little naturalness or dignity in his images as purity in his idiom. But his imagination, though extravagant, is vigorous and original." Pibrac; 53. Pibrac, a magistrate of great integrity, obtained an extraordinary reputation by his quatrains; a series of moral tetrastichs in the style of Theognis. These Desportes. first appeared in 1574, fifty in number, and were augmented to 126 in later editions. They were continually republished in the seventeenth century, and translated into many European and even oriental languages. It cannot be wonderful that, in the change of taste and manners, they have ceased to be read. An imitation of the sixth satire of Horace, by Nicolas Rapin, printed in the collection of Auguis, is good and in very pure style. Philippe Desportes, somewhat later, chose a better school than that of Ronsard; he rejected its pedantry and affectation, and by the study of Tibullus, as well as by his natural genius, gave a tenderness and grace to the poetry of love which those pompous versifiers had never sought. He has been esteemed the precursor of a better era; and his versification is rather less lawless," according to La Harpe, than that of his predecessors. metre and 54. The rules of metre became gradually established. Few writers of this period neglect the alternation of French masculine and feminine rhymes; but the open versification. vowel will be found in several of the earlier. Du Bartas almost affects the enjambement, or continuation of the sense beyond the couplet; and even Desportes does not avoid it. Their metres are various; the Alexandrine, if so we may call it, or verse of twelve syllables, was occasionally adopted by Ronsard, and in time displaced the old verse of ten syllables, which became appropriated to the lighter style. The Goujet, xiii. 304. The Semaine of Du Bartas was printed thirty times within six years, and translated into Latin, Italian, German, and Spanish, as well as English. Id. 312, on the authority of La Croix du Maine. Du Bartas, according to a French writer of the next century, used methods of exciting his imagination which I recommend to the attention of young poets. L'on dit en France que Du Bartas, auparavant que de faire cette belle description de cheval où il a si bien rencontré, s'enfermoit quelquefois dans une cham sonnets, as far as I have observed, are regular; and this form, which had been very little known in France, after being introduced by Jodelle and Ronsard, became one of the most popular modes of composition. Several attempts were made to naturalise the Latin metres; but this pedantic innovation could not long have success. Specimens of it may be found in Pasquier." General French poetry. 55. It may be said, perhaps, of French poetry in general, but at least in this period, that it deviates less from character of a certain standard than any other. It is not often low, as may be imputed to the earlier writers, because a peculiar style, removed from common speech, and supposed to be classical, was a condition of satisfying the critics; it is not often obscure, at least in syntax, as the Italian sonnet is apt to be, because the genius of the language and the habits of society demanded perspicuity. But it seldom delights us by a natural sentiment or unaffected grace of diction, because both one and the other were fettered by conventional rules. The monotony of amorous song is more wearisome, if that be possible, than among the Italians. 56. The characteristics of German verse impressed upon it by the meister-singers still remained, though the songs of those fraternities seem to have ceased. It was chiefly didactic or religious, often satirical, and employing the veil of apologue. Luther, Hans Sachs, and other more obscure names, are counted among the fabulists; but the most successful was Burcard Waldis, whose fables, partly from Æsop, partly original, were first published in 1548. German poetry. Bouterwek, v. 212. "Recherches de la France, 1. vii. c. 11. Baif has passed for the inventor of this foolish art in France, which was more common there than in England. But Prosper Marchand ascribes a translation of the Iliad and Odyssey into regular French hexameters to one Mousset, of whom nothing is known; on no better authority, however, than a vague passage of D'Aubigné, who "remembered to have seen such a book sixty years ago.' Though Mousset may be imaginary, he furnishes an article to Marchand, who brings together a good deal of learning as to the latinized French metres of the sixteenth century. Dictionnaire Historique. Passerat, Ronsard, Nicolas Rapin, and Pasquier tried their hands in this style. Rapin improved upon it by rhyming in Sapphics. The following stanzas are from his ode on the death of Ronsard : Vous que les ruisseaux d'Hélicon fréquentez, Contre le destin, &c. &c. The Froschmauseler of Rollenhagen, in 1545, is in a similar style of political and moral apologue with some liveliness of description. Fischart is another of the moral satirists, but extravagant in style and humour, resembling Rabelais, of whose romance he gave a free translation. One of his poems, Die Gluckhafte Schiff, is praised by Bouterwek for beautiful descriptions and happy inventions; but in general he seems to be the Skelton of Germany. Many German ballads belong to this period, partly taken from the old tales of chivalry in these the style is humble, with no poetry except that of invention, which is not their own; yet they are true-hearted and unaffected, and better than what the next age produced.* SECT. IV.-ON ENGLISH POETRY. Paradise of Dainty Devices -- Sackville Improvement in Poetry Gascoyne — Spenser's Shepherd's Kalendar Paradise of Devices. 