Of the author of this work, Francis Meres or Meers, comparatively little is known. He sprang from an old and highly respectable family in Lincolnshire, and was born in 1565, the son of Thomas Meres, of Kirton in Holland in that county. After graduating from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1587, proceeding M.A. in 1591 at his own University, and subsequently by ad eundem at Oxford, he settled in London, where in 1597, having taken orders, he was living in Botolf Lane. He was presented in July 1602 to the rectory of Wing in Rutland, keeping a school there. He remained at Wing till his death, in his eighty-first year, January 29, 1646-7. As Charles FitzGeoffrey, in a Latin poem in his Affaniae addressed to Meres, speaks of him as 'Theologus et poeta', it is possible that the 'F.M.' who was a contributor to the Paradise of Dainty Devices is to be identified with Meres. In addition to the Palladis Tamia, Meres was the author of a sermon published in 1597, a copy of which is in the Bodleian, and of two translations from the Spanish, neither of which is of any interest.
Meres's Discourse is, like the rest of his work, mainly a compilation, with additions and remarks of his own. Much of it is derived from the thirty-first chapter of the first book of Puttenham; with these distinctions, that Meres's includes the poets who had come into prominence between 1589 and 1598, and instituted parallels, biographical and critical, between them and the ancient Classics. It is the notices of these poets, and more particularly the references to Shakespeare's writings, which make this treatise so invaluable to literary students. Thus we are indebted to Meres for a list of the plays which Shakespeare had produced by 1598, and for a striking testimony to his eminence at that date as a dramatic poet, as a narrative poet, and as a writer of sonnets. The perplexing reference to Love's Labour's Won has never been, and perhaps never will be, satisfactorily explained. To assume that it is another title for All's Well that Ends Well in an earlier form is to cut rather than to solve the knot. It is quite possible that it refers to a play that has perished. The references to the imprisonment of Nash for writing the Isle of Dogs, to the unhappy deaths of Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and to the high personal character of Drayton are of great interest. Meres was plainly a man of muddled and inaccurate learning, of no judgment, and of no critical power, a sort of Elizabethan Boswell without Boswell's virtues, and it is no paradox to say that it is this which gives his Discourse its chief interest. It probably represents not his own but the judgments current on contemporary writers in Elizabethan literary circles. And we cannot but be struck with their general fairness. Full justice is done to Shakespeare, who is placed at the head of the dramatists; full justice is done to Spenser, who is styled divine, and placed at the head of narrative poets; to Sidney, both as a prose writer and as a poet; to Drayton, to Daniel, and to Hall, Lodge, and Marston, as satirists. We are surprised to find such a high place assigned to Warner, 'styled by the best wits of both our universities the English Homer,' and a modern critic would probably substitute different names, notably those of Lodge and Campion, for those of Daniel and Drayton in a list of the chief lyric poets then in activity. In Meres's remarks on painters and musicians, there is nothing to detain us.
Of a very different order is the important critical treatise which comes next, Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to which are prefixed as prolegomena Dryden's Dedicatory Epistle to The Rival Ladies, Sir Robert Howard's Preface to Four New Plays, and, as supplementary, Howard's Preface to The Duke of Lerma, and Dryden's Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. As Dryden's Essay, like almost all his writings, both in verse and prose, was of a more or less occasional character, it will be necessary to explain at some length the origin of the controversy out of which it sprang, as well as the immediate object with which it was written.
The Restoration found Dryden a literary adventurer, with a very slender patrimony and with no prospects. Poetry was a drug in the market; hack-work for the booksellers was not to his taste; and the only chance of remunerative employment open to him was to write for the stage. To this he accordingly betook himself. He began with comedy, and his comedy was a failure. He then betook himself to a species of drama, for which his parts and accomplishments were better fitted. Dryden had few or none of the qualifications essential in a great dramatist; but as a rhetorician, in the more comprehensive sense of the term, he was soon to be unrivalled. In the rhymed heroic plays, as they were called, he found just the sphere in which he was most qualified to excel. The taste for these dramas, which owed most to France and something to Italy and Spain, had come in with the Restoration. Their chief peculiarities were the complete subordination of the dramatic to the rhetorical element, the predominance of pageant, and the substitution of rhymed for blank verse. Dryden's first experiment in this drama was the Rival Ladies, in which the tragic portions are composed in rhyme, blank verse being reserved for the parts approaching comedy. In his next play, the Indian Queen, written in conjunction with Howard, blank verse is wholly discarded. The dedication of the Rival Ladies to Orrery is appropriate. Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill, and first Earl of Orrery, was at this time Lord President of Munster, and it was he who had revived these rhymed plays in his Henry V., which was brought out in the same year as Dryden's comedy. Whoever has read this drama and Orrery's subsequent experiments, Mustapha (1665), the Black Prince (1667), Tryphon (1668), will be able to estimate Dryden's absurd flattery at its proper value.
