The details and illustrations of the long catalogue of these invite comment, but we must abstain therefrom. When the list is finished, Puttenham returns to his generalities with a discussion of the main principle of ornament, which he calls Decorum or “Decency,” dividing and illustrating the kinds of it into choice of subject, diction, delivery, and other things, not without good craftsmanship, and with a profusion of anecdotes chiefly of the Helotry kind. He then (rather oddly, but not out of keeping with his classical models) has a chapter of decorum in behaviour, turns to the necessity of concealing art, and ends with a highly flattering conclusion to the Queen.

We have yet to mention some minorities; less briefly, the two champions—Campion and Daniel, who brought the question of “Rhyme v. 'Verse'” to final arbitrament of battle; the great name (not so great here as elsewhere) of Francis Bacon; and lastly, one who, if representative of a further stage, is far the greatest of Elizabethan critics, and perhaps the only English critic who deserves the adjective great before Dryden.

The earliest (1591) of these is Sir John Harington, in the prefatory matter[[258]] of his translation of the Orlando, which contains the gibe at Puttenham above referred to. Minors: Harington, Meres, Webster, Bolton, &c. It is otherwise much indebted to Sidney, from whom, however, Harington differs in allowing more scope to allegorical interpretation. Then comes Francis Meres, whose Palladis Tamia[[259]] (1598) is to be eternally mentioned with gratitude, because it gives us our one real document about the order of Shakespeare’s plays, but is quite childish in the critical characterisation which it not uninterestingly attempts. Webster’s equally famous, and universally known, epitheting of the work of Shakespeare and others in the Preface to The White Devil (1612) adds yet another instance of the short sight of contemporaries; but tempting as it may be to comment on these, it would not become a Historian of Criticism to do so in this context. Sir W. Vaughan in The Golden Grove (1600) had earlier dealt, and Bolton[[260]] in his Hypercritica (1616), and Peacham in his Complete Gentleman (1622), were later to deal, with Poetry, but in terms adding nothing to, and probably borrowed from, the utterances of Sidney, Webbe, and Puttenham. Their contributions are “sma’ sums,” as Bailie Nicol Jarvie says, and we must neglect them.

The most interesting literary result of the “new versifying” craze is to be found, without doubt, in the Observations in the Art of English Poesy of Thomas Campion[[261]] and the subsequent Defence of Rhyme of Samuel Daniel. Campion and his Observations. The former was issued in 1602, and the latter still later:—that is to say more than twenty years after Spenser’s and Harvey’s letters, and more than thirty after the appearance—let alone the writing—of Ascham’s Schoolmaster. In the interval the true system of English prosody had put itself practically beyond all real danger; but the critical craze had never received its quietus. Nay, it survived to animate Milton: and there are persons whom we could only name for the sake of honour, and who do not seem to see that it is dead even yet. Both the writers mentioned were true poets: and the curious thing is that the more exquisitely romantic poet of the two was the partisan of classical prosody. But Campion—who dedicated his book to Lord Buckhurst, the doyen (except poor old Churchyard) of English poetry at the time, and one whose few but noble exercises in it need hardly vail their crest to any contemporary poetry but Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s—was far too wise a man, as well as far too good a poet, to champion any longer the break-neck and break-jaw hexameters of Harvey and Stanyhurst. We have seen that almost from the first there had been questions of heart among the partisans of the New Versifying. That English is not tolerant of dactyls—that the dactyl, do what you will, in English, will tilt itself into an anapæst with an anacrusis—is a truth which no impartial student of metre with an ear, and with an eye to cover the history of English poetry, can deny. Some even of these pioneers had seen this: Campion has the boldness to declare it in the words, “It [the dactylic hexameter] is an attempt altogether against the nature of our language.” But though he was bold so far, he was not quite bold enough. He could not surmount the queer Renaissance objection to rhyme. That all the arguments against the “barbarism” of this tell equally against Christianity, chivalry, the English constitution, the existence of America, gunpowder, glass-windows, coal-fires, and a very large number of other institutions of some usefulness, never seems to have occurred to any of these good folk. But no man can escape his time. Campion, not noticing, or not choosing to notice, the intensely English quality of the anapæst, limits, or almost limits, our verse to iambs and trochees. It was possible for him—though it still appears to be difficult for some—to recognise the tribrach, the mere suggestion of which in English verse threw Dr Guest into a paroxysm of “!!!!’s,” but which exists as certainly as does the iamb itself. On the contrary he shows himself in advance of Guest, and of most behind Guest to his own time, by admitting tribrachs in the third and fifth places. Nay, he even sees that a trochee may take the place of an iamb (Milton’s probably borrowed secret) in the first place, though his unerring ear (I think there is no verse of Campion’s that is unmusical) insists on some other foot than an iamb following—otherwise, he says, “it would too much drink up the verse.” But, on the whole, he sets himself to work, a self-condemned drudge, to make iambic and trochaic verses without rhyme. And on these two, with certain licences, he arranges schemes of English elegiacs, anacreontics, and the rest. Some of the examples of these are charming poems, notably the famous “Rose-Cheeked Laura,” and the beautiful “Constant to None,” while Campion’s subsequent remarks on English quantity are among the acutest on the subject. But the whole thing has on it the curse of “flying in the face of nature.” You have only to take one of Campion’s own poems (written mostly after the Observations) in natural rhyme, and the difference will be seen at once. It simply comes to this—that the good rhymeless poems would be infinitely better with rhyme, and that the bad ones, while they might sometimes be absolutely saved by the despised invention of Huns and Vandals, are always made worse by its absence.

