The Sprat passage[[522]] is of the very first importance in the History of English Literature, and has at last been recognised as being so. Sprat. In it the gorgeous, floriated, conceited style of the earlier century is solemnly denounced, and a “naked natural style of writing” enjoined. But Sprat is careful to point out that this was for the purposes of the Society—for the improvement not of literature but of science; and he does not attempt to argue it out at all from the literary side. The pronouncement expresses the whole sense of the time; it is epoch-making in the history of literary taste; but it does not give itself out as literary criticism, though the spirit of it may be seen in half the literary criticism that follows for nearly a hundred and fifty years.

The infant historians[[523]] also may be pretty briefly despatched. Edward Phillips. Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, was by all accounts a most respectable person; and considering the prevalence of Royalist opinions (especially as he shared them), he says quite as much about his uncle as could be expected. Besides, it is just possible that Milton was no more engaging as an uncle and schoolmaster than he was as a husband and father. He was not alive when Theatrum Poetarum[[524]] appeared in the winter of 1674-75, but the dignity of the opening “Discourse of the Poets and Poetry in general” has made some think that he had had a hand in it. I am not so sure of this. That it is addressed to Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Sherburne (each, for all the learning of the former and the literary merits of both, among those “rhyming amorists” and Cavaliers whom Milton certainly disliked, and at least affected to disdain) need not much matter. But the style, though often ambitious, does not seem to me above the reach of a man of some learning and moderate ability, who had been about Milton in his youth for years, and at intervals afterwards. Such a man would naturally take the noble-sentiment view of Poetry, talk of the melior natura and “that noble thing education,” and the like; nor would he be at a loss for Miltonic precedents of another kind when he felt inclined to speak of “every single-sheeted pie-corner poet who comes squirting out an Elegy.” His Theatrum Poetarum. The piece is creditable as a whole, and ends with a hesitating attribution of poetic merit to Spenser and Shakespeare, in spite of the “rustic obsolete words,” the “rough-hewn clowterly verse” of the one, and the “unfiled expressions, the rambling and undigested fancies” of the other. The body of the book—an alphabetical dictionary, first of ancient then of modern poets, and lastly of poetesses, alphabetically arranged in a singularly awkward fashion by their prænomina or Christian names when Phillips knows these, and by others when he does not—is much less important. Here again the nephew has been robbed to give to the uncle the notices of Marlowe and Shakespeare, in both of which the most noticeable expressions, “Clean and unsophisticated wit” and “unvulgar style,” apply to Shakespeare himself. Phillips has undoubted credit for appreciation of Drummond (whom he had partially edited from the papers of Scot of Scotstarvit many years earlier) and for singling out from the work of Wither (which was then a by-word with Cavalier critics) The Shepherd’s Hunting for admiration. But he is much more of a list-maker than of a critic.

William Winstanley (who brought out his Lives of the Most Famous English Poets[[525]] some dozen years later, and levied contributions on Phillips himself in the most nonchalant manner) was a mere bookmaker, to whom is assigned the post of manufacturer for years of “Poor Robin’s Almanack,” and who did other hack-work. Winstanley’s Lives. His book is chiefly an unmethodical compilation of anecdotes; and as the lives of men of letters have always had more attraction than their works, Winstanley has been found readable. His place here is simply due to the fact that, putting archaics like Bale and Pits aside, he is the second English Historian of Poets, if not of Poetry.

In connection with Phillips and Winstanley (whom he avowedly follows and acridly comments, accusing them at the same time of having stolen his thunder from a previously published Catalogue) it may be well to notice Gerard Langbaine, the somewhat famous author of the Account of the English Dramatic Poets.[[526]] Langbaine’s Dramatic Poets. Of real criticism there is hardly even as much in Langbaine as in his two Esaus or Jacobs, taking it which way you please. But he is the spiritual ancestor of too many later critics; and there are still too many people who confuse his method with that of criticism for him to be quite left out. That he had a particular animosity to Dryden[[527]] is less to his discredit than to that of the class to which he belongs. This kind of parasite usually fastens on the fattest and fairest bodies presented to it. Langbaine is first of all a Quellenforscher. Having some reading and a good memory, he discovers that poets do not as a rule invent their matter, and it seems to him a kind of victory over them to point out where they got it. As a mere point of literary history there is of course nothing to object to in this: it is sometimes interesting, and need never be offensive. But, as a matter of fact, it too often is made so, and is always made so in Langbaine. “I must take the freedom to tell our author that most part of the language is stolen.” “Had Mr W. put on his spectacles he would have found it printed thus,” &c., &c. This hole-picking generally turns to hole-forging; and one is not surprised to find Langbaine, after quoting at great length Dryden’s cavillings at the men of the last age, huddling off as “some praises” the magnificent and immortal eulogies[[528]] which atone for them. I am afraid that Dante, if he had known Langbaine, would have arranged a special bolgia for him; and it would not have lacked later inhabitants.

