verse as have been preserved are without value. Fairfax existed only when he was guided by the magical genius of Tasso. A fragment of his description of Rinaldo at the Mount of Olives may here be given:

Thus prayed he. With purple wings up-flew,

In golden weed, the morning's lusty Queen,
Begilding with the radiant beams she threw
His helm, his harness, and the mountain green;

in pralthes, the gowne and the sword ralcall; and, that the seden is about the stone, then that wear plumes above their Hellmotte Doe therem (though th5°25 It not on frsBathe Paying, Gudant arma toga!/ Wey Comation Hath on serhe, and I trust my and I trust my Limmes and sperit both art farge as neither shalbe, defertyue to y strive of my river and Contry), whether de. be with woryting or weapon; only my, despre is my strwire may be arreated, and & Boubt not, but yt halbs are stablo, the rohith his. Lo: pt you Donregt of me, I count would be a good stepp, and to that good Fourryt your Bonors commendation, I perfroadt me would be a good meanes. So & Gumbly) take my leave this with. P Stagust/

Yover Geners most bound

&John Haryygheny

Facsimile Letter from Haryngton to Lady Russell
British Museum, Lansdowne MS. 82

Upon his breast and forehead gently blew
The air, that balm and nardus breath'd unseen;
And o'er his head, let down from clearest skies,
A cloud of pure and precious dew there flies.

The heavenly dew was on his garments spread,

To which compared, his clothes pale ashes seem,
And sprinkled so that all that paleness fled,

And thence of purest white bright rays outstream :

So cheered are the flowers, late withered,

With the sweet comfort of the morning beam,
And so, returned to youth, a serpent old

Adorns herself in new and native gold.

The lovely whiteness of his changed weed

The prince perceived well and long admired;
Toward the forest march'd he on with speed,

Resolv'd, as such adventures great required;
Thither he came, whence, shrinking back for dread
Of that strange desert's sight, he first retired;
But not to him fearful or loathsome made

That forest was, but sweet with pleasant shade.

M-IOSVA SYLVESTRI

NESTISSIMI·POETÆ
ET
GALLICI
DV
BARTA:TRANSLA

Richard Carew (15551620) was born at East An

thony, in Cornwall, and was educated as a gentlemancommoner of Christ Church, Oxford. He disputed in pub

lic with Philip Sidney when they both were children; a little later Carew is associated

as an antiquary with the historians Camden, Spelman,

and Raleigh. He represented various Cornish boroughs in parliament, and in 1602 he published a valuable Survey

of Cornwall. His first instal-
ment of Tasso, called Godfrey

of Bulloigne, was published
at Exeter in 1594. Of the
career of Edward Fairfax
very little is known.
was probably the natural son

He

of Sir Thomas Fairfax of Denton. Almost all his life was spent in delightful retirement in the forest of Knaresborough. His Godfrey of Bulloigne was printed first in 1600. It is believed that Edward Fairfax died in 1635. Sir John Harington (or Haryngton) (1561-1612) was a godson of Queen Elizabeth, and he translated the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto in 1591, in obedience to her command. A very odd publication of Harington's in prose, the Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596, which is partly a useful hygienic treatise and partly a savage Rabelaisian satire, deeply offended the Queen, and Harington was driven from Court. He cast in his lot with Essex, and shared his adventures and his disgrace. The Epigrams of Harington were much admired, and were collected, in 1613, after his death. He was no

Joshua Sylvester

SYLVESTER

to tender

Deemg mforced (through the gravvous visitacion of Gods hravir hand, opon your Highms poore Citter of Con= Son) thus long (& yet longer like) to deferr the Impres: sion of my stender Cabours (long-smee mant onto your Math) I thought it more then tyme, by some other my humble Homage to Your Highms. But wanting both leasure, m my self. Where in the Country) such helps, as I could have wished, To copie the entire Works (coorthin your Ma." readmg) I was fame thus ~ Soudamlir to scribble over this small Parts That I'm the mean time) by a Qart, I might (as it wear) give. Your Highnes Possession of the whole; untill it shall please Ehr Almightn, in his end his Mercie to End to this Lamentable Affliction, wth for his dear Sorms ༢༥ Sake I most earms the beseech him. & vour to protect your Sacred Mat & all your Royal familie under the wiges of his gracious favour

ch

an

M~

VOL. II

mos & humbh Subir d

& devited Servant,

Josuah Sylvester

Letter from Sylvester to James I.

