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 idéal 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 contemporaries 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

Teipsum, published in 1599, is written in four-lined stanzas of heroic lines, a measure which was afterwards honored by being taken as the vehicle of one of Dryden's early efforts; but Dryden borrowed it more immediately from the Gondibert of Davenant. The Orchestra is composed in a peculiarly-constructed stanza of seven lines, extremely well adapted to express the ever-varying rhythm of those dancing movements which the poet, by a thousand ingenious analogies, traces throughout all nature.

(iv.) The unanimous admiration of contemporaries placed the genius of JOHN DONNE (1573-1631), Dean of St. Paul's, in one of the foremost places among the men of letters of his day. His life, too, full of vicissitudes, and his devotion of great and varied powers, first to scholastic study and retirement, then to the service of the state in active life, and last to the ministry of the Church, by familiarizing him with all the phases of human life, furnished his mind with rich materials for poetry of various kinds. When entering upon the career of the public service, as secretary to the Treasurer Lord Ellesmere, he made a secret marriage with the daughter of Sir George Moor, a lady whom he had long ardently loved, and the violent displeasure of whose family involved Donne in severe persecution. Though distinguished in his youth for wit and gayety, he afterwards, under deep religious conviction, embraced the clerical profession, and became as remarkable for intense piety as he had previously been for those accomplishments which had made him the Pico di Mirandola of his age. The writings of Donne are very voluminous, and consist of love verses, epigrams, elegies, and, above all, satires, which latter department of his works is that by which he is now principally remembered. As an amatory poet he has been justly classed by Johnson among the metaphysical poets-writers in whom the intellectual faculty obtains an enormous and disproportionate supremacy over sentiment and feeling. These authors are ever on the watch for unexpected and ingenious analogies; an idea is racked into every conceivable distortion; the most remote comparisons, the obscurest recesses of historical and scientific allusion, are ransacked to furnish comparisons and illustrations which no reader can suggest to himself, and which, when presented to him by the perverse ingenuity of the poet, fill him with a strange mixture of astonishment and shame, like the distortions of the posture-master or the tricks of sleight-of-hand. It is evident that in this cultivation of the odd, the unexpected, and the monstrous, the poet becomes perfectly indifferent to the natural graces and tender coloring of simple emotion; and in his incessant search after epigrammatic turns of thought, he cares very little whether reason, taste, and propriety be violated. This false taste in literature was at one time epidemic in Spain and Italy, from whence, in all proba

ties 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.” — (Lit. ii. 129.)

bility, it infected English poets, who have frequently rivalled their models in ingenious absurdity. The versification of Donne is singularly harsh and tuneless, and the contrast between the ruggedness of his expression and the far-fetched ingenuity of his thought adds to the oddity of the effect upon the mind of the reader, by making him contrast the unnatural perversion of immense intellectual activity with the rudeness and frequent coarseness both of the ideas and the expression. In Donne's Satires, of which he wrote seven, and in his Epistles to friends, we naturally find less of this portentous abuse of intellectual legerdemain, for the nature of such compositions implies that they are written in a more easy and colloquial strain; and Donne has occasionally adapted, with great felicity, the outlines of Horace and Juvenal to the manners of his own time and country. Pope has translated some of Donne's Satires into the language of his own time, under the title of "The Satires of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, versified."

(v.) But the real founder of Satire in England, if we are to judge by the relative scope and completeness of his works in this department, was JOSEPH HALL (1574-1656), Bishop of Norwich, a man equally remarkable for the learning, dignity, and piety with which he fulfilled his pastoral functions, and the heroic resignation with which he supported poverty and persecution when deprived of them. He produced six books of Satires, under the title of Virgidemiarum (i. e. a harvest or collection of rods, a word modified from the similar term Vindemiarum, vintage), which form a complete collection, though they were not all published at the same time, the first three books, quaintly entitled by their author toothless Satires, having appeared in 1597, while a student at Cambridge; and the latter three, designated biting Satires, two years afterwards. Some of these excellent poems attack the vices and affectations of literature, and others are of a more general moral application. For the vivacity of their images, the good sense and good taste which pervade them, the abundance of their illustrations, and the ease and animation of the style, they are deserving of high admiration. Read merely as giving curious pictures of the manners and society of the day, they are very interesting in themselves, and throw frequent light on obscure passages of the contemporary drama. Hall, like Juvenal, often employs a peculiar artifice which singularly heightens the piquancy of his attacks, viz. that of making his secondary allusions or illustrations themselves satirical. Some of these satires are extremely short, occasionally consisting of only a few lines. His versification is always easy, and often elegant; and the language offers an admirable union of the unforced facility of ordinary conversation with the elevation and conciseness of a more elaborate style.*

§ 10. Space will permit only a rapid allusion to several secondary poets who adorned this period, so rich in variety and vigor. The two brothers, PHINEAS FLETCHER and GILES FLETCHER, who lived, approx

* To Donne and Hall should be added the name of JOHN MARSTON, the dramatic poet, as one of the chief satirists of the Elizabethan era. In 1599 he published three books of Satires, under the title of The Scourge of Villainy.