRENVILLE
+    PIGOTT in his "Manual of Scandinavian Mythology."
+
+    These warlike barbarians were long reproached that even their
+    religion fomented an implacable hatred of their enemies; for in the
+    future state of their paradisiacal Valhalla, their deceased heroes
+    rejoiced at their celestial compotations, _to drink out of the skulls
+    of their enemies_.
+
+    A passage in the death-song of Regner Lodbrog, literally translated,
+    is, "Soon shall we _drink_ out of the _curved trees of the head_;"
+    which Bishop Percy translates, "Soon, in the splendid hall of Odin,
+    we shall drink beer out of the skulls of our enemies." And thus also
+    have the Danes themselves, the Germans, and the French.
+
+    The original and extraordinary blunder lies with Olaus Wormius, the
+    great Danish antiquary, to whose authority poets and historians bowed
+    without looking further. Our grave Olaus was bewildered by this
+    monstrous style of the Scalds, and translated this drinking bout at
+    Valhalla according to his own fancy,--"Ex concavis crateribus
+    craniorum;"--thus turning the "trees of the head" into a "skull," and
+    the skull into a hollow cup. The Scald, however, was innocent of this
+    barbarous invention; and, in his violent figures and disordered
+    fancy, merely alluded to the branching horns, growing as trees, from
+    the heads of animals--that is, the curved horns which formed their
+    drinking cups. If Olaus here, like Homer, nodded, something might be
+    urged for his defence; for who is bound to understand such remote, if
+    not absurd conceits? but I do not know that we could plead as fairly
+    for his own interpolating fancy of "drinking out of the skulls of
+    their enemies."
+
+    This grave blunder became universal, and a century passed away
+    without its being detected. It was so familiar, that Peter Pindar
+    once said that the booksellers, like the heroes of Valhalla, drank
+    their wine out of the skulls of authors.
+
+  [7] HICKES and WANLEY mistook the "Ormulum," a paraphrase of Gospel
+    history, as mere prose; when in fact it is composed in long lines of
+    fifteen syllables without rhyme.
+
+  [8] See "A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology," by Mr. Grenville
+    Pigott. 1839. "The Northern Mythology" will be found here not only
+    skilfully arranged, but its wondrous myths and fables elucidated by
+    modern antiquaries. It is further illustrated by the translation of
+    the poem of Oehlenschläger, on "The Gods of the North;" whose genius
+    has been transfused in the nervous simplicity of the present version.
+
+  [9] Such is the critical decision of CONYBEARE, a glorious
+    enthusiast. "Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry," by John Josiah
+    Conybeare. 1826.
+
+    The late Mr. Price, the editor of Warton's History, announced an
+    elaborate work on the Anglo-Saxon poetry. The verse of CONYBEARE and
+    the disquisitions of PRICE would have completed this cycle of our
+    ancient poetry. But a fatal coincidence marked the destiny of these
+    eminent votaries of our poetic antiquity--both prematurely ceasing to
+    exist while occupied on their works. CONYBEARE has survived in his
+    brother, whose congenial tastes collected his remains; PRICE, who had
+    long resided abroad, and there had silently stored up the whole
+    wealth of Northern literature, on his return home remained little
+    known till his valued edition of Warton announced to the literary
+    world the acquisitions they were about to receive. He has left a name
+    behind him, but not a work, for Price had no fraternal friend.
+
+    Since this chapter was written, Mr. Thos. Wright has published "An
+    Essay on the State of Literature and Learning under the
+    Anglo-Saxons." It displays a comprehensive view taken by one to whose
+    zealous labours the lovers of our ancient literature are so deeply
+    indebted.
+
+
+
+
+CÆDMON AND MILTON.
+
+
+Cædmon, the Saxonists hail as "the Father of English Song!"
+
+The personal history of this bard is given in the taste of the age.
+Cædmon was a herdsman who had never read a single poem. Sitting in his
+"beership," whenever the circling harp, that "Wood of Joy!" as the Saxon
+gleemen have called it, was offered to his hand, all unskilled, the
+peasant, stung with shame, would hurry homewards. Already past the
+middle of life, never had the peasant dreamt that he was a sublime poet,
+or at least a poet composing on sublime themes, incapable as he was even
+of reading his own Saxon.
+
+As once he lay slumbering in a stall, the apparition of a strange man
+thus familiarly greeted him:--"Cædmon, sing some song to me!" The
+cowherd modestly urged that he was mute and unmusical:--"Nevertheless
+thou shalt sing!" retorted the benignant apparition. "What shall I
+sing?" rejoined the minstrel, who had never sung. "Sing the origin of
+things!" The peasant, amazed, found his tongue loosened, and listened to
+his own voice; a voice which was to reach posterity!
+
+He flew in the morning to the town-reeve to announce a wonder, that he
+had become a poet in the course of a single night. He recited the poem,
+which, however--for we possess it--only proves that between sleeping and
+waking eighteen lines of dreamy periphrasis may express a single idea.
+Venerable Bede held this effusion as a pure inspiration: the modern
+historian of the Anglo-Saxons indulgently discovers three ideas:
+Conybeare, more critical, acknowledges that "the eighteen lines expand
+the mere proposition of 'Let us praise God, the maker of heaven and
+earth.'" But this was only the first attempt of a great enterprise--it
+was a thing to be magnified for the neighbouring monastery of Whitby,
+who gladly received such a new brother.
+
+For a poet who had never written a verse, it was only necessary to open
+his vein: a poet who could not read only required to be read to. The
+whole monkery came down with the canonical books; they informed him of
+all things, from "Genesis" down to "the doctrine of the apostles." "The
+good man listened," as saith Venerable Bede, "like a clean animal
+ruminating; and his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his
+teachers wrote them down, and learned from his mouth." These teachers
+could not have learned more than they themselves had taught. We can only
+draw out of a cistern the waters which we have poured into it. Every
+succeeding day, however, swelled the Cædmonian Poem; assuredly they
+wanted neither zeal nor hands--for the glory of the monastery of Whitby!
+
+Such is a literary anecdote of the seventh century conveyed to us by
+ancient Bede. The dream of the apparition's inspiration of this
+unlettered monk was one more miracle among many in honour of the
+monastery; and it was to be told in the customary way, for never yet in
+a holy brotherhood was found a recusant.
+
+Even to this day we ourselves dream grotesque adventures; but in the
+days of monachism visions were not merely a mere vivid and lengthened
+dream, a slight delirium, for they usually announced something
+important. A dream was a prognostic or a prelude. The garrulous
+chroniclers, and saintly Bede himself, that primeval gossiper, afford
+abundant evidence of such secret revelations. Whenever some great act
+was designed, or some awful secret was to be divulged, a dream announced
+it to the world. Was a king to be converted to Christianity, the people
+were enlightened by the vision which the sovereign revealed to them; was
+a maiden to take the vow of virginity, or a monastery to be built, an
+angelical vision hovered, and sometimes specified the very spot. Was a
+crime of blood to be divulged by some penitent accessory, somebody had a
+dream, and the criminal has stood convicted by the grave-side, which
+gave up the fatal witness in his victim. In those ages of simplicity and
+pious frauds, a dream was an admirable expedient by which important
+events were carried on, and mystification satisfactorily explained the
+incomprehensible.
+
+The marvellous incident on which the history of Cædmon revolves may only
+veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from
+the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were
+often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart
+of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a
+like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or
+popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a
+_peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed
+in a_ DREAM.[1]
+
+Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.[2] The
+present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both
+Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have
+formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in
+the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single
+shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by
+several besides "the Dreamer." Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected
+a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such
+discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by
+some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the
+continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Cædmonian poem
+among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people
+with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a
+paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal
+as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions
+are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have
+been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we
+possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the
+corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern
+dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may
+confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Cædmon is no name at
+all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer
+of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic
+syllables![3] Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever
+becomes of the pretended Dreamer.
+
+It has become an arduous inquiry whether MILTON has not drawn largely
+from the obscurity of this monkish Ennius? "In reading Cædmon," says
+SHARON TURNER, "we are reminded of Milton--of a 'Paradise Lost' in rude
+miniature." Conybeare advances, "the pride, rebellion, and punishments
+of Satan and his princes have a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that
+_much of this portion might be almost literally translated by a cento of
+lines from the great poet_."[4] A recent Saxonist, in noticing "the
+creation of Cædmon as beautiful," adds, "it is still more interesting
+from _its singular correspondence even in expression with 'Paradise
+Lost_.'"
+
+The ancient, as well as the modern, of these scriptural poets has
+adopted a narrative which is not found in the Scriptures. The rebellion
+of Satan before the creation of man, and his precipitation with the
+apostate angels into a dungeon-gulf of flame, and ice, and darkness,
+though an incident familiar to us as a gospel text, remains nothing more
+than a legend unhallowed by sacred writ.
+
+Where are we, then, to seek for the origin of a notion universal
+throughout Christendom? I long imagined that this revolt in heaven had
+been one of the traditions hammered in the old rabbinical forge; and in
+the Talmudical lore there are tales of the fallen angels; but I am
+assured by a learned professor in these studies, that the Talmud
+contains no narrative of "the Rebellion of Satan." The Hebrews, in their
+sojourn in Babylon, had imbibed many Chaldean fables, and some fanciful
+inventions. At this obscure period did this singular episode in sacred
+history steal into their popular creed? Did it issue from that awful
+cradle of monstrous imaginings, of demons, of spirits, and of terrifying
+deities, Persia and India? In the Brahminical Shasters we find a
+rebellion of the angels before the creation, and their precipitation
+from light into darkness; their restoration by the clemency of the
+Creator, however, occurs after their probationary state, during millions
+of years in their metamorphoses on earth. But this seems only the veil
+of an allegory designed to explain their dark doctrine of the
+metempsychosis. The rebellion of the angels, as we have been taught it,
+is associated with their everlasting chains and eternal fire; how the
+legend became universally received may baffle inquiry.[5]
+
+But the coincidence of the Cædmonian with the Miltonian poem in having
+adopted the same peculiar subject of the revolt of Satan and the
+expulsion of the angels, is not the most remarkable one in the two
+works. The same awful narrative is pursued, and we are startled at the
+opening of the Pandemonium by discovering the same scene and the same
+actors. When we scrutinise into minuter parts, we are occasionally
+struck by some extraordinary similarities.
+
+Cædmon, to convey a notion of the ejection from heaven to hell, tells
+that "the Fiend, with all his comrades, fell from heaven above, through
+as long as _three nights and days_." Milton awfully describes Satan
+"confounded, though immortal," rolling in the fiery gulf--
+
+  _Nine times the space that measures day and night_
+  To mortal men.
+
+Cædmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that "House
+of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a _name_ that the
+highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called
+_Satan_ thenceforwards." Milton has preserved the same notice of the
+origin of _the name_, thus--
+
+                To whom the _Arch-Enemy_,
+  And thence in heaven called _Satan_--
+
+Satan in Hebrew signifying "the Enemy," or "the Adversary."
+
+The harangue of Satan to his legions by the Saxon monk cannot fail to
+remind us of the first grand scene in the "Paradise Lost," however
+these creations of the two poets be distinct. "The swart hell--a land
+void of light, and full of flame," is like Milton's--
+
+                   ----yet from these flames
+  No light, but rather darkness visible.
+
+The locality is not unlike, "There they have at even, immeasurably long,
+each of all the fiends a renewal of fire, with sulphur charged; but
+cometh ere dawn the eastern wind frost, bitter-cold, ever fire or dart."
+This torment we find in the hell of Milton--
+
+                                The bitter change
+  Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
+  From beds of raging _fire_ to starve in _ice_.
+
+                                     The parching air
+  _Burns frore_, and _cold performs the effect of fire_.[6]
+
+The "Inferno" of Dante has also "its eternal darkness for the dwellers
+in fierce _heat_ and in _ice_."[7] It is evident that the Saxon, the
+Italian, and the Briton had drawn from the same source. The Satan of
+Cædmon in "the torture-house" is represented as in "the dungeon of
+perdition." He lies in chains, his feet bound, his hands manacled, his
+neck fastened by iron bonds; Satan and his crew the monk has degraded
+into Saxon convicts. Milton indeed has his
+
+  Adamantine chains and penal fire,
+
+and
+
+  A dungeon horrible on all sides round.
+
+But as Satan was to be the great actor, Milton was soon compelled to
+find some excuse for freeing the evil spirit from the chains which
+Heaven had forged, and this he does--
+
+  Chain'd on the burning lake, _nor ever thence
+  Had ris'n or heaved his head, but that the will
+  And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
+  Left him at large to his own dark designs_,
+  That with reiterated crimes he might
+  Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
+  Evil to others.
+
+The Saxon monk had not the dexterity to elude the difficult position in
+which the arch-fiend was for ever fixed; he was indissolubly chained,
+and yet much was required to be done. It is not, therefore, Satan
+himself who goes on the subdolous design of wreaking his revenge on the
+innocent pair in Paradise; for this he despatches one of his associates,
+who is thus described: "Prompt in arms, he had a crafty soul; this chief
+set his helmet on his head; he many speeches knew of guileful words:
+wheeled up from thence, he _departed through the doors of hell_." We are
+reminded of
+
+  The infernal doors, that on their hinges grate
+  Harsh thunder.
+
+The emissary of Satan in Cædmon had "a strong mind, lion-like in air,
+_in hostile mood he dashed the fire aside with a fiend's power_."[8]
+That demon flings aside the flames of hell with the bravery of his
+sovereign, as we see in Milton--
+
+  Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
+  His mighty stature; _on each hand the flames
+  Driv'n backward, slope their pointing spires, and roll'd
+  In billows_, leave in the midst a horrid vale.[9]
+
+Cædmon thus represents Satan:--"Then spoke the haughty king, who of
+angels erst was _brightest, fairest in heaven_--beloved of his
+master--_so beauteous was his form_, he was like to the light stars."
+
+Milton's conception of the form of Satan is the same.
+
+                    His form had not yet lost
+  All her _original brightness_, nor appear'd
+  Less than archangel ruin'd.[10]
+
+And,
+
+  His countenance as the _morning star_ that guides
+  The starry flock, allured them.[11]
+
+Literary curiosity may be justly excited to account for these apparent
+resemblances, and to learn whether similarity and coincidence
+necessarily prove identity and imitation; and whether, finally, Cædmon
+was ever known to Milton.
+
+The Cædmonian manuscript is as peculiar in its history as its subject.
+This poem, which we are told fixed the attention of our ancestors "from
+the sixth to the twelfth century," and the genius of whose writer was
+"stamped deeply and lastingly upon the literature of our country,"[12]
+had wholly disappeared from any visible existence. It was accidentally
+discovered only in a single manuscript, the gift of Archbishop Usher to
+the learned Francis JUNIUS. During thirty years of this eminent
+scholar's residence in England, including his occasional visits to
+Holland and Friesland, to recover, by the study of the Friesic living
+dialect, the extinct Anglo-Saxon, he devoted his protracted life to the
+investigation of the origin of the Gothic dialects. A Saxon poem,
+considerable for its size and for its theme, in a genuine manuscript,
+was for our northern student a most precious acquisition; and that this
+solitary manuscript should not he liable to accidents, Junius printed
+the original at Amsterdam in 1655, unaccompanied by any translation or
+by any notes.
+
+We must now have recourse to a few dates.
+
+Milton had fallen blind in 1654. The poet began "Paradise Lost" about
+1658; the composition occupied three years, but the publication was
+delayed till 1667.
+
+If Milton had any knowledge of Cædmon, it could only have been in the
+solitary and treasured manuscript of Junius. To have granted even the
+loan of the only original the world possessed, we may surmise that
+Junius would not have slept through all the nights of its absence. And
+if the Saxon manuscript was ever in the hands of Milton, could our poet
+have read it?
+
+We have every reason to believe that Milton did not read Saxon. At that
+day who did? There were not "ten men to save the city." In Milton's
+"History of England," a loose and solitary reference to the Saxon
+Chronicle, then untranslated, was probably found ready at hand; for all
+his Saxon annals are drawn from the Latin monkish authorities: and in
+that wonderful list of one hundred dramatic subjects which the poet had
+set down for the future themes of his muse, there are many on Saxon
+stories; but all the references are to Speed and Hollinshed. The nephew
+of the poet has enumerated all the languages in which Milton was
+conversant--"the Hebrew, (and I think the Syriac,) the Greek, the
+Latin, the Italian, the Spanish, and French." We find no allusion to any
+of the northern tongues, which that votary of classical antiquity and of
+Ausonian melody and fancy would deem--can we doubt it?--dissonant and
+barbarous. The Northern Scalds were yet as little known as our own
+Saxons. A recent discovery that Milton once was desirous of reading
+Dutch may possibly be alleged by the Saxonists as an approach to the
+study of the Saxon; but at that time Milton was in office as "the
+Secretary for Foreign Tongues," and in a busy intercourse with the
+Hollanders.[13]
+
+"Secretary Milton" at that moment was probably anxious to con the
+phrases of a Dutch state-paper, to scrutinise into the temper of their
+style. Had Milton ever acquired the Dutch idiom for literary purposes,
+to study Vondel, the Batavian Shakspeare,[14] from whom some foreigners
+imagine our poet might have drawn his "Lucifer," it could not have
+escaped the nephew in the enumeration of his uncle's philological
+acquirements. But even to read Dutch was not to read a Saxon manuscript,
+whose strange characters, uncouth abbreviations, and difficult
+constructions, are only mastered by long practice. To have known
+anything about the solitary Cædmon, the poet must have been wholly
+indebted to the friendly offices of its guardian; a personal intimacy
+which does not appear. The improbability that this scholar translated
+the manuscript phrase by phrase is nearly as great as the supposition
+that the poet could have retained ideas and expressions to be reproduced
+in that epic poem, which was not commenced till several years after.
+
+The personal habits of Junius were somewhat peculiar; to his last days
+he was unrelentingly busied in pursuits of philology, of which, he has
+left to the Bodleian such monuments of his gigantic industry. Junius was
+such a rigid economist of time, that every hour was allotted to its
+separate work; each day was the repetition of the former, and on a
+system he avoided all visitors. Such a man could not have submitted to
+the reckless loss of many a golden day, in hammering at the obscure
+sense of the Saxon monk, which the critics find by his own printed text
+he could not always master; nor is it more likely that Milton himself
+could have sustained his poetic excitement through the tedious progress
+of a verbal or cursory paraphrase of Scripture history by this Gothic
+bard. At that day even Junius could not have discovered those "elastic
+rhythms," which solicit the ear of a more modern Saxon scholar in his
+studies of Cædmon,[15] but which we entirely owe to the skill, and
+punctuation, and accentuation of the recent editor, Mr. Thorpe.
+
+Be it also observed, that Milton published his "Paradise Lost" in the
+lifetime of Junius, the only judge who could have convicted the bard who
+had daringly proposed
+
+                   -----------to pursue
+  Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme--
+
+of concealing what he had silently appropriated.
+
+There are so many probabilities against the single possibility of Milton
+having had any knowledge of Cædmon, that we must decide by the numerical
+force of our own suggestions.
+
+The startling similarities which have led away critical judgments, if
+calmly scrutinised, may be found to be those apparent resemblances or
+coincidences which poets drawing from the same source would fall into.
+There is a French mystery of "The Conception," where the scene is hell;
+Lucifer appeals to its inmates in a long address. This Satan of "The
+Conception" strikingly reminds us of the Prince of Darkness of Milton,
+and indeed has many creative touches; and had it been written after the
+work of Milton, it might have seemed a parody.[16]
+
+Similarity and coincidence do not necessarily prove identity and
+imitation. Nor is the singular theme of "the Rebellion of the Angels"
+peculiar to either poet, since those who never heard of the Saxon monk
+have constructed whole poems and dramas on the celestial revolt.[17]
+
+We may be little interested to learn, among all the dubious inquiries of
+"the origin of 'Paradise Lost,'" whether a vast poem, the most elaborate
+in its parts, and the most perfect in its completion--a work, in the
+words of the great artist--
+
+            ------who knows how long
+  Before had been contriving?--P. L., ix. 138.
+
+was or could be derived from any obscure source. The interval between
+excellence and mediocrity removes all connexion; it is that between
+incurable impotence and genial creation. A great poet can never be
+essentially indebted even to his prototype.
+
+If we may still be interested in watching the primitive vigour of the
+self-taught, compared with the intellectual ideal of the poetical
+character, we must not allow ourselves, as might be shown in one of the
+critics of the Saxon school, to mistake nature in her first poverty,
+bare, meagre, squalid, for the moulded nudity of the Graces. The nature
+of Ennius was no more the nature of Virgil than the nature of Cædmon was
+that of Milton, for what is obvious and familiar is the reverse of the
+beautiful and the sublime. We have seen the ideal being,
+
+  Whose stature reach'd the sky, and on his crest
+  Sat Horror plumed--
+
+by the Saxon monk sunk down to a Saxon convict, "fastened by the neck,
+his hands manacled, and his feet bound."
+
+Cædmon represents Eve, after having plucked the fruit, hastening to Adam
+with the apples,--
+
+  Some in her hands she bare,
+  Some in her bosom lay,
+  Of the unblest fruit.
+
+However natural or downright may be this specification, it is what could
+not have occurred with "the bosom" of our naked mother of mankind, and
+the artistical conception eluded the difficulty of carrying these
+apples--
+
+  ------------from the tree returning, in her hand
+  _A bough of fairest fruit_.--ix. 850.
+
+In Cædmon, it costs Eve a long day to persuade the sturdy Adam, an
+honest Saxon, to "the dark deed;" and her prudential argument that "it
+were best to obey the pretended messenger of the Lord than risk his
+aversion," however natural, is very crafty for so young a sinner. In
+Milton we find the Ideal, and before Eve speaks one may be certain of
+Adam's fall--for
+
+        ----------in her face excuse
+  Came prologue, and apology too prompt,
+  Which with bland words at will, she thus address'd.
+
+A description too metaphysical for the meagre invention of the old Saxon
+monk!
+
+We dare not place "the Milton of our forefathers" by the side of the
+only Milton whom the world will recognise. We would not compare our
+Saxon poetry to Saxon art, for that was too deplorable; but, to place
+Cædmon in a parallel with Milton, which Plutarch might have done, for he
+was not very nice in his resemblances, we might as well compare the
+formless forms and the puerile inventions of the rude Saxon artist,
+profusely exhibited in the drawings of the original manuscript of
+Cædmon,[18] with the noble conceptions and the immortal designs of the
+Sistine Chapel.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Sir Francis Palgrave's "Dissertation on Cædmon," in the
+    Archæologia.
+
+    In another work this erudite antiquary explains the marvellous part
+    of Cædmon's history by "natural causes;" and such a principle of
+    investigation is truly philosophical; but we must not look over
+    imposture in the search for "natural causes." "Cædmon's inability to
+    perform his task," observes our learned expositor, "appears to have
+    arisen rather from the want of musical knowledge than from his
+    dulness, and therefore it is quite possible that, _allowing for some
+    little exaggeration_, his poetical talents may have been _suddenly
+    developed in the manner described_."--"Hist. of England," i. 162.
+    Thus the Saxon Milton rose in one memorable night after a whole life
+    passed without the poet once surmising himself to be poetical; and
+    thus, for we consent not to yield up a single point in the narrative
+    of "the Dream," appeared the patronising apparition and the
+    exhilarating dialogue. A lingering lover of the Mediæval genius can
+    perceive nothing more in a _circumstantial legend_ than "a little
+    exaggeration." I seem to hear the shrill attenuated tones of Ritson,
+    in his usual idiomatic diction, screaming, "It is a _Lie_ and an
+    _Imposture_ of the stinking _Monks_!"
+
+    The Viscount de Chateaubriand is infinitely more amusing than the
+    plodders in the "weary ways of antiquity." The mystical tale of the
+    Saxon monk is dashed into a glittering foam of enigmatical brevity.
+    "_Cædmon rêvait en vers et composait des poèmes en dormant; Poésie
+    est Songe._" And thus dreams may be expounded by dreams!--"Essai sur
+    la Litérature Anglaise," i. 55.
+
+  [2] "The Six Days of the Creation" offered a subject for an heroic
+    poem to Dracontius, a Spanish monk, in the fifth century, and who was
+    censured for neglecting to honour the seventh by a description of the
+    Sabbath of the Divine repose. It is preserved in "Bib. Patrum," vol.
+    viii., and has been published with notes. Genesis and Exodus--the
+    fall of Adam--the Deluge--and the passage of the Red Sea, were themes
+    which invited the sacred effusions of Avitus, the Archbishop of
+    Vienne, who flourished in the sixth century. His writings were
+    collected by Père Sirmond. This Archbishop attacked the Arians, but
+    we have only fragments of these polemical pamphlets; as these were
+    highly orthodox, what is wanting occasioned regrets in a former day.
+    Other histories in Latin verse drawn from the Old Testament are
+    recorded.
+
+  [3] Among our ancestors all proper names were significant; and when
+    they are not, we have the strongest presumptive reasons for
+    suspecting that the name has been borrowed from some other tongue.
+    The piety of many monks in their pilgrimages in the Holy Land would
+    induce them to acquire some knowledge of the Hebrew or even the
+    Chaldee--Bede read Hebrew. A scholar who has justly observed this,
+    somewhat cabalistically has discovered that "the initial word of
+    Genesis in Chaldee," and printed in Hebraic characters [Hebrew:
+    behadsin], exhibits the presumed name of the Saxon monk.
+
+  [4] This sort of cento seems to have been a favourite fancy with this
+    masterly versifier; for of another Anglo-Saxon bard who composed on
+    warlike subjects, this critic says--"If the names of Patroclus and
+    Menelaus were substituted for Byrthnoth and Godric, some of the
+    scenes might be almost literally translated into a cento of lines
+    from Homer." Homer's claim to originality, however, is secure from
+    any critical collation with the old Saxon monk.
+
+    [5] Notwithstanding the information with which I was favoured, I
+    cannot divest myself of the notion that "the rebellion of the angels"
+    must be more explicitly described among the Jewish traditions than
+    yet appears; because we find allusions to it in two of the
+    apostolical writings. In the epistle of Jude, ver. 6: "_The angels
+    which kept not their first estate_, but left their own habitation, He
+    hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment
+    of the great day." And in Peter, ii. 4: "_God spared not the angels
+    that sinned, but cast them down to Hell_, and delivered them unto
+    chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment." These texts have
+    admitted of some dispute; but it seems, however, probable that the
+    apostles, just released from their Jewish bondage, had not
+    emancipated themselves from the received Hebraical doctrines.
+
+  [6] Paradise Lost, ii. 594.
+
+  [7] Inferno, Canto iii. 5.
+
+  [8] Cædmon, p. 29.
+
+  [9] Paradise Lost, i. 221.
+
+  [10] Paradise Lost, i. 592.
+
+  [11] Paradise Lost, v. 798.
+
+  [12] Guest's "History of English Rhythms," ii. 23.
+
+  [13] This curious literary information has been disclosed by ROGER
+    WILLIAMS, the founder of the State of Rhode Island, who was
+    despatched to England in 1651, to obtain the repeal of a charter
+    granted to Mr. Coddington. I give this remarkable passage in the
+    words of this Anglo-American:--"It pleased the Lord to call me for
+    some time and with some persons to practise the Hebrew, the Greek,
+    Latin, French and Dutch. _The secretary of the council, Mr. Milton,
+    for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages._ Grammar rules
+    begin to be esteemed a tyranny. I taught two young gentlemen, a
+    parliament-man's sons, as we teach our children English--by words,
+    phrases, and constant talk, &c." This vague &c. stands so in the
+    original, and leaves his "wondrous tale half-told." "Memoirs of Roger
+    Williams, the Founder of the State of Rhode Island, by James D.
+    Knowles, Professor of Pastoral Duties in the Newton Theological
+    Institution," 1834, p. 264.
+
+    I am indebted for this curious notice to the prompt kindness of my
+    most excellent friend ROBERT SOUTHEY; a name long dear to the public
+    as it will be to posterity; an author, the accuracy of whose
+    knowledge does not yield to its extent.
+
+  [14] Mr. SOUTHEY observes, in a letter now before me, that "VONDEL'S
+    'Lucifer' was published in 1654. His 'Samson,' the same subject as
+    the 'Agonistes,' 1661. His 'Adam,' 1664. CÆDMON, ANDREINI, and
+    VONDEL, each or all, may have led Milton to consider the subject of
+    his 'Paradise Lost.' But Vondel is the one who is most likely to have
+    impressed him. Neither the Dutch nor the language were regarded with
+    disrespect in those days. Vondel was the greatest writer of that
+    language, and the _Lucifer_ is esteemed the best of his tragedies.
+    Milton alone excepted, he was probably the greatest poet then
+    living."
+
+    This critical note furnishes curious dates. Milton was blind when the
+    _Lucifer_ was published; and there is so much of the personal
+    feelings and condition of the poet himself in his "Samson Agonistes,"
+    that it is probable little or no resemblance could be traced in the
+    Hollander. The "Adam" of Milton, and the whole "Paradise" itself, was
+    completed in 1661. As for Cædmon, I submit the present chapter to Mr.
+    Southey's decision.
+
+    No great genius appears to have made such free and wise use of his
+    reading as Milton has done, and which has led in several instances to
+    an accusation of what some might term plagiarism. We are not certain
+    that Milton, when not yet blind, may not have read some of those
+    obscure modern Latin poets whom Lauder scented out.
+
+  [15] Guest's "History of English Rhythms."
+
+  [16] This speech, in which Satan appeals to and characterises his
+    Infernals, may be read in Parfait's analysis of the Mystery.--_Hist.
+    du Théâtre François_, i. 79.
+
+  [17] _L'Angeleida_ of VALVASONE, the _Adamo_ of ANDREINI, and
+    others.--Hayley's Conjectures on the Origin of "Paradise Lost." See
+    also Tiraboschi, and Ginguéné.
+
+  [18] These singular attempts at art may be inspected in above fifty
+    plates, in the Archæologia, vol. xx. We may rejoice at their
+    preservation, for art, even in the attempts of its children, may
+    excite ideas which might not else have occurred to us.
+
+
+
+
+BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE.
+
+
+The Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of "The Exploits of Beowulf" forms a
+striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cædmon. Its
+genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it
+derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive
+simplicity of a Homeric period--the infancy of customs and manners and
+emotions of that Hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for
+mankind:--that Hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but
+imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he
+metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental
+romance of another age and another race.
+
+The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel
+position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and
+whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like
+circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were
+those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single
+incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays,
+extended their dominion as "Sea-Kings" on the illimitable ocean.[1] The
+war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society,
+when great men knew only to be heroes, flattered by their bards, whose
+songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.
+
+We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the
+Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily
+prowess; vaunting, and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the
+son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage
+alliance--that primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid the
+perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations
+could be friends; the family bond was a sure claim to protection. Like
+the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as
+indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but
+welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their
+treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets
+and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their
+violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these
+mighty marauders, who were even chivalric ere chivalry rose into an
+order. The religion of these ages was wild as their morality; few heroes
+but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganised
+Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their
+genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not
+always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic
+legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted
+by historians as authentic records.[2] But if antiquaries still wander
+among shadows, the poet cannot err. BEOWULF may be a god or a nonentity,
+but the poem which records his exploits must at least be true, true in
+the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals--the
+emotions of his contemporaries.
+
+BEOWULF,[3] a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the
+North. We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a
+Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory
+days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of
+Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in
+society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic
+enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers
+were questioned "whether they were thieves?" a designation which the
+inquirers did not intend as a term of reproach, nor was it scorned by
+the valiant;[4] for the spoliation of foreigners, at a time when the law
+of nations had no existence, seemed no disgrace, while it carried with
+it something of glory, when the chieftain's sword maintained the swarm
+of his followers, or acquired for himself an extended dominion.
+
+Beowulf was a mailed knight, and his gilded ensign hung like a meteor in
+the air, and none knew the fate it portended. The warder of the coast,
+for in those days many a warder kept "ocean-watch" on the sea-cliffs,
+takes horse, and hastens to the invader; fearlessly he asks, "Whence,
+and what are ye? Soonest were best to give me answer."
+
+The hero had come not to seek feud, nor to provoke insult, but with the
+free offering of his own life to relieve the sovereign of the Eastern
+Danes, whose thanes, for twelve years, had vainly perished, struggling
+with a mysterious being--one of the accursed progeny of Cain--a foul
+and solitary creature of the morass and the marsh. In the dead of the
+night this enemy of man, envious of glory and abhorrent of pleasure,
+glided into the great hall of state and revelry, raging athirst for the
+blood of the brave there reposing in slumber. The tale had spread in
+songs through all Gothland. This life-devourer, who comes veiled in a
+mist from the marshes, may be some mythic being; but though monstrous,
+it does little more than play the part of the Polyphemus of antiquity
+and the Ogre of modern fairyism.
+
+In the timber-palace chambers were but small and few, and the guests of
+the petty sovereign slept in the one great hall, under whose echoing
+roof the Witenagemot assembled, and the royal banquet was held; there
+each man had his "bed and bolster" laid out, with his shield at his
+head, and his helmet, breastplate, and spear placed on a rack beside
+him--"at all times ready for combat both in house and field."
+
+This scene is truly Homeric; and thus we find in the early state of
+Greece, for the historian records this continual wearing of armour,
+_like the barbarians_, because "their houses were unfenced, and
+travelling was unsafe."[5]
+
+The watchman of the seas leaves not the coast, duteous in his lonely
+cares; while Beowulf, with his companions, marches onwards. They came to
+where the streets were paved; an indication in that age of a regal
+residence. The iron rings in their mailed coats rang as they trod in
+their "terrible armour." They reach the king's house; they hang up their
+shields against the lofty wall. They seat themselves on a bench, placing
+in a circle their mailed coats, their bucklers, and their javelins. This
+warlike array called forth an Ulysses, "famed for war and wisdom;" they
+parley; the thane hastens to announce the warlike but the friendly
+visitor; and the hero, so famed for valour, yet would not obtrude his
+person, standing behind the thane, "for he knew the rule of ceremony."
+The prince of the East Danes joyfully exclaims, that "he had known
+Beowulf when a child; he remembered the name of his father, who married
+the only daughter of Hrethel the Goth. It is said that he has the
+strength of thirty men in the grip of his hand. God only could have
+sent him."
+
+Beowulf, he whose beautiful ship had come over "the swan-path," may now
+peacefully show himself in his warlike array. Beowulf stood upon the
+dais; his "sark of netted mail" glittered where the armourer's skill had
+wrought around the war-net. Here we discover the ornamental artist as in
+the Homeric period. He found the prince of the East Danes, "old and
+bald" like Priam, seated among his earls. Our hero, whom we have
+observed so decorous in "his rule of ceremony," now launches forth in
+the commendation of his own prowess.
+
+He who had come to vanquish a fiend exulted not less in a swimming-match
+in the seas, "when the waves were boiling with the fury of winter,"
+during seven whole days and nights, combating with the walruses.
+
+The exploits of Beowulf are of a supernatural cast; and this
+circumstance has bewildered his translator amid mythic allusions, and
+thus the hero sinks into the incarnation of a Saxon idol,--a protector
+of the human race. It is difficult to decide whether the marvellous
+incidents be mythical, or merely exaggerations of the northern poetic
+faculty. We, however, learn by these, that corporeal energies and an
+indomitable spirit were the glories of the hero-life; and the outbreaks
+of their self-complacency resulted from their own convictions, after
+many a fierce trial.
+
+Such an heroic race we deem barbarous; but what are the nobler spirits
+of all times but the creatures of their age? who, however favoured by
+circumstances, can only do that which is practicable in the condition of
+society.
+
+Henforth, the son of Eglaff, sate at the feet of the king; jealousy
+stirred in his breast at the prowess of "the proud seafarer." This
+cynical minister of the king ridicules his youthful exploits, and
+sarcastically assured the hero, that "he has come to a worse matter now,
+should he dare to pass the space of one night with the fiend." This
+personage is the Thersites of our northern Homer--
+
+  With witty malice studious to defame,
+  Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim.
+
+And like Thersites, the son of Eglaff receives a blasting reproach:--"I
+tell thee, son of Eglaff, drunken with mead, that I have greater
+strength upon the sea than any other man. We two (he alludes to his
+competitor), when we were but boys, with our naked swords in our hands,
+where the waves were fiercest, warred with the walruses. The whale-fish
+dragged me to the bottom of the sea, grim in his gripe; the mighty
+sea-beast received the war-rush through my hand. The sea became calm, so
+that I beheld the ocean promontories, as the light broke from the east.
+Never since have the sea-sailors been hindered of their way; never have
+I heard of a harder battle by night under the concave of heaven, nor of
+a man more wretched on the ocean-streams. Of such ambushes and fervour
+of swords I have not heard aught of thee, else had the fiend I come to
+vanquish never accomplished such horrors against thy prince. I boast
+not, therefore, son of Eglaff! but never have I slaughtered those of my
+kin, for which hast thou incurred damnation, though thy wit be good."
+
+In this state of imperfect civilization, we discover already a right
+conception of the female character. At the banquet the queen appears;
+she greeted the young Goth, bearing in her own hand the bright sweet
+liquor in the twisted mead-cup. She went among the young and the old
+mindful of their races; the free-born queen then sate beside the
+monarch. There was laughter of heroes. A bard sung serene on "the origin
+of things," as Iopas sang at the court of Dido, and Demodocus at that of
+Alcinous. The same bard again excites joy in the hall by some warlike
+tale. Never was banquet without poet in the Homeric times.
+
+Here our task ends, which was not to analyse the tale of Beowulf, but
+solely to exhibit the manners of a primeval epoch in society. The whole
+romance, though but short, bears another striking feature of the mighty
+minstrel of antiquity; it is far more dramatic than narrative, for the
+characters discover themselves more by dialogue than by action.
+
+The literary history of this Anglo-Saxon metrical romance is too
+remarkable to be omitted. It not only cast a new light on a disputed
+object in our own literary history, but awoke the patriotism of a
+foreign nation. Beowulf had shared the fate of Cædmon, being preserved
+only in a single manuscript in the Cottonian Library, where it escaped
+from the destructive fire of 1731, not, however, without injury. In
+1705, Wanley had attempted to describe it, but he did not surmount the
+difficulty. Our literary antiquaries, with Ritson for their leader,
+stubbornly asserted that the Anglo-Saxons had no metrical romance, as
+they opined by their scanty remains. The learned historian of our
+Anglo-Saxons, in the progress of his ceaseless pursuit, unburied this
+hidden treasure--which at once refuted the prevalent notions; but this
+literary curiosity was fated to excite deeper emotions among the honest
+Danes.
+
+The existing manuscript of "The Exploits of Beowulf" is of the tenth
+century; but the poem was evidently composed at a far remoter period;
+though, as all the personages of the romance are Danes, and all the
+circumstances are Danish, it may be conjectured, if it be an original
+Anglo-Saxon poem, that it was written when the Danes had a settlement in
+some parts of Britain. At Copenhagen the patriotism of literature is
+ardent. The learned there claimed Beowulf as their own, and alleged that
+the Anglo-Saxon was the version of a Danish poem; it became one of the
+most ancient monuments of the early history of their country, and not
+the least precious to them for its connexion with English affairs. The
+Danish antiquaries still amuse their imagination with the once Danish
+kingdom of Northumbria, and still call us "brothers;" as at Caen, where
+the whole academy still persist in disputations on the tapestry of
+Bayeux, and style themselves our "masters."
+
+It was, therefore, a national mortification to the Danes that it was an
+Englishman who had first made known this relic; and further, that it
+existed only in the library of England. The learned THORKELIN was
+despatched on a literary expedition, and a careful transcript of the
+manuscript of Beowulf was brought to the learned and patriotic Danes. It
+was finished for the press, accompanied by a translation and a
+commentary, in 1807. At the siege of Copenhagen a British bomb fell on
+the study of the hapless scholar, annihilating "Beowulf," transcript,
+translation, and commentary, the toil of twenty years. It seemed to be
+felt, by the few whose losses by sieges never appear in royal Gazettes,
+as not one of the least in that sad day of warfare with "our brothers."
+THORKELIN was urged to restore the loss. But it was under great
+disadvantages that his edition was published in 1815. Mr. Kemble has
+redeemed our honour by publishing a collated edition, afterwards
+corrected in a second with a literal version. Such versions may supply
+the wants of the philologist, but for the general reader they are doomed
+to be read like vocabularies. Yet even thus humbled and obscured,
+BEOWULF aspires to a poetic existence. He appeals to nature and excites
+our imagination--while the monk, CÆDMON, restricted by his faithful
+creed, and his pertinacious chronology--seems to have afforded more
+delight by his piety than the other by his genius--and remains renowned
+as "the Milton of our forefathers!"
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in
+    Turner's "Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons," i. 456, third edition.
+
+  [2] Mr. KEMBLE, the translator of BEOWULF, has extricated himself out
+    of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the
+    Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate
+    abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero.
+    Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the
+    translation, it is preceded by "A Postscript to the Preface," far
+    more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate
+    youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of "the
+    postscript to cut away the preface root and branch," for all that he
+    had published was delusion! particularly "all that part of my preface
+    which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null
+    and void!" The result of all this scholar's painful researches is,
+    that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an
+    ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies,
+    and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.
+
+    The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of
+    the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old
+    masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at
+    their head, have "treated mythic and traditional matters as
+    ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa,
+    furbished up for us in the North." What a delightful phantasmagoria
+    comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet
+    illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.
+
+  [3] These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of
+    animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in
+    bone and nerve was known as "the Bear;" the more insatiable, as "the
+    Wolf;" and "the Wild Deer" is the common appellative of a warrior.
+    The term "Deer" was the generic name for animal, and not then
+    restricted to its present particular designation.
+
+      "Rats and Mice, and such SMALL DEER,"
+
+    baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great
+    source of the English language--the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their
+    perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their
+    own--and read _geer_ or _cheer_. Percy discovered in the old metrical
+    romance of "Sir Bevis of Southampton," the very distich which Edgar
+    had parodied.--Warton, iii. 83.
+
+  [4] Thucydides, Lib. i.
+
+  [5] Thucydides.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGLO-NORMANS.
+
+
+The Anglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five
+centuries.
+
+A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood
+themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood.
+They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might
+have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their
+warlike independence had passed away. And, as a martial abbot declared
+of his countrymen, "they had taken their swords from their sides and had
+laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now
+too dull for the field."[1] They could not even protect the soil which
+they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of
+their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane,
+and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Danish monarch. In
+a state of semi-civilization their rude luxury hardly veiled their
+unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people
+could not advance into national greatness.
+
+When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the
+Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites
+were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles. Edward,
+long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in
+Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits
+of these French neighbours--the great speaking the foreign idiom in
+their houses, and writing in French their bills and accompts.[2] Already
+there was a faction of Frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational
+English sovereign.
+
+William the Norman surveyed an empire already half Norman; and in the
+prospect, with his accustomed foresight, he mused on a doubtful
+succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey
+of their hardier neighbour, lie open for conquest to a more intelligent
+and polished race.
+
+The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the
+people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the
+shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his
+newly-acquired realm, "the Conqueror" withdrew into his duchy, and there
+passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding
+Saxon; a spirit of resistance, however suppressed, bound men together,
+and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might
+have reversed the conquest of England.[3]
+
+During this mysterious and protracted visit, and apparent abandonment of
+his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion
+nursed in the councils of Norman nobles, and strengthened by the
+boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all to share in the
+present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did
+William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days;
+the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land, and the
+language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind
+of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is
+probable, however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a
+more natural gestation, and expanded as circumstances favoured its awful
+growth. One night in December the King suddenly appeared in England, and
+soon unlimited confiscations and royal grants apportioned the land of
+the Saxons among the lords of Normandy, and even their lance-bearers. It
+seemed as if every new-comer brought his castles with him, so rapidly
+did castles cover the soil.[4] These were strongholds for the tyrant
+foreigner, or open retreats for his predatory bands; stern overlookers
+were they of the land!
+
+The Norman lords had courts of their own; sworn vassals to their
+suzerain, but kinglings to the people. Sometimes they beheld a Saxon
+lord, whose heart could not tear itself from the lands of his race, a
+serf on his own soil; but they witnessed without remorse the rights of
+the sword. Norman prelates were silently substituted for Saxon
+ecclesiastics, and whole companies of claimants arrived to steal into
+benefices or rush into abbeys. It was sufficient to be a foreigner and
+land in England, to become a bishop or an abbot. Church and State were
+now indissolubly joined, for in the general plunder each took their
+orderly rank. It was the triumph of an enlightened, perhaps a cunning
+race, as the Norman has been proverbially commemorated, over "a rustic
+and almost an illiterate generation," as the simplicity of our Saxon
+prelates, who could not always speak French, is described by Ordericus
+Vitalis, a monk who, long absent from England, wrote in Normandy.
+Ingulphus, the monk of Croyland, though partial to "the Conqueror,"
+however, honestly confesses that when the English were driven from their
+dignities, their successors were not always their superiors.
+
+All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble
+their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their
+flowing hair, and throwing aside the loose Saxon gown, they assumed the
+close vest of the more agile Norman. "Mail of iron and coats of steel
+would have better become them," cried an indignant Saxon. We have seen
+what a martial Saxon abbot declared to the Conqueror, while he mourned
+over his pacific countrymen. This was the time when it was held a shame
+among Englishmen to appear English. It became proverbial to describe a
+Saxon who ambitioned some distinguished rank, that "he would be a
+gentleman if he could but talk French."
+
+Fertile in novelties as was this amazing revolution, the most peculiar
+was the change of the language. The style of power and authority was
+Norman; it interpreted the laws, and it was even to torment the rising
+generation of England; children learned the strange idiom by construing
+their Latin into French, and thus, by learning two foreign languages
+together, wholly unlearned their own. Not only were they taught to speak
+French, but the French character was adopted in place of their own
+alphabet. It was a flagrant instance of the Conqueror's design to
+annihilate the national language, that finding a College at Oxford with
+an establishment founded by Alfred to maintain divines who were "to
+instruct the people in their own vulgar tongue," William decreed that
+"the annual expense should never after be allowed out of the King's
+exchequer."[5]
+
+The Norman prince on his first arrival could have entertained no scheme
+of changing the language, for he attempted to acquire it. The secretary
+of the Conqueror has recorded that when the monarch seemed inclined to
+adopt the customs of his new subjects, which his moderate measures at
+first indicated, the Norman prince had tried his patience and his ear to
+babble the obdurate idiom, till he abhorred the sound of the Saxon
+tongue. If because the Conqueror could not learn the Saxon language he
+decided wholly to abolish it, this would seem nothing more than a
+fantastic tyranny; but in truth, the language of the conquered is
+usually held in contempt by the conquerors for other reasons besides
+offending the delicacy of the ear. The Normans could not endure the
+Saxon's untunable consonants, as it had occurred even to the unlettered
+Saxons themselves; for barbarians as their hordes were when they first
+became the masters of Britain, they had declared that the British tongue
+was utterly barbarous.[6]
+
+But not at his bidding could the military chief for ever silence the
+mother-tongue. Enough for "this stern man" to guard the land in peace,
+while every single hyde of land in England was known to him, and "put at
+its worth in HIS BOOK," as records the Saxon chronicler. The language of
+a people is not to be conquered as the people themselves. The
+"birth-tongue" may be imprisoned or banished, but it cannot die--the
+people think in it; the images of their thoughts, their traditional
+phrases, the carol over the mead-cup, and their customs far diffused,
+survived even the iron tongue of the curfew.
+
+The Saxons themselves, who had chased the native Britons from their
+land, still found that they could not suppress the language of the
+fugitive people. The conquerors gave their Anglo-Saxon denominations to
+the towns and villages they built; but the hills, the forests, and the
+rivers retain their old Celtic names.[7] Nature and nationality will
+outlast the transient policy of a new dynasty.
+
+The novel idiom became the language of those only with whom the
+court-language, whatever it be, will ever prevail--the men who by their
+contiguity to the great affect to participate in their influence. In
+that magic circle of hopes and fears where royalty is the sole magician
+of the fortunes of men, the Conqueror perpetuated his power by
+perpetuating his language. Ignorance of the French tongue was deemed a
+sufficient pretext for banishing an English bishop pertinacious in his
+nationality, who had for a while been admitted to the royal councils,
+but whose presence was no longer necessary to the dominant party.
+
+To the successors of the Norman William it might appear that the English
+idiom was wholly obliterated from the memories of men; not one of our
+monarchs and statesmen could understand the most ordinary words in the
+national tongue. When Henry the Second was in Pembrokeshire, and was
+addressed in English--"Goode olde Kynge," the King of England inquired
+in French of his esquire what was meant? Of the title of "Kynge," we are
+told that his majesty was wholly ignorant! A ludicrous anecdote of the
+chancellor of Richard the First is a strange evidence that the English
+language was wholly a foreign one for the English court. This chancellor
+in his flight from Canterbury, disguised as a female hawker, carrying
+under his arm a bundle of cloth, and an ell-measure in his hand, sate by
+the sea-side waiting for a vessel. The fishermen's wives inquired the
+price of the cloth; he could only answer by a burst of laughter; for
+this man, born in England, and chancellor of England, did not know a
+single word of English! One more evidence will confirm how utterly the
+Saxon language was cast away. When the famous Grosteste, bishop of
+Lincoln (who would no doubt have contemned his Saxon surname of
+"Great-head"), a voluminous writer, once condescended to instruct "the
+ignorant," he wrote pious books for their use in French; the bishop
+making no account of the old national language, nor of the souls of
+those who spoke it.
+
+When the fate of conquest had overthrown the national language, and thus
+seemed to have bereaved us of all our literature, it was in reality only
+diverging into a new course. For three centuries the popular writers of
+England composed in the French language. Gaimar, who wrote on our Saxon
+history; Wace, whose chronicle is a rhymed version of that of Geoffry of
+Monmouth; Benoit de Saint Maur (or Seymour); Pierre Langtoft, who
+composed a history of England; Hugh de Rotelande (Rutland), and so many
+others, were all English; some were descendants from Norman progenitors,
+but in every other respect they were English. Some were of a third
+generation.
+
+Our Henry the Third was a prodigal patron of these Anglo-Norman poets.
+This monarch awarded to a romancer, Rusticien de Pise, who has
+proclaimed the regal munificence to the world, a couple of fine
+"chateaux," which I would not, however, translate as has been done by
+the English term "castles." Well might a romancer so richly remunerated
+promise his royal patron to finish "The Book of Brut," the never-ending
+theme to the ear of a British monarch who, indeed, was anxious to
+possess such an authentic state-paper. Who this Rusticien de Pise was,
+one cannot be certain; but he was one of a numerous brood who,
+stimulated by "largesses" and fair chateaux, delighted to celebrate the
+chivalry of the British court, to them a perpetual fountain of honour
+and preferment. We may now smile at the Count de Tressan's querulous
+nationality, who is indignant that the writers of the French romances of
+the Round Table show a marked affectation of dwelling on everything that
+can contribute to the glory of the throne and court of England,
+preferring a fabulous Arthur to a true Charlemagne, and English knights
+to French paladins.[8] When Tressan wrote, this striking circumstance
+had not received its true elucidation; the hand of these writers had
+only flowed with their gratitude; these writers composed to gratify
+their sovereign, or some noble patron at the English court, for they
+were English natives or English subjects, long concealed from posterity
+as Englishmen by writing in French. It had then escaped the notice of
+our literary antiquaries at home and abroad, that these Englishmen could
+have composed in no other language. How imperfect is the catalogue of
+early English poets by Ritson! for it is since his day that this
+important fact in our own literary history has been acknowledged by the
+French themselves, who at length have distinguished between Norman and
+Anglo-Norman poets. M. Guizot was enabled by the French government to
+indulge his literary patriotism by sending a skilful collector to
+England to search in our libraries for Norman writings; and we are told
+that none but Anglo-Norman writers have been found--that is, Englishmen
+writing on English affairs, and so English that they have not always
+avoided an unguarded expression of their dislike of foreigners, and even
+of Normans!
+
+It is worthy of observation, that even those Norman writers who came
+young into England soon took the colour of the soil; and what rather
+surprises us, considering the fashion of the court at that period,
+studied the original national language, translated our Saxon writings,
+and often mingled in their French verse phrases and terms which to this
+day we recognise as English. Of this we have an interesting evidence in
+an Anglo-Norman poetess, but recently known by the name of "Marie de
+France;" yet had she not written this single verse accidentally--
+
+  Me nummerai par remembrance,
+  _Marie ai num, si sui de France_--
+
+we should from her subjects, and her perfect knowledge of the vernacular
+idiom of the English, have placed this Sappho of the thirteenth century
+among the women of England. This poetess tells us that she had turned
+into her French rhymed verse the Æsopian Fables, which one of our kings
+had translated into English from the Latin. This royal author could have
+been no other than Alfred, to whom such a collection has been ascribed.
+We learn from herself the occasion of her version. Her task was
+performed for a great personage who read neither Latin nor English; it
+was done for "the _love_ of the renowned Earl William Longsword"--
+
+              ----Cunte Willaume,
+  Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume.
+
+Who would calculate the "largesse" "Count William," this puissant
+Longsword, cast into the lap of this living muse when she offered all
+this melodious wisdom; whose beautiful simplicity a child might
+comprehend, but whose moral and politic truths would throw even the
+Norman Longsword into a state of rational musing? Her "Lais," short but
+wild "Breton Tales," which our poetess dedicated to her sovereign, our
+Henry the Third, are evidence that Marie could also skilfully touch the
+heart and amuse the fancy.
+
+In her poems, Marie has translated many French terms into pure English,
+and abounds with allusions to English places and towns whose names have
+not changed since the thirteenth century. Her local allusions, and her
+familiar knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English people, prove
+that "Marie," though by the accident of birth she may be claimed by
+France, yet by her early and permanent residence, and by the constant
+subjects of her writings, her "Breton Tales," and her "Fables" from the
+English, by her habits and her sympathies, was an Englishwoman.
+
+At this extraordinary period when England was a foreign kingdom, the
+English people found some solitary friends--and these were the rustic
+monk and the itinerant minstrel, for they were Saxons, but subjects too
+mean and remote for the gripe of the Norman, occupied in rooting out
+their lords to plant his own for ever in the Saxon soil.
+
+The monks, who lived rusticated in their scattered monasteries,
+sojourners in the midst of their conquered land, often felt their Saxon
+blood tingle in their veins. Not only did the filial love of their
+country deepen their sympathies, but a more personal indignation rankled
+in their secret bosoms at the foreign intruders, French or Italian--the
+tyrannical bishop and the voluptuous abbot. There were indeed monks, and
+some have been our chroniclers, base-born, humiliated, and living in
+fear, who in their leiger-books, when they alluded to their new
+masters, called them "the conquerors," noticed the year when some
+"conqueror" came in, and recorded what "the conquerors" had enacted. All
+these "conquerors" designated the foreigners, who were the heads of
+their houses. But there were other truer Saxons. Inspired equally by
+their public and their private feeling, these were the first who,
+throwing aside both Latin and French, addressed the people in the only
+language intelligible to them. The patriotic monks decided that the
+people should be reminded that they were Saxons, and they continued
+their history in their own language.
+
+This precious relic has come down to us--the "Saxon Chronicle"[9]--but
+which in fact is a collection of chronicles made by different persons.
+These Saxon annalists had been eye-witnesses of the transactions they
+recorded, and this singular detail of incidents as they occurred without
+comment is a phenomenon in the history of mankind, like that of the
+history of the Jews contained in the Old Testament, and, like that, as
+its learned editor has ably observed, "a regular and chronological
+panorama of a people described in rapid succession by different writers
+through many ages in their own VERNACULAR LANGUAGE." The mutations in
+the language of this ancient chronicle are as remarkable as the fortunes
+of the nation in its progress from rudeness to refinement; nor less
+observable are the entries in this great political register from the
+year One of Christ till 1154, when it abruptly terminates. The
+meagreness of the earlier recorders contrasts with the more impressive
+detail of later enlarged and thoughtful minds. When we come to William
+of Normandy, we have a character of that monarch by one who knew him
+personally, having lived at his court. It is not only a masterly
+delineation, but a skilful and steady dissection. The earlier Saxon
+chronicler has recorded a defeat and retreat which Cæsar suffered in his
+first invasion, which would be difficult to discover in the Commentaries
+of Cæsar.
+
+The true language of the people lingered on their lips, and it seemed to
+bestow a shadowy independence to a population in bondage. The remoter
+the locality, the more obdurate was the Saxon; and these indwellers were
+latterly distinguished as "Uplandish" by the inhabitants of cities. For
+about two centuries "the Uplandish" held no social connexion; separated
+not only by distance, but by their isolated dialects and peculiar
+customs, these natives of the soil shrunk into themselves, intermarrying
+and dying on the same spot; they were hardly aware that they were
+without a country.
+
+It was a great result of the Norman government in England that it
+associated our insular and retired dominion with that nobler theatre of
+human affairs, the Continent of Europe. In Normandy we trace the first
+footings of our national power; the English Sovereign, now a prince of
+France, ere long on the French soil vied in magnitude of territory with
+his paramount Lord, the Monarch of France. Such a permanent connexion
+could not fail to produce a conformity in manners; what was passing
+among our closest neighbours, rivals or associates, was reflected in the
+old Saxon land which had lost its nationality.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Speed, 441. This was said to "the Conqueror," and this Abbot of
+    St. Alban's paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become
+    treason.
+
+  [2] A circumstance which Milton has recorded.
+
+  [3] Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the
+    country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the
+    Norman; SPELMAN, the great antiquary, and BLACKSTONE, the historian
+    and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the
+    assumed title of "the Conqueror" to a mere technical feudal term of
+    "_Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of
+    inheritance_." The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the
+    estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled "the
+    Conqueror," _and such is still the proper phrase in the law of
+    Scotland_. RITSON is indignant at what he calls "a pitiful forensic
+    quibble."
+
+    But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedate WHITELOCKE,
+    positively asserts that "William only conquered Harold and his army;
+    for he never was, nor _pretended to be_, the conqueror of England,
+    although the _sycophant monks of the time_ gave him that
+    title."--Whitelocke's "Hist. of England," 33.
+
+    In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul's,
+    which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William
+    denominates himself, "by the grace of God, _King of Englishmen_" (Rex
+    Anglorum), and addresses it "to all his well-beloved _French and
+    English people_, greeting."--Stowe's "Survey of London," 326, Edit.
+    1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was "the Conqueror"
+    as well as the sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn
+    the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind
+    his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sang of his hero,--
+
+      ------------------qui regna sur la France,
+      Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.
+
+  [4] The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of
+    Goldsmith which reminds us--
+
+      "To fly from PETTY TYRANTS--to THE THRONE!"
+
+    In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles
+    bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of
+    power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though
+    opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their mutual
+    interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They
+    were razed by commission, or by writs to the sheriffs; and a law was
+    further enacted that "none hereafter, without license, should
+    embattle his house." And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles.
+    See two dissertations on "Castles," by Sir ROBERT SUTTON, and by
+    AGARD; "Curious Discourses by Eminent Antiquaries," i. 104 and 188.
+
+    This number of castles seems incredible; possibly many were
+    "embattled houses." My learned friend, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an
+    antiquary most versant in manuscripts, inclines to think there may be
+    some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or
+    to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he
+    was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven
+    thousand virgins of St. Ursula.
+
+  [5] Speed, 440.
+
+  [6] A curious fact discovered by Mr. Turner in a Cottonian manuscript
+    has brought this circumstance to our knowledge. In a grant of land in
+    Cornwall, an Anglo-Saxon king, after mentioning the Saxon name of the
+    place, adds, "which the inhabitants there called, _barbarico nomine_,
+    by the barbarous name of Pendyfig;" which was the British or Welsh
+    name.--"Vindication of the Ancient British Poems," 8.
+
+  [7] Camden has noticed this striking circumstance in his "Britannia."
+    See also Percy's Preface to Mallett's "Northern Antiquities," xxxix.
+
+  [8] See his Preface to the prose romance of "La Fleur des Batailles."
+
+  [9] Miss Gurney, who has honourably been hailed as "the Elstob of her
+    age," privately printed her own close version of the "Saxon
+    Chronicle" from the printed text, 1810. Happy lady! who, when
+    sickness had made her its prisoner, opened the "Saxon Chronicle;" and
+    she learned that she might teach the learned.
+
+    The Rev. Dr. INGRAM, principal of Trinity College, Oxon, has since
+    published his translation, accompanied by the original, a collation
+    of the manuscripts, and notes critical and explanatory. 1823. 4to. A
+    volume not less valuable than curious.
+
+
+
+
+THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL.
+
+
+When learning was solely ecclesiastical and scholastical, there were no
+preceptors for mankind. The monastery and the university were far
+removed from the sympathies of daily life; all knowledge was out of the
+reach of the layman. It was then that the energies of men formed a
+course of practical pursuits, a system of education of their own. The
+singular institution of chivalry rose out of a combination of
+circumstances where, rudeness and luxury mingling together, the utmost
+refinement was found compatible with barbaric grandeur, and holy justice
+with generous power. In lawless times they invented a single law which
+included a whole code--the law of knightly honour. _L'Ordenne de
+Chevalerie_ is the morality of knighthood, and invests the aspirant with
+every moral and political virtue as every military qualification.[1]
+
+Destitute of a national education, the higher orders thus found a
+substitute in a conventional system of manners. Circumstances, perhaps
+originally accidental, became customs sealed with the sign of honour. In
+this moral chaos order marshalled confusion, as refinement adorned
+barbarism. A mighty spirit lay as it were in disguise, and it broke out
+in the forms of imagination, passion, and magnificence, seeking their
+objects or their semblance, and if sometimes mistaken, yet still laying
+the foundations of social order and national glory in Europe.
+
+A regular course of practical pursuits was assigned to the future noble
+"childe" from the day that he left the parental roof for the baronial
+hall of his patron. In these "nurseries of nobility," as Jonson has well
+described such an institution, in his first charge as varlet or page,
+the boy of seven years was an attendant at the baron's table, and it
+was no humiliating office when the youth grew to be the carver and the
+cupbearer. He played on the viol or danced in the brawls till he was
+more gravely trained in "the mysteries of woods and rivers," the arts of
+the chase, and the sciences of the swanery, and the heronry, and the
+fishery; the springal cheerily sounded a blast of venery, or the
+falconer with his voice caressed his attentive hawk, which had not
+obeyed him had he neglected that daily flattery.
+
+At fourteen the varlet became an esquire, vaulting on his fiery steed,
+and perfecting himself in all noble exercises, nicely adroit in the
+science of "courtesie," or the etiquette of the court; and already this
+"servant of love" was taught to elect _La dame de ses pensées_, and wore
+her favour and her livery for "the love of honour, or the honour of
+love," as Sir Philip Sydney in the style of chivalry expressed it.
+
+At the maturity of twenty and one years the late varlet, and now the
+esquire, stood forth a candidate to blazon his shield by knighthood--the
+accomplished gentleman of these Gothic days, and right learned too, if
+he can con his Bible and read his romance. Enchanting mirror of all
+chivalry! if he invent songs and set them to his own melodies. Yet will
+the gentle "batchelor" he dreaming on some gallant feat of arms, or some
+martial achievement, whereby "to win his spurs." On his solemn entrance
+into the church, laying his sword upon the altar, he resumed it by the
+oath which for ever bound him to defend the church and the churchmen.
+Thus all human affairs then were rounded by the ecclesiastical orbit,
+out of which no foot dared to stray. All began and all ended as the
+romances which formed his whole course of instruction--with the devotion
+which seemed to have been addressed to man as much as to Heaven.
+
+After the termination of the Crusades, the grand incident in the life of
+the BARON was a pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem; what the
+penitent of the Cross had failed to conquer, it seemed a consolation to
+kneel at and to weep over: a custom not obsolete so late as the reigns
+of our last Henries; and still, though less publicly avowed, the
+melancholy Jerusalem witnesses the Hebrew and the Christian performing
+some secret vow, to grieve with a contrition which it seems they do not
+feel at home.
+
+In these peregrinations a lordly Briton might chance to find some French
+or Italian knight as rash and as haughty; it was a law in chivalry that
+a knight should not give way to any man who demanded it as a right, nor
+decline the single combat with any knight under the sun; a challenge
+could not therefore be avoided. But a _pas d'armes_ was not always a
+friendly invitation, for often under the guise of chivalry was concealed
+the national hostility of the parties.
+
+But when no crusade nor pilgrimage in the East, nor predatory excursion
+in the West, nor even the blazonry of a tournament, which fed his eyes
+with a picture of battle, summoned to put on his mail-coat, how was the
+vacant Lord to wear out his monotonous days in his castle of indolence?
+The domestic fool stood beside him, archly sad, or gravely mirthful, as
+his master willed, with a proverb or a quip; and, with his licensed
+bauble, was the most bitterly wisest man in the castle. Patron of the
+costly manuscript which he could not himself read, the romancer of his
+household awaited his call; the great then had fabulators or
+tale-tellers, as royalty has now, by title of their office--its readers.
+But this Lord was too vigorous for repose, and the tranquillity of chess
+was too trying for his brain; the chess-board was often broken about the
+head of some mute dependent, or perchance on one who returned the dagger
+for the board. There was little peace for his restlessness, when, weary
+in his seat, his priceless Norway hawk perched above his head,[2] and
+his idle hounds spread over the floor, ceaselessly reminded him of those
+wide and frowning forests which were continually encroaching on the
+tillage of the contemned agriculturist, offering a mimetic war, not only
+against the bird and the beast, but man himself; for the lairs of the
+forest concealed the deer he chased, and often the bandit who chased the
+Lord--the terrible Lord of this realm of wood and water, where, whoever
+would fowl a bird or strike a buck, might have his eyes torn from their
+sockets, or on the spot of his offence mount the instant gallows.[3]
+
+There was a disorderly grandeur about the castellated mansion which
+should have required the ukase of this Sovereign of many leagues,
+surrounded by many hundreds of his retainers; but rarely the cry of the
+oppressed was allowed to disturb the Lord, while all within were exact
+in their appointments, as clock-work movements which were wound up in
+the government of these immense domestic establishments. Great families
+had their "household books," and in some the illegible hand of the
+lordly master himself, when the day arrived that even barons were
+incited to scriptural attempts, may yet be seen.[4] These nobles, it
+appears, were more select in their falconer and their _chef de cuisine_
+than in their domestic tutor, for such there was among the retainers of
+the household. This humiliated sage, indeed, in his own person was a
+model for the young varlets, on whom it was his office to inculcate that
+patient suppleness and profound reverence for their Lord and their
+superiors, which seemed to form the single principle of their education.
+At this period we find a domestic proverb which evidently came from the
+buttery. As then eight or ten tables were to be daily covered, it is
+probable the chivalric epicures sometimes found their tastes
+disappointed by the culinary artists; it would seem that this put them
+into sudden outbreakings of ill-humour, for the proverb records that
+"the minstrels are often beaten for the faults of the cooks."
+
+Too much leisure, too many loungers, and the tedium of prolonged
+banquets, a want of the pleasures of the luxurious sedentary would be as
+urgent as in ages more intellectual and refined; those pleasures in
+which we participate though we are passive, receiving the impressions
+without any exertion of our own--pleasures which make us delighted
+auditors or spectators. The theatre was not yet raised, but the
+listlessness of vacuity gave birth to all the variegated artists of
+revelry. If they had not comedy itself, they abounded with the comic,
+and without tragedy the tragic often moved their emotions. Nor were they
+even then without their scenical illusions, marvels which came and
+vanished, as the Tregetour clapped his hands--enchantments! which though
+Chaucer opined to be only "natural magic," all the world tremblingly
+enjoyed as the work of devils; a sensation which we have totally lost in
+the necromancy of our pantomimes. And thus it was that in the illumed
+hall of the feudal Lord we discover a whole dramatic company; which,
+however dissimilar in their professional arts, were all enlisted under
+the indefinite class of MINSTRELS; for in the domestic state of society
+we are now recalling, the poetic minstrel must be separated from those
+other minstrels of very different acquirements, with whom, however, he
+was associated.
+
+There were minstrels who held honourable offices in the great
+households, sometimes chosen for their skill and elocution to perform
+the dignified service of heralds, and were in the secret confidence of
+their Lord; these were those favourites of the castle, whose guerdon was
+sometimes as romantic as any incident in their own romance.
+
+No festival, public or private, but there the minstrel poet was its
+crowning ornament. They awakened national themes in the presence of
+assembled thousands at the installation of an abbot, or the reception of
+a bishop.[5] Often, in the Gothic hall, they resounded some lofty
+"Geste," or some old "Breton" lay, or with some gayer Fabliau, indulging
+the vein of an improvvisatore, altering the old story when wanting a new
+one. Delightful rhapsodists, or amusing tale-tellers, combining the
+poetic with the musical character, they displayed the influence of the
+imagination over a rude and unlettered race--
+
+          ----They tellen Tales
+  Both of WEEPYING and of GAME.
+
+Chaucer has portrayed the rapture of a minstrel excited by his harp, a
+portrait evidently after the life.
+
+  Somewhat he _lisped_ for his wantonness
+  _To make the English swete upon his tonge_;
+  And in his Harping when that he had songe,
+  _His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright,
+  As don the Sterrés in a frosty night_.
+
+The minstrel more particularly delighted "the Lewed," or the people,
+when, sitting in their fellowship, the harper stilled their attention by
+some fragment of a chronicle of their fathers and their father-land. The
+family harper touched more personal sympathies; the ancestral honours of
+the baron made even the vassal proud--domestic traditions and local
+incidents deepened their emotions--the moralising ditty softened their
+mind with thought, and every county had its legend at which the heart of
+the native beat. Of this minstrelsy little was written down, but
+tradition lives through a hundred echoes, and the "reliques of ancient
+English poetry," and the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and some
+other remains, for the greater part have been formed by so many metrical
+narratives and fugitive effusions.
+
+There were periods in which the minstrels were so highly favoured that
+they were more amply rewarded than the clergy--a circumstance which
+induced Warton to observe with more truth than acuteness, that "in this
+age, as in more enlightened times, the people loved better to be pleased
+than to be instructed."[6] Such was their fascination and their passion
+for "Largesse!" that they were reproached with draining the treasury of
+a prince. It is certain that this thoughtless race have suffered from
+the evil eye of the monkish chroniclers, who looked on the minstrels as
+their rivals in sharing the prodigality of the great; yet even their
+monkish censors relented whenever these revellers appeared. It was a
+festive day among so many joyless ones when the minstrel band
+approached the lone monastery. Then the sweet-toned Vielle, or the merry
+Rebeck, echoed in the hermit-hearts of the slumbering inmates; vaulters
+came tumbling about, jugglers bewitched their eyes, and the grotesque
+Mime, who would not be outdone by his tutored ape. Then came the stately
+minstrel, with his harp borne before him by his smiling page, usually
+called "The Minstrel's Boy." One of the brotherhood has described the
+strolling troop, who
+
+    Walken fer and wyde,
+  Her, and ther, in every syde,
+    In many a diverse londe.
+
+The easy life of these ambulatory musicians, their ample gratuities, and
+certain privileges which the minstrels enjoyed both here and among our
+neighbours, corrupted their manners, and induced the dissipated and the
+reckless to claim those privileges by assuming their title. A disorderly
+rabble of minstrels crowded every public assembly, and haunted the
+private abode. At different periods the minstrels were banished the
+kingdom, in England and in France; but their return was rarely delayed.
+The people could not be made to abandon these versatile dispensers of
+solace, amid their own monotonous cares.
+
+At different periods minstrels appear to have been persons of great
+wealth--a circumstance which we discover by their votive religious acts
+in the spirit and custom of those days. The Priory of St. Bartholomew in
+Smithfield, in 1102, was founded by "Rahere," the king's minstrel, who
+is described as "a pleasant-witted gentleman," such as we may imagine a
+wealthy minstrel, and moreover "the king's," ever to have been.[7] In
+St. Mary's Church at Beverley, in Yorkshire, stands a noble column
+covered with figures of minstrels, inscribed, "This Pillar made the
+Minstrels;" and at Paris, a chapel dedicated to St. Julian of the
+Minstrels, was erected by them, covered with figures of minstrels
+bearing all the instruments of music used in the middle ages, where the
+violin or fiddle is minutely sculptured.[8]
+
+If in these ages of romance and romancers the fair sex were rarely
+approached without the devotion of idolatry, whenever "the course of
+true love" altered--when the frail spirit loved too late and should not
+have loved, the punishment became more criminal than the crime; for
+there was more of selfish revenge and terrific malignity than of
+justice, when autocratical man became the executioner of his own decree.
+The domestic chronicles of these times exhibit such harrowing incidents
+as those of _La Châtelaine de Vergy_, where suddenly a scene of
+immolation struck through the devoted household; or that of "La Dame du
+Fayel,"[9] who was made to eat her lover's heart. And those who had not
+to punish, but to put to trial, the affections of women who were in
+their power, had their terrible caprices, a ferocity in their barbarous
+loves. Year after year the Gothic lord failed to subdue the immortalised
+patience of Griselda, and such was our "Childe Waters," who put to such
+trials of passion, physical and mental, the maiden almost a mother. In
+the fourteenth century, one century later than the histories of the
+"_Châtelaine_" and the "_Dame_," either the female character was
+sometimes utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly
+reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women
+were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the riverside were
+plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular
+proverb--"It is nothing! only a woman being drowned." La Fontaine,
+probably without being aware of this allusion to a practice of the
+fourteenth century, has preserved the proverbial phrase in his "La Femme
+noyée," beginning,
+
+  Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n'est rien,
+  C'est une Femme qui se noye![10]
+
+The personages and the manners here imperfectly sketched, constituted
+the domestic life of our chivalric society from the twelfth century to
+the first civil wars of England. In this long interval few could read;
+even bishops could not always write; and the Gothic baron pleaded the
+privilege of a layman for not doing the one nor the other.
+
+The intellectual character of the nation can only be traced in the
+wandering minstrel and the haughty ecclesiastic. The minstrel mingling
+with all the classes of society reflected all their sympathies, and in
+reality was one of the people themselves; but the ecclesiastic stood
+apart, too sacred to be touched, while his very language was not that
+either of the noble or of the people.
+
+A dense superstition overshadowed the land from the time of the first
+crusade to the last. It may be doubtful whether there was a single
+Christian in all Christendom, for a new sort of idolatry was introduced
+in shrines, and relics, and masses; holy wells, awful exorcisms, saintly
+vigils, month's minds, pilgrimages afar and penances at home;
+lamp-lighting before shrines decked with golden images, and hung with
+votive arms and legs of cripples who recovered from their rheumatic
+ails. The enthusiasm for the figure of the cross conferred a less pure
+sanctity on that memorial of pious tribulation. Everywhere it was placed
+before them. The crusader wore that sign on his right shoulder, and when
+his image lay extended on his tomb, the crossed legs were reverently
+contemplated. They made the sign of the cross by the motion of their
+hand, in peril or in pleasure, in sorrow and in sin, and expected no
+happy issue in an adventure without frequently signing themselves with
+the cross. The cross was placed at the beginning and at the end of their
+writings and inscriptions, and it opened and closed the alphabet. The
+mystical virtues of the cross were the incessant theme of the Monachal
+Orders, and it was kissed in rapture on the venal indulgence expedited
+by the papal Hierophant. As even in sacred things novelty and fashion
+will perversely put in their claim, we find the writers and sculptors
+varying the appearance of the cross; its simple form [Symbol] became
+inclosed in a circle [Symbol], and again varied by dots [Symbol].[11]
+The guardian cross protected a locality; and in England, at the origin
+of parishes, the cross stood as the hallowed witness which marked the
+boundaries, and which it had been sacrilege to disturb. It was no
+unusual practice to place the sign at the head of private letters,
+however trivial the contents, as we find it in charters and other public
+documents. In one of the Paston letters, the piety of the writer at a
+much later period could not detail the ordinary occurrences of the week
+without inserting the sacred letters I.H.S.; and similar invocations are
+found in others.[12]
+
+The material symbol of Christianity had thus been indiscriminately
+adopted without conveying with it the virtues of the Gospel. The cross
+was a myth--the cross was the _Fetish_[13] of an idolatrous
+Christianity--they bowed before it, they knelt to it, they kissed it,
+they kissed a palpable and visible deity; never was the Divinity
+rendered more familiar to the gross understandings of the vulgar; and in
+these ages of unchristian Christianity, the cross was degraded even to a
+vulgar mark, which conveniently served for the signature of some
+unlettered baron.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly
+    observed, "Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie
+    tournoient au bien public, au profit de l'Etat." It was when the
+    causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms
+    without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some
+    noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found
+    equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some
+    losses.
+
+  [2] I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the
+    most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of
+    the present day.--Nicholls, "History of Leicestershire," xxxix.
+
+  [3] The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his
+    venery.--Selden's notes to "Drayton's Polyolbion," Song ii.
+
+    An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command
+    of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in
+    France.--_Journal des Savans_, 1838.
+
+  [4] A curious specimen of these "Household Books," though of a later
+    period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop
+    Percy. Many exist in manuscript, and contain particulars more
+    valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually
+    valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age.
+    [The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses
+    of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir
+    Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by
+    Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these
+    editors render them of much use in illustration of the history of
+    each era.--ED.]
+
+  [5] "Warton," i. 94.
+
+  [6] "Warton," ii. 412.
+
+  [7] Stowe's "Survey by Strype," book iii. 235. We might wish to learn
+    the authority of Stowe for ascribing this "pleasant wit" to Rahere of
+    the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly,
+    our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. "The
+    king's minstrel" is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of
+    this priory "a king of the minstrels?" an office which the French
+    also had, _Roy des Ménéstraulx_, a governor instituted to keep order
+    among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however "pleasant-witted," seems to
+    have fallen into penance for his "wit," for he became the first
+    prior.
+
+  [8] _Antiquités Nationales_, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this
+    Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.
+
+  [9] Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic
+    narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of
+    fiction. _La Châtelaine de Vergy_ has been sometimes confounded with
+    _Le Châtelaine de Coucy_, the lover of _La Dame du Fayel_. The story
+    of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth
+    century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a
+    favourite with the tale-tellers--the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and
+    Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the "Fabliaux, or Tales,"
+    of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French
+    literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle
+    dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an
+    ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of
+    France.--Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of
+    Childe Waters in Percy's Collection has all the pathetic simplicity
+    of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it
+    with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans's Old Ballads.
+
+  [10] Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has
+    used it as a familiar illustration of the obstinacy of some
+    women--which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled
+    by instances from the masculine sex; however, his language must not
+    be disguised by a modern version. "Celui qui forgea le conte de la
+    femme qui, pour aucune correction de ménaces et bastonnades, ne
+    cessait d'appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, précipité dans l'eau,
+    haussoit encore, en s'étouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa
+    tête signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en vérité tous
+    les jours on voit l'image expresse de l'opiniâtreté des femmes."
+
+    The punishment of our "Ducking-stool" for female brawlers possibly
+    originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the
+    river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the
+    obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough,
+    _s'étouffant_,--merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord
+    and master.
+
+  [11] Leland's "Itinerary," ii. 126.
+
+  [12] Paston's "Letters," v. 17.
+
+  [13] See the very curious chapter on the "Fetish Worship," in that
+    very original and learned work "The Doctor," v. 133.
+
+
+
+
+GOTHIC ROMANCES.
+
+
+A new species of literature arose in the progress of that practical
+education which society had assumed; a literature addressed to the
+passions which rose out of the circumstances of the times; dedicated to
+war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed
+restricted to the extreme indulgence of those ennobling pursuits. In too
+much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that
+knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly
+licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their
+religion were then darkened by the grossest superstition, their faith
+was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric
+valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous
+honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land,
+by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered
+the helpless.
+
+Everything had assumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society
+had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day
+was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had
+sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more
+volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to
+revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a
+traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics,
+satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the
+looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them
+this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this
+stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.
+
+ROMANCE, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted,
+in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical
+investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source.
+The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history;
+and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true,
+it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form of ROMANCE
+came from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether
+the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provençal or the Armorican
+soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in
+considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to
+their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual
+refutations.[1] While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they
+were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate
+inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of
+invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of
+antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which,
+at distant intervals, and by novel circumstances, enlarged and modified
+the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.
+
+In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in
+the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that
+this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall
+never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient
+Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?[2]
+
+Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to
+track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that
+port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe,
+and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced
+to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant shores of Brittany,
+that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system
+startled the literary world by his assumption, that "the British
+history" of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions!
+the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop
+Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a
+number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an
+event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances
+of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne--the tutelary genius of
+France and Germany.
+
+They had looked to the east, and to the north--and wherever they looked
+for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of
+the universe for that which is universal.
+
+ROMANCE sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found,
+notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as
+prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful
+in her concealments.
+
+The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts--it is an
+aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man
+might not be ill defined and charactered as "a mimetic and fabling
+animal."
+
+The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the
+twelfth century. The first were "Estoires," or pretended chronicles,
+like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then
+predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of
+Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch.
+In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after
+nearly two centuries passed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned
+into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty
+in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers
+of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely
+accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens
+loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves,
+"translatés de rime en prose," or "mis en beau langage." Many of the old
+French metrical Romances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in
+this humbled form; but their "mensogne magnanime," to use Tasso's style,
+who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery
+of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose
+Romances in manuscript received a new life by passing through the press;
+and these, in their venerable "lettres Gothiques," are still hoarded for
+the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of
+invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form
+we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular
+that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours
+conferred on the prose.[3]
+
+These Romances, in their manuscript state, were cherished objects;[4]
+the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines,
+described as those "great books of parchment," or "the great book of
+Romances," were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every
+ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by
+clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous
+illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, "lymned
+with gold of graver's work" on an azure ground; or the purple page
+setting off the silvery letters;--objects then of perpetual attraction
+to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could
+not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are
+exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as
+their instruments, military and musical.
+
+Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,[5] we may view
+the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a
+lady's robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged,
+which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessed _le Roman
+de la Violette_, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply
+struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the
+best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his
+collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a
+collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.[6] If their hard
+outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under
+the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted
+labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not
+mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if
+the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had
+meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have
+been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on
+the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and
+fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted
+on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of
+a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the
+pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their
+brothers and sisters--the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in
+a monk's frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a cock bending its
+submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in
+its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements
+of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun's
+veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a
+cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of
+suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves.
+These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular
+feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.
+
+The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in the Bodleian Library,
+reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and
+mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had
+completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had
+finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the
+paintings which embellish this precious volume.[7]
+
+Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed
+by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a
+presentation copy, might count on the meed of "massy goblets" when the
+munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which
+indeed had been anticipated by the writer. This incident occurred to
+Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in
+reply to his majesty's inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly
+told that "the book treated of Amour!"
+
+To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious
+invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling
+exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments
+which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may
+often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always
+supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar
+extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile,
+the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of
+the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the
+writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are
+pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable
+effect--a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a
+scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details
+are more circumstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they
+often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed
+with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied,
+as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are often
+struck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their
+polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection;
+they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less
+truth because it is given with little art.
+
+The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton
+considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure
+rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic?
+for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider
+stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more
+perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action.
+If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the
+Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among
+these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one
+best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in
+favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their
+faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; "nor," he adds, "do
+they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the
+historical pencil." And he has more particularly noticed "Le bone
+Florence de Rome,"--thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels.
+"Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so
+many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old
+Romance."[8] This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales
+were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the
+tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and
+the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the "Estoires"
+never to be forgotten.
+
+Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains.
+SIDNEY might have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy
+rival of his masters: SPENSER borrowed largely, and repaid with
+munificence: MILTON in his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on
+this terrestrial race,
+
+  -----------and what resounds
+  In fable or romance of Uther's son,
+  Begirt with British or Armoric knights.
+
+"In 'Amadis of Gaul,'" has said our true laureate, "may be found the
+Zelmane of the 'Arcadia,' the Masque of Cupid of the 'Faery Queen,' and
+the Florizel of the 'Winter's Tale.' Sidney, Spenser, and Shakspeare
+imitated this book: was ever book honoured by three such imitators?"[9]
+
+A great similarity is observable among these writers of fiction, both in
+their incidents and the identity of their phrases; an evidence that
+these inventors were often drawing from a common source. In these ages
+of manuscripts they practised without scruple many artifices, and might
+safely appropriate the happiest passages of their anonymous
+brothers.[10] One Romance would produce many by variations; the same
+story would serve as the groundwork of another: and the later Romancer,
+to set at rest the scruples of the reader, usually found fault with his
+predecessors, who, having written the same story, had not given "the
+true one!" By this innocent imposture, or this ingenious impudence, they
+designed to confer on their Romance the dignity of History. The metrical
+Romances pretend to translate some ancient "Cronik" which might be
+consulted at Caerleon, the magical palace of the vanished Arthur: or
+they give their own original Romance as from some "Latyn auctour," whose
+name is cautiously withheld; or they practise other devices, pretending
+to have drawn their work from "the Greek," or "the English," and even
+from an "unknown language." In some Colophons of the prose Romances the
+names of real persons are assigned as the writers;[11] but the same
+Romance is equally ascribed to different persons, and works are given as
+translations which in fact are originals. Amid this prevailing
+confusion, and these contradictory statements, we must agree with the
+editor of Warton, that we cannot with any confidence name the author of
+any of these prose Romances. RITSON has aptly treated these pseudonymous
+translators as "men of straw." We may say of them all as the antiquary
+DOUCE, in the agony of his baffled researches after one of their
+favourite authorities, a Will o' the Wisp named Lollius, exclaimed,
+somewhat gravely--"Of Lollius it will become every one to speak with
+diffidence." Ariosto seems to have caught this bantering humour of
+mystifying his readers in his own Gothic Romance, gravely referring his
+extravagances to "the Chronicle of the pseudo Archbishop Turpin" for his
+voucher! What was with the Italian but a playful stroke of satire on the
+pretended verity of Turpin himself, may have covered a more serious
+design with these ancient romance-writers. Père Menestrier ascribed
+these productions to Heralds, who, he says, were always selected for
+their talents, their knowledge and their experience; qualifications not
+the most essential for romance-writing. "According to the bad taste of
+those ignorant ages," he proceeds, "it is from them so many Romances on
+feats of arms and on chivalry issued, by which they designed to elevate
+their own office, and to celebrate their voyages in different
+lands."[12] St. Palaye, in adopting this notion of these Heraldical
+Romancers, with more knowledge of the ancient Romancers than the good
+Father possessed, has added a more numerous body, the _Trouvères_, who,
+either in rehearsing or in composing these poetical narratives, might
+urge a stronger claim.
+
+When Père Menestrier imagined that it was the intention of these
+Heralds, by these Romances, "to celebrate their voyages in different
+lands," it seems to have escaped him that "the voyages" of these
+Romancers to the visionary Caerleon, to England, or to Macedonia, were
+but a geography of Fairy Land.
+
+In the History of Literature we here discover a whole generation of
+writers, who, so far from claiming the honour of their inventions, or
+aspiring after the meed of fame, have even studiedly concealed their
+claims, and, with a modesty and caution difficult to comprehend, dropped
+into their graves without a solitary commemoration.
+
+These idling works of idlers must have been the pleasant productions of
+persons of great leisure, with some tincture of literature, and to whom,
+by the peculiarity of their condition, fame was an absolute nullity. Who
+were these writers who thus contemned fame? Who pursued the delicate
+tasks of the illuminator and the calligrapher? Who adorned Psalters with
+a religious patience, and expended a whole month in contriving the
+vignette of an initial letter? Who were these artists who worked for no
+gain? In those ages the ecclesiastics were the only persons who answer
+to this character; and it would only be in the silence and leisure of
+the monastery that such imaginative genius and such refined art could
+find their dwelling-place. I have sometimes thought that it was Père
+Hardouin's conviction of all this literary industry of the monks which
+led him to indulge his extravagant conjecture, that the classical
+writings of antiquity were the fabrications of this sedentary
+brotherhood; and his "pseudo-Virgilius" and "pseudo-Horatius" astonished
+the world, though they provoked its laughter.
+
+The Gothic mediæval periods were ages of imagination, when in art works
+of amazing magnitude were produced, while the artists sent down no
+claims to posterity. We know not who were the numerous writers of these
+voluminous Romances, but, what is far more surprising, we are nearly as
+unacquainted with those great and original architects who covered our
+land with the palatial monastery, the church, and the cathedral. In the
+religious societies themselves the genius of the Gothic architect was
+found: the bishop or the abbot planned while they opened their treasury;
+and the sculptor and the workmen were the tenants of the religious
+house. The devotion of labour and of faith raised these wonders, while
+it placed them beyond the unvalued glory which the world can give.[13]
+
+We cannot think less than Père Hardouin that there were no poetical and
+imaginative monks--Homers in cowls, and Virgils who chanted vespers--who
+could compose in their unoccupied day more beautiful romances than their
+crude legends, or the dry annals of the Leiger book of their abbey. Some
+knowledge these writers had of the mythological, and even the Homeric
+and Virgilian fictions, for they often gave duplicates of the classical
+fables of antiquity. Circe was a fair sorceress, the one-eyed Polyphemus
+a dread giant, and Perseus bestrode a winged dragon, before they were
+reflected in romances. But what we discover peculiar in these works is a
+strange mixture of sacred and profane matters, always treated in a
+manner which scents of the cloister. Before he enters the combat, the
+knight is often on his knees, invoking his patron-saint; he proffers his
+vows on holy relics; while ladies placed in the last peril, or the most
+delicate positions, by their fervent repetitions of the sign of the
+cross, or a vow to found an abbey, are as certainly saved: and for
+another refined stroke of the monachal invention, the heroes often close
+their career in a monastery or a hermitage. The monkish morality which
+sat loosely about them was, however, rigid in its ceremonial discipline.
+Lancelot de Lac leaves the bed of the guilty Genevra, the Queen of the
+good king Arthur, at the ring of the matin-bell, to assist at mass; so
+scrupulous were such writers that even in criminal levities they should
+not neglect all the offices of the Church. The subject of one of these
+great romances is a search after the cup which held the real blood of
+Christ; and this history of the _Sang-real_ forms a series of romances.
+Who but a monk would have thought, and even dared to have written it
+down, that all the circumstances in this romance were not only certain,
+but were originally set down by the hand of Jesus himself? and further
+dared to observe, that Jesus never wrote but twice before--the Lord's
+Prayer, and the sentence on the woman taken in adultery. Such a pious,
+or blasphemous fraud, was not unusual among the dark fancies of the
+monastic legendaries.
+
+Some of these Homers must have left their lengthening Iliad, as Homer
+himself seems to have done, unfinished; tired, or tiring, for no doubt
+there was often a rehearsal, "the tale half told" was resumed by some
+Elisha who caught the mantle his more inspired predecessor had let fall.
+It appears evident that several were the continuators of a favourite
+romance; and from deficient attention or deficient skill a fatal
+discrepancy has been detected in the identical characters--the ordinary
+fate of those who write after the ideas of another, with indistinct
+conceptions, or with fancies going contrary to those of the first
+inventor.
+
+These metrical romances in manuscript, and the printed prose in their
+original editions, are now very costly. By the antiquary and the poet
+these tomes may be often opened. With the antiquary they have served as
+the veritable registers of their ages. The French antiquaries, and Carte
+in England, have often illustrated by those ancient romances many
+obscure points in geography and history. Except in the mere machinery of
+their fancy, these writers had no motive to pervert leading facts, for
+these served to give a colour of authenticity to their pretended
+history, or to fix their locality. As they had not the erudition to
+display, nor were aware of the propriety of copying, the customs and
+manners of the age of their legendary hero, they have faithfully
+transmitted their own; we should never have had but for this lucky
+absurdity the "Tale of Thebes" turned into a story of the middle ages;
+while Alexander the Great is but the ideal of a Norman baron in the
+splendour and altitude of the conception of the writers. It was the
+ignorance of the illuminators of our Latin and Saxon manuscripts of any
+other country than their own which enabled STRUTT to place before the
+eye a pictorial exhibition of our Anglo-Saxon fathers. Compared with the
+realities of these originals, with all their faults of tediousness, the
+modern copiers of ancient times, in their mock scenes of other ages, too
+often reflect in the cold moonlight of their fancy a shadowy
+unsubstantial antiquity.
+
+The influence of these fabulous achievements of unconquerable heroes and
+of self-devoted lovers over the intellect and the passions of men and
+women, during that vast interval of time when they formed the sole
+literature, was omnipotent. In the early romances of chivalry, when
+their genius was purely military, and directed to kindle a passion for
+joining the crusades, we rarely find adventures of the tender passion;
+but, since women cannot endure neglect, and the female character has all
+the pliancy of sympathy, and has performed her part in every age on the
+theatre of society, we discover the extraordinary fact that many ladies
+assumed the plumy helmet and dexterously managed the lance. The ladies
+rode amid armed knights resistless as themselves. It was subsequently,
+when we find that singularly fantastic institution of "The Courts of
+Love," which delivered their "Arrets" in the style of a most refined
+jurisprudence, that these beautiful companions-at-arms were satisfied to
+conquer the conquerors by more legitimate seductions, and that the
+romances told of little but of loves. Ariosto and Tasso are supposed to
+have drawn their female warriors from the Amazonian Penthesilea and the
+Camilla of Homer and Virgil; but it would seem that the prototype of
+these feminine knights these poets also found among those old romances
+which they loved.
+
+It is unquestionable that these martial romances of chivalry inflamed
+the restlessness of those numerous military adventurers who found an
+ample field for their chivalry after the crusades, in our continued
+incursions into France, of which country we were long a living plague,
+from the reign of Edward III. to that of Henry V., nearly a century of
+national tribulation. Many "a gentyl and noble esquyer," if perchance
+the English monarch held a truce with France or Scotland, flew into some
+foreign service. Sir Robert Knolles was known to the French as "le
+véritable démon de la guerre;" and Sir John Hawkwood, when there was no
+fighting to be got at home, passed over into Italy, where he approved
+himself to be such a prodigy of "a man-at-arms," that the grateful
+Florentines raised his statue in their cathedral; this image of English
+valour may still be proudly viewed. This chivalric race of
+romance-readers were not, however, always of the purest "order of
+chivalry." If they were eager for enterprise, they were not less for its
+more prudential results. A castle or a ransom in France, a lordly
+marriage, or a domain in Italy, were the lees that lie at the bottom of
+their glory.
+
+We continued long in this mixed state of glory clouded with barbarism;
+for at a time when literature and the fine arts were on the point of
+breaking out into the splendour of the pontificate of Leo the Tenth, in
+our own country the great Duke of Buckingham, about 1500, held the old
+romance of "The Knight of the Swan" in the highest estimation, because
+the translator maintained that our duke was lineally descended from that
+hero; the first peer of the realm was proud of deriving his pedigree
+from a fabulous knight in a romantic genealogy.
+
+But all the inventions and fashions of man have their date and their
+termination. For three centuries these ancient romances, metrical or
+prose, had formed the reading of the few who read, and entranced the
+circle of eager listeners. The enchantment was on the wane; their
+admirers had become somewhat sceptical of "the true history" which had
+been so solemnly warranted; another taste in the more chastened
+writings of Roman and Grecian lore was now on the ascendant. One last
+effort was made in this decline of romantic literature, in that
+tesselated compilement where the mottled pieces drawn out of the French
+prose romances of chivalry were finely squared together by no unskilful
+workman, in Sir THOMAS MALORY, to the English lover of ancient romance
+well known by the title of _La Morte d'Arthur_. This last of these
+ancient romances was finished in the ninth year of the reign of Edward
+IV., about 1470. CAXTON exulted to print this epical romance; and at the
+same time he had the satisfaction of reproaching the "laggard" age.
+"What do ye now," exclaimed the ancient printer, "but go to the
+_Bagnes_, and play at dice? Leave this! leave it! and read these noble
+volumes." Volumes which not many years after, when a new system of
+affairs had occurred to supplant this long-idolised "order of chivalry,"
+ROGER ASCHAM plainly asserted only taught "open manslaughter and bold
+bawdry." Such was the final fate of Love and Arms!
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Warton and Percy, Ritson and Leyden, Ellis and Turner and Price,
+    and recently the late Abbé de la Rue.
+
+  [2] A profound and poetic genius has thrown out a new suggestion on
+    the origin of these Eastern tales. "I think it not unlikely that the
+    'Milesian Tales' contained the germs of many of those _now in the_
+    'Arabian Nights.' The Greek empire must have left deep impressions on
+    the Persian intellect--so also many of the Roman Catholic _Legends_
+    are taken from _Apuleius_. The exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche is
+    evidently a philosophical attempt to parry Christianity with a quasi
+    Platonic account of the fall and redemption of man."--Coleridge's
+    "Literary Remains," i. 180. Whatever were these "Milesian Tales,"
+    they amused the Grecian sages in the earliest period of their
+    history.
+
+  [3] Ritson and Weber have elegantly printed some of the best English
+    metrical romances. In France they have recently enriched literature
+    with many of these manuscript romances. See "Gentleman's Magazine,"
+    Oct. 1839.
+
+  [4] It is a curious fact, that in 1390 Sir James Douglas, of
+    Dalkeith, the ancestor of the Earl of Morton, apparently valued them
+    as about equal to the statutes of the realm; for he bequeathed in his
+    will to his son, "Omnes libros meos tam _Statutorum_ Regni Scocie
+    quam _Romancie_."--Laing's "Early Metrical Tales," Edinburgh, 1826.
+
+  [5] A collection of these romances formed into three folio tomes in
+    manuscript was enriched by seven hundred and forty-seven miniatures,
+    _avec les Initiales peintes en or et couleurs_. 6093, Roxburgh Cat.
+
+  [6] Cat. of the Duke de la Vallière, 4507. Strutt would have done as
+    much for ourselves, but he worked in unrequited solitude with all the
+    passion of the French amateur, but without his "best artists."
+
+  [7] This romance was composed about the year 1200; the present copy
+    was made in 1338. There is also a splendid manuscript with rich and
+    delicate illuminations of the ancient romance of Alexander in prose
+    in the Brit. Mus., Bib. Reg. 15, E. 6.
+
+  [8] Campbell's "Essay on English Poetry."
+
+  [9] Our vernacular literature owes to the unremitting ardour of our
+    laureate recent editions of "La Morte d'Arthur," "Palmerin of
+    England," and a new translation from the Portuguese of "Amadis of
+    Gaul." For readers who are not antiquaries, and who may recoil from
+    the prolixity of the ancient romances, there is a work of their
+    species which may amply gratify their curiosity, and it is of easy
+    acquisition. It is not an unskilful compilation from the romances of
+    chivalry made by RICHARD JOHNSON, a noted bookwright in the reign of
+    Elizabeth; it has passed through innumerable editions, and has at
+    last taken its station in the popular library of our juvenile
+    literature. I suspect that the style has been too often altered in
+    the modern editions, which has injured its raciness. It is well known
+    as "The Renowned History of the Seven Champions of Christendom." The
+    compiler has metamorphosed the Rowland, Oliver, Guy, Bevis, &c., into
+    seven saints or champions of Christendom; but "he has preserved some
+    of the most capital fictions of the old Arabian romance."--Warton,
+    iii. 63, Ed. 8vo. It may serve as a substitute for the old
+    black-letter romances, being a compendium of their rich or their
+    grotesque fancies; or, as Ritson observes with his accustomed
+    energetical criticism, "It is a compound of superstition, and, as it
+    were, all the lyes in Christendom in one lye, and is in many parts of
+    the country believed at this day to be as true as the
+    gospel."--"Dissertation on Romance," xxxiv.
+
+  [10] One of the most celebrated romantic histories is "the Troy-book
+    of Guido delle Colonne," which has been considered as the original of
+    all the later tales of Troy. On the acute suggestion of Tyrwhit,
+    Douce ascertained that this fabulous history, by many regarded as
+    original, is only a Latin translation of a Norman poet,* which Guido
+    passes off as a history collected from Dares and other fictitious
+    authorities, but disingenuously conceals the name of Benoit de Saint
+    Maur, whose works he appears to have found when he came to England.
+    It was a prevalent practice in the middle ages to appropriate a work
+    by a cautious suppression of any mention of the original. Tiraboschi
+    might now be satisfied that Guido delle Colonne was in England, which
+    he doubted, since he now stands charged with only turning into Latin
+    prose the poem of a Norman, that is, an English poet at the court of
+    our Henry the Second.
+
+      * Douce's "Illustrations of Shakspeare."
+
+  [11] In the curious catalogue of these romances in the Roxburgh
+    Library, the cataloguer announced three or four of these pretended
+    authors as "names unknown to any literary historians," and considered
+    the announcement a literary discovery.
+
+  [12] Père Menestrier, "Chevalerie Ancienne et Moderne," chap. v. On
+    HERALDS.
+
+  [13] See Bentham's "History and Antiquities of Ely," 27.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGIN OF THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGES OF EUROPE.
+
+
+The predominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, retarded
+the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous
+nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins
+remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the
+universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither
+legions nor consuls to maintain its predominance.
+
+From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of
+whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and
+were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted
+that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them,
+attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This
+vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of
+antiquity; but in its corrupt state; freed from a complex construction,
+and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the
+ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt latinisms,
+were called "the scum of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar
+barbarisms," by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth
+century.[1] It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of
+customs, that from this heterogeneous mass were hewed out those
+VERNACULAR DIALECTS of Europe which furnished each people with their own
+idiom, and which are now distinguished as the MODERN LANGUAGES.
+
+In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the
+sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the
+majesty of the Latin accent; lands favoured by more genial skies, and
+men blessed with more flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern
+races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words--to sounds
+so new to them they gave their own rude inflections; there is but one
+organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy--a musical and a tutored ear.
+The Gaul,[2] in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness;
+and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost
+the vowelly confluence.
+
+This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons,
+was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe--sisters still
+bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various
+fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin
+line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious
+generation of language as _Romans_, or _Romance_, or _Romaunt_, still
+proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves
+had distinguished it as _Rustic_, to indicate a base dialect used only
+by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.
+
+But when these different nations had established their separate
+independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it
+was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy of the studies,
+and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language
+maintained its pre-eminence over the particular dialect, and as the
+course of human events succeeded in the overwhelming of ancient Rome,
+another Rome shadowed the world. Ecclesiastical Rome, whence the novel
+faith of Christianity was now to emanate, far more potent than military
+Rome, perpetuated the ancient language. The clergy, through the
+diversified realms of Europe, were held together in strict conformity,
+and by a common bond chained to the throne of the priesthood--one faith,
+one discipline, one language!
+
+The Latin tongue, both in verse and prose, was domiciliated among people
+of the most opposite interests, customs, and characters. The primitive
+fathers, the later schoolmen, the monkish chroniclers, all alike
+composed in Latin; all legal instruments, even marriage-contracts, were
+drawn in Latin: and even the language of Christian prayer was that of
+abolished paganism.
+
+The idiom of their father-land--or as we have affectionately called it,
+our "mother-tongue," and as our ancient translator of the
+"Polychronicon" energetically terms it, "the birth-tongue"--those first
+human accents which their infant ear had caught, and which from their
+boyhood were associated with the most tender and joyous recollections,
+every nation left to fluctuate on the lips of the populace, rude and
+neglected. Whenever a writer, proposing to inform the people on subjects
+which more nearly interested them, composed in the national idiom, it
+was a strong impulse only which could induce him thus to submit to
+degrade his genius. One of the French crusaders, a learned knight, was
+anxious that the nation should become acquainted with the great
+achievements of the deliverers of Jerusalem; it was the command of his
+bishop that induced him to compose the narrative in the vernacular
+idiom; but the twelve years which he bestowed on his chronicle were not
+considered by him as employed for his glory, for he avows that the
+humiliating style which he had used was the mortifying performance of a
+religious penance.
+
+All who looked towards advancement in worldly affairs, and were of the
+higher orders in society, cultivated the language of Rome. It is owing
+to this circumstance, observes a learned historian of our country, that
+"the Latin language and the classical writers were preserved by the
+Christian clergy from that destruction which has entirely swept from us
+the language and the writings of Phoenicia, Carthage, Babylon, and
+Egypt."[3] We must also recollect that the influence of the Latin
+language became far more permanent when the great master-works of
+antiquity were gradually unburied from their concealments. In this
+resurrection of taste and genius, they derived their immortality from
+the imperishable soul of their composition. All Europe was condemned to
+be copiers, or in despair to be plagiarists.
+
+It is well known how the admirable literatures of Greece and Rome struck
+a fresh impulse into literary pursuits at that period which has been
+distinguished as the restoration of letters. The emigration of the
+fugitive Greeks conveyed the lost treasures of their more ancient
+literature to the friendly shores of Italy. Italy had then to learn a
+new language, and to borrow inspiration from another genius.
+
+The occupation of disinterring manuscripts which had long been buried in
+dungeon-darkness, was carried on with an enthusiasm of which perhaps it
+would be difficult for us at this day to form an adequate conception.
+Many exhausted their fortunes in remote journeys, or in importations
+from the East; and the possession of a manuscript was considered not to
+have been too dearly purchased by the transfer of an estate, since only
+for the loan of one the pledge was nothing less.[4] The discovery of an
+author, perhaps heard of for the first time, was tantamount to the
+acquisition of a province; and when a complete copy of "Quintilian" was
+discovered, the news circulated throughout Europe. The rapture of
+collation, the restoration of a corrupt text, or the perpetual
+commentary, became the ambition of a life, even after the era of
+printing.
+
+This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnished the studious
+with honours and avocations; but they were reserved only for themselves:
+it withdrew them from the cultivation of all vernacular literature. They
+courted not the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignified
+secretaryship offered the only profit or honour the literary man
+contemplated. Accustomed to the finished compositions of the ancients,
+the scholar turned away from the rudeness of the maternal language.
+There was no other public opinion than what was gathered from the
+writings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read; they transcribed as
+sacred what authority had long established; their arguments were
+scholastic and metaphysical, for they held little other communication
+with the world, or among themselves, but through the restricted medium
+of their writings. This state was a heritage of ideas and of opinions,
+transmitted from age to age with little addition or diminution.
+Authority and quotation closed all argument, and filled vast volumes.
+University responded to university, and men of genius were following
+each other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to so late a period as
+the days of Erasmus, every Latin word was culled with a classical
+superstition; and a week of agony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid
+with a mosaic of phrases.[5] While this verbal generation flourished,
+some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes of Cicero, and, in a
+cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil. All native vigour died away in
+the coldness of imitation; and a similarity of thinking and of style
+deprived the writers of that raciness which the nations of Europe
+subsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacular literature.
+
+It is remarkable of those writers who had already distinguished
+themselves by their Latin works, that when they began to compose in
+their native language, those classical effusions on which they had
+confidently rested their future celebrity sank into oblivion; and the
+writers themselves ceased to be subjects either of critical inquiry or
+of popular curiosity, except in that language in which they had opened a
+vein of original thought, in a manner and diction the creation of their
+own feelings. Here their natural power and their freed faculties placed
+them at a secure interval from their imitators. Modern writers in Latin
+were doomed to find too many academical equals; but those who were
+inimitable in their vernacular idiom could dread no rival, and
+discovered how the productions of the heart, rather than those of the
+lexicon, were echoed to their authors in the voice of their
+contemporaries.
+
+The people indeed were removed far out of the influence of literature.
+The people could neither become intelligent with the knowledge, nor
+sympathise with the emotions, concealed in an idiom which had long
+ceased to be spoken, and which exacted all the labour and the leisure of
+the cloistered student.
+
+This state of affairs had not occurred among the Greeks, and hardly
+among the Romans, who had only composed their immortal works in their
+maternal tongue. Their arts, their sciences, and their literature were
+to be acquired by the single language which they used. It was the
+infelicity of their successors in dominion, to weary out the tenderness
+of youth in the repulsive labours of acquiring the languages of the two
+great nations whose empire had for ever closed, but whose finer genius
+had triumphed over their conquerors.
+
+With the ancients, instruction did not commence until their seventh
+year; and till they had reached that period Nature was not disturbed in
+her mysterious workings: the virgin intellect was not doomed to suffer
+the violence of our first barren studies--that torture of learning a
+language which has ceased to be spoken by the medium of another equally
+unknown. Perhaps it was owing to this favourable circumstance that,
+among the inferior classes of society in the two ancient nations, their
+numerous slaves displayed such an aptitude for literature, eminent as
+skilful scribes, and even as original writers.
+
+One of the earliest prose writers in our language when style was
+beginning to be cultivated, has aptly described, by a domestic but
+ingenious image, the effect of our youth gathering the burdens of
+grammatical faggots in the Sylva of antiquity. It is Sir THOMAS ELYOT
+who speaks, in "The Boke of the Governor," printed in 1531: "By that
+time the learner cometh to the most sweet and pleasant rendering of old
+authors, the sparks of fervent desire are extinct with the burthen of
+grammar, like as a little fire is even quenched with a great heap of
+small sticks, so that it can never come to the principal logs, where it
+should burn in a great pleasant fire."
+
+It was Italy, the Mother and the Nurse of Literature (as the filial zeal
+of her sons has hailed her), which first opened to the nations of Europe
+the possibility of each creating a vernacular literature, reflecting
+the image not of the Greeks and of the Romans, but of themselves.
+
+Three memorable men, of the finest and most contrasted genius, appeared
+in one country and at one period. With that contempt for the language of
+the people in which the learned participated, busied as they were at the
+restoration of letters by their new studies and their progressive
+discoveries, PETRARCH contemned his own Italian "Rime," and was even
+insensible to the inspiration of a mightier genius than his own,--that
+genius who, with a parental affection, had adopted the orphan idiom of
+his father-land; an orphan idiom, which had not yet found even a name;
+for it was then uncertain what was the true language of Italy. DANTE had
+at first proposed to write in Latin; but with all his adoration of his
+master Virgil, he rejected the verse of Virgil, and anticipated the
+wants of future ages. A peculiar difficulty, however, occurred to the
+first former of the vernacular literature of Italy. In the state of this
+unsettled language--composed of fragments of the latinity of a former
+populace, with the corruptions and novelties introduced by its new
+masters--deformed by a great variety of dialects--submitted, in the
+mouths of the people, to their caprices, and unstamped by the hand of a
+master--it seemed hopeless to fix on any idiom which, by its inherent
+nobleness, should claim the distinguished honour of being deemed
+Italian. DANTE denied this envied grace to any of the rival
+principalities of his country. The poet, however, mysteriously asserted
+that the true Italian "volgare" might be discovered in every Italian
+city; but being common to all, it could not be appropriated by any
+single one. Dante dignified the "volgare illustre" which he had
+conceived in his mind, by magnificent titles;--it was "illustrious," it
+was "cardinal," it was "aulic," it was "courtly," it was the language of
+the most learned who had composed in the vulgar idiom, whether in
+Sicily, in Tuscany, in Puglia, even in Lombardy, or in the marshes of
+Ancona! This fanciful description of the Italian language appeared
+enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautious
+TIRABOSCHI. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet
+to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he
+marked the mechanical gradations--the stages of every language, from
+rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive
+no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit of
+DANTE had penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of
+facts, and the arranger of dates. DANTE, in his musings, had thrown a
+mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently
+contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian
+style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed classical.
+DANTE wrote, and DANTE was the classic of his country.
+
+The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy was
+BOCCACCIO, who threw out the fertility of his genius in the _volgare_ of
+nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself
+into all the conditions of society; he touched all the passions of human
+beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their
+manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of
+Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and
+diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his
+"volgare eloquenza."
+
+The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it
+is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first
+efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have
+required more hewing and polishing to be modelled into elegance, and
+more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its
+earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the
+contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of "the Ploughman;" they
+delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the
+critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman,
+Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period,
+did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author
+till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style;
+and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the
+rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following
+generation.
+
+It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled
+that of other countries, but the material which those artists handled
+yielded more kindly to their touch. The shell they struck gave a more
+melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut from the northern
+forests.
+
+Custom and prejudice, however, predominated over the feelings of the
+learned even in Italy. Their epistolary correspondence was still carried
+on in Latin, and their first dramas were in the language of ancient
+Rome. ANGELO POLITIAN appears to have been the earliest who composed a
+dramatic piece, his "Orfeo," in "stilo volgare," and for which he
+assigns a reason which might have occurred to many of his
+predecessors--"perchè degli spettatori fusse meglio intesa," that he
+might be better understood by the audience!
+
+The vernacular idiom in Italy was still so little in repute, while the
+prejudice in favour of the Latin was so firmly rooted, that their youths
+were prohibited from reading Italian books. A curious anecdote of the
+times which its author has sent down to us, however, shows that their
+native productions operated with a secret charm on their sympathies; for
+VARCHI has told the singular circumstance that his father once sent him
+to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his
+inveterate passion for reading works in the vernacular tongue.
+
+The struggle for the establishment of a vernacular literature was
+apparent about the same period in different countries of Europe; a
+simultaneous movement to vindicate the honour and to display the merits
+of their national idiom.
+
+JOACHIM DE BELLAY, of an illustrious literary family, resided three
+years with his relative the Cardinal at Rome; the glory of the great
+vernacular authors of Italy inflamed his ardour; and in one of his poems
+he developes the beauty of "composing in our native language," by the
+deeper emotions it excites in our countrymen. Subsequently he published
+his "Defense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise," in 1549, where
+eloquently and learnedly he would persuade his nation to write in their
+own language. FERREIRA, the Portuguese poet, about the same time, with
+all the feelings of patriotism, resolved to give birth to a national
+literature; exhorting his countrymen to cultivate their vernacular
+idiom, which he purified and enriched. He has thus feelingly expressed
+this glorious sentiment--
+
+  Eu desta gloria so' fico contente
+  Que a minha terra amei, e a minha gente.
+
+In Scotland we find Sir DAVID LYNDSAY, in 1553, writing his great work
+on "The Monarchie," in his vernacular idiom, although he thought it
+necessary to apologise, by alleging the example of Moses, Aristotle,
+Plato, Virgil, and Cicero, who had all composed their works in their own
+language.
+
+In our own country Lord BERNERS had anticipated this general movement.
+In 1525, when he ventured on the toil of his voluminous and spirited
+Froissart, he described it as "translated out of Frenshe into our
+_maternal English tongue_;" an expression which indicates those filial
+yearnings of literary patriotism which were now to give us a native
+literature.
+
+The predominant prejudice of writing in Latin was first checked in
+Germany, France, and England by the leaders of that great Revolution
+which opposed the dynasty of the tiara. It was one of the great results
+of the Reformation, that it taught the learned to address the people.
+The versions of the Scriptures seemed to consecrate the vernacular idiom
+of every nation in Europe. Peter Waldo began to use the vernacular
+language in his version, however coarse, of the Bible for the Vaudois,
+those earliest Reformers of the Church; and though the volume was
+suppressed and prohibited, a modern French literary historian deduces
+the taste for writing in the maternal tongue to this rude but great
+attempt to attract the attention of the people. The same incident
+occurred in our own annals; and it was the English Bible of Edward the
+Sixth which opened the sealed treasures of our native language to the
+multitude. Calvin wrote his great work. "The Institute of the Christian
+Religion," at the same time in the Latin language and in the French; and
+thus it happens that both these works are alike original. Calvin deemed
+that to render the people intelligent their instructor should be
+intelligible; and that if books are written for a great purpose, they
+are only excellent in the degree that they are multiplied. Calvin
+addressed not a few erudite recluses, but a whole nation.
+
+It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the
+veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or
+rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry
+of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national
+tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new
+direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new
+mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who
+would have walled in public opinion by circumscribing all knowledge to a
+privileged class. A remarkable evidence of this disposition appears in
+an incident which occurred to Sir THOMAS WILSON, the author of two
+English treatises on the arts of Logic and of Rhetoric. An emigrant in
+the days of the Papistic Mary, he was arraigned at Rome before the
+Inquisition, on the general charge of heresy, but especially for having
+written his "Arts of Logic" and "of Rhetoric" in a language which, at
+least we may presume, the whole conclave could not have criticised. The
+torture was not only shown to him, but he tells us that "he had felt
+some smart of it." The dark inquisitors taught our critic a new canon in
+his own favourite arts; and our English Aristarchus soon discovered how
+far those perfidious arts of reasoning and of eloquence may betray the
+hapless orator, when his words are listened to by malicious judges,
+equally skilled in mutilating sentences, or catching at loose words.
+"They brought down my great heart by telling me plainly that my
+_defence_ had put me into further peril." Our baffled rhetorician saw
+that his only safety was to abstain from using the great instrument of
+his art, which was now locked up in silence. He was left, as he
+expresses himself, "without all help and without all hope, not only of
+liberty, but also of life." He escaped by a strange incident. It would
+seem that in an insurrection of the populace they set fire to the
+prison, and in a burst of popular freedom, forgetful of their bigotry,
+or from the spirit of vengeance on their hateful masters, they suffered
+the heretics to creep out of their cells; an ebullition of public spirit
+in "the worthy Romans," which the luckless English expounder of logic
+and rhetoric might well account as "an enterprise never before
+attempted." On Wilson's return to England be was solicited to revise his
+admirable "Art of Rhetoric," but he strenuously refused to "meddle with
+it, either hot or cold." Still smarting from the torture which his
+innocent progeny had occasioned, he seems to have alleviated his
+martyrdom with the quaint humour of a querulous prologue.
+
+In these awful transitions from one state of society to another, even
+the most sagacious are predisposed to discover what they secretly wish.
+Erasmus foresaw that a great change was approaching; but although he has
+delivered a prediction, it seems doubtful whether he had discerned the
+object aright. "I see," he writes, "a certain golden age ready to arise,
+which perhaps will not be my lot to partake of, yet I congratulate the
+world, and the younger sort I congratulate, in whose minds, however,
+Erasmus shall live and remain, by the remembrance of good offices he
+hath done." These "good offices" were restricted to his ardent labours
+in classical literature; but did Erasmus foresee in the change the
+subversion of the papal system by which Luther had often terrified the
+timid quietness of our gentle recluse, or the rise of the vernacular
+literature which had yet no existence? Erasmus, indeed, was so little
+sensible of this approaching change, that his amusing Colloquies, and
+his Panegyric on Folly, whose satirical humour had been so happily
+adapted to open the minds of men, he confined to the lettered circles;
+as Sir Thomas More did his "Utopia," which, had it been intelligible to
+the people, might have impressed them with some principles of political
+government. The Sage of Rotterdam imagined that the great movement of
+the age was to restore the classical pursuits of antiquity, and never
+dreamed of that which, in opposition to the ancient, soon obtained the
+distinction of "the New Learning," as it is expressed by Roger
+Ascham--the knowledge which was adapted to the wants and condition of
+the people. Erasmus would have been startled at the truth, that the
+language of antiquity would even be neglected by the generality of
+writers; that every European nation would have classics of their own;
+and that the finest geniuses would make their appeals to the people in
+the language of the people.
+
+The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued
+among the most illustrious writers both at home and abroad. A judicious
+critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his "Nero Cæsar,"
+recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by
+the classical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of
+"Chrysostom." It is indeed a curious circumstance that when an English
+play was performed at the University of Cambridge before Queen
+Elizabeth, the Vice-Chancellor was called on to remonstrate with the
+ministers of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the
+dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest
+against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of
+"Gammer Gurton's Needle," which was long considered to be the first
+attempt at English comedy.[6] This conduct of the University offered no
+encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their
+vernacular idiom.
+
+The genius of VERULAM, whose prescient views often anticipated the
+institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to
+have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. Lord BACON
+did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of
+embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that
+his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult
+in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of
+his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he
+had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses
+himself, in "that universal language which may last as long as books
+last." It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the
+learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think
+and write, and prefer his own "Essays," in their living pith, to the
+colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of
+the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our
+illustrious CAMDEN partook largely of this reigning fatuity when he
+wrote the reign of Elizabeth--the history of his contemporaries, and the
+"Britannia"--the history of our country, in the Latin language; as did
+BUCHANAN that of Scotland, and DE THOU his great history, which includes
+that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the
+deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.
+
+There was a peculiar absurdity in composing modern history in the
+ancient language of a people alike foreigners to the feelings as well as
+to the nature of the transactions. The Latin had neither proper terms to
+describe modern customs, nor fitting appellatives for titles and for
+names and places. The fastidious delicacy of the writers of modern
+latinity could not endure to vitiate their classical purity by the
+Gothic names of their heroes, and of the barbarous localities where
+memorable transactions had occurred. These great authors, in their
+despair, actually preferred to shed an obscurity over their whole
+history, rather than to disturb the collocation of their numerous
+diction. Buchanan and De Thou, by a ludicrous play on words, translated
+the proper names of persons and of places. A Scottish worthy,
+_Wiseheart_, was dignified by Buchanan with a Greek denomination,
+_Sophocardus_; so that in a history of Scotland the name of a
+conspicuous hero does not appear, or must be sought for in a Greek
+lexicon, which, after all, may require a punster for a reader. The
+history of De Thou is thus frequently unintelligible; and two separate
+indexes of names and places, and the public stations which his
+personages held, do not always agree with the copy preserved in the
+family. The names of the persons are latinised according to their
+etymology, and all public offices are designated by those Roman ones
+which bore some fancied affinity. But the modern office was ill
+indicated by the ancient; the constable of France, a military charge,
+differed from the _magister equitum_, and the marshals of France from
+the _tribunus equitum_. His equivocal personages are not always
+recognised in this travesty of their Roman masquerade.
+
+A remarkable instance of the gross impropriety of composing an English
+history in Latin, and of the obstinate prejudice of the learned, who
+imagined that the ancient idiom conferred dignity on a theme wholly
+vernacular, appeared when the delegates of Oxford purchased ANTHONY
+WOOD'S elaborate work on "The History and Antiquities of the University
+of Oxford." Our honest antiquary, with a true vernacular feeling, had
+written the history of an English university, during an uninterrupted
+labour of ten years, in his artless but natural idiom. The learned
+delegates opined that it was humiliating the Oxford press, to have its
+history pass through it in the language of the country; and Dr. Fell,
+with others, was chosen to dignify it into Latin. What was the result of
+this pompous and inane labour? The author was sorely hurt at the sight
+of his fair offspring disguised in its foreign and fantastic dress. What
+was clear in English, was obscure in the circumlocution of rotund
+periods and affected phraseologies; the circumstantial narrative and the
+local descriptions, so interesting to an English reader, were not only
+superfluous, but repulsive to the foreigner. ANTHONY WOOD indignantly
+re-transcribed the whole of his English copy, and left the fair volumes
+to the care of the university itself, not without the hope which has
+been realized, that his work should be delivered to posterity stamped by
+its author's native genius.[7]
+
+Such was the crisis, and such the difficulties and the obstructions of
+that native literature in whose prosperous state every European people
+now exults. Homogeneous with their habitual associations, moulded by
+their customs and manners, and everywhere stamped by the peculiar
+organization of each distinct race, we see the vernacular literature
+ever imbued with the qualities of the soil whence it springs,
+diversified, yet ever true to nature. Had the native genius of the great
+luminaries of literature not found a vein which could reach to the
+humblest of their compatriots, they who are now the creators of our
+vernacular literature had remained but pompous plagiarists or frigid
+babblers, and the moderns might still have been pacing in the trammels
+of a mimetic antiquity.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Sidonius Apollinaris.
+
+  [2] An ingenious literary antiquary has given us a copious
+    vocabulary, as complete evidence of Latin words merely abbreviated by
+    omitting their terminations, whence originated those numerous
+    monosyllables which impoverish the French language. In the following
+    instances the Gauls only used the first syllable for the entire word,
+    damnum--_damn_; aureum--_or_; malum--_mal_; nudum--_nud_;
+    amicus--_ami_: vinum--_vin_; homo--_hom_, as anciently written;
+    curtus--_court_; sonus--_son_; bonus--_bon_: and thus made many
+    others.
+
+    The nasal sound of our neighbours still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks
+    into _Gracque_; Titus Livius is but _Tite Live_; and the historian of
+    Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintus Curtius, is the ludicrous
+    _Quinte Curce_!--Auguis, "Du Génie de la Langue Françoise."
+
+  [3] Turner's "History of England."
+
+  [4] See "Curiosities of Literature," article Recovery of Manuscripts.
+
+  [5] ERASMUS composed a satirical dialogue between two vindictive
+    Ciceronians; it is said that a duel has been occasioned by the
+    intrepidity of maintaining the purity of a writer's latinity. The
+    pedantry of mixing Greek and Latin terms in the vernacular language
+    is ridiculed by RABELAIS in his encounter with the Limousin student,
+    whom he terrified till the youngster ended in delivering himself in
+    plain French, and left off "Pindarising" all the rest of his
+    days.--"Pantagruel," lib. ii. c. 6.
+
+  [6] Collier's "History of Dramatic Poetry," ii. 463.
+
+  [7] We now possess this valued literary history, which none, perhaps,
+    but Anthony à Wood could have so fervently pursued: "The History and
+    Antiquities of the University of Oxford," in five volumes, quarto.
+    Edited by John Gutch. It is a distinct work from the far-known
+    "Athenæ Oxonienses." Why did this great work, as well as some others,
+    come forth with a Latin title? This absurdity was a remaining taint
+    of the ancient prejudice. But an English work was not the more
+    classical for bearing a Latin title.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
+
+
+Johnson pronounced it impossible to ascertain when our speech ceased to
+be Saxon and began to be English; and although since his day English
+philology has extended its boundaries, the lines of demarcation are very
+moveable for the literary antiquary. At whatever point we set out, we
+may find that something which preceded has been omitted; a century may
+pass away and leave no precise epoch; and transitions of words and
+styles, like shades melting into each other, may elude perception. Too
+often wanting sufficient data, the toil of the antiquary becomes
+baffled, and the microscopic eye of the philologist pores on empty
+space. The learned have their theories; but in darkness we are doomed to
+grope, and in a circle we can fix on no beginning.
+
+The elegant researches of Ellis, the antiquarian lore of Ritson, the
+simplicity of taste of Percy, the poetic fervour of Campbell, the
+elaborate diligence of Sharon Turner, and more recent names skilled in
+Saxon lore, have given opposite hypotheses, conjectures, and
+refutations. "A modification of language is not in reality a change,"
+observes a powerful researcher in literary history,[1] who is at a loss
+"whether some compositions shall pass for the latest offspring of the
+mother, or the earliest fruit of the daughter's fertility"--a shrewd
+suspicion which the genealogists of words may entertain concerning the
+legitimate and the illegitimate, or the pure and the corrupt.
+
+The Saxon language had been tainted by some Latin terms from the
+ecclesiastics, and some fashionable Normanisms from the court of the
+Confessor; when the Norman-French, fatal as the arrow which pierced
+Harold, by a single blow struck down that venerable form--and never has
+it arisen! And now, with all its pomp, such as it was, it lies entombed
+and coffined in some scanty manuscripts.
+
+We indeed triumph that the language of our forefathers never did depart
+from the land, since it survived among the people. What survived? It
+soon ceased to be a written tongue, for no one cared to cultivate an
+idiom no longer required, and utterly contemned. After the Conquest, the
+miserable Saxons lost their "book-craft." We find nothing written but
+the continuation of a meagre chronicle. A few pietists still lingered in
+occasional homilies, and a solitary charter has been perpetuated; but
+the style was already changed, and as a literary language the
+Anglo-Saxon had for ever departed! It had sunk to the people, and they
+treated the ancient idiom after their fashion--the language of books
+served not simple men; laying aside its inflections, and its inversions,
+and its arbitrary construction, they chose a shorter and more direct
+conveyance of their thoughts, and only kept to a language fitted to the
+business of daily life. This getting free from the encumbrances of the
+Anglo-Saxon we may consider formed the obscure beginnings of THE ENGLISH
+LANGUAGE. All the gradual changes or the sudden innovations through more
+than two centuries may not be perceivable by posterity; but philologists
+have marked out how first the inversion was simplified, and then the
+inflections dropped; how the final E became mute, and at length was
+ejected; how ancient words were changed, and Norman neologisms
+introduced. As this English cleared itself of the nebulosity, the
+anomalies, and all the complex machinery of the mother idiom, a natural
+style was formed, very homely, for this vaunted Saxon now came from the
+mouths of the people, and from those friends of the people, the monks,
+who only wrote for their humble brother-Saxons. The English writers who
+were composing in French, and the more learned who displayed their
+clerkship by their Latinity, had a standard of literature which would
+regulate or advance their literary workmanship; but there was no
+standard in the language of bondage: it had mixed, as Ritson oddly
+describes it, "with one knows not what," a disorganization of words and
+idioms. Numerous DIALECTS pervaded the land; the east and the west
+agreed as ill together as both did with the north and the south; and
+they who wrote for the people each chose the dialect of their own
+shire.
+
+The "Saxon Chronicle," which closes with the year 1155, had been
+continued at progressive intervals by different writers; this authentic
+document of the Anglo-Saxon diction exhibits remarkable variations of
+style; and a critical Saxonist has detected the corruptions of its
+idiom, its inflections, and its orthography--in a word, that through
+successive periods it had suffered a material alteration in its
+character.[2]
+
+Somewhat more than a century after the Norman invasion, about 1180,
+Layamon made an English version of Wace's "Brut"--that French metrical
+chronicle which the Anglo-Norman had drawn from the Latin history of
+"Geoffry of Monmouth." Here we detect an entire changeableness of style,
+or rather a transformation; but what to call it the most skilful have
+not agreed. George Ellis drew a copious specimen of a writer unnoticed
+by Warton; but, confounded by "its strange orthography," and mournfully
+doubtful of his own meritorious glossary, he considered the style,
+"though simple and unmixed, yet a very barbarous Saxon." A recent critic
+opines that Layamon "seems to have halted between two languages, the
+written and the spoken." Mr. Campbell imagines it "the dawn" of our
+language; while some Saxonists have branded it as semi-Saxon. It seems a
+language thrown into confusion, struggling to adapt itself to a new
+state of things; it has no Norman-French, it is saturated with Saxon,
+but the sentences are freed from inversions.[3]
+
+About the same period as Layamon's version of Wace, we have a very
+original attempt of a writer, in those days of capricious pronunciation,
+to convey to the reader the orthoepy by regulating the orthography. As
+it is only recently that we have obtained any correct notion of a
+writing which has suffered many misconceptions from our earlier English
+scholars, the history of this work becomes a bibliographical curiosity.
+
+An ecclesiastic paraphrased the Gospel-histories. He was a critical
+writer, projecting a system to which he strictly adhered, warning his
+transcribers as punctually to observe, otherwise "they would not write
+the word right;" they were therefore "to write those letters twice which
+he had written so." The system consisted in doubling the consonant after
+a short vowel to regulate the pronunciation. He wrote broth_err_ and
+afft_err_; is _iss_, and it _itt_.[4]
+
+It is evident that this critical was also a refined writer; for it
+indicated some delicacy, when we find him apologising for certain
+additions in his version, which was metrical, not found in the original,
+and merely used by him for the convenience of filling up his metre. The
+first literary historians to whose lot it fell to record this anomalous
+work, among whom were HICKES and WANLEY, judging by appearances, in the
+superabundance of the rugged consonants, deemed this refined
+Anglo-Saxon's writing as the work of an ignorant scribe, or as a rude
+provincial dialect, or harsh enough to be the work of an English Dane;
+its metrical form eluded all detection, as the verses were a peculiar
+metre of fifteen syllables, all jumbled together as prose: as such they
+gave some extracts, but it is evident that this was done with little
+intelligence of their author. TYRWHIT, occupied on his "Chaucer," had a
+more percipient ear for these Anglo-Saxon metres, and discovered that
+this prose was strictly metrical; but he surely advanced no farther--he
+did not discover the writer's design that "the Ennglisshe writ" was for
+"Ennglisshe menn to lare"--to learn. Indeed, Tyrwhit, who complains that
+Hickes in noticing this peculiarity of spelling "has not explained the
+author's reason for it," himself so little comprehended the system of
+the double consonants, that in his extract, humorously "begging pardon"
+of this old and odd reformer whom the critic was not only offending,
+but massacring, "for not following his injunctions," he discards "all
+the superfluous letters!" not aware that it was the intention of the
+writer to preserve the orthoepy. Even our Anglo-Saxon historian missed
+the secret; for he has remarked on the words, that they were "needlessly
+loaded with double consonants." Yet he was not wholly insensible to the
+substantial qualities of the writer, for he discovered in the diction
+that "the order of words is uniformly more natural, the inflections are
+more unfrequent, and the phrases of our English begin to emerge." And,
+finally, our latest authority decides that this work, so long
+misinterpreted, is "the oldest, the purest, and by far the most valuable
+specimen of our old English dialect that time has left us."[5]
+
+What is "old English" is the question. The title of this work may have
+perplexed the first discoverers as much as the double consonants. The
+writer was an ecclesiastic of the name of ORM, and he was so fascinated
+with his own work for the purity of its diction, and the precision of
+its modulated sounds, that in a literary rapture he baptized it with
+reference to himself; and _Orm_ fondly called his work the _Ormulum_!
+One hardly expected to meet with such a Narcissus of literature in an
+old Anglo-Saxon, philologist of the year so far gone by, yet we now find
+that Orm might fairly exult in his Ormulum!
+
+Nearly a century after Layamon, in the same part of England, the monk,
+ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER, wrote his "Chronicle," about 1280. This honest
+monk painfully indited for his brother-Saxons the whole history of
+England, in the shape of Alexandrine verse in rhyme; the diction of the
+verse approaches so nearly to prose, that it must have been the
+colloquial idiom of the west. The "Ingliss," as it was called in the
+course of the century between Layamon and Robert of Gloucester, betrays
+a striking change; and modern philologists have given the progressive
+term of "middle English" to the language from this period to the
+Reformation.[6] Our chronicler has fared ill with posterity, of whom
+probably he never dreamt. Robert of Gloucester, who is entirely divested
+of a poetical character, as are all rhyming chroniclers, has had the
+hard hap of being criticised by two merciless poets; and, to render his
+uncouthness still more repulsive, the black-letter fanaticism of his
+editor has vauntingly arrayed the monk whom he venerated in the sable
+Gothic, bristling with the Saxon characters.[7] It has therefore
+required something like a physical courage to sit down to Robert of
+Gloucester. Yet in the rhymer whom Warton has degraded, Ellis has
+discovered a metrical annalist whose orations are almost eloquent, whose
+characters of monarchs are energetic, and what he records of his own age
+matter worthy of minute history.
+
+Another monk, ROBERT MANNYNG, of Brunne, or Bourne, in Lincolnshire, who
+had versified PIERS LANGTOFT'S "Chronicle," has left a translation of
+the "Manuel des Péchés," ascribed to Bishop Grosteste, who composed it
+in politer French. In this "Manual of Sins," or, as he terms it, "A
+Handlyng of Sinne," according to monkish morality and the monkish
+devices to terrify sinners, our recreative monk has introduced short
+tales, some grave, and some he deemed facetious, which convey an idea of
+domestic life and domestic language. It is not without curiosity that we
+examine these, the earliest attempts at that difficult trifle--the art
+of telling a short tale, Robert de Brunne is neither a Mat Prior nor a
+La Fontaine, but he is a block which might have been carved into one or
+the other, and he shows that without much art a tale may be tolerably
+told.[8] His octosyllabic verse is more fluent than the protracted
+Alexandrine of his "Chronicle." The words fall together in natural
+order, and we seem to have advanced in this rude and artless "Ingliss."
+But the most certain evidence that "the English" was engaging the
+attention of those writers who professedly were devoting their pens to
+those whom they called "the Commonalty," is, that they now began to
+criticise; and we find Robert de Brunne continually protesting against
+"strange Ingliss." This phrase has rather perplexed our inquirers.
+"Strange Ingliss" would seem to apply to certain novelties in diction
+used by the tale-reciters and harpers, for so our monk tells us,
+
+                 "I wrote
+  In symple speeche as I couthe,
+  That is _lightest in manne's mouthe_.
+  I mad (made) nought for no disoúrs (tale-tellers),
+  Ne for no seggers nor harpoúrs,
+  Bot for the luf (love) of symple menu
+  That _strange Inglis_ cann not ken."
+
+It was about this time that the metrical romances, translated from the
+French, spread in great number, and introduced many exotic phrases. In
+the celebrated romance of "Alisaundre" we find French expressions,
+unalloyed by any attempt at Anglicising them, overflowing the page. The
+phrase is, however, once applied to certain strange metres which our
+monk avoided, for many "that read English would be confounded by them."
+
+Whatever Robert de Brunne might allude to by his "strange Ingliss,"[9]
+the same cry and the identical expressions are repeated by a writer not
+many years afterwards--RICHARD ROLLE, called "the Hermit of Hampole." He
+produced the earliest versions of the Psalms into English prose, with a
+commentary on each verse; and a voluminous poem in ten thousand lines,
+entitled "The Prikke of Conscience," translated from the Latin for "the
+unletterd men of Engelonde who can only understand English." In the
+prologue to this first Psalter in English prose he says, "I seke no
+_straunge Ynglyss_, bot _lightest_ and _communest_, and wilk (such) that
+is most like unto the Latyn; and thos I fine (I find) no proper Inglis I
+felough (follow) the wit of the words, so that thai that knowes noght
+(not) the Latyne, be (by) the Ynglys may come to many Latyne wordys."
+Here we arrive at open corruption! Already a writer appears refined
+enough to complain of the poverty of the language in furnishing "proper
+Inglis" or synonymes for the Latin; the next step must follow, and that
+would be in due time the latinising "the Ynglys."
+
+A great curiosity of the genuine homeliness of our national idiom at
+this time has come down to us in a manuscript in the Arundel
+Collection, now in our national library. It is a volume written by a
+monk of St. Austin's at Canterbury, in the Kentish dialect, about a
+century and a half after Layamon, and half a century after Robert of
+Gloucester, in 1340. This honest monk, like others of the Saxon
+brotherhood, was writing for his humbled countrymen, or, as he expresses
+himself, with a rude Doric simplicity,
+
+  Vor Vader and for Moder and for other Ken.
+
+I throw into a note what I have transcribed of this specimen of the old
+Saxon-English, or, as it is called, "Semi-Saxon."[10] In this specimen
+of the language as spoken by the people the barbarism is native, pure in
+its impurity, and unalloyed by any spurious exotic. This English spoken
+in the Weald of Kent, Caxton tells us, in his time, was "as broad and
+rude English as is spoken in any place in England." When contrasted with
+the diction of a northern bard, whom a singular accident retrieved for
+us,[11] it offers a curious picture of the English language, so
+different at precisely the same period. The minstrel's flow of verse
+almost anticipates the elegance of a writer of two centuries later.
+
+The poems of LAURENCE MINOT consist of ten narrative ballads on some of
+the wars of Edward the Third in Scotland and in France. The events this
+bard records show that his writings were completed in 1352. His editor
+is surprised that "the great monarch whom he so eloquently and so
+earnestly panegyrised was either ignorant of his existence or insensible
+of his merit." Minot was probably nothing more than a northern minstrel,
+whose celebrity did not extend many leagues. His verses convey to us a
+perfect conception of the minstrel character, throwing out his almost
+extemporaneous "Lays" on the predominant incidents of his day. All these
+narrative poems open by soliciting the attention of the auditors:--
+
+  LITHES! and I sall tell you tyll
+  The bataile of Halidon Hyll.
+
+And in another,--
+
+  HERKINS how long King Edward lay,
+  With his men before Tournay.
+
+The singularity of these "Lays" consists in coming down to us in a
+written form, evidently with great care and fondness, bearing their
+author's unknown name. They might have appropriately been preserved in
+Percy's "Reliques of English Poetry."[12]
+
+Three centuries had now passed, and still the national genius languished
+in the Norman bondage of the language. But the commonalty were
+increasing in number and in weight, and an indignant sense of the
+destitution of a national language was not confined to the laity; it was
+attracting the attention of those who thought and who wrote. Richard of
+Bury, Bishop of Durham, who put forth the first bibliographical treatise
+by an Englishman, and may he ranked among the earliest critical
+collectors of a private library, in his celebrated treatise on the love
+of books, the "Philo-biblion,"[13] breathes all the enthusiasm of study;
+but while he directs our attention to the classical writers of
+antiquity, he stimulates his contemporaries to emulate them by composing
+new books. Although he himself wrote in Latin, he regrets that no
+institution for children in the English language existed; and he
+complains, that our English youth "first learned the French, and from
+the French the Latin." Our youth were sent into France to polish their
+nasal Norman. This writer flourished about 1330, and thus ascertains,
+that in the beginning of the reign of Edward III. no English was taught.
+The "Polychronicon," a Latin chronicle compiled by the monk Higden, was
+finished somewhat later, about 1365; and we find the complaint more
+bitterly renewed. "There is no nation," wrote this honest monk, "whose
+children are compelled to leave their own language, as we have since the
+Normans came into England. A gentleman's child must speak French from
+the time that he is rocked in a cradle, or plays with a child's breche."
+
+The Latin Chronicle of Higden, twenty years later, was translated into
+English by John de Trevisa. On this passage the translator furnishes the
+important observation, that, since this was written, a revolution had
+occurred through our grammar-schools: the patriotic efforts of one Sir
+John Cornewaile, in teaching his pupils to construe their Latin into
+English, had been generally adopted; "so that now," proceeds Trevisa,
+"the yere of our Lorde 1385, in all the grammere scoles of Engelond,
+children leaveth Frensche and construeth and lerneth in Englische." The
+innovation had startled our translator, for, like all innovations, there
+was loss as well as profit, when, quitting what we are accustomed to,
+we launch dubiously into a new acquisition. The disuse of the French
+would detriment their intercourse abroad, and, on great occasions, at
+home. This was a time when Trevisa himself, in selecting some Scriptural
+inscriptions for the chapel of Berkley Castle, where he was chaplain,
+had them painted on boards in Norman-French, and Latin, in alternate
+lines. They are still visible. English itself was yet too base for the
+service of God.
+
+It was still a debateable question, as appears by the prefatory dialogue
+between Trevisa and his patron, Lord Berkley, whether any translation of
+the Chronicle were at all necessary, Latin being the general language.
+It was, however, a noble enterprise, being the first great effort in our
+vernacular prose. This mighty volume is a universal history, which, in
+its amplitude and miscellaneous character, seemed to contain all that
+men could know; and the version long enjoyed the favour of all readers
+as the first historical collection in the English language. It bears the
+seal of the monkish taste, being equally pious and fabulous. It not only
+opens before the days of Adam, but, like the creation, has its seven
+divisions; it has monsters, however, which are not found in Genesis. The
+monk is doubtful whether they came of Adam or of Noah. They, indeed,
+came from the elder Pliny, to whose puerile wonders and hasty
+compilation we owe the foundation of our natural history.
+
+It was about the period that Higden concluded his labours, that Sir John
+Mandeville deemed it wise, having written his Travels in Latin and
+French, to compose them also in the vernacular idiom;--a strong
+indication of the rising disposition to cultivate the national tongue.
+The policy of our Government now accorded with the general disposition;
+and hence originated the noble decision of Edward III., in 1362, to
+banish from our courts of law the Norman-French; but so awkward seemed
+this great novelty, that the statute is written in the very language it
+abolishes,[14] and, indeed, to which our great lawyers, the timid
+slaves of precedents, long afterwards clung in their barbarous
+law-French phrases mingled with their native English.
+
+A mightier movement even than the royal decree in favour of fostering
+the national language was a translation of the Scriptures, by the
+intrepid spirit of Wickliffe. This had been done with the pledge of his
+life, for that was often in peril while he thus struck the first impulse
+of that reformation which not only influenced his own age, but one more
+remote. The translation of Wickliffe was a new revelation of the Word of
+God in the language of many. The streets were crowded with Lollards, as
+his followers were denominated, of which, like similar odious names
+attached to a rising party, the origin remains uncertain; Lollardy was,
+however, a convenient term to describe treason in the Church and the
+State. Wickliffe's translation of the Old Testament still lies in
+numerous manuscripts, for our cold neglect of which we have incurred the
+censure of the foreigner. The New Testament has happily been
+printed.[15]
+
+If we place by the side of the text of Wickliffe our later versions, we
+may become familiar with that Saxon-English which our venerable Caxton
+subsequently considered was "more like to Dutch than English."
+
+But the picturesque language of our emotions, the creative diction of
+poetry, appeared in the courtly style of Chaucer, who nobly designed to
+render the national language refined and varied, while his great
+contemporaries, the author of Piers Ploughman lingered in a rude
+dialect, and Gower was still composing alternately in Latin and in
+French.
+
+The emancipation of the national language was subsequently confirmed by
+another monarch. A curious anecdote in our literary history has recently
+been disclosed of Henry V. To encourage the use of the vernacular
+tongue, this monarch, in a letter missive to one of the city companies,
+declared that "_the English tongue hath in modern days begun to be
+honourably enlarged and adorned, and for the better understanding of the
+people_ the common idiom should be exercised in writing:" this was at
+once setting aside the Norman-French and the Latin for the daily
+business of civil life. By this record it appears that many of the craft
+of brewers, to whose company this letter was addressed, had "knowledge
+of writing and reading in the English idiom, but Latin and French they
+by no means understood." We further learn that now "the LORDS and the
+COMMONS BEGAN _to have their proceedings noted down in the mother
+tongue_;" and this example was therefore to be followed by the city
+companies.[16]
+
+At this advanced age of transition, so unsettled was the language of
+ordinary affairs, that the same document bears evidence of three
+different idioms. We find the petition of an Irish chieftain, a prisoner
+in the Tower, written in the French language, while the endorsed royal
+answer is in English, and the order of the council in Latin.[17] The
+bulletins of Henry V. to the mayor and aldermen of London are written in
+English, but endorsed in French.
+
+As if they designed to hold out a model to their subjects and to
+sanction the use of their native English, both this prince, and his
+father, Henry IV., left their wills in the national language,[18] at a
+time when the nobles employed Latin or French for such purposes.
+
+There has often existed a sympathy between ourselves and our near
+neighbours of France, when not disturbed by war. This great movement of
+establishing a national language, and freeing themselves from the Roman
+bondage, was tried at a later period by the French government, who were
+nearly baffled in the attempt. An ordinance of Louis XII. was issued _to
+abolish the use of the Latin tongue_; but such was the prejudice in
+favour of the ancient language, that notwithstanding that the Latin of
+the bar had degenerated into the most ludicrous barbarism, the lawyers
+were unwilling to yield to the popular wish. The use of Latin in France
+in all legal instruments lasted till the succeeding reign of Francis I.,
+who, by two ordinances, declared that THE FRENCH LANGUAGE should be
+solely used in all public acts. It was, however, as late as forty years
+after, in 1629, that at length the public offices consented to draw
+their instruments in their vernacular language.[19] So long has general
+improvement to contend with the force of habit and the passion of
+prepossession; and such were the difficulties which the vernacular style
+of both these great empires had to overcome.
+
+When the learned HICKES, in his patriotic fervour to trace the
+legitimacy of the English from its parent language, adjudged that
+"nine-tenths of our words were of Saxon origin," he exultingly appealed
+to the Lord's Prayer, wherein there are only three words of French or
+Latin extraction. This startled TYRWHIT, then busied on his Chaucerian
+glossary, and who in that labour had before him a different aspect of
+our mottled English. That was not the day when writers would maintain
+opinions against authority. Awed by the great Saxonist, the poetical
+antiquary compromised, alleging that "though the _form_ of our language
+was still Saxon, yet the _matter_ was in a great measure French." His
+successor in English philology, GEORGE ELLIS, still further faltered and
+arbitrated; suggesting that the great Saxonist, to complete his
+favourite scheme, would trace some _old Gaulish_ French to a _Teutonic_
+origin. In tracing the formation of the English language, we are
+sensible that the broad and solid foundations lie in the Saxon, but the
+superstructure has often, with a magical movement, varied in its
+architecture. An enamoured Saxonist has recently ventured to assert that
+"English is but another term for Saxon;" but an ocular demonstration has
+been exhibited in specimens of the _modern English_ of our
+master-writers, marking by italics all the words of Saxon derivation. By
+these it appears that the translators of the Bible have happily
+preserved for us the pristine simplicity of our Saxon-English, like the
+light in a cathedral through its storied and saintly window, shedding
+its antique hues on hallowed objects. But as we advance, we discover in
+our most eminent writers the anglicisms diminish; and SHARON TURNER has
+observed that a fifth of the Saxon language has ceased to be used. A
+recent critic[20] has curiously calculated that the English language,
+now consisting of about 38,000 words, contains 23,000, or nearly
+five-eighths, Anglo-Saxon in their origin; that in our most idiomatic
+writers, there is about one-tenth _not_ Anglo-Saxon, and in our least
+about one-third.[21] A cry of our desertion of our Saxon purity has
+been raised by those who have not themselves practised it in their more
+elevated compositions; but are we to deem that English corrupted which
+recedes from its Saxon character, and compels the daughter to lose the
+likeness of her mother? Are we to banish to perpetuity those foreigners
+who have already fructified our Saxon soil? In an age of extended
+literature, conversant with objects and productive of associations which
+never entered into the experience of our forefathers, the ancient
+language of the people must necessarily prove inadequate; a new language
+must start out of new conceptions. Look into our present "exchequer of
+words;" there lies many a refined coinage struck out of the arts and the
+philosophies of Europe. Every word which genius creates, and which time
+shall consecrate, is a possession of the language which must be
+inscribed into that variable doomsday book of words--the English
+Dictionary. Devotees of Thor and Woden! the day of your idolatries has
+passed, and your remonstrances are vain as your superstitions.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Mr. Hallam.
+
+  [2] Dr. Bosworth.
+
+  [3] Of this recondite writer Ellis has said, "probably Layamon never
+    will be printed;" but we live in an age of publication, and Layamon
+    is said to be actually in the press. [Since this was written, the
+    work has been published at the cost of the Society of Antiquaries,
+    under the editorial care of Sir Frederick Madden.]
+
+  [4] Dr. Bosworth, or Mr. Thorpe, has explained this attempt more
+    fully. "From this idea of doubling the consonant after a short vowel,
+    as in German, we are enabled to form some tolerably accurate notions
+    as to the pronunciation of our forefathers. Thus, Orm (or Ormin)
+    writes _min_ and _win_ with a single _n_ only, and _lif_ with a
+    single f, because the i is long, as in _mine_, _wine_, and _life_. On
+    the other hand, wherever the consonant is doubled, the vowel
+    preceding is sharp and short, as _winn_, pronounced _win_, not
+    _wine_."--"Origin of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages," 24.
+
+  [5] Guest's "Hist. of English Rhythms," ii. 186.
+
+  [6] During the thirteenth century, the organic change proceeded so
+    rapidly that there is quite as wide a difference between the language
+    of Layamon and that which was written at the beginning of the
+    fourteenth century (about the time of Robert of Gloucester), as there
+    is between the English language of the reign of Edward the Second and
+    the tongue of the present day.--See Mr. Wright's learned "Essay on
+    the Literature of the Anglo-Saxons," 107.
+
+  [7] Hearne, in his preface, exclaims in ecstacy--"This is the _first
+    book_ ever printed in this kingdom, it may be in _the whole world, in
+    the black letter_, with a mixture of _the Saxon characters_, which is
+    the very garb that was in vogue in the author's time, that is, in the
+    thirteenth century." Hearne often claims our gratitude, while his
+    earnest simplicity will extort a smile. On our ancient Bibles he
+    could not refrain from exclaiming--"Though I have taken so much
+    pleasure in perusing the English Bible of the year 1541, yet 'tis
+    nothing equal to that I should take in turning over that of the year
+    1539." His antiquarianism kindled his piety over Cranmer's Bible.
+
+    Thomas was haunted by a chimera that whatever was obsolete deserved
+    to be revived. This honest spirit of antiquarianism, working on a
+    most undiscerning intellect, seems to have kindled into a literary
+    bigotry in his sateless delight of "the black-letter of our
+    grandfathers' days." Hearne set this unhappy example of printing
+    ancient writers with all their obsolete repulsiveness in orthography
+    and type. He was closely followed by RITSON, and by WHITAKER in his
+    edition of "Piers Ploughman;" and these editors assuredly have scared
+    away many a neophyte in our vernacular literature. RITSON printed his
+    "Ancient Songs" with the Saxon characters and abbreviations, which
+    render them often unintelligible. This literary antiquary lived to
+    regret this superstitious antiquarianism. He had prepared a new
+    edition entirely cleared of these offences, but which unfortunately
+    he destroyed at the morbid close of his life.
+
+  [8] Turner's "History of England," v. 217, will furnish the curious
+    reader readily with several of these specimens of the modes of
+    thinking and of acting of the middle ages, when monks only were the
+    preceptors of mankind.
+
+  [9] This term of "strange Ingliss" has yet been found so obscure as
+    to occasion some strictures, which, like the Interpreter in the
+    Critic, are the most difficult to comprehend. I must refer to
+    Monsieur Thierry's very delightful "History of the Conquest of
+    England," ii. 271, for a very refined speculation on our Robert de
+    Brunne's unlucky obscurity. Monsieur Thierry imagines that the
+    "strange Ingliss" was the refined English which had flown into
+    Scotland, and there become the cultivated language of the minstrels
+    and the court, and which our hapless Saxons on _this side of the
+    Tweed_ had sunk into a dialect only fitted for serfs. This finer and
+    more elevated English could not be understood by a base commonalty;
+    this was "strange Ingliss" to them. A very interesting event in the
+    history of both nations had transplanted the purer English to the
+    Scottish court:--Malcolm, whom the usurpation of Macbeth had driven
+    from the Scottish throne, was expatriated in England during an
+    interval of near twenty years; the affection of the monarch for the
+    English was such, that he adopted their language, and when the royal
+    family of England was expelled by the Conqueror, the king received
+    them and the emigrant Saxons, and married the English princess. This
+    gave rise to that intercourse with the south of Scotland, of which
+    the result in our literary, if not in our civil, history is
+    remarkable. Certain it is that much broad Scotch is good old English,
+    and the noblest minstrelsy cometh "fra the North Countrie."
+
+  [10] On the leaf appears, in the handwriting of the author, "This Boc
+    is Dan Michelis of Northgate ywrite an Englis of his ozene hand that
+    hatte _Ayenbyte of inwyt_, and is of the boc-house of Seynt Austyn's
+    of Cantorberi." The writer was seventy years of age; and he tells us
+    that he was not--
+
+      "Blind, and dyaf, and alsuo dumb,
+      Of zeventy yer al not rond,
+      Ne ssette by draze to the grond,
+      Uor peny nor mark, ne nor pond."
+
+    At the end the monk tells us for whom he writes--
+
+      "Nou ich wille that ye ywite hou hitt is ywent
+      Thet this Boc is ywrite mid Engliss of Kent.
+      This Boc is ymade vor lewede men,
+      Vor Vader and vor Moder and vor other Ken,
+      Ham vor to berze uram alle manyere Zen
+      Thet ine have inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen.
+      Huo ase God is his name yzed
+      Thet this Boc made God him yeue that bread
+      Of Angles of Hauene and thereto his red,
+      And underuongè his Zoule, huanne that is dyad."
+
+  [11] While Tyrwhit was busied on the "Canterbury Tales" his attention
+    was excited by the old cataloguer of the Cottonian manuscripts to a
+    _Chaucer exemplar emendate scriptum_. On a spare leaf the name of
+    Richard Chawfer had been scrawled, which might have been that of some
+    former possessor. There are two fatalities which hang over the pen of
+    a slumbering cataloguer--ignorance and indolence. Our present one
+    caught an immortal name and never travelled onwards; and, struck by
+    the fairness of the writing, inferred that it was a copy of Chaucer
+    critically accurate. It turned out to be the compositions of an
+    unknown poet who not willingly relinquished his claim on posterity,
+    for he has subscribed his name, LAURENCE MINOT. [The manuscript is
+    marked Galba, E. IX.; specimens were first published from it by
+    Tyrwhit and Warton, and the entire series ultimately by Ritson.]
+
+  [12] Ritson's first edition (1795) of Minot having become very
+    difficult to procure, an elegant re-impression, and apparently a
+    correct one, was published in 1825.
+
+  [13] "Philobiblion, sive de Amore Librorum et Institutione
+    Bibliothecæ," ascribed to Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham; but
+    Fabricius says it was written by Robert Holcot, a learned friar, at
+    his desire.--Fab. "Bib. Med. Ævi," vol. i. It is the bishop, however,
+    who was the collector, and always speaks in his own person. It has
+    been recently translated by Mr. Inglis.
+
+  [14] Barrington on the Statutes.
+
+    In Blackstone's "Commentaries," book iii. chap. 21, we find much
+    curious information, and some philosophical reflections. The use of
+    the technical law-Latin is adroitly defended. Under Cromwell the
+    records were turned into English; at the Restoration the practisers
+    declared they could not express themselves so significantly in
+    English, and they returned to their Latin. In 1730, a statute ordered
+    that the proceedings at law should be done into English, that the
+    common people might understand the process, &c. But after many years'
+    experience the people are as ignorant in matters of law as before,
+    and suffer the inconveniences of increasing _the expense of all legal
+    proceedings_ by being bound by the stamp-duties to write only a
+    stated number of words in a sheet, _and the English language, through
+    the multitude of its particles, is so much more verbose than the
+    Latin, that the number of sheets is much augmented_. Two years
+    subsequently it was necessary to make a new act to allow all
+    technical terms to continue Latin, which were too ridiculous to be
+    translated, such as _nisi prius, fieri facias, habeas corpus_. This
+    last act, in 1732, has defeated every beneficial purpose intended by
+    the preceding statute of 1730.
+
+    One hardly expected to find philological acumen in the dry discussion
+    of law-Latin, but when the _three_ words, "_secundum formam
+    statuti_," require _seven_ in English, "according to the form of the
+    statute," one easily comprehends the heavy weight of the _stamp-duty_
+    for _writing English_. The Saxons, who made no use of particles of
+    speech, had more merit than we were aware of.
+
+  [15] By the Rev. JOHN LEWIS, 1731, fo., and republished by the Rev.
+    H. H. BABER, 1810, 4to.
+
+    The censure of Fabricius deserves our notice. After mention of
+    Wickliffe's version of the Bible, he adds, "Mirum est Anglos eam
+    (versionem) tam diu neglexisse quum vel linguæ causa ipsis in pretio
+    esse debeat."--"Bib. Lat.," v. 321.
+
+    It is provoking to be reminded of our neglected duties by a
+    foreigner. We might assuredly be curious to learn how the sublimity
+    and the colloquial and narrative parts of this vast treasure of our
+    ancient language were produced under the primitive pen of Wickliffe.
+    A fine copy of Wickliffe's Bible was in the library of Mr. Douce, and
+    I have heard, with great satisfaction, that it will probably be
+    edited by Sir Francis Madden.
+
+  [16] Herbert's "History of the City Companies."
+
+  [17] I derive this curious fact from Mr. Tyler's "History of Henry of
+    Monmouth," ii. 245.
+
+  [18] These wills are preserved in Mr. Nichols' "Collection of Royal
+    Wills."
+
+  [19] Le Comte de Neufchateau, "Essay on French Literature," prefixed
+    to the late edition of Pascal's works.
+
+  [20] "Edinburgh Review," Oct., 1839.
+
+  [21] See "Quarterly Rev.," lix. 34.--The critic is deeply imbued with
+    his delight of Saxon-English. "The first bursts in our literature
+    (probably the noblest are meant) are in almost pure Saxon." The
+    critic particularly appeals to Milton for two instances; yet surely
+    the Greekised, the Latinised, and even the Italianised Milton will
+    not serve to assert the pre-eminence of our venerable dialect. "A
+    country congregation" is its more certain test; where the language of
+    the people is the only language required. Cobbett's writings
+    throughout are Saxon-English. Coleridge considered Asgill and De Foe
+    the most idiomatic writers.
+
+
+
+
+VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
+
+
+The vicissitudes of the English language are more evident than its
+origin. In the history of a language we are perpetually reminded, by the
+remonstrances of the critics, of the corruptions of its purity, the
+perils of innovation, and the obtrusion of neologisms, while we find
+these same critics fastidiously rejecting what they deem the antiquated
+and the obsolete; many causes are constantly operating these changes of
+language. The style of one age ceases to be that of another; new
+modifications of thought create new modes of expression; and as
+knowledge enlarges its sphere, and society changes its manners, novel
+objects imperiously demand adequate terms.
+
+Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history
+of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our
+destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse
+with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by
+foreign neologisms.
+
+For more than five centuries was the Saxon language the language of
+England; the awful revolution of 1066 produced novelties of all kinds,
+but none greater than the entire change in our Saxon language, which,
+however, our Norman masters could never eradicate from among the people.
+During three centuries most of our English writers composed in French.
+When Greek was first studied in the reign of Henry the Seventh, it
+planted many a hellenism in our English; the translation of the
+Scriptures in that of Edward the Sixth, while it transmitted many
+latinisms, at the same time revived the simplicity of the Saxon-English,
+which seemed to bear a sort of evidence that a primitive language was
+most suitable for primitive Christianity in contrast with the pompous
+corruptions of Rome.
+
+Under Elizabeth favourite phrases were insinuated into the dialect by
+over-refined travellers, who spoke "minionlike," while the revolution
+of the Netherlands incorporated among us many a rough but vigorous
+inmate. In the days of James and Charles, the long residence of the
+Spanish Gondomar at our court, and the romantic pilgrimage of love to
+Madrid, and the political ties which bound the two nations, framed the
+style of courtesy, as well as set the fashions.
+
+The puritanic commonwealth under Cromwell sunk down the language to its
+basest uses. Stripped to nakedness, the jargon of the market and the
+shop hid itself under the gibberish of its cant. Writers then abounded
+equally illiterate and fanatical. Perhaps we owe to these mean
+scribblers the scorn and pride with which Milton constructed on the
+Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial
+and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was
+never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for
+its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman.
+Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally
+gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment
+that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the
+Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have
+been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, destitute of every
+sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished
+Duke of Weimar at St. James's, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe
+at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in
+our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English
+language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national
+events.
+
+The history of the vernacular language of other European nations
+discovers the same mutability, though not always produced by those great
+public incidents which may have been peculiar to ourselves. In Spain,
+however, we find that the possession of that land by the Moors has left
+in the Castilian language a whole dictionary of Arabic words which now
+mingle with the vernacular idiom, and for ever shall bear witness of the
+triumphs of their ancient masters. But in the history of a vernacular
+language it may also happen that the first writers, combining in a
+singleness of taste, may construct a particular style. The earliest
+writers of France had modelled their taste by the Greek; Jodelle,
+Ronsard, Du Bartas, and others, imbued with Attic literature, Greekised
+the French idiom, by their compounds, their novel terms, and their
+sonorous periphrases. The Court and the ladies were adopting this new
+style, and, as usual, the unskilful were diverging into the most
+ridiculous affectations. But it was possible that the French language
+might have acquired a concision and vigour of which it is now destitute,
+for those early writers threw out a more original force than their tame
+successors. The artificial delicacy of the French critics has condemned
+these attempts as barbarisms; but to have transplanted these atticisms
+into the native soil, partook more of boldness than of barbarism. The
+attempt failed, if it could ever have succeeded, by the civil wars which
+soon drew off the minds of men from the placable innovators of language.
+
+The French, though not an insular people, have been subject to rapid
+revolutions in their language. The ancient Gaulish-French has long been
+as unintelligible to a modern Frenchman as our Saxon is to us; even
+those numerous poets of France who at a later period composed in their
+_langue Romane_, are strewed in the fields of their poesy only as
+carcasses, which no miracle of antiquarian lore shall ever resuscitate.
+Compare the style of one writer with another only two centuries later,
+or Rabelais with Voltaire! The age of Louis XIV. effected the most rapid
+change in the vernacular style, insomuch that the diction of the writers
+of the preceding reign of Louis XIII. had fallen obsolete in the short
+space of half a century. And yet the chastened style of the age of Louis
+XIV., with its cold imitation of classical antiquity, was to receive a
+higher polish from the hand of a Pascal, a novel brilliancy from the
+touch of a Montesquieu, and a more numerous prose from the impassioned
+Rousseau. The age of erudition and taste was to be succeeded by the more
+energetic age of genius and philosophy. An anecdote recorded of Vaugelas
+may possibly be true, and is a remarkable evidence of this perpetual
+mobility of style. This writer lived between 1585 and 1650, and during
+thirty years had been occupied, _more suo_, on a translation of Quintus
+Curtius. It was during this protracted period that the French style was
+passing through its rapid transitions. So many phrases had fallen
+superannuated, that this martyr to the purity of his diction was
+compelled to re-write the former part of his version to modernise it
+with his later improved composition. The learned Menage lived to be old
+enough to have caught alarm at this vicissitude of taste, and did not
+scruple to avow that no work could last which was not composed in Latin.
+
+The languages of highly cultivated nations are more subject to this
+innovation and variableness than the language of a people whose native
+penury receives but rare accessions. Hence the ancient and continued
+complaints through all the generations of critics, from the days of
+Julius Cæsar and Quintilian to those in which we are now writing.[1] The
+same hostility against novelty in words or in style is invariably
+proclaimed. The captiousness of criticism has usually referred to the
+style of the preceding authors as a standard from which the prevalent
+style of its contemporaries has erringly diverged. The preceptors of
+genius at all times seem to have been insensible to the natural progress
+of language, resisting new qualities of style and new forms of
+expression; in reality, this was inferring, that a perfect language
+exists, and that a creative genius must be trammelled by their limited
+and arbitrary systems. This prejudice of the venerable brotherhood may,
+I think, be traced to its source. Every age advantageously compares
+itself with its predecessor, for it has made some advances, and rarely
+suspects that the same triumph is reserved for its successor; but
+besides this illusion in regard to the style, which, like the manners of
+the time, is passing away, the veteran critic has long been a practised
+master, and in the daring and dubious novelties which time has not
+consecrated, he must descend to a new pupilage; but his rigid habits are
+no longer flexible; and for the matured arbiter of literature who tastes
+"the bitterness of novelty," what remains but an invective against the
+minting of new words, and the versatility of new tastes?
+
+The fallacy of the systematic critics arises from the principle that a
+modern language is stationary and stable, like those which are
+emphatically called "the dead languages," in which every deviation
+unsupported by authority is legally condemned as a barbarism. But the
+truth is, that every modern language has always existed in fluctuation
+and change. The people themselves, indeed, are no innovators; their very
+phrases are traditional. Popular language can only convey the single
+uncompounded notions of the people; it is the style of facts; and they
+are intelligible to one another by the shortest means. Their
+Saxon-English is nearly monosyllabic, and their phraseology curt. Hence
+we find that the language of the mob in the year 1382 is precisely the
+natural style of the mob of this day.[2] But this popular style can
+never be set up as the standard of genius, which is mutable with its
+age, creating faculties and embodying thoughts which do not enter into
+the experience of the people, and therefore cannot exercise their
+understandings.
+
+A series of facts will illustrate our principle, that the language of
+every literary people exists in a fluctuating condition, and that its
+vaunted purity and its continued stability are chimerical notions.
+
+In this history of the vicissitudes of the English language, we may
+commence with our remote ancestors the Anglo-Saxons. When their studies
+and their language received a literary character, they coveted great
+pomposity in their style. They interlarded their staves with Latin
+words; and, even in the reign of the Confessor, the French language was
+fashionable. "The affectation of the Anglo-Saxon literati was evidently
+tending to adulterate their language; and even if the Conquest had not
+taken place, the purity of the English language would have been speedily
+destroyed by the admixture of a foreign vocabulary."[3] Thus early were
+we perilling our purity!
+
+In 1387, John de Trevisa, translating the Latin Polychronicon of Higden,
+tells us he avoids what he calls "the old and ancient English." A
+century afterwards, Caxton, printing this translation of Trevisa, had to
+re-write it, to change the "rude and old English, that is, to wit,
+certain words which in these days be neither used nor understood." It
+might have startled Master Caxton to have suspected that he might be to
+us what Trevisa was to him, as it had equally amazed Trevisa, when he
+discovered archaisms which had contracted the rust of time, to have
+imagined that his fresher English were to be archaisms to his printer in
+the succeeding century.
