mantic and allegoric fiction. Hawes was both a scholar and a traveller, and was perfectly familiar with the French and Italian poetry as well as with that of his own country. It speaks very little, however, for his taste, that, among the preceding English poets, he has evidently made Lydgate his model, even if it should be admitted that, as Warton affirms, he has added some new graces to the manner of that cold and wordy versifier. Lydgate and Hawes may stand together as perhaps the two writers who, in the century and a half that followed the death of Chaucer, contributed most to carry forward the regulation and modernisation of the language which he began; their mere poetical merits are not worth contending about. Barklay, who did not die till 1552, when he had attained a great age, employed his pen principally in translations, in which line his most celebrated performance is his Ship of Fools,' from the German of Sebastian Brandt, which was printed in 1509. Barklay, however, besides consulting both a French and a Latin version of Brandt's poem, has enlarged his original with the enumeration and description of a considerable variety of follies which he found flourishing among his own countrymen. This gives the work some value as a record of the English manners of the time; and the verse has also rather more facility than was then common; but both its poetical and its satirical pretensions are of the very humblest order. At this date our best writers of what was called poetry seem to have been occupied with the words in which they were to clothe their ideas, almost to the exclusion of all the higher objects of the poetic art. And that, perhaps, is what of necessity happens at a particular stage in the progress of a nation's literature at the stage corresponding to the transitionstate in the growth of the human being between the termination of free, rejoicing boyhood, and the full assurance of manhood begun; which is peculiarly the season not of achievement but of preparation, not of accomplishing ends but of acquiring the use of means and instruments, and also, it may be added, of the aptitude to mistake the one of these things for the other.

Nor is there anything that is of much more intrinsic value in the poetry, so called, of the earlier part of the reign of Henry VIII. Among the writers in verse of this date the most famous name is that of John Skelton, the satirist, who is, however, little better than a rhyming buffoon, and the greater part of whose ribaldry is now nearly unintelligible. It may be doubted, indeed, if a considerable portion of his grotesque, incoherent jingle ever had much more than a sort of halfdrunken meaning. He rattles along, however, through sense and nonsense, with a vivacity that had been a stranger to English poetry for many a weary day; and his freedom and spirit, unrefined as they were, may have done something to shake the Muse of his country out of her long fit of somnolency, and to whet the popular taste for the enjoyment of a higher strain than his own. Skel

ton, who died in 1529 in the sanctuary of Westminster, where he had taken refuge to escape the vengeance of Cardinal Wolsey, long the chief butt at which he had shot his satiric shafts, was in his own day a great popular favourite; Ritson has enumerated nearly a score of his publications, most of which were more than once printed. For all the coarseness of his English rhymes, too, it is remarkable that he was one of the first classical scholars of his time, and wrote Latin verse with great purity. Indeed, he is styled by Erasmus Britannicarum literarum decus et lumen (the light and ornament of English letters). Along with Skelton may be classed William Roy,-the same who assisted Tyndal in his translation of the New Testament,-who is asserted by Bale to be the author of a singular work entitled 'Read me and be not wroth, for I say nothing but troth,' which is supposed to have been first printed abroad about 1525.* This is also a satire upon Wolsey and the clergy in general, and is as bitter as might be expected from the supposed author, who, having begun his life as a friar, spent the best part of it in the service of the Reformation, and finished it at the stake. His verses display much less coarseness, and also more true vigour, than the generality of Skelton's effusions; but neither of these modern clergy-scourgers is more than a puny whipster compared with the sturdy old inditer of the 'Visions of Pierce Ploughman,' who flourished a century and a half before them. lines are thongs, theirs threads. Among the buffoonpoets of this age, and there were no others, is also to be reckoned John Heywood, styled the Epigrammatist, from the six centuries of Epigrams, or versified jokes, which form a remarkable portion of his works. Heywood's conversational jocularity has the equivocal credit of having been exceedingly consoling both to the old age of Henry VIII. and to his daughter Queen Mary; it must have been strong jesting that could move the sense of the ludicrous in either of these terrible personages. Besides a number of plays, which are the most important of his productions, Heywood also wrote a long burlesque allegory, which fills a thick quarto volume, on the dispute between the old and the new religions, under the title of A Parable of the Spider and the Fly;" where it appears that by the spider is intended the Protestant party, by the fly the Catholic, but in which, according to the judgment of old Harrison, "he dealeth so profoundly, and beyond all measure of skill, that neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach unto the meaning thereof.+"

