[1206] This song is printed in Campbell’s Specimens of English Poets, vol. i. p. 117. It begins,
“When first mine eyes did view and mark.”
The little poem of Edwards, called Amantium Iræ, has often been reprinted in modern collections, and is reckoned by Brydges one of the most beautiful in the language. But hardly any light poem of this early period is superior to some lines addressed to Isabella Markham by Sir John Harrington, of the date of 1564. If these are genuine, and I know not how to dispute it, they are as polished as any written at the close of the Queen’s reign. These are not in the Paradise of Dainty Devices.
Sackville’s induction. 59. But at the close of that dark period, while bigotry might be expected to render the human heart torpid, and the English nation seemed too fully absorbed in religious and political discontent, to take much relish in literary amusements, one man shone out for an instant in the higher walks of poetry. This was Thomas Sackville, many years afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and High Treasurer of England, thus withdrawn from the haunts of the muses to a long and honourable career of active life. The Mirrour of Magistrates, published in 1559, is a collection of stories by different authors, on the plan of Boccaccio’s prose work, De Casibus virorum illustrium, recounting the misfortunes and reverses of men eminent in English history. It was designed to form a series of dramatic soliloquies united in one interlude.[1207] Sackville, who seems to have planned the scheme, wrote an Induction, or prologue, and also one of the stories, that of the first Duke of Buckingham. The Induction displays best his poetical genius; it is, like much earlier poetry, a representation of allegorical personages, but with a fertility of imagination, vividness of description, and strength of language, which not only leave his predecessors far behind, but may fairly be compared with some of the most poetical passages in Spenser. Sackville’s Induction forms a link which unites the school of Chaucer and Lydgate to the Faery Queen. It would certainly be vain to look in Chaucer, wherever Chaucer is original, for the grand creations of Sackville’s fancy, yet we should never find any one who would rate Sackville above Chaucer. The strength of an eagle is not to be measured only by the height of his place, but by the time that he continues on the wing. Sackville’s Induction consists of a few hundred lines; and even in these there is a monotony of gloom and sorrow, which prevents us from wishing it to be longer. It is truly styled by Campbell a landscape on which the sun never shines. Chaucer is various, flexible, and observant of all things in outward nature, or in the heart of man. But Sackville is far above the frigid elegance of Surrey; and, in the first days of the virgin reign, is the herald of that splendour in which it was to close.
[1207] Warton, iv. 40. A copious account of the Mirrour for Magistrates occupies the forty-eighth and three following sections of the History of Poetry, p. 33-105. In this Warton has introduced rather a long analysis of the Inferno of Dante, which he seems to have thought little known to the English public, as in that age, I believe, was the case.
Inferiority of poets in early years of Elizabeth. 60. English poetry was not speedily animated by the example of Sackville. His genius stands absolutely alone in the age to which as a poet he belongs. Not that there was any deficiency in the number of versifiers; the muses were honoured by the frequency, if not by the dignity, of their worshippers. A different sentence will be found in some books; and it has become common to elevate the Elizabethan age in one undiscriminating panegyric. For wise counsellors, indeed, and acute politicians, we could not perhaps extol one part of that famous reign at the expense of another. Cecil and Bacon, Walsingham, Smith, and Sadler, belong to the earlier days of the queen. But in a literary point of view, the contrast is great between the first and second moiety of her four and forty years. We have seen this already in other subjects than poetry; and in that we may appeal to such parts of the Mirrour of Magistrates as are not written by Sackville, to the writings of Churchyard, or to those of Gouge and Turberville. These writers scarcely venture to leave the ground, or wander in the fields of fancy. They even abstain from the ordinary commonplaces of verse, as if afraid that the reader should distrust or misinterpret their images. |Gascoyne.| The first who deserves to be mentioned as an exception is George Gascoyne, whose Steel Glass, published in 1576, is the earliest instance of English satire, and has strength and sense enough to deserve respect. Chalmers has praised it highly. “There is a vein of sly sarcasm in this piece which appears to me to be original; and his intimate knowledge of mankind enabled him to give a more curious picture of the dress, manners, amusements, and follies of the times, than we meet with in almost any other author. His Steel Glass is among the first specimens of blank verse in our language.” This blank verse, however, is but indifferently constructed. Gascoyne’s long poem, called The Fruits of War, is in the doggrel style of his age; and the general commendations of Chalmers on this poet seem rather hyperbolical. But his minor poems, especially one called The Arraignment of a Lover, have much spirit and gaiety;[1208] and we may leave him a respectable place among the Elizabethan versifiers.
[1208] Ellis’s Specimens. Campbell’s Specimens, ii. 146.
Spenser’s Shepherd’s Kalendar. 61. An epoch was made, if we may draw an inference from the language of contemporaries, by the publication of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Kalendar in 1579.[1209] His primary idea, that of adapting a pastoral to every month of the year, was pleasing and original, though he has frequently neglected to observe the season, even when it was most abundant in appropriate imagery. But his Kalendar is, in another respect, original, at least when compared with the pastoral writings of that age. This species of composition had become so much the favourite of courts, that no language was thought to suit it but that of courtiers, which, with all its false beauties of thought and expression, was transferred to the mouths of shepherds. A striking instance of this had lately been shown in the Aminta; and it was a proof of Spenser’s judgment, as well as genius, that he struck out a new line of pastoral, far more natural, and therefore more pleasing, so far as imitation of nature is the source of poetical pleasure, instead of vieing, in our more harsh and uncultivated language, with the consummate elegance of Tasso. It must be admitted, however, that he fell too much into the opposite extreme, and gave a Doric rudeness to his dialogue, which is a little repulsive to our taste. The dialect of Theocritus is musical to our ears, and free from vulgarity; praises which we cannot bestow on the uncouth provincial rusticity of Spenser. He has been less justly censured on another account, for intermingling allusions to the political history and religious differences of his own times; and an ingenious critic has asserted that the description of the grand and beautiful objects of nature, with well-selected scenes of rural life, real but not coarse, constitute the only proper materials of pastoral poetry. These limitations, however, seem little conformable to the practice of poets or the taste of mankind; and if Spenser has erred in the allegorical part of his pastorals, he has done so in company with most of those who have tuned the shepherd’s pipe. Several of Virgil’s Eclogues, and certainly the best, have a meaning beyond the simple songs of the hamlet; and it was notorious that the Portuguese and Spanish pastoral romances, so popular in Spenser’s age, teemed with delineations of real character, and sometimes were the mirrors of real story. In fact, mere pastoral must soon become insipid, unless it borrows something from active life or elevated philosophy. The most interesting parts of the Shepherd’s Kalendar are of this description; for Spenser has not displayed the powers of his own imagination so strongly as we might expect in pictures of natural scenery. This poem has spirit and beauty in many passages; but is not much read in the present day, nor does it seem to be approved by modern critics. It was otherwise formerly. Webbe, in his Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, calls Spenser “the rightest English poet he ever read,” and thinks he would have surpassed Theocritus and Virgil, “if the coarseness of our speech had been no greater impediment to him, than their pure native tongues were to them.” And Drayton says, “Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his name, had he only given us his Shepherd’s Kalendar, a masterpiece, if any.”[1210]
[1209] The Shepherd’s Kalendar was printed anonymously. It is ascribed to Sydney by Whetstone in a monody on his death in 1586. But Webbe, in his Discourse on English Poesie, published the same year, mentions Spenser by name.
[1210] Preface to Drayton’s Pastorals.