But these dramatic innovations were sure not to pass without protest, though the protest came from a quarter where it might least have been expected. Sir Robert Howard was the sixth son of Thomas, first Earl of Berkshire. He had distinguished himself on the Royalist side in the Civil War, and had paid the penalty for his loyalty by an imprisonment in Windsor Castle during the Commonwealth. At the Restoration he had been made an Auditor of the Exchequer. Dryden seems to have made his acquaintance shortly after arriving in London. In 1660 Howard published a collection of poems and translations, to which Dryden prefixed an address 'to his honoured friend' on 'his excellent poems.' Howard's rank and position made him a useful friend to Dryden, and Dryden in his turn was no doubt of much service to Howard. Howard introduced him to his family, and in December 1663 Dryden married his friend's eldest sister, the Lady Elizabeth Howard. In the following year Dryden assisted his brother-in-law in the composition of the Indian Queen. There had probably been some misunderstanding or dispute about the extent of the assistance which Dryden had given, which accounts for what follows. In any case Howard published in 1665, professedly under pressure from Herringman, four plays, two comedies, The Surprisal and The Committee, and two tragedies, the Vestal Virgin and Indian Queen; and to the volume he prefixed the preface, which is here reprinted. It will be seen that though he makes no reference to Dryden, he combats all the doctrines laid down in the preface to the Rival Ladies. He exalts the English drama above the French, the Italian, and the Spanish; and vindicates blank verse against rhymed, making, however, a flattering exception of Orrery's dramas. If Dryden was not pleased, he appears to have had the grace to conceal his displeasure. For he passed the greater part of 1666 at his father-in-law's house, and dedicated to Howard his Annus Mirabilis. But Howard was to have his answer. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy he is introduced in the person of Crites, and in his mouth are placed all the arguments advanced in the Preface that they may be duly refuted and demolished by Dryden in the person of Neander. At this mode of retorting Howard became really angry; and in the Preface to the Duke of Lerma, published in the middle of 1668, he replied in a tone so contemptuous and insolent that Dryden, in turn, completely lost his temper. The sting of Howard's Preface lies, it will be seen, in his affecting the air of a person to whom as a statesman and public man the points in dispute are mere trifles, hardly worth consideration, and in the patronising condescension with which he descends to a discussion with one to whom as a mere litterateur such trifles are of importance. The Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy Dryden prefixed to the second edition of the Indian Emperor, one of the best of his heroic plays. The seriously critical portion of this admirable little treatise deals with Howard's attacks on the employment of rhyme in tragedy, on the observance of strict rules in dramatic composition, and on the observance of the unities. But irritated by the tone of Howard's tract, Dryden does not confine himself to answering his friend's arguments. He ridicules, what Shadwell had ridiculed before, Howard's coxcombical affectation of universal knowledge, makes sarcastic reference to an absurdity of which his opponent had been guilty in the House of Commons, mercilessly exposes his ignorance of Latin, and the uncouthness and obscurity of his English. The brothers-in-law afterwards became reconciled, and in token of that reconciliation Dryden cancelled this tract.