His

But while in England the new life to which poetry had awakened had thus as yet produced nothing better than ribaldry and buffoonery, it is remarkable that in Scotland, where social civilization in general was certainly much less advanced, the art had already been extensively cultivated in Ritson's Bibliog. Poet., p. 318. Description of England.

its higher departments, and at this very time, or a few years earlier, one at least of its greatest masters was enriching his land's language with compositions worthy of any age. The truth is, that the Scottish poetry of the early part of the sixteenth century was but the same spring which had visited England in the latter part of the fourteenth, the impulse originally given by the poetry of Chaucer only now come to its height in that northern clime. For it was a curious consequence of the relative circumstances of the two countries, that while the literature of Scotland, the poorer and ruder of the two, could exert no influence upon that of England, the literature of England could not fail powerfully to affect and modify that of its more backward neighbour. No English writer would think of studying or imitating Barbour; but every Scottish poet who arose after Chaucer would seek, or, even if he did not seek, would still inevitably catch, some inspiration from that great example. If it could in any circumstances have happened that Chaucer should have remained unknown in Scotland, the singular fortunes of James I. were shaped as if on purpose to transfer the voice and spirit of his poetry into the literature of that country. James expressly calls Chaucer and Gower his "maisters dear." From this time forward the native voice of the Scottish Muse was mixed with this other foreign voice. Robert Henryson, the author of the beautiful pastoral of Robin and Makyn,' which is popularly known from having been printed by Bishop Percy in his Reliques,' has two poems entitled the 'Testament of Fair Cresseide,' and the Complaint of Cresseide,' designed as continuations or supplements to Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseide.' All that is known of the era of Henryson is, that he was alive and very old about the close of the fifteenth century. Gawin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who flourished in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and who is famous for his translation of the 'Eneid,' the first metrical version of any ancient classic that had yet appeared in the dialect of either kingdom, affects great anxiety to eschew "Southron," or English, and to write his native tongue in all its breadth and plainness; but it does not follow, from his avoidance of English words, that he may not have formed himself to a great extent on the study of English models. At the same time it may be admitted that neither in his translation nor in his original works of King Hart,' and the' Palace of Honour,'-which are two long allegories, full, the latter especially, of passages of great descriptive beauty,-does Douglas convict himself of belonging to the school of Chaucer. He is rather, if not the founder, at least the chief representative, of a style of poetry which was attempted to be formed in Scotland by enriching and elevating the simplicity of Barbour and his immediate followers with an infusion of something of what was deemed a classic manner, drawn in part directly from the Latin writers, but more from those of the worst than those of the best

age, in part from the French poetry, which now began in like manner to aspire towards a classic tone. This preference, by the Scottish poets, of Latin and French to Southron," as a source from which to supply the deficiencies of their native dialect, had probably no more reasonable origin than the political circumstances and feelings of the nation; the genius of the language itself was wholly opposed to it, and it therefore never could become more than a temporary fashion. Yet it infected more or less all the writers of this age; and among the rest, to a considerable extent, by far the greatest of them all, William Dunbar. This admirable master, alike of serious and comic song, may justly be styled the Chaucer of Scotland, whether we look to the wide range of his genius, or to his eminence in every style over all the poets of his country who preceded and all who for ages came after him. That of Burns is certainly the only name among the Scottish poets that can yet be placed on the same line with that of Dunbar; and even the inspired ploughman, though the equal of Dunbar in comic power, and his superior in depth of passion, does not approach the elder poet either in grandeur or in general fertility of imagination. Finally, to close the list, comes another great name, that of Sir David Lyndsay, whose productions are not indeed characterised by any high imaginative power, but yet display infinite wit, spirit, and variety in all the forms of the more familiar poetry. Lyndsay was the favourite, throughout his brief reign and life, of the accomplished and unfortunate James V., and survived to do perhaps as good service as any in the war against the ancient church by the tales, plays, and other products of his abounding satiric vein, with which he fed, and excited, and lashed up the popular contempt for the now crazy and tumbling fabric once so imposing and so venerated. Perhaps he also did no harm by thus taking off a little of the acrid edge of mere resentment and indignation with the infusion of a dash of merriment, and keeping alive a genial sense of the ludicrous in the midst of such serious work. If Dunbar is to be compared to Burns, Lyndsay may be said to have his best representative among the more recent Scottish poets in Allan Ramsay, who does not, however, come so near to Lyndsay by a long way as Burns does to Dunbar.

