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great feature of this change we have not yet indicated. With this desire for more exact knowledge, with this widening of the political sympathies, with this craving for more simplicity and more regularity in literature, there came in another sentiment which was not so interesting or pretty. This was the decline of the spirit of adventure. The poetry of the Elizabethans had been very largely animated by this spirit. It had been written by men of adventure, by soldiers such as Sidney, by buccaneers such as Lodge and Raleigh. Now all that was over; the poets would go no more a-roving, and if they were to be soldiers in the future, it was in a grievous and unromantic fight with their own flesh and blood, in fields that their fathers had tilled in friendship side by side. The brief period of splendid lawlessness on the high seas in the days of Elizabeth had told on the literature of this country, as the adventures of the Greeks told on the tragedies of Eschylus, or as the deeds of Icelanders who went a-viking told on their drapas and their sagas. But to this brief period of intoxication, a time of depression and collapse was bound to follow.

Without, then, too ingeniously building up what should be, from a knowledge of what was, we can on the whole put ourselves pretty distinctly

into the place of a young man who, about 1623, should find himself moved to head a reaction against the ruling taste of the day in verse. In much of what has been already said, of course the view of the supposititious young man, rather than my own view, has been dwelt upon. We can imagine such a young fellow, in some Cambridge College, returning from the company of a circle of friends who had been passing MS. poems of Dean Donne from hand to hand in an ecstasy, we can imagine him saying to himself, "Are they mad to praise this coarse and obscure Progress of the Soul? Are we doomed for ever to have to endure such verse as this,

'Virtue is soul, always in all deeds, all?'

Is this craze for calling heaven and earth to witness the ingenuity of a conceit to spread like a canker through every member of our literature?" He would question thus, and we must not blame him if, in his anger, and in his craving after style, after proportion, he should neglect those eminent beauties which we can perceive readily enough, and which have made us of late too tender to the faults of the early portion of the seventeenth century.

If it were my duty here to call attention to what is good in those interesting writers of the age of Charles, the task would be an easy and a

gratifying one. But I desire to keep close to the question which is before us, the causes which led to the classical reaction. I cannot blind myself to the fact that one of the principal of these causes was what I have indicated, the inequality and alembicated character of the poetry in vogue. The young man I have imagined would turn to his Ars Poetica, and would smile to think that the very monsters which Horace painted by the light of prophecy were come to the birth at last. The lovely woman ending in a fish, what simile could better describe the beautiful moral monstrosity of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess? Where does the dolphin gallop through the woods and the wild boar breast the waves, if not in the cantos of the Purple Island? Who so ingenious as Herbert or Carew in painting the cypress when it was a shipwreck they were commissioned to paint? All the commonplaces of that wonderful prelude of Horace would come back to the young man as singularly, as pitifully, characteristic of his own age, and he would have little inclination to praise the technical beauty in the purple patch itself, be it cypress or dolphin or woman. He would rather be inclined to dream of a straightforward prosaic poetry, closely bound down by the unities, by the rules of composition such as Aristotle and Horace

have given them; and would reply to the ancient question, Is it Nature, is it Art, that leads to a praiseworthy poem? by asking another question, What do my contemporaries answer?" And when they had all vociferated "Nature," he would draw his toga around him, with as Roman an air as he could affect, and would quietly decide for "Art."

The young man to whom I have been alluding has not been a mere figure of rhetoric; he existed, and his name was Edmund Waller. To him and to his peculiar qualities of mind and character happens to be due the first initiation into that great change, that turning topsy-turvy of all poetic literature, which was henceforth to be the main intellectual labour of the seventeenth century. Waller was not a great, or attractive, or inspiring man, although of course he must have had exceptional powers and singular opportunities to have effected what he did effect. But he is the hero of this whole volume. My readers will be forced, if they pay me the compliment of listening to me, to hear a very great deal about him, and to become tolerably intimate with his talents and his character. I need not here, at the close of a chapter, say anything more about him, but the last minutes which we spend together now may be devoted

to the speculation, Why was it not John Milton, instead of Edmund Waller, to whom it was given to revolutionize poetry in England?

Here, again, as everywhere where we look closely into the historic development of literature, we see the value of dates, and the paramount importance of a clear chronological sequence. Broadly speaking, it was because Milton was born. three years later than Waller, and did not so rapidly come to maturity, that we did not receive from him a classical bias which would have been something very different from Waller's. The time was ripe, and when, in 1623, these first experiments in distich were made, the public taste was like touchwood, and caught the fire to let it steadily smoulder. In 1623 Milton was a schoolboy still; six years passed before the Nativity Ode was written, and there he displayed himself simply as the most brilliant of the Marinists.

At Horton, in his famous five years' retirement, he afterwards withdrew from this erroneous school of conceits, and wrote the lovely polished poems which we know. But he was out of the world, while the leaders of the new school were in it, and they with their facile prosaic manner gave the public something much more popular, though far less noble, than Milton's withdrawn and solemn

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