[506] Baillet, Jugemens des Sçavans, has criticised all these and several more. Rapin’s opinion on Latin poetry is entitled to much regard from his own excellence in it. He praises three lyrists, Casimir, Magdelenet and Cerisantes; the two latter being French. Sarbieuski a de l’élévation mais sans pureté; Magdelenet est pur mais sans élévation. Cerisantes a joint dans ses odes l’un et l’autre; car il écrit noblement, et d’un style assez pur. Après tout, il n’a pas tant de feu, que Casimir, lequel avoit bien de l’esprit, et de cet esprit heureux qui fait les poètes. Bucanan a des odes dignes de l’antiquité, mais il a de grandes inégalités par le mélange de son caractère qui n’est pas assez uni. Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 208.
In Germany and Italy. 67. The Germans wrote much in Latin, especially in the earlier decads of this period. Melissus Schedius, not undistinguished in his native tongue, might have been mentioned as a Latin poet in the last volume, since most of his compositions were published in the sixteenth century. In Italy we have not many conspicuous names. The bad taste that infested the school of Marini, spread also, according to Tiraboschi, over Latin poetry. Martial, Lucan, and Claudian, became in their eyes better models than Catullus and Virgil. Baillet, or rather those whom he copies, and among whom Rossi, author of the Pinacotheca Virorum illustrium, under the name of Erythræus, a profuse and indiscriminating panegyrist, for the most part, of his contemporaries, furnishes the chief materials, bestows praise on Cesarini, and Querenghi, whom even Tiraboschi selects from the crowd, and Maffei Barberini, best known as pope Urban VIII.
In Holland. Heinsius. 68. Holland stood at the head of Europe in this line of poetry. Grotius has had the reputation of writing with spirit, elegance, and imagination. But he is excelled by Heinsius, whose elegies, still more than his hexametres, may be ranked high in modern Latin. The habit, however, of classical imitation, has so much weakened all individual originality in these versifiers, that it is often difficult to distinguish them, or to pronounce of any twenty lines that they might not have been written by some other author. Compare, for example, the elegies of Buchanan with those of Heinsius, wherever there are no proper names to guide us; a more finished and continued elegance belongs, on the whole (as at least I should say), to the latter, but in a short passage this may not be perceptible, and, I believe, few would guess with much confidence between the two. Heinsius, however, like most of the Dutch, is remarkably fond of a polysyllabic close in the pentameter; at least in his Juvenilia, which, notwithstanding their title, are perhaps better than his later productions. As it is not necessary to make a distinct head for the Latin drama, we may here advert to a tragedy by Heinsius, Herodes Infanticida. This has been the subject of a critique by Balzac, for the most part very favourable; and it certainly contains some highly beautiful passages. Perhaps the description of the Virgin’s feelings on the nativity, though praised by Balzac, and exquisitely classical in diction, is not quite in the best taste.[507]
[507] Oculosque nunc huc pavida nunc illuc jacit,
Interque matrem virginemque hærent adhuc,
Suspensa matris gaudia, ac trepidus pudor.
. . . sæpe, cum blandus puer
Aut a sopore languidas jactat manus,
Tenerisque labris pectus intactum petit,
Virginea subitus ora perfundit rubor,
Laudemque matris virginis crimen putat.
A critique on the poems of Heinsius will be found in the Retrospective Review, vol. i., p. 49; but notwithstanding the laudatory spirit, which is, for the most part, too indiscriminating in that publication, the reviewer has not done justice to Heinsius, and hardly seems, perhaps a very competent judge of Latin verse. The suffrages of those who were so, in favour of this Batavian poet, are collected by Baillet, n. 1482.
Casimir Sarbievius. 69. Sidonius Hoschius, a Flemish Jesuit, is extolled by Baillet and his authorities. But another of the same order, Casimir Sarbievius, a Pole, is far better known, and, in lyric poetry, which he almost exclusively cultivated, obtained a much higher reputation. He had lived some years at Rome, and is full of Roman allusion. He had read Horace, as Sannazarius had Virgil, and Heinsius Ovid, till the style and tone became spontaneous, but he has more of centonism than the other two. Yet, while he constantly reminds us of Horace, it is with as constant an inferiority; we feel that his Rome was not the same Rome, that Urban VIII. was not Augustus, nor the Polish victories on the Danube like those of the sons of Livia. Hence, his flattery of the great, though not a step beyond that of his master, seems rather more displeasing, because we have it only on his word that they were truly great. Sarbievius seldom rises high or pours out an original feeling; but he is free from conceits, never becomes prosaic, and knows how to put in good language the common-places with which his subject happens to furnish him. He is, to a certain degree, in Latin poetry, what Chiabrera is in Italian, but does not deserve so high a place. Sarbievius was perhaps the first who succeeded much in the Alcaic stanza, which the earlier poets seem to avoid, or to use unskilfully. But he has many unwarrantable licences in his metre, and even false quantities, as is common to the great majority of these Latin versifiers.
