life of the time; but the modern reader, I think, will little regret the dimness in which time has plunged these allusions, for they only still - further complicate an allegory which of itself often detracts from the charm and interest of the narrative. § 5. As a specimen of Spenser's mode of conducting his allegory, I will give here a rapid analysis of the Second Book, or the Legend of Temperance. In Canto I. the wicked enchanter, Archimage, meeting Sir Guyon, informs him that a fair lady, whom the latter supposes to be Una, but who is really Duessa, has been foully outraged by the RedCross Knight. Guyon, led by Archimage, meets the Red-Cross Knight, and is on the point of attacking him, when the two champions recognize each other, and, after courteous conference, part. Sir Guyon then hears the despairing cry of a lady, and finds Amaria, newly stabbed, lying beside a knight (Sir Mordant), and holding in her lap a babe with his hands stained by its mother's blood. After relating her story, the lady dies. Canto II. describes Sir Guyon's unsuccessful attempts to wash the babe's bloody hands. He then finds his steed gone, and proceeds on foot to the Castle of Golden Mean, where dwell also her two sisters, Elissa and Perissa -Too Little and Too Much with their knights. Canto III. describes the adventures of the Boaster, Bragadoc chio, who has stolen Guyon's steed, but who is ignominiously compelled to give it up, and is abandoned by Belphœbe, of whom this canto contains a description, of consummate beauty. In Canto IV. Guyon delivers Phaon from the violence of Furor and the malignity of the hag Occasion. Canto V. describes the combat of Guyon with Pyrochles, who unbinds Fury, and is then wounded by him; and Atin lies to obtain the aid of Cymochles. Canto VI. gives a most rich and exquisite picture of the temptation of Guyon by the Lady of the Idle Lake. In Canto VII. is contained the admirable description of the Cave of Mammon, who tempts Sir Guyon with riches. The VIIIth Canto depicts Guyon in his trance, disarmed by the sons of Acrates, and delivered by Arthur. Canto IX. describes the House of Temperance inhabited by Alma. This is a most ingenious and beautifully developed allegory of the human body and mind, each part and faculty being typified. Canto X. gives a chronicle of the ancient British kings down to the reign of Gloriana, or Elizabeth. In the XIth canto the Castle of Temperance is besieged, and delivered by Arthur. The XIIth and last canto of this book describes the attack of Guyon upon the Bower of Bliss, and the ultimate defeat of Acrasia or Sensual Pleasure. From this very rough and meagre analysis, which is all that my limits will permit, the reader may in some measure judge of the conduct of the fable in Spenser's great poem. § 6. The versification of the work is a peculiar stanza, based upon the ottava rima so universally employed by the romantic and narrative poets of Italy, and of which the masterpieces of Tasso and Ariosto furnish familiar examples. To the eight lines composing this form of metre, Spenser's exquisite taste and consummate ear for harmony induced him to add a ninth, which, being of twelve instead of, as in the others, ten syllables, winds up each phrase with a long, lingering cadence of the most delicious melody. I have already observed how extensively the forms of Italian versification as in the various examples of the sonnet and the heroic stanza - had been adopted by the English poets; and I have insisted, particularly in the case of Chaucer, on the skill with which our language, naturally rude, monosyllabic, and unharmonious, had been softened and melodized till it was little inferior, in power of musical expression, to the tongues of Southern Europe. None of our poets is more exquisitely and uniformly musical than Spenser. Indeed the sweetness and flowingness of his verse are sometimes carried so far as to become cloying and enervated. The metre he employed being very complicated, and necessitating a frequent recurrence in each stanza of similar rhymes - namely, four of one ending, three of another, and two of a third- he was obliged to take considerable liberties with the orthography and accentuation of the English language. In doing this, in giving to our metallic northern speech the flexibility of the liquid Italian, he shows himself as unscrupulous as masterly. By employing an immense mass of old Chaucerian words and provincialisms, nay, even by occasionally inventing words himself, he furnishes his verse with an inexhaustible variety of language; but at the same time the reader must remember that much of the vocabulary of the great poet was a dialect that never really existed. Its peculiarities have been less permanent than those of almost any other of our great writers. § 7. The power of Spenser's genius does not consist in any deep analysis of human passion or feeling, in any skill in the delineation of character; but in an unequalled richness of description, in the art of representing events and objects with an intensity that makes them visible and tangible. He describes to the eye, and communicates to the airy conceptions of allegory, the splendor and the vivacity of visible objects. He has the exhaustless