+
+At the period at which our present vernacular literature opened on us,
+Eliot, More, and Ascham maintained great simplicity of thought and
+idiom; yet even at this period, about 1550, the language seemed in
+imminent danger; it raised the tone of our primitive critics, and the
+terrors of neologism took all frightful shapes to their eyes!
+
+A refined critic of our language then was the learned Sir JOHN CHEKE,
+who at this early period considered that the English language was
+capable of preserving the utmost purity of style, and he was jealously
+awake to its slightest violations. A friend of his, Sir THOMAS HOBY, a
+courtly translator of the "Courtier of Castiglione," had solicited his
+critical opinion. The learned Cheke, equally friendly and critical,
+insinuated his abhorrence of "an unknown word," and apologises for his
+corrections, lest he should be accounted "overstraight a deemer of
+things, by marring his handywork." Hoby had evidently alarmed, by some
+sprinklings of Italianisms--some capriccios of "new-fangled" words--the
+chaste ear of our Anglican purist. I preserve this remarkable letter to
+serve as a singular specimen of our English, unpolluted even by a
+Latinism.[4]
+
+"Our own tongue should be written _clean_ and _pure_, unmixt and
+unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein, if we take not heed,
+by time, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her
+house as bankrupt. For then doth our tongue naturally and praisably
+utter her meaning, when she borroweth no counterfeitness of other
+tongues to attire herself withal; but used plainly her own, with such
+shift as nature, craft, experience, and following of other excellent,
+doth lead her unto; and if she want at any time (as, being imperfect,
+she must), yet let her borrow with such bashfulness that it may appear,
+that if either the mould of our own tongue could serve us to fashion a
+word of our own, or if the old denizened words could content and ease
+this need, we would not boldly venture on unknown words. This I say, not
+for reproof of you, who have scarcely and necessarily used, where
+occasion seemeth, a strange word so, as it seemeth to grow out of the
+matter, and not to be sought for; but for my own defence, who might be
+counted overstraight a deemer of things, if I give not this account to
+you, my friend, of my marring this your handy work."
+
+Such was the tone even of our primitive critics! the terrors of
+neologism were always before their eyes. All those accessions of the
+future opulence of the vernacular language were either not foreseen or
+utterly proscribed, while, at the same time, the wants and imperfections
+of the language, amid all its purity or its poverty, were felt and
+acknowledged. We perceive that even this stern champion of his
+vernacular idiom confesses that "he may want at time, being imperfect,
+and must borrow with bashfulness." The cries of the critics suddenly
+break on us. Another contemporary critic of not inferior authority
+laments that "there seemed to be no mother-tongue." "The far-journeyed
+gentlemen" returned home not only in love with foreign fashions, but
+equally fond "to powder their talk with over-sea language." There was
+French-English, and English Italianated. Professional men disfigured the
+language by conventional pedantries; the finical courtier would prate
+"nothing but Chaucer." "The mystical wisemen and the poetical clerks
+delivered themselves in quaint proverbs and blind allegories."[5] The
+pedantic race, in their furious Latinisms, bristling with polysyllabic
+pomposity, deemed themselves fortunate when they could fall upon "dark
+words," which our critic aptly describes "catching an ink-horn term by
+the tail." The eloquence of the more volatile fluttered in the splendid
+patches of modern languages. It seemed as if there were to be no longer
+a native idiom, and the good grain was choked up by the intruding cockle
+which flourished by its side. Another contemporary critic announces that
+"our English tongue was a gallimaufry or hodge-podge of all other
+speeches." ARTHUR GOLDING grieves over the disjected members of the
+language:--
+
+  "Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature),
+  Dismember'd, hack'd, maim'd, rent, and torn,
+  Defaced, patch'd, marr'd, and made in scorn."
+
+A critic who has left us "An Arte of English Poetry," written perhaps
+about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which,
+however, he never could in his own verses, "natural, pure, and the most
+usual of all his country," seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard
+of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but
+there he acknowledges that "the preachers, the secretaries, and
+travellers," were great corrupters, and not less "our Universities,
+where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the
+primitive languages." The coarse bran of our own native English was,
+however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be
+gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against "the daily talk of
+northern men." The _good southern_ was that "we of Middlesex or Surrey
+use." Middlesex and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all
+British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied
+from "the usual speech of the Court, and that of London within sixty
+miles, and not much above." But was our English more stable within this
+assigned circumference of the metropolis than any other line of
+demarcation? About 1580, CAREW informs us that "Within these sixty years
+we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of
+our language consisteth in them."
+
+Some there were among us who, alarmed that such ceaseless infusions were
+polluting the native springs of English, would look back with veneration
+and fondness on our ancient masters. Our great poet SPENSER,[6] then
+youthful, declared that the language of CHAUCER was the purest English;
+and our bard hailed, in a verse often quoted by the critics--
+
+  Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled.
+
+But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of
+having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old
+Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which
+he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological
+antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for
+introducing "a waggon-load of words," and have proclaimed that Chaucer
+"wrote the language of no age;" a reproach which has been transferred to
+our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the
+English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery
+of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for
+recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy
+axe of verbal pedantry.
+
+Descending a complete century, in 1656 we are surprised at discovering
+HEYLIN, at a period relatively modern, reiterating the language of his
+ancient predecessors. This latter critic published his animadversions on
+the pedantic writings of HAMON L'ESTRANGE, who had opened on us a
+floodgate of Latinisms. Heylin observes: "More French and Latin words
+have gained ground upon us since _the middle of Queen Elizabeth's
+reign_ than were admitted by our ancestors, not only since the Norman,
+but the Roman conquest." This was written before the Restoration of
+Charles the Second, when we were to be overrun by Gallicisms. This
+complaint did not cease with Heylin, for it has often been renewed.
+Heylin drew up in alphabetical order the uncouth and unusual words which
+are to be found in Hamon L'Estrange's "History," and yet many of these
+foreigners since the days of Heylin have become denizens. So unsettled
+were the notions of our philology with regard to style, that L'Estrange
+could venture in his rejoinder, which contains sufficient vinaicre, as
+he writes it, a defence of these hard words, which is entertaining. "As
+to those lofty words, I declare to all the world this not uningenuous
+acknowledgment, that having conversed with authors of the noblest and
+chief remark in several languages, not only their notions but their very
+words especially being of the most elegant import, became at length so
+familiar with me, as when I applied myself to this present work I found
+it very difficult to renounce my former acquaintance with them; but as
+they freely offered themselves, so I entertained them upon these
+considerations. First, I was confident that among learned men they
+needed no other passe than their own extraction; and for those who were
+mere English readers I saw no reason they should wonder at them,
+considering that for their satisfaction I had sent along with every
+foreigner his interpreter, to serve instead of a dictionary." Hamon
+L'Estrange's "Life of Charles I." was certainly a piece of infelicitous
+pedantry, as we may judge by this specimen.[7]
+
+Even great authors glanced with a suspicious eye on these vicissitudes
+of language, not without a conviction that they themselves were
+personally interested in these uncertain novelties. It would seem as if
+Milton, from the new invasion of Gallic words and Gallic airiness which
+broke in at the Restoration, had formed some uneasy anticipations that
+his own learned diction and sublime form of poetry might suffer by the
+transition, and that Milton himself might become as obsolete as some of
+his great predecessors appeared to his age. The nephew of Milton, in the
+preface to his "Theatrum Poetarum," where the critical touch of the
+great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets,
+who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. Writing
+in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: "From Queen Elizabeth's
+reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry
+of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to
+examine it well. If no poetry should please but what is calculated to
+every refinement of a language, of how ill consequence this would be for
+the future let him consider, and make it his own case, who, being now in
+fair repute, shall, two or three ages hence, when the language comes to
+be double-refined, understand that his works are come obsolete and
+thrown aside. I cannot--" he, perhaps Milton, continues--"I cannot but
+look upon it as a very pleasant humour that we should be so compliant
+with the French custom as to follow set fashions, not only in garments,
+but in music and poetry. For clothes, I leave them to the discretion of
+the modish; breeches and doublet will not fall under a metaphysical
+consideration. But in arts and sciences, as well as in moral notions, I
+shall not scruple to maintain, that what was '_verum et bonum_' once,
+continues to be so always. Now whether the trunk-hose fancy of Queen
+Elizabeth's days, or the pantaloon genius of ours be best, I shall not
+be hasty to determine."
+
+Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply
+to the CRITICS, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents;
+but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the
+LEXICOGRAPHERS, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings
+of their great "exchequer of words." Turn over the prefaces of our elder
+lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary
+of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those
+which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his
+record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak,
+and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure. BARET, one of our
+earliest lexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses
+himself:--"I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete
+words which now a daies no good writer will use."[8] Words spurned at by
+the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers
+of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet
+another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into
+confusion. HENRY COCKRAM, whose volume has been at least twelve times
+reprinted, boldly avows that "what any before me in this kind have
+begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;" and,
+presuming on the privilege of "an interpreter of hard English words,"
+the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms,
+which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some
+writers and speakers, as Hamon L'Estrange, were attempting.[9] What a
+picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the
+fleeting stages of their decadency from TREVISA to CAXTON, from CAXTON
+to BARET, from BARET to COCKRAM, and from COCKRAM to his numerous
+successors!
+
+Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that "purity
+of style," whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated
+querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom,
+fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to
+attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She
+has even submitted to Fashion, that most encroaching usurper of words,
+who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banishing the old
+and establishing the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy
+unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fashion under the
+consecrated name of CUSTOM.
+
+But let us not quit this topic of "purity of style" without offering our
+sympathies for those who have suffered martyrdom in their chimerical
+devotion. In the days of my youth there were some who would not write a
+word unwarranted by Swift or Tillotson; these were to be held fast for
+pure idiomatic prose, by those who felt insulted by the encumbering
+Lexiphanicisms of the ponderous numerosity of Johnson; and recently a
+return to our Saxon words, diminutive in size, has been trumpeted in a
+set oration at the University of Glasgow by a noble personage. This
+taste is rife among critics of limited studies. Charles Fox, a fine
+genius who turned towards the pursuits of literature too late in life,
+was a severe sufferer, and purified his vocabulary with a scrupulosity
+unknown to any purist, so nervously apprehensive was this great man lest
+he should not write English. Addison, Bolingbroke, and Middleton were
+not of sufficient authority, for he would use no word which was not to
+be found in Dryden. Alas! what disappointments await the few who creep
+along their Saxon idiom, or who would pore on the free gracefulness of
+Dryden as a dictionary of words and phrases! Could the chimerical purity
+which these are in search of be ever found, never would it lend
+enchantment to their page, should their taste be cold or their fancy
+feeble. The language of genius must be its own reflection, and the good
+fortune of authors must receive the stamp used in their own mint.
+
+It happens with the destiny of words, as in the destiny of empires. Men
+in their own days see only the beginnings of things, and more sensibly
+feel the inconvenience of that state of transition inflicted by
+innovation, in its first approaches often capricious, always empirical.
+These vicissitudes of language in their end were to produce a vernacular
+idiom more wealthy than our native indigence seemed to promise. All
+those vehement cries of the critics which we have brought together were
+but the sharp pangs and throes of a parturient language in the natural
+progress of a long-protracted birth.
+
+A national idiom in its mighty formation, struggling into its perfect
+existence, encumbered by the heavy mass in which it lies involved,
+resembles the creation of the lion of the Bard of Paradise, when
+
+            --------Half appear'd
+  The tawny Lion, PAWING TO GET FREE
+  HIS HINDER PARTS.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Curiosities of Literature," Art. "HISTORY OF NEW WORDS."
+
+  [2] These are political squibs thrown out by the mobocracy in the
+    reign of Richard the Second. They are preserved in Mr. Turner's
+    "History of England." I print them in their modern orthography. The
+    first specimen runs in familiar rhymes:--
+
+    "Jack the Miller asked help to turn his mill aright. He hath ground
+    small, small! The King's son of Heaven he shall pay for all. Look thy
+    Mill go aright with the four sails, and the post stand in
+    steadfastness. With Right and with Might, with Skill and with Will,
+    let Might help Right, and Skill go before Will, and Right before
+    Might, then goes our Mill aright, and if Might go before Right, and
+    Will before Skill, then is our Mill mis adyght."
+
+    Now we have plain, intelligible prose--
+
+    "Jack Carter prays you all that ye make a good end of that ye have
+    begun, and do well, and still better and better; for at the even men
+    near the day. If the end be well, then is all well. Let Piers the
+    ploughman dwell at home, and dyght us corn. Look that Hobbe the
+    robber be well chastised. Stand manly together in truth, and help the
+    truth, and truth shall help you."
+
+  [3] Sir Francis Palgrave's "Rise and Progress of the English Common
+    wealth;" Proofs and Illustrations, ccxiii.
+
+  [4] This letter to the translator Hoby has been passed over by those
+    who collected the few letters of the learned CHEKE; and, what seems
+    strange, appears only in the first edition of Hoby's translation,
+    having been omitted in the subsequent editions. Perhaps the
+    translator was not enamoured of his excellent critic.
+
+  [5] Sir Thomas Wilson's "Arte of Rhetoric," 1553.
+
+  [6] Spenser's protest against the Innovators of Language may be seen
+    in his "Three Letters," which are preserved unmutilated in Todd's
+    "Spenser;" they are deficient in Hughes' edition.
+
+  [7] Heylin's "Observations on the Historie of the Reign of King
+    Charles." L'Estrange's rejoinder may be found in the second edition
+    of his History.
+
+  [8] "Alvearie, or quadruple Dictionary of Four Languages," 1580.
+
+  [9] "The English Dictionary, or an Interpreter of Hard English
+    Words," by H. C., gent., 1658. The eleventh and twelfth editions are
+    before me. The last, edited by another person, is not so copious as
+    the former. In Cockram's own edition we have a first "Book" of his
+    "Hard Words," followed by a second of what he calls "Vulgar Words,"
+    which are English. The last editor has wholly omitted the second
+    part. Of the first part, or the "Hard Words," Cockram observes that
+    "They are the _choicest words now in use_, and wherewith our language
+    is enriched and become so copious, to which words the common sense is
+    annexed." [See note on this Dictionary, with some few specimens of
+    its contents, in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii.]
+
+
+
+
+DIALECTS.
+
+
+Dialects reflect the general language diversified by localities.
+
+A dialect is a variation in the pronunciation, and necessarily in the
+orthography of words, or a peculiarity of phrase or idiom, usually
+accompanied by a tone which seems to be as local as the word it utters.
+It is a language rarely understood out of the sphere of the population
+by whom it is appropriated. A language is fixed in a nation by a
+flourishing metropolis of an extensive empire, a dialect may have
+existed coeval with that predominant dialect which by accident has
+become the standard or general language; and moreover, the contemned
+dialect may occasionally preserve some remains or fragments of the
+language which, apparently lost, but hence recovered, enable us rightly
+to understand even the prevalent idiom.
+
+All nations have had dialects. Greece had them, as France, and Italy
+have them now. Homer could have included in a single verse four or five
+dialects; but though the Doric and the Ionic were held the most
+classical, none of them were barbarous, since their finest writers have
+composed in these several dialects. Even some Italian poets and comic
+writers have adopted a favourite dialect; but no classical English
+author could have immortalised any one of our own.
+
+Ancient Greece, as Mitford describes, "though a narrow country, was very
+much divided by mountains and politics." And mountains and politics,
+which impede the general intercourse of men, inevitably produce
+dialects. Each isolated state with fear or pride affected its
+independence, not only by its own customs, but by its accent or its
+phrase. In France the standard language was long but a dialect. There
+potent nobles, each holding a separate court and sovereignty in his own
+province, offered many central points of attraction. The Counts of Foix,
+of Provence and of Toulouse, and the Dukes of Guienne, of Normandy and
+of Brétagne, were all munificent patrons of those who cultivated what
+they termed "l'art du beau parler," each in their provincial idiom.
+These were all subdivisions of the two rival dialects to which the
+Romane language had given birth. But the river Loire ran between them;
+and a great river has often been the boundary of a dialect: France was
+thus long divided. On the south of the Loire their speech was called the
+language of _Oc_, and on the north the language of _Oil_; names which
+they derived from the different manner of the inhabitants pronouncing
+the affirmative _Oui_. The language of the poetical Troubadours on the
+south of the Loire had not the happier destiny of its rival, used by the
+Trouvères on the north. It was this which became the standard language,
+while the other remains a dialect. Here we have a remarkable incident in
+the history of dialects in a great country; it was long doubtful which
+was to become the national language; and it has happened, if we may
+trust an enthusiast of Languedoc, that his idiom, expressing with more
+vowelly softness and _naïveté_ the familiar emotions of love and
+friendship, and gaiety and _bonhomie_, gave way to a harsher idiom and a
+sharp nasal accent; and all ended by the Parisian detecting the
+provincials by their shibboleth, and calling them all alike Gascons, and
+their taste for exaggeration and rhodomontade gasconades; while the
+southerns, who hold that what is called the French language is only a
+perversion of their own dialect, like our former John Bull, fling on the
+Parisian the old Gaulish appellative of _Franchiman_.[1]
+
+The dialects of England were produced by occurrences which have happened
+to no other nation. Our insular site has laid us open to so many
+masters, that it was long doubtful whether Britain would ever possess a
+uniform language. The aboriginal Britons left some of their words
+behind them in their flight, as the Romans had done in their
+dominion,[2] and even the visiting Phoenician may have dropped some
+words on our coasts. The Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons brought in a
+new language, and, arriving from separate localities, that language came
+to us diversified by dialects; and the Danes, too, joined the northern
+brotherhood of pirate-kings who planted themselves in our soil. The
+gradual predominance of the West-Saxon over the petty kingdoms which
+subdivided Britain first approached to the formation of a national
+language. The West-Saxon was the land of Alfred, and the royal
+cultivation of its dialect, supreme in purity as the realm stood in
+power, rendered it the standard language which we now call Anglo-Saxon.
+
+"Had the Heptarchy (Octarchy) continued," observed Bishop Percy, "our
+English language would probably have been as much distinguished for its
+dialects as the Greek, or at least as that of the several independent
+states of Italy." In truth, we remained much in that condition while a
+power hostile to the national character assumed the sovereignty. So
+unsettled was the English language, that a writer at the close of the
+fourteenth century tells us that different parts of the island
+experienced a difficulty to understand one another. A diversity of
+pronunciation, as well as a diversity in the language, was so prevalent,
+that the Northern, the Southern, and the Middle-land men were
+unintelligible when they met; the Middle-land understood the Northern
+and the Southern better than the Northman and the Southman comprehended
+one another; the English people seemed to form an assemblage of distinct
+races. Even to this day, a scene almost similar might be exhibited.
+Should a peasant of the Yorkshire dales, and one from the vales of
+Taunton, and another from the hills of the Chiltern, meet together, they
+would require an interpreter to become intelligible to each other; but
+in this dilemma what county could produce the Englishman so versed in
+provincial dialects as to assist his three honest countrymen?
+
+If etymology often furnishes a genealogy of words through all their
+authentic descents, so likewise a map of provincial idioms might be
+constructed to indicate the localities of the dialects. There we might
+observe how an expansive and lengthened river, or intervening fells and
+mountains which separate two counties, can stop the course of a dialect,
+so that the idiom current on one side, when it passes the borders
+becomes intrusive, little regarded, and ere it reaches a third county
+has expired in the passage. Thus the Parret, we are told, is the
+boundary of the Somersetshire dialect; for words used cast of the Parret
+are only known by synonyms on the west side. The same incident occurs in
+Italy, where a single river runs through the level plain; there the
+Piedmontese peasant from the western end meeting with a Venetian from
+the eastern could hold but little colloquial intercourse together; a
+Genoese would be absolutely unintelligible to both, for, according to
+their proverb, "Language was the gift of God, but the Genoese dialect
+was the invention of the devil." In those rank dialects left to run to
+seed in their wild state, without any standard of literature, we hardly
+recognise the national idiom; the Italian language sprung from one
+common source--its maternal Latin; but this we might not suspect should
+we decide solely by its dialects: and we may equally wonder how some of
+our own could ever have been mangled and distorted out of the fair
+dimensions of the language of England.
+
+All who speak a dialect contract a particular intonation which, almost
+as much as any local words, betrays their soil; these provincial tones
+are listened to from the cradle; and, as all dialects are of great
+antiquity, this sounding of the voice has been bequeathed from
+generation to generation.[3] It is sometimes a low muttering in the
+throat, a thick guttural like the Welsh, or a shrill nasal twang, or a
+cadence or chant; centuries appear not to have varied the tone more than
+the vocable. The Romance of "Octavien Imperator," which was written
+possibly earlier than the reign of Henry VI., is in the Hampshire
+dialect nearly as it is spoken now. The speech of a Yorkshireman is
+energetically described by our ancient Trevisa. "It is so sharpe,
+slytting, frotyng, and unshape, that we sothern men maye unneth
+understond that language." As we advance in the North, the tones of the
+people are described as "round and sonorous, broad open vowels, and the
+richness and fulness of the diphthongs fill their mouths" with a firm,
+hardy speech.
+
+A striking contrast is observable among those who by their secluded
+position have held little intercourse with their neighbours, and have
+contracted an overweening estimation of themselves, and a provincial
+pride in their customs, manners, and language. Norfolk, surrounded on
+three sides by the sea, remains unaltered to this day, and still
+designates as "Shiremen" all who are born out of Norfolk, not without
+"some little expression of contempt." There is "a narrowness and tenuity
+in their pronunciation," such as we may fancy--for it is but a
+fancy--would steal out of the lips of reserved, proudful men, and who,
+as their neighbours of Suffolk run their common talk into strange
+melancholy cadences, have characterised their peculiar intonation as
+"the Suffolk whine!" In Derbyshire the pronunciation is broad, and they
+change the G into K. The Lancashire folk speak quick and curt, omit
+letters, or sound three or four words all together; thus, _I
+wou'didd'n_, or _I woudyedd'd_, is a cacophony which stands for _I wish
+you would_! When the editor of a Devonshire dialect found that it was
+aspersed as the most uncouth jargon in England, he appealed to the
+Lancashire.[4]
+
+But such vile rustic dissonance or mere balderdash concerns not our
+vernacular literature, though it seems that even such agrestic rubbish
+may have its utility in a provincial vocabulary; for the glossary to the
+"Exmoor language" was drawn up for the use of lawyers on the western
+circuit, who frequently mistook the evidence of a rustic witness for
+want of an interpretation of his words. Some ludicrous misconceptions of
+equivocal terms or some ridiculous phraseology have been recorded in
+other counties, among the judges and the bar at a county assize.
+
+But it is among our provincial dialects that we discover many beautiful
+archaisms, scattered remnants of our language, which explain those
+obscurities of our more ancient writers, singularities of phrase, or
+lingual peculiarities, which have so often bewildered the most acute of
+our commentators. After all their voluminous research and their
+conjectural temerity, a villager in Devonshire or in Suffolk, and, more
+than either, the remoter native of the North Countree, with their common
+speech, might have recovered the baffled commentators from their agony.
+The corrections of modern editors have often been discovered to be only
+ingenious corruptions of their own whenever the original provincial
+idiom has started up.
+
+These provincial modes of speech have often actually preserved for us
+the origin of English phraseology, and enlightened the philologist in a
+path unexplored. In one of the most original and most fanciful of the
+dramas of Ben Jonson, "The Sad Shepherd," the poet designed to
+appropriate a provincial dialect to the Witch Maudlin's family. He had
+consulted Lacy the comedian, who was a native of Yorkshire, respecting
+the northern phraseology. Unfortunately, this drama was never finished;
+and the consequence is, that the dialects are incorrectly given, and are
+worsened by the orthography of the printer. Yet it was from this
+imperfect attempt to convey some notion of our dialects that Horne Tooke
+was able to elucidate one of his grammatical discoveries, in regard to
+the conjunction IF, which, from "The Sad Shepherd," is demonstrated to
+be anciently the imperative of the verb GIF, or give. Thus it was, by
+apparently very rude dialects, this famous philologist was enabled to
+substantiate beyond doubt a signification which had occurred to no one
+but himself.[5]
+
+A language in the progress of its refinement loses as well as gains in
+the amount of words, and the good fortune of expressive phrases. Some
+become equivocal by changing their signification, and some fall
+obsolete, one cannot tell why, for custom or caprice arbitrate, guided
+by no law, and often with an unmusical ear. These discarded but faithful
+servants, now treated as outcasts, and not even suspected to have any
+habitation, are safely lodged in some of our dialects. As the people are
+faithful traditionists, repeating the words of their forefathers, and
+are the longest to preserve their customs, they are the most certain
+antiquaries; and their oral knowledge and their ancient observances
+often elucidate many an archæological obscurity. Hence, two remarkable
+consequences have been discovered in the history of our popular idioms;
+many words and phrases used in the land of Cockney, now deemed not only
+vulgar but ungrammatical, are in fact not corruptions of the native
+tongue, but the remains of what was anciently at different periods the
+established national dialect.[6] This transmitted language descended to
+the humbler classes, unimpaired and unaugmented, through a long line of
+ancestry. Again, it is often probable that the provincial word which in
+its pronunciation merely reverses the order of the letters, as now
+uttered, and which is only heard from the mouths of the people, may
+convey the original spoken sound, and be the genuine English. Are we
+quite sure that the polishers may not often have been the corrupters of
+our language? Nor let us be positive that the metropolitan taste has
+always fixed on the most felicitous or the most forcible of our
+idiomatic words or phrases, since we may discover some lingering among
+our provincial dialects which should never have been dismissed, and
+which claim to be restored. When JOHNSON compiled his "Dictionary," he
+was not aware of the authentic antiquity of our dialectic terms and
+phrases. Our literary antiquities had not yet engaged the attention of
+general scholars. Provincialisms were not deemed by the legislator of
+our language legitimate words; he did not recognise their primitive
+claims, nor their relative affinities, but ejected them as vagabonds.
+But words are not barbarous nor obsolete because no longer used in our
+written composition, since some of the most exquisite and picturesque,
+which have ceased to enrich our writings, live in immortal pages. After
+the issue of Johnson's great labour, our national literature began to
+attract the studies of literary men, who soon perceived how this
+neglected but existing stock of idiomatic English in our provincialisms
+more certainly explained our elder writers in verse and prose. Amid the
+murmurs raised by the archæologists, ASH attempted to supply the
+palpable deficiency of Johnson; but the matter was too abundant, and his
+space too contracted. In vain he attempted his "Supplement;" all the
+counties in England seemed to rise against the luckless glossarist; but
+notwithstanding its limited utility, his vocabulary was often preferred
+for its copiousness to the more elaborate lexicon. The spirit of inquiry
+was now abroad after the "winged words;" and ingenious persons, within
+these twenty years,[7] have produced a number of provincial glossaries;
+but several are still wanting, particularly those of Kent, and Sussex,
+and Hampshire. All these glossaries collected together might form a
+provincial lexicon marking each county. A few might be allowed to enter
+into the great dictionary of the English language; but that would not be
+their safest place, for they would then lie at the mercy of successive
+editors, who would not always discern a precious archaism amid the
+baseness and corruption of language. The origin, the nature, and the
+history of our provincial idioms have yet never been investigated,
+though the subject, freed from its mere barbarisms, opens a diversified
+field to the philosopher, the antiquary, and the philologist.
+
+Grose, who wrote in 1785, notices the state of those counties which were
+remote from the metropolis, or which had no immediate intercourse with
+it before "newspapers and stage-coaches imported scepticism, and made
+every ploughman and thresher a politician and a freethinker." The
+accelerated intercourse of the people has long passed beyond the diurnal
+folio and the evanescent stage-coach, and in a century of railroads and
+national schools the provincial glossary will finally vanish away.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Dictionnaire Languédocien-françois," par l'Abbé de Sauvages.
+    "_Franchiman_ est formé de l'Allemand, et signifie _homme de
+    France_." The Abbé wrote in 1756, when he did not care to translate
+    too literally; the Frank-man meant the _Free man_, for the Franks
+    called themselves so, as "the free people." This learned Gascon, in
+    his zeal for the _Langue d'oc_, explains, "_Parla Franchiman_," means
+    "parler avec l'accent (bon ou mauvais) des provinces du nord du
+    royaume:" an insinuation that the French accent might not be
+    positively the better one. The good Abbé had such a perfect
+    conviction of the superiority of his Languedocians, that he would
+    have no other servants not only for their superior integrity, but for
+    that of their language.
+
+  [2] "Palgrave," 174. They also received some in exchange, many words
+    in Cæsar being British.--Hearne's "Leland's Itinerary," vi.
+
+  [3] In that very curious "Logonomia Anglica" of the learned Alexander
+    Gill--the father, for his son of the same name succeeded him as
+    master of St. Paul's--we have the orthoepy of our dialects given with
+    great exactness. This work was produced about 1619, and we find the
+    peculiar provincial pronunciation of the present day. A work so
+    curious in the history of our vernacular tongue should not have been
+    composed in Latin. Mr. Guest has carefully translated a judicious
+    extract,--"History of English Rhythms," ii, 204.
+
+  [4] The late Dr. Valpy told me that Mr. Walker, the orthoepist, had
+    so intimate a knowledge of the provincial peculiarities of
+    pronunciation, that in a private course of reading at Oxford with
+    twelve undergraduates, he told each of them the respective place of
+    their birth or early education.
+
+  [5] Tooke's "Diversions of Purley," p. 141.
+
+  [6] In "Anecdotes of the English Language," by Samuel Pegge, an
+    antiquary, who called himself "an old modern," the reader will find
+    several curious exemplifications of the vulgar dialect, sometimes
+    fancifully, but often satisfactorily ascertained. It is amusing to
+    detect what we call _vulgarisms_ composing the language of Chaucer
+    and Shakspeare, and even our Bibles and Liturgies.
+
+  [7] RAY was the first who collected "Local Words, _North Country_ and
+    _South_ and _East Country_." "The Exmoor Scolding and Courtship" is
+    an authentic specimen of the _Exmoor Language_. The words were
+    collected by a blind fiddler, and the dialogues were written by a
+    clergyman with the fiddler's assistance, before 1725. We have a
+    glossary of Lancashire words and phrases, contained in the humorous
+    works of Tim Bobbin. Other county glossarists have appeared within
+    the last fifteen years:--BROCKETT'S "North Country Words;" "Suffolk
+    Words and Phrases," by Major MOOR; Mr. ROGER WILBRAHAM'S "Attempt at
+    a Glossary of Cheshire Words;" Mr. JENNINGS' "Dialect of the West of
+    England," particularly the Somersetshire words; Mr. BRITTON on those
+    of Wiltshire; and the Rev. JOSEPH HUNTER has given "The Hallamshire
+    Glossary," to which are appended "Words used in Halifax," by the Rev.
+    JOHN WATSON, and also an addition to the "Yorkshire Words," by
+    THORESBY, the Leeds antiquary.
+
+    An investigation of the origin, nature, and history of DIALECTS was
+    proposed by the late Dr. BOUCHER for a complete glossary of all the
+    dialects of the kingdom. But these precious stores, not only of the
+    vocables but of the domestic history of England--its manners,
+    occupations, amusements, diet, dress, buildings, and other
+    miscellaneous topics--rich in all the affluence of the laborious
+    readings of more years than the siege of Troy, was but bread cast
+    away on the waters, and was never given to the public for want of
+    public support. After the author's death, two eminent editors
+    zealously resumed the work, which was already prepared; but the
+    public remained so little instructed of its value, it suddenly
+    ceased! Works of national utility should be consecrated as national
+    property, and means should be always ready to avert such a calamity
+    to the literature of England, and to the information of Englishmen,
+    as was the suppression of the labours of BOUCHER.
+
+
+
+
+MANDEVILLE; OUR FIRST TRAVELLER.
+
+
+Mandeville was the Bruce of the fourteenth century, as often calumniated
+and even ridiculed. The most ingenuous of voyagers has been condemned as
+an idle fabulist; the most cautious, as credulous to fatuity; and the
+volume of a genuine writer, which has been translated into every
+European language, has been formally ejected from the collection of
+authentic travels. His truest vindication will be found by comprehending
+him; and to be acquainted with his character, we must seek for him in
+his own age.
+
+At a period when Europe could hardly boast of three leisurely wayfarers
+stealing over the face of the universe; when the Orient still remained
+but a Land of Faery, and "the map of the world" was yet unfinished; at a
+time when it required a whole life to traverse a space which three years
+might now terminate, Sir JOHN MANDEVILLE set forth to enter unheard-of
+regions. Returning home, after an absence of more than thirty years, he
+discovered a "mervayle" strange as those which he loved to record--that
+he was utterly forgotten by his friends!
+
+He had returned "maugre himself," for four-and-thirty years had not
+satiated his curiosity; his noble career had submitted to ordinary
+infirmities--to gout and the aching of his limbs; these, he lamentably
+tells, had "defined the end of my labour against my will, God knoweth!"
+The knight in this pilgrimage of life seems to have contracted a duty
+with God, that while he had breath he should peregrinate, and, having
+nothing to do at home, be honourable in his generation by his enterprise
+over the whole earth. And earnestly he prays "to all the _readers_ and
+_hearers_ of my book," (for "hearers" were then more numerous than
+"readers,") "to say for him a _Pater-Noster_ with an _Ave-Maria_." He
+wrote for "solace in his wretched rest;" but the old passion, the
+devotion of his soul, finally triumphed over all arthritic pangs. The
+globe evidently was his true home; and thus Liege, and not London,
+received the bones of an unwearied traveller, whose thoughts were ever
+passing beyond the equator.
+
+With us, to whom an excursion to "the Londe of Promyssioun or of Behest"
+has sometimes arisen out of a morning engagement--we who impelled by
+steam go "whither we list," with those billets which might serve as
+letters of recommendation in the steppes of Tartary,--we may wonder how
+our knight, who would not win his way by the arts of commerce, like his
+predecessor Marco Polo, bore up his chivalry; for in his traversing he
+had nothing to offer but his honourable sword, and probably his medical
+science, which might be sometimes as perilous. But difficulties
+insuperable to us could not enter into the emotions, nor were they the
+accidents which impeded the traveller, "who, on the day of St. Michael,
+in the year of our Lord 1322, passed the sea, and went the way to
+Hierusalem, and to behold the mervayles of Inde." A deep religious
+emotion, an obscure indefinite curiosity, and a courageous decision to
+wander wherever the step of man could press on the globe, to tell the
+world "the mervayles" it unconsciously holds within its orb, were the
+inspiration of a journey which stood next in solemnity to a departure to
+the world of spirits. Sir John had prepared himself, for he was learned
+not only in languages, but in authentic romance, and in romantic
+history; and he honestly resolved to tell all "the mervayles" which he
+had seen, and those which he had not; and these last were not the least.
+
+Sir John Mandeville's probity remains unimpeached; for the accuracy of
+whatever he relates from his own personal observation has been confirmed
+by subsequent travellers. On his return to Europe he hastened to Rome to
+submit his book to the Pope, and to "his wise council," and "those
+learned men of all nations who dwell at that court." The volume was
+critically reviewed; and his holiness "ratified and confirmed my book in
+all points," by referring to an account in Latin: this account was
+probably written by some missionary; Rubriquis had been dispatched on an
+unsuccessful mission to Christianize the great Khan of Tartary in 1230;
+or it was the writings of Marco Polo, which could not be unknown at
+Rome. In that day all real information was consigned to the fugitive
+manuscript, partially known, and often subject to the interpolations and
+capricious alterations of its possessor, and what sometimes occurred, to
+the silent plagiarisms of other writers--of which even Mandeville
+himself has been suspected.
+
+The Pope decreed that not only all that Mandeville related was
+veracious, but that the Latin book which his holiness possessed
+contained _much more_, and from whence the Mappa Mundi had been made.
+Indeed Mandeville has himself told us that he wrote only from his
+recollections as they "would come into his mind;" these necessarily were
+often broken and obscure. Some "mervayles" remained unrecorded, and
+hereafter were to be "more plainly told;" but I fear these are lost for
+us.
+
+In this "true" book we find many things very untrue, but we may doubt
+whether any in that day were as positive in this opinion. The author
+himself designed no imposition on his readers; he tells us what he
+believed; part of which he had seen and the rest he had heard, and
+sometimes had transcribed from sources deemed by him authentic. Who can
+suspect the knight of spotless honour, and whose piety would not
+relinquish his _Ave-Marias_ for a dominion? Having fought during two
+years under the ensign of the Sultan of Egypt, and being offered in
+marriage the Sultan's daughter and a province, he refused both, when his
+Christianity was to be exchanged for Mahometanism.
+
+This was a period when the marvellous never weakened the authenticity of
+a tale. The mighty tome of Pliny, that awful repository of all the
+errors of antiquity, and other writers of equal name, detail prodigies
+and legends, and so do the Fathers. Who would not have rejoiced to
+transcribe Pliny or St. Austen? Who imagined that all the delectable
+adventures of the romances, over which they passed many a dreamy day,
+with the very names of the personages and the very places where they
+occurred, were solely chimeras of the brain? The learned Mandeville was
+evidently not one of these sceptics: for he observes, that "the trees of
+the sun and of the moon are well known to have spoken to King
+Alisaundre, and warned him of his death." The unquestioned fact is in
+that famed romance; and others might be referred to if we required
+additional authority. I have read of these talking trees of the sun and
+moon in _Guarino detto il Meschino_, who lived a year among them to
+learn his own genealogy, and then was graceless enough to laugh at
+these timber-oracles. Mandeville forgot not in the island of Lango, not
+distant from Crete, the legend of the unfortunate "Lady of the Land,"
+who remained a dragoness, because no one had the hardihood to kiss her
+lips to disenchant her. He tells likewise of the Faery Lady who guarded
+the sparrow-hawk; whoever ventured to assist that lady during three days
+and nights, was rewarded by the boon of having whatever he wished. A
+king who, not wanting anything, had the audacity to wish to have the
+lady herself, was fairly warned that he did not know what he asked, as
+happens to the reckless; but, persisting in his absolute will, he
+incurred the curse of perpetual war to the last of his race!
+
+We trace such tales among the romances, with all their circumstances;
+and some may have reached the listener from the Arabian tale-teller. The
+monsters he describes Mandeville never invented; these, human and
+animal, he gave as some of his predecessors had done, from Pliny, or
+Ælian, or Ctesias,[1] who have sent them down to be engraven in the
+Great Nuremberg Chronicle, and adorned in the immortal page of
+Shakspeare. Marco Polo had noticed that portentous bird which could lift
+an elephant by its claws; he does not tell us that he had seen any bird
+of this wing, but we all know where it is to be found--in the Arabian
+Tales! Sir Thomas Browne accuses Mandeville of _confirming_ the fabulous
+accounts of India by Ctesias; but, in truth, our knight does not
+"confirm these refuted notions of antiquity;" he only repeats them, with
+the prelude of "men seyn." No one was more honest than Mandeville, for
+when he had to describe the locality of paradise, he fairly acknowledges
+that "he cannot speak of it properly, for I was not there; it is far
+beyond, but as I have _heard say_ of wise men, it is on the highest
+part of the earth, nigh to the circle of the moon." However, he has
+contrived to describe the wall, which is not of stone, but of moss, with
+but a single entrance, "closed with brennynge fyre;" and though no
+mortal could enter, yet it was known that there was a well in paradise,
+whence flowed the four floods that run through the earth. "Wise men," he
+tells us, said this; some of these "wise men" were the Rabbins; and
+three centuries afterwards, the accounts of paradise, by a finer genius
+than Mandeville, the illustrious Rawleigh, remained much the same.
+
+To explain some of those incredible incidents which occurred to the
+author himself might exercise some critical ingenuity. Mandeville's
+adventure in "the Valley Perilous," when he saw the Devil's head with
+eyes of flame, great plenty of gold and silver, which he was too
+frightened to touch, and, moreover, a multitude of dead bodies, as if a
+battle had been fought there, might probably be resolved into some
+volcanic eruption, the rest supplied by his own horrifying imagination;
+for he tells, with great simplicity, "I was more devout then than ever I
+was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends that _I saw in
+divers figures_;" that is, at the _shapes_ of the disparted rocks. The
+travellers were beaten down by tempests, winds, and thunder, which raged
+in this pent-up vale. As he marks the locality, the spot may yet be
+ascertained.
+
+There was no imposition practised in all such legends; it is we who are
+startled by the supernatural in a personal narrative; but in the
+fourteenth century the more wonderful the tale, the more authentic it
+appeared, as it sunk into the softest and richest moulds of the most
+germinating imagination. The readers, or the hearers, were as well
+prepared to believe, as the writers prompt to gather up, their fictions.
+Collections of "Mirabilia Mundi," "Wonders," were a fashionable title
+applied to any single country, as well as to the world--to England or
+Ireland, to the Holy Land or the Indies. The "Mirabilia" might be the
+running title for a whole system of geography. The age of imagination
+has long been unfurnished of all its ingenious garniture, and yet we
+still catch at some evanescent hour of fancy susceptible of those
+ancient delights. We have lost something for which we have no
+substitute. Would not the modern novelist rejoice in the privilege of
+intermingling supernatural inventions to break the level of his
+every-day incidents and his trivial passions so soon forgotten? But that
+glowing day has set, leaving none of its ethereal hues in our cold
+twilight. Mandeville may still be read for those wild arabesques which
+so long unjustly proved fatal to his authentic narrative. His simplicity
+often warrants its truth; he assures us that Jerusalem is placed in the
+middle of the earth, because when he stuck his staff in the ground,
+exactly at noon, it cast no shadow; and having ascertained the spherical
+form of the globe, he marvels how the antipodes, whose feet are right
+upwards towards us, yet do not fall into the firmament! When he
+describes the elegant ornaments of "a vine made of gold that goeth all
+about the hall, with many bunches of grapes, some white, and the red
+made of rubies," he tells what he had seen in some divan; but when he
+records that "the Emperor hath in his chamber a pillar of gold, in which
+is a ruby and carbuncle a foot long, which lighteth all his chamber by
+night," it may be questioned whether this carbuncle be anything more
+than an Arabian fancy, a tale to which he had listened. Some of his
+ocular marvels have been confirmed by no questionable authority.
+Mandeville's description of a magical exhibition before the Khan of
+Tartary is a remarkable instance of the strange optical illusions of the
+scenical art, and the adroitness of the Indian jugglers--a similar scene
+appears in a recent version of the autobiography of the Emperor Akber.
+What seemed the spells of magic to the Europeans of that age, and of
+which some marvellous descriptions were brought to Europe by the
+crusaders or the pilgrims, and embellished the romances, our exquisite
+masques and our grand pantomimes have realized. Three centuries were to
+elapse ere the court of England could rival the necromancy of the court
+of Tartary.
+
+Mandeville first composed his travels in the Latin language, which he
+afterwards translated into French, and lastly out of French into
+English, that "every man of my nation may understand it." We see the
+progressive estimation of the languages by this curious statement which
+Mandeville has himself given. The author first secured the existence of
+his work in a language familiar to the whole European world; the French
+was addressed to the politer circles of society; and the last language
+the author cared about was the vernacular idiom, which, at that time the
+least regarded, required all the patriotism of the writer in this
+devotion of his pen.
+
+Copies of these travels were multiplied till they almost equalled in
+number those of the Scriptures; now we may smile at the "mervayles" of
+the fourteenth century, and of Mandeville, but it was the spirit of
+these intrepid and credulous minds which has marched us through the
+universe. To the children of imagination perhaps we owe the
+circumnavigation of the globe and the universal intercourse of
+nations.[2]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] CTESIAS, a physician in high repute at the Persian Court, and
+    often referred to by Diodorus. He has been universally condemned as a
+    fabulous writer, to which charge his descriptions of some animals was
+    liable. But a naturalist of the highest order, the famous CUVIER, has
+    perhaps done an act of justice to this fabricator of animals. Ctesias
+    reported the mythological creations which he had witnessed in
+    hieroglyphical representations as actual living animals. It is
+    glorious to remove from the darkened name of a writer, unjustly
+    condemned, the obloquy of two thousand years.--"Theory of the Earth,"
+    translated by Professor Jameson, 76.
+
+  [2] Of modern editions of Mandeville's "Travels in England," that of
+    1725, printed by Bowyer, is a large octavo. There are numerous
+    manuscripts of Mandeville in existence. An edition collated might
+    discover either omissions or interpolations. This might serve as the
+    labour of an amateur. Mandeville has not had the fortune of his
+    predecessor Marco Polo, to have met with a Marsden, learned in
+    geographical and literary illustration.
+
+    Long subsequently to the time that this article was written, this
+    edition of 1725 has been reprinted, with the advantage of a
+    bibliographical introduction by Mr. Halliwell, and a collation of
+    texts. [It was published in 1839, in an octavo volume of 326 pages,
+    with illustrative engravings from manuscripts and printed books.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAUCER.
+
+
+In the chronology of our poetical collectors, GOWER takes precedence of
+CHAUCER unjustly, for Chaucer had composed many of his works in the only
+language which he has written before the elder claimed the honours of an
+English vernacular poet, and, probably, then only emulating the success
+of him who first set the glorious example. Nor less in the rank of
+poetry must Chaucer hold the precedence. The first true English poet is
+Chaucer; and notwithstanding that the rhythmical cadences of his unequal
+metre are now lost for us, Chaucer is the first modeller of the heroic
+couplet and other varieties of English versification. By the felicity of
+his poetic character, Chaucer was not only the parent, but the master,
+of those two schools of poetry which still divide its votaries by an
+idle rivalry, and which have been traced, like our architecture, the one
+to a Gothic origin, and the other to a classical model.
+
+The personal history of CHAUCER, poetical and political, might have been
+susceptible of considerable development had the poet himself written it,
+for his biographers had no life to record. Speght, one of the early
+editors, in the good method of that day, having set down a variety of
+heads, including all that we might wish to know of any man, when this
+methodiser of commonplaces came to fill up these well-planned divisions
+concerning Chaucer, he could only disprove what was accepted, and supply
+only what is uncertain. The "Life of Chaucer" by Godwin is a theoretical
+life, and, as much as relates to Chaucer himself, a single fatal fact,
+when all was finished, dispersed the baseless vision.[1] The whole
+rested on the unauthenticated and contradictory statements of Leland,
+who, writing a century after the times of Chaucer, hastily collected
+unsubstantial traditions, and, what was less pardonable in Leland, fell
+into some anachronisms.
+
+This defective chronology in the life of the poet has involved the more
+important subject of the chronology of his works. Posterity may be
+little concerned in the dates of his birth and his burial--his unknown
+parentage--his descriptive name--and, above all, his suspicious shield,
+which the heralds opined must have been blazoned out of the
+twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth propositions of the first book of
+Euclid, from the poet's love of geometry, or, more obviously, from
+having no coat-of-arms to show of "far more ancient antiquity." But
+posterity would have been interested in the history of the genius of
+Chaucer, who having long paced in a lengthened circuit of verbal version
+and servile imitation, passed through some remarkable transitions,
+kindling the cold ashes of translation into the fire of invention; from
+cloudy allegory breaking forth into the sunshine of the loveliest
+landscape-painting; and from the amatory romance gliding into that vein
+of humour and satire which in his old age poured forth a new creation.
+All this he might himself have told, or Gower might have revealed, had
+the elder bard who lauded the lays and "ditties" of the youth of "the
+Clerk of Venus" loved him as well in his old age. But elegant
+literature, as distinguished from scholastic, was then without price or
+reward. The few men of genius who have written at this early period are
+only known to us by their writings, and probably were more known to
+their contemporaries by the station which they may have occupied, than
+by that which they maintain with posterity.
+
+By royal patents and grants to the poet, we trace his early life at
+court, his various appointments, and his honourable missions to Genoa
+and to France--we must not add as confidently his visit to Petrarch.
+
+Chaucer, in his political life, was bound up with the party of John of
+Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; and, by a congenial spirit, with the novel
+doctrines of his friend, Dr. Wickliffe. The sister of his lady finally
+became the third Duchess of Lancaster, and the family alliance
+strengthened the political bond. How the Lancastrian exploded in the
+poet, something we know, but little we comprehend; and those who have
+attempted to lift the veil have not congratulated themselves on their
+success. The poet himself has not entrusted his secret to posterity,
+except, as is usual with poets, by eloquent lamentations. The exposition
+of a political transaction is never without some valued results; and
+though deprived of names and dates, we are not without some dim lights:
+the palpable truth may not be obvious, but it may happen that we may
+stumble on it.
+
+Chaucer himself has stated, "In _my youth_ I was drawn in to be
+assenting to certain _conjurations_ and other _great matters of ruling
+of citizens_, and those things have been my _drawers in and exciters_ in
+the matters _so painted and coloured_, that _first_ to me seemed then
+_noble and glorious for all the people_."
+
+Here the tale is plain, for this is the language of one who early in
+life had engaged in some popular scheme, and these early indications of
+the temper of the Wickliffite or the Lancastrian, or both, had
+subsequently led to some more perilous attempts. They were, like all
+reforms, something "noble and glorious for the people," and as sometimes
+happens among reformers, what _at first_ appeared to promise so well,
+ended in disappointment and "penance in a dark prison."
+
+The locality of this patriotic act was the city of London. He alludes to
+"free elections by great clamours of much people," for great disease of
+misgovernment in the hands of "_torcentious citizens_." When the fatal
+day arrived that he openly joined with a party for "the people," against
+those citizens whom he has so awfully denounced, it is evident, though
+we have no means to discriminate factions in an age of factions,[2]
+that he and his "conjurors" discovered that "all the people" were not of
+one mind. This votary or this victim of reform suddenly flings his
+contempt at "the hatred of the mighty senators of London or of its
+commonalty," and closes with a painful remembrance of "the janglings of
+THE SHEEPY PEOPLE!" The style of Chaucer bears the stamp of passionate
+emotions; words of dimension, or of poignant sarcasm. The "torcentious
+citizens" is an awful bolt, and "the sheepy people" is sufficiently
+picturesque.
+
+In dismay the whole party took flight. Chaucer, in Zealand, exhausted
+his means to supply the wants of his political associates, till he
+himself found that even the partnership of common misery does not always
+preserve men from ingratitude. Returning home, potent persecutors cast
+him into a dungeon. Was the Duke of Lancaster absent, or the Duke of
+Gloucester in power? Let us observe that in all these dark events the
+loyalty of the poet is never impeached, for Chaucer enjoyed without
+interruption the favour of both his sovereigns, Edward III. and Richard
+II.; and we discover that once when dismissed from office, Richard
+allowed him to serve by deputy, which was evidence that Chaucer had
+never been dismissed by the king himself. The whole transaction,
+whatever it was, was a political movement between two factions. Chaucer
+indeed pleads that whatever he had done was under the control of others,
+himself being but "the servant of his sovereign." At that period the
+factions in the state were more potent than the monarch. In the
+convulsive administration of a youthful prince, they who oppose the
+court are not necessarily opposing the sovereign.
+
+It was behind the bars of a gloomy window in the Tower, where "every
+hour appeared to be a hundred winters," that Chaucer, recent from exile,
+and sore from persecution, was reminded of a work popular in those days,
+and which had been composed in a dungeon--"The Consolations of
+Philosophy," by Boethius--and which he himself had formerly translated.
+He composed his "TESTAMENT OF LOVE," substituting for the severity of an
+abstract being the more genial inspiration of love itself. But the
+fiction was a reality, and the griefs were deeper than the fancies. In
+this chronicle of the heart the poet mourns over "the delicious hours he
+was wont to enjoy," of his "richesse," and now of his destitution--the
+vain regret of his abused confidence--the treachery of all that
+"summer-brood" who never approach the lost friend in "the winter hour"
+of an iron solitude. The poet energetically describes his condition;
+there he sate "witless, thoughtful; and sightless, looking." This work
+the poet has composed in prose; but in the leisure of a prison the
+diction became more poetical in thoughts and in words than the language
+at that time had yet attained to, and for those who read the black
+letter it still retains its impressive eloquence.
+
+But this apology which Chaucer has left of his conduct in this political
+transaction has incurred a fatal censure. "Never," observes Mr.
+Campbell, "was an obscure affair conveyed in a more obscure apology."
+His political integrity has been freely suspected. Chaucer has even been
+struck by the brilliant arrow of the Viscount de Chateaubriand.
+"Courtisan, Lancastrien, Wickliffist, infidèle à ses convictions,
+traitre à son parti, tantôt banni, tantôt voyageur, tantôt en faveur,
+tantôt en disgrace." No, thou eloquent Gaul! Chaucer never was out of
+favour, however he may have been more than once dismissed from his
+office; nor can we know whether the poet was ever "infidèle à ses
+convictions."
+
+Obscure must ever remain the tale of justification in a political
+transaction which terminated on the part of the apologist by revealing
+"disclosures for the peace of the kingdom," denied by those whom they
+implicated, though their truth was offered to be maintained by the
+accuser, in the custom of the times, by single combat; and by
+confessions which acknowledge errors of judgment, but not of intention;
+and by penitence, which, if the patriot designed what was "glorious to
+all the people," he should never have repented of.
+
+This obscure apology conceals the agony of conflicting
+emotions--indignation at ungrateful associates, and a base desertion of
+ancient friends, who were plotting against him. Whether Chaucer was
+desirous of burying in obscurity a story of torturous details, or one
+too involved in confused motives for any man to tell with the precision
+of a simple statement, we know of no evidence which can enable us to
+decide with any certainty on an affair which no one pretends to
+understand. Chaucer might have been the scapegoat of the sovereign, or
+the champion of the people. We can rather decide on his calamity than
+his conduct. Many are the causes which may dissolve the bonds of
+faithless "conjurations;" and it is not always he who abandons a party
+who is to be criminated by political tergiversation.
+
+The circumstances of Chaucer's life had combined with his versatile
+powers. He had mingled with the world's affairs both at home and abroad:
+accomplished in manners, and intimately connected with a splendid court,
+Chaucer was at once the philosopher who had surveyed mankind in their
+widest sphere, the poet who haunted the solitudes of nature, and the
+elegant courtier whose opulent tastes are often discovered in the
+graceful pomp of his descriptions. It was no inferior combination of
+observation and sympathy which could bring together into one company the
+many-coloured conditions and professions of society, delineated with
+pictorial force, and dramatised by poetic conception, reflecting
+themselves in the tale which seemed most congruous to their humours. The
+perfect identity of these assembled characters, after the lapse of near
+five centuries, make us familiar with the domestic habits and modes of
+thinking of a most interesting period in our country, not inspected by
+the narrow details of the antiquarian microscope, but in the broad
+mirror reflecting that truth or satire which alone could have
+discriminated the passions, the pursuits, and the foibles of society.
+Thus the painter of nature, who caught the glow of her skies and her
+earth in his landscape, was also the miniature portrayer of human
+likenesses. When Chaucer wrote, the classics of antiquity were
+imperfectly known in this country--the Grecian muse had never reached
+our shores; this was, probably, favourable to the native freedom of
+Chaucer. The English poet might have lost his raciness by a cold
+imitation of the Latin masters; among the Italians, Dante, Petrarch, and
+Boccaccio, Chaucer found only models to emulate or to surpass. Hence the
+English bard indulged that more congenial abundance of thoughts and
+images which owns no other rule than the pleasure it yields in the
+profusion of nature and fancy. A great poet may not be the less Homeric
+because he has never read Homer.
+
+Nature in her distinct forms lies open before this poet-painter; his
+creative eye pursued her through all her mutability, but in his details
+he was a close copier. In his rural scenery there is a freshness in its
+luxuriance; for his impressions were stamped by their locality. This
+locality is so remarkable, that Pope had a notion, which he said no one
+else had observed, that Chaucer always described real places to
+compliment the owners of particular gardens and fine buildings. Let us
+join him in his walks--
+
+  When that the misty vapour was agone,
+  And clear and fair was the morníng,
+  The dews, like silver, shiníng
+  Upon the leaves.
+
+The flowers sparkle in "their divers hues"--he sometimes counts their
+colours--"white, blue, yellow, and red"--on their stalks, spreading
+their leaves in breadth against the sun, gold-burned. His grass is "so
+small, so thick, so fresh of hue." The poet goes by a river whose water
+is "clear as beryl or crystal;" turning into "a little way" towards a
+park in compass round, and by a small gate.
+
+  Whoso that would freely might gone (go)
+  Into this Park walled with green stone.
+
+The owner of that park, probably, was startled when he came to "the
+little way," and to "the small gate." This was either the park of some
+great personage, or possibly Woodstock Park, where stood a stone lodge,
+so long known by the name of "Chaucer's House," that in the days of
+Elizabeth it was still described as such in the royal grant. If poets
+have rarely built houses, at least their names have consecrated many.
+
+His
+
+  Garden upon a river in a green mead;
+  The gravel gold, the water pure as glass,
+
+and "the eglantine and sycamore arbour, so thickly woven, where the
+priers who stood without all day could not discover whether any one was
+within," was assuredly some particular garden. The stately grove has all
+the characters of its trees--the oak, the ash, and the fir--to "the
+fresh hawthorn,"
+
+  Which in white motley that so swote doth smell.
+
+In all these lovely scenes there was a delicious sense of joyous
+existence; the inmates of the forest burst forth, from "the little
+conies, the beasts of gentle kind," to "the dreadful roe and the buck,"
+and from their green leaves they who "with voice of angels" entranced
+the poet-musician--
+
+  So loud they sang that all the woodés rung
+  Like as it should shiver in pieces small,
+  And as methought that the Nightingale
+  With so great might her voice out-wrest,
+  Right as her heart for love would brest (burst).
+
+So true is the accidental remark of the celebrated Charles Fox, that "of
+all poets Chaucer seems to have been the fondest of the singing of
+birds." These were the peculiar delights in the poetic habits of
+Chaucer, who was an early riser, and often mused on many a rondel in
+gardens, and meads, and woods, at earliest dawn. This poet's sun-risings
+are the most exhilarating in our poetry.
+
+We may doubt if the vernal scenes of Chaucer can be partaken by his more
+chilly posterity. Did England in the seasons of Chaucer flourish with a
+more genial May and a more refulgent June? Or should we suspect that the
+travelled poet clothed our soil with the luxuriance of Provençal fancy,
+and borrowed the clear azure of Italy to soften the British roughness
+even of our skies?
+
+Tyrwhit, the able commentator of Chaucer, has thrown out an incidental
+remark, which seems equally refined and true. "Chaucer in his serious
+pieces often follows his author with the servility of a mere translator;
+and in consequence his narration is jejune and constrained (as often
+appears in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and his translations of Dante),
+whereas in the comic he is generally satisfied with borrowing a slight
+hint of his subject, which he varies, enlarges, and embellishes at
+pleasure, and gives the whole the air and colour of an original; a sure
+sign that his genius rather led him to compositions of the latter kind."
+
+This remark is an instance of critical sagacity. The creative faculty in
+Chaucer had not broken forth in his translations, which evidently were
+his earliest writings. The native bent of his genius, the hilarity of
+his temper, betrays itself by playful strokes of raillery and concealed
+satire when least expected. His fine irony may have sometimes left his
+commendations, or even the objects of his admiration, in a very
+ambiguous condition. The learned editor of the second part of the
+"Paston Letters" hence has been induced to infer that the spirit of
+chivalry, from the reign of the third Edward, had entirely declined, and
+only existed in the forms of conventional and fashionable society, and
+had sunk into a mere foppery, a system of forms and etiquettes, because
+Chaucer, a court-poet, treats with irony the chivalric manners. Whether
+this ingenious inference will hold with literary antiquaries, I will not
+decide; but I am inclined to suspect that Chaucer's indulgence of his
+taste for irony was not in the mind of this learned editor. Our poet has
+stamped with his immortal ridicule the tale told in his own person--"The
+Rime of Sir Thopas," which is considered as a burlesque of the metrical
+romances. In those days there was an inundation of these romances, as
+"the thirst and hunger" of the present is accommodated with as spurious
+a brood. We have our "drafty prose" as they had their "drafty riming."
+But shall we infer from this ludicrous effusion of the great poet, that
+he held so light the venerable fablers, the ancient romancers, with
+whose "better parts" he had nourished his own genius? This is his own
+confession. Often in his years of grief, when the poet wondered
+
+  How he lived, for day ne night,
+  I may not sleep--
+  Sitting upright in my bed,
+
+then it was that he prescribed for his "secret sorrows" that medicine
+which, "drunk deeply," makes us forget ourselves. In those hours the
+poet
+
+  Bade one reach me a Boke,
+  A ROMANCE, and he it me took
+  To read, and drive the Night away;
+  For methought it better play
+  Than play either at Chess or Tables.
+
+And assuredly Chaucer found many passages in the old fablers not less
+entrancing than some of his own. Our poet indulged this vein of playful
+irony on persons as well as on things. A sly panegyric, sufficiently
+ambiguous for us to accept as a refined stroke, we find on the abstruse
+and interminable question of predestination; on which the Nonne's priest
+declares--
+
+  But I ne cannot boult it to the bren,
+  As can the holy doctor Augustín,
+  Or Boecé, or _the bishop Bradwardín_.
+
+As this bishop, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first who
+treated theology on mathematical principles, and likewise wrote on the
+"Quadrature of the Circle," we may presume "Bishop Bradwardin" rather
+perplexed the poet. Chaucer discovers his ironical manner when gravely
+stating the different theories of dreaming--
+
+  ---------What causeth Suevenes[3]
+  On the morrow or on evens?
+
+he playfully concludes, and modern philosophy could no better assist the
+inquiry--
+
+  ---------Whoso of these Miracles
+  The causes know bet[4] than I
+  Define he, for I certainly
+  Ne can them not, ne never thinke
+  To busie my witte for to swinke
+  To know why this is more than that is,
+  Well worthé of this thing Clerkés,
+  That treaten of this and of other werkés,
+  For I, of none opinion
+  Nil.
+
+It is with the same pleasantry he avoids all commonplace descriptions,
+by playfully suggesting his pretended unskilfulness for the detail, or
+his want of learning--
+
+  Me list not of the chaf, ne of the stre,
+  Maken so long a tale, as of the corn.
+                        "Man of Lawe's Ta'e."
+
+Yet humour and irony are not his only excellences, for those who study
+Chaucer know that this great poet has thoughts that dissolve in
+tenderness; no one has more skilfully touched the more hidden springs of
+the heart.
+
+The Herculean labour of CHAUCER was the creation of a new style. In this
+he was as fortunate as he was likewise unhappy. He mingled with the
+native rudeness of our English words of Provençal fancy, and some of
+French and of Latin growth. He banished the superannuated and the
+uncouth, and softened the churlish nature of our hard Anglo-Saxon; but
+the poet had nearly endangered the novel diction when his artificial
+pedantry assumed what he called "the ornate style" in "the Romaunt of
+the Rose," and in his "Troilus and Cressida." This "ornate style"
+introduced sesquipedalian Latinisms, words of immense dimensions, that
+could not hide their vacuity of thought. Chaucer seems deserted by his
+genius when "the ornate style" betrays his pangs and his anxiety. As the
+error of a fine genius becomes the error of many, because monstrous
+protuberances may be copied, while the softened lines of beauty remain
+inimitable, this "ornate style" corrupted inferior writers, who, losing
+all relish of the natural feeling and graceful simplicity of their
+master, filled their verse with noise and nonsense. This vicious style,
+a century afterwards, was resumed by STEPHEN HAWES. We have, however, a
+glorious evidence, amid this struggle both with a new and with a false
+style, of Chaucer's native good taste; he finally wholly abandoned this
+artificial diction; and his later productions, no longer disfigured by
+such tortured phrases and such remote words, awaken our sympathy in the
+familiar language of life and passion.
+
+TYRWHIT has ingeniously constructed a metrical system to arrange the
+versification to the ear of a modern reader; by this contrivance he
+would have removed all obstructions in the pronunciation and in the
+syllabic quantities. He maintained that the lines were regular
+decasyllabics. But who can read this poet for any length, even the
+"Canterbury Tales" in the elaborated text of Tyrwhit, without being
+reminded of its fallacy? Even the E final, on which our critic has laid
+such stress, though often sounded, assuredly is sometimes mute. Dan
+Chaucer makes at his pleasure words long or short, and dyssyllabic or
+trisyllabic; and this he has himself told us--
+
+  But for the rime is light and lewde,
+  Yet make it somewhat agreáble,
+  Though some verse fail in a sylláble.
+
+Our critic was often puzzled by his own ingenuity, for in some
+inveterate cases he has thrown out in despair an observation, that "a
+reader who cannot perform such operations for himself (that is, helping
+out the metre) had better not trouble his head about the versification
+of our ancient authors." The verse of Chaucer seems more carefully
+regulated in his later work, "the Tales;" but it is evident that Chaucer
+trusted his cadences to his ear, and his verse is therefore usually
+rhythmical, and accidentally metrical.
+
+On a particular occasion the poet submitted to the restraint of equal
+syllables, as we discover in "The Court of Love," elaborately metrical,
+and addressed to "his princely lady," with the hope that she might not
+refuse it "for lack of ornate speech." It is evident, therefore, that
+Chaucer had a distinct conception of the heroic or decasyllabic verse,
+but he did not consider that the mechanical construction of his verse
+was essential to the free spirit of his fancy. "I am no metrician," he
+once exclaimed; he wrote
+
+  Books, songs, ditees
+  In RIME, or else in CADENCE.
+                   "The House of Fame."
+
+This circumstance arose from the custom of the age, when poems were
+_recited_, and not _read_; readers there were none among the people,
+though auditors were never wanting; it was much the same among the
+higher orders. Poems were usually performed in plain chant, and a verse
+was musical by the modulation of the harp. There was no typographical
+metre placed under the eye of the reciter; the melody of the poet too
+often depended on the adroitness of the performer; and the only
+publishers of the popular poems of Chaucer were the harpers, who, in
+stately halls on festal days, entranced their audience with Chaucer's
+Tale, or his "Ballade." His poem of "Troilus and Cressida," although
+almost as long as the Æneid, was intended to be _sung_ to the harp as
+well as _read_, as the poet himself tells us, in addressing his poem---
+
+  And _redde_ where so thou be, or elles _sung_.
+
+In the most ancient manuscripts of Chaucer's works the cæsura in every
+line is carefully noted, to preserve the rhythmical cadence with
+precision; without this precaution the harmony of such loose
+versification would be lost. In the later editions, when the race of
+roaming minstrels had departed, and our verse had become solely
+metrical, the printers omitted this guide to the ancient recitation. We
+perceive this want in the uncertain measures of Chaucer's versification;
+and a dexterous modulation is still required to catch the recitative of
+Chaucer's poems.
+
+Are the works of our great poet to be consigned to the literary dungeon
+of the antiquary's closet? I fear that there is more than one
+obstruction which intervenes between the poet's name, which will never
+die, and the poet's works, which will never be read. A massive tome,
+dark with the Gothic type, whose obsolete words and difficult phrases,
+and, for us, uncadenced metre, are to be conned by a glossary as
+obsolete as the text, to be perpetually referred to, to the interruption
+of all poetry and all patience, appalled even the thorough-paced
+antiquary, Samuel Pegge, as appears by his honest confession. Already a
+practised bibliosopher proclaims, alluding to the edition by Tyrwhit of
+Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," "And who reads any other portion of the
+poet?" Yet the "Canterbury Tales" are but the smallest portion of
+Chaucer's works! But some skilful critics have perpended and decided
+differently: even among the projected labours of Johnson was an edition
+of Chaucer's works; and Godwin, when diligently occupied on this great
+poet, with just severity observed that "a vulgar judgment had been
+propagated by slothful and indolent persons, that the 'Canterbury Tales'
+are the only part of the works of Chaucer worthy the attention of a
+modern reader, and this has contributed to the wretched state in which
+his works are permitted to exist."
+
+Are we then no longer to linger over the visionary emotions of the great
+poet in the fine portraitures of his genius from his youthful days, when
+the fever of his soul, not knowing where to seek for its true aliment,
+careless of life, fed on its own sad musings, in Chaucer's "DREME," or,
+onwards in life, in the "TESTAMENT OF LOVE," that chronicle of the heart
+in a prison solitude? And are we no longer interested in those personal
+traits Chaucer has so frequently dropped of his own tastes and humours,
+so that we are in fact better acquainted with Chaucer than we are with
+Shakspeare? Even during his official occupations, this poet loved his
+studious solitary nights, and frequently alludes to his passion. Must we
+close that "HOUSE OF FAME," with whose fragments Pope reared "The
+Temple?" Has all the enchantment of the moonlight-land of chivalry and
+fairyism in "THE FLOURE AND THE LEAFE" vanished? Are we no longer to
+listen to "THE COMPLAINT OF THE BLACK KNIGHT," which touched a duchess
+or a queen? or the stanzas of "THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE," which
+musically resound that musical encounter? Is the legend of pathetic
+tenderness in the impassioned "TROILUS," and "the sillie woman who
+falsed Troilus," ever to be closed? there may we pursue the vicissitudes
+of love, in what the poet calls "a little tragedy;" and we find Ovidian
+graces amid its utter simplicity. There are, indeed, vicissitudes of
+taste as well as of love. "Troilus and Cressida" was the favourite in
+the days of Henry VIII. over the "Canterbury Tales" and "The Floure and
+the Leafe;" it was, too, the model of Sidney in the court of Elizabeth;
+Love triumphed at court over Humour and Fancy.
+
+It is true that the language of Chaucer has failed, but not the writer.
+The marble which Chaucer sculptured has betrayed the noble hand of the
+artist; the statue was finished; but the grey and spotty veins came
+forth, clouding the lucid whiteness.
+
+For the poet or the poetical, the difficulty of the language may be
+surmounted with a reasonable portion of every-day patience. I know, from
+several of my literary contemporaries, that this, however, has not been
+conceded. The more familiar I became with Chaucer, the more I delighted
+in the significance of the Chaucerian words. From some modern critics,
+occasionally the name of Chaucer startles the ear. One, indeed, has
+recently complained that "Chaucer's divine qualities are languidly
+acknowledged by his unjust countrymen;"[5] and Coleridge emphatically
+said, "I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is
+especially delicious in my old age. How exquisitely tender he is!"[6]
+
+But the popularity of this gifted child of nature, and this shrewd
+observer of mankind, is doomed to another obstruction than that of his
+curious diction. The playfulness of his comic invention, and the freedom
+of his simplicity, will no longer be allowed to atone for the levity of
+some of his incidents. When Warton, to display the genuine vein of the
+Chaucerian humour, imprudently analysed the "Miller's Tale," having
+reached the middle, the critic, recollecting himself, suddenly breaks
+off with a curt remark--"The sequel cannot be repeated here!" In a
+recklessness of all knowledge, and in an unhappy hour, the poet of "Don
+Juan" decided, while he probably would have started from Chaucer's
+black-letter tome, that "Chaucer, notwithstanding the praises bestowed
+on him, I think obscene and contemptible. He owed his celebrity merely
+to his antiquity." As if the greatest of our poets had only been
+celebrated in the day when Byron wrote! Yet in all the unfettered
+invention and nudity of style, there was no grossness in the temper, and
+less in the habits, of the poet. He addressed his own age as his
+contemporaries were doing in France and in Italy, and from whom he had
+borrowed the very two tales on which this censure has fallen. In telling
+"a merrie tale," Chaucer could not have anticipated this charge; and, in
+truth, for subjects which are obscene and disgustful he had no taste, as
+he showed in his reproof of Gower for having selected two repulsive
+ones--the unnatural passions of Canace and Apollonius Tyrius. Of these
+our Chaucer cries,--
+
+  Of all swiche cursed stories I say, Fy!
+
+Our poet has himself pleaded that having fixed on his personage, he had
+no choice to tell any other tale than what that individual would himself
+have told. Before we immolate Chaucer on the altar of the Graces, we
+should not only listen to his plea, but to his own easy remedy for this
+disorder produced by his too faithful copy after nature.
+
+  --------Whoso list not to hear,
+  Turn over the leaf, and chese another tale!
+
+Our notions and our customs of delicacy are the result of a change in
+our manners of no distant period; and, compared with our neighbours,
+many are still but conventional. They are so even in respect to
+ourselves, for, not to go back to the golden days of Elizabeth, the
+language and the manners of the court of Anne would have startled modern
+decorum. The "polite conversation" of Swift has fortunately preserved
+for us specimens which we could not have imagined. Our poems, our
+comedies, and our tales, so late as the days of Swift and Pope, have
+allusions, and even incidents and descriptions, which we no longer
+tolerate. How far our fastidiousness lies on the surface of our lesser
+morals, I will not decide; but men of genius have complained that this
+fastidiousness has become too restrictive, by contracting the sphere of
+inventive humour, which flashes often in such small matters as ludicrous
+tales and playful levities, which must not lie on our tables.
+
+Chaucer long remained a favourite in the most polite circles; Aubrey, at
+the close of the seventeenth century, in his "Idea," recommends the
+study of Chaucer, as the poet in full reputation. At a later period, the
+days of Dryden and Pope, our versifiers were continually renovating his
+humour and his more elegant fictions. OGLE, with others, attempted to
+modernize Chaucer; but it is as impossible to give such a version of
+Chaucer as to translate the Odes of Horace. They corrupted by their
+interpolations, and weakened by their diffusion; Chaucer was not
+discernible in the dimness of their paraphrase. The great beauties of
+Chaucer spring up from the soil in which they lie embedded; and the most
+skilful hand will discover that in gathering the flower it must cease to
+live without its root.
+
+We never possessed a tolerably correct edition of this master-poet; and
+the very circumstance of the continued popularity of the poems with the
+many has occasioned their present wretched condition. When works
+circulated in their manuscript state, before the era of printing, the
+popularity of a poet made his text the more liable to corruption.
+Multiplied transcripts were produced by heedless or licentious scribes,
+whose careless omissions, and whose perpetuated blunders and even
+interpolations can only be credited by the collators of the manuscripts
+of Chaucer. This happened with the very first printed edition by Caxton.
+Our patriarchal publisher discovered that he had printed from a very
+faulty manuscript, and, in that primitive age of simplicity and
+printing, nobly suppressed the edition which dishonoured the author, and
+substituted an improved one. Doubtless GOWER, a grave and learned poet,
+whose copies are remarkably elegant, has descended to us in a purer
+condition than CHAUCER, for he was rarely transcribed. Speght was the
+first editor who gave a more complete edition of Chaucer, with the
+useful appendage of a glossary, the first of its kind, and which has
+been a fortunate acquisition for later glossographers. But Speght, with
+the aid of Stowe, who was equally industrious, was so deficient in
+critical acumen, as to have impounded any stray on the common stamped
+with the initials of Chaucer. Thus our poet has suffered all the
+mischances of faithless scribes, unintelligent printers, and uncritical
+editors. To make the bad worse, the last modern edition of Chaucer, by
+URRY, though recommended by the white letter, offering this bland relief
+to a modern reader, is a showy volume, of which we are forbidden to read
+a line! The history of this edition is an evidence how ill our scholars,
+at no remote period, were qualified to decide on the fate of a great
+vernacular author. Urry, the pupil of Dean Aldrich, and the friend of
+Bishop Atterbury, appears to have been one of that galaxy or confederacy
+of wits called "the Wits of Christ Church." The "Student of Christ
+Church, Oxon," offered a title and a place which would sanction an
+edition of Chaucer; one object of which was to contribute five hundred
+pounds to finish Peckwater Quadrangle. The pompous folio appeared
+heralded by the queen's licence for the exclusive sale for fourteen
+years. Our editor at first seems to have been reluctant and modest, till
+instigated by his great patrons to divest himself of all fear of the
+author. In his innocence conceiving that the strokes of his own pen
+would silently improve an obsolete genius, this merciless interpolator,
+changing words and syllables at pleasure, has furnished a text which
+Chaucer never wrote![7] If the worst edition that was ever published
+contributed to finish Peckwater Quadrangle, it is amusing to be reminded
+that causes are often strangely disproportionate to their effects.
+
+The famous portion of Chaucer's Miscellaneous Volume has been fortunate
+in the editorial cares of TYRWHIT. Tyrwhit, a scholar as well as an
+antiquary, was an expert philologer; his extensive reading in the lore
+of our vernacular literature and our national antiquities promptly
+supplied what could not have entered into his more classical studies;
+and his sagacity seems to have decided on the various readings of all
+the manuscripts, by piercing into the core of the poet's thoughts.[8]
+
+It is remarkable that some of the most lively productions of several
+great writers have been the work of their maturest age. Johnson
+surpassed all his preceding labours in his last work, the popular Lives
+of the Poets. The "Canterbury Tales" of Chaucer were the effusions of
+his advanced age, and the congenial verses of Dryden were thrown out in
+the luxuriance of his later days. Milton might have been classed among
+the minor poets had he not lived to be old enough to become the most
+sublime. Let it be a source of consolation, if not of triumph, in a long
+studious life of true genius, to know that the imagination may not
+decline with the vigour of the frame which holds it; there has been no
+old age for many men of genius.
+
+We must lament that at such an early period in our vernacular
+literature, we have to record that the two fathers of our poetry,
+congenial spirits as they were, too closely resembled most of their
+sons--in one of the most painful infirmities of genius. I have said
+elsewhere that jealousy, long supposed to be the offspring of little
+minds, is not, however, confined to them. We do not possess the secret
+history of the two great poets, Chaucer and Gower; but we are told by
+Berthelet in his edition of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," when he quotes
+the commendatory lines on Gower by Chaucer, that the poets "were both
+excellently learned, _both great friendes together_." Ancient
+biographers usually fall into this vague style of eulogy, which served
+their purpose rather than a more critical research. True it is that
+"they were both great friends," but, what Berthelet has not told, they
+became also "both great enemies." We know that Chaucer has commemorated
+the dignified merits of "the moral Gower," and that Gower has poured
+forth an effusion not less fervid than elegant from the lips of Venus,
+who calls Chaucer "her own clerk, who in the flower of his youth had
+made ditees and songes glad which have filled the land." Did this little
+passion of poetic jealousy creep into their great souls? Else how did it
+happen that Chaucer, who had once solicited the correcting hand of his
+friend, in his latest work, reprehended the sage and the poet, and that
+Gower, who had not stinted the rich meed of his eulogy which appeared in
+the first copies of his "Confessio Amantis," erased the immortality
+which he had bestowed. The justice of their reciprocal praise neither of
+these rivals could efface, for that outlives their little jealousies.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] After Godwin had sent to press his biography of Chaucer, a
+    deposition on the poet's age in the Herald's College detected the
+    whole erroneous arrangement: as the edifice so ingeniously
+    constructed had fallen on the aërial architect, he alleged truly that
+    the deposition "contradicted the received accounts of all the
+    biographers;" in fact, they had repeated original misstatements. The
+    appendix, therefore, to the history of this modern biographer stands
+    as a perpetual witness against its authenticity;--there are some
+    histories to which an appendix might prove to be as fatal. In this
+    dilemma, our bold sophist was "absurd and uncharitable enough" to add
+    one more conjecture to his "Life of Chaucer,"--that "the poet, from a
+    motive of vanity, had been induced _to state on oath_ that he was
+    about forty when, in truth, he was fifty-eight!"--Hippisley's
+    "Chapters on Early English Literature," 85.
+
+  [2] It has been alleged by more than one writer, that this mysterious
+    affair relates to the election for the mayoralty of John of
+    Northampton, a Wickliffite and a Lancastrian. But Mr. Turner, whose
+    researches are on a more extended scale than any of his predecessors,
+    truly observes that--"There are other periods besides the one usually
+    selected to which the personal evils which Chaucer complains of are
+    applicable."--"Hist. of England," v. 296. It is as likely to have
+    occurred when Nicholas Brambre, a confidential partisan of government
+    in the City, appointed to the mayoralty by his party, caught "the
+    Freemen" by ambushes of armed men, and turned the Guildhall into a
+    fortress. At such a time "Free Elections" might have been considered
+    by Chaucer as something "noble and glorious for all the people."
+
+  [3] Dreams.
+
+  [4] Better.
+
+  [5] Autobiography of an Opium-Eater.--"Tait's Mag." August, 1835.
+
+  [6] Coleridge's "Table-Talk."
+
+  [7] So unskilful or so incurious was Warburton in the language of our
+    ancient poets, that in his notes on Pope he quotes the following
+    lines of Chaucer--
+
+      "Love wol not be _constreined_ by maistrie.
+      Whan maistrie cometh, the _God_ of love anon
+      _Beteth_ his wings, and _farewel_, he is gon"--
+
+    from Urry's edition, in which they appear thus transformed and
+    corrupted:
+
+      Love will not be _confined_ by maisterie.
+      When maisterie comes, the _Lord_ of love anon
+      _Flutters_ his wings, and _forthwith_ is he gone.
+
+    [An excellent example of the superior vigour of Chaucer may be seen
+    in an original passage of his "Palamon and Arcite," contrasted with
+    Dryden's tamer modernization of the same, in "Curiosities of
+    Literature," vol. ii. p. 107.--ED.]
+
+  [8] This "sagacity" has been much and justly questioned by the more
+    advanced students of medieval literature. Sir Harris Nicolas has
+    produced an excellent edition of the poet; but the best text of the
+    "Canterbury Tales" has been published by Mr. Thos. Wright, from a
+    careful collation of the oldest manuscript.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+GOWER.
+
+
+In the church of St. Saviour in Southwark may be viewed an ancient
+monument with its sculptured and Gothic canopy; pictured on its side the
+three visionary virgins, Charity, Mercy, and Pity, solicit the prayer of
+the passenger for the soul of the suppliant whose image lies extended on
+the tomb, with folded hands, and in his damask habit flowing to his
+feet. His head reposes on three mighty tomes, and is decked with a
+garland, either of roses which proclaim his knighthood, or the wreath of
+literature which would more justly distinguish the wearer,--JOHN GOWER,
+the poet.
+
+In the life of this poet, almost the only certain incident seems to be
+his sepulchral monument: and even this it had been necessary to repair
+after the malignity of the Iconoclasts; and of the three sculptured
+volumes which support the poet's head, a single one only has been opened
+by the world, for the tomb has perpetuated what the press has not.
+
+The three tomes on the tomb of Gower represent his three great works;
+but what is remarkable, and shows the unsettled state of our literature,
+each of these great works is written in a different language, though
+equally graced with Latin titles. The first, in French, is the "Speculum
+Meditantis;" the moral reflections relieved by historical examples. The
+second, in Latin verse, is "Vox Clamantis;" this "Voice" comes not from
+the desert, for it is that of the clamours of the people; a satire on
+all ranks, and an exhortation to the youthful monarch to check his own
+self-indulgence; it includes a chronicle of the insurrection of the
+populace, or "the clowns," as they were called in Richard the Second's
+reign. The vernacular style, rather than Latin verse, would have more
+aptly celebrated the feats of Wat Tyler, or Bet and Sim, Gibbe and Hyke,
+Hudde and Judde, Jack and Tib. The reporter had no doubt been present at
+the active scene. The swarm rush on to the call of one another, in
+hexameters and pentameters. The singularity of the subject, which gives
+no bad picture of the hurry of a disorderly mob, and the felicity of an
+old translation, induce me to preserve a partial extract from the
+manuscript. Our own age has witnessed similar scenes.
+
+  Watte vocat, cui Thome venit, neque Symme retardat,
+    Betteque, Gibbe simul Hyke venire jubent.
+  Colle furit, quem Gibbe juvat nocumenta parantes,
+    Cum quibus ad dampnum Wille coire vovet.
+  Grigge rapit, dam Dawe strepit, comes est quibus Hobbe,
+    Lorkin et in medio non minor esse putat.
+  Hudde ferit, quos Judde terit, dum Tebbe juvatur,
+    Jacke domos que viros vellit, et ense necat.
+
+  Tom comes, thereat, when called by Wat, and Simon as forward we find;
+  Bet calls as quick to Gibb, and to Hyck that neither would tarry
+    behinde.
+  Gibbe, a good whelp of that litter, doth help mad Coll more mischief
+    to do,
+  And Will he doth vow, the time is come now, he'll join with their
+    company too.
+  Davie complains whiles Grigg gets the gains, and Hobb with them doth
+    partake;
+  Lorkin aloud, in the midst of the crowd, conceiveth as deep is his
+    stake.
+  Hudde doth spoil, whom Judde doth foile, and Tebbe lends his helping
+    hand,
+  But Jack, the mad-patch, men and horses doth snatch, and kills all at
+    his command.
+
+The third and greater work, and the only printed one of Gower, is the
+"Confessio Amantis," an English poem of about thirty thousand lines; a
+singular miscellany of allegory, of morality, and of tales. It is
+studded with sententious maxims and proverbs, and richly diversified
+with narrations, pleasant and tragic; but the affectation of learning,
+for learning in its crude state always obtrudes itself, even in works of
+recreation, has compressed the Aristotelian philosophy, to edify and
+surprise the readers of the poet's fairy or romantic tales. Robert de
+Brunne, to illustrate monachal morals, interspersed domestic stories;
+and amidst the prevalent penury of imagination, that rhyming monk
+affords the most ancient specimens of English tales in verse: and as
+Gower's single printed work is of the same species of composition, a
+system of ethics illustrated by tales, it has been thought that the
+monk who rhymed in 1300 was the true predecessor of the poet who
+flourished at the close of that century, however Gower may have purified
+the "rime doggrel," and elevated the puerile tale. The straw-roof must
+be raised before the cupola. Genius in its genealogy must not blush at
+its remote ancestor; the noblest knight may often go back to the mill or
+the forge. If this rude moralising rhymer really be the poetical father
+of Gower, then is this antiquated monk the inventor of that narrative
+poetry which Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, and even some of our
+contemporaries, have so delightfully diversified. But story-telling has
+been of all periods.
+
+There is a portion in this volume which concerns the personal history of
+the poet.
+
+This work was composed at the suggestion of Richard the Second himself,
+who among other luxuries loved Froissart's romance and Chaucer's rhymes,
+and was even willing to be taught the grave lessons which he could not
+practise. As Gower one day was rowed in his boat on the Thames, he met
+his "liege lord" in the royal barge, who commanded the poet to enter,
+and, in a long unrestrained conversation, desired him "to book some new
+thing in the way he was used." Probably the youthful monarch alluded to
+the "Vox Clamantis," in which the poet had exhorted his "liege lord" to
+exercise every kingly virtue, and had without reserve touched on too
+many imperfections of a court-life. It was to be "a book," added the
+young monarch, "in which he himself might often look." The poet aspired
+to fix the honour which he had received, and resolved, in his own words,
+
+  To write in such a manner-wise,
+  Which may be wisdom to the wise,
+  And play to them that list to play.
+
+In a word, we have here the great Horatian precept by the intuition of
+our earliest poet.
+
+The political admonitions, and the keen satire on the youthful
+favourites of the youthful monarch of a luxurious court, and the relaxed
+morals of the higher ranks, the clergy, and the judges, were all offered
+with more than the freedom of a poet--they sound the deep tones of the
+patriot. The sage had solemnly contemplated on the discontents and
+clamours of the people, and presciently observed the rising of that
+state-tempest, which in an instant dethroned this magnificent and
+thoughtless prince.
+
+In the course of the reign of Richard the Second it appears that several
+alterations were made in the poem. The dedicatory preface was
+suppressed. Berthelet, the ancient printer of the "Confessio Amantis,"
+discovered that "the prologue" had disappeared, though the same number
+of lines were substituted, "cleane contrary both in sentence and in
+meaning." Gower has therefore incurred the reproach of a disloyal
+desertion of his hapless master to court a successful usurper. One
+critic tells that "he was given to change with the turns of state."
+Bishop Nicholson, with dull levity, has a fling at all poets, for he
+censures Gower for "making too free with his prince--a liberty, it
+seems, allowed to men of his profession;" while Thomas Hearne, the blind
+bigot of passive obedience, in editing a monkish life of Richard the
+Second, would have all Gower condemned to oblivion, because "he had
+treated the monarch's memory ill, and spoke with equal freedom of the
+clergy." This vacillating conduct of "the moral Gower," however, need
+not leave any stain on his memory. We see he had never at any time
+adulated the youthful monarch; however his tales may have charmed the
+royal ear, the verse often left behind a wholesome bitterness. Gower had
+praised Henry of Lancaster at a period when he could not have
+contemplated the change of dynasty; and when it happened, the poet was
+of an age far too advanced either to partake of the hopes or the fears
+that wait on a new reign.
+
+But this tale of Gower's free and honest satire on courts and courtiers
+is not yet concluded. The sphere of a poet's influence is far wider than
+that of his own age; and however we may now deem of this grave and
+ancient poet, he still found understanding admirers so late as in the
+reign of Charles the First. In the curious "Conference" which took place
+when Charles the First visited the Marquess of Worcester, at Ragland
+Castle, with his court, there is the following anecdote respecting the
+poet Gower.
+
+The marquess was a shrewd though whimsical man, and a favourite of the
+king for his frankness and his love of the arts. His lordship
+entertained the royal guest with extraordinary magnificence. Among his
+rare curiosities was a sumptuous copy of Gower's volume.
+
+Charles the First usually visited the marquess after dinner. Once he
+found his lordship with the book of John Gower lying open, which the
+king said he had never before seen. "Oh!" exclaimed the marquess; "it is
+a book of books! and if your majesty had been well versed in it, it
+would have made you a king of kings." "Why so, my lord?" "Why, here is
+set down how Aristotle brought up and instructed Alexander the Great in
+all the rudiments and principles belonging to a prince." And under the
+persons of Aristotle and Alexander, the marquess read the king such a
+lesson that all the standers-by were amazed at his boldness.
+
+The king asked whether he had his lesson by heart, or spake out of the
+book? "Sir, if you would read my heart, it may be that you might find it
+there; or if your majesty pleased to get it by heart, I will lend you my
+book." The king accepted the offer.
+
+Some of the new-made lords fretted and bit their thumbs at certain
+passages in the marquess's discourse; and some protested that no man was
+so much for the absolute power of a king as Aristotle. The marquess told
+the king that he would indeed show him one remarkable passage to that
+purpose; and turning to the place, read--
+
+  A king can kill, a king can save;
+  A king can make a lord a knave;
+  And of a knave, a lord also.
+
+On this several new-made lords slank out of the room, which the king
+observing, told the marquess, "My lord, at this rate you will drive away
+all my nobility."
+
+This amusing anecdote is an evidence that this ethical poet, after two
+centuries and a half, was not forgotten; his spirit was still vital, his
+volume still lay open on the library table; it afforded a pungent lesson
+to the courtiers of Charles the First as it had to those of Richard the
+Second.
+
+GOWER was learned, didactic, and dignified. The manuscripts of his works
+are usually noble and sumptuous copies; more elegantly written and more
+richly illuminated than the works of other poets. His commonplaces and
+his legendary lore seem to have awed the simplicity of the readers of
+two centuries, whose taste did not yet feel that failure of the poet who
+narrated a fable from Ovid with the dull prolixity of a matter-of-fact
+chronicler. His fictions are rarely imaginative; yet critics, far abler
+judges of his relative merits than ourselves, since they lived within
+the sphere of his influence, hailed this grave father of our poesy.
+Leland, the royal antiquary of Henry the Eighth, expressed his ideas
+with great elegance and sensibility, when he said of Gower that "his
+diligent culture of our poesy had extirpated the ordinary herbs; and
+that the soft violet and the purple narcissus were now growing, where
+erst was nothing seen but the thistle and the thorn." There are indeed
+some graceful flowers in his desert. But all criticism is usually
+relative to the age, and excellence is always comparative. GOWER stamped
+with the force of ethical reasoning his smooth rhymes; and this was a
+near approach to poetry itself. If in the mind of CHAUCER we are more
+sensible of the impulses of genius--those creative and fugitive
+touches--his diction is more mixed and unsettled than the tranquil
+elegance of GOWER, who has often many pointed sentences and a surprising
+neatness of phrase. A modern reader, I think, would find the style of
+Gower more easily intelligible than the higher efforts of the more
+inventive poet.
+
+
+
+
+PIERS PLOUGHMAN.
+
+
+Contemporary with GOWER and CHAUCER lived the singular author of "The
+Visions of William concerning PIERS PLOUGHMAN;" singular in more
+respects than one, for his subject, his style, and, we may add, for the
+intrepidity and the force of his genius.
+
+This extraordinary work is ascribed to one whose name is merely
+traditional, to Robert Langland, a secular priest of Salop; when he
+wrote, and where he died, are as dubious as his text, the authenticity
+of which is often uncertain from the variations in all the manuscripts.
+But the real life of an author, at least for posterity, lies beyond the
+grave; and no writer is nameless whose volume has descended to us as one
+of the most memorable in our ancient vernacular literature.
+
+In character, in execution, and in design, "The Visions of William of
+PIERS PLOUGHMAN" are wholly separated from the polished poems of GOWER
+and CHAUCER; the work bears no trace of their manner, nor of their
+refinement, nor of their versification; and it has baffled conjectural
+criticism to assign the exact period of a composition which appears more
+ancient than any supposed contemporary writings. Those who would decide
+of the time in which an author wrote by his style, here are at a loss to
+conceive that the splendid era of romantic chivalry, the age of Edward
+the Third and his grandson, which produced the curious learning and the
+easy rhymes of the "Confessio Amantis," and the pleasantry and the fine
+discriminations of character of the "Canterbury Tales," could have given
+birth to the antiquated Saxon and rustic pith of this genuine English
+bard. Either his labour was concluded ere the writings of the court
+poets had travelled to our obscure country priest in his seclusion in a
+distant county, or else he disdained their exotic fancies, their
+Latinisms, their Gallicisms, and their Italianisms, and their trivial
+rhymes, that in every respect he might remain their astonishing
+contrast, with no inferiority of genius. There was no philosophical
+criticism in the censure of this poet by Warton, when he condemns him
+for not having "availed himself of the rising and rapid improvements of
+the English language," and censures him for his "affectation of obsolete
+English." These rising improvements may never have reached our bard, or
+if they had he might have disdained them; for the writer of the "Visions
+concerning Piers Ploughman" was strictly a national poet; and there was
+no "affectation of obsolete English" in a poet preserving the forms of
+his native idiom, and avoiding all exotic novelties in the energy of his
+Anglo-Saxon genius. His uncontaminated mind returned to or continued the
+Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre and unrhymed verse; he trusted its
+cadence to the ear, scorning the subjection of rhyme. WEBBE, a critic of
+the age of Elizabeth, considered this poet as "the first who had
+observed the quantity of our verse without the curiosity of rhyme."
+
+It is useless to give the skeleton of a desultory and tedious
+allegorical narrative. The last editor, Dr. Whitaker, imagined that "he
+for the first time had shown that it was written after a regular and
+consistent design," notwithstanding that he himself confesses, that "the
+conclusion is singularly cold and comfortless and _leaves the inquirer,
+after a long peregrination, still remote from the object of his
+search_"--a conclusion where nothing is concluded! The visionist might
+have been overtaken by sleep among the bushes of the Malvern Hills for
+twenty cantos more, without at all deranging anything which he had said,
+or inconveniencing anything which he might say. In truth, it is a heap
+of rhapsodies, without any artifice of connexion or involution of plot,
+or any sustained interest of one actor more than another among the
+numerous ideal beings who flit along the dreamy scenes.
+
+The true spirit of this imaginative work is more comprehensible than any
+settled design. That mysterious or mythical personage, "Piers
+Ploughman," is the representative of "the Universal Church," says Dr.
+Whitaker; or "Christian life," says Mr. Campbell. What he may be is very
+doubtful, for we have "True Religion," a fair lady, who puts in surely a
+higher claim to represent "the Universal Church," or "Christian life,"
+than "the Ploughman," who has to till his half-acre and save his idling
+companions from "waste" and "wane." The most important personage is
+"Mede," or bribery, who seems to exert an extraordinary influence over
+the Bench, and the Bar, and the Church, and through every profession
+which occurred to the poet.
+
+The pearls in these waters lie not on the surface. The visionist had
+deeper thoughts and more concealed feelings than these rhapsodical
+phantoms. In a general survey of society, he contemplates on the court
+and the clergy, glancing through all the diversified ranks of the laity,
+not sparing the people themselves, as their awful reprover. It was a
+voice from the wilderness in the language of the people. The children of
+want and oppression had found their solitary advocate. The prelacy,
+dissolved in the luxuriousness of papal pomp, and a barbarous
+aristocracy, with their rapacious dependents, were mindless of the
+morals or the happiness of those human herds, whose heads were counted,
+but whose hearts they could never call their own.
+
+We are curious to learn, in this disordered state of the Commonwealth,
+the political opinions entertained by this sage. They are as mysterious
+as Piers Ploughman himself.
+
+Passive obedience to the higher powers is inculcated apparently rather
+for its prudence than its duty. This we infer from his lively parable of
+"the Cat of a Court," and "A Route of Ratones and Small Mice."
+"Grimalkin, though sometimes apt to play the tyrant when appetite was
+sharp, would often come laughing and leaping among them. A rat, a
+whisker of renown, cunningly proposed to adorn the cat with an ornament,
+like those which great lords use who wear chains and collars about their
+necks; it should be a tinkling bell, which, if cats would fancy the
+fashion, would warn us of their approach. We might then in security be
+all lords ourselves, and not be in this misery of creeping under
+benches. But not a raton of the whole rout, for the realm of France, or
+to win all England, would bind the bell round the imperial neck. A
+mouseling, who did not much like rats, concluded that if they should
+even kill the cat, then there would come another to crunch us and our
+kind; for men will not have their meal nibbled by us mice, nor their
+nights disturbed by the clattering of roystering rats. Better for us to
+let the cat alone! My old father said a kitten was worse. The cat never
+hurt me; when he is in good-humour, I like him well,--and by my counsel
+cat nor kitten shall be grieved. I will suffer and say nothing. The
+beast who now chastiseth many, may be amended by misfortune. Are the
+rats to be our governors? I tell ye, we would not rule ourselves!" The
+poet adds, "What this means, ye men who love mirth interpret for me, for
+I dare not!"
+
+The parable seems sufficiently obvious. The ratons represent a haughty
+aristocracy, and "the small mouse" is one of the people themselves, who
+in his mouse-like wisdom preferred a single sovereign to many lords. But
+the poet's own reflection, addressed to "the men of mirth," seems
+enigmatic. Is he indulging a secret laugh at the passive obedience of
+the prudential mouse?
+
+Our author's indignant spirit, indeed, is vehemently democratic. He
+dared to write what many trembled to whisper. Genius reflects the
+suppressed feelings of its age. It was a stirring epoch. The spirit of
+inquisition had gone forth in the person of Wickliffe; and wherever a
+Wickliffe appears, as surely will there be a Piers Ploughman. When a
+great precursor of novel opinions arises, it is the men of genius in
+seclusion who think and write.
+
+But our country priest, in his contemplative mood, was not less
+remarkable for his prudence than for his bold freedom, aware that the
+most corrupt would be the most vindictive. The implacable ecclesiastics,
+by the dread discipline of the church, would doom the apostle of
+humanity, but the apostate of his order, to perpetual silence--by the
+spell of an anathema; and the haughty noble would crush his victim by
+the iron arm of his own, or of the civil power. The day had not yet
+arrived when the great were to endure the freedom of reprehension. The
+sage, the satirist, and the seer, for prophet he proved to be, veiled
+his head in allegory; he published no other names than those of the
+virtues and the vices; and to avoid personality, he contented himself
+with personification.
+
+A voluminous allegory is the rudest and the most insupportable of all
+poetic fictions; it originates in an early period of society--when its
+circles are contracted and isolated, and the poet is more conversant
+with the passions of mankind than with individuals. A genius of the
+highest order alone could lead us through a single perusal of such a
+poem, by the charm of vivifying details, which enables us to forget the
+allegory altogether--the tedious drama of nonentities or abstract
+beings. In such creative touches the author of Piers Ploughman displays
+pictures of domestic life, with the minute fidelity of a Flemish
+painting; so veracious is his simplicity! He is a great satirist,
+touching with caustic invective or keen irony public abuses and private
+vices; but in the depth of his emotions, and in the wildness of his
+imagination, he breaks forth in the solemn tones and with the sombre
+majesty of Dante.
+
+But this rude native genius was profound as he was sagacious, and his
+philosophy terminated in prophecy. At the era of the Reformation they
+were startled by the discovery of an unknown writer, who, two centuries
+preceding that awful change, had predicted _the fate of the religious
+houses from the hand of a king_. The visionary seer seems to have fallen
+on the principle which led Erasmus to predict that "_those who were in
+power_" would seize on the rich shrines, because _no other class of men_
+in society could mate with so mighty a body as the monks. Power only
+could accomplish that great purpose, and hence our Vaticinator fixed on
+the highest as the most likely; and the deep foresight of an obscure
+country priest, which required two centuries to be verified, became a
+great moral and political prediction.
+
+Without, however, depreciating the sagacity of the predictor, there is
+reason to suspect that the same thought was occurring to some of the
+great themselves. The Reformation of Henry the Eighth may be dated from
+the reign of Richard the Second. That mighty transition into a new order
+of events in our history would then have occurred, for the stag was
+started, and the hunt was up. It was an accidental and unexpected
+circumstance which turned aside the impending event, which was to be
+future and not immediate. Henry Bolingbroke, in the early part of his
+life, seems to have entertained some free opinions respecting the
+property of the church. He seemed not unfavourable to Wickliffe's
+doctrines, and, when Earl of Derby, once declared that "princes had too
+little, and religious houses too much." This unguarded expression, which
+was not to be forgotten, we are told, occasioned one of the rebellions
+during his reign. But when Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne, age and
+prudence might have come together; the monarch balanced the dread of a
+turbulent aristocracy, and the uncertain tenure of dominion to be held
+at their pleasure, against the security of sheltering the throne under
+the broad alliance of a potent prelacy; a potent prelacy whose doom was
+fixed, though the hour had not yet struck! The monarch affixed a bloody
+seal to this political convention by granting a statute which made the
+offence of heresy capital; a crime which heretofore in law was as
+unknown as it seemed impossible to designate, and described only in
+figurative terms, as something very alarming, but which any prudent
+heretic might easily, if not explain, at least recant. To give it more
+solemnity, the statute is delivered in Latin, and the punishment of
+burning was to be inflicted "_corum populo, in eminente loco_."[1]
+
+The "Visions of Piers Ploughman," when the day which his prescience
+anticipated arrived, were eagerly received; it is said the work passed
+through three editions in one year, about 1550, in the reign of the
+youthful monarch of the Reformation; the readers at that early period of
+printing would find many passages congenial to the popular sentiments,
+and our nameless author was placed among the founders of a new era.
+
+The "VISIONS OF PIERS PLOUGHMAN" will always offer studies for the
+poetical artist. This volume, and not Gower's nor Chaucer's, is a well
+of English undefiled. SPENSER often beheld these Visions; MILTON, in his
+sublime description of the Lazar House, was surely inspired by a
+reminiscence of Piers Ploughman. Even Dryden, whom we should not suspect
+to be much addicted to black-letter reading beyond his Chaucer, must
+have carefully conned our Piers Ploughman; for he has borrowed one very
+striking line from our poet, and possibly may have taken others. BYRON,
+though he has thrown out a crude opinion of Chaucer, has declared that
+"the Ploughman" excels our ancient poets. And I am inclined to think
+that we owe to Piers Ploughman an allegorical work of the same wild
+invention, from that other creative mind, the author of the "Pilgrim's
+Progress." How can we think of the one, without being reminded of the
+other? Some distant relationship seems to exist between the Ploughman's
+_Dowell_ and _Dobet_, and _Dobest_, Friar _Flatterer_, _Grace_ the
+Portress of the magnificent Tower of _Truth_ viewed at a distance, and
+by its side the dungeon of _Care_, _Natural Understanding_, and his lean
+and stern wife _Study_, and all the rest of this numerous company, and
+the shadowy pilgrimage of the "Immortal Dreamer" to "the Celestial
+City." Yet I would mistrust my own feeling, when so many able critics,
+in their various researches after a prototype of that singular
+production, have hitherto not suggested what seems to me obvious.[2]
+
+Why our rustic bard selected the character of a ploughman as the
+personage adapted to convey to us his theological mysteries, we know not
+precisely to ascertain; but it probably occurred as a companion fitted
+to the humbler condition of the apostles themselves. Such, however, was
+the power of the genius of this writer, that his successors were content
+to look for no one of a higher class to personify their solemn themes.
+Hence we have "The Crede of Piers Ploughman;" "The Prayer and Complaint
+of the Ploughman;" "The Ploughman's Tale," inserted in Chaucer's volume;
+all being equally directed against the vicious clergy of the day.
+
+"The Crede of Piers Ploughman," if not written by the author of the
+"Vision," is at least written by a scholar who fully emulates his
+master; and Pope was so deeply struck with this little poem, that he has
+very carefully analysed the whole.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Barrington's "Observations on the more ancient Statutes."
+
+  [2] For the general reader I fear that "The Visions of Piers
+    Ploughman" must remain a sealed book. The last edition of Dr.
+    WHITAKER, the most magnificent and frightful volume that was ever
+    beheld in the black letter, was edited by one whose delicacy of taste
+    unfitted him for this homely task: the plain freedom of the vigorous
+    language is sometimes castrated, with a faulty paraphrase and a
+    slender glossary; and passages are slurred over with an annihilating
+    &c. Much was expected from this splendid edition; the subscription
+    price was quadrupled, and on its publication every one would rid
+    himself of the mutilated author. The editor has not assisted the
+    reader through his barbarous text interspersed with Saxon characters
+    and abbreviations, and the difficulties of an obscure and elliptical
+    phraseology in a very antiquated language. Should ever a new edition
+    appear, the perusal would be facilitated by printing with the white
+    letter. There is an excellent specimen for an improved text and
+    edition in "Gent. Mag.," April, 1834. [This improved text of the
+    "Vision" and "Crede" has, since this note was originally written,
+    been published with notes by T. Wright, M.A.; and has been again
+    reprinted recently.]
+
+
+
+
+OCCLEVE; THE SCHOLAR OF CHAUCER.
+
+
+Warton passed sentence on OCCLEVE as "a cold genius, and a feeble
+writer." A literary antiquary, from a manuscript in his possession,
+published six poems of Occleve; but that selection was limited to the
+sole purpose of furnishing the personal history of the author.[1]
+Ritson's sharp snarl pronounced that they were of "peculiar stupidity;"
+George Ellis refused to give "a specimen;" and Mr. Hallam, with his
+recollection of the critical brotherhood, has decreed, that "the poetry
+of Occleve is wretchedly bad, abounding with pedantry, and destitute of
+grace or spirit." We could hardly expect to have heard any more of this
+doomed victim--this ancient man, born in the fourteenth century,
+standing before us, whose dry bones will ill bear all this shaking and
+cuffing.
+
+A literary historian, who has read manuscripts with the eagerness which
+others do the last novelty, more careful than Warton, and more
+discriminate than Ritson, has, with honest intrepidity, confessed that
+"OCCLEVE has not had his just share of reputation. His writings greatly
+assisted the growth of the popularity of our infant poetry."[2] Our
+historian has furnished from the manuscripts of OCCLEVE testimonies of
+his assertion.
+
+Among the six poems printed, one of considerable length exhibits the
+habits of a dissipated young gentleman in the fourteenth century.
+
+OCCLEVE for more than twenty years was a writer in the Privy Seal, where
+we find quarter days were most irregular; and though briberies
+constantly flowed in, yet the golden shower passed over the heads of
+the clerks, dropping nothing into the hands of these innocents.
+
+Our poet, in his usual passage from his "Chestres Inn by the Strond" to
+"Westminster Gate," by land or water--for "in the winter the way was
+deep," and "the Strand" was then what its name indicates--often was
+delayed by
+
+  The outward signe of Bacchus and his lure,
+  That at his dore hangeth day by day,
+  Exciteth Folk to taste of his moistúre
+  So often that they cannot well say Nay!
+
+There was another invitation for this susceptible writer of the Privy
+Seal.
+
+  I dare not tell how that the fresh repaír
+  Of Venus femel, lusty children dear,
+  That so goodlý, so shapely were, and fair,
+  And so pleasánt of port and of manére.
+
+There he loitered,
+
+  To talk of mirth, and to disport and play.
+
+He never "pinched" the taverners, the cooks, the boatmen, and all such
+gentry.
+
+  Among this many in mine audience,
+  Methought I was ymade a man for ever--
+  So tickled me that nyce reverénce,
+  That it me made larger of dispence;--
+  For Riot payeth largely ever mo;
+  He stinteth never till his purse be bare.
+
+He is at length seized amid his jollities,
+
+  By force of the penniless maladíe,
+  Ne lust[3] had none to Bacchus House to hie.
+  Fy! lack of coin departeth compaigníe;
+  And hevé purse with Herté liberál
+  Quencheth the thirsty heat of Hertés drie,
+  Where chinchy Herté[4] hath thereof but small.
+
+This "mirror of riot and excess" effected a discovery, and it was, that
+all the mischiefs which he recounts came from the high reports of
+himself which servants bring to their lord. The Losengour or pleasant
+flatterer was too lightly believed, and honied words made more harmful
+the deceitful error. Oh! babbling flattery! he spiritedly exclaims,
+author of all lyes, that causest all day thy lord to fare amiss. Such
+is the import of the following uncouth verse:--
+
+  Many a servant unto his Lord saith
+  That all the world speaketh of him, Honoúr,
+  When the contrarie of that is sooth in faith;
+  And lightly leeved is this Losengoúr,[5]
+  His hony wordés wrapped in Erroúr,
+  Blindly conceived been, the more harm is,
+  O thou, FAVELE, of lesynges auctoúr,[6]
+  Causest all day thy Lord to fare amiss.
+  The Combre worldés;[7] 'clept been Enchantoúrs
+  In Bookes, as I have red----.
+
+OCCLEVE was a shrewd observer of his own times. That this rhymer was
+even a playful painter of society we have a remarkable evidence
+preserved in the volume of his great master. "The Letter of Cupid," in
+the works of Chaucer, was the production of Occleve, and appears to have
+been overlooked by his modern critics. He had originally entitled it, "A
+Treatise of the Conversation of Men and Women in the Little Island of
+Albion." It is a caustic "polite conversation;" and deemed so execrably
+good, as to have excited, as our ancient critic Speght tells, "such
+hatred among the gentlewomen of the Court, that Occleve was forced to
+recant in that boke of his called 'Planetas Proprius.'"[8] The Letter of
+Cupid is thus dated:--
+
+  Written in the lusty month of May,
+  In our Paléis where many a millión
+  Of lovers true have habitatión,
+  The yere of grace joyfull and jocúnd,
+  A thousand four hundred and secónd.
+
+Imagery and imagination are not required in the school of society.
+Occleve seems, however, sometimes to have told a tale not amiss, for
+WILLIAM BROWN, the pastoral bard, inserted entire a long story by old
+Occleve in his "Shepherd's Pipe." To us he remains sufficiently uncouth.
+The language had not at this period acquired even a syntax, though with
+all its rudeness it was neither wanting in energy nor copiousness, from
+that adoption of the French, the Provençal, and the Italian, with which
+Chaucer had enriched his vein. The present writer seems to have had some
+notions of the critical art, for he requests the learned tutor of Prince
+Edward, afterwards Edward the Fourth, to warn him, when,--
+
+  Metring amiss;
+
+and when
+
+            He speaks unsyttingly,[9]
+  Or not by just peys[10] my sentence weigh,
+  And not to the order of enditing obey,
+  And my colours set ofté sythe awry.
+
+We might be curious to learn, with all these notions of the suitable,
+the weighty, the order of enditing, and the colours often awry, whether
+these versifiers had really any settled principles of criticism. Occleve
+is a vernacular writer, bare of ornament. He has told us that he knew
+little of "Latin nor French," though often counselled by his immortal
+master. His enthusiastic love thus exults:--
+
+  Thou wer't acquainted with Chaucer?--Pardie!
+  God save his soul!
+  The first findér of our faire langáge!
+
+There is one little circumstance more which connects the humble name of
+this versifier with that of Chaucer. His affectionate devotion to the
+great poet has been recorded by Speght in his edition of Chaucer.
+"Thomas Occleve, for the love he bare to his master, caused his picture
+to be truly drawn in his book 'De Regimine Principis,' dedicated to
+Henry the Fifth." In this manuscript, with "fond idolatry," he placed
+the portraiture of his master facing an invocation. From this portrait
+the head on the poet's monument was taken, as well as all our prints. It
+bears a faithful resemblance to the picture of Chaucer painted on board
+in the Bodleian Library.[11] Had Occleve, with his feelings, sent us
+down some memorial of the poet and the man, we should have conned his
+verse in better humour; but the history of genius had not yet entered
+even into the minds of its most zealous votaries.[12]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "_Poems by_ THOMAS HOCCLEVE, _never before printed, selected from
+    a manuscript in the possession of George Mason, with a preface,
+    notes, and glossary_," 1796. The notes are not amiss, and the
+    glossary is valuable; but the verses printed by Mason are his least
+    interesting productions. The poet's name is here written with an H,
+    as it appeared in the manuscript; but there is no need of a modern
+    editor changing the usual mode, because names were diversely written
+    or spelt even in much later times. The present writer has been called
+    not only _Occleve_, but _Occliffe_, as we find him in Chaucer's
+    works.
+
+  [2] Turner's "History of England," v. 335.
+
+  [3] No desire.
+
+  [4] Niggardly heart.
+
+  [5] A Chaucerian word, which well deserves preservation in the
+    language.
+
+  [6] FAVELL, author of "Lyes." FAVELL, the editor of Hoccleve,
+    explains as _cajolerie_, or flattery, by words given by Carpentier in
+    his supplement to "Du Cange." Pavel is personified by "Piers
+    Ploughman," and in Skelton's "Bouge of Court." FAVELE in langue
+    Romane is Flattery--hence _Fabel_, Fabling.--Roquefort's
+    "Dictionnaire." The Italian FAVELLIO, parlerie, babil,
+    caquet--Alberti's "Grand Dictionnaire"--does not wholly convey the
+    idea of our modern _Humbug_, which combines _fabling_ and _caquet_.
+
+  [7] The encumbrances to the world. In another poem he calls death
+    "that Coimbre-world." It was a favourite expression with him, taken
+    from Chaucer. See "Warton," ii. 352, note.
+
+  [8] A title which does not appear in the catalogue of his writings by
+    Ritson, in his "Bibliographia Poetica."
+
+  [9] Unfittingly.
+
+  [10] Weight; probably from the French _poids_.
+
+  [11] It is in Royal MS. 17 D. 6. The best is in the Harleian MS.
+    4866. There is also a very curious full-length preserved in a single
+    leaf of vellum, Sloane MS. 5141; which has been copied in Shaw's
+    "Dresses and Decorations of the Middle Ages," vol. i.--ED.
+
+  [12] A single trait, however, has come down to us from that other
+    scholar of Chaucer, whom we are next to follow. Lydgate assures us,
+    from what he heard, that the great poet would not suffer petty
+    criticisms "to perturb his reste." He did not like to groan over, and
+    "pinch at every blot," but always "did his best."--
+
+      My master Chaucer that founde ful many spot,
+      Hym lyste not gruche, nor pynch at every blot;
+      Nor move himself to perturb his reste;
+      I have perde tolde, but seyd alway his beste.
+
+        LYDGATE's "Troy."
+
+
+
+
+LYDGATE; THE MONK OF BURY.
+
+
+LYDGATE, the monk of Bury, was also the scholar of Chaucer: our monk had
+not passed a whole sequestered life in his Benedictine monastery; he had
+journeyed through France and Italy, and was familiar with the writings
+of Dante, and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and of Alain Chartier. The
+delectable catalogue of his writings, great and small, exceeds two
+hundred and fifty, and may not yet be complete, for they lie scattered
+in their manuscript state. A great multitude of writings, the incessant
+movements of a single mind, will at first convey to us a sense of
+magnitude; and in this magnitude, if we observe the greatest possible
+diversity of parts, and, if we may use the term, the flashings of the
+most changeable contrasts, we must place such a universal talent among
+the phenomena of literature.
+
+LYDGATE composed epics, which were the lasting favourites of two whole
+centuries--so long were classical repetitions of "Troy" and of "Thebes"
+not found irksome.[1] In his graver hours he instructed the world by
+ethical descants, Æsopian fables, and quaint proverbs; fixed their
+wonder by saintly legends and veracious chronicles; and disported in
+amorous ditties, and many a merrie tale: translating or inventing,
+labour or levity, rounded the unconscious day of the versifying monk. We
+descend from the "Siege of Troy," a romance of nearly thirty thousand
+lines, which long graced the oriel window, to the freer vein of humour
+of "London Lick-penny," which opens the street scenery of London in the
+fourteenth century, and "The Prioresse and her Three Wooers," that
+exquisitely ludicrous narrative ballad for the people.[2]
+
+Ritson, whose rabid hostility to the clerical character was part of his
+constitutional malady, whether it related to "a mendacious prelate" or
+"a stinking monk," after having expended twenty pages in the mere
+enumeration of the titles of Lydgate's writings, heartlessly hints at
+the "cart-loads of rubbish of a voluminous poetaster; a prosaic and
+drivelling monk." And this is greedily seized on by the hand of the
+bibliographer. Percy and Ellis, too, mention DAN LYDGATE with contempt.
+Critics often find it convenient to resemble dogs, by barking one after
+the other, without any other cause than the first bark of a brother, who
+had only bayed the moon. It now seemed concluded that the rhyming monk
+was to be dismissed for ever. A very credible witness, however, at last
+deposed that "Lydgate has been oftener abused than read."[3] And now Mr.
+Hallam tells us that "GRAY, no light authority, speaks more favourably
+of Lydgate than either Warton or Ellis;" and this nervous writer, with
+his accustomed correct discernment, has alleged a valid reason why Gray
+excelled them in this criticism; for "great poets have often the taste
+to discern, and the candour to acknowledge, those beauties which are
+latent amidst the tedious dulness of their humbler brethren."
+
+Warton has, however, afforded three copious chapters on Lydgate, which
+are half as much as his enthusiasm bestowed on Chaucer. A Gothic monk,
+composing ancient romances, was a subject too congenial to have been
+neglected by the historian of our poetry, and he has limned and
+illuminated the feudal priest with the love of the votary, who deemed,
+in his "lone-hours,"
+
+  Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
+  Of hoar Antiquity, but strown with flowers.
+
+His miniature is exquisitely touched. "He was not only the poet of his
+monastery, but of the world in general. If a _disguising_ was intended
+by the company of goldsmiths, a _mask_ before his majesty, a _may-game_
+for the sheriffs and aldermen of London, a _mumming_ before the
+lord-mayor, a procession of _pageants_ for the festival of Corpus
+Christi, or a _carol_ for the coronation, Lydgate was consulted, and
+gave the poetry."[4]
+
+Mr. HALLAM objects that "the attention fails in the school-boy stories
+of Thebes and Troy; but it seems probable that Lydgate would have been a
+better poet in satire upon his own times, or delineation of their
+manners--themes which would have gratified us much more than the fate of
+princes."
+
+This is relatively true--true as regards some of us, but not at all as
+respects Lydgate, nor the people of his age, nor the king and the
+princes who commanded themes congenial with their military character,
+and their simple tastes, romantically charming the readers of two
+centuries. If our critic, in the exercise of his energetic faculties,
+lives out of the necromancy of the old Romaunt, afar from Thebes and
+Troy, Thomas Warton was cradled among the children of fancy, and in his
+rovings had tasted their wild honey. The only works of Lydgate which
+attracted his attention were precisely these tedious "Fate of Princes"
+and "The Troy Book."
+
+The other modern critics--Ritson, Percy, and Ellis--had but a slight
+knowledge of DAN[5] LYDGATE. They have generally acted on the pressure
+of the moment, to get up a hasty court of _Pie-poudre_--that fugitive
+tribunal held at fairs--to determine on the case of a culprit even
+before they could shake the dust off their feet. But time calls for an
+arrest of hasty judgments, or brings forward some illustrious advocate
+to reverse the judicial decision, or set forth the misfortunes of the
+accused. Two, most eminent in genius, stand by the side of the monk of
+Bury--COLERIDGE and GRAY. Coleridge has left us his protest in favour of
+Lydgate, for he deeply regrets that in the general collection of our
+poets, the unpoetic editor "had not substituted _the whole of Lydgate's
+works from the manuscript extant_, for the almost worthless Gower."[6]
+Gray alone has taken an enlarged view of the state of our poetry and our
+language at this period. When that master-spirit abandoned the history
+of our poetry from his fastidious delicacy or from his learned
+indolence, because Warton had projected it, English literature sustained
+an irreparable loss.[7] In Gray surely we have lost a literary historian
+such as the world has not yet had; so rare is that genius who happily
+combines qualities apparently incompatible. In his superior learning,
+his subtle taste, his deeper thought, and his more vigorous sense, we
+should have found the elements of a more philosophical criticism, with a
+more searching and comprehensive intellect, than can be awarded to our
+old favourite, THOMAS WARTON. In the neglected quartos of GRAY we
+discover that the poet had set earnestly to work on the archæology of
+our poetry; we also find in his works those noble versions of the
+northern Scalds, and the Welsh bards, which he designed to have
+introduced into his history; thus to have impressed on us a perfect
+notion of a national poetry, by poetry itself; a rare good fortune
+which does not enliven the toil of prosaic critics or verbal
+interpreters. Gray had found the manuscripts of Lydgate at Cambridge,
+and has made them a vehicle for the most beautiful disquisitions. On a
+passage in Lydgate, the poet-critic developes a curious occurrence in
+the history of the poetic art--namely, that proneness to minute
+circumstances which lengthens the strains of our elder poets, and which
+the impatience of modern taste rejects as tediousness; yet this will be
+found to be "the essence of poetry and oratory." This topic is
+important; and as I can neither add nor dare to take away from this
+perfect criticism, I submit to the task of transcribing what I am sure
+will come to most of my readers in all its freshness and novelty.
+
+Our ancient poet seems to be apologising for telling long stories, which
+he asserts cannot be told "in wordes few"--
+
+  For a storye which is not plainly told,
+  But constreyned under _wordes few_
+  For lack of truth, wher they ben new or olde,
+  Men by reporte cannot the matter shewe;
+  These oakés greaté be not down yhewe
+  First at a stroke, but by a _long prócesse_;
+  Nor long stories a word may not expresse.
+
+    LYDGATE, in his "Fall of Princes."
+
+On this Gray has delivered the following observations:--"These 'long
+processes,' indeed, suited wonderfully with the attention and simple
+curiosity of the age in which LYDGATE lived; many a _stroke_ have he and
+the best of his contemporaries spent upon _a sturdy old story_, till
+they had blunted their own edge and that of their readers--at least a
+modern reader will find it so: but it is a folly to judge of the
+understanding and patience of those times by our own. They loved, I will
+not say tediousness, but _length_ and a train of circumstances in a
+narration. The vulgar do so still: it gives an air of reality to facts;
+it fixes the attention; raises and keeps in suspense their expectation,
+and supplies the defects of their little and lifeless imagination; and
+it keeps pace with the slow motion of their own thoughts. Tell them a
+story as you would tell it to a man of wit; it will appear to them as an
+object seen in the night by a flash of lightning: but when you have
+placed it in various lights and in various positions, they will come at
+last to see and feel it as well as others. But we need not confine
+ourselves to the vulgar, and to understandings beneath our own.
+Circumstance ever was and ever will be the life and the essence both of
+oratory and of poetry. It has in some sort the same effect upon every
+mind that it has upon that of the populace; and I fear the _quickness
+and delicate impatience of these polished times_ in which we live are
+but the forerunners of the decline of all those beautiful arts which
+depend upon the imagination. Homer, the father of _circumstance_, has
+occasion for the same apology which I am making for Lydgate and for his
+predecessors."[8]
+
+At the monastery of Bury we might have listened to that Gothic monk's
+"goodly tale," or "notable proverb of Æsopus" for the nonce; or saintly
+legend, or "merrie balade;" or the story of "Thebes," which the scholar
+took up from his master Chaucer: or that from "Bochas," and Guido
+Colonna's "Troy Book:" but too numerous were the volumes to tell, and
+too voluminous was many a volume. Verbose and diffuse, yet clear and
+fluent, ran his page; too minutely copious were his descriptions, yet
+the delineations seemed the more graphical; his verse, too long or too
+short, halts in his measures till we fall into the minstrel's "metring,"
+and lines break forth, beautiful as any in our day. He expands the same
+image, and loses all likeness in a prolix simile, for his readers were
+not so impatient as ourselves. These poets suffered or enjoyed a fatal
+facility of rhyming, lost for us, from the use of polysyllabic words
+from the French and the Latin accented on the last syllable, a custom
+continued by the Scots; and these provided them with too ready an
+abundance of poetic terminations or rhymes, tending to make their poems
+voluminous. The art of selection is the art of an age less florid and
+more fastidious, but not always more genial or more inventive. The
+pruning-hook was not in use when planters were too eager to gather the
+first fruits from the trees which their own hands had put into the
+earth.
+
+Alas! apologies only leave irremediable faults as they were! The
+tediousness of Dan Lydgate remains as languid, his verse as halting, and
+"Thebes" and "Troy" as desolate, as we found them!
+
+Let us, however, be reminded, that he who wholly neglects the study of
+our ancient poets must submit to the loss of knowledge which a
+philosopher would value; the manners of the age, the modes of feeling,
+the stream of thought, the virgin fancies, and that position which the
+human character takes in distant ages--these will imbue his memory with
+the genius of his country and the eternal truth of authentic nature. No
+English poet should wholly resign these masses of vernacular poetry to
+the lone closet of the antiquary; he who loves the gain of labour will
+excavate these quarries for their marble, for we know they are marble,
+since many a noble column has been raised from these shapeless and
+unhewed blocks.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "The Troy Tale" was composed at the command of the King, Henry
+    the Fifth; as "the Fall of Princes," from Boccace, was at the desire
+    of Humphrey, the good Duke of Gloucester. He wrote regal poems for
+    kings, while he dispersed wisdom and merriment for their subjects.
+
+  [2] While this volume is passing through the press, "A Selection from
+    the Minor Poems of Lydgate" has been edited by Mr. Halliwell. The
+    versatility of Lydgate's poetical skill is advantageously shown in
+    his comic satire, and his ethics drawn from a deep insight into human
+    nature. The editor suggests a new reading for the title of the ballad
+    of "London _Lick-penny_," more suitable to the misadventures of its
+    hero,--"London _Lack-penny_," for London could not lick a penny from
+    the forlorn hero who had not one to offer to it. GROSE, probably
+    taken by the humorous designation, has placed it among his local
+    proverbs.
+
+    The tale of the "Prioress and her Three Wooers" is one of the
+    happiest fabliaux. Mr. Campbell transcribed "the merrie tale" for his
+    Specimens, when he discovered that a preceding forager had
+    anticipated him in Mr. Jamieson, who has preserved it in his "Popular
+    Ballads," i. 253.
+
+  [3] Turner's "Hist. of England," v.
+
+  [4] I may point out the raw material which our poetical antiquary has
+    here worked up with such perfect effect in this picturesque
+    enumeration. Appended to Speght's "Chaucer," that editor furnished a
+    very curious list of about a hundred works by Lydgate, which were in
+    his own possession. Most of the singular poetical exhibitions here
+    enumerated are mentioned towards the end of that list, and which
+    Warton has happily appropriated, and so turned a dry catalogue into a
+    poetical picture. [A selection of Lydgate's Poems, 44 in number, were
+    printed by the Percy Society in 1840.]
+
+  [5] DAN, as Ritson tells us, is a title given to the individuals of
+    certain religious orders, from the barbarous Latin _Domnus_, a
+    variation of _Dominus_, or the French _Dam_, or _Dom_. _Dan_ became a
+    corruption of _Don_ for _Dominus_. The title afterwards extended to
+    persons of respectable condition, as vague as our complimentary
+    esquire. It was applied to Chaucer by Spenser, and when obsolete it
+    became jocular; for we have "Dan Cupid." Prior renewed it with
+    ludicrous gravity when telling a tale which he had from "Dan Pope."
+    It is still used in an honourable sense by the Spaniards in their
+    DON.
+
+  [6] "Literary Remains," ii. 130.
+
+  [7] The great poet has left two or three most precious fragments; but
+    these have long been buried in those ill-fated quartos, consisting
+    chiefly of notes on Greek and on Plato, which Matthias published with
+    extraordinary pomp; and, so he used to say, as a monument for himself
+    as well as the bard--a monument which, his egregious self-complacency
+    lived to witness, partook more of the properties of a tombstone than
+    the glory of a column.
+
+  [8] "Gray's Works," by Matthias, ii. p. 60.
+
+
+
+
+THE INVENTION OF PRINTING
+
+
+Printing remained, as long as its first artificers could keep it, a
+secret and occult art; and it is the only one that ceaselessly operates
+all the miracles which the others had vainly promised.
+
+Who first thought to carve the wooden immoveable letters on blocks?--to
+stamp the first sheet which ever was imprinted? Or who, second in
+invention, but first in utility, imagined to cast the metal with fusile
+types, separate from each other?--to fix this scattered alphabet in a
+form, and thus by one stroke write a thousand manuscripts, and, with the
+identical letters, multiply not a single work, but all sorts of works
+hereafter? Was it fortunate chance, or deliberate meditation, or both in
+gradual discovery, which produced this invention? In truth, we can
+neither detect the rude beginnings, nor hardly dare to fix on the
+beginners. The _Origines Typographicæ_ are, even at this late hour,
+provoking a fierce controversy, not only among those who live in the
+shades of their libraries, but with honest burghers; for the glory of
+patriotism has connected itself with the invention of an art which came
+to us like a divine revelation in the history of man. But the place, the
+mode, and the person--the invention and the inventor--are the subjects
+of volumes! Votaries of Fust, of Schöffer, of Gutenberg, of Costar! A
+sullen silence or a deadly feud is your only response. Ye jealous cities
+of Mentz, of Strasburg, and of Haarlem, each of ye have your armed
+champion at your gates![1]
+
+The mystical eulogist of the art of printing, who declared that "the
+invention came from Heaven," was not more at a loss to detect the origin
+than those who have sought for it among the earliest printers.[2]
+Learned but angry disputants on the origin of printing, what if the art
+can boast of no single inventor, and was not the product of a single
+act? Consider the varieties of its practice, the change of wood to
+metal, the fixed to the moveable type; view the complexity of its
+machinery; repeated attempts must often have preceded so many inventions
+ere they terminated in the great one. From the imperfect and
+contradictory notices of the early essays--and of the very earliest we
+may have no record--we must infer that the art, though secret, was
+progressive, and that many imperfect beginnings were going on at the
+same time in different places.
+
+Struck by the magnitude and the magnificence of the famous Bible of
+Fust, some have decided on the invention of the art by one of its most
+splendid results; this, however, is not in the usual course of human
+affairs, nor in the nature of things. "The Art of Printing," observes
+Dr. Cotton, in his introduction, "was brought almost to perfection in
+its infancy; so that, like Minerva, it may be said to have sprung to
+life, mature, vigorous, and armed for war." But in the article
+"Moguntia, or Mentz," this acute researcher states that "after all that
+has been written with such angry feelings upon the long-contested
+question of the _origin of the Art of Printing_, Mentz appears still to
+preserve the best-founded claim to the honour of being the _birth-place
+of the Typographic Art_; because," he adds, "the specimens adduced in
+favour of Haarlem and Strasburg, even if we should allow their
+genuineness, are confessedly of _a rude and imperfect execution_." We
+require no other evidence of the important fact, that the art, in its
+early stages, had to pass through many transitions--from the small
+school-books, or Donatuses, of Costar, to the splendid Bible of Fust.
+Had the art been borrowed or stolen from a single source, according to
+the popular tradition, the works would have borne a more fraternal
+resemblance, and have evinced less inferiority of execution; but if
+several persons at the same time were working in secrecy, each by his
+own method, their differences and their inferiority would produce "the
+rude and imperfect specimens." Mr. Hallam has suffered his strong
+emotion on the greatness of the invention to reflect itself back on the
+humble discoverers themselves; and, unusual with his searching
+inquiries, calls once more on Dr. Cotton's Minerva, but with a more
+celestial panoply. "The _high-minded inventors_ of this great art tried,
+at _the very outset_, so bold a flight as the printing _an entire
+Bible_. It was Minerva leaping on earth, in her divine strength and
+radiant armour, ready at the moment of her nativity to subdue and
+destroy her enemies."[3] The Bible called the Mazarine Bible, thus
+distinguished from having been found in the Cardinal's library, remains
+still a miracle of typography, not only for its type, but for the
+quality of the paper and the sparkling blackness of its ink.[4] The
+success of the art was established by this Bible; but the goldsmith
+Fust, who himself was no printer, was no otherwise "high-minded," than
+by the usurious prices he speculated on for this innocent imposture of
+vending what was now a printed book for a manuscript copy!
+
+No refined considerations of the nature and the universal consequences
+of their discovery seem to have instigated the earliest printers; this
+is evident by the perpetual jealousy and the mystifying style by which
+they long attempted to hide that secret monopoly which they had now
+obtained.
+
+The first notions of printing might have reached Europe from China. Our
+first block-printing seems imitated from the Chinese, who print with
+blocks of wood on one side of the paper, as was done in the earliest
+essays of printing; and the Chinese seem also to have suggested the use
+of a thick black ink. European traders might have imported some fugitive
+leaves; their route has even been indicated, from Tartary, by the way of
+Russia; and from China and Japan, through the Indies and the Arabian
+Gulf. The great antiquity of printing in China has been ascertained. Du
+Halde and the missionary Jesuits assert that this art was practised by
+the Chinese half a century before the Christian era! At all events, it
+is evident that they exercised it many centuries before it was attempted
+in Europe. The history of gunpowder would illustrate the possibility of
+the same extraordinary invention occurring at distinct periods. Roger
+Bacon indicated the terrible ingredients a hundred years before the monk
+Schwartz, about 1330, actually struck out the fiery explosion, and had
+the glory of its invention. Machines to convey to a distance the thunder
+and the lightning described by their discoverers were not long after
+produced. But it would have astonished these inventors to have learnt
+that guns had been used as early as the year 85 A.D., and that the fatal
+powder had been invented previously by the Chinese. Well might the
+philosophical Langles be struck by "the singular coincidence of the
+invention in Europe of the compass, of gunpowder, and of printing, about
+the same period, within a century." These three mighty agents in human
+affairs have been traced to that wary and literary nation, who, though
+they prohibit all intercourse with "any barbarian eye," might have
+suffered these sublime inventions to steal away over "their great wall."
+
+What has happened to the art of printing also occurred to the sister-art
+of engraving on copper. Tradition had ascribed the invention as the
+accidental discovery of the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra. But the Germans
+insist that they possess engravings before the days of the Italian
+artist; and it is not doubtful that several of the compatriots of
+Finiguerra were equally practising the art with himself. Heinecken would
+arbitrate between the jealous patriots; he concedes that Vasari might
+ascribe the invention of the art in Italy to Finiguerra, yet that
+engraving might have been practised in Germany, though unknown in Italy.
+Buonarotti, the great judge of all art, was sensible that in this sort
+of invention every artist makes his own discoveries. Alluding to the art
+of engraving, he says, "It would be sufficient to occasion our
+astonishment, that the ancients did not discover the art of
+chalcography, were it not known that DISCOVERIES OF THIS SORT generally
+occur ACCIDENTALLY to the mechanics in the exercise of their
+calling."[5] On this principle we may confidently rest. All the early
+printers, like the rivals of Finiguerra at home, and his unknown
+concurrents in Germany, were proceeding with the same art, and might
+urge their distinct claims.
+
+The natural magic of concave and convex lenses, those miracles of
+optical science, one of which searches Nature when she eludes the eye,
+and the other approximates the remotest star--the microscope and the
+telescope; who were their inventors, and how have those inventions
+happened? These instruments appeared about the same time. The Germans
+ascribe the invention of the microscope to a Dutchman, one Drebell;
+while the Neapolitan Fontana claims the anterior invention; but which
+Viviani, the scholar of Galileo, asserts, from his own knowledge, was
+presented to the King of Poland by that father of modern philosophy long
+anterior to the date fixed on by the Germans. The history of the
+telescope offers a similar result. Fracastorius may have accidentally
+combined two lenses; but he neither specified the form nor the quality;
+and in these consisted the real discovery, which we find in Baptista
+Porta, and which subsequently was perfected by Galileo. The invention of
+the art of printing seems a parallel one. It appeared in various
+quarters about the same time; and in the process of successive attempts,
+by intimation, by conjecture, and by experiment, each artificer
+insensibly advanced into a more perfect invention; till some fortunate
+claimant for the discovery puts aside all preceding essayists, who, not
+without some claims to the invention, leave their advocates in another
+generation to dispute about their rights, which are buried in oblivion,
+or falsified by traditional legends.
+
+Thus it has happened that obscure traditions envelope the origin of
+some of the most interesting inventions. Had these ingenious discoveries
+been as simple and as positive as their historians oppositely maintain,
+these origins had not admitted of such interminable disputes. We may
+therefore reasonably suspect that the practitioners in every art which
+has reached to almost a perfect state, such as that of printing, have
+silently borrowed from one another; that there has often existed a
+secret connexion in things, and a reciprocal observation in the
+intercourse of men alike intent on the same object; that countries have
+insensibly transferred a portion of their knowledge to their neighbours;
+that travellers in every era have imparted their novelties, hints
+however crude, descriptions however imperfect; all such slight notices
+escape the detection of an historian; nothing can reach him but the
+excellence of some successful artist. In vain rival concurrents dispute
+the invention; the patriotic historian of the art clings to his people
+or his city, to fix the inventor and the invention, and promulgates
+fairy tales to authenticate the most uncertain evidence.[6]
+
+The history of printing illustrates this view of its origin. The
+invention has been long ascribed to GUTENBERG, yet some have made it
+doubtful whether this presumed father of the art ever succeeded in
+printing a book, for we are assured that no colophon has revealed his
+name. We hear of his attempts and of his disappointments, his bickerings
+and his lawsuits. He seems to have been a speculative bungler in a
+new-found art, which he mysteriously hinted was to make a man's fortune.
+The goldsmith, Fust, advanced a capital in search of the novel
+alchymy--the project ends in a lawsuit, the goldsmith gains his cause,
+and the projector is discharged. Gutenberg lures another simple soul,
+and the same golden dream vanishes in the dreaming. These copartners,
+evidently tired of an art which had not yet found an artist, a young
+man, probably improving on Gutenberg's blunders, one happy day displayed
+to the eyes of his master, Fust, a proof pulled from his own press. In
+rapture, the master confers on this Peter Schoeffer a share of his
+future fortunes; and to bind the apprentice by the safest ties of
+consanguinity, led the swart youth, glorious with printer's ink, to the
+fair hand of his young daughter. The new partnership produced their
+famed Psalter of 1457; and shortly followed their magnificent Bible.
+
+While these events were occurring, COSTAR, of Haarlem, was plodding on
+with the same "noble mystery," but only printing on one side of a leaf,
+not having yet discovered that a leaf might be contrived to contain two
+pages. The partisans of Costar assert that it was proved he substituted
+moveable for fixed letters, which was a giant's footstep in this new
+path. A faithless servant ran off with the secret. The history of
+printing abounds with such tales. Every step in the progress of the
+newly-invented art indicates its gradual accessions. The numbering of
+the pages was not thought of for a considerable time; the leaves were
+long only distinguished by letters or signatures--a custom still
+preserved, though apparently superfluous.
+
+There is something attractive for rational curiosity in the earliest
+beginnings of every art; every slight improvement, even though trivial,
+has its motive, and supplies some want. On this principle the history of
+punctuation enters into the history of literature. Caxton had the merit
+of introducing the Roman pointing as used in Italy; and his successor,
+Pynson, triumphed by domiciliating the Roman letter. The dash, or
+perpendicular line, thus, | was the only punctuation they used. It was,
+however, discovered that "the craft of poynting well used makes the
+sentence very light." The more elegant comma supplanted the long uncouth
+|; the colon was a refinement, "showing that there is more to come." But
+the semicolon was a Latin delicacy which the obtuse English typographer
+resisted. So late as 1580 and 1590 treatises on orthography do not
+recognise any such innovator; the Bible of 1592, though printed with
+appropriate accuracy, is without a semicolon; but in 1633 its full
+rights are established by Charles Butler's "English Grammar." In this
+chronology of the four points of punctuation it is evident that
+Shakspeare could never have used the semicolon--a circumstance which the
+profound George Chalmers mourns over, opining that semicolons would
+often have saved the poet from his commentators.
+
+FUST had bound his workmen to secrecy by the solemnity of an oath; but
+at the siege of Mentz that freemasonry was lost. These early printers
+dispersed, some were even bribed away. Two Germans set up their press in
+the monastery of Subiaco, in the vicinity of Naples, whose confraternity
+consisted of German monks. These very printers finally retreated to Rome
+for that patronage they had still to seek; and at Rome they improved the
+art by adopting the Roman character. Not only the invention of the art
+was progressive, but the art itself was much more so.
+
+We have other narratives of printers romantically spirited away from the
+parent-presses; one of the most extraordinary is the history of printing
+set up at Oxford, ten years before the art was practised in Europe,
+except at Haarlem and Mentz. Henry VI., by advice of the Archbishop of
+Canterbury, despatched a confidential agent in disguise, under the
+guidance of Caxton, in his trading journeys to Flanders. The Haarlemites
+were so jealous of idling strangers who had come on the same insidious
+design, that foreigners had frequently been imprisoned.
+
+The royal agent never ventured to enter the city, but by heavy bribes in
+a secret intercourse with the workmen, one dark night he smuggled a
+printer aboard a vessel, and carried away Frederick Corsellis. That
+printer, on landing in England, was attended by a guard to Oxford. There
+he was constantly watched till he had revealed the mysterious craft. The
+evidence of this unheard-of history hinged on a record at Lambeth-palace
+authenticating the whole narrative, and on a monument of Corsellis's
+art, which any one might inspect at the Bodleian, being a book bearing a
+date six years prior to any printing by Caxton. The record at Lambeth,
+however, was never found, and never heard of, and the date of the book
+might have been accidentally or designedly falsified. An x dropped in
+the date of the impression would account for the singularity of a book
+printed before our Caxton had acquired the art. The tale long excited a
+sharp controversy, when Corsellis at Oxford was considered as the first
+printer in England. The possibility of the existence of this person at
+Oxford, and even of the book he printed, appears by a lively
+investigation of Dr. Cotton;[7] and I have been assured of a
+circumstance which, if true, would render the story of Corsellis
+probable; it is that a family of this name may still be found in
+Oxfordshire. The whole history has, however, by some been considered as
+supposititious, standing on the single evidence of a Sir Richard Atkyns,
+a servile lawyer and royalist of no great character in the days of
+Charles the Second.[8] Grafting his tale on the accident of the date of
+this book, he had a covert design--to maintain a theory or a right that
+printing was "a flower of the crown," constituting the sovereign the
+printer of England! all others being his servants. This enormous
+prevention of the abuses of the press was not deemed too extravagant for
+those desperate times.
+
+The only certainty in the history of printing, after all the fables of
+its origin, is its native place. It is a German romance enlivened by
+some mysterious adventures, wanting only the opening pages, which no one
+can supply.[9] Even the most philosophic of bibliographers, Daunou,
+utters a cry of despair, and moreover, at this late day, seems at a
+loss to decide on the nature of the influence of the art of printing!
+"We live too near the epoch of the discovery of printing to judge
+accurately of its influence, and too far from it to know the
+circumstances which gave birth to it." Our sage seems to think that
+another cycle of at least a thousand years must pass away ere we can
+decide on the real influence of printing over the destinies of man: this
+new tree of knowledge bears other fruit than that of its own sweetness,
+source of good and evil, of sense and of nonsense! whence we pluck the
+windy fruitage of opinions, crude and changeable!
+
+How has it happened that such a plain story as that of the art of
+printing should have sunk into a romance? Solely because the
+monopolisers dreaded discovery. It originated in deception, and could
+only flourish for their commercial spirit in mysterious obscurity. Among
+the first artisans of printing every one sought to hide his work, and
+even to blind the workmen. After their operations, they cautiously
+unscrewed the four sides of their forms, and threw the scattered type
+beneath, for, as one craftily observed to his partner, "When the
+component parts of the press are in pieces, no one will understand what
+they mean." One of the early printers of the fifteenth century at
+Mutina, or Modena, professes his press to have been _in ædibus
+subterraneis_--doubtless, if possible, still further to darken the
+occult mystery. They delivered themselves in a mystical style when they
+alluded to their unnamed art, and impressed on the marvelling reader
+that the volume he held in his hand was the work of some supernatural
+agency. They announced that the volumes in this newly-found art were
+"neither drawn, nor written with a pen and ink, as all books before had
+been." In the "Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," our honest printer,
+plain Caxton, caught the hyperbolical style of the dark monopolising
+spirit of the confraternity. I give his words, having first spelt them.
+"I have practised and learned at my great charge, and dispense to ordain
+(put in order) this said book in print after the manner and form as ye
+may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to
+the end that _every man may have them_ AT ONCE; for all the books of
+this story, thus imprinted as ye see, were _begun in one day, and also
+finished in one day_." A volume of more than seven hundred folio
+pages, "begun and finished in one day," was not the less marvellous for
+being impossible. But for the times was the style! Caxton would keep up
+the wonder and the mystery of an art which men did not yet comprehend;
+and because a whole sheet might have been printed in one day, and was
+_all at once_ pulled off, and not line by line, our venerable printer
+mystified the world. And all this was said at a time when so slow was
+the process of transcription, that one hundred Bibles could not be
+procured under the expense of seven thousand days, or of nearly twenty
+years' labour. Honest men, too eager in their zeal, particularly when
+their personal interests are at stake, sometimes strain truth on the
+tenter-hooks of fiction. The false miracle which our primeval printer
+professed he had performed we seem to have realized: it is amusing to
+conceive the wonderment of Caxton, were he now among us, to view the
+steam working that cylindrical machine which disperses the words of a
+speaker throughout the whole nation, when the voice which uttered them
+is still lingering on our ear!
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The city of Haarlem designs to erect a statue of COSTAR [since
+    this was written the statue has been placed in the great square];
+    thus publicly, in the eyes of Europe, to vindicate the priority of
+    this inventor of typography. But a statue is not the final argument
+    which, like the cannon of monarchs (that _ultima ratio regum_), will
+    carry conviction on the spot it is placed. Mentz has already erected
+    a statue of GUTENBERG. I have no doubt that, in the present state of
+    agitation, both these statues will have much to say to one another,
+    as the mystical Pasquin and Marforio of typography.
+
+  [2] "Some Observations on the Use and Original of the noble Art and
+    Mystery of Printing," by F. Burges. Norwich, 1701. This is declared
+    to be the first book printed at Norwich; where it appears that the
+    establishment of a printing-office, so late as in 1701, encountered a
+    stern opposition from its sage citizens. The writer did not know that
+    as far back as 1570 a Dutch printer had exercised the novel art by
+    printing religious books for a community of Dutch emigrants who had
+    taken refuge at Norwich, according to the recent discovery of Dr.
+    Cotton, in his "Typographical Gazetteer"--a volume abounding with the
+    most vigorous researches.
+
+  [3] Hallam's "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," i. 211.
+
+  [4] Twenty copies of this famous Bible exist; one is preserved in our
+    Royal Library.
+
+  [5] Ottley's "Inquiry into the Early History of Engraving." See also
+    note in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i, p. 43.
+
+  [6] Dr. WETTER, of Mentz, has lately shown that, contrary to the
+    common opinion, Gutenberg himself printed long with _wooden blocks_;
+    and that, instead of the invention of moveable types having been the
+    result of long study, _it arose out of a "sudden fancy."_
+
+    How the Doctor has authenticated "the sudden fancy," I know not, but
+    the apotheosis has passed. In three successive days, in the month of
+    August, 1837, all Mentz congregated to worship the statue, by
+    Thorwaldsen, of their ancient citizen in the square that henceforward
+    bears his name. A chorus of 700 voices resounded the laud of the
+    German printer; the flags in the regatta waved to his honour; and the
+    festival rejoiced the city: and when the figure of Gutenberg was
+    unveiled, the artillery, the music, and the people's voices, blending
+    together, seemed to echo in the skies.
+
+  [7] Dr. Cotton's curious "Typographical Gazetteer," art. OXONIA. Of a
+    class of the earliest printed books, having no printer's name, he
+    observes, "These may have been printed by Corsellis, or any one
+    else."
+
+  [8] Atkyns on the "Original and Growth of Printing." This quarto
+    pamphlet is highly valued among collectors for Loggan's beautiful
+    print of Charles the Second, Archbishop Shelden, and General Monk.
+    Dr. Middleton refuted this ridiculous tale of an ideal printer, one
+    Corsellis, in his "Dissertation on the Origin of Printing in
+    England," first published 1735, and which now may be seen in his
+    works.
+
+  [9] The fourth day of the "Bibliographical Decameron" of Dr. Dibdin
+    exhibits an ample view of the pending controversies on the "Origines
+    Typographicæ." Every bibliographer has his favourite hero. The reader
+    will observe that I have none! And yet possibly my tale may be the
+    truest.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST ENGLISH PRINTER.
+
+
+The ambitious wars of a potent aristocracy inflicted on this country
+half a century of public misery. Our fields were a soil of blood; and
+maternal England long mourned for victories she obtained over her own
+children--lord against lord, brother against brother, and the son
+against the father. Rival administrations alternately dispossess each
+other by sanguinary conflict; a new monarch attaints the friends of his
+predecessor; conspiracy rises against conspiracy--scaffold against
+scaffold; the king is re-enthroned--the king perishes in the Tower; York
+is triumphant--and York is annihilated.
+
+Few great families there were who had not immolated their martyrs or
+their victims; and it frequently occurred that the same family had
+fallen equally on both sides, for it was a war of the aristocracy with
+the aristocracy: "Save the commons and kill the captains," was the
+general war-cry. The distracted people were perhaps indifferent to the
+varying fortunes of the parties, accustomed as they were to behold after
+each battle the heads of lords and knights raised on every bridge and
+gate.
+
+During this dread interval, all things about us were thrown back into a
+state of the rudest infancy; the illiterature of the age approached to
+barbarism; the evidences of history were destroyed; there was such a
+paucity of readers, that no writers were found to commemorate
+contemporary events. Indeed, had there been any, who could have ventured
+to arbitrate between such contradictory accounts, where every party had
+to tell their own tale? Oblivion, not history, seemed to be the
+consolation of those miserable times.
+
+It was at such an unhappy era that the new-found art of printing was
+introduced into England by an English trader, who for thirty years had
+passed his life in Flanders, conversant with no other languages than
+were used in those countries.
+
+Our literature was interested in the intellectual character of our
+first English printer. A powerful mind might, by the novel and mighty
+instrument of thought, have created a national taste, or have sown that
+seed of curiosity without which no knowledge can be reared. Such a
+genius might have anticipated by a whole century that general passion
+for sound literature which was afterwards to distinguish our country.
+But neither the times nor the man were equal to such a glorious
+advancement.
+
+The first printed book in the English language was not printed in
+England. It is a translation of Ráoul le Fevre's "Recuyel of the
+Historyes of Troye," famed in its own day as the most romantic history,
+and in ours, for the honour of bibliography, romantically valued at the
+cost of a thousand guineas. This first monument of English printing
+issued from the infant press at Cologne in 1471, where Caxton first
+became initiated in "the noble mystery and craft" of printing, when
+printing was yet truly "a mystery," and Caxton himself did not import
+the art which was to effect such an intellectual revolution till a year
+or two afterwards, on his return home. The first printer, it is evident,
+had no other conception of the machine he was about to give the nation
+than as an ingenious contrivance, or a cheap substitute for costly
+manuscripts--possibly he might, in his calculating prudence, even be
+doubtful of its success!
+
+At the announcement of the first printed book in our vernacular idiom,
+the mind involuntarily pauses: looking on the humble origin of our
+bibliography, and on the obscure commencement of the newly-found art of
+printing itself, we are startled at the vast and complicated results.
+
+The contemporaries of our first printer were not struck by their novel
+and precious possession, of which they participated in the first fruits
+in the circulation and multiplication of their volumes. The introduction
+of the art into England is wholly unnoticed by the chroniclers of the
+age, so unconscious they were of this new implement of the human mind.
+We find Fabian, who must have known Caxton personally--both being
+members of the Mercers' Company--passing unnoticed his friend; and
+instead of any account of the printing-press, we have only such things
+as "a new weathercock placed on the cross of St. Paul's steeple." Hall,
+so copious in curious matters, discovered no curiosity to memorialize
+in the printing-press; Grafton was too heedless; and Holinshed, the most
+complete of our chroniclers, seems to have had an intention of saying
+something by his insertion of a single line, noticing the name of
+"Caxton as the first practiser of the art of printing;" but he was more
+seriously intent in the same paragraph to give a narrative of "a bloody
+rain, the red drops falling on the sheets which had been hanged to dry."
+The history of printing in England has been vainly sought for among
+English historians; so little sensible were they to those expansive
+views and elevated conceptions, which are now too commonplace eulogies
+to repeat.
+
+By what subdolous practices among the first inventors of this secret art
+Caxton obtained its mastery, we are not told, except that he learnt the
+new art "at his own great cost and expense;" and on his final return
+home, he was accompanied by foreigners who lived in his house, and after
+his death became his successors. Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Machlinia and
+others, by their names betray their German origin. We have recently
+discovered that we had even a French printer who printed English books.
+Francis Regnault (or Reynold, anglicised) was a Frenchman who fell under
+the displeasure of the Inquisition for printing the Bible in English. He
+resided in England, and had in hand a number of primers in English and
+other similar books, which at length excited the jealousy of _the
+Company of Booksellers in London_--in the reign of Henry the Eighth. To
+allay this bibliopolic storm, the affrighted French printer, with all
+his stock in hand, procured Coverdale and Grafton to intercede with
+Cromwell to grant him a licence to sell what he had already printed,
+engaging hereafter "to print no more in the _English tongue_ unless he
+have an _Englishman_ that is learned to be his corrector;" and further,
+he offers to cancel and reprint any faulty leaf again.[1]
+
+Caxton did not extend his views beyond those of a mercantile printer and
+an indifferent translator. As a writer, Caxton had reason to speak with
+humility of the style of his vernacular versions. His patroness, the
+Lady Margaret, sister to our Edward the Fourth, and Duchess of
+Burgundy, after inspecting some quires of his translation of the
+"Recuyel of the Historyes of Troye," returned them, finding, as Caxton
+ingenuously acknowledges, "some defaut in his English which she
+commanded him to amend." Tyrwhit sarcastically observes, that the
+duchess might have been a purist. As we are not told what were these
+"defauts," we cannot decide on the good taste or the fastidiousness of
+the sister of Edward the Fourth. But the duchess was not the only critic
+whom Caxton had to encounter, for we learn by his preface to his "Boke
+of Æneydos compiled by Virgil," now metamorphosed into a barbarous
+French prose romance, and the French translation translated, that there
+were "gentlemen who of late have blamed me that in my translations I had
+over-curious terms which could not be understood by common people. I
+fain would satisfy every man." He apologises for his own style by
+alleging the unsettled state of the English language, of which he tells
+us that "the language now used varieth far from that which was used and
+spoken when I was born." An absence of thirty years from his native land
+did not improve a diction which originally had been none of the purest.
+We find in his translations an abundance of pure French words, and it is
+remarkable that the printer of the third edition of the Troy history, in
+1607, altered whole sentences "into plainer English," alleging, "the
+translator, William Caxton, being, _as it seemeth_, no Englishman!"
+
+The "curious" prices now given among the connoisseurs of our earliest
+typography for their "Caxtons," as his Gothic works are thus honourably
+distinguished, have induced some, conforming to traditional prejudice,
+to appreciate by the same fanciful value "the Caxtonian style." But
+though we are not acquainted with the "defauts" which offended the Lady
+Margaret, nor with the "terms which were not easily understood," as
+alleged by "the gentlemen," nor with "the sentences improperly
+Englished," as the later printer declared, we shall not, I suspect, fall
+short of the mark if we conclude that the style of a writer destitute of
+a literary education, a prolix genius with a lax verbosity, and almost a
+foreigner in his native idiom, could not attain to any skill or felicity
+in the maternal tongue.
+
+As a printer, without erudition, Caxton would naturally accommodate
+himself to the tastes of his age, and it was therefore a consequence
+that no great author appears among "the Caxtons." The most glorious
+issues of his press were a Chaucer and a Gower, wherein he was simply a
+printer. The rest of his works are translations of fabulous histories,
+and those spurious writings of the monkish ages ascribed by ignorant
+transcribers to some ancient sage. He appears frequently to have been at
+a loss what book to print, and to have accidentally chosen the work in
+hand; so he tells us--"Having no work in hand, I sitting in my study,
+where as lay many diverse paunflettes and bookys, happened that to my
+hand came a lytel boke in French, which late was translated out of Latin
+by some noble clerk of France, which book is named Æneydos." And this
+was the origin of his puerile romance! He exercised no discrimination in
+his selection of authors, and the simplicity of our first printer far
+exceeded his learning. One of his greater works is "The noble History of
+King Arthur and of certain of his Knights." Caxton, who had charmed
+himself and his ignorant readers with his authentic "Æneydos," hesitated
+to print "this history," for there were different opinions that "there
+was no such Arthur, and that all such books as be made of him be but
+feigned and fables." It would be difficult to account for the scepticism
+of one who always found the marvellous more delectable than the natural,
+and who had published so many "feigned" histories--as "The veray trew
+History of the valiant Knight Jason," or the "Life of Hercules," and all
+"The Merveilles of Virgil's Necromancy," solemnly vouching for their
+verity! His sudden scruples were, however, relieved, when "a gentleman"
+assured our printer that "it was great folly and blindness in the
+disbelievers of this true history."
+
+In the early stage of civilization men want knowledge to feel any
+curiosity; like children, they are only affected through the medium of
+their imagination. But it is a phenomenon in the history of the human
+mind, that at a period of refinement we may approximate to one of
+barbarism. This happens when the ruling passion wholly returns to
+fiction, and thus terminates in a reckless disregard for all other
+studies. Whenever history, severe and lofty, displaying men as they are,
+is degraded among the revels and the masques of romance; and the slow
+inductions of reasoning, and the minute discoveries of research, and the
+nice affinities of analogy, are impatiently rejected, while fiction in
+her exaggerated style swells every object into a colossal size, and
+raises every passion into hyperbolical violence; a distaste for
+knowledge, and a coldness for truth, which must follow, are fatal to the
+sanity of the intellect. And thus in the day of our refinement we may be
+reverting to our barbarous infancy.
+
+Caxton, mindful of his commercial interests and the taste of his
+readers, left the glory of restoring the classical writers of antiquity,
+which he could not read, to the learned printers of Italy.[2] The Orator
+of Cicero, the histories of Herodotus and Polybius, the ethics of
+Seneca, and the elaborate volumes of St. Austin, were some of the rich
+fruits of the early typography of the German printers who had conveyed
+their new art to the Neapolitan monastery of Subiaco. Our English
+printer, indeed, might have heard of their ill-fortune, when, in a
+petition to the Pope, they sent forth this cry--"Our house is full of
+proof-sheets, but we have nothing to eat!" The trivial productions from
+Caxton's press, romantic or religious legends, and treatises on hunting
+and hawking, and the moralities of the game of chess, with Reynard the
+Fox, were more amusing to the ignorant readers of his country; but the
+national genius was little advanced by a succession of "merveillous
+workes;" nor would the crude, unformed tastes of the readers be matured
+by stimulating their inordinate appetites. The first printing-press in
+England did not serve to raise the national taste out of its barbarous
+infancy. Caxton was not a genius to soar beyond his age, but he had the
+industry to keep pace with it, and with little judgment and less
+learning he found no impediment in his selection of authors or his
+progress in translation.
+
+Our earliest printed works consist of these translations of French
+translations; and the historian of our poetry considered that this very
+circumstance, which originated in the general illiteracy of the times,
+was more favourable to our vernacular literature than would have been
+the publication of Roman writers in their original language. Had it not
+been for these French versions, Caxton could not have furnished any of
+his own. The multiplication of English copies multiplied English
+readers, and when at length there was a generation of readers, an
+English press induced many to turn authors who were only qualified to
+write in their native tongue.
+
+Venerable shade of Caxton! the award of the tribunal of posterity is a
+severe decision, but an imprescriptible law! Men who appear at certain
+eras of society, however they be lauded for what they have done, are
+still liable to be censured for not doing what they ought to have done.
+Patriarch of the printing-press! who to thy last and dying day withdrew
+not thy hand from thy work, it is hard that thou shouldst be amenable to
+a law which thy faculties were not adequate to comprehend; surely thou
+mayst triumph, thou simple man! amid the echoes of thy "Caxtonians"
+rejoicing over thy Gothic leaves--but the historian of the human mind is
+not the historian of typography.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "State Papers of Henry the Eighth," vol. i. 589.
+
+  [2] We have Caxton's own confession in his preface to "The Book of
+    Æneydos," or the Æneid of Virgil, where, in soliciting the
+    late-created poet-laureat in the University of Oxford, John Skelton,
+    to oversee his prose translation of the French translation, he
+    notices the translations of Skelton of "The Epistles of Tully," and
+    the "History of Diodorus Siculus," _out of Latin into English_, and
+    as "one that had read Virgil, Ovid, Tully, and all the other noble
+    poets and orators to _me unknown_."
+
+
+
+
+EARLY LIBRARIES.
+
+
+There probably was a time when there existed no private libraries in the
+kingdom, nor any save the monastic; that of Oxford, at the close of the
+thirteenth century, consisted of "a few tracts kept in chests." In that
+primeval age of book-collecting, shelves were not yet required. Royalty
+itself seems to have been destitute of a royal library. It appears, by
+one of our recently published records, that King John borrowed a volume
+from a rich abbey, and the king gave a receipt to Simon his Chancellor
+for "the book called Pliny," which had been in the custody of the Abbot
+and Convent of Reading. "The Romance of the History of England," with
+other volumes, have also royal receipts. The king had either deposited
+these volumes for security with the Abbot, or, what seems not
+improbable, had no established collection which could be deemed a
+library, and, as leisure or curiosity stimulated, commanded the loan of
+a volume.
+
+The borrowing of a volume was a serious concern in those days, and heavy
+was the pledge or the bond required for the loan. One of the regulations
+of the library of the Abbey of Croyland, Ingulphus has given. It regards
+"the lending of their books, as well the smaller without pictures as the
+larger with pictures;" any loan is forbidden under no less a penalty
+than that of excommunication, which might possibly be a severer
+punishment than the gallows.
+
+Long after this period, our English libraries are said to have been
+smaller than those on the Continent; and yet, one century and a half
+subsequently to the reign of John, the royal library of France,
+belonging to a monarch who loved literature, Jean le Bon, did not exceed
+ten volumes. In those days they had no idea of establishing a library;
+the few volumes which each monarch collected, at great cost, were always
+dispersed by gifts or bequests at their death; nothing passed to their
+successor but the missals, the _heures_, and the _offices_ of their
+chapels. These monarchs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
+amid the prevailing ignorance of the age, had not advanced in their
+comprehension of the uses of a permanent library beyond their great
+predecessor of the ninth, for Charlemagne had ordered his books to be
+sold after his death, and the money given to the poor.
+
+Yet among these early French kings there were several who were lovers of
+books, and were not insensible of the value of a studious intercourse,
+anxious to procure transcribers and translators. A curious fact has been
+recorded of St. Louis, that, during his crusade in the East, having
+learned that a Saracen prince employed scribes to copy the best writings
+of philosophy for the use of students, on his return to France he
+adopted the same practice, and caused the Scriptures and the works of
+the Fathers to be transcribed from copies found in different abbeys.
+These volumes were deposited in a secure apartment, to which the learned
+might have access; and he himself passed much of his time there,
+occupied in his favourite study, the writings of the Fathers.[1]
+
+Charles le Sage, in 1373, had a considerable library, amounting to nine
+hundred volumes. He placed this collection in one of the towers of the
+Louvre, hence denominated the "Tour de la Librarie," and entrusted it to
+the custody of his valet-de-chambre, Gilles Malet, constituting him his
+librarian.[2] He was no common personage, for great as was the care and
+ingenuity required, he drew up an inventory with his own hand of this
+royal library. In that early age of book-collecting, volumes had not
+always titles to denote their subjects, or they contained several in one
+volume,[3] hence they are described by their outsides, their size, and
+their shape, their coverings and their clasps. This library of Charles
+the Fifth shines in extreme splendour, with its many-coloured silks and
+velvets, azure and vermeil, green and yellow, and its cloths of silver
+and of gold, each volume being distinctly described by the colour and
+the material of its covering. This curious document of the fourteenth
+century still exists.[4]
+
+This library passed through strange vicissitudes. The volumes in the
+succeeding reigns were seized on, or purchased at a conqueror's price,
+by the Duke of Bedford, Regent of France. Some he gave to his brother
+Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, and they formed a part of the rich
+collection which that prince presented to Oxford, there finally to be
+destroyed by a fanatical English mob; others of the volumes found their
+way back to the Louvre, repurchased by the French at London. The
+glorious missal that bears the Regent's name remains yet in this
+country, the property of a wealthy individual.[5]
+
+Accident has preserved a few catalogues of libraries of noblemen in the
+fourteenth and fifteenth century, more pleasant than erudite. In the
+fourteenth century, the volumes consisted for the greater part of those
+romances of chivalry, which so long formed the favourite reading of the
+noble, the dame and the damoiselle, and all the lounging damoiseaux in
+the baronial castle.[6]
+
+The private libraries of the fifteenth century were restricted to some
+French tomes of chivalry, or to "a merrie tale in Boccace;" and their
+science advanced not beyond "The Shepherd's Calendar," or "The Secrets
+of Albert the Great." There was an intermixture of legendary lives of
+saints, and apocryphal adventures of "Notre Seigneur" in Egypt; with a
+volume or two of physic and surgery and astrology.
+
+A few catalogues of our monastic libraries still remain, and these
+reflect an image of the studies of the middle ages. We find versions of
+the Scriptures in English and Latin--a Greek or Hebrew manuscript is not
+noted down; a commentator, a father, and some schoolmen; and a writer on
+the canon law, and the mediæval Christian poets who composed in Latin
+verse. A romance, an accidental classic, a chronicle and legends--such
+are the usual contents of these monastic catalogues. But though the
+subjects seem various, the number of volumes were exceedingly few. Some
+monasteries had not more than twenty books. In such little esteem were
+any writings in the vernacular idiom held, that the library of
+Glastonbury Abbey, probably the most extensive in England, in 1248,
+possessed no more than four books in English,[7] on religious topics;
+and in the later days of Henry the Eighth, when Leland rummaged the
+monasteries, he did not find a greater number. The library of the
+monastery of Bretton, which, owing to its isolated site, was among the
+last dissolved, and which may have enlarged its stores with the spoils
+of other collections which the times offered, when it was dissolved in
+1558, could only boast of having possessed one hundred and fifty
+distinct works.[8]
+
+In this primitive state of book-collecting, a singular evidence of their
+bibliographical passion was sometimes apparent in the monastic
+libraries. Not deeming a written catalogue, which might not often be
+opened, sufficiently attractive to remind them of their lettered stores,
+they inscribed verses on their windows to indicate the books they
+possessed, and over these inscriptions they placed the portraits of the
+authors. Thus they could not look through their windows without being
+reminded of their volumes; and the very portraits of authors,
+illuminated by the light of heaven, might rouse the curiosity which
+many a barren title would repel.[9]
+
+To us accustomed to reckon libraries by thousands, these scanty
+catalogues will appear a sad contraction of human knowledge. The
+monastic studies could not in any degree have advanced the national
+character; they could only have kept it stationary; and, excepting some
+scholastic logomachies, in which the people could have no concern, one
+monkish writer could hardly ever have differed from another.
