xviii THE PREDECESSORS book, worthily accompanies Surrey in his sweet an musical directness of phrase, his simple and genuin expression of feeling. The "Garden" shows that lively sense of its charm in which Englishmen have rarely been wanting; yet here there is little selection as yet of idea and phrase; and, as one often notes in early description, little sign of close study from Nature. But the pedantry of immature and commonplace classical allusion often intervenes in Grimald and his contemporaries; they are only novices, as yet, in the school of the Renaissance. And much the same may be said, in general, of Edwards, the principal contributor to the Paradise, Lord Oxford, Lord Vaux, and others: graceful and tender pieces are not wanting; but on the whole a tone of melancholy moralization prevails; we feel the heavy and storm-broken atmosphere of England under Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth's first regnal years. The old alliterative element of our poetry is also often unpleasantly prominent; the aid it lends is anything but artful; the metres almost without exception are forms of Iambic, often disposed in lines of somewhat oppressive length, a source of heaviness in effect which the skill of Surrey disguises. Rarely have we any lightly-pacing stanza, such as Tottel offers in the Paradise-the rhymes follow our present accentuation, the peculiar form of forced final accent which Spenser revived, with unsatisfactory effect, from Chaucer, being avoided. On the * It * "Whatever be the subject," says Hallam, "a tone of sadness reigns through this misnamed Paradise of Daintiness, as it does through all the English poetry of this particular age. seems as if the confluence of the poetic melancholy of the Petrarchists with the reflective seriousness of the Reformation overpowered the lighter sentiments of the soul." recole, Tottel's volume, if it contains more rude work, ges better writing, even in the work of its lesser poets, at an the Paradise. Distinct advance, I think, cannot be e aimed for the later work; and of the study of ancient arm and sentiment in poetry no important trace as et appears. The classical element, so far as I have oticed, in its essential features is, in fact, hardly beyond what we may find in such a work as Gower's Lover's Confession of 1393. Another very curious point, which I can only indicate, is the almost entire absence of the poetry of common life, whether of the ballad or of the tale, from the whole of this early literature. The lyrical tale, indeed, as distinguished from the ballad by greater condensation and vividness, and corresponding diminution of the narrative element, was all but unknown in England for more than a century and a half later. The ballad, so far as this class of our poetry, English or Scotch, in its existing form at least, can be safely dated, appears during the sixteenth century. But by the middle of it the only example of any merit, and of proved date, so far as I am aware, and this rather a song of common life than a ballad as commonly understood, appears to be the drinking song in Gammer Gurton, published in 1557. This in its boldness of phrase and lively lilt of metre stands out among the serious lyrics of the time, and doubtless is but a specimen of a class which, probably, had not literary merit enough to find preservation. And even this we owe, more or less, to the "new learning"; Still, if he be rightly named the author, having been successively Master of St. John's and of Trinity at Cambridge. XX THE PREDECESSORS The nearest exceptions, however, to the above remarks will be found in Gifford's Posie, which, though published in 1580, may, in his editor's opinion, represent work of the previous twenty years. Here we have a humorous tale, reminding one in substance of Chaucer and other old fabulists, of much spirit and liveliness; and (in a higher vein of poetry) a spirited address to the Soldiers of the day, which has a direct and practical air very unusual in the writings of the time. In these pieces, and in several charming addresses to lady-loves or friends, Gifford has the modern character which I shall notice in the following poets, whilst in point of tenderness, grace and inventive fancy, he stands much above them. But Gifford, even more than Watson, (afterwards to be characterized,) does not appear to have reached the popularity due to his merits in his own age. Having, above, briefly noticed those writers who, as the first creators of our renewed poetry, possess an interest altogether special and peculiar, I shall with even more brevity review those who intervene, and who were the representatives of the art during Spenser's youth. Turbervile, whose volume of miscellaneous poems appeared in 1567 and 1570, strikes us at first by his singular modernness: his style, metres, language might be the commonplace of our own, or indeed of any age. He maintains a facile literary level through his long and, it must be owned, often tedious pieces, whilst his predecessors rarely attempt more than brief flights; in this respect only giving evidence of literary advance, for Turbervile wants alike the depth and seriousness of the earlier writers, and the charm and imaginative beauty which we associate with the Elizabethan period. Turbervile further marks increasing translation of Ovid's Heroides (1567). culture in his The best piece I have found in him is the rendering of the Asterie epigram ascribed to Plato : My Girl, thou gazest much upon the golden skies: all mine eyes! With Turbervile, who "scarcely ventures to leave the ground," we may join Tusser. His Points of Good Husbandrie (1557) are homely precepts expressed in lively metre. Once popular, they now deserve note here only as showing the extension of literary activity into a practical field of common life; they speak of a wider class of readers than those whom Surrey or Edwards would have found. George Gascoigne's Hundred Flowers, published in 1572, were, however, as his Preface notes, the "Posies and rimes" of his youth, and may date during the ten years following 1554. This miscellaneous collection appears to be more original in its sources than the title-page, which puts forward translations from Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto, prepares us to expect: and there is no strong impress of the Renaissance movement upon his allusions or his style. Amongst the numerous love-poems the " Arraignment" is a bright and neatly written allegory; and others show a musical fluency which, as with Turbervile, is in a certain sense more modern than the deeply-inwoven harmonies of Spenser, or Shakespeare in his lyrical work. Other pieces are in the moralizing vein of the older anthologies. The 'Mask" devised for Lord Mountacute contains a rather *Hallam: Part II., ch. v. xxii THE PREDECESSORS vigorous description of the Battle of Lepanto in fourteensyllable metre, which is a kind of prelude to such narratives as we afterwards find in Drayton and others. But the "Fruites of Warre" and other long pieces of this miscellany are tedious and commonplace. Gascoigne's Steele Glas (1576) has the credit of being "the earliest instance of English satire." * Beginning with a rather pretentious allegory on the birth of satire, the "Glas" professes to image the world as it is. But though we have here many curious details of the time, set forth in clear, simple language, and a flowing though monotonous blank-verse, it does not seem to me to show any real insight into its tooambitious subject, and the style rarely rises above prose. Several translations, including one from the Phænissæ, described by Warton as full of paraphrase and omission, are also due to Gascoigne. It is, in fact, this wide range of matter which renders him noteworthy in the gradual development of our poetry: he attempts, in a commonplace way, much of what the next generation was destined to accomplish. The last place in this little survey I have reserved for Sackville's Induction or Prologue to the Mirror of Magistrates (published, according to Sir E. Brydges, not before 1563), which, in Hallam's phrase, “in the first days of Elizabeth's reign, is the herald of the splendour in which it was to close." was to close." The gloom and grandeur of this piece places Sackville alone amongst the writers who, here and in Scotland, had preceded him in trying the difficult path of allegory, * Hallam: Part II., ch. v. |