whether the practice of literature would be tolerated during the new reign, his fears might well have been founded on the apprehension that the monarch was too much rather than too little interested in the art of letters. In King JAMES VI. and I. the London poets came forward to welcome one who was so far from "hating boetry "-like one of his successors-that he had laboured with zeal to become a poet himself. Nor was verse the only medium in which James VI. of Scotland had exercised his abilities. He was no less ambitious to shine in prose, as theologian, as critic, as sociologist, as publicist. No writer in the glorious galaxy of his English subjects, not even Bacon and Raleigh, sought to excel in so many fields of literature as the King; certainly none was so confident, in his sanguine moments, that he had succeeded in all. No one, in the presence of Apollo, affected more ecstasy, or assumed a greater claim to poetic immortality. I shall your names eternal ever sing; I shall tread down the grass on Parnass hill; sang King James VI. very lustily in his Invocations to the Goddis, and his were none of those elegant and trivial efforts at genteel penmanship which royal personages in all ages have conceived to be a graceful amateur pastime. There was nothing of the amateur about James. He aimed at no less glory than is given by "the perfection of Poesy, whereunto few or none can attain." Moreover, he was in this also, so far as he went, a genuine man of letters, that he saw, and poignantly and repeatedly deplored, his own deficiencies. Criticism, which could otherwise hardly treat the grotesque works of James I. with Alas!" he says, patience, is disarmed by his candour. God by nature hath refused me the like lofty and quick genius"-which he is applauding in the French poet Du Bartas-" and my dull muse, age and fortune have refused me the like skill and learning." Later on in life, when the King still hankered after literary glory, still stretched on tiptoe to pluck a leaf from the golden laurel which, after all, he found to hang too high for him, his judgment was better than his practice. He could not pretend even to his subjects that he was satisfied with his own prose or verse, and there is something really pathetic in the way in which he alternates sentences of royal truculence with apologies for imperfections due to burdens of office so great and so continual, and to a spirit that never has leave to be "free and unvexed." Evidence seems to prove that the King's modest estimate of his own genius was more than acknowledged in England, and literary aspirants had to be very poor or in great personal danger before they brought themselves down to flattering the monarch as a writer. But, in an age so abundantly autocratical, there must have been something extremely gratifying to the mind of authors in knowing that any one of them could hope to do better than the despot what the despot of all things most desired to do. James VI. of Scotland and I. of England (1566–1625) was the son of Mary, Queen of Scotland, and Lord Darnley. His mother's abdication, the year after JAMES I. THE SONNETEERS 261 his birth, made him King of Scotlaud, and exposed him to extraordinary dangers. Those about him, however, perceived these perils, and his education was conducted with remarkable care and good sense. He became a sound scholar, and his intellectual sympathies were widened almost to the limits of taste and knowledge as understood by the Renaissance of his time in Scotland. He early determined to be an eminent writer, and in 1584, in the midst of the intrigues of politicians contending for his person, he published The Essays of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie. These are sonnets, in which the King emulates the French writers of his day, a romance in rime royal called Phonix, some short gnomic pieces, and versions of his favourite poet, Du Bartas, and of Lucan. All these, though with some Scotch peculiarities, are essentially and characteristically Elizabethan. In 1588, James began his career as a theologian by the publication of the first of his Meditations. In 1591 he issued fresh sets of translations from Du Bartas as His Majesty's Poetical Exercises at Vacant Hours, in 1597 a prose dialogue on Demonology, and in 1599 his political treatise called Basilikon Doron, dedicated to his son Henry. All these were his publications before, in 1603, he became King of England; after that event he produced The True Law of Free Monarchies (1603), A Counterblast to Tobacco (1604), Triplici Nodo Triplex Cuneus (1607), and a number of controversial works of theology. He permitted his chaplain, Richard Montague (15771641), the famous author of the Appello Cæsarem, to collect his Works in 1616. This was done, with much greater completeness, by Mr. R. S. Rait in 19001901. If James I., on his arrival at his Southern country, had any time to spare The for an inspection of the national poetry, he might observe that the sonnet had Sonneteers undergone rapid and complete development since he, in 1584, and under the guidance of Du Bartas, had been one of the first to cultivate it in the North. The posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, of which an account has already been given, had given a violent stimulus to the fashion of writing sonnets; during the last ten years of Elizabeth this was one of the forms of literature most universally cultivated. The Delia of SAMUEL DANIEL, which was very widely enjoyed and imitated, inaugurated the system by which poets enshrined in cycles of sonnets, under a feigned pastoral name, their amatory passion for some cold fair lady or their enthusiastic admiration of some friend. In this, the second period of the English sonnet, close attention was paid to smoothness of versification, and in this respect the performances of the sonneteers were of great value. They made the old rough jingle of the popular poetry intolerable to the ear, by familiarising it with more luxurious and delicate artifice in prosody. Many of the sonnet-cycles, in fact, were no more than exercises in versification, and the best sonneteers, having learned to manipulate iambic verse and to arrange their rhymes, passed on to other business of a broader kind. But some of the sonnet-cycles were valuable in themselves, and free from slavish imitation of Desportes and the other fashionable French models. There is intellectual strength and a certain splendour of imagery in Barnabe Barnes (1569-1609), whose Parthenophil and Parthenophe belongs to 1593. Barnes, who had been a soldier in Italy and France, had a wide knowledge of the writings of the Pléiade, |