+
+The monastic libraries have been declared to have afforded the last
+asylums of literature in a barbarous era; and the preservation of
+ancient literature has been ascribed to the monks: but we must not
+accept a fortuitous occurrence as any evidence of their solicitude or
+their taste. In the dull scriptorium of the monk, if the ancient authors
+always obtained so secure a place, they slept in comparative safety, for
+they were not often disturbed by their first Gothic owners, who hardly
+ever allude to them. If ancient literature found a refuge in the
+monastic establishments, the polytheistical guests were not slightly
+contemned by their hosts, who cherished with a different taste a
+bastardised race of the Romans. The purer writers were not in request;
+for the later Latin verse-makers being Christians, the piety of the
+monks proved to be infinitely superior to their taste. Boethius was
+their great classic; while Prudentius, Sedulius, and Fortunius, carried
+the votes against Virgil, Horace, and even Ovid; though Ovid was in some
+favour for his marvellous Romance. The polytheism of the classical poets
+was looked on with horror, so literally did they construe the
+allegorical fables of the Latin muse. Even till a later day, when
+monkery itself was abolished, the same Gothic taste lingered among us in
+its aversion to the classical poets of antiquity, as the works of
+idolaters!
+
+Had we not obtained our knowledge of the great ancients by other
+circumstances than by their accidental preservation by the monks, we
+should have lost a whole antiquity. The vellum was considered more
+precious than the genius of the author; and it has been acutely
+conjectured that the real cause of the minor writers of antiquity having
+come down to us entire, while we have to lament for ever the lacerations
+of the greater, has been owing to the scantiness of the parchment of a
+diminutive volume. They coveted the more voluminous authors to erase
+some immortal page of the lost decades of Livy, or the annals of
+Tacitus, to inscribe on it some dull homily or saintly legend. That the
+ancients were neglected by these guardians appears by the
+dungeon-darkness from which the Italian Poggio disinterred many of our
+ancient classics; and Leland, in his literary journey to survey the
+monastic libraries of England, often shook from the unknown author a
+whole century of dust and cobwebs. When libraries became one source of
+the pleasures of life, the lovers of books appear to have been curious
+in selecting their site for perfect seclusion and silence amid their
+noble residences, and also in their contrivances to arrange their
+volumes, so as to have them at instant command. One of these Gothic
+libraries, in an old castle belonging to the Percys, has been described
+by Leland with congenial delight. I shall transcribe his words,
+accommodating the reader with our modern orthography.
+
+"One thing I liked extremely in one of the towers; that was a STUDY
+called PARADISE; where was a closet in the middle of eight squares
+latticed 'abrate;' and at the top of every square was a desk ledged to
+set books on, on coffers within them, and these seemed as joined hard to
+the top of the closet; and yet by pulling, one or all would come down
+breast-high in rabbets (or grooves), and serve for desks to lay books
+on."
+
+However clumsy this invention in "Paradise" may seem to us, it was not
+more so than the custom of chaining their books to the shelves, allowing
+a sufficient length of chain to reach the reading-desk--a mode which
+long prevailed when printing multiplied the cares of the librarian.
+
+[Illustration: _King's Library, British Museum_
+
+London, Frederick Warne & C^o.]
+
+All these libraries, consisting of manuscripts, were necessarily limited
+in their numbers; their collectors had no choice, but gladly received
+what occurred to their hands; it was when books were multiplied by the
+press, that the minds of owners of libraries shaped them to their own
+fancies, and stamped their characters on these companions of their
+solitude.
+
+We have a catalogue of the library of Mary Queen of Scots, as delivered
+up to her son James the Sixth, in 1578,[10] very characteristic of her
+elegant studies; the volumes chiefly consist of French authors and
+French translations, a variety of chronicles, several romances, a few
+Italian writers, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and her favourite
+poets, Alain Chartier, Ronsard, and Marot. This library forms a striking
+contrast with that of Elizabeth of England, which was visited in 1598 by
+Hentzner, the German traveller. The shelves at Whitehall displayed a
+more classical array; the collection consisted of Greek, Latin, as well
+as Italian and French books.
+
+The dearness of parchment, and the slowness of the scribes, made
+manuscripts things only purchasable by princely munificence. It was the
+discovery of paper from rags, and the novel art of taking copies without
+penmen, which made books mere objects of commerce, and dispersed the
+treasures of the human mind free as air, and cheap as bread.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Essai Historique sur la Bibliothèque du Roi," par M. Le Prince.
+
+  [2] This Gilles Malet, who was also the king's reader, had great
+    strength of character; he is thus described by Christine de
+    Pise:--"Souverainement bien lisoit, et bien ponttoit, et entendens
+    homs estoit;" "he read sovereignly well, with good punctuation, and
+    was an understanding man." She has recorded a personal anecdote of
+    him. One day a fatal accident happened to his child, but such was the
+    discipline of official duties, that he did not interrupt his
+    attendance on the king at the usual hour of reading. The king having
+    afterwards heard of the accident which had bereaved the father of his
+    child, observed, "If the intrepidity of this man had not exceeded
+    that which nature bestows upon ordinary men, his paternal emotion
+    would not have allowed him to conceal his misfortune."
+
+  [3] The reader may form some idea of the discordant arrangement of a
+    volume of manuscripts by the following entries:--"Un Livre qui
+    commence de Genesis, et aussi traite des fais Julius Cesar, appelle
+    Suetoine." "Un Livre en François, en un volume, qui ce commence de
+    Genesis, et traite du fait des Romains, de la vie des SS. Peres
+    Hermites, et de Merlin."
+
+  [4] "Hist. de l'Académie Royale des Inscriptions," tome i. 421, 12mo.
+
+  [5] It has, within the last few years, been added to the British
+    Museum.--ED.
+
+  [6] _Dame_ was the lady of the knight; the _Damoiselle_, the wife of
+    an esquire; _Dameisel_, or _Damoiseau_, was a youth of noble
+    extraction, but who had not yet attained to knighthood.--Rocquefort,
+    "Glossaire de la Langue Romane."
+
+  [7] Ritson's "Dissertation on Romance and Minstrelsy," lxxxi.
+
+  [8] See an "Essay on English Monastic Libraries," by that learned and
+    ingenious antiquary, the Rev. Joseph Hunter.
+
+  [9] Some of these extraordinary window-catalogues of the monastic
+    library of St. Albans were found in the cloisters and presbytery of
+    that monastery, and are preserved in the "Monasticon Anglicanum."
+
+  [10] Dibdin's "Bibliographical Decameron," iii. 245.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY THE SEVENTH.
+
+
+There was a state of transition in our literature, both classical and
+vernacular, which deserves our notice in the progress of the genius of
+the nation.
+
+A prudent sovereign in the seventh Henry, amid factions rather joined
+together than cemented, gave a semblance of repose to a turbulent land,
+exhausted by its convulsions. A martial rudeness still lingered among
+the great; and we discover by a curious conversation which the learned
+Pace held with some of the gentry, with whom, perhaps, he had
+indiscreetly remonstrated, attempting to impress on their minds the
+advantages of study, that his advice was indignantly rejected. Such
+pursuits seemed to them unmanly, and intolerable impediments in the
+practice of those more active arts of life which alone were worthy of
+one of gentle blood; their fathers had been good knights without this
+idling toil of reading.
+
+Henry the Seventh, when Earl of Richmond, during his exile in France
+from 1471 to 1485, had become a reader of French romances, an admirer of
+French players, and an amateur of their peculiar architecture. After his
+accession we trace these new tastes in our poetry, our drama, and in a
+novel species of architecture which Bishop Fox called Burgundian, and
+which is the origin of the Tudor style.[1] A favourer of the histrionic
+art, he introduced a troop of French players. Wary in his pleasures as
+in his politics, this monarch was moderate in his patronage either of
+poets or players, but he was careful to encourage both. The queen
+participated in his tastes, and appears to have bestowed particular
+rewards on "players", whose performances had afforded her unusual
+delight; and among the curious items of her majesty's expenditure, we
+find that many of these players were foreigners--"a French player, an
+Italian poet, a Spanish tumbler, a Flemish tumbler, a Welshman for
+making a ryme, a maid that came out of Spain and danced before the
+queen."
+
+This monarch had suffered one of those royal marriages which are a
+tribute paid to the interests of the State. Henry had yielded with
+repugnance to a union with Elizabeth the Yorkist; the sullen Lancastrian
+long looked on his queen with the eyes of a factionist. Toward the
+latter years of his life this repugnance seems to have passed away, as
+this gentle consort largely participated in his tastes. It was probably
+in their sympathy that the personal prejudices of Henry melted away.
+This indeed was a triumph of the arts of imagination over the warped
+feelings of the individual; it marked the transition from barbaric arms
+to the amenities of literature, and the softening influence of the
+mimetic arts; it was the presage of the magnificence of his successor.
+The nation was benefited by these new tastes; the pacific reign made a
+revolution in our court, our manners, and our literature.
+
+We may date from this period that happy intercourse which the learned
+English opened with the Continent, and more particularly with literary
+Italy; our learned travellers now appear in number. Colet, the founder
+of St. Paul's School, not only passed over to Paris, but lingered in
+Italy, and returned home with the enthusiasm of classical antiquity.
+Grocyn, to acquire the true pronunciation of the Greek, which he first
+taught at Oxford, domesticated with Demetrius Chalcondyles and Angelo
+Politian, at Florence. Linacre, the projector of the College of
+Physicians, visited Rome and Florence. Lilly, the grammarian, we find at
+Rhodes and at Rome, and the learned Pace at Padua. We were thus early
+great literary travellers; and the happier Continentalists, who rarely
+move from their native homes, have often wondered at the restless
+condition of those whom they have sometimes reproached as being
+_Insulaires_; yet they may be reminded that we have done no more than
+the most ancient philosophers of antiquity. Our reproachers fortunately
+possessed the arts, and even the learning, which we were willing by
+travel and costs to acquire. "The Islanders" may have combined all the
+knowledge of all the world, a freedom and enlargement of the mind, which
+those, however more fortunately placed, can rarely possess, who restrict
+their locality and narrow their comprehension by their own home-bound
+limits.
+
+The king, delighting in poetry, fostered an English muse in the learned
+rhyme of STEPHEN HAWES, who was admitted to his private chamber, for the
+pleasure which Henry experienced in listening to poetic recitation. It
+was probably the taste of his royal master which inspired this bard's
+allegorical romance of chivalry, of love, and of science. This elaborate
+work is "The Pastime of Pleasure, or the History of Graunde Amour and la
+bell Pucell, containing the knowledge of the seven sciences and the
+course of man's life." At a time when sciences had no reality, they were
+constantly alluding to them; ignorance hardily imposed its erudition;
+and experimental philosophy only terminated in necromancy. The seven
+sciences of the accomplished gentleman were those so well known,
+comprised in the scholastic distich.
+
+In the ideal hero "Graunde Amour," is shadowed forth the education of a
+complete gentleman of that day. From the Tower of "Doctrine," to the
+Castle of "Chivalry," the way lies equally open, but the progress is
+diversified by many bye-paths, and a number of personified ideas or
+allegorical characters. These shadowy actors lead to shadowy places; but
+the abounding incidents relieve us among this troop of passionless
+creatures.
+
+This fiction blends allegory with romance, and science with chivalry. At
+the early period of printing, it was probably the first volume which
+called in the graver's art to heighten the inventions of the writer, and
+the accompanying wood-cuts are an evidence of the elegant taste of the
+author, although that morose critic of all poesy, honest Anthony à Wood,
+sarcastically concludes that these cuts were "to enable the reader to
+understand the story better." This once courtly volume, our sage
+reports, "is now thought but worthy of a ballad-monger's stall."[2]
+"The Pastime of Pleasure" was even despised by that great
+book-collector, General Lord Fairfax, who, on the copy he possessed, has
+left a memorandum "that it should be changed for a better book!" The
+fate of books vacillates with the fancies of book-lovers, and the
+improvements of a later age. In the days of Fairfax, the gloom of the
+civil wars annihilated their imaginations.
+
+But the gorgeousness of this romance struck the Gothic fancy of the
+historian of our poetry, magic, chivalry, and allegory! In the
+circumstantial analysis of Warton, the reader may pursue his "course of
+man's life" through the windings of the labyrinth. It seems as if the
+patience of the critic had sought a relief amid his prolonged chronicle
+of obscure versifiers, in a production of imagination, the only one
+which had appeared since Chaucer, and which, to the contemplative poetic
+antiquary, showed him the infant rudiments of the future Spenser.
+
+This allegorical romance is imbued with Provençal fancy, and probably
+emulated the "Roman de la Rose," which could not fail to be a favourite
+with the royal patron, among those French books which he loved. Fertile
+in invention, it is, however, of the old stock; fresh meads and
+delicious gardens,--ladies in arbours,--magical trials of armed knights
+on horses of steel, which, touched by a secret spring, could represent a
+tourney. We strike the shield at the castle-gate of chivalry, and we
+view the golden roof of the hall, lighted up by a carbuncle of
+prodigious size; we repose in chambers walled with silver, and
+enamelling many a story. There are many noble conceptions among the
+allegorical gentry. She, whom Graunde Amour first beheld was mounted on
+her palfrey, flying with the wind, encircled with tongues of fire, and
+her two milkwhite greyhounds, on whose golden collars are inscribed in
+diamond letters, _Grace_ and _Governance_. She is Fame, her palfrey is
+Pegasus, and her burning tongues are the voice of Posterity! There are
+some grotesque incidents, as in other romances; a monster wildly
+created, the offspring of Disdain and Strangeness--a demon composed of
+the seven metals! We have also a dwarf who has to encounter a giant with
+seven heads; our subdolous David mounts on twelve steps cut in the rock;
+and to the surprise of the giant, he discovered in "the boy whom he had
+mocked," his equal in stature, and his vanquisher, notwithstanding the
+inconceivable roar of his seven heads!
+
+Warton transcribed a few lines to show this poet's "harmonious
+versification and clear expression;" but this short specimen may convey
+an erroneous notion. Our verse was yet irregular, and its modulation was
+accidental rather than settled; the metrical lines of Hawes, for the
+greater part, must be read rhythmically, it was a barbarism that even
+later poets still retained. He also affected an ornate diction; and
+Latin and French terms cast an air of pedantry, more particularly when
+the euphony of his verse is marred by closing his lines with his
+elongated polysyllables; he probably imagined that the dimensions of his
+words necessarily lent a grandeur to his thoughts. With all these
+defects, Hawes often surpasses himself, and we may be surprised that, in
+a poem composed in the court of Henry the Seventh, about 1506, the poet
+should have left us such a minutely-finished picture of female beauty as
+he has given of La Pucelle; Hawes had been in Italy, and seems with an
+artist's eye to have dwelt on some picture of Raphael, in his early
+manner, or of his master Perugino, in his hard but elaborate style.
+
+  Her shining hair, so properly she dresses,
+  Aloft her forehead, with fayre golden tresses;
+  Her forehead stepe, with fayre browés ybent;
+  Her eyen gray; her nosé straight and fayre;
+  In her white cheeks, the faire bloudé it went
+  As among the white, the reddé to repayre;
+  Her mouthe right small; her breathe sweet of ayre;
+  Her lippes soft and ruddy as a rose;
+  No hart alive but it would him appose.
+  With a little pitte in her well-favoured chynne;
+  Her necke long, as white as any lillye,
+  With vaynés blewe, in which the bloude ranne in;
+  Her pappés rounde, and thereto right pretýe;
+  Her armés slender, and of goodly bodýe;
+  Her fingers small, and thereto right longe,
+  White as the milk, with blewé vaynes among;
+  Her feet propér; she gartred well her hose;
+  I never sawe so fayre a créatúre.
+
+The reign of Henry the Seventh was a misty morning of our vernacular
+literature, but it was the sunrise; and though the road be rough, we
+discover a few names by which we may begin to count--as we find on our
+way a mile-stone, which, however rudely cut and worn out, serves to
+measure our distances.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Speed's "History," 995.
+
+  [2] This forlorn volume of Anthony's "Stalls" is now a gem placed in
+    the caskets of black-letter. This poetic romance, by its excessive
+    rarity,--the British Museum is without a copy,--has obtained most
+    extraordinary prices among our collectors. A copy of the first
+    edition at the Roxburgh sale reached 84_l._, which was sold at Sir M.
+    M. Sykes' for half the price; later editions, for a fourth. A copy
+    was sold at Heber's sale for 25_l._ It may, however, relieve the
+    distress of some curious readers to be informed that it may now be
+    obtained at the most ordinary cost of books. Mr. SOUTHEY, with
+    excellent judgment, has preserved the romance in his valuable volume
+    of "Specimens of our Ancient Poets," from the time of Chaucer; it is
+    to be regretted, however, that the text is not correctly printed, and
+    that the poem has suffered mutilation--six thousand lines seem to
+    have exhausted the patience of the modern typographer. [A more
+    perfect and accurate edition, from that printed in 1555, was
+    published by the Percy Society in 1845, under the editorship of Mr.
+    Thos. Wright.]
+
+
+
+
+FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY.
+
+
+Society must have considerably advanced ere it could have produced an
+historical record; and who could have furnished even the semblance but
+the most instructed class, in the enjoyment of uninterrupted leisure,
+among every people? History therefore remained long a consecrated thing
+in the hands of the priesthood, from the polytheistical era of the Roman
+Pontiffs who registered their annals, to the days that the history of
+Christian Europe became chronicled by the monastic orders.[1] Had it not
+been for the monks, exclaimed our learned Marsham, we should not have
+had a history of England.
+
+The monks provided those chronicles which have served both for the
+ecclesiastical and civil histories of every European people. In every
+abbey the most able of its inmates, or the abbot himself, was appointed
+to record every considerable transaction in the kingdom, and sometimes
+extended their views to foreign parts. All these were set down in a
+volume reserved for this purpose; and on the decease of every sovereign
+these memorials were laid before the general chapter, to draw out a sort
+of chronological history, occasionally with a random comment, as the
+humour of the scribe prompted, or the opinions of the whole monastery
+sanctioned.
+
+Besides these meagre annals the monasteries had other books more curious
+than their record of public affairs. These were their Leiger-books, of
+which some have escaped among the few reliques of the universal
+dissolution of the monasteries. In these registers or diaries they
+entered all matters relating to their own monastery and its
+dependencies. As time never pressed on the monkish secretary, his
+notabilia runs on very miscellaneously. Here were descents of families,
+and tenures of estates; authorities of charters and of cartularies;
+curious customs of counties, cities, and great towns. Strange accidents
+were not uncommon then; and sometimes, between a miracle or a natural
+phenomenon, a fugitive anecdote stole in. The affairs of a monastery
+exhibited a moving picture of domestic life. These religious houses,
+whose gate opened to the wayfarer, and who were the distributors of
+useful commodities to the neighbouring poor--for in their larger
+establishments they included workmen of every class--did not, however,
+maintain their munificence untainted by mundane passions. Forged
+charters had often sealed their possessions, and supposititious grants
+of mortuary donations silently transferred the wealth of families. These
+lords of the soil, though easy landlords, still cast an "evil eye" on
+the lands of their neighbour. Even rival monasteries have fought in
+meadows for the ownership; the stratagems of war and the battle-array of
+two troops of cudgelling monks might have furnished some cantos to an
+epic, less comic perhaps than that of "The Rape of the Bucket."
+
+In the literary simplicity of the twelfth to the fourteenth century,
+while every great monastery had its historian, every chronicle derived
+its title from its locality; thus, among others, were the Glastonbury,
+the Peterborough, and the Abingdon Chronicles: and when Leland, so late
+as the reign of Henry the Eighth, in his search into monastic libraries,
+discovered one at St. Neot's, he was at a loss to describe it otherwise
+than as "The Chronicle of St. Neot's." The famous Doomsday Book was
+originally known as "Liber de Winton," or "The Winchester Book," from
+its first place of custody. The same circumstance occurred among our
+neighbours, where _Les grandes Chroniques de Saint Denys_ were so called
+from having been collected or compiled by the monks of that abbey. An
+abstract notion of history, or any critical discrimination of one
+chronicle from another, was not as yet familiar even to our scholars;
+and in the dearth of literature the classical models of antiquity were
+yet imperfectly contemplated.
+
+It is not less curious to observe that, at a time when the literary
+celebrity of the monachal scribe could hardly pass the boundaries of the
+monastery, and the monk himself was restricted from travelling, bound by
+indissoluble chains, yet this lone man, as if eager to enjoy a literary
+reputation, however spurious, was not scrupulous in practising certain
+dishonest devices. Before the discovery of printing, the concealment of
+a manuscript for the purpose of appropriation was an artifice which, if
+we may decide by some rumours, more frequently occurred than has been
+detected. Plagiarism is the common sin of the monkish chronicler, to
+which he was often driven by repeating a mouldy tale a hundred times
+told; but his furtive pen extended to the capital crime of felony. I
+shall venture to give a pair of literary anecdotes of monkish writers.
+
+Matthew of Paris, one of these chroniclers, is somewhat esteemed, and
+Matthew of Westminster is censured, for having copied in his "Flores
+Historiarum" the other Matthew; but we need not draw any invidious
+comparison between the two Matthews, since Matthew the first had himself
+transcribed the work of Roger the Prior of Wendover. The famous
+"Polychronicon," which long served as a text-book for the encyclopædic
+knowledge of the fourteenth century, has two names attached to it, and
+one, however false, which can never be separated from the work,
+interwoven in its texture. This famed volume is ascribed to Ranulph, or
+Ralph Higden of St. Werberg's Monastery, now the Cathedral of Chester.
+Ralph, that he might secure the tenure of this awful edifice of
+universal history for a thousand years, most subdolously contrived that
+the initial letter of every chapter, when put together, signified that
+Ralph, a monk of Chester, had compiled the work. Centuries did not
+contradict the assumption; but time, that blabber of more fatal secrets
+than those of authors, discovered in the same monastery that another
+brother Roger had laboured for the world their universal history in his
+"Polycratica Temporum." On examination, the truth flashed! For lo! the
+peccant pen of Ralph had silently transmigrated the "Polycratica" into
+the "Polychronicon," and had only laid a trap for posterity by his
+treacherous acrostics![2]
+
+These universal chroniclers usually opened, _ab initio_, with the
+Creation, dispersed at Babel reach home, and paused at the Norman
+Conquest. This was their usual first division; it was a long journey,
+but a beaten path. Whatever they found written was history to them, for
+they were without means of correcting their aptitude for credence. Their
+anachronisms often ludicrously give the lie to their legendary
+statements.
+
+Most of these monastic writers composed in a debased Latinity of their
+own, bald and barbarous, but which had grown up with the age; their
+diction bears a rude sort of simplicity. Yet though they were not
+artists, there were occasions when they were inevitably graphic--when
+they detail like a witness in court. These writers have been lauded by
+the gratitude of antiquaries, and valued by philosophical historians. A
+living historian has observed of them, that "nothing can be more
+contemptible as compositions; nothing can be more satisfactory as
+authorities." But it is necessary that we should be reminded of the
+partial knowledge and the partial passions of these sources of our
+earlier modern history. Lift the cowl from the historiographers in their
+cells recording those busy events in which they never were busied,
+characterising those eminent persons from whom they were far removed;
+William of Malmesbury, not one of the least estimable of these writers,
+confesses that he drew his knowledge from public rumours, or what the
+relaters of news brought to them.[3] In some respects their history
+sinks to the level of one of our newspapers, and is as liable to be
+tinged with party feelings. The whole monastery had as limited notions
+of public affairs as they had of the kingdom itself, of which they knew
+but little out of their own county.
+
+No monastic writer, as an historian, has descended to posterity for the
+eminence of his genius, for the same stamp of mind gave currency to
+their works. Woe to the sovereign who would have clipt their wings! then
+"tongues talked and pens wrote" monkish. There was a proverb among them,
+that "The giver is blessed, but he who taketh away is accursed." None
+but themselves could appeal to Heaven, and for their crowned slaves they
+were not penurious of their beatitude. They knew to crouch as well as to
+thunder. They usually clung to the reigning party; and a new party or a
+change of dynasty was sure to change their chronicling pen. HALL, the
+chronicler of Henry the Eighth, at the first moment when it was
+allowable to speak distinctly concerning these monkish writers,
+observed, "These monastical persons, learned and unliterate, better fed
+than taught, took on them to write and register in the book of fame the
+arts, and doings, and politic governance of kings and princes." It seems
+not to have occurred to the chronicler of Henry the Eighth that, had not
+those monks "taken on them to write and register," we should have had no
+"Book of Fame." It is a duty we owe to truth to penetrate into the
+mysteries of monkery, but the monks will always retain their right to
+receive their large claims on our admiration of their labours.
+
+There was also another class of early chroniclers throughout Europe; men
+who filled the office of a sort of royal historiographer, who
+accompanied the king and the army in their progress, to note down the
+occurrences they deemed most honourable or important to the nation. But
+incidents written down by a monk in his cell, or by a diarist pacing the
+round with majesty, would be equally warped, by the views of the
+monastery in the one case, or by a flattering subservience to the higher
+power in the other.
+
+In this manner the early history of Europe was written; the more ancient
+part was stuffed with fables; and when it might have become useful in
+recording passages and persons of the writer's own times, we have a
+one-sided tale, wherein, while half is suppressed, the other is
+disguised by flattery or by satire. Such causes are well known to have
+corrupted these first origins of modern history, a history in which the
+commons and the people at large had very little concern, till the day
+arrived, in the progress of society, when chronicles were written by
+laymen in the vernacular idiom for their nation.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Archbishop Plegmund superintended the Saxon Annals to the year
+    891. The first Chronicles, those of Kent or Wessex, were regularly
+    continued by the Archbishops of Canterbury, or by their directions,
+    as far as 1000, or even 1070.--"The Rev. Dr. Ingram's preface to the
+    Saxon Chronicle."
+
+    These were our earliest Chronicles; the Britons possibly never wrote
+    any.
+
+  [2] We have a remarkable instance among the Italian historians of
+    this period. Giovanni Villani wrote about 1330; Muratori discovered
+    that Villani had wholly transcribed the ancient portion of his
+    history from an old Chronicle of Malespini, who wrote about 1230,
+    without any acknowledgment whatever. Doubtless Villani imagined that
+    an insulated manuscript, during a century's oblivion, had little
+    chance of ever being classed among the most ancient records of
+    Italian history. Malespini's "Chronicle," like its brothers, was
+    stuffed with fables; Villani was honest enough not to add to them,
+    though not sufficiently so not silently to appropriate the whole
+    chronicle--the only one Dante read.--"Tiraboschi," v. 410, part 2nd.
+
+  [3] We have an elegant modern version of this monk's history by the
+    Rev. J. Sharpe.
+
+
+
+
+ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE.
+
+
+Very early in the sixteenth century appeared a volume which seems to
+have perplexed our literary historians by its mutable and undefinable
+character. It is a book without a title, and miscalled by the deceptive
+one of "Arnolde's Chronicle, or the Customs of London;" but "the
+Customs" are not the manners of the people, but rather "the Customs" of
+the Custom-House, and it in no shape resembles, or pretends to be "a
+chronicle." This erroneous title seems to have been injudiciously
+annexed to it by Hearne the antiquary, and should never have been
+retained. This anomalous work, of which there are three ancient
+editions, had the odd fate of all three being sent forth without a title
+and without a date; and our bibliographers cannot with any certainty
+ascertain the order or precedence of these editions. One edition was
+issued from the press of a Flemish printer at Antwerp, and possibly may
+be the earliest. The first printer, whether English or Flemish, was
+evidently at a loss to christen this monstrous miscellaneous babe, and
+ridiculously took up the title and subjects of the first articles which
+offered themselves, to designate more than a hundred of the most
+discrepant variety. The ancient editions appeared as "The names of the
+Baylyfs, Custos, Mayres, and Sherefs of the Cyte of London, with the
+Chartour and Lybartyes of the same Cyte, &c. &c., with other dyvers
+matters good and necessary for every Cytezen to understand and know;"--a
+humble title equally fallacious with the higher one of a "Chronicle,"
+for it has described many objects of considerable curiosity, more
+interesting than "mayors and sheriffs," and even "the charter and
+liberties" of "the cyte."
+
+In conveying a notion of a jumble,[1] though the things themselves are
+sufficiently grave, we cannot avoid a ludicrous association; yet this
+should not lessen the value of its information.
+
+A considerable portion of this medley wholly relates to the municipal
+interests of the citizens of London--charters and grants, with a vast
+variety of forms or models of public and private instruments, chiefly of
+a commercial description. Parish ordinances mix with Acts of Parliament;
+and when we have conned the oath of the beadle of the ward, we are
+startled by Pope Nicholas' Bull. We have the craft of grafting trees and
+altering of fruits, as well in colour as in taste, close to an oration
+of the messenger of "the Soudan of Babylon" to the Pope in 1488. Indeed,
+we have many more useful crafts, besides the altering of the flavour of
+fruits, and the oration of the Mahometan to the representative of St.
+Peter; for here are culinary receipts, to keep sturgeon, to make vinegar
+"shortly," "percely to grow in an hour's space," and to make ypocras,
+straining the wine through a bag of spices--it was nothing more than our
+mulled wine; and further, are receipts to make ink, and compound
+gunpowder, to make soap, and to brew beer. Whether we may derive any
+fresh hints from our ancestor of the year 1500 exceeds my judgment; but
+to this eager transcriber posterity owes one of the most passionate
+poems in our language; for betwixt "the composition between the
+merchants of England and the town of Antwerp," and "the reckoning to buy
+wares in Flanders," first broke into light "A Ballade of the Notbrowne
+Mayde." Thus, when an indiscriminating collector is at work, one cannot
+foresee what good fortune may not chance to be his lot.
+
+Warton has truly characterised this work as "the most heterogeneous and
+multifarious miscellany that ever existed;" but he seems to me to have
+mistaken both the design of the collector, and the nature of the
+collection. Some supposed that the collector, Richard Arnolde, intended
+the volume to be an antiquarian repertory; but as the materials were
+recent, that idea cannot be admitted; and Warton censures the compiler,
+who, to make up a volume, printed together whatever he could amass of
+notices and papers of every sort and subject. The modern editor of
+"Arnolde's Chronicle" was perplexed at the contents of what he calls "a
+strange book."
+
+The critical decision of Warton is much too searching for a volume in
+which the compiler never wrote a single line, and probably never
+entertained the remotest idea of the printer's press. This book without
+a name is, in fact, nothing more than a simple collection made by an
+English merchant engaged in the Flemish trade. Nor was such a work
+peculiar to this artless collector; for in a time of rare publications,
+such men seemed to have formed for themselves a sort of library, of
+matters they deemed worthy of recollection, to which they could have
+easy recourse.[2] By the internal evidence, Arnolde was no stranger at
+Antwerp, nor at Dordrecht. Antwerp was then a favourite residence of the
+English merchants; there the typographic art flourished, and the
+printers often printed English books; and as this collection was printed
+at Antwerp by Doesborowe, a Flemish printer, we might incline with Douco
+to infer that the Flemish was the first edition; for it seems not
+probable that a foreign printer would have selected an English volume of
+little interest to foreigners, to reprint; although we can imagine that
+from personal consideration, or by the accident of obtaining the
+manuscript, he might have been induced to be the first publisher.
+Whoever was the first printer, the collector himself seems to have been
+little concerned in the publication, by the suppression of his name, by
+the omission of a title, by not prefixing a preface, nor arranging in
+any way this curious medley of useful things, which he would familiarly
+turn to as his occasions needed, and--if we may compare a grave volume
+with the lightest--was of that class which ladies call their
+"scrap-books," and assuredly not, according to its fallacious title, a
+CHRONICLE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] In Oldys' "British Librarian" there is an accurate analysis of
+    the work, in which every single article is enumerated.
+
+  [2] A similar volume to Arnolde's may be found in the "Harl. MSS.,"
+    No. 2252.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST PRINTED CHRONICLE.
+
+
+The first chronicle in our vernacular prose, designed for the English
+people, was the earnest labour of one of themselves, a citizen and
+alderman, and sometime sheriff of London, ROBERT FABYAN. Here, for the
+first time, the spectacle of English affairs, accompanied by what he has
+called "A Concordance of Stories," which included separate notices of
+French history contemporaneous with the periods he records, was opened
+for "the unlettered who understand no Laten." Our chronicler, in the
+accustomed mode, fixes the periods of history by dates from Adam or from
+Brute. He opens with a superfluous abridgment of Geoffry of
+Monmouth--the "Polychronicon" is one of his favourite sources, but his
+authorities are multifarious. His French history is a small stream from
+"La Mere des Chroniques," and other chronicles of his contemporary
+Gaguin, a royal historiographer who wandered in the same taste, but who,
+Fabyan had the sagacity to discover, carefully darkened all matters
+unpleasant to Frenchmen, but never "leaving anything out of his book
+that may sound to the advancement of the French nacyon."
+
+It was a rare occurrence in a layman, and moreover a merchant, to have
+cultivated the French and the Latin languages. Fabyan was not a learned
+man, for the age of men of learning had not yet arrived, though it was
+soon to come. At that early day of our typography, when our native
+annalists lay scattered in their manuscript seclusion, it was no
+ordinary delving which struck into the dispersed veins of the dim and
+dark mine of our history. So little in that day was the critical
+knowledge of our writers, that Fabyan has "quoted the same work under
+different appellations," and some of our historical writers he seems not
+to have met with in his researches, for the chronicles of Robert of
+Gloucester and of Peter Langtoft, though but verse, would have
+contributed some freshness to his own. In seven unequal divisions, the
+chronicle closes with the days of the seventh Henry. These seven
+divisions were probably more fantastical than critical; the number was
+adopted to cheer the good man with "the seven joys of the Virgin," which
+he sings forth in unmetrical metre, evidently participating in the
+rapturous termination of each of his own "seven joys."
+
+Our grave chronicler, arrayed in his civic dignities, seems to have
+provoked the sensitiveness of the poetical critic in Warton, and the
+caustic wit in Horace Walpole. "No sheriff," exclaims Walpole, "was ever
+less qualified to write a history of England. He mentions the deaths of
+princes and revolutions of government with the same phlegm and brevity
+as he would speak of the appointment of churchwardens."
+
+We may suspect that our citizen and chronicler, however he might be
+familiar with the public acts of royalty, had no precise notions of the
+principles of their government. We cannot otherwise deem of an
+historical recorder whose political sagacity, in that famous interview
+between our Edward the Fourth and Louis the Eleventh, of which Comines
+has left us a lively scene, could not penetrate further than to the
+fashion of the French monarch's dress. He tells us of "the nice and
+wanton disguised apparel that the King Louys wore upon him at the time
+of this meeting, _I might make a long rehearsal_, apparalled more like a
+minstrel than a prince." Fabyan shared too in the hearty "John Bullism"
+of that day in a mortal jealousy of the Gaul, and even of his _Sainte
+Ampoule_. Though no man had a greater capacity of faith for miracles and
+saints on English ground, yet for those of his neighbours he had found
+authority that it was not necessary for his salvation to believe them,
+and has ventured to decide on one, that "they must be folys (fools) who
+believe it." Had the _Sainte Ampoule_, however, been deposited in
+Westminster Abbey for our own coronations, instead of the Cathedral at
+Rheims for a French king, Fabyan had not doubted of the efficacy of
+every drop of the holy oil.
+
+But the dotage of FABYAN did not particularly attach to him; and though
+his intellectual comprehension was restricted to the experience of an
+alderman, he might have been the little Machiavel of his wardmote--for
+he has thrown out a shrewd observation, which no doubt we owe to his
+own sagacity. In noticing the neglect of a mayor in repairing the walls
+which had been begun by his predecessor, he observes that this generally
+happens, for "one mayor will not finish that thing which another
+beginneth, for then they think, be the deed ever so good and profitable,
+that the honour thereof shall be ascribed to the beginner, and not to
+the finisher, which lack of charity and desire of vainglory causeth many
+good acts and deeds to die, and grow out of mind, to the great decay of
+the commonwealth of the city." A profound observation, which might be
+extended to monarchs as well as mayors.
+
+Indulging too often the civic curiosity of "a citizen and alderman,"
+FABYAN has been taunted for troubling posterity. "FABYAN," says Warton,
+"is equally attentive to the succession of the mayors of London and the
+monarchs of England. He seems to have thought the dinners at Guildhall
+and the pageantries of the city companies more interesting transactions
+than our victories in France and our struggles for public liberty at
+home."
+
+This seems to be a random stricture. The alderman, indeed, has carefully
+registered the mayors and the sheriffs of London; and the scientific in
+"high and low prices" perhaps may be grateful that our pristine
+chronicler has also furnished the prices of wheat, oxen, sheep, and
+poultry--but we cannot find that he has commemorated the diversified
+forms these took on the solemn tables of the Guildhall, nor can we meet
+with the pasteboard pomps of city pageants, one only being recorded, on
+the return of Henry the Sixth from France.
+
+Our modern critic, composing in the spirit of our day, alludes to "the
+struggle for public liberty"; but "public liberty" must have been a very
+ambiguous point with the honest citizen who had been a sad witness to
+the contests of two murderous families, who had long sought their mutual
+destruction, and long convulsed the whole land. We may account for the
+tempered indifference, and "the brief recitals" for which this simple
+citizen is reproached, who had lived through such changeful and
+ensanguined scenes, which had left their bleeding memories among the
+families of his contemporaries.
+
+The faculties of Fabyan were more level with their objects when he had
+to chronicle the "tempestuous weathering of thunder and lightning," with
+the ominous fall of a steeple, or "the image of our Lady" dashed down
+from its roof; or when he describes the two castles in the air, whence
+issued two armies, black and white, combating in the skies till the
+white vanished! Such portents lasted much later than the days of Fabyan,
+for honest Stowe records what had once ushered in St. James's night,
+when the lightning and thunder coming in at the south window and
+bursting on the north, the bells of St. Michael were listened to with
+horror, ringing of themselves, while ugly shapes were dancing on the
+steeple. Their natural philosophy and their piety were long stationary,
+yet even then some were critical in their remarks; for when Fabyan
+recorded "flying dragons and fiery spirits in the air," this was
+corrected by omitting "the fiery spirits," but agreeing to "the flying
+dragons." Fabyan, however, has preserved more picturesque and ingenious
+visions in some legends of saints or apparitions--still delightsome.
+These legends formed their "Works of Fiction," and were more affecting
+than ours, for they were supernatural, and no one doubted their verity.
+
+Our pristine chronicler, as we have seen, has received hard measure from
+the two eminent critics of the eighteenth century, who have censured as
+a history that which is none. Chronicles were written when the science
+of true history had yet no existence; a chronicle then in reality is but
+a part of history. Every fact dispersed in its insulated state refuses
+all combination; cause and effect lie remote and obscured from each
+other; disguised by their ostensible pretexts, the true motives of
+actions in the great actors of the drama of history cannot be found in
+the chronological chronicler. The real value of his diligence consists
+in copiousness and discrimination; qualities rather adverse to each
+other. FABYAN betrays the infirmities of the early chronicler, not yet
+practised even in the art of simple detail, without distinction of the
+importance or the insignificance of the matters he records: his eager
+pen reckoned the number without knowing to test the weight; to him all
+facts appeared of equal worth, for all alike had cost him the same toil;
+and thus he yields an abundance without copiousness. In raising the
+curiosity which he has not satisfied for us, his mighty tome shrinks
+into a narrow scope, and his imperfect narratives, brief and dry, offer
+only the skeletons of history. The mere antiquarian indeed prefers the
+chronicle to the history; the acquisition of a fact with him is the
+limit of his knowledge, and he is apt to dream that he possesses the
+superstructure when he is only at work on the foundations.
+
+The Chronicle of FABYAN attracts our notice for a remarkable incident
+attending its publication. The Chronicle was finished in 1504, and
+remained in manuscript during the author's life, who died in 1512. The
+first edition did not appear till 1516. The cause which delayed the
+printing of an important work, for such it was in that day, has not been
+disclosed; yet perhaps we might have been interested to have learned
+whether this protracted publication arose out of neglect difficult to
+comprehend, or from the printer, reluctant to risk the cost, or from any
+impediment from a higher quarter.
+
+Be this as it may, we possess the writer's genuine work, for the
+printer, Pynson, was faithful to his author. The rarity of this first
+edition Bale, on a loose rumour which no other literary historian has
+sanctioned, ascribes to its suppression by Cardinal Wolsey, who is
+represented in his fury to have condemned the volume to a public
+ignition, which no one appears to have witnessed, for its "dangerous
+exposition of the revenues of the clergy," which is not found in the
+volume. FABYAN truly was _ter Catholicus_; he was of the old religion,
+dying in the odour of sanctity, and was spared the trial of the new. The
+alderman's voluminous will is now for us at least as curious as anything
+in his chronicle.[1] We here behold the play of the whole machinery of
+superstition, when men imagined that they secured the repose of their
+souls by feeing priests and bribing saints by countless masses. This
+funereal rite was then called "the month's mind," and which, at least
+for that short period, prolonged the memory of the departed. For this
+lugubrious performance were provided ponderous torches for the bearers,
+tapers for shrines, and huge candlesticks to be kept lighted at the
+altar. Three trentballs--that is, thirty masses thrice told--were to be
+chorused by the Grey Friars; six priests were to perform the high mass,
+chant the requiem, and recite the _De Profundis_ and the _Dirige_; and
+for nine years, on his mortuary day, he charges his "tenement in
+Cornhill" to pay for an _Obite_! But not only friars and priests were to
+pray or to sing for the repose of the soul of Alderman Fabyan, all
+comers were invited to kneel around the tomb; and at times children were
+to be called in, who if they could not read a _De Profundis_ from the
+Psalter, the innocents were to cry forth a _Pater-Noster_ or an _Ave_!
+There was a purveyance of ribs of beef and mutton and ale, "stock-fish,
+if Lent," and other recommendations for "the comers to the _Dirige_ at
+night." The Alderman, however, seems to have planned a kind of economy
+in his "month's mind," for not only was the repose of his soul in
+question, but also "the souls of all above written"--and these were a
+bead-roll of all the branches of Fabyan's family.
+
+The Chronicle of FABYAN was not long given to the world when it
+encountered the doom of a system at its termination, just before the
+beginnings of a coming one; that fatal period of a change in human
+affairs and human opinions, usually described as a state of transition.
+But in this particular instance, the change occurred preceded by no
+transitional approach; for within the small circuit of thirty years it
+seemed as if the events of whole centuries had been more miraculously
+compressed, than any in those "lives of the saints" whose legendary
+lore, provided the saints were English, Master FABYAN had loved to
+perpend. It was Henry the Eighth who turned all the sense of our
+chronicler into nonsense, all his honest faith into lying absurdities,
+all his exhortations to maintain "religious houses" into treasonable
+matters.
+
+Successive editors of the editions of 1533, 43, and 55, surpassed each
+other in watchfulness, to rid themselves of the old song. Never was
+author so mutilated in parts, nor so wholly changed from himself; and
+when, as it sometimes happened, neither purgation nor castration availed
+the reforming critics, the author's sides bore their marginal
+flagellations. The corrections or alterations were, however, dexterously
+performed, for the texture of the work betrayed no trace of the rents.
+The omission of a phrase saved a whole sentence, and the change of an
+adjective or two set right a whole character. It is true they swept away
+all his delightful legends, without sparing his woful metres of "the
+seven joys of the Blessed Virgin," and his appreciation of some
+favourite relics. They disbanded all the saints, or treated them as they
+did "the holy virgin Edith," of whom Fabyan has recorded that "many
+_virtues_ be rehearsed," which they delicately reduced to _verses_. His
+Holiness the Pope is simply "the Bishop of Rome;" and on one memorable
+occasion--the Papal interdiction of John--this "Bishop" is designated in
+the margin by the reformer as "that monstrous and wicked Beast." The
+narrative of Becket cost our compurgators, as it has many others, much
+shifting, and more omissions. In the tale of the hardy and ambitious
+Archbishop murdered by knightly assassins, Fabyan said, "They _martyred_
+the blessed Archbishop;" our corrector of the press simply reads, "They
+slew the traitorous Bishop." The _omissions_ and the commissions in the
+Chronicle of FABYAN are often amusing and always instructive; but these
+could not have been detected but by a severe collation, which has been
+happily performed. When the antiquary Brand discovered that FABYAN had
+been "_modernized_" in later editions, his observation would seem to
+have extended no further than to the style: but the style of FABYAN is
+simple and clear even to modern readers: modernized truly it was, not
+however for phrases, but for notions--not for statements, but for
+omissions--not for words, but for things.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] We are indebted to the zealous research of Sir Henry Ellis for
+    the disinterment of this document as well as for the collations which
+    appear in his edition.
+
+
+
+
+HENRY THE EIGHTH; HIS LITERARY CHARACTER.
+
+
+Peace and policy had diffused a halcyon calmness over the land, and the
+people now discerned the approach of another era. Henry the Eighth, who
+appears with such opposite countenances in the great gallery of history,
+gave the country more glorious promises of an accomplished sovereign
+than England had yet witnessed; and however he may appear differently
+before the calm eye of posterity, the passions of his own times secured
+his popularity even to his latter days. Youthful, with all its vigorous
+and generous temper, and not inferior in the majesty of his intellect
+any more than in that of his person--learned in his closet, yet
+enterprising in action--this sovereign impressed his own commanding
+character on the nation. Such a monarch gave wings to their genius. Long
+pent up in their unhappy island, they soon indulged in a visionary
+dominion in France, and in rapid victories in Scotland; insular England
+once more aspired to be admitted into the great European family of
+states; and Henry was the arbiter of Francis of France, and of Charles
+of Germany. The awakened spirit of the English people unconsciously was
+preparatory to the day which yet no one dreamed of. The minds of men
+were opening to wider views; and he who sate on the throne was one who
+would not be the last man in the kingdom to be mindless of its progress.
+
+This lettered monarch himself professed authorship, and a sceptre was
+his pen. When he sent forth a volume which all Europe was to read, and
+was graced by a new title which all Europe was to own, who dared to
+controvert the crowned controversialist, or impugn the validity of that
+airy title? His majesty alone was allowed to confute himself.[1] Trained
+from his early days in scholastic divinity, for he was designed to be
+an archbishop, the volume, however aided by others, was the native
+growth of his own mind. The king's taste for this learning was
+studiously flattered by the great cardinal, who gently recommended to
+his restless master a perusal of the nineteen folios of Thomas Aquinas,
+possibly with the hope of fixing the royal fly in the repose of the
+cobwebs of the schoolmen. Such, indeed, were his habits of study, that
+he could interest himself in compiling a national Latin grammar, when
+the schools succeeded to the dissolved monasteries. The grammar was
+issued as an act of parliament; no other but the royal grammar was to be
+thumbed without incurring the peril of a premunire.[2]
+
+It is to be regretted that we are supplied with but few literary
+anecdotes of this literary monarch. Some we may incidentally glean, and
+some may be deduced from inference. The age was not yet far enough
+advanced in civilization to enjoy that inquisitive leisure which leaves
+its memorials for a distant posterity in the court tattle of a
+Suetonius, or the secret history of a Procopius. It has, however, been
+recorded that certain acts of parliament and proclamations were
+corrected by the royal pen, and particularly the first draught of the
+act which empowered the king to erect bishoprics was written by his own
+hand; and he was the active editor of those monarchical pamphlets, as
+they may be classed, on religious topics, which were frequently required
+during his reign.
+
+This learned monarch was unquestionably the first patron of our
+vernacular literature; he indulged in a literary intercourse with our
+earliest writers, and evinced a keen curiosity on any novelty in the
+infant productions of the English press. On frequent occasions he took a
+personal interest in the success, and even in the concoction, of
+literary productions. He fully entered into the noble designs of Sir
+Thomas Elyot to create a vernacular style, and critically discussed
+with him the propriety of the use of new words, "apt for the purpose."
+And on one occasion, when Sir Thomas Elyot projected our first Latin
+dictionary, the king, in the presence of the courtiers, commended the
+design, and offered the author not only his royal counsel, but a supply
+of such books as the royal library possessed.
+
+The king was not offended, as were some of the courtiers, with the
+freedom displayed by Elyot in some of his ethical works. Elyot tells
+us--"His grace not only took it in the better part, but with princely
+words, full of majesty, commended my diligence, simplicity, and courage,
+in that I spared no estate in the rebuking of vice." The king, at the
+same time that he protected Elyot from his petty critics, rewarded the
+early efforts of another vernacular author, who had dedicated to him his
+first work in English prose, by a pension, which enabled the young
+student, Roger Ascham, to set off on his travels. A remarkable instance
+of Henry's quick attention to the novelties of our literature appears by
+his critical conversation with the antiquary, Thynne, who had presented
+to him his new edition of Chaucer. His Majesty soon discovered the
+novelty of "The Pilgrim's Tale," a bitter satire on the pride and state
+of the clergy, which at the time was ascribed to Chaucer. The king
+pointing it out to the learned editor, observed, in these very
+words--"William Thynne! I doubt this will not be allowed, for I suspect
+the bishops will call thee in question for it." The editor submitted,
+"If your grace be not offended, I hope to be protected by you." The king
+"bade him go! and fear not!" It is evident that his majesty was "not
+offended" at a severe satire on the clergy. But even Henry the Eighth
+could not always change at will his political position--the minister in
+power may find means to counteract even the absolute king. A great stir
+was made in Wolsey's parliament; it was even proposed that the works of
+Chaucer should be wholly suppressed--some good-humoured sprite rose in
+favour of the only poet in the nation, observing that all the world knew
+that Dan Chaucer had never written anything more than fables! The
+authority of Wolsey so far prevailed that "The Pilgrim's Tale" was
+suppressed, and it seems that the haughty prelate would willingly have
+suppressed the editor in his own person. THYNNE was an intimate
+acquaintance of SKELTON, whose caustic rhymes of "Colin Clout" had been
+concocted at his country-house. THYNNE, in this perilous adventure of
+publishing "The Pilgrim's Tale," was saved from the talons of the
+cardinal, for this monarch's royal word was at all times sacred with
+him.
+
+A literary anecdote of this monarch has been recently disclosed, which
+at least attests his ardour for information. When Henry wanted time, if
+not patience, to read a new work, he put copies into the hands of two
+opposite characters, and from the reports of these rival reviewers the
+king ventured to deduce his own results. This method of judging a work
+without meditating on it, was a new royal cut in the road of literature,
+to which we of late have been accustomed; but it seemed with Henry
+rather to have increased the vacillations of his opinions, than steadied
+the firmness of his decisions.
+
+The court of Henry displayed a brilliant circle of literary noblemen,
+distinguished for their translations, and some by their songs and
+sonnets. Parker, Lord Morley, was a favourite for his numerous versions,
+some of which he dedicated to the king; the witty Wyat, who always
+sustained the anagram of his name, was a familiar companion; nor could
+Henry be insensible to the elegant effusions of Surrey, unless his
+political feelings indisposed his admiration. It was at the king's
+command that Lord Berners translated the "Chronicles of Froissart," and
+the volume is adorned by the royal arms. Sternhold, the memorable
+psalm-enditer, was a groom of the chamber, and a personal favourite with
+his master; and Henry appointed the illustrious Leland to search for and
+to preserve the antiquities of England, and invested him with the
+honourable title of "The King's Antiquary."
+
+Scholars, too, stood around the royal table; and the company at the
+palace excelled that of any academy, as Erasmus has told us. Learning
+patronised by a despot became a fashionable accomplishment, and the
+model for the court was in the royal family themselves. It is from this
+period that we may date that race of learned ladies which continued
+through the long reign of our maiden queen. Yet, before the accession
+of Henry the Eighth, half a century had not elapsed when female
+literature was at so low an ebb that Sir Thomas More noticed as an
+extraordinary circumstance that Jane Shore could read and write. When
+Erasmus visited the English court, he curiously observed that "The
+course of human affairs was changed; the monks, famed in time passed for
+learning, are become ignorant, and WOMEN LOVE BOOKS." Erasmus had
+witnessed at the court of Henry the Eighth the Princess Mary and
+Elizabeth, both of whom held an epistolary correspondence in Latin; the
+daughter of Sir Anthony Cook, and Lady Jane Grey, versed in Greek; and
+the Queen Catherine Parr, his fervent admirer for his paraphrase on the
+four gospels. Erasmus had frequented the house of the More's, which he
+describes as a perfect _musarum domicilium_. The venerable Nicholas
+Udall, a contemporary, has also left us a picture of that day. "It is
+now a common thing to see young virgins so nouzeld (nursed) and trained
+in the study of letters, that they willingly set all other vain pastimes
+at nought--reading and writing, and with most earnest study, both early
+and late." The pliable nobility of Henry the Eighth easily took the bend
+of the royal family, and among their daughters, doubtless, there were
+more learned women than are chronicled in Ballard's "Memoirs." Lady Jane
+Grey meditating on Plato was not so uncommon an incident as it appears
+to us in the insulated anecdote. The learning of that day must not be
+held as the pedantry of a later, for it was laying the foundations of
+every knowledge in the soil of England.
+
+The king's more elegant tastes diffused themselves among the finer arts
+at a time when they were yet strangers in this land; his father's
+travelled taste had received a tincture of these arts when abroad, in
+Henry the Eighth they burst into existence with a more robust aptitude.
+He eagerly invited foreign artists to his court; but the patronage of an
+English monarch was not yet appreciated by some of the finest geniuses
+of Italy; we lay yet too far out of their observation and sympathies;
+and it is recorded of one of the Italian artists, a fiery spirit, who
+had visited England, that he designated us as _quelle bestie Inglesi_.
+Raphael and Titian could not be lured from their studios and their blue
+skies; but, fortunately, a northern genius, whose name is as immortal as
+their own, was domiciliated by the liberal monarch, the friend of
+Erasmus and of More--Hans Holbein.
+
+Among the musicians of Henry we find French, Italians, and Germans; he
+was himself a musician, and composed several pieces which I believe are
+still retained in the service of the Royal Chapel.[3] He had a taste for
+the gorgeous or grotesque amusements of the Continent, combining them
+with a display of the fine arts in their scenical effects. One memorable
+night of the Epiphany, the court was startled by a new glory, where the
+king and his companions appeared in a scene which the courtiers had
+never before witnessed. "It was a mask after the manner of Italy, a
+thing not seen afore in England," saith the chronicler of Henry's
+court-days. Once, to amaze a foreign embassy, and on a sudden to raise
+up a banqueting-house, the monarch set to work the right magicians; an
+architect, and a poet, and his master of the revels, were months
+inventing and labouring. The regal banqueting-house was adorned by the
+arts of picture and music, of sculpture and architecture; all was full
+of illusion and reality; the house itself was a pageant to exhibit a
+pageant. The magnificent prince was himself so pleased, that he
+anxiously stopped his visitors at the points of sight most favourable to
+catch the illusion of the perspective. A monarch of such fine tastes and
+gorgeous fancies would create the artists who are the true inventors.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The manuscript of Henry the Eighth reposes in the Vatican,
+    witnessed by his own hand in this inscription:--"Anglorum Rex,
+    Henricus Leoni X. 'mittit hoc opus et fidei testem et amicitiæ.'"--I
+    found this inscription in one of the notes of Selden to the
+    "Polyolbion" of Drayton.
+
+  [2] The famous Grammar of Lilly was the work of a learned
+    association, in which it appears that both the king and the cardinal
+    had the honour to co-operate. Sir Thomas Elyot has designated Henry
+    "as the chief author."--Preface to "The Castle of Health."
+
+  [3] Sir John Hawkins' "History of Music," vol. ii.
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS OF THE PEOPLE.
+
+
+The people of Europe, who had no other knowledge of languages than their
+own uncultivated dialects, seem to have possessed what, if we may so
+dignify it, we would call a fugitive literature of their own. It is
+obvious that the people could not be ignorant of the important
+transactions in their own land; transactions in which their fathers had
+been the spectators or the actors, the sons would perpetuate by their
+traditions; the names of their heroes had not died with them on the
+battle-field. Nor would the villain's subjection to the feudal lord
+spoil the merriment of the land, nor dull the quip of natural
+facetiousness.
+
+Before the people had national books they had national songs. Even at a
+period so obscure as the days of Charlemagne there were "_most ancient
+songs_, in which the acts and wars of the old kings were sung." These
+songs which, the secretary of Charlemagne has informed us, were
+sedulously collected by the command of that great monarch, are described
+by the secretary, according to his classical taste, as _barbara et
+antiquissima carmina_; "barbarous," because they were composed in the
+rude vernacular language; yet such was their lasting energy that they
+were, even in the eighth century, held to be "most ancient," so long had
+they dwelt in the minds, of the people! The enlightened emperor had more
+largely comprehended their results in the vernacular idiom, on the
+genius of the nation, than had the more learned and diplomatic
+secretary. It was an ingenious conjecture, that, possibly, even these
+ancient songs may in some shape have come down to us in the elder
+northern and Teutonic romances, and the Danish, the Swedish, the
+Scottish, and the English popular ballads. The kindling narrative, and
+the fiery exploits which entranced the imagination of Charlemagne,
+mutilated or disguised, may have framed the incidents of a romance, or
+been gathered up in the snatches of old wives' tales, and, finally, may
+have even lingered in the nursery.
+
+Our miserable populace had poets for themselves, whose looser carols
+were the joy of the streets or the fields. Unfortunately we only learn
+that they had such artless effusions, for these songs have perished on
+the lips of the singers. The monks were too dull or too cunning to
+chronicle the outpourings of a people whom they despised, and which
+assuredly would have often girded them to the quick. A humorous satire
+of this kind has stolen down to us in that exquisite piece of drollery
+and grotesque invention, "The Land of Cokaigne."[1] They had historical
+ballads which were rehearsed to all listeners; and it was from these
+"old ballads, popular through succeeding times," that William of
+Malmesbury tells us that "he learned more than from books written
+expressly for the information of posterity," though he will not answer
+for their precise truth. They had also political ballads. A memorable
+one, free as a lampoon, made by one of the adherents of Simon de
+Montfort, Earl of Leicester, in the fugitive day of his victory in 1264,
+occasioned a statute against "slanderous reports or tales to cause
+discord betwixt king and people," a spirit which by no means was put
+down by that enactment.[2] This was a ballad sung to the people, as
+appears by the opening line,--
+
+  Sitteth all stille, and harkeneth to me!
+
+This ballad strikingly contrasts with another of unnerving dejection,
+after the irreparable defeat of the party, and the death of the Earl of
+Leicester, which, it is remarkable, is written in French, having been
+probably addressed solely to that discomfited nobility who would
+sympathise with the lament.[3]
+
+The people, or the inferior classes of society, who despised the courtly
+French then in vogue, formed such a multitude, that it was for them that
+ROBERT of GLOUCESTER wrote his Chronicle, and that ROBERT of BRUNNE
+translated the Chronicle of Peter Langtoft, and a volume of recreative
+tales from the French. The people even then were eager readers, or, more
+properly, auditors; and this further appears in the naïveté of our
+rhymer's prologue to this Chronicle. The monk tells us, that this story
+of England which he now shows in English, is not intended for the
+learned, but the illiterate; not for the clerk, but the layman;
+
+  Not for the lerid, but the lewed;[4]
+
+and he describes the class, "they who take solace and mirth when they
+sit together in fellowship," and deem it "wisdom for to witten" (to
+know)
+
+  The state of the land, and haf it written.
+
+The Hermit of Hampole expressly wrote his theological poems for the
+people, for those who could understand only English.
+
+At a period when we glean nothing from any literature of the people, we
+find that it had a positive existence; for two chronicles and a
+collection of tales and theological poems were furnished for them in
+their native idiom, by writers who unquestionably sought for celebrity.
+The people, too, had what in every age has been their peculiar
+property,--all the fragmentary wisdom of antiquity in those "Few words
+to the Wise," so daily useful, or so apt in the contingencies of human
+life; proverbs and Æsopian fables, delightedly transmitted from father
+to son. The memories of the people were stored with short narratives;
+for a startling tale was not easily forgotten. They had songs of trades,
+appropriated to the different avocations of labourers. These were a
+solace to the solitary task-worker, or threw a cheering impulse when
+many were employed together. Such HALL aptly describes as
+
+  Sung to the wheel, and sung unto the payle.[5]
+
+These songs are found among the people of every country; and these
+effusions were the true poetry of the heart, which kept alive their
+social feelings. The people had even the greater works brought down for
+them to a diminutive size; the lays of minstrelsy were usually fragments
+of the metrical chronicles, or a disjointed tale from some romance;[6]
+such as the popular Fabliaux, which form the amusing collection of Le
+Grand.
+
+These proverbs and these fables, these songs and these tales, all these
+were a library without books, till the day arrived when the people had
+books of their own, open to their comprehension, and responding to their
+sympathies. That this traditional literature was handed down from
+generation to generation appears from the circumstance, that hardly had
+the printing-press been in use when a multitude of "the people's books"
+spread through Europe their rude instruction or their national humour.
+They were even rendered more attractive by the expressive woodcuts which
+palpably appealed to a sense which required no "cunning" to comprehend.
+Their piety and their terror were long excited by that variety of Satan
+and his devils, which were exhibited to their appalled imaginations--the
+the mouth of hell gaping wide, and the crowd of the damned driven in by
+the flaming pitchforks. "The Calendar of Shepherds," originally a
+translation from the French, was a popular handbook, and rich were its
+contents--a perpetual almanac, the saints' days, with the signs of the
+zodiac, a receptacle of domestic receipts, all the wisdom of proverbs,
+and all the mysteries of astrology, divinity, politics, and geography,
+mingled in verse and prose. It was the encyclopædia for the poor man,
+and even for some of his betters.
+
+The courtly favourites of a former age descended from the oriel window
+to the cottage-lattice; perpetuated in our "chap-books," sold on the
+stalls of fairs, and mixed with the wares of "the chapman," they became
+the books of the people. "The Gestes" of Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis
+of Hampton, and other fabulous heroes of chivalry, have been recognised
+in their humble disguise of the "Tom Thumb," and "Tom Hickathrift," and
+"Jack the Giant-Killer" of the people.
+
+In France their "bibliothèque bleue," books now in the shape of
+pamphlets, deriving their name from the colour of their wrappers,
+preserves the remains of the fugitive literature of the people; and in
+Italy to this day several of the old romances of chivalry are cut down
+to a single paul's purchase, and delight the humble buyers.[7] Guerin
+Meschino, of native origin, still retains his popularity. In Germany
+some patriotic antiquaries have delighted to collect this household
+literature of the illiterate. The Germans, who, more than any other
+nation, seem to have cherished the hallowed feelings of the homestead,
+have a term to designate this class of literature; they call these
+volumes _Volksbücher_, or "the people's books."
+
+There existed a more intimate intercourse between the vernacular writers
+of Germany and our own than appears yet to have been investigated. "The
+Merry Jests of Howleglas," most delectable to the people from their
+grossness and their humour, is of German origin; and it has been
+recently discovered that "The History of Friar Rush," which perplexed
+the researches of Ritson, is a literal prose version of a German poem,
+printed in 1587.[8] "Reynard the Fox"--a most amusing Æsopian
+history--an exquisite satire on the vices of the clergy, the devices of
+courtiers, and not sparing majesty itself--an intelligible manual of
+profound Machiavelism, displaying the trickery of circumventing and
+supplanting, and parrying off opponents by sleights of wit--was
+translated by Caxton from the Dutch.[9]
+
+This political fiction has been traced in several languages to an
+earlier period than the thirteenth century. The learned Germans hold it
+to be a complete picture of the feudal manners; and Heineccius, one of
+the most able jurists, declares that it has often assisted him in
+clearing up the jurisprudence of Germany, and that for the genius of the
+writer the volume deserves to be ranked with the classics of antiquity.
+The writer probably had good reasons for concealing his name, but his
+intimacy with a Court-life is apparent. He has dexterously described the
+wiles of Reynard, whose cunning overreached his opponents; his wit, his
+learning, his humour, and knowledge of mankind, are of no ordinary
+degree; and this favourite satire contributed, no less than the works of
+Erasmus, of Rabelais, and of Boccaccio, to pave the way for the
+Reformation. It was among the earliest productions of the press in
+Germany and in England, and became so popular here that on the old
+altar-piece of Canterbury cathedral are several paintings taken from
+this pungent satire. The modern Italian poet, CASTI, seems to have
+borrowed the plan of his famous political satire "Gl' Animali Parlanti"
+from Reynard the Fox.
+
+The Germans have occasionally borrowed from us, as we also from the
+Italian jest-books, many of our "tales and quick answers;" the facetiæ
+of Poggius and Domenichi, and others, have been a fertile source of our
+own.
+
+All tales have wings, whether they come from the east or the north, and
+they soon become denizens wherever they alight. Thus it has happened
+that the tale which charmed the wandering Arab in his tent, or cheered
+the Northern peasant by his winter-fire, alike held on its journey
+toward England and Scotland. Dr. Leyden was surprised when he first
+perused the fabliaux of "The Poor Scholar," "The Three Thieves," and
+"The Sexton of Cluni," to recognise the popular stories which he had
+often heard in infancy. He was then young in the poetical studies of the
+antiquary, or he would not have been at a loss to know whether the Scots
+drew their tales from the French, or the French from their Scottish
+intercourse; or whether they originated with the Celtic, or the
+Scandinavian, or sometimes even with the Orientalists.
+
+The genealogy of many a tale, as well as the humours of native jesters,
+from the days of Henry the Eighth to those of Joe Miller, who, as
+somebody has observed, now, too, begins to be ancient, may be traced not
+only to France, to Spain, and to Italy, but to Greece and Rome, and at
+length to Persia and to India. Our most familiar stories have afforded
+instances. The tale of "Whittington and his Cat," supposed to be
+indigenous to our country, was first narrated by Arlotto, in his
+"Novella delle Gatte," in his "Facetie," which were printed soon after
+his death, in 1483; the tale is told of a merchant of Genoa. We must,
+however, recollect that Arlotto had been a visitor at the Court of
+England. The other puss, though without her boots, may be seen in
+Straparola's "Piacevoli Notti." The familiar little Hunchback of the
+"Arabian Nights" has been a universal favourite; it may be found
+everywhere; in "The Seven Wise Masters," in the "Gesta Romanorum," and
+in Le Grand's "Fabliaux." The popular tale of Llywellyn's greyhound,
+whose grave we still visit at Bethgelert, Sir William Jones discovered
+in Persian tradition, and it has given rise to a proverb, "As repentant
+as the man who killed his greyhound." In "Les Maximes des Orientaux" of
+Galland, we find several of our popular tales.
+
+"Bluebeard," "Red-riding Hood," and "Cinderella," are tales told alike
+in the nurseries of England and France, Germany and Denmark; and the
+domestic warning to the Lady Bird, the chant of our earliest day, is
+sung by the nurse of Germany.[10] All nations seem alike concerned in
+this copartnership of tale-telling; borrowing, adulterating, clipping,
+and even receiving back the identical coin which had circulated wherever
+it was found. Douce, one of whose favourite pursuits was tracing the
+origin and ramification of tales, to my knowledge could have afforded a
+large volume of this genealogy of romance; but that volume probably
+reposes for the regale of the next century, that literary antiquary
+being deterred by caustic reviewers from the publication of his useful
+researches.
+
+The people, however, did not advance much in intelligence, even after
+the discovery of printing, for new works, which should have been
+designed for popular purposes, were still locked up in a language which
+none spoke and only the scholar read; and this, notwithstanding a noble
+example had been set by the Italians to the other nations of Europe. In
+the early days of our printing, the vernacular productions of the press
+were thrown out to amuse the children of society, fashioned as their
+toys. We have an abundance of poetical and prose facetiæ, all of which
+were solely adapted to the popular taste, and some of the writers of
+which were eminent persons. Few but have heard of "The Merry Tales of
+the Madmen of Gotham," and of "Scogin's Jests, full of witty mirth and
+pleasant shifts." These facetious works are said to be "gathered" by
+Andrew Borde,[11] a physician and humorist of a very original cast of
+mind, and who professedly wrote for "the Commonwealth," that is, the
+people, many other works on graver topics, not less seasoned with
+drolleries. He was the first who composed medical treatises in the
+vernacular idiom. His "Breviarie of Health" is a medical dictionary, and
+held to be a "jewel" in his time, as Fuller records. In this
+alphabetical list of all diseases, his philosophy reaches to the
+diseases of the mind, whose cure he combines with that of the body, the
+medicine and the satire often pleasantly illustrating each other. From
+the "Dietarie of Health" the modern apostles of regimen might expand
+their own revelations; it contains many curious matters, not only on
+diet, but on the whole system of domestic economy, even to the building
+of a house, regulating a family, and choosing a good air to dwell in,
+&c. Another of his books, "The Introduction of Knowledge," is a
+miscellany of great curiosity, describing the languages and manners of
+different countries; in it are specimens of the Cornish, Welsh, Irish,
+and Scotch languages, as also of the Turkish and Egyptian, and others,
+and the value of their coins. The apt yet concise discrimination of the
+national character of every people is true to the hour we are writing.
+
+The writings of Borde incidentally preserve curious notices of the
+domestic life and of the customs and arts of that period. Whitaker, in
+his history of Whalley, has referred to his directions for the
+construction of great houses, in illustration of our domestic
+architecture. In all his little books much there is which the antiquary
+and the philosopher would not willingly pass by.
+
+Andrew Borde was one of those eccentric geniuses who live in their own
+sphere, moving on principles which do not guide the routine of society.
+He was a Carthusian friar; his hair-shirt, however, could never mortify
+his unvarying facetiousness; but if he ever rambled in his wits, he was
+a wider rambler, even beyond the boundaries of Christendom, "a thousand
+or two and more myles;" an extraordinary feat in his day. He took his
+degree at Montpelier, was incorporated at Oxford, and admitted into the
+College of Physicians in London, and was among the physicians of Henry
+the Eighth. His facetious genius could not conceal the real learning and
+the practical knowledge which he derived from personal observation.
+Borde has received hard measure from our literary historians. This
+ingenious scholar has been branded by Warton as a mad physician. To
+close the story of one who was all his days so facetious, we find that
+this Momus of philosophers died in the Fleet. This was the fate of a
+great humorist, neither wanting in learning or genius.
+
+It is said that such was his love of "the commonwealth," that he
+sometimes addressed them from an open stage, in a sort of gratuitous
+lecture, as some amateurs of our own days have delighted to deliver; and
+from whence has been handed down to us the term of "MERRY-ANDREW."
+
+In the limited circles which then divided society, the taste for humour
+was very low. We had not yet reached to the witty humours of Shakspeare
+and Jonson. Sir Thomas More's "Long Story," in endless stanzas, which
+Johnson has strangely placed among the specimens of the English
+language, was held as a tale of "infinite conceit," assuredly by the
+great author himself, who seems to have communicated this sort of taste
+to one of his family. Rastall, the learned printer, brother-in-law of
+More, and farther, the grave abbreviator of the statutes in English,
+issued from his press in 1525, "The Widow Edith's Twelve Merrie Gestys."
+She was a tricking widow, renowned for her "lying, weeping, and
+laughing," an ancient mumper, who had triumphed over the whole state
+spiritual, and the temporality: travelling from town to town in the full
+practice of dupery and wheedling, to the admiration of her numerous
+victims. The arts of cheatery were long held to be facetious; most of
+the "Merrie Jests" consist of stultifying fools, or are sharping tricks,
+practised on the simple children of dupery. There is a stock of this
+base coinage. This taste for dupery was carried down to a much later
+period; for the "Merrie conceited jests of George Peele," and of
+Tarleton, are chiefly tricks of sharpers.
+
+"The Hye Way to the Spyttel Hous," or as we should say, "the road to
+ruin," exposes the mysteries and craft of the venerable brotherhood of
+mendicancy and imposture; their ingenious artifices to attract the eye,
+and their secret orgies concealed by midnight; all that flourishes now
+in St. Giles's, flourished then in the Barbican. Not long after we have
+the first vocabulary of cant language of "The Fraternitye of
+Vacabondes:" whose honorary titles cannot be yet placed in Burke's
+Extinct Peerage.
+
+There were attacks on the fair sex in those days which were parried by
+their eulogies. We seem to have been early engaged in that battle of the
+sexes, where the perfections or the imperfections of the female
+character offered themes for a libel or a panegyric. From the days of
+Boccaccio, the Italians have usually paid their tribute to "illustrious
+women," notwithstanding the free insinuations of some malicious
+novelists; that people preceded in the refinement of social life the
+tramontani. England and France, in their ruder circle of society,
+contracted a cynicism which appears in a variety of invectives and
+apologies for the beautiful sex.
+
+One of the most popular attacks of this sort was "The School-house of
+Women," a severe satire, published anonymously. One of the heaviest
+charges is their bitter sarcasm on the new dresses of their friends. The
+author, one Edward Gosynhyll, charmed, no doubt, by his successful
+onset, and proud in his victory, threw off the mask; mending his
+ambidextrous pen for "The Praise of all Women," called "Mulierum Pean,"
+he acknowledged himself to be the writer of "The School-house." Probably
+he thought he might now do so with impunity, as he was making the
+_amende honorable_. Whether this saved the trembling Orpheus from the
+rage of the Bacchantes, our scanty literary history tells not; but his
+defence is not considered as the least able among several elicited by
+his own attack.
+
+"The Wife lapped in Morels' Skins, or the Taming of a Shrew," was the
+favourite tale of the Petruchios of those days, where a haughty dame is
+softened into a degrading obedience by the brutal command of her mate; a
+tale which some antiquaries still chuckle over, who have not been so
+venturous as this hero.[12]
+
+All these books, written for the people, were at length consumed by the
+hands of their multitudinous readers; we learn, indeed, in Anthony à
+Wood's time, that some had descended to the stalls; but at the present
+day some of these rare fugitive pieces may be unique. This sort of
+pamphlet, Burton, the anatomist of melancholy, was delighted to heap
+together: and the collection formed by such a keen relish of popular
+humours, he actually bequeathed to the Bodleian Library, where, if they
+are kept together, they would answer the design of the donor; otherwise,
+such domestic records of the humours and manners of the age, diffused
+among the general mass, would bear only the value of their rarity.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Mr. Ellis has preserved it entire, with notes which make it
+    intelligible to any modern reader.
+
+  [2] Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," ii. 1.--"The
+    liberty of abasing their kings and princes at pleasure, assumed by
+    the good people of this realm, is a privilege of very long standing."
+
+  [3] The Political Songs of England have been recently given by Mr.
+    Thomas Wright, to whom our literature owes many deep obligations. [In
+    the series of volumes published by the Camden Society.]
+
+  [4] _Lewed_ Mr. Campbell interprets _low_, which is not quite
+    correct. Hearne explains the term as signifying "the laity, laymen,
+    and the illiterate."--The _layman_ was always considered to be
+    _illiterate_, by the devices of the monks.
+
+  [5] It is to be regretted that Mr. JAMIESON, in his "Popular
+    Ballads," was unavoidably prevented enlarging this class of his
+    songs. He has given the carols of the _Boatmen_, the _Corn-grinders_,
+    and the _Dairy-women_.--Jamieson's "Popular Ballads," ii. 352. [See
+    also "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii., p. 142, for an article on
+    Songs of Trades, or Songs of the People. A volume of "Songs of the
+    English Peasantry" was published by the Percy Society; and several
+    others are given with the tunes in Chappell's "Popular Music of the
+    Olden Time."]
+
+  [6] Hearne's "Preface to Peter Langtoft's Chronicle," xxxvii.
+
+  [7] The curious researches of a French antiquary in this class of
+    literature are given in the two octavo volumes entitled "Histoire des
+    Livres Populaires, ou de la Littérature du Colportage," (Paris,
+    1854,) by M. Chas. Nisard, who was appointed to the task by a Royal
+    Commission.--ED.
+
+  [8] "Foreign Quarterly Review," vol. 18. [It is reprinted in the
+    first Volume of Thoms' "Early English Prose Romances."]
+
+  [9] It has been frequently reprinted, and recently in Germany, as a
+    _livre de luxe_, illustrated with admirable designs by Kaulbach.--ED.
+
+  [10] Weber. "Brit. Bib.," vol. iv.--The German song of the Ladybird
+    is beautifully versified in the preface to "German Popular Stories,"
+    by the late Edgar Taylor.
+
+  [11] A calamity to which wits are incident is that of having their
+    names prefixed to collections to give them currency. I do not know
+    whether this has not happened to our author. "The Merry Tales of the
+    Madmen of Gotham" are no doubt of great antiquity; they are
+    characterised by a peculiar simplicity of silliness. "Scogin's
+    Jests," of the sixty which we have, a very few tradition may have
+    preserved, but they must have received in the course of time the
+    addition of pointless jests, tales marred in the telling, and some
+    things neither jest nor tale; and it is remarkable that these are
+    always accompanied by an inane moralisation, while the more tolerable
+    appear to be preserved in their original condition. Some future
+    researcher may be so fortunate as to compare them with the first
+    editions if they exist.
+
+    John Scogin was a gentleman of good descent, who was invited to court
+    by Edward the Fourth for the pleasantry of his wit; he was a caustic
+    Democritus, and gave rise to a proverbial phrase, "What says Scogin?"
+    If he usually said two-thirds of what is ascribed to him in this
+    volume, he had never given rise to a proverb. "The Merry Tales of the
+    Madmen of Gotham" have been recently reprinted by Mr. Halliwell.
+
+    [12] Several of these pieces are preserved in Mr. Utterson's "Select
+    Pieces of Early Popular Poetry." This attack on women proved not a
+    theme less fertile among our neighbours; how briskly the skirmish was
+    carried on the notice of a single writer will show:--"Alphabet de
+    l'Imperfection et Malice des Femmes, par J. Olivier, licencier aux
+    loix, et en droit-canon," 1617; three editions of which appeared in
+    the course of two years. This blow was repelled by "Defense des
+    Femmes contre l'Alphabet de leur pretendue Malice," by Vigoureux,
+    1617; the first author rejoined with a "Réponse aux Impertinences de
+    l'Aposté Capitaine Vigoureux," by Olivier, 1617. The fire was kept up
+    by an ally of Olivier, in "Réplique à l'Anti-Malice du Sieur
+    Vigoureux," by De la Bruyere, 1617. At a period earlier than this
+    conflict, the French had, as well as ourselves, many works on the
+    subject.
+
+
+
+
+THE DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY A PRIMITIVE AUTHOR.
+
+
+Sir Thomas Elyot is the first English prose writer who avowedly
+attempted to cultivate the language of his country. We track the prints
+of the first weak footsteps in this new path; and we detect the
+aberrations of a mind intent on a great popular design, but still vague
+and uncertain, often opposed by contemporaries, yet cheered by the
+little world of his readers.
+
+ELYOT for us had been little more than a name, as have been many retired
+students, from the negligence of contemporaries, had he not been one of
+those interesting authors who have let us into the history of their own
+minds, and either prospectively have delighted to contemplate on their
+future enterprises, or retrospectively have exulted in their past
+labours.
+
+This amiable scholar had been introduced at Court early in life; his
+"great friend and crony was Sir Thomas More;" so plain Anthony à Wood
+indicates the familiar intercourse of two great men. Elyot was a
+favourite with Henry the Eighth, and employed on various embassies,
+particularly on the confidential one to Rome to negotiate the divorce of
+Queen Katherine. To his public employments he alludes in his first work,
+"The Governor," which "he had gathered as well of the sayings of most
+noble authors, Greek and Latin, as by his own experience, he being
+continually trained in some daily affairs of the public weal from his
+childhood."
+
+A passion for literature seems to have prevailed over the ambition of
+active life, and on his return from his last embassy he decided to write
+books "in our vulgar tongue," on a great variety of topics, to instruct
+his countrymen. The diversity of his reading, and an unwearied pen,
+happily qualified, in this early age of the literature of a nation, a
+student who was impatient to diffuse that knowledge which he felt he
+only effectually possessed in the degree, and in the space, which he
+communicated it.
+
+His first elaborate work is entitled, "The Boke of the Governor, devised
+by Sir Thomas Elyot," 1531,--a work once so popular, that it passed
+through seven or eight editions, and is still valued by the collectors
+of our ancient literature.
+
+"The Governor" is one of those treatises which, at an early period of
+civilization, when general education is imperfect, becomes useful to
+mould the manners and to inculcate the morals which should distinguish
+the courtier and the statesman. Elyot takes his future "Governor" in the
+arms of his nurse, and places the ideal being amid all the scenes which
+may exercise the virtues, or the studies which he developes. The work is
+dedicated to Henry the Eighth. The design, the imaginary personage, the
+author and the patron, are equally dignified. The style is grave; and it
+would not be candid in a modern critic to observe that, in the progress
+of time, the good sense has become too obvious, and the perpetual
+illustrations from ancient history too familiar. The erudition in
+philology of that day has become a schoolboy's learning. They had then
+no other volumes to recur to of any authority, but what the ancients had
+left.
+
+Elyot had a notion that, for the last thousand years, the world had
+deteriorated, and that the human mind had not expanded through the
+course of ages. When he compared the writers of this long series of
+centuries, the babbling, though the subtle, schoolmen, who had chained
+us down to their artificial forms, with the great authors of antiquity,
+there seemed an appearance of truth in his decision. Christianity had
+not yet exhibited to modern Europe the refined moralities of Seneca, and
+the curious knowledge of Plutarch, in the homilies of Saints and
+Fathers; nor had its histories of man, confined to our monkish
+annalists, emulated the narrative charms of Livy, nor the grandeur of
+Tacitus. Of the poets of antiquity, Elyot declared that the English
+language, at the time he wrote, could convey nothing equivalent, wanting
+even words to express the delicacies, "the turns," and the euphony of
+the Latin verse.
+
+A curious evidence of the jejune state of the public mind at this period
+appears in this volume. Here a learned and grave writer solemnly sets
+forth several chapters on "that honest pastime of dancing," in which he
+discovers a series of modern allegories. The various figures and
+reciprocal movements between man and woman, "holding each other by the
+hand," indicate the order, concord, prudence, and other virtues so
+necessary for the common weal. The _singles_ and _reprinses_ exhibit the
+virtue of circumspection, which excites the writer to a panegyric of the
+father of the reigning sovereign. These ethics of the dance contain some
+curious notices, and masters in the art might hence have embellished
+their treatises on the philosophy of dance; for "in its wonderful
+figures, which the Greeks do call _idea_, are comprehended so many
+virtues and noble qualities." It is amusing to observe how men willingly
+become the dupes of their fancies, by affecting to discover motives and
+analogies, the most unconnected imaginable with the objects themselves.
+Long after our polished statesman wrote, the Puritan excommunicated the
+sinful dancer, and detected in the graceful evolutions of "the honour,"
+the "brawl," and the "single," with all their moral movements, the
+artifices of Satan, and the perdition of the souls of two partners,
+dancing too well. It was the mode of that age thus to moralise, or
+allegorise, on the common acts of life, and to sanction their idlest
+amusements by some religious motive. At this period, in France, we find
+a famous _Veneur_, Gaston Phebus, opening his treatise on "hunting" in
+the spirit that Elyot had opened to us the mysteries of dancing. "By
+hunting, we escape from the seven mortal sins, and therefore, the more
+we hunt, the salvation of our souls will be the more secure. Every good
+hunter in this world will have joyance, glee, and solace, (_joyeuseté,
+liesse, et deduit_,) and secure himself a place in Paradise, not perhaps
+in the midst, but in the suburbs, because he has shunned idleness, the
+root of all evil."
+
+"The Boke of the Governor" must now be condemned to the solitary
+imprisonment of the antiquary's cell, who will pick up many curious
+circumstances relative to the manners of the age--always an amusing
+subject of speculation, when we contemplate on the gradations of social
+life. I suspect the world owed "The Governor" to a book more famous than
+itself--the _Cortegiano_ of Castiglione, which appeared two years before
+the first edition of this work of Elyot, and to whose excellence Elyot
+could have been no stranger in his embassies to his holiness, and to the
+emperor. But of "The Governor," and "The Cortegiano," what can we now
+say, but that three centuries are fatal to the immortality of volumes,
+which, in the infancy of literature, seemed to have flattered themselves
+with a perpetuity of fame.
+
+It was, however, a generous design, in an age of Latin, to attempt to
+delight our countrymen by "the vulgar tongue;" but these "first fruits,"
+as he calls them, gave their author a taste of the bitterness of "that
+tree of knowledge."
+
+In a subsequent work, "Of the Knowledge which maketh a Wise Man," Elyot
+has recorded how he had laid himself open to "the vulgar." In the circle
+of a Court there was equal peril in moralising, which was deemed to be a
+rebuke, as in applying rusty stories, which were considered as nothing
+less than disguised personalities. "The Boke" was not thankfully
+received. The _persifleurs_, those butterflies who carry waspish stings,
+accounted Sir Thomas to be of no little presumption, that "in noting
+other men's vices he should correct _magnificat_." This odd neologism of
+"magnificat" was a mystical coinage, which circulated among these
+aristocratic exclusives who, as Elyot describes them, "like a galled
+horse abiding no plaisters, be always knapping and kicking at such
+examples and sentences as they do feel sharp, or do bite them." The
+chapters on "The Diversity of Flatterers," and similar subjects, had
+made many "a galled jade wince;" and in applying the salve, he got a
+kick for the cure. They wondered why the knight wrote at all! "Other
+much wiser men, and better learned than he, do forbear to write
+anything." They inscribed modern names to his ancient portraits. The
+worried author exclaims--"There be Gnathos in Spain as well as in
+Greece; Pasquils in England as well as in Rome, &c. If men will seek for
+them in England which I set in other places, I cannot let (hinder)
+them." But in another work--"Image of Governance," 1540--when he
+detailed "the monstrous living of the Emperor Heliogabalus," and
+contrasted that gross epicurean with Severus, such a bold and open
+execration of the vices of a luxurious Court could not avoid being
+obvious to the royal sensualist and his companions, however the
+character and the tale were removed to a bygone age.
+
+In this early attempt to cultivate "the vulgar tongue," some cavilled
+at his strange terms. It is a striking instance of the simplicity of the
+critics at that early period of our language, that our author formally
+explains the word _maturity_--"a Latin word, which I am constrained to
+usurp, lacking a name in English, and which, though it be strange and
+dark, yet may be understood as other words late comen out of Italy and
+France, and made denizens among us." Augustus Cæsar, it seems, had
+frequently in his mouth this word _matura_--do maturely! as "if he
+should have said, Do neither too much nor too little--too swiftly nor
+too slowly." Elyot would confine the figurative Latin term to a
+metaphysical designation of the acts of men in their most perfect state,
+"reserving," as he says, "the word ripeness to fruit and other things,
+separate from affairs, as we have now in usage." Elyot exults in having
+augmented the English language by the introduction of this Latin term,
+now made English for the first time! It has flourished as well as this
+other, "the _redolent_ savours of sweet herbs and flowers." But his ear
+was not always musical, and some of his neologisms are less
+graceful--"_an alective_," to wit; "_fatigate_," to fatigue; "_ostent_,"
+to show, and to "_sufficate_ some disputation." Such were the first weak
+steps of the fathers of our language, who, however, culled for us many a
+flower among their cockle.
+
+But a murmur more prejudicial arose than the idle cavil of new and hard
+words; for some asserted that "the Boke seemed to be overlong." Our
+primeval author considered that "knowledge of wisdom cannot be shortly
+declared." Elyot had not yet attained, by sufficient practice in
+authorship, the secret, that the volume which he had so much pleasure in
+writing could be over tedious in reading. "For those," he observes
+sarcastically, "who be well willing, it is soon learned--in good faith
+sooner than primero or gleek." The nation must have then consisted of
+young readers, when a diminutive volume in twelves was deemed to be
+"overlong." In this apology for his writings, he threw out an undaunted
+declaration of his resolution to proceed with future volumes.--"If the
+readers of my works, by the noble example of our most dear sovereign
+lord, do justly and lovingly interpret my labours, I, during the residue
+of my life, will now and then set forth such fruits of my study,
+profitable, as I trust, unto this my country, leaving malicious readers
+with their incurable fury." Such was the innocent criticism of our
+earliest writer--his pen was hardly tipped with gall.
+
+As all subjects were equally seductive to the artless pen of a primitive
+author, who had yet no rivals to encounter in public, Elyot turned his
+useful studies to a topic very opposite to that of political ethics. He
+put forth "The Castle of Health," a medical treatise, which passed
+through nearly as many honourable editions as "The Governor." It did
+not, however, abate the number, though it changed the character of his
+cavillers, who were now the whole corporate body of the physicians!
+
+The author has told his amusing story in the preface to a third edition,
+in 1541.
+
+"Why should I be grieved with reproaches wherewith some of my country do
+recompense me for my labours, taken without hope of temporal reward,
+only for the fervent affection which I have ever borne toward the public
+weal of my country? 'A worthy matter!' saith one; 'Sir Thomas Elyot has
+become a physician, and writeth on physic, which beseemeth not a knight;
+he might have been much better occupied.' Truly, if they will call him a
+physician who is studious of the weal of his country, let men so name
+me."
+
+But there was no shame in studying this science, or setting forth any
+book, being--
+
+"Thereto provoked by the noble example of my noble master King Henry
+VIII.; for his Highness hath not disdained to be the chief author of an
+introduction to grammar for the children of his subjects.
+
+"If physicians be angry that I have written physic in English, let them
+remember that Greeks wrote in Greek, the Romans in Latin, and Avicenna
+in Arabic, which were their own proper and maternal tongues. These were
+paynims and Jews, but in this part of charity they far surmounted us
+Christians."
+
+Several years after, when our author reverted to his "Castle of Health,"
+the Castle was brightened by the beams of public favour. Its author now
+exulted that "It shall long preserve men, be some physicians never so
+angry." The work had not been intended to depreciate medical
+professors, but "for their commodity, by instructing the sick, and
+observing a good order in diet, preventing the great causes of sickness,
+or by which they could the sooner be cured." Our philosopher had
+attempted to draw aside that mystifying veil with which some affected to
+envelope the arcana of medicine, as if they were desirous "of writing in
+cypher that none but themselves could read." Our author had anticipated
+that revolution in medical science which afterwards, at a distant
+period, has been productive of some of the ablest treatises in the
+vernacular languages of Europe.
+
+The patriotic studies of Elyot did not terminate in these ethical and
+popular volumes, for he had taxed his daily diligence for his country's
+weal. This appeared in "The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1535," a
+folio, which laid the foundation of our future lexicons, "declaring
+Latin by English," as Elyot describes his own labour.
+
+Elyot had suffered some disappointments as a courtier in the days of
+Wolsey, who lavished the royal favours on churchmen. In a letter to Lord
+Cromwell, he describes himself with a very narrow income, supporting his
+establishment, "equal to any knight in the country where I dwell who
+have much more to live on;" but a new office, involving considerable
+expense in its maintenance, to which he had been just appointed, he
+declares would be his ruin, having already discharged "five honest and
+tall personages."--"I wot not by what malice of fortune I am constrained
+to be in that office, whereunto is, as it were, appendent loss of money
+and good name, all sharpness and diligence in justice now-a-days being
+everywhere odious." And this was at a time when "I trusted to live
+quietly, and by little and little to repay my creditors, and _to
+reconcile myself to mine old studies_."
+
+This letter conveys a favourable impression of the real character of
+this learned man; but Elyot had condescended abjectly to join with the
+herd in the general scramble for the monastic lands; and if he feigned
+poverty, the degradation is not less. There are cruel epochs in a great
+revolution; moments of trial which too often exhibit the lofty
+philosopher shrinking into one of the people. It is probable that he
+succeeded in his petition, for I find his name among the commissioners
+appointed to make a general inquiry after lands belonging to the Church,
+as also to the colleges of the universities, in 1534.
+
+But in this day of weakness Elyot sunk far lower than petitioning for
+suppressed lands. Elyot was suspected of inclining to Popery, and being
+adverse to the new order of affairs. His former close intimacy with Sir
+Thomas More contributed to this suspicion, and now, it is sad to relate,
+he renounces this ancient and honourable friendship! Peter denied his
+Master. "I beseech your good lordship now to lay apart the remembrance
+of the amity betwixt me and Sir Thomas More, which was but _usque ad
+aras_, as is the proverb, considering that I was never so much addicted
+unto him as I was unto truth and fidelity towards my sovereign lord."
+Was the influence of such illustrious friendships to be confined to
+chimney-corners? Had Elyot not listened to the wisdom, and revered the
+immutable fortitude, of "his great friend and crony?"--he, the stern
+moralist, who, in his "Governor," had written a remarkable chapter on
+"the constancy of friends," and had illustrated that passion by the
+romantic tale of Titus and Gesippus, where the personal trials of both
+parties far exceed those of the Damon and Pythias of antiquity, and are
+so eloquently developed and so exquisitely narrated by the great Italian
+novelist.
+
+The literary history of Sir THOMAS ELYOT exhibits the difficulties
+experienced by a primitive author in the earliest attempts to open a new
+path to the cultivation of a vernacular literature; and it seems to have
+required all the magnanimity of our author to sustain his superiority
+among his own circle, by disdaining their petulant criticism, and by the
+honest confidence he gathered as he proceeded, in the successive
+editions of his writings.
+
+
+
+
+SKELTON.
+
+
+At a period when satire had not yet assumed any legitimate form, a
+singular genius appeared in Skelton. His satire is peculiar, but it is
+stamped by vigorous originality. The fertility of his conceptions in his
+satirical or his humorous vein is thrown out in a style created by
+himself. The Skeltonical short verse, contracted into five or six, and
+even four syllables, is wild and airy. In the quick-returning rhymes,
+the playfulness of the diction, and the pungency of new words, usually
+ludicrous, often expressive, and sometimes felicitous, there is a
+stirring spirit which will be best felt in an audible reading. The
+velocity of his verse has a carol of its own. The chimes ring in the
+ear, and the thoughts are flung about like coruscations. But the magic
+of the poet is confined to his spell; at his first step out of it he
+falls to the earth never to recover himself. Skelton is a great creator
+only when he writes what baffles imitation, for it is his fate, when
+touching more solemn strains, to betray no quality of a poet--inert in
+imagination and naked in diction. Whenever his muse plunges into the
+long measure of heroic verse, she is drowned in no Heliconian stream.
+Skelton seems himself aware of his miserable fate, and repeatedly, with
+great truth, if not with some modesty, complains of
+
+  Mine homely rudeness and dryness.
+
+But when he returns to his own manner and his own rhyme, when he riots
+in the wantonness of his prodigal genius, irresistible and daring, the
+poet was not unconscious of his faculty; and truly he tells,--
+
+  Though my rime be ragged,
+  Tattered and jagged,
+  Rudely rain-beaten,
+  Rusty, moth-eaten,
+  If ye take well therewith,
+  It hath in it some pith.
+
+Whether Skelton really adopted the measures of the old tavern-minstrelsy
+used by harpers, who gave "a fit of mirth for a groat," or "carols for
+Christmas," or "lascivious poems for bride-ales," as Puttenham, the
+arch-critic of Elizabeth's reign, supposes; or whether in Skelton's
+introduction of alternate Latin lines among his verses he caught the
+Macaronic caprice of the Italians, as Warton suggests; the Skeltonical
+style remains his own undisputed possession. He is a poet who has left
+his name to his own verse--a verse, airy but pungent, so admirably
+adapted for the popular ear that it has been frequently copied,[1] and
+has led some eminent critics into singular misconceptions. The minstrel
+tune of the Skeltonical rhyme is easily caught, but the invention of
+style and "the pith" mock these imitators. The facility of doggrel
+merely of itself could not have yielded the exuberance of his humour and
+the mordacity of his satire.
+
+This singular writer has suffered the mischance of being too original
+for some of his critics; they looked on the surface, and did not always
+suspect the depths they glided over: the legitimate taste of others has
+revolted against the mixture of the ludicrous and the invective. A taste
+for humour is a rarer faculty than most persons imagine; where it is not
+indigenous, no art of man can plant it. There is no substitute for such
+a volatile existence, and where even it exists in a limited degree, we
+cannot enlarge its capacity for reception. A great master of humour, who
+observed from his experience, has solemnly told us that "it is not in
+the power of every one to taste humour, however he may wish it--it is
+the gift of God; and a true feeler always brings half the entertainment
+along with him."[2]
+
+Puttenham was the first critic who prized Skelton cheaply; the
+artificial and courtly critic of Elizabeth's reign could not rightly
+estimate such a wild and irregular genius. The critic's fastidious ear
+listens to nothing but the jar of rude rhymes, while the courtier's
+delicacy shrinks from the nerve of appalling satire. "Such," says this
+critic, "are the rhymes of Skelton, usurping the name of a Poet Laureat,
+being indeed but a rude rayling rhimer, and all his doings
+ridiculous--pleasing only the popular ear." This affected critic never
+suspected "the pith" of "the ridiculous;" the grotesque humour covering
+the dread invective which shook a Wolsey under his canopy. Another
+Elizabethan critic, the obsequious Meres, re-echoes the dictum. These
+opinions perhaps prejudiced the historian of our poetry, who seems to
+have appreciated them as the echoes of the poet's contemporaries. Yet we
+know how highly his contemporaries prized him, notwithstanding the host
+whom he provoked. One poetical brother[3] distinguishes him as "the
+Inventive Skelton," and we find the following full-length portrait of
+him by another:--[4]
+
+  A poet for his art,
+    Whose judgment sure was high,
+  And had great practise of the pen,
+    His works they will not lie;
+  His termes to taunts did leane,
+    His talk was as he wrate,
+  Full quick of wit, right sharpe of wordes,
+    And skilful of the state;
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  And to the hateful minde,
+    That did disdaine his doings still,
+  A scorner of his kinde.
+
+When Dr. Johnson observed that "Skelton cannot be said to have attained
+great elegance of language," he tried Skelton by a test of criticism at
+which Skelton would have laughed, and "jangled and wrangled." Warton
+has also censured him for adopting "the familiar phraseology of the
+common people." The learned editor of Johnson's "Dictionary" corrects
+both our critics. "If Skelton did not attain great elegance of language,
+he however possessed great knowledge of it." From his works may be drawn
+an abundance of terms which were then in use among the vulgar as well as
+the learned, and which no other writer of his time so obviously (and
+often so wittily) illustrated. Skelton seems to have been fully aware of
+the condition of our vernacular idiom when he wrote, for he has thus
+described it:--
+
+  Our natural tongue is rude,
+  And hard to be enneude
+  With polished termes lusty;
+  Our language is so rusty,
+  So cankered, and so full
+  Of frowards, and so dull,
+  That if I would apply
+  To write ordinately,
+  I wot not where to find
+  Terms to serve my mind.
+
+It was obviously his design to be as great a creator of words as he was
+of ideas. Many of his mintage would have given strength to our idiom.
+Caxton, as a contemporary, is some authority that Skelton improved the
+language.
+
+Let not the reader imagine that Skelton was only "a rude rayling
+rhimer." Skelton was the tutor of Henry the Eighth; and one who knew him
+well describes him as--
+
+  Seldom out of prince's grace.
+
+Erasmus distinguished him "as the light and ornament of British
+letters;" and one, he addresses the royal pupil, "who can not only
+excite your studies, but complete them." Warton attests his classical
+attainments--"Had not his propensity to the ridiculous induced him to
+follow the whimsies of Walter Mapes, Skelton would have appeared among
+the first writers of Latin poetry in England." Skelton chose to be
+himself; and this is what the generality of his critics have not taken
+in their view.
+
+Skelton was an ecclesiastic who was evidently among those who had
+adopted the principles of reformation before the Reformation. With equal
+levity and scorn he struck at the friars from his pulpit or in his
+ballad, he ridiculed the Romish ritual, and he took unto himself that
+wife who was to be called a concubine. To the same feelings we may also
+ascribe the declamatory invective against Cardinal Wolsey, from whose
+terrible arm he flew into the sanctuary of Westminster, where he
+remained protected by Abbot Islip until his death, which took place in
+1529, but a few short months before the fall of Wolsey. It is supposed
+that the king did not wholly dislike the levelling of the greatness of
+his overgrown minister; and it is remarkable that one of the charges
+subsequently brought by the council in 1529 against Wolsey--his
+imperious carriage at the council-board--is precisely one of the
+accusations of our poet, only divested of rhyme; whence perhaps we may
+infer that Skelton was an organ of the rising party.
+
+"Why Come you not to Court?"--that daring state-picture of an omnipotent
+minister--and "The Boke of Colin Clout," where the poet pretends only to
+relate what the people talk about the luxurious clergy, and seems to be
+half the reformer, are the most original satires in the language. In the
+days when Skelton wrote these satires there appeared a poem known by the
+title of "Reade me and be not Wrothe," a voluminous invective against
+the Cardinal and the Romish superstitions, which has been ascribed by
+some to Skelton. The writer was WILLIAM ROY, a friar; the genius, though
+not the zeal, of ROY and SKELTON are far apart--as far as the buoyancy
+of racy originality is removed from the downright earnestness of grave
+mediocrity. Roy had been the learned assistant of Tyndale in the first
+edition of the translation of the New Testament, and it was the public
+conflagration at London of that whole edition which aroused his
+indignant spirit. The satire, which had been printed abroad, was
+diligently suppressed by an emissary of the Cardinal purchasing up all
+the copies; and few were saved from the ravage;[5] the author, however,
+escaped out of the country.
+
+In "The Crown of Lawrell" Skelton has himself furnished a catalogue of
+his numerous writings, the greater number of which have not come down to
+us. Literary productions were at that day printed on loose sheets, or in
+small pamphlets, which the winds seem to have scattered. We learn there
+of his graver labours. He composed the "Speculum Principis" for his
+royal pupil--
+
+  To bear in hand, therein to read,
+
+and he translated Diodorus Siculus--
+
+  Six volumes engrossed, it doth contain.
+
+To have composed a manual for the education of a prince, and to have
+persevered through a laborious version, are sufficient evidence that the
+learned Skelton had his studious days as well as his hours of caustic
+jocularity. He appears to have written various pieces for the court
+entertainment; but for us exists only an account of the interlude of the
+"Nigramansir," in the pages of Warton, and a single copy of the goodly
+interlude of "Magnificence,"[6] in the Garrick collection. If we accept
+his abstract personations merely as the names, and not the qualities of
+the dramatic personages, "Magnificence" approaches to the true vein of
+comedy.
+
+Skelton was, however, probably more gratified by his own Skeltonical
+style, moulding it with the wantonness of power on whatever theme, comic
+or serious. In a poem remarkable for its elegant playfulness, a very
+graceful maiden, whose loveliness the poet has touched with the most
+vivid colouring, grieving over the fate of her sparrow from its feline
+foe, chants a dirige, a paternoster, and an Ave Maria for its soul, and
+the souls of all sparrows. In this discursive poem, which glides from
+object to object, in the vast abundance of fancy, a general mourning of
+all the birds in the air, and many allusions to the old romances,
+"Philip Sparrow," for its elegance, may be placed by the side of
+Lesbia's Bird, and, for its playfulness, by the Vert Vert of Gresset.
+
+But Skelton was never more vivid than in his Ale-wife, and all
+
+  The mad mummyng
+  Of Elynour Rummyng,--
+
+a piece which has been more frequently reprinted than any of his works.
+It remains a morsel of poignant relish for the antiquary, still
+enamoured of the portrait of this grisly dame of Leatherhead, where her
+name and her domicile still exist. Such is the immortality a poet can
+bestow.[7] "The Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng" is a remarkable production
+of THE GROTESQUE, or the low burlesque; the humour as low as you please,
+but as strong as you can imagine. Cleland is reported, in Spence's
+Anecdotes of Pope, to have said, that this "Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng"
+was taken from a poem of Lorenzo de' Medici. There is indeed a jocose
+satire by that noble bard, entitled "I Beoni," the Topers; an elegant
+piece of playful humour, where the characters are a company of thirsty
+souls hastening out of the gates of Florence to a treat of excellent
+wine. It was printed by the Giunti, in 1568,[8] and therefore this
+burlesque piece could never have been known to Skelton. The manners of
+our Alewife and her gossips are purely English, and their contrivances
+to obtain their potations such as the village of Leatherhead would
+afford.
+
+The latest edition of Skelton was published in the days of Pope, which
+occasioned some strictures in conversation from the great poet. The
+laureated poet of Henry the Eighth is styled "beastly;" probably Pope
+alluded to this minute portrait of "Elynoure Rummynge" and her crowd of
+customers. Beastliness should have been a delicate subject for censure
+from Pope. But surely Pope had never read Skelton; for could that great
+poet have passed by the playful graces of "Philip Sparrow" only to
+remember the broad gossips of "Elynoure Rummyng?"
+
+The amazing contrast of these two poems is the most certain evidence of
+the extent of the genius of the poet; he who with copious fondness dwelt
+on a picture which rivals the gracefulness of Albano, could with equal
+completeness give us the drunken gossipers of an Ostade. It is true that
+in the one we are more than delighted, and in the other we are more than
+disgusted; but in the impartiality of philosophical criticism, we must
+award that none but the most original genius could produce both. It is
+this which entitles our bard to be styled the "Inventive Skelton."
+
+But are personal satires and libels of the day deserving the attention
+of posterity? I answer, that for posterity there are no satires nor
+libels. We are concerned only with human nature. When the satirical is
+placed by the side of the historical character, they reflect a mutual
+light. We become more intimately acquainted with the great Cardinal, by
+laying together the satire of the mendacious Skelton with the domestic
+eulogy of the gentle Cavendish. The interest which posterity takes is
+different from that of contemporaries; our vision is more complete; they
+witnessed the beginnings, but we behold the ends. We are no longer
+deceived by hyperbolical exaggeration, or inflamed by unsparing
+invective; the ideal personage of the satirist is compared with the real
+one of the historian, and we touch only delicate truths. What Wolsey was
+we know, but how he was known to his own times, and to the people, we
+can only gather from the private satirist; corrected by the passionless
+arbiter of another age, the satirist becomes the useful historian of the
+man.
+
+The extraordinary combination in the genius of Skelton was that of two
+most opposite and potent faculties--the hyperbolical ludicrous masking
+the invective. He acts the character of a buffoon; he talks the language
+of drollery; he even mints a coinage of his own, to deepen the colours
+of his extravagance--and all this was for the people! But his hand
+conceals a poniard; his rapid gestures only strike the deeper into his
+victim, and we find that the Tragedy of the State has been acted while
+we were only lookers-on before a stage erected for the popular gaze.[9]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] George Ellis, although an elegant critic, could not relish "the
+    Skeltonical minstrelsy." In an extract from a manuscript poem
+    ascribed to Skelton, "The Image of Hypocrisy," and truly Skeltonical
+    in every sense, he condemned it as "a piece of obscure and
+    unintelligible ribaldry;" and so, no doubt, it has been accepted. But
+    the truth is, the morsel is of exquisite poignancy, pointed at Sir
+    Thomas More's controversial writings, to which the allusions in every
+    line might be pointed out. As these works were written after the
+    death of Skelton, the merit entirely remains with this fortunate
+    imitator.
+
+    In the public rejoicings at the defeat of the Armada, in 1589, a
+    ludicrous bard poured forth his patriotic effusions in what he called
+    "A Skeltonical Salutation, or Condign Gratulation," of the Spaniard,
+    who, he says,--
+
+      ----In a bravado,
+      Spent many a crusado.
+
+    In a reprint of the poem of "Elynoure Rummynge," in 1624, which may
+    be found in the "Harl. Miscellany," vol. i., there is a poem prefixed
+    which ridicules the lovers of tobacco; this anachronism betrays the
+    imitator. At the close there are some verses from the Ghost of
+    Skelton; but we believe it is a real ghost.
+
+  [2] Sterne.
+
+  [3] Henry Bradshaw. "Warton," iii. 13.
+
+  [4] Thomas Churchyard.
+
+  [5] After the death of the Cardinal it was reprinted, in 1546; but
+    the satire was weakened, being transferred from Wolsey and wholly
+    laid on the clergy. The very rare first edition is reprinted in the
+    "Harleian Miscellany," by Parke, vol. ix. Tyndale has reproached his
+    colleague with being somewhat artful and mutable in his friendships;
+    but the wandering man proved the constancy of his principles, for as
+    a heretic he perished at the stake in Portugal.
+
+  [6] It has passed through a reprint by the Roxburgh Club.
+
+  [7] A noble amateur laid on the shrine of this antiquated beauty
+    20_l._ to possess her rare portrait; and, on the republication of
+    this portrait, Steevens wrote some sarcastic verses on the
+    print-collectors in the "European Mag." 1794; they show this famous
+    commentator to have been a polished wit, though he pronounced the
+    Sonnets of Shakspeare unreadable. These verses have been reprinted in
+    "Dibdin's Bibliomania."
+
+  [8] Roscoe's "Lorenzo de' Medici," i. 290.
+
+  [9] The first collection of some of the works of Skelton was made by
+    Thomas Marshe, in 1568. Another edition, by an unknown editor, was in
+    1736; the text of which is, as Gifford justly observed, execrable.
+    Many of his writings still remain in their manuscript state--see
+    Harleian MSS., 367, 2252; and many printed ones have not been
+    collected. There is no task in our literature so desperately
+    difficult as that of offering a correct text of this anomalous poet;
+    but we may hope to receive it from the diligent labours of Mr. Dyce,
+    so long promised; it would form one of the richest volumes of the
+    Camden publications. [Since this note was written, the poetical works
+    of Skelton have been published by the Rev. A. Dyce, (2 vols. 8vo, T.
+    Rodd, 1843,) with an abundance of elucidatory notes and
+    bibliographical information; so that this difficult task has been
+    performed with great success; and the volumes are among the most
+    valuable of the many works of that conscientious editor.]
+
+
+
+
+THE SHIP OF FOOLS.
+
+
+The Stultifera Navis, or Ship of Fools, composed in verse by Sebastian
+Brandt, a learned German civilian, is a general satire on society. It
+has been translated into verse, or turned into prose, in almost every
+European language; and no work of such dimensions has been made so
+familiar to general readers.
+
+There are works whose design displays the most striking originality;
+but, alas! there are so many infelicitous modes of execution! To freight
+a ship with fools, collected from all the classes and professions of
+society, would have been a creative idea in the brain of Lucian, or
+another pilgrimage for the personages of Chaucer; and natural or
+grotesque incidents would have started from the invention of Rabelais.
+These men of genius would have sportively navigated their "Ship," and
+not have driven aboard fool after fool, an undistinguishable shoal, by
+the mere brutal force of the pen, only to sermonise with a tedious
+homily or a critical declamation. Erasmus playfully threw out a small
+sparkling volume on folly, which we still open; Brandt furnishes a
+massive tome, with fools huddled together; and while we lose our own, we
+are astonished at his patience.
+
+The severity of this decision, we own, is that of a critic of the
+nineteenth century on an author of the sixteenth.
+
+It is amusing to observe the perplexities of an eminent French critic,
+Monsieur Guizot, in his endeavour to decide on the "Stultifera Navis." A
+critic of his school could not rightly comprehend how it happened that
+so dull a book had been a popular one, multiplied by editions in all the
+languages of Europe. "It is," says M. Guizot, "a collection of
+extravagant or of gross _plaisanteries_--which may have been poignant at
+their time, but which at this day have no other merit than that of
+having had great success three hundred years ago." The salt of
+plaisanteries cannot be damped by three centuries, provided they were
+such; but our author is by no means facetious: he is much too downright;
+the tone is invariably condemnatory or exhortative; and the Proverbs,
+the Psalms, and Jeremiah, are more frequently appealed to than Cicero,
+Horace, and Ovid, who occasionally show their heads in his margin.
+
+We must look somewhat deeper would we learn why a book which now tries
+our patience was not undeserving of those multiplied editions which have
+ascertained its popularity.
+
+At the period when this volume appeared, we in the north were far
+removed from the urbanity and the elevated ethics of lettered Italy.
+Brandt took this general view of society at the time when the
+illustrious Castiglione was an ambassador to our Henry the Seventh, and
+was meditating to model the manners of his countrymen by his _Libro
+dell' Cortigiano_; and La Casa, by his _Galateo_, was founding a code of
+minute politeness. But neither France, nor Germany, nor England, had yet
+greatly advanced in the civil intercourse of life, and could not
+appreciate such exility of elegance, and such sublimated refinement.
+With us, the staple of our moral philosophy was of a homespun but firm
+texture, and had in it more of yarn than of silk. Men had little to
+read; they were not weary of that eternal iteration of admonition on
+whatever was most painful or most despicable in their conduct; their
+ideas were uncertain, and their minds remained to be developed; nothing
+was trite or trivial. In his wide survey of human life, the author
+addressed the mundane fools of his age in the manner level to their
+comprehension; the ethical character of the volume was such, that the
+Abbot Trithemus designated it as a divine book; and in this volume,
+which read like a homily, while every man beheld the reflection of his
+own habits and thoughts, he chuckled over the sayings and doings of his
+neighbours. If any one quipped the profession of another, the sufferer
+had only to turn the leaf to find ample revenge; and these were the
+causes of the uninterrupted popularity of this ethical work.
+
+"The Ship of Fools" is, indeed, cumbrous, rude, and inartificial, and
+was not constructed on the principles which regulate our fast-sailing
+vessels; yet it may be prized for something more than its curiosity. It
+is an ancient satire, of that age of simplicity which must precede an
+age of refinement.
+
+If man in society changes his manners, he cannot vary his species; man
+remains nothing but man; for, however disguised by new modes of acting,
+the same principles of our actions are always at work. The same follies
+and the same vices in their result actuate the human being in all ages;
+and he who turns over the volume of the learned civilian of Germany will
+find detailed those great moral effects in life which, if the modern
+moralist may invest with more dignity, he could not have discovered with
+more truth. We have outgrown his counsels, but we never shall elude the
+vexatious consequences of his experience; and many a chapter in the
+"Ship of Fools" will point many an argument _ad hominum_, and awaken in
+the secret hours of our reminiscences the pang of contrite sorrows, or
+tingle our cheek with a blush for our weaknesses. The truths of human
+nature are ever echoing in our breasts.
+
+"The Ship of Fools," by Alexander Barclay--a volume of renown among
+literary antiquaries, and of rarity and price--is at once a translation
+and an original. In octave stanza, flowing in the ballad measure,
+Barclay has a natural construction of style still retaining a vernacular
+vigour. He is noticed by Warton for having contributed his share in the
+improvement of English phraseology; and, indeed, we are often surprised
+to discover many felicities of our native idiom; and the work, though it
+should be repulsive to some for its black-letter, is perfectly
+intelligible to a modern reader. The verse being prosaic, preserves its
+colloquial ease, though with more gravity than suits sportive subjects;
+we sometimes feel the tediousness of the good sense of the Priest of St.
+Mary Ottery.
+
+The edition of 1570 of the "Ship of Fooles"[1] contains other
+productions of Barclay. In his "Eclogues,"[2] our good priest, who did
+not write, as he says, "for the laud of man," indulged his ethical and
+theological vein in pastoral poetry; and the interlocutors are citizens
+disputing with men of the country, and poets with their patrons. To have
+converted shepherds into scholastic disputants or town-satirists was an
+unnatural change; but this whimsical taste had been introduced by
+Petrarch and Mantuan; and the first eclogues in the English language,
+which Warton tells us are those of Barclay, took this strange form--an
+incongruity our Spenser had not the skill to avoid, and for which Milton
+has been censured. The less fortunate anomalies of genius are often
+perpetuated by the inconsiderate imitation of those who should be most
+sensible of their deformity.
+
+In the eclogues of Barclay, the country is ever represented in an
+impoverished, depressed state; and the splendour of the city, and the
+luxurious indulgence of the citizen and the courtier, offer a singular
+contrast to the extreme misery of the agriculturist. We may infer that
+the country had been deplorably ravaged or neglected in the civil wars,
+which, half a century afterwards, was to be covered by the fat beeves of
+the graziers of Elizabeth.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The woodcuts in this edition are wretched; though in part they
+    are copied from the fine specimens of the art which embellish the
+    Latin version of Locherus.
+
+  [2] One of these, a "Dialogue between a Citizen and Uplandishman,"
+    has been reprinted by the Percy Society, under the editorship of Mr.
+    Fairholt, who has given a digest of the other Eclogues in a
+    Preface.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF SIR THOMAS MORE.
+
+
+If the art of biography be the development of "the ruling passion," it
+is in strong characters that we must seek for the single feature.
+Learned and meditative as was Sir THOMAS MORE, a jesting humour, a
+philosophical jocundity, indulged on important as well as on ordinary
+occasions, served his wise purpose. He seems to have taken refuge from
+the follies of other men by retreating to the pleasantry of his own.
+Grave men censured him for the absence of all gravity; and some imagined
+that the singularity of his facetious disposition, which sometimes
+seemed even ludicrous, was carried on to affectation. It was certainly
+inherent,--it was a constitutional temper--it twined itself in his
+fibres,--it betrayed itself on his countenance. We detect it from the
+comic vein of his boyhood when among the players; we pursue it through
+the numerous transactions of his life; and we leave him at its last
+solemn close, when life and death were within a second of each other,
+uttering three jests upon the scaffold. Even when he seemed to have
+quitted the world, and had laid his head on the block, he bade the
+executioner stay his hand till he had removed his beard, observing,
+"that that had never committed any treason."
+
+This mirthful mind had, indeed, settled on his features. ERASMUS, who
+has furnished us with an enamelled portrait of MORE, among its minuter
+touches reluctantly confessed that "the countenance of Sir Thomas More
+was a transcript of his mind, inclining to an habitual smile;" and he
+adds, "ingenuously to confess the truth, that face is formed for the
+expression of mirth rather than of gravity or dignity." But, lest he
+should derange the gravity of the German to whom he was writing, Erasmus
+cautiously qualifies the disparaging delineation--"though as far as
+possible removed from folly or buffoonery." MORE, however, would assume
+a solemn countenance when on the point of throwing out some facetious
+stroke. He has so described himself when an interlocutor in one of his
+dialogues addresses him--"You use to look so sadly when you mean
+merrily, that many times men doubt whether you speak in sport when you
+mean good earnest."[1]
+
+The unaffected playfulness of the mind; the smile whose sweetness
+allayed the causticity of the tongue; the tingling pleasantry when
+pointed at persons; the pungent raillery which corrected opinions
+without scorn or contumely; and the art of promptly amusing the mind of
+another by stealing it away from a present object--appeared not only in
+his conversations, but was carried into his writings.
+
+The grave and sullen pages of the polemical labours of MORE, whose
+writings chiefly turn on the controversies of the Romanists and the
+Reformers, are perhaps the only controversial ones which exhibit in the
+marginal notes, frequently repeated, "a merrie tale." "A merry tale
+cometh never amiss to me," said MORE truly of himself. He has offered an
+apology for introducing this anomalous style into these controversial
+works. He conceived that, as a layman, it better became him "to tell his
+mind merrily than more solemnly to preach." Jests, he acknowledges, are
+but sauce; and "it were but an absurd banquet indeed in which there were
+few dishes of meat and much variety of sauces; but that is but an
+unpleasant one where there were no sauce at all."
+
+The massive folio of Sir THOMAS MORE'S "English Works"[2] remains a
+monument of our language at a period of its pristine vigour. Viewed in
+active as well as in contemplative life, at the bar or on the bench, as
+ambassador or chancellor, and not to less advantage where, "a good
+distance from his house at Chelsea, he builded the new building, wherein
+was a chapel, a library, and a gallery," the character, the events, and
+the writings of this illustrious man may ever interest us.
+
+These works were the fertile produce of "those spare hours for writing,
+stolen from his meat and sleep." We are told that "by using much
+writing, towards his latter end he complained of the ache of his
+breast." He has himself acknowledged that "those delicate dainty folk,
+the evangelical brethren (so More calls our early reformers), think my
+works too long, for everything that is, they think too long." More
+alludes to the rising disposition in men for curtailing all forms and
+other ceremonial acts, especially in the church service.
+
+MORE, however skilful as a Latin scholar, to promulgate his opinions
+aimed at popularity, and cultivated our vernacular idiom, till the
+English language seems to have enlarged the compass of its expression
+under the free and copious vein of the writer. It is only by the
+infelicity of the subjects which constitute the greater portion of this
+mighty volume, that its author has missed the immortality which his
+genius had else secured.
+
+MORE has been fortunate in the zeal of his biographers; but we are
+conscious, that had there been a Xenophon or a Boswell among them, they
+could have told us much more. The conversations of Sir THOMAS MORE were
+racy. His was that rare gift of nature, perfect presence of mind,
+deprived of which the fullest is but slow and late. His conversancy with
+public affairs, combined with a close observation of familiar life, ever
+afforded him a striking aptitude of illustration; but the levity of his
+wit, and the luxuriance of his humour, could not hide the deep sense
+which at all times gave weight to his thoughts, and decision to his
+acts. Of all these we are furnished with ample evidence.
+
+Domestic affection in all its naïve simplicity dictated the artless
+record of Roper, the companion of More, for sixteen years, and the
+husband of his adored daughter Margaret.[3] The pride of ancestry in the
+pages of his great-grandson, the ascetic Cresacre More, could not borrow
+the charm of that work whence he derived his enlarged narrative.[4] More
+than one beadsman, the votaries of their martyr, have consecrated his
+memory even with their legendary faith;[5] while recent and more
+philosophical writers have expatiated on the wide theme, and have
+repeated the story of this great Chancellor of England.[6]
+
+"The child here waiting at table, whomever shall live to see it, will
+prove a marvellous man." It was thus that the early patron of More,
+Cardinal Morton, sagaciously contemplated on the precocity of More's
+boyhood. His prompt natural humour broke out at the Christmas revels,
+when the boy, suddenly slipping in among the players, acted an extempore
+part of his own invention. Yet this jocund humour, which never was to
+quit him to his last awful minute, at times indulged a solemnity of
+thought, as remarkable in a youth of eighteen. In the taste of that day,
+he invented an allegorical pageant. These pageants consisted of
+paintings on rolls of cloth, with inscriptions in verse, descriptive of
+the scenical objects. They formed a series of the occupations of
+childhood, manhood, the indolent liver, "a child again," and old age,
+thin and hoar, wise and discreet. The last scenes exhibited more
+original conceptions. The image of DEATH, where under his "misshapen
+feet" lay the sage old man; then came "the Lady FAME," boasting that she
+had survived death, and would preserve the old man's name "by the voice
+of the people." But FAME was followed by TIME, "the lord of every hour,
+the great destroyer both of sea and land," deriding simple "Fame;" for
+"who shall boast an eternal name before me?" Yet was there a more potent
+destroyer than TIME; Time itself was mortal! and the eighth pageant
+revealed the triumph of ETERNITY. The last exhibited the poet himself,
+meditating in his chair--he "who had fed their eyes with these fictions
+and these figures." The allegory of Fame, Time, and Eternity, is a
+sublime creation of ideal personifications. The conception of these
+pageants reminds one of the allegorical "Trionfi" of Petrarch; but they
+are not borrowed from the Italian poet. They were, indeed, in the taste
+of the age, and such pageants were exhibited in the streets; but the
+present gorgeous invention, as well as the verses, were the fancies of
+the youthful More.
+
+MORE in his youth was a true poet; but in his active life he soon
+deserted these shadows of the imagination.
+
+A modern critic has regretted, that, notwithstanding the zeal of his
+biographers, we would gladly have been better acquainted with MORE'S
+political life, his parliamentary speeches, his judicial decrees, and
+his history as an ambassador and a courtier.
+
+There is not, however, wanting the most striking evidence of MORE'S
+admirable independence in all these characters. I fix on his
+parliamentary life.
+
+As a burgess under Henry the Seventh, he effectually opposed a royal
+demand for money. When the king heard that "a beardless boy had
+disappointed all his purpose," the malice of royalty was wreaked on the
+devoted head of the judge his father, in a causeless quarrel and a heavy
+fine. When MORE was chosen the Speaker of the Commons, he addressed
+Henry the Eighth on the important subject of _freedom of debate_. There
+is a remarkable passage on the heat of discussion, and the diversity of
+men's faculties, which displays a nice discrimination in human nature.
+"Among so many wise men, neither is every one wise alike; nor among so
+many alike well-witted, every man alike well-spoken; and it often
+happeneth, that likewise as much folly is uttered with painted polished
+speeches, so many boisterous and rude in language see deep, indeed, and
+give right substantial counsel. And since also in matters of great
+importance the mind is so often occupied in the matter, that a man
+rather studies what to say than how, by reason whereof the wisest man
+and best-spoken in a whole country fortuneth, while his mind is fervent
+in the matter, somewhat to speak in such wise as he would afterward wish
+to have been uttered otherwise; and yet no worse will had he when he
+spake it, than he had when he would gladly change it."
+
+Once the potent cardinal, irritated at the free language of the Commons,
+to awe the House, came down in person, amid the blazonry of all the
+insignia of his multiform state. To check his arrogance, it was debated
+whether the minister should be only admitted with a few lords. MORE
+suggested, that as WOLSEY had lately taxed the lightness of their
+tongues, "it would not be amiss to receive him in all his pomp, with his
+(silver) pillars, emblems of his ecclesiastical power, as a pillar of
+the church, his maces, his pole-axes, his crosses, his hat, and his
+great seal too, to the intent that if he find the like fault with us
+hereafter, we may the more boldly lay the blame on those his grace
+brings with him." The cardinal made a solemn oration; and when he
+ceased, behold the whole House was struck by one unbroken and dead
+silence! The minister addressed several personally--each man was a mute:
+discovering that he could not carry his point by his presence, he seemed
+to recollect that the custom of the House was to speak by the mouth of
+their Speaker, and WOLSEY turned to him. MORE, in all humility,
+explained the cause of the universal silence, by the amazement of the
+House at the presence of so noble a personage; "besides, that it was not
+agreeable to the liberty of the House to offer answers--that he himself
+could return no answer except every one of the members could put into
+his head their several wits." The minister abruptly rose and departed
+_re infectâ_. Shortly after, WOLSEY in his gallery at Whitehall told
+MORE, "Would to God you had been at Rome, Mr. More, when I made you
+Speaker!" "So would I too!" replied MORE; and then immediately
+exclaimed, "I like this gallery much better than your gallery at Hampton
+Court;" and thus, talking of pictures, he broke off "the cardinal's
+displeasant talk."
+
+This was a customary artifice with MORE. He withdrew the mind from
+disturbing thoughts by some sudden exclamation, or broke out into some
+facetious sally, which gave a new turn to the conversation. Of many, to
+give a single instance. On the day he resigned the chancellorship, he
+went after service to his wife's pew; there bowing, in the manner and
+with the very words the Lord Chancellor's servant was accustomed to
+announce to her, that "My lord was gone!" she laughed at the idling
+mockery; but when assured, in sober sadness, that "My lord was gone!"
+this good sort of lady, with her silly exclamation of "Tillie vallie!
+Tillie vallie! will you sit and make goslings in the ashes?" broke out
+into one of those domestic explosions to which she was very liable. The
+resigned chancellor, now resigned in more than one sense, to allay the
+storm he had raised, desired his daughters to observe whether they could
+not see some fault in their mother's dress. They could discover none.
+"Don't you perceive that your mother's nose stands somewhat awry?" Thus
+by a stroke of merriment, he dissipated the tedious remonstrances and
+perplexing inquiries which a graver man could not have eluded.
+
+At the most solemn moments of his life he was still disposed to indulge
+his humour. When in the Tower, denied pen and ink, he wrote a letter to
+his beloved Margaret, and tells her that "This letter is written with a
+coal; but that to express his love a peck of coals would not suffice."
+
+His political sagacity equalled the quickness of his wit or the flow of
+his humour. He knew to rate at their real value the favours of such a
+sovereign as Henry VIII. The king suddenly came to dine at his house at
+Chelsea, and while walking in the garden, threw his arm about the neck
+of the chancellor. Roper, his son-in-law, congratulated More on this
+affectionate familiarity of royalty. More observed, "Son, the king
+favours me as (much as) any subject within the realm; howbeit I have no
+cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him a castle in
+France, it should not fail to go!"
+
+MORE seems to have descried the speck of the Reformation, while others
+could not view even the gathering cloud in the political horizon. He and
+Roper were conversing on their "Catholic prince, their learned clergy,
+their sound nobility, their obedient subjects, and finally that no
+heretic dare show his face." More went even beyond Roper in his
+commendation; but he proceeded, "And yet, son Roper, I pray God that
+some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading
+heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day that we would gladly
+be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches
+quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have
+ours quietly to ourselves." Roper, somewhat amazed, alleged his reasons
+for not seeing any cause which could produce such consequences. The zeal
+of the juvenile Catholic broke out into "a fume," which More perceiving,
+with his accustomed and gentle artifice exclaimed merrily, "Well, son
+Roper, it shall not be so! it shall not be so!"
+
+No one was more sensible than MORE that to gain over the populace it is
+necessary to descend to them. But when raillery passed into railing, and
+sarcasm sunk into scurrility, in these unhappy polemical effusions, our
+critics have bitterly censured the intolerance and bigotry of Sir THOMAS
+MORE. All this, however, lies on the surface. The antagonists of MORE
+were not less free, nor more refined. MORE wrote at a cruel crisis; both
+the subjects he treated on, and the times he wrote in, and the distorted
+medium through which he viewed the new race as the subverters of
+government, and the eager despoilers of the ecclesiastical lands, were
+quite sufficient to pervert the intellect of a sage of that day, and
+throw even the most genial humour into a state of exacerbation.
+
+Our sympathies are no longer to be awakened by the worship of images and
+relics--prayers to saints--the state of souls in purgatory--and the
+unwearied blessedness of pilgrimages--nor even by the subtle inquiry,
+Whether the church were before the gospel, or the gospel before the
+church?--or by the burning of Tyndale's Testament, and "the confutation
+of the new church of Frere Barnes:" all these direful follies, which
+cost Sir Thomas More many a sleepless night, and bound many a harmless
+heretic to the stake, have passed away, only, alas! to be succeeded by
+other follies as insane, which shall in their turn meet the same fate.
+Those works of MORE are a voluminous labyrinth; but whoever winds its
+dark passages shall gather many curious notices of the writer's own age,
+and many exquisite "merrie tales," delectable to the antiquary, and not
+to be contemned in the history of the human mind.
+
+The impending Reformation was hastened by a famous invective in the form
+of "The Supplication of Beggars." Its flagrant argument lay in its
+arithmetic. It calculated all the possessions of the clergy, who though
+but "the four-hundredth part of the nation, yet held half of the
+revenues."
+
+MORE replied to "The Supplication of the Beggars" by "The Supplications
+of the Souls in Purgatory." These he represented in terror at the
+sacrilegious annihilation of the masses said for their repose; and this
+with the Romanist was probably no weak argument in that day.
+
+MORE more reasonably ridicules the extravagance of the estimates. Such
+accounts, got up in haste and designed for a particular purpose, are
+necessarily inaccurate; but the inaccuracy of a statement does not at
+all injure the drift of the argument, should that be based on truth.
+
+With MORE "the heretics" were but ordinary rebels, as appears by the
+style of his narrative. "A rabble of heretics at Abingdon did not intend
+to lose any more labour by putting up bills (petitions) to Parliament,
+but to make an open insurrection and subvert all the realm, to kill the
+clergy, and sell priests' heads as good and cheap as sheep's
+heads--three for a penny, buy who would! But God saved the church and
+the realm. Yet after this was there one John Goose roasted at
+Tower-hill, and thereupon some other John Goose began to make some
+gaggling awhile, but it availed him not. And now we have this gosling
+with his 'Supplication of Beggars.' He maketh his bill in the name of
+the beggars. The bill is couched as full of _lies_ as the beggar
+swarmeth full of _lice_. We neither will nor shall need to make much
+business about this matter; we trust much better in the goodness of good
+men."
+
+The marriage of the clergy was no doubt at first abused by some. MORE
+describes one Richard Mayfield, late a monk and a priest, and, it may be
+added, a martyr, for he was burned. Of this man he says, "His holy life
+well declares his heresies, when being both a priest and a monk he went
+about two wives, one in Brabant, another in England. What he meant I
+cannot make you sure, whether he would be sure of the one if t'other
+should happen to refuse him, or that he would have them both, the one
+here, the other there; or else both in one place, the one because he was
+priest, the other because he was monk."[7]
+
+Such is the ludicrous ribaldry which runs through the polemical works of
+Sir THOMAS MORE: the opposite party set no better example, and none
+worse than the redoubtable Simon Fish, the writer of the "Supplication
+of Beggars." Oldmixon expresses his astonishment that "the famous Sir
+Thomas More was so hurried by his zeal that he forgot he was a
+gentleman, and treated Mr. Fish with the language of a monk."
+
+Writers who decide on other men and on other times by the spirit of
+their own, try human affairs by a false standard. MORE was at heart a
+monk. He wore a prickly hair-shirt to mortify the flesh; he scourged
+himself with the knotted cord; he practised the penance; and he appeals
+to miraculous relics as the evidences of his faith! I give his own words
+in alluding to the Sudarium, that napkin sent to king Abgarus, on which
+Jesus impressed the image of his own face: "And it hath been by like
+miracle in the thin corruptible cloth kept and preserved these 1500
+years fresh and well preserved, to the inward comforts, spiritual
+rejoicing, and great increase of fervour in the hearts of good Christian
+people." To this he joins another similar miraculous relic, "the
+evangelist Luke's portrait of our blessed Lady, his mother."[8]
+
+Such were considered as the evidences of the true faith of the
+Romanists; but MORE with his relics was then dealing in a damaged
+commodity. Lord Herbert has noticed the great fall of the price of
+relics at the dissolution of the monasteries: some which had been left
+in pawn no one cared to redeem.
+
+"The History of King Richard the Third," which first appeared in a
+correct state in this folio, has given rise to "historic doubts" which
+led to some paradoxes. The personal monster whom MORE and SHAKSPEAKE
+exhibited has vanished, but the deformity of the revolting parricide was
+surely revealed in the bones of the infant nephews. This, the earliest
+history in our vernacular literature, may still be read with delight. As
+a composition the critical justice of Lord Orford may be cited. "Its
+author was then in the vigour of his fancy, and fresh from the study of
+the Greek and Roman historians, whose manner he has imitated." The
+details in this history of a prince of the house of York, though they
+may be tinged with the gall of the Lancastrian Cardinal Morton, descend
+to us with the weight of contemporary authority. It is supposed that
+MORE may have derived much of the materials of his history from his
+early patron, but the charms which still may retain us are the natural
+yet dramatic dialogue--the picturesque touches--and a style, at times,
+whose beauty three centuries have not wrinkled--and the emotions which
+such vital pages leave in the reader's mind.[9]
+
+The "UTOPIA" of Sir THOMAS MORE, which being composed in Latin is not
+included in this great volume of his "Workes," may be read by the
+English reader in its contemporary spirited translation,[10] and more
+intelligibly in Bishop Burnet's version. The title of his own coinage
+has become even proverbial; and from its classical Latinity it was
+better known among foreigners even in Burnet's day than at home. This
+combination of philosophy, politics, and fiction, though borrowed from
+the ideal republic of Plato, is worthy of an experienced statesman and a
+philosopher who at that moment was writing not only above his age, but,
+as it afterwards appeared, above himself. It has served as the model of
+that novel class of literature--political romances. But though the
+"Utopia" is altogether imaginary, it displays no graces of the
+imagination in an ingeniously constructed fable. It is the dream of a
+good citizen, and, like a dream, the scenes scattered and unconnected
+are broken into by chimerical forms and impracticable achievements. In
+times of political empiricism it may be long meditated, and the "Utopia"
+may yet pass through a million of editions before that new era of the
+perfectibility of the human animal, the millennium of political
+theorists, which it would seem to have anticipated.
+
+This famous work was written at no immature period of life, for MORE was
+then thirty-six years of age. The author had clear notions of the
+imperfections of governments, but he was not as successful in proposing
+remedies for the disorders he had detected. A community where all the
+property belongs to the government, and to which every man contributes
+by his labour, that he may have his own wants supplied; a domestic
+society which very much resembles a great public school, and converts a
+citizen, through all the gradations of his existence, from form to form;
+and where every man, like an automatical machine, must be fixed in his
+proper place,--supposes a society of passionless beings which social
+life has never shown, and surely never can. The art of carrying on war
+without combating, by the wiliness of stratagems; or procuring a peace
+by offering a reward for the assassination of the leaders of the enemy,
+with whom rather than with the people all wars originate; the injunction
+to the incurable of suicide; the paucity of laws which enabled every man
+to plead his own cause; the utmost freedom granted to religious sects,
+where every man who contested the religion of another was sent into
+exile, or condemned to bondage; the contempt of the precious metal,
+which was here used but as toys for children, or as fetters for
+slaves;--such fanciful notions, running counter to the experience of
+history, or to the advantages of civilised society, induced some to
+suspect the whole to be but the incoherent dreams of an idling
+philosopher, thrown down at random without much consideration. It is
+sobriety indulging an inebriation, and good sense wandering in a
+delirium. Burnet, in his translation, cautiously reminds his readers
+that he must in nowise be made responsible for the matter of the work
+which "he ventured" to translate. Others have conceived "the Utopia"
+dangerous for those speculators in politics who might imagine the author
+to have been serious. MORE himself has adjudged the book "no better
+worthy than to lye always in his own island, or else to be consecrated
+to Vulcan."
+
+But assuredly many of the extraordinary principles inculcated in "the
+Utopia" were not so lightly held by its illustrious author. The
+sincerity of his notions may be traced in his own simple habits, his
+opinions in conversation, and the tenor of his invariable life. His
+contempt of outward forms and personal honours, his voluntary poverty,
+his fearlessness of death--all these afford ample evidence that the
+singularity of the man himself was as remarkable as the work he
+produced. The virtues he had expatiated on, he had contemplated in his
+own breast.
+
+This singular, but great man, was a sage whose wisdom lay concealed in
+his pleasantry; a politician without ambition; a lord chancellor who
+entered into office poor, and left it not richer. When his house was to
+be searched for treasure, which circumstance had alarmed his friends,
+well did that smile become him when he observed that "it would be only a
+sport to his family," and he pleasantly added, "lest they should find
+out my wife's gay girdle and her gold beads." When the clergy, in
+convention, had voted a donation amounting to no inconsiderable fortune,
+"not for services to be performed, but for those which he had chosen to
+do," More rejected the gift with this noble confession--"I am both
+over-proud, and over-slothful also, to be hired for money to take half
+the labour and business in writing that I have taken since I began." And
+when accused by Tyndale and others for being "the proctor of the
+clergy," and richly fed, how forcible was his expression! "He had
+written his controversial works only that God might give him thanks."
+
+It happened, however, that his after-conduct in life, in regard to that
+religious toleration which he had wisely maintained in his ideal
+society, was as opposite as night to noon. Could he then have ever been
+earnest in his "Utopia?"--he who exults over the burning of a heretic,
+who "could not agree that before the day of doom there were either any
+saint in heaven or soul in purgatory, or in hell either," for which
+horrible heresy he was delivered at last into the secular hands, and
+"burned as there was never wretch I ween better worth."[11] This
+harmless and hapless metaphysical theologian did not disagree with More
+on the existence of saints, of souls, nor of hell. The heretic
+conceived--and could he change by volition the ideas which seemed to him
+just?--that no reward or punishment could be inflicted before the final
+judgment. A conversation of five minutes might have settled the
+difference, for they only varied about the precise time!
+
+In that great revolution which was just opening in his latter days, MORE
+seems sometimes to have mistaken theology for politics. A strange and
+mysterious change, such as the history of man can hardly parallel,
+occurred in the mind of MORE, by what insensible gradations is a secret
+which must lie in his grave.
+
+This great man laid his head on the block to seal his conscience with
+his blood. Protestants have lamented this act as his weakness, the
+Romanists decreed a martyrdom. In a sudden change of system in the
+affairs of a nation, when even justice may assume the appearance of
+violence, the most enlightened minds, standing amidst their ancient
+opinions and their cherished prejudices subverted, display how the
+principle of integrity predominates over that of self-preservation.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 127.
+
+  [2] "The Workes of Sir Thomas More in the English Tongue, 1557, fo.,"
+    a venerable folio of nearly 1500 pages in double columns, is closely
+    printed in black-letter.
+
+  [3] Roper's "Life of Sir Thomas More," which had been suppressed
+    through the reign of Elizabeth, only first appeared in 1626, at
+    Paris, when a Roman Catholic princess in the person of Henrietta, the
+    queen of Charles the First, had ascended the throne of England; it
+    was republished in 1729. There is also an elegant modern reprint by
+    Mr. Singer.
+
+  [4] The Life by his great-grandson was printed in 1627, and
+    republished in 1726. This biography is the one usually referred to.
+    Though with a more lucid arrangement, and a fuller narrative, than
+    Roper's life, the writer inherited little of the family genius,
+    except the bigotry of his great ancestor.
+
+  [5] _Tres Thomæ._ The three Thomases are, Aquinas, à Becket, and
+    More--by Dr. Thomas Stapleton. Another Life by J. H. is an
+    abridgment, 1662. These writers, Romanists, as well as the
+    great-grandson, have interspersed in their narrative more than one of
+    those fabulous incidents and pious frauds, visions, and miracles,
+    which have been the opprobrium of Catholic biographers.
+
+  [6] Macdiarmid, in his "Lives of British Statesmen," has chiefly
+    considered the political character of this Lord-Chancellor. Others
+    have written lives merely as accompaniments to the editions of some
+    of his works.
+
+  [7] Works, fo. 346.
+
+  [8] "Works of Sir Thomas More," 113, col. 2.
+
+  [9] Mr. Singer has furnished us with a correct reprint of this
+    history. More's "Life of Richard the Third" had been given by our
+    chroniclers from copies mutilated or altered. A work whose merits
+    arise from the beauty of its composition admits of neither.
+
+  [10] The old translation, "by Raphe Robinson, 1551," has been
+    republished by Dr. Dibdin, accompanied by copious annotations. Almost
+    everything relating to the family, the life, and the works of the
+    author may be found in "the biographical and literary introduction."
+    It is the first specimen of an edition where the diligence of the
+    editor has not been wasted on trivial researches or nugatory
+    commentaries.
+
+  [11] "Sir Thomas More's Workes," 348.
+
+
+
+
+THE EARL OF SURREY AND SIR THOMAS WYATT.
+
+
+Not many years intervened between the uncouth gorgeousness of HAWES, the
+homely sense of BARCLAY, the anomalous genius of SKELTON, and the pure
+poetry of Henry Howard the EARL of SURREY. In the poems of SURREY, and
+his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt,[1] the elder, the age of taste, if not of
+genius, opens on us. Dryden and Pope sometimes seem to appear two
+centuries before their date. There is no chronology in the productions
+of real genius; for, whenever a great master appears, he advances his
+art to a period which labour, without creation, toils for centuries to
+reach.
+
+The great reformer of our poetry, he who first from his own mind,
+without a model, displayed its permanent principles, was the poetic Earl
+of Surrey. There was inspiration in his system, and he freed his genius
+from the barbaric taste or the undisturbed dulness which had prevailed
+since the days of Chaucer. His ear was musical, and he formed a metrical
+structure with the melodies of our varied versification, rejecting the
+rude rhythmical rhyme which had hitherto prevailed in our poetry. He
+created a poetic diction, and graceful involutions; a finer selection of
+words, and a delicacy of expression, were now substituted for vague
+diffusion, and homeliness of phrases and feeble rhymes, or, on the other
+hand, for that vitiated style of crude pedantic Latinisms, such as
+"purpúre, aureáte, pulchritúde, celatúre, facúnde," and so many others,
+laborious nothings! filling the verse with noise. The contemplative and
+tender SURREY charms by opening some picturesque scene or dwelling on
+some impressive incident. He had discerned the error of those
+inartificial writers, whose minute puerility, in their sterile
+abundance, detailed till nothing was remembered, and described, till
+nothing was perceptible. Hitherto, our poets had narrowed their powers
+by moulding their conceptions by temporary tastes, the manners and modes
+of thinking of their day; but their remoteness, which may delight the
+antiquary, diminishes their interest with the poetical reader. SURREY
+struck into that secret path which leads to general nature, guided by
+his art: his tenderness and his thoughtful musings find an echo in our
+bosoms, and are as fresh with us as they were in the court of Windsor
+three centuries past.
+
+These rare qualities in a poet at such a period would of themselves form
+an era in our literature; but SURREY also extended their limits; the
+disciple of Chaucer was also the pupil of Petrarch, and the Earl of
+SURREY composed the _first sonnets_ in the English language, with the
+amatory tenderness and the condensed style of its legitimate structure.
+Dr. Nott further claims the honour for Surrey of the invention of heroic
+blank verse; Surrey's version of Virgil being unrhymed.
+
+When Warton suggested that Surrey borrowed the idea of blank verse from
+Trissino's "Italia Liberata," he seems to have been misled by the
+inaccurate date of 1528, which he affixed to the publication of that
+epic. Trissino's epic did not appear till 1547,[2] and Surrey perished
+in the January of that year. It was indeed long a common opinion that
+Trissino invented the _versi sciolti_, or blank verse, though Quadrio
+confesses that such had been used by preceding poets, whose names he has
+recorded. The mellifluence and flexibility of the vowelly language were
+favourable to unrhymed verse; while the poverty of the poetic diction,
+and the unmusical verse of France, could never venture to show itself
+without the glitter of rhyme. The heroic blank verse, however, was an
+after-thought of Surrey: he first composed his unrhymed verse in the
+long Alexandrine, had afterwards felicitously changed it for the
+decasyllabic verse, but did not live to correct the whole of his
+version. Surrey could not therefore have designed the pauses and the
+cadences of blank verse in his first choice, nor will they be found in
+his last. Nor can it be conceded that blank verse was wholly unknown
+among us. Webbe, a critic long after, in the reign of Elizabeth,
+considers the author of Pierce Ploughman as "the first whom he had met
+with who observed the quantity of our verse, _without the curiosity of
+rhyme_."
+
+Dr. Nott, with editorial ardour, considers that the unfinished model of
+Surrey was the prototype of all subsequent blank verse, and was also the
+origin of its introduction into dramatic composition. A sweeping
+conclusion! when we consider the artificial structure of our blank verse
+from the days of Milton, who, not without truth, asserted that "he first
+gave the example of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the
+troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming." This indeed has been denied
+to Milton by those who look to dates, and have no ear; and are apt to
+imagine that rhymeless lines, mere couplets, with ten well-counted
+syllables in each, must necessarily form blank verse. Dr. Nott, in
+quoting the eulogy of Ascham on this noble effort of Surrey "to bring
+our national poetry to perfection," has omitted to add what followed,
+namely, the censure of Surrey for not having rejected our heroic verse
+altogether, and substituted the hexameter of Virgil, in English verse.
+It is therefore quite evident that Ascham had formed no conception of
+blank verse, no more than had Surrey, such as it was to be formed by the
+ear of Milton, and by some of his successors. All beginnings are
+obscure; something is borrowed from the past, and something is invented
+for the future, till it is vain to fix the gradations of invention which
+terminate in what at length becomes universally adopted.
+
+Could the life, or what we have of late called the psychological
+history, of this poetic Earl of SURREY be now written, it would
+assuredly open a vivid display of fine genius, high passions, and
+romantic enthusiasm. Little is known, save a few public events; but the
+print of the footsteps shows their dimension. We trace the excellence,
+while we know but little of the person.
+
+The youth of SURREY, and his life, hardly passed beyond that period,
+betrayed the buoyancy of a spirit vehement and quick, but rarely under
+guidance. Reckless truth, in all its openness and its sternness, was his
+habit, and glory was his passion; but in this restlessness of generous
+feelings his anger too easily blazed forth. He was haughty among his
+peers, and he did not even scorn to chastise an inferior. We are not
+surprised at discovering that one of so unreserved a temper should in
+that jealous reign more than once have suffered confinement. But the
+youthful hero who pursued to justice a relative and a court favourite,
+for a blow, by which that relative had outraged Surrey's faithful
+companion--he who would eat flesh in Lent--he who issued one night to
+break the windows of the citizens, to remind them that they were a
+sinful race, however that might have been instigated by zeal for "the
+new religion"--all such things betrayed his enthusiastic daring, but his
+deeds, to become splendid, depended on their direction. The lofty
+notions he attached to his descent; his proud shield quartering the arms
+of the Confessor, which the duke, his father, dared not show to a
+jealous monarch; his feats of arms at the barriers, and his military
+conduct in his campaigns,
+
+    ----------Who saw Kelsal blaze,
+  Landrecy burnt, and battered Boulogne render;
+    At Montreuil's gate hopeless of a recure (recovery),
+
+there, where that twin-spirit, his beloved associate, Clere, to save his
+wounded friend, had freely yielded his own life; his magnificence as a
+courtier, the companion of the princely Richmond; all "the joy and feast
+with a king's son;" his own record of the brilliant days, and the
+soothing fancies of "proud Windsor:" "its large open courts;" "the
+gravelled ground for the foaming horse;" "the palm-play;" "the stately
+seats and dances;" "the secret groves," and "the wild forest, with cry
+of hounds;" and more than all, the mysterious passion for "the fair
+Geraldine," cover the misty shade of Surrey with a cloud of glory,
+which, while it veils the man from our sight, seems to enlarge the
+object we gaze on.
+
+We see this youth, he who first taught the English Muse accents she had
+never before tried, hurried from his literary seclusion to be immolated
+on the scaffold, by the arts of a remorseless rival, of him whose pride
+at last sent him to the block, and who signed the death-warrant of his
+own brother! It was at a moment when the dying monarch, as the breath
+was fleeting from his lips, once in his life was voiceless to condemn a
+state victim, that Somerset took up the stamp which Henry used, to affix
+it to the death-warrant of SURREY. Victim of his own domestic circle!
+The father disunited with the son, from fear or jealousy; the mother
+separated from the father, to the last vowing unforgiving vengeance; a
+sister disnatured of all kin, hastening to be the voluntary accuser of
+her father and her brother! These domestic hatreds were the evil spirits
+which raged in the house of the Howards, and hurried on the fate of the
+accomplished, the poetic, the hapless Earl of Surrey.
+
+A tale of such grandeur and such woe passed away unheeded even by a
+slight record, so inexpert were the few writers of those days, and
+probably so perilous was their curiosity. The pretended trial of Surrey,
+who being no lord of parliament, was tried by a timorous jury at
+Guildhall, seems to have been studiously suppressed, and the last solemn
+act of his life, "the leaving it," is alike concealed. Even in the
+registers of public events by our chroniclers, they unanimously pass
+over the glorious name and the miserable death--to spare the monarch's
+or the victim's honour.
+
+The poems of SURREY were often read, as their multiplied editions show;
+but of the noble poet and his Geraldine, tradition had not sent down
+even an imperfect tale. In this uncertainty, the world was disposed to
+listen to any romantic story of such genius and love and chivalry.
+
+The secret history of SURREY was at length revealed, and the gravity of
+its discloser vouched for its authenticity. Who would doubt the
+testimony of plain Anthony à Wood?
+
+SURREY is represented hastening on a chivalric expedition to Italy; at
+Florence he challenges the universe, that his Geraldine was the peerless
+of the beautiful. In his travels, Cornelius Agrippa exhibited to Surrey,
+in a magical mirror, his fair mistress as she was occupied at the moment
+of inspection. He beheld her sick, weeping in bed, reading his poems, in
+all the grief of absence. This incident set spurs to his horse. At
+Florence he hastened to view the chamber which had witnessed the birth
+of so much beauty. At the court he affixed his challenge, and maintained
+this emprise in tilt and tourney. The Duke of Florence, flattered that a
+Florentine lady should be renowned by the prowess of an English
+nobleman, invited Surrey to a residence at his court. But our Amadis
+more nobly purposed to hold on his career through all the courts of
+Italy, shivering the lances of whoever would enter the lists, whether
+"Christian, Jew, or Saracen." Suddenly the Quixotism ends, by this
+paragon of chivalry being recalled home by the royal command.
+
+This Italian adventure seemed congenial with the romantic mystery in
+which the poet had involved the progress of his passion for his poetic
+mistress. He had himself let us into some secrets. Geraldine came from
+"Tuscany;" Florence was her ancient seat, her sire was an earl, her dame
+of "princes' blood," "yet she was fostered by milk of an Irish breast;"
+and from her tender years in Britain "she tasted costly food with a
+king's child." The amatorial poet even designates the spots hallowed by
+his passion; he first saw her at Hunsdon, Windsor chased him from her
+sight, and at Hampton Court "first wished her for mine!"
+
+These hints and these localities were sufficient to irritate the vague
+curiosity of Surrey's readers, and more particularly of our critical
+researchers, of whom Horace Walpole first ventured to explain the
+inexplicable. With singular good fortune, and from slight grounds,
+Walpole conjectured that Geraldine was no Italian dame, but Lady
+Elizabeth Fitzgerald, one of the daughters of the Earl of Kildare; the
+family were often called the Geraldines. The Italian descent from the
+Geraldi was made out by a spurious genealogy. The challenge and the
+tournament no one doubted. But some harder knots were to be untied; and
+our theoretical historian, unfurnished by facts and dates, it has been
+recently shown, discovered some things which never existed.
+
+But every writer followed in the track. Warton compliments the sagacity
+of Walpole, and embroiders the narrative. The historian of our poetry
+not only details the incident of the magical mirror, but adds that "the
+imagination of Surrey was _heated anew_ by this _interesting
+spectacle_!" He therefore had no doubt of the reality; and, indeed, to
+confirm the whole adventure of the romantic chivalry, he refers the
+curious to a finely sculptured shield which is still preserved by the
+Dukes of Norfolk. The Italian adventures of Surrey, and all that Walpole
+had erroneously suggested, are fully accepted, and our critic
+observes--"Surrey's life throws so much light on the character and the
+subjects of his poetry, that it is almost impossible to consider the one
+without exhibiting the _few anecdotes_ of the other." But the critical
+sagacity of Warton did not wholly desert him through all the
+circumstantial narrative, for suddenly his pen pauses, and he exclaims
+on these travels of Surrey, that "they have the air of a romance!"
+
+And it was a romance! and it served for history many a year![3] This
+tale of literary delusion may teach all future investigators into
+obscure points of history to probe them by dates.
+
+It was long after the days of Walpole and Warton, and even of George
+Ellis, that it was discovered that these travels into Italy by Surrey
+had been transferred literally from an "Historical Romance." A great
+wit, in Elizabeth's reign, Tom Nash, sent forth in "the Life of Jack
+Wilton, an unfortunate traveller," this whole legend of Surrey. The
+entire fiction of Nash annihilates itself by its extraordinary
+anachronisms.
+
+In what respect Nash designed to palm the imposture of his "Historical
+Romance" on the world, may be left to be explained by some "Jack
+Wiltons" of our own. He says "all that in this _phantastical treatise_ I
+can promise is some _reasonable conveyance of history_, and variety of
+mirth." Must we trust to their conscience for "the reasonable
+conveyance?"
+
+We now trace the whole progress of this literary delusion.
+
+On Surrey's ideal passion, and on this passage misconceived--
+
+  From Tuscan came my lady's worthy race;
+  Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat--
+
+the romancer inferred that Geraldine must be a fair Florentine; Surrey
+had alluded to the fanciful genealogy of the Geralds from the Geraldi.
+On this single hint the romancer sends him on his aërial journey in this
+business of love and chivalry.
+
+This romance, of which it is said only three copies are known, was
+published in 1594. Four years after, DRAYTON, looking about for subjects
+for his Ovidian epistles, eagerly seized on a legend so favourable for
+poetry, and Geraldine and Surrey supplied two amatory epistles. Anthony
+à Wood, finding himself without materials to frame a life of the poetic
+Surrey, had recourse to "the famous poet," as he calls Drayton, whom he
+could quote; for Drayton was a consecrated bard for the antiquary, since
+Selden had commented on his great topographical poem. But honest Anthony
+on this occasion was not honest enough. He did not tell the world that
+he had fallen on the romance itself, Drayton's sole authority. Literally
+and silently, our antiquary transcribed the fuller passages from a
+volume he was ashamed to notice, disingenuously dropping certain
+incidents which would not have honoured the memory of Surrey. Thus the
+"phantastical" history for ever blots the authentic tomes of the grave
+_Athenæ Oxonienses_. A single moment of scrutiny would have detected the
+whole fabricated narrative; but there is a charm in romance which
+bewitched our luckless Anthony.
+
+Thus it happened that the romancer, on a misconception, constructs an
+imaginary fabric; the poet Drayton builds on the romancer; the sober
+antiquary on both; then the commentators stand upon the antiquary. Never
+was a house of cards of so many stories. The foundation, Surrey's poetic
+passion, may be as fictitious as the rest; for the visionary Geraldine,
+viewed in Agrippa's magic mirror was hardly a more mysterious shadow.
+
+Not one of these writers was informed of what recent researches have
+demonstrated. They knew not that this Earl of Surrey in boyhood was
+betrothed to his lady, also a child--one of the customs to preserve
+wealth or power in great families of that day. These historians were
+unfurnished with any dates to guide them, and never suspected that when
+Surrey is made to set off on his travels in Italy, after a Donna Giraldi
+who had no existence, he was the father of two sons, and "the fair
+Geraldine" was only _seven_ years of age! that Surrey's first love broke
+out when she was _nine_; that he declared his passion when she was about
+_thirteen_; and finally, that Geraldine, having attained to the womanly
+discretion of _fifteen_, dismissed the accomplished Earl of Surrey, with
+whom she never could be united, to accept the hand of old Sir Anthony
+Brown, aged sixty. Lady Brown disturbs the illusion of Geraldine, in the
+modest triumph of sixteen over sixty.
+
+Dr. Nott is in trepidation for the domestic morality of the noble poet;
+yet some of these amatory sonnets may have been addressed to his
+betrothed. He has perplexed himself by a formal protest against the
+perils of Platonic love, but apologises for his hero in the manners of
+the age. It appears that not only the mistress of Petrarch, but those of
+Bayard the chevalier "sans reproche," and Sir Philip Sidney, were
+married women, with as crystalline reputations as their lovers. Nor
+should we omit the great friend of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was a
+staid married man, notwithstanding his romantic passion for Anne Bullen.
+The courtly imitators of Petrarch had made love fashionable. It is
+evident that Surrey found nothing so absorbing in his passion, whatever
+it might be; for whenever called into public employment he ceased to be
+Petrarch--which Petrarch never could, and possibly for a want of
+occupation. A small quantity of passion, dexterously meted out, may be
+ample to inspire an amatorial poet. Neither Surrey nor Petrarch,
+accomplished lovers and poets, with all their mistress' coquetry and
+cruelty, broke their hearts in the tenderness of their ideas, or were
+consumed by "the perpetual fires" of their imagination.
+
+We have now traced the literary delusion which long veiled the personal
+history of the Earl of Surrey, and which has duped so many ingenious
+commentators. The tale affords an additional evidence of that "confusion
+worse confounded" by truth and fiction, where the names are real, and
+the incidents fictitious; a fatality which must always accompany
+"Historical Romances." The same mischance occurred to "The Cavalier" of
+DE FOE, often published under different titles, suitable to the designs
+of the editors, and which tale has been repeatedly mistaken for an
+authentic history written at the time. Under the assumed designation by
+"a Shropshire Gentleman," whole passages have been transferred from the
+Romance into the authentic history of Nichols's Leicestershire--just as
+Anthony à Wood had felicitously succeeded in his historical authority of
+Tom Nash's "Life of Jack Wilton."
+
+In the story of SURREY and WYATT, one circumstance is too precious to be
+passed over. WYATT commenced as a writer nearly ten years before Surrey,
+and his earlier poetic compositions are formed in the old rhythmical
+school. His manuscripts, which still exist, bear his own strong marks in
+every line to regulate their cæsura; for our ancient poets, to satisfy
+the ear, were forced to depend on such artificial contrivances. It was
+in the strict intercourse of their literary friendship that the elder
+bard surrendered up the ancient barbarism, and by the revelation of his
+younger friend, studied an art which he had not himself discovered.
+Wyatt is an abundant writer; but he has wrought his later versification
+with great variety, though he has not always smoothed his workmanship
+with his nail. For many years Wyatt had smothered his native talent, by
+translation from Spanish and Italian poets, and in his rusty rhythmical
+measures. He lived to feel the truth of nature, and to practise happier
+art. Of his amatory poems, many are graceful, most ingenious. The
+immortal one to his "Lute," the usual musical instrument of the lover or
+the poet, as the guitar in Spain, composed with as much happiness as
+care, is the universal theme of every critic of English poetry.
+
+His defrauded or romantic passion for Anne Bullen often lends to his
+effusions a deep mysterious interest, when we recollect that the poet
+alludes to a rival who must have made him tremble as he wrote.
+
+  Who list to hunt? I know where is an hind!
+    But as for me alas! I may no more,
+    The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
+  I am of them that furthest come behind.
+  Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
+    As well as I may spend his time in vain;
+    Graven with diamonds, in letters plain,
+  There is written, her fair neck round about--
+    "Noli me tangere, for Cæsar's I am,
+    _And wild to hold, though I seem tame_."
+
+We perceive Wyatt's keen perception of character in the last verse,
+admirably expressive of the playfulness and levity of the thoughtless
+but susceptible Anne Bullen, which never left her when in the Tower or
+on the scaffold. The poems of WYATT accompanied the unhappy queen in her
+imprisonment; and it was Wyatt's sister who received her prayer-book
+with her last smile, for the block before her could not disturb the
+tenderness of her affections.
+
+WYATT is an ethical poet, more pregnant with reflection than
+imagination; he was intimately conversant with the world; and it is to
+be regretted that our poet has only left three satires, the first
+Horatian Epistles we possess. These are replete with the urbanity and
+delicate irony of the Roman, but what was then still unexampled, flowing
+with the fulness and freedom of the versification of Dryden. Wyatt had
+much salt, but no gall.
+
+WYATT excelled SURREY in his practical knowledge of mankind; he had been
+a sojourner in politic Madrid, and had been employed on active
+embassies. Surrey could only give the history of his own emotions,
+affections, and habits; he is the more interesting poet for us; but we
+admire a great man in Wyatt, one whose perception was not less subtile
+and acute, because it spread on a far wider surface of life.
+
+WIAT, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the
+taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was
+a nice observer of times, persons, and circumstances, knowing when to
+speak, and we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be
+recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry
+thrown out by him produced three great revolutions--the fall of Wolsey,
+the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emancipation of England from
+the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, besides their connexion with Anne
+Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great Cardinal. One day Wyatt
+entering the king's closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and
+displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who
+always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humour, and
+to keep the Cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of
+"the curs baiting a butcher's dog." The application was obvious to the
+butcher's son of Ipswich, and we are told, for the subject but not the
+tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a
+falling minister was laid down by this address of the wit. It was with
+the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a passion on the delay
+of his divorce, that, with a statesmanlike sympathy, appealing to the
+presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed, "Lord! that a
+man cannot repent him of his sin but by the pope's leave!" The hint was
+dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched!
+When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous
+machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a
+revolution, besides the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of
+all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his
+counsel:--"Butter the rooks' nests!"--that is, divide all these houses
+and lands with the nobility and gentry.
+
+Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have
+learned if a great wit, where wit was ever relished, could have saved
+himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.
+
+Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the
+other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the
+intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould.
+They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the
+same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a
+community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one
+flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the
+verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate
+man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame
+perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet's immortality from
+that friend's noble epitaph. In his epitaph, Surrey dwells on every
+part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the
+excellences of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and
+the heart--but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his
+thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt's was
+
+  A head, where Wisdom's mysteries did frame,
+    Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain,
+  As on a stithy,[4] where some work of fame
+    Was daily wrought.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "The Works of the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt," by Dr.
+    Nott, form an important accession to our national literature. If we
+    cannot always agree with the conclusions of our literary antiquary,
+    we must value the variety of his researches, not less profound than
+    extensive.
+
+  [2] "Tiraboschi," vol. vii.--Haym's "Bibliotheca Italiani." When
+    Conybeare communicated the same information to Dr. Bliss, it must
+    have been derived from Warton.
+
+  [3] And, strange to add, it is still history! Mr. Godwin, in "The
+    Lives of Necromancers," details every part of this apocryphal tale!
+    And the Edinburgh reviewer very philosophically, not doubtful of its
+    verity, accounts for all its supernatural magic, and clearly explains
+    the inexplicable!
+
+  [4] The smith's forge.
+
+
+
+
+THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.
+
+
+Incidents of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are
+those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the
+consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the
+suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it
+was not, and it could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the
+absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have
+annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of
+many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own
+corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own
+unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object
+it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was
+too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of
+the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness," and when
+appeared the "Godly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called,
+he was saluted as "a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of
+Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single
+blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements,"
+was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an
+English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut
+off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and
+extolled even in his latter days.
+
+Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The
+plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its
+division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed
+the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which
+dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king refused the
+lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the
+new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.
+
+As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or
+co-partnership of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open
+prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants
+wearied the crown to participate in that national spoliation. Every one
+hastened to urge some former service, or some present necessity, as a
+colourable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A
+strange custom was then introduced, that of "begging for an estate."
+Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a
+convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favours were
+sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a
+pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two
+or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pass,
+he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On
+the king's appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and
+Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says
+Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They
+were begging for an estate. The king granted their petition. On this
+Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he
+had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his
+brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable priory of St.
+Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the
+Earl of St. Germains.
+
+The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the
+receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch
+defenders of their new possessions:[1] gratitude was the least of their
+merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was
+relishing, and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce,
+whose voracity of reformation attempted to snatch at the lands of the
+universities, which had certainly gone had not Henry's love of
+literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty's own
+words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier:--"Ha!
+sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth
+on edge, to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the
+monasteries; but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of
+colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better
+bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when
+we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein; but content yourselves
+with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to
+increase your worldhoods."
+
+Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel
+royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently
+no chance of attention from his lordship without the most open and
+explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in
+bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the abbey of St. Osyth, for "some
+present trouble in this suit," one day sent twenty pounds, with "my poor
+hearty good will, during my life." Perhaps the bribe, though only placed
+to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear,
+in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey,
+though, afterwards, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built
+the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own
+name in the once-famed Audley-End. Sir Thomas Elyot, in soliciting his
+lordship's mediation with the king to reward him with "some convenient
+portion of the suppressed lands," found it advisable to offer a
+conditional promise! "Whatsoever portion of land that I shall attain by
+the king's grace, I promise to give to your lordship the first year's
+fruits, with my assured and faithful heart and service." All were
+offering their hearts and the rest of their lives to Lord Cromwell.
+
+As for the regal dispenser himself, so stupendous was his portion that
+it became necessary to found a court never heard of before--"The Court
+of Augmentation," an expressive designation, indicating its plenary
+character, with its chancellor and its treasurer, and a long routine of
+officers, and none too many, "that the king might be justly dealt with,"
+says Cowell, "the interpreter," "for all the manors and parks, the
+colleges and chantries, and the religious houses which the king did not
+sell or give away;" that is, the selected prey which the royal eagle
+grasped in his own talons.
+
+We are accustomed to trace the Reformation to Henry the Eighth; but in
+verity small are the claims of this sovereign on posterity, for through
+all the multiplied ramifications of superstition, nothing under him was
+reformed. The other great event of the Reformation--the assumption of
+the spiritual supremacy--accorded with the national independence from a
+foreign jurisdiction. The policy was English; but it originated in the
+private passions of the monarch. Assuredly, had the tiara deigned to nod
+to the regal solicitor, then had "the Defender of the Faith" only given
+to the world another edition of his book against Luther.
+
+In the last years of his reign, Henry vacillated in his uncertain
+reform. Sometimes leaning on one party and sometimes on another; he had
+lost the vigour of his better days. In his last parliament, though not
+without some difficulty, both from Protestant and Papist, they had voted
+for "the augmentation" of the royal revenue, their grant of the
+chantries. These chantries were the last wrecks of the monastic lands. A
+single church had often several chantries attached to it. Chantries were
+endowments of estates by the sinners of that age for the benefit of
+having eternal masses sung for their departed souls. Henry on this
+occasion, in his last speech, strongly animadverts on the national
+disunion; and among his thanks mingles his menaces "to unite them in a
+more unacceptable way" than the tenderness with which at that moment he
+addressed them, for their concessions to his "Court of Augmentation."
