have been unexpected. It is, as may be supposed, almost wholly religious; the shorter pieces are the best."

Poetry of

Sidney.

66. Astrophel and Stella, a series of amatory poems by Sir Philip Sidney, though written nearly ten years before, was published in 1591. These songs and sonnets recount the loves of Sidney and Lady Rich, sister of Lord Essex; and it is rather a singular circumstance that, in her own and her husband's lifetime, this ardent courtship of a married woman should have been deemed fit for publication. Sidney's passion seems indeed to have been unsuccessful, but far enough from being platonic. Astrophel and Stella is too much disfigured by conceits, but is in some places very beautiful; and it is strange that Chalmers, who reprinted Turberville and Warner, should have left Sidney out of his collection of British poets. A poem by the writer just mentioned, Warner, with the quaint title, Albion's England, 1586, has at least the equivocal merit of great length. It is rather legendary than historical; some passages are pleasing, but it is not a work of genius, and the style, though natural, seldom rises above that of prose.

mium of

Spenser.

67. Spenser's Epithalamium on his own marriage, written perhaps in 1594, is of a far higher mood Epithala than anything we have named. It is a strain redolent of a bridegroom's joy, and of a poet's fancy. The English language seems to expand itself with a copiousness unknown before, while he pours forth the varied imagery of this splendid little poein. I do not know any other nuptial song, ancient or modern, of equal beauty. It is an intoxication of ecstasy, ardent, noble, and pure. But it pleased not Heaven that these day-dreams of genius and virtue should be undisturbed.

h I am not aware that Southwell has gained any thing by a republication of his entire poems in 1817. Headley and Ellis had culled the best specimens. St. Peter's Complaint, the longest of his poems, is wordy and tedious; and in reading the volume I found scarce any thing of merit which I had not seen before.

i Godwin having several years since made some observations on Sidney's

amour with Lady Rich, a circumstance which such biographers as Dr. Zouch take good care to suppress, a gentleman who published an edition of Sidney's Defence of Poetry thought fit to indulge in recriminating attacks on Godwin himself. It is singular that men of sense and education should persist in fancying that such arguments are likely to convince any dispassionate reader.

Poems of

68. Shakspeare's Venus and Adonis appears to have been published in 1593, and his Rape of Lucrece Shakspeare. the following year. The redundance of blossoms in these juvenile effusions of his unbounded fertility obstructs the reader's attention, and sometimes almost leads us to give him credit for less reflection and sentiment than he will be found to display. The style is flowing, and, in general, more perspicuous than the Elizabethan poets are wont to be. But I am not sure that they would betray themselves for the works of Shakspeare, had they been anonymously published.

Daniel and

69. In the last decad of this century several new poets came forward. Samuel Daniel is one of these. Drayton. His Complaint of Rosamond, and probably many of his minor poems, belong to this period; and it was also that of his greatest popularity. On the death of Spenser, in 1598, he was thought worthy to succeed him as poetlaureate; and some of his contemporaries ranked him in the second place; an eminence due rather to the purity of his language than to its vigour. Michael Drayton, who first tried his shepherd's pipe with some success in the usual style, published his Barons' Wars in 1598. They relate to the last years of Edward II., and conclude with the execution of Mortimer under his son. This poem, therefore, seems to possess a sufficient unity, and, tried by rules of criticism, might be thought not far removed from the class of epic-a dignity, however, to which it has never pretended. But in its conduct Drayton follows history very closely, and we are kept too much in mind of a common chronicle. Though not very pleasing, however, in its general effect, this poem, The Barons' Wars, contains several passages of considerable beauty, which men of greater renown, especially Milton, who availed himself largely of all the poetry of the preceding age, have been willing to imitate.

70. A more remarkable poem is that of Sir John Davies, afterwards chief-justice of Ireland, enof Davies. titled, Nosce Teipsum, published in 1599, usually,

Nosce

Teipsum

* British Bibliographer, vol. ii. Head- by contemporary critics as the polisher ley remarks that Daniel was spoken of and purifier of the English language.

though rather inaccurately, called, On the Immortality of the Soul. Perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which fewer languid verses will be found. Yet, according to some definitions, the Nosce Teipsum is wholly unpoetical, inasmuch as it shows no passion and little fancy. If it reaches the heart at all, it is through the reason. But since strong argument in terse and correct style fails not to give us pleasure in prose, it seems strange that it should lose its effect when it gains the aid of regular metre to gratify the ear and assist the memory. Lines there are in Davies which far outweigh much of the descriptive and imaginative poetry of the last two centuries, whether we estimate them by the pleasure they impart to us, or by the intellectual vigour they display. Experience has shown that the faculties peculiarly deemed poetical are frequently exhibited in a considerable degree, but very few have been able to preserve a perspicuous brevity without stiffness or pedantry (allowance made for the subject and the times), in metaphysical reasoning, so successfully as Sir John Davies.

on acSatires of Hall,

Marston, and Donne.

