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. 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 Phænissa, 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." 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. and it is natural to suppose that Spenser was influenced in youth by so signal a display of vividness and power. In the seriousness and darkness of its atmosphere, the strange and gigantic forms which people it, this brief poem recalls the designs with which, not long before, Michel Angelo had vaulted the Sistine, and might be termed the consummation of that cast of thought which I have noticed in the writers who lived during the revolutions of that bad period which extends from the middle of Henry the Eighth's reign to the close of Mary's. Sackville's metre (the noble Rhyme Royal of Chaucer) and his diction seem to me of an intentionally antique quality; but the sustained majesty of his style, the closeness in thought and in imagery, are his own. Sackville stands single in his strength among the writers of Spenser's youth, and preludes to him more clearly than any other since Chaucer. Putting him aside, I may sum up the result of the preceding essay thus:We have first a period of true Renaissance impulse in its best sense in Surrey and those who worked in his manner. But the range of poetry attempted is narrow the chief value of the work done lies in its grace, its elegance of form, its simple and incisive language. These high qualities then fade away: what follows is an epoch of fluency and variety of aim, whilst the style assumes a distinctively modern character, which is partly aided by the ficiency in imaginative power exhibited. is past the hour is here for the auroral Spenser and his contemporaries. singular de The twilight Thé splendour of II. GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO "THE SHEPHEARDES CALENDER." 1579-80. THAT side of Spenser's work for the advance of our literature which lay rather in the form than the matter, rather in showing his contemporaries how to deal with language and metre, how to give symmetry and unity, how to use foreign models, new or old,than in creating poems of intense and enduring interest on their own account, is most fully exhibited in the Calender. It is at once the ante-room to his own glorious palace of poetry, and to that which, from Shakespeare to Milton, was created by the first and greatest group of the modern master-singers of England. Dating the age of conscious Renaissance among us from 1490 or 1500, the first fruits of its poetry (as my preceding sketch has noticed), during the fifty years before 1580, gave a fair number of single pieces which in simplicity of style, in depth of thought, in expression of natural feeling, occasionally in melody of words, equal or surpass Spenser's production. But "the strength of an eagle," as Hallam remarks, when comparing Sackville with Spenser, "is not to be measured only by the height of his place, but by the time that he continues on the wing"; and the Calender, as Spenser's latest and best biographer truly observes, proves that "at the age of twenty-seven Spenser had realized an idea of English poetry far in advance of anything which his age had yet conceived or seen."* * Dean Church: ch. ii. English poets (to put out of sight the Scottish poetry of the century, which pursues, in part, an independent course), during this period had produced no one piece of such range in subject, such art in writing; nothing which (even at the vast interval that an honest judgment must recognize between a Vergil and a Spenser), could so fairly recall ancient master-works. It was to this continuous display of power, this bulk and mass, that, I think, we must ascribe much of the immense influence exercised by the Calender over the literature of its time: to the weight of the blow, not less than to the skill with which it was directed. The If the Calender proved to be a "turning-point in the history of our poetry," a work with which only Chaucer's Pilgrimage could fairly be compared in point of extent and power, its position was, it appears, clearly recognized at the date of publication. sense that a great poet had arisen has never been more clearly expressed than in the Epistle of E. K. prefixed; and it is noteworthy that he dwells most upon the style and command of language shown by the "new Poete"; thus showing a true if unconscious estimate of Spenser's peculiar literary mission; although at the same time betraying a sense that the artificial archaism prevalent in his diction requires apology. The love of mystery and allegory which is so marked in the literature of the Elizabethan age, (forming, doubtless, a parallel to its atmosphere of political intrigue and statecraft, as that itself is an expression of the Machiavellianism of the sixteenth century,) is curiously displayed in this Preface, and (so far as we may now infer) * Church. |