THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME IX SLICE VI
English Language to Epsom Salts

Articles in This Slice

ENGLISH LANGUAGE. In its historical sense, the name English is now conveniently used to comprehend the language of the English people from their settlement in Britain to the present day, the various stages through which it has passed being distinguished as Old, Middle, and New or Modern English. In works yet recent, and even in some still current, the term is confined to the third, or at most extended to the second and third of these stages, since the language assumed in the main the vocabulary and grammatical forms which it now presents, the oldest or inflected stage being treated as a separate language, under the title of Anglo-Saxon, while the transition period which connects the two has been called Semi-Saxon. This view had the justification that, looked upon by themselves, either as vehicles of thought or as objects of study and analysis, Old English or Anglo-Saxon and Modern English are, for all practical ends, distinct languages,—as much so, for example, as Latin and Spanish. No amount of familiarity with Modern English, including its local dialects, would enable the student to read Anglo-Saxon, three-fourths of the vocabulary of which have perished and been reconstructed within 900 years;[1] nor would a knowledge even of these lost words give him the power, since the grammatical system, alike in accidence and syntax, would be entirely strange to him. Indeed, it is probable that a modern Englishman would acquire the power of reading and writing French in less time than it would cost him to attain to the same proficiency in Old English; so that if the test of distinct languages be their degree of practical difference from each other, it cannot be denied that “Anglo-Saxon” is a distinct language from Modern English. But when we view the subject historically, recognizing the fact that living speech is subject to continuous change in certain definite directions, determined by the constitution and circumstances of mankind, as an evolution or development of which we can trace the steps, and that, owing to the abundance of written materials, this evolution appears so gradual in English that we can nowhere draw distinct lines separating its successive stages, we recognize these stages as merely temporary phases of an individual whole, and speak of the English language as used alike by Cynewulf, by Chaucer, by Shakespeare and by Tennyson.[2] It must not be forgotten, however, that in this wide sense the English language includes, not only the literary or courtly forms of speech used at successive periods, but also the popular and, it may be, altogether unwritten dialects that exist by their side. Only on this basis, indeed, can we speak of Old, Middle and Modern English as the same language, since in actual fact the precise dialect which is now the cultivated language, or “Standard English,” is not the descendant of that dialect which was the cultivated language or “Englisc” of Alfred, but of a sister dialect then sunk in comparative obscurity,—even as the direct descendant of Alfred’s Englisc is now to be found in the non-literary rustic speech of Wiltshire and Somersetshire. Causes which, linguistically considered, are external and accidental, have shifted the political and intellectual centre of England, and along with it transferred literary and official patronage from one form of English to another; if the centre of influence had happened to be fixed at York or on the banks of the Forth, both would probably have been neglected for a third.

The English language, thus defined, is not “native” to Britain, that is, it was not found there at the dawn of history, but was introduced by foreign immigrants at a date many centuries later. At the Roman Conquest of the island the languages spoken by the natives belonged all (so far as is known) to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic family, modern forms of which still survive in Wales, Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, Isle of Man and Brittany, while one has at no distant date become extinct in Cornwall (see [Celt]: Language). Brythonic dialects, allied to Welsh and Cornish, were apparently spoken over the greater part of Britain, as far north as the firths of Forth and Clyde; beyond these estuaries and in the isles to the west, including Ireland and Man, Goidelic dialects, akin to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, prevailed. The long occupation of south Britain by the Romans (A.D. 43-409)—a period, it must not be forgotten, equal to that from the Reformation to the present day, or nearly as long as the whole duration of modern English—familiarized the provincial inhabitants with Latin, which was probably the ordinary speech of the towns. Gildas, writing nearly a century and a half after the renunciation of Honorius in 410, addressed the British princes in that language;[3] and the linguistic history of Britain might have been not different from that of Gaul, Spain and the other provinces of the Western Empire, in which a local type of Latin, giving birth to a neo-Latinic language, finally superseded the native tongue except in remote and mountainous districts,[4] had not the course of events been entirely changed by the Teutonic conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries.

The Angles, Saxons, and their allies came of the Teutonic stock, and spoke a tongue belonging to the Teutonic or Germanic branch of the Indo-Germanic (Indo-European) family, the same race and form of speech being represented in modern times by the people and languages of Holland, Germany, Denmark, the Scandinavian peninsula and Iceland, as well as by those of England and her colonies. Of the original home of the so-called primitive Aryan race (q.v.), whose language was the parent Indo-European, nothing is certainly known, though the subject has called forth many conjectures; the present tendency is to seek it in Europe itself. The tribe can hardly have occupied an extensive area at first, but its language came by degrees to be diffused over the greater part of Europe and some portion of Asia. Among those whose Aryan descent is generally recognized as beyond dispute are the Teutons, to whom the Angles and Saxons belonged.

The Teutonic or Germanic people, after dwelling together in a body, appear to have scattered in various directions, their language gradually breaking up into three main groups, which can be already clearly distinguished in the 4th century A.D., North Germanic or Scandinavian, West Germanic or Low and High German, and East Germanic, of which the only important representative is Gothic. Gothic, often called Moeso-Gothic, was the language of a people of the Teutonic stock, who, passing down the Danube, invaded the borders of the Empire, and obtained settlements in the province of Moesia, where their language was committed to writing in the 4th century; its literary remains are of peculiar value as the oldest specimens, by several centuries, of Germanic speech. The dialects of the invaders of Britain belonged to the West Germanic branch, and within this to the Low German group, represented at the present day by Dutch, Frisian, and the various “Platt-Deutsch” dialects of North Germany. At the dawn of history the forefathers of the English appear to have been dwelling between and about the estuaries and lower courses of the Rhine and the Weser, and the adjacent coasts and isles; at the present day the most English or Angli-form dialects of the European continent are held to be those of the North Frisian islands of Amrum and Sylt, on the west coast of Schleswig. It is well known that the greater part of the ancient Friesland has been swept away by the encroachments of the North Sea, and the disjecta membra of the Frisian race, pressed by the sea in front and more powerful nationalities behind, are found only in isolated fragments from the Zuider Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Many Frisians accompanied the Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Old English was in many respects more closely connected with Old Frisian than with any other Low German dialect. Of the Geatas, Eotas or “Jutes,” who, according to Bede, occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, and formed a third tribe along with the Angles and Saxons, it is difficult to speak linguistically. The speech of Kent certainly formed a distinct dialect in both the Old English and the Middle English periods, but it has tended to be assimilated more and more to neighbouring southern dialects, and is at the present day identical with that of Sussex, one of the old Saxon kingdoms. Whether the speech of the Isle of Wight ever showed the same characteristic differences as that of Kent cannot now be ascertained, but its modern dialect differs in no respect from that of Hampshire, and shows no special connexion with that of Kent. It is at least entirely doubtful whether Bede’s Geatas came from Jutland; on linguistic grounds we should expect that they occupied a district lying not to the north of the Angles, but between these and the old Saxons.

The earliest specimens of the language of the Germanic invaders of Britain that exist point to three well-marked dialect groups: the Anglian (in which a further distinction may be made between the Northumbrian and the Mercian, or South-Humbrian); the Saxon, generally called West-Saxon from the almost total lack of sources outside the West-Saxon domain; and the Kentish. The Kentish and West-Saxon are sometimes, especially in later times, grouped together as southern dialects as opposed to midland and northern. These three groups were distinguished from each other by characteristic points of phonology and inflection. Speaking generally, the Anglian dialects may be distinguished by the absence of certain normal West-Saxon vowel-changes, and the presence of others not found in West-Saxon, and also by a strong tendency to confuse and simplify inflections, in all which points, moreover, Northumbrian tended to deviate more widely than Mercian. Kentish, on the other hand, occupied a position intermediate between Anglian and West-Saxon, early Kentish approaching more nearly to Mercian, owing perhaps to early historical connexion between the two, and late Kentish tending to conform to West-Saxon characteristics, while retaining several points in common with Anglian. Though we cannot be certain that these dialectal divergences date from a period previous to the occupation of Britain, such evidence as can be deduced points to the existence of differences already on the continent, the three dialects corresponding in all likelihood to Bede’s three tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Geatas.

As it was amongst the Engle or Angles of Northumbria that literary culture first appeared, and as an Angle or Englisc dialect was the first to be used for vernacular literature, Englisc came eventually to be a general name for all forms of the vernacular as opposed to Latin, &c.; and even when the West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the literary or classical form of speech, it was still called Englisc or English. The origin of the name Angul-Seaxan (Anglo-Saxons) has been disputed, some maintaining that it means a union of Angles and Saxons, others (with better foundation) that it meant English Saxons, or Saxons of England or of the Angel-cynn as distinguished from Saxons of the Continent (see New English Dictionary, s.v.). Its modern use is mainly due to the little band of scholars who in the 16th and 17th centuries turned their attention to the long-forgotten language of Alfred and Ælfric, which, as it differed so greatly from the English of their own day, they found it convenient to distinguish by a name which was applied to themselves by those who spoke it.[5] To these scholars “Anglo-Saxon” and “English” were separated by a gulf which it was reserved for later scholarship to bridge across, and show the historical continuity of the English of all ages.

As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense, presents three main stages of development—Old, Middle and Modern—distinguished by their inflectional characteristics. The latter can be best summarized in the words of Dr Henry Sweet in his History of English Sounds:[6] “Old English is the period of full inflections (nama, gifan, caru), Middle English of levelled inflections (naame, given, caare), and Modern English of lost inflections (name, give, care = nām, giv, cār). We have besides two periods of transition, one in which nama and name exist side by side, and another in which final e [with other endings] is beginning to drop.” By lost inflections it is meant that only very few remain, and those mostly non-syllabic, as the -s in stones and loves, the -ed in loved, the -r in their, as contrasted with the Old English stán-as, lufað, luf-od-e and luf-od-on, þá-ra. Each of these periods may also be divided into two or three; but from the want of materials it is difficult to make any such division for all dialects alike in the first.

As to the chronology of the successive stages, it is of course impossible to lay down any exclusive series of dates, since the linguistic changes were inevitably gradual, and also made themselves felt in some parts of the country much earlier than in others, the north being always in advance of the midland, and the south much later in its changes. It is easy to point to periods at which Old, Middle and Modern English were fully developed, but much less easy to draw lines separating these stages; and even if we recognize between each part a “transition” period or stage, the determination of the beginning and end of this will to a certain extent be a matter of opinion. But bearing these considerations in mind, and having special reference to the midland dialect from which literary English is mainly descended, the following may be given as approximate dates, which if they do not demarcate the successive stages, at least include them:—

Dr Sweet has reckoned Transition Old English (Old Transition) from 1050 to 1150, Middle English thence to 1450, and Late or Transition Middle English (Middle Transition) 1450 to 1500. As to the Old Transition see further below.

The Old English or Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was highly inflectional, though its inflections at the date when it becomes known to us were not so full as those of the earlier Gothic, and considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their classical periods. They corresponded more closely to those of modern literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms were more numerous and distinct; for example, the German guten answers to three Old English forms,—gódne, gódum, gódan; guter to two—gódre, gódra; liebten to two,—lufodon and lufeden. Nouns had four cases. Nominative, Accusative (only sometimes distinct), Genitive, Dative, the latter used also with prepositions to express locative, instrumental, and most ablative relations; of a distinct instrumental case only vestiges occur. There were several declensions of nouns, the main division being that known in Germanic languages generally as strong and weak,—a distinction also extending to adjectives in such wise that every adjective assumed either the strong or the weak inflection as determined by associated grammatical forms. The first and second personal pronouns possessed a dual number = we two, ye two; the third person had a complete declension of the stem he, instead of being made up as now of the three stems seen in he, she, they. The verb distinguished the subjunctive from the indicative mood, but had only two inflected tenses, present and past (more accurately, that of incomplete and that of completed or “perfect” action)—the former also used for the future, the latter for all the shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponded generally to that of German. Thus from King Alfred’s additions to his translation of Orosius: “Donne þy ylcan dæge hi hine to þæm ade beran wyllað þonne todælað hi his feoh þaet þær to lafe bið æfter þæm gedrynce and þæm plegan, on fif oððe syx, hwilum on ma, swa swa þaes feos andefn bið” (“Then on the same day [that] they him to the pile bear will, then divide they his property that there to remainder shall be after the drinking and the sports, into five or six, at times into more, according as the property’s value is”).

The poetry was distinguished by alliteration, and the abundant use of figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and archaic words never found in prose. Thus in the following lines from Beowulf (ed. Thorpe, l. 645, Zupitza 320):—

Trans.:—

The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few foreign elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives entirely from its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned from the Romans in the German wars had been adopted into the common West Germanic tongue, and are found in English as in the allied dialects. Such were stræte (street, via strata), camp (battle), cásere (Cæsar), míl (mile), pín (punishment), mynet (money), pund (pound), wín (wine); probably also cyriće (church), biscop (bishop), læden (Latin language), cése (cheese), butor (butter), pipor (pepper), olfend (camel, elephantus), ynce (inch, uncia), and a few others. The relations of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent those of destroyers; and with the exception of the proper names of places and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained by the new population, few British words found their way into the Old English. Among these are named broc (a badger), bréc (breeches), clút (clout), púl (pool), and a few words relating to the employment of field or household menials. Still fewer words seem to have been adopted from the provincial Latin, almost the only certain ones being castra, applied to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as cæstre, ceaster, now found in composition as -caster, -chester, -cester, and culina (kitchen), which gave cylen (kiln). The introduction and gradual adoption of Christianity, brought a new series of Latin words connected with the offices of the church, the accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign productions either actually made known, or mentioned in the Scriptures and devotional books. Such were mynster (monasterium), munuc (monk), nunne (nun), maesse (mass), schol (school), œlmesse (eleemosyna), candel (candela), turtle (turtur), fic (ficus), cedar (cedrus). These words, whose number increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are commonly called Latin of the second period, the Latin of the first period including the Latin words brought by the English from the continent, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the Roman provincials or the Welsh. The Danish invasions of the 8th and 10th centuries resulted in the establishment of extensive Danish and Norwegian populations, about the basin of the Humber and its tributaries, and above Morecambe Bay. Although these Scandinavian settlers must have greatly affected the language of their own localities, but few traces of their influence are to be found in the literature of the Old English period. As with the greater part of the words adopted from the Celtic, it was not until after the dominion of the Norman had overlaid all preceding conquests, and the new English began to emerge from the ruins of the old, that Danish words in any number made their appearance in books, as equally “native” with the Anglo-Saxon.

The earliest specimens we have of English date to the end of the 7th century, and belong to the Anglian dialect, and particularly to Northumbrian, which, under the political eminence of the early Northumbrian kings from Edwin to Ecgfrið, aided perhaps by the learning of the scholars of Ireland and Iona, first attained to literary distinction. Of this literature in its original form mere fragments exist, one of the most interesting of which consists of the verses uttered by Bede on his deathbed, and preserved in a nearly contemporary MS.:—

Trans.:—

But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its West-Saxon form, the earliest literary remains of which date to the 9th century, when under the political supremacy of Wessex and the scholarship of King Alfred it became the literary language of the English nation, the classical “Anglo-Saxon.” If our materials were more extensive, it would probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several periods; as it is, considerable differences have been shown to exist between the “early West-Saxon” of King Alfred and the later language of the 11th century, the earlier language having numerous phonetic and inflectional distinctions which are “levelled” in the later, the inflectional changes showing that the tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical stage existed quite independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th century by the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form of glosses to the Latin gospels and a service-book, often called the Ritual of Durham, where we find that, owing to the confusion which had so long reigned in the north, and to special Northumbrian tendencies, e.g. the dropping of the inflectional n in both verbs and nouns, this dialect had advanced in the process of inflection-levelling far beyond the sister dialects of Mercian and the south, so as already to anticipate the forms of Early Middle English.

Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned the epic poem of Beowulf, the original nucleus of which has been supposed to date to heathen and even continental times, though we now possess it only in a later form; the poetical works of Cynewulf; those formerly ascribed to Cædmon; several works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of Orosius and of The Pastoral Care of St Gregory, are contemporary specimens of his language; the Old English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the theological works of Ælfric (including translations of the Pentateuch and the gospels) and of Wulfstan; and many works both in prose and verse, of which the authors are unknown.

The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses, are in a Runic character; but the letters used in the manuscripts generally are a British variety of the Roman alphabet which the Anglo-Saxons found in the island, and which was also used by the Welsh and Irish.[7] Several of the Roman letters had in Britain developed forms, and retained or acquired values, unlike those used on the continent, in particular

(d f g r s t). The letters q and z were not used, q being represented by cw, and k was a rare alternative to c; u or v was only a vowel, the consonantal power of v being represented as in Welsh by f. The Runes called thorn and wēn, having the consonantal values now expressed by th and w, for which the Roman alphabet had no character, were at first expressed by th, ð (a contraction for ɣɣ or ɣh), and v or u; but at a later period the characters þ and Þ were revived from the old Runic alphabet. Contrary to Continental usage, the letters c and

(g) had originally only their hard or guttural powers, as in the neighbouring Celtic languages; so that words which, when the Continental Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic languages, had to be written with k, were in Old English written with c, as cêne = keen, cynd = kind.[8] The key to the values of the letters, and thus to the pronunciation of Old English, is also to be found in the Celtic tongues whence the letters were taken.

The Old English period is usually considered as terminating 1120, with the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest. The Conquest established in England a foreign court, a foreign aristocracy and a foreign hierarchy.[9] The French language, in its Norman dialect, became the only polite medium of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not only as unknown but as the language of a subject race, was left to the use of boors and serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be written at all. The natural results followed.[10] When the educated generation that saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language, ceasing to be read and written, lost all its literary words. The words of ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on as vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those that related to science, art and higher culture, the bold artistic compounds, the figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The practical vocabulary shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And when, generations later, English began to be used for general literature, the only terms at hand to express ideas above those of every-day life were to be found in the French of the privileged classes, of whom alone art, science, law and theology had been for generations the inheritance. Hence each successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue showed a larger adoption of French words to supply the place of the forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted a notable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being only that the French words affected the English vocabulary. The Norman French words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the Central or Parisian French words which followed under the early Plantagenets, were mainly Latin words which had lived on among the people of Gaul, and, modified in the mouths of succeeding generations, had reached forms more or less remote from their originals. In being now adopted as English, they supplied precedents in accordance with which other Latin words might be converted into English ones, whenever required; and long before the Renascence of classical learning, though in much greater numbers after that epoch, these precedents were freely followed.

While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest was thus a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, the grammar of the language was not directly affected by it. There was no reason why it should—we might almost add, no way by which it could. While the English used their own words, they could not forget their own way of using them, the inflections and constructions by which alone the words expressed ideas—in other words, their grammar; when one by one French words were introduced into the sentence they became English by the very act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of course precisely what happens at the present day: telegraph and telegram make participle telegraphing and plural telegrams, and naïve the adverb naïvely, precisely as if they had been in the language for ages.

But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must be pronounced with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas; it is all-important to hear whether a word is bonus or bonis or bonas or bonos. This implies a measured and distinct pronunciation, against which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is continually struggling, while indolence and carelessness continually compromise it. In the Germanic languages, as a whole, the main stress-accent falls on the radical syllable, or on the prefix of a nominal compound, and thus at or near the beginning of the word; and the result of this in English has been a growing tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney winder, sofer, holler, Sarer, Sunder, would yer, for window, sofa, holla, Sarah, Sunday, would you, the various final vowels sinking into an obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt er, but formerly represented by final e. Already before the Conquest, forms originally hatu, sello, tunga, appeared as hate, selle, tunge, with the terminations levelled to obscure ě; but during the illiterate period of the language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable (except i) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change was going on, we see a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full inflections of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the language that the names Transition and Period of Confusion (Dr Abbott’s appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.

Although the written remains of the transition stage are few, sufficient exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic change in some of the dialects. Within three generations after the Conquest, faithful pens were at work transliterating the old homilies of Ælfric, and other lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church, into the current idiom of their posterity.[11] Twice during the period, in the reigns of Stephen and Henry II., Ælfric’s gospels were similarly modernized so as to be “understanded of the people.”[12] Homilies and other religious works of the end of the 12th century[13] show us the change still further advanced, and the language passing into Early Middle English in its southern form. While these southern remains carry on in unbroken sequence the history of the Old English of Alfred and Ælfric, the history of the northern English is an entire blank from the 11th to the 13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the terrible retaliation inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English culture for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the kingdom of Scotland during the same period, it probably perished during the calamities to which that country was subjected during the half-century of struggle for independence. In reality, however, the northern English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish inroads had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman Conquest in the south.

Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter of England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of north and south alike, and become the English of the future. The Mercian kingdom, which, as its name imports, lay along the marches of the earlier states, and was really a congeries of the outlying members of many tribes, must have presented from the beginning a linguistic mixture and transition; and it is evident that more than one intermediate form of speech arose within its confines, between Lancashire and the Thames. The specimens of early Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses, in a mixed Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century; but, in a 9th-century gloss, the so-called Vespasian Psalter, representing what is generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the close of the Old English period we find some portions of a gloss to the Rushworth Gospels, namely St Matthew and a few verses of St John xviii., to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters and one or two small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which in many respects stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish, approaching the one or the other more nearly as we have to do with North Mercian or South Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find an undoubted midland dialect in the transition stage from Old to Middle English, in the eastern part of ancient Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and south-east by the Saxon Middlesex and Essex, and on the east and north by the East Anglian Norfolk and Suffolk and the Danish settlements on the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the monastery of Peterborough, one of the copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, transcribed about 1120, was continued by two succeeding hands to the death of Stephen in 1154. The section from 1122 to 1131, probably written in the latter year, shows a notable confusion between Old English forms and those of a Middle English, impatient to rid itself of the inflectional trammels which were still, though in weakened forms, so faithfully retained south of the Thames. And in the concluding section, containing the annals from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the latter year, we find Middle English fairly started on its career. A specimen of this new tongue will best show the change that had taken place:

1140 A.D.—And[14] te eorl of Angæu wærd ded, and his sune Henri toc to þe rice. And te cuen of France to-dælde fra þe king, and scæ com to þe iunge eorl Henri. and he toc hire to wiue, and al Peitou mid hire. þa ferde he mid micel færd into Engleland and wan castles—and te king ferde agenes him mid micel mare ferd. þoþwæthere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden þe ærcebiscop and te wise men betwux heom, and makede that sahte that te king sculde ben lauerd and king wile he liuede. and æfter his dæi ware Henri king. and he helde him for fader, and he him for sune, and sib and sæhte sculde ben betwyx heom, and on al Engleland.[15]

With this may be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from 10 to 20 years later (Hatton Gospels, Luke i. 46[16]):

Da cwæð Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast geblissode on gode minen hælende. For þam þe he geseah his þinene eadmodnysse. Soðlice henen-forð me eadige seggeð alle cneornesse; for þam þe me mychele þing dyde se þe mihtyg ys; and his name is halig. And his mildheortnysse of cneornisse on cneornesse hine ondraedende. He worhte maegne on hys earme; he to-daelde þa ofermode, on moda heora heortan. He warp þa rice of setlle, and þa eadmode he up-an-hof. Hyngriende he mid gode ge-felde, and þa ofermode ydele for-let. He afeng israel his cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he spræc to ure fæderen, Abrahame and his sæde on a weorlde.

To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the versified chronicle of Layamon or Laweman, a priest of Ernely on the Severn, who, using as his basis the French Brut of Wace, expanded it by additions from other sources to more than twice the extent: his work of 32,250 lines is a mine of illustration for the language of his time and locality. The latter was intermediate between midland and southern, and the language, though forty years later than the specimen from the Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and can scarcely be considered even as Early Middle English. The following is a specimen (lines 9064-9079):

On Kinbelines daeie ... þe king wes inne Bruttene, com a þissen middel aerde ... anes maidenes sune, iboren wes in Beþleem ... of bezste alre burden. He is ihaten Jesu Crist ... þurh þene halie gost, alre worulde wunne ... walden englenne; faeder he is on heuenen ... froure moncunnes; sune he is on eorðen ... of sele þon maeidene, & þene halie gost ... haldeð mid him seoluen.

The Middle English was pre-eminently the Dialectal period of the language. It was not till after the middle of the 14th century that English obtained official recognition. For three centuries, therefore, there was no standard form of speech which claimed any pre-eminence over the others. The writers of each district wrote in the dialect familiar to them; and between extreme forms the difference was so great as to amount to unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had to be translated for the benefit of the men of the north:—

Three main dialects were distinguished by contemporary writers, as in the often-quoted passage from Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polychronicon completed in 1387:—

“Also Englysche men ... hadde fram þe bygynnynge þre maner speche, Souþeron, Norþeron and Myddel speche (in þe myddel of þe lond) as hy come of þre maner people of Germania.... Also of þe forseyde Saxon tonge, þat ys deled a þre, and ys abyde scarslyche wiþ feaw uplondysche men and ys gret wondur, for men of þe est wiþ men of þe west, as hyt were under þe same part of heyvene, acordeþ more in sounynge of sþeche þan men of þe norþ wiþ men of þe souþ; þerfore hyt ys þat Mercii, þat buþ men of myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners of þe endes, undurstondeþ betre þe syde longages Norþeron and Souþeron, þan Norþern and Souþern undurstondeþ oyþer oþer.”

The modern study of these Middle English dialects, initiated by the elder Richard Garnett, scientifically pursued by Dr Richard Morris, and elaborated by many later scholars, both English and German, has shown that they were readily distinguished by the conjugation of the present tense of the verb, which in typical specimens was as follows:—-

Of these the southern is simply the old West-Saxon, with the vowels levelled to e. The northern second person in -es preserves an older form than the southern and West-Saxon -est; but the -es of the third person and plural is derived from an older -eth, the change of -th into -s being found in progress in the Durham glosses of the 10th century. In the plural, when accompanied by the pronoun subject, the verb had already dropped the inflections entirely as in Modern English. The origin of the -en plural in the midland dialect, unknown to Old English, is probably an instance of form-levelling, the inflection of the present indicative being assimilated to that of the past, and the present and past subjunctive, in all of which -en was the plural termination. In the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, the northern dialect had attained before the end of the 13th century to the simplicity of Modern English, while the southern dialect still retained a large number of inflections, and the midland a considerable number. The dialects differed also in phonology, for while the northern generally retained the hard or guttural values of k, g, sc, these were in the two other dialects palatalized before front vowels into ch, j and sh. Kirk, chirche or church, bryg, bridge; scryke, shriek, are examples. Old English hw was written in the north qu(h), but elsewhere wh, often sinking into w. The original long á in stán, már, preserved in the northern stane, mare, became ō elsewhere, as in stone, more. So that the north presented a general aspect of conservation of old sounds with the most thorough-going dissolution of old inflections; the south, a tenacious retention of the inflections, with an extensive evolution in the sounds. In one important respect, however, phonetic decay was far ahead in the north: the final e to which all the old vowels had been levelled during the transition stage, and which is a distinguishing feature of Middle English in the midland and southern dialects, became mute, i.e., disappeared, in the northern dialect before that dialect emerged from its three centuries of obscuration, shortly before 1300. So thoroughly modern had its form consequently become that we might almost call it Modern English, and say that the Middle English stage of the northern dialect is lost. For comparison with the other dialects, however, the same nomenclature may be used, and we may class as Middle English the extensive literature which northern England produced during the 14th century. The earliest specimen is probably the Metrical Psalter in the Cotton Library,[17] copied during the reign of Edward II. from an original of the previous century. The gigantic versified paraphrase of Scripture history called the Cursor Mundi,[18] is held also to have been composed before 1300. The dates of the numerous alliterative romances in this dialect have not been determined with exactness, as all survive in later copies, but it is probable that some of them were written before 1300. In the 14th century appeared the theological and devotional works of Richard Rolle the anchorite of Hampole, Dan Jon Gaytrigg, William of Nassington, and other writers whose names are unknown; and towards the close of the century, specimens of the language also appear from Scotland both in official documents and in the poetical works of John Barbour, whose language, barring minute points of orthography, is identical with that of the contemporary northern English writers. From 1400 onward, the distinction between northern English and Lowland Scottish becomes clearly marked.

In the southern dialect one version of the work called the Ancren Riwle or “Rule of Nuns,” adapted about 1225 for a small sisterhood at Tarrant-Kaines, in Dorsetshire, exhibits a dialectal characteristic which had probably long prevailed in the south, though concealed by the spelling, in the use of v for f, as valle fall, vordonne fordo, vorto for to, veder father, vrom from. Not till later do we find a recognition of the parallel use of z for s. Among the writings which succeed, The Owl and the Nightingale of Nicholas de Guildford, of Portesham in Dorsetshire, before 1250, the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, 1298, and Trevisa’s translation of Higden, 1387, are of special importance in illustrating the history of southern English. The earliest form of Langland’s Piers Ploughman, 1362, as preserved in the Vernon MS., appears to be in an intermediate dialect between southern and midland.[19] The Kentish form of southern English seems to have retained specially archaic features; five short sermons in it of the middle of the 13th century were edited by Dr Morris (1866); but the great work illustrating it is the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse of Conscience), 1340,[20] a translation from the French by Dan Michel of Northgate, Kent, who tells us—

In its use of v (u) and z for ƒ and s, and its grammatical inflections, it presents an extreme type of southern speech, with peculiarities specially Kentish; and in comparison with contemporary Midland English works, it looks like a fossil of two centuries earlier.

Turning from the dialectal extremes of the Middle English to the midland speech, which we left at the closing leaves of the Peterborough Chronicle of 1154, we find a rapid development of this dialect, which was before long to become the national literary language. In this, the first great work is the Ormulum, or metrical Scripture paraphrase of Orm or Ormin, written about 1200, somewhere near the northern frontier of the midland area. The dialect has a decided smack of the north, and shows for the first time in English literature a large percentage of Scandinavian words, derived from the Danish settlers, who, in adopting English, had preserved a vast number of their ancestral forms of speech, which were in time to pass into the common language, of which they now constitute some of the most familiar words. Blunt, bull, die, dwell, ill, kid, raise, same, thrive, wand, wing, are words from this source, which appear first in the work of Orm, of which the following lines may be quoted:—

The author of the Ormulum was a phonetist, and employed a special spelling of his own to represent not only the quality but the quantities of vowels and consonants—a circumstance which gives his work a peculiar value to the investigator. He is generally assumed to have been a native of Lincolnshire or Notts, but the point is a disputed one, and there is somewhat to be said for the neighbourhood of Ormskirk in Lancashire.

It is customary to differentiate between east and west midland, and to subdivide these again into north and south. As was natural in a tract of country which stretched from Lancaster to Essex, a very considerable variety is found in the documents which agree in presenting the leading midland features, those of Lancashire and Lincolnshire approaching the northern dialect both in vocabulary, phonetic character and greater neglect of inflections. But this diversity diminishes as we advance.

Thirty years after the Ormulum, the east midland rhymed Story of Genesis and Exodus[22] shows us the dialect in a more southern form, with the vowels of modern English, and from about the same date, with rather more northern characteristics, we have an east midland Bestiary.

Different tests and different dates have been proposed for subdividing the Middle English period, but the most important is that of Henry Nicol, based on the observation that in the early 13th century, as in Ormin, the Old English short vowels in an open syllable still retained their short quantity, as năma, ŏver, mĕte; but by 1250 or 1260 they had been lengthened to nā-me, ō-ver, mē-te, a change which has also taken place at a particular period in all the Germanic, and even the Romanic languages, as in buō-no for bŏ-num, pā-dre for pă-trem, &c. The lengthening of the penult left the final syllable by contrast shortened or weakened, and paved the way for the disappearance of final e in the century following, through the stages nă-me, nā-mĕ, nā-m’, nām, the one long syllable in nām(e) being the quantitative equivalent of the two short syllables in nă-mĕ; hence the notion that mute e makes a preceding vowel long, the truth being that the lengthening of the vowel led to the e becoming mute.

After 1250 we have the Lay of Havelok, and about 1300 the writings of Robert of Brunne in South Lincolnshire. In the 14th century we find a number of texts belonging to the western part of the district. South-west midland is hardly to be distinguished from southern in its south-western form, and hence texts like Piers Plowman elude any satisfactory classification, but several metrical romances exhibit what are generally considered to be west midland characteristics, and a little group of poems, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knighte, the Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, thought to be the work of a north-west midland writer of the 14th century, bear a striking resemblance to the modern Lancashire dialect. The end of the century witnessed the prose of Wycliff and Mandeville, and the poetry of Chaucer, with whom Middle English may be said to have culminated, and in whose writings its main characteristics as distinct from Old and Modern English may be studied. Thus, we find final e in full use representing numerous original vowels and terminations as

Him thoughtè that his hertè woldè brekè,

in Old English—

Him þuhte þæt his heorte wolde brecan,

which may be compared with the modern German—

Ihm däuchte dass sein Herze wollte brechen.

In nouns the -es of the plural and genitive case is still syllabic—

Reede as the berstl-es of a sow-es eer-es.

Several old genitives and plural forms continued to exist, and the dative or prepositional case has usually a final e. Adjectives retain so much of the old declension as to have -e in the definite form and in the plural—

Numerous old forms of comparison were in use, which have not come down to Modern English, as herre, ferre, lenger, hext = higher, farther, longer, highest. In the pronouns, ich lingered alongside of I; ye was only nominative, and you objective; the northern thei had dispossessed the southern hy, but her and hem (the modern ’em) stood their ground against their and them. The verb is I lov-e, thou lov-est, he lov-eth; but, in the plural, lov-en is interchanged with lov-e, as rhyme or euphony requires. So in the plural of the past we love-den or love-de. The infinitive also ends in en, often e, always syllabic. The present participle, in Old English -ende, passing through -inde, has been confounded with the verbal noun in -ynge, -yng, as in Modern English. The past participle largely retains the prefix y- or i-, representing the Old English ge-, as in i-ronne, y-don, Old English zerunnen, zedón, run, done. Many old verb forms still continued in existence. The adoption of French words, not only those of Norman introduction, but those subsequently introduced under the Angevin kings, to supply obsolete and obsolescent English ones, which had kept pace with the growth of literature since the beginning of the Middle English period, had now reached its climax; later times added many more, but they also dropped some that were in regular use with Chaucer and his contemporaries.

Chaucer’s great contemporary, William Langland, in his Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman, and his imitator the author of Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede (about 1400) used the Old English alliterative versification for the last time in the south. Rhyme had made its appearance in the language shortly after the Conquest—if not already known before; and in the south and midlands it became decidedly more popular than alliteration; the latter retained its hold much longer in the north, where it was written even after 1500: many of the northern romances are either simply alliterative, or have both alliteration and rhyme. To these characteristics of northern and southern verse respectively Chaucer alludes in the prologue of the “Persone,” who, when called upon for his tale said:—

The changes from Old to Middle English may be summed up thus: Loss of a large part of the native vocabulary, and adoption of French words to fill their place; not infrequent adoption of French words as synonyms of existing native ones; modernization of the English words preserved, by vowel change in a definite direction from back to front, and from open to close, ā, becoming ō,, original ē, ō tending to ee, oo, monophthongization of the old diphthongs eo, ea, and development of new diphthongs in connexion with g, h, and w; adoption of French orthographic symbols, e.g. ou for ū,, qu, v, ch, and gradual loss of the symbols ɔ, þ, ð, Þ; obscuration of vowels after the accent, and especially of final a, o, u to ĕ; consequent confusion and loss of old inflections, and their replacement by prepositions, auxiliary verbs and rules of position; abandonment of alliteration for rhyme; and great development of dialects, in consequence of there being no standard or recognized type of English.

But the recognition came at length. Already in 1258 was issued the celebrated English proclamation of Henry III., or rather of Simon de Montfort in his name, which, as the only public recognition of the native tongue between William the Conqueror and Edward III., has sometimes been spoken of as the first specimen of English. It runs:—

“Henri þurȝ godes fultume king on Engleneloande Lhoauerd on Yrloande. Duk on Normandie on Aquitaine and eorl on Aniow. Send igretinge to alle hise holde ilærde and ileawede on Huntendoneschire. þæt witen ȝe wel alle þæt we willen and vnnen þæt þæt vre rædesmen alle oþer þe moare dæl of heom þæt beoþ ichosen þurȝ us and þurȝ þæt loandes folk on vre kuneriche. habbeþ idon and schullen don in þe worþnesse of gode and on vre treowþe. for þe freme of þe loande. þurȝ þe besiȝte of þan to-foren-iseide redesmen. beo stedefæst and ilestinde in alle þinge a buten ænde. And we hoaten alle vre treowe in þe treowþe þæt heo vs oȝen. þæt heo stedefæstliche healden and swerien to healden and to werien þo isetnesses þæt ben imakede and beon to makien þurȝ þan to-foren iseide rædesmen. oþer þurȝ þe moare dæl of heom alswo alse hit is biforen iseid. And þæt æhc oþer helpe þæt for to done bi þan ilche oþe aȝenes alle men. Riȝt for to done and to foangen. And noan ne nime of loande ne of eȝte. wherþurȝ þis besiȝte muȝe beon ilet oþer iwersed on onie wise.’ And ȝif oni oþer onie cumen her onȝenes; we willen and hoaten þæt alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan. And for þæt we willen þæt þis beo stedefæst and lestinde; we senden ȝew þis writ open iseined wiþ vre seel. to halden amanges ȝew ine hord. Witnesse vs seluen æt Lundene. þane Eȝtetenþe day. on þe Monþe of Octobre In þe Two-and-fowertiȝþe ȝeare of vre cruninge. And þis wes idon ætforen vre isworene redesmen....

“And al on þo ilche worden is isend in to æurihce oþre shcire ouer al þære kuneriche on Engleneloande. and ek in tel Irelonde.”

The dialect of this document is more southern than anything else, with a slight midland admixture. It is much more archaic inflectionally than the Genesis and Exodus or Ormulum; but it closely resembles the old Kentish sermons and Proverbs of Alfred in the southern dialect of 1250. It represents no doubt the London speech of the day. London being in a Saxon county, and contiguous to Kent and Surrey, had certainly at first a southern dialect; but its position as the capital, as well as its proximity to the midland district, made its dialect more and more midland. Contemporary London documents show that Chaucer’s language, which is distinctly more southern than standard English eventually became, is behind the London dialect of the day in this respect, and is at once more archaic and consequently more southern.

During the next hundred years English gained ground steadily, and by the reign of Edward III. French was so little known in England, even in the families of the great, that about 1350 “John Cornwal, a maystere of gramere, chaungede þe lore (= teaching) in gramere scole and construccion of [i.e. from] Freynsch into Englysch”;[23] and in 1362-1363 English by statute took the place of French in the pleadings in courts of law. Every reason conspired that this “English” should be the midland dialect. It was the intermediate dialect, intelligible, as Trevisa has told us, to both extremes, even when these failed to be intelligible to each other; in its south-eastern form, it was the language of London, where the supreme law courts were, the centre of political and commercial life; it was the language in which the Wycliffite versions had given the Holy Scriptures to the people; the language in which Chaucer had raised English poetry to a height of excellence admired and imitated by contemporaries and followers. And accordingly after the end of the 14th century, all Englishmen who thought they had anything to say to their countrymen generally said it in the midland speech. Trevisa’s own work was almost the last literary effort of the southern dialect; henceforth it was but a rustic patois, which the dramatist might use to give local colouring to his creations, as Shakespeare uses it to complete Edgar’s peasant disguise in Lear, or which 19th century research might disinter to illustrate obscure chapters in the history of language. And though the northern English proved a little more stubborn, it disappeared also from literature in England; but in Scotland, which had now become politically and socially estranged from England, it continued its course as the national language of the country, attaining in the 15th and 16th centuries a distinct development and high literary culture, for the details of which readers are referred to the article on [Scottish Language].

The 15th century of English history, with its bloody French war abroad and Wars of the Roses at home, was a barren period in literature, and a transition one in language, witnessing the decay and disappearance of the final e, and most of the syllabic inflections of Middle English. Already by 1420, in Chaucer’s disciple Hoccleve, final e was quite uncertain; in Lydgate it was practically gone. In 1450 the writings of Pecock against the Wycliffites show the verbal inflections in -en in a state of obsolescence; he has still the southern pronouns her and hem for the northern their, them:—

“And here-aȝens holi scripture wole þat men schulden lacke þe coueryng which wommen schulden haue, & thei schulden so lacke bi þat þe heeris of her heedis schulden be schorne, & schulde not growe in lengþe doun as wommanys heer schulde growe....