305

poet, but a man of great shrewdness of observation, prompt and cool in action, and of a ready wit. An immense popularity attended the versions of Joshua

Title-page of Sylvester's translation of Du
Bartas' "Divine Weekes and Workes," 1605

the language. This is an example of his

Sylvester (1563-1618), who attached.
himself to the French poet Du Bartas,
as Chapman did to Homer. Sylvester
was the son of a Kentish clothier, and
he was educated under Hadrianus
Saravia at Southampton, and then
at Leyden. He became a merchant-
adventurer, and spent much time in
the Low Countries. As early as 1591
he began to publish instalments of his
immense version of The Divine Weeks
and Works of Du Bartas, on which he
was engaged all the rest of his life. In
1613 Sylvester became secretary to the
great Merchants' Company at Middel-
burg, in Zealand, and there he died on
September 28, 1618. His version of
the French poet's Puritan epic long
retained its popularity, and it is well
known that Milton was intimately
acquainted with it. The Divine Weeks
and Works, whether in Du Bartas'
French or in Sylvester's English, has
now become intolerably tedious and
unattractive; but the translator, had
he concentrated his powers on a
happier object, might have enriched
work at its best:

Sweet Night, without thee, without thee alas!
Our life were loathsome, even a hell to pass ;
For outward pains and inward passion still,
With thousand deaths, would soul and body thrili.
O Night, thou pullest the proud mask away
Wherewith vain actors in this world's great play
By day disguise them. For, no difference
Night makes between the peasant and the prince,
The poor and rich, the prisoner and the judge,
The foul and fair, the master and the drudge,
The fool and wise, Barbarian and the Greek,
For Night's black mantle covers all alike.

CHAPTER VIII

JACOBEAN DRAMA

THERE can be no question that in the first quarter of the seventeenth century the imaginative force of the English people ran so vehemently in a single channel, that all other manifestations of it are in danger of being regarded as side-streams or backwaters. As the man of fancy in the reign of Elizabeth had naturally turned to an amorous or pastoral lyric as the medium in which to express the passion which worked in him, so his successor in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. naturally produced a tragedy or a farcical tragi-comedy. The drama was the characteristic art of the age in England, and even if we omit Shakespeare from our consideration, as a figure too disturbing and overshadowing, the fact remains true that it was in the drama that Jacobean England displayed its main current of imagination.

By the end of the sixteenth century the question of the direction which English drama was to take was absolutely settled. The classical play, which had enjoyed so overwhelming a success in Italy and France, had been glanced at by our poets, gingerly touched and rejected as inappropriate and unsympathetic. Just as in France the inspiration of the dramatists had been from the first directly academic, so with us it was directly popular. The earliest modern plays in France, such as those of Jodelle and La Péruse, had been classroom entertainments, given in French in place of Latin, by actors who imitated the verses of Seneca in the vernacular instead of repeating them in the original. This was how French tragedy was formed, and on these lines it rose, smoothly and steadily, to Corneille and Racine. But we have seen that English tragedy was, from the first, a wild and popular entertainment, allied to the mediaval morality and to the medieval farce rather than to anything that Aristotle could have legislated for or Scaliger have approved. The experiments of Fulke Greville, and still more of Samuel Daniel (who, like Jodelle, but half a century later than he, wrote a Senecan Cleopatra in choruses) may give us an idea of what our drama might have become if we had taken the same turn as the French.

By 1600, however, the question was finally settled. The taste for declamation, for long moral disquisitions in rhymed soliloquy, had been faintly started by a few University pedants and had been rejected by the public in favour of a loud, loose tragedy and a violently contrasted and farcical comedy. In England something of the same national disposition to adopt for the stage extravagant and complicated plots, which had been met with a few years