In the preface of Daniel’s answering Defence of Rhyme to all the worthy lovers and learned professors [thereof] within His Majesty’s dominions,[[262]] he says that he wrote it “about a year since,” upon the “great reproach” given by Campion, and some give it the date of 1603 or even 1602; but Dr Grosart’s reprint is dated five years later. Daniel and his Defence of Rhyme. The learned gentleman to whom it was specially written was no less a person than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom some of us (acknowledging that the matter is no matter) do not yet give up as “Mr W. H.” The advocate affects, with fair rhetorical excuse (though of course he must have known that the craze was nearly half a century old, and had at least not been discouraged by his patron’s uncle nearly a generation before), to regard the attack on rhyming as something new, as merely concerned with the “measures” of Campion. Daniel, always a gentleman, deals handsomely with his antagonist, whom he does not name, but describes as “this detractor whose commendable rhymes, albeit now an enemy to rhyme, have given heretofore to the world the best notice of his worth,” and as a man “of fair parts and good reputation.” And having put himself on the best ground, in this way, from the point of view of morals and courtesy, he does the same in matter of argument by refusing to attack Campion’s “numbers” in themselves (“We could,” he says well, “have allowed of his numbers, had he not graced his rhymes”), and by seizing the unassailable position given by custom and nature—“Custom that is before all law; Nature that is above all art.” In fact, not Jonson himself, and certainly none else before Jonson, has comprehended, or at least put, the truth of the matter as Daniel puts it, that arbitrary laws imposed on the poetry of any nation are absurd—that the verse of a language is such as best consorts with the nature of that language. This seems a truism enough perhaps; but it may be very much doubted whether all critics recognise it, and its consequences, even at the present day. And it is certain that we may search other early English critics in vain for a frank recognition of it. With an equally bold and sure foot he strides over the silly stuff about “invention of barbarous ages” and the like. Whatever its origin (and about this he shows a wise carelessness), it is “an excellence added to this work of measure and harmony, far happier than any proportion quantity could ever show.” It “gives to the ear an echo of a delightful report,” and to the memory “a deeper impression of what is delivered.” He is less original (as well as, some may think, less happy) in distinguishing the accent of English from the quantity of the classical tongues; but the classicisers before Campion, if not Campion himself, had made such a mess of quantity, and had played such havoc with accent, that he may well be excused. The universality of rhyme is urged, and once more says Daniel (with that happy audacity in the contemning of vain things which belongs to the born exploders of crazes), “If the barbarian likes it, it is because it sways the affections of the barbarian; if civil nations practise it, it works upon their hearts; if all, then it has a power in nature upon all.” But it will be said, “Ill customs are to be left.” No doubt: but the question is begged. Who made this custom “ill”? Rhyme aims at pleasing—and it pleases. Suffer then the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, for all the tyrannical rules of rhetoric cannot make it otherwise. Why are we to be a mere servum pecus, only to imitate the Greeks and Latins? Their way was natural to them: let ours be so to us. “Why should laboursome curiosity still lay affliction on our best delights?” Moreover, to a spirit whom nature hath “fitted for that mystery,” rhyme is no impediment, “but rather giveth wings to mount.” The necessary historical survey follows, with a surprising and very welcome justification of the Middle Ages against both Classics and Renaissance. “Let us,” says this true Daniel come to judgment, “go not further, but look upon the wonderful architecture of the State of England, and see whether they were unlearned times that could give it such a form?” And if politically, why not poetically? Some acute and, in the other sense, rather sharp criticism of Campion’s details follows, with a few apologetic remarks for mixture of masculine and feminine rhymes on his own part: and the whole concludes in an admirable peroration with a great end-note to it. Not easily shall we find, either in Elizabethan times or in any other, a happier combination of solid good sense with eager poetic sentiment, of sound scholarship with wide-glancing intelligence, than in this little tractate of some thirty or forty ordinary pages, which dispelled the delusions of two generations, and made the poetical fortune of England sure.