Lyndsay is supposed to have survived till about the year 1567.* Before that date a revival of the higher poetry had come upon England like the rising of a new day. Two names are commonly placed together at the head of our new poetical literature, Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt; but the former has in every way the best title to precedence. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, memorable in our history as the last victim of the capricious and sanguinary tyranny of Henry VIII., had already, in his short life, which was terminated by the axe of the executioner in his twenty-seventh year, carried away from all his countrymen the Irving's Lives of the Scottish Poets. 2nd edit. 1810, ii. 83.

laurels both of knighthood and of song. The superior polish alone of the best of Surrey's verses would place him at an immeasurable distance in advance of all his immediate predecessors. remarkable, indeed, is the contrast in this respect which his poetry presents to theirs, that in modern times there has been claimed for Surrey the honour of having been the first to introduce our existing system of rhythm into the language. Even Chaucer, it is contended, only wrote in what may be called accentual metre, that is to say, in metre regulated by the number of accents; Surrey was our first writer in syllabic metre, or metre regulated by the number both of accents and syllables. This notion we hold to be quite unfounded, believing the verse of Chaucer to be as regular, even according to the syllabic system of rhythm, as that of Surrey, having in fact, independently of other considerations, been evidently borrowed from the same Italian examples on which Surrey appears to have chiefly formed himself; and the whole apparent prosodial difference between the poetry of the one and that of the other being occasioned by the change which had taken place in the interim in the pronunciation of the language. The true merit of Surrey is, that, proceeding upon the same system of versification which had been introduced by Chaucer, and which indeed had in principle been followed by all the writers after Chaucer, however rudely or imperfectly some of them may have succeeded in the practice of it, he restored to our poetry a correctness, polish, and general spirit of refinement such as it had not known since Chaucer's time, and of which, therefore, in the language as now spoken, there was no previous example whatever. To this

it

may be added that he appears to have been the first in this age (but here, too, Chaucer was before him) who sought to modulate his strains after that elder poetry of Italy, which thenceforward became one of the chief fountain-heads of inspiration to that of England throughout the whole space of time over which is shed the golden light of the names of Spenser, of Shakspeare, and of Milton. Surrey's own imagination was neither rich nor soaring; and the highest qualities of his poetry, in addition to the facility and general mechanical perfection of the versification, are delicacy and tenderness. It is altogether a very light and bland Favonian breeze. The poetry of his friend Wyatt is of a different character, neither so flowing in form nor so uniformly gentle in spirit, but perhaps making up for its greater ruggedness by a force and a depth of sentiment occasionally which Surrey does not reach.

The poems of Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt were first published together in 1557. In 1559 appeared the first edition of 'The Mirror for Magistrates,' a collection of narratives of the lives of various remarkable personages who had figured in our history, taken in general, with little more embellishment than their reduction to a metrical form, from the common chronicles. The idea of the work appears to have been borrowed

from a Latin treatise of Boccaccio's, which had been translated and versified many years before by Lydgate, under the title of "The Fall of Princes;' but it is of note in the history of our poetry simply in consequence of two pieces which it contains, the Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham, and the Induction preceding it, both the composition of Thomas Sackville, then a very young man, and probably a student of law, but afterwards ennobled by the titles of Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. These poems evince a strength of creative imagination which had been unknown to the English Muse since the days of Chaucer; and the Induction especially, which is throughout a splendid gallery of allegoric paintings, entitles Sackville to the renown of having had no small share in lighting the way to the greatest painter in our own or any other poetry-the divine author of the Fairy Queen.

The

Edmund Spenser, born in London about the year 1553, had already published several minor works, when, in 1590, he gave to the world the three first books of his great poem; the three others, which leave it still unfinished, did not appear till 1596; and he died in January, 1599. Without calling Spenser the greatest of all poets, we may still say that his poetry is the most poetical of all poetry. Other poets are all of them something else as well as poets, and deal in reflection, or reasoning, or humour, or wit, almost as largely as in the pure product of the imaginative faculty; his strains alone are poetry, all poetry, and nothing but poetry. It is vision unrolled after vision, to the sound of endlessly varying music. "shaping spirit of imagination," considered apart from moral sensibility,-from intensity of passion on the one hand and grandeur of conception on the other, certainly never was possessed in the like degree by any other writer; nor has any other shown a deeper feeling of all forms of the beautiful; nor have words ever been made by any other to embody thought with more wonderful art. The language of Spenser has been usually described as being of a more antique cast than that commonly written in his day, and he has been supposed to have thus reverted to the English of an earlier age on some principle of poetic propriety or effect; but the notion that the general contexture of his style has anything antiquated about it is certainly unfounded. He affects a very few archaic words and forms, scarcely half a dozen in all,--and, excepting the occasional intrusion of one of these, there is nothing in his vocabulary or grammar to distinguish him from other writers of the same date. Indeed, much of his verse has rather an

