rected by Mr. Malone, who pronounces it to be exactly that of his contemporaries. His authority is weighty; still, however, without reviving the exploded error respecting Jonson's censure, one might imagine the difference of Spenser's style from that of Shakspeare's, whom he so shortly preceded, to indicate that his gothic subject and story made him lean towards words of the elder time. At all events, much of his expression is now become antiquated; though it is beautiful in its antiquity, and like the moss and ivy on some majestic building, covers the fabric of his language with romantic and venerable associations. His command of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before, or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which characterise the very greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of circumstance, like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure through the utmost extremities of the foliage which it nourishes. On a comprehensive view of the whole work, we certainly miss the charm of strength, symmetry, and rapid or interesting progress; for, though the plan which the poet designed is not completed, it is easy to see that no additional cantos could have rendered it less perplexed*. But still there is a richness in his materials, even where their coherence is loose, and their disposition confused. The clouds of his allegory may seem to spread into shapeless forms, but they are still the clouds of a glowing atmosphere. Though his story grows desultory, the sweetness and grace of his manner still to this point in his Hypercritica. He is recommending abide by him. He is like a speaker whose words were his choice not his necessity. Has Drayton, or Daniel, or Peele, Marlowe, or Shakspeare the obscure words found constantly recurring in Spenser? "Let others," says Daniel (the well-languaged Daniel as Coleridge calls him) "Let others sing of knights and paladines, In aged accents and untimely words, I sing of Delia in the language of those who are about her and of her day." Davenant is express on the point, and speaks of Spenser's new grafts of old withered words and exploded expressions. Surely the writers of his own age are better authorities than Malone, who read verbally not spiritually, and, emptying a commonplace-book of obsolete words, called upon us to see in separate examples what collectively did not then exist. It is easy to find many of Spenser's Chaucerisms in his contemporaries, but they do not crowd and characterize their writings; they tincture, but they do not colour; they are there, but not for ever there. Bolton, who wrote in 1622 of language and style, speaks authors for imitation and study-" Those authors among us, whose English hath in my conceit most propriety, and is nearest to the phrase of court, and to the speech used among the noble, and among the better sort in London; the two sovereign seats, and as it were Parliament tribunals, to try the question in." "In verse there are," he says, "to furnish an English Historian with copy and tongue, Ed. Spenser's Hymns. I cannot advise the allowance of other of his Poems, as for practick English, no more than I can do Jeff. Chaucer, Lydgate, Peirce Ploughman, or Laureat Skelton. It was laid as a fault to the charge of Sallust, that he used some old outworn words, stolen out of Cato his Books de Originibus. And for an Historian in our tongue to AFFECT the like out of those our Poets would be accounted a foul oversight. That therefore must not be." Gray has a letter to prove that the language of the age is never the language of poetry. Was Spenser behind or Shakspeare in advance? Stage language must necessarily be the language of the time; and Shakspeare gives us words pure and neat, yet plain and customary-the style that Ben Jonson loved, the eldest of the present and the newest of the past-while Spenser fell back on Chaucer Well of English undefilde, as the as he was pleased to express it. (See WARTON'S Essay on Spenser, vol. i., and HALLAM, Lit. Hist. vol. ii. p. 328.) "The language of Spenser," says Hallam, "like that of Shakspeare, is an instrument manufactured for the sake of the work it was to perform."] tones continue to be pleasing, though he may speak too long; or like a painter who makes us forget the defect of his design, by the magic of his colouring. We always rise from perusing him with melody in the mind's ear, and with pictures of romantic beauty impressed on the imagination. For these attractions "The Fairy Queen" will ever continue to be resorted to by the poetical student. It is not, however, very popularly read, and seldom perhaps from beginning to end, even by those who can fully appreciate its beauties. This cannot be [* Mr. Campbell has given a character of Spenser, not so enthusiastic as that to which I have alluded, but so discriminating, and in general sound, that I shall take the liberty of extracting it from his Specimens of the British Poets.-HALLAM, Lit. Hist. vol. ii. p. 334.] [† Spenser's allegorical story resembles, methinks, a continuance of extraordinary dreams.-SIR W. Davenant. After my reading a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old lady between 70 and 80, she said that I had been showing her a collection of pictures. She said very right.