A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2

by J. M. D. Meiklejohn

“A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, when there is no love.”

No man could say wiser things in pithier words; and we may well say of his thoughts, in the words of Tennyson, that they are—

“Jewels, five words long,

That on the stretched forefinger of all time

Sparkle for ever.”

[5.] William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has been already treated of in the chapter on the sixteenth century. But it may be noted here that his first two periods—as they are called—fall within the sixteenth, and his last two periods within the seventeenth century. His first period lies between 1591 and 1596; and to it are ascribed his early poems, his play of Richard II., and some other historical plays. His second period, which stretches from 1596 to 1601 holds the Sonnets, the Merchant of Venice, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and a few historical dramas. But his third and fourth periods were richer in production, and in greater productions. The third period, which belongs to the years 1601 to 1608, produced the play of Julius Cæsar, the great tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and some others. To the fourth period, which lies between 1608 and 1613, belong the calmer and wiser dramas,—Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII. Three years after—in 1616—he died.

[6.] The Second Half.—The second half of the great and unique seventeenth century was of a character very different indeed from that of the first half. The Englishmen born into it had to face a new world! New thoughts in religion, new forces in politics, new powers in social matters had been slowly, steadily, and irresistibly rising into supremacy ever since the Scottish King James came to take his seat upon the throne of England in 1603. These new forces had, in fact, become so

strong that they led a king to the scaffold, and handed over the government of England to a section of Republicans. Charles I. was executed in 1649; and, though his son came back to the throne in 1660, the face, the manners, the thoughts of England and of Englishmen had undergone a complete internal and external change. The Puritan party was everywhere the ruling party; and its views and convictions, in religion, in politics, and in literature, held unquestioned sway in almost every part of England. In the Puritan party, the strongest section was formed by the Independents—the “root and branch men”—as they were called; and the greatest man among the Independents was Oliver Cromwell, in whose government John Milton was Foreign Secretary. Milton was certainly by far the greatest and most powerful writer, both in prose and in verse, on the side of the Puritan party. The ablest verse-writer on the Royalist or Court side was Samuel Butler, the unrivalled satirist—the Hogarth of language,—the author of Hudibras. The greatest prose-writer on the Royalist and Church side was Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down, in Ireland, and the author of Holy Living, Holy Dying, and many other works written with a wonderful eloquence. The greatest philosophical writer was Thomas Hobbes, the author of the Leviathan. The most powerful writer for the people was John Bunyan, the immortal author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. When, however, we come to the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and the new influences which their rule and presence imparted, we find the greatest poet to be John Dryden, and the most important prose-writer, John Locke.

[7.] The Poetry of the Second Half.—The poetry of the second half of the seventeenth century was not an outgrowth or lineal descendant of the poetry of the first half. No trace of the strong Elizabethan poetical emotion remained; no writer of this half-century can claim kinship with the great authors of the Elizabethan period. The three most remarkable poets in the latter half of this century are John Milton, Samuel Butler, and John Dryden. But Milton’s culture was derived chiefly from the great Greek and Latin writers; and his poems show

few or no signs of belonging to any age or generation in particular of English literature. Butler’s poem, the Hudibras, is the only one of its kind; and if its author owes anything to other writers, it is to France and not to England that we must look for its sources. Dryden, again, shows no sign of being related to Shakespeare or the dramatic writers of the early part of the century; he is separated from them by a great gulf; he owes most, when he owes anything, to the French school of poetry.