“Also here-wiþal into þe open siȝt of ymagis in open chirchis, alle peple, men & wommen & children mowe come whanne euere þei wolen in ech tyme of þe day, but so mowe þei not come in-to þe vce of bokis to be delyuered to hem neiþer to be red bifore hem; & þerfore, as for to soone & ofte come into remembraunce of a long mater bi ech oon persoon, and also as forto make þat þe mo persoones come into remembraunce of a mater, ymagis & picturis serven in a specialer maner þan bokis doon, þouȝ in an oþer maner ful substanciali bokis seruen better into remembrauncing of þo same materis þan ymagis & picturis doon; & þerfore, þouȝ writing is seruen weel into remembrauncing upon þe bifore seid þingis, ȝit not at þe ful: Forwhi þe bokis han not þe avail of remembrauncing now seid whiche ymagis han.”[24]

The change of the language during the second period of Transition, as well as the extent of dialectal differences, is quaintly expressed a generation later by Caxton, who in the prologue to one of the last of his works, his translation of Virgil’s Eneydos (1490), speaks of the difficulty he had in pleasing all readers:—

“I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen, whiche late blamed me, sayeng, yt in my translacyons I had ouer curyous termes, whiche coud not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse olde and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfy euery man; and so to doo, toke an olde boke and redde therein; and certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele vnderstande it. And also my lorde abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to me late certayn euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in to our englysshe now vsid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe; I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be vnderstonden. And certaynly, our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone, whiche is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wexynge one season, and waneth and dycreaseth another season. And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so much that in my days happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shipe in tamyse, for to haue sayled ouer the sea into zelande, and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete, and specyally he axyd after eggys, And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges; and she vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo! what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? certaynly, it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes, euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre wyll vtter his comynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And som honest and grete clerkes haue ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude and curyous, I stande abasshed; but in my Iudgemente, the comyn termes that be dayli vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe.”

In the productions of Caxton’s press we see the passage from Middle to Early Modern English completed. The earlier of these have still an occasional verbal plural in -n, especially in the word they ben; the southern her and hem of Middle English vary with the northern and Modern English their, them. In the late works, the older forms have been practically ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern English. Both in the completion of this result, and in its comparative permanence, the printing press had an important share. By its exclusive patronage of the midland speech, it raised it still higher above the sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were multiplied and found their way into every corner of the land, and the art of reading became a more common acquirement, the man of Northumberland or of Somersetshire had forced upon his attention the book-English in which alone these were printed. This became in turn the model for his own writings, and by-and-by, if he made any pretensions to education, of his own speech. The written form of the language also tended to uniformity. In previous periods the scribe made his own spelling with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to the particular values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to disturbance in the most common words and combinations by his ocular recollections of the spelling of others. But after the introduction of printing, this ocular recognition of words became ever more and more an aim; the book addressed the mind directly through the eye, instead of circuitously through eye and ear; and thus there was a continuous tendency for written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and that the most usual, or through some accident the best known, but not necessarily that which would have been chosen had the ear been called in as umpire. Modern English spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to individual results and whimsical caprice as to principles, is the creation of the printing-office, the victory which, after a century and a half of struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits. Besides eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The British and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been referred to. This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an alphabet with the French forms and values of the letters. Thus k took the place of the older c before e and i; qu replaced cw; the Norman w took the place of the wén (Þ), &c.; and hence it has often been said that Middle English stands nearer to Old English in pronunciation, but to Modern English in spelling. But there were certain sounds in English for which Norman writing had no provision; and for these, in writing English, the native characters were retained. Thus the Old English g (

), beside the sound in go, had a guttural sound as in German tag, Irish magh, and in certain positions a palatalized form of this approaching y as in you (if pronounced with aspiration hyou or ghyou). These sounds continued to be written with the native form of the letter as burȝ, ȝour, while the French form was used for the sounds in go, age,—one original letter being thus represented by two. So for the sounds of th, especially the sound in that, the Old English thorn (þ) continued to be used. But as these characters were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was introduced, the founts, cast for continental languages, had no characters for them, so that they were dropped entirely, being replaced, ȝ by gh, yh, y, and þ by th. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In the north it is curious that the printers tried to express the forms rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently ȝ was represented by z, the black letter form of which was confounded with it, while the þ was expressed by y, which its MS. form had come to approach or in some cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find zellow, ze, yat, yem = yellow, ye, that, them; and in Modern Scottish, such names as Menzies, Dalziel, Cockenzie, and the word gaberlunzie, in which the z stands for y.

Modern English thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length reached the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single older verbal form, the southern -eth of the third person singular, continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but the northern form in -s was intermixed with it in poetry (where it saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller an, none, mine, thine, in the early part of the 16th century at least, were used in positions where their shortened forms a, no, my, thy are now found (none other, mine own = no other, my own). But with such minute exceptions, the accidence of the 16th century was the accidence of the 19th. While, however, the older inflections had disappeared, there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from noun and verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The laxity of word-order which was permitted in older states of the language by the formal expression of relations was often continued though the inflections which expressed the relations had disappeared. Partial analogy was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case, because, in another, such identification was accidentally produced, as for instance the past participles of write and take were often made wrote and took, because the contracted participles of bind and break were bound and broke. Finally, because, in dropping inflections, the former distinctions even between parts of speech had disappeared, so that iron, e.g., was at once noun, adjective and verb, clean, adjective, verb and adverb, it appeared as if any word whatever might be used in any grammatical relation, where it conveyed the idea of the speaker. Thus, as has been pointed out by Dr Abbott, “you can happy your friend, malice or foot your enemy, or fall an axe on his neck. You can speak and act easy, free, excellent, you can talk of fair instead of beauty (fairness), and a pale instead of a paleness. A he is used for a man, and a lady is described by a gentleman as ‘the fairest she he has yet beheld.’ An adverb can be used as a verb, as ’they askance their eyes’; as a noun, ‘the backward and abyss of time’; or as an adjective, a ‘seldom pleasure.’”[25] For, as he also says, “clearness was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness. Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came uppermost in the mind without much regard to syntax, and the result was a forcible and perfectly unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such as

or, as instances of brevity,

These characteristics, together with the presence of words now obsolete or archaic, and the use of existing words in senses different from our own, as general for specific, literal for metaphorical, and vice versa, which are so apparent to every reader of the 16th-century literature, make it useful to separate Early Modern or Tudor English from the subsequent and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has declared in favour of individual senses and constructions which are alone admissible in ordinary language.

The beginning of the Tudor period was contemporaneous with the Renaissance in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in geography and science. The revival of the study of the classical writers of Greece and Rome, and the translation of their works into the vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new words derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects or to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old ideas. Often also it seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as the spirit of the old, that it came more natural to them to express themselves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue, and thus words of Latin origin were introduced even when English already possessed perfectly good equivalents. As has already been stated, the French words of Norman and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin words in an altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby other Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the 16th century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the form of the words procession and progression to show that the one was used in England in the 11th, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the formation of new words from Latin had gone on in French as well as in English since the Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words, e.g. as persuade and persuasion, were borrowed from their French equivalents or formed from Latin in England independently. With some words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England directly from Latin, borrowed from contemporary late French, or had been in England since the Norman period, even photograph, geology and telephone have the form that they would have had if they had been living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French and English from the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century.[26] While every writer was thus introducing new words according to his notion of their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not accepted by contemporaries or posterity; a long list might be formed of these mintages of the 16th and 17th centuries, which either never became current coin, or circulated only as it were for a moment. The revived study of Latin and Greek also led to modifications in the spelling of some words which had entered Middle English in the French form. So Middle English doute, dette, were changed to doubt, debt, to show a more immediate connexion with Latin dubitum, debitum; the actual derivation from the French being ignored. Similarly, words containing a Latin and French t, which might be traced back to an original Greek θ, were remodelled upon the Greek, e.g. theme, throne, for Middle English teme, trone, and, by false association with Greek, anthem, Old English antefne, Latin antiphona; Anthony, Latin Antonius; Thames, Latin Tamesis, apparently after Thomas.

The voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in Spanish forms, of which negro, potato, tobacco, cargo, armadillo, alligator, galleon may serve as examples.

The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of Shakespeare’s literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the Bible (a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the revolution of 1688. The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived 1688 are still in use; but a long list might be made out of those that appear for the last time before that date. This sifting of the literary vocabulary and gradual fixing of the literary spelling, which went on between 1611, when the language became modern in structure, and 1689, when it became modern also in form, suggests for this period the name of Seventeenth-Century Transition. The distinctive features of Modern English have already been anticipated by way of contrast with preceding stages of the language. It is only necessary to refer to the fact that the vocabulary is now much more composite than at any previous period. The immense development of the physical sciences has called for a corresponding extension of terminology which has been supplied from Latin and especially Greek; and although these terms are in the first instance technical, yet, with the spread of education and general diffusion of the rudiments and appliances of science, the boundary line between technical and general, indefinite at the best, tends more and more to melt away—this in addition to the fact that words still technical become general in figurative or metonymic senses. Ache, diamond, stomach, comet, organ, tone, ball, carte, are none the less familiar because once technical words. Commercial, social, artistic or literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous words from modern European languages, especially French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch (these two at a less recent period): thus from French soirée, séance, dépôt, débris, programme, prestige; from Italian bust, canto, folio, cartoon, concert, regatta, ruffian; from Portuguese caste, palaver; from Dutch yacht, skipper, schooner, sloop. Commercial intercourse and colonization have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words more or fewer from Hindostani, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, and from American, Australian, Polynesian and African languages.[27] More important even than these, perhaps, are the dialect words that from time to time obtain literary recognition, restoring to us obsolete Old English forms, and not seldom words of Celtic or Danish origin, which have been preserved in local dialects, and thus at length find their way into the standard language.

As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it is probable that original English words do not now form more than a fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that we still identify the language with that of the 9th century, and class it as a member of the Low German division. But this explains itself, when we consider that of the total words in a dictionary only a small portion are used by any one individual in speaking or even in writing; that this portion includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority of the others. The latter are in fact almost all names—the vast majority names of things (nouns), a smaller number names of attributes and actions (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very nature, names of the things, attributes and actions which come less usually or, it may be, very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from 10 to 15% of the whole; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical their number will increase; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse mathematics the proportion may be 40%. But after all, it is not the question whence words may have been taken, but how they are used in a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are new words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will become as thoroughly native, i.e. familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this respect English is still the same language it was in the days of Alfred; and, comparing its history with that of other Low German tongues, there is no reason to believe that its grammar or structure would have been very different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the Norman Conquest had never taken place.

A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great changes may and indeed must have taken place between the first arrival of the Saxons and the days of King Alfred, when literature practically begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of the vocabulary, the body of primary “words of common life,” which, notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the “poetic and rhetorical,” as well as the “scientific” terms of Old English have died out, and a new vocabulary of “abstract and general terms” has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer “technical, commercial and scientific” vocabulary is composed of words not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized languages.

The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and which result in making modern English words very different from their Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words like stone, mine, doom, day, nail, child, bridge, shoot, Anglo-Saxon stán, mín, dóm, dæg, nægel, cild, brycg, scéot. The history of English sounds (see [Phonetics]) has been treated at length by Dr A.J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following, (1) In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained nearly unchanged; thus the words at, men, bill, God, dust are pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more like the Scotch o and North English u respectively, and in most words the short a had a broader sound like the provincial a in man. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the words bán, hær, soece or séce, stól (bahn or bawn, hêr, sök or saik, stōle) are now bōne, hair, seek, stool; while the two high vowels ú (= oo) and i (ee) have become diphthongs, as hús, scír, now house, shire, though the old sound of u remains in the north (hoose), and the original i in the pronunciation sheer, approved by Walker, “as in machine, and shire, and magazine.” (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have usually been lengthened, as in nă-ma, cŏ-fa, now name, cove; but to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of ĭ and ŭ. (4) Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure ĕ, and then, if final, disappeared; so oxa, séo, wudu became ox-e, se-e, wud-e, and then ox, see, wood; oxan, lufod, now oxen, loved, lov’d; settan, setton, later setten, sette, sett, now set. (5) The back consonants, c, g, sc, in connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to ch, j, sh, as circe, rycg, fisc, now church, ridge, fish. A medial or final g has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant to w or y, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in boga, laga, dæg, heg, drig, now bow, law, day, hay, dry. W and h have disappeared before r and l, as in write, (w)lisp, (h)ring; h final (= gh) has become f, k, w or nothing, but has developed the glides u or i before itself, these combining with the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging with it into a simple vowel-sound, as ruh, hoh, boh, deah, heah, hleah, now rough, hough, bough, dough, high, laugh=ruf, hok, bŏw, dō, hī, lâf. R after a vowel has practically disappeared in standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the vowel, as in hear, bar, more, her. These and other changes have taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws; the details as to time and mode may be studied in special works. It may be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical gender in English, and the almost complete disappearance of cases, are purely phonetic phenomena. Gender (whatever its remote origin) was practically the use of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in accordance with the genus, genre, gender or kind of nouns to which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were uniformly levelled to final ĕ, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into genders or kinds having no other existence disappeared. Thus when þæt godé hors, þone godan hund, þa godan bóc, became, by phonetic weakening, þe gode hors, þe gode hownd, þe gode boke, and later still the good horse, the good hound, the good book, the words horse, hound, book were no longer grammatically different kinds of nouns; grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of adjectives has entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated by rationality and sex, instead of grammatical gender, which has no existence in English. The man who lost his life; the bird which built its nest.

Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from that date (with the exception of the northern English in Scotland, where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we have little history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as local and popular forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie (1589) says:—

“Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their language is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the termes of Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [= one] matter; nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our Southerne English is, no more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th’ English Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men.”—Arber’s Reprint, p. 157.

In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of interest in these forms of English, several of which following in the wake of the revival of Lowland Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries, have produced a considerable literature in the form of local poems, tales and “folk-lore.” In these respects Cumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, the “far north” and “far west” of Puttenham, where the dialect was felt to be so independent of literary English as not to be branded as a mere vulgar corruption of it, stand prominent. More recently the dialects have been investigated philologically, a department in which, as in other departments of English philology, the elder Richard Garnett must be named as a pioneer. The work was carried out zealously by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte and Dr A.J. Ellis, and more recently by the English Dialect Society, founded by the Rev. Professor Skeat, for the investigation of this branch of philology. The efforts of this society resulted in the compilation and publication of glossaries or word-books, more or less complete and trustworthy, of most of the local dialects, and in the production of grammars dealing with the phonology and grammatical features of a few of these, among which that of the Windhill dialect in Yorkshire, by Professor Joseph Wright, and that of West Somerset, by the late F.T. Elworthy, deserve special mention. From the whole of the glossaries of the Dialect Society, and from all the earlier dialect works of the 18th and 19th centuries, amplified and illustrated by the contributions of local collaborators in nearly every part of the British Isles, Professor Joseph Wright has constructed his English Dialect Dictionary, recording the local words and senses, with indication of their geographical range, their pronunciation, and in most cases with illustrative quotations or phrases. To this he has added an English Dialect Grammar, dealing very fully with the phonology of the dialects, showing the various sounds which now represent each Old English sound, and endeavouring to define the area over which each modern form extends; the accidence is treated more summarily, without going minutely into that of each dialect-group, for which special dialect grammars must be consulted. The work has also a very full and valuable index of every word and form treated.

The researches of Prince L.L. Bonaparte and Dr Ellis were directed specially to the classification and mapping of the existing dialects,[28] and the relation of these to the dialects of Old and Middle English. They recognized a Northern dialect lying north of a line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber, which, with the kindred Scottish dialects (already investigated and classed),[29] is the direct descendant of early northern English, and a South-western dialect occupying Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire, which, with the Devonian dialect beyond it, are the descendants of early southern English and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This dialect must in the 14th Century have been spoken everywhere south of Thames; but the influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become “far western.” An East Midland dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire to London, occupies the cradle-land of the standard English speech, and still shows least variation from it. Between and around these typical dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland proper, or dialects between it and the others already mentioned. Thus “north of Trent” the North-western dialect of south Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby and Stafford, with that of Shropshire, represents the early West Midland English, of which several specimens remain; while the North-eastern of Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents the dialect of the Lay of Havelok. With the North Midland dialect of south-west Yorkshire, these represent forms of speech which to the modern Londoner, as to Puttenham, are still decidedly northern, though actually intermediate between northern proper and midland, and preserving interesting traces of the midland pronouns and verbal inflections. There is an Eastern dialect in the East Anglian counties; a Midland in Leicester and Warwick shires; a Western in Hereford, Worcester and north Gloucestershire, intermediate between south-western and north-western, and representing the dialect of Piers Plowman. Finally, between the east midland and south-western, in the counties of Buckingham, Oxford, Berks, Hants, Surrey and Sussex, there is a dialect which must have once been south-western, but of which the most salient characters have been rubbed off by proximity to London and the East Midland speech. In east Sussex and Kent this South-eastern dialect attains to a more distinctive character. The Kentish form of early Southern English evidently maintained its existence more toughly than that of the counties immediately south of London. It was very distinct in the days of Sir Thomas More; and even, as we see from the dialect attributed to Edgar in Lear, was still strongly marked in the days of Shakespeare. In the south-eastern corner of Ireland, in the baronies of Forth and Bargy, in county Wexford, a very archaic form of English, of which specimens have been preserved,[30] was still spoken in the 18th century. In all probability it dated from the first English invasion. In many parts of Ulster forms of Lowland Scotch dating to the settlement under James I. are still spoken; but the English of Ireland generally seems to represent 16th and 17th century English, as in the pronunciation of tea, wheat (tay, whait), largely affected, of course, by the native Celtic. The subsequent work of the English Dialect Society, and the facts set forth in the English Dialect Dictionary, confirm in a general way the classification of Bonaparte and Ellis; but they bring out strongly the fact that only in a few cases can the boundary between dialects now be determined by precise lines. For every dialect there is a central region, larger or smaller, in which its characteristics are at a maximum; but towards the edges of the area these become mixed and blended with the features of the contiguous dialects, so that it is often impossible to define the point at which the one dialect ends and the other begins. The fact is that the various features of a dialect, whether its distinctive words, characteristic pronunciations or special grammatical features, though they may have the same centre, have not all the same circumference. Some of them extend to a certain distance round the centre; others to a much greater distance. The only approximately accurate way to map the area of any dialect, whether in England, France, Germany or elsewhere, is to take a well-chosen set of its characteristic features—words, senses, sounds or grammatical peculiarities, and draw a line round the area over which each of these extends; between the innermost and outermost of these there will often be a large border district. If the same process be followed with the contiguous dialects, it will be found that some of the lines of each intersect some of the lines of the other, and that the passing of one dialect into another is not effected by the formation of intermediate or blended forms of any one characteristic, but by the overlapping or intersecting of more or fewer of the features of each. Thus a definite border village or district may use 10 of the 20 features of dialect A and 10 of those of B, while a village on the one side has 12 of those of A with 8 of those of B, and one on the other side has 7 of those of A with 13 of those of B. Hence a dialect boundary line can at best indicate the line within which the dialect has, on the whole, more of the features of A than of B or C; and usually no single line can be drawn as a dialect boundary, but that without it there are some features of the same dialect, and within it some features of the contiguous dialects.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE PERIODS AND DIALECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The vertical lines represent the four leading forms of English—Northern, Midland, Southern, and Kentish—and the names occurring down the course of each are those of writers and works in that form of English at the given date. The thickness of the line shows the comparative literary position of this form of speech at the time: thick indicating a literary language; medium, a literary dialect; thin, a popular dialect or patois; a dotted line shows that this period is unrepresented by specimens. The horizontal lines divide the periods; these (after the first two) refer mainly to the Midland English; in inflectional decay the Northern English was at least a century in advance of the Midland, and the Southern nearly as much behind it.

Beyond the limits of the British Isles, English is the language of extensive regions, now or formerly colonies. In all these countries the presence of numerous new objects and new conditions of life has led to the supplementing of the vocabulary by the adoption of words from native languages, and special adaptation and extension of the sense of English words. The use of a common literature, however, prevents the overgrowth of these local peculiarities, and also makes them more or less familiar to Englishmen at home. It is only in the older states of the American Union that anything like a local dialect has been produced; and even there many of the so-called Americanisms are quite as much archaic English forms which have been lost or have become dialectal in England as developments of the American soil.

The steps by which English, from being the language of a few thousand invaders along the eastern and southern seaboard of Britain, has been diffused by conquest and colonization over its present area form a subject too large for the limits of this article. It need only be remarked that within the confines of Britain itself the process is not yet complete. Representatives of earlier languages survive in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, though in neither case can the substitution of English be very remote. In Ireland, where English was introduced by conquest much later, Irish is still spoken in patches all over the country; though English is understood, and probably spoken after a fashion, almost everywhere. At opposite extremities of Britain, the Cornish of Cornwall and the Norse dialects of Orkney and Shetland died out very gradually in the course of the 18th century. The Manx, or Celtic of Man, is even now in the last stage of dissolution; and in the Channel Isles the Norman patois of Jersey and Guernsey have largely yielded to English.