71. Hall's Satires are tolerably known, partly count of the subsequent celebrity of the author in a very different province, and partly from a notion, to which he gave birth by announcing the claim, that he was the first English satirist. In a general sense of satire, we have seen that he had been anticipated by Gascoyne; but Hall has more of the direct Juvenalian invective, which he may have reckoned essential to that species of poetry. They are deserving of regard in themselves. Warton has made many extracts from Hall's Satires; he praises in them "a classical precision, to which English poetry had yet rarely attained;" and calls the versification" equally energetic and elegant." The former epithet may be admitted; but elegance is hardly compatible with what Warton owns to be the chief fault of Hall, "his obscurity, arising from a remote phraseology, constrained combinations, unfamiliar allusions, elliptical apostrophes, and abruptness of expression." Hall is in

m

VOL. II.

K

fact not only so harsh and rugged, that he cannot be read with much pleasure, but so obscure in very many places that he cannot be understood at all, his lines frequently bearing no visible connexion in sense or grammar with their neighbours. The stream is powerful, but turbid and often choked." Marston and Donne may be added to Hall in this style of poetry, as belonging to the sixteenth century, though the satires of the latter were not published till long afterwards. With as much obscurity as Hall, he has a still more inharmonious versification, and not nearly equal vigour.

72. The roughness of these satirical poets was perhaps studiously affected; for it was not much in unison with the general tone of the age. It requires a

Modula

tion of English

verse.

good deal of care to avoid entirely the combinations of consonants that clog our language; nor have Drayton or Spenser always escaped this embarrassment. But in the lighter poetry of the queen's last years, a remarkable sweetness of modulation has always been recognised. This has sometimes been attributed to the general fondness for music. It is at least certain, that some of our old madrigals are as beautiful in language as they are in melody. Several collections were published in the reign of Elizabeth. And it is evident that the regard to the capacity of his verse for marriage with music, that was before the poet's mind, would not only polish his metre, but give it grace and sentiment, while it banished also the pedantry, the antithesis, the prolixity, which had disfigured the earlier lyric poems. Their measures became more various: though the quatrain, alternating by eight and six syllables, was still very popular, we find the trochaic verse of seven, sometimes ending with a double rhyme, usual towards the end of the queen's reign. Many of these occur in England's Helicon, and in the poems of Sidney.

Chapman ;

73. The translations of ancient poets by Phaier, Golding, Stanyhurst, and several more, do not chal- Translation lenge our attention; most of them, in fact, being of Homer by very wretched performances.P Marlowe, a more celebrated name, did not, as has commonly been said, translate the poem of Hero and Leander ascribed to Musæus, but expanded it into what he calls six Sestiads on the same subject; a paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most licentious kind. This he left incomplete, and it was finished by Chapman. But the most remarkable productions of this kind are the Iliad of Chapman, and the Jerusalem of Fairfax, both printed in 1600; the former, however, containing in that edition but fifteen books, to which the rest was subsequently added. Pope, after censuring the haste, negligence, and fustian language of Chapman, observes, "that which is to be allowed him; and which very much contributed to cover his defects, is a free daring spirit that animates his translation, which is something like what one might imagine Homer himself would have written before he arrived at years of discretion." He might have added, that Chapman's translation, with all its defects, is often exceedingly Homeric; a praise which Pope himself seldom attained. Chapman deals abundantly in compound epithets, some of which have retained their place; his verse is rhymed, of fourteen syllables, which corresponds to the hexameter better than the decasyllable couplet; he is often uncouth, often unmusical, and often low; but the spirited and rapid flow of his metre makes him respectable to lovers of poetry. Waller, it is said, could not read him without transport. It must be added, that he is an unfaithful translator, and interpolated much, besides the general redundancy of his style."

74. Fairfax's Tasso has been more praised, and is better known. Campbell has called it, in rather strong Tasso, terms, "one of the glories of Elizabeth's reign.' It is not the first version of the Jerusalem, one very literal

P Warton, chap. liv., has gone very laboriously into this subject.

Marlowe's poem is republished in the Restituta of Sir Egerton Brydges. It is singular that Warton should have taken it for a translation of Musæus.

99 Fairfax.

Warton, iv. 269. Retrospective Review, vol. iii. See also a very good comparison of the different translations of Homer, in Blackwood's Magazine for 1831 and 1832, where Chapman comes in for his due.