Wilson’s Art of Rhetorique. 32. Thomas Wilson, afterwards secretary of state, and much employed under Elizabeth, is the author of an “Art of Rhetorique,” dated in the preface January 1553. The rules in this treatise are chiefly from Aristotle, with the help of Cicero and Quintilian, but his examples and illustrations are modern. Warton says that it is the first system of criticism in our language.[1331] But in common use of the word it is no criticism at all, any more than the treatise of Cicero de Oratore; it is what it professes to be, a system of rhetoric in the ancient manner; and, in this sense, it had been preceded by the work of Leonard Cox, which has been mentioned in a former chapter. Wilson was a man of considerable learning, and his Art of Rhetorique is by no means without merit. He deserves praise for censuring the pedantry of learned phrases, or, as he calls them, “strange inkhorn terms,” advising men “to speak as is commonly received;” and he censures also what was not less pedantic, the introduction of a French or Italian idiom, which the travelled English affected in order to show their politeness, as the scholars did the former to prove their erudition. Wilson had before published an Art of Logic.
[1331] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iv. 157.
Gascoyne; Webbe. 33. The first English criticism, properly speaking, that I find, is a short tract by Gascoyne, doubtless the poet of that name, published in 1575; “Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English.” It consists only of ten pages, but the observations are judicious. Gascoyne recommends that the sentence should as far as possible be finished at the close of two lines in the couplet measure.[1332] Webbe, author of a “Discourse of English Poetry” (1586), is copious in comparison with Gascoyne, though he stretches but to seventy pages. His taste is better shown in his praise of Spenser for the Shepherd’s Kalendar, than of Gabriel Harvey for his “Reformation of our English verse;” that is, by forcing it into uncouth Latin measures, which Webbe has himself most unhappily attempted.
[1332] Gascoyne, with all the other early English critics, was republished in a collection by Mr. Haslewood in two volumes, 1811 and 1815.
Puttenham’s Art of Poesie. 34. A superior writer to Webbe was George Puttenham, whose “Art of English Poesie,” published in 1589, is a small quarto of 258 pages in three books. It is in many parts very well written, in a measured prose, rather elaborate and diffuse. He quotes occasionally a little Greek. Among the contemporary English poets, Puttenham extols “for eclogue and pastoral poetry Sir Philip Sydney and Master Chaloner, and that other gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd’s Kalendar. For ditty and amorous ode I find Sir Walter Rawleigh’s vein most lofty, insolent, [bold? or uncommon?] and passionate; Master Edward Dyer for elegy most sweet, solemn, and of high conceit; Gascon [Gascoyne] for a good metre and for a plentiful vein; Phaer and Golding for a learned and well connected verse, specially in translation, clear, and very faithfully answering their author’s intent. Others have also written with much facility, but more commendably perhaps, if they had not written so much nor so popularly. But last in recital and first in degree is the queen our sovereign lady, whose learned, delicate, noble muse easily surmounteth all the rest that have written before her time or since, for sense, sweetness, and subtilty, be it in ode, elegy, epigram, or any other kind of poem, heroic or lyric, wherein it shall please her majesty to employ her pen, even by so much odds as her own excellent estate and degree exceedeth all the rest of her most humble vassals.”[1333] On this it may be remarked, that the only specimen of Elizabeth’s poetry which, as far as I know, remains, is prodigiously bad.[1334] In some passages of Puttenham, we find an approach to the higher province of philosophical criticism.
[1333] Puttenham, p. 51. of Haslewood’s edition, or in Censura Literaria, i. 348.
[1334] Ellis’s Specimens, ii. 162.
Sydney’s Defence of Poesy. 35. These treatises of Webbe and Puttenham may have been preceded in order of writing, though not of publication, by the performance of a more illustrious author, Sir Philip Sydney. His Defence of Poesy was not published till 1595. The Defence of Poesy has already been reckoned among the polite writings of the Elizabethan age, to which class it rather belongs than to that of criticism; for Sydney rarely comes to any literary censure, and is still farther removed from any profound philosophy. His sense is good, but not ingenious, and the declamatory tone weakens its effect.
Sect. III.—On Works of Fiction.
Novels and Romances in Italy and Spain—Sydney’s Arcadia.