The table on p. 599 (a revision of that brought before the Philological Society in Jan. 1876) graphically presents the chronological and dialectal development of English. Various names have been proposed for the different stages; it seems only necessary to add to those in the table the descriptive names of Dr Abbott, who has proposed (How to Parse, p. 298) to call the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the “Synthetical or Inflexional Period”; the Old English Transition (Late Anglo-Saxon of Dr Skeat), the “Period of Confusion”; the Early Middle English, “Analytical Period” (1250-1350); the normal Middle English, “National Period” (1350-1500); the Tudor English, “Period of Licence”; and the Modern English, “Period of Settlement.”

Bibliography.—As the study of English has made immense advances within the last generation, it is only in works recently published that the student will find the subject satisfactorily handled. Among the earlier works treating of the whole subject or parts of it may be mentioned—A History of English Rhythms, by Edwin Guest (London, 1838); the Philological Essays of Richard Garnett (1835-1848), edited by his son (London, 1859); The English Language, by R.G. Latham (5th ed., London, 1862); Origin and History of the English Language, by G.P. Marsh (revised 1885); Lectures on the English Language, by the same (New York and London, 1863); Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, by C.F. Koch (Weimar, 1863, &c.); Englische Grammatik, by Eduard Mätzner (Berlin, 1860-1865), (an English translation by C.J. Grece, LL.B., London, 1874); The Philology of the English Tongue, by John Earle, M.A. (Oxford, 1866, 5th ed. 1892); Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language, by F.A. March (New York, 1870); Historical Outlines of English Accidence, by the Rev. R. Morris, LL.D. (London, 1873), (new ed. by Kellner); Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar, by the same (London, 1874); The Sources of Standard English, by T.L. Kington Oliphant, M.A. (London, 1873); Modern English, by F. Hall (London, 1873); A Shakespearian Grammar, by E.A. Abbott, D.D. (London, 1872); How to Parse, by the same (London, 1875); Early English Pronunciation, &c., by A.J. Ellis (London, 1869); The History of English Sounds, by Henry Sweet (London, 1874, 2nd ed. 1888); as well as many separate papers by various authors in the Transactions of the Philological Society, and the publications of the Early English Text Society.

Among more recent works are: M. Kaluza, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (Berlin, 1890); Professor W.W. Skeat, Principles of English Etymology (Oxford, 1887-1891); Johan Storm, Englische Philologie (Leipzig, 1892-1896); L. Kellner, Historical Outlines of English Syntax (London, 1892); O.F. Emerson, History of the English Language (London and New York, 1894); Otto Jespersen, Progress in Language, with special reference to English (London, 1894); Lorenz Morsbach, Mittelenglische Grammatik, part i. (Halle, 1896); Paul, “Geschichte der englischen Sprache,” in Grundriss der german. Philologie (Strassburg, 1898); Eduard Sievers, Angelsächsische Grammatik (3rd ed., Halle, 1898); Eng. transl. of same (2nd ed.), by A.S. Cook (Boston, 1887); K.D. Bülbring, Altenglisches Elementarbuch (Heidelberg, 1902); Greenough and Kittredge, Words and their Ways in English Speech (London and New York, 1902); Henry Bradley, The Making of English (London, 1904). Numerous contributions to the subject have also been made in Englische Studien (ed. Kölbing, later Hoops; Leipzig, 1877 onward); Anglia (ed. Wülker, Flügel, &c.; Halle, 1878 onward); publications of Mod. Lang. Assoc. of America (J.W. Bright; Baltimore, 1884 onward), and A.M. Elliott, Modern Language Notes (Baltimore, 1886 onward).

(J. A. H. M.; H. M. R. M.)

[1] A careful examination of several letters of Bosworth’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary gives in 2000 words (including derivatives and compounds, but excluding orthographic variants) 535 which still exist as modern English words.

[2] The practical convenience of having one name for what was the same thing in various stages of development is not affected by the probability that (E.A. Freeman notwithstanding) Engle and Englisc were, at an early period, not applied to the whole of the inhabitants of Teutonic Britain, but only to a part of them. The dialects of Engle and Seaxan were alike old forms of what was afterwards English speech, and so, viewed in relation to it, Old English, whatever their contemporary names might be.

[3] The works of Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr Stevenson for the English Historical Society. There is an English translation in Six Old English Chronicles in Bohn’s Antiquarian library.

[4] As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further in Rhys’s Lectures on Welsh Philology, pp. 226-227; also Dogatschar, Lautlehre d. gr., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im Altengl. (Strassburg, 1888).

[5] Æthelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter “Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes”; Eadred in 955 is “Angul-seaxna cyning and cásere totius Britanniae,” and the name is of frequent occurrence in documents written in Latin. These facts ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the 17th century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as if they had invented it. By “Anglo-Saxon” language they meant the language of the people who sometimes at least called themselves “Anglo-Saxons.” Even now the name is practically useful, when we are dealing with the subject per se, as is Old English, on the other hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with English as a whole.

[6] Transactions of the Philological Society (1873-1874), p. 620; new and much enlarged edition, 1888.

[7] See on this Rhys, Lectures on Welsh Philology, v.

[8] During the Old English period both c and

appear to have acquired a palatal value in conjunction with front or palatal vowel-sounds, except in the north where c, and in some cases

, tended to remain guttural in such positions. This value was never distinguished in Old English writing, but may be deduced from certain phonetic changes depending upon it, and from the use of c, cc, as an alternative for tj (as in ort

eard, orceard = orchard, fetian, feccean = fetch), as well as from the normal occurrence of ch and y in these positions in later stages of the language, e.g. cild = child, taècean = teach,

iellan = yell, dae

= day, &c.

[9] For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman Conquest on the English Language, see Freeman, Norman Conquest, ch. xxv.

[10] There is no reason to suppose that any attempt was made to proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed used in some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Conqueror himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of coming to an end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two centuries more by the accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything French received a fresh impetus.

[11] MS. Cotton Vesp. A. 22.

[12] Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by W.W. Skeat (1871-1887), second text.

[13] Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century, first and second series, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S.), (1868-1873).

[14] The article þe becomes te after a preceding t or d by assimilation.

[15] Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel (1865), p. 265.

[16] Skeat, Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Gospels (1874).

[17] Edited for the Surtees Society, by Rev. J. Stevenson.

[18] Edited for the Early English Text Society, by Rev. Dr Morris.

[19] The Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman exists in three different recensions, all of which have been edited for the Early English Text Society by Rev. W.W. Skeat.

[20] Edited by Rev. Dr Morris for Early English Text Society, in 1866.

[21] Here, and in tatt, tu, taer, for þatt, þu, þaet, after t, d, there is the same phonetic assimilation as in the last section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle above.

[22] Edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Morris (1865).

[23] Trevisa, Translation of Higden’s Polychronicon.

[24] Skeat, Specimens of English Literature, pp. 49, 54.

[25] A Shakspearian Grammar, by Dr E.A. Abbott. To this book we are largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor English.

[26] Evangelist, astronomy, dialogue, are words that have so lived, of which their form is the result. Photograph, geology, &c., take this form as if they had the same history.

[27] See extended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr Morris’s Historical Outlines of English Accidence, p. 33.

[28] See description and map in Trans. of Philol. Soc., 1875-1876, p. 570.

[29] The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix on the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map of Scotland, by James A.H. Murray (London, 1873).

[30] A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse) of the Old Dialect of the English Colony of Forth and Bargy, collected by Jacob Poole, edited by W. Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867).

ENGLISH LAW (History). In English jurisprudence “legal memory” is said to extend as far as, but no further than the coronation of Richard I. (Sept. 3, 1189). This is a technical doctrine concerning prescriptive rights, but is capable of expressing an important truth. For the last seven centuries, little more or less, the English law, which is now overshadowing a large share of the earth, has had not only an extremely continuous, but a matchlessly well-attested history, and, moreover, has been the subject matter of rational exposition. Already in 1194 the daily doings of a tribunal which was controlling and moulding the whole system were being punctually recorded in letters yet legible, and from that time onwards it is rather the enormous bulk than any dearth of available materials that prevents us from tracing the transformation of every old doctrine and the emergence and expansion of every new idea. If we are content to look no further than the text-books—the books written by lawyers for lawyers—we may read our way backwards to Blackstone (d. 1780), Hale (d. 1676), Coke (d. 1634), Fitzherbert (d. 1538), Littleton (d. 1481), Bracton (d. 1268), Glanvill (d. 1190), until we are in the reign of Henry of Anjou, and yet shall perceive that we are always reading of one and the same body of law, though the little body has become great, and the ideas that were few and indefinite have become many and explicit.

Beyond these seven lucid centuries lies a darker period. Nearly six centuries will still divide us from the dooms of Æthelberht (c. 600), and nearly seven from the Lex Salica (c. 500). We may regard the Norman conquest of England as marking the confluence of two streams of law. The one we may call French or Frankish. If we follow it upwards we pass through the capitularies of Carlovingian emperors and Merovingian kings until we see Chlodwig and his triumphant Franks invading Gaul, submitting their Sicambrian necks to the yoke of the imperial religion, and putting their traditional usages into written Latin. The other rivulet we may call Anglo-Saxon. Pursuing it through the code of Canute (d. 1035) and the ordinances of Alfred (c. 900) and his successors, we see Ine publishing laws in the newly converted Wessex (c. 690), and, almost a century earlier, Æthelberht doing the same in the newly converted Kent (c. 600). This he did, says Beda, in accordance with Roman precedents. Perhaps from the Roman missionaries he had heard tidings of what the Roman emperor had lately been doing far off in New Rome. We may at any rate notice with interest that in order of time Justinian’s law-books fall between the Lex Salica and the earliest Kentish dooms; also that the great pope who sent Augustine to England is one of the very few men who between Justinian’s day and the 11th century lived in the Occident and yet can be proved to have known the Digest. In the Occident the time for the Germanic “folk-laws” (Leges Barbarorum) had come, and a Canon law, ambitious of independence, was being constructed, when in the Orient the lord of church and state was “enucleating” all that was to live of the classical jurisprudence of pagan Rome. It was but a brief interval between Gothic and Lombardic domination that enabled him to give law to Italy: Gaul and Britain were beyond his reach.

The Anglo-Saxon laws that have come down to us (and we have no reason to fear the loss of much beyond some dooms of the Mercian Offa) are best studied as members of a large Teutonic family. Those that proceed from the Kent and Wessex of the 7th century are closely related to the continental folk-laws. Their next of kin seem to be the Lex Saxonum and the laws of the Lombards. Then, though the 8th and 9th centuries are unproductive, we have from Alfred (c. 900) and his successors a series of edicts which strongly resemble the Frankish capitularies—so strongly that we should see a clear case of imitation, were it not that in Frankland the age of legislation had come to its disastrous end long before Alfred was king. This, it may be noted, gives to English legal history a singular continuity from Alfred’s day to our own. The king of the English was expected to publish laws at a time when hardly any one else was attempting any such feat, and the English dooms of Canute the Dane are probably the most comprehensive statutes that were issued in the Europe of the 11th century. No genuine laws of the sainted Edward have descended to us, and during his reign England seems but too likely to follow the bad example of Frankland, and become a loose congeries of lordships. From this fate it was saved by the Norman duke, who, like Canute before him, subdued a land in which kings were still expected to publish laws.

In the study of early Germanic law—a study which now for some considerable time has been scientifically prosecuted in Germany—the Anglo-Saxon dooms have received their due share of attention. A high degree of racial purity may be claimed on their behalf. Celtic elements have been sought for in them, but have never been detected. At certain points, notably in the regulation of the blood-feud and the construction of a tariff of atonements, the law of one rude folk will always be somewhat like the law of another; but the existing remains of old Welsh and old Irish law stand far remoter from the dooms of Æthelberht and Ine than stand the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, kings of the Lombards. Indeed, it is very dubious whether distinctively Celtic customs play any considerable part in the evolution of that system of rules of Anglian, Scandinavian and Frankish origin which becomes the law of Scotland. Within England itself, though for a while there was fighting enough between the various Germanic folks, the tribal differences were not so deep as to prevent the formation of a common language and a common law. Even the strong Scandinavian strain seems to have rapidly blended with the Anglian. It amplified the language and the law, but did not permanently divide the country. If, for example, we can to-day distinguish between law and right, we are debtors to the Danes; but very soon law is not distinctive of eastern or right of western England. In the first half of the 12th century a would-be expounder of the law of England had still to say that the country was divided between the Wessex law, the Mercian law, and the Danes’ law, but he had also to point out that the law of the king’s own court stood apart from and above all partial systems. The local customs were those of shires and hundreds, and shaded off into each other. We may speak of more Danish and less Danish counties; it was a matter of degree; for rivers were narrow and hills were low. England was meant by nature to be the land of one law.

Then as to Roman law. In England and elsewhere Germanic law developed in an atmosphere that was charged with traditions of the old world, and many of these traditions had become implicit in the Christian religion. It might be argued that all that we call progress is due to the influence exercised by Roman civilization; that, were it not for this, Germanic law would never have been set in writing; and that theoretically unchangeable custom would never have been supplemented or superseded by express legislation. All this and much more of the same sort might be said; but the survival in Britain, or the reintroduction into England, of anything that we should dare to call Roman jurisprudence would be a different matter. Eyes, carefully trained, have minutely scrutinized the Anglo-Saxon legal texts without finding the least trace of a Roman rule outside the ecclesiastical sphere. Even within that sphere modern research is showing that the church-property-law of the middle ages, the law of the ecclesiastical “benefice,” is permeated by Germanic ideas. This is true of Gaul and Italy, and yet truer of an England in which Christianity was for a while extinguished. Moreover, the laws that were written in England were, from the first, written in the English tongue; and this gives them a unique value in the eyes of students of Germanic folk-law, for even the very ancient and barbarous Lex Salica is a Latin document, though many old Frankish words are enshrined in it. Also we notice—and this is of grave importance—that in England there are no vestiges of any “Romani” who are being suffered to live under their own law by their Teutonic rulers. On the Continent we may see Gundobad, the Burgundian, publishing one law-book for the Burgundians and another for the Romani who own his sway. A book of laws, excerpted chiefly from the Theodosian code, was issued by Alaric the Visigoth for his Roman subjects before the days of Justinian, and this book (the so-called Breviarium Alarici or Lex Romana Visigothorum) became for a long while the chief representative of Roman law in Gaul. The Frankish king in his expansive realm ruled over many men whose law was to be found not in the Lex Salica or Lex Ribuaria, but in what was called the Lex Romana. “A system of personal law” prevailed: the homo Romanus handed on his Roman law to his children, while Frankish or Lombardic, Swabian or Saxon law would run in the blood of the homo barbarus. Of all this we hear nothing in England. Then on the mainland of Europe Roman and barbarian law could not remain in juxtaposition without affecting each other. On the one hand we see distinctively Roman rules making their way into the law of the victorious tribes, and on the other hand we see a decay and debasement of jurisprudence which ends in the formation of what modern historians have called a Roman “vulgar-law” (Vulgarrecht). For a short age which centres round the year 800 it seemed possible that Frankish kings, who were becoming Roman emperors, would be able to rule by their capitularies nearly the whole of the Christian Occident. The dream vanished before fratricidal wars, heathen invaders, centrifugal feudalism, and a centripetal church which found its law in the newly concocted forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore (c. 850). The “personal laws” began to transmute themselves into local customs, and the Roman vulgar-law began to look like the local custom of those districts where the Romani were the preponderating element in the population. Meanwhile, the Norse pirates subdued a large tract of what was to be northern France—a land where Romani were few. Their restless and boundless vigour these Normans retained; but they showed a wonderful power of appropriating whatever of alien civilization came in their way. In their language, religion and law, they had become French many years before they subdued England. It is a plausible opinion that among them there lived some sound traditions of the Frankish monarchy’s best days, and that Norman dukes, rather than German emperors or kings, of the French, are the truest spiritual heirs of Charles the Great.

In our own day, German historians are wont to speak of English law as a “daughter” of French or Frankish law. This tendency derived its main impulse from H. Brunner’s proof that the germ of trial by jury, which cannot be found in the Anglo-Saxon laws, can be found in the prerogative procedure of the Frankish kings. We must here remember that during a long age English lawyers wrote in French and even thought in French, and that to this day most of the technical terms of the law, more especially of the private law, are of French origin. Also it must be allowed that when English law has taken shape in the 13th century it is very like one of the coutumes of northern France. Even when linguistic difficulties have been surmounted, the Saxon Mirror of Eike von Repgow will seem far less familiar to an Englishman than the so-called Establishments of St Louis. This was the outcome of a slow process which fills more than a century (1066-1189), and was in a great measure due to the reforming energy of Henry II., the French prince who, in addition to England, ruled a good half of France. William the Conqueror seems to have intended to govern Englishmen by English law. After the tyranny of Rufus, Henry I. promised a restoration of King Edward’s law: that is, the law of the Confessor’s time (Lagam Eadwardi regis vobis reddo). Various attempts were then made, The Norman age. mostly, so it would seem, by men of French birth, to state in a modern and practicable form the laga Eadwardi which was thus restored. The result of their labours is an intricate group of legal tracts which has been explored of late years by Dr Liebermann. The best of these has long been known as the Leges Henrici Primi, and aspires to be a comprehensive law-book. Its author, though he had some foreign sources at his command, such as the Lex Ribuaria and an epitome of the Breviary of Alaric, took the main part of his matter from the code of Canute and the older English dooms. Neither the Conqueror nor either of his sons had issued many ordinances: the invading Normans had little, if any, written law to bring with them, and had invaded a country where kings had been lawgivers. Moreover, there was much in the English system that the Conqueror was keenly interested in retaining—especially an elaborate method of taxing the land and its holders. The greatest product of Norman government, the grandest feat of government that the world had seen for a long time past, the compilation of Domesday Book, was a conservative effort, an attempt to fix upon every landholder, French or English, the amount of geld that was due from his predecessor in title. Himself the rebellious vassal of the French king, the duke of the Normans, who had become king of the English, knew much of disruptive feudalism, and had no mind to see England that other France which it had threatened to become in the days of his pious but incompetent cousin. The sheriffs, though called vice-comites, were to be the king’s officers; the shire-moots might be called county courts, but were not to be the courts of counts. Much that was sound and royal in English public law was to be preserved if William could preserve it.

The gulf that divides the so-called Leges Henrici (c. 1115) from the text-book ascribed to Ranulf Glanvill (c. 1188) seems at first sight very wide. The one represents a not easily imaginable chaos and clash of old rules and Royal justice. new; it represents also a stage in the development of feudalism which in other countries is represented chiefly by a significant silence. The other is an orderly, rational book, which through all the subsequent centuries will be readily understood by English lawyers. Making no attempt to tell us what goes on in the local courts, its author, who may be Henry II.’s chief justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, or may be Glanvill’s nephew, Hubert Walter, fixes our attention on a novel element which is beginning to subdue all else to its powerful operation. He speaks to us of the justice that is done by the king’s own court. Henry II. had opened the doors of his French-speaking court to the mass of his subjects. Judges chosen for their ability were to sit there, term after term; judges were to travel in circuits through the land, and in many cases the procedure by way of “an inquest of the country,” which the Norman kings had used for the ascertainment of their fiscal rights, was to be at the disposal of ordinary litigants. All this had been done in a piecemeal, experimental fashion by ordinances that were known as “assizes.” There had not been, and was not to be, any enunciation of a general principle inviting all who were wronged to bring in their own words their complaints to the king’s audience. The general prevalence of feudal justice, and of the world-old methods of supernatural probation (ordeals, battle, oaths sworn with oath-helpers), was to be theoretically respected; but in exceptional cases, which would soon begin to devour the rule, a royal remedy was to be open to any one who could frame his case within the compass of some carefully-worded and prescript formula. With allusion to a remote stage in the history of Roman law, a stage of which Henry’s advisers can have known little or nothing, we may say that a “formulary system” is established which will preside over English law until modern times. Certain actions, each with a name of its own, are open to litigants. Each has its own formula set forth in its original (or, as we might say, originating) writ; each has its own procedure and its appropriate mode of trial. The litigant chooses his writ, his action, and must stand or fall by his choice. Thus a book about royal justice tends to become, and Glanvill’s book already is, a commentary on original writs.