fertility of Rubens, with that great painter's sensuous and voluptuous profusion of color. Among the most important of his other poetical writings, I must mention his Mother Hubbard's Tale; his Daphnaida, an idyllic elegy bewailing the early death of the accomplished Sidney; and above all his Amoretti, or love poems, the most beautiful of which is his Epithalamium, or Marriage-Song on his own nuptials with the "fair Elizabeth." This is certainly one of the richest and chastest marriage-hymns to be found in the whole range of literature, combining warmth with dignity, the intensest passion with a noble elevation and purity of sentiment. Here, too, as well as in innumerable passages of the Fatry Queen, do we see the influence of that lofty and abstract philosophical idea of the identity between Beauty and Virtue, which he borrowed from the Platonic speculations. § 8. The name of SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586) occurs so frequently in the literary history of this age, and that illustrious man exerted so powerful an influence on the intellectual spirit of the epoch, that our notice of the age would be incoraplete without some allusion - to his life, even did not the intrinsic merit of his writings give him a place among the best poets and prose-writers of the time. He united in his own person almost all the qualities that give splendor to a character, natural as well as adventitious - nobility of birth, beauty of person, bravery, generosity, learning, and courtesy. He was almost the beau ideal of the courtier, the soldier, and the scholar. The jewel of the court, the darling of the people, and the liberal and judicious patron of arts and letters, his early and heroic death gave the crowning grace to a consummate character. He was born in 1554, and died at the age of thirty-two, of a wound received in the battle of Zutphen (October 19, 1586), fought to aid the Protestants of the Netherlands in their heroic struggle against the Spaniards. His contributions to the literature of his country consist of a small collection of Sonnets, remarkable for their somewhat languid and refined elegance; and the prose romance, once regarded as a manual of courtesy and refined ingenuity, entitled The Arcadia. Judging only by its title, many critics have erroneously regarded this work as a purely pastoral composition, like the Galatea of Cervantes, the Arcadia of Sannazzaro, and the multitude of idyllic romances which were so fashionable at that time; but the narrative of Sidney, though undoubtedly written on Spanish and Italian models, is not exclusively devoted to pastoral scenes and descriptions. A great portion of the work is chivalric, and the grace and animation with which the knightly pen of Sidney paints the shock of the tourney, and the noble warfare of the chase, is not surpassed by the luxurious elegance of his pastoral descriptions. In the style we see perpetual traces of that ingenious antithetical affectation which the imitation of Spanish models had rendered fashionable in England, and which became at last a kind of Phebus or modish jargon at the court, until it was ultimately annihilated by the ridicule of Shakspeare, just as Molière destroyed the style précieux which prevailed in his day in France. One charming peculiarity of Sidney is the pure and elevated view he takes of the female character, and which his example powerfully tended to disseminate throughout the literature of his day. This alone would be sufficient to prove the truly chivalrous character of his mind. The story of the Arcadia, though occasionally tiresome and involved, is related with considerable skill; and the reader will be enchanted, in almost every page, with some of those happy thoughts and graceful expressions which he hesitates whether to attribute to the felicity of accident or to a peculiar delicacy of fancy. Sidney also wrote a small tract entitled A Defence of Poesy, in which he strives to show that the pleasures derivable from imaginative literature are powerful aids not only to the acquisition of knowledge, but to the cultivation of virtue. He exhibits a peculiar sensibility to the power and genius so often concealed in rude national legends and ballads. § 9. The epoch which I am endeavoring to describe was fertile in a class of poets, not perhaps attaining to the highest literary merit, but whose writings are marked by a kind of solid and scholar-like dignity which will render them permanently valuable. (i.) Such was Samuel DanieL (1562–1619), whose career seems to have been tranquil and happy, and who enjoyed among his contem poraries the respect merited not only by his talents, but by a regularity of conduct then sufficiently rare among poets who, like Daniel, were connected with the stage. His works are tolerably voluminous, and all bear the stamp of that grave vigor of thought and dignified evenness of expression which, while it seldom soars into sublimity, or penetrates deep into the abysses of passion, is never devoid of sense and reflection. His most celebrated work is The History of the Civil Wars, a poem on the Civil Wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, in that peculiar style of poetical narrative and moral meditation