57. THE poems of Wyatt and Surrey, with several more, first appeared in 1557, and were published in a little book, entitled Tottel's Miscellanies. But as both of these belonged to the reign of Henry VIII., their poetry has come already under our review. It is probable that Lord Vaux's short pieces, which are next to those of Surrey and Wyatt in merit, were written before the middle of the century. Some of these are published in Tottel, and others in a scarce collection; the first edition of which was in 1576, quaintly named, The Paradise of Dainty Devices. The poems in this volume, as in that of Tottel, are not coeval with its publication; it has been supposed to represent the age of Mary, full as much as that of Elizabeth, and one of the chief contributors, if not framers of the collection, Richard Edwards, died in 1566. Thirteen poems are by Lord Vaux, who certainly did not survive the reign of Mary. * Bouterwek, vol. ix. Heinsius, vol. iv. Character of this col 58. We are indebted to Sir Egerton Brydges for the republication, in his British Bibliographer, of the lection. Paradise of Dainty Devices, of which, though there had been eight editions, it is said that not above six copies existed. The poems are almost all short, and by more nearly thirty than twenty different authors. "They do not, it must be admitted," says their editor, "belong to the higher classes; they are of the moral and didactic kind. In their subject there is too little variety, as they deal very generally in the common-places of ethics, such as the fickleness and caprices of love, the falsehood and instability of friendship, and the vanity of all human pleasures. But many of these are often expressed with a vigour which would do credit to any era. ... If my partiality does not mislead me, there is in most of these short pieces some of that indescribable attraction which springs from the colouring of the heart. The charm of imagery is wanting, but the precepts inculcated seem to flow from the feelings of an overloaded bosom." Edwards he considers, probably with justice, as the best of the contributors, and Lord Vaux the next. We should be inclined to give as high a place to William Hunnis, were his productions all equal to one little poem ; but too often he falls into trivial morality and a ridiculous excess of alliteration. The amorous poetry is the best in this Paradise; it is not imaginative or very graceful, or exempt from the false taste of antithetical conceits, but sometimes natural and pleasing; the serious pieces are in general very heavy, yet there is a dignity and strength in some of the devotional strains. They display the religious earnestness of that age with a kind of austere philosophy in their views of life. Whatever indeed be the subject, a tone of sadness reigns through this misnamed Paradise of Daintiness, as it does through all the English poetry of this particular age. It seems as if the confluence y Beloe's Anecdotes of Literature, vol. v. This song is printed in Campbell's Specimens of English Poets, vol. i. p. 117. It begins, "When first mine eyes did view and mark." The little poem of Edwards, called Amantium Iræ, has often been reprinted in modern collections, and is reckoned by Brydges one of the most beautiful in the language. But hardly any light poem of this early period is superior to some lines addressed to Isabella Markham by Sir John Harrington, bearing the date of 1564. If these are genuine, and I know not how to dispute it, they are as polished as any written at the close of the queen's reign. These are not in the Paradise of Dainty Devices. of the poetic melancholy of the Petrarchists with the reflective seriousness of the Reformation overpowered the lighter sentiments of the soul; and some have imagined, I know not how justly, that the persecutions of Mary's reign contributed to this effect. Sackville's 59. But at the close of that dark period, while bigotry might be expected to render the human heart torpid, and the English nation seemed too fully Induction. absorbed in religious and political discontent to take much relish in literary amusements, one man shone out for an instant in the higher walks of poetry. This was Thomas Sackville, many years afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and high treasurer of England, thus withdrawn from the haunts of the Muses to a long and honourable career of active life. The Mirrour of Magistrates, published in 1559, is a collection of stories by different authors, on the plan of Boccaccio's prose work, De Casibus virorum illustrium, recounting the misfortunes and reverses of men eminent in English history. It was designed to form a series of dramatic soliloquies united in one interlude." Sackville, who seems to have planned the scheme, wrote an Induction, or prologue, and also one of the stories, that of the first Duke of Buckingham. The Induction displays best his poetical genius; it is, like much earlier poetry, a representation of allegorical personages, but with a fertility of imagination, vividness of description, and strength of language, which not only leave his predecessors far behind, but may fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser. Sackville's Induction forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the Faery Queen. It would certainly be vain to look in Chaucer, wherever Chaucer is original, for the grand creations of Sackville's fancy, yet we should never find any one who would rate Sackville above Chaucer. The strength of an eagle is not to be measured only by the height of his place, but by the time that he continues on the wing. Sackville's Induction consists of a few hundred a Warton, iv. 40. A copious account of the Mirrour for Magistrates occupies the forty-eighth and three following sections of the History of Poetry, p. 33105. In this Warton has introduced rather a long analysis of the Inferno of Dante, which he seems to have thought little known to the English public, as in that age, I believe, was the case. |