Continent. But so it was, and in the singular unison of the aim which actuated Malherbe (1555— 1628), Waller, and Opitz, we see the action of an intellectual force far deeper than the rage of leaguers or the ambition of a Gustavus Adolphus. And our reply to the question why this movement began first in France would be that at the final decline of the Renaissance it was France that stood at the intellectual head of Europe.

To admit this it is plainly necessary to admit that this change from the romantic to the classic was a step forwards, a necessary element in the progress of the human mind. The critic who should make this admission must be prepared to find himself in opposition to all the accepted canons of the last seventy years. He must be ready to be charged with paradox, the love of enunciating what is manifestly absurd, with applauding a change that gave us Cowley in exchange for Spenser. I hope that before this inquiry is concluded I may bring forward reasons for a view that at first sight appears so ridiculous. In the meantime we are occupied with France. I do not myself believe, or see any reason for suspecting, that the change to classicism in England was originally started by direct influence from France, any more than from Germany or from Holland or

from Spain. It should be stated that the date of the beginning of that change must now be placed much earlier than it has hitherto been the custom to place it. In my next chapter, I shall show, by irrefragable proof, that Waller was writing didactic occasional poems in distichs which were often as good as Dryden's ever became, at least as early as 1623. Now Malherbe, with whom by universal consent the fashion for correct versifying and the exclusion of ornament set in, was not at this time a poet known even to the French public. A few of his pieces had come to light, but he had published no book: he was simply a fructifying centre of influence, just as Rossetti lately was in London for twenty years before he printed a book.

Malherbe's poems did not appear in Paris till 1630, two years after his death, and at least nine years after Waller, in his mother's country-house in Buckinghamshire, had discovered almost all that was to be learned about the fabrication of smooth and balanced couplets. Moreover, when Malherbe is spoken of as a polisher of the couplet, it leads us to suspect that his works have been more read about than read. It is, in fact, a very curious circumstance, which I do not recollect to have seen noted by any critic, that this great leader of the precise style in poetry, this harbinger of Boileau and

Racine, wrote less in alexandrines than any other French poet on record. Except one solitary frag

ment', of no importance, I do not think a single copy of verses in the conventional French distich has been attributed to Malherbe. Of the possible influence of St Amant on Waller, some ten years afterwards, something may presently be said, and there is no question at all that when the Revolution drove the Royalist English poets to Paris and Rouen, they eagerly studied their French contemporaries and predecessors; but then they had already formed their own style. I do not believe that Waller and Sidney Godolphin and Denham were in the very smallest degree affected by the French revolt against the poetry of the Renaissance when they opened their campaign against the romantic school at home. I am persuaded that it was the result of one of those atmospheric influences which disturb the tradition of literature simultaneously in all the countries of Europe alike, and that it was a much more blind and unconscious movement than that which towards the close of the eighteenth century impelled all the literatures of Europe to throw off the chains which they had adopted one hundred and fifty years before.

1 The lines, addressed to Mme de Rambouillet, which were inserted in the letter from Malherbe, published in Le Recueil de Lettres nouvelles by Faret in 1627.

We return, then, to England, and to our date 1623, the year of the publication of the first folio Shakespeare, and of the composition of Waller's earliest couplets. An examination of the records of the Stationers' Company will help us nothing in forming a notion of the state of English poetry at that date. For some reason or other the publication of verse in the third decade of the seventeenth century was extremely slack, though preceded and followed by periods of great publishing activity. The new king, Charles I., was averse to the writing of poems; he would stroll up to young bards in the gardens of Oxford, and would say to them, "I saw thy copy of verses on her ladyship's eyebrow. They were good, vastly good! See to it that thou write no more." Such compliments were not encouraging to unfledged versemen, and whether from this or some other reason, the imprint 162— is rare on books of poetry, even of dramatic poetry. With one accord the poets of the Marini and Gongora school, who were then in the ascendant, desisted from publication till long after this. Phineas Fletcher, Carew, Herbert, Habington, and Suckling, all of whom claim to be leading writers of the second and third decades of the century, made no public appearance until the fourth, while Herrick waited until late in the fifth, as did Waller

himself.

From a purely bibliographical point of view, therefore, the title-pages of the poets are sadly misleading, and 1623 seems really to belong rather to the old generation of Shakespeare than to that of the so-called metaphysical school.

It was, in fact, a moment of exhaustion and transition in the book-trade. The day of the romance-writers and pamphlet-mongers was over; sixpenny plays and novels and verse-romances were no more sold over the counter. The gentlemen that had asked for "all Greene's works, ay! and all Nash's too" were dead, or old and gone away into the country. Even Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Lodge's Rosalind were beginning to lose their vogue. Books were more expensive, more cumbrous in form; education was spreading, the taste for knowledge was taking the place of that innocent curiosity and romantic simplicity which had made the fortune of the Elizabethan booksellers. Already the shadow of the great political crisis was beginning to darken the horizon, and men were troubled in their minds, seeking for exact information, interested in travels, in philosophy, above all, in theology. The great vogue of the Puritan divines was beginning, and almost the only verse which succeeded was put into the form of plays, cheaply printed, and hawked about in