The only too notable quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns produced some deservedly famous literature of the critical kind in England, but its greatest result in that way, The Battle of the Books, will be best noticed, together with its author’s other works, and in the order rather of its own publication than of its composition. Temple. Nor need the earlier protagonists, Temple and Bentley, occupy us much; though the latter will give an opportunity of paying at least respects to a kind of Criticism of which we have perforce said little. Temple, a charming writer, and the author, at the close of his critical Essay on Poetry, of one of the most exquisite sentences in English, is simply a critic pour rire. The hundred pages of his Works[[529]] which are devoted to literature, invited the exercise of Macaulay’s favourite methods by the enormity of their ignorance, the complacency of their dogmatism, and the blandness of their superficiality. Temple has glimmerings—he intimates pretty plainly some contempt of at least the French “rules”; but he will still be talking of what he has given himself hardly the slightest pains to know.

This could not be said of Bentley, and the Phalaris Dissertation has been not undeservedly ranked as one of the representative pieces of critical literature. Bentley. It is only unfortunate that Bentley has meddled so little with the purely literary side of the matter; and the sense of this misfortune may be tempered by remembrance of his dealings with Milton. He is, however, perfectly right in at least hinting[[530]] that the Pseudo-Phalaris might have been convicted on literary counts, as well as on linguistic and chronological, and that, on grounds of style, the theory of those half-sceptics who attributed the Letters to Lucian was almost worse than the error of the true believers. That Lucian could have written a line of this skimble-skamble stuff is simply impossible; and it must always remain an instance of the slight sense of style possessed by the Humanists that a really great man of letters, like Politian, should have given countenance to the absurdity.

From any point of critical consideration Collier’s famous book[[531]] must be a most important document in the History of Criticism; and though from some such points it may be of even greater importance than it is to us, we can in no wise omit it. Collier’s Short View. For it is probably the earliest instance in our history where a piece of criticism has apparently changed, to a very great extent, the face of an important department of literature, and has really had no small part in bringing about this change. It is, however, indirectly rather than directly that it concerns us; for it is only here and there that Collier takes the literary way of attack, and in that way he is not always, though he is sometimes, happy. Curiously enough, one of his felicities in this kind has been imputed to him for foolishness by his great panegyrist. It is not necessary to feel that sympathy with his opinions on ecclesiastical and political affairs which Macaulay naturally disclaimed, and which some others may cheerfully avow, in order to see that the Tory critic was quite right, and the Whig critic quite wrong, in regard to the dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama. What may be thought of their technical scholarship does not matter. But Macaulay’s undoubted familiarity with the classics must have had a gap in it, and his wide knowledge of modern literature several much greater gaps, if he did not know—first, that Collier had ancient criticism on his side, and secondly, that the allegation of ancient authority and practice where favourable, the arguing-off of it where inconvenient, were exactly the things to influence his generation. When everybody was looking back on the Vossian precept, “Imitate the Ancients, but imitate them only in what is good,” and drawing forward to the Popian axiom,

“To copy Nature is to copy them,”

“dissertations on the Greek and Latin Drama” were not otiose at all, they were absolutely necessary.

But for the most part, as is notorious, Collier is as ethical as Plutarch or Plato. It was desirable that he should be so, and nobody but a paradoxer will ever defend the style of play-writing which produced such things as Limberham, and The Old Bachelor, and even The Relapse—though the first be Dryden’s, and contain some good things in the characters of Prudence and Brainsick, though the second show us the dawn of Congreve’s wit, and though the third contain handfuls of the sprightliest things in the English language. It is in reference to this last, by the way, that Collier chiefly quits the path of ethical criticism, and takes to that of literary, or at least dramatic. There is hardly a sharper and more well-deserved beating-up of the quarters of a ragged dramatic regiment anywhere than that (at p. 212 sq.) on the glaring improbabilities of Vanbrugh’s plot, the absolute want of connection between the title part of it and the real fable—Tom Fashion’s cheating his brother of Hoyden—and the way in which the characters are constantly out of character in order that the author may say clever things. But Collier has serious matters on his mind too much to give us a great deal of this; and the other definitely literary points which I have noted, in a very careful re-reading of the piece for this book, are not numerous. I wish he had not called Love’s Labour’s Lost (p. 125) “a very silly play”; but how many people were there then living who would have thought differently? I wish he had worked out his statement (rather rash from his own point of view) at p. 148, “Poets are not always exactly in rule.” He might have developed his views on the Chorus (p. 150) interestingly. I have some other places; but they are not important. The sum is, that though Collier evidently knew most critical authorities, from Aristotle and Horace, through Heinsius and Jonson, to Rapin, and Rymer, and Dryden himself, very well; though he could (pp. 228, 229) state the Unities, and even argue for them—this was not his present purpose, which was simply to cleanse the stage. His interest in other matters in fact blunted what might have been a keen interest in literature proper. And this is thoroughly confirmed by study of his interesting and characteristic Essays,[[532]] where, out of more than five hundred pages, exactly four are devoted to literature, and these give us nothing but generalities.