the example of which had been set by Sackville's Mirrour for Magistrates, and which was at this time a favorite type among the literary men of England. Daniel's poem is in eight books, in stanzas of eight lines; and the talents of the writer struggle in vain against the prosaic nature of the subject, for Daniel closely adheres to the facts of history, which he can only occasionally enliven by a pathetic description or a sensible and vigorous reflection. His language is exceedingly pure, limpid, and intelligible. The poem entitled Musophilus is an elaborate defence of learning, cast into the form of a dialogue. The two interlocutors, Musophilus and Philocosmus, pronounce, in regular and well-turned stanzas, the usual arguments which the subject suggests. Many of Daniel's minor poems, as his Elegies, Epistles, Masques, and Songs, together with his contributions to the dramatic literature of the day, justify the reputation which he possessed. Good sense, dignity, and an equable flow of pure language and harmonious versification, are the qualities which posterity will acknowledge in his writings. He is said to have succeeded Spenser to the post of poet laureate. (ii.) A poet somewhat similar in general character to Daniel, but endowed with a much greater originality, was MICHAEL DRAYTON (15631631), a voluminous writer. His longest and most celebrated productions were the topographical and descriptive poem entitled Polyolbion, in thirty cantos or songs, The Barons' Wars, England's Heroical Epistles, The Battle of Agincourt, The Muses' Elysium, and the delicious fancies of The Court of Fairy. The Polyolbion is a minute poetical itinerary of England and Wales, in which the affectionate patriotism of the writer has enumerated — county by county, village by village, hill by hill, and rivulet by rivulet the whole surface of his native land; enlivening his work as he goes on by immense stores of picturesque legend and the richest profusion of allegory and personification. It is composed in the long-rhymed verse of twelve syllables, and is, both in design and execution, absolutely unique in literature. The notes attached to this work, in which Drayton was assisted by "that gulf of learning," the incomparable Selden, are a wonderful mass of curious erudition. Drayton has described his country with the painful accuracy of the topographer and the enthusiasm of a poet; and the Polyolbion will ever remain a most interesting monument of industry and taste. In The Barons' Wars Drayton has described the principal events of the unhappy reign of Edward II. The poem is composed in the stanza of Ariosto, which Drayton, in his preface, selects as the most perfect and harmonious; and the merits and defects of the work may be pretty accurately characterized by what has been said above concerning Daniel's poem on a not dissimilar subject. The Heroical Epistles are imagined to be written by illustrious and unfortunate personages in English history to the objects of their love. They are therefore a kind of adaptation of the plan of Ovid to English annals. It was quite natural that a poet so fertile as Drayton, who wrote in almost every form, should not have neglected the Pastoral, a species of composition at that time in general favor. His efforts in this department are certainly not inferior to those of any of his contemporaries, not even excepting Spenser himself; while in this class of his writings, as well as in his inimitable fairy poems, Drayton has never been surpassed. In the series entitled The Muses' Elysium, consisting of a series of nine idyls, or Nymphals, as he calls them, and above all in the exquisite little mock-heroic of Nymphidia, everything that is most graceful, delicate, quaint, and fantastic in that form of national superstition almost peculiar to Great Britain - the fairy mythology, is accumulated and touched with a consummate felicity. The whole poem of Nymphidia is a gem, and is almost equalled by the Epithalamium in the VIIIth Nymphal, on the marriage of "our Tita to a noble Fay." It is interesting to trace the use made of these graceful superstitions in the Midsummer Night's Dream and the Merry Wives of Windsor. (iii.) The vigorous versatility of the age, founded on solid and extensive acquirements, is well exemplified in the poems of SIR JOHN DAVIES (1570-1626), a learned lawyer and statesman, and Chief Justice of Ireland, who has left two works of unusual merit and originality, on subjects so widely different that their juxtaposition excites almost a feeling of ludicrous paradox. The subject of one of them, Nosce Teipsum, is the proof of the immortality of the soul; that of the other, entitled Orchestra, the art of dancing. The language of Davies is pure and masculine, his versification smooth and melodious; and he seems to have communicated to his metaphysical arguments in the first poem, something of the easy grace and rhythmical harmony of the dance, while he has dignified and elevated the comparatively trivial subject of the second by a profusion of classical and learned allusions.* The Nosce * On the Nosce Teipsum, Mr. Hallam remarks, "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 vigor they display. Experience has shown that the facul |