+
+It is also evident, by this able and extraordinary speech, that Henry
+would gladly have revoked his gift to the people of "the Word of God in
+their mother-tongue," as his majesty expresses himself.[2] He had,
+indeed, already in part withdrawn the freedom he had granted by
+restricting it to a few persons, and only to be used on particular
+occasions. His majesty proceeds--"You lay too much stress on your own
+expositions and fantastical opinions. In such sublime matters you may
+easily mistake. This permission of reading the Bible is only designed
+for private information, not to furnish you with reprimanding phrases
+and expressions of reproach against priests and preachers. I am
+extremely sorry to find with how little reverence the Word of God is
+mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into
+wretched rhyme, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern." This
+part of the king's speech was pointed at the general readers of the
+Scriptures; but his majesty did not discover any happier union among the
+clergy themselves, whom he roundly rates:--"I am every day informed that
+you of the clergy are declaiming against each other in the pulpit; and
+here your charity and discretion are quite lost in vehemence and satire.
+Some are too stiff in their old _mumpsimus_, and others too busy and
+curious in their new _sumpsimus_.[3] Thus the pulpits are, as it were,
+batteries against each other; the noise is hostile and ruinous. How can
+we expect the poor people should live friendly with their neighbours
+when they have such unhappy precedents of discord and dissension in
+those that teach them?"
+
+Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His
+unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might
+prostrate himself, and, in the writer's language, who, however, was a
+papist, "bury himself in the earth," to testify his reverence for "the
+real presence," when it was brought before him. His will, which, though
+it was put aside, was not the less the king's will, attested his last
+supplications to "the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven."
+And he endowed an altar at Windsor, "to be honourably kept up with all
+things necessary for _a daily mass_, there to be read _perpetually while
+the world shall endure_." At the same time Henry endowed the poor
+knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their
+eternal masses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his
+sins; but his perpetual masses, and the world, did not endure together.
+
+With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign
+historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed
+a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism
+which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as
+the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than
+to censure.
+
+This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of
+the monasteries and the national emancipation from the tiara--but
+patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] A fear of the restitution of these abbey-lands to their former
+    uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late
+    as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College,
+    in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically--"If the
+    State should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey lands to
+    their former use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now
+    5000_l._" At a later revolution, when the bishops' lands were seized
+    on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates,
+    or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not
+    misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these
+    parliamentarians who hold estates without title-deeds.
+
+  [2] See an abstract from one of his Proclamations in "Curiosities of
+    Literature," vol. iii. p. 373.--ED.
+
+  [3] This alludes to the well-known story of the old priest, who
+    having blunderingly used _mumpsimus_ for _sumpsimus_, would never be
+    put right, alleging that "he hated all novelties."
+
+
+
+
+A CRISIS AND A REACTION. ROBERT CROWLEY.
+
+
+There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a
+crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles;
+the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel;
+the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a
+painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when
+neither can cast down the other.
+
+Fortunate are the people who have only to pass through a single crisis.
+But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting
+crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction,
+usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the hoarded vengeance
+and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics,
+action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not
+being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus
+preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial
+interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that
+equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a
+partition of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The
+Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion
+greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more
+subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The
+reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a
+reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the
+revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the
+people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth,
+Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole
+community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal
+persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations;
+of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of
+the ejected with the ejectors--rapid scenes at once tragic and
+ludicrous.
+
+Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in
+1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two
+sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the
+shortest in our annals.
+
+A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch
+of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its
+vernacular literature was retarded by the events which occurred in the
+reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed
+suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another
+war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry--it was a universal
+conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves
+combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the
+Romanist, or in restoring "the papelin" to root out "the gospeller," in
+these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy
+people; and while both maintained that they were proffering "the true
+religion," religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward
+with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with
+her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.
+
+Edward the Sixth, a boy-king, and a puppet-prince, invested with supreme
+power, acted without any volition of his own. We are prepossessed in his
+favour by his laborious diary. It is, however, remarkable that no
+solitary entry made in that book of life, no chance effusion, disturbs
+the uninterrupted equanimity. Whether the young king signs for the
+decapitation of his two uncles, or jots down the burning of Joan of
+Kent, an Arian, and another of a Dutchman, a Socinian, or records how a
+live goose suspended had its head sliced off by those who run at the
+ring, they seem equally to be matters of course, and by him were only
+distinguished by their respective dates. A nation's hope has always been
+the flattering painter of every youthful prince who dies immaturely; in
+the royal youth is lamented the irreparable loss of the future great
+monarch. But his father had been the most glorious youthful prince who
+ever adorned a throne; and it would be hard to decide, by the heartless
+chronicle of Edward, whether such an imperturbable spirit would have
+closed his life as a Nero or a Titus. This unhappy young prince must
+have felt the utter misery of his condition, for his was that curse of
+power, when in its exercise power itself becomes powerless, while its
+hands must be directed by another's. Had the reign of Edward the Sixth
+been prolonged, we should have had a polemical monarch, if we may judge
+by a collection of texts of Scripture, in proof of the doctrine of
+justification by faith, which exists in his own handwriting, written in
+French, and dedicated to his uncle.[1]
+
+This was a calamitous period for the nation; we derive little
+consolation when we discover that not more than three centuries ago our
+ancestors were a semi-barbarous race? We seem to be consulting the
+annals of some Asiatic dynasty, when we see a royal nephew tranquilly
+affixing his signature to the death-warrants of his uncles; imprisonment
+or exile would have been too tender for these state victims; we see one
+brother attainted by another, and the scaffold finally receiving both;
+and a Queen of England, in the captivity of the Romish superstition,
+hailing with a benediction her own _autos da fè_. What we should have
+gained had the accomplished prince lived, we cannot conjecture; but what
+the nation were spared by the death of the melancholy Mary, is not
+doubtful. Edward and Mary were opposite bigots; and both alike presumed
+that they were appointed to the work of sanctity; but every reform which
+requires to be carried on by coercion will long appear ambiguous to the
+better-tempered. The bigotry as well as the puerile taste of the prince
+appeared when he composed a comedy or interlude against _The Whore of
+Babylon_, and the _The False Gods_; but the brawls of polemics, at
+least, are more tolerable than torture and the sacrifice of fire.
+
+It was one of the first evils of the Reformation, that the people were
+ill prepared to receive their emancipation. All sense of subordination
+rapidly disappeared in society; even the spell of devotion was
+dissolved; and the people seemed to consider that, having rid themselves
+of one spurious mode of religion, there was no longer any religion in
+the world. "Thus for religion ye keep no religion," wrote the learned
+Cheke, in once addressing an armed multitude, who cruelly would not
+tolerate the Christianity of their neighbours.
+
+An immature reformation is accompanied by certain unavoidable
+inconveniences. Its first steps are incomprehensible to the thoughtless,
+and too vague for the considerate, doing what it should not do, and
+leaving undone what it ought to do, comprehending too much, and omitting
+many things. A revolutionary reform breaks out with an ebullition of
+popular feelings; but in escaping from one tyranny, men do not
+necessarily enter into freedom. The reformer, in abandoning what is
+known, looks to an uncertain and distant futurity; the anti-reformer
+appeals to precedent, and clings to what is real--his good is positive,
+and his evil is not concealed. In the removal of some long-standing
+evils in civil society, some portion of good goes with them; for many of
+these served as expedients to supply certain wants, and therefore
+relatively were or may be beneficial. Even our old prejudices, when
+scrutinised, often will be found to have struck their roots in the
+common welfare. The complicate interests of civil society were at first
+a web woven by strong hands, so that much of the antiquated may retain
+its soundness, while the gloss of the new may set off but a loose and
+flimsy texture. These are some of the difficulties of an age of
+innovation, which may wisely check without stopping the velocity of its
+movements. The only unerring reformer who partakes not of human
+infirmities, neither deceived by illusions, nor overcome by prejudices,
+and whose only wisdom is experience, must be that silent and unceasing
+worker of the destinies of man--Time!
+
+At the period now before us, the crisis and the reaction were alike
+remarkable. The people who witnessed in four successive reigns four
+different systems of religion, mutable with the times, amidst their
+incertitude were in fact taught a religious scepticism. One of the great
+innovations in divine service was that of preaching from the pulpit,
+instead of reading set homilies or other prescribed lessons, by which
+the Romanists had reduced their whole devotion to a mumbled ritual and a
+mechanical service--formularies and forms which ceased to operate on
+the heart, and carried on a religion that was not religious.
+
+The introduction of _preaching_ appears to have been followed by an
+unhappy effect. Latimer, in the rude simplicity of his style, complains
+of some that went to church for the benefit of being "lulled into a
+nap." There was a still greater grievance in this novel custom of
+preaching; for from the pulpits the turbulent were rousing the passions
+of the people, by declaiming against what some termed "the abuses which
+ought to be put away;" while others, persevering in their old doctrine,
+were alarming their auditors, for the loss of what had been put away.
+Pulpit thundered against pulpit; for it was not only the reformer, but
+the anti-reformer, who were the preachers. The fact was, that by an
+avaricious policy, "the court of augmentation," which had to pension the
+monks of the suppressed houses, filled up the vacant benefices as fast
+as they occurred, by appointing these annuitants, to curtail the
+pension-list. The enemy was thus settled in the camp of the reformers.
+This spirit of division was caught by the rude stage of that day in
+their comedies or interludes. This inundation of popular clamour was
+only to be stayed by coercion--by proclamations and orders in council.
+The Council of State issued their orders, or rather their instructions,
+how the preachers were to preach, and that none but the licensed should
+be permitted to ascend into the pulpit. Even Latimer himself was
+discountenanced for his apostolical freedoms, by inveighing against the
+gentry, who sent their sons to college, instead of educating them at
+home for the church. Academical degrees were abrogated as
+anti-Christian; Greek was heresy; and all human learning was to be vain
+and useless to "the gospellers." As the preachers were to be licensed,
+it came to the turn of the players and the printers not to enact or
+print their interludes, without a special licence from the privy
+council; and at length the interludes were actually inhibited for
+"containing matter relating to sedition;" and this proclamation more
+particularly specifies those that "play in English." The Romanists had
+their interludes as well as the Reformers. Bishop Percy once observed
+that the excellence of the drama, as every wise man would have it, is
+to form a supplement to the pulpit,--this literally occurred in the
+present instance; but the pulpit was itself as disorderly, to use the
+words of the proclamation, "as any light and fantastical head could list
+to invent and devise." Our most skilful delver into dramatic history,
+amidst his curious masses of disinterments, has brought up this
+proclamation. We must connect the state of these rude players with these
+rude preachers; the interludes were nothing more than reflections from
+the sermons; player and preacher were the same. By connecting these
+together, we form a juster notion of their purpose than we find in the
+isolated fact. There was now sedition in religion as well as in
+politics.
+
+The prevalent fervour scattered its sparks through all the ranks of
+society, and the thoughts of all were concentrated on the sole object of
+"the new religion." The Reformation was the great political topic in the
+court of Edward the Sixth; discussions in theology were no longer
+confined to colleges or to the clergy. Our poets, ever creatures of
+their age, reflecting its temper, and who best tell its story, confined
+their genius to ballads and interludes, making rough sport for loungers
+and for the common people; or, in their quieter moods, were devoted to
+metrical versions from the Scriptures. In a history of our vernacular
+literature, the introduction of a versified psalter and of psalm-singing
+forms an incident; as the passion for psalmody itself is a portion of
+the history of the Reformation. "This infectious frenzy of sacred song,"
+as Thomas Warton describes what he condemns as puritanic, we adopted
+from the practice of Calvin, who had introduced psalm-singing into the
+Geneva discipline, but really had himself borrowed it from the
+popularity of the first psalms in French metre, by Clement Marot. This
+natural and fine genius, as a commutation for an irregular life--and he
+had been imprisoned for eating flesh in Lent--was persuaded by the
+learned Vatable, the Hebrew Professor, to perform this signal act of
+penance. The gay novelty charmed the court, and was equally delightful
+to the people; every one chose the psalm which expressed his own
+personal feelings or described his own condition, adapted to some
+favourite air for the instrument or the voice. At the time it could have
+been little suspected that while Calvin was stripping the religious
+service of its pageantry, and denuding it even of its decent ceremonies,
+he would have condescended to anything so human as a tune and a chorus;
+yet the austere reformer of Geneva showed no deficient knowledge of
+human nature, when he contrived to make men sing in concert, or carol in
+the streets, and shorten their work by a song cheerful or sad; for
+psalms there are for joy or for affliction, effusions for all hours,
+suitable to all ranks.[2]
+
+Another incident in which our vernacular literature was remotely
+connected, was the calling in of the ancient Rituals, Missals, and other
+books of the Latin service, and establishing the book of Common Prayer
+in the common language. But the people at large seemed reluctant to
+alter their antiquated customs, which habit had long endeared to them.
+While they had listened to an unintelligible Mass, they had, from their
+childhood, contracted a spirit of devotion. Their fathers had bowed to
+the Mass as a holy office from time immemorial; and from their childhood
+they had attached to it those emotions of holiness which were not the
+less so by their erroneous association of ideas. When their religion
+became a mere Act of Parliament, and their prayers were in plain
+English, all appeared an affair of yesterday. The church service seemed
+no longer venerable, the new priesthood no longer apostolical; and the
+giddy populace protested against the common dues exacted by their
+neighbour the curate, for their marriages and baptisms and funerals.
+They forsook their churches, and even refused to pay tithes.
+
+It is in revolutionary periods that we find men adapted for these rare
+occasions; who, had they not lived amid the commotions around them, had
+probably not emerged out of the sphere of their neighbours. Such minds
+quickly sympathise with popular grievances and popular clamours, and
+obtain their reformation, often at the sacrifice of their individual
+interest, as if the cause were their appointed vocation. They are
+advocates who plead, imbued even by all the prejudices of their clients;
+they are organs resounding the fulness of the passions around them: a
+character of this order is the true representative of the multitude;
+and we listen to all their cries in the single voice of such a man.
+
+And such a man was ROBERT CROWLEY, a universal reformer through Church
+and State; whose unwearied industry run the pace of his zeal; whose
+declarations were as open as his designs were definite; and whose
+resolved spirit pursued its object in every variable form which his
+imagination could invent, and which incessant toil never found irksome.
+
+Crowley had been a student at Magdalen College at Oxford, and obtained a
+fellowship. At the close of the reign of Henry the Eighth, Crowley
+appears to have sojourned in "the great city;" and in that of Edward the
+Sixth, we must not be surprised to discover the Fellow of Magdalen
+established as a printer and bookseller, and moreover combining the
+elevated characters of poet and preacher. How it happened that a man of
+letters, and not undistinguished by his genius, adopted a mechanical
+profession, we may account for from the exigencies of the time. Possibly
+Crowley's fellowship was what Swift once called "a beggarly fettleship."
+In the hurried reform of the day, "the universal good" was attended by
+"a great partial evil." In the dissolution of the abbeys and priories
+they had also demolished those useful exhibitions proceeding from them,
+by which poor students were maintained at the universities. Many, thus
+deprived of the means of existence at college, were compelled to forsake
+their Alma-Mater and seek another course of life. It was probably this
+incident which had thrown this learned man among the people. How Crowley
+contrived to fulfil his fourfold office of printer, bookseller, poet,
+and preacher, with eminent success, the scanty notices of his life
+disappoint our curiosity. We would gladly enter into the recesses of
+this man's arduous life. Did he partition the hours of his day? What
+habits harmonised such clashing pursuits? Was he a sage whose wisdom
+none of his followers have gathered? Was the shop of the studious man
+haunted by learned customers? When we think of the printer's press and
+the bookseller's counter, we are disposed to inquire, Where mused the
+poet, and where stood the preacher?
+
+Crowley is the author of many controversial pieces, and some satirical
+poems reflecting the manners and the passions of his day, all which
+enjoyed repeated editions. But he was not less a favourite sermoniser.
+He touched a tremulous chord in the hearts of the people, and his
+opinions found an echo in their breasts. The pulpit and the press,
+perhaps, had been his voluntary choice, to print out what he had spoken
+ere it perished, or offer a supplement to a sermon in some awful tome of
+theology and reform. His Pulpit and his Press!--"those two prolific
+sources of faction," exclaimed Thomas Warton.
+
+As a printer and book-vendor, Crowley is distinguished by that curiosity
+of research which led him to be the first publisher of "The Visions of
+Piers Ploughman," which had hitherto slept in the dust of its manuscript
+state. Warton restricts the merit of his discovery merely to the fervour
+of a controversialist eager to propagate his own opinions; and truly the
+bold spirit of reform, and the satirical strokes on the ecclesiastics of
+the times of Edward the Third, in that remarkable and unknown author,
+were in unison with a Reformer in the age of Reformation. It must be
+confessed that the historian of our poetry cherished some collegiate
+prejudices, and that his native good humour is liable to change when his
+pen scourges a puritan and a predestinarian, as was Robert Crowley. But
+Warton wrote when he imagined that the suppressed absurdities of Popery
+required no longer any strong satire from a Calvinist; and as Crowley,
+too, lived to hold many dignities in the reign of Elizabeth, Crowley
+appeared to Warton to be the member of "a Church whose doctrines and
+polity his undiscerning zeal had a tendency to destroy." Strype has only
+ventured to describe Crowley as "an earnest professor of religion." The
+meek curate of Low-Leyton could not rise to the magisterial indignation
+of one of the "heads of houses," one who, at least, ought to have been,
+and who, I understand, probably missed the honour and the profit by his
+own ingenuous carelessness.
+
+One of the most striking productions of this earnest Reformer, for its
+freedom, was his address to the assembled Parliament. The title is
+expressive--"An Information and Petition against the _Oppressors of the
+Commoners of this Realm_. Compiled and imprinted for this only purpose,
+that among them that have to do in the Parliament, some godly-minded
+men may hereat take occasion to speak more in the matter than the author
+was able to write." Crowley too modestly alludes to any deficiencies of
+his own; his "information" is ample, and doubtless conveyed to the ear
+of those "who had to do in the Parliament," what must have startled the
+oldest senator.
+
+Who are "the oppressors of the poor commoners?" All the orders in
+society! the clergy--the laity--and, above all, "the Possessioners!"
+
+This term, "the Possessioners," was a popular circulating coinage struck
+in the Mint of our reformer--and probably included much more than meets
+our ear. Every land-owner, every proprietor, was a "Possessioner."
+Whether in an orderly primitive commonwealth there should be any
+"Possessioners," might be a debateable point in a parliament composed of
+"the poor Commons" themselves, with our Robin for their speaker. But
+however this might be, "the Possessioners of this realm," as he calls
+them, "could only be reformed by God working in their hearts, as he did
+in the primitive church, when the _Possessioners_ were contented and
+very willing _to sell their possessions, and give the price thereof to
+be common to all the faithful believers_." This seems perfectly
+intelligible, but our reformer judged it required some explanation--as
+thus:--"He would not have any to take him as though he went about to
+make all things common." Doubtless, there were some propagators of this
+new revelation of a primitive Christian community, and as little doubt
+that Robin himself was one; for he adds, "If the Possessioners know how
+they ought to bestow their possessions," and he had already instructed
+them, in that case "he doubted not _it should not need to have all
+things made common_." Such was the logic of this primitive radical
+reformer. A bland compromise, and a sturdy menace! This "grievance" of
+the "Possessioners" might be reformed, till poverty itself became a test
+of patriotism. They had yet to learn that to impoverish the rich is not
+to enrich the poor.
+
+At that day they were bewildered in their notions of property, and their
+standards of value; they had neither discovered the sources nor the
+progress of the wealth of a nation. They murmured at importation, for
+which they seemed to pay the penalties, and looked on exportation as a
+conveyance of the national property to the foreigner. They fixed the
+prices at which all consumable articles were to be sold; the farmer's
+garner was inspected; the landlords who became graziers were denounced;
+forestallers and regraters haunted the privy councils of the king; the
+markets were never better supplied; and the people wondered why every
+article was dearer. About this time the prices of all commodities, both
+in France and England, had gradually risen. The enterprise of commerce
+was probably working on larger capitals. As expenses increased, the
+landlords held that they were entitled to higher rents. In Crowley's
+denunciations, "God's plague" is invoked against all "lease-mongers,
+pilling and polling the poor commoner." The Parliament of Henry the
+Eighth had legalized the interest of money at ten per cent.; Robin would
+have this "sinful act" repealed: loans should be gratuitous by the
+admonition in Luke, "Do ye lend, looking for no gain thereof." In this
+manner he applies the text against usury. They seemed to have no notion
+that he who bought ever intended to sell. This rude political economist
+proposed that all property should be kept stationary. No one should have
+a better portion than he was born to. Where then was to be found the
+portion of "the poor commoner" not born to any? or him whose loss of
+fortune was to be repaired by industry and enterprise? Prices advanced;
+double rents! double tithes! Our radical preacher attacks his brother
+ecclesiastics. "We can neither come into the world, nor remain in it,
+nor go out of it, but they must have a fleece! Let it be lawful to
+perform all their ministries by ourselves; we can lay an honest man in
+his grave without a set of carrion-crows scenting their prey." The
+splendour of the ancient landed aristocracy and the prodigal luxury of
+the ecclesiastics more forcibly struck their minds than those silent
+arts of enlarged traffic which were perpetuating the wealth of the
+nation, and producing its concomitant evils.
+
+While the people were thus agitated, divided, and distracted, the same
+state of disorder was shaking the more intelligent classes of society.
+Our mutable governments during four successive reigns gave rise to
+incidents which had not occurred in the annals of any other people. With
+the higher orders it was not only a conflict of the old and the new
+religions; public disputations were frequent, creeds were yet to be
+drawn from school-divinity, the artificial logic of syllogisms and
+metaphysical disputations held before mixed audiences, where the
+appellant, when his memory or his acumen failed him, was disconcerted by
+the respondent; but when the secular arm was called in, alternately as
+each faction predominated, and the lives and properties of men were to
+be the result of these opinions, then men knew not what to think, nor
+how to act. What had served as argument and axiom within a few years, a
+state proclamation condemned as false and erroneous. A dereliction of
+principle spread as the general infection of the times, and in despair
+many became utterly indifferent to the event of affairs to which they
+could apply no other remedy than to fall in with the new course,
+whatever that might be.
+
+The history of the universities exhibits this mutable picture of the
+nation. There were learned doctors who, under Henry the Eighth, abjured
+their papacy--under Edward vacillated, not knowing which side to lean
+on--under Mary recanted--and under Elizabeth again abjured. Many an
+apostate on both sides seemed converted into zealous penitents;
+persecutors of the friends with whom they had consorted, and deniers of
+the very opinions which they had so earnestly propagated. The facility
+with which some illustrious names are recorded to have given way to the
+pressure of events seems almost incredible; but, for the honour of human
+nature, on either side there were some who were neither so tractable nor
+so infirm.
+
+The heads of houses stood for antiquity, with all its sacred rust of
+time; they looked on reform with a suspicious eye, while every man in
+his place marked his eager ejector on the watch. Under Edward the Sixth,
+Dr. Richard Smith, a potent scholastic, stood forth the stern advocate
+of the ancient order of things. However, to preserve his professorship,
+this doctor recanted of "his popish errors;" shortly afterwards he
+declared that it was no recantation, but a retractation signifying
+nothing: to make the doctor somewhat more intelligible, and a rumour
+spreading that "Dr. Smith was treading in his old steps," he was again
+enforced to read his recantation, with an acknowledgment that "his
+distinction was frivolous, both terms signifying the same thing." He did
+not recant the professorship till Cranmer invited Peter Martyr from
+Germany to the chair of the disguised Romanist. The political Jesuit
+attended even the lectures of his obtrusive rival, took notes with a
+fair countenance, till suddenly burst the latent explosion. An armed
+party menaced the life of Peter Martyr, and a theological challenge was
+sent from the late professor to hold a disputation on "the real
+presence." Peter Martyr protested against the barbarous and ambiguous
+terms of the scholastic logic, and would only consent to explain the
+mystery of the sacrament by the terms of _carnaliter_ and
+_corporaliter_; for the Scriptures, in describing the Supper, mention
+the flesh and the body, not the matter and substance. He would, however,
+indulge them to accept the terms of _realiter_ and _substantialiter_.
+
+There was "a great hubbub" at Oxford on this most eventful issue. The
+popish party and the reformers were alike hurried and busied; books and
+arguments were heaped together; the meanest citizen took his stand. The
+reforming visitors of Edward arrived; all met, all but Dr. Smith, who
+had flown to Scotland, on his way to Louvain. However, he had left his
+able deputies, who were deep in the lore in which it appears Peter
+Martyr required frequent aid to get on. Both the adverse parties
+triumphed; that is usual in these logomachies; but the Romanists account
+for the success of the Reformed by the circumstance that their judges
+were Reformers.
+
+Such abstruse subjects connected with religious associations, and
+maintained or refuted by the triumph or the levity of some haughty
+polemic, produced the most irreverent feelings among the vulgar. As the
+Reformation was then to be predominant, the common talk of the populace
+was diversified by rhymes and ballads; and it was held, at least by the
+wits, that there was "no real presence," since Dr. Smith had not dared
+to show himself. The papistical sacrament was familiarly called "Jack in
+the Box," "Worm's meat," and other ludicrous terms, one of which has
+descended to us in the term which jugglers use of _hocus pocus_. This
+familiar phrase, Anthony Wood informs us, originated in derision of the
+words, "Hoc est corpus," slovenly pronounced by the mumbling priest in
+delivering the emblem as a reality. As opprobrious words with the
+populace indicate their furious acts, scandalous scenes soon followed.
+The censers were snatched from the hands of the officiating priests;
+mass-books were flung at their heads; all red-lettered and illuminated
+volumes were chopped in pieces by hatchets: nor was this done always by
+the populace, but by students, who in their youth and their reform knew
+of no better means to testify their new loyalty to the visitors of
+Edward. One of the more ludicrous scenes among so many shameful ones,
+was a funereal exhibition of the schoolmen. Peter Lombard, "the master
+of sentences," accompanied by Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, carried on
+biers, were tumbled into bonfires!
+
+Five years after these memorable scenes, the same drama was to be
+repeated, performed by a different company of actors. Religion assumed a
+new face; that which had hardly been established was blasted by the name
+of heresy. All who had flourished under Edward were now called in
+question. The ancient tenants now ejected the newcomers, and affronted
+them by the same means they had themselves been affronted. No one at
+first knew how affairs were to turn out; some still clung to the reform;
+others were reverting to the old system. There were in fact for some
+time two religions at once in the university. The Common Prayer-book in
+English was, however, but faintly read, while the Mass was loudly
+chanted. Jewel's letter to the Queen was cautiously worded. This zealous
+reformer, in an unhappy moment, had yielded to his fears, and subscribed
+a recantation, which he soon after abjured before a Protestant
+congregation in Germany. When Peter Martyr heard the little bell ring to
+Mass, he sighed, and said, "that bell would destroy all the sound
+doctrine in the college." Gardiner gave him a safe-conduct homewards,
+which saved Peter Martyr from the insolent triumph of his rival, the
+scholastic Dr. Smith, and the Spanish friars with whom Mary supplied his
+place.
+
+But the Marians also burned books, as likewise men!
+
+The funeral of the schoolmen carried on their biers was too recent to be
+forgotten; and in return, all Bibles in English, and all the
+commentators on the Bible in the vernacular idiom, and which, we are
+told, "for their number seemed almost infinite," were thrown together in
+the market-place; and the lighted pyre proclaimed to Oxford the ominous
+flames of superstition, which consumed, not long after, opposite to
+Baliol College, the great unfortunate victims of reformation. There
+Latimer and Ridley bowed their spirits in the fires, while Cranmer, from
+the top of the Bocardo, witnessed the immolation, praying to God to
+strengthen them, and felt in anticipation his own coming fate. Then
+followed expulsions and emigrations. We have a long list of names. Five
+years afterwards, such was the rapid change of scenery, these fugitives
+returned to re-possess themselves of their seats, and were again and
+finally the ejectors under Elizabeth.
+
+The history of this mutable period is remarkably shown in the singular
+incident of Catherine, the wife of Peter Martyr, and St. Frideswide.
+
+Peter Martyr, when celibacy was the indispensable virtue of an
+ecclesiastic, brought his wife into his college, and also his bawling
+children. This spirit of reform was an abhorrence to the conscience and
+the quiet of the monks. A brothel, a prostitute, and a race of bastards,
+formed, according to the old inmates, the residence of the family of the
+reformer. The wife of Martyr died, and was interred near the relics of
+St. Frideswide. In the Marian days, it was resolved that the departed
+female should be condemned for heresy, and, since the corpse lay not
+distant from "that religious virgin, St. Frideswide," it should be
+disinterred; and the Dean of Christ Church had the remains of Martyr's
+wife dug up and buried in the dunghill of his stable. Five years after,
+when Elizabeth reigned, the fate of the disturbed bones of the wife of
+Martyr was recollected, and, by command, with patience and ingenuity,
+the sub-dean collected from the dunghill the bones which time had
+disjointed, and placed them in a coffin in the cathedral till they
+should be reburied with greater solemnity. A search was at the same time
+made by the sub-dean for the bones of St. Frideswide, which were not
+found where they had reposed for centuries. They had been hidden by some
+relic-adoring Catholic, to save them from the profane hands of the
+triumphant heretics of Edward the Sixth. In the obscurest part of the
+church, after much seeking, two silken bags were discovered, which had
+carefully preserved the relics of St. Frideswide. The sub-dean, who
+seems to have been at once a Romanist and a Reformer, considered that
+these bones of Peter Martyr's wife and the female saint should receive
+equal honours. He put them in the same coffin, and they were re-interred
+together. This incident provoked some scoffs from the witless, and some
+grave comments from those who stood more in awe of the corpse of the
+saint than of the sinner. Thus they were buried and coupled together;
+and a scholar, whether a divine or a philosopher his ambiguous style
+will not assure us, inscribed this epitaph:--
+
+  _Hic jacet Religio cum Superstitione._
+
+Did the profound writer insinuate a wish that in one grave should lie
+mingled together Religion with Superstition? or that they are still as
+inseparable as the bones of the wife of Peter Martyr with the bones of
+St. Frideswide? Or did he mean nothing more than the idle antithesis of
+a scholar's pen?
+
+At this uncertain crisis of the alliance between Church and State, the
+history of our English Bible exhibits a singular picture of the Church,
+which, from courting the favour of the great, gradually grew into its
+own strength, and rested on its own independence. We perceive it first
+attracting the royal eye, and afterwards securing the patronage of
+ministers. This phenomenon is observable in the Bible commanded to be
+printed by Edward the Sixth. There we view his majesty's portrait
+printed and illumined in red. Under Elizabeth, in the same Bible,
+omitting only the Papistic fish-days, we are surprised by the two
+portraits of the Earl of Leicester, placed before the Book of Joshua,
+and Cecil Lord Burleigh, adorning the Psalms. This is the first edition
+of the Bishops' Bible. But subsequently, in 1574, we discover that the
+portraits of the royal favourites are both withdrawn, and a map of the
+Holy Land substituted, while the arms of Archbishop Parker seem to have
+been let into the vacancy which Lord Burleigh erst so gloriously
+occupied. The map of the Holy Land unquestionably is more appropriate
+than the portraits of the two statesmen; but the arms of the archbishop
+introduced into the Scriptures indicate a more egotistic spirit in the
+good prelate than, perhaps, becomes the saintly humility of the pastor.
+The whole is an exhibition of that worldliness which in its first
+weakness is uncertain of the favour of the higher powers, but which
+cannot conceal its triumph in its full-grown strength; the great
+ecclesiastic, no longer collecting portraits of ministers, stamps his
+own arms on the sacred volume, to ratify his own power!
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] It will be found in the additional manuscripts at the British
+    Museum.
+
+  [2] See an article on Psalms in vol. ii. of "Curiosities of
+    Literature."--ED.
+
+
+
+
+PRIMITIVE DRAMAS.
+
+
+Scriptural dramas, composed by the ecclesiastics, furnished the nations
+of Europe with the only drama they possessed during many centuries.
+Voltaire ingeniously suggested, that GREGORY of Nazianzen, to wean the
+Christians of Constantinople from the dramas of Greece and Rome,
+composed sacred dramas; _The Passion of Christ_ afforded one of the
+deepest interest. This remarkable transition might have occurred to this
+father of the Church, from the circumstance that the ancient Greek
+tragedy had originally formed a religious spectacle; and the choruses
+were turned into Christian hymns. Warton considered this fact as a new
+discovery in the obscure annals of the earliest drama.[1] The temples of
+the idols were for ever to be closed, for true religion and triumphant
+faith could show the miraculous Being who, blending the celestial with
+the human nature, was no longer the empty fable of the poet. The gross
+simplicity of the inventors, and the undisturbed faith of the people,
+perceived nothing profane in the representation of an awful mystery by a
+familiar play. Christian or Pagan, the populace remains the same, and
+must be amused; the invention of scriptural plays would keep alive their
+religious faith, and sacred dramas would be a happy substitute for those
+of which they were denied evermore to be spectators.
+
+This attempt to christianise the drama did not produce an immediate
+effect; but the Roman dramatic art could not fail to degenerate with the
+Roman empire; and the actors themselves were but the descendants of the
+mimi, a race of infamous buffoons, objects of the horror and the
+excommunication of the primitive fathers.[2]
+
+In the obscurity of the medieval period, the origin of these sacred
+dramas in Europe is lost. They are only incidentally noticed by those
+who had yet no notions of the drama. But though in England their remains
+are found at a much earlier period than in any other country, this seems
+to have been a mere accident from the utter neglect, or rather
+ignorance, of other nations of the origin of their own early drama; for
+these scriptural plays, judging by those which we possess, seem struck
+in the same mint, and are worked out of a common stock, and their
+appearance we can hardly doubt was coeval. Monks were the writers or
+inventors, and a general communication was kept up with Rome throughout
+every European realm. The subjects and the personages of these biblical
+dramas are treated with the same inartificial arrangement, and when
+translated it would be difficult to distinguish between a French, a
+Flemish, or an English mystery; and in their progressive state,
+branching out into three distinct classes, they passed in all countries
+through the same mutations.
+
+It has been conjectured that they were first introduced into Italy, from
+its intercourse with the metropolis of the Greek Empire; but when we
+have recourse to its literary recorder, we gather nothing but ambiguity.
+Tiraboschi is dubious whether the early Italian mysteries exhibited in
+the year 1264 were anything more than a dumb show, or the processional
+display of a religious pageant. Decided, on system, not to approve of
+such familiar exhibitions of sacred themes, the Jesuit has cautiously
+noticed two companies who evidently had performed a mystery, or
+miracle-play. In that piece there is a direction that "An angel and the
+virgin _sing_;" but our learned Jesuit will not venture even to surmise
+that "the virgin and the angel" _acted_ their parts, but merely chanted
+a poem.[3] The literary antiquary Signorelli inclines to fix the
+uncertain date of the first sacred drama so late as in 1445.[4] In
+France these early scriptural exhibitions were so little comprehended,
+that Le Grand D'Aussy, in his pretension that his nation possessed the
+drama in the thirteenth century, derives the origin of their mysteries
+from such pieces as the three fabliaux which he has given, as the
+earliest dramas.[5] So little conversant in his day--not a distant
+one--were the French antiquaries with a subject which has of late become
+familiar to their tastes. We learn nothing positive of their "Mysteries"
+till their "Confraerie de la Passion" was incorporated in 1402.
+
+The earliest of these representations necessarily would be in Latin,[6]
+and performed in monasteries by the ecclesiastics themselves, on
+festival days; in this state, how could they have been designed for the
+people? Aware of this difficulty, and convinced that these holy plays
+were in their origin intended for popular instruction and recreation, it
+has been conjectured that the Latin mystery was accompanied by a
+pantomimic show, for the benefit of the people; but an impatient
+concourse could be little affected by the action of the performers,
+almost as incomprehensible as the language was unintelligible. The
+people, a great animal only to be fondled in one way, as usual, worked
+out their own wants; they taught learned clerks the only method by which
+they were to be amused, by having the same thing after their own
+fashion, and to be comprehended in their own language; and the day at
+last arrived when even the people themselves would be actors. In the
+obscurity of the medieval period, the literary antiquary has often to
+feel his way in the darkness, till among uncertain things he fancies
+that he grasps the palpable. We are not furnished with precise dates,
+but some natural circumstances may account for the introduction of the
+mysteries in the _vernacular idiom_. About the eighth century, merchants
+carried on their trades in the great fairs, and to attract the people
+together, jugglers, minstrels, and buffoons were well paid, and the
+populace flocked. Such a multitudinous concourse appears to have created
+alarm among their great lords; and the ecclesiastics in vain proscribed
+these licentious revelries. It would be nothing more than a stroke of
+their accustomed policy if we imagine that, seeing the people were eager
+after such public entertainments, the monks should take them into their
+own hands; and offering a far more imposing exhibition than even the
+tricks of jugglers, combining piety with merriment, at once awe and
+delight the people by their scriptural histories and the legends of
+saints, in the language common to them all, thus enticing them from
+profane mummeries. It was a revolution in the history of the people,
+who, without education, seemed to grow learned in the mysteries and to
+be witnesses of miracles!
+
+This account is not incongruous with another probably not less true, and
+which indeed has been received as indisputable among the more ancient
+literary historians of France, and is well known by the verses of
+Boileau in his "Art of Poetry." Palmers and Pilgrims--the one returning
+from the East, bearing in their caps the hallowed palm-branch of
+Palestine, and the other from some distant shrine, their chaplets and
+cloaks covered with the many-coloured scallops--taking their stand in
+thoroughfares, and leaning on their staffs, while their pendent relics
+and images attracted the gazer, would win an audience from among the
+people. These venerable itinerants or semi-saints recited their sacred
+narratives in verse or even in prose; they had sojourned amid "the holy
+places," which they described; they had their adventures to tell,
+serious or comic; and that many of these have entered into the great
+body of ROMANCE, and were caught up by the Trouvères, we can easily
+imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the
+amusement of their simple auditors, who, in the course of time,
+occasionally provided for these actors a stage on a green in the
+vicinage of their town; thus an audience of burghers and clowns, and no
+critics, was first formed. The ecclesiastics adopted performances so
+certain of popular attraction, and became the sole authors of these
+inartificial dramas, as they were of romances and chronicles. They had
+but one object, and knew to treat it only in one way. They imagined that
+they were instructing the people by initiating them into scriptural
+history, the only history then known, and by keeping the sources of
+popular recreation in their own hands, they looked for their success in
+the degree they excited their terror or their piety, and not less their
+ribald merriment; and for the people the profane drollery and the
+familiar dialogue were as consistent with their feelings as the articles
+of their creed, for which they would have died, as well as laughed at.
+
+These primeval dramas are not inconsiderable objects in the philosophy
+of literary history. In England,[7] and probably throughout Europe, they
+long kept their standing; they linger in Italy, and still possess devout
+Spain. Not long since at Seville they had their mysteries adapted to the
+seasons--the Crucifixion for Good Friday, and the Nativity for
+Christmas, and the Creation whenever they chose; and a recent editor of
+the plays of Cervantes assures us, that these _Autos Sacramentales_
+still form a source of amusement and edification to the pilgrims at the
+Shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, which it seems still receives such
+visitors.[8]
+
+These scriptural plays were known in England before 1119; they formed
+public performances in the metropolis in 1180. They were then confined
+to the monasteries, and when the audience required the space, they were
+exhibited in churches, and sometimes even in cemeteries. So true it is
+that the first theatres were churches and the first actors churchmen.
+Some reprobated the sight of the priestly character, or the "fols
+clers," "mad clerks," in their grotesque disguisings; if they were
+sanctioned by one pope, they were condemned by another. The clergy,
+except on some rare occasion, when exhibiting before royalty or
+nobility,[9] were at length not reluctant to yield their places to a new
+race of performers. In the metropolis they never lost their control over
+these representations, for they consigned them to the care of their
+inferior brethren, the parish clerks; but in provincial towns it was not
+long ere the people themselves discovered that they, with some little
+assistance from the neighbouring monasteries, were competent to take
+them into their own hands. The honest members of guilds or corporations,
+of mechanics and tradesmen, formed themselves into brotherhoods of
+actors, ambitious of displaying their mimetic faculty to their
+townsfolk. The play had now become the people's play, and the scale of
+the representation widened at every point; it was to be acted in an open
+plain, and it was to extend sometimes through eight days.[10] Such was
+the concourse of spectators, and indeed the performers were themselves
+a crowd. All were anxious to show themselves in some part, and such a
+play might require nearly a hundred personages. In a miracle-play, the
+whole life of a saint, from the cradle to martyrdom, was displayed in
+the same piece; the youth, the middle-age, and the caducity of the
+eminent personage required to be enacted by three different actors, so
+that there were the first, the second, and the third Jacob, to emulate
+one another, and provoke bickerings; townsfolk when acting, it appears,
+being querulously jealous. Something of scenical illusion was contrived,
+and what in the style of the green-room is termed "properties"[11] was
+attempted, by the description we find in the directions to the actors,
+and by the mischances which occurred to the unpractised performers by
+their clumsy machinery. Their mode of representation was so much alike,
+that the same sort of ludicrous accidents have come down to us relative
+to our native mysteries, as occurred in those of France. Bishop Percy
+has quoted a malicious trick played by the Flemish Owl-glass, the
+buffoon of the times, among his neighbours in one of these
+mysteries;[12] a Judas had nearly hanged himself, and the cross had
+nearly realised a crucifixion. Among these unlucky attempts they gilded
+over the face to represent the Eternal Father; the honest burgher,
+nearly suffocated, never appeared again; and the next day it was
+announced that for the future the Deity should lie "covered by a cloud."
+A scaffold was built up of three or more divisions for "the stage-play:"
+Paradise opened at the top, the world moved in the centre, and the
+yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, as the devils run in and out,
+showed the bottomless pit; and whenever the protruding wings of that
+infernal monster approached, "and fanned" the near spectators, the
+terror was real.
+
+These mysteries abound with a licentiousness to which the rude
+simplicity of the age was innocently insensible; a ludicrous turn is
+often given to the solemn incidents of holy writ; and the legend of a
+saint opened an unbounded scope to their mother-wit. The usual remark of
+the people when they had been pleased with a performance was, "To-day
+the mystery was very fine and devout; and the devils played most
+pleasantly."[13] The devils were the buffoons, and compliment one
+another with the most atrocious titles. The spectators, who shed tears
+at the torturous crucifixion, would listen with delight to the volume of
+reciprocal abuse voided by Satan and the Satanic, whose very names, at
+any other time or place, would have paralysed the intellect. This
+strange mixture of religious and ludicrous emotions attests that the
+authors and the spectators were in the childhood of society, satisfied
+that they were good Christians. Such were the earliest attempts of our
+dramatic representations; but men must tread with naked feet before they
+put on the sock and buskin.
+
+Several of these annual exhibitions in provincial towns have descended
+to us, as those of the Chester Whitsun-plays, and others in great towns.
+Originally, doubtless, written in Latin, they soon submitted to the
+Norman rule, vigilant to practise every means to diffuse the _French_
+language; but in this state they could not deeply delight the great body
+of the Saxon people.[14] The monk, Ralph Higden, under the influence of
+that national spirit which had been evinced by some former native
+monks, directed his efforts to the relief of his countrymen. Thrice he
+journeyed to Rome to obtain the permission of his holiness to translate
+these holy plays into the vernacular _English_ for the people.[15] Three
+journeys to Rome indicate some difficulty about the propriety of this
+mode of edifying the populace, of which indeed there were conflicting
+opinions. But the time was favourable; the youthful monarch on the
+throne, our third Edward, was beginning to encourage the use of the
+vernacular idiom, and in 1338, Higden put forth mysteries in the native
+tongue, and thus accomplished what, in the great volume of the
+Polychronicon, he has so energetically exhorted should be done, for the
+maintenance of what he termed "the birth-tongue."
+
+The day could not fail to arrive in the gradations of the public
+intellect, even such as it then was, that society would feel the want of
+something more directly operating on their sympathies, or their daily
+experience, than the unvaried scriptural tale. Mysteries however devout,
+by such familiar repetition, would lose something of their awfulness, as
+miracle-plays would satiate their tastes, as they became deficient in
+the freshness of invention. The first approaches of this change in their
+feelings are observable in the later miracle-plays, where, as a novel
+attraction to the old plays, abstract personations are partially
+introduced; but this novelty was to be carried much higher, and to
+include a whole set of new dramatic personages. A more intellectual
+faculty was now exercised in the plan of the MORALITY, or moral
+play.[16] This was no inconsiderable advancement in the progress of
+society; it was deepening the recesses of the human understanding,
+awakening and separating the passions; it was one of those attempts
+which appear in the infancy of imagination, consisting not of human
+beings, but of their shadowy reflections, in the personification of
+their passions,--in a word, it was allegory! To relieve the gravity of
+this ethical play, which was in some danger of calling on the audience
+for deeper attention than their amusement could afford, the morality not
+only retained their old favourite, the Devil, but introduced a more
+natural buffoon in the Vice, who performed the part of the domestic fool
+of our ancestors, or the clown of our pantomime.
+
+These unsubstantial personages of allegory--these apparitions of human
+nature--were to assume a more bodily shape, when not only the passions,
+but the individual characters whom they agitated, were exhibited in
+every-day life, not however yet venturing into a wide field of society,
+but peeping from a corner,--it was nothing more than a single act,
+satirical and comic, in a dialogue sustained by three or four
+professional characters of the times. It was called the INTERLUDE, or
+"_a play between_," to zest by its pleasantry the intervals of a
+luxurious, and sometimes a wearisome, banquet. The most dramatic
+interludes were the invention of JOHN HEYWOOD, the jester of Henry the
+Eighth. The Scottish Bard, Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, alludes to
+these interludes, in his "Paleys of Honour."
+
+  Grete was the preis the feast royál to sene,
+  At ease they eat, with INTERLUDES between.[17]
+
+Such was the march of events, the steppings which were conducting the
+national genius to the verge of tragedy and comedy; a vast interval of
+time and labour separates the writers of these primitive plays from the
+fathers of dramatic art; yet however ludicrous to us the simplicity of
+the age, often these singular productions betray shrewd humour and
+natural emotions. To condemn them as barbarous and absurd would be
+forming a very inadequate notion of the influence of these earliest of
+our European dramas on their contemporaries. An enlightened lover of the
+arts has said, perhaps with great truth, that Raphael never received
+from his age such flattering applause, and excited such universal
+approbation, as did Cimabué, the rude father of his art. The first
+essays strike more deeply than even the masterpieces of a subsequent age
+after all its successful labour; for its more finished excellence
+depends partly on reflection, as well as on sensation.
+
+The mystery and the morality lingered among us; but in the improved
+taste and literature of the court of Henry the Eighth, the facetious
+INTERLUDE, while it was facetious, won the royal smile. The successive
+agitations of the age, however, could not fail to reflect its tempers in
+these public exhibitions. In the reforming government of Edward the
+Sixth, the miracle-plays were looked on as Romish spectacles, and were
+fast sinking into neglect, when the clergy of the papistic queen
+retrograded into this whole fabulous mythology; adepts not only in the
+craft of miracles, but desirous, by these shows or "plays of miracles,"
+to revive the taste in the imaginations of the people. The public
+authorities patronised what recently they had laughed at or had scorned.
+On Corpus Christi day, the Lord Mayor and the Privy Council were
+spectators of _The Passion of Christ_, always an affecting drama; and it
+was again represented before this select audience: and on St. Olave's
+day, the truly "miracle-play" of that legendary saint was enacted in the
+church dedicated to the saint.[18]
+
+The history of the INTERLUDE more particularly marks an epoch, for it
+enters into our political history. Mysteries and moralities were purely
+religious or ethical themes, but the comic interludes took a more
+adventurous course; and their writers, accommodating themselves to the
+fashions of the day, were the organs of the prevalent factions then
+dividing the unquiet realm.
+
+From the earliest moment of the projected reformation or emancipation
+from the Papal dominion by Henry, we discover the players of interludes
+at their insidious work; but affairs were floating in that uncertain
+state when the new had by no means displaced the old. In 1527, Henry the
+Eighth was greatly diverted at an interlude where the heretic Luther and
+his wife were brought on the stage, and the Reformers were
+ridiculed.[19] The king in the Creed and the ceremonies remained a
+Romanist; and in 1533, a proclamation inhibits "the playing of
+enterludes concerning doctrines now in question and controversy."[20]
+"The Defender of the Faith" was still irresolute to defend or to attack.
+In 1543, an act of parliament was passed for the control of dramatic
+representations; and at this later date, this reforming monarch decreed,
+that "no person should play in interludes any matter contrary to the
+doctrines of the Church of Rome!" Chronology in history is not only
+useful to date events, but to date the passions of sovereigns. It was
+absolutely necessary for Edward the Sixth on his ascension immediately
+to repeal this express act of parliament of his father;[21] and then the
+emancipated interluders now, openly, with grave logic or laughing
+ridicule, struck at all "the Roman superstitions." Hence we had Catholic
+and Protestant dramas. The Romanists had made very free strictures on
+Cromwell, Cranmer, and their followers; and on the side of the reformed
+we have no deficiency of oppugners of the Romish Church. Under Henry the
+Eighth, we have the sacred drama of _Every-man_, a single personage, by
+whom the writer not unaptly personifies human nature. This drama came
+from the Romanists to recall the auditors back to the forsaken
+ceremonies and shaken creed of their fathers. Under Edward the Sixth, we
+have _Lusty Juventus_, whom Satan and his old son Hypocrisy, with an
+extraordinary nomenclature of "holy things," would inveigle back to that
+seductive harlot, "Abominable Living," which the Reformer imagined was
+the favourite Dulcinea of "the false priests."[22] On the accession of
+Mary, this queen hastened a proclamation against the interludes of the
+Reformers. The term used in the proclamation looks like an ironical
+allusion to a word which now had long been bandied on the lips of the
+populace. It specifies to be for "the _reformation_ of busy meddlers in
+matters of religion." A strict watch was kept on the players, some of
+whom suffered for enacting a reformed interlude. Such plays seem to have
+been patronised in domestic secrecy. The interference of the Star
+Chamber was called forth in 1556 for the total suppression of dramatic
+entertainments. In many places some magistrates had slackened their
+pursuit after "players," and reluctantly obeyed the public authorities.
+The first act of Elizabeth resembled in its character those of her
+brother Edward and her sister Mary, however opposite were the systems of
+their governments. The queen put a sudden stop to the enacting of all
+interludes which opposed the progress of the Reformation; there seemed
+to be no objection to any of a different cast; but Elizabeth lived to be
+an auditor of more passionate dramas than these theological logomachies
+performed on the stage, where the dull poet had sometimes quoted chapter
+and verse in Genesis or St. Matthew.
+
+It is not generally known that, while these Catholic and Protestant
+dramas were opposed to each other in England, at the same period the
+Huguenots in France had also entertained the derisory muse of the more
+comic interludes. There was, however, this difference in the fortunes of
+the writers; as in France the government had never reformed nor changed
+their position, there could have been no period which admitted of the
+public representation of these satirical dramas. In their dramatic
+history, it was long considered that the subjects of these Hugonistic
+dramas were too tender to bear the handling; and the brothers Parfait,
+in their copious "History of the French Theatre," only afford a slight
+indication of "the turbulent Calvinists," who had spread "pieces of
+dangerous heresy and fanaticism against the Pope, the cardinals, and the
+bishops; works which could not be noticed without profaning the
+page!"--and therefore they refrain from giving even their titles! It is
+in this spirit, and with such apologies, that historians have often
+castrated their own history. The existence of these dramas might have
+escaped our knowledge, had not the more enlightened judgment of the Duke
+de la Vallière supplied what the more stubborn Romanists had suppressed.
+This lover of literature has favoured the curious with the interesting
+analysis of two rare French Protestant plays, _Le Marchand Converti_, in
+1558; and _Le Pape Malade et tirant à sa Fin_, in 1561. Allowing largely
+for the gross invectives of the Calvinist--"_les impiétés_"--they
+display an original comic invention, and sparkle with the most lively
+sallies.[23] It is remarkable that _Le Marchand Converti_, at such an
+early period of modern literature, is a regular comedy of five acts,
+introduced by a prologue in verse; odes are interspersed, and each act
+concludes with a chorus, whom the author calls "the company." The
+classical form of this unacted play, instinct with the spirit of the new
+reform, betrays the work of a learned hand.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Warton's "Hist. of Eng. Poetry," iii. 195, 8vo edition; but it
+    has been suggested that, as Saint Gregory composed more poetically,
+    this earliest sacred drama was the production of a later writer,
+    another Gregory, bishop of Antioch, A.D. 572. The dramatist, however,
+    was an ecclesiastic, and that point only is important on the present
+    occasion.
+
+  [2] TERTULLIAN, CHRYSOSTOM, LACTANTIUS, CYPRIAN, and others, have
+    vehemently declaimed against theatres and actors. It is doubtless the
+    invectives of the Fathers which have been the true origin of the
+    puritanic denouncement against "stage-plays" and "play-goers." The
+    Fathers furnished ample quotations for PRYNNE in his "Histriomastix."
+    It is, however, curious to observe that at a later day, in the
+    thirteenth century, the great schoolman, Thomas Aquinas, greatly
+    relaxed the prohibitions; confessing that amusement is necessary to
+    the happiness of man, he allows the decent exercise of the histrionic
+    art. See a curious tract, "The Stage Condemned," which contains a
+    collection of the opinions of the Fathers, 1698. Riccoboni, "Sur les
+    Théâtres," does not fail to appeal to the great schoolman.
+
+  [3] "Tiraboschi," iv.
+
+  [4] These dramas subsequently formed no uncommon spectacle in the
+    streets of Italy, whence some Italian critics have fancied that the
+    Gothic poem of Dante--his Hell, his Purgatory, and his Paradise--was
+    an idea caught from the threefold stage of a mystery which often
+    fixed his musings in the streets of his own Florence. As late as in
+    the year 1739, a mystery of _The Damned Soul_, acted by living
+    personages, was still exhibited by a company of strollers in Turin;
+    we have the amusing particulars in a letter by Spence.--Spence's
+    "Anecdotes," 397. They have sunk to the humble state of puppet-shows,
+    and are still exhibited at Carnival time at Venice and elsewhere.
+
+  [5] See the note and this extraordinary blunder in _Fabliaux_, ii.
+    152.
+
+  [6] Mr. Wright has published a curious collection of Latin mysteries
+    of the twelfth century. [For a detailed notice of other printed
+    collections see note to "Curiosities of Literature," vol. i. p.
+    352.--ED.]
+
+  [7] Perhaps the very last remains of such rude dramatic exhibitions
+    are yet to be traced in our counties--about Christmas-tide, or rather
+    old Christmas, whose decrepit age is personified. In Lancashire and
+    Yorkshire, and also in Dorsetshire, families are visited by "the
+    great Emperor of the Turks" and St. George of England, or by the
+    lion-hearted Richard. After a fierce onset, ringing their tin swords,
+    the Saracens groan and drop. The Leech appears holding his phial;
+    from some drops the dead survive their fate, and rise for the
+    hospitable supper. The dialogue, however, has not been so traditional
+    as the exhibition. The curious portion of these ancient exhibitions
+    is, therefore, totally lost in the substitutions of the rude rustics.
+    The Wassail Songs, or the Christmas Carols, have come down with fewer
+    losses than these ancient "Tales of the Crusaders;" for the language
+    of emotion, and the notice of old picturesque customs, cling to the
+    memory, and endure with their localities. But for these we must
+    travel far from the land of the Cockneys.
+
+  [8] Bouterwek.
+
+  [9] The clergy long continued to assist at these exhibitions, if they
+    did not always act in them. In 1417, an _English Mystery_ was
+    exhibited before the Emperor Sigismund, at the Council of Constance,
+    on the usual subject of the Nativity. The _English Bishops_ had it
+    rehearsed several days, that the actors might be perfect before their
+    imperial audience. We are not told in what language their _English
+    Mystery_ was recited; but we are furnished with a curious fact, that
+    "the Germans consider this play as the first introduction of that
+    sort of dramatic performance in their country."--"Henry of Monmouth,"
+    by the Rev. J. E. Tyler, ii. 61.
+
+  [10] The Spanish nation, unchangeable in their customs, have retained
+    the last remains of the ancient Mysteries in the divisions of their
+    dramas, called "Jornadas."
+
+  [11] "A sheep-skin for Jews, wigs for the Apostles, and vizards for
+    Devils," appear in the churchwardens' accounts at Tewkesbury, 1578,
+    "for the players' geers."--"Hist. of Dramatic Poetry," ii. 140. The
+    same diligent inquirer has also discovered the theatrical term
+    "properties," in allusion to the furniture of the stage, and which is
+    so used by Shakspeare, employed in its present sense in an ancient
+    morality.--Ib. ii. 129.
+
+  [12] "Reliques of Ancient Poetry," i. 129.
+
+  [13] "Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française."--The proverbial phrase
+    is accompanied by a very superfluous remark--"Ce mot a passé d'usage
+    avec les moeurs de ces temps anciens." See also "Dict. de Trevoux,"
+    art. _Mystère_.
+
+  [14] That the translation of the "Chester Plays" was made from the
+    _French_, and not from the _Latin_, as Warton supposed, is
+    ingeniously elucidated by Mr. Collier. In the English translation,
+    some of the original French passages have been preserved.--"Annals of
+    the Stage," ii. 129.
+
+    When Warton found that these plays were translated into English, he
+    concluded that they were from the Latin. He totally forgot that the
+    French was long the prevalent language of England. And this important
+    circumstance, too often overlooked by preceding inquirers, has thrown
+    much confusion in our literary history.
+
+    The best account we have of Ralph Higden may be found in the _first_
+    volume of Lardner's Cyclopædia on "The Early History of the English
+    Stage," a work of some original research, at page 193.
+
+  [15] The earliest and rudest known miracle-play in English has been
+    published by Mr. Halliwell--_The Harrowing of Hell_. It was written
+    in the reign of Edward the Second, and is a curious instance of the
+    childhood of the drama.
+
+  [16] The reign of Henry the Sixth may he fixed upon as the epoch of a
+    new species of dramatic representation, known by the name of a
+    moral.--_Collier_, i. 23.
+
+  [17] The reader may gratify his curiosity, and derive considerable
+    amusement, from the skilful analysis of primitive dramas, both
+    manuscript and printed, which Mr. COLLIER has drawn up with true
+    dramatic taste. There are also copious specimens in a curious article
+    on Heywood in the volume on "The English Drama" of Lardner's
+    Cyclopædia,--the labour of a learned antiquary. [One of Heywood's
+    Interludes was printed by the Percy Society from his MS. in the
+    British Museum, under the editorial care of Mr. Fairholt; who
+    prefixed an analysis with copious extracts from his other
+    Interludes.] The progress of the drama was similar both in France and
+    England, yet our vivacious neighbours seem to have invented a
+    peculiar burlesque piece of their own, under the title of _Sotties_,
+    and whose chief personage takes the quality of _Prince des Sots_; and
+    _La Mère Sotte_, who is represented with her infant _Sots_. These
+    pieces still retained their devout character, with an intermixture of
+    profane and burlesque scenes, highly relished by the populace. "Ils
+    le nommèrent par un quolibet vulgaire, _Jeux de Pois pilez_, et ce
+    fut selon toutes les apparences à cause de mélange du sacré et du
+    profane qui régnait dans ces sortes de jeux." The cant phrase which
+    the people coined for this odd mixture of sacred and farcical
+    subjects, of _Mashed Peas_, may lose its humour with us, but we find
+    by Bayle, art. "D'Assoucy," that they were collected and printed
+    under this title, and fetched high prices among collectors. These
+    _Sotties_ were acted by a brotherhood calling themselves _Enfans sans
+    Soucy_.--Parfait, "Hist. du Théâtre Français," i. 52. One of their
+    chief composers was PIERRE GRINGOIRE, of whose rare _Sotties_ I have
+    several reprints by the learned Abbé Caron. Gringoire invented and
+    performed his _Sotties_, in ridicule of the Pope, on a scaffold or
+    stage, to charm his royal master, Louis the Twelfth, in 1511; for an
+    ample list of his gay satires see "Biog. Universelle," art.
+    "Gringoire."
+
+  [18] Strype's "Mem. of Eccles. Hist.," iii. 379.
+
+  [19] "Annals of the Stage," i. 107.
+
+  [20] Warton's "Hist. of Eng. Poetry," iii. 428, 8vo.
+
+  [21] Rastell's "Collection of Statutes," fo. 32--d.
+
+  [22] Both these ancient dramas are reprinted in Hawkins' "Origin of
+    the English Drama." Many such dramas remain in manuscript.
+
+  [23] "Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français," iii. 263, ascribed to the
+    Duke de la Vallière. He has preserved many passages exquisitely
+    humorous. He felt awkwardly in performing his duty to his readers,
+    after what his predecessors, Messieurs Parfait, had declared;--and,
+    to calm the terrors of _les personnes scrupuleuses_, it is amusing to
+    observe his plea, or his apology, for noticing these admirable
+    antipapistic satires:--"They are outrageous and abound with
+    impieties; but they are extremely well written for their time, and
+    truly comic. I considered that I could not avoid giving these
+    extracts, were it only to show to what lengths the first pretended
+    reformers carried their unreasonable violence against the holy
+    Father, and the court of Rome." The apology for their transcription,
+    if not more ingenuous, is at least more ingenious than the apology
+    for their suppression.
+
+
+
+
+THE REFORMER BISHOP BALE; AND THE ROMANIST JOHN HEYWOOD, THE COURT
+JESTER.
+
+
+BALE, Bishop of Ossory, and JOHN HEYWOOD, the court jester, were
+contemporaries, and both equally shared in the mutable fortunes of the
+satiric dramas of their times; but they themselves were the antipodes of
+each other: the earnest Protestant BALE, the gravest reformer, and the
+inflexible Catholic HEYWOOD, noted for "his mad merry wit," form one of
+those remarkable disparities which the history of literature sometimes
+offers.
+
+BALE was originally educated in a monastery; he found an early patron,
+and professed the principles of the Reformation; and, like Luther,
+sealed his emancipation from Catholic celibacy by a wife, whom he
+tenderly describes as "his faithful Dorothea." It was a great thing for
+a monk to be mated with such constancy at a time when women were usually
+to be described as shrews, or worse. From the day of marriage the malice
+of persecution haunted the hapless heretic; such personal hatreds could
+not fail of being mutual. He seems to have too hastily anticipated the
+Reformation under Henry the Eighth, for though that monarch had freed
+himself from "the bishop of Rome," he had by no means put aside the
+doctrines, and Bale, who had already begun a series of two-and-twenty
+reforming interludes in his "maternal idiom," found it advisable to
+leave a kingdom but half reformed. He paused not, however, till he had
+written a whole library against "the Papelins," the last production
+always seemed the most envenomed. On the death of Henry he unexpectedly
+appeared before Edward the Sixth, who imagined that he had died. Bale
+had the misfortune to be promoted to the Irish bishopric of Ossory--to
+plant Protestantism in a land of Papistry! Frustrated in his unceasing
+fervour, Bale escaped from martyrdom by hiding himself in Dublin. The
+death of Edward relieved our Protestant bishop from this sad dilemma;
+for on the accession of Mary he flew into Switzerland. There he
+indulged his anti-papistical vein; the press sent forth a brood, among
+which might have been some of better growth, for he laboured on our
+British biography and literature; but as there were yet but few
+Protestants to record, it flowed, and sometimes overflowed, against all
+the friends of the Papacy; Pits, who subsequently resumed the task, a
+sullen and fierce Papist, in revenge omitted in the line of our
+illustrious Britons, Wickliffe and every Wickliffite. Such were the
+beginnings of our literary history. On the accession of Elizabeth, his
+country received back its exile; but Bale refused to be reinstated in
+his Irish see, and sunk into a quiet prebendary of Canterbury. Fuller
+has called our good bishop "Bilious Bale." Some conceive that this
+bishop has suffered ill-treatment merely for having thrown out some
+remarkable, or abominable, invectives. Proselytes, however sincere in
+their new convictions and their old hatreds, both operating at once,
+colour their style as some do their faces, till by long use the
+heightened tint seems faint, and they go on deepening it, and thus at
+last the natural countenance is lost in the artificial mass.
+
+If Bale were no poet, in the singular dramas we have, he at least
+displays a fluent invention; he tells plainly what is meant, which we
+like to learn; and I do not know whether it be owing to his generally
+indifferent verse that we sometimes are struck by an idiomatic phrase,
+and a richness of rhymes peculiar to himself, which sustain our
+attention.[1]
+
+Of JOHN HEYWOOD, the favourite jester of Henry the Eighth and his
+daughter Mary, and the intimate of Sir Thomas More, whose congenial
+humour may have mingled with his own, more table-talk and promptness at
+reply have been handed down to us than of any writer of the times. His
+quips, and quirks, and quibbles are of his age, but his copious
+pleasantry still enlivens; these smoothed the brow of Henry, and relaxed
+the rigid muscles of the melancholy Mary. He had the _entrée_ at all
+times to the privy-chamber, and often to administer a strong dose of
+himself, which her majesty's physicians would prescribe. He is
+distinguished as Heywood the epigrammatist; a title fairly won by the
+man who has left six centuries of epigrams, collected and adjusted as
+many English proverbs in his verse, besides the quaint conceits of
+"crossing of proverbs."[2] Of these six hundred epigrams it is possible
+not a single one is epigrammatic: we have never had a Martial. Even when
+it became a fashion, to write books of epigrams half a century
+subsequently, they usually closed in a miserable quibble, a dull
+apophthegm, or at the best, like those of Sir John Harrington, in a
+plain story rhymed. Wit, in our sense of the term, was long unpractised,
+and the modern epigram was not yet discovered.
+
+Heywood, who had flourished under Henry, on the change in the reign of
+Edward, clung to the ancient customs. He was a Romanist, but had he not
+recovered in some degree from the cecity of superstition, he had not so
+keenly exposed, as he has done, some vulgar impostures. It happened,
+however, that some unlucky jest, trenching on treason, flew from the
+lips of the unguarded jester; it would have hanged some--but pleasant
+verses promptly addressed to the young sovereign saved him at the
+pinch,--however, he gathered from "the council" that this was no
+jesting-time, and he left the country in the day that Bale was returning
+from his emigration under King Henry. On Mary's accession, Bale again
+retired, and Heywood suddenly appeared at court. Asked by the queen
+"What wind blew him there?" "Two specially; the one to see your
+majesty!" he replied. "We thank you for that," said the queen, "but I
+pray you what is the other?" "That your grace might see me!" There was
+shrewdness in this pleasantry, to bespeak the favour of his royal
+patroness. Four short years did not elapse ere Elizabeth opened her long
+reign, and then the merry Romanist for ever bid farewell to his native
+land, while Bale finally sat beside his English hearth. These were very
+moveable and removeable times, and no one was certain how long he should
+remain in his now locality.
+
+The genius of HEYWOOD created "The Merrie Interlude;" unlike BALE, as in
+all things, he never opened the Bible for a stage-play, but approaching
+Comedy, he became the painter of manners, and the chronicler of domestic
+life. Warton certainly has hastily and contradictorily censured Heywood,
+without a right comprehension of his peculiar subjects; yet he admired
+at least one of Heywood's writings, in which, being anonymous, he did
+not recognise the victim of his vague statements. Warton and his
+followers have obscured a true genius for exuberant humour, keen irony,
+and exquisite ridicule, such as Rabelais and Swift would not have
+disdained, and have not always surpassed. One of his interludes is
+accessible for those who can revel in a novel scene of comic invention.
+This interlude is "The Four P's; the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary,
+and the Pedler." Each flouts the other, and thus display their
+professional knaveries.[3]
+
+The ludicrous strokes of this piece could never have come from a bigot
+to the ancient superstition, however attached to the ancient creed. We
+cannot tell how far the jester may have been influenced by a
+proclamation of 28th of Henry the Eighth, to protect "the poor innocent
+people from those light persons called pardoners by colour of their
+indulgences," &c. He has curiously exhibited to us all the trumpery
+regalia of papistry; as he also exposed "The Friery" in another
+interlude which has all the appearance of a merry tale from Boccaccio.
+
+So plays the jocund spirit of Heywood the Jester, in his minstrel-verse
+and pristine idiom; but we have now to tell another tale. Heywood is the
+author of a ponderous volume, and an interminable "parable" of "The
+Spider and the Fly." It is said to have occupied the thoughts of the
+writer during twenty years. This unlucky "heir of his invention" is
+dressed out with a profusion of a hundred woodcuts--then rare and
+precious things--among which starts up the full-length of the author
+more than once. Warton impatiently never reached the conclusion, where
+the author has confided to us the secret of his incomprehensible
+intention. There Warton would have found that "we must understand that
+the spiders represent the Protestants, and the flies the Catholics; that
+the maid with the broom sweeping away the cobwebs (to the annoyance of
+their weavers) is Mary armed with the civil power, executing the
+commands of her Master (Christ), and her mistress (Mother Church)." We
+see at once all the embarrassments and barrenness of this wearying and
+perplexed fancy. Warton contents himself with what he calls "a sensible
+criticism," taken from Harrison, a Protestant minister, and one of the
+partners of Holinshed's Chronicle; it is as mordacious as a periodical
+criticism. "Neither he who made this book, nor any who reads it, can
+reach unto the meaning." Warton, to confirm "the sensible criticism,"
+alleges as a proof of its unpopularity, that it was never reprinted; but
+it was published in 1556, and Mary died in 1558. A vindication of "the
+maid with the broom" might be equally unwelcome to "spiders and flies."
+
+How it happened that the court jester who has sent forth such volumes of
+mirth could have kept for years hammering at a dull and dense poem, is a
+literary problem which perhaps admits of a solution. We may ascribe this
+aberration of genius to the author's position in society. Heywood was a
+Romanist from principle; that he was no bigot, his free satires on
+vulgar superstitions attest. But the jester at times was a thoughtful
+philosopher. One of his interludes is _The Play of the Weather_, where
+the ways of Providence are vindicated in the distribution of the
+seasons. But "mad, merry Heywood" was the companion of many
+friends--Papists and Protestants--at court and in all the world over.
+His creed was almost whole in broken times, perhaps agreeing a little
+with the Protestant, and then reverting to the Romanist. In this
+unbalanced condition, mingling the burlesque with the solemn, unwilling
+to excommunicate his friend the Protestant "spider," and intent to
+vindicate the Romanist "fly;" often he laid aside, and often resumed,
+his confused emotions. It might require dates to settle the precise
+allusions; what he wrote under Henry and Edward would be of another
+colour than under the Marian rule. His gaiety and his gravity offuscate
+one another; and the readers of his longsome fiction, or his dark
+parallel, were puzzled, even among his contemporaries, to know in what
+sense to receive them. Sympathising with "the fly," and not uncourteous
+to "the spider," our author has shown the danger of combining the
+burlesque with the serious; and thus it happened that the most facetious
+genius could occupy twenty years in compounding, by fits and starts, a
+dull poem which neither party pretended rightly to understand.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] One of these interludes has been recently published by the Camden
+    Society, under the skilful editorship of Mr. Collier, from a
+    manuscript corrected by Bale himself in the Devonshire collection--it
+    is entitled "Kynge Johan," [and founded on events in his reign, made
+    subservient to the ultra-protestantism of Bale.] Others have been
+    printed in the "Harleian Collection," vol. i.; and in Dodsley's "Old
+    English Drama."
+
+  [2] That is, proverbs with humorous answers to them. See the
+    "Bibliographical and Critical Catalogue," by Mr. Payne Collier, of
+    Lord Francis Egerton's "Library of Early English Literature," p. 2.
+
+  [3] Dodsley's "Old Plays," vol. i.
+
+
+
+
+ROGER ASCHAM.
+
+
+It would, perhaps, have surprised ROGER ASCHAM, the scholar of a learned
+age, and a Greek professor, that the history of English literature might
+open with his name; for in his English writings he had formed no
+premeditated work, designed for posterity as well as his own times. The
+subjects he has written on were solely suggested by the occasion, and
+incurred the slight of the cavillers of his day, who had not yet learned
+that humble titles may conceal performances which exceed their promise,
+and that trifles cease to be trivial in the workmanship of genius.
+
+An apology for a favourite recreation, that of archery, for his
+indulgence in which his enemies, and sometimes his friends, reproached
+the truant of academic Greek; an account of the affairs of Germany while
+employed as secretary to the English embassy; and the posthumous
+treatise of "The Schoolmaster," originating in an accidental
+conversation at table, constitute the whole of the claims of Ascham to
+the rank of an English classic--a degree much higher than was attained
+by the learning of Sir Thomas Elyot, and the genius of Sir Thomas More.
+
+The mind of Ascham was stored with all the wealth of ancient literature
+the nation possessed. Ascham was proud, when alluding to his master the
+learned Cheke, and to his royal pupil Queen Elizabeth, of having been
+the pupil of the greatest scholar, and the preceptor to the greatest
+pupil in England; but we have rather to admire the intrepidity of his
+genius, which induced him to avow the noble design of setting an example
+of composing in our vernacular idiom. He tells us in his "Toxophilus,"
+"I write this English matter in the English language for Englishmen." He
+introduced an easy and natural style in English prose, instead of the
+pedantry of the unformed taste of his day; and adopted, as he tells us,
+the counsel of Aristotle, "to speak as the common people do, to think as
+wise men do."
+
+The study of Greek was the reigning pursuit in the days of Ascham. At
+the dispersion of the Greeks on the loss of Constantinople, the learned
+emigrants brought with them into Europe their great originals; and the
+subsequent discovery of printing spread their editions. The study of
+Greek, on its first appearance in Europe, alarmed the Latin Church, and
+was long deemed a dangerous and heretical innovation. The cultivation of
+this language was, however, carried on with enthusiasm, and a
+controversy was kindled, even in this country, respecting the ancient
+pronunciation. A passion for Hellenistic lore pervaded the higher
+classes of society. There are fashions in the literary world as sudden
+and as capricious as those of another kind; and which, when they have
+rolled away, excite a smile, although possibly we have only adopted
+another of fresher novelty. The Greek mania raged. Ascham informs us
+that his royal pupil Elizabeth understood Greek better than the canons
+of Windsor; and, doubtless, while the queen was translating Isocrates,
+the ladies in waiting were parsing. Lady Jane Grey studying Plato was
+hardly an uncommon accident; but the touching detail which she gave to
+Ascham of her domestic persecution, on trivial forms of domestic life,
+which had induced her to fly for refuge to her Greek, has thrown a deep
+interest on that well-known incident. All educated persons then studied
+Greek; when Ascham was secretary to our ambassador at the Court of
+Charles the Fifth, five days in the week were occupied by the ambassador
+reading with the secretary the Greek tragedians, commenting on
+Herodotus, and reciting the Orations of Demosthenes. But this rage was
+too capricious to last, and too useless to be profitable; for neither
+the national taste nor the English language derived any permanent
+advantage from this exclusive devotion to Greek, and the fashion became
+lost in other studies.
+
+It was a bold decision in a collegiate professor, who looked for his
+fame from his lectures on Greek, to venture on modelling his native
+idiom, with a purity and simplicity to which it was yet strange. Ascham,
+indeed, was fain to apologise for having written in English, and offered
+the king, Henry the Eighth, to make a Greek or a Latin version of his
+"Toxophilus," if his grace chose. "To have written in another tongue
+had been both more profitable for my study, and also more honest
+[honourable] for my name; yet I can think my labour well bestowed, if,
+with a little hindrance of my profit and name, may come any furtherance
+to the pleasure or commodity of _the gentlemen and yeomen of England_.
+As for the Latin and Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in
+them that none can do better; _in the English tongue_, contrary,
+_everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and handling,
+that no man can do worse_."
+
+Such were the first difficulties which the fathers of our native
+literature had to overcome. Sir Thomas Elyot endured the sneer of the
+cavillers, for his attempt to inlay our unpolished English with Latin
+terms; and Roger Ascham, we see, found it necessary to apologise for at
+all adopting the national idiom. Since that day neologisms have
+fertilised the barrenness of our Saxon, and the finest geniuses in
+Europe have abandoned the language of Cicero, to transfuse its grace
+into an idiom whose penury was deemed too rude for the pen of the
+scholar. Ascham followed his happier genius, and his name has created an
+epoch in the literature of England.
+
+A residence of three years in Germany in the station of confidential
+secretary of our ambassador to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, placed him
+in a more extensive field of observation, and brought him in contact
+with some of the most remarkable men of his times. It is much to be
+regretted, that the diary he kept has never been recovered. That Ascham
+was inquisitive, and, moreover, a profound observer at an interesting
+crisis in modern history, and that he held a constant intercourse with
+great characters, and obtained much secret history both of persons and
+of transactions, fully appears in his admirable "Report of the Affairs
+and State of Germany, and the Emperor Charles' Court." This "Report" was
+but a chance communication to a friend, though it is composed with great
+care. Ascham has developed with a firm and masterly hand the complicated
+intrigues of the various powers, when Charles the Fifth seemed to give
+laws to Germany and Italy. This emperor was in peace with all the world
+in 1550, and in less than two years after, he was compelled to fly from
+Germany, surrounded by secret enemies. Ascham has traced the
+discontents of the minor courts of Italian dukes, and German princes,
+who gradually deserted the haughty autocrat--an event which finally led
+to the emperor's resignation. It is a moral tale of princes openly
+countenancing quietness, and "privily brewing debate"--a deep
+catastrophe for the study of the political student. Ascham has explained
+the double game of the court of Rome, under the ambitious and restless
+Julius the Third, who, playing the emperor against the French monarch,
+and the French monarch against the emperor, worked himself into that
+intricate net of general misery, spun out of his own crafty
+ambidexterity. This precious fragment of secret history might have
+offered new views and many strokes of character to the modern historian,
+Robertson, who seems never to have discovered this authentic document;
+yet it lay at hand. So little even in Robertson's day did English
+literature, in its obscurer sources, enter into the pursuits of our
+greatest writers.
+
+Ascham's first work was the "Toxophilus, the Schole, or Partitions of
+Shootinge." At this time fire-arms were so little known, that the term
+"shooting" was solely confined to the bow, then the redoubtable weapon
+of our hardy countrymen. In this well-known treatise on archery, he did
+what several literary characters have so well done, apologised for his
+amusement in a manner that evinced the scholar had not forgotten himself
+in the archer.
+
+It affords some consolation to authors, who often suffer from neglect,
+to observe the triumph of an excellent book. Its first appearance
+procured him a pension from Henry the Eighth, which enabled him to set
+off on his travels. Subsequently, in the reign of Mary, when that
+eventful change happened in religion and in politics, adverse to Ascham,
+our author was cast into despair, and hastened to hide himself in safe
+obscurity. It was then that this excellent book, and a better at that
+time did not exist in the language, once more recommended its author;
+for Gardiner, the papal bishop of Winchester, detected no heresy in the
+volume, and by his means, the Lords of the Council approving of it, the
+author was fully reinstated in royal favour. Thus Ascham twice owed his
+good fortune to his good book.
+
+"The Schoolmaster," with its humble title, "to teach children to
+understand, write, and speak the Latin tongue," conveys an erroneous
+notion of the delight, or the knowledge which may be drawn from this
+treatise, notwithstanding that the work remains incomplete, for there
+are references to parts which do not appear in the work itself. "The
+Scholemaster" is a classical production in English, which may be placed
+by the side of its great Latin rivals, the Orations of Cicero, and the
+Institutes of Quintilian. It is enlivened by interesting details. The
+first idea of the work was started in a real conversation at table,
+among some eminent personages, on occasion of the flight of some
+scholars from Eton College, driven away by the iron rod of the master.
+"Was the schoolhouse to be a house of bondage and fear, or a house of
+play and pleasure?" During the progress of the work the author lost his
+patron, and incurred other disappointments; he has consigned all his
+variable emotions to his volume. The accidental interview with Lady Jane
+Grey; his readings with Queen Elizabeth in their daily intercourse with
+the fine writers of antiquity, and their recreations at the regal game
+of chess--for such was the seduction of Attic learning, that the queen
+on the throne felt a happiness in again becoming the pupil of her old
+master; these, and similar incidents, present those individual touches
+of the writer, which give such a reality to an author's feelings.[1]
+
+It is to be regretted that Ascham held but an indolent pen. Yet it were
+hard to censure the man for a cold neglect of his fame, who seems
+equally to have neglected his fortune. Ascham has written little; and
+all he left his family was "this little book" (The Schoolmaster), and
+which he bequeathed to them, as the right way to good learning, "which,
+if they follow, they shall very well come to sufficiency of living."
+This was an age when the ingenious clung to a patron; the widow and the
+son of Ascham found the benefits of this testamentary recommendation. It
+must, however, be confessed to have been but a capricious legacy, for no
+administrator might have been found to "the will." The age of patronage
+was never that of independence to an author.
+
+Johnson, in his admirable "Life of Ascham," observed, that "his
+disposition was kind and social; he delighted in the pleasure of
+conversation, and was probably not much inclined to business." It is
+certain that he preferred old books to pounds sterling, for once he
+requested to commute a part of his pension for a copy of the "Decem
+Rhetores Græci," which he could not purchase at Cambridge. His frequent
+allusions in his letters when abroad to "Mine Hostess Barnes," who kept
+a tavern at Cambridge in the reign of Edward the Sixth, with tender
+reminiscences of her "fat capons," and the "good-fellowship" there; and
+further, his sympathy at the deep potation, when standing hard by the
+emperor at his table, he tells us, "the emperor drank the best I ever
+saw,--he had his head in the glass five times as long as any of us, and
+never drank less than a good quart at once of Rhenish wine," and his
+determination of providing "every year a little vessel of Rhenish" for
+his cronies: and still further, his haunting the cockpit, and sometimes
+trusting fortune by her dice, notwithstanding that he describes "dicing"
+as "the green pathway of Hell;" all these _traits_ mark the boon
+companion loving his leisure and his lounge.
+
+When engaged in public life, a collegiate fellowship appeared to him to
+offer supreme felicity. He writes thus,--"Ascham to his friends: who is
+able to maintain his life at Cambridge, knows not what a felicity he
+hath." Such was the conviction of one who had long lived in courts.
+
+But when we consider that Ascham was Latin secretary to Edward the
+Sixth, to Mary, and to Elizabeth, and intimately acquainted with the
+transactions of these cabinets, with the sovereigns, and the ministers;
+and during three years held a personal intercourse with the highest
+foreign court;--we must regret, if we no not censure, the man who,
+possessing these rare advantages, with a vigorous intellect, and a
+felicitous genius, has left the world in silence. Assuredly, in Ascham,
+we have lost an English Comines, who would have rivalled our few
+memoir-writers, who, though with pens more industrious, had not eyes
+more observant, nor heads more penetrating, than this secretary of three
+sovereigns.
+
+There is, however, reason to conclude, that he himself was not
+insensible to these higher claims which his station might have urged on
+his genius and his diligence. Every night during his residence abroad,
+which was of no short period, he was occupied by filling his Diary,
+which has not, in any shape, come down to us. He has also himself told,
+that he had written a book on "The Cockpit," one of the recreations of
+"a courtly gentleman." We cannot imagine that such writings, by the hand
+of Ascham, would be destroyed by his family, who knew how to value them.
+A modern critic, indeed, considers it fortunate for Ascham's credit,
+that this work on "The Cockpit" has escaped from publication. The
+criticism is fallacious, for if an apology for cock-fighting be odious,
+the author's reputation is equally hurt by the announcement as by the
+performance. But the truth is, that such barbarous sports, like the
+bear-baiting of England and the bull-fights of Spain, have had their
+advocates. Queen Elizabeth had appointed Ascham her bear-keeper; and he
+was writing in his character when disclosing the mysteries of the
+cockpit. But the genius of our author was always superior to his
+subject; and this was a treatise wherein he designed to describe "all
+kinds of pastimes joined with labour used in open place, and in the
+day-light." The curious antiquary, at least, must regret the loss of
+Ascham's "Cockpit."
+
+Ascham lived in the ferment of the Reformation: zealously attached to
+the new faith under Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth, how did he preserve
+himself during the intermediate reign, when he partook of the favours of
+the papistical sovereign? His master and friend, the learned Sir John
+Cheke, had only left for himself the choice of a recantation, or a
+warrant for execution; but of Ascham's good fortune, nothing is known
+but its mystery. The novel religion had, however, early heated the
+passions, and narrowed the judgment, of Ascham. He wrote at a period
+when the Romanist and the Protestant reciprocally blackened each other.
+Ascham not only abhorred all Italians as papists, but all Italian books
+as papistical. He invokes the interposition of the civil magistrate
+against Petrarch and Boccaccio, whose volumes were then selling in every
+shop. Baretti strikes at his manes with his stiletto-pen, in an animated
+passage;[2] and Warton is indignant at his denunciation of our ancient
+romances, of which the historian of our poetry says, "he has written in
+the spirit of an early Calvinistic preacher, rather than as a sensible
+critic and a polite scholar"--he who, in his sober senses, was eminently
+both.
+
+We may lament that the first steps in every revolution are taken in
+darkness, and that the reaction of opinions and prejudices is itself
+accompanied by errors and prejudices of its own. The bigotry of the new
+faith was not inferior to the old. The reforming Archbishop Grindal
+substituted the dull and barbarous Palingenius, Sedulius, and
+Prudentius, for the great classical authors of antiquity. The
+Reformation opened with fanaticism; and men were reformers before they
+were philosophers. Had Ascham, a learned scholar, and a man of fine
+genius, been blessed with the prescient eye of philosophy, he had
+perceived that there was not more papistry in the solemn "Trionfi" of
+Petrarch, and not less "honest pastime" in a "merrie tale" of Boccaccio,
+than in cock-fighting and dicing; and that with these works the
+imagination of the public was gradually stepping out of a supernatural
+world of folio legends, into a world of true nature, which led to that
+unrivalled era which immortalised the closing century.
+
+We must recollect that the bigotry of the Reformation, or that which
+afterwards assumed the form of puritanism, in their absurd notion of the
+nature of idolatry attached to every picture and every statue on sacred
+subjects, eventually banished the fine arts from England for a long
+century, and retarded their progress even to our own days. A curious
+dialogue has been preserved by Strype, whose interlocutors are Queen
+Elizabeth and a Dean. The Dean having obtained some of those fine German
+paintings, those book-miniatures which are of the most exquisite finish,
+placed them in her majesty's prayer-book. For this the queen proscribed
+the dean, as she did those beautiful illuminations, as "Romish and
+idolatrous;" and with a Gothic barbarism, strange in a person with her
+Attic taste, commanded the clergy "to wash all pictures out of their
+walls." To this circumstance the painter Barry ascribes the backward
+state of the fine arts, which so long made us a by-word among the
+nations of Europe, and even induced the critical historian of the arts,
+Winkelman, to imagine that the climate of England presented an internal
+obstruction to the progress of art itself; it was too long supposed that
+no Englishman could ever aspire to be an artist of genius. The same
+principle which urged Ascham to denounce all Italian books, instigated
+his royal pupil "to wash out all pictures;" and even so late as the
+reign of George the Third, when the artists of England made a noble
+offer, gratuitously to decorate our churches with productions of their
+own composition, the Bishop of London forbade the glorious attempt to
+redeem English art from the anathema of foreign critics.
+
+Ascham, whose constitutional delicacy often impeded his studies, died
+prematurely. The parsimonious queen emphatically rated his value by
+declaring, that she would rather have lost ten thousand pounds--no part
+of which, during his life, the careless yet not the neglected Ascham
+ever shared.
+
+Roger Ascham was truly what Pope has described Gay to have been, "in wit
+a man, simplicity a child;" and he has developed his own character in
+his letters. Latin and English, they are among the earliest specimens of
+that domestic and literary correspondence in which the writer paints
+himself without reserve, with all the warm touches of a free pencil, gay
+sallies of the moment, or sorrows of the hour, confiding to the bosom of
+a friend the secrets of his heart and his condition; such as we have
+found in the letters of Gray and of Shenstone.
+
+The works of Ascham, which are collected in a single volume, remain for
+the gratification of those who preserve a pure taste for the pristine
+simplicity of our ancient writers. His native English, that English
+which we have lost, but which we are ever delighted to recover, after
+near three centuries, is still critical without pedantry, and beautiful
+without ornament: and, which cannot be said of the writings of Sir
+THOMAS ELYOT and Sir THOMAS MORE, the volume of ASCHAM is indispensable
+in every English library, whose possessor in any way aspires to connect
+together the progress of taste and of opinion in the history of our
+country.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] There were five editions of "The Scholemaster" within twenty
+    years of its first publication, of which that of 1573 is the most
+    correct and rare.--Dr. Valpy's "Cat."
+
+  [2] Baretti's "Account of the Manners of Italy," ii. 137--the most
+    curious work of this Anglo-Italian.
+
+
+
+
+PUBLIC OPINION.
+
+
+How long has existed that numerous voice which we designate as "Public
+Opinion;" which I shall neither define nor describe?
+
+The history of the English "people," considered in their political
+capacity, cannot be held to be of ancient date. The civil wars of
+England, and the intestine discords of the bloody Roses, seem to have
+nearly reduced the nation to a semi-barbarous condition; disputed
+successions, cruel factions, and family feuds, had long convulsed the
+land, and the political disorganization had been as eventful as were,
+not long after, the religious dissensions.
+
+The grandfather of Elizabeth, Henry the Seventh, had terminated a
+political crisis. It was his policy to weaken the personal influence of
+the higher nobility, whose domination our monarchs had often fatally
+experienced. This seems to have been the sole "public" concern of this
+prudential and passionless sovereign, who, as the authority of the
+potent aristocracy declined, established that despotic regality which
+remained as the inheritance of the dynasty of the Tudors.
+
+In the days of the queen's father all "public interests" were
+concentrated in the court-circle and its dependencies. The Parliament
+was but the formal echo of the voice which came from the cabinet. The
+learned Spelman has recorded that when the Lower House hesitated to pass
+the bill for the dissolution of the monasteries, they were summoned into
+the king's presence; and the Commons being first kept in waiting some
+hours in his gallery, the king entered, looking angrily on one side and
+then on the other: the dark scowl of the magnificent despot announced
+his thoughts; and they listened to the thunder of his voice. "I hear,"
+said he, "that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will
+have some of your heads."[1] I do not recollect whether it was on this
+occasion that his majesty saluted his faithful Commons as "brutes!" but
+the burly tyrant treated them as such. The penalty of their debates was
+to be their heads; therefore this important bill passed _nemine
+contradicente_!
+
+However contemptuously this monarch regarded those who were within his
+circle, he was sufficiently enlightened in the great national revolution
+he meditated to desire to gain over the multitude on his side. The very
+circumstance of the king allowing, as the letters patent run, "the free
+and liberal use of the Bible in _our own natural English tongue_," was a
+_coup-d'état_, and an evidence that Henry at one time designed to create
+a people of readers on whom he counted to side with him. The people were
+already possessed of the Reformation, before Henry the Eighth had
+renounced the papacy. The reformers abroad had diligently supplied them
+with versions of the Scriptures, and no small numbers of pamphlets
+printed abroad in English were dispersed among the early "gospellers,"
+the expressive distinction of the new heretics; a humble but fervent
+rabble of tailors, joiners, weavers, and other handicraftsmen, who left
+"the new for the old God," ready martyrs against the gross papistical
+impostures, and many females theological, who turned away from the
+corporal presence, and whom no bishop could seduce to curtsey to a
+saint.
+
+The new concession made to this people was indeed received with
+enthusiasm. All flocked to read, or to be read to. Never were the
+Scriptures so artlessly scrutinised; they furnished whole scenes for
+interludes, and were tagged with rhymes for ballads; even the grave
+judges, before they delivered their charges, prefaced them by a text.
+Each reader became an expounder, and new schismatics were busied with
+new heresies. The king had not calculated on this result; and when he
+found the nation abounded not with readers so much as with
+disputants--that controversies raged where uniformity was
+expected--Henry became so irritated at the universal distraction of
+opinion, that his first attempt to raise a public voice ended, as has
+been since often attempted, in its suppression. The permission to read
+the sacred volume was contracted by the most qualifying clauses. The
+noble and the gentry might read it "alone in their garden or orchard, or
+other retired places," but men and women in the lower ranks were
+absolutely forbidden to read it, or to have it read to them.[2]
+
+The clashing polemics of the brother and the sister of Elizabeth did not
+advance the progress of civil society. The novelists, if we may so term
+these lovers of novelty, flushed with innovation, were raging with every
+rapid change, while the ancients, in spite and in despondence, sullenly
+clung to the old, which they held could never be the obsolete. The first
+movements of the great reform seemed only to have transferred the late
+civil wars which had distracted the land, to the minds of the people in
+a civil war of opinions.
+
+When Elizabeth ascended the throne, there was yet no recognised "public"
+in the commonwealth; the people were mere fractional and incoherent
+parts of society. This heroic queen, whose position and whose masculine
+character bear some affinity to those of the great Catharine of Russia,
+had to create "a people" subservient to the very design of advancing the
+regal authority in its ascendancy. The policy of the maiden queen was
+that of her ancestors; but the same jealousy of the aristocracy turned
+her genius to a new source of influence, unknown to her progenitors, and
+which her successors afterwards hardly recognised. In the awful
+mutations through which society had been passing, some had been silently
+favourable to the queen's views. The population had considerably risen
+since the reign of Henry the Seventh.[3] Property had changed hands, and
+taken new directions; and independent classes in society were rising
+fast.
+
+The great barons formerly had kept open houses for all comers and goers;
+five hundred or a thousand "blue coats" in a single family crowded their
+castles or their mansions; these were "trencher slaves" and
+"swash-bucklers;" besides those numerous "retainers" of great lords,
+who, neither menial nor of the household, yet yielded their services on
+special occasions, for the privilege of shielding their own insolence
+under the ostentatious silver "badge," or the family arms, which none
+might strike with impunity, and escape from the hostility of the whole
+noble family. In the opening scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ our national
+bard has perpetuated the insolence of the wearers with all the reality
+of nature and correctness of custom. Such troops of idling partisans
+were only reflecting among themselves the feuds and the pride of their
+rival masters; shadows of the late civil wars which still lingered in
+the land.[4]
+
+The first blow at the independent grandeur of the nobles had been struck
+by the grandfather of the queen; the second was the consequence of the
+acts of her father. The new proprietors of the recently-acquired
+abbey-lands, and other monastic property, were not only courtiers, but
+their humbler dependents; many of them the commissioners who had
+undervalued all these manors and lordships, that they might get such
+"Robin Hood's pennyworths" more easily by the novelty of "begging" for
+them. These formed a new body of proprietors, who gradually constituted
+_a new gentry_, standing between the nobles and the commonalty; and from
+the nature of their property they became land-jobbers, letting and
+under-letting, raising rents, enhancing the prices of commodities,
+inclosing the common lands, and swallowing up the small farms by large
+ones. There arose in consequence a great change in agricultural
+pursuits, no longer practised to acquire a miserable subsistence; the
+land was changed into a new mine of wealth; and among the wealthiest
+classes of English subjects were the graziers, who indeed became the
+founders of many families.[5]
+
+The nobles found their revenues declining, as an excess of expenditure
+surprised them; this changeable state only raised their murmurs, for
+they seemed insensible to the cause. Their ancient opulence was secretly
+consuming itself; their troops of domestics were thinned in numbers; and
+a thousand families disappeared, who once seemed to have sprung out of
+the soil, where whole generations had flourished through the wide
+domains of the lord. A great change had visibly occurred in the baronial
+halls. The octogenarians in Elizabeth's later days complained that the
+country was depopulating fast; and the chimneys of the great mansions
+which had smoked the year round, now scarcely announced "a merry
+Christmas."
+
+A transition from one state of society to another will always be looked
+on suspiciously by those who may deem the results problematical; but it
+will be eagerly opposed by those who find the innovation unfavourable to
+themselves. The results of the new direction of landed property,
+incomprehensible to the nobles, were abhorrent to the feelings of the
+people. Among "the people," that is, the populace, there still survived
+tender reminiscences of the warmth of the abbots' kitchens; and many a
+wayfaring guest could tell how erst by ringing at the monastic gate the
+wants of life had been alleviated. The monks, too, had been excellent
+landlords living amid their tenants; and while the husbandmen stood at
+easy rents, the public markets were regularly maintained by a constant
+demand. In the breaking up of the monasteries many thousands of persons
+had been dispersed; and it would seem that among that sturdy community
+of vagabonds which now rose over the land, some low Latin words in their
+"pedler's French," as the canting language they devised is called,
+indicate their origin from the familiar dialect of the ejected poor
+scholars of the late monastic institutions.
+
+The commotions which rose in all parts of the country during the brief
+reign of Edward the Sixth were instigated by the ancient owners of these
+lands, who conceived that they had been disinherited by the spoliators;
+thus weakly they avenged their irrecoverable losses; nor did such
+leaders want for popular pretences among a discontented populace, who,
+as they imagined, were themselves sufferers in the common cause. We are
+informed, on the indubitable authority of the diary of the youthful
+Edward, that "_the_ PEOPLE had conceived a wonderful hatred against
+GENTLEMEN whom they held as _their enemies_." The king seems distinctly
+to distinguish the gentry from the nobility.
+
+In the decline of the great households a result, however, occurred,
+which tended greatly to improve the independent condition of "the
+people." The manual arts had been practised from generation to
+generation, the son succeeding the father in the wide domains of some
+noble; but when the great lords were contracting the scale of their
+establishments, and failed to furnish occupation to these dependents,
+the mechanics and artificers took refuge in the towns; there localised,
+they were taught to reap the fruits of their own daily industry; and as
+their labour became more highly appreciated, and the arts of commerce
+were more closely pursued, they considerably heightened the cost of
+those objects of necessity or pleasure which supplied the wants or the
+luxuries of the noble. In becoming citizens, they ceased to be mere
+domestics in the great households; a separate independence was raised
+between the lord and his mechanic; the humble class lost something in
+leaving the happy carelessness of life for a condition more anxious and
+precarious; but the influence of the noble was no longer that of the
+lord paramount, but simply the influence of the customer over the
+tradesman; "an influence," as Hume shrewdly remarks, "which can never be
+dangerous to civil government."
+
+We now distinctly perceive new classes in civil society rising out of
+the decline of the preponderating power of the great barons, and of the
+new disposition of landed property; the gentry, the flourishing
+agriculturist, and those mechanics and artificers who carried on their
+trades, independently of their former lordly patrons; we now, therefore,
+discern the first elements of popularity.
+
+There was now "a people," who might be worthy of entering into the views
+of the statesman; but it was a divided people. Among them, the queen
+knew, lay concealed her domestic enemies; a more novel religion than the
+new was on the watch to shake her established church; and no
+inconsiderable portion of her subjects in their papal consciences were
+traitors. The arts of juncture, or the keeping together parts broken and
+separated, making hearts compliant which were stubbornly opposed to each
+other, demanded at once the firmness and the indulgence of the wisest
+policy; and such was the administration of Elizabeth. A reign of
+continued struggle, which extended to nearly half a century, was a
+probationary period for royalty; and a precarious throne, while it
+naturally approximated the sovereign to the people, also taught the
+nation its own capacities, by maintaining their monarch's glory amid her
+external and internal enemies.
+
+The nobility was to feel the weight of the royal prerogative; no noble
+families were permitted to intermarry, and no peer could leave the
+kingdom, without the license of the queen. But at the very time she was
+ruling them with a potent hand, Elizabeth courted the eyes and the
+hearts of "the people;" she sought every occasion to exhibit her person
+in processions and progresses, and by her speech and manner shed her
+graciousness on the humblest of her subjects. Not slow to perceive their
+wants and wishes, she it was who first gave the people a theatre, as her
+royal style expressed it, "for the recreation of our loving subjects, as
+for our solace and pleasure;" and this at a time when her council were
+divided in their opinion.
+
+Participating in the inmost feelings of the people, she commanded that
+the awful tomes of Fox's "Acts and Monuments," a book written, as the
+author has himself expressed it, for "the simple people," should be
+chained to the desk of every church and common hall. In this "Book of
+Martyrs," gathered from all quarters, and chronicling the obscurest
+individuals, many a reader, kindling over the lengthened page, dwelt on
+his own domestic tale in the volume of the nation. These massy volumes
+were placed easy of access for perpetual reference, and doubtless their
+earnest spirit multiplied Protestants.
+
+No object which concerned the prosperity of the people but the Queen
+identified herself with it; she saluted Sir Thomas Gresham as her "royal
+merchant," and opening with her presence his Exchange, she called it
+Royal. It is a curious evidence of her system to win over the people's
+loyalty, that she suggested to Sir Thomas Wilson to transfuse the
+eloquence of Demosthenes into the language of the people, to prepare
+them by such solemn admonitions against the machinations of her most
+dreaded enemy. Our translator reveals the design by his title: "The
+Three Orations of Demosthenes, with those his fower Orations titled
+expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedonie, most needful to
+be redde in these dangerous dayes, of all them that love their
+countrie's libertie." The Queen considered the aptness of their
+application, and the singular felicity of transferring the inordinate
+ambition of Philip of Macedon to Philip of Spain. To these famous
+"philippics" was prefixed the solemn oath that the young men of Greece
+took to defend their country against the royal invader, "at this time
+right needful for all Christians, not only for Englishmen, to observe
+and follow."
+
+It was not until eighteen years after that the Armada sailed from the
+shores of Spain, and this translation perpetuates an instance of
+political foresight.
+
+The genius of Elizabeth created her age; surrounding herself by no puny
+favourites of an hour, in the circle of her royalty were seen the most
+laborious statesmen our annals record, and a generation of romantic
+commanders; the secretaries of state were eminently learned; and the
+queen was all these herself, in her tried prudence, her dauntless
+intrepidity, and her lettered accomplishments. The energies of the
+sovereign reached the people, and were responded to; the spirit-stirring
+events rose with the times: it was a reign of enterprise and emulation,
+a new era of adventure and glory. The heroes of England won many a day's
+battle in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain, and in Portugal; and the
+ships of England unfurled their flags in unknown seas, and left the
+glory of the maiden queen in new lands.
+
+It would be no slight volume which should contain the illustrious names
+of a race of romantic adventurers, who lost their sleep to gain new
+trophies in a campaign, to settle a remote colony, or to give a name to
+a new continent. All ranks in society felt the impulse of the same
+electrical stroke, and even the cupidity of the mere trader was elevated
+into heroism, and gained a patent of heraldry. The spirits of that age
+seemed busied with day-dreams, of discovering a new people, or founding
+a new kingdom. Shakespeare alludes to this passion of the times:
+
+  Some to the wars, to try their fortune there;
+  Some to discover islands far away.
+
+If our Drake was considered by the Spaniard as the most terrible of
+pirates, in England he was admired as another Columbus. The moral
+feeling may sometimes be more justly regulated by the degree of
+latitude. The Norrises, the Veres, the Grenvilles, the Cavendishes, the
+Earl of Cumberland, and the Sidneys, bear a lustre in their characters
+which romance has not surpassed; and many there were as resolutely
+ambitious as Sir John Davies, who has left his name to the Straits still
+bearing it. Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Sir Philip, who became a
+distinguished statesman, had once designed to raise a new kingdom in
+America; and his romantic son resumed this design of founding an empire
+for the Sidneys. The project was secretly planned between our puerile
+hero and the adventurous Drake, and was only frustrated by the queen's
+arrest of our hero at Plymouth. Of the same batch of kingdom-founders
+was Sir Walter Rawleigh; he baptised with the spirit of loyalty his
+"Virginia." Muscovy, at that stirring period, was a dominion as strange
+as America and the Indies; during the extraordinary events of this
+period, when Elizabeth had obtained a monopoly of the trade of that
+country, the Czar proposed to marry an English lady; a British alliance,
+both personal and political, he imagined, should his subjects revolt,
+might secure an asylum in the land of his adoption. The daughter of the
+Earl of Huntington was actually selected by the queen to be the Czarina;
+but her ladyship was so terrified at the Muscovite and his icy region,
+that she lost the honour of being a romantic empress, and the civilizer
+of all the Russias. Thus, wherever the winds blew, the name of Elizabeth
+was spread; "the great globe itself" seemed to be our "inheritance," and
+seemed not too vast a space to busy the imaginations of the people.
+
+This was the time of first beginnings in the art of guiding public
+opinion. Ample volumes, like those of Fox, powerful organs of the
+feelings of the people, were given to them. The Chronicles of Hall and
+Holinshed opened for them the glory of the love of their father-land. It
+was the genius of this active age of exploits which inspired RICHARD
+HAKLUYT to form one of the most remarkable collections in any language,
+yet it was solely to be furnished from our own records, and the mighty
+actors in the face of the universe were solely to be Englishmen. Now
+appeared the three tomes of "The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and
+Discoveries, made by the English Nation;" northward, southward, and
+westward, and at last "the new-found world of America;" a world, with
+both Indies, discovered within their own century!--these amazed and
+delighted all classes of society. The legendary voyages of the monkish
+chroniclers, their maritime expeditions, opening with the fabulous
+Arthur, hardly exceeded the simplicity of our first discoverers. Many a
+hero had led on the adventurers; but their secretaries and historians
+were often themselves too astonished at what they witnessed, and stayed
+too short a time, to recover their better judgment in new places, and
+among new races of men. Sanctioned by many noble and genuine adventures,
+not less authentic appeared their terrors and their wonder; in polar
+icebergs, or before that island which no ship could approach, wherein
+devils dwelt; or among the sunny isles of Greece, and the burning
+regions of Ormus and Malacca, and the far realms of Cambaya and Cathay;
+in Ethiopia and in Muscovy, in Persia and in Peru; on the dark coast of
+Guinea, and beyond in Africa; and in Virginia, with her feathered
+chiefs; with many a tale of Tripoli and Algiers, where Britons were
+found in chains, till the sovereign of England demanded their
+restitution, and of the Holy Land, where the peaceful crusaders now only
+knelt in pilgrimage. All this convinced them that the world was
+everywhere inhabited; and that all was veracious, as Sebastian Cabot,
+the true rival of Columbus, and perhaps our countryman, had marked in
+his laborious maps, which he had engraved, and which were often wondered
+at, as they hung in the Privy Gallery at Westminster. Alas! for the
+readers of modern travels, who can no longer participate in the wild and
+awful sensations of the all-believing faith of "the home-bred wit" of
+the Elizabethan era--the first readers of HAKLUYT'S immense collection.
+
+The advancement of general society out of its first exclusive circle
+became apparent when "the public" themselves were gradually forming a
+component part of the empire.
+
+"The new learning," as the free discussions of opinions and the popular
+literature of the day were distinguished, widely spread. Society was no
+longer scattered in distant insulations. Their observation was more
+extended, their thought was more grave; tastes multiplied, and finer
+sympathies awakened. "The theatre" and "the ordinary" first rose in this
+early stage of our civilization; and the ceaseless publications of the
+day, in the current form of pamphlets, were snatched up, even in the
+intervening pauses of theatrical representation, or were commented upon
+by some caustic oracle at the ordinary, or in Powles' walk. We were now
+at the crisis of that great moral revolution in the intellectual history
+of a people, when the people become readers, and the people become
+writers. In the closer intercourse with their neighbours, their
+insulated homeliness was giving way to more exotic manners; they seemed
+to imitate every nation while they were incurring the raillery or the
+causticity of our satirists, who are not usually the profoundest
+philosophers. The satirists are the earliest recorders of manners, but,
+fugitive historians of fugitive objects, they only sport on the surface
+of things. The progressive expansion of social life, through its
+homeliest transitions, are more clearly discerned in the perspective
+view; for those who are occupied by opening their narrow ways, and by
+lengthening their streets, do not contemplate on the architectural city
+which is reserved for posterity.
+
+It was popular to ridicule the finical "Monsieur Traveller," who was
+somewhat insolent by having "swum in a gondola;" or to raise a laugh at
+him who had "bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, and
+his bonnet in Germany." It did not occur to our immortal satirist that
+the taste which had borrowed the doublet and the bonnet, had also
+introduced to his happier notice the tales of Bandello and the Giuletta
+of Luigi Porto. The dandy of Bishop Hall almost resembles the fantastic
+picture of Horace, in illustrating a combination of absurdities. Hall
+paints with vigour:
+
+  A French head join'd to neck Italian;
+  His thighs from Germany, his breast from Spain;
+  An Englishman in none, a fool in all.
+
+But if this egregious man of fashion borrowed the wordiness of Italian
+compliment, or the formality of the Spanish courtesy, he had been also
+taught the sonnet and the stanza, and those musical studies which now
+entered into the system of education, and probably gave delicacy to our
+emotions, and euphony to our language. The first attempts in the
+refinements of manners are unavoidably vitiated by too close a copy; and
+it is long before that becomes graceful which began in affectation. When
+the people experienced a ceaseless irritability, a marvelling curiosity
+to learn foreign adventures and to inspect strange objects, and "laid
+out ten doits to see a dead Indian," these were the nascent propensities
+which made Europe for them a common country, and indicated that insular
+genius which at a distant day was to add new dominions to the British
+empire.
+
+This public opinion which this sovereign was creating she watched with
+solicitude, not only at home, but even abroad. No book was put forth
+against her government, but we find her ministers selecting immediately
+the most learned heads or the most able writers to furnish the replies.
+Burghley, we are told, had his emissaries to inform him of the ballads
+sung in the streets; and a curious anecdote at the close of the reign of
+Elizabeth informs us how anxiously she pondered on the manifestations of
+her people's feelings. The party of Lord Essex, on the afternoon before
+their insurrection, ordered the play of the tragical abdication of
+Richard the Second. It is one of the charges in their trial; and we
+learn, from a more secret quarter than the public trial, that the queen
+deeply felt the acting of this play at that moment as the watchword of
+the rebels, expressive of their designs. The queen's fears transformed
+her into Richard the Second; and a single step seemed to divide her
+throne from her grave. The recollection of this circumstance long
+haunted her spirits; for, a year and a half afterwards, in a literary
+conversation with the antiquary Lambarde, the subject of a portrait of
+Richard the Second occurring, the queen exclaimed, "I am Richard the
+Second, know ye not that?" The antiquary, at once wary and ingenuous,
+replied, well knowing that the virgin queen would shrink were her
+well-beloved Essex to be cast among ordinary rebels, "Such a wicked
+imagination was attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned
+creature that ever your majesty made." The queen replied, "He that will
+forget God will also forget his benefactors." So long afterwards was
+the royal Elizabeth still brooding over the gloomy recollection.
+
+In the art of government a new principle seemed to have arisen, that of
+adopting and guiding public opinion, which, in the mutations of civil
+and political society, had emerged as from a chaos. A vacillating and
+impetuous monarch could not dare it; it was the work of a thoughtful
+sovereign, whose sex inspired a reign of love. Elizabeth not only lived
+in the hearts of her people, but survived in their memories; when she
+was no more, her birthday was long observed as a festival day; and so
+prompt was the remembrance of her deeds and her words, that when Charles
+the First once published his royal speech, an insidious patriot sent
+forth "The Speech of Queen Elizabeth," which being innocently printed by
+the king's printer, brought him into trouble. Our philosophic
+politician, Harrington, has a remarkable observation on the
+administration of Elizabeth, which, laying aside his peculiar views on
+monarchy, and his theoretical balances in the State, we may partly
+adopt. He says, "If the government of Elizabeth be rightly weighed, it
+seems rather the exercise of a principality in a commonwealth than a
+sovereign power in a monarchy. Certain it is that she ruled wholly with
+an art she had to high perfection, by humouring and blessing her
+people."
+
+Did Harrington imagine that political resembles physical science? In the
+revelations of the Verulamian philosophy, it was a favourite axiom with
+its founder, that we subdue Nature by yielding to her.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Spelman's "History of Sacrilege."
+
+  [2] 34 Henry VIII.
+
+  [3] Hallam's "Constitution of England," i. 8, 4to.
+
+  [4] The remains of this feudal pomp and power were visible even at a
+    later period in the succeeding reign, when we find the Earl of
+    Nottingham, in his embassy to Spain, accompanied by a retinue of five
+    hundred persons, and the Earl of Hertford, at Brussels, carried three
+    hundred gentlemen.
+
+  [5] "The graziers have assured me of their credit, and some of them
+    may be trusted for a hundred thousand pounds."--Sir J. Harrington's
+    Prologue to _The Metamorphosis of Ajax_.
+
+
+
+
+ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY.
+
+
+Some of the first scholars of our country stepped out of the circle of
+their classical studies with the patriotic design of inculcating the
+possibility of creating a literary language. This was a generous effort
+in those who had already secured their supremacy by their skill and
+dexterity in the two languages consecrated by scholars. Many of the
+learned engaged in the ambitious reform of our _orthography_, then
+regulated by no certain laws; but while each indulged in some scheme
+different from his predecessors, the language seemed only to be the more
+disguised amid such difficult improvements and fantastic inventions.
+
+A curious instance of the monstrous anomalies of our orthography in the
+infancy of our literature, when a spelling-book was yet a precious thing
+which had no existence, appears in this letter of the Duchess of Norfolk
+to Cromwell, Earl of Essex.
+
+  "_My ffary gode lord--her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a
+  glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld I pra you take hit (in) wort An
+  hy wer habel het showlde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone._"
+
+These lines were written by one of the most accomplished ladies of the
+sixteenth century, "the friend of scholars and the patron of
+literature." Dr. Nott, who has supplied this literary curiosity, has
+modernized the passage word by word; and though the idiom of the times
+is preserved, it no longer wears any appearance of vulgarity or of
+illiteracy.
+
+"My very good lord,--Here I send you, in token of the New Year, a glass
+of setyll set in silver gilt; I pray you take it (in) worth. An I were
+able, it should be better. I would it were worth a thousand crowns."
+
+The domestic correspondence, as appears in letters of the times, seems
+to indicate that the writers imagined that, by conferring larger
+dimensions on their words by the duplication of redundant consonants,
+they were augmenting the force, even of a monosyllable![1]
+
+In such disorder lay our orthography, that writers, however peculiar in
+their mode of spelling, did not even write the same words uniformly.
+Elizabeth herself wrote one word, which assuredly she had constantly in
+her mind, seven different ways, for thus has this queen written the word
+_sovereign_. The royal mistress of eight languages seemed at a loss
+which to choose for her command. The orthography of others eminent for
+their learning was as remarkable, and sometimes more eruditely
+whimsical, either in the attempt to retrace the etymology, or to modify
+exotic words to a native origin; or, finally, to suit the popular
+pronunciation. What system or method could be hoped for at a time when
+there prevailed a strange discrepancy in the very names of persons, so
+variously written not only by their friends but by their owners? Lord
+Burleigh, when Secretary of State, daily signing despatches with the
+favourite _Leicester_, yet spelt his name _Lecester_; and Leicester
+himself has subscribed his own name eight different ways.[2]
+
+At that period down to a much later, every one seems to have been at a
+loss to write their own names. The name of _Villers_ is spelt fourteen
+different ways in the deeds of that family. The simple dissyllabic but
+illustrious name of _Percy_, the bishop found in family documents, they
+had contrived to write in fifteen different ways.
+
+This unsettled state of our _orthography_, and what it often depended
+on, our _orthoepy_, was an inconvenience detected even at a very early
+period. The learned Sir JOHN CHEKE, the most accomplished Greek scholar
+of the age, descended from correcting the Greek pronunciation to invent
+a system of English orthography. Cheke was no formal pedant; with an
+enlarged notion of the vernacular language, he aimed to restore the
+English of his day to what then he deemed to be its purity. He would
+allow of no words but such as were true English, or of Saxon original;
+admitting of no adoption of any foreign word into the English language,
+which at this early period our scholar deemed sufficiently copious. He
+objected to the English translation of the Bible, for its introduction
+of many foreign words; and to prove them unnecessary he retranslated the
+Gospel of St. Matthew, written on his own system of a new orthography.
+His ear was nice, and his Attic taste had the singular merit of giving
+concision to the perplexed periods of our early style. But his
+orthography deterred the eyes of his readers; however the learned Cheke
+was right in his abstract principle, it operated wrong when put in
+practice, for every newly-spelt word seemed to require a peculiar
+vocabulary.
+
+When Secretaries of State were also men of literature, the learned Sir
+THOMAS SMITH, under Elizabeth, composed his treatise on "The English
+Commonwealth," both in Latin and in English--the worthy companion of the
+great work of Fortescue. Not deterred by the fate of his friend, the
+learned Cheke, he projected even a bolder system, to correct the writing
+of English words. He designed to relieve the ear from the clash of
+supernumerary consonants, and to liquify by a vowelly confluence. But
+though the scholar exposed the absurdity of the general practice, where
+in certain words the redundant letters became mutes, or do not
+comprehend the sounds which are expressed, while in other words we have
+no letters which can express the sounds by which they are spoken, he had
+only ascertained the disease, for he was not equally fortunate in the
+prevention. An enlargement of the alphabet, ten vowels instead of five,
+and a fantastical mixture of the Roman, the Greek, and the Saxon
+characters, required an Englishman to be a very learned man to read and
+write his maternal language. This project was only substituting for one
+difficulty another more strange.
+
+Were we to course the wide fields which these early "rackers of
+orthography" have run over, we should start, at every turn, some strange
+"winged words;" but they would be fantastic monsters, neither birds with
+wings nor hares with feet. Shakspeare sarcastically describes this
+numerous race: "Now he is turned ORTHOGRAPHER his words are a very
+fantastical banquet; just so many strange dishes." Some may amuse. One
+affords a quaint definition of the combination of _orthoepy_ with
+_orthography_, for he would teach "how to write or _paint the image of
+man's voice_ like to the life or nature."[3] The most popular amender of
+our defective orthography was probably BULLOKAR, for his work at least
+was republished. He proposed a bold confusion, to fix the fugitive
+sounds by recasting the whole alphabet, and enlarging its number from
+twenty-four to more letters, giving two sounds to one letter, to some
+three; at present no mark or difference shows how the sounded letters
+should be sounded, while our speech (or orthography) so widely differed;
+but the fault, says old Bullokar, is in the _picture_, that is, the
+letters, not the speech. His scheme would have turned the language into
+a sort of music-book, where the notes would have taught the tones.[4] I
+extract from his address to his country a curious passage. "In true
+orthographie, both the _eye_, the _voice_, and the _eare_ must consent
+perfectly without any let, doubt, or maze. Which want of concord in the
+eye, voice, and ear I did perceive almost thirtie yeares past by the
+very voice of children, who, guided by the eye with the letter, and
+giving voice according to the name thereof, as they were taught to name
+letters, yielded the eare of the hearer a degree contrary sound to the
+word looked for; hereby grewe quarrels in the teacher, and lothsomeness
+in the learner, and great payne to both, and the conclusion was that
+both teacher and learner must go by rote, or no rule could be followed,
+when of 37 parts 31 kept no square, nor true joint."
+
+All these reformers, with many subsequent ones, only continued to
+disclose the uneasy state of the minds of the learned in respect to our
+inveterate orthography; so difficult was it, and so long did it take to
+teach the nation how to spell, an art in which we have never perfectly
+succeeded. Even the learned Mulcaster, in his zealous labour to "the
+right writing of the English tongue," failed, though his principle
+seems one of the most obvious in simplicity. This scholar, a master of
+St. Paul's school, freed from collegiate prejudices, maintained that
+"words should be written as they were spoken." But where were we to seek
+for the standard of our orthoepy? Who was to furnish the model of our
+speech, in a land where the pronunciation varied from the court, the
+capital, or the county, and as mutable from age to age? The same effort
+was made among our neighbours. In 1570 the learned Joubert attempted to
+introduce a new orthography, without, however, the aid of strange
+characters. His rule was only to give those letters which yield the
+proper pronunciation; thus he wrote, _oeuvres_, uvres; _françoise_,
+fransaise; _temps_, tems.
+
+Among the early reformers of our vernacular idiom, the name of RICHARD
+MULCASTER has hardly reached posterity. Our philologer has dignified a
+small volume ostensibly composed for "the training of children,"[5] by
+the elevated view he opened of far distant times from his own of our
+vernacular literature--and he had the glory of having made this noble
+discovery when our literature was yet in its infancy.
+
+This learned master of St. Paul's school developes the historical
+progress of language, on the great philosophical principle that no
+impediment existed to prevent the modern from rivalling the more perfect
+ancient languages. In opposition to the many who contended that no
+subject can be philosophically treated in the maternal English, he
+maintained that no one language, naturally, is more refined than
+another, but is made so by the industry of "eloquent speech" in the
+writers themselves, and by the excellence of the matter; a native soil
+becomes more genial in emulating a foreign. I preserve the pleasing
+illustration of his argument in the purity of his own prose, and because
+he was the prophet of our literature.
+
+"The people of Athens thus beautified their speech and enriched their
+tongue with all kinds of knowledge, both bred within Greece and borrowed
+from without. The people of Rome having plotted (planned) their
+government much like the Athenians, became enamoured of their
+eloquence, and translated their learning wherewith they were in love.
+The Roman authority first planted the Latin among us here, by force of
+their conquest; the use thereof for matters of learning doth cause it
+continue, though the conquest be expired. And, therefore, the learned
+tongues, so termed of their store, may thank their own people both for
+their fining (refinement) at home and their favour abroad. But did not
+these tongues use even the same means to brave (adorn) themselves, ere
+they proved so beautiful?
+
+"There be two special considerations which keep the Latin and other
+learned tongues, though chiefly the Latin, in great countenance among
+us; the one is the knowledge which is registered in them; the other is
+the conference which the learned of Europe do commonly use by them, both
+in speaking and writing. We seek them for profit, and keep them for that
+conference; but whatever else may be done in our tongue, either to serve
+private use, or the beautifying our speech, I do not see but it may well
+be admitted, _even though in the end it displaced the Latin_, as the
+Latin did others, and furnished itself by the Latin learning. For is it
+not indeed a marvellous bondage to become servants to one tongue for
+learning sake, the most of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we
+may have the very same treasure in our own tongue, with the gain of most
+time? Our own, bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom; the
+Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom. I honour the Latin, but I
+worship the English. I wish all were in ours which they had from others;
+and by their own precedent, do let us understand how boldly we may
+venture, notwithstanding the opinion of some of our people, as desire
+rather to please themselves with a foreign tongue wherewith they are
+acquainted, than to profit their country in her natural language, where
+their acquaintance should be. The tongues which we study were not the
+first getters, though by learned travel (labour) they prove good
+keepers; but they are ready to return and discharge their trust when it
+shall be demanded, in such a sort, as it was committed for term of
+years, and not for inheritance."
+
+"But it is objected," our learned Mulcaster proceeds, with his engaging
+simplicity, that "the English tongue is of small reach, stretching no
+further than this island of ours, nay not there over all. What tho'
+(then)? It reigneth there, though it go not beyond sea. And be not
+English folk finish (refined) as well as the foreign, I pray you? And
+why not our tongue for speaking, and our pen for writing, as well as our
+bodies for apparel, and our tastes for diet? But you say that we have no
+cunning (knowledge) proper to our soil to cause foreigners to study it,
+as a treasure of such store. What tho' (then)? Why raise not the English
+wits, if they will bend their wills either, for matter or for method, in
+their own tongue, TO BE IN TIME AS WELL SOUGHT TO BY FOREIGN STUDENTS
+FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE, AS OUR SOIL IS SOUGHT TO AT THIS TIME
+BY FOREIGN MERCHANTS FOR INCREASE OF THEIR WEALTH?"[6]
+
+We, who have lived to verify the prediction, should not less esteem the
+prophet; the pedagogue, MULCASTER, is a philosopher addressing men--a
+genius who awakens a nation. His indeed was that "prophetic eye," which,
+amid the rudeness of its own days, in its clear vision contemplated on
+the futurity of the English language; and the day has arrived, when "_in
+the end it displaced the Latin_," and "FOREIGN STUDENTS" learn our
+language "FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE."
+
+The design of Mulcaster to regulate orthography by orthoepy was revived
+so late as in 1701, in a curious work, under the title of "Practical
+Phonography," by John Jones, M.D. He proposed to write words as they are
+"fashionably" sounded. He notices "the constant complaints which were
+then rife in consequence of an unsettled orthography." He proclaims war
+against "the visible letters," which, not sounded, occasion a faulty
+pronunciation. I suspect we had not any spelling-books in 1701. I have
+seen Dyche's of 1710, but I do not recollect whether this was the first
+edition; this sage of practical orthography was compelled to submit to
+custom, and taught his scholars to read by the _ear_, and not by the
+_eye_. "Yet custom," he adds, "is not the truest way of speaking and
+writing, from not regarding the originals whence words are derived;
+hence, abundance of errors have crept both into the pronunciation and
+writing, and English is grown a medley in both these respects." Such was
+the lamentation of an honest pedagogue in 1710.
+
+The "Phonography" of Dr. Jones was probably well received; for three
+years after, in 1704, he returned to his "spelling," which, he observed,
+"however mean, concerned the benefit of millions of persons." He had a
+notion to "invent a universal language to excel all others, if he
+thought that people would be induced to use it."[7]
+
+Even the learned of our own times have indulged some of these
+philological reveries. One would hardly have suspected that Dr.
+FRANKLIN, whose genius was so wholly practical, contemplated to
+revolutionise the English alphabet: words were to be spelt by the sounds
+of their letters, which were to be regulated by six new characters, and
+certain changes in the vowels. He seems to have revived old Bullokar.
+PINKERTON has left us a ludicrous scheme of what he calls "an improved
+language." Our vowel terminations amount but to one-fourth of the
+language; all substantives closing in hard consonants were to have a
+final vowel, and the consonant was to be omitted after the vowel. We
+were to acquire the Italian euphony by this presumed melody for our
+harsh terminations. In this disfigurement of the language, a _quack_
+would be a _quaco_, and _that_ would be _tha_. Plurals were to
+terminate in _a_: _pens_ would be _pena_; papers, _papera_. He has very
+innocently printed the entire "Vision of Mirza" from the "Spectator," on
+his own system; the ludicrous jargon at once annihilates itself. Not
+many years ago, JAMES ELPHINSTONE, a scholar, and a very injudicious
+one, performed an extraordinary experiment. He ventured to publish some
+volumes of a literary correspondence, on the plan of writing the words
+as they are pronounced. But this editor, being a Scotchman, had two
+sorts of Scotticisms to encounter--in idiom and in sound.
+Notwithstanding the agreeable subjects of a literary correspondence, it
+is not probable that any one ever conquered a single perusal of pages,
+which tortured the eye, if they did not the understanding.
+
+We may smile at these repeated attempts of the learned English, in their
+inventions of alphabets, to establish the correspondence of
+pronunciation with orthography, and at their vowelly conceits to
+melodise our orthoepy. All these, however, demonstrate that our language
+has never been written as it ought to have been. All our writers have
+experienced this inconvenience. Considerable changes in spelling were
+introduced at various periods, by way of experiment; this liberty was
+used by the Elizabethan writers, for an improvement on the orthography
+of Gower and Chaucer. Since the days of Anne we have further deviated,
+yet after all our efforts we are constrained to read words not as they
+are written, and to write different words with the same letters, which
+leaves them ambiguous. And now, no reform shall ever happen, short of
+one by "the omnipotence of parliament," which the great luminary of law
+is pleased to affirm, "can do anything except making a man a woman."
+Customary errors are more tolerable than the perplexing innovations of
+the most perverse ingenuity.[8] The eye bewildered in such uncouth pages
+as are here recorded, found the most capricious orthography in popular
+use always less perplexing than the attempt to write words according to
+their pronunciation, which every one regulated by the sounds familiar
+to his own ear, and usually to his own county. Even the dismemberment of
+words, omitting or changing letters, distracts attention;[9] and modern
+readers have often been deterred from the study of our early writers by
+their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have,
+therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by
+printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have
+transcribed them.
+
+Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye,
+or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such
+reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written
+language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of
+the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not
+spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words
+leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar
+invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, "a
+pronouncing dictionary," which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt
+to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker,
+and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary
+disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are
+after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing
+indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the
+language of the Cherokees.[10]
+
+We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of
+the English language. All words ending in _ugh_ must confound him: for
+instance, _though_, _through_, and _enough_, alike written, are each
+differently pronounced; and should he give us _bough_ rightly, he may be
+forgiven should he blunder at _cough_; if he escape in safety from
+_though_, the same wind will blow him out of _thought_. What can the
+foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language
+pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar who holds little
+intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his
+acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a
+material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A
+list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a
+single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written.
+
+That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been
+considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have
+laudably persevered in writing the past tense _red_, as a distinction
+from the present _read_, and anciently I have found it printed _redde_.
+Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not
+distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily contused
+the times. _G_ before _I_ ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded
+hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might
+equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of
+scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing
+words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled
+by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute _b_
+in _doubt_ and _debt_, it was objected that by this castration of a
+superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their
+Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the
+French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they
+wrote _tems_, rejecting the _p_ in _temps_, they wholly lost sight of
+the Latin original, _tempus_. Milton seems to have laid down certain
+principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions
+printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more
+natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose
+pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their
+primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the
+analogy of languages.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See "The Paston Letters," edited by Sir JOHN FENN; and LODGE'S
+    authentic and valuable Collection.
+
+  [2] George Chalmers' "Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare
+    Papers," 94.--See on this subject in "Curiosities of Literature,"
+    art. "Orthography of Proper Names." [Also a note on the orthography
+    of Shakspeare's name, in an Essay on that Poet, in a future page of
+    the present volume.]
+
+  [3] "An Orthographie, composed by J(ohn) H(art), Chester Herald,"
+    1569. A book of extreme rarity. A copy at Horne Tooke's sale was sold
+    for 6_l._ 6_s._ It is in the British Museum.
+
+  [4] "Bullokar's Booke at large for the Amendment of Orthographie for
+    English Speech," &c. &c., 1580, 4to; republished in 1586.
+
+  [5] "The first part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chieflie of
+    the _right writing of our English Tong_," 1582, 12mo.
+
+  [6] In this copious extract from Mulcaster's little volume, we have a
+    specimen of the unadulterated simplicity of the English language. I
+    have only modernised the orthography for the convenience of the
+    reader, but I have not altered a single word.
+
+  [7] The second work of our Phonographer is entitled "The New Art of
+    Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to
+    Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read
+    Words by the Sight thereof,--rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c.,"
+    by J. Jones, M.D., 1704.
+
+    I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are
+    pronounced--
+
+      VISIBLE LETTERS.    CUSTOMARY AND FASHIONABLY.
+          Mayor                     Mair.
+          Worcester                 Wooster
+          Dictionary                Dixnary
+          Bought                    Baut.
+
+    "All words", he observes, "were originally written as sounded, and
+    all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and
+    pleasure's sake from
+
+      the harder to the easier     \
+      the harsher to the pleasanter > sound."
+      the longer to the shorter    /
+
+  [8] The Grammar prefixed to Johnson's Dictionary, curiously
+    illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will
+    furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts.
+
+  [9] When we began to drop the letter K in such words as _physic_,
+    _music_, _public_, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790,
+    observed on this new fashion, that "forty years ago no schoolboy had
+    dared to have done this with impunity." These words in older English
+    had even another superfluous letter, being _physicke_, _musicke_,
+    _publicke_. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be
+    considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonants _ck_
+    have not been shorn of their final _k_. We do not write _attac_,
+    _ransac_, _bedec_, nor _bulloc_, nor _duc_, nor good _luc_.
+
+    The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though
+    identically the same in point of sound, produces a painful effect on
+    the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of
+    monosyllables in which the final and redundant _k_ is not
+    written,--"_Dic_ gave _Jac_ a _kic_ when _Jac_ gave _Dic_ a _knoc_ on
+    the _bac_ with a _thic stic_." If even such familiar words and simple
+    monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost
+    a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded,
+    disguised by the mutilation of several letters.
+
+  [10] A most serious attempt was made a few years ago to establish
+    English spelling by sound. A journal called the _Fonetic Nuz_ (_sic_
+    to give the idea of the pronunciation of the word _News_) was
+    published, and Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" printed with a type
+    expressly cast for the novel forms. The ruin of the projector closed
+    the experiment.--ED.
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE.
+
+
+A strong predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their
+vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what
+is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same
+utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general
+propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?
+
+These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and
+the Romans would not only afford a classical ear, long exercised in the
+nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied
+to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design--that of
+elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but
+unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true
+intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had
+this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a
+privileged class. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days,
+iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears
+by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.[1]
+Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among
+the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their native
+melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance
+of rhyme.
+
+With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native
+verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our
+fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither
+admired nor imitated.[2] The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken
+up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem
+with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected
+predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his _Versi e Regole della_
+POESIA NUOVA--the very term afterwards adopted by the English
+critics--and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on
+principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of
+"new poetry" appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei
+illustrates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of
+other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what
+followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their
+rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so
+laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the
+new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud
+outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their
+bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.
+
+In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars,
+Jodelle, Passerat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French
+with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known,
+later, D'Urfé, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adopted _blank verse_,
+for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that "Les vers sans rime sont
+morts pour jamais." French poetry, which at that period could hardly
+sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have
+betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The "new poetry" in France,
+however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned
+his prejudices leaned in its favour, but as a faithful historian the
+truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this
+awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with
+great curiosity and honest naïveté. "Since only these two nations, the
+Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without
+rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe
+which poetises, who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which
+sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people
+for more than seven or eight centuries, even in Italy itself, I can
+readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry
+than with that of the Greeks and the Romans."[3]
+
+The candour of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable
+antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware
+of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries.
+
+It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the
+wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these experiments
+on our prosody; and, on the pretence of "reformed verse," were for
+revolutionising the whole of our metrical system.
+
+The musical impression made by a period consisting of long and short
+syllables arranged in a certain order is what the Greeks called
+_rhythmus_, the Latins _numerus_, and we _melody_ or _measure_. But in
+our verse, simply governed by accent, and whose rhythm wholly depends on
+the poet's ear, those durations of time, or sounds, like notes in music,
+slow or quick, long or short, which form the quantities or the time of
+the measured feet of the ancients, were no longer perceptible as in the
+inflection, the inversion, and the polysyllabic variety of the voluble
+languages of Greece and Rome. The artificial movements in the hexameter
+were inflicting on the ear of the uninitiated verse without melody, and,
+denuded of rhyme, seemed only a dislocated prose, in violation of the
+genius of the native idiom.
+
+Several of our scholars, invested by classical authority, and carrying
+their fasces wreathed with roses, unhappily influenced several of our
+poets, among whom were Sidney and Spenser, in their youth subservient to
+the taste of their learned friend Gabriel Harvey, to submit their
+vernacular verse to the torturous Roman yoke. Had this project of
+versification become popular it would necessarily have ended in a
+species of poetry, not referring so much to the natural ear affected by
+the melody of emotion, as to a mechanical and severe scansion. To this
+Milton seems to allude in a sonnet to Lawes, the musician--
+
+  Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
+  First taught our English music how to span
+  Words with just _note_ and _accent_, not to scan
+  _With Midas' ears, committing short and long_.
+
+The poet of all youthful poets had a narrow escape from "dark
+forgetfulness" when from the uncouth Latin hexameters, his "Fairy Queen"
+took refuge in the melodious stanza of modern Italy. STANYHURST has left
+a memorable woful version of Virgil, and the pedantic GABRIEL HARVEY had
+espoused this Latin intruder among the English muses. The majestic march
+of the Latin resounding lines, disguised in the miserable English
+hexameters, quailed under the lash of the satirical TOM NASH, who
+scourged with searching humour. "The Hexameter verse I grant to be a
+gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar), yet this
+clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to
+set his plough in; he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a
+man running upon quagmires, up the hill in one syllable, and down the
+dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gait which he
+vaunts himself with among the Greeks and Latins."
+
+A treatise on "the New Poetry," or "the Reformed Verse," for it assumed
+this distinction, was expressly composed by WILLIAM WEBBE,
+recommendatory of this "Reformation of our English verse."[4] Some years
+after Dr. THOMAS CAMPION, accomplished in music and verse, a composer of
+airs, and a poet of graceful fancy in masques, fluent and airy in his
+rhymes, seating himself in the critic's chair, renewed the exotic
+system. Notwithstanding his own felicity in the lighter measures of
+English verse, he denounces "the vulgar and inartificial custom of
+RIMING, which hath, I know, deterred many excellent wits from the
+exercise of English poetry."[5] He calls it "the childish titillation of
+rime."
+
+We may regret that Dr. Campion, who composed in Latin verse, held his
+English in little esteem, since he scattered them whenever he was called
+on, and not always even printed them. The physician, for such was
+Campion, held too cheap his honours as a poet and a musician; however,
+he was known in his days as "SWEET MASTER CAMPION," and his title would
+not be disputed in ours. In dismissing his critical "Observations," he
+has prefixed a poem in what he calls "Licentiate Iambicks," which is our
+blank verse; it is a humorous address of an author to his little book,
+consisting only of nearly five leaves:--
+
+                  Alas, poor book, I rue
+  Thy rash selfe-love; go spread thy papery wings;
+  Thy lightness cannot helpe, or hurt my fame.
+
+The poet DANIEL replied by his "Defence of Rime," an elaborate and
+elegant piece of criticism, to which no reply was sent forth by the
+anti-rhymers.
+
+It has often been inquired how came the vernacular rhyme to be wholly
+substituted for the classical metres, since the invaders of the Roman
+empire everywhere adopted the language of Rome with their own, for in
+the progress of their dominion everywhere they found that cultivated
+language established. The victors submitted to the vanquished when the
+contest solely turned on their genius.
+
+A natural circumstance will explain the occasion of this general
+rejection of the ancient metres. These artificial structures were
+operations too refined for the barbarian ear. Their bards, who probably
+could not read, had neither ability nor inclination to be initiated into
+an intricate system of metre, foreign to their ear, their tastes, and
+their habits, already in possession of supremacy in their own poetic
+art. Their modulation gave rhythm to their recitative, and their musical
+consonance in their terminable sounds aided their memory; these were all
+the arts they wanted; and for the rest they trusted to their own
+spontaneous emotions.
+
+Rhyme then triumphed, and the degenerate Latinists themselves, to court
+the new masters of the world, polluted their Latin metres with the
+rhymes too long erroneously degraded as mere "Gothic barbarisms." Had
+the practice of the classical writers become a custom, we should now be
+"committing long and short," and we should have missed the discovery of
+the new world of poetic melody, of which the Grecians and the Latins
+could never have imagined the existence.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] For a remarkable effusion of this ancient idolatry and classical
+    superstition, see _Quarterly Review_, August, 1834.
+
+    The ancient poetry of the Greeks was composed for recitation. The
+    people never read, for they had no books; they listened to their
+    rhapsodists; and their practised ear could decide on the artificial
+    construction of verses regulated by _quantity_, and not by the latent
+    delicacy and numerosity of which modern versification is susceptible.
+
+  [2] Quadrio, "Storia e raggione d'ogni Poesia," i. 606.
+
+  [3] Pasquier, "Les Recherches de la France," p. 624, fo. 1533.
+
+  [4] "A Discourse of English Poetrie; together with the Author's
+    Judgment touching the Reformation of our English Verse," by WILLIAM
+    WEBBE, graduate, 1586, 4to.
+
+  [5] "Observations on the Art of English Poesie, by THOMAS CAMPION,
+    wherein is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the
+    English tongue will receive eight several kinds of numbers proper to
+    itself, which are all in this Book set forth, and were never before
+    this time by any man attempted," 1602.
+
+
+
+
+ORIGIN OF RHYME.
+
+
+Contending theories long divided the learned world. One party asserted
+that the use of Rhyme was introduced by the Saracenic conquerors of
+Spain and of Sicily, for they had ascertained that the Arabian poets
+rhymed; the other, who had traced Rhyme to a northern source among the
+Scandinavian bards, insisted that Rhyme had a Gothic origin; and as
+Rhyme was generally used among the monks in the eighth century, they
+imagined that in the decline of ancient literature the dexterous monks
+had borrowed the jingle for their church hymns, to win the ear of their
+Gothic lords; both parties alike concurred in condemning Rhyme as a
+puerile invention and a barbarous ornament, and of a comparatively
+modern invention.
+
+The opinions of the learned are transmitted, till by length of time they
+are accepted as facts; and in this state was Rhyme considered till our
+own days. Warton, in the course of his researches in the history of our
+poetry, was struck at the inaccuracy of one of these statements; for he
+had found that rhymed verse, both Latin and vernacular, had been
+practised much earlier than the period usually assigned. But Warton,
+though he thus far corrected the misstatements of his predecessors,
+advanced no further. No one, indeed, as yet had pursued this intricate
+subject on the most direct principle of investigation; conjecture had
+freely supplied what prevalent opinion had already sanctioned; and we
+were long familiarised to the opprobrious epithet of "Monkish Rhymes."
+The subject was not only obscure, but apparently trivial; for Warton
+dismisses an incidental allusion to the origin of Rhyme by an apology
+for touching on it. "Enough," he exclaims, in his impatience, "has been
+said on a subject of so little importance;"[1] and it is curious to
+observe, that the same vexatious exclamation occurred to a French
+literary antiquary. "We must not believe," said Lenglet du Fresnoy,
+"that we began to rhyme in France about 1250, as Petrarch pretends. The
+romance of Alexander existed before, and it is not probable that the
+first essay of our versification was a great poem. Abelard composed
+love-songs in the preceding century. I believe Rhyme was still more
+ancient; and it is useless to torment ourselves to discover from whom we
+learned to rhyme. As we always had poets in our nation, so we have also
+had Rhyme."[2] Thus two great poetical antiquaries in England and France
+had been baffled in their researches, and came to the same mortifying
+conclusion. They were little aware how an inquiry after the origin of
+Rhyme could not be decided by chronology.
+
+The origin of Rhyme was an inquiry which, however unimportant Warton in
+his despair might consider it, had, though inconclusively treated, often
+engaged the earnest inquiries of the learned in Italy and in Spain, in
+Germany and in France. It is remarkable that all the parties were
+equally perplexed in their researches, and baffled in their conclusions.
+Each inquirer seemed to trace the use of Rhyme by his own people to a
+foreign source, for with no one it appeared of native growth. The
+Spaniard Juan de la Enzina, one of the fathers of the Spanish drama, and
+who composed an "Art of Poetry," (_Arte de Trovar_, as they expressively
+term the art of invention,) fancied that Rhyme had passed over into
+Spain from Italy, though in the land of Redondillas the guitar seemed
+attuned to the chant of their Moorish masters; but in Italy Petrarch, at
+the opening of his epistles, declares that they had drawn their use of
+Rhyme from Sicily; and the Sicilians had settled that they had received
+it from the Provençals; while those roving children of fancy were
+confident that they had been taught their artless chimes by their former
+masters, the Arabians! Among the Germans it was strenuously maintained
+that this modern adjunct to poetry derived its origin and use from the
+Northern Scalds. Fauchet, the old Gaulish antiquary, was startled to
+find that Rhyme had been practised by the primitive Hebrews!
+
+Fauchet, struck by discovering the use of Rhyme among this ancient
+people, and finding it practised by the monks in their masses in the
+eighth century, suggested for its modern prevalence two very dissimilar
+causes. With an equal devotional respect for "the people of God," and
+for the monks, whom he considered as sacred, he concluded that "possibly
+some pious Christian by the use of Rhyme designed to imitate the holy
+people;" but at the same time holding, with the learned, Rhyme to be a
+degenerate deviation from the classical metres of antiquity, he
+insinuates, "or perchance some vile poetaster, to eke out his deficient
+genius, amused the ear by terminating his lines with these ending
+unisons." He had further discovered that the Greek critics had, among
+the figures of their rhetoric, mentioned the _homoioteleuton_, or
+consonance. The abundance of his knowledge contradicted every system
+which the perplexed literary antiquary could propose; and impatiently he
+concludes,--"Rhyme has come to us from some part of the world, or
+nation, whoever it may be; for I confess I know not where to seek, nor
+what to conclude. It was current among the people and the languages
+which have arisen since the ruin of the Roman empire."[3]
+
+Since the days of ancient Fauchet, no subsequent investigators, even
+such great recent literary historians as Warton, Quadrio, Crescembini
+and Gray, Tiraboschi, Sismondi and Ginguené, have extricated us by their
+opposite theories from these uncertain opinions. It was reserved for the
+happy diligence of the learned Sharon Turner to explore into this abyss
+of darkness.[4] To defend the antiquity of the Rhyming Welsh bards, he
+pursued his researches through all languages, and demonstrated its early
+existence in all. His researches enable us to advance one more step, and
+to effect an important result, which has always baffled the
+investigators of these curious topics.
+
+Rhyming poems are found not only in the Hebrew but in the Sanscrit, in
+the Bedas, and in the Chinese poetry,[5] as among the nations of Europe.
+It was not unknown to the Greeks, since they have named it as a
+rhetorical ornament; and it appears to have been practised by the
+Romans, not always from an accidental occurrence, but of deliberate
+choice.
+
+To deduce the origin of rhyme from any particular people, or to fix it
+at any stated period, is a theory no longer tenable. The custom of
+rhyming has predominated in China, in Hindustan, in Ethiopia; it chimes
+in the Malay and Javanese poetry, as it did in ancient Judea: this
+consonance trills in the simple carol of the African women; its echoes
+resounded in the halls of the frozen North, in the kiosque of the
+Persian, and in the tent of the Arab, from time immemorial. RHYME must
+therefore be considered _as universal as poetry itself_.
+
+Yet rhyme has been contemned as a "monkish jingle," or a "Gothic
+barbarism;" but we see it was not peculiar to the monks nor the Goths,
+since it was prevalent in the vernacular poetry of all other nations
+save the two ancient ones of Greece and Rome. Delighting the ear of the
+man as it did that of the child, and equally attractive in the most
+polished as in the rudest state of society, rhyme could not have
+obtained this universality had not this concord of returning sounds a
+foundation in the human organization influencing the mind. We might as
+well inquire the origin of dancing as that of rhyming; the rudest
+society as well as the most polished practised these arts at every era.
+And thus it has happened, as we have seen, that the origin of rhyme was
+everywhere sought for and everywhere found.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Warton's "Second Dissertation on the Introduction of Learning
+    into England."
+
+  [2] Lenglet du Fresnoy--Preface to his edition of the "Roman de la
+    Rose."
+
+  [3] Much curious matter will be found in the rare volume of Fauchet
+    "Recueil de l'Origine de la Langue et Poesie Françoise Ryme et Romans
+    plus les Noms et Summaire des Oeuvres, de cxxvii. Poètes François,
+    vivant avant l'an MCCC.;" liv. i. ch. vii., 1610, 4to.
+
+  [4] See "Two Inquiries respecting the Early Use of Rhyme," by Sharon
+    Turner, Esq.--_Archæologia,_ vol. xiv. The subject further enlarged,
+    "On the Origin and Progress of Rhyme in the Middle Ages."--_Hist. of
+    England_, iv. 386.
+
+  [5] The second book the Chinese children read is a collection
+    conveyed in _rhyming lines_.--_Davis on the Chinese._
+
+
+
+
+RHYMING DICTIONARIES.
+
+
+If our poets in rhyme dared to disclose one of the grand mysteries of
+their art, they would confess that, to find rhymes for their lines is a
+difficulty which, however overcome, after all has botched many a fine
+verse; the second line has often altered the original conception of the
+preceding one. The finest poems in the language, if critically examined,
+would show abundant evidence of this difficulty _not overcome_. This
+difficulty seems to have occurred to our earliest critics, for
+GASCOIGNE, in his "Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making
+Verse or Rhyme in English"--and WEBBE, in his "Discourse," repeats the
+precept--would initiate the young poet in the art of rhyme-finding: the
+simplicity of the critic equals the depth of his artifice.
+
+"When you have one verse _well settled_ and _decently ordered_, which
+you may dispose at your pleasure to end it with _what word you will_;
+then whatsoever the word is, you may speedily run over the other words
+which are answerable thereunto (for more readiness through all the
+letters alphabetically),[1] whereof you may choose that which will _best
+fit the sense_ of your matter in that place; as, for example, if your
+last word end in book, you may straightway in your mind run them over
+thus--book, cook, crook, hook, look, nook, pook, &c. &c. Now it is
+_twenty to one but always one of these shall jump with your former word
+and matter in good sense_."
+
+The poet in _rhyme_ has therefore in his favour "twenty to one" of a
+chance that his second line may "jump" with his former one. We were not
+aware that the odds were so favourable, even when we look over the
+finished poetry of Pope, who has written so much, or of Gray, who has
+written so little. Boileau tells us he always chose a rhyme for his
+second line before he wrote out his first, that by this means he might
+secure the integrity of the sense; and this he called "the difficult
+art of rhyming." These are mysteries which only confirm the hazard which
+rhymers incur; and, on the whole, though we do marvellously escape, the
+poet at every rhyming line still stands in peril.
+
+This torture of rhyme-finding seems to have occasioned a general
+affliction among modern poets; and an unhappy substitute was early found
+in arranging collections of rhymes, and which subsequently led to a
+monstrous device. In Goujet's "Bibliothèque Française," vol. iii., will
+be found a catalogue of these rhyming dictionaries: the earliest of the
+French was published in 1572. Indeed, some of these French critics
+looked upon these rhyming dictionaries as part of the art of poetry,
+recommending pocket editions for those who in their walks were apt to
+poetise, as if finding a rhyme would prompt a thought.
+
+Among these early attempts is an extravagant one by Paul Boyer. It is a
+kind of encyclopædia, in which all the names are arranged by their
+terminations, so that it furnishes a dictionary of rhymes.
+
+The demand for rhymes seems to have continued; for in 1660, D'Ablancourt
+Fremont published a _Dictionnaire_, which was enlarged by Richelet in
+1667. It seems we were not idle in threading rhymes in our own country,
+for Poole, in 1657, in his "Parnassus," furnishes a collection of
+rhymes; and he has had his followers. But the perfect absurdity or
+curiosity of a rhyming lexicographer appears in one of Walker's
+Dictionaries of the English Language. As he was a skilful philologist,
+he has contrived to make it useful for orthography and pronunciation. He
+advances it as on a plan "not hitherto attempted;" and his volume on the
+whole, as Moreri observes of Boyer's, is a thing "_plaisant à
+considérer_."
+
+A dictionary of rhymes is as miserable a contrivance to assist a verse
+as counting the syllables by the finger is to regulate the measure; in
+the case of rhyme it is sense which should regulate the verse, and in
+that of metre it is the ear alone which can give it melody.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] Here is the first idea of "A Dictionary of Rhymes," which has
+    inspired so many unhappy bards.
+
+
+
+
+THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE.
+
+
+Among the arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an
+anonymous work.[1] The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable
+to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first printed in 1589,
+we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The
+author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic
+has often adroitly addressed "the most beautiful, or rather the beauty,
+of queens;" and to illustrate that figure which he terms "the gorgeous,"
+has preserved for us some of her regal verses.
+
+Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has
+formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that "this
+book came into my hands with _its bare title without any author's
+name_." The author himself could not have been at all concerned in
+delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to
+the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.
+
+This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir
+John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as
+"the unknown _Godfather_, that, this last year save one (1589), set
+forth a book called 'The Arte of English Poesie.'" About twelve years
+afterwards, Carew, in his "Survey of Cornwall," appears to have been the
+first who disclosed the writer's name as "Master Puttenham;" but this
+was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605,
+Camden only alludes to the writer as "the _gentleman_ who proves that
+poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first
+historiographers." Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his
+"Hypercritica," notices "this work (_as the fame is_) of one of Queen
+Elizabeth's pensioners, Puttenham." The qualifying parenthesis "as the
+fame is," leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.
+
+Who was Puttenham? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by
+any contemporary. Even the baptismal name of this writer has been
+subject to contradiction.[2]
+
+In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to
+himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined
+ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his
+prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,[3] which our mature
+critic still deemed "pretty;" but, according to one of his rhetorical
+technical terms, "it holds too much of the _cachemphaton_ or _foule
+speech_, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense." Our author was a
+travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to
+have been connected with the _corps diplomatique_, for he had been
+present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we
+discover by coeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage
+relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished
+hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes:--"These and many such like
+disgustings we find in men's behaviour, and specially in the courtiers
+of foreign countries, _where in my youth I was brought up_, and very
+well observed their manner of life and conversation; for of _mine own
+country I have not made so great experience_."
+
+This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author's history, for at
+eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by "Our Eclogue
+of Elpine." When he tells us that "he had not had so great experience of
+his own country as of others," we may be surprised, for no contemporary
+writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England,
+which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which
+bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of
+poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of
+English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all
+betray a stranger's absence from home. But, what seems more
+extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions,
+critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own--to "our
+comedy" and to "our enterlude," and has frequent illustrations drawn
+from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the
+singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous,
+and that no contemporary has ever mentioned the name of Puttenham. How
+are we to reconcile these discrepancies, and how account for these
+numberless vernacular compositions, with the condition of one who was
+"brought up abroad," and who had such "little experience of his own
+country?" We appear to read a work composed by different persons.
+
+The same anomalous character is attached to the work as we have
+discovered concerning the writer.
+
+This "Arte of English Poesie," which Warton observes "remained long as a
+rule of criticism," and still may be consulted for its comprehensive
+system, its variety of poetic topics, and its contemporary historical
+anecdotes, is the work of a scholar, and evidently of a courtier. His
+scholastic learning furnished the terms of his numerous figures of
+rhetoric, each of which is illustrated by examples drawn from English
+literature; but aware that this uncouth nomenclature might deter, as he
+says, "the sort of readers to whom I write, too scholastical for our
+MAKERS," as he classically calls our poets, "and more fit for clerks
+than for courtiers, for whose instruction this travail is taken," our
+logician was cast into the dilemma of inventing English descriptions for
+these Greek rhetorical figures. We had no English name--"the rule might
+be set down, but there was no convenient name to hold it in memory."
+
+To familiarise the technical terms of rhetoric by substituting English
+descriptive ones, led to a ludicrous result. The Greek term of _histeron
+proteron_ was baptised the _preposterous_; these are words misplaced,
+or, as our writer calls it, "in English proverb, the cart before the
+horse," as one describing his landing on a strange coast said thus
+_preposterously_, that is, placing before what should follow--
+
+  When we had climb'd the cliff, and were ashore.
+
+instead of
+
+  When we had come ashore, and climb'd the cliff.
+
+The _hipallage_ he calls _the changeling_, when changing the place of
+words changes the sense; as in the phrase "come dine with me, and stay
+not," turned into "come stay with me, and dine not." This change of
+sense into nonsense he called "the changeling," in allusion to the
+nursery legend when fairies steal the fairest child, and substitute an
+ill-favoured one. This at least is a most fanciful account of nonsense!
+I will give the technical terms of satire; they display a refinement of
+conception which we hardly expected from the native effusions of the
+wits of that day. _Ironia_, he calls the _dry-mock_; _sarcasmus_, the
+_bitter taunt_; the Greek term _asteismus_ he calls _the merry
+scoff_--it is the jest which offends not the hearer. When we mock
+scornfully comes the _micterismus_, the _fleering frumpe_, as he who
+said to one to whom he gave no credit, "_No doubt, sir, of that!_" The
+_antiphrasis_, or the _broad flout_, when we deride by flat
+contradiction, antithetically calling a dwarf a giant; or addressing a
+black woman, "In sooth ye are a fair one!" The _charientismus_ is _the
+privy nippe_, when you mock a man in a _sotto voce_; and the
+_hyperbole_, as the Greeks term the figure, and the Latins _dementiens_,
+our vernacular critic, for its immoderate excess, describes as "the
+over-reacher, or the loud liar." The rhetorical figures of our critic
+exceed a hundred in number, if Octavius Gilchrist has counted rightly,
+all which are ingeniously illustrated by fragments of our own
+literature, and often by poetical and historical anecdotes by no means
+common and stale. We must appreciate this treasure of our own antiquity,
+though we may smile when we learn that while we speak or write, however
+naturally, we are in fact violating, or illustrating, this heap of
+rhetorical figures, without whose aid unconsciously our _fleering
+frumpes_, our _merry scoffs_, and our _privy nippes_, have been
+intelligible all our days.
+
+In the more elevated spirit of this work, the writer opens by defining
+the poet, after the Greek, to be "a maker" or creator, drawing the verse
+and the matter from his native invention,--unlike the _translator_, who
+therefore may be said to be a versifier, and not a poet. This canon of
+criticism might have been secure from the malignity of hypercriticism.
+It happened, however, that in the year following that in which "The Art
+of Poetry" was published, Sir John Harrington put forth his translation
+of Ariosto, and, presuming that none but a poet could translate a poet,
+he caught fire at the solemn exclusion. The vindictive "versifier"
+invented a merciless annihilation both of the critic and his "Art," by
+very unfair means; for he proved that the critic himself was a most
+detestable poet, and consequently the very existence of "The Art" itself
+was a nullity! "All the receipts of poetry prescribed," proceeds the
+enraged translator of Ariosto, "I learn out of this very book, never
+breed excellent poets. For though the poor gentleman laboureth to make
+poetry an art, he proveth nothing more plainly than that it is a _gift_
+and not an _art_, because making himself and many others so cunning in
+the art, yet he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it."
+
+Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the
+destinies of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with
+that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which
+reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric?
+We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values
+"the courtly trifles," which he calls "pretty devices," among the
+inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of
+"geometrical figures in verse," his delight in egg or oval poems,
+tapering at the ends and round in the middle, and his columnar verse,
+whose pillars, shaft, and capital, can be equally read upwards and
+downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention
+in "parcels of his own poetry," obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by
+his intolerable "triumphals," poetical speeches for recitation; and a
+series of what he calls "partheniades, or new year's gifts,"--bloated
+eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could
+endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some
+appointment at court.
+
+When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and
+the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the
+rhetorician showed the ear of Midas. He condemns the following lines as
+"going like a minstrel's music in a metre of eleven, very harshly in my
+ear, whether it be for lack of good rime or of good reason, or of both,
+I wot not." And he exemplifies this lack of "good rime and good reason,
+or both," by this exquisitely tender apostrophe of a mother to her
+infant:
+
+  Now suck, child, and sleep, child, thy mother's own joy,
+  Her only sweet comfort to drown all annoy;
+  For beauty, surpassing the azured sky,
+  I love thee, my darling, as ball of mine eye.
+
+Such a stanza indeed may disappoint the reader when he finds that we are
+left without any more.
+
+In the history of this ambiguous book, and its anonymous author, I
+discover so many discrepancies and singularities, such elaborate
+poetical erudition, combined with such ineptitude of poetic taste, that
+I am inclined to think that the more excellent parts could never have
+been composed by the courtly trifler. It is remarkable that this curious
+Art of English Poetry was ascribed to SIDNEY; and Wanley, in his
+catalogue of the Harley Library, assigns this volume to Spenser.[4] I
+lay no stress on the singular expression of Sir John Harrington,
+applied to the present writer, as "the unknown _godfather_," which seems
+to indicate that the presumed writer had named an offspring without
+being the parent. Nor will I venture to suggest that this work may at
+all have been connected with that treatise of "the English poets," which
+Spenser, we know, had lost and never recovered. The poet lived ten years
+after the present publication, and it does not appear that he ever
+claimed this work. Manuscripts, however, we may observe, strangely
+wandered about the world in that day, and such literary foundlings often
+fell into the hands of the charitable. In that day of modest
+publication, some were not always solicitous to claim their own; and
+there are even instances of the original author, residing at a distance
+from the metropolis, who did not always discover that his own work had
+long passed through the press; so narrow then was the sphere of
+publication, and so partial was all literary communication.
+
+One more mystery is involved in the authorship of this remarkable work:
+first printed in 1589, we gather from the book itself that it was in
+hand at least as early as in 1553. This glorious retention of a work
+during nearly forty years, would be a literary virtue with which we
+cannot honour the trifler who complacently alludes to so many of his own
+writings which no one else has noticed, and unluckily for himself has
+furnished for us so many "parcels of his poetry," to exemplify "the
+art."
+
+If we resolve the enigma, by acknowledging that this learned and curious
+writer has not been the only critic who has proved himself to be the
+most woful of poetasters, this decision will not account for the
+mysterious silence of the writer in allowing an elaborate volume, the
+work of a great portion of a life, to be cast out into the world unnamed
+and unowned.
+
+I find it less difficult to imagine that some stray manuscript,
+possibly from the relics of SIDNEY, or perhaps the lost one of SPENSER,
+might have fallen into the hands of some courtly critic, or "the
+Gentleman Pensioner," who inlaid it with many of his own trivialities:
+the discrepancy in the ingenuity of the writing with the genius of the
+writer in this combination of learning and ineptitude would thus be
+accounted for; at present it may well provoke our scepticism.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "The Arte of English Poesie, contrived in three bookes--the first
+    of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of
+    Ornament," 1589, 4to.
+
+  [2] Ames appears first to have called him _Webster_ Puttenham.
+    Possibly Ames might have noted down the name from Carew, as Master
+    Puttenham, which by an error of the pen, or the printer, was
+    transformed into the remarkable Christian name of _Webster_. I cannot
+    otherwise account for this misnomer. Steevens, in an indistinct
+    reference to a manuscript, revealed it to be _George_; and probably
+    was led to that opinion by the knowledge of a manuscript work in the
+    Harleian Collection by a George Puttenham. It is a defence of
+    Elizabeth in the matter of the Scottish Queen. Ellis, our poetic
+    antiquary, has distinguished our author as "Webster, _alias_ George."
+    All this taken for granted, the last editor, probably in the course
+    of his professional pursuits, falls on a nuncupative will, dated
+    1590, of a _George_ Puttenham; already persuaded that such a name
+    appertained to the author of the "Art of English Poetry," he ventured
+    to corroborate what yet remained to be ascertained. All that he could
+    draw from the nuncupative will of this _George_ Puttenham is, that he
+    "left all his goods, movable and immovable, moneys, and bonds," to
+    Mary Symes, a favourite female servant; but he infers that "he
+    probably was our author." Yet, at the same time, there turned up
+    another will of one _Richard_ Puttenham, "a prisoner in her Majesty's
+    Bench." _Richard_, therefore, may have as valid pretensions to "The
+    Arte of English Poesie," as _George_, and neither may be the author.
+    This matter is trivial, and hardly worth an inquiry.
+
+    Haslewood, laborious but unfortunately uneducated, is the editor of
+    an elegant reprint of this "Arte of English Poesie." A modern reader
+    may therefore find an easy access to a valuable volume which had been
+    long locked up in the antiquary's closet.
+
+  [3] See page 157 of "The Arte of English Poesie."
+
+  [4] The following letter is an evidence of the uncertain accounts
+    respecting this author among the most knowing literary historians.
+    Here, too, we find that Webster, or George, or Richard, is changed
+    into Jo!--
+
+    "What authority Mr. Wood has for Jo. Puttenham's being the author of
+    the 'Art of English Poetry' I do not know. Mr. Wanley, in his
+    'Catalogue of the Harley Library,' says that _he had been told that
+    Edmund Spenser was the author of that book, which came out
+    anonymous_. But Sir John Harrington, in his preface to 'Orlando
+    Furioso,' gives so hard a censure of that book, that Spenser could
+    not possibly be the author."--"Letter from THOMAS BAKER to the Hon.
+    James West," printed in the "European Magazine," April, 1788.
+
+
+
+
+THE DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT.
+
+
+A single volume sent forth from the privacy of a retired student, by its
+silent influence may mark an epoch in the history of the human mind
+among a people.
+
+Such a volume was "The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot," a
+singular work which may justly claim the honour in this country of
+opening that glorious career which is dear to humanity and fatal to
+imposture.
+
+Witchcraft and magic, and some similar subjects, through a countless
+succession of ages, consigned the human intellect to darkness and to
+chains. In this country these conspiracies against mankind were made
+venerable by our laws and consecrated by erring piety. They were long
+the artifices of malignant factions, who found it mutually convenient to
+destroy each other by the condemnation of crimes which could never be
+either proved or disproved. The sorcerers and witches under the Church
+of Rome were usually the heretics; and our Henry the Eighth, who was a
+Protestant pope, transferred the grasp of power to the civil law, and an
+Act of Parliament of the Reformation made witchcraft felony. Dr.
+Bulleyn, a celebrated physician and a reformer, who lived through the
+gloomy reign of Philip and Mary, bitterly laments "that while so many
+blessed men are burned, witches should walk at large." When the Act fell
+into disuse, Elizabeth was reminded, by petitions from the laity and by
+preaching from the clergy, that "witches and sorcerers were wonderfully
+increasing, and that her Majesty's subjects pined away until death."
+Witchcraft was again confirmed to be felony.
+
+The learned and others were fostering the traditions of the people about
+spirits, the incubus, and the succubus, the assemblies of witches, and
+the sabbaths of Satan. Some constructed their theories to explain the
+inexplicable; and too many, by torture, extorted their presumed facts
+and delusive confessions. The sage doated--the legal functionaries were
+only sanguinary executioners; and the merciful, with the kindest
+intentions, were practising every sort of cruelty, by what was termed
+trials to save the accused. The history of these dismal follies belongs
+even to a late period of the civilization of Christian Europe! An
+enlightened physician of Germany had raised his voice in defence of the
+victims who were suffering under the imputation of Sorcery;[1] not
+denying the Satanic potency, he maintained that the devil was very well
+able to execute his own malignant purposes without the aid of such
+miserable agents. It required a protracted century ere Balthaser
+Bekker's "World Bewitched" could deprive Satan himself of his
+personality, indeed of his very existence. But it was a subject to be
+tenderly touched; superstition was a sacred thing, and too often riveted
+with theology; and though the learned Wierus had thus guarded his
+system, to a distant day he encountered the polemical divines. One of
+his fiercest assailants was a layman, the learned Bodin, he who has
+composed so admirable a treatise on Government, now deeply plunged into
+the "Demonomanie des Sorciers." The volume of Wierus, he tells us, "made
+his hair stand on end." "Shall we," he cries, "credit a little
+physician" before all the philosophers of the world, and the laws of God
+which condemn sorcerers?
+
+While Wierus and Bodin had been thus employed, an Englishman, Reginald
+Scot, in the serene retreat of a studious life, was silently labouring
+on the development of this great moral conquest over the prejudices of
+Europe. Reginald Scot, who passed his life in the occupation of his
+studies, seems to have concentrated them on this great subject, for he
+has left no other work, except an esteemed tract on the cultivation of
+the hop--the vine of his Kentish county. Although he took no degree at
+college, his erudition was not the less extensive, as appears by his
+critical knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek. But it was chiefly by his
+miscellaneous reading, where nothing seems to have escaped his
+insatiable curiosity on the extraordinary subjects which he ventured to
+scrutinise with such minute attention, that he was enabled to complete
+one of the most curious investigations of the age. Anthony Wood, in his
+peculiar style, tells us that "Scot gave himself up solely to _solid
+reading_, and to the perusal of _obscure authors_ that had by the
+generality of the learned been neglected." This is a curious description
+of the early state of our vernacular literature, and of those students
+who, watchful over the spirit of the times, sought a familiar
+acquaintance with the opinions of their contemporaries. All writers were
+condemned as "obscure" who stood out of the pale of classical antiquity;
+and plain Anthony, who rarely dipped into the writings of Greece and
+Rome, but was an incessant lover of the miscellaneous writers of modern
+date, distinguishes his favourites as "solid reading." In the days of
+Reginald Scot our scholars never ventured to quote other authority than
+some ancient; but the poets from Homer to Ovid, the historians from
+Tacitus to Valerius Maximus, and the essayists from Plutarch to Aulus
+Gellius, could not always supply arguments and knowledge for an age and
+on topics which had nothing in common with their own.
