lines; and even in these there is a monotony of gloom and sorrow, which prevents us from wishing it to be longer. It is truly styled by Campbell a landscape on which the sun never shines. Chaucer is various, flexible, and observant of all things in outward nature, or in the heart of man. But Sackville is far above the frigid elegance of Surrey; and, in the first days of Elizabeth's reign, is the herald of that splendour in which it was to close.

years of

60. English poetry was not speedily animated by the Inferiority of example of Sackville. His genius stands absopoets in early lutely alone in the age to which as a poet he Elizabeth. belongs. Not that there was any deficiency in the number of versifiers; the Muses were honoured by the frequency, if not by the dignity, of their worshippers. A different sentence will be found in some books; and it has become common to elevate the Elizabethan age in one undiscriminating panegyric. For wise counsellors, indeed, and acute politicians, we could not perhaps extol one part of that famous reign at the expense of another. Cecil and Bacon, Walsingham, Smith, and Sadler, belong to the earlier days of the queen. But in a literary point of view, the contrast is great between the first and second moiety of her four-and-forty years. We have seen this already in other subjects than poetry; and in that we may appeal to such parts of the Mirrour of Magistrates as are not written by Sackville, to the writings of Churchyard, or to those of Gouge and Turberville. These writers scarcely venture to leave the ground, or wander in the fields of fancy. They even abstain from the ordinary commonplaces of verse, as if afraid that the reader should distrust or misinterpret their images. The first who deserves to be mentioned as an exception is George Gascoyne, whose Steel Glass, published in 1576, is the earliest instance of English satire, and has strength and sense enough to deserve respect. Chalmers has praised it highly. "There is a vein of sly sarcasm in this piece which appears to me to be original; and his intimate knowledge of mankind enabled him to give a more curious picture of the dress, manners, amusements, and follies of the times, than we meet with in almost any other author. His Steel Glass is among the first specimens of blank

Gascoyne.

verse in our language." This blank verse, however, is but indifferently constructed. Gascoyne's long poem, called the Fruits of War, is in the doggerel style of his age; and the general commendations of Chalmers on this poet seem rather hyperbolical. But his minor poems, especially one called The Arraignment of a Lover, have much spirit and gaiety; and we may leave him a respectable place among the Elizabethan versifiers.

Shepherd's

61. An epoch was made, if we may draw an inference from the language of contemporaries, by the publi- Spenser's cation of Spenser's Shepherd's Kalendar in 1579. Kalendar. His primary idea, that of adapting a pastoral to every month of the year, was pleasing and original, though he has frequently neglected to observe the season, even when it was most abundant in appropriate imagery. But his Kalendar is, in another respect, original, at least when compared with the pastoral writings of that age. This species of composition had become so much the favourite of courts, that no language was thought to suit it but that of courtiers, which, with all its false beauties of thought and expression, was transferred to the mouths of shepherds. A striking instance of this had lately been shown in the Aminta; and it was a proof of Spenser's judgment, as well as genius, that he struck out a new line of pastoral, far more natural, and therefore more pleasing, so far as imitation of nature is the source of poetical pleasure, instead of vying, in our more harsh and uncultivated language, with the consummate elegance of Tasso. It must be admitted, however, that he fell too much into the opposite extreme, and gave a Doric rudeness to his dialogue, which is a little repulsive to our taste. The dialect of Theocritus is musical to our ears, and free from vulgarity; praises which we cannot bestow on the uncouth provincial rusticity of Spenser. He has been less justly censured on another account, for intermingling allusions to the political history and religious differences of his own times; and an ingenious critic has asserted that the de

b Ellis's Specimens. Campbell's Specimens, ii. 146.

The Shepherd's Kalendar was printed anonymously. It is ascribed to Sidney by Whetstone in a monody on

his death, in 1536. But Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetry, published the same year, mentions Spenser by

name.

scription of the grand and beautiful objects of nature, with well-selected scenes of rural life, real but not coarse, constitute the only proper materials of pastoral poetry. These limitations, however, seem little conformable to the practice of poets or the taste of mankind; and if Spenser has erred in the allegorical part of his pastorals, he has done so in company with most of those who have tuned the shepherd's pipe. Several of Virgil's Eclogues, and certainly the best, have a meaning beyond the simple songs of the hamlet; and it was notorious that the Portuguese and Spanish pastoral romances, so popular in Spenser's age, teemed with delineations of real character, and sometimes were the mirrors of real story. In fact, mere pastoral must soon become insipid, unless it borrows something from active life or elevated philosophy. The most interesting parts of the Shepherd's Kalendar are of this description; for Spenser has not displayed the powers of his own imagination, so strongly as we might expect, in pictures of natural scenery. This poem has spirit and beauty in many passages; but is not much read in the present day, nor does it seem to be approved by modern critics. It was otherwise formerly. Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, calls Spenser "the rightest English poet he ever read," and thinks he would have surpassed Theocritus and Virgil, "if the coarseness of our speech had been no greater impediment to him, than their pure native tongues were to them." And Drayton says, "Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his name, had he only given us his Shepherd's Kalendar, a masterpiece, if any.

