retained, unaltered, his New Way to Pay Old Debts, for the sake of its sketch from life in Sir Giles Overreach: and his Fatal Dowry also has been preserved, in Rowe's plagiarism from it in The Fair Penitent. But these are hardly his best works: others, at any rate, exhibit his characteristic peculiarities more strikingly. Such are The Unnatural Combat, an extravagant tragedy, in which a son avenges by parricide the murder of his mother; and The Duke of Milan, full of variety, and ending in a catastrophe of wildly conceived horror. Such also are The Bondman, spirited and rough; The Picture, fanciful and romantic; and The City Madam, remarkable for the richness of the poetry with which it invests contemporary life, and still more for the energy with which, in the person of Luke, the dramatist depicts the changes caused by circumstances in a character uniting meanness with ambition.*

It is instructive to note how the low moral tone, if not of the

*PHILIP MASSINGER.

From the Tragedy of "The Fatal Dowry."

The Marshal of Burgundy having died while imprisoned for debt, his son Charalois surrenders himself to redeem the dead body. He speaks from the prisondoor, as the funeral passes, attended by a few soldiers of the deceased as mourners. How like a silent stream shaded with night, And gliding softly with our windy sighs, Moves the whole frame of this solemnity; Tears, sighs, and blacks, filling the simile! Whilst I, the only murmur in this grove Of death, thus hollowly break forth!To stay awhile.Rest, rest in peace, dear earth! Thou that brought'st rest to their unthankful lives, Whose cruelty denied thee rest in death! Here stands thy poor executor, thy son,

-Vouchsafe

That makes his life prisoner to bail thy death;
Who gladlier puts on this captivity,

Than virgins long in love their wedding-weeds.
Of all that ever thou hast done good to,
These only have good memories: for they
Remember best, forget not gratitude.

I thank you for this last and friendly love!
And, though this country, like a viperous mother,
Not only hath eat up ungratefully

All means of thee, her son, but last thyself,
Leaving thy heir so bare and indigent,
He cannot raise thee a poor monument,
Such as a flatterer or an usurer hath;
Thy worth in every honest breast builds one,
Making their friendly hearts thy funeral stone!

nation, yet at least of those for whom plays were written, is indicated by all these works. With Massinger the most heroic sentiments, rising sometimes, as in his Virgin Martyr, into religious rapture, prevail through whole scenes, along with which come others of the grossest ribaldry. By Ford, on the other hand, incidents of the most revolting kind are laid down as the foundation of his plots; and in the representation of these he wastes a pathos and tenderness, which, though lyrical rather than dramatic, are yet deeper than anything elsewhere to be found in our drama.*

*JOHN FORD.

From the Play of "The Lover's Melancholy."
Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales
Which poets of an elder time have feign'd
To glorify their Tempe, bred in me
Desire of visiting that paradise.

To Thessaly came; and, living private,

Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
I day by day frequented silent groves,
And solitary walks. One morning early
This accident encountered me.

I heard

The sweetest and most ravishing contention
That art and nature ever were at strife in.

A sound of music touch'd mine ears, or rather
Indeed entranc'd my soul. As I stole nearer,
Invited by the melody, I saw

This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute,
With strains of strange variety and harmony,
Proclaiming (as it seem'd) so bold a challenge
To the clear quiristers of the woods, the birds,
That, as they flock'd about him, all stood silent,
Wond'ring at what they heard. I wonder'd too.
A nightingale,

Nature's best-skill'd musician, undertakes

The challenge; and, for every several strain

The well-shaped youth could touch, she sung her own.

He could not run division with more art

Upon his quaking instrument, than she,
The nightingale, did with her various notes
Reply to.

Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
Into a pretty anger; that a bird,

Whom art had never taught cleffs, moods, or notes,

Should vie with him for mastery, whose study

Had busied many hours to perfect practice:
To end the controversy, in a rapture,
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,
So many voluntaries, and so quick,

When we open the pages of Shirley, again, a man of very fine poetic fancy, with an excellent turn for the light comedy of manners, we are tempted to suppose that we must, by mistake, have stumbled on some of the foulest births that appeared in the reign of Charles the Second. Vice is no longer held up as a mere picture: it is indicated, and sometimes directly recommended, as a fit example. When the drama was at length suppressed, the act destroyed a moral nuisance.

That there was curiosity and cunning,
Concord in discord, lines of diff'ring method
Meeting in one full centre of delight.

The bird, (ordain'd to be

Music's first martyr,) strove to imitate

These several sounds; which when her warbling throat

Fail'd in, for grief down dropt she on the lute

And brake her heart! It was the quaintest sadness

To see the conqueror upon her hearse

To weep a funeral elegy of tears.