+
+With more elevated views than Wierus, Scot denied the power of
+sorcerers, because it attributed to them an omnipotence which can only
+be the attribute of divine power. Our philosopher could publish only
+half the truth. "My question is not, as many fondly suppose, whether
+there be witches or not, but whether they can do such miraculous works
+as are imputed unto them." He thus adroitly eludes an argument which the
+public mind was not yet capable of comprehending. The "Discoverer" had
+to encounter a fierce host in shaking the predominant creed. The
+passions of mankind were enlisted against the zealous antagonist of an
+ancient European prejudice; the vital interests of priestly exorcists
+were at stake. To doubt of a supernatural agency seemed to some to be
+casting a suspicion over miracles and mysteries. The most ticklish point
+was the difficulty of explaining Scriptural phrases, which Reginald Scot
+denied related to witches, in the ordinary sense attached to these
+miserable women; the Hebrew term merely designating a female who
+practised the arts of "a poisoner," or "a cozener or cheat." The whole
+scene of the witch of Endor seems to have racked the "Discoverer's"
+invention through several chapters, to unveil the preparatory management
+of such incantations, by the ventriloquising Pythonissa, and her
+confederate, some lusty priest. All these Scot presumes to trace in the
+obscure and interrupted narrative of the Israelitish Macbeth, who, in
+his despair, hastened by night to listen to his approaching fate, which
+hardly required the gift of prophecy to predict.
+
+Our "Discoverer" prepared his readers for a revolution in their
+opinions. It appears that in his day, notwithstanding some fairies still
+lurking in the bye-corners of our poets, the whole fairy creed had in
+fact passed away. He appeals to this native mythology, now utterly
+exploded, as an evidence of popular infatuation; and our philosopher
+observes that he cannot hope that the partial reader should look with
+impartial eyes on this book; it were labour lost to ask for this, for,
+he adds, "I should no more prevail therein than if _a hundred years
+since I should have entreated your predecessors_ to believe that Robin
+Goodfellow, that great but antient bull-beggar, had been but a cousening
+merchant, and no devil indeed." This was a philosophical parallelism;
+and the corollary pinched the present generation concerning their
+witches, they who were now holding their fathers dotards for their
+belief in fairies.
+
+The volume abounds with many strange incidents, which its singular
+subject involved. The solitary witch of the homestead was not the poetic
+witch uttering her incantations at her mystic cauldron. Her homely feats
+are familiar, but the revelations of the impostures are not. "The devils
+and spirits," the powers of the kingdom of darkness, are more fantastic.
+These raw materials have been woven in the rich looms of Shakspeare and
+Goethe. Our author included in his volume a complete treatise of
+legerdemain, or the conjuring art. To convince the people that many acts
+may appear miraculous without the intervention of a miracle, he
+ingeniously initiated himself into the deceptious practices of the
+juggler; but he dreaded lest the spectators of his dexterity should
+depose against his own witchcraft, and "the Familiar," his confederate.
+Our seer, to save himself from fire or water, has not only minutely
+explained these "deceitful arts," but cautiously accompanied them by
+woodcuts of the magical instruments used on these occasions. At the
+time, these were surprising revelations. The sagacity of our author
+anticipated the fate of his work. It appears to have shaken the
+credulity of a very few reflecting magistrates; yet such scholars as Sir
+Thomas Smith, the great political writer, when he retired from public
+life, as a justice of peace, was active in punishing witches. But the
+book was denounced by the divines.
+
+When Reginald Scot's work was translated into Dutch, we learn from an
+arch-enemy of philosophy, the intolerant Calvinistical polemic, Voetius,
+that "this book was an inexhaustible source, whence not a few learned
+and unlearned persons in the Netherlands have begun to doubt, and grow
+sceptics and libertines with regard to witchcraft. Our country is
+infected with libertines and half libertines, and they have proceeded to
+such a pitch of ignorance, that this set of new Sadducees laugh at all
+the operations and apparitions of the devils as phantoms and fables of
+old women, and timorous superstition." The work was more successful
+abroad than at home; and, indeed, how often have the benefactors of
+mankind experienced that the voice of foreigners is the voice of
+posterity! They decide without prepossessions.
+
+The FIRST edition of the "Discoverie of Witchcraft," 1584, is of extreme
+rarity, the copies having been burned by the order of James, on his
+accession to the English throne, in compliance with the act of
+parliament of 1603, which ratified a belief in witchcraft throughout the
+three kingdoms; but the author had not survived to see that day. This
+awful prejudice broke out afresh under the fanatical government, and
+gave rise to an infamous class of men who were called "witch-finders."
+When a reward was publicly offered, there seemed to be no end in finding
+witches. It was probably this great evil which reminded the people of
+Scot, whose work was reprinted in 1651, but the public so eagerly
+required another edition, that it was again republished in 1665. The
+fact was, that justices, judges, and juries, had so little improved by
+the _second_ edition, that many had kept with great care their
+note-books of "Examinations of Witches," and were discovering "hellish
+knots of them." It was only in the preceding year that Sir Matthew Hale
+had left for execution two female victims, without even summing up the
+evidence, solely resting on the fact that "there were witches," for
+which assumption he appealed "to the Scriptures," and he added, to "the
+wisdom of all nations!" What is not less remarkable in this trial, the
+illustrious corrector of "vulgar errors," Sir Thomas Browne, in his
+medical character examining the accused person, who was liable to
+fainting fits, acknowledged that the fits were natural and common; but
+the philosopher was so prepossessed that the woman was a witch, that he
+pronounced against her, alleging this mystical explanation of "the
+subtleties of the devil," who had taken this opportunity of her natural
+fits to be "co-operating with her malice!" What a demonstration that
+superstition holds its mastery even over the philosophic intellect!
+
+The popular prejudice was confirmed by narratives of witchcraft, by
+Joseph Glanvil, one of the early founders of the Royal Society; by the
+visionary learning of the platonic Dr. More; and by the theological
+dogmatism of Meric Casaubon. Dr. More was desirous that every parish
+should keep a register of all authentic histories of apparitions and
+witchcraft: and Glanvil was so staunch a believer, that he considered
+that the strong unbelief in some persons was an evidence of what they
+denied; for that so confident an opinion could not be held but by some
+kind of witchcraft and fascination in the senses. All these, and such as
+these, treat with extreme contempt and cover with obloquy "the Father of
+the modern Witch-advocates," "the Gallant of the Old Hags!" This was our
+Reginald Scot.
+
+The most elaborate treatise on the subject was now sent forth by John
+Webster; "The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft," 1677, fo. He defends
+Scot and Wierus against Glanvil and Casaubon. He was a clergyman, and
+dares not agitate the question, _an sint_, whether there be witches or
+not; but _quomodo sint_, in what manner they act, and what the things
+are they do, or can perform. The state of the question is not simply the
+being of witches, or _de existencia_, but only _de modo existendi_. The
+dispute of their manner of existing necessarily supposes their
+existence. He has, however, detected many singular impostures, and the
+volume is full and curious.[2]
+
+Glanvil and his "Sadducismus Triumphatus, or full evidence concerning
+Witches," 1668, a book so popular that I have never met with a very fair
+copy, introduced with plenary evidence a minute narrative of "the Demon
+of Tedworth," whose invisible drum beat every night for above a year, in
+the house of some reverend magistrate, who had evidently raised a spirit
+which he could not lay, and whose Puck-like pranks wofully deranged the
+whole unsuspicious family. This tale, confirmed by affidavits, but
+shaken by demurrers, was long an article of faith, but finished by
+furnishing the comedy of Addison's "Drummer." The controversy about
+witches, including that of ghosts, which were equally the incessant but
+volatile phantoms of their chase, now assumed a more serious aspect than
+ever. The illustrious Boyle, who had observed the unguarded heat with
+which it was pursued, vainly cautioned the parties, that even religion
+might suffer by weak arguments drawn from uncertain statements. Boyle
+had more reason to say this than one might suppose; for Dr. More, ever
+too vehement and too fanciful, had exclaimed in his unhappy conviction,
+"No bishop, no king! no spirit, no God!"[3]
+
+Shadwell in his "Lancashire Witches," resolved to advance nothing
+without authority, accompanies that comedy with ample notes, drawn from
+the writings of witch-believers. His witches, therefore, are far beneath
+those of Shakspeare, for they do nothing but what we are told witches
+do; the whole system of witchery is here exhibited. In his remarkable
+preface, Shadwell tells us, that if he had not represented them as
+_real_ witches, "it would have been called atheistical by a prevailing
+party."
+
+The belief in witchcraft was maintained chiefly by that fatal error
+which had connected the rejection of any supernatural agency in old
+women with religious scepticism; and it was fostered by the statutes,
+which with the lawyer admitted of no doubt. "We cannot doubt of the
+existence of witchcraft, seeing that our law ordains it to be punished
+by death," was the argument of Sir George Mackenzie, the great Scottish
+advocate; nor is it less sad to see such minds as that of the great Dr.
+Clarke, celebrated for his logical demonstrations, thus reasoning on
+witchcraft, astrology, and fortune-telling; "All things of this sort,
+whenever they have any reality in them, are evidently diabolical; and
+when they have no reality, they are cheats and lying impostures."[4] The
+great demonstrator thus confesses "the reality" of these chimeras!
+Another not less celebrated divine, Dr. Bentley, infers that "no English
+priest need affirm the existence of sorcery or witchcraft, since they
+now have a public law which they neither enacted nor procured, declaring
+these practices to be felony!"[5] Did the doctor know that churchmen
+have had no influence in creating that belief, or in enacting this
+statute?
+
+The gravity of Blackstone seems strangely disturbed when as a lawyer he
+was compelled to acknowledge its existence. "It is a crime of which one
+knows not well what account to give." The commentator on the laws of
+England found no other resource than to turn to Addison, whose gentle
+sagacity could only discover that "_in general_, there has been such a
+thing as witchcraft, though one cannot give credit to any _particular_
+modern instance of it." Not one of these writers had yet ventured to
+detect the hallucinations of self-credulity in the victims, and the
+crimes of remorseless men in their persecutors. The name and the volume
+of their own countryman had never reached them, who two centuries before
+had elucidated these chimeras.
+
+After the statute against witchcraft had been repealed in England, we
+must not forget that an act of the Assembly of the Calvinistic Church of
+Scotland confesses "as a great national sin, the act of the British
+Parliament abolishing the burning and hanging of witches."
+
+The name of Reginald Scot does not appear in the "Biographia
+Britannica;" and it was only from a short notice by Bayle, that Dr.
+Birch, in his translation of the General Dictionary, was induced to draw
+up a life of our earliest philosopher. Such was the fate of this
+"English gentleman," as Bayle has described him; and the philosophical
+reader, in what is now before him, may detect the shifting shades of
+truth, till it settles in its real and enduring colour; the philosopher
+had demonstrated a truth which it required a century and a half for the
+world to comprehend.
+
+That such courageous and generous tempers as that of REGINALD SCOT
+should fail themselves of being the spectators of that noble revolution
+in public opinion which was the ripening of their own solitary studies,
+is the mortifying tale of the benefactors of mankind.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "De Prestigiis Demonum et Incantationibus ac Veneficiis," 1564.
+
+  [2] Webster notices the popular delusions of the country people in
+    the following passage, in which he is speaking of a sound judgment as
+    necessary to a competent witness:--"They ought to be of a sound
+    judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasie, nor of a
+    melancholic constitution; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear,
+    and a black sheep to be a demon; the noise of the wild swans, flying
+    high in the night, to be spirits--or, as they call them here in the
+    north, _Gabriel Ratchets_; the calling of a daker hen, in the meadow,
+    to be the _whistlers_; the howling of the female fox in a gill or
+    clough for the male, to be the cry of fairies." "The _Gabriel
+    Ratchets_," in our author's time, seem to have been the same with the
+    German _Rachtvogel_, or _Rachtraven_. The word and the superstition
+    are well known in Lancashire, though in a sense somewhat different;
+    for the _Gable-Rachets_ are supposed to be something like litters of
+    puppies yelping (gabbling) in the air. _Ratch_ is certainly a dog in
+    general.
+
+    The _whistlers_ are the green or whistling plovers, which fly very
+    high in the night uttering their characteristic note.--Whitaker's
+    "History of Whalley."
+
+  [3] In a correspondence I have read between Dr. More and one of his
+    enthusiastic disciples, the Rev. Edmund Elys, the letters usually
+    turn on the reality of apparitions and magical incantations; both
+    these learned men were hunting about all their lifetimes to find a
+    true ghost. Elys often breaks out in triumph that he has at length
+    discovered an authentic ghost; in subsequent letters the evidence
+    gradually diminishes, and finally the apparition and evidence vanish
+    together. The following pious doubts, addressed to the philosophic
+    More, may amuse the reader:--
+
+      "Most honoured dear Sir,
+
+    "I should be troublesome to you if I did not repress many strong
+    inclinations to write to you, for I do not take greater comfort in
+    anything than in the thoughts of _you_ and the _notions_ you have
+    communicated to the world.
+
+    "I now entreat you to tell me one of your arguments why this act is
+    unlawfull, viz., to inquire by this black art (as I am sure it is,
+    though I am told some preachers allow it), whether such or such a
+    _suspected person_ has stolen a thing; viz., by putting a key into
+    the midst of a Bible, and clasping or tying the Bible on it, and then
+    hanging the key upon some man's finger put into the hollow of the
+    handle; and then one of the company saying these words--Ps. 1. 19,
+    20, 'When thou a thief dost see,' &c., to these words, 'To use that
+    life most vile.' If the Bible turn upon the finger (holding it by the
+    key) when such or such a person is named, then he is judged to be the
+    thief. Some persons that dined at the same table with me had an
+    humour to try this trick. I declared it was very _wicked_, &c., but,
+    however, they would do it. And a gentleman of great acquaintance in
+    the world said that a learned divine asserted it was no hurt, &c. I
+    thought it might not be a sin for me to stay in the room, after I had
+    made that profession of my dissent, &c. They tried what would be
+    done; and, upon the naming of one or two, the key did not move, but
+    on the naming of one (who afterwards was known to be an accomplice in
+    the theft) the Bible turned on the finger very plainly in the sight
+    of divers persons, myself being one. The gentleman that was most
+    eager to have the _experiment_ holds that there never were any
+    _apparitions_, &c. I told him that this was equivalent to _an
+    apparition_; for here was an _ocular demonstration_ of the existence
+    and operation of an intelligent invisible being, &c."
+
+  [4] In his "Exposition of the Church Catechism."
+
+  [5] Remarks upon a late "Discourse of Free-Thinking," 1743, p. 47.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST JESUITS IN ENGLAND.
+
+
+The fate of the English Protestants, exiles under the Marian
+administration, was, as the day arrived, to be the lot of the English
+Papists under the government of Elizabeth. These opposing parties, when
+cast into the same precise position, had only changed their place in it;
+and in this revolution of England, in both cases alike, the expatriated
+were to return, and those at home were to become the expatriated.
+
+During the short reign of Edward, conformity was not pressed; and
+notwithstanding two statutes, the one to maintain the queen's supremacy,
+and the other strictly to enjoin the use of the Book of Common Prayer,
+through the first ten or twelve years of Elizabeth Romanist and
+Protestant entered into the same parish church. "The old Marian
+priests," whom the rigid papists indeed afterwards scornfully decried,
+were wont to inquire of any one, to use their own term, "whether they
+were _settled_?" and were satisfied to lure from the seduction of a
+protestant pulpit some lonely waverer, if by chance they found an easy
+surrender. There were, indeed, many who would neither "settle" nor
+"waver," and these were called "Occasionalists;" they insisted that
+"Occasional conformity" had nothing _per se malum_--that human laws
+might be complied with or neglected according to circumstances; so
+learned doctors had opined! The old religion seemed melting into the
+new, when the Romanists, of another temper than "the old Marian
+priests," protested against this pacific toleration, and procured from
+the fathers of the Council of Trent a declaration against schismatics
+and heretics: this was but the prelude of what was to come from a final
+authority; but this was sufficient to divide the Romanists of England,
+and to alarm the Protestants, yet tender in their reformation.
+
+The sterner Romanists gradually seceded from their preferments in the
+church or their station in the universities, and at length forsook the
+land. Two eminent persons effected a revolution among their
+brother-exiles, of which our national history bears such memorable
+traces. These extraordinary men were Dr. ALLEN, of Oriel College, a
+canon in the cathedral of York, and who subsequently was invested with
+the purple as the English cardinal, and ROBERT PARSONS, of Baliol,
+afterwards the famous Jesuit. They left England at different periods,
+but when they met abroad, their schemes were inseparable--and possibly
+some of their writings; though it may be doubted whether the subtile and
+daring genius of Parsons, which Cardinal Allen declared equalled the
+greatest whom he had known, ever acted a secondary part.
+
+Allen abandoned his country for ever in 1565. He soon projected the
+gathering of his English brothers, scattered in foreign lands; he
+conceived the formation for the fugitive Romanists of England of another
+Oxford, ostensibly to furnish a succession of Romish priests to preserve
+the ancient papistry of England, which was languishing under "the old
+Marian priests." In 1568 an English college was formed at Douay; in
+twenty years Allen witnessed his colleges rise at Rheims, at Rome,[1] at
+Louvain and St. Omer, and at Valladolid, at Seville, and at Madrid. From
+these cradles and nurseries of holiness to Rome, and of revolt to
+England, issued those seminary priests whose political religionism
+elevated them into martyrdom, and involved them in inextricable
+treason.[2]
+
+In these labours Allen had, as early as 1575, associated himself with
+Parsons, who in that year had entered into the order of the Jesuits.
+Allen sought the vigorous aid of the "soldiery of Jesus," alleging "that
+England was as glorious a field for the propagation of faith as the
+Indies." From that time the more ambiguous policy and deeper views of
+that celebrated Society gave a new character to the Romish missionaries
+to England, and were the cause of all their calamities; a history
+written in blood, at whose legal horrors our imagination recoils, and
+our sympathy for the honourable and the hapless may still dim our eyes
+with tears.
+
+Parsons, pensioned by Spain and patronised by Rome--wide and deep in his
+comprehensive plans--slow in deliberation, but decisive in execution--of
+a cold and austere temper, yet flexible and fertile in intrigue--with
+his working head and his ceaseless hand--once at least looked for
+nothing less than the dominion of England, ambitious to restore to Papal
+Rome a realm which had once been her fief. This daring Machiavelian
+spirit had long been the subtle and insidious counsellor, conjointly
+with Allen, of the cabinets of Madrid and of Rome. From Rome came the
+denunciatory bull of 1569, renewed with an artful modification in 1580,
+and again in 1588; and from Spain the Armada.
+
+It has been ascertained by his own writings that the Jesuit Parsons, who
+had obtained free access to the presence of the Spanish monarch, left
+Madrid in 1585, about the time when the preparations for the Armada
+began, and returned to Madrid in 1589, the year after its destruction;
+so that the English Jesuit, whose sanguine views had aided the
+inspiration, had also the fortitude to console and to assure the Spanish
+monarch that "the punishment of England had only been deferred." Of this
+secret intercourse with the Court of Madrid we have the express avowal
+of the English Cardinal, Allen, in that infuriated "Admonition to the
+Nobility and People of England," the precursor of the Armada; in which
+this Italianated Englishman, contrary to those habits and that language
+of amenity to which he had been accustomed, suddenly dropped the veil,
+and, at the command of his sacerdotal suzerain, raged against Elizabeth
+more furiously than had the Mar-prelate Knox.
+
+In the year 1580 PARSONS and CAMPIAN came the first Jesuit missionaries
+to their native soil. Camden was acquainted with both these personages
+at college. The contrast of their personal dispositions might have
+occasioned their selection; for the chiefs of this noted order not only
+exercised a refined discernment in the psychology of their brothers and
+agents, but always acted on an ambidextrous policy. Campian, with
+amenity of manners and sweetness of elocution, with a taste imbued with
+literature, was adapted to win the affections of those whom Parsons
+sometimes terrified by his hardihood. They landed in England at
+different ports; and, though at first separated, subsequently they
+sometimes met. They travelled under a variety of disguises, sure of
+concealment in the priests' secret chamber of many a mansion, or they
+haunted unfrequented paths. A tradition in the Stonor family still
+points at a tangled dell in the park where Campian wrote his "Decem
+Rationes," and had his books and his food conveyed to him.
+
+We have an interesting account of the perilous position which he
+occupied; his devoted spirit, not to be subdued by despair, but tinged
+with the softest melancholy, is disclosed in a letter to the general of
+the order. He tells him that he is obliged to assume a most antick
+dress, which he often changes as well as his name; but his studious
+habits were not interrupted amid this scene of trouble; he says, "Every
+day I ride about the country. Sitting on my horse, I meditate a short
+sermon, which coming into the house I more perfectly polish. Afterwards,
+if any come to me I discourse with them, to which they bring thirsty
+ears." But notwithstanding that most threatening edicts were dispersed
+against them, he says, that "by wariness and the prayers of good people,
+we have in safety gone over a great part of the island. I see many
+forgetting themselves to be careful for us." He concludes, "We cannot
+long escape the hands of heretics, so many are the eyes, the tongues,
+and treacheries of our enemies. Just now I read a letter where was
+written, 'Campian is taken.' This old song now so rings in mine ears
+wheresoever I come, that very fear hath driven all fear from me; my life
+is always in my hand. Let them that shall be sent hither for our supply
+bring this along with them, well thought on beforehand."
+
+Our Jesuits in some respects betrayed themselves by their zeal in
+addressing the nation through their own publications. Parsons, under the
+lugubrious designation of John Howlet, that is, Owlet, sent forth his
+"screechings;" and Campian, too confident of his irrefutable "Decem
+Rationes," was so imprudent as to publish "A Challenge for a Public
+Disputation" in the presence of the queen. The eye of Walsingham opened
+on their suspected presence. A Roman Catholic servant unwittingly
+betrayed Campian, who suffered as a state victim.[3] Parsons saw his own
+doom approaching, and vanished! This able Jesuit was confident that the
+great scheme was to be realised by means more effective than the
+martyrdom of young priests. His awful pen was to change public opinion,
+and nearly forty works attest his diligence, while he mused on other
+resources than the pen to overturn the kingdom.
+
+The history of the order records that, thirty years afterwards, Father
+Parsons, lying on his death-bed, ordered to be brought to him the cords
+which had served as the instruments of torture of his martyred friend,
+and, having kissed them fervently, bound round his body these sad
+memorials of the saintly Campian.[4]
+
+Two of the numerous writings ascribed to Parsons, one before the Armada,
+and the other subsequent to it, are remarkably connected with our
+national history; the ability of the writer, and the boldness of the
+topics, have at various periods influenced public opinion and national
+events. The first "A Dialogue between a Scholar, a Gentleman, and a
+Lawyer," was printed abroad in 1583 or 1584, and soon found a conveyance
+into England. The first edition was distinguished as "Father Parsons'
+Green Coat," from its green cover. It is now better known as
+"Leicester's Commonwealth," a title drawn from one of its sarcastic
+phrases.
+
+To describe this political libel as a mere invective would convey but
+an imperfect notion of its singularity. The occasion which levelled this
+artful and elaborate scandalous chronicle at Leicester, and at Leicester
+alone, remains as unknown as this circumstantial narrative descends to
+us unauthenticated and unrefuted. That the whole was framed by invention
+is as incredible as that the favourite of Elizabeth during thirty years
+could possibly have kept his equal tenor throughout such a criminal
+career, besides not a few atrocities which were prevented by intervening
+accidents with which the writer seems equally conversant as with those
+perpetrated. The mysterious marriages of Leicester--his first lady found
+at the foot of the stairs with her neck broken, but "without hurting the
+hood on her head"--husbands dying quickly--solemnised marriages reduced
+to contracts--are remarkable accidents. We find strange persons in the
+earl's household; Salvador, the Italian chemist, a confidential
+counsellor, supposed to have departed from this world with many secrets,
+succeeded by Dr. Julio, who risked the promotion. We are told of the
+lady who had lost her hair and her nails--of the exquisite salad which
+Leicester left on the supper-table when called away, which Sir Nicholas
+Throgmorton swore had ended his life--of the Cardinal Chatillon, who,
+after having been closeted with the queen, returning to France, never
+got beyond Canterbury--of the sending a casuist with a case of
+conscience to Walsingham, to satisfy that statesman of the moral
+expediency of ridding the state of the Queen of Scots by an Italian
+philtre--all these incidents almost induce one to imagine the existence
+of an English Borgia, drawn full-length by the hand of a Machiavel.
+
+If this strange history were true, it would not be wanting in a moral;
+for if Leicester were himself this poisoner, there seems some reason to
+believe that the poisoner himself was poisoned. "The beast," as
+Throgmorton called this earl, found but a frail countess in the Lady
+Lettice, whose first husband, the Earl of Essex, had suddenly expired.
+The Master of the Horse had fired her passion--a hired bravo, in
+cleaving his skull, did not succeed in despatching the wounded lover:
+where the blow came from they did not doubt. Leicester was conducting
+his countess to Kenilworth; stopping at Cornbury Hall, in Oxfordshire,
+the lady was possibly reminded of the tale of Cumnor Hall. To Leicester,
+after his usual excessive indulgence at table, the countess deemed it
+necessary to administer a cordial--it was his last draught! Such is the
+revelation of the page, and latterly the gentleman, of this earl.
+Certain it is that Leicester was suddenly seized with fever, and died on
+his way to Kenilworth, and that the Master of the Horse shortly after
+married the poisoning countess of the great poisoner.[5]
+
+Had the writer unskilfully heaped together such atrocious acts or such
+ambiguous tales the libel had not endured; the life of this new Borgia
+is composed of richer materials than extravagant crimes. It furnishes a
+picture of eventful days and busied personages; truth and fiction
+brightening and shadowing each other. Some close observer in the court
+circle, one who sickened at the queen's insolent favourite, was a
+malicious correspondent. Some realities lie on the surface; and Sir
+Philip Sidney was baffled or confounded when he would have sent forth
+his chivalric challenge to the veiled accuser.
+
+The adversaries of the Jesuits referred to Busenbaum, a favourite author
+with the order, to inform the world that among the artifices of the
+political brotherhood was inculcated the doctrine of systematic calumny.
+"Whenever you would ruin a person or a government, you must begin by
+spreading calumnies to defame them. Many will incline to believe or to
+side with the propagator. Repetition and perseverance will at length
+give the consistency of probability, and the calumnies will stick to a
+distant day." A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of
+calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This
+principle has taken full effect on this state-favourite. The libel was
+most diligently spread about--"La Vie Abominable" was read throughout
+Europe. This story of the "subject without subjection," who "shoots at
+a diadem" in England or Scotland, and turns England into a "Leicesterian
+commonwealth," raised princely anger: the queen condescended to have
+circular letters written to protest against it, considering the libel as
+reflecting on herself, in the choice of so principal a counsellor: and
+though her majesty discovered that the author was nothing less than "an
+incarnate devil," yet to this day the state-favourite Leicester remains
+the most mysterious personage in our history; nor is there any historian
+from the days of Camden who dares to extenuate suspicions which come to
+us palpable as realities. In truth, the life of Leicester is darkness;
+his political intrigues probably were carried on with all parties, which
+probably he adopted and betrayed by turns: at last his caprice stood
+above law. And even in his domestic privacy there were strange
+incidents, dark and secret, which eye was not to see, nor ear to listen
+to; and we have a remarkable chance-evidence of this singular fact in
+that mysterious sonnet of Spenser, prefixed to his version of Virgil's
+"Gnat," whose sad tale was his own, dedicated "to the deceased lord;"
+his "cloudy tears" have left "this riddle rare" to some "future Oedipus"
+who has never arisen.[6]
+
+The Armada flying from our coasts evinced to Spain and Rome that
+Elizabeth was not to be dethroned. What then remained to hold a
+flattering vision of the English crown to Philip, and to cast the
+heretical land into confusion? The genius of this new Machiavel rose
+with the magnitude of the subject and the singularity of the occasion.
+
+The policy or the weakness of Elizabeth never consented to settle the
+succession; and as the queen aged, all Europe became more interested in
+that impending event. This was a cause of national uneasiness, and an
+implement for political mischief.
+
+In 1594 was printed at Antwerp "A Conference about the next Succession
+to the Crown of England." The purpose of this memorable tract is
+twofold. The first part inculcates the doctrine that society is a
+compact made by man with man for the good of the commonwealth; that the
+forms of government are diverse, and therefore are by God and nature
+left to the choice of the people; that kings do not derive their title
+from any birthright, or lineal descent, but from their coronation, with
+conditions and admissions by the consent of the people; and that kings
+may be deposed, or the line of succession may be altered, as many of our
+own and other monarchs have suffered from various causes, being
+accountable for their misgovernment or natural incompetency.
+"Commonwealths have sometimes chastised lawfully their lawful princes,
+though never so lawfully descended." This has often been "commodious to
+the weal-public," and "it may seem that God prospered the same by the
+good success and successors that hence ensued."[7]
+
+This theory of monarchical government was opposed to those "absurd
+flatterers who yield too much power to princes," and was not likely, as
+we shall see, to be only a work of temporary interest. Let us, however,
+observe that this advocate of the people's supremacy over their
+sovereign's was himself the vowed slave to passive obedience, and the
+indefeasible and absolute rule of the sacerdotal suzerain.
+
+The second division is a very curious historical treatise on the titles
+and pretensions of ten or eleven families of the English blood-royal,
+"what may be said for them, and what against them." From its topics it
+was distinguished as "The Book of Titles." It was well adapted to
+perplex the nation or raise up competitors, while, however, it reminded
+them "of the slaughter and the executions of the nobility of England."
+In this uncertainty of the succession, Isabella of Spain, whose ancestry
+is drawn from the Conquest through many descents, is shown to have the
+best title, and James of Scotland the worst.
+
+The book appeared in London with a dedication to the Earl of Essex--this
+was a stroke of refined malice, and produced its full effect on the
+queen. In this panegyric on the earl's "eminence in place and in
+dignity, in favour of the prince and in high liking of the people," the
+wily Jesuit intimated that "no man is like to have greater sway on
+deciding of this great affair (the succession), when time shall come for
+that determination, and those that shall assist you and are likest to
+follow your fame and fortune." The jealous alarm of Elizabeth had often
+been roused by the imprudence of the earl, and on this occasion it
+thundered with all her queenly rage; she herself showed him the
+dangerous eulogiums of the insidious dedicator, till the hapless earl
+was observed to grow pale, and withdrew from court with a mind
+disturbed, and was confined by illness till the queen's visit once more
+restored him to favour.
+
+The immediate effect of the "Conference" appears by an act of Parliament
+of the 35th of Elizabeth, enacting that "whoever was found to have it in
+his house should be guilty of high treason;" but its more permanent
+influence is remarkable on several national occasions. This tract
+contributed to hasten the fate of the hapless Charles. The doctrine of
+cutting off the heads of kings, "the whole body being of more authority
+than the only head," was too opportune for the business in hand to be
+neglected by the Independents. The first part, licensed by their
+licenser, was printed at the charge of the Parliament, disguised as
+"Several Speeches delivered at a Conference concerning the Power of
+Parliament to proceed against their King for Misgovernment." The nine
+chapters of the Conference were turned into these nine pretended
+speeches![8] These furnished the matter of the speech of Bradshaw at the
+condemnation of the monarch; and even Milton, in his "Defence of the
+English People," adopted the doctrines. Never has political pamphlet
+directed an event more awful, and on which the destiny of a nation was
+suspended. Even an abstract of it served for the nonce, under the title
+of "The Broken Succession of the Crown of England," at the time that
+Cromwell was aiming at restoring the English monarchy in his own person.
+It was again renovated in 1681, at the time of agitating the bill of
+exclusion against James the Second. I believe it has appeared in other
+forms. Nor was the fortune of "Leicester's Commonwealth" less remarkable
+in serving the designs of a party. It was twice reprinted, in 1641, as a
+melancholy picture of a royal favourite, and again, probably with the
+same political design, in 1706.
+
+Parsons' claim to these two memorable tracts has been impugned. My
+ingenious friend Dr. Bliss has referred to two letters of Dr. Ashton,
+Master of Jesus College, and Dean Mosse, on the subject of "Leicester's
+Commonwealth," which he considers "fully prove" that it was not the work
+of Parsons. I give these letters.
+
+  _Dr. Ashton to Dean Mosse._
+
+"There is nothing in the book that favours the Spanish invasion, and all
+the treason is only against Leicester. Parsons has been esteemed the
+author of it; but I can't yet believe that 'twas his, for several
+reasons.
+
+"First; there's nothing in it of the fierce and turbulent spirit of that
+Jesuit; but a tender concern for the Queen and government both in church
+and state.
+
+"Secondly; the book makes a papist own that several of the priests and
+others were traitors, and often commends Burleigh, who was the chief
+persecutor, and ordered the writing of 'The Book of Justice,' &c., which
+certainly Parsons would not have done, whose errand into England not
+long before was to renew the excommunication of the Queen, and declare
+her subjects freed from their allegiance, nay bound to take up arms
+against her; especially since Campian, his brother missionary, was one
+of those martyrs, and he himself very narrowly escaped.
+
+"Thirdly; when Parsons and Campian came into England in '80, it was to
+further the designs of the King of Spain, and persuade the people that
+upon the Queen's forfeiture he had a right to take possession of her
+crown. But there's nothing looks that way in the book, unless defending
+the title of the Queen of the Scots and her son be writing for the
+invasion. There was a book written a little before this, for the Scotch
+succession, by Lesly, bishop of Rosse, under the name of Morgan, even
+by the connivance of Queen Elizabeth, as Camden tells us; but the
+seminary priests and Jesuits were all upon the Spanish right by virtue
+of the Pope's bull of excommunication; and upon this foot Parsons
+afterwards wrote his 'Andr. Philopater,' and 'Book of Titles,' in the
+name of N. Doleman.
+
+"Fourthly; I can't think Parsons capable of writing this book; for how
+could a man that from '75 to his dying day (bating a few months in the
+year '80) lived at Rome, be able to know all the secret transactions,
+both in _court_ and _country_, in England, which perhaps were mysteries
+to all the nation except a few statesmen about the Queen?
+
+"Lastly; I can't believe that Parsons, who was expelled (or forced to
+resign his fellowship in Baliol) for his immoralities, and then
+pretended to be a physician, and at last went to Rome and turned Jesuit,
+would tell that story of Leicester's management of the University of
+Oxford. There are several other improbabilities.
+
+"The book seems to be written by a man moderate in religion (whether
+Papist or Protestant, I can't say), but a bitter enemy to Leicester--one
+that was intimate with all the court affairs, and, to cover himself from
+_the bear's_ fury, contrived that this book should come as it were from
+abroad, under the name of Parsons."
+
+  _Dr. Mosse's Notes on the above Letter._
+
+"First, He points out several facts to show that the book must have been
+written at the end of 1584, certainly between 1583 and '85, when in '85
+Leicester went general into Holland, of which there is no mention in the
+book, as Drake observes.
+
+"Secondly, The design. I see nothing in the book relating to the
+invasion, the design being to support the title of the Queen of Scots
+and her son. Dr. James was the first who in print affirmed Parsons to be
+the only author--which was then in many mouths, that he wrote it from
+materials sent him by Burleigh. But as it is not very likely that
+Parsons, who lived at Rome, should be acquainted with all the
+transactions set down in that book, so 'tis less probable that Burleigh
+should pitch upon him for such a work; and I take the report to be
+grounded only on a passage in the book that mentions the _papers_
+Burleigh had against Leicester."
+
+Dr. Mosse then gives what Wood has written, and Wood's inference, that
+neither Pitts nor Ribadeneira giving it in the list of his writings is a
+sufficient argument; and the doctor concludes--
+
+"In short, the author is very uncertain; and, for anything that appears
+in it, it may as well be a protestant's as a papist's. I should rather
+think it the work of some subtle courtier, who for safety got it printed
+abroad, and sent into England under the name of Parsons."[9]
+
+Allowing these arguments to the fullest extent, they are not sufficient
+to disprove the authorship ascribed to Parsons. The drift and character
+of this English Jesuit seem not to have been sufficiently taken in by
+these critics. There would certainly be no difficulty in the Jesuit
+assuming the mask of a moderate religionist, and a loyal subject; for
+the advantage of the disguise, he would even venture the bold stroke of
+condemning the martyrs. The conclusion of Dr. Mosse, that the book might
+be written by either a protestant or a papist, betrays its studied
+ambiguity. It was usual with the Jesuits to conform to prevalent
+opinions to wrestle with them. Sometimes the Jesuit was the advocate for
+the dethronement of monarchs, and at other times urged passive obedience
+to the right divine. In truth, it is always impossible to decide on the
+latent meaning of the Jesuitic pen. Pascal has exhausted the argument.
+
+Dr. Ashton may be mistaken when he asserts that Parsons and Campian came
+to England in 1580, to further the designs of the King of Spain. The
+policy of the Roman Catholic party at that moment did not turn on the
+Spanish succession; during the life of the Scottish Mary, the party were
+all united in one design; it was at her death, in 1587, that it split
+into two opposite factions. At the head of one stood the Jesuit Parsons;
+in his rage and despair, having failed to win over the Scottish prince,
+he raised up the claims of the Spanish line, reckless of the ruin of
+his country by invasion and internal dissension: the other party,
+British at heart, consisting of laymen and gentlemen, would never concur
+in the invasion and conquest of England by a foreign prince. This
+curious contingency has been elucidated by our ambassador at the court
+of France, Sir Henry Neville, in a letter to Cecil.[10] It is therefore
+quite evident why "the book did not look _that way_," as Dr. Ashton
+expresses it, and why all Parsons' subsequent writings did.
+
+Dr. Ashton considers it impossible that Parsons, who lived abroad so
+much of his lifetime, should be so intimate with the secret transactions
+of the court and country of England. But Parsons kept up a busy
+communication with this country. This he has himself incidentally told
+us, in his "Memorial for Reformation," written in 1596; he says, "I have
+had occasion, _above others_, for more than twenty years, not only to
+know the state of matters in England, but also of many foreign nations."
+It is recorded that he received three hundred letters from England on
+his Book of Titles. He was very critical in the history of our great
+families, and had a taste for personal anecdote, even to the gossip of
+the circle. In a remarkable work which he sent forth under the name of
+Andreas Philopater, a Latin reply to the queen's proclamation, he
+describes her ministers as _sprung from the earth_. Of Sir Nicholas
+Bacon, he says that he was an under-butler at Gray's Inn; of Lord
+Burleigh, that his father served under the king's tailor, and that his
+grandfather kept an alehouse, and that for himself during Mary's reign
+he had always his beads in his hand. In this defamatory catalogue, the
+Earl of Leicester is not forgotten: the son of a duke, the grandson of
+an esquire, and the great-grandson of a carpenter; a more flagitious
+man, a more insolent tyrant England never knew; _never had the Catholics
+a more bitter enemy_; books, both in the French and the English
+language, have exposed his debaucheries, his adulteries, his homicides,
+his parricides, his thefts, his rapines, his perjuries, his oppressions
+of the poor, his cruelties, his deceitfulness, and the injuries he did
+to the Catholic religion, to the public, and to private families. This
+is quite a supplement to Leicester's "Commonwealth," condensing all its
+original spirit.
+
+That Lord Burleigh should have supplied materials for this political
+libel, stands next to an impossibility. One passage asserts that "the
+Lord Treasurer hath as much in his keeping of Leycester's own
+hand-writing as is sufficient to hang him, if he durst present it to her
+majesty." This could only have been a random stroke of the hardy writer;
+for were it absolutely true, that sage would never have entrusted that
+secret to any man. It would have been placing his own life in jeopardy.
+As for the tattle of the lady who, in delivering a letter from Leicester
+into the hands of Lord Burleigh, "at the door of the withdrawing
+chamber," was instructed to drop it in a way that it might attract the
+queen's notice, and induce her majesty to read it, it surely was not
+necessary for Lord Burleigh to communicate this "shift" of Leicester's
+practices; the lady might have deposited this secret manoeuvre in the
+ear of the faithless courtier who unquestionably contributed his zealous
+quota to this Leicesterian Commonwealth.
+
+With regard to "the Conference," the Roman Catholic historian, Dodd, and
+others, have inclined to doubt whether Parsons was the author; and their
+argument is--not an unusual one with the Jesuits--you cannot prove it,
+and he has denied it. Cardinal Allen and Sir Francis Englefield may have
+contributed to this learned work, but Parsons held the pen. It appeared
+under the name of Doleman; and it is said that the harmless secular
+priest who bore that name fell into trouble in consequence. We may for
+once believe Parsons himself, that the name was chosen for its
+significance, as "a man of dole," grieving for the loss of his country.
+He has in other writings continued the initials, N. D., associating his
+feelings with these letters. On the same querulous principle, he had
+formerly taken that of "John Howlett," or Owlet. He fancied such
+significant pseudonyms, in allusion to his condition; thus he took that
+of "Philopater." He varied his initials, as well as his fictitious
+names. He was a Proteus whenever he had his pen in his hand; Protestant
+and Romanist, Englishman and Spaniard.
+
+It is now, however, too late to hesitate in fixing on the true parent of
+these twin-productions; twins they are, though in the intellectual state
+twins are not born on the same day. These productions are marked by the
+same strong features; their limbs are fashioned alike; and their
+affinity betrays itself, even in their tones. The author could not
+always escape from adopting a peculiar phraseology, or identical
+expressions, which unavoidably associate the later with the earlier
+work, the same in style, in manner, and in plan. Imitation is out of the
+question where there is identity. One pen composed these works, as they
+did thirty more.
+
+The English writings of the Jesuit PARSONS have attracted the notice of
+some of our philological critics. Parsons may be ranked among the
+earliest writers of our vernacular diction in its purity and pristine
+vigour, without ornament or polish. It is, we presume, Saxon English,
+unblemished by an exotic phrase. It is remarkable that our author, who
+passed the best part of his days abroad, and who had perfectly acquired
+the Spanish and the Italian languages, and slightly the French, yet
+appears to have preserved our colloquial English, from the vicissitudes
+of those fashionable novelties which deform the long unsettled
+Elizabethan prose. To the elevation of Hooker his imagination could
+never have ascended; but in clear conceptions and natural expressions no
+one was his superior. His English writings have not a sentence which to
+this day is either obsolete or obscure. Swift would not have disdained
+his idiomatic energy. Parsons was admirably adapted to be a libeller or
+a polemic.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] At Rome there was "The English Hospital," founded by two of the
+    kings of our Saxon Heptarchy; a thousand years had consecrated that
+    small domicile for the English native; but now the emigrants, and not
+    the pilgrims, of England claimed an abode beneath the papal eye. It
+    had been a refuge to the fugitives from the days of Henry the Eighth;
+    subsequently this English Hospital, under the auspices of Cardinal
+    Allen, assumed the higher title of "The English College at Rome," and
+    the Jesuit Parsons closed his days as its rector without attaining to
+    the cardinalship.
+
+  [2] The seminarists were universally revered as candidates of
+    martyrdom.--See Baronius, "Martyrol." Rome, 29 Dec. St. Philip Neri,
+    who lived in the neighbourhood of the English Seminary in Rome, would
+    frequently stand near the door of the house to view the students
+    going to the public schools. This saint used to bow to them, and
+    salute them with the words--"_Salvete flores martyrum._"--Plowden's
+    "Remarks on Missions of Gregorio Panzani," Liege, 1794, p. 97.
+
+  [3] As Roman Catholics usually interpolate history with miracles, so
+    we find one here; being assured that the judge, while passing
+    sentence on Campian, drawing off his glove, found his hand stained
+    with blood, which he could not wash away, as he showed to several
+    about him who can witness of it.--Lansdowne MSS., 982, fo. 21.
+
+  [4] "Hist. Soc. Jesu." Pars quinta, Tomus posterior. Auctore Jos.
+    Juvencio, 1710.
+
+  [5] This remarkable incident, in keeping with the rest, was
+    discovered by Dr. Bliss in a manuscript note on "Leicester's Ghost,"
+    as communicated by the page to the writer from his own personal
+    observations.--"Athenæ Oxon.," ii. col. 74.
+
+    If this voracious Apicius did not die of a surfeit, the fever might
+    have been caught from the cordial. The marriage of the Master of the
+    Horse seems to wind up the story.
+
+  [6] See the subsequent article on "SPENSER."
+
+  [7] "There is," continues our author, "a point much to be noted,"
+    which is, "what men have commonly succeeded in the places of such as
+    have been deposed?" The successors of five of our deposed monarchs
+    have been all eminent princes; "John, Edward the Second, Richard the
+    Second, Henry the Sixth, and Richard the Third, have been succeeded
+    by the three Henries--the Third, Fourth, and Seventh; and two
+    Edwards--Third and Fourth."
+
+  [8] I have not seen this edition of "The Conference," or "Speeches,"
+    but it must assuredly have suffered some mutilations; for Parsons
+    often puts down some marginal notes which were not suitable to the
+    republicans of that day. Such, for instance, as these--"A Monarchy
+    the best Government;" "Miseries of Popular Governments." Mabbott, the
+    licenser, must have rescinded such unqualified axioms.
+
+  [9] Cole's MSS., xxx. 129. Cole adds, that Baker, in a manuscript
+    note upon Pitt's and Ribadeneira's silence, observes, "That's no
+    argument--the book was a libel, and libels are not mentioned in
+    catalogues by friends."
+
+  [10] Winwood's "Memorials," vol. i., p. 51.
+
+
+
+
+HOOKER.
+
+
+The government of Elizabeth, in the settlement of an ecclesiastical
+establishment, had not only to pass through the convulsive transition of
+the "old" to the "new religion," as it was called at the time; but
+subsequently it was thrown into a peculiar position, equally hateful to
+the zealots of two antagonist parties or factions.
+
+The Romanists, who would have disputed the queen's title to the crown,
+were securely circumscribed by their minority, or pressed down by the
+secular arm; they were silenced by penal statutes, or they vanished in a
+voluntary exile; and even their martyrs were only allowed to suffer as
+traitors. A more insidious adversary was lurking at home; itself the
+child of the Reformation, it had been nourished at the same breast, and
+had shared in the common adversity; and this youthful protestantism was
+lifting its arm against its elder sister.
+
+A public event, when it becomes one of the great eras of a nation, has
+sometimes inspired one of those "monuments of the mind," which take a
+fixed station in its literature, addressed to its own, but written for
+all times. And thus it happened with the party of the MAR-PRELATES; for
+these mean and scandalous satirists, and their abler chiefs, were the
+true origin of Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity." The scandalous
+pamphlets of the MAR-PRELATES met their fate, crushed by the sharper
+levity of more refined wits; the more solemn volumes of their learned
+chiefs encountered a master genius, such as had not yet risen in the
+nation.
+
+In the state of the language, and the polemical temper of these early
+opposite systems of church, and indeed of civil government, it was
+hardly to be expected that the vindication of the ruling party should be
+the work of an elevated genius. The vernacular style was yet imperfectly
+moulded, the ear was not yet touched by modulated periods, nor had the
+genius of our writers yet extended to the lucid arrangement of
+composition; moreover, none had attained to the philosophic disposition
+which penetrates into the foundations of the understanding, and appeals
+to the authority of our consciousness. On a sudden appeared this
+master-mind, opening the hidden springs of eloquence--the voice of one
+crying from the wilderness.
+
+It had been more in the usual course of human affairs, that the whole
+controversy of ecclesiastical polity should have remained in the
+ordinary hands of the polemics; the cold mediocrity of the Puritan
+Cartwright might have been answered by the cold mediocrity of the
+Primate Whitgift. Their quarrel had then hardly passed their own times;
+and "the admonition," and "the apology," and all "the replies and
+rejoinders," might have been equally suffered to escape the record of an
+historian.
+
+But such was not the issue of this awful contest; and the mortal
+combatants are not suffered to expire, for a master-genius has involved
+them in his own immortality.[1]
+
+The purity and simplicity of Izaak Walton's own mind reflected the
+perfect image of HOOKER; the individualising touches and the careful
+statements in that vital biography seem as if Hooker himself had written
+his own life.
+
+We first find our author in a small country parsonage, at
+Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire; where a singular
+occurrence led to his elevation to the mastership of the Temple.
+
+Two of his former pupils had returned from their travels--Sir Edwin
+Sandys and George Cranmer, men worthy of the names they bore; for the
+one became his ardent patron, and the other the zealous assistant in
+his great work. Longing to revisit their much-loved tutor, who did not
+greatly exceed them in age, they came unexpectedly; and, to their
+amazement, surprised their learned friend tending a flock of sheep, with
+a Horace in his hand. His wife had ordered him to supply the absence of
+the servant. When released, on returning to the house, the visitors
+found that they must wholly furnish their own entertainment--the lady
+would afford no better welcome; but even the conversation was
+interrupted by Hooker being called away to rock the cradle. His young
+friends reluctantly quit his house to seek for quieter lodgings,
+lamenting that his lot had not fallen on a pleasanter parsonage, and a
+quieter wife to comfort him after his unwearied studies. "I submit to
+God's will while I daily labour to possess my soul in patience and
+peace," was the reply of the philosophic man who could abstract his mind
+amid the sheep, the cradle, and the termagant.
+
+The whole story of the marriage of this artless student would be
+ludicrous, but for the melancholy reflection that it brought waste and
+disturbance into the abode of the author of the "Ecclesiastical Polity."
+
+According to the statutes of his college he had been appointed to preach
+a sermon at Paul's-cross: he arrived from Oxford weary and wet, with a
+heavy cold; faint and heartless, he was greatly agitated lest he should
+not be able to deliver his probationary sermon; but two days' nursing by
+the woman of the lodgings recovered our young preacher. She was an
+artful woman, who persuaded him that his constitutional delicacy
+required a perpetual nurse; and for this purpose offered, as he had no
+choice of his own, to elect for him a wife. On his next arrival she
+presented him with her daughter. There was a generosity in his gratitude
+for the nursing him for his probationary sermon, which only human beings
+wholly abstracted from the concerns of daily life could possibly
+display. He resigned the quiet of his college to be united to a female
+destitute alike of personal recommendations and of property. As an
+apology for her person, he would plead his short-sightedness; and for
+the other, that he never would have married for any interested motive.
+Thus, the first step into life of a very wise man was a folly which was
+to endure with it. The wife of Hooker tyrannized over his days, and at
+last proved to be a traitress to his fame.
+
+The mastership of the Temple was procured for the humble rector of
+Drayton-Beauchamp by the recommendation of his affectionate Edwin
+Sandys. But not without regret did this gentle spirit abandon the lowly
+rectory-house for "the noise" of the Temple-hall. Hooker required for
+his happiness neither elevation nor dignities, but solely a spot wherein
+his feeble frame might repose, and his working mind meditate; solitude
+to him was a heaven, notwithstanding his eternal wife Joan!
+
+Hooker might have looked on the Temple as a vignette represents the
+greater picture. The Temple was a copy reduced of the kingdom, with the
+same passions and the same parties. What had occurred between the
+Archbishop Whitgift and the Puritan Cartwright, was now opened between
+the lecturer and the master of the Temple.
+
+The Evening Lecturer at the Temple was Walter Travers--an eminent man,
+of insinuating manners and of an irreproachable life. He had been nursed
+in the presbytery of Geneva, and was the correspondent of Beza in the
+French, and of Knox in the Scottish Church; above all, Travers was the
+firm associate of Cartwright, and the consulted oracle of the English
+dissenters. He ruled over an active party of the younger members, and,
+by insensible innovations, appears to have there established the new
+ecclesiastical commonwealth, which at first consisted of the most
+trivial innovations in ceremonies and the most idle distinctions.
+Travers was looking confidently to the mastership, when the appointment
+of Hooker crossed his ambitious hopes.
+
+With the disciples of parity, a free election, and not a royal
+appointment, was a first state principle. To preserve the formality,
+since he could not yet possess the reality, Travers suggested to the new
+master of the Temple that he should not make his appearance till Travers
+had announced his name to the body of the members, and then he would be
+admitted by their consent. To this point in "the new order of things,"
+the sage Hooker returned a reasonable refusal. "If such custom were here
+established, I would not disturb the order; but here, where it never
+was, I might not of my own head take upon me to begin it." The
+formality required was, in fact, a masked principle, which cast a doubt
+on his right and on the authority which had granted it. "You conspire
+against me," exclaimed the nonconformist, "affecting superiority over
+me;" and condensing all the bitterness of his mingled religion and
+politics, he reproached Hooker that "he had entered on his charge by
+virtue _only of an human creature_, and not by the _election of the
+people_." With TRAVERS the people were more than "human creatures;" the
+voice of the people was a revelation of Heaven; this sage probably
+having first counted his votes. These were the inconveniences of a
+transition to a new political system; the parties did not care to
+understand one another. These two good men, for such they were, now
+brought into collision, bore a mutual respect, connected too by blood
+and friendly intercourse. But in a religious temper or times, while men
+mix their own notions with the inscrutable decrees of Heaven, who shall
+escape from the torture of insolvable polemics? Abstruse points of
+scholastic theology opened the rival conflict. A cry of unsound doctrine
+was heard. "What are your grounds?" exclaimed TRAVERS. "The words of St.
+Paul," replied HOOKER. "But what author do you follow in expounding St.
+Paul?" Hooker laid a great stress on reason on all matters which allowed
+of the full exercise of human reason. Two opposite doctrines now came
+from the same pulpit! The morning and the evening did not seem the same
+day. The son of Calvin thundered his shuddering dogmas; the child of
+Canterbury was meek and merciful. If one demolished an unsound doctrine,
+it was preached up again by the other. The victor was always to be
+vanquished, the vanquisher was always to be victor. The inner and the
+outer Temple appeared to be a mob of polemics.
+
+Travers was silenced by "authority." He boldly appealed to her majesty
+and the privy council, where he had many friends. His petition argued
+every point of divinity, while he claimed the freedom of his ministry.
+But there stood Elizabeth's "black husband," as the virgin queen deigned
+in her coquetry to call the archbishop. The party of Travers circulated
+his petition, which was cried up as unanswerable; it was carried in
+"many bosoms:" Hooker was compelled to reply; and the churchmen
+extolled "an answer answerless:" the buds of the great work appear among
+these sterile leaves of controversy.[2]
+
+The absence of Travers from the Temple seemed to be more influential
+than even his presence. He had plenteously sown the seeds of
+nonconformity, and the soil was rich. Hooker had foreseen the far-remote
+event; "Nothing can come of contention but the mutual waste of the
+parties contending, till a common enemy dance in the ashes of them
+both." It must be confessed that Hooker had a philosophical genius.
+
+It was amid the disorders around him that the master of the Temple
+meditated to build up the great argument of polity, drawn from the
+nature of all laws, human and divine. The sour neglect and systematic
+opposition of the rising party of the dissenters had outwearied his
+musings. Clinging to the great tome which was expanding beneath his
+hand, the studious man entreated to be removed to some quieter place. A
+letter to the primate on this occasion reveals, in the sweetness of his
+words, his innate simplicity. He tells that when he had lost the freedom
+of his cell at college, yet he found some degree of it in his quiet
+country parsonage: but now he was weary of the noise and opposition of
+the place, and God and nature did not intend him for contention, but for
+study and quietness. He had satisfied himself in his studies, and now
+had begun a treatise in which he intended the satisfaction of others: he
+had spent many thoughtful hours, and he hoped not in vain; but he was
+not able to finish what he had begun, unless removed to some quiet
+country parsonage, where he might see God's blessings spring out of our
+mother earth, and "eat his own bread in peace and privacy."
+
+The humble wish was obtained, and the great work was prosecuted.
+
+In 1594, four books of the "Ecclesiastical Polity" were published, and
+three years afterwards the fifth. These are for ever sanctioned by the
+last revisions of the author. The intensity of study wore out a frame
+which had always been infirm; and his premature death left his
+manuscripts roughly sketched, without the providence of a guardian.
+
+These unconcocted manuscripts remained in the sole custody of the widow.
+Strange rumours were soon afloat, and transcripts from Hooker's papers
+got abroad, attesting that in the termination of the "Ecclesiastical
+Polity," the writer had absolutely sided with the nonconformists. The
+great work, however, was appreciated of such national importance, that
+it was deemed expedient to bring it to the cognizance of the privy
+council, and the widow was summoned to give an account of the state of
+these unfinished manuscripts. Consonantly with her character, which we
+have had occasion to observe, in the short interval of four months which
+had passed since the death of Hooker, this widow had become a wife. She
+had at first refused to give any account of the manuscripts; but now, in
+a conference with the archbishop, she confessed that she had allowed
+certain puritanic ministers "to go into Hooker's study and to look over
+his writings; and further, that they burned and tore many, assuring her
+that these were writings not fit to be seen." There never was an
+examination by the privy council, for the day after her confession this
+late widow of Hooker was found dead in her bed. A mysterious
+coincidence! The suspected husband was declared innocent, so runs the
+tale told by honest Izaac Walton.
+
+These manuscripts were now delivered up to the archbishop, who placed
+them in the hands of the learned Dr. Spenser to put into order; he was
+an intimate friend of Hooker, and long conversant with his arguments.
+However, as this scholar was deeply occupied in the translation of the
+Bible, he entrusted the papers to a student at Oxford, Henry Jackson, a
+votary of the departed genius.
+
+On the decease of Dr. Spenser, the manuscripts of Hooker were left as "a
+precious legacy" to Dr. King, bishop of London, in 1611. They were
+resigned with the most painful reluctance by the speculative and
+ingenious student to whom they had been so long entrusted, that he
+looked on them with a parental eye, having transcribed them and put many
+things together according to his idea of the system of Hooker.[3] During
+the time the manuscripts reposed in the care of the bishop of London, an
+edition of the five books of the "Ecclesiastical Polity," with some
+tractates and sermons, was published in 1617;[4] had Dr. King thought
+that these manuscripts were in a state fitted for publication, he would
+have doubtless completed that edition. He died in 1621, and the
+manuscripts were claimed by Archbishop Abbot for the Lambeth library.
+
+Again, in 1632, the five undoubted genuine books were reprinted. Laud,
+then archbishop of Canterbury, attracted probably by this edition,
+examined the papers--he was startled by some antagonist principles, and
+left the phantom to sleep in its darkness; whether some doctrines which
+broadly inculcate _jure divino_ were touches from the Lambeth quarter,
+or whether the interpolating hand of some presbyter had insidiously
+turned aside the weapon, the conflicting opinions could not be those of
+the judicious Hooker.
+
+But their fate and their perils had not yet terminated; the episcopalian
+walls of Lambeth were no longer an asylum, when the manuscripts of
+Hooker were to be grasped by the searching hands and heads of Prynne and
+Hugh Peters, by a vote of the Commons! At this critical period the sixth
+and eighth books were given to the world, announced as "a work long
+expected, and now published according to the most authentique copies."
+We are told of six transcripts with which this edition was collated. It
+is perplexing to understand when these copies got forth, and how they
+were all alike deficient in the seventh book, which the setter forth of
+this edition declares to be irrecoverable. After the Restoration, Dr.
+Gauden made an edition of Hooker; in the dedication to the king he
+offers the work as "now augmented and I hope completed, with the three
+last books, so much desired and so long concealed." This remarkable
+expression indicates some doubt whether he possessed the perfect copies,
+nor does he inform us of the manner in which he had recovered the lost
+seventh book. The recent able editor of the works of Hooker favours its
+genuineness by internal evidence, notwithstanding it bears marks of
+hasty writing; but he irresistibly proves that the sixth book is wholly
+lost, that which is named the sixth being never designed as a part of
+the "Ecclesiastical Polity."
+
+Both the great parties are justly entitled to suspect one another; a
+helping hand was prompt to twist the nose of wax to their favourite
+shape; and the transcripts had always omissions, and we may add,
+commissions. Some copies of the concluding book asserted that "Princes
+on earth are only accountable to Heaven," while others read "to the
+people." We perceive the facility of such slight emendations, and may be
+astonished at their consequences; but we need not question the hands
+which furnished the various readings. When we recollect the magnificent
+entrance into the work, we must smile at the inconclusive conclusion,
+the small issue from so vast an edifice. "Too rigorous it were that the
+breach of human law should be held a deadly sin. A mean there is between
+extremities, _if so be that we can find it out_." Never was the _juste
+milieu_ suggested with such hopeless diffidence. Such was not the tone,
+nor could be the words, of our eloquent and impressive HOOKER. From the
+first conception of his system, his comprehensive intellect had surveyed
+all its parts, and the intellectual architecture was completed before
+the edifice was constructed. This admirable secret in the labour of a
+single work, on which many years were to be consumed, our author has
+himself revealed to us; a secret which may be a lesson. "I have
+endeavoured that every former part might give strength unto all that
+follow, and every latter bring some light unto all before; so that if
+the judgments of men do but hold themselves in suspense, as touching the
+first more general meditations, till in order they have perused the rest
+that ensue, what may seem dark at the first will afterwards be found
+more plain, even as the latter particular decisions will appear, I doubt
+not, more strong, when the other have been read before."[5] Here we have
+an allusion to a noble termination of his system.
+
+This great work of Hooker strictly is theological, but here it is
+considered simply as a work of literature and philosophy. The first book
+lays open the foundations of law and order, to escape from "the mother
+of confusion which breedeth destruction. The lowest must be knit to the
+highest." We may read this first book as we read the reflections of
+Burke on the French revolution; where what is peculiar, or partial, or
+erroneous in the writer does not interfere with the general principles
+of the more profound views of human policy. And it is remarkable that
+during the anarchical misrule of France, when all governments seemed
+alike unstable, some one who had not wholly lost his senses among those
+raving politicians, published separately this _first book of
+Ecclesiastical Polity_; a timely admonition, however, alas! timeless! I
+was not surprised to find classed among "Legal Bibliography" the works
+of Hooker.
+
+The fate of those controversies which in reality admit of no argument,
+is singularly exemplified in the history of this great work. These are
+the controversies where the parties apparently going the same course,
+and intent on the same object, but impelled by opposite principles, can
+never unite; like two parallel lines, they may run on together, but
+remain at the same distance, though they should extend themselves to
+infinity. Opposite propositions are assigned by each party, or from the
+same premises are educed opposite inferences. In the present case both
+parties inquired after a model for church-government; there was none!
+Apostolical Christianity had hardly left the old synagogue. Hooker
+therefore asserted that the form of church-government was merely a human
+institution regulated by laws; and that laws were not made for private
+men to dispute, but to obey. The nonconformist urged the Protestant
+right of private judgment and a satisfied conscience. Hooker, alarmed at
+this irruption of schisms, to maintain established authority, or rather
+supremacy, was driven to take refuge in the very argument which the
+Romanist used with the Protestant.
+
+The elaborate preface of Hooker is a tract of itself; it is the secret
+history of nonconformity, and of the fiery Calvin. Yet was it from
+positions here laid down that James the Second declared that it was one
+of the two books which sent him back to the fold of Rome. It is not
+therefore surprising that when a part was eagerly translated by an
+English Romanist to his Holiness, who had declared that "he had never
+met with an English book whose writer deserved the name of an
+author!"--so low then stood our literature in the eyes of the
+foreigner,--that the Pope perceived nothing anti-papal in the eloquent
+advocate of established authority, while he was deeply struck at the
+profundity of the genius of "a poor obscure English priest;" and the
+bishop of Rome exclaimed, "There is no learning that this man has not
+searched into; nothing too hard for his understanding, and his books
+will get reverence by age." Our James the First, who it must be allowed
+was no ordinary judge of polemics, on his arrival in England inquired
+after Hooker, and was informed that his recent death had been deeply
+lamented by the queen. "And I receive it with no less sorrow," observed
+the new English monarch, "for I have received more satisfaction in
+reading a leaf in Mr. Hooker than I have had in large treatises by many
+of the learned: many others write well, but yet in the next age they
+will be forgotten."
+
+The attestations of his Holiness and our James the First, to some of my
+readers, may appear very suspicious. They are, however, prophetic; and
+this is an evidence that the "Ecclesiastical Polity" must contain
+principles more deeply important than those which might more
+particularly have been grateful to these regal critics. Our sage, it is
+true, has not escaped from a severer scrutiny, and has been taxed as
+"too apt to acquiesce in all ancient tenets." What was transitory, or
+what was partial, in this great work, may be subtracted without injury
+to its excellence or its value. Hooker has written what posterity reads.
+The spirit of a later age, progressive in ameliorating the imperfect
+condition of all human institutions, must often return to pause over
+the first book of "Ecclesiastical Polity," where the master-genius has
+laid the foundations and searched into the nature of all laws whatever.
+HOOKER is the first vernacular writer whose classical pen harmonised a
+numerous prose. While his earnest eloquence, freed from all scholastic
+pedantry, assumed a style stately in its structure, his gentle spirit
+sometimes flows into natural humour, lovely in the freshness of its
+simplicity.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] When our literary history was only partially cultivated, the
+    readers of Hooker were often disturbed amidst the profound reasonings
+    of "The Ecclesiastical Polity," by frequent references to volumes and
+    pages of T. C. The editors of Hooker had thrown no light on these
+    mysterious initials. Contemporaries are not apt to mortify themselves
+    by recollecting that what is familiar to them may be forgotten by the
+    succeeding age. Sir John Hawkins, a literary antiquary, drew up a
+    memoir which explains these initials as those of Thomas Cartwright,
+    and has correctly arranged the numerous tracts of the whole
+    controversy. But Hawkins having consigned this accurate catalogue to
+    "The Antiquarian Repertory," it could be little known; and Beloe, in
+    his "Anecdotes of Literature," vol. i., transcribing the entire
+    memoir of Hawkins, _verbatim_, without the slightest acknowledgment,
+    obtains a credit for original research. Beloe is referred to for this
+    _authentic_ information by Burnet, in his "Specimens of English
+    Prose-Writers."
+
+  [2] Both these papers of Travers and Hooker are preserved in Hooker's
+    Works. Many curious points are discussed by Hooker with admirable
+    reasoning. The divinity of Hooker, who is the firm advocate of legal
+    authority, is enlightened and tolerant; while Travers, who advocated
+    unrestrained personal freedom, is in his divinity narrow and
+    merciless. He sees only "the Elect," and he casts human nature into
+    the flames of eternity.
+
+  [3] "A studious and cynical person, who never expected or desired
+    more than his small preferment. He was a great admirer of Richard
+    Hooker, and collected some of his small treatises."--_Athenæ
+    Oxonienses._
+
+  [4] Anthony Wood has said it contained all the eight books, (followed
+    by General Dictionary and Biographia Britannica,) and accused Gauden
+    of pretending to publish three books for the first time in 1662.
+
+  [5] "Ecclesiastical Polity," book First.
+
+
+
+
+SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
+
+
+Were I another Baillet, solely occupied in collecting the "_jugemens des
+sçavans_"--the decisions of the learned--the name of Sir Philip Sidney
+would bring forth an awful crash of criticism, rarely equalled in
+dissonance and confusion.
+
+He who first ventured to pronounce a final condemnation on "THE ARCADIA"
+of Sir PHILIP SIDNEY as a "tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral
+romance," was Horace Walpole;--a decision suited to the heartlessness
+which wounded the personal qualities of an heroic man, the pride of a
+proud age. Have modern critics too often caught the watchword when given
+out by an imposing character? The irregular Hazlitt honestly confides to
+us, in an agony of despair, that "Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom
+I cannot acquire a taste," tormented by a conviction that a taste should
+be acquired. The peculiar style of this critic is at once sparkling and
+vehement, antithetical and metaphysical. The volcano of his criticism
+heaves; the short, irruptive periods clash with quick repercussion; the
+lava flows over his pages, till it leaves us in the sudden darkness of
+an hypercriticism on "the celebrated description of the 'Arcadia.'"
+
+Gifford, once the Coryphæus of modern criticism, whose native shrewdness
+admirably fitted him for a partisan, both in politics and in literature,
+did not deem Walpole's depreciation of Sidney "to be without a certain
+degree of justice; the plan is poor, the incidents trite, the style
+pedantic." But our prudential critic harbours himself in some security
+by confessing to "some nervous and elegant passages."
+
+At our northern Athens, the native coldness has touched the leaves of
+"The Arcadia" like a frost in spring. The agreeable researcher into the
+history of fiction confesses the graceful beauty of the language, but
+considers the whole as "extremely tiresome." Another critic states a
+more alarming paroxysm of criticism, that of being "lulled to sleep over
+the interminable 'Arcadia.'"
+
+What innocent lover of books does not imagine that "The Arcadia" of
+Sidney is a volume deserted by every reader, and only to be classed
+among the folio romances of the Scuderies, or the unmeaning pastorals
+whose scenes are placed in the golden age? But such is not the fact.
+"Nobody, it is said, reads 'The Arcadia;' we have known very many
+persons who read it, men, women, and children, and never knew one read
+it without deep interest and admiration," exclaims an animated critic,
+probably the poet Southey.[1] More recent votaries have approached the
+altar of this creation of romance.
+
+It may be well to remind the reader that, although this volume, in the
+revolutions of times and tastes, has had the fate to be depreciated by
+modern critics, it has passed through fourteen editions, suffered
+translations in every European language, and is not yet sunk among the
+refuse of the bibliopolists. "The Arcadia" was long, and it may still
+remain, the haunt of the poetical tribe. SIDNEY was one of those writers
+whom Shakespeare not only studied but imitated in his scenes, copied his
+language, and transferred his ideas.[2] SHIRLEY, BEAUMONT and FLETCHER,
+and our early dramatists turned to "THE ARCADIA" as their text-book.
+Sidney enchanted two later brothers in WALLER and COWLEY; and the
+dispassionate Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE was so struck by "The Arcadia," that he
+found "the true spirit of the vein of ancient poetry in Sidney." The
+world of fashion in Sidney's age culled their phrases out of "The
+Arcadia," which served them as a complete "Academy of Compliments."
+
+The reader who concludes that "The Arcadia" of Sidney is a pedantic
+pastoral, has received a very erroneous conception of the work. It was
+unfortunate for Sidney that he borrowed the title of "The Arcadia" from
+Sannazaro, which has caused his work to be classed among pastoral
+romances, which it nowise resembles; the pastoral part stands wholly
+separated from the romance itself, and is only found in an interlude of
+shepherds at the close of each book; dancing brawls, or reciting verses,
+they are not agents in the fiction. The censure of pedantry ought to
+have been restricted to the attempt of applying the Roman prosody to
+English versification, the momentary folly of the day, and to some other
+fancies of putting verse to the torture.
+
+"The Arcadia" was not one of those spurious fictions invented at random,
+where an author has little personal concern in the narrative he forms.
+
+When we forget the singularity of the fable, and the masquerade dresses
+of the actors, we pronounce them to be real personages, and that the
+dramatic style distinctly conveys to us incidents which, however veiled,
+had occurred to the poet's own observation, as we perceive that the
+scenes which he has painted with such precision must have been
+localities. The characters are minutely analyzed, and so correctly
+preserved, that their interior emotions are painted forth in their
+gestures as well as revealed in their language. The author was himself
+the tender lover whose amorous griefs he touched with such delicacy, and
+the undoubted child of chivalry he drew; and in these finer passions he
+seems only to have multiplied himself.
+
+The manners of the court of Elizabeth were still chivalric; and Sidney
+was trained in the discipline of those generous spirits whom he has
+nobly described as men of "high-erected thoughts seated in a heart of
+courtesy." Hume has censured these "affectations, conceits, and
+fopperies," as well became the philosopher of the Canongate; but there
+was a reality in this shadow of chivalry. Amadis de Gaul himself never
+surpassed the chivalrous achievements of the Earl of Essex; his life,
+indeed, would form the finest of romances, could it be written. He
+challenged the governor of Corunna to single combat for the honour of
+the nation, and proposed to encounter Villars, governor of Rouen, on
+foot or on horseback. And thus run his challenge:--"I will maintain the
+justice of the cause of Henry the Fourth of France, against the league;
+and that I am a better man than thou, and that my mistress is more
+beautiful than thine." This was the very language and the deed of one of
+the Paladins. It was this spirit, fantastic as it may appear to us,
+which stirred Sidney, when Parsons the Jesuit, or some one who lay
+concealed in a dark corner of the court, sent forth anonymously the
+famous state-libel of "Leicester's Commonwealth." To the unknown
+libeller who had reflected on the origin of the Dudleys, that "the Duke
+of Northumberland was not born a gentleman," Sir Philip Sidney, in the
+loftiest tone of chivalry, designed to send a cartel of defiance.
+Touched to the quick in any blur in the _Stemmata Dudleiana_, which, it
+is said, occupied the poet Spenser when under the princely roof of
+Leicester, Sidney exclaims, "I am a Dudley in blood, that Duke's
+daughter's son; my chief honour is to be a Dudley, and truly am I glad
+to have cause to set forth the nobility of that blood; none but this
+fellow of invincible shamelessness could ever have called so palpable a
+matter in question." He closed with the intention of printing at London
+a challenge which he designed all Europe to witness. "Because that thou
+the writer hereof doth most falsely lay want of gentry to my dead
+ancestors, I say that thou therein liest in thy throat, which I will be
+ready to justify upon thee in any place of Europe where thou wilt assign
+me a free place of coming, as within three months after the publishing
+thereof I may understand thy mind. And this which I write, I would send
+to thine own hands if I knew thee; but I trust it cannot be intended
+that he should be ignorant of this printed in London, who knows the very
+whisperings of the Privy-chamber."[3]
+
+We, who are otherwise accustomed to anonymous libels, may be apt to
+conclude that there was something fantastical in sending forth a
+challenge through all Europe:--we, who are content with the obscure
+rencontre of a morning, and with the lucky chance of an exchange of
+shots.
+
+The narrative of "The Arcadia" is peculiar; but if the reader's
+fortitude can yield up his own fancy to the feudal poet, he will find
+the tales diversified. Sidney had traced the vestiges of feudal warfare
+in Germany, in Italy, and in France; those wars of petty states where
+the walled city was oftener carried by stratagem than by storm, and
+where the chivalrous heroes, like champions, stepped forth to challenge
+each other in single combat, almost as often as they were viewed as
+generals at the head of their armies. Our poet's battles have all the
+fierceness and the hurry of action, as if told by one who had stood in
+the midst of the battle-field; and in his "shipwreck," men fight with
+the waves, ere they are flung on the shore, as if the observer had sat
+on the summit of a cliff watching them.
+
+He describes objects on which he loves to dwell with a peculiar richness
+of fancy; he had shivered his lance in the tilt, and had managed the
+fiery courser in his career; that noble animal was a frequent object of
+his favourite descriptions; he looks even on the curious and fanciful
+ornaments of its caparisons; and in the vivid picture of the shock
+between two knights, we see distinctly every motion of the horse and the
+horseman.[4] But sweet is his loitering hour in the sunshine of
+luxuriant gardens, or as we lose ourselves in the green solitudes of the
+forests which most he loves. His poetic eye was pictorial; and the
+delineations of objects, both in art and nature, might be transferred to
+the canvas.
+
+There is a feminine delicacy in whatever alludes to the female
+character, not merely courtly, but imbued with that sensibility which
+St. Palaye has remarkably described as "full of refinement and
+fanaticism." And this may suggest an idea not improbable, that
+Shakespeare drew his fine conceptions of the female character from
+Sidney. Shakespeare solely, of all our elder dramatists, has given true
+beauty to woman; and Shakespeare was an attentive reader of "The
+Arcadia." There is something, indeed, in the language and the conduct of
+Musidorus and Pyrocles, two knights, which may startle the reader, and
+may be condemned as very unnatural and most affected. Their friendship
+resembles the love which is felt for the beautiful sex, if we were to
+decide by their impassioned conduct and the tenderness of their
+language. Coleridge observed that the language of these two friends in
+"The Arcadia" is such as we would not now use, except to women; and he
+has thrown out some very remarkable observations.[5] Warton, too, has
+observed, that the style of friendship between males in the reign of
+Elizabeth would not be tolerated in the present day; sets of sonnets, in
+a vein of tenderness which now could only express the most ardent
+affection for a mistress, were then prevalent.[6] They have not
+accounted for this anomaly in manners by merely discovering them in the
+reigns of Elizabeth and James. It is unquestionably a remains of the
+ancient chivalry, when men, embarking in the same perilous enterprise
+together, vowed their mutual aid and their personal devotion. The
+dangers of one knight were to be participated, and his honour to be
+maintained, by his brother-in-arms. Such exalted friendships, and such
+interminable affections, often broke out both in deeds and words which,
+to the tempered intercourse of our day, offend by their intensity. A
+male friend, whose life and fortune were consecrated to another male,
+who looks on him with adoration, and who talks of him with excessive
+tenderness, appears to us nothing less than a chimerical and monstrous
+lover! It is certain, however, that in the age of chivalry, a Damon and
+Pythias were no uncommon characters in that brotherhood.
+
+It is the imperishable diction, the language of Shakespeare, before
+Shakespeare wrote, which diffuses its enchantment over "The Arcadia;"
+and it is for this that it should be studied; and the true critic of
+Sidney, because the critic was a true poet, offers his unquestioned
+testimony in Cowper--
+
+  SIDNEY, WARBLER OF POETIC PROSE!
+
+Even those playful turns of words, caught from Italian models, which are
+usually condemned, conceal some subtility of feeling, or rise in a
+pregnant thought.[7] The intellectual character of Sidney is more
+serious than volatile; the habits of his mind were too elegant and
+thoughtful to sport with the low comic; and one of the defects of "The
+Arcadia" is the attempt at burlesque humour in a clownish family.
+Whoever is not susceptible of great delight in the freshness of the
+scenery, the luxuriant imagery, the graceful fancies, and the stately
+periods of "The Arcadia," must look to a higher source than criticism,
+to acquire a sense which nature and study seem to deny him.
+
+I have dwelt on the finer qualities of "The Arcadia;" whenever the
+volume proves tedious, the remedy is in the reader's own hands, provided
+he has the judgment often to return to a treasure he ought never to
+lose.
+
+It is indeed hardly to be hoped that the volatile loungers over our
+duodecimos of fiction can sympathise with manners, incidents, and
+personages which for them are purely ideal--the truth of nature which
+lies under the veil must escape from their eyes; for how are they to
+grow patient over the interminable pages of a folio, unbroken by
+chapters, without a single resting-place?[8] And I fear they will not
+allow for that formal complimentary style, borrowed from the Italians
+and the Spaniards, which is sufficiently ludicrous.
+
+The narrative too is obstructed by verses, in which Sidney never
+obtained facility or grace. Nor will the defects of the author be always
+compensated by his beauties, for "The Arcadia" was indeed a fervent
+effusion, but an uncorrected work. The author declared that it was not
+to be submitted to severer eyes than those of his beloved sister, "being
+done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in her presence, the rest by
+sheets sent as fast as they were done." The writer, too, confesses, to
+"a young head having many fancies begotten in it, which, if it had not
+been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry
+might I be that they came in, than they gat out." So truly has Sidney
+expressed the fever of genius, when working on itself in darkness and in
+doubt--absorbing reveries, tumultuous thoughts, the ceaseless
+inquietudes of a soul which has not yet found a voice. Even on his
+death-bed, the author of "The Arcadia" desired its suppression; but the
+fame her noble brother could contemn was dear to his sister, who
+published these loose papers without involving the responsibility of the
+writer, affectionately calling the work, "The Countess of Pembroke's
+Arcadia;" and this volume of melodious prose, of visionary heroism, and
+the pensive sweetness of loves and friendships, became the delight of
+poets.
+
+There is one more work of Sidney, perhaps more generally known than "The
+Arcadia"--his "Defence of Poetry." Lord Orford sarcastically apologised,
+in the second edition of his "Royal and Noble Authors," for his omission
+of any notice of this production. "I had forgotten it," he says; and he
+adds, "a proof that I at least did not think it sufficient foundation
+for so high a character as he acquired." It was a more daring offence to
+depreciate this work of love, than the romance which at least lay
+farther removed from the public eye. The "Defence of Poetry" has had,
+since the days of Walpole, several editions by eminent critics. Sidney,
+in this luminous criticism, and effusion of poetic feeling, has
+introduced the principal precepts of Aristotle, touched by the fire and
+sentiment of Longinus; and, for the first time in English literature,
+has exhibited the beatitude of criticism in a poet-critic.
+
+Sir PHILIP SIDNEY assuredly was one of the most admirable of mankind,
+largely conspicuous in his life, and unparalleled in his death. But was
+this singular man exempt from the frailties of our common nature? If we
+rely on his biographer Zouch, we shall not discover any; if we trust to
+Lord Orford, we shall perceive little else. The truth is, that had
+Sidney lived, he might have grown up to that ideal greatness which the
+world adored in him; but he perished early, not without some of those
+errors of youth, which even in their rankness betrayed the generous soil
+whence they sprung. His fame was more mature than his life, which indeed
+was but the preparation for a splendid one. We are not surprised, that
+to such an accomplished knight the crown of Poland was offered, and that
+all England went into mourning for their hero. We discover his future
+greatness, if we may use the expression, in the noble termination of his
+early career, rather than in the race of glory which he actually ran.
+The life of Sidney would have been a finer subject for the panegyric of
+a Pliny, than for the biography of a Plutarch; his fame was sufficient
+for the one, while his actions were too few for the other.[9]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "Annual Review," iv. 547.
+
+  [2] Who does not recognise a well-known passage in SHAKESPEARE,
+    copied too by COLERIDGE and BYRON, in these words of SIDNEY--"More
+    sweet than a gentle south-west wind which comes creeping over flowery
+    fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer." Such
+    delightful diction, which can only spring out of deep poetic emotion,
+    may be found in the poetic prose of Sidney.
+
+      "Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
+      That breathes upon a bank of violets,
+      Stealing and giving odour."--
+
+        Shaks. _Twelfth Night_, act 1, sc. i.
+
+      "And sweeter than the gentle south-west wind,
+      O'er willowy meads and shadow'd waters creeping,
+      And Ceres' golden fields."--
+
+        Coleridge's _First Advent of Love_.
+
+      "Breathing all gently o'er his cheek and mouth,
+      As o'er a bed of violets the sweet south."--
+
+        _Don Juan_, canto 2, verse 168.
+
+  [3] Sidney alludes to all that secret history of Leicester which
+    Parsons the Jesuit pretends to disclose in his "Leicester's
+    Commonwealth." This challenge was found among the Sidney papers, but
+    probably was not issued.
+
+  [4] See "The Arcadia," p. 267; eighth edition, 1633.
+
+  [5] See Coleridge's "Table-Talk," ii. 178.
+
+  [6] Richard Barnfielde's "Affectionate Shepherd" forms such a
+    collection of sonnets which were popular. The poet bewails his
+    unsuccessful love for a beautiful youth, yet professing the chastest
+    affection. Poets, like mocking-birds, repeat the notes of others,
+    till the cant becomes idle, and the fashion of style obsolete.
+
+  [7] A lady who has become enamoured of the friend who is pleading for
+    her lover, and suddenly makes the fatal avowal to that friend, thus
+    expresses her emotion--"Grown bolder or madder, or bold with madness,
+    I discovered my affection to him." "He left nothing unassayed to
+    disgrace himself, to grace his friend."--p. 39.
+
+  [8] In the late Mr. Heber's treasures of our vernacular literature
+    there was a copy of "The Arcadia," with manuscript notes by Gabriel
+    Harvey. He had also divided the work into chapters, enumerating the
+    general contents of each.--"Bib. Heberiana," part the first. A
+    republication of this copy--omitting the continuations of the Romance
+    by a strange hand, and all the eclogues, and most of the
+    verses--would form a desirable volume, not too voluminous.
+
+  [9] This summary of the character of Sidney I wrote nearly thirty
+    years ago, in the "Quarterly Review."
+
+
+
+
+SPENSER.
+
+
+Though little is circumstantially related, yet frequent outbreakings,
+scattered throughout the writings of Spenser, commemorate the main
+incidents of his existence. His emotions become dates, and no poet has
+more fully confided to us his "secret sorrows."
+
+Spenser in the far north was a love-lorn youth when he composed "The
+Shepherd's Calendar." This rustic poem, rustic from an affectation of
+the Chaucerian style, though it bears the divisions of the twelve
+months, displays not the course of the seasons so much as the course of
+the poet's thoughts; the themes are plaintive or recreative, amatorial
+or satirical, and even theological, in dialogues between certain
+interlocutors. To some are prefixed Italian mottoes; for that language
+then stamped a classical grace on our poetry. In the eclogue of January
+we perceive that it was still the season of hope and favour with the
+amatory poet, for the motto is, _Anchora Speme_ ("yet I hope"); but in
+the eclogue of June we discover _Gia Speme Spenta_ ("already hope is
+extinguished"). A positive rejection by Rosalind herself had for ever
+mingled gall with his honey, and he ungenerously inveighs against the
+more successful arts of a hated rival. Rosalind was indeed not the
+Cynthia of a poetic hour: deep was the poet's first love; and that
+obdurate mistress had called him "her Pegasus," and laughed at his
+sighs.
+
+It was when the forlorn poet had thus lost himself in the labyrinth of
+love, and "The Shepherd's Calendar" had not yet closed, that his learned
+friend Harvey, or, in his poetical appellative, Hobbinol, to steal him
+away from the languor of a country retirement, invited him to southern
+vales, and with generous warmth introduced "the unknown" to Sir Philip
+Sidney. This important incident in the destiny of Spenser has been
+carefully noted by a person who conceals himself under the initials E.
+K., and who is usually designated as "the old commentator on 'The
+Shepherd's Calendar.'" This E. K. is a mysterious personage, and will
+remain undiscovered to this day, unless the reader shall participate in
+my own conviction.
+
+"The Shepherd's Calendar" was accompanied by a commentary on every
+separate month; and this singularity of an elaborate commentary in the
+first edition of the work of a living author was still more remarkable
+by the intimate acquaintance of the commentator with the author himself.
+E. K. assures us, and indeed affords ample evidence, that "he was privy
+to all his (the poet's) designs." He furnishes some domestic details
+which no one could have told so accurately, except he to whom they
+relate; and we find our commentator also critically conversant with many
+of the author's manuscripts which the world has never seen. Rarely has
+one man known so much of another. The poet and the commentator move
+together as parts of each other. In the despair of conjecture some
+ventured to surmise that the poet himself had been his own commentator.
+But the last editor of Spenser is indignant at a suggestion which would
+taint with strange egotism the modest nature of our bard. Yet E. K. was
+no ordinary writer; an excellent scholar he was, whose gloss has
+preserved much curious knowledge of ancient English terms and phrases.
+We may be sure that a pen so abundant and so skilfully exercised was not
+one to have restricted itself to this solitary lucubration of his life
+and studies. The commentary, moreover, is accompanied by a copious and
+erudite preface, _addressed to Gabriel Harvey_, and the style of these
+pages is too remarkable not to be recognised. At length let me lift the
+mask from this mysterious personage, by declaring that E. K. is
+Spenser's dear and generous friend Gabriel Harvey himself. I have judged
+by the strong peculiarity of Harvey's style; one cannot long doubt of a
+portrait marked by such prominent features. Pedantic but energetic,
+thought pressed on thought, sparkling with imagery, mottled with learned
+allusions, and didactic with subtle criticism--this is our Gabriel! The
+prefacer describes the state of our bardling as that of "young birds
+that be nearly crept out of their nest, who, by little, first prove
+their tender wings before they make a greater flight. And yet our new
+poet flieth as a bird that in time shall be able to keep wing with the
+best."
+
+From this detection, we may infer that the Commentary was an innocent
+_ruse_ of the zealous friend to overcome the resolute timidity of our
+poet.[1] His youthful muse, teeming with her future progeny, was,
+however, morbidly sensible in the hour of parturition. Conscious of her
+powers, thus closes the address "To his Booke:"--
+
+  And when thou art past jeopardie,
+  Come tell me what was said of me,
+  And I will send more after thee.
+
+After several editions, the work still remained anonymous, and the
+unnamed poet was long referred to by critics of the day only as "the
+late unknown poet," or "the gentleman who wrote 'The Shepherd's
+Calendar.'"
+
+In Sir Philip Sidney the youthful poet found a youthful patron. The
+shades of Penshurst opened to leisure and the muse. "The Shepherd's
+Calendar" at length concluded, "The Poet's Year" was dedicated to
+"Maister Philip Sidney, worthy of all titles, both of learning and
+chivalry." Leicester, the uncle of Sidney, was gained, and from that
+moment Spenser entered into a golden servitude.
+
+The destiny of Spenser was to be thrown among courtiers, and to wear the
+silken trammels of noble patrons--a life of honourable dependence among
+eminent personages. Here a seductive path was opened, not easily scorned
+by the gentle mind of him whose days were to be counted by its reveries,
+and the main business of whose life was to be the cantos of his "Faery
+Queen."
+
+Of the favours and mortifications during his career of patronage, and of
+his intercourse with the court, too little is known; though sufficient
+we shall discover to authenticate the reality of his complaints, the
+verity of his strictures, and all the flutterings of the sickening heart
+of him who moves round and round the interminable circle of "hope
+deferred."
+
+Our poet was now ascending the steps of favouritism; and the business of
+his life was with the fair and the great. He looked up to the smiles of
+distinguished ladies, for to such is the greater portion of his poems
+dedicated. If her Majesty gloried in "The Faery Queen," we are surprised
+to find that the most exquisite of political satires, "Mother Hubbard's
+Tale," should be addressed to the Lady Compton and Monteagle; that "The
+Tears of the Muses" were inscribed to Lady Strange; and that "The Ruins
+of Time" are dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke. For others, their
+nuptials were graced by the music of his verse, or their sorrows were
+soothed by its elegiac tenderness.[2] In the Epithalamion on his own
+marriage, the poet reminds
+
+  The sacred sisters who have often times
+  Been to the aiding others to adorn,
+  Whom ye thought worthy of your graceful rymes,
+  That even the greatest did not greatly scorn
+  To hear their names sung in your simple lays,
+  But joyed at their praise.
+
+"The Tears of the Muses," as one of his plaintive poems is called, had
+possibly been spared had the poet only moved among that bevy of ladies
+whose names are enshrined in his volumes, around the Queen, whose
+royalty so frequently rises with splendour in his verse. Unawares,
+perhaps, the gentle bard discovered that personal attachments by cruel
+circumstances were converted into political connexions; that a favourite
+must pay the penalty of favouritism; and that in binding himself more
+closely to his patrons, he was wounded the more deeply by their great
+adversary; and in gaining Sidney, Leicester, and Essex, Spenser was
+doomed to feel the potent arm of the scornful and unpoetic Burleigh.
+
+The Queen was the earliest and the latest object of our poet's musings.
+"The Maiden Queen" enters into almost every poem. Shortly after the
+publication of "The Shepherd's Calendar," wherein her Majesty occupies
+the month of April, Spenser, in writing to Harvey, has this remarkable
+passage:--"Your desire to hear of my late being with her Majesty must
+die in itself." By this ambiguous reply, it is, however, evident that
+Harvey, and probably Spenser himself, had looked forwards, by the
+intervention of his great patrons, that "the unknown poet," as he is
+called by "the old commentator," would have been honoured by an
+interview with the royal poetess. Elizabeth, among her princely
+infirmities, had the ambition of verse. She was afterwards saluted as
+
+  A peerless prince and peerless poetess,
+
+by Spenser, who must, however, have closed his ear at her harsher
+numbers.[3] We may regret that we know so little of our Spenser's
+intercourse with the Queen. If Sidney made him known to her Majesty, as
+Philips has told, the poet might have read to the Queen the earlier
+cantos of his romantic epic. The poet himself has only recorded that
+"The Shepherd of the Ocean," Sir Walter Raleigh, brought him into the
+presence of Cynthia, "The Queen of the Ocean," who
+
+      To his oaten pipe inclined her ear,
+  And it desired, at timely hours, to hear.
+
+The Lord Treasurer Burleigh seems to have marred those "timely hours."
+Spenser had lingered before the fountain of court favour; and how often
+the dark shadow of the political minister intervened between the poet
+and the throne we are reminded by the deep sensitiveness of the victim,
+the murmurs, and even the scorn of the indignant bard.
+
+Under the patronage of Leicester, the poet's services were transferred
+to Lord Arthur Grey, the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who appointed
+Spenser his secretary. He has vindicated this viceroy's administration
+in the "Faery Queen," by shadowing forth his severe justice in Arthegal,
+accompanied by his "Iron Man," whose iron flail "threshed out
+falsehood" in their quest of Ierne, in that "Land of Ire" where justice
+and the executioner were ever erratic.
+
+Of the brief life of the poet, his better years were consumed in
+Ireland, where he filled several appointments more honourable than
+lucrative. His slender revenue seems not to have flourished under a
+grant of land from the crown, on the conditions attached to it in
+1585.[4] Cast into active service, the musings of the "Faery Queen" were
+assuredly often thrown aside; its fate was still dubious, for Ireland
+was not a land of the muses, as he himself declared, when a chance
+occurrence, the visit of Rawleigh to that country, gave Spenser another
+Sidney. The "Faery Queen" once more opened its mystical leaves on the
+banks of the Mulla, before a judge, whose voice was fame.
+
+  And when he heard the music that I made,
+  He found himself full greatly pleased at it;
+  He gan to cast great liking to my lore,
+  And great disliking to _my luckless lot,
+  That banish'd had myself, like wight forlore,
+  Into that waste where I was quite forgot_.
+
+Spenser has here disclosed involuntarily "the secret sorrow."
+
+The acres of Kilcolman offered no delights to "the wight forlore,
+forgotten in that waste." Our tender and melancholy poet was not blessed
+with that fortitude which, even in a barren solitude, can muse on its
+own glory, as Petrarch and Rousseau were wont, and which knows also to
+value a repose freed from spiteful rivalries and mordacious malignity.
+And now opened his tedious suings at court, for what, but to obtain some
+situation in his native home, which offered repose of mind, and
+carelessness of the future? We know of his restless wanderings to
+England, and his constant returns to Ireland. We find the poet, in
+1590, wearied by solicitations, throwing out the immortal lines so
+painfully descriptive of
+
+  What hell it is in suing long to bide.
+
+It was in this year that the first three books of the romantic epic were
+published, which was followed by the grant of a pension in February,
+1591. But five years afterwards the poet still remains the same
+querulous court-suitor; the miserable man wasting his days and his
+nights; for then he tells us in his "Prothalamion," how on a summer's
+day he
+
+  Walk'd forth to ease his pain,
+  Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames.
+  ------------------I whose sullen care,
+  Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
+  In princes' court, and expectation vain
+  Of idle hopes which still do fly away,
+  Like empty shadows, to afflict my brain.
+
+When this was written Spenser had possessed the lands of Kilcolman more
+than ten years, and held his pension. Were the lands profitless, and the
+pension still to be solicited? The poet has only perpetuated his "secret
+sorrows;" his pride or his delicacy has thrown a veil over them. He has
+sent down to posterity his disappointments, without alluding to the
+nature of his claims.
+
+It was in 1597 that Spenser laid before the Queen his memorable "View of
+the State of Ireland." This state-memorial still makes us regret that
+our poet only wrote verse; there is a charm in his sweet and voluble
+prose, a virgin grace which we have long lost in the artificial
+splendour of English diction. Here is no affectation of Chaucerian
+words; the gold is not spotted with rust. The vivid pictures of the
+poet; the curiosity of the antiquary; and above all, a new model of
+policy of the practical politician, combine in this inestimable tract.
+Spenser suggested that the popular hero of that day, his noble friend
+the Earl of Essex, would be more able to conciliate popular favour in
+Ireland. By an alternate policy, from that day to the present, has our
+government tried to rule that fair "Land of Ire," either by a Lord
+Grey's severity of justice--the Arthegal, accompanied by his "iron man,"
+with his "iron flail;" or by the generous graciousness of an Earl of
+Essex, courting popularity: but neither would serve; the more quiet
+wisdom lay in colonization, happily begun, and so fatally neglected. The
+powerful eloquence of the poet and the secretary attracted the Queen's
+attention. She recommended Spenser to the Irish Council to be Sheriff of
+Cork; again was "the wight forlore" sent back to his undesired locality;
+yet now, perhaps, honours and promotion were awaiting the "miserable
+man." The royal letter was dated in September, and in the following
+month, suddenly, the Irish insurrection broke out. The flight of Spenser
+and his family from the Castle of Kilcolman was momentous--perhaps they
+witnessed the flames annihilating their small wealth. Spenser himself
+lost more than wealth; for the father beheld the sacrifice of his child,
+and the author was bereaved of all his manuscripts, now lost or
+scattered--his hopes, his pride, and his fame! He flew to England, not
+to live, but to experience how this last stroke of fortune went beyond
+the force of his own passionate descriptions, or of his nature to
+endure. In an obscure lodging, and within three short months, the most
+sensitive of men, broken-hearted, closed his eyes in mute grief, and in
+a premature death; Spenser perished at the zenith of human life.
+
+Curiosity has been excited to learn the occasion of the inveterate
+prejudice of an insensible Lord Treasurer against a tender poet, who had
+courted his favour. This hostility of "the mighty peer" seems not to
+have broken forth openly till the publication of the first three books
+of the "Faery Queen;" for all the poet's personal allusions to Burleigh
+were written shortly after that event.
+
+Can so small a creature as a poet when it creeps into the sphere of a
+jealous statesman's policy draw on itself his hateful attention? Are
+crafty politicians in office like richly-laden travellers who start at a
+crossing shadow? Burleigh possessed the full confidence of his sovereign
+from her youth; but she was a woman subject to caprices, and would call
+her ancient friend and servant "an old fool." Burleigh was fearfully
+jealous of two potent rivals--the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of
+Essex; these "men of arms," the patrons of Spenser, were each
+subsequently the head of the opposition to the pacific administration of
+the Lord Treasurer.
+
+"The sage old sire," moreover, well knew the romantic self-idolatry of
+his royal mistress; her infirmity of poetical susceptibility; her
+avidity of poignant flatteries on her beauty, her chastity, and even on
+her verse. Her Majesty was now in the ascension of that glorified
+beatitude, the "Faery Queen;" and this transfiguration was the work of
+him whom he held to be a creature of his great rivals!
+
+We are interested to detect the vacillating conduct of the poet to the
+implacable statesman. Spenser accompanied his presentation copy of the
+"Faery Queen" to the Lord-Treasurer with a sonnet, in which he
+humiliated the muse before his great court-enemy--
+
+  On whose mighty shoulders most doth rest
+  The burden of this kingdom's government,
+  Unfitly I these idle rimes present,
+  The labour of lost time and wit unstay'd.
+
+If Spenser had complained of former cold neglect, now he had to endure,
+what a poet can never forgive, bitter disdain.
+
+Wounded in spirit, the poet composed, immediately after the first
+appearance of the "Faery Queen," "The Ruins of Time;" there, eulogising
+the departed Sir Francis Walsingham for his love of learning and care of
+"men of arms," he launches forth a thunderbolt against the wary and
+frigid Burleigh--
+
+    For he that now wields all things at his will,
+  Scorns one and th' other, in his deeper skill.
+
+And he repeats the accusation in "Mother Hubbard's Tale"--
+
+  Oh, grief of griefs! Oh, gall of all good hearts!
+  To see that virtue should despised be
+  Of him, that first was raised for vertuous parts;
+  And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,
+  Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted be.
+  Oh, let the man by whom the Muse is scorn'd,
+  Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorn'd.
+
+We have, too, a more finished portrait of an evil _minister_ who "lifted
+up his lofty towers,"
+
+  That they begin to threat the neighbour sky;
+
+in which unquestionably we find some of the deformities of Burleigh's
+political physiognomy.
+
+           He no count made of nobility;
+  The realm's chief strength and girlond of the crown--
+  He made them dwell in darkness of disgrace,
+  For none but whom he list might come in place.
+  Of men of armes he had but small regard,
+  But kept them low, and strained very hard;
+  For men of learning little he esteem'd,
+  His wisdome he above their learning deem'd.
+  As for the rascal commons least he cared,
+  For not so common was his bounty shared.
+  Let God, said he, if please care for the manie,
+  I for myself most care before else anie.
+  Yet none durst speak, ne none durst of him plaine,
+  So great he was in grace, and rich through gaine.
+
+The gentle bard of the "Faery Queen" now sate down to continue his great
+work; but haunted by this spectral and iron-eyed monster of an
+unpatronising minister, he actually violates the solemnity of his theme
+by opening with another recollection, so fatal to his own repose:--
+
+  The rugged forehead that, with grave foresight,
+  Welds kingdoms, causes, and affairs of state,
+  My looser rimes I wote doth sharply wite,
+  For praising love as I have done of late.
+  Such ones ill judge of love, that cannot love,
+  Ne in their frozen heart feel kindly flame.
+
+But the minister could not banish him from the sovereign:--
+
+  To such therefore I do not sing at all,
+  But to that Sacred Saint, my sovereign Queen;
+  To her I sing of love that loveth best,
+  And best is loved.
+
+About the same time Spenser had written "The Tears of the Muses," where,
+expressing a poet's wish that the royal palaces of Eliza should be
+filled with
+
+  ----------Praises of divinest wits,
+  Who her eternize with their heavenly writs,
+
+I suspect that Burleigh figures again among
+
+  -------------The salvage brood,
+  Who, having been with acorns always fed,
+  Can no whit cherish this celestial food;
+  But, with base thoughts, are unto blindness led,
+  And kept from looking on the lightsome day.
+
+After these indignant effusions, Spenser in proceeding with the "Faery
+Queen" tergiversated in his feelings. The poet had shadowed with some
+tenderness the calamities of the Scottish Mary, in the gentle characters
+of Amoret and Florizel. Yielding to political changes, the Queen of
+Scots is suddenly horribly transformed into the false Duessa. For the
+honour of the poet we may concede that he partook of those
+party-passions which great statesmen know to raise up at will, and which
+never fail to influence contemporaries. Burleigh never paused till he
+laid the head of Mary on the block.[5] In the fifth book of the "Faery
+Queen" the poet has exhibited the trial of this state victim, and has
+made her sister-sovereign gracefully conceal tears which possibly were
+never shed; but who could expect that "the rugged forehead"--him whom he
+had denounced that "alive or dead" should by "the muse be ever
+scorned"--should appear with all the dignity of wisdom!
+
+  The sage old Sire, that had to name
+  The kingdom's care, with a white silver head,
+  That many high regards and reasons 'gainst her read.
+
+The poet did worse as he advanced in his work, for in the sixth book he
+absolutely denies that it was his intention in any of his "former writs"
+to reflect on "this mighty peer." To what "former writs" Spenser alludes
+is not clear. The matchless picture of the fruitless days of a
+court-expectant in "Mother Hubbard's Tale," which many of my readers may
+have by heart, is supposed to have been represented to Lord Burleigh by
+"backbiters" as a censure on him; it was an immortal one! and the
+application was easy.
+
+It was after the appearance of the "Faery Queen" that Elizabeth,
+economical as were her bounties, sealed her delight by a permanent
+pension. Was it on this occasion that the remonstrance of the prudential
+Lord Treasurer diminished by half its amount? "All this for a song!"
+exclaimed Burleigh. "Then give him what is reason," rejoined the Queen.
+The words were remembered by the bard, but the royal command lay
+neglected at the exchequer. On a progress Spenser reminded her Majesty,
+by a petition, in the smallest space that ever suitor presented one, and
+in a style of which it was not easy to forget a word.[6] The Lord
+Treasurer got reprimanded, and the poet present payment. We cannot avoid
+associating the anecdote with these lines--
+
+  To have thy Prince's grace, yet want her Peer's;
+  To have thy asking, yet wait many years.
+
+We may now close with Burleigh; but much remains to be developed in the
+fortunes of a court-suitor, as we trace them in the history of our
+Spenser. The coldness of the Lord Treasurer may not have been the only
+cause of the poet's deep and constant laments. The sojourner in the
+circle of a court may be mortified not only by its repulse or its
+neglect, but also by the capricious favour of his patron. A devotion of
+service may provoke offence, whether it be from zeal too improvident,
+from officiousness too busy, or from an ingenuousness too open. He is
+thrown into a position in which he must preserve silence, and cannot
+always hope for pardon.
+
+One incident of this nature deeply affected our poet in his intercourse
+with Lord Leicester. We only discover it by a remarkable dedicatory
+sonnet to his translation of Virgil's "Gnat." Had the poet not decided
+that the mysterious tale should reach posterity, he would not have
+published the sonnet several years after it was composed, for it is
+dedicated "to the deceased lord!" The poet has energetically described
+the delicacy and difficulty of the position into which he had been cast.
+
+  _Wrong'd, yet not daring to express my pain_
+  To you, good lord! the causer of my care,
+  In cloudy tears my case _I thus complain
+  Unto yourself, that only privy are_.
+  But if that any Oedipus, unware,
+  Shall chance, through power of some divining spright,
+  To read _the secret of this riddle rare_,
+  And know the purport of my evil plight;
+  Let him rest pleased with his own insight,
+  Ne further seek to gloze upon the text;
+  _But grief enough it is to grieved wight,
+  To feel hit fault_, and not be further vext.
+  But what so by myself may not be shown,
+  May by this Gnat's complaint be easily known.
+
+The Gnat of Virgil, observing a serpent in the act of darting on a
+sleeping swain, stings the eye of the sleeper; starting at the pain, the
+disturbed man crushes the gnat, but, thus awakened, he saves himself
+from the crested serpent. The poem turns on the remonstrance of the
+ghost of the gnat, which had no other means than by inflicting its
+friendly sting to warn him of his peril who had thus hastily deprived it
+of its own innocent existence. What was "the serpent," and why the poet
+was hardly used as "the gnat," and why he was
+
+  Wrong'd, yet not daring to express his pain,
+
+and yet "grieved to feel _his fault_," is "a riddle rare," supposed to
+require some Oedipus of secret history to solve. The moral is obvious.
+The character of the royal favourite may give rise to many suggestions;
+but if I may venture a conjecture on what the parties themselves "were
+only privy to," Spenser had touched on some high matter, where his
+affectionate zeal, however sagacious, on this occasion hurt the pride of
+Leicester--too haughty or too mortified to be lessoned by his familiar
+dependant, who, like the gnat, found that his timely warning was "his
+fault."
+
+A sage of the antiquarian school imagined that he could solve the enigma
+of Spenser's sorrows, by arranging, with dates and accounts of salaries,
+the official situations which the poet held. To remove the odium
+attached to Burleigh's prepossessions against the poet, he assumes that
+without the Lord Treasurer's consent Spenser could not have received his
+lands or his pensions. But the royal grant of the forfeited lands was
+obviously the reward for his conduct, suggested by those under whose eye
+he had served: the patronage of Sidney and the Lords Leicester and Grey
+may be imagined to have greatly outweighed any cavils of Burleigh.
+George Chalmers infers that all the complaints of the poet are "too
+highly coloured, _if they really were complaints respecting himself_!"
+and concludes that all the poet's querulousness must be ascribed, not to
+Burleigh, but to the Irish rebellion. But the calamity of the Irish
+rebellion occasioned no complaints from the poet--only his death! for we
+have not a line by Spenser during the short interval which elapsed
+between his flight from Ireland and his decease in London.
+
+It was not by an estimate of salaries and an arrangement of dates, which
+yield no result, but by a statement of feelings, in which the "secret
+sorrows" of Spenser lie concealed, that we can decide on the real source
+of his continued complaints. The poet must be judged by the habits of
+his mind, and by those interior conflicts which are often unconnected
+with those external circumstances open to common observers. Of all the
+tuneful train Spenser was the most poetical in the gentlest attributes
+of the poet. That robust force which the enterprise of active life
+demands was not lodged in that soul of tenderness; and worldly cares,
+like that cancer in the breast which the sufferer hides from others,
+dejected the fancy which at all times was working ceaselessly among its
+bright creations. His vein was inexhaustible, and we have lost perhaps
+more than we possess of his writings. The author of "The Faery Queen"
+required above all things leisure and the muse. His first steppings into
+life were auspicious. To Sir Philip Sidney he had opened the first
+cantos of his romantic epic; the catastrophe of that poet-hero made our
+poet a mourner all his days. There was no substitute for a congenial
+patron: all other patrons could be but the very statues of patronage,
+cold representatives of the departed, but no longer the bosom companion
+of the poet's thoughts, and the generous arbiter of his fortunes.
+
+In his last days Spenser has not dropped even one "melodious tear;" but
+he was wept by his brothers the poets, who held his pall and bestrewed
+his hearse with their elegies, and beheld in the fate of their great
+master their own. And thus truly, though ambiguously, Phineas Fletcher
+described his destiny--
+
+  Poorly, poor man! he lived; poorly, poor man! he died.
+
+So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was
+thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source
+of his "secret sorrows"--his unceasing and vain solicitation at court,
+the suitor of so many patrons; the _res angusta domi_ perpetually
+pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man.
+
+I know of no satire aimed at SPENSER; a singular fate for a great poet:
+even "satyric Nash" revered the character of the author of "The Faery
+Queen." I have often thought that among the numerous critics of SPENSER,
+the truest was his keen and witty contemporary; for this town-wit has
+stamped all our poet's excellences by one felicitous word--"HEAVENLY
+SPENSER."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] A strange personage has been fixed on as the commentator. Spenser
+    lodged with a Mrs. Kerke, where his parcels were directed. E. K. has
+    been conjectured to be Mr. Kerke, her husband!
+
+    It is a proof of the deficient skill of the modern editors of
+    Spenser, Hughes and Aikin, that they have omitted the curious and
+    valuable Commentary of E. K. It has been judiciously restored to the
+    last and best edition, by Mr. Todd. The woodcuts might also have been
+    preserved.
+
+  [2] These complimentary sonnets, evidently composed "for the nonce,"
+    are not the happiest specimens in our language of these minor poems,
+    no more than they are of the real genius of Spenser. I have seen a
+    German reprint, consisting _only_ of Spenser's Sonnets, by the
+    learned Von Hammer. Foreign critics often startle one by their
+    fancies on English poetry.
+
+  [3] We have several printed specimens of her Majesty's poetry, which
+    does not want for elevation of thought; but to compose poetry with
+    the energy of her prose, deprived her Majesty of all the grace and
+    melody of verse. I have been informed, on the best authority, that
+    Elizabeth exercised her poetical pen more voluminously than we have
+    hitherto known, for that there exists a manuscript volume of her
+    Majesty's poems in that rich repository of State-papers--the Hatfield
+    Collection.
+
+  [4] Three thousand acres of dilapidated estates of the Earl of
+    Desmond. The receivers of these grants were called "The Undertakers,"
+    as they were bound to bring the lands into cultivation, which, after
+    the ravages of fire and sword, consisted of tenantless farms and a
+    wasted soil. Sir Walter Rawleigh had a grant of twelve thousand
+    acres, which he probably found profitless, for he made them over at a
+    low rate to the Boyle family.
+
+  [5] I have been favoured with the sight of several manuscript letters
+    of Burleigh, in the possession of a gentleman in the neighbourhood of
+    Taunton, which relate to this critical period. They remarkably
+    display the eager and remorseless decision of Burleigh. Messengers
+    were sent off three or four times in a day, countermanding the former
+    command, as the mind of Elizabeth vacillated, disconcerting the plans
+    of the minister. The order "to cut off her head" is given with the
+    most revolting minuteness.
+
+  [6] This petition in rhyme is well known--
+
+      "I was promised on a time,
+      To have reason for my rhime;
+      From that time unto this season,
+      I received nor rhime nor reason."
+
+    Mr. Todd deems the anecdote apocryphal, because he can only retrace
+    it to Fuller, who published it seventy years after the incident
+    recorded, assigning no authority. Honest Fuller has, however, given a
+    tolerable authority for such a sort of thing, namely, that it was "a
+    story commonly _told_ and _believed_." There could be no motive for
+    any one to invent the circumstance and the pleasantry, gratuitously
+    to ascribe it to the poet. Mr. Todd is pleased to call "the numbers
+    magical," and decides on this "ridiculous memorial"--a criticism
+    fatal to all the playfulness of genius. Were the "Rhimes" not good
+    enough for the nonce, and "the Reason" amusingly convenient to be
+    remembered?
+
+    The anecdote is only deficient in its date, and possibly may relate
+    to some former donation before the pension was fixed. Edward Phillips
+    gives the large sum of five hundred pounds--another version of the
+    same story; and he wrote about the same time. What remains
+    inexplicable is, that this pension to Spenser seems to have been
+    wholly unknown to his contemporaries--to Camden and to others--who
+    wrote subsequently. The grant of this pension was only discovered a
+    few years ago in the Chapel of the Rolls. The pension was only for
+    fifty pounds; but the value of money makes the royal gift more decent
+    than at first it would seem.
+
+
+
+
+THE FAERY QUEEN.
+
+
+SPENSER, the courtly spectator of the tilt, the pageant, and the
+masque--musing over the tome of old Gothic romances, and striking into
+the vein of fabling of Italian poesy, whose novelty had nearly
+supplanted the ancient classics--was at once ARIOSTO and TASSO and OVID.
+
+SPENSER composed with great facility; incessant production seems to have
+been his true existence. His was one of those minds whose labour
+diffuses their delight, and whose delight provokes to labour. He seems
+always to be in earnest, and sometimes in haste, for he had much to
+work. While composing the "Faery Queen," he had that concurrent poem of
+the regal Arthur, of no inferior _calibre_, ever in his mind. The "Faery
+Queen" would have contained, had it been completed, not much under a
+hundred thousand verses. The "Iliad" does not exceed fifteen. He seems
+to have been satisfied with his first unblotted thoughts. He has defects
+which might have proved fatal to an ordinary versifier; but his
+voluminous vein lies protected by his genius.
+
+The artificial complexity of his nine-lined stanza put him to many
+shifts; he exercised arbitrary power in shortening words or lengthening
+syllables, and hardily invented novel terminations to common words, to
+provide his multiplicity of rhymes; he falsified accentuation, to adapt
+it to his metre, and violated the orthography, to adjust the rhyme. He
+dilated his thoughts to fill up the measure of his stanza; and we are
+too often reminded of the hammering of the chain. The first book of the
+"Faery Queen," when the difficulties of this novel stanza must have been
+most arduous, is necessarily composed with most care, and, both for
+subject and execution, is of itself a complete poem. As Spenser acquired
+facility and dexterity, his pen winged its flight through the prescribed
+labyrinth of sweet sounds.
+
+His exquisite ear had felt the melody of the vowelly and voluble stanza
+of Italy, and to which he even added a grace of his own by a new
+measure, in the Alexandrine close. This verse had been introduced by
+Sir Thomas Wyatt with no great effect; it was adroitly adopted by
+Spenser to give a full cadence to his stanza. Dryden, in its occasional
+use, professedly derived it from Spenser, and seems to have carried away
+the honour, when Pope in exemplifying its solemn effect ascribes it to
+the latter poet, who he tells us had taught--
+
+  --------------The full-resounding line,
+  The long majestic march and energy divine.
+
+The inanity of that race--
+
+  Of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
+
+and made such free use of "the full-resounding line," void of all
+thought, only betrayed their barrenness by this additional extension of
+their weakness. Hence it incurred the partial censure of our great
+poetical critic, as "a needless Alexandrine,"
+
+  That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.
+
+But the soul of melody lies hidden in the musician's instrument; and the
+Spenserian stanza, to be felt, must find its echo in the ear of the
+reader. A master in the art of versification was struck by our poet's
+modulation, so musical was his ear in the rhythm of his verse. He
+remarked this in those two delicious pieces, "The Prothalamion," a
+spousal hymn on the double marriage of two ladies, personated as two
+swans in these harmonious lines--
+
+  -------------Two swans of goodly hue,
+  Came softly swimming down along the Lee;[1]--
+
+and "The Epithalamium" on the poet's own nuptials, or, as the poet
+notes--
+
+  Song made in lieu of many ornaments,
+  With which my Love should duely have been deck'd.
+
+One feature in Spenser's versification seems to have escaped notice,
+although Warton has expressly written a dissertation on that subject. It
+is Spenser's discreet use of _alliteration_; never obtrusive, but
+falling naturally into the verse, it may escape our perception while it
+is acting on our feeling. Unconsciously or by habit, his ear became the
+echo of his imagination; sound was the response of thought, and, as much
+as his epithets, scattered the "orient hues" of his fancy. Alliteration
+and epithets, which with mechanical versificators are a mere artifice,
+because only an artifice, and glare and glitter, charm by their
+consonance when they rise out of the emotions of the true poet.[2]
+
+Some persons have been deterred from venturing on the "Faery Queen" from
+a notion that the style had rusted with time, and is as obsolete as
+chivalry itself. This popular prejudice has been fostered by an opinion
+of Ben Jonson, which probably referred chiefly to "The Shepherd's
+Calendar," where Spenser had adopted a system of Chaucerian words, which
+to us is more curious than fortunate, and which on the first publication
+required a glossary. This system he abandoned in his romantic epic; but
+he loved to sprinkle some remaining graces of antiquity, some _naïve_
+expressions, or some picturesque words; and his modern imitators, amid
+their elaborate pomp, have felt the secret charm, and have mottled their
+Spenserian stanza with these archaisms.
+
+Of all poets SPENSER excelled in the pictorial faculty. His
+circumstantial descriptions are minute yet vivid. They are, indeed,
+exuberant, for he loved not to quit his work while he could bring the
+object closer to the eye. This diffusion, flowing with the melody of his
+verse, often raises the illusion of reverie till we seem startled by
+reality, and we appear to have beheld what only we have been told.[3]
+Poet of poets! SPENSER made a poet at once of COWLEY, and once lent an
+elegant simplicity to THOMSON. GRAY was accustomed to open Spenser when
+he would frame
+
+  Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn;
+
+and MILTON, who owned Spenser to have been his master as well as his
+predecessor, lingered amid his musings, and with many a Spenserian image
+touched into perfection his own sublimity.
+
+In associating the name of SPENSER with MILTON and GRAY, we are reminded
+of the distinctness of his poetic faculty, and the difference of his
+personal character. Spenser, tender, elegant, and fanciful, rarely
+participated in their condensed energies or the severity of their
+greatness; the personal character of our courtly poet was moulded by his
+position in society.
+
+When we float along the stream of his melodious song, conscious only of
+its beauty, we do not often pause at elevations which raise the feeling
+of the sublime. Such daring visions, when they do rise on us, rather
+indicate the power of his genius than the habit of his mind. Our gentle
+Spenser was often satisfied with rivalling without surpassing his
+originals, which Milton and Gray ever did when they copied. It seems,
+therefore, unreasonable to assert that Spenser has combined the daring
+sternness of Dante with the wild fantasy of Goethe. Yet their lofty
+creations have not gone beyond those of Spenser's personifications of
+Despair--of Fear--of Confusion--of Astonishment--of laborious Care, that
+workman in his smithy, living amid the unceasing strokes of his
+perpetual hammers--or of Jealousy, from a mortal man metamorphosed with
+Ovidean fancy: his single eye, for he had long worn out the other, never
+could be closed; no slumber could press down those restless lids; tenant
+of a cavern, listening day and night to the roaring billows incessantly
+beating his abode, threatening with its huge ruins to fall on the wretch
+wasting in self-torments, till, nothing left of him, he vanished into a
+flitting aëry sprite--
+
+  Forgot he was a Man, and JEALOUSY is hight.[4]
+
+There are two sublime descriptions of NIGHT which may be read together.
+In the one she is the
+
+  Sister of heavie Death, and nurse of Woes!
+
+and elsewhere she appears as
+
+  That most ancient Grandmother of all,
+  Older than Jove----
+
+NIGHT befriending Deceit and Shame, takes one of their daughters, the
+witch Duessa, in her "pitchy mantle;" yoking her coal-black steeds to
+her iron waggon, they penetrate to the inferior regions, bearing a
+mortal caitiff to be _restored_ to this wicked life--"the messenger of
+death" passing over the earth, the screeching owl, the baying dogs, the
+howling wolf, warn of the witch's presence; and in hell the trembling
+ghosts stand
+
+  Chattering with iron teeth, and staring wide
+  With stonie eyes--and flock'd on every side
+  To gaze on EARTHLY WIGHT that with the NIGHT durst ride.[5]
+
+The sublime fragment on "Mutability," where Nature is viewed seated
+mysteriously amid the creation, has not been excelled by the most
+philosophical poets.
+
+  Great Nature ever young, yet full of eld,
+  Still moving, yet immoved from her sted;
+  Unseen of any, yet of all beheld,
+  Thus sitting on her throne----
+
+If such noble inventions appear rare, it perhaps is owing to the wide
+extent of the "faery land," as well as to the poet's proneness to
+luxuriance of diction. If from that voluminous inspiration the poet has
+sometimes trespassed on the critic's bourn, or the romantic eulogist of
+chastity itself has sometimes violated his own virgin page, for Spenser,
+always imitative, caught a slight infection from his old romancers and
+his Italian favourites, all this exuberance bears fruit; freedom and
+force will ever interest the artists of poetry.
+
+Whoever has passed into the house of Pride,
+
+  Whose walls were high, but nothing strong nor thick,
+
+and marked her on her progress, "drawn by six unequal beasts," with her
+vile counsellors in their wicked gradation; or has entered "the ancient
+house of Holiness;" or counted in the den of Riches,
+
+  The huge great iron chests, and coffers strong,
+
+amid the dead men's bones scattered around those chests and coffers, has
+realized the marvellous architecture of Fancy; or, whoever roving with
+the muse of Spenser through all her localities, meets the sylvan men
+whom the chaste Una governed, or the satyrs whom the frail Hellenore
+would not quit; or when that muse unveils her voluptuous charms, listens
+to her song in the enchanted gardens of Armida; or in the approach to
+Acrasia in the bower of Bliss, starts at the nymphs wantonly wrestling
+in the glassy waters, laughing and blushing; or more innocently gazes on
+the gorgeous Masque of Cupid, or the dance of the poet and mistress
+among the Graces,--finds all endowed with poetic existences,
+unchangeable in their nature amid the changes of taste so long as
+imagination shall seek for its delights, and genius for the language of
+its emotions.
+
+"The Faery Queen" was designed by its author to consist of twelve books;
+six of which we only possess, published at two several times, and a
+fragment of another. The subject of each book is a moral attribute;
+Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. Each
+attribute is personified by a knight-errant, with all the passions of
+bodily mortality.
+
+The plan of the poem is so inartificial, that the twelve books, had it
+been completed, could only have formed twelve separate poems; our poet
+followed the free and fertile way of Ariosto. The introduction of Prince
+Arthur may have been designed to give a sort of unity to the incoherent
+twelve knights, who would have been finally led under his auspices to
+the court of the Faery Queen; but as the prince, however respectable in
+romance, comes and vanishes, does nothing, and says little, we incline
+to the humour of the editor, Hughes, that "the prince is here seen only
+in his minority, performing his exercises in Fairy-land as a _private
+gentleman_." The versatile plan was adapted to the genius of the poet;
+the ductility of his invention, the luxuriance of his imagination, and
+the never-ceasing flow of his mellifluous stanza, would have suffered
+constraint and mutilation, bound by prescribed forms, and modelled by
+the classical epic. At the period that the poet Hughes published his
+edition[6] of Spenser, our editors and critics were little conversant
+with the Elizabethan literature, nor had the taste of the learned
+emancipated itself from the established form of the epic of antiquity.
+But Hughes was alive to the vital poetry before him, though evidently
+perplexed to fix on a criterion, or to specify the class of poetry, for
+"The Faery Queen." His excellent judgment struck into a new and right
+path. He describes it as "a poem of a particular kind;" and in his
+"Remarks on The Faery Queen," he had the merit of distinguishing poetry,
+like architecture, into its Gothic origin, as well as its classical.
+This was a discovery at that period; and subsequent critics, such as
+Bishop Hurd, and more recently Schlegel, have run away with the honour,
+by their more ample development of the romantic school. Hughes was
+hardly aware of the importance of this division; for his discovery
+amounts to little more than one of those first thoughts, which have not
+ripened into a principle.
+
+"The Faery Queen" was the last great work modelled on Chivalry.
+Awakening from the gloom of the theological contests of Edward and Mary,
+the court of the Maiden Queen, from state-policy and her own
+disposition, had been transformed into a court of romance. Glory was the
+cheap but inappreciable meed bestowed by the economical sovereign; and
+love was the language to which the female from the throne could bend to
+listen to her subject.
+
+Elizabeth, stately and tender, was herself "the Faery Queen," without
+even the poet's flattery, when seated under the dais, amid long
+galleries hung with cloth of gold or silver, and all the moving
+tilt-yard glittering in its shine; "the noise of music," and the sound
+of shields; the solemn procession, and gay crowd of the many-coloured
+liveries; the tasselled caparisons of the horses, and the nodding plumes
+of the knights. There our poet fed his eyes on the pageant, enchanting
+by its scenical allegory--as when four noble challengers approached--the
+children of DESIRE--attempting to win the Fortress of BEAUTY,--that is,
+Whitehall and her Majesty![7] They stand in a car, "shadowed with white
+and carnation silk, being the colours of Desire." But the challengers
+must yield to Beauty, whose princely voice is their ample guerdon; and
+on the following day were the tourney and the barriers "courageously
+tried." Thus were the days of chivalry, in its forms or its "fopperies,"
+restored by the Faery Queen; and with such festivals SPENSER nursed his
+gorgeous fancy, and the Queen was the true inspirer of his romantic
+Epic.
+
+Warton and Hurd observe that Spenser copied real _manners of his time_
+as much as Homer. We must here distinguish an essential difference, if
+Homer really represented the manners of the heroic age. It is true, that
+much of the _manners_ and forms of chivalry prevailed among the
+courtiers of Elizabeth; but such _adventures_ of chivalry as Spenser has
+described in his singular poem were transplanted from the ancient
+romances. The _incidents_ are therefore not of the poet's age; and we
+can only read his narrative as the last of the romances.
+
+The old romance of "La Morte d'Arthur" was still the fashionable reading
+of the court; nor had the gorgeous enchantments of Stephen Hawes yet
+vanished, for a new edition had issued in 1555. Spenser had read Hawes;
+and however entranced by the pageantry of the fiction, from the uncouth
+stanza of "The Pastime of Pleasure" he may have been led to the
+construction of the Spenserian; for it is one of the aptitudes of true
+genius to carry to perfection what it finds imperfect.
+
+"The Faery Queen" was produced at a crisis of transition when the old
+romantic way was departing, notwithstanding the temporary influence of a
+courtly revival, and the new had not yet arrived. The whole machinery of
+Gothic invention could hardly be worked; its marvels had ceased to be
+wondrous, and began to be ridiculed. The fantastic extravagance of the
+ordinary writers of fiction--that crowd of poet-apes which always rise
+after a great work has appeared--has been censured by the two great
+literary satirists of that day, MARSTON and HALL; Hall, indeed, suddenly
+checks his censorial temerity in blaming themes made sacred by the Faery
+Muse.
+
+  Let no rebel satire dare traduce
+  Th' eternal legends of thy fairy Muse,
+  Renowned SPENSER, whom no earthly wight
+  Dares once to emulate----
+
+The compliment to Spenser does not diminish the satire levelled at the
+class.
+
+Contemporary satirists furnish a precise date when ancient things are on
+the turn and getting out of fashion; they are the first who, like hawks,
+descend on their quarry.
+
+If Spenser attempted to infuse a rejuvenescence into the dry veins of
+the old age of romance, by the vitality of _Allegory_, he has fallen
+into a great error; for his twelve knight-errants do not interest our
+sympathies the more for being twelve wandering virtues. Allegorical
+poetry not long after his day also declined; and when it was resumed by
+PHINEAS FLETCHER, in what he has fantastically named and described as
+"The Purple Island," or "the little ISLE OF MAN," the poetry can hardly
+preserve itself amid the ludicrous analogies which, with such ingenious
+perversity of taste, are struck out between anatomy and poesy, too many
+not very agreeable to recollect.
+
+CHIVALRY and ALLEGORY, two columns of our poet's renown, thus soon gave
+way; and SPENSER has often suffered the heaviest penalty to which a
+great poet was ever condemned--neglect!
+
+But these infelicitous forms, which disguised the most tender and
+imaginative genius, could not deprive it of its "better parts." Spenser
+still remained the poet among poets themselves; though for the world at
+large, indeed, Spenser seemed to be recognised only as a poet in the
+chronology of poetry. A critic of great delicacy, and a votary of "the
+Gothic school," despaired for the destiny of our poet. "The Faery
+Queen," exclaimed HURD, in the agony of his taste, "one of the noblest
+productions of modern poetry, is fallen into so general a neglect, that
+all the zeal of the commentators is esteemed officious and impertinent,
+and will never restore it to those honours which it has, once for all,
+irrecoverably lost."
+
+This sharp lament broke out in 1760, when, only two years before, the
+two rival editions of CHURCH and UPTON had simultaneously appeared; and
+the latter could at least boast both of the novelty and the curiosity of
+its commentary. But literary commentators held forth few attractions to
+the incurious readers of that day. More than thirty years have now
+elapsed since the last classical edition of Spenser's works. But at no
+period was Spenser ever forgotten by poetical recluses; and professed
+imitations of our poet in modern times, though they may not always be
+Spenserian, have never ceased, from Shenstone to Mickle, and from
+Beattie to Byron.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The Lee is the stream.
+
+  [2] I offer some instances of alliteration; but the beauty of such
+    lines can only be rightly judged by the context.--
+
+      "In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell
+      And will be found with peril and with pain."
+
+      "Such as a lamp whose life does fade away,
+      Or as the moon cloathed with cloudy night."
+
+      "A world of waters,
+      Horrible, hideous, roaring with hoarse cry."
+
+      "They cherelie chaunt, and rymes at random flung,
+      The fruitful spawn of their rank fantasies;
+      They feed the ears of fools with flattery."
+
+      "All the day before the sunny rays,
+      He used to slug or sleep, in slothful shade."
+
+      "Unpitied, unplagued, of foe or friend."
+
+      "And with sharp shrilling shriek do bootless cry."
+
+      "Did stand astonish'd at his curious skill,
+      With hungry ears to hear his harmony."
+
+  [3] Spenser has suffered a criticism from Mr. Campbell, who, a great
+    poet himself, has otherwise done ample justice to his ancient master.
+    "It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing
+    of the _brief strokes_ and _robust power_ which characterize the
+    _very greatest poets_." Certain it is Spenser is rarely "brief and
+    robust;" but contrary natures cannot operate in the same genius. If
+    Spenser rarely shows the strength and brevity of "the very greatest
+    poets," so may it be said that "the very greatest poets" rarely rival
+    the charm of his diffusion; or, as Mr. Campbell himself attests, in
+    "verse more magnificently descriptive." But the voice of Poetry is
+    more potent than its criticism, and truly says Mr. Campbell--"We
+    shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary
+    things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colour
+    of language, than in this RUBENS OF ENGLISH POETRY."
+
+    Twining was a scholar, deeply versed in classical lore, which he has
+    shown to great advantage in his "Version of and Commentary on
+    Aristotle's Treatise of Poetry." In his Dissertations "On Poetical
+    and Musical Imitation" prefixed to this work, our critic is quite at
+    home with Pope and Goldsmith, but he seems wholly shut out from
+    Spenser! In a note to his first Dissertation he tells us "the
+    following stanza of SPENSER has been much admired:"--
+
+      The joyous birds shrouded in cheareful shade,
+      Their notes unto the voice attempred sweet;
+      Th' angelical soft trembling voices made
+      To th' instruments divine respondence meet;
+      The silver-sounding instruments did meet
+      With the base murmurs of the waters-fall;
+      The waters-fall with difference discreet,
+      Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
+      The gentle-warbling wind low answered to all.*
+
+    Our critic observes that Dr. Warton says of these lines, that "they
+    are of themselves a complete concert of the most delicious music."
+    Indeed, this very stanza in Spenser has been celebrated long before
+    Joseph Warton wrote, and often since; now listen to our learned
+    _Twining:_--
+
+    "It is unwillingly that I differ from a person of so much taste. I
+    cannot consider as music, much less as 'delicious music,' a mixture
+    of incompatible sounds--of sounds musical with sounds unmusical. The
+    singing of birds cannot possibly be 'attempered' to the notes of a
+    human voice. The mixture is, and must be, disagreeable. To a person
+    listening to a concert of voices and instruments, the interruption of
+    singing-birds, wind, and water-falls, would be little better than the
+    torment of Hogarth's enraged musician. Further, the description
+    itself is, like too many of Spenser's, coldly elaborate, and
+    indiscriminately minute. Of the expressions, some are feeble and
+    without effect, as 'joyous birds'--some evidently improper, as
+    'trembling voices' and 'cheerful shades;' for there cannot be a
+    greater fault in a voice than to be tremulous, and cheerful is surely
+    an unhappy epithet applied to shade--some cold and laboured, and such
+    as betray too plainly the necessities of rhyme; such is--
+
+      "'The waters-fall with difference discreet.'"
+
+    Such is the anti-poetical and technical criticism! Imagine a
+    music-master, who had never read a line of poetry, attempting to
+    perform the "delicious music" of our poet--or a singing-master, who
+    had never heard a "joyous bird," tuning up some fair pupil's
+    "trembling voice," and we might have expected this criticism from
+    such "enraged musicians!" Would our critic insist on having a
+    philharmonic concert, or a simple sonata? He who will not suffer
+    birds to be "joyous," nor "the shade cheerful," which their notes
+    make so.
+
+      "Th' angelical soft trembling voices made
+      To th' instruments divine respondence meet,"
+
+    the "softness trembling" with the verse; had our critic forgotten
+    Strada's famed contest of the Nightingale with the Lyre of the poet,
+    when, her "trembling voice" overcome in the rivalry, she fell on the
+    strings to die? And what shall we think of the classical critic who
+    has pronounced that "the descriptions of Spenser are coldly
+    elaborate"--the most vivid and splendid of our poetry?
+
+    But the most curious part remains to be told. This fine stanza of
+    Spenser is one of his free borrowings, being a translation of a
+    stanza in Tasso,** excepting the introduction of "the silver-sounding
+    instruments." The Æolian harp played on by the musical winds was a
+    happiness reserved for Thomson. The felicitous copy of Spenser
+    attracted Fairfax, who, when he came to the passage in Tasso, kept
+    his eye on Spenser, and has carefully retained "the joyous birds" for
+    the "vezzosi augelli" of the original.
+
+    It is certain that, without poetic sensibility, the most learned
+    critic will ever find that the utmost force of his logic in these
+    matters will not lead to reason, but to unreason. Imagination only
+    can decide on imagination.
+
+       * "The Faery Queen," book II. canto xii. st. 71.
+
+      ** "Gerusalemme Liberata," canto xvi. st. 12.
+
+  [4] "The Faery Queen," book III. canto x.
+
+  [5] "The Faery Queen," B. III. canto iv, st. 65, and B. I. canto v.
+    st. 20.
+
+  [6] This edition of 1715, from its modernized orthography, and from
+    greater freedoms taken with the text, is valueless.
+
+  [7] Thia famous tourney may be viewed in Hollinshed--"England," 1317,
+    fo. The four illustrious challengers were, the Earl of Arundel, Lord
+    Windsor, Sir Fulke Greville, and Sir Philip Sidney.
+
+
+
+
+ALLEGORY.
+
+
+Allegory and its exposition of what is termed the double or secret
+sense, is a topic on more than one account important. The mystical art
+of types and symbols has given rise to some extraordinary abuses, and
+even to artifices, which may be considered as an imposture practised on
+the human understanding. An extended fictitious narrative, constructed
+on the principle of one continued allegory, is a topic which critical
+learning has not expressly treated on. An allegorical epic never
+occurred to the ancient legislator of poetry; and modern critics have
+consented to define ALLEGORY as "that art in which one thing is
+_related_, and another _understood_."
+
+But it has been subsequently discovered that this definition was too
+narrow to comprehend the multiform shapes which allegory assumes, either
+in the subtility or the grossness of its nature.
+
+Licentious commentators have rioted in their presumed discoveries by
+extorting from the apparent meaning a hidden sense; or by typical
+adumbrations wresting allusions to persons or circumstances. The genius
+of allegory has triumphed from an extended metaphor to a whole poem
+itself; and its chimerical results have often resembled the
+metamorphoses of Ovid, turning every object into an altered shape, and
+making two objects, wholly unconnected, appear to rise out of each
+other. We may show from the success of many of these pretended
+revelations that the difficulty has not always been so great as the
+absurdity.
+
+A prevalent folly has usually some parent-origin; and the present one of
+ALLEGORY may have been an ancient one. The learned have sought for the
+source of Allegory in the night of Egyptian darkness, among their
+hieroglyphics. That curious tale of antiquity which Herodotus has
+preserved shows us all the obscurity and the inconvenience of
+allegorical communication in its ambidextrous nature. The four
+symbols--of the arrows, the bird, the mouse, and the frog, which the
+Scythian ambassadors silently presented to Darius on his invasion of
+their deserts, were an allegory; and like many allegories, this
+emblematical embassy admitted of contrary interpretations. This
+enigmatic humour of the Egyptian learning seems to have been caught by
+the emblematical Greeks. The priesthood, eager to save the divinity of
+their whole theogony from the popular traditions and poetical impieties
+of that bible of the Polytheists, the Iliad, opened the secret or double
+sense of Homer. They maintained that the Homeric fables were nothing
+less than an allegory, shadowing forth the mysteries of nature, and
+veiling an arcanum of the sciences physical and moral. And these
+elucidators of speculative obscurities formed a sect under the lower
+Platonists.[1] The fathers were perfect children in their ridiculous
+allegories, and they allegorised the Old Testament throughout; and
+assuredly the Rabbins did not yield in puerility to the fathers. But all
+these were on topics too solemn to enter into our present inquiry.
+
+We may, however, smile when we discover this race of Oedipuses among the
+_romanzatori_, or the publishers of the ancient romances. With solemn
+effrontery these proceeded on the principle of allegory to dignify their
+light and lying volumes, either to renovate the satiated curiosity of
+their readers, to cover the freedom of their prurient incidents, or to
+tolerate their marvellous fantasies. The editor of "Amadis of Gaul"
+revealed a secret yet untold. The common reader hitherto had never
+strayed beyond the literal sense; but he was now informed that he had
+only culled the most perishable flowers; for the more elevated mind were
+reserved the perennial fruits of a mystical interpretation of the occult
+sense. It was in this way that the famous "Romaunt of the Rose," from a
+mere love-story and a general satire on society, was converted into a
+volume of theology, of politics, of ethics, and even of the _grand
+oeuvre_ of the alchemists. Such inchoate mysteries were told under "the
+rose!" The most ludicrous display of their literary imposture may be
+seen in that collection of popular tales called the _Gesta Romanorum_.
+Every tale is accompanied by the gloss of a pious allegorist. An
+"Emperor," or "Pompey the Great," is a frequent personage in these
+tales, and is always the type of "our Heavenly Father," or "the soul,"
+or "the Saviour;" while _Contes à la Fontaine_, however licentious, pass
+through a moralization by the puritanical cant of hypocritical monkery.
+
+Conforming to the spurious piety of this monkish taste, a voluminous
+commentary expounded the morality of the ravishing versatilities of
+Ariosto. Berni gravely assured us that all the marvels of enchanted
+gardens, voluminous dragons, sylvan savages, and monsters with human
+faces, were only thrown out for the amusement of the ignorant; and
+concludes with these memorable lines, which he freely borrowed from the
+father of Italian poesy--
+
+  Ma voi ch'avete gl'intelletti sani,
+  Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde,
+  Sotto queste coperte alte e profonde![2]
+
+"But ye of sounder intellect admire the wisdom hidden under these
+coverings, high and profound!" A strain so solemn and melodious was not
+the least exquisite pleasantry from a burlesque satirist!
+
+Camoens having adopted the Grecian mythology in his Christian epic,
+recourse was had to a mystic allegory to defend the incongruity; when
+Vasco de Gama and his companions sport with Thetis and her nymphs,
+allegorically, though in good earnest, some Portuguese commentator has
+explained how "these phantastic amours signify the _wild sects_ of
+different enthusiasts in the most rational institutions, which, however
+contrary to each other, all agree in deriving their authority from the
+same source." To such ineptitudes are the allegorists sometimes driven,
+from the sickly taste of gratifying the infirmity of readers by cloaking
+their freest inventions in the garb of piety and morality. Thus the
+popular literature of Europe was overrun by these adumbrations. Even
+Milton echoed the occult doctrine which he had caught from the seers of
+the old _Romanzatori_--those Gothic Homers in whose spells he had been
+bound:--
+
+  Forests and enchantments drear,
+  _Where more is meant than meets the ear_.
+
+While this mania of allegorising fictitious narratives was in vogue, a
+remarkable occurrence, had it been publicly known, might have let the
+initiated into a secret more "high and profound" than any of their
+esoteric revelations, and might have exposed the imposture which had
+been so long practised on their simplicity. The hapless Tasso was
+harassed by a most "stiff-necked" generation of "the learned Romans," as
+he calls the Classicists--a mob of _signori_, of mechanical critics,
+protesting against his potent inventions.
+
+  Magnanima Mensogna, hor quando è il vero
+  Si bello che si posse à te preporre.
+
+The forest incantations of Ismen, and the enchantments of Armida, those
+true creations of Gothic romance, were on the point of utter perdition.
+In this extremity the poet decided to have recourse to the prevalent
+folly of fitting an allegory to his epic. He acknowledges to his
+confidential friend that the whole was only designed to humour the
+times, and begs that he may not be laughed at. "I will act the profound,
+and show that I have a deep political purpose;" and he might have added
+a whole system of ethics which has been extorted from the presumed
+allegory. "Under this shield," he proceeds, "I shall endeavour to
+protect the _loves_ and the _enchantments_"--those golden leaves which
+the furious classicists would have torn out of his romantic epic. By
+this singular fact we are led to this important discovery, that to
+allegorise is no difficult affair, for the present allegory was "the
+work of a single morning!"[3]
+
+Tasso's confession is a perpetual demonstration of _the fallacies of
+allegory_. We must wholly rid ourselves of "gl' intelletti sani," if we
+doubt that the original writers who have been so largely allegorised
+ever composed an extended fictitious narrative but in all the freedom of
+invention, in open daylight, and never seeking to hide nature in secret
+coverts.
+
+If, as we see, an allegory may be ingeniously drawn from a work which
+never was allegorical; so when an allegory seems designed, its secret
+application is usually the forlorn hope of literature, since the most
+subtile conjectures on these enigmas have wholly differed from each
+other.
+
+Persons and incidents in an allegorical fiction are noses of wax, ever
+to be shaped by a more adroit finger. But in a lengthened allegory, the
+ground is often shifted; the allegorister tires of his allegory, and at
+length means what he says and nothing more. This has driven the
+expounders of the double sense into the absurdity of explaining an
+identical object, sometimes in a metaphysical, and at others in a
+material sense; they take up what their fancy requires, and cautiously
+drop what would place them in an inextricable position.
+
+DANTE opened his great work in the darkness of an allegory; but how the
+erratic commentators have lost their way in "Le tenebre della Divina
+Commedia!" What are the three allegorical animals which open "the
+Vision?" The double sense remains inexplicable from its abundant
+explanations. Are these animals personifications of three great
+passions? Is the gay panther the type of luxurious pleasure, the lion of
+ambition, the she-wolf of avarice? But what if the spotted panther
+should be the representative of Dante's own Florence, and its spots
+indicate the Neri and the Bianchi factions? The hungry lion, with its
+lofty head, would then be superb France, and the lean she-wolf, never
+satiate, be devouring Rome. Yet a later revelation from Niebuhr,
+according to his Platonic ideas, sees but three metaphysical beings the
+types of the soul, the understanding, and the senses. Should some future
+allegorister discover, by his historical, political, and ethical
+fancies, that the three animals were designed, one for a wavering and
+maculated Ghibelline, and the others for the resolute papal Guelphs, the
+probability would be much the same. In truth we can afford but small
+confidence to these expounders of the double sense; for when Jean
+Molinet allegorised the "Roman de la Rose," and illustrated it by
+historical appliances, as chronology was rarely consulted in his day, it
+appears that this good canon of Valenciennes had allegorised in
+reference to persons who flourished and events which occurred posterior
+to the time of the writers.
+
+In the instances which we have indicated, such as in Ariosto and Tasso,
+it was the commentator who had indulged his allegorical genius, not the
+original writers themselves. With one of our great poets unhappily the
+case is reversed; the poetic character and destiny of Spenser stand
+connected with allegory; for here the poet himself prematurely
+_meditated on his allegory before he invented his fiction_. The
+difference is immense. SPENSER fell a victim to this phantom of the
+poetic creed of his day. Deeming a mystic allegory a novel spirit in
+poesy, he who was to run the glorious career of Faery-land first forged
+the brazen bonds which he could never shake off. His invention was made
+subordinate to a prescribed system. The poet was continually running
+after the allegory, which he did not always care to recover in the
+exuberance of his imagination, and the copious facility of his stanzas.
+Often must he have deprived his twelve knights-errant of their tangible
+humanity, perpetually relapsing into their metaphysical nonentities--Sir
+Guyon into temperance, Arthegal into justice, and Sir Caladore into
+courtesy!
+
+Yet this is not the sole defect of the allegorical character of the
+"Faery Queen." We may suspect that when SPENSER decided on constructing
+an allegorical poem, he had not any settled notions of the artifice of
+types, nor yet of the subjects to be symbolised; of fictions which were
+to conceal truths, and of truths which might be mistaken for fictions. A
+strange confusion often prevails in his system, sometimes ambiguous,
+sometimes contradictory, whenever the allegory loses itself in what is
+not allegorical, or the reality is as suddenly lost amid the mystical
+fancies.
+
+The poet himself announced that the "Faery Queen" was "a continued
+allegory or dark conceit;" and he was so strongly convinced that "all
+allegories are doubtfully construed," that he determined to expound his
+own text regarding a most eminent personage; but this was merely to
+secure a courtly eulogy on a royal patroness. "In the 'Faerie Queene' I
+mean _glory_ in my _general_ intention, but in my _particular_ I
+conceive the most excellent and glorious person of the Queen and her
+kingdom in Faery-land." He afterwards adds that "in some places also I
+do otherwise shadow her." And further, the poet informs us that "her
+Majesty is two persons, a royal Queen and a most virtuous and beautiful
+lady." Truly her Majesty might have viewed herself "in mirrors more than
+one," and, as she much liked, in different dresses. Now as the Faerie
+Queen, now as Belphoebe, now as Cynthia, now as Mercilla; and in the
+"Legend of Chastity," who would deny that Britomart is the shadow of the
+Virgin Queen, notwithstanding that this lady-warrior bears a closer
+resemblance to Virgil's Camilla, to Ariosto's Bradamante, and Tasso's
+Clorinda? All this the poet has revealed; but had he been silent, these
+mystical types might have baffled even the perilous ingenuity of Upton,
+his egregious expounder of the double sense, the exuberance of whose
+conjectural sagacity might have enlightened and charmed even Spenser
+himself!
+
+The poet was himself aware that when an allegory does not gracefully
+unveil itself, it admits of the most dubious expositions. The allegories
+of the "Faery Queen" which allude to public events are transparent. The
+first book exhibits the struggles of the Reformation with papistry. Una
+is Truth, the Red-cross Knight the Christian militant, still subjected
+to trial and infirmity, separated from Una, or as it was called, "the
+true Religion," by the magical illusions of Archimagus, whom Warton
+considers was the arch-fiend himself, but Upton only an adumbration of
+"his Holiness." The terrible giant, Orgoglio, seems to have a stronger
+claim to be the proud and potent Bishop of Rome, enamoured as he is of
+Superstition in the false Duessa, that gorgeous enchantress, so fair and
+foul, arrayed in purple and scarlet, whom he has seated on his
+seven-headed dragon, and on whose head he has placed a triple crown. The
+dark den of monstrous Error, the hastening cavalcade of every splendid
+vice, the combat with the Infidel Sans Foy, the church militant finally
+triumphant in the solemn union of the Red-cross with Una, complete the
+allegory of "Holiness." The Apocalypse may serve as the commentary on
+some of these personages; but the well-known title of the lady may not
+be risked to "ears polite." But such is the moveable machinery of
+allegorical history, that Sir Walter Scott, in his review of Todd's
+Spenser, has discovered many other shadowings of _facts_, in the history
+of Christian "Holiness," who, like the Red-cross Knight, separated from
+Una, had to encounter "the monster Error, and her brood," in paganism,
+before the downfall of Orgoglio and Duessa, and popery in England; in
+the freedom of the Red-cross Knight from his imprisonment, our critic
+reveals the establishment of the Protestant Church.[4] Sir Walter might
+have noticed Spenser's abhorrence of the puritans.
+
+The allegory is still more obvious when the poet alludes to some
+contemporary events. It is then a masquerade by daylight, where the
+maskers pass on, holding their masks in their hands. In the fifth book
+we see the distressed Knight Bourbon, opposed by a rabble-rout in his
+attempt to possess himself of the Lady _Fleur de Lis_, whom he loves for
+"her lordships and her lands." He bears away that half-reluctant and coy
+lady. But for this purpose Bourbon had basely changed his shield, and,
+reproached by Sir Arthegal or Justice, he offers but a recreant's
+apology:--
+
+        ----When time shall serve,
+  My former shield I may resume again;
+  To temporise is not from truth to swerve.
+
+  Fie on such forgerie! said Arthegal,
+  Under one hood to shadow faces twain.
+
+The change of shields of Sir Bourbon is the change of faith of Henry of
+Navarre; and the reluctant mistress is that uncompliant France whom he
+forced to take him as her monarch. Not less obvious is the episode of
+the Lady Belgé calling for aid on the British prince--she, now widowed,
+and whose seventeen sons were reduced to five by the cruelties of
+Geryon, and the horrors of that implacable "monster, who lay hid in
+darkness, under the cursed Idol's altar-stone;" the great revolution of
+the Netherlands, the reduction of the seventeen provinces, and the
+horrors of a Romish persecution, are apparent.
+
+But when the allegory runs into obscurer incidents and more fictitious
+personages than those which we have noticed, it becomes rarefied into
+volatile conjecture, or by our ingenuity may be shaped into partial
+resemblances, always uncertain, when we accept invented fictions as
+historical evidence. We know that a writer of an elaborate fictitious
+narrative may have touched on circumstances and characters caught from
+life; but all these, in passing through the mind of the inventor, are
+usually so altered from their reality, to be accommodated to the higher
+design of the invention, that any parallel in private history, or any
+likeness of an individual character, any indistinct allusion, can never
+deserve our historical confidence. A picture of human nature would be an
+anomalous work, in which we could trace no resemblance to individuals,
+or discover no coincidences of circumstances.
+
+A century and a half after the publication of the "Faery Queen," a
+commentator of "the double sense" revealed to its readers that sealed
+history which they had never read, and which the poet had never
+divulged. A few traditional rumours may have floated down; but it was
+UPTON'S edition which startled the world by the abundance of its modern
+revelations.
+
+JOHN UPTON, prebendary of Rochester, and the master of a public school,
+which he raised to eminence, was distinguished for his scholastic
+acquirements, the depth of his critical erudition, and for his
+acquaintance with the history of the Elizabethan court, chiefly,
+however, drawn from Camden. Acute in his emendations of texts, they were
+not, however, slightly tinged by an over-refining pedantry at the cost
+of his taste; and as his judgment was the infirmest of his faculties, in
+his enthusiasm for an historical illustration of Spenser, he seems often
+encumbered by his knowledge striking out similitudes and parallels; a
+few appear not infelicitous, but many are suggested in the
+licentiousness of vague conjecture, or left half in the light and half
+in the dark. His "Critical Observations on Shakspeare" remind one of
+Bentley's "slashing" of Milton. Dr. Johnson has been censured for the
+severity of his character of UPTON; I know not whether the doctor ever
+attended to Upton's Commentary on Spenser; he has, however, admirably
+hit off a prominent feature of our critic. "Every cold"--in Upton's case
+I would rather say warm--"empiric, when his heart is expanded by a
+successful experiment, swells into a theorist."
+
+"In one sense," says UPTON, "you are in Fairy-Land, yet in another you
+may be in the British dominions." And further, "where the _moral_
+allusion is not apparent, you must look for an _historical_ allusion."
+Such are the fundamental positions of the allegorical theory, by which a
+conjectural historian designs to unveil the secret sense of a romantic
+epic; the poet, according to him, having frigidly descended into the
+historiographer of the court of Elizabeth, rather than of the court of
+the Faery Queen--to catch "the Cynthias of the minute," and to waste his
+colours on their evanescent portraits.
+
+And amusing it is to watch the historical conjecturer of a romantic poem
+perilously creeping along the dark passages of secret history; but he is
+often at a stand. In "the palpable obscure," the historical reality,
+which he seems to be touching, suddenly disappears under his grasp. We
+have no golden key to open the occult chamber, where we are told so many
+knights and ladies lie entranced near two centuries in their magical
+sleep, and where, amid the shadowiness, the historical necromancer
+promptly furnishes us with their very names, recognising all these
+enchanted persons by their very attitudes.
+
+One of his most felicitous conjectures regards "the gentle squire
+Timias" as the poet's honoured friend, Sir Walter Rawleigh. Sir Walter
+once incurred the disgrace of the Queen by a criminal amour with one of
+the maids of honour; he was for some time banished the court; but the
+injury to the lady was expiated by marriage. The private history we are
+to look for in the Allegory. Timias offends Belphoebe the patroness of
+Chastity, and the Queen of England, who surprised "the gentle squire"
+in a very suspicious attitude of tenderness with Amoret. This lady was
+suffering from violence, having been "rapt by greedie Lust," and the
+gentle squire himself had partaken of the mischance, in encountering
+that savage. Timias; the knight, is seen--
+
+  From her fair eyes wiping the dewy wet,
+  Which softly slid; and kissing them atween,
+  And handling soft the hurts which she did get.
+
+Belphoebe on the sudden appears, and indignantly exclaims--
+
+  "Is this the Faith?" she said, and said no more;
+  But turn'd her face, and fled away for evermore.
+
+In a romantic scene,[5] "the gentle squire" in banishment is wasted with
+grief, so as not to be recognised by his friends; his lone companion is
+a turtle-dove, a magical and sympathizing bird, who entices Belphoebe,
+that Sovereign Chastity, to pursue its playful flight, till it leads her
+to the cell of the miserable man from whom she had so long averted her
+face, and Timias recovers her favour.
+
+In this extended scene we are to view the condition of Rawleigh during
+his disgrace; and the opening of the canto gives some countenance to the
+particular application. The aptitude of a resemblance, however, may only
+be a coincidence. The fatal error of our conjectural historian is that
+of spinning at his allegory long after he is left without a thread. In
+Amoret's calamitous adventure, "rapt by greedie Lust," Upton sees an
+adumbration of the lady of Sir Walter _before_ her marriage; and in
+another adventure, where another person, _Serena_, with "the gentle
+squire," are both carried to a hermit's cell, to be healed of the wounds
+inflicted by calumny and scandal, their condition _after_ marriage. Our
+diviner, as further evidence of "the double sense," discovers how
+remarkably appropriate was the name of Serena to the lady of Rawleigh.
+
+In all these transmigrations of persons the enigmatical expounder
+acknowledges that the typical incidents suddenly diverge from their
+prototype. The parallels run crooked, and the fictions will not square
+with the facts; and he desperately exclaims that "the poet has
+designedly perplexed the story:" but he concludes with this hardy
+assumption, "If the reader cannot see through these disguises, he will
+see nothing but _the dead letter_." And what but "the dead letter," as
+this hierophant of mystic senses asperses the free inventions of genius,
+can now interest the readers of Spenser? For the honour of our poet we
+protest against the dark and broken dreams hovering about a
+commentator's desk. Who can credit that the courteous and courtly spirit
+of Spenser would thus lay bare to the public eye the delicate history of
+the lady of Sir Walter, even by a remote allusion? Yet this he does by
+connecting her name with Amoret carried away by "greedie Lust," and with
+Serena, who required to be healed of the wounds inflicted by scandal.
+Can we conceive that the poet would have thus deliberately re-opened the
+domestic wound, still tender, of his patron-friend, and distressed that
+"serene" lady, in a poem to be read by them, to be conned by malicious
+eyes, and to be consigned to posterity?
+
+The readers of Upton's revelations may often be amused by his lettered
+ingenuity reasoning with eager perversity. In Book II. Canto i. a
+pathetic incident occurs in a forest, where we find a lady with her
+infant on her bosom, and her knight extended in death beside her. Her
+shriek is deadly as the blow she has given herself. Guyon the Knight of
+Temperance flies to her succour; dying, she tells how "her liefest lord"
+had been beguiled, "for he was flesh," by Acrasia, or sensual pleasure.
+The lady had recovered him from the fell embraces of that sorceress,
+who, in parting, seduces him to drink from a charmed cup her accursed
+_wine_. On his return homewards with his lady he would quench his thirst
+at a fountain, but
+
+  So soon as Bacchus with the Nymphe does lincke,
+
+that is, the instant the pure water reaches his viny lips, he tastes,
+and he dies!
+
+The Knight of Temperance takes the infant from the bleeding bosom of the
+mother to wash it in the fountain--but no water could cleanse its bloody
+hand; hence it was to be called "Ruddimane:" it was "a sacred symbol in
+the son's flesh, to tell of the mother's innocence." Upton had
+discovered that the great Irish insurrectionist O'Neal, as Camden
+records, "dwelt in all the pollutions of unchaste embraces, and had
+several children by O'Donnel's wife."
+
+The badge of the O'Neals was "a bloody hand." In the ecstasy of
+divination he exclaims, "This lady with the bloody-handed babe is--the
+wife of O'Neal!" The dying lady had told her sad tale, but never had she
+hinted at the Irish origin. Her knight had fallen a victim to Acrasia; a
+suitable incident in the legend of temperance--a result of that
+"passion" at which the poet pointed, and described as one which
+
+  Robs Reason of her due regality.
+
+And this simple incident is converted into the fate of the O'Neals,
+presenting an image of the miseries of the Irish rebellion!
+
+We pass by the contemporary portraits inscribed by our speculative
+historian with real names. When fancy is busy, likenesses are often
+found; a single feature is sometimes taken for a whole physiognomy.
+Never surely did our conjecturer shoot wider of the mark than when he
+discovered in the two burlesque characters of the poltroon Braggadochio
+and his cheating squire Trompart, the Duke of Anjou and his envoy
+Simier. These were eminent characters known in the court of Elizabeth.
+To the French prince the Queen seemed partial, and once placed a ring on
+his finger, too sanguinely accepted as a plight of betrothment; and
+Simier was a discreet diplomatist, whom the Queen publicly commended for
+his conduct. To have degraded such distinguished men by such vulgar
+baseness would have been a discrepancy in the taste and decorum of our
+courtly poet which Spenser never betrayed.[6]
+
+In regard to Spenser, after all these allusions problematical for a
+succeeding generation, the poet is no longer to be judged by the
+darkness which has hidden small and fugitive matters. We cannot know the
+degree which Spenser allowed himself in distant allusions to the court
+of Elizabeth, or, as the poet himself vaguely said, to "Fairy-land;" he
+may have promised far more than he would care to perform; for an epical
+poet must have found the descent into a chronicler of scandalous
+legends, a portrayer of so many nameless personages, incompatible with
+the flow and elevation of his themes. And for what was never ascertained
+in its own age we dare not confide to that mystical vaticinator of past
+events, a conjectural historian!
+
+Our interpreter of allegory was honest as well as hardy; in truth, he is
+sometimes startled at the historical revelations which crowd on his
+mind. It required "the hound's fine footing," to borrow the beautiful
+figure of Spenser himself, for our conjecturer to course in this field
+of allegory. With great candour he says, "Let us take care we do not
+overrun our game, or start more game than we are able to catch." His
+occasional dilemmas are amusing. He perplexed himself by a discovery
+that Amoret, whom he had made the lady of Sir Walter Rawleigh, might
+also have served for Mary Queen of Scots. In this critical crucifixion,
+he cries in torture, "I will neither affirm nor deny that Amoret is the
+type of Mary Queen of Scots!" But he had his ecstasies; for on another
+occasion, having indulged a very extravagant fancy, he exclaims in
+joyous rapture, "This may show how far types and symbols may be
+carried!" Yet, with his accustomed candour, he lowers down. "If the
+reader should think my arguments too flimsy, and extended beyond their
+due limits, and should laugh
+
+  To see their thrids so thin as spiders frame,
+  And eke so short that seem'd their ends out shortly came,
+
+let him consider the latitude of interpretation all types and symbolical
+writings admit."[7] Truly that latitude has been too often abused on
+graver subjects than "The Faery Queen;" but the honesty of our mystical
+interpreter of double senses may plead for the extravagance of his
+ingenuity whenever he needs our indulgence.
+
+Enough on this curious subject of allegory--this child of darkness among
+the luminous progeny of fancy. We have shown its changeable nature, and
+how frequently it fails in unity and clearness; we have demonstrated
+that "the double sense"--this system of types and symbols--has served as
+an imposture, since allegories have been deduced from works which were
+not allegorical, and forced interpretations of an ambiguous sense have
+led to fallacies which have fatally been introduced into history, into
+politics, and into theology.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] We have a collection of these "Allegoricæ Homericæ." Even the
+    great Verulam caught the infectious ingenuity; and, in "the wisdom of
+    the ancients," explains everything with the skill of a great Homeric
+    scholiast.
+
+  [2] Berni's "Bojardo," canto xxxi. st. 2. He has hardly improved the
+    verse in the "Inferno," canto ix. ver. 61.--
+
+      O voi ch'avete gl'intelletti sani,
+      Mirate la dottrina che s'asconde,
+      _Sotto il velame degli versi strani_.
+
+  [3] The "Allegoria dalla Poema" is appended to the ancient editions
+    of Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata." The one before me is dated
+    Ferrara, 1582. I believe it has been indignantly rejected by modern
+    editors. When we detect Tasso seriously describing Godfrey as the
+    type of the human understanding--Rinaldo, and Tancred, and others, as
+    different faculties of the soul--and the common soldiers as the body
+    of man--we regret that an honourable mind should degrade itself by
+    such literary imposture. At length, having succeeded in imposing on
+    others, he attempted to impose on himself; for he actually commenced
+    a second "Jerusalem" on the allegorical system, and did not more
+    happily succeed in his elder days than our Akenside in his
+    philosophical destruction of his youthful poem.
+
+  [4] "Edinburgh Review," vol. vii. p. 215.
+
+  [5] Book III. canto viii.
+
+  [6] It has been observed of Upton that, though an excellent classical
+    scholar, he was little versed in the romances of chivalry. In the
+    romance of "Gyron le Courtois" he would have found the original of
+    the farcical Knight Braggadochio; a fact, long after I had written
+    the above, which I owe to Mr. Southey. Such ludicrous caricatures are
+    unusual with the delicacy and elegance of Spenser; and they seem
+    never to have been struck in his mint. I suspect we should not have
+    had such farcical personages in the "Faery Queen," had not Spenser's
+    propensity to imitation induced him to follow his beloved patron, who
+    has not happily introduced in the "Arcadia" the low comic of Damoetas
+    and his ugly daughter Mopsa.
+
+  [7] Upton's note at the close of the fifth book of "The Faery Queen."
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST TRAGEDY AND THE FIRST COMEDY.
+
+
+In the transition from the simpler interlude to the aggrandizement of a
+more complicate scene and more numerous personages, so indistinct were
+the notions of tragedy and comedy, that the writer of a morality in
+1578, declaring that his purpose was to represent "the manners of men,
+and fashion of the world now-a-days," distinguishes his drama both as "a
+Pleasant Tragedy" and "a Pitiful Comedy."[1] This play, indeed, may be
+placed among the last of the ancient dramas; and it is probable that the
+author considered that these vague expressions might serve to designate
+a superior order of dramatic productions.
+
+The term Comedy was as indefinite in France as with ourselves. Margaret
+of Valois, in 1544, gave the title of comedy to such scriptural pieces
+as _The Nativity_, _The Adoration of the Kings_, and _The Massacre of
+the Innocents_; and in Spain, at the same period, they also called their
+moral pieces comedies. The title of one of these indicates their matter,
+_La Doleria del Sueño del Mundo; Comedia tratada por via de Philosophia
+Moral_,--"The Anguish of the Sleep of the World; a Comedy treated in the
+style of Philosophic Morality." Comedy was the general appellative for a
+play. Shakspeare himself calls the play of the players in _Hamlet_ both
+a tragedy and a comedy. It is quite evident that at this period they had
+no distinct conception of comedy merely as a pleasant exhibition of
+society. Aristotle had not afforded them a correct description in our
+sense, drawing his notions from the old comedy, those personal satires
+or farcical lampoons acted on the Athenian stage.
+
+To this day we remain still unsatisfied what Dante meant by calling his
+great poem a "Commedia." Dante throws the same sort of mystery over the
+species of his poem as he has done over the creation of a classical
+diction for his own Italy. According to his interpretation, the lofty
+style was denominated tragic, and in opposition to it he has called his
+work "Commedia," as of a more humble style; and on another occasion he
+describes comedy as something that begins sadly and ends happily, as we
+find it in his great poem. We must, however, accept the definition as
+very obscure, when we consider that both his subject and his diction so
+often led him to sublimity of conception and expression; but the style
+of criticism was yet unformed in the days of the Italian Homer.
+
+It is remarkable that Boccaccio has entitled his pastoral of "Ameto" a
+"Commedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine." It is difficult to imagine that the
+almost contemporaneous commentator would have misused the word; we might
+presume he attached the idea of a drama to this disputed term.
+
+While these indistinct notions of tragedy and comedy were prevalent with
+us, even long after we had a public theatre, we really possessed tragedy
+and comedy in their more classical form; Tragedy, which soared to the
+sententiousness of Seneca; and Comedy, which sported with Plautus and
+Terence.
+
+We owe this first TRAGEDY in our language, represented before the Queen
+in 1561, by the gentlemen of the Inner Temple, to the master-spirit who
+planned _The Mirror for Magistrates_, and left as its model _The
+Induction_. SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, the first Earl of Dorset, in that
+national poem had struck with the nerve of Chaucer while he anticipated
+the grave melodious stanza and the picturing invention of Spenser. But
+called away from the land of the muses to the political cabinet, this
+fine genius seems repeatedly to have consigned his works to the hands of
+others; even his lighter productions are still concealed from us in
+their anonymous condition. As in _The Mirror for Magistrates_ Sackville
+had resigned that noble scheme to inferior names, so in this tragedy of
+_Ferrex and Porrex_, or, as it was sometimes entitled, _The Tragedy of
+Gorboduc_, while his genius struck out the same originality of plan, yet
+the titlepage informs us that he accepted a coadjutor in THOMAS NORTON,
+who, as much as we know of him in other things, was a worthy partner of
+Sternhold and Hopkins.
+
+In this first tragedy in our language, cast in the mould of classical
+antiquity, we find a division of scenes and a progressive plot carried
+on, though somewhat heavily, through five acts; the ancient ethical
+choruses are preserved, changing their metres with rhyme. And here, for
+the first time, blank verse was recited on the stage. Notwithstanding
+these novel refinements, our first tragedy bears a strong impress of
+ancient simplicity. Every act was preceded by "a dumb show," prefiguring
+the incidents of the opening act; these scenical displays of something
+considered to be analogous to the matter were remains of the pageants.
+
+Blank verse, which the Earl of Surrey had first invented for his version
+of Virgil, the Earl of Dorset now happily applied to the dramatic
+dialogue. To both these noblemen our poets owe their emancipation from
+rhyme; but the rhythmical artifices of blank verse were not discovered
+in the monotonous, uncadenced lines of its inventors. The happiest
+inventor does not overcome all difficulties.
+
+SACKVILLE, in this tragedy, did not work with the potent mastery of his
+_Induction_; his fire seems smothered in each exact line; he steals on
+with care but with fear, as one treading on ice, and appears not to have
+settled in his mind the true language of emotion, for we feel none. He
+is ethical more than dramatic. His lifeless personages have no
+distinctness of character; his speeches are scholastic orations: but the
+purity of his diction and the aptness of his epithets are remarkable;
+his words and phrases are transparent; and he may be read with ease by
+those not versed in ancient lore. The political part of the tragedy is
+not destitute of interest; developing the misery of fraternal wars, the
+division of sovereign power, each contending for dominion, and closing
+in the dissolution of all government, by the despair of a people. We
+have ourselves witnessed in these times a similar scene of the enmity of
+brothers and monarchs.