The precipitation of English law in so coherent a form as that which it has assumed in Glanvill’s book is not to be explained without reference to the revival of Roman jurisprudence in Italy. Out of a school of Lombard lawyers at Pavia had come Lanfranc the Conqueror’s adviser, and the Lombardists had already been studying Justinian’s Institutes. Then at length the Digest came by its rights. About the year 1100 Irnerius was teaching at Bologna, and from all parts of the West men were eagerly flocking to hear the new gospel of civilization. About the year 1149 Vacarius was teaching Roman law in England. The rest of a long life he spent here, and faculties of Roman and Canon law took shape in the nascent university of Oxford. Whatever might be the fate of Roman law in England, there could be no doubt that the Canon law, which was crystallizing in the Decretum Gratiani (c. 1139) and in the decretals of Alexander III., would be the law of the English ecclesiastical tribunals. The great quarrel between Henry II. and Thomas of Canterbury brought this system into collision with the temporal law of England, and the king’s ministers must have seen that they had much to learn from the methodic enemy. Some of them were able men who became the justices of Henry’s court, and bishops to boot. The luminous Dialogue of the Exchequer (c. 1179), which expounds the English fiscal system, came from the treasurer, Richard Fitz Nigel, who became bishop of London; and the treatise on the laws of England came perhaps from Glanvill, perhaps from Hubert Walter, who was to be both primate and chief justiciar. There was healthy emulation of the work that was being done by Italian jurists, but no meek acceptance of foreign results.

A great constructive era had opened, and its outcome was a large and noble book. The author was Henry of Bratton (his name has been corrupted into Bracton), who died in 1268 after having been for many years one of Henry Bracton. III.’s justices. The model for its form was the treatise of Azo of Bologna (“master of all the masters of the laws,” an Englishman called him), and thence were taken many of the generalities of jurisprudence: maxims that might be regarded as of universal and natural validity. But the true core of the work was the practice of an English court which had yearly been extending its operations in many directions. For half a century past diligent record had been kept on parchment of all that this court had done, and from its rolls Bracton cited numerous decisions. He cited them as precedents, paying special heed to the judgments of two judges who were already dead, Martin Pateshull and William Raleigh. For this purpose he compiled a large Note Book, which was discovered by Prof. Vinogradoff in the British Museum in 1884. Thus at a very early time English “common law” shows a tendency to become what it afterwards definitely became, namely, “case law.” The term “common law” was being taken over from the canonists by English lawyers, who used it to distinguish the general law of the land from local customs, royal prerogatives, and in short from all that was exceptional or special. Since statutes and ordinances were still rarities, all expressly enacted laws were also excluded from the English lawyers’ notion of “the common law.” The Great Charter (1215) had taken the form of a grant of “liberties and privileges,” comparable to the grants that the king made to individual men and favoured towns. None the less, it was in that age no small body of enacted law, and, owing to its importance and solemnity, it was in after ages regarded as the first article of a statute book. There it was followed by the “provisions” issued at Merton in 1236 and by those issued at Marlborough after the end of the Barons’ War. But during Henry III.’s long reign the swift development of English law was due chiefly to new “original writs” and new “forms of action” devised by the chancery and sanctioned by the court. Bracton knew many writs that were unknown to Glanvill, and men were already perceiving that limits must be set to the inventive power of the chancery unless the king was to be an uncontrollable law-maker. Thus the common law was losing the power of rapid growth when Bracton summed the attained results in a book, the success of which is attested by a crowd of manuscript copies. Bracton had introduced just enough of Roman law and Bolognese method to save the law of England from the fate that awaited German law in Germany. His book was printed in 1569, and Coke owed much to Bracton.

The comparison that is suggested when Edward I. is called the English Justinian cannot be pressed very far. Nevertheless, as is well known, it is in his reign (1272-1307) that English institutions finally take the forms that they are to keep through coming centuries. We already see the parliament of the three estates, the convocations of the clergy, the king’s council, the chancery or secretarial department, the exchequer or financial department, the king’s bench, the common bench, the commissioners of assize and gaol delivery, the small group of professionally learned judges, and a small group of professionally learned lawyers, whose skill is at the service of those who will employ them. Moreover, the statutes that were passed in the first eighteen years of the reign, though their bulk seems slight to us nowadays, bore so fundamental a character that in subsequent ages they appeared as the substructure of huge masses of superincumbent law. Coke commented upon them sentence by sentence, and even now the merest smatterer in English law must profess some knowledge of Quia emptores and De donis conditionalibus. If some American states have, while others have not, accepted these statutes, that is a difference which is not unimportant to citizens of the United States in the 20th century. Then from the early years of Edward’s reign come the first “law reports” that have descended to us: the oldest of them have not yet been printed; the oldest that has been printed belongs to 1292. These are the precursors of the long series of Year Books (Edw. II.-Hen. VIII.) which runs through the residue of the middle ages. Lawyers, we perceive, are already making and preserving notes of the discussions that take place in court; French notes that will be more useful to them than the formal Latin records inscribed upon the plea rolls. From these reports we learn that there are already, as we should say, a few “leading counsel,” some of whom will be retained in almost every important cause. Papal decretals had been endeavouring to withdraw the clergy from secular employment. The clerical element had been strong among the judges of Henry III.’s reign: Bracton was an archdeacon, Pateshull a dean, Raleigh died a bishop. Their places begin to be filled by men who are not in orders, but who have pleaded the king’s causes for him—his serjeants or servants at law—and beside them there are young men who are “apprentices at law,” and are learning to plead. Also we begin to see men who, as “attorneys at law,” are making it their business to appear on behalf of litigants. The history of the legal profession and its monopoly of legal aid is intricate, and at some points still obscure; but the influence of the canonical system is evident: the English attorney corresponds to the canonical proctor, and the English barrister to the canonical advocate. The main outlines were being drawn in Edward I.’s day; the legal profession became organic, and professional opinion became one of the main forces that moulded the law.

The study of English law fell apart from all other studies, and the impulse that had flowed from Italian jurisprudence was ebbing. We have two comprehensive text-books from Edward’s reign: the one known to us as Fleta, the other as Britton; both of them, however, quarry their materials from Bracton’s treatise. Also we have two little books on procedure which are attributed to Chief-Justice Hengham, and a few other small tracts of an intensely practical kind. Under the cover of fables about King Alfred, the author of the Mirror of Justices made a bitter attack upon King Edward’s judges, some of whom had fallen into deep disgrace. English legal history has hardly yet been purged of the leaven of falsehood that was introduced by this fantastic and unscrupulous pamphleteer. His enigmatical book ends that literate age which begins with Glanvill’s treatise and the treasurer’s dialogue. Between Edward I.’s day and Edward IV.’s hardly anything that deserves the name of book was written by an English lawyer.

During that time the body of statute law was growing, but not very rapidly. Acts of parliament intervened at a sufficient number of important points to generate and maintain a persuasion that no limit, or no ascertainable limit, 14th and 15th centuries. can be set to the legislative power of king and parliament. Very few are the signs that the judges ever permitted the validity of a statute to be drawn into debate. Thus the way was being prepared for the definite assertion of parliamentary “omnicompetence” which we obtain from the Elizabethan statesman Sir Thomas Smith, and for those theories of sovereignty which we couple with the names of Hobbes and Austin. Nevertheless, English law was being developed rather by debates in court than by open legislation. The most distinctively English of English institutions in the later middle ages are the Year-Books and the Inns of Court. Year by year, term by term, lawyers were reporting cases in order that they and their fellows might know how cases had been decided. The allegation of specific precedents was indeed much rarer than it afterwards became, and no calculus of authority so definite as that which now obtains had been established in Coke’s day, far less in Littleton’s. Still it was by a perusal of reported cases that a man would learn the law of England. A skeleton for the law was provided, not by the Roman rubrics (such as public and private, real and personal, possessory and proprietary, contract and delict), but by the cycle of original writs that were inscribed in the chancery’s Registrum Brevium. A new form of action could not be introduced without the authority of Parliament, and the growth of the law took the shape of an explication of the true intent of ancient formulas. Times of inventive liberality alternated with times of cautious and captious conservatism. Coke could look back to Edward III.’s day as to a golden age of good pleading. The otherwise miserable time which saw the Wars of the Roses produced some famous lawyers, and some bold doctrines which broke new ground. It produced also Sir Thomas Littleton’s (d. 1481) treatise on Tenures, which (though it be not, as Coke thought it, the most perfect work that ever was written in any human science) is an excellent statement of law in exquisitely simple language.

Meanwhile English law was being scholastically taught. This, if we look at the fate of native and national law in Germany, or France, or Scotland, appears as a fact of primary importance. From beginnings, so small and formless Legal education. that they still elude research, the Inns of Court had grown. The lawyers, like other men, had grouped themselves in gilds, or gild-like “fellowships.” The fellowship acquired property; it was not technically incorporate, but made use of the thoroughly English machinery of a trust. Behind a hedge of trustees it lived an autonomous life, unhampered by charters or statutes. There was a hall in which its members dined in common; there was the nucleus of a library; there were also dormitories or chambers in which during term-time lawyers lived celibately, leaving their wives in the country. Something of the college thus enters the constitution of these fellowships; and then something academical. The craft gild regulated apprenticeship; it would protect the public against incompetent artificers, and its own members against unfair competition. So the fellowship of lawyers. In course of time a lengthy and laborious course of education of the medieval sort had been devised. He who had pursued it to its end received a call to the bar of his inn. This call was in effect a degree. Like the doctor or master of a university, the full-blown barrister was competent to teach others, and was expected to read lectures to students. But further, in a manner that is still very dark, these societies had succeeded in making their degrees the only steps that led to practice in the king’s courts. At the end of the middle ages (c. 1470) Sir John Fortescue rehearsed the praises of the laws of England in a book which is one of the earliest efforts of comparative politics. Contrasting England with France, he rightly connects limited monarchy, public and oral debate in the law courts, trial by jury, and the teaching of national law in schools that are thronged by wealthy and well-born youths. But nearly a century earlier, the assertion that English law affords as subtle and civilizing a discipline as any that is to be had from Roman law was made by a man no less famous than John Wycliffe. The heresiarch naturally loathed the Canon law; but he also spoke with reprobation of the “paynims’ law,” the “heathen men’s law,” the study of which in the two universities was being fostered by some of the bishops. That study, after inspiring Bracton, had come to little in England, though the canonist was compelled to learn something of Justinian, and there was a small demand for learned civilians in the court of admiralty, and in what we might call the king’s diplomatic service. No medieval Englishman did anything considerable for Roman law. Even the canonists were content to read the books of French and Italian masters, though John Acton (c. 1340) and William Lyndwood (1430) wrote meritorious glosses. The Angevin kings, by appropriating to the temporal forum the whole province of ecclesiastical patronage, had robbed the decretists of an inexhaustible source of learning and of lucre. The work that was done by the legal faculties at Oxford and Cambridge is slight when compared with the inestimable services rendered to the cause of national continuity by the schools of English law which grew within the Inns of Court.

A danger threatened: the danger that a prematurely osseous system of common law would be overwhelmed by summary justice and royal equity. Even when courts for all ordinary causes had been established, a reserve of Chancery. residuary justice remained with the king. Whatever lawyers and even parliaments might say, it was seen to be desirable that the king in council should with little regard for form punish offenders who could break through the meshes of a tardy procedure and should redress wrongs which corrupt and timid juries would leave unrighted. Papal edicts against heretics had made familiar to all men the notion that a judge should at times proceed summarie et de plano et sine strepitu et figura justitiae. And so extraordinary justice of a penal kind was done by the king’s council upon misdemeanants, and extraordinary justice of a civil kind was ministered by the king’s chancellor (who was the specially learned member of the council) to those who “for the love of God and in the way of charity,” craved his powerful assistance. It is now well established that the chancellors started upon this course, not with any desire to introduce rules of “equity” which should supplement, or perhaps supplant, the rules of law, but for the purpose of driving the law through those accidental impediments which sometimes unfortunately beset its due course. The wrongs that the chancellor redressed were often wrongs of the simplest and most brutal kind: assaults, batteries and forcible dispossessions. However, he was warned off this field of activity by parliament; the danger to law, to lawyers, to trial by jury, was evident. But just when this was happening, a new field was being opened for him by the growing practice of conveying land to trustees. The English trust of land had ancient Germanic roots, and of late we have been learning how in far-off centuries our Lombard cousins were in effect giving themselves a power of testation by putting their lands in trust. In England, when the forms of action were crystallizing, this practice had not been common enough to obtain the protection of a writ; but many causes conspired to make it common in the 14th century; and so, with the general approval of lawyers and laity, the chancellors began to enforce by summary process against the trustee the duty that lay upon his conscience. In the next century it was clear that England had come by a new civil tribunal. Negatively, its competence was defined by the rule that when the common law offered a remedy, the chancellor was not to intervene. Positively, his power was conceived as that of doing what “good conscience” required, more especially in cases of “fraud, accident or breach of confidence.” His procedure was the summary, the heresy-suppressing (not the ordinary and solemn) procedure of an ecclesiastical court; but there are few signs that he borrowed any substantive rules from legist or decretist, and many proofs that within the new field of trust he pursued the ideas of the common law. It was long, however, before lawyers made a habit of reporting his decisions. He was not supposed to be tightly bound by precedent. Adaptability was of the essence of the justice that he did.

A time of strain and trial came with the Tudor kings. It was questionable whether the strong “governance” for which the weary nation yearned could work within the limits of a parliamentary system, or would be compatible The Tudor Age. with the preservation of the common law. We see new courts appropriating large fields of justice and proceeding summarie et de plano; the star chamber, the chancery, the courts of requests, of wards, of augmentations, the councils of the North and Wales; a little later we see the high commission. We see also that judicial torture which Fortescue had called the road to hell. The stream of law reports became intermittent under Henry VIII.; few judges of his or his son’s reign left names that are to be remembered. In an age of humanism, alphabetically arranged “abridgments” of medieval cases were the best work of English lawyers: one comes to us from Anthony Fitzherbert (d. 1538), and another from Robert Broke (d. 1558). This was the time when Roman law swept like a flood over Germany. The modern historian of Germany will speak of “the Reception” (that is, the reception of Roman law), as no less important than the Renaissance and Reformation with which it is intimately connected. Very probably he will bestow hard words on a movement which disintegrated the nation and consolidated the tyranny of the princelings. Now a project that Roman law should be “received” in England occurred to Reginald Pole (d. 1558), a humanist, and at one time a reformer, who with good fortune might have been either king of England or pope of Rome. English law, said the future cardinal and archbishop, was barbarous; Roman law was the very voice of nature pleading for “civility” and good princely governance. Pole’s words were brought to the ears of his majestic cousin, and, had the course of events been somewhat other than it was, King Henry might well have decreed a reception. The rôle of English Justinian would have perfectly suited him, and there are distinct traces of the civilian’s Byzantinism in the doings of the Church of England’s supreme head. The academic study of the Canon law was prohibited; regius professorships of the civil law were founded; civilians were to sit as judges in the ecclesiastical courts. A little later, the Protector Somerset was deeply interested in the establishment of a great school for civilians at Cambridge. Scottish law was the own sister of English law, and yet in Scotland we may see a reception of Roman jurisprudence which might have been more whole-hearted than it was, but for the drift of two British and Protestant kingdoms towards union. As it fell out, however, Henry could get what he wanted in church and state without any decisive supersession of English by foreign law. The omnicompetence of an act of parliament stands out the more clearly if it settles the succession to the throne, annuls royal marriages, forgives royal debts, defines religious creeds, attaints guilty or innocent nobles, or prospectively lends the force of statute to the king’s proclamations. The courts of common law were suffered to work in obscurity, for jurors feared fines, and matter of state was reserved for council or star chamber. The Inns of Court were spared; their moots and readings did no perceptible harm, if little perceptible good.

Yet it is no reception of alien jurisprudence that must be chronicled, but a marvellous resuscitation of English medieval law. We may see it already in the Commentaries of Edward Plowden (d. 1585) who reported cases at length and lovingly. Bracton’s great book was put in print, and was a key to much that had been forgotten or misunderstood. Under Parker’s patronage, even the Anglo-Saxon dooms were brought to light; they seemed to tell of a Church of England that had not yet been enslaved by Rome. The new national pride that animated Elizabethan England issued in boasts touching the antiquity, humanity, enlightenment of English law. Resuming the strain of Fortescue, Sir Thomas Smith, himself a civilian, wrote concerning the Commonwealth of England a book that claimed the attention of foreigners for her law and her polity. There was dignified rebuke for the French jurist who had dared to speak lightly of Littleton. And then the common law took flesh in Coke. the person of Edward Coke (1552-1634). With an enthusiastic love of English tradition, for the sake of which many offences may be forgiven him, he ranged over nearly the whole field of law, commenting, reporting, arguing, deciding,—disorderly, pedantic, masterful, an incarnate national dogmatism tenacious of continuous life. Imbued with this new spirit, the lawyers fought the battle of the constitution against James and Charles, and historical research appeared as the guardian of national liberties. That the Stuarts united against themselves three such men as Edward Coke, John Selden and William Prynne, is the measure of their folly and their failure. Words that, rightly or wrongly, were ascribed to Bracton rang in Charles’s ears when he was sent to the scaffold. For the modern student of medieval law many of the reported cases of the Stuart time are storehouses of valuable material, since the lawyers of the 17th century were mighty hunters after records. Prynne (d. 1669), the fanatical Puritan, published ancient documents with fervid zeal, and made possible a history of parliament. Selden (d. 1654) was in all Europe among the very first to write legal history as it should be written. His book about tithes is to this day a model and a masterpiece. When this accomplished scholar had declared that he had laboured to make himself worthy to be called a common lawyer, it could no longer be said that the common lawyers were indoctissimum genus doctissimorum hominum. Even pliant judges, whose tenure of office depended on the king’s will, were compelled to cite and discuss old precedents before they could give judgment for their master; and even at their worst moments they would not openly break with medieval tradition, or declare in favour of that “modern police-state” which has too often become the ideal of foreign publicists trained in Byzantine law.

The current of legal doctrine was by this time so strong and voluminous that such events as the Civil War, the Restoration and the Revolution hardly deflected the course of the stream. In retrospect, Charles II. reigns so soon Hale. as life has left his father’s body, and James II. ends a lawless career by a considerate and convenient abdication. The statute book of the restored king was enriched by leaves excerpted from the acts of a lord protector; and Matthew Hale (d. 1676), who was, perhaps, the last of the great record-searching judges, sketched a map of English law which Blackstone was to colour. Then a time of self-complacency came for the law, which knew itself to be the perfection of wisdom, and any proposal for drastic legislation would have worn the garb discredited by the tyranny of the Puritan Cæsar. The need for the yearly renewal of the Mutiny Act secured an annual session of parliament. The mass of the statute law made in the 18th century is enormous; but, even when we have excluded from view such acts as are technically called “private,” the residuary matter bears a wonderfully empirical, partial and minutely particularizing character. In this “age of reason,” as we are wont to think it, the British parliament seems rarely to rise to the dignity of a general proposition, and in our own day the legal practitioner is likely to know less about the statutes of the 18th century than he knows about the statutes of Edward I., Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Parliament, it should be remembered, was endeavouring directly to govern the nation. There was little that resembled the permanent civil service of to-day. The choice lay between direct parliamentary government and royal “prerogative”; and lengthy statutes did much of that work of detail which would now be done by virtue of the powers that are delegated to ministers and governmental boards. Moreover, extreme and verbose particularity was required in statutes, for judges were loath to admit that the common law was capable of amendment. A vague doctrine, inherited from Coke, taught that statutes might be so unreasonable as to be null, and any political theory that seemed to derive from Hobbes would have been regarded with not unjust suspicion. But the doctrine in question never took tangible shape, and enough could be done to protect the common law by a niggardly exposition of every legislating word. It is to be remembered that some main features of English public law were attracting the admiration of enlightened Europe. When Voltaire and Montesquieu applauded, the English lawyer had cause for complacency.

The common law was by no means stagnant. Many rules which come to the front in the 18th century are hardly to be traced farther. Especially is this the case in the province of mercantile law, where the earl of Mansfield’s (d. 1793) long presidency over the king’s bench marked an epoch. It is too often forgotten that, until Elizabeth’s reign, England was a thoroughly rustic kingdom, and that trade with England was mainly in the hands of foreigners. Also in medieval fairs, the assembled merchants declared their own “law merchant,” which was considered to have a supernational validity. In the reports of the common law courts it is late in the day before we read of some mercantile usages which can be traced far back in the statutes of Italian cities. Even on the basis of the excessively elaborated land law—a basis which Coke’s Commentary on Littleton seemed to have settled for ever—a lofty and ingenious superstructure could be reared. One after another delicate devices were invented for the accommodation of new wants within the law; but only by the assurance that the old law could not be frankly abolished can we be induced to admire the subtlety that was thus displayed. As to procedure, it had become a maze of evasive fictions, to which only a few learned men held the historical clue. By fiction the courts had stolen business from each other, and by fiction a few comparatively speedy forms of action were set to tasks for which they were not originally framed. Two fictitious persons, John Doe and Richard Roe, reigned supreme. On the other hand, that healthy and vigorous institution, the Commission of the Peace, with a long history behind it, was giving an important share in the administration of justice to numerous country gentlemen who were thus compelled to learn some law. A like beneficial work was being done among jurors, who, having ceased to be regarded as witnesses, had become “judges of fact.” No one doubted that trial by jury was the “palladium” of English liberties, and popularity awaited those who would exalt the office of the jurors and narrowly limit the powers of the judge.

