heresy, with its extravagance, affectation, and preciosity, had but hastened on the certain and necessary reaction. When the leaders of literature began to write as Donne and Crashaw1 did, it was absolutely inevitable that other leaders should soon begin to write like Waller and Dryden. But there was more in the change to a classical taste than can be understood merely by a reference to our local schools of poetry in England. When Waller purified his verse of ornament and arranged it in distichs, he was unconsciously doing what was simultaneously being done in the other leading nations of Europe. It will perhaps help us to understand the change in England, if we glance briefly, in the first place, at some of her neighbours. If a change was needed anywhere, it was in Italy, where the emptiness of the later Petrarchists, the insipidity of the pastoral poets, the monstrous 9966 1 One example will serve as well as a dozen, and the reader may amuse himself by turning to Crashaw, who writes a poem of thirtyone stanzas on the Weeping of the Magdalen, in which he calls her eyes "parents of silver-footed rills," "heavens of ever-falling stars," "Heaven's spangles,' nests of milky doves," "two walking baths," "portable and compendious oceans," "wells into which the Lamb dips his white foot," and "Time's hour-glasses;" while the tears themselves are "rivers of cream," "a brisk cherub's breakfast," "richest pearls,' ," "thawing crystal," "sorrow's best jewels," "simpering sons of those fair eyes, your fertile mothers," and as many more unlikely things as the reader's curiosity can wish for. 39.66 extravagances of Marini, had reduced imaginative literature to the lowest ineptitude. But the soil of Italy was too thoroughly exhausted to produce a Dryden or a Pope, and the real reaction there was one against poetry altogether. A sort of classical revival, however, was attempted at the close of the sixteenth century by Chiabrera, who in disdaining the folly of the Marinists, and in trying to recall his countrymen to a Greek simplicity, attained a position somewhat analogous to that of Cowley. But he stood alone until Filicaja came, and Italy presents us with the spectacle of a literature too effete and nerveless to undergo the process of even a classical change. When at last the precise manner of that school was introduced, it was Parini, who, fresh from the study of Pope, attempted to graft an English bud on to the worn Italian stock. It is plain, therefore, that for the first time since English poetry had begun to exist, Italy had no help to give her in her literary revolution. We turn to the Teutonic nations. In Germany, in Denmark, in Sweden, there could at least be no exhaustion of the soil, for here modern poetry had not begun to exist. Here we might expect a young literature, fresh in all the colours of the morning, to arise with healing in its wings. But, heresy, with its extravagance, affectation, and preciosity, had but hastened on the certain and necessary reaction. When the leaders of literature began to write as Donne and Crashaw' did, it was absolutely inevitable that other leaders should soon begin to write like Waller and Dryden. But there was more in the change to a classical taste than can be understood merely by a reference to our local schools of poetry in England. When Waller purified his verse of ornament and arranged it in distichs, he was unconsciously doing what was simultaneously being done in the other leading nations of Europe. It will perhaps help us to understand the change in England, if we glance briefly, in the first place, at some of her neighbours. If a change was needed anywhere, it was in Italy, where the emptiness of the later Petrarchists, the insipidity of the pastoral poets, the monstrous 66 1 One example will serve as well as a dozen, and the reader may amuse himself by turning to Crashaw, who writes a poem of thirtyone stanzas on the Weeping of the Magdalen, in which he calls her eyes "parents of silver-footed rills," "heavens of ever-falling stars," Heaven's spangles,' 9966 nests of milky doves," ," "two walking baths," "portable and compendious oceans, ""wells into which the Lamb dips his white foot," and "Time's hour-glasses;" while the tears themselves are "rivers of cream," "a brisk cherub's breakfast," "richest pearls," thawing crystal," "sorrow's best jewels," "simpering sons of those fair eyes, your fertile mothers," and as many more unlikely things as the reader's curiosity can wish for. 99.66 generation of Waller. So much we may note in passing. Holland was the sole Teutonic country that already possessed a modern literature, a literature springing from the Renaissance. And here we seem nearer to England, for during the first half of the seventeenth century several literary courtesies passed, in a variety of ways, between Starter and Dekker, between Huyghens and Donne, between Vondel and Milton. The robust poetry of Holland underwent no sudden change or development, for two reasons. In the first place, humanism had originally and universally lost more of its bloom and grace in coming to Holland than in coming to any other country; secondly, the temper of the Dutch, except for one very brief and dubious moment at the end of the sixteenth century, was never romantic at all, but didactic or else farcical and melodramatic'. The Dutch had works answering more or less to those of Marlowe and of Ben Jonson, but nothing that recalls Spenser or Shakespeare. Their principal work therefore was, not to 1 The Dutch have this year (March 16, 1885) celebrated the tercentenary of their greatest dramatist, Brederô. The English play which approaches nearest to the works of this man is Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; the humour of Brederô is the humour of Ostade, or of Terence read through the eyes of Ostade. eliminate fantastic beauty, but to polish the execution of their verses, and this Vondel did slowly, through an interminable life of labour, all down the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. At the close of his career, a classicism exactly answering to ours had invaded all Dutch literature, but it had come unobserved, and had been outstripped by the like tendency in England. Something might be said of Spain, whose drama continued to affect our own. But we pass on to France, which is here mentioned last, because it has been customary to take for granted that the change in English poetry was entirely caused by the influence of France. I have quoted the other countries of Europe to show that there is no need to look for so strong an operation of the French mind in England, since every other country was, in one form or another, depressed, subdued, exhausted by rules and colourless ambitions at that very same time. England and France have occupied more attention than any other countries, but mainly because of their superior vitality, and the splendour of their production. It is, indeed, a strange thing that at the moment when England, under the cloud of her civil war, retired from the notice of Europe, she should be drawn into a species of literary alliance with the nations of the |