+
+A political anecdote confining this tragedy is worth recording. In the
+discussions of the dangers and mischiefs of such a state of
+insubordination, the poet, adopting the prevalent notions of the divine
+right and the authority of "the absolute king," inculcates the doctrine
+of passive obedience. These lines, which appear in the first edition,
+were silently removed from the later ones.[2] It is an evidence that
+these dreary principles, which in the following reigns of James and
+Charles produced such fatal misunderstandings, even at this time began
+to be questioned. Our poet, however, under the reckless councils of a
+court minion, had covered the severest satire on those monarchs who rage
+with "the lust of kingdoms," and "subject to no law," and who hold their
+enormous will to be the privilege of regal power. Sackville seems to
+have adopted the principle which Machiavel had artfully managed in his
+"Prince," in the spirit of damning irony.
+
+There is such a level equality throughout the whole style of this
+drama,[3] that it has given rise to a suspicion that the work could only
+be the composition of one mind and one ear. It is not in the
+constitution of the human intellect that Norton could emulate Sackville,
+or that Sackville could bring himself down to Norton. This internal
+evidence struck Warton; and tracing it by _The Mirror for Magistrates_,
+the suspicion was confirmed; the scenes of _Gorboduc_ are visibly marked
+with the greater poet's characteristics, "in a perspicuity of style and
+a command of numbers superior to the tone of his times." The name of
+Norton affixed to the titlepage might only indicate his management of
+the pageants! and possibly, being a licenser of books and a puritan,
+even his name might be a recommendation of this drama, for certain
+persons. Few things in those days were more loosely conducted than the
+business and the artifices of printers, who generally procured their
+copies surreptitiously, or were permitted to accommodate them to their
+own free management and deceptive titlepages.
+
+We must not decide on _the first tragedy_ by a comparison with the more
+attractive and impassioned ones which soon afterwards inundated our
+theatres. The court-circle had never before listened to such an amazing
+novelty; and the poetic critic of that day pronounced that "those
+stately speeches and well-sounding phrases were full of notable
+morality, which it doth most delightfully teach." Sir Philip Sidney only
+grieved that this tragedy might not remain as an exact model of all
+tragedies, being "faulty both in place and time, the two necessary
+companions of all corporal actions." Sidney did not live to witness the
+code of Aristotle impugned, and his unities set at defiance, by a swarm
+of dramatic bees, whose wild music and native sweetness were in their
+own humming and their own honey.
+
+This our first tragedy attracted by its classical form the approval of
+some great moderns. RYMER, a stout Aristotelian, who has written on
+tragedy, was astonished to find "such a classical fable on this side the
+Alps," which, he plainly tells us, "might have been a better direction
+to Shakspeare and Jonson than any which they had the luck to follow."
+And Pope was not the less struck by the chaste style and the decorum of
+Sackville, who having several murders in his tragedy, veiled them from
+the public eye; conforming to the great Horatian canon, they are told,
+and not viewed in the representation. Pope in conversation declared,
+too, that Sackville wrote in a much purer style than Shakspeare in his
+first plays, without affectation and bombast! and he has delivered a
+more formal decision in print. "The writers of the succeeding age might
+have improved as much in other respects by copying from Sackville, from
+a propriety in the sentiments and dignity in the sentences, and an
+unaffected perspicuity of style, which all the succeeding poets, not
+excepting Shakspeare himself, either little understood or perpetually
+neglected."
+
+These are edicts from the school of classical antiquity. It was on the
+earnest recommendation of Pope that Spence published an edition of this
+tragedy, which had accidentally been put into the hands of Pope by the
+father of the Wartons. Our vernacular writers, even the greatest, were
+almost unknown in that day, and they only accidentally occurred.[4]
+
+Spence, a feeble classical critic, was so overcome by the notion that "a
+privy-counsellor" must be more versant in the language and the feelings
+of royalty than a plebeian poet, that in his preface pointing out "the
+stately speeches," he exclaimed in ecstasy--"'Tis no wonder if the
+language of _kings_ and _statesmen_ should be less happily imitated by a
+_poet_ than a _privy-counsellor_." To vindicate Shakspeare, at whom this
+unguarded blow seemed levelled, the historian of our poetry, seated in
+his professorial chair, flung his lightning on the impious critic.
+"Whatever merit there is in this play, and particularly in the speeches,
+it is more owing to the poet than the privy-counsellor. If a first
+minister was to write a tragedy, I believe the piece will be the better
+the less it has of the first minister. When a statesman turns poet, I
+should not wish him to fetch his ideas or his language from the cabinet.
+I know not why a king should be better qualified than a private man to
+make kings talk in blank verse."
+
+Literary history would have supplied the positive fact. Cardinal
+Richelieu, that great minister, wrote a memorable tragedy; and, in
+accordance with his own familiar notions, the minister called it
+_Europe_. It was written in the style of "a privy-counsellor," and it
+was hissed! while Corneille, who wrote as a poet, for the national
+theatre, composed sentiments which statesmen got by heart.
+
+Our literary antiquaries long doted on the first English comedy--_Gammer
+Gurton's Needle_--being a regular comedy in five acts in rhyme. The
+rusticity of the materials is remarkable. A diligent crone, darning the
+lower habiliments of Hodge, loses her needle--
+
+  A little thing, with a hole in the end, as bright as any siller (silver),
+  Small, long, sharp at the point, and straight as any piller.
+
+Had a needle not been a domestic implement of more rarity than it is
+since Birmingham flourished, we had not had such a pointed and polished
+description. In fact, the loss of the Gammer's needle sets the whole
+village in flames; the spark falling from the mischievous waggery of a
+Tom o' Bedlam in an artful insinuation against a certain gossip notable
+for the luxuriance of her grotesque invectives. Dame Chat is a scold,
+whose curses and oaths neither the fish-market nor Shakspeare himself
+could have gone beyond. Brawls and battles involve the justice, the
+curate, and the devil himself, in their agency. The prime author of all
+the mischief produces the catastrophe; for he contrives to make Hodge
+extract from a part more tender than his heart the cause of so much
+discord, with great risk to its point and straightness; and the parties
+conclude--
+
+  For Gammer Gurton's needle's sake let us have a PLAUDITE!
+
+The writer of this extraordinary, and long supposed to be the earliest
+comedy in our language, the titlepage informs us was Mr. S----, Master
+of Arts; and, moreover, that it was acted at the University of
+Cambridge. When afterwards it was ascertained that Mr. S---- was no less
+a person than JOHN STILL, subsequently Bishop of Bath and Wells, it did
+not diminish the number of its admirers. The black-letter brotherhood
+were long enamoured of this most ancient comedy, as a genuine beauty of
+the infancy of the drama. Dodsley and Hawkins enshrined _Gammer Gurton's
+Needle_ in their "Reliquary;" and literary superstition
+
+  Swore it was the relick of a saint.
+
+The mere lovers of antiquity endured the raillery of the wits for the
+puerility of the plot, the vulgar humour, and the homeliness of the
+style. One had asserted that "STILL had displayed the true genius of
+comedy, and the choice of his _subject_ only was to be regretted;"
+another declared that "the vein of familiar humour and a kind of
+grotesque imagery are not unlike some parts of Aristophanes, but without
+the graces of _language_." Thus one admirer gives up the subject, and
+another the style! Even Warton fondly lingered in an apology for the
+grossness of the "Gammer."--"In a polished age that writer would have
+chosen, nor would he perhaps have disgraced, a better subject. It has
+been thought surprising that a learned audience could have endured some
+of the indelicate scenes. But the established festivities of scholars
+were gross, and agreeable to their general habits." This apology has
+turned out to be more plausible than true.
+
+This ancient comedy is the work of a truly comic genius, who knew not
+how to choose his subject, and indulged a taste repulsive to those who
+only admit of delicate, and not familiar humour. Its grossness, however,
+did not necessarily result from the prevalent grossness of the times;
+since a recent discovery, with which Warton was unacquainted, has shown
+the world that an English comedy which preceded the hitherto supposed
+first comedy in our language, is remarkable for its chasteness--the
+propriety of its great variety of characters, the truth of the manners
+in a wide circle of society, and the uninterrupted gaiety pervading the
+whole airy composition.
+
+So recently as in 1818 an ancient printed drama, styled _Ralph Roister
+Doister_, was discovered;[5] a legitimate comedy of five acts in rhyme,
+and, as the writer himself professes, modelled on the dramas of Plautus
+and Terence. He claims for it the honour of the highest class--that of
+"Comedy," but this term was then so indistinct that the poet adds the
+more usual one of "Enterlude."
+
+GAMMER GURTON is a representation of sordid rusticity. ROISTER DOISTER
+opens the moveable scenery of domestic life in the metropolis--touched
+with care, and warm with reality. The plot, without involution,
+progresses through the acts. An egotistical and affectedly amorous
+hair-brain, ever lamenting the dangerous beauty of his ridiculous self,
+fancies to marry a fair dame. He is hit off as
+
+  So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,
+  I trow, never was any creature living.
+
+He is the whetstone of a sharp parasite, whose opening monologue
+exhibits his full portrait--
+
+  But, know ye, that for all this merry note of mine,
+  He might oppose me now that should ask where I dine.
+
+He runs over a nomenclature of a most variegated acquaintance, with some
+fugitive strictures exquisitely personal. We find ourselves in a more
+advanced stage in society than we expected in the reigns of our last
+Henry or Edward. Such personages abounded in the twenty years of peace
+and luxury under James the First, when the obsequious hanger-on
+flourished among the town-heroes of "The Gull's Horn-book." This
+parasite is also one of those domestic dependents whose shrewdness and
+artifices supply a perpetual source of comic invention; such as those
+found among the Latin dramatists, whose scenes and incidents are
+Grecian, and from whom this "Matthew Merry-greek" by his name seems
+happily transplanted. This poet delights by scenes coloured with the
+truth of nature, and by the clear conception of his domestic personages.
+There is a group of domestics--the ancient housekeeper spinning on her
+distaff amidst her maidens, some sowing, some knitting, all in free
+chat; these might have formed a study for the vivid Teniers, and even
+for Shakspeare in his happiest vein. They are not the domestics of Swift
+and of Mandeville--the spoilers of the establishment; not that they are
+without the common feelings of the servants' hall, for they have at
+heart the merry prosperity of their commonwealth. After their
+"drudgerie," to dissipate their "weariness" was the fundamental
+principle of the freedom of servitude. Their chorus is "lovingly to
+agree." A pleasant song, on occasion of the reception of "a new-come
+man" in the family, reveals the "mystery" of their ancient craft.[6]
+
+These early dramatists describe their characters by their names; an
+artless mode, which, however, long continued to be the practice of our
+comic writers, and we may still trace it in modern comedies. Steele, in
+his periodical paper, "The Lover," condemned it as no better a device
+than of underwriting the name of an animal; it is remarkable, that in
+this identical paper an old bachelor is called "Wildgoose," and the
+presumed author of "The Lover" is Marmaduke "Myrtle." Anstey has made
+the most happy use of characteristic names in the "Bath Guide," which is
+an evidence that they may still be successfully appropriated, whenever
+an author's judgment equals the felicity of his invention.
+
+Of a comedy, conjectured to have been written at the close of the reign
+of Henry the Eighth, we may be surprised that the language hardly
+retains a vestige of the rust of antiquity:--so true it is that the
+familiar language of the people has been preserved with rare
+innovations. Its Alexandrine measure properly read or chanted is a metre
+which runs on with facility; the versification has even happily imitated
+the sounds of the different instruments played on in one of the
+serenades; a refinement which we could not have imagined to have been
+within the reach of an artificer of verse in those days. All this would
+look suspicious, if for an instant we could imagine that this admirable
+drama was the contrivance of some Chatterton or Ireland. In style and
+versification the writer far distanced those of his contemporaries,
+whose affectation of phrases rendered them harsh and obscure; he has,
+therefore, approached us. It is remarkable also that the very measure of
+this ancient dramatist, though those whose ear is only used to the
+decasyllabic measure have called it "a long hobbling metre," has been
+actually chosen by a modern poet, when writing familiar dialogue with
+the design of reviving rhymed comedy.[7]
+
+The fate of some books is as remarkable as the histories of some men.
+This lorn and lost drama, deprived even of its title and the printer's
+name, offered no clue to the discovery of the fine genius who composed
+it; and the possessor, who deposited it in the library of Eton College,
+was not at all aware of its claim to be there preserved. It was to
+subsequent research, after the reprint had been made, that both the
+writer and the celebrity of his comedy were indisputably ascertained. We
+owe the discovery to a comic incident in the drama: an amatory epistle
+prepared by a scrivener's hand, for our gay amourists then could not
+always compose, if they could write their billets-doux, being
+maliciously read to the lady, by purposely neglecting the punctuation,
+turned out to be a severe satire. The discomfited lover hastens to wreak
+his vengeance on the hapless scribe, who, however, reading it with the
+due punctuation, proves it to be a genuine love-letter. Wilson, in his
+"Art of Logic," gave this letter as an example of the use of punctuation
+in settling the sense; and without which, as in the present instance, we
+may have "a double sense and contrary meaning." He fortunately added
+that his example was "taken out of an interlude made by NICHOLAS UDALL."
+
+This was the learned UDALL, the Master of Eton School; and this very
+comedy had been so universally admired, that "Roister-Doister" became a
+proverbial phrase to designate a hair-brained coxcomb. We now possess
+two pictures of the habits, the minds, and the dialogue of the English
+people in rural and in city life by two contemporaries, who wanted not
+the art of "holding the mirror up to nature."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] "A Moral and Pitiful Comedie," entitled, "All for Money," &c., by
+    T. Lupton, 1578. In the prologue the author calls it "A Pleasant
+    Tragedy."
+
+  [2] The lines, which are very miserable, are preserved in Dodsley's
+    "Old Plays."
+
+  [3] Warton has analysed this drama in his "History of English
+    Poetry," vol. iv. 178, 8vo. It is in the Collection of Dodsley and
+    Hawkins.
+
+  [4] This our first tragedy, _Ferrex and Porrex_, offers a striking
+    evidence of our literary knowledge. Dryden, alluding to it, refers to
+    a spurious copy published under the title of _Gorboduc_ but he could
+    not have seen it, for he calls it _Queen Gorboduc_, whereas he is
+    _King_; and he appears to think that it was written in _rhyme_; and
+    notices Shakspeare as the inventor of blank verse! When Pope
+    requested Spence to reprint _Gorboduc_, they were so little cognisant
+    of these matters, that the spurious and defective _Gorboduc_ was
+    printed instead of the genuine _Ferrex and Porrex_. This ignorance of
+    our ancient writers lasted to a later period.
+
+  [5] Reprinted by the Rev. Mr. Briggs, the possessor. After a limited
+    reprint it was republished as the first number of a cheap edition of
+    Old English Dramas, published by T. White, 1830; a work carried on to
+    a few volumes only. The text reads apparently very correct, and seems
+    to have passed under a skilful eye. I have read it with attention,
+    because I read it with delight. [It has since been reprinted by the
+    Shakspeare Society, carefully collated from the unique original now
+    in Eton College Library, by Mr. Payne Collier.]
+
+  [6] This song of Domesticity, as probably it never has been noticed,
+    I preserve in the note, that the reader may decide on the melody of
+    such native simplicity.
+
+    This song may have been written about the close of the reign of Henry
+    the Eighth. The short ballad metres in our ancient poems are
+    perfectly harmonious, and the songs are racy and joyous,--
+
+      I.
+
+        A thing very fitte
+        For them that have witte
+        And are felowes knitte
+      Servants in one house to bee,
+        As fast fast for to sitte,
+        And not oft to flitte
+        Nor varie a whitte,
+      But lovingly to agree.
+
+      II.
+
+        No man complainyng
+        Nor other disdainyng
+        For losse or for gainyng,
+      But felowes or friends to bee,
+        No grudge remainyng,
+        No work refrainyng,
+        Nor helpe restrainyng,
+      But lovingly to agree.
+
+      III.
+
+        No man for despite
+        By worde or by write
+        His felowe to twite,
+      But further in honestie;
+        No good turns entwite
+        Nor old sores recite,
+        But let all goe quite,
+      And lovingly to agree.
+
+      IV.
+
+        After drudgerie
+        When they be werie,
+        Then to be merie,
+      To laugh and sing they be free
+        With chip and cherie,
+        High derie derie,
+        Trill on the berie,
+      And lovingly to agree!
+
+  [7] Hayley.
+
+
+
+
+THE PREDECESSORS AND CONTEMPORARIES OF SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+The establishment of a variety of theatres is an incident in the history
+of the people, as well as of the national genius. The drama at first
+existed, it may be said, in privacy. Royalty and nobility maintained
+their own companies; the universities acted at their colleges, the
+"children" or the singing boys at the public schools, the lawyers at
+their halls; and some of the gentry at their seats had servants who were
+players. A stage for strollers would occasionally be hastily erected in
+the unsheltered yards of inns, and they would ramble into the country
+till an Act of Elizabeth in 1572 controlled these erratic bodies,
+classing them with "rogues and vagabonds." Throughout the kingdom there
+was a growing predilection for theatrical entertainments--it was the
+national anticipation of a public theatre.
+
+If Elizabeth, a popular sovereign, in 1572 checked the strollers
+assuming the character of players, two years afterwards, in 1574, she
+granted a patent to the servants of the Earl of Leicester[1] "to
+exercise the faculty of playing stage-plays, as well for the recreation
+of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;" and she added,
+"within our city of London, and of any of our cities." This was a boon
+royally given, in which her "loving subjects" might gather from the tone
+of this dramatic state-paper, that the queen had resolved in council
+that the public should not be denied sharing in her own amusements.
+
+The pleasures of the people were not, however, yet those of their grave
+seignors. The puritanic spirit of the anti-dramatists, which sometimes
+divided the councils of the queen, had lodged among the honest
+wardmotes. A protracted contest between the privy-council and the lord
+mayor in common council, with protests and petitions, rose up; and long
+it seemed hopeless to patronise the players, who were not suffered to
+play. The Recorder Fleetwood, of whom we have many curious
+police-reports in the style of a _lieutenant de police_--as the chief of
+his own spies, and the executioner of his own decrees--had himself a
+fertile dramatic invention, which was largely developed in the singular
+"orders of the common-council" against the alarming innovation of PUBLIC
+PLAYS in the boundaries of the civic jurisdiction.[2] There was not a
+calamity, moral and physical, which could happen to any city which the
+Recorder has not made concomitant with the opening of playhouses. The
+infection of the plague was, however, then an irrefutable argument. In
+this contest between the court and the city, the common-council remained
+dogged assertors of their privileges; they drove the players from their
+sacred precincts to the boundaries and to "the liberties," where,
+however, they harassed these children of fancy by a novel claim, that
+none were to be free in the "liberties" but themselves, which argument
+was submitted to the law officers for their decision. The privy-council
+once more interfered, by a declaration that the chief justices had not
+yet been able to determine their case, and therefore there was to be no
+present "intermeddling." It is evident that the government all along had
+resolved that the people should have a theatre. After two years of
+opposition to the patent granted to the players in 1574, the first
+playhouse was built--a timber house in the suburbs--and received the
+appropriate title of "The Theatre;" and about the same time "The
+Curtain" rose in its vicinage, a name supposed to have been derived from
+that appendage to a stage; for to those who had been accustomed to the
+open stage of an inn-yard, the drop or "curtain" separating the actors
+from the audience was such a novelty, that it left its name to the
+house. The Blackfriars, the Round Globe, the Square Fortune--whence
+Edward Alleyn, by his histrionic fame, drew the wealth which endowed
+Dulwich College--are names almost consecrated by the eminent geniuses
+whose lives were connected with these theatres; and at one time it
+appears that seventeen playhouses had been erected; they were, however,
+wooden and thatched, till the Fortune was built with brick, and, in the
+theatrical phrase, "the heavens," that is, the open top, was tiled.
+
+The popular fervour of the drama had now a centrical attraction; a place
+of social resort, with a facility of admission, was now opened;[3] and
+when yet there was no reading public, the theatre would be substituted
+for the press; and often, wearied of the bearward and coarser sports,
+they flocked to the more intellectual entertainment. The playhouse was a
+wider sphere for their exertions, and it opened an arduous competition
+for the purveyors of these incessant novelties. The managers of theatres
+had now to look about for plays and playwrights. A general demand
+required, not only an abundant, but, unfortunately, a rapid supply. What
+a crisis for genius, for its development and its destruction!
+
+This was an event in the history of our literature which has not
+occurred in the literary history of any other European people. It was
+about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth that a race of dramatic
+writers burst forth on the nation--writers, not easily numbered, of
+innumerable dramas.
+
+Literature now opened a new avenue for a poor scholar, the first step of
+advancement in society from a collegiate life for those who found their
+future condition but ill provided for. A secretaryship, a chaplainship,
+or to be a gentleman's usher--in a word, an humble retainer in great
+families--circumscribed the ambition of the meek and the worthy; but
+there were others, in "their first gamesome age," whose
+
+                  ----doting sires,
+  Carked and cared to have them lettered--
+  But their kind college from the teat did tent,
+  And forced them walk before they weaned were.[4]
+
+This, however, is but the style of apology which one of them gives to
+veil the fact that many were ejected from "the teat." Fiery emanations
+these, compelled to leave their cloistered solitudes, restless and
+reckless, they rushed to the metropolis, where this new mart of genius
+in the rising dramatic age was opened. Play-writing and play-acting, for
+they were often combined, were too magical a business to resist its
+delusions.
+
+They wrote, with rare exceptions, without revision. An act or two,
+composed with some meditation to awaken interest--a few moveable scenes
+rapidly put together--and, at some fortunate moment, a burst of
+poetry--usually wound up in pell-mell confusion; for how could they
+contrive a catastrophe to the chaos? Such writers relied on the passing
+curiosity which their story might raise, and more on the play of the
+actors, who, in the last bustling scenes, might lend an interest which
+the meagre dialogue of the economical poet so rarely afforded. They
+never wrote for posterity, and seem never to have pretended to it. They
+betrayed no sympathy for their progeny; the manager's stock was the
+foundling hospital for this spurious brood; the Muse even often sold her
+infant while it still lay on the breast. The huddled act of a play was
+despatched to the manager as the lure of a temporary loan, accompanied
+by a promissory note of expedition; and assuredly they kept to their
+word if ever they concluded the work.
+
+This facility of production may be accounted for, not only from the more
+obvious cause which instigated their incessant toil, but from the ready
+sources whence they drew their materials. They dramatised evanescent
+subjects, in rapid competition, like the ballad-makers of their own day,
+or the novelists of ours; they caught "the Cynthia of the minute"--a
+domestic incident--a tragic tale engaging the public attention produced
+many domestic tragedies founded on actual events; they were certain of
+exciting the sympathies of an audience. Two remarkable ones have been
+ascribed to Shakespeare by skilful judges: _Arden of Feversham_, where
+the repentance of an adulterous wife in the agony of conscience so
+powerfully reminds one of the great poet, that the German, Tieck, who
+has recently translated it, has not hesitated to subscribe to the
+opinion of some of our own critics; and _The Yorkshire Tragedy_, which
+was printed with the name of Shakespeare in his own lifetime, and has
+been held to be authentic; and surely _The Yorkshire Tragedy_ at least
+possessed an equal claim with the monstrous _Titus Andronicus_[5] not to
+be ejected from the writings of Shakespeare. It is most probable that
+that, among others, was among the old plays which he often took in hand;
+and our judicial decisions have not always found "the divinity which
+stirs within them." The Italian novelists, which had been recently
+translated in PAINTER'S "Palace of Pleasure," these dramatists ransacked
+for their plots; this source opened a fresh supply of invention, and a
+combination of natural incidents, which varies the dry matter-of-fact
+drawn from the "Chronicles," which in their hands too often produced
+mere skeletons of poetry. They borrowed from the ancients when they
+could. Plautus was a favourite. They wrote for a day, and did not expect
+to survive many.
+
+The rapid succession of this multitude of plays is remarkable; many have
+wholly perished by casualties and dispersions, and some possibly may
+still lie unsunned in their manuscript state.[6] We have only the titles
+of many which were popular, while the names of some of these artificers
+have come down to us without any of their workmanship. In a private
+collection, Langbaine had gathered about a thousand plays, besides
+interludes and drolls; and yet these were but a portion of those plays,
+for many never passed through the press; the list of anonymous authors
+is not only considerable, but some of these are not inferior in
+invention and style to the best.[7] We may judge of the prolific
+production of these authors by THOMAS HEYWOOD, a fluent and natural
+writer, who never allowed himself time to cross out a line, and who has
+casually informed us that "he had either an entire hand, or at least a
+main finger, in two hundred and twenty plays."
+
+The intercourse of the proprietors or managers of the theatres and these
+writers has been only incidentally, and indeed accidentally, revealed to
+us.[8] It was justly observed by Gifford, that these dramatic poets,
+either from mortification or humility, abstained from dwelling, or even
+entering upon their personal history. Though frequent in dedications,
+they are seldom explicit; and even their prefaces fail to convey any
+information, except of their wants or their grievances, from evils which
+are rarely specified. The truth is, that this whole poetical race, which
+suddenly broke out together, a sort of wild insurrection of genius,
+early found that they were nothing more than the hirelings of some
+crafty manager, at whose beck and mercy they lived. Writing plays was
+soon held to be as discreditable an occupation as that of the players
+themselves; indeed, not seldom the poets themselves were actors--these
+departments were so frequently combined, that the term player is
+sometimes used equally for a performer on the stage, and a writer of
+plays.
+
+This fraternity, children of ill-fortune and of passion, were scarce
+distinguishable from each other; and if the fortunes, and the fate of
+some, are more known, it is but by the recklessness of their days--their
+criminal impetuosity. Several perished in their immaturity, torches
+blazing, while they were consuming themselves. The chance-record of the
+violent end of one; a cry of desperation still more horrible of another;
+the death-bed repentance of a third; the dishonourable life of dupery
+probably practised by a fourth;[9] are adapted to enter into moral, if
+not into literary history.
+
+The Psychologist, the historian of the soul among the brotherhood of
+genius--for such were many among them--feels how precious are the
+slight memorials of noble passions, disguised by a degraded existence.
+However tortuous their lives seem, some grasped at celebrity, and some
+looked towards distant fame. If some have eloquently reproached
+themselves, there are, too, those who exulted in the consciousness of
+their intellectual greatness. They were of different magnitude, and in
+the scroll of their names some have been recognised by posterity.
+
+An ungenial critic has morosely censured Robert Greene, who, harboured
+in an obscure lodging, which a poor man's charity had yielded, when
+lying on his death-bed, prayed for the last favour that poor man's
+charity could bestow on a miserable, but a conscious poet--that his
+coffin might be covered with bays. In the shadow of death, the poet and
+the romancer dwelt on the fame which he cherished as life.
+
+Even their small theatres appeared to the poet "thronged," and the heart
+of the dramatist would swell at "the shouts and claps." Drayton, who, at
+a later day, joined in several dramas, has perpetuated this rejoicing of
+the poet, which he himself had experienced in that small world "the
+proud round" of the Globe Theatre. It is a sonnet in the collection
+which he has entitled "Idea," and which no successful dramatist will
+read without some happy emotion.
+
+  In pride of wit, when _high desire of fame
+  Gave life and courage to my labouring pen_,
+  And first the sound and vertue of my name
+  Were grace and credit in the ears of men;
+  With those the _thronged theaters_ that presse,
+  I in _the circuit_ for the Lawrell strove,
+  Where the _full praise_, I freely must confesse,
+  In heate of blood and modest minde might move;
+  _With_ SHOWTS _and_ CLAPS _at every little_ PAWSE
+  When the _prowd_ ROUND _on everie side hath rung_.
+
+The ample roll might not be tedious, though it were long, had we aught
+to record of this brotherhood of genius--but nothing we know of the
+much-applauded, and much-ridiculed, and most ingenious JOHN LYLY;
+nothing of the searching and cynical MARSTON; nothing of the inventive
+and flowing DEKKER; nothing of the unpremeditated strains of the fertile
+HEYWOOD; nor of the pathetic WEBSTER; nor of MIDDLETON, from whose
+"Witch" Shakespeare borrowed his incantations; nor of ROWLEY, whom
+Shakespeare aided; nor of the equal and grave MASSINGER; nor of the
+lonely and melancholy FORD.
+
+Among these poets stood He, in whose fire the Greek of Homer burned
+clear in his Homeric English. Chapman often caught the ideas of Homer,
+and went on writing Homerically; at once the translator and the
+original. One may read in that "most reverend aspect" of his, the lofty
+spirit that told how, above all living, was to him the poet's life--when
+he exclaimed--
+
+  The work that I was born to do is done!
+                        The conclusion
+  Makes the beginning of my life; for never
+  Let me be said to live, till I live ever![10]
+
+The plays were bought by a manager for his company, and each company was
+jealously alive that no other should perform their purchased copies.
+These monopolists were therefore anxious to suppress the publication of
+plays, and to smother the fame of their dramatist on their own boards.
+The players, who were usually copartners, at the sovereign pleasure of
+their proprietorship, unmercifully mutilated the tender limbs of their
+poet,[11] or what was not less usual, made him for ever ridiculous by
+foisting in whole scenes of the basest humour, as clap-traps for "the
+groundlings," and which sometimes were perpetuated in the prompter's
+copy. Such scenes of ribaldry have tainted even immortal pages, and
+have provoked much idle criticism either to censure or to palliate.
+
+As the stock-copies increased and lost their novelty, they required some
+new-fashioning. The tarnished piece was drawn out of the theatrical
+wardrobe; once in vogue, and now neglected, the body, not yet
+moth-eaten, might be flounced with new scenes. To this humiliated state
+of jobbers of old plays, were reduced the most glorious names in our
+drama's roll. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Massinger sate down to this
+obscure drudgery. Our earlier commentators on Shakespeare had no
+suspicion that even his plays were often _rifacimentos_ of neglected
+stock-copies. When the account-books of Henslow, the manager, were
+discovered at Dulwich College, they supplied some strange literary
+anecdotes. This entry appears, "lent to Bengemen Jonson, forty shillings
+for his adycions to Jeronymo," which was an old favourite play of Kyd's.
+Again, more lent for "new adycions." When Hawkins republished "Jeronymo"
+in his collection, he triumphantly rejected these "adycions," as being
+"foisted in by the players." This he had detected by collation with the
+first edition; further his critical decision could not advance. The
+Diary of Henslow was fatal to the matter-of-fact critic--the passages he
+had ejected relate to the madness of Hieronymo for the murder of his
+son; the learned poet never wrote with such a Shakespearian force.
+
+Our early dramatists not only jobbed in this chance-work, but
+established a copartnership for the quicker manufacture; and we find
+sometimes three or four poets working on one play, share and share
+alike, or in due proportions, whenever they could peaceably adjust their
+mutual celebrities.[12] Could we penetrate into the recesses of the
+theatre of that day, I suspect we should discover civil wars in the
+commonwealth. These partners sometimes became irreconcilably jealous.
+Jonson and Marston and Decker, who had zealously co-operated,
+subsequently exhausted their quivers at one another. Greene was
+incurably envious of Marlow, and got his friend Nash to be as much so,
+till Marlow and Nash compromised, and wrote together the tragedy of
+_Dido_, with the affection of twins. Lofty Chapman flashed an
+"invective" against proud "Ben," and when Anthony Munday, a copious
+playwright, was hailed by a critic as "the best plotter," Jonson, in his
+next _play_, ridiculed "the best plotter." Can we forget that in
+_Eastward Hoe_, one of the most amusing of our old comedies, whence
+Hogarth borrowed the hint of his "Idle and Industrious Apprentices," by
+Jonson, Chapman and Marston, the madness of Ophelia is poorly ridiculed?
+It would seem that a junction of the poets usually closed in a rupture.
+
+Our first tragedy and comedy were moulded on the classical model, for
+both the writers were university-men. It is, however, remarkable that
+the greater number of our early dramatists who now occupy our attention
+were also members of the universities, had taken a degree, and some were
+skilful Greek scholars.[13] How then did it happen, that not one of
+these scholars submitted to the artificial apparatus and the
+conventional code of their legislator, the Stagyrite? We observe a
+sudden revolution in the dramatic art.
+
+Our poets had not to address scholastic critics; for, as one of them has
+delivered himself,--
+
+  --------They would have GOOD PLAYS, and not produce
+  Such musty fopperies of antiquity;
+  Which do not suit the humorous age's back,
+  With clothes in fashion.
+
+It was their business to raise up that multiform shape which alone could
+win the mutable attention of a very mixed audience. At once they clung
+to the human nature before them; they ran through all the chords of the
+passions; mingling the comic with the tragic, they struck out a new
+course in their inartificial drama. They were at all events inventors,
+for they had no prototypes. Every poet was an original, _more suo_,
+mindless of the encumbering alloy, for they knew that the vein they had
+opened was their own, and confided too frequently in its abundance to
+find its richness. It was a spontaneous burst which broke forth in the
+excitement of these new times, and which, as far as the careless
+prodigality of the vernacular genius is concerned, in the raciness of
+its idiom, and the flow of its conceptions, and the freshness of its
+imagery, can never return, for the virgin genius of a people must pass
+away!
+
+Valueless, indeed, was our early drama held by graver men. Sir Thomas
+Bodley wholly rejected from his great library all plays, "to avoid
+stuffing it with baggage-books;" but more particularly objected to
+"ENGLISH PLAYS, _as unlike those of other nations_, which are esteemed
+for learning the languages; and many of them," he adds, "are compiled by
+men of great wisdom and learning."
+
+The perplexities of the founder of the noble Bodleian Library were
+occasioned by our dramatic illegitimacy; we had no progenitors, and we
+were not spell-bound by the three unities. Originality in every kind
+startled the mind which could only pace in the trammels of authority. On
+the principle Bodley rejected our _English plays_ he also condemned our
+_English philosophy_; and Lord Bacon rallied him on that occasion by a
+good-humoured menace of "a cogitation against Libraries," which must
+have made the cheeks of the great collector of books tingle. Bodley with
+excellent truth described himself as "the carrier's horse which cannot
+blench the beaten way in which I was trained."
+
+In banishing the productions of the national genius from that national
+library which his hand had proudly erected, little was Bodley able to
+conceive, that a following generation would dwell on those very "English
+plays," would appeal to them as the depositaries of our language, and as
+the secret history of the people, a history which no historian writes,
+their modes of thinking in the transition of their manners, in the
+vicissitudes of their passions, and in the scenes of their politics and
+their religion; and what most would have astonished our great
+_bibliophile_, that collectors like himself, presuming on "their wisdom
+and learning," would devote their vigils to collate, to comment, and to
+edit "these baggage-books of English plays," and above all, that
+foreigners, after a century or two, should enrich their own literature
+by the translations, or enlarge their own genius by the imitations of
+these bold originals.
+
+By emancipating themselves from the thraldom of Greece and the servility
+of Rome our dramatists have occasioned later critics to separate our own
+from the classical drama of antiquity. They are placed in "the Romantic"
+school; a novel technical term, not individually appropriate, and which
+would be less ambiguous if considered as "the Gothic."[14] At the time
+when Italy and France had cast themselves into thraldom, by adhering to
+the contracted models of the drama of antiquity, two nations in Europe,
+without any intercourse whatever, for even translation was not yet a
+medium, were spontaneously creating a national drama accordant with the
+experience, the sympathies, and the imagination of their people. The
+theatre was to be a mirror of enchantment, a moveable reflection of
+themselves. These two nations were England and Spain. The dramatic
+history of Spain is the exact counterpart which perfectly tallies with
+our own. In Spain the learned began with imitations and translations of
+the ancient classics; but these formal stately dramas were so coldly
+received, that they fell into desuetude, and were succeeded by those
+whose native luxuriant genius reached to the secret hearts of their
+audience; and it was this second race, not, indeed, so numerous as our
+own, who closed with the Spanish Shakespeare.[15] This literary
+phenomenon, though now apparent, was not perceived when it was
+occurring.
+
+Every taste has delivered its variable decision on these our old plays,
+each deciding by its own standard; and the variance is occasioned not
+always by deficiency in critical judgment, but in the very nature of the
+object of criticism, in the inherent defect of our ancient drama itself.
+These old plays will not endure criticism. They were not written for
+critics, and they now exist even in spite of criticism. They were all
+experiments of the freest genius, rarely placed under favouring
+circumstances. They were emanations of strong but short conceptions,
+poured forth in haste and heat; they blotted their lines as rarely as we
+are told did Shakespeare; they revelled in their first conceptions,
+often forgotten in their rapid progress; the true inspiration was lodged
+in their breasts, the hidden volcano has often burst through its
+darkness, and flamed through a whole scene, for often have they written
+as Shakespeare wrote. We may look in them for entire scenes, felicitous
+lines, and many an insulated passage, studies for a poet; anthologies
+have been drawn from these elder dramatists.[16] We may perceive how
+this sudden generation of poets, some of whose names are not familiar
+to us, have moulded our language with the images of their fancy, and
+strengthened it by the stability of their thoughts.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] This Patent, corrected from a former copy in Rymer, has been
+    recovered by Mr. Collier.--_Annals of the Stage_, i. 211.
+
+  [2] This singular document, incorrectly given by Strype, Mr. Collier
+    has completed. "It throws much new light on the state of the drama at
+    this period;" and still more on the strange arguments which the
+    Puritans of the day alleged against players and plays.--Mr. Collier
+    has preserved an old satirical epigram which had been perilous to
+    print at that day; it was left for posterity on the fly-leaf of a
+    book. It is addressed to--
+
+      "'The Fooles of the Cittee,'--
+      They establish as a rule,
+      Not one shall play the fool,
+      But they--a worthy school!"
+
+  [3] At the inferior playhouses the admission was as low as a penny
+    for "the groundlings" who stood in the roofless pit, which still
+    retained the name of "the yard"--evidently from the old custom of
+    playing in the yards of inns. In the higher theatres "a room," or
+    box, varied from sixpence to two shillings and sixpence. They played
+    in daylight, and rose from their dinner to the playhouse. It was one
+    of the City regulations, that "no playing be in the dark, so that the
+    auditory may return home before sunset." Society was then in its
+    nursery-times; and the solemnity of "the orders in common council"
+    admirably contrasts with their simplicity; but they acted under the
+    terror that, when they entered a playhouse, they were joining in "the
+    devil's service!"
+
+  [4] Two such poor scholars are introduced in "The Return from
+    Parnassus" alternately "banning and cursing Granta's muddy bank;" and
+    Cambridge, where "our oil was spent."
+
+  [5] The popular taste at all times has been prone to view in
+    representation the most harrowing crimes--probably influenced by the
+    vulgar notion that, because the circumstances are literally true,
+    they are therefore the more interesting. One of these writers was
+    ROBERT YARRINGTON, who seems to have been so strongly attracted to
+    this taste for scenical murder, that he wrote "Two Lamentable
+    Tragedies," which he contrived to throw into one play. By a strange
+    alternation, the scene veers backwards and forwards from England to
+    Italy, both progressing together;--the English murder is of a
+    merchant in Thames-street, and the Italian of a child in a wood by
+    ruffians hired by the uncle; the ballad deepens the pathetic by two
+    babes--but which was the original of a domestic incident which first
+    conveyed to our childhood the idea of an unnatural parent? It appears
+    that we had a number of what they called "Lamentable Tragedies,"
+    whose very titles preserve the names of the hapless victims. Taylor,
+    the Water-poet, alludes to these "as murders fresh in memory;" and
+    has himself described "the unnatural father who murdered his wife and
+    children" as parallel to one of ancient date. Acts of lunacy were not
+    then distinguishable from ordinary murders.--_Collier_, iii. 49.
+
+  [6] Not many years ago Isaac Reed printed _The Witch_ of MIDDLETON.
+    Recently another manuscript play appeared, _The Second Maiden's
+    Tragedy_. To the personal distresses of the actors in the days of the
+    Commonwealth we owe several dramas, which they published, drawn out
+    of the wrecks of some theatrical treasury; such was _The Wild-Goose
+    Chase_ of FLETCHER, which they assured us was the poet's favourite.
+    It is said that more than sixty of these plays, in manuscript, were
+    collected by Warburton, the herald, and from the utter neglect of the
+    collector had all gone to singe his fowls. When THEOBALD solemnly
+    declared that his play, _The Double Falsehood_, was written by
+    Shakespeare, it was probably one of these old manuscript plays. This
+    drama was not unsuccessful; nor had Theobald shot far wide of the
+    mark, since Farmer ascribed it to Shirley, and Malone to Massinger.
+
+  [7] See the last and enlarged edition of Charles Lamb's "Specimens of
+    the English Dramatic Poets." In the second volume, in "Extracts from
+    the Garrick Plays," under the odd names of _"Doctor Dodypol, a
+    comedy_, 1600," we have scenes exquisitely fanciful--and _Jack Drum's
+    Entertainment_, 1601, where "the free humour of a noble housekeeper"
+    may be placed by the side of the most finished passages even in
+    Shakespeare. Yet _Doctor Dodypol_ has wholly escaped the notice even
+    of catalogue-scribes--and _Jack Drum_ is not noticed by the
+    collectors of these old plays. I only know these two dramas by the
+    excerpts of Lamb; but if the originals are tolerably equal with "The
+    Specimens," I should place these unknown dramas among the most
+    interesting ones.
+
+  [8] By the discovery of the Diary of Henslow, the illiterate manager
+    of the theatre, connected with Edward Alleyn. Henslow was the
+    pawnbroker of the company, and the chancellor of its exchequer. He
+    could not spell the titles of the plays; yet, in about five years,
+    160 were his property. He had not less than thirty different authors
+    in his pay.--_Collier_, iii. 105. [His Diary has been published by
+    the Shakespeare Society under the editorship of Mr. Payne
+    Collier.--ED.]
+
+  [9] Marlow--Nash--Greene--Peele.
+
+  [10] When Pope translated Homer, Chapman's version lay open before
+    him. The same circumstance, as I have witnessed, occurred with the
+    last translator--Mr. Sotheby. Charles Lamb justly appreciated
+    Chapman, when he observed, that "He would have made a great epic
+    poet, if indeed he has not abundantly shown himself to be one; for
+    his Homer is not so properly a translation, as the stories of
+    Achilles and Ulysses rewritten. The earnestness and passion which he
+    has put into every part of these poems would be incredible to a
+    reader of more modern translations."
+
+    The striking portrait of Chapman is prefixed to Mr. Singer's elegant
+    edition of this poet's version of Homer's "Battle of the Frogs and
+    the Mice"--and the Hymns. His _Iliad_, collated with his last
+    corrections and alterations, well deserves to fill a stationary niche
+    in our poetical library. Chapman has, above all our poets, most
+    boldly, or most gracefully, struck out those "words that
+    burn"--compound epithets.
+
+  [11] An original leaf of the manuscript of one of Marlow's plays, in
+    the possession of Mr. J. P. Collier, is a singular literary
+    curiosity. On a collation with the printed copy, the mutilations are
+    not only excessive, but betray a defective judgment. An elaborate
+    speech, designed by the poet to develope the character of the famous
+    Guise, was cut down to four meagre lines.--_Annals of the Stage_,
+    iii. 134.
+
+  [12] Charles Lamb has alluded to this fact; and, in one of his
+    moments of enthusiasm, exclaims--"This was the noble practice of
+    these times." Would not the usual practice of a man of genius,
+    working his own drama, be "nobler?" We presume the unity of feeling
+    can only emanate from a single mind. In the instance here alluded to
+    we should often deceive ourselves if we supposed, from the
+    combination of names which appear on the old titlepages, that those
+    who are specified were always _simultaneously employed_ in the new
+    direction of the same play. Poets were often called in to alter the
+    old or to supply the new, which has occasioned incongruities which
+    probably were not to be found in the original state.
+
+  [13] Green, Nash, Lyly, Peele, and Marston were from the
+    university--Marlow and Chapman were exquisite translators from the
+    Greek.
+
+  [14] The term, the Romantic School, is derived from the _langue
+    Romans_ or _Romane_, under which comprehensive title all the modern
+    languages may be included; formed, as they are, out of the wrecks of
+    the Latin or _Roman_ language. However this may apply to the origin
+    of the _languages_, the term is not expressive of the _genius_ of the
+    people. In the common sense of the term "Romantic," the Æneid of
+    Virgil is as much a Romance as that of Arthur and his knights. The
+    term "Romantic School" is therefore not definite. By adopting the
+    term _Gothic_, in opposition to the _Classical_, we fix the origin,
+    and indicate the species.
+
+  [15] Bouterwek's Hist. of Spanish Lit. i. 128.
+
+  [16] Two of these collections are to be valued.
+
+    "COTGRAVE'S English Treasury of Wit and Language," 1655. He neglected
+    to furnish the names of the dramatic writers from whom he drew the
+    passages. Oldys, with singular diligence, succeeded in recovering
+    these numerous sources, which I transcribed from his manuscript
+    notes. Oldys' copy should now repose in the library of Mr. Douce,
+    given to the Bodleian.
+
+    A collection incomparably preferable to all preceding ones is "The
+    British Muse, or a Collection of Thoughts--Moral, Natural, or
+    Sublime--of our English poets who flourished in the Sixteenth and
+    Seventeenth Centuries," by THOMAS HAYWARD, gent. 1732, in three
+    volumes. It took a new title, not a new edition, as "The Quintessence
+    of English Poetry." Such a title could not recommend itself. The
+    prefatory matter was designed for a critical history of all these
+    Anthologies, and was the work of Oldys; but it was miserably mangled
+    by Dr. Campbell, then the Aristarchus of the booksellers, to save
+    print and paper! Our literary antiquary has vented, in a manuscript
+    note, his agony and his indignation. He had also greatly assisted the
+    collector; the circuit is wide and copious, and there is not a name
+    of note which does not appear in these volumes. The ethical and
+    poetic powers of our old dramatic poets, as here displayed, I doubt
+    could be paralleled by our literary neighbours. We were a thoughtful
+    people at the time that our humour was luxuriant--as lighter gaiety
+    was from the first the national inheritance of France.
+
+    Of this collection, says Oldys, "Wherever you open it, you are in the
+    heart of your subject. Every leaf includes many lessons, and is a
+    system of knowledge in a few lines. The merely speculative may here
+    find experience; the flattered, truth; the diffident, resolution,
+    &c." For my part, I think of these volumes as highly as Oldys
+    himself.
+
+    But what has occasioned the little success of these collections of
+    single passages and detached beauties, like collections of proverbs,
+    is the confusion of their variety. We are pleased at every glance;
+    till the eye, in weariness, closes over the volume which we neglect
+    to re-open.
+
+    CHARLES LAMB'S "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets" is of deeper
+    interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole
+    scenes by a true unerring emotion. His was a poetical mind labouring
+    in poetry.
+
+
+
+
+SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+The vicissitudes of the celebrity of Shakespeare may form a chapter in
+the philosophy of literature and the history of national opinions.
+Shakespeare was destined to have his dramatic faculty contested by many
+successful rivals, to fall into neglect, to be rarely acted and less
+read, to appear barbarous and unintelligible, to be even discarded from
+the glorious file of dramatists by the anathemas of hostile criticism;
+and finally, in the resurrection of genius (a rare occurrence!) to
+emerge into universal celebrity. This literary history of Shakespeare is
+an incident in the history of the human mind singular as the genius
+which it relates to. The philosopher now contemplates the phenomenon of
+a poet who in his peculiar excellence is more poetical than the poets of
+every other people. We have to track the course of this prodigy, and if
+possible to comprehend the evolutions of this solitary luminary. It is
+knowledge which finally must direct our feelings in the operations of
+the mind as well as in the phenomena of nature. We are conscious that
+even the anomalous is regulated by its own proper motion, and that there
+is nothing in human nature so arbitrary as to stand by itself so
+completely insulated as to be an effect without a cause.
+
+SHAKESPEARE is a poet who is always now separated from other poets, and
+the only one, except POPE, whose thoughts are familiar to us as
+household words. His eulogy has exhausted the language of every class of
+enthusiasts, the learned and the unlearned, the profound and the
+fantastical. The writings of this greatest of dramatists are, as once
+were those of Homer, a Bible whence we receive those other revelations
+of man, and of all that concerns man. There was no excess of wonder and
+admiration when HURD declared that "This astonishing man is the most
+original THINKER and SPEAKER since the days of HOMER."
+
+The halo which surrounds the poetic beatitude has almost silenced
+criticism in its devotion; but a literary historian may not at all
+times be present in the choir of votaries; his labours lie outwards
+among the progressive opinions of a people, nor is he free to pass over
+what may seem paradoxical if it lies in his way.
+
+The universal celebrity of Shakespeare is comparatively of recent
+origin: received, rejected, and revived, we must ascertain the alternate
+periods, and we must look for the causes of the neglect as well as the
+popularity of the poet. We may congratulate ourselves on the numerous
+escapes of our national bard from the oblivion of his dramatic brothers.
+The history and the works of Shakespeare, and perhaps the singularity of
+the poet's character in respect to his own writings, are some of the
+most startling paradoxes in literary history.
+
+Malone describes Shakespeare as "the great poet whom nature framed to
+disregard the wretched models that were set before him, and to create a
+drama from his own native and original stores." This cautious but
+creeping commentator, notwithstanding that he had often laboured to
+prove the contrary, gaily shot this arrow drawn from the quiver of
+Dryden, who has delivered very contradictory notions of Shakespeare.
+Veritably--for we are now writing historically--Shakespeare never
+"created our drama, disregarding the wretched models before him;" far
+from this! the great poet had those models always before him, and worked
+upon them; no poet has so freely availed himself of the inventions of
+his predecessors, and in reality many of the dramas of Shakespeare had
+been written before he wrote.
+
+It cannot be denied that our great poet never exercised his invention in
+the fables of his dramas; thus he spared himself half the toil of his
+work. He viewed with the prophetic eye of genius the old play or the old
+story, and at once discovered all its capabilities; he saw at once all
+that it had and all that it had not; its characterless personages he was
+confident that he could quicken with breath and action, and that his own
+vein, allowed to flow along the impure stream, would have the force to
+clear the current, and to expand its own lucid beauty.
+
+Had not the felicitous genius of our bard revelled in this facility of
+adopting and adapting the ready-made inventions of many a luckless
+playwright, we might have lost our Shakespeare; for he never wrote for
+us, but for his little theatre. He had no leisure to afford whole days
+in constructing plots for plays, nor much troubled himself with those
+which he followed closely even to a fault; nor did the quickness of his
+genius neglect a solitary thought, nor lose a fortunate expression. To
+what extent were these borrowings from manuscript plays we cannot even
+surmise; we have one specimen of Shakespeare's free use of whatever the
+poet's judgment caught, in those copious passages which he transplanted
+from North's "Plutarch" and Holinshed's "Chronicles," lending their
+words his own music.
+
+One of his commentators, George Steevens, published six old plays on
+which Shakespeare had grounded six of his own; but this rash act was in
+the early days of the commentatorship; Steevens must soon have
+discovered the inconvenience of printing unreadable dramas, to exhibit
+the concealed industry of the mighty bard. The spells of Shakespeare did
+not hang on the artificial edifice of his fable; he looked abroad for
+mankind, and within his own breast for all the impulses of the beings of
+his imagination. All he required was a scene; then the whole "sphere of
+humanity," as Jonson expressed it, lie wide before him. There was a Jew
+before the _Merchant of Venice_; a shrew had been tamed before Katherine
+by Petruchio; a King Lear and his three daughters, before the only one
+the world knows; and a tragical Hamlet had philosophised like Seneca, as
+the satirical Nash told, before our Shakespeare's: but this list is
+needless, for it would include every drama he has left us. Even the
+beings of his creation lie before him in their embryon state. His
+creative faculty never required more than a suggestion. The prototype of
+the wonderful Caliban has not hitherto been discovered, but the fairies
+of the popular mythology become the creatures of his own imagination.
+Middleton first opened the incantations of "the witches." The Hecate of
+Middleton is a mischief-brooding hag, gross and tangible, and her
+"spirits, black, white, and grey," with her "devil-toad, devil-ram,
+devil-cat, and devil-dam," disturb their spells by the familiar drollery
+of their names, and their vulgar instincts. Out of this ordinary
+domestic witchcraft the mightier poet raised "the weird sisters,"
+
+  That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth,
+  And yet are on't,
+
+nameless, bodiless, vanishing shadows!
+
+                And what seemed corporal
+  Melted as breath into the wind.
+
+The dramatic personages which seem to me peculiar to Shakespeare, and in
+which he evidently revelled, serving his purposes on very opposite
+occasions, are his clowns and domestic fools. Yet his most famous comic
+personage, the fat knight, was the rich graft on the miserable scion of
+Sir John Oldcastle, in an old play; the slight hint of "a mere pampered
+glutton" was idealised into that inimitable variety of human nature
+combined in one man--at once so despicable and so delightful!
+
+The life of our poet remains almost a blank, and his very name a subject
+of contention.[1] Of that singular genius who is now deemed the
+national bard, we can only positively ascertain that the place of his
+birth was that of his death; a circumstance which, for a poet, is some
+evidence of his domestic prosperity; but the glorious interval of
+existence, how and all he performed on the stage of human life, no one
+observed as differing from his fellows of the company, and he of all men
+the least; and of his productions, wherein we are to find every
+excellence to which any poet has reached, our scepticism is often at
+work to detect what is Shakespearian among that which cannot be.
+
+Of the idle traditions of the youth of Shakespeare, Malone, after
+"foraging for anecdotes" during half a century, has painfully satisfied
+us that all which so many continued to repeat was apocryphal. Having
+with his own eyes ascertained that Sir Thomas Lucy had no park, he
+closed with his famous corollary, that "therefore he could have no deer
+to be stolen." But other parks and other deer were liable to the
+mischance of furnishing venison for a young deer-fancier to treat his
+friends; and Sir Thomas Lucy, probably, was Justice Shallow on this
+occasion to the poetic stripling. The other circumstances of the poet's
+early life, too well known to repeat, may stand on the same ground.
+Personal facts may come down to us confused, inaccurate, and mistaken,
+but they do not therefore necessarily rest on no foundation. The
+invention of such irrelevant circumstances seems to be without a motive;
+and though the propagators of gossip are strange blunderers, they rarely
+aspire to be original inventors. We are not concerned with such tales,
+for there is nothing in them which is peculiar to the idiosyncrasy of
+the great poet.
+
+The first noticeable incident in the life of Shakespeare was his
+marriage in 1582, in his eighteenth year; the nuptials of the poet seem
+an affair of domestic convenience, rather than a poetical incident in
+"the romance of life."
+
+In 1586, being only twenty-two years of age, Shakespeare quitted home
+for the metropolis.
+
+At this critical moment of his life, which Malone sought for in despair,
+we should have remained in darkness, had not the unfortunate and
+intrepid industry of the most devoted enthusiast of the Shakespearian
+school lifted his steady torch.[2] Shakespeare arrived at the theatre
+not to hold the horses of gentlemen, as was so long reported, without,
+for he had a more friendly interest within, doors. There he joined a
+neighbour in his shire, Richard Burbage, who subsequently became the
+renowned actor of the future Shakespeare's creations; and likewise
+Thomas Green, his townsman, and no inferior actor and poet. It is hardly
+a conjecture to presume that their friendly invitations had tempted our
+youthful adventurer to join their company. In three years Shakespeare
+obtained shares in the theatre, which multiplied every year, till he
+became the joint-proprietor with Burbage. The friendship of the actor
+and the dramatist was a golden bond, when each had conferred on the
+other their mutual popularity. The plays of Shakespeare were higher
+favourites with the public during the lifetime of this Garrick of the
+poet's own days; and the renowned actor was so charmed by his own
+success, that he perpetuated among his daughters the delightful name of
+Juliet, which reminded him, with pride, of his own exquisite Romeo.
+
+Shakespeare proved a closer and a more refined observer of the art of
+acting than nature had enabled him to show himself as an actor, by
+practising his own professional precepts. Two actors, who long survived
+the poet, recorded that he had critically instructed the one to enact
+Hamlet, and the other Henry the Eighth.[3]
+
+How in an indifferent actor like Shakespeare was betrayed those latent
+dramatic faculties by which he was one day to be the delight of that
+stage which he could not tread, remains a secret which the poet has not
+told. But whether it was by accident or in some happy hour, we know not,
+that Shakespeare, in conning the manuscript of some wretched drama, felt
+the glorious impulse which prompted the pen to strike out whole
+passages, and to interpolate whole scenes; that moment was the obscure
+birth of his future genius. How he was employed at this unknown era of
+his life, the peevish jealousy of a brother of the craft has curiously
+informed us.
+
+When Shakespeare was a name yet scarcely known, save to that mimetic
+world, tenanted by playwrights, it appears that he was there sustaining
+an active and secret avocation. The great bard had been serving a silent
+apprenticeship to the dramatic muse, by trying his hand on the old
+stock-pieces which lay in the theatrical treasury, and further venturing
+his repolishing touches on the new. Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele had
+submitted to his soft pencillings or his sharp pruning-hook. The actors
+were often themselves a sort of poets, and would compete with those who
+were only poets; and in pricing the hasty wares, would often have them
+fashioned to their liking. Alluding to the treatment the dramatists were
+enduring from their masters, Robert Greene indignantly addressed his
+peers. This curious passage, first discovered by Tyrwhit, has been often
+quoted, and indispensably must be once more; for it tells us how
+Shakespeare, in 1592, had been fully employed within six years of his
+arrival at the metropolis. Greene desires his friends would no longer
+submit to the actors. "Do not trust those burrs, who have sought to
+cleave to us all; those puppets that speak from our mouths, those antics
+garnished in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they all have
+been beholding, is it not like that you to whom they all too have been
+beholding, shall, were ye in that case I am now, be both of them at once
+forsaken?[4] Yes, trust them not! There is _an upstart crow beautified
+with our feathers_, that with _his tyger's heart wrapt in a player's
+hide_, supposes he is as well able to _bombast[5] out a blank verse_ as
+the best of you, and being _an absolute Johannes Factotum_, is, in his
+own conceit, the only SHAKE-SCENE in a country."
+
+"The absolute Johannes Factotum," "the only shake-scene," and "the crow
+beautified with their feathers," are one person; but "the tyger's heart
+wrapt in a player's hide," particularly points out that person. It is,
+in fact, a parody of a line composed by this batch of poets in one of
+their dramas, _The Contention of the Two Houses of York and Lancaster_;
+and which, with many others, Shakespeare had wholly appropriated. In the
+third part of _King Henry the Sixth_, in Act I., Scene IV., it stands as
+Peele or Greene had originally composed it--
+
+  O, tyger's heart wrapt in a woman's hide!
+
+This attack on our untiger-like Shakespeare turns poor Greene into an
+enraged wasp, peevish and mortified at the Shakespearian hand which had
+often larded his leanness, or scarified his tumidities. Greene charges
+Shakespeare with altering the plays of himself, Marlowe, Lodge, and
+Peele, and then claiming all the merit of the work![6]
+
+Our great bard was not insensible to the fancy of his querulous
+libeller, since it was on Greene's "Dorastus and Fawnia" Shakespeare
+founded his _Winter's Tale_, as he took his _As You Like It_ from
+Lodge's "Rosalynd," whose very name he preserved. Thus borrowing from
+the writings of his unfortunate and reckless brothers of Parnassus, he
+has made immortal works which have long expired.
+
+The active employment of Shakespeare among the old plays was so well
+known at the time, that when his name became familiar to the public, the
+printers were often eager to obtain the original neglected plays in
+their meagre condition, to avail themselves of the popularity of the
+Shakespearian rifacimentos. Fraud and deception were evidently practised
+on the uncritical readers. One of these cunning publishers issued the
+old play of _The Contention of the Two Houses_, &c., as _newly corrected
+and enlarged_ by William Shakespeare; which was true as it was acted on
+the stage, but false in the copy of the elder dramatist which was
+republished. In this manner several plays not only bear the consecrating
+name of Shakespeare, but seven which are now discarded from his works
+appeared in the edition of Rowe; in some of these the hand of
+Shakespeare appears to have been discerned; and it has been suggested by
+Mr. Collier, an experienced critic in the history of the drama, that it
+is possible that all the plays of Shakespeare have not yet been given to
+the world.
+
+In the second and third parts of _King Henry the Sixth_, for the first
+was placed in his volume merely to complete the historical series,
+Shakespeare made ample use of several dramas; and Malone, whose
+microscopic criticism obtained for him the sarcastic cognomen of
+_Minutius Felix_, by an actual scrutiny, which we may well believe cost
+him the most anxious pains, computed the lines of these dramas, and has
+passed his word, that of six thousand and forty-three lines, one
+thousand seven hundred and seventy-one were written by some author who
+preceded Shakespeare; two thousand three hundred and seventy-three were
+formed by him on the foundation laid by his predecessors, and one
+thousand eight hundred and forty-nine lines were entirely our poet's own
+composition. Malone has even contrived to distinguish them in the text;
+those which Shakespeare _adopted_ are printed in the usual manner; the
+speeches which he _altered_ or expanded, are marked by inverted commas;
+and to all the lines entirely _composed_ by himself, asterisks are
+prefixed. A critical reader may derive a curious gratification by
+attending to this novel text of our national poet; the only dramatist to
+whom this singularity has ever occurred, and on whose writings this
+anomalous operation could have been performed.
+
+Shakespeare was more conversant with these preceding dramatists, most of
+whose writings have perished, than we can ever discover; but it is
+fortunate for us that his creative faculties brooded over such a world
+of chaotic genius. He scrupled not to appropriate those happier
+effusions which were not only worthy of his own genius, but are not
+distinguishable from it. Sometimes he only retouched, sometimes he nobly
+amplified, expanding a slight hint into some glorious passage, and
+elevating a creeping dialogue into an impassioned scene. His judgment
+was always the joint-workman of his fancy.
+
+Who by the interior evidence could have conjectured that the following
+Shakespearian effusion, musical with his own music, was, in truth, a
+mere transcription from an old play of _Richard Duke of York_, whose
+author remains unknown? I mark by italics the rejections of Shakespeare.
+In the slight emendations, we may observe that our poet consulted his
+ear; but in the first verse he has chosen a more expressive term.
+
+  ------Doves will peck in _rescue_ (safeguard) of their brood.
+  Unreasonable creatures feed their young;
+  And though man's face be fearful to their eyes,
+  Yet, in protection of their tender ones,
+  Who hath not seen them even with those _same_ wings
+  Which _they have sometimes_ used _in_ fearful flight,
+  (Which sometime they have used with fearful flight,)
+  Make war with him that climb'd unto their nest,
+  Offering their own lives in their young's defence?
+
+The speech of Queen Margaret, in the third part of _Henry the Sixth_,
+Act V. Scene IV., in the old play, consisted of a single metaphor
+included in twelve lines. The single metaphor was not rejected, but it
+is amplified and nobly sustained through forty lines in the queen's
+animated address to the lords:--
+
+  The mast but now blown overboard,
+  The cable broke, the holding anchor lost, &c.
+
+The two celebrated scenes in which the dead body of the murdered Duke of
+Gloster is placed before us, with such precision of horror, minutely
+appalling, and of the raving despair of Cardinal Beaufort so awfully
+depicted by his death, "making no sign," are splendours whose igniting
+sparks flew out of the ashes of old plays, one of _King John_, and the
+other of _The Contentions of the Two Houses_, and of the chronicles. But
+still these sublime descriptions and these fearful images are the
+inspirations of Shakespeare; their truth of nature, and the completeness
+of the purpose of the poet, the bare originals could not impart.
+
+These ascertained evidences may suffice--it would be tedious to proceed
+with their abundance--of the studiousness and propriety of Shakespeare
+in his adoptions and adaptations of our earlier drama. Dr. Farmer was
+the first to discover that these plays were not written _originally_ by
+Shakespeare; but that able researcher was not then aware of what only
+the progress of discovery could demonstrate, that hardly a single drama
+of our national bard can be deemed to have been of his own original
+invention.
+
+While thus occupied in altering and writing old plays for his own
+theatre, in 1593 first appeared to the world the name of William
+Shakespeare in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton of his "Venus
+and Adonis." The poet has called this poem, of a few pages, "the first
+heir of my invention." For him who had already written much, the
+expression is singular, and it looks like a tacit acknowledgment that
+the poet considered that the five or six plays which he had already set
+forth had really no claim to "_his_ invention." And the dedication
+betrays the tremulousness of a virgin effort. "Should this first heir
+prove deformed," declared our poet in his own Shakespearian diction, "I
+shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after _ear so
+barren a land_, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest." The poet,
+doubtless, was induced to proceed; for the following year, 1594,
+produced his "Lucrece." He described his first poem as "unpolished
+lines;" and he still calls his second his "untutored lines." As the
+former, so likewise is the present dedicated to the same earl. The
+fervour of the style indicates the influence of the patron, and the
+singleness of the devotion of the poet, who tells his noble patron "What
+I have done is yours, and what I have to do is yours." The humble
+actor's intercourse with his noble friend is a remarkable incident, for
+the poet was not yet famous when he prefixed his name to these poems.
+This earl, then in his youth, we learn was attached to theatrical
+amusements; and it has been ingeniously conjectured that the princely
+donation of a thousand pounds, which the peer presented to the poet, a
+tradition which Davenant had handed down, may have occurred, if it ever
+happened, in the interval between the publication of these two poems.
+
+The Ovidian deliciousness of "Venus and Adonis," and the more solemn
+narrative of "Tarquin and Lucrece," early obtained celebrity among the
+youthful and impassioned generation. Shakespeare was long renowned as
+the amatory poet of the nation by many who had not learned to
+distinguish the bard among his dramatic brethren. Numerous editions of
+these poems confirm their popularity, and the public voice resounded
+from the lyres of many poets.
+
+No poet more successfully opened his career than Shakespeare by these
+two popular poems; but it is remarkable that he made no farther essay
+with a view to permanent fame, which, as it would seem to us, he never
+imagined he was to derive from his dramas.
+
+Meres, a critic of the day, has informed us that, in 1598, some sonnets
+by Shakespeare were in circulation among his friends. These were
+effusions of the hour; and, possibly, some may have been descriptive of
+his own condition. In 1599, a poetical collection called "The Passionate
+Pilgrim," appeared under the name of Shakespeare; and ten years
+afterwards another, entitled "Shakespeare's Sonnets," was given to the
+world; but as poetical miscellanies were formed in those days by
+publishers who were not nice in the means they used to procure
+manuscripts, it is quite uncertain what are genuine and what may be the
+composition of other writers in these collections.
+
+In "The Passionate Pilgrim," some critics find difficulty in tracing the
+hand of the poet; and we accidentally discover by the complaint of
+Heywood, a congenial dramatist, that there were two of his poems in one
+edition of this collection; and we know that there were also other poems
+by Marlowe, and Barnefield, and others. Heywood tells us that
+Shakespeare was greatly offended at this licentious use of his name;[7]
+but he must have been imperturbably careless on such matters, otherwise
+he would not have suffered three editions of this spurious miscellany.
+
+The fate of "The Sonnets" is remarkable. Steevens boldly ejected them
+from the poet's works, declaring that the strongest Act of Parliament
+that could be framed could not compel their perusal. Shall we ascribe to
+this caustic wit a singular deficiency in his judicial decisions, or
+look to some other cause for the ejection of these sonnets which have
+become of late the subject of so much curious inquiry? An ingenious
+attempt has been recently made to form what is called an autobiography
+of the poet by stringing together the sonnets in six distinct poems;
+this would be sufficient evidence that they had never passed under the
+eye of the author, and that he could have had no concern in a
+publication which has thus mutilated his living members. This
+bookseller's collection remains for more than one cause an ambiguous
+volume.
+
+Shakespeare now stands alone the national bard; but hoary Time, which
+has decreed who are his inferiors, once saw them his equals; and when he
+mingled with his fellows, possibly the world looked up to a Coryphæus
+whose name was not Shakespeare. Two inquiries interest us: Was the
+pre-eminence of our national bard acknowledged by his
+contemporaries?--and, What cause occasioned the utter neglect of his own
+reputation?
+
+Among his contemporaries, Shakespeare could not possess the pre-eminence
+of the present age, for who were then to be his judges? His rivals or
+his audience? Our gentle Shakespeare, as Jonson called him, perhaps at
+no time appreciated his own genius at its peculiar excellence, and
+therefore was not likely to discover his solitary pre-eminence among a
+formidable crowd of rivals, nor were they likely to acknowledge in their
+friend "Will" the prevailing charm which has now subdued the world. They
+have even occasionally darted a shaft of ridicule or a sharp parody at
+our immortal tragedian; the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia could serve
+these dramatic writers as a subject for raillery;[8] and the airy
+Fletcher, who would have emulated Shakespeare, was guilty of sneering at
+his inimitable master. The learned JONSON was apt to be critical;
+CHAPMAN cast his Greek glances haughtily on the vernacular bard; MARSTON
+was caustic; and DRAYTON, his intimate, who had composed two or three
+tragedies, could hardly perceive any supremacy in SHAKESPEARE, and for
+us, seems parsimoniously to commend his "comic vein" as strong
+
+  As any one that traffick'd with the stage;
+
+while BEN JONSON is hailed as
+
+  Lord of the theatre, who could bear
+  The buskin, as the sock, away.
+
+It was not from his dramatic brothers that SHAKESPEARE could have
+discovered his more than supremacy; and while the brotherhood had family
+quarrels among themselves, Shakespeare appears never to have moved
+offensively or defensively. Gifford tells us that he has never mentioned
+one of his contemporaries with commendation, and only once appears, with
+Jonson and others, to have contributed some commendatory lines to the
+volume of an obscure and whimsical poet.[9] As Shakespeare did not deal
+in this literary traffic of that day, he has received fewer tributes
+than some of the meanest of our poets. But if Shakespeare has not
+noticed any of his associates, neither has the poet ever alluded to
+himself in his works. He never exults in his triumphs, nor is querulous
+on those who oppugned them.
+
+With his audience he was unquestionably popular; we hear of none of his
+plays having been condemned, though such mischances are recorded of his
+rivals, and, above all, of his great compeer Jonson. We know that he was
+fortunate in the personation of his characters; and those natural
+touches, listened to on the spot when nature was left free to act her
+part, fell on contagious and instantaneous sympathies. But if the poet
+charmed by his "many-coloured life," his very faults were not less
+delightful. His audience revelled in bustle and bombast, and it is
+possibly in compliance with their stirring unchastised taste that we
+have received so much of his rude originals.
+
+Our poet's recklessness of the fate of his own dramas, and his utter
+disregard of posterity, is at least one unquestionable fact in the blank
+page of his life. He was utterly reckless of his personal reputation
+among his contemporary readers, or otherwise he would not have suffered
+in his lifetime mutilated dramas, or even their first draughts,
+surreptitiously procured, to pass under his own name;--huddled pieces
+without even the divisions of the acts, or crude and ridiculous dramas
+which he was incapable of having written. These were suicidal acts of
+his own fame, but they never broke his silence; and even in his retreat
+from the metropolis, in the leisure of his native bowers of Avon,
+Shakespeare felt not
+
+  That last infirmity of noble minds,
+  The spur of fame,
+
+pricking his patient acquiescence, and disturbing his careless freedom;
+he issued no protest, he uttered no complaint, against the effrontery of
+the printers of those days, who published, as "newly corrected by
+William Shakespeare," old plays which he never wrote; nor did he yield
+the yearnings of a nurse to those ricketty children of the press which
+passed as his progeny, bearing a name which he never could have deemed
+immortal. We may trace to its real cause this utter carelessness of his
+poetical existence.
+
+The horizon of this poet's hopes was bounded by his daily task and his
+prosperous theatre. Assuredly it was not an ordinary gratification to be
+conscious that his friend Burbage would call into a real existence
+_Romeo_, _Macbeth_, and _Othello_, and that the shares of the playhouse
+would in due time be transferred for Warwickshire acres. But his mind
+was above his condition, and however the dramatist flourished at "the
+Globe," Shakespeare himself felt the misery of a degraded
+station;--players and play-writing were held to be equally despicable in
+that day. This "secret sorrow" he may have himself confided to us; for
+in one of "the sonnets," he pathetically laments the compulsion which
+forced him to the trade of pleasing the public; and this humiliation, or
+this "stain," as the poet felt it, is illustrated by a novel
+image--"Chide Fortune," exclaims the bard,
+
+  The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
+  That did not better for my life provide
+  Than public means which public manners breeds;
+  Thence comes it that _my name receives a brand;
+  And almost thence my nature is subdued
+  To what it works in_, LIKE THE DYER'S HAND.
+
+SHAKESPEARE, in the vigour of life, withdrew from the theatre and the
+metropolis, returning to his native abode.[10] "The properties and the
+wardrobe" were now exchanged for "land and tithes." It is consolatory
+for us to have ascertained that our national bard, not yet, however,
+national, did not participate in the common misery of his noblest
+brothers. Four years glided away in the tranquil obscurity of his
+family, till his death! Yet still some old associations survived with
+the dramatic bard, some reveries of the winter theatre of "the
+Blackfriars," and the summer Globe "open to the sky," for we are told
+that two or three of his noblest dramas were composed during his
+retirement; and he retained his unbroken love for old companionship to
+the last, for, by a credible tradition, Shakespeare died of a fever
+contracted by convivial indulgence at a joyous meeting with his beloved
+cronies Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton.
+
+We hear nothing more of SHAKESPEARE nor of any fragmentary manuscripts;
+no verses were scattered on his funereal bier as with Spenser, no
+sepulchral volume of elegies was gathered, as with Jonson, to consecrate
+his memory. There was yet no SHAKESPEARE! no national bard! The poet
+himself could not have favoured a friend with a copy of many of his own
+plays, and probably could not himself have repeated one of those admired
+soliloquies which we now get by rote. SHAKESPEARE was wholly insensible
+to the days which were to come. All this to us seems incredible!
+
+Seven years passed away silently, and the nation remained without their
+Shakespeare, although Jonson, in the very year that the poet had
+deceased, had set the first example of a collection of dramas made by
+their own author; the volume sanctioned by his critical learning he
+dignified as his "works:" a proud distinction by which he laid himself
+open to the epigrammatists. At length, in 1623, two of Shakespeare's
+fellow-comedians, Heminges and Condell, published the first folio
+edition of "Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and
+Tragedies."
+
+These player-editors profess that "they have done this office to the
+dead only to keep the memory of so worthy a _friend and fellow_ alive as
+was our Shakespeare." Yet their utter negligence shown in "their
+fellow's" volume is no evidence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps
+of their care or their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so
+much an offering of affection as a pretext to secure the copyright.
+Their real design seems to have been to recover the monopoly of ALL the
+plays, having lost the proprietorship of several which had _stolen
+abroad in Shakespeare's lifetime_, and to obtain this crafty purpose
+they practised a fraudulent deception.
+
+_Fifteen quarto plays_ the public already possessed; no one appears to
+have known how they had issued from the study of the poet, or the
+treasury of the theatre. Our player-editors, however, now cautioned
+their readers that these fifteen plays were a fraud practised on them;
+that "they were stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed."
+But what these new editors themselves alleged, they knew was false; for
+they actually reprinted, unaltered, in their own collection these
+declared surreptitious copies. As the reprint became subject to their
+negligence, these _first editions_ were appreciated by Capel and Malone
+as manuscripts, and by these quarto plays they corrected the text of the
+folio volume. The mystifying republication of these fifteen quarto plays
+is a piece of literary history of no common occurrence. CAPEL imagined
+that the player-editors merely reprinted these very copies which they
+had so loudly decried to save the labour of transcription. But looking
+closer into this affair, we seem to detect that a double deception was
+practised. The printers of these plays had secured the copyright by
+entering them at Stationers' Hall, and when the folio collection was
+projected it was found necessary by Heminges and Condell to admit the
+proprietors into the copartnership of the volume. Hence their names
+appear in the titlepage. Malone imagined that this circumstance
+indicated that the volume of Shakespeare was considered so great a risk
+that it required the joint aid of these printers. But the parties only
+united to secure the monopoly of all the plays.
+
+It therefore results that the player-editors pretended to warn the
+public that all the preceding editions were "maimed and deformed," and
+the proprietors of these pretended surreptitious editions silently
+acquiesced in their own condemnation, for the future advantages they
+expected to derive from their share in the monopoly.
+
+It is quite obvious that the first proprietors of the quarto plays could
+never have acquired such complete copies without either Shakespeare or
+his company having furnished them. Yet Shakespeare, if he had connived
+at these publications, could never have revised the press; another
+evidence of the utter recklessness of the poet of the fate of his
+dramas.
+
+The player-editors supplied about twenty new dramas, and by another
+adroit deception in their titlepage they announced that all the dramas
+were NOW published "acording to the original copies."
+
+Alas! where were these "original copies?" The precious autographs could
+not have endured through many a season the thumbings of "the
+book-holder" or the prompter. The playhouse copies, carelessly written
+out in parts for the actors, interpolated with whole scenes, spurious
+with ribaldry, and extemporaneous nonsense at the caprice of some
+favourite actor, corrupt with false readings, obscure with distorted
+alterations, and often omissions of a line or half a line to connect or
+to complete the sense, verse lurking in prose, and metre without
+feet,--such were the original sins of the copies despatched in haste to
+a rapid press, and the writings of Shakespeare come before the world in
+these hurried proofs from printers among whom a corrector of the press
+seems to have been unknown. It is in this prolific soil of weeds that
+many are still too curiously seeking for the genuine text of
+Shakespeare, perhaps too often irretrievable.[11] The recollections of
+these two players were so inaccurate that they at first totally omitted
+the _Troilus and Cressida_, which is inserted without pagination, and
+with little discrimination in the writings of Shakespeare, preserved
+the barbarous _Titus Andronicus_, evidently one of Marlowe's gigantic
+pieces, and the old play of "the first part of _Henry the Sixth_;" but
+it is by no means certain that not less than twenty other dramas had
+various degrees of claims to be included in the works of Shakespeare;
+such as the suspicious _Pericles_.[12] But the incompetence of these
+player-editors, even in transcribing from the prompter's copies, was not
+their only fault. "Will" was but "their fellow;" time had not hallowed
+him into the national poet; and they themselves had formed no elevated
+conception of the art of Sophocles and Terence; for in their dedication
+to two peers they express their fear whether their noble patrons from
+"their greatness would _descend to the reading of_ SUCH TRIFLES;" the
+immortal writings! These unhappy editors seem to reflect back to us the
+humiliated feelings of Shakespeare and the age on the histrionic art. In
+that early epoch of our literature the sock and buskin had indeed been
+worn by a reckless race.
+
+Charles the First was a lover of the English drama. The king delighted
+to explore into the manuscript plays which were laid before the master
+of the revels for his license. Milton has acquainted us that the
+writings of Shakespeare formed the favourite studies of the monarch.[13]
+In the "Iconoclastes," alluding to those writers who have shown the
+characteristic religious hypocrisy of tyrants, Milton observes, "I shall
+not instance an abstruse author wherein the king might be less
+conversant, but one whom we well know was the CLOSET COMPANION of these
+his solitudes, William Shakespeare."
+
+This has been considered as a designed reproach, and we are startled by
+such a style from the author of "Comus" and of "Samson Agonistes." The
+odious distinction of not referring the king to an abstruse author
+seems a palpable sneer at the course of the king's reading, who,
+however, was not deficient in learning; and in making the king's "closet
+companion" Shakespeare, Milton too well knew that he was casting the
+deepest odium on the royal character, for to this poet's then masters,
+the puritanical faction, there could be nothing less to be forgiven than
+a king, and a king in his imprisonments, mockingly here called "these
+his solitudes," than to be a play-reader! The slur, the gibe, and the
+covert satire are, I fear, too obvious. I would gladly have absolved our
+great bard from this act of treason at least against the majesty of
+Shakespeare's genius.[14] Milton had more deeply studied Shakespeare
+than any king whatever; but at this moment his literature was to be
+stretched on the torture of his politics.
+
+In the history of the celebrity of Shakespeare, this day of royal favour
+sank amid the national tempest: and the theatre was abolished with the
+throne.
+
+With the Restoration, the drama returned to the people. Half a century
+only had elapsed since our poet flourished; but in that half century our
+style, with our manners and modes of feeling, had suffered the
+vicissitudes of a revolution. If in the reign of Charles the First they
+perceived a change in the language from that of Elizabeth, that change
+was more apparent when, in retrograding, it was reduced to the indigent
+nakedness of the Puritanic period, and then, bursting into an opposite
+direction, like
+
+  Stars shot madly from their spheres
+
+was mottled by the modern Gallic in phrase and in criticism, corrupting
+our national taste, and thus removing us still further from the
+Shakespearian diction in idiom and in imagery. A great master of
+language, Dryden, confesses he found Shakespeare almost as difficult as
+old Chaucer.
+
+On the restored theatre, "the renowned Jonson," thus distinguished by
+Shadwell, retained his supremacy in _The Fox_, _The Silent Woman_, and
+_The Alchemist_, and the airy and loose Fletcher was popular, being
+considered by this new generation as having drawn the characters of
+gentlemen more to their humour than his grave predecessors. One of the
+first managers was Davenant: to his partiality, for he was eager to
+acknowledge Shakespeare his father, both in blood and in verse, we may
+ascribe the revival of that poet's plays. Dryden has told that it was
+Davenant who first taught him to appreciate our national bard; they were
+caught by the fancy of the poet; but the great ethical preceptor of
+mankind had never entered into their contemplation; and thus _Macbeth_
+shrank into an opera under the hand of Davenant; and the _Tempest_,
+after having been seemingly burlesqued by duplicate characters of
+Miranda, Ferdinand, and Caliban, by Davenant and Dryden together, was
+turned into an opera by Shadwell, and exhibited as if it were a
+pantomime, depending now on popular favour for new dresses, new music,
+and new machinery. _Romeo and Juliet_ was altered by the Honourable
+James Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law, to introduce a happy conclusion:
+however, it is but justice to the town to record that they were so
+firmly divided in opinion on the catastrophe, that it was alternately
+played as tragedy and tragic-comic. We may fairly conclude by these
+profanations, that the true taste for our national bard had passed
+away.[15]
+
+Evelyn is a literary man, whose judgment has its value; and assuredly,
+he records the taste of the court-circle. In 1661 he saw "_Hamlet,
+Prince of Denmark_, played; but now, _the old plays begin to disgust
+this refined age_, since his Majesty has been so long abroad." Pepys,
+his contemporary, was a play-haunter: and how he relished _The Midsummer
+Night's Dream_, with all its beautiful fancy, appears by his firm
+opinion, that "it was the most insipid, ridiculous play he had ever
+seen." _Macbeth_, though "a deep tragedy, had a strange perfection in a
+_divertisement_;" that is, _Macbeth_ was Davenant's opera, with music
+and dancing. But Pepys _read_ Othello, and we have his deliberate
+notion; "but having lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours, Othello_
+seemed a mean thing!" It is clear from these, and there are other as
+remarkable instances, that their ideas of the drama had wholly changed;
+that Nature and Fancy had retired from the stage to give precedence to
+what are called "Heroic Tragedy," and comedies of Intrigue.
+
+Shakespeare's plays, in a great measure, were banished the stage; but we
+may presume that Shakespeare still preserved some readers, though not
+critical ones, for four years after the Restoration the third edition of
+Shakespeare in 1664, with seven additional dramas, one of which, _The
+Yorkshire Tragedy_, had been printed with his name in his lifetime, was
+given to the world.
+
+Leaving the theatre, and its moody humours of the populace, let us turn
+to those who think in their closet. How did such critics arbitrate? We
+can have no judge more able than the learned author of "Hudibras,"--"The
+quickest apprehensions, and aptest geniuses to anything they undertake,
+do not always prove _the greatest masters_ in it, for there is more
+patience and phlegm required in those that attain to any degree of
+perfection, than is commonly found in the temper of _active and ready
+wits that soon tire, and will not hold out_." Butler instances Virgil,
+who wanting much of that natural easiness of wit that Ovid had, "did,
+nevertheless, with hard labour and long study, arrive at a higher
+perfection, than the other, with all his dexterity of wit, but less
+industry, could attain to. The same we may observe of JONSON and
+SHAKESPEARE, for he that _is able to think long and judge well, will be_
+_sure to find out better things than another man can hit upon suddenly,
+though of more quick and ready parts_; which is commonly but CHANCE, and
+the other wit and judgment."[16]
+
+After this long extract, it is quite evident that with a predilection
+for Shakespeare, alive at times to his true touches of nature, BUTLER
+could not at that day take a comprehensive view of the faculties of the
+great bard. What we deem his intuitive faculty seemed but "chance" that
+could only "hit suddenly;" that prodigality of genius, the marvels which
+modern criticism has revealed to its initiated--was an advent--the day
+had not yet come! Butler perceived the electrical strokes of
+Shakespeare; but the mental shadowings--and the oneness--which rose
+together in the creation of a _Macbeth_, a _Hamlet_, a _Lear_, was a
+philosophical result, which probably no one had yet dreamed of.
+
+If the genius of SHAKESPEARE were neglected, it was also destined to be
+arraigned and condemned.
+
+Critical learning was yet new in our literature; it had taken its birth
+in Italy, among a crowd of philosophers, rhetoricians and philologists,
+busied in developing the true principles of every species of literary
+composition. The academy _Della Crusca_ was a tribunal, and the "Poetic
+of Aristotle," commented on by the renowned Castelvetro, was a code,
+which was chiefly directed to the dramatic art. Our airy neighbours,
+whose national theatre at its beginning had much resembled our own in
+its freedom and originality, at the erection of the famous French
+Academy, evidently in imitation of the Cruscan, with the great cardinal
+at its head, surrendered to the Greeks and to Aristotle. Everything now
+was to be as it had been, and every work, whatever might be its genius,
+was to be strictly modelled by certain arbitrary decisions; and all
+tragedies were to be written according to the humour of that ancient
+people, the Greeks, with their choruses,--and regulated by the severe
+unities of time and place and action! Bossu set down his prescriptions
+to compound an Epic, and Père Rapin, in his "Reflections on Aristotle's
+Treatise of Poetry," dictated "Universal Rules" for all sorts of
+poetry. RYMER, the collector of our Foedera, in his earlier days, was an
+excellent scholar, and cultivated elegant literature. He translated this
+very work of Père Rapin, to which he prefixed an ingenious critical
+preface on comparative poetry. Enraptured by Grecian tragedy, and
+vivacious with French criticism, and moreover sanguine with an elevated
+conception of a certain forthcoming tragedy, which was to appear "a
+faultless piece" among our own monstrous dramas, Rymer grasped the new
+and formidable weapon of modern criticism. Armed at all points with a
+Grecian helmet and a Gallic lance, this literary Quixote sallied forth
+to attack all the giants, or the windmills, of the English theatre.
+
+Now appeared "The Tragedies of the Last Age examined by the Practice of
+the Ancients. 1678." This explosion entirely fell on three of Fletcher's
+plays.[17] This critical bomb was learned and lively. The court, and
+consequently the popular, tastes were classical or Gallic; RYMER haunted
+St. James's, and soon became one of "their majesties' servants." He had
+formed the most elevated conception of the dramatic art, and that
+tragedy was a poem for kings; and he tells, that the poets who first
+brought tragedy to perfection were made viceroys.
+
+"The poetry of the last age," the age of Elizabeth, he considered was
+"rude as our architecture," and he detected the cause in our utter
+"neglect of the Poetic of Aristotle, on which all the great men in Italy
+had commented, before on this side of the Alps we knew of the existence
+of such a book."
+
+This critic-poet,--for unluckily for Aristotle, Rymer resolved on being
+both,--had a notion that "though it be not necessary that all heroes
+should be kings, yet undoubtedly all crowned heads should be heroes;"
+this was a prerogative of the crown never to be invaded by any
+parliament of poets. This passive obedience in the critical art was
+perfume in "the royalty" of a dedication to Charles the Second,
+preparatory of the writer's own legitimate tragedy of _Edgar, or the
+English Monarch_, in rhymed verse; and the first inroad of his critical
+demolition was to expose "the barbarisms" of Milton's blank! Rymer was
+as intrepid as he was enterprising. He composed his tragedy on the
+principles which he advocated, and the result was precisely what
+happened to the Abbé d'Aubignac, who wrote on the same system.
+Undoubtedly, he congratulated himself on the perfection of the clockwork
+machinery of his legitimate drama, where he had inviolably preserved the
+unities, for the action begins about one o'clock at noon, and the
+catastrophe closes at ten at night! He would have been right by
+"Shrewsbury clock." To the audience, however, the "long hour" might have
+seemed much longer than the delightful _Winter's Tale_ of Shakespeare,
+which includes the events of twenty years!
+
+The formidable critique, not the tragedy, made a great sensation; many
+were on the side of the stout Aristotelian, though some might deem that
+little mercy had tempered his justice. Dryden prepared an answer, for we
+have its heads; but he seems to have been awed by the critic's learning,
+for he never proceeded, and at a later day Rymer was a critic quite
+after Pope's own heart on our ancient drama.[18] Some years after, the
+critique was honoured by a second edition, and in the following year
+this _combat à l'outrance_ was again waged, with no diminished
+intrepidity, in "A Short View of Tragedy, with some reflections on
+SHAKESPEARE, and other PRACTITIONERS for the Stage," 1693. This,
+notwithstanding the offensive theme, is replete with curious literature,
+and some original researches in Provençal poetry.
+
+"Rymer is the worst critic that ever lived." Such is the warm decision
+of an eloquent modern critic.[19] But in taste, as well as in more
+serious affairs, every age is governed by opinions. A mechanical critic
+then seemed mathematically irrefutable. Judging an English drama by the
+practice of the ancients, his triumph was easy. This scholastic
+doctrine, however, proved too subtle for the English people, and even
+the learned themselves in time looked up to nature. The philosophy of
+criticism, that is, of the human mind, was then imperfectly
+comprehended. A critic will be no longer safe who has nothing by heart
+but canons of criticism. The curious "Tracts" of RYMER are a memorable
+evidence how a learned critic deprived of native susceptibility, may
+distort the noblest productions, by coarse jocularity and that malice of
+criticism--ridicule! He calls _Othello_ "the tragedy of the
+pocket-handkerchief." That beautiful incident Shakespeare had found in
+Cynthio's novel, and probably intuitively felt how casualties, small as
+this one, in human affairs may become associated with our highest
+passions. Rymer only exposed the poverty of his imagination when, with a
+morsel of Quintilian, he would demonstrate this incident to be "too
+small a matter to move us in tragedy, much like Fortunatus' purse and
+the invisible cloak, long ago worn threadbare, and stowed up in the
+wardrobe of obsolete romance." With _Othello's_ tragic tale before him,
+the critic worms himself into "the burlesque or comic parts," and these
+he insidiously lauds, to insinuate that _Othello_ is but "a bloody
+farce." The blending of the comic and the serious in the same character,
+as in that of Iago, as often we find it in the many-coloured scenes of
+human life, was an artful mixture too potent and poisonous in the cup of
+mechanical criticism. There is a strange malignant drollery, a bitter
+pleasantry in the villanous Iago, as in the scene where he alarms
+Brabantio for the fate of his daughter, which to "the heroic" dramatist,
+who could only move on stilts, was mistaken for "farce," and not
+comprehended in his narrow views of human nature.
+
+RYMER, however, was a ripe scholar, and the founder in our literature of
+what has been considered as the French or the classical school of
+criticism; and he has won the unlucky distinction of being designated as
+"Shakespeare's critic!" In Dryden's prologue to "Love Triumphant," there
+is an allusion which Sir Walter Scott could not assign to any
+individual, though he acutely suspected it had a reference to some
+person: Sir Walter at that moment forgot Rymer and his "heroic
+tragedy." The lines are now very significant.
+
+  To SHAKESPEARE'S CRITIC, he bequeaths the curse,
+  _To find his faults_, and yet HIMSELF MAKE WORSE.[20]
+
+The uncertain criticisms of Dryden on Shakespeare were often dictated by
+the impulse of the moment, and stand in strange opposition to each
+other. At one happy time, indeed, he exclaimed, "I admire Jonson, but I
+love Shakespeare;" but he had not dived into the spirit of the poet,
+else we should not have had the strong censure of a "lethargy of thought
+for whole scenes together;" we should not have heard of "the bombast
+speeches of Macbeth;" nor that "the historical plays, _The Winter's
+Tale_, and _Measure for Measure_, are so meanly written, that the comedy
+neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment."
+
+Dryden, however great as a poet, was deficient in passion, whose natural
+touches he acknowledged he had found in Otway. In his earliest pieces,
+while enamoured of the false taste of his heroic tragedies, it is
+certain he had formed little relish for nature and Shakespeare, which,
+at a later period of life, he seems to have been more open to.
+
+In 1681, the Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate, was so little acquainted with
+Shakespeare, that _Lear_ being brought to his notice, he found it a
+treasure, a heap of jewels unstrung and unpolished; and having had "the
+good fortune to light upon an expedient to rectify it," he brought it on
+the stage.
+
+Shakespeare was now out of fashion, and a man of fashion aimed a last
+and mortal blow. The noble author of the "Characteristics" anathematised
+"the Gothic model of poetry." He told the nation that "the British muses
+were in their infant state, without anything of shapeliness or person,
+lisping in their cradles, with stammering tongues which nothing but
+their youth and rawness can excuse." Our dramatic SHAKESPEARE and our
+epic MILTON are among these venerable bards, "_rude as they were
+according to their time and age_." The classical pedant had, however,
+the sagacity to perceive that they have provided us with "the richest
+ore." Nature and Shakespeare lifted not their veil to the cold
+artificial soliloquist whose faint delicacy bred its own sickliness, and
+who, in the march and glitter of his external pomp, only betrayed the
+internal failure of his vigour.
+
+The fourth and last folio edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1685. The
+poet again was locked up in a huge folio for the following twenty-five
+years, when, in 1709, he was freed by Rowe, who now gave him to the
+world at large in a more current form, which would meet the eye of the
+many.[21]
+
+The appearance of Rowe's edition at least placed the volumes in the
+hands of Steele and Addison, and possibly it formed their first studies
+of this poet. Whoever will take the pains to examine their popular
+papers may discover the fruits of their first thoughts. Steele at first
+seems to have derived his knowledge of Shakespeare from the plays as
+they were represented; he quotes _Macbeth_ by memory very faultily in
+the famous exclamation of Macduff, and seems quite unconscious of the
+character of Lady Macbeth, and indeed notices that all the female
+characters of Shakespeare make "so small a figure."[22] As we proceed,
+we discover him more deeply read and more familiar with the poet's
+language. It was not to be hoped from Addison's colder fancy and
+classical severity, that the Elizabethan poet could transport this
+critic by his inexhaustible imagery and a diction which paints the
+passions as well as reveals them. The prosaic genius of Addison, which
+had produced a frigid _Cato_, could hardly fathom the depth of the
+mightier soul. He pronounced Shakespeare "very faulty in hard metaphors
+and forced expressions," and he joins Shakespeare and Nat Lee as
+instances of the false sublime.[23] Pope's idea was similar, in his
+conversation, not in his preface; and later so was Thomas Warton's.[24]
+
+In 1718, Bysshe, in compiling his "Art of Poetry," which consists of
+mere extracts, passed by "Spenser and the poets of his age, because
+their language has become so obsolete that most readers of our age have
+no ear for them, and therefore SHAKESPEARE is so rarely cited in this
+collection."
+
+Rowe silently corrected his unostentatious edition; when fifteen years
+had elapsed, Tonson called on a greater poet to succeed to the editorial
+throne. The classical taste of Pope was disturbed and rarely sympathised
+with "the choice of the subjects, the wrong conduct of the incidents,
+false thoughts, forced expressions:" in tenderness to Shakespeare these
+he held to be "not so much defects, but superfoetations," which are to
+be ascribed to the times, to interpolation, to the copyists; and
+contemning "the dull duty" of editorship, he initiated himself into the
+novel office of expurgator; striking out or inserting at pleasure--not
+only pruning, but grafting. Schlegel exclaims in agony, that Pope would
+have given us a mutilated Shakespeare! but Pope, to satisfy us that he
+was not insensible to the fine passages of Shakespeare, distinguished by
+inverted commas all those which he approved! So that Pope thus furnished
+for the first time what have been called "The _Beauties_ of
+Shakespeare!" but amid such a disfigured text, the _faults_ of
+Shakespeare must have been too apparent! Pope but partially relished and
+often ill understood his Shakespeare; yet in the liveliest of prefaces
+he offers the most vivid delineation of our great bard's _general
+characteristics_. The _genius of Shakespeare_ was at once comprehended
+by his brother poet; but _the text_ he was continually tampering with
+ended in a fatal testimony that POPE had no congenial taste for the
+style, the manner, and the whole native drama of England.[25] POPE laid
+himself open to the investigating eye of THEOBALD.
+
+The attention of THEOBALD had been drawn to our old plays by THOMAS
+COXETER, an enthusiast of our ancient dramatists. This Coxeter was the
+original projector of their revival, but having communicated his plan,
+he witnessed the incompetent DODSLEY appropriate this fond hope of his
+dreamy life, and he has left us his indignant groans.[26]
+
+After an interval of seven years Theobald gave his edition. His attempts
+were limited to the emendation of corrupt passages and the explanation
+of obscure ones: the more elevated disquisitions to develope the genius
+of his author, by principles of criticism applied to his beauties or his
+defects, he assigned to "a masterly pen." This at least was not
+arrogant; the man who is sensible of his own weakness, is safe by not
+tasking it to the proof. His annotations are amusing from the
+self-complacency of the writer, who at times seems to have been struck
+by his own felicitous results; and in truth he was often successful,
+more than has been honestly avowed by those who have poached on his
+manor. Theobald exulted over Pope, but he read his triumph in "The
+Dunciad."
+
+The Popeians now sunk the sole merit of the laborious sagacity of "the
+restorer," as Mr. Pope affectionately called him, to that of "a
+word-catcher." But "piddling Theobald," branded in the forehead by the
+immortal "Dunciad," was the first who popularised the neglected writings
+of Shakespeare.[27] His editions dispersed thirteen thousand copies,
+while nearly a third of Pope's original subscription edition, of seven
+hundred and fifty copies, were left unvendible.[28]
+
+It is an evidence of the spread of Shakespeare's celebrity, that a
+fashionable circle had formed themselves into a society under the title
+of "The Shakespeare Club." Every week they bespoke some favourite play;
+but, unexpectedly, the _acted plays_ of Shakespeare seemed to lose
+greatly of their secret magic: this failure was charged upon the unhappy
+performers, whose skill appeared all unequal to raise the emotions
+which the bard had inspired in the closet. Certain it is, that for the
+full comprehension of the genius of this great poet, we must learn to
+think, to reflect, to combine, for what has passed is a part of what is
+going on; and this is a labour more adapted for the repose of the closet
+than the business of the theatre. Much is written which must remain in
+the mind, and cannot come within the province of acting. The dramas of
+Shakespeare, as they have descended to us, modern taste also has always
+required to be altered and adapted; they are less calculated for
+performance on the stage than those of almost any other dramatist who
+has become classical in the theatre. Unquestionably, the great poet had
+retained much of the barbarism of the old plays which he re-wrote
+without remodelling; bustle which hurries on our attention without
+stimulating our feelings; some flagrant indecorums and some absolute
+nonsense to the taste of "the groundlings of the Globe." In the reverie
+of the poet's pages, the eye glides silently over the offending passages
+which cannot detain it. It was these prominent defects which provoked so
+many modern alterations; and no doubt Tate and Cibber, and all that
+race, exulted like Shadwell, who in his dedication to his alteration of
+_Timon of Athens_ exclaims, "I can truly say I have made it into a
+play." When Sir James Mackintosh observed, that "Massinger's taste, as
+Shakespeare's genius, is displayed with such prodigal magnificence in
+the _parts_, but never employed in the construction of the whole," he
+was perhaps not aware of the real cause, which was that of our great
+poet following the construction of old plays, without altering their
+ordonnance. It is true also, that the characters of Shakespeare require
+something of his own genius in their personifiers to sustain the perfect
+illusion; great actors seem always to have felt the deep emotions they
+raised; they studied, they meditated, till at length they personified
+the ideal character they represented. We are told this of Burbage and
+Betterton, and we know it of Garrick and Mrs. Siddons.
+
+A novel fate was now to befal Shakespeare. Theobald had made his volumes
+useful for all hands; a man of rank, who had been the Speaker of the
+House of Commons, set the first example of literary magnificence. Sir
+THOMAS HANMER had cradled his fancy in the idealism of publication; his
+edition was to be not only "the fairest impression, beautified with the
+ornaments of sculpture," but it was not to be _sold_ by booksellers! The
+Shakespeare of Sir Thomas Hanmer seemed to be a sacred thing, like the
+shew-bread of ancient Israel, to be touched by no profane hand, nor
+eaten but by an exclusive class. He made a gratuitous donation of his
+"sculptured" edition to his Alma Mater, to issue from the university
+press, at a very moderate subscription price. The embroidered mantle,
+however, but ill concealed the trifler. Sir Thomas had vigorously
+attacked the grammatical errors of the poet, which, in fact, was often a
+violation of the text, for Shakespeare wrote ungrammatically; the other
+editorial effort was a metrical amusement, gently lopping a redundant,
+or straightening a limping line; the only harm of his edition was his
+modesty in adopting all the innovations of his predecessors, for his own
+were quite innocent. On the whole, Sir Thomas appears to have edited his
+Shakespeare, wearing all the while his "white kid gloves," which the Mad
+Tom Hervey, who ran away with his lady, by information which he ought
+not to have divulged, assured the world that the baronet always slept
+in.
+
+Under the veil of giving "dear Mr. Pope's" edition, which no one craved,
+the great author of "The Divine Legation" now edited Shakespeare. It
+must have occurred to the readers of this edition, that hitherto no one
+had entered into any right conception of a great portion of the poet's
+writings. Many passages with which our memory is familiar were wrested
+into the most whimsical readings; plain matters were for ever obscured
+by perverse but ingenious interpretations; not only the words, but the
+thoughts of the author were changed; here a line was to be wholly
+rejected, and there an interpolation was to clear an imperfect sense;
+but the most prominent feature of the commentary was that learned fancy
+which struck out allusions to the most recondite circumstances of
+learned antiquity.[29]
+
+In this great commentator on Shakespeare there was always a contest
+between his learning and his fancy; the one was copious, and the other
+was exuberant; neither could yield to the other; and the reader was
+sure to be led astray by both. His fervid curiosity was absolutely
+creative; all things crowded to bear on his point; in the precipitancy
+of his pen, his taste or his judgment was not of that degree which could
+save him even from inglorious absurdities. But the ingenious follies of
+his literature were such that they have often been preserved, for the
+sake of all that learning which it required for their refutation.
+
+When all was over, and the battle was fought and lost, the friends of
+the great man acknowledged that the editor's design had never been to
+explain Shakespeare! and that he was even conscious that he had
+frequently imputed to the poet meanings which had never entered the mind
+of the bard! Our critic's grand object was to display his own learning
+in these amusements of his leisure. Warburton wrote for Warburton, and
+not for Shakespeare; and the literary confession almost rivals those of
+Lauder or Psalmanazar.
+
+There is one more remarkable object in the Shakespeare of Warburton. He
+not only preserved that strange device of Pope to distinguish the most
+beautiful passages by _inverted commas_, but carried on that ridiculous
+process on his own separate account, by marking his favourites by
+_double commas_. It is evident that these great editors judged
+Shakespeare by these fragmentary and unconnected passages, which could
+not indicate the harmonious and gradual rise of the thoughts, nor the
+fine transitions of emotions, and less the comprehensive genius of the
+inventor. They were scattering the living members which must be viewed
+whole with all their movements, and at last must be sought for by the
+reader in his own mind. The truest mode of discovering the beauties of
+an author is first to be conversant with the beautiful, otherwise it is
+possible that the beauties may escape the readers, even should they be
+marked by a Pope or a Warburton.
+
+The acknowledged failure of the preceding editions invited to a fresh
+enterprise, and it was the edition of Johnson, in 1765, which conferred
+on Shakespeare the stability of a classic, by the vigour and
+discrimination of his criticism, and the solemnity of his judicial
+decisions.
+
+When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition
+of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of
+the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and
+native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his
+age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not
+systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in
+casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single
+scholiast. He enumerates, however, the desiderata for this purpose;
+among which we find that of reading the books which Shakespeare read,
+and to compare his works with those of writers who lived at the same
+time, or immediately preceded, or immediately followed him. This
+project, happily conceived, inferred comprehensive knowledge in the
+proposer; but it was only a reverie; a dim Pisgah view which the
+sagacity of the great critic had taken of that future Canaan, which he
+himself never entered. With this sort of knowledge, and these forgotten
+writers, which the future commentators of Shakespeare revelled in,
+Johnson remained wholly unacquainted.
+
+But what proved more fatal to the editorial ability of JOHNSON than this
+imperfect knowledge of the literature and the manners of the age of
+Shakespeare, was that the commentator rarely sympathised with the poet,
+for his hard-witted and unpliant faculties, busied with the more
+palpable forms of human nature, when thrown amid the supernatural and
+the ideal, seemed suddenly deserted of their powers; the magic knot was
+tied, which cast our Hercules into helpless impotence; and in the circle
+of imaginative creation, we discover the baffled sage resisting the
+spell, by apologising for Shakespeare's introduction of his mighty
+preternatural beings! a certain evidence that the critic had never
+existed for a moment under their influence. "Witches, fairies, and
+ghosts, would not now be tolerated by an audience;" such was the grave
+and fallacious assumption of the unimaginative critic, which seems
+something worse than Voltaire's raillery; for though that wit ridiculed
+the ghost in Hamlet, he afterwards had the poetic agility to transfer
+its solemnity to his own Semiramis,--though, like all rapid inlayers,
+the appliqué did not fit to his work.[30]
+
+We may even suspect the degree of our great critic's susceptibility of
+the infinitely-varied emotions flowing in the inexhaustible vein of the
+poet of nature. In those judicial summaries at the close of each drama,
+his cold approbation, his perplexing balancings, his hazarded doubts, or
+his positive censures, all alike betray the uncertainty and the
+difficulties of a critical mind, which misapplied its energies to themes
+adverse to its habits.
+
+Johnson's preface to his Shakespeare was long held as a masterpiece; and
+several splendid passages, after more than half a century, remain to
+remind us of his nervous intellect. If we now read that preface with a
+different understanding than that of most of his contemporaries, it is
+because Johnson himself has revealed his poetical confessions in certain
+"Lives of the Poets." We now look on that famed preface much more as a
+labour of pomp than a labour of love. Far from me be any irreverence to
+our master-genius of the passed century, whose volumes were read by all
+readers, and imitated by all writers; my first devotion to literature
+was caught from his pages; and the fire still burns on that altar. But
+the literary character of JOHNSON, with his enduring works, is no longer
+a subject of inquiry, but of history; of truths established, and not of
+opinions which are mutable.
+
+Can we imagine that Johnson himself experienced a degree of conviction,
+some perplexing consciousness, that his spirit was not endowed with the
+sensibility of Longinus? A profound thinker, acutely argumentative and
+analytical, though clothed in the purple of his cumbrous diction, and
+the cadences of his concatenated periods, when he touched on themes of
+pure imagination, and passions not merely declamatory, had nothing left
+to him but the solitary test of his judgment, to decide on what lies out
+of the scope of daily life. He interpreted the pathetic and the sublime,
+till they ceased to be either by the force of his reasoning and the
+weakness of his conceptions; he cross-examined shadowy fancies, till
+they vanished under the eye of the judge. He had no wing to ascend into
+"the heaven of invention."
+
+In JOHNSON'S SHAKESPEARE, therefore, we may trace that deficient
+sympathy which subsequently betrayed itself in his revolting decisions
+on Collins, on Gray, on Milton, and on others. It was his hard fate to
+be called on to deliver his solemn decisions on two of our greatest
+poets; from Spenser he had fortunately escaped, having wholly forgotten
+the Muse of Mulla, while his piety and his taste had remembered
+Blackmore, in the collection of English poets. It is curious to detect
+the mode by which our great critic extricated himself from the
+difficulties of his judicial function on Shakespeare and on Milton, by
+his prudential sagacity, and his passive obedience to established
+authorities. Johnson's preface to Shakespeare was grafted on Pope's, as
+afterwards, when he came to Milton, he followed the track of Addison.
+But Johnson was too honest to disguise the reality of his own
+conviction: it was legitimate to adopt theirs, but it was independent to
+preserve his own; in this dissonance he has left a lesson and a warning
+for some who are eminent, and who travel in the high-road of criticism.
+
+It is thus that we find in this famous preface to Shakespeare that he is
+hailed as the poet of nature, and is placed by the side of Homer; and of
+this Pope had instructed the critic; but in the sudden change the noble
+qualities of the bard are minutely reversed; the antithesis was too
+often in the critic's own taste; and the characteristic excellence
+ascribed to Shakespeare seems hardly compatible with the number and the
+grossness of his faults. Every work of note bears the impression of its
+times; and we learn from the faithful chronicler of Johnson the real
+occasion which gave rise to this remarkable preface. "A blind and
+indiscriminate admiration of Shakespeare had exposed the British nation
+to the ridicule of foreigners; and this preface was considered as a
+grave, well-considered, and impartial opinion of the judge." Such was
+the defence of the logical critic, who so diligently enumerated the
+defects of his author, that Voltaire, who could never understand the
+language nor comprehend the genius of Shakespeare, might sometimes have
+referred to Johnson to confirm his own depreciating notions.
+
+The extensive plan for the illustration of the poet, imperfectly
+projected by Johnson, was finally executed through a series of editions,
+which gave rise to a new class of literary antiquaries.
+
+Shortly after the first edition of Johnson, Dr. FARMER led the way to
+the disclosure of a new lore in our old books. Farmer had silently
+pursued an untired chase in this "black" forest, for he had a keen
+_gusto_ for the native venison, and, alluding to his Shakespearian
+pursuits, exclaimed in the inspiring language of his poet--
+
+  Age cannot wither them, nor custom stale
+  Their infinite variety.
+
+His vivacity relieved the drowsiness of mere antiquarianism. This novel
+pursuit once opened, an eager and motley pack was hallooed up, and
+Shakespeare, like Actæon, was torn to pieces by a whole kennel of his
+own hounds, as they were typified, with equal humour and severity. But
+to be severe and never to be just is the penury of the most sordid
+criticism; and among these
+
+  Spirits black, white, and grey,
+
+are some of the most illustrious in English literature.
+
+The original edition of Johnson consisted only of eight volumes; had not
+the contriving wisdom of the printers impressed the last into twenty and
+one huge tomes, they might easily have been expanded into forty.
+
+When we survey the massive _variorum_ edition of Shakespeare, we are
+struck by the circumstance that nothing similar has happened to any
+other national author. It was not to be expected that, after the
+invention of the art of printing, an author could arise, whose works
+should be disfigured by treacherous transcribers, corrupted by
+interpolations, and still more by a race of men whose art was unknown to
+the ancients, subjecting his text to the mercy of contending
+commentators and conjectural critics. But a singular combination of
+untoward circumstances attached to this poet and his works, produced
+this remarkable result. The scholiasts among the ancient classics had
+rejoiced in some rare emendation of the text, or the rhetorical
+commentator had flourished in the luxuriance of the latent beauties of
+some favourite author. But a far wider and deeper source of inquiry was
+now to be attempted, historical or explanatory--comments to clear up
+obscure allusions; to indicate unknown prototypes; to trace the
+vicissitudes of words as well as things; to picture forth the customs
+and the manners which had faded into desuetude; and to re-open for us
+the records of our social and domestic life, thus at once to throw us
+back into that age, and to familiarize us with that language, of
+Shakespeare which had vanished. Shakespeare, it may be said, suddenly
+became the favourite object of literary inquiry. Every literary man in
+the nation conned over and illumined "the infinite variety" of the bard.
+And assuredly they enriched our vernacular literature with a collection
+of historical, philological, and miscellaneous information, unparalleled
+among any other literary people. In 1785, ISAAC REED, in one of his
+prefaces, informs us, that "the works of Shakespeare, during the last
+twenty years, have been the object of public attention."
+
+All this novel knowledge was, however, not purchased at a slight cost.
+It was not only to be snatched up by accidental discovery, but it was
+more severely tasked by what Steevens called "a course of
+black-letter!"--dusty volumes, and fugitive tracts, and the wide range
+of antiquarian research. The sources whence they drew their waters were
+muddy; and STEEVENS, who affected more gaiety in his chains than his
+brothers in the Shakespearian galley, with bitter derision reproached
+his great coadjutor MALONE, whom he looked on with the evil eye of
+rivalry for drawing his knowledge from "books too mean to be formally
+quoted."
+
+The commentators have encumbered the poet, who often has been but a
+secondary object of their lucubrations, for they not only write notes on
+Shakespeare, but notes, and bitter ones too, on one another. This
+commentary has been turned into a gymnasium for the public sports of
+friendly and of unfriendly wrestlers; where some have been so earnest,
+that it is evident that, in measuring a cast, they congratulated
+themselves in the language of Orlando, "If ever he goes alone again,
+I'll never wrestle for prize more."
+
+THOMAS WARTON once covered with his shield some of the minor
+brotherhood: "If Shakespeare is worth reading, he is worth explaining;
+and the researches used for so valuable and elegant a purpose merit the
+thanks of genius and candour, not the satire of prejudice and
+ignorance." But this serves not as an apology for abusing the privilege
+of a commentator; elucidating the poet into obscurity by information
+equally contradictory and curious; racking us by fantastic readings
+which no one imagined before or since; and laying us open to the mercy
+of some who never ventured to sharpen their pens but on our irresistible
+Shakespeare. What has been the result of the petty conflicts between the
+arch maliciousness of Steevens and the fervent plodding of Malone, which
+raised up two parties among the Shakespearian commentators, till they
+became so personal, that a Steevenite and a Malonist looked on each
+other suspiciously, and sometimes would drop the ordinary civilities of
+life? At length, strange to tell, after Steevens had laboured with zeal
+equal to the whole confraternity, it became a question with him, In what
+manner the poet COULD be read? Are we to con over each note appended to
+each word or passage?--but this would be perpetually to turn aside the
+flow of our imagination; or are we to read a large portion of the text
+uninterruptedly, and then return to the notes?--but this would be
+breaking the unity of the poet into fragments; or, for a final decision,
+and the avowal must have mortified the ingenuous illustrator, according
+to a third class of readers, were these illustrations to be altogether
+rejected? must the poet or the commentator be at continual variance? or
+shall we endure to see "Alcides beaten by his page?"
+
+Might I be allowed to offer an award on a matter so involved and
+delicate as this union between the genius of Shakespeare and the genius
+of his commentators, I would concede the divorce, from the
+incompatibility of temper between the parties; but I would insist on a
+separate maintenance, to preserve the great respectability attached to
+the party most complained of. The true reader of Shakespeare may then
+accommodate himself with two editions; the one for his hand, having
+nothing but what the poet has written; the other for the shelf, having
+all the commentators have conjectured, confuted, and confounded.[31]
+
+The celebrity of Shakespeare is no longer hounded by his nationality.
+Even France responds, though the voice of Parisian critics is muffled,
+confused, and ambiguous; they have not yet solved the great problem, why
+Shakespeare is an omnipotent dramatist.[32] The school of Corneille and
+Racine are perplexed, like Quin, who could not be brought to acknowledge
+the creative acting of Garrick, observing that, "If that young man were
+right, all which they had hitherto done was wrong."
+
+Voltaire, in early life, to compose the _Henriade_, to escape from the
+Bastile, or to conceal his espionage--for he appears to have been a
+secret _employé_ of the French ministry--resided a considerable time in
+England. He acquired an unusual knowledge of our language, and
+published an essay on the epic poets in English.[33] He discovered a new
+world among our writers, and was the first who introduced the Literature
+of England into France. Voltaire expounded to his nation the philosophy
+of Newton; but unhappily he criticized and translated Shakespeare, whose
+idiomatic phrases and metaphorical style did not admit of the
+demonstrations of the Newtonian system. To the author of the _Henriade_,
+who had ever before his eyes the two great masters whom he was one day
+to rival, the anti-classical and "Gothic" genius of a poet of the
+Elizabethan period, scorning the unities, following events without the
+contrivance of an intrigue artfully developed, mingling farce with
+tragedy, buffoons with monarchs, and preternatural beings stalking amid
+the palpable realities of life--such irregular dramas seemed to the
+Aristotelian but "des farces monstrueuses," as we see they appeared to
+Rymer and Shaftesbury; but Voltaire was too sagacious to be wholly
+insensible that "these monstrous farces, which they call tragedies, had
+scenes grand and terrific." Voltaire, then meditating on his future
+dramas, in passing over the surface of the soil, discovered that a mine
+lay beneath--
+
+              Some ore
+  Among a mineral of metals base,
+
+and the embedded treasure was worked with more diligence than with
+gratitude to the owner. If Voltaire ridiculed what he had found, it was
+partly with the desire of its concealment, but not wholly; for it was
+impossible for any foreigner to interpret sweet words, and idiomatic
+phrases, not to be found in dictionaries; or to make way through the
+bewilderment of the perpetual metaphorical diction of the daring fancy
+of the great poet; but the deformities of the bard would be too
+intelligible; all those parts which Pope would have struck out as
+"superfoetations." A bald version, or a malicious turn, would amuse the
+world by those amazing absurdities, which the wit, too famous for his
+ridicule, rejoiced to commit, and Europe yet knew nothing of
+Shakespeare, and lay under the sway of this autocrat of Literature.[34]
+
+Mrs. MONTAGUE was the Minerva, for so she was complimented on this
+occasion, whose celestial spear was to transfix the audacious Gaul. Her
+"Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the
+Greek and French dramatic poets," served for a popular answer to
+Voltaire. This accomplished lady, who had raised a literary coterie
+about her, which attracted such fashionable notice that its title has
+survived its institution, found in "the Blue-stocking Club" choral hymns
+and clouds of incense gathering about the altar in Portman Square! The
+volume is deemed "a wonderful performance," by those echoes of
+contemporary prepossessions, the compilers of dictionary-biography; even
+the poet Cowper placed Mrs. Montague "at the head of all that is called
+learned."
+
+This lady's knowledge of the English drama, and the genius of our
+ancient Literature, is as vague and indistinct as that of the Greek
+tragedians, to whom she frequently refers, without, we are told, any
+intimacy with the originals. She discovers many bombast speeches even in
+_Macbeth_, but she triumphantly exclaims, "Shakespeare redeems the
+nonsense, the indecorum, the irregularities of his plays;"
+irregularities which seem to her incomprehensible. Her criticisms are
+the random reflections of her feelings; but trusting to our feelings
+alone, unaccompanied by that knowledge on which they should be based, is
+confiding in a capricious, and often an erring dictator, governed by our
+own humours, or by fashionable tastes.
+
+Thus have we viewed our bard through distinct eras, from the time in
+which he was not yet pre-eminently distinguished among his numerous
+peers; the Shakespeare of his own day could not be the Shakespeare of
+posterity; his rivals could only view that genius in its progress, and
+though there was not one who was a Shakespeare, yet, in that bursting
+competition of genius, there were many who were themselves Shakspearian.
+In a succeeding era, novel and unnational tastes prevailed; to the
+Drydenists who, dismissing the language of nature, substituted a false
+nature in their exaggerated passion, Shakespeare might have said of
+himself--
+
+  I dare do all that may become a man,
+  Who dares do more is none;--
+
+and when tried by the conventional code of criticism, and condemned;
+the poet of creation, might have exclaimed to Rymer and to Shaftesbury--
+
+  The poet's eye,
+  Bodying forth the forms of THINGS UNKNOWN, gives to airy nothing
+  A local habitation and a name.
+
+Emerging into light through his modern editors, the volume in the hands
+of all men; the English public, with whom the classical model was held
+as nothing, received him as their national bard; for every one read in
+"the chance" that could only "hit suddenly," as Butler has described the
+genius of Shakespeare, revelations about himself. It seemed as if the
+poet had served in all professions, taking every colour of public and
+domestic life. Lawyers have detected their law-cunning in the legal
+contrivances of the poet; physicians have commented on the madness of
+Lear, and the mystery of Hamlet; statesmen have meditated on profound
+speculations in civil polity; the merchant and the mechanic, the soldier
+and the maiden--all, from the crowned head to the sailor-boy, found that
+in the cursory pages of the great dramatist, he had disclosed to all the
+tribes of mankind the secrets of their condition. The plenitude and the
+pliancy of the Shakespearian mind may be manifested by a trivial
+circumstance. We are a people of pamphleteers; a free country has a free
+communication; and many, for interest or vainglory, rush to catch the
+public ear. To point out the drift of their effusions, and aid a dubious
+title by an unquestioned authority, the greater number of these
+incessant fugitives, coming in all shapes, will be usually found to have
+recourse for this apposite thought, and crowning motto, to the prodigal
+pages of Shakespeare, who, thus pressed into their service, has often
+made the drift of the pamphleteer intelligible, vainly sought in his
+confused pamphlet.
+
+When the strange condition of his works made the poet the noble prey of
+a brood of commentators, antiquarian and philological, from that
+generation he derived nothing of that abstract greatness with which we
+are now accustomed to contemplate a genius which seems universal. It was
+not by new readings, contested restorations, conjectural emendations,
+and notes explanatory of customs and phrases, however useful, that we
+could penetrate into the depths of a genius profound as nature herself,
+and it was only when philosophical critics tested this genius by their
+own principles, that the singularity was discovered to Europe.
+
+Hitherto the critical art had been verbal, or didactic, or dogmatic; but
+when the mind engaged itself in watching its own operations, by analysis
+and combination, and when the laws of its constitution formed a science,
+educing principles, and exploring the sources of our emotions, all
+arbitrary conventions were only rated at their worth, while the final
+appeal was made to our own experience: these nobler critics founded the
+demonstrations of their metaphysical reasonings on our consciousness.
+This novel philosophy was more surely and more deeply laid in the nature
+of man, and whatever concerns man, than the arbitrary code of the
+Stagyrite, who had founded many of his laws on what had only been
+customs. We were passing from the history of the human understanding to
+the history of the imagination; and the whole beautiful process of the
+intellectual faculties was a new revelation. Theories of taste and
+systems of philosophy multiplied our sympathies, and amplified our
+associations; the intellectual powers had their history, and the
+passions were laid bare in their eloquent anatomy. But in these severe
+investigations, this new school had to seek for illustrations and for
+examples which might familiarize their abstract principles; and these
+philosophical critics appealed to nature, and drew them from her poetic
+interpreter.
+
+It was the philosophical critics who, by trying Shakespeare by these
+highest tests, fixed him on his solitary eminence. From Lord Kaimes,
+through a brilliant succession of many a Longinus, the public has been
+instructed. The strokes of nature and the bursts of passion, the
+exuberance of his humour and the pathos of his higher mood, untutored
+minds had felt more or less, and Shakespeare was lauded for what they
+considered to be his "natural parts;" and it was parts only on which
+they could decide, for the true magnitude they could not yet comprehend.
+The loneliness of his genius, in its profundity or its elevation, and
+the delicacy of its delineations, the mighty space his universal faculty
+extends before us, these they could never reach! The phenomenon had not
+been explained--the instruments had not yet been invented which could
+fathom its depths, or take the admeasurement at the meridian.
+
+But if philosophical criticism has been so far favourable to develope
+the truth of nature in the great poet, it is not a consequence that
+Shakespeare himself produced his poetry on those revolving systems of
+metaphysics by which some late æsthetic and rhetorical German critics
+have somewhat offuscated the solitary luminary. They have developed such
+a system of intricate thinking in the genius of the poet, such a refined
+connexion between his conceptions and the execution of his dramatic
+personages--they have so grafted their own imagination upon his, that at
+times it becomes doubtful whether we are influenced by the imagination
+of the critic, or that of the poet. In this seraphic mode of criticism,
+the poem becomes mythic, and the poet a myth; in the power of
+abstraction, these critics have passed beyond the regions of humanity.
+We soar with them into the immensity of space, and we tremble as if we
+stood alone in the universe; we have lost sight of nature, as we seem to
+have passed her human boundaries. The ancient divinity of poetry itself,
+even Homer, is absorbed in the Shakespearian myth; for Shakespeare, to
+snatch a feather from the fiery wing of Coleridge, is "the Spinosistic
+deity, an omnipresent creativeness."
+
+Thou whose rapt spirit beheld the vision of human existence, "the wheel
+in the middle of the wheel, and the spirit of the living creature
+within," and wrotest thy inspirations, how shall we describe thy
+faculty? To paint lightning, and to give it no motion, is the doom of
+the baffled artist. Something, however, we may conceive of the
+Shakespearian faculty when we say that it consisted in a facility of
+feeling, an aptitude in following those trains of thought which
+constitute that undeviating propriety, in the consonance of the
+character with its action, and the passion with its language. Whether
+the poet followed the romancer or the chronicler in his conception of a
+dramatic character, he at the first step struck into that undeviating
+track of our humanity amid the accidents of its position. The progress
+of each dramatic personage was therefore a unity of diction and
+character, of sentiment and action; all was direct, for there was no
+effort where all was impulse; and the dramatic genius of Shakespeare, as
+if wholly unstudied, seems to have formed the habit of his intellectual
+character. Was this unerring Shakespearian faculty an intuitive
+evidence, like certain axioms; or may we venture to fancy that our poet,
+as it were, had discovered the very mathematics of metaphysics?
+
+Besides this facility of feeling appropriating to itself the whole
+sphere of human existence, there is another characteristic of our
+national bard. He struck out a diction which I conceive will be found in
+no other poet. What is usually termed diction would, applied to
+Shakespeare, be more definite, and its quality more happily explained,
+if we call it _expression_, and observed in what magic the Shakespearian
+expression lies. This diction has been subject to the censure of
+obscurity. Modern critics have ascribed the invention of our dramatic
+blank verse to Shakespeare; but Shakespeare was no inventor in the usual
+acceptation of the term, and assuredly was not of unrhymed metre: what,
+indeed, are imperfectly or rarely found among his tuneful predecessors
+and contemporaries, are the sweetness of his versification, combined
+with ceaseless imagery; we view the image through the transparency of
+the thought never disturbing it; it is neither a formal simile nor an
+expanded metaphor--it is a single expression, a sensible image combined
+with an emotion.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Posterity is even in some danger of losing the real name of our
+    great dramatic poet. In the days of Shakespeare, and long after,
+    proper names were written down as the ear caught the sound, or they
+    were capriciously varied by the owner. It is not therefore strange
+    that we have instances of eminent persons writing the names of
+    intimate friends and of public characters in a manner not always to
+    be recognised. Of this we are now furnished with the most abundant
+    evidence, which was not sufficiently adverted to in the early times
+    of our commentators.
+
+    The autographs we possess of our national bard are unquestionably
+    written SHAKSPERE, according to the pronunciation of his native town;
+    there the name was variously written,--even in the same public
+    document,--but always regulated by the dialectical orthoepy. The
+    marriage license of the poet, recovered in the "Gentleman's Magazine"
+    for September, 1836, offers a striking evidence of the viciousness of
+    the pronunciation and the utter carelessness with which names were
+    written, for there we find it SHAGSPERE.
+
+    That the poet himself considered that the genuine name was
+    SHAKESPEARE, accordant with his own (a spear, the point upward),
+    seems certain, notwithstanding his compliance with the custom of his
+    country; for his "Rape of Lucrece," printed by himself in 1594, in
+    the first edition bears the name of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, as also does
+    the "Venus and Adonis," that first heir of his invention; these first
+    editions of his juvenile poems were doubtlessly anxiously scrutinised
+    by the youthful bard. In the literary metropolis the name was so
+    pronounced. Bancroft has this allusion in his Epigrams--"To
+    Shakespeare:"--
+
+      "Thou hast so used thy pen, or shook thy speare,
+      That poets startle."
+
+    The well-known allusion of Robert Greene, to a shake-scene, confirms
+    the pronunciation. I now supply one more evidence--that of Thomas
+    Heywood, the intimate of Shakespeare and his brother dramatists; he,
+    like some others, has printed the name with a hyphen, which I
+    transcribe from the volume open before me,--
+
+      "Mellifluous Shake-speare,"
+
+        _Hierarchie of Angels_, 206.
+
+    The question resolves itself into this--Is the name of our great bard
+    to descend to posterity with the barbaric curt shock of SHAKSPERE,
+    the twang of a provincial corruption; or, following the writers of
+    the Elizabethan age, shall we maintain the restoration of the euphony
+    and the truth of the name of SHAKESPEARE?
+
+  [2] Mr. J. Payne Collier, in his "New Facts regarding the Life of
+    Shakespeare."
+
+  [3] Roscius Anglicanus.--They were Richard Burbage and John Lowin.
+
+  [4] Greene was then lying on his last pallet of rhyme and misery,
+    dictating this sad legacy of "a groat's worth of wit bought with a
+    million of repentance."
+
+  [5] _Bombast_ is not here used in the present application of the
+    term, in a depreciating sense, but is a simile derived from the
+    cotton used in stuffing out or quilting the fashionable dresses.
+
+  [6] Collier's "New Facts," 13. Dyce's edition of "Greene's Dramatic
+    Works."
+
+  [7] Heywood's "Apology for Actors."--The Epistle to his bookseller at
+    the end.
+
+  [8] In the comedy of _Eastward Ho!_ the joint production of Jonson,
+    Marlowe, and Chapman,--Shakespeare is ridiculed, particularly the
+    madness of Hamlet and Ophelia.
+
+  [9] ROBERT CHESTER, a fantastical versifier, whose volume is priced
+    in the "Bib. Anglo-Poetica" at 50_l._, but this price was too
+    moderate; for, at the sale of Sir M. Sykes, some ingenious lover of
+    absurd poetry willingly gave 61_l._ 19_s._ I have not yet seen this
+    extraordinary production, and derive my knowledge only from a
+    specimen in the catalogue.
+
+  [10] In 1612 or 13.
+
+  [11] Most of our old plays come before us in a corrupt and mangled
+    state. They were often imperfectly caught by the scribe, or otherwise
+    surreptitiously obtained; hurried through the press from some
+    illegible manuscript by a careless printer, who would throw three
+    distinct speeches into the mouth of one character, transpose the
+    names of the dramatis personæ, and omit the change of scene; while
+    others again with indiscriminate fidelity, from a stolen transcript
+    of the prompter's book, preserved his private memorandums and
+    directions in the stage-copy. Even in the first folio of Shakespeare,
+    so absent from their work were the player-editors, that "tables and
+    chairs" are introduced to direct the property-man, or the
+    scene-shifters, to be in readiness. Verse is printed as prose, to
+    save the expenditure of those small blank spaces which divide those
+    two regions of genius. The dramatists themselves, who probably
+    conceived that they had consigned all their property in their vended
+    plays, never read their own proof-sheets. The reader may form a clear
+    conception of the injuries inflicted on these writers by the existing
+    presentation copy of Massinger's "Duke of Milan," in which may be
+    seen how the poet, after its publication, indignantly corrected the
+    multiplied and the strange errata. The printer gave this text--
+
+      "Observe and honour her as if the SEAL
+      Of woman's goodness only dwelt in hers."
+
+    The poet corrected this to "the SOUL." The sagacity of an English
+    Bentley could hardly have conjectured the happy emendation; only the
+    poet himself could have supplied it.
+
+    Again the printer's text runs--
+
+      "From any lip whose HONOUR writ not Lord."
+
+    The poet corrected this also to "whose OWNER."
+
+    These errors of the press are far more important to the readers of
+    Shakespeare than many suspect. "Who knows," exclaimed the acute
+    Gifford, "whether much of the ingenious toil to explain nonsense in
+    the variorum edition of Shakespeare is not absolutely wasted upon
+    mere _errors of the press_?" Not long after this was said, an actual
+    experiment of the kind was made by a skilful printer. This person,
+    during the leisure of eleven years of a French captivity, had found
+    his most constant companion in a Shakespeare.* By his own experience
+    of the blunders and the mischances of the typographer, to which we
+    may add also a little sagacity, he recovered some of the lost text.
+    His new readings were accompanied by an explanation of those
+    mechanical accidents which had caused these particular errata. The
+    practical printer mortified the haughty commentator by several
+    felicitous and obvious emendations. The grave brotherhood of
+    black-letter looked askance on such humble ingenuity, and turned
+    against the simple printer. Unluckily for ZACHARY JACKSON, he had the
+    temerity, in the flush of success, of abandoning his type-work to err
+    in "the dalliance of fancy" into an ambitious Commentary of "seven
+    hundred passages," when seventy had exceeded his fair claim. The
+    commentating printer therefore met with the fate of the immortalised
+    cobbler who ventured to criticise beyond the right measure of his
+    last.
+
+      * So numerous were the English prisoners in France during the
+      persecuting war of Napoleon, and so general was the demand for a
+      Shakespeare, that more than one edition, I think, was printed by
+      the French booksellers, which I have seen on their literary
+      stalls.
+
+  [12] Collier's "Poetical Decameron," i. 52. STEEVENS thought _The
+    Yorkshire Tragedy_ to be Shakespearian; and the Rev. ALEXANDER DYCE,
+    struck by the Shakespearian soliloquy of the wife, decides that "it
+    contains passages worthy of his pen."--_Dyce's Mem. of Shakespeare_,
+    xxxi.
+
+  [13] That Shakespeare was the favourite poet of Charles the First is
+    confirmed to the eyes of posterity; for on the copy the king used, he
+    has written his own name, and left other traces of his pen; the
+    volume now bears also the autograph of George the Third. It is
+    preserved, it is hoped, in the library of the sovereigns of England.
+
+  [14] Milton, however, has been misinterpreted by some modern critics;
+    when, on this occasion, having quoted that passage in _Richard the
+    Third_ which displays his hypocrisy, Milton adds--"_Other stuff of
+    this sort_ may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet
+    used not much license in departing from the truth of history." Pye,
+    in his "Commentary on the Poetic of Aristotle," is indignant at the
+    language of Milton. He takes the term "stuff" in its modern
+    depreciating sense; but it had no such meaning with Milton, it merely
+    signified _matter_. Pye exclaims--"Could Milton have imagined that
+    _the stuff_ of Mr. William Shakespeare would be preferred to 'Comus'
+    and the 'Samson Agonistes?'"--212.
+
+  [15] I derive my knowledge from the "Roscius Anglicanus" of DOWNES,
+    the prompter; it is a meagre chronicle, and the scribe is illiterate;
+    but the edition by F. WALDRON, 1784, is an addition to our literary
+    history. Though chiefly dramatic, it abounds with some curious secret
+    history. Waldron, himself an humble actor, was, however, a sagacious
+    literary antiquary; but his modesty and failure of encouragement
+    impeded his proposed labours. Gifford found him intelligent when that
+    critic was busied on Jonson; and I possess an evidence of his acute
+    emendations.
+
+    By this chronicle of our drama, it appears that in a list of fifteen
+    stock plays there are seven of Beaumont and Fletcher, three of
+    Jonson, and three of Shakespeare. In another list of twenty-one plays
+    there are _five_ of Jonson, and but _one_ of Shakespeare and that
+    _Titus Andronicus_.
+
+  [16] Butler's "Genuine Remains," ii. 494.
+
+  [17] _Rollo, King and no King_, and _The Maid's Tragedy_.
+
+  [18] We may listen to Pope:--S. "Rymer is a learned and strict
+    critic!"--P. "Ay, that's exactly his character. He is generally
+    right, though rather too severe in his opinion of the particular
+    plays he speaks of; and is, on the whole, one of the best critics we
+    ever had."--Spence's "Anecdotes," 172.
+
+  [19] "Edinburgh Review," Sept. 1831.
+
+  [20] The fate of Rymer's Tragedy has been illustrated by the
+    inimitable humour of Addison in No. 592 of "The Spectator."
+    Describing different theatrical properties, he says--"They are
+    provided with above a dozen showers of snow, which, as I am informed,
+    are the plays of many unsuccessful poets artificially cut and
+    shredded for that use. Mr. Rymer's _Edgar_ is to fall in snow at the
+    next acting of _King Lear_, in order to heighten, or rather to
+    alleviate, the distress of that unfortunate prince, and to serve by
+    way of decoration to a piece which that great critic has written
+    against."
+
+  [21] On the play-bills of that day I find the modern dramas of
+    _Cato_, _The Conscious Lovers_, and Cibber's and Farquhar's plays are
+    simply announced, while the elder dramatists have accompanying
+    epithets, which show the degree of their celebrity according, at
+    least, to the director of the bills; and perhaps indicate the
+    necessity he was under to remind the public, who were not familiar
+    with the titles of these old plays. Thus appear "_The Silent Woman_,
+    a Comedy by the _famous_ Ben Jonson;" "_Hamlet, Prince of Denmark_,
+    written by the _immortal_ Shakespeare;" "_The Soldier's Fortune_,
+    written by the late _ingenious_ Mr. Otway." Though Shakespeare bears
+    away the prize among these epithetical allotments, I suspect that his
+    _immortality_--here positively assigned to him--was owing to the
+    honour of the recent edition by Rowe.
+
+    In 1741 the theatre seems to have recommended the dramas of
+    Shakespeare for the variety of their _historical subjects_. On one of
+    these bills _Richard the Third_ is described as "containing the
+    distresses of King Henry the Sixth; the murder of young King Edward
+    the Fifth and his brother in the Tower; the landing of the Earl of
+    Richmond, and the death of King Richard in the memorable battle of
+    Bosworth, being the last that was fought between the Houses of York
+    and Lancaster; with many other true historical passages."
+
+  [22] "Tatler"--42.
+
+  [23] "Spectator"--39, 285.
+
+  [24] V. iv. 186.
+
+  [25] Pope said that "it was mighty simple in Rowe to write a play
+    now, professedly in Shakespeare's style, that is, the style of a bad
+    age!" He relished as little Milton's "high style," as he called it.
+    "The high style would not have been borne even in Milton, had not his
+    subject turned so much on such strange out-of-the-world things as it
+    does." Lord Shaftesbury would furnish a code of criticism in the days
+    of Pope, when the "Gothic model" was proscribed by such high
+    authorities. But Pope expressed unqualified approbation for the
+    stately but classical "Ferrex and Porrex," and occasioned Spence to
+    reprint it;--a tragedy in the unimpassioned style and short
+    breathings of the asthmatic Seneca.
+
+  [26] COXETER, after a search of thirty years, faithfully collating
+    the best of our old plays, tells us he happened to communicate his
+    scheme to one who now invades it; but for what mistakes and confusion
+    may be expected from the medley now advertising in ten volumes, he
+    appeals to the "Gorboduc" which Spence had published by the desire of
+    Pope; both these wits, and the future editor of "Old Plays," Dodsley,
+    had used the spurious edition! Coxeter's judgment was prophetic in
+    the present instance. "Dodsley's Collection" turned out to be a
+    chance "medley;" unskilled in the language and the literature and the
+    choice of his dramatists, he, as he tells us, "by the assistance of a
+    little common sense set a great number of these passages right;" that
+    is, the dramatist of the dull "Cleone" brought down the ancient
+    genius to his own, and, if he became intelligible, at least he was
+    spurious. If, after all, some parts were left unintelligible, the
+    reader must consider how many such remain in Shakespeare.
+
+  [27] A third edition lies before me, 1757. The preface of the first
+    edition of 1733 was much curtailed in the second of 1740, as well as
+    the notes--particularly those which Theobald describes as "rather
+    verbose and declamatory, and so notes merely of ostentation." The
+    candour is admirable. The third edition seems a mere reprint of the
+    second. The first edition is also curious for its plates preserving
+    the _costume_ or dress of the characters at the time.
+
+    [28] This was one of those literary secrets which are only divulged
+    on that final day of judgment which happens to authors when, on the
+    decease of their publishers, those literary cemeteries, their
+    warerooms, open for the sale of what are called "their effects;" but
+    which, in this instance of literary property, may be deemed "the
+    ineffectual effects." At the sale of "the effects" of Tonson, the
+    great bibliopolist, in 1767, one hundred and forty copies of Pope's
+    "Shakespeare," in six volumes quarto, for which the original
+    subscribers paid six guineas, were disposed of at sixteen shillings
+    only per set.--"Gent. Mag.," lvii. 76.
+
+  [29] See "Quarrels of Authors."
+
+  [30] Laharpe, in a paroxysm of criticism, had both to defend and to
+    censure his great master, Voltaire, on the subject of the Marvellous
+    in Tragedy; and, strange to observe, in the coldness of the
+    Aristotelian-Gallic Poetic, our "monster-poet" carries away the palm.
+    The critic acknowledges that, though he is loath to compare
+    "Semiramis" to that "monster of a tragedy"--"Hamlet," the Ghost there
+    acts as a ghost should do, showing himself but to one person, and
+    revealing a secret unknown to all but himself; while the Ghost of
+    Ninus appears in a full assembly, only to tell the hero to listen to
+    somebody else who knows the secret as well as the Ghost.--"Cours de
+    Littérature."
+
+  [31] Much, if not all, that is valuable in this great body of varied
+    information, has been alphabetically arranged in "A Glossary, or
+    Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs,
+    Proverbs, &c., which have required illustration in the _works of
+    English Authors_, particularly _Shakespeare and his Contemporaries_,"
+    by Archdeacon Nares, 4to, 1822: a compilation as amusing as it is
+    useful, and which I suspect has not been justly appreciated. It is a
+    substitute for all these commentators; and with this volume, at an
+    easy rate, we are made free of the whole Shakespearian corporation.
+
+  [32] Monsieur VILLEMAIN, who possesses a perfect knowledge of our
+    English writers on historical subjects, and many years since composed
+    a life of Cromwell, has drawn up an elaborate article on SHAKESPEARE
+    in the "Biographie Universelle." The perplexities of his taste, and
+    the contradictory results of his critical decisions, are amusing; but
+    it must have been a serious labour for a person of his strict
+    candour. Our critic remains astonished at Johnson's preference of
+    Shakespeare's comic to his tragic genius, which never can be, he
+    adds, the opinion of foreigners. Monsieur Villemain is perfectly
+    right; for no foreigner can comprehend the humour, not always
+    delicate but strong, which often depends on the phrase, as well as on
+    the character; but he errs when he can only discover in the comedy of
+    Shakespeare merely a drama of intrigue, and not a picture of manners.
+    Our critic has formed no conception of the poet's ideal standard and
+    universal nature; insomuch that to this day we continue to apply
+    among ourselves those exquisite personal strokes of the comic
+    characters of Shakespeare. Our critic, who cannot perceive that which
+    perhaps only a native can really taste, is indignant at the
+    enthusiastic critic who has decided that MOLIÈRE only gave "a prosaic
+    copy of human nature, and is merely a faithful or a servile
+    imitator." I suppose this critic is Schlegel, a prejudiced critic on
+    system. I beg leave to add, that it is not necessary to decry the
+    French Shakespeare to elevate our own. Molière is as truly an
+    original genius as any dramatist of any age.
+
+  [33] This rare tract, which I once read in a private library which
+    had been collected in the days of Pope, was apparently Voltaire's
+    entire composition; for the Gallicisms bear the impression of a
+    foreigner's pen, and of one determined to prove the authenticity of
+    its source. "Voltaire, like the French in general," said Dr. Young,
+    "showed the greatest complaisance outwardly, and had the greatest
+    contempt for us inwardly." He consulted Dr. Young about his Essay in
+    English, and begged him to correct any gross faults. The doctor set
+    himself very honestly to work, marked the passages most liable to
+    censure, and when he went to explain himself about them, Voltaire
+    could not avoid bursting out and laughing in his face!--_Spence._
+
+    Had Voltaire accepted the doctor's verbal corrections, or the
+    opinions suggested by him, something else than the "laughing in the
+    face" had been recollected.
+
+  [34] Two specimens of the criticism of Voltaire may explain his
+    involuntary and his voluntary blunders:--
+
+    In _Hamlet_, when one sentinel inquires of the other--"Have you had
+    quiet guard?" he is answered--"Not a mouse stirring!" which Voltaire
+    translates literally--"Pas un souris qui trotte!" How different is
+    the same circumstance described by Racine--"Tout dort, et l'armée, et
+    le vents, et Neptune!" A verse Kaimes had condemned as mere bombast!
+    To every people who had not associated with the general
+    night-stillness of a castle the movement of a mouse, this description
+    would appear ludicrously puerile; while, with us, the familiar idiom
+    is most happily appropriate to the speaker; but this natural language
+    no foreigner can acquire by study or reflection; we imbibe our idioms
+    as we did the milk of the nurse's breast.
+
+    In _Julius Cæsar_, when Voltaire translates Cæsar's reply to
+    Metellus, who would fall at his feet to supplicate for the repeal of
+    his brother's banishment, the Cæesar of Shakespeare uses metaphorical
+    expressions. He would not yield to
+
+      "That which melteth fools; I mean sweet words,
+      Low-crooked curt'sies, and base _spaniel-fawning_.
+      If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for him,
+      _I'd spurn thee like a cur out of my way_."
+
+    This natural style was doubtless "trop familier" for the polished
+    Frenchman, and his version is malicious, and he delights to detail
+    every motion of a spaniel, even to the licking of the feet of his
+    master!--
+
+      "_Les airs d'un chien couchant_ peuvent toucher un sot;
+      Flatte, prie à genoux, et _lèche-moi les pieds_--
+      Va, je te _rosserai_ comme un chien."
+
+    _Rosser_ can only be translated by so mean a phrase as "a sound
+    beating;" while to spurn is no ignoble action, and is used rather in
+    a poetical than familiar style.
+
+
+
+
+THE "HUMOURS" OF JONSON.
+
+
+JONSON studied "THE HUMOURS," and not the passions. What were these
+"humours"? The bard himself does not distinguish them from "manners"--
+
+  Their MANNERS, now call'd HUMOURS, feed the stage.
+
+The ambiguity of the term has confounded it with humour itself; they
+are, however, so far distinct, that a "humour," that is, some absorbing
+singularity in a character, may not necessarily be very humorous--it may
+be only absurd.
+
+When this term "humours" became popular, it sunk into a mystification.
+Every one suddenly had his "humour." It served on all occasions as an
+argument which closed all discussion. The impertinent insisted on the
+privilege of his "humour." "The idiot" who chose to be "apish," declared
+that a lock of hair fantastically hung, or the dancing feather in his
+cap, were his "humour." A moral quality, or an affection of the mind,
+was thus indiscriminately applied to things themselves, when they were
+objects of affectation or whim. The phrase was tossed about till it bore
+no certain meaning. Such indeed is the fate of all fashionable
+cant--ephemera which, left to themselves, die away with their season.
+
+The ludicrous incongruity of applying these physical qualities to moral
+acts, and apologizing for their caprices by their "humours," was too
+exquisitely ludicrous not to be seized on as the property of our comic
+satirists. Shakespeare and Jonson have given perpetuity to this term of
+the vocabulary in vogue, and Jonson has dignified it by transferring it
+to his comic art. Shakespeare has personified these "humours" in that
+whimsical, blunt, grotesque Corporal Nym, the pith of whose reason and
+the chorus of whose tune are his "humours;" admirably contrasting with
+that other "humourist," his companion, ranting the fag-ends of tragedies
+"in Cambyses' vein." Jonson, more elaborate, according to his custom,
+could not quit his subject till he had developed the whole system in
+two comedies of "Every Man IN" and "Every Man OUT of his HUMOUR."
+
+The vague term was least comprehended when most in use. Asper, the
+censor of the times,[1] desires Mitis, who had used it, "to answer what
+was meant:" Mitis, a neutralized man, "who never acts, and has therefore
+no character," can only reply, "Answer what?" The term was too plain or
+too obscure for that simple soul to attach any idea to a word current
+with all the world.
+
+The philosopher then offers
+
+  To give these ignorant well-spoken days
+  Some taste of their abuse of this word HUMOUR.
+
+This rejoices his friend Cordatus:
+
+  Oh, do not let your purpose fall, good Asper;
+  It cannot but arrive most acceptable,
+  Chiefly to such as have the happiness
+  Daily to see how _the poor innocent word
+  Is rack'd and tortured_.
+
+It is then that Asper, or rather Jonson, plunges into a dissertation on
+"the elements," which, according to the ancient philosophy, compound the
+fragile body of man, with the four "humours," or moistures.[2]
+
+Had not this strange phrase been something more than a modish coinage,
+it had not endured so long and spread so wide. Other temporary phrases
+of this nature were equally in vogue, nor have they escaped the vigilant
+causticity of Jonson. Such were "the vapourers," and "the jeerers;" but
+these had not substance in them to live, and Jonson only cast on them a
+side-glance. "The humours" were derived from a more elevated source than
+the airy nothingness of fashionable cant.
+
+How "the humours" came into vogue may I think be discovered. A work long
+famous, and of which multiplied editions, in all the languages of
+Europe, were everywhere spread, deeply engaged public attention; this
+work was _Huarté's Examen de Ingenios_, translated into English as "The
+Examination of Men's Wits." It was long imagined that the Spaniard had
+drawn aside the veil from nature herself, revealing among her varieties
+those of the human character. The secret, "to what profession a man
+will be most apt," must have taken in a wide circle of inquirers. In the
+fifth chapter, we learn that "the differences of men's wits depend on
+the hot, the moist, and the dry;" the system is carried on through "the
+elements" and "the humours." The natural philosophy is of the schools,
+but the author's anatomy of the brain amounted to a demonstration of the
+phenomenon, as it seemed to him. He, however, had struck out some hardy
+novelties and some mendacious illustrations. The system was long
+prevalent, and every one now conceived himself to be the passive agent
+of his predominant temperament or "humour," and looked for that page
+which was to discover to him his own genius. This work in its day made
+as great a sensation as the "Esprit" of Helvetius at a later time; and
+in effect resembled the phrenology of our day, and was as ludicrously
+applied. The first English version--for there are several--appeared in
+1594, and we find that, four years after, "the humours" were so rife
+that they served to plot a whole comedy, as well as to furnish an
+abundance of what they called "epigrams," or short satires of the
+reigning mode.
+
+Jonson's intense observation was microscopical when turned to the minute
+evolutions of society, while his diversified learning at all times bore
+him into a nobler sphere of comprehension. This taste for reality, and
+this fulness of knowledge on whatever theme he chose, had a reciprocal
+action, and the one could not go without the other. Our poet doggedly
+set to "a humour" through its slightest anomalies, and in the pride of
+his comic art expanded his prototype. Yet this was but half the labour
+which he loved; his mind was stored with the most burdensome knowledge;
+and to the scholar the various erudition which he had so diligently
+acquired threw a more permanent light over those transient scenes which
+the painter of manners had so carefully copied.
+
+The pertinacity of Jonson in heaping such minute particularities of "a
+humour," has invariably turned his great dramatic personages into
+complete personifications of some single propensity or mode of action;
+and thus the individual is changed into an abstract being. The passion
+itself is wholly there, but this man of one volition is thrown out of
+the common brotherhood of man; an individual so artificially constructed
+as to include a whole species. Our poet, if we may decide by the system
+which he pursued, seems to have considered his prodigious dramatic
+characters as the conduit-pipes to convey the abundant waters which he
+had gathered into his deep cisterns.
+
+It is surely evident that such elaborate dramatic personages were not
+extemporary creations thrown off in the heat of the pen. Our poet
+professed to instruct as much as to delight; and it was in the severity
+of thought and the austerity of his genius that his nobler conceptions
+arose. His studious habits have been amply ascertained. When he singled
+out "a humour," to possess himself of every trait of the anomalous
+dispositions he contemplated, he must gradually have accumulated, as
+they occurred, the particulars whence to form the aggregate; and like
+Swift, in his "Advice to Servants," in his provident diligence he must
+have jotted down a mass such as we see so curiously unfolded in "the
+character of the persons," prefixed to "Every Man in his Humour," a
+singular dramatic sketch. To this mass, with due labour and shaping, he
+gave the baptism of an expressive name, and conceived that a name would
+necessarily become a person. If he worked in this manner, as I believe
+he did, and "the characters" we have just seen confirm the suggestion,
+it sufficiently explains the space he required to contain his mighty and
+unmixed character--the several made into one; and which we so frequently
+observe he was always reluctant to quit, while a stroke in his jottings
+remained untold. His cup indeed often runs over, and sometimes the dregs
+hang on our lips. We have had perhaps too many of these jottings.
+
+But if Jonson has been accused of having servilely given portraits--and
+we have just seen in what an extraordinary way they are portraits--his
+learning has also been alleged as something more objectionable in the
+dramatic art; and we have often heard something of the pedantry of
+Jonson.
+
+In that elaborate personage Sir Epicure Mammon, we have not only the
+alchemist and the epicurean to answer that characterizing name, but we
+are not to be set free without enduring the obscure babble of "the
+projection" and "the projectors"--which assuredly cost some patient
+sweat of that curious brain--and further being initiated into the
+gastronomic mysteries of the kitchens of the ancients. Volpone, and "the
+gentleman who loves not noise," his other masterpieces, like Sir Epicure
+Mammon, are of the same colossal character. In "The Fox" and "The Fly,"
+the richest veins of antiquity are melted down into his own copious
+invention; nor had the ancients themselves a picture so perfect, or a
+scene so living, of those legacy-hunters, though that vice was almost a
+profession with them. If true learning in the art of the drama be
+peccant, our poet is a very saintly sinner; and Jonson indeed was, as
+Cleaveland has hailed his manes,
+
+  The wonder of a learned age.
+
+The fate of Jonson has inflicted its penalties on his very excellences.
+Some modern critics, whose delicacy of taste in its natural feebleness
+could not strain itself to the vigour of Jonson, have strangely failed
+to penetrate into the depths of that mighty mind; and some modern poets
+have delivered their sad evidence, that for them the Coryphæus of our
+elder dramatists has become unintelligible. Of all our dramatists,
+Jonson, the Juvenal of our drama, alone professed to study the "humour"
+or manners of the age; but manners vanish with their generation; and ere
+the century closes even actors cannot be procured to personate
+characters of which they view no prototype. They remain as the triumphs
+of art and genius, for those who are studious of this rare combination;
+but they were the creatures of "the age," and not for "all time," as
+Jonson himself energetically and prophetically has said of
+Shakespeare.[3]
+
+Shadwell, who has left us nearly twenty comedies, and "the god of whose
+idolatry" was Jonson, in his copious prefaces, and prologues and
+epilogues, overflows with his egotistical admiration of "the humours."
+In his preface to _The Sullen Lovers_, he says that we are not to expect
+the intrigue of comedy, plot and business, lest he should "let fall the
+humour." And in _The Humourist_, he says, "Mr. Jonson was very unjustly
+taxed for personating particular men," in the writing of his humours;
+"but it will ever be the fate of them that write the humours of the
+town." We have more of this in the dedication of _The Virtuoso_, where
+we are told that "four of the humours are entirely new." We have his
+definition of these "humours" in the epilogue to _The Humourists_, and
+which is neatly expressed.
+
+  A Humour is the bias of the mind,
+  By which, with violence, 'tis one way inclined;
+  It makes our action lean on one side still;
+  And, in all changes, that way bends the will.
+
+It is singular that as Jonson has been somewhat censured for drawing so
+elaborately these artificial men and their humours, Shadwell should have
+adopted the notion, and made it the staple of his comic invention.
+
+When men were more insulated, and society was less monotonous than at
+the present day, those whom we now call humourists, without however any
+allusion to the system of the humours, and whom we now rarely meet with,
+allowed their peculiar tastes and fancies to be more prominent in their
+habits, so as to make them more observable, and more the subject of
+ridicule than we find them in the present level decorum of society.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] In the Introduction to _Every Man Out of his Humour_.
+
+  [2] See Nares' "Glossary" for an account of these Humours in their
+    philosophical sense.
+
+  [3] "He was not of an age, but for all time."--_Jonson._
+
+
+
+
+DRAYTON.
+
+
+"THE POLY-OLBION" of DRAYTON is a stupendous work, "a strange Herculean
+toil," as the poet himself has said, and it was the elaborate production
+of many years. The patriotic bard fell a victim to its infelicitous but
+glorious conception; and posterity may discover a grandeur in this
+labour of love, which was unfelt by his contemporaries.
+
+The "Poly-olbion" is a chorographical description of England and Wales;
+an amalgamation of antiquarianism, of topography, and of history;
+materials not the most ductile for the creations of poetry. This poem is
+said to have the accuracy of a road-book; and the poet has contributed
+some notices, which add to the topographic stores of CAMDEN; for this
+has our poet extorted an alms of commendation from such a niggardly
+antiquary as Bishop Nicholson, who confesses that this work affords "a
+much truer account of this kingdom than could be well expected from the
+pen of a poet."
+
+The grand theme of this poet was his fatherland! The muse of Drayton
+passes by every town and tower; each tells some tale of ancient glory,
+or of some "worthy" who must never die. The local associations of
+legends and customs are animated by the personifications of mountains
+and rivers; and often, in some favourite scenery, he breaks forth with
+all the emotion of a true poet. The imaginative critic has described the
+excursions of our muse with responsive sympathy. "He has not," says
+Lamb, "left a rivulet so narrow that it may be stepped over without
+honourable mention, and has associated hills and streams with life and
+passion beyond the dreams of old mythology." But the journey is long,
+and the conveyance may be tedious; the reader, accustomed to the
+decasyllabic or heroic verse, soon finds himself breathless among the
+protracted and monotonous Alexandrines, unless he should relieve his ear
+from the incumbrance, by resting on the cæsura, and thus divide those
+extended lines by the alternate grace of a ballad-stanza. The artificial
+machinery of Drayton's personifications of mountains and rivers, though
+these may be often allowed the poet, yet they seem more particularly
+ludicrous, as they are crowded together on the maps prefixed to each
+county, where this arbitrary mythology, masculine and feminine, are to
+be seen standing by the heads of rivers, or at the entrances of towns.
+
+This extraordinary poem remains without a parallel in the poetical
+annals of any people; and it may excite our curiosity to learn its
+origin. The genealogy of poetry is often suspicious; but I think we may
+derive the birth of the "Poly-olbion" from LELAND's magnificent view of
+his designed work on "Britain," and that hint expanded by the
+"Britannia" of CAMDEN, who inherited the mighty industry, without the
+poetical spirit of LELAND: DRAYTON embraced both.
+
+It is a nice question to decide how far history may be admitted into
+poetry; like "Addison's Campaign," the poem may end in a rhymed gazette.
+And in any other work of invention, a fiction, by too free an infusion
+of historical matter, can only produce that monster called "the Romance
+of History," a nonsensical contradiction in terms, for neither can be
+both; or that other seductive and dangerous association of real persons
+and fictitious incidents, the historical romance! It is remarkable that
+DRAYTON censures DANIEL, his brother poet, for being _too historical_ in
+his "Civil Wars," and thus transgressing the boundaries of history and
+poetry, of truth and invention. Of these just boundaries, however, he
+himself had no clear notion. Drayton in his "Baron's Wars" sunk into a
+grave chronicler; and in the "Poly-olbion," we see his muse treading a
+labyrinth of geography, of history, and of topography!
+
+The author of the "Poly-olbion" may truly be considered as the inventor
+of a class of poems peculiar to our country, and which, when I was
+young, were popular or fashionable. These are loco-descriptive poems.
+Such were Denham's "Cooper's Hill,"[1] and its numerous and, some,
+happy imitations. In these local descriptions some favoured spot in the
+landscape opens to the poet not only the charm of its natural
+appearance, but in the prospect lie scenes of the past. Imagination,
+like a telescope fixed on the spot, brings nearer to his eyes those
+associations which combine emotion with description; and the contracted
+spot, whence the bard scattered the hues of his fancy, is aggrandized by
+noble truths.
+
+The first edition of the "Poly-olbion," in 1613, consisted of eighteen
+"Songs," or cantos, and every one enriched by the notes and
+illustrations of the poet's friend, our great national antiquary,
+SELDEN, whose avarice of words in these recondite stores conceals almost
+as many facts as he affords phrases. This volume was ill received by the
+incurious readers of that age. Drayton had vainly imagined that the
+nobles and gentlemen of England would have felt a filial interest in the
+tale of their fathers, commemorated in these poetic annals, and an
+honourable pride in their domains here so graphically pictured. But no
+voice, save those of a few melodious brothers, cheered the lonely
+lyrist, who had sung on every mountain, and whose verse had flowed with
+every river. After a hopeless suspension of nine years, the querulous
+author sent forth the concluding volume to join its neglected brother.
+It appeared with a second edition of the first part, which is nothing
+more than the unsold copies of the first, to which the twelve additional
+"Songs" are attached, separately paged. These last come no longer
+enriched by the notes of Selden, or even embellished by those fanciful
+maps which the unfortunate poet now found too costly an ornament.
+Certain accidental marks of the printer betray the bibliographical
+secret, that the second edition was in reality but the first.[2] The
+preface to the second part is remarkable for its inscription, in no good
+humour,
+
+  TO ANY THAT WILL READ IT!
+
+There was yet no literary public to appeal to, to save the neglected
+work which the great SELDEN had deemed worthy of his studies: but there
+was, as the poet indignantly designates them, "a cattle, _odi profanum
+vulgus et arceo_, of which I account them, be they never so great." And
+"the cattle" conceived that there was nothing in this island worthy
+studying. We had not yet learned to esteem ourselves at a time when six
+editions of Camden's "Britannia," in the original Latin, were diffusing
+the greatness of England throughout Europe.
+
+But though this poet devoted much of his life to this great antiquarian
+and topographic poem, he has essayed his powers in almost every species
+of poetry; fertility of subject, and fluency of execution, are his
+characteristics. He has written historical narratives too historical;
+heroic epistles hardly Ovidian; elegies on several occasions, or rather,
+domestic epistles, of a Horatian cast; pastorals, in which there is a
+freshness of imagery, breathing with the life of nature; and songs, and
+satire, and comedy. In comedy he had not been unsuccessful, but in
+satire he was considered more indignant than caustic. There is one
+species of poetry, rare among us, in which he has been eminently
+successful; his "Nymphidia, or Court of Faerie," is a model of the
+grotesque, those arabesques of poetry, those lusory effusions on
+chimerical objects. There are grave critics who would deny the poet the
+liberty allowed to the painter. The "Nymphidia" seems to have been ill
+understood by some modern critics. The poet has been censured for
+"neither imparting nor feeling that half-believing seriousness which
+enchants us in the wild and magical touches of Shakespeare;" but the
+poet designed an exquisitely ludicrous fiction. Drayton has, however,
+relieved the grotesque scenes, by rising into the higher strains of
+poetry, such as Gray might not have disdained.
+
+It was the misfortune of Drayton not to have been a popular poet, which
+we may infer from his altercations with his booksellers, and from their
+frequent practice of prefixing new title pages, with fresher dates, to
+the first editions of his poems. That he was also in perpetual quarrel
+with his muse, appears by his frequent alteration of his poems. He often
+felt that curse of an infelicitous poet, that his diligence was more
+active than his creative power. Drayton was a poet of volume, but his
+genius was peculiar; from an unhappy facility in composition, in
+reaching excellence he too often declined into mediocrity. A modern
+reader may be struck by the purity and strength of his diction; his
+strong descriptive manner lays hold of the fancy; but he is always a
+poet of reason, and never of passion. He cannot be considered as a poet
+of mediocrity, who has written so much above that level; nor a poet who
+can rank among the highest class, who has often flattened his spirit by
+its redundance.
+
+There was another cause, besides his quarrel with his muse, which threw
+a shade over the life of Drayton. He had been forward to greet James the
+First, on his accession to the throne of England, with a congratulatory
+ode; but for some cause, which has not been revealed, he tells us, "he
+suffered shipwreck by his forward pen." The king appears to have
+conceived a personal dislike to the bard, a circumstance not usual with
+James towards either poets or flatterers. It seems to arise from some
+state-matter, for Drayton tells us,
+
+  I feare, as I do stabbing, this word, state.
+
+According to Oldys, Drayton appears to have been an agent in the
+Scottish king's intercourse with his English friends; some unlucky
+incident probably occurred, which might have indisposed the monarch
+towards his humble friend. The unhappy result of his court to the new
+sovereign cast a sour and melancholy humour over his whole life;
+Drayton, in his "Elegy" to his brother-poet, Sandys, has perpetuated his
+story.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Dr. Johnson has ascribed the invention of local poetry to Denham,
+    who, he thought, had "traced a new scheme of poetry, copied by Garth
+    and Pope, after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration
+    of smaller poets." Johnson and the critics of his day were wholly
+    unacquainted with the Fathers of our poetry; nor is it true that we
+    have not had loco-descriptive poems since Garth and Pope, which may
+    rank with theirs.
+
+  [2] Perhaps none of our poets have been more luckless in their
+    editors than Drayton. He himself published a folio edition of his
+    works in 1619; but some of his more interesting productions, now
+    lying before me, are contained in a small volume, 1631--the year in
+    which he died.
+
+    A modern folio edition was published by Dodsley in 1748. The
+    title-page assures us that this volume contains _all_ his writings;
+    while a later edition, in four volumes 8vo, 1753, pretends to supply
+    the deficiencies of the former, which at length Dodsley had
+    discovered, but it is awkwardly done by an _Appendix_, and is still
+    deficient. The rapid demand for a new edition of Drayton between 1748
+    and 1753 bears a suspicious aspect. An intelligent bibliopolist, Mr.
+    Rodd, informs me that this _octavo_ edition is in fact the identical
+    _folio_, only arranged to the octavo form by a contrivance, well
+    known among printers, at the time of printing the folio. The
+    separation of the additional poems in the Appendix confirms this
+    suggestion.
+
+    Of the "Poly-olbion," the edition called the second, of 1622, has
+    fetched an excessive price; while the first, considered incomplete,
+    may be procured at a very moderate price. The possessor of the first
+    edition, however, enjoys the whole treasure of Selden's lore. Mr.
+    Southey, in his "Specimens of Our Ancient Poets," has reprinted the
+    entire "Poly-olbion" with his usual judgment; but, unhappily, the
+    rich stores of Selden the publishers probably deemed superfluous.
+    Drayton is worthy of a complete edition of his works.
+
+
+
+
+THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH.
+
+
+Rawleigh is a great name in our history, and fills a space in our
+imagination. His military and maritime genius looked for new regions, to
+found perhaps his own dominion. Yet was this hero the courtier holding
+"the glass of fashion," and the profound statesman--whose maxims and
+whose counsels Milton, the severe Milton, carefully collected--and the
+poet, who, when he found a master-genius lingering in a desert, joyed to
+pay him the homage of his protection. Rawleigh, who, in his youthful
+hours, and even through his vagrant voyages, was at all times a student,
+in the ripeness of his knowledge was a sage. Thus he who seemed through
+all his restless days to have lived only for his own age, was the true
+servant of posterity.
+
+If ever there have been men whose temperaments and dispositions have
+harmonized within themselves faculties seemingly incompatible, with an
+equability of force combining the extremes of our nature, it would not
+be difficult to believe that Sir Walter Rawleigh was one of this rarest
+species. Various and opposite were his enterprises, but whichever was
+the object his aptitude was prompt; for he is equally renowned for his
+active and his contemplative powers; in neither he seems to have held a
+secondary rank. And he has left the nation a collection of his writings
+which claim for their author the just honours of being one of the
+founders of our literature.
+
+This is the perspective view of his _character_ as it appears at a
+distance; his was a strange and adventurous _life_! the shifting scenes
+seem gathering together as in a tale of fiction, full of as surprising
+incidents, and as high passions, and as intricate and mysterious as the
+involutions of a well-invented fable. And in this various history of a
+single individual should we be dazzled by the haughtiness of prosperity,
+and even be startled by the baseness of humiliation, still shall we find
+one sublime episode more glorious than the tale, and as pathetic a close
+as ever formed the catastrophe of a tragic romance. I pursue this
+history as far as concerns its psychological development.
+
+It was the destiny of Rawleigh to be the artificer of his own fortunes,
+and in that arduous course to pass through pinching ways and sharp
+turns. The younger son of a family whose patrimony had not lasted with
+their antiquity, he had nothing left but his enterprise and his sword;
+his mind had decided on his calling. The romantic adventures of the
+Spanish in new regions had early kindled the master-mind which takes its
+lasting bent from its first strong impulse. The Spaniards and their new
+world, "the treasures and the paradises" which they enjoyed, haunted his
+dreams to his latest days. The age in which the great struggle had
+commenced in Europe for the independence of nations and of faiths, was
+as favourable to the indulgence of the military passion as it was
+pregnant with political instruction. No period in modern history was so
+prodigal of statesmen and of heroes; and Rawleigh was to be both.
