poetical passages, or lyricism, at all; it contains but one or two soliloquies, and those carefully prepared for effect, like Racine's afterwards. The language is stilted, but never vociferous; it runs on a level, with none of the usual English ups and downs. Variety of action is subordinated to the . illustration of character exactly in the French style.

The question is, however, where can Denham have seen any French tragedies? He had not at that date left his own country, and French books, especially plays and poems, were very slow to cross the Channel. It would be preposterous to suppose him affected by Montchrestien, Hardy, or Rotrou; while the great Corneille, to whose tragedies The Sophy does bear a distinct affinity, was so exactly Denham's contemporary, that it is very difficult to admit the notion of his influence. Until the production of the Cid, Corneille had published nothing that Denham could possibly copy; is it or is it not within the range of credibility that between 1636 and 1642 Denham could have seen the Cid? There is, however, practically no resemblance between the two plays, and if Denham imitated Corneille at all, it must have

demands, is full of good poetical passages in the old blood-andthunder style, and is noticeable, moreover, for what appears to me to be very early imitation of Milton's lyrics.

been in Cinna. I do not, however, believe that, curious as is the analogy, there was any actual prompting from France, but that The Sophy remains a solitary1 specimen of the Seneca tragedy amongst the English drama of the age, just as the curious play of Tyr et Sidon, as Mr Saintsbury was the first to point out, remains a solitary experiment in romantic tragedy in seventeenthcentury French.

We are told that on the publication of The Sophy, Waller said that Denham had "broken out, like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when no one was aware, or the least suspected it." It is interesting to see Waller, who seems never to have praised his romantic contemporaries, instantly perceiving that this was a spiritual comrade of his

own.

We have already observed with how much tact Waller seized the passing events of the hour as topics for his poetry. Denham did the same, even in this tragedy about the Turk. He wrote it in the great year of suspense, 1641, and it is full of little allusions to current politics. It is certainI shall presently be able to prove it—that Denham, though a staunch Cavalier, leaned towards the

1 Half a century had passed since Daniel had written his choral tragicomedies, the Cleopatra and the Philotas, imitations, I suppose, rather of Jodelle's French than of Seneca's Latin.

party of peace. When he puts into the mouth of his Turkish lord these sentiments,

"It is the fate of princes, that no knowledge
Comes pure to them, but passing through the eyes
And ears of other men it takes a tincture

From every channel; and still bears a relish
Of flattery or private ends;"

it is impossible not to see him shaking his head over Charles's mad answer in July to the demand of the Houses for the removal of evil counsellors; and still plainer is the irony about the King, who has been so long divided from his subjects that he becomes a tale to them, and who, when he asks whether he is still beloved, is told that

"Still some old men

Tell stories of you in the chimney-corner."

Events hurried on, and, amidst the momentous bustle of the first years of civil war, it may surprise us to hear the little voice of poetry raised above the din. It was in 1642, the year before Chalgrove Field and Newbury, the year too before Waller's terrible and almost fatal collapse, that Denham published his celebrated poem of Cooper's Hill, a piece conceived in a mood as calm and philosophical as if the halcyons had been brooding over the placid ocean of English politics. This poem

was so decisive a victory for the adherents of the classical school that we may call it their Marston Moor, and not too fantastically conceive Denham and Waller, for Waller certainly had a share in its execution, as routing the forces of the romanticists with their ranks of serried couplets. In spite of all successive attempts in the same style,-and they have been myriad,-Cooper's Hill still remains the most celebrated, though perhaps the last read of topographical poems.

It is not quite true, as all the Augustan critics used to aver, that no topographical poetry had been written in England before Denham. Drayton's Polyolbion and Browne's Britannia's Pastorals belong, no doubt, to altogether a different order; but it is very extraordinary if Denham had never read the Penshurst of Ben Jonson. There was, however, something to be distinguished between the praise of a great peer's house and the tribute to a national river. The Penshurst belonged to the old political dispensation, Cooper's Hill to the new. As before, Denham showed himself extremely dexterous in calling public attention to his verses; they were full of actuality. He opens by rejecting the habitual appeal to Parnassus and Helicon. To this green hill on the south side of the Thames he cries:

"If I can be to thee

A Poet, thou Parnassus art to me,"

and the stately winding river shall take a nobler place than Helicon. There was a certain manly directness about Denham, which at once recommended him to the public.

In the reprints of his poems which he himself issued, and in those which have since been standard, the tone of Cooper's Hill is rigidly Royalist. But a glance at the very rare first edition of 1642', shows that the author revised almost every other line, and omitted whole passages which proved him to lean towards the Neuters. At present the sudden reference to St Paul's, and the eulogy of Waller, follow the invocation very abruptly. In 1642 these were led up to by some curious lines, the appropriateness of which when Waller's plot was discovered a few months later on, must have made Denham's ears tingle and his hair stand on end:-"Some study plots, and some those plots to undo, Others to make them and undo them too, False to their hopes, afraid to be secure, Those mischiefs only which they make, endure;

1 "Cooper's Hill. A Poeme. London. Printed for Tho. Walkley, and are to be sold at his shop at the Signe of the Flying Horse between York House and Britain's Burse. 1642." Tho. Walkley was the printer of Waller's first genuine edition.