But during this age the chief addition to English jurisprudence was made by the crystallization of the chancellor’s equity. In the 17th century the chancery had a narrow escape of sharing the fate that befell its twin sister the star Equity. chamber. Its younger sister the court of requests perished under the persistent attacks of the common lawyers. Having outlived troubles, the chancery took to orderly habits, and administered under the name of “equity” a growing group of rules, which in fact were supplemental law. Stages in this process are marked by the chancellorships of Nottingham (1673-1675) and Hardwicke (1737-1756). Slowly a continuous series of Equity Reports began to flow, and still more slowly an “equity bar” began to form itself. The principal outlines of equity were drawn by men who were steeped in the common law. By way of ornament a Roman maxim might be borrowed from a French or Dutch expositor, or a phrase which smacked of that “nature-rightly” school which was dominating continental Europe; but the influence exercised by Roman law upon English equity has been the subject of gross exaggeration. Parliament and the old courts being what they were, perhaps it was only in a new court that the requisite new law could be evolved. The result was not altogether satisfactory. Freed from contact with the plain man in the jury-box, the chancellors were tempted to forget how plain and rough good law should be, and to screw up the legal standard of reasonable conduct to a height hardly attainable except by those whose purses could command the constant advice of a family solicitor. A court which started with the idea of doing summary justice for the poor became a court which did a highly refined, but tardy justice, suitable only to the rich.

About the middle of the century William Blackstone, then a disappointed barrister, began to give lectures on English law at Oxford (1758), and soon afterwards he began to publish (1765) his Commentaries. Accurate enough in its Blackstone. history and doctrine to be an invaluable guide to professional students and a useful aid to practitioners, his book set before the unprofessional public an artistic picture of the laws of England such as had never been drawn of any similar system. No nation but the English had so eminently readable a law-book, and it must be doubtful whether any other lawyer ever did more important work than was done by the first professor of English law. Over and over again the Commentaries were edited, sometimes by distinguished men, and it is hardly too much to say that for nearly a century the English lawyer’s main ideas of the organization and articulation of the body of English law were controlled by Blackstone. This was far from all. The Tory lawyer little thought that he was giving law to colonies that were on the eve of a great and successful rebellion. Yet so it was. Out in America, where books were few and lawyers had a mighty task to perform, Blackstone’s facile presentment of the law of the mother country was of inestimable value. It has been said that among American lawyers the Commentaries “stood for the law of England,” and this at a time when the American daughter of English law was rapidly growing in stature, and was preparing herself for her destined march from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Excising only what seemed to savour of oligarchy, those who had defied King George retained with marvellous tenacity the law of their forefathers. Profound discussions of English medieval law have been heard in American courts; admirable researches into the recesses of the Year-Books have been made in American law schools; the names of the great American judges are familiar in an England which knows little indeed of foreign jurists; and the debt due for the loan of Blackstone’s Commentaries is being fast repaid. Lectures on the common law delivered by Mr Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States may even have begun to turn the scale against the old country. No chapter in Blackstone’s book nowadays seems more antiquated than that which describes the modest territorial limits of that English law which was soon to spread throughout Australia and New Zealand and to follow the dominant race in India.

Long wars, vast economic changes and the conservatism generated by the French Revolution piled up a monstrous arrear of work for the English legislature. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) had laboured for the overthrow Bentham. of much that Blackstone had lauded. Bentham’s largest projects of destruction and reconstruction took but little effect. Profoundly convinced of the fungibility and pliability of mankind, he was but too ready to draw a code for England or Spain or Russia at the shortest notice; and, scornful as he was of the past and its historic deposit, a code drawn by Bentham would have been a sorry failure. On the other hand, as a critic and derider of the system which Blackstone had complacently expounded he did excellent service. Reform, and radical reform, was indeed sadly needed throughout a system which was encumbered by noxious rubbish, the useless leavings of the middle ages: trial by battle and compurgation, deodands and benefit of clergy, John Doe and Richard Roe. It is perhaps the main fault of “judge-made law” (to use Bentham’s phrase) that its destructive work can never be cleanly done. Of all vitality, and therefore of all patent harmfulness, the old rule can be deprived, but the moribund husk must remain in the system doing latent mischief. English law was full of decaying husks when Bentham attacked it, and his persistent demand for reasons could not be answered. At length a general interest in “law reform” was excited; Romilly and Brougham were inspired by Bentham, and the great changes in constitutional law which cluster round the Reform Act of 1832 were accompanied by many measures which purged the private, procedural and criminal law of much, though hardly enough, of the medieval dross. Some credit for rousing an interest in law, in definitions of legal terms, and in schemes of codification, is due to John Austin (d. 1859) who was regarded as the jurist of the reforming and utilitarian group. But, though he was at times an acute dissector of confused thought, he was too ignorant of the English, the Roman and every other system of law to make any considerable addition to the sum of knowledge; and when Savigny, the herald of evolution, was already in the field, the day for a “Nature-Right”—and Austin’s projected “general jurisprudence” would have been a Nature-Right—was past beyond recall. The obsolescence of the map of law which Blackstone had inherited from Hale, and in which many outlines were drawn by medieval formulas, left intelligent English lawyers without a guide, and they were willing to listen for a while to what in their insularity they thought to be the voice of cosmopolitan science. Little came of it all. The revived study of Germanic law in Germany, which was just beginning in Austin’s day, seems to be showing that the scheme of Roman jurisprudence is not the scheme into which English law will run without distortion.

In the latter half of the 19th century some great and wise changes were made by the legislature. Notably in 1875 the old courts were merged in a new Supreme Court of Judicature, and a concurrent administration of law and Recent changes. equity was introduced. Successful endeavours have been made also to reduce the bulk of old statute law, and to improve the form of acts of parliament; but the emergence of new forces whose nature may be suggested by some such names as “socialism” and “imperialism” has distracted the attention of the British parliament from the commonplace law of the land, and the development of obstructive tactics has caused the issue of too many statutes whose brevity was purchased by disgraceful obscurity. By way of “partial codification” some branches of the common law (bills of exchange, sale of goods, partnership) have been skilfully stated in statutes, but a draft criminal code, upon which much expert labour was expended, lies pigeon-holed and almost forgotten. British India has been the scene of some large legislative exploits, and in America a few big experiments have been made in the way of code-making, but have given little satisfaction to the bulk of those who are competent to appreciate their results. In England there are large portions of the law which, in their present condition, no one would think of codifying: notably the law of real property, in which may still be found numerous hurtful relics of bygone centuries. So omnipresent are statutes throughout the whole field of jurisprudence that the opportunity of doing any great feat in the development of law can come but seldom to a modern court. More and more, therefore, the fate of English law depends on the will of parliament, or rather of the ministry. The quality of legal text-books has steadily improved; some of them are models of clear statement and good arrangement; but no one has with any success aspired to be the Blackstone of a new age.

The Council of Law Reporting was formed in the year 1863. The council now consists of three ex-officio members—the attorney-general, the solicitor-general and the president of the Incorporated Law Society, and ten members Law reporting. appointed by the three Inns of Court, the Incorporated Law Society and the council itself on the nomination of the general council of the bar. The practitioner and the student now get for a subscription of four guineas a year the reports in all the superior courts and the House of Lords, and the judicial committee of the privy council issued in monthly parts a king’s printer’s copy of the statutes, and weekly notes, containing short notes of current decisions and announcements of all new rules made under the Judicature Acts and other acts of parliament, and other legal information. In addition the subscriber receives the chronological index of the statutes published from time to time by the Stationery Office, and last, but not least, the Digests of decided cases published by the council from time to time. In 1892 a Digest was published containing the cases and statutes for twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, and this was supplemented by one for the succeeding ten years, from 1891 to 1900. The digesting is now carried on continuously by means of “Current Indexes,” which are published monthly and annually, and consolidated into a digest at stated intervals (say) of five years. The Indian appeals series, which is not required by the general practitioner, is supplied separately at one guinea a year.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the corporate life of the Inns of Court in London became less and less active. The general decay of the organization of crafts and gilds showed itself among lawyers as among other craftsmen. Legal education. Successful barristers, sharing in the general prosperity of the country, became less and less able and willing to devote their time to the welfare of their profession as a whole. The Inns of Chancery, though some of their buildings still remain—picturesque survivals in their “suburbs”—ceased to be used as places for the education of students. The benchers of the Inns of Court, until the revival towards the middle of the 19th century, had wholly ceased to concern themselves with the systematic teaching of law. The modern system of legal education may be said to date from the establishment, in 1852, of the council of legal education, a body of twenty judges and barristers appointed by the four Inns of Court to control the legal education of students preparing to be called to the bar. The most important feature is the examination which a student must pass before he can be called. The examination (which by degrees has been made “stiffer”) serves the double purpose of fixing the compulsory standard which all must reach, and of guiding the reading of students who may desire, sooner or later, to carry their studies beyond this standard. The subjects in which the examination is held are divided into Roman law; Constitutional law and legal history; Evidence, Procedure and Criminal law; Real and Personal Property; Equity; and Common law. The council of legal education also appoint a body of readers and assistant readers, practising barristers, who deliver lectures and hold classes.

Meanwhile the custom remains by which a student reads for a year or more as a pupil in the chambers of some practising barrister. In the 18th century it first became usual for students to read with a solicitor or attorney, and after a short time the modern practice grew up of reading in the chambers of a conveyancer, equity draftsman or special pleader, or, in more recent times, in the chambers of a junior barrister. Before the modern examination system, a student required to have a certificate from the barrister in whose chambers he had been a pupil before he could be “called,” but the only relic of the old system now is the necessity of “eating dinners,” six (three for university men) in each of the four terms for three years, at one of the Inns of Court.

The education of solicitors suffered from the absence of any professional organization until the Incorporated Law Society was established in 1825 and the following years. So far as any professional education is provided for solicitors or required from them, this is due to the efforts of the Law Society. As early as 1729 it was required by statute that any person applying for admission as attorney or solicitor should submit to examination by one of the judges, who was to test his fitness and capacity in consideration of a fee of one shilling. At the same time regular preliminary service under articles was required, that is to say, under a contract by which the clerk was bound to serve for five years. The examination soon became, perhaps always was, an empty form. The Law Society, however, soon showed zeal for the education of future solicitors. In 1833 lectures were instituted. In 1836 the first regular examinations were established, and in 1860 the present system of examinations—preliminary, intermediate and final—came into effect. Of these only the last two are devoted to law, and both are of a strictly professional character. The final examination is a fairly severe test of practical acquaintance with all branches of modern English law. The Law Society makes some provision for the teaching of students, but this teaching is designed solely to assist in preparation for the examinations.

At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge there has, since 1850, been an attempt to promote the study of law. The curriculum of legal subjects in which lectures are given and examinations held is calculated to give a student a sound fundamental knowledge of general principles, as well as an elementary acquaintance with the rules of modern English law. Jurisprudence, Roman law, Constitutional law and International law are taught, as well as the law of Real and Personal Property, the Law of Contract and Tort, Criminal law, Procedure and Evidence. But the law tripos and the law schools suffer from remoteness from the law courts, and from the exclusively academical character of the teaching. Law is also taught, though not on a very large scale, at Manchester and at Liverpool. London University has encouraged the study of law by its examinations for law degrees, at which a comparatively high standard of knowledge is required; and at University College, London, and King’s College, London, teaching is given in law and jurisprudence.

Authorities.—F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1898); K.E. Digby, History of the Law of Real Property; Sir W. Dugdale, Origines juridicales (1671); O.W. Holmes, The Common Law (Boston, 1881); H. Hallam, Constitutional History; W.S. Holdsworth, History of English Law, 3 vols. (1903-9); J. Reeves, History of English Law, ed. W.F. Finlason (1869); T. Madox, History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (1769); C. de Franqueville, Le Système judiciaire de la Grande-Bretagne (Paris, 1893); Sir F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, History of English Law (2 vols., 1898); H. Brunner, The Sources of the Law of England, trans. by W. Hastie (1888); Sir R.K. Wilson, History of Modern English Law (1875); A.V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England (1905); Sir J.F. Stephen, History of the Criminal Law of England (3 vols., 1883); W. Stubbs, Select Charters, Constitutional History; the Publications of the Selden Society and the Year Books in the Rolls Series.

(F. W. M.)

ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (1) Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages; (3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing characteristics of the product, quâ literary. The precise delimitation of what may narrowly be called “English” literature, i.e. in the English language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to American literature (q.v.), and to the vernacular literatures of Scotland (see [Scotland]; and [Celt]: Literature), Ireland (see [Celt]: Literature), and Wales (see [Celt]: Literature); see also [Canada]: Literature. Reference may also be made to such general articles on particular forms as [Novel]; [Romance]; [Verse], &c.

I. Earliest Times to Chaucer

English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of considerable length.

It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and that an extensive body of poetry was handed down—not, indeed, with absolute fixity of form or substance—from generation to generation. This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line, the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to regular melodies, but to be recited—probably with some kind of instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from the best passages in Beowulf (q.v.); for there can be little doubt that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary redaction.

The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times. Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians, would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred of former days. Chaucer’s knowledge of “the song of Wade” is one proof among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact, portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend—Beowulf, Widsith, Finnesburh and Waldere. The second of these has no poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a minstrel (named Widsith, “far-travelled”), who claims to have been at many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant fragment of Finnesburh (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece, belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in Beowulf. Waldere, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines) is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of the 5th century; the hero is the “Waltharius” of Ekkehart’s famous Latin epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of Beowulf.

It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging to the 10th century: The Battle of Brunanburh, which has been greatly over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the Battle of Maldon, the work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been preserved.

One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time. In the next generation England produced in Bede (Bæda) a man who in solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all. Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion; but the only native divinities he mentions are the goddesses Hrēth and Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to Hrēthemōnath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without leaving a record.

The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful Dream of the Rood, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only, and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of Judith, however, is certainly much later; and the Exodus, though early, seems to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on [Cædmon] and [Cynewulf], to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.

The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very curious Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn may be regarded as belonging to the same class.

The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary poetry is the group of dramatic monologues—The Banished Wife’s Complaint, The Husband’s Message, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer. The date of these compositions is uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This, however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short pieces—Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer—which have something of a lyric character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure and the use of the refrain. Wulf and Eadwacer, indeed, exhibits a still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its extent and variety.

While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was written much earlier. The English laws of Æthelberht of Kent, though it is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the 12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual guides.

Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, St Gregory’s Pastoral Care and his Dialogues (the latter rendered by Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all (not excepting the secular History of Orosius) essentially religious in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the Pastoral Care, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted in the Orosius, and in the free rendering and amplification of the Consolation of Boethius and of the Soliloquies of Augustine, Alfred appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws (preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle]), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from Latin and of homilies and saints’ lives, the substance of which is derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it has therefore for us little importance except from the philological point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the writings of Ælfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels, though executed in Ælfric’s time (about 1000), is by other hands. The sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical value.

From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic manual of the science of the time—chronology, astronomy, arithmetic, metre, rhetoric and ethics—by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or two formulas of incantations in Irish.

Two famous works of fiction, the romance of Apollonius of Tyre and the Letter of Alexander, which in their Latin form had much influence on the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on The Wonders of the East. In these works, and some minor productions of the time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find interest in other than religious subjects.

The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The 12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see [Anglo-Norman]). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little originality. The Peterborough Chronicle, it is true, was continued till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin. The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from Ælfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the Ancren Riwle (q.v.), a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding the author’s remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The Ayenbite of Inwyt (see [Michel, Dan]), a wretchedly unintelligent translation (finished in 1340) from Frère Lorens’s Somme des vices et des vertus, is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.

The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from adopting foreign metrical forms. The artless verses of the hermit Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The Proverbs of Alfred, written about 1200, is (like the later Proverbs of Hendyng) in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type, containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and touching meditation known as the Moral Ode, which is somewhat earlier in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse—a line of seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the Ormulum (see [Orm]) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of which, as the Luve Ron of Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The Story of Genesis and Exodus, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the Owl and Nightingale, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a “contention” of the type familiar in French and Provençal literature. The “Gallic” type of humour may be seen in various other writings of this period, notably in the Land of Cockaigne, a vivacious satire on monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of Dame Siviz, a story of Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright’s Specimens of Lyric Poetry) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style. The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons’ War the popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French. Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in 1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.

At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition, the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free rendering of the Norman-French Brut of Wace, with extensive additions from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent historical source of some value for the events of the writer’s own times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire). Mannyng’s chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier part from Wace’s Brut, and in its later part from an Anglo-French chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington.

Not far from the year 1300 (for the most part probably earlier rather than later) a vast mass of hagiological and homiletic verse was produced in divers parts of England. To Gloucester belongs an extensive series of Lives of Saints, metrically and linguistically closely resembling Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, and perhaps wholly or in part of the same authorship. A similar collection was written in the north of England, as well as a large body of homilies showing considerable poetic skill, and abounding in exempla or illustrative stories. Of exempla several prose collections had already been made in Anglo-French, and William of Wadington’s poem Manuel des péchés, which contains a great number of them, was translated in 1303 by Robert Mannyng already mentioned, with some enlargement of the anecdotic element, and frequent omissions of didactic passages. The great rhyming chronicle of Scripture history entitled Cursor Mundi (q.v.) was written in the north about this time. It was extensively read and transcribed, and exercised a powerful influence on later writers down to the end of the 14th century. The remaining homiletic verse of this period is too abundant to be referred to in detail; it will be enough to mention the sermons of William of Shoreham, written in strophic form, but showing little either of metrical skill or poetic feeling. To the next generation belongs the Pricke of Conscience by Richard Rolle, the influence of which was not less powerful than that of the author’s prose writings.

Romantic poetry, which in French had been extensively cultivated, both on the continent and in England from the early years of the 12th century, did not assume a vernacular form till about 1250. In the next hundred years its development was marvellously rapid. Of the vast mass of metrical romances produced during this period no detailed account need here be attempted (see [Romance], and articles, &c. referred to; [Arthurian Romance]). Native English traditions form the basis of King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamtoun and Havelok, though the stories were first put into literary form by Anglo-Norman poets. The popularity of these home-grown tales (with which may be classed the wildly fictitious Coer de Lion) was soon rivalled by that of importations from France. The English rendering of Floris and Blancheflur (a love-romance of Greek origin) is found in the same MS. that contains the earliest copy of King Horn. Before the end of the century, the French “matter of Britain” was represented in English by the Southern Arthur and Merlin and the Northern Tristram and Yvaine and Gawin, the “matter of France” by Roland and Vernagu and Otuel; the Alexander was also translated, but in this instance the immediate original was an Anglo-French and not a continental poem. The tale of Troy did not come into English till long afterwards. The Auchinleck MS., written about 1330, contains no fewer than 14 poetical romances; there were many others in circulation, and the number continued to grow. About the middle of the 14th century, the Old English alliterative long line, which for centuries had been used only in unwritten minstrel poetry, emerges again in literature. One of the earliest poems in this revived measure, Wynnere and Wastour, written in 1352, is by a professional reciter-poet, who complains bitterly that original minstrel poetry no longer finds a welcome in the halls of great nobles, who prefer to listen to those who recite verses not of their own making. About the same date the metre began to be employed by men of letters for the translation of romance—William of Palerne and Joseph of Arimathea from the French, Alexander from Latin prose. The later development of alliterative poetry belongs mainly to the age of Chaucer.

The extent and character of the literature produced during the first half of the 14th century indicate that the literary use of the native tongue was no longer, as in the preceding age, a mere condescension to the needs of the common people. The rapid disuse of French as the ordinary medium of intercourse among the middle and higher ranks of society, and the consequent substitution of English for French as the vehicle of school instruction, created a widespread demand for vernacular reading. The literature which arose in answer to this demand, though it consisted mainly of translations or adaptations of foreign works, yet served to develop the appreciation of poetic beauty, and to prepare an audience in the near future for a poetry in which the genuine thought and feeling of the nation were to find expression.