CHAPTER VII.

THE AGE OF SPENSER, SHAKSPEARE, BACON, AND MILTON.

A. D. 1558-A. D. 1660.

SECTION FIFTH: THE NON-DRAMATIC POETRY.

SPENSER'S POETRY. 1. His Genius-His Minor Poems.--2. Spenser's Faerie QueeneIts Design.-3. Allegories of the Faerie Queene-Its Poetical Character.-4. The Stories of the Six Books of the Faerie Queene.-MINOR POETS. 5. The Great Variety in the Kinds of Poetry-Classification of them.-6. Metrical Translations-MarloweChapman-Fairfax-Sandys.-7. Historical Narrative Poems-Shakspeare-Daniel -Drayton-Giles and Phineas Fletcher.-8. Pastorals-Pastoral Dramas of Fletcher and Jonson-Warner-Drayton-Wither-Browne.-9. Descriptive Poems-Drayton's Poly-Olbion-Didactic Poems-Lord Brooke and Davies-Herbert and Quarles -Poetical Satires-Hall-Marston-Donne.-10. Earlier Lyrical Poems-Shakspeare, Fletcher and Jonson-Ballads-Sonnets of Drummond and Daniel.-11. Lyrical Poems of the Metaphysical School-Donne and Cowley-Lyrics and other Poems of a Modern Cast-Denham and Waller.-MILTON'S POETRY. 12. His Life and Works.— 18. His Minor Poems-L'Allegro and Il Penseroso-Comus-Lycidas-Ode on the Nativity-Later Poems-Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.-14. The Paradise Lost.

b. 1558. d. 1599.

THE POETRY OF EDMUND SPENSER.

1. In our study of the Non-Dramatic Poetry of this period, the first name we require to learn is that of Spenser, a word of happy omen, one of the most illustrious names in the literary annals of Europe; the name of

-That gentle Bard,

Chosen by the Muses for their Page of State;
Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace.

Among English poets he stands lower only than Shakspeare, and Chaucer, and Milton: and, if we extend the parallel to the continent, his masterpiece is not unworthy of companionship with its Italian model, the chivalrous epic of Ariosto. But no comparison is needed for endearing, to the pure in heart, works which unite, as few such unite, rare genius with moral purity; or for recommending, to the lovers of poetry, poems which exhibit at once exquisite sweetness and felicity of language, a luxuriant beauty

of imagination which has hardly ever been surpassed, and a tenderness of feeling never elsewhere conjoined with an imagination so vivid.

Spenser's earliest works broke in on what may be considered, in the history of our poetry, as a pause in the march of improvement. Since the middle of the century, no more decisive advance had taken place than that which is shown by the homely satire and personal narrative of Gascoigne. In his "Shepherd's Calendar," Spenser, while he exhibited some fruits of his foreign studies, purposely adopted, as a means of gaining truth to nature, a rusticity both of sentiment and of style, which, though ardently admired at the time, does not now seem to have presaged the ideality of his later works. His Italian tastes were further proved by an elaborate series of sonnets; and several other poems of greater extent may, with these, be summarily passed over.

2. We must make ourselves acquainted more closely with his greatest work, a Narrative Poem, which, though it contains many thousand lines, is nevertheless incomplete, no more than half of the original design being executed. It is asserted, on doubtful authority, that the latter half was written, but perished by shipwreck. The diction is not exactly that of the poet's time, being, by an unfortunate error of judgment, studded purposely with phrases and forms that had already become antiquated; and odd expressions are also forced sometimes on the author by the difficulties of the measure he adopted, that fine but complex stanza of nine lines which all of us know in Childe Harold.

His magnificent poem is called "The Faerie Queene." The title does in some degree signify the contents; but the notion which it tends to convey is considerably different from the reality. The Fairy Land of Spenser is not the region which we are accustomed to understand by that term. It is indeed a realm of marvels; and there are elves and other supernatural beings among its inhabitants: but these are only its ornaments. It is rather the Land of Chivalry, a country not laid down on any map; a scene in which heroic daring and ideal purity are the objects chiefly presented for our admiration; and in which the principal personages are knights achieving perilous adventures, and ladies rescued from frightful miseries, and enchanters, good and evil, whose spells affect the destiny of those human persons.

The imaginary world of the poem, and the doings and sufferings of its denizens, are, in a word, those of the chivalrous romances: and the idea of working up such subjects into poems worthy of a cultivated audience, had already been put in act in the romantic epics of Italy. Our great poet would not, proba