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy was written at Charleton Park in the latter part of 1665, and published by Herringman in 1668. It was afterwards carefully revised, and republished with a dedication to Lord Buckhurst in 1684. Dryden spent more pains than was usual with him on the composition of this essay, though he speaks modestly of it as 'rude and indigested,' and it is indeed the most elaborate of his critical disquisitions. It was, he said, written 'chiefly to vindicate the honour of our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.' Its more immediate and particular object was to regulate dramatic composition by reducing it to critical principles, and these principles he discerned in a judicious compromise between the licence of romantic drama as represented by Shakespeare and his School, and the austere restraints imposed by the canons of the classical drama. Assuming that a drama should be 'a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,' it is shown that this end can only be attained in a drama founded on such a compromise; that the ancient and modern classical drama fails in nature; that the Shakespearian drama fails in art. At the conclusion of the essay he vindicates the employment of rhyme, a contention which he afterwards abandoned. The dramatic setting of the essay was no doubt suggested by the Platonic Dialogues, or by Cicero, and the essay itself may have been suggested by Flecknoe's short Discourse of the English Stage, published in 1664.
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy may be said to make an era in the history of English criticism, and to mark an era in the history of English prose composition. It was incomparably the best purely critical treatise which had hitherto appeared in our language, both synthetically in its definition and application of principles, and particularly in its lucid, exact, and purely discriminating analysis. It was also the most striking and successful illustration of what may be called the new prose style, or that style which, initiated by Hobbes and developed by Sprat, Cowley, and Denham[1] blended the ease and plasticity of colloquy with the solidity and dignity of rhetoric, of that style in which Dryden was soon to become a consummate master.
The Advice to a Young Reviewer brings us into a very different sphere of criticism, and has indeed a direct application to our own time. It was written by Edward Copleston, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's and Bishop of Llandaff. Born in February 1776 at Offwell, in Devonshire, Copleston gained in his sixteenth year a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After carrying off the prize for Latin verse, he was elected in 1795 Fellow of Oriel. In 1800, having been ordained priest, he became Vicar of St. Mary's. In 1802 he was elected Professor of Poetry, in which capacity he delivered the lectures subsequently published under the title of Praelectiones Academicae—a favourite book of Cardinal Newman's. In 1814 he succeeded Dr. Eveleigh as Provost of Oriel. In 1826 he was made Dean of Chester, in 1828 Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St. Paul's. He died at Llandaff, on October 14th, 1849. Copleston is one of the fathers of modern Oxford, and from his provostship date many of the reforms which transformed the University of Gibbon and Southey into the University of Whateley, of Newman, of Keble, and of Pusey. The brochure which is printed here was written when Copleston was Fellow and Tutor of Oriel. It was immediately inspired, not, as is commonly supposed, by the critiques in the Edinburgh Review, but by the critiques in the British Critic, a periodical founded in 1793, and exceedingly influential between that time and about 1812. Archbishop Whateley, correcting a statement in the Life of Copleston by W.J. Copleston, says that it was occasioned by a review of Mant's poems in the British Critic[2]. But on referring to the review of these poems, which appeared in the November number of 1806, plainly the review referred to, we find nothing in it to support Whateley's assertion. That the reviews in the British Critic are, however, what Copleston is parodying in the critique of L'Allegro is abundantly clear, but what he says about voyages and travels and about science and recondite learning appear to have reference to articles particularly characteristic of the Edinburgh Review. It was not, however, till after the date of Copleston's parody that the Edinburgh Review began conspicuously to illustrate what Copleston here satirises; it was not till a time more recent still that periodical literature generally exemplified in literal seriousness what Copleston intended as extravagant irony. It is interesting to compare with Copleston's remarks what Thackeray says on the same subjects in the twenty-fourth chapter of Pendennis, entitled 'The Pall Mall Gazette.' This brochure is evidently modelled on Swift's 'Digression Concerning Critics' in the third section of the Tale of a Tub, and owes something also to the Treatise on the Bathos in Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies, as the title may have been suggested by Shaftesbury's Advice to an Author. The Advice itself and the supplementary critique of Milton are clever and have good points, but they will not bear comparison with the satire of Swift and Pope.
