Juveniles equites pone se sequentes
Per fani spatia ampla perducebat
Assidue urbis dominas intuentes.”
But so it was, and so it was to be long after. In 1718 Bysshe, in his Art of Poetry, “passed by Spenser and the poets of his age, because
their language has become so obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them, and therefore Shakspere is quoted so rarely in this collection.” And Thomas Warton says of Pope’s obligations to Milton, “It is strange that Pope, by no means of a congenial spirit, should be the first who copied Comus or Il Penseroso. But Pope was a gleaner of the old English poets; and he was here pilfering from obsolete English poetry without the least fear or danger of being detected.” Pope certainly was a proficient in his own “art of stealing wisely.” “Who now reads Cowley?” he asks, and answers his own question in the lines he borrowed from him.
What an anomalous period in our literature was this!—polished, witty, brilliant to the highest degree, displaying in its own productions incomparable taste and art, yet so incapable, seemingly, of “tasting” the great writers who had gone before it! Fancy a time when people went about—people of cultivation, too—asking who was that fellow Shakspere! To us he seems as real and as large a figure in his dim perspective as the largest and most alive that swaggers in the foreground of to-day. Do we not feel something weird and uncanny, something ghostly, on opening the Retrospective Review so late as 1825, and finding Robert Herrick gravely paraded as a new discovery? Fifty years ago that was by the dates; as we read it seems five hundred. The critic antedates by centuries his subject—like his own god Lyæus, “ever fresh and ever young”—and is infinitely older, quainter, more remote from us. Is it our turn next to be forgotten? Shall we not all be asking at our next Centennial if Tennyson ever lived, debating whether Master Farquhar
was really the author of the poems attributed to Browning, finding Longfellow difficult and obscure, and wondering in our antiquarian societies if Thackeray was a religious symbol or something to eat? Shall we—but if we keep on in this wise, one thing plainly we shall not do, and that is get back to our neglected Catholic poets—now twice neglected. Let us leave our future to bury its own dead, and betake ourselves once more to the poetic past.
We have seen that our Catholic poets, if forgotten, were at least forgotten in good company; in the ample recognition which came at last to the latter they did not so fully share. In that Renaissance of our early literature which marked the close of the last century, and which, pioneered by Percy, Ritson, Wright, Nichols, Warton, Brydges, and others, restored to the Elizabethan poets, with Chaucer and Milton, their “comates in exile,” a pre-eminence from which they will scarcely be dislodged, many of our particular friends came to the surface. But most of them did not long remain there, dropping quickly out of sight, either from intrinsic weight or the indifference of the literary fishers who had netted them. How far any such indifference may have been due to their faith we will not venture to say. We should be sorry to believe that the hateful spirit of religious bigotry had invaded the muse’s peaceful realm, scaring nymph and faun from the sides of Helicon with strange and hideous clamor. For our own part, we like a poet none the worse for being a Protestant, though we may like him a trifle the better for being a Catholic. We have a vague notion that all good poets ought to be Catholics, and a secret persuasion
that some day they will be; that the Tennysons, the Holmeses, the Longfellows and Lowells and Brownings of the future will be gathered into the fold, and only the ——s or the ——s (the reader will kindly fill up these blank spaces with his pet poetical aversions) be left to raise the hymns of heterodoxy on the outside in melancholy and discordant chorus,
“Their lean and flashy songs