The contributions of “large-browed Verulam” to criticism have sometimes been spoken of with reverence: and it is not uncommon to find, amid the scanty classics of the subject, which until recently have been recommended to the notice of inquirers, not merely a place, but a place of very high honour, assigned to The Advancement of Learning. Bacon. Actual, unprejudiced, and to some extent expert, reference to the works, however, will not find very much to justify this estimate: and, indeed, a little thought, assisted by very moderate knowledge, would suffice to make it rather surprising that Bacon should give us so much, than disappointing that he should give us little or nothing. A producer of literature who at his best has few superiors, and a user of it for purposes of quotation, who would deserve the name of genius for this use alone if he had no other title thereto—Bacon was yet by no means inclined by his main interests and objects, or by his temperament, either towards great exaltation of letters, or towards accurate and painstaking examination of them. Indeed, it is in him—almost first of all men, certainly first of all great modern men—that we find that partisan opposition between literature and science which has constantly developed since. It is true that his favourite method of examination into “forms” might seem tempting as applied to literature; and that it would, incidentally if not directly, have yielded more solid results than his Will-o'-the-wisp chase of the Form of Heat. But this very craze of his may suggest that if he had undertaken literary criticism it would have been on the old road of Kinds and Figures and Qualities, in which we could expect little but glowing rhetorical generalisation from him.

Nor is the nature of such small critical matter as we actually have from him very different. The Essays. The Essays practically give us nothing but the contents of that Of Studies, a piece too well known to need quotation; too much in the early pregnant style of the author to bear compression or analysis; and too general to repay it. For the critic and the man of letters generally it is, in its own phrase, to be not merely tasted, nor even swallowed, but chewed and digested; yet its teachings have nothing more to do with the critical function of “study” than with all others.

The Advancement[[263]] at least excuses the greatness thrust upon it in the estimates above referred to, not merely by the apparent necessity that the author should deal with Criticism, but by a certain appearance of his actually doing so. The Advancement of Learning. Comparatively early in the First Book he tackles the attention to style which sprang up at the Renaissance, opening his discussion by the ingenious but slightly unhistorical attribution of it to Martin Luther, who was forced to awake all antiquity, and call former times to his succour, against the Bishop of Rome. Not a few names, for the best part of two centuries before the great cause of Martinus v. Papam was launched, from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Erasmus and Reuchlin, will put in evidence before the tribunal of chronology against this singular assertion; and though the Italian Humanists of the fifteenth century might not (at least in thought) care anything for the Pope except as a source of donatives and benefices, it is certain that most of them were as constitutionally disinclined to abet Luther as they were chronologically disabled from in any way abetting him. Bacon’s argument and further survey are, however, better than this beginning. To understand the ancients (he says justly enough) it was necessary to make a careful study of their language. Further, the opposition of thought to the Schoolmen naturally brought about a recoil from the barbarisms of Scholastic style, and the anxiety to win over the general imprinted care and elegance and vigour on preaching and writing. All this, he adds as justly, turned to excess. Its denunciation of mere word-study. Men began to “hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their words with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.” The Ciceronianism of Osorius, Sturm, “Car of Cambridge,” and even Ascham, receives more or less condemnation; and Erasmus is, of course, cited for gibes at it. On this text Bacon proceeds to enlarge in his own stately rhetoric, coolly admitting that it “is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.” But he very quickly glides off into his usual denunciations of the schoolmen. Nor have I found anything else in this First Book really germane to our purpose; for one cannot cite as such the desultory observations on patronage of literature (among other branches of learning) which fill a good part of it.

The Second Book is somewhat more fruitful in quantity, if not very much; but the quality remains not very different. The opening “Address to the King” contains, in an interesting first draft (as we may call it), the everlasting grumble of the scientific man, that science is not sufficiently endowed, the further grumble at mere book-learning, the cry for the promotion—by putting money in its purse—of research. The Second and Third Chapters contain some plans of books drawn up in Bacon’s warm imaginative way, especially a great series of Histories, with the History of England for their centre. And then we come, in the Fourth Chapter, to Poesy.

But except for Bacon’s majestic style (which, however, by accident or intention, is rather below itself here) there is absolutely nothing novel. Its view of Poetry. The view (which, as we have seen, all the Elizabethan critics adopted, probably from the Italians)—the view is that poetry is just a part of learning licensed in imagination; a fanciful history intended to give satisfaction to the mind of man in things where history is not; something particularly prevalent and useful in barbarous ages; divisible into narrative, representative and allusive; useful now and then, but (as Aristotle would say) not a thing to take very seriously. Yet poetry, a vinum dæmonum at the worst, a mere illusion anyhow, is still, even as such, a refuge from, and remedy for, sorrow and toil. Of its form, as distinguished from its matter, he says,[[264]] “Poetry is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present.” He attempts no defence of it as of other parts of learning, because “being as a plant that cometh of the lust of the earth without a formal seed, it hath sprung up and spread abroad more than any other kind.” And he turns from it to philosophy, with the more than half-disdainful adieu, “It is not good to stay too long in the theatre.”