The excerpt which comes next in this Miscellany links with the name of the author of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy the name of the most illustrious of his contemporaries. The difference, indeed, between Milton and Dryden is a difference not in degree merely, but in kind, so immeasurably distant and alien is the sphere in which they moved and worked both as men and as writers. It has sometimes been questioned whether Dryden is a poet. Few would dispute that Milton divides with Shakespeare the supremacy in English poetry. In Dryden as a man there is little to attract or interest us. In character and in private life he appears to have been perfectly commonplace. We close his biography, and our curiosity is satisfied. With Milton it is far otherwise. We feel instinctively that he belongs to the demi-gods of our race. We have the same curiosity about him as we have about Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare, so that the merest trifles which throw any light on his personality assume an interest altogether out of proportion to their intrinsic importance. Our debt to Ellwood is, it must be admitted, much less than it might have been, if he had thought a little more of Milton and a little less of his somewhat stupid self and the sect to which he belonged. But, as the proverb says, we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth, and we are the richer for the Quaker's reminiscences. With Ellwood's work, the History of Thomas Ellwood, written by Himself, we are only concerned so far as it bears on his relation with Milton. Born in 1639, the son of a small squire and justice of the peace at Crowell in Oxfordshire, Ellwood had, in 1659, been persuaded by Edward Burrough, one of the most distinguished of Fox's followers, to join the Quakers. He was in his twenty-fourth year when he first met Milton. Milton was then living in Jewin Street, having removed from his former lodging in Holborn, most probably in the autumn of 1661. The restoration had terminated his work as a controversialist and politician. For a short time his life had been in peril, but he had received a pardon, and could at least live in peace. He could no longer be of service as a patriot, and was now occupied with the composition of Paradise Lost. Since 1650 he had been blind, and for study and recreation was dependent on assistance. Having little domestic comfort as a widower, he had just married his third wife.
Ellwood's narrative tells its own story. What especially strikes us in it, and what makes it particularly interesting, is that it presents Milton in a light in which he is not presented elsewhere. Ellwood seems to have had the same attraction for him as Bonstetten had for Gray. No doubt the simplicity, freshness, and enthusiasm of the young Quaker touched and interested the lonely and world-wearied poet who, when Ellwood first met him, had entered on his fifty-fifth year; he had no doubt, too, the scholar's sympathy with a disinterested love of learning. In any case, but for Ellwood, we should never have known the softer side of Milton's character, never have known of what gentleness, patience, and courtesy he was capable. And, indeed, when we remember Milton's position at this time, as tragical as that of Demosthenes after Chaeronea, and of Dante at the Court of Verona, there is something inexpressibly touching in the picture here given with so much simplicity and with such evident unconsciousness on the part of the painter of the effect produced. There is one passage which is quite delicious, and yet its point may be, as it commonly is, easily missed. It illustrates the density of Ellwood's stupidity, and the delicate irony of the sadly courteous poet. Milton had lent him, it will be seen, the manuscript of Paradise Lost; and on Ellwood returning it to him, 'he asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him, and after some further discourse about it I pleasantly said to him, "Thou has said much here of Paradise Lost, but what has thou to say of Paradise Found?"' Now the whole point and scope of Paradise Lost is Paradise Found—the redemption—the substitution of a spiritual Eden within man for a physical Eden without man, a point emphasised in the invocation, and elaborately worked out in the closing vision from the Specular Mount. It is easy to understand the significance of what follows: 'He made me no answer, but sat sometime in a muse; then broke off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.' The result no doubt of that 'muse' was the suspicion, or, perhaps, the conviction, that the rest of the world would, in all probability, be as obtuse as Ellwood; and to that suspicion or conviction we appear to owe Paradise Regained. The Plague over, Milton returned to London, settling in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. 'And when afterwards I went to wait on him there … he shewed me his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in a pleasant tone said to me, "This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of."' In 'the pleasant tone' more, and much more, is implied, of that we may be very sure, than meets the ear. We should like to have seen the expression on Milton's face both on this occasion and also when, on Dryden requesting his permission to turn Paradise Lost into an opera, he replied; 'Oh, certainly, you may tug my verses if you please, Mr. Dryden.' It may be added that Paradise Lost was not published till 1667, and Paradise Regained did not see the light till 1671. Ellwood seems to imply that Paradise Regained was composed between the end of August or the beginning of September 1665, and the end of the autumn of the same year, which is, of course, incredible and quite at variance with what Phillips tells us. Ellwood is, no doubt, expressing himself loosely, and his 'afterwards' need not necessarily relate to his first, or to his second, or even to his third visit to Milton after the poet's return to Artillery Walk, but refers vaguely to one of those 'occasions which drew him to London.' When he last saw Milton we have no means of knowing. He never refers to him again. His autobiography closes with the year 1683.