Barlæus. 70. Gaspar Barlæus had as high a name, perhaps, as any Latin poet of this age. His rhythm is indeed excellent, but if he ever rises to other excellence, I have not lighted on the passages. A greater equality I have never found than in Barlæus; nothing is bad, nothing is striking. It was the practice with Dutchmen on their marriage to purchase epithalamiums in hexameter verse; and the muse of Barlæus was in request. These nuptial songs are, of course, about Peleus and Thetis, or similar personages, interspersed with fitting praises of the bride and bridegroom. Such poetry is not likely to rise high. The epicedia, or funeral lamentations, paid for by the heir, are little, if at all, better than the epithalamia; and the panegyrical effusions on public or private events rather worse. The elegies of Barlæus, as we generally find, are superior to the hexameters; he has here the same smoothness of versification, and a graceful gaiety which gives us pleasure. In some of his elegies and epistles he counterfeits the Ovidian style extremely well, so that they might pass for those of his model. Still, there is an equability, a recurrence of trivial thoughts and forms, which, in truth, is too much characteristic of modern Latin to be a reproach to Barlæus. He uses the polysyllabic termination less than earlier Dutch poets. One of the epithalamia of Barlæus, it may be observed before we leave him, is entitled Paradisus, and recounts the nuptials of Adam and Eve. It is possible that Milton may have seen this; the fourth book of the Paradise Lost compresses the excessive diffuseness of Barlæus, but the ideas are in great measure the same. Yet, since this must naturally be the case, we cannot presume imitation. That Milton availed himself of all the poetry he had read, we cannot doubt; if Lauder had possessed as much learning as malignity, he might have made out his case (such as it would have been), without having recourse to his own stupid forgeries. Few of the poems of Barlæus are so redundant as this; he has the gift of stringing together mythological parallels and descriptive poetry without stint, and his discretion does not inform him where to stop.
Balde.—Greek poems of Heinsius. 71. The eight books of Sylvæ by Balde, a German ecclesiastic, are extolled by Baillet and Bouterwek far above their value; the odes are tumid and unclassical; yet some have called him equal to Horace. Heinsius tried his skill in Greek verse. His Peplus Græcorum Epigrammatum was published in 1613. These are what our schoolboys would call very indifferent in point of elegance, and, as I should conceive, of accuracy: articles and expletives (as they used to be happily called), are perpetually employed for the sake of the metre, not of the sense.
Latin poets of Scotland. Jonston’s Psalms. 72. Scotland might perhaps compete with Holland in this as well as in the preceding age. In the Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, published in 1637 by Arthur Jonston, we find about an equal produce of each century, the whole number being thirty-seven. Those of Jonston himself, and some elegies by Scot of Scotstarvet, are among the best. The Scots certainly wrote Latin with a good ear and considerable elegance of phrase. A sort of critical controversy was carried on in the last century as to the versions of the psalms by Buchanan and Jonston. Though the national honour may seem equally secure by the superiority of either, it has, I believe, been usual in Scotland to maintain the older poet against all the world. I am nevertheless inclined to think that Jonston’s psalms, all of which are in elegiac metre, do not fall short of those of Buchanan, either in elegance of style or in correctness of Latinity. In the 137th, with which Buchanan has taken much pains, he may be allowed the preference, but not at a great interval, and he has attained this superiority by too much diffuseness.
Owen’s Epigrams. 73. Nothing good, and hardly tolerable, in a poetical sense, had appeared in Latin verse among ourselves till this period. Owen’s epigrams (Audoeni Epigrammata), a well-known collection, were published in 1607; unequal enough, they are sometimes neat and more often witty: but they scarcely aspire to the name of poetry. |Alabaster’s Roxana.| Alabaster, a man of recondite Hebrew learning, published in 1632 his tragedy of Roxana, which, as he tells us, was written about forty years before for one night’s representation, probably at college, but had been lately printed by some plagiary as his own. He forgets, however, to inform the reader, and thus lays himself open to some recrimination, that his tragedy is very largely borrowed from the Dalida of Groto, an Italian dramatist of the sixteenth century.[508] The story, the characters, the incidents, almost every successive scene, many thoughts, descriptions and images, are taken from this original; but it is a very free translation, or rather differs from what can be called a translation. The tragedy of Groto is shortened, and Alabaster has thrown much into another form, besides introducing much of his own. The plot is full of all the accumulated horror and slaughter in which the Italians delighted on their stage. I rather prefer the original tragedy. Alabaster has spirit and fire with some degree of skill; but his notion of tragic style is of the “King Cambyses’ vein;” he is inflated and hyperbolical to excess, which is not the case with Groto.