unusually modern air. There are passages of many lines in his 'Mother Hubbard's Tale,' especially, which almost anticipate the rounded flow of Dryden and the terseness of Pope.

But England was now a land of song, and the most poetical age of our national literature had fairly commenced. The minor Elizabethan poetry is for the most part distinguished by ingenuity

and elaboration, often carried to the length of quaintness both in the thought and the expression; but if there be more in it of art than of nature, the art is still that of a high school, and always lies in something more than in the mere disguising of prose in the dress of poetry. If it is sometimes unnatural, it is at least very seldom simply insipid, like much of the well-sounding verse of more recent times. The writers are always in earnest either with their nature or their art; they never write from no impulse and with no object except that of stringing common-places into rhyme or rhythm; their verses, when not very good, are apt to be at least, what is the next best thing in poetry, very bad; they rarely fall into that mere mediocrity which, venial elsewhere, it has long been. agreed is the deadliest of sins in this art by gods, by men, and by booksellers,

mediocribus esse poetis

Non homines, non dii, non concessere columne.

In the long list of these minor names of the Elizabethan poetry appears the bright name of William Shakspeare. Shakspeare published his Venus and Adonis in 1593, and his Tarquin and Lucrece in 1594; his Passionate Pilgrim did not appear till 1599; the Sonnets not till 1609. It is almost certain, however, that the first-mentioned of these pieces, which, in his dedication of it to the Earl of Southampton, he calls the first heir of his invention, was written some years before its publication; for at the latter date he had already produced several of his dramas, as we know from more than one contemporary testimony. Indeed, it is probable that all the other poetry we have of Shakspeare's was composed before his dramas. It is the utterance of that spirit of highest invention and sweetest song before it had found its proper theme; but much is here, also, though still immature, that is all Shaksperian-the vivid conception, the inexhaustible fertility and richness of thought and imagery, the glowing passion, the gentleness withal that is ever of the poetry as it was of the man, the enamoured sense of beauty, the living words, the ear-delighting and heart-enthralling music, nay, even the dramatic instinct itself, and the idea at least, if not always the realization, of that sentiment of all-subordinating and consummating art of which his dramas are the most wonderful exemplification among the creations of human genius. Notwithstanding all this, however, it must be admitted that the manner of this early poetry of Shakspeare is not the highest ; it abounds for the greater part in the conceits and quaintnesses, and intricate involutions and tortuosities of all kinds, which infected the early spring of our modern English poetry; and this strengthens the belief that, although published after, the Venus and Adonis, and Tarquin and Lucrece, at least, must have been composed before the appearance of the first part of the Fairy Queen.

The chief glory of what is commonly called the Elizabethan age of our poetry, the drama of

Shakspeare and his contemporaries, belongs, in truth, more properly to the commencement of the next period; and we shall reserve the consideration of it till then, contenting ourselves for the present with merely noting the successive steps in the progress of our national drama up to this, the era of its maturity and perfection. From the first introduction of dramatic representations in England, probably as far back as the beginning of the twelfth century, down to the beginning of the fifteenth, or perhaps somewhat later, the only species of drama known was that styled the Miracle, or MiraclePlay. The subjects of the miracle-plays were all taken from the histories of the Old and New Testament, or from the legends of saints and martyrs; and, indeed, it is probable that their original design was chiefly to instruct the people in religious knowledge. They were often acted as well as written by clergymen, and were presented in abbeys, in churches, and in churchyards, on Sundays or other holidays. It appears to have been not till some time after their first introduction that

