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little dingy quartos, with a rough paper cover stitched round them, at the doors of the theatres.

There were interesting people enough to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Literary curiosity was a thing forgotten, although the preceding generation had to some degree possessed it. Sir Aston Cockaine, that egotistical poetaster, mentions that he knew all the men of that time, and could have written their lives had it been worth his while. The exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies instead of doing this. In country places one or two of the generation that had seen Spenser and Shakespeare arise were still alive-Gabriel Harvey, Lodge, Barnfield, old men who were to give no further sign of life. The dramatists showed more vitality, though most of them held back their plays from publication until the thirties. Yet Webster's glorious Dutchess of Malfy belongs to our year 1623, and Jonson, Middleton, Chapman, and Heywood were still at work. Massinger was just emerging, and Ford was about to emerge. A whole troop or phalanx of tragic and comic playwrights was preparing to add its quota to the verse of the Donne and Marini school.

Meanwhile, though so little was published, a great deal was read. Each University, but Cam

bridge in particular, was a hotbed of poetry.

The

exciting, fantastical, hysterical canzonets of the great Dean of St Paul's were eagerly passed from hand to hand1, and were as seed that sprung up in the breasts of dozens of ardent young writers. Poetry was no longer a profession, it was a cultus. A certain order of conceits was a shibboleth, which the public not only did not understand, but was not expected to understand. Poetry began to be written for poets, for the elect, for a circle; and this was one of the deadly effects of that curious embargo upon publication of which I have spoken. Utter disregard was paid to unity, to proportion, to extent. In the great generation there had been too little regard for these qualities. Without profanity be it spoken, Sidney's Arcadia is dreadfully amorphous and invertebrate, and Macaulay's

1 There was no edition of Donne's Poems printed earlier than 1633, but their impress on the poetry of the preceding generation is strongly marked.

2 Henry More, in 1642, ushers in his Cambridge epic, the Psychozoia, with the usual defiance of the vulgar reader :

I strike my silver-sounded lyre,—
First struck myself by some strong fire,-
And all the while her warning ray
(Reflect from fluid glass) doth play

On the white banks. But all are deaf
Unto my Muse, that is most lief [dear]
To mine own self.

difficulty of being in at the death of the Blatant Beast would never have been propounded if the Faery Queen had not been so long that it is really excusable not to be aware that the Blatant Beast does not die. But if the Arcadia is shapeless, what are we to say of Oceana? and let not him call the Faery Queen tedious or dull who has never grappled with Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. This masterpiece, with the charming mysterious name, is an allegory in twelve cantos, describing the body and functions of man :—

"His lungs are like the bellows, that respire
In every office, quickening every fire;

His nose the chimney is, whereby are vented
Such fumes as with the bellows are augmented."

So Quarles prattles away in a foolish poem of congratulation to Fletcher, but the author of the Purple Island himself strikes a much more lofty note, and for page upon pompous page describes, to a group of nymphs and shepherd-boys, who sit around him on a little hill of daisies, the tedious and inaccurate geography of this Isle of Man, with all its ridiculous and unseemly towns and lakes and rivers.

We know the poets of this early Caroline period almost entirely by extracts, and their ardour,

quaintness, and sudden flashes of inspiration give them a singular advantage in this form. The sustained elevation which had characterized Shakespeare and Spenser, and even in some degree several of the chief of their contemporaries, had passed away, but still the poets were most brilliant, most delectable in their purple patches. That same much over-estimated Phineas Fletcher rises in his more natural and more felicitous moments to a rare echo of the luxurious Spenserian sweetness. This was strikingly the case with the lyrists. Carew, Lovelace, and half-a-dozen more are known to all lovers of poetry, not by their books, which are in the hands of but few persons, but by those matchless exceptions which criticism has lifted. from their grotesque miscellanies, and has preserved in anthologies. It is quite right that they should live by those pieces, and I should be the last to wish to break one leaf away from their never-tooample bays. But it seems to me mere pedantry, and pedantry of a particularly unwholesome kind, to pretend that the works of all the Marinist or socalled metaphysical poets of the reign of Charles I. are not excessively unequal in merit, and constantly ready to sink into unpardonable bathos or swell into equally unpardonable bombast. And this inequality goes so far, and pervades the literature

of the period so completely, that even the versewriters who have never taken any rank, in their own day or since, have their flashes of intense romantic beauty. I stretch my hand to my bookshelves, and I take down the first Caroline volume that I touch. It happens to be John Mason's tragedy of Muleasses the Turk, a mere bibliophile's curiosity. Nobody, so far as I know, from the date of its production to the present hour, has ever commended a word of it. I feel as though John Mason's ghost, after a silence of two hundred and fifty years, might be breathing hard by my side at the excitement of resuscitation. I glance along the pages and I read

"Our life is but a sailing to our death

Through the world's ocean; it makes no matter then
Whether we put into the world's vast deep
Shipped in a pinnace or an argosy."

That is very fine, surely! But is Muleasses, therefore, a good play? We look a little further and we find one of the personages, under the pressure of a certain annoyance, giving the following directions to his confidant :

"Thy fears keep in

My trembling soul; it does not leave my breast. Mount to the flaming girdle of the world,

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