+
+Two noble schools for military education were opened for our youthful
+volunteer: among the Protestants in France, when they assembled their
+own armies, and subsequently in the Netherlands, under the Prince of
+Orange, Rawleigh learned the discipline of a valorous but a wary leader,
+and beheld in Don John of Austria the hardihood of a presumptuous
+commander, whose "self-confidence could overcome the greatest
+difficulties, yet in his judgment so weak, that he could not manage the
+least."
+
+The captain who had fleshed his sword in many a field, now cast his
+fortunes in that other element which led Columbus to discovery, and
+Pizarro to conquest. Rawleigh had an uterine brother, whom he justly
+called his "true brother," Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a great navigator, and
+the projector of a new passage to the Indies; an expedition was fitted
+out by them to colonise some parts of North America; his first maritime
+essay was frustrated by a disastrous accident. But the intrepid activity
+of Rawleigh allowed no pause, and now it turned against the rebellious
+kerns of Ireland. His disputes with Grey, the Lord-deputy, brought them
+before the council-board in the presence of the queen. Our adventurer
+knew how to value this fortunate opportunity. His eloquent tale struck
+his lordly adversary dumb, and was not slightly noticed by Elizabeth.
+The soldier of fortune was now hanging loosely about the circle of the
+court, watchful of another fortunate moment to attract the queen's
+attention. There was a very remarkable disposition in this extraordinary
+man, as I have elsewhere noticed, of practising petty artifices in the
+affairs of life. The gay cavalier flung his rich embroidered mantle
+across the plashy spot for an instantaneous foot-cloth, not unknowing
+that an act of gallantry was sure to win the susceptible coquetry of his
+royal mistress. His personal grace, and his tall stature, and the charm
+of his voluble elocution when once admitted into the presence, were
+irresistible. On the same system as he had cast his mantle before the
+queen, he scratched on a window-pane likely to catch her majesty's eye
+that verse expressive of his "desire" and "his fear to climb," to which
+the queen condescended to add her rhyme.
+
+The man of genius was not yet entangled in the meshes of political
+parties, and was still contemplating on an imaginary land north of the
+Gulf of Florida, as studious of the art of navigation as he had been of
+the art of war. He has left a number of essays on both these subjects,
+composed for Prince Henry in the succeeding reign. He was already in
+favour with the queen, for she sanctioned a renewal of the unfortunate
+expedition under his brother. Rawleigh had the largest vessel built
+under his own eye, for he was skilful in naval architecture, and he
+named it "The Rawleigh," anticipating the day when it should leave that
+name to a city or a kingdom. It was on this occasion that the queen
+commanded Rawleigh to present to his brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, a
+precious gem on which was engraven an anchor guided by a lady,
+graciously desiring in return the picture of the hardy adventurer. Such
+were the arts of female coquetry which entered so admirably into her
+system of policy, kindling such personal enthusiasm in the professed
+lovers of their royal mistress, while she resigned her heroes to their
+enterprises at their own honourable cost of their fortunes or their
+lives. In this second expedition Sir Humphrey Gilbert realised a
+discovery of what was then called "The Newfoundland," of which he took
+possession for England with the due formalities; but on his return his
+slender bark foundered, and thus obscurely perished one of the most
+enlightened of that heroic race of our maritime discoverers--the true
+fathers of future colonies.
+
+Rawleigh, unrolling an old map which had been presented to her royal
+father, charmed the queen by the visions which had long charmed himself.
+Her majesty granted letters patent to secure to him the property of the
+countries which he might discover or might conquer. Rawleigh minutely
+planned the future operations, and by the captains he sent, for the
+queen would not part with her favourite, that country was discovered to
+which had the royal maiden not so eagerly given the name of "Virginia,"
+had probably borne that of Rawleigh; for subsequently he betrayed this
+latent design when he proposed founding a city with that romantic name.
+
+But the pressing interests of our home affairs withdrew his mind from
+undiscovered dominions. Rawleigh was a chief adviser of Elizabeth in the
+great Spanish invasion. He was eminently active in various expeditions,
+and not less serviceable in parliament. The ceaseless topic of his
+counsels, and the frequent exercise of his pen, was the alarming
+aggrandisement of the Spanish power. At this day, perhaps, we can form
+no adequate notion of that Catholic and colossal dominion which Rawleigh
+dwells on. "No prince in the west hath spread his wing far over his nest
+but the Spaniard, and made many attempts to make themselves masters of
+all Europe." Possibly he may have ascribed too great an influence to the
+treasures of India, which seem to have been always exaggerated; however,
+he assures us, and as a statesman he may have felt a conviction, that
+"its Indian gold endangers and disturbs all the nations of Europe; it
+creeps into counsels, purchases intelligence, and sets bound loyalty at
+liberty in the greatest monarchies. When they dare not with their own
+forces invade, they basely entertain the traitors and vagabonds of all
+nations." We have here a complete picture of those arts of policy which,
+in the revolutionary system of France, endangered Europe, and which may
+yet, should ever a colossal power again overshadow its independent
+empires.
+
+To clip "the wing that had spread far over its nest," by cutting off
+the uninterrupted supplies of the plate fleets of Spain, was a course in
+which the queen only perceived the earnest loyalty of the intrepid
+adventurer; nor was that loyalty less for its perfect accordance with
+his own personal concerns.
+
+Rawleigh and his joint adventurers in these discoveries were carrying on
+their expeditions at the risk of their private fortunes, and it appears
+that his own zeal had beguiled young men to change their immoveable
+lands for light pinnaces. The prudential ministers looked on with a cold
+eye, and the economical sovereign, as she was wont, rewarded her hero in
+her own way. Elizabeth bestowed titular honours, and cut out a seignory
+in Ireland from the Earl of Desmond's domains, which Rawleigh's own
+sword had chiefly won; twelve thousand acres, yielding no rents;
+dismantled farms and tenantless hamlets--an estate of fire and blood! A
+more substantial patent was conferred on him, to license taverns for the
+sale of wines; and at length it was enlarged to levy tonnage and
+poundage, specifying that the grant was "to sustain his great charges in
+the discovery of remote countries."
+
+This was one of those odious monopolies by which the parsimonious
+sovereign pretended to reward the services of the individual by the
+infliction of a great public grievance, infinitely more intolerable than
+any pension-list; for every monopoly was a traffic admitting all sorts
+of abuses. Rawleigh's inventive faculty often broke forth into humbler
+schemes in domestic affairs. He seems first to have perceived in the
+expansion of society, the difficulty of communication for the wants of
+life. He projected an office for universal agency; and in this he
+anticipated that useful intelligence which we now recognise by the term
+of advertisement. New enterprises and ceaseless occupation were the
+aliment of that restless and noble spirit. But these monopolies,
+severely exacted, provoking complaints and contests, were one among
+other causes which may account for Rawleigh's unpopularity, even at his
+meridian.
+
+To his absorbing devotion to obtain the queen's favour, he has himself
+ascribed his numerous enemies. While Elizabeth listened to his ingenious
+solutions of all her inquiries, many close at hand took umbrage lest
+they themselves were being supplanted; while he himself, with marked
+expressions, disdained all popularity. Hence, from opposite quarters, we
+learn how haughtily his genius bore him in commanding the world under
+him. And there is no doubt, as Aubrey tells us, that he was "damnably
+proud." Even in the height of court favour, this great man was obnoxious
+to the people. This we see by an anecdote of Tarleton, the jester of
+Elizabeth, famed for his extemporal acting. Performing before the queen,
+while Rawleigh stood by her majesty, shuffling a pack of cards, and
+pointing to the royal box, the jesting comedian exclaimed, "See, the
+knave commands the queen!" Her majesty frowned; but the audience
+applauding, the queen, ever chary in checking any popular feeling,
+reserved her anger till the following day, when Tarleton was banished
+from the royal presence. Nor was Rawleigh less unpopular in the
+succeeding reign, when the mob hooted this great man, and when this
+great man condescended to tell them how much he despised such rogues and
+varlets! The inconsiderate multitude, in the noble preface to his great
+work, he compared to "dogs, who always bark at those they know not, and
+whose nature is to accompany one another in these clamours."
+
+However busied by the discovery of remote countries, the armed ships of
+Rawleigh often brought into port a Spanish prize. The day arrived--the
+short but golden day--when, as his contemporary and a secretary of state
+has told us, "he who was first to roll through want, and disability to
+exist, before he came to a repose," betrayed a sudden affluence--in the
+magnificence about him--in the train of his followers, when he seemed to
+be the rival of the chivalrous Essex--in the gorgeousness of his dress,
+from the huge diamond which buttoned his feather, to his shoes powdered
+with pearls, darting from every point of his person the changeful light
+of countless jewels. In this habiliment, fitted to be the herald of that
+goddess of beauty to which Elizabeth was familiarly compared, beside the
+Queen during her royal progresses, stood the captain of her guard, and
+her eyes were often solaced as they dwelt on the minion of fortune, her
+own prosperous adventurer; it was with secret satisfaction that she knew
+his treasure was not taken out of her exchequer. It could only have
+been some great Spanish galleon, like that of "The Madre de Dios," which
+furnished Rawleigh with that complete suit of armour of solid silver
+which fixed all eyes at the tilt; or which went to build the stately
+mansion of Sherborne, and to plan its fanciful gardens and groves,
+drawing the river through the rocks. Curious in horticulture as in the
+slightest arts he practised, Rawleigh's hands transplanted the first
+orange trees which breathed in this colder clime, as he had given
+Ireland the Virginian potato, and England the Virginian tobacco, and
+perhaps the delicious ananas. But Sherborne was Church land. It is said
+that Sir Walter had often cast a wistful eye on it as it lay in his
+journeys from Devonshire. It gave umbrage to some in Church and State
+that, by frightening a timid Bishop of Salisbury, he had prevailed on
+him to alienate the manor of Sherborne from his see in favour of the
+Crown, that it might the more securely be transferred to him who had
+coveted it, till another coveter, in the despicable Carr, plundered him
+who had despoiled the diocese.
+
+A genius versatile as ambitious, moving in the eventful court of a
+female sovereign, though often musing on "remote countries" or Spanish
+galleons, could not stand as a mere spectator amid the agitated
+amphitheatre of politics, nor in the luxuriance of courtly idleness save
+himself from softer, but not always less fatal, intrigues. Rawleigh was
+the victim of love and of politics.
+
+On his first entrance to a court life, Rawleigh found Burleigh and
+Leicester watchful of each other. They were the heads of dark factions
+which clouded the Court of Elizabeth, and crooked were the ways our
+aspirant had to wind. Leicester seems to have been an early patron of
+Rawleigh, by means of his nephew Sir Philip Sidney. At length,
+perceiving his ascendancy over the Queen, the great lord, to overturn
+this idol of womanish caprice, introduced his youthful son-in-law, the
+famous and unfortunate Essex; nor had he, who himself had been a
+reigning favourite, miscalculated on the fascination of a new lover. The
+contest for the royal smile became too apparent; ruptures and
+reconciliations followed, till death closed these eventful jealousies.
+Rawleigh had glided over to the opposition under the subtle and the
+plotting Cecil.
+
+An intrigue of less guiltiness than these dark machinations of heartless
+men banished Rawleigh from court. In the dalliance of the ladies of the
+privy-chamber, through the long tedious days of audience, he once too
+wittily threw out an observation on that seductive but spotless circle,
+the maids of honour, who, he declared were "like witches, who could do
+hurt, but do no good." There was one, however, the bewitching
+Throgmorton, who was all goodness; the impassioned knight was
+resistless; and subsequently the law consecrated what love had already
+irrevocably joined. But envy with its evil eye was peering. The Queen of
+Virgins, implacable in love-treasons, sent the lovers to the Tower.
+
+In this desperate predicament, Rawleigh had lost in an hour the proud
+work of his highest ambition, the favour of his mistress-sovereign. The
+forlorn hero had recourse to one of those prompt and petty stratagems in
+which he was often so dexterous. At his prison-window, one day, he
+beheld the Queen passing in her barge, and suddenly raved like a
+distracted lover. He entreated to be allowed to go in disguise to rest
+his eyes once more on the idol of his heart; and when the governor
+refused this extraordinary request of a state-prisoner, he, in his
+agony, struggled. Their daggers were clutched; till Sir Arthur Gorge,
+seeing "the cold iron walking about," rushed between these terrible
+combatants. All this, Gorge, then a friend of Rawleigh, minutely
+narrates in a letter to Cecil, at the same time gently hinting that, if
+the minister deem it proper, it may be communicated to the queen, that
+such was the miserable condition of Rawleigh, that he fell distracted
+only at the distant sight of her majesty. This theatrical scene was got
+up for the nonce, and served as a prologue to another characteristic
+effusion, a letter of raving gallantry, which Orlando Furioso himself
+might have penned, potent with the condensed essence of old romance. The
+amorist in his prison thus sorrows: "I was wont to behold her riding
+like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus; the gentle wind
+blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks like a nymph; sometime
+sitting in the shade like a goddess, sometime singing like an angel."
+Sir Walter knew how high the pulse beat of his royal mistress, now aged
+by her sixtieth year. He obtained his freedom, but was banished the
+presence. And now, cast out of court favour, and calling himself "The
+Queen's Captive," Rawleigh, whom many had feared and few had not
+admired, found that even fools had the courage to vex a banished
+favourite.
+
+There was no hope; yet Rawleigh, in his exile at his own Sherborne,
+addressed more than one letter to the queen, warning her of "the dangers
+of a Spanish faction in Scotland." But the letters were received in
+silence. Rawleigh then attempted to awaken Cecil to the state of
+Ireland, then on the point of exploding into a rebellion. He compares
+himself to the Trojan soothsayer, "who cast his spear against the wooden
+horse, and was not believed." The language of complaint was not long
+tolerable to a spirit which would have commanded the world; and at once
+he took his flight from the old to the new, and his fleet and himself
+were again buoyant on the ocean.
+
+This was Rawleigh's first voyage to "the empire of Guiana," as it was
+then called. His interesting narrative Hume has harshly condemned, as
+containing "the most palpable lies ever imposed on the credulity of
+mankind." Our romantic adventurer has incurred censure for his own
+credulity in search of mines which appear to have existed, and of "the
+golden city," which lying Spaniards had described; and he had even his
+honour impeached by the baffled speculators of his own day, whom he had
+beguiled with his dreams; but he who sacrificed life and fortune in a
+great enterprise, left the world a pledge that he at least believed in
+his own tale.
+
+Rawleigh, like other men of genius, was influenced by the spirit of the
+age, which was the spirit of discovery; and to the brave and the
+resolved, what could be impracticable which opened a new world? The
+traditions of the Spaniards had been solemnly recorded in the
+collections of their voyages, and had been sanctioned by the reports of
+Rawleigh's own people: and he himself had fed his eyes and his dreams on
+the novel aspect of those fertile plains and branching rivers, inhabited
+by fifty nations; on animals of a new form, and birds of a new plumage;
+and on a vegetable world of trees and plants, and flowers, and fruits,
+on which the eye dwelt for the first time--a fresh creation, "the face
+of whose earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil
+spent by manurance."
+
+The origin of those puerile tales which the Europeans brought home with
+them has not been traced. Some have the air of religious legends,
+descriptive of the Paradise of the Blacks, such as that chimerical
+Manoa, where they said, "the king had golden images of every object on
+earth." Or were such marvellous fictions the shrewd inventions of these
+children of nature, more cunning than the men of Europe, stupified and
+credulous from their sovereign passion? When the Indians on the coast
+found that the whites seemed insatiate of gold and pearls, they fostered
+the madness, directing their strange invaders far up into the land, to
+the great city of Manoa, the El-Dorado of the Spaniards, and which no
+one ever reached. In this manner they probably designed to rid
+themselves of their ambiguous guests, sending them to stray in the
+deserts of primeval forests, or to sail along interminable rivers,
+wrecked amid rapid falls.
+
+Rawleigh endured many miseries; and on his return his narrative was
+deemed fabulous. The pathos of his language, however, perpetuates his
+dignified affliction. "Of the little remaining fortune I had, I have
+wasted in effect all herein; I have undergone many constructions, been
+accompanied with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickness, and
+peril. From myself I have deserved no thanks, for I am returned a beggar
+and withered."
+
+An enterprise which was, as he himself considered it to be, national,
+crushed the resources of the individual. He assures us that he might
+have enriched himself, had "it become the former fortune in which he
+once lived, and sorted with all the offices of honour, which by her
+majesty's grace he held that day in England, for him _to go journies of
+picory_;" that is, in Gondomar's plain Spanish "piracy;" for the
+Spaniards applied the term _picarro_, a rogue or thief, to every one
+sailing in their forbidden seas. The dedication of his narrative, though
+directed to Howard and Cecil, was evidently addressed to "the lady of
+ladies," who, however, could not break her enchanted silence.
+
+Spain trembled at the efforts of a single hero of England; she seemed to
+anticipate her uncertain dominion over that new world. Spain, though
+proud and mighty, standing on her golden feet, yet found them weak as
+unbaked clay, while her treasure-fleets were either burned or sunk, or
+carried into our ports. But at home there were those who dreaded the
+ascendancy of that bold spirit, which even in his present sad condition
+asserted that "there were men worthy to be kings of these dominions, and
+who, by the queen's grace and leave, would undertake it of themselves."
+His adversaries would cloak their private envy under the fair colour of
+the public safety, or seemed wise with prudential scepticism. Yet the
+dauntless soul of Rawleigh, amid his distresses, despatched two ships
+under his devoted Keymis, to keep up the intercourse with the weak
+colony he had left behind; this was the second voyage to Guiana, which
+only increased the anxiety for a third, which soon followed.
+
+It is a curious instance of that alarm of jealousy prevalent with the
+favourites of those days, that during the time of Rawleigh's disgrace at
+court merely his sudden appearance in the metropolis, as the news is
+cautiously indicated, "gave cause of discontent to some other"--that is,
+the reigning favourite, Essex; possibly there might be some cause, for
+the writer tells, that Rawleigh was "in good hope to return into
+grace;"[1] but this restorative was not then administered to the lorn
+stroller from Sherborne. The queen was imperturbable.
+
+The royal anger of Elizabeth never interfered with her policy, nor
+dulled her sagacity. Two years after, in 1596, it was decided to attack
+the Spanish fleet in their own harbours, according to a plan laid down
+by Rawleigh, as far back as in 1588; he was now wanted, and therefore he
+was remembered, as far as his appointment, to be one of the four
+commanders in the famous expedition against Cadiz. Essex, as
+commander-in-chief, betrayed his incompetence, and Rawleigh the prompt
+energy of his military and his maritime abilities. Essex, at all times
+his rival, and never his friend, saw his own lustre dusked by the
+eminence of his inferior; and on his return fatally read in the eyes of
+his royal mistress the first omen of his decline. During his absence,
+his recommendation of Sir Thomas Bodley for the secretaryship of state
+had been rejected, and the hated Cecil had triumphed. Rawleigh now
+undertook a more difficult affair than the victory of Cadiz--he effected
+an amicable arrangement between Cecil and Essex; and this seems to have
+been a most grateful service to the queen, for a month afterwards, we
+find him again at court. Five years must have elapsed,--so long the
+queen could preserve the royalty of her anger.
+
+Restored to the queen's favour, the lover had lost nothing of his
+fascination. The very day on which Cecil led Rawleigh in "as captain of
+the guard," he rode in the evening with the queen, and held a private
+conference; where, probably, many secrets and counsels were divulged,
+too long and too proudly suppressed.[2] All this was done in the absence
+of Essex, but not without his consent: for the three enemies were now to
+be friends.
+
+The second great expedition followed. Again Essex betrayed his
+inexperience and his failure, while Rawleigh, in a brilliant action,
+took Fayal. The reception of Essex at court levelled his ambition, and
+he retreated from the queen's reproaches, sick at heart, to bury himself
+in sullen seclusion. The remainder of his days exhibit a series of
+disturbed acts, in the continued conflict between his own popularity and
+the variable favour of the queen. To complete this tale of political
+intrigues, we have a letter, remarkable for its style, its matter, and
+its object, from Rawleigh to Cecil, urging the annihilation of "the
+tyrant," before "it is too late," in terms hardly ambiguous enough to
+save Rawleigh from the charge of having hurried on the fate of Essex, at
+whose execution he shed tears;[3] and in the confession of one of
+Essex's desperate advisers, in their mad rising, we learn that the earl
+had fixed on Rawleigh to be got rid of.
+
+If we reflect a moment on this triumvirate of political friends--and
+Cecil secretly assured the Scottish monarch, that "he and they would
+never live under one apple-tree"--we may see how the wiles and
+jealousies of love are not more fatal than those of intriguing
+statesmen. Rawleigh, for a purpose reconciles Essex with Cecil; but in
+reality, the three alike bear a mutual antipathy. When Essex in disgrace
+lay sick at home, and the queen half-repentant in her severity sent a
+friendly message to the earl, this appearance of returning favour
+towards Essex startled Rawleigh, who is seized with sickness in his
+turn; and the queen, at once the royal slave and mistress of her
+court-lovers, is compelled to send him a cordial of an equivalent
+kindness; and both these political patients were cured by the same
+prescription.
+
+Cecil and Rawleigh paused not till they laid the head of Essex on the
+block; and that day sealed their own fortunes, for, left without a
+rival, they became rivals to each other. "Those," said Rawleigh on the
+scaffold, "who set me against him, set themselves afterwards against me,
+and were my greatest enemies." This may be placed among the confessions
+of criminal friendships!
+
+Cecil "bore no love to Rawleigh," tells a contemporary; but we know more
+than contemporaries, and we possess secrets which Rawleigh could not
+discover while Elizabeth was on the throne, though a lurking suspicion
+of the hollowness of his friend "Robin" may have lain on his mind when
+he wrote this verse on the ambidextrous Talleyrand, who through all
+changes
+
+  Still kept on the mountain, and left us on the plain.
+
+It was while this subdolous minister was holding most intimate
+intercourse with Rawleigh, while his son was placed under his guardian
+care at Sherborne, and he himself, with Lord Cobham his brother-in-law,
+was there a guest, that this extraordinary Machiavel was daily working
+at the destruction of both his friends! This was effectually done by
+instilling into the Scottish monarch antipathies never to be uprooted.
+On the demise of the queen, Rawleigh was for raising up an English
+against a Scottish party; he was for keeping the government in their own
+hands, and, looking on the successor to the English throne as a
+foreigner, and his people as a needy race, would have only admitted him
+on terms; or, as Aubrey hints, was for "setting up a commonwealth."
+Little dreamed Rawleigh that he was already sold and disposed of; that
+his friend, Secretary Cecil, was surrounding Durham-House, Rawleigh's
+town residence, by domestic and midnight spies; and, as the secretary
+was wont, laying traps to decoy his associate in the councils of
+Elizabeth into something which might be shifted into a semblance of
+treason against the future sovereign.[4]
+
+The train so covertly laid, the mine was sprung at the due hour.
+Rawleigh's reception by the king was the prognostic of his fall.
+Rawleigh announced, James exclaimed, _more suo_,--"Rawleigh! Rawleigh!
+o' my saul, mon, I have heard _rawly_ of thee!"[5] Cecil, who had
+participated in the fall of Essex, the chief of the Scottish party, all
+expected would have shared in the same royal repulse. Lady Kildare once
+aptly described Cecil, when she threatened "to break the neck of that
+weasel;" and afterwards the Scottish monarch, admiring the quick
+shiftings and keen scent of the crafty creature in the playful style of
+the huntsman, characterised his minister, in his kennel of courtiers, as
+his "little beagle." "The weasel," had all along, moving to and fro,
+kept his unobserved course; and, to the admiration of all, now "came out
+of the chamber like a giant, to run his race for honour and fortune."
+That astute Machiavel had long prepared staunch friends for himself in
+well-paid Scots. James was hardly seated on his new throne, when his
+minister opened one of his political exhibitions by the
+incomprehensible Cobham conspiracy; and this ingenious artificer of
+state-plots had knotted the present with one apparently more real; but
+though they would not hold together, they served to put his friend on
+his memorable trial. When the eloquence of Rawleigh had baffled his
+judges, and the evidence failed, Cecil, then sitting in court in the
+character of a friend, secretly conveyed an insidious letter, sufficient
+to serve as an ambiguous plea for a mysterious conviction. Rawleigh was
+judicially but illegally condemned; and the affair terminated in a
+burlesque execution, where men were led to the block, and no one
+suffered decapitation.[6]
+
+A remarkable circumstance, however, occurred, which must not be passed
+over in this psychological history of Rawleigh. In the Tower, during the
+examination of the weak and worthless Cobham, who was shifting evidence,
+Rawleigh affected a recklessness of life; suddenly, he inflicted upon
+himself what his enemies afterwards called "the guilty blow in the
+Tower;" in the blow he did not risk his life, "being, in truth, rather a
+cut than a stab" in his breast. Mortified passion may have overcome for
+a moment the hero whose fortitude had often been more nobly tried; but
+in my own mind, I cannot avoid including the present incident among
+those similar minor artifices, designed for some grand effect.
+
+Rawleigh, condemned, was suffered to live twelve years in the Tower,
+whence he obtained a release, but not a pardon; the condemnation was
+suspended over his head like the pointed sword, ready to drop on the
+guest invited to the mockery of a festival. A new secretary, Winwood,
+and a new favourite, Buckingham, had listened to the vision of a gold
+mine, and an English colony. The sage, who had passed through that
+school of wisdom, his own "History of the World," when called into
+action, was still the same romantic adventurer. What else for him
+remained in England, but the dream of his early days? The military and
+the naval writings, as well as the "History of the World," of Rawleigh,
+had been designed by their great author to mould the genius of that
+prince to whom he looked for another Elizabethan reign; but Prince Henry
+had sunk into an untimely grave, and the sovereign who loved as much as
+any one an awful volume, was deterred from valuing the man.
+
+Rawleigh gathered together all the wrecks of his battered fortune, and,
+with a company of adventurers, equipped the fleet which was hastening to
+found a new empire. Ere its sails were filled with propitious gales, its
+ruin was prepared. The secret plans of its great conductor, confided to
+our government, by their order were betrayed to the jealous council of
+Castille. Lying in sickness, Rawleigh lands on a hostile coast; his son,
+with filial emulation, combated and fell; his confidential Keymis, whose
+life was devoted to him, could not endure reproach, and closing his
+cabin-door, ended his days; and if he himself bore up with life, it was
+that his life was still due to many. "I could die heart-broken, as Drake
+and Hawkins had died before, when they failed in their enterprise. My
+brains are broken, and I cannot write much; I live, and I told you why."
+But he knew his life was a pledge no longer redeemable. His "rabble of
+idle rascals" mutinied, till the hope of falling in with the Spanish
+treasure-fleet lured them homewards. The letters to his wife are among
+the most tragical communications of a great mind greatly despairing, and
+may still draw tears.
+
+On Rawleigh's return, a proclamation was issued for his arrest, and he
+surrendered to his near kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley, vice-admiral of
+Devon. On their journey to London, they were joined by Manoury, a French
+physician, not unskilled in chemistry, a favourite study with Rawleigh.
+
+It was in this journey that Rawleigh contrived one of those humiliating
+stratagems which we have several times noted with astonishment. In a
+confidential intercourse with the French chemist, he procured drugs by
+which he was enabled to counterfeit a strange malady. Alas! the great
+man was himself cozened. Manoury was the most guileful of _Moutons_, and
+his near kinsman, Stukeley, the most infamous of traitors![7]
+
+The conflict of opposite emotions which induced this folly who shall
+describe? Rawleigh died in the elevation of his magnanimous spirit; as
+truly great when he took his farewell of his world, as when he closed
+the last sublime page of his great volume. He knew his fate, and he had
+come to meet it. The moment was disastrous; the Spanish match lay in one
+scale, and the head of Rawleigh was put in the other by the implacable
+Spaniard; and when a state-victim is required, the political balance is
+rarely regulated by simple justice.
+
+An eminent critic has pronounced, that "the 'History of the World,' by
+Rawleigh, is rather an historical dissertation, than a work rising to
+the majesty of history."
+
+It sometimes happens that the application of an abstract principle of
+the critical art to some particular work may tend to injure the writer,
+without conveying any information to the reader; for thus the rare
+qualities of originality are wholly passed by, should the masterly
+genius have composed in a manner unprescribed by any canon of criticism.
+
+Our author was not ignorant of the laws of historical composition,
+which, he observes, "many had taught, but no man better, and with
+greater brevity, than that excellent learned gentleman, Sir FRANCIS
+BACON."
+
+The ardent and capricious genius of our author projected a universal
+history which was to occupy three mighty folios, at a time when our
+language had not yet produced a single historical work; he had no model
+to look up to; nor, had there been, was he disposed to be casting in
+other men's moulds. The design and the execution were a creation of his
+own. Masses of the most curious parts of learning were to be drawn out
+of recondite tomes, from the Rabbins, the Fathers, the historians and
+the poets of every nation; all that the generations of men have thought,
+and whatever they have memorably acted. But in this voluminous scroll of
+time, something was to enter of not less price--what his own searching
+spirit thought, what his diligence had collected, and farther, what his
+own eyes had observed in the old and the new worlds. TRUTH and
+EXPERIENCE were to be the columns which supported and adorned HISTORY.
+And this we read in "The MIND of the Frontispiece," one of those
+emblematical representations of "the mind" of the author, which the
+engravers of that day usually rendered less pictorial than
+perplexing.[8]
+
+A universal genius was best able to compose a universal history;
+statesman, soldier, and sage, in writing the "History of the World," how
+often has Rawleigh become his own historiographer! He had been a pilgrim
+in many characters; and his philosophy had been exercised in very
+opposite spheres of human existence. A great commander by land and by
+sea, he was critical in all the arts of stratography, and delights to
+illustrate them on every occasion. The danger of having two generals for
+one army, is exemplified by what he himself had witnessed at Jarnac; in
+a narrative of Carthage, when the Romans lost their fleet, he points out
+the advantages of a flying navy, from what had occurred under his own
+eye in the wars of the Netherlands, and of Portugal; and concludes that
+"it is more difficult to defend a coast than to invade it." In the midst
+of a narrative of the siege of a town of Carthage, when the besieged
+rushed out of the town eager to learn the terms of the capitulation
+before they were concluded, the Roman general seized on this advantage
+by entering with his army, without concluding the capitulation. "A
+similar incident happened when I was a young man in France, of Marshal
+Monluc, while a parley was held about the surrender; but noble men held
+this conduct as not honourable." Foreign mercenaries, he observes, are
+not to be relied on, for at the greatest extremity, they have not only
+refused to fight, but have passed over to the enemy; or they have become
+the masters of those who hired them, as the Turks were called in by the
+Greeks, and the Saxons by the Britons; and here he distinguishes the
+soldiery consisting of English, French, and Scotch, which established
+the independence of the Netherlands; in this case, these mercenaries
+were bound together by one common interest with the people who had
+required their aid; therefore, these stood in the condition of allies,
+as well as of foreigners solely retained by pay.
+
+His digressions are never more agreeable than when they become
+dissertations; the most ordinary events of history assumed a new face by
+the noble speculations which he builds on them, full of a searching,
+critical spirit, of sound morality, and of practicable policy; often
+profound, always eloquent. One on the Mosaic code as a precedent for the
+laws of other nations, would have delighted Montesquieu. On the
+inviolability of oaths, he admirably describes them as "the chains by
+which free-men are tied to the world." On slavery--on idolatry--on
+giving the lie--on the point of honour--on the origin of local names of
+America by their first discoverers--such topics abound in his versatile
+pages. Even curious matters engaged his attention, and in the new world
+he inspected nature with the close eye of a naturalist;[9] nor has he
+disdained, at times, a pleasant tale. There are few pages of this
+venerable, but genial volume, where we do not find that it is Rawleigh
+who speaks or who acts, making legible his secret thoughts, charming the
+story of four thousand years with the pleasures of his own memory.
+
+The actual condition of society; the politics of past governments; the
+arts, the trades, the inventions of past ages, matters deeply
+interesting in the history of man, often forgotten, and hardly
+recoverable, judged by that large mind which had so boldly planned the
+"History of the World," cannot properly be censured as "Digressions."
+"True it is," he adds, "that I have also made many others, which, if
+they shall be laid to my charge, I must cast the fault into the great
+heap of human error. For seeing we digress in all the ways of our
+lives--yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digression, it
+may the better be excused in writing of their lives and actions. _I am
+not altogether ignorant in the laws of history and of the kinds._"
+
+It is evident that our author was conscious that he had struck into a
+virgin vein, and however amenable to the code of historical composition,
+very gracefully apologises for indulging the novelty. The novelty indeed
+was so little comprehended by those gross feeders on the carrion of time
+who can discover nothing in history but its disjointed and naked facts,
+that, rejecting every "digression" as interrupting the chronology, they
+put forth their abridgments; and Alexander Ross rejoiced to call his
+"The Marrow of History;" but probably found, to his dismay, that he had
+only collected the dry bones; and that in all this "History of the
+World," nothing was more veritable than the author's own emotions. All
+which these matter-of-fact retailers had so carefully omitted we now
+class by a title which such writers rarely recognise as the philosophy
+of history. Great writers admit of no abridgment. If you do not follow
+the writer through all the ramifications of his ideas, and imbue your
+mind with the fulness of the author's mind, you can receive only
+interrupted impressions, and retain but an imperfect and mutilated image
+of his genius. The happiest of abridgments is the author's own skill in
+composition: to say all that is necessary and to omit all that is
+superfluous--this is the secret of abridgment, and there is no other of
+a great original work.
+
+"The History of the World" appeared as a literary phenomenon, even to
+the philosophical Hume. He expresses his astonishment at "the extensive
+genius of the man who being educated amid naval and military
+enterprises, had _surpassed in the pursuits of literature even those of
+the most recluse and sedentary lives_."
+
+This is much from him who has taught us not to wonder but to inquire.
+Rawleigh, however, had dropped some hints on his Hebraic studies;
+acknowledging his ignorance of that recondite language, he was indebted
+to some preceding interpreters and to "some learned friends;" and he
+adds with good humour, but with a solemn feeling, "Yet it were not to be
+wondered at had I been beholding to neither, having had _eleven years'
+leisure_ to obtain the knowledge of that or any other language." It did
+not occur to our historian that "eleven years" of uninterrupted leisure
+yields a full amount of "the most recluse and sedentary life." With a
+universal mind Rawleigh was eager after universal knowledge; and we have
+positive and collateral evidence that he sought in his learned circle
+whatever aid the peculiar studies of each individual could afford him.
+
+A circumstance as remarkable as the work itself occurred in the author's
+long imprisonment. By one of those strange coincidences in human
+affairs, it happened that in the Tower Rawleigh was surrounded by the
+highest literary and scientific circle in the nation. Henry, the ninth
+Earl of Northumberland, on the suspicion of having favoured his relative
+Piercy, the gunpowder-plot conspirator, was cast into this state-prison,
+and confined during many years. This earl delighted in what Anthony Wood
+describes as "the obscure parts of learning." He was a magnificent
+Mecænas, and not only pensioned scientific men, but daily assembled them
+at his table, and in this intellectual communion participating in their
+pursuits he passed his life. His learned society were designated as "the
+Atlantes of the mathematical world;" but that world had other
+inhabitants, antiquaries and astrologers, chemists and naturalists.
+There was seen Thomas Allen, another Roger Bacon, "terrible to the
+vulgar," famed for his _Bibliotheca Alleniana_, a rich collection of
+manuscripts, most of which have been preserved in the Bodleian; the name
+of Allen survives in the ardent commemorations of Camden, of Spelman,
+and of Selden. He was accompanied by his friend Doctor Dee, but whether
+Dee ever tried their patience or their wonder by his "Diary of
+Conferences with Spirits" we find no record; and by the astronomical
+Torporley, a disciple of Lucretius, for his philosophy consisted of
+atoms; several of his manuscripts remain in Sion College. The
+muster-roll is too long to run over. In this galaxy of the learned, the
+brightest star was Thomas Hariot, who merited the distinction of being
+"the universal philosopher;" his inventions in algebra, Descartes, when
+in England, silently adopted, but which Dr. Wallis afterwards
+indignantly reclaimed; his skill in interpreting the text of Homer
+excited the grateful admiration of Chapman when occupied by his version;
+Bishop Corbet has described--
+
+           Deep Hariot's mine,
+  In which there is no dross.
+
+Two others were Walter Warner, who is said to have suggested to Harvey
+the great discovery of the circulation of the blood, and Robert Hues,
+famed for his "Treatise on the Globes." These, with Hariot, were the
+earl's constant companions; and at a period when science seemed
+connected with necromancy, the world distinguished the earl and his
+three friends as "Henry the Wizard, and his three Magi." We may regret
+that no Symposia have come down to us from this learned society in the
+Tower, which we may consider as the first philosophical society in our
+country. All these persons, eminent in their day, appear to have written
+in their various departments, and were inventors in science; yet few of
+their works have passed through the press. This circumstance is a
+curious evidence in our literary history, that in that day the studious
+composed their works without any view to their publicity; the difficulty
+of obtaining a publisher for any work of science might also have
+conduced to confine their discoveries to their private circle. Some of
+these learned men probably were uncouth writers; Dee never could end a
+sentence in his rambling, confused style. Many of these works, scattered
+in their forlorn state of manuscript, often fell into hands who
+appropriated them to their own purpose. Even Hariot's treatise, which
+furnished Descartes with a new idea of the science, was a posthumous
+publication by his friend Warner, merely to secure a continuance of the
+pension which had been granted to him by the Earl of Northumberland.
+
+These philosophers appear to have advanced far into their inquiries,
+for they were branded by atheism or deism. What therefore has reached us
+coming from ignorant or prejudiced reporters will not satisfy our
+curiosity. Of Hariot, Wood tells that "he always undervalued the old
+story of the creation of the world, and could never believe the trite
+position _ex nihilo nihil fit_. He made a _philosophical theology_,
+wherein he cast off the Old Testament, so that consequently the New
+would have no foundation. He was a deist, and his doctrine he did impart
+to the Earl of Northumberland and to Sir Walter Rawleigh, when he was
+compiling his 'History of the World.' He would controvert the matter
+with eminent divines, who therefore having no good opinion of him, did
+look on the matter of his death as a judgment for nullifying the
+Scriptures." Hariot died of a cancer on his lip.
+
+From such accounts we can derive no knowledge of the _philosophical
+theology_ of Hariot. He was the philosopher, however, who went to
+Virginia with the design of establishing a people of peace, with the
+Bible in his hand. He taught those children of nature its pure doctrines
+till they began to idolise the book itself, embracing it, kneeling to
+it, and rubbing their bodies with it. This new Manco Capac checked this
+innocent idolatry, but probably found some difficulty in making them
+rightly comprehend that the Bible was but a book like any other, made by
+many hands; but that the spiritual doctrine contained in it was a thing
+not to be touched nor seen, but to be obeyed. Such a philosopher, could
+he have remained among these Indians, would have become the great
+legislator of a tribe of primitive Christians; and as he actually
+contrived to construct an alphabet for them, this seems to have been his
+intention.
+
+The doctrines of Hariot, which Wood has reprobated, certainly were not
+infused into the pages of Rawleigh; his divinity is never sceptical; his
+researches only lead to speculations purely ethical and political--what
+men have done, and what men do.[10]
+
+Such were the men of science, daily guests in the Tower during the
+imprisonment of Rawleigh; and when he had constructed his laboratory to
+pursue his chemical experiments, he must have multiplied their wonders.
+With one he had been intimately connected early in life; Hariot had been
+his mathematical tutor, was domesticated in his house, and became his
+confidential agent in the expedition to Virginia. Rawleigh had earnestly
+recommended his friend to the Earl of Northumberland, and Sion House in
+consequence became for Hariot a home and an observatory.
+
+The scholastic Dr. Burhill is supposed to have been one among the
+learned friends whose assistance in his Hebraic researches Rawleigh
+acknowledges. It was such a student that might have led Rawleigh into
+his singular discussion on the site of paradise. One great name has
+claimed the tracings of his hand in the "History of the World." Ben
+Jonson has positively told that he wrote a piece on the Punic wars,
+which Rawleigh "altered and set in his book." The verses prefixed to the
+"Mind of the Frontispiece" are Jonson's. There was an intimacy between
+Jonson and Rawleigh which appears to have been interrupted, and this may
+possibly have given occasion to the remarkable sharp stricture from
+Jonson, in his conversation with Drummond, that "Rawleigh esteemed more
+fame than conscience; the best wits in England were employed in making
+his 'History of the World.'"
+
+Rawleigh, in his vast and recondite collection of criticism and
+chronology, would enrich his volume with the stores accumulated from the
+sources of brother-minds; it is even said that he submitted his
+composition to Serjeant Hoskyns, that universal Aristarchus of that day,
+at whose feet, to use the style of honest Anthony, all poets threw their
+verses;[11] but the most material characteristic of his work Rawleigh
+could borrow from no one--the tone and elevation of his genius.
+
+But if the "History of the World" instructed his contemporaries, there
+was a greater history in his mind, which had secured the universal
+acceptance of posterity--the history of his own times. But the age of
+Elizabeth, in manuscript, might be an act of treason in the court of
+James the First, in the eyes of his redoubted rival Cecil; he who did
+not wholly escape from malicious applications in writing the history of
+the world that had passed away, eluded the fatal struggle with
+contemporary passions. He has himself acquainted us of this loss to our
+domestic political history: "It will be said by many that I might have
+been more pleasing to the reader if I had written the story of mine own
+times, having been permitted to draw water as near the well-head as
+another. To this I answer, that whosoever in writing a modern history
+shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his
+teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and
+servants into greater miseries. He that goeth after her too far off,
+loseth her sight and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a
+middle distance, I know not whether I should call that kind of course,
+temper or baseness."[12]
+
+The miscellaneous writings of Rawleigh are so numerous and so various,
+that Oldys has classed them under the heads, poetical, epistolary,
+military, maritime, geographical, political, philosophical, and
+historical.[13]
+
+Of a character so exalted and a genius so varied, how has it happened
+that Gibbon, who had once intended to compose the wondrous tale of his
+life, has pronounced his character to be "ambiguous;" and that Hume has
+described it as "a great, but ill-regulated mind?"[14]
+
+The story of Rawleigh is a moral phenomenon; but what is there that
+moves in the sphere of humanity, of which, when we discover the
+principle of action, we cannot calculate even the most eccentric
+movements? Rawleigh from the first was to be the architect of his own
+fortunes; this was a calamity with him, for a perpetual impulse was
+communicated to the versatility and the boundless capacity of a genius
+which seemed universal. Soldier and sailor, sage and statesman, he could
+not escape from the common fate of becoming the creature of
+circumstance. What vicissitudes! what moral revelations! How he
+disdained his enviers! His towering ambition paused not in its altitude;
+he reached its apex, and having accomplished everything, he missed all!
+He whose life is a life of adventure, who is now the daring child of
+fortune, and falls to be the miserable heir of misfortune, though glory
+sometimes disguises his recklessness, is doomed to be often humiliated
+as well as haughty.
+
+The favourite of his sovereign, thrown amid the contending suitors of a
+female Court, we have found creeping in crooked politics, and
+intriguing in dark labyrinths. Rawleigh met his evil genius in Cecil; he
+saw his solitary hope vanish with Prince Henry. Awakening his last
+energies with the juvenile passion of his early days, he pledged his
+life on a new adventure--it was his destiny to ascend the scaffold. He
+was always to be a victim of state. The day of his trial and the hour of
+his death told to his country whom they had lost. From the most
+unpopular man in England he became the object of the public sympathy,
+for they saw the permanent grandeur of the character, when its lustre
+was no longer dusked by cloudy interests or temporary passions.
+
+There is no object in human pursuits which the genius of Rawleigh did
+not embrace. What science was that unwearying mind not busied in? What
+arts of hoar antiquity did he not love to seek? What sense of the
+beautiful ever passed transiently over his spirit? His books and his
+pictures ever accompanied him in his voyages. Even in the short hour
+before his last morning, is he not still before us, while his midnight
+pen traces his mortuary verse, perpetuating the emotions of the sage,
+and of the hero who could not fear death.[15]
+
+Such is the psychological history of a genius of the first order of
+minds, whom posterity hails among the founders of our literature.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Lodge's "Illustrations of British History," iii. 67.
+
+  [2] Sidney Letters, ii. 45.
+
+  [3] When Rawleigh was himself in the place where he had put Essex--on
+    the scaffold, he solemnly declared that "he had no hand in his blood,
+    and was none of them that procured his death." How are we to
+    reconcile this declaration with the extraordinary letter which first
+    appeared in Murdin's Collection, and which Hume asserts "contains the
+    strongest proofs to the contrary?"--Mr. Lodge understands the advice
+    of Rawleigh in the very worst sense; Mr. Tytler, with ingenuity,
+    suggests that Cecil, with "a prospective wariness, which--not
+    satisfied with deceiving his contemporaries--provided _blinds for
+    posterity_," procured Rawleigh to address this letter to him; and, in
+    a word, that, in composing this energetic epistle, he was not so much
+    the writer as the agent in the plot. I am more disposed to believe
+    that when Rawleigh wrote so remarkable a letter, he was fully aware
+    of its import, and looked forwards to the result.
+
+  [4] The extraordinary means of the duplicity of this wily minister
+    are stated by Mr. TYTLER in the Appendix to his "Life of Rawleigh."
+
+  [5] As _Rawleigh_, like all his contemporaries, including Shakspeare,
+    wrote his name diversely, so that we are at a loss to pronounce it,
+    this spontaneous sally of the Scottish monarch reveals its real
+    pronunciation; which is also confirmed by a sort of epigram of that
+    day.
+
+  [6] The secret history of this state-riddle--the conspiracy of
+    Cobham, a disappointed courtier--as Mr. Lodge observes, might fill a
+    moderate volume of speculations on its darker parts. All historians
+    agree that it must remain insolvable, and "hopelessly obscure." It
+    is, however, opened with great vigour and novelty of research by Mr.
+    TYTLER in the Appendix to his biography of Rawleigh. But he passes
+    over too slightly the conversation and the offer of the "eight
+    thousand crowns;" and "the pension," of which Rawleigh said--"he
+    would tell him more when he saw the money." It is quite evident that
+    Rawleigh had been tampered with by the silly Cobham, whose ricketty
+    brains had been concocting a crude, fantastic plot, which was hardly
+    the initial of one. But Rawleigh had listened; he had not positively
+    refused his participation, neither had he yielded his consent. When
+    "the eight thousand crowns" had safely arrived, where were they to
+    go? Rawleigh declared that "when he saw the money, he would be ready
+    to talk more on the subject." Mr. Tytler, like Sir Walter, is pleased
+    to consider that the whole affair was "one of Lord Cobham's idle
+    conceits."
+
+  [7] This incident in the life of Rawleigh is told in the "Curiosities
+    of Literature," vol. iii. I have been enabled to give the secret
+    history of this Sir Lewis Stukeley, who having first despoiled, then
+    betrayed his great kinsman. That history offers one of the most
+    striking instances of moral retribution.
+
+  [8] The explanatory stanzas prefixed to this "Mind," though
+    unsubscribed by the name of the writer, were composed by Jonson, for
+    they appear in his works.
+
+  [9] Rawleigh notices a singular instinct in the birds in these new
+    regions, which built their nests on the twigs of trees, pendent over
+    the waters, rather than in the branches, to save their young from the
+    attacks of the monkeys. In such relations he is full and particular.
+    He collects the marvellous accounts of the _Ficus indica_--the
+    Banian, or sacred tree of the Brahmins; we nowhere find such a lively
+    picture of that singular curiosity of nature, the self-planting tree,
+    here minutely described.
+
+   [10] The authors of the "General Dictionary" censure Wood for his
+    unauthenticated assertions; and they infer that, as he was thus
+    evidently erroneous in his notion of Rawleigh's history, he may have
+    been equally so in his idea of the philosophical theology of Hariot.
+    Wood, however, could have alleged his authority, though a very
+    indifferent one. We have recently discovered that Wood here was only
+    transcribing the crude hearsays of his friend Aubrey; and, in these
+    matters, the Oxford antiquary, and the "magotie-headed" gossiper, as
+    Wood afterwards found him to be, were equally intelligent.
+
+  [11] Hoskyns wrote many poems. A manuscript volume of his poems,
+    fairly written we may presume for the press, and "bigger than all
+    Donne's works," was "lent by his son Sir Benedict," A. Wood tells us,
+    "who was a man that ran with the usurping Parliament, to a certain
+    person, in 1653, but he could never retrieve it." We are left in the
+    dark to know whether we have lost a great poet or only a loyalist;
+    whether the "certain person" was a parliamentary _enragé_, or only
+    utterly reckless of a collection of poems "bigger than Dr. Donne's!"
+    One poem of this great critic has come down to us, of which there is
+    more than one manuscript in the Museum, and one in the Ashmolean,--"A
+    Vision," addressed to the king during his confinement, in which he
+    introduces his mother, and his wife, and his child. By the frequency
+    of these copies we find how much temporary passion gave an interest
+    to very indifferent writings. It is printed by Dr. Bliss in the
+    "Athenæ Oxonienses."
+
+  [12] Preface to the "History of the World."
+
+  [13] The name of Rawleigh proved too attractive for the booksellers
+    to escape their grasp; they have forged his name on various
+    occasions, and they have done worse; for they have unquestionably
+    adulterated his genuine works by admitting writings which he never
+    could have written. Rawleigh composed some "Instructions to his Son
+    and to Posterity." The publisher of his "Remains" probably considered
+    that "The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father" must be
+    equally acceptable. Sir Walter had no aged father to address; and if
+    he had, he would not have written such a mean piece of puritanic
+    insolence. I suspect that "The Advice" was nothing but a parody on
+    "The Instructions" by some very witless scribbler.
+
+  [14] Hume was bitterly attacked in the "Biographia Britannica" by a
+    Dr. Philip Nicoll, one of the writers calling himself one of the
+    proprietors, for his account of the conduct of Rawleigh--art.
+    "Ralegh," note (cc). The spirit of nationality was rife in 1760, when
+    we find that a cruel apology is inflicted on Hume as "a foreigner!
+    for this writer may be allowed the privilege of that plea, as being
+    born and bred, and constantly living among a people, and under a
+    constitution, of a very different nature, genius, and temper from the
+    English!" I cannot believe that Hume, to remove the odium of
+    Rawleigh's death from the Scottish monarch, purposely depreciated the
+    hero; but probably looking hastily into the account of Guiana,
+    stuffed with the monstrous tales of a lying Spaniard, and considering
+    the whole to be a gross artifice of the great navigator for an
+    interested purpose, he gave way to his impressions.
+
+  [15] The Dean of Westminster was astonished at Rawleigh's
+    cheerfulness on the day of his execution, who "made no more of his
+    death than if he had been to take a journey." The divine was fearful
+    that this contempt of death might arise from "a senselessness of his
+    own state," but the hero satisfied the dean that he died "very
+    Christianly." Yet the gossip of Aubrey tells, that "his cousin
+    Whitney said, and I think it is printed, that he spake not one word
+    of Christ, but of the great and incomprehensible God with much zeal
+    and adoration, so that he concluded he was an a-Christ, not an
+    a-theist." In this manner great men were then judged whenever they
+    "ventured at discourse which was unpleasant to the churchmen," as
+    this confused recorder of curious matters has sent down to us. This
+    indicates that Socinian principles were appearing.
+
+
+
+
+THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHER, DR. DEE.
+
+
+At the dawn of philosophy its dreams were not yet dispersed, and
+philosophers were often in peril of being as imaginative as poets. The
+arid abstractions of the schoolmen were succeeded by the fanciful
+visions of the occult philosophers; and both were but preludes to the
+experimental philosophy of Bacon and Newton, and the metaphysics of
+Locke. The first illegitimate progeny of science were deemed occult and
+even magical; while astronomy was bewildered with astrology, chemistry
+was running into alchemy, and natural philosophy wantoned in the
+grotesque chimeras of magical phantoms, the philosophers themselves
+pursued science in a suspicious secresy, and were often imagined to know
+much more than the human faculties can acquire. These anagogical
+children of reverie, straying beyond "the visible diurnal sphere,"
+elevated above humanity, found no boundary which they did not pass
+beyond--no profundity which they did not fathom--no altitude on which
+they did not rest. The credulity of enthusiasts was kept alive by the
+devices of artful deceivers, and illusion closed in imposture.
+
+Shakspeare, in the person of Prospero, has exhibited the prevalent
+notions of the judicial astrologer combined with the adept, whose white
+magic, as distinguished from the black or demon magic, holds an
+intercourse with purer spirits. Such a sage was
+
+  --------transported,
+  And rapt in secret studies;
+
+that is, in the occult sciences; and he had
+
+  Volumes that he prized more than his dukedom.
+
+These were alchemical, astrological, and cabalistical treatises. The
+magical part of _The Tempest_, Warton has observed, "is founded on that
+sort of philosophy which was peculiar to JOHN DEE and his associates,
+and has been called 'the Rosicrucian.'"
+
+Dr. DEE was a Theurgist, a sort of magician, who imagined that they held
+communication with angelic spirits, of which he has left us a memorable
+evidence. His personal history may serve as a canvas for the picture of
+an occult philosopher--his reveries, his ambition, and his calamity.
+
+Dee was an eminent and singular person, more intimately connected with
+the patronage of Elizabeth than perhaps has been observed. It was the
+fate of this scholar to live in the reigns of five of our successive
+sovereigns, each of whom had some influence on his fortunes. His father,
+in the household of Henry the Eighth, suffered some "hard-dealing" from
+this imperious monarch injurious to the inheritance of the son; the
+harshness of the sire was considered by the royal children, for Edward
+granted a pension; Mary, in the day of trial, was favourably disposed
+towards the philosopher; and Elizabeth, a queen well known for her
+penurious dispensations, at all times promptly supplied the wants of her
+careless and dreamy sage.
+
+That decision of character which awaits not for any occasion to reveal
+itself, broke forth in his college-days. His skill in mathematics, and
+his astronomical observations, had attracted general notice; and in his
+twentieth year, Dee ventured on the novel enterprise of conferring
+personally with the learned of the Netherlands. In the reign of Henry
+the Eighth, little experimental knowledge was to be gathered out of
+books. Like the ancient, our insular philosophers early travelled to
+discover those novelties in science which were often limited to the
+private circle; there were no Royal or Antiquarian Societies, no
+"Transactions" of science or the arts. Robert Fludd, the great
+Rosicrucian, who became more famous than Dee in occult studies, before
+he gave the world his elaborate labours, passed six years in his travels
+in France, Germany, and Italy.
+
+Our youthful sage on his return to his college presented them with
+several curious instruments of science which were not then always
+procurable in the shops of mechanics. Philosophers often made as well as
+invented their implements. The learned Mercator was renowned for his
+globes; and mathematical instruments, of a novel construction, were the
+invention of the scientific Frisias.
+
+Our young philosopher, already suspected of a dangerous intimacy with
+the astral influences, did not quiet the murmurs by his improved
+dexterity in mechanics. In the elation of youth, he astounded the
+marvelling fellows of his college. Dee has himself confessed, that "his
+boyish attempts and exploits scholastical may not be meet to repeat." In
+a lecture, Dee executed a piece of mechanical invention which now would
+have been pantomimical, but was then necromantic. When a greater
+magician, Roger Bacon, by his art, had made the apparition of a man to
+walk from the top of All-Hallows steeple in Oxford to the top of St.
+Mary's, this optical illusion had endangered his life; and another great
+occult philosopher set forth a compassionate apology for the science of
+optics, but could only allege it was not magical, though it seemed so.
+Two centuries and a half had not sufficed to enlighten the fellows of a
+college at Oxford.
+
+Dee has suffered hard measure from those who have only judged of him in
+the last days of his unprotected distress. In his age, if we except
+mathematics, there were few demonstrable truths in science; disguised as
+it was by rank fables and airy hypotheses; nature was not interpreted so
+often as she was misunderstood. The ideal world seemed hardly more
+illusive than the material. While his sovereign, and the nation, and
+foreigners were looking up to the solitary sage, may we not pardon the
+honest egotism which once declared, that if he had found a Mæcenas,
+Britain would not have been destitute of an Aristotle? BACON had not yet
+appeared; and however we may deem of his aspiration, we cannot censure
+his judgment in discovering there was yet a vacant seat for him who was
+worthy to fill it.
+
+Dee was an eminent mathematician, but the early bent of his mind was
+somewhat fanciful; an inextinguishable ambition to fix the admiration of
+the world worked on a restless temperament and a long vagrant course of
+life; and his generous impulses burst into the wild exuberances of the
+reveries of astrology, alchemy, and the cabbala.
+
+The restlessness of a mind ever escaping from the bounded present to the
+indefinite future, directed his flight to the University of Louvain;
+there he attracted a noble crowd from the court of Brussels, whom he
+charmed like a new oracle of science. Then he rambled to Paris, to
+lecture on his favourite Euclid, explaining the elements not only
+mathematically, but by their application to natural philosophy, like
+another Pythagoras. A professorship was offered him on any terms; and
+the curious may still decide on his skill by a remarkable English
+preface which Dee furnished to the translation of Euclid by Sir Henry
+Billingsley. Admiration seemed more real to Dee when he attracted it on
+different spots. Preceded by his reputation, with a name which had
+received the baptism of fame, he returned homewards, where he had potent
+friends, in Sir John Cheke and in Cecil, and others who had been his
+auditors or his pupils; and he was pensioned by the youthful Edward.
+
+In the jealous reign of Mary, he gave umbrage by a correspondence with
+the confidential servants of the Princess Elizabeth; and Dee had now
+grown into such repute for his occult sciences, that there was little
+difficulty in accusing him of practising against the queen by
+enchantments. Cast into prison, the magician witnessed his "bedfellow,"
+a meek religious man, dragged to the flames, an incident which long
+after he could not remember without horror. The spirit of the sovereign
+fails not to betray itself in each succeeding reign. Mary bound men to
+the stake, Elizabeth sent them forth into new seas and new lands, and
+the pacific James, turning them into babbling polemics, only shed much
+human ink. The inquisitors unexpectedly detected no act of treason; but
+as possibly he might stand in peril of heresy, they recommended that he
+should be placed under the surveillance of Bishop Bonner, which probably
+was a royal protection. It is evident that Mary was as favourably
+disposed towards the philosopher as were her brother and her sister; and
+the literary memorial Dee addressed to the queen showed that he had no
+leisure to become an heresiarch.
+
+Dee proposed "the recovery and preservation of ancient writers and
+monuments." These had been lamentably dispersed and wasted by the
+spoilers of the dissolved monasteries. The moment was favourable for the
+acquisition, not only by obtaining manuscripts, but by procuring
+transcripts of all which their possessors would not part with. In this
+memorial Dee has recorded, that Cicero's treatise "De Republica"
+perished at Canterbury, and it was the single copy which authenticated
+its existence. With such a collection, he proposed to erect "a library
+royal"----a future Vatican, or a British Museum! A noble design, when as
+yet no national institution for general learning existed. This glorious
+opportunity was lost! Governments rarely comprehend those prescient
+minds which anticipate wants posterity cannot always supply.
+
+The early intercourse of the Princess Elizabeth with our philosopher
+suffered no interruption, as we shall have occasion to show, during her
+protracted reign, notwithstanding the ill fame of his awful skill in the
+occult sciences. We must throw ourselves into his times to judge of the
+calamity of this celebrity. This, and the succeeding age, were troubled
+by the faith of omens, meteors, and of "day-fatality," combined with the
+astral influences, malignant witchcraft, and horrible magic. It was only
+at the close of the seventeenth century, in 1682, that Bayle ventured
+anonymously in his "Thoughts on Comets," cautiously to demonstrate that
+these fugitive bodies in the heavens had no influence whatever over the
+cabinets of princes! Our own historian, Arthur Wilson, in describing "a
+blazing star," opined that it was not sent as "a flambeau" to usher in
+the funeral of the simple queen of James the First; the Puritan had no
+notion that heaven would compliment royalty; but he was not the less
+alarmed for the Protestant interest, as it concerned "the war then
+breaking out in Bohemia;" and so difficult was it to decide between the
+two opinions, that Rushworth, who wrote long afterwards, very carefully
+chronicles both. Such was the philosophy of the Elizabethan age, and
+truly much later, in France as well as in England.
+
+It was therefore in the spirit of the age that the minister of Elizabeth
+held a formal conference with Dr. Dee to fix on a fortunate day for the
+coronation, and which the sage opened to them on "the principles of the
+most ancient astrologers;" and the Privy Council punctually placed the
+crown on the head of the Queen of England. Nor was this the only occult
+lore for which his protection of the queen's safety was earnestly
+sought. Dee one morning was hastily summoned to prevent a sudden
+mischief impending over her majesty's person. A great puppet of wax,
+representing the queen, was discovered lying in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields,
+with a huge pin stuck through its breast. Dee undertook to quiet "Her
+Majesty and the Lords of the Honourable Privy-Council" within a few
+hours, but first insisted that, in the solemn disenchantment, Mr.
+Secretary Wilson should stand beside him to witness that Dee only used
+"godly means." It is not in our histories of England that we learn the
+real occasion of the coronation-day of Elizabeth, nor of the panic of
+"the Privy-Council" on the incident in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields; yet such
+domestic annals of a people enter into the national character, and have
+sometimes strangely influenced it.[1]
+
+Though Dee was imbued with the occult sciences of his age, he ardently
+cultivated arts and literature which would have honoured him in the
+present. He had formed a great library, rich in Irish and Welsh and
+other ancient manuscripts, which probably no other person then
+possessed;[2] an observatory where he watched, to read in the volume of
+the heavens; a laboratory of chemistry where the furnace rarely ceased;
+and a collection of philosophical instruments, too many of which were
+deemed magical. All these attested his energetic pursuits, to the
+manifold injury of a very moderate fortune, and the carelessness of a
+life of abstraction and reverie.
+
+But his ambition had accomplished its proud object; and on all public
+events wherein science was concerned, recourse was had to the sage of
+Mortlake. Camden refers to Dr. Dee's astronomical observations of a new
+star which had gradually vanished, though the celestial apparition had
+spread great fears and doubts; but our philosopher entertained the Queen
+the length of three days with the phenomenon. A more important labour
+was his reformation of the Gregorian Calendar, which even later
+mathematicians have deemed correct. The versatility of the pursuits of
+this scientific man was as remarkable as their ingenuity. In that reign
+of maritime enterprise many of our adventurers had taken nominal
+possession of many new countries, and the Queen had expressed a wish to
+learn their sites. One day, in her garden at Richmond, Dee unrolled to
+the royal eye a spacious scroll, hydrographical, geographical, and
+historical, where the rivers were tracked, and the coasts indented, and
+the authorities of the records inscribed on its page, by which the
+sovereign founded her title to dominions of which she had not always
+heard the names.[3] The genius of Dee was as erratic as the course of
+life he shortly fell into, but it kept great objects in view; and, as he
+projected a national library under Mary when literature itself seemed
+lost, under Elizabeth, when "this incomparable islandish monarchy" was
+menaced by the foreigner, he investigated "the art of navigation," and
+proposed "the perpetual guard and service of a petty navy royal,
+continually to be maintained without the Queen's charges or any
+unpleasant burdens to the Commons." Our inventor was anticipating our
+future national greatness, and such minds are only comprehended when
+they can no longer receive our gratitude.
+
+Our author published eight or ten learned works, and left unfinished
+fifty, some far advanced.[4]
+
+The imagination of Dee often predominated over his science; while both
+were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm
+the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult
+sciences, (which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever
+remains occult ceases to be science,) Dee lost his better genius.
+
+The mathematician whom the sage Burleigh had valued for his correction
+of the vulgar calendar must have amazed that statesman by a proposal to
+search for a mine for the royal service! claiming for his sole
+remuneration a letter patent granting him all _treasure trove_, as, in
+the barbarous law-French, is termed all wealth hidden in the earth,
+which, no claimant appearing, becomes appropriated by the sovereign. The
+mysterious agency of the _virgula divina_, or the divining rod, was to
+open the undiscovered mine, and to detect, in its progress, for the use
+of the bearer, the unsunned gold or silver which some had been foolish
+enough to inter, and not extract, from the earth.[5]
+
+The luminous genius who had illustrated the demonstrations of Euclid was
+penetrating into the arcane caverns of the cabbalists, and in a state of
+spiritual elevation fell into many a dreamy trance. The soul of the
+mystic would have passed into the world of spiritual existences, but he
+was not yet blessed with theurgic faculties, and patiently awaited for
+the elect. If Dee had many reveries, he had also many disciples both of
+rank and of name. Whatever a mind thus preoccupied and predisposed
+earnestly seeks, it usually finds; its own infirm imagination aids the
+deception of the artful. The elect spirit, long expected, was at last
+found in the person of Edward Kelley, a young apothecary, but an adept
+in the secret sciences: his services were engaged at a moderate salary.
+Kelley had to make his fortune.
+
+This KELLEY, who afterwards became an English alchemist, renowned among
+the votaries of the hermetic art, and of whom many a golden legend is
+recorded with which I dare not trust the reader, it appears, once lost
+his ears at Lancaster for coining; the judges not perhaps distinguishing
+the process by which the alchemist might have transmuted the baser into
+the precious metal. This neophyte, moreover, was a wizard--an aspirant
+in more supernatural arts--an incantator--a spirit-seer! Once with
+impious temerity he had ventured on questioning the dead! This "deed
+without a name" was actually perpetrated amid the powers of darkness in
+the park of Walton-in-the-dale, in the county of Lancaster. A recent
+corpse was dragged forth from the churchyard; whether the erected
+spectre made any sign of resuscitation is not recorded, but it probably
+did--for it spoke! A voice was heard delivering its short but awful
+responses, sufficient for the evil curiosity of the guardian of a ward,
+eager to learn the doomsday of that frail mortal's existence.
+
+For this tale our antiquary WEEVER has been quipped by our antiquary
+ANTHONY à WOOD, for his excessive credulity, as if Anthony would infer
+that he himself was incredulous on all supernatural disclosures! The
+authority was, however, unquestionable, for it came from the agent
+himself in this dark work, the opener of the grave, the spectator of the
+grim vaticinator, the listener to the sepulchral voice. He had often
+related this violation of "God's acre" to many gentlemen in Lancashire,
+as well as to the faithful scribe of our "Ancient Funeral Monuments."
+
+Many strange unexplained accounts have come down to us where _Voices_
+have been introduced, and it has been too usual at once to suppose that
+the attestations were nothing more than what Butler deems "solid lying."
+Leibnitz, a philosopher who seems to have delighted in the wonderful,
+gives an account of a dog who spoke different languages; the evidence is
+undeniable; and certain it is that the docile animal at his master's
+bidding opened his mouth--and good French or Latin was distinctly heard.
+When the astrologer Lilly assures us of one of the magical crystal
+globes or mirrors from whence the spirits absolutely gave responses, he
+has described their tones: "They speak, like the Irish, _much in the
+throat_." "This, if it proves nothing else, will serve to show that the
+Irish was the primitive language," sarcastically observes Gifford; but
+his acumen might have discovered that "it proved" something else, and
+that Lilly here really delivered a plain truth in this description of
+the _voices_ which gave the responses of the spirits.
+
+The art of the ventriloquist to convey his voice to the place he
+wills--into the gaunt jaws of a dead man's skull--into the moveable lips
+of a tutored dog, or into the invisible spirits of a magical globe--may
+be easily recognised. Ventriloquism has been oftener practised than has
+been known to the listeners. Speaking _much in the throat_ identifies
+that factitious voice, which, drawing the air into the lungs, proceeds
+out of the thorax, and not from a lower region, as the ancient etymology
+indicated. The Pythonesses of the oracles exercised this faculty, and it
+was not less skilfully practised by Edward Kelley.
+
+In the theurgic mysteries Dee would not deviate from what he deemed "the
+most Christian courses;" fervent orisons and other devotional ceremonies
+were to hallow the cabbalistical invocations,[6] and the astrological
+configurations and hieroglyphical cakes of wax, and other magical
+furniture. Among these was "a showstone," or an angelical mirror, placed
+on a pedestal.[7] By patient inspection at certain more blessed hours,
+the gifted seer could descry the apparitions of spirits moving within
+its cloudless orb; for at other times less propitious the surface was
+indistinct, as if a misty curtain hung over it.[8]
+
+By what natural progress of incidents the bold inventive genius of
+Kelley worked this fascination on the fatuity of the visionary might be
+curious to develope; but he who himself probably had been a dupe was the
+better adapted to play the impostor. Strange as this incident may appear
+to us, it was not rare at that day. A communion with invisible spirits
+entered into the general creed throughout Europe, and crystal or beryl
+was the magical medium; but as the gift of _seeing_ what was invisible
+to every one else was reserved for the elect, it was this circumstance
+which soon led to impostures. Persons even of ordinary rank in life
+pretended to be what they termed _speculators_, and sometimes women were
+_speculatrices_. Often by confederacy, and always by a vivacious fancy,
+these jugglers poured out their several artful revelations. We now may
+inscribe as an historical fact in the voluminous annals of human folly,
+from which, however, we have hardly yet wholly escaped, imaginary
+beings, and incantation of spirits, and all spectral apparitions.
+
+Kelley was now installed into the office of _Skryer_; a term apparently
+of Dee's invention. Listening to the revelations of angelic spirits and
+to the mysterious secret, the alchemist inflamed the cabbalistical faith
+of the visionary. It is certain that Dee now abandoned his mundane
+studies, and for many a year, through some thousands of pages, when
+Kelley was in the act of "skrying," sate beside "the show-stone," the
+eager scribe of those imagined conferences with "the spirits," received,
+to use his own words, "through the eye and the ear of E. K." Kelley was
+a person of considerable fancy, which sometimes approached to a poetical
+imagination; the masquerade of his spiritual beings is remarkable for
+its fanciful minuteness. Voices were at times audible to Dee; but the
+terrific noises of supernatural agency which sometimes accompanied the
+visions could only have been heard by the poetical ear of Kelley, though
+assuredly they shook the doctor. I will give the reader a notion of one
+of these scenes.
+
+E. K. looking into the show-stone, said, "I see a garland of white
+rose-buds about the border of the stone: they be well opened, but not
+full out."
+
+[Delta] "The great mercies of God be upon us; we beseech him to increase
+our faith."
+
+E. K. "Amen! But while I consider these buds better they seem rather to
+be white lilies."
+
+[Delta] "The eternal God wipe away our blackness, and make us purer and
+whiter than snow."
+
+E. K. "They are 72 in number (angels), seeming with their heads
+_alternatim_, seeming with their heads one towards me and one towards
+you. A voice cometh shouting out from the lilies, and all the lilies are
+become on fire. I hear a sound as though it were of many waters poured
+or streaming down in the clifts of great rocks and mountains. The noise
+is marvellous great; I hear it as afar off, and through the stone, or as
+it were of a thousand water-mills going together."
+
+A VOICE. "_Est. Et quo modo est?_"
+
+ANOTHER VOICE. "_Male et in summo: et mensuratum est._"
+
+E. K. "I hear a great roaring, as if it were out of a cloud over one's
+head, not perfectly like thunder."
+
+ANOTHER VOICE. "_The Seal is broken!_"
+
+E. K. "Now I see beyond like a furnace-mouth as big as four or five
+gates of a city, as if it were a quarter of a mile off, with a horrible
+smother of smoke coming out of it; and by it a great lake of pitch, and
+it bubbleth or simpereth as water doth when it beginneth to seethe.
+There standeth by the pit a white man in a white garment tucked up; his
+face is marvellous fair: this white spiritual creature saith, 'My Lord,
+_Ascend_!'"
+
+E. K. "Now there cometh out a thing like a lion in the hinder parts, and
+his fore parts hath many heads of divers fashions upon one trunk; he
+hath like feathers on his neck; his heads are seven, three on one side,
+and three on another, and one in the middle, longer than the rest, lying
+backward to his tailward. The white man giveth him a bloody sword, and
+he taketh it in his fore-foot. The white man tieth this monster's
+fore-legs with a chain, that he cannot go but as one shackled. Now he
+giveth the monster a great hammer with a seal at that end where the
+hammer striketh. The white man has cried with a loud cry, 'A horrible
+and terrible beast!' The white man taketh the hammer and striketh him in
+the forehead of that head which is in the middle. Now all this vision is
+vanished away: the stone is clear."
+
+On another occasion E. K. says, "I hear a marvellous noise, as of many
+mountains: which of the mouths do speak I cannot discern. I hear a
+greater noise still; I never heard any such noise; it is as if half the
+world were rushing down a hill."[9]
+
+During two years, in which Dee deserted his studies and sacrificed his
+fortune, the name of Dee still remained so eminent that learned
+foreigners in their visits to England continued their inquiries after
+him. A Polish prince, Albert a'Laski, who was received with high honours
+at our court, applied to the Earl of Leicester for an introduction to
+the great English philosopher, and the Earl appointed a day to dine with
+Dr. Dee. Then it was that our philosopher disclosed his mortifying
+condition, that he could no longer entertain his noble guests without
+selling his plate. The Queen instantly sent him forty angels in gold.
+The illustrious Polander became a constant visitor, was initiated into
+the theurgic mysteries; there came a whisper from the unseen "spirits"
+that this palatine of Siradia might yet be the elected King of Poland!
+Ambitious princes are as credulous as ambitious philosophers. The
+predictors of a crown, with a royal exchequer from the alchemists,
+seduced the imagination, and a'Laski invited the sages with their
+families to reside at his castle.
+
+There the Polish lord seems to have wearied of the angelic
+communications; he transferred them to the Emperor, Rodolph, the Second,
+at Prague. In all the courts of Europe, occult philosophers found a
+ready admittance.
+
+Dee came auspiciously recommended to the emperor; for our author had
+formerly dedicated to the emperor's father, Maximilian, his
+cabbalistical volume, which, when admitted to a private interview with
+Rodolph, the sage beheld lying open on the table.[10] The introduction
+of an author to an emperor by his own work may have something really
+magical in its effect, provided the spell is not disturbed by him who
+raised it. In an inflated oration Dee announcing himself like a babbling
+missionary, as a messenger from angels, the emperor curtly observed that
+he did not understand Latin! The Pope's Nuncio opportunely demanded that
+the two English necromancers should be questioned at Rome. Their flight
+relieved the emperor. A Bohemian count rejoiced to receive the fugitives
+at his castle of Trebona, where strange alchemical projections of pewter
+flagons turned into silver, which the goldsmiths of Prague bought, are
+attested solemnly by Arthur Dee, the son of the doctor, to the
+philosophical Sir Thomas Browne. This must have been that day of elation
+which Dee entered in his diary. "Master Edward Kelley did open the great
+secret to me. God be thanked!" This Arthur Dee, indeed, remained an
+inveterate alchemist all his life; but the man who in his medical
+character was recommended by James the First to the Czar of Russia, and,
+after several years' residence at Moscow, on his return home, was
+appointed physician to Charles the First, would be a reputable witness
+in any court of law.[11]
+
+Dee and Kelley were abroad, living together, from 1583 to 1589. Their
+adventures would form a romance, but I am not writing one. Their
+condition was mysterious, as were the incidents of their lives.
+Sometimes reduced to the most pitiable necessities for "meat and drink;"
+at other times we find Dee travelling with a princely equipage, in three
+family coaches, a train of waggons, and an escort of fifty horsemen.
+These extraordinary personages long attracted the wonder of the
+Continent; but whatever happened, their fortunes were variable. The
+pride of Dee was sensitive--there are querulous entries in his
+diary--there appeared some false play in his dangerous coadjutor--Kelley
+was dropping hints that he lived in a miserable state of
+delusion--preludes to the great rupture! Mephistopheles menaced his
+victim. It is evident that Kelley determined to break up the profitless
+partnership and set up for himself. The noise the parties raised in
+their quarrels on the Continent induced Elizabeth to command their
+return.[12] The alchemist did not return home with Dee. He obtained the
+patronage of the emperor, and was created a knight; but as usually
+happened with great alchemists, Sir Edward Kelley was twice cast into
+prison. Sir Edward, however, continued his correspondence with Dee, and
+sent her majesty a timely information of some design against her person.
+This adventurer may appear a very suspicious personage. Lord Burleigh
+addresses this "Baron of Bohemia," as the minister designates him, with
+high respect and admiration, for his "virtues, his wisdom, and
+learning." However, in the same confidential letter, his lordship
+informs "the good knight" of some malicious reports; that "he did not
+come home, because he could not perform that, indeed, which has been
+reported of him:" and others had gone so far as to deem Sir Edward "an
+impostor." This letter, written by Burleigh's own hand,[13] shows the
+skilful falconer luring the bird. Dee assured the queen that "the Baron
+of Bohemia" positively possessed the secret of the great operation. The
+queen anxiously concerted measures to secure the escape of Sir Edward
+Kelley from his second imprisonment. Agents were despatched, the jailers
+were drugged, the horses were awaiting for the fugitive; scaling the
+wall, he fell, and died of his contusions, thus abruptly closing the
+romance of a daring disturbed spirit.
+
+Dee returned to England in December, 1589, and presenting himself to the
+queen at Richmond, was received, as he was ever accustomed to be, with
+all graciousness. But the philosopher, after the absence of six years,
+returning to his studious abode, beheld it nearly dismantled; his
+chemical apparatus, with all his scientific implements, had been
+destroyed by a mob, and his library pillaged. Every day this victim of
+science experienced the effects of popular obloquy. He gathered up what
+fragments he could; and again rapt in study, he again relapsed into his
+old wants. The _res angusta domi_ once more disturbed his lares. Yet the
+queen was not unmindful of her philosopher; Mr. Cavendish was despatched
+to assure him that he might freely pursue his studies, and brought a
+royal Christmas gift of two hundred angels in gold, to be renewed with
+the season.
+
+But the old man craved more than an uncertain eleemosynary bounty; his
+creditors multiplied, and the great will forget the man whom they rarely
+see. Dee has feelingly classed those who had outwearied his generous
+nature, "the ungrateful and the thankless; and the scorners and
+disdainers." The royal hand alone could repair his injuries, and
+vindicate his genius. Dee addressed a memorial to the queen, praying
+that a commission might be appointed to inquire into his case, which, as
+he energetically expressed himself, had been "written with tears of
+blood." He did not draw up his petition as an illustrious pauper, but as
+a claimant for services performed.
+
+A commission was immediately assigned, and it was followed by a literary
+scene of singular novelty.
+
+Dee, sitting in his library, received the royal commissioners. Two
+tables were arranged; on one lay all the books he had published, with
+his unfinished manuscripts; the most extraordinary one was an elaborate
+narrative of the transactions of his own life. This manuscript his
+secretary read, and as it proceeded, from the other table Dee presented
+the commissioners with every testimonial; these vouchers consisted of
+royal letters from the queen, and from princes, ambassadors, and the
+most illustrious persons of England and of Europe: passports which
+traced his routes, and journals which noted his arrivals and departures:
+grants and appointments, and other remarkable evidences; and when these
+were wanting, he appealed to living witnesses.
+
+Among the employments which he had filled, he particularly alludes to "a
+painful journey in the winter season, of more than fifteen hundred
+miles, to confer with learned physicians on the Continent, about her
+majesty's health." He showed the offers of many princes to the English
+philosopher to retire to their courts, and the princely establishment at
+Moscow proffered by the czar; but he had never faltered in his devotion
+to his sovereign. He appealed to the clerks of the records of the Tower,
+and to other antiquaries,[14] for his free distribution of the
+manuscripts which he had often discovered. He complains that his house
+at Mortlake was too public for his studies, and incommodious for
+receiving the numerous foreign literati who resorted to him. Of all the
+promised preferments, he would have chosen the Mastership of St. Cross
+for its seclusion. Here is a great man making great demands, but
+reposing with dignity on his claims; his wants were urgent, but the
+penury was not in his spirit. The commissioners, as they listened to
+this autobiography, must often have raised their eyes in wonder on the
+venerable and dignified author before them.
+
+The report was most favourable; the queen spontaneously declared that
+Dee should have St. Cross, and the incumbent might be removed to a
+bishopric. She allotted him a considerable pension, and commanded Lady
+Howard to write "words of comfort" to his wife; and further sent an
+immediate supply by the hands of Sir Thomas Gorge. The letter to his
+wife and the ready money were, however, the only tangible gift, for St.
+Cross and the pension he never received!
+
+Two years after we find Dee still memorialising. He published "A Letter
+Apologetical, with a Plain Demonstration and Fervent Protestation for
+the Course of the Philosophical Studies of _a Certain Studious
+Gentleman_," 1599. This was a vindication against the odium of magical
+practices. At length, the archbishop installed him in the wardenship of
+Manchester College; but though our adventurer now drew into harbour, it
+was his destiny to live in storms. The inmates always suspected him of
+concealing more secrets of nature than he was willing to impart; and the
+philosopher who had received from great men in Europe such testimonies
+of their admiration, now was hourly mortified by the petty malice of the
+obscure fellows of his college. After several years of contention, he
+resigned a college which no occult arts he possessed could govern.
+
+His royal patroness was no more. The light and splendour of the Court
+had sunk beneath the horizon; and in the chill evening of his life the
+visionary looked up to those who were not susceptible of his innocent
+sorcery. Still retaining his lofty pretensions, he addressed the King,
+and afterwards the parliament. He implored to be freed from vulgar
+calumnies, and to be brought to trial, that a judicial sentence might
+clear him of all those foul suspicions which had clouded over his days
+for more than half a century. It is to be regretted that this trial did
+not take place; the accusations and the defence would have supplied no
+incurious chapter in the history of the human mind. A necromancer, and a
+favourite with Elizabeth, was not likely to be tolerated in the Court of
+James the First. Cecil, who when young had been taught by his father to
+admire the erudition of the reformer of the Gregorian calendar, was not
+the same person in the Court of James the First as in that of Elizabeth;
+he resigned the sage to his solitude, and, with the policy of the
+statesman, only reasonably enough observed, that "Dee would shortly go
+mad!"
+
+Misfortune could neither break nor change the ambitious spirit of the
+deserted philosopher. He still dreamed in a spiritual world which he
+never saw nor heard, and hopefully went on working his stills, deprived
+of the powder of projection. He sold his books for a meal; and if the
+gossiper Aubrey may be trusted, in such daily distress he may have
+practised on the simplicity of his humble neighbours, by sometimes
+recovering a stolen basket of linen, though it seems he refused the more
+solemn conjuration of casting a figure for a stray horse! It is only in
+this degradation of sordid misery that he is shown to us in the
+_Alchemist_ of Jonson. Weary, as he aptly expresses himself, of "sailing
+against the wind's eye," in 1608, in the eighty-first year of his age,
+he resolved to abandon his native land. There was still another and a
+better world for the pilgrim of science; and it was during the
+preparations to rejoin his Continental friends in Germany that death
+closed all future sorrows.
+
+It was half a century after the decease of Dr. Dee, that the learned
+Meric Casaubon amazed the world by publishing the large folio containing
+"A True and Faithful Relation of what passed many Years between Dr. JOHN
+DEE and SOME SPIRITS," 1659, from a copy in the Cottonian Library. Yet
+is this huge volume but a torso; the mighty fragments, however, were
+recovered from the mischances of a kitchen fire, by Elias Ashmole, a
+virtuoso in alchemy and astrology, who toiled and trembled over the
+mystical and almost the interminable quires. Such is the fate of books!
+the world will for ever want the glorious fragments of Tacitus and Livy,
+but they have Dee passingly entire.[15]
+
+MERIC CASAUBON was the learned son of a more learned father, but his
+erudition much exceeded his judgment. He had written a treatise against
+the delusions of "Enthusiasm," from whence the author derived but little
+benefit; for he demonstrated the existence of witches. Yet Meric
+Casaubon, meek and honest, was solicited by Cromwell to become his
+historiographer; but from principle he declined the profit and the
+honour; during the Oliverian rule, he became an hypochondriac, and has
+prefixed an hypochondriacal preface to this unparalleled volume. His
+faith is obsequious, and he confirms the verity of these conferences
+with "spirits," by showing that others before Dee had enjoyed such
+visitations. The fascination of a conference with "spirits" must have
+entered into the creed even of higher philosophers; for we are startled
+by discovering that the great Leibnitz observed on this preface, that
+"it deserves to be translated, _as well as the work itself_!"[16]
+
+When this book of marvels was first published, the world was overcome by
+the revelations. Those saintly personages, whose combined wisdom then
+assisted the councils of England, Owen, Goodwin, Nye, and others of that
+sort, held a solemn consistory for the suppression of the book. They
+entertained a violent suspicion that the whole of this incomprehensible
+jargon was a covert design by some of the Church of England party, by a
+mockery of their own style, to expose the whole sainthood, who pretended
+so greatly to inspiration. But the bomb exploded at once, and spread in
+all directions; and ere they could fit and unfit their textual debates,
+the book had been eagerly bought, and placed far beyond the reach of
+suppression.[17]
+
+The "True Relation of what passed many Years between Dr. DEE and SOME
+SPIRITS," long excited curiosity which no one presumed to satisfy.
+During no less a period than five-and-twenty years was Dee recording
+what he terms his "Actions with Spirits," for all was written by his own
+hand. It would be an extravagant inference to conclude that a person of
+blameless character and grave habits would persevere through a good
+portion of his life in the profitless design of leaving a monument of
+posthumous folly solely to mystify posterity. Some fools of learning,
+indeed, have busied themselves in forging antiquities to bewilder some
+of their successors, but these malicious labours were the freaks of idle
+hours, not the devotion of a life. Even the imposture of Kelley will not
+wholly account for the credulity of Dee; for many years after their
+separation, and to his last days, Dee sought for and at length found
+another "Skryer."[18] Are we to resolve these "Actions with Spirits" by
+the visions of another sage, a person eminent for his science, and a
+Rosicrucian of our own times,--that illustrious Emanuel Swedenborg, who,
+in his reveries, communed with spirits and angels? It would thus be a
+great psychological phenomenon which remains unsolved.
+
+No one has noticed that a secret communication, uninterrupted through
+the protracted reign of Elizabeth, existed between the Queen and the
+philosopher. The deep interest her Majesty took in his welfare is
+strikingly revealed to us. Dee, in his frequent troubles, had constantly
+recourse to the Queen, and she was ever prompt at his call. The personal
+attentions of the Queen often gratified his master-passion--often she
+sent kind messages by her ladies and her courtiers--often was he
+received at Greenwich, Richmond, and at Windsor; and he was singularly
+honoured by her Majesty's visits at his house in Mortlake. The Queen
+would sometimes appear waiting before his garden, when he would approach
+to kiss her hand and solve some difficult inquiry she had prepared for
+him. On one of these occasions Dee exhibited to her Majesty a concave
+mirror; a glass which had provoked too much awful discussion, but which
+would charm the Queen while this Sir David Brewster of his age
+condescended to explain the optical illusions. When Dee, in his travels,
+was detained by sickness in Lorraine, her Majesty despatched two of her
+own physicians to attend on this valued patient. The Queen incessantly
+made golden promises of preferment; many eminent appointments were fixed
+on. He had, too, a patron in Leicester, the favourite of Elizabeth, for
+in that terrible state-libel of "Leicester's Commonwealth," among the
+instruments of that earl's dark agencies we discover "Dee and Allen, two
+atheists, for figuring and conjuring," that is, for astrological
+diagrams and magical invocations![19] As, notwithstanding the profusion
+of the Queen's designs for his promotion, he received but little, and
+that little late, the sincerity of the royal patron has been arraigned.
+Mysterious as the philosopher's cabbalistic jargon with which he
+sometimes entertained her, her Majesty seems to have remunerated empty
+phrases by providing notional places; but Elizabeth may not have
+deserved this hard censure; she unfailingly supplied her money-gifts, a
+certain evidence of her sincerity! The truth seems to be that royal
+promises may be frustrated by intervening competitors and ministerial
+expedients. At the Court, the evil genius of Dee stood ever by his side,
+saluting the philosopher with no friendly voice, as "the arch-conjuror
+of the whole kingdom!" The philosopher struggled with the unconquerable
+prejudices of the age.
+
+If we imagine that Elizabeth only looked on Dee as the great alchemist
+who was to replenish her coffers, or the mystic who propounded the world
+of spirits, this would not account for the Queen permitting Dee to
+remain on the Continent during six years. Had such been the Queen's
+hopes, she would have hermetically sealed the philosopher in his house
+at Mortlake, where in her rides to Richmond she might conveniently have
+watched the progress of gold-making and listened to the theurgic
+revelations. Never would she have left this wanderer from court to
+court, with the chance of conveying to other princes such inappreciable
+results of the occult sciences.
+
+What then was the cause of this intimate intercourse of the Queen with
+Dr. Dee; and what the occasion of that mysterious journey of fifteen
+hundred miles in the winter season to consult physicians on her
+Majesty's health, of which he had reminded the Queen by her
+commissioners, but which they could not have comprehended? Did these
+mysterious physicians reside in one particular locality; and in the vast
+intervening distance were there no skilful physicians equally able for
+consultation?
+
+A casual hint dropped by Lilly, the famous astrologer, will unveil the
+mysterious life of Dee during his six years' residence abroad. Lilly
+tells us that "for many years, in search of the profounder studies, he
+travelled into foreign parts; _to be serious_, he was Queen Elizabeth's
+intelligencer, and had a salary for his maintenance from the secretaries
+of state." Lilly, who is correct in his statements except on the
+fabulous narratives of his professional art, must have written from some
+fact known to him; and it harmonizes with an ingenious theory to explain
+the unintelligible diary of Dee, suggested by Dr. ROBERT HOOKE, the
+eminent mathematician.
+
+HOOKE, himself a great inventor in science, entertained a very high
+notion of the scientific character of Dee, and of his curiosity and
+dexterity in the philosophical arts--optics, perspective, and mechanics.
+Deeply versed in chemistry, mathematics, and the prevalent study of
+astrology, like another Roger Bacon (or rather a Baptista Porta),
+delighting in the marvellous of philosophical experiments, he was sent
+abroad to amuse foreign princes, while he was really engaged by
+Elizabeth in state affairs. Hooke, by turning over the awful tome, and
+comparing several circumstances with the history of his own life, was
+led to conclude that "all which relates to the spirits, their names,
+speeches, shows, noises, clothing, actions, &c., were all
+_cryptography_; feigned relations, concealing true ones of a very
+different nature." It was to prevent any accident, lest his papers
+should fall into hostile hands, that he preferred they should appear as
+the effusions of a visionary, rather than the secret history of a real
+spy. When the spirits are described as using inarticulate words,
+unpronounceable according to the letters in which they are written, he
+conjectured that this gibberish would be understood by that book of
+Enoch which Dee prized so highly, and which Hooke considered to contain
+the cypher. Hooke, however, has not deciphered any of these inarticulate
+words; but as the book of Enoch seems still to exist, this Apocalypse
+may yet receive its commentator, a task which it appears Dr. Adam Clarke
+once himself contemplated.[20]
+
+There is one fatal objection to this ingenious theory of cryptography;
+this astounding diary opens long before Dee went abroad, and was
+continued long after his return, when it does not appear that he was
+employed in affairs of state.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] About the same time, in 1574, Ruggeiri, a Florentine, was
+    condemned to the galleys for having conspired against the French
+    monarch in favour of the Duke of Alençon, his brother. The act of
+    treason consisted in making an image of wax, the perfect likeness of
+    Charles the Ninth, which had a heart pricked with pins. This was the
+    exact peril into which our English queen had been cast--probably by
+    some Romanist who fancied himself, or herself, to be an adept.
+
+  [2] A catalogue of Dr. Dee's library, in his own handwriting, may be
+    found in Harl. MSS. 1879. Four thousand volumes, "abounding with a
+    curious harvest of books illustrative of the occult art," but also
+    containing the ancient classics. He expended on his collections the
+    considerable sum of "thirty hundred pounds," as he tells us, for at
+    that day they counted by "hundreds."
+
+  [3] These ingenious rolls, or maps, are now deposited among the
+    Cottonian manuscripts.
+
+  [4] The curious catalogue of both is found in the "Biog. Britannica."
+    Dee would have printed more of his writings, but he found the
+    printers too often adverse to his hopes, as "few men's studies were
+    in such matters employed." One of his manuscripts was so voluminous,
+    containing an account of his "Inventions," being "greater than the
+    English Bible," that it appeared "so dreadful to the printers," that
+    our philosopher postponed its publication to "a sufficient
+    opportunity," which never occurred.
+
+    These unfinished writings are scattered in the COTTONIAN and the
+    ASHMOLEAN Collections, for their learned founders anxiously recovered
+    them.
+
+    The naval project appears in a singular volume, entitled "General and
+    Rare Memorials pertaining to the Perfect Art of Navigation, 1577,
+    folio." The author printed only one hundred copies, which he
+    distributed among confidential friends, patriotically refusing a
+    considerable offer for a copy by a foreign Power. This volume is said
+    to be one of the scarcest books in the English language. A copy at
+    the British Museum contains notes in the handwriting of Dee himself,
+    fraught with his usual sorrows; his representation of his affairs is
+    not luminous, and seems written with a dulled spirit--querulous and
+    involved.
+
+  [5] The mystery of the divining rod is as ancient as the days of
+    Cicero. The German miners introduced its practice among our Cornish
+    miners. Childrey, in his "Britannia Baconiana, or the Natural
+    Rarities of England, Scotland, and Wales," 1661, cautiously
+    describes, as a disciple of Bacon should, its effects on mines of
+    lead in Somersetshire. Boyle and the Royal Society were perplexed by
+    the evidence. We have accounts from some, unimpeachable for
+    integrity, of the agitation of the divining rod as authentic and
+    incomprehensible as any recorded of animal magnetism. A few years
+    ago, a learned writer in the "Quarterly Review" surprised us by
+    reviving the phenomenon, in the history of it, as performed by a lady
+    of distinction, in the present day, searching for a spring of water.
+
+    Many frauds have succeeded by this pretended rod of divination. The
+    reader may consult Le Brun's "Histoire Critique des Pratiques
+    Superstitieuses" for "La Baguette;" but, above all, a philosophical
+    article by the scientific BIOT, in "Biog. Universelle," art. _Ayman
+    Jacques_. [An account of its use at Freiburg in discovering silver
+    mines, and a picture of its form, may be seen in Dr. Brown's "Travels
+    in Germany," 4to, 1677, p. 136.]
+
+    The divining rod consists simply of a hazel bough forked: the bearer
+    firmly grasps the two pointed ends, holding it before him; it must
+    bend, or become agitated, when it indicates the spot which conceals a
+    spring of water, or buried metal. In the hands of a susceptible agent
+    tremulous nerves, in the solemn operation, would be likely to
+    communicate their irritability to the hazel bough. But who has
+    enjoyed the magic of the _treasure trove_? The divining-rod,
+    described as the Mosaical rod, furnishes an incident in "The
+    Antiquary" of Sir Walter Scott, which was probably borrowed from an
+    amusing incident in the Life of Lilly the astrologer; where we
+    discover that David Ramsay, his majesty's clockmaker, having heard of
+    a great treasure in the Cloyster of Westminster Abbey, came at
+    midnight, accompanied by one of the elect, with the Mosaical
+    rods--"on the west side of the Cloyster the hazle rods turned over
+    another." David Ramsay had brought a great sack to hold the treasure,
+    when suddenly all the demons issued out of their beds in a storm,
+    that--"we verily believed the west end of the church would have
+    fallen." The torches were suddenly extinguished, the rods would not
+    move, and they returned home faster than they came.
+
+  [6] Sloane MSS., 3191.
+
+  [7] There can be no doubt of the reality of all these magical
+    apparatus, for we actually possess them. The magical mirror, having
+    lost its theurgic enchantment, finally was placed among the
+    curiosities of the late Earl of Oxford. Lysons describes it as a
+    round piece of volcanic glass finely polished--some one calls it
+    Kennel coal. The hieroglyphical cakes of wax were deposited at the
+    British Museum, probably at the time the precious manuscripts of
+    Dee's conferences with "the Spirits" were so carefully lodged in the
+    Cottonian Collections.
+
+  [8] This superstition retains all its freshness in the East. A
+    magician at Cairo recently,
+
+    "Taking in of SHADOWS WITH A GLASS"--(_The Alchemist of Jonson_),
+    has, I believe, been recorded by a noble lord; having startled the
+    lookers-on with one shadow, painfully recognised, and another of a
+    great _bibliophile_, who, seen in the glass, walking in a garden with
+    his hands full of books, was supposed to be the worthy Archdeacon
+    Wrangham. I must however add, that the same magician showed himself
+    very dull to a dear friend of mine; and that his "speculator," a boy
+    called, apparently accidentally, from the street, only displayed his
+    gift in nonsensical mendacity.
+
+  [9] In the golden days of animal magnetism, more than forty years
+    ago, I heard many tales, and visited many scenes, where there must
+    have been much imposture practised, more credulity contagious, and
+    much which I never could comprehend. In the magnetic sleep, where the
+    body seemed extinct--and in the luminous crisis, where the soul was
+    wakeful in all its invisible operations--the inspired communicant,
+    undisturbed by the sly contrivances of the unbeliever, seemed
+    transported when and where they listed. A Mr. Baldwin, in 1795 our
+    consul at Alexandria, in search of what he called the Divinity of
+    Truth, imagined he had found it in this new and mystical science.
+    Always seeking for fitting subjects, a cunning Arab long served his
+    purpose on ordinary matters, but it was his fortune to fall on an
+    Italian wanderer far more susceptible of the magnetic influence. For
+    three years, in his own abode, he has chronicled down "The Sittings,"
+    as he calls them, where, in the magnetic sleep, the communicant
+    poured forth in verse and prose mysteries and revelations. On his
+    return to England, Mr. Baldwin printed, by Bulmer, in an unpublished
+    quarto, these "Sittings," in the native language of the inspired; as
+    the subject was an improvisatore, it probably cost him little to
+    charm Mr. Baldwin in "celestial colloquy sublime" with answers to
+    most unanswerable inquiries; and descriptions of ecstatic scenes
+    which made the pen tremble with wonder and delight in the hands of
+    the infatuated scribe. Baldwin, with the faith of Dee, wrote down the
+    revelations of _his_ Edward Kelley.
+
+  [10] This volume is Dee's "Monas Hieroglyphica, Mathematice,
+    Cabalistice, et Anagogice Explicata," 1564; a book which Elizabeth
+    lamented she could not comprehend. It is reprinted in the "Theatrum
+    Chymicum Britannicum" of that lover of the occult sciences, ELIAS
+    ASHMOLE.
+
+  [11] The often-repeated tales of this vanished alchemy may startle
+    the incredulous; but the dupes and the knaves have been so numerous
+    that we cannot distinguish between them. Sir Humphry Davy assured me
+    that making gold might be no impossible thing, though, publicly
+    divulged, a very useless discovery. Metals seem to be composite
+    bodies, which nature is perpetually preparing, and it may be reserved
+    for the future researchers in science to trace, and perhaps to
+    imitate, some of these curious operations. Dr. Girtanner of Gottingen
+    predicted, not many years ago, that "In the nineteenth century the
+    transmutation of metals would be generally practised;" a set of
+    kitchen utensils in gold, he assures us, would save us from the
+    deathly oxides of copper, &c.
+
+  [12] Harl. MSS., 6986 (26)--A letter from Dr. Dee to the Queen,
+    congratulating her on the defeat of the Armada. He declares that he
+    is ready with Kelley, and their families, to return home. Dated Nov.
+    1588.
+
+  [13] This letter, from the Burleigh Papers, is printed by
+    Strype.--_Annals_, iv. 3.
+
+  [14] We have several manuscript letters which passed between DEE and
+    STOWE. They show all the warmth of their literary intercourse. Dee
+    offers his present aid, and promises his future assistance.
+
+  [15] The curious may find a copious narrative of the recovery of
+    these manuscripts, written by Ashmole himself, printed in Ayscough's
+    Catalogue of MSS., p. 371, where also he is referred to the
+    autographs of Dee, in the British Museum.
+
+  [16] "General Dictionary," by BIRCH, art. _Meric Casaubon_--Note B.
+
+  [17] This literary anecdote I derive from a manuscript and
+    contemporary note in the printed copy at the British Museum.
+
+  [18] This office of "skryer" is ambiguous--no dictionary will assist
+    us. "In the year before he died, 1607, Dee procured one Bartholomew
+    Hickman to serve him _in the same manner_ as Kelley had
+    done."--_Biog. Brit>._, v. 43. In what manner? Did Hickman pretend to
+    descry the "actions of the spirits" in the show-stone, or only to
+    drudge on the powder of projection? Forty years have elapsed since I
+    turned over the interminable "Diary," and now my eyes are dim and my
+    courage gone. I suspect, however, that that magical herb--eye-bright,
+    however administered, will fail to penetrate through the darkness
+    which surrounds the chaotic mass of manuscript.
+
+  [19] It requires a late posterity to correct the gross prejudices of
+    contemporaries; it was not the least of the honours which Dee enjoyed
+    to have been closely united with the studies of the "atheist" Allen,
+    "the father of all learning and virtuous industry, infinitely beloved
+    and admired by the court and the university." The ardent eulogy of
+    Wood is earnest.--_Athen. Oxon._, ii. 541.
+
+  [20] "As it is asserted that the six books of Mysteries transcribed
+    from the papers of Dr. John Dee, by Elias Ashmole, Esqre., preserved
+    in the Sloane Library, (Plutarch XVI., G,) are a collection of papers
+    relative to State Transactions between Elizabeth, her Ministers, and
+    different Foreign Powers, in which Dr. Dee was employed sometimes as
+    an official agent openly, and at other times as a Spy, I purpose to
+    make an extract from the whole work, and endeavour, if possible, to
+    get a key to open the Mysteries. A. C."--_Cat. of Adam Clarke's MSS._
+
+
+
+
+THE ROSACRUSIAN FLUDD.
+
+
+The confraternity of the Rose-cross long attracted public notice.
+Congenial with the more ancient freemasonry, it was probably designed
+for a more intellectual order; it was entitled "The Enlightened," "The
+Immortal," and "The Invisible." Its name has been frequently used to
+veil mysteries, to disguise secret agents, and to carry on those artful
+impostures which we know have been practised on infirm credulity by the
+dealers in thaumaturgical arts, to a very recent period. The modern
+illuminati, of whom not many years past we heard so much, are
+conjectured to have branched out of the sublime society of the
+Rose-cross.
+
+This mystical order sprung up among that mystical people, the Germans,
+who are to this day debating on its origin, for, like other secret
+societies, its concealed source eludes the search. It was at the
+beginning of the seventeenth century that a German divine, John
+Valentine Andreæ, a scholar of enlarged genius, in his controversial
+writings amused his readers by certain mysterious allusions to a society
+for the regeneration of science and religion; in the ambiguity of his
+language, it remained doubtful whether the society was already
+instituted, or was to be instituted. Suddenly a new name was noised
+through Europe, the name of Christian Rosencreutz, the founder three
+centuries back of a secret society, and a eulogy of the order was
+dispersed in five different languages.
+
+The name of the founder seemed as mystical as the secret order, the Rose
+and the Cross.[1] The rose, with the Germans, which was placed in the
+centre of their ceiling, was the emblem of domestic confidence, whence
+we have our phrase "under the rose;" and the cross, the consecrated
+symbol of Christianity, described the order's holy end; such notions
+might suit a mystical divine.[2] In the legend, the visionary founder
+was said to have brought from Palestine all the secrets of nature and of
+art, the elixir of longevity, and the stone so vainly called
+philosophical.[3]
+
+If to some the society had a problematical existence, others were
+convinced of its reality; learned men became its disciples, its
+defenders; and one eminent person published its laws and its customs.
+Michael Maier, the physician of the Emperor Rodolph, who had ennobled
+him for his services, having become initiated by some adepts, travelled
+over all Germany seeking every brother, and from their confidential
+instruction collected their laws and customs. At the same time, ROBERT
+FLUDD, a learned physician of our own country, distinguished for his
+science and his mysticism, introduced Rosacrusianism into England; its
+fervent disciple, he furnished an apology for the mystical brotherhood
+when it seemed to require one.
+
+The arcane tomes of Fludd often spread, and still with "the Elect" may
+yet spread, an inebriating banquet of "the occult sciences"--all the
+reveries of the ancient Cabalists, the abstractions of the lower
+Platonists, and the fancies of the modern Paracelsians, all that is
+mysterious and incomprehensible, with the rich condiment of science.
+There are some eyes which would still pierce into truths muffled in
+jargon and rhapsody, and dwell on the images of realities in the
+delirious dreams of the learned.
+
+Two worlds, "The Macrocosm," or the great visible world of nature, and
+"the Microcosm," or the little world of man, form the comprehensive
+view, designed, to use Fludd's own terms, as "an Encyclophy, or Epitome
+of all arts and sciences."[4] This Rosacrusian philosopher seeks for
+man in nature herself, and watches that creative power in her little
+mortal miniatures. In his Mosaic philosophy, founded on the first
+chapter of Genesis, our seer, standing in the midst of Chaos, separates
+the three principles of the creation: the palpable darkness--the
+movement of the waters--at length the divine light! The corporeity of
+angels and devils is distinguished on the principle of _rarum et
+densum_, thin or thick. Angelic beings, through their transparency,
+reflect the luminous Creator; but, externally formed of the most
+spiritual part of water or air, by contracting their vaporous subtilty,
+may "visibly and organically talk with man." The devils are of a heavy
+gross air; so Satan, the apostle called "the prince of air;" but in
+touch they are excessive cold, because the spirit by which they live--as
+this philosopher proceeds to demonstrate--drawn and contracted into the
+centre, the circumference of dilated air remains icy cold. From angels
+and demons, the Rosacrusian would approach even to the Divinity;
+calculating the infinity by his geometry, he reveals the nature of the
+Divine Being, as "a pure monad, including in itself all numbers." A
+paradoxical expression, lying more in the words than the idea, which
+called down an anathema on the impiety of our Theosophist, for ascribing
+"composition unto God." The occult philosopher warded off this perilous
+stroke. "If I have said that God is in composition, I mean it not as a
+part compounding, but as the sole compounder, in the apostolic style,
+'He is over all, and in all.'" He detects the origin of evil in the
+union of the sexes; the sensual organs of the mother of mankind were
+first opened by the fruit which blasted the future human race. He broods
+over the mystery of life--production and corruption--regeneration and
+resurrection! On the lighter topics of mortal studies he displays
+ingenious conceptions. The title of one of his treatises is "De Naturæ
+Simia," or "The Ape of Nature,"--that is, ART! a single image, but a
+fertile principle.
+
+Sympathies and antipathies, divine and human, are among the mysteries of
+our nature. By two universal principles, the boreal, or condensing power
+of cold, and the austral, or the rarefaction of heat, impulsion and
+repulsion, our physician explains the active operations in the human
+frame--notions not wholly fanciful; but, at once medical and magical,
+this doctrine led him into one of the most extraordinary conceptions of
+mystical invention, yet which long survived the inventor; so seductive
+were the first follies of science.
+
+Man exists in the perpetual opposition of sympathies and antipathies;
+and the Cabalist in the human frame beheld the contests of spirits,
+benevolent or malign, trooping on the four viewless winds which were to
+be submitted to his occult potentiality. Nor was the physician
+unsuccessful, for in the sweetness of his elocution, pleasant fancies
+and elevated conceptions operated on the charmed faith of his
+imaginative patients.
+
+The mysterious qualities of the magnet were held by Fludd as nothing
+less than an angelical effluvia. In his "Mystic Anatomy," to heal the
+wounds of a person miraculously, at any distance, he prescribed a
+Cabalistical, Astrological, and Magnetic Unguent. A drop of blood
+obtained from the wound mixed with this unguent, and the unguent applied
+to the identical instrument which inflicted the wound, would, however
+distant the patient resided, act and heal by the virtue of sympathy.
+This singular operation was ludicrously named "the weapon-salve."
+
+Fludd not only produces the attestations of eminent persons, who, in
+charity we may believe, imagined that they had perfectly succeeded in
+practising his "mystic anatomy," but he also alleges for its authority
+the practice of Paul, who cured diseases by only requiring that the
+handkerchiefs and aprons of patients should be brought to him. Hardly a
+single extravagance of the Paracelsian fancy of Fludd but rests on some
+scriptural authority,--on some fictitious statement,--or some credulous
+imagination. Fludd, indeed, as our plain Oxford antiquary shrewdly
+opineth, was "strangely profound in obscure matters."[5] A curious tract
+was published by FLUDD, to clear himself from the odium of magical
+dealings, in reply to a fiery parson, one Foster, who took an
+extraordinary mode of getting his book read, by nailing it at the door
+of the Rosacrusian at night, that it might be turned over in the morning
+by the whole parish! This was "A Sponge to Wipe away the Weapon-Salve,"
+showing, that "to cure by applying the salve to the weapon, is magical
+and unlawful." The parson evidently supposed that it did cure! Fludd
+replied by "The Squeezing of Parson Foster's Sponge. 1631, 4to."--"to
+crush and squeeze his sponge, and make it by force to vomit up again the
+truth which it hath devoured." Our sage throughout displays the most
+tempered disposition, and the most fervent genius; but the nonsense is
+equally curious.
+
+We smile at the _sympathy_ of "the weapon-salve;" but we must not forget
+that this occult power was the received philosophy of the days of our
+Rosacrusian. Who has not heard of "the sympathetic powder" of Sir Kenelm
+Digby, by which the bloody garter of James Howell was cured, and
+consequently its pleasant owner, without his own knowledge? or of the
+"sympathetic needles" of the great author of "Vulgar Errors," by which,
+though somewhat perplexed, he concluded that two lovers might correspond
+invisibly? and, above all others, the warts of the illustrious Verulam,
+by sympathy with the lard which had rubbed them, wasting away as the
+lard rotted when nailed on the chamber window? Lord Bacon acquaints us
+that "It is constantly received and avouched, that _the anointing of the
+weapon that maketh the wound_ will heal the wound itself."[6] Indeed,
+Lord Bacon himself had discovered as magical a sympathy, for he
+presented Prince Henry, as "the first fruits of his philosophy, _a
+sympathising stone_, made of several mixtures, to know the heart of
+man," whose "operative gravity, magnetic and magical, would show by the
+hand that held it whether the heart was warm and affectionate." The
+philosophy of that day was infinitely more amusing than our own "exact"
+sciences!
+
+We may smile at jargon in which we have not been initiated, at whimsical
+combinations we do not fancy, at analogies where we lose all semblance,
+and at fables which we know to be nothing more; but we may credit that
+these mystical terms of the learned FLUDD conceal many profound and
+original views, and many truths not yet patent. It is enough that one of
+the deepest scholars, our illustrious SELDEN, highly appreciated the
+volumes and their author. It is indeed remarkable that Bayle, Niceron,
+and other literary historians, have not ventured to lay their hands on
+this ark of theosophical science; too modest to dispute, or too generous
+to attack: unlike the great adversary of Fludd, Père Mersenne, who
+denounced the Rosacrusian to Europe as a caco-magician, who had ensured
+for himself perdition throughout eternity.
+
+Père Mersenne, at Paris, stood at the head of the mathematical class,
+the early companion, and to his last day the earnest advocate, of
+Descartes. That great philosopher was secretly disposed not to reject
+all the reveries of the occult philosophers. It is certain that he had
+listened with complacency to the universal elixir, which was to preserve
+human life to an indefinite period; and one of his disciples, when he
+heard of his death, persisted in not crediting the account. His own
+vortices displayed the picturesque fancy of a Rosacrusian; and moreover,
+likewise, he was calumniated as an atheist. Père Mersenne not only
+defended his friend, but, to clear the French philosopher of any such
+disposition, he attacked the Rosacrusians themselves. Too vehement in
+his theological hatreds, he dared to publish too long a nomenclature of
+the atheists of his times;[7] and among Machiavel, Cardan, Campanella,
+and Vanini, appears the name of our pious Fludd. Mersenne expressed his
+astonishment that James the First suffered such a man to live and to
+write.
+
+On this occasion Fludd was more fortunate than Dee. He obtained an
+interview with his learned sovereign, to clear himself of "the Frier's
+scandalous report." He found his Majesty "regally learned and gracious;
+excellent and subtile in his inquisitive objections, and instead of a
+check, I had much grace and honour from him, and I found him my kingly
+patron all the days of his life." Mersenne, notwithstanding the odium he
+cast on the personal character of Fludd, was willing to bribe the
+Heresiarch, for he offered to unite with him in any work for the
+correction of science and art, provided Fludd would return to that
+Catholic creed which his ancestors had professed. "I tell this to my
+countrymen's shame," exclaims Fludd, "who, instead of encouraging me in
+my labours, as by letters from Polonia, Suevia, Prussia, Germany,
+Transylvania, France, and Italy, I have had, do pursue me with malice,
+which when a learned German heard of, it reminded him of the speech of
+Christ, that 'no man is a prophet in his own country.' Without any
+bragging of my knowledge, be it spoken, I speak this feelingly; but a
+guiltless conscience bids me be patient."
+
+The writings of Fludd are all composed in Latin; it is remarkable that
+the works of an English author, residing in England, should be printed
+at Frankfort, Oppenheim, and Gouda. This singularity is accounted for by
+the author himself. Fludd, in one respect, resembled Dee; he could find
+no English printers who would venture on their publication. When Foster
+insinuated that his character as a magician was so notorious, that he
+dared not print at home, Fludd tells his curious story: "I sent my
+writings beyond the seas, because our home-born printers demanded of me
+five hundred pounds to print the first volume, and to find the cuts in
+copper; but beyond the seas it was printed at no cost of mine, and as I
+could wish; and I had sixteen copies sent me over, with forty pounds in
+gold, as an unexpected gratuity for it." It is evident that, throughout
+Europe, they were infinitely more inquisitive in their occult
+speculations than we in England; and however this may now seem to our
+credit, certainly our incuriosity was not then a consequence of our
+superior science, for he whose mighty mind was to give a new and
+enduring impulse to the study of nature, who was to teach us how to
+philosophize, and was now drawing us out of this dark forest of the
+human intellect into the lucid expanse of his creative mind, was himself
+still fascinated by magical sympathies, surmised why witches eat human
+flesh, and instructed us in the doctrine of spirits, angelic and
+demoniac. Bacon would have elucidated the theory of Dee, and the
+imaginative mysticism of the Rosacrusian.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Fuller's amusing explanation of the term Rosa-crusian was written
+    without any knowledge of the supposititious founder. He says--"Sure I
+    am that a Rose is the sweetest of flowers, and a Cross accounted the
+    sacredest of forms and figures, so that much of eminency must he
+    imported in their composition."--_Fuller's Worthies._
+
+  [2] The chemists, in the style of their arcana, explain the term by
+    the mystical union, in their secret operations, of the dew and the
+    light. They derive the dew from the Latin _Ros_, and, in the figure
+    of a cross X, they trace the three letters which compose the word
+    _Lux_--light. Mosheim is positive in the accuracy of his information.
+    I would not answer for my own, though somewhat more reasonable; it is
+    indeed difficult to ascertain the origin of the name of a society
+    which probably never had an existence.
+
+  [3] In the Harleian MSS., from 6481 to 6486, are several Rosacrusian
+    writings, some translated from the Latin by one Peter Smart, and
+    others by a Dr. Rudd, who appears to have been a profound adept.
+
+  [4] These are his words in reply to his adversary Foster, the only
+    work which he published in English, in consequence of the attack
+    being in the vernacular idiom. The term here introduced into the
+    language is, perhaps, our most ancient authority for the modern term
+    _Encyclopædia_, which Chambers curtailed to _Cyclopædia_.
+
+  [5] The collected writings of ROBERT FLUDD, under the latinised name
+    "De Fluctibus," should form six volumes folio. His "Philosophia
+    Mosaica" has been translated, 1659, fo. He makes Moses a great
+    Rosacrusian. The secret brotherhood must be still willing to give
+    costly prices for their treasure. At the recent sale of Mr. Hibbert,
+    the "Opera" of Fludd obtained twenty pounds! The copy was doubtless
+    "very fine," but the price was surely cabalistical. Nor are these
+    tomes slightly valued on the Continent.
+
+  [6] "Lord Bacon's Natural History," Cent. x. 998.--"In this
+    experiment, upon the relation of men of credit, though myself as
+    _yet_ am not fully inclined to believe it," his lordship gives ten
+    notes or points as extraordinary as "the ointment" itself.
+
+  [7] This list appeared in some Commentaries on Genesis, but was
+    suppressed in most of the copies; the whole has, however, been
+    recovered by Chauffepié in his Dictionary.
+
+
+
+
+BACON.
+
+
+In the age of Elizabeth, the English mind took its first bent; a
+new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion,
+its legislation, and its literature. In every class of genius there
+existed nothing to copy; everything that was to be great was to find a
+beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to
+discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant
+in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators
+of our peaceful literature.
+
+Among these first INVENTORS--our epical SPENSER, our dramatic
+SHAKESPEARE and JONSON, our HOOKER, who sounded the depths of the origin
+of law, and our RAWLEIGH, who first opened the history of mankind--at
+length appeared the philosopher who proclaimed a new philosophy,
+emancipating the human mind by breaking the chains of scholastic
+antiquity. He was a singular being who is recognised without his name.
+
+Aristotle, in taking possession of all the regions of knowledge, from
+the first had assumed a universal monarchy, more real than that of his
+regal pupil, for he had subjugated the minds of generation after
+generation. Through a long succession of ages, and amid both extinct and
+new religions, the writings of the mighty Stagyrite, however long known
+by mutilated and unfaithful versions, were equally studied by the
+Mahometan Arabian and the Rabbinical Hebrew, and, during the scholastic
+ages, were even placed by the side, and sometimes above, the Gospel; and
+the ten categories, which pretended to classify every object of human
+apprehension, were held as another revelation. Centuries succeeded to
+centuries, and the learned went on translating, commenting, and
+interpreting, the sacred obscurity of the autocratical edict of a genius
+whose lofty omniscience seemed to partake in some degree of divinity
+itself.
+
+But from this passive obedience to a single encyclopædic mind, a fatal
+consequence ensued for mankind. The schoolmen had formed, as Lord Bacon
+has nobly expressed himself, "an unhallowed conjunction of divine with
+human matters;" theology itself was turned into a system, drawn out of
+the artificial arrangements of Aristotle; they made their orthodoxy
+dependent on "the scholastic gibberish;"[1] and to doubt any doctrine of
+"the philosopher," as Aristotle was paramountly called, might be to sin
+by a syllogism--heretical, if not atheistical. In reality it was to
+contend, without any possibility of escape, with the ecclesiastical
+establishment, whose integrity was based on the immoveable conformity of
+all human opinions. Every university in Europe, whose honours and
+emoluments arose from their Aristotelian chairs, stood as the sentinels
+of each intellectual fortress. Speculative philosophy could therefore no
+further advance; it could not pass that inviolable circle which had
+circumscribed the universal knowledge of the human race. No one dared to
+think his own thoughts, to observe his own observations, lest by some
+fortuitous discovery, in differing from the Aristotelian dialectic, he
+might lapse from his Christianity. The scholastical sects were still
+agitating the same topics; for the same barbarous terms supplied, on all
+occasions, verbal disputations, which even bloody frays could never
+terminate.
+
+If we imagine that this awful fabric of the Aristotelian or scholastic
+philosophy was first shaken by the Verulamian, we should be conferring
+on a single individual a sudden influence which was far more
+progressive. In a great revolution, whence we date a new era, we are apt
+to lose sight of those devious paths and those marking incidents which
+in all human affairs are the prognostics and the preparations; the
+history of the human mind would be imperfectly revealed, should we not
+trace the great inventors in their precursors.
+
+Early in the sixteenth century appeared simultaneously a number of
+extraordinary geniuses. An age of philosophical inventors seemed to
+arise; a new generation, who, each in his own way, were emancipating
+themselves from the dogmas of the ancient dictator. This revolt against
+the old scholastics broke forth in Italy, in Spain, in France, in
+Germany, and even reached our shores. These philosophers were the
+contemporaries of Luther: they had not engaged in his theological
+reformation, but it is more than probable that they had caught the
+inspiration of his hardy spirit. We are indeed told that the famous
+Cornelius Agrippa, though he could not desert the Rome of his patrons,
+yet saw with satisfaction its great pontiff attacked by Luther; as
+Erasmus and others equally delighted to satirize all the scholastic
+monkery.[2] Luther, too, made common cause with them, in the demolition
+of that ancient edifice of scholastic superstition which, under the
+supremacy of Aristotle, barred out every free inquiry.
+
+Of these eminent men, an elegant scholar, Ludovicus Vives, by birth a
+Spaniard, had been invited to the English court by our Henry the Eighth,
+to be the preceptor of the Princess Mary. Vives too was the friend of
+Erasmus; but while that facetious sage only expended his raillery on the
+scholastic madness, Vives formally attacked the chief, whose final
+authority he declared had hitherto solely rested on the indolence of the
+human mind. Ramus, in France, advanced with more impetuous fury; he held
+a public disputation against the paramount authority of the Stagyrite in
+philosophy; and in his "Aristotelian Animadversions" he profanely
+shivered into atoms of absurdity the syllogistic method, and substituted
+for the logic of Aristotle one of his own, which was long received in
+all the schools of the reformed, for Ramus was a Huguenot. This
+innovator was denounced to the magistrate; for, by opposing Aristotle,
+he had committed open hostility against religion and learning! The
+erudite Abate Andres, probably an Aristotelian at heart, observes, in
+noticing the continued persecutions of this bold spirit, that, "to tell
+the truth, Ramus injured himself far more than the Aristotelian doctrine
+which he had impugned"[3]--and true enough, if it were a rival
+Aristotelian who cast Ramus out of the window, to be massacred by the
+mob on St. Bartholomew's day. Two eminent scholars of Italy contested
+more successfully the doctrines of Aristotle: Patricius collected
+everything he could to degrade and depreciate that philosopher, and to
+elevate the more seductive and imaginative Plato. He asserted that
+Aristotle was the plagiarist of other writers, whose writings he
+invariably affected to contemn; and he went so far as to suggest to the
+Pope to prohibit the teaching of the Aristotelian doctrines in the
+schools; for the doctrines of Plato more harmoniously accorded with the
+Christian faith. Less learned, but more original than Patricius, the
+Neapolitan Telesius struck out a new mode of philosophizing. The study
+of mathematics had indicated to Telesius a severe process in his
+investigations of nature, and had taught him to reject those conjectural
+solutions of the phenomena of the material world--subtleties and
+fictions which had led Aristotle into many errors, and whose universal
+authority had swayed opinions through successive ages. "Telesius," says
+Lord Bacon, "hath renewed the tenet of Parmenides, and is the best of
+our novelists."[4] Lord Bacon considered the Telesian system worthy of
+his development and his refutation. But, by his physical system,
+Telesius had broken the spell, and sent forth the naturalist to
+scrutinize more closely into nature; and possibly this Neapolitan sage
+may have kindled the first spark in the experimental philosophy of
+Bacon.
+
+All these were eminent philosophers who had indignantly rejected the
+eternal babble of the scholastics, and the vain dicta of the
+peripatetics; and in the same cycle were others more erratic and
+fantastic. These bold artificers of novel systems of philosophy had not
+unsuccessfully attacked the dogmas of Aristotle, but to little purpose,
+while they were substituting their own. The prevalent agitation of the
+philosophical spirit, now impetuous and disturbed, shot forth mighty
+impulses in imaginary directions, and created chimeras. Agrippa and
+Paracelsus, Jordano Bruno, Cardan and Campanella, played their
+"fantastic tricks," till the patient genius of the new philosophy arose
+simultaneously in the Italian Galileo and the founder of the Verulamian
+method.
+
+Amid the ruins of these systems of philosophies, it was not with their
+fallen columns that Lord Bacon designed to construct a new philosophy of
+his own--a system in opposition to other systems. He would hold no
+controversies: for refutations were useless if the method he invented
+was a right one. He would not even be the founder of a sect, for he
+presumed not to establish a philosophy, but to show how we should
+philosophize. The father of experimental philosophy delivered no
+"opinions," but "a work;" patient observation, practical results, or new
+and enlarged sciences, "not to be found in the space of a single age,
+but through a succession of generations." D'Alembert observed, "The
+Baconian philosophy was too wise to astonish." His early sagacity had
+detected the fatal error of all system-makers; each, to give coherence
+to his hypothesis, had recourse to some occult operation, and sometimes
+had ventured to give it a name which was nothing more than an abstract
+notion, and not a reality ascertained to exist in nature. The Platonist
+had buried his lofty head amid the clouds of theology, beyond the
+aspirations of man: the Aristotelian, by the syllogistic method of
+reasoning, had invented a mere instrument of perpetual disputation,
+without the acquisition of knowledge; and in the law which governed the
+material world, when Democritus had conceived his atom, and endowed it
+with a desire or appetency to move with other atoms, or Telesius
+imagined with cold and heat to find the first beginnings of motion--what
+had they but contracted nature within the bars of their systems, while
+she was perpetually escaping from them? The greater philosopher sought
+to follow nature through her paths, to be "her servant and interpreter;"
+or, as he has also expressed it, "to subdue nature by yielding to her."
+
+Lord Bacon was conscious of the slow progress of truth; he has himself
+appealed to distant ages. So progressive is human reason, that a novel
+system, at its first announcement, has been resisted as the most
+dangerous innovation, or rejected as utterly false; yet at a subsequent
+period the first promulgator who had struck into the right road is
+censured, not for his temerity, but for his timidity, in not having
+advanced to its termination, and laying the burden on posterity to
+demonstrate that which he had only surmised or assumed. It is left to
+another generation to shoot their arrow forth a truer aim, far more
+distantly. Some of the most important results in philosophical inquiries
+by men who have advanced beyond their own age, have been subjected to
+this inconvenience; and we now are familiarized to axioms and
+principles, requiring no further demonstration, which in their original
+discovery were condemned as dangerous and erroneous; for the most novel
+principles must be disputed before they can be demonstrated, till time
+in silence seals its decree with authority.
+
+Some discoveries have required almost a century to be received, while
+some truths remain still problematical, and, like the ether of Newton,
+but a mere hypothesis. What is the wisdom of the wise but a state of
+progression? and the inventor has to encounter even the hostility of his
+brothers in science; even Lord Bacon himself was the victim of his own
+idols of the den--those fallacies that originate from the peculiar
+character of the man; for by undervaluing the science of mathematics, he
+refused his assent to the Copernican system.
+
+The celebrity of Lord Bacon was often distinct from the Baconian
+philosophy at home--a circumstance which concerns the history of our
+vernacular literature. The lofty pretensions of a new way to "The
+Advancement of Learning," and the "Novum Organum" of an art of
+invention, to invent arts, were long a veiled mystery to the English
+public, who were deterred from its study by the most offuscating
+translations of the Latin originals. English readers recognised in Lord
+Bacon, not the interpreter of Nature through all her works, but the
+interpreter of man to man, of their motives and their actions, in his
+"Sermones Fideles," those "Essaies" which "come home to our business and
+to our bosoms." Such readers were left to wonder how the historian of
+"The Winds," and of "Life and Death"--the gatherer of medical receipts
+and of masses of natural history, amid all such minute processes of
+experiments and inductions, groping in tangible matter, as it seemed to
+ordinary eyes, could in the mere naturalist be the creator of a new
+philosophy of intellectual energy. The ethical sage who had unfolded the
+volume of the heart they delightfully comprehended, but how the mind
+itself stood connected with the outward phenomena of nature remained
+long an enigma for the men of the world. Lord Bacon, in his dread to
+trust the mutability of our language placed by the side of the universal
+language of the learned which fifteen centuries had fixed sacred from
+innovation, had concluded that the modern languages will "at one time or
+another play the bankrupt with books." The sage who, in his sanguine
+confidence in futurity, had predicted that "third period of time which
+will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning," had not,
+however, contemplated on a national idiom; nor in that noble prospect of
+time had he anticipated a race of the European learned whose vernacular
+prose would create words beyond the reach of the languages of antiquity.
+No work in our native idiom had yet taken a station. The volume of
+Hooker we know not how he read; but the copiousness of the diction
+little accorded with the English of the learned Lord Chancellor, who had
+pressed the compactness of his aphoristic sentences into the brevity of
+Seneca, but with a weight of thought no Roman, if we except Tacitus, has
+attained. Rawleigh and Jonson were but contemporaries, unsanctioned by
+time; nor could he have looked even on them as modellers for him whose
+own genius was still more prodigally opulent, though not always with the
+most difficult taste.
+
+Lord Bacon, therefore, decided to compose his "Instauratio Magna" in
+Latin. Dedicating the Latin version of the "Advancement of Learning" to
+the Prince, he observed--"It is a work I think will live, and be a
+_citizen of the world, as English books are not_." Lord Bacon saw
+"bankruptcy in our language," and houseless wanderers in our books. The
+commonwealth of letters had yet no existence. Haunted by this desolating
+notion that there was no perpetuity in English writings, he rested not
+till his own were translated by himself and his friends, Jonson, and
+Hobbes, and Herbert; and often enlarging these Latin versions, some of
+his English compositions remain, in some respect, imperfect, when
+compared with those subsequent revisions in the Latin translations.
+
+By trusting his genius to a foreign tongue, Lord Bacon has dimmed its
+lustre; the vitality of his thoughts in their original force, the
+spontaneity of his mind in all its raciness, all those fortuitous
+strokes which are the felicities of genius, were lost to him who had
+condemned himself to the Roman yoke. Professor Playfair always preferred
+quoting the original English of those passages of the treatise "De
+Augmentis Scientiarum," which had first appeared in "The Advancement of
+Learning." The felicity of many of those fine or forcible conceptions is
+emasculated in a foreign and artificial idiom; and the invention of
+novel terms in an ancient language left it often in a clouded obscurity.
+
+The hand of Lord Bacon had already moulded the language at pleasure, and
+he might have preceded his friend Hobbes in the lucidity of a
+philosophical style. The style of Lord Bacon is stamped with the
+originality of the age, and is as peculiar to him as was that of
+Shakspeare to the poet. He is not only the wittiest of writers in his
+remote allusions, but poetical in his fanciful conceptions. His style
+long served for a model to many succeeding writers. One of the most
+striking imitations is that curious folio of secret history, and
+brilliant sententiousness, and witty pedantry, the Life of Archbishop
+Williams by Bishop HACKET. It was with declining spirit Lord Bacon
+composed his "History of Henry the Seventh;" it was an oblation to
+majesty; the king himself was his critic; and the Solomon, as he terms
+Henry the Seventh, was that image of peaceful sovereignty which James
+affected.
+
+He who thought that the language would have failed him, has himself
+failed to the language, and we have lost an English classic. Since the
+experimental philosophy arose out of practical discoveries, it should
+not have been limited to recluse students, but open to the practitioners
+not yet philosophers, now condemned to study it by translations of a
+translation. It required two centuries before the writings of Bacon
+reached the many. Now, a single volume, in the most popular form, places
+them in the hands of artisans and artists, who are to learn from them to
+think, to observe, and to invent.
+
+The first modern edition of the collected writings of Lord Bacon was
+that by Blackbourne, in 1730. It probably awoke the public attention;
+but English readers eager to possess themselves of the Baconian
+philosophy were still doomed to their old ignorance, for no one was yet
+to be found bold enough to risk versions, which in the mere translation
+often require to be elucidated. This first edition, however, hastened
+the arduous task of "methodising" the philosophy of Bacon in English, by
+Dr. PETER SHAW, in 1733, who then suggested that the noble Baconian
+scheme had not been "sufficiently understood and regarded." This Dr.
+SHAW was one of the court physicians, attached to scientific pursuits,
+which he usefully displayed by popular lectures and writings, on
+subjects with which the public were then not familiar. Imbued with the
+genius of Bacon, this diligent student unfortunately had a genius of his
+own; he fancied that he could reconstruct the works of our great
+philosopher, by a more perfect arrangement. He separated, or he joined;
+he classed, and he new-named; and not the least curious of his
+singularities is that of assigning right principles for his wrong
+doings. He did not abridge his author; for justly he observes, great
+works admit of no abridgment; but to shorten their extent, he took the
+liberty of what he terms "dropping,"--that is, "leaving out." Of his
+translations of the Latin originals, of which he experienced all the
+difficulty, he observes, that "a direct translation would have left the
+works more obscure than they are," and therefore he adopted what he
+terms "an open version." A precise notion of this mode of free
+translation, it might be difficult to fix on; it would be too open if it
+admitted what was not in the original, or if it suffered what was
+essential to escape. His irremissible sin was that of "modernizing the
+English" of Lord Bacon. The most racy and picturesque expressions of our
+elder writers were then to be weakened down to a vapid colloquial style.
+Willymot had translated Lord Bacon's "Essays" from the Latin, and thus
+substituted his own loose incondite sentences, which he deemed "more
+fashionable language," for the brilliancy or the energy of Lord Bacon's
+native vein. Dr. Shaw's three goodly quartos, however, long conveyed in
+some shape to the English public the Baconian philosophy. There is
+something still seductive in these fair volumes, with their copious
+index, and a glossary of the philosophical terms invented by Bacon; I
+loved them in the early days of my studies; and they have been deemed
+worthy to be revived in a late edition.
+
+In my youth, the illustrious name of Lord Bacon was more familiar to
+readers than his works, and they were more frequently reminded of the
+Lord Chancellor by the immortal verse of Pope, than by that Life of
+Bacon by Mallet, which may be read without discovering that the subject
+was the father of modern philosophy, excepting that in the last page, as
+if accidentally, there occurs a slight mention of the Great Instauration
+itself! The very choice of Mallet, in 1740, for an editor of Lord Bacon,
+is a striking evidence how imperfectly the genius of the Instaurator of
+sciences was comprehended.
+
+The psychological history of Lord Bacon has all that oneness which is
+the perfection of mind. We see him in his boyhood, studious of the
+phenomena of nature, meditating on the multiplication of echoes at the
+brick-conduit, near his father's house; there he sought to discover the
+laws of sound; as in his latest days, when on the snowy road an
+experiment suddenly occurred, "touching the conservation and the
+induration of bodies," whether snow could not preserve flesh equally
+with salt. Alighting from his carriage, with his own hands he assisted
+the experiment, and was struck by that chilliness which, a few days
+after, closed in death; yet the dying naturalist, too weak to write the
+last letter he dictated, expressed his satisfaction that the experiment
+"answered excellently well."
+
+But he who, by the cruelty of fortune and mortal infirmity, lived many
+lives in the span of one short life, ever wrestling with Nature to
+subdue her, could never subdue himself by himself. He idolized state and
+magnificence in his own person; the brilliancy of his robes and the
+blaze of his equipage his imagination seemed to feed on; he loved to be
+gazed on in the streets, and to be wondered at in the cabinet; but with
+this feminine weakness, this philosopher was still so philosophic as to
+scorn the least prudential care of his fortune. So that, while he was
+enamoured of wealth, he could not bring himself down to the love of
+money. Participating in the corruptions of the age, he was himself
+incorruptible; the Lord Chancellor never gave a partial or unjust
+sentence, and Rushworth has told us, that not one of his decrees was
+ever reversed. Such a man was not made to crouch and to fawn, to breathe
+the infection of a corrupted court, to make himself the scape-goat in
+the mysterious darkness of court-intrigues; but he was this man of
+wretchedness! Truly he exclaimed one day, in grasping a volume, For this
+only am I fitted. The intellectual architect who had modelled his house
+of Solomon, and should have been for ever the ideal inhabitant of that
+palace of the mind, was the tenant of an abode of disorder, where every
+one was master but its owner, a maculated man seeking to shelter himself
+in dejection and in shade. Whisperers, surmisers, evil eyes and evil
+tongues, the domestic asp, whose bite sends poison into the veins of him
+on whom it hangs--those were his familiars, while his abstracted mind
+was dictating to his chaplain the laws and economy of nature.
+
+Yet there were some better spirits in the mansion of Gorhambury, and
+even in the obscurity of Gray's Inn, who have left testimonies of their
+devotion to the great man long after his death. In the psychological
+history of Lord Bacon, we must not pass by the psychological monument
+which the affectionate Sir Thomas Meautys, who, by his desire, lies
+buried at his feet, raised to his master. The design is as original as
+it is grand, and is said to have been the invention of Sir Henry Wotton,
+who, in his long residence abroad, had formed a refined taste for the
+arts which were yet strangers in England. The simplicity of our
+ancestors had placed their sculptured figures recumbent on their tombs;
+the taste of Wotton raised the marble figure to imitate life itself, and
+to give the mind of the original to its image. The monument of Bacon
+exhibits the great philosopher seated in profound contemplation in his
+habitual attitude, for the inscription records for posterity, _Sic
+sedebat_.[5]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] The Abate ANDRES, in his erudite "Origine &c. d'ogni
+    Letteratura," gives this remarkable description--"_i_ GHIRIBIZZI
+    _della Dialetica e Metafisica d'Aristotele_." As we are at a loss to
+    discover the origin of the term _gibberish_, and as it is suitable to
+    the present occasion, may we conjecture that we have here found
+    it?--xii. 26.
+
+  [2] Enfield, ii. 448.
+
+  [3] Andres "Dell' Origine e Progressi d'ogni Letteratura," xv. 165.
+
+  [4] Montagu's Bacon, iv. 46.
+
+  [5] See "Curiosities of Literature," art. "Bacon at Home."
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRST FOUNDER OF A PUBLIC LIBRARY.
+
+
+The first marked advancement in the progress of the national
+understanding was made by a new race of public benefactors, who, in
+their munificence, no longer endowing obsolete superstitions, and
+inefficient or misplaced charities, erected libraries and opened
+academies; founders of those habitations of knowledge whose doors open
+to the bidding of all comers.
+
+To the privacy and the silent labours of some men of letters and some
+lovers of the arts, usually classed under the general designation of
+COLLECTORS, literary Europe, for the great part, owes its public museums
+and its public libraries. It was their ripe knowledge only which could
+have created them, their opulence only which could render them worthy of
+a nation's purchase, or of its acceptance, when in their generous
+enthusiasm they consecrated the intellectual gift for their countrymen.
+
+These collections could only have acquired their strength by their
+growth, for gradual were their acquisitions and innumerable were their
+details; they claimed the sleepless vigilance of a whole life, the
+devotion of a whole fortune, and often that moral intrepidity which
+wrestled with insurmountable difficulties. We may admire the generous
+enthusiasm whose opulence was solely directed to enrich what hereafter
+was to be consecrated as public property; but it has not always received
+the notice and the eulogy so largely its due. It is but bare justice to
+distinguish these men from their numerous brothers whose collections
+have terminated with themselves, known only to posterity by their
+posthumous catalogues--the sole record that these collectors were great
+buyers and more famous sellers. Of many of the FOUNDERS of public
+collections the names are not familiar to the reader, though some have
+sometimes been identified with their more celebrated collections, from
+the gratitude of a succeeding age.
+
+A collection formed by a single mind, skilled in its favourite pursuit,
+becomes the tangible depository of the thoughts of its owner; there is
+a unity in this labour of love, and a secret connexion through its
+dependent parts. Thus we are told that Cecil's library was the best for
+history; Walsingham's, for policy; Arundel's, for heraldry; Cotton's,
+for antiquity; and Usher's, for divinity. The completion of such a
+collection reflects the perfect image of the mind of the philosopher,
+the philologist, the antiquary, the naturalist, the scientific or the
+legal character, who into one locality has gathered together and
+arranged this furniture of the human intellect.
+
+To disperse their collections would be, to these elect spirits, to
+resolve them back into their first elements--to scatter them in the air,
+or to mingle them with the dust.[1] Happily for mankind, these have been
+men to whom the perpetuity of their intellectual associations was a
+future existence. Conscious that their hands had fastened links in the
+unbroken chain of human inquiry, they left the legacy to the world. The
+creators of these collections have often betrayed their anxiety to
+preserve them distinct and entire. Confident I am that such was the real
+feeling of a recent celebrated collector. The rich and peculiar
+collection of manuscripts, and of rare and chosen volumes, of FRANCIS
+DOUCE, from his earliest days had been the objects of his incessant
+cares. With means extremely restricted, but with a mind which no
+obstructions could swerve from its direct course, through many years he
+accomplished a glorious design. Our modest antiquary startled the most
+curious, not only of his countrymen but of foreigners, by his knowledge,
+diversified as his own unrivalled collections, in the recondite
+literature of the middle ages, and whatever exhibited the manners, the
+customs, and the arts of every people and of every age. Late in life he
+accidentally became the possessor of a considerable fortune, and having
+decided that this work of his life should be a public inheritance, he
+seemed at a loss where it might at once rest in security, and lie
+patent for the world. The idea of its dispersion was very painful, for
+he was aware that the singleness of design which had assembled such
+various matters together could never be resumed by another. He often
+regretted that in the great national repository of literature the
+collection would merge into the universal mass. It was about this time
+that we visited together the great library of Oxford. Douce contemplated
+in the Bodleian that arch over which is placed the portrait of SELDEN,
+and the library of Selden preserved entire; the antiquary's closet which
+holds the great topographical collections of Gough; and the distinct
+shelves dedicated to the small Shakespearian library of MALONE. He
+observed that the collections of Rawlinson, of Tanner, and of others,
+had preserved their identity by their separation. This was the subject
+of our conversation. At this moment Douce must have decided on the
+locality where his precious collection was to find a perpetual abode;
+for it was immediately on his return home that our literary antiquary
+bequeathed his collection to the Bodleian Library, where it now occupies
+more than one apartment.
+
+To the anxious cares of such founders of public collections, England, as
+well as Italy and France, owes a national debt; nor can we pass over in
+silence the man to whom first occurred the happy idea of instituting a
+library which should have for its owners his own fellow-citizens. A
+Florentine merchant, emancipated from the thraldom of traffic, vowed
+himself to the pursuits of literature, and, just before the art of
+printing was practised, to the preservation of manuscripts, which he not
+only multiplied by his unwearied hand, but was the first of that race of
+critics who amended the texts of the early copyists. What he could not
+purchase, his pure zeal was not the less solicitous to preserve.
+Boccaccio had bequeathed his own library to a convent in Florence, and
+its sight produced that effect on him which the library of Shakespeare,
+had it been preserved, might have had on an Englishman; and since he
+could not possess it, he built an apartment solely to preserve it
+distinct from any other collection.
+
+At a period when the owners of manuscripts were so avaricious of their
+possessions that they refused their loan, and were frugal even in
+allowing a sight of their leaves, the hardy generosity of this
+Florentine merchant conceived one of the most important designs for the
+interests of learning;--to invite readers, he bequeathed his own as A
+PUBLIC LIBRARY.[2] He who occupied but a private station, first offered
+Europe a model of patriotic greatness which princes and nobles in their
+magnificence would emulate. It has been said that the founder of this
+public library at Florence had only revived the noble design of the
+ancients, who had displayed their affection for literature by even
+bestowing their own names on public libraries; but this must not detract
+from the true glory of the merchant of Florence; it was at least an idea
+which had wholly escaped the less liberal of his learned contemporaries.
+
+Sir THOMAS BODLEY may be considered as the first founder of a public
+library in this country, raised by the hand of an individual. A picture
+of the obstructions, the anxieties, the hopes, and the disappointments
+of the founder of the Bodleian, exhibits a person of rank and opulence
+submitting even to minute drudgery, and to the most humiliating
+solicitations, and busily occupied by a foreign as well as a domestic
+correspondence, to accomplish what he long despaired of--a library
+adequate to the wants of every English student.
+
+BODLEY, in the sketch of his own life, betrays that early book-love
+which subsequently broke out into that noble passion for "his reverend
+mother, the University of Oxford." Sir Thomas Bodley had ably served in
+some of the highest state-employments; but, at length, discovered the
+secret pathway to escape from "court contentions;" and this he found
+when busying himself with a vast ideal library--the future Bodleian!
+Long, indeed, it was but ideal; the labour of his day, the dream of his
+night, so slowly rose the reality of the fabric. It was difficult to
+determine on the class or the worth of authors--often rejecting, always
+augmenting, still consulting, now advising, or being advised; sometimes
+irresolute, and at others decisive; now exulting, and now despondent.
+However fervid was his noble enthusiasm for literature, and for his
+library, not less remarkable was that provident sagacity which he
+combined with it, and by which only he could carry on the vast design.
+
+What were the emotions of Bodley through this long period, what his
+first intentions, and what his immutable decision, have fortunately been
+laid open to us in a close correspondence with his first librarian. Our
+parent-founder of a public library, with the forcible simplicity of the
+natural colloquial style of that day, has developed his own character.
+"Examining exactly for the rest of my life what course I might take, and
+having sought, as I thought, all the ways to the wood, to select the
+most proper, I concluded, at the last, to set up my staff at the library
+door in Oxon; being thoroughly persuaded, that in my solitude and
+surcease from the commonwealth affairs, I could not busy myself to
+better purpose." He early discovered that the formation of his library
+required the co-operation of many favourable circumstances: "some kind
+of knowledge, some purse-ability, great store of honourable friends;
+else it would prove a vain attempt and inconsiderate." After many
+perplexities, the great resolve seemed to sanction the act, and he
+exclaims--"The project is cast, and whether I live or die, to such ends
+altogether I address my thoughts and deeds!" Such was the solemn pledge,
+and such the deed of gift, which Bodley, in the greatness of his mind,
+contracted with posterity.
+
+But the minor cares and the minuter anxieties were to open on him; and
+it must be confessed that he tried the patient duties of the learned Dr.
+James, whom he had judiciously elected for the first librarian, but who
+often vents a groan on his interminable labours. Sir Thomas gently
+reproaches him: "I am toiled exceedingly, no less than yourself, with
+writing, buying, binding, disposing, &c.; but I am fed with pleasure of
+seeing the end." Bodley had not only to form a universal library, but to
+build one on the desolate ruins of that founded by Duke Humphrey, whose
+royal name could not save his books and manuscripts, which had all been
+purloined and wasted. The pledges left for their loan not being worth
+half the value of the books, the volumes were never returned; and those
+which remained in the reign of Edward the Sixth were burned as
+"superstitious," for their rubrics and illuminations. The history of
+this library might have deterred our new founder, by reminding him of
+the fate which may await even on public libraries. At all events, for
+many years it required all his fortitude to encounter a rabble of
+master-carpenters, joiners, carvers, glaziers, builders, claspers, and
+stringers, and the chain-smiths; for at that day books were chained to
+their shelves, with chains long enough to reach the desk. A book was
+tethered, and could never stray from its paddock. Then came the
+classification and the arrangements! discussions not easily to be
+adjusted with his librarian, whether a book should be classed as a work
+of theology or of politics? Sir Thomas found an incessant business at
+London in packing up "dry fats," or vats of books, barging them for
+Oxford; he was receiving fresh supplies from Italy, from Spain, from
+Turkey, and designed to send a scholar to travel in the East, to collect
+Arabic and Persian books, on which he sagaciously observed, that "in
+process of time, by the extraordinary diligence of some one student,
+these Eastern languages may be readily understood." Bodley anticipated
+our Society for Oriental Literature.
+
+But not merely solicitous to erect a vast library, Bodley was equally
+anxious to consecrate the spot to study itself. He is uneasy at too
+public an admission, lest idlers should mix among the students, and, as
+he plainly tells, "be daily pestering the room with their gazing and
+babbling, and trampling up and down, disturbing the real studious." With
+what fervour he rejoices when, at length, he lived to witness the day of
+the opening of the library, and found that "all proceeded orderly, and
+with such silence!" But although he had bestowed all his cares and his
+fortune on this institution, it still was but an infant, and he had to
+look towards spirits as enlarged as his own, to protect the orphan of
+the public. It met with some who adopted it, and Bodley had their names
+inscribed in the register of this public library; but he was as cautious
+as he was courteous--the vain were not to be gratified for penurious
+gifts. Books, and not names, were wanted. At first, impatiently zealous,
+he murmurs of "promises received for performances." But latterly, he had
+occasion to exhort the university to mark by their particular
+acknowledgments, the donations in volumes or in money. The honourable
+roll on which the names are inscribed, includes not only those of the
+most eminent of our county, but also of several ladies, who rivalled
+those heroes and statesmen who had the honour of laying the foundation
+of the Bodleian Library.[3]
+
+In Sir Thomas Bodley's character we view the conscious dignity of a
+great design, yet combined with the sedate reflection of a man practised
+in the world. There were certain traits of vanity, which may give a
+colour to the insinuations of some--who might consider they had been
+deprived of legacies--that it was his enormous vanity which raised this
+edifice of learning. It is amusing to discover, that when the Bishop of
+Exeter proposed to visit the library, a letter of Sir Thomas immediately
+precedes his visitor. "I pray you, observe his speeches, and liking or
+disliking, and in your next let me know it." When James the First was
+preparing to visit the library, he furnished hints to the librarian for
+his speech to the literary monarch: "It must not carry greater length
+than for half a quarter of an hour's utterance. It must be short and
+sweet, and full of stuff." The librarian was desirous to hide Buchanan
+when the king came down to Oxford; but Bodley, probably not approving
+the concealment of any of his literary stores, observed, "It will not
+avail to conceal him in his desk since he is in the catalogue, nor have
+we any reason to take any notice of the king's dislike; but," he warily
+adds, "should it excite his Majesty's notice, we must allege that the
+books were put there in the Queen's time." But nothing save the most
+delicate attention towards an author could have prompted his order
+concerning Coryat the traveller, who had presented his book to the
+library. On the author's coming to Oxford, Sir Thomas desired that "it
+should be placed in such a manner, that when the author came down, it
+may seem to magnify the author and the book." In his ardour for the
+general interests of his library, Bodley absolutely insisted that his
+librarian should persevere in his forlorn fellowship, for "marriage,"
+opined the founder of the Bodleian Library, "is too full of domestic
+impeachments to afford him so much time from his private affairs." The
+doctor decided against the celibacy of a librarian, and was gravely
+admonished on the absurdity of such conduct in one who had the care of a
+public library! for "it was opening a gap to disorder hereafter." With
+a happier prescience, Bodley foresaw that race of generous spirits who,
+long after, and at distant intervals, have carried on his great views.
+Listen to the simplicity and force of the venerable style of our first
+founder of a PUBLIC LIBRARY.
+
+"We cannot but presume that, casting (counting) what number of noble
+benefactors have already concurred in a FERVOUR OF AFFECTION to that
+PUBLIC PLACE OF STUDY, we shall be sure in TIME TO COME to find some
+OTHERS OF THE LIKE DISPOSITION to the advancement of learning."[4]
+
+With such a hallowed purpose ever before him, can we conceive the
+agonies of the founder of a public library, on being for ever denied an
+entrance into it? and yet such was the fate of one of the most
+illustrious of this race. The mournful history of the founder of the
+Cottonian Library will ever excite the regrets of a grateful posterity,
+and its catastrophe will witness how far above life he loved and valued
+his collected lore! It happened that among the many rare manuscripts
+collected by Sir ROBERT COTTON, one reached his hands, which struck him
+by the singularity of the subject; it was a political theory to show the
+kings of England "how to bridle the impertinency of Parliaments." An
+unfaithful amanuensis, the son of the Dr. James whom we have just
+noticed, took copies and sold them to the curious. When the original was
+at length traced to the Cottonian collection, Sir Robert was sued in the
+Star-chamber, and considered as the author of a work whose tendency was
+to enslave the nation. It was long afterwards discovered that this
+manuscript had been originally written by Sir Robert Dudley, when in
+exile at Florence. Cotton was now denied all access to his library; his
+spirits sunk in the blackest melancholy; and he declared to an intimate
+friend, that "those who had locked up his library from him had broken
+his heart." Now deprived of that learned crowd who once were flowing
+into his house, consulting and arranging his precious manuscripts; torn
+away from the delightful business of his life, and in torment at the
+doubtful fate of that manuscript collection, which had consumed forty
+years at every personal sacrifice to form it for the "use and service of
+posterity," he sunk at the sudden stroke. In the course of a few weeks,
+he was so worn by injured feelings, that from a ruddy-complexioned man,
+"his face was wholly changed into a grim blackish paleness, near to the
+resemblance and hue of a dead visage." Such is the expression of one who
+knew him well. Before he died, Sir Robert requested the learned Spelman
+to acquaint the Privy Council that "their so long detaining his books
+from him had been the cause of his mortal malady." "On this message,"
+says the writer of a manuscript letter of the day, "the Lord Privy Seal
+came to Sir Robert, when it was too late to comfort him, from the King,
+from whom also the Earl of Dorset came within half an hour of Sir
+Robert's death, to condole with Sir Thomas Cotton, his son, for his
+father's death; and with an assurance that as his Majesty loved his
+father, so he would continue his love to him: Sir Robert hath intailed
+his library of books as sure as he can make it upon his son and his
+posterity. If Sir Robert's heart could be ripped up, his library would
+appear in it, as Calais in Queen Mary's." Such is the affecting fate of
+the founder of the Cottonian Library, that great individual whose sole
+labour silently formed our national antiquities, and endowed his country
+with this wealth of manuscripts.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Sir Simonds d'Ewes feelingly describes in his will, his "precious
+    library." "It is my inviolable injunction that it be kept entire, and
+    not sold, divided, or dissipated." It was not, however, to be locked
+    up from the public good. Such was the feeling of an eminent
+    antiquary.
+
+    A later Sir Simonds d'Ewes was an extravagant man, and seems to have
+    sold everything about 1716, when the collection passed into the
+    possession of the Earl of Oxford.
+
+  [2] Tirabosohi, VI. pt. i, 131.
+
+  [3] See Gutch's edition of Wood's "Annals of the University of
+    Oxford," vol. I. pt. ii. p. 928.
+
+  [4] The vigilant curiosity of Tom Hearne, the antiquary, collected
+    the singular correspondence of the Founder of the Bodleian Library
+    with Dr. James, the first librarian, and published it under the title
+    of "Reliquiæ Bodleianæ, or Some Genuine Remains of Sir Thomas
+    Bodley," 1703, 8vo. The curious reader will find in Gutch's edition
+    of Wood's "Annals of the University of Oxford" many letters by
+    Bodley, and his liberal endowments to provide a fixed revenue after
+    his decease.
+
+
+
+
+EARLY WRITERS, THEIR DREAD OF THE PRESS; THE TRANSITION TO AUTHORS BY
+PROFESSION.
+
+
+At the close of the reign of Elizabeth, the public, awakening at the
+first dawn of knowledge, with their stirring passions and their eager
+curiosity, found their wants supplied by a new race of "ready writers,"
+who now teased the groaning press--a diversified race of miscellaneous
+writers, who had discovered the wants of the people for books which
+excited their sympathies and reflected their experience, and who caught
+on their fugitive pages the manners and the passions of their
+contemporaries. No subject was too mean to be treated; and had domestic
+encyclopædias been then invented, these would have been precisely the
+library the people required: but now, every book was to be separately
+worked. The indiscriminate curiosity of an uneducated people was
+gratified by immature knowledge; but it was essential to amuse as well
+as to inform: hence that multitude of fugitive subjects. The mart of
+literature opened, and with the book-manufactory, in the language of
+that primeval critic, WEBBE, of innumerable sorts of English books, and
+infinite fardles of printed pamphlets, "all shops were stuffed."
+
+It has been attempted to fix on the name of that great patriarch, the
+Abraham of our Israel, who first invented our own book-craft; but it
+would be indiscreet to assign the honour to any particular person, or
+even to inquire whether the cupidity of the book-vender first set to
+work the ingenuity of the book-weaver. Who first dipped his silver pen
+into his golden ink, and who first conceived the notion of this literary
+alchemy, which transmutes paper into gold or lead? It was, I believe, no
+solitary invention; the rush of "authors by profession" was
+simultaneous.
+
+Former writers had fearfully courted fame; they were the children of the
+pleasures of the pen; these were a hardier race, who at once seized on
+popularity; and a new trade was opened by the arts of authorship. In
+the primitive age of publication, before there existed "a reading
+public," literary productions were often anonymous, or, which answered
+the same purpose, they wore the mask of a fictitious name, and were
+pseudonymous, or they hid themselves under naked initials, by which
+means the owners have sometimes lost their own property. It seems a
+paradox that writers should take such great pains to defraud themselves
+of their claims.
+
+This coyness of publication was prevalent among our earliest writers,
+when writing and publishing were not yet almost synonymous terms. Before
+we had "authors by profession," we had authors who wrote, and seemed to
+avoid every sort of publicity. To the secluded writers of that day, the
+press was arrayed with terrors which have ceased to haunt those who are
+familiar with its daily labours, and our primeval writers trembled
+before that halo of immortality, which seemed to hang over that
+ponderous machinery. Writers eagerly affixed their names to polemical
+tracts, or to devotional effusions, during the melancholy reigns of
+EDWARD the Sixth and MARY, as a record of their zeal, and sometimes as
+an evidence of their voluntary martyrdom; but the productions of
+imagination and genius were yet rare and private. The noble-minded
+hardly ventured out of the halcyon state of manuscript to be tossed
+about in open sea; it would have been compromising their dignity, or
+disturbing their repose, to submit themselves to the cavils of the
+Cynics, for even at this early period of printed books we find that the
+ancient family of the _Malevoli_, whom Terence has noticed, had survived
+the fall of Rome, and here did not find their "occupation gone." With
+many scholars, too, it was still doubtful whether the vernacular muses
+in verse and prose were not trivial and homely. In the inchoate state of
+our literature, some who were imbued with classical studies might have
+felt their misgivings, in looking over their "gorgeous inventions," or
+their "pretty devices," as betraying undisciplined strength, bewildering
+fancies, and unformed tastes. They were not aware, even at that more
+advanced period, when a series of "poetical collections" appeared, of
+what they had already done; and it has been recently discovered, that
+when the printer of "England's Helicon" had innocently affixed the
+names of some writers to their pieces, to quiet their alarms, he was
+driven to the clumsy expedient of pasting slips of paper over their
+names. This was a spell which Time only dissolved, that great revealer
+of secrets more deeply concealed.
+
+When publication appeared thus terrible, an art which was not yet valued
+even the artists themselves would slight. We have a striking instance of
+this feeling in the circumstance of a sonnet of our Maiden Queen, on the
+conspiracies then hatching by the party of her royal sister of Scotland.
+One of the ladies of her bedchamber had surreptitiously transcribed the
+poem from her majesty's tablet; and the innocent criminal had thereby
+cast herself into extreme peril. The queen affected, or at least
+expressed, her royal anger lest the people should imagine that she was
+busied in "such toys," and her majesty was fearful of being considered
+too lightly of, for so doing. The grave sonnet might, however, have been
+accepted as a state-paper. The solemn theme, the grandeur of the queenly
+personages, and the fortunes of two great nations at issue, communicated
+to these verses the profound emotions of contemplative royalty, more
+exquisite than the poetry. Yet Elizabeth could be checked by "the fear
+to be held too lightly by such toys."
+
+The same motive had influenced some of the great personages in our
+literature, who, by the suppression of their names, anxiously eluded
+public observation, at the very moment they were in reality courting it!
+_Ignoto_ and _Immerito_, or bare initials, were the concealing
+signatures of Rawleigh, of Sidney, and of Spenser. The works of the Earl
+of Surrey, then the finest poems in the language, were posthumous. "The
+Arcadia" of Sidney possibly was never intended for the press. The noble
+Sackville, who planned the grand poem of "The Mirror of Magistrates,"
+willingly left his lofty "Induction" anonymous among the crowd. In the
+first poetical miscellany in our language collected by the printer
+Tottell, are "The Poems of _uncertain Authors_;" so careless were the
+writers themselves to preserve their names, and so little aware of
+having claims on posterity. Some years after, when those other poetical
+collections, "The Paradise of Dainty Devices" and "England's Helicon,"
+were projected by their publishers, they were borrowed or stolen from
+manuscripts which lay neglected with their authors, and who for the most
+part conceal themselves under quaint signatures.
+
+The metropolis, in the days of Elizabeth and James, bore a pretty close
+resemblance to those ancient cities now existing before us on the
+Continent, famous in their day, but which, from causes not here
+necessary to specify, have not grown with the growth of time. Cologne,
+Coblentz, and Mayence, are such cities; and the city of Rouen, in its
+more ancient site, exhibits a picture of the streets of London in the
+days of Shakspeare. Stationary in their limits and their population, the
+classes of society are more distinctly marked out; but the individual
+lives more constantly under the survey of his neighbours. Their art of
+living is to live in the public eye; to keep up appearances, however
+this pride may prove inconvenient. No one would seem to have an
+established household, or always care to indicate its locality; their
+meals are at a public table, and their familiar acquaintance are found
+in the same public resorts; their social life becomes contracted as
+their own ancient narrow streets.
+
+Such was London, when the Strand was a suburb, with only a few scattered
+mansions; the present streets still retain the family names, thus
+separating London from its regal sister. The glory of the goldsmiths and
+the mercers blazed in Cheapside, "the beauty of London;" and
+Fleet-street was the Bond-street of fashionable loungers. In this
+contracted sphere, where all moved, and the observers had microscopical
+eyes, any trivial novelty was strangely magnified, and the great
+personage was an object for their scrutiny as well as the least
+considerable. Thus we find that the Lord Chancellor Bacon is censured by
+one of the gossiping pens of that day for his inordinate pride and pomp
+on the most ordinary occasions. He went in his state robes "to cheapen
+and buy silks and velvets at Sir Baptist Hicker's and Burner's shops."
+James the First, I think, once in Parliament alluded to the "goldsmiths
+at Cheap, who showed not the bravery of former days," as a mark of the
+decline of national prosperity. One of the popular alarms of that day
+was "the rising of the apprentices," whenever the city's clumsy "watch
+and ward" were put to the rout; the apprentices usually made an attempt
+on their abhorrence, Bridewell, or pulled down two or three houses on
+Shrove-Tuesday. Once, on the trying of some ordnance in Moorfields, the
+court was seized by a panic of "a rising in the city." From all this we
+may form some notion of the size of the metropolis, and its imbecile
+police. In a vast and flourishing metropolis the individual in liberty
+and security passes among the countless waves of this ocean of men.
+
+A metropolis thus rising from its contracted infancy, extending in
+growth, and diversified by new classes of society, presented many
+novelties in its crowded scenes; mutable manners, humorous personages,
+all the affectations or the homeliness of its citizens. Many writers,
+among whom were some of admirable genius, devoted their pens to fugitive
+objects and evanescent scenes, sure of finding an immediate reception
+from the sympathy of their readers. New modes of life, and altered
+manners during a lengthened peace, brought men into closer observation
+of each other; the ranks in society were no longer insulated; their
+haunts were the same localities, the playhouse, the ordinary, and Paul's
+Walk. There we find the gay and the grave--the disbanded captain--the
+critic from the inns of court--fantastic "fashion-mongers"--the
+coney-catcher who watches "the warren,"--and the gull, "town or
+country," a term which, unlike that of "the coney-catcher," has survived
+the times before us, and is imbedded in the language.[1] They even
+touched on the verge of that last refinement in society, critical
+coteries. We learn from Jonson, that there was "a college of critics,"
+where a new member, "if he could pay for their suppers," might abuse the
+works of any man, and purchase for himself "the terrible name of a
+critic;" and ladies "lived free from their husbands," held coteries, and
+"gave entertainments to all the wits." This was the incipient state of
+the new world of manners, and what we now call "society;" and society
+provokes satire!
+
+It was at the close of the Elizabethan period that our first
+town-satirists arose, from whom we learn the complicate system of
+manners, in the artifices practised in society; and in looking on their
+phantasmagorias, we are often startled among their grotesque forms by
+discovering our own exact faces. Satires on manners, descriptive of the
+lighter follies and the more involved artifices of social life, could
+hitherto have had no scope. The great in station alone constituted what
+may be considered as society, without any of those marking differences
+resulting from the inequalities of fortune. Satire then, as with
+Skelton, was an invective discharged at some potent individual at the
+risk of life; or it was an attack on a whole body, as Piers Ploughman's
+on the clergy of the times, while Will, or John, or Piers, whatever was
+his name, hid himself behind a hedge on Malvern Hills. Society, in the
+modern acceptation, of a miscellaneous mixture, which equalizes men even
+in their inequality, supplying passing objects for raillery or
+indignation, opened that wider stage, which a growing metropolis only
+could exhibit. We must become intimate with men to sound even the depths
+of superficial follies, and declamation may even fall short in the
+conception of some enormous criminal. Society must have considerably
+advanced before a town-satirist could appear.
+
+The change in style was not less remarkable than that in manners.
+Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, after the wild luxuriance
+of fancy which had everywhere covered the fresh soil of the public mind,
+in the riot of our genius, a great change was occurring in the minds of
+our writers. Nature, in her open paths of sunshine, no longer busied
+them, while they stole into the bye-corners of abstract ideas, and roved
+after glittering conceits. Philosophy introduced itself into poetry, and
+wit became the substitute for passion. It was then that Sir John Davies
+wrote his "Immortality of the Soul," which still remains a model of
+didactic verse; and Donne, "The Progress of the Soul," a progress which
+he did not venture to conclude--a poem the most creative and eccentric
+in the language, but which must be reserved for the few. Donne, who
+closed his life as a St. Austin, had opened it as a Catullus.
+
+The depth of sentiment was contracted into sententious epigrams, alike
+in prose and verse; and in the display of their ingenuity, the remotest
+objects were brought into collision, and the most differing things into
+a strange coherence, to startle by surprises, and to make us admire
+these wonders by their novelty. They cast about them their pointed
+antitheses, and often subsided into a clink of similar syllables, and
+the clench of an ambiguous word.
+
+In all matters they affected curt phrases; and it has been observed that
+even the colloquial style was barbarously elliptical. They spoke gruff
+and short, affecting brevity of words, which was probably held to be
+epigrammatic. It became fashionable to write what they entitled books of
+"Epigrams" and books of "Characters." They appear to have taken their
+notion of an epigram from the Greek anthology, where the term was
+confined to any inscription for a statue or a tomb, or any object to be
+commemorated. Modern literature, in adopting the term, has applied it to
+a different purpose from its original signification. An epigram now is a
+short satire closing with a point of wit. Wit, in our present sense, was
+yet unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered. Ben
+Jonson has composed books of epigrams; but, though he has censured Sir
+John Harrington's as not being epigrams, but mere narratives, has
+written himself in the prevalent style of his day. They are short poems
+on persons, and on incidents in his own life, which he poured out to
+relieve his own feelings when they were outraged, and, so far, they are
+a reflection of the poet's state of mind--the autobiography of his
+potent intellect. As among these epigrammatists we never had a Martial,
+so among these character-writers we could hardly expect a La Bruyère for
+his refined causticity; but the most skilful, as Sir Thomas Overbury and
+Bishop Earle, are so witty as to seem grotesque, but it is human nature
+disguised in the fashions of the day.[2]
+
+This infection of style must have come from a higher source than a mere
+fashionable affectation of the day, for it endured through half a
+century. The axiomatic style of Bacon in his "Essaies," which first
+appeared in 1597, probably set the model of the curt period for these
+Senecas in prose and verse, who found no difficulty in putting together
+short sentences, without, however, having discovered the art of short
+thoughts.
+
+This change in style is considered as characteristic of the age of
+James, but it began before his reign. The age of this monarch has been
+universally condemned as the age of pedantry, and of quibbles and
+conceits, all which, indeed, have been liberally ascribed to his taste;
+but in the plentiful evidence of his wit and humour, it would be
+difficult to find an instance of these bastard ornaments of style.
+
+In the history of literature the names of sovereigns usually only serve
+to mark its dates; and an "author-sovereign," to use Lord Shaftesbury's
+emphatic expression, can exercise no prerogative, and yields even his
+precedence. In more than one respect JAMES THE FIRST may form an
+exception, for the barren list of his writings alone might serve to
+indicate the age; their subjects were not so peculiar to this monarch's
+taste as they were common with higher geniuses than his majesty.
