That Collier’s victory was very mainly due to the fact that he struck in at the right moment, as spokesman of an already formed popular opinion, would be a matter of reasonable certainty in any case; but the certainty is here historical. Sir T. P. Blount. One of many proofs at hand is in the curious lighterfull of critical lumber which Sir Thomas Pope Blount launched four (or eight?) years before Collier let his fireship drive into the fleet of the naughty playwrights. In this book,[[533]] dedicated to Mulgrave, that noble poet himself, Roscommon, Cowley, and the lately published and immensely influential Whole Duty of Man, are quoted to support the argument that “A poet may write upon the subject of Love, but he must avoid obscenity.”[[534]]
Sir Thomas, however, comes within the inner, and not merely the outer, circle of criticism for his aims and his collections, though certainly not for any critical genius that he displays. His “Remarks upon Poetry,” no less than the “Characters and Censures” which make up the other part of his work, are the purest compilation: and though we are certainly not without compilers in these days (what indeed can a Historian of Criticism do but compile to a great extent?), there are very few of us who are at once honest enough and artless enough to follow the method of Blount. Whether he is arguing that good humour is essentially necessary to a poet (how about the genus irritabile?) or that a poet should not be addicted to flattery, or discussing the “Eglogue, Bucholic [sic], or Pastoral,” whether he is following Phillips and Winstanley and borrowing from both, in compiling a dictionary of poets, he simply empties out his common place-book. “Dryden remarks,” “Rapin observes,” “Mr Cowley tells us,” “Mr Rymer can nowise allow” (this is happy, for it was habitual with Mr Rymer “nowise to allow”), such are the usherings of his paragraphs. He is not uninteresting when he is original (cf. his remarks on Waller); but one is almost more grateful to him for his collections, which put briefly, and together, the critical dicta of a vast number of people. Here we may read, with minimum of trouble, how Julius Scaliger could not see anything in Catullus but what is common and ordinary; how Dr Sprat said that till the time of Henry the Eighth there was nothing wrote in the English language except Chaucer that a man would care to read twice; how Scaliger once more, and Petrus Crinitus, and Johannes Ludovicus Vives, and Eustatius Swartius, thought Claudian quite in the first rank of poets; how Tanneguy le Fèvre shook his head over Pindar as having “something too much the air of the Dithyrambick”; and how Cœlius Rhodiginus was good enough to find that same Dantes Aligerus, who displeased others, a “poet not contemptible.”[[535]] These things are infinitely pleasant to read, and give one a positive affection for Sir Thomas Pope Blount as one turns them in the big black print of his handy quarto; yet perhaps it would be excessive to call him a great critic. What he does, besides providing this gazophylacium for the connoisseur, is to show how wide the interest in criticism was.
A further turn, and the last in this walk, may be furnished to us by one of his own quotations (p. 137 of the Characters and Censures) of an answer to the question, “Whether Milton and Waller were not the best English poets, and which was the better of the two?” from The Athenian Mercury, vol. v., No. 4. Periodicals: The Athenian Mercury, &c. For this curious and interesting medley of Dunton’s, and Samuel Wesley’s, and others’, was almost the first to provide something in English answering, or that might have answered, to the Journal des Savants and the Mercure Galant. Actually, the Mercury was not very literary. I do not pretend to have examined the original volumes with any very great care. But in the three copious books which were either directly compiled out of it, or composed in imitation—the Athenian Oracle,[[536]] Athenian Sport, and The British Apollo—literature holds no very large place. The Oracle does indeed give at p. 438 a very elaborate answer to the question, “Whether the Dramatic Poets of the Last Age exceeded those of this?” and the Apollo, besides a versification of the identical query and answer which Blount had quoted, contains a long descant on the Origin of Poetry, and a remarkably shrewd answer to the question, “Which is the best poet—Boileau, Molière, or La Fontaine?” But the time of literary periodicals in England was not yet, though this was the very eve of it: and they must therefore be postponed.[[537]]
[484]. The chief critical loci in Milton are all among the best known passages of his work. They are the peremptory anathema on rhyme in the prose note added to Paradise Lost, in what Professor Masson has settled to be the “Fifth Form of the First Edition”; the short Defence of Tragedy, wholly on Italian principles but adapted to Puritan understandings, prefixed to Samson Agonistes; the first description of his own studies in The Reason of Church Government; the more elaborate return upon that subject—a singular mixture of exquisite phrasing and literary appreciation with insolent abuse—in the Apology for Smectymnuus (which is not, as some have thought, the same thing as The [Platonic] Apology) and divers clauses in the Tractate of Education, especially the reference to “Castelvetro, Tasso, and Mazzoni,” whom he credits with “sublime art,” and puts on a level with Aristotle and Horace. We might add a few casual girds, such as that at the supposed cacophony of Hall’s “Teach each” in the Apology for Smectymnuus, which has been compared to Malherbe’s vellications of Desportes (cf. sup., p. 245). A complete critical treatise from him (if only he could have been prevailed upon to write in a good temper) would have been of supreme interest: it is not so certain that it would have been of supreme value, even if he had been in that temper.
[485]. He has practically given us nothing but a slight apology for sacred verse (common in his time and natural from the author of the Davideis); with a slighter seasoning of the also familiar defence of poetry from being mere “lying,” in the Preface to the folio edition of his Poems; some still slighter remarks on Comedy in that to Cutter of Coleman Street; and hardly more than a glance at literary education in his Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy. In this last we may feel a sort of gust of the same spirit which appears in his disciple Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (v. infra).
[486]. Both these will be found in Chalmers’ Poets, vi. 349-372. Hobbes’s Answer is also in Molesworth’s ed. of the Works, iv. 443-458. It is there followed by a short literary letter to Edward Howard of the British Princes, the most egregious of Dryden’s egregious leash of brothers-in-law. To these may be added the brief literary passage in the chapter of “Intellectual Virtues” in the First Part of Leviathan (ibid., iii. 58) and the “Brief” of the Rhetoric (referred to supra, vol. i. p. 40); ibid., vi. 416-510. I have a copy of the first edition of this, anonymous and undated, but assigned to 1655-57 by bibliographers. It does not contain the shorter Art of Rhetoric, which follows in Molesworth.
[487]. This Boojum, I fear, will disturb some of my friends. But I put him under the protection of the Powder of Pimperlimpimp, and of the Equinoctials of Queubus.
[488]. See the Discourse on Satire—Scott (in the edition revised by the present writer) (London, 1882-93), xiii. 24 sq., or Ker (ed. cit. post), ii. 33 sq.
[489]. I do not smile so much as some may over “no, not Du Bartas.” But though oases are far from rare in what may seem, to those who know it not, this thirsty land of criticism, I hardly know a more delightful “diamond of the desert” than the refusal to admit somebody else lest you should have to admit Dante, and the subsequent “Dante, Marino, and others.” When the eye is weary of italic print, or of a too closely packed quarto page, or of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac, in any type or format, it is pleasant half to shut it, and let the dream of these “others” wave before one. I see that they must have written in Italian; but other common measure, other link to bind them both to the Commedia and to the Adone, is yet to seek for me.