Bibliography.—Only general works need be mentioned here. Those cited contain lists of books for more detailed information. (1) For the literature from the beginnings to Chaucer:—B. ten Brink, Geschichte der englischen Litteratur, vol. i. 2nd ed., by A. Brandl (Strassburg, 1899) (English translation from the 1st ed. of 1877, by H.M. Kennedy, London, 1883); The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. i. (1907). (2) For the Old English period:—R. Wülker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsachsischen Litteratur (Leipzig, 1885); Stopford A. Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (London, 1898); A. Brandl, “Altenglische Litteratur,” in H. Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1908). (3) For the early Middle English Period:—H. Morley, English Writers, vol. iii. (London, 1888; vols. i. and ii., dealing with the Old English period, cannot be recommended); A. Brandl, “Mittelenglische Litteratur,” in H. Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (1st ed., Strassburg, 1893); W.H. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (London, 1906).

(H. Br.)

II. Chaucer to the Renaissance

The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers, sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers, that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun and the other “courtly makers” of France. But while he was still striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion,—in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. The new prose—which Chaucer knew in several of the writings of Boccaccio—was vastly different from any that he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes like those exempla which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid, well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of stories like Griselda and the Franklin’s Tale to coarse mirth and malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer’s Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio’s tales and novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer’s literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in the transformation of his methods of narration.

This transformation was effected not so much through the mere superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless, happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character, the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere,—as may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the Pardoner’s Tale. It is therefore in the latest and most original of the Canterbury Tales that his art is most admirable, most distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of perfect adaptation to his theme; his versification is not only correct but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the dimensions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives, and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appropriate to their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a consummate artist than as a poet.

Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remarkable for mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist. Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning; and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.

There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed as artists. There was the beginner of the Piers Plowman cycle[1], the author of the Prologue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought before him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remarkable successor of this man, the author of the B-text, an almost prophetic figure, a great poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the heart and haunt the memory. Besides these, an unknown writer far in the north-west had, in Gawayne and the Grene Knight, transformed the medieval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation, and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author’s power of visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum narrative, had been transformed, in Patience, into a narrative so detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly of the great fish, and sat humbled and rebuked beside the withered gourd-vine. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in the 19th century, that delicate flower of loneliness and aspiration, Pearl, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment.

All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time, immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although genius is a purely personal and incommunicable element, technical gains are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it,

But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer and his great contemporaries. Pearl and Patience were apparently unknown to the 15th century, but Gawayne and Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s works were known and were influential in one way or another throughout the century. Gawayne called into existence a large number of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is only superficial. Piers Plowman gave rise to satirical allegories written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence of the first Piers Plowman poem was soon buried for centuries under the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made, but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.

Wide and lasting Chaucer’s influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability than England had (see [Scotland]: Literature). In England the three chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve (see [Occleve]) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but continually praised as Chaucer’s equal or even superior. Hoccleve was not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with Lydgate’s, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest poem, De regimine principum, may have repelled readers who were not princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer’s death and his care to transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full of Chaucer’s phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master’s use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer’s decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the 15th century so dreary a flock of imitations.

Lydgate’s productivity was enormous,—how great no man can say, for, as was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic (140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic, legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving for facts—true or fictitious—the same craving that made possible the poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author’s own peculiar sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale, without taking on from his personality something that was not in it before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of words, and that famous “ornate diction,” those “aureate terms,” with which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the diction of Chaucer.

Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet, exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to trace through Hawes the line of Spenser’s spiritual ancestry seem not well advised. The resemblances that have been pointed out are such as arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed his general conception to Hawes, or that the Faëry Queene would have differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the Pastime of Pleasure had never been written. The machinery of chivalric romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain without the aid of Hawes.

It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to literature in this age? Was it because of the perturbed conditions arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars? Perhaps not, though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses which he perhaps received from the “Fadre of Curteisy,” Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should lack the Morte Darthur. But it may very well be that the wars and the tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local and special accidents rather than general communal influences are apt to shape the choice of boys of exceptional character, and we have many instances of great talents turning to literature or art when war or commerce or science was the dominant attraction of social life.

But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point of technique; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about the distinction between literature and ordinary writing usually feel that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised. Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness, and is an easy means of substituting logic for imagination. The failure to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of Chaucer’s decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his fellows never knew how Chaucer’s verse sounded when properly read. It is a mistake to suppose that the disappearance of final unaccented e from many words or its instability in many others made it difficult for Lydgate and his fellows to write melodious verse. Melodious verse has been written since the disappearance of all these sounds, and the possibility of a choice between a form with final e and one without it is not a hindrance but an advantage to a poet, as Goethe, Schiller, Heine and innumerable German poets have shown by their practice. The real difficulty with these men was that they pronounced Chaucer’s verse as if it were written in the English of their own day. As a matter of fact all the types of verse discovered by scholars in Lydgate’s poems can be discovered in Chaucer’s also if they be read with Lydgate’s pronunciation. Chaucer did not write archaic English, as some have supposed,—that is, English of an earlier age than his own,—it would have been impossible for him to do so with the unfailing accuracy he shows; he did, however, write a conservative, perhaps an old-fashioned, English, such as was spoken by the conservative members of the class of society to which he was attached and for which he wrote. An English with fewer final e’s was already in existence among the less conservative classes, and this rapidly became standard English in consequence of the social changes which occurred during his own life. We know that a misunderstanding of Chaucer’s verse existed from the 16th century to the time of Thomas Tyrwhitt; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in Chaucer’s own lifetime.

There are several poems of the 15th century which were long ascribed to Chaucer. Among them are:—the Complaint of the Black Knight, or Complaint of a Lover’s Life, now known to be Lydgate’s; the Mother of God, now ascribed to Hoccleve; the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, by Clanvowe; La Belle Dame sans merci, a translation from the French of Alain Chartier by Richard Ros; Chaucer’s Dream, or the Isle of Ladies; the Assembly of Ladies; the Flower and the Leaf; and the Court of Love. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer’s poorest work. The Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf are perhaps better than the Book of the Duchess, but not so good as the Parliament of Fowls. The Flower and the Leaf, it will be remembered, was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contemporaries, regarded it as Chaucer’s. An additional interest attaches to both it and the Assembly of Ladies, from the fact that the author may have been a woman; Professor Skeat is, indeed, confident that he knows who the woman was and when she wrote. These poems, like the Court of Love, are thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France, as Professor Neilson has shown for the Court of Love and Mr Marsh for the Flower and the Leaf; but there are a freshness of spirit and a love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer’s Legend, to have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The Court of Love is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence. An effort has been made, to be sure, to show that it was written by Scogan and that the writing of it constituted the offence mentioned by Chaucer in his Envoy to Scogan, but it has been clearly shown that this is impossible, both because the language is later than Scogan’s time and because nothing in the poem resembles the offence clearly described by Chaucer.

Whatever may be true of the authorship of the Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf, there were women writers in England in the middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed compiler of the treatise on hunting in the Book of St Albans, may be mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the sunlight is the supposed authoress of the Nut Brown Maid, for if language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman, and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for 1463-1464, “Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our Lord’s Passion, 6s. 8d.,” which is apparently the earliest mention of a woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers, but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his Garland of Laurel, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern literary club; Erasmus’s Suffragette Convention may correspond to no reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type. Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.

The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions deserve special attention,—songs and carols, popular ballads and certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France. The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event, they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.

The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most famous of the latter, the Nut Brown Maid, has often been called a ballad, and “lyrical ballad” it is in the sense established by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson’s charming Robin and Malkin, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned his technique from the songs and carols.

The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century, however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression, each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art, and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date probably belong to the same time.

Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.

Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know, but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas Hardy has so charmingly described in The Return of the Native.

The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a literary effort which spent itself in vain (see [Drama]). The most notable of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the Towneley (or Wakefield) Plays, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony of Chaucer’s Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly displayed if one compares his Pageant for Presentation before the King at Hereford with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we are apt to forget the equally fine, though very different qualities shown in some of the later pageants of the York Plays. Such, for example, is the final pageant, that of the Last Judgment, a drama of slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution not inadequate to the theme.

The Abraham and Isaac play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not, as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the Chester Abraham and Isaac, but is derived directly from the latter by processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries, apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.

Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in the 15th century,—or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the Castle of Perseverance and the Pride of Life. Others belonging to the century are Mind, Will and Understanding, Mankind and Medwall’s Nature. There are also parts of two pageants in the Ludus Coventriae (c. 1460) that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different, different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality. Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the middle ages. None of the 15th century Moralities is literature of the first rank, though both the Castle of Perseverance and Pride of Life contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in Everyman, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English has only irregularly rhymed passages.

Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their performance or their mere existence—no texts have been preserved to us, except the very curious Play of the Sacrament—it is impossible to speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a form was, of course, not confined to the 15th century. Notwithstanding the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its existence can be demonstrated from c. 1110 to the time of Shakespeare. But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this period of supposed barrenness.

What was the nature of the “Komedy of Troylous and Pandor” performed before Henry VIII. on the 6th of January 1516 we have no means of knowing. It is very early indeed to assume the influence of either classical or Italian drama, and although we have no records of similar plays from the 15th century, it must be remembered that our records are scanty, that the middle ages applied the dramatic method to all sorts of material, and that it is therefore not impossible that secular plays like this were performed at court at a much earlier date. The record at any rate does not indicate that it was a new type of play, and the Griselda story had been dramatized in France, Italy and the Netherlands before 1500.

That not much good prose was written in the 15th century is less surprising than that so little good verse was written. The technique of verse composition had been studied and mastered in the preceding age, as we have seen, but the technique of prose had apparently received no serious consideration. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one thought of prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the Astrolabe and his occasional noteworthy successes with the difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy; and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes, dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse, and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five writers need be named: John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the compiler of the first chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important. Pecock (c. 1395-c. 1460) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind. He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings, therefore—or at least the Repressor—are excellent in general structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply, with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by frequent figures of speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas, while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and controversial. But his principal English work, the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, differs from Pecock’s in being rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.

No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range over the whole field of 15th century literature, and no doubt he tried, as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the Canterbury Tales, but among all his numerous publications not one is the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as literature which he introduced to the world was the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see [Arthurian Legend]). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the warmth and beauty of the old knight’s conception of chivalry and his love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naïve charm; “thystorye (i.e. the history) of the sayd Arthur,” as Caxton long ago declared, “is so gloryous and shynyng, that he is stalled in the first place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Crysten men”; it is not, however, as the first of a new species, but as the final flower of an old that this glorious and shining book retains its place in English literature.

Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is really astonishing, as is also its range. More than three hundred separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate and of the seventy printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems, allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and in verse; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent historical events, in prose and in verse; prose romances and metrical romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse; poems and prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and philosophical treatises, and ethical and prudential treatises; treatises of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was also written in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other centuries were read by the educated classes.

Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and 15th centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the only English man of letters before the 16th century who knew Italian literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship. Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon their return to England they were immediately absorbed in administrative cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however, for the leaders of the great intellectual awakening which began in England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert, Harvey and Harriott.

When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John Skelton, although according to Erasmus “unum Britannicarum literarum lumen ac decus,” and although possessing great originality and vigour both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or indulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate, but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless inversions of word-order whenever he wished to write elegant and dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the middle of the 16th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals and practices of the refined writers of the 15th.

In fine, the 15th century has, aside from its vigorous, though sometimes coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of literature. It offers, however, in richest profusion problems for the literary antiquarian and the student of the relations between social conditions and literary productivity,—problems which have usually been attacked only with the light weapons of irresponsible speculation, but which may perhaps be solved by a careful comparative study of many literatures and many periods. Moreover, although in the quality of its literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously unlettered; and this was of great importance for the future of English literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

For bibliography see vol. ii. of the Cambridge History of Literature (1909); and Brandl’s Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur (reprinted from Paul’s Grundriss der germanischen Philologie). Interesting general discussions may be found in the larger histories of English Literature, such as Ten Brink’s, Jusserand’s, and (a little more antiquated) Courthope’s and Morley’s.

(J. M. Ma.)

III. Elizabethan Times

General Influences, and Prologue to 1579.—The history of letters in England from More’s Utopia (1516), the first Platonic vision, to Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called “Elizabethan.” With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age preceding, and also from the classical or “Augustan” age that followed. The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages, not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the Falls of Princes, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form, allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare’s use of the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser’s of the allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages are not transformed, as in the Mirror for Magistrates, they strike us as survivals from a lost world.

So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the 16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives, or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the end fertilize these workings of genius.

What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican Church grew out of General forces. the English Reformation. A third force lay within the sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term. It was culture—the prefatory work of culture and education, which at once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. “Elizabethan” literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare’s Henry V. came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces, political, religious and educational, were of very different duration and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to 1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these elements is required.

Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors. The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir Thomas More Politics. found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers, who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was echoed only in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the “Indian Peru” to the “still-vext Bermoothes.” Yet, in default of any true historian, the queen’s wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title. But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth’s success and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, which was finished so late as 1622. But the public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in the verse of Milton.

The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin’s Institution is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for millions of later men Religious change. and marking a term of departure in the national prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of vernacular English were sharpened—somewhat jaggedly—in the pamphlet battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were proved for descriptive economy by Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe’s reports of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne’s Steel Glass as in Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar; and the English Reformation lived partly on its pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence,—trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.’s Act of Supremacy and Hooker’s treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for a hundred years.

Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of Colet and his friends, there spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and Latin Classical culture. tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather solitary, work of power, the Utopia (which remained in Latin till 1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his Schoolmaster (1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power, and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare had ample Latin for his purpose.

The direct impact of the classics on “Elizabethan” literature, whether through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe. But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are hard to discern. Italy and France. This is another point that distinguishes the English Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex. The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne’s reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history,—the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song, pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time—and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and culture—if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German legend is found not only in Marlowe’s Faustus, but in the by-ways of play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science. The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in unexpected spots.

As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or the French Philosophy. of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence in the Faerie Queene (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville’s house, lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epoch-marking Italian dialogues during his two years’ stay (1583-1585) in London. The debates in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are heard in the Nosce Teipsum (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, “of the schools” as well as “of the blood,” animates Cassius and also the French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca’s old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare, is penetrated with the freer reading of life and conduct suggested by Montaigne. Platonism—with its vox angelica sometimes a little hoarse—is present from the youthful Hymns of Spenser to the last followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the Christianized doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.

We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.

Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between the Latin, or more rhetorical, and the ancestral elements of the language, and this Prose to 1580. was true both of diction and of construction. We need to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the more naïf writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero and Boëthius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549, 1552, 1559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence), and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer,—nearly the first examples of a sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions (1526-1540-1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare’s time, was largely the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers. About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the dramatists. Hoby’s version (1561) of Castiglione’s Courtier, with its command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book between Berners’s Froissart (1523-1525) and North’s Plutarch (1579). Ascham’s Schoolmaster is the most typical English book of Renaissance culture, in its narrower sense, since Utopia. Holinshed’s Chronicle (1577-1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter to minister to Shakespeare.

The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s songs show the revival, not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since Verse to 1580. Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt’s sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt’s primary deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly accented—the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d. 1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory; and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of Chaucer’s as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two translated Aeneids, like all that written previous to Peele, gave little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of Elizabeth’s reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like Grimoald, in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), the first of many such garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic power, Sackville’s Induction (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture, A Mirror for Magistrates, was published for twenty years. In spirit medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very ideal that nursed it—that of the all-sided, all-accomplished “courtier” or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill. Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank verse satire, The Steel Glass (1576), save the years between Sackville and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.

The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period—at first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something utterly Drama to 1580. different from itself, something that throws the antique to the winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled those in Chaucer’s Prologue. These forms, which may be termed medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in Respublica, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of a “Vice” or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys; his King Johan, a reformer’s partisan tract in verse, contains the germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters. Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to present. In Thersites (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and in Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552 at latest), the best known of them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In others, like Misogonus (written 1560), the abstract element and improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy, native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still with farce, was shadowed forth in Damon and Pithias and in the curious play Common Conditions; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned in Gascoigne’s Supposes, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the ranker rustic fun of Gammer Gurton’s Needle (written c. 1559) and other labours of “rhyming mother-wits.” But there was no style, no talk, no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and Norton, and Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur (acted 1588), are not so much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed, besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms like Gismond of Salern, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of Promos and Cassandra (the foundation of Measure for Measure), to interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry, though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon the stage.

Verse from Spenser to Donne.—Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his Astrophel and Stella was written, if not known in unpublished form, about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of Spenser. The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579). This work, of which only a few passages have the seal of Spenser’s coming power, was justly acclaimed for its novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal, and in many measures: though it was criticized for its “rustic” and archaic diction—a “no language” that was to have more influence upon poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser’s desire to write high tragedy, avowed in his October, was not to be granted; his nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the Hymns To Love and To Beauty are possibly his earliest verses of sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his Complaints of 1591, above all in The Ruins of Time, the second in his Amoretti (1595) and Colin Clout and Epithalamion, which are autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596, while the fragment Of Constancy (so-called) is first found in the posthumous folio of 1609. This poem is the fullest reflex, outside the drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and mechanism the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors, ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also a political meaning. Ariosto was not a vates sacer; and so Spenser took Tasso’s theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world; between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain, England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical and Greek ideals.

Spenser’s moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio and Giordano Bruno. But The Faerie Queene lives by its poetry; and its poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the “magnificent” Prince Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out of his tapestry, with its “glooming light much like a shade,” pace his figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his ground-tone is a sombre melancholy—unlike that of Jaques—and his deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style amongst English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer, Milton and Shelley. His “artificial” diction, drawn from middle English, from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser’s strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous slowness of tempo, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief technical invention, the nine-line stanza (ababbcbcC) was developed not from the Italian octave (abababcc), but by adding an alexandrine to the eight-line stave (ababbcbc) of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. It is naturally articulated twice—at the fifth line, where the turn of repeated rhyme inevitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming, Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is shown in his fable, Mother Hubbard’s Tale, and in his curious verse memoir, Colin Clout; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery. With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless the style of Spenser remains. His Muiopotmos is the lightest-handed of mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the law of beauty.

The mantle of Spenser fell, somewhat in shreds, upon poets of many schools until the Restoration. As though in thanks to his master Tasso, he lent to Edward Fairfax, the best translator of the Jerusalem Delivered (Godfrey of Bulloigne, 1600), some of his own ease and intricate Spenserians. melody. Harington, the witty translator of Ariosto (1591) and spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the Christ’s Victory and Triumph of the younger Giles Fletcher (1610), and Spenser’s emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in The Purple Island (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton. The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in Henry More’s and Joseph Beaumont’s verse disquisitions on the soul. Spenser’s pastoral and allusive manner was allowed by Drayton in his Shepherd’s Garland (1593), and differently by William Browne in Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), and by William Basse; while his more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in the anonymous Britain’s Ida and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was buoyantly echoed in Orchestra (1596), Sir John Davies’ poem on the dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th-century verse, blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris, and constantly between.

The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and who Drayton and Daniel. yet remained himself. His Endimion and Phoebe in passages stands near Hero and Leander; his England’s Heroical Epistles (1597) are in ringing rhetorical couplets; his Odes (1606), like the Ballad of Agincourt and the Virginian Voyage, forestall and equal Cowper’s or Campbell’s; his Nymphidia (1627) was the most popular of burlesque fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his Poly-Olbion (1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from “fine madness” and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his favoured forms, and in his Musophilus (1599) as well as in his admirable prose Defence of Rhyme (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes and glories of that illustre vulgare, the literary speech of England. All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder Albion’s England (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey’s poem upon Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by the last twenty years of the queen’s reign; and the same is true of Shakespeare’s and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the Mirror for Magistrates, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal, started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and remained therefore the more shapeless.

The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and 1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his Hekatompathia (1582), a string of translations in one of the exceptional measures that Sonnets. were freely entitled “sonnets.” But from the first, in the hands of Sidney, whose Astrophel and Stella (1591) was written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost. Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have announced that Shakespeare’s Sonnets are but his mode of taking exercise. But there is poetry in “God’s plenty” almost everywhere; and few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable’s Diana (1592), of the Parthenophil and Parthenophe of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with poetry, and of the stray minor groups, Alcilia, Licia, Caelia; while the Caelica of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered. Astrophel and Stella, Drayton’s Idea (1594-1619), Spenser’s Amoretti and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (printed 1609) are addressed to definite and probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage, ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In most of these series, as in Daniel’s paler but exquisitely-wrought Delia (1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.

The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whose Metamorphoses, familiar in Golding’s old version (1555-1557), furnished descriptions, decorations and Mythic poems. many tales, while his Heroides gave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe. Shakespeare owed something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has to say. In Venus and Adonis the poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in The Rape of Lucrece he is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator’s interest. Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.