+
+When on the throne of England, it was deemed advisable to collect his
+majesty's writings, the honour of the editorship was conferred on
+Montague, Bishop of Winton, whom Fuller has characterised as "a potent
+courtier;" and the courtly potency of the prelatical editor effuses
+itself before the "majesty of kings" in the most awful of all prefaces.
+
+Cavillers there were, who, on distinct principles, objected to a king
+being a writer of books, carrying on war "by the pen instead of the
+pike, and spending his passion on paper instead of powder." This was a
+military cry from those whose "occupation had long gone." Others, more
+critically nice, assumed that, "since writing of books had grown into a
+trade, it was as discreditable for a king to become an author as it
+would be for him to be a practitioner in a profession." Such objectors
+were not difficult to put down, and the bishop has furnished an ample
+catalogue of "royal authors" among all great nations; and, in our own,
+from Alfred to Elizabeth. The royal family of James were particularly
+distinguished for their literary acquirements. As that was the day when
+no argument could be urged without standing by the side of some
+authority, the bishop had done well, and no scholar in an upper class
+could have done better; but this bishop was imprudent, his restless
+courtliness fatigued his pen till he found a _divine origin of
+king-writing_! "The majesty of kings," he asserts, "is not unsuited to a
+writer of books;" and proceeds--"_The first royal author_ is the King of
+kings--God himself, who doth so many things for our imitation. It
+pleased his divine wisdom to be _the first in this rank_, that we read
+of, that did _ever write_. He wrote on the tables on both sides, which
+was the work of God." This was in the miserable strain of those
+unnatural thoughts and remote analogies which were long to disfigure the
+compositions even of our scholars. How James and the bishop looked on
+one another at their first meeting, after this preface was fairly read,
+one would like to learn; but here we have the age!
+
+One work by this royal author must not pass away with the others; it is
+not only stamped with the idiosyncrasy of the author, but it is one of
+those original effusions which are precious to the history of man. "THE
+BASILICON DORON, or His Majesty's Instructions to His Dearest Son Henry
+the Prince," is a genuine composition in the vernacular idiom; not the
+prescribed labour of a secretary, nor the artificial composition of the
+salaried literary man, but warm with the personal emotions of the royal
+author. He writes for the Prince of Scotland, and about the Scottish
+people; he instructs the prince even by his own errors and misfortunes.
+Some might be surprised to find the king strenuously warning the prince
+against pedantry; exhorting his pupil to avoid what he calls any
+"corrupt leide, as book-language and pen-and-ink terms;" counselling him
+_to write in his own language_, "for it best becometh a king to purify
+and make famous his own tongue." To have ventured on so complete an
+emancipation from the prevalent prejudices, in the creation of a
+vernacular literature, is one evidence, among many, that this royal
+author was not a mere pedant; and the truth is, that his writings on
+popular subjects are colloquially unostentatious; abstaining from those
+oratorical periods and rhetorical fancies which the scholar indulged in
+his speeches and proclamations--the more solemn labours of his own hand.
+
+It is due to the literary character of James the First to notice his
+prompt sympathies with the productions of genius. This monarch had not
+exceeded his twentieth year when we find him in an intercourse with men
+of letters and science at home and abroad. The death of Sidney called
+forth an elegiac poem, and the works of the astronomer Tycho Brahe are
+adorned by a poetical tribute from the royal hand; during the winter the
+king passed in Denmark he was a frequent visitor of the philosopher, on
+whom he conferred an honour and a privilege. That he addressed a letter
+to Shakspeare, grateful for the compliments received in _Macbeth_, there
+is little reason to doubt; for Davenant, the possessor of the letter,
+which was finally lost, told it to the Duke of Buckingham; few
+traditions are so clearly traced to their source; and indeed some mark
+of James's attention to Shakspeare is positively told by Ben Jonson in
+his Elegy on "The Swan of Avon"--
+
+  --------What a sight it were,
+  To see thee on our waters yet appear;
+  And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
+  That so did take Eliza and OUR JAMES![3]
+
+Hooker was the favourite vernacular author of James; and his earliest
+inquiry, on his arrival in England, was after Hooker, whose death he
+deeply regretted. James wrote a congratulatory letter to Lord Bacon on
+his great work; the king at least bowed to the genius of the man. It
+was by the especial command of this royal "pedant," twenty-four years
+after the publication of Fairfax's _Tasso_, that a second edition
+revived that version; and he provided Herbert the poet with a sinecure
+or pension, that his muse might cease to be disturbed. James the First
+was not only the patron of Ben Jonson, but admitted the bard to a
+literary intercourse; and it is probable that we owe to those
+conferences some of the splendour of the Masques, and in which there are
+many strokes of the familiar acquaintance of the poet with his royal
+admirer. More grave and important objects sometimes engaged his
+attention. It was James the First who assigned to the learned Usher the
+task of unfolding the antiquities of the British churches; and it was
+under the protection of this monarch that Father Paul composed the
+famous history, which, as fast as it was written, was despatched to
+England by our ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton; and, in this country, this
+great history was first published. These are not the only testimonies of
+his strong affection for literature and literary men; but they may
+surprise some who only hear of a pedant-king, who in reality was only a
+"learned" one.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] This technical term, designating the class of youthful loungers,
+    was a new term in 1596, when Sir John Davis wrote his "Epigrams"--
+
+    "Oft in my laughing rimes I name a GULL,
+      But this _new terme_ will many questions breed;
+    Therefore, at first, I will expresse at full
+      Who is a true and perfect Gull indeed."
+
+    His delineation is admirable; Gifford, in his "Jonson," quotes it at
+    length,--i. 14. But whoever may be curious about these masculine
+    "birds" will be initiated into the mysteries of "Gullery" by "The
+    Gulls' Horn-book" of DEKKER, of which we have a beautiful edition,
+    with appropriate embellishments, by Dr. Nott.
+
+  [2] Dr. Bliss has given an excellent edition of Bishop Earle's
+    "Microcosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and
+    Characters."
+
+  [3] Every atom of candour is to be grudged to this hapless monarch;
+    it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr. Hallam prompt instantly
+    to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never
+    have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize
+    with the genial effusions of our poet.
+
+
+
+
+THE AGE OF DOCTRINES.
+
+
+We now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have
+entered into another reign; and, a new epoch arises in our Literature,
+our tastes, and our manners.
+
+We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure,
+and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted
+level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all
+flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of
+corruption; breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A
+monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who,
+as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the
+desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land." All was
+to be the festival of an unbroken repose--a court of shows and sports,
+the rejoicings of three kingdoms.
+
+But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two
+troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public;
+both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called
+Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the "true
+protestants of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over
+both papist and presbyter.
+
+To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for "the
+sincerest Kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who
+had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on "an evil mass in England,"
+the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His
+more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops,
+nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church
+discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery,
+and knew what lay at the bottom--he had tasted the dregs. He did not
+like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was
+"the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared,
+perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that "he came to
+maintain what the queen had established,"--he demanded from the puritans
+conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they
+preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing,
+ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common
+sufferings of the party.[1]
+
+The claims of the Romanists were more tender than those of the sons of
+John Knox; they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch, delayed what
+he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being
+"very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of
+monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way" startled the
+English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same?
+are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require
+absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?
+
+The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption
+of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power
+of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder.
+Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "Was the great revolution of civil
+liberty made only for the prince's safety?" Whatever might be this
+reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled it, by the
+never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy.
+"The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the
+pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests
+busily inculcated that "anything may be done against heretics, because
+they are worse than Turks and infidels;" then barrels of gunpowder were
+placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his dominion
+by absolving the Romanists of England from their oath of allegiance. The
+English monarch chose to be the advocate of his own cause, to vindicate
+his regal rights, and to protest before all Europe against this
+monstrous usurpation. He wrote "The Apology for the Oath of Allegiance,"
+and we must concede to his tract this merit, that if the cause were
+small, boundless and enduring was the effect. In every country in
+Europe, through all the ranks of the learned, and for many a year, this
+effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the
+apostolical court, and of the promulgators of the emancipation of
+mankind;[2] nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul
+Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronized by
+the English monarch.
+
+It was on a nation divided into unequal parts of irreconcileable
+opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for
+twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long
+artillery of a hundred volumes.
+
+Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask
+themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralize
+opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered
+stronger than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested
+principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Æneas
+brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It
+was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter,
+laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at
+Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the
+provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the
+Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in
+many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own
+name by calling it "King James's College." He lived to see a small
+building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be
+finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds.
+When the day arrived that those became the masters whom those dogmatists
+had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed
+into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more
+efficacious.
+
+James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large
+inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all
+they desired, and he was the only monarch who cast a generous thought
+on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to
+be reflected in the court: and in that enchanted circle of flattery and
+of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how "he gave
+like a king;" but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter
+carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly
+comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.
+
+James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what
+creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman
+Catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the
+childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the
+Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating
+apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church
+become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of
+France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?
+
+Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts
+of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. By puritans
+hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the
+"blue-bonnets," who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the
+streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the
+first "the coming-in" seemed as much like an invasion as an accession;
+never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific
+policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and
+finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere
+metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike
+indefinite, had to wrestle with "the five hundred kings," as James once
+called the Commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all
+parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or
+false.
+
+But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we
+find it?[3]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed
+    for--the famous conference at Hampton Court.
+
+  [2] A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists
+    on both sides may be found in Irving's "Lives of the Scottish Poets,"
+    ii. 234.
+
+  [3] I have at least honestly attempted "An Inquiry into the Literary
+    and Political Character of James the First."
+
+
+
+
+PAMPHLETS.
+
+
+Pamphlets, those leaves of the hour, and volumes of a season and even of
+a week, slight and evanescent things as they appear, and scorned at by
+opposite parties, while each cherishes their own, are in truth the
+records of the public mind, the secret history of a people which does
+not always appear in the more open narrative; the true bent and temper
+of the times, the contending interests, the appeal of a party, or the
+voice of the nation, are nowhere so vividly brought before us as by
+these advocates of their own cause, too deeply interested to disguise
+their designs, and too contracted in their space to omit their essential
+points.
+
+Of all the nations of Europe our country first offered a rapid
+succession of these busy records of men's thoughts, their contending
+interests, their mightier passions, their aspirations, and sometimes
+even their follies. Wherever pamphlets abound there is freedom, and
+therefore have we been a nation of pamphleteers. Even at the time when
+the press was not yet free, an invincible pamphlet struck a terror; the
+establishment of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth disturbed the
+little synagogue of puritans, and provoked the fury of the Mar-Prelate
+pamphlets; the pacific reign of James covered the land with a new
+harvest of agricultural pamphlets; but when we entered on an age when
+men thought what they listed, and wrote what they thought, pamphlets ran
+through the land, and then the philosophical speculator on human affairs
+read what had never before been written; the troubles of Charles the
+First and the nation sounded the trumpet of civil war by the blast of
+pamphlets; state-plots and state-cabals were hatched at least by the
+press, under the second Charles, and popery and arbitrary government
+terrified the nation by their pamphlets; the principles of English
+government and toleration expanded in the pamphlets of the reign of
+William the Third, even Locke's Treatises on Toleration and on
+Government were at first but pamphlets; and under Anne the nation
+observed the light skirmishes of Whig and Tory pamphlets.
+
+Our neighbours in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not
+comprehend our constitution, imitated our arts of insurgency, and from
+the same impulses at length rivalled us; but the very term of pamphlet
+is English; and the practice seemed to them so novel, that a recent
+French biographer designates an early period of the French revolution as
+one when "the art of PAMPHLETS had not yet reached perfection."
+
+The history of pamphlets would form an extraordinary history; but
+whoever gathers a history from pamphlets must prepare for contradiction.
+Rushworth had formed a great collection to supply the materials of his
+volumes, but speaks slightly of them, while insinuating his own sagacity
+in separating truth from falsehood; but he concluded "very
+suspiciously," observed Oldys, that none need trouble themselves with
+any further examination than what he had been pleased to make. This
+suspicion was more manifest when Nalson began another collection from
+pamphlets to shake the evidence of the pamphlets of Rushworth. Each had
+found what he craved for; for whoever will look only into those on his
+favourite side, finds enough written with his own passions, but he will
+obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at
+his own face in the glass.
+
+But we must not consider pamphlets wholly in a political view; their
+circuit is boundless, holding all the world of man; they enter into
+every object of human interest. The silent revolutions in manners,
+language, habits, are there to be traced; the interest which was taken
+on novel objects of discovery would be wholly lost were it not for these
+records; and, indeed, it is the multiplicity of pamphlets on a
+particular topic or object which appear at a particular period, that
+offer the truest picture of public opinion.
+
+Those who would not dare to compose a volume have fluttered in the
+leaves of a pamphlet. Three or four ideas are a good stock to set up a
+pamphlet, and look well in it, as picked wares in a shop-window. The
+mute who cannot speak at a dinner or on the hustings, is eloquent in a
+pamphlet; and he who speaks only to excite the murmurs of his auditors,
+amply vindicates himself by a pamphlet. I doubt whether there is a
+single important subject to which some English pamphlet may not form a
+necessary supplement. Many eminent in rank, or who, from their position,
+have never written anything else, have written a pamphlet; and as the
+motive must he urgent which induces any such to have recourse to their
+pen, so the matter is of deeper interest; and it has often happened that
+the public have thence derived information which else had not reached
+them. The heads of parties have sometimes issued these manifestoes; and
+the tails, in the form of a pamphlet, have sometimes let out secrets for
+which they have been reprimanded.
+
+Some of the most original conceptions, whose very errors or
+peculiarities even may instruct, lie hidden in pamphlets. These
+effusions of a more permanent nature than those of politics, are usually
+literary, scientific, or artistical, the spontaneous productions of
+amateurs, the precious suggestions, and sometimes the original
+discoveries of taste or enthusiasm. These are the _deliciæ_ of the
+amenities of literature; and such pamphlets have often escaped our
+notice, since their writers were not authors, and had no works of their
+own among which to shelter them.
+
+The age of Charles the First may be characterised as the age of
+pamphlets. Of that remarkable period, we possess an extraordinary
+collection, which amounts to about thirty thousand pieces, uniformly
+bound in two thousand volumes of various sizes, accompanied by twelve
+folio volumes of the catalogue chronologically arranged, exhibiting
+their full titles. Even the date of the day is noted when each pamphlet
+was published. It includes a hundred in manuscript written on the king's
+side, which at the time were not allowed to be printed. The formation of
+this collection is a romantic incident in the annals of Bibliography.
+
+In that critical year, 1640, a bookseller of the name of Thomason
+conceived the idea of preserving, in that new age of contested
+principles, an unbroken chain of men's arguments, and men's doings. We
+may suppose that this collector, commencing with the year 1640, and
+continuing without omission or interruption to the year 1660, could not
+at first have imagined the vast career he had to run; there was,
+perhaps, sagacity in the first thought, but there was far more
+intrepidity in never relinquishing this favourite object during these
+perilous twenty years, amid a conflict of costly expenditure, of
+personal danger, and almost insurmountable difficulties.
+
+The design was carried on in secrecy through confidential servants, who
+at first buried the volumes as they collected them; but they soon became
+too numerous for such a mode of concealment. The owner, dreading that
+the ruling government would seize on the collection, watched the
+movements of the army of the Commonwealth, and carried this itinerant
+library in every opposite direction. Many were its removals, northward
+or westward, but the danger became so great, and the collection so
+bulky, that he had at one time an intention to pass them over into
+Holland, but feared to trust his treasure to the waves. He at length
+determined to place them in his warehouses, in the form of tables round
+the room, covered with canvas. It is evident that the loyalty of the man
+had rendered him a suspected person; for he was once dragged from his
+bed, and imprisoned for seven weeks, during which time, however, the
+collection suffered no interruption, nor was the secret betrayed.
+
+The secret was, however, evidently not unknown to some faithful servants
+of the king; for when, in 1647, his Majesty at Hampton Court desired to
+see a particular pamphlet, it was obtained for him from this collection,
+though the collector was somewhat chary of the loan, fearing the loss of
+what he felt as a limb of his body, not probably recoverable. The king
+had the volume with him in his flight towards the Isle of Wight; but it
+was returned to the owner, with his Majesty's earnest exhortation, that
+he should diligently continue the collection. A slight accident which
+happened to the volume occasioned the collector to leave this
+interesting incident on record.[1]
+
+When Cromwell ruled, a place of greater security was sought for than the
+owner's warehouses: a fictitious sale was made to the University of
+Oxford, who would be more able to struggle for their preservation than a
+private individual, if the Protector discovered and claimed these
+distracted documents of the history of his own times.
+
+Mr. Thomason lived to complete his design; he witnessed the restoration,
+and died in 1666, leaving his important collection, which was still
+lodged at Oxford, and which he describes in his will "as not to be
+paralleled," in trust to be sold for the benefit of his children. His
+will affords an evidence that he was a person of warm patriotic
+feelings, with a singular turn of mind, for he left a stipend of forty
+shillings for two sermons to be annually preached, one of which was to
+commemorate the destruction of the Armada.
+
+The collection continued at Oxford many years awaiting a purchaser;[2]
+and at length appears to have been bought by Mearne, "the king's
+stationer," at the command of the Secretary of State for Charles the
+Second; but Charles, who would little value old pamphlets, and more
+particularly these, which only reminded him of such mortifying
+occurrences, by an order in council in 1684 munificently allowed the
+widow of Mearne to dispose of them as well as she could. In 1709 we find
+them offered to Lord Weymouth,[3] and in 1732 they were still undisposed
+of; but in those times of loyal rebellion, either for the assumption or
+the restoration of the throne, that of the Commonwealth excited so
+little interest, and this extraordinary collection was so depreciated,
+that Oldys then considered it would not reach the twentieth part of the
+four thousand pounds which it was said that the collector had once
+refused for it.[4] In 1745 a representative of the Mearne family still
+held the volumes,[5] and eventually they were purchased at the small
+price of three or four hundred pounds by George the Third, and by him
+were presented to the national library, where they now bear the name of
+the King's Pamphlets.
+
+Thus having escaped from seizure and dispersion, this noble collection
+remained in the hands of those who priced it as a valueless incumbrance,
+and yet seem to have respected the object of the enterprise, for they
+preserved it entire. It may be some consolation to such intrepid
+collectors that their intelligence and their fervour are not in vain,
+and however they may fail in the attainment of their motive, a great end
+may fortunately be achieved.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] In vol. 100, small quarto, we find the following memorandum:--
+
+    "Mem'dum that Col^l Will Legg and Mr. Arthur Treavor were employed by
+    his Majes^e K. Ch. to gett for his present use a pamphl^t which his
+    majestie had then occasion to make use of, & not meeting with it,
+    they both come to me, having heard that I did employ myself to rake
+    up all such things from the beginning of that Parliament, and finding
+    it with me, told me it was for his majestys own use. I told them all
+    I had were at his maj^y command and service, & withal told them if I
+    should part with it & loose it--presuming that when his majestie had
+    done with it, that little account would be made of it, and that if I
+    should loose it, by that loss a limb of my collection, which I should
+    be very loath to see, well knowing it would be impossible to supplie
+    it if it should happen to be lost; with which answer they returned to
+    his majes^e at Hampton C^t (as I take it) & tould him they had found
+    the person which had it, & withal how loath he that had it was to
+    part with it, he much fearing its loss. Whereupon they came to me
+    again from his maj^e to tell me that upon the word of a king (to use
+    the king's own expressions) they would safely return it, whereupon
+    immediately by them I sent it to his majestie. Who having done with
+    it, & having it with him when he was going towards the Isle of Wight,
+    let it fall in the _durt_, and then calling for the two persons (who
+    attended him) delivered it to them with a charge as they would answer
+    it another day, that they should both speedily & safely return it to
+    him from whom they had received it, and withal to desire the party to
+    go on & continue what had begun. Which book, together with his
+    Maj^ties signification to me, by these worthy and faithful gents, I
+    received both speedily and safely. My volume hath that mark of honour
+    which no other volume in my collection hath, & v^y diligently and
+    carefully I continued the same until that most hapie restoration &
+    coronation of his most gratious majestie King Charle y^e 2d, whom God
+    long preserve.
+
+      "GEO. THOMASON."
+
+    The volume bears the "honours" of its mischance. There are a great
+    number of stains on the edges of the leaves--some more than an inch
+    in depth. The accident must have happened on the road in the king's
+    flight, from the marks of the mud.
+
+  [2] In 1676, Dr. Barlow, one of the trustees, writes to the Rev.
+    George Thomason, who was a Fellow of Queen's College and the eldest
+    son of the collector, respecting the collection and its value. The
+    letter is printed in Beloe's "Anecdotes of Literature," vol. ii.
+
+  [3] A letter from Dr. Jenkin, who was chaplain to Lord Weymouth, to
+    Mr. Baker, Dec. 3, 1709:--"There is another rarity then to be sold,
+    which is proffered to my lord--a Collection of Pamphlets, in number
+    30,000, bound in 2000 volumes. The collection was begun by Charles
+    1st in 1640, and continued to 1660. In a printed paper, where I saw
+    this account, it is said the collectors refused 4000_l._ for
+    them."--_Masters' Life of Rev. Thomas Baker_, p. 28.
+
+  [4] "Phoenix Britannicus,"--"Oldys' Dissertation upon Pamphlets," p.
+    556. Oldys drew up an account of these pamphlets from "The Memoirs of
+    the Curious," published in 1701. He says, that the Collection was
+    made by _Tomlinson, the bookseller_, and the Catalogue by Marmaduke
+    Foster, the auctioneer; and relates a traditional story, that it is
+    reported that Charles the First gave ten pounds for reading one of
+    these pamphlets, at the owner's house in St. Paul's Churchyard. This
+    collection was not commenced until Nov. 1640, and the king left
+    London in Jan. 1642; during this time the collection could not be
+    very numerous, nor would there be that difficulty in seeing a
+    pamphlet as at the subsequent more distracted period. It is curious
+    to trace the origin of traditionary tales; they often stand on a
+    rickety foundation. We find that the king did borrow a pamphlet, but
+    at a time when he could not hasten to St. Paul's Churchyard to read
+    it; we may presume that the bookseller did not charge his majesty so
+    disloyal a price as ten pounds for the perusal of a single pamphlet;
+    he probably received only the king's approbation of his design, which
+    doubtless was no slight stimulus to its completion.
+
+  [5] A Mr. Sisson, a druggist in Ludgate-street, who died in 1749;
+    they then became the property of his relative; Miss Sisson, who seems
+    gladly to have disburdened herself of this domestic grievance in
+    1761.--_Hollis' Memoirs_, p. 121.
+
+
+
+
+THE OCEANA OF HARRINGTON.
+
+
+The hardy paradoxes, not wholly without foundation, and the humiliating
+truths so mortifying to human nature, of the mighty "Leviathan," whose
+author was little disposed to flatter or to elevate his brothers,[1]
+were opposed by an ideal government, more generous in its sympathies,
+and less obtrusive of brute force, or "the public sword," in the OCEANA
+of JAMES HARRINGTON.
+
+Free from mere party motives of the Monarchist or the Commonwealth-man,
+for he gratified neither, Harrington was the greatest of political
+theorists; and his "political architecture," with all his "models of
+government, notional and practicable," still remains for us, and has not
+been overlooked by some framers of constitutions.
+
+The psychological history of HARRINGTON combines with his works. His was
+a thoughtful youth, like that of Sidney, of Milton, and Gray, which
+never needed correction, but rather kept those around him in awe. Among
+the usual studies of his age, it was an enterprise to have acquired the
+modern languages, as entering into an extensive plan of foreign travel,
+which the boy had already decided on. The death of his father before his
+legal age enabled him to realise this project. Political studies,
+however, had not yet occurred to him; and when he left England, he "knew
+no more of monarchy, anarchy, aristocracy, and democracy or oligarchy,
+than as hard words for which he was obliged to look into the
+dictionary."
+
+In Holland, he first contemplated on the image of popular liberty,
+recent from the yoke of Spain; it was a young people rejoicing in the
+holiday of freedom. There he found a friend in the fugitive Queen of
+Bohemia: his uncle, Lord Harrington, had been the governor of that
+spirited princess. He passed over into Denmark with the crownless
+elector, soliciting for that aid which no political prudence could
+afford. He resisted the seductions of those noble friendships in pursuit
+of his great plan. He entered France, he loitered in Germany, and at
+length advanced into Italy. At Rome, he refused to bestow on his
+holiness the prostrate salutation, and when some Englishmen complained
+of their compatriot's stiffness to Charles the First, who reminded the
+young philosopher that he might have performed a courteous custom as to
+a temporal prince, the reply was happy--"having kissed his majesty's
+hand, he would always hold it beneath him to kiss any prince's toe."
+
+Our future political theorist was deeply struck in his admiration of the
+aristocratic government of Venice, which he conceived to be the most
+perfect and durable government hitherto planned by the wit of man. Such
+was the prevalent notion throughout Europe concerning a government
+existing in secrecy and mystery! In Italy, he found Politics, Literature
+and Art, and provided himself with a rich store of Italian books,
+especially on political topics. Machiavelli with him was "the prince of
+Politicians;" but he has opened his great work with the name of another
+Italian, "Janotti (Giannotti), the most excellent describer of the
+Commonwealth of Venice." Giannotti is a name which, though it has not
+shared the celebrity of Machiavelli, seems to have been that of a more
+practical politician, for Giannotti at length obtained that honourable
+secretaryship of Florence, the loss of which, it is said, so deeply
+mortified the lofty spirit of his greater rival, that the illustrious
+ex-secretary died of grief, which his philosophy should have quieted.
+
+Harrington returned home an accomplished cavalier; but the commonwealth
+of Holland, the aristocracy of Venice, the absolute monarchy of France,
+imperial Germany, and what else he had contemplated in the northern
+courts, must have furnished to his thoughtful mind the elements of his
+theory of politics.
+
+He returned home to the privacy of his studies, refusing any public
+employment; but that he kept up an intercourse with the court, appears
+by his personal acquaintance with the king. Many years form a blank in
+his life; once indeed he had made an ineffectual attempt to enter
+parliament, but failed, though his sentiments were well known in favour
+of popular government. It is probable, that in that unhappy period, when
+persons and events were alike of so mixed and ambiguous a character, our
+philosopher could not sympathize with the clash of temporary passions.
+
+When the king was to be conveyed from Newcastle in 1646, Harrington was
+chosen to attend his person as "a gentleman well known to the king
+before, and who had never engaged with any party whatever." He was then
+in his thirty-fifth year.
+
+This appointment of Harrington was agreeable to the king. Charles found
+in Harrington the character he well knew how to appreciate. He conversed
+on books, and pictures, and foreign affairs, and found a ripe scholar, a
+travelled mind, and a genius overflowing with strange speculative
+notions. Their conversations were free; Harrington did not conceal his
+predilection for commonwealth institutions, at which the king was
+impatient. Neither could bring the other to his own side, for each was
+fixed in taking opposite views; the one looking to the advantages of
+monarchy, and the other to those of a republic. The only subject they
+could differ on, never interrupted their affections; the theoretical
+commonwealth-man, and the practical monarch, in their daily intercourse,
+found that they had a heart for each other.
+
+In Charles the First, Harrington discovered a personage unlike the
+distorted image which political passions had long held out. In adversity
+the softened prince seemed only to be "the man of sorrows." On one
+occasion Harrington vindicated the king's conduct, and urged that the
+royal concessions were satisfactory. This strong personal attachment to
+Charles alarmed the party in power. Harrington was ordered away. He
+subsequently visited the king when at St. James's, and was present at
+the awful act of the decapitation. Charles presented Harrington with a
+last memorial. Aubrey, who knew Harrington, may tell the rest of his
+story. "Mr. Harrington was on the scaffold with the king when he was
+beheaded; and I have ofttimes heard him speak of King Charles the First
+with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable; and that his death gave
+him so great grief, that he contracted a disease by it; that never
+anything did go so near to him."
+
+The agony of that terrible day afflicted Harrington with a malady from
+which he was never afterwards freed; a profound melancholy preyed upon
+his spirits; he withdrew into utter seclusion, not to mourn, but to
+despond. His friends were alarmed at a hermit's melancholy; some
+imagined that his affection for the king had deranged his intellect;
+others ascribed his seclusion to mere discontent with the times.
+
+To rid himself of friendly importunities, and to evince that his mind
+was not deranged, whatever might be his feelings, he confided to his
+circle that he had long been occupied in the study of civil government,
+to invent an art which should prevent the disorders of a state. It was
+his opinion that "a government is not of so accidental or arbitrary
+institution as people imagine; for in society there are natural causes
+producing their necessary effects as well as in the earth or the air."
+The passionless sage was so discriminately just, that he declared that
+"our late troubles were not wholly to be ascribed to the misgovernment
+of the prince, nor to the stubbornness of the people; but to the nature
+of certain changes which had happened to the nation." He then, for their
+curious admiration, disclosed the perfect model of a commonwealth in his
+"OCEANA."
+
+OCEANA, or England, was the model of "a free state;" a political
+"equality" was its basis; equality to be guarded by a number of devices.
+Harrington laid the foundation of politics, on the principle that
+_empire follows the balance of property_, whether lodged in one, in a
+few, or in many. Toland asserts that this was as noble a discovery as
+that of the circulation of the blood, of printing, gunpowder, or the
+compass, or optic glasses; the Newtonian gravity had not then been
+established, or, doubtless, it had been enumerated.
+
+To preserve the political equality, there were to be "balances" in
+dominion and in property. An agrarian law, by its distributions suitable
+to the rank of the individual, and which were never to be enlarged nor
+diminished, would prevent any man, or any party, overpowering the
+people by their possessions. All those states in Europe which were the
+remains of Gothic dominion, were thrown into internal conflicts by their
+"overbalances." The overbalance of one man was tyranny; of a few, was
+oligarchy; of the many, was rebellion, or anarchy.[2] The perpetual
+shifting of their "balances" had produced all their disturbances. He
+traced this history in extinct governments, as well as in our own. So
+refined were his political optics, that he discerned when our kings had
+broken Magna Charta some thirty times; and during the reign of Charles
+the First, he asserts that these "balances" had been altered nine times.
+
+The "balance of property" being the foundation of the commonwealth, the
+superstructure was raised of magistracy. Magistracy was to proceed by
+"rotation," and to be settled by the "ballot." The senate was to be
+elected by the purity of suffrage, which was to be found in the
+balloting-box. And in this rotatory government, the third part of the
+senate would be wheeled out at their fixed terms. The senate by these
+self-purgations would renovate its youth; and the sovereign authority,
+by this unceasing movement, would act in its perpetual integrity.
+
+In this equal commonwealth no party can be at variance with, or gain
+ground upon another; and as there can be no factions, so neither will
+there be any seditions; because the people are without the power or the
+interest to raise commotions; they would be as likely to throw
+themselves into the sea as to disturb the state. It is one of his
+political axioms, that where the public interest governs, it is a
+government of laws; but where a private interest, it is a government of
+men, and not of laws.
+
+HARRINGTON was no admirer of a mixed monarchy; his political logic
+includes some important truths. "In a mixed monarchy, the nobility
+sometimes imposing chains on the king or domineering over the people,
+the king is either oppressing the people without control, or contending
+with the nobility, as their protectors; and the people are frequently
+in arms against both king and nobles, till at last one of the three
+estates becomes master of the other two, or till they so mutually weaken
+one another, that either they fall a prey to some more potent
+government, or naturally grow into a commonwealth--therefore mixed
+monarchy is not a perfect government; but if no such parties can
+possibly exist in OCEANA, then it is the most equal, perfect, and
+immortal commonwealth. _Quod erat demonstrandum._"
+
+The "equality" of Harrington, however, was not fashioned to any vulgar
+notions of a levelling democracy. He maintained the distinctions of
+orders in society. The great founder of a commonwealth was first a
+_gentleman_, from Moses downwards; though, he says, "there be great
+divines, poets, lawyers, great men in all professions, the genius of a
+great politician is peculiar to _the genius of a gentleman_." And
+further, "An army may as well consist of soldiers without officers, or
+of officers without soldiers, as a commonwealth (especially such an one
+as is capable of greatness) consist of a people without gentry, or of a
+gentry without a people."
+
+A work of such original invention, replete with the most curious
+developments of all former political institutions, of which the author
+proposed to resume the advantages and to supply the deficiencies, from
+the ancient commonwealth of Moses to the recent republic of the
+Hollanders, and moreover throwing out some novel general views of our
+own national history, formed a volume opportune to engage public
+attention. It was enlivened by the pleasing form of a romance, where, in
+the council of the legislators, the debaters plead for their favourite
+form of government with infinite spirit.
+
+The publication of "Oceana" was, however, long retarded; first, by the
+honesty of our sage, and, secondly, by the influence of two very
+opposite parties equally alarmed. Harrington was anxious that his
+proselytes should debate his opinions, and even partially promulgate
+them in their pamphlets, before he ventured to publish them. What he
+ably elucidated they faithfully repeated: the consequence of this
+indiscretion was, that the novelty had lost its gloss; and, when finally
+his great discovery of empire following the balance of property
+appeared, the author was reproached for its obviousness. Every great
+principle appears obvious when once ascertained. The vague rumours that
+had spread that a new model of government was about to appear, made the
+Cromwellites and the cavaliers alike alert in their opposition; the
+bashaws of the great sultan, the new lords and major-generals of the
+Protector, sate uneasy in their usurped seats; the cavaliers, who knew
+Harrington's predisposition for republican institutions, loudly
+remonstrated. The author was compelled to send his papers to the
+printers by stealth and by snatches, dispersing them among different
+presses. The first edition of "Oceana" exhibits a strange appearance, in
+a confusion of all sorts of types and characters--black letter, Italian
+and Roman, accompanied by an unparalleled "List of Errors of the Press,"
+being several folio pages with double columns! The author has even
+marked the lacerations of his panting and hunted volume from "a spaniel
+questing who hath sprung my book out of one press into two other." The
+myrmidons of Oliver hunted down their game from press to press, and at
+length pounced on their prey, and, with a Pyrrhic triumph, bore it to
+Whitehall.
+
+All solicitations of the author to retrieve his endeared volume proved
+fruitless; in despair he ventured on a singular expedient. Lady
+Claypole, the daughter of the Protector, studied to be exceedingly
+gracious, and to play the princess. Unacquainted with her ladyship,
+Harrington requested an audience; waiting in the antechamber, her little
+daughter soon attracted his attention; carrying her in his arms, he
+entered the presence-chamber, and declared that he had a design to steal
+the young lady--not from love, but for revenge.
+
+"Have I injured you?"
+
+"Not at all! but your father has stolen my child, and then you would
+have interceded for its restoration."
+
+The parable of the parental author was easily explained; the pleasing
+manners of the elegant cavalier, which were not commonly seen in the new
+court of the protectorate, doubtless assisted the petitioner with the
+recent princess of the revolution. "Are you sure," she earnestly
+inquired, "that your book contains nothing against my father's
+government?"
+
+"It is a political romance! to be dedicated to your father, and the
+first copy to be opened by yourself."
+
+Lady Claypole conceived there could not be any treason in a romance. She
+persuaded Oliver to look it over himself; the Protector, who there found
+himself as "the Lord Archon of Oceana," and probably with his sharp
+judgment deeming the whole a "romance," returned it, drily observing,
+that "the power which he had got by the sword he would not quit for a
+little paper-shot:" but he added, with his accustomed sanctimonious
+policy, that "he as little approved as the gentleman of the government
+of a _single person_, but that he had been compelled to take the office
+of High-Constable to preserve the peace among all parties who could
+never agree among themselves."
+
+"Oceana" was published at a crisis when the people were still to be
+enchanted by the name of "Commonwealth," though they began to think that
+they had been mistaken in their choice, since their grievances had been
+heavier than under the old monarchy which they had dissolved. Harrington
+familiarly compared their present unquiet state to that of a company of
+puppy-dogs cramped up in a bag, when finding themselves ill at ease for
+want of room, every one of them bites the tail or the foot of his
+neighbour, supposing that to be the source of his misery. To such a
+restless people, a continual change of rulers on the rotatory system
+seemed a great relief; any worse than their present masters they would
+not suppose. "The Rota" of Harrington became so popular, that a club was
+established bearing its name; and they held their debates every evening
+with doors open for auditors or orators.
+
+This political club was the resort of the finest geniuses of the age,
+many of whom have left their eminent names in our history and our
+literature. The members sat at a circular table--the table of ancient
+knighthood and modern equality, which left a passage open within its
+circuit to have their coffee delivered hot without any interruption to
+the speaker or "the state of the nation." A contemporary assures us that
+these debates were more ingenious and spirited than he had ever heard,
+and that those in parliament were flat to them. Every decision how
+affairs should be carried was left to the balloting-box--"a box in
+which there is no cogging," observes the master-genius of "the Rota."
+
+This "balloting" and the principle of "rotation" were hateful to the
+parliamentarians; for, as we are told, "they were cursed tyrants, in
+love with their power, and this was death to them." HENRY NEVILLE, the
+author of "Plato Redivivus," the constant associate of Harrington, and
+who, Hobbes (alluding to the "Oceana") said, "had a finger in the pye,"
+had the boldness to propose the system of "rotation" to the House,
+warning them that, if they did not accept that model of government, they
+would shortly fall into ruins. In their then ticklish condition, the
+House had the decency to return their thanks, and the intrepidity to
+keep their places.
+
+This perfectioned model of a government, when opened for the inspection
+of mankind, exhibited a glorious framework; but it seemed questionable
+whether this political clockwork or intellectual mechanism could perform
+its exact librations, depending on a number of "balances" to preserve
+its nice equilibrium; and whether it could last for perpetuity by that
+"rotatory" motion by wheels which were never to cease. Some objected,
+that the author in the science of politics had been fascinated, as some
+in mechanics, who imagined that they had discovered "the perpetual
+motion." But this objection the constructor of this "political
+architecture" indignantly rejected. He knew that the capacity of matter
+can only work as long as it lasts, and therefore there can be no
+perpetual motion; but "the mathematician must not take God to be such as
+he is. The equal commonwealth is built up by the understandings of the
+people. Now the people never die--they are not brute matter. This
+movement of theirs comes from the hands of the Eternal Mover, even God
+himself."
+
+This romance of politics has been pronounced by a high authority as "one
+of the boasts of English literature;" and the philosophic Hume has even
+ventured to pronounce the work as "the _only valuable model of a
+commonwealth_ that has yet been offered to the public." Perhaps the
+historian would pass it off as "the only valuable one," from a
+conviction that it was perfectly harmless. It is worthy of remark, that
+when, in 1688, a grand _auto da fè_ was performed by the university of
+Oxford on certain political works--when they condemned to the flames
+Baxter's "Holy Commonwealth," written against Harrington's "Heathen
+Commonwealth," as Baxter calls "Oceana," with Hobbes, and Milton, and
+others--no one proposed this condign punishment to the manes of
+Harrington, considering, no doubt, that a romance was too impracticable
+as a political system. Yet the republican party has always held to
+"Oceana" as their text-book; and it was with this view that TOLAND
+edited this great work, and, in his life of Milton, has declared
+"Oceana" to be an unrivalled model of a commonwealth, for its
+_practicableness_, _equality_, and completeness; and once HOLLIS, during
+the fervour of founding a republic in Corsica, recommended by public
+advertisement "Oceana" as the most perfect model of a free government.
+
+"OCEANA" has perpetuated a thoughtful politician's dreams. But are there
+no realities in dreams? Even in dreaming, a great artist often combines
+conceptions too fugitive, too mysterious, too beauteous, for his
+palpable canvas. And thus the fanciful pictures of our philosophical
+politician were the results of his deep and varied studies in the
+ancient and modern writings on the science of politics--from Aristotle
+to Machiavel, from Machiavel to Hobbes. His pages are studded with
+axioms of policy, and impress us by many an enduring truth. His style is
+not always polished, and is sometimes perplexed; but no writer has
+exceeded him in the felicity and boldness of his phrases; and his pen,
+though busied on higher matters, sparkles with imagery and illustration.
+
+That a mind so sagacious and even predictive as was that of Harrington's
+in the uncertainty of human events should be led away by theoretical
+fallacies, is an useful example for political speculators.[3] Constantly
+he extols the dark mysterious dominion of aristocratic Venice, "being a
+commonwealth having no causes of dissolution." He dwells on "the
+rotation of its senate," and its prompt, remedial, concealed power. "It
+is immortal in its nature; and to this day she stands with one thousand
+years of tranquillity on her back: notwithstanding," he thoughtfully
+adds, "that this government consists of men not without sin."
+
+A single day of treason sufficed to terminate this immortal commonwealth
+of Venice, with all its "ballotings" and "its rotations," and its hidden
+and horrible dictature, where sate the council of "Three" in their dark
+conclave, like the sister-fates, the arbiters of every soul in Venice.
+Alas for that folly of the wise, who, in the delusion of a theory, to
+support the edifice of imagination disguise the truths which might shake
+it! The advocate of a free state, he who pretends to draw sovereignty
+from the hands of a people, is the perpetual eulogist of the most
+refined tyranny that ever swayed the destiny of a people. Spirit of
+Harrington! meditate in thy sepulchral city, motionless and naked as she
+lies, there to correct so many passages of admiration which spread their
+illusion in thy "OCEANA!"
+
+Harrington was equally fallible on the strength of his political axiom,
+"that the balance of power depends on that of property;" applying it to
+his own critical period, he pronounced that it was impossible ever to
+re-establish monarchy among English commonwealth-men. Property had
+changed possessors; it could never revert to its former owners. Four
+years after "Oceana" was published, and "the Rota Club" was still
+illumining the nation, the commonwealth returned to monarchy by a beck,
+and without a word!
+
+Theoretical politicians too often omit in their artificial
+constructions, and their moral calculations, something more prompt to
+act in the conduct of men than even their interests--the stirring
+passions of ambition, of faction, and the vacillations of "the sovereign
+people," now maddening for a republic, now rushing into a monarchy,
+"tumbling and tossing upon their bed of sickness."
+
+When the Restoration arrived, however it may have deranged the system,
+it seems not to have disturbed the systematiser. He observed, that "the
+king comes in; if he calls a parliament of the cavaliers on our great
+estates, let them sit seven years, and they will all turn
+commonwealth-men." He retained in all its force his master-passion of
+ideal politics. He now decided to reduce "Oceana" into plain axioms,
+divested of tedious argumentation, and formal demonstration, adapted to
+the most vulgar capacities. He was easily induced to offer some
+immediate instructions for the king's service. A paper was first shown
+to some of the courtiers, who suspected treason in any scheme where
+their particular interests were not at all consulted. One morning, when
+Harrington was busily engaged, with all his aphorisms lying loose on a
+table before him, suddenly entered Sir William Poulteney, and other
+officers, to seize on the philosopher and the philosophy "for
+treasonable designs and practices." As they were huddling together the
+scattered members of the "Oceanic" mind, the innocent philosopher,
+innocent of treason, begged the favour of "stitching them together"
+before they were taken to Whitehall. The derangement of his system
+appeared to him more dreadful than seeing himself hurried to the Tower.
+
+Harrington had kept up his intimacy with old friends, among whom were
+many commonwealth-men, from Major Wildman, an intriguing Cromwellite,
+down to the notorious Barebones, on whom he declared, however, that he
+had only called, "at his shop" thrice in his life. He was now involved
+in a pretended plot, which the Chancellor himself, though furnished with
+accounts of the meetings of certain parties, declared that he could make
+nothing of. A speculative politician was a very suspicious person in the
+days of restoration. Harrington, assuredly, was no plotter. Our
+philosopher contrived to send his sisters his examination before his
+relative Lord Lauderdale and others, curious for its topics of
+discussion, and the poignancy of the dialogue. I cannot pass by one
+singular passage.
+
+"You charge me with being eminent in principles contrary to the king's
+government, and the laws of this nation. Some, my lord, say, that I,
+being a private man, have been so mad as to meddle with politics; what
+had a private man to do with government? My lord, there is not any
+_public_ person, not any _magistrate_ that has written in politics,
+worth a button. All they that have been excellent in this way have been
+private men, as private men as myself. There is Plato, there is
+Aristotle, there is Livy, there is Machiavel. My lord, I can sum up
+Aristotle's politics in a very few words; he says there is the barbarous
+monarchy, such a one where the people have no votes in making the laws;
+he says there is the heroic monarchy, such a one where the people have
+their votes in making the laws; and then he says there is democracy, and
+affirms that a man cannot be said to have liberty but in a democracy
+only."
+
+My Lord Lauderdale, who thus far had been very attentive, at this showed
+some impatience.
+
+_Har._--"I say Aristotle says so; I have not said so much. And under
+what prince was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince in
+the world? Did Alexander hang up Aristotle, did he molest him?" And he
+proceeds with Livy, who wrote under Cæsar, and the commonwealth-man,
+Machiavel, under the Medici, unmolested.
+
+"I wrote under an usurper, Oliver. He having started up into the throne,
+his officers kept a murmuring for a commonwealth. He told them that he
+knew not what they meant, but let any one show him that there was any
+such thing as a commonwealth, they should see that he sought not
+himself; the Lord knew he only sought to make good the cause. Upon this
+some sober men thought that if any in England could show what a
+commonwealth was, it was myself. I wrote, and after I had written,
+Oliver never answered his officers as he had done before; therefore I
+wrote not against the king's government; and if the law could have
+punished me, Oliver had done it; therefore my writing was not obnoxious
+to the law. After Oliver, the parliament said they were a commonwealth;
+I said they were not; and proved it, insomuch that the parliament
+accounted me a cavalier, and one that had no other design in my writing
+than to bring in the king; and now the king, first of any man, makes me
+a Roundhead!"
+
+Certainly no theoretical politician has ever more lucidly set before us
+the cruel dilemmas of speculative science.
+
+The story of HARRINGTON now becomes calamitous. In vain his sisters
+petitioned that the prisoner, for his justification, should be brought
+to trial,--no one dared to present the petition to parliament. He was
+suddenly carried off to St. Nicholas Island, near Plymouth, and by
+favour afterwards was lodged in Plymouth Castle, where the governor
+treated the state-prisoner with the kindness he had long wanted. His
+health gradually gave way; his mind fell into disorder; his high spirit
+and his heated brain could not brook this tormenting durance; his
+intellect was at times clouded by some singular delusions; and his
+family imagined that it was intended that he should never more write
+"Oceanas." The physician of the castle had prescribed constant doses of
+guaiacum taken in coffee. At length, other physicians were despatched by
+his family; they found an emaciated patient deprived of sleep, and under
+their hands testified that the copious use of this deleterious beverage,
+with such drying drugs, was sufficient to occasion hypochondriasm, and
+even frenzy, in any one who had not even a predisposition. The surly
+physician of the state-prison insisted that Harrington counterfeited
+madness.
+
+His delusions never left him, yet otherwise his faculties remained
+unaltered. He had strange fancies about the operations of the animal
+spirits, good and evil, and often alarmed his friends by his vivacious
+descriptions of these invisible agencies. "Nature," he said, "which
+works under a veil, is the heart of God." But how are we to account, in
+a mind otherwise sane, for his notion that his thoughts transpired from
+him, and took the shapes of flies or bees? Aubrey has given a gossiper's
+account of this ludicrous hypochondriasm. Harrington had a summer-house
+revolving on a pivot, which he turned at will to face the sun; there sat
+the great author of "Oceana," whisking a fox's brush to disperse this
+annoyance of his transpired thoughts in the flies or bees, which,
+whenever they issued from crevices, he would appeal to those present,
+whether it was not evident to them that they had emerged from his
+brain? An eminent physician had flattered himself that he would be able
+to out-reason this delusion, by that force of argument and positive
+demonstration to which his illustrious patient only would attend; but
+the physician discovered that no argument could avail with the most
+invincible disputant in Europe. The sanity of the man only strengthened
+his insanity. Besides, our philosopher believed that he had discovered a
+new system of physiology, in what he called "The Mechanics of Nature."
+Harrington declared that his fate was that of Democritus, who, having
+made a great discovery in anatomy, was deemed mad by his associates,
+till Hippocrates appeared, and attested the glorious truth, confounding
+the laughers for ever! He now resolved to prove against his doctors,
+that his notions were not, as they alleged, hypochondriacal whims, or
+fanciful delusions. Among his manuscripts was found this promised
+treatise, thus opening--"Having been for nine months, some say, in a
+disease, I in a cure, I have been the wonder of physicians, and they
+mine!" It is much to be regretted that the first part of this singular
+design has only reached us, wherein he has laid down his axioms, many of
+which are indisputable, coherent, and philosophical, however chimerical
+might have been their application to his particular notions. The
+narrative of his own disorder, which was to form the second part, would
+have been a great psychological curiosity, for the philosopher was there
+to have told us, how "he had felt and saw Nature; that is, how she came
+first into his senses, and by the senses into the understanding," and
+"to speak to men that have had the same sensations as himself." The
+logical deliriums of Harrington, it is not impossible, might have thrown
+a beam of light on "The Human Nature" of Hobbes, and "The Understanding"
+of Locke.
+
+It is for the medical character to develop the mysteries of this
+condition of man; but this moral phenomenon of the partial delusions of
+the noblest intellect remains an enigma they have not yet solved.
+Harrington never recovered his physical energy, while his
+"Understanding" betrayed no symptoms of any decay in the exercise of his
+vigorous faculties.
+
+There is one dark cloud which dusks the lustre of the name of
+HARRINGTON. Opening the volume of his works, we are startled by an
+elaborate treatise on "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy." It is not
+merely one of the most eloquent invectives against monarchical
+institutions, but it overflows with the most withering defamations, such
+as were prevalent at that distempered season, when the popular writers
+accumulated horrors on the memories of their late sovereigns, to
+metamorphose their monarchs into monsters. In this terrible state-libel,
+all kings are anathematised: James the First was the murderer of his
+son; Charles the First was a parricide. Of that "resolute tyrant
+Charles," we have an allusion to "his actions of the day; his actions of
+the night;"--from which we must infer that they were equally criminal.
+
+The reader, already acquainted with the intimate intercourse of our
+author with Charles the First, and with all his permanent emotions,
+which probably induced his mental disorder, must start at the disparity
+of the writing with the writer. A thorough-paced partisan has here acted
+on the base principle of reviling the individual, whom he privately
+acknowledged to be wholly of an opposite character. It would be a
+solecism in human nature, had Harrington sent forth an historical
+calumny, which only to have read must have inflicted a deep pang in his
+heart. He was a philosopher, who neither flattered nor vilified the
+prince nor the people; their common calamities he ascribes to inevitable
+causes, which had been long working those changes independent of either.
+In the reigns of James and Charles, according to his favourite
+principle, "The English Balance," in favour of "popularity," was
+"running like a bowl down hill." He does justice to the sagacity of the
+indolent James, who, he tells us, "not seldom prophesied sad things to
+his successors;" and of Charles the First, on succeeding to his father,
+Harrington has expressed himself with the utmost political wisdom and
+felicity of illustration. "There remained nothing to the destruction of
+a monarchy, retaining but the name, more than a prince who, by
+contending, should make the people to feel those advantages which they
+could not see. And this happened to the next king (Charles), who, too
+secure in that undoubted right whereby he was advanced to the throne
+which had no foundation, dared to put this to an unseasonable trial, on
+whom, therefore, fell the tower in Silo. Nor may we think they on whom
+this tower fell were sinners above all men; but that we, unless we
+repent and look better to the true foundations, must likewise
+perish."[4] All that our philosopher had to deliver to the world on the
+many contested points of that unhappy reign, was the illustration of his
+principle, and not the infamy of vulgar calumny. With the philosophic
+Harrington, Charles the First was but "a doomed man;" not more a sinner,
+because the tower of Silo had fallen upon his head, than those who stood
+without. This was true philosophy, the other was faction.
+
+The treatise on "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy," prominently
+placed at the opening of the works of Harrington, and inseparably
+combined with his opinions by the reference in the general index--this
+treatise which has settled like a gangrene on the fair character of the
+author of "Oceana," which has called down on his devoted head the
+execrations of honourable men,[5] and which has misled many generations
+of readers, is the composition of a salaried party writer, in no way
+connected with our author. Toland, the first editor of Harrington's
+works, introduced into the volume this anonymous invective, which has
+thus come down to us sanctioned by the philosopher's name. There was no
+plea of any connexion between the two authors, and much less between
+their writings. The editor of the edition of 1771 has silently
+introduced the name of the real author in the table of contents, but
+without prefixing it to the tract, or without any further indication to
+inform the reader.
+
+Whether zeal for "the cause" led Toland to this editorial delinquency,
+or whether he fell into this inadvertence from deficient acumen, it
+remains a literary calamity not easily paralleled, for a great author is
+condemned for what he never could have written.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] I must refer the reader for the development of the system of
+    Hobbes to the Essay on Hobbes in the "Quarrels of Authors," (last
+    edition, p. 436.)
+
+  [2] The masterpiece of legislation of Abbé Sieyes, who, during the
+    French Revolution, had always a new constitution in his pocket, was
+    founded on this principle of "checks and balances in the state,"
+    evidently adopted from Harrington. In Scott's "Life of Napoleon,"
+    vol. iv., the Abbé Sieyes' system is described.
+
+  [3] I think that Harrington presciently detected the latent causes of
+    a great revolution in France. The curiosity of the passage may
+    compensate for its length--
+
+    "Where there is tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, it
+    must end in death or recovery. Though the people of the world, in the
+    dregs of the Gothic empire, be yet tumbling and tossing upon the bed
+    of sickness, they cannot die; nor is there any means of recovery for
+    them but by ancient prudence; whence, of necessity, it must come to
+    pass that this drug be better known. If _France_, _Italy_, and
+    _Spain_ were not all sick--all corrupted together, there would be
+    none of them so; for the sick would not be able to withstand the
+    sound, nor the sound to preserve their health without curing of the
+    sick. _The first of these nations, which, if you stay her leisure,
+    will, in my mind, be France_, that recovers the health of ancient
+    prudence, shall certainly _govern the world_."--_Oceana_, p. 168;
+    edition 1771.
+
+  [4] The Art of Law-giving, 366, 4to edition.
+
+  [5] See the solemn denunciations of the "Biographia Britannica," p.
+    2536, which are repeated by later biographers; see Chalmers.
+
+
+
+
+THE AUTHOR OF "THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY."
+
+
+The author of "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy," whose historical
+libel is perpetuated in the works of Harrington, is JOHN HALL, of Gray's
+Inn, sometimes described of Durham; one of those fervid spirits who take
+the bent of the times in a revolutionary period. He must be classed
+among those precocious minds which astonish their contemporaries by
+acquisitions of knowledge, combined with the finest genius, and in their
+boyhood betray no immaturity. We may receive with some suspicion
+accounts of such gifted youths, though they come from competent judges;
+but when we are reminded of the Rowley of Chatterton, and find what HALL
+did, we must conclude that there are meteorous beings, whose eccentric
+orbits we know not how to describe. HALL, prevented by the civil wars
+from entering the university, pursued his studies in the privacy of the
+library at Durham. When the war ceased, he was admitted at Cambridge;
+and in 1646 published, in his nineteenth year, _Horæ Vacivæ_, or
+"Essays, with some Occasional Considerations." These are essays in
+prose; and at a time when our literature could boast of none except the
+masterpieces of Lord Bacon, a boy of nineteen sends forth this
+extraordinary volume. Even our plain Anthony caught the rapture; for he
+describes its appearance--"the sudden breaking forth of which amazed not
+only the university, but the more serious part of men in the three
+nations, when they (the Essays) were spread." Here is the puerility of a
+genius of the first order! A boy's essays raised the admiration of "the
+three nations!" and they remain still remarkable! This youth seems to
+have modelled his manner on Bacon for the turn of his thoughts, and on
+Seneca for the point and sparkle of his periods. The dwarf rose strong
+as a giant.[1]
+
+The boy having astonished the world by a volume of his prose, amazed
+them in the succeeding year by a volume of his verse, poetry as graceful
+as the prose was nervous; his verses still adorn the most elegant of our
+modern anthologies.[2]
+
+Attracted to the metropolis, he entered as a student at Gray's Inn; and
+there his political character soon assumed the supremacy over his
+literary. He sided with the independents, the ultra-commonwealth-men,
+and satirised the presbyterians, the friends of monarchy. He plunged
+into extreme measures; courting his new masters by the baseness of a
+busy pen, he justified Barebones' parliament, got up a state-pamphlet
+against the Hollanders, proposed the reform of the universities, "to
+have the Frier-like list of the fellowships _reduced_, and _the rest of
+the revenue_ of the university _sequestered into the hands of the
+committee_," of which, probably, he might himself have been one. The
+exchequer was opened; he received "present sums of money;" and the
+council granted their scribe a considerable pension.
+
+During this life of political activity, Hall, in 1650, was commanded by
+the council of state to repair to Scotland, to attend on Cromwell, for
+the purpose of settling affairs in favour of the commonwealth, and to
+wean the Scots from their lingering affection for the surviving Stuart.
+It was then that Hall, in his vocation, sent forth the thunder of a
+party-pamphlet, "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy." This
+extraordinary tract consists of two parts: the first, more elaborately
+composed, is an argumentative exposition of anti-monarchical doctrines;
+in the second, to bring the business home to their bosoms, he offers a
+demonstration of his principles, in a review of the whole Scottish
+history, sarcastically reminding them of their kings "crowned with happy
+reigns, and quiet deaths (two successively scarce dying naturally)." It
+is a mass of invectives and calumnies in the disguise of grave history;
+and this historical libel, concocted for a particular time and a
+particular place, was eagerly received at Edinburgh, and immediately
+republished in London, where it was sure of as warm a reception.[3]
+
+Hall's passion for literature must have been intense; for amid these
+discordant days, he found time to glide into hours of refreshing
+studies. He gave us the first vernacular version of "The Sublime" of
+Longinus,[4] and left another of the moral Hierocles. This gifted youth
+with sportive facility turned English into Latin, or Latin into English;
+it has been recorded of him that he translated the greater part of a
+singular work of the Alchemical Maier, in one afternoon over his wine at
+a tavern; and he entranced the ear of that universal patron, Edward
+Bendlowes, by turning into Latin verse three hundred lines of his
+mystical poem of "Theophila," at one sitting.
+
+In this impassioned existence, excited by the acrimony of politics, and
+the enthusiasm of study, he fell into reckless dissipation, and
+undermined a constitution which, probably, had all the delicacy and
+sensitiveness of his genius. He sunk in the struggle of celebrity and
+personal indulgence, and hastened back to his family to die, when he had
+hardly attained to manhood.
+
+A true prodigy of genius was this JOHN HALL; for not only he could warm
+into admiration our literary antiquary, but the greater philosopher
+Hobbes, not prone to flattery, has left a memorial of this impassioned
+and precocious being. "Had not his debauches and intemperance diverted
+him from the more severe studies, he had made an extraordinary person;
+for no man had ever done so great things at his age."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Three or four of these Essays have been reprinted in "The
+    Restituta," vol. iii. The original book is very rare.
+
+  [2] See Ellis' "Specimens."
+
+  [3] I found the origin of this eloquent and factious performance in
+    an account of JOHN HALL, prefixed to his translation of "Hierocles on
+    the Golden Verses of Pythagoras:" it proceeds from a friend--John
+    Davies of Kidwelly. The treatise of Hall, in its original edition, is
+    so rare, that no copy has been found at the British Museum, nor in
+    the King's Library; it was, however, reprinted at the time in London.
+
+  [4] A piece of great learning, entitled 'The Height of Eloquence,'
+    written in Greek, by Dionysius Longinus, rendered into English from
+    the original, by John Hall, Esq., London, 1652, 8vo.--_Brüggeman's
+    English Transactions._
+
+
+
+
+COMMONWEALTH.
+
+
+When the term COMMONWEALTH deeply occupied the minds of men, they had
+formed no settled notions about the thing itself; the term became
+equivocal, of such wide signification that it was misunderstood and
+misapplied, and always ambiguous; and a confusion of words led many
+writers into a confusion of notions.
+
+The term _Commonweal_, or _wealth_, indeed appears in our statutes, in
+the speeches of our monarchs, and in the political works of our writers,
+long before the idea of a _republic_, in its popular sense, was
+promulgated by the votaries of democracy. The term _Commonweal_ explains
+itself; it specifies no particular polity but the public weal; and even
+the term _republic_ originally meant nothing more than _res publicæ_, or
+"the affairs of the public." Sir THOMAS SMITH, the learned secretary to
+Elizabeth, who has written on the English constitution, entitles his
+work "The Commonwealth of England." James the First justly called
+himself "the great servant of the Commonwealth." The Commonwealth,
+meaning the kingdom of England, is the style of all the learned in law.
+
+The ambiguity of the term _Commonwealth_ soon caused it to be perverted
+by the advocates of popular government, who do not distinguish the State
+from the people; this appears as early as the days of Rawleigh, who
+tells us, that "the government of all the common and baser sort is by an
+_usurped nick-name_ called a COMMONWEALTH."[1]
+
+It was in the revolutionary period of Charles the First that the terms
+_Commonwealth_ and _Commonwealth-man_ were adopted by the governing
+party, as precisely describing their purity of devotion to the public
+weal. In the temper of the times the Commonwealth became opposed to the
+monarchy, and the Commonwealth-man to the royalist. Cromwell ironically
+asked what was a Commonwealth? affecting an ignorance of the term.
+
+When Baxter wrote his "Holy Commonwealth" against Harrington's
+"Heathenish Commonwealth," he had said, "I plead the cause of monarchy
+as better than democracy or aristocracy." Toland, a Commonwealth-man in
+the new sense, referring to Baxter's work, exclaims that "A monarchy is
+an odd way of modelling a Commonwealth." Baxter alluded to an English
+Commonwealth in its primitive sense, and Toland restricted the term to
+its modern application. Indeed, Toland exults in the British
+constitution being a Commonwealth in the popular sense, in his preface
+to his edition of Harrington's works, and has the merit of bringing
+forward as his authority the royal name of James the First, and which
+afterwards seems to have struck Locke as so apposite that he
+condescended to repeat it. The passage in Toland is curious: "It is
+undeniably manifest that the English government is _already a
+Commonwealth_ the most free and best constituted in the world. This was
+_frankly_ acknowledged by King James the First, who styled himself _the
+great servant of the Commonwealth_." One hardly suspected a republican
+of gravely citing the authority of the royal sage on any position!
+
+The Restoration made the term _Commonwealth-man_ odious as marking out a
+class of citizens in hostility to the government; and _Commonwealth_
+seems, in any sense, to have long continued such an offensive word that
+it required the nicest delicacy to handle it. The use of the term has
+even drawn an apology from LOCKE himself when writing on "government."
+"By Commonwealth," says our philosophical politician, "I must be
+understood all along to mean, _not a democracy_, but any independent
+community, which the Latins signified by the word _civitas_, to which
+the word which best answers in our language is _Commonwealth_." However,
+Locke does not close his sentence without some trepidation for the use
+of an unequivocal term, obnoxious even under the new monarchy of the
+revolution. "To avoid ambiguity, I crave leave to use the word
+_Commonwealth_ in that sense in which I find it _used by King James the
+First_, and I take it to be its genuine signification--which _if anybody
+dislike, I consent with him to change it for a better_!" An ample
+apology! but one which hardly suits the dignity of the philosophical
+writer.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+  [1] Rawleigh's "Remains."
+
+
+
+
+THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE.
+
+
+It is only in the silence of seclusion that we should open the awful
+tome of "The True Intellectual System of the Universe" of RALPH
+CUDWORTH.[1] The history and the fate of this extraordinary result of
+human knowledge and of sublime metaphysics, are not the least remarkable
+in the philosophy of bibliography.
+
+The first intention of the author of this elaborate and singular work,
+was a simple inquisition into the nature of that metaphysical necessity,
+or destiny, which has been introduced into the systems both of
+philosophy and religion, wherein man is left an irresponsible agent in
+his actions, and is nothing more than the blind instrument of inevitable
+events over which he holds no control.
+
+This system of "necessity," or fate, our inquirer traced to three
+different systems, maintained on distinct principles. The ancient
+Democritic or atomical physiology endows inert matter with a motive
+power. It views a creation, and a continued creation, without a creator.
+The disciple of this system is as one who cannot read, who would only
+perceive lines and scratches in the fairest volume, while the more
+learned comprehend its large and legible characters; in the mighty
+volume of nature, the _mind_ discovers what the _sense_ may not, and
+reads "those sensible delineations by its own inward activity," which
+wisdom and power have with their divinity written on every page. The
+absurd system of the atomist or the mere materialist, Cudworth names the
+atheistic.
+
+The second system of "necessity" is that of the theists, who conceive
+that the will of the Deity, producing in us good or evil, is determined
+by no immutability of goodness and justice, but an arbitrary will
+omnipotent; and therefore all qualities, good and evil, are merely so by
+our own conventional notions, having no reality in nature. And this
+Cudworth calls _the divine fate_, or _immoral theism_, being a religion
+divesting the Creator of the intellectual and moral government of the
+universe; all just and unjust, according to this hypothesis, being mere
+factitious things. This "necessity" seems the predestination of
+Calvinism, with the immorality of antinomianism.
+
+The third sort of fatalists do not deny the moral attributes of the
+Deity, in his nature essentially benevolent and just; therefore there is
+an immutability in natural justice and morality, distinct from any law
+or arbitrary custom; but as these theists are necessarians, the human
+being is incapacitated to receive praise or blame, rewards or
+punishments, or to become the object of retributive justice; whence they
+deduce their axiom that nothing could possibly have been otherwise than
+it is.
+
+To confute these three fatalisms, or false hypotheses of the system of
+the universe, Cudworth designed to dedicate three great works; one
+against atheism, another against immoral theism, and the third against
+the theism whose doctrine was the inevitable "necessity" which
+determined all actions and events, and deprived man of his free agency.
+
+These licentious systems were alike destructive of social virtues; and
+our ethical metaphysician sought to trace the Deity as an omnipotent
+understanding Being, a supreme intelligence, presiding over all, in his
+own nature unchangeable and eternal, but granting to his creatures their
+choice of good and evil by an immutable morality. In the system of the
+visible and corporeal world the sage contemplated on the mind which
+everywhere pervaded it; and his genius launched forth into the immensity
+of "The Intellectual System of the Universe."
+
+In this comprehensive design he maintains that the ancients had ever
+preserved the idea of one Supreme Being, distinct from all other gods.
+That multitude of pagan deities, poetical and political, were but the
+polyonomy, or the many names or attributes, of one God, in which the
+unity of the Divine Being was recognised. In the deified natures of
+things, the intelligent worshipped God; the creator in the created. The
+pagan religion, however erroneous, was not altogether nonsensical, as
+the atheists would represent it.
+
+In this folio of near a thousand pages, Cudworth opens the occult
+sources of remote antiquity; and all the knowledge which the most
+recondite records have transmitted are here largely dispersed. There is
+no theogony and no cosmogony which remains unexplored; the Chaldean
+oracles, and the Hermaic hooks, and the Trismegistic writings, are laid
+open for us; the arcane theology of the Egyptians is unveiled; and we
+may consult the Persian Zoroaster, the Grecian Orpheus, the mystical
+Pythagoras, and the allegorising Plato. No poet was too imaginative, no
+sophist was too obscure, to be allowed to rest in the graves of their
+oblivion. All are here summoned to meet together, as at the last
+tribunal of their judgment-day. And they come with their own words on
+their lips, and they commune with us with their own voices; for this
+great magician of mind, who had penetrated into the recesses of mythic
+antiquity to descry its dim and uncertain truths, has recorded their own
+words with the reverence of a votary to their faiths. "The sweetness of
+philology allays the severity of philosophy; the main thing, in the
+meantime, being the philosophy of religion.[2] But for our parts, we
+neither call Philology nor yet Philosophy our mistress, but serve
+ourselves of either as occasion requireth." Such are the words of the
+historian of "The Intellectual System of the Universe."
+
+It is this mine of recondite quotations in their original languages,
+most accurately translated, which has imparted such an enduring value to
+this treasure of the ancient theology, philosophy, and literature;[3]
+for however subtle and logical was the master-mind which carried on his
+trains of reasoning, its abstract and abstruse nature could not fail to
+prove repulsive to the superficial, for few could follow the genius who
+led them into "the very darkest recesses of antiquity," while his
+passionless sincerity was often repugnant to the narrow creed of the
+orthodox. What, therefore, could the consequence of this elaborate
+volume when given to the world be, but neglect or hatred? And long was
+"The Intellectual System" lost among a thoughtless or incurious race of
+readers. It appeared in 1678. It was nearly thirty years afterwards,
+when the neglected author was no more, in 1703, that Le Clerc, a great
+reader of English writers, furnished copious extracts in his
+"Bibliothèque Choisie," which introduced it to the knowledge of
+foreigners, and provoked a keen controversy with Bayle. This last great
+critic, who could only decide by the translated extracts, proved to be a
+formidable antagonist of Cudworth. At length, in 1733, more than half a
+century subsequent to its publication, Mosheim gave a Latin version,
+with learned illustrations. The translation was not made without great
+difficulty; and a French one, which had been begun, was abandoned.
+Cudworth has invented many terms, compound or obscure; and though these
+may be traced to their sources, yet when a single novel term may allude
+to metaphysical notions or to recondite knowledge, the learning is less
+to be admired than the defective perspicacity is to be regretted. It
+was, however, this edition of a foreigner which awakened the literary
+ardour of the author's countrymen towards their neglected treasure, and
+in 1743 "The True Intellectual System" at length reached a second
+edition, republished by Birch.[4]
+
+The seed of immortal thoughts are not sown to perish, even in the loose
+soil where they have long lain disregarded. "The Intellectual System"
+has furnished many writers with their secondary erudition, and possibly
+may have given rise to that portion of "The Divine Legation" of
+Warburton, whose ancient learning we admire for its ingenuity, while we
+retreat from its paradoxes; for there is this difference between this
+solid and that fanciful erudition, that Warburton has proudly made his
+subject full of himself, while Cudworth was earnest only to be full of
+his subject. The glittering edifice of Paradox was raised on moveable
+sands; but the more awful temple has been hewn out of rocks which time
+can never displace. Even in our own days, Dugald Stewart has noticed
+that some German systems, stripped of their deep neological disguise,
+have borrowed from Cudworth their most valuable materials. The critical
+decision of Leibnitz must not, however, be rejected; for if there is
+some severity in its truth, there is truth in its severity. "Dans 'Le
+Système Intellectuel' je trouve beaucoup de savoir, mais non pas assez
+de méditation."
+
+Such is the great work of a great mind! We have already shown its hard
+fate in the neglect of the contemporaries of the author--that
+thoughtless and thankless world many a great writer is doomed to
+address; and we must now touch on those human infirmities to which all
+systems of artificial theology and speculative notions are unhappily
+obnoxious.
+
+In stating the arguments of the atheists at full, and opposing those of
+their adversaries, this true inquirer suffered the odium of Atheism
+itself! "It is pleasant enough," says Lord Shaftesbury, "that the pious
+Cudworth was accused of giving the upper hand to the atheist for having
+only stated their reasons and those of their adversaries fairly
+together." The truth seems, that our learned and profound author was not
+orthodox in his notions. To explain the difficulty of the Resurrection
+of bodies which in death resolve themselves into their separate
+elements, Cudworth assumed that they would not appear in their substance
+as a body of flesh, but in some ethereal form. In his researches he
+discovered the Trinity of Plato, of Pythagoras, and of Parmenides, and
+that of the Persian Mithra of three Hypostases, numerically distinct, in
+the unity of the Godhead; this spread an alarm among his brothers the
+clergy, and Cudworth was perpetually referred to as an unquestionable
+authority by the heterodox writers on the mystery of the Christian
+Trinity. Even his great principle, that the Unity of the Deity was known
+to the polytheists, was impugned by a catholic divine as derogatory of
+revelation, he insisting that the Pagan divinities were only a
+commemoration of human beings. Yet the notion of Cudworth, so amply
+illustrated, was not peculiar to him, for it had already been
+promulgated by Lord Herbert, and by the ancients themselves.
+
+As all such results contradicted received opinions, this pious and
+learned man was condemned by some as "an Arian, a Socinian, or at best a
+deist." Some praised his prudence, while others intimated his
+dissimulation; on several dogmas he delivers himself with great reserve,
+and even so ambiguously, that his own opinions are not easily
+ascertained, and are sometimes even contradictory. There have been more
+recent philosophers, who, from their prejudices, have hardly done
+justice to the search for truth of Cudworth; he is depreciated by Lord
+Bolingbroke, who, judging the philosopher by the colour of his coat, has
+treated the divine with his keenest severity, as "one who read too much
+to think enough, and admired too much to think freely." Bolingbroke
+might envy the learning which he could not rival, and borrow from those
+recondite stores the knowledge which otherwise might not have reached
+him.
+
+Our great author had indeed the heel of Achilles. Exercising the most
+nervous logic, and the most subtle metaphysics, he was also deeply
+imbued with Platonic reveries. Ambitious, in his inquiries, to discuss
+subjects placed far beyond the reach of human faculties, he delighted,
+with his eager imagination, to hover about those impassable precincts
+which Providence and Nature have eternally closed against the human
+footstep. It was this disposition of his mind which gave birth to the
+wild hypothesis of _the plastic life of Nature_, to unfold the
+inscrutable operations of Providence in the changeless forms of
+existence. There is nothing more embarrassing to atheism, in deriving
+the uninterrupted phenomena of nature from a fortuitous mechanism of
+inert matter, than to be compelled to ascribe the unvaried formation of
+animals to a cause which has no idea of what it performs, although its
+end denotes an intention; executing an undeviating system without any
+intelligence of the laws which govern it. We cannot indeed conceive
+every mite, or gnat, or fly, to be the immediate handwork of the
+ceaseless labours of the Deity, though so perfectly artificial is even
+its wing or its leg that the Divine Artificer seems visible in the
+minutest production. Cudworth, to solve the enigma, fancifully concluded
+that the Deity had given a plastic faculty to matter--"A vital and
+spiritual, but unintelligent and necessary, agent to execute its
+purposes." He raised up a sort of middle substance between matter and
+spirit--it seemed both or neither; and our philosopher, roving through
+the whole creation, sometimes describes it as an inferior subordinate
+agent of the Deity, doing the drudgery, without consciousness; lower
+than animal life; a kind of drowsy unawakened mind, not knowing, but
+only doing, according to commands and laws impressed upon it.
+
+The consequence deduced by the subtle Bayle from this fanciful system
+was, that, had the Deity ever given such a plastic faculty, it was an
+evidence that it is not repugnant to the nature of things, that
+unintelligent and necessary agents should operate, and therefore a
+motive power might be essential to matter, and things thus might exist
+of themselves.[5] It weakened the great objection against atheism.
+Philosophers, to extricate themselves from occult phenomena, have too
+often flung over the gaping chasms which they cannot fill up, the slight
+plank of a vague conjecture, or have constructed the temporary bridge of
+an artificial hypothesis; and thus they have hazarded what yields no
+sure footing. Of this "folly of the wise," the inexplicable ether of
+Newton, the whirling worlds or vortices of Descartes, and the vibrations
+and the vibratiuncles of Hartley, among so many similar fancies of other
+philosophers, furnish a memorable evidence. The _plastic life of
+Nature_, as explained by Cudworth, only substituted a novel term for a
+blind, unintelligent agent, and could neither endure the ridicule of
+Bolingbroke nor the logic of Bayle, and is thrown aside among the
+deceitful fancies of scholastic dreamers.
+
+There was indeed from his earliest days a tinge of Platonic refinement
+in the capacious understanding of this great metaphysician. The theses
+he maintained at college were the dawn of the genius of his future
+works. One was on "The Eternal Differences between Good and Evil," which
+probably led long after to his treatise on "Eternal and Immutable
+Morality"--an exposition of the dangerous doctrines of Hobbes and the
+Antinomians.[6] The other question he disputed was, that "there are
+incorporeal substances immortal in their own nature"--a topic he
+afterwards investigated in "The True Intellectual System of the
+Universe"--against the principles of the Epicurean philosophy. These
+scholastic exercises are an evidence that the youthful student was
+already shaping in his mind the matters and the subjects of his future
+great work. Beautiful is this unity of mind which we discover in every
+master-genius! Even into his divinity he seems to have carried the same
+fanciful refinement; he maintained that "the Lord's Supper was a feast
+upon a sacrifice;" and such was the charm of this mysterious doctrine,
+that it was adopted by some of the greatest divines and scholars. It is
+not therefore surprising that Cudworth was held in the highest
+estimation by the Platonic Dr. MORE, of which I give a remarkable
+instance. Cudworth, as other divines, wrote on Daniel's prophecy of the
+seventy weeks, which, he says in a letter, is "A Defence of Christianity
+against Judaism, the seventy weeks never having yet been sufficiently
+cleared and improved." Since the days of Cudworth others have "cleared
+and improved," and his "demonstration" is not even noticed among
+subsequent "demonstrations;" but Judaism still remains. Yet on this
+theological reverie, Dr. More has used this forcible language:--"Mr.
+Cudworth has demonstrated the manifestation of the Messiah to have
+fallen out at the end of the sixty-ninth week, and his passion in the
+midst of the seventieth. This demonstration is of as much price and
+worth in theology, as either the circulation of the blood in physic, or
+the motion of the earth in natural philosophy." This is not only a
+curious instance of the argumentative theology of that period, but of
+the fascination of a most refining genius influencing kindred
+imaginations.
+
+We now come to record the melancholy fate of this great work, in
+connexion with its great author. He had arranged it into three elaborate
+volumes; but we possess only the first--the refutation of atheism; that
+subject, however, is of itself complete. Although I know not any private
+correspondence of Cudworth, after the publication of "The Intellectual
+System," which might more positively reveal the state of his feelings,
+and the cause of the suppression of his work, in which he had made
+considerable progress, yet we are acquainted with circumstances which
+too clearly describe its unhappy fate. We learn from Warburton that this
+pious and learned scholar was the victim of calumny, and that, too
+sensitive to his injuries, he grew disgusted with his work; his ardour
+slackened, and the mass of his papers lay in cold neglect. The
+philosophical divine participated in the fate of the few who, like him,
+searched for truth freed from the manacles of received opinions.
+
+Cudworth left his manuscripts to the care of his daughter, Lady Masham,
+the friend of Locke, who passed his latter days in her house at Oates.
+Her ladyship was literary, but the reverse of a Platonical genius; she
+wrote against the Platonic Norris' "Love of God," and admitted in her
+religion no principles which were not practicable in morals, and seems
+to have been rather the disciple of the author of "The Human
+Understanding," than the daughter of the author of "The Intellectual
+System." For the good sense of Lady Masham erudition lost its curiosity,
+and imagination its charm; and she probably with some had certain
+misgivings of the tendency of her father's writings! He had himself been
+careless of them, for we know of no testamentary direction for their
+preservation. By her these unvalued manuscripts were not placed in a
+cabinet, but thrown in a heap into the dark corner of some neglected
+shelf in the library at Oates. And from thence, after the lapse of half
+a century, they were turned out, with some old books, by the last Lord
+Masham, to make room for a fashionable library for his second lady. A
+bookseller purchased them with a notion that this waste paper contained
+the writings of Locke, and printing a Bible under the editorship of the
+famous Dr. Dodd, introduced the scripture notes, found among the heap,
+in the commentary, under the name of Locke. The papers were accidentally
+discovered to be parts of "The Intellectual System," and after having
+suffered mutilation and much confusion in the various mischances which
+they passed through, they finally repose among our national collections;
+fragments on fragments which may yet be inspected by those whose
+intrepidity would patiently venture on the discoveries which lie amid
+this mass of theological metaphysics. They are thus described in
+Ayscough's "Catalogue," 4983:--"Collection of Confused Thoughts,
+Memorandums, &c., relating to the Eternity of Torments--Thoughts on
+Pleasure--Commonplace Book of Motives to Moral Duties, two volumes; and
+five volumes on Free-will." This description is imperfect; and many
+other subjects, the groundwork of his future inquiries, will be found in
+these voluminous manuscripts. One volume, still highly valued, was
+snatched from the wreck, Cudworth's "Treatise Concerning Eternal and
+Immutable Morality," which was edited by Dr. Chandler many years after
+the death of the author.
+
+After all, we possess a mighty volume, subject no longer to neglect nor
+to mischance. "The True Intellectual System of the Universe" exists
+without a parallel for its matter, its subject, and its manner. Its
+matter furnishes the unsunned treasures of ancient knowledge, the
+history of the thoughts, the imaginations, and the creeds of the
+profoundest intellects of mankind on the Deity. Its subject, though
+veiled in metaphysics more sublime than human reasoning can pierce, yet
+shows enough for us to adore. And its manner, brightened by a subdued
+Platonism, inculcates the immutability of moral distinctions, and
+vindicates the free agency of the human being against the impious tenets
+which deliver him over a blind captive to an inexorable "necessity."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] My copy is the folio volume of the first edition, 1678; but they
+    have recently reprinted Cudworth at Oxford in four volumes.
+
+  [2] A remarkable expression, which we supposed was peculiar to the
+    more enlarged views of our own age. But who can affix precise notions
+    to general terms? Cudworth'a notion of "the philosophy of religion"
+    was probably restricted to the history of the ancient philosophies of
+    religion.
+
+  [3] In the first edition, the _references_ of its numerous quotations
+    were few and imperfect; Dr. Birch, in the edition of 1743, supplied
+    those that were wanting from Mosheim's Latin translation of the work.
+    Warburton observed that "all the translations from the Greek are
+    wonderfully exact."
+
+  [4] It may be regretted that this valuable mass of curious erudition
+    is not furnished with an ordinary index. A singular clue to the
+    labyrinth the author has offered, by a running head on every single
+    one of the thousand pages; and a minutely analytical table of the
+    contents is appended to the mighty tome. This indeed impresses us
+    with a full conception of the sublimity of the work itself; but our
+    intimacy with this multitude of matters is greatly interrupted by the
+    want of a ready reference to particulars which an ordinary index
+    would have afforded.
+
+  [5] Continuation des Pensées Diverses, iii. 90.
+
+  [6] This volume, still read and valued, was fortunately saved amidst
+    the wreck of the author's manuscripts, and was published from his own
+    autograph copy which he had prepared for the press, so late as 1781,
+    8vo.
+
+
+
+
+DIFFICULTIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS.
+
+
+The editors of contemporary memoirs have often suffered an impenetrable
+mystery to hang over their publications, by an apparent suppression of
+the original. By this studious evasion of submitting the manuscript to
+public inspection, they long diminished the credit of the printed
+volumes. Enemies whose hostility the memorialists had raised up, in the
+meanwhile practised every artifice of detraction, racking their
+invention to persuade the world that but little faith was due to these
+pretended revelations; while the editors, mute and timorous, from
+private motives which they wished to conceal, dared not explain, in
+their lifetime, the part which they had really taken in editing these
+works. In the course of years, circumstances often became too
+complicated to be disentangled, or were of too delicate a nature to be
+nakedly exposed to the public scrutiny; the accusations grew more
+confident, the defence more vague, the suspicions more probable, the
+rumours and the hearsays more prevalent--the public confidence in the
+authenticity of these contemporary memoirs was thus continually shaken.
+
+Such has been the fate of the history of the Earl of Clarendon, which,
+during a long interval of time, had to contend with prudential editors,
+and its perfidious opponents. And it is only at this late day that we
+are enabled to draw the veil from the mystery of its publication, and to
+reconcile the contradictory statements, so positively alleged by the
+assertors of the integrity of the text, and the impugners of its
+genuineness. We now can adjust with certainty so many vague
+protestations of its authenticity, by those who could not themselves
+have known it, with the sceptical cavils which at times seemed not
+always doubtful, and with one infamous charge which was not less
+positive than it proved to be utterly fictitious. The fate and character
+of this great historical work was long involved in the most intricate
+and obscure incidents; and this bibliographical tale offers a striking
+illustration of the disingenuity alike of the assailants and the
+defenders.
+
+The history of Lord CLARENDON was composed by the express desire of
+Charles the First. This prince, in the midst of his fugitive and
+troubled life, seemed still regardful of posterity; and we might think,
+were it not too flattering to his judgment, that by his selection of
+this historian, he anticipated the genius of an immortal writer. We know
+the king carefully conveyed to the noble author many historical
+documents, to furnish this vindication, or apology, of the calamitous
+measures to which that fated sovereign was driven. The earnest
+performance of this design, fervid with the eloquence of the writer,
+proceeding on such opposite principles to those of the advocates of
+popular freedom, and bearing on its awful front the condemnatory title
+of "The Rebellion," provoked their indignant feelings; and from its
+first appearance they attempted to blast its credit, by sinking it into
+a mere party production. But the elevated character of "The Chancellor
+of Human Nature," as Warburton emphatically described him, stood almost
+beyond the reach of his assailants: it was by a circuitous attack that
+they contrived to depreciate the work, by pointing their assault on the
+presumed editors of the posthumous history. And though the genius of the
+historian, and the peculiarity of his style, could not but be apparent
+through the whole of this elaborate work, yet rumours soon gathered from
+various quarters, that the text had been tampered with by "the Oxford
+editors;" and some, judging by the preface, and the heated and party
+dedication to the queen, which, it has been asserted, afterwards induced
+the Tory frenzy of Sacheverell, imagined that the editors had converted
+the history into a vehicle of their own passions. The "History of
+Clarendon" was declared to be mutilated, interpolated, and, at length,
+even forged; the taint of suspicion long weakened the confidence of
+general readers. Even Warburton suspected that the editors had taken the
+liberty of omitting passages; but, with a reliance on their honour, he
+believed they had never dared to incorporate any additions of their own.
+
+The History of Lord CLARENDON thus, from its first appearance, was
+attended by the concomitant difficulties of contemporary history, as we
+shall find the editors soon discovered when they sat down to their task;
+difficulties which occasioned their peculiar embarrassments. Even the
+noble author himself had considered that "a piece of this nature,
+wherein the infirmities of some, and the malice of others, both things
+and persons, must be boldly looked upon and mentioned, is not likely to
+appear in the age in which it was written." Lord Clarendon seems to have
+been fully aware that the freedom of the historical pen is equally
+displeasing to all parties. A contemporary historian is doomed to the
+peculiar unhappiness of encountering living witnesses, prompt to
+challenge the correctness of his details, and the fairness of his views;
+for him the complaints of friends will not be less unreasonable than the
+clamours of foes. And this happened to the present work. The history was
+not only assailed by men of a party, but by men of a family. They whose
+relatives had immolated their persons, and wrecked their fortunes, by
+their allegiance to the royal cause, were mortified by the silence of
+the historian; the writer was censured for omissions which had never
+entered into his design; for he was writing less a general history of
+the civil war, than a particular one of "the Rebellion," as he deemed
+it. Others eagerly protested against the misrepresentation of the
+characters of their ancestors; but as all family feelings are in reality
+personal ones, such interested accusers may not be less partial and
+prejudiced than the contemporary historian himself. He, at least, should
+be allowed to possess the advantage of a more immediate knowledge of
+what he narrates, and the right of that free opinion, which deprived of,
+he would cease to be "the servant of posterity." Lord Lansdowne was
+indignant at the severity of the military portrait of his ancestor, Sir
+Richard Greenvill, and has left a warm apology to palliate a conduct
+which Clarendon had honestly condemned; and recently, the late Earl of
+Ashburnham wrote two agreeable volumes to prove that Clarendon was
+jealous of the royal favour which the feeble Ashburnham enjoyed, and to
+which the descendant ascribed the depreciation of that favourite's
+character.
+
+The authenticity of the history soon became a subject of national
+attention. The passions of the two great factions which ruled our
+political circles had broken forth from these kindling pages of the
+recent history of their own day. They were treading on ashes which
+covered latent fires. Whenever a particular sentence raised the anger of
+some, or a provoking epithet for ever stuck to a favourite personage,
+the offended parties were willing to believe that these might be
+interpolations; for it was positively affirmed that such there were.
+Twenty years after its first publication, we find Sir Joseph Jekyl, in
+the House of Commons, solemnly declaring that he had reason to believe
+that the "History of the Rebellion" had not been printed faithfully.
+
+An incident of a very singular nature had occurred, even before the
+publication of the History, which assuredly was unknown to the editors.
+Dr. Calamy, the historian of the non-conformists, at the time that Lord
+Clarendon's History was printing at Oxford, was himself on the point of
+publishing his Narrative of Baxter, and was anxious to ascertain the
+statements of his lordship on certain matters which entered into his own
+history. This astute divine, with something of the cunning of the
+serpent, whatever might be his dove-like innocence, hit upon an
+extraordinary expedient, by submitting the dignity of his order to pass
+through a most humiliating process. The crafty doctor posted to Oxford,
+and there, cautiously preserving the incognito, after ingratiating
+himself into the familiarity of the waiter, and then of the perruquier,
+he succeeded in procuring a secret communication with one of the
+printers. The good man exults in the wonders which sometimes may be
+opened to us by what he terms "a silver key rightly applied." The doctor
+had invented the treason, and now had only to seek for the traitor. A
+faithless workman supplied him with a sight of all the sheets printed,
+and, with a still grosser violation of the honour of the craft, exposed
+the naked manuscript itself to the prying eyes of the critical
+dissenter. To the honour of Clarendon, as far as concerned Calamy's
+narrative, there was no disagreement; but the aspect of the manuscript
+puzzled the learned doctor. It appeared not to be the original, but a
+transcript, wherein he observed "alterations and interlineations;"
+paragraphs were struck out, and insertions added. Here seemed an
+important discovery, not likely to remain buried in the breast of the
+historian of the non-conformists; and he gradually let it out among his
+literary circle. The appearance of the manuscript fully warranted the
+conviction, of him who was not unwilling to believe, that the History of
+Clarendon had been moulded by the hands of those dignitaries of Oxford
+who were supposed to be the real editors. The History was soon called in
+contempt, "The Oxford History." The earliest rumours of a corrupt text
+probably originated in this quarter, as it is now certain, since the
+confession of Dr. Calamy appears in his diary, that he was the first who
+had discovered the extraordinary state of the manuscript.
+
+Some inaccuracies, great negligence of dates, certain apparent
+contradictions, and some imperfect details--often occasioned by the
+noble emigrant's distant retirements, deprived, as we now know, of his
+historical collections--did not tend to dissipate the prevalent
+suspicions. The manuscript was frequently called for, but on inquiry it
+was not found in the Bodleian Library--it was said to be locked up in a
+box deposited in the library of the Earl of Rochester, who had died
+since the publication. Sometimes they heard of a transcript and
+sometimes of an original; it was reported that the autograph work by
+Lord Clarendon, among other valuables, had been destroyed in the fire of
+the Earl of Rochester's house at New Park. The inquirers became more
+importunate in their demands, and more clamorous in their
+expostulations.
+
+About this period, Oldmixon, one of the renowned of the Dunciad, stepped
+forth as a political adventurer in history. He enlisted on the popular
+side; he claimed the honours of the most devoted patriotism; but in what
+degree he may have merited these will best appear when we shall more
+intimately discover the man himself. Oldmixon had wholly engaged with a
+party, and being an industrious hand, had assigned to himself a good
+deal of work. Preparatory to his copious History of the Stuarts, he had
+preluded by two smaller works his "Critical History of England," and his
+"Clarendon and Whitelocke Compared." He had repeatedly insinuated his
+suspicions that the "History of the Rebellion" was not the entire work
+of Clarendon; but the more formal attack, by specifying the falsified
+passages, at length appeared in the preface to his History of the
+Stuarts. The subject of the genuineness of Clarendon's text had so long
+engaged public discussion, that it evidently induced this writer to
+particularise it, among other professed discoveries, on his extensive
+titlepage, as one not the least likely to invite the eager curiosity of
+his readers. The heavy charge was here announced to be at length brought
+to a positive demonstration. We perceive the writer's complacency, when
+with an air of triumph he declared, "to all which is prefixed some
+account of the liberties taken with Clarendon's History _before it came
+to the press_, such liberties as make it doubtful what part of it is
+Clarendon's and what not."
+
+It is here we find the anonymous communication of "A gentleman of
+distinction," who was soon known to be Colonel Ducket, an M.P., and a
+Commissioner of the Excise. The colonel details a conversation with
+Edmund Smith, the poet, who died at his seat, that "there had been a
+fine History written by Lord Clarendon; but what was published under his
+name was patchwork, and might as properly be called the history of the
+deans Aldrich, Smalridge, and Atterbury; for to his knowledge it was
+altered, and he himself was employed to interpolate the original." In a
+copy of the history, Smith had scored numerous passages of this sort,
+and particularly the famous one of Cinna, which had been applied to the
+character of Hampden.
+
+We may conceive the sensation produced by this apparently authenticated
+tale. Oldmixon in triumph confirms it too from another quarter; for he
+appeals to "A reverend divine now living, who saw the Oxford copy by
+which the book was printed, altered, and interpolated." This divine was
+our Dr. Calamy, who could not deny what he had truly affirmed.
+
+The anonymous voucher for this extraordinary charge which appears in the
+preface, was an after-thought of our historical scribe at the late hour
+of publication, when it must have occurred to him that the world would
+require the most positive testimony of such a foul forgery. It is
+remarkable that Oldmixon had already, in the body of his work, broadly
+embroidered the narrative. We may form some notion of the mode in which
+this impetuous writer composed history, blending his passions with his
+facts, by observing what he did in the present matter. In the text of
+his history we discover the tale solemnly worked up into a tragic scene
+of penitential remorse on a death-bed; and, still farther to appropriate
+and confirm the exciting narrative of this forgery, he had artfully
+bolstered it up by an accompanying anecdote. When Smith the poet had
+foisted in the description of Cataline, (or Cinna, as it is erroneously
+written in Clarendon,) one of the doctors slapped him on the back,
+exclaiming with an asseveration, "_It will do!_" And our historian
+proceeds: "The remorse he expressed for being concerned in this
+imposture were his last words." He then declares that in the
+highly-finished portraits of Clarendon, "all likeness is lost in a
+barren superfluity of words, and the workings of a prejudiced
+imagination, where one may suppose the drawing was his own. But that
+there has been much daubing in some places, and more dirt in others, put
+in by his editors, is now incontestable. In those clumsy painters into
+whose hands his work fell, there is something so very false and base,
+that such coin could only come from a college mint." Thus,
+inconsiderately, but not the less maliciously, Oldmixon filled his rapid
+page, and betrays his eagerness to snatch at any floating rumour or
+loose conversation, which he gives the world with the confidence, though
+he could not with the dignity, of historical truth. And it is this
+reckless abandonment of his pen in his post-haste and partial works of
+history, which must ever weaken our trust in those more interesting
+portions for whose authority he refers to unknown manuscripts; and the
+more so, when we often detect his maimed and warped, and even
+interpolated quotations; and farther, recollect that Oldmixon stands
+himself a convicted criminal at the bar of history, having been detected
+in interpolating the historian Daniel when employed as editor by Kennet,
+which sunk the value of the first edition of that historical collection.
+
+How was this positive and particularising charge to be refuted? Years
+had elapsed, and Smith had never whispered such an important secret to
+any friend. The original manuscript had not yet appeared to confront the
+detractor, and to prove the fidelity of the editors. There are
+difficulties which truth cannot always surmount. It is not only easier
+to raise a falsehood than to prove a truth, but it is possible that
+there may be accidents which may wholly prevent the discovery of truth.
+Of an accusation made years after the event, and the persons no longer
+in existence, we may never be enabled to remove the objections which it
+has succeeded in raising.
+
+From this calamity the History of Clarendon had a narrow escape. All the
+parties concerned were no longer in life, save one, who seemed as much
+lost to the world--Atterbury, forgotten in exile. The authenticity of
+the History of Clarendon was, however, the concern of literary Europe.
+Foreign journalists conveyed the astounding tale, assuring the literary
+exile that if he remained silent, the accusation must be considered as
+proved. The reply did not linger, for a simple fact demolished this
+inartificial fabric. Atterbury solemnly declared that he had never seen
+any manuscript of Lord Clarendon's History; that he believed he had
+never exchanged a word in his life with Smith, whose habitual conduct
+was too loose to tolerate; and if that were true which Ducket had
+affirmed, that "Smith had died with a lie in his mouth." Atterbury added
+some new information respecting the real editors, who were Dean Aldrich
+and Bishop Sprat, and the late Earl of Rochester, the son of Lord
+Clarendon.
+
+This unexpected confutation from the sole survivor of the accused
+parties revived the dismayed Clarendonians. The cards had changed; and
+these in their turn called for a sight of that copy of Clarendon said to
+have been scored by Smith. Oldmixon, baffled and mortified, appealed to
+his communicator; the most idle prevarications were alleged; and Colonel
+Ducket even cavilled at the wording of the letter which Oldmixon had
+published. Both parties were anxious to fling the odium on the other,
+but neither had the honesty to retract the slander. We may believe that
+they were both convinced that the manuscript of Clarendon had been
+tampered with, but that neither could ascertain either the matter or the
+manner. Ducket died during their embarrassment, and to his last day
+persisted in confirming his account, and even furnishing fresh
+particulars, as Oldmixon assures us.
+
+In this extraordinary history of the fate of a disputed manuscript,
+which all had inquired after, and none had found, an incident occurred
+which put to rout Oldmixon and the numerous objectors to its
+authenticity. Seven books of the Clarendon manuscripts at length were
+discovered lodged in the custody of a lawyer in Bartlett's Buildings,
+Holborn, who was one of the executors of the second Earl of Clarendon;
+and, to the utter dismay of Oldmixon, the often-controverted passage of
+Hampden was to be seen in the original writing of the noble author.
+Several distinguished personages were admitted to consult the autograph;
+but when others applied, who came formally armed with an autograph
+letter of Lord Clarendon, to compare the writing with the manuscript,
+the lawyer was alarmed at the hostile investigation, and cautiously
+evaded an inspection by these eager inquirers, perhaps judging that
+whatever might be the consequence, the trouble was certain.
+
+Oldmixon, in his last distress, persisted in declaring that he was not
+bound to trust in the genuineness of a manuscript of which he was
+refused the examination. It must be acknowledged, that any partial view
+of the Clarendon manuscript, seen by a few, was not sufficient to
+establish its authority with the public; and certainly till the recent
+edition by Dr. Bandinel appeared, admirably collated, the aspersions and
+surmises of the objectors to its genuineness had by no means been
+removed, and, we may add, were not wholly unfounded.
+
+This history of the great work of Lord Clarendon would be imperfect did
+we not develope the real causes which so long continued to obscure the
+inquiry, and involve its mysterious publication in the most perplexing
+intricacy.
+
+Lord Clarendon himself not only doubted the propriety of the
+publication, but had even consented to its suppression till a "fit
+season, which was not likely to be in the present age." His elevated
+genius looked far onward to posterity. In his remarkable will, he
+recommended his sons to consult Archbishop Sancroft and Bishop Morley;
+and it was only his second son, the Earl of Rochester, who took an
+active part. The position of editors was as delicate as it was perilous,
+and it has been aptly described by the last editor, who at length has
+furnished us with a complete Clarendon. "The immediate descendants of
+the principal actors were alive; many were high in favour; others were
+connected by the closer links of friendship or alliance." The change of
+a virulent epithet might be charitable, and spare the ulcerated memories
+of a family; and time, which blunts the keen edge of political
+animosities, might plead for the omission of "the unfavourable part of a
+character," which happened to be rather of a domestic than of a public
+nature.
+
+All these were important causes which perplexed the editorship of the
+History of Lord Clarendon; and there were also minor ones which operated
+on the publication. Difficulties occurred in the arrangement of the
+parts. The Earl hardly lived to revise his work; portions of the "Life"
+had been marked by him to be transferred to the "History." The first
+transcript by Shaw, the secretary of the author, was discovered to be
+very incorrect. It was necessary that a fairer copy should repair the
+negligence of the secretary's. Dean Aldrich read the proofs, and
+transmitted them to the Earl of Rochester, accompanied by the manuscript
+copy which the earl preserved. The corrections on the proofs were by his
+hand. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who then had the reputation of being
+the most skilful critic in our vernacular idiom, it appears, suggested
+some verbal alterations. But it was affirmed, that the Earl of Rochester
+had been so scrupulous in altering the style of his father, and so
+cautious not to allow of any variations from the original, that the
+strictures of Sprat had not been complied with, which however was not
+true; for though the Earl of Rochester would allow no hand but his own
+to correct the proofs, there were omissions and verbal alterations, and
+occasionally may be found what went far beyond the mere change of words
+or phrases.
+
+The manuscript which Calamy saw at the press shows that the transcript,
+however fair, had required corrections, and probably some confusion had
+sometimes occurred in transferring passages from the "Life" into the
+"History." This only can account for the reasonable suspicions of "The
+Curious Impertinent," which part had been so gratuitously acted by the
+learned Doctor on this occasion, and evidently spread the first rumours
+of a corrupted or an altered text.
+
+The pretended forgery on Clarendon was nothing but a gross imposture.
+Who was most deeply concerned in the fabricated lie, we cannot now
+ascertain. Of the poet, however, we know that after frequent admonitions
+he had been expelled his college, for habitual irregularities; and
+having lost his election of the censorship of the college, indulged
+vindictive feelings towards Dean Aldrich. It was his delight to ridicule
+and vituperate the Christ Church deans,--and he might have called the
+History of Clarendon, "patch-work," from some imperfect knowledge picked
+up at the Oxford press. The poet, whose conversation flowed with his
+wine, on a visit at the seat of Colonel Ducket, indulging to excess his
+Epicurean tastes, there died suddenly of repletion, by prescribing for
+himself so potent a dose, that the apothecary warned him of "the
+perilous stuff," which advice was received with contempt. As the scored
+Clarendon by Smith was never brought forth, it probably never existed to
+the extent described; and as Smith died unexpectedly, there could have
+been no scene of a death-bed repentance, about a forgery which had never
+been committed. The party-lie caught up in conversation was too suitable
+to the purposes of Oldmixon's History not to be preserved, and even
+exaggerated; Ducket found a ready tool in a popular historian, who was
+not too critical in his researches, whenever they answered his end.
+
+But Truth is the daughter of Time--all the Clarendon manuscripts at
+length were collected together, and now securely repose in the Bodleian
+Library, where had they been deposited at first, the anxiety and
+contention which for half a century disturbed the peace of honest
+inquirers had been spared. Why they were not there placed, open to
+public inspection, is no longer difficult to conjecture. Although no
+historical fact in the main had been altered, yet omissions and
+variations, and some of a delicate nature, there were, sufficient to
+awaken the keen glance of a malicious or an offended observer. The
+anxious solicitude to withdraw the manuscripts till they might more
+safely be examined, at a remote period, was the real and the sole cause
+of their mysterious concealment; and led many from party-motives to
+question the authenticity, and others to defend the genuineness, of
+which they were so many years without any evidence.
+
+This bibliographical tale affords a striking illustration of the nature
+of hearsays, surmises, and cavils; of confident accusations, but ill
+parried by vague defences; of the infamous fictions to which party-men
+can be driven; all which were the consequences of that apparent
+suppression of the original work, which had occurred from the critical
+difficulties which await the editors of contemporary memoirs. The
+disingenuity of both parties, however, is not less observable, for while
+the Clarendonians maintained that the editors, as these had protested,
+scrupulously followed the manuscript, they themselves had never seen the
+original, and the Oldmixons as audaciously assumed that it was
+interpolated and mutilated, without, however, producing any other
+evidence than their own surmises, or gross fictions of popular rumours.
+
+With the fate of Clarendon before his eyes, a witness of the injury
+which this mysterious mode of publishing the History of Lord Clarendon
+had occasioned, the son of Bishop Burnet suffered that congenial work,
+the "History of his own Times," to participate in the same ill-fortune.
+On the publication of the first volume, this editor promised that the
+autograph "should be deposited in the Cottonian Library for the
+satisfaction of the public, as soon as the second volume should be
+printed." This was not done; the editor was repeatedly called on to
+perform that solemn contract in which he had engaged with the public. A
+recent fire had damaged many of the Cottonian manuscripts, and this was
+now pleaded as an excuse for not trusting the bishop's manuscript to the
+chance of destruction. Expostulation only met with evasion. We are not
+now ignorant of the real cause of this breach of a solemn duty. The
+bishop in his will had expressly enjoined that his History should be
+given in the state in which he had himself left it. But the freedom of
+the paternal pen had alarmed the filial editor. He found himself in the
+exact position which the son of Lord Clarendon had already preoccupied.
+Omissions were made to abate the displeasure of those who would have
+writhed under the severity of the historian's censure--characters were
+but partially delineated, and the tale sometimes was left half told. It
+happened that the bishop had often submitted his manuscript to the eyes
+of many during his life-time. Curious researchers into facts, and
+profound observers of opinions, had become diligent extractors, more
+particularly the supervisor of the printed proofs; and when the printed
+volumes appeared, most of these omissions stood as living testimonials
+to the faithlessness of the prudential editor. The margins of various
+copies, among the curious in Literature, overflowed with the
+castrations: the forbidden fruit was plucked. We now have the History of
+Burnet not entirely according to "the will" of the fervid chronicler,
+but as far as its restored passages could be obtained; for some, it is
+evident, have never been recovered.[1] Thus it happened, that the
+editors of Clarendon and Burnet form a parallel case, suffering under
+the inconveniences of editors of contemporary memoirs.
+
+The perplexed feeling of the times in regard to both these Histories we
+may catch from a manuscript letter of the great collector, Dr.
+Rawlinson:--"Among Bishop Turner's[2] manuscripts," Rawlinson writes,
+"are observations on Lord Clarendon's History, when sent him by old
+Edward's son, the Nonjuror, who gave it to Alma Mater; _if alterations
+were made_, this may be a means of discovering. I have often wondered
+why _the original MS._ of that History is not put into some public place
+to answer all objections; but when I consider _a whimsical family_, my
+surprise is the less. Judge BURNET has promised under his hand, on the
+backside of every title of the second volume of his father's History of
+his Life and Times, to put in the originals into some public library;
+but _quando_ is the case. I purchased the MS. of a gentleman who
+corrected the press, when that book was printed, and amongst his papers
+I have _all the castrations_, many of which, I believe, he communicated
+to Dr. Beach's sons, whom T. Burnet had abused in a life of his father,
+at the end of the second volume."[3] Here, then, the world possessed
+sufficient evidence at the time of their early appearance, that these
+Histories had suffered variations and omissions--by the heirs of their
+authors, and the imperfect executors of their solemn and testamentary
+will.
+
+I cannot quit the present subject without a remark on these great party
+Histories of Clarendon and Burnet. Both have passed through the fiery
+ordeal of national opinion,--and both, with some of their pages singed,
+remain unconsumed: the one criticized for its solemn eloquence, the
+other ridiculed for its homely simplicity; the one depreciated for its
+partiality, the other for its inaccuracy; both alike, as we have seen,
+by their opposite parties, once considered as works utterly rejected
+from the historical shelf.
+
+But Posterity reverences Genius, for posterity only can decide on its
+true worth. Time, potent over criticism, has avenged our two great
+writers of the history of their own days. The awful genius of CLARENDON
+is still paramount, and the vehement spirit of BURNET has often its
+secret revelations confirmed. Such shall ever be the fate of those
+precious writings, which, though they have to contend with the passions
+of their own age, yet, originating in the personal intercourse of the
+writers with the subject of their narratives, possess an endearing charm
+which no criticism can dissolve, a reality which outlasts fiction, and a
+truth which diffuses its vitality over pages which cannot die.[4]
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] Burnet's "History," iv. 552, edition 1823.
+
+  [2] _Sic_ in original, but probably Tanner.
+
+  [3] Rawlinson's Bodleian MSS., vol. ii., lett. 38.
+
+  [4] I refer the reader to "Curiosities of Literature," vol. ii. art.
+    "Of Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts;" he will there find
+    that in the case of the Marquis of Halifax' Diary, of which to secure
+    its preservation the writer had left two copies, both were silently
+    destroyed by two opposite partisans, the one startled at some mean
+    deceptions of the Revolutionists of 1688, and the other at the
+    Catholic intrigues of the court.
+
+
+
+
+THE WAR AGAINST BOOKS.
+
+
+The history of our literature, at the early era of printing, till the
+first indications appear of what is termed "copyright," forms a chapter
+in the history of our civilization which has not been opened to us.
+
+This history includes two important incidents in our literary annals;
+the one, an exposition of the complicate arts practised by an alarmed
+government to possess an absolute control over the printers, which
+annihilated the freedom of the press; and the other, the contests of
+those printers and booksellers who had grants and licenses, and other
+privileges of a monopoly, with the rest of the brotherhood, who
+maintained an equal right of publication, and contended for the freedom
+of the trade.
+
+Although Caxton, our first printer, bore the title of _Regius
+Impressor_, printed books were still so rare in this country under
+Richard the Third, that an act of parliament in 1483 contains a proviso
+in favour of aliens to encourage the importation of books. During a
+period of forty years, books were supplied by foreign printers, some of
+whom appear to have accompanied their merchandise, and to have settled
+themselves here. It became necessary to repeal this privilege conceded
+to foreign presses, when under Henry the Eighth the art of printing was
+skilfully exercised by the King's natural subjects, and to protect the
+English printers lest their art should decline from a failure of
+encouragement.
+
+Our earliest printers were the vendors and the binders of their own
+books, and their domicile on their title-pages directed the curious to
+their abodes. Few in number, their limited editions, it is conjectured,
+did not exceed from two to four hundred copies. The first printers were
+generally men of competent wealth; and every book was the sole property
+of its single printer. The separate departments of author, bookseller,
+and bookbinder, were not yet required, for as yet there was no "reading
+public." Some of our ancient printers combined all these characters in
+themselves. The commerce of literature had not yet opened in the
+speculative vendors of books, and that race of writers who have been
+designated in the modern phrase as "authors by profession." The very
+nature of literary property could only originate in a more advanced and
+intellectual state of society, when unsettled opinions and contending
+principles would create a growing demand for books which no one yet
+contemplated, and a property, of a novel and peculiar nature, in the
+very thoughts and words of a writer.
+
+The art of printing, confined within a few hands, was usually practised
+under the patronage of the King, or the Archbishop, or some nobleman.
+There existed not the remotest suspicion, that the simple machinery of
+the printer's press, could ever be converted into an engine of torture
+to try the strength, or the truth, of the church and the state.
+Sedition, or any allusion to public affairs, never entered the brains of
+the ingenious mechanics, solely occupied in lowering the prices of the
+text-writers in the manuscript market, by their own novel and wondrous
+transcript. Their first wares had consisted of romances which were
+consulted as authentic histories; "dictes, or sayings," of ancient sages
+which no one cared to contradict; and homilies and allegories whose
+voluminousness had no tediousness. Neither did the higher powers ever
+imagine that any control seemed needful over the printer's press. They
+only lent the sanction of their names, or the shelter of their abode, at
+the Abbey of Westminster or the monastery of St. Albans, to encourage
+the manufacture of a novel curiosity, for its beautiful toy, a printed
+book--and the press at first was at once free and innocent.
+
+But the day of portents was not slow in its approach--a stirring age
+pressed on, an age for books. Under Henry the Eighth, books became the
+organs of the passions of mankind, and were not only printed, but spread
+about; for if the presses of England dared not disclose the hazardous
+secrets of the writers, the people were surreptitiously furnished with
+English books from foreign presses. It was then that the jealousy of the
+state opened its hundred eyes on the awful track of the strange
+omnipotence of the press. Then first began that WAR AGAINST BOOKS which
+has not ceased in our time.
+
+Perhaps he who first, with a statesman's prescient view, had
+contemplated on this novel and unknown power, and, as we shall see, had
+detected its insidious steps stealing into the cabinet of the sovereign,
+was the great minister of this great monarch. It has been surmised that
+the cardinal aimed to crush the head of the serpent, by stopping the
+printing press in the monastery at St. Albans, of which he was the
+abbot; for that press remained silent for half a century. In a
+convocation the cardinal expressed his hostility against printing;
+assuring the simple clergy that, if they did not in time suppress
+printing, printing would suppress them.[1] This great statesman, at this
+early period, had taken into view its remote consequences. Lord Herbert
+has curiously assigned to the cardinal his ideas as addressed to the
+pope:--"This new invention of printing has produced various effects of
+which your Holiness cannot be ignorant. If it has restored books and
+learning, it has also been the occasion of those sects and schisms which
+daily appear. Men begin to call in question the present faith and tenets
+of the church; and the laity read the Scriptures; and pray in their
+vulgar tongue. Were this suffered, the common people might come to
+believe that there was not so much use of the clergy. If men were
+persuaded that they could make their own way to God, and in their
+ordinary language as well as Latin, the authority of the mass would
+fall, which would be very prejudicious to our ecclesiastical orders. The
+mysteries of religion must be kept in the hands of priests--the secret
+and arcanum of church government. Nothing remains more to be done than
+to prevent further apostacy. For this purpose, since printing could not
+be put down, it were best to set up learning against learning; and, by
+introducing able persons to dispute, to suspend the laity between fears
+and controversies. Since printing cannot be put down, it may still be
+made useful." Thus, the statesman, who could not by a single blow
+annihilate this monster of all schism, would have wrestled with it with
+a statesman's policy.
+
+The cardinal at length was shaken by terrors he had never before felt
+from the hated press. This minister had writhed under the printed
+personalities of the rabid SKELTON and the merciless ROY; but a pamphlet
+in the form of "_The Supplication of Beggars_" is a famed invective,
+which served as a prelude to the fall of the minister. The author, SIMON
+FISH, had been a student of Gray's Inn, where, in an Aristophanic
+interlude, he had enacted his grace the cardinal to the life, and deemed
+himself fortunate to escape from his native shores to elude the gripe of
+Wolsey. In this pamphlet all the poverty of the nation,--for our
+national poverty at all times is the cry of "The Beggars,"--the
+taxation, and the grievances, are all laid to the oppression of the
+whole motley prelacy. These were the thieves and the freebooters, the
+cormorants and the wolves of the state, and the king had nothing more to
+do than to put them to the cart's tail, and end all the beggary of
+England by appropriating the monastic lands.
+
+On a day of a procession at Westminster this seditious tract, aiming at
+the annihilation of the whole revenues of churchmen, was found scattered
+in the streets. Wolsey had the copies carefully gathered and delivered
+to him, to prevent any from reaching the king's eyes. Merchants, at that
+day, were often itinerants in their way of trade with their foreign
+correspondents, and frequently conveyed to England these writings of our
+fugitive reformers. Two of these merchants, by the favour of Anne
+Bullen, had a secret interview with the king. They offered to recite to
+the royal ear the substance of the suppressed libel. "I dare say you
+have it all by heart," the king shrewdly observed, and listened. After a
+pause, Henry let fall this remarkable observation--"If a man should pull
+down an old stone wall, and begin at the lower part, the upper might
+chance to fall on his head." What at that moment was passing in the
+sagacious mind of the future regal reformer, is now more evident than
+probably it was to its first hearers. Wolsey, suspicious and troubled,
+came to warn the king of "a pestilent heretical libel being abroad."
+Henry, suddenly drawing the very libel out of his bosom, presented a
+portentous copy to the startled and falling minister. The book became a
+court-book; and "the witty atheistical author," as the Roman Catholic
+historian designated him, was invited back to England under the
+safeguard of the royal protection.
+
+But the secret, and, perhaps, the yet obscure influence of the press,
+must often have been apparent to Henry the Eighth, when the king sat in
+council. There he marked the alarms of Wolsey, and the terrified
+remonstrances of the entire body of "the Papelins;" and when the day
+came that their ejectors filled their seats, the king discovered, that
+though the objects were changed, the same dread of the press continued.
+The war against books commenced; an expurgatory index, or a catalogue of
+prohibited books, chiefly English, was sent forth before Henry had
+broken with the papal power; subsequently, the fresher proclamation
+declared the books of the Papelins to be "seditious," as the use of "the
+new learning" had been anathematized as "heretical."
+
+In these rapid events, dates become as essential as arguments. In 1526,
+anti-popery books, with their dispersers, were condemned as heretical.
+In 1535, all books favouring popery were decreed to be "seditious
+books." There were books on the king's supremacy, for or against, which
+cost some of their writers their heads; and there were "injunctions
+against English books," frequently renewed as "pestilent and infectious
+learnings."[2] All these show that now the press had obtained activity,
+and betray the uneasy condition of the ruling powers, who were startled
+by a supernatural voice which they had never before heard.
+
+When the first persecution of "the new religion" occurred, it did not
+abate the secret importations of Lutheran books.[3] These with the
+merchant had become an article of commerce; and with the zealous
+dispensers, an article of faith: both alike ventured their lives in
+conveying them to London, and other places, and even smuggled them into
+the universities. They landed their prohibited goods in the most distant
+places, at Colchester, or in Norfolk. One of these chapmen in this
+hazardous commodity of free-thinking was at last caught at his
+bookbinder's. He suffered at the flaming stake, and others met his fate.
+
+It was now apparent that the secrecy and velocity of conveying the novel
+projects of reform, which could not otherwise have been communicated to
+the great body of the people, till this awful instrument had been set to
+work; the unity of opinion which it might create among the confused
+multitude; and the passions which a party either in terror, or in
+triumph, could artfully rouse in the sympathies of men; were felt and
+acknowledged by the monarch, who had himself staked the possession of
+his independent dominion on the energy and the eloquence of a single
+book,[4] to prepare his people for his meditated emancipation from the
+Tiara; and were any other proof wanting, we discover the terror of the
+Bishop of Durham, on the appearance of "a little book printed in
+English, issuing from Newcastle." His lordship writes in great
+trepidation to the minister Cromwell, of this portentous little book,
+"like to do great harm among the people," and advising that "letters be
+directed to all havens, towns, and other places, to forbid the book to
+be sold." All the ports to be closed against "a little book brought by
+some folks from Newcastle!" These incidents were certain demonstrations
+of the political influence of this new sovereignty of the
+printing-press.
+
+In the simplicity of this early era of printing, the same bishop had all
+the copies of Tindal's Testament bought up at Antwerp, and burned. The
+English merchant employed on this occasion was a secret follower of the
+modern apostle, who, on his part, gladly furnished all the unsold copies
+which had hung on hand, anxious to correct a new edition which he was
+too poor to publish. When one of the Tindalites was promised his pardon
+if he would reveal the name of the person who had encouraged this new
+edition, he accepted the grace; and he assured the Lord Chancellor that
+the greatest encourager and supporter of his Antwerp friends had been
+the bishop himself, who, by buying up half the unsold impression, had
+enabled them to produce a second. This was the first lesson which taught
+that it is easier to burn authors than books.
+
+There were two methods by which governments could counteract the
+inconveniences of the press: the one, by clipping its wings, and
+contracting the sphere of its action, which we shall see was early
+attempted; and the other, by adroitly turning its vehemence into an
+opposite direction, making the press contend with the press, and by
+division weaken its dominion.
+
+Henry the Eighth left the age he had himself created, with its awakened
+spirit. The three succeeding reigns, acting in direct opposition to each
+other, disturbed the minds of the people; controversies raged, and books
+multiplied. The sphere of publication widened, in this vertiginous era,
+printers greatly increased in the reign of Edward the Sixth. But the
+craft did not flourish, when the craftsmen had become numerous. We have
+the contemporary authority of one of the most eminent printers, that the
+practice of the art, and the cost of the materials, had become so
+exceedingly chargeable, that the printers were driven by necessity to
+throw themselves into the hands of "the Stationers," or booksellers, for
+"small gains."[5] It is probable that at this period, the printers
+perceived that vending their books at the printing-office was not a mode
+which made them sufficiently public. This is the first indication that
+the printing, and the publication or the sale of books, were becoming
+separate trades.
+
+In this history of the progress of the press in our country, the
+Stationers' Company now appears. This institution becomes an important
+branch of our investigation, for its influence over our literature, for
+its monopoly, opposed to the interests of other publishers, and above
+all, for the practice of the government in converting this company into
+a ready instrument to restrain the freedom of the press.
+
+Anterior to the invention of printing, there flourished a craft or trade
+who were denominated _Stationers_; they were scribes and limners, and
+dealers in manuscript copies, and in parchment and paper, and other
+literary wares. It is believed by our antiquaries that they derived
+their denomination from their fixed locality, or _station in a street_,
+either by a shop or shed, and probably when their former occupation had
+gone, still retained their dealings in literature, and turned to
+booksellers.[6] This denomination of _stationers_, indicating their
+stationary residence, would also distinguish them from the itinerant
+vendors, who in a more subordinate capacity at a later period, appear to
+have hawked about the town and the country pamphlets and other portable
+books.
+
+In the reign of Philip and Mary "the Stationers" were granted a charter
+of incorporation, and were invested with the most inquisitorial powers.
+
+The favours of a tyrant are usually favours to individuals who profit at
+the cost of the community, and who themselves overlooking every
+principle of justice, bind up their own selfish monopoly with the
+prosperity of criminal power. This we discover in the Company of
+Stationers, who were the willing dupes of that absolute power in the
+State which had created the corporation to do its watchful work, to
+carry on the war against books, and by their passive obedience they
+secured to themselves those privileges, and licenses, and other
+monopolies, which they now amply enjoyed.
+
+By this charter of the Stationers, it was specified that no one was to
+exercise the art of printing, unless he was one of the society; and the
+corporation, with their extraordinary but lawful authority, were to
+search as often as they pleased any house or chamber, &c., of any
+stamper or printer, or binder, or seller, of any manner of books, which
+they deemed obnoxious to the State, or their own interest!--to seize,
+burn, take away, or destroy, or convert to their own use.[7] The
+Stationers were, in fact, a Spanish inquisition for the cabinet of
+Philip and Mary, and whom the queen consulted on critical occasions, for
+her majesty once sent for the warden to inquire whether they had seen or
+heard of a sort of books sent from Zurich? The war against books was
+never pushed to such extremities as in a proclamation of Philip and
+Mary, which Strype calls, "a short but terrible proclamation." Here we
+learn that "whoever finds books of heresy, sedition, and treason, and
+does not forthwith burn the same without showing or reading them to any
+other person, shall be _executed for a rebel_!"[8] It is evident, that
+the grant of this incorporation was designed to make the interests of
+the company subservient to those of the court; for by the intermediate
+aid of the vigilant Stationers, every printer would be controlled, since
+none were allowed to be printers who were not members of this
+corporation, and therefore amenable to its laws.
+
+In the succeeding reign of Elizabeth everything changed except these
+state-proclamations in the war against books. The object had altered,
+but not the objection, for though the books were different the
+Elizabethan style is identical with the Marian. The same plenary powers
+of the Stationers were strengthened by an additional injunction, by
+which the government held the whole brotherhood with a closer grasp. The
+company were commissioned not only "to search into bookbinders' shops,
+as well as printing-offices, for unlawful and heretical books," but they
+were responsible for "any unruly printer who might endanger the church
+and state," and "who for covetousness regard not what they print,
+whereby ariseth great disorder by publication of unfruitful, vain, and
+infamous books and papers. None shall print any manner of book except
+the same be first _licensed by her majesty by express words in writing_,
+or by _six of her privy council_."[9]
+
+When we recollect that the Stationers' Company under Mary, were composed
+of the very same individuals who two years after under Elizabeth, were
+busily ornamenting their shelves with all their late "seditious and
+heretical" books, and in removing out of sight all their late lawful and
+loyal ware, this transition of the feelings must have placed them in a
+position painful as it was ridiculous. But the true genius of a
+commercial body is of no party, save the predominant; pliant with their
+interests, a corporation, like a republic, in their zealous union can do
+that with public propriety which, in the individuals it is composed of,
+would be incongruous and absurd.
+
+The rage of government in this war against books was still sharper at a
+later period, provoked by the spread of the Mar-prelate pamphlets. A
+decree of the Star-chamber in 1586, among other orders, allows no
+printer to have an additional press without license; awards that there
+shall be no printing in any obscure part of a house; nor any printer out
+of the city of London, excepting at the two Universities; and till "the
+excessive multitude of printers be abated, diminished, or by death given
+over," no one shall resume that trade; and that the wardens of the
+Stationers' Company, with assistants, shall enter at all times
+warehouses, shops, &c., to seize all "letter-presses, and other printing
+instruments, to be defaced, melted, sawed in pieces, broken or battered
+at the smith's forge."[10] Amid all this book-phobia, a curious
+circumstance occurred. The learned could not prosecute their studies for
+the prohibition against many excellent works, written by those who were
+"addicted to the errors of Popery in foreign parts," and which also
+contained "matters against the state of this land." In this dilemma, a
+singular expedient was adopted. The archbishop allowed "Ascanius de
+Renialme, a merchant bookseller, to bring into this realm _some few
+copies_ of every such sort of books, upon this condition only, that they
+be first brought to me, and so delivered only to such persons whom we
+deem most meet men to have the reading of them." At this time it must
+have been an affair of considerable delicacy and difficulty to obtain a
+quotation, without first hastening to Lambeth Palace, there to be
+questioned!
+
+Printing and literature, during the long reign of Elizabeth, in spite of
+all these Star-chamber edicts, amazingly increased; there seemed to be a
+swell from all the presses. Of 175 stationers, 140 had taken their
+freedom since this queen's accession. "So much had printing and learning
+come in request under the Reformation," observes our historical
+antiquary Strype. And such was the proud exultation of the great printer
+John Day, that when he compared the darkness of the preceding period
+with what this publisher of Fox's mighty tomes of Martyrology deemed its
+purer enlightenment, he never printed his name without this pithy
+insinuation to the reader, "Arise, for it is DAY!" Books not only
+multiplied, but unquestionably it was at this period that first appeared
+the art of aiding these ephemeral productions of the press which
+supplied the wants of numerous readers. The rights of authors had
+hitherto derived a partial existence in privilege conceded by the royal
+patron, but it was now that they first gathered the fuller harvests of
+public favour. We shall shortly find a notice among the book-trade of
+what is termed "copyright."[11]
+
+If the freedom of the press had been wholly wrested from the printers,
+it was not the sole grievance in the present state of our literature,
+for another custom had been assumed which hung on the royal
+prerogative--that of granting letters patent, or privileged licenses,
+under the broad seal to individuals, to deal in a specific class of
+books, to the exclusion of every other publisher. Possibly the same
+secret motive which had contrived the absolute control of the press,
+suggested the grants of these privileges. One enjoyed the privilege of
+printing Bibles; another all law-books; another grammars; another
+"almanacks and prognostications;" and another, ballads and books in
+prose and metre. These privileges assuredly increased the patronage of
+the great, and the dispensations of these favours were doubtless often
+abused. A singing man had the license for printing music-books, which he
+extended to that of being the sole vendor of all ruled paper, on the
+plea that where there were ruled lines, musical notes might be pricked
+down; and a private gentleman, who was neither printer nor stationer,
+had the privilege of printing grammars and other things, which he farmed
+out for a considerable annual revenue, by which means these books were
+necessarily enhanced in price.
+
+Such monopolies, which entered into the erroneous policy of that age,
+and the corrupt practices of patronage, long continued a source of
+discontent among the generality. This was now a period when the spirit
+of the times raised up men who would urge their independent rights. A
+struggle ensued between the monopolists and the excluded, who clamoured
+for the freedom of the trade. "Unruly printers" not only resisted when
+their own houses were besieged by "the searchers" of the stationers, but
+openly persisted in printing any "lawful books" they chose, in defiance
+of any royal privilege. A busy lawyer had been feed, who questioned this
+stretch of the prerogative. But the patriotism or the despair of these
+"unruly printers" led to the Clink or to Ludgate--to imprisonment or to
+bankruptcy! The day had not yet arrived when civil freedom, though
+youthful and bold, with impunity could "kick against the pricks" of the
+prerogative. It is curious here to discover that the aggrieved had even
+formed "a trade-union" for contributions to defend suits at law against
+the privileged; and when they were reminded that this mode only
+aggravated their troubles, and were asked by the sleek monopolists what
+they would gain if all were in common, which, as the privileged assumed,
+"would make havoc for one man to undo another," that is, those who were
+patentless would undo the patentees--these Cains, in the bitterness of
+their hearts, fiercely replied to their more favoured brothers, "We
+should make you beggars like ourselves!"[12]
+
+Amid these clamours in the commonwealth of literature, the patentees
+became alarmed at the danger of having their patents revoked. The
+booksellers had become the more prosperous race, and some of these,
+combining with the Stationers' Company, opposed the privileged few. The
+advocates for the freedom of the trade advanced a proposition too tender
+to be handled by the Doctor of Civil Law, who was chosen for the
+arbitrator. At once these boldly impugned the prerogative royal itself
+in its exercise of granting privileges to printers, which they declared
+was against law; and however they might more successfully urge, that the
+better policy for the public was to admit of competition, and moderating
+of prices by this freedom of publication, they add, "So, too, let every
+man print what 'lawful book' he choose, without any exceptions, even
+'any book of which the copies thereof had been _bought of the authors_
+for their money.'" Here we find the first notice of "copyright," and the
+very inadequate notions yet entertained of its nature.
+
+The plea of the patentees more skilfully addressed the Doctor of Civil
+Law by their assumption of the irrefragable rights of the royal
+prerogative. Their own privileges they maintained by the custom, as they
+showed that "all princes in Christendom had granted privileges for
+printing, sometimes for a term of years, or for life; that ancient books
+bore this inscription, _Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum_; that the
+queen's progenitors had exercised this right, and would any dare to
+lessen her majesty's prerogative?" All infringers had ever been
+punished. They further urged, that the good of the commonwealth required
+that printing should be in the hands of known men, being an art most
+dangerous and pernicious if it were not straitened and restrained by
+politic order of the prince or magistrates. With truer arguments they
+alleged that many useful books were now published unprofitable to the
+patentees, who had no other means of repaying themselves but by the sale
+of other books restricted to them by the protection of their privileges;
+and finally, they declared that the public were incurring some danger
+that good books might not be printed at all if privileges were revoked,
+for _the first printer was at charge for the author's pains and other
+extraordinary cost_; but should any succeeding printer who had "_the
+copy gratis_" sell cheaper on better paper, and with notes and
+additions, it would put an end to the sale of the original edition; and
+they pithily conclude with the old wisdom, that "It is easier to amend
+than to invent." Here again we see specified the cost of "copyright" in
+the publication of a new book.
+
+This attempt to open the freedom of the trade, which occurred about
+1583, the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Elizabeth, at length was not
+wholly unsuccessful; the monopolists conceded certain advantages,[13]
+and about twenty years subsequently, towards the end of that queen's
+reign, when the craft of authorship, adapting its wares to the fashion
+of the day, was practised by a whole race of popular writers, the
+booksellers became almost the sole publishers of books, employing the
+printers in their single capacity.[14]
+
+In this war against books, the severe decree of the Star Chamber, 1586,
+was renewed with stricter prohibitions, and more penal severity by a
+decree of the Star Chamber, under Charles the First, in 1637. Printing
+and printers were now placed under the supervision of the great officers
+of state; law-books were to be judiciously approved by the lord
+chief-justice; historical works were to be submitted to the secretaries
+of state; heraldry was left to the lord marshal; divinity, physic,
+philosophy, and poetry, were to be sanctioned by the Archbishop of
+Canterbury or the Bishop of London. Two copies of every work were to be
+preserved in custody, to prevent any alterations being made in the
+published volumes, which would be detected on their comparison.
+Admirable preparatory and preventive measures! Here would ensue a
+general purgation of every atom in the human system, occasioning
+obstructions to the doctrines and discipline of the Church of England,
+and the state of government. The aim of all these decrees and
+proclamations was to abridge the number of printers, and to invigorate
+the absolute power conferred on the Stationers' Company, who had long
+delivered themselves, bound hand and foot, to the government, for the
+servile possession of their privileges. Printers were still limited to
+twenty, as in the reign of Elizabeth, and only four letter-founders
+allowed. Every printed book on paper was to bear the impress of the
+printer's name, on pain of corporal punishment. They held books in such
+terror, that even those which had formerly been licensed, were not
+allowed to be reprinted, without being "reviewed," as they express it,
+and re-watched by placing on guard this double sentinel. There are some
+extraordinary clauses which betray the feeble infancy of the rude policy
+of that day. The decree tells us that "printing in corners without
+license had been usually done by journeymen out of work," and to provide
+against this source of inquietude, it compels the printers to employ all
+journeymen out of employ, "though the printer should be able to do his
+own work without these journeymen;" and in the same spirit of
+compulsion, it ordains that all such unemployed shall be obliged to work
+whenever called on.[15] Masters and men were equally amenable to fines
+impossible to be paid, and penal pains almost too horrible to endure,
+short of life, but not of ruin: a dark, a merciless, a mocking tribunal
+where the judges sate the prosecutors, and whose unwritten laws hung on
+their own lips; and where to discharge any accused person as innocent
+was looked on as a reproach of their negligence, or an imputation of
+their sagacity.
+
+Did the severity of these decrees produce the evils they encountered, or
+was it the existence of the evils which provoked the issue of these
+edicts? Did the terrific executions eradicate the political mischief?
+There was no free press in Elizabeth's reign, and yet libels abounded!
+The government compulsively contracted the press by their twenty
+stationary printers; and behold! moveable presses, whose ubiquity was
+astonishing as their ceaseless working. An invisible printer
+mysteriously scattered his publications here and there, during the
+contest of the Mar-prelate faction with the bishops; and the libels of
+the Jesuit Parsons, and others of the Roman party, were as rife against
+her majesty and her minister. The same occurred when the Star-chamber
+was guided by the genius of Laud; the altar was raised, and the
+sacerdotal knife struck! but the groans of the immolated victims were a
+shout of triumph. A clear demonstration that nothing is really gained by
+the temporary suppressions which power may enforce; the sealed book
+circulates till it is hoarded, and the author pilloried, mutilated, or
+hanged, obtains a popularity, which often his own genius afforded him no
+chance to acquire.
+
+The secret design of all these entangling edicts was to hold the
+printers in passive obedience to the government, whatever that
+government might be; for each separate government, though acting on
+opposite principles, manifested a remarkable uniformity in their
+proceedings with the press. In the arbitrary days of Charles the Second,
+an extraordinary, if not an audacious, attempt was made to wrest the art
+of printing out of the hands of its professors, and to place the press
+wholly at the disposal of the sovereign. This usurping doctrine was
+founded on a startling plea. As our monarchs had granted privileges to
+the earliest printers, and, from the introduction of the art into
+England, had never ceased their patronage or their control, it was
+inferred, that our kings had never yielded _the royal prerogative of
+printing_ any more than they had that of _coining_. The "mystery" of
+printing, in the style of the lawyers, was "a flower of the crown!"--the
+exercise of the prerogative; and therefore every printer in England must
+be a sworn servant of the crown. At such a period we are not surprised
+to find an express treatise put forth to demonstrate to his sacred
+majesty, that "printing belonged to him, in his public and private
+capacity, as supreme _magistrate_ and as _proprietor_;" in reality there
+was to be but one printer for all England, and that printer the king!
+This was giving at once the most elevated and the most degraded notions
+of "the divine art," which this servile assumer describes can "not only
+bereave the king of his good name, but of the very hearts of his
+people."[16]
+
+We observe the lamentations of these advocates of arbitrary power over
+the freedom of the press, or, as such maintained, the confusion produced
+"by the exorbitant and unlawful exercise of printing in modern times."
+They appeal to the miseries and calamities not only recently witnessed
+in our own country, but in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and
+Switzerland. Wherever they track a footstep of the liberty of the press,
+they pause to discover its accompanying calamity. One of these writers,
+to convey an adequate notion of the spread and political influence of
+the press, has thrown out a very excitable remark:--"Had this art been
+known in the time of the grand profession of the Donatist and Arian
+heresy, it would have drowned the world in a second deluge of blood and
+confusion, to its utter destruction long time since." A stroke of church
+history which might suggest a whole volume!
+
+The interests of the printers had coincided with the designs of
+government, in limiting the number of presses; for the policy of their
+narrow confederacy was, the fewer printers the more printing! But the
+interests of the booksellers were quite opposite; they were for
+encouraging supernumerary printers, and overstocking the
+printing-offices with journeymen, and by this means they succeeded in
+bringing the printers down to their price or their purpose; and it is
+insinuated, on the Machiavelian principle, that the number being greater
+than could live honestly by the trade, one-half must be knaves, or
+starve. And it seems that "knaves" were in greater requisition by the
+publishers of "the unlawful," or, as these were afterwards called on the
+establishment of a licenser of the press, "the unlicensed books," who
+revelled in their seductive profits.[17]
+
+Among the effusions of the political Literature of the egregious Sir
+ROGER L'ESTRANGE, versed in the arcana of the publishing system of his
+day, I discover a project which terminated in renewing the office of the
+Licenser of Books, in his own person; the only pitiful preferment the
+Restoration brought the clamorous Loyalist. Our literary knight
+addressed Charles the Second, to impress on his Majesty the urgency of
+an immediate regulation of the press; "this great business of the press
+being now engrossed by Oliver's creatures, and the _honest_ printers
+being impoverished by the late times."
+
+This project to regulate the press by L'Estrange, chiefly turned on the
+dexterous management of the printers. He calculated, for four thousand
+pounds, to buy up the presses of the poor printers, who were willing to
+be reimbursed, and look to better trades. The bolder project was to
+emancipate the printers from the tyranny of the booksellers, by which
+means they would no longer be necessitated to print whatever their
+masters ordered. The printers at this moment had menaced to separate
+themselves from the stationers, with a view of their own.
+
+The printers had been gradually deprived of any shares in new
+publications; they had been thrown out of all copyright, and probably
+had grown somewhat jealous of their prosperous masters; the printers
+complained that they were nothing else than slaves to the booksellers.
+They called for an independent company of "the mystery," and reverting
+to the custom of the early printers, they desired to have their own
+presses under their own management, and to print only the copies of
+which they themselves were the proprietors.
+
+The future licenser of the press, who was throwing his net to haul in
+all these fish at a cast, took advantage of this project, which at once
+was levelled at the freedom of the trade, and the freedom of the press.
+Printers solely working on their own copies, would indeed check "the
+ungovernable ambition of the booksellers," by diminishing their
+copyrights; while those "unhappy printers" would be relieved, who at
+present have no other work than what "the great dealers in treasonous or
+seditious books" furnished them. All these were but the ostensible
+motives, for the real object designed was that the printers should
+become the creatures of the patronage of government, and, by the
+diminution of their number, the contracted circle would be the more
+easily managed.
+
+Such were the systematic struggles of our governments in the revival of
+the severe acts for the regulation of printing at various periods. It
+was long assumed that printing was not a free trade, but always to
+remain under regulation.
+
+When Dr. Johnson, labouring under the pressure of his ancient notions,
+contending with the clear perception of his sceptical sagacity, once
+stood awed before the sublime effusion of Milton's "Areopagitica," he
+hazarded this opinion, for by balancing his notions it cannot be
+accepted as a decision: "The danger of such unbounded liberty, and the
+danger of bounding it, have produced a problem in the science of
+government which human understanding seems unable to solve."
+
+And whatever either the advocates or the adversaries of the freedom of
+the press may allege, this problem in the science of government remains
+as insoluble at this day as at any former period--a truth demonstrated
+by a circumstance which has repeatedly occurred in our own political
+history. The noble treatise of Milton for a free press had not the
+slightest influence on that very parliament whose members had long
+suffered from its oppression. The Catholics clamoured for a free press
+under Charles the Second, but the same act operating against them under
+James the Second, from the use of the press by the Protestant party--the
+liberty of the press was then condemned as exorbitant and intolerable.
+The advocates of a free press thus become its adversaries whenever they
+themselves form the ruling power. Orators for the freedom of the press
+suddenly send forth outcries against its abuses; but as those, whoever
+the party may be, who are in place, are called the government, it always
+happens that the opposition, whatever may be their principles, must
+submit to the risk of being deemed seditious libellers.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+  [1] See a curious note of Hearne's in his Glossary to "Peter
+    Langtoft's Chronicle," p. 685. Also Herbert's "Typog. Antiq." p.
+    1435.
+
+  [2] Strype's "Memorials," i. 344 and 218.
+
+  [3] A curious and a copious catalogue of these books, "though the
+    books themselves are almost perished," may be seen in Strype's
+    "Ecclesiastical Memorials," i. 165.
+
+  [4] The book, "De Verâ Differentiâ inter Regiam Potestatem et
+    Ecclesiasticam," was called "The King's Book." It seems that the
+    scholastic monarch gave some finishing strokes to what had probably
+    passed through the hands of his most expert casuists.
+
+  [5] "Archæologia," vol. xxv. 104.
+
+    [6] Pegge, in his "Anecdotes of the English Language," has somewhat
+    crudely remarked that "the term _Stationers_ was appropriated to
+    _Booksellers_ in the year 1622;" but it was so long before. It is
+    extraordinary that Mr. Todd, well read in our literary history,
+    admits this imperfect disclosure of Pegge into the "Dictionary of the
+    English Language." The term _Stationer_ and _Bookseller_ were
+    synonymous and in common use in the reign of Elizabeth, and may be
+    found in Baret's "Alvearie," 1573.
+
+  [7] The Charter may be found in Herbert's "Typographical
+    Antiquities," p. 1584.
+
+  [8] Strype's "Memorials," iii: part 2nd. p. 130.
+
+  [9] In the Lansdowne Manuscripts, 43, fol. 76, will be found "an act
+    to restrain the licentious printing of unprofitable and hurtful
+    books," 1580. After declaring that the art of printing is "a most
+    happy and profitable invention," it is pointed at those "who pen or
+    translate in the English tongue poesies, ditties, and songs, serving
+    for a great part of them to none other end, what titles soever they
+    bear, but to set up an art of making lascivious and ungodly love, to
+    the intolerable corruption of life and manners--_and to the no small
+    or sufferable waste of the treasure of this realm, which is thereby
+    consumed in paper, a forren and chargeable commoditie_." The first
+    paper made in England was at Dartford, in 1588, by a German, who was
+    knighted by the queen.
+
+  [10] This decree of the Star-chamber is printed in Herbert's
+    "Typographical Antiquities," p. 1668.
+
+  [11] The privilege of a royal grant to the author was the only
+    protection the author had for any profits of his work. Henry the
+    Eighth granted Palsgrave his exclusive right for the printing of his
+    book for seven years. Bishop Cooper obtained a privilege for the sale
+    of his "Thesaurus" for twelve years; and a translator of Tacitus, for
+    his version, during his natural life.
+
+  [12] "Archæologia," xxv. 112.
+
+  [13] Nichols on the Stationers' Company.--"Lit. Anecdotes," iii.
+
+    We have a list "of books yielded by the richer printers who had
+    licenses from the queen;" but whether they were only copies bestowed
+    in charity for the poorer "stationers," or given up by the
+    monopolists, I do not understand.--Herbert's "Typographical Antiq."
+    p. 1672.
+
+  [14] Herbert's "Typographical Antiq."--preface.
+
+  [15] This remarkable "Decree of Starr-chamber concerning Printing"
+    was in the possession of Thomas Hollis, and is printed in the
+    Appendix to his curious Memoirs, p. 641.
+
+  [16] "The Original and Growth of Printing, collected out of History
+    and the Records of this Kingdom," &c., by Richard Atkyns, Esq., 1664.
+    In this rare tract first appeared a narrative of the introduction of
+    printing into Oxford, _before Caxton_, by the printer Francis
+    Corsellis, to prove that printing was brought into England by Henry
+    the Sixth.
+
+  [17] For "unlicensed books" the printer charged twenty-five per cent.
+    extra, but the booksellers sold them for double and treble the cost
+    of other books.
+
+    "Considerations and Proposals in order to the Regulation of the
+    Press, together with diverse instances of Treasonous and Seditious
+    Pamphlets, proving the necessity thereof," 1663.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+  ABORIGINES, British, 1--5.
+
+  ADDISON'S "Drummer," origin of, 419.
+
+  ADVENTURES of the Elizabethan era, 375--378.
+
+  ALCHEMY, modern opinions on, 631.
+
+  ALLEGORY, poetic, 487--501.
+
+  ALLEN, Cardinal, 424.
+
+  ALLITERATION in Spenser's verse, 477.
+
+  ANGLO-NORMANS, the, 59--69.
+
+  ANGLO-SAXONS arrive in Britain, 17; history of their career, 28--36.
+
+  ANONYMOUS authorship, 672.
+
+  ARCADIA, the, of Sir P. Sidney, 451--459.
+
+  ARIOSTO turned into allegory, 489.
+
+  ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE, 240--242.
+
+  ARTHUR, King of Britain, 17.
+
+  ASCHAM, R., and his "Schoolmaster," 359--367.
+
+  ATTERBURY, Bishop, vindicates the genuine character of Clarendon's
+    History, 731.
+
+  AUDLEY, Lord Chancellor, enriched by church-lands, 318.
+
+  AUGMENTATION, Court of, 318.
+
+
+  BABBLE, etymology of, 3, _n._
+
+  BACON, Francis, Lord; a believer in occult science, 646--649; his
+    philosophy, 650, 660.
+
+  BALE, Bishop, and his satires, 358.
+
+  BARCLAY'S Eclogues, 287.
+
+  BARON, the, of the Middle Ages, 71.
+
+  BEOWULF and his exploits, 51--58.
+
+  BIBLES publicly burned in Oxford, 335; first translated into English,
+    369; afterwards prohibited, _ib._
+
+  BIBLE AND KEY, mode of discovering thieves, 420, _n._
+
+  BIBLIOTHEQUE BLEUE, 260.
+
+  BODLEY, Sir Thos., founds his great library, 664--669; refuses to
+    include plays in his library, 525.
+
+  BOOKS of the people, 256--267.
+
+  BOOKS, war against, 738--756.
+
+  BORDE, ANDREW, 263--265.
+
+  BRANDT, S., and his "Ship of Fools," 285--288.
+
+  BRITAIN and its early inhabitants, 12--23.
+
+  BRUTUS lands in Britain, 2.
+
+  BURBAGE, the actor of Shakespeare's heroes, 534.
+
+  BURLEIGH, Lord, his hostility to Spenser, 467--471.
+
+  BURNET, Bishop: his "History of his own time," 735--737.
+
+  BURTON and his curious pamphlets, 267.
+
+  BUTLER, S., criticizes Jonson and Shakespeare, 551, 552.
+
+
+  CÆDMON, the Anglo-Saxon poet, 37--50.
+
+  CALAMY, Dr., casts doubt on Clarendon's History, 728.
+
+  CALUMNY, and its uses, 429.
+
+  CAMOENS explained by allegory, 489.
+
+  CAMPIAN, the Jesuit, 425--427.
+
+  CAMPION, Dr., his opinion of rhyme, 396.
+
+  CASAUBON publishes Dee's intercourse with spirits, 636.
+
+  CAXTON and his works, 212--220.
+
+  CECIL, Lord, plots against Rawleigh, 602--604.
+
+  CAMPERNOUN begs an estate, 317.
+
+  CHAPMAN and his "Homer," 522.
+
+  CHARACTERS, books of, 676.
+
+  CHARLES I. a student of Shakespeare, 548.
+
+  CHAUCER and his English, 136; his life and works, 158--176.
+
+  CHEKE, Sir J., on the English language, 133.
+
+  CHESTER Whitsun-plays, 346.
+
+  CHIVALRY, institution of, 70.
+
+  CLARENDON'S History, 724--737.
+
+  CLASSIC authors neglected, 415.
+
+  COBHAM conspiracy, the, 604.
+
+  COCKRAM, H., his dictionary, 139, _n._
+
+  COLLECTORS, and their useful labours, 661.
+
+  COMEDY, an indefinite term originally, 502; Dante so styles his poem,
+    _ib._; the first English comedy, 507.
+
+  COMMONWEALTH, origin of the term, 712, 713.
+
+  CORSELLIS, and the early Oxford press, 210.
+
+  COSTAR, the early printer, 209.
+
+  COTTON, Sir Robert, his famous library, 668; his melancholy death,
+    669.
+
+  COXETER prepares an edition of old plays, 559.
+
+  CROMWELL and his grants of church lands, 318; his opinion of his
+    position, 699.
+
+  CROSS, the enthusiasm for the sign of, 79.
+
+  CROWLEY, Robert, and his works, 329--332.
+
+  CRYPTOGRAPHY practised by Dr. Dee, 640.
+
+  CUDWORTH, R., and his "System of the Universe," 714--723.
+
+
+  DANTE and his allegories, 491.
+
+  DAY, John, the printer, 748.
+
+  DEE, Dr., the occult philosopher, 617; his scholastic career, 618,
+    619; his troubles at court, 620; his acquaintance with Princess
+    Elizabeth, 621; fixes a lucky day for her coronation, _ib._; is
+    consulted by her privy council, 622; his library, _ib._; his works,
+    623; his mystic studies, 624--629; his foreign travels, 630--634; his
+    return and death, 635, 636; his connexion with spirits, 636; his
+    political position, 640.
+
+  DESCARTES, a favourer of occult philosophy, 647.
+
+  DIALECTS, 142--150.
+
+  DICTIONARIES of rhyme, 403.
+
+  DIGBY, Sir Kenelm, his sympathetic powder, 646.
+
+  DIVINING ROD, account of the, 624.
+
+  DODSLEY'S edition of old plays, 559, _n._
+
+  DOUCE, Francis, and his collections, 662.
+
+  DRAMAS, primitive, 339--352.
+
+  DRAMATIC TASTE in the time of Charles II., 550, 551.
+
+  DRAMATISTS of the reign of Elizabeth, 516--528.
+
+  DRAYTON, proud of theatrical praise, 621; his poetical works,
+    581--589.
+
+  DRUIDS, the, 1--11.
+
+  DRYDEN and his criticisms on Shakespeare, 554--556.
+
+
+  "ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY," by Richard Hooker, 439--450.
+
+  EDWARD THE SIXTH, character of, 323.
+
+  ELIZABETH, Queen, studies under Ascham, 359--363; objects to religious
+    pictures, 366; her popular politics, 370--380; her sensitiveness to
+    public opinion, 379; compares herself to Richard II., 380; her varied
+    orthography, 382; fears to be thought a poetess, 672.
+
+  ELPHINSTONE writes words as pronounced, 389.
+
+  ELYOT, Sir Thomas, and his "Boke of the Governor," 268--275.
+
+  ENGLAND, derivation of the name, 25.
+
+  ENGLISH priestly colleges abroad, 424.
+
+  ENGRAVING on copper, invention of. 206.
+
+  EPIGRAMS, books of, 676.
+
+  ESSEX, Earl of, introduced to Queen Elizabeth as an opponent of
+    Rawleigh, 596; his incompetence as a general, 600; his disgrace and
+    death, 602.
+
+
+  FABULOUS early history of Britain, 1.
+
+  FABYAN'S Chronicle, 243--249.
+
+  FAIRIES disbelieved, 416.
+
+  FARMER, Dr., his annotations on Shakespeare, 567.
+
+  FINIGUERRA discovers the art of engraving for printing, 206.
+
+  FISH, S., and his "Supplication of Beggars," 741.
+
+  FLORENCE, first public library at, 663.
+
+  FLUDD, the occult philosopher, 642--649.
+
+  FOREIGN CRITICISM and its value, 417.
+
+  FOXE'S Book of Martyrs popularized, 374.
+
+  FRANKLIN contemplates spelling by sound. 388.
+
+  FREEDOM of the press, 756.
+
+  FRENCH words derived from Latin, 97, _n._; ordered to be solely used
+    for law, 125.
+
+  FRIENDSHIP a romantic attachment in the days of Elizabeth, 451.
+
+  FUST'S first printed Bible, 204.
+
+
+  GAMMER GURTON'S Needle long considered the first English comedy,
+    507--509.
+
+  GENTRY, rise of, 371.
+
+  GHOSTS, controversies concerning, 419.
+
+  GIBBERISH, derivation of the term, 651, _n._
+
+  GLANVIL'S treatise on witchcraft, 418, 419.
+
+  GORBODUC, the first English tragedy, 503--506.
+
+  GOWER the poet, his life and works, 177--182.
+
+  GOTHIC romances, 81--95.
+
+  GREEK a fashionable language among ladies, 360.
+
+  GREENE, Robt., attack on Shakespeare, 536.
+
+  GREGORY of Nazianzen, author of the earliest sacred dramas, 339.
+
+  GREY, Lady Jane, her classic attainments, 360.
+
+  GUIANA, Rawleigh's voyages to, 598--600.
+
+  GUTENBERG, the early printer, 208.
+
+
+  HAKLUYT'S collection of voyages, 377.
+
+  HALE, Sir Matthew, and his judgment on witches, 417.
+
+  HALL, John, and his work on monarchy, 709--711.
+
+  HANMER, Sir T., his edition of Shakespeare, 562.
+
+  HARIOT, Thos., the traveller, 611--613.
+
+  HARRINGTON, Sir J., on poetry, 409; his Oceana, 692--708.
+
+  HARVEY, Gabriel, introduces Spenser to Sir P. Sidney, 460; supposed to
+    be the annotator of the Shepherd's Calendar, 461.
+
+  HAWES, Stephen, the poet, 230--233.
+
+  HASTINGS, battle of, 60.
+
+  HENRY the Eighth, his literary character, 250--255.
+
+  HENRY the Seventh, as a patron of literature, 228--233.
+
+  HENSLOW, the Elizabethan manager, 520, _n._, 523.
+
+  HEXAMETER verse ridiculed by Nash, 396.
+
+  HEYWOOD, John, and his works, 354--358.
+
+  HIGDEN, R., and the Polychronicon, 236.
+
+  HISTORY and its sources, 234--239.
+
+  HOOKER, the favourite author of James I., 679; his Ecclesiastical
+    Polity, 439--450; the simplicity of his life, 440; his marriage, 441;
+    his uneasy mastership of the Temple, 442; his return to the country,
+    444; his premature death and unconcocted manuscripts, 445--447.
+
+  HOSKYNS, a critic and poet, temp. James I., 623, _n._
+
+  HUARTE'S Examination of Men's Wit, 579.
+
+  HUMOURS, and their significance, 578.
+
+  HUGUENOT satiric plays, 351.
+
+
+  ICELANDIC poetry, 34.
+
+  INTERLUDES, their invention, 348.
+
+  INVENTION of printing, 203--213.
+
+
+  JACKSON, Z., comments on Shakespeare, 547, _n._
+
+  JAMES I., ratifies the belief in witchcraft, 417; his literary
+    character, 677--680; his polemical feats, 682--684.
+
+  JAMES, Dr., first librarian to Sir Thos. Bodley, 665--667.
+
+  JESUITS in England, 423.
+
+  JOHNSON'S edition of Shakespeare, 563--566.
+
+  JONES, Dr., and his Phonography, 388.
+
+  JONSON, Ben, employed by Henslowe--to add to other's plays, 523; his
+    study of humours, 578--583; assists in Rawleigh's History of the
+    World, 613; his literary intercourse with James I., 680.
+
+  JOUBERT'S French orthoepy, 385.
+
+  JUNIUS, J., a student of our ancient literature, 45--47.
+
+
+  KELLEY, Edw., the alchemist, 625--633.
+
+  KYD'S play of Jeronimo, 523.
+
+
+  LAMBE, Chas., his specimens of the dramatic poets, 519, _n._, 528, _n._
+
+  LANGUAGES, European, origin of, 96--110; English, its origin,
+    111--127; vicissitudes of, 128--141.
+
+  "LEICESTER'S COMMONWEALTH," a political libel, 427--435; its author
+    challenged by Sir P. Sidney, 454.
+
+  L'ESTRANGE, the book licenser, 754.
+
+  LEXICOGRAPHERS, the Elder, 138.
+
+  LIBRARIES, ancient, 221--227.
+
+  LOCAL NAMES, their derivation, 27.
+
+  LONDON in the days of Shakespeare, 673.
+
+  LYDGATE, the Monk of Bury, 196--202.
+
+
+  MABINOGION, the, 21, _n._
+
+  MAGIC, early belief in, 413.
+
+  MAGIC MIRRORS, 627, and _note_.
+
+  MALONE'S edition of Shakespeare, 568.
+
+  MANDEVILLE, the traveller, 151--157.
+
+  MANUSCRIPTS, their value in the middle ages, 221--223.
+
+  MARIE DE FRANCE, the poetess, 66.
+
+  MARPRELATE pamphlets, 747.
+
+  MARTYR, Peter, opposes school logic, 334; anecdotes of, 335--337.
+
+  MASHAM, Lady, her neglect of her father's works, 722.
+
+  MASSINGER'S plays, faulty in printed editions, 547, _n._
+
+  MATTHEW of Paris, the monkish chronicler, 236.
+
+  MEMOIRS, publishers of contemporary, 724--737.
+
+  MERSENNE, Père, attacks the Rosacrusians, 647.
+
+  METRES of the ancients used by the moderns, 303.
+
+  MICROSCOPE, invention of, 207.
+
+  MILTON resembles Cædmon, 40--50; his principles of orthography, 392;
+    his account of Charles I. studying Shakespeare, 548, 9.
+
+  MINSTRELS of the Middle Ages, 75.
+
+  MONASTERIES, spoliation of, 316--321.
+
+  MONOPOLIES in the reign of Elizabeth, 594; of printing, 748.
+
+  MONKERY popular with the people, 372.
+
+  MONTAGUE, Mrs., defends Shakespeare, 572.
+
+  MORALITIES, or moral plays, 347.
+
+  MORE, Sir T., his psychological character, 289--302.
+
+  MULCASTER attempts orthographical reform, 385; his praise of the
+    English language, 386.
+
+  MYSTERIES, or Scriptural plays, 344--348.
+
+
+  NOBILITY, the, decline in grandeur in the time of Henry VII., 371;
+    decay of great households, 372; restrained in their marriages by
+    Elizabeth, 374.
+
+
+  OCCASIONALISTS, 423.
+
+  OCCLEVE, the scholar of Chaucer, 191--195.
+
+  OCEANA, the, of Sir J. Harrington, 692--705.
+
+  OLDMIXON denies the genuine character of Clarendon's history,
+    728--732.
+
+  ORTHOEPY as a means of correcting orthography, 382--392.
+
+  ORTHOGRAPHY in the days of Elizabeth, 382--387.
+
+
+  PAINTER'S "Palace of Pleasure," 518.
+
+  PAMPHLETS, their history and value, 685--691.
+
+  PARSONS the Jesuit, 424--427.
+
+  PASTIME of Pleasure, by Hawes, 230--233.
+
+  PARTNERSHIP in dramatic authorship, 523--524.
+
+  PHILOSOPHERS of the 16th century, 651--653.
+
+  PIERS PLOWMAN, his vision, 183--190.
+
+  PINKERTON and his "improved language," 388.
+
+  POLEMICS in the time of James I., 381--384.
+
+  POLITICAL pamphlets, remarkable history of a curious collection,
+    687--691.
+
+  POLYOLBION, by Drayton, analysed, 584--589.
+
+  POPE'S edition of Shakespeare, 558--590, _n._
+
+  POSSESSIONERS, 331.
+
+  PREACHING, when introduced, 326.
+
+  PREDECESSORS of Shakespeare, 514.
+
+  PRESS, the, dreaded by early writers, 670--673.
+
+  PRINTING, invention of, 203--213; first introduced to England,
+    214--220.
+
+  PSYCHOLOGICAL history of Rawleigh, 590.
+
+  PUBLIC LIBRARIES first founded, 661.
+
+  PUBLIC OPINION, rise of, 368--380.
+
+  PURITANS in the time of James I., 681.
+
+  PUTTENHAM'S Arte of English Poesie, 405--412.
+
+
+  RALPH ROISTER DOISTER, the first English comedy, 509.
+
+  RAMUS opposes Aristotle, 652.
+
+  RAWLEIGH, Sir W., his character, 590; his early career, 591; voyages
+    undertaken at his suggestion, 593; his favour at court, 595; his
+    reverse of fortune, 597; his affected romance of love to Elizabeth,
+    _ib._; his first voyage, 598; his restoration to the queen's favour,
+    601; the Cobham conspiracy, 604; unpopularity with James I., _ib._;
+    last voyage, 605; death, 606; his ability as a historiographer, 607;
+    his great general knowledge, 608; his long imprisonment, 610; his
+    philosophical theology, 612.
+
+  REED'S edition of Shakespeare, 568.
+
+  REFORMATION, the, 324.
+
+  RETAINERS of the old Nobility, 370.
+
+  REYNARD the Fox, 260.
+
+  RHYME in Italy and France, 393, 394; origin of, 399--402.
+
+  RHYMING DICTIONARIES, 403.
+
+  ROMANCES, Anglo-Norman, 65; Gothic, 81--95.
+
+  ROMANS, the, in Britain, 13--16.
+
+  ROPER'S Life of More, 291, _n._
+
+  ROSACRUSIAN confraternity, 642.
+
+  ROTA, the, a political club, 699.
+
+  ROWE'S edition of Shakespeare, 557.
+
+  ROY, W., satirizes Wolsey, 280.
+
+  RYMER, and his Shakespearian Criticism, 553--556.
+
+
+  SACKVILLE, Earl of Dorset, the author of the first English tragedy,
+    504.
+
+  SACRAMENT of Rome ridiculed, 334.
+
+  SATIRES, Ancient, 257.
+
+  SATIRISTS, early, 675.
+
+  SAXON CHRONICLE, the, 68.
+
+  SCOGIN THE JESTER, 263, _n._
+
+  SCOT, Reginald, his "Discoverie of Witchcraft," 413--422.
+
+  SELDEN, John, notes Drayton's poem, the "Polyolbion," 586.
+
+  SERVANT'S Song, 511, _n._
+
+  SHADWELL'S Lancashire Witches, 420; founds his dramatic style on
+    Jonson, 582.
+
+  SHAKESPEARE, patronized by James I., 679; indebted to Sidney's Arcadia
+    for some poetic passages,452; his early dramas, 518--523; his
+    predecessors and contemporaries, 514--528; vicissitudes of his fame,
+    529; his use of the plots, &c., of predecessors, 530--532; incidents
+    of his early life, 533, 534; his dramatic career, 534--538; his poems,
+    539--540; his treatment by contemporaries, 541; popularity with the
+    public, 542; careless of his own fame, 543; first edition of his
+    works, 545; editions by Rowe, 557; Pope, 558; Theobald, 559; Sir T.
+    Hanmer, 561; Warburton, 563; Johnson, _ib._; the _Variorum_ edition,
+    567; annotations by Rymer, 553; Farmer, 567; Reed, Steevens, Malone,
+    568; Warton, 569; Voltaire, 566.
+
+  SHIP, the, of Fools, 285--288.
+
+  SIDNEY, Sir P., and his Arcadia, 451--453; his chivalric manners, 454;
+    his appreciation of the female character, 455; his great work
+    published by his sister, 458; the general regret at his death, 459;
+    critical injustice to Sidney from Horace Walpole, 451--458.
+
+  SKELTON the poet, 276--284.
+
+  SKULLS as drinking cups, 32, _n._
+
+  SMITH, Sir T., attempts to correct orthography, 383.
+
+  SONGS, Ancient, 256--259.
+
+  SORCERY, and its believers, 414.
+
+  SPANISH Dramatic History, 526.
+
+  SPELLING, and its difficulties, 389--391.
+
+  SPENSER, incidents of his life little known, 460; his introduction to
+    Sir P. Sidney, _ib._; his Shepherd's Calendar, 461; his mode of Life,
+    462; his Irish adventures, 464--467; his death, 473; his Faery Queen,
+    475--486; its allegorical character, 492.
+
+  SPIRITUAL visions of Dr. Dee, 628--636.
+
+  SPOLIATION of the monasteries, 316--321.
+
+  STAR CHAMBER decrees against books, 751.
+
+  STATIONERS, their origin, 744.
+
+  STEEVENS, edition of Shakespeare, 568.
+
+  STILL, Bishop, the Author of an Early Comedy, 508.
+
+  STONEHENGE, 10, _n._
+
+  SURREY, the poetical Earl of, 303--315.
+
+  SYMPATHETIC POWDER, for magical cures, 616.
+
+
+  TALES, popular, their origin, 261.
+
+  TARLTON'S jest against Sir W. Rawleigh, 595.
+
+  TASSO, explains the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by allegory, 490.
+
+  TECHNICAL terms of Rhetoric, 408.
+
+  TELESCOPE, invention of, 207.
+
+  THEATRES, ancient, in London, 515, 516.
+
+  THEOBALD'S edition of Shakespeare, 559, 560.
+
+  THOMASON'S remarkable collection of political phamphlets, 687--691.
+
+  THORKELIN, the Danish Scholar, 57.
+
+  TINDAL'S Testament, curious narrative concerning, 743.
+
+  TOLAND dishonestly inserts a political libel in Harrington's works,
+    708.
+
+  TOWER OF LONDON, scientific men imprisoned in, 610.
+
+  TRAGEDY, the first English, 503--506.
+
+  TRAVELLERS satirized by Bishop Hall, 378.
+
+  TRAVERS, and his controversy with Hooker, 442, 443.
+
+  TRIADS, Welsh, 22, 23, _n._
+
+  TROYNOVANT founded, 2.
+
+  TYRWHIT, editor of Chaucer, 175.
+
+
+  UDALL, N., author of the first English comedy, 513.
+
+  UNIVERSE, Cudworth's system of the, 714--723.
+
+  UPTON'S edition of Spenser, 495--500.
+
+  UTOPIA, Sir T. More's, 299.
+
+
+  VARIORUM EDITION of Shakespeare, 567.
+
+  VENICE, its government extolled, 693; fallacy of such praise, 702.
+
+  VENTRILOQUISM practised by Magicians, 626.
+
+  VERNACULAR dialects of Europe, 96--110; of England, 124.
+
+  VERSE, Anglo-Saxon, 32.
+
+  VICISSITUDES of the English language, 128--141; of the French, 130; of
+    the Latin, 131.
+
+  VIRGINIA, named by Queen Elizabeth, 593.
+
+  VOLTAIRE criticises Shakespeare, 570--572.
+
+
+  WAR against books, 738--756.
+
+  WARBURTON'S edition of Shakespeare, 562, 563.
+
+  WARTON, T., comments on Shakespeare, 569.
+
+  WEAPON-SALVE, for magical cures, 646.
+
+  WEBSTER, J., his elaborate treatise on witchcraft, 418.
+
+  WELSH memorials of early Britain, 20.
+
+  WICKLIFFE'S translation of the Bible, 123.
+
+  WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, the Monkish historian, 237.
+
+  WILLIAM I. invades England, 59.
+
+  WILSON, Thos., endangered at Rome for his writings on rhetoric, 106;
+    his translation of Demosthenes, 374.
+
+  WITCHCRAFT, early belief in, 413.
+
+  WITCH-FINDERS, 417.
+
+  WOLSEY'S war against the press, 740.
+
+  WOMEN, satires on, 265.
+
+  WYATT, Sir T., the poet, 312--315.
+
+
+  YARRINGTON and his tragedies, 518, _n._
+
+
+
+BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+The following typographical errors have been corrected:
+
+    Page 248: "Three 248 trentballs--that is, thirty masses thrice
+      told--were to be chorused by the Grey Friars; six priests were to
+      perform the high mass, chant the requiem, ..." 'were' amended from
+      'swere'.
+
+    Page 337: "Thus they were buried and coupled together; and a
+      scholar, whether a divine or a philosopher his ambiguous style will
+      not assure us, inscribed this epitaph:--" 'philosopher' amended
+      from 'philosoper'.
+
+    Page 375: "The spirits of that age seemed busied with day-dreams,
+      of discovering a new people, or founding a new kingdom. Shakespeare
+      alludes to this passion of the times:" 'Shakespeare' amended from
+      'Shakspeare'.
+
+    Page 624: "[An account of its use at Freiburg in discovering silver
+      mines, and a picture of its form, may be seen in Dr. Brown's
+      'Travels in Germany,' 4to, 1677, p. 136.]" 'mines' amended from
+      'imines'.
+
+    Page 687: "The age of Charles the First may be characterised as the
+      age of pamphlets." 'characterised' amended from 'charactersied'.
+
+    Page 744: "But the craft did not flourish, when the craftsmen had
+      become numerous." 'craftsmen' amended from 'craftmen'.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMENITIES OF LITERATURE***
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