-POPE to Spence.] ascribed merely to its presenting a few words which are now obsolete; nor can it be owing, as has been sometimes alleged, to the tedium inseparable from protracted allegory. Allegorical fable may be made entertaining. With every disadvantage of dress and language, the humble John Bunyan has made this species of writing very amusing. The reader may possibly smile at the names of Spenser and Bunyan being brought forward for a moment in comparison; but it is chiefly because the humbler allegorist is so poor in language, that his power of interesting the curiosity is entitled to admiration. We are told by critics that the passions may be allegorised, but that Holiness, Justice, and other such thin abstractions of the mind, are too unsubstantial machinery for a poet; yet we all know how well the author of the Pilgrim's Progress (and he was a poet though he wrote in prose) has managed such abstractions as Mercy and Fortitude. In his artless hands, those attributes cease to be abstractions, and become our most intimate friends. Had Spenser, with all the wealth and graces of his fancy, given his story a more implicit and animated form, I cannot believe that there was anything in the nature of his machinery to set bounds to his power of enchantment. Yet, delicious as his poetry is, his story, considered as a romance, is obscure, intricate, and monotonous. He translated entire cantos from Tasso, but adopted the wild and irregular manner of Ariosto. The difference is, that Spenser appears, like a civilised being, slow and sometimes half forlorn, in exploring an uninhabited country, while Ariosto traverses the regions of romance like a hardy native of its pathless wilds. Hurd and others, who forbid us to judge of "The Fairy Queen" by the test of classical unity, and who compare it to a gothic church, or a gothic garden, tell us what is little to the purpose. They cannot persuade us that the story is not too intricate and too diffuse. The thread of the narrative is so entangled, that the poet saw the necessity for explaining the design of his poem in prose, in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh; and the perspicuity of a poetical design which requires such an explanation may, with no great severity, be pronounced a contradiction in terms. It is degrading to poetry, we shall perhaps be told, to attach importance to the mere story which it relates. Certainly the poet is not a great one whose only charm is the management of his fable; but where there is a fable, it should be perspicuous. There is one peculiarity in "The Fairy Queen" which, though not a deeply pervading defect, I cannot help considering as an incidental blemish; namely, that the allegory is doubled and crossed with complimentary allusions to living or recent personages, and that the agents are partly historical and partly allegorical. In some instances the characters have a threefold allusion. Gloriana is at once an emblem of true glory, an empress of fairyland, and her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Envy is a personified passion, and also a witch, and, with no very charitable insinuation, a type of the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. The knight in dangerous distress is Henry IV. of France; and the knight of magnificence, Prince Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, an ancient British hero, is the bulwark of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. Such distraction of allegory cannot well be said to make a fair experiment of its power. The poet may cover his moral meaning under a single and transparent veil of fiction; but he has no right to muffle it up in foldings which hide the form and symmetry of truth. Upon the whole, if I may presume to mea sure the imperfections of so great and venerable a genius, I think we may say that, if his popularity be less than universal and complete, it is not so much owing to his obsolete language, nor to degeneracy of modern taste, nor to his choice of allegory as a subject, as to the want of that consolidating and crowning strength, which alone can establish works of fiction in the favour of all readers and of all ages. This want of strength, it is but justice to say, is either solely or chiefly apparent when we examine the entire structure of his poem, or so large a portion of it as to feel that it does not impel or sustain our curiosity in proportion to its length. To the beauty of insulated passages who can be blind? The sublime description of " Him who with the Night durst ride,” "The House of Riches," "The Canto of Jealousy," "The Masque of Cupid," and other parts, too many to enumerate, are so splendid, that after reading them, we feel it for the moment invidious to ask if they are symmetrically united into a whole. Succeeding generations have acknowledged the pathos and richness of his strains, and the new contour and enlarged dimensions of grace which he gave to English poetry. He is the poetical father of a Milton and a Thomson. Gray habitually read him when he wished to frame his thoughts for composition; and there are few eminent poets in the language who have not been essentially indebted to him. "Hither, as to their fountain, other stars Repair, and in their urns draw golden light." The publication of "The Fairy Queen," and the commencement of Shakspeare's dramatic career, may be noticed as contemporary events; for by no supposition can Shakspeare's appearance as a dramatist be traced higher than 1589*, and that of Spenser's great poem was in the year 1590. I turn back from that date to an earlier period, when the first lineaments of our regular drama began to show themselves. Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dramatic authors more important than Bale and Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, before the titles of tragedy and comedy were well distinguished, had written comedies on such subjects as the Resurrection of Lazarus, and the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He was, in fact, the last of the race of mysterywriters. Both Bale and Heywood died about the middle of the sixteenth century, but flourished (if such a word can be applied to them) as early as the reign of Henry VIII. Until the time of Elizabeth, the public was contented with mysteries, moralities, or interludes, too humble to deserve the name of comedy. The first of these, the mysteries, originated almost as early as the Conquest, in shows given by the church to the people. The moralities +, which were chiefly allegorical, probably arose about the middle of the fifteenth century, and [* It is clear that before 1591, or even 1592, Shakspeare had no celebrity as a writer of plays; he must, therefore, have been valuable to the theatre chiefly as an actor; and if this was the case, namely, that he speedily trode the stage with some respectability, Mr. Rowe's tradition that he was at first admitted in a mean capacity must be taken with a bushel of doubt-CAMPBELL, Life of Shakspeare, 8vo. 1838, p. xxii] [+ The Mysteries Mr. Collier would have called MiraclePlays, and the Moralities, Morals or Moral-Plays.] the interludes became prevalent during the reign of Henry VIII. ‡ Lord Sackville's Gorboduc, first represented in 1561-2, and Still's Gammer Gurton's Needle, about 1566, were the earliest, though faint, draughts of our regular tragedy and comedy§. They did not, however, immediately supersede the taste for the allegorical moralities. Sackville even introduced dumb show in his tragedy to explain the piece, and he was not the last of the old dramatists who did so. One might conceive the explanation of allegory by real personages to be a natural complaisance to an audience; but there is something peculiarly ingenious in making allegory explain reality, and the dumb interpret for those who could speak. In reviewing the rise of the drama, Gammar Gurton's Needle, and Sackville's Gor boduc, form convenient resting-places for the memory; but it may be doubted if their superiority over the mysteries and moralities be half so great as their real distance from an affecting tragedy, or an exhilarating comedy. The main incident in Gammer Gurton's Needle is the loss of a needle in a man's small-clothes. Warton also mentions Rastell, the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, who was a printer; but who is believed by the historian of our poetry to have been also an author, and to have made the moralities in some degree the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published [about 1519] a new interlude on The Nature of the Four Elements, in which The Tracts of America lately discovered and the manners of the natives are described. [See Collier's Annals, vol. ii. p. 319.] [§ Sackville became a statesman, and forsook the pleasant paths of poetry; nor does he appear to have encouraged it in others; for in an age rife with poetical commendations he seems to have drawn but one solitary sonnet, and that attached to a book where praises were made cheap-" The Faerie Queene." He died, and received a funeral sermon from Abbot, but no tears of regret from the Muses;-he who should have been a second Pembroke or Southampton. Still took to the church and became a bishop-but not before the creator of our comedy had written a supplicatory letter that, for acting at Cambridge, a Latin play should be preferred to an English one.] [Speaking of Gammer Gurton, Scott writes, "It is a piece of low humour; the whole jest turning upon the loss and the recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair the breeches of her man Hodge; but in point of manners, it is a great curiosity, as the carta supellex of our ancestors is scarcely anywhere so well described." "The unity," he continues, " of time, place, and action, are observed through the play, with an accuracy of which France might be jealous." And adds, alluding to Gorboduc, "It is remarkable, that the earliest English tragedy and comedy are both works of considerable merit; that each partakes of the distinct character of its class; that the tragedy is without intermixture of comedy; the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy.”—Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 333.] Gorboduc has no interesting plot or impassioned dialogue ; but it dignified the stage with moral reflection and stately measure. It first introduced black verse instead of ballad rhymes in the drama. Gascoigne gave a farther popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase of Jocasta, from Euripides, which appeared in 1566. The same author's "Supposes," translated from Ariosto, was our earliest prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy and spirited. Edward's Palamon and Arcite was acted in the same year, to the great admiration of Queen Elizabeth, who called the author into her presence, and complimented him on having justly drawn the character of a genuine lover. Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated into English verse at different times, and by different authors, before the year 1581. One of these translators was Alexander Neyvile, afterwards secretary to Archbishop Parker, whose Oedipus came out as early as 1563; and though he was but a youth of nineteen, his style has considerable beauty. The following lines, which open the first act, may serve as a specimen. "The night is gone, and dreadful day begins at length t' appear, And Phoebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth rear; And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in skies, Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's eyes. Now shall the houses void be seen, with plague devoured quite, And slaughter which the night hath made shall day bring Doth any man in princely thrones rejoice? O brittle joy! They judge amiss, that deem the Prince to have the happy In 1568 was produced the tragedy of "Tancred and Sigismunda," by Robert Wilmot, and four other students of the Inner Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays; but that reprint is taken not from the first edition, but from one greatly polished and amended in 1592*. Considered as a piece coming within the verge of Shakspeare's age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immediately subsequent to these writers we meet with several obscure and uninteresting dramatic names, among which is that of Whet [* Newly revived, and polished according to the decorum of these days. That is, as Mr. Collier supposes, by the removal of the rhymes to a blank verse fashion.] stone, the author of "Promos and Cassandra," [1578], in which piece there is a partial anticipation of the plot of Shakspeare's Measure for Measure. Another is that of Preston, whose tragedy of Cambyses + is alluded to by Shakspeare, when Falstaff calls for a cup of sack, that he may weep “in King Cambyses' veint." There is, indeed, matter for weeping in this tragedy; for, in the course of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. To make the skinning more pathetic, his own son is witness to it, and exclaims, "What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same to see, His father fleaed in this wise? O how it grieveth me!" It may comfort the reader to know that this theatric decortication was meant to be allegorical; and we may believe that it was performed with no degree of stage illusion that could deeply affect the spectators. In the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, we come to a period when the increasing demand for theatrical entertainments produced play-writers by profession. The earliest of these appears to have been George Peele, who was the city poet and conductor of the civil pageants. His " Arraignment of Paris" came out in 1584. Nash calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless we make allowance for his antiquity, the expression will appear hyperbolical; but, with that allowance, we may justly cherish the memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language. His "David and Bethsabe" is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender, and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of In the title-page it is denominated "A lamentable Tragedy, mixed full of pleasant Mirth." [The Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.BEN JONSON. (Gifford, vol. ix. p. 180.) I suspect that Shakspeare confounded King Cambyses with King Darius. Falstaff's solemn fustian bears not the slightest resemblance, either in metre or in matter, to the vein of King Cambyses. Kyng Daryus, whose doleful strain is here burlesqued, was a pithie and plesaunt Enterlude, printed about the middle of the sixteenth century.-GIFFORD. Note on Jonson's Poetaster, Works, vol. ii. p. 455.] [§ The stage direction excites a smile. Flea him with a false skin.] 1 versification and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare*. David's character-the traits both of his guilt and sensibility-his passion for Bethsabe-his art in inflaming the military ambition of Urias, and his grief for Absalom, are delineated with no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of Bethsabe is introduced by these lines: Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes And stroke my bosom with thy gentle fan: My soul, incensed with a sudden fire? What tree, what shade, what spring, what paradise, Joab thus describes the glory of David: At the conclusion of the tragedy, when David gives way to his grief for Absalom, he is roused [* Mr. Dyce, in his edition of Peele, has quoted this pas sage from Mr. Campbell," a critic," he styles him," who is by no means subject to the pardonable weakness of discovering beauties in every writer of the olden time." p. xxxviii. It is quoted too by Mr. Hallam (Lit. Hist. vol. ii. p.378), who concurs with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive.] with great dignity and energy by the speech of Joab. When informed by Joab of the death of his son, David exclaims: Darid. Thou man of blood! thou sepulchre of death! Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood? Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes, And art thou angry he is now cut off, That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths, Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, were the other writers for our early stage, a part of whose career preceded that of Shakspeare*. Lyly, whose dramatic language [An interesting subject of inquiry in Shakspeare's literary history, is the state of our dramatic poetry when he began to alter and originate English plays. Before his time mere mysteries and miracle plays, in which Adam and Eve appeared naked, in which the devil displayed his horns and tail, and in which Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering the ark, had fallen comparatively into disuse, after a popularity of four centuries; and, in the course of the sixteenth century, the clergy were forbidden by orders from Rome to perform in them. Meanwhile Moralities," which had made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, were also hastening their retreat, as well as those pageants and masques in honour of royalty, which nevertheless aided the introduction of the drama. But we owe our first regular dramas to the universities, the inns of court, and public seminaries. The scholars of these |