Chaucer Society, the Early English Text Society, has enabled the critic to form a generalised view of the character of our primitive literature. It is as easy as it is illiberal to sneer at the scholar who reproduces, with all the care bestowed upon a play of Eschylus, the text of William of Palerne or Guy of Warwick. But the thanks of all lovers of learning are due to the patient toil of those who, leaving the more flowery paths of literature, are content to illustrate the infant efforts of the English Muse for the sake of any one who may feel an interest in them. Nevertheless, while the multiplication of materials makes it easier for the historian to generalise his conception, the task of selection and arrangement becomes, in one sense, more difficult. I have been bold enough to abandon the plan of Warton, and to revert, with considerable modifications, to the plan of Gray. But as men's ideas of what is meant by the History of Poetry have been greatly confused by the manner in which the subject has been treated, I must ask the reader to let me explain what are my reasons for building on altogether new foundations, and what the principles are on which this history is constructed.

1. The experience of Warton points clearly to the conclusion that the history of English Poetry cannot be treated in a satisfactory manner unless the design of the historian possesses unity. Gray's design satisfied this condition up to a certain point, but it was open to the objection, that though he accurately noted the course of our poetry, and gave a just analysis of the general causes that produced it, the classification he adopted did not always correspond with the facts. The "schools" of which he speaks existed only in a metaphor borrowed from the art of painting, which suggests that the poets grouped under them were separated from each other by external differences more profound than was actually the case, and which, moreover, seems to exclude

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from the development of the art the operation of all but technical influences. I have endeavoured to extend his conception. In this history I have looked for the unity of the subject precisely where the political historian looks for it, namely, in the life of the nation as a whole my aim has been to treat poetry as an expression of the imagination, not simply of the individual poet, but of the English people; to use the facts of political and social history as keys to the poet's meaning, and to make poetry clothe with life and character the dry record of external facts.

2. If the course of our poetry is to be treated historically, it must exhibit the principle of its growth and movement. Movement in political history is measured by the achievements of arms and commerce; in constitutional history by changes in laws and institutions, by the spectacle of

Freedom slowly broadening down
From precedent to precedent ;

in poetry, and the other arts of expression, it is mainfested by the simultaneous appearance in the nation of new modes of thought, fresh types of composition, improved methods of harmony. Mind works upon mind; the small beginnings of one generation are carried forward, if only a little way, in the next. Hence we cannot afford to despise the rude art of our forefathers; and it is much to be regretted that Warton, by simply collecting archaic materials without attempting to group and classify them, created a kind of distaste for the historic study of our early literature. See, for example, the effect his method has produced on a scholar like M. Taine.

"Must we," asks M. Taine, speaking of Chaucer's successors," quote all these good people who speak without having anything to say? You may find them in Warton; dozens of translators, importing the poverties of French literature, and imitating imitations; rhyming chroniclers,

most commonplace of men, whom we only read because we must accept history from every quarter, even from imbeciles; spinners and spinsters of didactic poems, who pile up verses on the training of falcons, on heraldry, on chemistry; editors of moralities, who invent the same dreams over again for the hundredth time, and get themselves taught universal history by the goddess Sapience. Like the writers of the Latin decadence, these folk only think of copying, compiling, abridging, constructing in text-books, in rhymed memoranda, the encyclopædia of their times."1 Having thus dismissed the Middle Ages en bloc, M. Taine proceeds to consider the typical mediæval poet :Listen to the most illustrious, the grave Gower— 'morall Gower,' as he was called. He is like an old secretary of a Court of Love, André le Chapelain, or any other, who would pass the day in solemnly registering the sentences of ladies, and in the evening, partly asleep on his desk, would see in a half dream their sweet smiles and their beautiful eyes. The ingenious but exhausted vein

of Charles of Orleans still flows in his French ballads. He has the same fondling delicacy almost a little affected. The poor little poetic spring flows yet in thin, transparent streamlets over the smooth pebbles, and murmurs with a babble pretty, but so low that at times you cannot hear it. But dull is the rest! His great poem, Confessio Amantis, is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor, imitated chiefly from Jean de Meung, having for object, like the Roman de la Rose, to explain and classify the impediments of love. The superannuated theme is always reappearing, covered by a crude erudition. You will find there an exposition of hermetic science, lectures on the philosophy of Aristotle, a treatise on politics, a litany of ancient and modern legends gleaned from the compilers, marred in

1 Taine's History of English Literature (translated by H. Van Laun), 1886, p. 219.

the passage by the pedantry of the schools and the ignorance of the age. . . . Hawes copies the House of Fame by Chaucer, and a sort of allegorical amorous poem after the Roman de la Rose. . . Barclay translates the Mirror of Good Manners and the Ship of Fools. Continually we meet with dull abstractions, used up and barren; it is the scholastic phase of poetry. If anywhere there is an accent of greater originality it is in Lydgate's Dance of Death, bitter buffooneries, sad gaieties, which in the hands of artists and poets were having their run throughout Europe."

All this is very agreeable; some of it is very true. Yet it is questionable whether so much wit is quite appropriate in a humanist, whose motto ought to be Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "It remains for all of us to go where Numa and Ancus have arrived"; and it may be that the twenty-fifth century will find as little of interest in the nineteenth as M. Taine finds in the fourteenth century. But if the reader is to be taught to regard the poor English poets of the fourteenth century with such vast disdain, it would at least be well that the critic should allow him to descend in his balloon to an elevation at which objects can be separately discerned, and some slight regard be had to dates and characteristics. Gower is dull. No doubt; nevertheless, as he must have composed his ballads about the middle of the fourteenth century, there is some difficulty in supposing him to have been working in the "ingenious but exhausted vein" of Charles of Orleans, who began to write after the battle of Agincourt. Nor because Gower borrowed from Jean de Meung, for the machinery of his Confessio Amantis, the single idea of confession, need we at once leap to the conclusion that he was in other respects an imitator of that savage satirist; or indeed that the latter, in the 1 Taine's History of English Literature, pp. 219-224.

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Roman de la Rose, was animated by any such commonplace motive as "to explain and classify the impediments of love." It is certainly a trifling matter to be ignorant that there is no essential resemblance between the Temple of Glass and the House of Fame, and that, so far as any trace of "copying" is visible, the imitating author of the former poem was not Hawes, but Lydgate ; but facts are perhaps held in too great contempt when originality" is specially attributed to Lydgate, the most voluminous and plodding translator of the Middle Ages. One of Lydgate's translations (preserved at the end of a rare black-letter folio)1 is entitled "The Dance of Machabree," and deals with the subject of the Dance of Death; but as this funereal composition is entirely guiltless of "buffoonery or gaiety," "sad or bitter," it may be conjectured that M. Taine's ideas of its character were derived from an imperfect recollection of what he “found in Warton " about the Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins by William Dunbar.

Morose, indeed, would an Englishman be, if he complained of the lively critics of France, who study the masterpieces of our literature with so much acuteness, and often with so much appreciation, because they turn with distaste from the lisping numbers of our earlier poets.2 I have referred to M. Taine's critical method for the purpose partly of illustrating the disadvantages arising from Warton's chronological treatment of his subject, partly of proving to the English reader that we ourselves cannot afford to skim with the same lightness as M. Taine over two centuries of our national verse. For it is very certain that the poets of the late English Renaissance, whom M. Taine admires, by no means shared his opinion of Gower. In Pericles

1 The only place where I have ever seen this poem is in Tottel's edition of the Falls of Princes (1554), a copy of which is in the British Museum.

2 Yet M. Jusserand, writing with all the qualities of his nation, has succeeded in clothing the subject with amenity and interest in his Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglais (1894).