miracle-plays came to be annually represented under the direction and at the expense of the guilds or trading companies of towns, as at Chester and elsewhere. The characters, or dramatis persona, of the miracle-plays, though sometimes supernatural or legendary, were always actual personages, historical or imaginary; and in that respect these primitive plays approached nearer to the regular drama than those by which they were succeeded, the Morals, or Moral-plays, in which not a history, but an apologue was represented, and in which the characters were all allegorical. The moral-plays are traced back to the early part of the reign of Henry VI., and they appear to have gradually arisen out of the miracle-plays, in which, of course, characters very nearly approaching in their nature to the impersonated vices and virtues of the new species of drama must have occasionally appeared. The Devil of the Miracles, for example, would very naturally suggest the Vice of the Morals; which latter, however, it is to be observed, also retained the Devil of their predecessors, who was too amusing and popular a character to be discarded. Nor did the moral-plays altogether put down the miracle-plays: in many of the provincial towns, at least, the latter continued to be represented almost to as late a date as the former. Finally, by a process of natural transition very similar to that by which the sacred and supernatural characters of the religious drama had been converted into the allegorical personifications of the moral-plays, these last, gradually becoming less and less vague and shadowy, at length, about the middle of the sixteenth century, boldly assumed life and reality, giving birth to the first examples of that regular tragedy and comedy, the rise and progress of which it will be our task to detail in the next Book.

We will then also pursue the history of English Music from the point to which we brought it down in the last Book.

In every period of the history of the fine arts a taste for excessive decoration has invariably been an indication of their decline. To this point we have already traced the progress of Gothic architecture in England; and it was fast verging toward the degradation into which it had long fallen on the Continent, when those mighty revolutions were consummated in arts, literature, and religion, which nearly at the same moment extinguished the Gothic style, and overthrew the power by which its most stupendous monuments had been raised.

It is, however, by no means true that the establishment of the reformed church in England, and the decline of ecclesiastical architecture, stand to each other in the immediate relation of cause and effect. The violent measures of Henry VIII. only brought the era of ecclesiastical architecture to its termination more abruptly in this country than elsewhere; for it must be remembered, that sooner or later its splendour has been universally eclipsed, independently of the interposition of any change in religion or religious government. In England its history may be considered to terminate with the reign of Henry VII., since no ecclesiastical building of importance originated in that of his successor; and the Abbey Church of Bath, begun by Bishop King in the year 1500, is the only edifice of that class referrible to the sixteenth century. Architecture has found few more liberal patrons than Wolsey. Like the prelates of earlier days, he was a proficient in the art,* which he encouraged with the unbounded munificence characteristic of all his pursuits and undertakings. Yet this princely churchman founded no monastery and rebuilt no cathedral. His buildings were consecrated to those institutions for the advancement of learning and science for which "Christendom shall ever speak his virtue," or to the display of that lofty ostentation in which he sought to rival his sovereign. The shadow was already

The design of the graceful tower of Maudlin College, Oxford, is traditionally ascribed to him.

cast upon ecclesiastical architecture, even in the dominions of the " Defender of the Faith."

We have already noticed, by anticipation, the parish churches and chantry chapels in which the ecclesiastical and monumental Gothic of this period shone out brilliantly ere it sunk for ever. Its subsequent history may be dispatched in a few words. As we advance toward the middle of the sixteenth century, the Gothic style begins to exhibit extreme negligence in the composition and proportion of its parts, even when entirely free from any mixture of the Italian decoration which was rapidly advancing to displace it. Some few examples may be found in which the Gothic style ran pure, though on the lees, to the end of the sixteenth century. Bath Abbey, the progress of which had been interrupted at the Reformation, and was not resumed until the reign of Elizabeth (it was not, indeed, entirely completed till the year 1616), is one of the last, and exhibits throughout the most unequivocal marks of decline.

From this period unmixed Gothic architecture is extinct; and, if later examples occur, they only prove the art to have sunk into that hopeless state of imbecility which resorts to imitation. The court of Jesus College, Cambridge, which dates as late as the reign of Charles I., bears no signs of progression, but might pass for a structure of the first half of the sixteenth century, while the outer gateway is remarkable for its resemblance-perhaps unique in this country-to the French Gothic of the same period.

The close of the ecclesiastical era, so far from operating to the discouragement of architecture in general, had the effect of advancing it with a fresh impetus, by directing into a new channel the wealth which it was still the pride and pleasure of the English nobles to appropriate to building. Castellated architecture was no more. The progress of events had softened the feudal baron into a courtier. His "bruised arms" were "hung up for monuments"-his "stern alarums changed to