XIII. PAPER FOR 1858.

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Examiners: Dr. DASENT and Professor CRAIK.

1. Give an account of the Brut of Layamon, or of the Ormulum, or of the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, or of the Chronicle of Robert de Brunne, or of the Visions of Piers Plowman; noticing the date, authorship, language, form of verse, and subject.

2. Give a similar account of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or of Gower's 'Confessio Amantis.'

3. Sketch the origin and growth of the English drama to the appearance of Shakspere.

4. Estimate the influence exercised by popular poetry on the character and spirit of a nation, and quote any striking passages that you may remember from English or Scottish ballads.

5. Compare Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth; first, in respect of the general spirit and manner of their poetry; and, secondly, in respect of their versification.

6. Sketch the biography of Pope, or Swift, or Johnson, or Burke, or Scott.

7. Give a short account of the principal English works of Francis Bacon; arranging them either in

the order of time, or according to the departments to which they belong; and noticing generally the subject of each, and the manner in which it is treated.

8. State the argument of Milton's 'Monody of Lycidas,' and explain the expressions printed in italics in the following passage :

For so, to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise;
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide,
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.
Look homeward, angel, now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye dolphins! waft the hapless youth.'

9. Describe the course of the action either in Milton's 'Comus,' or in his 'Samson Agonistes.'

10. Compare Bacon and Burke, first as thinkers, and secondly as writers.

11. Characterise succinctly any six of the most distinguished English poetical writers of the present century, and any six of the most distinguished English writers in prose during the same period.

12. Enumerate and characterise briefly the principal English parliamentary orators of the last and the present century.

13. From which of Shakspere's plays is each of the following passages taken? Mention the character who utters them, and the context in which they

occur, and explain the peculiarities of idiom and the allusions contained in them :

:

(1) 'But earthly happier is the rose distilled

Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.'

(2) The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.'

(3) 'I should not see the sandy hour-glass run
But should think of shallows and of flats,
And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand,
Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs,
To kiss her burial.'

(4) 'Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,
Like to the Egyptian thief at point of death,
Kill what I love?'

(5)

'All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.'

(6) 'Our revels now are ended: these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'

(7) 'It is the curse of kings to be attended

By slaves that take their humours for a warrant
To break within the bloody house of life.'

(8) 'How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds Makes ill deeds done!'

(9) 'You, cousin Hereford, upon pain of death,

Till twice five summers have enriched our fields
Shall not regreet our fair dominions,

But tread the stranger paths of banishment.'
(10) 'A pound of man's flesh taken from a man
Is not so estimable, profitable neither,

As flesh of muttons, beefs, or goats.'

(11) 'She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat, like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at Grief.'

(12) 'O! who can hold a fire in his hand,
By thinking of the frosty Caucasus,
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast ;

Or wallow naked in December's snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?'

(13) 'Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,
Being so troublesome a bedfellow ?

O polished perturbation, golden care,
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night, sleep with it now!
Yet not so sound, and half so deeply sweet,
As he, whose brow with homely biggin bound,
Snores out the watch of night.'

(14) 'This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infestion and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands.'

(15) 'If that same demon that hath gulled thee thus,
Should with his lion gait walk the whole world,
He might return to vasty Tartar back,
And tell the legions, "I can never win

A soul so easy as that Englishman's.”’

(16) 'But list to me, my Humphrey, my sweet Duke, Methought I sat in seat of majesty,

In the cathedral church of Westminster,

And in that chair where kings and queens were crowned,
Where Henry and dame Margaret kneeled to me,
And on my head did set the diadem.'

(17) 'Alas! I am the mother of these griefs:
Their woes are parcell'd, mine are general.
She for an Edward weeps, and so do I;
I for a Clarence weep, so doth not she:
These babes for Clarence weep, and so do I;
I for an Edward weep, so do not they.'

(18) 'For who would bear the whips and scorns of time . . But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.'

(19) 'Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence

And portance in my travel's history:

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak-such was the process,

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.'