If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Molière’s Alceste loved and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away disappointed, and think Lyric. the old poetry heartless. But it is not heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and grouping (in Venus and Adonis), or the delicate beating out of rhyme in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation. Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser’s there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619) of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion’s songs are not only supremely musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality. Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation, are all there: and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the various Miscellanies, A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), the Phoenix Nest (1593) and Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1602); while other such collections, like England’s Helicon (1600), were chiefly garlands of verse that was already in print.

There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt, however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.

Verse from Donne to Milton.—As the age of Elizabeth receded, some changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson, as in John Donne (1573-1631), one of the greater poets of the nation, and in many writers after Donne, may Metaphysical or fantastic schools. be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion against the natural man and his claims to pleasure—a revulsion from which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (The Temple, 1633), the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (The Flaming Heart) and occasional golden stanzas; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to 1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious Fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Habington with his Castara (1634), who show the same temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter section of the famous “metaphysical” or “fantastic” school, which includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like Cartwright and Cleveland (in whom survives the vein of satire that also marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the century. In his Life of Cowley Johnson tramples on the “metaphysical” poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their historical importance.

In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper disquisitive and introspective. The poet’s emotion is played with in a cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne’s passion is so real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical. His satires, his Valentine, his Litany, and his lyric or odic pieces in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of “wit” or intelligence, and “will” or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are but one idiosyncrasy of Donne’s intricate soul, whose general progress, so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction, to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The Anatomy of the World and other ambitious pieces have the same quality amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the omnipresence of the poetic gift. The “fantastic” school, if it contains some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.

Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry were modified. Donne’s frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in general came to Rhythm. be studied more for its own sake, and the study was rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew’s amorous iambics, or of Wither’s trochees, or of Crashaw’s odes, or of Marvell’s octo-syllables, has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly “Pindaric” in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly “Pindaric” as in Cowley’s experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated, balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used, began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller’s for two generations; but Denham’s overestimated Cooper’s Hill (1642), Cowley’s Davideis (1656), and even Ogilby’s Aeneid made the path plainer for Dryden, the first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious feeling. Drummond’s Poems of 1616 and Flowers of Zion (1623) are full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a Spenserian, but his Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), with their slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the devotional poets. But his Shepherd’s Hunting and other pieces in his volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.

Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered in Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not excelled within his range of Herrick. topic, which includes flowers and maidens—whom he treats as creatures of the same race—and the swift decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for his own paganism. The Hesperides are pure Renaissance work, in natural sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon. Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics outlives his “epic and Pindaric art.” There are many writers who last by virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless The long poem. poet by many a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of or unattempted in England, was the “long poem,” heroical and noble, the “phantom epic,” that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), Cowley’s Davideis and Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida (1659) attest the effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness, faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in each of them, and in Pharonnida there is far more than enough poetry to save it.

Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran clear and lay at Milton. the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of natural things were already original in the Nativity Ode, written when he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent Platonism and golden blank verse of the Comus (1634); the birth of long-sleeping power in the Lycidas (1637), with its unapproached contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour of the tombless friend;—the newness, the promise, the sureness of it all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton’s scholars a century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or during Milton’s long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme; and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.

Milton also had a medieval side to his brain, as the History of Britain shows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the Christian heaven and hell inserted. The time, indicated by retrospect and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to the popular mystery play; and Milton at first planned out Paradise Lost as such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied. But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the epic. The subject, therefore, was partly medieval, partly Protestant,—for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment, with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their journeys between Olympus, Earth and hell, invocations, set similes, battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the Renaissance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of equal gift; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and absolute expression of something that in the English stock is inveterate—the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton’s doctrine and his sympathies in Paradise Lost (1667) has never escaped notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out in Paradise Regained (1671), when he has at once to reprobate and glorify Athens, the “mother of arts.” In this afterthought to the earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury. In Samson Agonistes (1671) the ethical treatment as well as the machinery is Sophoclean, and the theology not wholly Christian. But the fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton’s own; and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.

The essential solitude of Milton’s energies is best seen in his later style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most recent memories of the drama were also the worst; the forms of Cowley and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser’s manner was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater dramatists (including John Ford); and their tragic diction and measure are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of the Paradise Lost and its divided sympathies are cemented, at least superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton’s youth and prime—possibly kept fresher by his blindness—are felt through the sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton’s artistry, as of his self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the known powers and liberties of the metre; and yet, as has often been shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metrical ictus is at times hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and representative character ensure attention, so long as the oppositions of soul and temper in the England of Milton’s time remain, as they still are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit; but he does not do this, for nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton; all his culture only gives immortal form to its expression. The critics have instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is quenched in English civilization.

Drama, 1580-1642.—We must now go back to the drama, which lies behind Milton, and is the most individual product of all English Literature. The nascent drama of genius can be found in the “University wits,” who flourished Drama. between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd, Peele, Greene and Marlowe. John Lyly is the first practitioner in prose—of shapely comic plot and pointed talk—the artificial but actual talk of courtly masquers who rally one another with a bright and barren finish that is second nature. Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, Midas, and Lyly’s other comedies, mostly written from 1580 to 1591, are frail vessels, often filled with compliment, mythological allegory, or topical satire, and enamelled with pastoral interlude and flower-like song. The work of Thomas Kyd, especially The Spanish Tragedy (written c. 1585), was the most violent effort to put new wine into the old Senecan bottles, and he probably wrote the lost pre-Shakespearian Hamlet. He transmitted to the later drama that subject of pious but ruinous revenge, which is used by Chapman, Marston, Webster and many others; and his chief play was translated and long acted in Germany. Kyd’s want of modulation is complete, but he commands a substantial skill of dramatic mechanism, and he has more than the feeling for power, just as Peele and Greene have more than the feeling for luxury or grace. To the expression of luxury Peele’s often stately blank verse is well fitted, and it is by far the most correct and musical before Marlowe’s, as his Arraignment of Paris (1584) and his David and Bethsabe attest. Greene did something to create the blank verse of gentle comedy, and to introduce the tone of idyll and chivalry, in his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594). Otherwise these writers, with Nashe and Lodge, fall into the wake of Marlowe.

Tamburlaine, in two parts (part i. c. 1587), The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II. (the first chronicle play of genius), and the incomplete poem Hero and Leander are Christopher Marlowe’s title-deeds Marlowe. (1564-1593). He established tragedy, and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not obscure his power, in his greater passages, describing the descent of Helen, the passing of Mortimer, and the union of Hero and Leander, to attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures, gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden’s orotund heroes; but in Faustus and in Edward II. they become real, almost human beings. His constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised the planning-out of Faustus. The glory and influence of Marlowe on the side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines, which are varied not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names to the point of splendid extravagance; and their sound is heard in Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in Marlowe’s own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe’s Jew, launched his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe’s oratory, and modulated, in Richard II., his master’s type of chronicle tragedy.

As the middle ages receded, the known life of man upon this earth became of sovereign interest, and of this interest the drama is the freest artistic expression. If Marlowe is the voice of the impulse to explore, the plays of Shakespeare. Shakespeare are the amplest freight brought home by any voyager. Shakespeare is not only the greatest but the earliest English dramatist who took humanity for his province. But this he did not do from the beginning. He was at first subdued to what he worked in; and though the dry pedantic tragedy was shattered and could not touch him, the gore and rant, the impure though genuine force of Kyd do not seem at first to have repelled him; if, as is likely, he had a hand in Titus Andronicus. He probably served with Marlowe and others of the school at various stages in the composition of the three chronicle dramas finally entitled Henry VI. But besides the high-superlative style that is common to them all, there runs through them the rhymed rhetoric with which Shakespeare dallied for some time, as well as the softer flute-notes and deeper undersong that foretell his later blank verse. In Richard III., though it is built on the scheme and charged with the style of Marlowe, Shakespeare first showed the intensity of his original power. But after a few years he swept out of Marlowe’s orbit into his own vaster and unreturning curve. In King John the lyrical, epical, satirical and pathetic chords are all present, if they are scarcely harmonized. Meantime, Lyly and Greene having displaced the uncouther comedy, Shakespeare learned all they had to teach, and shaped the comedy of poetic, chivalrous fancy and good-tempered high spirits, which showed him the way of escape from his own rhetoric, and enabled him to perfect his youthful, noble and gentle blank verse. This attained its utmost fineness in Richard II., and its full cordiality and beauty 1590-1595. in the other plays that consummate this period—A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and one romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Behind them lay the earlier and fainter romances, with their chivalry and gaiety, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Throughout these years blank verse contended with rhyme, which Shakespeare after a while abandoned save for special purposes, as though he had exhausted its honey. The Italian Renaissance is felt in the scenery and setting of these plays. The novella furnishes the story, which passes in a city of the Southern type, with its absolute ruler, its fantastic by-laws on which the plot nominally turns, and its mixture of real life and marvel. The personages, at first fainter of feature and symmetrically paired, soon assume sharper outline: Richard II. and Shylock, Portia and Juliet, and Juliet’s Nurse and Bottom are created. The novella has left the earth and taken wings: the spirit is now that of youth and Fancy (or love brooding among the shallows) with interludes of “fierce vexation,” or of tragedy, or of kindly farce. And there is a visionary element, felt in the musings of Theseus upon the nature of poetry of the dream-faculty itself; an element which is new, like the use made of fairy folklore, in the poetry of England.

Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most popular as 1596-1600. he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons, dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of Henry IV., and its interlude or offshoot, The Merry Wives of Windsor. The play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant, diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur, “dying in his excellence and flower,” is perhaps more attractive than Henry of Agincourt. But in the “middle comedies,” As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night, the warriors are home at court, where women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the note; and Shakespeare’s prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection behind it.

Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The energy which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they were not 1601-1608. out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and The White Devil, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Maid’s Tragedy, and A Woman Killed with Kindness. But, in spite of Shakespeare’s affinities with these authors at many points, Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not together), and the two quasi-antique plays Troilus and Cressida, and Timon of Athens, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North’s Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest scope; and Florio’s translation (1603) of Montaigne’s Essays, coming out between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, counted probably for more than any other book. The Sonnets (published 1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations of the stranger dramas like Troilus and Measure for Measure. But whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of a great poet’s suffering and friendship.

Shakespeare’s last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608 with his contributions to Pericles, Prince of Tyre. For unknown reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record, as though in justice Last period. to the world, the happy turns by which tragic disaster is at times averted. Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest all move, after a series of crimes, calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty, where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the faint and desperate last partings—of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and Horatio—which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere of the roman d’aventure, which had already been adapted by Beaumont and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his handiwork. In The Tempest this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy music. Even if it be true that in Prospero’s words the poet bids farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the composition of Henry VIII.; and not improbably also in The Two Noble Kinsmen. His share in two early pieces, Arden of Feversham (1592) and Edward III., has been urged, never established, and of many other dramas he was once idly accused.

Shakespeare’s throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare’s conceits, his experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons. Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind, but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich, harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through discord. He is also many persons in one; in his Sonnets he is even, it may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality not of his own fancying—with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry and of Cleopatra—that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare’s mastery of this art is approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him eternally actable—the skill of raising, straining and relieving the suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will tolerate—he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his fanfare over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified England, as in Cymbeline, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly. Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.

Shakespeare’s method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in poetical intuition, Jonson. was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples even after 1660. He had “the devouring eye and the portraying hand”; he could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine, drawn from the Poetics and Horace, which moulded his creative practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does this by beginning with the “humour,” or abstract idiosyncrasy or quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy, Every Man in his Humour (acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson’s monumental pieces, Volpone or the Fox (acted 1605) and The Alchemist (acted 1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given for an instant by The Silent Woman, Bartholomew Fair (acted 1614), or The Staple of News, still less by topical plays like Cynthia’s Revels, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged with contempt. The erudite tragedies, Sejanus (acted 1603) and Catiline, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson’s finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary Sad Shepherd, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose is of the best, especially in his Discoveries, a series of ethical essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and various, those of Dryden. The “sons” of Jonson, Randolph and Browne, Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of “humours,” his learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his architectural power, or his relieving graces.

As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine and recesses of poisoned Romantic drama. darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has “poetry enough for anything”; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and artistic conscience lay partly in the conditions of the stage. Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The performances of each play were few. There was no authors’ copyright, and dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.

The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity of his romantic Chapman. love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies on Bussy d’Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624), honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman’s life. Their virtues are only partially Homer’s, but the general epic nobility and the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer’s limpidity and continuity and the translator’s imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same strain spoils Marston’s plays, and obscures his genuine command of the language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.

It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be provisionally grouped as follows. (a) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the latter of treatises Dekker and Heywood. and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in Old Fortunatus (1600) and The Honest Whore, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as in his English Traveller and Woman killed with Kindness (acted 1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (b) Amongst dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best scenes recall the creator Middleton and Webster. of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in high comedy, like The Old Law, that turns on some exquisite point of honour—“the moral sense of our ancestors”; in comedy that is merely graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness and lust, like those in The Changeling and Women beware Women. He and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in The Changeling and Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi (whose “pity,” when it came, was “nothing akin to him”). In Webster’s other principal play, Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil (produced about 1616), the title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors, distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism, without Shakespeare’s ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril Tourneur, in The Revenger’s Tragedy, is even more of a poet than Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment. These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark province, (c) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight. The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with his vein of Cervantesque Beaumont and Fletcher. mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and The Maid’s Tragedy. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like Bonduca, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic; but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare’s heroines. These faults are present also in Philip Massinger. Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence which is like a high table-land without summits. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside Shakespeare’s, and one of the best. Massinger’s interweaving of impersonal or political conceptions, as in The Bondman and The Roman Actor, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely an artist of the decline, (d) A mass of plays, of which the authorship is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, The Many. baffle classification. There are domestic tragedies, such as Arden of Feversham; scions of the vindictive drama, like The Second Maiden’s Tragedy; historic or half-historic tragedies like Nero. There are chronicle histories, of which the last and one of the best is Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, and melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are realistic citizen comedies akin to The Merry Wives, like Porter’s refreshing Two Angry Women of Abingdon; there are Jonsonian comedies, vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field’s and many more. Few of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the dramatic or poetic instinct. (e) Outside the regular drama there are many varieties: academic plays, like The Return from Parnassus and Lingua, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or entertainments in the Italian style, like The Faithful Shepherdess; versified character-sketches, of which Day’s Parliament of Bees, with its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is the master, and Milton, in his Comus, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas made only to be read, like Daniel’s and Fulke Greville’s; and Latin comedies, like Ignoramus. All these species are only now being fully grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.

There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in 1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated power (reflected Ford and Shirley. in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest of Annabella in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or the high crazed heroism of Calantha in The Broken Heart, is beyond the pale, if only he can dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.

Prose from 1579 to 1660.—With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550. In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary, sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose, the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover, prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long unset; that is, the parts of speech—noun and verb, epithet and adverb—were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact, could never be sure of doing the day’s work in the right fashion. The cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by its interests than by its styles.

The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio, Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of The novel. Navarre, and others were purveyed, as remarked above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf in the playwrights’ libraries. The first of famous English novels, Lyly’s Euphues (1578), and its sequel Euphues and his England, are documents of form. Lyly and euphuism. They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model for some years to many followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence, complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constituent clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping. Sidney’s incomposite and unfinished Arcadia, written 1580-1581, despite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms, with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and situation, through which the writer’s eager and fretted spirit shines. Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone that they were meant in chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe’s drastic and photographic tale of masculine life, Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate Traveller, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin declamation, of Nashe himself—by far the most powerful of the group—and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.

In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin countries. Sidney, in his Defence of Poesy (1595, written about 1580), and Jonson, in his Discoveries, offer a well-inspired and lofty restatement of the current Criticism. answers to the current questions, but could give no account of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend the “truth” of poetry—which was identified with all inventive writing and not only with verse—poetry was saddled with the work of science and instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in Shakespeare’s plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the “Areopagus,” an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel’s firm and eloquent Defence of Rhyming (1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in his Advancement of Learning and De Augmentis; and Jonson, besides passing his famed judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like Webbe’s Discourse of Poetry and the Art of English Poesy (1589) ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.

The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great achievements from Berners’ Froissart (1523-1525) to Urquhart’s Rabelais (1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often obscure, their number Translators. witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch’s Morals and Camden’s Britannia, and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his translation, made from Amyot’s classic French, of Plutarch’s Lives (1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in Montaigne’s Essays (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental exploration; and Shelton, in Don Quixote (1612), the chief tragi-comic creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius, Heliodorus, Commines, Celestina and many others, is so good and often so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of historical and social but not of artistic note, being only a fragment of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque, excitable or dull.

Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594-1597), an accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first of note since Wycliffe Hooker. written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason as one of the safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power, and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate resonant eloquence, Hooker’s style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons (1621-1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry, their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was Donne’s younger contemporary and the subject of Milton’s Latin epitaph.

With Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosophy began its unbroken course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured by his Bacon. bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight, crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the “idols,” or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize this conception. The De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623) expanded from the English Advancement of Knowledge (1605) draws the map; the Novum Organum (1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of inductive logic; the New Atlantis sketches an ideally equipped and moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his English. The Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical, put together inductively, or rather by “simple enumeration” of the pros and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and statesman, disenchanted—why not?—with mankind, concerned with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop, Bacon’s style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton’s angels, it is “dilated or condensed” according to its purposes. In youth and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes of prose—the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. The History of Henry VII. (1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English before Clarendon. Bacon’s musical sense for the value and placing of splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe’s. But the master of mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon’s—the voice of Rosalind and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel and critical maxim.

As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate, of note in the early history of Deism, and much of the writing of the ambidextrous Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of genius away from English. The Leviathan (1651) with its companion books on Human Nature and Liberty, and Hobbes’ explosive dialogue on the civil wars, Behemoth (1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes’ speculations on the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or “Kingdom of Darkness,” enraged all parties, and left their track on the thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from his Table Talk), Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is not that of a poet, and the poetical Funereal prose. prose is the most distinctive kind of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of Fletcher’s Philaster, or of Spenser’s Despair. It is exemplified in Bacon’s Essay Of Death, in the anonymous descant on the same subject wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne’s plea for suicide, in Raleigh’s History of the World, in Drummond’s Cypress Grove (1623), in Jeremy Taylor’s sermons and Holy Dying (1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial (1658) and Letter to a Friend. Its usual vesture is a long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. The Religio Medici (1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his only true rival in musical sensibility to words.

Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman, and one of the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in his Liberty of Prophesying, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender, intricate, copious, inexhaustible in image and Jeremy Taylor. picturesque quotation. From the classics, from the East, from the animal world, from the life of men and children, his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master of the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its coupled clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found long after in his scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another kind pervades Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy Burton. (1621), where the humorous medium refracts and colours every ray of the recluse’s far-travelled spirit. The mass of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton’s style, is another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language. Burton and Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of their time, which yields up such precious savours to their fancy, that we may be thankful for the delay of more precise science and scholarship. Fancy, too, of a suddener and wittier sort, preserves some of the ample labours of Thomas Fuller, which are scattered over the years 1631-1662; and the Lives and Compleat Angler (1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or pious pieces of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical (Britannia, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and chronological learning, one of the many savants of the Anglican church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer style than Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against the multiplying of “vitals in religion”; the chief were Chillingworth, one of the closest of English apologists, in his Religion of Protestants (1638), and John Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who form a curious digression in the history of modern philosophy, produced two writers, John Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric prose, more directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and their champion of erudition, Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System, gave some form to their doctrine.

Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the historian’s material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, printed in 1702-1704, thirty years after his death. Historical writing Clarendon. hitherto, but for Bacon’s Henry VII., had been tentative though profuse. Raleigh’s vast disquisition upon all things, The History of the World (1614), survives by passages and poetic splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles’s History of the Turks, and the rhetorical History of the Long Parliament by May, had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon’s book, one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries, spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon’s Life, above all the picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence, unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton’s Milton’s prose. polemic prose, hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print in Areopagitica (1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive energies that were to be transformed into Paradise Lost and Samson. His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible; he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.

A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with Tyndale’s, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations. More scholarly than all the The Authorized Version. preceding versions which it utilized, it won its incomparable form, not so much because of the “grand style that was in the air,” which would have been the worst of models, as because the style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the greatest translation—being of a whole literature, or rather of two literatures—in an age of great translations.

Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose. The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English hands, failing a La Bruyère—in Hall’s, in Overbury’s, even in those of the gay and skilful Earle (Microcosmographie, 1628)—the Character is a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensée, or detached remark, practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the popular Resolves of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more modern form, though Howell’s English is in the plainer and quicker movement.