Sidney's

contempo

" d

62. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poesie, which may have been written at any time between 1581 character of and his death in 1586, laments that "poesy thus rary poets. embraced in all other places, should only find in our time a bad welcome in England;" and, after praising Sackville, Surrey, and Spenser for the Shepherd's Kalendar, does not "remember to have seen many more that have poetical sinews in them. For proof whereof, let but most of the verses be put into prose, and then ask the

d Preface to Drayton's Pastorals.

meaning, and it will be found that one verse did but beget another, without ordering at the first what should be at the last; which becomes a confused mass of words, with a tinkling sound of rhyme, barely accompanied with reason. Truly many of such writings as come under the banner of irresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches as men that had rather read lovers' writings, and so caught up certain swelling phrases, than that in truth they feel those passions."

Improve

ment soon

after this time.

63. It cannot be denied that some of these blemishes are by no means unusual in the writers of the Elizabethan age, as in truth they are found also in much other poetry of many countries. But a change seems to have come over the spirit of English poetry soon after 1580. Sidney, Raleigh, Lodge, Breton, Marlowe, Greene, Watson, are the chief contributors to a collection called England's Helicon, published in 1600, and comprising many of the fugitive pieces of the last twenty years. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, in 1602, is a miscellany of the same class. A few other collections are known to have existed, but are still more scarce than these. England's Helicon, by far the most important, has been reprinted in the same volume of the British Bibliographer as the Paradise of Dainty Devices. In this juxta-position the difference of their tone is very perceptible. Love occupies by far the chief portion of the later miscellany; and love no longer pining and melancholy, but sportive and boastful. Every one is familiar with the beautiful song of Marlowe, "Come live with me and be my love;" and with the hardly less beautiful answer ascribed to Raleigh. Lodge has ten pieces in this collection, and Breton eight. These are generally full of beauty, grace, and simplicity; and while in reading the productions of Edwards and his coadjutors every sort of allowance is to be made, and we can only praise a little at intervals, these lyrics, twenty or thirty years later, are among the best in our language. The conventional tone

e

[It was much enlarged in 1608 and been reprinted by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1621, and is not now scarce, having 1826.-1847.]

is that of pastoral; and thus, if they have less of the depth sometimes shown in serious poetry, they have less also of obscurity and false refinement.

of moral

64. We may easily perceive in the literature of the Relaxation later period of the queen, what our biographical austerity. knowledge confirms, that much of the austerity characteristic of her earlier years had vanished away. The course of time, the progress of vanity, the prevalent dislike, above all, of the Puritans, avowed enemies of gaiety, concurred to this change. The most distinguished courtiers, Raleigh, Essex, Blount, and we must add Sidney, were men of brilliant virtues, but not without licence of morals; while many of the wits and poets, such as Nash, Greene, Peele, Marlowe, were notoriously of very dissolute lives.

Serious

65. The graver strains, however, of religion and philosophy were still heard in verse. The Soul's poetry. Errand, printed anonymously in Davison's Rhapsody, and ascribed by Ellis, probably without reason, to Silvester, is characterized by strength, condensation, and simplicity. And we might rank in a respectable place among these English poets, though I think he has been lately overrated, one whom the jealous law too prematurely deprived of life, Robert Southwell, executed as a seminary priest in 1591, under one of those persecuting statutes which even the traitorous restlessness of the English Jesuits cannot excuse. Southwell's poetry wears a deep tinge of gloom, which seems to presage a catastrophe too usual to

Ellis, in the second volume of his Specimens of English Poets, has taken largely from this collection. It must be owned that his good taste in selection gives a higher notion of the poetry of this age than, on the whole, it would be found to deserve; yet there is so much of excellence in England's Helicon, that he has been compelled to omit many pieces of great merit.

Campbell reckons this, and I think justly, among the best pieces of the Elizabethan age. Brydges gives it to Raleigh without evidence, and we may add, without probability. It is found in manuscripts, according to Mr. Campbell, of the date of 1593. Such poems as this could only be written by a man who

had seen and thought much; while the ordinary Latin and Italian verses of this age might be written by any one who had a knack of imitation and a good ear. [It was published in the second edition of Davison, 1608, with the title, The Lie. In Silvester's works it bears the present title. Its publication therein would of course be presumptive evidence that he was the author, were it not weakened, as Sir Harris Nicolas observes, by the circumstance that it is also published among the poems of the Earl of Pembroke. If it is really found, as Campbell tells us, in a manuscript of 1593, Pembroke's claim must be out of the question.-1847.]